If you actually read the article and the many citations, it’s a strong data-based approach. If you only read the title or skim, or just react emotionally then it could hit you the wrong way. All of which is to say that this is an important issue, it’s presented well and with sensitivity, and it’s just the kind of thought-provoking article called for in the guidelines.
That it’s already flagged off the front page is a credit to no one.
A selection of some of the embedded links from the piece:
If you actually read the article and the many citations, it’s a strong data-based approach.
As a review of the federal sentencing guidelines status quo, sure. As a source of proposed remedies, no.
I didn't go into the article looking for an argument that there were problems with that system and the application of it. I had prior knowledge there, and fleshing it out further wasn't my only reason to read this.
I went into the article looking for the proposed remedies (and a ounce of hope that they wouldn't be as hollow as the headline suggested). If they had limited the scope of the article to the problem they wish to describe, I'd agree with you. But the headline and the "lol, trump" paragraphs aim the article higher. Those aspects don't stick to the tough data-driven no-nonsense image fivethrityeight tries to convey.
Tritium. In addition to the points made by other replies, current fusion is (mostly) D-T, and we’re nowhere near breeding T in the reactor, so it has to be made in fission plants. Tritium is very expensive, and a significant risk for nuclear weapons proliferation.
This will probably end up pushing us to Lithium fusion pretty fast, the fuel is a lot more common and the temperature requirement is only a little hotter.
That said nuclear proliferation from tritium is a lot less of a risk than from uranium. Anyone can put together a nuclear event with sufficient enriched uranium, pinching tritium to fuse using a fission event, well it's a significant technical hurdle.
It would explode, but for any reactor we’re likely to build in our lifetimes, it wouldn’t be anything like a nuclear bomb. We’ve had nastier explosions in natural gas refineries. There would be radiological contamination from the Tritium and any neutron-activated material, but it would be more of an expensive cleanup than an environmental disaster. It would be dirty though, especially if the reactor had been running for a while, building up dust. What wasn’t radioactive would still likely be stuff you don’t want to breathe or ingest.
TL;DR Boom lots of dead people in the containment structure, expensive cleanup, but nothing like a fission disaster. It would be an uninspiring explosion, but it would be dirty.
This is wrong in every possible way. There isn't enough mass of hot material in any plausible fusion reactor to even breach the vacuum chamber.
Or for better context: research facilities today regularly lose plasma containment. It's why we don't have practical fusion reactors, but they're already at the plasma densities we would run at (which is an order of magnitude or so better then the Sun achieves).
Yeah. There's even a clue in what it's called: a vacuum chamber.
Densities are extremely low, so you only have a few grams of material in the reactor, even at large volumes anticipated for a commercial design.
Furthermore, the reaction is extremely finicky, as demonstrated by what an incredibly hard time we are having creating and more importantly sustaining it. Any deviation from the ideal and it just goes out. So no runaway chain reactions.
I’d be more surprised if people working for a company like Facebook weren’t raging hypocrites. Other than stratospheric levels of cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy or just not giving a shit is the only way someone could work for them. In my experience far more people are hypocrites than truly callous and uncaring.
Peter Thiel though, seems like less of a hypocrite and more like someone who just says and does whatever he thinks is personally advantageous, and screw everyone who isn’t Peter a Thiel.
There is the possibility that they well and truly believe that living inside a panoptikon that also manipulates us to manufacture desire for products and consent for political goals is the best of all possible worlds.
Or they are in it for the money and are lacking in ethical integrity.
We do, but outside of California, it's a cakewalk. Mostly checks for functional brake lights, turn signals, wipers, etc. And, again, outside of California, some minimal emissions tests you'll pass unless your car is seriously ailing.
Not exactly. This is highly dependent upon not only state but county as well. The type of vehicle and its age and even things like a vehicle with collectors plates can factor into emissions and testing requirements.
As an example my sister lives in a county in Colorado that doesn't do emissions testing. I bought a car - 2001 Subaru Legacy - from her several years ago and had to pass emissions as I do live in a county that requires it. It failed spectacularly. The car was not 'seriously ailing' either. The forward O2 sensor needed to be replaced and then it passed just fine.
Granted from what I hear California has pretty strict emissions requirements, but it's not necessarily a cake walk outside of California either, although sometimes it is. It's highly variable.
I grew up in a place where the racial bias narrative of policing was just something I knew to be true. It took a long time, and a lot of statistics from a ton of sources to realize that aside from sentencing, it’s mostly that the system as a whole sucks. The problem is the correlation between race and poverty, and poverty and crime. It’s fair to point to the history of mistreatment of black people in the US as a root driver of poverty, and therefore crime, but that’s often lost in the noise.
Take the recent shooting of a young black man in his grandmother’s yard. The narrative is now that he was unarmed, and shot in the back. While true, both points are deceptive. He was unarmed, but he ran from the cops, at night, didn’t follow commands, and had a metallic object in his hands when he turned to face the officers. This was all caught on FLIR. He was shot in the back, after the first shot to his front spun him around. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Comply with commands and argue your case in court. Your odds of being shot go down to near zero when you’re not running away or acting like a lunatic. Even in cases of obvious abuse like that poor bastardized NYPD cops strangled to death, were predicated on resisting arrest.
As long as people fleeing and resisting gets conflated with cases of compliant people being abused, not much will change. As long as cases of disproportionate arrests rates are conflated with wrongful arrests and convictions, not much will change. The two major predictors of have a bad time in the system are socioeconomic class, and how you act with officers. Race is a factor in sentencing, but that seems to rarely be the issue talked about in popular cases.
WThe narrative is that an unarmed young black man was shot in his grandmother's yard because the police did, in fact, shoot an unarmed young black man in his grandmother's yard. That narrative isn't "deceptive". It is what in fact happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_in_the_alternative
It’s very real.