Astronauts play by different rules, because they're comparing the odds of cancer from radiation exposure against the odds of dying in a fiery rocket explosion. Their lifetime limit (1 Sv) is 1000 times the yearly limit for the general public.
The college where I teach just renovated its science center. I'm very happy with the tabletop power we have in our new physics classroom, and I think the "lessons learned" apply to a kitchen too:
Don't do low-voltage DC. It'll never be the voltage you want, and plug standardization is a nightmare.
Don't put outlets on the top of the table. You'll spill, drop crumbs, and ruin the outlets.
Think about spilled liquids. A lot.
Make sure you can move the table to the other side of the room without cutting wires.
Our new physics lab classroom has long, heavy wooden "butcher block" tables with a top that overhangs the edge by an inch. The outlets are on the front edge of the table, protected from liquids by the overhang. The outlet boxes run to a heavy-duty cable with a male plug on the end: you plug the tables into a recessed floor box.
I hope they hired a marine engineer to work out the anti-fouling issues. The system may work great now, but in a couple months every single surface exposed to seawater will be covered with barnacles and algae. The article mentions cleaning heat exchangers as part of maintenance, but some of this crap can't be scrubbed off without a chisel.
Hey, cut the Prenda guys some slack. They really need to earn some spending money, what with their upcoming dismissal from the bar and possible RICO prosecution...
I want cloud storage! My boss says it's going to be the next big thing to contextualize our value process, so I have to have it! Hmm, let's see:
13 months of Creative Cloud with 20 GB of cloud storage: $650 Infinity months of Creative Suite 6 plus 13 months of 25 GB Google Drive storage: $635 Being able to put non-Adobe files in my cloud storage: priceless.
As an aside, are there any functions where the integral approaches infinity (for positive values of x) as f(x) approaches zero (asymptotically or otherwise)???
“When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” asked the MIT economist Morris Adelman, perhaps the most important exponent of this view. “The best one-word answer: never.” Effectively, energy supplies are infinite.
This is dead wrong. The economic argument says that oil production is tied to the profitability of ever-more-expensive production technologies. We will never "run out of oil" because eventually we won't be able to afford to extract it, but this will happen while there's still oil in the ground. There's a similar physics argument, based on "energy return on energy invested": fossil fuel production ends when the energy required to pull it out of the ground is greater than the energy of the fuel itself. There will still be some in the ground, and it might be useful for making expensive chemicals, dyes, or lubricants, but it's pointless as a fuel.
So no, we won't ever run out of oil. But we will reach a point where you can't have any. To characterize this situation as "infinite supply" is ludicrous.
It doesn't have to be a carbon tax. Road mile taxes, or higher gasoline taxes would serve the same purpose in this instance. But when you get to the level of encouraging very specific behaviors like getting grocery delivery, I think that the combination of not knowing if this really incentivizes the right behavior, and the cost of setting up such schemes, makes these "solutions" worse than the status quo.
You've just explained why it has to be a carbon tax rather than a road mile tax, gasoline tax, etc -- to ensure you incentivize (?) the right behavior, you apply tax pressure on the specific thing you want to avoid, rather than encouraging specific behaviors that might or might not get the job done in an optimal way.
I'm a free-market environmentalist. I say, monetize the external costs of environmental damage, and let the market figure out the best strategy for saving the planet.
I imagine they may even throw away less because of the very tight margins they run.
I don't see why a corner shop would have tighter margins than a supermarket: the retail food business is a cut-throat game, and everyone in it is running at the razor's edge between a few percent profit and driving away their fickle customers.
Anyway, the point I'm making is about the statistics of small numbers. A supermarket with 10,000 customers a week can count on selling, say, 100 cucumbers a week, pretty reliably. A corner shop with 200 customers a week might sell 2 cucumbers a week on average, but some weeks it'll be 5, some weeks it'll be zero. So they'll probably stock 5 a week, and have to throw them all out half the time.
Yeah, if you tried to house the faculty and staff families on campus too, plus the head shops and thrift stores along the main drag off campus, plus all *their* families... a college town is about the smallest "self-contained living unit" you find in American society, and even that only works by keeping half the population in tiny dorm rooms and giving the other half cars.
I'm not saying you couldn't make things more compact -- and as the oil runs out we'll probably have to -- but that involves personal sacrifices most Americans aren't ready to make yet.
What is this "European" system of which you speak?
He started it. The Polish author I'm replying to described how things worked "outside the US". That seemed pretty broad to me, so I narrowed it down to just Europe, based on my personal experience seeing corner shops in the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria.
I'm the first to admit that some Americans generalize too broadly about the rest of the world, but this conversation started off with a Polish guy implying that corner shops are used worldwide, followed by a Briton (I checked) saying that because I'm American I'm clueless about European multiculturalism -- and *I'm* the one being called out for hasty generalization?
Most major grocery chains in my part of the country already offer it, and advertise it heavily, so clearly something's wrong with your premise. It's this: retail stores are expensive to operate. Bright lights, well-heated stores full of poorly-insulated refrigerated boxes, with hot lights inside the refrigerated boxes -- it's a thermodynamics nightmare. Add to that the cost of cleaning, checkout workers... that's all big money.
In my experience, the grocery delivery services know that you're going to be super-suspicious about low-quality food, and make a point of giving you the best stuff. They advertise this heavily, and from what I've seen it's true. (Their financial incentive to give you crap food is smaller than their financial incentive to operate fewer expensive retail stores.)
Also, keep in mind that if they're delivering from a central warehouse rather than a retail location, the food won't have been sitting out shriveling on a display shelf for three days before you buy it.
Agree 100%. I happen to think almost everything wrong with America could be solved with a 100% carbon tax. But that's not gonna happen, so let's forget about the "best solution" and see what we can do about merely good solutions.
If you want to be even more efficient how about you do a "Foxconn" - live, eat, etc at your workplace and do away with most grocery trips completely.
The thing is, if you want to do this without sacrificing quality of life (which the actual Foxconn employees certainly do), you need to put a *lot* of stuff on the workplace's campus. Single-family housing, apartments, medical facilities, food, movie theaters, playgrounds, legal offices, accountants, education, police... all this stuff takes up space, so your campus starts to sprawl over square miles, people start buying cars to get across campus, and then you've got to provide auto sales and service...
And pretty soon you've invented the "town". Large domestic U.S. military bases are a great example of how this happens in practice.
The savings cited by the article are large enough that the added emissions from starting and stopping your car, getting off and back on the freeway, etc. might still make delivery a win. And of course, there are tons of people (esp. those with kids) who do make special trips.
Slashdot Mirror
Astronauts play by different rules, because they're comparing the odds of cancer from radiation exposure against the odds of dying in a fiery rocket explosion. Their lifetime limit (1 Sv) is 1000 times the yearly limit for the general public.
The college where I teach just renovated its science center. I'm very happy with the tabletop power we have in our new physics classroom, and I think the "lessons learned" apply to a kitchen too:
Don't do low-voltage DC. It'll never be the voltage you want, and plug standardization is a nightmare.
Don't put outlets on the top of the table. You'll spill, drop crumbs, and ruin the outlets.
Think about spilled liquids. A lot.
Make sure you can move the table to the other side of the room without cutting wires.
Our new physics lab classroom has long, heavy wooden "butcher block" tables with a top that overhangs the edge by an inch. The outlets are on the front edge of the table, protected from liquids by the overhang. The outlet boxes run to a heavy-duty cable with a male plug on the end: you plug the tables into a recessed floor box.
There is no deep water in the Baltic Sea: it's only about 50 meters deep in most places. The OTEC guys are talking about depths 20 times that.
If you're going to be pedantic, I've got you out-gunned.
I hope they hired a marine engineer to work out the anti-fouling issues. The system may work great now, but in a couple months every single surface exposed to seawater will be covered with barnacles and algae. The article mentions cleaning heat exchangers as part of maintenance, but some of this crap can't be scrubbed off without a chisel.
Read the article: after leaving the data center, the heat is sent to a heat pump where it's used to heat houses.
Hey, cut the Prenda guys some slack. They really need to earn some spending money, what with their upcoming dismissal from the bar and possible RICO prosecution...
Oops, we got so wrapped up in the whole "money buys power" thing that we forgot to make sure we wanted to buy the same stuff.
I wouldn't know, I bought Illustrator CS3 TEN YEARS AGO and it still works fine for everything I do.
I want cloud storage! My boss says it's going to be the next big thing to contextualize our value process, so I have to have it! Hmm, let's see:
13 months of Creative Cloud with 20 GB of cloud storage: $650
Infinity months of Creative Suite 6 plus 13 months of 25 GB Google Drive storage: $635
Being able to put non-Adobe files in my cloud storage: priceless.
Slashdot interviewing MacAfee? Somebody call the U.S. Strategic Paranoia Reserve, we're going to have to tap into it.
As an aside, are there any functions where the integral approaches infinity (for positive values of x) as f(x) approaches zero (asymptotically or otherwise)???
Yes. f(x) = 1/x is the standard example.
“When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” asked the MIT economist Morris Adelman, perhaps the most important exponent of this view. “The best one-word answer: never.” Effectively, energy supplies are infinite.
This is dead wrong. The economic argument says that oil production is tied to the profitability of ever-more-expensive production technologies. We will never "run out of oil" because eventually we won't be able to afford to extract it, but this will happen while there's still oil in the ground. There's a similar physics argument, based on "energy return on energy invested": fossil fuel production ends when the energy required to pull it out of the ground is greater than the energy of the fuel itself. There will still be some in the ground, and it might be useful for making expensive chemicals, dyes, or lubricants, but it's pointless as a fuel.
So no, we won't ever run out of oil. But we will reach a point where you can't have any. To characterize this situation as "infinite supply" is ludicrous.
Point taken, I forgot what I was on about in the original post.
It doesn't have to be a carbon tax. Road mile taxes, or higher gasoline taxes would serve the same purpose in this instance. But when you get to the level of encouraging very specific behaviors like getting grocery delivery, I think that the combination of not knowing if this really incentivizes the right behavior, and the cost of setting up such schemes, makes these "solutions" worse than the status quo.
You've just explained why it has to be a carbon tax rather than a road mile tax, gasoline tax, etc -- to ensure you incentivize (?) the right behavior, you apply tax pressure on the specific thing you want to avoid, rather than encouraging specific behaviors that might or might not get the job done in an optimal way.
I'm a free-market environmentalist. I say, monetize the external costs of environmental damage, and let the market figure out the best strategy for saving the planet.
I imagine they may even throw away less because of the very tight margins they run.
I don't see why a corner shop would have tighter margins than a supermarket: the retail food business is a cut-throat game, and everyone in it is running at the razor's edge between a few percent profit and driving away their fickle customers.
Anyway, the point I'm making is about the statistics of small numbers. A supermarket with 10,000 customers a week can count on selling, say, 100 cucumbers a week, pretty reliably. A corner shop with 200 customers a week might sell 2 cucumbers a week on average, but some weeks it'll be 5, some weeks it'll be zero. So they'll probably stock 5 a week, and have to throw them all out half the time.
Yeah, if you tried to house the faculty and staff families on campus too, plus the head shops and thrift stores along the main drag off campus, plus all *their* families... a college town is about the smallest "self-contained living unit" you find in American society, and even that only works by keeping half the population in tiny dorm rooms and giving the other half cars.
I'm not saying you couldn't make things more compact -- and as the oil runs out we'll probably have to -- but that involves personal sacrifices most Americans aren't ready to make yet.
What is this "European" system of which you speak?
He started it. The Polish author I'm replying to described how things worked "outside the US". That seemed pretty broad to me, so I narrowed it down to just Europe, based on my personal experience seeing corner shops in the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria.
I'm the first to admit that some Americans generalize too broadly about the rest of the world, but this conversation started off with a Polish guy implying that corner shops are used worldwide, followed by a Briton (I checked) saying that because I'm American I'm clueless about European multiculturalism -- and *I'm* the one being called out for hasty generalization?
Yeah, I've got to agree. Cannibalism is the best option.
Nice. You're hittin' the "hipster foodie" stereotype out of the park, man!
Grocery stores would fight it
Most major grocery chains in my part of the country already offer it, and advertise it heavily, so clearly something's wrong with your premise. It's this: retail stores are expensive to operate. Bright lights, well-heated stores full of poorly-insulated refrigerated boxes, with hot lights inside the refrigerated boxes -- it's a thermodynamics nightmare. Add to that the cost of cleaning, checkout workers ... that's all big money.
In my experience, the grocery delivery services know that you're going to be super-suspicious about low-quality food, and make a point of giving you the best stuff. They advertise this heavily, and from what I've seen it's true. (Their financial incentive to give you crap food is smaller than their financial incentive to operate fewer expensive retail stores.)
Also, keep in mind that if they're delivering from a central warehouse rather than a retail location, the food won't have been sitting out shriveling on a display shelf for three days before you buy it.
Agree 100%. I happen to think almost everything wrong with America could be solved with a 100% carbon tax. But that's not gonna happen, so let's forget about the "best solution" and see what we can do about merely good solutions.
If you want to be even more efficient how about you do a "Foxconn" - live, eat, etc at your workplace and do away with most grocery trips completely.
The thing is, if you want to do this without sacrificing quality of life (which the actual Foxconn employees certainly do), you need to put a *lot* of stuff on the workplace's campus. Single-family housing, apartments, medical facilities, food, movie theaters, playgrounds, legal offices, accountants, education, police ... all this stuff takes up space, so your campus starts to sprawl over square miles, people start buying cars to get across campus, and then you've got to provide auto sales and service ...
And pretty soon you've invented the "town". Large domestic U.S. military bases are a great example of how this happens in practice.
The savings cited by the article are large enough that the added emissions from starting and stopping your car, getting off and back on the freeway, etc. might still make delivery a win. And of course, there are tons of people (esp. those with kids) who do make special trips.