The base load capacity claim isn't bogus. First of all, I believe what he actually claimed was that a combination of wind and solar would provide reasonable base load. Regardless, all you have to do is throw in some on-demand generation, then chop off the production peaks and divert them to hydrogen electrolysis. This can easily be turned into methane to store for use in peaking plants or for transport fuels, which was the other half of the plan.
And, before your brain shuts down since I said the magical buzzword "hydrogen", remember this: Efficiency doesn't matter. Only cost matters. Large scale wind turbines can be comprised of little more than iron, carbon, hydrogen and aluminum. Equipment for electrolysis and natural gas storage and turbines are similarly low-cost. Natural gas and transport fuels are high-value as compared to electricity. There's no reason it wouldn't work. But it does require some political will and leaders more interested in real beneficial change than just endless campaign promises.
Wind and renewables would be more economical, if the US government would act in the national interest by using tariffs to eliminate the massive trade deficits to Asia and the Middle East.
US oil peaked nearly three decades ago. US natural gas peaked in 2001. Coal and biofuels have not made up the difference for transportation uses. Even nuclear remains a black sheep.
Instead, the US is intent on continuing to trade blood for oil and selling out the country to foreigners. It's sad, but apparently it's what you idiots want.
The plant has only 0.38% total efficiency, and the sucrose is only 30% of that. You can knock off at least another 20% to account for distillation (which is generous). And optimistically you're looking at total efficiency of around 0.01%. So do we really need to improve on 0.07% ?
Abstract isn't free. The summary doesn't say what size vessel they use. But cerium oxide is about $15 / lb. At 0.07 percent efficiency, given global average insolation, that gives you about 100 gge / acre / month. Not bad at all. Not as good as corn ethanol, but corn doesn't grow in the desert.
Your data isn't that interesting. Launching your cellphone into space* isn't worthy of slashdot. This has been done a hundred times before. All you're doing at this point is polluting the environment. Call us when you manage to launch a bucket of gravel into orbit or something truly novel.
He worked for Medtronic, which is a huge recipient of healthcare funding for unnecessary surgeries for old people. So, in a sense, yes, he was being indirectly paid by the US government as he tried to frame his neighbor as being anti-government-spending. I'd say that qualifies as promoting a product.
Yeah, it's obvious that unionization is just workers taking over some responsibilities of management. They don't do this because they like working harder than necessary. They do it because the management is incompetent.
Nuclear power is at the very base of the modern economy. Fossil fuels won't supply our energy needs for long. Renewables can't make up the difference in the short term. We can't afford to dismantle our energy production and ship it off to the third world the same way we did with toy manufacturing.
The Honeywell CEO was on the news just a few days ago saying the only reason US businesses are hoarding cash and aren't hiring is that they don't have "certainty". How could you possibly not have "certainty" in the production of something as basic as nuclear fuel? It has a payback of something like forty-to-one. From a purely material perspective, you'd have to be a complete retard not to make obscene profits in nuclear power.
Of course, the reason US industry doesn't have certainty is obvious: their competitors cheat. Thanks to globalization of trade but not of governance, other countries subsidize their businesses, operate under substandard environmental and labor standards, ignore human rights, and block US businesses from competing fairly. In the mean time, with our free trade and open borders, US consumers are exporting real wealth to developing nations, propping up their growth.
So how can US businesses get "certainty"? There's only one way: by making all competitors operate on the same, level playing field. That means one of two things: either import/export tariffs, or global government.
The downsides to global government should be obvious.
Personally, I think the US will be better off if we choose tariffs. Hell, we could completely seal the borders if we wanted to. We are still the wealthiest nation on Earth. We have more resources per capita than anyone. The US spans nearly every climate zone. We can have a completely self-sufficient, world-class standard of living. In the long term, no other nation could come close. Totally free trade is not in our best interests. The founders knew this, and wrote tariffs right into the Constitution. It is only in recent decades that politicians have sold out this power to the WTO and globalist institutions. It didn't improve the lives or earnings of the average American over the last thirty years. And it's high time for the farce to end.
When I was a teen, everyone had cars and gas money but not everyone had a gaming console or a high speed internet connection. These days I imagine those trends have reversed.
At least they let the French write the dress code instead of the Germans. I'd rather see co-workers wearing black socks with tennis shoes than socks and sandals.
Ah, I see. Yes, my mistake, I glossed over part of one of your sentences. Personally, I wouldn't describe it as an "abandonment of federalism" but I can see how that makes sense.
You're not using the word federalism correctly. It doesn't mean "centralization of everything", it means "centralization of only certain well-defined things". It means "separation of powers".
But, you're right, it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked for exactly the reasons spelled out in the Anti-Federalist Papers, that the central government would ignore any limits and grow without bound. That's the glaring flaw of federalism.
I'm not sure you understand the concept of democracy. Most Americans are for the war on (some) drugs. Most are against smoking. Most were for prohibition. Most are against (some) guns. Most are for the giant espionage apparatus that "keeps them safe".
Most people are complete fucking retards. Democracy is the notion that we should pretend to care what they think. None of those agencies are anti-democracy. They're anti-freedom.
There is no good argument for Keynesian economics, because it not only ignores but actively subsidizes the biggest negative externality of all: human consumers.
Modern mainstream economists have managed to be both socialists *and* corporate whores.
I really love to see these types of projects using other open hardware, such as the Arduino. I cringe whenever I see some simple project that requires a bunch of custom electronics. I mean, in the software world, it doesn't really matter if you want to waste time creating yet-another-library for your app. But in meatspace, people can only afford to have so many little pieces of custom electronics and your motor controller probably doesn't justify a completely custom circuit.
Not a bad idea. You could do this already in states with small producer tariffs and time-of-day pricing. It would be interesting as a CHP system though it depends on how well you can make use of low-level heat.
Okay, so let's do this. You're not going to agree that cost is the only factor. So I'll grant you that efficiency matters, up to a certain point. Let's decide what that point is.
What would you suggest should be the ideal global average solar energy collection efficiency target?
Because I'm going to say that anything over 3% is a complete waste of time and resources.
And here's a simple, relatively conservative way of justifying that number. If you take all the desert land on Earth and multiply it by the average global insolation and divide that among all people in the world, at 3% efficiency you get over 12 kilowatts per person, which is about the average energy usage in the US and more than twice the total global energy usage in 2008. And that's just desert. At 3% efficiency, an average roof generates over 400 watts continuously.
You're not launching solar energy into space. You're not putting it on top of your car. Why should it be more efficient than 3%?
Economics is about how to most effectively manage limited resources.
Well, regardless of the solution you come up with, the first step is:
1) Manage the resource.
Since half of the sunlight that hits the Earth isn't managed by humans at all, and the other half is only managed in a secondary or tertiary sense at less than 1% thermodynamic efficiencies, squabbling about limited resources is rather pointless.
It's like, it's raining money. And instead of dragging out a huge net that will catch 5% of the money that falls on it, people are standing outside holding out their shirts and talking about how limited the money is and how they need more efficient shirts.
Slashdot Mirror
Did Flynn recognize Tron because he was upside down or something?
Tron had two discs.
the dialog rivals Attack of the Clones
Much of the plot seemed lifted from Star Wars.
The base load capacity claim isn't bogus. First of all, I believe what he actually claimed was that a combination of wind and solar would provide reasonable base load. Regardless, all you have to do is throw in some on-demand generation, then chop off the production peaks and divert them to hydrogen electrolysis. This can easily be turned into methane to store for use in peaking plants or for transport fuels, which was the other half of the plan.
And, before your brain shuts down since I said the magical buzzword "hydrogen", remember this: Efficiency doesn't matter. Only cost matters. Large scale wind turbines can be comprised of little more than iron, carbon, hydrogen and aluminum. Equipment for electrolysis and natural gas storage and turbines are similarly low-cost. Natural gas and transport fuels are high-value as compared to electricity. There's no reason it wouldn't work. But it does require some political will and leaders more interested in real beneficial change than just endless campaign promises.
Most wind turbines use induction generators, which don't require magnets. Only small-scale turbines in poor locations require magnets.
U.S. would still be interested in the region without the oil.
Right. We're interested in gas too.
Wind and renewables would be more economical, if the US government would act in the national interest by using tariffs to eliminate the massive trade deficits to Asia and the Middle East.
US oil peaked nearly three decades ago. US natural gas peaked in 2001. Coal and biofuels have not made up the difference for transportation uses. Even nuclear remains a black sheep.
Instead, the US is intent on continuing to trade blood for oil and selling out the country to foreigners. It's sad, but apparently it's what you idiots want.
100 gge / mo is 1200 gge / yr. And that's actually much better than corn ethanol, which only yields about 270 gge per season.
This should be unsurprising, really. Photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. Take sugar cane for example:
Ethanol fuel in Brazil has a calculation that results in: "Per hectare per year, the biomass produced corresponds to 0.27 TJ. This is equivalent to 0.86 W per square meter. Assuming an average insolation of 225 W per square meter, the photosynthetic efficiency of sugar cane is 0.38%." Sucrose accounts for little more than 30% of the chemical energy stored in the mature plant; 35% is in the leaves and stem tips, which are left in the fields during harvest, and 35% are in the fibrous material (bagasse) left over from pressing.
The plant has only 0.38% total efficiency, and the sucrose is only 30% of that. You can knock off at least another 20% to account for distillation (which is generous). And optimistically you're looking at total efficiency of around 0.01%. So do we really need to improve on 0.07% ?
I imagine it involves somewhat high temperatures. But both of your examples should work fine.
Abstract isn't free. The summary doesn't say what size vessel they use. But cerium oxide is about $15 / lb. At 0.07 percent efficiency, given global average insolation, that gives you about 100 gge / acre / month. Not bad at all. Not as good as corn ethanol, but corn doesn't grow in the desert.
Your data isn't that interesting. Launching your cellphone into space* isn't worthy of slashdot. This has been done a hundred times before. All you're doing at this point is polluting the environment. Call us when you manage to launch a bucket of gravel into orbit or something truly novel.
*cue the "it's not space" replies
It was pretty much inevitable that reward of government contracts would eventually devolve into hand-to-hand combat.
Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus.
He worked for Medtronic, which is a huge recipient of healthcare funding for unnecessary surgeries for old people. So, in a sense, yes, he was being indirectly paid by the US government as he tried to frame his neighbor as being anti-government-spending. I'd say that qualifies as promoting a product.
Yeah, it's obvious that unionization is just workers taking over some responsibilities of management. They don't do this because they like working harder than necessary. They do it because the management is incompetent.
Something tells me that more people die every year from spider bites than from nuclear energy.
Nuclear power is at the very base of the modern economy. Fossil fuels won't supply our energy needs for long. Renewables can't make up the difference in the short term. We can't afford to dismantle our energy production and ship it off to the third world the same way we did with toy manufacturing.
The Honeywell CEO was on the news just a few days ago saying the only reason US businesses are hoarding cash and aren't hiring is that they don't have "certainty". How could you possibly not have "certainty" in the production of something as basic as nuclear fuel? It has a payback of something like forty-to-one. From a purely material perspective, you'd have to be a complete retard not to make obscene profits in nuclear power.
Of course, the reason US industry doesn't have certainty is obvious: their competitors cheat. Thanks to globalization of trade but not of governance, other countries subsidize their businesses, operate under substandard environmental and labor standards, ignore human rights, and block US businesses from competing fairly. In the mean time, with our free trade and open borders, US consumers are exporting real wealth to developing nations, propping up their growth.
So how can US businesses get "certainty"? There's only one way: by making all competitors operate on the same, level playing field. That means one of two things: either import/export tariffs, or global government.
The downsides to global government should be obvious.
Personally, I think the US will be better off if we choose tariffs. Hell, we could completely seal the borders if we wanted to. We are still the wealthiest nation on Earth. We have more resources per capita than anyone. The US spans nearly every climate zone. We can have a completely self-sufficient, world-class standard of living. In the long term, no other nation could come close. Totally free trade is not in our best interests. The founders knew this, and wrote tariffs right into the Constitution. It is only in recent decades that politicians have sold out this power to the WTO and globalist institutions. It didn't improve the lives or earnings of the average American over the last thirty years. And it's high time for the farce to end.
When I was a teen, everyone had cars and gas money but not everyone had a gaming console or a high speed internet connection. These days I imagine those trends have reversed.
At least they let the French write the dress code instead of the Germans. I'd rather see co-workers wearing black socks with tennis shoes than socks and sandals.
I believe I used it correctly.
Ah, I see. Yes, my mistake, I glossed over part of one of your sentences. Personally, I wouldn't describe it as an "abandonment of federalism" but I can see how that makes sense.
federalism
You're not using the word federalism correctly. It doesn't mean "centralization of everything", it means "centralization of only certain well-defined things". It means "separation of powers".
But, you're right, it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked for exactly the reasons spelled out in the Anti-Federalist Papers, that the central government would ignore any limits and grow without bound. That's the glaring flaw of federalism.
anti-democratic shit
I'm not sure you understand the concept of democracy. Most Americans are for the war on (some) drugs. Most are against smoking. Most were for prohibition. Most are against (some) guns. Most are for the giant espionage apparatus that "keeps them safe".
Most people are complete fucking retards. Democracy is the notion that we should pretend to care what they think. None of those agencies are anti-democracy. They're anti-freedom.
There is no good argument for Keynesian economics, because it not only ignores but actively subsidizes the biggest negative externality of all: human consumers.
Modern mainstream economists have managed to be both socialists *and* corporate whores.
I really love to see these types of projects using other open hardware, such as the Arduino. I cringe whenever I see some simple project that requires a bunch of custom electronics. I mean, in the software world, it doesn't really matter if you want to waste time creating yet-another-library for your app. But in meatspace, people can only afford to have so many little pieces of custom electronics and your motor controller probably doesn't justify a completely custom circuit.
Joke's on you the banks are all run by idiots who invest in my efficient shirt factory.
Not a bad idea. You could do this already in states with small producer tariffs and time-of-day pricing. It would be interesting as a CHP system though it depends on how well you can make use of low-level heat.
Okay, so let's do this. You're not going to agree that cost is the only factor. So I'll grant you that efficiency matters, up to a certain point. Let's decide what that point is.
What would you suggest should be the ideal global average solar energy collection efficiency target?
Because I'm going to say that anything over 3% is a complete waste of time and resources.
And here's a simple, relatively conservative way of justifying that number. If you take all the desert land on Earth and multiply it by the average global insolation and divide that among all people in the world, at 3% efficiency you get over 12 kilowatts per person, which is about the average energy usage in the US and more than twice the total global energy usage in 2008. And that's just desert. At 3% efficiency, an average roof generates over 400 watts continuously.
You're not launching solar energy into space. You're not putting it on top of your car. Why should it be more efficient than 3%?
Economics is about how to most effectively manage limited resources.
Well, regardless of the solution you come up with, the first step is:
1) Manage the resource.
Since half of the sunlight that hits the Earth isn't managed by humans at all, and the other half is only managed in a secondary or tertiary sense at less than 1% thermodynamic efficiencies, squabbling about limited resources is rather pointless.
It's like, it's raining money. And instead of dragging out a huge net that will catch 5% of the money that falls on it, people are standing outside holding out their shirts and talking about how limited the money is and how they need more efficient shirts.