The studies aren't trash, generally. In fact, it's most likely that they're all true at the same time, except that you only got a 30-word summary typed up by a journalist who only skimmed the abstract. It's entirely possible for a food to be both good and bad for you in completely independent ways. A study that found that the amount of fat in eggs is unhealthy does not contradict a study that says the good cholesterol in eggs is helpful. Neither one of those studies really tells you whether eggs are good for you or bad for you overall, or in what quantity. Unfortunately, the media reports every single one of these very specific findings as if they were the complete story, resulting in the alternating "good for you"/"bad for you" articles you're whining about.
I swear, those books were written as satire. Or from a starting list with a title like "every cliche ever." For god's sake, one of them ends on a literal cliffhanger.
Recently, even without government subsidies, it has been approaching price break-even for sunny suburban locations.
We're well past this break-even point, even without incentives. Panels will more than pay for themselves, without incentives, in most of the united states. (possibly all, but there's probably some guy who lives in a cave who would disagree) With incentives, our payback is about 5-6 years. Without them, it would take 15, but the panels have a 25-year warranty and an expected life of 40+ years, so we're set either way. There are even companies now who will install them for free, and then lease them to you at a rate lower than your electric bill was.
Instead of trying to control individual ACs like this, they should be giving out massive credits to those who go to the expense of installing solar.
Since we're talking about Arizona, they very definitely are. It's changed a small amount since we did our install, but at the time, SRP and APS (the two local power companies) were both offering $3 per watt of installed generation capacity, on the condition that you leave the system in place if you ever move. On a 7kW system like ours, that's $21,000 up-front. It's essentially an investment in maintenance- and fuel-free peak-load power production for them, and it makes sense for everybody involved.
After all the tax credits and such, our 7kW system was about $8k in Arizona. It makes about $1300/year in power at present electric rates, and has a 25-year warranty. If you can afford it, it's beats the living crap out of putting your money in a CD, even assuming we could get something more like historical CD rates these days.
Eventually, your wife will discover monoprice.com, call you out on both misleading her AND hoarding useless shit, and make you get rid of it all again. Seriously-- when any cable you can conceive of is like $4 shipped, there just isn't a point to keeping an entire attic full of them "just in case".
Do none of you people ever use ebay? I don't know your exact model, but QIC 150MB SCSI tape drives are going for like $180 on ebay right now. Don't tell me your time to put it in a box and ship it isn't worth $180. I didn't see a 3X caddy CD-ROM, but caddy drives range from $15-$80.
Somebody will buy ANYTHING. And you'll find that although you have a few things that sell for $2+shipping, you'll also probably have a few that end up getting bid up to $300 inexplicably. It's never what you expect.
I've only once failed to sell a piece of junk on ebay, and it sold on the second try. I've even succeeded selling things like "broken 12-year-old Palm PDA with smashed screen" and "grab bag of random cables i found in my garage, untested". Sell in batches, so that you only have to go to the post office once.
Why... why would you do this? The recycler? Hell, I've sold things like "grab-bag of untested PC cables i found in my garage" on ebay for money. Functional Amigas could have at least earned you several good dinners out with the wife if you hadn't just dumped 'em... and selling to somebody who will use the gear is ALWAYS a better option than recycling, which should be your option of last resort. People on ebay will buy ANYTHING, and pay you to ship it to them.
Start in on your video game collection next. It's just a waste, sitting there unplayed-- people will pay you to play those games. Your easiest option is probably a swap service like goozex.com-- just get on and list your collection, and requests will start to roll in. It's taken most of a year for my old games to gradually disappear, since the older ones are not requested frequently-- but it's pretty low-effort.
Definitely. When I cleared out the PC junk after the last move, I did the same for books. Sold it all on ebay, one piece at a time. I realized-- as much as I liked those books, I don't reread them often. And when I do, repurchasing the handful of books I reread would hardly be expensive. All I was doing was wasting a shitload of books somebody else could have been reading, while simultaneously annoying my wife.
Don't let that lack of moving frequency let you think it's not going to be a pain. I did the same thing-- but believe me, the first time you do a full-house move with a grownup-sized house and a ten-year hoard of junk, you'll seriously regret it.
Also, that's how i learned that people on ebay will buy ANYTHING, and that you're probably wasting a ton of money by letting a bunch of crap sit around in your garage/closet. Hell, I found a half-inch stack of vintage Apple "rainbow" logo stickers-- which i sold one at a time for about $4 each. Made more than $100 on those alone. Sell your junk. You'll have the cash on hand for that one time in fifty where you end up actually needing something you cleared out, and you'll get a new one that isn't covered in mouse turds from sitting in your basement.
I'm sure that varies-- 8%/year is just the average I found for our power company in Arizona. Our rate is also about $.12/kWh, but we have substantially more sun. Cloudy days are a rarity-- our average insolation is more than double that of Minnesota, if I remember correctly. Obviously, this changes the balance a bit. On top of that, our peak sun and our peak load track pretty well, since it's mostly air conditioning. If it's not sunny, we're also not using nearly as much power. Places where heating is the largest energy load don't correlate their usage quite as well with solar production.
One thing that IS true anywhere: it's still far, far more cost effective to invest in load reduction than in generation. Insulation, better HVAC, washer/dryer upgrades, and so forth will all pay for themselves far more quickly-- and have the nice side effect of making any eventual generation capacity you install cheaper.
There are a LOT of different subsidies and credits involved. Arizona's state involvement is a small tax credit that caps out at $1000, if memory serves. The biggest one is actually the power company-- SRP and APS both will give you something like $3/watt up front for system installations. Not far behind is the massive 30% federal tax credit. I'm certainly not pretending otherwise.
"Now, the making of solar panels already use up more energy than they're able to produce in their lifetimes... wny make the energy (& $) cost any greater."
No, no they don't. Manufacturing energy payback is around two years on average, with variations for manufacturing technique. The panels are typically warranted for 25 years, and will probably last 40 or more. I'd say it's a fairly good return on energy investment.
"Sure, real soon now. And yet, every time I try and get a quote on mounting a few panels on my roof, the cost is $25,000 and it will take me 30 years to break-even on the electricty."
Out of curiosity, where are you located? We did an install last year, and our payback time at the current electric rates is about seven years. If you assume the rates rise at the average 8% per year that they've been doing, it's even quicker. But we're in Arizona, where solar is a no-brainer. The panels have a 25-year *warranty* and a 40-year life is not unreasonable. The inverter will need replacing about once every 12 years, but that's a trivial cost compared to the savings. Even if we're only in the house for another ten years, we'll likely double our investment, before the resale value of the system when we sell the house is even taken into account.
He fudged the data, failed to get approval for the study, got blood samples from kids at his son's birthday party, had a conflict of interest (was working on a vaccine alternative), didn't get permission to do invasive tests on kids (lumbar punctures and colonoscopies, among others), only used 12 subjects, didn't get the hospital's permission for the study, was censured for ethical violations, lost his medical credentials, had his study retracted, and lost the support of even his co-authors.
But that's all beside the point-- the critical thing is that substantially larger and longer-running studies have consistently contradicted his findings.
I would have guessed you were a very young driver without much exposure to cars, had you not mentioned 30 years of driving experience. The american-made pickup truck we previous to our current cars had a parking brake pedal. These aren't uncommon, and the pedal location is standard. And the Prius? It has a huge "ON" button above the keyhole. Key in, push button. And if you managed to find the keyhole, you found the button and its obvious label. How is this unnecessarily complex? I respect you for taking the time to look up what you didn't understand, but I'm a little baffled that you needed to.
You could call the vacuum "aether" if you wanted to-- I've got no problem with adopting old words for new purposes. The reason we don't is that the idea of the aether was essentially a fixed reference frame for light to travel in. Einstein made short work of that with special relativity, and we know that the idea of an aether as it was defined then can't be correct. So we stopped calling it that.
And for us slightly less serious underwater photographers, I can imagine a nice little point-and-shoot cast in a solid block of polycarbonate. No gaskets at all-- no leaks until crush depth and catastrophic failure.
I absolutely agree. My only point was that it seems like this study kept an eye on people's workouts, but did not scrupulously police their caloric intake-- relying on them to "keep eating the same." But with such a small number of calories burned per day, it's very, very easy for a person to think they're eating the same and screw it up completely with only a few extra bites of food here and there. Heck, all they'd have to do is have a gatorade after their workout to completely ruin the calorie deficit they'd created.
Most people just starting a workout program have a couple of months of exercise to do just to get into the shape to be able to do a proper workout. The sort of exercise being described here isn't going to help much. At 200 calories per day, you'd need something like 17 days to lose a single pound, and it's such a small amount per day that tiny slipups in diet would throw out any benefit without even being noticed. While the summary says they didn't change their diets, it would only take something like 50 extra calories per meal/snack to completely negate the workout, and only an extra bite or so per meal to cut the benefit in half.
I doubt you'll find a doctor who would prescribe these drugs without first suggesting you get off your arse and do some exercise. Nobody does this, of course, so prescriptions for these drugs get handed out as the next best thing when a patient won't do what is needed for themselves. It's not some huge profit conspiracy, although there is certainly profit involved-- but if you end up on statins without having given a serious effort at altering diet and exercise, it's your own fault.
The original version (NHW10) was only sold in Japan, from 1997-2000. What you're calling "first generation" was the first sold in the US (NHW11), but the second revision of the car. The first version probably would have been unsellable in the US, as the gasoline engine was only 58hp.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. I was really hoping for something to replace my ancient DeCSS shirt.
The studies aren't trash, generally. In fact, it's most likely that they're all true at the same time, except that you only got a 30-word summary typed up by a journalist who only skimmed the abstract. It's entirely possible for a food to be both good and bad for you in completely independent ways. A study that found that the amount of fat in eggs is unhealthy does not contradict a study that says the good cholesterol in eggs is helpful. Neither one of those studies really tells you whether eggs are good for you or bad for you overall, or in what quantity. Unfortunately, the media reports every single one of these very specific findings as if they were the complete story, resulting in the alternating "good for you"/"bad for you" articles you're whining about.
I swear, those books were written as satire. Or from a starting list with a title like "every cliche ever." For god's sake, one of them ends on a literal cliffhanger.
Recently, even without government subsidies, it has been approaching price break-even for sunny suburban locations.
We're well past this break-even point, even without incentives. Panels will more than pay for themselves, without incentives, in most of the united states. (possibly all, but there's probably some guy who lives in a cave who would disagree) With incentives, our payback is about 5-6 years. Without them, it would take 15, but the panels have a 25-year warranty and an expected life of 40+ years, so we're set either way. There are even companies now who will install them for free, and then lease them to you at a rate lower than your electric bill was.
Since we're talking about Arizona, they very definitely are. It's changed a small amount since we did our install, but at the time, SRP and APS (the two local power companies) were both offering $3 per watt of installed generation capacity, on the condition that you leave the system in place if you ever move. On a 7kW system like ours, that's $21,000 up-front. It's essentially an investment in maintenance- and fuel-free peak-load power production for them, and it makes sense for everybody involved.
After all the tax credits and such, our 7kW system was about $8k in Arizona. It makes about $1300/year in power at present electric rates, and has a 25-year warranty. If you can afford it, it's beats the living crap out of putting your money in a CD, even assuming we could get something more like historical CD rates these days.
Eventually, your wife will discover monoprice.com, call you out on both misleading her AND hoarding useless shit, and make you get rid of it all again. Seriously-- when any cable you can conceive of is like $4 shipped, there just isn't a point to keeping an entire attic full of them "just in case".
Do none of you people ever use ebay? I don't know your exact model, but QIC 150MB SCSI tape drives are going for like $180 on ebay right now. Don't tell me your time to put it in a box and ship it isn't worth $180. I didn't see a 3X caddy CD-ROM, but caddy drives range from $15-$80.
Somebody will buy ANYTHING. And you'll find that although you have a few things that sell for $2+shipping, you'll also probably have a few that end up getting bid up to $300 inexplicably. It's never what you expect.
I've only once failed to sell a piece of junk on ebay, and it sold on the second try. I've even succeeded selling things like "broken 12-year-old Palm PDA with smashed screen" and "grab bag of random cables i found in my garage, untested". Sell in batches, so that you only have to go to the post office once.
Why... why would you do this? The recycler? Hell, I've sold things like "grab-bag of untested PC cables i found in my garage" on ebay for money. Functional Amigas could have at least earned you several good dinners out with the wife if you hadn't just dumped 'em... and selling to somebody who will use the gear is ALWAYS a better option than recycling, which should be your option of last resort. People on ebay will buy ANYTHING, and pay you to ship it to them.
Start in on your video game collection next. It's just a waste, sitting there unplayed-- people will pay you to play those games. Your easiest option is probably a swap service like goozex.com-- just get on and list your collection, and requests will start to roll in. It's taken most of a year for my old games to gradually disappear, since the older ones are not requested frequently-- but it's pretty low-effort.
Definitely. When I cleared out the PC junk after the last move, I did the same for books. Sold it all on ebay, one piece at a time. I realized-- as much as I liked those books, I don't reread them often. And when I do, repurchasing the handful of books I reread would hardly be expensive. All I was doing was wasting a shitload of books somebody else could have been reading, while simultaneously annoying my wife.
Don't let that lack of moving frequency let you think it's not going to be a pain. I did the same thing-- but believe me, the first time you do a full-house move with a grownup-sized house and a ten-year hoard of junk, you'll seriously regret it.
Also, that's how i learned that people on ebay will buy ANYTHING, and that you're probably wasting a ton of money by letting a bunch of crap sit around in your garage/closet. Hell, I found a half-inch stack of vintage Apple "rainbow" logo stickers-- which i sold one at a time for about $4 each. Made more than $100 on those alone. Sell your junk. You'll have the cash on hand for that one time in fifty where you end up actually needing something you cleared out, and you'll get a new one that isn't covered in mouse turds from sitting in your basement.
I'm sure that varies-- 8%/year is just the average I found for our power company in Arizona. Our rate is also about $.12/kWh, but we have substantially more sun. Cloudy days are a rarity-- our average insolation is more than double that of Minnesota, if I remember correctly. Obviously, this changes the balance a bit. On top of that, our peak sun and our peak load track pretty well, since it's mostly air conditioning. If it's not sunny, we're also not using nearly as much power. Places where heating is the largest energy load don't correlate their usage quite as well with solar production.
One thing that IS true anywhere: it's still far, far more cost effective to invest in load reduction than in generation. Insulation, better HVAC, washer/dryer upgrades, and so forth will all pay for themselves far more quickly-- and have the nice side effect of making any eventual generation capacity you install cheaper.
There are a LOT of different subsidies and credits involved. Arizona's state involvement is a small tax credit that caps out at $1000, if memory serves. The biggest one is actually the power company-- SRP and APS both will give you something like $3/watt up front for system installations. Not far behind is the massive 30% federal tax credit. I'm certainly not pretending otherwise.
"Now, the making of solar panels already use up more energy than they're able to produce in their lifetimes...
wny make the energy (& $) cost any greater."
No, no they don't. Manufacturing energy payback is around two years on average, with variations for manufacturing technique. The panels are typically warranted for 25 years, and will probably last 40 or more. I'd say it's a fairly good return on energy investment.
"Sure, real soon now. And yet, every time I try and get a quote on mounting a few panels on my roof, the cost is $25,000 and it will take me 30 years to break-even on the electricty."
Out of curiosity, where are you located? We did an install last year, and our payback time at the current electric rates is about seven years. If you assume the rates rise at the average 8% per year that they've been doing, it's even quicker. But we're in Arizona, where solar is a no-brainer. The panels have a 25-year *warranty* and a 40-year life is not unreasonable. The inverter will need replacing about once every 12 years, but that's a trivial cost compared to the savings. Even if we're only in the house for another ten years, we'll likely double our investment, before the resale value of the system when we sell the house is even taken into account.
the prius is like a 5 year old car model and in all this
A minor nit-- the Prius has been available in Japan since 1997, and in the US since late 2000. It's a 13-year-old car.
He fudged the data, failed to get approval for the study, got blood samples from kids at his son's birthday party, had a conflict of interest (was working on a vaccine alternative), didn't get permission to do invasive tests on kids (lumbar punctures and colonoscopies, among others), only used 12 subjects, didn't get the hospital's permission for the study, was censured for ethical violations, lost his medical credentials, had his study retracted, and lost the support of even his co-authors.
But that's all beside the point-- the critical thing is that substantially larger and longer-running studies have consistently contradicted his findings.
I would have guessed you were a very young driver without much exposure to cars, had you not mentioned 30 years of driving experience. The american-made pickup truck we previous to our current cars had a parking brake pedal. These aren't uncommon, and the pedal location is standard. And the Prius? It has a huge "ON" button above the keyhole. Key in, push button. And if you managed to find the keyhole, you found the button and its obvious label. How is this unnecessarily complex? I respect you for taking the time to look up what you didn't understand, but I'm a little baffled that you needed to.
You could call the vacuum "aether" if you wanted to-- I've got no problem with adopting old words for new purposes. The reason we don't is that the idea of the aether was essentially a fixed reference frame for light to travel in. Einstein made short work of that with special relativity, and we know that the idea of an aether as it was defined then can't be correct. So we stopped calling it that.
And for us slightly less serious underwater photographers, I can imagine a nice little point-and-shoot cast in a solid block of polycarbonate. No gaskets at all-- no leaks until crush depth and catastrophic failure.
I absolutely agree. My only point was that it seems like this study kept an eye on people's workouts, but did not scrupulously police their caloric intake-- relying on them to "keep eating the same." But with such a small number of calories burned per day, it's very, very easy for a person to think they're eating the same and screw it up completely with only a few extra bites of food here and there. Heck, all they'd have to do is have a gatorade after their workout to completely ruin the calorie deficit they'd created.
Most people just starting a workout program have a couple of months of exercise to do just to get into the shape to be able to do a proper workout. The sort of exercise being described here isn't going to help much. At 200 calories per day, you'd need something like 17 days to lose a single pound, and it's such a small amount per day that tiny slipups in diet would throw out any benefit without even being noticed. While the summary says they didn't change their diets, it would only take something like 50 extra calories per meal/snack to completely negate the workout, and only an extra bite or so per meal to cut the benefit in half.
I doubt you'll find a doctor who would prescribe these drugs without first suggesting you get off your arse and do some exercise. Nobody does this, of course, so prescriptions for these drugs get handed out as the next best thing when a patient won't do what is needed for themselves. It's not some huge profit conspiracy, although there is certainly profit involved-- but if you end up on statins without having given a serious effort at altering diet and exercise, it's your own fault.
We will always have the poor.
Not if we launch them into space.
The original version (NHW10) was only sold in Japan, from 1997-2000. What you're calling "first generation" was the first sold in the US (NHW11), but the second revision of the car. The first version probably would have been unsellable in the US, as the gasoline engine was only 58hp.