I really don't get why so many American's are up in arms about un-manned aircraft - there have been aircraft "looking down into" their backyards for 100 years now, who cares if it has a pilot IN IT or not. Tons and tons of police driving by your house LOOKING INTO your yard.
Inorite? We've used fighter jets to blow up brown people for decades, but only now do they start complaining about drone strikes?
Oh, wait - Estimated cost of an F35, $110M. Actual cost of an unmanned reconnaissance drone, $299.99. Which of those do you see Officer Obie casually using to peek through your bedroom window or check out your backyard pool party?
Overall, though, these rules completely disgust me. They get it exactly backward, allowing a class proven untrustworthy when given new surveillance technology to use them, while blocking any possible citizen-initiated use of the same.
I suppose I have only one thing to say - I have a shotgun, and don't tolerate weird-looking noisy birds in my backyard. So go ahead, send me some challenging skeet, boys!
I dread each and every story on Bitcoin, because inevitably, someone rolls this particular turd out.
A Ponzi scheme pays its yield on an investment (possibly bogus, but not necessarily) out of capital. Bitcoin functions as a currency, not an investment. The exchange rate rises and falls based on supply and demand, "Bitcoin" itself has no expected yield. It doesn't pay dividends, it doesn't go to harvest, you can't eat it or burn it.
Yes, you have people speculating on it - Just as you do with the USD:GBP exchange rate, on the price of gold, on corn futures, on who will win the next big game. Speculation in a market doesn't make the underlying asset a Ponzi scheme, no matter how many times you claim it.
You don't have a semi-viable alternative you have a currency that is going into a deflationary spiral.
Would you care to explain that, given that we have another 130 years before the last BTC-generating block issues?
Yes, at some point the BitCoin community will need to figure out how to avoid exactly that deflationary spiral. You can't, however, use that argument to explain the current exchange rate.
It means these coins are being hoarded. If it was real money this would be damaging the economy.
Hoarding does count as a type of scarcity. Not the only one, however. A perfectly liquid commodity can still rise and fall in price based solely on good ol' Supply and Demand.
When more people want to use Bitcoin, they need to first obtain BTC before they can spend it. As the easiest way to get Bitcoins, they "buy" some with their local currency. This transaction demonstrates increased demand for BTC, and decreased demand for USD - So the exchange rate goes up.
Now, we have a LOT more USD in circulation than we do BTC, so the decreased demand on the USD doesn't actually show up anywhere. Similarly, a larger proportion of the entire BTC economy has changed hands, so the price shows drastically more volatility. But they very much have an equal and opposite effect on each other, adjusted for scale. Every asteroid Earth pulls closer, also pulls the Earth toward the asteroid.
Seriously, what incentive is there for me to support BTC now the rush is over?
Do you ever send (or receive) money outside your home country?
Do you want a bank account no government can freeze if they decide you voted the "wrong" way last election?
Do you believe you have every right to spend your hard-earned money playing online poker if you damned well want to?
Yeah, you can use physical cash for an awfully lot of things. But when you need to get funds halfway around the world, or store more of it than will fit comfortably under your mattress - We finally have a semi-viable alternative. Let the haters hate - In the meantime, I'll just keep using Bitcoin for its intended purpose - As a semi-anonymous digital currency.
Plenty of comments have pointed out that those of us who do code do it because we enjoy it rather than for money or career prospects or some other capitalism-inspired reason. Absolutely true, but that misses the real issue here.
To be blunt, most people can't learn to code beyond a painfully basic level. Yes, you can teach most people to write "hello world". You can get them up to the level of writing simple macros, simple queries, simple shell scripts. And after a decade of doing it, they'll still make total newbie mistakes - Uninitialized variables (nothing in that cell to grab, Dave!), randomly mixed booleans in their non-fully-parenthesized WHERE clause, failure to escape nested variable substitutions, etc.
Going further, even if significantly more people could eventually learn to code at a passable level, the vast majority of people hate everything about the mode of thinking programming requires, from the sustained alpha state to thinking in equations to iteratively breaking big problems into smaller ones. Describe how you code to someone - really get into it and express your zeal - and watch them squirm.
Or to put it another way - If everyone could (stand to) write code, we wouldn't have a massive shortage of a highly-paid and in-demand profession after four years of massive unemployment. If anything, we'd have a glut of programmers. And yet... That has not happened
Such a statement bears no relation to a modern understanding of depression and suicide.
Sometimes, the "modern understanding" has more to do with fluffy feelgood BS than reality. No one wants to admit that little Billy, or Dad, or Aunt Thelma hated life so much they would want out of it - And no one wants to admit they care more because "how dare that asshole deprive me of his continued presence" than out of any sincere concern for why someone might have wanted out so desperately.
For some reason, we have this bizarre obsession that no one in our society has any responsibility for their actions or the general course of their life. You choose not to eat? You have a disease. You eat too much? You have a disease. You can't stand living here anymore? You have a disease. You choose to rob someone and get shot in the process? How dare that bastard not respect your traumatic childhood! You get lung cancer? Damn those tobacco companies! You can't make ends meet? Tax those 1%er bastards more! I sound like a caustic uncaring bastard for daring to post this? I must have some sort of empathy deficiency disorder.
So... You want to die? We have more than enough people on the planet, see ya. If it takes drugs to numb you into sticking around on this ball of mud, perhaps you shouldn't stick around?
Anything that abridges our fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms automatically injures us all. Aside from the danger of disproving the various fictional rights we generally assume we have - It polarizes the whackjobs, it makes the sheep less complacent, it makes us hate the government instead of merely having a healthy distrust of it. Hell, you've all thoroughly proven yourself completely incompetent over the past few years, why not make yourselves outright enemies of the people?
You all should fear real injury because of this decision. Not from me (more of a sheep than a lion, sadly - I live too comfortably to care), but currently an awfully lot of people don't have much more to lose. Take away even their "hope" in a shared delusions, and you've created an entire class of very real monsters.
Cisco 'showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public' in recommending the investment in its model 3945 branch routers
No, please, don't throw millions at us. Here, take this $50 Linksys router instead.
I hate corporate America as much as the next guy, but in this case "Wanton indifference" translates as "performed their legal duty to maximize shareholder value". In a perfect world, should they have said no? Sure. In this world, making that call would have gotten them (rightly) sued by shareholders.
This is not as rare as many people might like to think - it's been a fact of recent civil wars in my lifetime, that one side systematically destroyed all birth records of the other.
We, uh, haven't had a whole lot of civil wars in the US since the birth of anyone currently living here. Yes, we've all heard about the sisters from middle-of-nowhere Appalachia who never left their home valley for their first 40 years of life and now can't prove themselves as US citizens. And yes, I'd still have to call that pretty damned rare.
Their lives are already greatly limited and with the aggressive work of republican groups screaming about vote fraud, we can ensure that they lose even the right to vote in our lifetime, since they certainly would have voted democrat anyway.
Does that bother you? I mean, that people (on both sides of the aisle) automatically assume voter ID laws disproportionately affects Democrats? It basically shouts to the world, "We have such a strong association as the party of complete losers, of illegals, of 3rd gen welfare dynasties, that we just assume all the human trash in our society will vote blue".
And FWIW, I don't vote red. You can't just assume that everyone belongs to the GOP who happens to believe we should verify citizenship before allowing people to exercise the core right of that citizenship. That everyone who believes in fiscal responsibility sides with the misogynistic religious whackjobs on the right. That "I disagree with you" automatically makes me a member of "the enemy".
Because everyone lives the way you do, and if they don't, they don't count.
Certain activities in our society come with prerequisites. If you want to drive, you need a driver's license. If you want to hunt, you need a hunting license. If you want to work as an MD, you need a medical license.
No, everyone does not live the way I do. But if they want to live the way I do - And that includes voting - Then they need to meet the associated prerequisites. If you can't prove you exist as a legal US citizen, then no, you shouldn't get to vote.
When you can come up with an intellectually honest answer as to why voter ID laws always seem to specify types of IDs that non-Republican voters tend on average to be lacking in greater quantities I might even buy it.
You mean, something so rare as a "Driver's license"? Or a free (to the poor and elderly) state-issued ID card as an alternative? Yep. Clearly racist, right there. Everyone knows minorities don't drive, fly, buy cigarettes, buy alcohol, use credit cards, use checks, or visit certain federal buildings.
Seriously, how does anyone (retirees aside, but they had to have made it through the rest of their life to get that status) manage to live in the modern world without a license or ID?
but was granted a six-month breather back in August 2012 after the U.S. government asked the District Attorney to consider adjournment of Monsegur's trial 'in light of the defendant's ongoing cooperation with the Government.
Remember kids, you too can win six months of freedom at a time by selling your friends and your soul!
Uncle Sam wants you! To report terrorists that don't support $current_leading_party !
Companies exist for the same reason that you exist. You just do. While it's true that most companies must turn a profit to survive (except for those which are some rich persons vanity project), it doesn't mean they need to be driven by money.
Heya boss - SEC on line 1 for you. Something about "maximizing shareholder value"?
mid-14c., "compensation, payment," whether periodical, for regular service or for a specific service; from Anglo-French salarie (late 13c.), Old French salarie, from Latin salarium "salary, stipend," originally "soldier's allowance for the purchase of salt," noun use of neuter of adjective salarius "pertaining to salt," from sal (genitive salis) "salt" (see salt (n.)). Japanese sarariman "male salaried worker," literally "salary-man," is from English. The verb meaning "to pay a regular salary to" is attested from late 15c. [etymonline.com]
Some sources also claim that Roman soldiers originally got paid with actual salt, later shifting to payment in token currency rather than the commodity merely as a matter of convenience.
All just a matter of what you value the most. If you spend half your income on booze, why wouldn't you take payment in whiskey? Likewise, if you send a lot of money into and/or out of your home country, why would you want the hassle of dealing with money changers or international money orders, when you could get paid partially with a lower-friction currency not bound to any particular country's economy?
Everyone who uses Bitcoin is a currency speculator.
You could say the same about the US Dollar. You have "speculated" that the government won't default; that Bernanke won't devalue the dollar (even more) with another even bigger round of QE; that Walmart won't decide next week that they only take payment in gold or vintage Furbys or Yuan (yes, they can. No, it doesn't.)
You can't buy everyday essentials with it
Not the best hill to die on - You can buy just about anything denominated in BTC today. In addition to the thousands of online vendors that take it, you can even visit a growing number of brick-and-mortars that take it.
Remember folks, the more people that join the pyramid the more the "bitcoins" held by people like the above poster are worth. Think of that vested interest after reading about how wonderful these things are.
Remember folks, don't take financial advice from people who don't understand the term "pyramid scheme".
Pyramid schemes: The "every gun is an AK-47" of the financial world.
Anyone with bitcoins knows that they need real money as well. So any bitloon would also have some other way to pay, or they aren't eating tonight.
Anyone with an oil field knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with cattle knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with gold knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with a silo full of corn knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with "real money" can't eat it.
Anyone with "real money" knows they need GBP (when they visit the UK).
Anyone with "real money" can't put it in their gas tank (though I suppose you could burn it for heat).
Use of one currency doesn't preclude the use of others. Bitcoin, whether the haters gonna hate or not, has become the preferred online currency for small-scale international transactions between people whose governments have silly archaic rules about sending "real" money into or out of the country (ie, all of them). Case in point, try sending $50 to a friend in a country that doesn't use your native currency. You can expect to nearly double that in the various fees you'll need to pay to do it legally and safely (by which I mean not stuffing an envelope with bills and praying you can trust the postal service in both countries).
"Real money" has exactly one required use - Paying your annual government extortion bill. For everything else, you can use whatever the hell both sides of the transaction agree upon. Corn, wine, oil, gold, frankincense, myrrh, BTC. All good, so long as both sides agree.
I would think that battery banks would be a big benefit for ROI, especially if you got aggressive with conservation as you would be able to run with little grid power all the time, and especially at night.
Not if your state requires net metering (43 currently do). In that case, you just generate more than you need during the day and feed it back to the grid; at night or on cloudy days, you draw power from the grid; at the end of the month, you only pay (or get paid for!) the net of the amount you used vs the amount you generated.
Keep in mind, the biggest problem with batteries doesn't come solely from their (not inconsiderable) cost, but everything about them. They start off big and heavy and toxic in at least three different ways. To maximize their lifetime, you need to watch your power use patterns to even out your load, then you still need to condition them periodically. When they fail, they may simply stop working, they may act as a slow short and drain the whole bank, they may actually explode (rare but it happens) spewing acid and lead all over your basement. And finally, they do have a finite lifetime, so even under the best of conditions, you need to replace basically half your battery bank every three to five years.
You would really only want to go with batteries if you wanted to go completely off-grid. And make no mistake, that has a lot of appeal, particularly considering that the electric utilities largely hate people making their own power (not because of the cost or lost sales, but because it stresses their poorly-designed distribution networks). But to go totally off grid, you either need a substantially oversized solar array and batteries to match, or a willingness to read by candlelight if you have a solid week of rain.:)
Did you also get a heavy subsidy, or have the panel prices really crashed so much?
The (federal) tax credits don't expire until 2016, so you can still get them. But the prices I quoted count as full retail, you can get them right off Amazon.
You can even get "starter kits" in the sub-500W range to prove to yourself whether or not it will work in your situation. They come with 2-4 panels and a 500W "plug-and-play inverter (you literally just plug it into an outlet, though you do need to take care not to overload that particular circuit - 20A from the grid + 5A from solar means you could possibly draw 25A on wire not rated for it without blowing the breaker). You'll pay a bit more for that because of the small scale, in the $2-$3/watt range, but for a total under $1000.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't get why so many American's are up in arms about un-manned aircraft - there have been aircraft "looking down into" their backyards for 100 years now, who cares if it has a pilot IN IT or not. Tons and tons of police driving by your house LOOKING INTO your yard.
Inorite? We've used fighter jets to blow up brown people for decades, but only now do they start complaining about drone strikes?
Oh, wait - Estimated cost of an F35, $110M. Actual cost of an unmanned reconnaissance drone, $299.99. Which of those do you see Officer Obie casually using to peek through your bedroom window or check out your backyard pool party?
Overall, though, these rules completely disgust me. They get it exactly backward, allowing a class proven untrustworthy when given new surveillance technology to use them, while blocking any possible citizen-initiated use of the same.
I suppose I have only one thing to say - I have a shotgun, and don't tolerate weird-looking noisy birds in my backyard. So go ahead, send me some challenging skeet, boys!
wtf???
US: "He's guilty. And has bad hair."
NZ: "Okay then, you can have him."
Instead of screwing around with politics, I have a much better idea...
Replace the kernel idle loop with a UEFI signing key cracker. Let it chow down on Microsoft's key.
Bitcoin is literally a ponzi scheme.
I dread each and every story on Bitcoin, because inevitably, someone rolls this particular turd out.
A Ponzi scheme pays its yield on an investment (possibly bogus, but not necessarily) out of capital. Bitcoin functions as a currency, not an investment. The exchange rate rises and falls based on supply and demand, "Bitcoin" itself has no expected yield. It doesn't pay dividends, it doesn't go to harvest, you can't eat it or burn it.
Yes, you have people speculating on it - Just as you do with the USD:GBP exchange rate, on the price of gold, on corn futures, on who will win the next big game. Speculation in a market doesn't make the underlying asset a Ponzi scheme, no matter how many times you claim it.
You don't have a semi-viable alternative you have a currency that is going into a deflationary spiral.
Would you care to explain that, given that we have another 130 years before the last BTC-generating block issues?
Yes, at some point the BitCoin community will need to figure out how to avoid exactly that deflationary spiral. You can't, however, use that argument to explain the current exchange rate.
It means these coins are being hoarded. If it was real money this would be damaging the economy.
Hoarding does count as a type of scarcity. Not the only one, however. A perfectly liquid commodity can still rise and fall in price based solely on good ol' Supply and Demand.
When more people want to use Bitcoin, they need to first obtain BTC before they can spend it. As the easiest way to get Bitcoins, they "buy" some with their local currency. This transaction demonstrates increased demand for BTC, and decreased demand for USD - So the exchange rate goes up.
Now, we have a LOT more USD in circulation than we do BTC, so the decreased demand on the USD doesn't actually show up anywhere. Similarly, a larger proportion of the entire BTC economy has changed hands, so the price shows drastically more volatility. But they very much have an equal and opposite effect on each other, adjusted for scale. Every asteroid Earth pulls closer, also pulls the Earth toward the asteroid.
Seriously, what incentive is there for me to support BTC now the rush is over?
Do you ever send (or receive) money outside your home country?
Do you want a bank account no government can freeze if they decide you voted the "wrong" way last election?
Do you believe you have every right to spend your hard-earned money playing online poker if you damned well want to?
Yeah, you can use physical cash for an awfully lot of things. But when you need to get funds halfway around the world, or store more of it than will fit comfortably under your mattress - We finally have a semi-viable alternative. Let the haters hate - In the meantime, I'll just keep using Bitcoin for its intended purpose - As a semi-anonymous digital currency.
Plenty of comments have pointed out that those of us who do code do it because we enjoy it rather than for money or career prospects or some other capitalism-inspired reason. Absolutely true, but that misses the real issue here.
To be blunt, most people can't learn to code beyond a painfully basic level. Yes, you can teach most people to write "hello world". You can get them up to the level of writing simple macros, simple queries, simple shell scripts. And after a decade of doing it, they'll still make total newbie mistakes - Uninitialized variables (nothing in that cell to grab, Dave!), randomly mixed booleans in their non-fully-parenthesized WHERE clause, failure to escape nested variable substitutions, etc.
Going further, even if significantly more people could eventually learn to code at a passable level, the vast majority of people hate everything about the mode of thinking programming requires, from the sustained alpha state to thinking in equations to iteratively breaking big problems into smaller ones. Describe how you code to someone - really get into it and express your zeal - and watch them squirm.
Or to put it another way - If everyone could (stand to) write code, we wouldn't have a massive shortage of a highly-paid and in-demand profession after four years of massive unemployment. If anything, we'd have a glut of programmers. And yet... That has not happened
Such a statement bears no relation to a modern understanding of depression and suicide.
Sometimes, the "modern understanding" has more to do with fluffy feelgood BS than reality. No one wants to admit that little Billy, or Dad, or Aunt Thelma hated life so much they would want out of it - And no one wants to admit they care more because "how dare that asshole deprive me of his continued presence" than out of any sincere concern for why someone might have wanted out so desperately.
For some reason, we have this bizarre obsession that no one in our society has any responsibility for their actions or the general course of their life. You choose not to eat? You have a disease. You eat too much? You have a disease. You can't stand living here anymore? You have a disease. You choose to rob someone and get shot in the process? How dare that bastard not respect your traumatic childhood! You get lung cancer? Damn those tobacco companies! You can't make ends meet? Tax those 1%er bastards more! I sound like a caustic uncaring bastard for daring to post this? I must have some sort of empathy deficiency disorder.
So... You want to die? We have more than enough people on the planet, see ya. If it takes drugs to numb you into sticking around on this ball of mud, perhaps you shouldn't stick around?
Dear USSC:
Anything that abridges our fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms automatically injures us all. Aside from the danger of disproving the various fictional rights we generally assume we have - It polarizes the whackjobs, it makes the sheep less complacent, it makes us hate the government instead of merely having a healthy distrust of it. Hell, you've all thoroughly proven yourself completely incompetent over the past few years, why not make yourselves outright enemies of the people?
You all should fear real injury because of this decision. Not from me (more of a sheep than a lion, sadly - I live too comfortably to care), but currently an awfully lot of people don't have much more to lose. Take away even their "hope" in a shared delusions, and you've created an entire class of very real monsters.
Cisco 'showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public' in recommending the investment in its model 3945 branch routers
No, please, don't throw millions at us. Here, take this $50 Linksys router instead.
I hate corporate America as much as the next guy, but in this case "Wanton indifference" translates as "performed their legal duty to maximize shareholder value". In a perfect world, should they have said no? Sure. In this world, making that call would have gotten them (rightly) sued by shareholders.
A NASCAR spokesman has issued a clarification, saying that the takedown request was done out of respect for those injured.
Aka, A NASCAR spokeman admitted they fraudulently claimed copyright in issuing a DMCA takedown request.
Wait, no one care? But but but, safe haven and all that!
Oh, screw you, taking my ball and going home - Burn Rome to the fucking ground, barbarians!
This is not as rare as many people might like to think - it's been a fact of recent civil wars in my lifetime, that one side systematically destroyed all birth records of the other.
We, uh, haven't had a whole lot of civil wars in the US since the birth of anyone currently living here. Yes, we've all heard about the sisters from middle-of-nowhere Appalachia who never left their home valley for their first 40 years of life and now can't prove themselves as US citizens. And yes, I'd still have to call that pretty damned rare.
Their lives are already greatly limited and with the aggressive work of republican groups screaming about vote fraud, we can ensure that they lose even the right to vote in our lifetime, since they certainly would have voted democrat anyway.
Does that bother you? I mean, that people (on both sides of the aisle) automatically assume voter ID laws disproportionately affects Democrats? It basically shouts to the world, "We have such a strong association as the party of complete losers, of illegals, of 3rd gen welfare dynasties, that we just assume all the human trash in our society will vote blue".
And FWIW, I don't vote red. You can't just assume that everyone belongs to the GOP who happens to believe we should verify citizenship before allowing people to exercise the core right of that citizenship. That everyone who believes in fiscal responsibility sides with the misogynistic religious whackjobs on the right. That "I disagree with you" automatically makes me a member of "the enemy".
Because everyone lives the way you do, and if they don't, they don't count.
Certain activities in our society come with prerequisites. If you want to drive, you need a driver's license. If you want to hunt, you need a hunting license. If you want to work as an MD, you need a medical license.
No, everyone does not live the way I do. But if they want to live the way I do - And that includes voting - Then they need to meet the associated prerequisites. If you can't prove you exist as a legal US citizen, then no, you shouldn't get to vote.
When you can come up with an intellectually honest answer as to why voter ID laws always seem to specify types of IDs that non-Republican voters tend on average to be lacking in greater quantities I might even buy it.
You mean, something so rare as a "Driver's license"? Or a free (to the poor and elderly) state-issued ID card as an alternative? Yep. Clearly racist, right there. Everyone knows minorities don't drive, fly, buy cigarettes, buy alcohol, use credit cards, use checks, or visit certain federal buildings.
Seriously, how does anyone (retirees aside, but they had to have made it through the rest of their life to get that status) manage to live in the modern world without a license or ID?
but was granted a six-month breather back in August 2012 after the U.S. government asked the District Attorney to consider adjournment of Monsegur's trial 'in light of the defendant's ongoing cooperation with the Government.
Remember kids, you too can win six months of freedom at a time by selling your friends and your soul!
Uncle Sam wants you! To report terrorists that don't support $current_leading_party !
Companies exist for the same reason that you exist. You just do. While it's true that most companies must turn a profit to survive (except for those which are some rich persons vanity project), it doesn't mean they need to be driven by money.
Heya boss - SEC on line 1 for you. Something about "maximizing shareholder value"?
It makes for one less step when they want to buy their drugs.
Sorry, my dealer only takes payment in Tide Unscented. Do you know of a good BTC to detergent exchange?
Funny choice of words.
Some sources also claim that Roman soldiers originally got paid with actual salt, later shifting to payment in token currency rather than the commodity merely as a matter of convenience.
All just a matter of what you value the most. If you spend half your income on booze, why wouldn't you take payment in whiskey? Likewise, if you send a lot of money into and/or out of your home country, why would you want the hassle of dealing with money changers or international money orders, when you could get paid partially with a lower-friction currency not bound to any particular country's economy?
Everyone who uses Bitcoin is a currency speculator.
You could say the same about the US Dollar. You have "speculated" that the government won't default; that Bernanke won't devalue the dollar (even more) with another even bigger round of QE; that Walmart won't decide next week that they only take payment in gold or vintage Furbys or Yuan (yes, they can. No, it doesn't.)
You can't buy everyday essentials with it
Not the best hill to die on - You can buy just about anything denominated in BTC today. In addition to the thousands of online vendors that take it, you can even visit a growing number of brick-and-mortars that take it.
Remember folks, the more people that join the pyramid the more the "bitcoins" held by people like the above poster are worth. Think of that vested interest after reading about how wonderful these things are.
Remember folks, don't take financial advice from people who don't understand the term "pyramid scheme".
Pyramid schemes: The "every gun is an AK-47" of the financial world.
Anyone with bitcoins knows that they need real money as well. So any bitloon would also have some other way to pay, or they aren't eating tonight.
Anyone with an oil field knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with cattle knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with gold knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with a silo full of corn knows they need real money as well.
Anyone with "real money" can't eat it.
Anyone with "real money" knows they need GBP (when they visit the UK).
Anyone with "real money" can't put it in their gas tank (though I suppose you could burn it for heat).
Use of one currency doesn't preclude the use of others. Bitcoin, whether the haters gonna hate or not, has become the preferred online currency for small-scale international transactions between people whose governments have silly archaic rules about sending "real" money into or out of the country (ie, all of them). Case in point, try sending $50 to a friend in a country that doesn't use your native currency. You can expect to nearly double that in the various fees you'll need to pay to do it legally and safely (by which I mean not stuffing an envelope with bills and praying you can trust the postal service in both countries).
"Real money" has exactly one required use - Paying your annual government extortion bill. For everything else, you can use whatever the hell both sides of the transaction agree upon. Corn, wine, oil, gold, frankincense, myrrh, BTC. All good, so long as both sides agree.
I would think that battery banks would be a big benefit for ROI, especially if you got aggressive with conservation as you would be able to run with little grid power all the time, and especially at night.
:)
Not if your state requires net metering (43 currently do). In that case, you just generate more than you need during the day and feed it back to the grid; at night or on cloudy days, you draw power from the grid; at the end of the month, you only pay (or get paid for!) the net of the amount you used vs the amount you generated.
Keep in mind, the biggest problem with batteries doesn't come solely from their (not inconsiderable) cost, but everything about them. They start off big and heavy and toxic in at least three different ways. To maximize their lifetime, you need to watch your power use patterns to even out your load, then you still need to condition them periodically. When they fail, they may simply stop working, they may act as a slow short and drain the whole bank, they may actually explode (rare but it happens) spewing acid and lead all over your basement. And finally, they do have a finite lifetime, so even under the best of conditions, you need to replace basically half your battery bank every three to five years.
You would really only want to go with batteries if you wanted to go completely off-grid. And make no mistake, that has a lot of appeal, particularly considering that the electric utilities largely hate people making their own power (not because of the cost or lost sales, but because it stresses their poorly-designed distribution networks). But to go totally off grid, you either need a substantially oversized solar array and batteries to match, or a willingness to read by candlelight if you have a solid week of rain.
Did you also get a heavy subsidy, or have the panel prices really crashed so much?
The (federal) tax credits don't expire until 2016, so you can still get them. But the prices I quoted count as full retail, you can get them right off Amazon.
You can even get "starter kits" in the sub-500W range to prove to yourself whether or not it will work in your situation. They come with 2-4 panels and a 500W "plug-and-play inverter (you literally just plug it into an outlet, though you do need to take care not to overload that particular circuit - 20A from the grid + 5A from solar means you could possibly draw 25A on wire not rated for it without blowing the breaker). You'll pay a bit more for that because of the small scale, in the $2-$3/watt range, but for a total under $1000.
but it's not a matter of replacing the current 'bad' apples with a new batch -- they will be human too.
We don't want to "replace" the current crop of losers - We want to burn down the whole fucking orchard.
The security theater has gone on for about 11 years too long now. End it.