We already have laws that should prevent most Airbnb rentals in New York City. As the New York Times wrote: "The New York State attorney general believes most Airbnb listings in New York are illegal." You aren't allowed to rent a room for less than 30 days unless you are present throughout the rental. Also, subletting is explicitly prohibited in most apartment rental agreements.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Environmentally Beneficial Electrification, primarily the increased adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps, could double electricity demand by 2050 while increasing energy efficiency and reducing both pollution and GHG emissions. Any flattening of electricity demand is temporary and should not influence policy. We should be pleased to see electricity demand begin to grow more and more rapidly after about 2024. This fuel-switching from end use fossil fuel combustion to electricity will constitute the Second Great Electrification of our society and will result in a massive transfer of revenue from the fossil fuel to the electricity sector.
It is essential that we begin planning now to produce and consume twice as much electricity rather than being swayed by a temporary moderation of demand. We should also begin to plan the managed de-capitalization of the retail natural gas utilities. Natural gas, if used in the future, should only be used for generating electricity. Homes and businesses should be "all-electric" and rely on electric vehicles, induction cooking, and heat pumps. Although utilities are still trying to expand their natural gas customer base, it is essential that we recognize that any new natural gas infrastructure is likely to become a stranded asset prior to 2050.
No one compels CBC to encode data in a publicly defined syndication format (RSS or Atom). However, if they do so, then I believe it is reasonable to imply that they accept that their data will be used in the manner which is normal and customary for data in such a format and in such manner as was clearly intended by those who created these formats. If CBC does not wish to syndicate their data, then they are free to use other formats for its encoding or use access control to prevent copying of the data.
What CBC seems to be attempting to do is to "poison the stream" of syndicated data. They are entering a large and long-existing "ecosystem" of feeds, feed readers and feed aggregators and trying, via unilateral action, to force the system to work in ways that it was intentionally not intended to work. While CBC may be free to set up their own system, with it own standards and usage constraints, they cannot be permitted to impose their own ideas on others.
Encoding data in a syndication format should be considered an implicit license to syndicate that data. However, such an implicit license should be considered a limited license --- limited to things traditionally associated with syndication apps. For instance, one should assume a license to copy, distributed and display the content of an item in a reader, however, that does not imply any license to copy or modify the content for any other use. In other words, the implicit license is limited only to those functions and purposes which are inherent to syndication itself.
+1. We should also define a sunset date for combustion-based furnaces used to heat homes and buildings. We need the "Heat without Fire" provided by heat pumps -- preferably geothermal heat pumps.
bob wyman
Voting should be done using a permanent, re-countable record (i.e. paper), in person, and behind a curtain.
Computers should never be used vote. You might use them to count votes recorded on paper, but the paper should always be available for quality checks and recounts.
Absentee ballots should only be permitted for military or diplomatic personnel, or those with a certified inability to reach the polls. (i.e. note from a doctor.)
Even if we reduce natural gas use in electricity generation, there will still remain a massive amount of natural gas, oil and propane used for heating, cooking and industrial processes.
We should replace natural gas heating with geothermal heat pumps.
Lauren has been on the Internet longer than most of you have been alive. I've been following him since about 1980 or so, but he's been on the net longer than just about anyone. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A warrant to search cloud files should only be issued if a similar warrant could be issued for the homes and offices of all those who files will be searched.
Given that few governments would be able to issue warrants to search all the homes and offices in their territory, cloud warrants should not issue.
One's right to privacy should be independent of the location of private data.
Whenever anyone talks about Carbon Capture and Sequestration in underground wells, refer them to the Aliso Canyon gas leaks. Leaking methane rises since it is lighter than air, but CO2 would sink to the ground and flow like water. It would drown any living thing in its path. From this we should learn that it is too dangerous to store CO2 in the ground. Eventually, we'll have a leak. If you doubt that, then consider that natural gas has market value and the 100,000 lbs or so that are leaking every hour in LA is wasting a great deal of value. If the industry can't figure out how to securely store something that has such value, why would we believe they can safely store something that they consider to have no value? (i.e. CO2).
If they can't store methane safely in underground wells, then you can't trust them to store CO2 in such wells.
The New York State Senate uses an "Open Legislation" system that allows anyone to not only see the text of bills but also to comment on them. However, in several years of using this system, I don't think I've ever seen anyone other than me comment on a bill... If people aren't even interested enough to comment, why would we expect them to vote.
Take a look at this New York bill, https://www.nysenate.gov/legis..., as an example. At the bottom, you'll see a Disqus comment block... Try to find a bill that someone actually commented on...
The largest final, end-use demand for energy is seen in two sectors: Heating and transportation. In both these sectors, direct combustion of fossil fuels is almost universal. The market served by "electricity" is third in size behind these two. However, electrically powered heat pumps, particularly geothermal heat pumps (GHPs), and electric vehicles (EVs) are dramatically more efficient than fossil fueled systems. GHPs, even when using power generated using fossil fuels, will reduce fossil fuel consumption.
In the US, we have a few thousand electrical generation plants, but we have about 100 million buildings and many more automobiles -- almost all of which contain at least one fossil fuel burner. Even if the entire electrical system converted to "clean" power tomorrow, we'd still have a massive problem as a result of that 100's of millions of "distributed" fossil fuel burners.
In order to free ourselves of fossil fuels, we need to eliminate end-use direct combustion of fossil fuels by "fuel switching"; converting to electrical systems. The second step would be to de-carbonize the electrical generation system (using renewable systems). This is achievable.
The Utilities should be focused on the need to dramatically grow the market for electricity rather than worrying about losing 10% or 20% of today's small market to DER deployments. Today, only 1/3 of energy delivered to end-users is in the form of electricity. The remaining 2/3 is largely fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels are primarily consumed in direct, point-of-use combustion to provide energy in transportation or thermal (heating) applications. The utilities should understand that almost every penny of revenue that flows to satisfy the 2/3 of demand not currently satisfied by electricity is, in fact, money that could instead flow to the electric sector (both utilities and DER).
The key to growing electric revenues, and thus making DER irrelevant, is "fuel switching" -- switching from fossil fuels to electric vehicles and heat pumps (for heating/cooling). This switch is largely inevitable and will result in greater efficiency of energy use, lowered emissions, lower costs for consumers and higher revenues for utilities. Over the next few decades, it is clear that we must move away from fossil fuels. The environmental impacts of fossil fuel use will only become increasingly unacceptable and it is inevitable that the price of fossil fuels will increase. Over time, we'll see an increase in the portion of delivered energy that is in the form of electricity. We'll also see it generated from cleaner sources.
What we will see over the next few decades is the "Second Great Electrification" of society. The first great electrification began over a 100 years ago and has primarily focused on lighting, communications, appliances and entertainment. The Second Great Electrification will focus on transportation and HVAC (heating/cooling). The result of this will be one of the most massive transfers of income in history: We'll transfer most of the revenue and profits of the fossil fuel industry to the Electricity Generation industry -- some of which is utilities but much of which will one day be composed of site-sourced renewable energy such as rooftop solar, wind, etc.
The utilities should be encouraging electric vehicles in transportation applications and heat pumps in heating/cooling applications. Ground source heat pumps would be preferred. Use of either would decrease demand for point-of-use burning of fossil fuels, reduce emissions and energy costs while increasing demand for electricity (either locally or centrally generated.)
Electricity is only about 33% of energy "delivered" to end-users. The remainder is fossil fuels burned in point-of-use applications; primarily transportation and heating. If we are to dramatically reduce point-of-use burning of fossil fuels, we'll need to dramatically increase the amount of electricity that is generated. Electric utilities should realize that the future is electricity and they should see new business opportunities in every fossil fueled vehicle and every furnace or water heater. The future market for "electricity" is double or triple the size of today's market.
Even if distributed generation with solar panels, wind, or whatever is able to serve 20% to 30% of today's electric demand tomorrow, that will be only 7% to 9% of the total energy market. Rather than worrying about losing a small part of their future market, the electric utilities should be working on figuring out how to crush the oil and gas companies and drive them out of the point-of-use energy business.
We need to "re-electrify" this country... That's what the utilities should be focused on.
According the Wikipedia, the damage from geothermal induced seismicity in Basel, Switzerland was not the "billion in damages" that you report but actually "7 million – 9 million Swiss francs (about 6.5 million to 8.3 million U.S dollars)". But, even though your damage estimate is off by several orders of magnitude, the folk in Basel where probably right in shutting down the project before damages actually did reach the "billion" or more territory.
Some companies are developing water-free fracking methods. For instance, GasFrac uses LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gel) instead of water. If water is the problem (or, at least one the problems), it would seem that states might ban the use of water in fracking and require water-free methods. As I understand it, other companies or researches are working on fracking using CO2 or nitrogen. see: http://www.gasfrac.com/
The 10th problem, "Lack of Updates," is the one inexcusable issue in the review. Whatever other problems might exist, they could all be corrected over time if the authors of the course pay close attention to students' and reviewers' experience with the course.
Given the ability to record interactions, quiz results, and test results, the key strength of online instruction should be, in fact, that the course can undergo a process of continuous improvement -- constantly learning from students how to teach better and capturing those lessons in constantly updated course material.
An online course without a vigorous review and improvement process is simply a wasted opportunity to do better and a waste of some portion of the time of all students who follow those who have already gone before.
We need, I think, to transition from thinking about a course as something that teaches students and, instead, see it as an opportunity to learn how to teach better. For instance, when we collect "grades," we should view them as measures of the course's success rather than simply the success of the students. An ideal course would result in all qualified students successfully mastering at least the minimum level of understanding. Thus, the real reason for testing should be to determine the weaknesses of the course and the need for improvement in the course -- as indicated by students who were not successfully taught.
Because manufacturing, powering and disposing of the devices seems intuitively like a set of processes that would consume a great deal of energy and produce a great deal of emissions as a side effect.
Slashdot Mirror
We already have laws that should prevent most Airbnb rentals in New York City. As the New York Times wrote: "The New York State attorney general believes most Airbnb listings in New York are illegal." You aren't allowed to rent a room for less than 30 days unless you are present throughout the rental. Also, subletting is explicitly prohibited in most apartment rental agreements. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Environmentally Beneficial Electrification, primarily the increased adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps, could double electricity demand by 2050 while increasing energy efficiency and reducing both pollution and GHG emissions. Any flattening of electricity demand is temporary and should not influence policy. We should be pleased to see electricity demand begin to grow more and more rapidly after about 2024. This fuel-switching from end use fossil fuel combustion to electricity will constitute the Second Great Electrification of our society and will result in a massive transfer of revenue from the fossil fuel to the electricity sector.
It is essential that we begin planning now to produce and consume twice as much electricity rather than being swayed by a temporary moderation of demand. We should also begin to plan the managed de-capitalization of the retail natural gas utilities. Natural gas, if used in the future, should only be used for generating electricity. Homes and businesses should be "all-electric" and rely on electric vehicles, induction cooking, and heat pumps. Although utilities are still trying to expand their natural gas customer base, it is essential that we recognize that any new natural gas infrastructure is likely to become a stranded asset prior to 2050.
See: Brattle Group Report, projecting doubling of electricity demand: http://www.brattle.com/news-an...
Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent Explains the history of movements focused on reducing taxes of the very wealthy. Good read. Very informative.
No one compels CBC to encode data in a publicly defined syndication format (RSS or Atom). However, if they do so, then I believe it is reasonable to imply that they accept that their data will be used in the manner which is normal and customary for data in such a format and in such manner as was clearly intended by those who created these formats. If CBC does not wish to syndicate their data, then they are free to use other formats for its encoding or use access control to prevent copying of the data. What CBC seems to be attempting to do is to "poison the stream" of syndicated data. They are entering a large and long-existing "ecosystem" of feeds, feed readers and feed aggregators and trying, via unilateral action, to force the system to work in ways that it was intentionally not intended to work. While CBC may be free to set up their own system, with it own standards and usage constraints, they cannot be permitted to impose their own ideas on others. Encoding data in a syndication format should be considered an implicit license to syndicate that data. However, such an implicit license should be considered a limited license --- limited to things traditionally associated with syndication apps. For instance, one should assume a license to copy, distributed and display the content of an item in a reader, however, that does not imply any license to copy or modify the content for any other use. In other words, the implicit license is limited only to those functions and purposes which are inherent to syndication itself.
+1. We should also define a sunset date for combustion-based furnaces used to heat homes and buildings. We need the "Heat without Fire" provided by heat pumps -- preferably geothermal heat pumps. bob wyman
Voting should be done using a permanent, re-countable record (i.e. paper), in person, and behind a curtain. Computers should never be used vote. You might use them to count votes recorded on paper, but the paper should always be available for quality checks and recounts. Absentee ballots should only be permitted for military or diplomatic personnel, or those with a certified inability to reach the polls. (i.e. note from a doctor.)
There are still some of us who remember DEC. I joined DEC in 1979 and left Digital in 1991. Those were the good old days...
Even if we reduce natural gas use in electricity generation, there will still remain a massive amount of natural gas, oil and propane used for heating, cooking and industrial processes.
We should replace natural gas heating with geothermal heat pumps.
Lauren has been on the Internet longer than most of you have been alive. I've been following him since about 1980 or so, but he's been on the net longer than just about anyone. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Lauren: Thanks for your posting.
A warrant to search cloud files should only be issued if a similar warrant could be issued for the homes and offices of all those who files will be searched.
Given that few governments would be able to issue warrants to search all the homes and offices in their territory, cloud warrants should not issue.
One's right to privacy should be independent of the location of private data.
Whenever anyone talks about Carbon Capture and Sequestration in underground wells, refer them to the Aliso Canyon gas leaks. Leaking methane rises since it is lighter than air, but CO2 would sink to the ground and flow like water. It would drown any living thing in its path. From this we should learn that it is too dangerous to store CO2 in the ground. Eventually, we'll have a leak. If you doubt that, then consider that natural gas has market value and the 100,000 lbs or so that are leaking every hour in LA is wasting a great deal of value. If the industry can't figure out how to securely store something that has such value, why would we believe they can safely store something that they consider to have no value? (i.e. CO2).
If they can't store methane safely in underground wells, then you can't trust them to store CO2 in such wells.
The New York State Senate uses an "Open Legislation" system that allows anyone to not only see the text of bills but also to comment on them. However, in several years of using this system, I don't think I've ever seen anyone other than me comment on a bill... If people aren't even interested enough to comment, why would we expect them to vote.
Take a look at this New York bill, https://www.nysenate.gov/legis..., as an example. At the bottom, you'll see a Disqus comment block... Try to find a bill that someone actually commented on...
"Do the right thing" was commonly said to be the motto of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) back in the early years of the computer business.
To reduce cooling and heating expense as well as reduce environmental impact, I would insist on Geothermal Heat Pumps.
The largest final, end-use demand for energy is seen in two sectors: Heating and transportation. In both these sectors, direct combustion of fossil fuels is almost universal. The market served by "electricity" is third in size behind these two. However, electrically powered heat pumps, particularly geothermal heat pumps (GHPs), and electric vehicles (EVs) are dramatically more efficient than fossil fueled systems. GHPs, even when using power generated using fossil fuels, will reduce fossil fuel consumption.
In the US, we have a few thousand electrical generation plants, but we have about 100 million buildings and many more automobiles -- almost all of which contain at least one fossil fuel burner. Even if the entire electrical system converted to "clean" power tomorrow, we'd still have a massive problem as a result of that 100's of millions of "distributed" fossil fuel burners.
In order to free ourselves of fossil fuels, we need to eliminate end-use direct combustion of fossil fuels by "fuel switching"; converting to electrical systems. The second step would be to de-carbonize the electrical generation system (using renewable systems). This is achievable.
The Utilities should be focused on the need to dramatically grow the market for electricity rather than worrying about losing 10% or 20% of today's small market to DER deployments. Today, only 1/3 of energy delivered to end-users is in the form of electricity. The remaining 2/3 is largely fossil fuels. Those fossil fuels are primarily consumed in direct, point-of-use combustion to provide energy in transportation or thermal (heating) applications. The utilities should understand that almost every penny of revenue that flows to satisfy the 2/3 of demand not currently satisfied by electricity is, in fact, money that could instead flow to the electric sector (both utilities and DER).
The key to growing electric revenues, and thus making DER irrelevant, is "fuel switching" -- switching from fossil fuels to electric vehicles and heat pumps (for heating/cooling). This switch is largely inevitable and will result in greater efficiency of energy use, lowered emissions, lower costs for consumers and higher revenues for utilities. Over the next few decades, it is clear that we must move away from fossil fuels. The environmental impacts of fossil fuel use will only become increasingly unacceptable and it is inevitable that the price of fossil fuels will increase. Over time, we'll see an increase in the portion of delivered energy that is in the form of electricity. We'll also see it generated from cleaner sources.
What we will see over the next few decades is the "Second Great Electrification" of society. The first great electrification began over a 100 years ago and has primarily focused on lighting, communications, appliances and entertainment. The Second Great Electrification will focus on transportation and HVAC (heating/cooling). The result of this will be one of the most massive transfers of income in history: We'll transfer most of the revenue and profits of the fossil fuel industry to the Electricity Generation industry -- some of which is utilities but much of which will one day be composed of site-sourced renewable energy such as rooftop solar, wind, etc.
The utilities should be encouraging electric vehicles in transportation applications and heat pumps in heating/cooling applications. Ground source heat pumps would be preferred. Use of either would decrease demand for point-of-use burning of fossil fuels, reduce emissions and energy costs while increasing demand for electricity (either locally or centrally generated.)
Electricity is only about 33% of energy "delivered" to end-users. The remainder is fossil fuels burned in point-of-use applications; primarily transportation and heating. If we are to dramatically reduce point-of-use burning of fossil fuels, we'll need to dramatically increase the amount of electricity that is generated. Electric utilities should realize that the future is electricity and they should see new business opportunities in every fossil fueled vehicle and every furnace or water heater. The future market for "electricity" is double or triple the size of today's market.
Even if distributed generation with solar panels, wind, or whatever is able to serve 20% to 30% of today's electric demand tomorrow, that will be only 7% to 9% of the total energy market. Rather than worrying about losing a small part of their future market, the electric utilities should be working on figuring out how to crush the oil and gas companies and drive them out of the point-of-use energy business.
We need to "re-electrify" this country... That's what the utilities should be focused on.
Do you have the right to anonymity while shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater?
How can we prevent people from shouting "Fire!" if we have no means to discover *who* shouted "Fire!"?
ALL-IN-1 and Notes....
According the Wikipedia, the damage from geothermal induced seismicity in Basel, Switzerland was not the "billion in damages" that you report but actually "7 million – 9 million Swiss francs (about 6.5 million to 8.3 million U.S dollars)". But, even though your damage estimate is off by several orders of magnitude, the folk in Basel where probably right in shutting down the project before damages actually did reach the "billion" or more territory.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity_in_Basel
Some companies are developing water-free fracking methods. For instance, GasFrac uses LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gel) instead of water. If water is the problem (or, at least one the problems), it would seem that states might ban the use of water in fracking and require water-free methods. As I understand it, other companies or researches are working on fracking using CO2 or nitrogen.
see: http://www.gasfrac.com/
The 10th problem, "Lack of Updates," is the one inexcusable issue in the review. Whatever other problems might exist, they could all be corrected over time if the authors of the course pay close attention to students' and reviewers' experience with the course.
Given the ability to record interactions, quiz results, and test results, the key strength of online instruction should be, in fact, that the course can undergo a process of continuous improvement -- constantly learning from students how to teach better and capturing those lessons in constantly updated course material.
An online course without a vigorous review and improvement process is simply a wasted opportunity to do better and a waste of some portion of the time of all students who follow those who have already gone before.
We need, I think, to transition from thinking about a course as something that teaches students and, instead, see it as an opportunity to learn how to teach better. For instance, when we collect "grades," we should view them as measures of the course's success rather than simply the success of the students. An ideal course would result in all qualified students successfully mastering at least the minimum level of understanding. Thus, the real reason for testing should be to determine the weaknesses of the course and the need for improvement in the course -- as indicated by students who were not successfully taught.
How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
Because manufacturing, powering and disposing of the devices seems intuitively like a set of processes that would consume a great deal of energy and produce a great deal of emissions as a side effect.