Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to JackElder,
they're perfectly visible.
Yes, I just had a batch of them recently. They're not an outright lie, you do get animals. Charles Atlas was also quite big, supposedly from flexing in front of the mirror (for years, and eating all the right foods, and possibly having a physique that responds the right way). And if you you're actually able to land a roundhouse kick on a bully's head, you might be considered unbeatable.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to 3410,
I can still do it in 3 days, last time I checked.
Not that muscle.
But what about that mini-submarine? That must have been real.
Heh, was it radio controlled? So they could save money by just explaining afterwards why none of them ever come back.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That's a conservative estimate. And guess what - they weren't insured! No insurance company would cover such a risk, so the government and people absorb it. If nuclear power plants had to be insured for their potential liability, they would never get built.
To be fair to insurers, they can't build actuarial tables with no data, so fair enough. That's not proof in itself that the cost would be too high for insurers, just that they have no way of working out how much to charge, and they don't insure if they can't work that out. Part of the problem is there have been too few meltdowns.
If 69 billion seems like a lot, consider also the very large number of plants that exist and how long they have operated for, and how much profit they make. The cost of insurance might not be that high to them, if decent data could actually be collected.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Thomas Johnson,
I must say that after a mis-spent childhood reading comics that advertised these things
I'd go so far as to say everything advertised in them is disappointing. Ever seen a Sea Monkey (tm). With the naked eye? How about "Unbeatable fighting power in 3 days?". I've seen what people in martial arts clubs are like after 3 days training. How about "Charles Atlas Muscles"?. Try flexing yourself heaps and see if you get muscle mass any time soon.
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Field Theory: Japan moves, in reply to Hadyn Green,
It kinda makes sense to evacuate. Even if you don't think it'll go to a full meltdown, move people now just in case.
Also, it's one thing to evacuate a small bunch of ex-pats, quite another to evacuate the population of a region as densely populated as Japan.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Cecelia,
Did he ever have one?
He's like a Twinkie. Will still be edible in the post-zombie-apocalypse world, but not really very nice even when brand new.
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How often do nuclear reactors get subjected to meltdown containment tests?
They don't get built just so they can be melted down, no. But you can test a lot of things in isolation to get a very accurate picture of the overall system. They don't use actual people in car crash tests either, but those tests give very accurate information about what the effect on the human body is in those cars well before anyone ever gets to actually die in one.
It is quite possible to work out the melting point of the containment materials, how much energy is required to melt them, and how much energy there is to burn in the deactivated reactor. If you make one of them more than the other, plus a massive safety margin, you can be pretty damned certain of the outcome. I don't need to hold a candle against a 1 ton slab of concrete to know it isn't going to melt it. I could use a cutting torch to melt it, if I had enough fuel, and exactly how much fuel that would be could be worked out by melting the entire ton. Or I could melt one kilo of it, and multiply the fuel used by 1000. How inaccurate do you think this is? Once you quantify that inaccuracy, you build huge safety margins around it. At some point, you have to say "that's enough safety". They don't use the bare minimum.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Richard Aston,
You just have to find page 3 girls who like that sort of thing and it's all good?
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Richard Aston,
Will they be lobbying for public flogging of looters next?
Page 3 girls might work better. Isn't the paper aimed at people who don't have the internet?
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Rich Lock,
But: 1) they are still unable to produce that food 25 flippin' years after being dosed, and 2) the UK is a bloody long way away from the Ukraine.
They're unable to produce some kinds of food. Which is not the only thing farmland can be used for. It could be used for forestry, for instance. Or it could lie fallow for that time and emerge as considerably better farmland. Yes, it does suck for those farmers, but it's hardly the post-apocalyptic landscape Matthew was suggesting could be an outcome in NZ. And again, that was a fucked old plant in a fucked old empire. I wouldn't want one of those either.
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