Coal power doesn't cost 10 cents a kwh. It's more like 4-6 cents, before distribution grid costs. Unless you go off the grid, you're still going to have that, as the power lines need to be maintained.
Of course, clean coal is much more expensive, quite possibly making it more expensive than building nuclear plants. The level of cleaning/scrubbing making coal clean is expensive.
They may be the world leader, but I'd argue that it's not helping them as much as nuclear power is helping France, which, on average is a electricity exporter.
While increasing the efficiency of a solar cell can indeed make it cheaper, in that if the increase in efficiency doesn't significantly increase the cost of a cell, making it so you need half as many, half as much mounting equipment, etc... It doesn't really matter.
I agree with you, the significant obstacle isn't the efficiency of solar panels. It's the cost of them, more so than the space they take up.
If we could produce solar panels that were half as efficient as current panels for the cost of a ream of paper(for the area), that were still able to have the lifespan, it'd be a no brainer in many cases. If we were able to make panels, even minimally efficient, that were about the same cost and durability as shingles, it'd be easy.
This is almost exactly the argument I used to convince some people to finally jump on the computer wagon.
Sure, it'll be cheaper and more powerful in the future. But they were running a business and the expected savings would pay for the systems in less than two years with an expected lifespan of at least five.
Then again, they didn't shock her a huge number of times.
You break a bone on somebody that old - infection could set in, a clot could break loose and cause a stroke.
That's what I mean by it's safer than the alternatives. Worst case, slap a IED on their chest for a while and monitor their heart. Take them to the hospital.
People get tasered every day and it only kills a couple a year in the whole nation, assuming you take worst case scenarios. Most of those involved dozens or even hundreds of shocks. Thus my statement of develop a ROE for the taser, don't use it as a compliance tool(torture), use it as a tool to temporarily disable the subject so you can disarm & cuff them.
A taser should only be used when a cop would normally use a gun, and the exact same procedure should used every time a cop discharges a taser as would be used if a cop discharges a gun.
Actually, I support the usage of a taser where the taser replaces more lethal/dangerous means, not just the gun.
For example, people can be killed, have limbs broken, and concussions as a result of the usage of a baton or truncheon. A taser is, properly used, safer for both police officers and suspect than the previous methods.
What needs to be emphasized is proper use.
One specific case I can think of involved a very old woman - the point I'd like to make is that it's very easy for that very old woman to injure herself. Much less a physically fit officer. Just think of a scenario like this - officer has hold of a arm. Grandma simply drops, placing her entire weight on fragile decalcified bones. Snap - there goes a elbow, wrist, or forearm.
A taser, while still dangerous, is probably less dangerous in such a scenario. But it gets on the newspaper as 'Officer tases 80 year old granny!'.
In line with this, the UN's position isn't that taser use is necessarily torture, it's that it CAN be torture.
Much like using a baton in the restraining on somebody resisting arrest isn't torture, but using on somebody who's restrained is.
I think that the honest answer would be to leave the cause of death alone unless the taser company manages to provide substantial proof otherwise. I can't say how good their proof is in this case.
All the deaths that I'm aware of involved numerous shocks, and people who are perhaps more vulnerable. The correct solution, in my belief is to emphasize the taser's less lethal nature.
The alternative methods officers have to subdue a resisting/fighting subject are nearly always more damaging. Arm bars, blows, sometimes baton or truncheon assisted, having numerous officers pile on top of the suspect, etc... In some cases the alternative might even be to shoot the suspect.
The taser is safer. We shouldn't necessarily condemn the taser, instead concentrating on proper use of it. There are ROE's for the use of the firearm, maybe the ROE for taser use needs to be tightened up in some districts.
By the way, a small scale solution could be to run specific circuits off lead acid batteries (e.g. 12V lighting or a computer with a 12V input power supply), primarily charged by by the renewable source, with a backup from the grid triggered when the battery drops below a set value. I'd ask around at RV suppliers who sell small scale solar systems to see what they have.
Most of the time, if you have a connection to the grid you use that - running the meter backwards when more power is being produced by the renewable source than consumed. Batteries wear out, a grid connection doesn't.
Indeed, specifically in the case of the sales tax, import tarriffs:
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
Basically, NY can't put a sales tax on out of state goods because it's actually a tariff. They WOULD be allowed to charge a tariff if, for example, they need to inspect something. Let's say NY decides all foreign food needs to be inspected for safety. They could levy a tariff to cover that. BUT, any excess(the tariff makes more money than the testing costs) belongs to the federal government.
Yes, cities often put an extra tax on to cover their expenses. Food and medicine is often exempted*. NY is known for 'tax holidays' where they'll make clothing under a certain dollar amount tax free. It can get ugly.
If Amazon banned New York, held firm, it would send a message to other states and the affiliates in those states to not pass this kind of law
Bingo. This law will cost your state jobs and revenue. Have a nice day.
It's sort of like Barrett refusing to do business with any state that bans his firearms to citizens. (IE California).
He's done it too. California police departments got a bit of a shock after endorsing the banning of the.50BMG round and found out that they could no longer get their material destruction/long range sniper rifles serviced.
And PLEASE stop comparing American states to countries: Canada != New York State. The United States are a country, like Canada, France or the Federated States of Micronesia.
While we're more tightly knit than say, the EU, we're also a lot looser than most countries.
So it's not 100% wrong. Besides, the US constitution could be considered the original NAFTA. Tariffs between states are strictly forbidden, and indeed, this could be considered a tariff.
If I WAS amazon, I'd take it to court in that fashion. If I felt it necessary, I'd take the bite and stop selling in NY. Encourage other online retailors to do the same. The people would complain if that happened.
It seemed like a peculiar (and slightly crackpot) hobby with no obvious application. Heh.
Heh indeed. Most applications are indeed illegal, but imagine parking your van outside a bank and tuning in. Account numbers, passwords, all sorts of information.
On the governmental side, the stakes were much higher and therefore they got much more creative.
Hint: Your keyboard isn't encrypted. Your video cable isn't encrypted(yet). Both can be picked up from non-zero distances. I saw a japanese program on it once.
My yardstick? When it's for 'science' rather than 'profit' it becomes science or investigation rather than graverobbing. It becomes archaeology when everybody who knew the individual in life, heck, when everyone who was alive when the individual was alive, has passed on. Bonus points for major culture shift, knowledge loss as well.
So yes, extracting General Washington could be considered archaeology. Same with Lincoln.
Still, the trouble with King Tut is the very mass of stuff Pharohs were buried with. It can provide clues into a culture that the bears no resemblance to it's descendants.
At the same time, I think that respect should be shown. Make up a fake body to show to the public. Put the body and artifacts back when you're done(though adding preservative structures, coatings, containers is ok too).
I know this is cynical to even say but if the police don't have a lot of free time then they're going to make a decision that will create less hassle for themselves.
Generally speaking, while an insurance company might be a bit more likely to have a lawyer on staff, a family can make a police officer's life MUCH more of a hassle than the insurance company. A lawyer costs money, even if he's staff. He could be doing something else, after all.
On the other hand, you could have a family that's calling you up every day, visiting, writing letters, complaining, etc... And they're willing to 'work' pro-bono.
The insurance company is much more likely to simply go 'meh' and pay off. They've done it before.
Of course, I'm curious as to the method/cause of death. Did he shoot himself? Run his car into a bridge? Take too many pills? Slit his wrists?
On the gun side, I think that it's fairly traditional, and regularly swept under the rug, for a police officer/military member/veteran/hunter type to off themself with a firearm, leave no note, but with cleaning supplies laid out. It's routinely called a 'cleaning accident'. I say that because I clean my guns regularly, and they don't get pointed at my head, much less have the trigger pulled, during any part of the operation. Step 1 is to unload/verify unloaded. Step 2 is generally to pull the bolt out/slide off of the gun. At that point, the gun is not going to fire. The last step would be to reload, in the case of my defensive weapons.
So yes, I consider 99.99% of 'accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning the gun' as a suicide.
On the other types - well, there was a major star who died from drug interactions combined with unsafe dosages; but they don't think it was suicide. Slitting the wrists would be hard to wriggle out of. Is there the potential that he wasn't in his right mind?
A safety deposit box isn't a bad idea for keeping your important records. In my safety deposit box, I keep the title to my house*, the title to my car, my will**, extra checks, passport, birth certificate, etc...
Having a password list in there, in a sealed envelope for your executor isn't a bad idea. They're going to need a death cert and key to get in there anyways.
*Yes, I'm unusual, I own my own house in the free and clear. **I have extra copies with my executor and in my house, in my records box.
Are you putting up the solar to save money or save the planet?
Nothing we can do is going to kill the planet. So that's out.
On the other hand, I DO like clean air. But I also like money. Decisions, Decisions...
Making solar panels isn't a green proposition for the most part, but neither is coal power.
Zero sum gain cash flow + lower carbon footprint
Problem is, every time I've calculated it out, even using inflated California electricity prices, it's net negative on the cash flow. Assuming a modest 5% cost of capital, solar systems will never pay themselves off. That's assuming zero maintenance after installation. Heck, I'm not even counting installation labor in a lot of them, just the price of the kit.
So first decide, are you saving the planet or making money?
At the moment, making money. Personally, I'd love to dump my money into purchasing a new nuke plant. Don't quite have the money for that though, don't bust the private investor cap where I'm allowed to get into various speculative investments.
Personally, I'd keep jacking the clean coal requirements up. Either they'll make it clean or they'll switch to something else.
Meanwhile I keep looking for ways to economically save energy. You see, I think that that's the true trick. I've been shopping for a freezer for a while - I passed up the minimum energy efficiency Kenmore for the Energy Star Whirlpool. Waited for it to be on sale, too. Going by the energy efficiency ratings, I would have made up for the extra cost even if I hadn't gotten it on sale within the first three years.
I keep looking at those heat pump water heaters, I remember seeing one for $300, which would be a good deal, if it was available.;) My house is mostly fluorescent.
Past 90% or so you need more than a still, you need some sort of 'molecular sieve'. In practice that translates to hydrophillic granules that absorb the water, leaving the ethanol.
Generally speaking, from what I've seen it's a more direct process. You convert the cellulose directly into the gasoline analogue rather than converting it to ethanol first.
Coal gasification has existed since WWII, it's just a matter of what's cheaper, combined with lead times.
allows them to be processed/assembled into Ethanol easily and efficiently on-site.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, personally. A large factory type ethanol plant can produce it in far larger containers, pay closer attention(on average) to the mix, use a larger still with more advanced heat exchangers, resulting in less heat loss for a given amount of distilling.
Then there's transportation issues. While transporting ethanol might be a pain, we've been transporting more volitile and/or sensitive chemicals for years. Gasoline, Milk, Propane, Natural Gas, Vodka, Beer, etc... For every gallon of ethanol you're having to transport 14 pounds of sugar. A gallon of ethanol only weighs 6.6 pounds. So while transporting the liquid is more of a pain in the butt, is it really more expensive than transporting twice the mass of sugar?
he'll be able to strike it big if he can package/scale this device into a version suitable for a filling station, and convert the majority of the input products to a liquefied form.
Not very likely, I think. Even with a scaled up, more efficient process, a single pump would likely be able to go through a months worth of production in a single day, even if the average quick-shop building was completely converted over.
Yes, if this catches on then the price of inedible sugar will skyrocket.
The cameras were also in plain sight, and he was especially brazen in how he went about it all.
The UK currently has one of the most extensive deployments of surveillance cameras in the world. Has it worked for them? From everything I've read, they would have prevented more crimes investing in more officers.
And the reason is just as you cited - an insignificant number of those cameras are monitored at any given moment, so seeing a crime live is rare. So at most, they're used for evidence after the fact. But in a city of several million, you could have 10k criminals, thugs, lowlifes. Even if you get a nice close up of the face, most of the time you don't recognize him or her, thus the video is effectively useless.
I think rental insurance is definitely a good idea, however it's never going to reimburse you 100%. There's deductibles, unique items, data on your HDs and such. That antique picture. Family photographs*. The jewelry from your grandmother.
If it's worth $2 at a pawn shop, some thieves will steal it.
So, first priority would be to prevent the incident Second would be catching the thief in the act Third would be detection, catching and recovery after the fact. Last would be calling the insurance company.
*While a thief might not steal them, he may damage them during the robbery.
So yes, they could indeed cut the railroad a deal, but for how long?
Personally, I'd see them electrifying the switching yards first. That's where you have a fair bit of the acceleration, after all. You'd keep the engines for the time being for speed maintenance and starting if they have to stop outside of a yard. Or go up a hill.;)
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I find it interesting that you're 40% NG(20% cola) and that you're getting 7.68 c/KWh.
NG generally has cheap construction costs and expensive running costs. But you probably have substantional cheap NG deposits.
Coal power doesn't cost 10 cents a kwh. It's more like 4-6 cents, before distribution grid costs. Unless you go off the grid, you're still going to have that, as the power lines need to be maintained.
Of course, clean coal is much more expensive, quite possibly making it more expensive than building nuclear plants. The level of cleaning/scrubbing making coal clean is expensive.
'Huge' is now defined as 3% now?
They may be the world leader, but I'd argue that it's not helping them as much as nuclear power is helping France, which, on average is a electricity exporter.
Since solar is currently 4X, that means it will drop to .2-.8X of CURRENT power costs.
Do you happen to have a source on this? All the times I've figured it, it's around 10X as much.
4X might be with some of the high levels of subsidies and such. Or a large solar thermal installation, which photovoltiacs don't figure into.
Or maybe it's compared to retail electrical prices, and doesn't include support equipment such as the inverter.
While increasing the efficiency of a solar cell can indeed make it cheaper, in that if the increase in efficiency doesn't significantly increase the cost of a cell, making it so you need half as many, half as much mounting equipment, etc... It doesn't really matter.
I agree with you, the significant obstacle isn't the efficiency of solar panels. It's the cost of them, more so than the space they take up.
If we could produce solar panels that were half as efficient as current panels for the cost of a ream of paper(for the area), that were still able to have the lifespan, it'd be a no brainer in many cases. If we were able to make panels, even minimally efficient, that were about the same cost and durability as shingles, it'd be easy.
But that's not the case.
This is almost exactly the argument I used to convince some people to finally jump on the computer wagon.
Sure, it'll be cheaper and more powerful in the future. But they were running a business and the expected savings would pay for the systems in less than two years with an expected lifespan of at least five.
I got the wrong TLA.
I meant AED - Automatic External Defibrillator.
Though yes, there might be some interesting uses with an IED.
It didn't kill the one in the article I read.
Then again, they didn't shock her a huge number of times.
You break a bone on somebody that old - infection could set in, a clot could break loose and cause a stroke.
That's what I mean by it's safer than the alternatives. Worst case, slap a IED on their chest for a while and monitor their heart. Take them to the hospital.
People get tasered every day and it only kills a couple a year in the whole nation, assuming you take worst case scenarios. Most of those involved dozens or even hundreds of shocks. Thus my statement of develop a ROE for the taser, don't use it as a compliance tool(torture), use it as a tool to temporarily disable the subject so you can disarm & cuff them.
A taser should only be used when a cop would normally use a gun, and the exact same procedure should used every time a cop discharges a taser as would be used if a cop discharges a gun.
Actually, I support the usage of a taser where the taser replaces more lethal/dangerous means, not just the gun.
For example, people can be killed, have limbs broken, and concussions as a result of the usage of a baton or truncheon. A taser is, properly used, safer for both police officers and suspect than the previous methods.
What needs to be emphasized is proper use.
One specific case I can think of involved a very old woman - the point I'd like to make is that it's very easy for that very old woman to injure herself. Much less a physically fit officer. Just think of a scenario like this - officer has hold of a arm. Grandma simply drops, placing her entire weight on fragile decalcified bones. Snap - there goes a elbow, wrist, or forearm.
A taser, while still dangerous, is probably less dangerous in such a scenario. But it gets on the newspaper as 'Officer tases 80 year old granny!'.
In line with this, the UN's position isn't that taser use is necessarily torture, it's that it CAN be torture.
Much like using a baton in the restraining on somebody resisting arrest isn't torture, but using on somebody who's restrained is.
I think that the honest answer would be to leave the cause of death alone unless the taser company manages to provide substantial proof otherwise. I can't say how good their proof is in this case.
All the deaths that I'm aware of involved numerous shocks, and people who are perhaps more vulnerable. The correct solution, in my belief is to emphasize the taser's less lethal nature.
The alternative methods officers have to subdue a resisting/fighting subject are nearly always more damaging. Arm bars, blows, sometimes baton or truncheon assisted, having numerous officers pile on top of the suspect, etc... In some cases the alternative might even be to shoot the suspect.
The taser is safer. We shouldn't necessarily condemn the taser, instead concentrating on proper use of it. There are ROE's for the use of the firearm, maybe the ROE for taser use needs to be tightened up in some districts.
By the way, a small scale solution could be to run specific circuits off lead acid batteries (e.g. 12V lighting or a computer with a 12V input power supply), primarily charged by by the renewable source, with a backup from the grid triggered when the battery drops below a set value. I'd ask around at RV suppliers who sell small scale solar systems to see what they have.
Most of the time, if you have a connection to the grid you use that - running the meter backwards when more power is being produced by the renewable source than consumed. Batteries wear out, a grid connection doesn't.
Yes, cities often put an extra tax on to cover their expenses. Food and medicine is often exempted*. NY is known for 'tax holidays' where they'll make clothing under a certain dollar amount tax free. It can get ugly.
If Amazon banned New York, held firm, it would send a message to other states and the affiliates in those states to not pass this kind of law
.50BMG round and found out that they could no longer get their material destruction/long range sniper rifles serviced.
Bingo. This law will cost your state jobs and revenue. Have a nice day.
It's sort of like Barrett refusing to do business with any state that bans his firearms to citizens. (IE California).
He's done it too. California police departments got a bit of a shock after endorsing the banning of the
And PLEASE stop comparing American states to countries: Canada != New York State. The United States are a country, like Canada, France or the Federated States of Micronesia.
While we're more tightly knit than say, the EU, we're also a lot looser than most countries.
So it's not 100% wrong. Besides, the US constitution could be considered the original NAFTA. Tariffs between states are strictly forbidden, and indeed, this could be considered a tariff.
If I WAS amazon, I'd take it to court in that fashion. If I felt it necessary, I'd take the bite and stop selling in NY. Encourage other online retailors to do the same. The people would complain if that happened.
It seemed like a peculiar (and slightly crackpot) hobby with no obvious application. Heh.
Heh indeed. Most applications are indeed illegal, but imagine parking your van outside a bank and tuning in. Account numbers, passwords, all sorts of information.
On the governmental side, the stakes were much higher and therefore they got much more creative.
I'm getting a kick out of some of the posts.
Hint: Your keyboard isn't encrypted. Your video cable isn't encrypted(yet). Both can be picked up from non-zero distances. I saw a japanese program on it once.
My yardstick? When it's for 'science' rather than 'profit' it becomes science or investigation rather than graverobbing. It becomes archaeology when everybody who knew the individual in life, heck, when everyone who was alive when the individual was alive, has passed on. Bonus points for major culture shift, knowledge loss as well.
So yes, extracting General Washington could be considered archaeology. Same with Lincoln.
Still, the trouble with King Tut is the very mass of stuff Pharohs were buried with. It can provide clues into a culture that the bears no resemblance to it's descendants.
At the same time, I think that respect should be shown. Make up a fake body to show to the public. Put the body and artifacts back when you're done(though adding preservative structures, coatings, containers is ok too).
I know this is cynical to even say but if the police don't have a lot of free time then they're going to make a decision that will create less hassle for themselves.
Generally speaking, while an insurance company might be a bit more likely to have a lawyer on staff, a family can make a police officer's life MUCH more of a hassle than the insurance company. A lawyer costs money, even if he's staff. He could be doing something else, after all.
On the other hand, you could have a family that's calling you up every day, visiting, writing letters, complaining, etc... And they're willing to 'work' pro-bono.
The insurance company is much more likely to simply go 'meh' and pay off. They've done it before.
Of course, I'm curious as to the method/cause of death. Did he shoot himself? Run his car into a bridge? Take too many pills? Slit his wrists?
On the gun side, I think that it's fairly traditional, and regularly swept under the rug, for a police officer/military member/veteran/hunter type to off themself with a firearm, leave no note, but with cleaning supplies laid out. It's routinely called a 'cleaning accident'. I say that because I clean my guns regularly, and they don't get pointed at my head, much less have the trigger pulled, during any part of the operation. Step 1 is to unload/verify unloaded. Step 2 is generally to pull the bolt out/slide off of the gun. At that point, the gun is not going to fire. The last step would be to reload, in the case of my defensive weapons.
So yes, I consider 99.99% of 'accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning the gun' as a suicide.
On the other types - well, there was a major star who died from drug interactions combined with unsafe dosages; but they don't think it was suicide. Slitting the wrists would be hard to wriggle out of. Is there the potential that he wasn't in his right mind?
So many questions.
A safety deposit box isn't a bad idea for keeping your important records. In my safety deposit box, I keep the title to my house*, the title to my car, my will**, extra checks, passport, birth certificate, etc...
Having a password list in there, in a sealed envelope for your executor isn't a bad idea. They're going to need a death cert and key to get in there anyways.
*Yes, I'm unusual, I own my own house in the free and clear.
**I have extra copies with my executor and in my house, in my records box.
Are you putting up the solar to save money or save the planet?
;) My house is mostly fluorescent.
Nothing we can do is going to kill the planet. So that's out.
On the other hand, I DO like clean air. But I also like money. Decisions, Decisions...
Making solar panels isn't a green proposition for the most part, but neither is coal power.
Zero sum gain cash flow + lower carbon footprint
Problem is, every time I've calculated it out, even using inflated California electricity prices, it's net negative on the cash flow. Assuming a modest 5% cost of capital, solar systems will never pay themselves off. That's assuming zero maintenance after installation. Heck, I'm not even counting installation labor in a lot of them, just the price of the kit.
So first decide, are you saving the planet or making money?
At the moment, making money. Personally, I'd love to dump my money into purchasing a new nuke plant. Don't quite have the money for that though, don't bust the private investor cap where I'm allowed to get into various speculative investments.
Personally, I'd keep jacking the clean coal requirements up. Either they'll make it clean or they'll switch to something else.
Meanwhile I keep looking for ways to economically save energy. You see, I think that that's the true trick. I've been shopping for a freezer for a while - I passed up the minimum energy efficiency Kenmore for the Energy Star Whirlpool. Waited for it to be on sale, too. Going by the energy efficiency ratings, I would have made up for the extra cost even if I hadn't gotten it on sale within the first three years.
I keep looking at those heat pump water heaters, I remember seeing one for $300, which would be a good deal, if it was available.
Past 90% or so you need more than a still, you need some sort of 'molecular sieve'. In practice that translates to hydrophillic granules that absorb the water, leaving the ethanol.
Generally speaking, from what I've seen it's a more direct process. You convert the cellulose directly into the gasoline analogue rather than converting it to ethanol first.
Coal gasification has existed since WWII, it's just a matter of what's cheaper, combined with lead times.
allows them to be processed/assembled into Ethanol easily and efficiently on-site.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, personally. A large factory type ethanol plant can produce it in far larger containers, pay closer attention(on average) to the mix, use a larger still with more advanced heat exchangers, resulting in less heat loss for a given amount of distilling.
Then there's transportation issues. While transporting ethanol might be a pain, we've been transporting more volitile and/or sensitive chemicals for years. Gasoline, Milk, Propane, Natural Gas, Vodka, Beer, etc... For every gallon of ethanol you're having to transport 14 pounds of sugar. A gallon of ethanol only weighs 6.6 pounds. So while transporting the liquid is more of a pain in the butt, is it really more expensive than transporting twice the mass of sugar?
he'll be able to strike it big if he can package/scale this device into a version suitable for a filling station, and convert the majority of the input products to a liquefied form.
Not very likely, I think. Even with a scaled up, more efficient process, a single pump would likely be able to go through a months worth of production in a single day, even if the average quick-shop building was completely converted over.
Yes, if this catches on then the price of inedible sugar will skyrocket.
The cameras were also in plain sight, and he was especially brazen in how he went about it all.
The UK currently has one of the most extensive deployments of surveillance cameras in the world. Has it worked for them? From everything I've read, they would have prevented more crimes investing in more officers.
And the reason is just as you cited - an insignificant number of those cameras are monitored at any given moment, so seeing a crime live is rare. So at most, they're used for evidence after the fact. But in a city of several million, you could have 10k criminals, thugs, lowlifes. Even if you get a nice close up of the face, most of the time you don't recognize him or her, thus the video is effectively useless.
At most, it moves crime around the corner.
I think rental insurance is definitely a good idea, however it's never going to reimburse you 100%. There's deductibles, unique items, data on your HDs and such. That antique picture. Family photographs*. The jewelry from your grandmother.
If it's worth $2 at a pawn shop, some thieves will steal it.
So, first priority would be to prevent the incident
Second would be catching the thief in the act
Third would be detection, catching and recovery after the fact.
Last would be calling the insurance company.
*While a thief might not steal them, he may damage them during the robbery.
So yes, they could indeed cut the railroad a deal, but for how long?
;)
Personally, I'd see them electrifying the switching yards first. That's where you have a fair bit of the acceleration, after all. You'd keep the engines for the time being for speed maintenance and starting if they have to stop outside of a yard. Or go up a hill.