Go to Google Scholar and type in the paper's title - often there will be a link to a publically available copy of the pdf, such as is the case for reference 1.
And you sound like you made up your mind before even really digging into the literature. Your first job as a scientist is to not fool yourself.
I did exactly that actually. The only link to the study I could find in 5 minutes of searching is paywalled. I'm not going to pay $31.50 just to make a point on HN.
Based on the tables in this paper, alcohol-caused cancer is responsible for 0.8% of deaths. I don't see how the numbers in the paper could be used to calculate a value of 4% for any statistic related to alcohol+cancer.
Put that into Google Scholar (the paper title or just "guzman thc"), then click on the Cited by xxx below in the search results to find newer papers.
GW Pharma is a company doing clinical trials, and i think Canadian licenced producers of cannabis are doing trials as well (though i don't know how many are about cancer/anti-tumoral activity).
Here's a long list of research papers on cannabinoids:
Oh I know that, I mailed Cristina Sanchez about her research. I looked for the GW trial (brain metastasis IIRC) in UK but so far couldn't find any results.
thanks for the other link, I never looked at that website before.
ps: and to add to the theories, Desprez cbd research hints at ID-1 transcription regulation; ID-1 appearing to be a embryogenic-time gene, turning cells into highly mobile and differentiating regime => aggressive tumor. If CBD does interfere with ID-1 expression, it's not implausible that tumors grow much more slowly and locally, which is probably always good.
pps: one more thing, cbd and cannabinoids have a huge image problem; people just dismiss it as hippie shit.
Solar, wind & batteries will power the future. It is a question of when not if. All others will fade into oblivion. So long, and thanks for all the Joules.
This comment adds nothing and presents no argument. And I find this sentiment really hard to understand. Why bet everything on solar? Nuclear technology already exists now. In fact it's existed for quite awhile. We could have gotten rid of coal decades ago, if not for irrational fear. It may already be too late to stop climate change. Why wait another decade or two (or three...) until the kinks in solar are worked out (if they ever are...)?
It's also a bit ridiculous to point out the improvement in solar technology, and ignore everything else. Sure solar technology is improving over time. So is nuclear. And it could probably be improving a lot faster if it got the same level of interest. The major accidents everyone thinks of were all by decades old reactors. We know of much safer ways to do things, and we've learned a lot from those events.
Even coal will improve over time. All that discussion of the coming robot revolution surely applies to coal mining.
Ok, let's find some common ground: we agree current nuclear reactors "could be a lot better". With very finite uranium, coal, and oil deposits on earth these forms of energy generation are only a short-term solution. As an aside, it would also be great to save those energy supplies for a dark and rainy day.
My prediction is based on Econ 101: the cheapest solution will win.
Nuclear reactors (and coal plants) are long-term investment projects with payback over decades. If you're close to the equator, it doesn't even make sense today. And the increasing cost differential between solar and nuclear/coal will mean that zone is expanding towards the poles.
I'm sorry if you're financially or intellectually invested in nuclear, but that's what i think will happen.
Even if you look U-235 alone, we have at least a couple centuries of it using conventional reactor tech, based on the known (explored) deposits, and very conservative estimates of how many more we will discover once existing stock starts to dwindle and prices start going up. Less conservative estimates give it closer to 5-6 centuries.
Now, if we use the tech to its fullest extent - meaning U-238 breeder reactors, rather than conventional U-235 ones - then fuel supply is infinite for all practical purposes. It also by and large solves the nuclear waste problem.
The main problem with nuclear isn't price per watt, it's the upfront cost. It requires a massive initial investment before you start getting anything useful out of it, and it requires an even more massive investment to start deriving benefits from scaling up. Solar, on the other hand, can start with a very small investment, and gradually ramp up, with a smooth curve of decreasing cost as scale increases. That makes it more attractive to private sector.
Nuclear is something that pretty much requires very long term planning and subsidies of the kind that only governments are really capable of, and in the era of democratic governments and nuclear scare among the general public, it's just not happening.
Well, except for countries that don't have to care about public opinion. China, for example, is building a lot of new nuclear plants. They aren't ignoring solar, either, and they're making massive investments there as well - but they're not putting all their eggs in one basket.
I'm happy to hear uranium will last for a long time, gives us a good alternative if the sun ever stopped shining (e.g. massive volcano or asteroid). But it doesn't really change the economics.
China's newly installed solar capacity in 2016 was 34 GW and growing fast, they currently have 20 nuclear reactors under construction with a capacity of 20GW. So solar is quickly outpacing nuclear even in China, and the trend is in solar's favor.
The only saving grace that nuclear has at the moment is the lack of massive battery capacity. Electric cars are quickly changing that, and then it will be game over for nuclear.
I think that potential investors of nuclear reactors see this trend now as well, which is why interest in building new nuclear reactors in market-based economies is quickly fading (of course it depends on latitude at which point in time solar/wind dominance is reached). Quite substantial cost overruns are also typical for nuclear power plants, but rare for solar/wind.
> It's also a bit ridiculous to point out the improvement in solar technology, and ignore everything else. Sure solar technology is improving over time. So is nuclear.
The solar improvements are a lot more demonstrable, the nuclear ones are usually more theoretical due to the time and cost of building new reactors.
>In fact it's existed for quite awhile. We could have gotten rid of coal decades ago, if not for irrational fear.
Unsafe nuclear has existed for quite a while. Safe nuclear has yet to prove it's practical, which includes being cost effective against wind and solar.
> And I find this sentiment really hard to understand. Why bet everything on solar?
Parent mentioned wind and solar, and they didn't exclude others like hydro and tidal where appropriate. That's not betting everything on solar.
>All that discussion of the coming robot revolution surely applies to coal mining.
To a large extent it already has. New mines are human intensive to create, but largely automated after they're online.
This is wishful thinking. Solar, wind and batteries has tons of unsolved problems. And I have serious doubts they will be solved in the next 15-20 years.
I hear news about new "revolutionary" batteries every months for at least 20 years. But still, every device uses the same old batteries.
The biggest problem is that no system can withstand such huge alternations in amounts of generated power. Solar and wind energy isn't available 24/7 and generation can't be rapidly changed to compensate for changes in consumption.
Nuclear power presently produces ~11% of world electricity. Wind + solar can scale to that penetration level even without battery storage and in much of the world wind or solar will already deliver LCOE lower than new-build nuclear. Reaching really high penetration levels depends on presently-unknown economics of large scale storage. (Much how the success or failure of molten salt reactors and every other next-generation nuclear dream is dependent far more on delivered costs than physics.)
EDIT: I see that you were responding to someone who is already sure that storage-backed wind and solar will become the only electricity sources. That's certainly a bolder claim than scaling up to match present-day nuclear penetration levels.
Certainly Wind and Solar can scale to 11%. The question is about the other 89%. A significant chunk of it could be nuclear instead of coal and we would definitely be better off. And make no mistake, you need to choose between coal and nuclear because it'll be a long while before batteries have sufficient capacity to power the grid for days at a time.
> Certainly Wind and Solar can scale to 11%. The question is about the other 89%.
Is it still in question? If you can get to 11% then you can get to 100% with enough geographic distribution and batteries. Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal, even old unsafe nuclear never got to that point.
So may the best one of us win. My most profitable investments have been based on other people's myopia, and it is a far sweeter victory than scoring points in an online discussion forum.
Short advice: get a low-cost physically-replicating ETF covering a large part of the market (e.g. Vanguard) and dollar-cost average. This is the ultra-low-effort average returns approach.
Stock picking advice and understanding the economy:
I really recommend reading all of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders which can be found on the Berkshire Hathaway website. They are written in a down-to-earth style and offer a panoramic view of investing, from accounting issues to competitive advantages to macroeconomics. You can also see Warren's investing style evolve and him deal with various issues throughout history, from high inflation to the dot-com boom. Warren boils down many issues into easily remembered sayings ("Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy", though the sayings themselves are probably as old as the stock market itself).
Find investments that have moats is one of Warren's guiding rules, i.e. business advantages that are hard to replicate.
Learn about accounting. You don't have to learn everything, but you should know about the things that will affect your valuation of an investment. Pension contributions, stock-option accounting, etc. Come up with your own metrics to compare companies in a sector to find out who is the most efficient etc.
You will have to find an edge, something that most other people don't know, otherwise you'll just follow the crowd. Things that aren't in fashion are great places to find bargains.
Understand how a discounted cash flow (DCF) calculation works. The important part in a DCF from the point of an investor is to look at how sensitive the results are with regard to changes in the input variables (because the risk-free interest rate and size/timing of future cash flows isn't known in advance).
Understand the effect of interest rates on asset prices (see DCF calculation).
Understand the debt cycle. We are at an interesting point in time, coming ever closer to our debt-carrying capacity.
It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by insuring the plant against meltdown costs.
Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.
And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.
Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when you don't externalise so many costs.
Yeah, it'll make sense to do that when you start insuring other power plants for the environmental damage they cause.
We're not charging a carbon tax on coal plants. We're not charging drivers for the air pollution they cause in cities. If you believe the WHO when they say 7 million people die prematurely from air pollution, are you going to start making air-polluters pay for that? (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut...)
Are you insuring dams against the floods they would cause if they break?
It'd be great to do those things, but it's unreasonable to unfairly punish nuclear when you're not willing to charge other power plant technology for their expected negative externalities.
If you're going to start enacting "reasonable taxes" on negative externalities, start by getting us off of dirty energy, not by preventing us from using reusable energy.
It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.
Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.
You can't reject one form of power [as worse than existing power] because of externalities if you aren't considering the negative externalities of the existing power. It's not out of fairness, it's out of minimizing future damage.
If you aren't accurately considering the environmental damage of oil/coal/gas, then you can't say they're superior to nuclear just because you are considering its negatives.
I agree -- I look forward to a future of clean renewables, but even still wind and solar are inconsistent. Our storage systems aren't good enough to "just use batteries."[1]
We need a dependable, renewable form of energy that can bridge the gap for 80 years until our storage is good enough.
What exactly do you mean? It's too expensive? Legally impossible? No insurer would insure this?
It's a thought experiment to show what replacing wishful thinking with a tiny amount of objectivity would look like. OP was talking about expectation value of damages etc. Insurers are companies that deal with these sorts of things professionally.
The economic damages of Fukushima and Chernobyl are real and gigantic. It would be foolish to ignore them.
I would state it differently. Derivatives can be quite useful for the economy, because they allow people to offload risk, e.g. companies can hedge their commodity or exchange rate risks.
They become a problem in banks that have a lot of them ("weapons of financial mass destruction") because of their opacity on the balance sheet (DB has one line in their balance sheet for derivatives, ~ 500 billion Euros) and because banks offload their long-tail risks to their depositors and ultimately the taxpayer. The new bail-in rules mean that depositors in banks are essentially guaranteeing the bank's balance sheet. Think about that the next time you look at your bank account.
You've hit the nail on the head, the derivatives they have on their books are massive compared to shareholder equity. "Counterparty risk" are the words nobody analysing bank's derivatives positions wants to hear.
It's a terrible mistake there has never been a separation of investment banking from commercial banking in Germany (i realise the line is hard to draw), because the German taxpayer is essentially guaranteeing this shoddily run bank.
Unfortunately German politicians seem to be quite oblivious to this problem. Joe Ackermann (then CEO of DB) was giving Merkel advice on the financial crisis of 2008, so there seems to be some asymmetry of information there...
That's awfully glib. There is medical marijuana in Michigan (a relatively restrictive regime, but still) and we still have pretty big problems with prescription drug abuse and heroin. Never mind that marijuana is at least as available as other illegal drugs. It's probably even easier and cheaper to get than a prescription for opiates.
A lot of these people got hooked on opiates through a prescription from their doctor. These doctors prescribing opiates before trying medical marijuana for pain management are endangering the wellbeing and lives of their patients.
And you sound like you made up your mind before even really digging into the literature. Your first job as a scientist is to not fool yourself.