Posted by antonsirius on 9/23/2010 7:26:00 PM (view original):

Posted by jiml60 on 9/23/2010 2:56:00 PM (view original):
Where's the humor in that?  The Tina Fey stuff was hilarious.

Meh. Fey's Palin stuff is overrated. It just looks fantastic next to Armisen's travesty of an Obama impression.

True.  It really wasn't that great...Pohler's rap on the other hand...

"Are you saying there couldnt be funny Obama skits? That he was so perfect that there was nothing to mock?"

If that's what you want to read into my response, go with it. Do you see communists under your bed each night, Joe McCarthy?

I'm not a big fan of the current SNL cast, the Obama stuff that I saw wasn't funny at all.

Posted by jiml60 on 9/23/2010 10:50:00 PM (view original):
"Are you saying there couldnt be funny Obama skits? That he was so perfect that there was nothing to mock?"

If that's what you want to read into my response, go with it. Do you see communists under your bed each night, Joe McCarthy?

I'm not a big fan of the current SNL cast, the Obama stuff that I saw wasn't funny at all.

You asked "Where is the humor in that".

So people complain, and not necessarily wrongly so, when companies "ship jobs overseas".  Is that not what the US Government is doing here?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/28/AR2009072802617.html

http://www.usec.com/americancentrifuge_loanguarantee.htm

In a nutshell, this company, which is apparently the only American company that enriches uranium for use in Nuclear power plants, applied for a $ 2 Billion government loan guarantee.  So did a French company.  The DOE granted the guarantee to the French company.

While campaigning in Ohio in 2008, and in a subsequent letter to Ohio's governor, President Obama promised to fully support the request for the guarantee for the Ohio plant.  He may very well have done so, this is not necessarily aimed at him, more so at the entire government sponsored process.  (edit) I am not saying that we need to privatize this process, obviously it needs to be well-regulated, just that it seems a little off base here.

DOE says that the Ohio-based company was not up to snuff technology-wise for this project, so they awarded it to the French company.

Wouldn't it have been better, for this country, if they would have supported the American based company?

NO
THE FRENCH ARE BETTER

Posted by wrmiller13 on 9/24/2010 11:58:00 AM (view original):
So people complain, and not necessarily wrongly so, when companies "ship jobs overseas".  Is that not what the US Government is doing here?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/28/AR2009072802617.html

http://www.usec.com/americancentrifuge_loanguarantee.htm

In a nutshell, this company, which is apparently the only American company that enriches uranium for use in Nuclear power plants, applied for a $ 2 Billion government loan guarantee.  So did a French company.  The DOE granted the guarantee to the French company.

While campaigning in Ohio in 2008, and in a subsequent letter to Ohio's governor, President Obama promised to fully support the request for the guarantee for the Ohio plant.  He may very well have done so, this is not necessarily aimed at him, more so at the entire government sponsored process.  (edit) I am not saying that we need to privatize this process, obviously it needs to be well-regulated, just that it seems a little off base here.

DOE says that the Ohio-based company was not up to snuff technology-wise for this project, so they awarded it to the French company.

Wouldn't it have been better, for this country, if they would have supported the American based company?

By not giving them government handouts, the company will be forced to become more competitive.

That's the argument against any form of individual welfare, anyway. It would seem to apply equally as well here.

Good point, anton.  It's amazing that most people can't apply that same logic to big business; I guess it's easier to throw out the socialist card.

Also when/if the Ohio-based company failed to deliver the project, these same nutjobs would be screaming about wasting our tax dollars on inept companies.

We need to find out why the change. As much as I am against hand outs and welefare, there seems to be no real analysis of why the change in policy.

I have no problem with competition, and I am certainly not in favor of corporate welfare (nor extensive individual welfare but that is a different discussion).

My issue here was the apparent double standard of being critical of companies that ship jobs overseas (in the name of lower costs and higher efficiency mind you) and then the government itself doing so.

Maybe. But the feds didn't go with the French company in the name of lower costs and higher efficiency. Apples and oranges.

Posted by antonsirius on 9/25/2010 9:36:00 AM (view original):
Maybe. But the feds didn't go with the French company in the name of lower costs and higher efficiency. Apples and oranges.

So why do you think they did it?

So if it was not lower costs or higher efficiency, than what was it?

This company is already the only one in the USA that does uranium enrichment (which speaks volumes about our governmental desire for "clean" energy IMO).  This was for a new uranium enrichment project.

For large scale energy production, not gonna get much "cleaner" than nuclear, but how long has it been since we (the orginal pioneers in nuclear energy right?) even considered building new power plants?

It's right there in the original article. wr. "DOE says that the Ohio-based company was not up to snuff technology-wise for this project." Now maybe you believe that's just "the French are cheaper/more efficient" using different words, but when it comes to uranium enrichment I'd think better technology would mean less waste product

Posted by antonsirius on 9/26/2010 11:07:00 AM (view original):
It's right there in the original article. wr. "DOE says that the Ohio-based company was not up to snuff technology-wise for this project." Now maybe you believe that's just "the French are cheaper/more efficient" using different words, but when it comes to uranium enrichment I'd think better technology would mean less waste product

the frenchies run some 80% of their nation on nuclear power - its sad the US is still so stuck on high pollutant coal.

and I actually agree with anton. If the US company wants to get up to snuff for government handouts they can first raise capital by increasing shares or finding private lenders.  As for the shipping jobs over seas argument - anyone that believes that the job market is not a worldwide market is living in a cave.  If you want to make higher paying jobs in the US more attractive than cheap labor overseas you have to provide a value (technology, efficiency, speed, tax offsets) to accommodate the higher labor costs.... we just don't do that, instead we whine that we are losing jobs to foreign countries.  we are only losing jobs to foreign countries because they are more attractive incentive-wise to US companies - not because US companies want to outsource for the hell of it.  

In poking around for information on this, it looks like there's a new facility being constructed in the US using Australian laser-based technology that will be state-of-the-art once it's up and running. So in a couple of years we should be getting those contracts - right now, though, the Ohio enrichment facility is relatively decrepit:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf28.html

The other interesting thing in that article is that the French facility is partially owned by Iran -- which means that while they don't have access to the actual enrichment technology, they do get a share of the enriched uranium the facility produces. I'm not sure whether that factored into the equation when the DOE made their decision, and in what direction that might have influenced it. It could be that if we buy more uranium from that facility, for instance, there's less of it to go to the Iranians...