Balta1701

Former Senator Dan Coates will challenge Bayh.

This is sorta a remarkable storyline presented here from ABC. The Administration lately is running with this basic premise, to counter the people who say that the guy should not be tried by our judicial system or that we should have started electrocuting his balls. Their argument is that the guy has been talking and providing intelligence without being tortured. How is that happening? Well, for starters, its happening because they got his family involved and let them work with him. Why was his family willing to get involved to help the U.S. government? Because his family believed he would be treated fairly by the DOJ and not tortured.

QUOTE (Tex @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 06:56 PM) Again I ask, what industry will those jobs in in? What jobs will offer decent wages without a college degree? Those jobs were manufacturing. Those are leaving in droves. I would like to agree with you, but I can't think of a job sector that will produce those jobs. What jobs will remain that will offer decent wages with a college degree?

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 06:47 PM) Maybe now is the time to get educated elsewhere since tuitions are going up so high in-state. Trouble is, that's sorta the same everywhere. California, for example, the State Universities are a disaster area because the funding that used to be there from the state has dried up. The faculty members there have been required to take unpaid furloughs for a couple days a month, basically working without pay several days, to help the state cover its budget gaps. I wouldn't take a job at a UC system school right now if they gave me the best offer in the history of mankind. And it's getting like that everywhere.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 04:33 PM) Yup. Obama too, he had to one-up McCain. It always gets brought into the picture all the time, it's never going to happen though. It's just not that easy to do. Frankly, the $10 billion or so his admin. came up with last year really wasn't bad.

QUOTE (joeynach @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 03:14 PM) If Crede were a DH then you would have a DH who hits .255/20/70, you can get better than that. Yeah, Jones/Kotsay!

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 02:41 PM) If you're Obama or a Democrat in office, then yes. The Obama administration has done jack sh*t to help people deal with mortgages.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 09:57 AM) Unfortunately there is indeed a lot of truth to this, and I don't think it surprises anyone here. I'm not arguing that we should be doing these things, just that it's better to be safe than sorry in terms of national defense. Apparently, Obama agrees for the most part (who many of you elected), hence the wars he never ended, refunded, and pumped even more trooped into. But this is where we come to the "Defense spending doesn't count!" issue. We're spending $700 billion dollars on the DOD this year, and even as we wind down the wars, that's going up at almost the rate at which healthcare costs increase. $30-50 billion a year. You can't spend to infinity just because it's on defense. It's a huge slice of the budget, and being safe rather than sorry on defense is the attitude that has given us a large part of this debt that people keep telling me is so terrible.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 10:27 AM) Yeah, the biggest problems with the shuttle program is that most everything is of 1970's design. I don't know that you could do much with it, without starting over. Just as with most large engineering projects, once you shut the construction down, you really can't rebuild it. You keep enough industry online to continue to produce the necessary spare parts, but you don't have the ability to gear up to do a total refit. The reason for getting rid of the shuttle is how unsafe and cost-ineffective it turned out to be as a resuable vehicle anyway.

QUOTE (bmags @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 09:34 AM) JD Hayworth is insane. Dude's just a pro-torture republican. Which is why he's going to win.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 09:34 AM) And no, F22's are not useless, they have a very specific and sometimes necessary use. When? (The reason why I'm pointing at the F-22 is that its a $100 billion program that I find very useless as an air superiority fighter when there's no need for an expensive air superiority fighter right now.) (also, if the government were to waste $1 billion on helping Unions, I bet you'd find a lot of complaints about that. Yet you're finding fault with me focusing on a very large program of very limited use. This is why I keep using the joke "Defense spending doesn't really count.")

Link

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 09:28 AM) So are you claiming that the only planes we've EVER ordered that we didn't need were F22's? You do realize in war, when we deliver ammo, etc...to our troops, we don't do it in F22's, right? Similarly, the same planes are used to deliver food, supplies, etc. So you're arguing that the F-22 is useless and we need more cargo planes. I'm game. Even using conservative estimates for the cost of a C-130, you get 3.5 of them for the price of 1 F-22.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 09:24 AM) Would you rather we let everyone starve to death in Haiti because having planes may mean they're also used for war? How many F-22's are being used for Haiti relief?

A clarification. I'm not on paper opposed to new nuclear development, I just don't think its cost-effective. Similarly, I'm not opposed to coal with CCS, I just don't think its cost-effective. It's possible that there may be a major change (i.e. something similar to what Hansen refers to that you cite) in the next set of reactors that could push construction costs back the other way. I'm not in favor of banning all funding for nuclear development or anything like that (although I don't want a single new plant constructed anywhere until there is a long-term storage plan for the waste). I think of nuclear like I think of ethanol right now. It only exists because of a combination of previous efforts decades ago, sometimes for other reasons (i.e. bomb-building, corn subsidies) but it is not cost-effective right now and it will take a major leap forwards to make it cost-effective. There's nothing wrong with maintaining a research program on it and trying to work out the kinks, or putting together alternate ideas. But these loan guarantees are pretty much as valuable to me as the gigantic subsidies for corn-based-ethanol; they distort the market heavily at large taxpayer expense without significant, long-term gains. Maybe that changes quickly; if you could suddenly convert every ethanol plant to running switchgrass, that would do it. If you could suddenly cut the cost of new nuclear by 2/3, that would do it.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 3, 2010 -> 07:09 AM) In other words, if we start building them again, we will increase demand and the workforce will also increase. Don't focus so heavily on the one Moodys study about potential credit problems due to unforseen construction cost increases, either. Thekey flaw in that logic is; you assume that no one else in the world has been building reactors/maintaining the necessary skills and equipment. This is not true with nuclear, however, it is true with solar. It is true that nuclear consntruction worldwide is quite slow, but this is again because of the continual cost overruns on the projects that have been undertaken. They updated the MIT study a year ago and produced a cost estimate of $.084/kwh (a rate of cost increase equal to that of fossil fuels over the same period, and there was that massive fossil fuel price spike at the same time). However, that was again based on a base construction cost of $4000/KW, which as I've discussed repeatedly, the evidence says over and over that this is the price they quote until you actually get close to an agreement to build the plant, where it has this nasty habit of doubling or more from there. From that report: For a pro-nuclear report, that's surprisingly strong "This isn't working well" language. There may not have been agreement, but if you read the words they wrote, someone, probably a couple of people in fact, on that panel are as pessimistic as me.

The Clippers again? Seriously?

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 09:39 PM) Everywhere has so much better stuff - so much of what you want... you should go. At least you can have peace of mind knowing that the country you live in isn't killing the rest of the world by its pollution. And messed up health care system. And lack of redistribution of wealth. And education standards. My, this country sucks. We suck! SUCK! However, a lot of them use nuclear power.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan99 @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 09:06 PM) Avatar was one of the cheesiest movies I've seen recently. If you are going to criticize District 9 for that you have to criticize Avatar for that. Unless you like such amazing dialogue as "You aren't in Kansas anymore", "Why did you save me?" A: "You have a strong heart", or "Then everything changed, I fell in love". Titanic won an oscar despite DiCaprio's brilliant "This is not good!"

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 09:18 PM) Again, everywhere else is so much better then the US. Go live there. Thankfully, doing so will protect me from changes to the atmosphere...

So, this is the one issue that's still going to be out there even after this recall...a lot of people seem fully convinced that this problem also relates to some glitch in Toyota's electronics.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 09:09 PM) Maybe if they called it stimulus spending? It wouldn't be the worst stimulus in the world, but in this case, you need 2 things to happen. First, you need to actually get the plant built - the way the "please the right wing" guarantees may work, if you were a financier, you could cash out successfully even if the plant never was built (note - either way, a Wall Street firm gets rich. This is not an accidental flaw). Second...you'd have to have the plant built within the next year or two. (You start them now and you probably finish by 2016 or so.). We'd be better off buying a load of windmills and solar panels, IMO. Or, paying people to bury dollar bills in big holes, either way.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 08:52 PM) Nobody else is even worth mentioning. I doubt their play at this level will last, but would you want to face the Bulls right now? The only team they can't beat is the Clippers.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 07:19 PM) Balta, all cost estimates I can find for wind and solar put it several multiples above nuclear. More in the range of .25-.30/ kWh versus .08-.10 for nukes. You'll notice first that you've flipped units. Second, that Moody's analysis actually winds up with the same number you give there, $.25 or so/kwh, as the resultant cost. Why is that number so much higher than the one you give? Because nuclear plants have this nasty habit of having their costs overrun the initial value quoted by as much as a factor of 2-3. You see that in the Florida plants, in the San Antonio Plants, etc. They quote the low price to get people interested and maybe secure a loan where the Federal Government will eat most of the cost whether they get built or not, like what the President has just proposed. Then, as the project leaves the planning phase...boom.Here's Time Magazine talking about this issue last summer:

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Feb 2, 2010 -> 06:34 PM) Yea, but we need more money spent to figure it all out and what and how we're going to fix it. Again, that's your side. Ours says the answers are already out there, and working in other countries.