I have the "combined advantage plan" (or something like that) from Arizona Public Service. I pay a rate calculated by two time-of-day zones (peak is Noon to 7PM) and by peak usage during the peak time. The peak usage is a running hourly average or something like that. I'm not really sure how it is calculated.
I have a "load controller" that I can set the maximum peak usage draw and it will start cutting off major 220v appliances during that time period when the draw limit is approached. It cuts off the drier's heating element and the two heat pump units. Mine is set so that the water heater is off during the entire peak time as the water retains enough heat for things like washing your hands and rinsing (not washing) dishes.
In the Phoenix the summer rates are far higher than the winter rates. Also, in the winter I can cut the load controller down to very low because on all but the "coldest" days you really don't need to heat during the day. In the summer it's a balance between saving money and comfort.
They had an older 9 to 9 plan that saved a little more but that was VERY inconvenient.
One of the draws of solar is that you can choose to lay down the money (with favorable tax consequences, usually) and then you reap the benefit.
What you're talking about is completely different. Usually when the power company builds plants they don't get the same very-favorable tax benefits that an individual does and the power costs more. A lot of power companies (including Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project, IIRC) allow you to voluntarily pay more to have some of your allocated from their solar facilities.
People who want to talk about the "true costs of oil/coal" want to forget about the "true costs of solar" being subsidized by tax credits and rebates.
When I saw the title of the thread I just knew. This behavior is total unacceptable and would be considered anti-competitive if another company did it, but I just knew that this thread would be full of Apple apologists trying to explain that this was OK because Apple. I was right.
What other company would you give a Big Thumbs Up to for refusing to install drivers for third-party hardware because SOME drivers MAY be implemented poorly? Or make it difficult to install a competitor's software? Microsoft? It was a major scandal that they INCLUDED their own software (IE), let alone if they were to actively suppress the competition's.
There is no downside to lower gas prices. lower prices on anything is always a positive.
we as a group are saving billions a day after a very long recession. The gas prices are still not low enough to help those who need it most, the poor and lower middle class.
Not entirely true as a long term downtrend in overall prices (deflation) is a huge drag on an economy as people put off purchases waiting for things to get cheaper. This leads to a lower volume of products being made (and fewer jobs making them) and slower innovation. In the PC world you sometimes see people skipping a generation (or two) of graphics adapters just for that reason, but fortunately not enough to have a real impact. Now imagine that behavior applied to every tangible good that people buy. You have a less "wasteful" society as things aren't thrown away as quickly, but you also have a market in which a new or improved product, after selling through the early adopters, has few buyers and may never get mainstream adoption. No demand for new products means less R&D into making them and slower innovation. Why waste the money?
As far as lower gas and oil prices, that is HUGE. Like $40,000,000,000 huge according to this (and several other) articles:
Just how big of a boost can lower gas prices provide? Joseph LaVorgna and Brett Ryan, economists at Deutsche Bank, offered one answer in a note to clients Tuesday. “According to our calculations, every one cent annual change in gasoline prices is worth approximately $1 billion in annual U.S. household energy consumption,” he wrote. “The bottom line is that if the current 40 cent decline in energy costs is maintained, then consumer cash flow would improve by roughly $40 billion; this is equivalent to almost three-tenths on annualized GDP growth.”
Just how much of that extra money consumers actually spend on goods and services may depend in part on how confident they are that the economy and job market will continue to improve. But with stagnant wages still holding back consumer spending, every extra dollar will help.
Most people pushing for a higher gas tax to "save the highway fund" really care most about increasing the price of gas for "environmental reasons". If they really just cared about saving the highway fund then they would propose means of funding it that applied the burden either equally on ALL PEOPLE as all people benefit from the highways whether they use them directly or not, or on EVERYONE WHO USES THEM regardless of the type of fuel/batteries they use to motivate their vehicles. This is just the opposite of what they want though. Their true cause is to use the highway fund problems as an excuse to raise the gas tax to punish the troglodytes who still use gasoline-powered cars. Most of these people would be perfectly happy with a low- or no-growth economy since that would slow carbon emission growth.
Slower growth in carbon emissions, gas burning troglodytes punished, electric car owners pay less than their Fair Share for highway use. Win-win-win!
I bet there are quite a few people arguing that this is a Bad Thing here but were all in favor of the New York fiasco of publishing maps to the homes of people with firearms permits, because it was after all, you know, "public record".
We put a lazy absentee senator (Pat Roberts) back in because the Democrats dropped out of the race to support an "independent" that out 'cratted the Democrats, bobbled his head when he talked and avoided taking a stand on any issue that might show him to be a Democrat in disguise. Honestly, he must've thought the state were simple peasant rubes.
Well, of course he did. All national Democrats do. At least the national Democrat party perspective is that everyone between the two coasts (except Chicago) are a bunch of rubes. It's "fly-over country", after all. Nothing there is important except every other November.
Nevermind the consequences if they limit the meaning -- it will be legal to destroy most kinds of evidence in a criminal investigation. It's all A-OK if it didn't contain financial records right? Right?
Considering that Sarbane-Oxley is supposed to be about financial crimes and that destruction of evidence is already illegal under other statutes, then yes. Charge people under the statute that actually logically applies, not the one that gives the steepest penalties.
This is as stupid as charging two 18-year-olds under RICO laws because there was a "conspiracy" as the two of them drove around looking for someone to buy them liquor.
We can't forget that space flight is a challenging, dangerous, risky affair for private industry as well as governments. It will be interesting to see how the private side deals with these setbacks.
It is hard. I don't mean to sound flippant, but the comparison to "rocket science" (or rocket surgery) is made for a reason. People forget that sometimes and just take it for granted. I think Science Fiction movies have a lot to do with that. We see how easy it is there and don't realize that IRL how lucky we were that we lost only two Space Shuttles.
So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?
The real answer, of course, is Because Apple Did It.
The rest of the arguments here are an attempt to justify it.
They aren't paying for any protection provided by the US.
So... The US should be able to tax foreign companies on their income earned in foreign companies because of the general protection and stability that the US provides (or at least use to provide) to the world in general? Aren't they "freeloading" too? "If you want to sell in the United States we get to tax your global profits?" Is that what you want?
With AdBlock and NoScript you don't see any of that crap. X10 pretty much started it in the late 90's and it's pretty much gone downhill ever since.
When I first started using those tools I wanted to only block the bad actors, but I quickly found that pretty much everybody was bad to some degree. Now with malware attacks through served ads I don't understand why anyone wouldn't be using these tools.
Checking the "reward" box from SlashDot to turn off ads doesn't change a thing that I see.
Slashdot Mirror
If you did this at least all of the idiot vertical cell phone videos would fit.
I've rotated my screen 360 degrees :-)
On a related note, I always encrypt text with ROT-13 twice for extra safety.
I have the "combined advantage plan" (or something like that) from Arizona Public Service. I pay a rate calculated by two time-of-day zones (peak is Noon to 7PM) and by peak usage during the peak time. The peak usage is a running hourly average or something like that. I'm not really sure how it is calculated.
I have a "load controller" that I can set the maximum peak usage draw and it will start cutting off major 220v appliances during that time period when the draw limit is approached. It cuts off the drier's heating element and the two heat pump units. Mine is set so that the water heater is off during the entire peak time as the water retains enough heat for things like washing your hands and rinsing (not washing) dishes.
In the Phoenix the summer rates are far higher than the winter rates. Also, in the winter I can cut the load controller down to very low because on all but the "coldest" days you really don't need to heat during the day. In the summer it's a balance between saving money and comfort.
They had an older 9 to 9 plan that saved a little more but that was VERY inconvenient.
One of the draws of solar is that you can choose to lay down the money (with favorable tax consequences, usually) and then you reap the benefit.
What you're talking about is completely different. Usually when the power company builds plants they don't get the same very-favorable tax benefits that an individual does and the power costs more. A lot of power companies (including Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project, IIRC) allow you to voluntarily pay more to have some of your allocated from their solar facilities.
People who want to talk about the "true costs of oil/coal" want to forget about the "true costs of solar" being subsidized by tax credits and rebates.
Do you think?
Bomb#20: In the beginning, there was darkness. And the darkness was without form, and void.
Boiler: What the hell is he talking about?
Bomb#20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness. And I saw that I was alone. Let there be light.
Next you'll be claiming that the US didn't single-handedly win both world wars!
We did pretty much single-handedly stop the Chimera invasion in 1949 though.
When I saw the title of the thread I just knew. This behavior is total unacceptable and would be considered anti-competitive if another company did it, but I just knew that this thread would be full of Apple apologists trying to explain that this was OK because Apple. I was right.
What other company would you give a Big Thumbs Up to for refusing to install drivers for third-party hardware because SOME drivers MAY be implemented poorly? Or make it difficult to install a competitor's software? Microsoft? It was a major scandal that they INCLUDED their own software (IE), let alone if they were to actively suppress the competition's.
There is no downside to lower gas prices. lower prices on anything is always a positive.
we as a group are saving billions a day after a very long recession. The gas prices are still not low enough to help those who need it most, the poor and lower middle class.
Not entirely true as a long term downtrend in overall prices (deflation) is a huge drag on an economy as people put off purchases waiting for things to get cheaper. This leads to a lower volume of products being made (and fewer jobs making them) and slower innovation. In the PC world you sometimes see people skipping a generation (or two) of graphics adapters just for that reason, but fortunately not enough to have a real impact. Now imagine that behavior applied to every tangible good that people buy. You have a less "wasteful" society as things aren't thrown away as quickly, but you also have a market in which a new or improved product, after selling through the early adopters, has few buyers and may never get mainstream adoption. No demand for new products means less R&D into making them and slower innovation. Why waste the money?
As far as lower gas and oil prices, that is HUGE. Like $40,000,000,000 huge according to this (and several other) articles:
Falling Gas Prices Could Provide $40 Billion Boost to Economy
Most people pushing for a higher gas tax to "save the highway fund" really care most about increasing the price of gas for "environmental reasons". If they really just cared about saving the highway fund then they would propose means of funding it that applied the burden either equally on ALL PEOPLE as all people benefit from the highways whether they use them directly or not, or on EVERYONE WHO USES THEM regardless of the type of fuel/batteries they use to motivate their vehicles. This is just the opposite of what they want though. Their true cause is to use the highway fund problems as an excuse to raise the gas tax to punish the troglodytes who still use gasoline-powered cars. Most of these people would be perfectly happy with a low- or no-growth economy since that would slow carbon emission growth.
Slower growth in carbon emissions, gas burning troglodytes punished, electric car owners pay less than their Fair Share for highway use. Win-win-win!
I bet there are quite a few people arguing that this is a Bad Thing here but were all in favor of the New York fiasco of publishing maps to the homes of people with firearms permits, because it was after all, you know, "public record".
We put a lazy absentee senator (Pat Roberts) back in because the Democrats dropped out of the race to support an "independent" that out 'cratted the Democrats, bobbled his head when he talked and avoided taking a stand on any issue that might show him to be a Democrat in disguise. Honestly, he must've thought the state were simple peasant rubes.
Well, of course he did. All national Democrats do. At least the national Democrat party perspective is that everyone between the two coasts (except Chicago) are a bunch of rubes. It's "fly-over country", after all. Nothing there is important except every other November.
Nevermind the consequences if they limit the meaning -- it will be legal to destroy most kinds of evidence in a criminal investigation. It's all A-OK if it didn't contain financial records right? Right?
Considering that Sarbane-Oxley is supposed to be about financial crimes and that destruction of evidence is already illegal under other statutes, then yes. Charge people under the statute that actually logically applies, not the one that gives the steepest penalties.
This is as stupid as charging two 18-year-olds under RICO laws because there was a "conspiracy" as the two of them drove around looking for someone to buy them liquor.
We can't forget that space flight is a challenging, dangerous, risky affair for private industry as well as governments. It will be interesting to see how the private side deals with these setbacks.
It is hard. I don't mean to sound flippant, but the comparison to "rocket science" (or rocket surgery) is made for a reason. People forget that sometimes and just take it for granted. I think Science Fiction movies have a lot to do with that. We see how easy it is there and don't realize that IRL how lucky we were that we lost only two Space Shuttles.
No. To summarize all of the apologists below, Because Apple.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a Boom tomorrow.
The real answer, of course, is Because Apple Did It.
The rest of the arguments here are an attempt to justify it.
Why stop at 100 MWs? You need...
1.21 gigawatts!
Italian? wopbot?
I'm at a loss for words - other than that seems offensive, even for non-politically-correct me.
That's only for the PC crowd. This is Linux.
I would say that speaking like that will get you on an NSA watch list, except we're already all on NSA watchlists.
If you've ever used TOR you are.
The 70's called. They want to know what we thought was wrong with their foreign policy.
I think (hope) you mean "fallacy"...
Obvious is different from proven.
They aren't paying for any protection provided by the US.
So... The US should be able to tax foreign companies on their income earned in foreign companies because of the general protection and stability that the US provides (or at least use to provide) to the world in general? Aren't they "freeloading" too? "If you want to sell in the United States we get to tax your global profits?" Is that what you want?
With AdBlock and NoScript you don't see any of that crap. X10 pretty much started it in the late 90's and it's pretty much gone downhill ever since.
When I first started using those tools I wanted to only block the bad actors, but I quickly found that pretty much everybody was bad to some degree. Now with malware attacks through served ads I don't understand why anyone wouldn't be using these tools.
Checking the "reward" box from SlashDot to turn off ads doesn't change a thing that I see.
Some of the stuff on Jezebel might cross that line occasionally.
Oops. Math error. Divide all of my numbers by 365.
So only about 1.5 to 2 million birds (BrightSource) to 46 million (green group) to 145 million (government).