There are many factors aside from spending habits that might lead to discrepancies between purchasing power of a 6 figure salary.
One example: discrepancies in the local cost of living. For example, someone could live like royalty on a 6 figures is Arkansas, but might barely scrape by with the same salary in San Francisco. According to nerd wallet, a salary of $106k in San Francisco is roughly equivalent to a salary of $50k in Little Rock, AR.
It's pretty presumptuous to suggest that they need to sitting down and carefully tracking spend without knowing more information. Especially considering the original poster wasn't asking for advice (or judgement) from a random internet stranger.
"Lyman believes that the department’s past efforts have “consistently underestimated”the “spectrum of mission risks posed by these microreactors," mostly around the technical challenges of keeping the radioactive fuel safe and operational in battlefield conditions.
“Fielding these reactors without commanders fully understanding the radiological consequences and developing robust response plans to cope with the aftermath could prove to be a disastrous miscalculation,” warned Lyman."
That might be different for civilian use though. I don't know exactly what "battlefield conditions" means (airdropping it in? bullets hitting it?), but that's likely different if you're just aiming for decentral power generation but have safe ways to deploy and maintain.
It is being funded by the pentagon. It isn't for civilian use.
When considering "battlefield conditions" think along the lines of people with heat seeking missiles and infrared goggles who can easily spot a hot nuclear reactor, and who really want to bring down a base.
Not to mention how complicated it is to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor even if conditions are ideal. The additional training and personnel required to support one of these things... would it really be worthwhile in the end?
"Battlefield conditions" means they need it to run the air conditioning in forward bases in occupied countries. At the moment, this is astonishingly expensive, because it has to be done with fuel trucked in across dangerous supply lines.
If you're using enough power to warrant even a small nuclear reactor there's really no use trying to hide your thermals except maybe in a marine environment.
Yes, this is about military use, I understood the comment from davidu to possibly not be focused on military use but about the idea in general, hence the difference between the positive lookout and yours (and the article's).
I'm not saying it isn't a bad idea for certain applications. I'm skeptical of the military application that is currently being pushed. It remains to be seen if one of these would even be plausible in the civilian arena, and the pentagon certainly isn't championing such (not that it should).
All of that just to power AC? Is the risk really worth the reward? Have the consequences of a failure in a military setting been fully considered?
Naval nuclear reactors are stored deep within the internal structure of the vessel (i.e. a negligible heat signature from the nuclear reactor is not visible from the outside). The proposed micro-reactor designs will vent the exhaust heat out into the open through an open Brayton cycle (i.e. it'll be really easy to spot).
Ships can be abandoned at sea with little risk because the nuclear material is likely to be unrecoverable. This is not true for reactors on land.
Sure. But the concern isn't about whether or not a nuclear-powered vessel can be identified as such; that information isn't really concealed, you'll have it as part of the same documentation that lets you ID a ship or submarine by class. The concern is about what happens when somebody drops a couple of mortar bombs on your land-based microreactor, or sets off a buried IED under it, or drives a VBIED into it.
Germany's infrastructure has been stressed in recent years by immigration and other factors. The two books that the article places a spotlight on are: 1) "The Dumbing Down of Germany" and 2) "Tolerance Isn’t Easy" (as roughly translated within the article). These books represent the german people's response to that.
The first book, "The Dumbing Down of Germany", suggests a frustration with the decline of their education system -- something that Germany has traditionally valued highly. This is particularly concerning because sentiments like this lead to the rise of Hitler and eventually WWII.
The second book, "Tolerance Isn’t Easy", offers comfort with the influx of immigrants. This may be viewed as an attempt to stymie the tension. Alternatively, this may be viewed as an anesthetic that is wearing off. As of checking today this title is actually 13th on the list.
To answer your question. Why Germans as opposed to someone else? I suppose it is partially because Germany is a big player in the EU. It is particularly concerning because of Germany's role in WWII. To some it seems like things are trending in the same direction. As stated in the last paragraph: "Germany has been undergoing dramatic social change since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred 30 years ago this November... Fear-mongering arguments against immigration and an Islamic takeover continue to attract scores of German citizens whose future economic prospects are less than rosy. Regardless, one cannot help but detect the political vestiges of an old GDR intolerance in its novel political manifestations."
Well I speak German and nationality wise am too. But I grew up in a decidedly English speaking context.
Hence my interest in hn's focus on Germans. It's not so much what's happening in germany more than why would western english media analyse german reading trends.
That is not a question of what's happening in germany...but rather one of english speaking media somehow deemed this interesting. Why?
The old adage: "TV will rot your brain" seems more true the older I get. Probably needs to be updated to include spending too much time on the internet.
"Thus, Gallup's methodology is not the only way to estimate the percentage of the population that is gay or lesbian. Still, all available estimates of the actual gay and lesbian population in the U.S. are far lower than what the public estimates, and no measurement procedure has produced any figures suggesting that more than one out of five Americans are gay or lesbian."
It is because there is an understanding, from first principles, of the dynamics that drive weather (e.g. conservation of mass, momentum and energy). The current models are build upon these principles to make predictions, and conform to expectations of how physics operates. The method that these models are based on (finite volume) is efficient and adaptable if modifications need to be made.
Using AI and ML to make predictions about weather will likely not account for the conservation principles and might lead to ridiculous results (in some sense). Creating an accurate AI/ML model of a complex and chaotic system might lead to wrong predictions under extreme circumstances (e.g. predicting the weather >5 days out for an extreme hurricane) or under conditions where some implicit assumption has changed. One can at-least attempt to grapple with these issues when using finite volume. Under AI/ML you just have to hope your model is properly trained.
I fully agree, but I think that is easier said than done.
It is conceivable that this would require massive amounts of money to lobby politicians and inform the public of an issues that most people don't give a shit about (Hell, people are so scientifically averse that vaccination is still a significant issues in 2019).
What makes this even more challenging is that there are parties whose interest is to exploit that information for their personal gain rather than helping the individuals with that DNA (e.g. insurance companies, government agencies, etc.). Those parties likely have access to more money and are more capable of lobbying and propagandizing for their interests.
No great advancement comes without dangers. But at the moment we seem to be stifling the benefits while allowing government surveillance to go through "for the good of society".
One example: discrepancies in the local cost of living. For example, someone could live like royalty on a 6 figures is Arkansas, but might barely scrape by with the same salary in San Francisco. According to nerd wallet, a salary of $106k in San Francisco is roughly equivalent to a salary of $50k in Little Rock, AR.
It's pretty presumptuous to suggest that they need to sitting down and carefully tracking spend without knowing more information. Especially considering the original poster wasn't asking for advice (or judgement) from a random internet stranger.
source: https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...