Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?"
Watching the global thermometer dispels this delusion fairly quickly.
Nuclear is still HEAVILY subsidized. One of the major subsidies idemnifies the operators from damages if a plant fails and spews radioactives over the neighborhood. No private insurance group or conglomerate of such groups was willing to offer that insurance at any price.
Citation? Are you saying that a plant operator is not responsible for damages caused should they have a major issue? Really? They are immune to civil suits? Somehow I don't think that is correct. The operators of Three Mile Island lost a class action suit and paid out millions because of the accident there. Not to mention that if it IS true, it costs nothing until there is an issue, which after 70 years there hasn't been, at least anything major.
Whether this is reasonable or not is disputable. It is clearly a subsidy, however. And so is destabilizing foreign governments to keep the oil flowing.
It's clearly not what you think, if it's anything at all.
You people and this idea that the military is all about oil, shesh. Evidence is that the military is about a LOT more than arranging for cheap and free flowing oil, and if it was really all about that, we are really stupid to just sit back and let the whole world benefit when we could just take the oil we needed from South America and let the rest of the world duke it out over what we can't use. But the truth is, we are not that kind of country, at least for the most part. We really are not in the world domination game, even though we'd obviously win if we where, same with oil. We just don't go to war over such things, and never really have. Others have, but not the USA.
There's some people who live downstream from a mountain top that just, oops, ended up in the river who might disagree with you.
You sarcasm is noted... (I sure hope you are not serious... ) SUE the people that made the mistake and put the mountain into the river. There are an army of personal injury and trial lawyers who will be more than willing to help you.
An individual, or even a small group of individuals, doesn't have much recourse when a big company tells them to "like it or lump it".
This is not true. Civil courts are *required* to treat everybody the same, and corporations are "just people" when it comes to civil courts so that's why I suggest you file suit. Now the court might tell you to pound sand, but the company doesn't have the power to just dismiss your suit, even if it was totally bogus from the start, only the judge can do that. So just telling you to "lump it" is only effective if you follow their command. If you really feel wronged, I suggest you not do what the company says....
Ok, we are done here then, being that there is no point.
I don't find the zealot global warming crowd to be very willing to actually discuss it rationally anyway. They just want to run around talking about the sky falling and calling the science settled and those who doubt it members of the flat earth society. Just remember, according to you guys, we are all cooked anyway, so it doesn't really matter what we do, so get ready for the Apocalypse.
Yea great, lets just subsidize Solar until it's viable, surely it will work out better than all the windmills we put government money into which are rotting even though they are but a few years old.
As if nuclear and fossil fuels weren't subsidized up the wazoo.
Neither of these technologies where "subsidized" in any meaningful way (perhaps nuclear was a bit at the start, but that's long over). Oil has NEVER been subsidized from the time of Standard Oil on.
Your defense argument is not well placed either. We spend money on defense, lots of it, but that is not just about protecting oil prices as you seem to think, but about protection of the national interests which happens to include it's economic interests which are best served though stable Oil prices. But this benefits the world as well as the USA. Remember, if it was ONLY about oil, we could easily take control of any parts of the world's Oil supply we wanted and there is literally nobody out there who could stop us. We don't do this because it's NOT just about oil.
So can we stop with the liberal canards yet? We are WAY off topic now..
Most of the environmental issues from Coal have effectively been eliminated, except for the perceived C02 emission standard,
So, other than spewing the single largest existing threat to the welfare of human civilization, coal is just fine.
Gota stuff the straw man eh?
So, you are going out on the "It's Settled science: global warming is man made" limb? OK, but you still need to address the emerging economies and their reliance on *cheep* coal power. I don't think the leaders of China are going to care, and if they don't, we are all cooked anyway (using your logic and if the dire predictions actually come true). Good luck with that.
IMHO, this global warming/climate change or what ever we are supposed to call it today, is not the dire problem it's made out to be, and the proof that it's man made is very much not settled. What is a problem is the way the issue is being used for political gain by those who are not above ginning up a crisis and then not let it go to waste.
Meanwhile, by your arguments, the problem of setting up a recycling center for solar panels appears to be an intractible dilemma.
Gota stuff some more in? Hope you win that fight, here's a match so you can take on the scarecrow.
I've not said it's an intractable problem, only that it's an issue that is NOT being considered by most proponents of solar power. Can you safely deal with this stuff? Yep, but it takes public education, infrastructure and consumes resources (electric power and the like) to do. All this accrues to the wrong side of the balance sheet for solar power, making it more expensive than just the purchase/installation price you see now. Solar isn't viable without these costs fully baked in so this only makes the case for solar even worse when you consider this cost too.
Face it, solar is not viable, even without all this other stuff.
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?
Fossil fuel plants are not required to pay for or clean up substantial amounts of pollution they generate. They dump vast quantities of CO2 and other pollutants, both gaseous and particulate, and never are required to pay for the full impact they have. Sure, there are some emissions controls and cleanup they are required to consider but they do not and never have been required to pay for the full cost of their pollution. Good luck getting them to pay to "clean up" their toxic byproducts too. This is called an externality.
This is a patently false claim. If you don't think so, Civil law allows you to sue for damages if something somebody else does damages your property, even if what they are doing is legal. It might not be commonly done, but legal recourse exists. So if what you claim is true, grab the nearest lawyer you can find and start filing class action suits on any fossil fuel fired generation plant you can find. Start with everybody downwind in your class. Good luck, you are going to need it.
Most of the environmental issues from Coal have effectively been eliminated, except for the perceived C02 emission standard, at least here in the US. Certainly this has not been the case in the past, but here in the USA there is not wide spread environmental damage from fossil fuels (apart from the C02 question). So power generators effectively deal with these costs (i.e. pass them on to consumers really).
Further, it's worth noting that even many industrialized countries have made similar environmental improvements, while the emerging countries like China don't yet care and are eclipsing the USA's environmental impact by a large margin using decades old technologies. The problem here is NOT the USA, if you are really interested in environmental protection you need to look well beyond our borders. In almost every way imaginable the environmental situation here in the USA has been steadily improving to the point where we are head and shoulders above our peers in the industrialized world.
You have indeed discovered the unvarnished truth, solar is not viable in terms of cost and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Not true at all. The subsidies and tax write-offs and other benefits continue to pile up. Someone who is paying full retail for his panels is just someone who is too lazy to file the appropriate paperwork.
Yea great, lets just subsidize Solar until it's viable, surely it will work out better than all the windmills we put government money into which are rotting even though they are but a few years old.
There is another great truth of life.... There is no free money, even when the government gives it to you it has to come from somewhere. They ether get it from taxes, borrowing (future taxes), or they print it. Don't be fooled into thinking they can just print, because when they do that everyone pays though inflation.
Solar will only really make sense when it can stand on it's own.
They'd be stupid not to consider, "how much will it cost to clean up the mess?" in today's day and age where the EPA can come in and pretty much regulate you out of business for messing things up.
That's true, which is one reason why not many coal plants are being built in the USA today.
However, solar panels aren't competing against new coal plants -- they are competing against the many existing coal plants which have been running for years, and whose construction has already been paid for. Those plants' only ongoing costs are maintenance and fuel, which makes them relatively inexpensive to operate.
The cost of repairing the damage to the climate that those plants cause, OTOH, may be quite large, but the owners of the plants will not be responsible for paying that cost, so they don't care.
I think you are mistaken. Most Coal plants today are headed for the dust bin of history for a number of political and regulatory reasons. It's simply much cheaper to use Natural Gas (thanks to fracking) than coal. Of course the current administration's choice to cap C02 emissions per Watt hour produced didn't help coal either.
But I think solar faces a real problem too. The disposal of solar panels can be a significant problem because they contain some seriously toxic materials. You cannot just land fill this stuff and the facilities needed to process this material into something safe or reuse it don't exist yet. It remains to be seen how cost effective and environmentally impacting this will be.
I'll revise my statement... For now, Solar use in the most ideal of circumstances seems to be comparable, but there are significant environmental issues that need to be carefully controlled or the production, use and decommissioning of the components WILL be an issue. You just don't landfill this stuff to get rid of it and if you do, it's going to be a really big mess. Also, using solar in less than ideal locations, simply doesn't work out for the environment or the ROI.
Many solar panels are NOT highly recyclable and contain components which are highly toxic. The sad fact is that the more efficient panels are the ones that are toxic and difficult to recycle, but even the less efficient ones have their issues. Consumers, on average, have no clue about these issues, so I'm sure the "ideal" situation for handling these components will be the exception and not the rule.
Home solar installations are still not very cost effective. I installed one at home anyway because I thought it would be a neat thing to play with, but the payback estimates the vendor and government used to sell me on it were vastly aggressive, claiming a 3-5 year payback. So far it has been nearly 10 years and I've not yet made back 20% of the installation cost.
In any case, solar might become more viable as we move away from coal, which the EPA seems to want to force sooner rather than later.
I also question the "environmentalism" of solar given how utterly dirty and toxic the processes are for making the cells themselves.
This is an example of what Musk says "the lay of the land today, where there are indeed too many suppliers, most of whom are producing relatively low photonic efficiency solar cells at uncompelling costs"
So he's just betting that the case for solar gets better sometime soon so he's investing in a company that does solar stuff. He already knows that he will loose money in the short term. He's taking a risk with his money, I hope it pays off, but I don't think the chances are good.
"the lay of the land today, where there are indeed too many suppliers, most of whom are producing relatively low photonic efficiency solar cells at uncompelling costs" (Quote from http://blog.solarcity.com/sile...)
You have indeed discovered the unvarnished truth, solar is not viable in terms of cost and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Conservation is usually the best bang for the buck, but even that has it's limits.
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?" They'd be stupid not to consider, "how much will it cost to clean up the mess?" in today's day and age where the EPA can come in and pretty much regulate you out of business for messing things up.
Right now, if one considers the TCO of solar, they come up way short of other options. Environmentally they fail too, but you have to open up your aperture to the total life cycle of the system to be totally fair. Most of the environmentalists don't like to do that.
I don't disagree that most can master enough skill to produce acceptable photos in a short time. The basics are not that hard. But I still find what the true artists can do with the process amazing and the more I try to do similar things, the more impressed I am with the skills they developed.
Remember though that the processing and printing are really just the last part of the whole process. Actually getting the image captured, looking though the viewfinder and exposing the film, is a whole series of choices and trade offs that your average photographer simply doesn't understand. How this set of choices translate into changes to the processing and printing activities are even less understood, even by the folks who do it digitally.
Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
Shesh, where I get this move to digital, I do not agree that skills in analog photography are without value. I really enjoy a good picture made using film and admire the talent of those who can do great things with it.
I guess folks get enjoyment using the analog medium. It takes great skill and equipment to expose film, develop, and print even in B&W. Now days though, you can do all the same things digitally and much faster and easier, taking much of the skill out of it.
But... If you are looking for quality over skill, digital is where you will end up eventually. I don't care if you are talking audio, video or photos. You see, the analog stuff has it's limitations that are part of the medium, where digital limits are set by the engineering of the whole system which is driven by cost. You can literally get any quality you need from digital if you have enough money. Need more dynamic range? You got it. Need better SNR? Sure thing. Need better resolution? No problem, just write the check and we will get right on it.
It's simply progress... Like moving from vinyl to CD or VHS to DVD was progress, of a good kind. But like I said before, we are losing the skills needed to use the analog medium, Skills that I admired.
I'm not going to argue the active insurgency issue, but one needs to carefully consider what's behind that before you pull up tent stakes and head home. In the case of Iraq, the insurgency was a proxy for groups OUTSIDE Iraq. In this case it was a pay a little bit to deal with it now or be forced to pay a LOT more later, a president who only cares about politics and his legacy does trash like this hoping the debt won't come due on his watch. They hoped that later was after 2016.
Seems later is fast approaching....
We paid dearly for Europe and Japan by the way. The Normandy landing and the various islands in the south pacific cost tens of thousands of lives from just the US military alone. Europe and Russia paid with millions of lives. So even though the type of warfare was different, the costs of war can be and are high. What really happened in Iraq is we got tired of the drip drip drip of taking casualties all the time so we decided to run. It's not that we lost huge numbers, we didn't, even during an insurgency and near civil war. We just where not committed to seeing it though and left for political reasons.... Soon we will be back for political reasons, and we will pay an even more dear price...
Ahh, you are just inventing history now...no, I'm not. History of Richard Armey, Freedomworks and the origin of the tea baggers
Secrets of the tea party
The tea party is an AstroTurf campaign front for Koch and Sciafe, with some money from DeVos (of Amway)
WHO CARES if the Koch Brothers want to fund a political organization. It's a free country, at least for now, and the First amendment still applies. If you think the left doesn't have rich people who give to political causes (i.e. that your side has the moral high ground on this issue) you are gravely mistaken. It's hypocritical of the left to act all shocked and bothered about how politics and money work and start yelling about how awful the Koch brothers are because they donate a small portion of their vast fortune to causes you don't approve of. Your side does it too, so stop acting like you don't.
Back to the Tea Party, I think your side is just scared of a grass roots organization that leans right and seems to have some traction. In an effort to discredit it, you have adopted scorched earth level rhetoric which is not becoming. Face it, you guys are scared to death, and you should be given the 2014 polling I've seen. Your side is facing a huge backlash caused by 6 years of Obama both in domestic and foreign policy and I got a feeling the problem you face is going to last well past the 2014 election as more of Obama's chickens come home to roost. Get ready, you are going to have to live with the Tea Party for another decade at the very least and likely they will have significant influence in this country.
No, I'm saying "in general" they don't. There are the gifted few who will work just because, but the majority will fall to the temptation to be lazy if you make it easy to do so.
I'm further saying, that you will have a more productive society if folks are self reliant and not prone to dependency.
Never the less, we have remained in captured territory for decades, which looked a lot like "quagmires" of the previous post.
We have stayed in various locations world wide as a matter of routine, the strategic reasons for why where not in question. Of course, we could argue about the advisability of departing Iraq and Afghanistan where we have simply unilaterally withdrawn. The current events in Iraq seem to say it is/was a bad idea.
When you look at the Wikipedia page on Socialism you will find Marx discussed in the Social and Political section, so where Socialism encompasses more than Marxism, Marxism is indeed socialism at its core. As Wikipedia articles go, this one isn't too bad. Read if for yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Look, the Tea Party was "invented" to protest HARP and things like the stimulus plan that didn't work. Obamacare was AFTER the Tea Party got started. Not to mention, they generally don't stand on the streets and yell about anything. I know, I've been to their events, pretty calm affairs if you ask me..
Next you will call them racist..... Que liberal rhetoric in three... Two... One...
Americans don't understand the concept of socialism and still think it's a bad thing.
Didn't Carl Marx define socialism? Where the state controls (owns) everything or real value and personal property rights are severely limited? Everybody works for the state, and in return gets from the state what they need to live?
Socialism when taken to its logical conclusion IS a bad thing. Socialism destroys the motivation of personal responsibility, discourages risk taking and hard work as a means to foster innovation and efficiency because it takes from the "rich" (who got that way when somebody took a risk and/or worked hard) and distributes it though government waste and fraud to the "poor".
What are they teaching in school these days? Shesh.. Socialism isn't a bad thing? You are nuts. Of course, if you define socialism as something other than what it's traditionally been your statement might be right, but words mean things.
Back when we used to win wars instead of getting locked into fruitless decade-long quagmires, we also managed to subsidize college tuition more than we do now....
Haven't we had a continued presence in Europe for 70 years now? Our presence in Japan has been a few years short of that too.
South Korea has sucked up resources for 60?
The only reason we are not in Vietnam is because we got booted out when we surrendered/lost or whatever that was.
Slashdot Mirror
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?"
Watching the global thermometer dispels this delusion fairly quickly.
You mean that temperature gauge that shows no measurable increase in the last 20 years? http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...
As we say here in Texas.. Y'all got a big problem with that theory of yours. But don't let the facts get in your way.
Nuclear is still HEAVILY subsidized. One of the major subsidies idemnifies the operators from damages if a plant fails and spews radioactives over the neighborhood. No private insurance group or conglomerate of such groups was willing to offer that insurance at any price.
Citation? Are you saying that a plant operator is not responsible for damages caused should they have a major issue? Really? They are immune to civil suits? Somehow I don't think that is correct. The operators of Three Mile Island lost a class action suit and paid out millions because of the accident there. Not to mention that if it IS true, it costs nothing until there is an issue, which after 70 years there hasn't been, at least anything major.
Whether this is reasonable or not is disputable. It is clearly a subsidy, however. And so is destabilizing foreign governments to keep the oil flowing.
It's clearly not what you think, if it's anything at all.
You people and this idea that the military is all about oil, shesh. Evidence is that the military is about a LOT more than arranging for cheap and free flowing oil, and if it was really all about that, we are really stupid to just sit back and let the whole world benefit when we could just take the oil we needed from South America and let the rest of the world duke it out over what we can't use. But the truth is, we are not that kind of country, at least for the most part. We really are not in the world domination game, even though we'd obviously win if we where, same with oil. We just don't go to war over such things, and never really have. Others have, but not the USA.
There's some people who live downstream from a mountain top that just, oops, ended up in the river who might disagree with you.
You sarcasm is noted... (I sure hope you are not serious... ) SUE the people that made the mistake and put the mountain into the river. There are an army of personal injury and trial lawyers who will be more than willing to help you.
An individual, or even a small group of individuals, doesn't have much recourse when a big company tells them to "like it or lump it".
This is not true. Civil courts are *required* to treat everybody the same, and corporations are "just people" when it comes to civil courts so that's why I suggest you file suit. Now the court might tell you to pound sand, but the company doesn't have the power to just dismiss your suit, even if it was totally bogus from the start, only the judge can do that. So just telling you to "lump it" is only effective if you follow their command. If you really feel wronged, I suggest you not do what the company says....
Ok, we are done here then, being that there is no point.
I don't find the zealot global warming crowd to be very willing to actually discuss it rationally anyway. They just want to run around talking about the sky falling and calling the science settled and those who doubt it members of the flat earth society. Just remember, according to you guys, we are all cooked anyway, so it doesn't really matter what we do, so get ready for the Apocalypse.
As if nuclear and fossil fuels weren't subsidized up the wazoo.
Neither of these technologies where "subsidized" in any meaningful way (perhaps nuclear was a bit at the start, but that's long over). Oil has NEVER been subsidized from the time of Standard Oil on.
Your defense argument is not well placed either. We spend money on defense, lots of it, but that is not just about protecting oil prices as you seem to think, but about protection of the national interests which happens to include it's economic interests which are best served though stable Oil prices. But this benefits the world as well as the USA. Remember, if it was ONLY about oil, we could easily take control of any parts of the world's Oil supply we wanted and there is literally nobody out there who could stop us. We don't do this because it's NOT just about oil.
So can we stop with the liberal canards yet? We are WAY off topic now..
Most of the environmental issues from Coal have effectively been eliminated, except for the perceived C02 emission standard,
So, other than spewing the single largest existing threat to the welfare of human civilization, coal is just fine.
Gota stuff the straw man eh?
So, you are going out on the "It's Settled science: global warming is man made" limb? OK, but you still need to address the emerging economies and their reliance on *cheep* coal power. I don't think the leaders of China are going to care, and if they don't, we are all cooked anyway (using your logic and if the dire predictions actually come true). Good luck with that.
IMHO, this global warming/climate change or what ever we are supposed to call it today, is not the dire problem it's made out to be, and the proof that it's man made is very much not settled. What is a problem is the way the issue is being used for political gain by those who are not above ginning up a crisis and then not let it go to waste.
Meanwhile, by your arguments, the problem of setting up a recycling center for solar panels appears to be an intractible dilemma.
Gota stuff some more in? Hope you win that fight, here's a match so you can take on the scarecrow.
I've not said it's an intractable problem, only that it's an issue that is NOT being considered by most proponents of solar power. Can you safely deal with this stuff? Yep, but it takes public education, infrastructure and consumes resources (electric power and the like) to do. All this accrues to the wrong side of the balance sheet for solar power, making it more expensive than just the purchase/installation price you see now. Solar isn't viable without these costs fully baked in so this only makes the case for solar even worse when you consider this cost too.
Face it, solar is not viable, even without all this other stuff.
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?
Fossil fuel plants are not required to pay for or clean up substantial amounts of pollution they generate. They dump vast quantities of CO2 and other pollutants, both gaseous and particulate, and never are required to pay for the full impact they have. Sure, there are some emissions controls and cleanup they are required to consider but they do not and never have been required to pay for the full cost of their pollution. Good luck getting them to pay to "clean up" their toxic byproducts too. This is called an externality.
This is a patently false claim. If you don't think so, Civil law allows you to sue for damages if something somebody else does damages your property, even if what they are doing is legal. It might not be commonly done, but legal recourse exists. So if what you claim is true, grab the nearest lawyer you can find and start filing class action suits on any fossil fuel fired generation plant you can find. Start with everybody downwind in your class. Good luck, you are going to need it.
Most of the environmental issues from Coal have effectively been eliminated, except for the perceived C02 emission standard, at least here in the US. Certainly this has not been the case in the past, but here in the USA there is not wide spread environmental damage from fossil fuels (apart from the C02 question). So power generators effectively deal with these costs (i.e. pass them on to consumers really).
Further, it's worth noting that even many industrialized countries have made similar environmental improvements, while the emerging countries like China don't yet care and are eclipsing the USA's environmental impact by a large margin using decades old technologies. The problem here is NOT the USA, if you are really interested in environmental protection you need to look well beyond our borders. In almost every way imaginable the environmental situation here in the USA has been steadily improving to the point where we are head and shoulders above our peers in the industrialized world.
Not true at all. The subsidies and tax write-offs and other benefits continue to pile up. Someone who is paying full retail for his panels is just someone who is too lazy to file the appropriate paperwork.
Yea great, lets just subsidize Solar until it's viable, surely it will work out better than all the windmills we put government money into which are rotting even though they are but a few years old.
There is another great truth of life.... There is no free money, even when the government gives it to you it has to come from somewhere. They ether get it from taxes, borrowing (future taxes), or they print it. Don't be fooled into thinking they can just print, because when they do that everyone pays though inflation.
Solar will only really make sense when it can stand on it's own.
They'd be stupid not to consider, "how much will it cost to clean up the mess?" in today's day and age where the EPA can come in and pretty much regulate you out of business for messing things up.
That's true, which is one reason why not many coal plants are being built in the USA today.
However, solar panels aren't competing against new coal plants -- they are competing against the many existing coal plants which have been running for years, and whose construction has already been paid for. Those plants' only ongoing costs are maintenance and fuel, which makes them relatively inexpensive to operate.
The cost of repairing the damage to the climate that those plants cause, OTOH, may be quite large, but the owners of the plants will not be responsible for paying that cost, so they don't care.
I think you are mistaken. Most Coal plants today are headed for the dust bin of history for a number of political and regulatory reasons. It's simply much cheaper to use Natural Gas (thanks to fracking) than coal. Of course the current administration's choice to cap C02 emissions per Watt hour produced didn't help coal either.
But I think solar faces a real problem too. The disposal of solar panels can be a significant problem because they contain some seriously toxic materials. You cannot just land fill this stuff and the facilities needed to process this material into something safe or reuse it don't exist yet. It remains to be seen how cost effective and environmentally impacting this will be.
I'll revise my statement... For now, Solar use in the most ideal of circumstances seems to be comparable, but there are significant environmental issues that need to be carefully controlled or the production, use and decommissioning of the components WILL be an issue. You just don't landfill this stuff to get rid of it and if you do, it's going to be a really big mess. Also, using solar in less than ideal locations, simply doesn't work out for the environment or the ROI.
Many solar panels are NOT highly recyclable and contain components which are highly toxic. The sad fact is that the more efficient panels are the ones that are toxic and difficult to recycle, but even the less efficient ones have their issues. Consumers, on average, have no clue about these issues, so I'm sure the "ideal" situation for handling these components will be the exception and not the rule.
Home solar installations are still not very cost effective. I installed one at home anyway because I thought it would be a neat thing to play with, but the payback estimates the vendor and government used to sell me on it were vastly aggressive, claiming a 3-5 year payback. So far it has been nearly 10 years and I've not yet made back 20% of the installation cost.
In any case, solar might become more viable as we move away from coal, which the EPA seems to want to force sooner rather than later.
I also question the "environmentalism" of solar given how utterly dirty and toxic the processes are for making the cells themselves.
This is an example of what Musk says "the lay of the land today, where there are indeed too many suppliers, most of whom are producing relatively low photonic efficiency solar cells at uncompelling costs"
So he's just betting that the case for solar gets better sometime soon so he's investing in a company that does solar stuff. He already knows that he will loose money in the short term. He's taking a risk with his money, I hope it pays off, but I don't think the chances are good.
"the lay of the land today, where there are indeed too many suppliers, most of whom are producing relatively low photonic efficiency solar cells at uncompelling costs" (Quote from http://blog.solarcity.com/sile...)
You have indeed discovered the unvarnished truth, solar is not viable in terms of cost and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Conservation is usually the best bang for the buck, but even that has it's limits.
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?" They'd be stupid not to consider, "how much will it cost to clean up the mess?" in today's day and age where the EPA can come in and pretty much regulate you out of business for messing things up.
Right now, if one considers the TCO of solar, they come up way short of other options. Environmentally they fail too, but you have to open up your aperture to the total life cycle of the system to be totally fair. Most of the environmentalists don't like to do that.
I don't disagree that most can master enough skill to produce acceptable photos in a short time. The basics are not that hard. But I still find what the true artists can do with the process amazing and the more I try to do similar things, the more impressed I am with the skills they developed.
Remember though that the processing and printing are really just the last part of the whole process. Actually getting the image captured, looking though the viewfinder and exposing the film, is a whole series of choices and trade offs that your average photographer simply doesn't understand. How this set of choices translate into changes to the processing and printing activities are even less understood, even by the folks who do it digitally.
Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
Shesh, where I get this move to digital, I do not agree that skills in analog photography are without value. I really enjoy a good picture made using film and admire the talent of those who can do great things with it.
I guess folks get enjoyment using the analog medium. It takes great skill and equipment to expose film, develop, and print even in B&W. Now days though, you can do all the same things digitally and much faster and easier, taking much of the skill out of it.
But... If you are looking for quality over skill, digital is where you will end up eventually. I don't care if you are talking audio, video or photos. You see, the analog stuff has it's limitations that are part of the medium, where digital limits are set by the engineering of the whole system which is driven by cost. You can literally get any quality you need from digital if you have enough money. Need more dynamic range? You got it. Need better SNR? Sure thing. Need better resolution? No problem, just write the check and we will get right on it.
It's simply progress... Like moving from vinyl to CD or VHS to DVD was progress, of a good kind. But like I said before, we are losing the skills needed to use the analog medium, Skills that I admired.
Film developer huffing eh?
B&W film chemicals are not that good for getting high, but I guess is you need a fix(er) you can try it. Just don't drink the stuff...
I'm not going to argue the active insurgency issue, but one needs to carefully consider what's behind that before you pull up tent stakes and head home. In the case of Iraq, the insurgency was a proxy for groups OUTSIDE Iraq. In this case it was a pay a little bit to deal with it now or be forced to pay a LOT more later, a president who only cares about politics and his legacy does trash like this hoping the debt won't come due on his watch. They hoped that later was after 2016.
Seems later is fast approaching....
We paid dearly for Europe and Japan by the way. The Normandy landing and the various islands in the south pacific cost tens of thousands of lives from just the US military alone. Europe and Russia paid with millions of lives. So even though the type of warfare was different, the costs of war can be and are high. What really happened in Iraq is we got tired of the drip drip drip of taking casualties all the time so we decided to run. It's not that we lost huge numbers, we didn't, even during an insurgency and near civil war. We just where not committed to seeing it though and left for political reasons.... Soon we will be back for political reasons, and we will pay an even more dear price...
Ahh, you are just inventing history now...no, I'm not. History of Richard Armey, Freedomworks and the origin of the tea baggers Secrets of the tea party The tea party is an AstroTurf campaign front for Koch and Sciafe, with some money from DeVos (of Amway)
WHO CARES if the Koch Brothers want to fund a political organization. It's a free country, at least for now, and the First amendment still applies. If you think the left doesn't have rich people who give to political causes (i.e. that your side has the moral high ground on this issue) you are gravely mistaken. It's hypocritical of the left to act all shocked and bothered about how politics and money work and start yelling about how awful the Koch brothers are because they donate a small portion of their vast fortune to causes you don't approve of. Your side does it too, so stop acting like you don't.
Back to the Tea Party, I think your side is just scared of a grass roots organization that leans right and seems to have some traction. In an effort to discredit it, you have adopted scorched earth level rhetoric which is not becoming. Face it, you guys are scared to death, and you should be given the 2014 polling I've seen. Your side is facing a huge backlash caused by 6 years of Obama both in domestic and foreign policy and I got a feeling the problem you face is going to last well past the 2014 election as more of Obama's chickens come home to roost. Get ready, you are going to have to live with the Tea Party for another decade at the very least and likely they will have significant influence in this country.
No, I'm saying "in general" they don't. There are the gifted few who will work just because, but the majority will fall to the temptation to be lazy if you make it easy to do so.
I'm further saying, that you will have a more productive society if folks are self reliant and not prone to dependency.
Never the less, we have remained in captured territory for decades, which looked a lot like "quagmires" of the previous post.
We have stayed in various locations world wide as a matter of routine, the strategic reasons for why where not in question. Of course, we could argue about the advisability of departing Iraq and Afghanistan where we have simply unilaterally withdrawn. The current events in Iraq seem to say it is/was a bad idea.
Not that I trust Wikipedia on everything...
When you look at the Wikipedia page on Socialism you will find Marx discussed in the Social and Political section, so where Socialism encompasses more than Marxism, Marxism is indeed socialism at its core. As Wikipedia articles go, this one isn't too bad. Read if for yourself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Ahh.. You are just inventing history now..
Look, the Tea Party was "invented" to protest HARP and things like the stimulus plan that didn't work. Obamacare was AFTER the Tea Party got started. Not to mention, they generally don't stand on the streets and yell about anything. I know, I've been to their events, pretty calm affairs if you ask me..
Next you will call them racist..... Que liberal rhetoric in three... Two... One...
Americans don't understand the concept of socialism and still think it's a bad thing.
Didn't Carl Marx define socialism? Where the state controls (owns) everything or real value and personal property rights are severely limited? Everybody works for the state, and in return gets from the state what they need to live?
Socialism when taken to its logical conclusion IS a bad thing. Socialism destroys the motivation of personal responsibility, discourages risk taking and hard work as a means to foster innovation and efficiency because it takes from the "rich" (who got that way when somebody took a risk and/or worked hard) and distributes it though government waste and fraud to the "poor".
What are they teaching in school these days? Shesh.. Socialism isn't a bad thing? You are nuts. Of course, if you define socialism as something other than what it's traditionally been your statement might be right, but words mean things.
Back when we used to win wars instead of getting locked into fruitless decade-long quagmires, we also managed to subsidize college tuition more than we do now....
Haven't we had a continued presence in Europe for 70 years now? Our presence in Japan has been a few years short of that too.
South Korea has sucked up resources for 60?
The only reason we are not in Vietnam is because we got booted out when we surrendered/lost or whatever that was.
So we seem to do this quite a bit.