the worst fears of the GOP will be realized - people will be getting better healthcare at lower cost.
The GOP by and large isnt bothered if your costs get lower (though, in reality, it is not actually possible for the majority's costs to get lower when we are now covering higher risk people); the concern is that we are going down a path of surrendering every area of life to government control. The idea that the government has the right to tell you to buy X product in order to live in this country is problematic; and its problematic that the government is OK with saying "it doesnt matter what bad choices you make in life, we (that is America at large) has your back".
Theres a term called "enablement" when dealing with someone who has an addiction / other problem; it refers to feeding their bad choices by taking away all consequences. What do you suppose happens when everyone is paying into insurance to cover the terrible choices others make? Or, I suppose, we could fix that by legislating exactly how people can live everyday life, but Im not seeing that as much better.
The website launch cant really be blamed on partisanship; its not like congress was arguing over the placement of DIVs. The partisan arguments were whether we could shut the program down; but as that wasnt really going anywhere its hard to blame that for a broken website.
The contractor dropped the ball, and there was no management or accountability put into place. Really not that complicated, and theres not really any other explanation when the higher ups were convinced the site would launch just fine on Oct 1.
As I understand it the issue is the sheer amount of regulation and requirements set by government around nuclear power. Specifically, requirements requiring pre-allocating funds for decommissioning a plant (something which will generally have to occur many decades after the plant opens), the amount of insurance, etc.
Not really trying to get into a debate about the merits or lack thereof of those regulations-- but they are a huge factor in the startup cost of a new nuclear plant, and factually noone really disputes that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Correction-- numbers above are for petajoules, and the number for gasoline was actually for propane's energy density. Gasoline would have clocked in at 1,000,000,000 MJ / 36 MJ/L = 27,800,000 L
Its waste gobbles up lots of land for thousands of years. Once you factor the actual disposal costs in, nuclear isn't much better than coal.
Coal's waste has to be captured, and once youve captured it its pretty much no good to anyone, and never will be.
Nuclear's waste comes in convenient glass rods, is highly likely to be useable as Yet Another Source of Energy, and really doesnt require that much room to store given how incredibly energy-dense it is.
Pulling up scarce resources and consuming them for energy.
If you want to take it to that level, solar isnt technically renewable either; and heres a shocker, its actually nuclear energy. Heres another shocker, solar panels require the use of "non-renewable" resources, like "rare earth" minerals.
The question is, are we likely to run out, and the answer AFAICT appears to be no; I have never heard it suggested that we are likely to run out of uranium due to using it for nuclear energy. To put this into perspective, to get 1 terajoule of energy, you would need to
A) burn 38,500,000 L of gasoline (100% efficiency) or
B) stick 1 L of Uranium-235 into a nuclear reactor (source)
Its basically a non-issue. Solar may be a bigger issue simply
Check the link i sent. Every estimate (DoE, OECD/NEA, California Energy Commission, France's EDF) there puts solar at the bottom of the barrel except for perhaps exotic energy sources like wave power. Hydro is better, wind is better, nuclear is better. It is just not cost effective, it eats up gobs of land, and its not as reliable. One of those charts puts more than 1/3 of Solar's costs at simply having sufficient storage to maintain availability.
Im not arguing that solar has no place at a residential level, but it is a terrible area for the US gov't to be investing as a major energy source at a utilities level. Im not even putting forward oil / gas as the solution; it seems pretty clearly to be nuclear, which in every one of those graphs is a fraction of the cost of solar, and scales incredibly well.
Im also not arguing for subsidizing oil / gas, and I really dont understand why every single person who has responded to seems to think I am-- can people really not see beyond "hes either on the right or on the left for this issue"? Im on the "lets do what makes actual sense" side, and solar is not going to be powering the lions share of the grid for a very long time, if ever.
Thats totally my mistake-- I was aiming for "between 0.5 more and 10x as much" and ended up screwing the numbers up. It is possible i was multiplying by 4, because of the 4x difference in capacity factor-- but that too would have been a mistake, as (I believe) that number would probably be figured into the costs listed in the graph.
Should be factors of 1.5x, and 10x, or "between 50% more and 900% more" -- the 10x number coming from the Max Levelized Cost of Energy for Solar PV (590) compared to "Coal, pulverized, unscrubbed" (40, though admittedly not sounding like a good choice of fuel) or "Natural Gas Combined Cycle" (70, almost 1/9th). These came from the OpenEl database (2 charts down from where the link lands you). I was basically attempting to look at average case (50% seemed close) and worst case (10x).
That system works when the minority party has any honest interest in negotiating
Rhetoric like this may make you feel justified in tearing down the checks and balances built into our democracy, but lets be clear you arent justified. Your logic appears to be "Id like to compromise, but the other side is so darn pigheaded". Problem is, EVERYONE says that when they dont want to compromise; this is very similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect. IM not being argumentative, YOURE being argumentative!
he present Republican party typically acts in ideological lockstep with a stance of "negotiating means doing EVERYTHING EXACTLY OUR WAY NO COMPROMISE."
Both sides do this. The easy answer, as Carl Levin (D) pointed out, is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to call the bluff of the filibusterers: Make them actually get up and filibuster, and when they falter, call the vote, and pass the measure. Obama said it pretty clearly in 2005.... As did Biden, calling it a power grab by republicans to minimize the voice of dissent. As did Reid in 2008, indicating that he believed it would "ruin our country", and he would never support it
In case you think the situation is different now and that no longer applies, Id note that there were 3 democrats who voted against it, and basically gave the same reasons stated above. The difference is that they had the integrity to back their words up with action when the tables were turned. You want bi-partisanship, here it is: if Carl Levin were in my state, and were pro-life, I would consider voting for him simply because he showed integrity in this matter, unlike basically every other democrat who was in office in 2005 and objected when republicans attempted the same maneuver. And for the record, I say the same for those republicans who favored the nuclear option in 2005 and now find themselves on the wrong side of the fence: it displays an utter lack of integrity.
Every once and a while it is good to do a sanity check and see whether you are simply falling into a default defensive position rather than rationally evaluating whether "your party's" position is defensible. I recognize that there are probably a good number of democrats who, if aware of the nature and consequences of this vote, would oppose it. I would hope that it would be the majority of them, and that corrective action would be taken-- though at this point its pretty much too late.
The thing is, I can put solar on my house, and I will be to able to generate enough power, on occasion, to have some extra to put back on the grid. With the right configuration and local storage, I can even go off the grid.
And I dont oppose that, and I dont see why the government even needs to be involved with that; it seems to me to be a smart move to install solar panels from the consumer point of view, and it makes solar companies money, so Im not exactly seeing why the government needs to pick winners in this area.
Separately, you may not have noticed that the Republicans have held effective veto power over new legislation in the Senate until just yesterday.
This is baloney. For one, democrats had the house, the senate, and the executive from 2008 to 2010. For another, you could argue that any time the house and senate are held by different parties, each holds "effective veto power", but only if you assume one particular party has a particular right to execute its own agenda.
Its irrelevant though, because if democrats really wanted to make a change regarding subsidies, they had 2 whole years of free reign to do so; they did not, and the attempt to hide behind the following few years (where republicans STILL couldnt do very much, given senate opposition and Obama's veto power) is a little lame.
It also staggers imagination that you seem to be implicitly supporting the "nuclear option", which was historically opposed by both parties, has never been invoked, and was opposed by Obama as recently as 2005 because of how utterly insane it is to have a vote that its time to ignore the voting rules. Have fun with that in 4 years, I guess; you may want to listen to Carl Levin's remarks on why it was a stupid idea that everyone now has to live with.
If you cant bother to read my post (like the part where I dont actually like the corn ethanol subsidies), you shouldnt expect the discussion to continue.
I'm perfectly okay with my tax dollars going towards expanding renewable energy.
Right, but its not exactly fair to say "Im perfectly OK with your dollars going towards....", which is what youre effectively saying. And the issue is that we're NOT at the tipping point, and nuclear and natural gas are both substantially cheaper, more scalable, and have higher capacity factors than solar (by a factor of 4): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates
So no, I dont want my dollars being dumped into a technology is nowhere near being competitive with established technology.
The startup costs for nuclear are largely high BECAUSE of government.
So it's possible that planned, carefully considered large scale investment in solar or some other form of renewable energy will pay off.
Investing in every possible alternative technology in the hope that one sticks sounds like a massive waste of money. Thats how its supposed to work: good technology takes off, the bad stuff fails and disappears. You get problems when you start screwing with that, like bad technology that is forever on government life support.
Its disgusting how this topic goes from "fact vs fact" to "fossil vs non-fossil", and everyone ends up shoehorned into one category or the other. Im advocating Nuclear, which is definately "non-fossil", but im against subsidizing solar, because it makes zero financial or common sense.
Please dont assume (as so many posters have) that being against solar subsidies automatically means im pro-big oil, or pro-oil subsidies, or pro-corn ethanol, or anything else; I never said any of that.
Why are you stopping us from making clean energy from OUR LAND instead of supporting terrorists by using oil and corn ethanol?
Im doing no such thing; the question is whether the government needs to subsidize solar, which I see no reason for. If it makes financial or environmental sense to install panels on your roof, wonderful, do so; we had one on my house when I was growing up.
And why are you bringing corn ethanol into this, as if Ive somehow expressed support for it? Isnt that a stereotypically democrat issue, to push corn ethanol as a green alternative to petro?
Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels. In a single family home, not only do you generate electricity, the panels shade the structure and keep it cooler in the summer months.
I totally agree, and I am utterly lost as to how thats relevant to the discussion. If you're arguing that we should provide tax incentives for doing so, I would say "maybe, but why: if it makes financial sense, people will do it anyways". If youre arguing that the businesses themselves need government assistance, I would say "rubbish", because there are plenty of solar companies out there doing just fine.
Id be fine with getting rid of any and all such subsidies, and considering dems had control of both houses and the executive from 2008-2010, and maintained both the senate and the executive for the last 3 years, its a little much to pin this on republicans.
But the idea that other energy sources would have trouble competing with solar right now is just nuts. Cost-wise, things dont look that good for solar-- depending on what measure you look at, its anywhere from 50% to 5000% more expensive than other technology like nuclear or natural gas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates
The utilities are doing just fine, and would be without subsidies; aside from not having to worry about mirror orientation, cloud cover, energy storage, and land leases, their fixed and operational costs tend to be lower, and their capacity factor is higher.
Slashdot is supposed to be a technology site, but sometimes an idea pops up that has no real-world merit and slashdotters become convinced that its the best thing since sliced bread, no matter what the facts and statistics are. Solar just isnt there yet: Get over it.
They (I) also dont like the thought process that goes "Startup needs money --> government has to provide it". Solarcity managed to secure themselves a loan from BoA just fine, with no government help.
Solar uses huge amounts of land-per-MWh-- between 3 and 10, depending on who you ask, what technology, and how you measure; it also generally ignores the whole "peak solar output is very different than average", or the whole "this only works in places with a lot of room and a lot of sun". This isnt the solution youre looking for; want to save the environment, stop fighting nuclear.
Their argument, as laid out by House Republicans and libertarian organs like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, is that the federal government shouldn't 'pick winners and losers' in the energy markets or gamble taxpayer dollars on renewable-energy loans to companies like Solyndra
Are they wrong? Harping on solar over and over when its pretty clear that the efficiency, price, and land usage just arent there isnt going to fix the issue. Solar is a good supplemental tech, but its not going to save the world, and dumping $500 million into one company that goes bankrupt really does deserve criticism. If the amount had been like $10 million, maybe we wouldnt be having this discussion.
The assumption has always been that, without heavy government subsidies, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power would never be able to compete with fossil fuels
That presents a long term problem, doesnt it? Fundamentally one of the issues is that you cant fight supply and demand-- not successfully. If fuel is significantly cheaper than solar, the government isnt going to be able to pay off the difference indefinitely; and if solar IS cheaper in the long haul, people will jump on board (which is why they do).
But the idea that solar companies cant succeed without government help is ridiculous anyways. Didnt Elon Musk help found a solar firm (solarcity) about thats going strong, apparently with no government help? I found out about this while looking him up for the tesla articles, and I was a little surprised-- heres a firm thats been around for quite a while, is doing very well, and apparently had no help from the government! They did try to get a fed loan guarantee, and it fell through, and they went to a bank (BoA?) and got their loan. I guess that doesnt really help the narrative that "poor solar firms cant compete without government help", which perhaps is why such stories arent reported more widely.
Setting defaults to try to force an ideology is a really terrible idea, and generally results in an arms race, users leaving, or a ton of unintended consequences. See: Do Not Track.
And for last of those many, many years we've seen firefox project made from a distrinctly different browser into inferior google chrome clone.
What features are you objecting to? The automatic updater which actually works? The sync mechanism?
inferior
Im personally a fan of Chrome, but Firefox is definately faster in some areas, and its addons are definitely superior.
built specifically to benefit google by being essentially thin clients completely reliant on web services (google's business model).
Thats some wacky logic. The trend is towards the web, which is coincidentally where Google's bread and butter is; it does not follow that anyone embracing the web is doing so specifically to benefit google-- especially when said web-embracee is a web-browser maker. Is Microsoft also trying to "specifically benefit google" by embracing the web with their new OSes?
This is starkly differentiated from days when google clearly didn't exercise its power over mozilla years ago.
Mozilla has been getting money from Google for at least 7 years now; thats longer than theyve been a browser of any note whatsoever. To put that in perspective, Firefox was hitting version 1.0 sometime around 2004, and 1.5 sometime in 2005 or 2006. (and if youre going to make a snarky comment about the version numbering, id point out that back then it took about 1 year to get a few measly features like a new tab button (1.0 -> 1.5), whereas it now takes about 8 weeks).
Slashdot Mirror
the worst fears of the GOP will be realized - people will be getting better healthcare at lower cost.
The GOP by and large isnt bothered if your costs get lower (though, in reality, it is not actually possible for the majority's costs to get lower when we are now covering higher risk people); the concern is that we are going down a path of surrendering every area of life to government control. The idea that the government has the right to tell you to buy X product in order to live in this country is problematic; and its problematic that the government is OK with saying "it doesnt matter what bad choices you make in life, we (that is America at large) has your back".
Theres a term called "enablement" when dealing with someone who has an addiction / other problem; it refers to feeding their bad choices by taking away all consequences. What do you suppose happens when everyone is paying into insurance to cover the terrible choices others make? Or, I suppose, we could fix that by legislating exactly how people can live everyday life, but Im not seeing that as much better.
The website launch cant really be blamed on partisanship; its not like congress was arguing over the placement of DIVs. The partisan arguments were whether we could shut the program down; but as that wasnt really going anywhere its hard to blame that for a broken website.
The contractor dropped the ball, and there was no management or accountability put into place. Really not that complicated, and theres not really any other explanation when the higher ups were convinced the site would launch just fine on Oct 1.
Every benchmark ive seen suggests that noone comes remotely close to the performance or power-per-performance of a bog standard Xeon.
As I understand it the issue is the sheer amount of regulation and requirements set by government around nuclear power. Specifically, requirements requiring pre-allocating funds for decommissioning a plant (something which will generally have to occur many decades after the plant opens), the amount of insurance, etc.
Not really trying to get into a debate about the merits or lack thereof of those regulations-- but they are a huge factor in the startup cost of a new nuclear plant, and factually noone really disputes that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Correction-- numbers above are for petajoules, and the number for gasoline was actually for propane's energy density. Gasoline would have clocked in at
1,000,000,000 MJ / 36 MJ/L = 27,800,000 L
Its waste gobbles up lots of land for thousands of years. Once you factor the actual disposal costs in, nuclear isn't much better than coal.
Coal's waste has to be captured, and once youve captured it its pretty much no good to anyone, and never will be.
Nuclear's waste comes in convenient glass rods, is highly likely to be useable as Yet Another Source of Energy, and really doesnt require that much room to store given how incredibly energy-dense it is.
Pulling up scarce resources and consuming them for energy.
If you want to take it to that level, solar isnt technically renewable either; and heres a shocker, its actually nuclear energy. Heres another shocker, solar panels require the use of "non-renewable" resources, like "rare earth" minerals.
The question is, are we likely to run out, and the answer AFAICT appears to be no; I have never heard it suggested that we are likely to run out of uranium due to using it for nuclear energy. To put this into perspective, to get 1 terajoule of energy, you would need to
A) burn 38,500,000 L of gasoline (100% efficiency)
or
B) stick 1 L of Uranium-235 into a nuclear reactor
(source)
Its basically a non-issue. Solar may be a bigger issue simply
Check the link i sent. Every estimate (DoE, OECD/NEA, California Energy Commission, France's EDF) there puts solar at the bottom of the barrel except for perhaps exotic energy sources like wave power. Hydro is better, wind is better, nuclear is better. It is just not cost effective, it eats up gobs of land, and its not as reliable. One of those charts puts more than 1/3 of Solar's costs at simply having sufficient storage to maintain availability.
Im not arguing that solar has no place at a residential level, but it is a terrible area for the US gov't to be investing as a major energy source at a utilities level. Im not even putting forward oil / gas as the solution; it seems pretty clearly to be nuclear, which in every one of those graphs is a fraction of the cost of solar, and scales incredibly well.
Im also not arguing for subsidizing oil / gas, and I really dont understand why every single person who has responded to seems to think I am-- can people really not see beyond "hes either on the right or on the left for this issue"? Im on the "lets do what makes actual sense" side, and solar is not going to be powering the lions share of the grid for a very long time, if ever.
Thats totally my mistake-- I was aiming for "between 0.5 more and 10x as much" and ended up screwing the numbers up.
It is possible i was multiplying by 4, because of the 4x difference in capacity factor-- but that too would have been a mistake, as (I believe) that number would probably be figured into the costs listed in the graph.
Should be factors of 1.5x, and 10x, or "between 50% more and 900% more" -- the 10x number coming from the Max Levelized Cost of Energy for Solar PV (590) compared to "Coal, pulverized, unscrubbed" (40, though admittedly not sounding like a good choice of fuel) or "Natural Gas Combined Cycle" (70, almost 1/9th). These came from the OpenEl database (2 charts down from where the link lands you). I was basically attempting to look at average case (50% seemed close) and worst case (10x).
That system works when the minority party has any honest interest in negotiating
Rhetoric like this may make you feel justified in tearing down the checks and balances built into our democracy, but lets be clear you arent justified. Your logic appears to be "Id like to compromise, but the other side is so darn pigheaded". Problem is, EVERYONE says that when they dont want to compromise; this is very similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect. IM not being argumentative, YOURE being argumentative!
he present Republican party typically acts in ideological lockstep with a stance of "negotiating means doing EVERYTHING EXACTLY OUR WAY NO COMPROMISE."
Both sides do this. The easy answer, as Carl Levin (D) pointed out, is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to call the bluff of the filibusterers: Make them actually get up and filibuster, and when they falter, call the vote, and pass the measure.
Obama said it pretty clearly in 2005....
As did Biden, calling it a power grab by republicans to minimize the voice of dissent.
As did Reid in 2008, indicating that he believed it would "ruin our country", and he would never support it
In case you think the situation is different now and that no longer applies, Id note that there were 3 democrats who voted against it, and basically gave the same reasons stated above. The difference is that they had the integrity to back their words up with action when the tables were turned. You want bi-partisanship, here it is: if Carl Levin were in my state, and were pro-life, I would consider voting for him simply because he showed integrity in this matter, unlike basically every other democrat who was in office in 2005 and objected when republicans attempted the same maneuver. And for the record, I say the same for those republicans who favored the nuclear option in 2005 and now find themselves on the wrong side of the fence: it displays an utter lack of integrity.
Every once and a while it is good to do a sanity check and see whether you are simply falling into a default defensive position rather than rationally evaluating whether "your party's" position is defensible. I recognize that there are probably a good number of democrats who, if aware of the nature and consequences of this vote, would oppose it. I would hope that it would be the majority of them, and that corrective action would be taken-- though at this point its pretty much too late.
The thing is, I can put solar on my house, and I will be to able to generate enough power, on occasion, to have some extra to put back on the grid. With the right configuration and local storage, I can even go off the grid.
And I dont oppose that, and I dont see why the government even needs to be involved with that; it seems to me to be a smart move to install solar panels from the consumer point of view, and it makes solar companies money, so Im not exactly seeing why the government needs to pick winners in this area.
Separately, you may not have noticed that the Republicans have held effective veto power over new legislation in the Senate until just yesterday.
This is baloney. For one, democrats had the house, the senate, and the executive from 2008 to 2010. For another, you could argue that any time the house and senate are held by different parties, each holds "effective veto power", but only if you assume one particular party has a particular right to execute its own agenda.
Its irrelevant though, because if democrats really wanted to make a change regarding subsidies, they had 2 whole years of free reign to do so; they did not, and the attempt to hide behind the following few years (where republicans STILL couldnt do very much, given senate opposition and Obama's veto power) is a little lame.
It also staggers imagination that you seem to be implicitly supporting the "nuclear option", which was historically opposed by both parties, has never been invoked, and was opposed by Obama as recently as 2005 because of how utterly insane it is to have a vote that its time to ignore the voting rules. Have fun with that in 4 years, I guess; you may want to listen to Carl Levin's remarks on why it was a stupid idea that everyone now has to live with.
If you cant bother to read my post (like the part where I dont actually like the corn ethanol subsidies), you shouldnt expect the discussion to continue.
I'm perfectly okay with my tax dollars going towards expanding renewable energy.
Right, but its not exactly fair to say "Im perfectly OK with your dollars going towards....", which is what youre effectively saying. And the issue is that we're NOT at the tipping point, and nuclear and natural gas are both substantially cheaper, more scalable, and have higher capacity factors than solar (by a factor of 4):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates
So no, I dont want my dollars being dumped into a technology is nowhere near being competitive with established technology.
The startup costs for nuclear are largely high BECAUSE of government.
So it's possible that planned, carefully considered large scale investment in solar or some other form of renewable energy will pay off.
Investing in every possible alternative technology in the hope that one sticks sounds like a massive waste of money. Thats how its supposed to work: good technology takes off, the bad stuff fails and disappears. You get problems when you start screwing with that, like bad technology that is forever on government life support.
Its disgusting how this topic goes from "fact vs fact" to "fossil vs non-fossil", and everyone ends up shoehorned into one category or the other. Im advocating Nuclear, which is definately "non-fossil", but im against subsidizing solar, because it makes zero financial or common sense.
Please dont assume (as so many posters have) that being against solar subsidies automatically means im pro-big oil, or pro-oil subsidies, or pro-corn ethanol, or anything else; I never said any of that.
Why are you stopping us from making clean energy from OUR LAND instead of supporting terrorists by using oil and corn ethanol?
Im doing no such thing; the question is whether the government needs to subsidize solar, which I see no reason for. If it makes financial or environmental sense to install panels on your roof, wonderful, do so; we had one on my house when I was growing up.
And why are you bringing corn ethanol into this, as if Ive somehow expressed support for it? Isnt that a stereotypically democrat issue, to push corn ethanol as a green alternative to petro?
Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels. In a single family home, not only do you generate electricity, the panels shade the structure and keep it cooler in the summer months.
I totally agree, and I am utterly lost as to how thats relevant to the discussion. If you're arguing that we should provide tax incentives for doing so, I would say "maybe, but why: if it makes financial sense, people will do it anyways". If youre arguing that the businesses themselves need government assistance, I would say "rubbish", because there are plenty of solar companies out there doing just fine.
Id be fine with getting rid of any and all such subsidies, and considering dems had control of both houses and the executive from 2008-2010, and maintained both the senate and the executive for the last 3 years, its a little much to pin this on republicans.
But the idea that other energy sources would have trouble competing with solar right now is just nuts. Cost-wise, things dont look that good for solar-- depending on what measure you look at, its anywhere from 50% to 5000% more expensive than other technology like nuclear or natural gas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates
The utilities are doing just fine, and would be without subsidies; aside from not having to worry about mirror orientation, cloud cover, energy storage, and land leases, their fixed and operational costs tend to be lower, and their capacity factor is higher.
Slashdot is supposed to be a technology site, but sometimes an idea pops up that has no real-world merit and slashdotters become convinced that its the best thing since sliced bread, no matter what the facts and statistics are. Solar just isnt there yet: Get over it.
Then "stop subsidizing them" seems to be a reasonable response.
Plus, we should be encouraging solar over other sources for a host of reasons,
No, we should be encouraging nuclear first, then solar / wind / geothermal, because nuclear is actually scalable and doesnt chew up gobs of land.
If true, it seems like a more fair discussion would be whether ANY of that funding should happen.
Regardless of what the congressfolk say, I think you would find that your average conservative would NOT be for that (myself included).
Its not ironic at all. The government can and does do some things well. It does not follow that the government should be involved in all things.
Theres a reason that venture capital and bank loans exist; thats not a role we need the government playing.
They (I) also dont like the thought process that goes "Startup needs money --> government has to provide it". Solarcity managed to secure themselves a loan from BoA just fine, with no government help.
Reality check:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf
http://www.entergy-arkansas.com/content/news/docs/AR_Nuclear_One_Land_Use.pdf
Solar uses huge amounts of land-per-MWh-- between 3 and 10, depending on who you ask, what technology, and how you measure; it also generally ignores the whole "peak solar output is very different than average", or the whole "this only works in places with a lot of room and a lot of sun". This isnt the solution youre looking for; want to save the environment, stop fighting nuclear.
Their argument, as laid out by House Republicans and libertarian organs like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, is that the federal government shouldn't 'pick winners and losers' in the energy markets or gamble taxpayer dollars on renewable-energy loans to companies like Solyndra
Are they wrong? Harping on solar over and over when its pretty clear that the efficiency, price, and land usage just arent there isnt going to fix the issue. Solar is a good supplemental tech, but its not going to save the world, and dumping $500 million into one company that goes bankrupt really does deserve criticism. If the amount had been like $10 million, maybe we wouldnt be having this discussion.
The assumption has always been that, without heavy government subsidies, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power would never be able to compete with fossil fuels
That presents a long term problem, doesnt it? Fundamentally one of the issues is that you cant fight supply and demand-- not successfully. If fuel is significantly cheaper than solar, the government isnt going to be able to pay off the difference indefinitely; and if solar IS cheaper in the long haul, people will jump on board (which is why they do).
But the idea that solar companies cant succeed without government help is ridiculous anyways. Didnt Elon Musk help found a solar firm (solarcity) about thats going strong, apparently with no government help? I found out about this while looking him up for the tesla articles, and I was a little surprised-- heres a firm thats been around for quite a while, is doing very well, and apparently had no help from the government! They did try to get a fed loan guarantee, and it fell through, and they went to a bank (BoA?) and got their loan. I guess that doesnt really help the narrative that "poor solar firms cant compete without government help", which perhaps is why such stories arent reported more widely.
Setting defaults to try to force an ideology is a really terrible idea, and generally results in an arms race, users leaving, or a ton of unintended consequences. See: Do Not Track.
but if there's no licence then they're not free by any sense of the word.
Except for the most common usage of the word, which is to say free as in beer.
And for last of those many, many years we've seen firefox project made from a distrinctly different browser into inferior google chrome clone.
What features are you objecting to? The automatic updater which actually works? The sync mechanism?
inferior
Im personally a fan of Chrome, but Firefox is definately faster in some areas, and its addons are definitely superior.
built specifically to benefit google by being essentially thin clients completely reliant on web services (google's business model).
Thats some wacky logic. The trend is towards the web, which is coincidentally where Google's bread and butter is; it does not follow that anyone embracing the web is doing so specifically to benefit google-- especially when said web-embracee is a web-browser maker. Is Microsoft also trying to "specifically benefit google" by embracing the web with their new OSes?
This is starkly differentiated from days when google clearly didn't exercise its power over mozilla years ago.
Mozilla has been getting money from Google for at least 7 years now; thats longer than theyve been a browser of any note whatsoever. To put that in perspective, Firefox was hitting version 1.0 sometime around 2004, and 1.5 sometime in 2005 or 2006. (and if youre going to make a snarky comment about the version numbering, id point out that back then it took about 1 year to get a few measly features like a new tab button (1.0 -> 1.5), whereas it now takes about 8 weeks).