And apparently too stupid to make it work either. Still waiting to see any plant run continuously at any price, let alone to a point where we can talk about the economics of it all.
It seems surreal that we are talking about resurrecting Mammoths while their close genetic kin are still in a pretty harsh decline. Perhaps we should be trying to store sequences of good cross section of the remaining elephants so that in some future century we can dust off the old thumb drives and bring them back with enough genetic diversity to properly re-introduce them somewhere.
I think there will be a killer app needed in the form of a home electrolysis machine to be able to make enough hydrogen at night to top off your car for general commuting. Without that there is a huge barrier as you point out.
EV's today solve the commuter problem by the fact that they can be readily recharged at home. The infrastructure of chargers on the road for longer trips is still spotty and "adventuresome". Hydrogen fuel cell cars face that problem in the local neighborhood as well. If you have to drive an hour out of your way each week to fill up your tank most folks won't go for it.
I think that most households would do great with 1 EV and 1 plug-in hybrid, cutting out out a very large portion of their footprint and using gasoline for those occasional longer trips as it is very well suited to.
I had to go through one for my Top Secret clearance, as well as have an investigator interview my references. A few years later I got a Secret clearance and all that was involved was filling out paperwork. The temporary clearance came in 2 weeks, the final one took another 6 weeks.
I am pretty sure all they do for a Secret clearance is check your credit, criminal record, and citizenship. If nothing comes up you get a rubber stamp. It only gets complicated if they dig up Iranian relatives, or some other red flag.
My opinion on the polygraph is that it is horse pucky. Half the folks they were screening that day failed, some got yelled at and accused of being terrorists (pre 9/11, FYI). One girl fell asleep. I had nothing to hide, but having read up on it ahead of time I decided to do calculus problems in my head when they baselined me for telling a lie to make sure I registered a strong response during the LOOOONG wait they put in between questions to let a guilty mind wander. I was the first one done. I am quite happy to no longer be working on government BS, there just isn't much interesting or well paying left being done at government agencies or at their contractors.
Let the early adopters suffer. I am not a big gamer, and frankl I often find that buying last year's game gives me a better experience. You can avoid the flops, avoid the major bugs, pay half price, and get to play at a good FPS on cheaper hardware.
... Houses are not the only user of electricity. There are business, industry, streetlights, etc. It would take billions of dollars worth of batteries to store a few days worth of power.
It takes Billions and Trillions of dollars of military horsepower to keep the oil flowing. Those backwater dictators don't generally bomb themselves after all. So using the bogey man of high cost is disingenuous without the context of all the dollars we spend on subsidies and wars to keep the oil, gas, and coal flowing.
I don't think you will find a whole lot of sane folks arguing that switching to all renewables (or even mostly renewables) is a trivial step. However the naysayers all seem to say "The sun doesn't always shine, so solar is stupid." A more thoughtful approach is to realize that the sun often shines when we need air conditioning the most, so it can be a 20% solution without creating mass disruption, and in fact fills in a hole that actually does exist. Hydroelectric works better in winter/spring (where available) as that is when the water is flowing, and can be ramped up/down relatively easily. In certain areas wind is pretty reliably blowing. All combined these sources are enough for certain areas to have a high degree of coverage. Batteries may be a good way to load level the remainder. It is clear that the current grid is not designed around pushing the power around near as much as a heavily renewable supply would need, but that really is more of an engineering problem than a physics one.
Load leveling in general is a problem with MANY creative solutions. Winter heating for example can be in the form of heat storage in a 2-phase transition (think parafin wax or similar). With some smarts to the grid (still mostly vaporware, but again it is mostly an engineering problem, not a physics one) you can have homes in winter dump extra electricity into heat into their 2-phase heat storage box whenever there is extra power (when the wind is blowing), and back off when there is a power crunch. It need not ALL be stored in electron form, phonons work too.
Similarly electric cars really should be smarter than they are about charging. Having cars that talk to the local power company to decide when to charge would go a long way to leveling the grid and making it more practical soak up the variations in a more variable supply. Most EV's today have chargers that readily charge at anywhere from 1-6 kW rate (Teslas can charge from 1-19 kW), but there are no smarts being put into place to take advantage of this. People setup timers if they have EV charging programs, but that is very crude. I'd rather just setup my EV to be charged by 7AM and let the utilities command and control vary the charge time and rate, and give me a cut of the savings, but no system exists yet.
WTF? Being at the POLE would be 6 months of light followed by 6 months of dark. Being above the arctic circle merely means that you have at least one day that the sun never sets, or never rises.
In manufacturing there is a tendency to add extra inspectors after each slip up (well in defense related manufacturing anyway, from what I saw). Eventually every inspector comes to believe that what they are supposed to inspect ihas either already been inspected numerous times, or would get inspected by someone else later. Soon there are so many inspections that nobody actually does a real inspection, as they all believe their inspection is redundant. With multiple levels of proof reading I imagine a similar failure mode is going on here. Just one inspector should be tasked with QA signoff, not a crowd of them.
Happens all the time. We had a report that had one project member with a title of SRP Lap Dog. It was put there in jest about 6 months earlier, along with some swear words that actually did get caught int the final edits, but not the title. Professionals are human too, and stuff happens.
The sad thing is that a mere slip of paper saying that you want to college is a prerequisite to get through the HR department for a huge number of jobs. So it does not matter that you can code like a fiend, you have to be able to show a slip of paper from an accredited university to even make it into the hiring manager's inbox.
So a relatively poorly qualified cheater has a much better chance of getting a job than a very skilled self taught person for a wide variety jobs. An ill gotten degree is still worth quite a bit of coin in this day and age.
We could have a whole separate discussion as to whether most university exams do a decent job assessing knowledge and talent.
YouTube could really be done much better. It is such a vast cesspool of random crap that there is a lot to be done for bringing some order to it. There are excellent university lectures lost right next to cat videos.
How a fixed youtube would fit into Facebook is beyond me however...
Critical to any of your questions is your budget, as well as available space secondarily.
If you have the $$$ you can of course install solar as well as install a very pricey battery bank and inverter setup to have power backup. It is possible to get yourself setup for a few days of stored energy without too much trouble (still very expensive). Get an EV like a Leaf or a Tesla to avoid petrol usage. Stay grid tied so that you can keep keep your battery bank and EV topped up during long dark periods in case the power cuts out. Being 100% power independent by yourself is not a trivial matter, but having a house scale UPS is not impossible with enough cash to throw at the problem.
Install a wood burning stove and keep at least a few weeks of wood or wood pellets stashed for heating backup.
But really, we cannot have an advancing society if the most basic infrastructure of heating, power, and water is not solidly maintained and reliable. Having everyone running with a hodge-podge of backups is really inefficient for everyone in society. Consider moving to a different country if you can, trying to fix your own country these days will get you black listed or disappeared.
Yeah, but it is much easier and safer for a company to have a blanket policy and just deny people the job.
Lots of folks get denied a position with no explanation and no recourse. So was your drug test a false positive? You may never know that was the issue. How many folks have failed drug screens over poppy seed bagels? There is a valid gastronomic reason to eat them and they are 100% legal (even in DC!), but once you fail the drug test for traces opiates you are guilty until proven innocent, but often never have a chance to even try or even know to try.
Like audio recordings of interrogations, the summary will be transcribed and the original wiped to save storage space. Clearly that transcription will never, ever, in a million years get tampered with.
Aiming guns at currently non-violent protesters was not enough to cause outrage (among a great many more blatant violations, but this is?!
Face it, those in charge will get a slap on the wrist at best at this point. Power has corrupted, and it is too late to do anything meaningful. If you try expect to get on a secret list and have your life screwed with royally. Hunker down and hope you aren't alredy on a list to get "disappeared".
Go through your email inbox sometime. Try thinking like a paranoid below average intelligence cop with a daily quota to meet and read the last dozen or so emails you sent out of context, same with recent text messages. Innocent statements taken out of context can be bent and twisted in a cop's, or prosecutor's head.
Got pictures of your toddler daughter playing in the sprinkler or bath tub on there somewhere? You might not want them looking through there and charging you with distributing child pornography.
The broader point is that a large percentage people have much of their personal lives on the phone. Anything that make that makes that easily accessible to the police without your consent is a big deal. Information that we kept in our home file cabinet just a decade or two ago is now on our phone, so anything that makes it easier to search a phone than a house is a big step backwards in our freedom.
ESPN for $50/mo would be a GREAT outcome. Right now your cable dollars subsidize a sports show, which uses those dollars to help fund sports. In my opinion this is a poor use of money in our society. If ESPN could not get enough subscribers to be profitable on their own, they would wither and die. Good riddance! If professional sports can't get as much money for their viewing rights, they might be less profitable, maybe a few billionaires would have to live with a little less each year or go into some other business. Good riddance!
So yes, a ton of entertainment would find itself non-viable in an ala-carte system, and there would be a big shake-up to go through. Whoopy-do.
HBO for example is expensive, and not bundled into basic cable, how the hell do they survive? Good programming that enough people find worth their extra $$ to have. We would see more of this. If enough people liked ESPN at a price that kept them on the air, then they would survive, just as HBO does today.
We may only have a couple dozen providers still in business, but they would have programming that was desired by the consumer, or they would die. The rest would die as capitalism says they should.
I am rooting for a death spiral. There are so many cable channels that would die a very quick death in any sort of ala carte system where they actually had to compete. The system has been cable system has been setup to extract maximum dollars, while providing very low quality (maximizing profit). I'd much rather see an ala carte system with a few very good premium channels, along with some scrappy quirky channel, and let the invisible hand slap down the rest. I want to be able to get HBO without ESPN, QVC, TLC,CNN, Fox News, etc. Get it down to a handful of good channels that i pick out for $20 a month and I might sign back up.
For now I watch a few things on Hulu and Netflix, and buy dozen or so DVD's a year. I am pretty happy with what I get for the money, and I am very glad that ESPN doesn't get one red cent from me.
In poor countries is is often cheapest to eat meals like rice with vegetables, or noodle soup with vegetables. In the US and other developed countries vegetables and fruits are fairly pricey relative to high calorie processed foods. I can get a 500 calorie sausage McMuffin for $1 (ready to eat no les), about the same price that I pay for an 100 calorie apple, and less than I pay for a 25 calorie bell pepper. I can get 3-4 boxes of mac and cheese at 700 calories a box for that same $1.
Go compare what is costs in most cities to put a veggie loaded salad with some white meat chicken on the table ($20-25 in my experience) compared to a vat of spaghetti with red sauce ($3-4, or $7-8 if you toss in a pound of meat). Poor people are making rational economic choices based on how we have driven down the cost per calorie in processed foods.
The rising standard of living brings great economies of scale (and subsidies), but not to everything equally. So veggies don't get relatively cheaper, but meat and cheese do.
In a sane world we would respond by backing off of meat and dairy subsidies and heavily subsidize fresh fruit and vegetables. Maybe outlaw checkout aisle candy and put baskets of fresh fruit there. Some euro countries are doing this, we probably never will.
The double standards between law enforcement and the public are exactly the opposite of what they should be. As a trusted public official (with years of training dollars poured into them) they should be held to a higher standard, and face worse penalties for breaking the law than the general public. Sadly, our failing state is more intent on preserving power than protecting justice, truth, and the public.
"With tech jobs there's no geographical need to pick a particular location other than space, power and bandwidth -- and those can be bought. Why not go cheap?"
Availability of employees is a HUGE cost/risk in locating is an armpit state, or even armpit region of one of the coastal states. Locating in the Bay Area lets you pull local programming talent mostly at will. Pay a high enough salary and you can get a wide range of software talent as needed. Locate yourself in North Dakota and recruiting at almost any price is a near impossibility despite the low cost of living. Employees won't want to up-end their family , and if you go bust there is likely almost no backup plan. So while there is no specific geographical reason, there are very strong economic reasons to put your new company where prices are already high.
It is counter-intuitive for sure, but it is well understood thing, it is the same reason to locate a diamond shop in the existing diamond district rather than across town where you would think there is less competition.
I work for a German company is the USA because they simply have exhausted the local talent pool for ASIC designers, and it is far easier to buy up talent in our area than to organically grow it at home. Lack of expansion was viewed as a bigger risk than the risks of managing a US group from thousands of miles away, cost was pretty far down on the list of issues.
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I do not support cults. Nuff said.
And apparently too stupid to make it work either. Still waiting to see any plant run continuously at any price, let alone to a point where we can talk about the economics of it all.
Show me a functioning reprocessing operatio in ANY of the countries using nuclear. Solving the nuclear waste issue is more of a myth than renewables.
My thoughts exactly.
It seems surreal that we are talking about resurrecting Mammoths while their close genetic kin are still in a pretty harsh decline. Perhaps we should be trying to store sequences of good cross section of the remaining elephants so that in some future century we can dust off the old thumb drives and bring them back with enough genetic diversity to properly re-introduce them somewhere.
I think there will be a killer app needed in the form of a home electrolysis machine to be able to make enough hydrogen at night to top off your car for general commuting. Without that there is a huge barrier as you point out.
EV's today solve the commuter problem by the fact that they can be readily recharged at home. The infrastructure of chargers on the road for longer trips is still spotty and "adventuresome". Hydrogen fuel cell cars face that problem in the local neighborhood as well. If you have to drive an hour out of your way each week to fill up your tank most folks won't go for it.
I think that most households would do great with 1 EV and 1 plug-in hybrid, cutting out out a very large portion of their footprint and using gasoline for those occasional longer trips as it is very well suited to.
I had to go through one for my Top Secret clearance, as well as have an investigator interview my references. A few years later I got a Secret clearance and all that was involved was filling out paperwork. The temporary clearance came in 2 weeks, the final one took another 6 weeks.
I am pretty sure all they do for a Secret clearance is check your credit, criminal record, and citizenship. If nothing comes up you get a rubber stamp. It only gets complicated if they dig up Iranian relatives, or some other red flag.
My opinion on the polygraph is that it is horse pucky. Half the folks they were screening that day failed, some got yelled at and accused of being terrorists (pre 9/11, FYI). One girl fell asleep. I had nothing to hide, but having read up on it ahead of time I decided to do calculus problems in my head when they baselined me for telling a lie to make sure I registered a strong response during the LOOOONG wait they put in between questions to let a guilty mind wander. I was the first one done. I am quite happy to no longer be working on government BS, there just isn't much interesting or well paying left being done at government agencies or at their contractors.
Let the early adopters suffer. I am not a big gamer, and frankl I often find that buying last year's game gives me a better experience. You can avoid the flops, avoid the major bugs, pay half price, and get to play at a good FPS on cheaper hardware.
...
Houses are not the only user of electricity. There are business, industry, streetlights, etc. It would take billions of dollars worth of batteries to store a few days worth of power.
It takes Billions and Trillions of dollars of military horsepower to keep the oil flowing. Those backwater dictators don't generally bomb themselves after all. So using the bogey man of high cost is disingenuous without the context of all the dollars we spend on subsidies and wars to keep the oil, gas, and coal flowing.
I don't think you will find a whole lot of sane folks arguing that switching to all renewables (or even mostly renewables) is a trivial step. However the naysayers all seem to say "The sun doesn't always shine, so solar is stupid." A more thoughtful approach is to realize that the sun often shines when we need air conditioning the most, so it can be a 20% solution without creating mass disruption, and in fact fills in a hole that actually does exist. Hydroelectric works better in winter/spring (where available) as that is when the water is flowing, and can be ramped up/down relatively easily. In certain areas wind is pretty reliably blowing. All combined these sources are enough for certain areas to have a high degree of coverage. Batteries may be a good way to load level the remainder. It is clear that the current grid is not designed around pushing the power around near as much as a heavily renewable supply would need, but that really is more of an engineering problem than a physics one.
Load leveling in general is a problem with MANY creative solutions. Winter heating for example can be in the form of heat storage in a 2-phase transition (think parafin wax or similar). With some smarts to the grid (still mostly vaporware, but again it is mostly an engineering problem, not a physics one) you can have homes in winter dump extra electricity into heat into their 2-phase heat storage box whenever there is extra power (when the wind is blowing), and back off when there is a power crunch. It need not ALL be stored in electron form, phonons work too.
Similarly electric cars really should be smarter than they are about charging. Having cars that talk to the local power company to decide when to charge would go a long way to leveling the grid and making it more practical soak up the variations in a more variable supply. Most EV's today have chargers that readily charge at anywhere from 1-6 kW rate (Teslas can charge from 1-19 kW), but there are no smarts being put into place to take advantage of this. People setup timers if they have EV charging programs, but that is very crude. I'd rather just setup my EV to be charged by 7AM and let the utilities command and control vary the charge time and rate, and give me a cut of the savings, but no system exists yet.
WTF? Being at the POLE would be 6 months of light followed by 6 months of dark. Being above the arctic circle merely means that you have at least one day that the sun never sets, or never rises.
In manufacturing there is a tendency to add extra inspectors after each slip up (well in defense related manufacturing anyway, from what I saw). Eventually every inspector comes to believe that what they are supposed to inspect ihas either already been inspected numerous times, or would get inspected by someone else later. Soon there are so many inspections that nobody actually does a real inspection, as they all believe their inspection is redundant. With multiple levels of proof reading I imagine a similar failure mode is going on here. Just one inspector should be tasked with QA signoff, not a crowd of them.
Happens all the time. We had a report that had one project member with a title of SRP Lap Dog. It was put there in jest about 6 months earlier, along with some swear words that actually did get caught int the final edits, but not the title. Professionals are human too, and stuff happens.
The sad thing is that a mere slip of paper saying that you want to college is a prerequisite to get through the HR department for a huge number of jobs. So it does not matter that you can code like a fiend, you have to be able to show a slip of paper from an accredited university to even make it into the hiring manager's inbox.
So a relatively poorly qualified cheater has a much better chance of getting a job than a very skilled self taught person for a wide variety jobs. An ill gotten degree is still worth quite a bit of coin in this day and age.
We could have a whole separate discussion as to whether most university exams do a decent job assessing knowledge and talent.
YouTube could really be done much better. It is such a vast cesspool of random crap that there is a lot to be done for bringing some order to it. There are excellent university lectures lost right next to cat videos.
How a fixed youtube would fit into Facebook is beyond me however...
Critical to any of your questions is your budget, as well as available space secondarily.
If you have the $$$ you can of course install solar as well as install a very pricey battery bank and inverter setup to have power backup. It is possible to get yourself setup for a few days of stored energy without too much trouble (still very expensive). Get an EV like a Leaf or a Tesla to avoid petrol usage. Stay grid tied so that you can keep keep your battery bank and EV topped up during long dark periods in case the power cuts out. Being 100% power independent by yourself is not a trivial matter, but having a house scale UPS is not impossible with enough cash to throw at the problem.
Install a wood burning stove and keep at least a few weeks of wood or wood pellets stashed for heating backup.
But really, we cannot have an advancing society if the most basic infrastructure of heating, power, and water is not solidly maintained and reliable. Having everyone running with a hodge-podge of backups is really inefficient for everyone in society. Consider moving to a different country if you can, trying to fix your own country these days will get you black listed or disappeared.
Yeah, but it is much easier and safer for a company to have a blanket policy and just deny people the job.
Lots of folks get denied a position with no explanation and no recourse. So was your drug test a false positive? You may never know that was the issue. How many folks have failed drug screens over poppy seed bagels? There is a valid gastronomic reason to eat them and they are 100% legal (even in DC!), but once you fail the drug test for traces opiates you are guilty until proven innocent, but often never have a chance to even try or even know to try.
Like audio recordings of interrogations, the summary will be transcribed and the original wiped to save storage space. Clearly that transcription will never, ever, in a million years get tampered with.
The system will "malfunction" and fail to record data when it matters, so who cares.
Aiming guns at currently non-violent protesters was not enough to cause outrage (among a great many more blatant violations, but this is?!
Face it, those in charge will get a slap on the wrist at best at this point. Power has corrupted, and it is too late to do anything meaningful. If you try expect to get on a secret list and have your life screwed with royally. Hunker down and hope you aren't alredy on a list to get "disappeared".
Go through your email inbox sometime. Try thinking like a paranoid below average intelligence cop with a daily quota to meet and read the last dozen or so emails you sent out of context, same with recent text messages. Innocent statements taken out of context can be bent and twisted in a cop's, or prosecutor's head.
Got pictures of your toddler daughter playing in the sprinkler or bath tub on there somewhere? You might not want them looking through there and charging you with distributing child pornography.
The broader point is that a large percentage people have much of their personal lives on the phone. Anything that make that makes that easily accessible to the police without your consent is a big deal. Information that we kept in our home file cabinet just a decade or two ago is now on our phone, so anything that makes it easier to search a phone than a house is a big step backwards in our freedom.
ESPN for $50/mo would be a GREAT outcome. Right now your cable dollars subsidize a sports show, which uses those dollars to help fund sports. In my opinion this is a poor use of money in our society. If ESPN could not get enough subscribers to be profitable on their own, they would wither and die. Good riddance! If professional sports can't get as much money for their viewing rights, they might be less profitable, maybe a few billionaires would have to live with a little less each year or go into some other business. Good riddance!
So yes, a ton of entertainment would find itself non-viable in an ala-carte system, and there would be a big shake-up to go through. Whoopy-do.
HBO for example is expensive, and not bundled into basic cable, how the hell do they survive? Good programming that enough people find worth their extra $$ to have. We would see more of this. If enough people liked ESPN at a price that kept them on the air, then they would survive, just as HBO does today.
We may only have a couple dozen providers still in business, but they would have programming that was desired by the consumer, or they would die. The rest would die as capitalism says they should.
I am rooting for a death spiral. There are so many cable channels that would die a very quick death in any sort of ala carte system where they actually had to compete. The system has been cable system has been setup to extract maximum dollars, while providing very low quality (maximizing profit). I'd much rather see an ala carte system with a few very good premium channels, along with some scrappy quirky channel, and let the invisible hand slap down the rest. I want to be able to get HBO without ESPN, QVC, TLC,CNN, Fox News, etc. Get it down to a handful of good channels that i pick out for $20 a month and I might sign back up.
For now I watch a few things on Hulu and Netflix, and buy dozen or so DVD's a year. I am pretty happy with what I get for the money, and I am very glad that ESPN doesn't get one red cent from me.
In poor countries is is often cheapest to eat meals like rice with vegetables, or noodle soup with vegetables. In the US and other developed countries vegetables and fruits are fairly pricey relative to high calorie processed foods. I can get a 500 calorie sausage McMuffin for $1 (ready to eat no les), about the same price that I pay for an 100 calorie apple, and less than I pay for a 25 calorie bell pepper. I can get 3-4 boxes of mac and cheese at 700 calories a box for that same $1.
Go compare what is costs in most cities to put a veggie loaded salad with some white meat chicken on the table ($20-25 in my experience) compared to a vat of spaghetti with red sauce ($3-4, or $7-8 if you toss in a pound of meat). Poor people are making rational economic choices based on how we have driven down the cost per calorie in processed foods.
The rising standard of living brings great economies of scale (and subsidies), but not to everything equally. So veggies don't get relatively cheaper, but meat and cheese do.
In a sane world we would respond by backing off of meat and dairy subsidies and heavily subsidize fresh fruit and vegetables. Maybe outlaw checkout aisle candy and put baskets of fresh fruit there. Some euro countries are doing this, we probably never will.
The double standards between law enforcement and the public are exactly the opposite of what they should be. As a trusted public official (with years of training dollars poured into them) they should be held to a higher standard, and face worse penalties for breaking the law than the general public. Sadly, our failing state is more intent on preserving power than protecting justice, truth, and the public.
"With tech jobs there's no geographical need to pick a particular location other than space, power and bandwidth -- and those can be bought. Why not go cheap?"
Availability of employees is a HUGE cost/risk in locating is an armpit state, or even armpit region of one of the coastal states. Locating in the Bay Area lets you pull local programming talent mostly at will. Pay a high enough salary and you can get a wide range of software talent as needed. Locate yourself in North Dakota and recruiting at almost any price is a near impossibility despite the low cost of living. Employees won't want to up-end their family , and if you go bust there is likely almost no backup plan. So while there is no specific geographical reason, there are very strong economic reasons to put your new company where prices are already high.
It is counter-intuitive for sure, but it is well understood thing, it is the same reason to locate a diamond shop in the existing diamond district rather than across town where you would think there is less competition.
I work for a German company is the USA because they simply have exhausted the local talent pool for ASIC designers, and it is far easier to buy up talent in our area than to organically grow it at home. Lack of expansion was viewed as a bigger risk than the risks of managing a US group from thousands of miles away, cost was pretty far down on the list of issues.