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California, 1999 emission 362.8 million tons CO2 (link). Land area is 155,959 sq.m. (403,932 sq.km.). Population (2000) 33,8 M. (link).

Picking European country with similar population... Spain, 40.3 million people, 499.542 sq km (2004) 247.2 million tons CO2 (1998, link),

So basically, you're completely failed to substatiate 89% or its connection to DU. (Your own number above is 56%; again, I think it is inaccurate, but you appear to be coming off the 89% number..) Anyways, whether 56% is true or not, 56%!=89%, also.

Incidentally, 12-18% of people 18-64 have some form of disability according to the 2000 US census. 29% is really not that much more than 18%, especially when mental/anxiety/PTSD effects are considered.

How viable is solar power? I was asking myself this question and here's the numbers I came up with.

In 2001 the USA used 96275 trillion BTUs of energy that year. This comes to 3.22 trillion watts.

Now there are about 295 million people in the US, so this comes to about 11Kw per person at any given time.

This means each person uses is responsible for 262 Kwh of power per day.

Now lets say that square meter of sunlight provides 1 kw of energy on average and the average area gets 5 good hours of sunlight per day. Looking at this chart, you can see that this assumption isn't too far off.

The typical solar panel is about 30% efficient. This means that for every square meter of solar panel would render 1.5 KwH every day.

This means that each man woman and child would need 174 square meters of panel to be responsible for all the energy made and used in their name!

If every person in the united states of America put up solar panels. We would have over 51 billion square meters of panel, that's close to 20,000 square miles of panel or the equivalent of covering most of over in panels.

Now these numbers account for all energy used both domestic, industrial, and exported. Also these numbers do not account for the added or lost efficiency of converting systems over to pure electrical power as opposed to other energy processes like those used in the internal combustion engine.

I left the links to my math in just incase I botched anything.

You do realize that abortion is considered by many to be tantamount to murder.

[...]

Don't write this behavior off to stupidity. These people are voting based on their personal ethics, not their pocketbooks.

My point is every election cycle the Republicans promise to do end abortion, or put state led prayer in public school, or prevent gays from marrying, or outlaw flag burning, or whatever, and yet every election cycle they don't. Instead they push their crony-capitalist agenda that results in lowering standards of living for the majority of Americans.

The reason why the Republicans never do anything about these social issues is that they need them to promote the idea of besiegement among their grassroot supporters. If Republicans ever did outlaw abortion, as they could today given that anti-abortion supporters currently control all three branches of the federal government, then the Republicans would lose one of their most powerful rallying cries of the past 30 years, and they're not about to do that. Instead the Republicans use abortion to get out the vote, and turn around and use that power for their wealthy backers.

Every year, the Republican grassroots are worse off than the year before. Workers are laid off, as companies take advantage of promiscuous trade policies. Every year, education cut is, so there is less opportunity of the worker to be retrained and get a new job. Every year welfare is cut, so now the worker can barely feed his kids. Every year health care costs rise. Every year, the worker falls further and further behind. Every year laws and programs that would help him are weakened. And every year, the worker laments that this year is worse than the previous one. Yet, every election he happily votes for the person who helped put him in that situation because THIS TIME he's going to "keep the sodomites down". He never realizes he's being taken advantage of, and that is dumb.

Finally, I would imagine that the cost of living in Kansas is lower than many other regions of the country. $30k might not support one person in New York City, but would probably be a nice wage in a small Kansas town.

I didn't make a comparison of the purchasing power of x dollars in one part of the country, than another. "Rich" and "poor" are relative terms, of course they are going to be defined for whatever domain (in this case geographic) you're talking about. For your information, according to the census bureau, the median household income is $40k, with a mean of $50k.

Here's a Kansan example of what I meant by the poor voting against their own interests. Kiowa County has a median household income 22% below the state average, 29% of which comes from government programs. Since 1995, it has received $40 million from farm subsidies alone Yet, that county is so desperate to get "big government off its back", in 1992, it voted to secede from Kansas. Every time they vote to eliminte these programs, they are quite literally voting to take money out of their own pockets.

As for education, don't confused schooling with learning. School is an excellent way to learn some ideas, but a very poor way to learn other ideas: Why do you think certain professions require apprenticeship? The average fulltime farmer isn't some ignorant country hick: He's a small businessman who needs to understand farming, science, finance and even a bit of law. There's a lot more to the job then digging a hole in the ground and dropping a few seeds.

It's quite interesting that you brought up the stereotype that everyone in Kansas is a farmer. They're not. In fact, one of the largest employers in Kansas is Boeing.

What really has touched me off about your "farmer's aren't dumb" comment, is that I'm willing to bet that between the two us, only one of us grew up with a cornfield less than a 100 feet from his bedroom window.

If you really live in New York City, you've got over a million households that bring in over $75,000 a year. I'm sure charging $150 for a house visit and $70 for each additional hour would not be out of the realm of what they can do.

Why not have that rate out there? If no one wants to pay it, you're in the same boat. If people pay it, now you're making more money than before. Hell, charge 10% more than the Geek Squad with people knowing they will get some good service. Now your visits are 3 to 4x what they were before...

Still not worth it?

For example, MSN can't index or find content in the Census Bureau's American FactFinder (http://factfinder.census.gov/). For a site-specific search term like "Demographic Profile", Google finds about 19,800 pages while MSN Search finds only 1,090.

Try, for example, the search term "population males per females ohio". Google's first hit is a map of the males per female for the state of Ohio. MSN Search's first hit is The Ohio Journal of Science Abstracts Volumn 104. No. 5 - December 2004 which talks about the population of white-tailed deer, roosting turkey vultures, frogs, and fish.

Which do you think is more useful?

To rub salt in the wound, the money is then mostly wasted and used inefficiently.

I've worked in state and city government, and for large corporations. The government organizations I worked for did far more with far fewer resources than any of the companies I worked for. People who choose to work in government, that I encountered, were there out of idealism that they could make a difference -- happy to be there in spite of lower wages than they could get in private industry. The companies I worked for are full of greedy bastards who think primarily of their own gain, and what they can gouge the company and the customer for.

As far as England is concerned, we also tried it before Truman's new deal. We got better education for fewer resources. I'm not saying it was perfect or that it would work exaclty the same now, only that it is certainly doable.

I consider myself a product of a public school system, in the relatively poor state of Iowa, that worked very well. Lots of local community control. Lots of parental involvement.

There was a large jump in US literacy between 1940 and 1960. I would attribute that to the rise of public education programs -- which were much less common before then.

Imagine if people had twice the resources and knew the government wasn't going to help the less fortunate for them.

They'd be buying bigger TVs, bigger SUVs, and bigger houses, sending their kinds to more expensive private schools. Every man for himself! You'll have a hard time convincing most people that, if their taxes were eliminated, that they should still pay, say, 20%, to charities.

Do you like the fact that you're paying for military protection for basicly the entire globe,

Nope. I didn't vote for people who support this agenda.

...massively subsidising whole industries like airlines,

Hmmmm. A tricky one. In general, I certainly don't favor government subsidies of businesses. But take a small town like Burlington, Iowa. If there wasn't some regulation and subsidy, the town would not be served by any airlines -- the nearest airport with a commercial airline would be 2:30 hours away.

...farm corporations, telecom, transportation,

Nope.

and paying to incarcerate and destroy the lives of millions of non-violent cannibus users?

What I find interesting is that most of these examples you cite were instituted as part of a conservative or Replublican agenda. Hmmmmm.

I used the US Census bureau list of names for a school project once (this is the 1990 listing). Wrote a small perl script that took random names from each file and put them together for a full name.
There are last names, men's first names and women's first names files.

the moral of the story is, as always: when the company and stockholders win, you better be a stockholder. because if you're an employee, you're screwed.

Could somebody explain to me how on Slashdot we get outraged when somebody without perfect technical knowledge comments on a technical issue but we mod up people who comment on economics without apparently knowing a thing about it?

It's true that sometimes employers and employees play zero-sum games: if one side wins, the other side loses. But the main activity of any company is for investors, managers, workers, suppliers, and customers to play positive-sum games, ones where everybody ends up better off. If you don't get that, you will be unable to comprend how capitalism works.

study that came out that says that outsourcing is good for the economy. but is it? what it really provides is a decline in the quality of jobs in america.

Again, you don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about. If overseas trade were such a bad thing, then wouldn't drastic increases in trade over the last few decades have resulted in drastically worse standards of living? The answer is no, because trade is generally a positive-sum game, and because the principle of comparative advantage means that trade pays off not just for poor countries, but rich ones as well.

I certainly grant that lowering trade barriers can hurt some workers, even though the populace as a whole gains. Those people we should help, but we can pay for that with plenty of room to spare out of the gains that come from freer trade.

That's just because there's approx. 90 billion people in India.
90 billion???dude even the world's population is barely over 6.4 billion..India's just over a billion.
well Indians might be sleeping on ceil^H^H^H^Hroofs, but it seems there are ppl who do hang their brains from their ceilings while /.ing

• Google provides a search engine, and sells advertising, another service
• Ditto Yahoo!
• Citibank's products are services - brokering loans and mortgages, banking, etc., - look at your bank statement - they're called "service charges" for a reason.
• Mastercard and Visa are also service companies, not manufacturers. Again, they charge merchants a percentage as a service fee.
• EBay provides an auction marketplace as a service.

You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "service industry" in an economic context - it's much more than just "billable hours". It includes "providing a service for a fee".

You might want to see this partial list of what constitutes a service industry http://www.census.gov/eos/www/napcs/napcs.htm

Includes:

• Information

  (a) producing and distributing information and cultural products, (b) providing the means to transmit or distribute these products as well as data or communications, and (c) processing data.

• Finance and Insurance

  financial transactions (transactions involving the creation, liquidation, or change in ownership of financial assets) and/or in facilitating financial transactions. Three principal types of activities are identified:
  
  Raising funds by taking deposits and/or issuing securities and, in the process, incurring liabilities. Establishments engaged in this activity use raised funds to acquire financial assets by making loans and/or purchasing securities. Putting themselves at risk, they channel funds from lenders to borrowers and transform or repackage the funds with respect to maturity, scale and risk. This activity is known as financial intermediation.
  
  Pooling of risk by underwriting insurance and annuities. Establishments engaged in this activity collect fees, insurance premiums, or annuity considerations; build up reserves; invest those reserves; and make contractual payments. Fees are based on the expected incidence of the insured risk and the expected return on investment.
  
  Providing specialized services facilitating or supporting financial intermediation, insurance, and employee benefit programs.
  
  In addition, monetary authorities charged with monetary control are included in this sector.

• Professional, Scientific and Technical Services

  professional, scientific, and technical activities for others. These activities require a high degree of expertise and training. The establishments in this sector specialize according to expertise and provide these services to clients in a variety of industries and, in some cases, to households. Activities performed include: legal advice and representation; accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services; architectural, engineering, and specialized design services; computer services; consulting services; research services; advertising services; photographic services; translation and interpretation services; veterinary services; and other professional, scientific, and technical services.
  
  This sector excludes establishments primarily engaged in providing a range of day-to-day office administrative services, such as financial planning, billing and recordkeeping, personnel, and physical distribution and logistics. These establishments are classified in Sector 56, Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services.

• Administrative and Support, Waste Management and Remediation Services

  routine support activities for the day-to-day operations of other organizations. These essential activities are often undertaken in-house by establishments in many sectors of the economy. The establishments in this sector specialize in one or more of these support activities and provide these services to clients in

And besides gaining more support for open source what other reason would someone else bother with such a project? There certainly won't be a paycheck involved if you're not worry about profit. Good intentions are fine but it doesn't pay the bills.

Gross generalisation. Open source often pays the bills. When one developer can develop a software used by millions of people the marginal cost per person is in the noise. Broken per-copy IP licensing models break this simple truth. With 6,400,000,000+ people in the world it is a statistical certainty that for popular software somebody somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to write good software.

It may be a government department not wanting their citizens to send millions of dollars overseas when a taxpayer funded programmer can do it for a few thousand. It may be a researcher who wants to investigate the technical aspects. It may be a teenager who wants to show how hot they are. It may be a retiree looking for something to do and wanting to contribute back the community. It may be a contract programmer in between jobs wanted to keep their skills up. It may be a third world programmer looking to make contacts in the first world. It may be a commercial software consumer not happy with what's available, rolling their own and not wanting to become a vendor because they prefer the good will. It may simply be a programmer pissed off with the junk available in the commercial arena.

Fact is, your rant about money being the only motivator is pathetic and a sad reflection on your tunnel-vision education.

---

DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation

A composite index measuring deprivations in the three basic dimensions captured in the human development index-- a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living--and also capturing social exclusion.

Poverty as measured by one's lifespan? That's necessarily a relative measure. Clearly we prefer people to live longer (except those people worried about world overpopulation), but developing a ranking system based off the notion that a short lifespan means living in poverty (as if this is a reasonable conclusion; if I die in a car crash at age 23, did I live a life of extreme poverty? Certainly not!) makes the measure a relative one. The index, therefore, is one which tends to favor equalization of lifespans, and thus, equalizations of the factors which may promote equal lifespans, such as education, healthcare, and yes -- income, which enables the purchase of all these factors.

Knowledge? How does one measure that, and to what degree of relevance? The knowledge of the African bushmen is irrelevant to me, yet they are far more knowledgeable in that r

A composite index measuring deprivations in the three basic dimensions captured in the human development index-- a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living--and also capturing social exclusion.

Poverty as measured by one's lifespan? That's necessarily a relative measure. Clearly we prefer people to live longer (except those people worried about world overpopulation), but developing a ranking system based off the notion that a short lifespan means living in poverty (as if this is a reasonable conclusion; if I die in a car crash at age 23, did I live a life of extreme poverty? Certainly not!) makes the measure a relative one. The index, therefore, is one which tends to favor equalization of lifespans, and thus, equalizations of the factors which may promote equal lifespans, such as education, healthcare, and yes -- income, which enables the purchase of all these factors.

Knowledge? How does one measure that, and to what degree of relevance? The knowledge of the African bushmen is irrelevant to me, yet they are far more knowledgeable in that r

• Iraq - ~16,000
• Sudan - somewhere between 7,000 and 300,000 depending on who you ask

I'm getting sick of this repetitive FUD by anonymous posters modded up. Probably marketing 'droids.

Forget philosophies. FOSS is simple statistics. With 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and widely used software it is a statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and motivation to write good software. And when one person writes it millions of people can use it. Open source software and commoditisation is simply supply-and-demand and the market in action.

---

DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation

That is news to me. Montana has a much lower population density than Texas, especially considering the route the Trans-Texas Corridor would take. This image should illustrate the point. I would like to now say "The Trans-Texas Corridor will have a speed limit."

In case you haven't noticed, China has roughly the equivalent of 3.2 Class A's assigned to it. Let's put this in proportion for a moment. According to IANA the IBM (009/8), DEC(016/8), MIT (018/8), and the US Postal Service (056/8) collectively hold more address space than China.

Why does the US Postal service require more than 1/4 of China's address space? More importantly, will they give it up when the time comes that the rest of the world needs it?

While we might not run out of address space for 20 years, I think that the author of your paper was being optimistic in assuming that the corporate world would be willing to modify its infrastructure to "play nice" with address space, shedding extra addresses and keeping everything on private networks (10/8) with only machines that need global accessibility having globally-routable IP addresses.

The IPv4 address shortage is only a myth to countries that have as much address space as they need. It is real elsewhere. China has a population of approximately 1,284,303,705 (July 2002, http://www.nationbynation.com/China/Population.htm l) with your 54,172,684 allocated addresses. That would leave one IP address for every 23 people. Compare this to the United States with 295,065,333 (December 2004, http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/popclock) having at least 6 addresses for every last man, woman, child, and infant.

All in all, I don't think that they're bitter that companies got /8's because they asked. They're bitter because they can't have as much space as they need, let alone the sort of opulent overallocation seen elsewhere. And yes, their netspace is limited, and they need it.

The need to change the system is clear, in my eyes. We are placing a higher priority on softer crimes that hurt only a corporation than we are of harder crimes where people hurt other people. The problem is not in government. Government is elected in this country by YOU. If there were enough people out there getting outraged by this, then it would stop. The real problem is that the politicians KNOW that the group of people whothis targets the most 18-30 year olds, tend not to vote anyways. So passing a law that targets them is actually a good move. "I can say I am fighting crime and not hurt the people who vote for me". Best of both worlds for them. That group of people, 18-30 yrs old, sealled their fate in the last national election. They were supposed to be out in force, they never showed up

You guys are screwwing yourselves and then complaining about it! Here are the US Census stats. Look at them yourself, 18-24, one of the largest segments of the population right now. 38 percent registered to vote. The election results say that only about 25% of those registered actually voted. 45-65 age group, 70% registered and actually nearly 75% of them voted too. Who is screwwing who here? If you actually voted, I would bet you the politicians would take sharp notice over your issues or fear losing their jobs. I would personally guarantee it! Those numbers have to drastically change before ANYTHING is going to happen though.

Well, you made me stop and think long enough to do the math.

With 12.5 % of a population of 295,000,000 at the poverty level, or 36,875,000. Following the previous poster's chart of $250 billion donated, that means that each person at the poverty level in the United States could receive $6779.66. (No links, you can do your own math.) I'd say giving each impoverished American a newer used Volvo is pretty generous. Of course, if it was donated more wisely instead of more freely, it might actually get where it is needed.

Also, if you'd care to check around on your 'American' spirit you leftist commie pinko America hating Michael Moore wannabe moron, on such sites as The World Food Programme, you might see that America normally gives more to humanitarian causes than the rest of the world combined.

If you wanted to start a "save the world" thread on slashdot, it would have probably been more beneficial and more 'interesting' to suggest we all visit thehungersite.com.

I'd also be more inclined to suggest that the author possibly donate his old PC to the local library after he upgrades or something that seems maybe a little less forceful than "screw your wants and needs, give your hard earned money away".

Btw, to the author, since you seem to be interested in SFF, the Asus S-presso has a nice look to me.

Well, you made me stop and think long enough to do the math.

With 12.5 % of a population of 295,000,000 at the poverty level, or 36,875,000. Following the previous poster's chart of $250 billion donated, that means that each person at the poverty level in the United States could receive $6779.66. (No links, you can do your own math.) I'd say giving each impoverished American a newer used Volvo is pretty generous. Of course, if it was donated more wisely instead of more freely, it might actually get where it is needed.

Also, if you'd care to check around on your 'American' spirit you leftist commie pinko America hating Michael Moore wannabe moron, on such sites as The World Food Programme, you might see that America normally gives more to humanitarian causes than the rest of the world combined.

If you wanted to start a "save the world" thread on slashdot, it would have probably been more beneficial and more 'interesting' to suggest we all visit thehungersite.com.

I'd also be more inclined to suggest that the author possibly donate his old PC to the local library after he upgrades or something that seems maybe a little less forceful than "screw your wants and needs, give your hard earned money away".

Btw, to the author, since you seem to be interested in SFF, the Asus S-presso has a nice look to me.

Yes, it does.

Found some tables from census.gov that make my point very well. From 1967 to 2001 the top 5% share of aggregate income increased from 17.5% to 22.4%. In fact the share of aggregate income for the bottom 80% declined. The top 20% increased from 43.8% to 50.1%.

This happened because while the income of the 50th percentile increased from $32,000 in 1967 to $42,000 in 2001, in the 90th percentile the numbers went from $67,000 to $113,000. At the 95th percentile, $85,000 became $150,000.

Thus, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Found some tables from census.gov that make my point very well. From 1967 to 2001 the top 5% share of aggregate income increased from 17.5% to 22.4%. In fact the share of aggregate income for the bottom 80% declined. The top 20% increased from 43.8% to 50.1%.

This happened because while the income of the 50th percentile increased from $32,000 in 1967 to $42,000 in 2001, in the 90th percentile the numbers went from $67,000 to $113,000. At the 95th percentile, $85,000 became $150,000.

Thus, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Steve: a lot of your comments in /. are on the money or at least worth a read but "as long as we have a few smart people..." is abjectly elitist and dooms us to a downward spiral...I'm sure some in the whitehouse hold the same view even if they are not aware they are one of the dimwits. and as for "...it doesn't matter how many dumb people you have..." Did you notice our recent election?
...If only 5% of students are really good at math, that is still tens of millions of students and thats more than enough to engineer world class materials and products. The other 95% will get jobs to service others,...
I don't think so. Unless you can put that 5% all in one place, they won't have anybody who understands them, or can even STAND them and they won't have anybody to compete with. Don't underestimate comptetitive instinct as a motive to drag the best performance out of people. Having a place, like MIT, doesn't seem to work either: MIT gets only a fourth of its students from other countries as a matter of policy and could easily take more if grades and test scores were the only criteria for admission. Your spin on foriegn students misses the point: we need them as much as they need us if we are going to remain a country of "the best and the brightest" and keep the old phrase "American know-how" from becoming a joke.
Lets look at your math a bit more closely:
get the census bureau demographic picture for this [or any other ] country. In our case there are only 60 million people old enough to be in school. Suppose they all were in school. Then your 5% number is 3 million, country wide, in all grades who are capable of benefitting from a more strenuous math curriculum. No school system I know can provide tutors for a gifted 5%. Or, viewed another way, only in poorer schools [class size > 20 ]would you be likely to find even one of your worthy student per classroom on average.

NO. Wrong answer, Wrong attitude. The number who could really "get" most math is closer to 50% if it were a family and community value [read the comments about Korea] to do so and the salary and community respect for teachers would attract teachers that "got" math. People are put in classrooms to learn about things. They are put in familys to care about things...but the caring predicts success for the learning.

According to the article there were 240,000 complaints in 2003, and the population of the U.S. is about 294,920,046, http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/popclock , so if my calcutations are right 240,000 / 294,920,046 * 100 = 0.081377%. That seems to be a very small percentage of the population determining what we see or hear for everybody.

You can get the coordinates of all US zip codes from a file on the US Census Bureau's web site:

http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zcta5.tx t

This file also has some other interesting stats on each zip code. FYI, there are 32,767 zip codes in the US (2^15 - 1)

Then you can parse the file and do whatever you want with it. I wrote a PHP script that puts all the stats in a database.

This simple program calculates the distance between 2 zip codes, and also generates a US map by plotting each zip code.

http://sproutworks.com/zipcode.php

If you're in the US, try this site: http://geocoder.us/. It a demo of the perl module Geo::Coder::US, available from the CPAN. Pretty hott.

It uses the Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data, which isn't the most reliable for non-urban areas, but it's public domain.

So overall, more wealth is entering into the country than is leaving. Unfortunately most of it is going into the hands of corporations, while the median standard of living continues to plummet like a rock.

Hardly. Median income dropped somewhat during the recession as one would expect, but stablized in 2003 at about the same level as 1998.

Tech jobs here are few and far between. The two ISPs here, ACS and GCI are the two biggest players outside of the state for tech jobs. Turnover is slow because there's not much to move into. Leaving Alaska for a job is tougher than elsewhere (except possibly Hawaii) due to distances. Moving in and out of Alaska is expensive with respect to time and money. For many folks, getting a tech job is a waiting game.

Corporations and locals governments aren't really interested in Alaska from a tech standpoint. Alaska, by and large, has a higher cost of living (about 30% average state-side average). That excuse only seems to go so far, especially when there's still 600,000 people living in Alaska. With the median income being about 50ka year, Alaska has high computer ownership than most other states(sorry no figures, just winging that one from memory), one would believe that there'd be ample market to exploit. With corporations and local government possessing slow turn-over and little growth in Alaska otherwise, getting a tech job is kind of hard.

Personal note: I have a tech job and I'm very happy with it. It was highly contested and I was hired in part due to my knowledge of Linux but that's a discussion for another topic.

Just look at the numbers from you own government.

FACTS:
* Residential electricity consumption is 35% of the total (not 3% as you state)

* Roofspace is not as you stated. From the census data and DOE data: The average housing unit size is 2066 sq ft. There are 107 million units. 50% of houses are 1 story (roof=sq footage). The other 50% are 2 story or more (Census), which I estimated roof space is half of living space (this averages in the added garage roof space of some with the loss of roof space to 3 or more levels). The result was increased by 6% for the added area of the average roof slope. Commercial was 67 billion sqft. If you want to do a more detailed analysis, It would be great, send it to me. The average single family unit is 2527 sqft which I didn't use in these calcs, and are 88% of total housing units, so these numbers are likely underestimating roof space by around 15% or so. However the outcome will not likely be more than +/-10%.

* Of course not all roofs will be usable. The point is to get perspective on the land area needed. Even if 1/3 of roofs are usable, then problem solved. If you don't use roofs, the land area required is still VERY small. THE LAND AREA IS NOT THE SIZE OF TEXAS! With 17% panels on trackers the land area is a 46 mile square - 22% smaller than Dugway Proving grounds OR 0.8% THE SIZE OF TEXAS. With multijuction concentrators, its less than half of that. The problem here is you've been programmed to believe it should take a huge amount of space, BUT IT JUST DOESN'T. Clear yet?

*OK Say you want to replace ALL the US energy with solar(oil, coal, Natural Gas, wood, etc). How much land would it take? The US uses 98.3 Quads a year, or 2.88E13 kWh. Using 40% efficient multijunction concentrators ($1/Wp!) on trackers in average location (Kansas City) you get 964 kWh/m^2/year. LAND REQUIRED: a 100 mile square. OR 4% the size of Texas! VERY SMALL! 1/10th the 290,000 km^2 number you cite (Reference for this number please).

*Obviously once you see the real numbers - infrastructure isn't a problem. In fact a distributed PV system, some on roofs, some in local grids, some in large arrays would reduce distribution and transmission infrastructure substantially

averages 170 W/m^2 when it reaches the ground.

Yikes! Here the first problem with your calculations! Solar insolation is 1300 W/m^2 outside the atmosphere, 1000 W/m^2 on the ground in peak sun conditions. NOT 170! (look it up yourself you'll find tens of thousands of refs on Google)

expect to use intermittently depending on weather and time of year.

insolation FOR A FIXED panel at an angle equal to latitude provides an average of 6 hours of peak sun per day in the average US location. (of course the solar insolation is changing based on time of day. However this is how it is specified in the industry: pre-integrated to an equal number of peak hours). That equals 2190 kWh/m^2/year. Some locations a little more, some a little less. With trackers this goes up 25-50%. See the National Renewable energy laboratory insolation database and mapservers for more data.

inefficiency of incorrect angles in capturing the energy

Already considered see above numbers are already based on tilted fixed panels. Trackers of course improve the angle and thus the energy, but I'm giving a simple case, not best case.

storage costs, maintenance costs, spacing inefficiencies

Spacing is accounted for, 17% is total edge to edge module efficiency not cell efficiency. Maintenance costs, essentially are none (solid state revolution man) no moving parts, no dusting, no snow removal required (the benefits of dusting/cleaning has been proven to be of small benefit. less than 4%). Storage is an issue. There are many storage technologies and they do cost money (some solar technologies, not PV, are self storing such as Solar 2's phase change salt storage). However, energy profile on the grid tracks the solar cycle closely. 40%-60% of our energy could be replaced without substantial storage added to the system. (another 20-30% could come from wind, as the Dutch have shown, and the base load could be largely provided with geothermal, biomass, and wave. Thought I do think storage is an important piece of the puzzle.)

I don't know where you got your 'roof space' figure (2.43e11) but it seems high

From the 2000 census data for households and the DOE for commercial buildings

From the CIA factbook we use 3.602 * 10^13 kwH.

The number you show is ENERGY consumption NOT ELECTRICITY consumption, and its a little too high (I guess the are spooks not energy experts). From the Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration total energy consumption is 2.88E13 kWh. The total US ELECRICITY consumption is 3.4E12 kWh - which is what we are talking about.

Don't get me wrong, I really *want* to believe that solar is our best bet.

Today is your lucky day. The numbers are very much right (as you can now see). And we didn't have to even invoke any extra land consumption OR higher efficiency cells OR Dye-sensitized solar cells which can be used as windows on high rise buildings, etc. PV is amazing stuff with incredible potential, 40% annual market growth, prices are nearing $1/peak watt (33

And just for the long term, can you provide your definition of "middle class"?

If we're talking lifestyle:

In the Midwest, $60,000 to $150,000 annual gross income. $150,000 to $250,000 would be "upper middle class". $250,000 to $1,000,000 would be "lower upper class". I say this because a "middle class lifestyle" should be supportable on a single income, and that income should be enough to house, clothe, raise, and send off to college two to three children. Like it was through the 50's and 60's.

Now if we're talking actual gross income (look here for these numbers):

$33,314 to $83,500 would be "middle class": 40th percentile to 80th percentile, covering 40% of the population. $83,501 to $150,498 could be "upper middle class", making anything over $150,499 "upper class".

Do you feel middle class now?

But according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward Prescott, if your household is making less than $200,000 annually, you must be pretty lazy since it's "easy" to do.

Oddly enough, the only reason I had the stats handy was because a co-worker of mine seemed to think that the 3.5 Mil that Bush won by this year was some huge margin, and I looked at the last 80 years of elections (I used encyclopedia britannica's site for the numbers, they have it laid out fairly nicely) and pointed out to him that only 5 races since 1920 (or 1924, not sure anymore) were decided by fewer votes, and most had nowhere near 110 million people voting. So your comment came up at just the right time for me to know the numbers on it.

But anyway, I actually think that the numbers of Republicans and Democrats are roughly equal, but that Republicans are more likely to vote.

(spouting from memory here, so if these stats are wrong my apologies, but I think they're close):

The 18-24 demographic polled at better than 60-40 in favor of Kerry, and yet that group is known to have the lowest voter turnout percentages.

The census bureau has a report from the 2000 elections that's kind of interesting:
election report

At the risk of continuing an offtopic thread.

How ignorant some people are. Of the total U.S. working population the percentage of farmers are 0.7% (951,810 out of 129,721,512). California by contrast have 1.3% farmers (196,695 out of 14,718,928). Last time I checked California voted Democrat, only beaten by NY, RI, VT, DC, MD, and MA. Instead of looking at the US map showing state electorates won, try looking for a map where counties are displayed to get a more accurate view of vote distribution.

If Bush only counted on the farmers he would have barely beaten Nader with his 0.3% national vote.

At the risk of continuing an offtopic thread.

How ignorant some people are. Of the total U.S. working population the percentage of farmers are 0.7% (951,810 out of 129,721,512). California by contrast have 1.3% farmers (196,695 out of 14,718,928). Last time I checked California voted Democrat, only beaten by NY, RI, VT, DC, MD, and MA. Instead of looking at the US map showing state electorates won, try looking for a map where counties are displayed to get a more accurate view of vote distribution.

If Bush only counted on the farmers he would have barely beaten Nader with his 0.3% national vote.

1) Reject all voters who have voted for one party eversince they began voting! Obviously, these do not think through any issues or let alone care about anything but the party affiliation.

2) Put strict limits on who can vote - reject people without at least a college degree because we don't want an ignoramus who barely made it through high school and doesn't know which ocean is on the western side of the United States voting for anyone....

Leave voting to the educated 24 or so percent of the population. This way you preclude idiots and unwashed masses who choose a candidate based on looks or some such peripheral bullshit trait... This way you also eliminate bible-thumping, inbred, toothless dickweeds, oh and by the way, most of the states that voted for Bush....

I still cannot believe Bush won...

No, he said Deficit, not Debt.
Full appologies then, Let's calculate how much you owe for the past four years, and based on that tabulate the next 4 year trend. Your average Daily Deficit Is $5.67 per day With 365.25 days per year over the past four years, $8,283.87 was how much bush cost you for his first term, assuming a constant rate of deficit spending, your total bill for 8 years of Dubya is $16,567.74 per person...
That's just over half the median* income of an african american family in 2001.

*=http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p60-218.pd f

> The electoral college ensures this since electoral representation is determined based on raw population data from the census.

This is not exactly true as, "Each State is allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each State's population as determined in the Census)." http://www.fec.gov/pages/ecworks.htm

So small states actually get more electoral votes per person than larger states. In the example below D.C. gets 3 electoral votes representing 570,000 people while California gets 1 electoral vote for each 616,000 people.

For Example:
California
pop = 33,900,000
electoral votes = 55
each electoral vote represents 616,000+

Texas
pop = 20,900,000
electoral votes = 34
each electoral vote represents 615,000

Ohio
pop = 11,400,000
electoral votes = 20
each electoral vote represents 570,000

Tennessee
pop = 5,700,000
electoral votes = 11
each electoral vote represents 518,000

District of Columbia
pop = 570,000
electoral votes = 3
each electoral vote represents 190,000

NOTE: Data from 2000 census http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/

"You sort of suspect that Californians and New Yorkers might be a tad more educated and informed than Montanans and Kansans?"

And you would sort of not be right.

According to the Education State Rankings Annual Survey, New York does indeed rank higher at 6th, with Montana at 10th, Kansas at 15th, and California dragging in at 43rd.

Basically, though, you just picked a couple bad examples, since most of the "Red" states do come in the bottom half...

However, that survey mainly looks at k-12 education quality...maybe not quite what we're looking for.

According to the census, the rankings for high school and college graduates as a percent of total population are as follows (in that order):

New York: 82.0% (t-33), 29.3% (12)
California: 79.0% (t-44), 28.5% (13)
Montana: 88.3% (7), 24.8% (t-23)
Kansas: 87.5% (12), 26.7% (18)

So MT and KS have more high school graduates, but less college graduates (although they are above average, unlike NY and CA on HS grads). Seems pretty inconclusive either way.

My personal observations growing up in a blue upper midwest state (rural), and living in a red western state (rural), blue midwest state (urban), and a red midwest state (urban), spending significant time in an eastern blue state (urban), and spending the last 7+ years at institutions of higher learning are:

1) There are idiots in equal quantities everywhere without any regard to political affiliation.
2) People in rural areas tend to have a better understanding of urban issues than urban residents do of rural issues, although I wouldn't consider the majority of either group well informed about the other.
3) People in the rural west are more socially liberal and fiscally conservative than those in the rural midwest. Urban dwellers are more socially and fiscally liberal than both.
4) Degrees don't necessarily mean someone is informed or intelligent.

"You sort of suspect that Californians and New Yorkers might be a tad more educated and informed than Montanans and Kansans?"

And you would sort of not be right.

According to the Education State Rankings Annual Survey, New York does indeed rank higher at 6th, with Montana at 10th, Kansas at 15th, and California dragging in at 43rd.

Basically, though, you just picked a couple bad examples, since most of the "Red" states do come in the bottom half...

However, that survey mainly looks at k-12 education quality...maybe not quite what we're looking for.

According to the census, the rankings for high school and college graduates as a percent of total population are as follows (in that order):

New York: 82.0% (t-33), 29.3% (12)
California: 79.0% (t-44), 28.5% (13)
Montana: 88.3% (7), 24.8% (t-23)
Kansas: 87.5% (12), 26.7% (18)

So MT and KS have more high school graduates, but less college graduates (although they are above average, unlike NY and CA on HS grads). Seems pretty inconclusive either way.

My personal observations growing up in a blue upper midwest state (rural), and living in a red western state (rural), blue midwest state (urban), and a red midwest state (urban), spending significant time in an eastern blue state (urban), and spending the last 7+ years at institutions of higher learning are:

1) There are idiots in equal quantities everywhere without any regard to political affiliation.
2) People in rural areas tend to have a better understanding of urban issues than urban residents do of rural issues, although I wouldn't consider the majority of either group well informed about the other.
3) People in the rural west are more socially liberal and fiscally conservative than those in the rural midwest. Urban dwellers are more socially and fiscally liberal than both.
4) Degrees don't necessarily mean someone is informed or intelligent.

So, by your system Wyoming and North Dakota who both have slightly over 1 million people put together should be able to out-vote all 35.4 million people in California (see population numbers here)? Now how is that fair? Or is your definition of "fair" one that most people are not familiar with?

How the hell can anything be fairly voted on when 22% of the counties effectively control 50% of the vote.

This pretty-much explains why the Electoral college is so important.

Without it, a handful of states would control the elections, based on population alone. (California, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and New York come to mind.) Because of the EC, the combined population of a few states don't (necessarily) out-vote the population of the rest of the country.

I realize that I'm comparing apples with oranges, but the idea is this: there are a few counties in California that have a deciding influence on the results of elections there. By the same token, California (as a state) COULD have a deciding influence over presidential elections, were it not for the EC.

For an example: California has 55 electoral votes. This is the same as the combined electoral votes of the six New England states (ME, NH, VT, CT, RI and MA) and Pennsylvania. The combined population of those seven states is 26,486,610 (based on 2003 estimates), compared with California's 35,484,453. This looks to me like the EC helps to even-out the pull a state has over others. If we went by population, one populous state would be able to have a greater numerical pull than it does now.

So, I will cede the point that there is no historical evidence that a rise in minimum wage has an impact on national unemployment or real GDP per capita growth. I decided to look at real income per capita as well (the data I found only went to 1967-2001) and there is a very loose correlation between unemployment and per-capita income growth (R-squared .4) but, again, there was no correlation between minimum wage growth and real income growth.

I guess what we have learned here is that minimum wage doesn't really have any correlation with unemployment, personal income growth, or GDP growth - on a national scale. However, if I'm a pizza shop owner and I can afford $100 worth of salary per day, if minimum wage goes up that means I can a)hire fewer workers or b)keep the same number of workers for fewer hours each. The latter scenario basically keeps unemployment and income rates the same - the difference is that folks have more free time to possibly have more than one job. Hrm. There's an interesting idea that I'll have to pursue a little further I think...

Yes but your 55 electoral votes represent 35.5M people. The three votes in Wyoming represent 500,000 people (which is, incidentally, fewer citizens than live in the District of Columbia by 100,000 citizens). Per citizen, Wyoming has 3.8 times the power in the Electoral College than does California. The swing-state dynamics change over time; small-state power does not.

California would give its left nut to get rid of the Electoral College; Wyoming will hold on to the death.

'Cuz I do! The U.S. Census Bureau says that there was only maternal one death per 100,000 births in 2001.

Considering that most American Business are small (less then 10 people) lets think about our options...

Option A - Bush: give a tax cut for hiring a welfare person.

Option B - Kerry: Tax the evil owners and give more money to welfare people...

Hmmm.....

the first reason is archaic. that makes sense for the days when things travelled by horse, but that's not necessary anymore.

your second reason is a bit odd. does california really have over half the population of the country? i find that hard to believe. in fact this proves otherwise. and don't say you were just making a point.

and your third (and supposedly most important) is a simple attack on the democrats, which you, obviously, are not. do you realize that george bush is making the federal government stronger than ever? homeland security, the patriot act, his proposed amendment to the FEDERAL constitution banning gay marriage (an issue that is traditionally left to the states to decide on and isn't even addressed in the constitution). also, you say that we need equal voting power in each state, but you're wrong there as well. we don't have that with the electoral college. it gives more voting power to big states and the smaller states that no one gives 2 shits about don't matter (such as your example of RI, where i happen to live). my vote here doesn't matter. i'm going to vote anyways, but RI will elect kerry, but the 4 electoral votes we get won't affect the outcome. so it looks like you're wrong there as well. your argument is weak. with the electoral college, you just need to win in a handful of states. it doesn't matter if you win the popular vote in that state by a margin of 2 votes either. maybe the electoral system worked 200 years ago when it was created, but in the modern united states, it doesn't work, at least not the way the electoral votes are handed out in every state.