Slashdot Mirror

microplastics grow up to be room-sized Barney action figures.

Everyone wants to make money on their homes, not just Californians

Well yes, but you asked about California. This graph makes clear that it's a supply problem in California. Unless you want people to leave the state.

If you want to talk about other areas of the country, you have this sort of angry citizen showing up to city council meetings:

“Have you considered the racket and the lights and the crowds and the traffic, and everything that’s going to happen to those of us who live here?”
It is a familiar sight in America: the public meeting, the angry residents, the housing developer trying to explain himself over the boos.
“Take the money you’ve got and get out of here,” one person shouts. A chant begins: “Oppose! Oppose! Oppose!”

And of course, this sort of thing happens in California, too. For years there's been a billboard along highway 580 opposing new housing in the bay area.

Less than a decade ago, /. went into meltdown because a Swedish car company proposed that future cars would have welded hoods (bonnets) and not be user serviceable.

Looks like the prediction was wrong, though. Future cars will instead let you store your luggage under the hood, since there's no need to put an engine there anymore.

And so is pointing guns at law enforcement. But hey, they're white!

And in several cases, in custody today or even dead. What's your point?

the guys at the original Bundystock got a free pass for promising to shoot people http://static2.businessinsider... http://www.reviewjournal.com/s... http://graphics8.nytimes.com/i... http://www.trbimg.com/img-536a... http://www.motherjones.com/fil... the new bunch overgeneralized from that.

> Florida gets half to one quarter the solar energy at the rooftop that California

Where did you POSSIBLY come up with that?!

Bakersfield gets 1461 kWh/kW/year
Tampa gets 1364 kWh/kW/year

Here, do it yourself if you don't believe me:

http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/pvwatts/version1/

I got it from eyeballing http://www.trbimg.com/img-53e6... so why does that map show FL in green not yellow? Apparently whoever chose the color scale on that map made the yellow band way too narrow.

but yes, that was very very inaccurate rough math.

I'm sure Bakersfield is the entire state of California.

Now if you don't believe that Bakersfield fills the entire state you could look for areas with higher solar insolation.

For example

Victorville, CA Annual Avg. (kWh/m2/day): 8.15 vs
Tamp, FL Annual Avg. (kWh/m2/day): 4.98

Nope it isn't twice the solar insulation but it's getting up there.

So edit my erroneous statement to something more like:

No the cost isn't just being subsidized. Florida gets half to 3/4 the solar energy at the rooftop that California gets to for the same power usage you have to install more panels.

Another factor is hurricanes. In California you can use cheaper panels because they don't have to be rated to withstand hurricane force winds. Even if you use the same number of panels in an Florida installation you'll have to pay for more expensive panels and more expensive mounting brackets/rail systems. Everything has to be stronger in a state that is likely to see a hurricane every few years when the panels would otherwise last >30 years.

With no subsidy in either state you'd still spend more for solar PV to get the same power in Florida.

My property line also extends upwards. [latimes.com]

The drone pictured in that story looks like a flying penis

Finnish grocery plastic bags are really hard-core compared to American grocery plastic bags.

Finnish plastic bags are sturdy enough for carrying heavy loads (~ 10 kg, easily) and are relatively to comfortable to carry. They can be, and are regularly, reused for numerous purposes including recurring visits to the grocery store.

In contrast, the American bags are film-thin; you need two plastic bags to carry a single gallon of milk. The handles drill into your finger joints with considerable pain. When you get home, you don't think twice before chucking the plastic bags in a trash bin.

There's also the problem that zoning departments (in Miami, at least) have this fetish with imposing street-level boutique retail that's economically non-viable due to small size and limited parking. You can walk all over downtown Miami and see buildings with street-level boutique-sized retail spaces that can't get leased (or stay leased, because the tenants go bankrupt within months). But if a developer planning a square-block skyscraper wants to configure the space for one huge urban big-box store in the basement with 6 floors of free parking for shoppers stacked above it and the tower's ground-floor lobby, the New Urbanists get all bitchy about it (example store from New York: http://www.trbimg.com/img-4f897067/turbine/chi-best-buy-20120414/600 )