In this country, executives get paid for performance-- or at least for tweaking the stock price. Unions, with their incessant demands for decent working conditions, interfere with the creation of totemic representations of shareholder value.
That was a joke right? "Shareholder value" when talking about passenger airlines is pretty much zero. The lifetime profit/loss of the industry is a loss. Every legacy US airline has declared bankruptcy at least once. Southwest has not gone belly up, but you would have been far better investing in the S&P 500 over the last five or ten year periods, perhaps longer.
The problem is that owning airlines is "sexy" and way too much money is invested in it. The result is that shareholders are completely and utterly screwed. The problem with airlines is not the execs, the unions, the corporate structure, or even fuel costs. The problem is the "sexy" factor has caused there to be way too much capacity built and no airline can operate at a long term profit because of it.
funny, I go with the lowest bidder for airlines based in other parts of the world and the food, beer & wine, entertainment and courteous service are included. the US airlines *could* do it if money-grubbing scum weren't allowed to get away with excessivly lining their own pockets
Right now, the aviation industry has a net loss for the lifetime of the industry. The stockholders certainly don't see any money, and they keep getting totally wiped out. Compare executive compensation of airline companies and other companies. Airline execs make far less on average than execs at companies of similar sizes. Who is left? Who are the "money-grubbing scum"?
In the accompanying text, the DOE estimates the total new capacity additions to our electric system between 2011 and 2015 will be between 166 and 355 gigawatts.
You wrote " There are quite a number of people out there that would sooner die then choose Apple because of their shiny retarded walled garden approach to computing. I'll go back to a clamshell phone before I choose Apple for anything."
I respect that choice. I personally want that walled garden. Decades ago, before malware came around, I used to spend 5K a year on software. Anything that I thought had a chance of increasing my productivity, I bought it. Malware changed all that. I now have to consider the risk that some cool little utility will utterly screw up my system. Or install stupid tool bars that I have to spend way too much time to get rid of. The result of this is the amount of software I consume has declined by 75% compared to 25 years ago.
The Apple walled garden changed all that. I can install boatloads of things with a very high degree on confidence that they are safe.
My brother in law has a PC that got infected with hundreds of pieces of malware and is unusable. His Iphone and Ipad are going along just fine.
There are a large number of us that very much want a walled garden. Yes, it is not for everyone, but it most certainly is for some of us.
> I understand that the grad students of a few Nobel Prize winners have been pretty embittered by the lack of official recognition of their contributions.
Having worked with just such an embittered professor, I would go as far as saying as some Nobel prizes should have been awarded to the grad students.
I also think there is a bit of a presumption in the Nobel committee to assume work was done by the older and wiser professor. When Bardeen came up with the theory of super-conducting, a key (if not THE key) element of the theory is the concept of Cooper pairs. Cooper was a grad student working with Bardeen. How much you want to bet that Cooper came up with the idea, and Bardeen named them Cooper pairs because Bardeen wanted to make sure Cooper shared in the credit for the theory? If there were more professors like Bardeen, there would not be quite so many embittered former grad students walking around today.
Fun fact: Sheldon Cooper of Big Bang Theory is actually named after the Cooper who helped formulate the theory of super-conducting.
Almost everything I buy in the continental US is shipped/flown in, as well, from sardines to salmon, mandarins to garlic, as well as small appliances and almost everything electronic (including wire), and of course cars.
Even if that is true in your case (and is most certainly is not true for most Americans), there are a host of things you indirectly consume that are surely made in the 48 states.
Your electricity comes mostly from coal and natural gas that all came from within the country. That car you said was shipped in? Well, you may own an import, but most Americans do not. And even imported cars might have been made here. Toyota, and many others, have plants in the USA. You ever eat bread? The grain was grown and processed in the US. How about soap? Yeah, that was made here as well.
How about your house, did you import that? If you live in Hawaii, you actually will be importing most of the building materials. Are the roads you drive on imported from Germany? Nope, the asphalt comes from refineries in the US. How about the steel and concrete for that bridge you just drove over? Yep, that all came from with the 48 states as well.
By weight, you would be shocked how much of what you use in your life actually came from within the 48 states. It is probably in the ballpark of 95-99%. In Hawaii, almost all of that has to be shipped in. And in relatively small quantities as well, which just compounds the pain.
Hawaii does grow their own tropical fruit. It's really good. Papayas there are yummy.
Oh come now. You repeated essentially exactly the same statement as GP and then claimed GP was wrong?!?!
If the OP's statement was true, most panels would need to be replaced by the 25 year mark, since the standard panel guarantee is a minimum of 80% at the 25 year mark. Very few panels are replaced as most do much much better.
And it's not a "guarantee". Nobody guarantees anything for 25 years.
* inverters blow out, occasionally needing replacement * sometimes you use more power than the panels can provide (especially if you have a garage) * a home with north-facing roof or on the north side of anything bigger than it doesn't fare so well. * as sibling said - the sun goes down every day.
True.
* if you have kids, odds are good they're going to throw something onto the roof. Odds are better that it'll be hard enough to crack the glass on a panel.
Not true. Panels are designed to withstand pretty heavy hail hitting it at terminal velocity. Unless your kids are shooting at your roof with a gun, the panels should be fine.
* even top-end panels last about 25 years max before peak output drops below 80% of rated Wp
Not true. Standard guarantee is that panels will be at the 80% mark or higher at 25 years.
Finally, to make a panel, you have to burn an unholy amount of electricity just to feed the CZ furnaces for the wafers/cells (letting alone wafering, cell processing, panel construction, etc). It has to come from *somewhere*...
True. But energy payback time is down to between.5 and 1.4 years depending on exact technology used. That's from the EPIA March 2011 white paper, and things are surely better now.
... However, nuclear weapons increase the destructiveness of large-scale war...
You may very well be correct. However. the only experimental data to date, shows the opposite. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less lethal than the fire bombings of other Japanese cities. Furthermore, the fire bombings did not get the Japanese to give up. The nukes did. Total destruction was far less with nukes than the part of the war without them.
The significant quote is "Twin Creeks has lifted 14 laminae from a single donor wafer in its labs with Hyperion and produced solar cells on ten laminae lifted from a single donor wafer."
So, they've only been able to lift 14 wafers from a donor and made all of ten cells? Really? Either their web page is way out of date, or Twin Creeks is so early in the process that they are years and years away from being ready to ship.
Man how many times have we seen these stories already - "cheap solar power discovery, will make solar pv affordable" but then years later nothing has changed.
It would be great if some of these things actually got productizd, I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...
Nothing changes???? In 1980, solar PV cost about $22 a watt. If you order a large system today, you can do that for about $3 a watt. If you take inflation into account, that 1980 number is closer to $50 a watt in today's dollars. Yes, a reduction in price of 94% is peanuts compared to what has happened with computers, but that still beats the heck out of all of all the other energy sources. For example, oil costs more today than in 1980. Coal costs more than in 1980. And so it goes.
Solar is already cheaper than grid power in some areas. If prices keep dropping at the same rate they have been dropping (about 8% a year), within a decade, solar PV will be cheaper than the retail electricity rate for pretty much everyone in the US.
I once had a "reputable" company doing that to me (unsubscribe did not work, phone calls, etc.). So, I found e-mail address for about fifteen higher ups in the company, and set up a filter that would auto-forward anything I got from their domain them to all fifteen of them (with "Please unsubscribe me" added). Their e-mail was then automatically deleted. It must have worked, because a couple of years later I changed e-mail systems, and I've never had to recreate that filter.
You wrote "That means when you carry it around every day, it won't fall apart as fast. It WILL fall apart eventually - that's always been my experience with laptops in general"
Yeah, mine too, until my family started buying Macbooks. Maybe we are just lucky, but the only one we had flake out was one my wife spilled a glass of hot tea on the keyboard (and it even worked well for 18 months after that!).
Yeah, a buddy of mine used to always buy the Best Buy extended warranty. The one time he actually needed to use it, he had to bring the laptop in five times to have the same issue fixed (three is supposed to trigger the lemon policy and get you a new unit). Best Buy argued that, since Best Buy was too stupid to actually fix the issue, none of the attempts to fix the laptop actually counted. My friend spent at least ten hours at Best Buy arguing, and at least 20 hours on the phone with me complaining about them. After six months without his laptop, Best Buy finally honored their lemon policy and gave him a new laptop.
JFC! I will happily avoid all of this insanity by not buying the extended warranty.
You wrote "I have always believed that tablets were a very small niche application. "
OK. The last serious estimate I read said that there are already 30 million tablets out there and within 36 months there will most likely be around 300 million.
You wrote "Do Ceglia's lawyers not know that you can mark stuff as confidential so that only the lawyers, judge, and jury can see it? How can it be more confidential than that?"
Easy, don't let anyone see it! Can't get more confidential than that! Take our word for it, the contract says you owe us lots of money. And also take our word for it that the contract says you can't see what the contract says.
You wrote ""The amended agreement is identical to the previous one in every way, except the following:" which could be covered in a couple of paragraphs, rather than reading tens of pages of legalese to find what has changed."
I forget what on-line EULA I once printed (maybe Itunes?). It was ___90___ freaking pages long. And _something_ had changed. Good God.
I propose a new law. Any EULA more than four pages long is null and void....
You wrote "making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces"
You also wrote "that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology, etc."
If you covered all man made structures with solar PV, you would have more than enough power to run our society. There is also lots of land that is already pretty wasted. For example, you could put solar farms on old mountain top removal mines.
Same amount of power, but not the same amount of energy. The capacity factor of this monster should be much higher than almost any wind turbine. The result should be much more energy. And of great benefit to grid operators, the output should be dramatically more stable than the output of wind turbines (which can fall to zero in seconds). I just did some googling and they are estimating a capacity factor of.6 for this tower. That's somewhere between double and triple of what most wind turbines deliver.
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In this country, executives get paid for performance-- or at least for tweaking the stock price. Unions, with their incessant demands for decent working conditions, interfere with the creation of totemic representations of shareholder value.
That was a joke right? "Shareholder value" when talking about passenger airlines is pretty much zero. The lifetime profit/loss of the industry is a loss. Every legacy US airline has declared bankruptcy at least once. Southwest has not gone belly up, but you would have been far better investing in the S&P 500 over the last five or ten year periods, perhaps longer.
The problem is that owning airlines is "sexy" and way too much money is invested in it. The result is that shareholders are completely and utterly screwed. The problem with airlines is not the execs, the unions, the corporate structure, or even fuel costs. The problem is the "sexy" factor has caused there to be way too much capacity built and no airline can operate at a long term profit because of it.
funny, I go with the lowest bidder for airlines based in other parts of the world and the food, beer & wine, entertainment and courteous service are included. the US airlines *could* do it if money-grubbing scum weren't allowed to get away with excessivly lining their own pockets
Right now, the aviation industry has a net loss for the lifetime of the industry. The stockholders certainly don't see any money, and they keep getting totally wiped out. Compare executive compensation of airline companies and other companies. Airline execs make far less on average than execs at companies of similar sizes. Who is left? Who are the "money-grubbing scum"?
What the hell is electric landing gear?
This. http://blog.cafefoundation.org/?p=5207
The summary appears to be accurate and the article is real enough.
As for as partisan fluff, could you please tell me what you are talking about? I don't see it.
We haven't built a new major power plant in a long, long time and we aren't likely to do so anytime soon either.
Look at figure 95 on this page.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/sector_electric_power_all.cfm#powergen
In the accompanying text, the DOE estimates the total new capacity additions to our electric system between 2011 and 2015 will be between 166 and 355 gigawatts.
Yeah, I have to admit that Itunes does really stink up the place. I am regularly astonished at how stupid some of the things it does are.
You wrote " There are quite a number of people out there that would sooner die then choose Apple because of their shiny retarded walled garden approach to computing. I'll go back to a clamshell phone before I choose Apple for anything."
I respect that choice. I personally want that walled garden. Decades ago, before malware came around, I used to spend 5K a year on software. Anything that I thought had a chance of increasing my productivity, I bought it. Malware changed all that. I now have to consider the risk that some cool little utility will utterly screw up my system. Or install stupid tool bars that I have to spend way too much time to get rid of. The result of this is the amount of software I consume has declined by 75% compared to 25 years ago.
The Apple walled garden changed all that. I can install boatloads of things with a very high degree on confidence that they are safe.
My brother in law has a PC that got infected with hundreds of pieces of malware and is unusable. His Iphone and Ipad are going along just fine.
There are a large number of us that very much want a walled garden. Yes, it is not for everyone, but it most certainly is for some of us.
> I understand that the grad students of a few Nobel Prize winners have been pretty embittered by the lack of official recognition of their contributions.
Having worked with just such an embittered professor, I would go as far as saying as some Nobel prizes should have been awarded to the grad students.
I also think there is a bit of a presumption in the Nobel committee to assume work was done by the older and wiser professor. When Bardeen came up with the theory of super-conducting, a key (if not THE key) element of the theory is the concept of Cooper pairs. Cooper was a grad student working with Bardeen. How much you want to bet that Cooper came up with the idea, and Bardeen named them Cooper pairs because Bardeen wanted to make sure Cooper shared in the credit for the theory? If there were more professors like Bardeen, there would not be quite so many embittered former grad students walking around today.
Fun fact: Sheldon Cooper of Big Bang Theory is actually named after the Cooper who helped formulate the theory of super-conducting.
Almost everything I buy in the continental US is shipped/flown in, as well, from sardines to salmon, mandarins to garlic, as well as small appliances and almost everything electronic (including wire), and of course cars.
Even if that is true in your case (and is most certainly is not true for most Americans), there are a host of things you indirectly consume that are surely made in the 48 states.
Your electricity comes mostly from coal and natural gas that all came from within the country. That car you said was shipped in? Well, you may own an import, but most Americans do not. And even imported cars might have been made here. Toyota, and many others, have plants in the USA. You ever eat bread? The grain was grown and processed in the US. How about soap? Yeah, that was made here as well.
How about your house, did you import that? If you live in Hawaii, you actually will be importing most of the building materials. Are the roads you drive on imported from Germany? Nope, the asphalt comes from refineries in the US. How about the steel and concrete for that bridge you just drove over? Yep, that all came from with the 48 states as well.
By weight, you would be shocked how much of what you use in your life actually came from within the 48 states. It is probably in the ballpark of 95-99%. In Hawaii, almost all of that has to be shipped in. And in relatively small quantities as well, which just compounds the pain.
Hawaii does grow their own tropical fruit. It's really good. Papayas there are yummy.
Oh come now. You repeated essentially exactly the same statement as GP and then claimed GP was wrong?!?!
If the OP's statement was true, most panels would need to be replaced by the 25 year mark, since the standard panel guarantee is a minimum of 80% at the 25 year mark. Very few panels are replaced as most do much much better.
And it's not a "guarantee". Nobody guarantees anything for 25 years.
Solar panel makers do exactly that. see http://us.sunpowercorp.com/support/warranty/
Solar panels are warrantied for maybe 1-3 years against manufacturing defects if you're lucky, and that's about it.
OK, I'm done with you. You clearly have never read a solar panel guarantee. Just follow the link.
* inverters blow out, occasionally needing replacement
* sometimes you use more power than the panels can provide (especially if you have a garage)
* a home with north-facing roof or on the north side of anything bigger than it doesn't fare so well.
* as sibling said - the sun goes down every day.
True.
* if you have kids, odds are good they're going to throw something onto the roof. Odds are better that it'll be hard enough to crack the glass on a panel.
Not true. Panels are designed to withstand pretty heavy hail hitting it at terminal velocity. Unless your kids are shooting at your roof with a gun, the panels should be fine.
* even top-end panels last about 25 years max before peak output drops below 80% of rated Wp
Not true. Standard guarantee is that panels will be at the 80% mark or higher at 25 years.
Finally, to make a panel, you have to burn an unholy amount of electricity just to feed the CZ furnaces for the wafers/cells (letting alone wafering, cell processing, panel construction, etc). It has to come from *somewhere*...
True. But energy payback time is down to between .5 and 1.4 years depending on exact technology used. That's from the EPIA March 2011 white paper, and things are surely better now.
... However, nuclear weapons increase the destructiveness of large-scale war...
You may very well be correct. However. the only experimental data to date, shows the opposite. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less lethal than the fire bombings of other Japanese cities. Furthermore, the fire bombings did not get the Japanese to give up. The nukes did. Total destruction was far less with nukes than the part of the war without them.
I would argue that each of those are more timeless and universal than the Enterprise would have been.
All of them except for the Pisa tower are far larger than the Enterprise would have been.
You know that the Enterprise would not have been built nearly as well as any of those things.
...
You really think the builders would have done a worse job than the guys who built the tower of Pisa? That's a joke, right?
BSA is why my company and family dropped Microsoft Office and went to Openoffice.
http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/technology/hyperion.html
The significant quote is "Twin Creeks has lifted 14 laminae from a single donor wafer in its labs with Hyperion and produced solar cells on ten laminae lifted from a single donor wafer."
So, they've only been able to lift 14 wafers from a donor and made all of ten cells? Really? Either their web page is way out of date, or Twin Creeks is so early in the process that they are years and years away from being ready to ship.
Man how many times have we seen these stories already - "cheap solar power discovery, will make solar pv affordable" but then years later nothing has changed.
It would be great if some of these things actually got productizd, I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...
Nothing changes???? In 1980, solar PV cost about $22 a watt. If you order a large system today, you can do that for about $3 a watt. If you take inflation into account, that 1980 number is closer to $50 a watt in today's dollars. Yes, a reduction in price of 94% is peanuts compared to what has happened with computers, but that still beats the heck out of all of all the other energy sources. For example, oil costs more today than in 1980. Coal costs more than in 1980. And so it goes.
Solar is already cheaper than grid power in some areas. If prices keep dropping at the same rate they have been dropping (about 8% a year), within a decade, solar PV will be cheaper than the retail electricity rate for pretty much everyone in the US.
I once had a "reputable" company doing that to me (unsubscribe did not work, phone calls, etc.). So, I found e-mail address for about fifteen higher ups in the company, and set up a filter that would auto-forward anything I got from their domain them to all fifteen of them (with "Please unsubscribe me" added). Their e-mail was then automatically deleted. It must have worked, because a couple of years later I changed e-mail systems, and I've never had to recreate that filter.
You wrote "That means when you carry it around every day, it won't fall apart as fast. It WILL fall apart eventually - that's always been my experience with laptops in general"
Yeah, mine too, until my family started buying Macbooks. Maybe we are just lucky, but the only one we had flake out was one my wife spilled a glass of hot tea on the keyboard (and it even worked well for 18 months after that!).
Yeah, a buddy of mine used to always buy the Best Buy extended warranty. The one time he actually needed to use it, he had to bring the laptop in five times to have the same issue fixed (three is supposed to trigger the lemon policy and get you a new unit). Best Buy argued that, since Best Buy was too stupid to actually fix the issue, none of the attempts to fix the laptop actually counted. My friend spent at least ten hours at Best Buy arguing, and at least 20 hours on the phone with me complaining about them. After six months without his laptop, Best Buy finally honored their lemon policy and gave him a new laptop.
JFC! I will happily avoid all of this insanity by not buying the extended warranty.
You wrote "I have always believed that tablets were a very small niche application. "
OK. The last serious estimate I read said that there are already 30 million tablets out there and within 36 months there will most likely be around 300 million.
That's one heck of a niche.
You wrote "Do Ceglia's lawyers not know that you can mark stuff as confidential so that only the lawyers, judge, and jury can see it? How can it be more confidential than that?"
Easy, don't let anyone see it! Can't get more confidential than that! Take our word for it, the contract says you owe us lots of money. And also take our word for it that the contract says you can't see what the contract says.
You wrote ""The amended agreement is identical to the previous one in every way, except the following:" which could be covered in a couple of paragraphs, rather than reading tens of pages of legalese to find what has changed."
I forget what on-line EULA I once printed (maybe Itunes?). It was ___90___ freaking pages long. And _something_ had changed. Good God.
I propose a new law. Any EULA more than four pages long is null and void....
You wrote "it is the rare building that can collect enough power for its own climate control, to say nothing of the entire energy needs."
I didn't say cover all buildings, I said cover all man made structures. That would include parking lots, roads, etc.
You wrote "making photovoltaic solar panels is a very nasty industrial process that consumes almost as much energy in producing a panel as it produces"
Energy payback time of First Solar's panels is less than a year. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDUQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.firstsolar.com%2FDownloads%2Fpdf%2FSummaryReport_French_EHS_Aspects_CdTe_PV_NA.pdf&rct=j&q=first%20solar%20energy%20payback%20time&ei=dpIxTpudIoWDtgfT2PCUDQ&usg=AFQjCNHEb0gxRv6ts6DlJrNGfme8gLeHnw&sig2=94JzaGT_GJ7NjZqYJ5fxzQ&cad=rja
You also wrote "that large scale solar farms destroy the fragile desert ecology, etc."
If you covered all man made structures with solar PV, you would have more than enough power to run our society. There is also lots of land that is already pretty wasted. For example, you could put solar farms on old mountain top removal mines.
Same amount of power, but not the same amount of energy. The capacity factor of this monster should be much higher than almost any wind turbine. The result should be much more energy. And of great benefit to grid operators, the output should be dramatically more stable than the output of wind turbines (which can fall to zero in seconds). I just did some googling and they are estimating a capacity factor of .6 for this tower. That's somewhere between double and triple of what most wind turbines deliver.