Thursday, March 10th, 2016
Joe Romm, - Think Progress
Stephan: Here is some excellent news about nuclear power -- the nuclear fantasy has priced itself out of the market. Safety issues couldn't close down this ill-conceived technology, but the inability to make a profit could. A sorry commentary, but good news nonetheless.
A nuclear power plant
Credit: Toru Hana/AP
In the modern era, nuclear power plants have almost always become more and more expensive over time. They have a “negative learning curve” — along with massive delays and cost overruns in market economies. This is confirmed both by recent studies and by the ongoing cost escalations of nuclear plants around the world, as I’ll detail in this post.
The cost escalation curse of nuclear power
“Ever since the completion of the first wave of nuclear reactors in 1970, and continuing with the ongoing construction of new reactors in Europe, nuclear power seems to be doomed with the curse of cost escalation,” read one 2015 journal article, “Revisiting the Cost Escalation Curse of Nuclear Power.”
In the United States, the cost of Georgia Power’s newest twin Vogtle reactors may top initial estimates of $14 billion and reach $21 billion, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission testimony. Of course, the first two Vogtle Units begun in 1971 took 18 years to build (a […]
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Thursday, March 10th, 2016
Dan Wright , - Mint Press News
Stephan: The saga of the F-35 continues. Nearly a $1,000,000,000,000 (that's a million millions) has been spent on this fighter originally designed for a kind of air combat that really no longer exists, and even on those terms it is a failure. The money spent on this grotesque combo of fraud, greed, and incompetence, would have paid for every college student in the United States over the last decade to go through college and graduate school getting a PhD, all at no cost to them. But this ill-conceived aircraft has been a success in one way: For the corporations involved it has proven to be one of the most profitable boondoggles in the history of the world.
Rife with problems, the plane has caused concern among the UK, US and other buyers.
Credit: USAF
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of austerity, it was the age of a trillion dollar warplane that no one could make work.
The financial sink hole known as the F-35 continues to fail the most basic flight and sensor tests. The warplane, estimated to have a total cost around $1.5 trillion, has already come up short in simulated dogfights with the F-16. Yes, the new and improved model is worse than a plane introduced in 1978.
The F-35 also has a limited fuel supply which means it will not be able to stay in an area to protect ground troops. Not that that would matter anyway as the plane’s Gatling guns still don’t work. Also, there are concerns as to whether the F-35 can […]
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Thursday, March 10th, 2016
Brendan Fischer and Zachary Peters, - truthout
Stephan: The Theocratic Right through ALEC and funded by the Koch brothers and The Bradley Foundation, amongst others, wants to privatize public education and turn it into a profit center, in which each child becomes a cash cow. It is an appallingly bad idea, but very profitable.
Also desirable from the Republicans' perspective is that in privatized schools you can teach Creationist nonsense, Ayn Rand economics, and other fantasies so beloved by the Right. All this, of course, has significant political implications. As is clear from looking at the demographics of the Trump voters ignorant religious voters are easier to manipulate and more likely to vote for Republicans.
Despite widespread public opposition to the corporate-driven education privatization agenda, at least 172 measures reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model bills were introduced in 42 states in 2015, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org and PRWatch.org. (A PDF version of this report may be downloaded here.)
One of ALEC’s biggest funders is Koch Industries and the Koch brothers’ fortune. The Kochs have had a seat at the table – where the private sector votes as equals with legislators – on ALEC’s education task force via their “grassroots” group Americans for Prosperity and their Freedom Partners group, which was described as the Kochs’ “secret bank.”
The Kochs also have a voice on ALEC’s Education Task Force through multiple state-based think tanks of the State Policy Network, ALEC’s sister organization, which is funded by many of the same corporations and foundations and donor entities.
ALEC’s Education Task Force is also funded by the billionaire DeVos family, which bankrolls a privatization operation called “American Federation of Children,” and by for-profit corporations like K12 Inc., which was […]
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Thursday, March 10th, 2016
Stephan: Another story of family life with guns. By sheer chance the bullet that shot the mother did not kill her. The story stood out for me because the mother previously became known nationally as a "good guy with a gun." This kind of accident happens hundreds of times each year in the U.S. and nowhere else in the developed world.
Jamie Gilt, a “good guy with a gun” was accidentally shot in the back by her 4-year old son.
PALATKA, FlORIDA — A north Florida woman told deputies her 4-year-old son shot her in the back while he was sitting in the back seat of her pickup truck.
A Putnam County Sheriff’s Office news release says a deputy saw 31-year-old Jamie Gilt of Jacksonville behaving frantically inside the truck Tuesday afternoon and quickly realized she’d been shot.
The release says the woman told deputies her son accidentally shot her. He wasn’t harmed and was reunited with family members. The Department of Children and Families will investigate.
CBS affiliate WTEV reports that deputies found Gilt with a bullet wound inside her truck with a horse trailer on the back stopped in travel lanes on a highway. She was on her way to pick up a horse, according to deputies.
Deputies say a .45-caliber handgun was on the truck’s floor.
Gilt was […]
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Wednesday, March 9th, 2016
Daveen Rae Kurutz, - The Times (Beaver County, PA)
Stephan: This is absolutely outrageous; in the second decade of the 21st century in the United States a woman still isn't being paid the same as a man for the same work. In fact, the trend is reversing and matters are getting worse.
Here is the abstract for the report:
The Gender Wage Gap: 2015; Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity
by Ariane Hegewisch and Asha DuMonthier (March 2016)
The gender wage gap for weekly full-time workers in the United States widened between 2014 and 2015. The median weekly earnings for full-time work increased for both women and men during 2015, but the increase was more substantial for men than women. In 2015, the ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly full-time earnings was 81.1 percent, a decrease of 1.4 percentage points since 2014, when the ratio was 82.5 percent. Women’s median weekly earnings for full-time work were $726 in 2015 compared with $895 for men. Controlling for inflation, women’s earnings increased by 0.9 percent, while men’s earnings increased by 2.6 percent since 2014.
Click through to
download the report on which this story is based.
The quest toward equal pay for women and men seems to have taken a step back last year.
A study issued Monday in advance of International Women’s Day shows that the gap between median weekly pay for men and women grew in 2015. According to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research, pay for men grew more than it did for women last year. That gap grew by about 1.7 percent.
In 2015, the median weekly earnings for a woman was $726; for a man, it was $895. A woman working full-time earned about 81.1 percent of what a man earned. (emphasis added)
“While we have many advancements to celebrate since the first International Women’s Day more than 100 years ago, the widening of the wage gap, even as women have higher levels of education than men, is a setback for women, their families and the United States economy,” said Heidi Hartmann, president of the think tank in a release.
While the gap has closed in the past decade, it’s doing so at a much slower rate than in the prior 10 years. According to the group, the gap closed by 0.3 percentage points […]
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