547610831

547610831 t1_je34rg3 wrote

The thing that always kills me about economics is how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy it is. A lot of companies are doing fine and are still laying off workers just based on the fear of an economic downturn that may or may not come. Of course if those layoffs spread enough then it creates the very downturn everyone was afraid of. It's all just a mind game.

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547610831 t1_ja88cn7 wrote

>I live in Bavaria and our mushrooms are still radioactive.

Everything is radioactive my guy. If you brought a pallet of bananas into a nuclear plant it would have to be disposed of as nuclear waste due to the radiation level. Regardless, Chernobyl killed less people than coal plants do every day. And it's much less an indictment of nuclear as it is Communism and the Soviet Union. No reactor like that is currently operating.

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547610831 t1_ja7xh0f wrote

  1. Just because a regulation exists doesn't mean it actually improves safety. Quite frankly a lot of nuclear regulations DECREASE safety. They're not really about safety at all, they're just a way to increase costs. Most of the cost isnt new safety decices, it's just mountains of extra paperwork.

  2. The perception of risk regarding nuclear is just completely askew. Thousands of chemicals we use are also known carcinogens and can be handled with minimal regulations. Chemical leaks are a daily occurrence to the point they rarely make the news. The regulations against radiation are thousands of times stricter than those against most chemical carcinogens. Even the worst case scenario with nuclear you're talking tens of deaths. Lots of chemical spills have killed thousands and they kill hundreds of thousands in terms of long term exposures. Global warming will kill millions or even tens of millions. The risk from nuclear is miniscule in comparison to the alternatives.

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547610831 t1_ja7qf13 wrote

That's not really true at all. Lots of nuclear plants were built in reasonable time frames and budgets. A new nuclear plant used to only cost a Billion dollars (yes, that's adjusted for inflation. The problem is that anti-nuke forces took hold in many governments (especially after TMI and Chernobyl) and they made the regulatory environment completely untenable. Plants that were virtually complete had to be torn apart and rebuilt, many were just abandoned because the cost of the new regulations was more than the cost of the original plant. No industry can ever survive that way. And that was the whole point. The people who make these regulations don't want nuclear to survive. It was just a backhanded way of killing nuclear without an outright ban.

https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/historical-construction-costs-of-global-nuclear-power-reactors

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547610831 t1_ja7oq8o wrote

The problem here is that any first of a kind technology is going to cost a huge amount of money. If you're actually serious about a technology then you've got to be willing to endure a lot of cost overruns and schedule delays on the first few plants. If you're just going to cancel the whole program because the first plant is a cluster fuck then don't even bother.

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547610831 t1_ja039uu wrote

>You're arguing for the principle of freedom of speech, but the moment any principle causes more harm than good, that principle should be immediately abandoned.

If you abandon your principles as soon as its convenient then you don't actually have any principles. Besides, wearing a mask wasn't going to kill anyone to begin with so your hypothetical is kinda useless.

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547610831 t1_ja02fr0 wrote

Sorry, but if your argument is that people who speak the truth the government doesn't want to you to hear should be silenced and government propaganda should be praised then we will never agree. Perhaps you would be more at home in Communist China? That sort of attitude is exactly WHY the Supreme Court needs to defend freedom of speech.

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547610831 t1_j9ysj5h wrote

>The amount of things that got people throttled or banned but ended up being true in the past three years is unacceptable.

For instance I got banned from r/coronavirus for saying people should wear masks back when the government was saying they shouldn't. A few weeks later you'd get banned for saying they shouldn't wear masks because the government flipped positions. There were multiple rounds of mass banning in that sub for similar issues where the government or new cycle flip flopped.

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