Everybody who's against Bitcoin is mad because they didn't mine it in the early days.
I didn't invest in beenie-babies or Miami real estate or any number of other tulip crazes and I don't regret missing them either. My life will happily go on without ever hearing another word about bitcoin. It serves no purpose that I care about. Spend your life worrying about opportunities missed and you'll live a very unhappy life.
I'm not sure the 100% idea would ever happen, but I know the notion of varying capital gains taxes based on the duration they have been held has been discussed a lot as means to discourage risky, short-term bet-making, market churn and encourage investment.
Several problems with that solution. 1) It is a bookkeeping nightmare. Even if you could keep super accurate records in a useable and transparent form (nobody does) it would be impossible as a practical matter to check them. 2) Taxation is a post-hoc solution and it's not remotely difficult for a large firm to dodge taxes. 3) It does nothing to eliminate or mitigate the information asymmetry problem which is at the core of the issue. 4) It's not remotely clear that it would actually cause the behavior to cease - at best it might shift the problem elsewhere.
Can't the SEC grow a pair and actually say definitively whether people are being front run or not?
The SEC isn't as all powerful as they seem. They are pretty limited in budget and resources. That is not an accident. Guess who controls SEC funding? Congress.
There is no mechanism provided by any exchange which would allow any market maker to observe orders entering the exchange and then enter an order ahead of them.
Doesn't have to be provided by the exchange. What they do is place small (100 share) on lots of stocks and when someone buys a small amount, the HFT algorithms can interpret intent to buy and buy up that stock ahead of the rest of the order. Some exchanges even pay firms to make markets which is nuts until you realize what they really are doing. Additionally a lot of orders are not filled on open exchanges but in dark pools. Stock exchanges permit HFT firms to co-locate in the exchanges. There is NO plausible reason to do that unless some form of front running is occurring. There is NO reason for HFT firms to lay their own fiber or microwave connections unless it provides them some huge informational advantage.
Seriously, read Flash Boys. It's an interesting read and worth your time. Even if it gets parts of the story wrong, there is enough credible evidence in there which can be backed up to paint a pretty damning picture of how you are getting screwed. Maybe not big time screwed but definitely screwed.
Because HDTV ruined our computer monitors. They have no vertical space anymore.
So rotate the monitor 90 degrees and tell your video card. Works great if it bothers you that much. Usually I like having my monitor horizontal but I get how vertical could be useful sometimes.
Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?
I think it's a fad and a rather annoying one at that because they tend to overdo it. They try so hard to hide things for the sake of appearance that they hide things that shouldn't be hidden. They worry about making it pretty instead of making it functional. I want functional first and if pretty follows then that's great.
Basically it's designers who understand aesthetics but not function. Artists without any engineering sense.
It has a combined address/search bar
on
Firefox 29: Redesign
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· Score: 4, Informative
You can search in the address bar. I do it all the time. No special add-ons needed either. It will search your default search engine very similar to Chrome. Why they have an additional search bar I don't really know. I never use it because I don't need to.
I will be extraordinarily impressed if you can get your Galaxy S5 to communicate with an 8" floppy drive (or the computer using it), even assuming you have some hypothetical proprietary/non-standard connector to make the physical connection with.
Why would you want to do that? I was addressing the problem of standard USB products making it too easy to bridge the air gap. Replace the 8" floppy completely with a USB product (or similar) with a non-standard connector. Then you don't have the problem of memory sticks or phones plugging in easily.
If it's lasted four decades (I assume they run tests periodically), what makes you think it's going to break any time soon?
It's not that it's likely to break. The problem (potentially) is that you don't know when it might break and if it does it's not clear if it can be repaired.
if you're going to fly, you want to be flying in an old bird--assuming proper maintenance, anything that was going to go wrong in a aircraft would have gone wrong already, so if it's still flying after several decades, it's likely the safest thing in the world.
That logic is flawed in several ways.
First, just because something has lasted a long time is not sufficient by itself to prove that it is safe. There is a bell curve to any product and some will last longer than others. With a large enough sample it may be simply that you are riding in the lucky plane that hasn't had a problem yet. Longevity alone does not constitute evidence of safety alone, though it *may* be evidence of solid design and/or maintenance if such proof can be correlated with other data.
Second, if something has been flying a long time, it may not be at risk for some failure modes but age and use generally bring on new failure modes to consider. Metal fatigue accrues over time - sometimes long periods of time and it isn't always easy to catch. Age related maintenance can be addressed but the longer something flies the greater the chance that something in the maintenance will be overlooked. It's a roll of the dice each time and if something can go wrong, eventually it will with enough chances.
Third is that old planes necessarily lack some of the improvements in safety features found on newer planes. Modern cars are a LOT safer in a crash than cars from 40 years ago. Modern cars also have features like stability control to help avoid accidents in the first place. Airplanes are similar in that regard. The state of the art in technology has progressed.
There was a reason the Bush White house was low-tech.
Security was not the primary reason - that was at best a second order effect. Mostly it was bureaucratic inertia, particularly on the part of the old-farts that tend to inhabit positions of power. People are slow to change, particularly older people.
The owners of the company I run are both in their 70s and they have the sort of computer skills you might expect for someone that age - i.e. poor. They're not opposed to new tech but they've been doing things a certain way for a long time and have a hard time even understanding the potential of new tech sometimes, much less operate it. They prefer a paper catalog to an online one, even when the online one is faster once you learn it.
Do you really think that the United States military, very specifically, the part of it that can unleash a version of hell that you have trouble even imagining, does not have the budget to get those drives manufactured, one off or any other part of the system?
Just because they theoretically can doesn't make it a good idea. Are you seriously going to claim that this is the only means by which to secure these systems? That nothing else more modern could possibly do the job with equal or better security? Color me dubious.
I'm fine with ain't-broke-don't-fix-it but if the choice is between building a stupidly expensive small run of some obsolete tech or swapping the old tech out for new, I'd vote for the later every time unless there is a very specific technical reason not to do so.
You have to admit, the old hardware makes it hard for some random officer to violate the air gap by plugging in his USB-using cellphone.
A problem easily solved by using a proprietary/non-standard connector. You can use USB without using a standard connector. Electrically it doesn't matter at all.
The energy density of even lithium ion batteries is two orders of magnitude lower than gasoline or coal. Current battery technology simply is impractical for the purpose of storing grid level amounts of power. We have ways of doing it but they involve things like having a nearby hydroelectric dam that you can pump water back into the reservoir.
Coal is going away. It is losing big to natural gas. NG is cheaper, burns more easily, transports more easily.
Swapping coal for NG is like your boat leaking less than it used to. It just buys you time but you're still going to sink.
NG is presently cheaper but that does not mean it will remain so indefinitely. NG is cheap primarily because there is a suddenly large supply of it compared to the infrastructure available to process it.. Once the US starts exporting lots of it and the infrastructure to use it is built the price will tend to rise in time.
And no, coal is not going away. We can hope we need less of it but the USA is the figurative Saudi Arabia of coal. We have an absurd amount of it and absent some technological breakthrough it is going to remain a significant part of our energy portfolio for the foreseeable future.
Personally I use this to sell it: they can run on nuclear waste and the leftovers are safe in 300 years, not thousands.
300 years is still a REALLY long time. The USA hasn't even been a country for that long. Do you really trust the geopolitical situation to be stable for that long? Can you be sure that the waste will be handled appropriately by generations that haven't even been born yet?
then point out how fossil fuels are spewing out radiation every day and nobody complains, but when a nuclear plant leaks a little it suddenly is a huge deal.
Because radiation is scary and smokestacks aren't. Weird I agree. Unfortunately I have this sinking feeling that it will take a climate disaster to get everyone to actually act on this issue. I'm amazed how short term selfish a lot of people can be when it comes to issues like this.
They also are using a plutonium-uranium mix to burn off weapons grade plutonium, so it is, in fact, reducing the proliferation risk in some ways.
Reducing != Eliminating. It only takes one nuke in the wrong hands to cause an awful awful lot of mayhem.
Nuclear power is the safest power source we have (4000 times safer than coal, 900 times safer than oil) - it has caused far fewer deaths than any other type of power generation pr TWh produced.
It's safe except where it REALLY isn't. You volunteering to move in close proximity to the Chernobyl plant? How about Fukashima? I even agree with your general point that nuclear's safety record is overall pretty good but your evaluation metric isn't the only relevant one and possibly not the most important. Risk is not simply a calculation of historical outcomes but also potential future outcomes. Nuclear might be safer now but it is not clear that it will remain so. Really it would only take a small number (possibly just 1) of nuclear accidents catch up in the number of deaths caused.
Nuclear pollution is (thankfully) infrequent but VERY severe when it occurs. When a nuke plant goes bad it can easily make an area uninhabitable for centuries. Coal plants are pretty nasty too but not as acutely and the cleanup is far quicker in terms of human lifetimes. Neither is without its drawbacks.
Plus you seem to be forgetting that nuclear power is presently inseparable from the potential to create nuclear weapons which in turn have the potential to kill billions. Coal might slowly choke us to death but nuclear weapons could erase that deaths/TWh gap within hours. I'm not opposed to nuclear power (in fact I think it is underutilized) but let's not pretend that there are no safety issues involved. There are without question governments and political leaders who I genuinely think should be kept away from nuclear power because of the proliferation problem. Even reactors like Thorium designs which make weapons harder still don't eliminate the problem entirely.
Who are you talking about? Certainly not the USA. We're somewhere around 10% renewable. Germany may be near 30% (which is great) but that's not even remotely close to 100%.
I don't get what you want to say with that line "Solar and wind are unpredictable sources of power on time scales shorter than months".
Simple. I can hand you a stack of coal of any arbitrary size and you can tell me exactly how long it will burn and the amount of energy that will be released almost down to the BTU. Does not matter when you burn it because it will always be the same. However no one can tell you exactly how much wind will be available next Tuesday. I can tell you the average amount that will probably be available over the next few weeks, and once you get to month to year long time frames the averages become pretty predictable for both solar and wind. But nobody can tell how much precisely will be available more than a few hours hours in advance. This means you MUST have standby power available for when the wind doesn't blow and when the sun isn't so shiny. Over long periods of time, wind and solar are fairly predictable. I can tell you to within a few days how many days are likely to be sunny where I live but I can't tell you which days those will be.
Germany has the same geothermal sources as any one else (except the gifts some have with hot springs etc.) however geothermal is more suited for heating than for power generation, again: what is your point?
Germany does not have the geothermal resources of Iceland or any other country with significant volcanic activity. I'm talking grid scale power generation allowing you to take fossil fuel plants out of the equation en-mass. Something that will account for a large percent of the power grid. Germany's geothermal resources are modest at best. Same is true for most of the rest of the world.
We have the _technology_ since decades. It is only a question of installation of plants (and upgrading the grid), sigh.
Explain to me how you are planning to get airplanes to fly with renewable energy? How about marine vessels? Virtually all of those are dependent on fossil fuels which by definition are not renewable. (and no, ethanol/methanol are not renewable because they require fossil fuels to make and appear be a net loss of energy or at best roughly breakeven - biofuels might get there one day but they aren't there now) How exactly do you propose to generate base load power in sufficient quantity with renewable sources? It cannot be done with wind/solar/hydro/geo-therm given the current state of those technologies. We can do a LOT of renewable energy but 100% is simply not possible right now unless you are using some weird definition of renewable that twists the term beyond all rational sense.
Germanies goal is to be 100% renewable at 2030, that is in 16 years.
They can have whatever goal they want and I admire the idealism. Won't happen though, at least not in that time frame. There are no existing or near term likely technologies that would permit a country the size of Germany to go 100% renewable within 16 years. They could make a huge dent - maybe 30-50% but 100% is impossible. Planes and most boats will require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future and I doubt all cars will go electric by 2030 either. Solar and wind are unpredictable sources of power on time scales shorter than months which means fusion or fossil fuels are still in the equation. Germany has limited hydro and geothermal resources. Bio-fuels like ethanol and methanol require fossil fuels to produce and there isn't enough crop land to satisfy demand even if we use them. Technologically it simply isn't possible to get to 100% renewable in the near future.
That said I'm rooting for Germany to get as close to 100% as they can. We really do need to take this sort of stuff seriously and I admire some of the efforts they are making.
I believe the USA can at least manage 20% - 30% till then.
Feasible though I'm dubious about its chances politically.
Thorium based MSR technology should be a national priority.
I probably agree but even if it proves to be as safe and reliable as one might hope, it's still nuclear power and thus it's probably dead on arrival. Too many broken promises and bad safety disasters by other fission reactors to get people to listen rationally. Thorium reactors mitigate a lot of the problems with fission power but they don't eliminate the problems entirely. They make less toxic waste but they still make it and it still needs to be dealt with. They make weapons proliferation more difficult but not impossible. They still can release radioactive materials under some disaster scenarios. So what will happen politically is that those who oppose more nuclear power (oddly both fossil fuel producers AND many environmentalists) will do is point out that all the same risk factors exist and let people's fears do the rest. Since people are scared of radiation, thorium reactors will be unlikely ever see the light of day in most places.
Mass deployment of nuclear power could almost completely replace fossil fuels in half that time.
Not economically or politically possible. The risks involved with nuclear fission mean that private insurance is not going to happen so governments will have to indemnify it and that isn't likely to happen in a lot of places. Too many voters are too scared of nuclear. While reactors have become safer, they haven't been demonstrated to be safe enough to not require absurdly strict oversight. Nobody has solved the problems of waste or weapons proliferation. Nuclear is relatively safe generally but when accidents happen they can be REALLY dangerous and make large areas uninhabitable for centuries.
Technologically it fission could replace a lot of (though not all) fossil fuels but it will not happen because technology concerns are just one part of the equation. Put it this way: if you asked 100 people whether they would rather live next to a nuke plant or a coal plant, I'd lay you good odds that 90%+ would prefer to live near the coal plant even if the data showed the risk to their health was higher.
The only application which would require somewhat more work is airplane propulsion, where it's hard to match Jet-A
The "only application"? Not true, particularly for marine applications. First you have to replace virtually every internal combustion engine on the planet including those cars, power tools, some appliances, boats, ships, personal watercraft, etc. Some of those have solutions in the pipleline (cars, applicances and some tools) whereas others have no practical replacement likely in the near term. There is no practical way to power most marine vehicles with electricity. We can make a few large vessels nuclear but doing so en-mass is a bad idea on a whole bunch of levels. There is presently no electric motor replacement for an outboard motor on a smaller boat. Even if it were possible today to convert all these engines (it's not) it would still take decades if we started now for economic reasons.
It raises energy costs by using a source that is less efficient.
Efficient by what measure? BTUs? BTUs per unit of pollution? Are you accounting for ALL the costs including pollution and related effects?
End the subsidies, and let people decide what power is best for them.
Ok, then you need to end the subsidies for fossil fuels as well, both the explicit ones (tax reductions, etc) as well as the implicit ones (not paying for pollution). Right now fossil fuel users are able to dump massive amounts of pollution into the environment and thus externalize much the cost of their actions. If you want to get all libertarian about this then let's REALLY make it a level playing field and have all the costs involved on the table.
So no reduction in conventional power is possible because back-up is always needed at night or when the wind does not blow.
No reduction? Bullshit. You need standby production but they do not have to be active - inactive plants generate little/no pollution. Solar and wind demonstrably can replace a significant amount of traditional (fossil + nuke) sources. Solar and wind cannot replace the entire need but that does not make them a bad idea.
The rest of the post I'm responding to is complete troll bullshit without any credible scientific sources so I'll just ignore the anonymous troll from here.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody who's against Bitcoin is mad because they didn't mine it in the early days.
I didn't invest in beenie-babies or Miami real estate or any number of other tulip crazes and I don't regret missing them either. My life will happily go on without ever hearing another word about bitcoin. It serves no purpose that I care about. Spend your life worrying about opportunities missed and you'll live a very unhappy life.
A bit off topic, but how will this changeover affect companies like square that depend on swipe and sign for most transactions?
Short answer is "who cares?". If they can't get with the new technology then we don't need them.
I'm not sure the 100% idea would ever happen, but I know the notion of varying capital gains taxes based on the duration they have been held has been discussed a lot as means to discourage risky, short-term bet-making, market churn and encourage investment.
Several problems with that solution. 1) It is a bookkeeping nightmare. Even if you could keep super accurate records in a useable and transparent form (nobody does) it would be impossible as a practical matter to check them. 2) Taxation is a post-hoc solution and it's not remotely difficult for a large firm to dodge taxes. 3) It does nothing to eliminate or mitigate the information asymmetry problem which is at the core of the issue. 4) It's not remotely clear that it would actually cause the behavior to cease - at best it might shift the problem elsewhere.
Can't the SEC grow a pair and actually say definitively whether people are being front run or not?
The SEC isn't as all powerful as they seem. They are pretty limited in budget and resources. That is not an accident. Guess who controls SEC funding? Congress.
There is no mechanism provided by any exchange which would allow any market maker to observe orders entering the exchange and then enter an order ahead of them.
Doesn't have to be provided by the exchange. What they do is place small (100 share) on lots of stocks and when someone buys a small amount, the HFT algorithms can interpret intent to buy and buy up that stock ahead of the rest of the order. Some exchanges even pay firms to make markets which is nuts until you realize what they really are doing. Additionally a lot of orders are not filled on open exchanges but in dark pools. Stock exchanges permit HFT firms to co-locate in the exchanges. There is NO plausible reason to do that unless some form of front running is occurring. There is NO reason for HFT firms to lay their own fiber or microwave connections unless it provides them some huge informational advantage.
Seriously, read Flash Boys. It's an interesting read and worth your time. Even if it gets parts of the story wrong, there is enough credible evidence in there which can be backed up to paint a pretty damning picture of how you are getting screwed. Maybe not big time screwed but definitely screwed.
Because HDTV ruined our computer monitors. They have no vertical space anymore.
So rotate the monitor 90 degrees and tell your video card. Works great if it bothers you that much. Usually I like having my monitor horizontal but I get how vertical could be useful sometimes.
Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?
I think it's a fad and a rather annoying one at that because they tend to overdo it. They try so hard to hide things for the sake of appearance that they hide things that shouldn't be hidden. They worry about making it pretty instead of making it functional. I want functional first and if pretty follows then that's great.
Basically it's designers who understand aesthetics but not function. Artists without any engineering sense.
You can search in the address bar. I do it all the time. No special add-ons needed either. It will search your default search engine very similar to Chrome. Why they have an additional search bar I don't really know. I never use it because I don't need to.
Yeah if I wanted a browser with no conventional pull-down menus and no title bar I'd use Chrome.
So enable the pull downs and title bar. They're still there and still available. I'm using it that way now.
I will be extraordinarily impressed if you can get your Galaxy S5 to communicate with an 8" floppy drive (or the computer using it), even assuming you have some hypothetical proprietary/non-standard connector to make the physical connection with.
Why would you want to do that? I was addressing the problem of standard USB products making it too easy to bridge the air gap. Replace the 8" floppy completely with a USB product (or similar) with a non-standard connector. Then you don't have the problem of memory sticks or phones plugging in easily.
If it's lasted four decades (I assume they run tests periodically), what makes you think it's going to break any time soon?
It's not that it's likely to break. The problem (potentially) is that you don't know when it might break and if it does it's not clear if it can be repaired.
if you're going to fly, you want to be flying in an old bird--assuming proper maintenance, anything that was going to go wrong in a aircraft would have gone wrong already, so if it's still flying after several decades, it's likely the safest thing in the world.
That logic is flawed in several ways.
First, just because something has lasted a long time is not sufficient by itself to prove that it is safe. There is a bell curve to any product and some will last longer than others. With a large enough sample it may be simply that you are riding in the lucky plane that hasn't had a problem yet. Longevity alone does not constitute evidence of safety alone, though it *may* be evidence of solid design and/or maintenance if such proof can be correlated with other data.
Second, if something has been flying a long time, it may not be at risk for some failure modes but age and use generally bring on new failure modes to consider. Metal fatigue accrues over time - sometimes long periods of time and it isn't always easy to catch. Age related maintenance can be addressed but the longer something flies the greater the chance that something in the maintenance will be overlooked. It's a roll of the dice each time and if something can go wrong, eventually it will with enough chances.
Third is that old planes necessarily lack some of the improvements in safety features found on newer planes. Modern cars are a LOT safer in a crash than cars from 40 years ago. Modern cars also have features like stability control to help avoid accidents in the first place. Airplanes are similar in that regard. The state of the art in technology has progressed.
There was a reason the Bush White house was low-tech.
Security was not the primary reason - that was at best a second order effect. Mostly it was bureaucratic inertia, particularly on the part of the old-farts that tend to inhabit positions of power. People are slow to change, particularly older people.
The owners of the company I run are both in their 70s and they have the sort of computer skills you might expect for someone that age - i.e. poor. They're not opposed to new tech but they've been doing things a certain way for a long time and have a hard time even understanding the potential of new tech sometimes, much less operate it. They prefer a paper catalog to an online one, even when the online one is faster once you learn it.
Do you really think that the United States military, very specifically, the part of it that can unleash a version of hell that you have trouble even imagining, does not have the budget to get those drives manufactured, one off or any other part of the system?
Just because they theoretically can doesn't make it a good idea. Are you seriously going to claim that this is the only means by which to secure these systems? That nothing else more modern could possibly do the job with equal or better security? Color me dubious.
I'm fine with ain't-broke-don't-fix-it but if the choice is between building a stupidly expensive small run of some obsolete tech or swapping the old tech out for new, I'd vote for the later every time unless there is a very specific technical reason not to do so.
Brand new in box on ebay for $195
You really want to trust national security to stuff we find on ebay?
You have to admit, the old hardware makes it hard for some random officer to violate the air gap by plugging in his USB-using cellphone.
A problem easily solved by using a proprietary/non-standard connector. You can use USB without using a standard connector. Electrically it doesn't matter at all.
The energy density of even lithium ion batteries is two orders of magnitude lower than gasoline or coal. Current battery technology simply is impractical for the purpose of storing grid level amounts of power. We have ways of doing it but they involve things like having a nearby hydroelectric dam that you can pump water back into the reservoir.
Coal is going away. It is losing big to natural gas. NG is cheaper, burns more easily, transports more easily.
Swapping coal for NG is like your boat leaking less than it used to. It just buys you time but you're still going to sink.
NG is presently cheaper but that does not mean it will remain so indefinitely. NG is cheap primarily because there is a suddenly large supply of it compared to the infrastructure available to process it.. Once the US starts exporting lots of it and the infrastructure to use it is built the price will tend to rise in time.
And no, coal is not going away. We can hope we need less of it but the USA is the figurative Saudi Arabia of coal. We have an absurd amount of it and absent some technological breakthrough it is going to remain a significant part of our energy portfolio for the foreseeable future.
Implicit subsidies are bogus. Everybody gets implicit subsidies. Why do you want to single out power companies?
Implicit subsidies are properly referred to as externalities and they are anything but "bogus".
Personally I use this to sell it: they can run on nuclear waste and the leftovers are safe in 300 years, not thousands.
300 years is still a REALLY long time. The USA hasn't even been a country for that long. Do you really trust the geopolitical situation to be stable for that long? Can you be sure that the waste will be handled appropriately by generations that haven't even been born yet?
then point out how fossil fuels are spewing out radiation every day and nobody complains, but when a nuclear plant leaks a little it suddenly is a huge deal.
Because radiation is scary and smokestacks aren't. Weird I agree. Unfortunately I have this sinking feeling that it will take a climate disaster to get everyone to actually act on this issue. I'm amazed how short term selfish a lot of people can be when it comes to issues like this.
They also are using a plutonium-uranium mix to burn off weapons grade plutonium, so it is, in fact, reducing the proliferation risk in some ways.
Reducing != Eliminating. It only takes one nuke in the wrong hands to cause an awful awful lot of mayhem.
Nuclear power is the safest power source we have (4000 times safer than coal, 900 times safer than oil) - it has caused far fewer deaths than any other type of power generation pr TWh produced.
It's safe except where it REALLY isn't. You volunteering to move in close proximity to the Chernobyl plant? How about Fukashima? I even agree with your general point that nuclear's safety record is overall pretty good but your evaluation metric isn't the only relevant one and possibly not the most important. Risk is not simply a calculation of historical outcomes but also potential future outcomes. Nuclear might be safer now but it is not clear that it will remain so. Really it would only take a small number (possibly just 1) of nuclear accidents catch up in the number of deaths caused.
Nuclear pollution is (thankfully) infrequent but VERY severe when it occurs. When a nuke plant goes bad it can easily make an area uninhabitable for centuries. Coal plants are pretty nasty too but not as acutely and the cleanup is far quicker in terms of human lifetimes. Neither is without its drawbacks.
Plus you seem to be forgetting that nuclear power is presently inseparable from the potential to create nuclear weapons which in turn have the potential to kill billions. Coal might slowly choke us to death but nuclear weapons could erase that deaths/TWh gap within hours. I'm not opposed to nuclear power (in fact I think it is underutilized) but let's not pretend that there are no safety issues involved. There are without question governments and political leaders who I genuinely think should be kept away from nuclear power because of the proliferation problem. Even reactors like Thorium designs which make weapons harder still don't eliminate the problem entirely.
We are already far above 30% ....
Who are you talking about? Certainly not the USA. We're somewhere around 10% renewable. Germany may be near 30% (which is great) but that's not even remotely close to 100%.
I don't get what you want to say with that line "Solar and wind are unpredictable sources of power on time scales shorter than months".
Simple. I can hand you a stack of coal of any arbitrary size and you can tell me exactly how long it will burn and the amount of energy that will be released almost down to the BTU. Does not matter when you burn it because it will always be the same. However no one can tell you exactly how much wind will be available next Tuesday. I can tell you the average amount that will probably be available over the next few weeks, and once you get to month to year long time frames the averages become pretty predictable for both solar and wind. But nobody can tell how much precisely will be available more than a few hours hours in advance. This means you MUST have standby power available for when the wind doesn't blow and when the sun isn't so shiny. Over long periods of time, wind and solar are fairly predictable. I can tell you to within a few days how many days are likely to be sunny where I live but I can't tell you which days those will be.
Germany has the same geothermal sources as any one else (except the gifts some have with hot springs etc.) however geothermal is more suited for heating than for power generation, again: what is your point?
Germany does not have the geothermal resources of Iceland or any other country with significant volcanic activity. I'm talking grid scale power generation allowing you to take fossil fuel plants out of the equation en-mass. Something that will account for a large percent of the power grid. Germany's geothermal resources are modest at best. Same is true for most of the rest of the world.
We have the _technology_ since decades. It is only a question of installation of plants (and upgrading the grid), sigh.
Explain to me how you are planning to get airplanes to fly with renewable energy? How about marine vessels? Virtually all of those are dependent on fossil fuels which by definition are not renewable. (and no, ethanol/methanol are not renewable because they require fossil fuels to make and appear be a net loss of energy or at best roughly breakeven - biofuels might get there one day but they aren't there now) How exactly do you propose to generate base load power in sufficient quantity with renewable sources? It cannot be done with wind/solar/hydro/geo-therm given the current state of those technologies. We can do a LOT of renewable energy but 100% is simply not possible right now unless you are using some weird definition of renewable that twists the term beyond all rational sense.
Germanies goal is to be 100% renewable at 2030, that is in 16 years.
They can have whatever goal they want and I admire the idealism. Won't happen though, at least not in that time frame. There are no existing or near term likely technologies that would permit a country the size of Germany to go 100% renewable within 16 years. They could make a huge dent - maybe 30-50% but 100% is impossible. Planes and most boats will require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future and I doubt all cars will go electric by 2030 either. Solar and wind are unpredictable sources of power on time scales shorter than months which means fusion or fossil fuels are still in the equation. Germany has limited hydro and geothermal resources. Bio-fuels like ethanol and methanol require fossil fuels to produce and there isn't enough crop land to satisfy demand even if we use them. Technologically it simply isn't possible to get to 100% renewable in the near future.
That said I'm rooting for Germany to get as close to 100% as they can. We really do need to take this sort of stuff seriously and I admire some of the efforts they are making.
I believe the USA can at least manage 20% - 30% till then.
Feasible though I'm dubious about its chances politically.
Thorium based MSR technology should be a national priority.
I probably agree but even if it proves to be as safe and reliable as one might hope, it's still nuclear power and thus it's probably dead on arrival. Too many broken promises and bad safety disasters by other fission reactors to get people to listen rationally. Thorium reactors mitigate a lot of the problems with fission power but they don't eliminate the problems entirely. They make less toxic waste but they still make it and it still needs to be dealt with. They make weapons proliferation more difficult but not impossible. They still can release radioactive materials under some disaster scenarios. So what will happen politically is that those who oppose more nuclear power (oddly both fossil fuel producers AND many environmentalists) will do is point out that all the same risk factors exist and let people's fears do the rest. Since people are scared of radiation, thorium reactors will be unlikely ever see the light of day in most places.
Mass deployment of nuclear power could almost completely replace fossil fuels in half that time.
Not economically or politically possible. The risks involved with nuclear fission mean that private insurance is not going to happen so governments will have to indemnify it and that isn't likely to happen in a lot of places. Too many voters are too scared of nuclear. While reactors have become safer, they haven't been demonstrated to be safe enough to not require absurdly strict oversight. Nobody has solved the problems of waste or weapons proliferation. Nuclear is relatively safe generally but when accidents happen they can be REALLY dangerous and make large areas uninhabitable for centuries.
Technologically it fission could replace a lot of (though not all) fossil fuels but it will not happen because technology concerns are just one part of the equation. Put it this way: if you asked 100 people whether they would rather live next to a nuke plant or a coal plant, I'd lay you good odds that 90%+ would prefer to live near the coal plant even if the data showed the risk to their health was higher.
The only application which would require somewhat more work is airplane propulsion, where it's hard to match Jet-A
The "only application"? Not true, particularly for marine applications. First you have to replace virtually every internal combustion engine on the planet including those cars, power tools, some appliances, boats, ships, personal watercraft, etc. Some of those have solutions in the pipleline (cars, applicances and some tools) whereas others have no practical replacement likely in the near term. There is no practical way to power most marine vehicles with electricity. We can make a few large vessels nuclear but doing so en-mass is a bad idea on a whole bunch of levels. There is presently no electric motor replacement for an outboard motor on a smaller boat. Even if it were possible today to convert all these engines (it's not) it would still take decades if we started now for economic reasons.
It raises energy costs by using a source that is less efficient.
Efficient by what measure? BTUs? BTUs per unit of pollution? Are you accounting for ALL the costs including pollution and related effects?
End the subsidies, and let people decide what power is best for them.
Ok, then you need to end the subsidies for fossil fuels as well, both the explicit ones (tax reductions, etc) as well as the implicit ones (not paying for pollution). Right now fossil fuel users are able to dump massive amounts of pollution into the environment and thus externalize much the cost of their actions. If you want to get all libertarian about this then let's REALLY make it a level playing field and have all the costs involved on the table.
So no reduction in conventional power is possible because back-up is always needed at night or when the wind does not blow.
No reduction? Bullshit. You need standby production but they do not have to be active - inactive plants generate little/no pollution. Solar and wind demonstrably can replace a significant amount of traditional (fossil + nuke) sources. Solar and wind cannot replace the entire need but that does not make them a bad idea.
The rest of the post I'm responding to is complete troll bullshit without any credible scientific sources so I'll just ignore the anonymous troll from here.