I am pretty certain the person who spent thousands on a top end gaming rig does not particularly care about saving $126 over the course of three years.
But point out that besides saving him electricity, that the better power supply is less likely to fail and will scream less, and he's interested again.
A gold rated E80+ power supply is less likely to quit.
As for the value of your used equipment, it might be more complicated - if 'everybody' is putting in lithium-ion in 5 years, it might turn your controller into the equivalent of a VCR when DVDs reign supreme.
What you're trying to do is ASSUME my damage from my emissions... particularly to cancer rates etc which you can't know and you clearly don't care. You just want to level a fine for emitting certain gases.
Don't forget the particulates.
No, you're reaching the same as cigarette executives. I acknowledge that any levies for damages has to be estimated. As the amounts go up, eventually yes, it does become possible to make closer estimates.
But I maintain that charging something close to the damages is better than charging nothing in most cases.
But you're not internalizing costs if you do that. You're just leveling a fine for X emissions. You can show that clearly. You can say "you emitted X amount of Y chemical"... and we have a tax of Z for every X of Y chemical emitted. Done.
Actually, taxing it is a classic method of internalizing costs. I maintain that calling it a 'fine' is a misnomer. It's a fee, a tax. The difference is subtle, but important. You see, if we call it a fine, we open up pollution industry to lawsuits, after all, they're doing wrong by the government's own word. Now if we call it a fee, that doesn't happen, we can still have industry, and industry is important.
I have no problem with you doing that. But you're not internalizing costs. To internalize a cost implies that you know what the costs are per emission or at least per power plant and not as some median average but that that power plant is personally responsible for...
To bring back your original complaint - accuracy vs precision. A fee per pollutant is accurate, while it might not be precise. But it's still closer than the alternate.
Which means you have to assume. And that's fine. Tell me you're assuming and make it clear you're assuming. Don't tell me you know when you don't know.
Fine. We're assuming that we know approximately what the damages from the pollution are and are charging based on that assumption. We're using the best collected science available to come up with a rough estimate that, while not perfect(as I've said MANY TIMES) is closer than the current zero.
After all, you apparently feel that terms like 'in the ballpark' implies a precise measurement.
If, as you say, global warming could be completely rolled back for a few billion, well, that's pocket change to the oil and coal companies. They'd be pushing for it in every government.
My problem with you is not what you're doing but the argument you're using for the thing you're doing. Its sophistry. You're spinning this weird argument to justify your position that is fallacious.
Weird and nonstandard, maybe, but you're going to have to do better than simply say my argument is fallacias.
Let me boil it down for you: While we cannot precisely measure the damage caused by pollution from various sources, we can at least estimate it. By charging what amounts to a 'pollution tax' for these releases, we provide an economic incentive to contain, control and reduce these pollutants. I would replace the EPA's 'mandate all controls, no matter how expensive' strategy, because it strangles development and sends production overseas which lack even basic pollution controls. If the economic activity doesn't justify the expense of the pollution, then it shouldn't take place. If it does, then it does.
The job is going to be flawed. Everything humans do is. All we can do is our best.
So you're going to have not just call it 'fallacious'. You're going to actually have to post sources proving me false. Because thus far you've posted 4 links about some geo-engineering ideas that even the developers don't know if they're going to work. I find them interesting, but you haven't proven me wrong. You haven't proven any of my starting points false. Simply calling them so is far from enough.
Lithium battery technology needs much more sophisticated charge/discharge/monitoring controllers than lead-acid. There's a bit of way to go before domestic PV/battery controllers are up to the task.
From my review of the situation, it's more that they're different. Yes, you can get away with a dumber charger on lead-acid, but when you're doing domestic PV with a large battery array, you want a sophisticated charger anyways.
Same deal with LiIon, really. the minimum charger is a bit more complicated, but again, as the size of the battery increases so doesn't the sophistication of the charger to handle it. Tesla chargers, for example, are really fancy, but we're talking about a HUGE array here, capable of powering the average house for around 2 days.
As such, from what I've read, theres are 'smart' LiIon batteries that are capable of working with a dumb lead-acid charger and thus working fine - see LiIon replacements for car & motorcycle batteries that are drop-in replacements. They handle the safe charging aspects on their own.
But if you have a solar setup, you don't have a dumb charger, thus conflict emerges. So yeah, you'd have to change out the charger at that time. Though when I looked at solar last year, the battery controllers the store had were compatible with Lead-Acid, NiMH, and Lithium. You know your own system though.
And yes. If you have a system currently that's working, the last thing I'd do would be to suggest replacing it before it's EOL.
Just keep an open mind when replacement time does come around.
On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.
Ah, and it comes out. You're coal power. Gotcha. No, I don't need 'causation' to tax you, no more than Uncle Sam needs causation to tax my income.
On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.
Let's see. We have studies that: 1. Show emissions from coal power plants. We know what they are, quantities, etc... 2. Show air samples in communities around said plants containing elevated amounts of said emissions. 3. Show elevated amounts of illness
At this point, yeah, it could still be considered correlation. However, that's not all 4. Laboratory tests of said emissions, in the amounts experienced by the communities, have shown that the lab animals exposed suffer higher rates of illness/death 5. Biological studies have even identified the mechanisms involved in creating many of the illnesses.
Face it dude, you're a tobacco exective saying that the increased incidences of lung cancer among smokers is 'only correlation'.
People that don't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation shouldn't cite statistics AT ALL.
Well, it's a good thing you don't cite any, now is it?
As to power plants being dangerous to workers etc... don't be obtuse. It makes you sound petty and quarrelsome which is not helping you.
I thought it was a valid arguing tactic going by your example.
As to internalizing costs, you cannot do that unless you can nail down causation on a case by case basis.
You may not be able to be precise about it, but you can get it in the ballpark.
As to 29%... we're talking about PM2.5 in San Francisco actually if you read the source. And the amount of air pollution in San Francisco is pretty fucking low.
Compared to China, yes. They still have problems with it.
Let me make this clear, you know there is arsenic in many natural water sources right? That's something we often use as RAT POISON.
There's also Uranium in my water. Do I need to point out why I don't need to worry about having a functioning nuclear reactor for a body anytime soon? Man, you assume all sorts of ignorance on my part. And then you go on and on and on about it...
Yes, dosage is incredibly important. But the point is - there's enough pollution from coal power plants, combined with other pollution sources, to cause serious negative health benefits. Remember how I mentioned taxing gasoline for it's pollution as well? You're ALL responsible.
As to the geo engineering... if you're not familiar with the proposed methods of geo engineering than you're not well read on climate change. Period.
And this matters why when my point was only tangently related to climate change? Again, reading your sources, these are not 'shovel ready' proposals.
The cost structure for these plans is well under a billion dollars for either one. And either would entirely negate the effect of global warming. Understand... ENTIRELY negate the warming. ALL of it.
If that was true, I'd expect a lot more scientists to be jumping on it.
Instead, from the articles it's made very clear that there remains a LOT of research left on the Sulfur Dioxide problem, and the second points out that it'd only be a partial solution, and reducing CO2 emissions would still be needed.
The carbon credit scheme will do nothing of the kind whilst costing trillions.
if you want the warming to stop, support a plan that will ACTUALLY work.
Which is all well and good when you realize that I never supported carbon credits. I viewed them as an over-co
In which case they've already gotten millions/billions to develop the system, but it's still nothing compared to what deployment in an actual city would cost.
Though in that case it can become something of a bidding process - a city that promises to provide land and at least some funding is going to have more 'skin' in the game, likely making the permitting process easier. So they'll be picked first.
That's locally responsive though, not system responsive. For example, where I live there are roads where if the lights were to cooperate ALL directions of traffic could sail through without stopping.
As is, all too often all their responsiveness(they're camera triggered) does is force ALL cars to stop at the light. I see it all the time. Cars pull up and stop on the side street, while the highway is completely clear. Then the highway goes red just as cars are approaching(from the last red light), to let the cars that could have sailed through a minute earlier go.
It could be a matter of simply placing cameras further out, but there you're again getting to the point that networking makes more sense.
As for hooking your toaster up to the internet, I refer you back to the 'no business plan' part of my post.
Doing it anonymously is the only way. Unless you're a fame-seeker like Trump, having that much money can be a real PITA because it'll bring so much attention to you, and you won't be able to have a normal life or normal relationships; everyone will be after you for your money.
Or go with the Gates methodology - don't worry about anonymous, consider your 'new job' to be running a charity foundation. Examine charities in-depth to find the good ones that can efficiently help the world with the money they're given, then give enough money to really make a difference.
By getting out there and making a difference, he'd have that contact.
Still, he's a programmer, not a CEO. His skillset is different, so it's going to take some time to adjust.
No? Well, I guess you have little confidence in your product then.
I'm really hopeful that PRT - Personal Rapid Transit, can help with a subset of a city's transportation needs, reducing dependence upon cars and taxis, where subways and Buses aren't quite responsive enough.
However, the companies working on it just don't have the capital to cover a true pilot program.
Okay, I know of at least one example. Red lights and traffic signs. In ye old days, each was manually set and timed on the spot.
However, by networking them and sometimes adding extra sensors, that allows you to have a more responsive traffic system, thus reducing delays and increasing capacity, and improving ability to route around damage.
By providing an interface to the public web, that enables devices like traffic aware GPS and eventually self-driving cars to help assist in 'routing around damage/congestion', again, improving the situation.
That being said, 'Internet of Things' shares a lot in common with the.com boom. Lots of 'neat ideas', not nearly as many sound business plans that even went as far as 'Sell advertising' - IE Google. 'Sell things, especially niche items that might be hard to find in local stores*' - Amazon. Sell games without the need to keep track of discs - Steam. Etc...
*Consider their original model of book selling - Finding a book in a bookstore, or even the local grocery store, is easy. Finding a *specific* book is harder, and ordering through your local bookstore is something of a pain, and yes, I did it before Amazon.
Why are articles citing battery sizes in kWh these days?
Probably because it's a more useful metric, as it tells you the total *energy* in the battery without extra steps. To determine the Ah equivalent, you'd need to multiple by 1k, then divide by the battery's voltage. After all, to convert Ah into Wh, you multiply by the battery's voltage.
quote the battery's size in kWh and you don't need to know the voltage(for the generic purposes of an article). Volts for extremely large battery packs are somewhat optional, after all, it all depends on how you wire them.
Sustainability: 'Very' Recyclability: Effectively Total. Only problem right now is that there isn't enough of them to justify the recycling centers that are present for lead-acid types. That's quickly changing. Long term cost effectiveness: Improving all the time as we improve manufacturing.
Rube Goldberg reaches from the grave. For some reason people think complex means advanced
Rube was about unnecessary complexity. A lot of our refining of technology is indeed about reducing complexity, leading to more reliable products. For example, a GenIII nuclear plant is supposed to have 50% fewer valves than a GenII. What does getting rid of half your valves and something like 30% of your piping do? It means that there's a lot less stuff to break, and you can build the remaining stuff sturdier with the freed up space.
To get back to the flow batteries - a steam power plant is hella complex compared to an internal combustion engine, but at that scale the complexity pays for itself with added efficiency.
Same deal with flow batteries. While they're unlikely to make sense in a car, when you're looking at extending power production or covering gaps at a wind or solar farm, flow batteries start looking simpler than assembling and managing the pile of conventional batteries that would be necessary for the same capacity. After all, with the flow battery, while the 'terminals' might be complex as heck, expanding storage is almost as simple as putting in another tank of electrolyte. Not having to put in a building, install racking, move in and wire X hundreds or thousands of batteries.
You might see racks upon racks of lead-acid batteries providing infrastructure support for telco rooms be replaced with smaller, longer-lived Lithium-Ion batteries,
In 2012, Li-Ion was 'niche' for battery backup. By late 2013 it was making inroads into data centers.
I'd almost rate it like HD vs SSD - while performance metrics are different, LiIon is a superior battery held back only by cost. Drop the price of it by 60% and suddenly it's cheaper to ship(lighter per Wh), lasts longer(double or more of lead-acid), more efficient(~95% efficient vs 80%, and lower standby loss as well; takes deep-discharges better), etc...
BTW, the batteries in the telco office would likely take up the same space - LiIon is a lot more power dense by mass, not by volume. A similar amount of energy takes about the same amount of volume. The difference is that the racking could be a heck of a lot lighter.
What you have are statistics where countries that have lots of power plants have a certain rate of lung cancer and countries with none have a lower rate.
That's far from the only source for such statistics.
That's literally your methodology. And its fallacious.
You're still assuming, thus making an ass of yourself. It's not even a majority of the method for determining that pollution from coal power causes negative health effects.
The reality is that it is a great deal more complicated than that. The power plants obviously are not dangerous to people in and of themselves.
Never been in one, I take it? Steam explosions are a killer, though fortunately rather rare today in developed countries.
It is rather the emissions. And the emissions are only dangerous if you breath them in a given concentration over a given period of time. And even then whether or not you develop cancer at all is a probability and not a certainty.
Again, you're carefully explaining something that I already know. I'll explain it to you again: I know this and state that, because we can statistically determine that coal power increases expenses through various ways, we should internalize that expense by charging for pollution.
To expand upon this, I support charging for ALL pollution, not just that from coal power plants. Steel production would be hit some as well, as would things like paper mills. For cars, well, because monitoring the pollution from 'every' car would be impractical, we'd have to fall back to statistical methods - figure out a baseline, add that to fuel taxes. Then, depending on whether an individual vehicle is estimated to be more or less polluting per gallon of fuel burned, an appropriate differential tax would be charged. Either at purchase or registration, I'm not sure which.
As to emissions from china, its so diluted by that point that it doesn't really matter.
29% of California's air pollution 'doesn't really matter'? Wow...
As to lawn mower taxes you're comparing the bureaucratic overhead of managing a few hundred power plants to managaging the taxation on a lawn mower?
Rejected.
Strawman again. I was looking at one of the biggest tax systems in the country - the taxation of gasoline for the purposes of road funding. Thus, the lawn mower becomes an example. It can also be used for off-roading, standby generators, 4-wheelers, dirt bikes, and everything else other than driving on roads we do with gasoline.
Look, I suggest you stop trying to predict my positions or lines of thought because you're really bad at it. Not putting you down as a person, but I'm rather non-standard on the best of days.
As to geo engineering methods... you've apparently spent literally no time at all looking into such things. This is disappointing.
I read an awful lot, and this is the first time I've seen these proposals. People read different things. The salt crystal proposal looks very interesting, but also very preliminary. 30MW for how large of an area? For 5% reflection gain, how much is this estimated to be?
The second has a proposed effective period of 20 years, and would require 20M tons of SO2 every 1-4 years. You're not fitting that through 'garden hoses'.
As to the gas released... that was actually surfer dioxide. I know... you don't like the idea of emitting that... but the amounts required to get the effect are so low that you really can't complain about it.
For the record, as long as there's reasonable evidence that it'll stay up there until it's degraded to something less dangerous, and that the positive effects outweigh the negative, I'm not opposed to it. Shocking, isn't it?
Now... lets say a man in the neighboring town gets lung cancer.
Why are you going after this strawman? I've already said that, being able to tie any one case of cancer/illness/death to any one polluter is impossible, but ultimately irrelevant. You can reasonably prove that without your powerplant there would have been 10 deaths from lung cancer, but statistically speaking, your plant is causing 1 case of ultimately fatal lung cancer a year.
Your notion is to institute some assumed damages on every bit of emissions and put this money into some kind of state fund and then when people get cancer they draw upon that fund.
Not exactly, but it's reasonably close.
So... no one is actually breaking that smoke in until it has diluted to such an extent that the ability to cause respriatory issues is no longer even remotely credible.
Impossible unless you set up on the moon or something. California is getting a decent percentage of it's air pollution from China. Also, people go all over everywhere. You can't prove that your plant's emissions aren't getting to people. Or do you shut down every time the wind shifts?
Must I still pay your fee? Of course. Because while you claim to be dealing with externals, your real intent is to discourage the use of coal.
And you assume that you know what I'm thinking. Making an ass out of you and me. Anyways. As I said above, I don't see you actually managing to prevent your pollution from reaching humans, and besides, the pollution charge wouldn't just be for damage to humans, but the environment and such. So your proposed change of building the plant somewhere where the emissions don't reach humans fails, so yes, you would still have to pay the fees.
Part of the problem is, as you say, being precise with externalities like this is difficult. Road taxes on gasoline are intended to pay for the roads, but it's considered just too expensive to do things like exempt the tax for the gasoline you're buying for your lawn mower. So you end up paying tax on that gasoline as well. So yes, there's quite a bit of averaging in my proposed charge system.
On the other hand, let me tell you how you DO avoid the charges: By not emitting them in the first place. You install pollution controls so you're emitting less. Your pollution charges go down in proportion. Simple, measurable, done.
Two of them that I like:
Citations please. I want to see engineering proposals. Also, carbon monoxide is a GHG, so no, pumping it up there wouldn't help from what I remember.
And keep in mind the big corps are the ones making solar panels, wind mills, LED lights, and all the other stuff that is supposed to save you from THE END TIMES.
Big businesses are also the ones burning coal and such... Personally, I like LED lights mostly because of longevity and savings on my power bill. I'm also not highly affected by AGW, living in the middle of Alaska and all.
You're right on precision vs accuracy. Result of 'training' to try to keep me from using complex words too much.
No, saying the link between coal power and deaths/illnessess is 'weak correlation' is like denying global warming. There's plenty of proof sufficient to say that the burning of coal for power causes pollution that lowers the quality and quantity of life for those around it. It's accurate. It's precision can be in question - which is why high end estimates are double that of the low end, but their presence is not in doubt.
As for lung cancer from coal power vs campfires, that's what statistics are for. Not 'everybody' living close to a coal powerplant loves camping. Yet they still demonstrate a higher incident rate of lung cancer which isn't explained by variances in smoking rates, economic status, etc... Hell, that's what autopsies and scientific studies are for. It's not like air tests are hard to do with the proper equipment.
You don't NEED to prove that any given case was caused by them in order to prove that the quantity of said cases is, at least by standard scientific measures (IE standards like '99% likely to explain the difference'.
As for CO2 - I wouldn't say that it isn't a problem either, and like I mentioned, by the time you clean coal up enough to be close to natural gas, much less power sources like nuclear, wind, or solar, it's more expensive than nuclear. Personally, I've seen enought evidence to believe in man-made global warming. As CO2 per kWh is pretty much the worst with coal, I'd like to see less of it from that angle as well.
Because you pount the 'correlation vs causation' thing several times, I'll rebuff that with this: The correlation is extremely strong, and we don't just have correlation. We also have labratory studies where we have shown that coal power plant emissions(yes, including the 'clean' ones), do indeed cause cancer in lab specimens.
I didn't say that I hate coal. I hate dirty coal, and from what I've seen, clean coal is no longer cheaper than the alternatives. Speaking of which, no, coal is no longer the cheapest power source. Natural Gas beats it so much that they're converting coal power plants to natural gas on a regular basis, and coal is losing market share.
As for 'cheaper', well, ask why we no longer use asbestos, lead paint, leaded gasoline, mercury switches, etc... The level of 'clean' required for power generation, especially coal, keeps going up, increasing expense.
Also, Cheap is no longer such if we end up having to abandon cities due to rising water levels because of global warming. That's just even more indirect than air and water pollution.
Sure, but government agencies assign dollar values to lives all the time, though they do vary. DOT's value is lower, for example, than the FAA's.
You're still stuck trying for too much accuracy. Ballpark is enough for this sort of stuff, then you adjust as science clarifies or the situation changes. IE the actual damages from X could be estimated to be $8-12. Nailing it down closer is less important, at least in the short term, than the fact that charging $10 for the damage is 'fairer' then charging them $0.
As such you can't attribute a given number to coal power generation.
When did I mentioned that the pollution damage was from CO2? Oh, I didn't? Then why bring it up that way? I've very clearly said pollution, not CO2.
To my knowledge, if you removed both those from the coal emissions which modern coal plants can do... then the health issues you're citing vanish.
They don't remove them completely, and no, they don't vanish. Become an order of magnitude less, that you get. Even 2, but at that point a nuclear plant is cheaper, and still cleaner(on average, including pollution from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but excluding nuclear weapons stuff). No, 'filtered coal' is not cheaper. I've seen what it takes to get a modern coal plant up and running (Healy clean coal plant).
Felonious Sexual Assault: II. Engages in sexual penetration with a person, other than his legal spouse, who is 13 years of age or older and under 16 years of age where the age difference between the actor and the other person is 4 years or more; or If he was 17 and her 15, that's only two years, well within NH's 4 year 'R&J' exemption. Indeed, by the way the statute is constructed, once legal they're always legal.
Though the second article says 18 and 15, but even at 3 years and change it shouldn't have triggered statutory rape charges by the letter of NH law.
Lacking statutory rape, they'd have go go for 'actual' rape charges, IE it was against her will, and browsing news articles, that's what they did. They simply failed to make that case.
Personally, I think that the term 'felony' has lost too much of it's meaning. Back in the day, it was used to describe a crime where the death penalty could be used.
Today, it's generally used to describe anything that could be punished by a year or more in prison. Not that you are, just that you could me.
Personally, I'd change it up slightly. It wouldn't be a felony UNLESS you are actually sentenced and serve a complete year in prison for it.
I thought about having a fine equivalent - something like $12k, but then thought, no, I don't want to give the courts the incentive to fine people $12k simply to put them in the felony category.
Keep in mind that part of this desire to restrict the felon status is because it comes with a relatively large amount of restrictions on your rights.
On the other hand, I'm not against considering you a felon if you manage to stack up a year of imprisonment non-sequentially. A month here, 2 months there, half a year for X, 3 months for Y, and you're a felon. Though, again, it would have to be for 'non-bullshit' reasons. Bullshit reasons include 'didn't pay court mandated fees because they tossed you in jail long enough to lose your job, then gave your unemployed self 30 days to come up with $3k'.
Should the computer thing be a felony? Probably not. We have plenty of felony level things we can sentence people for in the course of 'sexual misbehavior' without making 'used a computer in the commission of' one of them.
First, Stingray is now a 'generic' term for these sorts of devices. So I'd be careful about claiming they all have the same functionality, or lack of it.
Second, operating as a bridge is actually the primary usage mode when operating in 'active' mode - where it 'forces' phones to connect to it instead of the normal tower.
Third, from what I remember, at least the first ones were built off of standard mobile cell tower systems, just with extra intercepts and data recording equipment.
I wonder if they created this to add another charge because if you blow up an IED (or something else) then they will charge you for any deaths, attempted deaths, and destruction of property.
That's my take on it. I really dislike it because bomb-making is generally illegal anyways, they can hit you sufficiently hard there.
But you get silly things like charging a woman who's bomb-efforts extended to giving a rash to her target with 'making a WMD' because, by golly, she was attempting to make a chemical weapon! if you use the police definition, which waters down the definition to the point that the military would consider it useless. Tank round? WMD Willy Pete grenades used to create smoke screens? WMD Artillery round? WMD. Everything the Air Force fires? WMD. Etc....
Keep in mind that we're talking about North Dakota here. I lived in Minot for some time - their second largest community. It still wasn't that large.
As such, they're unlikely to exploit the 'less lethal armed drone' legality. Just not enough call, not enough money. You might see a cooperative test project with a manufacturer, but that's about it.
Meanwhile drones are probably more interesting to the counties - where it might be 30 minutes to get a deputy to an accident scene from driving distance alone.
I find the possibility of them being used for S&R purposes to be much more common than law enforcement.
And yes, the legislator is already stating that he'll be pushing to ban non-lethals in 2 years anyways. Knowing that, again, I don't see much beyond 'research deployment' where the developer has to provide the armed drone, for free. Not worth the capital cost otherwise.
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I am pretty certain the person who spent thousands on a top end gaming rig does not particularly care about saving $126 over the course of three years.
But point out that besides saving him electricity, that the better power supply is less likely to fail and will scream less, and he's interested again.
A gold rated E80+ power supply is less likely to quit.
Well, you have things like this available: http://genasun.com/all-product...
As for the value of your used equipment, it might be more complicated - if 'everybody' is putting in lithium-ion in 5 years, it might turn your controller into the equivalent of a VCR when DVDs reign supreme.
What you're trying to do is ASSUME my damage from my emissions... particularly to cancer rates etc which you can't know and you clearly don't care. You just want to level a fine for emitting certain gases.
Don't forget the particulates.
No, you're reaching the same as cigarette executives. I acknowledge that any levies for damages has to be estimated. As the amounts go up, eventually yes, it does become possible to make closer estimates.
But I maintain that charging something close to the damages is better than charging nothing in most cases.
But you're not internalizing costs if you do that. You're just leveling a fine for X emissions. You can show that clearly. You can say "you emitted X amount of Y chemical"... and we have a tax of Z for every X of Y chemical emitted. Done.
Actually, taxing it is a classic method of internalizing costs. I maintain that calling it a 'fine' is a misnomer. It's a fee, a tax. The difference is subtle, but important. You see, if we call it a fine, we open up pollution industry to lawsuits, after all, they're doing wrong by the government's own word. Now if we call it a fee, that doesn't happen, we can still have industry, and industry is important.
I have no problem with you doing that. But you're not internalizing costs. To internalize a cost implies that you know what the costs are per emission or at least per power plant and not as some median average but that that power plant is personally responsible for...
To bring back your original complaint - accuracy vs precision. A fee per pollutant is accurate, while it might not be precise. But it's still closer than the alternate.
Which means you have to assume. And that's fine. Tell me you're assuming and make it clear you're assuming. Don't tell me you know when you don't know.
Fine. We're assuming that we know approximately what the damages from the pollution are and are charging based on that assumption. We're using the best collected science available to come up with a rough estimate that, while not perfect(as I've said MANY TIMES) is closer than the current zero.
After all, you apparently feel that terms like 'in the ballpark' implies a precise measurement.
If, as you say, global warming could be completely rolled back for a few billion, well, that's pocket change to the oil and coal companies. They'd be pushing for it in every government.
My problem with you is not what you're doing but the argument you're using for the thing you're doing. Its sophistry. You're spinning this weird argument to justify your position that is fallacious.
Weird and nonstandard, maybe, but you're going to have to do better than simply say my argument is fallacias.
Let me boil it down for you:
While we cannot precisely measure the damage caused by pollution from various sources, we can at least estimate it. By charging what amounts to a 'pollution tax' for these releases, we provide an economic incentive to contain, control and reduce these pollutants. I would replace the EPA's 'mandate all controls, no matter how expensive' strategy, because it strangles development and sends production overseas which lack even basic pollution controls. If the economic activity doesn't justify the expense of the pollution, then it shouldn't take place. If it does, then it does.
The job is going to be flawed. Everything humans do is. All we can do is our best.
So you're going to have not just call it 'fallacious'. You're going to actually have to post sources proving me false. Because thus far you've posted 4 links about some geo-engineering ideas that even the developers don't know if they're going to work. I find them interesting, but you haven't proven me wrong. You haven't proven any of my starting points false. Simply calling them so is far from enough.
Quite possible. It's just that at this point 'internet connected' allows for easier maintenance/updating.
Other options for *successful* internet connected items might be parking meters. Pay for your parking on your smart phone.
Probably not worth it - internet connected street lights. A light & motion sensor is enough for them.
Lithium battery technology needs much more sophisticated charge/discharge/monitoring controllers than lead-acid. There's a bit of way to go before domestic PV/battery controllers are up to the task.
From my review of the situation, it's more that they're different. Yes, you can get away with a dumber charger on lead-acid, but when you're doing domestic PV with a large battery array, you want a sophisticated charger anyways.
Same deal with LiIon, really. the minimum charger is a bit more complicated, but again, as the size of the battery increases so doesn't the sophistication of the charger to handle it. Tesla chargers, for example, are really fancy, but we're talking about a HUGE array here, capable of powering the average house for around 2 days.
As such, from what I've read, theres are 'smart' LiIon batteries that are capable of working with a dumb lead-acid charger and thus working fine - see LiIon replacements for car & motorcycle batteries that are drop-in replacements. They handle the safe charging aspects on their own.
But if you have a solar setup, you don't have a dumb charger, thus conflict emerges. So yeah, you'd have to change out the charger at that time. Though when I looked at solar last year, the battery controllers the store had were compatible with Lead-Acid, NiMH, and Lithium. You know your own system though.
And yes. If you have a system currently that's working, the last thing I'd do would be to suggest replacing it before it's EOL.
Just keep an open mind when replacement time does come around.
On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.
Ah, and it comes out. You're coal power. Gotcha. No, I don't need 'causation' to tax you, no more than Uncle Sam needs causation to tax my income.
On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.
Let's see. We have studies that:
1. Show emissions from coal power plants. We know what they are, quantities, etc...
2. Show air samples in communities around said plants containing elevated amounts of said emissions.
3. Show elevated amounts of illness
At this point, yeah, it could still be considered correlation. However, that's not all
4. Laboratory tests of said emissions, in the amounts experienced by the communities, have shown that the lab animals exposed suffer higher rates of illness/death
5. Biological studies have even identified the mechanisms involved in creating many of the illnesses.
Face it dude, you're a tobacco exective saying that the increased incidences of lung cancer among smokers is 'only correlation'.
People that don't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation shouldn't cite statistics AT ALL.
Well, it's a good thing you don't cite any, now is it?
As to power plants being dangerous to workers etc... don't be obtuse. It makes you sound petty and quarrelsome which is not helping you.
I thought it was a valid arguing tactic going by your example.
As to internalizing costs, you cannot do that unless you can nail down causation on a case by case basis.
You may not be able to be precise about it, but you can get it in the ballpark.
As to 29%... we're talking about PM2.5 in San Francisco actually if you read the source. And the amount of air pollution in San Francisco is pretty fucking low.
Compared to China, yes. They still have problems with it.
Let me make this clear, you know there is arsenic in many natural water sources right? That's something we often use as RAT POISON.
There's also Uranium in my water. Do I need to point out why I don't need to worry about having a functioning nuclear reactor for a body anytime soon? Man, you assume all sorts of ignorance on my part. And then you go on and on and on about it...
Yes, dosage is incredibly important. But the point is - there's enough pollution from coal power plants, combined with other pollution sources, to cause serious negative health benefits. Remember how I mentioned taxing gasoline for it's pollution as well? You're ALL responsible.
As to the geo engineering... if you're not familiar with the proposed methods of geo engineering than you're not well read on climate change. Period.
And this matters why when my point was only tangently related to climate change? Again, reading your sources, these are not 'shovel ready' proposals.
The cost structure for these plans is well under a billion dollars for either one. And either would entirely negate the effect of global warming. Understand... ENTIRELY negate the warming. ALL of it.
If that was true, I'd expect a lot more scientists to be jumping on it.
Instead, from the articles it's made very clear that there remains a LOT of research left on the Sulfur Dioxide problem, and the second points out that it'd only be a partial solution, and reducing CO2 emissions would still be needed.
The carbon credit scheme will do nothing of the kind whilst costing trillions.
if you want the warming to stop, support a plan that will ACTUALLY work.
Which is all well and good when you realize that I never supported carbon credits. I viewed them as an over-co
In which case they've already gotten millions/billions to develop the system, but it's still nothing compared to what deployment in an actual city would cost.
Though in that case it can become something of a bidding process - a city that promises to provide land and at least some funding is going to have more 'skin' in the game, likely making the permitting process easier. So they'll be picked first.
That's locally responsive though, not system responsive. For example, where I live there are roads where if the lights were to cooperate ALL directions of traffic could sail through without stopping.
As is, all too often all their responsiveness(they're camera triggered) does is force ALL cars to stop at the light. I see it all the time. Cars pull up and stop on the side street, while the highway is completely clear. Then the highway goes red just as cars are approaching(from the last red light), to let the cars that could have sailed through a minute earlier go.
It could be a matter of simply placing cameras further out, but there you're again getting to the point that networking makes more sense.
As for hooking your toaster up to the internet, I refer you back to the 'no business plan' part of my post.
Doing it anonymously is the only way. Unless you're a fame-seeker like Trump, having that much money can be a real PITA because it'll bring so much attention to you, and you won't be able to have a normal life or normal relationships; everyone will be after you for your money.
Or go with the Gates methodology - don't worry about anonymous, consider your 'new job' to be running a charity foundation. Examine charities in-depth to find the good ones that can efficiently help the world with the money they're given, then give enough money to really make a difference.
By getting out there and making a difference, he'd have that contact.
Still, he's a programmer, not a CEO. His skillset is different, so it's going to take some time to adjust.
No? Well, I guess you have little confidence in your product then.
I'm really hopeful that PRT - Personal Rapid Transit, can help with a subset of a city's transportation needs, reducing dependence upon cars and taxis, where subways and Buses aren't quite responsive enough.
However, the companies working on it just don't have the capital to cover a true pilot program.
Okay, I know of at least one example. Red lights and traffic signs. In ye old days, each was manually set and timed on the spot.
However, by networking them and sometimes adding extra sensors, that allows you to have a more responsive traffic system, thus reducing delays and increasing capacity, and improving ability to route around damage.
By providing an interface to the public web, that enables devices like traffic aware GPS and eventually self-driving cars to help assist in 'routing around damage/congestion', again, improving the situation.
That being said, 'Internet of Things' shares a lot in common with the .com boom. Lots of 'neat ideas', not nearly as many sound business plans that even went as far as 'Sell advertising' - IE Google. 'Sell things, especially niche items that might be hard to find in local stores*' - Amazon. Sell games without the need to keep track of discs - Steam. Etc...
*Consider their original model of book selling - Finding a book in a bookstore, or even the local grocery store, is easy. Finding a *specific* book is harder, and ordering through your local bookstore is something of a pain, and yes, I did it before Amazon.
Why are articles citing battery sizes in kWh these days?
Probably because it's a more useful metric, as it tells you the total *energy* in the battery without extra steps. To determine the Ah equivalent, you'd need to multiple by 1k, then divide by the battery's voltage. After all, to convert Ah into Wh, you multiply by the battery's voltage.
quote the battery's size in kWh and you don't need to know the voltage(for the generic purposes of an article). Volts for extremely large battery packs are somewhat optional, after all, it all depends on how you wire them.
Sustainability: 'Very'
Recyclability: Effectively Total. Only problem right now is that there isn't enough of them to justify the recycling centers that are present for lead-acid types. That's quickly changing.
Long term cost effectiveness: Improving all the time as we improve manufacturing.
Rube Goldberg reaches from the grave. For some reason people think complex means advanced
Rube was about unnecessary complexity. A lot of our refining of technology is indeed about reducing complexity, leading to more reliable products. For example, a GenIII nuclear plant is supposed to have 50% fewer valves than a GenII. What does getting rid of half your valves and something like 30% of your piping do? It means that there's a lot less stuff to break, and you can build the remaining stuff sturdier with the freed up space.
To get back to the flow batteries - a steam power plant is hella complex compared to an internal combustion engine, but at that scale the complexity pays for itself with added efficiency.
Same deal with flow batteries. While they're unlikely to make sense in a car, when you're looking at extending power production or covering gaps at a wind or solar farm, flow batteries start looking simpler than assembling and managing the pile of conventional batteries that would be necessary for the same capacity. After all, with the flow battery, while the 'terminals' might be complex as heck, expanding storage is almost as simple as putting in another tank of electrolyte. Not having to put in a building, install racking, move in and wire X hundreds or thousands of batteries.
You might see racks upon racks of lead-acid batteries providing infrastructure support for telco rooms be replaced with smaller, longer-lived Lithium-Ion batteries,
In 2012, Li-Ion was 'niche' for battery backup. By late 2013 it was making inroads into data centers.
I'd almost rate it like HD vs SSD - while performance metrics are different, LiIon is a superior battery held back only by cost. Drop the price of it by 60% and suddenly it's cheaper to ship(lighter per Wh), lasts longer(double or more of lead-acid), more efficient(~95% efficient vs 80%, and lower standby loss as well; takes deep-discharges better), etc...
BTW, the batteries in the telco office would likely take up the same space - LiIon is a lot more power dense by mass, not by volume. A similar amount of energy takes about the same amount of volume. The difference is that the racking could be a heck of a lot lighter.
What you have are statistics where countries that have lots of power plants have a certain rate of lung cancer and countries with none have a lower rate.
That's far from the only source for such statistics.
That's literally your methodology. And its fallacious.
You're still assuming, thus making an ass of yourself. It's not even a majority of the method for determining that pollution from coal power causes negative health effects.
The reality is that it is a great deal more complicated than that. The power plants obviously are not dangerous to people in and of themselves.
Never been in one, I take it? Steam explosions are a killer, though fortunately rather rare today in developed countries.
It is rather the emissions. And the emissions are only dangerous if you breath them in a given concentration over a given period of time. And even then whether or not you develop cancer at all is a probability and not a certainty.
Again, you're carefully explaining something that I already know. I'll explain it to you again: I know this and state that, because we can statistically determine that coal power increases expenses through various ways, we should internalize that expense by charging for pollution.
To expand upon this, I support charging for ALL pollution, not just that from coal power plants. Steel production would be hit some as well, as would things like paper mills. For cars, well, because monitoring the pollution from 'every' car would be impractical, we'd have to fall back to statistical methods - figure out a baseline, add that to fuel taxes. Then, depending on whether an individual vehicle is estimated to be more or less polluting per gallon of fuel burned, an appropriate differential tax would be charged. Either at purchase or registration, I'm not sure which.
As to emissions from china, its so diluted by that point that it doesn't really matter.
29% of California's air pollution 'doesn't really matter'? Wow...
As to lawn mower taxes you're comparing the bureaucratic overhead of managing a few hundred power plants to managaging the taxation on a lawn mower?
Rejected.
Strawman again. I was looking at one of the biggest tax systems in the country - the taxation of gasoline for the purposes of road funding. Thus, the lawn mower becomes an example. It can also be used for off-roading, standby generators, 4-wheelers, dirt bikes, and everything else other than driving on roads we do with gasoline.
Look, I suggest you stop trying to predict my positions or lines of thought because you're really bad at it. Not putting you down as a person, but I'm rather non-standard on the best of days.
As to geo engineering methods... you've apparently spent literally no time at all looking into such things. This is disappointing.
I read an awful lot, and this is the first time I've seen these proposals. People read different things. The salt crystal proposal looks very interesting, but also very preliminary. 30MW for how large of an area? For 5% reflection gain, how much is this estimated to be?
The second has a proposed effective period of 20 years, and would require 20M tons of SO2 every 1-4 years. You're not fitting that through 'garden hoses'.
As to the gas released... that was actually surfer dioxide. I know... you don't like the idea of emitting that... but the amounts required to get the effect are so low that you really can't complain about it.
For the record, as long as there's reasonable evidence that it'll stay up there until it's degraded to something less dangerous, and that the positive effects outweigh the negative, I'm not opposed to it. Shocking, isn't it?
Now... lets say a man in the neighboring town gets lung cancer.
Why are you going after this strawman? I've already said that, being able to tie any one case of cancer/illness/death to any one polluter is impossible, but ultimately irrelevant. You can reasonably prove that without your powerplant there would have been 10 deaths from lung cancer, but statistically speaking, your plant is causing 1 case of ultimately fatal lung cancer a year.
Your notion is to institute some assumed damages on every bit of emissions and put this money into some kind of state fund and then when people get cancer they draw upon that fund.
Not exactly, but it's reasonably close.
So... no one is actually breaking that smoke in until it has diluted to such an extent that the ability to cause respriatory issues is no longer even remotely credible.
Impossible unless you set up on the moon or something. California is getting a decent percentage of it's air pollution from China. Also, people go all over everywhere. You can't prove that your plant's emissions aren't getting to people. Or do you shut down every time the wind shifts?
Must I still pay your fee? Of course. Because while you claim to be dealing with externals, your real intent is to discourage the use of coal.
And you assume that you know what I'm thinking. Making an ass out of you and me. Anyways. As I said above, I don't see you actually managing to prevent your pollution from reaching humans, and besides, the pollution charge wouldn't just be for damage to humans, but the environment and such. So your proposed change of building the plant somewhere where the emissions don't reach humans fails, so yes, you would still have to pay the fees.
Part of the problem is, as you say, being precise with externalities like this is difficult. Road taxes on gasoline are intended to pay for the roads, but it's considered just too expensive to do things like exempt the tax for the gasoline you're buying for your lawn mower. So you end up paying tax on that gasoline as well. So yes, there's quite a bit of averaging in my proposed charge system.
On the other hand, let me tell you how you DO avoid the charges: By not emitting them in the first place. You install pollution controls so you're emitting less. Your pollution charges go down in proportion. Simple, measurable, done.
Two of them that I like:
Citations please. I want to see engineering proposals. Also, carbon monoxide is a GHG, so no, pumping it up there wouldn't help from what I remember.
And keep in mind the big corps are the ones making solar panels, wind mills, LED lights, and all the other stuff that is supposed to save you from THE END TIMES.
Big businesses are also the ones burning coal and such... Personally, I like LED lights mostly because of longevity and savings on my power bill. I'm also not highly affected by AGW, living in the middle of Alaska and all.
You're right on precision vs accuracy. Result of 'training' to try to keep me from using complex words too much.
No, saying the link between coal power and deaths/illnessess is 'weak correlation' is like denying global warming. There's plenty of proof sufficient to say that the burning of coal for power causes pollution that lowers the quality and quantity of life for those around it. It's accurate. It's precision can be in question - which is why high end estimates are double that of the low end, but their presence is not in doubt.
As for lung cancer from coal power vs campfires, that's what statistics are for. Not 'everybody' living close to a coal powerplant loves camping. Yet they still demonstrate a higher incident rate of lung cancer which isn't explained by variances in smoking rates, economic status, etc... Hell, that's what autopsies and scientific studies are for. It's not like air tests are hard to do with the proper equipment.
You don't NEED to prove that any given case was caused by them in order to prove that the quantity of said cases is, at least by standard scientific measures (IE standards like '99% likely to explain the difference'.
As for CO2 - I wouldn't say that it isn't a problem either, and like I mentioned, by the time you clean coal up enough to be close to natural gas, much less power sources like nuclear, wind, or solar, it's more expensive than nuclear. Personally, I've seen enought evidence to believe in man-made global warming. As CO2 per kWh is pretty much the worst with coal, I'd like to see less of it from that angle as well.
Because you pount the 'correlation vs causation' thing several times, I'll rebuff that with this: The correlation is extremely strong, and we don't just have correlation. We also have labratory studies where we have shown that coal power plant emissions(yes, including the 'clean' ones), do indeed cause cancer in lab specimens.
I didn't say that I hate coal. I hate dirty coal, and from what I've seen, clean coal is no longer cheaper than the alternatives. Speaking of which, no, coal is no longer the cheapest power source. Natural Gas beats it so much that they're converting coal power plants to natural gas on a regular basis, and coal is losing market share.
As for 'cheaper', well, ask why we no longer use asbestos, lead paint, leaded gasoline, mercury switches, etc... The level of 'clean' required for power generation, especially coal, keeps going up, increasing expense.
Also, Cheap is no longer such if we end up having to abandon cities due to rising water levels because of global warming. That's just even more indirect than air and water pollution.
Sure, but government agencies assign dollar values to lives all the time, though they do vary. DOT's value is lower, for example, than the FAA's.
You're still stuck trying for too much accuracy. Ballpark is enough for this sort of stuff, then you adjust as science clarifies or the situation changes. IE the actual damages from X could be estimated to be $8-12. Nailing it down closer is less important, at least in the short term, than the fact that charging $10 for the damage is 'fairer' then charging them $0.
As such you can't attribute a given number to coal power generation.
Sure I can!
5.7-11.7 euro cents per kWh, for the dirtiest plants.
MN estimates it at 1.8 cents per kWh
When did I mentioned that the pollution damage was from CO2? Oh, I didn't? Then why bring it up that way? I've very clearly said pollution, not CO2.
To my knowledge, if you removed both those from the coal emissions which modern coal plants can do... then the health issues you're citing vanish.
They don't remove them completely, and no, they don't vanish. Become an order of magnitude less, that you get. Even 2, but at that point a nuclear plant is cheaper, and still cleaner(on average, including pollution from TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but excluding nuclear weapons stuff). No, 'filtered coal' is not cheaper. I've seen what it takes to get a modern coal plant up and running (Healy clean coal plant).
What is interesting is a few years earlier they could legally have sex. Then for a couple of years it's a felony. Then it's legal again.
Incorrect, barring any recent legal changes in the State of New Hampshire.
Felonious Sexual Assault: II. Engages in sexual penetration with a person, other than his legal spouse, who is 13 years of age or older and under 16 years of age where the age difference between the actor and the other person is 4 years or more; or
If he was 17 and her 15, that's only two years, well within NH's 4 year 'R&J' exemption. Indeed, by the way the statute is constructed, once legal they're always legal.
Though the second article says 18 and 15, but even at 3 years and change it shouldn't have triggered statutory rape charges by the letter of NH law.
Lacking statutory rape, they'd have go go for 'actual' rape charges, IE it was against her will, and browsing news articles, that's what they did. They simply failed to make that case.
Personally, I think that the term 'felony' has lost too much of it's meaning. Back in the day, it was used to describe a crime where the death penalty could be used.
Today, it's generally used to describe anything that could be punished by a year or more in prison. Not that you are, just that you could me.
Personally, I'd change it up slightly. It wouldn't be a felony UNLESS you are actually sentenced and serve a complete year in prison for it.
I thought about having a fine equivalent - something like $12k, but then thought, no, I don't want to give the courts the incentive to fine people $12k simply to put them in the felony category.
Keep in mind that part of this desire to restrict the felon status is because it comes with a relatively large amount of restrictions on your rights.
On the other hand, I'm not against considering you a felon if you manage to stack up a year of imprisonment non-sequentially. A month here, 2 months there, half a year for X, 3 months for Y, and you're a felon. Though, again, it would have to be for 'non-bullshit' reasons. Bullshit reasons include 'didn't pay court mandated fees because they tossed you in jail long enough to lose your job, then gave your unemployed self 30 days to come up with $3k'.
Should the computer thing be a felony? Probably not. We have plenty of felony level things we can sentence people for in the course of 'sexual misbehavior' without making 'used a computer in the commission of' one of them.
Is this an actual industry?
Personal ads back in the paper days, craigslist, etc...
Yes, it's an industry. However, most at least maintain the pretext that it's 'singles' seeking others.
First, Stingray is now a 'generic' term for these sorts of devices. So I'd be careful about claiming they all have the same functionality, or lack of it.
Second, operating as a bridge is actually the primary usage mode when operating in 'active' mode - where it 'forces' phones to connect to it instead of the normal tower.
Third, from what I remember, at least the first ones were built off of standard mobile cell tower systems, just with extra intercepts and data recording equipment.
I wonder if they created this to add another charge because if you blow up an IED (or something else) then they will charge you for any deaths, attempted deaths, and destruction of property.
That's my take on it. I really dislike it because bomb-making is generally illegal anyways, they can hit you sufficiently hard there.
But you get silly things like charging a woman who's bomb-efforts extended to giving a rash to her target with 'making a WMD' because, by golly, she was attempting to make a chemical weapon! if you use the police definition, which waters down the definition to the point that the military would consider it useless. Tank round? WMD Willy Pete grenades used to create smoke screens? WMD Artillery round? WMD. Everything the Air Force fires? WMD. Etc....
Keep in mind that we're talking about North Dakota here. I lived in Minot for some time - their second largest community. It still wasn't that large.
As such, they're unlikely to exploit the 'less lethal armed drone' legality. Just not enough call, not enough money. You might see a cooperative test project with a manufacturer, but that's about it.
Meanwhile drones are probably more interesting to the counties - where it might be 30 minutes to get a deputy to an accident scene from driving distance alone.
I find the possibility of them being used for S&R purposes to be much more common than law enforcement.
And yes, the legislator is already stating that he'll be pushing to ban non-lethals in 2 years anyways. Knowing that, again, I don't see much beyond 'research deployment' where the developer has to provide the armed drone, for free. Not worth the capital cost otherwise.