Inundating a national park that host "an abundance of uniquely adapted life forms"?
A total of 1,042 plant species, 51 species of native mammals, 346 types of birds, 36 classifications of reptiles, six types of fish and five species of amphibians have all managed to thrive in this extreme climate.http://www.ohranger.com/death-...
"In Japan, some ten desalination facilities linked to pressurised water reactors operating for electricity production yield some 14,000 m/day of potable water, and over 100 reactor-years of experience have accrued." -- http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Given that the death penalty was in existence prior to his crime, yet the perp still did what he did, it seems that the threat of punishment was no deterrent. So if the death penalty is not a deterrent...
That's completely faulty reasoning.
Example: if, in the absense of capital punishment, 63 crimes are committed in Fooland, and in the presense of capital punishment, 50 crimes are committed in Fooland, there has been a definite deterrent effect despite the fact that 50 perps were undeterred.
Those are obviously made-up numbers, but I suspect there is some point at which the size of the deterrent effect would convince everyone to keep capital punishment on the books. For example, if you could choose between
(a) 6000 people are murdered with no capital punishment, for a total of 6000 deaths, or
(b) 50 people are murdered in the presence of capital punishment, 38 murderers are convicted and excecuted, 1 innocent person convicted and executed, for a total of 89 deaths
But what's worse than that: sometimes Google just plain ignores the quotation marks you put in your query. They're supposed to mean that each search result must contain the search term that you've surrounded with quotes. Nope, lately I've been getting a lot of search results that just don't contain the term in quotes.
Help fight against this trend toward dumbed-down search!
If this "anonymous, unique identifier" is a fiction, the "privacy abuse" is obvious.
On the other hand, if the "anonymous, unique identifier" truly is anonymous, where is the "privacy abuse"? We're going to have ads served to us regardless. Better to have ads that are relevant to my interests than random, irrelevant ads.
if Michigan had made a law that said Asians can't enter the following colleges (Insert list of top universities) then they should have struck that down. But that isn't what affirmative action is.
I do have concern about such a system causing a sort of deflation in electrical provision though. IE customer A is the end point, and frustrated by maintenance costs he cuts his connection. Now suddenly B is the last segment, and A wasn't that much further away, and now he's bearing increased cost due to A leaving. So he leaves. Next thing you know the whole neighborhood is leaving...
If a utility is up-front about what the maintenence costs will be, even before the line is constructed, it will cut down the problem until the only people leaving are those who really should be leaving. You could even require new customers to put up the first year's worth of maintenence costs as "earnest money," to make sure they're really serious about wanting and needing an expensive build-out of the network.
There are cases where "deflation" should happen, though. If a boomtown of 2000 people becomes a ghost town of two, it's not fair to those who choose to live in viable communities, to pour enormous resources into subsidizing continued service to the two holdouts.
while it's 'fair and accurate' it is very much 'not easy'
Not easy, but easier than it used to be. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to adapt a GIS system to analyze how many segments a particular customer uses, and how many other customers are using those same segments, and bill the maintenance costs accordingly. And if we were talking about another type of distribution system where the value of the delivered commodity is much higher than a residential electric bill (say, an oil pipeline), it would make a lot more sense to go to this effort.
As a high school kid in the '80s I wrote a paper about the Rural Electrification Administration. The gist of my paper was that this was a perfect example of a federal agency that had long since accomplished its mission and outlived its usefulness. Wikipedia says "In 1934, less than 11% of US farms had electricity... By 1942, nearly 50% of US farms had electricity, and by 1952 almost all US farms had electricity."
The REA existed until 1994 -- and it's still not completely gone, because it was absorbed into the "Rural Utilities Service." It's impossible to put a stake through the heart of a federal agency.
I should make a stronger distinction between construction costs and maintenance costs. Construction is a one-time cost that can be amortized over many years, and I'll grant that subsidized construction, like the early work done by the REA, was probably a good thing. But maintenance costs are forever, and if the owner of some far-flung cabin can't bear the full cost of maintaining a line that serves no one else, that line never should have been built in the first place.
If Oklahoma uses this system, then the utility is being fairly compensated for the power lines no matter how little electricity the customer actually buys.
That's true if the pricing scheme accurately reflects the costs. If the pricing scheme is a kludge that merely gives the illusion of providing an accurate cost breakdown, it is now coming back to bite them.
Distribution utilities pay a wholesale price for each kilowatt-hour purchased from a generating facility. Individuals who want to sell excess power generated by their rooftop unit should have the same status as the big guys -- receiving wholesale, not retail rates for the power they put into the grid. (This encourages right-sizing of an individual's solar installation. Effectively, those individuals do get retail price for the non-excess solar power that they consume themselves.)
Once that level playing field is understood and established, distribution utilities should heartily welcome little guys selling power. The more places you can go to obtain the commodity you're redistributing, the better off you are. Each additional seller makes the market more competitive and makes the network more robust.
Perhaps what is needed here is breaking apart the distribution side of the business and the generation side, so each side can pursue their conflicting interests.
This sort of thinking has the cost of the line be $0 every customer but the last one, who's charged millions. Not all that practical. It's much easier to look at the cost of the line* and divide by the number of customers. I'd say it's more fair as well.
You've presented two extremes, and neither represents the most fair and accurate way to allocate maintenence costs.
The most fair and accurate way is to look at who is served by each segment of the line. It makes no sense to make the last customer bear the entire cost of maintaining the entire line; but it does make sense to make him bear the entire cost of maintaining the last segment of the line, which serves only him. The next-to-last segment serves two customers, and its maintenance should be borne by those two customers; the next segment after that serves three, etc.
There are scenarios where simply dividing by the total number of customers can lead to severe misallocation of resources. If the line serves 999 customers who live in a relatively tight cluster, but the 1000th customer wants to build a home 100 miles from that cluster, the utility will never recover the cost of that extremely long line extension if the single customer it serves is permitted to pay "average" rates. The other 999 customers should not be forced to subsidize the new customer's unrealistic desire to live in such a remote location while enjoying all the comforts of civilization.
Did the Vice Chancellor know you were on his side -- i.e. that you thought this policy was ridiculous? I would have said "Sir, I will be your best ally in getting this policy repealed, but in the meantime we have to follow it." Or could he have gotten the impression that you were just gleefully implementing the policy like some tool? The former would set anyone up for promotion more than the latter.
Why shouldn't I talk about valid statistics? Here is one of the many places you can find the statistics: http://www.motherjones.com/blu... This article says Americans spent 33% of their incomes on food in 1963, and by 2009 this had dropped to only 6%.
It's called Engel's Law.
I know you're not the only person making less they did 15 years ago. There are probably millions like you, but in spite of that, Mother Jones can still point out how much more affordable food tends to be these days. Engel's Law has not been violated. Instead of writing another ad-hominem attack, you'd do better to use that time learning about Engel's Law: http://my.safaribooksonline.co...
(Hey, that author also cites milk as an example of something that is now consuming a smaller fraction of family budgets.)
Last time I checked, elections still work on the basis of one-person-one-vote. But how do you attract votes to your cause or to your philosophy? With political advertisements and marketing campaigns. Those cost money, and always will. Like it or not, speech really is money: if I stand on a soapbox in a vacant town square and express my views, I am exercising my First Amendment rights, but in a completely ineffectual way. If I purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times instead, my ideas will have infinitely greater impact.
This is why donations matter in a democracy. They affect the way that each one person exercises his or her one vote.
What you are saying is that Political Action Committies with large budgets should have exactly the same amount of influence as PACs with small budgets. You have robbed Jane of her power to strengthen FooPAC by making a $15 donation to FooPAC, because it will have the same amount of influence regardless of whether Jane donates.
What also follows from this is that if the Build-a-KKK-Statue-on-the-Washington-Mall PAC raises $40, and in the outraged backlash, the We-Mustn't-Build-a-KKK-Statue-on-the-Washington-Mall PAC raises $53 million, Congress must give an equal amount of attention to both of those organizations.
Sorry, seems like you haven't thought this through.
Suppose Jane feels three time as strongly about issue foo as Joe does, and therefore she donates $15 to FooPAC and Joe only donates $5. Are you suggesting that FooPAC should be forced to refund $10 to Jane? Then no one would be free to act on their ethos more strongly than the weakest actor.
Your anecdotal situation doesn't change the fact that there's a long-term trend in which basic commodities consume an ever-smaller fraction of average family income.
Your personal milk consumption habits don't change the fact that milk is a basic commodity.
Do you have a recurring habit of allowing your desire to be argumentative sap people's productivity, or of valuing anecdotes over bulk statistics?
Colorado had a perfectly simple online form, and then one year they rebuilt it to require Silverlight 2.0, of all things! Now, Silverlight 1.0 was the last version that supported PowerPC; that meant my not-that-long-in-the-tooth PowerMac G5, perfectly serviceable for all other web sites, was dead in the water.
I sent them a nasty nastygram, and the next year Silverlight was gone.
Taxact.com, like Turbotax, provides an online "interview" that guides you through the process, makes complying with the law much easier, and finds deductions that you might otherwise overlook. I am glad that a third party is providing that service. And I'm glad that multiple third parties are doing this, and making continuous improvements because they are competing with each other on the basis of ease-of-use and correctness-of-calculations.
If the IRS had a monopoly on providing this service, and developed it in-house, you can bet it would be as user-friendly as waiting in line at the DMV. I'm not so naive as to claim that the third-party efforts are bug-free, but they're better than the IRS would do, because what motivation would a faceless IRS bureaucrat have to fix bugs in the software?
There's also a motivation to be secure: Third-party sites can be sued if your private data leaks out, but the IRS cannot be sued.
Slashdot Mirror
I was pretty shocked to learn that the Arkansas River now runs dry before it reaches Dodge City.
It does not manage to "get out of Dodge."
Inundating a national park that host "an abundance of uniquely adapted life forms"?
A total of 1,042 plant species, 51 species of native mammals, 346 types of birds, 36 classifications of reptiles, six types of fish and five species of amphibians have all managed to thrive in this extreme climate. http://www.ohranger.com/death-...
Yes, what could be greener?
"In Japan, some ten desalination facilities linked to pressurised water reactors operating for electricity production yield some 14,000 m/day of potable water, and over 100 reactor-years of experience have accrued." -- http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Given that the death penalty was in existence prior to his crime, yet the perp still did what he did, it seems that the threat of punishment was no deterrent. So if the death penalty is not a deterrent...
That's completely faulty reasoning.
Example: if, in the absense of capital punishment, 63 crimes are committed in Fooland, and in the presense of capital punishment, 50 crimes are committed in Fooland, there has been a definite deterrent effect despite the fact that 50 perps were undeterred.
Those are obviously made-up numbers, but I suspect there is some point at which the size of the deterrent effect would convince everyone to keep capital punishment on the books. For example, if you could choose between
would you not choose (b)?
So those would be the rats of NIH?
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... )
One thing Google has perfected is using massive data sets generated from users to improve user experience.
I have to disagree. Google Search keeps changing the rules and doesn't always respect your query elements.
For example, you can read about how Google replaced the plus-sign operator with quotation marks: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/goo...
But what's worse than that: sometimes Google just plain ignores the quotation marks you put in your query. They're supposed to mean that each search result must contain the search term that you've surrounded with quotes. Nope, lately I've been getting a lot of search results that just don't contain the term in quotes.
Help fight against this trend toward dumbed-down search!
If you cover a portion of the lunar surface with photovoltaics made from local materials, much less needs to be lifted up out of a gravity well.
http://news.discovery.com/spac...
Regardless of which concept ultimately gets pursued, it looks like the Japanese will be in the vanguard.
If this "anonymous, unique identifier" is a fiction, the "privacy abuse" is obvious.
On the other hand, if the "anonymous, unique identifier" truly is anonymous, where is the "privacy abuse"? We're going to have ads served to us regardless. Better to have ads that are relevant to my interests than random, irrelevant ads.
if Michigan had made a law that said Asians can't enter the following colleges (Insert list of top universities) then they should have struck that down. But that isn't what affirmative action is.
Are you sure? Study: Asian Americans hurt most by affirmative action in education
I do have concern about such a system causing a sort of deflation in electrical provision though. IE customer A is the end point, and frustrated by maintenance costs he cuts his connection. Now suddenly B is the last segment, and A wasn't that much further away, and now he's bearing increased cost due to A leaving. So he leaves. Next thing you know the whole neighborhood is leaving...
If a utility is up-front about what the maintenence costs will be, even before the line is constructed, it will cut down the problem until the only people leaving are those who really should be leaving. You could even require new customers to put up the first year's worth of maintenence costs as "earnest money," to make sure they're really serious about wanting and needing an expensive build-out of the network.
There are cases where "deflation" should happen, though. If a boomtown of 2000 people becomes a ghost town of two, it's not fair to those who choose to live in viable communities, to pour enormous resources into subsidizing continued service to the two holdouts.
while it's 'fair and accurate' it is very much 'not easy'
Not easy, but easier than it used to be. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to adapt a GIS system to analyze how many segments a particular customer uses, and how many other customers are using those same segments, and bill the maintenance costs accordingly. And if we were talking about another type of distribution system where the value of the delivered commodity is much higher than a residential electric bill (say, an oil pipeline), it would make a lot more sense to go to this effort.
As a high school kid in the '80s I wrote a paper about the Rural Electrification Administration. The gist of my paper was that this was a perfect example of a federal agency that had long since accomplished its mission and outlived its usefulness. Wikipedia says "In 1934, less than 11% of US farms had electricity... By 1942, nearly 50% of US farms had electricity, and by 1952 almost all US farms had electricity."
The REA existed until 1994 -- and it's still not completely gone, because it was absorbed into the "Rural Utilities Service." It's impossible to put a stake through the heart of a federal agency.
I should make a stronger distinction between construction costs and maintenance costs. Construction is a one-time cost that can be amortized over many years, and I'll grant that subsidized construction, like the early work done by the REA, was probably a good thing. But maintenance costs are forever, and if the owner of some far-flung cabin can't bear the full cost of maintaining a line that serves no one else, that line never should have been built in the first place.
If Oklahoma uses this system, then the utility is being fairly compensated for the power lines no matter how little electricity the customer actually buys.
That's true if the pricing scheme accurately reflects the costs. If the pricing scheme is a kludge that merely gives the illusion of providing an accurate cost breakdown, it is now coming back to bite them.
Distribution utilities pay a wholesale price for each kilowatt-hour purchased from a generating facility. Individuals who want to sell excess power generated by their rooftop unit should have the same status as the big guys -- receiving wholesale, not retail rates for the power they put into the grid. (This encourages right-sizing of an individual's solar installation. Effectively, those individuals do get retail price for the non-excess solar power that they consume themselves.)
Once that level playing field is understood and established, distribution utilities should heartily welcome little guys selling power. The more places you can go to obtain the commodity you're redistributing, the better off you are. Each additional seller makes the market more competitive and makes the network more robust.
Perhaps what is needed here is breaking apart the distribution side of the business and the generation side, so each side can pursue their conflicting interests.
This sort of thinking has the cost of the line be $0 every customer but the last one, who's charged millions. Not all that practical. It's much easier to look at the cost of the line* and divide by the number of customers. I'd say it's more fair as well.
You've presented two extremes, and neither represents the most fair and accurate way to allocate maintenence costs.
The most fair and accurate way is to look at who is served by each segment of the line. It makes no sense to make the last customer bear the entire cost of maintaining the entire line; but it does make sense to make him bear the entire cost of maintaining the last segment of the line, which serves only him. The next-to-last segment serves two customers, and its maintenance should be borne by those two customers; the next segment after that serves three, etc.
There are scenarios where simply dividing by the total number of customers can lead to severe misallocation of resources. If the line serves 999 customers who live in a relatively tight cluster, but the 1000th customer wants to build a home 100 miles from that cluster, the utility will never recover the cost of that extremely long line extension if the single customer it serves is permitted to pay "average" rates. The other 999 customers should not be forced to subsidize the new customer's unrealistic desire to live in such a remote location while enjoying all the comforts of civilization.
Why do you call this a "post authoritarian decade"?
Was 2000 - 2010 an "authoritarian decade"? If so, why?
Gotta love those torch welding mobs...
If you believe "the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists," Columbine was not a reaction to bullying.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Did the Vice Chancellor know you were on his side -- i.e. that you thought this policy was ridiculous? I would have said "Sir, I will be your best ally in getting this policy repealed, but in the meantime we have to follow it." Or could he have gotten the impression that you were just gleefully implementing the policy like some tool? The former would set anyone up for promotion more than the latter.
Why shouldn't I talk about valid statistics? Here is one of the many places you can find the statistics: http://www.motherjones.com/blu...
This article says Americans spent 33% of their incomes on food in 1963, and by 2009 this had dropped to only 6%.
It's called Engel's Law.
I know you're not the only person making less they did 15 years ago. There are probably millions like you, but in spite of that, Mother Jones can still point out how much more affordable food tends to be these days. Engel's Law has not been violated. Instead of writing another ad-hominem attack, you'd do better to use that time learning about Engel's Law: http://my.safaribooksonline.co...
(Hey, that author also cites milk as an example of something that is now consuming a smaller fraction of family budgets.)
Last time I checked, elections still work on the basis of one-person-one-vote. But how do you attract votes to your cause or to your philosophy? With political advertisements and marketing campaigns. Those cost money, and always will. Like it or not, speech really is money: if I stand on a soapbox in a vacant town square and express my views, I am exercising my First Amendment rights, but in a completely ineffectual way. If I purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times instead, my ideas will have infinitely greater impact.
This is why donations matter in a democracy. They affect the way that each one person exercises his or her one vote.
What you are saying is that Political Action Committies with large budgets should have exactly the same amount of influence as PACs with small budgets. You have robbed Jane of her power to strengthen FooPAC by making a $15 donation to FooPAC, because it will have the same amount of influence regardless of whether Jane donates.
What also follows from this is that if the Build-a-KKK-Statue-on-the-Washington-Mall PAC raises $40, and in the outraged backlash, the We-Mustn't-Build-a-KKK-Statue-on-the-Washington-Mall PAC raises $53 million, Congress must give an equal amount of attention to both of those organizations.
Sorry, seems like you haven't thought this through.
How would you implement your proposal?
Suppose Jane feels three time as strongly about issue foo as Joe does, and therefore she donates $15 to FooPAC and Joe only donates $5. Are you suggesting that FooPAC should be forced to refund $10 to Jane? Then no one would be free to act on their ethos more strongly than the weakest actor.
Your anecdotal situation doesn't change the fact that there's a long-term trend in which basic commodities consume an ever-smaller fraction of average family income.
Your personal milk consumption habits don't change the fact that milk is a basic commodity.
Do you have a recurring habit of allowing your desire to be argumentative sap people's productivity, or of valuing anecdotes over bulk statistics?
Colorado had a perfectly simple online form, and then one year they rebuilt it to require Silverlight 2.0, of all things! Now, Silverlight 1.0 was the last version that supported PowerPC; that meant my not-that-long-in-the-tooth PowerMac G5, perfectly serviceable for all other web sites, was dead in the water.
I sent them a nasty nastygram, and the next year Silverlight was gone.
Taxact.com, like Turbotax, provides an online "interview" that guides you through the process, makes complying with the law much easier, and finds deductions that you might otherwise overlook. I am glad that a third party is providing that service. And I'm glad that multiple third parties are doing this, and making continuous improvements because they are competing with each other on the basis of ease-of-use and correctness-of-calculations.
If the IRS had a monopoly on providing this service, and developed it in-house, you can bet it would be as user-friendly as waiting in line at the DMV. I'm not so naive as to claim that the third-party efforts are bug-free, but they're better than the IRS would do, because what motivation would a faceless IRS bureaucrat have to fix bugs in the software?
There's also a motivation to be secure: Third-party sites can be sued if your private data leaks out, but the IRS cannot be sued.