Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.
The dispersed fallout? Hard to quantify because of it's dispersedness and long term slowness. But it is for example plutonium and we know it's effects on life on Earth, so one could proceed from there with some math and futurological trend extrapolation. And simply by using the knowledge we have about plutonium mixed with common sense.
After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations. Because they are top predators and have enriched the gamma dose in themselves. How often could you eat human meat?
> After Chernobyl you still today cannot eat fish from the lakes and rivers in 1000+ km radius from the site by Finnish recommendations.
Limit your eating of pike, but otherwise no major objections:
> Children, young people and persons of fertile age may not eat pike caught in a lake or in the sea more often than once or twice a month.
> Dioxin and PCB levels in fish from inland waters are normally low, and mercury levels are lower in other lake fish than in pike. The mercury and cesium-137 levels of fish vary from one lake to the other.
Finland. In Finland. According to Finnish authorities. Countries with East Block histories like Poland tend to not care as much what the actual science of the stuff is. Nor does the Nuclear Is Clean - crowd is seems. "Everything radiates; just look at the bonfire, it's radiation". Yeah, right.
Plutonium problem multiplies in top predators. Here already for thousands of years now thanks to nuclear plant disasters. Which are avoided by causing a slow power plant disaster by releasing radioactive pressure to the environment. Guy Debord's comment on this from Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: "much more civilized to sip a littl wine all of the time than to drink the whole bottle all at once like a Pole" :-)
Nuclear energy is a subsidised energy source, lobbied by powers that be on the corridors of power in the EU and everywhere else. Solar is cheaper.
Humanity is out of it's depth with this stuff. Could cause massive extinction event eventually even if we stopped now by killing and mutating sperm cells and all that. Go have a holiday in Fukushima. Go visit the deformed children still born in Uzbekistan near these places.
Maybe massive move to hydroponic farming done on sea rafts or something. Or on those whirling space stations with artificial gravity . 3d - printing food (if you believe in bioenergies first print some living tissue then kill it u done) is an option. Harvesting plankton is an option. Cultivating airborne plankton and such for protein is an option.
The guy is right (I know nothing about the guy himself): if the current trend continues we're left with desertation. We need soil - producing agriculture and
the current one is soil - destroying. It doesn't need to be economically viable in itself. It could be subsidized for common interest by the public sector.
> I haven't seen HN use shadowbanning to censor anyone.
Maybe it was the ones you didn't see? Bacause they were shadowbanned?
My post was about ethics, trying to be formal and simple about the question what is it to do the right thing. Basically it was about this: sometimes good is right, sometimes evil is right, so good can be wrong and evil can be right, and we have four things of which the main question is the question of right and wrong.
I wouldn't consider myself to be a "toxic personality" but being ghostbanned did piss me off a little. More than pacify me. I am pointing out a real ethical issue, not "escalating my bad behavior" by posting this comment is how I see it.
[Edit:]I love HN, it's one of the best sites I know. I'm just pointing out an aspect of it that I don't like. I might use different language now that I'm not as pissed anymore, but I would post it.
> I wouldn't consider myself to be a "toxic personality" but being ghostbanned did piss me off a little.
Being pissed off is a very reasonable emotion to being shadowbanned.
I'm sure you don't consider yourself toxic, but it's possible you were posting things that trolls or shills often post, and that resulted in you getting banned.
For example, there may be people astroturfing anti-vaccine misinformation on this site. Given public opinion polls and the revelations about all the money that goes into that movement, it's likely most anti-vaccine activism on the internet is made up of bots and paid astroturfers.
But if you're someone who genuinely believes the conspiracy theories, a site may end up banning you because you're indistinguishable from people are not sincere and not acting in good faith.
Any filter is going to have false positives, but that doesn't mean we should throw out the filter.
> We (as a species) overall do not behave like adults, really.
Ok fair enough. Still there's some sort of a social expectation to that effect. And when you don't behave then you'll get the social sanction given by the community. I can dig that this is the internet and that it's hard work to keep up the standard. You seem to see the two sides to this stuff as well.
Ok I'll agree upon it being a shades of grey - kind of thing. But why not just outright ban someone when it's clear he doesn't fall into those categories of a spammer, a scammer or a troll. Would be much more polite and straightforward in a kind situation where you just seem to have the "wrong opinions" that don't fit the forum or whatever.
It's kind of trivial to check if you're ghostbanned though via wget script or something for example. I don't think ghostbanning slows down spamming enough to be ethically justified.
