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Will Obamacare be overturned by the SCOTUS?
The Supreme Court will completely overturn Obamacare 19%  19%  [ 4 ]
The SC will only overturn the individual mandate 52%  52%  [ 11 ]
The SC will leave the bill intact. 24%  24%  [ 5 ]
Will what be overturned by who? 5%  5%  [ 1 ]
Total votes : 21
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2012 6:37 pm 
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Edited since I noticed Rynar's excellent observation. Hopwin, PM incoming.

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2012 7:03 pm 
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Hopwin wrote:
What is a "gun type nuke"? Do you mean a rail gun powered by fission or fusion? A gun that shoots radiation? A gun that fires mini nuclear bombs? A gun that fires radioactive bullets?


This is a nuclear device which uses what amounts to a large, internal slug launcher to achieve criticality. The difficult part of design a nuclear weapon capable of achieving significant detonation is achieving critical mass to the point where it cascades into a large explosion. There is a lot of careful balancing and design need to achieve the desired effect.

A dirty bomb is significantly easier because you don't need to achieve critical mass. All you need to is to distribute contaminated matter everywhere. Of course, it's much less physically imposing of a weapon as it doesn't really cause any physical damage. Even a bomb that could spread extreme amounts of contamination such as recently fission decay products would only cause fire damage and some minor embrittlement of certain materials. Such a bomb is nearly unfeasible to an entity without the resources other much more cost-efficient weapons.

A cheap dirty bomb would create significantly less contamination to the point where a typical decomissioning crew could easily clean the affected area in a matter of days.

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 03, 2012 8:38 pm 
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Ya know I'm not gonna post an idea that would be cheap and effective for terrorists.

I must have just hit one of those age marks where you gain +1 wisdom and hit a new bonus.

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PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:32 am 
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Corolinth wrote:
You do realize that the reason terrorists don't use nuclear "dirty bombs" is for cost effectiveness rather than an inability to produce? The public is scared of such devices because the word "nuclear" pops up, and that's automatically ten times worse than anything else that could possibly happen. Unfortunately, it really isn't.

To use DE's conceptual understanding notion, I actually do possess a conceptual understanding of how computers work, as opposed to a vague understanding, and I could build one out of raw parts. (Resistors and capacitors, not parts off of NewEgg.) It would not be anything you could play games on, because I don't have the resources to pack enough transistors onto a circuit board. It would, however, be a computer. It would not resemble a computer to many of you, but that's because many of you do not possess the conceptual understanding that you think you do.

It would not be a particularly powerful computer. This is due to my lacking proper facilities, resources, and man hours. It is not due to any other reason, aside perhaps laziness. I don't really feel like building my own homemade computer when I can buy one for a thousand dollars.

Similar concepts apply to nuclear weapons. Them damn turrists could conceivably build a dirty bomb. It would not level a city. They just don't have the supply chain to make one that could. It could, however, destroy an airport or a football stadium.

So could dynamite, and dynamite is cheaper and easier to get ahold of. So no, our oppressive and overreaching government isn't putting people on terrorists watch lists because they think someone made veiled references to being able to build a nuclear weapon in their basement. Domestic terrorists don't go through all the effort of making a suitcase nuke when plastic explosives do the job just as well.


If terrorists did build a dirty bomb like that, the vast majority of the explosive power would come from the chemical explosives in the first place. Building one that large, much like your regular dynamite bomb, means a truckload of explosives at a minimum.

Bombs that large aren't set off all that often because it isn't just a matter of having the financial resources to get enough explosives to do the job. It's also a matter of the "supply chain", and the actual emplacement of the bomb itself becoming more and more easily detected the bigger it gets. A dirty bomb only makes it easier to detect because it adds radiation to the various ways the thing can be detected. In addition to cost effectiveness, there's a large factor of "more likely to succeed".

Either way you'd end up with a blown up airport or football stadium. One would just be contaminated as well.

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PostPosted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:34 am 
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Rynar wrote:
I was just wondering if it would be possible to have a thread where we didn't have board members allude to the possibility that they might be attempting to make WMDs in their basements. I'm sure it's too late, but it would have been nice not to have every single member of our community be on some sort of watch list.


The government can recognize grandiose posturing just as well as we can. You are not going to get on a terrorist watch list because some fool claimed he could make a nuke in his basement as a casual hobbyist.

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2012 7:56 am 
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Good read. Becareful what you wish for.


http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2012/07/ ... epage=true

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PostPosted: Fri Jul 06, 2012 8:10 am 
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Nitefox wrote:
Good read. Becareful what you wish for.


http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2012/07/ ... epage=true

Er... The author states that Russian (and former Russian states) life expectancy is lower than EU and Japan because of their national healthcare... even though the EU and Japan have national healthcare too?

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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2012 5:46 pm 
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Why even build a dirty bomb? I never thought the idea of terrorism was to rack up body counts. A few nail wrapped M67s near a busy bus station or school will have a huge panic effect.

I think by focusing on the "dirty bomb" idea we are distracting ourselves from just how exposed and vunerable we are in the US.

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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2012 5:55 pm 
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Hannibal wrote:
Why even build a dirty bomb? I never thought the idea of terrorism was to rack up body counts. A few nail wrapped M67s near a busy bus station or school will have a huge panic effect.

I think by focusing on the "dirty bomb" idea we are distracting ourselves from just how exposed and vunerable we are in the US.


I explained this already. People have a disproportionate fear of radiation. A nail bomb will scare people, sure, but the effects pass pretty quickly. People didn't stay scared long after the Fort Hood massacre, or even 9/11.

Radiation is different. It's this magical bad stuff that comes from horrendous bombs that wipe out whole cities and which the government has always engaged in an elaborate balancing act not to use against another government, lest the entire earth be sent back to the 17th century... and yet which it also is ready to use at a moment's notice, should that final extreme ever arrive.

"Dirty bombs" aren't nukes, no and people understand that, but they tend to viscerally fear them in the same way because of that silent, invisible poison status that radiation has. As I said before, it is not helped with endless media panic over radiation. Look at some of the misinformation spread about nuclear accidents over the years, and how nuclear power (to say nothing of nuclear or radiological weapons) are treated in fiction. For example, reports of 10,000 roentgens per hour of radiation in towns near Chernobyl. The accident was horrendous, but this sort of exaggeration serves no one. 10,000 roentgens/hour is about what you'd get by sitting right in the middle of the ruins of the reactor itself right after the accident occurred.

That's why to build a dirty bomb - because we scare ourselves so badly over the threat, that actual use of one is likely to induce panic in a way simple explosions can't.

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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2012 6:44 pm 
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Nitefox wrote:
Good read. Becareful what you wish for.

http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2012/07/ ... epage=true


This article is hilarious.

Quote:
One more truth: the U.S. has gradually evolved from a country using black slave labor into a country that freely elected a black American as president. The “Affordable Health Care for America Act,” however, was imposed on the country overnight, the same way the Marxist health care system was imposed on Romania.


This is about the worst comparison possible. Did the author just conveniently forget about the Civil Rights Act, or all sorts of laws that imposed racial equality on the people?

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America’s health care system represents one-sixth of the economy. The total U.S. gross domestic product is $14.1 trillion, and one-sixth means about $2.35 trillion. Considering that the length of a dollar bill is 6.4 inches, a trillion dollar bills laid end to end would make a chain 96,906,565.66 miles long — extending almost 4 million miles beyond the sun.[iii] This unimaginably immense amount of tax money was paid by “we the people,” who should at the very least have been given a say about how it was to be spent.


He also appears to believe that the entire health care budget is being paid by tax money.

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Now the French patients are learning that if they discreetly slip an envelope with cash into the pocket of the doctor’s white lab coat hanging in his office, they will get more “attention.” A little extra attention may be vital in such a government-run health care system, where doctors are obliged by law to see sixty to seventy patients a day.


As opposed to the system we have now, where fee-for-service reimbursements are so low that doctors have to.....see a massive amount of patients per day? I don't see a whole lot of corruption coming out of that.

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Our American political servants who mindlessly approved the 2,000-plus pages of the Affordable Health Care for America Act also scrambled for cover. All, from those working in Congress to those working in White House, granted themselves American versions of Helias and Gerota. None of them wanted to put his life in the hands of a nationalized health care system run by bureaucrats. Some 1,200 companies that had given grants to the Democratic Party and labor unions representing 543,812 workers also received waivers from part of the health care reform law.


This is another outright lie. They didn't get waivers, they got extensions, but even all these unions still have to accede to the mandate by 2018 at the latest.


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2012 9:55 pm 
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Quote:
This is about the worst comparison possible. Did the author just conveniently forget about the Civil Rights Act, or all sorts of laws that imposed racial equality on the people?


Hardly. It took about 20-25 years after the Civil Rights Act for it to really take hold, and that was an act that affirmed something observably true - that the races are fundamentally equal human beings. It was not an attempt to impose a major revision of how economic activity is conducted. In that sense it may be a bad comparison, but only in that it's being overly generous to Obamacare.

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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2012 10:11 pm 
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http://archive.org/details/StaySafe1960

Despite the aged nature of this video, it actually illustrates how hard it is to make a nuclear bomb go off, in the sense that it's very very hard to make it go off by accident.

I especially like the "lightning-fast computers" line.

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PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 12:59 pm 
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Brought to you by the same people who made Bert the Turtle & Duck & Cover ;-)


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PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 3:40 pm 
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TheRiov wrote:
Brought to you by the same people who made Bert the Turtle & Duck & Cover ;-)


Despite having apparently the same narrator, this video is vastly more realistic and accurate. I don't know why they restricted it to official use; this is the sort of information the public should have had.

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 4:29 am 
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Diamondeye wrote:
TheRiov wrote:
Brought to you by the same people who made Bert the Turtle & Duck & Cover ;-)


Despite having apparently the same narrator, this video is vastly more realistic and accurate. I don't know why they restricted it to official use; this is the sort of information the public should have had.


I know right. Just do a little research into Operation Chromedome, Palomares, and Thule Air Force Base.

Nukes don't just "go off".

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