No idea. The point is that my numbers are more accurate than yours. Maybe the vendor you quoted decided to mark up their panels and not the inverters. But every online direct - sale store for solar equipment directly on the internet, the inverters are generally more expensive per watt than the panels. Do you dispute this?
If you cycle only 1/5 to 1/3 the battery's capacity through each cycle, but it lasts 3 times longer, you haven't accomplished much. The total amount of energy stored and recovered is the same. In the case of solar, the problem is that widespread panel deployment will eventually mean there are so many solar panels that a bunch of energy produced exceeds the entire demand for the local electric grid during certain hours of the day.
So you need to store that energy if you don't want to waste it. And the cost per kilowatt-hour stored, you can work out pretty easily.
If it's $800 for 1 kilowatt hour capacity, and you can store 0.8 kilowatt hour 1000 times before the battery dies, you pay $800 for a battery that can store and return $80 worth of electricity. Not a winner.
Maybe you can look up what the numbers are for lead acid. Don't think they are noticeably better. Also, the $800 figure is a few years old, it supposedly has been slowly declining. But even $100 a kilowatt-hour isn't going to cut it for storing electric grid energy. (though, it's an excellent deal for electric cars - $8500 for an 85 kilowatt-hour pack for a "full range" electric vehicle with comparable range to a gasoline car)
I'm not going to pretend to know all the answers, either, but a couple of insights for you.
1. Economic theories are as simple as possible in order to make testable predictions and to make analysis easier. All science tries to make theories as simple as possible, only adding complexity when it is required. This is fine, the problem is when politicians make policy decisions based on unproven or incorrect economic theories.
2. Regarding free trade specifically, these theories say it increases total net economic output. And it does. The problem now is that individual Americans being out of work is not a variable being considered or controlled for.
3. A certain political party shouts from the rooftops that the reason we need low taxes on the rich and a minimal safety net is so there is immense pressure to be a "producer" and to not be a drain on society, and that if we have anything like a real welfare state, no one will do any work and everything will fall into ruin.
The problem with this untested theory is it implicitly assumes that if people aren't being worked to death all the time, not enough will be produced since people are being lazy, and everything will collapse. It implicitly assumes scarce labor from productive people.
But this isn't true. There's millions and millions of unemployed and underemployed people willing to be productive, there just aren't jobs for them. And the productive laborers who are working are producing more resources than ever. So we end up in a society where we don't give that bum under the bridge with a cardboard sign a free apartment and a commissary card because we "can't afford" the material resources, yet our society has more money than ever and there is not a job available for that bum to earn his keep anyway.
Those prices include mark up for the vendor's profit. Also, in Europe you may have to pay various taxes on the panels that don't apply the same way to the inverters. So your numbers aren't a realistic reflection of cost - it's more accurate to use the price of oil as a basis for calculating worldwide petrol prices than the price at a particular gas station.
I don't know where your numbers are coming from. Mine from from sunelec.com. The inverters are 50 cents a watt, they have deals for panels that are under that.
This does make for a nice press release...but there are SINGLE junction panels, commercially available, that can do 20% efficient. 3 more junctions is a much more expensive device to manufacture - cheaper to just make the panels bigger.
Another problem is that right now, the wholesale prices for panels are below 50 cents a watt. The inverters are generally more expensive now. Effectively, quad junction panels just mean more watts per panel, which might mean less cost per watt but probably won't, but the major drivers of cost are unaffected.
It's cool, it's just solving the wrong problem. The problem is there's too much sunlight at midday, producing more electricity than people need, and no sunlight when the weather is bad.
Sort of. Yes, their retail store is basically a Wall Street funded charity, operating at about 3% profit. On the other side of things, Walmart isn't doing any better. Retail is a race to the bottom.
Amazon, by any reasonable metric, IS succeeding. Many of their businesses make more than adequate profit margins (especially their cloud business), and Amazon's business strategy is to grow into as many markets as possible and to take advantage of vertical integration. Amazon is effectively the publisher, the store, and the printing press when they sell you self published books to read on your kindle. They even effectively are the designers of that printing press - they write the Amazon PC software, design the hardware of the kindles, and all the web software and servers.
Similarly, when they sell groceries, they are both the distributor and the store.
Having multiple huge warehouses is a compromise - apparently, at their scale, they save more in reduced shipping costs to individual buyers than the losses from having to stock multiple warehouses with the same item pool.
Sure. IF a guard on duty spots it. Out of the millions of people daily passing through a railway network in a major city. Not to mention, someone selfie videoing with their phone is both incredibly common behavior and not really want the filming ban means. The guards would probably stop someone who showed up with professional movie cameras, a lighting and sound crew, the whole 9 yards...again, IF they saw it. Some of these stations may not have any guards on duty.
The real "fix" is to eliminate these open platforms entirely. Separate the people on the platform from the moving trains with plexiglass and automatic doors that only open if the train is present and stopped. This won't stop suicides but should stop shoving murders and accidents.
The crime was armed robbery, where the criminal pointed a loaded handgun at a human being and threatened to kill them if they did not give up their property. That's what makes this a serious crime - the threat of imminent death. It is completely legal to respond to an armed robbery by basically summarily gunning down the robber without warning.
I know the concept of depreciating capital assets. I know that isn't really a tax break - capital assets do lose actual real value the moment they are purchased and with every year of service. I know that even when the depreciation formula is too fast for the asset's real value decline, if the company ever sells the asset they pay the difference, so yeah basically asset depreciation is cost of doing business and not evading taxes.
I'm not going to pretend to know where the trillions come from, except that I've heard it from numerous credible sources...including the IMF. http://www.imf.org/external/pu...
Any source can be biased but unless you can produce someone with similar credentials...not just "I see some of their taxes, trust me there's no special treatment", no rational person would believe you.
On a serious note, if you are allowed to sleep - which the text description of the record seems to indicate to me - people will rack up a month to a year, easy, soon enough. Technically since the VR headsets are low voltage electronics, it makes me wonder if you could make a waterproof version so you could shower your funky ass off without removing it.
You mail an angry letter. I guess they type it in and submit it as if you had typed it into the web form. Can you imagine how youtube comments would be if people had to pay a stamp to make them and wait 6 weeks?
I am not going to sit here and claim that "carbon offsets" in most cases is anything but snake oil. You're right on that part.
Look, we can probably agree at least on one thing. The fuel we're burning has a negative value. That is, we may not know precisely the numerical number, but we know the sign is negative.
This means that PAYING the oil companies to get the fuel even more cheaply is a bad thing, right? I mean, even if we can't agree on a carbon tax amount, we should at least stop giving them public money, right? (and yes, a special tax break they get but other companies don't is basically the same thing as just writing them a check from the general treasury)
Exact measurement isn't possible, no. Nor is it actually possible to directly measure how much your health was affected if a nuclear plant melts down and exposes you to some rads., You can only roughly estimate it.
Pretending the damage is zero only benefits the ones causing the harm.
"CO2 is not a pollutant" is essentially a well crafted lie, such as "More Doctors Smoke Camels". It is true that a certain amount of C02 is normal. This by no means makes it ok to just turn this planet into Venus. Releasing excess CO2 by digging it out of the ground where it has been sequested for millions of years and then burning it is polluting.
If I build a contraption that leaves dogshit in your front lawn all the time, every day, and it stinks to high heaven and you have to deal with flies, I could also claim it's "natural" and "not a pollutant". I have damaged the value of your property, however. So you go to authorities and try to get me to stop. Unfortunately, I'm able to prove that my contraption is essential to modern life in some way, and the authorities dismiss your case.
Do you agree that even if you can't get me to stop dumping dogshit in your lawn, you should be paid a calculated sum that takes into account the loss of value to your property as a result of my actions?
It's simple. Anyone, anywhere - including those people in Alaska - who decides to burn fossil fuels is causing damage to OTHER PEOPLE's property. Not a whole lot of damage per barrel of fuel, but cumulative it's trillions. They call this a negative externality.
So the government has to make this right (can't be done any other way), and the most straightforward way to do so is to put a tax on burning fossil fuels so that the price per unit of fuel includes the economic value of the damage done to other people. This is fair and just. A worldwide agreement of course has to be reached between governments.
If this makes fuel in Alaska too expensive, then those people need to move somewhere warmer, if they are not able to earn enough money to pay for more expensive fuel. (or conserve fuel by rebuilding their dwellings to be super-insulated and use ground source heat pumps for heating)
More expensive fuel means people have an incentive to to pay for cleaner power or to conserve less fuel by investing in more efficient equipment and better insulation.
That wouldn't kill everyone, though. You _could_ build new cities farther inland. If you were a real go-getter society, you could manufacture the new buildings using modular methods in a factory instead of making each one a custom job, with the help of robots. You could build the new city designed from the start to be efficient, like constructing every building as a 50 story mixed use "arcology", linked together by sky bridges for more layers of connectivity than just streets. You could negate the arable land loss by growing your primary food via genetically engineered algae in compact, hyper productive algae grow rooms instead of needing countless square miles of farmland.
Some societies won't have their shit together, and they will drown. The universe doesn't owe us anything.
I agree with you. A 200 foot sea level rise would destroy a tremendous amount of valuable real estate, but it would realistically happen slowly enough that societies with the physical wealth and competent financial and government institutions would have plenty of time to move their cities inland.
Societies that don't have their shit together would take lots of casualties from flooding and near collapse from missing arable land and lost productive assets. But yeah, it's not the doom of man.
The reason to try to control CO2 levels is actually simply because all those coastal cities represent centuries of accumulated wealth. Far more money would be lost from that than we save by using fossil fuels instead of nuclear or solar or wind. (especially since fossil fuels also cause localized pollution and require expensive efforts to obtain and are finite, while nuclear/solar/wind is not finite on anything but the longest imaginable timescales)
The government can just wait for your prints to regrow (while you are held in custody)
If the pattern is still there, just sanded, they could take high resolution photos of your fingers and extract the pattern using software. Or use prints they took from you previously.
They can then make a finger simulator from your print information, enough to trick the sensor on the iphone.
Also, if your prints are sanded, how are you unlocking the phone normally...
Sanding your prints in response to a warrant is obviously obstruction of justice/contempt of court.
If you really have secret data, you should protect it behind a complex password, held only in your memory. Though I guess they can jail you til you give that up...
Slashdot Mirror
No idea. The point is that my numbers are more accurate than yours. Maybe the vendor you quoted decided to mark up their panels and not the inverters. But every online direct - sale store for solar equipment directly on the internet, the inverters are generally more expensive per watt than the panels. Do you dispute this?
If you cycle only 1/5 to 1/3 the battery's capacity through each cycle, but it lasts 3 times longer, you haven't accomplished much. The total amount of energy stored and recovered is the same. In the case of solar, the problem is that widespread panel deployment will eventually mean there are so many solar panels that a bunch of energy produced exceeds the entire demand for the local electric grid during certain hours of the day.
So you need to store that energy if you don't want to waste it. And the cost per kilowatt-hour stored, you can work out pretty easily.
If it's $800 for 1 kilowatt hour capacity, and you can store 0.8 kilowatt hour 1000 times before the battery dies, you pay $800 for a battery that can store and return $80 worth of electricity. Not a winner.
Maybe you can look up what the numbers are for lead acid. Don't think they are noticeably better. Also, the $800 figure is a few years old, it supposedly has been slowly declining. But even $100 a kilowatt-hour isn't going to cut it for storing electric grid energy. (though, it's an excellent deal for electric cars - $8500 for an 85 kilowatt-hour pack for a "full range" electric vehicle with comparable range to a gasoline car)
I'm not going to pretend to know all the answers, either, but a couple of insights for you.
1. Economic theories are as simple as possible in order to make testable predictions and to make analysis easier. All science tries to make theories as simple as possible, only adding complexity when it is required. This is fine, the problem is when politicians make policy decisions based on unproven or incorrect economic theories.
2. Regarding free trade specifically, these theories say it increases total net economic output. And it does. The problem now is that individual Americans being out of work is not a variable being considered or controlled for.
3. A certain political party shouts from the rooftops that the reason we need low taxes on the rich and a minimal safety net is so there is immense pressure to be a "producer" and to not be a drain on society, and that if we have anything like a real welfare state, no one will do any work and everything will fall into ruin.
The problem with this untested theory is it implicitly assumes that if people aren't being worked to death all the time, not enough will be produced since people are being lazy, and everything will collapse. It implicitly assumes scarce labor from productive people.
But this isn't true. There's millions and millions of unemployed and underemployed people willing to be productive, there just aren't jobs for them. And the productive laborers who are working are producing more resources than ever. So we end up in a society where we don't give that bum under the bridge with a cardboard sign a free apartment and a commissary card because we "can't afford" the material resources, yet our society has more money than ever and there is not a job available for that bum to earn his keep anyway.
Those prices include mark up for the vendor's profit. Also, in Europe you may have to pay various taxes on the panels that don't apply the same way to the inverters. So your numbers aren't a realistic reflection of cost - it's more accurate to use the price of oil as a basis for calculating worldwide petrol prices than the price at a particular gas station.
I don't know where your numbers are coming from. Mine from from sunelec.com. The inverters are 50 cents a watt, they have deals for panels that are under that.
That "way" is expensive as heck. The batteries only last for about 1000 cycles and they cost $800 per kilowatt hour. See the problem?
This does make for a nice press release...but there are SINGLE junction panels, commercially available, that can do 20% efficient. 3 more junctions is a much more expensive device to manufacture - cheaper to just make the panels bigger.
Another problem is that right now, the wholesale prices for panels are below 50 cents a watt. The inverters are generally more expensive now. Effectively, quad junction panels just mean more watts per panel, which might mean less cost per watt but probably won't, but the major drivers of cost are unaffected.
It's cool, it's just solving the wrong problem. The problem is there's too much sunlight at midday, producing more electricity than people need, and no sunlight when the weather is bad.
That's terrible, AND a waste of disk space. The Win10 upgrade is just going to wipe everything anyway.
Got a source? Seems like an obvious lie if it's really true, since why install all the updates if you're just going to upgrade a machine to Win 10?
Sort of. Yes, their retail store is basically a Wall Street funded charity, operating at about 3% profit. On the other side of things, Walmart isn't doing any better. Retail is a race to the bottom.
Amazon, by any reasonable metric, IS succeeding. Many of their businesses make more than adequate profit margins (especially their cloud business), and Amazon's business strategy is to grow into as many markets as possible and to take advantage of vertical integration. Amazon is effectively the publisher, the store, and the printing press when they sell you self published books to read on your kindle. They even effectively are the designers of that printing press - they write the Amazon PC software, design the hardware of the kindles, and all the web software and servers.
Similarly, when they sell groceries, they are both the distributor and the store.
Having multiple huge warehouses is a compromise - apparently, at their scale, they save more in reduced shipping costs to individual buyers than the losses from having to stock multiple warehouses with the same item pool.
Sure. IF a guard on duty spots it. Out of the millions of people daily passing through a railway network in a major city. Not to mention, someone selfie videoing with their phone is both incredibly common behavior and not really want the filming ban means. The guards would probably stop someone who showed up with professional movie cameras, a lighting and sound crew, the whole 9 yards...again, IF they saw it. Some of these stations may not have any guards on duty.
The real "fix" is to eliminate these open platforms entirely. Separate the people on the platform from the moving trains with plexiglass and automatic doors that only open if the train is present and stopped. This won't stop suicides but should stop shoving murders and accidents.
The crime was armed robbery, where the criminal pointed a loaded handgun at a human being and threatened to kill them if they did not give up their property. That's what makes this a serious crime - the threat of imminent death. It is completely legal to respond to an armed robbery by basically summarily gunning down the robber without warning.
I know the concept of depreciating capital assets. I know that isn't really a tax break - capital assets do lose actual real value the moment they are purchased and with every year of service. I know that even when the depreciation formula is too fast for the asset's real value decline, if the company ever sells the asset they pay the difference, so yeah basically asset depreciation is cost of doing business and not evading taxes.
I'm not going to pretend to know where the trillions come from, except that I've heard it from numerous credible sources...including the IMF. http://www.imf.org/external/pu...
Any source can be biased but unless you can produce someone with similar credentials...not just "I see some of their taxes, trust me there's no special treatment", no rational person would believe you.
Oil company FUD. I believe Elon Musk's "5+ trillion" quote over some random idiot online. Go vote for Trump, buddy.
On a serious note, if you are allowed to sleep - which the text description of the record seems to indicate to me - people will rack up a month to a year, easy, soon enough. Technically since the VR headsets are low voltage electronics, it makes me wonder if you could make a waterproof version so you could shower your funky ass off without removing it.
You mail an angry letter. I guess they type it in and submit it as if you had typed it into the web form. Can you imagine how youtube comments would be if people had to pay a stamp to make them and wait 6 weeks?
I am not going to sit here and claim that "carbon offsets" in most cases is anything but snake oil. You're right on that part.
Look, we can probably agree at least on one thing. The fuel we're burning has a negative value. That is, we may not know precisely the numerical number, but we know the sign is negative.
This means that PAYING the oil companies to get the fuel even more cheaply is a bad thing, right? I mean, even if we can't agree on a carbon tax amount, we should at least stop giving them public money, right? (and yes, a special tax break they get but other companies don't is basically the same thing as just writing them a check from the general treasury)
Exact measurement isn't possible, no. Nor is it actually possible to directly measure how much your health was affected if a nuclear plant melts down and exposes you to some rads., You can only roughly estimate it.
Pretending the damage is zero only benefits the ones causing the harm.
A typo does not make you any less ignorant or the winner of an argument.
"CO2 is not a pollutant" is essentially a well crafted lie, such as "More Doctors Smoke Camels". It is true that a certain amount of C02 is normal. This by no means makes it ok to just turn this planet into Venus. Releasing excess CO2 by digging it out of the ground where it has been sequested for millions of years and then burning it is polluting.
If I build a contraption that leaves dogshit in your front lawn all the time, every day, and it stinks to high heaven and you have to deal with flies, I could also claim it's "natural" and "not a pollutant". I have damaged the value of your property, however. So you go to authorities and try to get me to stop. Unfortunately, I'm able to prove that my contraption is essential to modern life in some way, and the authorities dismiss your case.
Do you agree that even if you can't get me to stop dumping dogshit in your lawn, you should be paid a calculated sum that takes into account the loss of value to your property as a result of my actions?
It's simple. Anyone, anywhere - including those people in Alaska - who decides to burn fossil fuels is causing damage to OTHER PEOPLE's property. Not a whole lot of damage per barrel of fuel, but cumulative it's trillions. They call this a negative externality.
So the government has to make this right (can't be done any other way), and the most straightforward way to do so is to put a tax on burning fossil fuels so that the price per unit of fuel includes the economic value of the damage done to other people. This is fair and just. A worldwide agreement of course has to be reached between governments.
If this makes fuel in Alaska too expensive, then those people need to move somewhere warmer, if they are not able to earn enough money to pay for more expensive fuel. (or conserve fuel by rebuilding their dwellings to be super-insulated and use ground source heat pumps for heating)
More expensive fuel means people have an incentive to to pay for cleaner power or to conserve less fuel by investing in more efficient equipment and better insulation.
That wouldn't kill everyone, though. You _could_ build new cities farther inland. If you were a real go-getter society, you could manufacture the new buildings using modular methods in a factory instead of making each one a custom job, with the help of robots. You could build the new city designed from the start to be efficient, like constructing every building as a 50 story mixed use "arcology", linked together by sky bridges for more layers of connectivity than just streets. You could negate the arable land loss by growing your primary food via genetically engineered algae in compact, hyper productive algae grow rooms instead of needing countless square miles of farmland.
Some societies won't have their shit together, and they will drown. The universe doesn't owe us anything.
I agree with you. A 200 foot sea level rise would destroy a tremendous amount of valuable real estate, but it would realistically happen slowly enough that societies with the physical wealth and competent financial and government institutions would have plenty of time to move their cities inland.
Societies that don't have their shit together would take lots of casualties from flooding and near collapse from missing arable land and lost productive assets. But yeah, it's not the doom of man.
The reason to try to control CO2 levels is actually simply because all those coastal cities represent centuries of accumulated wealth. Far more money would be lost from that than we save by using fossil fuels instead of nuclear or solar or wind. (especially since fossil fuels also cause localized pollution and require expensive efforts to obtain and are finite, while nuclear/solar/wind is not finite on anything but the longest imaginable timescales)
The government can just wait for your prints to regrow (while you are held in custody)
If the pattern is still there, just sanded, they could take high resolution photos of your fingers and extract the pattern using software. Or use prints they took from you previously.
They can then make a finger simulator from your print information, enough to trick the sensor on the iphone.
Also, if your prints are sanded, how are you unlocking the phone normally...
Sanding your prints in response to a warrant is obviously obstruction of justice/contempt of court.
If you really have secret data, you should protect it behind a complex password, held only in your memory. Though I guess they can jail you til you give that up...