They're thrilled they get to keep the money after getting the essentially free PR for the last decade. No fucking progress has been made.
They didn't even get to keep the money. Like the previous X-Prize, it was an insurance policy. Google has been paying the premiums on that policy for 10 years now. Probably much less than $20 million, but still a substantial sum of money. The insurance company came out on the right side of that bet this time. They're the ones who get to keep the money.
But hey, we got this lovely participation prize for the children, so it was worth it! Right?
Yeah, why not put 1 mil into an endowment fund, let it grow by dividend and then when someone finally reaches the moon, moves the required distance & takes photos, they will receive whatever is in the fund.
Because it's a little late. The prize was originally funded the same way the first X-Prize was funded, as an insurance policy. Google took out a policy, and paid the premiums on it to the insurance company. If the conditions of the prize were met, the insurance policy would pay out. Those premiums have been spent, for a decade now, and Google is letting the policy lapse. The insurance company made a very good bet this time.
If Google had initially funded the prize as a trust, then it could have been growing all this time and might have become a substantial sum of money. Unfortunately they didn't, since they expected the prize would be claimed, and much more quickly than a decade, so in order to keep their own costs low, they chose the insurance method. A $1 million prize a decade ago would have gotten no takers at all.
Their equiv. of "locker room talk" is way worse than I ever heard from working with males anywhere, even in an actual HS or college locker room.
Indeed. Women are expected to go beneath the shadow of death to bring forth life, and they're keenly aware of it. (If that sounds overly dramatic, look up the phrase "maternal mortality".)
Even without that factor, they're all aware that procreation is their bailiwick. Men mysticize and romanticize it all because they have no actual control whatsoever over the process. Women choose. Women decide. And their conversations about the subject are blunt and matter of fact to the point of crudity. Men who are being told that women are fragile flowers who need safe spaces away from any sexual innuendo are being lied to. The ones who are echoing that sentiment are being incredibly sexist, and even more incredibly ignorant. This absurd assertion by men that women need to be protected from sex talk is the very worst form of white knighting.
So much wrong with all this, but I'll just hit the high points.
Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator
No it won't. This is why the rhetoric matters, and why "warmest year on record" is such utterly useless nonsense. One average temperature number for an entire planet bathed in gigatons of fluids is absurd to the point of insanity. Those fluids move energy. Lots of energy. The atmosphere and the oceans are both giant energy conveyors. "Global warming" does not mean everywhere on Earth gets uniformly warmer by some number. That's why you're not supposed to use the phrase anymore. Some places will in fact get colder. The equator won't get appreciably warmer. Instead the tropical zone will get broader. Heat pushes further north and south during the respective summers than it used to. Regardless though, agriculture at and near the equator is nearly irrelevant: 79% of the Earth's equator is ocean, where human agriculture is nonexistent.
Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'.
Except they're starving because of assholes like Robert Mugabe, not because of climate anything (or weather, for that matter). Productive farmland became a desolate waste because people stopped farming, not because crops wouldn't grow. African starvation is the result of African land management policies and "charitable" donations of millions of tons of food from the developed world over decades that drove local farmers out of business, not CO2.
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy
Considering those brown people caused their own state of anarchy, Europeans are perfectly justified in demanding they stay the hell home and fix their own problems. A mass migration of millions is totally unjustified by any climate rhetoric, but you've been forcefed so many half-truths and lies about climate that you've become too blind to see the real causes of mass migrations. In short, they heard you're giving away free stuff and will accept the bullshit excuse of "climate refugee" as a reason for why they should get your free stuff. Maybe you can absorb a "few millions" and keep your cultural identity, but I doubt it, so you might want to consider self-preservation before you try to cure all the other ills of the world.
You spin a whole dystopian vision of the future at this point, which I'm not going to bother to quote because it too is crap. All food is local, with the exception of a handful of over-populated islands. Americans, and yes, Europeans too, have been getting fat while Africans starve, since time immemorial. It's just become fashionable since the '80s to notice and wring your hands about it, then butt in and make the problems worse. In the nearly 40 years since, Africa has had more than enough food to feed itself, and not enough, and good years or bad, the worst problem is politics, not climate.
...it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something.
Heavily tinted windows are illegal. ANY tint on the windshields or front side windows is also illegal. Rear passenger window tinting is legal, but only if it permits over 70% visible light through.
That varies very widely by jurisdiction. Much heavier tint and front tints are legal in some jurisdictions.
Also, no person was visible when the window went down. There was a limousine-style opaque divider between the front and rear seat and the pizzas were dispensed by robot from the rear window.
And lastly, you underestimate the ignorance of people. Plenty of people believed the giant "SELF-DRIVING DELIVERY VEHICLE" sticker on the side of the car.
The entire stock market has become infected with this bit of crazy, which tells me that collectively Wall Street are greedy, and stupid, and likely delusional if they have believed you can sustain a 10% growth forever. It's simply not possible, and consumers don't have that kind of money.
There's a good reason why Dell was taken private again. There's an ongoing need for desktops, laptops, and servers, which yes, is getting smaller, but it's not actually gone yet, but the stock market would have beaten up Dell's stock tremendously over that 12% reduction in sales.
There needs to also be some kind of certificate system added for open networks. Starbucks ought to be able to register their network with a CA, so that itâ(TM)s possible to verify that that open network with the SSID âoeStarbucksâ is not a phishing network.
Who cares if it's a "phishing network" as long as it reaches the public Internet? They can watch my SSH and TLS streams all they like (just like the NSA does). I don't care. I don't give a damn what open network I connect to, in Starbucks or anywhere else. The wireless part of the link is just one of many many parts of the link, all of which are vulnerable to eavesdropping. The TLS Everywhere initiative exists for a reason.
...authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to electricity pricing, land use, tax and environmental protection.
Let's all welcome China to the First World! We're going to redefine the phrase to include them now. How very American of them, to use electricity pricing, land use (zoning), taxes, and environmental protection regulations to crush something they don't like. We're so proud of them.
Being a capitalist dictatorship sure sounds so much better than being a communist dictatorship, don't you think? Remember kids, it's not an edict from the Powers That Be. It's just a change in zoning. Nothing to see here.
I should say they voted to remove an administrative rule. You can't sue to put it back into place.
Yes you can. There are rules about rule-making, in order to prevent capricious, expensive changes. This change may not have been done according to the rules. Lawyers are arguing about it now, and it looks like they have a case, as it hasn't been dismissed by the judge yet.
There actually is a straightforward and appealing pro-market case to make here and it could attract many (R)s...
Only the one that is of the same magnitude as the forced breakup of Ma Bell. If the government decrees that last mile providers must be broken out of their current respective corporate ownership into fully independent organizations regulated like utilities that must accept all comers who want to provide the Internet part of Internet service, then yes, it's a straightforward and appealing pro-market case.
Which can not possibly attract any (R)s at all, because what massive incumbent corporations want is sacrosanct to the current Republican party. The tech giants in this case are not the incumbents, so their opinions aren't relevant even if they weren't based out of California, and therefore permanently suspect in the eyes of the Republican party.
Let the corporations compete to give you the best and cheapest Internet.
Ahahahahahaha
Wait. You were serious... Maybe you haven't noticed, but Internet service providers in the United States have been behaving like an illegal cartel for two decades now, since the inception of the public Internet. They're not going to compete no matter how you change the rules. They don't have to, they don't want to, and because of the difficulty and expense of deploying that last mile, it's effectively a natural monopoly. Not quite as natural as water and sewer, but enough that you can expect the current behavior to always evolve, absent rules to the contrary.
Removing all the rules does not make things better. The right rules make things better. Net Neutrality is a right and necessary rule, because competition will always be absent.
Property tax in Longmont, CO is unchanged since 1991. Sales taxes went up from a total of 8.26% to 8.515% effective January 1, 2018, after a ballot measure approving it was voted on by the residents in November. History data does not seem to be readily available.
There's some complaining that property tax assessments have risen sharply in recent years in Boulder County, where Longmont is, but that's county-wide, in both incorporated and unincorporated areas.
Instead we blow billions on completely unreliable renewable energy sources that even after decades of investment and large scale destruction of the landscape still supply only a tiny fraction of our energy needs.
I'd say that billions are being spent, not blown, on renewable energy sources because they're known to work and you don't have to be a nuclear physicist to understand why, or get any licenses at all to make them. A wind turbine can be understood in its entirety by a 5th grader. Not so a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which has years if not a decade of very expensive and probably very dangerous development ahead of it before it can be used for commercial power. Could that work be done? I'm sure it could be. But it would require investment and risk and competent management, which is in short supply in this world. It's certainly beyond the capacity of modern governments, which have devolved into school-yard pissing contests between bouts of pigging out at the funding trough.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those who pissed me off.
If we legalized and regulated drugs, then the domino effect of violence that results from drugs starts to go away.
"Feeling blue? Need a pick-me-up? Get VitaRise! Cocaine in a pill! From GlaxoSmithKline."
Doesn't seem likely. Unfortunately even if all drugs are legalized, 40 years of anti-(some)-drug propaganda has had a lasting effect. It will take another 40 years before the promised benefits of legalization actually take serious effect, just because of human social inertia. Look at marijuana dispensaries today. Admittedly, national brands can't participate in that space because it's not yet a national market, but even if it were, I don't think you're going to see any household names entering that market any time in the next few generations. Management of the big multinationals are 65+ year old Baby Boomers who still buy the propaganda that weed will make your wives love black cock. It's going to require a whole generation to finally die off before non-violent drug distribution can become the norm.
The current generation of technology cannot be up to the requirements of the customer or else this would have been done a long time ago. The energy density of batteries is not yet there.
You'd better check your assumptions, or you're doing your employer a major disservice.
The 2020 model Roadster has been announced with a 620 mile range. It's the first announced that will use the new 2170 form factor lithium cells. Obviously the drag coefficient on a pickup truck is higher than for a 4 passenger sports car, but pickup trucks are also expected to be bigger and heavier than a sports car, giving plenty of room for additional batteries. I expect the non-towing range of a Tesla pickup to be at least 600 miles, and I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to push it to 800 miles. A Superduty version of a Tesla pickup could have a 1200 mile non-towing range.
Using current technology in volume production today. You need to pay very careful attention. Things are moving much faster than you're accustomed to.
And an electric work truck with an inverter is a game changer for everyone in the construction industry. Take the money you would have spent on a generator and use it to buy a Superduty Tesla. If your job site is 100 miles away, you could easily arrive with 80%-85% of your battery pack to spare, which you can then use all day long to run power tools. No need to buy a generator, fuel a generator, change the oil in a generator, mess with a balky generator that doesn't want to start in the cold, or any of that crap. You arrive, you park next to the job site, you engage your parking brake, you push the button that turns on the 110V NEMA plug panel, you hop out and plug in the extension cord you left coiled last night, and walk away. Your tools are powered for the day, and you never have to worry about your generator being broken, out of gas, or stolen.
Oh, and every time you turn on your saw, it's up to speed just a little bit faster than it was with the generator, because there's no lag between application of the load and the truck providing power like there is with a generator spinning itself up a little faster. All day long, you're just a little bit faster than you were. Not a lot, but over the course of a few weeks of work, it adds up. You might be done a day earlier than the guy down the street still using a genset, and that's money in your pocket.
Electric pickups are viable now. Not 10 years from now, not 5 years from now, not 3 years from now. Right now. The only thing stopping you is availability of lithium cells. Maybe your employer should have built a battery factory...
To be clear, the only surviving national electric vehicle subsidy is the $7500 federal tax credit. That tax credit has had a sunset clause in it since the day it was passed; when a manufacturer has 200,000 registered plug-in electric vehicles in the United States, that triggers collapse of the credit. At the end of the quarter the 200,000th vehicle is registered, the subsidy drops in half. It continues at $3,750 for the next 6 months, then drops in half again. It continues at $1,875 for the final six months, then drops to zero.
Tesla has had over 110,000 vehicles registered in the US already. They are well past the halfway mark. Model 3 production and sales in 2018 will trigger the end of the subsidy for Tesla Motors. All Tesla vehicles sold sometime in 2019 on will receive no federal subsidy.
The Tesla pickup truck will not be in production before 2019, so no Tesla pickup will be subsidized when they're finally sold.
(For EV market observers to be wrong about that prediction, Tesla would have to find $3 billion in the couch cushions tomorrow. Not gonna happen.)
The latest batch of offshore wind turbines are not subsidized at all, the companies didn't want the money.
Not true. That Bloomberg article is quite poor analysis for an alleged financial services company.
The approved projects for offshore wind turbines in the North Sea will not enjoy any construction subsidies, but they will enjoy plenty of operating subsidies in the form of Germany's absurdly high energy taxes that go to operators of renewables. If they weren't going to be selling in to Germany's energy market, these projects would still not be viable.
Presumably economies of scale and efficiencies of installers will continue to drop the installation costs of large scale wind generators, but there is a floor, a minimum cost below which installers can not go without taking a loss. Raw materials will always cost something, and for the foreseeable future there will be some labor involved. I would be curious to see an analysis of what that floor might be, and how it compares to current wholesale grid prices around the world. Not curious enough to try googling myself though...
If you want to connect to a peering location, buy enough fiber to get there through the public right of ways, just like the ISPs do.
Where do you think those public rights of way come from? I'll give you a hint. It's GOVERNMENT! Fucking idiot. You and the original poster are cut from the same cloth, just blithely taking for granted thousands of government functions while bleating about "government overreach". The service we're talking about does not exist without quite a lot of government, from the rights of way to the permitting, to the very concept that they can still own wire that is installed on someone else's property. Oh, and by the way, none of them pay me for the access to their easement on my property, which is not a public right of way. It existed before I bought the property and either getting rid of it or charging them rent for it is effectively a legal impossibility. I can't even fence them out of it. They have the legal right to subvert my fence if it blocks their easement. In common law countries, there's some 400 years of jurisprudence giving them that right. They certainly do NOT pay, me or anyone else, for their use of private property for their own profit.
The other coward's response only applies in some jurisdictions. In my jurisdiction, it's technically legal for me to drag my spool of fiber around the public rights of way, as long as I can get a permit. Of course, in my jurisdiction, Charter will challenge my permit the moment I file it. They have people whose job it is to watch for all such filings and file challenges to prevent competition from even beginning to form. Where they haven't managed to subvert the local government to the extent that they own a legal monopoly, such as mine, they instead game the permitting system to effectively produce the same result unless the challenged party has very deep pockets indeed.
All of which is the long from of what I said in pithier form in my original post. You have to understand what a government actually is and does before you could understand the pithier form. You manifestly did not understand. Now maybe you have a hint.
There's plenty that will multiply their investment. It's just that the time scale is longer than the attention span of their investors.
And some of their attempts to make more money by investing money might fail. There's no greater sin than losing a rich person's money.
Rich people believe they have the God-given right to get richer, as evidenced by their behavior, since, ooh, the beginning of time. To include feudal societies, theocracies, you name it. The form of government can shift and shift again, but the rich will always believe that the purpose of everything in the world is to make them richer. (Elon Musk appears to be the exception that proves the rule.)
If Apple dared to try to spend money on developing something new but screwed it up somehow, their stock price would plummet. Their tax haven situation is a convenient excuse for why they can't invest in serious new development. The fact it substantially reduces existential risk is not a coincidence.
At most I'd expect if it came back in a different form, they'd insist on 'approving' any petitions before actually being posted for people to sign (read as: censorship).
You don't seriously believe the site wasn't already censored do you? It was on the Internet. Trolls gonna troll. 4chan never sleeps. That site has been heavily censored since day one. It had to be.
You want fast access, pay for it. You want any access at all, pay for it. Let the market decide not the government. The less regulation the better off we are.
Ok. I'll go out and buy a spool of fiber right now. Can I walk across your property on my way to the peering location in my city? No? Then you're a fucking idiot and should shut up about things you don't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
They're thrilled they get to keep the money after getting the essentially free PR for the last decade. No fucking progress has been made.
They didn't even get to keep the money. Like the previous X-Prize, it was an insurance policy. Google has been paying the premiums on that policy for 10 years now. Probably much less than $20 million, but still a substantial sum of money. The insurance company came out on the right side of that bet this time. They're the ones who get to keep the money.
But hey, we got this lovely participation prize for the children, so it was worth it! Right?
Yeah, why not put 1 mil into an endowment fund, let it grow by dividend and then when someone finally reaches the moon, moves the required distance & takes photos, they will receive whatever is in the fund.
Because it's a little late. The prize was originally funded the same way the first X-Prize was funded, as an insurance policy. Google took out a policy, and paid the premiums on it to the insurance company. If the conditions of the prize were met, the insurance policy would pay out. Those premiums have been spent, for a decade now, and Google is letting the policy lapse. The insurance company made a very good bet this time.
If Google had initially funded the prize as a trust, then it could have been growing all this time and might have become a substantial sum of money. Unfortunately they didn't, since they expected the prize would be claimed, and much more quickly than a decade, so in order to keep their own costs low, they chose the insurance method. A $1 million prize a decade ago would have gotten no takers at all.
Their equiv. of "locker room talk" is way worse than I ever heard from working with males anywhere, even in an actual HS or college locker room.
Indeed. Women are expected to go beneath the shadow of death to bring forth life, and they're keenly aware of it. (If that sounds overly dramatic, look up the phrase "maternal mortality".)
Even without that factor, they're all aware that procreation is their bailiwick. Men mysticize and romanticize it all because they have no actual control whatsoever over the process. Women choose. Women decide. And their conversations about the subject are blunt and matter of fact to the point of crudity. Men who are being told that women are fragile flowers who need safe spaces away from any sexual innuendo are being lied to. The ones who are echoing that sentiment are being incredibly sexist, and even more incredibly ignorant. This absurd assertion by men that women need to be protected from sex talk is the very worst form of white knighting.
So much wrong with all this, but I'll just hit the high points.
Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator
No it won't. This is why the rhetoric matters, and why "warmest year on record" is such utterly useless nonsense. One average temperature number for an entire planet bathed in gigatons of fluids is absurd to the point of insanity. Those fluids move energy. Lots of energy. The atmosphere and the oceans are both giant energy conveyors. "Global warming" does not mean everywhere on Earth gets uniformly warmer by some number. That's why you're not supposed to use the phrase anymore. Some places will in fact get colder. The equator won't get appreciably warmer. Instead the tropical zone will get broader. Heat pushes further north and south during the respective summers than it used to. Regardless though, agriculture at and near the equator is nearly irrelevant: 79% of the Earth's equator is ocean, where human agriculture is nonexistent.
Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'.
Except they're starving because of assholes like Robert Mugabe, not because of climate anything (or weather, for that matter). Productive farmland became a desolate waste because people stopped farming, not because crops wouldn't grow. African starvation is the result of African land management policies and "charitable" donations of millions of tons of food from the developed world over decades that drove local farmers out of business, not CO2.
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy
Considering those brown people caused their own state of anarchy, Europeans are perfectly justified in demanding they stay the hell home and fix their own problems. A mass migration of millions is totally unjustified by any climate rhetoric, but you've been forcefed so many half-truths and lies about climate that you've become too blind to see the real causes of mass migrations. In short, they heard you're giving away free stuff and will accept the bullshit excuse of "climate refugee" as a reason for why they should get your free stuff. Maybe you can absorb a "few millions" and keep your cultural identity, but I doubt it, so you might want to consider self-preservation before you try to cure all the other ills of the world.
You spin a whole dystopian vision of the future at this point, which I'm not going to bother to quote because it too is crap. All food is local, with the exception of a handful of over-populated islands. Americans, and yes, Europeans too, have been getting fat while Africans starve, since time immemorial. It's just become fashionable since the '80s to notice and wring your hands about it, then butt in and make the problems worse. In the nearly 40 years since, Africa has had more than enough food to feed itself, and not enough, and good years or bad, the worst problem is politics, not climate.
...it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something.
That's racist.
I was not aware the Internet Archive had opened up their lending program. I mostly just use the Wayback Machine. Thank you SFWA. (And Ms. Streisand.)
Maybe, not being idiots, they understood that there was a person in the car?
Have you met any people? Like, ever? Or have you been living in a fallout shelter for the past 35 years?
Heavily tinted windows are illegal. ANY tint on the windshields or front side windows is also illegal. Rear passenger window tinting is legal, but only if it permits over 70% visible light through.
That varies very widely by jurisdiction. Much heavier tint and front tints are legal in some jurisdictions.
Also, no person was visible when the window went down. There was a limousine-style opaque divider between the front and rear seat and the pizzas were dispensed by robot from the rear window.
And lastly, you underestimate the ignorance of people. Plenty of people believed the giant "SELF-DRIVING DELIVERY VEHICLE" sticker on the side of the car.
The entire stock market has become infected with this bit of crazy, which tells me that collectively Wall Street are greedy, and stupid, and likely delusional if they have believed you can sustain a 10% growth forever. It's simply not possible, and consumers don't have that kind of money.
There's a good reason why Dell was taken private again. There's an ongoing need for desktops, laptops, and servers, which yes, is getting smaller, but it's not actually gone yet, but the stock market would have beaten up Dell's stock tremendously over that 12% reduction in sales.
There needs to also be some kind of certificate system added for open networks. Starbucks ought to be able to register their network with a CA, so that itâ(TM)s possible to verify that that open network with the SSID âoeStarbucksâ is not a phishing network.
Who cares if it's a "phishing network" as long as it reaches the public Internet? They can watch my SSH and TLS streams all they like (just like the NSA does). I don't care. I don't give a damn what open network I connect to, in Starbucks or anywhere else. The wireless part of the link is just one of many many parts of the link, all of which are vulnerable to eavesdropping. The TLS Everywhere initiative exists for a reason.
...authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to electricity pricing, land use, tax and environmental protection.
Let's all welcome China to the First World! We're going to redefine the phrase to include them now. How very American of them, to use electricity pricing, land use (zoning), taxes, and environmental protection regulations to crush something they don't like. We're so proud of them.
Being a capitalist dictatorship sure sounds so much better than being a communist dictatorship, don't you think? Remember kids, it's not an edict from the Powers That Be. It's just a change in zoning. Nothing to see here.
I should say they voted to remove an administrative rule. You can't sue to put it back into place.
Yes you can. There are rules about rule-making, in order to prevent capricious, expensive changes. This change may not have been done according to the rules. Lawyers are arguing about it now, and it looks like they have a case, as it hasn't been dismissed by the judge yet.
There actually is a straightforward and appealing pro-market case to make here and it could attract many (R)s...
Only the one that is of the same magnitude as the forced breakup of Ma Bell. If the government decrees that last mile providers must be broken out of their current respective corporate ownership into fully independent organizations regulated like utilities that must accept all comers who want to provide the Internet part of Internet service, then yes, it's a straightforward and appealing pro-market case.
Which can not possibly attract any (R)s at all, because what massive incumbent corporations want is sacrosanct to the current Republican party. The tech giants in this case are not the incumbents, so their opinions aren't relevant even if they weren't based out of California, and therefore permanently suspect in the eyes of the Republican party.
Let the corporations compete to give you the best and cheapest Internet.
Ahahahahahaha
Wait. You were serious... Maybe you haven't noticed, but Internet service providers in the United States have been behaving like an illegal cartel for two decades now, since the inception of the public Internet. They're not going to compete no matter how you change the rules. They don't have to, they don't want to, and because of the difficulty and expense of deploying that last mile, it's effectively a natural monopoly. Not quite as natural as water and sewer, but enough that you can expect the current behavior to always evolve, absent rules to the contrary.
Removing all the rules does not make things better. The right rules make things better. Net Neutrality is a right and necessary rule, because competition will always be absent.
What's happened to your property & sales taxes?
Property tax in Longmont, CO is unchanged since 1991. Sales taxes went up from a total of 8.26% to 8.515% effective January 1, 2018, after a ballot measure approving it was voted on by the residents in November. History data does not seem to be readily available.
There's some complaining that property tax assessments have risen sharply in recent years in Boulder County, where Longmont is, but that's county-wide, in both incorporated and unincorporated areas.
Instead we blow billions on completely unreliable renewable energy sources that even after decades of investment and large scale destruction of the landscape still supply only a tiny fraction of our energy needs.
I'd say that billions are being spent, not blown, on renewable energy sources because they're known to work and you don't have to be a nuclear physicist to understand why, or get any licenses at all to make them. A wind turbine can be understood in its entirety by a 5th grader. Not so a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, which has years if not a decade of very expensive and probably very dangerous development ahead of it before it can be used for commercial power. Could that work be done? I'm sure it could be. But it would require investment and risk and competent management, which is in short supply in this world. It's certainly beyond the capacity of modern governments, which have devolved into school-yard pissing contests between bouts of pigging out at the funding trough.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those who pissed me off.
If we legalized and regulated drugs, then the domino effect of violence that results from drugs starts to go away.
"Feeling blue? Need a pick-me-up? Get VitaRise! Cocaine in a pill! From GlaxoSmithKline."
Doesn't seem likely. Unfortunately even if all drugs are legalized, 40 years of anti-(some)-drug propaganda has had a lasting effect. It will take another 40 years before the promised benefits of legalization actually take serious effect, just because of human social inertia. Look at marijuana dispensaries today. Admittedly, national brands can't participate in that space because it's not yet a national market, but even if it were, I don't think you're going to see any household names entering that market any time in the next few generations. Management of the big multinationals are 65+ year old Baby Boomers who still buy the propaganda that weed will make your wives love black cock. It's going to require a whole generation to finally die off before non-violent drug distribution can become the norm.
The current generation of technology cannot be up to the requirements of the customer or else this would have been done a long time ago. The energy density of batteries is not yet there.
You'd better check your assumptions, or you're doing your employer a major disservice.
The 2020 model Roadster has been announced with a 620 mile range. It's the first announced that will use the new 2170 form factor lithium cells. Obviously the drag coefficient on a pickup truck is higher than for a 4 passenger sports car, but pickup trucks are also expected to be bigger and heavier than a sports car, giving plenty of room for additional batteries. I expect the non-towing range of a Tesla pickup to be at least 600 miles, and I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to push it to 800 miles. A Superduty version of a Tesla pickup could have a 1200 mile non-towing range.
Using current technology in volume production today. You need to pay very careful attention. Things are moving much faster than you're accustomed to.
And an electric work truck with an inverter is a game changer for everyone in the construction industry. Take the money you would have spent on a generator and use it to buy a Superduty Tesla. If your job site is 100 miles away, you could easily arrive with 80%-85% of your battery pack to spare, which you can then use all day long to run power tools. No need to buy a generator, fuel a generator, change the oil in a generator, mess with a balky generator that doesn't want to start in the cold, or any of that crap. You arrive, you park next to the job site, you engage your parking brake, you push the button that turns on the 110V NEMA plug panel, you hop out and plug in the extension cord you left coiled last night, and walk away. Your tools are powered for the day, and you never have to worry about your generator being broken, out of gas, or stolen.
Oh, and every time you turn on your saw, it's up to speed just a little bit faster than it was with the generator, because there's no lag between application of the load and the truck providing power like there is with a generator spinning itself up a little faster. All day long, you're just a little bit faster than you were. Not a lot, but over the course of a few weeks of work, it adds up. You might be done a day earlier than the guy down the street still using a genset, and that's money in your pocket.
Electric pickups are viable now. Not 10 years from now, not 5 years from now, not 3 years from now. Right now. The only thing stopping you is availability of lithium cells. Maybe your employer should have built a battery factory...
What's the government subsidy on these?
Nothing.
To be clear, the only surviving national electric vehicle subsidy is the $7500 federal tax credit. That tax credit has had a sunset clause in it since the day it was passed; when a manufacturer has 200,000 registered plug-in electric vehicles in the United States, that triggers collapse of the credit. At the end of the quarter the 200,000th vehicle is registered, the subsidy drops in half. It continues at $3,750 for the next 6 months, then drops in half again. It continues at $1,875 for the final six months, then drops to zero.
Tesla has had over 110,000 vehicles registered in the US already. They are well past the halfway mark. Model 3 production and sales in 2018 will trigger the end of the subsidy for Tesla Motors. All Tesla vehicles sold sometime in 2019 on will receive no federal subsidy.
The Tesla pickup truck will not be in production before 2019, so no Tesla pickup will be subsidized when they're finally sold.
(For EV market observers to be wrong about that prediction, Tesla would have to find $3 billion in the couch cushions tomorrow. Not gonna happen.)
The latest batch of offshore wind turbines are not subsidized at all, the companies didn't want the money.
Not true. That Bloomberg article is quite poor analysis for an alleged financial services company.
The approved projects for offshore wind turbines in the North Sea will not enjoy any construction subsidies, but they will enjoy plenty of operating subsidies in the form of Germany's absurdly high energy taxes that go to operators of renewables. If they weren't going to be selling in to Germany's energy market, these projects would still not be viable.
Presumably economies of scale and efficiencies of installers will continue to drop the installation costs of large scale wind generators, but there is a floor, a minimum cost below which installers can not go without taking a loss. Raw materials will always cost something, and for the foreseeable future there will be some labor involved. I would be curious to see an analysis of what that floor might be, and how it compares to current wholesale grid prices around the world. Not curious enough to try googling myself though...
If you want to connect to a peering location, buy enough fiber to get there through the public right of ways, just like the ISPs do.
Where do you think those public rights of way come from? I'll give you a hint. It's GOVERNMENT! Fucking idiot. You and the original poster are cut from the same cloth, just blithely taking for granted thousands of government functions while bleating about "government overreach". The service we're talking about does not exist without quite a lot of government, from the rights of way to the permitting, to the very concept that they can still own wire that is installed on someone else's property. Oh, and by the way, none of them pay me for the access to their easement on my property, which is not a public right of way. It existed before I bought the property and either getting rid of it or charging them rent for it is effectively a legal impossibility. I can't even fence them out of it. They have the legal right to subvert my fence if it blocks their easement. In common law countries, there's some 400 years of jurisprudence giving them that right. They certainly do NOT pay, me or anyone else, for their use of private property for their own profit.
The other coward's response only applies in some jurisdictions. In my jurisdiction, it's technically legal for me to drag my spool of fiber around the public rights of way, as long as I can get a permit. Of course, in my jurisdiction, Charter will challenge my permit the moment I file it. They have people whose job it is to watch for all such filings and file challenges to prevent competition from even beginning to form. Where they haven't managed to subvert the local government to the extent that they own a legal monopoly, such as mine, they instead game the permitting system to effectively produce the same result unless the challenged party has very deep pockets indeed.
All of which is the long from of what I said in pithier form in my original post. You have to understand what a government actually is and does before you could understand the pithier form. You manifestly did not understand. Now maybe you have a hint.
There's plenty that will multiply their investment. It's just that the time scale is longer than the attention span of their investors.
And some of their attempts to make more money by investing money might fail. There's no greater sin than losing a rich person's money.
Rich people believe they have the God-given right to get richer, as evidenced by their behavior, since, ooh, the beginning of time. To include feudal societies, theocracies, you name it. The form of government can shift and shift again, but the rich will always believe that the purpose of everything in the world is to make them richer. (Elon Musk appears to be the exception that proves the rule.)
If Apple dared to try to spend money on developing something new but screwed it up somehow, their stock price would plummet. Their tax haven situation is a convenient excuse for why they can't invest in serious new development. The fact it substantially reduces existential risk is not a coincidence.
At most I'd expect if it came back in a different form, they'd insist on 'approving' any petitions before actually being posted for people to sign (read as: censorship).
You don't seriously believe the site wasn't already censored do you? It was on the Internet. Trolls gonna troll. 4chan never sleeps. That site has been heavily censored since day one. It had to be.
You want fast access, pay for it. You want any access at all, pay for it. Let the market decide not the government. The less regulation the better off we are.
Ok. I'll go out and buy a spool of fiber right now. Can I walk across your property on my way to the peering location in my city? No? Then you're a fucking idiot and should shut up about things you don't understand.
Clicking on more links or "liking" more posts than the average user also leads to worse mental health, according to one study.
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