by hilzoy
(1) I imagine this is supposed to be an appeal to The Youth Vote:
This strikes me as pretty lame, which means that one (or more) of two things must be the case: (1) I am now officially antiquated, and have absolutely no sense at all of what Today’s Youth will find compelling. (2) Hillary Clinton’s advertising staff, antiquated or not, have no sense of what Today’s Youth will find compelling. If any of Today’s Youth are reading this blog, please feel free to let me know whether you think it’s me, HRC’s staff, or both.
(2) Apparently, MSNBC’s David Schuster has been suspended for his “pimped out” comment. (Chelsea Clinton has been making calls on behalf of her mother; Schuster asked: “But doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?”) I agree with Josh Marshall’s take on this. On the one hand, Schuster’s comment was repellent. It also made very little sense: I don’t think that it’s at all odd that Chelsea Clinton is making calls on behalf of her mother, and I think the “pimped out” comment would only begin to make sense if there were some reason to think that she was not capable of deciding for herself whether or not she wanted to help her mother out. If, for instance, Chelsea Clinton was calling around for her mother at the age of twelve, what Schuster said would still be vile, but at least it would be a vile way of making a reasonable point. As it is, it lacks even that redeeming feature.
That said, I really can’t see how this should merit a suspension on a network that employs Chris Matthews. There’s a nice long list of some of Matthews’ comments about Hillary Clinton here. One seems directly comparable to what Schuster said about Chelsea Clinton:
“When is a politician like Hillary Clinton or anybody else going to admit they have the A-word, ambition, and stop with this coy thing about, “I’m so flattered by so much” — it’s just like a strip-teaser saying she’s flattered by the all the attention.”
Calling her the “Madame DeFarge of the left” was also pretty low. But my all-time favorite Matthews moment was this:
“Is there, out there in the country or out in the Atlantic Ocean, some gigantic monster — big, green, horny-headed, all kinds of horns coming out, big, aggressive monster of anti-Hillaryism that hasn’t shown itself: it’s based upon gender, the fact that she’s a liberal, that she’s Bill, what — and that hasn’t shown itself, because people are being so nice in the polling, they are saying all the correct things?
Is there an anti-Hillary monster waiting out there that could deliver this nomination, or this election, to someone else?”
That kind of cool understatement gets me every time. And you have to love the followup: after Dee Dee Meyers says that she thinks people’s views about Hillary Clinton have more to do with the fact that she’s a Clinton than with her gender, Matthews asks:
“Well, therefore, does that silence tell you that there’s something hidden out there in terms of animosity?”
He’s like a parody of a Freudian analyst: “The fact that you are unaware of any hostility to your father indicates that your Oedipal rage is even more powerful than I had feared: so powerful and so threatening that you have had to repress it entirely.” Right.
I can’t see any reason why David Schuster should be suspended on the very same network where Chris Matthews gets to be a sexist jerk on his own show every night. So I agree with Josh:
“Many have rightly criticized Chris Matthews for his repeatedly degrading, often sexist and consistently clownish comments about Hillary Clinton. The most logical way for me to understand this development is that MSNBC is under a lot of fire for Matthews — but Matthews is untouchable — and Shuster’s easier to can or suspend.”
(3) According to ThinkProgress (h/t Ezra), Ann Coulter said this at CPAC:
“Hillary wanted [to change her campaign song to] “I am woman,” but it was already taken by Edwards.”
And then:
“A few moments later, Coulter said that the best thing that had ever happened to the campaign of “B. Hussein Obama” was when he was born “half black.””
Can she just go away, please?
(4) Ethanol: even worse for the environment than you thought. Yet another reason for dislodging Iowa from its position in the nominating process.
(5) Open Thread!
while i think what Shuster said was INCREDIBLY dumb, this is whole “outrage” thing is so completely manufactured it first makes me laugh, then sigh.
like you mentioned above about “today’s youth”, the phrase “pimped out” has moved from just being about prostitutes to being more of an all-encompassing reference to selling yourself or someone else (or even a thing) out. but of course Clinton is playing the “oh poor me” card, and itll work for a while.
hell, i’m more shocked little or no comment seems to have been made over something Matthews said on Tuesday night.
when Eugene Robinson said that HRC’s campaign was going ok after NH and only ran into trouble after Bill Clinton “inserted himself in the process” Matthews said something to the effect of “there’s always trouble after Bill Clinton inserts himself in something” causing panelist Dee Dee Meyers to cover her ears and probably wishing she was anywhere else at that moment.
1/ I think the add is awfull. Boring, slow and not funny. I doubt the targetgroup will respond much better.
2/ I find the ‘weight’ of the pimp-comment hard to judge, but have read in several places that Shuster is probabely sacrificed instaed of Matthews.
3/ Ann also referred to Obama as “the least dangerous Hussein” I know and said that she might vote for McCain if he chooses Romney as a VP.
4/ Yeah, the bio-ethenol findings were pretty bad. Trouble with hybrid cars is that they can’t tow – which means we can’t choose one. Zo I’m currently reading up on what to choose when our current car needs to be replaced; diesel or gas?
5/ In the Netherlands they polled about which things would be acceptable for a Dutch premier. I blogged about the weird results (in Dutch, but with nice graph).
Female is acceptable for 93%, single is acceptable for 90%, atheist for 87, homosexual for 78, black for 75, jewish for 53, jonger than 35 for 43%, visiting prostitutes for 34%, very christian 33%, muslim 27%, previous harddrugs usage 26% whilst being older than 70 would only be acceptable for 19% of the Dutch. McCain would be toast 😉
“On the one hand, Schuster’s comment was repellent. It also made very little sense”
How is it any different — other than that she’s a Clinton, of course — from the Romney kids campaigning non-stop?
(Did they ever get the dog off the car roof, and into the campaign? I didn’t follow closely.)
I’m seeing cable tv, as of a few weeks ago, for the first time since a few months in late 2002, but mainly since around 1992 or so.
It’s a very strange place, but I digress. The personalities, particularly of cable tv news, are known previously only to me from what people write about them, and from transcripts.
Chris Matthews, with a show on network tv for many years, is one of the few I’m familiar with, and long contemptuous of.
But I saw a hint of how he was regarded when Tom Brokaw was interviewed by Jon Stewart yesterday, and Stewart was making fun of Matthews (far too gently), and Brokaw made comments about being “the hall monitor,” and getting Matthews to calm down, but also about how Matthews had studied politics all his life, was such an expert, etc., and you could hear that NBC/MS-NBC has a very serious longterm investment in the guy as one of their Key Political Analysts; I think it’s clear they won’t do anything serious about Matthews until absolutely forced to.
And then he’d just be whitewashed and on the air again in under a year, a la Don Imus (I toldja so!, I toldja so!), anyway.
I think Shuster probably just made a dumb mistake; he wanted to say that Chelsea was pimpin’ HRC, in the vernacular sense of promoting, but instead suggested that mother was pimping out daughter, something altogether nastier. when old dudes attempt youthful idiom, hilarity ensues!
and on the context of the old attempting youthful…something, that video. yes, indeed, it is bad. (i like those candles burning in the background: had me thinking soft-core porn or maybe Stevie Nicks video….) but at least they cast HRC in a clean-cut white musical context. imagine if they’d tried some multiracial funk collective shit?
“Can she just go away, please?”
Not so long as people keep blogging about her.
=/
I’m not copacetic with all the others, including “muslim 27%,”, but I have a personal bias in being particular sorry to see this: “jewish for 53.”
Damn. Now I’m never going to be Dutch Prime Minister. And I was getting so close, what with my advancing political career.
But seriously, in this day and age, well, all I can say is I wish people would stop telling me that antisemitism just isn’t any kind of problem any more in Western societies.
dutchmarbel,
Jewish for 53%? I find that stunning and not really believable.
hilzoy,
I’m with you on the ad.
While your criticisms of Matthews are well taken, I don’t see why giving him a pass means MSNBC has to give Shuster a pass also. I think he’s getting off easy. Suppose he had said, in 2004, that Bush was pimping out Laura because she made some campaign appearances on his behalf. I think his career would be over.
Speaking as a professional ad man and one who is no stranger to political campaigns, I’d say this ad is perfect, really truly just spot on, if 14-year olds could vote.
I’m a little too old to really judge the video, but I have a feeling a lot of the age group it is meant for would see it as condescending. I think it also shows just how worried they are about the youth vote supporting Obama.
Concerning the Dutch poll, I agree with Gary and Bernard and would hope that the Jewish percentage, and in fact most of the percentages were much higher.
But then, I would imagine that for many of the categories in the US the response would be lower.
I do think Shuster’s “punishment” was appropriate, and I think it is sometimes inappropriate to try to mitigate how one person is treated based on how somebody else is treated.
Matthews is a jerk and really has something in for the Clintons. I have to wonder what they did to him in the past. But actually, I think his jekiness is probably actually helping Clinton garner some sympathy.
Coulter no longer even deserves to be quoted. Ignoring her is the best thing anybody can do.
Re ethanol, sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. That’s why there has to more effort to finding more alternatives ASAP.
Well, being 23, I suppose I’m more-or-less in the target demographic and am therefore obliged to respond. 🙂
Having watched the ad, the word that comes to mind is pathetic. Nothing says “I’m cool” quite like transparently pandering and failing miserably to pull it off.
And by-the-by, Hillary, I don’t believe anyone says “shred” unless they’re feeling retro.
As for the “pimped out” comment, it’s a testament to linguistic drift that it took me a while to figure out what the comment meant. I took to mean, as Webster might put it, “dressed in the ostentatious manner of a pimp.” This is, I believe, the usual usage among people of my generation.
Re: Alternatives to corn-based ethanol –
Today’s Science Friday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation was all about alternatives, and the show was full of details about microbe- and algae-activated fuels that can be produced at, and sent through the same infrastructure used by the oil companies, and at much less cost to the environment than corn-based ethanol.
I’m sure the podcast is available.
Comments on the post and other random thoughts:
(1) didn’t watch.
(2) the “pimped out” comment was directed at Chelsea, of whom most Americans have forgotten about over the past 7 years and thus still think of as a child (i.e., the 12 year old hilzoy references in the post). The comment was, therefore, out of bounds in those people’s minds, hence the suspension. Matthews’ comments, OTOH, were directed at Hillary, who presumably as a member of the “world’s greatest deliberative body™”, is able to defend herself.
(3) I read somewhere today that no one is buying Coulter’s latest book, good.
(4) I have to vehemently disagree. As a family farmer™ myself,* subsidies for ethanol are the greatest thing since crop crotation payments. Pretty soon, I can retire by selling my land to a rich doctor in Des Moines.**
(5) A few notes based upon recent travels:
All that said, it’s still good to be back in the United
Soviet Socialist RepublicStates.*Not that I have any idea how to farm, that’s what the hired help is for.
**AKA, dad.
I think I qualify as today’s youth and that is not compelling at all. To be fair I also don’t like MTV or droll little sketches so I don’t know whether I’m really their target audience. I’d say her advertising staff is definitely out of touch, this is the classic ‘old person trying to be hip and failing miserably’ schtick, and I don’t know anyone over 15 years old who’d see it as anything different.
You’re in the clear there. But unfortunately, reading point 2 you may be a little antiquated after all. I don’t think anyone of my generation would see Schusters remark as vile or repellent. They’d just understand it to be slang and move on. I can be rather oblivious to the subtleties implicit in certain language, so perhaps I’m just missing something. As it is, the worst I can blame him for is expressing himself poorly, I don’t see anything controversial.
Offtopic: Sup marbel. Dutch people representing! I like the way that poll was phrased. ‘Percentage of respondents that would find the following description of a new prime minister acceptable.’ I wouldn’t really be happy with any of those terms describing a prime minister.
“How would you describe the PM?”
-“Female.”
I wonder why John McCain’s campaign didn’t come up with this ad for him.
Several days ago, long before Pimpgate erupted, I read that Chelsea Clinton was calling Super delegates to ask for their support. I was immediately struck that it was odd that they chose her, as a non obvious political figure, to twist those arms. As a layman, it seemed to me that a call from Chelsea asking for their support is something entirely different than Mark Penn making that same call. There is a certain transparency in a call from Mark Penn (or similar), but with Chelsea, the calculus is very different.
As someone who has been paying way too much attention to this election, I have been aware that the super delegates will be THE important story of this election and will very likely decide who is the nominee. So when I saw that Chelsea was calling them, it sent up a red flag.
When I saw Shuster last night, that is EXACTLY (in my brain) what he was getting at when he poorly worded his now infamous phrase. Watch the video you posted. He really hits the super delegate point.
I won’t get into a long defense of Shuster’s comments other than to say that I think his skepticism is correct: Why is Chelsea twisting those arms? That is the fair question that he was inelegantly trying to ask last night.
Fortunately for the Clinton campaign, they took that ball and ran with it. Shuster was the blocking back who opened up the hole to run through.
People my age don’t use “pimped out” so casually and found the remark extremely offensive. Many older women have been told all their lives by condescending men that offensive statements really aren’t offensive; it is just that they are overreacting. They have had enough.
If you read blogs written mostly by women, you would know that hundreds of people were outraged, bombarded MSNBC with email, phone calls, and faxes. And they managed to hold them accountable, which seems a victory for all Democrats.
If Obama wants to appeal to increasingly infuriated older women, he should express outrage about the vicious misogyny directed at Clinton once in a while. When Obama supporters mock”manufactured outrage” and smirk about the “oh poor me card,” more women decide to vote for Clinton. They also stop reading and commenting on blogs they used to think were progressive.
Redstocking, I agree fully with your first statement and somewhat with your comment that Obama could be more forceful in decrying some of the statements.
At the same time he has frequently stated that gender should not be an issue in this campaign, and has never amde it even a side issue in any of his statements.
In regards to supporters, both camps have supporters who have crossed the line at times, sometimes even supporters who are officially part of the campaign.
When the comments. come from outside the campaign staff itself, it is very hard for either candidate to rebuke each and every one.
OTOH, and I may be wrong, I don’t remember Obama ever alluding to his race as an obvious way to garner support. Whereas Clinton has referred to gender in that manner.
Look, I will vote for either of them. I happen to think that Clinton would be a good President. However, I happen to think that Obama would be a much better candidate. And I can say without any hesitation that that statement is not in any way, shape or form grounded in her gender.
I saw that Hillary video earlier and thought it was put together by a misguided fan of hers. It was pretty embarassing.
Now it appears that she paid good money for that misguided botch? No wonder she burned through her coffers so quickly.
Whatever you think of that Obama video “Yes We Can” by Will.I.Am, it’s being sought out, viewed and independently downloaded millions of times (I really doubt And it didn’t cost Obama’s campaign a penny.
Hillary’s “shred” video:
Added: January 30, 2008
Views: 186,857
Barack’s “Yes we can” video:
Added: February 02, 2008
Views: 2,636,540
(Note that, for both videos, that’s just the viewings at their main YouTube page posting. )
With all due respect, redstocking, it’s also a question of idiom: this isn’t necessarily about men casually referring to young women as whores, unless you feel that sense #1 was intended.
(#1 “pimp out” [archaic]: to employ as a streetwalker)
Now, maybe it was–sense #2, while more current, due, as another commenter says, to linguistic drift, makes no sense in context.
(#2 “pimped out”=dressed or accessorized ostentatiously)
Which is why I still think sense #3 is the most likely intended one
(#3 “pimp” (verb, trans)=to advertise, promote)
Chelsea, I suspect, was being (rather incoherently) accused of overly aggressive promotion of HRC (as swarty says)–still an arguably sexist contention, but not quite the same thing as accusing her of prostituting her daughter!
I don’t thinkthat it should be acceptable for a perwon who is speaking ano what claims to abe a respectable outlet to us the phrase pimping. It isn’t professional.. Sloppy slangy degrading language degrades the professin of journalism.
Also I am not aware of this inciddet being caharacterized as a faux outrage incident by obama supporters. The diary on this incident on Daily Kos is written by an Obama supporter, for example. I think Hillary is a lousy candidtaeand would be as much of a compromiser and collarborator as president as she was as senator, but I am outraged over this.
I admit I did think the second tearing up incident was a bit much.
If Obama wants to appeal to increasingly infuriated older women, he should express outrage about the vicious misogyny directed at Clinton once in a while.
I think you meant to say “when Obama wants to appeal to Redstocking”. I don’t believe that you speak on behalf of all older women in the US, increasingly infuriated or otherwise. Certainly, some older women that I know have no desire to see him express such outrage.
When Obama supporters mock”manufactured outrage” and smirk about the “oh poor me card,” more women decide to vote for Clinton. They also stop reading and commenting on blogs they used to think were progressive.
Let me see if I have this straight. You’re complaining about one single comment on this thread, even though the majority of comments are openly hostile to NBC’s misogyny. You then use that one comment (which was written by someone I have not read before and is thus unlikely to be a regular around here) to tar the entire OW community, even though most commenters here were critical of the misogyny and hilzoy was quite explicit in her criticism.
I don’t think that is very fair of you. Getting only a handful of dissents is as close as any community on the internet can ever get to true consensus.
Also, I find the passive aggressive tone of “they also stop reading…” unhelpful. Who is they? Are you threatening to stop reading and commenting on this blog unless every single commenter agrees with you on this issue?
Redstocking spends more time threatening to leave various blogs than I think is likely to be productive. Redstocking, you may want to tinker with the phrasing. There are ways of saying “that disgusts me” that preserve a bit more focus.
As for the pimping comment, I’m delighted to see someone get in trouble for it, and I’m not much worried right at the moment about the fact that others are doing worse. Start where one can, work from there. It’s not that people like Matthews don’t deserve grief too, and more of it, for the bile they spew, but if it’s feasible at the moment to make Shuster face some music, hey, it’s a start. I’d like to all this hip use of slang based on prostitution go away; every bit along the way is improvement.
There appears to be a fundamental difference in how people seem to approach Ms Clinton, both on progressive blogs and on television. The default assumption seems to be that whatever she does, it is out of some ulterior (and impure) motive, while whatever her opponents do always get a positive spin put on them. The comment just above by swarty is a perfect illustration. It really seems like she is given the benefit of malice, and her opponents, the benefit of the doubt. I dont know why this is, but I guess it is an unattractive combination of misogyny and buying into the republican frames of the Clintons.
PS: John Miller, I certainly agree that there are legitimate and important differences between Ms Clinton and Mr Obama, which are reason enough to vote for either of them. This blog has outlined some of them quite well in the past. However, a lot of the attacks on her, especially by people who support her opponents are not based on any such reasons. I strongly believe that the republicans did an excellent job of smearing her and her husband in the 90’s, so much so that many democrats have bought into their framing of her and her character. Add to this, she faces barely hidden misogyny in the media and among many people.
Also, it is true probably that Sen. Obama has ever directly alluded to his race as a means to garner support, however it seems that blatant racial targeting is much more unacceptable than blatant misogyny especially in most of mainstream media. If Shuster had made a racially loaded remark instead, he would have lost his job a lot earlier, and not just been suspended. In this regard, Sen. Obama’s campaign did use race successfully and with justice, in response to Mr. Clinton’s remarks during the South Carolina primary.
sildan and mithi: thanks. I thought of saying that I believed “shreds” to be at least a decade out of date, but then I thought: who knows? It might have somehow come back. I also thought that the style of music was out of date, but had the same worry.
A truly lame ad.
As for ethanol, let’s specify that it’s corn-based ethanol. I just got back from Brazil where I rode in a lot of flex fuel cars using cane-based ethanol and it certainly seems to be working fine. The only down side I could see is that it’s increased the cost of cachaça, which may actually be a good thing.
You know, I think I’d be more apt to vote for Chelsea than Hillary. I mean, if the “Bill as co-President” argument that the Clinton campaign keeps making is true, then it shouldn’t technically make a difference, right? And Chelsea, at least, actually seems like a nice person.
They also stop reading and commenting on blogs they used to think were progressive.
Except to passive-aggressively return every once in a while to complain, of course.
Except to passive-aggressively return every once in a while to complain, of course.
I’d complain more on your blog, but I’d actually kind of like to see you write Teen Titans, and I don’t understand Canadian law at all.
As a 20-year old college student, I have to agree with your conclusion, Hilzoy. The ad reminds me of videos they showed us in high school featuring “hip”, “totally cool” teens listening to rap music on their iPods (all the kids have those now, right?) while disparaging drug use and unprotected sex.
The phrase “the blogs were going crazy,” in this context is cringe-worthy. They’re trying too hard.
Obama’s “Yes We Can” video is a good example of something that actually IS appealing.
but I’d actually kind of like to see you write Teen Titans
Or Legion of Superheroes, whatever. But this is proof — if comics were worth reading anymore, I would, and I wouldn’t make this mistake…
I’ll write Teen Titans myself, I guess. First thing, Robin gets recast as a girl. I bet no one’s thought of that before. Man, that’ll throw people for a loop.
biofuel is a screwball idea – its destined to kill hundreds of millions via raising the cost of the products of arable land / fertile ocean (I expect considerably more than global warming itself) – whilst sending the planet to hell in a hand basket as per the article.
I think we need an open thread just to document the pointless, bizarre anti-Hillary sexism everywhere. I found this to be breathtaking. From Peggy Noonan:
Fatal Attraction? Come on.
You know, in the era of shows like “Pimp My Ride”, I think in some ways the sexism here is deeper. It’s just directed at HRC herself rather than as an attack on her daughter, which is why it’s not as outrageous.
From the transcripts of Cheney’s top-secret energy meetings:
Cheney: Biofuel is a
screwballbrilliant idea — its destined to kill hundreds of millions via raising the cost of the products of arable land / fertile ocean — I expect considerably more than global warming itself — whilst sending the planet to hell in a hand basket!“As for ethanol, let’s specify that it’s corn-based ethanol. I just got back from Brazil where I rode in a lot of flex fuel cars using cane-based ethanol and it certainly seems to be working fine. The only down side I could see is that it’s increased the cost of cachaça, which may actually be a good thing.”
I’m not sure I follow you, Randy: the primary objection, at least in this current wave of stories, to ethanol is the carbon increase; does cane-based ethanol have fewer carbon costs?
I was at a lecture a number of years ago where the lecturer explained that the earth was being stretched beyond it’s replacement capacity in terms of producing food in many areas – such as fish. While the earth currently produces enough food for everyone it isn’t by a hell of a lot – and the economic system distributes the supply of food in particular ways from food sources and to various populations.
Some time after that I started to hear people talk about biofuel so I asked myself – how much land would hey need to convert to biofuel to displace fuel – well as far as I could tell – “all of it” – increasing over the years to “much more than all of it”. And it doesn’t need to be that bad – if food prices go up by a few cents there is almost certainly some guy out there who will be pushed from “on the edge” to “starving” – it is happening under our eyes right now – but in the long run we are not talking just a few cents we are talking huge increases.
There is talk of using algae and so forth but none of that really gets around the fundamental problem.
So what happens when a bit less food is produced and a bit more bio fuel? yeah food prices go up and energy prices go down. And what happens if food prices go up and energy prices go down?
Worse yet – what happens when countries starve?
BTW I don’t propose ignoring global warming I propose taking serious action against it – but I refuse to be wrong just because it puts me on the other side of hte fence to cheney. If Cherey agrees with me then I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The article made mention of corn-based ethanol primarily. It is remarkably less efficient for creating fuel. Cane based fuel has been used in Brazil for 33 years. Much of what is used is bagasse, the waste material from the cane after it is crushed. In order to create the alcohol from corn, the corn starch first must be converted to sugar, ethanol from cane does not need this step.
The article linked to above does not mention ethanol from cane. Ethanol from cane is much more efficient than from corn.
The article linked to above does not mention ethanol from cane. Ethanol from cane is much more efficient than from corn.
If we’re discussing biofuel in the U.S., this is a distinction without a difference. To put it bluntly, we’re not going to be using any non-corn-based ethanol anytime soon, if ever. We might as well just assume corn-based ethanol so we can realistically compare it against other energy alternatives rather than simply muddying the waters of the debate.
To put it bluntly, we’re not going to be using any non-corn-based ethanol anytime soon, if ever.
If they got rid of the 54 cent per gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol it might get used here. I’m not holding my breath, however.
A few thoughts on the ad (I am turning 26 in 2 months, male, and politically active, so I I think I’m in the target demographic. I also taught and coached HSers and still keep in touch with a lot of them, so I have a read on that age group too)
1-It’s really pathetically bad. Insultingly so, actually. That’s been the case with Clinton’s appeals multiple times, where I look at the fruits of her “flawless” campaign’s efforts and think, “really? You expect to win my vote with that?” The transparency of the “Obama is the black candidate now” ploy comes to mind as another example of this.
2-We’re constantly told that “the youth” doesn’t vote. And in this election, multiple times, young voters have come out in droves, matching or out-pacing seniors. And they’re breaking heavily for Obama. I think this video (when compared to, say, Yes, We Can) is a good demonstration that the “problem” with the youth vote, to the extent that there is one, has more to do with most politicians being completely clueless about what appeals to anyone under the age of 35 than anything else. Obama’s campaign and specifically the man himself gets it, and as such they respond to him like just about any other “interest group” would: send him money, volunteer their time, organize, and vote. The reason people under-35 haven’t voted in large numbers in the past probably has more to do with appeals like the “Shred” video than with any problem endemic to those age groups.
3-This is, IMO, also a sign of the coming Clinton loss. Mark Schmitt accurately gets the overall dynamic here: we have the classic insurgent/establishment contest going on, only for the first time, the insurgent has a legit shot at winning. As the establishment candidate, Hillary started as the default option for just about everyone, and Obama’s early surge in the polls reflected his ability to consolidate the two groups most likely to be looking for alternatives to the familiar old political hand: young voters and higher-educated, well-off voters. That’s the classic base of any insurgency. Obama’s goals, from there on out, where to poach away Hillary’s base, while Hillary’s goals were to portray Obama as unable to bear the Democratic standard (naive/inexperienced/unelectable/not vetted/insubstantial/just a talker). She just had to protect herself from defections. She’s largely failed at that task. First, she lost the African-American vote, big time. She’s also ceded a ton of ground for 35-50 voters, women, union and working class voters in the mid-west and west. She’s started to see Obama’s numbers rise with hispanic voters (44% in Arizona)…this is a problem. The longer the race goes on, the more time he has to continually add to his base by poaching away her voters, bit-by-bit. And he’s gotten far enough now where he could probably hold his current base and end up with a slim delegate lead in the end. Now her job is two-fold: she not only has to protect her flanks, she also has to start peeling away some of his base. So that means lame-o appeals to the youth like the video above. Or maybe she could dress-up her policy lists by saying yes we can! That sounds sexy! Or she could pepper her new stump speech with mentions of “optimism” and “vision” (while not really offering it).
It’s so transparent that, again, it’s insulting. Which brings me to another point: Hillary is really bad at campaigning, as far as I can tell. Sure, given 100% name recognition, built-in high favorables throughout the party and being spotted a 30-point lead, and enormous institutional support, she can win some states. And she’s real good at taking the knives out during a debate. But is she actually any good at offering voters some affirmative argument for why she should be their President? As far as I can tell, no. If she was, she would’ve never lost so much ground to Obama. His task was so much harder than hers: He had to introduce himself to voters, make them like him, make them trust him, and make them believe that it’s imperative they choose him over the candidate everyone assumed would be their nominee and was otherwise happy with. All she had to do was offer a compelling reason why everyone was right at the outset that she was the right candidate. And she hasn’t been able to do that! Further evidence, I think, that its no guarantee she will be able to hold any theoretic lead she has by simply having a “D” next to her name the day a general election fight begins.
At least we (hopefully) won’t have but one more month of this. She’s officially adopting the Rudy G strategy of riding out a string of losses in small states before the big states vote later on…hopefully its as successful for her as it was for him, and we can move on to Obama v McCain.
Kris said:
“The comment just above by swarty is a perfect illustration. It really seems like she is given the benefit of malice, and her opponents, the benefit of the doubt. I dont know why this is, but I guess it is an unattractive combination of misogyny and buying into the republican frames of the Clintons.”
I’m sorry but that comment can not go unanswered. The reaction today of the Clinton campaign was a political reaction. That is not to say that Shuster’s remarks were not wrong. Just because I describe a reaction as political does not mean that it is pejorative, and therefore misogynistic. The campaigns make political decisions all the time. Sometimes they dovetail. Their outrage today has to be taken in context with a host of competing interests. The debate challenge had begun to lose steam and MSNBC was signed up for one in Ohio, added to Shuster’s idiotic remark, were all figured into the decision to crank up the outrage. I did not and will not defend the pimp remark.
This is what political campaigns do. They try to dominate the news cycle as one of the tools of winning our hearts and minds. The Clinton campaign knows exactly what it is doing here. That is not being mean. That is a fact and if I was a Clinton supporter I would take today’s news cycle as a good one. Again that does not mean that the Shuster remark is some happy byproduct of the news cycle. But they took that awful remark and made it an issue to benefit their campaign.
Obama’s campaign has done exactly the same thing as well. Because I chose to highlight the Clinton team’s decision today does not qualify me as a misogynist. Be very careful at how you throw that charge around. There is nothing in what I have written that can be seen in that light.
yes sugar is the only one that passes the criteria from the article – but even that depends on context. Ethanol from sugar cane works in Brazil because they have an equatorial year-round growing season. You’d have to waste a lot of energy to grow a plant in an unnatural environment. then again if the subsidy was big enough someone would do it.
I’m starting to think Obama will take the election – the gap is opening up in the head to heads – and the super deligates surely want to actually win the election – and as much as I argued before that Hilary might still go ok in an election there is a point at which the polls show a gap too big for her to make up and it looks like they might be heading in that direction.
That together with Obama probably winning the next round or two and Clinton may be the one in the weak position when they sit down to pressure one of them to quit.
Still maybe others here know the odds better than me.
I’m in the target audience (18), and I can confirm that the ad fails miserably. Hillary’s ‘band members’ were annoying. It was almost like watching VH1–washed up has-been band members talking about the glory days, blissfully unaware that no one but them cares and the rest of the world has moved on. The ad doesn’t use its time effectively either. It spends too much time trying to make Hillary seem cool and not enough time trying to change my mind about not voting for her.
And yes, hilzoy, shred is seriously out of date.
On the other hand, I though the Obama video was pretty well done, and interesting to watch if nothing else.
As a member of the “target demographic,” I actually thought that video was mildly funny, but badly paced (it could have been 30 seconds, not a minute), which is kind of clutch for humor. I’m also not sure how much of the humor was intentional. . .the idea of making an intentionally kind of bad video so that it’ll go viral would not be new to the Hilary campaign.
Also, some people still say “shred.” They are, however, only hardcore metalheads (and some crossover thrash/punk kids) who didn’t notice that the 80s are over. It’s also sometimes used semi-ironically (what isn’t?). While it is theoretically possible that Hilary employs a thrash fan, it’s highly unlikely. Most of them don’t vote.
And, as I said before, removing a 54 cent per gallon tariff might make importing it here more feasible.
“That together with Obama probably winning the next round or two and Clinton may be the one in the weak position when they sit down to pressure one of them to quit.
Still maybe others here know the odds better than me.”
No one’s sitting down about anything before Texas and Ohio.
Note also the Time poll I just posted about.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate, but with the farm lobby manning that particular gate, the ethanol-source issue is a foregone conclusion. Once we’re using ethanol, trying to craft a policy that distinguishes between corn and cane is at least three steps too technical to ever get any traction.
1. There’s just way too much money in it, and it’s all on one side.
2. The policy debate is over “stuff that burns” and “renewable energy” — once you accept “stuff that burns,” the game is already over.
We can’t even get a decent discussion of clean coal technology, let alone different sources of ethanol.
Trying to explain the difference to the electorate without putting them to sleep is a fool’s errand. Even if you had enough political capital to do it, given the payoff, you’d get better dividends working toward other potential energy sources.
3. There’s too many other angles to demagogue. Before you even get to square one on explaining the difference, the farm lobby will hit you with “why should we buy foreign ethanol!? Aren’t we supposed to be reducing our foreign energy dependence!? Liek OMG!!”
4. Corn ethanol subsidies dovetail too closely with farm subsidies in general.
The bottom line is that we grow a lot of corn in the U.S. — too much of it, in fact — and so in the end, corn-based ethanol is just too damn easy for legislators. It lets them feed the agricultural-subsidy beast while selling a “green,” “alternative energy” policy. We’re already wasting that money in the first place; even holding the line here would be an accomplishment.
STOP GIVING COULTER WHAT SHE WANTS
I’ve yet to read some of the comments, but isn’t it pretty much established that the Clintons were offering their daughter as a date during the Nevada Caucuses?
STOP GIVING COULTER WHAT SHE WANTS
Too many… potential jokes… must consider posting rules… agh… snark overload
Alan’s 12:05 is pretty damn vile.
Ethanol is nothing but moonshine and a racket. Moonshine goes for between $20 and $40 per gallon because it is expensive to produce. Probably the biggest process cost is energy (I know a few things about distilling alcohol).
Here is an ethanol factory equipment manufacturer’s process diagram:
http://www.icminc.com/ethanol/production_process/diagram/
Energy in #1: Farmer growing corn (combine, trucks, crop-dusters, etc., etc.);
Energy in #2: Move corn (trains and trucks);
Energy in #3: Mill corn;
Energy in #4: Add corn to water and boil it;
Energy in #5: Generate steam to distill mash;
Energy in #6: Distribute/dispose of products and waste;
I’ve heard that it takes 2-3 gallons of gasoline to produce one gallon of ethanol. That makes sense to me. It equates to energy being around a third of the cost of the finished product in an energy-intensive process.
The green-collar salesmen at the manufacturer talk about ‘reclaiming’ CO2 (“Energy In” = “CO2 Production”). That is BS. The energy required to separate and liquefy CO2 exhaust would probably double again CO2 production. We can debate the global warming falsehoods some other day, but from the standpoint of energy independence, ethanol is moving backwards.
And it is really hurting those people around the world who actually know what ‘food insecurity’ means. Corn prices have tripled.
The answer is nuclear power.
Again, when talking about corn, I agree. It should not be used for ethanol.
On the ad- I thought it was a stupid parody from The Daily Show or something. But if that’s really from the Clinton campaign, they’ve made a tragic error. Not only is that not cool, it might actually turn young people right off. She ought to recall that thing and get her money back from the “consultants” who thought that up.
On the Shuster thing- I thought it was only Republicans who whipped up fake outrage over stupid remarks. Please, let’s all pretend we’re furious and maybe people will vote for “our girl” Hillary because some respected journalist slipped up and used an inappropriate phrase on a live TV show that is supposed to be controversial. (This was Tucker’s show where it happened.)
Also, on Shuster, I think MSNBC was freaking out because they had just set up an exclusive debate for Ohio or something with Hillary & Barack. Once this happened, her campaign turned up the fake outrage, bitched out all the exec’s at NBC and threatened to pull out of the debate which could be very lucrative for NBC. It’s a shame because Matthews and Tucker have this kind of thing coming, not Shuster. David Shuster is great – and while his apology was scripted for him, I am sure he actually meant it.
And it is really hurting those people around the world who actually know what ‘food insecurity’ means. Corn prices have tripled.
This is kind of a strawman argument. We wouldn’t be selling that corn anyway — depressing supply and raising prices is kind of the whole point of U.S. agricultural policy.
At any rate, none of what you said leads to this non sequitur:
The answer is nuclear power.
(…unsubsidized nuclear power is real cheap. Uh huh.)
Again, when talking about corn, I agree. It should not be used for ethanol.
Sure, but the point is: political realities dictate that we’re never going to get ethanol from any other source — or at least not before we get other, more efficient energy sources — so, while there is a meaningful distinction between different sources of ethanol, for the purposes of U.S. alternative-energy policy, it’s completely academic.
swarty,
I’m sorry if I imputed misogyny to you specifically. That was not my intention. However, your previous comment attempts to excuse Shuster by terming his comments to be “inelegant phrasing”. Given the pattern of attacks on Ms. Clinton, I think the remarks were inexcusable, and I took exception to your attempt at a defense. I did not mean to impute any other motives to your comment and I apologize if my remarks earlier gave this impression. I hope this clarifies things.
~Gary Farber
Again, Hillary is now the Democrats’ Rudy. The above outlined plan isn’t a winning strategy. She’s gonna need at least Maine, probably also a Virginia or Wisconsin, before March 4th. She can’t go 0-fer and expect to be competitive down the line, especially with SUSA showing her losing her edges among older voters, women, and hispanics in Maryland and Virginia (see here and here). She can’t hold him off forever, especially in the midst of loss-after-loss-after-loss. And she certainly isn’t going to eat into his base with videos like “Shred” or facile Bill mea culpas about race-baiting.
“If they got rid of the 54 cent per gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol it might get used here. I’m not holding my breath, however.”
Yep. To change this, though, we wouldn’t have to just dislodge Iowa from the primary process; we’d have to apportion Senate seats by population. Sigh.
In my dreams…
Yep. To change this, though, we wouldn’t have to just dislodge Iowa from the primary process; we’d have to apportion Senate seats by population. Sigh.
As per usual, hilzoy says in one sentence what takes me 3 posts and 4+ bullet points…
Sigh.
Nuclear power is cheap, available domestically in abundance, and gives off no emissions. You just mine Uranium, do a little enrichment, form it into fuel rods, add some control rods and, voila!; a sustainable domestic power source (and no CO2 if you care about that). With advances in electric cars, there is the real promise to get the oil noose off of our necks.
Chernobyl was an old Soviet design where, if the core’s temperature got hotter, it gave off more heat (thus the KaBoom). When our reactors get hot, they shut themselves down. The process is simple and safe.
Even with burden of 2008-style regulation, nuclear power is competitive with other forms of energy on a cost basis. When recess ends and we come to the conclusion that we need energy, nuclear power will be the low-cost option.
Adam,
Meanwhile, as countries like Brazil – which is energy independent by the way – continue to press forward with successful plans for alternative fuels, our foolishly consistent hobgoblin infested small minds will continue to subsidize farmers to grow corn for ethanol and we will be the only ones using it while simultaneously patting ourselves on the back for our self-proclaimed wisdom and efficiency.
Bill,
Not a word about to do with the waste from nuclear reactors.
Yep. To change this, though, we wouldn’t have to just dislodge Iowa from the primary process; we’d have to apportion Senate seats by population. Sigh.
In my dreams…
Hilzoy,
What is also maddening about is that we will probably be the only ones using corn for ethanol, which means that it’s unlikely that anyone will challenge these subsidies for corn-based ethanol in the WTO, as Brazil did successfully with cotton subsidies.
That’s a highly oversimplified take on the nuclear power issue. The fact that the safety issues have been — arguably — overstated doesn’t implicate the fact that nuclear power has been heavily subsidized and still incurs substantial plant maintenance costs no matter how you slice it.
The bottom line is that nuclear power is a mature technology, but it’s still more expensive over the long term than wind or hydroelectric power, and there’s no way to get a really good evaluation of the costs to the U.S. because of the political environment and the fact that the industry’s been subsidized to high heaven since its inception. Wind and solar, just to name the other big kids on the block, haven’t benefited from significant subsidies and aren’t even close to mature technologies yet — i.e., there’s a lot of upside.
Asserting that nuclear power is the best non-hydrocarbon energy option because most of its opponents emphasize the wrong parts of the debate isn’t a substantive point in favor of nuclear power. It’s just demagoguery going the other direction. It means that people tend to freak out when you say “Chernobyl” (unsurprisingly), and nothing more (except maybe that the potential downside to nuclear power, no matter how remote the risk of an accident, does exist and is significant at whatever-sigma) — and it certainly doesn’t say anything about real-world cost.
To clarify my previous comment from ages ago, I want to state that I didn’t intend it to be flippant. Rather the opposite: how could casual references to prostitution be good? I don’t use such language myself, but I hear other people use it so frequently that it takes me a minute for the actual meaning to click. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.
Not a word about to do with the waste from nuclear reactors.
That can be dealt with if done right, and with breeder reactors can be significantly mitigated. –It’s a huge recurring cost, but I’ve found it’s best to avoid the subject with pro-nuclear-power wonks, or they just write you off as a hippie. 🙂
Meanwhile, as countries like Brazil – which is energy independent by the way – continue to press forward with successful plans for alternative fuels, our foolishly consistent hobgoblin infested small minds will continue to subsidize farmers to grow corn for ethanol and we will be the only ones using it while simultaneously patting ourselves on the back for our self-proclaimed wisdom and efficiency.
Well, yeah, we’re idiots and our energy policy sucks. What else is new?
Nuclear power is cheap, available domestically in abundance, and gives off no emissions. You just mine Uranium, do a little enrichment, form it into fuel rods, add some control rods and, voila!; a sustainable domestic power source (and no CO2 if you care about that).
The number of things wrong with this sentence is simply staggering. For starters:
Uranium is present everywhere on earth, but there are relatively few places where the Uranium occurs in sufficient density so that ore extraction, processing and enrichment require less energy than you can generate from that ore in a reactor. In other words, most Uranium deposits cost more energy to mine than they can ever produce. That’s why reciting random numbers about how plentiful Uranium is on earth is so deceptive.
Mining and enrichment are not environmentally happy processes. They involve pulverizing tons granite for every few kilograms of useful ore. The crushed granite has to be processed with truly horrific chemicals which release potent greenhouse gases as a byproduct. You’re left with tons of lightly radioactive dross exposed on the landscape, leaking heavy metals into the water table.
Chernobyl was an old Soviet design where, if the core’s temperature got hotter, it gave off more heat (thus the KaBoom). When our reactors get hot, they shut themselves down. The process is simple and safe.
You’re confused. While Chernobyl’s design was flawed, modern pressurized water reactors in the US don’t differ significantly from the designs used in Three Mile Island. There are a number of ways that US reactors can fail that will not lead to automatic shutdown. You may be thinking of pipe dream breeder reactor designs that have never been used in commercial power generation before; some of them come closer to this failsafe operation. However, it is highly unlikely that breeder reactors will enter commercial service in the near future; the technology is too flawed.
Randy Paul;
Bury it. People bring up technical opposition to burying spent waste in metal caskets at Yucca Mountain. The argument is that in a few thousand years the casket will crack or corrode, and the (metal) spent fuel rod will magically leak out of the crack and contaminate the water table.
These people seem to forget that WE USED TO BLOW UP VERY LARGE NUCLEAR WARHEADS IN THE SAME AREA.
Any theoretical leakage from casket-encased metal fuel rods would be negligible in comparison with the existing contamination. I’ve spent a few nights in Beatty, and the town folk still seem normal.
Bill,
I forgot to mention:
Nuclear power is not cheap. It is significantly more expensive than fossil fuels, and that is after continuing massive subsidies from the federal government. Absent those subsidies, it is uncertain whether you could even insure a nuclear plant in this country, let alone generate a profit from one.
Bury it. People bring up technical opposition to burying spent waste in metal caskets at Yucca Mountain. The argument is that in a few thousand years the casket will crack or corrode, and the (metal) spent fuel rod will magically leak out of the crack and contaminate the water table.
These people seem to forget that WE USED TO BLOW UP VERY LARGE NUCLEAR WARHEADS IN THE SAME AREA.
That’s hardly a compelling argument for burying it. This is a major NIMBY issue also. In addition, given the government’s piss-poor record on guarding chemical plants, ports, etc., I am not comfortable with broadening the spectrum of potential terrorist targets.
Finally, what Turbulence and Adam said regarding the costs.
Bruce, did the Clintons use Chelsea to campaign or did they not? Does that mean she’s in any way associated with prostitution? Of course not.
The word ‘pimp’ has entered into our language whether you like it or not. I choose to interpret his words charitably.
I’d appreciate not being referred to as vile, if my words offended, I truly apologise.
Turbulence/ Randy Paul;
Chernobyl had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity, which means that when the core gets hot, it gives off more heat. Boom.
Three Mile Island, as well as the modern designs that are waiting to be built, have a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity, which means that when the core gets hot, it shuts down.
If I recall correctly, Three Mile Island had a failure of the cooling system caused by operator error, and some contamination was released from overheated fuel. The reactor shut itself down. A small amount of airborne contamination was released from the containment to the air. Those people ‘exposed’ received less exposure than one would on a long-haul airplane flight. How many people were killed or seriously injured (0)? How about death and injury from coal each year? Three Mile Island was a failure of people, and the inherent fail-safe nature of domestic plants was demonstrated. It was a media event.
The statement that nuclear power is not cost-effective is false. Wyoming is full of Uranium. So is Ontario. The process is simple.
A quick review of history indicates that NIMBY and one dollar will buy you a double cheeseburger at McDonalds when the time comes.
Buying more ethanol from Brazil means more of Amazonia turning into sugar cane factory farms.
The statement that nuclear power is not cost-effective is false. Wyoming is full of Uranium. So is Ontario. The process is simple.
Honestly, that skirted the legitimate questions of subsidies or the process of extracting the uranium.
A quick review of history indicates that NIMBY and one dollar will buy you a double cheeseburger at McDonalds when the time comes.
An accurate review of history would have come across the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant.
I happened to be living near the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama when it caught fire when someone decided to use a candle to look for air leaks, damaging control cables for the reactor units. As long as humans operate nuclear plants there will always be human error. It’s much too risky.
Buying more ethanol from Brazil means more of Amazonia turning into sugar cane factory farms.
Not likely. Amazonia has not been a good region to grow cane in the past. Indeed, Sao Paulo grows some 60% of the cane in Brazil and the Cerrado in the Center West region is more likely to be the location for expansion.
1. ‘Extracting’ the Uranium is easy. You dig it from the ground.
2. ‘History’ refers to those days preceding the Nurturing Age. 1989 doesn’t count.
That’s all for now. Good night.
Extracting the uranium from the ore as turbulence mentioned above. Surely you know it’s not found in the earth as reactor-ready rods. It’s not an easy process.
History’ refers to those days preceding the Nurturing Age. 1989 doesn’t count.
Talk about moving goal posts. Honestly, you’re being disingenuous here. $6 billion dollars was spent on Shoreham and it never went on line.
You also have yet again ignored the question of subsidies for nukes. It’s very hard to take your arguments seriously in light of this.
Good night.
“You may be thinking of pipe dream breeder reactor designs that have never been used in commercial power generation before; some of them come closer to this failsafe operation. However, it is highly unlikely that breeder reactors will enter commercial service in the near future; the technology is too flawed.”
No, he was almost certainly thinking of pebble bed reactors.
For other views on how to deal with nuclear power: nuclear power in France.
Alan, there are no inevitabilities in language. People make choices about their usage. Bad usages don’t have to be accepted just because they are common.
This is easy to explain. Clinton has cultivated the idea that she is a deep political player. She has cultivated the image of possessing ruthlessness and the willingness to employ sneaky or hyper-legalistic tactics. These aren’t accidental–she is essentially campaigning on “Republicans are nasty, and only I am nasty enough to beat them.” As such, when her campaign makes nasty comments or odd moves, people assume that it is part of her plan, rather than just an accident; even if it really is just an accident.
OK, time for a tirade.
First, let’s sort a few things out here:
1. Bill is correct that it is possible to build modern nuclear plants that self-regulate, i.e., that shut down if you lose containment, rather than go critical.
2. Turbulence, however, is correct in that many of our current plants aren’t this advanced, and the technology isn’t proven or cheap.
3. Randy is correct in that fuel is not at all the relevant recurring cost to consider for nuclear plants, and the fact that Bill even made that argument suggests strongly that he’s not all that well-informed about this topic to begin with.
The bottom line is that the safety issue is a red herring. Frankly, we don’t have good information on the future costs of nuclear power, partially because of the fact that it’s always been subsidized. But it’s fairly clear that even if it’s cost-effective, it’s still really, really expensive.
Here are some of the things we do know:
1. The upkeep costs for any nuclear power plant are very high. Also, those costs are all recurring, and they generally scale as poorly as hydrocarbon power (that is, the incremental costs tend to increase with generating capacity; there is no economy of scale). Specifically:
a. The bottom line is that nuclear power technology is very complex — it’s not as simple as putting some coal in a furnace and running a turbine. Everything is expensive.
b. Nuclear plants require highly-trained, specialized personnel and lots of oversight. We don’t even have decent staff as it is; training more is a long-term cost borne by the public, and the demand is inelastic, so the marginal cost of getting more nuclear engineers actually increases over time. The higher premium you place on safety, the worse this problem becomes.
c. There are significant ongoing repair and maintenance costs — nuclear power generation involves a lot of delicate equipment that’s often operating in extreme conditions and with enormously restrictive failsafe requirements.
d. The fuel ain’t free. Nuclear fuel is relatively cheaper and more accessible than coal or oil, but the cost to obtain it is non-trivial no matter what, and it’s not even a single order of magnitude better than hydrocarbons in terms of cost-per-watt, even if you don’t include all the secondary costs; see “wind” link in previous post.
e. There are many, many ancillary costs associated with nuclear fuel even aside from supply. Even if it were possible to simply “bury” nuclear waste without worrying about leakage polluting the groundwater — which it’s not — you can’t avoid the costs of security and transportation, neither of which is trivial.
2. Those costs are already significant for our old, dangerous plant designs — the new, fancy, safer plants Bill’s discussing (the ones that don’t exist yet) aren’t cheaper in any of the above respects, even after we work the kinks out, which we haven’t. In fact, the “better technology” ensures that the upkeep costs will be higher.
3. The historic record for nuclear power in straight dollar amounts simply sucks — even aside from the subsidies, we’ve built a bunch them and they’re still horrendously expensive. There’s no evidence of any sort of economy of scale — just the opposite, in fact.
4. The meltdown risk is not the issue, for or against. Again, no matter how much you reduce the risk of a meltdown, (a) it remains a downside unique to nuclear power that represents at least some potential cost, even proportioned for the risk, and (b) addressing the risk of a meltdown is not free — in fact, it’s very, very expensive. You can, in fact, take a lot of the “human error” out of the equation, but it takes a great deal of money to do so.
Nuclear-power advocates often assume that the meltdown issue is the only substantive objection to nuclear energy, which isn’t even remotely the case. It’s just a threshold issue — you don’t get to build a nuclear power plant if it might melt down; however, the fact that it won’t melt down doesn’t mean you should build the plant.
5. Nuclear energy is a mature technology; any further R&D gains we can wring out of it are incremental at best. Solar and wind power, just to take two examples, are not even close to mature; research dollars invested there represent potentially huge gains in efficiency.
6. Nuclear energy is not a growth market. Research in other technologies potentially leads to export profits, etc. No one is going to pay U.S. researchers because we can build better nuclear power plants. Inventing a super-efficient photoelectric cell, on the other hand…
7. The infrastructure investments necessary to move to nuclear power aren’t reversible; once you build the plants, it’s prohibitively expensive to take them apart again or choose a different path. If we go for solar or wind power first, on the other hand, our path isn’t foreclosed. The opportunity costs here are enormous — as in trillions of dollars enormous, over the lifetime of new plants.
8. None of the problems above apply to solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc. etc. etc. The recurring costs are lower in every respect and the economies of scale are better.
9. In addition to all of that, nuclear energy, like hydrocarbon-based energy, requires a centralized electrical grid, which has tons of its own built-in inefficiencies and costs. Solar power especially — but potentially wind power and other technologies as well — doesn’t share these inefficiencies:
a. Long-distance electrical transmission is cheap, but again, the cost is non-trivial.
b. The ongoing upkeep costs of power transmission are significant. Maintaining those electrical poles costs a lot of money.
c. Long-distance power transmission isn’t reliable, which is increasingly problematic. Local power sources means: fewer brownouts and blackouts; storms don’t knock out your electricity; people don’t die in hospitals during blackouts; a significantly smaller investment in the ridiculously expensive and inefficient backup power systems currently required at facilities where power is critical, like server farms, hospitals, banks, utilities, stock markets, television stations, etc. etc. etc. Keeping all those batteries charged is a waste.
d. The security risk of a centralized infrastructure is obvious and significant. The Northeast and California have already demonstrated that they don’t even need help knocking out their own electricity; a local-power infrastructure makes all that a non-issue.
10. [Just to have a nice, round number.]
No, he was almost certainly thinking of pebble bed reactors.
I knew I forgot something! I was going to mention that — a breeder reactor is a type of reactor that generates fissile material (and is essentially the basis for any argument that tries to class nuclear power as “renewable”). A pebble bed reactor is a modern reactor design that’s more efficient than a classic light water reactor, and that — in theory — doesn’t carry the risk of meltdown like a LWR does.
France does provide an empirical example suggesting that it is quite possible to run a country on nuclear power. Of course, Iceland provides an analogous example with regard to geothermal power. The question is still what the most efficient energy solution is for the United States.
Adam, this is an excellent comment. I’d add only two things:
1. Bill is correct that it is possible to build modern nuclear plants that self-regulate, i.e., that shut down if you lose containment, rather than go critical.
2. Turbulence, however, is correct in that many of our current plants aren’t this advanced, and the technology isn’t proven or cheap.
Um, I thought that there are currently ZERO production pebble bed reactors in operation. Considering how much simpler and safer the design is, it seems strange that we don’t actually generate power with them…unless designing, building, and operating pebble bed reactors is more challenging than their proponents are willing to admit.
a. The bottom line is that nuclear power technology is very complex — it’s not as simple as putting some coal in a furnace and running a turbine. Everything is expensive.
b. Nuclear plants require highly-trained, specialized personnel and lots of oversight.
These points are often under appreciated. People such as Bill like to carp about how the TMI incident was caused by operator error, but that’s simply not true. Yes, the operators made a number of mistakes. However, the system was designed in such a way that operators did not have information they needed to make control decisions in an emergency. During the TMI incident, operators were faced at several junctures with choices in which all alternatives had potential serious negative consequences with no clear rubric for choosing amongst them. Nobody thought the pressurized water reactor designs of the 1970s exhibited these design and operational flaws, and yet they did. The industry’s persistent inability to think sensibly about how complex systems fail does not inspire confidence.
No, he was almost certainly thinking of pebble bed reactors.
For other views on how to deal with nuclear power: nuclear power in France.
Seb,
Thanks for the correction. I was indeed mistaken. On review though, I think Bill was completely lost: his phrasing implied operating commercial reactors that exist in the US today, and those are neither pebble bed nor fast breeder.
The French nuclear system is interesting, but also somewhat bizarre. It is completely government run and centrally managed with very little transparency. Consequently, in the past they have been caught hiding significant design and safety flaws from the public that greatly increased the likelihood of an adverse event. Given the American fetish for local control and hatred of bureaucracy, it is difficult to imagine reproducing anything like the French system in the US. On the other hand, it seems that competitive energy markets are unable to sustain a serious private nuclear power industry.
Um, I thought that there are currently ZERO production pebble bed reactors in operation.
Well, according to the Wikipedia article, China has that prototype HTR-10, which has been online since 2000, and the South African reactor is in “active development” — who knows what that means. As far as I know, it depends on what your definition of a “production” reactor is, or maybe whether it’s “in operation.”
However, I’m not aware of any major operational hurdles to building new reactors; I think that the answer to the “why don’t we see more?” question is simply that we haven’t started any new reactors for a very long time, so even current projects are old designs. As far as I know, the (very few) reactor projects in active development in the U.S. were all abandoned a long time ago but — in what was surely a shocking development — restarted under the Bush Administration.
In retrospect, my last point should have been this:
10. Nuclear power just isn’t an effective solution in our current timeframe. All else aside, the oil demand crunch and probably global warming are very serious problems that demand immediate attention.
Nuclear reactors take forever to build and bring online, and don’t exactly have a favorable history as far as being completed on-schedule. Even if solar power, for example, is less cost-effective, it represents a sort of plug-and-play solution (no pun intended) to our current needs — new investment has an immediate effect on demand pressures, which creates an immediate return and also potentially eases transitions for a lot of legacy technology.
Even if nuclear power didn’t have any of the problems it does, we can’t build the plants any faster. That’s pretty important right now.
Nuclear power is “cheap” if you ignore the direct subsidies, the cost of security to prvent terrorist attacks, the residual risk of accident or attack, the government cost to burry the waste, and lots of pther problems. But its a good cheap attack on better solutions!
imagine if that money was used to subsidize wind and solar, which are just obviously the future.
and the ‘controversy’ about the ‘pimping’ thing is exactly tailored to appeal to clinton’s base, since old people are the most likely to not be cognizant of contemporary usage of the word.
john miller: Re ethanol, sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. That’s why there has to more effort to finding more alternatives ASAP.
Yup. Unintended consequences. Must.Resist.GW.comments…
Fatal Attraction? Come on.
What? You can’t see her boiling up bunny stew? I can…
And it is really hurting those people around the world who actually know what ‘food insecurity’ means. Corn prices have tripled.
Jeeze. A Bill comment I agree with. Don’t do that dude.
Hilzoy: we’d have to apportion Senate seats by population.
Not often I disagree with you, but let the cities run everything?
@Gary: I think they mean the religious jews, which means it beats bible-belt christianity and islam. People with Jewish parents are often not perceived as particularly Jewish unless they wear the religious attire. Though I might just not see a bias, I’m from Amsterdam. In our current climate I think I’d rather be orthodox jew than ortodox muslim though.
The energy alternatives are confusing for me. I’ve always been against nuclear energy, mainly because of the safety and waste-disposal issues. But things like this make me hesitate again. I do like research into alternative energy sources and support politicians who want to invest in it. How does Portugal fare with energy from the ocean? could Africa supply the EU with solar energy? What are the developments in windpower?
>>>You then use that one comment (which was written by someone I have not read before and is thus unlikely to be a regular around here) to tar the entire OW community<<< i guess that's referring to me, since i was the first to comment and use the phrase "oh poor me." i dont understand, really, redstocking's offense at this. to my eyes, it seems that whenever its convenient, Hillary plays up the "i'm just a girl" card, which is offensive to me and should really be offensive to women, since it makes a mockery of feminism. my girlfriend had no problems with Hillary per se when all this started, but over time she moved to Obama because she was sickened by Hillary shamelessness. does she need to renounce her womanhood now? it is long past due we had a woman president, just not this one. Shuster's comment was stupid and vulgar, and he shouldn't have said it. but Hillary is now willing to debate on Fox when it's tactically advantageous for her to do so, and how much sleazy offensive stuff has been said about the Clintons there? and its David Shuster--who's been one of the toughest TV reporters out there on Bush--is the one who finally gets her outraged? puh-lease.
Dutchmarbel: Late question about the survey you linked to. My Dutch is completely crap, being a triangulation between English and German, so I may have completely misunderstood, but it looked like the majority of people were saying that minority status (Turkish, Moroccan, Surinaman) was unacceptable. Does this mean immigrants from these places or anyone with ancestory from these places? Also, Antilles is acceptable to only 43%? The Antilles are part of the Netherlands. It’d be like an American saying that a president from Alaska would be unacceptable. (Or do I misunderstand the status of the Antilles? Maybe it’d be more like an American saying that a Puerto Rican would be unacceptable?) Either way it looks like you may have a racism problem going on in the Netherlands. And the over 70 problem strikes me as silly: the average life expectancy in the Netherlands is what 79? 80? Surely a 71 year old PM could be expected to live out his or her term. Yes, I know these same prejudices are at play in the US, but I expect more rationality from the Dutch.
“In our current climate I think I’d rather be orthodox jew than ortodox muslim though.”
That’s not precisely a comfort, it it?
“@Gary: I think they mean the religious jews, which means it beats bible-belt christianity and islam. People with Jewish parents are often not perceived as particularly Jewish unless they wear the religious attire. Though I might just not see a bias, I’m from Amsterdam.”
Also, I’m wondering how to read your explanation — which I appreciate, and obviously I’m not blaming you for the results — as other than either:
a) About half the Dutch population has a bigoted and antisemitic stereotype of Jews as Orthodoz/Hasidic wearers of funny clothes, yarmulkes, and strange ways; and on top of that, they’re so bigoted that they can’t see beyond appearances to conceive that any individual Orthodoz Jew might otherwise have political beliefs identical to theirs; or:
b) Other.
Maybe you can help me with the Other possibility.
Because I’m not seeing how that explanation helps. How is it different from saying “well, they’re thinking of the really dark-skinned people, rather than the light-skinned folks who look just like us, who are ok”?
“Orthodoz”? Is that a new sect, Gary?
Clearly, I should have made coffee.
Orthodox. Damn fingers hitting wrong keys twice, grumble, sassafrassafrassarassa.
To be honest, as a member of the ‘youth demographic’ (20 years old, male, somewhat politically active), I sort of view this post as two examples of the same situation.
The rock band video is ridiculous. My stupid friends aren’t politically active, and even the stupidest of them can detect blatant pandering that is so obvious as to border on mockery.
Also, anybody who thinks Hillary could ever have the word ‘shred’ applied to her really needs to share whatever amazing drugs they’re taking.
By the same token, as a member of my generation, being fired for saying that somebody is pimping something seems incredibly strange. I had to reread that comment several times – and then read the comments to see people explaining why it was offensive – before I even got it.
Now, perhaps my circle of friends is unusual, but I hear things like “yeah, but you’re a whore for X product anyway!” where X product is something a friend is recommending. “Stop pimping out X product” is just as common. While I agree that because my friends and I use words in a fashion like this doesn’t necessarily mean that prime time television should use the words in the same manner, I also think it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt before firing them.
In both cases, in my eyes, Hillary’s campaign ends up looking like a stick in the mud. If her intention was to make youth voters like me think “wow, Hillary is hardcore and totally cool and knows what we’re about!”, she failed with the ad, and then failed again when she chose to make a big issue out of what was probably (in my eyes anyway), nothing more than a case of poorly used slang.
Perhaps Hillary benefitted from getting the pundit in question fired. She certainly scored no points with me though.
I thought the ad was terrific and inspiring, not only does it remind voters of her anti-establishment roots, it expertly plays up her cred with today’s youth movement. I was on the fence before I saw this, but now I am definitely voting for.. oh never mind.
Gotta jet, gonna go shred on my axe. Hillary has been there, done that. Yadda, yadda, yadda. You go girl!
“Perhaps Hillary benefitted from getting the pundit in question fired.”
Or perhaps not. This never happened.
My mistake. Gary is quite correct. Schuster is suspended for an undetermined amount of time, not fired. Thanks for the correction, Gary.
Open thread:
Has anyone heard from Rilkefan lately?
Late-night Adam has done the subject justice. If I may, I’d just add:
11. Thermal cycle power plants of any sort are due to get a whole lot more expensive, because we’re running out of convenient cooling water supplies.
12. Nuclear power plants not only require more sophisticated and expensive operating talent, but the construction expertise is a whole lot more stringent than even a coal burner, let alone a wind turbine. You might be able to scrape up enough to build 1-2 plants a year, if you were lucky.
By the way, no link, but the last estimate I read put the SA pebble bed prototype up around $7000/kw investment. (Compared to a coal burner of $1500/kw). Nobody in their right mind will ever build a lot of those.
I’m not in the demographic Clinton was trying to reach in that video, but I can tell you she’s developing quite a knack for insulting her alleged core demographic.
She’s pre-emptively excusing expected losses in this week’s caucuses on the grounds that her supporters are too busy working to take time off to caucus for her. The insinuation being that Obama’s supporters are either trust fund pseudo-progressives or the unemployed.
Well, I have news for her. I went to Obama’s rally yesterday, and I was surely NOT the only middle-aged white woman there, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only middle-aged white woman who holds down a full time job who supports Obama, who is somehow making time to caucus for Obama, and who is having more and more trouble being just pro-Obama rather than anti-Hillary.
I swear, the Clintons piss me off more every time they open their mouths.
“By the way, no link, but the last estimate I read put the SA pebble bed prototype up around $7000/kw investment. (Compared to a coal burner of $1500/kw). Nobody in their right mind will ever build a lot of those.”
Projecting the cost of a prototype onto a hypothetical standardized production model seems questionable.
I’m going to comment once on nuclear power, and otherwise try not to, because I don’t have the technical expertise to make a sustained argument, and thus I won’t.
But for the record, I’m pretty sympathetic to examining the possibilities of building new nuclear power plants of a standardized design.
The lack of standardization was one of the many insane parts of the earlier waves of U.S. nuclear power plants, along with innumerable other design and safety issues.
Nonetheless, we have some 100+ nuclear power plants running the U.S. longer than I’ve been alive, with no one dead. France has a far more impressive record. It’s more than you can say for what coal mining has brought us.
Wind and sun aren’t available at all locations 100% of the time.
Disposal into the ground at a single site poses a danger at, at most, a single site on the planet. There are plenty of dangerous sites on the planet; the overall addition doesn’t strike me as apt to lead to a tribe of mutants fighting a planet of the apes, and I’m not inclined to worry that much about the trouble of ten thousand years from now. Call me over-optimistic, and I’ll deal, since I read a lot of the comments here as overly pessimistic about the possibilities. Getting sufficient trained personnel isn’t something I’m apt to believe is a real problem, for instance, if we actually care to bother to simply do it.
Generally speaking, I think there are sound reasons to be cautious about fission reactors, but there’s also a lot of knee-jerk rejection.
But I’m not going to argue engineering, or get into a back and forth on the details. I’m just mentioning, in case anyone is interested, that I think there is, in fact, a good case for carefully moving ahead on some further nuclear power production development, rather than dismissing it out of hand. Neither wind nor sun nor geothermal will be able to supply a majority of our power needs any time in the near or midterm, according to any possible projection I’ve seen.
I’m not apt to respond to questions on the topic; I’ll sit back and let y’all have it out with each other.
All I have to say about the ad is that I kept waiting for Will Ferrell or Andy Dick to show up. Nuff said.
Many thanks to all involved for the very informative nuclear and other power subthread.
“Orthodoz”?
Yes, a little known but remarkable sect, they refer to themselves as “God’s Sleepy People”.
Thanks –
I’m not in the target demographic but I hang out with a lot of people of the appropriate age — yay grad school! — and I think that a substantial majority would find Hillary’s ad lame, with a non-negligible minority find it hilarious as kitsch. Neither reaction is what she’d be going for, though.
Also, in re Schuster’s remark, I’m guessing (based on what little I’ve seen of him) that nick’s explanation is correct: he was trying to be hip and failed utterly. Much like Hillary’s ad, come to think of it. There are many acceptable uses of “pimp” nowadays (sorry, Bruce) — nick covers the basics here [go nick go!] — and Schuster looks like he went for one and missed. I’ve never seen in him the barely-repressed misogyny and absolute Clinton-hatred I’ve seen in Mathews, whose continued employment mystifies me. The only way he’s getting off the air, though, will be if a sufficient number of MSNBC’s target demographics complain both to them and their advertisers; I have no idea who or how, though.
“Yes, a little known but remarkable sect, they refer to themselves as ‘God’s Sleepy People’.”
Ah, yes, and they deeply resent the heretical “NoDoz” breakaway members. Thanks, Russell!
I may be more Orthodoz than I had realized.
But sometimes I stay awake for marathon sessions of days, just to feel dirty and to do the forbidden.
And my insomnia makes it hard for me to fulfill all the rituals.
But our Grand Rebbe, who is permanently in a coma, of course, sets the example for all of us. Why, all his children are also all in comas, they’re so respectful and religious!
And now it’s one of the five daily times for napping. Back soon!
Yup. Unintended consequences. Must.Resist.GW.comments…
OCSteve…sigh. Haven’t we been through this on TiO? Many people (like me) who believe that GW is a serious problem also believe that corn based ethanol is very very bad.
Not often I disagree with you, but let the cities run everything?
That would be democracy. I’m unclear on why someone in Wyoming deserves many more votes than someone in California. Perhaps because they love America more?
Yes, a little known but remarkable sect, they refer to themselves as ‘God’s Sleepy People’
Hmm…Do they accept converts or is this one of those religions you have to be born into?
While we’re picking on this survey, I also thought it was interesting that they asked about “Jewish”, “Moslem” or “strict? (strong? not sure of the exact word but I assume it means highly religious or something similar) Christian”. The implication, to me anyway, is that people in the Netherlands think that Christians can be mellow about their religion but Jews and Moslems are always fanatics. Or have I missed the cultural implication entirely?
You guys are snobs. The video is corny & lame, but lameness & corniness is a proud presidential campaign tradition in this country. That said, I sure hope no consultant got some exorbitant fee for it.
About that Hillary ad:
1) The storyline they’re using — VH1 Behind the Music — is for discussing bands that were finished by the late 80s or early 90s. Kids today don’t use the term “shredding” very much. And they mainly listen to bands which are still actively making music. I don’t think the target demographic would think this video was aimed at them.
2) The implication — that kids support Obama because he’s cool — is insulting.
3) The pacing and comic timing are awful. This thing seems to have been designed by committee.
In summary: that campaign ad is full of fail.
Fully recognizing that prejudice is alive and well in many human hearts (whether in the US, the Netherlands, or anywhere else), the categories listed are, as it so often seems to me with questionnaires, not the relevant ones.
If I had to say who I wanted in high office, my answer not be based on categories like Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, etc. It would have to with candidates’ beliefs about what it means to live in a diverse secular society. I would vote against anyone who said that civil/secular law should be made identical with their “religious” beliefs. This goes for atheists who might argue (as some have done) that parents shouldn’t be allowed to teach religious beliefs to their children because doing so is child abuse.
Maybe some of the responses to the questionnaire include this reasoning mushed up in the rest. Even then, the replies would include some amount of stereotyping as to which religious denominations are more likely to include people who want their beliefs to run the lives of the rest of us.
Amazon sugar cane (and soy), for example.
Uranium is nothing more than a heat source, really no different than natural gas or oil or coal. It isn’t that complex. Instead of generating heat from the combustion of fossil fuels, you generate heat through the friction created by the controlled splitting of atoms. Once the heat leaves the reactor compartment, nuclear plants are identical to convention plants. I’d be happy to get into any level of detail on this.
The magical ‘upkeep’ or ‘recurring’ costs associated with nuclear plants are no different than those associated with conventional plants (other than excessive government regulation based mostly around irrational fears, see above). I’d ask to what upkeep and recurring costs people are referring.
@Bill:
Chernobyl.
Disposal.
Radiation sickness and deaths in the mining process.
Coal sucks too, I’m willing to stipulate.
But please, don’t go into any further level of detail.
Dianne, the thing about “Christian” in a highly secularized European country is that it is something most people were born into (no denomination hopping like in the US), and regular Christians are people who go to church to marry, and for funerals.
The “strict” ones display their religious affiliation in some additional way and appear to take it seriously. In that way they are in the same class as observant muslims etc. They take their direction in life from religious teachings more than from the observable and changing reality. This is (seen as) a questionable trait for politicians.
Gary, I took dutchmarbel’s explanation to mean that the words “Christian”, “Muslim”, and “Jewish” refer to people who are serious observers of one of those faiths. People who are secular in orientation, no matter what their background, might not bother the people responding in that poll, but if they take their religion seriously then it’s a problem. Which might be an anti-religious bias, though again it might not. I’m a believing Christian but there are many fellow Christians whose religious beliefs regarding certain political issues bother me a great deal, to the point where I would not want them in office. I might be among those who might be among those rejecting a “very Christian” politician in that poll, depending on what meaning I thought I was supposed to assign to the phrase “very Christian”.
Now of course that may not be what dutchmarbel meant and even if it is, it might not be what the poll responders meant. Or some of them might be bigots and some of them only opposed to religious reactionaries.
Though that word “very” is potentially bothersome. Why distinguish between Jews and Muslims vs. “very Christian”? I suppose the assumption there is that the ordinary person is Christian, but not serious about it and everyone else is a nut. Though apparently the class of serious Christians are more whacked out than the class of all Jews, though not quite as scary as the class of all Muslims.
I think we need a better poll.
Kvenlander,
Note the frequent use of the word “if” in that article as well as this: “And while sugarcane cultivation is minimal now in the Amazon, some environmentalists fear growing demand for the fuel could push cane growers there.” . Precious little cane is being grown in Amazonia. Hopefully it will not increase and if the growers are smart, they’ll look to the cerrado instead. It’s much better suited for cane.
The far greater risk is from soybeans, especially as the demand for soy products grows in China. Perhaps we can start a thread on discouraging people from eating tofu.
Donald: I agree, the poll could have been better. But in my (possibly biased) world view, a Jewish or Islamic person is just as likely or more likely (especially in the case of Jewish) to have been born into the faith and observe it only for marrying and burying as a Christian. Hence, my concern about the apparent bias against all Jewish or Muslim people but only certain Christian people. Even if I suspect that in practice, Gary Farber’s biggest obstacle to becoming Dutch PM wouldn’t be his religion, but his, er, frank and forthright (aka undiplomatic) way of discussing controversial issues. (Assuming, of course, he got over that little citizenship problem.)
Uranium is nothing more than a heat source, really no different than natural gas or oil or coal. It isn’t that complex. Instead of generating heat from the combustion of fossil fuels, you generate heat through the friction created by the controlled splitting of atoms. Once the heat leaves the reactor compartment, nuclear plants are identical to convention plants. I’d be happy to get into any level of detail on this.
Aside from the fact that I really doubt any of us needs the condescending 9th grade explanation of how a fission reactor operates (except, apparently, Bill, who seems to believe that “friction” is apparently involved somehow, which is . . . incredible*), this is astonishingly naive.
*I mean, seriously. Friction? Someone teach this man about neutrons and energy and such, please.
Instead of generating heat from the combustion of fossil fuels, you generate heat through the friction created by the controlled splitting of atoms.
Um, what!?
“I suppose the assumption there is that the ordinary person is Christian, but not serious about it and everyone else is a nut.”
Seems like. I appreciate the explanations, and it’s certainly true that a good part of it might be secular anti-religious feeling, but it still looks to me as if there’s an inevitable implication that because you, to whatever degree, profess a religion or identity as a member of a non-Christian religious group, the question of whether that identity in any way prevents you from having identical political beliefs from the respondent isn’t even worth asking: the assumption that it does is simply inherent.
This seems problematic.
Is there a difference in this from believing that a Catholic politician is unacceptable, because Catholics have to follow the orders of the Pope, or that a Protestant from a given isn’t acceptable, because they’d have to follow that sect in some command that would interfere with their political judgment, other than that in this case, Christians aren’t having those assumptions made about them unless they’re “strong” Christians?
That is, if such assumptions were still being made today, in Holland, or in a hypothetical country, if we prefer, about Christians, regardless of what they actually believe, would that be any different?
I’m not asking because I think Donald or anyone is disagreeing with me: I’m asking to see if others might have other enlightening observations and perhaps corrections.
To clarify, the binding energy is released from the Uranium, in the form of fission products moving away from each other quickly. The fission products are slowed through interactions with other matter (AKA ‘friction’), which gives off heat, which is used to warm water, which is used to create steam, which makes turbines spin.
Chernobyl and disposal were covered above. To check on Uranium poisoning in the mines, I’ve referred to an opposition fact sheet and their only arguments are:
1. Death rates are higher in worldwide Uranium mines than they are in manufacturing and construction. Which means nothing because mining is more dangerous than manufacturing or construction.
2. That ‘there is no safe level of radiation’. Which is a false and obstructionist argument. A typical nuclear worker gets more radiation from the granite in the post office than he does at work. The 5,000 mrem whole body limit has been around for generations.
3. And then the obligatory ‘dispossessing indigenous cultures and peoples’ argument.
http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/resources/edkit/21uramine.pdf
“Even if I suspect that in practice, Gary Farber’s biggest obstacle to becoming Dutch PM wouldn’t be his religion, but his, er, frank and forthright (aka undiplomatic) way of discussing controversial issues.”
As a reality check, here is an absolutely typical example of my undiplomatic way of discussing controversial issues.
Judging by the Anti-Defamation League’s surveys, it looks like Holland is not necessarily more anti-Semitic than the US. Irritatingly, they use slightly different questions for their US and European surveys, but the Dutch are less likely to think that Jews have too much power in the business world than Americans (11 to 20%), though more likely to say that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country (46 to 31%).
The magical ‘upkeep’ or ‘recurring’ costs associated with nuclear plants are no different than those associated with conventional plants (other than excessive government regulation based mostly around irrational fears, see above).
This is completely and utterly false. I honestly don’t know where to begin.
I’d ask to what upkeep and recurring costs people are referring.
I’d ask that you try reading the 10+ point list of recurring costs that I laid out maybe 20 comments prior. I’ll provide you with cites if you actually bother to respond to some of it.
I’d also respectfully suggest that you familiarize yourself with some basic principles of nuclear fission before you make an even bigger fool of yourself trying to discuss this. I really do mean that sincerely, and not as an insult — I mean… “friction”? Wow.
Friction? Hmm, I always thought it was called radiation.
Randy: Shhhh! This is funny.
Remember, kids: friction is the engine that makes the wheels turn!
– From an article in my undergrad humor magazine advertising PHY 507: “Physics For Perverts”
Is Bill an Israeli? Because that all read like some second-rate Zion’s friction, to me.
Bill, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
Gary, part of the problem might be in the poll itself. Why ask about Jews and Muslims in general, vs. “very Christian” Christians? The responder might be led to assume that “Jew” or “Muslim” means “religious” Jew or “religious” Muslim. Secularists sometimes think all religious people are inherently irrational and while I may not like this , it’s a different thing from antisemitism or anti-Muslim hatred. Also, the poll should ask questions that would distinguish between feelings about religious people who favor some sort of theocracy and those who don’t and questions that would determine whether the responders think all people in a given religious category have the same beliefs about political issues.
All that said, the numbers are disturbing, which is why it’d be nice to have a poll that asked more precise questions.
I do find it startling that the French are apparently able to surmount the many obstacles that prevent the US from benefitting from nuclear power. Perhaps some profitable consulting work is possible. I note that the French seem able to have a nuclear power station up an running in 7-10 years.
I also love the cheery insouciance of “you just burn coal”. I am British and have actually seen a coal-fired plant close up. They are very complicated, very dirty and also apparently somewhat radioactive. Admittedly they can’t burn their way to China, but they do do a very considerable amount of environmental damage every damn day. You can clean them up considerably but it makes them (surprise) more complex and expensive to build.
People have a nimby reaction to nuclear power because they envision glowing green glop barely contained by cracked concrete. They do not realize that coal produces vast slag heaps full of heavy metals. I cannot cite it but I would wager that heavy metals contamination is a greater public health risk than radioactivity of any kind.
The US is blessed with vast natural resources and a petrol price that is so low that people use cars to cross the road (anecdotal, but yes I have seen that happen). Join the dots. The cheapest and most enviromentally friendly energy source of all is conservation.
The richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced nation in the world would be able to dunk this problem (as the French did) if there was any motivation to do so.
I think the categories of people “very Christian”, “Jewish”, and “Muslim” are all Other to “regular secular Christians”. Jews actually do much better than muslims or christians in this poll.
(BTW, I’m not trying to defend the poll, just trying to explain the strange groupings of people. And I’m not defending the prejudices apparent in the results.)
By the way, Orthodoz are of course the tribe that reached Australia.
Oh, please, Chuchu. At least he got the uranium part right, and the splitting-in-two bit was pretty close.
“By the way, no link, but the last estimate I read put the SA pebble bed prototype up around $7000/kw investment. (Compared to a coal burner of $1500/kw). Nobody in their right mind will ever build a lot of those.”
Projecting the cost of a prototype onto a hypothetical standardized production model seems questionable.
Gary: Besides the technical difficulties associated with the more advanced design, pebble bed reactors involve a significant ongoing cost due with fuel processing — each spherical “pebble” is a ceramic nuclear fuel in a graphite moderator, as opposed to, e.g., a simple fuel rod in more conventional reactors. The pebbles aren’t cheap or easy to make.
The magical ‘upkeep’ or ‘recurring’ costs associated with nuclear plants are no different than those associated with conventional plants (other than excessive government regulation based mostly around irrational fears, see above)
Use your common sense, please. Something as simple as a pressure relief valve cannot be vented to atmosphere in a nuke plant, unlike a gas-fired boiler. You can’t change a pump seal without special equipment. Not to mention the fact that every two years or so you have to pull the fuel rods out and dump them in a pond. Of course nukes require much more maintenance cost than anything else.
Cheap enough? Easy enough?
I showed the ad to my local Youth Vote Demographic (age 18) and she said:
Hint: anything that is flagrantly *made up* is not going to improve anyone’s image, because the image that comes across is, “I will make stuff up if I think it will make you like me”. DUH.
I left the “DUH” in so you know I am quoting Actual Youth.
In conclusion: Senator Clinton, please never again give money to whoever thought this was a good idea.
That’s true, Slart. At least he didn’t claim that nuclear power comes from alien space bats.
I think that nuclear power is something we need to pursue in the US because I think it’s the only currently viable way to replace coal as base load on our electric grid. I’m in favor of developing wind/solar/whatever, but none of those are really appropriate to replace coal plants.
And say what you want about nuclear power, it’s a damn sight cleaner and safer than coal power. Burning coal is about the dirtiest way to produce power that there is. Mining coal is dangerous and environmentally toxic. Burning the coal creates a tremendous amount of waste, most of which we don’t have to account for because we let coal plants use the skies as their sewer.
At least he got the uranium part right
Actually, he was talking about mined uranium, most of which isn’t even suitable as reactor fuel (i.e., it’s mostly U-238), and he left out, e.g., thorium and plutonium…
Cheap enough? Easy enough?
I feel like I may be missing a joke, but I was just trying to suggest one of the reasons that a pebble bed reactor might be much more expensive to maintain than other designs.
I’m in favor of developing wind/solar/whatever, but none of those are really appropriate to replace coal plants.
Uh, why not?
that a pebble bed reactor might be much more expensive to maintain than other designs.
Helium’s gonna be a big problem, too.
Michael:
Hillary is now the Democrats’ Rudy
The comparison is bogus. Hillary has about half the delegates so far. Indeed, as Markos pointed out, it is statistically very unlikely that *either* candidate will have the nomination sewn up before the convention. *That’s* the problem.
I think the categories of people “very Christian”, “Jewish”, and “Muslim” are all Other to “regular secular Christians”.
That’s the basic problem: What about the regular secular Jews/Muslims? Why assume that all Jewish or Islamic people are religious (with some hint of assuming fanatically religious) but only some Christian people are?
You can clean them up considerably but it makes them (surprise) more complex and expensive to build.
The last time I spoke to a senior engineer who designed and built emissions control technology for fossil fuel plants, I was lead to believe that such technology is not a large component of the coast of building and operating a power plant. But it is possible that my father was lying to me.
People have a nimby reaction to nuclear power because they envision glowing green glop barely contained by cracked concrete. They do not realize that coal produces vast slag heaps full of heavy metals. I cannot cite it but I would wager that heavy metals contamination is a greater public health risk than radioactivity of any kind.
I don’t envision anything of the sort and I’m well aware of problems associated with coal. It is more than a little arrogant to assume that everyone who disagrees with you about nuclear power is an ignorant fool who doesn’t understand basic physics.
I don’t think that an industry that has been as spectacular a failure as the nuclear industry has should be trusted with more massive subsidies absent some evidence of actual progress. What have we gotten for our subsidies so far besides additional future government liabilities and guarantees for decommissioning, cleanup, and waste disposal? We still don’t have the advanced “new” reactors that nuclear power proponents have been hawking like carnival barkers for over 30 years. Why?
The US is blessed with vast natural resources and a petrol price that is so low that people use cars to cross the road (anecdotal, but yes I have seen that happen). Join the dots. The cheapest and most enviromentally friendly energy source of all is conservation.
So, how many miles do you think Americans drive each year on journeys that are less than a mile long? I’ll give you a hint: its a tiny number compared to the total mileage driven by Americans. I’m sure it makes you feel good to bring up trivial facets of car culture, but it would be more useful to focus on the fact that right now, in the US, many people have no choice but to drive great distances. Lots of companies set up shop miles away from affordable housing and the only way for workers to get there is to drive 15 or 30 or 50 miles each way every day. That’s the part of car culture that actually counts in terms of fuel consumption.
The richest, most powerful, most technologically advanced nation in the world would be able to dunk this problem (as the French did) if there was any motivation to do so.
I think that’s more than a little naive. The French have been largely successful because they’ve built a massive centralized government bureaucracy cloaked in secrecy operating at high levels of professionalism. Americans really aren’t good at doing that and our attempts at to replicate it in ways more congenial to American culture have been abject failures.
I’d also point out that the US has never succeeded in building a supersonic jetliner like the Concorde or a decent high speed rail system like the TGV. There are some things that the US is just not good at and pretending that America is a superior country in all respects is unlikely to lead to fruitful lines of inquiry.
Actually the Dutch are infamous for being direct and blunt to the point of rudeness. Conversations between Dutch and Belgian (circumspect and conflict-averse) parties are a foyer of cultural caltrops.
OCSteve:
Hilzoy: we’d have to apportion Senate seats by population.
Not often I disagree with you, but let the cities run everything?
Steve: Please think of a way to translate this so it does not mean, “let the actual people who live in the country run everything”. That would be the nice interpretation. The not-so-nice one is, “let the non-white people have a share of the power in proportion to their share of the population”.
“We still don’t have the advanced ‘new’ reactors that nuclear power proponents have been hawking like carnival barkers for over 30 years. Why?”
Because of lack of political support. Yes, it would require public investment in one form or another.
It’s not a technical question, and neither is anyone claiming the free market will be sufficient.
He doesn’t have to, since it objectively doesn’t mean that.
The content is irrelevant. In the form “Let X be A,” “Not-x should therefore be A” is a logically fallacy. It simply doesn’t logically follow.
So there’s no need for Steve to alter what he wrote, to make clear that it doesn’t mean what it couldn’t logically mean.
Here’s a very handy chart outlining the electoral college imbalance and how heavily it favors rural states — the bottom line is that a vote in Wyoming counts for over three times as much as a vote in California. That’s a big gap.
I should also say that I don’t think it’s helpful to impute racism as a default explanation when a perfectly non-racist defense of the federal nature of the United States structure of government is available.
It’s inflamnatory and apt to raise high the emotional level of any discussion; I think it’s unhelpful to make the accusation as the very first response unless it’s absolutely clear it’s an appropriate analsysis.
If you must, the release of Uranium’s binding energy gives off big chunks of the former Uranium molecule, particulate radiation (beta, neutron, and alpha), and electromatic radiation. All traveling at high speeds.
The chunks and particulates interact with mass and create heat through friction in the fuel and cladding.
You may have me on that portion of the energy released in the form of electromagnetic radiation. It undergoes the photoelectric effect, Compton scattering, and pair production/pair annihilation. In the end though, they create heat as well. But that gets into Quantum Physics and the actual creation of mass when things get above 1.02 MeV.
Trying to keep things simple.
Coal plants are base load power plants. Base load plants run 24/7 (except for maintenance) and put out a constant level of energy. Base load power is usually 35-40% of peak load. Both nuclear and coal plants are well suited to this role.
There’s currently no solar or wind technology that can fill the role of base load power. Wind power is variable, based on weather conditions and other factors. Solar power only works during the day.
Actually Turbulence I would not presume to comment on the veracity of your father. If he says that retrofitting coal plants to make them cleaner is not a sinificant cost then I was mistaken and rejoice.
Nor am I ascribing to anyone in this discussion the “green glop” idea. I do believe that, contrasted to popular acceptance of nuclear power in France many ordinary people in the US (ie the people in who’s backyards we are puttin a plant or disposing of waste) have a “Simpsons” vision of nuclear power generation. That undoutedly makes deployment of powerplants more difficult.
I would be grateful if you could provide me with the statistics about US car use that you are looking at? Do you believe that current usage of cars is efficient? The location of work with respect to workers is of course a two-way street. I can locate on cheap ground out of town because I know that people will drive there.
Naive? Given the current US adminstration I have to chuckle a bit when you talk about France having a “massive centralized government bureaucracy cloaked in secrecy operating at high levels of professionalism”. Admittedly the professionalism is missing (sorry, could not resist).
I am not American, but you guys are famous for energy and knowhow. You have put people on the moon dammit. You are a very capable and energetic culture. How can you say “the US is just not good at” infrastructure/large projects. Look around at things like Airbus, TGV, GSM etc and get good at them.
Because of lack of political support. Yes, it would require public investment in one form or another.
It’s not a technical question, and neither is anyone claiming the free market will be sufficient.
Are you saying that there hasn’t been political support for nuclear power over the last half century? Or that there hasn’t been enough?
Lots of countries have invested vast sums of public money into nuclear power and as a result we have…little to show for it. The first pebble bed reactors were built over 40 years ago, largely with public investment. And today, 40 years later, Bill is still yammering on about how we’re going to have totally awesome pebble bed reactors that will solve all our problems, any day now, they’re just over the horizon.
The idea of nuclear power is attractive, but the technical obstacles to practical nuclear power generation are very substantial and it is simply not the case that all technical problems can be resolved with enough research and determination.
Both nuclear and coal plants are well suited to this role.
So’re hydro plants — and geothermal and tidal plants if you can make ’em.
There’s currently no solar or wind technology that can fill the role of base load power.
Assuming you don’t count batteries, either chemical or kinetic.
Solar power only works during the day.
Which actually makes it uniquely suited to easing peak-load requirements.
Wind and solar also both have the advantage of local usage — if you place them at the edges of the grid you essentially get a free 15% bonus in power generation based on transmission loss.
I am not American, but you guys are famous for energy and knowhow. You have put people on the moon dammit. You are a very capable and energetic culture. How can you say “the US is just not good at” infrastructure/large projects. Look around at things like Airbus, TGV, GSM etc and get good at them.
Nuclear power requires a lot of oversight, regulation, and attached bureaucracy. If there’s one thing I’ll concede that France is better at than the U.S., it’s bureaucracy.
Some other aspects to the equation are (a) France is already committed to nuclear power and couldn’t change if they wanted to, so part of the question for us is just whether we want to go that route; (b) France is a small country and doesn’t have the same logistical problems we do with long-distance power transmission, and (c) the more centralized French government lets them cut through a lot of the NIMBY problems that are simply more structurally intractable in the U.S.
In other words, it’s not as simple as “innovation” and “know-how.” The issue is that what works in France doesn’t necessarily work in the United States, and we need to consider what solution is the most cost-effective and logistically feasible here.
Being an open thread, fighting over paper ballots in Ohio.
(c) the more centralized French government lets them cut through a lot of the NIMBY problems that are simply more structurally intractable in the U.S.
Indeed. Given that the federal government is unable to even get a long term nuclear waste disposal site operational in the face of political opposition, I’m skeptical that we’ll see lots of new nuclear plants springing up anytime soon. After all, doing so would require fighting communities that host the plants, host the fuel processing facilities and host the rail lines over which nuclear materials must pass.
Erm, you are aware that there are currently very many nuclear power stations in daily operation worldwide? I seems to me that there is some aspect of “practical” that I am missing here. Perhaps a cost-comparisom with oil or coal prices?
I cannot judge how powerful NIMBY can be in the US. I do note that France backed off on the Superphenix project because the “environmentalist” opposition went as far as firing rockets at the containment building, so perhaps it is a problem everywhere.
My perception in this is that a French voter can be convinced that it is in the best interests of France not to be reliant on external suppliers of energy. The American voter, accustomed to cheap fuel, cannot. That leads directly to a difference in political will. I would call France’s decison, given their lack of other energy sources, strategic. The US has not yet been pushed up against that strategic decision, but it will come.
I would be grateful if you could provide me with the statistics about US car use that you are looking at? Do you believe that current usage of cars is efficient? The location of work with respect to workers is of course a two-way street. I can locate on cheap ground out of town because I know that people will drive there.
Sorry, I have no stats on hand. I’m not sure what you mean by efficient though. Certainly, the current state of affairs is not one I prefer. But my whole point here is that preferences are a red herring: people in the US need to drive in order to work. They certainly don’t enjoy blowing two hours of their day stuck in traffic commuting. The problems here involve issues of subsidization, land use and zoning policies, and white flight; they are not simple. We can discuss those if you want, but talking about how lazy Americans use cars to cross the street doesn’t get at any of those issues and those are the issues that actually matter.
Naive? Given the current US adminstration I have to chuckle a bit when you talk about France having a “massive centralized government bureaucracy cloaked in secrecy operating at high levels of professionalism”. Admittedly the professionalism is missing (sorry, could not resist).
That’s my point though. When the US government engages in massive centralized programs cloaked in secrecy with no real oversight, disasters occur. We end up with SDI or the Iraq War or the continuing environmental catastrophe of cold war nuclear weapons production or a network of secret prisons in europe.
The French are better at this sort of thing. They have a lot more respect for bureaucracy as a profession and the quality of their bureaucrats is correspondingly higher. We’ve had Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith.
Sorry to post in bits but “France is a small country”? It is smaller than America indeed, but you could get very, very lost in it. I fail to understand how the size of the country relates to the distance between plant and consumer, except as an upper limit?
I assume smarter people than me look carefully at usage, population centers and transmission loss and site plants accordingly, ie not too far away.
“The French are better at this sort of thing.”
And that’s why the U.S. space program never landed men on the moon, and Hoover Dam were never built.
But it’s not a matter of political support. It would be wrong and questionable to say that it was, rather than a technical question; instead, it’s a matter of fighting communities that host the plants, host the fuel processing facilities and host the rail lines over which nuclear materials must pass, which means that political support has nothing to do with it.
Erm, you are aware that there are currently very many nuclear power stations in daily operation worldwide? I seems to me that there is some aspect of “practical” that I am missing here. Perhaps a cost-comparisom with oil or coal prices?
Yes, there are many pressurized water reactors operating worldwide. Those reactors all have significant problems that Bill is hoping to alleviate with pebble bed reactors. I believe that a 2003 MIT study on the future of nuclear power concluded that costs for power generated by those reactors is significantly greater than costs for power generated by other sources.
My perception in this is that a French voter can be convinced that it is in the best interests of France not to be reliant on external suppliers of energy.
France is very reliant on other nations for its energy needs. As mentioned above, nuclear plants are good base load sources of energy but that is a double edged sword: it means that you can’t spin up or spin down to respond to fluctuations in demand (and demand does fluctuate significantly). Consequently, you need alternative energy sources and sinks to provide surge power or to accept surge power when local demand falls. Where are those alternative sources and sinks? In neighboring countries mostly. After all, almost all of France’s power is generated by nuclear plants… That’s why a small grid failure in Cologne, Germany can leave 5 million Parisians without power.
Now any interconnected grid will suffer problems like that to some extent, but nuclear-heavy grids are far more vulnerable. That suggests to me that you can’t build a viable grid based mostly on current nuclear technology: you need more flexible energy sources in order to respond to demand fluctuations. More importantly, getting most of your energy from nuclear power means dependence on other nations, just of a different sort.
The issues that you allude to “zoning”, “white flight” I am not competent to discuss, better yet, I suspect they are not relevant.
What this comes down to is the impact on behaviour of the cost of petroleum. I pay about $8 to put a US gallon of petrol in my car. The cost of driving to my work is then a factor in any job I take. It then becomes a factor for any employer wishing to retain my services.
The original London train network was created by employers moving their employees into town to work as cheaply as possible.
Bluntly, if it was not so incredibly cheap for Americans to drive, you would quickly find very many ways to cope. Until that time comes (and it will) you will not create infrastructure of any kind. There is no payoff.
That is what the “cheap shot” about driving across the road is about: driving in the states is so cheap that doing silly things with it has no significant downside.
Being an open thread, fighting over paper ballots in Ohio.
I mentioned this in another thread over a week ago, with local coverage from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but I’ll be damned if I can find the comment now. What’s fun is to read the comments on this issue in articles at Cleveland.com. The Republican d-bags there are calling it an effort by the Democrats to steal the election via ballot box stuffing. Despite the fact that this is, you know, a primary.
Found it! I knew I didn’t just dream it.
And that’s why the U.S. space program never landed men on the moon, and Hoover Dam were never built.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to respond with such sarcasm. The discussion so far has been relatively congenial and well informed. But if that’s your contribution, I won’t begrudge you.
Yes, the US built a really big concrete dam. Over 70 years ago.
Yes, the US sent men to the moon. Before I was born. And as a result of that, we got what exactly in exchange? Lots of useful things I’m sure, but mostly lots of practice developing weapons technology.
But hey, why would you bring up our moonshot work when you can talk about the amazing manned space exploration feats that NASA has brought us today? The space shuttle is a national engineering joke; why the government would construct a vehicle that Richard Feynman believed would blow up 1% of the time remains unclear. Aerospace engineers across the country don’t know whether to weep or to laugh when they consider it.
In the 1970s we had a single orbiting space station and today we have…a single orbiting space station.
But it’s not a matter of political support. It would be wrong and questionable to say that it was, rather than a technical question; instead, it’s a matter of fighting communities that host the plants, host the fuel processing facilities and host the rail lines over which nuclear materials must pass, which means that political support has nothing to do with it.
You may wish to reread the comment that seems to have lead to this response. I asked you to clarify what you meant. If you have no interest in doing that, just say so. Or do nothing. There’s no call for responding with sarcasm though.
More substantively, I still don’t know what you mean when you say public support. It seems that public investment is one component and I believe that there has been substantial public investment in nuclear power in the US and other countries.
Now the opposition of those communities stems in no small part from the technical problems. If we had awesome nuclear technology that produced dramatically less waste then I believe you’d likely see less opposition to disposal facilities and rail transport. If we had pebble bed reactors, then I believe you’d see less opposition to siting power plants in many towns. But we don’t have those things.
In a country like France, the government has a lot more leeway to push past those technical problems but that doesn’t change the fact that they exist.
Anything that is operational will have problems. Things that have not be done are of course perfect. I note that despite their myriad flaws the PWRs seem to be soliering on, producing reliable stable power and not killing anyone (except dear old Chernobyl of course).
You cite an incident that is, on a European scale a failure of load balancing. I accept your argument about the inflexibility of nuclear supply, but surely you must accept that there is a very big difference between dependency on a neighbour for load balancing (while remembering that France is the worlds largest electricity exporter) and depending on imports for base supply.
The issues that you allude to “zoning”, “white flight” I am not competent to discuss, better yet, I suspect they are not relevant.
If you “suspect” that issues zoning and white flight are not relevant to the issue of where people in the US live vs. where they work, and driving patterns overall, “not competent” barely scratches the surface! The issue of gas costs aside — and yes, you’re correct, American drivers don’t pay anywhere near the true cost of driving, not in gas taxes and not in road upkeep costs — if the cost of gas in the US went up to something akin to what Europeans pay tomorrow, it would change very little, thanks to the issues Turbulence raises that you dismiss as not relevant.
When I lived in Northern Virginia, I had to live about 16 miles from my office. Driving, despite the fact that it took me nearly an hour every morning, was faster than taking the Metro, due to the amount of time it would take me to reach the Metro station — five miles away — on surface streets. Why didn’t I move closer to work? Well, because then, instead of my rent costing me $1,650 a month, it would have cost me about $2,200, a price I was neither prepared to pay nor would have been balanced by any transportation savings.
Why would it have been so much more expensive? Because of crummy zoning which prevented housing above a certain density or over a certain number of stories. When you artificially restrict housing density via zoning, you make it more expensive to live there, so more people have to live farther away from their jobs.
So yeah, there’s a lot more at work than just the cost of a gallon of gas.
The issues that you allude to “zoning”, “white flight” I am not competent to discuss, better yet, I suspect they are not relevant.
I’ll give you a brief explanation and you can decide how relevant you think they are.
My wife works near Washington DC. We’d like to live in the city and not own a car and take public transit to work, as we have done in Boston. We can’t do that because she works in the technology sector and all the companies where she got job offers are located far outside the city, in the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing except highways. So she commutes 20 miles from a suburb to her office by car. She could reduce her commute but her housing costs would increase greatly.
Why are there so few large technology companies located in cities? Because technology folk don’t live in cities, they live in suburbs. Why do they do that? Because white folk in general have decided they prefer living in the suburbs than in the city. Why does that preference exist? In part because white folk aren’t comfortable sending their kids to urban schools with lots of minorities and in part because the local-control property-tax funded nature of American education ensures that suburban schools are going to have far more resources than urban schools and no one wants to sacrifice their kids’ futures by opting for a lower quality school.
As for zoning, it is difficult to build residential housing within walking distance of commercial facilities like grocery stores or movie theaters. That means that doing just about anything in the suburbs requires a car. So whole communities develop premised on the notion that every adult has a car.
These issues do not completely explain why Americans drive so much, but they are part of it. And these issues do have a large feedback component to them where constraints cause people to make bad choices which reinforces the original constraints.
Look, my wife and I want very much to live in a city and use only public transportation. We can’t afford to. We have a lot more resources than many people in the US and if we can’t do it, I can guarantee you that lots of others can’t either.
Bluntly, if it was not so incredibly cheap for Americans to drive, you would quickly find very many ways to cope. Until that time comes (and it will) you will not create infrastructure of any kind. There is no payoff.
I don’t think sweeping generalizations of such complex and interdependent systems are likely to be correct. If you wanted to dramatically lower the amount of driving people do, you would need to significantly increase housing density. Those sorts of infrastructure changes take decades to effect. There’s nothing “quick” about the coping that would need to happen: infrastructure changes on this scale are slow.
I also don’t think european-level pricing would make as big of a difference as you suspect. For a commuter that drives 50 miles each day and works 200 days a year driving a car that gets 30 miles per gallon paying $8 per gallon, we’re talking about an annual cost of $5300. Right now they’d be paying about $1900 (assuming a gas price of $2.85 per gallon). Now $3400 per year is a lot of money, but compared to the other costs its not that large, especially when those costs involve giving up the equity accumulated in your nice suburban home as you try to sell when no one is buying because everyone is moving to higher density residences.
You cite an incident that is, on a European scale a failure of load balancing. I accept your argument about the inflexibility of nuclear supply, but surely you must accept that there is a very big difference between dependency on a neighbour for load balancing (while remembering that France is the worlds largest electricity exporter) and depending on imports for base supply.
I’m afraid I don’t see this very big difference. Perhaps you can explain it to me in more detail. It seems that in either case, if your supplier screws up, your grid goes down.
You talk about France being the largest exporter as if it were only a good thing. I have no doubt that power exports bring in lots of revenue for France. However, France is dependent on those countries that import its power. If they stopped importing power, then the French grid would be adversely impacted because you can’t spin down a nuclear reactor easily. France is dependent on importers.
Bluntly, if it was not so incredibly cheap for Americans to drive, you would quickly find very many ways to cope. Until that time comes (and it will) you will not create infrastructure of any kind. There is no payoff.
I don’t mean to pile on, but this is the same basic trope as ‘a free market will solve all our problems’
Speaking of public transport, when I was in the UK this past summer, I was shocked at how expensive it was to travel within the country. Is it just the privatization of the rail system or something else? Ironically, it looked like the bus system had online booking that lowered the prices substantially, but it required having your schedule planned out well in advance, something that was not available to me as I was chaperoning students.
I skipped the ad as I’m sure I’m antiquated.
To me, 39 and female, the “pimped out” comment was deserving of abasing apology. “Pimp my ride” and “pimp your daughter” have vastly different connotations.
However, as I the only person who thinks that, if I were a superdelegate, Chelsea Clinton would be extremely easy to resist. “Hi Chelsea…Your mom?…Mmmmmm….Well, I’ll certainly think about it…Thanks for calling….Yes, yes, I’ll think about it.” It just seems an extraordinarily weak gambit. If Chelsea had extraordinary powers of persuasion, surely she’d be speaking at events? Set Cantwell on her fellow Senators, that might be hard to resist.
Why, all his children are also all in comas, they’re so respectful and religious!
My girlfriend’s in a coma. I think I like it.
===========================
I notice that the advocates of nuclear power have not answered either the high cost of mining Uranium, nor the need for cooling water in a world where clean water is becoming more and more scarce.
=============================
I think the ad is offensive to Bill. He really can play the sax. Now Ms Clinton is claiming to be as cool as him, but without the talent to back it up. Blergh.
I don’t know, getting a call from Chelsea would be infinitely preferable to getting a call from Mark Penn. The key thing about sales is getting one’s foot in the door, so I think Chelsea would at least have the advantage of ‘gee, I wonder what she is going to say?’
I hope I don’t get asked why I’m using her first name instead of calling her Clinton.
“…nor the need for cooling water in a world where clean water is becoming more and more scarce.”
Since any water used in nuclear power plants doesn’t need to be suitable/”clean” for drinking, I’m unclear as to the connection.
Obama Wins Nebraska and Washington.
Louisiana to come.
Wow, this is really interesting. Check this map, and observe that Obama swept Eastern Washington, the Inland Empire that’s as opposite liberal Western Washington, with Seattle, as night and day.
Eastern Washington is geographically, culturally, and politically, near-identical to Idaho, and not at all to Western Washington.
I was figuring Obama to win big in Washington due to the appeal of an outsider/liberal type amongst Seattle-type/Western Washington liberals, and Clinton to take more establishment Democrats in the east.
But this is the results before the West has come in.
Huh.
Hilzoy — the video is that lame and this assessment is coming from a 28 year old. I am not sure if I truly count as ‘young’ any more and part of that target audience, but it was damn lame. Obama might have been able to do the hyper non-ironic irony and do it well, but it is not Clinton’s brand to advertise that way
Gearing up the machine against Obama. They’re getting worried it might not be Clinton.
The Supreme Court case is a nice touch.
Wow, what a lot of response and I am falling off he edge of the day here…
More briefly than this deserves my slightly fluffy Parthian shot:
“Not compentent” mr T means what it says, I am not sufficiently informed about such matters to argue with you, but thankyou for the education effort.
So far the mass of stuff you are introducing seems to be symptom rather than cause. The “white flight” topic in particular opens a can of worm large enough to start many hares (yes I did mean to say that).
My work is either 18 or 31 kms away depending on the office I go to. I use trains and underground and sometimes bike the 18km one. This summer I shall certainly bike the 31km one. More to the point, my employer caps what they will pay for milage but has bought me a season ticket that works on every but of public transport.
Yes I would rather have the problem that I needed to waste some supply than the problem that I was structurally unable to fulfill a need. But I was not precise: France’s partners will provide the same balancing services independant of the oil price that is the point. France does need to sweat the uranium price but most certainly not the volatile, rising, controlled by not terribly nice regimes, oil price.
Infrastructure changes slow. Yep. But as I always say to my small boy, anything that you do not get started with takes forever. Anyone raising your gas prices should also considerably improve your public transport. I remain dismissive of the “Americans can’t do that” argument on infrastructure, with the rider that infra is a dance of government regulation and private provision.
Zoning. Hmmm. I can walk the shops easily and bike to bigger ones, though I might get the car out for a big weekly. It would need to change. Having huge tracts of housing with ne’er shop between them is just daft. But is it is a daftness that is suppoorted by cheap driving.
I welcome your contribution lbjp. UK public transport is like so much UK infra sometime great often cruddy. Not my poster-boy. Structural failure of investment over a long period. As to the trope, somebody had better start solving your problems and I would always propose an amalgam of regulation and innovation. Given that private enterprise has never been motivated asked to solve public transport issues in the US it might have something to contribute. If the question where posed and government put bounds on the acceptable responses.
Thankyou for a stimulating discussion and good night=morining.
All but ~8 counties in Washington have reported, and with the sole exception of Douglas County — which had all of 85 voters — Obama has crushed Clinton by more than 2-1 in every single county across the state so far, with 76% precincts reported.
King County, which includes Seattle, went 72%-27%-1%, with 83% precincts reported.
I’m unsurprised.
Sorry, but the EASTERN Washington vote (as you noted) surprised the heck out of me. Wow.
Guess they didn’t need me after all (at rehearsal and at auditions)…
Gary: “And that’s why the U.S. space program never landed men on the moon, and Hoover Dam were never built.”
Those are actually good examples of what the U.S. has traditionally been seen as good at — large, ambitious projects that exceeded expectations — as opposed to competent bureaucracies that do the boring, behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stuff, which we’re really not all that good at. I mean, just based on your own examples — look at the current state of the TVA and NASA.
There’s a little bit of stereotyping involved here, but it’s also not crazy to say that the U.S. tends to excel at entrepreneurialism and innovation whereas most European countries tend to be better at bureaucracy and maintenance. Think German and Swiss engineering, for example.
Also,
Since any water used in nuclear power plants doesn’t need to be suitable/”clean” for drinking, I’m unclear as to the connection.
An open-cycle nuclear plant means irradiated water and a risk of leakage. Since plutonium is pretty much one of the most toxic things on earth, there’s a serious concern about whether the runoff from a plant jeopardizes downstream supply or might get into the groundwater.
Even in a closed-cycle plant, the risk of leakage is definitely a concern, and then there’s of course design problems to deal with as well — increased safety costs money; that’s the basic theme for this entire discussion.
I thought Turbulence might have been talking about the need for heavy water in reactors along the CANDU design, but I don’t know. Regardless, pollution is definitely an issue no matter what.
“I mean, just based on your own examples — look at the current state of the TVA and NASA.”
Nothing to do with the larger point — and I’m going to repeat that three times from now on, since some folks (not you, Adam) don’t notice even when I repeat it two times — nothing to do with the larger point, and did I mention this has nothing to do with the larger point? — but Hoover Dam is on the border of Arizona and Nevada, and is run by the Bureau of Reclamation. I haven’t heard it’s in decline.
The Tennesse Valley Authority covers most of Tennessee, parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small slices of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
I’m unclear what connection they have that you’re making.
It says here, incidentally:
A google on “Tennessee Valley Authority” and “scandal” turns up the most recent references as 1986, although there’s an early hit on a piece from 2001 on the need for reform. Then it’s mostly references to Calvin Coolidge, and Teapot Dome.
Nothing via a news search, either. But I’m no student of the TVA in recent years, I must say.
Turb: …sigh.
Yes we have been through it, and I avoid it here for the most part. I want to say again that I appreciate you engaging me on the topic at TiO. I felt it was a useful thread.
Doctor Science: Please think of a way to translate this so it does not mean, “let the actual people who live in the country run everything”. That would be the nice interpretation. The not-so-nice one is, “let the non-white people have a share of the power in proportion to their share of the population”.
Huh? You read quite a lot into a one line comment. Where I am coming from – I grew up in Upstate NY (way before HRC). Politically, we were (and they still are) disenfranchised. Can’t outvote the city. That’s it. No need to look for racial crap.
Gary,
Brown’s Ferry 1 was the one I mentioned upthread that caught fire when employees used a candle to look for air leaks. Human error and fissile material just don’t go together well.
96% precincts reported, and Obama took every single county in Washington State except for the the 85 votes of Douglas County, of which he got only 38% to Clinton’s 62%.
Nebraska, 99% reported, Obama 25,986 67.5%
Hillary Rodham Clinton 12,396 32.2%,
Uncommitted 99 0.3%.
And Obama won Louisiana; a clean sweep of all three states, massively. 53%/38% so far, with 67% reporting.
OCSteve,
Sorry for sighing. FWIW, I greatly appreciate your willingness to engage on the subject at TiO and your patience in responding.
Are upstate voters really disenfranchised? As in, does NYC get a larger share of state money than it should based on its share of the population? Or are you saying that NYC voters are so numerous that the upstate denizens can’t outnumber them?
Also, I should say that my first reading of your comment was similar to Dr Science’s. I figured that I was misreading though because you’ve demonstrated that you’re not a racist and it wouldn’t be consistent with the other things you’ve written. My first impression came about because I have met people who use the phrases “urban” or “city dwellers” as shorthand for “blacks”…and unfortunately, the effect of the Senate (and the primary system for that matter) is to amplify the votes of white folk.
Sorry to post in bits but “France is a small country”? It is smaller than America indeed, but you could get very, very lost in it. I fail to understand how the size of the country relates to the distance between plant and consumer, except as an upper limit?
OK, first and most important thing to understand is that power transmission isn’t free. You have to step it up to an extremely high voltage and then step it back down again to make it economical, and even then you still lose a significant amount of electricity in transit.
So, with that in mind: relative to the U.S., European geographic and population characteristics are way, way more conducive to centralized, grid-based electricity systems.
For example: to get power out to, say, West Texas, you have to run one line all the way out there, which means (a) building it, even though almost no one lives out there and never will, (b) maintaining and repairing it, even though access is next to impossible, and (c) paying a premium just to use it, because no matter what you do, the inefficiencies of long-distance power transmission means you’ll probably lose about 15-20% of the power just sending it.
(Fun Bonus Fact: about 8% of all electricity in the U.S. is wasted in transmission.)
In Europe, on the other hand, two things tend to change the picture: (a) The population and infrastructure is much more evenly distributed, so there’s fewer middle-of-nowhere rural destinations like West Texas or Nowhere, WY; (b) There’s often an urban center “on the other side,” so to speak, so you often have the option of importing your energy from a neighboring country rather than wasting money running lines out to your rural areas. There’s nothing on the other side of West Texas but more West Texas.
So — again — the type of energy solution that works in France or Iceland doesn’t necessarily work in the U.S., and all of the things mentioned in this thread are important factors (and yes, zoning — and more specifically, suburbanization — is a huge issue that absolutely needs to be accounted for in the discussion).
I find this kinda hilarious, for some reason:
My italics. 14 whole people in the entire state of Nebraska’s Democratic Party couldn’t make up their minds. You’d almost think most people were opinionated, or something.
Obama also swept the Virgin Islands, for what it’s worth. No matter that Richard Branson now owns them.
(That’s a joke, von.)
Politically, we were (and they still are) disenfranchised. Can’t outvote the city.
Even in NY state, rural areas are not disenfranchised, they’re a minority. On the national level (which we’re talking about), rural areas are a minority with *disproportionate* power. Why should each person in a rural state deserve *more* political power than each person in an urban state?
Sorry about bringing in race, Gary, but this is the US and we have no politics that does not include racial politics. It’s sad, but it’s true.
The US population is currently about 80% urban, 20% rural. I think OCSteve is arguing that in a strict majority-rules democracy, the urban majority would get their way 100% of the time, whereas it would be more fair for urban areas to get their way 80% of the time, rural 20% of the time. Am I right, Steve?
But what hilzoy is arguing is that we’ve got a situation that gives rural states *more* than 20% of the power, and urban states less than 80%. And the real losers will be minorities within the urban states, because they will be just as outvoted as the rural states feared to be. And here’s that unpleasant racial angle, creeping in again.
How can you tell?
Nothing via a news search, either. But I’m no student of the TVA in recent years, I must say.
Well, me either; I was probably stretching a bit there. I should have just stuck with NASA 😉
Slartibartfast:
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but the part where Bill said “‘Extracting’ the Uranium is easy. You dig it from the ground,” was what tipped me off.
Really? Neutron capture is the same as friction? You learn something new practically every day, on blogs.
Ah, well. Digging it from the ground is easy. Separating out the isotopes; that there’s the hard part.
The NY State Senate has a three vote Republican majority. 32/29, and one vacancy. “The Senate has had a Republican majority since 1965.”
That’s primarily on upstate votes.
Balance of Revenue & Expenditure Among NYS Regions: Fiscal Years 4/1/97-3/31/98 Thru 4/1/00-3/31/01
5/1/2004:
“I should have just stuck with NASA ;)”
I’ve followed NASA’s ups and downs and ins and outs over the years to a moderate degree, though not remotely as closely as my friends who are active in the space community, and while there are certainly arguments to be made about various specific NASA decisions, and the question of the role of private enterprise in developing access to space is another big issue, but I’m not aware of any reasons to think that NASA became or has become unable to manage or accomplish large missions with the primary problem being a lack of sufficient all-around budget to accomplish all the missions they’re tasked with, combined with endless Congressional budget cuts.
It’s not as if NASA couldn’t have done endlessly more, or better, just with more money.
The safety issues on the shuttle arose because of pressures to keep up an unreasonable launch schedule, given the limitations of the shuttle. The limitations of the shuttle exist because it was a big fat compromise of a design, because of compromises over money. The excessive launch schedule could have been dealt with another couple of shuttles, which again, would have cost more money. And so on.
I’m not saying that every problem NASA developed because of these isssues would have been cured purely by throwing money at them, because that’s wrong. But it’s unclear that most of the problems would have occurred in the first place, or are otherwise inherent simply because NASA is an American enterprise, and Americans aren’t good at doing large longterm technical projects, or whatever the precise argument is.
Meanwhile, NASA has had a ton of brilliant successes with science missions — and an occasional failure.
Turb: Are upstate voters really disenfranchised? As in, does NYC get a larger share of state money than it should based on its share of the population? Or are you saying that NYC voters are so numerous that the upstate denizens can’t outnumber them?
Upstate is a dustbowl, a rust-belt. It’s died. I can’t express how depressing it is when I visit up there these days.
I should have said cities – with an S. It’s not just NYC, its Albany too. But yes – your vote in Franklin County is not worth the ink or even the chad.
Also, I should say that my first reading of your comment was similar to Dr Science’s.
I’m baffled by that. My entire comment:
Not often I disagree with you, but let the cities run everything?
To me it is an urban v. rural thing. Period. I actually scratch my head and try to think how anyone could get something racist out of my comment.
DS: I think OCSteve is arguing that in a strict majority-rules democracy, the urban majority would get their way 100% of the time, whereas it would be more fair for urban areas to get their way 80% of the time, rural 20% of the time. Am I right, Steve?
What the hell was I arguing? It was a one line, 12 word comment.
“But yes – your vote in Franklin County is not worth the ink or even the chad.”
Could you be a bit less metaphoric, and a bit more specific, as to how you mean, exactly, perhaps, please?
Thanks.
I’m not saying that every problem NASA developed because of these issues would have been cured purely by throwing money at them, because that’s wrong. But it’s unclear that most of the problems would have occurred in the first place, or are otherwise inherent simply because NASA is an American enterprise, and Americans aren’t good at doing large longterm technical projects, or whatever the precise argument is.
There are two different problems here: 1. NASA’s budget is too small for its mission and 2. NASA’s leadership is incompetent.
If the US government is consistently unwilling or unable to provide agencies with sufficient funds to perform the tasks appointed to them, then that bodes poorly for a massive government run centralized nuclear power program, doesn’t it? The same structural and institutional problems that keep NASA from getting a budget commensurate with its responsibilities will surely affect any other large central technology program as well.
I never said that Americans were too stupid to make technological things work given an infinite budget. What I did say is that the US government’s track record in carrying out massive centralized technology projects has been poor. Over the last few decades at least; there’s no need to talk about how awesome various engineering feats that were completed before anyone reading this was born are. I think that’s true in part because we’re culturally more hostile to massive centralized projects than the French are but also because elected representatives don’t want to pay for such projects.
Beyond the money though, NASA’s leadership has screwed up. If your boss tells you to do the impossible, the correct answer is “no, I can’t do that safely because it is impossible”. Functional leadership would never have approved the shuttle design in the first place and would certainly not have decided to build more shuttles after early operational experiences with the first one. This is the first rule of holes: you have to stop digging. So while we can talk about how NASA was underfunded, NASA also might have had more money to spend on alternatives if didn’t waste billions of dollars on fundamentally unworkable designs like the shuttle. Certainly, having your spacecraft repeatedly explode imposes some fairly serious costs.
I’d argue that the combination of a government that consistently refuses to provide sufficient investment and insists on making do when there’s not enough cash to get the job done safely is a recipe for disaster with a massive centralized nuclear program.
The Space Shuttles are an extraordinary feat of engineering that should never have been attempted in the first place — a boondoggle pursued in lieu of many better options — and so far NASA’s managed to blow up two of them. Even if the NRC is twice as competent as NASA, one meltdown is one too many.
This analogy seems pretty straightforward to me. What are we arguing about?
I was wondering why Charles hadn’t done his end-of-the-month report that we need another six months in Iraq.
Turns out he has. He just apparently decided not to post it at ObWi this time.
It’s going to really surprise people to hear this, but Charles finds good news to report. Who could have predicted it?
I think he probably did mean to use pimp in its sense of being controlled by another. Of course Chelsea is going to volunteer for her mom and do her best to get her elected; she doesn’t need to be coerced into doing that. At the same time, the continuation of the hands of media policy which was started by her parents (for good reason), telling kid journalists “I don’t talk to the press,” and strategically targeted appearances (like to Stanford sorority members) raises the question to some as to how free her activism actually is. All campaigns want their speakers to stay on message and not blather on about whatever they feel like talking about, but the parent-child relationship, carried over in a scripted setting in which the child is being unveiled deliberately and carefully in contrast to the many years of shielding and seclusion, makes her seem like a tool. Blunt, crass, sure, but he’s also a pundit, not the news anchor and I think most people were clear what he was suggesting. He could have said: “they’re using her as a chip,” but he went for the flippant shorthand. James Carville was a pretty bombastic figure and the cameras loved him. Matthews is the slippery bastard.
WHy be surprised OBama won Eastern washington? He cleaned up in Idaho next door.
Concerning Chelsea Clinton
Photographs at her wikipedia entry show her speaking at events (though not the big ones).
One point for her working the phone lines instead of the crowds may be that she is not what most people would consider pretty. There were more than enough bad jokes about her being so ugly* that she can’t be actually the natural child of her parents (that both can be considered good-looking). And at least since “JFK’s hair won againt Nixon” this plays a non-negligible role.
*I have seen worse; she should do something about her hair though imo.
My dad forwarded to me this deeply moving poem by 12-year-old Cameron Penny, which appears in Voices in Wartime: The Anthology – A Collection of Narratives and Poems (2005):
If you are lucky in this life
A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies
And when the soldiers look into the window
They don’t see their enemies
They see themselves as children
And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep
When they wake up, the land is well again.
One point for her working the phone lines instead of the crowds may be that she is not what most people would consider pretty.
Absent a poll of “most people,” I’m not inclined to put much credence in this. I think Chelsea ain’t half-bad, myself.
I continue to find it strange. You will collectively admit any kind of incapacity in execution of large projects (despite many examples to the contrary) rather than an incapacity of will.
That is the bottom line.
If the powerful, capable, dynamic United States of America truly wanted a well implemented, standardised, safe nuclear power programme it would come to pass. If the USA truly wanted to get people out of cars and into fast and efficient public transport and bikes it would come to pass.
Given the other large-scale activities (admittedly unproductive and badly executed) that the current administration has recently undertaken I think I can safely say that the money and effort would be well spent. What would you rather have, Guantanomo or urban rail? Foreign wars or stable base-line power provision for the eastern seabord?
This links back into the Clinobama cheerleading thread: who has the leadership needed to give your country what it needs, rather than what it thinks it wants?
More news on the Ohio ballots from the Plain Dealer. Looks like the county, at least, is going to be allowed to use a central-count optical-scan system for the primary, while the larger question of how the general will be handled remains open.
The central count system, unlike a precinct-count system, means no chance for voters to correct incorrect ballots, but there aren’t enough scanners to have one at every voting precinct. So looks like there may still be votes that go uncounted. But hey, no big deal — some of the ballots don’t work in the machines anyway!
(This particularly bugs me: “A failure to test ballots before the May 2006 primary forced elections workers to hand-count thousands of absentee ballots that were rejected by scanners. The printing errors resulted in final election results being delayed by nearly a week.” So what? Why can’t we as Americans be as concerned with getting it right as we are with getting it quickly?)
FWIW, one of our local weeklies has this to say about Obama’s chances in Ohio. Small number of data points, but in this county it’s not insignificant:
Clinton and Obama are debating at Cleveland State University on Feb. 26. If it’s at all possible for me to attend I’m going to.
Barnabas,
I’m not sure if that is a plural you or a singular you, but there is a small addenda to make. You wrote
If the powerful, capable, dynamic United States of America truly wanted a well implemented, standardised, safe nuclear power programme it would come to pass. If the USA truly wanted to get people out of cars and into fast and efficient public transport and bikes it would come to pass.
What you have to add to that is if there were an overwhelming perceived need that was generally agreed upon by the American people. That is, something like WWII or Sputnik.
I believe that Americans are hopelessly independent to the point that they will attribute group successes to individuals. This may sound like making excuses, but the fact that the US is the only OECD country without an organized health care regime, or the only one that not only tolerates but encourages gun ownership are just two examples of how Americans value their perceived independence, even when it might be argued to harm them. I don’t think there are any other countries where a notion of libertarianism has grown into the plant that you see now (a possible exception might be Australia I suppose)
That a whole series of related barriers has sprung up preventing the US from moving towards public transport or nuclear energy should be seen as facets of a perverse drive towards independence.
OCSteve:
What the hell was I arguing? It was a one line, 12 word comment.
— in reply to hilzoy. It was certainly part of an argument in the sense of “discussion”, though not in the sense of “yelling”.
“WHy be surprised OBama won Eastern washington? He cleaned up in Idaho next door.”
How much time have you spent in Eastern Washington?
It doesn’t have Moscow, for one big reason.
“One point for her working the phone lines instead of the crowds may be that she is not what most people would consider pretty.”
? I haven’t see one of those cracks since she was a child. She seems perfectly normally attractive and pretty to me, and I’ve heard plenty of similar comments. Do you have something against curly hair? Do you have some objective polls to cite, or are you just pulling this out of… your personal opinion?
Thanks for the reports, Phil; but the Ohio meeting only accounted for Cuyahoga County, right? How representative of the rest of Ohio is that?
LJ: “What you have to add to that is if there were an overwhelming perceived need that was generally agreed upon by the American people. That is, something like WWII or Sputnik.”
This is just trivial sloppiness I’m picking on for amusement, but I had no idea that America either started WWII in 1939, or launched Sputnik, due to perceived need. 🙂
Anyone want a good laugh? Here’s one.
Chelsea Clinton is definitely not ugly. So says I, at least.
DS: — in reply to hilzoy. It was certainly part of an argument in the sense of “discussion”, though not in the sense of “yelling”.
I’m still looking for the linkage – mentioning rural v. urban = racist.
On the broader question though – what happens with smaller states? Rhode Island, Delaware, etc. Screw ‘em?
LJ. Your remarks on WWII and Sputnik suggest that the US accepts centralized projects only in response to a clear external threat. Now that brings us nicely round to current reality of course…
I think that creating a percieved need in the population could alsmost be the defining feature of polical leadership.
I am a project manager by trade and when we see one of our own flailing around after a host of symptoms without addressing the core problem we call it firefighting. It seems to me that, even given fiercely independant spirits, there has been a vacuum of strategic leadership.
I’m still looking for the linkage – mentioning rural v. urban = racist.
I know people that use urban as shorthand for black. They tend to be afraid of cities, but they certainly exist.
On the broader question though – what happens with smaller states? Rhode Island, Delaware, etc. Screw ‘em?
Um…yes. Why should voters in RI get a larger voice in government? I mean, our agriculture subsidies provide some evidence that increasing the political power of rural states far beyond their share of the population leads to poor policy outcomes.
Oh agriculture policy, if you didn’t exist, we’d have to create you. You’re the one thing that conservatives and liberals can agree is just totally broken.
Thanks for the reports, Phil; but the Ohio meeting only accounted for Cuyahoga County, right? How representative of the rest of Ohio is that?
To the extent that any city is representative of an entire state the size of Ohio — which you and I would probably agree is “not much” — the answer is, er, not much. It’s a definite bellwether for Northern /Northeast Ohio, and probably for central Ohio as well; Columbus and Cleveland, as the largest cities in Ohio and in their respective regions, are pretty demographically similar and tend to vote similarly to my recollection. (Columbus obviously differs in having the gigantic Ohio State University and all the that engenders; although Northeast Ohio is peppered with medium-to-large liberal arts colleges like Oberlin, Baldwin-Wallace, John Carroll, etc.)
The vast swaths of Ohio between Cleveland and Columbus, and between Columbus and Cincinnati, are like rural areas anywhere else, and Cincinnati is of course extremely conservative. (We’re trying to get Kentucky to annex it.)
So, like I said, with such a small data point, I wouldn’t put any check marks in anybody’s column just yet. But it’s encouraging, in a county where a lot of the Democratic base is made up of old-school labor union Democrats who are otherwise kind of socially conservative.
It seems to me that, even given fiercely independant spirits, there has been a vacuum of strategic leadership.
I think this gets to the heart of the matter.
The debate about nuclear vs. coal vs. wind vs. whatever is very valuable. But, in the public debate at least, making basic changes in the way we live is simply not on the table.
American culture is designed around the assumption that everyone owns a car, and everyone drives everywhere they go. There’s no reason that has to be so. It might take a couple of generations to change that. That’s actually not that long of a time. Any other solution is going to take just as long.
Changes in the way we live need to be on the table.
I know people that use urban as shorthand for black.
That’s true, but the commenter in this case was OC.
Your basic point here is valid — race is factor in almost any public issue in the US. I’m just saying I find it doubtful that it’s what OC had in mind.
Thanks –
Since it’s an open thread, switching topics, some people spend a lot of time worrying about the dire threat of radical militant Islam, and support for al Qaeda, rising in Pakistan.
Actually:
In case anyone was wondering.
Barnabas, I agree with you insofar as, “I continue to find it strange. You will collectively admit any kind of incapacity in execution of large projects (despite many examples to the contrary) rather than an incapacity of will.
That is the bottom line.”
Here’s what you need to understand. The U.S. has an excellent historic record as far as creating huge, revolutionary advances in all sorts of areas (The Manhattan Project, Apollo, the Hoover Dam, etc., etc.). The fact is that our follow-through frankly sucks. Case in point: Bell Labs invented the transistor, but no one here saw a use for it, and voila: Sony.
I have little doubt that the U.S. could build the biggest, baddest, coolest nuclear reactor in the world if we set our minds to it. But I also have little doubt that within 5 years we’d have moved on to the next cool thing and forgotten all about it.
And the thing is, for nuclear reactors, that’s pretty important. After you build them they require a lot of ongoing maintenance and support, year after year after year. The way our bureaucracy works, projects that aren’t immediately visible to the public tend to get their budgets squeezed into oblivion.
[OK, quick primer in U.S. Administrative Agencies, and please excuse the alphabet soup:]
You can pretty much look across the entire field of U.S. bureaucracies, and the only ones that work at all are the ones that have high visibility, affect the public directly, and don’t cost much, like the SEC, the OMB, and NOAA.
And even then most of the high-profile agencies are somewhat defective in their own right: FCC, NLRB, EPA, OSHA, FTC, Social Security (SSA), INS, FDA, PTO, BLM… They all kind of suck to different degrees, but they at least kind of work. Usually. They certainly don’t work as well as a lot of their foreign counterparts.
But the agencies that have to work behind the scenes and that don’t have natural constituencies are near useless: FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, NASA, the NRC, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (gack), the entire Dept. of Education, the entire Dept. of Energy, the entire Dept. of Transporation… the scary thing is that these are what, from a high level, you’d consider the “important stuff” — i.e., our highways, electricity, schools… but they’re not sexy issues, and so they get underfunded and don’t really work.
(Please note that there are a lot of good, brilliant, dedicated people working in all the federal agencies, e.g. NASA — some of whom are good friends of mine — but I think that many of them will agree that the agencies themselves often don’t work nearly as well as they’re supposed to.)
It’s just an unfortunate failing of the U.S. political bureaucracy that the first programs that get put on the chopping block are the long-term, upkeep-and-maintenance stuff. It just doesn’t cause a big fuss if you cut education budgets by 5%, because the impact isn’t immediately apparent. So it happens again the next year, then the year after that, and after that…
And this is why some of us think that nuclear power is just not a good fit for the U.S. (and really, the history of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does bear this out). Our follow-through is bad, and for nuclear reactors that’s simply not acceptable. If you squeeze the budgets like you do with education, no one notices that all the plants are being run by people with no training and that parts aren’t getting replaced on time until one of them blows up.
Now, if you propose to me that the U.S. start up a new Apollo program to make a working fusion reactor, I might support that, because that’s the sort of thing we’ve traditionally been good at. But our expertise is in building better mousetraps, not in keeping the mousetraps we have in working order.
Concerning Chelsea
I do not think that she is ugly (although imo another hairstyle would suit her better, which again is not an objection to the hairstyle per se). I just remember the claim to be made* (and not just a decade ago but also recently) and that some pundits use(d) to make bad jokes on that enough to turn it into a meme. From the Clinton campaign’s point of view that could be a reason to not put her as much into the limelight as they could. I would not be surprised to see the “French Kerry” replaced by the “Clinton horse” in the fair and balanced reporting on the alopecine fishing tool mill (did it matter whether Kerry “really” looked French? I don’t think so).
Should Hillary Clinton get the nomination the rumors (=lies) about Chelsea’s siring will be brought up again in any case.
I fear reality will again be at best a secondary issue.
*also by people that have no interest to push any view but simply make a statement of personal taste. Personally I find most “official” beauties rather unattractive.
Sony was actually somewhat of a latecomer to the game. I suspect they were successful not because they were innovative in technology so much as they were innovative in mass-production cost control.
Which still supports your point, I think, only it wasn’t quite as simple as we invented the transistor (actually, transistors were invented by several people over a span of decades) and didn’t know what to do with it; Sony is just a company that built a whole lot of radios using them. IIRC the first commercial, mass-production application was hearing aids.
That’s kind of my point — Bell Labs invented the transistor but didn’t really exploit the technology because of their arrangements with the government granting them their phone monopoly; one of the side effects of the Kingsbury Commitment was that Bell had to divorce themselves from their research division, so Western Electric (the research arm) was just supporting Bell and doing work for the U.S., and they weren’t try to monetize the technology.
Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Zenith and RCA took some shots, but no one in the U.S. was really able to monetize the technology. Sony convinced Bell to license it to them and built the TR-55. The amazing thing is just how unexceptional it was.
The moral of the story, for the purposes of this discussion, is that the transistor, one of the the most important technological innovations of the 20th century, was patented by a U.S. company in 1948 (meaning the patent would have extended to 1965) and licensed to a tiny Japanese company for peanuts — and Sony used that technology to produce a radio in 1955 that gave birth to one of the most dominant consumer electronics corporations on the planet. Sony did nothing with the technology except build from the ground up and use smaller components. They invented nothing, but it didn’t matter — all they had to do was follow-through.
Even putting the radio aside, Bell Labs had a patent on freaking transistors and Sony was the company that got rich off of it. Transistors! That move makes IBM’s screwup with Microsoft look like small potatoes!
Unfortunately, Sony seems to be crapping out lately. They are getting their clocks cleaned by Nintendo.
Unfortunately, Sony seems to be crapping out lately. They are getting their clocks cleaned by Nintendo.
Yeah, and AT&T’s not exactly doing too shabby as of late. (In terms of money, not Price/Evil ratios.) Still, it’s a good story. 🙂
licensed to a tiny Japanese company for peanuts
Sony was small enough at the time that if it’d been much more money, they wouldn’t have been able to swing it. At the time, they gave the licensing fees some very serious consideration. Recall that Sony has a decent magnetic-tape (IIRC, could have been some other magnetic storage medium) business in the works, and they could have just stuck with that.
Not necessarily true. Designing something and turning out a product are two very different things.
I think inventors, for the most part, don’t wind up reaping the rewards of their inventions. Sometimes they get screwed out of the credit, too.
Back to Sony, though, you could nearly equivalently point out how Sony has let the bulk of the transistor business slip through its grasp by not building computers, at some point, but I’m not sure where that would lead.
I guess I could have expanded the above into some sort of generalization to the effect that inventors are not well-suited to manufacture, and possibly manufacturers are not well-suited to invent, but I really don’t know. There are lots of examples one could point to support that, and doubtless some counterexamples as well.
Yeah, there’s tons of different anecdotes you can provide on either side here — my personal favorites are Leslie Graves in the Manhattan Project and Edison’s machine shops — but in this case I was just trying to tell a story. To reiterate: freaking transistors. Even Tesla’s got nothing on that.
Hmmm…Farnsworth invented the TV and sold the patent for $1 million.
Nope, probably nothing like the transistor. But they didn’t have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight back then, either.
If only you knew then what you know now. Why, you’d have bought up cheap orange-grove land around where Disney now is, invested in IBM, and bought into Apple and Intel early.
I know a guy who did two of those things, and it made me suspect the existence of time-travel.
Slarti, I assume we’re just shooting the breeze now, but I’m enjoying it, so I’ll run with it. (At least you’re not accusing me of being a torture-lover.)
Obviously, all of the ‘follow-through’ examples can be answered by the “if hindsight was 20/20 argument,” but in the case of the transistor, it wasn’t just that it was invented by Bell Labs (an experience R&D outfit who arguably should have known how to monetize it) and that TI, RCA, Raytheon, and Zenith couldn’t do anything with it, it was also that the value was pretty easy to recognize even back then, and the patent was effective for at least 10 years after Sony built the TR-55 (IIRC, Bell still retained the license), and they still didn’t do anything with it.
It’s a debatable point, but it’s still a good story. And there’s good counterexamples to every story, of course; but to bring the discussion back to where it began, I’d still maintain that, speaking very broadly and admittedly stereotyping more than a little bit, the U.S. doesn’t have a very good track record at follow-through.
We do big projects very well. But we even seem to prefer to systematize maintenance and boring management tasks (See, e.g., Eli Whitney, Edison’s idea factories, Ford’s assembly line, the great pre-war and post-war R&D labs, etc., etc.) — anything to avoid having to fill out TPS reports or do anything that even resembles bureaucracy!
Sometimes I wonder if Germans and the Swiss just actually enjoy filling stuff out in triplicate. Different strokes, I suppose. They make better watches than we do.
I know a guy who did two of those things, and it made me suspect the existence of time-travel.
So you’ve seen that episode of Futurama too. The Farnsworth reference was the giveaway…
We do big projects very well.
If by well you mean on time and on budget and working correctly, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for an example in the last twenty years.
Absolutely! Although I’m not convinced that Bell Labs was ever all that motivated to turn ideas into moneymakers, through licensing agreements.
Nope, never seen a single Futurama episode. I’m culturally stunted, you know.
If by well you mean on time and on budget and working correctly, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for an example in the last twenty years.
Human Genome Project. Transitioning ARPANET into the current Internet. GPS.
Hmmm…GPS had been in the works since the early 1970s, at least, and the supposedly-bulletproof encryption put on the P-code solution was neatly cicumvented in short order by enterprising private-sector companies. By stating that SA would never be implemented, P-code level positioning accuracy was delivered to customers who don’t hold GPS crypto keys.
I’d be amazed to learn that they were on time and under budget, given that it’s a DoD program.
Just for fun and less off the top of my head: Artificial heart; Bose-Einstein condensate. High- capacity fiber; Asymmetric crystalline structures (Penrose tiling, etc.)
This is a fun game!
Are you saying someone invented a Bose-Einstein condensate, Adam?
😉
GPS reached full operating capacity in 1995. It was such an incremental project that I’m not sure how you’d define “on time” or “under budget,” but it does work pretty well for the cost.
On the other hand, I would have put Hubble on the list too, despite cost overruns, because it strikes me as having been well worth it. ::shrug::
Are you saying someone invented a Bose-Einstein condensate, Adam?
Sort of — the more they looked for it, the less they knew!
Did some one mention something about some technological feats that no one reading this thread is old enough to remember? I saw Telstar launch(on TV), I heard the words “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed “.
We didn’t build an SST because there was no money in doing so (do you see any now)and if you think all we got from going to the moon was a few technological advances, well you are just plain wrong.
Man do I feel old. Are the Monkees still around?
PS as a Field Artillery Forward Observer, I used GPS targeting in 1976. As well as a laser range finder( I couldn’t estimate range worth a flip without it)
GPS in 1976? Wow. The first Block I went upin 1978.
Targeting systems still, for the most part, use laser rangefinders, Wayne. It’s still hard to get range passively in a hurry. You guys could probably have done a decent job with triangulation, but that relies heavily on being able to accurately compute sightline azimuth.
Ok, ’nuff boring stuff.
“Nope, never seen a single Futurama episode.”
Generally pretty funny stuff that I’d recommend, FWIW. A fair amount of obscure references tucked away hither and yon, including the variables in the opening credits.
“Did some one mention something about some technological feats that no one reading this thread is old enough to remember?”
Unlikely, since we’ve had people as old as 99 comment more than once, a number of regulars are in their sixties, and comments from people in their seventies aren’t so rare as to make anyone lift an eyebrow.
Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Micky Dolenz are “still around.”
I’ll have to put it on my Tivo list. Which might actually work, now that I’ve mostly worked my way, in no particular order, most of the episodes of Smallville.
Thanks, Gary,
Now I don’t feel so old.
BTW Slartibartfast, the only way I know of to get range passively, is to look at the target and guess. Some guys are pretty good at it.
As I said, there’s triangulation. That’s completely passive, and can be fairly accurate, depending on how much you’re willing to sink into equipment to determine sightline azimuth. There’s also doing an inertial track on the target from a moving platform, which is a great deal like triangulation, only it takes a while to get enough baseleg.
And then there’s map-registering an aerial photograph of the target, but that’s not always possible. Measurement is probably your best bet, overall; you can laser-range a target to an accuracy of a couple of meters or less, over a distance of several miles. That’s plenty good enough for artillery, I’d think.
I find it interesting that everyone called me out on GPS. I thought my ARPANET fudge was way worse. 🙂 And the Human Genome Project was international (though arguably U.S.-centric).
I’m not sure it was an answerable question. I mean, the Internet and cell phones seem like the two obvious answers, but both were incremental technologies.
And it’s a loaded question, too — the U.S. has done all kinds of cool crash programs (Hoover Dam, Apollo, Manhattan Project, Hubble, etc.), but… budgets? We laugh at your so-called “budgets”!
BTW Slartibartfast, the only way I know of to get range passively, is to look at the target and guess. Some guys are pretty good at it.
Rule of thumb:
Hold up your thumb at arm’s length over your target, look through one eye, then the other, estimate the distance between the two points marked out by your thumbs at the target’s range, multiply by 10.
Supposedly.
I just read that yesterday. Haven’t tried it yet.
I just read that yesterday. Haven’t tried it yet.
OK, I gave in and tried it. I think the factor for me should be more like 8. But in theory, it seems like it should work if you know your own multiplier, right?
Adam’s got fat thumbs!
Have I mentioned that I work for a defense contractor? We don’t laugh at budgets so much as renegotiate them.
Slarti, being a science guy as you are, I can confidently predict that you will love Futurama. Pound for pound it was the most nerdlicious show on TV: Exec Producer David X. Cohen has a BA in physics from Harvard and an MS in comp sci from UC Berkeley; frequent writer Ken Keeler has a PhD in applied math; and many of the writing staff are math/science people.
See also Dr. Sarah’s Futurama Math. A typical joke, in which the robot sidekick Bender meets his “evil” twin:
As for Monkees, my wife has actually met Peter on several occasions, and has partied with Davy and Mickey after a show. I, on the other hand, have yet to meet a surviving Beatle or even Pete Best.
Being an open thread, I note with regret the deaths of both Tom Lantos and Roy Scheider.
Adam’s got fat thumbs!
No, short arms! Wait, long arms! Widely-spaced eyes? … I suck at trig. I’m think I’m actually better at calculus than trig. I would have made a horrible artilleryman. Especially with the thumbs.
Have I mentioned that I work for a defense contractor? We don’t laugh at budgets so much as renegotiate them.
So kind of like, “Well, you can either have the front half of the plane now for free, or if you give us $40M more, you can get the back half…”?
I imagine the laughing comes afterward 🙂
But seriously: who could ask, with a straight face, for the rear end of a plane? Just think of the two-dimensional harrassment suits!
But seriously: who could ask, with a straight face, for the rear end of a plane? Just think of the two-dimensional harrassment suits!
“Now that’s a hot piece of aft.”
Wait: please don’t tell me you’ve met a Beatle that didn’t survive.
Someone did, just the other day, but we couldn’t find it. We even called an All Hands meeting, but we couldn’t find it will all hands.
Bless you, Phil, but I’m just a lowly engineer, and am largely unencumbered by sciencey talents. If I were to have, say, attempted to construct a particle accelerator in middle school, it was purely to impress the girls.
Well, maybe not. I honestly can’t recall why I might have elected to start such a project.
Unfortunately, the design I picked sort of needed some glass-blowing skills that I was not in possession of, or the application of several hundred dollars toward a vacuum pump, and I didn’t have the squeeze.
A real nerd would have finished it, and written the name of his true love with a beam of electrons on a piece of gold leaf.
On the original topic of this post, this piece by Jesse Sheidlower of the OED (who I used to chat with at panix.chat, back in the Nineties) is typically informative.