Again, nice try, but no. Today's poor are wealthier than ever because the poor get socialist welfare handouts, and government manipulating the economy so the poor can keep on taking on debts to prop up their consumption.
Actually, no. All the economic data shows that today there are fewer (%) poor people in the world than at any time in history and numerically at any time since WWII. It also shows that the rate of improvement of average standard of living at all levels of society worldwide since 1980 is continuing to increase. The first world countries are to some extent paying the price, losing jobs and competing more and more on price vs. productivity as the rest of the world 'catches up' to us. Walmart has brought a nation's worth of people into the global middle class, by itself - the most of any institution in such a short time in history.
In the US, there are truly a lot of subsidies - IIRC the lowest 20% of income earners receives about 9% more from the government than they put in. The US 'poverty line' standard of living exceeds the global mean standard of living for everyone. And everyone from the poorest to the richest complains about the lack of jobs and so forth, while they buy almost everything at inflation-adjusted prices that are for the most part lower than they were in the 1960s.
But there is a real problem, that both socialists and non-socialists will have to figure out a way to deal with - a recent paper predicted that automation, smart robotics, AI, and other computational advances are going to eliminate 50% of the jobs that people presently have. This could include the majority of IT people, as well. So the big question is, "are we willing to let the robots do all the work, and live surprisingly well and at the same time frugally due to government distribution of wealth, or keep our jobs and eliminate the productivity advances that give us all these advances?" This is a very real issue that none of the -isms presently have an answer for. (WRT 'surprisingly well', note that the poorest person in the US has a better chance of having a healthy child and living to old age than the wealthiest or most powerful person on the planet 200 years ago.)
I don't suppose any of them considered keeping the legroom, making a little less profit per ticket, and making it up by not flying half-empty...
It's worth noting that since airline deregulation, when ticket prices were regulated and high, nearly every major airline has been in and out of bankruptcy or been bought out ("merged") once or twice. The recent merger of American and USAir is an interesting case in point. American was still in bankruptcy, and the merger was in part a method to restructure the airline to get them out of bankruptcy.
If I were an executive, I would find a different business to run. The airline business is way too stressful. They're working with purchase orders on the order of $10 billion to buy planes (though most airlines I think now lease their planes from leasing companies, to get these assets off their books and eliminate the debt overhang) at one end, and with $0.10 peanuts on the other end. They have to compete with other airlines that are so desperate to fill seats that they price the earliest tickets below cost, and hope the business travellers will make up the difference. And then there's weather.
Actually if Congress hadn't passed new spending increases, the budget would have been balanced. From my recollection, tax revenues did in fact increase under Reagan, as predicted. But Congress passed (and in fairness RR signed into law) spending increases almost double the increased revenues.
I am on Verizon Wireless, and used that as my internet connection for a couple of years, including my job as an IT person. I'm not a big movie watcher or anything, but it was fine for quite a while. I did finally sign up for cable internet (no TV, no phone) because I needed a fixed location for some web server testbed and document storage that required a fixed base. But I'm typing this on my laptop running through my phone in a friend's apartment in Miami. Verizon Wireless can get expensive as the data transfers get larger - basically $10 per 2GB/month.
Interestingly, my GF and her daughter are both cutting the cable and buying HD antennas. They get more *useful* channels - especially local and regional news, better quality (mostly), real HD, and a price of $0 per month. They won't be getting various cable channels but they weren't really watching any of them but the Weather Channel.
I'll just add (at the risk of getting flamed, derided, or insulted) that there are very good arguments from Systems Science that it is impossible to prove one or the other. For every argument for, there is a counter argument; and vice versa. So let's all just get along, and accept that other people may have thought things through just as intelligently as you and I have, and come to different conclusions.
Didn't you forget something in your cost basis, like a power source - solar, diesel generator, or whatnot? Also you have to look at the amortised cost for this equipment, which has a finite lifetime with a non-trivial probability of sudden failure.
who pays the utility exactly what the utility is crediting the PV provider
I don't think this is true. In both cases - you and your neighbor - the power is flowing through the meters, and being credited or debited accordingly at different rates. Those rates do reflect the cost of the infrastructure, the linemen, etc. as well as the raw cost of power. IIRC about 10% of power is lost in transmission, so it's paid for by the utility but lost as heat.
Also, utility profits are regulated by the state (or equivalent) - that's the nature of a state-regulated monopoly utility. Generally the rate is around 7%, or used to be. In return the utility provides reliable power to "everybody". If all power were converted to solar, and it still used the utility's wires, the utility would still be entitled to 7% profit on their service. The credit/debit values would be adjusted by the state regulators to reflect that. Hypothetically, and disregarding some very difficult electrical engineering issues, everyone could end up just paying a fixed amount for access to the wires, and the utility could just act as a brokerage for everyone buying and selling electricity, taking their percentage off the top.
The utilities don't have to bring power right to the house if it's not close to their infrastructure. My brother lives off the grid, 1/2 mile down his driveway. He would have had to pay $20,000 to have poles put in to get utility power, but he planned to be off grid anyway. His system, including an initial diesel generator, batteries, inverter/charger, etc. was less than $10,000. Since then he's largely converted to solar with a bit of wind, with the diesel still there just in case.
Notwithstanding some egregious examples like yours (the California 'deregulation' was possibly the worst example of legislative innumeracy and economic ignorance ever created), the agreement for regulated utilities is, indeed, that the company agrees to provide electricity to everyone, in return for being allowed a monopoly, and accepts a limited, fixed rate of return (typically 7%) with prices regulated by the state. This is sometimes, not always (or even generally), abused in various ways.
I have lived in two different states when the regulators and the utilities were fighting tooth and nail about every aspect of the business.
I think he meant just the added peak power that had to be generated with diesel. Most of the time their cost of generation is probably near that $0.02 wholesale price. That cost does not include the cost of the infrastructure - generators, wires, computers, etc. - or the cost of labor, which applies mostly regardless of source.
i think you would have regulatory and legal issues. You'd effectively be creating a tiny competing utility, which would violate the agreement between the state and the public utility company - the company gets a monopoly and guaranteed profits (typically 7% or so) in return for providing power to everyone and price regulation.
To add to the other reply which notes that the top 5% pay over 1/2 (58% if I read correctly) of the taxes, note that the bottom 50% paid less less than 2%. And, as the notes on that page indicate, this does not take into account various things like the EITC (counted as a spending program), which results in the bottom 50% having a net negative tax rate - i.e. they are receiving money from the government, and voting accordingly. And THAT is not counting various pure spending programs.
For perspective, when the income tax amendment was passed, it was argued that it would never be applied to anyone but the top 2% of incomes, and would never exceed 2% of income. Looks like once the door was open, that horse got out of the barn a long time ago. Prior to the Civil War, the federal government was largely funded by Post Office revenues (stamps), plus liquor and a few other things. The real, interesting question: since when did we need a federal government larger than that?
If some of the customers suddenly switch to pumping liquid in the line and the generator is unable to change anything and also keeps pumping, what do you think happens to the remaining customers? The pressure can blow their hoses.
Reminds me of a popular prank from days of old - folks who aren't familiar can look up "Water Hammer". The best example was a distant friend of mine, who went to a boys' school in an old building. The restroom had something like 12 sinks. A bunch of the boys got together and began turning the water taps on and off in unison. After a couple of minutes of this, the pressure wave generated caused the main coming into the school to break.
For those who aren't familiar with plumbing, water is 'incompressible' for all practical purposes. But it has momentum, and mass. So when turning the faucets on and off, the water gets started moving then is suddenly stopped, the momentum of all that moving water is suddenly converted to pressure, which in old systems results in a loud 'bang!' as the pipes are thrown around in the walls and expand slightly. Plumbing in modern systems has methods of handling that pressure wave to prevent water hammer. In the above case, the boys were effectively causing the pressure wave to reflect back and forth in the system, and were pumping it higher with each cycle until the weakest link broke. As the parent describes, the analogous thing can happen in electrical systems.
I think another simple example or at least related analogy is when you disconnect the wire from a running alternator in your car. Suddenly there is no place for the generated electricity to go. It bounces back and blows the diodes.
Heck, a reasonably talented and careful machinist could build a gun with a wood lathe, a drill and a few files. I may have left something out, but that's pretty much it. Maybe a chisel or two and a hammer.
For that matter, my neighbor (when I was a kid) built a 3 inch pipe cannon when he was young. It fired rocks over a mile. IIRC he had most of the barrel buried in dirt, which would explain why he didn't get sliced and diced by shrapnel from the barrel exploding. He's long dead of old age, so no details are available now.
I forget which company, but one of the jet engine companies has built and successfully tested turbine blades in an operating jet engine. IDK how much post-processing was required. And NASA funded making and testing a successful 3D printed rocket motor, which cost 1/10 as much as the original design and took 1/10 as long to make. It was made in one piece instead of fabricated from numerous components that had to be welded together. Welds, voids and impurities are the most common causes of failure in both systems and 3D printing is _potentially_ an answer to all of those failure points. So I would say (especially seeing the progress in just the last year or two) that your time scale is off by an order of magnitude.
Jet engine makers have made and tested (successfully) titanium turbine blades using additive manufacturing. Tolerances for those blades is on the order of 0.0001". I assume there must be some final fitting and polishing but they're not talking. And NASA funded a project that successfully built and tested a small rocket motor. The rocket motor was made in one piece, replacing a fabricated item that had many pieces. The time and cost to make it were both less than 10% of the old method.
IOW, companies are presently builing 3D printed parts and systems that are as good or better than equivalent high-precision parts.
Westinghouse Nuclear and the other vendor (GE? I don't recall) make a lot of money making fuel rods. It may not be that much compared to the cost of building the plant, but it's a very significant motivator for them to lobby against any other system.
I'd like your take on Kirk Sorenson's paperwork advocating LTFRs - from memory, Energy from Thorium and FLiBe Energy. He seems to be the most active proponent in the US of Thorium based MSRs. He and other advocates argue that because of the major differences in the entire system technology (not least the difference in proliferation risk), it would not be necessary to build Gigawatt scale reactors - instead they could be scaled to neighborhoods.
It's only an indicator not proof of anything, but IIRC the MSR run at Oak Ridge was a 10 MW reactor (the electricity produced was just sent to big resistors outside), fit into a single room, and was turned off every night and on in the morning. I think they were not using Thorium - it's been a year or so since I explored any of this and I'm too lazy/busy to retrace my steps.
Good data, thanks. My U233 number was misremembered. I didn't mean to imply U233 was required for the Thorium reactors, only that it's a relatively 'natural' use for it.
China and India are presently building (or in late stage planning) experimental hybrid Uranium+Thorium reactors but I think they are both solid-core (and I'm too lazy to go look it up!)
The problem with yellowcake, of course, is the cost and proliferation risk of enrichment. Thorium needs no enrichment (other than the starter neutron source, and at least one research project is attempting to use a linear accelerator to replace that - we shall see how that pans out). Advocates of the Thorium fuel cycle also argue that the LTFRs have at least two orders of magnitude less potential for proliferation. I think that number may not remain at that level as real experiments and analysis of the complete lifecycle are done, but nevertheless it's a worthwhile prospect.
The fact remains that there are strong commercial pressures against LTFRs due to the profitability and barriers to entry for nuclear fuel rod manufacturing and reprocessing.
Finally, as a space development advocate but not a nuclear scientist, it seems to me that Thorium fuel cycle might be a much more attractive / less scary technology for space propulsion than Uranium fuel cycles - to the extent that it might actually be possible to get through the political hurdles (in some country) That's offtopic for this discussion so I won't get into it here.
IDK, it's been a while since I looked into this. I think it was more about the money and politics. But recall that nuclear weapons aren't static - they can't just be left on a shelf indefinitely, but have to be torn down and the ingredients reprocessed periodically. So that may have been a factor. They may have just wanted a bigger raw material stockpile "just in case". (Ask yourself where the fuel in those 10,000 bombs that were decommissioned went - it didn't suddenly disappear.) On a related note, the US has kept stockpiled some hundreds of tons of U-233 for which there was no identifiable use for much of the last 30 years, and are just now getting ready to get rid of it - just when those Thorium reactors, which could very strongly use it (as starting triggers) might actually have a use for it.
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Again, nice try, but no. Today's poor are wealthier than ever because the poor get socialist welfare handouts, and government manipulating the economy so the poor can keep on taking on debts to prop up their consumption.
Actually, no. All the economic data shows that today there are fewer (%) poor people in the world than at any time in history and numerically at any time since WWII. It also shows that the rate of improvement of average standard of living at all levels of society worldwide since 1980 is continuing to increase. The first world countries are to some extent paying the price, losing jobs and competing more and more on price vs. productivity as the rest of the world 'catches up' to us. Walmart has brought a nation's worth of people into the global middle class, by itself - the most of any institution in such a short time in history.
In the US, there are truly a lot of subsidies - IIRC the lowest 20% of income earners receives about 9% more from the government than they put in. The US 'poverty line' standard of living exceeds the global mean standard of living for everyone. And everyone from the poorest to the richest complains about the lack of jobs and so forth, while they buy almost everything at inflation-adjusted prices that are for the most part lower than they were in the 1960s.
But there is a real problem, that both socialists and non-socialists will have to figure out a way to deal with - a recent paper predicted that automation, smart robotics, AI, and other computational advances are going to eliminate 50% of the jobs that people presently have. This could include the majority of IT people, as well. So the big question is, "are we willing to let the robots do all the work, and live surprisingly well and at the same time frugally due to government distribution of wealth, or keep our jobs and eliminate the productivity advances that give us all these advances?" This is a very real issue that none of the -isms presently have an answer for. (WRT 'surprisingly well', note that the poorest person in the US has a better chance of having a healthy child and living to old age than the wealthiest or most powerful person on the planet 200 years ago.)
I don't suppose any of them considered keeping the legroom, making a little less profit per ticket, and making it up by not flying half-empty...
It's worth noting that since airline deregulation, when ticket prices were regulated and high, nearly every major airline has been in and out of bankruptcy or been bought out ("merged") once or twice. The recent merger of American and USAir is an interesting case in point. American was still in bankruptcy, and the merger was in part a method to restructure the airline to get them out of bankruptcy.
If I were an executive, I would find a different business to run. The airline business is way too stressful. They're working with purchase orders on the order of $10 billion to buy planes (though most airlines I think now lease their planes from leasing companies, to get these assets off their books and eliminate the debt overhang) at one end, and with $0.10 peanuts on the other end. They have to compete with other airlines that are so desperate to fill seats that they price the earliest tickets below cost, and hope the business travellers will make up the difference. And then there's weather.
TL;DR - airlines ain't that profitable.
Rule of thumb for consumers: If you're not paying for something, that's not the product. You are the product.
Oh and 4k porn... I wouldn't, slightly fuzzy images are better for your intended purpose in watching it, than the "full gynaecologist" video version.
So, it's tits not zits?
Actually if Congress hadn't passed new spending increases, the budget would have been balanced. From my recollection, tax revenues did in fact increase under Reagan, as predicted. But Congress passed (and in fairness RR signed into law) spending increases almost double the increased revenues.
I am on Verizon Wireless, and used that as my internet connection for a couple of years, including my job as an IT person. I'm not a big movie watcher or anything, but it was fine for quite a while. I did finally sign up for cable internet (no TV, no phone) because I needed a fixed location for some web server testbed and document storage that required a fixed base. But I'm typing this on my laptop running through my phone in a friend's apartment in Miami. Verizon Wireless can get expensive as the data transfers get larger - basically $10 per 2GB/month.
Interestingly, my GF and her daughter are both cutting the cable and buying HD antennas. They get more *useful* channels - especially local and regional news, better quality (mostly), real HD, and a price of $0 per month. They won't be getting various cable channels but they weren't really watching any of them but the Weather Channel.
I'll just add (at the risk of getting flamed, derided, or insulted) that there are very good arguments from Systems Science that it is impossible to prove one or the other. For every argument for, there is a counter argument; and vice versa. So let's all just get along, and accept that other people may have thought things through just as intelligently as you and I have, and come to different conclusions.
Somebody once said, "In every meeting there is at least one asshole. Look around the room. If nobody you see is an asshole, you're it." :D
I would argue to remove subsidies for a lot of things, but that's another topic.
Didn't you forget something in your cost basis, like a power source - solar, diesel generator, or whatnot? Also you have to look at the amortised cost for this equipment, which has a finite lifetime with a non-trivial probability of sudden failure.
who pays the utility exactly what the utility is crediting the PV provider
I don't think this is true. In both cases - you and your neighbor - the power is flowing through the meters, and being credited or debited accordingly at different rates. Those rates do reflect the cost of the infrastructure, the linemen, etc. as well as the raw cost of power. IIRC about 10% of power is lost in transmission, so it's paid for by the utility but lost as heat.
Also, utility profits are regulated by the state (or equivalent) - that's the nature of a state-regulated monopoly utility. Generally the rate is around 7%, or used to be. In return the utility provides reliable power to "everybody". If all power were converted to solar, and it still used the utility's wires, the utility would still be entitled to 7% profit on their service. The credit/debit values would be adjusted by the state regulators to reflect that. Hypothetically, and disregarding some very difficult electrical engineering issues, everyone could end up just paying a fixed amount for access to the wires, and the utility could just act as a brokerage for everyone buying and selling electricity, taking their percentage off the top.
The utilities don't have to bring power right to the house if it's not close to their infrastructure. My brother lives off the grid, 1/2 mile down his driveway. He would have had to pay $20,000 to have poles put in to get utility power, but he planned to be off grid anyway. His system, including an initial diesel generator, batteries, inverter/charger, etc. was less than $10,000. Since then he's largely converted to solar with a bit of wind, with the diesel still there just in case.
Notwithstanding some egregious examples like yours (the California 'deregulation' was possibly the worst example of legislative innumeracy and economic ignorance ever created), the agreement for regulated utilities is, indeed, that the company agrees to provide electricity to everyone, in return for being allowed a monopoly, and accepts a limited, fixed rate of return (typically 7%) with prices regulated by the state. This is sometimes, not always (or even generally), abused in various ways.
I have lived in two different states when the regulators and the utilities were fighting tooth and nail about every aspect of the business.
I think he meant just the added peak power that had to be generated with diesel. Most of the time their cost of generation is probably near that $0.02 wholesale price. That cost does not include the cost of the infrastructure - generators, wires, computers, etc. - or the cost of labor, which applies mostly regardless of source.
i think you would have regulatory and legal issues. You'd effectively be creating a tiny competing utility, which would violate the agreement between the state and the public utility company - the company gets a monopoly and guaranteed profits (typically 7% or so) in return for providing power to everyone and price regulation.
To add to the other reply which notes that the top 5% pay over 1/2 (58% if I read correctly) of the taxes, note that the bottom 50% paid less less than 2%. And, as the notes on that page indicate, this does not take into account various things like the EITC (counted as a spending program), which results in the bottom 50% having a net negative tax rate - i.e. they are receiving money from the government, and voting accordingly. And THAT is not counting various pure spending programs.
For perspective, when the income tax amendment was passed, it was argued that it would never be applied to anyone but the top 2% of incomes, and would never exceed 2% of income. Looks like once the door was open, that horse got out of the barn a long time ago. Prior to the Civil War, the federal government was largely funded by Post Office revenues (stamps), plus liquor and a few other things. The real, interesting question: since when did we need a federal government larger than that?
but Obama's administration won't even take his phone call.
in fairness, neither has any other administration since about 1969.
If some of the customers suddenly switch to pumping liquid in the line and the generator is unable to change anything and also keeps pumping, what do you think happens to the remaining customers? The pressure can blow their hoses.
Reminds me of a popular prank from days of old - folks who aren't familiar can look up "Water Hammer". The best example was a distant friend of mine, who went to a boys' school in an old building. The restroom had something like 12 sinks. A bunch of the boys got together and began turning the water taps on and off in unison. After a couple of minutes of this, the pressure wave generated caused the main coming into the school to break.
For those who aren't familiar with plumbing, water is 'incompressible' for all practical purposes. But it has momentum, and mass. So when turning the faucets on and off, the water gets started moving then is suddenly stopped, the momentum of all that moving water is suddenly converted to pressure, which in old systems results in a loud 'bang!' as the pipes are thrown around in the walls and expand slightly. Plumbing in modern systems has methods of handling that pressure wave to prevent water hammer. In the above case, the boys were effectively causing the pressure wave to reflect back and forth in the system, and were pumping it higher with each cycle until the weakest link broke. As the parent describes, the analogous thing can happen in electrical systems.
I think another simple example or at least related analogy is when you disconnect the wire from a running alternator in your car. Suddenly there is no place for the generated electricity to go. It bounces back and blows the diodes.
Heck, a reasonably talented and careful machinist could build a gun with a wood lathe, a drill and a few files. I may have left something out, but that's pretty much it. Maybe a chisel or two and a hammer.
For that matter, my neighbor (when I was a kid) built a 3 inch pipe cannon when he was young. It fired rocks over a mile. IIRC he had most of the barrel buried in dirt, which would explain why he didn't get sliced and diced by shrapnel from the barrel exploding. He's long dead of old age, so no details are available now.
I forget which company, but one of the jet engine companies has built and successfully tested turbine blades in an operating jet engine. IDK how much post-processing was required. And NASA funded making and testing a successful 3D printed rocket motor, which cost 1/10 as much as the original design and took 1/10 as long to make. It was made in one piece instead of fabricated from numerous components that had to be welded together. Welds, voids and impurities are the most common causes of failure in both systems and 3D printing is _potentially_ an answer to all of those failure points. So I would say (especially seeing the progress in just the last year or two) that your time scale is off by an order of magnitude.
Jet engine makers have made and tested (successfully) titanium turbine blades using additive manufacturing. Tolerances for those blades is on the order of 0.0001". I assume there must be some final fitting and polishing but they're not talking. And NASA funded a project that successfully built and tested a small rocket motor. The rocket motor was made in one piece, replacing a fabricated item that had many pieces. The time and cost to make it were both less than 10% of the old method.
IOW, companies are presently builing 3D printed parts and systems that are as good or better than equivalent high-precision parts.
Westinghouse Nuclear and the other vendor (GE? I don't recall) make a lot of money making fuel rods. It may not be that much compared to the cost of building the plant, but it's a very significant motivator for them to lobby against any other system.
I'd like your take on Kirk Sorenson's paperwork advocating LTFRs - from memory, Energy from Thorium and FLiBe Energy. He seems to be the most active proponent in the US of Thorium based MSRs. He and other advocates argue that because of the major differences in the entire system technology (not least the difference in proliferation risk), it would not be necessary to build Gigawatt scale reactors - instead they could be scaled to neighborhoods.
It's only an indicator not proof of anything, but IIRC the MSR run at Oak Ridge was a 10 MW reactor (the electricity produced was just sent to big resistors outside), fit into a single room, and was turned off every night and on in the morning. I think they were not using Thorium - it's been a year or so since I explored any of this and I'm too lazy/busy to retrace my steps.
Good data, thanks. My U233 number was misremembered. I didn't mean to imply U233 was required for the Thorium reactors, only that it's a relatively 'natural' use for it.
China and India are presently building (or in late stage planning) experimental hybrid Uranium+Thorium reactors but I think they are both solid-core (and I'm too lazy to go look it up!)
The problem with yellowcake, of course, is the cost and proliferation risk of enrichment. Thorium needs no enrichment (other than the starter neutron source, and at least one research project is attempting to use a linear accelerator to replace that - we shall see how that pans out). Advocates of the Thorium fuel cycle also argue that the LTFRs have at least two orders of magnitude less potential for proliferation. I think that number may not remain at that level as real experiments and analysis of the complete lifecycle are done, but nevertheless it's a worthwhile prospect.
The fact remains that there are strong commercial pressures against LTFRs due to the profitability and barriers to entry for nuclear fuel rod manufacturing and reprocessing.
Finally, as a space development advocate but not a nuclear scientist, it seems to me that Thorium fuel cycle might be a much more attractive / less scary technology for space propulsion than Uranium fuel cycles - to the extent that it might actually be possible to get through the political hurdles (in some country) That's offtopic for this discussion so I won't get into it here.
IDK, it's been a while since I looked into this. I think it was more about the money and politics. But recall that nuclear weapons aren't static - they can't just be left on a shelf indefinitely, but have to be torn down and the ingredients reprocessed periodically. So that may have been a factor. They may have just wanted a bigger raw material stockpile "just in case". (Ask yourself where the fuel in those 10,000 bombs that were decommissioned went - it didn't suddenly disappear.) On a related note, the US has kept stockpiled some hundreds of tons of U-233 for which there was no identifiable use for much of the last 30 years, and are just now getting ready to get rid of it - just when those Thorium reactors, which could very strongly use it (as starting triggers) might actually have a use for it.
So, IDK it's just what I read.