I'll assume his other figures have similar accuracy.
They do. He's assuming 16.5% efficient for the coal power plants, they're actually 40-60% for all but the worst of them. A coal plant does NOT immediately toss 67% of the power it produces immediately up the smoke stack or whatever. The steam turbine itself isn't 50% efficient, it's closer to 60%.
Basically, he took the total efficiency figure for an out of date coal plant then multiplied it by 0.5 for 'good measure'. 5% for transmission losses is pretty standard, so he's good there. Losing 50% to charge from AC to a cell phone requires some gymnastics in how you measure it. Even a cheap USB charger should be 80%, and you're going to be at around that for a DC-DC converter(which converts it to AC internally) to get the 12V of solar cells down to a regulated 5V for USB.
To reach 50% you have to consider the internal charge circuits for the cell phone(.9), energy lost charging the battery(~90% for LiIon), etc... Even then I still get ~65%. Most of which can't be avoided by switching to locally generated DC.
I can't say much about your specific situation, but in general if you're far enough from the equator for snow, the ideal solar panel will have a fair bit of tilt to it. At which point you have some options for snow-clearing. One of the popular ones is to use a relatively small amount of electrical heating once the snow stops to make the panel 'too slick' for the snow, at which point it simply slides off. Then the panels make up that energy through the day. Keep in mind that they're considerably 'slicker' that way than an asphalt roof.
Also, if your roof is only worth 1/3rd your electrical use, that may be something that you want to examine, because you could save considerable money for cheaper than installing solar panels fixing whatever is taking so much.
I say this because I can satisfy my electrical needs using about 2/3rds of my south-facing roof, and I'm in Fairbanks, Alaska. Disclaimer: Annual average; I'd have to sell electricity in the summer and buy in the winter.
Yeah, if you're in an exceptionally noisy environment with a long cable run, it might make sense to buy a more expensive cable that features things like additional shielding, thicker gauge wires, etc...(or just go fiber).
Otherwise the ECC does it's job and there's no practical difference between the cheapest wire possible and the most expensive.
Hell, audiophiles can't tell when the testers are using coat hangers as speaker wires, and that's an actual analogue signal!
But the cases where a decently constructed commodity cable won't do but the 'premium' will are generally limited.
In many cases with 'premium' cables, you end up with cable and connectors so heavy that that causes the very problems than the cable was supposed to solve!
I'll admit, I've spent double the money on 'better than the cheapest I can get' cables on occasion, but that's usually because I had broken the cable through use/abuse that was there originally, so getting a 'tougher' cable made sense.
It is interesting that when there is a limited broad commercial viability, the "drug" designers and chemists are able to whip up a cure for something in under a year.
Problem: They've been working on the Ebola vaccine for a lot longer than a year. What really happened is that they had a vaccine in the early testing stages, with something like an estimated 5 years of testing left before it could be commercially deployed. Then we have a relatively huge ebola outbreak, panic sets in and they grant a waiver for the testing. Basically, they had enough information that 'We think this will probably help you survive exposure to Ebola. We're pretty sure it won't hurt you'. So they administer the vaccine in a sort of accelerated study, because it might save lives. Turns out it probably did.
Outside of an Ebola outbreak, the risks weren't worth it. During one? Worth it.
It actually reminds me of the first vaccination methods - Variolation. Fascinating history. Various versions around, but had a top end of 1% chance of death. Yes, the vaccination itself killed 1% of those treated. But it was against smallpox - with a death rate of 30% during epidemics. As long as the chances of catching smallpox was above 4%, it was 'worth it' to variate. And in Europe, the chances were a lot higher than 4%. Even royalty variolated their children.
As for cancer - apples and oranges dude. The problem with cancer is that it's actually lots of different problems, all under the same name. Causes, effects, treatments, all different.
We've developed lots of cures for various cancers, just not all of them yet.
Okay, digital data is supposed to be easy 1 and 0 communication. But when you get down to the physical media, said binary digits are represented by physical phenomenon. So +3.3V = 1, 0V = 0 type stuff.
Voltage, resistance, EM waves, magnetics, etc... You're actually back in the world of Analogue, and here you have to worry about noise.
When you're moving data as fast as you can, or storing it as densely as you can, interference becomes more likely. For example, you'd think that +3V =1 and 0V = 0 would be easy, but when you're flipping the signal as fast as you can, you end up with the cable possibly acting like a transformer or capacitor. So the voltage might run a bit higher, a bit lower, a bit faster, a bit slower, etc...
Radio transmissions, Solar noise, close by electrical cables, other data cables with parallel runs, etc... The world is 'noisy' even if you're using wires.
That's why you have error correction in digital communications. So the 'occasional' bit can become flipped and the system transparently recovers it, and you get your transmitted data, identical from the other side.
Given the size of the trial, it's really unlikely that it prevents less than 90% of the cases of Ebola that would otherwise develop. So while I agree that 100% continuing is all that likely, especially if you start including immune suppressed people such as the HIV positive, those with cancer, transplants, young children, the elderly, etc... Still, if you vaccinate 100% of those eligible for it and it provides 95% immunity to Ebola, odds are the vulnerable won't be exposed at all, because you'll have something like 5% of the flare-ups from a wild source, and such flareups should mostly be individual, not thousands.
On the other hand, thinking about Ebola and vaccines reminded me that vaccines have made an even deadlier disease less problematic - Rabies. It wasn't until a relatively short time ago that we had any survivors from the symptomatic stage, and even then getting those requires putting them into a medical coma for a while.
But with the vaccine we realistically save thousands of human lives every year in the USA alone, and that's with mostly vaccinating animals, not people, and only vaccinating humans who we suspect have been exposed or work in a higher exposure risk area.
Having a 100% proof vaccine for Ebola is nice, as long as it works for the majority of strains and also lasts for life.
Not necessarily. I'd say it remains 'nice' even if it only lasts for 6 months, so long as it works on 'most' strains, but said strains are identifiable.
The critical part here is that it works when given close to exposure. That makes it like the rabies vaccine. Ebola outbreak? You hit everybody in the village up with it, and it remains at 1-2 cases, not hundreds.
If it's 100% effective for life with 1 shot, it goes way beyond 'nice'. As such it would beat most vaccines today, as most vaccines are: Only about 90% effective, require multiple shots to reach that effectiveness, only last a limited period of time, etc...
Flu - annual(though that's for a wide number of varieties), Tetanus - 10 years, Hep A - 2 does, Hep B - 3 doses, Chickenpox - 2 doses, etc...
Discharging a weapon in a populated area is unsafe in nearly every circumstance.
Except in this case he managed to check off a number of 'safe' boxes. The described fence would stop the ammunition of choice from the weapon, and the ammunition fired at a relatively high angle would come down safely as well.
That being said, I don't want regular gunfire just because of the noise.
I would have told the drone owners that they can take their broken drone or they can press charges for destruction of property in exchange for the homeowner pressing trespassing/peeping charges on them.
This reminds me of the last drone I read about being taken out by gunfire. It was some PETA people using a quadracoptor to harass some hunters - it was really an obscenely loud whiny thing, and their goal was to scare game and such.
They complained to the cops that had shown up that their drone had been shot. The cops looked at them like 'so what'?
The PETA types tried 'but that was dangerous!' Keep in mind that, unlike this case, said hunters were in an area where firearm use was legal.
You don't think that, in a neighborhood, someone would know who has a drone like this?
Given that the drone operator was there to 'photograph a friend's house', I'm taking it as that he's not local. I could park a van a block or so away, launch the drone from the roof, and never be seen in person operating it.
And you're ignoring all the personal experiences posted in this thread by people who have actually been peppered by falling shot why? You even acknowledge that people 'felt it' but our sense of touch is sensitive - I can feel a sheet of paper falling onto me, it's going to take quite a bit more force to actually hurt me.
Now, it's certainly not identical, but I'm reminded of the Mythbuster's 'penny off the Empire State Building' where they determined that a falling penny from that height(assuming it didn't get blown back onto the building like most do), would only sting a bit when it hits.
And a penny is less aerodynamic but much more massive than a birdshot BB. A number of the finer grades look almost like sand.
And a source on the differences between rifle rounds and birdshot. AK round: 124 grains, TV 265 fps, 23 ft-lbs of force 5.56 round: 62 grains, 245fps, 8 ft-lbs 9mm: 115 gr, 195 fps, 10 ftlbs 00 buck: 54 grains, 130fps, 2 ft-lbs (it's TV is much lower than the rifle round because a sphere is less aerodynamic than the cone of a bullet) #8 birdshot: 1.3gr, 76 fps, 1 ft-lb (Too low for writer's ballistic calculator).
That's with the more aerodynamic spin stabilized projectiles fired from rifled barrels(even handguns today are rifled). Unless he was stupid enough to shoot the drone with a slug or buckshot, the projectiles reach terminal velocity very rapidly compared to a rifle and *fall* at a velocity that will limit damage.
If he fired it at an angle much above 30 degrees the pellets are only dangerous on the upward part of the parabola.
Even buckshot is only dangerous a bit further, and slugs have the longest range but are still relatively short-ranged compared to a rifle round.
So i get adverts in this use case, most of the adverts where repeated, and one was an infomercial for a water heater which ran to twenty minutes was relatively local to my location and it played about fifteen times in the hour of the flash thing.
You should have seen the ad campaign last election season. I live in a state of less than a million people, that's nominally 'conservative', but had a democratic senator. That campaign was intense.
How intense? Think about the hassle of $200 worth of political advertising between the two of them, per registered voter.
Because of the auction system and the amount/value of those political ads, if the saw that your IP was from our state, you saw nothing else. And many of them were full video ads.
My fear is that the time and energy to determine the external cost in dollars would be either impossible or too costly to ever actually do.
Now, this might sound 'mean', but we already do it. We have professionals at it. Actuaries. They have tables and you plug the numbers in and it spits out an estimate.
Please note that I said 'approximately'. It's impossible to determine 'exactly' how much damage coal plant X does, partially because it's dependent upon population density, the amount of power it produces, the dominant winds, rain patterns, etc...
What we can do is figure out a pretty close estimate on how much damage ALL the coal plants cause via the various pollutants, then look at Plant X, determine what it's producing via sampling, then charge for it.
If it lacks a certain control against mercury emission, for example, it's costs per kWh are going to be substantially increased because it has to pay for it.
I tend to blame slow ad servers more. With as many ad servers, tracking sites, and other crap revenue-generation webpages want to load on my computer, the odds that one of them is offline, slow, or frozen is fairly high. So I end up waiting for it to time out - until I block it and my computer doesn't even try.
Hell, one site I hit had FOUR auto-play videos on it - 2 of them the same ad that played at slightly different times, indicating that it wasn't even nice enough to pull it from the same location. Then it had the video about the article, AND a general news site feed.
The site was so horribly unusable that I could only conclude that the designers didn't view it without ad-blockers themselves.
Sequential loading, but also consider that many will delay the page showing until the ad is served or times out.
If the website is hitting 20 different ad servers & trackers, what are the odds that at least ONE of them is in a less than ideal routing location for your computer, not available, slow, or delayed?
I mean, blocking all the google, facebook, twitter, and such tracking & 'share this!' code sped up webpages quite well.
Why the hell would I want to share random posts on an internet forum, such as this, on facebook or whatever?
Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.
Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why computer ads were doing so 'poorly' compared to existing media using various metrics, when they realized that computer ads aren't less effective according to traditional metrics, but are lousy by the enhanced metrics. Then they started looking into traditional advertising, and started finding the same things - advertising not as effective as believed.
This probably is part of what led to the even more advertising, but that has the problem that it's actively driving viewers away from traditional media.
Like I said - higher mis-click rate. Making the close buttons tiny only pisses users off more, but ad servers 'encourage' that because they're paid more by the click, as you say. But that just pisses users off. I think the ad people are 'okay' with it because hunting for the close button helps.
Oh, and I've seen a number on my phone lately where they put the close button on the left side, not the right where you expect it.
My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.
I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.
Thing is, earlier advertising was much more nebulous about it's benefit. It's hard to tell how much soda any given soda commercial sells, whether it's worth it, etc... What metrics they do have shows that as the number of ads increase, the response rates fall - viewers become immune. And we're very immune at this point.
Hell, at this point aliens might find that we're 'utterly' immune to their propaganda due to the barrage we face every day.
Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.
It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.
It's not that they 'don't care'. It's that people value their time, and it takes time to fiddle with a USB plug. Just making it so it wasn't keyed would have helped, after that you just have the issue of the clutter of the cable.
With a wireless charger in the base of the monitor, I can toss my phone where any alerts are visible, just grab it(with more charge than it would have otherwise) when I go to leave, etc...
Hmm... I sense marketing opportunity - come up with a fancy premium stand - wireless charging, usb ports, height/tilt adjustments and all that. Have it 'universally' connect via the VERSA mounting.
Though I'll note that I was thinking of generation cost(~$0.05) for coal, not retail. Remember, that $0.10 per kWh includes transportation, electricity from the natural gas plant next door and the nuclear plant down the road, as well as the coal generation.
Also, the following article give some insight to the high energy usage by at least hospitals:
Yes, hospitals use a lot of electricity, but consider that everything else about hospitals are more expensive than average commercial buildings as well. After all, you're paying a lot of wages for doctors and nurses with masters degrees, using expensive drugs and equipment, etc....
As for your anecdotal 'evidence', keep in mind that I'm mostly talking about averages - you get lucky and don't have any upper respiratory track illnesses, but you're also 50 miles away. 30% of asthma cases are blamed on poor air quality.
Relative to coal, Natural gas isn't a problem at all, and nuclear, well, I want to see more of it. Remember, I wasn't putting down nuclear, just mentioning that worrying about the CO2 production from the concrete that goes into building the plant isn't actually that big of a deal in the face of the sheer amount of power the plant will produce over it's operational lifespan.
External health costs? Do you have any idea how many highly toxic chemicals are used, in quantity, to turn polysilicon into a working solar cell? *
Actually I do. You can find 'most' of them being released when coal is being burned for power, in sufficient quantities that the quantity of 'nastiness' per kWh is far, far lower with solar panels than with coal.
It's a bit like nuclear power - sure, the nastiness of the involved materials is far worse per kilogram than with coal, but we use so much coal per kWh that it ends up dirtier, especially since it can't be completely contained.
I may not agree with the methods, but I'm willing to put up with a lot to get rid of coal.
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I'll assume his other figures have similar accuracy.
They do. He's assuming 16.5% efficient for the coal power plants, they're actually 40-60% for all but the worst of them. A coal plant does NOT immediately toss 67% of the power it produces immediately up the smoke stack or whatever. The steam turbine itself isn't 50% efficient, it's closer to 60%.
Basically, he took the total efficiency figure for an out of date coal plant then multiplied it by 0.5 for 'good measure'. 5% for transmission losses is pretty standard, so he's good there. Losing 50% to charge from AC to a cell phone requires some gymnastics in how you measure it. Even a cheap USB charger should be 80%, and you're going to be at around that for a DC-DC converter(which converts it to AC internally) to get the 12V of solar cells down to a regulated 5V for USB.
To reach 50% you have to consider the internal charge circuits for the cell phone(.9), energy lost charging the battery(~90% for LiIon), etc... Even then I still get ~65%. Most of which can't be avoided by switching to locally generated DC.
I can't say much about your specific situation, but in general if you're far enough from the equator for snow, the ideal solar panel will have a fair bit of tilt to it. At which point you have some options for snow-clearing. One of the popular ones is to use a relatively small amount of electrical heating once the snow stops to make the panel 'too slick' for the snow, at which point it simply slides off. Then the panels make up that energy through the day. Keep in mind that they're considerably 'slicker' that way than an asphalt roof.
Also, if your roof is only worth 1/3rd your electrical use, that may be something that you want to examine, because you could save considerable money for cheaper than installing solar panels fixing whatever is taking so much.
I say this because I can satisfy my electrical needs using about 2/3rds of my south-facing roof, and I'm in Fairbanks, Alaska. Disclaimer: Annual average; I'd have to sell electricity in the summer and buy in the winter.
Yeah, if you're in an exceptionally noisy environment with a long cable run, it might make sense to buy a more expensive cable that features things like additional shielding, thicker gauge wires, etc...(or just go fiber).
Otherwise the ECC does it's job and there's no practical difference between the cheapest wire possible and the most expensive.
Hell, audiophiles can't tell when the testers are using coat hangers as speaker wires, and that's an actual analogue signal!
But the cases where a decently constructed commodity cable won't do but the 'premium' will are generally limited.
In many cases with 'premium' cables, you end up with cable and connectors so heavy that that causes the very problems than the cable was supposed to solve!
I'll admit, I've spent double the money on 'better than the cheapest I can get' cables on occasion, but that's usually because I had broken the cable through use/abuse that was there originally, so getting a 'tougher' cable made sense.
It is interesting that when there is a limited broad commercial viability, the "drug" designers and chemists are able to whip up a cure for something in under a year.
Problem: They've been working on the Ebola vaccine for a lot longer than a year. What really happened is that they had a vaccine in the early testing stages, with something like an estimated 5 years of testing left before it could be commercially deployed. Then we have a relatively huge ebola outbreak, panic sets in and they grant a waiver for the testing. Basically, they had enough information that 'We think this will probably help you survive exposure to Ebola. We're pretty sure it won't hurt you'. So they administer the vaccine in a sort of accelerated study, because it might save lives. Turns out it probably did.
Outside of an Ebola outbreak, the risks weren't worth it. During one? Worth it.
It actually reminds me of the first vaccination methods - Variolation. Fascinating history. Various versions around, but had a top end of 1% chance of death. Yes, the vaccination itself killed 1% of those treated. But it was against smallpox - with a death rate of 30% during epidemics. As long as the chances of catching smallpox was above 4%, it was 'worth it' to variate. And in Europe, the chances were a lot higher than 4%. Even royalty variolated their children.
As for cancer - apples and oranges dude. The problem with cancer is that it's actually lots of different problems, all under the same name. Causes, effects, treatments, all different.
We've developed lots of cures for various cancers, just not all of them yet.
Okay, digital data is supposed to be easy 1 and 0 communication. But when you get down to the physical media, said binary digits are represented by physical phenomenon. So +3.3V = 1, 0V = 0 type stuff.
Voltage, resistance, EM waves, magnetics, etc... You're actually back in the world of Analogue, and here you have to worry about noise.
When you're moving data as fast as you can, or storing it as densely as you can, interference becomes more likely. For example, you'd think that +3V =1 and 0V = 0 would be easy, but when you're flipping the signal as fast as you can, you end up with the cable possibly acting like a transformer or capacitor. So the voltage might run a bit higher, a bit lower, a bit faster, a bit slower, etc...
Radio transmissions, Solar noise, close by electrical cables, other data cables with parallel runs, etc... The world is 'noisy' even if you're using wires.
That's why you have error correction in digital communications. So the 'occasional' bit can become flipped and the system transparently recovers it, and you get your transmitted data, identical from the other side.
Given the size of the trial, it's really unlikely that it prevents less than 90% of the cases of Ebola that would otherwise develop. So while I agree that 100% continuing is all that likely, especially if you start including immune suppressed people such as the HIV positive, those with cancer, transplants, young children, the elderly, etc... Still, if you vaccinate 100% of those eligible for it and it provides 95% immunity to Ebola, odds are the vulnerable won't be exposed at all, because you'll have something like 5% of the flare-ups from a wild source, and such flareups should mostly be individual, not thousands.
On the other hand, thinking about Ebola and vaccines reminded me that vaccines have made an even deadlier disease less problematic - Rabies. It wasn't until a relatively short time ago that we had any survivors from the symptomatic stage, and even then getting those requires putting them into a medical coma for a while.
But with the vaccine we realistically save thousands of human lives every year in the USA alone, and that's with mostly vaccinating animals, not people, and only vaccinating humans who we suspect have been exposed or work in a higher exposure risk area.
Having a 100% proof vaccine for Ebola is nice, as long as it works for the majority of strains and also lasts for life.
Not necessarily. I'd say it remains 'nice' even if it only lasts for 6 months, so long as it works on 'most' strains, but said strains are identifiable.
The critical part here is that it works when given close to exposure. That makes it like the rabies vaccine. Ebola outbreak? You hit everybody in the village up with it, and it remains at 1-2 cases, not hundreds.
If it's 100% effective for life with 1 shot, it goes way beyond 'nice'. As such it would beat most vaccines today, as most vaccines are: Only about 90% effective, require multiple shots to reach that effectiveness, only last a limited period of time, etc...
Flu - annual(though that's for a wide number of varieties), Tetanus - 10 years, Hep A - 2 does, Hep B - 3 doses, Chickenpox - 2 doses, etc...
Discharging a weapon in a populated area is unsafe in nearly every circumstance.
Except in this case he managed to check off a number of 'safe' boxes. The described fence would stop the ammunition of choice from the weapon, and the ammunition fired at a relatively high angle would come down safely as well.
That being said, I don't want regular gunfire just because of the noise.
I would have told the drone owners that they can take their broken drone or they can press charges for destruction of property in exchange for the homeowner pressing trespassing/peeping charges on them.
This reminds me of the last drone I read about being taken out by gunfire. It was some PETA people using a quadracoptor to harass some hunters - it was really an obscenely loud whiny thing, and their goal was to scare game and such.
They complained to the cops that had shown up that their drone had been shot. The cops looked at them like 'so what'?
The PETA types tried 'but that was dangerous!' Keep in mind that, unlike this case, said hunters were in an area where firearm use was legal.
You don't think that, in a neighborhood, someone would know who has a drone like this?
Given that the drone operator was there to 'photograph a friend's house', I'm taking it as that he's not local. I could park a van a block or so away, launch the drone from the roof, and never be seen in person operating it.
but I think a BB would.
And you're ignoring all the personal experiences posted in this thread by people who have actually been peppered by falling shot why? You even acknowledge that people 'felt it' but our sense of touch is sensitive - I can feel a sheet of paper falling onto me, it's going to take quite a bit more force to actually hurt me.
Now, it's certainly not identical, but I'm reminded of the Mythbuster's 'penny off the Empire State Building' where they determined that a falling penny from that height(assuming it didn't get blown back onto the building like most do), would only sting a bit when it hits.
And a penny is less aerodynamic but much more massive than a birdshot BB. A number of the finer grades look almost like sand.
And a source on the differences between rifle rounds and birdshot.
AK round: 124 grains, TV 265 fps, 23 ft-lbs of force
5.56 round: 62 grains, 245fps, 8 ft-lbs
9mm: 115 gr, 195 fps, 10 ftlbs
00 buck: 54 grains, 130fps, 2 ft-lbs (it's TV is much lower than the rifle round because a sphere is less aerodynamic than the cone of a bullet)
#8 birdshot: 1.3gr, 76 fps, 1 ft-lb (Too low for writer's ballistic calculator).
That's with the more aerodynamic spin stabilized projectiles fired from rifled barrels(even handguns today are rifled). Unless he was stupid enough to shoot the drone with a slug or buckshot, the projectiles reach terminal velocity very rapidly compared to a rifle and *fall* at a velocity that will limit damage.
If he fired it at an angle much above 30 degrees the pellets are only dangerous on the upward part of the parabola.
Even buckshot is only dangerous a bit further, and slugs have the longest range but are still relatively short-ranged compared to a rifle round.
So i get adverts in this use case, most of the adverts where repeated, and one was an infomercial for a water heater which ran to twenty minutes was relatively local to my location and it played about fifteen times in the hour of the flash thing.
You should have seen the ad campaign last election season. I live in a state of less than a million people, that's nominally 'conservative', but had a democratic senator. That campaign was intense.
How intense? Think about the hassle of $200 worth of political advertising between the two of them, per registered voter.
Because of the auction system and the amount/value of those political ads, if the saw that your IP was from our state, you saw nothing else. And many of them were full video ads.
My fear is that the time and energy to determine the external cost in dollars would be either impossible or too costly to ever actually do.
Now, this might sound 'mean', but we already do it. We have professionals at it. Actuaries. They have tables and you plug the numbers in and it spits out an estimate.
Please note that I said 'approximately'. It's impossible to determine 'exactly' how much damage coal plant X does, partially because it's dependent upon population density, the amount of power it produces, the dominant winds, rain patterns, etc...
What we can do is figure out a pretty close estimate on how much damage ALL the coal plants cause via the various pollutants, then look at Plant X, determine what it's producing via sampling, then charge for it.
If it lacks a certain control against mercury emission, for example, it's costs per kWh are going to be substantially increased because it has to pay for it.
I tend to blame slow ad servers more. With as many ad servers, tracking sites, and other crap revenue-generation webpages want to load on my computer, the odds that one of them is offline, slow, or frozen is fairly high. So I end up waiting for it to time out - until I block it and my computer doesn't even try.
Hell, one site I hit had FOUR auto-play videos on it - 2 of them the same ad that played at slightly different times, indicating that it wasn't even nice enough to pull it from the same location. Then it had the video about the article, AND a general news site feed.
The site was so horribly unusable that I could only conclude that the designers didn't view it without ad-blockers themselves.
Sequential loading, but also consider that many will delay the page showing until the ad is served or times out.
If the website is hitting 20 different ad servers & trackers, what are the odds that at least ONE of them is in a less than ideal routing location for your computer, not available, slow, or delayed?
I mean, blocking all the google, facebook, twitter, and such tracking & 'share this!' code sped up webpages quite well.
Why the hell would I want to share random posts on an internet forum, such as this, on facebook or whatever?
Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.
Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why computer ads were doing so 'poorly' compared to existing media using various metrics, when they realized that computer ads aren't less effective according to traditional metrics, but are lousy by the enhanced metrics. Then they started looking into traditional advertising, and started finding the same things - advertising not as effective as believed.
This probably is part of what led to the even more advertising, but that has the problem that it's actively driving viewers away from traditional media.
Like I said - higher mis-click rate. Making the close buttons tiny only pisses users off more, but ad servers 'encourage' that because they're paid more by the click, as you say. But that just pisses users off. I think the ad people are 'okay' with it because hunting for the close button helps.
Oh, and I've seen a number on my phone lately where they put the close button on the left side, not the right where you expect it.
My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.
I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.
Thing is, earlier advertising was much more nebulous about it's benefit. It's hard to tell how much soda any given soda commercial sells, whether it's worth it, etc... What metrics they do have shows that as the number of ads increase, the response rates fall - viewers become immune. And we're very immune at this point.
Hell, at this point aliens might find that we're 'utterly' immune to their propaganda due to the barrage we face every day.
Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.
It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.
Note: I hate how easy the 'back' button is on my tablet.
The data isn't hidden, it flows into fewer columns, making the remaining ones wider.
As for looking at the site, you just have to accept that the cell phone view is substantially different than on a computer. It happens.
And there's typically nothing that interesting in the right columns...
It's not that they 'don't care'. It's that people value their time, and it takes time to fiddle with a USB plug. Just making it so it wasn't keyed would have helped, after that you just have the issue of the clutter of the cable.
With a wireless charger in the base of the monitor, I can toss my phone where any alerts are visible, just grab it(with more charge than it would have otherwise) when I go to leave, etc...
Hmm... I sense marketing opportunity - come up with a fancy premium stand - wireless charging, usb ports, height/tilt adjustments and all that. Have it 'universally' connect via the VERSA mounting.
Maybe even have a right/left speaker version. ;)
Sure:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Though I'll note that I was thinking of generation cost(~$0.05) for coal, not retail. Remember, that $0.10 per kWh includes transportation, electricity from the natural gas plant next door and the nuclear plant down the road, as well as the coal generation.
Also, the following article give some insight to the high energy usage by at least hospitals:
Yes, hospitals use a lot of electricity, but consider that everything else about hospitals are more expensive than average commercial buildings as well. After all, you're paying a lot of wages for doctors and nurses with masters degrees, using expensive drugs and equipment, etc....
As for your anecdotal 'evidence', keep in mind that I'm mostly talking about averages - you get lucky and don't have any upper respiratory track illnesses, but you're also 50 miles away. 30% of asthma cases are blamed on poor air quality.
Relative to coal, Natural gas isn't a problem at all, and nuclear, well, I want to see more of it. Remember, I wasn't putting down nuclear, just mentioning that worrying about the CO2 production from the concrete that goes into building the plant isn't actually that big of a deal in the face of the sheer amount of power the plant will produce over it's operational lifespan.
External health costs? Do you have any idea how many highly toxic chemicals are used, in quantity, to turn polysilicon into a working solar cell? *
Actually I do. You can find 'most' of them being released when coal is being burned for power, in sufficient quantities that the quantity of 'nastiness' per kWh is far, far lower with solar panels than with coal.
It's a bit like nuclear power - sure, the nastiness of the involved materials is far worse per kilogram than with coal, but we use so much coal per kWh that it ends up dirtier, especially since it can't be completely contained.
I may not agree with the methods, but I'm willing to put up with a lot to get rid of coal.