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Comment Half-Measures (Score 0) 3

Wouldn't they make more money from their chose constiuency through a zero-tolerance based branding, ie confessed Republicans, conservative voters, right-wing politicians, anyone who has, in a moment of [choose one: weekness, honesty, marital conflict] expressed an un-woke thought, as well as their indentured servants are banned from staying in or dining at any Marriott facility worldwide?

Comment Twittidiots (Score 2) 147

Personally, I've never been dumb enough to have an account with them, but if you do, now is a good time to delete it. (Please note that everything you've ever posted will still be in servers all over the world, ripe for the picking by companies that want to spam you, as well as all the alphabet scum: CIA, NSA, etc. As an aside, is it coincidental that Google's overlords were named "Alphabet"?).

Comment Re:Isn't that the plot of the Matrix? (Score 1) 256

by arkhan_jg (#57690986) Attached to: Controversial Spraying, Sun-Dimming Method Aims To Curb Global Warming

While I agree with you in principle, there are practical problems with nuclear power.

The first is that they usually end up a lot more expensive to build, run, and decommission than estimated in the planning stage; partly due to stringent regulation, as well as the required expertise. Nuclear does need strong oversight, because it's way too tempting for operators to start cutting corners to save operating costs, and we have multiple examples of nuclear contamination when that happened. Yes, new designs are a lot safer - they're also more expensive, which is one reason that they haven't really been built. It's more cost effective to run old plants long past their original design date, which of course has risks.

The second is public acceptance. If green lobby groups had that kind of power to influence government policy, we wouldn't have a carbon crisis in the first place. The oil and gas lobbies are extremely well funded, and that's what's ultimately kept them top of the pile - money talks. Radioactive and nuclear are maximum NIMBY, that's just the general public's view of nuclear, and it has been since at least the 70s. Coal plants emit more radioactive waste in the smoke than an equivalent rated nuclear reactor, but that is definitely not the public perception, and swinging the public behind radical energy-policy change is going to be hard enough without also trying to sell nuclear as the solution which has a very poor general public image, not least due to Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Lastly, and the biggest one really - it's just too late. We should have embarked on mass building nuclear 20-30 years ago, but we didn't, and we have to deal with where we are now. We need to be bring online non-carbon energy plants fast, not in 15 years when new nuke plants would finally be going online. Not that we shouldn't start on new nuclear plants too to kill off the hardest-to-replace carbon plants, but to avoid the 2deg point we need to stop building carbon plants right now, and aggressively decommission the existing ones as the carbon footprint extends for decades for every plant. Solar and wind plants can go up relatively quickly, grid redesign to decentralise can continue more aggressively, and the improvements and lowered costs will get here sooner if we're actually building them in bulk rather than waiting for theoretical tech improvements.

As a species we've made some pretty bad decisions, but our lack of action on energy production even though we knew the consequences looks like it might well be the worst. The perfect being the enemy of the good applies just as much to not building solar and wind plants today as it does to not building nuclear plants in the past. Frankly, I'm not bothered personally whether we build nuclear, solar or both, as long as we start getting non-carbon power online fast.

Because otherwise insane(ly expensive) geoengineering projects like TFA - with major drawbacks - will be our last ditch chance.

Submission + - FCC Silenced Puerto Rico Radio Station's Boosters in March 2017

Submitted by An dochasac
An dochasac writes: WAPA (680 AM) is a radio station in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria took out power, phone lines, cell towers and internet, WAPA was the only Puerto Rican radio station on the air for crucial public emergency communication. But WAPA's signal coverage was significantly cut in March 2017 when the FCC refused to renew the license for synchronous AM booster stations at Arecibo, Mayaguez and Aguadilla in March due to procedural issues with the petition for renewal. This decision limited the coverage, signal strength and signal quality of this station for remote and mountainous parts of Puerto Rico where the need for emergency communications is greatest.

The FCC audio division chief who pulled WAPA's synchronous booster license decided to retire a few days ago. The position is open but is focused on legal training rather than technical expertise and experience with emergency communications.

FCC audio division's regulations have done little to stop AM and satellite radio from broadcasting right-wing streams-of-consciousness throughout the lower 48 states. With IoT, cellular, mesh, satellite, social media and cognitive radio, communications technology is changing much faster than the FCC's legal efforts to regulate it.

But its arcane regulations leave Puerto Rico as one of the few islands in the Caribbean without a long distance shortwave broadcast station. With line of sight FM stations offline and WAPA's AM station neutered, post-Maria Puerto Ricans have a better chance of getting news and emergency information from Havana, Cuba than from anything under the FCC's increasingly pointless jurisdiction.

Submission + - Trump Is Right:Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas To Pay Low Wages To Immigrants (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: the Trump administration has drafted a new executive order that could actually mean higher wages for both foreign workers and Americans working in Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley companies, of course, will not be happy if it goes into effect.

The order aims to overhaul and limit work visas, notably the H-1B visa program. Tech companies rely on these to bring in foreign talent. Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false. The truth is that they want an expansion of the H-1B work visa program because they want to hire cheap, immobile labor — i.e., foreign workers.

To see how this works, note that most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) under the employment-based program in immigration law. EB sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.

Comment "...human-made greenhouse gases are responsible f" (Score 1) 371

When people write a statement such as this subject, it is not surprising that there is so much confusion and misunderstanding, leading to heat with no light. Any logical person considering that climate change has always occurred, since long before there were humans, should be able to construct a sentence that expresses the thought that s/he is trying to convey, in a more nuance manner which would contain at least a modicum of truth.

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