LOL. And you just know Amazon's going to fix it in their Kindle edition and push it to everybody's device, destroying the value. Hardcover's the only way to go.
I think I wasn't clear-- they're cannibalizing their sales all right. Every used book I buy instead of an ebook is a lost sale.
When the Kindle launched, ebook pricing slotted in between used prices and paperback prices. That was pretty reasonable. It's also not the case anymore, and you can see the results in these charts. $2.99 no-traditional-publisher ebooks sell like mad. $15 same-as-hardcover-pricing ebooks sell like crap as ebooks.
It was amazon, through their marketplace. Picked up Feersum Endjinn ($4.00 shipped), The Algebraist ($4.22 shipped), and Inversions ($4.95 shipped). To my surprise, two of the three shipped from the UK.
You're right in an absolute sense, since you exist and you care... and there's a few more around as well. But we're a rounding error. Not enough of a market for anybody to give a crap about, and the big publishers get your money via normal books anyway.
You: "I Want DRM-Free books!" Big Publishers: ".....ok. We call those books." Tiny Publishers: "sure... it's in 57 formats on my website, there's a youtube video of Cory Doctorow singing it karaoke-style at a tiki bar, and I blogged the entire thing as I was writing it to sell ads anyway." Amazon-centric Tiny Publishers: "shut up, dude... my book only costs $.99"
Look at REAMDE, cited in the article. $14.90 new in hardcover from the amazon marketplace and $14.99 for the Kindle edition. It's a new release, and it's about the same cost new, in hardcover, as it is for the Kindle. And that's before we mention getting some of your money back selling it used.
I've made a mistake, too. Both hardcovers are Deckle versions. However, the $20.77 is the amazon.com price and the $14.90 is from amazon's marketplace. Shipping charges may apply to the latter.
It's a distinction without a difference, though. Whether it's amazon itself shipping, or somebody amazon directed you to, it's either slightly cheaper or about the same price, and Amazon will happily buy it back for $6, effectively ending any question of which avenue costs the least.
In case anybody's mystified as to why REAMDE is selling better in print, it's because it's cheaper in hardcover, new, than it is on the Kindle. It's that simple.
I've been having the exact opposite experience. I don't have a kindle, but I use their app on my phone, and have for quite a while now. But in the last year, every time I go to buy a Kindle book, it's ~$15, and the hardcover version is $3.99 shipped. Or it's not available on the Kindle at all. Most recently, this was the case with three Iain M. Banks novels-- two shipped from the UK, and they were still only a couple dollars apiece, in hardcover.
This isn't Amazon's fault-- the publishers won their fight to set pricing. And they're pricing themselves right out of a sale. When the Kindle was new and ebooks were almost always cheaper than printed books, I bought quite a few. Now I'm buying books used again. The publishers have cut off their nose to spite their face, and in their fear of low-margin ebooks have lost their margin entirely.
A couple of things to keep in mind as you work through the complicated calculations to decide if it's worth it:
1. The panels are still working at 25 years. They'll probably still work at 40 years, too, although as you point out their output gradually declines. 2. Inverters are cheap relative to the panel cost, but you should plan on a replacement every 10-15 years, since they don't last as long. 3. The cost of power goes up. How much is anybody's guess, and every market is different. For us, the cost of power is outstripping inflation pretty solidly with an average yearly increase of 8% per year for the last 15 years or so. This goes a long way to offsetting "time value of money" calculations that show better returns if you just stuck the money in the market.
And finally, don't forget to evaluate the lease options-- these have smaller cost savings over time, but also neatly sidestep the upfront cost and time value of money problem. These are almost always a win for the consumer. You get immediate savings on your monthly bill, essentially replacing your electric bill with a smaller bill to the solar lease company. You'd save more if you bought the system, but the payback time is longer, and as you point out, much more complex to calculate.
You're right about the article. What's been surprising to me, though, is that PV has actually gotten cheaper than even industrial-scale solar thermal in the last few years. More than one large-scale facility out here in the desert has scrapped their plans for concentrating thermal plants, and is instead just buying a stack of panels. The best bang for your buck isn't in the big thermal plants anymore, thanks to the relentless decrease in price for photovoltaics.
...with a conveniently easy solution. Our peak load in the US is during the day. Our peak load is also nearly double our baseline load. It's also heavily correlated with the amount of sun, since one of the largest variable loads is AC. Solar is conveniently productive during the daytime, leaving us in a position where until we're making roughly half of our power from solar energy, we don't need to store it or concern ourselves with how we can use it as baseline power at night.
Agreed. Netflix's bungle cost them droves of high-profit customers: those of us lazy slobs whose movies sit unwatched for months at a time, but who kept paying anyway out of a ten-year-old habit. The price raise followed by the ridiculous Qwikster mess woke me up long enough to look around, realize that Blockbuster had gone from local-store laughingstock to a netflix-like service that includes games backed up by a local store for instant exchanges, and drop my DVD plan altogether. If they'd just kept their yaps shut, they could have probably continued charging me for the 3 DVD plan until I died, in exchange for mailing me a movie a month.
I'll keep paying for their streaming, but they really shot themselves in the foot here.
We'll have to deal with this someday, but probably not in our lifetimes. At some point, there simply won't be jobs for most people. This sounds great, except that our society is set up fundamentally around the idea of nearly everyone (or at least someone in every family group) having a job. In a future where there's only jobs for 10% of people, but without any changes to how we view work, 90% of everybody won't have any money with which to participate in all the amazing awesomeness of an automated future. We're not all cut out for research, design, or art... and even some of that will be automated eventually.
Problem is, that's where it looks like we'd be headed. Big companies will be the ones that build most of the automation, and will want to profit from it. And that's what they should do, because it's the only rational option in the way we've designed our corporations. So to gain access to all this automation, we'll need to work. Except the automation will be doing the jobs.
China are burning oil to make inefficient PV panels that will never generate the energy required to produce them
I'd love to see a citation on this. Typical panels average construction energy payback in one to two years, have consumer warranties in the 20-25 year range, and useful lifetimes of four or more decades. Are Chinese-made solar panel factories genuinely forty times less efficient than others? I kinda doubt it.
The iPhone lacked both an app store and an ability to run apps at launch as well. This sort of refinement works both ways-- Apple's phone put some pieces together in a new and polished way, and it didn't take long for other manufacturers to start copying their successes and adding their own new features. When other manufacturers had features that were successful, Apple quickly copied them as well. The ability to run native apps, copy and paste, cloud syncing, OTA updates, etc... it's a feedback loop.
I think it boils down to a difference of opinion on what "innovate" means. I don't think it takes anything away from Apple's accomplishments to say that few of their ideas were truly new (which is what a lot of people seem to use as a stricter definition of innovation). They are absolutely brilliant at packaging up the best of other people's ideas, polishing all the rough edges off, and leaving everything nonessential on the cutting-room floor.
This is not some sort of "lesser achievement." It's at least as important as the new ideas.
I'll leave off #3, since I don't know big luxury sedans, but your #1 and #2 requests match up ridiculously well with the Ford Escape Hybrid. EPA combined is 32mpg, towing capacity is 1500lbs. I've been averaging 36mpg, but I tend to do a little better than the window sticker in any car. Your mileage may vary. Pity it's the last year for it.
We have shade screens that block 90% of the visible light coming into our house, and surprisingly, it doesn't look dark at all. (But it cut a HUGE chunk off our utility bills.)
I think everybody's definition of "respectable" differs, as does their willingness to recycle and scavenge parts. I haven't bought a case or a PSU in eight years. The DVD burner is six years old. The keyboard is truly ancient, and the mouse is super-old. The monitor's five years old, and will probably remain with me until it dies. Hard drives usually go two or three generations for me. I'd never bother with a dedicated sound card now that I don't have to.
Which means a gaming PC "upgrade" for me means I just need a CPU, motherboard, RAM and GPU. Typically $400 for the lot, sometimes less as prices fluctuate-- 4GB of newer RAM is only like $25 right now, so it might be a bit lower. If I were to do a build right now (I probably won't-- although I still have the old desktop in a closet, my laptop is sufficient for even brand new game right now) I'd grab the i3/mobo bundle-of-the-week at Fry's for $130, $25 worth of new RAM, and a radeon 6870 for $150. More than enough for what I'm playing (I'm getting by on a laptop with a slower proc and older video card playing Deus Ex at 1680x1050), and it's a whopping $305, recycling most of what I used last round.
According to the press release, BMW is getting 170 lumens per watt from the laser headlights. That's substantially higher than the efficiency of most LEDs on the market-- even the very best are less efficient than that, and most are more like 90-100 lumens per watt.
Yet solar still can't compete without enormous subsidies.
At the utility-scale level, solar costs about twice as much per kWh produced compared to coal right now. On the other hand, when looked at from the retail side of the equation, where end-users pay several times the actual cost of power to provide a profit margin, it competes marvelously. I can either pay the power company $.12/kWh, or make it myself for substantially less. So I am.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been doing that for years. I'm pretty sure I read about it here, like 12 years ago.
Might also be different for Prime customers. Not sure there.
LOL. And you just know Amazon's going to fix it in their Kindle edition and push it to everybody's device, destroying the value. Hardcover's the only way to go.
I think I wasn't clear-- they're cannibalizing their sales all right. Every used book I buy instead of an ebook is a lost sale.
When the Kindle launched, ebook pricing slotted in between used prices and paperback prices. That was pretty reasonable. It's also not the case anymore, and you can see the results in these charts. $2.99 no-traditional-publisher ebooks sell like mad. $15 same-as-hardcover-pricing ebooks sell like crap as ebooks.
It was amazon, through their marketplace. Picked up Feersum Endjinn ($4.00 shipped), The Algebraist ($4.22 shipped), and Inversions ($4.95 shipped). To my surprise, two of the three shipped from the UK.
You're right in an absolute sense, since you exist and you care... and there's a few more around as well. But we're a rounding error. Not enough of a market for anybody to give a crap about, and the big publishers get your money via normal books anyway.
You: "I Want DRM-Free books!"
Big Publishers: ".....ok. We call those books."
Tiny Publishers: "sure... it's in 57 formats on my website, there's a youtube video of Cory Doctorow singing it karaoke-style at a tiki bar, and I blogged the entire thing as I was writing it to sell ads anyway."
Amazon-centric Tiny Publishers: "shut up, dude... my book only costs $.99"
Look at REAMDE, cited in the article. $14.90 new in hardcover from the amazon marketplace and $14.99 for the Kindle edition. It's a new release, and it's about the same cost new, in hardcover, as it is for the Kindle. And that's before we mention getting some of your money back selling it used.
I read different books *on* a Kindle. Just depends on what's cheaper where.
I've made a mistake, too. Both hardcovers are Deckle versions. However, the $20.77 is the amazon.com price and the $14.90 is from amazon's marketplace. Shipping charges may apply to the latter.
It's a distinction without a difference, though. Whether it's amazon itself shipping, or somebody amazon directed you to, it's either slightly cheaper or about the same price, and Amazon will happily buy it back for $6, effectively ending any question of which avenue costs the least.
I think you're reading the chart wrong. Both your links show the same grid:
$20.77 is the "Deckle Hardcover," whatever that is
$14.99 is the Kindle edition
$14.90 is the regular hardcover, new
$13.73 is the audiobook
In case anybody's mystified as to why REAMDE is selling better in print, it's because it's cheaper in hardcover, new, than it is on the Kindle. It's that simple.
I've been having the exact opposite experience. I don't have a kindle, but I use their app on my phone, and have for quite a while now. But in the last year, every time I go to buy a Kindle book, it's ~$15, and the hardcover version is $3.99 shipped. Or it's not available on the Kindle at all. Most recently, this was the case with three Iain M. Banks novels-- two shipped from the UK, and they were still only a couple dollars apiece, in hardcover.
This isn't Amazon's fault-- the publishers won their fight to set pricing. And they're pricing themselves right out of a sale. When the Kindle was new and ebooks were almost always cheaper than printed books, I bought quite a few. Now I'm buying books used again. The publishers have cut off their nose to spite their face, and in their fear of low-margin ebooks have lost their margin entirely.
A couple of things to keep in mind as you work through the complicated calculations to decide if it's worth it:
1. The panels are still working at 25 years. They'll probably still work at 40 years, too, although as you point out their output gradually declines.
2. Inverters are cheap relative to the panel cost, but you should plan on a replacement every 10-15 years, since they don't last as long.
3. The cost of power goes up. How much is anybody's guess, and every market is different. For us, the cost of power is outstripping inflation pretty solidly with an average yearly increase of 8% per year for the last 15 years or so. This goes a long way to offsetting "time value of money" calculations that show better returns if you just stuck the money in the market.
And finally, don't forget to evaluate the lease options-- these have smaller cost savings over time, but also neatly sidestep the upfront cost and time value of money problem. These are almost always a win for the consumer. You get immediate savings on your monthly bill, essentially replacing your electric bill with a smaller bill to the solar lease company. You'd save more if you bought the system, but the payback time is longer, and as you point out, much more complex to calculate.
You're right about the article. What's been surprising to me, though, is that PV has actually gotten cheaper than even industrial-scale solar thermal in the last few years. More than one large-scale facility out here in the desert has scrapped their plans for concentrating thermal plants, and is instead just buying a stack of panels. The best bang for your buck isn't in the big thermal plants anymore, thanks to the relentless decrease in price for photovoltaics.
...with a conveniently easy solution. Our peak load in the US is during the day. Our peak load is also nearly double our baseline load. It's also heavily correlated with the amount of sun, since one of the largest variable loads is AC. Solar is conveniently productive during the daytime, leaving us in a position where until we're making roughly half of our power from solar energy, we don't need to store it or concern ourselves with how we can use it as baseline power at night.
Agreed. Netflix's bungle cost them droves of high-profit customers: those of us lazy slobs whose movies sit unwatched for months at a time, but who kept paying anyway out of a ten-year-old habit. The price raise followed by the ridiculous Qwikster mess woke me up long enough to look around, realize that Blockbuster had gone from local-store laughingstock to a netflix-like service that includes games backed up by a local store for instant exchanges, and drop my DVD plan altogether. If they'd just kept their yaps shut, they could have probably continued charging me for the 3 DVD plan until I died, in exchange for mailing me a movie a month.
I'll keep paying for their streaming, but they really shot themselves in the foot here.
We'll have to deal with this someday, but probably not in our lifetimes. At some point, there simply won't be jobs for most people. This sounds great, except that our society is set up fundamentally around the idea of nearly everyone (or at least someone in every family group) having a job. In a future where there's only jobs for 10% of people, but without any changes to how we view work, 90% of everybody won't have any money with which to participate in all the amazing awesomeness of an automated future. We're not all cut out for research, design, or art... and even some of that will be automated eventually.
Problem is, that's where it looks like we'd be headed. Big companies will be the ones that build most of the automation, and will want to profit from it. And that's what they should do, because it's the only rational option in the way we've designed our corporations. So to gain access to all this automation, we'll need to work. Except the automation will be doing the jobs.
China are burning oil to make inefficient PV panels that will never generate the energy required to produce them
I'd love to see a citation on this. Typical panels average construction energy payback in one to two years, have consumer warranties in the 20-25 year range, and useful lifetimes of four or more decades. Are Chinese-made solar panel factories genuinely forty times less efficient than others? I kinda doubt it.
The iPhone lacked both an app store and an ability to run apps at launch as well. This sort of refinement works both ways-- Apple's phone put some pieces together in a new and polished way, and it didn't take long for other manufacturers to start copying their successes and adding their own new features. When other manufacturers had features that were successful, Apple quickly copied them as well. The ability to run native apps, copy and paste, cloud syncing, OTA updates, etc... it's a feedback loop.
I think it boils down to a difference of opinion on what "innovate" means. I don't think it takes anything away from Apple's accomplishments to say that few of their ideas were truly new (which is what a lot of people seem to use as a stricter definition of innovation). They are absolutely brilliant at packaging up the best of other people's ideas, polishing all the rough edges off, and leaving everything nonessential on the cutting-room floor.
This is not some sort of "lesser achievement." It's at least as important as the new ideas.
It's not an antibiotic.
I'll leave off #3, since I don't know big luxury sedans, but your #1 and #2 requests match up ridiculously well with the Ford Escape Hybrid. EPA combined is 32mpg, towing capacity is 1500lbs. I've been averaging 36mpg, but I tend to do a little better than the window sticker in any car. Your mileage may vary. Pity it's the last year for it.
We have shade screens that block 90% of the visible light coming into our house, and surprisingly, it doesn't look dark at all. (But it cut a HUGE chunk off our utility bills.)
I think everybody's definition of "respectable" differs, as does their willingness to recycle and scavenge parts. I haven't bought a case or a PSU in eight years. The DVD burner is six years old. The keyboard is truly ancient, and the mouse is super-old. The monitor's five years old, and will probably remain with me until it dies. Hard drives usually go two or three generations for me. I'd never bother with a dedicated sound card now that I don't have to.
Which means a gaming PC "upgrade" for me means I just need a CPU, motherboard, RAM and GPU. Typically $400 for the lot, sometimes less as prices fluctuate-- 4GB of newer RAM is only like $25 right now, so it might be a bit lower. If I were to do a build right now (I probably won't-- although I still have the old desktop in a closet, my laptop is sufficient for even brand new game right now) I'd grab the i3/mobo bundle-of-the-week at Fry's for $130, $25 worth of new RAM, and a radeon 6870 for $150. More than enough for what I'm playing (I'm getting by on a laptop with a slower proc and older video card playing Deus Ex at 1680x1050), and it's a whopping $305, recycling most of what I used last round.
According to the press release, BMW is getting 170 lumens per watt from the laser headlights. That's substantially higher than the efficiency of most LEDs on the market-- even the very best are less efficient than that, and most are more like 90-100 lumens per watt.
Yet solar still can't compete without enormous subsidies.
At the utility-scale level, solar costs about twice as much per kWh produced compared to coal right now. On the other hand, when looked at from the retail side of the equation, where end-users pay several times the actual cost of power to provide a profit margin, it competes marvelously. I can either pay the power company $.12/kWh, or make it myself for substantially less. So I am.