Honesty from buyers? My guess is you haven't sold a significant amount of stuff on eBay. I have over 10,000 feedbacks with a 99.7% positive rating and have seen just about every buyer scam in the book first hand. I'm an optimistic person by nature but when you've had people try to burn you as much as I have you cease being so optimistic about the "honesty from buyers". Most buyers are fine but a very significant percentage are not and making it impossible for sellers to respond to the bad ones does not help anyone.
The vast majority of feedbacks are either content free ("A+++++ BEST SELLER EVER!!!!") or simply rude responses from people who couldn't be bothered to resolve a problem civilly. I particularly love getting negative feedback from buyers who can't be bothered to actually read the auction terms. Happens ALL the time.
While I'll be the first to admit there are a lot of scummy sellers out there there are at least as many scummy buyers. eBay's change in policy is an attempt to assure buyers that eBay is safe (it isn't) so that they don't take their business elsewhere.
Can you explain the use of negative feedback against buyers?
Some buyers are extremely rude or difficult to work with just like with any retail or mail order business.
Many don't bother to actually read the terms of your auction and then act surprised (and rude) when you will not deviate from them.
A significant number of buyers cannot be bothered to pay for items they have one. I typically had to send payment reminders to about 2-4% of buyers and about 1% never pay.
Some buyers are outright thieves or deceptive.
Some buyers insist that you are overcharging for shipping even when you charge UPS standard rates.
Most often though negative feedback is left in retaliation for negative feedback left by the buyer. Sometimes justified, sometimes not. I've had buyers leave negative feedback about shipping speed 20 minutes after the auction closed and before they had paid for the item. Clearly unreasonable. I've also had buyers leave negative feedback for me when I darn well screwed up and deserved it.
The long and short of it is that sometimes sellers deserve negative feedback and sometimes buyers deserve negative feedback. There are plenty of good reasons in each case.
It seems that if they didn't pay that would be an issue you would take to Ebay, not something you'd complain about on their feedback page.
You can run through the non-paying bidder process but it has no teeth unless the buyer is a multiple time offender. eBay does not and (apparently) cannot make buyers pay - they only can kick them off eBay. Being able to tell other sellers about a problem buyer is one of the few defenses sellers have to recognize when a buyer is likely to be a problem. If a buyer has a history of negative feedback sellers sometimes can protect themselves. After all, if you are dealing with a known problem customer it should be my right as a seller not to deal with them.
So if AVG has turned to the dark side, what free/cheap non-bloatware options are out there worth trusting? I know of a few but it's a little hard to know who to trust.
Seems like every anti-malware software maker these days bloats their software into a 50+MB beast of a package that accomplishes little more than to slow your computer down. I have more trouble with their software than I do with actual mal-ware.
Because the people who are the biggest users - namely teenagers - aren't the ones paying for it. Blame out of touch parents for paying for an overpriced service to entertain their children.
As for my personal opinion, I think that the vast majority of medical conditions can be dealt with by someone with significantly less training/licensing (eg. nurses, online/telephone professionals, etc) than is currently demanded;
That's true but you are missing the real reason we use doctors. You pay for a doctor because he/she has the training to recognize when what *seems* like the regular stuff is not. The value of a surgeon isn't in being able to do yet another ho-hum appendectomy; it's when the patient has a complication on the operating table and you need the highest level of talent to immediately figure out what went wrong and fix it before the patient dies. Think of it a bit like insurance - you're not so much guarding against day to day costs - instead you are keeping yourself from ruin when everything goes to hell.
I'm married to a physician and have several close relatives that are nurses. Furthermore a client of mine is a nursing school. Nursing is a hard job and I would never disrespect anyone in the field but there is a BIG talent and training gulf between most nurses and the vast majority of doctors. For routine treatment it often doesn't matter but a lot of medicine in being able to recognize what is not routine and knowing what to do about it.
Cutting off any sale of a used handbag would result in fewer new sales, because the people who had been buying then selling would stop AND the people who had been buying used couldn't afford to start buying new.
That logic doesn't work in the world of luxury goods and conspicuous consumption. With a luxury good a big part of the reason they sell for such high prices is specifically because there aren't many available and not many people can buy them. The more "exclusive" the higher the price can be. Selling more can actually hurt a luxury good manufacturer in many cases because it loses its value as a status symbol. It dilutes their image as an exclusive make and they can find demand dropping rapidly right along with their ability to command premium prices.
Yes cutting off secondary markets hurts sales volume but for a status brand that might not be a bad thing. Doesn't mean that these companies should be able to cut off our right to resell what we own but they have a very good reason to do what they do.
Anyway, interesting story, and I'd be really interested to know where you took your business, since any competitor to eBay would be an interesting place to explore.
We sold the assets of the company (mostly some computer hardware and software) to another company. Otherwise we shut the company down. There simply was not enough margin in selling on eBay to make it profitable unless the item was stolen. It is a liquidation/wholesale marketplace so you have to be able to acquire items for less than wholesale prices in order to make a profit.
Outside of certain niche markets there is no viable alternative to eBay. I wish there was but eBay is effectively a monopoly or very close to being one. Some stuff you can sell on Amazon - especially books and *new* CDs/DVDs, sometimes Craigslist is a good alternative especially for heavy stuff you wouldn't ship anyway. For items like guns or alcohol there are some niche sites available but you'll need special licensing (such as a federal firearms license) to deal in those items anyway.
Its funny to see the VERO program criticised for being too strict...
It isn't that VeRO is too strict, it's that it is utterly useless. Aside from the most obvious forgeries it is impossible to determine authenticity without inspecting the item. Since neither eBay nor VeRO program members ever see the items being auctioned, they cannot possibly determine authenticity reliably.
Furthermore, VeRO program members typically have no interest in ANY of their products being sold in secondary markets so they just close auctions pretty much without any attempt to actually ascertain authenticity. This is in blatant conflict with the first sale doctrine. If eBay truly were a neutral arbiter they would attempt to help both the seller and the brand holder but eBay decided to simply cave in to the IP holder while screwing sellers out of their fees.
No I no longer sell via eBay. I closed up shop about two years ago after about 10,000 auctions. EBay continually raised rates and made it harder and harder to continue to do business with them.
What else besides Computer Science do you know something about? Your degree is only limiting if it is the only experience you actually have. If you have some real world experience then do whatever you know how to do.
Not really. At the time I was making a significant part of my income selling stuff on eBay. Suing them would have been cutting off my nose despite my face. Not to mention that I do not have the money to fight a multi-billion dollar corporation over the loss of a few hundred dollars in listing fees and lost sales. Plus even if I won (which I wouldn't) the damages I could collect would be insufficient to seriously cause eBay to change practices anyway. Only real hope of that would be some sort of a class action lawsuit.
In the end the right solution was just to stop selling on eBay. I used to send close to $100,000 a year in fees to eBay/PayPal. Now they get $0.00 from me so I think that hurts eBay more than any lawsuit I could possibly have been involved in.
I understand forgeries, as it could tarnish the brand names. But for legit items let them resell them.
You are right of course but eBay's problem is that eBay cannot be bothered to seriously check. The ONLY way to be reasonably sure an item is not a fake is to inspect it in person and have a full documentation trail detailing who bought it, where they bought it, and when. This is what they do in the art world to authenticate pieces. Since eBay never physically inspects ANY merchandise sold on their site, there is no way they can possible determine if an item is a fake.
From my own experience I've sold some high end luxury goods on consignment through eBay. (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Rolex, etc) In each case I had a full documentation trail, the parties were known to me or my close associates, and we had the items physically inspected by an expert in that merchandise to ensure authenticity. Through eBay's VeRO program we were accused several times of pedaling fakes even though we had the real thing. There was no opportunity for us to prove that we had authentic merchandise though we certainly could have done so were there any means to plead our case. Our auctions were summarily taken down and we were given strikes with no recourse of any kind. To be sure there are a TON of actual fakes on eBay but eBay sure as hell can't tell the difference. Worse, to avoid lawsuits they've given brand holders full power to remove auctions that they should have no power to influence under the first sale doctrine.
The problem is that eBay's incentives are all wrong - they just want their fees and no lawsuits - and they've handed responsibility (through VeRO) to trademark and brand holders whose incentives actually contradict the law. Louis Vuitton doesn't want ANY of their products sold via eBay regardless of authenticity. So eBay users get screwed in the deal either way. Sellers can have their auctions pulled for no good reason and buyers can't be reasonably sure of authentic products because eBay refuses to check. The winners here are definitely not you and me.
Whole Foods' whole business model involves projecting a "green" image...
That's absolutely true but they aren't the only ones doing rooftop solar by a long shot. Whole Foods image considerations just make them more likely to be early adopters since they get (potentially) an additional boost from marketing their "greeness". The economics rooftop solar seem to make sense even without marketing considerations. Nearly all the costs of a solar energy installation are fixed so it is a nice long term energy hedge.
You don't have to take my word for it. A quick google search will turn up hundreds of existing and proposed projects. Rooftop solar is still in its infancy to be sure but I'm confident we're going to see a lot more of it in years to come.
1) They haven't bothered to significantly upgrade their technology in years. Their development cycles are too slow and they've been milking their platforms as cash cows for too long with too little improvement.
2) PalmOS was clearly a dead end years ago and their Windows based systems basically outsource the crown jewels (the software) to Microsoft.
3) Treos were nifty at first but they've stagnated compared to the competition. Palm missed the idea that email is a killer app and never developed the backend infrastructure RIM did.
4) They don't have the financial resources or scale to compete long term with Nokia, RIM or Apple. And they have no defensible or must-have products to compensate.
5) Their "strategy" has been insane. There is no focus to the company. No vision. They buy technology and never use it. They break the company up for no clear reason and then put it back together.
To generate the amount of power used by america using currently feasible (economically feasible) solar panels...
Why is it always a 100% or nothing argument? Solar power has a useful place as a supplemental power source. Why is that so difficult to comprehend? It doesn't have to provide all our power to be a useful source of energy and in fact a diversity of power sources is generally a good thing. The most attractive thing about a plug in hybrid vehicle is that I can power it with coal, nuclear, solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, in addition to oil. I'm no longer 100% tied to a single source of power.
For obvious reasons nothing will grow below a solar panel.
Ummm... mushrooms?
...several states worth of surface area will have to be stripped of every last feature, every last plant, every last animal... which ones ?
Or we could just put them on top of all the land we WE ALREADY HAVE stripped to put buildings on.
Yep, with a 100% efficient solar panel over the roughly 3m^2 of surface, you might actually gather the full 1334 watts of available power per meter squared on a bright, cloud-free day, giving a full 4002 watts, almost 6HP! That's almost 20% of enough to run a small motorcycle, but you gathered it using a solar car!
OK smart guy explain this. I'm pretty sure the beancounters at Whole Foods are smart enough to do the math on whether rooftop solar is a good deal. You're making a mistake in presuming that rooftop/cartop solar has to be the primary power source to be useful or a good idea.
Why draw 100% of your power from the grid or gasoline when you don't have to? If the solar cells even partially recharge an electric powered or plug-in hybrid car it could be conceivably worth it. Say for example while it is sitting in a parking lot.
Personally I wonder why every cell phone and laptop does not have supplemental solar cells attached. Won't power them but it would extend battery life and prevent drainage when not in use.
Good call - Anyone know if this is already being done?
Yes it is already being done as a supplemental power technique. Whole Foods is testing such systems at several of their stores. They basically purchase power at a pre-established rate for a period of years (20 or so I think) from the company which builds and maintains the solar cells. Since the number of days of sunlight in a given year is predictable AND the sunlight tends to be most intense when air conditioning needs are the highest, it apparently greatly offsets their power needs at peak times. Doesn't get them off the grid but it apparently does reduce their draw from the grid significantly.
The company argues that it doesn't operate the plants, its wholly owned subsidiaries do.
Tax law is complicated so I wouldn't presume to know the particulars of Amazon's situation. It's quite common for economic entities to be comprised of a number of legally separate companies. For example General Electric is actually about 30 or so large legally separate companies under the umbrella of a single economic entity. In principle there is no problem with Amazon using subsidiaries to control their warehouses. Sometimes using subsidiaries can have beneficial tax consequences so there is no fundamental problem there either unless they are attempting to not pay taxes that they rightfully owe in spite of their corporate structure.
The real question is what is their consolidation policy for their financial statements. Generally speaking wholly owned subsidiaries have their financial statements consolidated into those of the parent company and they are treated as a single economic entity. (which in effect they are) The parent company has a lot of discretion as to how much detail they break out from their subsidiaries but they are required to show all material results, including of course taxes. All this consolidation policy information is required by the SEC to be in Amazon's financial statements.
Yep. All of my mangers are dumb shits. So why are you still working there? Are you trapped into working for "dumb shits" for some reason?
The company I am working at has been around since 1983 and they still do not have version control on their software. I told they hey lets get some version control, they told me I did not know what I was talking about. So if it is truly needed and they won't use it why are you still there? If they are a company that has been around since 1983 without version control that makes me wonder how critical your product is to their success.
Might get the cheaters through a class but it's hard to hide a lack of training in the real world. That's what managerial positions are for. I realize you are (probably) making a joke but management has its own skill set which is every bit as demanding as engineering. An unskilled manager is at least as obvious as an unskilled engineer and potentially a lot more damaging to the organization.
That will work until the have to sit down for an actual test or later when they try to hold a job. Might get the cheaters through a class but it's hard to hide a lack of training in the real world. I'm always astonished at the effort people put in to avoid work.
Of course I would blame the professors too for designing a course where such cheating is practically possible. There are definitely ways to make this sort of cheating much harder. In class tests and in class assignments are among the more obvious methods.
Re:Environmental impact of travel
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
...air travel produces 81.7 times the CO2 per person-mile as auto travel -- and that's assuming no carpooling, which increases the number even further. I won't dispute your numbers - I've read similar things in the past - but they miss an important point. There are FAR more cars on the road than airplanes. There certainly are more than 80 times as many cars as there are airplanes. Each year a few thousand planes are manufactured. In the US alone auto manufacturers typically sell 14-16 million cars a year. Planes might be worse per mile but automobiles have them in shear numbers.
Don't get me wrong I completely agree that airplane emissions are severely under regulated along with ships, watercraft, large trucks, locomotives, and lawn care equipment. Let's just agree that there is a problem to be addressed and that planes are not the only significant offender.
Environmental impact of travel
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Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
Anyway, I tend to agree with you, but I have to admit that air travel is not without externalities. Mainly, the demand for flights pumps a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere So does auto travel, rail travel, ship travel, personal watercraft travel and any other powered machine you care to mention. There are a lot of emissions besides just CO2 to worry about as well. I agree completely we should minimize the environmental impact but air travel is not a particularly egregious offender here.
For one, because he was never under oath. Go tell that to the parents of some of the soldiers who have died in a needless pointless war. I'm sure they'll be relieved to hear it's ok their son or daughter died because the President lied to us but not under oath.
Second, he never exactly lied, they merely "selectively observed" some facts, and "selectively neglected" others. What's with the equivocating? "Never exactly lied"? What the hell does that mean? A lie by omission is still a lie.
Obviously completely different from lying, and completely out of the realm of lying under oath. So if the President isn't under oath it's ok for him to lie? Bill Clinton was impeached because the Republicans had a majority in Congress and a (feeble) excuse. I didn't vote for him but only someone who is extremely partisan would think otherwise. Anyone who puts lying about a blowjob on the same level with starting a war under false pretenses is an imbecile of truly astonishing proportions.
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It discouraged honesty from buyers.
Honesty from buyers? My guess is you haven't sold a significant amount of stuff on eBay. I have over 10,000 feedbacks with a 99.7% positive rating and have seen just about every buyer scam in the book first hand. I'm an optimistic person by nature but when you've had people try to burn you as much as I have you cease being so optimistic about the "honesty from buyers". Most buyers are fine but a very significant percentage are not and making it impossible for sellers to respond to the bad ones does not help anyone.
The vast majority of feedbacks are either content free ("A+++++ BEST SELLER EVER!!!!") or simply rude responses from people who couldn't be bothered to resolve a problem civilly. I particularly love getting negative feedback from buyers who can't be bothered to actually read the auction terms. Happens ALL the time.
While I'll be the first to admit there are a lot of scummy sellers out there there are at least as many scummy buyers. eBay's change in policy is an attempt to assure buyers that eBay is safe (it isn't) so that they don't take their business elsewhere.
Can you explain the use of negative feedback against buyers?
The long and short of it is that sometimes sellers deserve negative feedback and sometimes buyers deserve negative feedback. There are plenty of good reasons in each case.
It seems that if they didn't pay that would be an issue you would take to Ebay, not something you'd complain about on their feedback page.
You can run through the non-paying bidder process but it has no teeth unless the buyer is a multiple time offender. eBay does not and (apparently) cannot make buyers pay - they only can kick them off eBay. Being able to tell other sellers about a problem buyer is one of the few defenses sellers have to recognize when a buyer is likely to be a problem. If a buyer has a history of negative feedback sellers sometimes can protect themselves. After all, if you are dealing with a known problem customer it should be my right as a seller not to deal with them.
So if AVG has turned to the dark side, what free/cheap non-bloatware options are out there worth trusting? I know of a few but it's a little hard to know who to trust.
Seems like every anti-malware software maker these days bloats their software into a 50+MB beast of a package that accomplishes little more than to slow your computer down. I have more trouble with their software than I do with actual mal-ware.
Why do people put up with this?
Because the people who are the biggest users - namely teenagers - aren't the ones paying for it. Blame out of touch parents for paying for an overpriced service to entertain their children.
As for my personal opinion, I think that the vast majority of medical conditions can be dealt with by someone with significantly less training/licensing (eg. nurses, online/telephone professionals, etc) than is currently demanded;
That's true but you are missing the real reason we use doctors. You pay for a doctor because he/she has the training to recognize when what *seems* like the regular stuff is not. The value of a surgeon isn't in being able to do yet another ho-hum appendectomy; it's when the patient has a complication on the operating table and you need the highest level of talent to immediately figure out what went wrong and fix it before the patient dies. Think of it a bit like insurance - you're not so much guarding against day to day costs - instead you are keeping yourself from ruin when everything goes to hell.
I'm married to a physician and have several close relatives that are nurses. Furthermore a client of mine is a nursing school. Nursing is a hard job and I would never disrespect anyone in the field but there is a BIG talent and training gulf between most nurses and the vast majority of doctors. For routine treatment it often doesn't matter but a lot of medicine in being able to recognize what is not routine and knowing what to do about it.
Cutting off any sale of a used handbag would result in fewer new sales, because the people who had been buying then selling would stop AND the people who had been buying used couldn't afford to start buying new.
That logic doesn't work in the world of luxury goods and conspicuous consumption. With a luxury good a big part of the reason they sell for such high prices is specifically because there aren't many available and not many people can buy them. The more "exclusive" the higher the price can be. Selling more can actually hurt a luxury good manufacturer in many cases because it loses its value as a status symbol. It dilutes their image as an exclusive make and they can find demand dropping rapidly right along with their ability to command premium prices.
Yes cutting off secondary markets hurts sales volume but for a status brand that might not be a bad thing. Doesn't mean that these companies should be able to cut off our right to resell what we own but they have a very good reason to do what they do.
Anyway, interesting story, and I'd be really interested to know where you took your business, since any competitor to eBay would be an interesting place to explore.
We sold the assets of the company (mostly some computer hardware and software) to another company. Otherwise we shut the company down. There simply was not enough margin in selling on eBay to make it profitable unless the item was stolen. It is a liquidation/wholesale marketplace so you have to be able to acquire items for less than wholesale prices in order to make a profit.
Outside of certain niche markets there is no viable alternative to eBay. I wish there was but eBay is effectively a monopoly or very close to being one. Some stuff you can sell on Amazon - especially books and *new* CDs/DVDs, sometimes Craigslist is a good alternative especially for heavy stuff you wouldn't ship anyway. For items like guns or alcohol there are some niche sites available but you'll need special licensing (such as a federal firearms license) to deal in those items anyway.
Its funny to see the VERO program criticised for being too strict...
It isn't that VeRO is too strict, it's that it is utterly useless. Aside from the most obvious forgeries it is impossible to determine authenticity without inspecting the item. Since neither eBay nor VeRO program members ever see the items being auctioned, they cannot possibly determine authenticity reliably.
Furthermore, VeRO program members typically have no interest in ANY of their products being sold in secondary markets so they just close auctions pretty much without any attempt to actually ascertain authenticity. This is in blatant conflict with the first sale doctrine. If eBay truly were a neutral arbiter they would attempt to help both the seller and the brand holder but eBay decided to simply cave in to the IP holder while screwing sellers out of their fees.
No I no longer sell via eBay. I closed up shop about two years ago after about 10,000 auctions. EBay continually raised rates and made it harder and harder to continue to do business with them.
What else besides Computer Science do you know something about? Your degree is only limiting if it is the only experience you actually have. If you have some real world experience then do whatever you know how to do.
You could have sued Ebay too...
Not really. At the time I was making a significant part of my income selling stuff on eBay. Suing them would have been cutting off my nose despite my face. Not to mention that I do not have the money to fight a multi-billion dollar corporation over the loss of a few hundred dollars in listing fees and lost sales. Plus even if I won (which I wouldn't) the damages I could collect would be insufficient to seriously cause eBay to change practices anyway. Only real hope of that would be some sort of a class action lawsuit.
In the end the right solution was just to stop selling on eBay. I used to send close to $100,000 a year in fees to eBay/PayPal. Now they get $0.00 from me so I think that hurts eBay more than any lawsuit I could possibly have been involved in.
I understand forgeries, as it could tarnish the brand names. But for legit items let them resell them.
You are right of course but eBay's problem is that eBay cannot be bothered to seriously check. The ONLY way to be reasonably sure an item is not a fake is to inspect it in person and have a full documentation trail detailing who bought it, where they bought it, and when. This is what they do in the art world to authenticate pieces. Since eBay never physically inspects ANY merchandise sold on their site, there is no way they can possible determine if an item is a fake.
From my own experience I've sold some high end luxury goods on consignment through eBay. (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Rolex, etc) In each case I had a full documentation trail, the parties were known to me or my close associates, and we had the items physically inspected by an expert in that merchandise to ensure authenticity. Through eBay's VeRO program we were accused several times of pedaling fakes even though we had the real thing. There was no opportunity for us to prove that we had authentic merchandise though we certainly could have done so were there any means to plead our case. Our auctions were summarily taken down and we were given strikes with no recourse of any kind. To be sure there are a TON of actual fakes on eBay but eBay sure as hell can't tell the difference. Worse, to avoid lawsuits they've given brand holders full power to remove auctions that they should have no power to influence under the first sale doctrine.
The problem is that eBay's incentives are all wrong - they just want their fees and no lawsuits - and they've handed responsibility (through VeRO) to trademark and brand holders whose incentives actually contradict the law. Louis Vuitton doesn't want ANY of their products sold via eBay regardless of authenticity. So eBay users get screwed in the deal either way. Sellers can have their auctions pulled for no good reason and buyers can't be reasonably sure of authentic products because eBay refuses to check. The winners here are definitely not you and me.
Whole Foods' whole business model involves projecting a "green" image...
That's absolutely true but they aren't the only ones doing rooftop solar by a long shot. Whole Foods image considerations just make them more likely to be early adopters since they get (potentially) an additional boost from marketing their "greeness". The economics rooftop solar seem to make sense even without marketing considerations. Nearly all the costs of a solar energy installation are fixed so it is a nice long term energy hedge.
You don't have to take my word for it. A quick google search will turn up hundreds of existing and proposed projects. Rooftop solar is still in its infancy to be sure but I'm confident we're going to see a lot more of it in years to come.
1) They haven't bothered to significantly upgrade their technology in years. Their development cycles are too slow and they've been milking their platforms as cash cows for too long with too little improvement.
2) PalmOS was clearly a dead end years ago and their Windows based systems basically outsource the crown jewels (the software) to Microsoft.
3) Treos were nifty at first but they've stagnated compared to the competition. Palm missed the idea that email is a killer app and never developed the backend infrastructure RIM did.
4) They don't have the financial resources or scale to compete long term with Nokia, RIM or Apple. And they have no defensible or must-have products to compensate.
5) Their "strategy" has been insane. There is no focus to the company. No vision. They buy technology and never use it. They break the company up for no clear reason and then put it back together.
To generate the amount of power used by america using currently feasible (economically feasible) solar panels...
Why is it always a 100% or nothing argument? Solar power has a useful place as a supplemental power source. Why is that so difficult to comprehend? It doesn't have to provide all our power to be a useful source of energy and in fact a diversity of power sources is generally a good thing. The most attractive thing about a plug in hybrid vehicle is that I can power it with coal, nuclear, solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, in addition to oil. I'm no longer 100% tied to a single source of power.
For obvious reasons nothing will grow below a solar panel.
Ummm... mushrooms?
...several states worth of surface area will have to be stripped of every last feature, every last plant, every last animal ... which ones ?
Or we could just put them on top of all the land we WE ALREADY HAVE stripped to put buildings on.
Yep, with a 100% efficient solar panel over the roughly 3m^2 of surface, you might actually gather the full 1334 watts of available power per meter squared on a bright, cloud-free day, giving a full 4002 watts, almost 6HP! That's almost 20% of enough to run a small motorcycle, but you gathered it using a solar car!
OK smart guy explain this. I'm pretty sure the beancounters at Whole Foods are smart enough to do the math on whether rooftop solar is a good deal. You're making a mistake in presuming that rooftop/cartop solar has to be the primary power source to be useful or a good idea.
Why draw 100% of your power from the grid or gasoline when you don't have to? If the solar cells even partially recharge an electric powered or plug-in hybrid car it could be conceivably worth it. Say for example while it is sitting in a parking lot.
Personally I wonder why every cell phone and laptop does not have supplemental solar cells attached. Won't power them but it would extend battery life and prevent drainage when not in use.
Good call - Anyone know if this is already being done?
Yes it is already being done as a supplemental power technique. Whole Foods is testing such systems at several of their stores. They basically purchase power at a pre-established rate for a period of years (20 or so I think) from the company which builds and maintains the solar cells. Since the number of days of sunlight in a given year is predictable AND the sunlight tends to be most intense when air conditioning needs are the highest, it apparently greatly offsets their power needs at peak times. Doesn't get them off the grid but it apparently does reduce their draw from the grid significantly.
The company argues that it doesn't operate the plants, its wholly owned subsidiaries do.
Tax law is complicated so I wouldn't presume to know the particulars of Amazon's situation. It's quite common for economic entities to be comprised of a number of legally separate companies. For example General Electric is actually about 30 or so large legally separate companies under the umbrella of a single economic entity. In principle there is no problem with Amazon using subsidiaries to control their warehouses. Sometimes using subsidiaries can have beneficial tax consequences so there is no fundamental problem there either unless they are attempting to not pay taxes that they rightfully owe in spite of their corporate structure.
The real question is what is their consolidation policy for their financial statements. Generally speaking wholly owned subsidiaries have their financial statements consolidated into those of the parent company and they are treated as a single economic entity. (which in effect they are) The parent company has a lot of discretion as to how much detail they break out from their subsidiaries but they are required to show all material results, including of course taxes. All this consolidation policy information is required by the SEC to be in Amazon's financial statements.
That will work until the have to sit down for an actual test or later when they try to hold a job. Might get the cheaters through a class but it's hard to hide a lack of training in the real world. I'm always astonished at the effort people put in to avoid work.
Of course I would blame the professors too for designing a course where such cheating is practically possible. There are definitely ways to make this sort of cheating much harder. In class tests and in class assignments are among the more obvious methods.
...air travel produces 81.7 times the CO2 per person-mile as auto travel -- and that's assuming no carpooling, which increases the number even further. I won't dispute your numbers - I've read similar things in the past - but they miss an important point. There are FAR more cars on the road than airplanes. There certainly are more than 80 times as many cars as there are airplanes. Each year a few thousand planes are manufactured. In the US alone auto manufacturers typically sell 14-16 million cars a year. Planes might be worse per mile but automobiles have them in shear numbers.Don't get me wrong I completely agree that airplane emissions are severely under regulated along with ships, watercraft, large trucks, locomotives, and lawn care equipment. Let's just agree that there is a problem to be addressed and that planes are not the only significant offender.