1960's: We sent people to the moon 1970's: We put a space station into low earth orbit 1980's: We had frequent flights to LEO with a reusable craft. 1990's: We had occasional flights to LEO with a reusable craft. 2000's: We managed to get people into orbit with a craft that might get used two more times before the end of its life.
"My first guess was... 5 megawatts... However,... [analysis showing that 120 Megawatts is more likely]."
Also, you can't borrow $425 million today and expect to pay back $490 million over the next 20 years, even if you are a local government that can issue tax-free municipal bonds.
...generating about 120 megawatts of electricity per day
120 megawatts per day? So, after about 8 days, it'll be generating a gigawatt? In a year, will it be producing 43.8 gigawatts?
Probably not.
My first guess was that it's probably generating 120 megawatt-hours per day, or what those of us who know physics would call "5 megawatts".
They say that they'll use about 1/3 of the generated energy, and plan to sell the remainder back to the grid. Electricity is usually worth something like $20-$50 / MWh. If they're selling 3.3MW into the grid, they might be able to get $1600 - $4000 / day from this thing.
However, they also say that they can recoup their $425M investment in 20 years. Assuming a 4% interest rate (municipal borrowing is cheap!), they'd need to pay back a little over $2.5 million per month, or about $85,000 per day.
If the power plant is actually generating 120 megawatts, then they're looking at (80*24) megawatt-hours per day, or $38,400 - $96,000. They're also selling steam and sludge, and I don't know what the current market value of those is. Yes, I know that you pay $60 - $100 / megawatt-hour for your home electric service, but electricity on the bulk market (especially at night) is a lot cheaper.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU GOD DAMNED AMERICANS?
To all non-Americans, but Kidbro in particular... next time you're talking with your friends about how stupid Americans are because they elected George Bush, remember this whole discussion. The modern expansion of sexual-harassment laws to the point that men are afraid to even talk to women at work has been driven almost entirely by left-leaning interest groups, specifically, feminists and trial lawyers. While "no dating" might sound like a prudish Christian policy, it's in fact driven by the kind of people that would be in power had we elected Kerry or Gore two or six years ago. I've worked at both left-leaning and right-leaning workplaces, and I'd feel much safer dating at work at a right-leaning place.
Other things that Democrats like Kerry support that result in people voting for Republicans: Our insane lawsuit system with no 'loser-pays'. Pretty much this whole greivance- and fear-based employment system, but also for nonwhites. (Indians and Asians excepted, of course) Our mind-bogglingly complex tax system. Restrictions on smoking in public, and the up-and-coming restrictions on food. That property-rights case last summer where the court decided that it'd be just fine to take your house as long as it was being sold to someone richer. An absolute right for a 12-year-old to get a partial-birth abortion on demand without parental notificaiton.
You misunderstood -- I said to get a $60k/year job, and pretend that you have a $30k / year job. I earn $60k / year, and if I invested every other paycheck, I would be putting away over $22k / year. I'm 30 years old. If I were to from here on out pretend that I only made $30k / year, and invest the difference at 12%, I'd have over <pinky>Ten Million Dollars</pinky> in assets by the time I was 65.
I save at a much lower rate than that, but I also get to drive a nicer car, live in a bigger house, go out to lunch with my coworkers daily, and so on. This is a choice I have made, and I recognize that it is a choice I have made. I don't resent other, wealthier people who have made different choices.
On the other hand, while $30k / year isn't a lavish lifestyle, it's not exactly where-is-my-next-meal-coming-from either.
As for Berkshire's returns, I used the data in their most recent shareholder letter, in which Buffet claims a 305,134% total return from 1965 to 2005, or 21.5% / year.* That's the growth in Berkshire's per-share book value, not necessarily its stock price.
This is the true path to wealth that any American can follow: Spend less than you earn. Invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
* That's right kids! If you're young, every dollar you spend today could instead be $3000+ waiting for you at retirement!
Is there any way for a person born into the 'middle class' of American society (access to education, minimal crime suburban living) to make 20 million, much less 35 million, before they are too old to go to space? Let's arbitrarily choose a cutoff age of 60.
Starting at age 25, get a reasonably well-paying job like computer programmer, earning $60,000 per year. Pretend that you got a normal job earning $30,000 per year and live the lifestyle of a $30k/year earner. Thanks to taxes, you'll have about $18,000 per year to invest.
Put your $18,000 per year into the stock market, and invest wisely enough that you get a 13% return. Historically, the stock market has returned about 12%/year, so you'll need to be a bit better than average. Learn how the market works and learn how to find companies that are undervalued. For reference, for the 41 years between 1965 and 2005, Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's company) returned an average of over 21%.
The total value of your holdings will pass $20,000,000 after about 40 years, when you're 65 years old. If you can match Buffet, it'll only take 28 years, and after 40 years, you'll have almost $300 million.
lets you see the formulas involved and play with their little Javascript calculator, though it only allows contributions of up to $9999 per year. You can enter $18 / year and multiply the end result by 1000.
Do the math on it. Imagine that GM had access to some magical technology that would double (triple?) gas mileage, or allow them to create an electric car with a 300 mile range and a 2-minute recharge time. Figure out how much that technology would be worth to GM -- and therefore how much you'd have to pay them to not use it. Figure out how much profit an oil company (or parent company with an interest in oil) would lose if such technology were introduced, and therefore the maximum that they'd be willing to spend to supress the technology. Under any reasonable set of starting conditions, the former is always greater than the latter.
Maybe they wouldn't need to be bribed. Maybe threats or captitalist solidarity would cause them to choose not to put the new technology in their car. In that case, though, Ford might. Or Kia. Or BMW. Or Ferrari. Or Honda. Or some car company in India that you've never heard of. Or John Deere might find out about it and get into the car business. There are easily a hundred companies in the world that could exploit such a technology if they knew of its existence.
A 250 mile range gets an electric car into the "very practical" range IMO.
The problem with an electric car that has a 250 mile range is that it is utterly worthless if you want to go somewhere 251 miles away -- or make a round trip to somewhere 126 miles away.
In my gasoline-powered car, I can stop at any filling station and add energy to its energy storage system at a rate of around 20 - 25 megawatts. What kind of electrical connections would you have to have to charge a battery at that rate? What kind of battery could absorb that much power?
Why would car companies supress innovations in vehicles? They'll gladly sell you anything that you're willing to pay them for, so long as what you're willing to pay is higher than their cost of producing it.
Secondly, we need to ensure that we do not kick up a lot of moon dust. This will have an impact to the immediate area around the mine, the equipment and the colony, and possibly further afield.
Kicking up moon dust doesn't work the same way on the moon as it does on Earth, because the moon has no atmosphere. Remember that science experiment you did in school where you dropped two rocks of two different sizes, and they fell to the ground at the same speed? That experiment works on the moon no matter how big the rocks are, even if the 'rock' is a microscopic dust particle. Any object on the moon falls immediately to the ground. Clouds of dust cannot exist on the moon, because there's no air to hold them up.
Actually, a bugle is the equivalent of a trumpet with all the buttons locked in the 'up' position. A bugle is therefore limited to a subset of the notes that a trumpet can play, and all bugle songs are made up of that subset. A trumpet player can play a song on the bugle -- especially a simple one like 'taps' -- without any training beyond maybe a five-minute practice session.
[Responding to "It's a 105-inch screen at 12 feet...] I'd say it creats the illution of watching a 1 inch screen at a distance of 1 inch.
This is a wild guess, but...
Your eye can't focus on anything one inch away. Hold your finger up to your eyeball and try to see your fingerprint. Unless you're very nearsighted, you simply can't focus your eye that close. So, along with the small screen, there is also a lens in front of that screen that works together with the lens in your eye -- when it's focused at 12 feet away -- to make what is essentially a microscope.
(1) The United States of America is the only country in the world with the word 'America' in its official name. Search the CIA World Factbook if you don't believe me. The only possible exception is the Territory of American Samoa, which is not an independent country.
(2) The official name of that country to the USA's south is Estados Unidos Mexicanos.
"American" is therefore unambiguous. "United Statesian" and similar constructions are not.
Here in scenic Idaho, we have a senator named Mike Crapo. His campaign signs always have a nice, tasteful line of stars over the a in his name. I'm guessing he's a bit sensitive about mispronunciations.
Either Firefox or Slashdot won't show the character 257.
Sony is such a big company - the PS3 guys have absolutely nothing to do with the recent audio-cd issues.
The Sony Playstation people I have spoken to / met (both online and in real person) all seemed nice and down-to-earth - not evil, moneygrabbing monsters.
Too bad for them. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. If they don't like it, they can go form their own company that doesn't put the word "Sony" on their products.
Nope. Let's say we have two people in a ship going.99c, one in front and one in back. The guy in the back shoots a red laser towards the front. Here's what an external observer would see:
Guy #1 pulls out and holds up a red laser. He shoots the beam. Because he's firing forward, the beam gets blue-shifted and heads up the hallway towards the front guy. A short while later, the front guy has a bunch of blue (ultraviolet? green? I'm too lazy to do the math right now) photons hit him. However, he's moving away from their source, so they get red-shifted back down to red. As long as the two aren't moving relative to each other, any red/blue shift will cancel each other out. The opposite happens if the front guy shoots a laser towards the guy in the back.
Note that this is also *exactly* what an observer flying past your house at.99c would see if you and a friend shot red lasers down the hall at each other.
Slashdot Mirror
1960's: We sent people to the moon
1970's: We put a space station into low earth orbit
1980's: We had frequent flights to LEO with a reusable craft.
1990's: We had occasional flights to LEO with a reusable craft.
2000's: We managed to get people into orbit with a craft that might get used two more times before the end of its life.
That's the residential retail price -- not the price that a power station can expect to get selling power to the grid.
I pay about $2.75 / gallon for milk at the local grocery store. That's not what a farmer gets for owning a cow that produces a gallon of milk.
Ahem.
... However, ... [analysis showing that 120 Megawatts is more likely]."
From my earlier post:
"My first guess was... 5 megawatts
Also, you can't borrow $425 million today and expect to pay back $490 million over the next 20 years, even if you are a local government that can issue tax-free municipal bonds.
You know, I could swear that when I checked it about two hours ago, the article (and not just the summary) said "megawatts per day".
According to the text at the bottom of the page, the article was updated about five minutes after I posted my initial analysis. USA Today is quick!
120 megawatts per day? So, after about 8 days, it'll be generating a gigawatt? In a year, will it be producing 43.8 gigawatts?
Probably not.
My first guess was that it's probably generating 120 megawatt-hours per day, or what those of us who know physics would call "5 megawatts".
They say that they'll use about 1/3 of the generated energy, and plan to sell the remainder back to the grid. Electricity is usually worth something like $20-$50 / MWh. If they're selling 3.3MW into the grid, they might be able to get $1600 - $4000 / day from this thing.
However, they also say that they can recoup their $425M investment in 20 years. Assuming a 4% interest rate (municipal borrowing is cheap!), they'd need to pay back a little over $2.5 million per month, or about $85,000 per day.
If the power plant is actually generating 120 megawatts, then they're looking at (80*24) megawatt-hours per day, or $38,400 - $96,000. They're also selling steam and sludge, and I don't know what the current market value of those is. Yes, I know that you pay $60 - $100 / megawatt-hour for your home electric service, but electricity on the bulk market (especially at night) is a lot cheaper.
To all non-Americans, but Kidbro in particular... next time you're talking with your friends about how stupid Americans are because they elected George Bush, remember this whole discussion. The modern expansion of sexual-harassment laws to the point that men are afraid to even talk to women at work has been driven almost entirely by left-leaning interest groups, specifically, feminists and trial lawyers. While "no dating" might sound like a prudish Christian policy, it's in fact driven by the kind of people that would be in power had we elected Kerry or Gore two or six years ago. I've worked at both left-leaning and right-leaning workplaces, and I'd feel much safer dating at work at a right-leaning place.
Other things that Democrats like Kerry support that result in people voting for Republicans: Our insane lawsuit system with no 'loser-pays'. Pretty much this whole greivance- and fear-based employment system, but also for nonwhites. (Indians and Asians excepted, of course) Our mind-bogglingly complex tax system. Restrictions on smoking in public, and the up-and-coming restrictions on food. That property-rights case last summer where the court decided that it'd be just fine to take your house as long as it was being sold to someone richer. An absolute right for a 12-year-old to get a partial-birth abortion on demand without parental notificaiton.
Politics over here is more than just Iraq.
The same reason that we use explosives in car air bags -- If you want it to operate quickly enough to matter, nothing else will do.
You misunderstood -- I said to get a $60k/year job, and pretend that you have a $30k / year job. I earn $60k / year, and if I invested every other paycheck, I would be putting away over $22k / year. I'm 30 years old. If I were to from here on out pretend that I only made $30k / year, and invest the difference at 12%, I'd have over <pinky>Ten Million Dollars</pinky> in assets by the time I was 65.
I save at a much lower rate than that, but I also get to drive a nicer car, live in a bigger house, go out to lunch with my coworkers daily, and so on. This is a choice I have made, and I recognize that it is a choice I have made. I don't resent other, wealthier people who have made different choices.
On the other hand, while $30k / year isn't a lavish lifestyle, it's not exactly where-is-my-next-meal-coming-from either.
As for Berkshire's returns, I used the data in their most recent shareholder letter, in which Buffet claims a 305,134% total return from 1965 to 2005, or 21.5% / year.* That's the growth in Berkshire's per-share book value, not necessarily its stock price.
This is the true path to wealth that any American can follow: Spend less than you earn. Invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
* That's right kids! If you're young, every dollar you spend today could instead be $3000+ waiting for you at retirement!
Starting at age 25, get a reasonably well-paying job like computer programmer, earning $60,000 per year. Pretend that you got a normal job earning $30,000 per year and live the lifestyle of a $30k/year earner. Thanks to taxes, you'll have about $18,000 per year to invest.
Put your $18,000 per year into the stock market, and invest wisely enough that you get a 13% return. Historically, the stock market has returned about 12%/year, so you'll need to be a bit better than average. Learn how the market works and learn how to find companies that are undervalued. For reference, for the 41 years between 1965 and 2005, Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's company) returned an average of over 21%.
The total value of your holdings will pass $20,000,000 after about 40 years, when you're 65 years old. If you can match Buffet, it'll only take 28 years, and after 40 years, you'll have almost $300 million.
This page:
http://www.moneychimp.com/articles/finworks/fmbas
lets you see the formulas involved and play with their little Javascript calculator, though it only allows contributions of up to $9999 per year. You can enter $18 / year and multiply the end result by 1000.
In other words, if you're going to own an electric car, you also need to own a real car. Got it.
Do the math on it. Imagine that GM had access to some magical technology that would double (triple?) gas mileage, or allow them to create an electric car with a 300 mile range and a 2-minute recharge time. Figure out how much that technology would be worth to GM -- and therefore how much you'd have to pay them to not use it. Figure out how much profit an oil company (or parent company with an interest in oil) would lose if such technology were introduced, and therefore the maximum that they'd be willing to spend to supress the technology. Under any reasonable set of starting conditions, the former is always greater than the latter.
Maybe they wouldn't need to be bribed. Maybe threats or captitalist solidarity would cause them to choose not to put the new technology in their car. In that case, though, Ford might. Or Kia. Or BMW. Or Ferrari. Or Honda. Or some car company in India that you've never heard of. Or John Deere might find out about it and get into the car business. There are easily a hundred companies in the world that could exploit such a technology if they knew of its existence.
The problem with an electric car that has a 250 mile range is that it is utterly worthless if you want to go somewhere 251 miles away -- or make a round trip to somewhere 126 miles away.
In my gasoline-powered car, I can stop at any filling station and add energy to its energy storage system at a rate of around 20 - 25 megawatts. What kind of electrical connections would you have to have to charge a battery at that rate? What kind of battery could absorb that much power?
Why would car companies supress innovations in vehicles? They'll gladly sell you anything that you're willing to pay them for, so long as what you're willing to pay is higher than their cost of producing it.
From 1996:
http://www.robertsdvd.com/failure.html
As an avid watcher of the reruns on TBS and CN, I just gotta say, you're misquoting. The correct quote is
"Sweet Zombie <weird, unnatural silence while the lips keep moving>"
Kicking up moon dust doesn't work the same way on the moon as it does on Earth, because the moon has no atmosphere. Remember that science experiment you did in school where you dropped two rocks of two different sizes, and they fell to the ground at the same speed? That experiment works on the moon no matter how big the rocks are, even if the 'rock' is a microscopic dust particle. Any object on the moon falls immediately to the ground. Clouds of dust cannot exist on the moon, because there's no air to hold them up.
Actually, a bugle is the equivalent of a trumpet with all the buttons locked in the 'up' position. A bugle is therefore limited to a subset of the notes that a trumpet can play, and all bugle songs are made up of that subset. A trumpet player can play a song on the bugle -- especially a simple one like 'taps' -- without any training beyond maybe a five-minute practice session.
In fairness, the original release date for this comedy about terrorists sneaking bombs onto airplanes was going to be 9/14/01...
Ha! Funniest thing I've read here in months. Wish that (a) I had mod points, and (b) there was a +6 Funny available.
...make sure you have at least a vague idea of what a slashdotting looks like.
This is a wild guess, but...
Your eye can't focus on anything one inch away. Hold your finger up to your eyeball and try to see your fingerprint. Unless you're very nearsighted, you simply can't focus your eye that close. So, along with the small screen, there is also a lens in front of that screen that works together with the lens in your eye -- when it's focused at 12 feet away -- to make what is essentially a microscope.
(1) The United States of America is the only country in the world with the word 'America' in its official name. Search the CIA World Factbook if you don't believe me. The only possible exception is the Territory of American Samoa, which is not an independent country.
(2) The official name of that country to the USA's south is Estados Unidos Mexicanos.
"American" is therefore unambiguous. "United Statesian" and similar constructions are not.
Here in scenic Idaho, we have a senator named Mike Crapo. His campaign signs always have a nice, tasteful line of stars over the a in his name. I'm guessing he's a bit sensitive about mispronunciations. Either Firefox or Slashdot won't show the character 257.
Too bad for them. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. If they don't like it, they can go form their own company that doesn't put the word "Sony" on their products.
Nope. Let's say we have two people in a ship going .99c, one in front and one in back. The guy in the back shoots a red laser towards the front. Here's what an external observer would see:
.99c would see if you and a friend shot red lasers down the hall at each other.
Guy #1 pulls out and holds up a red laser. He shoots the beam. Because he's firing forward, the beam gets blue-shifted and heads up the hallway towards the front guy. A short while later, the front guy has a bunch of blue (ultraviolet? green? I'm too lazy to do the math right now) photons hit him. However, he's moving away from their source, so they get red-shifted back down to red. As long as the two aren't moving relative to each other, any red/blue shift will cancel each other out. The opposite happens if the front guy shoots a laser towards the guy in the back.
Note that this is also *exactly* what an observer flying past your house at
Would you like to know more?