I believe that the historical need for FCM is obsolete and the USPS should be fully privatized. Packages should be delivered by UPS and FedEx, bills should go by email, bulk mail advertising should disappear forever.
The same remote areas which private delivery services rely on the USPS for delivery would not be served by private delivery service and do not have ready access to internet services. So like these areas do not have internet service now, without the UPS they would not have delivery service now.
Whether people should be living in these areas without being required to make other arrangements for mail delivery, package delivery, and internet is an interesting question just like is universal postal service required.
I'm pretty sure they just subcontract the last leg to save cost. For non-priority items it makes sense. If USPS went away, they'd just run their own truck (or possibly a shared FedEx/UPS truck) and charge a bit more.
No, they would not. Some areas would simply not be served.
That is fine, if the law giving the USPS a monopoly on first class mail went away...
The problem with that is that the USPS delivers anywhere within the US which is important for the existence of a nation. They are even required to by law and for a uniform price. Other delivery services have no such restrictions and can pick and choose who to deliver to and for how much.
Actually it does. The USPS has been subsidizing low package rates with first class postage rates for years. Why do you think the private carriers lobbied the Republicans to stab the USPS in the back with that crazy pension pre-fund plan that has the USPS running major deficits every year?
The private carriers may have wanted it but *Congress* did it, not just the Republicans, because the pension funds go directly into the treasury where Congress can spend them just like Social Security.
When mathematicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "logically inconsistent with published proofs, and those proofs are the basis of EVERYTHING".
Pass a federal law that... creates an unfunded mandate requiring each state to run government-owned fiber to every home and business, freely leasing fiber access to any ISP that wants it.
Federalism means that the federal government may not order the States to do things. The only power they have over the States is to withhold related funding like highway funding unless speed limits are passed.
It's a good thing we now have really powerful GPUs to make the GUI of newer systems as fast as the GUI on older systems which lacked powerful GPUs. Imagine how slow the GUI would be if we were still using 2D accelerators.
Oh, a strict Constitutionalist? Tell me, in your opinion, does "well regulated militia" mean any/every Tom, Dick, and mentally unstable Harry should be able to buy an Uzi without some kind of basic background check?
The subordinate clause *expands* what is protected. It means weapons suitable for a militia are protected (see US versus Miller) which includes machine guns, short barreled rifles, pistols with stocks, sawed off shotguns, many "destructive devices" as BATFE likes to define them, dirks, swords, knives, any arms that an infantryman would normally carry, and any arms that a law enforcement officer could carry including tasers and clubs. It also includes all magazine sizes whether fixed or removable, body armor, bayonets, bayonet mounts, and barrel shrouds which are also inexplicably known as "that thing which goes up".
Compromise is not possible; BATFE and various disingenuous politicians have poisoned that well.
I believe that technology like this will help nuclear power more than it could wind or solar. A lack of a power source capable of running the cooling pumps was what killed the reactors at Fukushima.
The failure at Fukushima was not caused by the diesel backup generators themselves. It was the location where they and the switching circuits were installed. If they had had battery backup instead, it would not have run any better once drowned.
If you want to make an argument that renewables will have a hard time replacing all baseload energy systems (because the power is more more diffuse, requiring a lot of land and more complicated grid management), that's a better argument to make. But any argument that starts with renewable energy simply not being able to compete in any context is wrong.
My two arguments against solar and wind are the expense of power storage systems and the cost, both expense and lower reliability, of the extra complexity.
Besides the direct subsidies, there is also rent seeking where power consumers are legally required to buy from renewable sources leading to negative prices where the producers are still making money. This also results in non-renewable sources operating at a lower capacity factor making them less economical which is particularly problematical for nuclear power where the fuel costs are low.
Of course non-renewable energy generation receives its own subsidies at least in the form of not applying a Pigovian tax. To me this just demonstrates the largest problems we face, politics and rent seeking.
Or Apple just wanted a plausible sounding excuse which is what I believe given the other steps they have taken to prevent repair of their products. Those batteries are glued in to operate as a timed self destruct device.
In my experience the most common failure in desktop PCs are the power supplies and while they can be difficult to replace depending on the cabling, what do you do if steps have been taken to prevent replacement like Dell did by swapping a couple of pins on the already standardized connector? Of course that means their motherboard was also customized. And some products have used customized hard drives with special firmware or even connector pinouts.
Portable devices are in a slightly different catagory since their design often will be better with non-repairable assembly. Unfortunately their design is often fragile as well. For the price I paid for my first laptop which was dead just a couple months out of warranty after three returns for service, I could have built at least two small form factor desktops with removable mass storage that could have still been in service years later with minor maintenance at most.
Strong armed with the help of the California Assembly who passed the laws allowing it to happen. I wonder how much the California politicians and their friends made from that.
an integrated control system to control the generation and distribution of electric power. If there is an excess of solar power then shutdown hydro and ramp down fossil power production. And do the opposite when there is a shortfall of solar.
If only there was some indicator of value which could be used to control supply and demand in a market with distributed active participants.
The simple solution is to build a few large bore (2m diameter), high pressure pipes up into lakes in the rocky mountains.
Any state which cooperates with California on a project like this will get what they deserve, more California. Oregon wisely never agreed on the pipeline to the Columbia river which California proposed.
Besides which California has plenty of mountains completely within the state to use for such a project. Of course using them would mean not fucking over one of the surrounding states for rents.
I can't wait for CA baseload to start going out if businesses. When the state has no baseload, the smart States will laugh at California. Dumbest group of people on the planet. They will get exactly what they deserve.
No worries, the California politicians can just pass a law forcing the baseload plants to continue operating.
I know the local coal power plant has a quite small footprint compared to the mountain of coal reserves they have laying beside it to sure if there's a supply issue it won't affect operation. This is quite the opposite for solar where the battery storage system fits in a shipping container for a solar grid covering an entire football field.
A football field worth of solar is just not all that much on the industrial power scale so the storage system which fits into a shipping container is proportionally small.
solar energy is only available during the day and sunny days are more productive than cloudy ones
Yes, that's the problem. Why you would pay for such an inconsistent source, then pay again to cover up that problem is what you need to explain.
Oh, that one is easy. It is easy to pay for it when using other people's money and the rents are very profitable no matter how much wealth is destroyed.
Charge variable rates during the day to control demand and make this data available to every metered consumer in real time and the problem will solve itself. Then if there is enough demand for high priced power, then the money will become available for infrastructure investment. The rent seekers and politicians will hate this though. The Greens will not like it much either.
Note this this solution is the opposite of the whole "deregulation" thing which lead up to the Enron power crisis. The politicians were just as much if not more responsible for that fiasco yet I did not see any of them criminally charged.
I hear there are some old engineers who designed the Oroville dam spillways who will work for cheap from their assisted living facilities so engineering costs might be reduced.
Knowing something of how California maintains their infrastructure, I suspect the spillway failure was do to lack of maintenance and inspection rather than engineering. For example:
Despite what the wikipedia article says, that was a inspection and maintenance failure because of a disconnect in who relies on the dam, the central valley, and who is responsible for maintaining it, ultimately the LA water district). What isn't mentioned is that it took a year for them to fabricate a new gate, and then they made it too short so they had to make another one.
The power (and water) problems of California will not be solved until the politics are repaired and that is not going to happen.
Hydro is the cleanest option to store energy, even if you have to make the lake, there are hills to be found pretty much everywhere but it requires a lot of investment, the problem is California although plenty of hills doesn't have a lot of water as it is. Perhaps if they dumped the energy in desalination plants, they'll fix both problems.
California would be one of the better places for pumped storage except for the politics. Building new dams when they have been removing them is just not politically feasible which is fine; if they end up giving away enough energy, maybe a neighboring state will build some pumped storage and sell their power back to them.
"Toxic"? As opposed to fossil fuels or uranium which are just so amazingly safe? Most batteries are recyclable (including lithium batteries) - the only issue is whether it is economical to recycle them. We're looking for the least worst option and everything indicates batteries + solar/wind are likely a major part of the least worst options. Any toxicity from batteries is easily justified in the face of the alternatives.
The problem with batteries, except maybe flow batteries, is that their energy density is very low so there is a *lot* to recycle. Nuclear power results in some very dangerous waste but the total volume is low; the volume is especially low if reprocessing is used to recover the fuel and concentrate the waste but we do not do that for political reasons.
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I believe that the historical need for FCM is obsolete and the USPS should be fully privatized. Packages should be delivered by UPS and FedEx, bills should go by email, bulk mail advertising should disappear forever.
The same remote areas which private delivery services rely on the USPS for delivery would not be served by private delivery service and do not have ready access to internet services. So like these areas do not have internet service now, without the UPS they would not have delivery service now.
Whether people should be living in these areas without being required to make other arrangements for mail delivery, package delivery, and internet is an interesting question just like is universal postal service required.
I'm pretty sure they just subcontract the last leg to save cost. For non-priority items it makes sense. If USPS went away, they'd just run their own truck (or possibly a shared FedEx/UPS truck) and charge a bit more.
No, they would not. Some areas would simply not be served.
That is fine, if the law giving the USPS a monopoly on first class mail went away...
The problem with that is that the USPS delivers anywhere within the US which is important for the existence of a nation. They are even required to by law and for a uniform price. Other delivery services have no such restrictions and can pick and choose who to deliver to and for how much.
The USPS pension funds go right into the treasury where Congress can get to them and there is no deal Congress can make that they cannot break.
Actually it does. The USPS has been subsidizing low package rates with first class postage rates for years. Why do you think the private carriers lobbied the Republicans to stab the USPS in the back with that crazy pension pre-fund plan that has the USPS running major deficits every year?
The private carriers may have wanted it but *Congress* did it, not just the Republicans, because the pension funds go directly into the treasury where Congress can spend them just like Social Security.
When mathematicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "logically inconsistent with published proofs, and those proofs are the basis of EVERYTHING".
Mathematicians just need to math harder.
Pass a federal law that ... creates an unfunded mandate requiring each state to run government-owned fiber to every home and business, freely leasing fiber access to any ISP that wants it.
Federalism means that the federal government may not order the States to do things. The only power they have over the States is to withhold related funding like highway funding unless speed limits are passed.
People may ask why I run Windows XP. It's because I have some old software that I like and it won't run on my newer Windows 10 computer.
It's why people virtualize old PCs now. You run your old PC in a window.
Great! Which driver do I install to virtualize old expansion ports so I can use the old hardware?
It's a good thing we now have really powerful GPUs to make the GUI of newer systems as fast as the GUI on older systems which lacked powerful GPUs. Imagine how slow the GUI would be if we were still using 2D accelerators.
Oh, a strict Constitutionalist? Tell me, in your opinion, does "well regulated militia" mean any/every Tom, Dick, and mentally unstable Harry should be able to buy an Uzi without some kind of basic background check?
The subordinate clause *expands* what is protected. It means weapons suitable for a militia are protected (see US versus Miller) which includes machine guns, short barreled rifles, pistols with stocks, sawed off shotguns, many "destructive devices" as BATFE likes to define them, dirks, swords, knives, any arms that an infantryman would normally carry, and any arms that a law enforcement officer could carry including tasers and clubs. It also includes all magazine sizes whether fixed or removable, body armor, bayonets, bayonet mounts, and barrel shrouds which are also inexplicably known as "that thing which goes up".
Compromise is not possible; BATFE and various disingenuous politicians have poisoned that well.
I believe that technology like this will help nuclear power more than it could wind or solar. A lack of a power source capable of running the cooling pumps was what killed the reactors at Fukushima.
The failure at Fukushima was not caused by the diesel backup generators themselves. It was the location where they and the switching circuits were installed. If they had had battery backup instead, it would not have run any better once drowned.
If you want to make an argument that renewables will have a hard time replacing all baseload energy systems (because the power is more more diffuse, requiring a lot of land and more complicated grid management), that's a better argument to make. But any argument that starts with renewable energy simply not being able to compete in any context is wrong.
My two arguments against solar and wind are the expense of power storage systems and the cost, both expense and lower reliability, of the extra complexity.
Besides the direct subsidies, there is also rent seeking where power consumers are legally required to buy from renewable sources leading to negative prices where the producers are still making money. This also results in non-renewable sources operating at a lower capacity factor making them less economical which is particularly problematical for nuclear power where the fuel costs are low.
Of course non-renewable energy generation receives its own subsidies at least in the form of not applying a Pigovian tax. To me this just demonstrates the largest problems we face, politics and rent seeking.
Or Apple just wanted a plausible sounding excuse which is what I believe given the other steps they have taken to prevent repair of their products. Those batteries are glued in to operate as a timed self destruct device.
In my experience the most common failure in desktop PCs are the power supplies and while they can be difficult to replace depending on the cabling, what do you do if steps have been taken to prevent replacement like Dell did by swapping a couple of pins on the already standardized connector? Of course that means their motherboard was also customized. And some products have used customized hard drives with special firmware or even connector pinouts.
Portable devices are in a slightly different catagory since their design often will be better with non-repairable assembly. Unfortunately their design is often fragile as well. For the price I paid for my first laptop which was dead just a couple months out of warranty after three returns for service, I could have built at least two small form factor desktops with removable mass storage that could have still been in service years later with minor maintenance at most.
Strong armed with the help of the California Assembly who passed the laws allowing it to happen. I wonder how much the California politicians and their friends made from that.
an integrated control system to control the generation and distribution of electric power. If there is an excess of solar power then shutdown hydro and ramp down fossil power production. And do the opposite when there is a shortfall of solar.
If only there was some indicator of value which could be used to control supply and demand in a market with distributed active participants.
Why am I still paying 24+ cents per kilowatt hour in CA then?
Because the politicians you elected made it law that you do so for your own good.
The simple solution is to build a few large bore (2m diameter), high pressure pipes up into lakes in the rocky mountains.
Any state which cooperates with California on a project like this will get what they deserve, more California. Oregon wisely never agreed on the pipeline to the Columbia river which California proposed.
Besides which California has plenty of mountains completely within the state to use for such a project. Of course using them would mean not fucking over one of the surrounding states for rents.
I can't wait for CA baseload to start going out if businesses. When the state has no baseload, the smart States will laugh at California. Dumbest group of people on the planet. They will get exactly what they deserve.
No worries, the California politicians can just pass a law forcing the baseload plants to continue operating.
I know the local coal power plant has a quite small footprint compared to the mountain of coal reserves they have laying beside it to sure if there's a supply issue it won't affect operation. This is quite the opposite for solar where the battery storage system fits in a shipping container for a solar grid covering an entire football field.
A football field worth of solar is just not all that much on the industrial power scale so the storage system which fits into a shipping container is proportionally small.
solar energy is only available during the day and sunny days are more productive than cloudy ones
Yes, that's the problem. Why you would pay for such an inconsistent source, then pay again to cover up that problem is what you need to explain.
Oh, that one is easy. It is easy to pay for it when using other people's money and the rents are very profitable no matter how much wealth is destroyed.
Charge variable rates during the day to control demand and make this data available to every metered consumer in real time and the problem will solve itself. Then if there is enough demand for high priced power, then the money will become available for infrastructure investment. The rent seekers and politicians will hate this though. The Greens will not like it much either.
Note this this solution is the opposite of the whole "deregulation" thing which lead up to the Enron power crisis. The politicians were just as much if not more responsible for that fiasco yet I did not see any of them criminally charged.
I hear there are some old engineers who designed the Oroville dam spillways who will work for cheap from their assisted living facilities so engineering costs might be reduced.
Knowing something of how California maintains their infrastructure, I suspect the spillway failure was do to lack of maintenance and inspection rather than engineering. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Despite what the wikipedia article says, that was a inspection and maintenance failure because of a disconnect in who relies on the dam, the central valley, and who is responsible for maintaining it, ultimately the LA water district). What isn't mentioned is that it took a year for them to fabricate a new gate, and then they made it too short so they had to make another one.
The power (and water) problems of California will not be solved until the politics are repaired and that is not going to happen.
Hydro is the cleanest option to store energy, even if you have to make the lake, there are hills to be found pretty much everywhere but it requires a lot of investment, the problem is California although plenty of hills doesn't have a lot of water as it is. Perhaps if they dumped the energy in desalination plants, they'll fix both problems.
California would be one of the better places for pumped storage except for the politics. Building new dams when they have been removing them is just not politically feasible which is fine; if they end up giving away enough energy, maybe a neighboring state will build some pumped storage and sell their power back to them.
"Toxic"? As opposed to fossil fuels or uranium which are just so amazingly safe? Most batteries are recyclable (including lithium batteries) - the only issue is whether it is economical to recycle them. We're looking for the least worst option and everything indicates batteries + solar/wind are likely a major part of the least worst options. Any toxicity from batteries is easily justified in the face of the alternatives.
The problem with batteries, except maybe flow batteries, is that their energy density is very low so there is a *lot* to recycle. Nuclear power results in some very dangerous waste but the total volume is low; the volume is especially low if reprocessing is used to recover the fuel and concentrate the waste but we do not do that for political reasons.