>>>>What role does linguistic fluency and creativity play into the assessment? >>Should be 'zero' otherwise it's not an IQ test.
Why? It's an intelligence test, not a knowledge test. A lot of people think that verbal innovativeness and creativity are an indication of general intelligence.
I think one example used in a book I read was a test that asked kids to develop captions for cartoons. The sample cartoon was a guy hanging off the edge of a building, and he had an empty speech bubble. Traditional "geniuses" tended to come up with captions like "Help, I'm going to fall!" or worse, "I am hanging on the side of a building." But one kid with linguistic genius, for example, said, "Give my regards to Hollywood!"
Certainly when we talk about people being "smart" this includes a broad range of categories for being "quick witted" (think Kvothe), which aren't assessed by those IQ tests that just ask you vocab questions and to do some math problems.
That's what I was saying - there's a lot of categories of intelligence, and while I think there is something to the notion of general intelligence, by and large IQ tests focus on a very narrow range of how people can be smart.
This is a subject I've studied before. IQ means different things to different people. Looking over some major tests, I found several schools of thought: 1) Mental quickness and flexibility 2) Factual knowledge 3) Ability to do problem solving 4) Spatial recognition.
IQ is *supposed* to be a general measure of how "smart" someone is (general intelligence), but while it does seem true that general intelligence does exist (doctors can pick up new knowledge in unrelated fields faster than people in some low-level fields), generally the tests just measure specific intelligence.
For example, when trying to test for mental quickness, they might give a kid a jigsaw puzzle to solve (this is what they did on my test in 2nd grade, actually - I spent half my time trying to put it together in unusual ways). But a kid can be "smart" and still be bad at jigsaw puzzles. Since its a timed event, there's also a certain amount of luck involved in how well a kid scores. The difference between "gifted" and "normal" might just be the time span it takes an unlucky kid to try the wrong pieces before he randomly pulls the right piece.
Factual knowledge is also a very difficult to assess subject. I looked over the Titan test (http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/), which is supposed to identify the top 0.0000....01% most intelligent people on the planet. Ok, cool. But one of the answers was an analogy involving Kuru, the prion brain disease contracted by cannibals in Papua New Guinea. I think the test only allowed you to miss a few questions (out of 45) before it ruled you out of the cool kids club. But my objection is, how does knowing what Kuru is make you a smart person? You might just be a trivia buff. And how can you rule someone out for not knowing it? The potential knowledge space for humanity is so impossibly large, that the probability of knowing individual random tidbits of knowledge like that is correspondingly low. How do you differentiate between smart, super-smart, and super-duper-smart? I don't think that any IQ test can provide that level of resolution, really.
More unanswered questions: Another problem is, of the four categories above, and others people have thought of, which do you assess on an IQ test, and how do you average them together? Why do we assume that IQ follows a Gaussian distribution? What role does linguistic fluency and creativity play into the assessment?
I'm not saying that IQ tests are bullshit, but I think people assign them too much value. When you can have the same person take five different IQ tests and get scored between 150 and 230 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score), I think we could agree the person is "smart", but beyond that, I don't think tests really mean that much.
>>Now ISPs and core networks have another excuse not to transition to IPv6. It will destroy this "market". 2^32 addresses is now a feature, not a bug.
I bet MIT is kicking itself for turning over its class A back in the day. That'd be worth approximately eleventy jillion dollars these days, at current market value.
>>If you're complaining that meters are 1/299,792,458 of a light-second, or that temperatures are stated in offsets from 273.15 K, consider this: Why are kelvins 25/6829 of the triple point of water and not some other fraction? Why are seconds 9,192,631,770 cycles of cesium-133 radiation and not some other number? Why pi instead of tau?
With Kelvin, 0 (absolute zero) is a scientific fixed point, but the units themselves are arbitrary. In this sense, it's superior to Celsius, which is entirely arbitrary. If we ever figure out what absolute hot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot) is, then that would make for a reasonable endpoint for the other side of the scale. But the units would likely be so large as to be unpractical, so we'd probably still use the arbitrary Celsius and Fahrenheit scales anyway.
Seconds could easily be more scientific, that's kind of my point. The SI system isn't nearly as scientific as people like to pretend it is.
They don't flicker like a CRT does (which is very noticeable for me at lower refresh rates, i.e. ~60Hz). Instead it's more of a marching ants effect I see when my eyes get close to the monitor. I've solved it by sitting further away with a larger, higher res, monitor.
LED tail lights absolutely flicker. It drives me insane. They constantly draw my attention away from other cars on the road.
>>Are you actually paying $0.24 per kwH? Here in Texas it runs about $0.10.
Yeah. California sucks. 24c/kWh is actually the levelized cost of solar power. Since I pay more than that (over twice that amount for peak Tier 5 power in the summer), solar was a good investment.
There are some guys who make plug-in kits for the Prius. Slightly bigger battery and some other doodads, and your first 60 (?) miles is purely off the battery, after which the standard operations kicks in. Charge overnight when electricity is cheap, potentially never tank up on your commute. Ain't too bad.
Looking at the numbers on a Prius (http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-ii-prius-technical-discussion/42156-energy-capacity-hybrid-battery.html) it doesn't seem worth it unless you upgrade the battery pack also. Priuses don't have a very large battery capacity.
At California electric rates, even at night electric cars are pretty expensive. Especially since it will easily push you out of your baseline allowance and into the bend-over category. In places where electricity is cheaper (i.e. everywhere else) electric and plug-ins make more sense.
>>Of course I'm making stuff up here, but do you really think it's nonsensical to make vehicles more efficient?
No, not at all. I drive a hybrid! When the IRS gives me 50 cents a mile wherever I drive, I am incentivized to make my miles as cheap as possible.
I simply think that relying on hybrids as a policy preference is a mistake, when it appears (both from studies and in talking with my hybrid-driving friends) that net fuel consumption stays the same.
>>What if instead of increasing MPG by a factor of two, MPG was instead increased by something astronomical--say 100x?
Or the other way, if fuel went up by 100x in price.
Yeah, people's driving habits would change. But that's kind of my point. When gas becomes cheaper, people drive more. When it becomes more inexpensive, they drive less. Hybrids have the effect of making gas cheaper, so it results in more miles driven.
>>Please tell me you don't really buy into that.
I think organic food is kind of a silly concept, but otherwise I don't see anything wrong with people gardening. It has a history, after all.
I thought about going off-grid, but it's not really worth it unless there's a zombie apocalypse or something.
Buying battery backups are very expensive, and there's times when your system isn't generating enough power to run your house at night. Being grid-tied is the way to go, IMO.
I agree that the incentive is only there because California's power situation is fucked up. But to look at it realistically, one has to ask: is there a reasonable chance it'll become un-fucked in the near future?
I tend to get annoyed at LCD lights on Christmas trees, LCD lights inside of cars and brake lights, monitors, movies, CRT monitor refresh at low rates, and so forth.
Perhaps it is my super power.
My wife used to think I was making it up, but now she's started noticing it, too. I'll growl, and she'll say, "Oh, that car three up and two over?"
>>In places where it costs a fortune to run air conditioning on electricity
If you install a solar system, what happens is you get energy credits for each kWh you generate, applied against your peak usage first. Since it's nice right now in April, I'm not running the AC at all, and building up a 10kWh credit per day I run the system (a bit less if it's cloudy).
So when summer runs around, I get to cool my house like a polar bear exhibit, and the energy either comes from my panels, or draws excess from the grid, which gets applied against my energy credits I've banked up. When all is said and done, it doesn't cost a fortune to run AC any more.
All PG&E customers in California. (http://www.pge.com/tariffs/electric.shtml#RESELEC)
If you have Time of Use billing, it can be pretty extreme. Lets run the math for your 2000 kWh usage in a month.
Summer Baseline allocation is 600kWh. This means PG&E expects that you should be able to stay within this limit during summer months. Go over, and you're penalized. Peak Rates: Tier 1 (up to 100% of baseline): 31c/kWh Tier 2 (100%-130%): 32.7c/kWh Tier 3 (130%-200%): 48.2c/kWh Tier 4 and 5 (200%+): 59.2c/kWh
Yep, that's top tier rates at 59.2c/kWh - they've gone up since the last time I looked at them. Part-peak and off-peak are significantly lower. So run your AC at night, I guess.
Assuming all peak usage, you've got a bill of 600kwh x 31c + 180kwh x 32.7c + 420kwh x 48.2c + 800 x 59.2c = 186+58.86+202.44+473.6 = $920 for a month's worth of power. (This would be $160 in your state.)
Driving hybrids is impractical or nonsensical? Because making IC engines extract power from petrofuel at their maximum efficiency by buffering with a battery, while gas gallons finally start to stay above $4, I suppose. Huh?
When that's your attitude, I'm neither surprised by nor interested in your interest in nukes and coal. Nor your hatred for "dirty hippies", who can never be as filthy as the nukes and coal you embrace.
Oh, I drive a hybrid. There's a very good reason for it - paying less for gas is a good thing. When the IRS gives you a flat mileage writeoff, and you drive 25,000 miles a year for work, it makes absolute sense to drive a car with high fuel efficiency.
I'm saying it's nonsensical as a *policy* standpoint. When people have hybrids, they tend to drive more. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss) Some people estimate [who?] that hybrids actually increase total gasoline consumption (and hence CO2 emissions) since it becomes much cheaper to drive.
I don't embrace coal for electricity. And the environmental impact of nukes is generally overstated. Did you not read the Shaka Plan for Energy? I want to use coal for gasoline.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process) You can convert coal to gas at about $1.80/gallon, and with no CO2 emissions at around $2.80/gallon.
>>Out of curiosity, why do you consider driving a hybrid to be nonsensical?
It's called the rebound effect. When you pay half as much for gas, people just end up driving more. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss)
Studies have found that there's a fair amount of homeostasis around the amount people want to budget for gas each year.
I don't buy bargain basement CFLs, but then again, I'm very sensitive to flicker as well. If you waggle a pencil in front of one, you should see it split into distinct lines. I've never seen a CFL that doesn't do this.
Cutting America's CO2 levels by 50% would merely put you in the middle of the current European pack, it's not nearly enough... We in Europe need to seriously curtail our CO2 emissions, and you guys need to double your efforts to get down to the same levels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Or we could always have twice as many babies. That'd reduce per capita emissions significantly.
>>we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by simply not using as much energy in the first place
If all of our power generation comes from CO2-free sources, cutting energy consumption won't do very much. =)
While CFLs are (much) more efficient than incandescent bulbs, CFLs produce a terrible quality of light, flicker noticeably (wave your hand in front of one), and release mercury gas at about twice the occupational hazard limit set by the EPA if you, you know, happen to drop one.
>>We don't need to cut them in half; we need to reduce them by 80% or more. That's why Obama set a goal of 80% of our energy from non-emitting sources by 2035.
Those two statements don't go together. Half our CO2 production is from energy, so 80% non-emitting energy sources will be only a.4 *.8 = 32% reduction in total CO2 emissions.
Of course I have bias. Did my post appear too objective with terms like "dirty hippie"?
>>To top it off your Shaka Energy Plan is all about having zero individual, personal, responsibility (let the energy companies figure it out) or burden (won't raise energy rates). In your own words, why shouldn't you support such a plan ( having slapped your name on it aside;) ).
Hey, you got it in one.
I'm firmly opposed to the environmentalist ideas that "being painful" and "good for the environment" go hand in hand. It's just Catholic self-flagellation under a different name.
It's closer to $6k per kW in my next of the woods (that's why I paid), but I'm sure you can find a company to do it for $5k. I went with a company that had done some installations in my neighborhood, though, and had a pretty good reputation.
If you don't want to pay the money up front, you take out a loan, and use the monthly savings on your power bill to pay off the loan. As long as you're paying more than 24c/kWh you'll run a net positive balance, and end up with a solar system of your own after 10 years.
There's companies that will actually do this for you - they'll install the system on your house for free, and then just sell you the power out of it. Here in California, if you're running in the high tier power rates, it's a good investment. They also lock in your power rate at a fixed price, whereas PG&E tends to raise rates one or twice a year. There's really no downside to doing this, unless you're planning on reducing your power consumption and/or expect PG&E to lower their rates in the future.
Time after time, conservationists say "we think you should X because it will save the world". Opponents say "You gaia-worshipping econutters can't tell us what to do, we're going to burn a tire just for you". Companies turn off their lights at night and discover that they are saving 25% on their electric bill. Or they recycle and discover they're saving on their raw material costs. The list goes on and on. Sure, there are some crazy suggestions out there, and sadly some of them have gotten backed by the government (like the incandescent bulb ban), when they haven't gotten completely redirected for the profit of some small group (corn-and-corn-only ethanol springs to mind, though I wouldn't be surprised to find out that GE sponsored a number of the anti-incandescent bulb legislators).
There's three main schools of thought for enviromentalism - the nutty Gaia-worshiping dirty hippies (who believe many crazy things against science), the Greenwashing Corporation Movement (pretending to be environmental to save money on dyes, water, etc., while diverting attention from the crazy Gaia-worshipers), and the enlightened self-interest people.
I fall into the latter camp. I think global warming is a real problem. I also won't give up driving a car, and biking to work (which is a 5.5 hour drive in my car, twice a month), or taking public transportation, or any of the other nonsensical things that hippies suggest we should do for Earth day. (Dirty hippies start with the indoctrination of the young: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfYawbcBGQ&feature=player_embedded) But I don't, you know, hate the environment. I go backpacking a lot, never litter, and so forth. But I put solar on my home solely for economic reasons (the CO2 reduction is just gravy) - if I can generate power myself at half the rate PG&E charges me, why shouldn't I do it?
The right wing rejects the science behind global warming because they don't want to give up their cars. The left wing thinks that global warming means we have to give up our cars, or suggest other similarly impractical or nonsensical things (like driving hybrids). Both sides are wrong.
The Shaka Energy Plan: It is possible to reduce America's CO2 levels by 50%, which would meet every CO2 target imaginable (and do much better than just stabilization, which a lot of accords shoot for), simply by targeting our power generation. Replace coal and gas with nuclear (and wind and solar when economical), which won't raise energy rates. Use our gas to power public transportation, and coal to power our cars. No more foreign energy imports, and we can even pat ourselves on the heads for being good little dirty hippies for our massive CO2 reduction.
>>Members of home associations that ban solar panels aren't really arguing that panels lower property prices, they're arguing "I don't want to see it"
Fortunately, here in California, it's explicitly illegal for HOAs to ban solar panel installations. They can hem and haw all they want (my HOA demanded to see the plans before "approving" installation), but they cannot stop you from putting it in, no matter what the CCNRs actually say.
To be fair, there's issues with some solar panels (highly reflective chrome surfaces can shine brilliant light into other people's houses, creating a nuisance), but most installations these days are a nice black matte,
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>>>>What role does linguistic fluency and creativity play into the assessment?
>>Should be 'zero' otherwise it's not an IQ test.
Why? It's an intelligence test, not a knowledge test. A lot of people think that verbal innovativeness and creativity are an indication of general intelligence.
I think one example used in a book I read was a test that asked kids to develop captions for cartoons. The sample cartoon was a guy hanging off the edge of a building, and he had an empty speech bubble. Traditional "geniuses" tended to come up with captions like "Help, I'm going to fall!" or worse, "I am hanging on the side of a building." But one kid with linguistic genius, for example, said, "Give my regards to Hollywood!"
Certainly when we talk about people being "smart" this includes a broad range of categories for being "quick witted" (think Kvothe), which aren't assessed by those IQ tests that just ask you vocab questions and to do some math problems.
That's what I was saying - there's a lot of categories of intelligence, and while I think there is something to the notion of general intelligence, by and large IQ tests focus on a very narrow range of how people can be smart.
This is a subject I've studied before. IQ means different things to different people. Looking over some major tests, I found several schools of thought:
1) Mental quickness and flexibility
2) Factual knowledge
3) Ability to do problem solving
4) Spatial recognition.
IQ is *supposed* to be a general measure of how "smart" someone is (general intelligence), but while it does seem true that general intelligence does exist (doctors can pick up new knowledge in unrelated fields faster than people in some low-level fields), generally the tests just measure specific intelligence.
For example, when trying to test for mental quickness, they might give a kid a jigsaw puzzle to solve (this is what they did on my test in 2nd grade, actually - I spent half my time trying to put it together in unusual ways). But a kid can be "smart" and still be bad at jigsaw puzzles. Since its a timed event, there's also a certain amount of luck involved in how well a kid scores. The difference between "gifted" and "normal" might just be the time span it takes an unlucky kid to try the wrong pieces before he randomly pulls the right piece.
Factual knowledge is also a very difficult to assess subject. I looked over the Titan test (http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/), which is supposed to identify the top 0.0000....01% most intelligent people on the planet. Ok, cool. But one of the answers was an analogy involving Kuru, the prion brain disease contracted by cannibals in Papua New Guinea. I think the test only allowed you to miss a few questions (out of 45) before it ruled you out of the cool kids club. But my objection is, how does knowing what Kuru is make you a smart person? You might just be a trivia buff. And how can you rule someone out for not knowing it? The potential knowledge space for humanity is so impossibly large, that the probability of knowing individual random tidbits of knowledge like that is correspondingly low. How do you differentiate between smart, super-smart, and super-duper-smart? I don't think that any IQ test can provide that level of resolution, really.
More unanswered questions:
Another problem is, of the four categories above, and others people have thought of, which do you assess on an IQ test, and how do you average them together?
Why do we assume that IQ follows a Gaussian distribution?
What role does linguistic fluency and creativity play into the assessment?
I'm not saying that IQ tests are bullshit, but I think people assign them too much value. When you can have the same person take five different IQ tests and get scored between 150 and 230 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score), I think we could agree the person is "smart", but beyond that, I don't think tests really mean that much.
>>Now ISPs and core networks have another excuse not to transition to IPv6. It will destroy this "market". 2^32 addresses is now a feature, not a bug.
I bet MIT is kicking itself for turning over its class A back in the day. That'd be worth approximately eleventy jillion dollars these days, at current market value.
>>It's mostly Cadillacs with their terrible LED tail lights. The effect is most noticeable (and distracting) when it's in your peripheral vision.
Yep. And it gets worse when you're tired, for some reason.
>>If you're complaining that meters are 1/299,792,458 of a light-second, or that temperatures are stated in offsets from 273.15 K, consider this: Why are kelvins 25/6829 of the triple point of water and not some other fraction? Why are seconds 9,192,631,770 cycles of cesium-133 radiation and not some other number? Why pi instead of tau?
With Kelvin, 0 (absolute zero) is a scientific fixed point, but the units themselves are arbitrary. In this sense, it's superior to Celsius, which is entirely arbitrary. If we ever figure out what absolute hot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot) is, then that would make for a reasonable endpoint for the other side of the scale. But the units would likely be so large as to be unpractical, so we'd probably still use the arbitrary Celsius and Fahrenheit scales anyway.
Seconds could easily be more scientific, that's kind of my point. The SI system isn't nearly as scientific as people like to pretend it is.
They don't flicker like a CRT does (which is very noticeable for me at lower refresh rates, i.e. ~60Hz). Instead it's more of a marching ants effect I see when my eyes get close to the monitor. I've solved it by sitting further away with a larger, higher res, monitor.
LED tail lights absolutely flicker. It drives me insane. They constantly draw my attention away from other cars on the road.
>>Are you actually paying $0.24 per kwH? Here in Texas it runs about $0.10.
Yeah. California sucks. 24c/kWh is actually the levelized cost of solar power. Since I pay more than that (over twice that amount for peak Tier 5 power in the summer), solar was a good investment.
Looking at the numbers on a Prius (http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-ii-prius-technical-discussion/42156-energy-capacity-hybrid-battery.html) it doesn't seem worth it unless you upgrade the battery pack also. Priuses don't have a very large battery capacity.
At California electric rates, even at night electric cars are pretty expensive. Especially since it will easily push you out of your baseline allowance and into the bend-over category. In places where electricity is cheaper (i.e. everywhere else) electric and plug-ins make more sense.
>>I get annoyed about talk about LCD lights. That's not how liquid crystal displays work!
LED lights, LCD displays. Typing too fast when tired will do that to me.
>>Yes, DDT was 40 years ago, but Seldane was 15 years ago
To be fair, you can eat pounds of DDT and not get sick. It's not toxic to humans. Bird eggs or whatever, but not humans.
Yeah, LED lights. And LCD screens. That's what I get for typing when I'm tired.
LED brake lights on some cars (Cadillacs are the worst) flicker very noticeably.
>>Of course I'm making stuff up here, but do you really think it's nonsensical to make vehicles more efficient?
No, not at all. I drive a hybrid! When the IRS gives me 50 cents a mile wherever I drive, I am incentivized to make my miles as cheap as possible.
I simply think that relying on hybrids as a policy preference is a mistake, when it appears (both from studies and in talking with my hybrid-driving friends) that net fuel consumption stays the same.
>>What if instead of increasing MPG by a factor of two, MPG was instead increased by something astronomical--say 100x?
Or the other way, if fuel went up by 100x in price.
Yeah, people's driving habits would change. But that's kind of my point. When gas becomes cheaper, people drive more. When it becomes more inexpensive, they drive less. Hybrids have the effect of making gas cheaper, so it results in more miles driven.
>>Please tell me you don't really buy into that.
I think organic food is kind of a silly concept, but otherwise I don't see anything wrong with people gardening. It has a history, after all.
I thought about going off-grid, but it's not really worth it unless there's a zombie apocalypse or something.
Buying battery backups are very expensive, and there's times when your system isn't generating enough power to run your house at night. Being grid-tied is the way to go, IMO.
I agree that the incentive is only there because California's power situation is fucked up. But to look at it realistically, one has to ask: is there a reasonable chance it'll become un-fucked in the near future?
I don't see it.
I tend to get annoyed at LCD lights on Christmas trees, LCD lights inside of cars and brake lights, monitors, movies, CRT monitor refresh at low rates, and so forth.
Perhaps it is my super power.
My wife used to think I was making it up, but now she's started noticing it, too. I'll growl, and she'll say, "Oh, that car three up and two over?"
CFLs are all pretty bad.
>>In places where it costs a fortune to run air conditioning on electricity
If you install a solar system, what happens is you get energy credits for each kWh you generate, applied against your peak usage first. Since it's nice right now in April, I'm not running the AC at all, and building up a 10kWh credit per day I run the system (a bit less if it's cloudy).
So when summer runs around, I get to cool my house like a polar bear exhibit, and the energy either comes from my panels, or draws excess from the grid, which gets applied against my energy credits I've banked up. When all is said and done, it doesn't cost a fortune to run AC any more.
>>Holy crap! Who pays that much for electricity?
All PG&E customers in California. (http://www.pge.com/tariffs/electric.shtml#RESELEC)
If you have Time of Use billing, it can be pretty extreme. Lets run the math for your 2000 kWh usage in a month.
Summer Baseline allocation is 600kWh. This means PG&E expects that you should be able to stay within this limit during summer months. Go over, and you're penalized.
Peak Rates:
Tier 1 (up to 100% of baseline): 31c/kWh
Tier 2 (100%-130%): 32.7c/kWh
Tier 3 (130%-200%): 48.2c/kWh
Tier 4 and 5 (200%+): 59.2c/kWh
Yep, that's top tier rates at 59.2c/kWh - they've gone up since the last time I looked at them. Part-peak and off-peak are significantly lower. So run your AC at night, I guess.
Assuming all peak usage, you've got a bill of 600kwh x 31c + 180kwh x 32.7c + 420kwh x 48.2c + 800 x 59.2c = 186+58.86+202.44+473.6 = $920 for a month's worth of power. (This would be $160 in your state.)
You see why I installed solar? =)
Oh, I drive a hybrid. There's a very good reason for it - paying less for gas is a good thing. When the IRS gives you a flat mileage writeoff, and you drive 25,000 miles a year for work, it makes absolute sense to drive a car with high fuel efficiency.
I'm saying it's nonsensical as a *policy* standpoint. When people have hybrids, they tend to drive more. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss) Some people estimate [who?] that hybrids actually increase total gasoline consumption (and hence CO2 emissions) since it becomes much cheaper to drive.
I don't embrace coal for electricity. And the environmental impact of nukes is generally overstated. Did you not read the Shaka Plan for Energy? I want to use coal for gasoline.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process) You can convert coal to gas at about $1.80/gallon, and with no CO2 emissions at around $2.80/gallon.
>>Out of curiosity, why do you consider driving a hybrid to be nonsensical?
It's called the rebound effect. When you pay half as much for gas, people just end up driving more. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss)
Studies have found that there's a fair amount of homeostasis around the amount people want to budget for gas each year.
I don't buy bargain basement CFLs, but then again, I'm very sensitive to flicker as well. If you waggle a pencil in front of one, you should see it split into distinct lines. I've never seen a CFL that doesn't do this.
Or we could always have twice as many babies. That'd reduce per capita emissions significantly.
(Per capita restrictions are very silly.)
>>we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by simply not using as much energy in the first place
If all of our power generation comes from CO2-free sources, cutting energy consumption won't do very much. =)
While CFLs are (much) more efficient than incandescent bulbs, CFLs produce a terrible quality of light, flicker noticeably (wave your hand in front of one), and release mercury gas at about twice the occupational hazard limit set by the EPA if you, you know, happen to drop one.
>>We don't need to cut them in half; we need to reduce them by 80% or more. That's why Obama set a goal of 80% of our energy from non-emitting sources by 2035.
Those two statements don't go together. Half our CO2 production is from energy, so 80% non-emitting energy sources will be only a .4 * .8 = 32% reduction in total CO2 emissions.
>>bias? what bias?
Of course I have bias. Did my post appear too objective with terms like "dirty hippie"?
>>To top it off your Shaka Energy Plan is all about having zero individual, personal, responsibility (let the energy companies figure it out) or burden (won't raise energy rates). In your own words, why shouldn't you support such a plan ( having slapped your name on it aside ;) ).
Hey, you got it in one.
I'm firmly opposed to the environmentalist ideas that "being painful" and "good for the environment" go hand in hand. It's just Catholic self-flagellation under a different name.
It's closer to $6k per kW in my next of the woods (that's why I paid), but I'm sure you can find a company to do it for $5k. I went with a company that had done some installations in my neighborhood, though, and had a pretty good reputation.
If you don't want to pay the money up front, you take out a loan, and use the monthly savings on your power bill to pay off the loan. As long as you're paying more than 24c/kWh you'll run a net positive balance, and end up with a solar system of your own after 10 years.
There's companies that will actually do this for you - they'll install the system on your house for free, and then just sell you the power out of it. Here in California, if you're running in the high tier power rates, it's a good investment. They also lock in your power rate at a fixed price, whereas PG&E tends to raise rates one or twice a year. There's really no downside to doing this, unless you're planning on reducing your power consumption and/or expect PG&E to lower their rates in the future.
There's three main schools of thought for enviromentalism - the nutty Gaia-worshiping dirty hippies (who believe many crazy things against science), the Greenwashing Corporation Movement (pretending to be environmental to save money on dyes, water, etc., while diverting attention from the crazy Gaia-worshipers), and the enlightened self-interest people.
I fall into the latter camp. I think global warming is a real problem. I also won't give up driving a car, and biking to work (which is a 5.5 hour drive in my car, twice a month), or taking public transportation, or any of the other nonsensical things that hippies suggest we should do for Earth day. (Dirty hippies start with the indoctrination of the young: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfYawbcBGQ&feature=player_embedded) But I don't, you know, hate the environment. I go backpacking a lot, never litter, and so forth. But I put solar on my home solely for economic reasons (the CO2 reduction is just gravy) - if I can generate power myself at half the rate PG&E charges me, why shouldn't I do it?
The right wing rejects the science behind global warming because they don't want to give up their cars.
The left wing thinks that global warming means we have to give up our cars, or suggest other similarly impractical or nonsensical things (like driving hybrids).
Both sides are wrong.
The Shaka Energy Plan: It is possible to reduce America's CO2 levels by 50%, which would meet every CO2 target imaginable (and do much better than just stabilization, which a lot of accords shoot for), simply by targeting our power generation. Replace coal and gas with nuclear (and wind and solar when economical), which won't raise energy rates. Use our gas to power public transportation, and coal to power our cars. No more foreign energy imports, and we can even pat ourselves on the heads for being good little dirty hippies for our massive CO2 reduction.
>>Members of home associations that ban solar panels aren't really arguing that panels lower property prices, they're arguing "I don't want to see it"
Fortunately, here in California, it's explicitly illegal for HOAs to ban solar panel installations. They can hem and haw all they want (my HOA demanded to see the plans before "approving" installation), but they cannot stop you from putting it in, no matter what the CCNRs actually say.
To be fair, there's issues with some solar panels (highly reflective chrome surfaces can shine brilliant light into other people's houses, creating a nuisance), but most installations these days are a nice black matte,