squiggleslash, you said, "Look, the most infamous dictatorship
in history, the German regime of 1933-1945, supported private
ownership."
squiggleslash, I think it all turns on how we define "private ownership."
The nazis asserted that anything anyone may have had was lent
to them by the state, something that they were responsible
for taking care of.
Fancy words but what did it actually mean in practice?
In the mid-thirties they made it a capital crime to remove any
property or money from germany. Of course merely leaving germany
unapproved itself was a crime. But trying to leave germany and
taking say jewelry was something the courts would direct people
to be executed for.
So is this private ownership? Or had there been a significant
erosion of its meaning?
In the 1930s all farmers were told what to produce and how much
to produce and what they would be paid for it, and if a farmer
didn't meet these targets the land could be taken from him.
Is this private ownership?
Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of
the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated
successor, second most powerful man in germany. Where the companies
he took private or had they in effect been nationalized?
Here's a quote from the "Jewish Virtual Library"
(see http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/goering.html):
"In 1936 his powers were further extended by his appointment as
Plenipotentiary for the implementation of the Four Year Plan, which
gave him virtually dictatorial controls to direct the German economy.
The creation of the state-owned Hermann Goering Works in 1937,
a gigantic industrial nexus which employed 700,000 workers and
amassed a capital of 400 million marks, enabled him to accumulate
a huge fortune."
But wait, if the Hermann Goering Works was state-owned how could
Goering be amassing a huge fortune thereby?
Obviously the Jewish Virtual Library feels that Goering is a part
of the nazi state, that you can't really separate him from the government
and that the confiscated companies that were combined to make the Hermann
Goering Works were in effect nationalized. I agree.
The nazi economy was a planned economy. The companies that were
not explicitly nationalized were told what to do, what to produce
and how much and how and what wages to pay their workers by government
ministries.
Is this private ownership?
There's some room for argument, but I argue that private
ownership only existed around the edges in nazi germany. That the
concept had been severly eroded.
In fact nazi germany was more nationalized, more centrally-controlled,
than than the soviet union was at a comparable point in time: 1925.
naasking, you said, "Do you really think installing power lines
and distributing power over them across an entire country is less
expensive and more efficient than generating the power close to
where you are using it?"
Yes, I do. Every month I pay heating and electric bills.
I believe I'm paying the true cost for these things, or even
a bit more, and that society at large is not subsidizing
my consumption.
I seriously doubt that I have an option for decentralized
power generation (say putting something in my backyard) that
when all factors are taken into account would cost less
than what I'm currently doing. Even if I had someone missed
noticing such, then others would noticed and there would
now be a wave of conversion to this inexpensive decentralized
power across the U.S. and Canada.
naasking, you said, "A solar installation for a home costs
between 10,000 and 30,000 dollars (Canadian), and will pay
itself off in 10-15 years. Maintenance is practically zero
for the first 20 years (barring major accidents like a high
impact on the panels)."
First question, have you done this yourself?
Can you be more specific -- what solar panels and how
and where installed?
Have you really considered all the costs? For example, does
the above include the cost of someone installing it? Or are
you assuming that you will do it and discounting your labor
(and mistakes) as free?
In my area unemployment is low and labor costs are high,
it's hard to imagine installation alone costing anything
less than 10,000 dollars (U.S.).
Have you considered the cost of having a space accessible
to the sun? I for example have a home surrounded by trees.
In order to put in a solar device I would have to cut down
quite a few trees. If I have someone else do it, that'll
cost I don't know how many thousands of dollars right there.
And I like the trees. Don't know how to put a dollar
value on that. Plus the trees cool the house significantly
in the summer. Wouldn't be to surprised if energy wise actually
lose out on such an exchange.
Now in my case I could cut down six big trees and
basically open up my roof to the sky but my situation is
probably not typical of most people in my area. More
common, particularly for new home buyers, is the situation
where one buys into a homeowners covented agreement. That
is one's neighbors have to agree if you want to make some
significant change to the external appearance of your house.
Anyone want to guess the odds here?
naasking, you say, "Solar does generate very little pollution,
the only pollutants being in the fabrication process. Even
there, they are small and with time, techniques improve and
pollutants drop."
But do you really know this to be the truth? I've heard the
opposite, that substantial amounts of pollution are produced
in fabrication and mining and that significant energy
consumption is required also, so that if we are really going
to look at the pollution impact we need to include all this in
the accounting. Which scenario is true, I don't know.
Whichever, wouldn't it be desirable to have a detailed
accounting?
naasking, you say, "Maintenance is practically zero for the
first 20 years (barring major accidents like a high impact
on the panels)."
I'd like to see real numbers. I imagine energy conversion
efficiency fades with time, I wonder how fast. I imagine
as the years go by a film forms on the glass. Is cleaning
required? Is cleaning assumed and assumed costless? Twenty
years, that's around the time a roof coating, like shingles,
lasts. Have we factored in the cost of working around the
photovoltavoics while insuring a water-tight roof (mess
up here and you can ruin a house fast).
Where is the energy produced by the solar cells stored
till it's actually used? Doesn't that require another
whole system? And what are its maintenance requirements?
What if something goes wrong in the first twenty years?
There may or may not be a less than even chance of this
happening, but if so, might it be that the cost of fixing
is quite high?
naasking asks, "Ten times costlier than currently available
schemes? What are you factoring into this?"
"Ten times costlier" was solely in terms of money.
Any other metric would be measureless because of disagreement
about what's worth what. Implicitly there might be other
factors hard to measure but worth up to ten times, because
otherwise there'd be no point in spending anymore than
present."
naasking, you ask, "How much is clean air and water worth to you?"
What does this have to do with it? You assert decentralized
renewable power generation is the only option. How does this
result in clean air and water? I'm asserting that compared
to some other options decentralized power generation would
make, based on what we are doing currently, for more dirty
air and water.
naasking, you said, "How much is avoiding asthma for you and
your children worth?"
I think the best guess right now based on what we know currently
is that asthma is caused by the clean environments we currently
raise children in. Not enough exposure to parasites, disease
etc. Likely has nothing to do with air pollution, except
exacerbating after the fact.
naasking, you say, "How much is ensuring a future for our children
and humanity as a whole worth?"
Again I don't understand how this connects to the assertion
that decentralized power generation is the best choice.
Look, given the importance of the issue and given the importance
for instance you place on it, wouldn't it be worthwhile
documenting exhaustively all the costs, pollution, monetary
and other metrics also, of the solar installation you're
speaking of?
7-Vodka said, "Capitalism in practice does not work like you
think. Monopolies and cartels are a dime a dozen in this world,
stiffling competition and using power and influence to maintain
outdated buisness models."
And I rather agree with this view of things with one significant
exception.
Basically: is it capitalism?
If you read Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes
of the Wealth of Nations" closely, you'll note that Smith
asserts that monopolies and cartels are all to common and
are responsible for much human poverty, misery and suffering
(see http://www.adamsmith.org.uk/smith/won-index.htm).
Much of his book then amounts to the proposal of an alternative
-- markets, ie. many competitive producers -- and an explanation
of why this would work much better. No where in his book is
there the assertion that monopolies and cartels will just
spontaneously disappear if society and the government favor
markets. On the contrary he asserts monopolies and cartels
form spontaneously and naturally.
There is the clear although not detailed articulation that
to have a market then most times one needs a government and
a society that effectively pursues and discourages cartels.
It is a source of amazement to me how an idea can be effectively
transformed to mean it's opposite. In other words the
assertion that 'captalism' includes monopoly, and also how
many monopolists claim to be capitalists, ie. Bill Gates.
With centralized or concentrated power generation we can optimize the power production so as to minimize negative side effects. Usually that would be either the pollution produced or cost of the power produced or both with normally there being a trade-off between the two.
There is an economy of scale involved here, when a lot of energy is being produced in one place we can afford to maintain that installation and to use expensive techniques to minimize pollution and/or to increase efficiency because when that cost is spread out over all the individual units of energy produced per unit it isn't expensive.
naasking says "decentralized power generation via renewables" is the answer. I say that unless we are expecting a Mad Max future then for decentralized power generation to work it has to be essentially maintenance free, has to to generate very little pollution and has to be low-cost, that is at least no more than ten times costlier than current.
I don't think we are anywhere near such a scenario and in fact every current decentralized power generation via renewables 'solution' is either high-maintenance (ie. expensive over the long haul), generates more pollution than fossil fuels when all factors are considered, and/or is much more than ten times as expensive as fossil fuel.
To prove my assertion I would have to examine every such scenario. To disprove it someone merely has to give me one real-life example.
I got curious as to how the speed of X18 would compare to a pentium 4.
Pulled up Intel's Instruction Set Reference
(ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manual s/ 24547104.pdf) and was
surprised to discover that they are apparently not giving the programmer
any clue as to how long, or how many clock cycles, it takes these instructions
to execute.
Likely this is because this is a very difficult question to answer, clock
cycles per instruction being highly variable dependent on what else is
going on in the processor at the same time.
As I recall in earlier versions of the the pentium clock cycles per instruction
would range from 110 to 20 cycles.
If we assume the average pentium 4 instruction takes 30 clock cycles to
complete, then a pentium 4 running at 2 gigahertz is executing 66 million
instructions per second.
The X18 executes 2.4 billion instructions per second. That's 36 times
faster.
Further the X18 in any quantity would probably cost several cents per cpu to
produce. The pentium 4 at 1.7 gigahertz cost about 209 dollars.
A little fairer comparison would be the X25 costing one dollar in quantity once
one has gone a million units down the learning curve. This is an array of 25 cpus
and its practical instruction processing rate is probably highly variable dependent
on application. There might be special cases where one could use all the cpus and
deliver 60 billion instructions per second (909 times faster than the pentium 4),
but more typically I would guess it would be a fraction of that although still
of course much faster.
Anonymous, although Charles Moore definitely is a minimalist,
there is nothing blocking anyone from implementing c++ or java or
visual basic on his X18.
Although I suspect C++ would be a bear, simply because C++ is
apparently difficult to implement for any processor, the others might
actually be easy.
Java has a forth-like bottom layer.
Visual Basic, well, I am reminded of Marcel Hendrix (see
http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/). Some time back he developed
a general procedure for implementing well-described computer
languages in forth.
As test cases he did this for several languages one of which
was Pascal. He was able to do these implementations quite rapidly,
almost automatically, and as I recall, Pascal implemented in Forth
was significantly faster than Borland's Turbo Pascal (implemented
in, I think, assembler?).
There's a man named Charles Moore who has been developing asynchronous
microprocessors over the last decade.
His current chip is called the X18 and it can maintain a sustained
processing rate of 2.4 billion instructions per second. The power
consumption at that rate is 20 milliwatts.
Check out http://www.mindspring.com/~chipchuck/X18.html
Also check out http://www.mindspring.com/~chipchuck/25x.html, which
describes his X25, currently available only as a prototype. Basically
its 25 X18s on one chip, running in parallel.
Assuming that you can write a program that could take full advantage of
25 such cpus that would amount to 60 billion instructions per second. The
power consumption is so low as to allow operation of the microprocessor
array for one year on one 100mAh battery.
Slashdot Mirror
squiggleslash, I think it all turns on how we define "private ownership." The nazis asserted that anything anyone may have had was lent to them by the state, something that they were responsible for taking care of.
Fancy words but what did it actually mean in practice?
In the mid-thirties they made it a capital crime to remove any property or money from germany. Of course merely leaving germany unapproved itself was a crime. But trying to leave germany and taking say jewelry was something the courts would direct people to be executed for.
So is this private ownership? Or had there been a significant erosion of its meaning?
In the 1930s all farmers were told what to produce and how much to produce and what they would be paid for it, and if a farmer didn't meet these targets the land could be taken from him.
Is this private ownership?
Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, second most powerful man in germany. Where the companies he took private or had they in effect been nationalized?
Here's a quote from the "Jewish Virtual Library" (see http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/goering .html):
"In 1936 his powers were further extended by his appointment as Plenipotentiary for the implementation of the Four Year Plan, which gave him virtually dictatorial controls to direct the German economy. The creation of the state-owned Hermann Goering Works in 1937, a gigantic industrial nexus which employed 700,000 workers and amassed a capital of 400 million marks, enabled him to accumulate a huge fortune."
But wait, if the Hermann Goering Works was state-owned how could Goering be amassing a huge fortune thereby?
Obviously the Jewish Virtual Library feels that Goering is a part of the nazi state, that you can't really separate him from the government and that the confiscated companies that were combined to make the Hermann Goering Works were in effect nationalized. I agree.
The nazi economy was a planned economy. The companies that were not explicitly nationalized were told what to do, what to produce and how much and how and what wages to pay their workers by government ministries.
Is this private ownership?
There's some room for argument, but I argue that private ownership only existed around the edges in nazi germany. That the concept had been severly eroded.
In fact nazi germany was more nationalized, more centrally-controlled, than than the soviet union was at a comparable point in time: 1925.
Yes, I do. Every month I pay heating and electric bills. I believe I'm paying the true cost for these things, or even a bit more, and that society at large is not subsidizing my consumption.
I seriously doubt that I have an option for decentralized power generation (say putting something in my backyard) that when all factors are taken into account would cost less than what I'm currently doing. Even if I had someone missed noticing such, then others would noticed and there would now be a wave of conversion to this inexpensive decentralized power across the U.S. and Canada.
naasking, you said, "A solar installation for a home costs between 10,000 and 30,000 dollars (Canadian), and will pay itself off in 10-15 years. Maintenance is practically zero for the first 20 years (barring major accidents like a high impact on the panels)."
First question, have you done this yourself?
Can you be more specific -- what solar panels and how and where installed?
Have you really considered all the costs? For example, does the above include the cost of someone installing it? Or are you assuming that you will do it and discounting your labor (and mistakes) as free?
In my area unemployment is low and labor costs are high, it's hard to imagine installation alone costing anything less than 10,000 dollars (U.S.).
Have you considered the cost of having a space accessible to the sun? I for example have a home surrounded by trees. In order to put in a solar device I would have to cut down quite a few trees. If I have someone else do it, that'll cost I don't know how many thousands of dollars right there. And I like the trees. Don't know how to put a dollar value on that. Plus the trees cool the house significantly in the summer. Wouldn't be to surprised if energy wise actually lose out on such an exchange.
Now in my case I could cut down six big trees and basically open up my roof to the sky but my situation is probably not typical of most people in my area. More common, particularly for new home buyers, is the situation where one buys into a homeowners covented agreement. That is one's neighbors have to agree if you want to make some significant change to the external appearance of your house. Anyone want to guess the odds here?
naasking, you say, "Solar does generate very little pollution, the only pollutants being in the fabrication process. Even there, they are small and with time, techniques improve and pollutants drop."
But do you really know this to be the truth? I've heard the opposite, that substantial amounts of pollution are produced in fabrication and mining and that significant energy consumption is required also, so that if we are really going to look at the pollution impact we need to include all this in the accounting. Which scenario is true, I don't know. Whichever, wouldn't it be desirable to have a detailed accounting?
naasking, you say, "Maintenance is practically zero for the first 20 years (barring major accidents like a high impact on the panels)."
I'd like to see real numbers. I imagine energy conversion efficiency fades with time, I wonder how fast. I imagine as the years go by a film forms on the glass. Is cleaning required? Is cleaning assumed and assumed costless? Twenty years, that's around the time a roof coating, like shingles, lasts. Have we factored in the cost of working around the photovoltavoics while insuring a water-tight roof (mess up here and you can ruin a house fast).
Where is the energy produced by the solar cells stored till it's actually used? Doesn't that require another whole system? And what are its maintenance requirements?
What if something goes wrong in the first twenty years? There may or may not be a less than even chance of this happening, but if so, might it be that the cost of fixing is quite high?
naasking asks, "Ten times costlier than currently available schemes? What are you factoring into this?"
"Ten times costlier" was solely in terms of money. Any other metric would be measureless because of disagreement about what's worth what. Implicitly there might be other factors hard to measure but worth up to ten times, because otherwise there'd be no point in spending anymore than present."
naasking, you ask, "How much is clean air and water worth to you?"
What does this have to do with it? You assert decentralized renewable power generation is the only option. How does this result in clean air and water? I'm asserting that compared to some other options decentralized power generation would make, based on what we are doing currently, for more dirty air and water.
naasking, you said, "How much is avoiding asthma for you and your children worth?"
I think the best guess right now based on what we know currently is that asthma is caused by the clean environments we currently raise children in. Not enough exposure to parasites, disease etc. Likely has nothing to do with air pollution, except exacerbating after the fact.
naasking, you say, "How much is ensuring a future for our children and humanity as a whole worth?"
Again I don't understand how this connects to the assertion that decentralized power generation is the best choice.
Look, given the importance of the issue and given the importance for instance you place on it, wouldn't it be worthwhile documenting exhaustively all the costs, pollution, monetary and other metrics also, of the solar installation you're speaking of?
And I rather agree with this view of things with one significant exception.
Basically: is it capitalism?
If you read Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations" closely, you'll note that Smith asserts that monopolies and cartels are all to common and are responsible for much human poverty, misery and suffering (see http://www.adamsmith.org.uk/smith/won-index.htm).
Much of his book then amounts to the proposal of an alternative -- markets, ie. many competitive producers -- and an explanation of why this would work much better. No where in his book is there the assertion that monopolies and cartels will just spontaneously disappear if society and the government favor markets. On the contrary he asserts monopolies and cartels form spontaneously and naturally.
There is the clear although not detailed articulation that to have a market then most times one needs a government and a society that effectively pursues and discourages cartels.
It is a source of amazement to me how an idea can be effectively transformed to mean it's opposite. In other words the assertion that 'captalism' includes monopoly, and also how many monopolists claim to be capitalists, ie. Bill Gates.
With centralized or concentrated power generation we can optimize
the power production so as to minimize negative side effects.
Usually that would be either the pollution produced or cost of the
power produced or both with normally there being a trade-off between
the two.
There is an economy of scale involved here, when a lot of energy is
being produced in one place we can afford to maintain that installation
and to use expensive techniques to minimize pollution and/or to
increase efficiency because when that cost is spread out over all
the individual units of energy produced per unit it isn't expensive.
naasking says "decentralized power generation via renewables" is
the answer. I say that unless we are expecting a Mad Max future
then for decentralized power generation to work it has to be
essentially maintenance free, has to to generate very little
pollution and has to be low-cost, that is at least no more than
ten times costlier than current.
I don't think we are anywhere near such a scenario and in fact
every current decentralized power generation via renewables
'solution' is either high-maintenance (ie. expensive over the
long haul), generates more pollution than fossil fuels when
all factors are considered, and/or is much more than ten times
as expensive as fossil fuel.
To prove my assertion I would have to examine every such
scenario. To disprove it someone merely has to give me one
real-life example.
I got curious as to how the speed of X18 would compare to a pentium 4.l s/ 24547104.pdf) and was
Pulled up Intel's Instruction Set Reference
(ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manua
surprised to discover that they are apparently not giving the programmer
any clue as to how long, or how many clock cycles, it takes these instructions
to execute.
Likely this is because this is a very difficult question to answer, clock
cycles per instruction being highly variable dependent on what else is
going on in the processor at the same time.
As I recall in earlier versions of the the pentium clock cycles per instruction
would range from 110 to 20 cycles.
If we assume the average pentium 4 instruction takes 30 clock cycles to
complete, then a pentium 4 running at 2 gigahertz is executing 66 million
instructions per second.
The X18 executes 2.4 billion instructions per second. That's 36 times
faster.
Further the X18 in any quantity would probably cost several cents per cpu to
produce. The pentium 4 at 1.7 gigahertz cost about 209 dollars.
A little fairer comparison would be the X25 costing one dollar in quantity once
one has gone a million units down the learning curve. This is an array of 25 cpus
and its practical instruction processing rate is probably highly variable dependent
on application. There might be special cases where one could use all the cpus and
deliver 60 billion instructions per second (909 times faster than the pentium 4),
but more typically I would guess it would be a fraction of that although still
of course much faster.
Although I suspect C++ would be a bear, simply because C++ is apparently difficult to implement for any processor, the others might actually be easy.
Java has a forth-like bottom layer.
Visual Basic, well, I am reminded of Marcel Hendrix (see http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/). Some time back he developed a general procedure for implementing well-described computer languages in forth.
As test cases he did this for several languages one of which was Pascal. He was able to do these implementations quite rapidly, almost automatically, and as I recall, Pascal implemented in Forth was significantly faster than Borland's Turbo Pascal (implemented in, I think, assembler?).
There's a man named Charles Moore who has been developing asynchronous microprocessors over the last decade. His current chip is called the X18 and it can maintain a sustained processing rate of 2.4 billion instructions per second. The power consumption at that rate is 20 milliwatts. Check out http://www.mindspring.com/~chipchuck/X18.html Also check out http://www.mindspring.com/~chipchuck/25x.html, which describes his X25, currently available only as a prototype. Basically its 25 X18s on one chip, running in parallel. Assuming that you can write a program that could take full advantage of 25 such cpus that would amount to 60 billion instructions per second. The power consumption is so low as to allow operation of the microprocessor array for one year on one 100mAh battery.