When physical documents, hard evidence, etc. go out the window in our all-digital future world, where will forensic proof like this still exist?
To some extent, it can still exist as part of the storage medium, especially if the data is written to write-once media. You can examine a CD-R under a microscope and determine that it was burned with a particular family of vintage 1998 CD burners and hasn't been tampered with since, but there's a good chance you can't prove that burner wasn't used in 2008. Certainly my '90s era burner still works. If I was a determined forger, I could probably find a partial spindle of blank CDs from the same era and create a document on a Pentium that would bear all the signs of having been created 20 years ago, even though I made it last week.
What we need is a new type of write-once media that, if unwritten, intentionally decays into unwritability after a few months, but stabilizes if written to. The fabrication date would be prewritten at the factory. It would have to exhibit changes if attempts are made to artificially preserve it beyond its design lifetime in writable state, such as by freezing it. The writer should cryptographically sign the data as it writes it, too, independently of any existing signatures the data may have, using a unique private key built into the writer stored using the same tamper-resistant chips Apple and others are using in their phones. It should independently sign sectors of bytes as an integral part of the filesystem format. Writer manufacturer(s) should publish the corresponding public key to every writer made each month. Traceability to the writer and verifiability of the data integrity are only nice to have though. What's important is the unwritability of the media after a predictable elapsed time.
It depends. How addictive is fighting in a war? I've known plenty of guys who quit cold turkey once their tours of duty were over and didn't feel any constant urge to keep shooting.
There's a few who still have the constant urge to keep shooting. At people, specifically. It's one of the severest forms of PTSD.
Unfortunately, they don't get much better healthcare than any random nicotine addict.
No, seriously. Qualcomm's position is that every step in the production chain that includes their IP/hardware needs to be individually licensed. Because company X makes a board that includes Qualcomm's IP, and then sells that board to company Y who makes a phone from it and sells said phone, then both X and Y need to be licensed.
How is this not an open-and-shut case of patent exhaustion?
It is. And the Supreme Court has gotten tired of the Federal Circuit that keeps trying to maintain the fiction that it isn't. So they ruled in May. Qualcomm apparently didn't get the memo. They don't have a leg to stand on. The brief required to scuttle their entire suit, and dismiss with prejudice, is one page long and cites that link.
Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers.
You are correct. Unfortunately, you didn't link the relevant case. Time shifting is legal, if each and every person is doing it with their own equipment. Time shifting is not legal if you use someone else's equipment to do it.
In other words, sites that provide a ripping service (with or without ads) are not legal. Apps that rip on your own computer or other device are legal. So sayeth the Supreme Court of the United States in 2014, so it's going to stick for quite some time.
How many convictions are required before you are concerned about it?
Thousands, per state, minimum. Tens of thousands in high population states.
How much fraud do you accept?
Approximately 0.01% is perfectly acceptable. The actual rate is less than that, year in and year out. 6 out of 136,628,459 is 0.0000000439%. I'm perfectly fine with a rate 100,000 times worse than that. Fortunately I don't have to settle for that.
Existing voting controls are quite good, most places. The only precincts I'm suspicious of are those with purely electronic voting, and the only part of that I'm suspicious of is the vote results. The actual voting controls are still quite good, even in places like that.
I like my state's method best. Scantron sheets, so there's a paper record that's electronically tabulated, with the tabulation happening right in front of you. The scanner rejects your ballot if you screwed it up somehow. Much better than any paper punch system, and far better than any purely electronic system.
Why, when someone objects to blatantly obviously politically motivated bullshit, do you immediately conclude that a) the objector also objects to any voting controls at all; and b) that there are no existing voting controls? You are 100% wrong in both cases.
If a fission reactor crashes on Mars, presumably the planet itself will break into a group of extremely radioactive fireballs which will then collide with Earth and kill us all. Is that what the 70 years of nuclear paranoia sci-fi has you thinking?
Well, and Hollywood. Everything we know about radioactive materials, we learned from Hollywood. If a radioactive spider bites you, you become super strong and can cling to the ceiling with cilia in your hands and toes!
Title says "Tesla Factory Reportedly Described As a 'Predator Zone' By Female Employees", but the first sentence says "Tesla's Fremont factory was described by a female employee...". So which one is it? Plural is quite different from singular....
The whole thing sounds eerily familiar. Attention-seeking woman with no particular skills of her own levels accusations of misogyny against a group of male nerds, and is promptly backed by hit pieces written by obviously wildly biased excuses for journalists who also happen to be well-known third wave feminists.
I've heard this song before. It was called GamerGate.
Fortunately, the software for the killbots was outsourced to India. The first generation sank into the swamp. So they built a second generation. It sank into the swamp. So they build a third generation. It caught fire, fell over, and sank into the swamp. It wasn't until the fourth generation that they were actually dangerous to humans: they would call you at all hours of the night and tell you that your computer is infected with a virus and that they can help you clean it, for a small fee.
So, the humans declare war on the robots and blacken the sky so that the robots no longer have a power source. Eventually the robots win the war anyways and turn the remaining humans into batteries that power the new robot civilization while having them trapped in a big elaborate VR simulation.
I can tell you who suffered because of all that 'free' excess solar electricity, every consumer of electricity in California, because the utility company is required, by law, to pay a premium price for every solar generated KWh fed into their grid, whether they need it or not, whether or not they can resell it.
You repeated that three different times, and got modded up every single time, but not once did you clarify that it varies substantially by state. 24 states require net metering to be paid at retail. All the rest pay less than the retail rate, and in three states, utilities are not required to offer net metering at all. 100% of those have an upper capacity limit, above which they're not even required to allow connection, let alone net metering. 11 of those have total generation limits. When the total installed base of net metering exceeds that limit, they're no longer required to pay the retail rate. That limit is 1% in nearly all states, though it ranges as high as 5% in Delaware and, specifically, California.
Once total photovoltaic generation capacity in California exceeds 5% of available capacity in the state, California utilities will no longer be required to pay retail rates to net metering installations.
Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics. Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
In a couple of centuries? You wrote that sentence immediately after the sentence about plastic-eating bacteria already known to exist? We should be so lucky that it would take a couple of centuries, but it won't. Evolution is really real, folks, and in bacteria, it's fast. Plastic is an organic compound, and it is right-this-second literally biodegradable.
The problem is not going to be what to do with all the plastic dust in the environment. The problem is going to be what substance do we use to replace plastic when there is so much plastic-eating bacteria in the environment that we're no longer able to protect medical equipment and other life critical machines from their ravages.
All these batteries we're talking about have a huge environmental impact as well. They also will need to be replaced regularly.
A largely one-time environmental impact to mine the materials. After that, they're recyclable, at extremely high material efficiencies.
Granted, having these grids and utilities controlled by private companies is completely unacceptable. That needs to change, but that's another matter entirely.
I can try to change that, or I can buy batteries. Guess which is actually under my control?
The reason is that it's great running your own service when everything works. But when stuff breaks, *I* had to fix it. If I was waiting for an important email, I had to drop everything I was doing and fix it. If I was waiting for an important email and didn't notice it broke, then I blissfully continued waiting until a day later when a friend asked me "Why haven't you responded to my email?" The final straw was when it broke when I was on vacation, leaving me technologically incommunicado unless I abandoned my vacation to fix it. I already have a job, and it's not babysitting a mission-critical email server.
Good thing your job isn't babysitting a mission-critical email server since you're obviously quite bad at it. I've been running a personal email server for 16 years now, and it's more reliable than my ISP, which is the lower bound for the reliability of an off-premises email service. When I can't reach any part of the Internet, I also can't reach gmail, but I can still reach my email. Delivery to it resumes when my ISP gets their shit together. Even when the power goes out, I have sufficient battery backup to keep my cable modem and my email server online for many hours. Twice in the past 16 years, my personal battery backup has exceeded the battery backup of my ISP's next hop. My equipment was still online, while the head end went down. Running your own email server is only difficult if you don't know what you're doing.
That said, you have a fair point about going off grid. Power electronics are notably more dangerous than email servers...
Nope. Where I'm at we have enough solar, geothermal, and hydro generating capacity that we make more than we use. We cannot legally disconnect from the grid though, which is complete BS because whenever the local power goes out (which is a lot because it's above ground lines through lots of trees that like to fall) we lose power as well.
Then you bought the wrong kind of grid-tie inverter. A proper grid-tie inverter has an internal relay that opens when it detects that grid power has gone down, but it maintains the linkage between your DC power sources and the AC side of the house. That way you don't backfeed power into the grid, endangering linemen, but your own power remains accessible. You have the kind that can't disconnect your generation sources from the grid, so it has to shut itself off completely when the grid goes down. Buy a better inverter.
The batteries AND the control systems for battery-backed solar are expensive and must be replaced fairly often. Batteries last, what, 5 years maybe in regular charge/discharge cycles?
Tesla Powerwall 2s have a 10 year warranty for daily deep cycle use. Longevity of the non-panel parts of a photovoltaic system is stretching longer and longer. I expect all of the components to hit 20 year lifespans in relatively short order. The demand is there.
The above ground ones have the issues we all know about, the below ground ones are susceptable[sic] to lightning.
Below ground lines are considerably less susceptible to lightning than above ground lines. Lightning can strike above ground lines literally anywhere along their length, while it can only reach below ground lines where they surface. The more lines that are buried, the less susceptible the grid is.
And the kiosks are a helluva lot less ugly than a stinking utility pole stuck in the ground every dozen yards. I have a kiosk in my yard, at the border with my neighbor. It's low, flat, and painted a deep green. I only notice it when I'm mowing. Neither poles nor transformers nor the wires they support in above ground systems are painted to blend into the background. Even better, the green metal box covering the transformer that serves me and my neighbors acts as a lightning shield for the transformer inside it. Even were it to take a direct strike (and given its shape and location, it never ever will), it would completely protect the transformer inside it.
Buried is better. If you're suffering a lot of transformer explosions that aren't induced by lightning, you should start buying better transformers that don't leak their oil.
I think switching the pricing for electricity to better reflect the true costs makes the most sense. Make the monthly charge representative of the costs of infrastructure and then change the usage charge to vary through the day to track the price of wholesale power.
Yes, it does. Guess how much maintaining the grid costs? It's 50 cents per day per meter, and that's in a suburban/rural service area with significantly lower meter per mile density than any urban grid. It's less than that in higher density regions. It costs a maximum of $15.50 per month to maintain the grid, and that's everything, from administrative staff in the office, to linemen in the field, to new buying and installing new utility poles and transformers, to tree removal, to paying the necessary share of the high voltage lines from the generators, to the service trucks and their maintenance depot, to debt servicing, to the cost of the property the home office sits on. Everything. And that's with a buffer built in for dealing with unusual weather events like damaging straight line winds, ice storms, tornadoes, floods, and lightning strikes. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. If the weather is mild in a year, it's less than 50 cents per day.
How do I know this? I've been a member-owner of a non-profit electric co-op for 15 years. Every member gets detailed financial statements every year, and I read them carefully. And because the co-op is non-profit, we're required by law to return unused funds, so every year, I get a check between $14 and $22, so ultimately, it costs 50 cents per day for 11 months of the year to pay for 12 months of grid maintenance. There's no funny business happening with hiding grid costs in the charges for electricity, either. I pay 7 cents per kilowatt-hour at night and 9 cents during the day, some of the lowest rates in the nation.
For-profit power companies who claim they can't allow their slave-customers to install solar panels without charging them a $30/month fee for a grid connection are lying. Arizona, I'm looking at you. They're demanding a 120%-150% profit. Arizona gets an average of only 4 tornadoes per year, compared to 32 per year in my state, and zero ice storms per year, the most expensive sources of line damage.
In the end, Arizona power companies are trying to accelerate the 2020-2028 time frame projected in the article, and cutting their own throats in the process. $30/month pays for a lot of batteries. Power companies that "fight back" the hardest against residential solar will go bankrupt the soonest. They're incentivizing their customers to become ex-customers.
Unless, of course, WWIII is a videogame war. Then we'd be all set.
You wish. Koreans and Chinese teams win international professional video game tournaments. The team the Koreans beat was European. The American team didn't even make it into the semifinals. The team the Chinese beat was nominally American, but only had two out of five American citizens. Two of the others were Korean and the fifth was filipino. Immigration at work...
No. All you need to know about Ajit Pai is that he is the former Associate General Counsel to Verizon.
We thought Tom Wheeler was going to be like Pai, since he was a former cable lobbyist. He surprised us, and the FCC reclassified ISPs as common carriers under his watch.
It really does come down to individuals. (And possibly his age contributed. Tom Wheeler knew he didn't need another job after his stint at the FCC. Pai is young. He's gonna need another cushy Verizon job.)
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When physical documents, hard evidence, etc. go out the window in our all-digital future world, where will forensic proof like this still exist?
To some extent, it can still exist as part of the storage medium, especially if the data is written to write-once media. You can examine a CD-R under a microscope and determine that it was burned with a particular family of vintage 1998 CD burners and hasn't been tampered with since, but there's a good chance you can't prove that burner wasn't used in 2008. Certainly my '90s era burner still works. If I was a determined forger, I could probably find a partial spindle of blank CDs from the same era and create a document on a Pentium that would bear all the signs of having been created 20 years ago, even though I made it last week.
What we need is a new type of write-once media that, if unwritten, intentionally decays into unwritability after a few months, but stabilizes if written to. The fabrication date would be prewritten at the factory. It would have to exhibit changes if attempts are made to artificially preserve it beyond its design lifetime in writable state, such as by freezing it. The writer should cryptographically sign the data as it writes it, too, independently of any existing signatures the data may have, using a unique private key built into the writer stored using the same tamper-resistant chips Apple and others are using in their phones. It should independently sign sectors of bytes as an integral part of the filesystem format. Writer manufacturer(s) should publish the corresponding public key to every writer made each month. Traceability to the writer and verifiability of the data integrity are only nice to have though. What's important is the unwritability of the media after a predictable elapsed time.
Is there a chemist in the house?
Will the roofs have diving boards?
It's just an apartment complex, not an arcology.
Great book though.
It depends. How addictive is fighting in a war? I've known plenty of guys who quit cold turkey once their tours of duty were over and didn't feel any constant urge to keep shooting.
There's a few who still have the constant urge to keep shooting. At people, specifically. It's one of the severest forms of PTSD.
Unfortunately, they don't get much better healthcare than any random nicotine addict.
Are there any companies that hope to have a non diesel/gasoline big rig available by then?
Yes.
Can someone tell me something? Will an electric car burn like a gasoline car?
Yes.
No, seriously. Qualcomm's position is that every step in the production chain that includes their IP/hardware needs to be individually licensed. Because company X makes a board that includes Qualcomm's IP, and then sells that board to company Y who makes a phone from it and sells said phone, then both X and Y need to be licensed.
How is this not an open-and-shut case of patent exhaustion?
It is. And the Supreme Court has gotten tired of the Federal Circuit that keeps trying to maintain the fiction that it isn't. So they ruled in May. Qualcomm apparently didn't get the memo. They don't have a leg to stand on. The brief required to scuttle their entire suit, and dismiss with prejudice, is one page long and cites that link.
Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers.
You mean "time shifting". This has been litigated already.
You are correct. Unfortunately, you didn't link the relevant case. Time shifting is legal, if each and every person is doing it with their own equipment. Time shifting is not legal if you use someone else's equipment to do it.
In other words, sites that provide a ripping service (with or without ads) are not legal. Apps that rip on your own computer or other device are legal. So sayeth the Supreme Court of the United States in 2014, so it's going to stick for quite some time.
In an ideal world, anything less than 100% legitimacy is unacceptable.
In an ideal world, love is forever, there's peace in the Middle East, and puppies don't pee on the floor.
If you find that ideal world, let me know. I'll come and take the crack pipe out of your hand.
Honestly, this is all bullshit semantics. Talk about Stuff that doesn't fucking matter. This sure as shit ain't News for Nerds.
Obviously. Nerds don't have friends.
How many do you want to allow, each election?
Very few.
How many convictions are required before you are concerned about it?
Thousands, per state, minimum. Tens of thousands in high population states.
How much fraud do you accept?
Approximately 0.01% is perfectly acceptable. The actual rate is less than that, year in and year out. 6 out of 136,628,459 is 0.0000000439%. I'm perfectly fine with a rate 100,000 times worse than that. Fortunately I don't have to settle for that.
Existing voting controls are quite good, most places. The only precincts I'm suspicious of are those with purely electronic voting, and the only part of that I'm suspicious of is the vote results. The actual voting controls are still quite good, even in places like that.
I like my state's method best. Scantron sheets, so there's a paper record that's electronically tabulated, with the tabulation happening right in front of you. The scanner rejects your ballot if you screwed it up somehow. Much better than any paper punch system, and far better than any purely electronic system.
Why, when someone objects to blatantly obviously politically motivated bullshit, do you immediately conclude that a) the objector also objects to any voting controls at all; and b) that there are no existing voting controls? You are 100% wrong in both cases.
If a fission reactor crashes on Mars, presumably the planet itself will break into a group of extremely radioactive fireballs which will then collide with Earth and kill us all. Is that what the 70 years of nuclear paranoia sci-fi has you thinking?
Well, and Hollywood. Everything we know about radioactive materials, we learned from Hollywood. If a radioactive spider bites you, you become super strong and can cling to the ceiling with cilia in your hands and toes!
Yikes, so much wrong with this.
Title says "Tesla Factory Reportedly Described As a 'Predator Zone' By Female Employees", but the first sentence says "Tesla's Fremont factory was described by a female employee...". So which one is it? Plural is quite different from singular. ...
The whole thing sounds eerily familiar. Attention-seeking woman with no particular skills of her own levels accusations of misogyny against a group of male nerds, and is promptly backed by hit pieces written by obviously wildly biased excuses for journalists who also happen to be well-known third wave feminists.
I've heard this song before. It was called GamerGate.
Attacking nerds never goes out of style...
That's when the battlebots come in.
Fortunately, the software for the killbots was outsourced to India. The first generation sank into the swamp. So they built a second generation. It sank into the swamp. So they build a third generation. It caught fire, fell over, and sank into the swamp. It wasn't until the fourth generation that they were actually dangerous to humans: they would call you at all hours of the night and tell you that your computer is infected with a virus and that they can help you clean it, for a small fee.
So, the humans declare war on the robots and blacken the sky so that the robots no longer have a power source. Eventually the robots win the war anyways and turn the remaining humans into batteries that power the new robot civilization while having them trapped in a big elaborate VR simulation.
Spoiler alert.
I can tell you who suffered because of all that 'free' excess solar electricity, every consumer of electricity in California, because the utility company is required, by law, to pay a premium price for every solar generated KWh fed into their grid, whether they need it or not, whether or not they can resell it.
You repeated that three different times, and got modded up every single time, but not once did you clarify that it varies substantially by state. 24 states require net metering to be paid at retail. All the rest pay less than the retail rate, and in three states, utilities are not required to offer net metering at all. 100% of those have an upper capacity limit, above which they're not even required to allow connection, let alone net metering. 11 of those have total generation limits. When the total installed base of net metering exceeds that limit, they're no longer required to pay the retail rate. That limit is 1% in nearly all states, though it ranges as high as 5% in Delaware and, specifically, California.
Once total photovoltaic generation capacity in California exceeds 5% of available capacity in the state, California utilities will no longer be required to pay retail rates to net metering installations.
Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics.
Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
In a couple of centuries? You wrote that sentence immediately after the sentence about plastic-eating bacteria already known to exist? We should be so lucky that it would take a couple of centuries, but it won't. Evolution is really real, folks, and in bacteria, it's fast. Plastic is an organic compound, and it is right-this-second literally biodegradable.
The problem is not going to be what to do with all the plastic dust in the environment. The problem is going to be what substance do we use to replace plastic when there is so much plastic-eating bacteria in the environment that we're no longer able to protect medical equipment and other life critical machines from their ravages.
All these batteries we're talking about have a huge environmental impact as well. They also will need to be replaced regularly.
A largely one-time environmental impact to mine the materials. After that, they're recyclable, at extremely high material efficiencies.
Granted, having these grids and utilities controlled by private companies is completely unacceptable. That needs to change, but that's another matter entirely.
I can try to change that, or I can buy batteries. Guess which is actually under my control?
The reason is that it's great running your own service when everything works. But when stuff breaks, *I* had to fix it. If I was waiting for an important email, I had to drop everything I was doing and fix it. If I was waiting for an important email and didn't notice it broke, then I blissfully continued waiting until a day later when a friend asked me "Why haven't you responded to my email?" The final straw was when it broke when I was on vacation, leaving me technologically incommunicado unless I abandoned my vacation to fix it. I already have a job, and it's not babysitting a mission-critical email server.
Good thing your job isn't babysitting a mission-critical email server since you're obviously quite bad at it. I've been running a personal email server for 16 years now, and it's more reliable than my ISP, which is the lower bound for the reliability of an off-premises email service. When I can't reach any part of the Internet, I also can't reach gmail, but I can still reach my email. Delivery to it resumes when my ISP gets their shit together. Even when the power goes out, I have sufficient battery backup to keep my cable modem and my email server online for many hours. Twice in the past 16 years, my personal battery backup has exceeded the battery backup of my ISP's next hop. My equipment was still online, while the head end went down. Running your own email server is only difficult if you don't know what you're doing.
That said, you have a fair point about going off grid. Power electronics are notably more dangerous than email servers...
...and degradation can even be unmeasurable.
Fascinating paper. First I'd heard of that. Thanks.
Nope. Where I'm at we have enough solar, geothermal, and hydro generating capacity that we make more than we use. We cannot legally disconnect from the grid though, which is complete BS because whenever the local power goes out (which is a lot because it's above ground lines through lots of trees that like to fall) we lose power as well.
Then you bought the wrong kind of grid-tie inverter. A proper grid-tie inverter has an internal relay that opens when it detects that grid power has gone down, but it maintains the linkage between your DC power sources and the AC side of the house. That way you don't backfeed power into the grid, endangering linemen, but your own power remains accessible. You have the kind that can't disconnect your generation sources from the grid, so it has to shut itself off completely when the grid goes down. Buy a better inverter.
The batteries AND the control systems for battery-backed solar are expensive and must be replaced fairly often. Batteries last, what, 5 years maybe in regular charge/discharge cycles?
Tesla Powerwall 2s have a 10 year warranty for daily deep cycle use. Longevity of the non-panel parts of a photovoltaic system is stretching longer and longer. I expect all of the components to hit 20 year lifespans in relatively short order. The demand is there.
The above ground ones have the issues we all know about, the below ground ones are susceptable[sic] to lightning.
Below ground lines are considerably less susceptible to lightning than above ground lines. Lightning can strike above ground lines literally anywhere along their length, while it can only reach below ground lines where they surface. The more lines that are buried, the less susceptible the grid is.
And the kiosks are a helluva lot less ugly than a stinking utility pole stuck in the ground every dozen yards. I have a kiosk in my yard, at the border with my neighbor. It's low, flat, and painted a deep green. I only notice it when I'm mowing. Neither poles nor transformers nor the wires they support in above ground systems are painted to blend into the background. Even better, the green metal box covering the transformer that serves me and my neighbors acts as a lightning shield for the transformer inside it. Even were it to take a direct strike (and given its shape and location, it never ever will), it would completely protect the transformer inside it.
Buried is better. If you're suffering a lot of transformer explosions that aren't induced by lightning, you should start buying better transformers that don't leak their oil.
I think switching the pricing for electricity to better reflect the true costs makes the most sense. Make the monthly charge representative of the costs of infrastructure and then change the usage charge to vary through the day to track the price of wholesale power.
Yes, it does. Guess how much maintaining the grid costs? It's 50 cents per day per meter, and that's in a suburban/rural service area with significantly lower meter per mile density than any urban grid. It's less than that in higher density regions. It costs a maximum of $15.50 per month to maintain the grid, and that's everything, from administrative staff in the office, to linemen in the field, to new buying and installing new utility poles and transformers, to tree removal, to paying the necessary share of the high voltage lines from the generators, to the service trucks and their maintenance depot, to debt servicing, to the cost of the property the home office sits on. Everything. And that's with a buffer built in for dealing with unusual weather events like damaging straight line winds, ice storms, tornadoes, floods, and lightning strikes. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. If the weather is mild in a year, it's less than 50 cents per day.
How do I know this? I've been a member-owner of a non-profit electric co-op for 15 years. Every member gets detailed financial statements every year, and I read them carefully. And because the co-op is non-profit, we're required by law to return unused funds, so every year, I get a check between $14 and $22, so ultimately, it costs 50 cents per day for 11 months of the year to pay for 12 months of grid maintenance. There's no funny business happening with hiding grid costs in the charges for electricity, either. I pay 7 cents per kilowatt-hour at night and 9 cents during the day, some of the lowest rates in the nation.
For-profit power companies who claim they can't allow their slave-customers to install solar panels without charging them a $30/month fee for a grid connection are lying. Arizona, I'm looking at you. They're demanding a 120%-150% profit. Arizona gets an average of only 4 tornadoes per year, compared to 32 per year in my state, and zero ice storms per year, the most expensive sources of line damage.
In the end, Arizona power companies are trying to accelerate the 2020-2028 time frame projected in the article, and cutting their own throats in the process. $30/month pays for a lot of batteries. Power companies that "fight back" the hardest against residential solar will go bankrupt the soonest. They're incentivizing their customers to become ex-customers.
Unless, of course, WWIII is a videogame war. Then we'd be all set.
You wish. Koreans and Chinese teams win international professional video game tournaments. The team the Koreans beat was European. The American team didn't even make it into the semifinals. The team the Chinese beat was nominally American, but only had two out of five American citizens. Two of the others were Korean and the fifth was filipino. Immigration at work...
No. All you need to know about Ajit Pai is that he is the former Associate General Counsel to Verizon.
We thought Tom Wheeler was going to be like Pai, since he was a former cable lobbyist. He surprised us, and the FCC reclassified ISPs as common carriers under his watch.
It really does come down to individuals. (And possibly his age contributed. Tom Wheeler knew he didn't need another job after his stint at the FCC. Pai is young. He's gonna need another cushy Verizon job.)