Now take a Donald Trump. No matter how greedy he is there's only just so much he can buy. At some point his money is just sitting around, doing nothing. He'll invest some of it, lose some of it, etc. But He's only got so much time in the day to do that. Eventually it becomes a war chest laying around doing nothing.
Except, that isn't how it works. That money is doing something, somewhere, all the time. No, he doesn't have it in a shoe box.
It is also not sitting idle in a bank account, but even that has benefits to the balance sheets of a bank. It is in investment companies being invested into new companies that will create jobs.
No it's not. It's really not.
Trump is probably a bad example because he goes bankrupt all the time, but pick any other hundred-millionaire or billionaire and look at where their money is. It is NOT in new companies. It is in old companies. It's in the stock market, chasing fewer and fewer stocks, driving their valuations to stratospheric levels completely divorced from the P/E ratio of the companies involved. It's creating bubbles in stocks, in commodities, in real estate, jumping from "sure thing" to "sure thing" with manic desperation. It most definitely is not creating new companies and new jobs. Look at the statistics for both job creation and small business creation. Both are effectively nonexistent.
Why? Let's examine the reasons.
The four Walton siblings collect approximately $3 billion dollars per year in Walmart dividends, every year. That's cash money that has to go somewhere, and even the most lavish of all possible lifestyles can't suck it up, so of course some large fraction of that cash gets reinvested. According to Forbes, the four of them together control $144 billion. Much of that is Walmart stock, but the rest is wherever those dividends have been reinvested.
Let's try to put that number into perspective. They could, in theory, get together and buy outright any but the largest 36 publicly traded companies in the world. That includes names like Honeywell, ConocoPhillips, Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, Walgreen, and Monsanto, to name but a few. Any two of them could buy General Motors and have at least $16 billion left over. Any one of them could buy Tesla Motors and have at least $9 billion left over.
Except, of course, they can't. It's not possible. Even if Alice Walton decided tomorrow that she really wanted to get out of consumer retail and into car manufacturing, she can't buy Tesla Motors. The NASDAQ couldn't take the shock. She'd have to liquidate some large fraction of her Walmart holdings, which would cause Walmart's share price to go through wild fluctuations as other billionaires tried to figure out what she's doing and whether or not she knows something they don't know about Walmart's health as a business. The NASDAQ circuit breaker would kick in, WMT would stop trading, and her brothers and sister would be on the phone yelling, "What the hell are you doing?!"
That's at the top end of what's conceivable, but not possible. Now let's consider the bottom end. Say, instead of a big splash, Alice Walton decides to use her ~$700 million in 2014 Walmart dividends, basically pocket money for her, to start a new business. Again, for the sake of comparison, let's consider a subject near and dear to Slashdot's heart, SpaceX. Elon Musk invested $100 million into SpaceX by the 4th year of its operations, according to the New York Times, quoting his own public statements. Alice Walton could, using one year of cash earnings from Walmart, invest seven times what Elon Musk invested into SpaceX in four years into her own new rocket company.
So where is it? Where's the new rocket company? SpaceX has done its capitalistic best to demonstrate that it's downright easy to compete with the United Launch Alliance, signing 46 launch contracts in a handful of years, demonstrating vast untapped demand, demand that pundits claimed didn't even exis
Might want to look up every single failed "Edutainment" attempt in history.
This. Microsoft may manage to demonstrate how to flush $2.5 billion faster than any company in history. There's no better way to convince kids not to use software than to use it as some sort of hamfisted teaching tool that is now mandatory.
I'll be interested in the Internet of Things as soon as I can get an IPv6 address for my balls.
Then rejoice! Hurricane Electric will give you your own/48 for free. Just set up a box to accept and route it and you can assign an IP to every single sperm in your beloved balls.
A thought just occurred to me: Assuming in the near to medium-term future we had many many large installations of battery banks (ala-Tesla batteries, for instance) charging and discharging constantly, how much waste heat would be generated by this, and how much would that waste heat contribute to global warming (positively or negatively)?
That depends entirely on where the power to do the charging comes from. If the power comes from the solar panels on your roof and is charging up your Tesla PowerWall, it's actually a net reduction in useless heat in your garage. Instead of the sun heating up your garage, it heats up your garage less and charges your batteries. The inefficiency in charging is a fraction of a fraction of what was going to be heat to begin with.
For other power sources, the waste heat generated is precisely the inefficiency of charging. For batteries that charge with 85% efficiency, 15% of the power is wasted as heat. One of many reasons why one of the criteria for a good battery is good charge and discharge efficiency. Still, the heat even from inefficient batteries contributes negligible amounts to global warming. The planet radiates heat into space from the top of the atmosphere, all day and all night. The biggest heat source is sunlight, and by biggest I mean it's literally trillions of times bigger than any one battery bank. (174 petawatts vs 10000 watts). The Earth radiates almost exactly 174 petawatts back into space. So exact that we have a hard time measuring it when it's different. Global warming is a thing mainly because of the potential for the composition of the atmosphere to change enough to change the amount of heat retention, not because of the waste heat of industrial processes. Industrial processes do nothing to change the temperature of Earth as long as Earth is able to continue radiating that heat into space.
Are you trolling, or are you really ignorant of the amount of engineering that goes into NASCAR? Or dragsters, for that matter?
I said the vehicle in the article is a drag strip car, or at best a track car. It is not a street car. You quoted... drag strip cars and track cars as counter-arguments?
I'm confused.
As for the engineering, there's this. Which says, in summary, that you can build any frame you like, except it must have a roll cage, and the roll cage must have a Newman Bar, it must be built of mild steel, it must have the specified tube radii, and it even must be coated in a specified color. Among other restrictions, to the point where there's not exactly a lot of innovative engineering happening in frame construction in NASCAR. There aren't very many degrees of freedom left.
But that's all beside the point anyway. The point is that a space frame isn't necessarily the best design because of its weakness with respect to torsional stress. A weakness that is irrelevant to track cars and dragsters because there is no vehicle surface more tightly controlled than that of a race track or drag strip. They don't have bumps, they don't have potholes, they don't have out of spec bankings. They don't even have seams. They're not anything like a street, in other words. So the chassis design constraints are nothing like the design constraints of a street car.
And that toy in the article isn't designed for streets. That's all I'm saying.
Reconcile your argument with the 19th amendment...
Easy. The 9th and 10th Amendments. Plus a whole slew of argumentation in the Federalist Papers.
Yes, later generations felt obliged to write amendments as if they conferred rights, rather than secured rights, because people go completely authoritarian at the drop of a hat. It's certainly not the way the Constitution was written, and it's the polar opposite of relativism. It was absolutely stated that the document was intended to restrict the government, not citizens. Rights don't "float in the ether independent of government." Rights adhere to individual citizens independently of, and in spite of, government.
So now the language of the Constitution is self-contradictory in tone, because a bunch of lawyers felt obliged to phrase some amendments as positive rights, rather than negative restrictions. Somehow it's human instinct to seek to organize in tribes headed by a king, and establish a hierarchy to oppress everybody "beneath" them. It wasn't supposed to be that way, and the Constitution still stands today as a piece of seriously radical thinking.
"Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees." --Sir Terry Pratchett
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11 Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed Delta - first launch failed Delta II - first nineteen successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellite's operational lifespan (55th was first total failure) Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed Falcon 9 - nineteenth launch failed (Secondary payload on the 4th launch aborted as a precaution) Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful Long March 2 - first launch failed Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly Proton - third launch failed Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed Proton-M - eleventh launch failed Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts) Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed Soyuz-FG - first nineteen launches successful (all 49 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS) Space Shuttle - nineteenth launch a partial failure (ATO) (25th was first total failure) Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed Titan III - first and sixth launches failed Titan IV - seventh launch failed Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
It was a good run, but the game is over. Falcon 9 slots in to the rankings as fourth in the history of rocket development, with a success record exceeded only by Shuttle, Soyuz-FG, and Delta II.
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11 Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed Delta - first launch failed Delta II - first eighteen successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellite's operational lifespan (55th was first total failure) Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed Falcon 9 - first eighteen launches successful (Secondary payload on the 4th launch aborted as a precaution, 19th was first total failure) Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful Long March 2 - first launch failed Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly Proton - third launch failed Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed Proton-M - eleventh launch failed Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts) Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed Soyuz-FG - first eighteen launches successful (all 46 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS) Space Shuttle - first eighteen successful (19th was first partial failure (ATO), 25th was first full failure) Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed Titan III - first and sixth launches failed Titan IV - seventh launch failed Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
It was a good run, but the game is over. Falcon 9 slots in to the rankings as fourth in the history of rocket development, with a success record exceeded only by Shuttle, Soyuz-FG, and Delta II.
Basically I have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. I don't think this proposed satellite service has an obvious natural customer base. Wouldn't mind being wrong but I just don't see it.
It very much depends on what they manage to do for the customer end. If they perform some voodoo when doing antenna design (MIMO included), the customer device could be the size and formfactor of a smartphone. From what I've been hearing out of the RF people, this is not out of the question. Between MIMO antennas on the ground and a phased array on the satellite, some dark magic becomes possible. Whether or not either SpaceX or OneWeb manages to implement such a thing remains to be seen. If they do.... It opens up many many possibilities, not least of which is competing with cellular carriers (another market where there's little love lost from customers).
You have to remember, in LEO, where an individual satellite completes an entire orbit in ~90 minutes, the ground station does not have a dish. Dishes are for talking to geosynchronous orbit, not low earth orbit. GSO satellites stay put, from the perspective of the ground, so you can aim your dish and be done with it. LEO satellites zip past you so quickly that your uplink is being handed off between satellites at least every half hour, and it could be as often as every few minutes, especially with a constellation as gigantic as the one SpaceX intends to loft. You could use a dish to talk to them, but it would be a hazard to anyone nearby as it tracks across the sky, then abruptly reaims itself to switch satellites.
In addition, LEO means the satellite can detect your transmission vastly more easily. Radio suffers from the inverse square law, so a satellite 1100 kilometers up (SpaceX's intended altitude) can hear you much more easily than a satellite 35786 kilometers up. The power density price of 1/(34686)^2 is brutal.
So no dishes. Smartphones, not dishes. Lots more potential customers.
I agree, Comcast (and every other cable provider) can trivially boost the bandwidth available to their customers. We know for a fact that all of their whining and crying about people daring to use the service they paid for is pure theater. They're fantastically profitable. Providing 10 times the throughput is just flipping a software setting. They know it, and I think they're counting on it for just this eventuality. It's their ace up their sleeve for smashing a competitor, just as you say.
For some people, that's enough to get them to stay. But consider this. All any competitor has to do is be something less offensive than a freewheeling asshole and if their product is even remotely broadband, it WILL attract customers who already have a broadband ISP. Because most of the existing broadband ISPs are freewheeling assholes. Add on VOIP calls on a portable device the same size and shape as the smartphone they already have? That works worldwide, with no "can you hear me now" games outside of parking structures? There's a reason there's now more than one company trying out this business plan. The numbers work out, and there's a larger market than the purely unserved population.
The same is not true for a constitutional amendment -- which is how many other major rights were endowed.
The constitution does not endow rights. The constitution delineates most rights mainly by restricting the government's ability to interfere. It explicitly states that its purpose is to restrict government, and anything not mentioned in it is retained by the states and the citizens.
This decision rests on the Equal Protection Clause, which is a part of the 14th Amendment, which most definitely went through a legislative process, so I have a hard time seeing where you're coming from. Any future Supreme Court would have to go through some serious contortions to undue this ruling so long as the 14th Amendment stands.
Anybody who would use this service is going to be WAY out in the boonies and there simply aren't huge numbers of people who live that remotely, who need and can afford fast internet service and who can be reached economically to sell them the necessary equipment.
I think you are underestimating just how desperate people are to get out from under Comcast's thumb. If OneWeb and/or SpaceX can operate in the US at all (and presumably they will be getting the necessary spectrum), both of them will be able to pick up a LOT of Comcast refugees, many of whom will be from urban areas. If they have anything like comparable bandwidth, they could make a huge dent in Comcast subscriber numbers. From what we've been hearing, these satellite systems stand a very good chance of being latency competitive with any land-based ISP that likes to meddle with customer traffic, and Comcast tops the list of meddlers. So reasonable latency and competitive bandwidth (which isn't hard, despite inflated claims by Comcast) would finally give entrenched monopolies and duopolies some competition.
If you don't see lower costs, it's probably because either the market has decided to utilize the tech to make products better rather than cheaper, or because there is no real competition in the market.
Yeah, about that...
The process has received eight patents and has 75 additional patents under review...
Guaranteed no competition for 20 years. More, if they successfully game the system with submarine patents. (And you can bet some of those 75 will turn out to be submarines.)
But rejoice! The patent system has spurred innovation! A manufacturing technique created with research paid for largely by taxes will now proceed to charge the public all the traffic will bear! For a generation! Maybe two! It's fantastic! And efficient! And more superlatives!
Yeah, it's nice that there's a new battery technology. You and I will never own one.
They are initially aiming at the power company market, thus huge batteries with huge price tags.
Theirs. Not yours. Not already rich? Shut up and pay your bills.
Also, this will never be able to be put on the road in most US states without drastically changing the look of the front end. Most states have a minimum headlight height of 22 inches and some have a 24 inch minimum.
Thank you for that. I thought there was some such limit, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't cite it along with the other list of street-legal fails.
I had heard that the majority of kit cars were tube frame construction, but I figured that was because tube frame parts pack into a much smaller space for shipping than unibody and unibody assembly requires really long welds that most people shouldn't be doing by hand.
Also as someone else pointed out, tube frame doesn't necessarily mean space frame. I see all mention of space frames have been eradicated, so that was probably overstated. Now we know it's just a tube frame, and there are any number of dune buggy owners who can vouch that some designs are terribly inferior to others. It remains to be seen which this is.
It definitely isn't. It's not street legal anywhere in the world that can afford to buy it (with the possible exception of Dubai). It has no side indicator lights, no side rearview mirrors, and while there are no photos of the rear of the vehicle, I'd be willing to bet it doesn't have the required center brake light. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would perform miserably in crash tests as well. Space frame construction is so rigid that a vehicle built with it tends to injure or kill its occupants (or occupant, in this case) in a collision at much higher rates than other designs, for lack of crumple zones.
I'd also like to see skid pad, slalom numbers, etc.
So would I. Space frames don't resist torsional stress very well, which is outright dangerous for high speed handling. You called it a track car. I'll go even farther, and call it a drag strip car. It doesn't sound suitable even for a track, let alone a street. Somebody else commented about the styling "straight out of a kid's calendar" and it definitely looks and sounds like a kid with too much money said "I wanna make a super awesome car! With 3D printing!!!111eleven" and neglected to talk to any mechanical engineers who had been involved in designing actual street legal, street capable cars. They may make 10,000 of them, but they won't look like the thing in the pictures.
In short, it looks like the concept cars that came out of Detroit for decades that never went into production because they were illegal or dangerous or both.
The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator".
<snip> Uuuh. That was a great rant about a book I never want to read. But the GGP was referring to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Not... whatever that was.
microTodd corrected one of your major misapprehensions, about LEGO's profitability, but not your worst one.
It's just that they realized they could make even more money at the expense of children's development.
Here you are just wrong. There have been a couple of studies that show that girl children who play with LEGO as little as once per week get such a boost to their spatial reasoning skills that they equal boys. Very young children start out with roughly equal spatial reasoning abilities. A gap begins to develop quite early, and most girls never catch back up.
Until now. Now that LEGO is gender-inclusive, many more little girls will not fall behind in spatial reasoning. They will stay equal with their male peers. It took pastel bricks and cute plastic animals to do it, but it's done now, and LEGO has singlehandedly done more positive good for children's development than any other organization in the past 3 years.
Gender-neutral is stupid and unrealistic. Gender-inclusive is the way forward, for all of us.
What we need is for advertisers to go back to showing girls playing with non-pink stuff, like Lego did before about 1985.
LEGO did that for more than 40 years and it did them no good at all.
LEGO's gender-inclusive advertising was worthless because the product didn't appeal to girls no matter how hard they tried to artificially interest girls. Boys like primary colors. Girls like pastels. Boys play with vehicles as readily as they play with characters. Girls play with characters and creatures almost exclusively, and ignore vehicles. Boys play with the outside of structures (think attack on the castle). Girls play with the inside of structures (think living in the castle). Boys are fine with characters who are defined by their occupation (cowboy, astronaut, firefighter). Girls want characters with names and stories of their own, with occupation a very distant third. Boys play with machines and mechanical things. Girls play with people and animals and organic things.
LEGO is now gender-inclusive in fact, not merely in advertising. They are not gender neutral. That's impossible. The genders are different. Gender-neutral is what you want, but gender-inclusive is the best you can get. For decades, LEGO were (apparently) gender neutral, and they were definitely gender-inclusive in their advertising. When they finally capitulated and fully committed to the pink, they made a billion dollars.
It is extremely hard to argue with a billion dollars.
Let's look at Lego. If Lego sold as many sets to girls as they sell to boys they would earn billions more than they do now. So they try hard to sell to girls.
They tried and tried, for decades, and failed every time. Until now. In 2012, they released the Friends line. And the number one bestselling LEGO of 2012 was Olivia's House. A Friends set. It beat every Star Wars set they make. I'm having trouble finding it now, but I read that in 2013, the Friends line was the number one bestselling LEGO theme by dollar value. Ahead of Star Wars. That's a fantastic amount of previously untapped market power.
They make pink sets with flowers and ponies.
Pink was good, but purple was what they settled on for Friends. It seems to work great.
It's just that Legos don't appeal to most girls.
They didn't. They do now. The $40 million in marketing and the tens of millions more invested over 4 years leading up to the release of the line might have helped.
LEGO has child behavior psychologists on staff. LEGO does research. And the new CEO listened to the research results. The research said "girls like bright colors". The research said "girls don't like fat dolls". The research said "girls play with the inside of a structure they've built, not the outside". The research said "girls prefer story-driven play about interpersonal relationships". So LEGO Friends sets are pink and purple and periwinkle, feature taller, slenderer mini-dolls, not mini-figures, have detailed building interiors, and have characters with names and backstories. In direct contrast to every non-licensed LEGO set for decades prior, and in marked contrast to LEGO's prior attempts to make sets for girls.
Bionicle and Ninjago have demonstrated that boys also like story-driven play with named characters, but boys are fine with the "overweight" appearance of minifigs, boys still play with the outside of structures, and boys still prefer darker, more saturated colors. In short, LEGO figured out that boys and girls are different and managed to zero in on the real differences.
The proof that they were right? $1 billion more in revenue than they expected, driven entirely by sales to girls. Girls made up the bulk of new customers, while boosting the LEGO buying of their brothers by concentrating the whole family in the LEGO aisle. The ongoing proof they were right? Double digit sales growth since 2012, when the overall toy market actually contracted in 2013, and was in the low single digits in 2014. Why did it work this time, when it failed so many times before? Hitting all of the differences in one package, instead of selectively picking and choosing among them. They've done pink and purple before. That didn't work. They did taller, more slender characters before. That didn't work either. They've done named characters before. That didn't work. Put it all together and market the hell out of it so little girls actually found out about it, and they finally broke through.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth continues to this day, but LEGO has tapped into billions of dollars, while still fundamentally making construction toys that are assembled brick by brick. It wasn't the spatial awareness, or digital dexterity that were the barriers. It was everything else.
If you trust Google translate for diplomacy, you'd better be ready for war.
Oh come on. Who goes to war over "yarn lightly extra nowhere fnord"?
Google is fine with the so-called Romance languages, but it fails hard when trying to translate Asian languages to Romance languages and vice versa.
Sometimes I think there was a concerted effort by Asian users to poison Google translate's database back when it was accepting user corrections. Especially of Japanese. It never seemed to get any better, and is still awful.
You have that entirely backwards. High-density living is the most carbon efficient.
You are confusing carbon efficient with carbon zero. Low density living enables carbon zero. High density carbon zero living is impossible without massive deployment of nuclear power, which is a nonstarter everywhere but China.
Proponents of high density living are people who have given up on carbon zero and are trying to make the best of a bad situation. It is a compromise, and not a good one. Carbon zero is possible now, using off the shelf technologies that have no political opponents in the general population. The only reason it hasn't happened already is a lack of capital at the family level. The needed capital is owned by a very few, very special people who are political opponents of anything and everything that reduces their revenues.
The US is the only country I' m aware of where most urban areas are mandated to follow suburban planning policies, making redevelopment within cities prohibitively expensive as all developments are subject to absurd parking mandates that make little sense in high density areas where good doesn't-even-need-subsidies transit should be the norm.
High density living is incompatible with low carbon living.
The only high density low carbon source of energy is a nonstarter because three generations are now terrified of nuclear power. Environmentalist rhetoric has been stunningly successful on that front. We went from people glorifying the "Atomic Age" to a complete turnaround in less than 50 years. That leaves wind and solar, both of which are diffuse power sources. In order to efficiently harvest diffuse power, the population should disperse as much as possible.
A typical suburban roof can accommodate enough photovoltaic panels to produce 50 kWh per day, enough to power even an older, inefficient air conditioner, and everything else in a typical suburban home. With a modern high efficiency air conditioner, or better yet a ground source heat pump, a typical suburban roof can produce enough power to power itself plus an electric car. Using equipment available today. When available solar panels become more efficient, that number only goes up, allowing a second vehicle, and eventually a third. As construction techniques improve, especially for windows, the power requirements to maintain a developed world standard of living in hundreds of millions of individual free-standing structures will continue to go down.
Given not very much additional technological advancement, we'll be at the point where every family will own a lifetime source of all the electrical energy they could possibly need, as long as they have a low density living option in which to deploy the solar panels to make it happen. That is a vast, sweeping freedom that a great many people will happily embrace.
It wouldn't surprise me to see fanatically anti-carbon regions outlaw high density living entirely anywhere where hydroelectric power is not readily available, because nuclear power is verboten, but gathering and transmitting enough diffuse energy to power a city is substantially inefficient compared to powering the dwelling literally underneath the power source.
Slashdot Mirror
Now take a Donald Trump. No matter how greedy he is there's only just so much he can buy. At some point his money is just sitting around, doing nothing. He'll invest some of it, lose some of it, etc. But He's only got so much time in the day to do that. Eventually it becomes a war chest laying around doing nothing.
Except, that isn't how it works. That money is doing something, somewhere, all the time. No, he doesn't have it in a shoe box.
It is also not sitting idle in a bank account, but even that has benefits to the balance sheets of a bank. It is in investment companies being invested into new companies that will create jobs.
No it's not. It's really not.
Trump is probably a bad example because he goes bankrupt all the time, but pick any other hundred-millionaire or billionaire and look at where their money is. It is NOT in new companies. It is in old companies. It's in the stock market, chasing fewer and fewer stocks, driving their valuations to stratospheric levels completely divorced from the P/E ratio of the companies involved. It's creating bubbles in stocks, in commodities, in real estate, jumping from "sure thing" to "sure thing" with manic desperation. It most definitely is not creating new companies and new jobs. Look at the statistics for both job creation and small business creation. Both are effectively nonexistent.
Why? Let's examine the reasons.
The four Walton siblings collect approximately $3 billion dollars per year in Walmart dividends, every year. That's cash money that has to go somewhere, and even the most lavish of all possible lifestyles can't suck it up, so of course some large fraction of that cash gets reinvested. According to Forbes, the four of them together control $144 billion. Much of that is Walmart stock, but the rest is wherever those dividends have been reinvested.
Let's try to put that number into perspective. They could, in theory, get together and buy outright any but the largest 36 publicly traded companies in the world. That includes names like Honeywell, ConocoPhillips, Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, Walgreen, and Monsanto, to name but a few. Any two of them could buy General Motors and have at least $16 billion left over. Any one of them could buy Tesla Motors and have at least $9 billion left over.
Except, of course, they can't. It's not possible. Even if Alice Walton decided tomorrow that she really wanted to get out of consumer retail and into car manufacturing, she can't buy Tesla Motors. The NASDAQ couldn't take the shock. She'd have to liquidate some large fraction of her Walmart holdings, which would cause Walmart's share price to go through wild fluctuations as other billionaires tried to figure out what she's doing and whether or not she knows something they don't know about Walmart's health as a business. The NASDAQ circuit breaker would kick in, WMT would stop trading, and her brothers and sister would be on the phone yelling, "What the hell are you doing?!"
That's at the top end of what's conceivable, but not possible. Now let's consider the bottom end. Say, instead of a big splash, Alice Walton decides to use her ~$700 million in 2014 Walmart dividends, basically pocket money for her, to start a new business. Again, for the sake of comparison, let's consider a subject near and dear to Slashdot's heart, SpaceX. Elon Musk invested $100 million into SpaceX by the 4th year of its operations, according to the New York Times, quoting his own public statements. Alice Walton could, using one year of cash earnings from Walmart, invest seven times what Elon Musk invested into SpaceX in four years into her own new rocket company.
So where is it? Where's the new rocket company? SpaceX has done its capitalistic best to demonstrate that it's downright easy to compete with the United Launch Alliance, signing 46 launch contracts in a handful of years, demonstrating vast untapped demand, demand that pundits claimed didn't even exis
Might want to look up every single failed "Edutainment" attempt in history.
This. Microsoft may manage to demonstrate how to flush $2.5 billion faster than any company in history. There's no better way to convince kids not to use software than to use it as some sort of hamfisted teaching tool that is now mandatory.
I'll be interested in the Internet of Things as soon as I can get an IPv6 address for my balls.
Then rejoice! Hurricane Electric will give you your own /48 for free. Just set up a box to accept and route it and you can assign an IP to every single sperm in your beloved balls.
A thought just occurred to me: Assuming in the near to medium-term future we had many many large installations of battery banks (ala-Tesla batteries, for instance) charging and discharging constantly, how much waste heat would be generated by this, and how much would that waste heat contribute to global warming (positively or negatively)?
That depends entirely on where the power to do the charging comes from. If the power comes from the solar panels on your roof and is charging up your Tesla PowerWall, it's actually a net reduction in useless heat in your garage. Instead of the sun heating up your garage, it heats up your garage less and charges your batteries. The inefficiency in charging is a fraction of a fraction of what was going to be heat to begin with.
For other power sources, the waste heat generated is precisely the inefficiency of charging. For batteries that charge with 85% efficiency, 15% of the power is wasted as heat. One of many reasons why one of the criteria for a good battery is good charge and discharge efficiency. Still, the heat even from inefficient batteries contributes negligible amounts to global warming. The planet radiates heat into space from the top of the atmosphere, all day and all night. The biggest heat source is sunlight, and by biggest I mean it's literally trillions of times bigger than any one battery bank. (174 petawatts vs 10000 watts). The Earth radiates almost exactly 174 petawatts back into space. So exact that we have a hard time measuring it when it's different. Global warming is a thing mainly because of the potential for the composition of the atmosphere to change enough to change the amount of heat retention, not because of the waste heat of industrial processes. Industrial processes do nothing to change the temperature of Earth as long as Earth is able to continue radiating that heat into space.
Are you trolling, or are you really ignorant of the amount of engineering that goes into NASCAR? Or dragsters, for that matter?
I said the vehicle in the article is a drag strip car, or at best a track car. It is not a street car. You quoted... drag strip cars and track cars as counter-arguments?
I'm confused.
As for the engineering, there's this. Which says, in summary, that you can build any frame you like, except it must have a roll cage, and the roll cage must have a Newman Bar, it must be built of mild steel, it must have the specified tube radii, and it even must be coated in a specified color. Among other restrictions, to the point where there's not exactly a lot of innovative engineering happening in frame construction in NASCAR. There aren't very many degrees of freedom left.
But that's all beside the point anyway. The point is that a space frame isn't necessarily the best design because of its weakness with respect to torsional stress. A weakness that is irrelevant to track cars and dragsters because there is no vehicle surface more tightly controlled than that of a race track or drag strip. They don't have bumps, they don't have potholes, they don't have out of spec bankings. They don't even have seams. They're not anything like a street, in other words. So the chassis design constraints are nothing like the design constraints of a street car.
And that toy in the article isn't designed for streets. That's all I'm saying.
Reconcile your argument with the 19th amendment...
Easy. The 9th and 10th Amendments. Plus a whole slew of argumentation in the Federalist Papers.
Yes, later generations felt obliged to write amendments as if they conferred rights, rather than secured rights, because people go completely authoritarian at the drop of a hat. It's certainly not the way the Constitution was written, and it's the polar opposite of relativism. It was absolutely stated that the document was intended to restrict the government, not citizens. Rights don't "float in the ether independent of government." Rights adhere to individual citizens independently of, and in spite of, government.
So now the language of the Constitution is self-contradictory in tone, because a bunch of lawyers felt obliged to phrase some amendments as positive rights, rather than negative restrictions. Somehow it's human instinct to seek to organize in tribes headed by a king, and establish a hierarchy to oppress everybody "beneath" them. It wasn't supposed to be that way, and the Constitution still stands today as a piece of seriously radical thinking.
"Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees." --Sir Terry Pratchett
Oh hey, thanks for updating the one I posted in a past article.
You're welcome. I've updated it once before, and gave you credit for that one. You didn't notice, so I left it off this time.
I believe we already had that game. I distinctly remember, the cake is a lie.
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed
Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed
Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed
Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed
Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11
Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed
Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed
Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed
Delta - first launch failed
Delta II - first nineteen successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellite's operational lifespan (55th was first total failure)
Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed
Falcon 9 - nineteenth launch failed (Secondary payload on the 4th launch aborted as a precaution)
Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful
Long March 2 - first launch failed
Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures
N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly
Proton - third launch failed
Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed
Proton-M - eleventh launch failed
Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful
Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts)
Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure
Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities
Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed
Soyuz-FG - first nineteen launches successful (all 49 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS)
Space Shuttle - nineteenth launch a partial failure (ATO) (25th was first total failure)
Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed
Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed
Titan III - first and sixth launches failed
Titan IV - seventh launch failed
Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
It was a good run, but the game is over. Falcon 9 slots in to the rankings as fourth in the history of rocket development, with a success record exceeded only by Shuttle, Soyuz-FG, and Delta II.
Maybe Falcon 9 Heavy will have better luck.
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed
Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed
Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed
Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed
Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11
Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed
Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed
Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed
Delta - first launch failed
Delta II - first eighteen successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellite's operational lifespan (55th was first total failure)
Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed
Falcon 9 - first eighteen launches successful (Secondary payload on the 4th launch aborted as a precaution, 19th was first total failure)
Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful
Long March 2 - first launch failed
Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures
N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly
Proton - third launch failed
Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed
Proton-M - eleventh launch failed
Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful
Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts)
Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure
Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities
Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed
Soyuz-FG - first eighteen launches successful (all 46 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS)
Space Shuttle - first eighteen successful (19th was first partial failure (ATO), 25th was first full failure)
Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed
Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed
Titan III - first and sixth launches failed
Titan IV - seventh launch failed
Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
It was a good run, but the game is over. Falcon 9 slots in to the rankings as fourth in the history of rocket development, with a success record exceeded only by Shuttle, Soyuz-FG, and Delta II.
Maybe Falcon 9 Heavy will have better luck.
Basically I have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. I don't think this proposed satellite service has an obvious natural customer base. Wouldn't mind being wrong but I just don't see it.
It very much depends on what they manage to do for the customer end. If they perform some voodoo when doing antenna design (MIMO included), the customer device could be the size and formfactor of a smartphone. From what I've been hearing out of the RF people, this is not out of the question. Between MIMO antennas on the ground and a phased array on the satellite, some dark magic becomes possible. Whether or not either SpaceX or OneWeb manages to implement such a thing remains to be seen. If they do.... It opens up many many possibilities, not least of which is competing with cellular carriers (another market where there's little love lost from customers).
You have to remember, in LEO, where an individual satellite completes an entire orbit in ~90 minutes, the ground station does not have a dish. Dishes are for talking to geosynchronous orbit, not low earth orbit. GSO satellites stay put, from the perspective of the ground, so you can aim your dish and be done with it. LEO satellites zip past you so quickly that your uplink is being handed off between satellites at least every half hour, and it could be as often as every few minutes, especially with a constellation as gigantic as the one SpaceX intends to loft. You could use a dish to talk to them, but it would be a hazard to anyone nearby as it tracks across the sky, then abruptly reaims itself to switch satellites.
In addition, LEO means the satellite can detect your transmission vastly more easily. Radio suffers from the inverse square law, so a satellite 1100 kilometers up (SpaceX's intended altitude) can hear you much more easily than a satellite 35786 kilometers up. The power density price of 1/(34686)^2 is brutal.
So no dishes. Smartphones, not dishes. Lots more potential customers.
I agree, Comcast (and every other cable provider) can trivially boost the bandwidth available to their customers. We know for a fact that all of their whining and crying about people daring to use the service they paid for is pure theater. They're fantastically profitable. Providing 10 times the throughput is just flipping a software setting. They know it, and I think they're counting on it for just this eventuality. It's their ace up their sleeve for smashing a competitor, just as you say.
For some people, that's enough to get them to stay. But consider this. All any competitor has to do is be something less offensive than a freewheeling asshole and if their product is even remotely broadband, it WILL attract customers who already have a broadband ISP. Because most of the existing broadband ISPs are freewheeling assholes. Add on VOIP calls on a portable device the same size and shape as the smartphone they already have? That works worldwide, with no "can you hear me now" games outside of parking structures? There's a reason there's now more than one company trying out this business plan. The numbers work out, and there's a larger market than the purely unserved population.
The same is not true for a constitutional amendment -- which is how many other major rights were endowed.
The constitution does not endow rights. The constitution delineates most rights mainly by restricting the government's ability to interfere. It explicitly states that its purpose is to restrict government, and anything not mentioned in it is retained by the states and the citizens.
This decision rests on the Equal Protection Clause, which is a part of the 14th Amendment, which most definitely went through a legislative process, so I have a hard time seeing where you're coming from. Any future Supreme Court would have to go through some serious contortions to undue this ruling so long as the 14th Amendment stands.
Anybody who would use this service is going to be WAY out in the boonies and there simply aren't huge numbers of people who live that remotely, who need and can afford fast internet service and who can be reached economically to sell them the necessary equipment.
I think you are underestimating just how desperate people are to get out from under Comcast's thumb. If OneWeb and/or SpaceX can operate in the US at all (and presumably they will be getting the necessary spectrum), both of them will be able to pick up a LOT of Comcast refugees, many of whom will be from urban areas. If they have anything like comparable bandwidth, they could make a huge dent in Comcast subscriber numbers. From what we've been hearing, these satellite systems stand a very good chance of being latency competitive with any land-based ISP that likes to meddle with customer traffic, and Comcast tops the list of meddlers. So reasonable latency and competitive bandwidth (which isn't hard, despite inflated claims by Comcast) would finally give entrenched monopolies and duopolies some competition.
It could be very interesting.
If you don't see lower costs, it's probably because either the market has decided to utilize the tech to make products better rather than cheaper, or because there is no real competition in the market.
Yeah, about that...
The process has received eight patents and has 75 additional patents under review...
Guaranteed no competition for 20 years. More, if they successfully game the system with submarine patents. (And you can bet some of those 75 will turn out to be submarines.)
But rejoice! The patent system has spurred innovation! A manufacturing technique created with research paid for largely by taxes will now proceed to charge the public all the traffic will bear! For a generation! Maybe two! It's fantastic! And efficient! And more superlatives!
Yeah, it's nice that there's a new battery technology. You and I will never own one.
They are initially aiming at the power company market, thus huge batteries with huge price tags.
Theirs. Not yours. Not already rich? Shut up and pay your bills.
Also, this will never be able to be put on the road in most US states without drastically changing the look of the front end. Most states have a minimum headlight height of 22 inches and some have a 24 inch minimum.
Thank you for that. I thought there was some such limit, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't cite it along with the other list of street-legal fails.
I had heard that the majority of kit cars were tube frame construction, but I figured that was because tube frame parts pack into a much smaller space for shipping than unibody and unibody assembly requires really long welds that most people shouldn't be doing by hand.
Also as someone else pointed out, tube frame doesn't necessarily mean space frame. I see all mention of space frames have been eradicated, so that was probably overstated. Now we know it's just a tube frame, and there are any number of dune buggy owners who can vouch that some designs are terribly inferior to others. It remains to be seen which this is.
Is that why so many high-speed race cars are built out of a shitload of tubing and not much else?
Were you trying to claim that NASCAR and dragsters are a counter-argument? I'd say that supports my position better than anything else.
This car is made by the free market...
In reply to roman_mir... That was beautiful.
I'm not sure I'd call this a super-car per se.
It definitely isn't. It's not street legal anywhere in the world that can afford to buy it (with the possible exception of Dubai). It has no side indicator lights, no side rearview mirrors, and while there are no photos of the rear of the vehicle, I'd be willing to bet it doesn't have the required center brake light. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would perform miserably in crash tests as well. Space frame construction is so rigid that a vehicle built with it tends to injure or kill its occupants (or occupant, in this case) in a collision at much higher rates than other designs, for lack of crumple zones.
I'd also like to see skid pad, slalom numbers, etc.
So would I. Space frames don't resist torsional stress very well, which is outright dangerous for high speed handling. You called it a track car. I'll go even farther, and call it a drag strip car. It doesn't sound suitable even for a track, let alone a street. Somebody else commented about the styling "straight out of a kid's calendar" and it definitely looks and sounds like a kid with too much money said "I wanna make a super awesome car! With 3D printing!!!111eleven" and neglected to talk to any mechanical engineers who had been involved in designing actual street legal, street capable cars. They may make 10,000 of them, but they won't look like the thing in the pictures.
In short, it looks like the concept cars that came out of Detroit for decades that never went into production because they were illegal or dangerous or both.
The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator".
<snip>
Uuuh. That was a great rant about a book I never want to read. But the GGP was referring to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Not... whatever that was.
microTodd corrected one of your major misapprehensions, about LEGO's profitability, but not your worst one.
It's just that they realized they could make even more money at the expense of children's development.
Here you are just wrong. There have been a couple of studies that show that girl children who play with LEGO as little as once per week get such a boost to their spatial reasoning skills that they equal boys. Very young children start out with roughly equal spatial reasoning abilities. A gap begins to develop quite early, and most girls never catch back up.
Until now. Now that LEGO is gender-inclusive, many more little girls will not fall behind in spatial reasoning. They will stay equal with their male peers. It took pastel bricks and cute plastic animals to do it, but it's done now, and LEGO has singlehandedly done more positive good for children's development than any other organization in the past 3 years.
Gender-neutral is stupid and unrealistic. Gender-inclusive is the way forward, for all of us.
What we need is for advertisers to go back to showing girls playing with non-pink stuff, like Lego did before about 1985.
LEGO did that for more than 40 years and it did them no good at all.
LEGO's gender-inclusive advertising was worthless because the product didn't appeal to girls no matter how hard they tried to artificially interest girls. Boys like primary colors. Girls like pastels. Boys play with vehicles as readily as they play with characters. Girls play with characters and creatures almost exclusively, and ignore vehicles. Boys play with the outside of structures (think attack on the castle). Girls play with the inside of structures (think living in the castle). Boys are fine with characters who are defined by their occupation (cowboy, astronaut, firefighter). Girls want characters with names and stories of their own, with occupation a very distant third. Boys play with machines and mechanical things. Girls play with people and animals and organic things.
LEGO is now gender-inclusive in fact, not merely in advertising. They are not gender neutral. That's impossible. The genders are different. Gender-neutral is what you want, but gender-inclusive is the best you can get. For decades, LEGO were (apparently) gender neutral, and they were definitely gender-inclusive in their advertising. When they finally capitulated and fully committed to the pink, they made a billion dollars.
It is extremely hard to argue with a billion dollars.
Let's look at Lego. If Lego sold as many sets to girls as they sell to boys they would earn billions more than they do now. So they try hard to sell to girls.
They tried and tried, for decades, and failed every time. Until now. In 2012, they released the Friends line. And the number one bestselling LEGO of 2012 was Olivia's House. A Friends set. It beat every Star Wars set they make. I'm having trouble finding it now, but I read that in 2013, the Friends line was the number one bestselling LEGO theme by dollar value. Ahead of Star Wars. That's a fantastic amount of previously untapped market power.
They make pink sets with flowers and ponies.
Pink was good, but purple was what they settled on for Friends. It seems to work great.
It's just that Legos don't appeal to most girls.
They didn't. They do now. The $40 million in marketing and the tens of millions more invested over 4 years leading up to the release of the line might have helped.
LEGO has child behavior psychologists on staff. LEGO does research. And the new CEO listened to the research results. The research said "girls like bright colors". The research said "girls don't like fat dolls". The research said "girls play with the inside of a structure they've built, not the outside". The research said "girls prefer story-driven play about interpersonal relationships". So LEGO Friends sets are pink and purple and periwinkle, feature taller, slenderer mini-dolls, not mini-figures, have detailed building interiors, and have characters with names and backstories. In direct contrast to every non-licensed LEGO set for decades prior, and in marked contrast to LEGO's prior attempts to make sets for girls.
Bionicle and Ninjago have demonstrated that boys also like story-driven play with named characters, but boys are fine with the "overweight" appearance of minifigs, boys still play with the outside of structures, and boys still prefer darker, more saturated colors. In short, LEGO figured out that boys and girls are different and managed to zero in on the real differences.
The proof that they were right? $1 billion more in revenue than they expected, driven entirely by sales to girls. Girls made up the bulk of new customers, while boosting the LEGO buying of their brothers by concentrating the whole family in the LEGO aisle. The ongoing proof they were right? Double digit sales growth since 2012, when the overall toy market actually contracted in 2013, and was in the low single digits in 2014. Why did it work this time, when it failed so many times before? Hitting all of the differences in one package, instead of selectively picking and choosing among them. They've done pink and purple before. That didn't work. They did taller, more slender characters before. That didn't work either. They've done named characters before. That didn't work. Put it all together and market the hell out of it so little girls actually found out about it, and they finally broke through.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth continues to this day, but LEGO has tapped into billions of dollars, while still fundamentally making construction toys that are assembled brick by brick. It wasn't the spatial awareness, or digital dexterity that were the barriers. It was everything else.
If you trust Google translate for diplomacy, you'd better be ready for war.
Oh come on. Who goes to war over "yarn lightly extra nowhere fnord"?
Google is fine with the so-called Romance languages, but it fails hard when trying to translate Asian languages to Romance languages and vice versa.
Sometimes I think there was a concerted effort by Asian users to poison Google translate's database back when it was accepting user corrections. Especially of Japanese. It never seemed to get any better, and is still awful.
You have that entirely backwards. High-density living is the most carbon efficient.
You are confusing carbon efficient with carbon zero. Low density living enables carbon zero. High density carbon zero living is impossible without massive deployment of nuclear power, which is a nonstarter everywhere but China.
Proponents of high density living are people who have given up on carbon zero and are trying to make the best of a bad situation. It is a compromise, and not a good one. Carbon zero is possible now, using off the shelf technologies that have no political opponents in the general population. The only reason it hasn't happened already is a lack of capital at the family level. The needed capital is owned by a very few, very special people who are political opponents of anything and everything that reduces their revenues.
The US is the only country I' m aware of where most urban areas are mandated to follow suburban planning policies, making redevelopment within cities prohibitively expensive as all developments are subject to absurd parking mandates that make little sense in high density areas where good doesn't-even-need-subsidies transit should be the norm.
High density living is incompatible with low carbon living.
The only high density low carbon source of energy is a nonstarter because three generations are now terrified of nuclear power. Environmentalist rhetoric has been stunningly successful on that front. We went from people glorifying the "Atomic Age" to a complete turnaround in less than 50 years. That leaves wind and solar, both of which are diffuse power sources. In order to efficiently harvest diffuse power, the population should disperse as much as possible.
A typical suburban roof can accommodate enough photovoltaic panels to produce 50 kWh per day, enough to power even an older, inefficient air conditioner, and everything else in a typical suburban home. With a modern high efficiency air conditioner, or better yet a ground source heat pump, a typical suburban roof can produce enough power to power itself plus an electric car. Using equipment available today. When available solar panels become more efficient, that number only goes up, allowing a second vehicle, and eventually a third. As construction techniques improve, especially for windows, the power requirements to maintain a developed world standard of living in hundreds of millions of individual free-standing structures will continue to go down.
Given not very much additional technological advancement, we'll be at the point where every family will own a lifetime source of all the electrical energy they could possibly need, as long as they have a low density living option in which to deploy the solar panels to make it happen. That is a vast, sweeping freedom that a great many people will happily embrace.
It wouldn't surprise me to see fanatically anti-carbon regions outlaw high density living entirely anywhere where hydroelectric power is not readily available, because nuclear power is verboten, but gathering and transmitting enough diffuse energy to power a city is substantially inefficient compared to powering the dwelling literally underneath the power source.