The lessons of TMI have been learned though, the accident has been thoroughly investigated and that's the reason why it's now being discussed in class.
Sorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that.
Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it will very rarely be orders, but instead description if what each of them are doing while following the safety procedure, to keep other crew members aware of what they're doing.
So no “Press that god damn red button!” but instead “I'm bypassing turbine through GCTA and moving to step 342.B.3”.
I'm pretty sure it's just the old photo look (plus the fact that in the current version, part of the space have been colonized by computers, which kind of ruins the mood).
It's not specific to the Soviet world, any control room built before computers looks like that. The examples I'm familiar with is nuclear power plants from the 70s:
I'm sure their's plenty of other control rooms in the same style, for subways, water networks, electricity grid, train networks, scattered around the western world.
Absolutely. We've just been better at engineering over time, and with synthetic fertilizer we gained access to a lot more of fertilizer than when we used manure.
The same way, humans have engineered forests since prehistory, but there's still a massive difference between a prehistoric forest and a modern exploited one.
In a pasture for instance, grass can grow because the plant incorporate enough organic matter in the soil to be consumed by microorganisms that will in return fixate the nitrogen from the air into nitrates that can be consumed by the plant. Then you have some equilibrium-ish (it depends on the seasons and the precipitation so it's not an actual equilibrium) amount of nitrogen and organic compounds in your soil.
When you plow the soil, you accelerate decomposition of organic matter that was previously sitting there (because you bring excess oxygen). In the short term, it favors the fixation of nitrogen by the microorganism of the soil (which is why fallow works) but the following years you have less nitrogen fixation than you'd have had otherwise (because there's less organic mater to provide energy to the microorganisms).
Enters the nitrogen fertilizer: with them you don't need microorganisms to provide the nitrogen for your plants, and as such you don't care about the organic matter load of your soil. That's what I call “engineered soil” in opposition to the soils that are driven by the microorganisms who balance the carbon/nitrogen content of the soil.
Of course that doesn't mean that the whole content of the soil is man-made, but coupled with other fertilization methods (which bring nutrients that were naturally almost absent from the soil before), it helped transformed regions which used to be margins with very low yields, into agricultural powerhouses (For instance, Brittany, the region I'm from in France, went from being one of the poorest due to low soil fertility, to the agricultural leader of the country).
Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both shared the same contempt of democracy.
> The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture.
I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.
Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).
> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.
Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).
> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.
As a friend of mine who also happens to be a math professor once said: mathematicians are like sculptors who marvel about the beauty of their creation, and are kind of disgusted when a physicist comes nearby and says “that's a cool hammer you got there, may I borrow it?”.
> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.
The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…
> This is not necessarily true. Yes the strait of hormuz is technically in their territorial waters, but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently.
Yes, until the US bombed Iran and then signed a terrible MoU that didn't reject Iranians claim of control of the said waterway…
As former French Ambassador Gerard Araud puts it, the US diplomacy has been deeply incompetent during the negotiations and they gave way too much to Iran in the MoU. As a result, at this point the US cannot realy claim Iran is infringing international laws anymore (not that international laws matter to the current US admin anyway)
