Meh. As the other replier noted, there are also crises that governments can cause, which the vast majority of private businesses can't. Wars tend to be an awfully good example of that, unfortunately.
As for coal mines, look up "open cut" instead of using that imagination.
No reason to. My point stands. They aren't doing coal mingin in urban areas and even if they were, it's not going to result in highly visible structures that you can see from a great distance.
I did some work at a plant adjacent to a small city where a very stupid fuckup with the scrubbers overnight had resulted in weak nitric acid condensing out on every car in town which ruined the paint and cost a fortune in compensation. It's a very bad idea to put a coal fired plant of any size near a town for many reasons, including land costs for a large footprint.
One can get similar scaled risks with fires in buildings. It isn't uncommon for things to have low probability but high damage risks associated with them. That doesn't mean you can't do them in urban areas. You just need to address the risks first.
Using the "astroturf" label to describe large public movements is just a silly ad hominem argument. Feel free to rationalize whatever you'd like, but this strikes me as an indication of considerable ignorance on your part. I think a better course of action would be for you to understand the viewpoints you downplay as astroturf.
For example, the US's EPA is part of the same government as the NSA or the US military. It uses different heavy-handed, often extra-legal tactics, but the same bureaucratic indifference for the welfare of the individual (and often, rule of law) is evident. The abuses of government aren't concentrated just in a few divisions we don't like.
The libertarian weighs the risks differently with government actions considered more dangerous and harmful than business actions. I side with that interpretation. No business has sovereign immunity, a captive revenue stream like taxpayers, or the raw power (on numerous levels) than government wields.
B: Rely on people to chop them and do their best to make the smallest possible cut. Then don't even get me started on the really careful manipulation involved to not lose one of those super small cut of hair.
This. It's a half a billion British Pounds budget. They can afford this modest effort. If you spend an hour per strand of hair, that's only 25 man-years to handle 50,000 hair strands. Even at 100k pounds per man-year cost, that would be 2.5 million pounds in labor costs. I don't see the problem.
That's not going to be near whiners either. And holes in the ground tend to be very easy to hide from the neighbors especially when there aren't many neighbors to begin with.
What valid pretext are you talking about exactly? That US "think-tank" groups pumped tons of money into the Euromaiden movement? That pro-Russian civilians are and were being killed by Kiev? Be more clear on this, because this is a lengthy discussion with many points and none match your particular verbiage.
Exactly. There's no valid pretext even if those accusations are correct.
Wind farms to date are bloody tiny in comparison to a coal mine or power station site
I'm not sure where you're getting that idea from. Land-based wind power by its nature has to be highly visible. Those turbines have to be in airflow, meaning that they tend to be on tall structures on hills. And because you don't want airplanes running into them, they do need to be visible. Coal mining is the most invisible because first, it's either underground or strip mining, which removes height rather than add it. Coal power plants require cooling towers and smokestacks. They tend to be high profile just due to the massive size of the those structures, but it's all in one place rather than spread out over vast areas. And there are some tricks for reducing the visibility of such things, particularly, the smaller power plants.
and even the largest of them are dual use unless you plan to farm giraffes.
You can't mix them with high population areas unlike a coal power plant. Wind turbines can slough ice and turbine blades hundreds of meters. That can punch through a vehicle or building and kill people. And they require service roads and grid connections, meaning they use up a bit of that "dual use" land in a way that a coal power plant does not.
Having said that, off shore wind power doesn't have a lot of those problems. And at times it apparently can be unseen from the shore.
I laid them all out in a spreadsheet once upon a time and the difference between the highest and lowest was less than 1%.
[...]
If you want to make net metering competitive you'll have to attack this regulatory scheme that tried to improve a natural monopoly for a commodity by introducing false competition.
Sounds to me like your "false competition" is good enough.
One funding group alone from the US provided 5 billion dollars to the Euromaiden party, where do you believe the money was spent? While you have to dig for the information, prior to the coup there were several reports of both of those mercenary companies being in Kiev (technically they are the same group with different names).
Initial ballistic reports from investigators was that the same snipers were shooting at both protesters and police. After the coup the investigation was handed over to UK investigators and died after the transition. Cablegate makes this pretty clear, and it's not hard to add 2 and 2 together.
And you believe this why?
I find it interesting how you will believe completely unsubstantiated rumors (like the one that Putin was exactly in the same airspace shortly before the Malaysian flight or a Ukrainian fighter shooting down a commercial jet, complete with fake "satellite photos") as long as it paints the right story.
And where is the valid pretext, that you told us about, for Russia's invasion of the Crimea? I'm still waiting for that. Even if the above web of bullshit were true, it still doesn't excuse that.
US intervention (providing money, guns, and training) and private mercenaries (The Craft, Blackwater) is just as bad as Russia sending in their troops.
I find your argument in favor of this claim to be completely irrelevant. It is painfully obvious that nobody is perfect. So no issue will ever be perfectly black and white. Does that mean that we should never protect the weak from being preyed on by the strong? No.
Second, Russia played this proxy game first in the Ukraine. They lost. Their puppet got kicked out in a coup. Then they invaded
Again, keep morality out of the equation for now. If you were the leader of Russia or China and you saw this happening, would you not read this as a direct attack against you?
Don't care. Tyrants deserve to be harried.
What we have today is more reminiscent of the East India company. Executive orders for "war" and private funding has given mercenary powers to big business bypassing Constitutional requirements for declaration of war by Congress and the People.
Where's the modern day East India company in your analogy? What "mercenary powers" have been given to this company? Does this company have the power to take over militarily a large country? And how is it more powerful than Gazprom, a more natural modern day counterpart to the East India company?
What I read here is the US did this, the West did that. While simultaneously ignoring that Russia has been behaving worse.
Any reason you think moral relativism is relevant here? Just because everything isn't perfectly black or white, doesn't mean that we can't make valid moral judgments about political things like, say, one country invading another.
They note that BUK missile makes a very brightly visible plume and persistent smoke trail as it goes through its trajectory, and there were apparently no confirmed instances of footage of this in relation to the plane.
And you believe them why?
Considering just how obviously exceptional it would look in the sky and how many photos there are of pretty much anything weird happening in the warring region, it does sound odd that no one got any footage of the missile. It should be visible for tens of kilometers in all directions.
Just like they got pictures of the plane before it crashed?
Not only this, with extreme weather events on the rise, flying is going to get more and more difficult.
Asserting it without proof doesn't make it true (sure, it's plausible, I'll grant that) nor does it say whether that increase in difficulty is significant or not.
I haven't heard of trains being stopped by wind, snow, rain, etc..
That's because you haven't heard of it. They aren't going to run trains through a hurricane, for example.
Good investment doesn't mean has some benefit. It means something with a good return on money spent. Sure, mass transit or bicycle can have a good ROI. But that isn't magically always the case. Instead, the US is notorious for having a bunch of such projects which don't provide more benefit than they cost.
If you actually read the relevant reports and papers, you'd not sound so utterly ridiculous.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I find it telling that you can't just discuss the IPCC's argument and have to resort to argument from authority. I think this is the point of the IPCC. It's an intellectual and rhetorical shortcut for people to advocate the theory of catastrophic AGW without actually having to under the issue.
Either you are right, or the vast, vast majority of climate scientists are right.
Because climate scientists are the only ones who possibly can have a legitimate opinion on AGW and its economic effects on human civilization. even though the latter is well outside their area of knowledge? And how do you know what the vast majority of climate scientists say anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. As the other replier noted, there are also crises that governments can cause, which the vast majority of private businesses can't. Wars tend to be an awfully good example of that, unfortunately.
As for coal mines, look up "open cut" instead of using that imagination.
No reason to. My point stands. They aren't doing coal mingin in urban areas and even if they were, it's not going to result in highly visible structures that you can see from a great distance.
I did some work at a plant adjacent to a small city where a very stupid fuckup with the scrubbers overnight had resulted in weak nitric acid condensing out on every car in town which ruined the paint and cost a fortune in compensation. It's a very bad idea to put a coal fired plant of any size near a town for many reasons, including land costs for a large footprint.
One can get similar scaled risks with fires in buildings. It isn't uncommon for things to have low probability but high damage risks associated with them. That doesn't mean you can't do them in urban areas. You just need to address the risks first.
It's kind of interesting how disinterested the US media got on that subject. I haven't heard about this story for a while.
Using the "astroturf" label to describe large public movements is just a silly ad hominem argument. Feel free to rationalize whatever you'd like, but this strikes me as an indication of considerable ignorance on your part. I think a better course of action would be for you to understand the viewpoints you downplay as astroturf.
For example, the US's EPA is part of the same government as the NSA or the US military. It uses different heavy-handed, often extra-legal tactics, but the same bureaucratic indifference for the welfare of the individual (and often, rule of law) is evident. The abuses of government aren't concentrated just in a few divisions we don't like.
The libertarian weighs the risks differently with government actions considered more dangerous and harmful than business actions. I side with that interpretation. No business has sovereign immunity, a captive revenue stream like taxpayers, or the raw power (on numerous levels) than government wields.
B: Rely on people to chop them and do their best to make the smallest possible cut. Then don't even get me started on the really careful manipulation involved to not lose one of those super small cut of hair.
This. It's a half a billion British Pounds budget. They can afford this modest effort. If you spend an hour per strand of hair, that's only 25 man-years to handle 50,000 hair strands. Even at 100k pounds per man-year cost, that would be 2.5 million pounds in labor costs. I don't see the problem.
That's not going to be near whiners either. And holes in the ground tend to be very easy to hide from the neighbors especially when there aren't many neighbors to begin with.
It was not rumor but fact
No, I googled this. It was rumor.
What valid pretext are you talking about exactly? That US "think-tank" groups pumped tons of money into the Euromaiden movement? That pro-Russian civilians are and were being killed by Kiev? Be more clear on this, because this is a lengthy discussion with many points and none match your particular verbiage.
Exactly. There's no valid pretext even if those accusations are correct.
"All you people" is PopeRatzo. Why don't you take it up with him and be enlightened?
Wind farms to date are bloody tiny in comparison to a coal mine or power station site
I'm not sure where you're getting that idea from. Land-based wind power by its nature has to be highly visible. Those turbines have to be in airflow, meaning that they tend to be on tall structures on hills. And because you don't want airplanes running into them, they do need to be visible. Coal mining is the most invisible because first, it's either underground or strip mining, which removes height rather than add it. Coal power plants require cooling towers and smokestacks. They tend to be high profile just due to the massive size of the those structures, but it's all in one place rather than spread out over vast areas. And there are some tricks for reducing the visibility of such things, particularly, the smaller power plants.
and even the largest of them are dual use unless you plan to farm giraffes.
You can't mix them with high population areas unlike a coal power plant. Wind turbines can slough ice and turbine blades hundreds of meters. That can punch through a vehicle or building and kill people. And they require service roads and grid connections, meaning they use up a bit of that "dual use" land in a way that a coal power plant does not.
Having said that, off shore wind power doesn't have a lot of those problems. And at times it apparently can be unseen from the shore.
I laid them all out in a spreadsheet once upon a time and the difference between the highest and lowest was less than 1%.
[...]
If you want to make net metering competitive you'll have to attack this regulatory scheme that tried to improve a natural monopoly for a commodity by introducing false competition.
Sounds to me like your "false competition" is good enough.
Yes, I have. And I've seen wind generators too. I have knowledge, dbIII, the likes of which you can barely imagine.
Like all resource extracting industries, they get favorable depreciation schedules on a bunch of their assets too.
Thank goodness coal-fired power plants are so aesthetically pleasing and pleasant to live around.
I'm sure the same people would find coal power plants just as much an eyesore. But such a plant would occupy less land and be next to less whiners.
One funding group alone from the US provided 5 billion dollars to the Euromaiden party, where do you believe the money was spent? While you have to dig for the information, prior to the coup there were several reports of both of those mercenary companies being in Kiev (technically they are the same group with different names).
Initial ballistic reports from investigators was that the same snipers were shooting at both protesters and police. After the coup the investigation was handed over to UK investigators and died after the transition. Cablegate makes this pretty clear, and it's not hard to add 2 and 2 together.
And you believe this why?
I find it interesting how you will believe completely unsubstantiated rumors (like the one that Putin was exactly in the same airspace shortly before the Malaysian flight or a Ukrainian fighter shooting down a commercial jet, complete with fake "satellite photos") as long as it paints the right story.
And where is the valid pretext, that you told us about, for Russia's invasion of the Crimea? I'm still waiting for that. Even if the above web of bullshit were true, it still doesn't excuse that.
US intervention (providing money, guns, and training) and private mercenaries (The Craft, Blackwater) is just as bad as Russia sending in their troops.
And you believe this why?
Because this is not a black and white issue?
I find your argument in favor of this claim to be completely irrelevant. It is painfully obvious that nobody is perfect. So no issue will ever be perfectly black and white. Does that mean that we should never protect the weak from being preyed on by the strong? No.
Second, Russia played this proxy game first in the Ukraine. They lost. Their puppet got kicked out in a coup. Then they invaded
Again, keep morality out of the equation for now. If you were the leader of Russia or China and you saw this happening, would you not read this as a direct attack against you?
Don't care. Tyrants deserve to be harried.
What we have today is more reminiscent of the East India company. Executive orders for "war" and private funding has given mercenary powers to big business bypassing Constitutional requirements for declaration of war by Congress and the People.
Where's the modern day East India company in your analogy? What "mercenary powers" have been given to this company? Does this company have the power to take over militarily a large country? And how is it more powerful than Gazprom, a more natural modern day counterpart to the East India company?
What I read here is the US did this, the West did that. While simultaneously ignoring that Russia has been behaving worse.
Maybe because not everything is black and white?
Any reason you think moral relativism is relevant here? Just because everything isn't perfectly black or white, doesn't mean that we can't make valid moral judgments about political things like, say, one country invading another.
They note that BUK missile makes a very brightly visible plume and persistent smoke trail as it goes through its trajectory, and there were apparently no confirmed instances of footage of this in relation to the plane.
And you believe them why?
Considering just how obviously exceptional it would look in the sky and how many photos there are of pretty much anything weird happening in the warring region, it does sound odd that no one got any footage of the missile. It should be visible for tens of kilometers in all directions.
Just like they got pictures of the plane before it crashed?
Not only this, with extreme weather events on the rise, flying is going to get more and more difficult.
Asserting it without proof doesn't make it true (sure, it's plausible, I'll grant that) nor does it say whether that increase in difficulty is significant or not.
I haven't heard of trains being stopped by wind, snow, rain, etc..
That's because you haven't heard of it. They aren't going to run trains through a hurricane, for example.
Sure, a country can always hyperinflate its currency. How is that working for Zimbabwe BTW?
It's also people who don't drive much. Sounds like an argument for pulling money out of the general fund.
Good investment doesn't mean has some benefit. It means something with a good return on money spent. Sure, mass transit or bicycle can have a good ROI. But that isn't magically always the case. Instead, the US is notorious for having a bunch of such projects which don't provide more benefit than they cost.
I think the new part is the "conjoined satellite" part. I think one engine places the two satellites, one after the other.
Superfund. Google it.
If you actually read the relevant reports and papers, you'd not sound so utterly ridiculous.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I find it telling that you can't just discuss the IPCC's argument and have to resort to argument from authority. I think this is the point of the IPCC. It's an intellectual and rhetorical shortcut for people to advocate the theory of catastrophic AGW without actually having to under the issue.
Either you are right, or the vast, vast majority of climate scientists are right.
Because climate scientists are the only ones who possibly can have a legitimate opinion on AGW and its economic effects on human civilization. even though the latter is well outside their area of knowledge? And how do you know what the vast majority of climate scientists say anyway?