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It's official: France bans short haul domestic flights in favour of train travel:
France has been given the green light to ban short haul domestic flights.
The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.
[...] France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population.
Transport minister Clément Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.
[...] The ban on short-haul flights will be valid for three years, after which it must be reassessed by the Commission.
"[This] is a major step forward in the policy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions," transport minister Beaune said in a press release.
[...] Sarah Fayolle, Greenpeace France transport campaign manager, told Euronews that there were both "negative and positive aspects" to the European Commission's decision given that only three routes are affected.
"It's going in the right direction, but the initial measure is one that's (not very) ambitious. We must go even further," she said.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @11:53AM (112 children)
>Comparing your situation to Bhopal sounds pretty disingenuous to me!
I would say rather than disingenuous, it's a matter of degrees, and when one's only source of viable income within 1000 miles has excessive air-traffic noise for a radius of 300 miles (and affordable property within that radius is itself in short supply), the available choice is: breathe jet pollution, or eat on welfare assistance while living in subsidized housing.
When you ignore problems and just let them ride, Bhopal level disasters are the eventual result. MIA hasn't had a poorly regulated cargo jet crash on a residential area, yet, but they did take out one commuter driving by the airport one day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Air_Flight_101 [wikipedia.org] "The Douglas DC-8 pitched up, stalled, and crashed to the ground in the parking lot of a mini-mall, killing all four people on board as well as one on the ground." https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/out-of-balance-the-crash-of-fine-air-flight-101-db484c84e4e6 [medium.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @03:46PM (34 children)
Nonsense. You acknowledge here that you choose this. Even if we ignore the disingenuous, hypocritical ludicrousness of comparing the killing of ten thousand people (and serious and often permanent injury to perhaps an order of magnitude more) to JoeMerchant whining that the place he chose to has minor amounts of noise and air pollution from planes, the rational among us have to admit that you chose this. You wanted the benefits of living near airports, thus you also volunteered for the costs.
The victims of Bhopal didn't choose to live near to a vast industrial disaster.
Nonsense again. Only by keeping the human population under 10k people forever after can you perfectly prevent Bhopal-level disasters. The rational person would instead ask "Does the activity have significant risks of Bhopal-level disasters associated with it?" And sorry, but short hop air travel does not. Sure, there's some magic scenario where the "poorly regulated" commuter plane hits the nuclear plant or the refinery just so and magically kills 10k people. But great effort has already been made to reduce such risks to extremely low levels. Banning flights beyond that will have no genuine positive benefit and large costs associated with it.
If we had misapplied JoeMerchant logic in a different way, we might well conclude that it is people living near airports that should be banned. After all, you came later through your own poor decision-making skills. And it is your presence that enables Bhopal-level disasters. Let's put the JoeMerchants away from danger instead where they can't be hurt or cause problems.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @04:41PM (33 children)
>he chose to has minor amounts of noise and air pollution from planes
Did I choose that, though? I had no knowledge of the jet fuel droplet fallout when I purchased the house. And, as for choice, that was the only affordable house within a 60 minute or less commute of the only source of employment available. I only figured out the brown spots on the leaves for myself after being in the home for more than a year. 12 years later, I confirmed that it was the only job available in the area with an exhaustive 4 month full time employment search of the aforementioned 300 mile radius. When I finally did find employment with insurance benefits for my 8 month pregnant wife, it was in an area that had acceptable air quality - for a short time until hurricanes changed that and we had sticky tar soot settling on everything every night, sticky tar soot in the air filters inside our home, and an industrial complex that didn't give a shit about the millions of people they forced that change on. That was a 6 month job search before we could relocate out of there. There are documented measurable significant negative health effects on the millions of residents on the Texas Gulf coast, and no long term actual compliance with their paper commitments to reduce pollution in the area.
>Only by keeping the human population under 10k people forever after can you perfectly prevent Bhopal-level disasters.
Hyperbolic bullshit. First, a target closer to 2 billion is easily sustainable with current technology, second, advances in systematic quality control and your anethma: regulation, the kinds of things that make space travel possible, those can also be, and to a limited degree have been, applied to commercial industry with a resultant decrease in disasters large and small, accidental and systematic. Yes, rockets still blow up, rocket science iz hard, the activities of daily life less so and the rates of disastrous consequences can be reduced with your little friend: regulation.
>"Does the activity have significant risks of Bhopal-level disasters associated with it?"
Ask the 110 passengers of ValuJet 592 May 11, 1996 how they liked their airboat tour of the Everglades, oh, wait, you can't because they were all dead by the time the airboats reached them.
How about the survivors of flight 401 December 29, 1972 - there were 75 of those, some due to Bob Marquis, a former wildlife officer who was hunting for frogs in his airboat, who arrived on the scene first.
But, sure, let's dial back regulations and never add any new ones, because those numbers are "acceptable losses" and, hell, they usually hit the swamp anyway.
>Banning flights beyond that will have no genuine positive benefit and large costs associated with it.
Try digging into TFA and weigh the actual positive benefits outlined in the basis of the decision, rather that your "regulation iz bad" knee jerk.
>we might well conclude that it is people living near airports that should be banned.
To an extent, you're not wrong, but the effects you are missing are the global ones, where residents of Pacific island nations, and literally billions of coastal residents around the world are losing their homes decades, perhaps centuries, earlier than they would have just so people who "prefer to fly" don't have to take the train.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @05:30PM (32 children)
Your failure to do basic research is irrelevant, as is your feeble attempts to portray your choice as somehow the only possible choice you could have made.
Patently false since you now have more than 10k people and hence the opportunity for accidents that kill more than 10k people.
Also keep in mind that rates of disastrous consequences can be increased with your little friend: regulation too. Rockets being an example. Rockets blow up. But a high launch private business like SpaceX will get a lot more rockets off between accidents than highly regulated NASA will with its one launch every two years Space Launch System.
Why don't you do that? Sounds like it'd be more productive than your arguments here. I'll note that flight wouldn't have qualified for the ban policy in France due to its length (somewhere around 600 miles).
As I noted above adding regulations can make air travel less safe. You're just not thinking.
I just did [soylentnews.org]. And no amount of digging will turn an idiotic policy into a smart one. It's examples like this and your immense ignorance of the consequences of that regulation that fuel these regular "regulation iz bad" discussions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @05:51PM (27 children)
Do you get Netflix in your corner of reality? A related story to this concept is: "Pepsi: Where's my Jet?" At issue, as taught in law schools today, is who Pepsi was marketing to? Did they intend to deceive their target market demographic?
As a new home purchaser, I did more diligent and complete research than most. While it may have been realistic for one in a thousand new home purchasers to have been aware of the issue of jet fuel fallout in North East Miami in 1992, it is actually an important issue for many more people than those who might be aware and capable of evaluating the issue.
And this has nothing to do with Greenpeace triggering your rage against the eco-weenies response?
Remains to be seen. With the benefit of decades of technological advancement, SpaceX blew up more than their share of rockets during development. That has as much to do with organizational and process maturity as any technical issues, and SpaceX also has had the benefit of learning from NASA's process maturity progress of the past 50+ years. Whether you realize it or not: process maturity is essentially regulation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:29PM (26 children)
No. It's not. It's a non sequitur.
You just said you didn't do that diligence again. The technical cause, "jet fuel fallout" might not be found with a study of the area, but its effects would be. After all, brown spotting on all plants in the area?
Another non sequitur sighted. The tank is full of them today!
It's basic engineering. The less frequent the activity, the larger the negative factors that come from inexperience, lack of testing, and just running the clock. For example, NASA has launched no manned space flights since 2011 more than a decade ago. SpaceX has launched four in the past two years. Unless someone has been working for NASA for more than 11 years, they won't have ever handled a crewed launch directly. And who knows what failure modes have been introduced (or will be introduced over the next few decades) by those processes to the SLS system? You won't find that until you launch a bunch of SLS rockets. And there's huge risks that NASA has dealt with mostly by hoping they don't happen - such as a direct hit on the launch complex by a powerful hurricane, a solid rocket motor going off in the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of their many, critical path contractors failing to deliver, or a presidential administration hostile enough to spaceflight to stop it completely.
Also consider that it'll be at least eight years before the SLS catches up to the present day successful launches of the crewed Dragon capsule. How many manned Falcon 9/Superheavy flights could NASA do in the meantime? Dozens to hundreds and all for the same overall price!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @06:47PM (25 children)
>You just said you didn't do that diligence again.
And you're denying the central issue for society at large: would an average, reasonable person entering into the transaction be aware of the risks involved?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:51PM (24 children)
Did the average, reasonable person ask homeowners in the area about problems like this? Did the average, reasonable person look at the landscaping?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @07:11PM (6 children)
>Did the average, reasonable person ask homeowners in the area about problems like this?
Having worked real-estate in the area for some time, I can say with authority: no, they did not. The average home buyer in the area barely noticed the deafening noise of the cargo jets overhead until after closing, much less asked about it pro-actively.
>Did the average, reasonable person look at the landscaping?
Look, yes. Notice the brown spots on the leaves? Maybe 1 in 10. Connect the dots with falling droplets of jet fuel? Less than 1 in 1000 even after living there for many years. Suffer the impacts of breathing jet fuel fallout? 100%. What are those impacts? Adequate studies have not yet been funded or pursued, but similar issues have been demonstrated all sorts of ways, just one example: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27102021/diesel-pollution-environmental-justice/ [insideclimatenews.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:01AM (5 children)
Don't need to. Brown spots mean problems.
Well, you do know about airports right?
Has your linked study actually found evidence of a real problem? The article merely noted that there was higher exposure for the usual underprivileged urban, ethnic groups, not that the exposure level was significant or harmful. And called for complete replacement of diesel trucks because of that difference in exposure. Could be a real problem, but it's not a real solution since those diesel trucks are a big factor in improving the lot of the people in those regions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @03:41AM (4 children)
> Brown spots mean problems.
Sure, you and how many expert botanists are homebuyers in Miami? The brown spots also come and go, like the jet noise. Based on prevailing winds you might have a couple of weeks or months without the flyovers, and they can happen morning noon and night for months at a time as well.
>actually found evidence of a real problem?
The linked study was the first Google result on the general topic (you think you are worth more effort than that?) Yes, indeed, diesel emissions have been linked to significant shortening of life expectancy and reduction of quality of life through a whole host of disease mechanisms. Do your own research, cherry pick me some results that say "diesel soot is harmless for humans to breathe" - should make fun reading.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @06:02AM (3 children)
I'm not the only person on the internet.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:50PM (2 children)
Care to wager how many human beings will read this in the next 20 years? ChatGPT and similar will only be infinitesimally influenced by our rambling here.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @11:38PM (1 child)
I'd say around ten. Plus there's a strong chance I'll review this discussion in the next few years.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @12:32AM
You are more optimistic than me, I would guess four, counting us, this deep in a thread.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @07:14PM (16 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @10:07PM (15 children)
>Also, did the average, reasonable person hire a professional to check the landscaping?
Oooh you hit a nerve. Your buddies in the bank require a "professional" home inspection before they will issue a mortgage (or, at least they used to, if they dropped that I'd be 110% in agreement). These "professional" home inspectors have, in my experience NEVER found the real hidden problems with the home, many of which I was able to spot from a distance while they were climbing their ladders and crawling around making a list of nits to pick that you're supposed to use to pressure the seller into lowering their price to cover their "professional" fee.
Their lists would include things like:
I lived with that cracked glazing for 12 years until I sold, it never leaked, never caused a bit of trouble, and my buyers replaced all the windows in the house so it didn't make a damn bit of difference to them.
Their lists did not include things like:
Most recent purchase the professional even "tested" the air conditioning (in February) with his "professional" IR thermometer and declared "blows cold, 68F" when the outside temperature was 67F. Standing 20' away from the evaporator / heat exchanger, I can hear a relay clicking in a non-functional cycling pattern, I ask the "professional" inspector about it and he claims ignorance, I should call an AC service company - I allow the seller (a contractor) to call his preferred AC service company and they confirm that the outdoor unit is toast, $1500 to replace.
So, does this have anything at all to do with the cost of regional travel in France? Well, first: you brought it up. Second: it's a clear example of regulation by private (banking) industry gone horribly wrong - government rarely does worse, and the main problem is that there's no evaluation of the inspectors to "close the loop" and sort the corrupt from the incompetent from the clueless from the occasionally helpful.
While I have little love for Greenpeace, particularly when they start going off on nuclear energy, I will applaud their occasional science based presentation which actually contains verifiable data from repeatable studies that reaches actionable conclusions with desirable results. Tangent warning, and I bet you've heard this one before, in the late 1980s the alligators of the Everglades were dying of mercury poisoning and nobody knew why. Greenpeace tracked the source of mercury to waste incinerators in Palm Beach County, got them shut down, and within a couple of years the alligators were no longer dying of mercury toxicity. Score 1 for Greenpeace, I tossed 'em $20 for that back when $20 meant something. Then they wouldn't f-ing stop burying me in anti-nuke garbage and I had to tell them to f-off.
Whether you agree about the concerns of global warming or not, the waste of fossil fuels - which commercial aircraft burn in massive quantities - is something to be avoided when possible anyway. Transfer of air traffic to surface rail transit in France will significantly reduce the burning of jet fuel, and France's trains are powered by 90% nuclear sourced electricity, something the festering codpieces seem to be willing to overlook in this case.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:11AM (14 children)
It started with your comparison of your mild problems with nearby airports to Bhopal. And because you kept making poor excuses for why you chose at the time to live close to a busy airport, ending with the "I didn't know about it" excuse. Now you're telling stories about the poor quality of the professional inspectors you employed. Well, you have my take on that already.
Unless, of course, it doesn't reduce air traffic. This wouldn't be the first time such a scheme had unintended consequences.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @04:11AM (13 children)
>you kept making poor excuses for why you chose at the time to live close to a busy airport
As for "close by," first, my home was not straight off the end of the runway, it was (and still is) 2 to 3 miles east, and 4 to 5 miles north of the runways, and that's the route the cargo jets fly, air traffic instruction is: "Proceed due east to Biscayne Bay and turn left."
The passenger jets all take a nice gentle turn and climb out over the water of Biscayne Bay, but the cargo shithead pilots pull hard then track along 100 to 200 yards inland from the Biscayne Bay shoreline in full-throttle climbout with their engines pointed straight at the homes between 55th street and 85th street North. I was in the area of 75th street and my windows would rattle for 2+ minutes from the jet thrust pointed directly at them, the people around 65th street had it even worse, they would have to pause telephone conversations inside with the windows shut for up to a minute while the cargo jets would fly over, and FedEx had a habit of sending out 2 sometime 3 at 5 minute intervals.
The airport PR flak is along the lines of "well, the traffic goes over different parts of the city depending on wind patterns, kind of spreads it around so nobody gets too much." and of course that's what the real estate agents parrot as well. Homes in the 65th street area can only be sold during those quiet weeks to months when the northbound traffic is leaving over the swamps instead of their homes. MIA air traffic control is one of those things that a bit more regulation would go a long way toward significantly improving the quality of life of thousands of people.
As for "choice," my choices were rental, or basically this home in this neighborhood that I found at the time for $80K, or something in an ethnically different neighborhood where I didn't fit in and would likely have been targeted for vandalism, theft and other harassment, or something over 5x the commute time to work, sucking significantly more car exhaust on a daily basis not to mention wasting 500 additional hours per year sitting in traffic, or keep looking for another job for months, likely only finding one out of state. The NRC was hiring inspectors.... Or, I could just ignore the 6.5 years I spent acquiring 2 technical degrees and go back to stocking shelves in a grocery store for $6 per hour and living with my Grandmother, having my parents pay my insurance. Homes in other neighborhoods were $120K and up, basically unattainable on a $37K/yr salary with some student loan debt and little in the way of down payment. So, yeah, plus the cargo noise wasn't nearly as bad when I bought in 1992 as it was when we finally left town in 2003 - something about Amazon.com and similar starting to deliver everything via FedEx and UPS air-freight.
>the poor quality of the professional inspectors you employed
IDK about your corner of reality, around here I hired some of the best of the best available professional home inspectors. IOW, they all suck.
>Unless, of course, it doesn't reduce air traffic. This wouldn't be the first time such a scheme had unintended consequences.
I have no doubt, with the right people, the BEST people, crafting the details of the regulation, implementation schedules, enforcement policies, etc. it could indeed be made to backfire. On the face of it: traffic wanting to go short hop flights in and out of France has no flights available, so instead they choose to book two flights that are above the regulated minimum distance, taking significantly more time and costing significantly more money than the readily available rail transport options? Yeah, there absolutely will be people who do that, but I believe that on the whole air traffic will decrease, particularly if the trains are run with excess capacity. The trains (in France) already have more schedule choices than existing flights.
You can choose to believe the opposite, you can state flatly or argue eloquently how you believe this will happen. I'll bet you a drink in the bar of your choice that if the regulation is passed, as described, net total air travel in the regulated area will decrease - perhaps not as much as projected, but significantly.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @07:05AM (12 children)
So it really was close by.
So you do acknowledge you had choices.
So they really were poor quality as advertised.
Indeed. It happened to be that way for the covid efforts as you noticed. It's SOP not a rare thing.
Or I can use JoeMerchant's own words [soylentnews.org]:
This was more important than anything discussed here. Covid killed over a million US inhabitants after all (like a hundred Bhopals). And yet, it devolved into a "bribe for the corrupt". It's not hard to see that you're whistling past a large graveyard here. I find it silly how you can propose regulations like this with a straight face while simultaneously complaining about the real world results of such gratuitous and uncritical regulation creation.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @04:34PM (11 children)
>So it really was close by.
If that's your definition of "close by" then pretty much the entire city of Miami is "close by" the airport, and when you start getting a little north of that "close by" zone, you start getting into the "close by" zone of Fort Lauderdale airport.
>So you do acknowledge you had choices.
You have a choice right now to jump in a truck, drive to the Fountain Paint Pots boardwalk, take a short hike, then leave the trail, stick your hand in a mud pot and then go rinse it off in a geyser. We all have choices.
>So they really were poor quality as advertised.
They barely advertise at all, they make their living as a required part of the homebuying process for anyone taking a mortgage with a bank. It's not government regulation, it's regulation from the banks and inertia in the industry. And 2008 showed just how well banks and other financial institutions regulated themselves in that industry.
>It happened to be that way for the covid efforts as you noticed.
US COVID relief seemed to go over and above in its efforts to disproportionately line the pockets of people who didn't need it. Beyond SOP to a new level (for the United States at least, of course we're a relatively young country), much like the post election results contest in 2020-2021.
>It's not hard to see that you're whistling past a large graveyard here.
The distinction is: death and disease have historically happened without being built and operated by people (debates about COVID being engineered in a lab to one side for a moment, please) the imperfect efforts to reduce the effects of COVID represent significant forward progress as compared with 1917/18 or previous out of control plagues. The main thing I saw as a "triumph" in the COVID situation was avoiding the scenario where we had patients who needed hospitalization for a (reasonable) chance of survival being turned away because the hospital resources were completely consumed - and the knock-on effects of other things requiring hospital treatment also being neglected and leading to bad outcomes due to the overtaxing of resources by COVID cases.
Now, my contention at the time, which I still stand by, is that there were a number of "potential pandemic outbreaks" prior to COVID where we appear to have kept the genie more or less in the bottle - most specifically a number of bird flu outbreaks that were contained mostly in Asia over the past 30 years, but also less closely related things like Ebola which certainly could be handled worse than they have been. The conclusion of that contention is: the COVID genie was released from the bottle due to neglect and dismantling of the (imperfect, as all such things are) systems that were built up progressively since 1918 through until inauguration day in 2017.
And, you see, rail travel is not as conducive to the transmission of disease as air travel. The rich can have entirely private cars, the well to do and even middle class can afford private compartments, there is much more access to fresh air and less rebreathing of the exhalations of hundreds of other people. If Italy had no short range flights to and from its airports and instead filled those needs with rail transit (exceptions made for Rome-Athens and similar trips which are significantly shorter by air, much as the proposed regulation is written already), then the spread of COVID in Italy at the start of the pandemic would have been slower, more easily identified, addressed, and controlled.
Matter of fact, in 2021 we took the kids on a (rare) lockdown outing for a rail tour in a nearby town, wherein we did rent our own private compartment and enjoyed the trip with minimal exposure to others.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @11:48PM (10 children)
Which it is BTW. The horizontal distance here is roughly six miles. And they're probably under 2000 feet when they pass overhead. No wonder you were getting diesel fuel spotting.
In other words, you're more informed now.
A big part of that success was that those potential pandemics were much less infectious than covid. And how again did the US manage to dismantle in three short years the entire medical infrastructure of the world outside of the US? Maybe if we pull your other finger, we'll get a better story?
You can't ride rail from New York City to Brussels. And it's slower.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @12:43AM (9 children)
>dismantle in three short years the entire medical infrastructure of the world
Not the medical (treatment) infrastructure, but the detection intelligence network, CDC and friends, took significant funding hits, not to mention installation of anti-science idiots in high level administration.
>You can't ride rail from New York City to Brussels.
And nobody is proposing any regulation on that route, or any other where rail is significantly slower than air.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 21 2022, @03:06AM (8 children)
Any evidence that this impaired anyone's response to the pandemic? Looked to me like we were getting good information all along.
You did. [soylentnews.org] For example, recall my example of a London hub that wants to handle a route from New York City to Brussels. The sensible way would be to fly the passengers to the hub, London, and then on to Brussels. You explicitly proposed banning all air travel between London and Brussels without regard for the economic, environmental, and basic time management of moving people around who start with the prior that they're already flying.
This is bike shed dysfunction. JoeMerchant and these French politicians don't know anything about moving people around, but burning jet fuel is bad, k?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @03:14PM (7 children)
>Any evidence that this impaired anyone's response to the pandemic?
Travel bans enacted after the horse was already out of the barn?
Mask mandates, social distancing, and global shutdown rolled out too little, too late?
The actual spread of the pandemic instead of it being contained near the source?
...Under the "you did" link you should find: London to Brussels which is very different from New York City to Brussels.
If you want to stretch that for NYC to Brussels, let's take a look at how that plays:
First, if I were making the trip, I would opt for one of the 6 currently scheduled daily non-stop options from NYC to Brussels, priced starting at $526 per passenger. Impact of short hop flight regulations: zero - or, maybe they run more of these direct flights to handle demand from the train mandate? Fine with me.
If I felt the need to save $73 on my trip by spending an additional 4+ hours in transit (plus taking double jeopardy of flight delays/cancellations) with a multi-hop flight, that option would then be "gone" but already has an option to hop a Chunnel ride from LHR direct to walking distance to wherever it is that I'm really going (unless I plan to visit someone like this guy [wikipedia.org]) on a train. For sake of argument, train transit time from LHR to one of the three Brussels main train stations, which you probably will end up going through, takes just over 3 hours, and since the trains leave much more frequently than even the short hop flights, you'll spend less time waiting for one, and less time fooling with final leg transit once you reach Brussels. I'll leave it to your free market to work out the pricing for all of this, if there's any sense in the issue it will be lower due to the lower operational costs of the trains vs the short hop planes, but if it isn't then I guess that's more profits to the owners / share holders, and that's a great thing too, isn't it?
The times I have traveled to/from Europe, I actually did make non-stop flights to my destination and get around by 95% train / 5% car from there. I made one (ridiculously expensive) trip MIA-LHR, week in LHR, LHR-AMS by air (no chunnel then) week in AMS, then by rail to Hamburg, week in Hamburg, then HAM-MIA direct. That LHR-AMS flight added a couple hundred dollars to the total transit cost vs taking the ferry, but saved me basically the whole day in travel time. Were the Chunnel not present, that would still be an option under the proposed regulation, and depending on where they draw the line on "same transit time by rail" it may still be. Due to the bullshit fare structures airlines have, I also might have saved $200 by flying HAM-LHR-MIA on the trip home, but it wasn't worth the time and hassle, to me.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @12:10AM (6 children)
I would, of course, not count those as examples. It wasn't funding that caused that but rather failure to act. You could have spent an order of magnitude more money and you would still get the same results.
And follows a lot of feels about why you choose to ignore my obvious point. I'll note the obvious, if the hop flight takes less than three hours, say one or two hours, for example, then you're saving time even if you can magically teleport to the train station as you proposed above.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @12:58AM (5 children)
>failure to act
Of course, the same administration that failed to act is the one that cut the funding, denigrated the value of the information produced, and I feel: obviously dragged their feet when presented with information from those denigrated organizations which couldn't present their information as quickly or convincingly because of how they were being managed.
Nonetheless, they eventually did act in what is now obviously a too little too late fashion.
>even if you can magically teleport to the train station as you proposed above.
Who said "travel broadens the mind" not so long ago?
All major airports in Europe have good rail connections. 30+ years ago Frankfurt's airport had a major train station directly in the air terminal.
Your language gives away your mindset "say you are an air hub operator in LHR", I am not, I am a passenger and as long as the industry is going to be heavily regulated, as it already is, I want those regulations serving my interests, not the hub operators.
>if the hop flight takes less than three hours, say one or two hours,
Do you even fly, bro? When the flight takes 45 minutes in flight time, there's 15+ minutes on each end of taxi and wait for clearance time, 15+ minutes of boarding and deboarding times, not to mention the time scheduled between flights, plus the uncertainty factor which is just as present in European air travel as the US, while their trains are far more reliable and on-time than air travel, unlike US trains.
Last time I flew, we landed early, then waited 50 minutes on the tarmac for a gate. Then we, as a family of US citizens, cleared customs in 20 minutes, jogged through the air terminal for another 15 minutes to our connecting gate, and barely made boarding time. Our non US counterparts from the first flight took over an hour to clear customs, missed any connecting flights they may have had and got to reschedule for another flight the next day, if available. Their 2 hour "hop flight" turned into an unplanned 12-24 hour layover. That's a common story in air travel, not so much on European trains.
But, I suppose you represent those air travelers who magically teleport from home to the terminal gate, bypassing security, then magically teleport from the runway on arrival to their final destination as easily as telephoning a chauffeur waiting in the cell phone lot?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @02:30AM (4 children)
Don't forget all the other governments that did that too. It's a cool narrative bro, but you're just not getting it. More money wouldn't have made a difference.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @03:07AM (3 children)
>More money wouldn't have made a difference.
I'm not saying more money, I'm saying the same money and political support they used to get. Other nations also rely on that very same network of monitoring and analysis to make their decisions, and in brighter times they look to the US for leadership.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @04:13AM (2 children)
Except it's pretty well established that those systems were functioning just fine.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @04:18AM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @02:43PM
>pretty well established that those systems were functioning just fine.
In your head.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @06:05PM (3 children)
You know what all three crashes that happened near MIA while I lived there, and air crashes in general, have in common with the short duration flights France is proposing diverting to rail travel? The tragic events happen primarily near takeoff or landing, impacting areas near the airfield. Those short duration flights also perform takeoff and landing cycles, in-fact they have orders of magnitude more takeoff and landing cycles per passenger mile traveled than the average flight which is not being proposed for diversion to rail travel. Cost-benefit ratios: encourage the better side of the equation and discourage the less desirable one.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:35PM (2 children)
It also ignores that we may well see higher levels of flight because air carriers and such have to work around the ban with more flights!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @06:57PM (1 child)
>air flight just doesn't kill that many people.
No, it doesn't. It does, however, kill more than rail travel - particularly when evaluated per passenger trip instead of per passenger mile as this evaluation should look at.
The bigger issue isn't people dying in transit (and, for that, you might want to throw in deaths in transit to/from the air fields... passenger car travel is horrid as compared to rail or air, and if you're outside a UK pub pedestrians hit by cars are a real problem, but that's another issue entirely.)
>we may well see higher levels of flight because air carriers and such have to work around the ban with more flights!
Sure, if you need to get from London to Brussels and you're stubborn enough to demand that your carcass be hauled through the stratosphere to do it, you can make a connection in Moscow to circumvent the regulation. There's also the (scrubbed from the internet, yet all too true) story of the Saudi prince who arrived in San Francisco but forgot his diary, so he sent a servant in his private 737 back to Saudi Arabia to retrieve it. Searches for the topic will find much more serious crimes against humanity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-concludes-saudi-crown-prince-ordered-jamal-khashoggis-assassination/2018/11/16/98c89fe6-e9b2-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html [washingtonpost.com] but, nonetheless, the hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel burned in pursuit of a forgotten book that the prince wished to have at hand a few days earlier makes for an extreme example of how fossil fuels are wasted for trivial desires, which you will call a non-sequitor, but I call on-point to the argument that these things (short hop travel) can be accomplished far more efficiently if people are appropriately encouraged to do so.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @08:54PM
Which is insignificant, as you noted in the next sentence.
It's poorly thought-out regulation and policy that harms us in these examples.
A typical example is a airline that has a hub operating out of either London or Brussels. It's not stubbornness, but normal airline efficiency. Now, for some reason, you want to break that because planes on short trips are bad somehow. Let's give a working example of how bad this particular case is. Suppose I want to go from New York City to Brussels. The only timely way to do that is by plane. So planes are involved no matter how bad you think they are.
So let's say that we have an airline with a hub in London, but not in Brussels. If flights between London and Brussels are allowed, then the airport can fly people from New York City to London and on to Brussels. But if they can't, then it's probably either a direct flight to Brussels or no flight at all! For airlines organized around hubs (and the advantageous concentration of logistics that provides), it likely would not be economic to have a plane that doesn't go through the hub.
If they don't get enough traffic for a direct flight, then that's that. Regulators infected with stupidity cooties have introduced significant inefficiencies into the air passenger market.
Because that journalist would still be alive, if the crown prince had to travel by train? Oh right, that's another non sequitur.
As to the high drama of a plane flight around the world for a journal - which may be far more important than you think, all you claim is hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel burned. Ho hum. I would indeed call this a non sequitur, due by definition to the lack of relevance to this thread. Most of these short hoppers aren't going to be Saudi Arabian princes chasing down journals. But rather very efficient travel like the hub airline example I mentioned earlier.
As to the final claim, what "far more efficiently"? Have you even considered this problem in the slightest? I was easily able to come up with reasonable use cases where it was more efficient to allow the short hop. Remember fuel is not the only resource on the planet you can "waste". So is human time. And human time routinely is more important than a small amount of fuel or slight increase in noise and pollution.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @04:58PM (76 children)
Let's review some of the exciting places this thread went: French virtue theater; asserting that free markets somehow can't do airports to private roads (a commons road with no actual ownership); the magic of government regulation and spending (when confronted with your own words claiming that covid spending didn't do that); whining about people who live off the grid and need their highly valuable internet; the usual alleged benefits of networks of family and friends; despising imaginary lottery culture (the 1 in a million US citizens who can afford broadband internet, right?); spinning tales of khallow selfishness; making demands of reality (like never have economic circumstances where you have to move); unity; asserting various bad ideas make sense in a "economic, environmental, and basic time management sense" that couldn't be described; stupid people and the various acts of destruction we need to inflict on society to accommodate them; and whining about the noise and pollution from Florida airports; Russia; what it means to be a US citizen; the US interstate highway system; "taxes iz bad"; and ignoring minor problems means Bhopals are gonna happen.
While I introduced a few, most of these came out of the JoeMerchant non sequitur machine.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @05:20PM (2 children)
>most of these came out of the JoeMerchant non sequitur machine.
If you're not enjoying the ride, the option to disembark at any time is yours.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:37PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @06:59PM
Your non-sequitur is my enjoyable and relevant anecdote, one would argue: if you aren't enjoying the process you surely have some grass that's worth watching grow (oops, winter there, isn't it... choices...) maybe paint that's drying, or even a Tic Tok video enticing your attention?
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @05:27PM (72 children)
>making demands of reality (like never have economic circumstances where you have to move)
Hmmm, let's take a little historical review of how often people were forced to move, abandon multi-generational lifestyle choices, by economic circumstances across the last 5000 years or so... since you hate the meander so much, I'll just state: today's "reality" is under-performing the past by orders of magnitude.
> asserting various bad ideas make sense
They make sense to me, and aren't bad in my view.
> that couldn't be described
Your lack of attention and willingness to dig into the source material is not an inability to be described.
> and ignoring minor problems means Bhopals are gonna happen.
Yep, that's pretty much where Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fine Air 101, and so many other disasters come from: ignoring a constellation of minor problems until they gang up to become major ones.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 19 2022, @06:43PM (2 children)
Can you be bothered to state that in an informative way? There's been a lot of movement then and a lot of movement now. My bet is the only metric you have that is orders of magnitude different is distance traveled. And that's pretty meaningless since you're still uprooted whether you move 50 miles by cart or 5,000 miles by moving van.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2022, @07:06PM (1 child)
>There's been a lot of movement then and a lot of movement now.
If you were in a war, or famine - which were widely documented historical events - sure, movement then. I believe the primary feature of life thousands of years ago (even hundreds) was how dull it was, nothing much changing. Prior to the World Wars, my ancestors relocated to Eastern Tennessee in the early 1800s, and basically didn't move from their spots except when marrying until - by choice - post WWII, ~150 years later - and even then about half of them stayed planted on the family farms for another 30-50 years. If you track them back to Scotland and Germany before that, they were pretty much stuck in their ruts for several hundred more years before then.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @11:50PM
And pretty common.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @01:54AM (68 children)
Read up on those accidents. They weren't just afflicted with a few minor problems that somehow tipped a delicate scale to make a serious accident. Each of these systems was engineered to be deeply in a safe state with a substantial safety margin. A bunch of minor problems never could push this stuff into a lethal accident. It took multiple serious problems to do that. Let's go through some details. The follow list is incomplete, but to just give an idea of how bad these failures were:
None of these are "a constellation of minor problems". When you get a really bad accident, it's not a safe system that got unlucky with the right constellation of minor problems. Instead there are a number of common factors: no adult supervision, hardware that had inherent control issues; ignoring or bypassing established procedures (for maintenance, testing, cargo loading, safety margins, etc), and a malicious indifference to the safety of those at risk from the system.
These might have started in some cases innocently enough as minor problems, but they didn't stay there. Various parties would have had to ignore some serious warning signs to get to the point of these accidents.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @04:21AM (67 children)
>None of these are "a constellation of minor problems".
Depends on your perspective. I see a little problem with the basic design, a little problem with the inspections, a little problem with the training, a little problem with the operations, and on and on and on until the shit hits the fan and they can't keep a lid on it anymore. Fix a few of those "little problems" (which, I will agree, are all actually big problems, but they're not painted that way when pushing to maximize profits by trimming a little here, a little there...) so fix a few of those and they could have kept their shit together, perhaps indefinitely.
Now, Fukushima, that's a different kettle of fish.... single fatal flaw (location choice) pretty much Trumped all possible preparations, operational excellence, etc.
> Various parties would have had to ignore some serious warning signs to get to the point of these accidents.
There's a lot of ways to accomplish that, I believe the most common are "siloed" operations where each part of the beast assumes the others will "do their jobs properly" and as a whole it will hang together because everyone in "our silo" has done "our jobs" well enough...
Or, you can take the NASA approach and just ignore the engineers when they read you the specs that say "don't launch" because they're usually overly cautious...
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @06:45AM (66 children)
Ok then.
I strongly disagree. There were other nuclear plants in locations with near identical problems. The difference was that Fukushima didn't have a high enough sea wall and had all of its backup generators knocked out by the resulting flooding (common failure mode which they probably thought they wouldn't have). There's been a lot of talk about the failings of the plant operators, but I view this differently than the previous accidents you mentioned for several reasons. First, for most of the lifespan of the nuclear plant (the reactors were build in the 1970s), there was no reasonable expectation that earthquakes could generate tsunamis that big. While there are some tsunami markers from a 9th century earthquake that was thought to be as powerful, these markers aren't at the Fukushima site. No one has ever cited research from before 2000 that firmly indicates magnitude 9 earthquakes and topping tsunami were possible at the site. Thus, a rational person wouldn't have expected them to know things that even the scientists of the time didn't know yet or have the 2011 earthquake penciled in on their calendars.
My take is that the earthquake and tsunami were way out of spec for the nuclear plant, and you wouldn't expect a smooth shutdown operation from that any more than you would a car that flipped over. And despite that, it failed pretty gracefully for 1970s tech. This is actually a good example of a successful recovery from what could have been a very harmful accident. For example, there was more harm from the societal reaction to the accident than the accident itself. I believe there's studies indicating dozens of deaths from the evacuation. Meanwhile there were only two documented deaths from the flooding itself (and IIRC two from construction accidents afterward) and none from the radiation release.
There were a number of things that the operator and construction did wrong. But most of these wouldn't have made the situation much worse than it was. The big ones were what I mentioned at the beginning. And there's not much point to complaining that they missed them when you don't have a means to do better.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2022, @03:56PM (65 children)
>There were other nuclear plants in locations with near identical problems.
Don't you mean: are. Don't you mean: they just haven't gotten unlucky, yet?
That's a problem with risk estimation during mass production. First: risk estimation is a terribly inaccurate business to start with. Second: if the risk is calculated on an individual site, you should also consider how many similar sites are being constructed and what the aggregate risk is for all of them, and how that will look in global public perception when these "one in a million years" events are happening every 6 to 24 months because you have installed a million of the things.
>Fukushima didn't have a high enough sea wall
Fans of walls can always propose a bigger wall. Walls are rarely a good answer in the long term.
>all of its backup generators knocked out
In 1990, when I was interviewing at the NRC in Atlanta as a potential plant inspector, they were already touting the "modern" designs which don't rely on generators to power pumps, but instead locate sufficient cooling water above the reactor so they have enough to gravity feed and keep things in spec for safe shutdown, twice, without any electricity at all. Too bad political pressure has prevented construction of virtually any new plants in the 30 years following that interview. Too bad that economic pressure prevented the retrofit of such passive safety measures on the existing plants, even after they are being refit for operation well beyond their original design lifetimes.
>While there are some tsunami markers from a 9th century earthquake that was thought to be as powerful, these markers aren't at the Fukushima site.
This directly reminds me of my neighbor on the river who called out the "top expert" on local river flooding before constructing his house in 1979. "Well, you see there them water marks on them old cypress trees there? Them trees they's 500 to 1000 years old, and them water marks shows where the floods been up to. You put your finished floor 1 or 2 feet above that highest water mark there and you're just gonna be alright." As he was finishing his 2000 square foot 3-2, just got the new carpet installed, the 1980 flood came, 4' higher than the water marks he built above. Now, Desoto County ain't knowed for bein' too sharp in the research department, and that there County Engineer ain't knowed nothin' about the USGS water data, collected on highway 70 and the river right outside of town what showed the floods of 1926 being a good 7' deeper than them water marks they seen on them 1000 year old cypress trees. Seems like either the water marks done faded out in the following 53 years, or maybe since they was lookin' down round their knees at the prominent seasonal water marks they just didn't notice that 1926 water mark up 'bove their heads. By the way, the latest hurricane just came through the area flooded an adjacent river up above interstate 75 for a couple of days.
>there's not much point to complaining that they missed them when you don't have a means to do better.
On Peace River, they could have consulted the USGS data - which was a bit tougher to access in 1979 than today, but still available for the asking if you knew who to ask.
In Japan, it's a small island, but not so small that there weren't other potential construction sites to consider.
Hind sight is all too easy, but relying on predictive powers of historical observations to calculate things like 1000 year Tsunami heights is an overly risky data source to base such high stakes results on. Of course, human nature is hard to beat. Another Netflix reference: Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari... daily tourist excursions to Whakaari, an active stratovolcano island 90 minutes off the NZ coast by boat, for many years ~50 cruise ship passengers selected the "active volcano adventure" for their day excursion from the ship plus another 30 or so tourists from other sources. After signing the standard disclaimers including listing their next of kin on the form, riding to the island in late 2019 and hiking up to the acid pool which is white with ash instead of its normal blue-green, geared up in hard hat and respirator one particularly nervous tourist finally thinks to ask: "When is the last time this erupted?" Kiwi tour guide responds: "Oh, once back in 2016, and once in 2013... those happened at night when nobody was around." It's worth a watch, and an honest question to yourself: would you have taken the tour before watching the story? Me, personally, might have been a tossup. I might have researched prior eruptions and called a pass when they informed current activity at "level 2," or, I might have just gone with it without asking, like ~70 people did that day, and most days for many years before "that day."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 20 2022, @11:39PM (64 children)
We'll only have to wait a few more centuries for another chance.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @12:37AM (63 children)
That's the fun thing about random events, a Tsunami the size of Fukushima is just as likely tomorrow as it was the day it happened.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 21 2022, @02:57AM (62 children)
Earthquakes aren't independently random events. Among other things, conservation of energy matters here. Once you have an earthquake of this size, it depletes the potential energy for future large earthquakes. That has to build up again before you can have another such earthquake.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 21 2022, @02:45PM (61 children)
>Once you have an earthquake of this size, it depletes the potential energy for future large earthquakes.
In the local area of the earthquake. As I understand it, it can also increase the potential energy for future large earthquakes in the general region.
That old saying "lightning never strikes twice" apparently only holds for a few hours. We had a major (multiple people in the area seeing ball lightning effects, massive electronics damage in three homes spread over 5 acres) lightning strike one afternoon, then about 72 hours later we had another one of similar magnitude hit approximately 150' away from the first strike.
Tectonic plates move slower than electrical charge, but they're still more art than science as to predicting the "next strike" - particularly across timespans of ~50 years.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @12:00AM (60 children)
Those earthquakes in the general region won't be near the local area of the first earthquake. And proximity is important for large tsunami to exist.
That's very different because it can take on the order of seconds to minutes to recharge for another lightning strike, depending on how vigorous the storm is and how quickly the region of the struck target can charge back up. The energy to recharge for a magnitude 9 earthquake is on the order of a thousand years.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @12:24AM (59 children)
>proximity is important for large tsunami to exist.
Except, of course, those tsunami which result from earthquakes hundreds and even thousands of miles across the ocean from the earthquake that caused them.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @02:29AM (58 children)
Even 9 magnitude earthquakes don't generate 13-14 meter tsunami [wikipedia.org] that far away. Please learn something today. For example [wikipedia.org]:
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @03:04AM (57 children)
There are differing opinions on this one:
http://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/news/volcano-watch-canary-islands-mega-tsunami-hypothesis-and-why-it-doesnt-carry [usgs.gov]
Of course if you support a 25m coastal Tsunami from New York to Rio, then there is no more insurance guarantee for that....
I'm sure there is a shield volcano or two in the Pacific that could pull off an impressive belly flop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilina_Slump [wikipedia.org]
But, why worry about any of that when Yellowstone is overdue:
http://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/questions-about-future-volcanic-activity-yellowstone [usgs.gov]
Hey look at that, they are simultaneously saying it's unpredictable, and that they wouldn't call it overdue.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2022, @04:10AM (56 children)
That's not a magnitude 9 earthquake - it's higher energy than that. And no it's not a differing opinion. '
In the next few minutes, right? There's also asteroid strikes. When you look far down the risk tail, you can find something. But those are also low frequency events.
That's sure to generate huge tsunami in Japan! /sarc
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 22 2022, @02:40PM (55 children)
>far down the risk tail, you can find something. But those are also low frequency events.
Maybe not as far as people like to believe:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2022, @01:42AM (54 children)
We have a great understanding of the frequency of asteroid strikes from history and geological evidence. It's not zero, but it's also not significant over the lifespan of a nuclear reactor. Try harder.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 23 2022, @03:12AM (53 children)
Don't forget, an airburst doesn't have to hit one particular facility, it has 500 to choose from, and if they are located like Fukushima a good ocean hit can be a long way away and still top the optimally designed seawall.
If you are comfortable with the approximate estimate of one meteor strike on a specific nuclear plant per 50,000 years, what's your feeling about an estimated strike on any nuclear plant anywhere once per 100 years?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2022, @06:20AM (52 children)
I think you're off by orders of magnitude. Tunguska leveled around 2000 square kilometers of forest and it would take a near hit like that to damage seriously a nuclear plant (if it won't knock down a tree, it won't knock down a nuclear plant IMHO). That's less than 1/200,000 the surface area of Earth. I've also seen estimates that Tunguska level events happen every 100-200 years. So I would estimate no more than a 1 in 20 million years chance of a Tunguska-level strike on any given nuclear plant. At 500 plants, that's 40,000 years between strikes on the entire system. While smaller asteroids are much more common (the frequency scales roughly as the cross-sectional area of the asteroid), they also do a lot less damage especially once they stop penetrating the atmosphere (Tunguska was actually along that threshold, it didn't actually hit the ground). We have vastly more infrastructure out there than just nuclear plants and we'd notice if it gets leveled routinely by asteroid strike.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2022, @06:22AM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 23 2022, @02:11PM (50 children)
>1/200,000 the surface area of Earth. I've also seen estimates that Tunguska level events happen every 100-200 years. So I would estimate no more than a 1 in 20 million years chance
Which is why I won't be hiring you for statistical risk estimates. "You have seen" should be replaced with a probability distribution. 150 years on average will have tails with significant probability above 200 and below 100.
It's not my favorite pastime but the numbers to make decisions on look like: 99.9% confidence of 0.1% or less chance of a catastrophic failure of any plant over the next 100 years. 95/5 confidence intervals are for psychology where they could never publish anything if higher confidence were required.
I'll agree that airburst meteor strikes are probably outside that limit. Fukushima seems proven to have chosen poorly in their construction site and seawall height vs actual probability of a catastrophic failure.
I suspect overconfidence in the earthquake severity and frequency data was to blame.
Lesson for the future: when fuzzy science scientists give you statistics about infrequent natural disaster frequency, go with the lower bounds of the presented confidence levels.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2022, @04:51PM (49 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 23 2022, @08:11PM (1 child)
I did notice you used the low number, but do you know what the probability below that lower number is? If not, stay the hell out of the low probability high cost risk estimation pontificating, please.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2022, @11:26PM
So no serious argument, eh?
Says the guy who brought nothing to this conversation except some hand waving.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 23 2022, @08:37PM (46 children)
Regarding normal distribution as a model for meteor strike frequency, if that is all your source has to offer, then their data set is seriously lacking in real-universe data for the distribution.
Meteors impacting Earth come in showers (clusters), not normal distributions.
I particularly liked the "closest approach watch" for DA 2014 in February 2013, when a 500 megaton bolide came out of our rather large blind spot and said "Surprise MFer!" to Chelyabinsk on the same day. Those were supposed to be unrelated, not part of a shower type event, but they still fit very poorly into any normal distribution model for space rocks.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 23 2022, @11:28PM (45 children)
Normal distribution as a model for averaging processes. It's backed by math [wikipedia.org] which is a lot more solid than JoeMerchant hand waving.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 24 2022, @12:05AM (44 children)
Normal distribution is the model you use when you don't know what the actual distribution looks like. It isn't a bad distribution, it works well for many natural processes, and is the best choice for a lot of things, particularly things that aren't very important and you just want a reasonable distribution that won't draw a lot of criticism when you choose it.
And, I'm so impressed that it's backed by "math"!!! I just can't tell you how impressed, really!!!!!
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2022, @12:09AM (43 children)
It's also the model you use when you know the actual distribution is normal. We can keep playing this game, but what's the point?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 24 2022, @04:39PM (42 children)
Asteroids are not normally distributed. They are in belts, bands, clusters and groups.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2022, @05:13PM (41 children)
If you had read my posts rather than go on this fantasy kick, you would have seen that I didn't claim otherwise. For example:
Recall that I was speaking of the distribution of an average. That is normally distributed by math.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 24 2022, @05:38PM (15 children)
>I was speaking of the distribution of an average. That is normally distributed by math.
I think you should apply as a technical consultant for the Associated Press, you're playing on the next level above which most wire stories are written.
However, when meteors of a certain size strike the earth at an "average of every 100-200 years":
First, an average is a single number, not a range.
Second, I might agree that the "best data available" is currently modeled as a normal distribution, but that's telling about the quality of that data which is anything but normally distributed in reality.
Third, four major strikes every 600 years may average to a strike every 150 years but if the strikes come in clusters of 3 to 5 within a few days, that's not a normal distribution and use of things like standard deviations don't apply, at least not appropriately like they do on a dataset that is more or less normally distributed.
Fourth, maybe you should stay away from the AP after all since the vast majority of their readers are challenged when trying to comprehend a simple average, much more so a normal distribution.
Our process engineers are proud when someone technically oriented "gets" the ramifications of a presentation with a bimodal distribution, and these are 2%er stats nerds. Still, I would trust about 1
1 in 50 of those process engineers to do a summary risk analysis for something as complex and important as a nuclear power plant, and based on my limited exposure to investors controlling $10M or more, I would trust less than 1 in 500 of them to do the right thing with that risk analysis.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2022, @11:38PM (14 children)
An average is a distribution not a single number.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @03:10AM (13 children)
Bzzzt. Webster:
a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average [merriam-webster.com]
A distribution is a better way of evaluating probability.
A normal distribution is the common default choice when the actual distribution is unknown.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @07:47AM (12 children)
And also when the distribution is known to be normal - as I repeatedly noted before. The average is such a distribution as I repeatedly noted before. And there's no point to your argument as I repeatedly noted before.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @04:17PM (11 children)
Webster defines the word you used: average, perfectly.
A distribution is almost always a better characterization of a statistical process, but again, you used that incorrectly as well, giving two numbers and failing to define what distribution is being used and how, probably because your source did as well.
A normal distribution is the most commonly used, and abused, to the point that a common subspecies of layman treats it as the only distribution.
When using a range of the normal distribution, the most commonly abused range is 95% confidence, or very roughly +/-2SD, but assuming this is both prone to misinterpretation and extremely inappropriate for high risk applications like potentially spreading radioactive isotopes across large highly populated regions and or farmland.
If you are using a distribution, both the shape of the distribution and the confidence limits should be specified along with the bounds numbers.
But, if you are ok with not really knowing the risks of these things you are pontificating about, that's fine for you, you have a better idea of what you are talking about than the average bear, still no real grasp, but better than average.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @06:24PM (10 children)
And wrong. Please don't forget that this time.
Should any of that ever be in error, please be sure to tell me. In the meantime, I'm just not interested in your criticism.
And completely irrelevant to our discussion since that isn't a problem here.
Remember we were speaking of something that was more than two orders of magnitude off. It's not going to be a problem with a slight increase in the number of standard deviations we choose to take.
You don't have a clue what you're talking about.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @06:59PM (9 children)
>a problem with a slight increase in the number of standard deviations we choose to take.
What's your idea of "slight" differences from 2 standard deviations?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @07:07PM (8 children)
20 standard deviations.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @08:51PM (7 children)
As accurate as you need to be, I see.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @10:12PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 26 2022, @12:09AM (5 children)
20 standard deviations is outrageous, in any field.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @04:20AM (4 children)
And yet, quite adequate for this task. We don't need to know the precision of the risk when the order of magnitude is more than sufficient.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 26 2022, @02:02PM (3 children)
Learn something today:
https://www.scribbr.com/statistics/standard-deviation/#:~:text=The%20standard%20deviation%20is%20the,clustered%20close%20to%20the%20mean. [scribbr.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @04:20PM (2 children)
Similarly, I can evaluate orders of magnitude risks without requiring significant precision. That's why I'm not concerned about a few standard deviations when I find that a risk is more than two orders of magnitude short of being a real problem. Conversely, imagine if I told you that a risk was negligible because it was 9.7% instead of a back of envelope calculation of 10%? That precision make you feel better?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 27 2022, @12:39AM (1 child)
When speaking of 20SD, that's - generously - over 10 sigma from the mean:
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/09/ten_sigma_numerics_and_finance.html [aleph.se]
1.529245*10^-23
Ain't nobody got that kind of data on much of anything in the real universe.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27 2022, @03:21AM
And as I have already observed, 10 sigma from the mean is not significant for the parameters I looked at because they were two orders of magnitude shy of being relevant.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 24 2022, @06:15PM (24 children)
Note the absence of tidy sound bite 100-200 year averages:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103518304676 [sciencedirect.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2022, @11:43PM (23 children)
Indeed. And that's because the study is about estimating the damage from a Tunguska-class asteroid, not its frequency of occurrence. If you had read the abstract:
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @03:20AM (22 children)
Because what we have data on is evidence of damage from impacts, like they are attempting to link back to the size, composition and relative speed of the impactor objects.
The actual rate of impacts is still out in your hand waving land, as demonstrated recently in Chelyabinsk. How often does that happen? Well, there was that one in Sodom and Gomorrah, then we keep finding more and more evidence of pre-historic massive impact craters... Then this happened:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/world/canada/meteorite-bed.amp.html [google.com]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @07:57AM (21 children)
So what? If we were to instead look at data on frequency of impacts by energy released, we would find a lot more relevant data. For example, nuclear detection systems routinely spot impacts up to about two orders of magnitude less energy released than Tunguska. We also have a well-established power distribution from small meteorites on up to large asteroids.
A theory of impact frequency isn't disproved by a single incident - especially one that was expected to occur!
Again, we're not finding such "more and more" evidence out of line with expectations.
Really, what is the point of this argument, Joe? When my crude model predicts that a Tunguska-type event happens every 100-200 years, does that mean that such impacts never would happen through tens of thousands of years of history and prehistory? Is this really an argument you want to waste my time with?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @04:25PM (20 children)
>nuclear detection systems routinely spot impacts up to about two orders of magnitude less energy released than Tunguska. We also have a well-established power distribution from small meteorites on up to large asteroids.
For the last what? 50 years? It's good data, but against a 4 billion years local system that is also occasionally visited by interstellar and intergalactic phenomenon, about 27% of which we estimate we have limited if any ability to detect, much less characterize.... The unknown unknowns still outweigh what we do know for impactors larger than Tunguska.
Really, what is the point of any argument, Khallow?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @06:34PM (10 children)
Sounds really good to me actually. This is a typical god of the gaps argument - that the behavior you claim could be there is squeezed into smaller and smaller gaps. This is actually a very extensive set of data you describe above. Most studies would consider 27% coverage of a population to be both remarkable and excessive, for example. And nobody, particularly you, has explained what's supposed to have changed in the last 50 years that such extensive data collection can't be applied to periods before present.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @07:04PM (9 children)
>Sounds really good to me actually.
Good for you.
Crappy risk estimation based on limited data and experience was behind the failure at Fukushima.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @07:09PM (8 children)
"Was". We have better risk estimation now. Honestly, I think they should just build new reactors on the site now. The accident is a sunk cost. To just let everything go to seed is a waste.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @08:59PM (7 children)
>We have better risk estimation now.
One would hope so.
>I think they should just build new reactors on the site now.
What you think, and I think, and the best risk estimates available today say, are far less important in the permitting process for new reactor sites than public opinion as expressed to the politicians who have ultimate veto power over any new construction.
Would be cool if "Science" could actually be trusted to get their predictions right and effectively communicated to the public often enough for the public at large to trust Science over reality TV star and other charismatic figures. Cool, but improbable today and apparently getting less likely for the near term future.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @04:23AM (6 children)
Which will be fine until the places that don't give public hysteria the same weight have a growing economic advantage over those that do. Constrained democracy isn't mob rule.
Sounds like we've moved to a different set of movable goalposts here. If we can just do stuff without regard to reality, then actual risk doesn't actually matter and your risk/reality based arguments on such can be conveniently ignored.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 26 2022, @02:29PM (5 children)
>the places that don't give public hysteria the same weight have a growing economic advantage
The nature of global economics, tragedy of the commons in our atmosphere and oceans, and preponderance of economic history all detract from the credibility of your idealistic statement.
>If we can just do stuff without regard to reality
We have been doing stuff in near total ignorance of reality since forever, case in point maybe since the very beginning of the industrial revolution.
As usual you miss my meaning and pontificate out your own tangent while complaining about goal posts that you think have moved but really haven't outside your personal perception.
What I said (more directly stated for your clearer understanding) was: political hysteria has veto power over the construction of large projects.
Always implicit, but also for clarity: Reality has ultimate say in projects' success and unintentional consequences.
Our limited knowledge of reality is improving, particularly when large unintentional consequences like Fukushima happen. However, it's not a steady forward march, particularly when "Science" is funded with the aim of influencing the powerful political hysteria rather than establishing better knowledge of reality.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @03:59PM (4 children)
How? I say the opposite routinely happens even in your examples. For example, offshoring. Global economics shows that if you can't do X in country Y, then you often can move production to country Z and skip the public hysteria. Even with nuclear power, France allows plenty of it even if Germany happens to think it's scary-dangerous. And there's plenty of other examples such as rare earths mining, textiles, or earning revenue free from excessive taxation. That checks off both global economics and preponderance of economic history BTW.
And there's a fair number of entertainers and protesters who operate by generating shock (Satanists, fruit mashers, flag burners). Or merely belong to an unpopular minority (Jews, Blacks, rich people). Or use recreational drugs, keep and bear firearms, prostitutes, hobby chemistry kits, or any number of unpopular or scary-dangerous activities.
Going back to nuclear power, public hysteria drives some really bad decisions like not making safer nuclear power plants because the existing ones are dangerous. You noted at one point that existing nuclear plants were operating past their expected life span. Well, the big reason why is that in many countries, new reactor construction has been effectively halted by public hysteria - for example, US, Japan, and Germany. So when you can't build new plants, but your country desperately needs the power from existing plants, then you get the situation where existing plants are run well beyond their design lifespan.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 26 2022, @08:35PM (3 children)
And France sure is kicking Germany's ass, economically...
>public hysteria drives some really bad decisions
100% agree, but... That doesn't change the real world power it wields.
>new reactor construction has been effectively halted
Since the 1-2 punch of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the growth rate of nuclear power plants world wide basically flat-lined.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @09:19PM (2 children)
In March, 2022 Germany had household electricity prices [statista.com] of $0.46 per kWh and France $0.19 per kWh. There's much more to economics than that, but it is a huge advantage.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 26 2022, @09:42PM (1 child)
And Tennessee has super low prices due to installed hydro... Cheap electricity is nice, it makes it cheaper to run trains for one thing....
But, overall... Neither Tennessee nor France nor Venezuela are impressing me with how they are using their cheap energy to kick economic ass on neighbors with higher energy prices.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27 2022, @04:12AM
You ever going to make a point with that?
So what? I didn't say that price of electricity was the only relevant economic data point. But the take home is that Germany would be doing considerably better with a more sensible and cheaper electricity policy. Say like Texas is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @06:57PM (8 children)
Also, we're not building a nuclear plant at some random point in the last 4 billion years, but within the next few decades. 50 years of current data trumps 4 billion years of behavior that doesn't happen any more. Unless you're Velikovsky (the "Worlds in Collision" guy), you don't expect routinely planetary collisions, breakups, and such in the near future. That's the driver for the huge impact frequencies of the first billion years of the Solar System, for example.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @08:49PM (7 children)
Next few decades, seems to be stretching up to 10 or more the way things are going.
Just one decade ago we had never consciously witnessed an interstellar object in this solar system, now we have confirmed two...
Point is, there is a systematic overconfidence in "The Science" which hurts the credibility that science deserves.
When a colleague read me his "mathematical proof" that the 8 bit checksum on the company's flagship product communication protocol would "protect against errors with a rate of one erroneous communication passing unblocked per so many million years" I, on my first day at the new company, expressed my scepticism but left it alone. Less than a year later we were gathered into a room to "solve the problem" which was causing erroneous (and painful) programming to pass with dozens of reports from the field in the prior 90 days.
Shit like that should not be proffered as proof to make the investors happy, but it is every day in all walks of life. That same mathematical proof wiz also regularly serves as a paid expert witness in court cases. My disgust with that system knows no bounds.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 25 2022, @10:10PM (6 children)
Which is irrelevant here. We have copious evidence of the actual incidence of asteroid impacts over a relevant range.
With math, you have to look at the initial conditions. Here, the likely problem was two-fold: underestimating error rates in the first place, and ignoring correlation errors - anomalies can wipe out large runs of bytes, not just one.
Here, we have no significant analogy. An asteroid or comet only brings a fixed amount of mass. A data anomaly can generate a lot of errors with no real upper bound. And as I noted before, we have a good idea of how much mass is brought to an impact and they usually come in fast enough (20+ km/s) that tidal forces don't have a significant effect.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 25 2022, @10:40PM (5 children)
>We have copious evidence of the actual incidence of asteroid impacts over a relevant range.
If you haven't gathered: I disagree, for all the aforementioned reasons.
>Here, the likely problem was two-fold
In my estimation, after working with the expert witness for over two years, the actual problem was a desire to demonstrate what his employer wanted to hear: this won't be a problem until after you have sold all your shares. Like so many other similar demonstrations, the flaws were rooted in willful ignorance of relevant information, and he was proven painfully (the patients did experience highly painful direct neurostimulation, 3x the amplitude approved for use in humans) incorrect in a short time.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @04:06PM (4 children)
Then that doesn't sound like a relevant example. The various pieces of evidence I've mentioned in this thread weren't driven by wishful thinking/willful ignorance.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 26 2022, @08:44PM (3 children)
>weren't driven by wishful thinking/willful ignorance.
Do you actually know this, or just assume that academians tell the truth because... because?
The more I learn, the lower the ratio of bonafide trustable information becomes. There is still good information out there, but it is far more common to learn a trusted source was not worthy than vice versa.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2022, @09:22PM (2 children)
Know this. And why wouldn't academicians tell the truth here? When there are problems with truth-telling, it's invariably due to conflict of interest. Here, you present no such conflict and just assert some radical doubt narrative without a reason for it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 27 2022, @12:36AM (1 child)
>When there are problems with truth-telling, it's invariably due to conflict of interest.
We can start with publish or perish. Follow that up with "my grant proposal is sexier than your grant proposal" and on and on, academia is anything but perfect and the conflicts of interest can be as shallow as: my ego won't allow any other result.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27 2022, @04:14AM
So?
So no actual evidence, of course. The problem with the narrative is that you still have an allegedly too low prediction rate for asteroid impacts by two orders of magnitude and somehow that's supposed to be sexy? Maybe we'll get a better narrative if we pull your other finger?