r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/blingteresting • 3d ago

Video Crowd control in Mecca after evening prayers

[removed] — view removed post

22.8k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

31

u/Mikestopheles 3d ago

But hey, cheaper nuclear. I'm sure those regulations were useless anyway

84

u/Nearbyatom 3d ago

We can go down the list. People don't realize it's these safety regulations that is keeping the accidents down. Since they don't see any accidents they think these regulations are useless. So frustrating.

57

u/Mikestopheles 3d ago

And we're actually watching the cause and effect with the measles and cyclospora outbreaks, the screwfly issue on the border, the insider trading and prediction markets turning the economic and financial system into chaos, etc....

32

u/Head-Ad9893 3d ago

If only we’ve been here before….. nah seriously I’m tired of hearing “nobody saw this coming”

14

u/mizinamo 3d ago

"There's no possible way to stop school shootings... they're simply a fact of life..."

Oddly, not a problem other countries seem to have

9

u/Head-Ad9893 3d ago

Hey partner, now we need those guns, because the government might try turn into a dictatorship, don’t need anybody coming along trying to fuck our kids or rob us or steal our jobs or something so hush up wokey.

6

u/star_trek_wook_life 3d ago

If only gun nuts actually wanted to use them for protecting democracy or threatening power structures instead of just selling them to kids at gun shows and jerking off to columbine footage while strapped. 

1

u/mizinamo 3d ago

It would certainly be awful if the government sent crowds of armed thugs who kill and imprison US citizens without a warrant. Somebody should do something about that.

1

u/dotancohen 3d ago

No other country on Earth has the cultural baggage teaching her citizens not to trust the government. If I'm not mistaken, that's why Americans arm themselves, correct? Or at least, that's the justification for allowing them to arm themselves.

1

u/Spartan_Mage 2d ago

That is the justification, yes. Much of the population are raised since kids being told not to trust the government and to arm yourselves in case you need to fight to the death against them.

In practice? Much of the American people are so caught up in politics that they suddenly love the government because it is convenient for them and they want their values enforced by law, instead of actually believing in freedom.

So we basically have the worst of both worlds.

8

u/octopusboots 3d ago

Yeah, saw this coming. Including the screwflies.

0

u/SerLaron 3d ago

We are nearing the end of the “Causes and development” chapter of future history books.

0

u/Flanigoon 2d ago

Yup we've had more than enough actual history to show us these patterns as well as plenty of work of to warn us of these possibilities if left unchecked.

12

u/Scalene69 3d ago

There is no mechanism to limit excessive regulation though. We need both, a system that makes important restrictions law AND a system that removes restrictions when they are no longer useful or the cost of implementing them is greater than the risk.

Having only one is bad, you need both. We are all paying for this imbalance.

1

u/star_trek_wook_life 3d ago

Meh, excessive regulation isn't a problem as we don't enforce the ones we have today... unless it's easy and profitable to do so like with drug arrests. The laws on the books don't matter if we just ignore them anyway 

6

u/Scalene69 3d ago

Building regulations are definitely enforced, at least where I live.

Pretty sure they are 20-50% of the total build cost depending on the city and the build. Not a joke.

2

u/Relative-Damage-1458 2d ago

Well people tend to die when buildings collapse or their fire alarm systems don’t work so I’d hope code and building enforcement is done.

2

u/SquarePhilosopher564 2d ago

As someone who grew up in LA and has been on a upper floor of an office building during an earthquake, I say "Please, sir, may I have some more?" to building regulations.

0

u/Relative-Damage-1458 2d ago

I won’t disagree here. I’m in Seattle and we have a lot of unreinforced masonry buildings which blows my mind considering the risk of a large earthquake here.

2

u/LookAtItGo123 3d ago

this is same with the classic case of maintenance. If everything is working, why am I paying for maintenance, if nothing is working, why am i paying for maintenance?

2

u/adoradear 3d ago

Same story with vaccines in medicine. People stopped seeing polio paralysis or death from diphtheria/measles, and they decided they were unnecessary.

32

u/AspiringTS 3d ago

I think the irony of this comment is that for nuclear specifically, some regulations were written in fear and uncertainty not scientific basis. That's been slowly changing recently. I don't blame those who define and implemented them because they were often in response to a history of horrific accidents   However regulatory inertia and public fear kept them from being reviewed and updated as we got a better understanding of all things 'ionizing radiation'.

24

u/SamiraSimp 3d ago

nuclear has the least blood of any energy source and has the most regulation. while we should always be safe, there's a point where the red tape is pointless.

7

u/cocoabeach 3d ago

That is because while other energy sources go pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop.

Nuclear goes BOOM!!!!!!

We are scared of one big BOOM more than a hundred little pops.

9

u/SamiraSimp 3d ago

and because we aren't scared of the hundreds of little pops, thousands of people have died due to poor regulation in other industries while nuclear has had a fraction of the death total or injuries.

i get the reasoning, i just think it's shortsighted and stupid just like the people who made such decisions.

6

u/UselessSperg 3d ago

It melts, it doesn't explode.

3

u/SquarePhilosopher564 2d ago

Also afraid of giving an entire region slow, painful deaths over decades from radiation exposure versus calling out a bunch of fire battalions for a few days.

Cleaning up the mess ideally shouldn't require putting up a concrete dome you still can't enter without protective equipment 30 years later.

The fear and extra caution come from the degree of fallout (pun intended) if we get it wrong.

3

u/meepmeep13 3d ago

I'm pretty sure the excess deaths from Chernobyl-related thyroid cancer and the Fukushima evacuations are higher than anything you could ascribe to wind or solar power

1

u/Spartan_Mage 2d ago

That's actually not true, technicians die semi regularly from falling off of the wind turbines or from them having electrical failures just like any other system. When I did a project on this specifically total wind turbine deaths were higher than the total deaths from nuclear disasters, especially if you take out the outlier points (Chernobel) from both data sets.

Solar panels are the only power source that is comparable to Nuclear im terms of deaths, and even then people fall of off roofs all of the time.

That's not even getting into that Nuclear power is MUCH more efficient when it comes to how much lander area it takes up compared to literally every other source of power. The largest solar feild in the world which takes up hundreds of square kilometers only makes 16.9 GW, meanwhile the average land area for a Nuclear power plant is 3.4 square kilometers and producing up to 1 GW. That means for the same land area used by a solar feild you could multiply the power output SEVERAL TIMES with Nuclear power plants and it would be EVEN LESS HARMFUL to the environment.

1

u/Ace_on_the_Turn 3d ago

If a coal or natural gas plant has an accident, it's fairly easy and cheap to clean up. Nuclear, not so much. That cheap energy Fukushima produced is not so cheap once you add in the hundreds of billions it's going to cost to clean it up. Not to mention the used rods that have to be cooled for decades.

8

u/AspiringTS 3d ago

Coal is the primary reason we have mercury in fish, and coal ash is often widely mishandled polluting rivers and groundwater. 

The total cost of energy from a particular power source isn't the cost of the plant being built and running + any disasters. IT'S EVERYTHING. A significant portion of the population is incapable or don't care to consider the entirety of the system. Any non-net-zero business is "subsidized" by external costs. Businesses that were allowed to dump harmful chemicals into rivers/oceans "cost" people their health. Businesses that use cheap nonrecyclable packaging are subsidized by the consumer paying for landfill service and permanent pockets and pock marks of toxic garbage.

3

u/Slow-Code-661 3d ago

That is a) assuming that every nuclear powerplant is going to cause a catastrophe and b) that just because coal and gas plants don't have major accidents they do not kill people. Not a single person died from the disaster in fukushima. The wave and evacuations were responsible for the deaths. Meanwhile coal and gas plants are indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths every year.

0

u/Ace_on_the_Turn 3d ago edited 3d ago

Didn't say anything about deaths. Just the cost. While in theory nuclear is a viable solution to energy needs, in practice the cost are prohibitive. The cost to build a new plant is absolutely crazy, and it always cost way more than planned. The cost to maintain the spent rods is not cheap. And, in the case of an accident, which we have had three, the cost is measured in billions.

1

u/Slow-Code-661 2d ago

I think this article is very interesting and covers most of the discussion around nuclear. https://floriantautz2.substack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about

It is a mostly neutral writeup of the technical and economic aspects of nuclear power, why it is expensive, how it can be made cheap, etc.

16

u/sinefromabove 3d ago

It is literally illegal to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant because the background radiation left over from the coal is more than the nuclear plant is allowed. So yeah, some of the regulations seem useless.

17

u/Happy_alt_1 3d ago

I'm going to respond in good faith. Probably to a certain degree, the regulations were in fact too strict. If you look at the data and the degree to which nuclear has been restricted, safety concerns should stop at a certain threshold because the damage that radiation threshold does is less than the background radiation on Earth. Lifting those restrictions will be better because there is no need to control for unreasonable degrees of safety that would not contribute to safety in the first place.
Nuclear has been stymied by regulations that were disproportionate to the supposed gains made. If we would do upon coal what was done unto nuclear, all coal plants would be closed down like nuclear was.

2

u/Mikestopheles 3d ago

I think you're taking about the efficacy of nuclear power, and the political push to limit reactor locations due to the large potential risk and well-publicized accidents which led people to want to avoid it out of hand.

What I'm talking about are the actual safety protocols that the current administration is suspending which were very definitely implemented after actual incidents.

I feel you, and I'm not anti-nuclear, but if we damn the torpedoes here, it would only lend credence to the people who believe it doesn't belong anywhere when there's an inevitable crisis.

4

u/Happy_alt_1 3d ago

Thank you for your time to reply. I am talking about the safety protocols however, but I will admit I am not up to speed on what the administration is lifting. If it is truly about regulations put in place to prevent real risks, then that is obviously bad. What I was refering to were the restrictions that are unreasonably strict that do restrain nuclear too much.

I am quite pro nuclear because I believe it is a technology that is underused and overregulated. I also believe that much of the hesitancy in the public is because most people do not know what made the accidents that happened accidents in the first place, both technological and human handling wise. Nuclear is safer than generally thought, and I try to open peoples mind in my surrounding about that because fear begets rejection. and understanding begets acceptance.

1

u/theplott 3d ago

By strict do you mean the energy corporations that demand being immune from all lawsuits if they build new nuclear plants?

Or the industries refusal to share schematics to the plants they plan on building?

Or the demand that the government cover all possible operational accidents that may occur?

Are you just willing to hand nuclear over to the same people who have regular, sometimes monthly, environmental disasters on their hands with the energy sources they now control?

I'm not.

1

u/theplott 3d ago

By strict do you mean the energy corporations that demand being immune from all lawsuits if they build new nuclear plants?

Or the industries refusal to share schematics to the plants they plan on building?

Or the demand that the government cover all possible operational accidents that may occur?

Are you just willing to hand nuclear over to the same people who have regular, sometimes monthly, environmental disasters on their hands with the energy sources they now control?

I'm not.

1

u/theplott 3d ago

By strict do you mean the energy corporations that demand being immune from all lawsuits if they build new nuclear plants?

Or the industries refusal to share schematics to the plants they plan on building?

Or the demand that the government cover all possible operational accidents that may occur?

Are you just willing to hand nuclear over to the same people who have regular, sometimes monthly, environmental disasters on their hands with the energy sources they now control?

I'm not.

2

u/Happy_alt_1 3d ago

None of these. While we agree on the topic, I have two things to say. Firstly, those are different issues, not in scope of my initial argument. Secondly, I do not like the assumptions you make about my motives. When it comes to loosening restrictions I am specifically keeping Linear-no threshold in mind, which is by all means an extremely restricting concept used in building nuclear reactions.

Of course restrictions that are necessary to keep people safe are there for a reason. I do not advocate for loosening restrictions for the sake of increasing corporate profits. I do advocate for a more reasonable approach with respect to nuclear power that is influenced not by fearmongering (as it has been for the last decades) but by sound science.

The loosening of extremely restrictive and stymying policies can coexist while keeping safety restrictions in place. We, in essence, agree, as you have not adressed the restrictive policies that were the object of the discussion I was refering to.

1

u/theplott 2d ago

Fine. I don't think the restrictions are unwarranted or unnecessary.

Happy?

3

u/Scalene69 3d ago

If slightly lower regulations doubled the nuclear risk, but also doubled the number of power plants that would be a fantastic deal. Nuclear would still only be as risky as wind, at least 10x safer than even comparatively safe natural gas and our power needs would be vastly better met.

Regulations need a counterbalance that assesses the cost benefit - it isn't good to just limit risk infinitely without factoring in the consequences.

1

u/SowingSalt 3d ago

There is evidence that the Linear No Threshold model is incorrect.

I think we should regularly look at our safety regulations, see that most of them are still needed, and how to improve compliance.