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One Worldwide Power Grid
randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!
A world wide power grid mean that the whole world is connected with one power grid.
However, we all know that there are conflicts between many countries of the world. The world wide power grid would be soon a strategic element in such conflicts. One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them. But such tatic move wouldn't only affect the conflict members but the whole world. So if Bush strikes Iraq, then France, Russia and China would be sitting in the dark.
I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Telephone companies basically still have a monopoly. But the bottom line is that there's only one twisted-pair wire going to your house. Someone has to maintain it. Other phone companies can sell phone service over the teleco's wires, but that hasn't caught on. If you have different companies trying to serve the same people in the same area, you're going to have mass confusion. The system wasn't set up to work that way, and getting it to work that way will take lots of money. The government has to do a decent job of regulating the monopolies.
Electricity is only slightly different. You only have one source of electricity going to your house. It would cost A LOT of money to run new wires to your house so you could use someone else's electricity. And no one wants two ugly wires in their backyard instead of one. It's not really worth it to set up a new grid, the money would be better spent upgrading the current one. And as far as blackouts go, things like that happen, but not very often. Let's see, their power was out for 24 (maybe a little more) hours. That's 24 hours out of roughly how many hours per year? It's good reliability, and I doubt you could really get much better. Weird things can happen, and the equipment is designed to shut off rather than risk getting fried. Sometimes things don't work quite the way they're supposed to, but it's not like they could test the stuff (oh, sorry about that last blackout, we were just testing stuff. It didn't really have to happen, but we needed to see what would happen if you got a real blackout.)
I hear this complaint a lot about American news sources, that they are "incapable of reporting from non-American perspectives". But I would put it to you that no news source can honestly claim to report news from a perspective too far removed from that of the reporters.
For example, if I want to read a straight-up unadulterated Iraqi viewpoint of the war, or the outage, or anything, I'm not going to go to Fox News, I'm going to go to an Iraqi news source. British? I'll go to the BBC, or the Telegraph, or something like that. Canadian? Well, there's a-plenty of Canadian news sources on the web.
Likewise, if I want to read American perspectives on anything, I'm not going to be reading the BBC.
In fact, I'd propose that when a news source goes too far out of their way to show "the other side", they risk covering up important truths altogether. Look at how CNN deliberately squelched stories that might make the Hussein regime look bad, all to keep their "access" to Baghdad.
It is as it is. Reporting facts is one thing, reporting "perspectives" is another. It ain't an American thing, it's a human thing.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
The world is a parasitic circle jerk system, everyone screws the next little guy down the ladder and those at the bottom of the ladder are slaves for those above them. Those at the top are the oppressors and the tyrants.
You should seek professional help for your paranoia.
Human society is a system where people collaborate to achieve more than they could by themselves. So instead of having to learn how to hunt and cook and make shoes and build a home and make clothes, people can specialize in a single skill, perform it more efficiently and achieve more collectively. Money is what you use to facilitate this trade.
Mmmm.. Donuts
you mean like phone service? since they've privatized phone service in Ontario I have yet to see any improvements on rural lines. It costs WAY too much to lay lines over such a large area, and there aren't enough people to provide the necessary returns. The same would be true for electricity.
Electricity generation and distribution has been privatized in Ontario (albeit only one company "owns" the infrastructure: Hydro One) and as I understand it many of the states affected by this blackout have a similar system in place. Hydro One has not increased generation capacity significantly in recent years, and it has several nuclear plants down for maintenance right now...I have no idea what's going on in the US system.
Note that this did not help (though I won't suggest it hurt just yet). I think once the Ohio system went down we basically saw a simple case of overload on the rest of the system, which took things down. The overload was partially due to a lot of use -- it was a HOT day, but also due to a lack of generation.
What *should* have happened is bits of the grid should have been shut off, but instead the plants went down, causing a cascading effect. Note that this is all conjecture on my part as I don't have all the facts I'm sure.
Money is a *very* special case, and I'd be happy to liberalize the printing of money if that meant the dollars would have to be backed by something, rather than paper fiat-money. I wouldn't care who stamped my coin of actual gold, I know it's of value
Is it? What makes gold of value where fiat money has none? Gold is just a mineral, paper money is just paper, most money is nothing but numbers on a computer. Gold hasn't backed anything or had any "value" for a large number of years now (except as a commodity), sorry to burst your bubble my friend.
Also, what about water, etc? Seems to me that like water, electricity has become a basic necessity. Yes, it is possible to live without, but probably over 99% of people use electricity on a daily basis and cannot function without it. Roads, education, and (in Canada) health care all fall into this category too. The role of the government in a democracy is, among other things, to provide the basic necessities so they are available to everyone at a fair price. For a government to not have regulations and some control over the electricity distribution system would simply be negligence imho.