Please note that rising property taxes is not a big issue in California because of Prop 13, which prevents properties from being reassessed until their next transfer of ownership. People who already own houses in the neighborhood will not see their property taxes go up any more than they otherwise would. Prop 13 was passed specifically to prevent owners from being forced out of their homes by rising property taxes, and it does a good job. Gentrification may increase the cost of living in other ways (e.g. by replacing affordable local stores with more expensive ones) but it will also help the local city's finances and help to pay for better public services.
The people who really lose out to gentrification are renters, who certainly can be priced out of their neighborhood. Even rent control and other tenant protections can be worked around, if nothing else by landlords selling to owners who plan to live there rather than rent out the property.
It is government regulation that makes the system work the way it does. Basically, utility rates have always been regulated, but California regulates them differently than most places. The amount utilities are allowed to charge depends heavily on consumption, not just production costs. When consumption goes down, the utilities are allowed to raise their rates enough that their profitability goes up rather than down. It produces the unusual situation where a company is encouraging its customers to buy less, and that's entirely by design.
An important point is that most of the specific conservation programs aren't dictated by the government, just the overall pricing rules. The utilities are free to come up with their own plans for encouraging conservation, and they naturally have a strong incentive to find the easiest, cheapest way of doing it. The utilities apparently think that CFLs are a big enough win over incandescent bulbs that they have subsidized them to get people to switch. Another big program is an attempt to get people to give up second refrigerators. Many people who got new refrigerators would move their old ones to their garages and keep using them. That was convenient because it meant people could have a whole second fridge full of cold soda and beer, but the old refrigerators tended to be inefficient, garages are bad places to put them (the higher ambient temperatures in the summer make the fridges power hogs), and a second fridge is more of a convenience than a necessity. Getting rid of them turned out to save a lot of power for a fairly minor inconvenience, so a modest cash reward was enough to get people to get rid of them.
I think that points to a big factor in all kinds of energy saving technology: people have only a vague idea of how much power different things use. We get a single electric bill rather than an itemized one, so it's very difficult to see where the money is going. If we don't know what in our house is using the most power, it's hard to make intelligent decisions about conservation. That's why policies that go beyond just raising prices are more likely to be successful at encouraging conservation. The average person may not have a very good idea about what in their house is wasting power, but the electrical utilities have the resources to figure out what things are especially wasteful on a larger scale. If you give the utilities the incentive to reduce consumption rather than increase it, they can do a more effective job of conservation than individuals can.
I am suprised a local/regional/state/country government doesn't just force the issue and issue a "Incandescent for LED trade scheme".
That's pretty much what's happening here in California. Our electrical utilities are regulated so that they are actually more profitable when electrical consumption goes down, so it makes sense for the utilities to subsidize energy saving technology. You can get rebates from the utility when you buy energy saving appliances, and they will either subsidize or give away energy saving lightbulbs. They seem to have concentrated on CFLs rather than LEDs, but the utilities have really been pushing them.
You must live somewhere with unreasonably cheap electricity, then. If you assume a lifespan of 1000 hours for an incandescent bulb, a 100W bulb will use 100 kWh over its lifetime. Unless you're getting your power for less than $0.02/kWh, you're spending more on power than you are on bulbs.
Meanwhile, CFLs have lifespans in the range of 5000-10,000 hours. That means that even if you are paying 5-10 times as much for a CFL as you do for an incandescent- and that will buy you good quality CFLs- you're still paying no more per hour of lifetime than you are for incandescents. Unless you have to keep a very tight rein on your spending, any power savings at all will pay for itself. Power savings on the order of 75%, which is typical for CFLs, is a huge win.
It depends a lot on the bulbs. You can get CFLs with 90+ CRI if you look, which is better than almost all LEDs. I have some very nice 42 watt, 2800 lumen, 5000 K CCT, 95 CRI CFLs that I use when I want more light than it's easy to get from a LED. They were moderately pricey, but worth every penny.
Except that ill-gotten gains are always subject to seizure. Look up US Federal drug forfeiture laws some time. The feds can take anything that's the proceed of or used to facilitate drug crimes. It doesn't matter what form the assets are in. If the feds can prove they were bought with drug money, they can seize them. If they were used as an active part of the trade, the feds can seize them. Since the bitcoins appear to be both, it's going to be pretty easy for the feds to get them.
You're being unreasonable. An unqualified reference to Oakland made to a general audience is almost always to the one in California, just as an unqualified reference to Paris is the capital of France, and an unqualified reference to Manhattan is the one in New York.
American passenger rail is dreadful largely because rail can't compete with air over the distances Americans want to travel. There are some plausible high speed rail routes, like Boston to Washington and maybe LA to San Francisco, but rail can't compete on speed with the longer routes people routinely want to take. Air travel has a substantial advantage over rail for travel from the East Coast to the Midwest, and utterly crushes it for travel from coast to coast.
At the same time, American freight rail is substantially faster and more efficient than European freight rail. That isn't a coincidence, either. On both continents, there's a lot of shared rail that has to serve both passengers and freight. In Europe, passengers take first priority, and in the US freight takes first priority. Passenger service in the US supposedly got much better during the worst of the Great Recession because there was enough less freight that it made a big difference for passenger trains' speed and reliability.
Yeah, but typical office PCs are already plenty fast for the things they typically do, so they aren't in need of a big boost. That's why PC manufacturers have been concentrating on making them smaller and cheaper rather than more powerful. It's those data sensitive applications that are atypical of office PCs that are the market for high performance drives.
Besides, if you only need 9.5 GB of unique data per day, you're probably better off upgrading your RAM rather than your hard drive. The stuff you access most will get cached, and you'll have plenty of memory on the odd chance you ever do need to do something that requires a lot.
I'd be willing to give it a try. I've been stuck by enough nurses in my life that I'd be willing to give a robot a try. I wonder if it would identify the same spot that the human phlebotomists always use; I've given blood enough times that I have a nice scar to show where the needle ought to go.
The problem with nuclear power comes in two forms:
The increased regulation isn't a separate thing; it's just a reaction to the potentially catastrophic results of a failure. When a small mistake can lead to a catastrophic failure that leaves the region around the plant uninhabitable for decades at the very least, people within the potentially affected area will demand regulations to make sure even small mistakes don't happen. This happens in any field where small mistakes can have terrible consequences on bystanders.
With all the talk of Santa Ana Winds I think there's an opportunity to build some of these wind farms in SoCal.
The Santa Anas are the wrong kind of wind for power generation because they blow only part of the time but very strongly when they are blowing. That means you need to build the turbines to be very strong to resist the peak winds, but you won't get to benefit from that strength most of the time. The ideal winds for power generation are more or less constant speed.
That said, there is a fair amount of wind power generation in Southern California. There are large wind farms built to take advantage of the wind funnel effects of the San Gorgonio and Tehachapi passes.
Yeah, because nowhere else in the USA is subject to natural disasters, and there's no cost to locating your data center a long way from the business it's supposed to be serving.
For honored dead, it was called lying in state, for dishonored it was parading the body, but in both cases the reason was the same: to get as many witnesses as possible to the fact the person was well and truly dead. Otherwise, there would be persistent rumors that they were still alive, people pretending to be them (or their children born after their official date of death), and the like. So it was gruesome but completely practical.
And it's not as if the need for this kind of thing has completely gone away. There are still people who are rumored to be alive long after their deaths, like Elvis Presley. In the fight against terrorism, there have been several cases where the US has published pictures of the obviously dead bodies of prominent enemies as a way of proving they're actually dead, and there was considerable speculation among conspiracy theorists about why Osama bin Laden's body was disposed of so quickly.
It's not as much the manufacturer as it is the statistics for the light. Look for lights with the color temperature you like, an acceptable Color Rendering Index (CRI, 90+ is best, 80+ is OK, below 80 is not worth considering), and then efficiency in lumens per watt. Any LED light that meets US EnergyStar requirements will be acceptable, since they require a CRI of at least 80, but I'd try to find higher than that.
The lights I'm so happy with are fluorescent tube replacements, rather than screw-in bulb replacements. They require you to bypass the fluorescent ballasts, which involves some electrical skill and may mean replacing your existing tube holders. They give almost 100 lumen/watt in a daylight balanced tube (a bit less in warm white) that seems to have an acceptable CRI. Their biggest drawback is that their light is a bit less diffuse than the T12 fluorescent tubes they replaced, so I needed to upgrade my diffusers as well as my lights.
That said, I think the biggest change is going to be in new forms of lighting that aren't drop-in replacements for existing bulbs and tubes. LEDs are different technology, and they have different inherent strengths and weaknesses from existing lighting technology. Specifically, they are individually small and produce only a bit of light, and they are more heat sensitive than other light sources. That means they do best when they're spread over a large area to provide diffuse light and avoid overheating. Cramming them into an incandescent bulb replacement makes them immediately useful, but it doesn't play to their strengths as light sources. That will only happen when we design completely new light sources that take full advantage LEDs' inherent advantages.
If you know where to shop, you can get high (90+) CRI fluorescent tubes in just about any color temperature. A lot of the manufacturers seem to have standardized on a three digit code to describe the lights, with the first digit giving the approximate CRI and the final two giving the color temperature. So a 927 tube would be 2700K with a 90+ CRI and a 641 would be 4100K with a CRI of about 60. If you buy a cheap tube without a labeled color or CRI, it will probably be a 641, which are the nasty, old fashioned ones that give fluorescent lighting such a bad reputation. 800 series tubes are a bit more expensive but give fairly good light and comparable efficiency to the 600 series. 900 series give really nice light that closely approximates a continuous spectrum, but lose some efficiency compared to the 800 series. I have 950 tubes in my remaining fluorescent tube fixtures, and they look great compared to the 641s I had before; colors really pop, and skin looks natural.
Unfortunately, most CFLs don't include a CRI on the packaging. They have to have a CRI of at least 80 to get an EnergyStar rating, but most of them are barely above that. You can find 90+ CRI in CFLs, but mostly in daylight simulation bulbs that are 5000K and above. It's too bad, because I think a lot of people would pay for higher CRI bulbs in a wider range of colors.
I personally hate the 2700K light because it's grossly blue deficient. Your eyes can adapt to a wide range of color temperatures while maintaining a visual perception that the light is neutral. Any time the light has a visually obvious color cast, it's a sign that it has a lot more of some colors than others. That applies to the notably warm light from incandescent lamps (and fluorescent lights that try to mimic them) as much as it does to 641 fluorescent lights that have a nasty green tint. You may be able to find high CRI 2700K lights, but that just means that they're doing a good job of mimicking blue deficient incandescent light, not that they're giving truly accurate color rendition.
FWIW, high color temperature is typically more efficient because it most closely matches the sensitivity of our eyes, not because it's letting through more raw blue light from the mercury spectrum. Basically, our eyes have evolved to be most sensitive to wavelengths that are strongest in natural daylight (green and yellow) and less sensitive to colors that are weaker in natural daylight (extreme blue and extreme red). Ratings of lighting efficiency take that sensitivity into account, so daylight balanced light is naturally more efficient than warmer light is.
I tried doing that with Fluorescents and realized it gave me headaches.
Make sure you get good quality, high CRI fluorescent lights. A lot of what people don't like about fluorescent lights is the poor quality light, which is sad, because better quality ones are available. You should try for a CRI above 90, and settle for one between 80 and 90. Most linear fluorescents have a CRI rating on the packaging, but CFLs usually don't. You can find high CRI CFLs, but mostly in daylight rather than soft white.
When to comes to offering warm yet visually efficient lighting, LEDs have a long way to go.
Stop right there. Have these people used recent LED lighting? I just upgraded some lights in my house to LEDs, and they're great. They're at least as good as the LED tubes they replaced, and that's at just over 100 lumens/watt. There are a lot of low quality LEDs out there, but the good ones are already very good indeed.
Don't neglect the cost of advertising, either. Paying for ads is a non-labor expense, and it can easily make or break a product..
In any case, complaining about marketing costs is often silly. An engineering team is basically a tool to convert money into new products. To stay in business, it has to be connected to another group that converts the new products back into money, which means some kind of marketing. You need both sides to pull their weight for the organization to thrive in the long term. As long as the marketing people are doing a good job of bringing in the money and aren't making promises the engineers can't keep, it shouldn't be a big deal to the engineers exactly how they do it.
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Please note that rising property taxes is not a big issue in California because of Prop 13, which prevents properties from being reassessed until their next transfer of ownership. People who already own houses in the neighborhood will not see their property taxes go up any more than they otherwise would. Prop 13 was passed specifically to prevent owners from being forced out of their homes by rising property taxes, and it does a good job. Gentrification may increase the cost of living in other ways (e.g. by replacing affordable local stores with more expensive ones) but it will also help the local city's finances and help to pay for better public services.
The people who really lose out to gentrification are renters, who certainly can be priced out of their neighborhood. Even rent control and other tenant protections can be worked around, if nothing else by landlords selling to owners who plan to live there rather than rent out the property.
Forget it Jake. It's Slashdot.
Fluorescent bulbs also contain small quantities of mercury, which is no fun to clean up and makes disposing of used fluorescent bulbs a pain.
It is government regulation that makes the system work the way it does. Basically, utility rates have always been regulated, but California regulates them differently than most places. The amount utilities are allowed to charge depends heavily on consumption, not just production costs. When consumption goes down, the utilities are allowed to raise their rates enough that their profitability goes up rather than down. It produces the unusual situation where a company is encouraging its customers to buy less, and that's entirely by design.
An important point is that most of the specific conservation programs aren't dictated by the government, just the overall pricing rules. The utilities are free to come up with their own plans for encouraging conservation, and they naturally have a strong incentive to find the easiest, cheapest way of doing it. The utilities apparently think that CFLs are a big enough win over incandescent bulbs that they have subsidized them to get people to switch. Another big program is an attempt to get people to give up second refrigerators. Many people who got new refrigerators would move their old ones to their garages and keep using them. That was convenient because it meant people could have a whole second fridge full of cold soda and beer, but the old refrigerators tended to be inefficient, garages are bad places to put them (the higher ambient temperatures in the summer make the fridges power hogs), and a second fridge is more of a convenience than a necessity. Getting rid of them turned out to save a lot of power for a fairly minor inconvenience, so a modest cash reward was enough to get people to get rid of them.
I think that points to a big factor in all kinds of energy saving technology: people have only a vague idea of how much power different things use. We get a single electric bill rather than an itemized one, so it's very difficult to see where the money is going. If we don't know what in our house is using the most power, it's hard to make intelligent decisions about conservation. That's why policies that go beyond just raising prices are more likely to be successful at encouraging conservation. The average person may not have a very good idea about what in their house is wasting power, but the electrical utilities have the resources to figure out what things are especially wasteful on a larger scale. If you give the utilities the incentive to reduce consumption rather than increase it, they can do a more effective job of conservation than individuals can.
That's pretty much what's happening here in California. Our electrical utilities are regulated so that they are actually more profitable when electrical consumption goes down, so it makes sense for the utilities to subsidize energy saving technology. You can get rebates from the utility when you buy energy saving appliances, and they will either subsidize or give away energy saving lightbulbs. They seem to have concentrated on CFLs rather than LEDs, but the utilities have really been pushing them.
You must live somewhere with unreasonably cheap electricity, then. If you assume a lifespan of 1000 hours for an incandescent bulb, a 100W bulb will use 100 kWh over its lifetime. Unless you're getting your power for less than $0.02/kWh, you're spending more on power than you are on bulbs.
Meanwhile, CFLs have lifespans in the range of 5000-10,000 hours. That means that even if you are paying 5-10 times as much for a CFL as you do for an incandescent- and that will buy you good quality CFLs- you're still paying no more per hour of lifetime than you are for incandescents. Unless you have to keep a very tight rein on your spending, any power savings at all will pay for itself. Power savings on the order of 75%, which is typical for CFLs, is a huge win.
It depends a lot on the bulbs. You can get CFLs with 90+ CRI if you look, which is better than almost all LEDs. I have some very nice 42 watt, 2800 lumen, 5000 K CCT, 95 CRI CFLs that I use when I want more light than it's easy to get from a LED. They were moderately pricey, but worth every penny.
Except that ill-gotten gains are always subject to seizure. Look up US Federal drug forfeiture laws some time. The feds can take anything that's the proceed of or used to facilitate drug crimes. It doesn't matter what form the assets are in. If the feds can prove they were bought with drug money, they can seize them. If they were used as an active part of the trade, the feds can seize them. Since the bitcoins appear to be both, it's going to be pretty easy for the feds to get them.
Here's a radical idea: why don't they fix the stupid exponential algorithm rather than papering it over by trimming the lists?
You're being unreasonable. An unqualified reference to Oakland made to a general audience is almost always to the one in California, just as an unqualified reference to Paris is the capital of France, and an unqualified reference to Manhattan is the one in New York.
American passenger rail is dreadful largely because rail can't compete with air over the distances Americans want to travel. There are some plausible high speed rail routes, like Boston to Washington and maybe LA to San Francisco, but rail can't compete on speed with the longer routes people routinely want to take. Air travel has a substantial advantage over rail for travel from the East Coast to the Midwest, and utterly crushes it for travel from coast to coast.
At the same time, American freight rail is substantially faster and more efficient than European freight rail. That isn't a coincidence, either. On both continents, there's a lot of shared rail that has to serve both passengers and freight. In Europe, passengers take first priority, and in the US freight takes first priority. Passenger service in the US supposedly got much better during the worst of the Great Recession because there was enough less freight that it made a big difference for passenger trains' speed and reliability.
Yeah, but typical office PCs are already plenty fast for the things they typically do, so they aren't in need of a big boost. That's why PC manufacturers have been concentrating on making them smaller and cheaper rather than more powerful. It's those data sensitive applications that are atypical of office PCs that are the market for high performance drives.
Besides, if you only need 9.5 GB of unique data per day, you're probably better off upgrading your RAM rather than your hard drive. The stuff you access most will get cached, and you'll have plenty of memory on the odd chance you ever do need to do something that requires a lot.
I'd be willing to give it a try. I've been stuck by enough nurses in my life that I'd be willing to give a robot a try. I wonder if it would identify the same spot that the human phlebotomists always use; I've given blood enough times that I have a nice scar to show where the needle ought to go.
The increased regulation isn't a separate thing; it's just a reaction to the potentially catastrophic results of a failure. When a small mistake can lead to a catastrophic failure that leaves the region around the plant uninhabitable for decades at the very least, people within the potentially affected area will demand regulations to make sure even small mistakes don't happen. This happens in any field where small mistakes can have terrible consequences on bystanders.
The Santa Anas are the wrong kind of wind for power generation because they blow only part of the time but very strongly when they are blowing. That means you need to build the turbines to be very strong to resist the peak winds, but you won't get to benefit from that strength most of the time. The ideal winds for power generation are more or less constant speed.
That said, there is a fair amount of wind power generation in Southern California. There are large wind farms built to take advantage of the wind funnel effects of the San Gorgonio and Tehachapi passes.
Given how often sarcasm goes over the head of natural intelligence, I wish them luck with their artificial kind.
Yeah, because nowhere else in the USA is subject to natural disasters, and there's no cost to locating your data center a long way from the business it's supposed to be serving.
For honored dead, it was called lying in state, for dishonored it was parading the body, but in both cases the reason was the same: to get as many witnesses as possible to the fact the person was well and truly dead. Otherwise, there would be persistent rumors that they were still alive, people pretending to be them (or their children born after their official date of death), and the like. So it was gruesome but completely practical.
And it's not as if the need for this kind of thing has completely gone away. There are still people who are rumored to be alive long after their deaths, like Elvis Presley. In the fight against terrorism, there have been several cases where the US has published pictures of the obviously dead bodies of prominent enemies as a way of proving they're actually dead, and there was considerable speculation among conspiracy theorists about why Osama bin Laden's body was disposed of so quickly.
It's not as much the manufacturer as it is the statistics for the light. Look for lights with the color temperature you like, an acceptable Color Rendering Index (CRI, 90+ is best, 80+ is OK, below 80 is not worth considering), and then efficiency in lumens per watt. Any LED light that meets US EnergyStar requirements will be acceptable, since they require a CRI of at least 80, but I'd try to find higher than that.
The lights I'm so happy with are fluorescent tube replacements, rather than screw-in bulb replacements. They require you to bypass the fluorescent ballasts, which involves some electrical skill and may mean replacing your existing tube holders. They give almost 100 lumen/watt in a daylight balanced tube (a bit less in warm white) that seems to have an acceptable CRI. Their biggest drawback is that their light is a bit less diffuse than the T12 fluorescent tubes they replaced, so I needed to upgrade my diffusers as well as my lights.
That said, I think the biggest change is going to be in new forms of lighting that aren't drop-in replacements for existing bulbs and tubes. LEDs are different technology, and they have different inherent strengths and weaknesses from existing lighting technology. Specifically, they are individually small and produce only a bit of light, and they are more heat sensitive than other light sources. That means they do best when they're spread over a large area to provide diffuse light and avoid overheating. Cramming them into an incandescent bulb replacement makes them immediately useful, but it doesn't play to their strengths as light sources. That will only happen when we design completely new light sources that take full advantage LEDs' inherent advantages.
If you know where to shop, you can get high (90+) CRI fluorescent tubes in just about any color temperature. A lot of the manufacturers seem to have standardized on a three digit code to describe the lights, with the first digit giving the approximate CRI and the final two giving the color temperature. So a 927 tube would be 2700K with a 90+ CRI and a 641 would be 4100K with a CRI of about 60. If you buy a cheap tube without a labeled color or CRI, it will probably be a 641, which are the nasty, old fashioned ones that give fluorescent lighting such a bad reputation. 800 series tubes are a bit more expensive but give fairly good light and comparable efficiency to the 600 series. 900 series give really nice light that closely approximates a continuous spectrum, but lose some efficiency compared to the 800 series. I have 950 tubes in my remaining fluorescent tube fixtures, and they look great compared to the 641s I had before; colors really pop, and skin looks natural.
Unfortunately, most CFLs don't include a CRI on the packaging. They have to have a CRI of at least 80 to get an EnergyStar rating, but most of them are barely above that. You can find 90+ CRI in CFLs, but mostly in daylight simulation bulbs that are 5000K and above. It's too bad, because I think a lot of people would pay for higher CRI bulbs in a wider range of colors.
I personally hate the 2700K light because it's grossly blue deficient. Your eyes can adapt to a wide range of color temperatures while maintaining a visual perception that the light is neutral. Any time the light has a visually obvious color cast, it's a sign that it has a lot more of some colors than others. That applies to the notably warm light from incandescent lamps (and fluorescent lights that try to mimic them) as much as it does to 641 fluorescent lights that have a nasty green tint. You may be able to find high CRI 2700K lights, but that just means that they're doing a good job of mimicking blue deficient incandescent light, not that they're giving truly accurate color rendition.
FWIW, high color temperature is typically more efficient because it most closely matches the sensitivity of our eyes, not because it's letting through more raw blue light from the mercury spectrum. Basically, our eyes have evolved to be most sensitive to wavelengths that are strongest in natural daylight (green and yellow) and less sensitive to colors that are weaker in natural daylight (extreme blue and extreme red). Ratings of lighting efficiency take that sensitivity into account, so daylight balanced light is naturally more efficient than warmer light is.
Make sure you get good quality, high CRI fluorescent lights. A lot of what people don't like about fluorescent lights is the poor quality light, which is sad, because better quality ones are available. You should try for a CRI above 90, and settle for one between 80 and 90. Most linear fluorescents have a CRI rating on the packaging, but CFLs usually don't. You can find high CRI CFLs, but mostly in daylight rather than soft white.
Stop right there. Have these people used recent LED lighting? I just upgraded some lights in my house to LEDs, and they're great. They're at least as good as the LED tubes they replaced, and that's at just over 100 lumens/watt. There are a lot of low quality LEDs out there, but the good ones are already very good indeed.
Don't neglect the cost of advertising, either. Paying for ads is a non-labor expense, and it can easily make or break a product..
In any case, complaining about marketing costs is often silly. An engineering team is basically a tool to convert money into new products. To stay in business, it has to be connected to another group that converts the new products back into money, which means some kind of marketing. You need both sides to pull their weight for the organization to thrive in the long term. As long as the marketing people are doing a good job of bringing in the money and aren't making promises the engineers can't keep, it shouldn't be a big deal to the engineers exactly how they do it.
Forget tinfoil; woven stainless steel is the in thing for wallets. I got mine more for the durability, but blocking RFID readers is a nice bonus.
You say tomayto, I say tomahto. What else is money laundering but trying to keep your money out of the government's control?