They will get all those battery chargers installed. Then, in 10 - 20 years, storage enabling practical electric cars for all situations will finally be perfected. It will be not batteries, but supercapacitors, that will run most efficiently at several thousand volts and draw very high initial currents. The battery chargers will be capable of neither the high voltage nor the surge currents that the supercapacitors will want to draw, and require complete replacement. In twenty years there will have been millions of dollars wasted. Finis!
I engage my printer, where I've made Microsoft Word or maybe even Notpad print the word, "5 TB Disk" or "Media Player" or "7 Port USB 2.0 Hub." I then take a pair of scissors, cut those words out of the printed paper, place them on the wallwart, and then use some transparent tape to put them on the matching wallwart.
As for the original problem, yeah, those 12" long "extension cords" that plug into a power strip or even a wall outlet, and then you plug the wallwart into it, are the answer for "spreading" problems. I have one power strip with about 5 or 6 of those for my entertainment center with the little desktop computer, USB-3 Hub, HDMI remote IR-controlled switch, IR-remote amplifier-distributor, etc. Biggest rats-nest of wires I have, except for possibly the ham radio shack.
And, anyway, whether you can see it or not, the solution to this is to invent and massively deploy mechanisms to suck up all the CO2 and turn it into elemental carbon and free-space oxygen. Put the oxygen back into the atmosphhere, put the carbon back into the coal mines it came from. Use solar and wind energy to do it. That's the ONLY solution to this. You can't go full-up renewable via solar and wind without dealing with the realities that they are both intermittent producers and wind emits huge CO2 in the concrete manufacture for the foundations of the turbines, and kills birds.
Better get to work on the CO2 dissociator and sequesterer...
Kill all the humans. Problem solved, no more human-produced CO2. OBTW, try killing all the Americans and that's what will happen - all humans dead, as we will use our nukes and the war will be unsurviveable on the planet. Sooo... wanna move onto the next hyperbole now?
OK, and BTW, we manufacture stuff at LOWER CO2 output than you do. Doesn't matter who you are, you don't have the access to clean-burning natural gas that we do. If we don't manufacture it, then you'll have to manufacture it. You do it, and there will be MORE CO2 'cuz you're gonna use coal. Nope, you can't use "renewable" any better than we can right now, not to manufacture all the stuff we do. 300 million of us die? There are - what? - 3 billion people in the world, so it will be some DIFFERENT 10% of the population that will try to live at elevated standards of living that we enjoy, and if we're all dead, they'll probably move here where the natural resources are. And you'll once again get the same, or more CO2 production from whatever bunch that the North American continent supports.
But killing all the humans is the environmental-wacko solution, as once expressed by Al Gore. He actually mused over it. Incredible.
...you're going to do about this so-called climate change?
The answer is, "Not a damned thing." Why? Because you can't. That is, not without widespread death from the methods you would use to combat it.
Raise the price of fuels to astronomical levels? It'd just plunge the almost-poor into abject poverty, which is deadly. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but living in poverty will take about 10. Wanna kill a lotta people? Make 'em poor. That's what the normal, environmentalist-approach is to every question, "Money is no object" and then we get cars that cost twice as much as they should while chasing the goal of eliminating 0.0002% of the remainder of some imagined deadly pollutant. Eliminate the pollutant and save 27 people this year, and kill 100,000 from poverty. (F U!)
The bottom line is that there's nothing you can do about this that will come out of a Congress or a Parliament. The answer for this is going to come out of a physics lab. Walking up and down in front of some legislature with your hand-lettered sign in your father-Christmas beard and sandals isn't going to do a damned thing because all they can do is create poor people by passing some expensive law, which will kill a good percentage of those newly-minted poor people.
No, the fix for this is going to come from scientists that invent the magic battery or the magic supercapacitor that will store grid electricity or electric car electricity so that we can stop using fossil fuels. Oh, BTW, wind is not gonna be the savior, since the foundation of each of these massive wind turbines takes about 250 cubic yards of concrete, which is a huge CO2 emitter during its manufacture. While a nuke plant uses maybe 400,000 cubic yards of concrete in its containment structure, our >52,000 wind turbines amount to 13,000,000 cubic yards of concrete, minimum, for their foundations. And our 52,000 wind turbines have a combined capacity of slightly less than 8 gigawatts. That compares to the largest nuclear power station in the world that has slightly more than 8 gigawatts output. Composed of multiple nuclear reactors, I believe it is 7, that would be 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete. How many such plants does it take to run the entire USA? 302,229 megawatt-hours was the April generation, so with 24 hours in a day and 30 days in April, that is about 420 megawatts continuously. 420 megawatts / 8 megawatts per 52,000 wind turbines, assuming the wind blows 24/7/365, would be 52.5 times the 52,000 or so wind turbines we have now, which would be 2,730,0000 total wind turbines, or 2,679,500 _additional_ wind turbines to be built, except the wind doesn't blow continuously so double that for backup, so we want and additional 5.4 million wind turbines. And again, at 250 cubic yards of concrete for foundation per wind turbine, that's 5.4 X 250 = 1,350 million cubic yards of CO2 producing concrete manufacturing.
And of course there's still PV, with solar farms as far as the eye can see. No big need for CO2 producing concrete with those, but the sun doesn't shine 24/7/365 either. Solar photovoltaic energy is only available for a fraction of the day, since there's that night bugaboo plus the occasional cloud, so we're going to need billions of them and we're going to need energy storage.
So... really... what's the answer? A wind turbine in the frame of absolutely every outdoor photograph anyone takes within the borders of the USA, and a country probably devoid of birds that would all be killed by the whirling blades? Or solar photovoltaic "farms" in said outdoor photographs no matter where in the USA one points the camera?
Solve those PHYSICS problems and MAYBE we could stem the production of CO2 if we can find out how to use electricity to replace a jet engine, but if we turn propellers with electric motors, we'll get propeller speeds again, back to the 1950's air travel model.
But nobody's going to solve this by whining at legislators.
Racist? Why is everything always racist? Just because the recent former president happens to be black, everything is now racist? We whites have been calling each other monkeys for 100's of years when we mean morons, but now all of a sudden we can't insult the president, like we've insulted all presidents throughout our entire history, just because he's black? Give it a f'n rest...
They're 2.5 miles in. That's about 13,000 feet. I own 100' of hose myself. Its not that rare or expensive. You could scour the Sears, Lowes, Home Depot, and Harbor Freight stores and come up with that much hose and fitting to connect them together with probably in a single city. Not a big deal, I think.
Heard on the news that Musk's idea is to thread a plastic, 1-meter diameter tube through the flooded areas, then blow it up like "a bouncy house" to evacuate the water and create a 1 meter diameter tunnel for the kids to crawl out through. Sounds good to me. Wonder if he's got some way of manufacturing a 1 meter tough but flexible plastic tube hundreds of yards long. Hopefully.
That assumes the cave roof is sealed. If it is, fine. If it isn't, those kids are REALLY in trouble since the water could rise further and flood the entire room where they are staying. Drown, no question. They need to get those drills in place and running, fast.
Movie content is certainly down, alright. There are lots of formula / sequel movies out, and they get tiresome. Really good movies are hard to find. Why don't they make more movies that are better? Well... because...
I saw the Fathom Events showing of Casablanca a few months ago. Its arguably been touted as the best movie ever made. I don't know about that, but it _is_ amazingly good entertainment. Why not more movies like that? Well... because you have to be the cinema version of Rembrant to build movies like those. IOW, its rare talent on the part of everyone involved. Getting everything together - the right director, the right actors, the right scriptwriters, etc. along with enough money is near-impossible, so when it happens, it happens rarely, and we get something truly amazing and enduring. But there won't be movies cranked out at 3 a week with that level of entertainment until we get artificial intelligence combined with cheap special effects to allow the computers to be able to know what is excellent and then to create it from thin air, no cameras, sets, actors, directors, etc. Then we can have more "Casablanca" films than we can drag our carcases to every week. But not until then.
I love the theater experience. Sit in the dark, watch a movie on a screen that fills my peripheral vision and listen to a sound system that, when a mortar shell hits "just over there", it "feels" like it hit "just over there." And I'm not distracted by my computer - I can always find something to check, search for, fix, or compose on my computer while watching a movie at home.
I used to enjoy the aspect of the eating the delicious popcorn without having to make it myself or clean up afterward myself, but since the local theaters only pop in coconut oil, which results in a large popcorn having about 60 mg of saturated fat, and since my heartscan was 94th percentile, my cardiologist basically says that eating it is akin to drinking rat poison, just a little slower. 60 mg is about 3X the recommended daily allowance. They start popping in canola oil, I can buy their popcorn again. But until then, I just get the big diet drink.
I see the same amount of movies I always did - most all of them - but it just costs me way less. My January admission bill before I got Moviepass was $85. Now $0. And I saw the 1st Purge yesterday too, and thought it to be much better than I expected.
...that it's ONLY 2/3rds. Who remembers / bothers to erase that data, anyway? For my cameras and GPSs, I doubt that I'd bother. Info available is immensely non-useful to anyone else. A PC memory I would erase, and spend time writing 1's, 0's, and then random #'s to it, but the other hardware I really wouldn't care about.
And who is SELLING these memory cards, anyway? That's not how you get rid of 'em. You get rid of 'em by losing them. Everybody knows that.
It was when they presented it to us in history class in the 50's / 60's. Maybe the schools with leftist, anti-American teachers don't think so know, but back then the attitude was pro-American.
I have mention on several posts taxing something else. I even said one time to check out the FairTax.
From a google search, the synopsis is:
"The Fair Tax Plan is a sales tax proposal to replace the current U.S. income tax structure. It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes. It also ends all taxes on gifts, estates, capital gains, alternative minimums, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment.Jan 29, 2018"
The best quote out of the Wikipedia page is footnote 62:
"Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Princeton University Econometrics to survey 500 European and Asian companies regarding the effect on their business decisions if the United States enacted the FairTax. 400 of those companies stated they would build their next plant in the United States, and 100 companies said they would move their corporate headquarters to the United States.[62] "
From that survey I am encouraged to believe that passing the FairTax would so tilt the playing field in favor of the USA that we would have really good jobs coming out our ears, prosperity would skyrocket, and we would generally see a second "gilded age" similar to the approx. 400% increase in the GDP between 1865 and 1913. The 16th Amendment authorizing the income taxes was passed in 1913. That created the poison we have now. Prosperity since then has been a rare thing. I believe the income taxes are mostly at fault for the stagnation of wages since about 1980, as the corporate rate of 35% chased manufacturing out of the USA to a great extent, those formerly well-paid manufacturing workers took much lesser-paid jobs in "service" industries, and created a class of people that like to work with their hands, are damned good at working with their hands, but sit home and collect unemployment, welfare, social security disability fraudulently sometimes, and generally are hugely underemployed in low-pay jobs while the good jobs are being done by Canadians, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, and Europeans, all of which had lower corporate income taxes. The FairTax book states that 22% of the price of any American-made good, on average, is composed of the expense in manufacturing in the USA attributable to income taxes of all sorts - corporate, personal for both workers and management making their labor more expensive, payroll, capital gains, etc. It takes about 30 - 33 hours to build a car in the US, workers make around $78 an hour including all benefits, and... multiplying those together, that's around $2,500. But income tax expense on a $40,000 SUV at 22% is $8,800. Which is more beneficial, paying workers $1.50 an hour and lowering the $2,500 to maybe $300, or abolishing the income tax and probably recovering half of that 22% - some of it belongs to workers so the company won't be able to recover, for instance, the worker's personal income tax, nor their share of the payroll taxes, but even 11% of the $40,000 SUV means a reduction in sticker price of $4,400 on that $40K American-made SUV. I just bought a Jeep Cherokee, the most "American Built" car on the planet, and could have gotten along nicely with that.
And it's not that the FairTax is so great, it is that the income taxes are so horrible. As early as just 50 years into the income taxes, JFK said:
"“The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.” John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963 "
Getting rid of the income taxes would put rocket engines on the economy, I believe, and the FairTax is the only proposal that would do it. A flat tax won't do it because a flat tax is still an INCOME tax.
"Depending on the height of a tower (which can range from 215 to 265 feet), each uses 250 to 420 cubic yards of concrete. In addition, there can be three or four substations, each requiring 1000 cubic yards of concrete.Aug 10, 2009 - Internet Google search."
Another intenet google search yields:
Wind Energy Facts at a Glance U.S. Wind Energy Capacity Statistics Total number of operating utility-scale wind turbines: >52,000 Number of U.S. states with operating utility-scale wind energy projects: 41 plus Guam and Puerto Rico U.S. installed wind capacity in 2016: 8,203 MW 12 more rows Wind Energy Facts at a Glance - AWEA
So, 52,000 wind turbines multiplied by a minimal 250 cubic yards of concrete per wind turbine is 13,000,000, or 13 million cubic yards of concrete.
That seems to be more than the 400,000 cubic yards of concrete per nuke plant, eh?
Oh, wait... the installed base of wind turbines comes to only 8203 megawatts, which would be 8.2 Gigawatts.
Yet another google search reveals:
"Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s (TEPCO) Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan is currently the world's largest nuclear power plant, with a net capacity of 7,965MW. "
So, the largest nuke plant in the world, for which probably in the neighborhood of 400,000 cubic yards of concrete were poured, approximately equals the power output of our entire installed base of wind turbines in the USA, and is far less a consumer of concrete than the above-mentioned 13 million cubic yards of concrete. And of course the nuke plant will produce electricity 24/7/365, while the wind turbines will only produce when there is wind blowing, which is not 24/7/365.
Taxes are necessary, INCOME taxes are not, and are immoral because they are simple stealing by the gov't. We didn't have them before 1913, and had roads, libraries, hospitals, police and fire departments, and so forth. We also had a 400% GDP growth from 1865 to 1913 when the income taxes were passed with the 16th Amendment. That was the near death-knell for rapid economic growth, since income taxes suppress prosperity. Abolish them, and watch the economy roar.
All INCOME taxes are bad - they are stealing. Tax things for sale, and services. They are not stealing because you can avoid them by not buying the item for sale, or services. The FairTax in particular provides a "prebate" that pays all the the FairTax on sales and services for spending up to the poverty level, so 1) poor people pay $0 FairTax and 2) Everything beyond poverty is "luxury" or at least unnecessary, and so can be avoided because you have the option of not buying it.
Now I'm curious if anyone has factored in the concrete used for the footing of each of those turbine towers. Typically each uses a lot of concrete to keep from blowing over in the wind. And, of course, we're building 10's of 1000's of them. That still might be / ought to be a lotta concrete.
OK, but we need very little uranium, in comparison to other ways of generating electricity. I now wonder what is the comparison with mining the raw materials to make all those wind turbine blades and solar panels, as well as the fossil fuel it takes to ship / truck them all over the place for their installation? Then there is an army of techs necessary to climb those towers and maintain the equipment in the generator room of those wind turbines, and those guys burn gasoline to get to those wind machines. Solar is probably less maintenance intensive, but can only generate a limited number of hours per day. Right now we have few ways to store generated power, so that situation isn't ideal either.
I have trouble believing that that one method is greatly superior to the others, save that coal is a huge polluter that doesn't have its full costs figured in, because nobody in fact actually cleans up all that pollution.
With the other things that are thrown into the atmosphere with coal power, such as radioactive elements that cause cancer, mercury that poison the fish that in turn poison us if we eat them too much, and of course the sulfur dioxide that is just plain poison, subsidies that allow power generation without the need to clean up all those other nasty things that come from burning coal would seem like a fairly good deal. Pay more to the gov't to pay the subsidies (are they subsidies, or tax "breaks?" NOT stealing a company's money by declaring a tax break is NOT my idea of a subsidy (and there should be NO such taxes on income period - not personal, corporate, payroll, self-employment, capital gains, gift, etc. - it is all stealing by the gov't, and is just as wrong if we steal from each other. Stealing is stealing. There are other things to tax - we don't need to be stealing from citizens at all, check out the FairTax.))
"Nuclear plants release around 100g of CO2/kWh, much better than coal but also much worse than wind and solar."
Lessee, that's 1 Kg / 10 KwH, 100 Kg per MwH, and 100,000 Kg / GwH. Where is the rail transport to bring enough carbon to the nuclear reactor to release 100,000 Kg of carbon dioxide for every hour of operation of a 1 Gw nuke? I don't normally see rail transport to nuke plants. They trucking it in, or what? Where is it combined with oxygen, what process within nuclear power generation has that happening?
Perhaps the calculation is for the workers in uranium mining driving to work each day, as if they wouldn't drive to some other work if they weren't mining uranium. Someone inputting tons and tons of carbon into the uranium enrichment process for use in nuclear fuel? Where is this carbon in the nuclear generation cycle?
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They will get all those battery chargers installed. Then, in 10 - 20 years, storage enabling practical electric cars for all situations will finally be perfected. It will be not batteries, but supercapacitors, that will run most efficiently at several thousand volts and draw very high initial currents. The battery chargers will be capable of neither the high voltage nor the surge currents that the supercapacitors will want to draw, and require complete replacement. In twenty years there will have been millions of dollars wasted. Finis!
I engage my printer, where I've made Microsoft Word or maybe even Notpad print the word, "5 TB Disk" or "Media Player" or "7 Port USB 2.0 Hub." I then take a pair of scissors, cut those words out of the printed paper, place them on the wallwart, and then use some transparent tape to put them on the matching wallwart.
As for the original problem, yeah, those 12" long "extension cords" that plug into a power strip or even a wall outlet, and then you plug the wallwart into it, are the answer for "spreading" problems. I have one power strip with about 5 or 6 of those for my entertainment center with the little desktop computer, USB-3 Hub, HDMI remote IR-controlled switch, IR-remote amplifier-distributor, etc. Biggest rats-nest of wires I have, except for possibly the ham radio shack.
And, anyway, whether you can see it or not, the solution to this is to invent and massively deploy mechanisms to suck up all the CO2 and turn it into elemental carbon and free-space oxygen. Put the oxygen back into the atmosphhere, put the carbon back into the coal mines it came from. Use solar and wind energy to do it. That's the ONLY solution to this. You can't go full-up renewable via solar and wind without dealing with the realities that they are both intermittent producers and wind emits huge CO2 in the concrete manufacture for the foundations of the turbines, and kills birds.
Better get to work on the CO2 dissociator and sequesterer...
Kill all the humans. Problem solved, no more human-produced CO2. OBTW, try killing all the Americans and that's what will happen - all humans dead, as we will use our nukes and the war will be unsurviveable on the planet. Sooo... wanna move onto the next hyperbole now?
OK, and BTW, we manufacture stuff at LOWER CO2 output than you do. Doesn't matter who you are, you don't have the access to clean-burning natural gas that we do. If we don't manufacture it, then you'll have to manufacture it. You do it, and there will be MORE CO2 'cuz you're gonna use coal. Nope, you can't use "renewable" any better than we can right now, not to manufacture all the stuff we do. 300 million of us die? There are - what? - 3 billion people in the world, so it will be some DIFFERENT 10% of the population that will try to live at elevated standards of living that we enjoy, and if we're all dead, they'll probably move here where the natural resources are. And you'll once again get the same, or more CO2 production from whatever bunch that the North American continent supports.
But killing all the humans is the environmental-wacko solution, as once expressed by Al Gore. He actually mused over it. Incredible.
...you're going to do about this so-called climate change?
The answer is, "Not a damned thing." Why? Because you can't. That is, not without widespread death from the methods you would use to combat it.
Raise the price of fuels to astronomical levels? It'd just plunge the almost-poor into abject poverty, which is deadly. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but living in poverty will take about 10. Wanna kill a lotta people? Make 'em poor. That's what the normal, environmentalist-approach is to every question, "Money is no object" and then we get cars that cost twice as much as they should while chasing the goal of eliminating 0.0002% of the remainder of some imagined deadly pollutant. Eliminate the pollutant and save 27 people this year, and kill 100,000 from poverty. (F U!)
The bottom line is that there's nothing you can do about this that will come out of a Congress or a Parliament. The answer for this is going to come out of a physics lab. Walking up and down in front of some legislature with your hand-lettered sign in your father-Christmas beard and sandals isn't going to do a damned thing because all they can do is create poor people by passing some expensive law, which will kill a good percentage of those newly-minted poor people.
No, the fix for this is going to come from scientists that invent the magic battery or the magic supercapacitor that will store grid electricity or electric car electricity so that we can stop using fossil fuels. Oh, BTW, wind is not gonna be the savior, since the foundation of each of these massive wind turbines takes about 250 cubic yards of concrete, which is a huge CO2 emitter during its manufacture. While a nuke plant uses maybe 400,000 cubic yards of concrete in its containment structure, our >52,000 wind turbines amount to 13,000,000 cubic yards of concrete, minimum, for their foundations. And our 52,000 wind turbines have a combined capacity of slightly less than 8 gigawatts. That compares to the largest nuclear power station in the world that has slightly more than 8 gigawatts output. Composed of multiple nuclear reactors, I believe it is 7, that would be 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete. How many such plants does it take to run the entire USA? 302,229 megawatt-hours was the April generation, so with 24 hours in a day and 30 days in April, that is about 420 megawatts continuously. 420 megawatts / 8 megawatts per 52,000 wind turbines, assuming the wind blows 24/7/365, would be 52.5 times the 52,000 or so wind turbines we have now, which would be 2,730,0000 total wind turbines, or 2,679,500 _additional_ wind turbines to be built, except the wind doesn't blow continuously so double that for backup, so we want and additional 5.4 million wind turbines. And again, at 250 cubic yards of concrete for foundation per wind turbine, that's 5.4 X 250 = 1,350 million cubic yards of CO2 producing concrete manufacturing.
And of course there's still PV, with solar farms as far as the eye can see. No big need for CO2 producing concrete with those, but the sun doesn't shine 24/7/365 either. Solar photovoltaic energy is only available for a fraction of the day, since there's that night bugaboo plus the occasional cloud, so we're going to need billions of them and we're going to need energy storage.
So... really... what's the answer? A wind turbine in the frame of absolutely every outdoor photograph anyone takes within the borders of the USA, and a country probably devoid of birds that would all be killed by the whirling blades? Or solar photovoltaic "farms" in said outdoor photographs no matter where in the USA one points the camera?
Solve those PHYSICS problems and MAYBE we could stem the production of CO2 if we can find out how to use electricity to replace a jet engine, but if we turn propellers with electric motors, we'll get propeller speeds again, back to the 1950's air travel model.
But nobody's going to solve this by whining at legislators.
Racist? Why is everything always racist? Just because the recent former president happens to be black, everything is now racist? We whites have been calling each other monkeys for 100's of years when we mean morons, but now all of a sudden we can't insult the president, like we've insulted all presidents throughout our entire history, just because he's black? Give it a f'n rest...
They're 2.5 miles in. That's about 13,000 feet. I own 100' of hose myself. Its not that rare or expensive. You could scour the Sears, Lowes, Home Depot, and Harbor Freight stores and come up with that much hose and fitting to connect them together with probably in a single city. Not a big deal, I think.
Heard on the news that Musk's idea is to thread a plastic, 1-meter diameter tube through the flooded areas, then blow it up like "a bouncy house" to evacuate the water and create a 1 meter diameter tunnel for the kids to crawl out through. Sounds good to me. Wonder if he's got some way of manufacturing a 1 meter tough but flexible plastic tube hundreds of yards long. Hopefully.
That assumes the cave roof is sealed. If it is, fine. If it isn't, those kids are REALLY in trouble since the water could rise further and flood the entire room where they are staying. Drown, no question. They need to get those drills in place and running, fast.
A 3/8" flexible air compressor hose, and the 5 HP Sears air compressor out in my garage would do the job.
...Tony Stark on the job, those kids are as good as out of that cave...
Movie content is certainly down, alright. There are lots of formula / sequel movies out, and they get tiresome. Really good movies are hard to find. Why don't they make more movies that are better? Well... because...
I saw the Fathom Events showing of Casablanca a few months ago. Its arguably been touted as the best movie ever made. I don't know about that, but it _is_ amazingly good entertainment. Why not more movies like that? Well... because you have to be the cinema version of Rembrant to build movies like those. IOW, its rare talent on the part of everyone involved. Getting everything together - the right director, the right actors, the right scriptwriters, etc. along with enough money is near-impossible, so when it happens, it happens rarely, and we get something truly amazing and enduring. But there won't be movies cranked out at 3 a week with that level of entertainment until we get artificial intelligence combined with cheap special effects to allow the computers to be able to know what is excellent and then to create it from thin air, no cameras, sets, actors, directors, etc. Then we can have more "Casablanca" films than we can drag our carcases to every week. But not until then.
I love the theater experience. Sit in the dark, watch a movie on a screen that fills my peripheral vision and listen to a sound system that, when a mortar shell hits "just over there", it "feels" like it hit "just over there." And I'm not distracted by my computer - I can always find something to check, search for, fix, or compose on my computer while watching a movie at home.
I used to enjoy the aspect of the eating the delicious popcorn without having to make it myself or clean up afterward myself, but since the local theaters only pop in coconut oil, which results in a large popcorn having about 60 mg of saturated fat, and since my heartscan was 94th percentile, my cardiologist basically says that eating it is akin to drinking rat poison, just a little slower. 60 mg is about 3X the recommended daily allowance. They start popping in canola oil, I can buy their popcorn again. But until then, I just get the big diet drink.
I see the same amount of movies I always did - most all of them - but it just costs me way less. My January admission bill before I got Moviepass was $85. Now $0. And I saw the 1st Purge yesterday too, and thought it to be much better than I expected.
...that it's ONLY 2/3rds. Who remembers / bothers to erase that data, anyway? For my cameras and GPSs, I doubt that I'd bother. Info available is immensely non-useful to anyone else. A PC memory I would erase, and spend time writing 1's, 0's, and then random #'s to it, but the other hardware I really wouldn't care about.
And who is SELLING these memory cards, anyway? That's not how you get rid of 'em. You get rid of 'em by losing them. Everybody knows that.
It was when they presented it to us in history class in the 50's / 60's. Maybe the schools with leftist, anti-American teachers don't think so know, but back then the attitude was pro-American.
I have mention on several posts taxing something else. I even said one time to check out the FairTax.
From a google search, the synopsis is:
"The Fair Tax Plan is a sales tax proposal to replace the current U.S. income tax structure. It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes. It also ends all taxes on gifts, estates, capital gains, alternative minimums, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment.Jan 29, 2018"
The organization has a website:
https://fairtax.org/
There's a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The best quote out of the Wikipedia page is footnote 62:
"Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Princeton University Econometrics to survey 500 European and Asian companies regarding the effect on their business decisions if the United States enacted the FairTax. 400 of those companies stated they would build their next plant in the United States, and 100 companies said they would move their corporate headquarters to the United States.[62] "
From that survey I am encouraged to believe that passing the FairTax would so tilt the playing field in favor of the USA that we would have really good jobs coming out our ears, prosperity would skyrocket, and we would generally see a second "gilded age" similar to the approx. 400% increase in the GDP between 1865 and 1913. The 16th Amendment authorizing the income taxes was passed in 1913. That created the poison we have now. Prosperity since then has been a rare thing. I believe the income taxes are mostly at fault for the stagnation of wages since about 1980, as the corporate rate of 35% chased manufacturing out of the USA to a great extent, those formerly well-paid manufacturing workers took much lesser-paid jobs in "service" industries, and created a class of people that like to work with their hands, are damned good at working with their hands, but sit home and collect unemployment, welfare, social security disability fraudulently sometimes, and generally are hugely underemployed in low-pay jobs while the good jobs are being done by Canadians, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, and Europeans, all of which had lower corporate income taxes. The FairTax book states that 22% of the price of any American-made good, on average, is composed of the expense in manufacturing in the USA attributable to income taxes of all sorts - corporate, personal for both workers and management making their labor more expensive, payroll, capital gains, etc. It takes about 30 - 33 hours to build a car in the US, workers make around $78 an hour including all benefits, and... multiplying those together, that's around $2,500. But income tax expense on a $40,000 SUV at 22% is $8,800. Which is more beneficial, paying workers $1.50 an hour and lowering the $2,500 to maybe $300, or abolishing the income tax and probably recovering half of that 22% - some of it belongs to workers so the company won't be able to recover, for instance, the worker's personal income tax, nor their share of the payroll taxes, but even 11% of the $40,000 SUV means a reduction in sticker price of $4,400 on that $40K American-made SUV. I just bought a Jeep Cherokee, the most "American Built" car on the planet, and could have gotten along nicely with that.
And it's not that the FairTax is so great, it is that the income taxes are so horrible. As early as just 50 years into the income taxes, JFK said:
"“The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.” John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963 "
Getting rid of the income taxes would put rocket engines on the economy, I believe, and the FairTax is the only proposal that would do it. A flat tax won't do it because a flat tax is still an INCOME tax.
Taxing wealth is ALSO stealing.
Well, we can try to account for the concrete in wind turbines.
First, nuke plants are about 400,000 cubic yards of concrete:
http://timjervis.blogspot.com/...
And an internet search says about wind turbines:
"Depending on the height of a tower (which can range from 215 to 265 feet), each uses 250 to 420 cubic yards of concrete. In addition, there can be three or four substations, each requiring 1000 cubic yards of concrete.Aug 10, 2009 - Internet Google search."
Another intenet google search yields:
Wind Energy Facts at a Glance
U.S. Wind Energy Capacity Statistics
Total number of operating utility-scale wind turbines: >52,000
Number of U.S. states with operating utility-scale wind energy projects: 41 plus Guam and Puerto Rico
U.S. installed wind capacity in 2016: 8,203 MW
12 more rows
Wind Energy Facts at a Glance - AWEA
So, 52,000 wind turbines multiplied by a minimal 250 cubic yards of concrete per wind turbine is 13,000,000, or 13 million cubic yards of concrete.
That seems to be more than the 400,000 cubic yards of concrete per nuke plant, eh?
Oh, wait... the installed base of wind turbines comes to only 8203 megawatts, which would be 8.2 Gigawatts.
Yet another google search reveals:
"Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s (TEPCO) Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan is currently the world's largest nuclear power plant, with a net capacity of 7,965MW. "
So, the largest nuke plant in the world, for which probably in the neighborhood of 400,000 cubic yards of concrete were poured, approximately equals the power output of our entire installed base of wind turbines in the USA, and is far less a consumer of concrete than the above-mentioned 13 million cubic yards of concrete. And of course the nuke plant will produce electricity 24/7/365, while the wind turbines will only produce when there is wind blowing, which is not 24/7/365.
The clear win seems to belong to the nuke plant.
Taxes are necessary, INCOME taxes are not, and are immoral because they are simple stealing by the gov't. We didn't have them before 1913, and had roads, libraries, hospitals, police and fire departments, and so forth. We also had a 400% GDP growth from 1865 to 1913 when the income taxes were passed with the 16th Amendment. That was the near death-knell for rapid economic growth, since income taxes suppress prosperity. Abolish them, and watch the economy roar.
All INCOME taxes are bad - they are stealing. Tax things for sale, and services. They are not stealing because you can avoid them by not buying the item for sale, or services. The FairTax in particular provides a "prebate" that pays all the the FairTax on sales and services for spending up to the poverty level, so 1) poor people pay $0 FairTax and 2) Everything beyond poverty is "luxury" or at least unnecessary, and so can be avoided because you have the option of not buying it.
Now I'm curious if anyone has factored in the concrete used for the footing of each of those turbine towers. Typically each uses a lot of concrete to keep from blowing over in the wind. And, of course, we're building 10's of 1000's of them. That still might be / ought to be a lotta concrete.
OK, but we need very little uranium, in comparison to other ways of generating electricity. I now wonder what is the comparison with mining the raw materials to make all those wind turbine blades and solar panels, as well as the fossil fuel it takes to ship / truck them all over the place for their installation? Then there is an army of techs necessary to climb those towers and maintain the equipment in the generator room of those wind turbines, and those guys burn gasoline to get to those wind machines. Solar is probably less maintenance intensive, but can only generate a limited number of hours per day. Right now we have few ways to store generated power, so that situation isn't ideal either.
I have trouble believing that that one method is greatly superior to the others, save that coal is a huge polluter that doesn't have its full costs figured in, because nobody in fact actually cleans up all that pollution.
With the other things that are thrown into the atmosphere with coal power, such as radioactive elements that cause cancer, mercury that poison the fish that in turn poison us if we eat them too much, and of course the sulfur dioxide that is just plain poison, subsidies that allow power generation without the need to clean up all those other nasty things that come from burning coal would seem like a fairly good deal. Pay more to the gov't to pay the subsidies (are they subsidies, or tax "breaks?" NOT stealing a company's money by declaring a tax break is NOT my idea of a subsidy (and there should be NO such taxes on income period - not personal, corporate, payroll, self-employment, capital gains, gift, etc. - it is all stealing by the gov't, and is just as wrong if we steal from each other. Stealing is stealing. There are other things to tax - we don't need to be stealing from citizens at all, check out the FairTax.))
"Nuclear plants release around 100g of CO2/kWh, much better than coal but also much worse than wind and solar."
Lessee, that's 1 Kg / 10 KwH, 100 Kg per MwH, and 100,000 Kg / GwH. Where is the rail transport to bring enough carbon to the nuclear reactor to release 100,000 Kg of carbon dioxide for every hour of operation of a 1 Gw nuke? I don't normally see rail transport to nuke plants. They trucking it in, or what? Where is it combined with oxygen, what process within nuclear power generation has that happening?
Perhaps the calculation is for the workers in uranium mining driving to work each day, as if they wouldn't drive to some other work if they weren't mining uranium. Someone inputting tons and tons of carbon into the uranium enrichment process for use in nuclear fuel? Where is this carbon in the nuclear generation cycle?