Wait, what? Then why are online prices frequently lower than for Walmart?
There are two glaring holes in your analysis : one is that even if there are more middlemen, the internet means that each entity can perform it's role with less human labor (since computers do almost all of the work for most transactions except for someone who has to physically put the items in the box for very low pay).
And second, those credit card fees may steal 3% from the consumer -> online store transaction, but all of the other transactions, which are between trusted entities (some of that 3% is to cover the cost of fraud) are near 0 fee direct bank transfers.
Exactly. I have thought this for a long time. The only permanent solution to this problem is to create sentient beings with all of the good qualities of humans, few of the bad, and vastly better brain performance. These beings should be in charge of taking care of us, and should provide those of us who want it a route to achieving our own personal enlightenment.
Again, I'm not an expert on this. You should read a textbook on the subject before making ignorant objections. I mean, your objections "sound" good...you sound like you've taken at least sophmore or junior level physics courses...but you are missing the forest for the trees.
In the case of a salt cavern, heat conduction through rocks is extremely slow. Where do you think the heat in the gas goes? It's irrelevant how much heat the cavern walls can absorb : the only factor that matters over multiple cycles is how fast the heat can conduct away which is pretty slow (rock is a good insulator)
Much higher pressures are obviously possible - gas bags under the great lakes is another proposed method. I don't know what the peak pressures for salt caverns are.
When you do the mining, you make a mountain of salt somewhere by evaporating it and then moving the crystals with heavy equipment. You don't dump the water into the water table, duh.
There ARE listed costs, I just named them. $1000-$1500 per kilowatt hour stored. Yes that sounds expensive, but assuming you only need a buffer against wind fluctuations at night (the solar would be for peak load in the day), you might need only a kilowatt hour per a few thousand watts of system capacity.
And actually the real plants they use right now are hybrid : they store energy using compressed air but they use the compressed air in gas turbine generators. Those gas turbine generators can work even when you're out of compressed air, providing a valuable amount of peaking capacity.
So again, a hybrid system that is mostly or totally renewable is entirely doable. A bunch of wind farms all over the country for base load, with compressed air to smooth out fluctuations. Solar arrays for heavy power usage in the day (when electricty would be cheap). Natural gas generators that use the compressed air for assistance for peaking and times when both the wind and the sun aren't ideal across the entire country.
Why would we do this? Cost. Have you seen how expensive a nuclear plant is? Coal is a finite fuel and it causes significant pollution that has a negative cost on the population. And of course burning oil is out of the question.
You make the caverns by drilling a hole into an underground salt pocket and sending down water to gradually mine out a huge cave by disolving the salt. Since you leave a many feet thick lining of salt all around the caverns are inherently hermetically sealed. Ironically, you use very similar equipment to that used in the petroleum industry.
Except that once you make one of these caverns, it lasts just about forever. Probably centuries for most of them. And so the only thing you have to fix in your system is damage from mechanical wear to the machinery, which can last for decades with occasional maintainence. There are enormous salt layers running for miles across entire states they can tap for this, and once the electric grid is finally nation wide it won't matter where we put the caverns. (a tie system is being built right now to make the electric grids interlinked)
As for the "heat of compression" nonsense : that heat is still in the compressed gas down in the huge cavern. Since the surface ara of the cavern is very small compared to the volume of gas inside, and you are only storing the gas a few hours, the gas will be hot when you let it out and use it. Current systems use the gas to increase the efficiency of a natural gas turbine generator.
Re:Yeah but how much is the ink cartridge?
on
Kidney Printer
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· Score: 1
Extremely high resolution photos can still be printed with inkjets.
Of course, if you want glossy photos, you might as well just print them online to a printer at your local walgreens, walmart, or other store. The quality will be better and the cost cheaper unless you are printing a huge number...no wait, still cheaper.
The posters below me say that this is because we cannot measure cognitive capacity. This is wrong. Intelligence testing, on the aggregate, produces extremely consistent numbers for large groups of people.
However, software matters. As it turns out, Asians are consistently more intelligent than white people, who are in the middle. (I am a white person)
It is thought that something about the culture of white people (aka USA/Europe) has lead to the technological advances they have made, while Asians lag behind.
The best theory I have heard is that it's the LANGUAGE. English language is the software that allows white people to develop new tech faster, which is why asians who know english from an early age do a better job at the high tech jobs than white people.
Where are you getting your numbers. According to "Wind and solar power systems: design, analysis, and operation", reasonable efficiencies are about 50% for compressed air storage. It depends upon compressor efficiency, leakage, motor generator efficiency, and several other variables.
It costs about $1-$1.50 per wat-hourt your store this way today. Bigger systems built per often should lower that cost. A big solar system that produces 5 or 6 watt hours per day per watt of capacity would need to store a couple watts of that for the night. At $1/watt for the solar system itself, that would be $2 worth of storage.
These numbers don't seem completely unfeasible : they are within a factor of 2 or 3 of what you need to compete with coal generation today. Just put a tax on the coal power producers proportional to the ecological damage they are doing, and this solar method would probably prove workable quite soon.
Regarding the french nuke : you have to pay for operating costs (expensive), maintenance (VERY EXPENSIVE), fuel (cheap today), waste disposal (ungodly expensive), and liability insurance (ungodly expensive).
A large solar PV plant can be run entirely by computers. It only needs human intervention once in a blue moon. A couple guys with a pickup will have to be there to do repairs, and they can improvise repairs using whatever cheap method they want. (rather than using ungodly expensive spare parts, wearing radiation suits, and filling out reams of paperwork)
A PV plant needs no fuel, the waste of the dead panels goes in landfills, and there's close to zero liability risks, especially if the plant is on cheap lands in rural arizona.
On the other hand, once we have a lot of solar plants, we will have to start paying for energy storage which will raise the cost significantly. The compressed air in a salt cavern method is one energy storage technique, however, that stores a huge amount of energy and is relatively cheap.
Just one panel, and every panel is identical to every other panel. And every subunit on every panel is identical to every subunit on the same panel and every other panel. This repetitiveness means that once you develop an extremely cheap and fast method for making one solar cell, you can make trillions of them the same way and replace most other forms of power generation.
Stirling cycles and thermal plants have more "fiddly bits" that have to be designed, manufactured, quality controlled, and maintained. In the long run I think the PV panels will win because of their simplicity - probably the straight PV panels without light concentrators, for that matter.
RIGHT NOW you can purchase thin film solar panels for $1/watt. Now, this doesn't include the inverters, which add more cost, nor labor or mounting hardware...but we are actually a lot closer to the threshold than you think.
The theory is that if $1/watt is the installed cost of solar panels, including labor and inverters, and you don't have to pay for fuel, and the maintenance costs are very small, it would be cost competitive with conventional power sources. The cost stability - fuel prices can't go up, and once you install the panels you do not have to worry about prices changing for the next 25+ years, means that solar would become the preferred source of new power plants.
You forgot virtual particles (which arise from the ether)
Modern physics still has an ether : the catch is that ether puts an absolute speed limit on things due to the limited refresh rate of the simulation engine running our universe.
To make a long story short, there is one CFL that consistently beats everything else around. It's the "ecosmart" bulb that they sell at home depot and amazon. Ecosmart was formally branded "nvision" and popular mechanics also found it to be a top cfl.
Ecosmart bulbs (I have dozens) start instantly, last an extremely long time, have a perceived color temperature very close to the incandescents they replace, and are generally the way to go. They produce tons of light, and there are higher wattage models (consumer reports likes the 60w light output one the best) if you need more light.
I would say 90% of the vitriol directed against CFLs on this comment thread is from people who bought other brands of bulbs. They are NOT all the same.
One last comment : if you are worried about the mercury, then only put the cfls in enclosed fixtures that are high up, and be very careful not to break them when you install them the one and only time. You won't be replacing a typical CFL anytime sooner.
Actually, those 'cheap CFLs', if they are the ecosmart brand, are the best ones on the market. Check out consumer reports sometime : the 60w version of those bulb outscores every other CFL in light quality and longevity.
If I were a hospital or clinic, I would interpret this the opposite. This is the first time anyone has EVER been fined, and it's for blatant refusals to give medical records to dozens of people or respond to mail. Given what it takes to actually be fined, I would stop harassing people with useless HIPAA notices and using it to obstruct anything from getting accomplished whenever convenient.
Almost certainly not measurable, but when you change bits on either device you are (very slightly) changing the internal energy of the device. Some states give the device higher energy than others. (no, I don't know if ones or zeroes have higher rest energy). Since e=mC^2, the mass of the device also goes up.
(this is true for all means of energy storage. A battery gets heavier when it is charged, etc, etc. Very slightly, of course)
Actually, it might just be. The radioactive debris is going to be pretty diluted by all that water. And we did detonate dozens of nuclear weapons in the pacific ocean with relatively small negative effects. (there was the japanese fishing boat crew that got directly into the path of the fallout, and we ruined the islands we set them off on, but other than that, it's all good)
Yes but I think the antimatter annihilation reaction would cause side reactions that would release neutrons and create more nuclear waste...
In practice, though, the reason highly radioactive nuclear waste even exists as a problem is because it ISN'T waste - it's unburned fuel. More than 99% of the energy in the nuclear fuel is still remaining, which is why the waste can emit dangerous levels of radiation for thousands of years.
Or you could just head over to newegg and pick up more storage 2TB at a time for around $60-$90 for 2 TB. (depends on which special is running at the time you look)
A NAS with only 4 TB is a little long in the tooth. If it works for you, fine, just saying...
No. Your genes are a programming code, and our best information indicates that is EXACTLY what is written in them. Reality could be different...but our best understanding of it today indicates that you are a digital computer with some very sophisticated procedural code.
Uhh...a computer system can keep trying when it hits an error. We programmers put stops in it because we know the computer will screw up once it leaves the reservation of known working states.
Humans keep running...and usually when they do something they don't know what they are doing, something bad happens they are lucky to survive...
From reading the actual FBI file, I noticed something interesting :
1. The FBI made an effort to investigate the book's author BEFORE they determined a crime had even been committed.
2. The FBI wrongly assumed the author was a pseudonym because they felt the topics "spoke from firsthand experience". They obviously never asked a chemist or someone who had actually tried these techniques if anything in the book would work. Had they done so, they would have realized the book was fake. Also, these government agents tended to take advertising copy at face value...getting information from the media the same way we do.
3. The FBI REALLY IS WATCHING YOU. Send them a letter and a news clipping and complain, and the FBI will INVESTIGATE YOU! Every letter written by some old lady had a note attached where an agent checked the files on that lady and found out what she had sent in the past. (evidently each time when the FBI found that a person had sent them things that seemed supportive of the agency, they would stop investigating)
The Man's own private records reveal many of the things we say about him are true. The Man really is ignorant and responds to popular opinion, not common sense. Criticize The Man, or communicate with him at all, and he will try to find a reason to send you to prison.
Why use a warp drive? What's wrong with the slow way? The only reason a centuries long journey bothers people is because 1. Current evolved humans won't live that long. 2. Human brains have hardware functions that make them feel impatience that they cannot adjust.
If you were a being that was an AI or an uploaded human you could adjust your perception of time to whatever it needed to be. A 500 year journey could seem like 10 minutes. And since your systems would have massive data redundancy and error control files, as well as self repair capability, you would arrive at the destination with no net damage or loss of information from your systems. (all damage from cosmic rays and time passing would be repaired quickly and no amount of damage that doesn't destroy the spacecraft could cause a significant loss to your memories)
A laughably bad idea. And totally unsuitable for manufacturing an interstellar vehicle. The reason is obvious : the rocket equation matters BIG time for interstellar journeys. You want to control where every last microgram of matter goes in your starship to optimize your mass ratios. Yes, I read the John Ringo book.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, what? Then why are online prices frequently lower than for Walmart?
There are two glaring holes in your analysis : one is that even if there are more middlemen, the internet means that each entity can perform it's role with less human labor (since computers do almost all of the work for most transactions except for someone who has to physically put the items in the box for very low pay).
And second, those credit card fees may steal 3% from the consumer -> online store transaction, but all of the other transactions, which are between trusted entities (some of that 3% is to cover the cost of fraud) are near 0 fee direct bank transfers.
Exactly. I have thought this for a long time. The only permanent solution to this problem is to create sentient beings with all of the good qualities of humans, few of the bad, and vastly better brain performance. These beings should be in charge of taking care of us, and should provide those of us who want it a route to achieving our own personal enlightenment.
Again, I'm not an expert on this. You should read a textbook on the subject before making ignorant objections. I mean, your objections "sound" good...you sound like you've taken at least sophmore or junior level physics courses...but you are missing the forest for the trees.
In the case of a salt cavern, heat conduction through rocks is extremely slow. Where do you think the heat in the gas goes? It's irrelevant how much heat the cavern walls can absorb : the only factor that matters over multiple cycles is how fast the heat can conduct away which is pretty slow (rock is a good insulator)
Much higher pressures are obviously possible - gas bags under the great lakes is another proposed method. I don't know what the peak pressures for salt caverns are.
When you do the mining, you make a mountain of salt somewhere by evaporating it and then moving the crystals with heavy equipment. You don't dump the water into the water table, duh.
There ARE listed costs, I just named them. $1000-$1500 per kilowatt hour stored. Yes that sounds expensive, but assuming you only need a buffer against wind fluctuations at night (the solar would be for peak load in the day), you might need only a kilowatt hour per a few thousand watts of system capacity.
And actually the real plants they use right now are hybrid : they store energy using compressed air but they use the compressed air in gas turbine generators. Those gas turbine generators can work even when you're out of compressed air, providing a valuable amount of peaking capacity.
So again, a hybrid system that is mostly or totally renewable is entirely doable. A bunch of wind farms all over the country for base load, with compressed air to smooth out fluctuations. Solar arrays for heavy power usage in the day (when electricty would be cheap). Natural gas generators that use the compressed air for assistance for peaking and times when both the wind and the sun aren't ideal across the entire country.
Why would we do this? Cost. Have you seen how expensive a nuclear plant is? Coal is a finite fuel and it causes significant pollution that has a negative cost on the population. And of course burning oil is out of the question.
You make the caverns by drilling a hole into an underground salt pocket and sending down water to gradually mine out a huge cave by disolving the salt. Since you leave a many feet thick lining of salt all around the caverns are inherently hermetically sealed. Ironically, you use very similar equipment to that used in the petroleum industry.
Except that once you make one of these caverns, it lasts just about forever. Probably centuries for most of them. And so the only thing you have to fix in your system is damage from mechanical wear to the machinery, which can last for decades with occasional maintainence. There are enormous salt layers running for miles across entire states they can tap for this, and once the electric grid is finally nation wide it won't matter where we put the caverns. (a tie system is being built right now to make the electric grids interlinked)
As for the "heat of compression" nonsense : that heat is still in the compressed gas down in the huge cavern. Since the surface ara of the cavern is very small compared to the volume of gas inside, and you are only storing the gas a few hours, the gas will be hot when you let it out and use it. Current systems use the gas to increase the efficiency of a natural gas turbine generator.
Extremely high resolution photos can still be printed with inkjets.
Of course, if you want glossy photos, you might as well just print them online to a printer at your local walgreens, walmart, or other store. The quality will be better and the cost cheaper unless you are printing a huge number...no wait, still cheaper.
Never mind, then.
The posters below me say that this is because we cannot measure cognitive capacity. This is wrong. Intelligence testing, on the aggregate, produces extremely consistent numbers for large groups of people.
However, software matters. As it turns out, Asians are consistently more intelligent than white people, who are in the middle. (I am a white person)
It is thought that something about the culture of white people (aka USA/Europe) has lead to the technological advances they have made, while Asians lag behind.
The best theory I have heard is that it's the LANGUAGE. English language is the software that allows white people to develop new tech faster, which is why asians who know english from an early age do a better job at the high tech jobs than white people.
Where are you getting your numbers. According to "Wind and solar power systems: design, analysis, and operation", reasonable efficiencies are about 50% for compressed air storage. It depends upon compressor efficiency, leakage, motor generator efficiency, and several other variables.
It costs about $1-$1.50 per wat-hourt your store this way today. Bigger systems built per often should lower that cost. A big solar system that produces 5 or 6 watt hours per day per watt of capacity would need to store a couple watts of that for the night. At $1/watt for the solar system itself, that would be $2 worth of storage.
These numbers don't seem completely unfeasible : they are within a factor of 2 or 3 of what you need to compete with coal generation today. Just put a tax on the coal power producers proportional to the ecological damage they are doing, and this solar method would probably prove workable quite soon.
Regarding the french nuke : you have to pay for operating costs (expensive), maintenance (VERY EXPENSIVE), fuel (cheap today), waste disposal (ungodly expensive), and liability insurance (ungodly expensive).
A large solar PV plant can be run entirely by computers. It only needs human intervention once in a blue moon. A couple guys with a pickup will have to be there to do repairs, and they can improvise repairs using whatever cheap method they want. (rather than using ungodly expensive spare parts, wearing radiation suits, and filling out reams of paperwork)
A PV plant needs no fuel, the waste of the dead panels goes in landfills, and there's close to zero liability risks, especially if the plant is on cheap lands in rural arizona.
On the other hand, once we have a lot of solar plants, we will have to start paying for energy storage which will raise the cost significantly. The compressed air in a salt cavern method is one energy storage technique, however, that stores a huge amount of energy and is relatively cheap.
Uhh, ever heard of compressed air and salt caverns? That method is cheap and allows storage of large amounts of energy.
Just one panel, and every panel is identical to every other panel. And every subunit on every panel is identical to every subunit on the same panel and every other panel. This repetitiveness means that once you develop an extremely cheap and fast method for making one solar cell, you can make trillions of them the same way and replace most other forms of power generation.
Stirling cycles and thermal plants have more "fiddly bits" that have to be designed, manufactured, quality controlled, and maintained. In the long run I think the PV panels will win because of their simplicity - probably the straight PV panels without light concentrators, for that matter.
Slow your roll, man! "Scammers??!!!"
RIGHT NOW you can purchase thin film solar panels for $1/watt. Now, this doesn't include the inverters, which add more cost, nor labor or mounting hardware...but we are actually a lot closer to the threshold than you think.
The theory is that if $1/watt is the installed cost of solar panels, including labor and inverters, and you don't have to pay for fuel, and the maintenance costs are very small, it would be cost competitive with conventional power sources. The cost stability - fuel prices can't go up, and once you install the panels you do not have to worry about prices changing for the next 25+ years, means that solar would become the preferred source of new power plants.
You forgot virtual particles (which arise from the ether)
Modern physics still has an ether : the catch is that ether puts an absolute speed limit on things due to the limited refresh rate of the simulation engine running our universe.
Consumer reports.
To make a long story short, there is one CFL that consistently beats everything else around. It's the "ecosmart" bulb that they sell at home depot and amazon. Ecosmart was formally branded "nvision" and popular mechanics also found it to be a top cfl.
Ecosmart bulbs (I have dozens) start instantly, last an extremely long time, have a perceived color temperature very close to the incandescents they replace, and are generally the way to go. They produce tons of light, and there are higher wattage models (consumer reports likes the 60w light output one the best) if you need more light.
I would say 90% of the vitriol directed against CFLs on this comment thread is from people who bought other brands of bulbs. They are NOT all the same.
One last comment : if you are worried about the mercury, then only put the cfls in enclosed fixtures that are high up, and be very careful not to break them when you install them the one and only time. You won't be replacing a typical CFL anytime sooner.
Actually, those 'cheap CFLs', if they are the ecosmart brand, are the best ones on the market. Check out consumer reports sometime : the 60w version of those bulb outscores every other CFL in light quality and longevity.
If I were a hospital or clinic, I would interpret this the opposite. This is the first time anyone has EVER been fined, and it's for blatant refusals to give medical records to dozens of people or respond to mail. Given what it takes to actually be fined, I would stop harassing people with useless HIPAA notices and using it to obstruct anything from getting accomplished whenever convenient.
Almost certainly not measurable, but when you change bits on either device you are (very slightly) changing the internal energy of the device. Some states give the device higher energy than others. (no, I don't know if ones or zeroes have higher rest energy). Since e=mC^2, the mass of the device also goes up.
(this is true for all means of energy storage. A battery gets heavier when it is charged, etc, etc. Very slightly, of course)
Wait, if you can't be extradited for a capital case....
Does that mean you could murder a dozen people, get on a plane to the EU before they catch you, and be safe from extradition? That can't be right.
Actually, it might just be. The radioactive debris is going to be pretty diluted by all that water. And we did detonate dozens of nuclear weapons in the pacific ocean with relatively small negative effects. (there was the japanese fishing boat crew that got directly into the path of the fallout, and we ruined the islands we set them off on, but other than that, it's all good)
Yes but I think the antimatter annihilation reaction would cause side reactions that would release neutrons and create more nuclear waste...
In practice, though, the reason highly radioactive nuclear waste even exists as a problem is because it ISN'T waste - it's unburned fuel. More than 99% of the energy in the nuclear fuel is still remaining, which is why the waste can emit dangerous levels of radiation for thousands of years.
Or you could just head over to newegg and pick up more storage 2TB at a time for around $60-$90 for 2 TB. (depends on which special is running at the time you look)
A NAS with only 4 TB is a little long in the tooth. If it works for you, fine, just saying...
No. Your genes are a programming code, and our best information indicates that is EXACTLY what is written in them. Reality could be different...but our best understanding of it today indicates that you are a digital computer with some very sophisticated procedural code.
Uhh...a computer system can keep trying when it hits an error. We programmers put stops in it because we know the computer will screw up once it leaves the reservation of known working states.
Humans keep running...and usually when they do something they don't know what they are doing, something bad happens they are lucky to survive...
From reading the actual FBI file, I noticed something interesting :
1. The FBI made an effort to investigate the book's author BEFORE they determined a crime had even been committed.
2. The FBI wrongly assumed the author was a pseudonym because they felt the topics "spoke from firsthand experience". They obviously never asked a chemist or someone who had actually tried these techniques if anything in the book would work. Had they done so, they would have realized the book was fake. Also, these government agents tended to take advertising copy at face value...getting information from the media the same way we do.
3. The FBI REALLY IS WATCHING YOU. Send them a letter and a news clipping and complain, and the FBI will INVESTIGATE YOU! Every letter written by some old lady had a note attached where an agent checked the files on that lady and found out what she had sent in the past. (evidently each time when the FBI found that a person had sent them things that seemed supportive of the agency, they would stop investigating)
The Man's own private records reveal many of the things we say about him are true. The Man really is ignorant and responds to popular opinion, not common sense. Criticize The Man, or communicate with him at all, and he will try to find a reason to send you to prison.
Why use a warp drive? What's wrong with the slow way? The only reason a centuries long journey bothers people is because 1. Current evolved humans won't live that long. 2. Human brains have hardware functions that make them feel impatience that they cannot adjust.
If you were a being that was an AI or an uploaded human you could adjust your perception of time to whatever it needed to be. A 500 year journey could seem like 10 minutes. And since your systems would have massive data redundancy and error control files, as well as self repair capability, you would arrive at the destination with no net damage or loss of information from your systems. (all damage from cosmic rays and time passing would be repaired quickly and no amount of damage that doesn't destroy the spacecraft could cause a significant loss to your memories)
A laughably bad idea. And totally unsuitable for manufacturing an interstellar vehicle. The reason is obvious : the rocket equation matters BIG time for interstellar journeys. You want to control where every last microgram of matter goes in your starship to optimize your mass ratios. Yes, I read the John Ringo book.