Huge study about safety can be misinterpreted by SUV drivers

Nuclear works, is economically feasible, and is safe (it's the people
who screw up, not the technology).
Of course, the ecos don't want it, either.

 

While this has been reported, it's wrong.
*SOME* in the Japanese gov't were willing, but the emperor and most of
the rest of the gov't weren't.
Otherwise, a surrender would have been easy to work out, since we had
already decided to not depose the Emperor, knowing the extremely high
position he held with the populace. While he was allowed to stay, he
was reduced to a figurehead.

Hardly; we know full well that the Japanese would have defended the
home islands with every means available, to include farm tools.
We know this beacuse they have said so themselves, and were in the
process of arming the civiliam populace to resist invasion.

It's very hard to read the future. You may be very right; with an
ability to see the future, Truman may have not used the Bomb.
The tradce-off would have been extremely costly in human lives,
though.
And it's not just the lives of the Japanese, Americans, British,
Austrailians, New Zealaners, and other allies who were fighting in the
South Pacific. The Chinese also have to be considered; Japan still
occupied vast areas of China, and were being especially brutal there.
Very few people have even heard of Nanking, yet the Japanese took
brutality to new levels there.

http://journalism.missouri.edu/~jschool/nanking/Introduction/introduction.htm
gives a report from a Japanese student.

Did Truman know about Nanking? I can't find info one way or the other.
Did the Bomb save lives? There's not really much dispute there.
if we hadn't used the Bomb in Japan, would the Cold War not have
happened? I can't see why not; Russia developed the Bomb shortly after
WW II. Even if we hadn't used it, we still had it. The presence of the
Bomb on both sides wasn't the cause of the Cold War, merely one of the
weapons that could have been used.

 

I've always wondered why 'conservatives' (to use the term loosely, as
it correlates with most 'no global warming' folks) think that a
billion dollars invested in developing new industries such as energy
conservation and energy sources that do not involve combustion of
fossil fuel is more wasteful and a drag on the economy than a billion
dollars spent on trying to cope with the flooding of our coastal
cities as the ocean rises.
[/QUOTE]

You've got conservatives all wrong then. Part of the reason conservatives
tend towards opposing the global warming crowd is who that crowd is and what
their aims are. Headline environmentalism has transformed over the last
decade or so into an extremist and anti-capitalist point of view. Whatever
the facts are regarding global warming, the extreme view pulls into it's
agenda the shift of power from capitalism towards socialism.

We have a fossil fueled based economy. Someday it will change and thank
goodness for it too, but, God willing, it won't be on the extremist
environmentalist schedule or terms.

 

I just think if Turman had really understood the power and after effects
of atom bombs, he would not have authorized them to be dropped. <

After the bloodbath on Okinawa had Truman not used the atomic bombs, but
instead sent thousands of American and Allied servicemen to their deaths
invading mainland Japan, he'd have likely been impeached. The expanding
scenario had even worse implications. Thus, while the deaths of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki civilians was regrettable, in the end the results
justified the means.

The combined political and military actions by the USA and the western
Allies in the closing months of WWII prevented a military nightmare had the
proposed multi-pronged invasion plan been launched, prevented the Soviets
from occupying Northern Japan and partitioning the Country ala Korea, and
prevented a likely years long guerilla campaign by Japanese militarists.
Retaining the Emperor allowed Japan to recover as a unified culture and
permitted the development of a democratic and economic miracle.

 

Well, in the USA the gasoline infastructure is going to be difficult
to overcome. Gasoline has such an economy of scale that any alternative
is going to cost more provided there is an equal level of taxes applied.
(Yes, I know that in some regions of the country electricity is so cheap
that an electric car charging in the garage is cheaper, but those
estimates generally road count taxes against gasoline but not electricity)

That said, keep in mind that production hybreds despite low or negative
profit margins are now at the performance levels of cars of the middle
1980s. My guess is in another 5-10 years they will have respectable
performance numbers even without a breakthrough in battery technology.

The problem here is CAFE. Many people in the USA want big cars. Plain and
simple. Instead of working with that, other people decided they would
just make is so people couldn't get affordable big cars. The result
was CAFE and the SUV explosion. Now, had CAFE not occured, only the
gasoline price shocks and emissions regs, today people would probably
be driving the sedans and wagons of the same large size they had for
decades with fuel economy that is significantly better than the SUVs
CAFE gave us.

Many would say that automakers wouldnt have bothered with fuel efficency
at all if it weren't for CAFE. That's wrong if any one has an
understanding of the subject. The fuel economy gains came through
the same control systems that brought about the emissions, reliability,
and performance gains. So long as the market demands reliability and
performance, so long as the emissions regs exist, we get the technology.

 

No, they wouldn't. There is too much money in the status-quo and US
government is about money. I wish the primary goal was telling the oil
producing countries to stick it up their behind because the US doesn't
need oil imports any more, but that doesn't make the forces that be money.

Of course, if corporations were long sighted instead of short sighted
they would make themselves the dominate forces in the new technologies
having the captial to do the development.

In other words, if stupidity wasn't the most powerful force on the planet
you'd be right and that's the way it should be done.

Yes, no energy generation is clean and pretty enough, also keeping us
with the status quo.

Wind is efficient. As efficient or more than any other means of turning
a generator. The question with wind is having it there to turn the
generator. But with correct deployment of turbines this could be
overcome.

 

And that's what I find puzzling. If CO2 is such an important problem,
the what-we-can-do-today answer is state of the art nuclear power. (not
stone age state run without protection like the old soviet plants)

We are told consistantly that CO2 is a problem, but somehow the
solutions always boil down to telling people how they have to live,
bring wealth to the 3rd world, and other political and social issues
rather than *SOLVING* the stated problem of too much CO2 being released
and meeting energy demands / increasing energy efficency.

 

There was an attempt to overthrow the emperor and fight on once it was
learned the emperor was going to surrender.

 

It is hard to figure out what the wackos want. The only thing I am sure
that will work is population control and a reduction in the total number
of humans on the planet.

I have no respect for most of the high profile environmentalist. They
preach conservation while flying around in private jets and riding to
events in limos. It often seems that they feel everyone else needs to
conserve. I'd love to match up the Sierra Club membership list with the
vehicle registration lists to see how many Sierra Club members are
driving SUVs.

Ed

 

You already know the answer to that. They don't WANT the problem (if
there is one) solved technologically. If you try to bring a
technological solution up, they'll pull out the precautionary
principle and demand you prove, a priori, that the new technology has
no bad side effects. They want to use CO2 (or whatever the bugaboo of
the week is) as a means of forcing austerity on people.

 

I'd love to match up the Sierra Club membership list with one of those
MOAB bombs the air force has. Those people destroyed my little town.

 

Approximately 11/23/03 13:33, C. E. White uttered for posterity:

Not really. Total global domination, just like any other
kook/cult group.

 

Approximately 11/23/03 12:01, Brent P uttered for posterity:

Stupidity has to compete with inertia.

Except that the operating permit for the Altamont wind farm is
being challenged by groups claiming the fans do too much damage
to birds.

 

Approximately 11/23/03 13:43, Matthew Russotto uttered for posterity:

The goal isn't to force austerity, just the force itself is
the goal.

 

Yep. See my posts earlier in this thread. My bet is that if there is
a technology breakthrough next week that promises clean, abundant, and
nearly free energy for the entire world, environmentalists would find
some way to oppose it.

 

How so? I'm curious to hear the argument for it being a mistake. Where
might we be today had those 2 bombs not been dropped?

 

Fair enough. Though, I think Truman understood that it was important that
the Japanese be defeated 100%. The Japanese could have (and probably did)
sue for peace many times towards the end. The problem with less than 100%
victory is illustrated in Iraq, where Hussein was left in power after the
first "victory" making a second "victory" necessary. That victory won't be
100% until Hussein and his crowd are dead or in jail.

I'm sure the Japanese were quite willing for the war to end and everyone
just go home. It should be obvious, though, that that would have been the
wrong thing to do. The bomb did what no other weapon or stategy had done up
to that point.

 

No. The preparations and fight-to-the-death willigness to defend the home
islands would have made invasion of japan would have made D-day look like
a walk in the park.

 

Yet the problem remains that wind is a form of energy.
If we take that energy out of the ecosystem, and convert it to heat
(the end result of the whole process), we are making changes to the
system.
yet the ecos say we aren't allowed to change the system.
This works for solar, too; we take sunlight (that heats the desert)
and transport it elecrtically to other places, and we've screwed with
the environment.
Uh-oh, I think I'm going nuts here...

 

The problem with electric cars is that the present infrastructure
can't handle it.
Can you imagine commuters in, say, LA coming home & plugging their
cars in to recharge?
Even using load leveling, the generating capacity just isn't there,
and even if it were, can you imaging the jump in electricity prices?
The number of industrial plants that operate now at night to use the
'surplus' electricity wouldn't be able to operate.
Yet, I see no one bringing this up. The cost to switch to electric
cars will be enormous.