If so, it doesn't sound like a particularly fair comparison to me. Nuclear facilities shouldn't be compared to Joe Randoms installing panels on their summer cottages, they should be compared to (at least) megawatt scale industrial installations, where the occupational hazards in construction probably aren't any worse than in a nuclear power plant. (The panels are at ground level on solar farms..)
> Today's nuclear plants are just big scaled-up versions of the Navy's original small reactors for ships
This is true, and Perrow's book contains an interesting discussion of this. The Navy had requirements which are different from civilian power generation: they needed small and relatively lightweight reactors whose power output can be quickly adjusted, and where fuel can be replaced quickly. None of these requirements make sense for a stationary civilian power plant.
I've had the idea for some time that the US government could easily expand nuclear generating capacity by simply passing a law providing for a nuclear reactor, operated and maintained by US Navy personnel, to power every military base on US territory. Any excess power produced by the plants would be sold to the commercial grid at prevailing rates, or even at a slight discount. The program would probably pay for itself.
I don't like the entire concept of "pre-existing conditions". It goes against the entire concept of caring for sick people.
We are all people. We all get sick sometimes. Sicknesses can last a long time, or a short time. Sick people need help. Help the sick people. Pay what you can (a reasonable amount) into a common pool and take what you need (only as much as you need)
> I don't like the entire concept of "pre-existing conditions".
If you have an elective health insurance system where people choose whether or not and when to participate, it implies this restriction.
Say you have private health insurance companies but don't allow them to prohibit members based on pre-existing conditions. Everyone will simply not get health insurance to avoid paying the premiums until the day they need it. That would make health insurance companies completely unviable financially.
This is why Obamacare both eliminated the pre-existing condition restriction and mandated people get health coverage. You can't have one without the other or you get the free-rider problem.
This is another reason why healthcare should just be universal. It doesn't work at all like an actual efficient market product.
Would a wait limit, like with hurricane insurance, help to mitigate this problem? You can't wait until the NWS declares a Category 4 storm is barreling towards you to buy coverage. I mean you can, but the coverage doesn't kick in until 30 days later.
Or turn it around and make it equally burdensome to both insurer and patient. If you acquire a malady while insured by a particular company, all medical expenses that are tied to that diagnosis must be forevermore paid by that insurer, even after the policy lapses, is cancelled, or the patient switches insurers.
If that sounds unfair to an insurer, that's great--now they know how we feel about it.
Insurers want to deny pre-existing conditions because they don't want to add already-sick people to their risk pool. They wouldn't have to, if the previous insurer was still on the hook for that diagnosis. But they'd never agree to that, because it exposes them to some of the same insolvency risk due to medical bankruptcy that some patients have to face.
Surely "what you can" should be relative to both your income and your need. We'd need to supervise the system to make sure people aren't taking advantage or else the whole system goes broke.
> into a common pool
We could also invest the money in the pool to make some extra cash and reduce what people need to pay in, we'd have to have an organization do that too.
> (only as much as you need)
How can we know what people need? We'd have to charge a token amount for office visits and medication so that people aren't frivolous with their medical visits, while perhaps guaranteeing an out of pocket limit in case of extreme illness. We'd also need some kind of system to verify that people are only taking what they need.
We probably have different ideas of "paying what you can". How do you judge whether someone is only paying what they can, or they are taking advantage? Not a rhetorical question.
One way is like we do today -- highly-paid positions often come with high-quality insurance, which is (ime) fairly expensive and low-paid positions have less expensive insurance that is a bit worse (all this on average, I'm sure there are outliers).
We are in different pools today but I don't see how that's meaningfully different than everyone being in one pool if the individual pools are large enough and you can't discriminate the population of the pools.
There are cases where it’s hard to tell if someone is truly paying what they can, but there are also cases where it’s easy: when it costs more than they can pay. Health insurance trivially fails the “paying what you can” criterion for sufficiently poor people.
Is semi-autonomous driving really that big a deal to people? Driving in the carpool lane is the "killer app" for me.
The only situations where I would trust self-autonomous driving are: (a) 5mph bumper to bumper traffic and (b) I-5 between SF and LA on a dry, clear day with little traffic around.
The Bolt is a cute, small car. I don't think the Tesla Model 3 is trying to be a "cute small car", per se. I know several people with Volts and Bolts and the owners love those cars.
Basically anywhere not unusually rich? They're no longer Maserati-uncommon around here like they were a few years ago (Maseratis: also rare most places) but they're still pretty uncommon. Might see one, maybe two a day on the road on a commute into the city and back. Some days a couple more, lots of days zero. I think I've seen one ever in my neighborhood of 100+ houses, and I'm not sure it belonged to anyone who lives here. And this is not an actually poor neighborhood, or even close. Just not rich.
Not OP, but I live outside a satellite city to Oslo and I feel like every 5th car I see on the road is a tesla and every other car is an EV of some kind. Many E-golfs, leafs and a ton of other ones. So there are some parts of the world where there are popular. Not having to pay "pollution tax" that can be up to 100% of the initial value of the car nor 25% vat helps drive adoption :)
Incidentally I ordered my first one today, a model x with the new drive trains etc. It will take a few months before it arrives.
The Chargepoint network is woefully inadequate (both locations and charge speed, anything capable of less than 120kw-150kw might as well be a 120V outlet) compared to Tesla's Supercharger network. Electrify America's network is still in its infancy (and you can't charge a Tesla on it yet until CCS adapters are available).
I travel cross country in the US frequently on the Supercharger network (Model S), without any range anxiety or fear of getting to an inoperable station late at night with little battery range left. Many hotels also have destination chargers, so I can charge overnight at the hotel while I sleep and leave with a full charge. I could not do this with any other EV.
Here's my experience with various charging networks:
- EVGO is excellent. They have L3 (chademo/sae) chargers in lots of locations, and they work. I believe they own the chargers. The chargers seem to be 400v/100a = 40kw.
- Chargepoint is very good. They have reliable chargers, just not many L3 chargers. Most of their chargers are L2 (~6kw). I don't think they own chargers, or they own only some of them. But they are reliable and/or have good service.
- Blink has always disappointed me - L3 is unreliable and always broken. Some L2 chargers work.
I don’t think so.
2 total losses over 350 aircrafts in 5 month.
In a year, rounding per defect, you have 1% of possibility to lose a 737 max.
I don’t know the exact numbers but I seriously doubt that 1% of all the people that drive on a car are dead every year.
Same here. But we should keep in mind that there is no guarantee that their stance stays the same, and they pretty much only answer to money and nothing/nobody else.
The thing with privacy stance is that it is primarily based on trust. If Microsoft now goes into privacy centric company, nothing makes me trust them as much as I trust them going back into selling ads after 5 years.
That’s why I think whatever trust solution we come up with will have a heavy audit component to it. I know everyone here hates SOX compliance, but the entire goal of SOX was to increase investors’ trust in financial reporting in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal. And it worked.
SaaS companies already make ridiculous margins. Applying a sensible regulatory framework around privacy and data usage auditing would add overhead to be sure, but I’m also sure software margins will cover it.
