Opinion Politics (warning, may contain political views you disagree with)

[holybishop]

 

[Scham]

On occasion? It's literally on her website in the about section. Here are some of the things AOC has prepossed.

• Defunding the police
• Closing all federal prisons
• Abolishing ICE, the CBP, and the DEA
• Repealing federal laws that criminalize border entry
• Instituting reparations for “victims of mass criminalization,” including prostitution
• Abolishing gang databases
• Eliminating basic school safety measures like SROs

I suppose if someone where to disagree with these policies then it shows they are extreme right wing?

Seriously? What a nut job!!!

 

[Bicco]

I think nuclear power is the best reliable and zero emission power available. Especially if it can be delivered in modular, factory built containers. The issue at the moment is that the power plants housing reactors are built insitu which takes time and costs a lot of money, so although the fuel to power cost is miles ahead of the likes of natural gas and way ahead of coal it still takes a long time for that cost to return table to flip the nuclear plant into the black.

If mass produced standardised nuclear reactors could be manufactured here then we would be able to reduce the cost, have zero emissions and maintain reliable power available for everyone without changing the way the current systems work - it would directly replace coal burning power, you could build them right next door.

There is the question of nuclear waste material which I believe for a person's entire lifetime of power is the size of a can of coke. There are areas of Australia that are away from cyclones and geologically stable enough that we could build a huge bunker and store that material away forever.

Then when fusion power, also nuclear, becomes available to similarly mass produce then we replace the fission power plants with those and there is even less waste, even more power and the fuel source is even more abundant.

I worked out the cost of using renewables with batteries to balance out the delivery, with a reasonable safety margin and purely for just Victoria's usage - it came to half a trillion dollars of infrastructure required. I believe we could replace all the power plants in Australia with nuclear for the same price. I'm not quite remembering the figures clearly but it was something in that ball park.

Pumped Hydro is the the simplest way of producing massive amounts of electricity quickly and with no emissions and in my completely uneducated mind, WA is the perfect place for it.
The idea would be to build man made hydro dams inland along the coast up to Geraldton. Using a combination of both wind/solar/wave power (which I think everyone would agree is abundant supply in that area) to pump the water from the ocean into the dams and then simply let the water flow back down into the ocean, through turbines, to produce power. A huge amount of infrastructure required but 0 waste from the production of the energy as is found with Nuclear. 0 emissions from the production of the energy. There is a catastrophic risk associated with dam wall failure, but that risk can be mitigated.
A quick search says that an investment between $6-8 billion for one 1100MW capacity nuclear power plant. Currently (this week) in water storage Tassie has 5500GW of stored water energy. Lake Gordon has approx 1/3 of that storage and is 278km2 and itself is approx 1/3 full. I'm not sure how deep it is. so looking at a dam approx 15km x 15km, again, not sure how deep, but you'd imagine 20-30m. That's heaps of water, heaps of stored power and no long term environmental issues. Well, there'd be local ones but that's a given.

 

[salim malik]

My son is teaching English in Portugal and now stuck there.
Initially it was a free for all with minimum cases, wear a mask but that was as far as the restrictions went. It's under control he said , we are doing fine , don't need lockdown.
Now it's a covid hell hole , overflowing hospitals , significant deaths .
It's now a lockdown but to late.
It's easy over here to be critical of the stance taken by the government but surely the reason we have minimal cases is because of the tough measures.
I wonder what would be the stance of critics of the tough measures if they were living through the nightmare that is Europe and the USA.

 

[Taylor]

Pumped Hydro is the the simplest way of producing massive amounts of electricity quickly and with no emissions and in my completely uneducated mind, WA is the perfect place for it.
The idea would be to build man made hydro dams inland along the coast up to Geraldton. Using a combination of both wind/solar/wave power (which I think everyone would agree is abundant supply in that area) to pump the water from the ocean into the dams and then simply let the water flow back down into the ocean, through turbines, to produce power. A huge amount of infrastructure required but 0 waste from the production of the energy as is found with Nuclear. 0 emissions from the production of the energy. There is a catastrophic risk associated with dam wall failure, but that risk can be mitigated.
A quick search says that an investment between $6-8 billion for one 1100MW capacity nuclear power plant. Currently (this week) in water storage Tassie has 5500GW of stored water energy. Lake Gordon has approx 1/3 of that storage and is 278km2 and itself is approx 1/3 full. I'm not sure how deep it is. so looking at a dam approx 15km x 15km, again, not sure how deep, but you'd imagine 20-30m. That's heaps of water, heaps of stored power and no long term environmental issues. Well, there'd be local ones but that's a given.

That's a good idea as long as your water storage dams aren't occupying habitat needed for something else, covering that area with salt water would destroy the environment around it and the amount of energy you put into the system via your renewables isn't given a massive haircut on the way out.

Otherwise it would be more efficient to use the power from the renewables to charge lithium iron phosphate batteries.

We would get a boost if we can use natural water catchment areas that are fed by natural sources higher up, that is just making the most of the environment. Have you looked into how much energy you need to power turbines and how large of a water tank you'd need to build to achieve that? The land between Perth and Gero is just like majority of the rest of WA, flat. You will need to elevate your dam. I don't think we have any places where we can put a plug in a natural formation to create a build up - not without that build up occupying significant flat areas around it since the depth isn't able to be achieved.

 

[Okinakashi]

Pumped Hydro is the the simplest way of producing massive amounts of electricity quickly and with no emissions and in my completely uneducated mind, WA is the perfect place for it.

There's not enough Hills in WA to make pumped Hydro Viable.

However, there's an almost unending supply of Sun and Wind - people get all shirty with wind turbines.

 

[Bicco]

You'd absolutely need to build the height, but once it's done it's done forever.

 

[Taylor]

Let's explore using renewables to power WA.

The average electric usage per year per capita in Australia is 9,044kWh
There are 2,760,000 people in WA.

That is 24,961,440,000 kWh per year.
480,027,692 kWh per week. This is the figure I will use as the safety buffer to allow for constant use regardless of the weather/maintenance/storm repair etc. This is the figure we need in battery reserves to see us through a week of nights (standard) and bad weather days where the sun is blocked and the winds are too high for the turbines to operate.

The Hornsdale Power Reserve (the big Tesla battery in SA) is 194,000 kWh. This cost $90m initial and a further $71m to bring it up to 194MWh.

To cover the buffer for WA we would need to use 2,474 copies of the Hornsdale Power Reserves.

That would cost $398,314,000,000

If we use the high end price of $25b for a nuclear power plant - we could build almost 16 of them for that price, and we don't need anywhere near that many to supply constant clean power to the state.

 

[FreoRicci]

My son is teaching English in Portugal and now stuck there.
Initially it was a free for all with minimum cases, wear a mask but that was as far as the restrictions went. It's under control he said , we are doing fine , don't need lockdown.
Now it's a covid hell hole , overflowing hospitals , significant deaths .
It's now a lockdown but to late.
It's easy over here to be critical of the stance taken by the government but surely the reason we have minimal cases is because of the tough measures.
I wonder what would be the stance of critics of the tough measures if they were living through the nightmare that is Europe and the USA.

That’s exactly what people fail to realise. It’s either lockdown and stop the spread or wait a few days and it’s spread out of control. There’s no ways about it. You can’t have a few days of freedom, see how it goes then lockdown. By then it’s too late. That’s what the Boris UK leadership did and Trump underplaying the virus. Now it’s way too late and they’ll suffer for months before it peaks.

People are fickle. Of course the lockdown is extreme, freedoms taken, inconvienece for their lives. The other side is overflowing hospitals, outbreaks in multiple areas. The result of that? Prolonged lockdowns, loss of lives and businesses closed indefinitely.
Wearing a mask for 14 days is going to be the norm in today’s world. We’re not in a normal pre pandemic world anymore.

 

[Taylor]

It’s either lockdown and stop the spread or wait a few days and it’s spread out of control.

There is a third choice.

Lock down the close contacts and trace their close contacts and lock them down too.

That's effectively what happened here, with the additional everyone else being locked down.

 

[Purple_Turtle]

That’s exactly what people fail to realise. It’s either lockdown and stop the spread or wait a few days and it’s spread out of control. There’s no ways about it. You can’t have a few days of freedom, see how it goes then lockdown. By then it’s too late. That’s what the Boris UK leadership did and Trump underplaying the virus. Now it’s way too late and they’ll suffer for months before it peaks.

Reckon Taiwan would like a word with you. A few others as well.

 

[Purple_Turtle]

Actually for the "there's no other choice than to lockdown people."

Results

Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a nonsignificant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, for example, the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95% CI: −5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden and + 13% (−12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.

Conclusions

While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less‐restrictive interventions.

Assessing mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID‐19

Background and Aims The most restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID-19 are mandatory stay-at-home and business closures. Given the consequences of the...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

 

[dockerfemme]

Let's explore using renewables to power WA.

The average electric usage per year per capita in Australia is 9,044kWh
There are 2,760,000 people in WA.

That is 24,961,440,000 kWh per year.
480,027,692 kWh per week. This is the figure I will use as the safety buffer to allow for constant use regardless of the weather/maintenance/storm repair etc. This is the figure we need in battery reserves to see us through a week of nights (standard) and bad weather days where the sun is blocked and the winds are too high for the turbines to operate.

The Hornsdale Power Reserve (the big Tesla battery in SA) is 194,000 kWh. This cost $90m initial and a further $71m to bring it up to 194MWh.

To cover the buffer for WA we would need to use 2,474 copies of the Hornsdale Power Reserves.

That would cost $398,314,000,000

If we use the high end price of $25b for a nuclear power plant - we could build almost 16 of them for that price, and we don't need anywhere near that many to supply constant clean power to the state.

I think our electricity needs might roughly double as we move to electric cars and get rid of gas cookers, hot water systems and space heaters. That seems to be the figure bandied about in other countries, but our limited space heating needs and the large amount of power used by our resources industry may make our multiplier less.

It will be interesting to see where our resources industry goes too, as over time we can expect to lose the gas industry, but a number of other things may increase - iron ore for steel for wind turbines, copper, lithium, who knows what else. The need for some of these things are predicted to increase fivefold across the world.

 

[Clems Knee]

P

On occasion? It's literally on her website in the about section. Here are some of the things AOC has prepossed.

• Defunding the police
• Closing all federal prisons
• Abolishing ICE, the CBP, and the DEA
• Repealing federal laws that criminalize border entry
• Instituting reparations for “victims of mass criminalization,” including prostitution
• Abolishing gang databases
• Eliminating basic school safety measures like SROs

I suppose if someone where to disagree with these policies then it shows they are extreme right wing?

I referenced her Wikipedia page for my list. It did not claim she championed defunding the police. I tried to find resources for the defunding the police claim, and found her defending the term as a useful slogan for bringing about change. She also apparently released one press release on reducing funding to NY police department and transferring it to another department.
I don’t agree with reducing funding for police, but the high level of systemic racism in the USA certainly needs to be addressed. I think you will also find AOCs views on this and others on your list a lot more nuanced than you claim.

 

[Bicco]

Let's explore using renewables to power WA.

The average electric usage per year per capita in Australia is 9,044kWh
There are 2,760,000 people in WA.

That is 24,961,440,000 kWh per year.
480,027,692 kWh per week. This is the figure I will use as the safety buffer to allow for constant use regardless of the weather/maintenance/storm repair etc. This is the figure we need in battery reserves to see us through a week of nights (standard) and bad weather days where the sun is blocked and the winds are too high for the turbines to operate.

The Hornsdale Power Reserve (the big Tesla battery in SA) is 194,000 kWh. This cost $90m initial and a further $71m to bring it up to 194MWh.

To cover the buffer for WA we would need to use 2,474 copies of the Hornsdale Power Reserves.

That would cost $398,314,000,000

If we use the high end price of $25b for a nuclear power plant - we could build almost 16 of them for that price, and we don't need anywhere near that many to supply constant clean power to the state.

I get your point but that is too simplistic a view. The Battery Power is not an everyday power source. It is terribly inefficient for every day power as you described, but if you need power NOW it's excellent. You literally turn on the switch and you have power. The SA batteries are for this. If a main transmission line goes down, they have immediate backup power until the problem can be fixed. The battery has power for days which is what it's for. Coal power takes hours if not days to fire up. Gas better, nuclear better, hydro better and then batteries best. With hydro you open another valve, get the turbine spinning and you have power in minutes.

 

[dockerfemme]

Pumped Hydro is the the simplest way of producing massive amounts of electricity quickly and with no emissions and in my completely uneducated mind, WA is the perfect place for it.
The idea would be to build man made hydro dams inland along the coast up to Geraldton. Using a combination of both wind/solar/wave power (which I think everyone would agree is abundant supply in that area) to pump the water from the ocean into the dams and then simply let the water flow back down into the ocean, through turbines, to produce power. A huge amount of infrastructure required but 0 waste from the production of the energy as is found with Nuclear. 0 emissions from the production of the energy. There is a catastrophic risk associated with dam wall failure, but that risk can be mitigated.
A quick search says that an investment between $6-8 billion for one 1100MW capacity nuclear power plant. Currently (this week) in water storage Tassie has 5500GW of stored water energy. Lake Gordon has approx 1/3 of that storage and is 278km2 and itself is approx 1/3 full. I'm not sure how deep it is. so looking at a dam approx 15km x 15km, again, not sure how deep, but you'd imagine 20-30m. That's heaps of water, heaps of stored power and no long term environmental issues. Well, there'd be local ones but that's a given.

I did see a concept paper, produced a number of years ago, that suggested something similar on top of the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. There would be big transmission costs from there, but little risk of salt water contamination and little risk to populations, I guess.

There is a professor at ANU (I think), called Andrew Blakers, who pushes a concept called off river hydro. You build a dam up high, and one down low, truck in water to get started, and then just cycle the water up and down. You have to try and feed in rainfall to keep the system topped up, or truck in again. He seems a very optimistic type, and even he considers WA somewhat challenging on this front, due to our lack of any real altitude.

You did mention waste. The hydro scheme, if workable, has no waste, but solar and wind have growing waste problems. The solar has toxicity in the waste, and the wind blades are huge and don’t break down.

Be interesting for an engineer to comment on your suggestion.

 

[Clems Knee]

There is a third choice.

Lock down the close contacts and trace their close contacts and lock them down too.

That's effectively what happened here, with the additional everyone else being locked down.

Lockdown meant that this was a 5 day imposition.

Having only close contacts locked down would have taken a week or so more, as the spread from missed contact tracing would have to go through another infection cycle.

Having no lockdown, or ringfencing certain areas would likely have dragged the process out for weeks as it did on the northern beaches and Victoria.

I’m glad we had the lockdown rather than the two alternatives.

 

[Bicco]

Reckon Taiwan would like a word with you. A few others as well.

Taiwan was extremely well prepared to the point that they have realtime GPS contact tracing with the health service working with the telephone operators. Allowing them to lockdown close contacts almost instantly. The other leading example was NZ with 'go hard, go early' which has primarily been adopted by us as a secondary measure post hotel quarantine.

 

[Bicco]

I did see a concept paper, produced a number of years ago, that suggested something similar on top of the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. There would be big transmission costs from there, but little risk of salt water contamination and little risk to populations, I guess.

There is a professor at ANU (I think), called Andrew Blakers, who pushes a concept called off river hydro. You build a dam up high, and one down low, truck in water to get started, and then just cycle the water up and down. You have to try and feed in rainfall to keep the system topped up, or truck in again. He seems a very optimistic type, and even he considers WA somewhat challenging on this front, due to our lack of any real altitude.

You did mention waste. The hydro scheme, if workable, has no waste, but solar and wind have growing waste problems. The solar has toxicity in the waste, and the wind blades are huge and don’t break down.

Be interesting for an engineer to comment on your suggestion.

The reality is no system is perfect. The Snowy River scheme would almost certainly not go ahead on environmental grounds if proposed today. We have to accept some level of pollution from the production of electricity.

 

[Purple_Turtle]

Taiwan was extremely well prepared to the point that they have realtime GPS contact tracing with the health service working with the telephone operators. Allowing them to lockdown close contacts almost instantly.

Taiwan definitely benefited from not being part of the WHO, which means they got onto the threat of Covid a lot sooner than everyone else, and from their previous experience with SARS.

With that said what's the point of having the big lockdown we did last year if it's not to build our capacity to respond to Covid outbreaks again in the future? We can't afford to shut down the state for 5 days everytime we have a case, and our state government been caught sitting on their arses instead of preparing.

 

[GoFreo4eva]

P


I referenced her Wikipedia page for my list. It did not claim she championed defunding the police. I tried to find resources for the defunding the police claim, and found her defending the term as a useful slogan for bringing about change. She also apparently released one press release on reducing funding to NY police department and transferring it to another department.
I don’t agree with reducing funding for police, but the high level of systemic racism in the USA certainly needs to be addressed. I think you will also find AOCs views on this and others on your list a lot more nuanced than you claim.

The argument around the defunding of police has been skewed by the far-right media as a means to just cut the number of police. It may have that impact but the actual focus was originally more about taking some of the welfare roles that fall to police because there is no other option and creating services that are better able to deal with issues like homelessness, drug addiction, and so on. This theoretically should allow the police to do the actual law and order police work more effectively. It was not originally just about trying to make the police impotent, although just referring to it as defunding police sure makes it sound that way.

As for the rest of the things she has had to say I am no expert. She certainly has a following among the 'woke' world that is for sure!

 

[dockerfemme]

I get your point but that is too simplistic a view. The Battery Power is not an everyday power source. It is terribly inefficient for every day power as you described, but if you need power NOW it's excellent. You literally turn on the switch and you have power. The SA batteries are for this. If a main transmission line goes down, they have immediate backup power until the problem can be fixed. The battery has power for days which is what it's for. Coal power takes hours if not days to fire up. Gas better, nuclear better, hydro better and then batteries best. With hydro you open another valve, get the turbine spinning and you have power in minutes.

My understanding of the Hornsdale battery is very different to yours. I believe it is primarily used to stabilise the grid for the minute by minute ups and downs of wind and solar. It is very good at this. In the event of the loss of a main transmission line, or of several cloudy, windless days, it provides very little. The CEO of the Tomago aluminium smelter is quoted as saying the Hornsdale battery would run his smelter for 8 minutes. (This was before an expansion of the battery, so maybe 12 minutes now).

 

[GoFreo4eva]

Taiwan was extremely well prepared to the point that they have realtime GPS contact tracing with the health service working with the telephone operators. Allowing them to lockdown close contacts almost instantly. The other leading example was NZ with 'go hard, go early' which has primarily been adopted by us as a secondary measure post hotel quarantine.

Taiwan and other successful limiters of COVID like Vietnam and Thailand were also match-fit having come off SARS, Bird Flu, and so on. They also have a population that has a more collectivist cultural view than what is generally the case in the western world and they generally will accept the directions of authority figures more willingly. There is some interesting stuff on cultural norms by Hofstede if you are interested.

The west is also increasingly selfish so getting people to act in the broader sense for a greater good imperative is harder to do as we want some sort of proof the directions we are being given are valid and not somehow driven by another agenda (the Bill Gates Vaccine conspiracy comes to mind here). I note from friends still in Vietnam that Tet (Lunar/Chinese New Year ) has created a huge problem and restarted the virus spread there so the same may happen in Taiwan.

 

[Bicco]

My understanding of the Hornsdale battery is very different to yours. I believe it is primarily used to stabilise the grid for the minute by minute ups and downs of wind and solar. It is very good at this. In the event of the loss of a main transmission line, or of several cloudy, windless days, it provides very little. The CEO of the Tomago aluminium smelter is quoted as saying the Hornsdale battery would run his smelter for 8 minutes. (This was before an expansion of the battery, so maybe 12 minutes now).

You're probably right, but the point is that it's for immediate, short term power.

 

[Okinakashi]

Taiwan definitely benefited

Taiwan track everyone via mobile phone all the time. If you're considered a close contact to a Covid positive case, you're shipped off to a Government run quarantine facility.

Imagine that here? Everyone bleats about having to miss out on the Pub and wearing muzzles.

If we implemented the rules that are followed Taiwan, we wouldn't need lockdows.