Any laws! Help!

Wait, I remember this approach. The USA PATRIOT Act. Pass some laws! Hurry!

I most definitely do not want to see another layer of bureaucracy added to the government without a chance for meaningful public review of the actual legislation. It'd be nice for opinion shapers such as yourself to at least pretend to care about the structure of our democracy.

screed:

That's like asking a wolf to guard the sheep. The wolf can't change what it is, and to blame it accomplishes nothing.

The government's job ought to be to keep the wolves small and well regulated, and to keep them the hell out of the political process.

The original Constitution served the country reasonably well up to the end of the nineteenth century, but it's been in need of an upgrade since then.

Mandatory publicly funded elections, with no private money of any kind allowed. I think private "speech" ought to be limited to actual people speaking out loud somewhere, or Op-ed, in this context. The effect in that case is more limited. TV ads just have too much of an emotional impact, when what we need is sober consideration. It'd be nice if we had a proper constitutional convention to sort that out though.

We ought to reconsider the idea that corporations are legal entities on par with people, though the implications are something only hardcore lawyers could really predict. The people who run corporations need to become more directly responsible for the acts of said corporations.

We most certainly ought to set maximum sizes, both in dollar and number-of-employee-and-contractor terms, on corporations. A lot of little ones are much less threatening to our overall democracy than a bunch of giant, too-big-to-fail, own-the-politicians ones.

I don't believe we have to surrender either our democracy or our capitalism-based prosperity to the religious faith that big corporations must be able to do anything they want.

/screed.

The first step is talking about it. Frankly, I wouldn't have believed a blogger could influence policy until Greenwald started doing it. The world really is changing right in front of our noses.

with great and gleeful anticipation.

Also: cable catnip. The next great buzzword. Thank you Sarah Palin.

We won't have the World's Strongest Military forever. History turns, and in time we will no longer have the ability to invade countries at will. Acting the bully now just ensures we'll be harshly treated then.

It's hard to know how cheap fission would be if we really invested heavily in doing it right. We spend a lot of money on safety studies, and on lobbying, but not so much on new (read: possibly unsafe) reactor designs, etc. I don't think it much matters, because it isn't a long term solution. There's only so much fissile material on the planet, and the waste storage requirement is also pretty gross.

What we really need to do is put some Manhattan-style dollars into fusion. It'll probably also be expensive to roll out, but given the prevalence of hydrogen in our vicinity, it's a real long term solution (along with solar, geothermal and wind). Those spacebased power plants look pretty nice too, assuming they can reliably get the power back to earth. We won't know about that till we try.

By investing heavily in renewables (of which category, basically, fusion is a member), we'll be sure that whatever research gains are made continue to benefit us indefinitely.

How much money total, in the history of the world, do you think has gone into fusion research? Like space development, it's a convenient "boondoggle" to point to, but the lack of results has much more to do with lack of funding than lack of possible progress.

http://virtualology.com/MANHATTENPROJECT.COM/costs.manhattanproject.net/

Finishing fission research to the point of being able to create bombs cost $20B in 1996 dollars. Not power plants, mind you-- mass destruction devices. Fission is *easy*.. just put a bunch of sufficiently enriched uranium together and away you go.

http://www.physicsessays.com/doc/s2005/Raman_FusionDay_031005.pdf

Note the total they asked for in the budget request:

Magnetic Fusion base program: $0.29-0.05 (billion)

http://www.tab.fzk.de/en/projekt/zusammenfassung/ab75.htm

What is the cost of fusion research?

In the past 30 years, substantial public funding has been invested in promoting plasma research. In the EU almost € 10 billion was spent on fusion research up to the end of the 90s. In the last few years, around € 130 million a year has been invested in fusion research from German Federal funds. For comparison, German Federal R&D spending on renewable energy and efficient use of energy in 2000 amounted to € 153 million. Up to the point of possible implementation of electricity generation by nuclear fusion, the current estimate is that R&D will need further promotion totalling around € 60-80 billion over a period of 50 years or so, € 20-30 billion within the EU. ITER was redimensioning from the initial € 7 billion to € 3.5 billion, which will probably be spread over ten years. A decision is needed next year on implementing ITER, its possible location and the division of the costs between the participating countries.

Finally, nuclear power plant implementation costs are measured in the billions, as are solar power implementations (on gigawatt scale), dams, etc.

We don't fund it right now, and we haven't spent crazy amounts of money on it in the past. We've made a hell of a lot of progress on a shoestring, but there's always someone who'll come out of the woodwork to cry about how we ought to spend the money on Right Now instead of thinking about tomorrow. Is it any surprise the country is in a shambles?