Right there, we have reason number one why dumping sewage is not like turning on an incandescent light bulb.
*shrug* It wasn't mine originally, just trying to explain the train of thought. To make it closer, it'd be more like him dumping his untreated sewage into the river you get your drinking water from. Sure, there are treatment systems YOU can use to render said water clean & safe, but it's more expensive for you than him simply cleaning his wastewater up before dumping it. In real life it's actually a mix between the two - he cleans up his water 90% or so, to the point that it's indistinguishable from the river water(that has animals and fish peeing and dumping into it all the time), and you do the necessary treatment to make it drinkable.
So the coal burning plant is the problem, but we're not going to do anything about them.
I was getting a little distracted in my writing there, wasn't I? If you've seen my posts around in nuclear threads, you'll find that my proposed electrical generation system is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% 'other'. If I had my 'Evil Overlord' ways, we'd be on a crash project to replace those coal plants with nuclear. One of the reasons I'd be doing so is that I've estimated that replacing everybody's vehicles with electric cars would result in about 50% more household electricity usage if they all charged at home. It'd also be a great way to even out power usage, so more baseload plants would be good. BTW, this would overwhelm the difference in electricity usage via lighting.
As for acid rain, well, it 's an excellent example how some fairly easy directed regulation can fix the problem. For not much more electricity cost, we can get the acid problem down to reasonable amounts.
That means both that they have the legal tools to intrude in situations where they think illlegal light bulbs may have been traded, and the legal means to punish people who trade or use illegally obtained light bulbs.
Getting a little paranoid, aren't you? People traded in 'illegal' high flow toilets for years, nobody really got busted. It's mostly enough just to keep local stores from carrying them.
So what's more important? Undetectably better air quality or human freedom? I think the latter.
It's only undetectable on the single bulb scale. Scale it up to millions of light bulbs and you can detect the differences.
Personally, my solution would be to just charge the coal(and other) plants for any pollution they release. None of this 'carbon trading' nonsense, that's just a way to hand profit to non-producers/conserve the polluter's pie. I'd just tax X per ton of lead, Y per ton of mercury, Z per ton of sulfer, and so on. If we decide the air or water is still too dirty, ratchet the offending pollutants up by 10% or so.
That encourages a clean environment with minimal 'personal' invasion. If an economic activity is worth the pollution, it's just not practical to stop it, you pay the fees and move on. If it IS economical to control the pollutants, even if it's with a multimillion scrubber system, you install the scrubber system and avoid the fees. You don't grandfather polluting plants in, discourage upgrades where you'd have to bring them into emission standards at the same times(vastly increasing the price), discourage NEW plants that have to compete with older polluting plants, etc...
Especially for airborne pollution that can make it across the seas, I'd charge the fees on the pollution caused by any imported products as well.
There's no vast pollution problem to fix.
By who's definition? Last figures I've seen place deaths due to air pollution in the thousands per year.
and the garbage truck was going to the landfill anyway, and used lightbulbs don't add appreciably to the payload. Moreover, the garbage truck represents big centralized collection and transport, which I think is arguably more efficient than hundreds of thousands of consumers jumping into their Accord to drive burnt-out CFLs to the recycling center (along with their old paint, oil, and other things you're not supposed to throw away.)
Manufacturing cheapness aside*, if properly built and used CFLs can last 50X as long as a traditional bulb, that's quite a differential. A quick search puts a random CFL at 82 grams. In order to extract the same transport penalty, the Incandescents would have to weigh only 1.6 grams. You're also going to want to break them, but the bases will still take up more space.
As for 'jumping into their accord to drive' - As you mention, there's also the old paint, oil and other stuff not to be disposed of in regular trash. So you're making a mass trip - you can keep the few bulbs you have to dispose of until your annual trip to the recycling center. Or turn them in at collection points you go to anyways - Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, etc... Or put them in the recycle bin for your trash pickup, like my parents do.
It'll be interesting to see what the mercury content in our landfills looks like in a couple decades.
Given the death of things like mercury thermostats, toys, and high-mercury industrial FL bulbs? Probably still lower than a couple decades ago. They've dropped the amount of mercury in the standard T-8/12 bulb by more than what they put in CFL bulbs.
*We need to give CFL warranties teeth, if we want to see improved manufacturing and non-fraudulent life claims on the part of cheap CFL makers.
It's a bit diffuse, and depends on the region, but here goes: 1. Most power in the USA is generated by burning coal. 2. While regulated and producing less pollution than ever, the sheer scale at which coal is burned means a lot of pollution. Remember acid rain? 3. Running an incandescent light bulb when more efficient alternatives are available means more coal burned, more pollution in the atmosphere, millions of people breathing the pollution emitted from the coal burned to produce the electricity to light the bulb. 4. Because it causes harm to others, it's like dumping sewage on your neighbor's lawn; just spread out so that it's a microscopic amount of sewage on each person's lawn. Though at this point it breaks down because 'sewage' at that dillution level often equals 'mild fertilizer' which will make the grass greener.;)
I find that comment odd, seeing as how both FL and LED produce 'white' light the same way - by exciting a mixture of phosphors that each then emit various colors of light in narrow bands, but the mix has been designed to appear white.
The phosphors are why white LEDs look yellow when off. It's really a blue/UV LED under there.
Now, I'd believe that they tend to use MORE types of phospher, giving a superior white, but you can buy flourescents that use a wider phospher mix to give a better color index as well.
LEDs and CCFL have one huge advantage over incandescent: you can have lots of them.
You know, I think this is the critical point. I used to live in a century old house. How old was it? It used to have gas lamps. Now, you have to treat gas lamps differently, they were mounted on the wall within reach. When they put electric lighing in, they simply swapped the fixtures. Still, the ideal placement for incandescent bulbs is different than for gas lamps. It's the same for FL and LED, as you mention. CFL is an attempt to stuff FL into a incandescent sized and shaped package; tubes are more efficient, and light just as well with a modern ballast and quality tube.
With Incandescent, you generally want to go as big as possible - the bulbs get more efficient as they get larger. With CFL, the light per square inch of bulb surface is often lower, but you can make the bulbs almost arbitrarily long. 4' is common, but so isn't 8'. People tend to not like early CFLs in the home due to the possibility of flicker and lousy color, but I've been seeing them more and more, especially in kitchens where you want even light. With LED - individual lamps can be *Tiny*, and the power demands aren't great. Still, they tend to be spotlights compared to the floodlights of FL and Incandescent. Directional. So I could see a track of them pointing every which way to give an overall even lighting, but that will look odd until people get used to them.
In the end, lighting fixture construction and placement will have to change to take the quirks of the new lighting systems into account.
Personally, I installed a ring FL fixture in my bedroom - gives a more dispursed light than what the old fixture gave.
Remember 're-use' is part of being green. Buying a new oven wastes more resources than simply buying a new bulb. Though from your report the new one bakes more evenly.
As I mentioned to Frank, my concern with this is that they might simply repass everything as necessary using a 'billion page omnibill'.
I'd rather have somebody actively seeking out bad laws to repeal as part of their job, while hopefully figuring out some system to encourage the legislature that's still dedicated to passing laws to pay more attention to them(to prevent the repeals congress from immediately killing it).
The problem I have with this 'rule' is the question of 'what's a law'? I mean, how do you decide what's a single law?
I mean, take the law against rape. You can have forcible rape, date rape, statutory rape, aggreviated rape, etc... Does the law against rape, with all those subclauses, count as a law, or does each subclause count as one?
Do we say 'the heck with it' and go by word count - in which case laws end up reading like poetry(fewest words possible), and possibly being vague?
Same argument could be made about failing to renew the good ones, and I'd be afraid that they'd simply repass EVERYTHING as part of a billion page omnibill evern expiration period.
Personally, I think we have enough laws on the books at this point that we could use a dedicated house of legislature to remove laws - call them the 'House of Repeals'. They're only allowed to repeal law, reduce spending, etc...
I'd have it be 100 members, like the Senate, but be via proportional voting for electing candidates. Simple majority for passing a repeal bill, then both the house and the senate need vote on it - but only ONE needs to pass it for it to be effective, then to the president, like a normal bill.
If that doesn't work well enough, we can tweak it later.
It seems like a large percentage of people believe that if everyone stopped smoking there would be no more cancer.
Matter of fact, they're running a radio campaign up here featuring somebody talking about getting donations to fight lung cancer - talking about his wife, who never smoked, getting it, and how non-smoking lung cancer is on the rise. Makes me wonder if there was some correlation between being at higher risk for lung cancer and smoking, even before you considered the increase caused by smoking.
Wouldn't be suprised - more low level workers, such as the miners, tended to smoke. So it could have distorted the data a bit.
Fatty Methyl Esters, that Biodiesel is made of, isn't considered a hazard per MSDS. Worst component is that it's a 1 for fire. Protection is rubber gloves. Looking up the MSDS for diesel reveals that it's considered a lot more hazardous, and IS a cancer concern if it contacts skin too much. SVO can theoretically be perfectly edible, of course.
Burning it in a diesel engine can raise questions, but of the sources I found, most mentioned that measured emissions for SVO and bio-diesel are essentially identical, and much cleaner than diesel. This site did mention in the conclusion that a properly modified SVO engine was cleaner yet than biodiesel on various 'non-regulated' compounds, including cancer-causing ones. Except for NOx, at least. What level of NOx it takes to be more dangerous than those other compounds, it didn't say.
In the end, I think you'd end up using biodiesel a lot anyways - for warming up the engines down south, and in the extreme north during wintertime w/additives just to get the stuff to flow so it can be pumped to the engine.
You're assuming that the THz scanners are effective. Trust me, the 'weakest link' ISN'T the airports without them. Also, the question becomes one of 'is the expense of the scanners worth any problems they might prevent'? Thus far they haven't shown effectiveness at preventing hijacking - armoring up the cockpit door and passanger response change HAS, and in comparison those actions were free, thus economical to enact.
swap 'drone' with 'firearm' and 'FAA' with 'BATF'. His post is a mismash of various gun regulations past and present in the USA. Though to be fair he didn't put in things like having the drone in the a federal building is a felony, even if deactivated.
$20 Airhog toy = $20 worth of machined metal that's now worth more like $2k because it's a silencer and needs to be registered.
The liability thing, more so than 'insurance', is likely the reason why they need state approval, and probably some legislation or at least judicial rulings.
Personally, I think it's going to mostly be the 'owner', but with the maker of the automation system(which isn't necessarily the car manufacturer) will carry significant amounts of liability coverage 'just in case' a flaw is found in their system. From a legislative standpoint, I'd consider indemnifying them, or at least limiting their liability(as in 'no punitive awards if the programmers haven't figured out how to best handle situation X yet'), as long as they can demonstrate that their system is a standard deviation safer than average human drivers, so that it's automatically saving property/lives, and that they have an active program to make it better. Once they are able to meet that standard reliably, start tightening the screws like they did for crash standards. Something like 'you have to be within a standard deviation of the best unit on the market'.
I say the 'owner' because some states have 'no fault' insurance laws, where you don't carry insurance in case you hit somebody, you carry insurance in case some fool hits you. You also have the problem that the system is most likely going to fail when presented with unusual circumstances - trying to use the autopilot in a blizzard, for example. Or with poorly maintained tires, and the poor thing just wasn't able to cope with a blown tire(though tire damage should be assumed as a possibility to be programmed for). Or the system could otherwise fail through sheer neglect, so on and so forth.
If the maker has to pay for the insurance, they'll increase the cost of the system to cover it, but it 'should' be counter-acted by lowered insurance premiums on the part of the owner. If it's actually substantially safer, even if he has to pay the whole cost the insurance should be less.
Also, a wood stove is a stored solar powered stove.
That's getting a bit pedantic, isn't it? I know a dude who calls wind mills and farms 'solar power' because the energy in the wind ultimately came from the sun. However, the means by which you utilize the power is very different. As are some of the concerns - you typically get more pollution with the wood furnace, for example.
So a solar furance is 'directly' powered by the sun, a wood furnace is powered by wood. If you have some practically microscopic wood farm inside the device, and said wood is then fed into a furnacce, then I'd consider it to be be a 'solar furnace'.
As for using hemp as a fuel - from a cost perspective you're probably better off burning it directly, though I could see a hemp rope/cloth facility using the leavings to power itself. For something this small, I'd be concerned that the materials would burn too hot/fast without extensive and therefore expensive processing. BTW.that's true of most grasses and other non-woody plants. Ultimately there are many potential fuel choices.
Doh... Of course you're correct, and I'm mostly thinking of my micro-production at home. Of course, back in the day you had the village baker, the average family didn't bake their own bread. What I get for trying to be among the first to post.;)
I should have stated a concern more for how easy it is to control the temperature of the stove - keeping it reliable is more important than the exact temperature, and many older ovens were large enough that if you wanted hot you used the back of the fire/oven, if you wanted lower temperature you kept it nearer the front.
As for the outdoor brick/mud oven - if it's solar powered you need something to control the damper, and if you're using stored heat you need a way to moderate the heat from extremely sunny/hot days, while still keeping it hot enough on rainy days.
Supplimental heat from a fire, or like in the one case it's 'add water here, get steam there', so if you have some sort of steam limiter, you have temperature control.
Reading the article, the first contender came with a proposal to give them efficient wood stoves first, to displace the open fires they're currently using. Doesn't imply that they have gas.
Of course, it makes me want to point out that a modern high efficiency wood stove might sufficiently solve the problem to the point that it renders the solar stove unnecessary. Wood is a renewable resource, they apparently have sufficient quantities of it, and from what I remember, ye old wood stoves were ~10x as efficient as open pit fires at heating and cooking, and modern high efficiency ones are ~50% more efficient than the ye old varieties.
So you're lookng at using 1/15th the wood. At which point you have to convince people that using the solar stove is more convienient/valuable than dealing with the much smaller amount of wood the solid fueled stove needs. Well, don't forget cleaning requirements. Let's see, stove rating areas:
I wonder how they thought the original designs would be accepted in the first place - We've long incorporated larger tanks for solar water heating to provide hot water at night. Also, even rural types like their convenience, which means being able to cook inside.
BTW, for the Americans - 200C ~ 400F. Considering 80% of my cooking is at 350F, that's sufficient.
Reviewing the designs, I am a touch concerned that I don't see thermostats for keeping the temp steady. Not as necessary for meat, but if you're baking bread you need fairly fine control.
Or they could just raise the price of the room by $1 and save the $30k. For that matter, I find $100 per room optimistic, it'd more likely be like $200 per room equipment, $400 labor. It'll actually annoy customers as well if they're like the prototypes and have only 1 outlet per panel.
You're also forgetting about power use costs on the part of the hotel - something around 10 cents a kwh. Figure on 1 kwh for the laptop and cellphone, maybe another for the TV. You'd have to run a hairdryer for nearly an hour to reach a kwh, but eh. People would probably rebel at paying for the minibar fridge.
3kwh = $.30, reducing income to 70 cents for the electricity. You have billing expenses, another 10-20 cents, and don't forget maintenance. GFCI sockets aren't as reliable as traditional ones, and these are likely less still. You're probably looking at closer to $18k/year, which means it takes 2 years to break even. Assuming your customers don't rebel.
Heck, why do you need per socket for this? I can understand for recharging electric vehicles, but not normal outlets.
Seriously this - it'd take a 100 watt laptop 10 hours to consume 10-20 cents of electricity. That's a price point where 'getting a card' or some sort of 'smart' extension cord to authorize your device is enough hassle to make people avoid you.
It's like a toll road where you have to pay $5 -.50 cents goes towards maintaining the road,.50 towards paying off the construction, $2 towards collection, and $2 to 'administration' costs.
I dislike schemes where the costs of selling you something execeeds the cost of the item.
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Right there, we have reason number one why dumping sewage is not like turning on an incandescent light bulb.
*shrug* It wasn't mine originally, just trying to explain the train of thought. To make it closer, it'd be more like him dumping his untreated sewage into the river you get your drinking water from. Sure, there are treatment systems YOU can use to render said water clean & safe, but it's more expensive for you than him simply cleaning his wastewater up before dumping it. In real life it's actually a mix between the two - he cleans up his water 90% or so, to the point that it's indistinguishable from the river water(that has animals and fish peeing and dumping into it all the time), and you do the necessary treatment to make it drinkable.
So the coal burning plant is the problem, but we're not going to do anything about them.
I was getting a little distracted in my writing there, wasn't I? If you've seen my posts around in nuclear threads, you'll find that my proposed electrical generation system is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% 'other'. If I had my 'Evil Overlord' ways, we'd be on a crash project to replace those coal plants with nuclear. One of the reasons I'd be doing so is that I've estimated that replacing everybody's vehicles with electric cars would result in about 50% more household electricity usage if they all charged at home. It'd also be a great way to even out power usage, so more baseload plants would be good. BTW, this would overwhelm the difference in electricity usage via lighting.
As for acid rain, well, it 's an excellent example how some fairly easy directed regulation can fix the problem. For not much more electricity cost, we can get the acid problem down to reasonable amounts.
That means both that they have the legal tools to intrude in situations where they think illlegal light bulbs may have been traded, and the legal means to punish people who trade or use illegally obtained light bulbs.
Getting a little paranoid, aren't you? People traded in 'illegal' high flow toilets for years, nobody really got busted. It's mostly enough just to keep local stores from carrying them.
So what's more important? Undetectably better air quality or human freedom? I think the latter.
It's only undetectable on the single bulb scale. Scale it up to millions of light bulbs and you can detect the differences.
Personally, my solution would be to just charge the coal(and other) plants for any pollution they release. None of this 'carbon trading' nonsense, that's just a way to hand profit to non-producers/conserve the polluter's pie. I'd just tax X per ton of lead, Y per ton of mercury, Z per ton of sulfer, and so on. If we decide the air or water is still too dirty, ratchet the offending pollutants up by 10% or so.
That encourages a clean environment with minimal 'personal' invasion. If an economic activity is worth the pollution, it's just not practical to stop it, you pay the fees and move on. If it IS economical to control the pollutants, even if it's with a multimillion scrubber system, you install the scrubber system and avoid the fees. You don't grandfather polluting plants in, discourage upgrades where you'd have to bring them into emission standards at the same times(vastly increasing the price), discourage NEW plants that have to compete with older polluting plants, etc...
Especially for airborne pollution that can make it across the seas, I'd charge the fees on the pollution caused by any imported products as well.
There's no vast pollution problem to fix.
By who's definition? Last figures I've seen place deaths due to air pollution in the thousands per year.
and the garbage truck was going to the landfill anyway, and used lightbulbs don't add appreciably to the payload. Moreover, the garbage truck represents big centralized collection and transport, which I think is arguably more efficient than hundreds of thousands of consumers jumping into their Accord to drive burnt-out CFLs to the recycling center (along with their old paint, oil, and other things you're not supposed to throw away.)
Manufacturing cheapness aside*, if properly built and used CFLs can last 50X as long as a traditional bulb, that's quite a differential. A quick search puts a random CFL at 82 grams. In order to extract the same transport penalty, the Incandescents would have to weigh only 1.6 grams. You're also going to want to break them, but the bases will still take up more space.
As for 'jumping into their accord to drive' - As you mention, there's also the old paint, oil and other stuff not to be disposed of in regular trash. So you're making a mass trip - you can keep the few bulbs you have to dispose of until your annual trip to the recycling center. Or turn them in at collection points you go to anyways - Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, etc... Or put them in the recycle bin for your trash pickup, like my parents do.
It'll be interesting to see what the mercury content in our landfills looks like in a couple decades.
Given the death of things like mercury thermostats, toys, and high-mercury industrial FL bulbs? Probably still lower than a couple decades ago. They've dropped the amount of mercury in the standard T-8/12 bulb by more than what they put in CFL bulbs.
*We need to give CFL warranties teeth, if we want to see improved manufacturing and non-fraudulent life claims on the part of cheap CFL makers.
It's a bit diffuse, and depends on the region, but here goes: ;)
1. Most power in the USA is generated by burning coal.
2. While regulated and producing less pollution than ever, the sheer scale at which coal is burned means a lot of pollution. Remember acid rain?
3. Running an incandescent light bulb when more efficient alternatives are available means more coal burned, more pollution in the atmosphere, millions of people breathing the pollution emitted from the coal burned to produce the electricity to light the bulb.
4. Because it causes harm to others, it's like dumping sewage on your neighbor's lawn; just spread out so that it's a microscopic amount of sewage on each person's lawn. Though at this point it breaks down because 'sewage' at that dillution level often equals 'mild fertilizer' which will make the grass greener.
I find that comment odd, seeing as how both FL and LED produce 'white' light the same way - by exciting a mixture of phosphors that each then emit various colors of light in narrow bands, but the mix has been designed to appear white.
The phosphors are why white LEDs look yellow when off. It's really a blue/UV LED under there.
Now, I'd believe that they tend to use MORE types of phospher, giving a superior white, but you can buy flourescents that use a wider phospher mix to give a better color index as well.
LEDs and CCFL have one huge advantage over incandescent: you can have lots of them.
You know, I think this is the critical point. I used to live in a century old house. How old was it? It used to have gas lamps. Now, you have to treat gas lamps differently, they were mounted on the wall within reach. When they put electric lighing in, they simply swapped the fixtures. Still, the ideal placement for incandescent bulbs is different than for gas lamps. It's the same for FL and LED, as you mention. CFL is an attempt to stuff FL into a incandescent sized and shaped package; tubes are more efficient, and light just as well with a modern ballast and quality tube.
With Incandescent, you generally want to go as big as possible - the bulbs get more efficient as they get larger. With CFL, the light per square inch of bulb surface is often lower, but you can make the bulbs almost arbitrarily long. 4' is common, but so isn't 8'. People tend to not like early CFLs in the home due to the possibility of flicker and lousy color, but I've been seeing them more and more, especially in kitchens where you want even light. With LED - individual lamps can be *Tiny*, and the power demands aren't great. Still, they tend to be spotlights compared to the floodlights of FL and Incandescent. Directional. So I could see a track of them pointing every which way to give an overall even lighting, but that will look odd until people get used to them.
In the end, lighting fixture construction and placement will have to change to take the quirks of the new lighting systems into account.
Personally, I installed a ring FL fixture in my bedroom - gives a more dispursed light than what the old fixture gave.
Maybe he has a classic/antique one?
Remember 're-use' is part of being green. Buying a new oven wastes more resources than simply buying a new bulb. Though from your report the new one bakes more evenly.
As I mentioned to Frank, my concern with this is that they might simply repass everything as necessary using a 'billion page omnibill'.
I'd rather have somebody actively seeking out bad laws to repeal as part of their job, while hopefully figuring out some system to encourage the legislature that's still dedicated to passing laws to pay more attention to them(to prevent the repeals congress from immediately killing it).
The problem I have with this 'rule' is the question of 'what's a law'? I mean, how do you decide what's a single law?
I mean, take the law against rape. You can have forcible rape, date rape, statutory rape, aggreviated rape, etc... Does the law against rape, with all those subclauses, count as a law, or does each subclause count as one?
Do we say 'the heck with it' and go by word count - in which case laws end up reading like poetry(fewest words possible), and possibly being vague?
I view it a bit like tuning an engine - there are many options that affect many things. It depends on what your goal is.
Unfortuantly, at this point the USG is equivalent to an old naturally aspirated V-8 with serious carbon buildup problems.
Same argument could be made about failing to renew the good ones, and I'd be afraid that they'd simply repass EVERYTHING as part of a billion page omnibill evern expiration period.
Personally, I think we have enough laws on the books at this point that we could use a dedicated house of legislature to remove laws - call them the 'House of Repeals'. They're only allowed to repeal law, reduce spending, etc...
I'd have it be 100 members, like the Senate, but be via proportional voting for electing candidates. Simple majority for passing a repeal bill, then both the house and the senate need vote on it - but only ONE needs to pass it for it to be effective, then to the president, like a normal bill.
If that doesn't work well enough, we can tweak it later.
It seems like a large percentage of people believe that if everyone stopped smoking there would be no more cancer.
Matter of fact, they're running a radio campaign up here featuring somebody talking about getting donations to fight lung cancer - talking about his wife, who never smoked, getting it, and how non-smoking lung cancer is on the rise. Makes me wonder if there was some correlation between being at higher risk for lung cancer and smoking, even before you considered the increase caused by smoking.
Wouldn't be suprised - more low level workers, such as the miners, tended to smoke. So it could have distorted the data a bit.
Okay, You made me do some research.
Fatty Methyl Esters, that Biodiesel is made of, isn't considered a hazard per MSDS. Worst component is that it's a 1 for fire. Protection is rubber gloves. Looking up the MSDS for diesel reveals that it's considered a lot more hazardous, and IS a cancer concern if it contacts skin too much. SVO can theoretically be perfectly edible, of course.
Burning it in a diesel engine can raise questions, but of the sources I found, most mentioned that measured emissions for SVO and bio-diesel are essentially identical, and much cleaner than diesel. This site did mention in the conclusion that a properly modified SVO engine was cleaner yet than biodiesel on various 'non-regulated' compounds, including cancer-causing ones. Except for NOx, at least. What level of NOx it takes to be more dangerous than those other compounds, it didn't say.
In the end, I think you'd end up using biodiesel a lot anyways - for warming up the engines down south, and in the extreme north during wintertime w/additives just to get the stuff to flow so it can be pumped to the engine.
You're assuming that the THz scanners are effective. Trust me, the 'weakest link' ISN'T the airports without them. Also, the question becomes one of 'is the expense of the scanners worth any problems they might prevent'? Thus far they haven't shown effectiveness at preventing hijacking - armoring up the cockpit door and passanger response change HAS, and in comparison those actions were free, thus economical to enact.
swap 'drone' with 'firearm' and 'FAA' with 'BATF'. His post is a mismash of various gun regulations past and present in the USA. Though to be fair he didn't put in things like having the drone in the a federal building is a felony, even if deactivated.
$20 Airhog toy = $20 worth of machined metal that's now worth more like $2k because it's a silencer and needs to be registered.
Oh certainly. I'm surprised it wasn't $20M, or even $200M. When you get into governmental waste, it's not hard to start hitting the billions.
The liability thing, more so than 'insurance', is likely the reason why they need state approval, and probably some legislation or at least judicial rulings.
Personally, I think it's going to mostly be the 'owner', but with the maker of the automation system(which isn't necessarily the car manufacturer) will carry significant amounts of liability coverage 'just in case' a flaw is found in their system. From a legislative standpoint, I'd consider indemnifying them, or at least limiting their liability(as in 'no punitive awards if the programmers haven't figured out how to best handle situation X yet'), as long as they can demonstrate that their system is a standard deviation safer than average human drivers, so that it's automatically saving property/lives, and that they have an active program to make it better. Once they are able to meet that standard reliably, start tightening the screws like they did for crash standards. Something like 'you have to be within a standard deviation of the best unit on the market'.
I say the 'owner' because some states have 'no fault' insurance laws, where you don't carry insurance in case you hit somebody, you carry insurance in case some fool hits you. You also have the problem that the system is most likely going to fail when presented with unusual circumstances - trying to use the autopilot in a blizzard, for example. Or with poorly maintained tires, and the poor thing just wasn't able to cope with a blown tire(though tire damage should be assumed as a possibility to be programmed for). Or the system could otherwise fail through sheer neglect, so on and so forth.
If the maker has to pay for the insurance, they'll increase the cost of the system to cover it, but it 'should' be counter-acted by lowered insurance premiums on the part of the owner. If it's actually substantially safer, even if he has to pay the whole cost the insurance should be less.
Check out Semi-automatic transmissions and formula one race cars with 'paddle shifters'. It's already been done, and with a unpredictable human still at the wheel as well!
Don't forget double clutch systems either. They're all computer controlled.
Also, a wood stove is a stored solar powered stove.
That's getting a bit pedantic, isn't it? I know a dude who calls wind mills and farms 'solar power' because the energy in the wind ultimately came from the sun. However, the means by which you utilize the power is very different. As are some of the concerns - you typically get more pollution with the wood furnace, for example.
So a solar furance is 'directly' powered by the sun, a wood furnace is powered by wood. If you have some practically microscopic wood farm inside the device, and said wood is then fed into a furnacce, then I'd consider it to be be a 'solar furnace'.
As for using hemp as a fuel - from a cost perspective you're probably better off burning it directly, though I could see a hemp rope/cloth facility using the leavings to power itself. For something this small, I'd be concerned that the materials would burn too hot/fast without extensive and therefore expensive processing. BTW.that's true of most grasses and other non-woody plants. Ultimately there are many potential fuel choices.
Doh... Of course you're correct, and I'm mostly thinking of my micro-production at home. Of course, back in the day you had the village baker, the average family didn't bake their own bread. What I get for trying to be among the first to post. ;)
I should have stated a concern more for how easy it is to control the temperature of the stove - keeping it reliable is more important than the exact temperature, and many older ovens were large enough that if you wanted hot you used the back of the fire/oven, if you wanted lower temperature you kept it nearer the front.
As for the outdoor brick/mud oven - if it's solar powered you need something to control the damper, and if you're using stored heat you need a way to moderate the heat from extremely sunny/hot days, while still keeping it hot enough on rainy days.
Supplimental heat from a fire, or like in the one case it's 'add water here, get steam there', so if you have some sort of steam limiter, you have temperature control.
Reading the article, the first contender came with a proposal to give them efficient wood stoves first, to displace the open fires they're currently using. Doesn't imply that they have gas.
Of course, it makes me want to point out that a modern high efficiency wood stove might sufficiently solve the problem to the point that it renders the solar stove unnecessary. Wood is a renewable resource, they apparently have sufficient quantities of it, and from what I remember, ye old wood stoves were ~10x as efficient as open pit fires at heating and cooking, and modern high efficiency ones are ~50% more efficient than the ye old varieties.
So you're lookng at using 1/15th the wood. At which point you have to convince people that using the solar stove is more convienient/valuable than dealing with the much smaller amount of wood the solid fueled stove needs. Well, don't forget cleaning requirements.
Let's see, stove rating areas:
The more you get, the better the product.
I wonder how they thought the original designs would be accepted in the first place - We've long incorporated larger tanks for solar water heating to provide hot water at night. Also, even rural types like their convenience, which means being able to cook inside. BTW, for the Americans - 200C ~ 400F. Considering 80% of my cooking is at 350F, that's sufficient. Reviewing the designs, I am a touch concerned that I don't see thermostats for keeping the temp steady. Not as necessary for meat, but if you're baking bread you need fairly fine control.
You're also forgetting about power use costs on the part of the hotel - something around 10 cents a kwh. Figure on 1 kwh for the laptop and cellphone, maybe another for the TV. You'd have to run a hairdryer for nearly an hour to reach a kwh, but eh. People would probably rebel at paying for the minibar fridge.
3kwh = $.30, reducing income to 70 cents for the electricity. You have billing expenses, another 10-20 cents, and don't forget maintenance. GFCI sockets aren't as reliable as traditional ones, and these are likely less still. You're probably looking at closer to $18k/year, which means it takes 2 years to break even. Assuming your customers don't rebel.
Heck, why do you need per socket for this? I can understand for recharging electric vehicles, but not normal outlets.
Seriously this - it'd take a 100 watt laptop 10 hours to consume 10-20 cents of electricity. That's a price point where 'getting a card' or some sort of 'smart' extension cord to authorize your device is enough hassle to make people avoid you. It's like a toll road where you have to pay $5 - .50 cents goes towards maintaining the road, .50 towards paying off the construction, $2 towards collection, and $2 to 'administration' costs.
I dislike schemes where the costs of selling you something execeeds the cost of the item.
Same here - I normally end up turning the porn audio completely off. Either I can't stand the 'music', or the voices.