No, if there was a one in a 110,000 chance of dying from a particular type of yoghurt, how long do you think it would remain on the market???
The usual cut-off is generally around one in a million for things you voluntarily do; but for things that get inflicted on you, 1 in 110,000 is pretty high. You may have a 1 in 113 chance of dying in a car crash, but at least YOU get the advantage of traveling around until YOUR untimely demise.
In this case, some git just blows your bloody brains out, and he gets to do this, and you get no advantage at all; it is inflicted on YOU by others.
I find that the question isn't "can these things be completely prevented", the question is: "how can we greatly reduce the incidence of mass shootings"? Countries like the UK and New Zealand have low incidences of these kinds of events, whereas America's incidence is very high. Having sensible laws that make it difficult for lone nuts getting hold of large magazine weapons is pretty effective.
You're defining it wrongly, baseload is the minimum demand in any given period, it's not half the peak. But it can be met with any combination of power supply at all.
All the deaths except coal are pretty low. What's not low are the costs of nuclear power; and the empirical costs show that it has a learning curve coefficient above one; it gets relatively more expensive the more plants you build, and you find out what not to do.
Netflix actually do something with their money; they fund original content and pay other producers for access to theirs and collaborate with them.
Scientific publishers don't do any of those things; they work entirely by creating artificial scarcity of a product paid for by others that they don't contribute to; at most they rate it.
I just looked up the formaldehyde thing. Apparently a non dry puff of an e-cigarette contains about a microgram of formaldehyde. But I knew that natural foods also metabolise to formaldehyde, I managed to find a table:
So 100g of apple, i.e. roughly an average apple contains ~1mg of formaldehyde; i.e. a thousand times more. Of course you don't inhale apples, but still, so it could be bad for your lungs nevertheless.
This link suggests that the amount of formaldehyde emitted is probably within established industrial limits over the course of a day, even for the users:
That's not really true, solar panel and wind power are both seeing annual double digit growth, and around 10% of the power generated in Europe now comes from wind. Indeed, already worldwide more than 50% of all new electricity installations, both capacity and delivered energy are now renewable. That means as the existing equipment wears out it's being replaced with much 'greener' equipment. And that can only accelerate. That's not 'token' gestures it's because wind in particular is actually competitive and solar is becoming ever more so. Even in America, which is moving slowly, the same economic forces are playing out and coal mines are closing.
The cost of electric car batteries are dropping at a similar rate.
A lot of people think that there's a difference between primary energy and electricity, but actually electricity has low entropy; watt for watt electricity is much more valuable than primary energy. So even though electricity is greening up, it's tending to replace primary energy; you need a lot less energy to drive an electric car than a fossil car, and electric cars are almost completely nicer to drive.
Sure, but it still chews up range pretty badly. Don't forget that the energy storage capacity of the battery is so very much less than that of a fuel tank. Also things like air conditioning/heating use a lot of range at slow speeds/stop-start; they're a bigger fraction of the energy and there's almost no waste heat from the engine available. The bottom line is that stop/start really seriously affects range.
Well, the real problem is too much fossil baseload, not too much solar. That baseload is polluting California and the planet. California's current grid generation mix is no longer what its grid needs; it needs more flexible fossil power and less baseload generation. There's no technical requirement at all that baseload be provided by baseload power plant.
That's the real story here; the solar is not generating anything like as much as California's demand even when it's running at peak output.
Actually, some of the silly money, top end cars can now accelerate as fast as they brake to within a fraction of a second. They're either hybrids or full electric. They're so powerful, and single gear, so they're mostly limited only by the rubber.
It mitigates it, but it doesn't cancel it. The regenerative braking only recovers at most around 80%, usually a lot less. If you repeatedly have to accelerate to speed, and then stop, over and over, you lose loads of energy.
I think you're making an extremely common mistake here.
The real world costs of electricity supplied by the power companies are likely to go down with more renewables. If you can generate cheap electricity with solar panels, so can the power company, in fact they can do it cheaper still. And they have access to wind power that works at night as well as back up generators; and they can have their own storage; and their storage will be cheaper than yours as well, for several reasons:
1) economies of scale 2) they can have multiple sources of electricity, hence they statistically average out to a reasonable degree, much better than solar panels alone ever can. 3) their storage can (terrain permitting) include pumped storage which is far cheaper than batteries.
So I don't think grids are going away any time soon. What are going away are fossil fuel plants particularly coal ones, and they're mostly being replaced with cheaper renewables as they wear out. More than 50% of all new energy supplies are already renewable, worldwide.
So you're saying that the coal gas plants deliberately dropped the ball and failed to deliver electricity? And that this was the fault of the wind power suppliers? Yeah, no. And don't forget they would get paid more for supplying electricity when it's in high demand.
I'm sorry, but I'm in the UK, we have lots of wind power here and nothing remotely like that has ever happened. It's never happened in Texas, and it's never happened in Denmark.
It's the job of the GRID operators to model things, and set equipment up, pay incentives etc. so that this doesn't EVER happen. I mean, you're talking about a grid with enough generating capacity connected, and those people aren't starting it up in time?
Uh, no, they just change the pitch of the blades. They can shut them down completely that way which they do when the wind is too high. They only run away if the control system fails; which has happened, but it's pretty rare. Spectacular when it happens though, one or more of the blades fall off and then the lack of balance snaps the tower!
> Encouraging people to shift demand from the peaks to the valleys, and enticing them with pricing discounts, will result in a slight flattening of the demand curve because only certain demands can actually be shifted.
Yes, that's the point of it; under ideal conditions the curve would become completely flat.
>The flattened curve will then cause the variable pricing to adjust, resulting in less incentive to shift demand.
Yes, less flattening, but not no flattening. And if the producers cancel out the pricing too much then the flattening goes away. The producers want a flatter demand curve because it means they need less expensive peaking generation, which helps them stay competitive.
So 1300 miles range? But do they typically need to drive 23 hours straight at 56 mph??? I'm thinking not.
The thing is battery technology is such that fast recharging to 80% takes just over half an hour. Provided the trucks stop every few hours (and there's laws for any given driver) it seems to be far less of an issue.
For those more extreme ranges, if you really need 1300 mile range, hybrid electrics are much more efficient and less massive, and with a better torque curve, than straight diesel.
That is basically the God fallacy that many engineers fall into. You think because you wrote it, that it has no bugs, and that it's fully understood?
I find it can be highly instructive to run a debugger even on working code, that is not cludge code.
I generally find it doing all kinds of crazy, inefficient things that I probably could not have predicted, even if I'm the one that actually designed and coded it!
Humans are very, very bad at writing robust systems; we never understand our software fully.
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No, if there was a one in a 110,000 chance of dying from a particular type of yoghurt, how long do you think it would remain on the market???
The usual cut-off is generally around one in a million for things you voluntarily do; but for things that get inflicted on you, 1 in 110,000 is pretty high. You may have a 1 in 113 chance of dying in a car crash, but at least YOU get the advantage of traveling around until YOUR untimely demise.
In this case, some git just blows your bloody brains out, and he gets to do this, and you get no advantage at all; it is inflicted on YOU by others.
I find that the question isn't "can these things be completely prevented", the question is: "how can we greatly reduce the incidence of mass shootings"? Countries like the UK and New Zealand have low incidences of these kinds of events, whereas America's incidence is very high. Having sensible laws that make it difficult for lone nuts getting hold of large magazine weapons is pretty effective.
He could have done pretty much the same thing with large magazine semiautomatic rifles though. Firing rate would have been lower, but not stupidly so.
You're defining it wrongly, baseload is the minimum demand in any given period, it's not half the peak. But it can be met with any combination of power supply at all.
All the deaths except coal are pretty low. What's not low are the costs of nuclear power; and the empirical costs show that it has a learning curve coefficient above one; it gets relatively more expensive the more plants you build, and you find out what not to do.
Netflix actually do something with their money; they fund original content and pay other producers for access to theirs and collaborate with them.
Scientific publishers don't do any of those things; they work entirely by creating artificial scarcity of a product paid for by others that they don't contribute to; at most they rate it.
I just looked up the formaldehyde thing. Apparently a non dry puff of an e-cigarette contains about a microgram of formaldehyde. But I knew that natural foods also metabolise to formaldehyde, I managed to find a table:
http://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/...
So 100g of apple, i.e. roughly an average apple contains ~1mg of formaldehyde; i.e. a thousand times more. Of course you don't inhale apples, but still, so it could be bad for your lungs nevertheless.
This link suggests that the amount of formaldehyde emitted is probably within established industrial limits over the course of a day, even for the users:
http://ecigarettereviewed.com/...
is it an African or European T.Rex?
Renewables have already flattened off the CO2 emissions curve, and from here on out, the CO2 emissions curve will go down.
That's not really true, solar panel and wind power are both seeing annual double digit growth, and around 10% of the power generated in Europe now comes from wind. Indeed, already worldwide more than 50% of all new electricity installations, both capacity and delivered energy are now renewable. That means as the existing equipment wears out it's being replaced with much 'greener' equipment. And that can only accelerate. That's not 'token' gestures it's because wind in particular is actually competitive and solar is becoming ever more so. Even in America, which is moving slowly, the same economic forces are playing out and coal mines are closing.
The cost of electric car batteries are dropping at a similar rate.
A lot of people think that there's a difference between primary energy and electricity, but actually electricity has low entropy; watt for watt electricity is much more valuable than primary energy. So even though electricity is greening up, it's tending to replace primary energy; you need a lot less energy to drive an electric car than a fossil car, and electric cars are almost completely nicer to drive.
Sure, but it still chews up range pretty badly. Don't forget that the energy storage capacity of the battery is so very much less than that of a fuel tank. Also things like air conditioning/heating use a lot of range at slow speeds/stop-start; they're a bigger fraction of the energy and there's almost no waste heat from the engine available. The bottom line is that stop/start really seriously affects range.
Well, the real problem is too much fossil baseload, not too much solar. That baseload is polluting California and the planet. California's current grid generation mix is no longer what its grid needs; it needs more flexible fossil power and less baseload generation. There's no technical requirement at all that baseload be provided by baseload power plant.
That's the real story here; the solar is not generating anything like as much as California's demand even when it's running at peak output.
Actually, some of the silly money, top end cars can now accelerate as fast as they brake to within a fraction of a second. They're either hybrids or full electric. They're so powerful, and single gear, so they're mostly limited only by the rubber.
It mitigates it, but it doesn't cancel it. The regenerative braking only recovers at most around 80%, usually a lot less. If you repeatedly have to accelerate to speed, and then stop, over and over, you lose loads of energy.
I think you're making an extremely common mistake here.
The real world costs of electricity supplied by the power companies are likely to go down with more renewables. If you can generate cheap electricity with solar panels, so can the power company, in fact they can do it cheaper still. And they have access to wind power that works at night as well as back up generators; and they can have their own storage; and their storage will be cheaper than yours as well, for several reasons:
1) economies of scale
2) they can have multiple sources of electricity, hence they statistically average out to a reasonable degree, much better than solar panels alone ever can.
3) their storage can (terrain permitting) include pumped storage which is far cheaper than batteries.
So I don't think grids are going away any time soon. What are going away are fossil fuel plants particularly coal ones, and they're mostly being replaced with cheaper renewables as they wear out. More than 50% of all new energy supplies are already renewable, worldwide.
So you're saying that the coal gas plants deliberately dropped the ball and failed to deliver electricity? And that this was the fault of the wind power suppliers? Yeah, no. And don't forget they would get paid more for supplying electricity when it's in high demand.
I'm sorry, but I'm in the UK, we have lots of wind power here and nothing remotely like that has ever happened. It's never happened in Texas, and it's never happened in Denmark.
It's the job of the GRID operators to model things, and set equipment up, pay incentives etc. so that this doesn't EVER happen. I mean, you're talking about a grid with enough generating capacity connected, and those people aren't starting it up in time?
If you are in the UK you should know that we refer to that as "typing Americanisms", not "speaking American".
Gives you an idea how much the 'baseload' coal generators are being paid to pollute, more like.
Uh, no, they just change the pitch of the blades. They can shut them down completely that way which they do when the wind is too high. They only run away if the control system fails; which has happened, but it's pretty rare. Spectacular when it happens though, one or more of the blades fall off and then the lack of balance snaps the tower!
> Encouraging people to shift demand from the peaks to the valleys, and enticing them with pricing discounts, will result in a slight flattening of the demand curve because only certain demands can actually be shifted.
Yes, that's the point of it; under ideal conditions the curve would become completely flat.
>The flattened curve will then cause the variable pricing to adjust, resulting in less incentive to shift demand.
Yes, less flattening, but not no flattening. And if the producers cancel out the pricing too much then the flattening goes away. The producers want a flatter demand curve because it means they need less expensive peaking generation, which helps them stay competitive.
It genuinely is a big improvement to go from baseload to peakload.
Peak load generation only runs occasionally and it matters a lot less if it's not very efficient, you want low capital costs.
Also, if it rarely runs you can stockpile biofuels for it from stuff like food waste or sewage.
Yeah, and the STUXNET worm defeated air gap defense, it's been done in the real world.
So 1300 miles range? But do they typically need to drive 23 hours straight at 56 mph??? I'm thinking not.
The thing is battery technology is such that fast recharging to 80% takes just over half an hour. Provided the trucks stop every few hours (and there's laws for any given driver) it seems to be far less of an issue.
For those more extreme ranges, if you really need 1300 mile range, hybrid electrics are much more efficient and less massive, and with a better torque curve, than straight diesel.
That is basically the God fallacy that many engineers fall into. You think because you wrote it, that it has no bugs, and that it's fully understood?
I find it can be highly instructive to run a debugger even on working code, that is not cludge code.
I generally find it doing all kinds of crazy, inefficient things that I probably could not have predicted, even if I'm the one that actually designed and coded it!
Humans are very, very bad at writing robust systems; we never understand our software fully.
All generating stations and all cars cause emissions when they're built though.
In the case of fossil fueled cars, it's around half the total emissions.