I generally agree. On a related note, on the "not a subsidy but still a hidden cost" side, I think there's a fair argument to be made that the cost of oil doesn't include the amount of money we spend on military efforts to bring "stability" to oil producing regions by bombing them, but that's less of a subsidy and more a question of policy costs not counting against a product when we evaluate the "cost of oil" versus the "cost of solar." Of course, once could legitimately ask whether all of the billions we spend bombing people is really doing much to stabilize our oil supply--I certainly think it's unlikely to be a net win at this point in history.
As for tax policy, I'd like to treat unincorporated businesses and corporations the same if possible. To the extent that money sits in a "business" account, it's still "inside" the business. It's certainly easier to see when that transition happens when you have a corporation paying out dividends, but I could certainly see tightening up the accounting rules for unincorporated businesses so they could declare a particular bank account as belonging to the business for tax purposes so it can easily retain earnings from year to year and use them to grow the business without being taxed as personal income.
The bottom line is we spend resources and create big distortions by trying to get businesses to pay taxes, and we have very little actual tax revenue to show for it. We do, however, have armies of accountants and financial engineers who get paid to engage in all sorts of wasteful hanky panky for tax avoidance. So we might as well just skip the whole thing and make up the revenue in a more sensible place. Businesses would run more efficiently, taxes would be easier to collect, it would get rid of asinine "double taxation" arguments and rhetoric over whether one industry is favored over another, and it would also likely put a lot of lobbyists out of business.
My fellow liberals don't seem to like the idea, but it seems like it would make the tax code more progressive. Right now, Bill Gates and Poor Old Granny pay the same corporate tax rate on any stock they own. If we taxed distributions, neither one would pay corporate income tax, but Gates would pay a higher rate on distributions while Poor Old Granny would get hers at the lower rates of a retired low-income senior.
The bulk of what these companies get in "tax breaks" are really just business expenses or common things like depreciation and the like.
Sure, I imagine so. Oil companies have a lot of equipment and other capital investments that depreciate, so that's probably a giant portion of it.
So, you are saying my "Child Tax Credit" is a subsidy of children?
Yes! Absolutely! Just like the home mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy for taking out a mortgage. Which is really just a bank subsidy once the market has factored everything in. Congress has done a great job of creating subsidies that cost other taxpayers money and convincing the majority of taxpayers that they're just "cutting taxes." But if I cut Bob's taxes and raise yours to cover it, it's no different than if I raise your taxes and cut Bob a check. But one of them is out of control spending and pork while the other one is just "cutting taxes" which is good and holy.
I say there are no tax breaks that amount to subsidies for big oil of any significance. You say they exist. So you need to produce the evidence of subsidies you claim exist.
I didn't say anything about oil-specific tax credits--just that tax credits are subsidies. And you've hedged very carefully with "of any significance," so I'm going to guess that it's very unlikely that anything I post will help here. But a quick Google indicates that there are tax breaks that are specific to extractive industries (most of which are enjoyed by the oil industry) like the ability to deduct intangible drilling costs in one year rather than over time. Intrestingly, it looks like the oil industry's breaks come largely in the form of reshaping how they do depreciation and deduct costs, so everything still ends up being "just depreciation." Anyway, most big politically-connected industries have weird cut-outs in the tax code like this, so I don't think it should be surprising that spends millions on lobbying has a few.
My solution to this type of thing would be to dump the corporate income tax entirely and raise dividend, capital gains, and estate taxes in a revenue-neutral way to make up the difference. We'll never get a corporate tax code that isn't full of bizarre exceptions for powerful industries, and corporations have huge financial flexibility to move money around and work around the laws, so I say we just let corporations act in an economically sensible way and tax the money when it's transferred to human owners.
The point I was trying to make is that this sort of misappropriation of funding is the root cause.
My point is that you might have been able to say that in 1993 (we don't know for sure), but now we have two variables to contend with. In real terms, funding has been cut approximately in half. So even if the system was 30% waste in 1993 and they spent the past 21 years diligently eliminating 100% of that waste, funding has been cut enough for the operation to be considered underfunded. It would have to be more than 50% waste right now assuming it was "correctly" funded in 1993 and a lot more than 50% waste now assuming it was overfunded in 1993 (which seems to be your contention). Sure, we can cut bike paths out, but I'm very skeptical of the notion that bike paths and ferries are major percentage of the federal outlay given that we have almost 48,000 miles of interstate highways or that half of the budget is wasted.
It looks like about half of the budget goes to the "state of good repair" right off the bat, so even assuming that everything else they do is waste, it's a pretty close call to say that the current budget is right, and that's only if the 1993 budget was waste-free.
Let's assume it was "correctly" funded and managed in 1993. Even assuming no new waste in the system, the revenue is down substantially in the face of inflation. Adding to that is the fact that you can drive a lot more miles per gallon of gas now than you could 21 years ago, so revenue per mile driven should be way down. I'm sure there's plenty of waste in the system, but the past 21 years have been a pretty substantial revenue cut by any reasonable measure.
Wear and tear on the roads per unit gas consumed has also changed. A modern car of simialr weight to a 1993 car should be expected to consume substantially less gas than the 93 car, so keeping the tax constant with respect to gallons of gas consumed and the CPI will still underfund maintenance assuming it was set correctly in 1993.
A tax credit for a specific person, company or sector is pretty much a subsidy by definition. It's favored treatment of one entity with the loss in revenue being made up by everybody else. I'd be all for simplyfing the corporate income tax or eliminating it completely, but as long as it's there, any loopholes or giveaways in it are subsidies.
If anything, it looks like commodities investors alone drive the price independent of supply/demand.
How does this work? Given that at the end of every futures contract is a barrel of oil, there must be somebody on one end buying the oil to use (or store) and somebody on the other end pumping the oil out of the ground to sell it. There's clearly a price differential between those two endpoints, but how does the path that price travels on its way between those endpoints make a serious long run difference?
Doesn't matter which country we buy it from specifically. Oil is a global market and disruptions in part of the supply jack up prices everywhere. I'm open to the idea that our poking a stick in the Middle East may not be generating much net stability, but on the assumption that it does, the primary reason we care about what goes on there enough to spend mony on it is that they're a big chunk of the world's oil supply.
Good to see that we're still beating the shit out of the people at the end of the engineer production pipeline for picking engineers from the output stream instead of looking at the earlier stages of the pipeline to figure out why it looks that way. Seriously, Google and Yahoo are not going to be able to force more 13 year old girls to dream of becoming engineers, and even if they do, it'll be 10+ years before we see the results. You can't hire 50% women out of a pool of 20% women without making serious compromises, and you can't turn most recent graduates in other fields into good engineers without massive retraining.
To get an engineering job at a super selective place like Google, you almost certainly need a CS or engineering degree. To be noticed in their truckload of excellent resumes, it helps to have a top school on your resume, or go to a top school that lets you network with other people who might work at highly selective companies. In order to do that, you need to decide well before your 18th birthday that you're serious about this stuff. You need to take the hard math and science classes in high school and you need to do well in them. You need to prep for tests and plan for your future. Google doesn't make that happen when you're 23 years old. You make it happen starting when you're 13-14 years old, 16 at the latest. If you miss that boat, some serious magic is going to have to happen to even get Google to notice your resume. Maybe you're one of a handful of whiz kids who can make a name in a big open source project, but barring that, you're probably out of luck.
If we want women in engineering, try to get girls interested in it in middle school. Slapping Google around for working with what they have isn't going to do the trick.
Those people can get plenty of technical jobs without a degree, but they'd probably never have a crack at a Google interview unless there was something particularly special about them. Google has so many resumes poured into its office every day that they could probably require a graduate degree for every position and still have way too many candidates. They have to filter on something, and that something has to be apparent from the resume. Technical education is a really good filter for technical jobs.
The numbers look like they're from the overall workforce, not necessarily the engineering sections. Do Google and Yahoo! have roughly the same sturucture, or is one of them much more engineering heavy?
That does sound really fishy. I guess if you're going to do that, you need to set the ransom low enough that the company will pay it for a "maybe he'll hold up his end of the bargain" level of assurance rather than a "problem is solved forever" level of assurance. If I said, "Give me a dollar or I'll expose your keys," it's probably worth a dollar to reduce the 100% probability of key exposure to anything marginally less than 100%. If I said, "Give me a hundred million dollars for an unkown but nonzero reduction in the probability that I'll expose your keys," that sounds like less of a good deal.
The best part of this is that the blackmailer could also sell your keys to somebody who might use them without you ever knowing. Not only did they not know beforehand whether the keys were going to be kept secret, there's no way to be 100% sure even now that the keys were left unused.
South San Francisco Bay area, PG&E. We're a mess when it comes to energy for a whole variety of reasons. My last bill was average $0.20 per kwh. Tiers here range from $0.13 to start to $0.36. You move up the tiers rapidly.
What's your threshold for "negligible" and how many negligible things add up to be non-negligible? Most households have more than one stupid electronics box that burns negligible but nonzero power 24 hours a day and would benefit from smarter sleep states.
Think of it this way: 35 watts in a household of 2 people is 3.5%. Let's say we go to 3 people per household and it drops to 2.3%. If that's a "normal" household, we could rephrase, "2.3% of your electricity bill," as, "2.3 % of all residential household energy consumption," which is a hell of a lot in absolute terms. I'd be willing to be that most utilities would notice a 1% drop in baseline consumption if it happened over a statistically significant interval.
Another thing to remember is that most households pay a progressive rate. The "20 cents per kwh" average is cute, but at my consumption level, I'm looking at 33 cents for the last marginal killowatt hours, and those are the kwh that get cut when you reduce your consumption. So it's about $100 per year. "Negligible" when compared to total household expenditures, but if you found it in your pocket at the end of the year, you'd notice. And if these devices were engineered properly, it's money that you'd get for free without having to do anything "green" like turning off the AC when it's hot or putting a brick in your toilet tank.
What are you paying for cable? If you're only watching it 45 minutes a day and it costs you, say $30 a month, we're talking about more than a dollar per hour. It seems like going with an on-demand streaming service would make a lot more sense.
The AC is a serious issue in your area. Not many good options to get around that. But you're off on the refrigerator. A modern one should average well below 100 watts over time. The vampire/suspend/idle draw of all of the electronic crap in my house exceeds the average draw of my refrigerator by a pretty notcieable margin.
I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where the air is reasonably dry and the temperature drops off pretty quickly at sunset, so even if it's 100+ degrees during the day, I can kick on the house fan at night and crash my house temperature with very little energy. If you have to run your AC 20 hours a day, your nights are probably still too hot to make that a viable option. That's rough.
I was astonished to measure mine at about 68 watts average consumption over a week. It looks like the new federal standards are less than 50 watts. That's some good design.
Is that "total national consumption / total population"? I don't think that's what people are thinking of when they think about their energy use. It's nice to know how much the factory used to make my bag of potato chips, but the direct consumption that I control in my house is a lot more limited than that. I work from home and my wife and I are gadget people, and we're at about 500 watts average continuous draw per person for our household. I'm trying to get that down and I'm starting to find that I can get the biggest gains by attacking some of the low power stuff that's on 24 hours a day. It looks like we draw about 250 watts while we're sleeping. That's 1/4 of our consumption, and the only things we really need while we're sleeping are the refrigerator and the burglar alarm. At least 150 of that is waste, which is about 5% of our total consumption.
Upgrading our AV receiver to a modern one (and one with a working remote so we don't forget to turn it off at night) made a noticeable difference. So did killing our old Sony GoogleTV that tended to stay on at night. I'm replacing the broken motherboard in our file server so that it can shut down nightly using cron and wake up using Wake On Lan, which should save us more than 33% on that device (once you account for the more efficient CPU and smaller fan).
Our DirecTV box gets shut down when we're not using it, but it's a smart DVR, so it records even when it's in power saving mode. I haven't measured what it consumes, but since I don't own the box, I don't have a lot of control over what it does.
My point is that you can reduce the amount of gadgets in your house, which is a better idea than accumulating even more materialistic crap and trying to save the planet my making it "green".
The point of the article is that by making the device greener, you can still have all of the gadgets at the same power consumption level. If we went with the "buy fewer gadgets and don't bother with energy efficiency" approach, we wouldn't have any gadgets and we'd be using the same amount of electricity, but it would all be going to run our shitty 1970's style refrigerators. Buy fewer gadgets if that's your thing, but any time you can get a 50% reduction in energy use on something that runs for many hours a day (or is always on), it's crazy not to do it. That stuff adds up.
Good point. Either they're in compliance or somebody should be accountable for it. It's pretty clear to me that this whole thing is another one of Issa's witch hunts, but that doesn't excuse violating data retention laws. We have them for very good reasons. "My dog ate my homework" doesn't cut it.
Last time I worked for a big corporation with a large IT department, we had a ridiculously small total space limit for emails stored on our server. It always seemd ridiculous to me until a senior IT guy said that it's basically for legal discovery reasons. As long as you have a policy of purging everything from your servers on a certain schedule (or based on size limits or some other reasonable variable that's not explicilty "purge the email because we're about to be sued"), you can minimize your what's available for discovery when somebody takes you to court and demands "all emails pertaining to X." You give them what you have on the server and odds are good that the employee hasn't kept copies of anything too old on thier PC, so if the opposition tries to drag out stuff from more than a year or so back, they're usually out of luck.
We went from horses and wagons to steam powered trains to space flight in a matter of a few generations. On the human timescale, we just figured out the basics of physics and chemistry. On the geological or astronomical timescale, the human timescale barely exists at all.
It's not crazy to assume that we'll be around for at least a few times as long as we've currently been doing serious physics. It's definitely not crazy to assume that if there's more than one intelligent civilization out there, a few of them would have been doing science and engineering for thousands or tens of thousands of years. It's not outside the realm of possibility that some of them may have operated for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
It seems a little be pessmistic to put the cosmic "upper limit" on technology at our current level of development.
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I generally agree. On a related note, on the "not a subsidy but still a hidden cost" side, I think there's a fair argument to be made that the cost of oil doesn't include the amount of money we spend on military efforts to bring "stability" to oil producing regions by bombing them, but that's less of a subsidy and more a question of policy costs not counting against a product when we evaluate the "cost of oil" versus the "cost of solar." Of course, once could legitimately ask whether all of the billions we spend bombing people is really doing much to stabilize our oil supply--I certainly think it's unlikely to be a net win at this point in history.
As for tax policy, I'd like to treat unincorporated businesses and corporations the same if possible. To the extent that money sits in a "business" account, it's still "inside" the business. It's certainly easier to see when that transition happens when you have a corporation paying out dividends, but I could certainly see tightening up the accounting rules for unincorporated businesses so they could declare a particular bank account as belonging to the business for tax purposes so it can easily retain earnings from year to year and use them to grow the business without being taxed as personal income.
The bottom line is we spend resources and create big distortions by trying to get businesses to pay taxes, and we have very little actual tax revenue to show for it. We do, however, have armies of accountants and financial engineers who get paid to engage in all sorts of wasteful hanky panky for tax avoidance. So we might as well just skip the whole thing and make up the revenue in a more sensible place. Businesses would run more efficiently, taxes would be easier to collect, it would get rid of asinine "double taxation" arguments and rhetoric over whether one industry is favored over another, and it would also likely put a lot of lobbyists out of business.
My fellow liberals don't seem to like the idea, but it seems like it would make the tax code more progressive. Right now, Bill Gates and Poor Old Granny pay the same corporate tax rate on any stock they own. If we taxed distributions, neither one would pay corporate income tax, but Gates would pay a higher rate on distributions while Poor Old Granny would get hers at the lower rates of a retired low-income senior.
Overblown as in, "not really happening to the extent we thought," or overblown as in, "Well, fuck the bees. We don't need 'em anyway"?
On a similar note, my coffee machine is not vulnerable to HeartBleed. Another point for the engineers over at Saeco over the morons at OpenSSL, right?
Sure, I imagine so. Oil companies have a lot of equipment and other capital investments that depreciate, so that's probably a giant portion of it.
Yes! Absolutely! Just like the home mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy for taking out a mortgage. Which is really just a bank subsidy once the market has factored everything in. Congress has done a great job of creating subsidies that cost other taxpayers money and convincing the majority of taxpayers that they're just "cutting taxes." But if I cut Bob's taxes and raise yours to cover it, it's no different than if I raise your taxes and cut Bob a check. But one of them is out of control spending and pork while the other one is just "cutting taxes" which is good and holy.
I didn't say anything about oil-specific tax credits--just that tax credits are subsidies. And you've hedged very carefully with "of any significance," so I'm going to guess that it's very unlikely that anything I post will help here. But a quick Google indicates that there are tax breaks that are specific to extractive industries (most of which are enjoyed by the oil industry) like the ability to deduct intangible drilling costs in one year rather than over time. Intrestingly, it looks like the oil industry's breaks come largely in the form of reshaping how they do depreciation and deduct costs, so everything still ends up being "just depreciation." Anyway, most big politically-connected industries have weird cut-outs in the tax code like this, so I don't think it should be surprising that spends millions on lobbying has a few.
My solution to this type of thing would be to dump the corporate income tax entirely and raise dividend, capital gains, and estate taxes in a revenue-neutral way to make up the difference. We'll never get a corporate tax code that isn't full of bizarre exceptions for powerful industries, and corporations have huge financial flexibility to move money around and work around the laws, so I say we just let corporations act in an economically sensible way and tax the money when it's transferred to human owners.
My point is that you might have been able to say that in 1993 (we don't know for sure), but now we have two variables to contend with. In real terms, funding has been cut approximately in half. So even if the system was 30% waste in 1993 and they spent the past 21 years diligently eliminating 100% of that waste, funding has been cut enough for the operation to be considered underfunded. It would have to be more than 50% waste right now assuming it was "correctly" funded in 1993 and a lot more than 50% waste now assuming it was overfunded in 1993 (which seems to be your contention). Sure, we can cut bike paths out, but I'm very skeptical of the notion that bike paths and ferries are major percentage of the federal outlay given that we have almost 48,000 miles of interstate highways or that half of the budget is wasted.
It looks like about half of the budget goes to the "state of good repair" right off the bat, so even assuming that everything else they do is waste, it's a pretty close call to say that the current budget is right, and that's only if the 1993 budget was waste-free.
Let's assume it was "correctly" funded and managed in 1993. Even assuming no new waste in the system, the revenue is down substantially in the face of inflation. Adding to that is the fact that you can drive a lot more miles per gallon of gas now than you could 21 years ago, so revenue per mile driven should be way down. I'm sure there's plenty of waste in the system, but the past 21 years have been a pretty substantial revenue cut by any reasonable measure.
Wear and tear on the roads per unit gas consumed has also changed. A modern car of simialr weight to a 1993 car should be expected to consume substantially less gas than the 93 car, so keeping the tax constant with respect to gallons of gas consumed and the CPI will still underfund maintenance assuming it was set correctly in 1993.
A tax credit for a specific person, company or sector is pretty much a subsidy by definition. It's favored treatment of one entity with the loss in revenue being made up by everybody else. I'd be all for simplyfing the corporate income tax or eliminating it completely, but as long as it's there, any loopholes or giveaways in it are subsidies.
How does this work? Given that at the end of every futures contract is a barrel of oil, there must be somebody on one end buying the oil to use (or store) and somebody on the other end pumping the oil out of the ground to sell it. There's clearly a price differential between those two endpoints, but how does the path that price travels on its way between those endpoints make a serious long run difference?
Doesn't matter which country we buy it from specifically. Oil is a global market and disruptions in part of the supply jack up prices everywhere. I'm open to the idea that our poking a stick in the Middle East may not be generating much net stability, but on the assumption that it does, the primary reason we care about what goes on there enough to spend mony on it is that they're a big chunk of the world's oil supply.
Good to see that we're still beating the shit out of the people at the end of the engineer production pipeline for picking engineers from the output stream instead of looking at the earlier stages of the pipeline to figure out why it looks that way. Seriously, Google and Yahoo are not going to be able to force more 13 year old girls to dream of becoming engineers, and even if they do, it'll be 10+ years before we see the results. You can't hire 50% women out of a pool of 20% women without making serious compromises, and you can't turn most recent graduates in other fields into good engineers without massive retraining.
To get an engineering job at a super selective place like Google, you almost certainly need a CS or engineering degree. To be noticed in their truckload of excellent resumes, it helps to have a top school on your resume, or go to a top school that lets you network with other people who might work at highly selective companies. In order to do that, you need to decide well before your 18th birthday that you're serious about this stuff. You need to take the hard math and science classes in high school and you need to do well in them. You need to prep for tests and plan for your future. Google doesn't make that happen when you're 23 years old. You make it happen starting when you're 13-14 years old, 16 at the latest. If you miss that boat, some serious magic is going to have to happen to even get Google to notice your resume. Maybe you're one of a handful of whiz kids who can make a name in a big open source project, but barring that, you're probably out of luck.
If we want women in engineering, try to get girls interested in it in middle school. Slapping Google around for working with what they have isn't going to do the trick.
"Hey, Facebook, can you give us some information about your company that couldn't possibly help you so we can almost certainly use it against you?"
"Uh, no thanks."
Those people can get plenty of technical jobs without a degree, but they'd probably never have a crack at a Google interview unless there was something particularly special about them. Google has so many resumes poured into its office every day that they could probably require a graduate degree for every position and still have way too many candidates. They have to filter on something, and that something has to be apparent from the resume. Technical education is a really good filter for technical jobs.
The numbers look like they're from the overall workforce, not necessarily the engineering sections. Do Google and Yahoo! have roughly the same sturucture, or is one of them much more engineering heavy?
That does sound really fishy. I guess if you're going to do that, you need to set the ransom low enough that the company will pay it for a "maybe he'll hold up his end of the bargain" level of assurance rather than a "problem is solved forever" level of assurance. If I said, "Give me a dollar or I'll expose your keys," it's probably worth a dollar to reduce the 100% probability of key exposure to anything marginally less than 100%. If I said, "Give me a hundred million dollars for an unkown but nonzero reduction in the probability that I'll expose your keys," that sounds like less of a good deal.
The best part of this is that the blackmailer could also sell your keys to somebody who might use them without you ever knowing. Not only did they not know beforehand whether the keys were going to be kept secret, there's no way to be 100% sure even now that the keys were left unused.
South San Francisco Bay area, PG&E. We're a mess when it comes to energy for a whole variety of reasons. My last bill was average $0.20 per kwh. Tiers here range from $0.13 to start to $0.36. You move up the tiers rapidly.
What's your threshold for "negligible" and how many negligible things add up to be non-negligible? Most households have more than one stupid electronics box that burns negligible but nonzero power 24 hours a day and would benefit from smarter sleep states.
Think of it this way: 35 watts in a household of 2 people is 3.5%. Let's say we go to 3 people per household and it drops to 2.3%. If that's a "normal" household, we could rephrase, "2.3% of your electricity bill," as, "2.3 % of all residential household energy consumption," which is a hell of a lot in absolute terms. I'd be willing to be that most utilities would notice a 1% drop in baseline consumption if it happened over a statistically significant interval.
Another thing to remember is that most households pay a progressive rate. The "20 cents per kwh" average is cute, but at my consumption level, I'm looking at 33 cents for the last marginal killowatt hours, and those are the kwh that get cut when you reduce your consumption. So it's about $100 per year. "Negligible" when compared to total household expenditures, but if you found it in your pocket at the end of the year, you'd notice. And if these devices were engineered properly, it's money that you'd get for free without having to do anything "green" like turning off the AC when it's hot or putting a brick in your toilet tank.
What are you paying for cable? If you're only watching it 45 minutes a day and it costs you, say $30 a month, we're talking about more than a dollar per hour. It seems like going with an on-demand streaming service would make a lot more sense.
The AC is a serious issue in your area. Not many good options to get around that. But you're off on the refrigerator. A modern one should average well below 100 watts over time. The vampire/suspend/idle draw of all of the electronic crap in my house exceeds the average draw of my refrigerator by a pretty notcieable margin.
I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where the air is reasonably dry and the temperature drops off pretty quickly at sunset, so even if it's 100+ degrees during the day, I can kick on the house fan at night and crash my house temperature with very little energy. If you have to run your AC 20 hours a day, your nights are probably still too hot to make that a viable option. That's rough.
I was astonished to measure mine at about 68 watts average consumption over a week. It looks like the new federal standards are less than 50 watts. That's some good design.
Is that "total national consumption / total population"? I don't think that's what people are thinking of when they think about their energy use. It's nice to know how much the factory used to make my bag of potato chips, but the direct consumption that I control in my house is a lot more limited than that. I work from home and my wife and I are gadget people, and we're at about 500 watts average continuous draw per person for our household. I'm trying to get that down and I'm starting to find that I can get the biggest gains by attacking some of the low power stuff that's on 24 hours a day. It looks like we draw about 250 watts while we're sleeping. That's 1/4 of our consumption, and the only things we really need while we're sleeping are the refrigerator and the burglar alarm. At least 150 of that is waste, which is about 5% of our total consumption.
Upgrading our AV receiver to a modern one (and one with a working remote so we don't forget to turn it off at night) made a noticeable difference. So did killing our old Sony GoogleTV that tended to stay on at night. I'm replacing the broken motherboard in our file server so that it can shut down nightly using cron and wake up using Wake On Lan, which should save us more than 33% on that device (once you account for the more efficient CPU and smaller fan).
Our DirecTV box gets shut down when we're not using it, but it's a smart DVR, so it records even when it's in power saving mode. I haven't measured what it consumes, but since I don't own the box, I don't have a lot of control over what it does.
The point of the article is that by making the device greener, you can still have all of the gadgets at the same power consumption level. If we went with the "buy fewer gadgets and don't bother with energy efficiency" approach, we wouldn't have any gadgets and we'd be using the same amount of electricity, but it would all be going to run our shitty 1970's style refrigerators. Buy fewer gadgets if that's your thing, but any time you can get a 50% reduction in energy use on something that runs for many hours a day (or is always on), it's crazy not to do it. That stuff adds up.
Good point. Either they're in compliance or somebody should be accountable for it. It's pretty clear to me that this whole thing is another one of Issa's witch hunts, but that doesn't excuse violating data retention laws. We have them for very good reasons. "My dog ate my homework" doesn't cut it.
Last time I worked for a big corporation with a large IT department, we had a ridiculously small total space limit for emails stored on our server. It always seemd ridiculous to me until a senior IT guy said that it's basically for legal discovery reasons. As long as you have a policy of purging everything from your servers on a certain schedule (or based on size limits or some other reasonable variable that's not explicilty "purge the email because we're about to be sued"), you can minimize your what's available for discovery when somebody takes you to court and demands "all emails pertaining to X." You give them what you have on the server and odds are good that the employee hasn't kept copies of anything too old on thier PC, so if the opposition tries to drag out stuff from more than a year or so back, they're usually out of luck.
We went from horses and wagons to steam powered trains to space flight in a matter of a few generations. On the human timescale, we just figured out the basics of physics and chemistry. On the geological or astronomical timescale, the human timescale barely exists at all.
It's not crazy to assume that we'll be around for at least a few times as long as we've currently been doing serious physics. It's definitely not crazy to assume that if there's more than one intelligent civilization out there, a few of them would have been doing science and engineering for thousands or tens of thousands of years. It's not outside the realm of possibility that some of them may have operated for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
It seems a little be pessmistic to put the cosmic "upper limit" on technology at our current level of development.