http://www.chicagoresourceexpo.com/

It's free, but obviously limited in attendance.  If you're local, register now.

Drugs are a high value item, wherein privacy is a requirement.  It's Silk Road that needs Bitcoin, not the other way around.  The reason it looks like it's the only successful model is because, for the time being, shopping online for legal items that are otherwise high value and easy to ship works just fine with credit cards.  The only thing that's going to undermine that is if the currency they use loses their trust or the credit card companies lose their trust.  A local model that you might pursue is the 'foodie movement' such as raw milk and local honey.  With the FDA coming down on raw milk suppliers and contract arrangements, there is room for a revival of the "milk man" who delivers the milk to the foodies from an undisclosed farm.

This happened informally in my city after a major windstorm tore through the area.  The debris was so extensive, and the city otherwise too busy with power and life safety, that the garbage wasn't getting picked up.  mostly because the garbage men have two routes each day, one before and one after lunch.  But if the truck gets full, they abandon the end of the route.  Apparently my street was near the end of that route, and garbage was getting out of hand, but the city said that they would cover the drop-off fees for city residents and then a couple of guys came buy and said that they would take all I had piled up (over three weeks) for $15.  I said "deal", and paid them cash.  They just took the bags of trash and tossed them into the bed of an old ford pickup along with what looked like half my street.

It's pretty obvious that neither one of you have ever actually attended a Tea Party rally to find out for yourself what they are about.  I have, and at least in my area of the country, freedom from government (and oppressive taxation) is pretty much the major undercurrent.  There are many libertarian leaning groups there, both young and old.  I shouldn't have to say this, but don't depend upon the observations of others for your opinions, particularly not people that listen to the media much.  I think that both of you would likely find that you have much in common with both the Tea Party people and the Wall Street occupiers if you took either event first hand.

the magstripe?

Toronto is a big city, with a completely differnet market dynamic.  You can't even know how much cheaper a mature & competitive private fire protection market could be.  You can't know if it might be $8 monthy for a home.  I'd bet that the relative costs of fire protection in NYC are vanishingly small.  It's a city of concrete and steel.  Toronto is pretty much likewise, is it not?

This is a perfect example of the level of sense these people have..

"Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Anyone with any rational sense would have to ask, "how could that be?" for those bombs were intended to be released into the immediate environment completely while not all, not even a lot, of the core of Chernobyl escaped into the air via the graphite fire.  Almost none would have even then if they hadn't used graphite as their moderator.  One of the reactors at Chernobyl was still producing power 10 years later, which also means that there were plant workers still at the site. 

Sorry, but that's simply not true.  Those numbers are based upon the assumption that anyone who dies from any form of cancer who lived within 100 or so miles downwind of the plant during the disaster, and likewise anyone who died from any other complication even loosely associated with radiation poisoning, died because of exposure to the radioactive material released.  It's intelectually dishonest to assume that all such deaths were related, the cancer rates were slightly elevated in the monitored population.  It probably is the root cause of thousands of deaths, but even so most of those people didn't lose very much off the average lifespan taken on aggregate.  It was still a horrible disaster made worse by politics and poor engineering and technical response training, but the actual reduction of lifespan was far less than feared.


It's probably that high right now.  Asbestos is far more dangerous for human life at that concentration than airborne iodine (which is what is the real threat) of the same concentration.  The solar wind produces more radioactive oxygen than that.


You're speaking of iodine.  We do have a simple defense such relatively low concentrations.  Iodine pills.  If the body doesn't need iodine, it won't try to assimulate more from food or any other source, and it will be ejected via urine.  The risks of radioactive iodine is the length of time in close proximity to tissue.  Moving iodine doesn't damage nearby tissues fast enough to trigger cancer.


And seaweed tofu.  It was a regular breakfast ration for the Japanese doctors and nurses in the humanitarian effort following the bombing of Japan.  Knowing nothing about radiation poisoning at the time, logic would have suggested that their rate of cancers would be significantly elevated in the following years, but it was not.

"Daniel Bartels, of the Columbia Business School, found that those who “endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism – the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences – tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits.”

http://www.strike-the-root.com/prohibition-did-work-sort-of

This stuff is too easy.

Why would they use it?  The QR codes are to receive funds from someone else, not pay for them.  It's completely backwards of how a credit card currently works.  Who is going to add magstripe readers to their cell phone so that they can scan the vendor's card when the camera can scan a QR sticker affixed to the register at least as well?

Not that I consider the Guardian a trustworthy source, but in the absence of counter-evidence, I shall consider myself duely corrected.

Actually there is.  Search Wikipedia for the terms "thorium fuel cycle" and "energy amp".  You will learn much.  When you finish, consider the question, "In light of what is known and how Europe handles fission waste products, why does the US wish to establish the long term repository in Nevada?"

I thought that there was one case of an overexposed plant employee who died after trying to help put out the coolant pool fire.  I might be wrong, or he simply died of something other than radiation exposure.

Well, he never claimed to compare a coal plant running normally to that of a nuke plant in catastrophic breakdown of containment.  It's rational enough to assume that he was comparing the average coal plant running normally to an average nuke plant running normally, and it's true.  I've worked at both types of power plants in my career, and even without knowing that a coal plant releases more radioactive material into the environment in a year than a nuke plant (which I did know, as it's pretty common knowledge in the industry) I wouldn't want to live near a coal plant.  Nothing grows within a quarter mile of the stack of Beckjord Powerhouse in SE Ohio, as it is the oldest running coal plant in America.  And even if I lived in sight of a nuke plant, these days one can get a rapid warning alert for an android phone that would inform you immediately if the nuke plant were to ever enter into forced shutdown, etc.

That said, if you take all of the radioactive material released by coal plants the world over, it's somewhat worse than a Chernobyl each year, it's just not so concentrated.  People died from both the Chernobyl event and the Fukushima event due to the concentrations of lethal exposure.  There were other effects from Chernobyl that could be debated, but the rates of cancer and birth defects were much lower than expected.  You likely get more dosage from the concrete blocks of buildings that you work in and from medical screening than you would have simply because you lived 10 or 20 miles from either of these events.  And no matter how the media presents it, Chernobyl was still a much worse environmental catastrophe than Fukushima.

To what end?  Who would use it?

"Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society."

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/how-fascism-kills-the-american-dream/

Is there any objection to this casual definition?

I'm saying that I may or may not agree, depending upon what you actually mean by that.   It's a vague statement standing alone.

Still not an argument.

Try requiring that dog owners pay a $300 'license' to fund an anti-dog torturing task force and see how much majority you have left.

Thanks for doing the research.