Even if you have solar, and even if you use zero net KWH of energy, your bill is still full of a bunch of different charges that you cannot avoid. These various fixed and distribution-based charges are what pay for the grid infrastructure. Solar only lets you avoid (some of) the supply charges, I.e. the charges for the actual KWH.
I have several neighbors with efficient homes and solar arrays who generate all their net energy and even send extra energy back to the grid, but they still have to pay nearly $17 per month in these unavoidable fees.
That's fair--they pay for the benefits of having the grid to buy from and sell to as needed. But please can you shills for the power company lobby stop pretending that solar folks are not paying their share of grid expenses.
Auto loan terms are getting longer these days with the average length up to 66 months and around 25% having a term between 6 years and 7 years. The interest paid on a seven year loan vs. a 5 year loan can be as much as 50% higher.
This, and the the previous poster's point about using a temporary shift in fuel price as a basis for a long-term decision, show that there is a kind of desperate denial in place for many Americans.
They were sold the big dream and are unwilling to see the simple truth; the dream of an easy, middle class life for most Americans is gone. The SUV is their symbol that they still have the kind of economic freedom that a widely-shared national prosperity used to offer. The inconvenient truths that it will cost them outrageous amounts of money to fuel, and that it will probably need major repairs long before the 7 year loan is paid off are comfortably far away when they are in the showroom buying their toy.
Why is the dream gone? That is a whole nother' thread that covers many parallel trends.
But one overarching factor is that the overall pie is stagnant or shrinking. Aside from the unproductive shenanigans of the finance parasites, and a similar milking of trillions of dollars through the for-profit health care system, plus the temporary fracking bubble that drills most of its wells at a loss using other sucker's money, there really aren't many growing sectors of the economy. We've lost many of the productive activities that had broadly-shared economic multipliers.
I'm not sure why that is exactly, but I suspect that it is driven by the inexorable decline in the ease of extraction of energy and all forms of raw materials. The easy oil and gas, the rich deposits of minerals, the virgin forests holding hundreds of years worth of stored growth, the teeming fisheries are all nearly gone. And the easy wealth goes with it.
So rather than clinging to the illusion that our lives will continue to be about which status-enhancing consumer product we should buy next, we probably should start looking at what elements are actually required to have a satisfying life without the pumped-up economic circus.
I'll give a hint--it's not about what you buy, its more about who you love and who can trust you to do what you say you will.
I have two close friends whose children each had symptoms similar to Asbergers/Autism whose lives have been transformed by changing their diet in ways that are generally aligned with the ideas in this study (unhealthy bacterial conditions in gut cause undigested proteins to leak through the gut into the bloodstream, where they cause problems when they bind to receptors in brain or other tissues).
There is a strict diet called the GAPS Diet that both of these families followed and they began to see substantive changes within months, and ongoing improvements over a couple of years that have really allowed these kids to blossom.
This is not hearsay. I knew these kids before and I know them after, and they have improved dramatically.
I live in a community of 60 households (clusters of duplexes a little outside of town, rather than an urban highrise) and we have run our own internet service here for 15 years.
We started with some cheesy radio links and have moved up in speed over the years to where we now have a direct fiber connection to a local ISP. We are currently buying 50MB symmetrical service for data, and that is sufficient to allow widespread streaming of Netflix for our residents (we don't have access to cable TV here, but a few folks have satellite). We added VOIP phone service a few years back, which the same ISP sells us over a separate set of fibers to avoid call quality issues. We have local servers for email, community website stuff and for the VOIP service (using the excellent SIPx open source software). We use open source PFSense software running on a low-power ALIX box as our central firewall & DHCP server.
We charge $30 for Internet and $30 for phone, with unlimited domestic long distance, which includes a small margin that allows us to accumulate funds for maintenance and improvements. These prices are considerably lower than people here would pay for equivalent services, and people are pretty happy with the quality. The system is maintained by a small team of volunteer geeks, and our residents understand that we won't necessarily jump out of bed to fix a problem--we'll do the best we can, but don't guarantee 100% service levels. We don't enforce any bandwidth caps per-household, and that has not been a problem.
This kind of thing is entirely feasible, as long as you have a core group of geeks that consider it something they are interested in putting some time into. We have saved our residents many tens of thousands of dollars over the years, keeping that money circulating in our local community instead of shipping it off to some corporate behemoth. And for those of us who do the work, we generally find it an engaging and enjoyable use of our time, and find it satisfying to provide a useful service to our neighbors.
Oh, and I concur with an earlier poster--if you do it, do it wired. Provide one jack to each condo, and let the owners distribute around their rooms as they see fit. You might provide some wireless access in common spaces.
Didn't anyone notce the part about needing "the light of 10,000 suns" to heat this to 3000 degrees? It's a bit less amazing when you add in the need for a giant, complex concentrated solar thermal array to heat the tiny chamber.
I hate university magazine technology boast articles...
How many times in the last 30 years have we seen this exact kind of boom and bust in the computer memory business?
There seems to be a 4-5 year cycle of high prices, over investment in production, and price crash. You see similar cycles in disk drives, LCD screens and other components. I suspect it is endemic to businesses that have massive capital costs for each technology iteration.
Yet we don't hear people saying that computers aren't viable simply because memory suppliers are having challenges timing market demand cycles.
As I read the comments for this topic, what stands out is that there are a bunch of arbitrary and conflicting interpretations of the "right" place to put things on a Unix/Linux system, each of which is justified by some sacred "historical reasoning" (even though no one can ever agree on said reasoning).
And that is the problem. Why should I have to know which arbitrary approach happened to be followed by a particular distro or installed package?
I don't have touchy geek pride or a need to whip out my big nerd phallus at parties--I just want the systems I manage or use to be reasonably robust and consistent. I don't care who wins--I just don't want all the variations.
There are already several comanies working on multi-core ARM chips for servers, because they believe that will be the most power-efficient way to handle big workloads. Here is one product announcement from the day after ARM 64 was announced:
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Applied Micro Circuits Corp. fired a shot across the bow of Intel, demonstrating the first 64-bit ARM server processor here. The X-Gene chip is the first of an array of competitors that will attack Intel's multi-billion dollar server franchise with cheaper, lower power ARM SoCs.
AMCC's X-Gene packs multiple 3 GHz cores complaint with the ARM 64-bit V8 architecture announced today at ARM Tech Con. The cores are quad-issue, out-of-order superscalar designs. The chip also sports Ethernet MACs, PCI Express and Serial ATA linked on an 80 GByte/second fabric.
The company showed a working version in an FPGA emulation it will ship in January. Silicon will sample in the second half of 2012.
Nuclear is, at best, a faustian bargain--awful, but arguably less awful than a few other choices.
While many Slashdotters happily wave away its real-world problems (waste, decommissioning, uninsurability, capital intensiveness, fuel supply, terrorism, non-distributed grid model, construction lead time and yes, slight potential for massive damage to life and property in a large geographic area) as irrelevant, many others are less sanguine. And that is not just because they are idiots--they look at the factors, weigh them and draw different conclusions.
And there are alternatives that might well be better. A recent study by the California Energy Commission that looks at estimated costs of 21 types of energy generation facilities estimates that a gen-3 Westinghouse AP1000 1,000 MW Pressurized Water Reactor would generate electricity in 2018 (the first year any of them could be expected to reach operational status) for between $0.17/kWh and $0.34/kWh.
The cost of solar PV today is already competitive with the high end of that range, and is dropping at a rapid pace.
This comes on the heels of another new report showing that the free-market insurance costs for nuclear would add from ($0.20/kWh) to a staggering $3.40/kWh.
If costs are the same or lower for renewable energy technologies that have numerous benefits and far fewer risks, why would rational people choose nuclear?
I looked at various Asterisk-based distributions for the residential phone system I run in my condo complex, and I found them all to feel pretty messy and hacked together. I kept looking and found SipXecs (http://sipfoundry.org), which is an amazingly polished open source project used in many companies.
It has a completely-integrated web management interface that controls all aspects of system config and operation. It is highly scalable, allows for clustering, comes pre-integrated to support SIP trunks from many carriers and phone devices from many vendors. It includes voicemail, IM, ACD (call center functionality), all completely managed through the web interface, and provides a user web portal as well for allowing access to these features plus call routing rules, phone directories, etc.
Architecturally SipX is cleaner, I think, than Asterisk, and is fully SIP-based. Calls between phones on a SipX switch pass their audio directly to each other, rather than passing through the switch, as is the case in Asterisk. Integration for SIP trunks is built-in. However if you need to use physical phone lines, SipX connects through external SIP gateway hardware from many vendors, rather than depending on the messy integration of cards into the server itself.
I now run phone service for myself and 25 of my neighbors for less than half of what we were paying, with way better features. Many SipX installations scale easily to hundreds of users.
Check http://ekmmetering.com./
They sell simple metering units that can either meter small (up to 30 amp, I think) circuits directly, or any size circuit using external current sensor rings. You can chain together a number of meters with simple 2-wire serial connections and attach them to a net-connected controller. The controller can be read from anywhere with a simple TCP socket call or they provide a free app that does it. The app runs on Windows, Mac or Linux.
I plan to use their stuff for a networked submetering system for the co-op I live in, to allow us to consolidate down from 30 utility meters (which cost $14 per month just to be hooked up) down to 4 meters. This will also allow us to share and net-meter a large solar array we are developing.
One individual is not threatened--he could just move when his ecosystem gets unworkable, although he would have a hell of a time selling his old assets(who would buy them?) and buying new ones somewhere else.
The problem is, when this happens to hundreds of millions or billions of people all at the same time, where do they all go? Into your cozy niche?
Not to mention the problem of losing many of the investments of thousands of years of civilization, when cities are made unusable due to rising coastal waters and tidal estuaries, failing water supplies or the repeated damage of extreme weather events. What is the economic hit of losing Manhattan or London, or Tokyo?
Sure, some people will be OK, but do you really think we can maintain our economic growth, our just-in-time global industrial systems, our political stability and the rule of law under such stresses?
Maybe, but why would anyone think so, when tiny little fluctuations in the economies of single countries (like the runs on currencies in Mexico, Thailand, Russia, etc.) end up causing huge global disruptions. Don't you think a systemic change in the physical viability of large areas of the planet might knock a point or two off the old DOW?
This seems to be a key point that is obfuscated or ignored by deniers. That there are gigantic sinks of fossil carbon, in addition to the fossil fuels we bring up, that have been sequestered safely under the conditions prevelant during all of human civilization. Many of these are predicted to, or have already begun being released, as global temperatures rise. Positive feedback means the more it happens, the more it will happen, until the system spirals wildly out of control.
And here is what is meant by irreversible--that these feedback loops will accelerate and cause massive disruption in time scales directly relevant to human civilization--i.e. the next few centuries, at least. Deniers like to bring up crap about there having been massive changes in temp all throughout the billions of years of the fossil record, so we should all relax. That is true, but in each case, these changes caused massive dislocation or extinction of the dominant plant and animal species of that time.
We're talking about what happens to this particular race of animals that is here spending its time reading and writing Slashdot postings. It is disingenuous for deniers to claim some lofty halo of wisdom that transcends mere human-centric concerns, especially when, for the most vociferous of them (such as the paid lackeys of Exxon-Mobile), they are more concerned with making a buck in the next fiscal quarter than they are about the concerns of even the humans alive today, much less those not yet born.
See the Adam device from Notion Ink. It will ship with a Pixel Qi screen that works in reflective mode (like the e-ink screen on a Kindle) in sunlight. However, unlike e-ink, it can also run in full color with normal video-friendly refresh rates, just by turning on the backlight. You get the best of both worlds, including very low power usage when running in reflective mode. On most Pixel Qi devices this switching on and off of the backlight can be done manually or automatically with an ambient light sensor.
The Adam device runs Android, rather than a direct Linux OS.
I think "vast sums of money in government handouts" is a bit overblown. The entire budget for the U.S. National Institute of Science (NIST) is about $640 million for 2008. According to this summary, about $5 million of that was set aside for "Measurements and Standards for the Climate Change Science Program" (although NASA and NOAA probably spend a lot more). Exxon Mobil alone is making 10 billion dollars of profit (not revenue) every 3 months. Who is getting the "vast sums of money"?
I suspect this fear of environmentalists is mostly just a fear that someone will try to tell you what you should (or should not) do, and you might not like what they say. That is understandable. However, the mentaility of the lone rugged individualist "doin what I want with MY land" has always been a false abstraction even when people were spread thin, as no piece of land exists in isolation from the rest (unless you happen to live in the biosphere project;-). It is suicidal when applied to a population approaching 7 billion armed with technology, a market-driven mythology of infinite growth, and 10 million gallons a minute of oil equivalent fossil energy (to put this number into perspective, one gallon of gasoline provides usable energy equivalent to about 2 months worth of human physical labor. Thus, every minute, fossil fuels provide the equivalent energy of over 200 billion extra humans working).
And why the hyperbole of "Gaia-worship-by-force"? Most enviromentalists I know are exquisitely practical in their thinking. They see systems in operation that SIMPLY CANNOT BE SUSTAINED OVER TIME and treat this as a problem to be solved. I suspect that you too would acknowledge, if asked in a respectful manner and encouraged to extrapolate things you already observe or believe, that things cannot go on this way much longer. Environmentalists look for workable solutions to this dilemma that can be applied early enough that there is some hope of having an effect before critical natural systems reach a point where they essentially fail to operate. Mostly they want to start by leveling the playing field for alternatives, or by giving them a minor start-up boost to help overcome the inertia of entrenched approaches.
As for Gaia worship, yes, environmentalists frequently look to biological systems for guidance. This is because they are the only systems known that can continue to operate successfully for extended time periods without catastrophic failure. Properly cared for farmland can be (and has been) productive for tens or hundreds of generations WITH NO EXTERNAL INPUTS except for the input of the sun and the natural distribution mechnisms of the water, carbon and other cycles. No technological solution ever devised can come close to doing this (the majority of farming done today is an industrial process for turning petroleum and natural gas into food--see The Omnivore's Dilemma for a good exploration of this).
Again, I ask, what is the program? Because one's personal unease with the consequences being a sprawling race on a fragile lifeboat is no substitute for a workable plan.
So what exactly are the skeptics here advocating? The status-quo?
That would mean defending continuation of current policies encouraging technological inefficiency and subsidies to giant centralized fossil energy producers. Can you explain why that is a good thing?
Are you really against a policy of encouraging efficiency, diversifying and distributing energy production nearer to sources, and increasing local self-sufficiency for food and household goods? For that is the starting point of most thoughtful responses to these issues.
Even if there were no danger of human-induced climate change and peaking of fossil energy supplies, this approach has the potential to make it a cleaner, safer, richer (in both the human sense, and the Bill Gate$ sense) and more equitable world. A world more likely to get passed-on in reasonably-decent condition to the next generation, and one that can degrade gracefully (rather than catastrophically) if the climate and energy shit does hit the fan.
Why then is decentralization and diversity on the internet something to passionately fight for, but the same qualities in energy policy something you want to fight against.
This kind of approach is a win-win for everyone except a few big energy conglomerates. It saddens me to hear so many smart people parroting the manufactured controversy of PR people on both sides, instead of thinking about solutions that improve things either way.
Let's do the things we can agree on first, then if things projected by the doomsayer's camp continue to firm up, we can start to argue about the tougher ones.
Good description here, under "Vortex Cooling" about halfway down the page.
I think the point many are missing is that it is valuable to find ways to do useful things like refrigeration without elaborate industrial infrastructure.
People take for granted how complex (and ultimately fragile) are our first world networks for raw materials, purified materials, machine tools, energy for manufacture, skilled engineering and labor, transportation, finance and trade. A breakdown at any of these levels can make complex machinery impossible to manufacture.
And without spare parts and service skills, any complex machine can quickly turn into an inert lump.
Try to picture being stranded in the desert and finding a brand new Toyota Land Rover that is complete with everything except spark plugs. Not going to do you much good, is it?
I have a 5 bedroom, 3000 sf house with plenty of gadgets and my $16,000 solar photovoltaic installation ($7,000 after rebates) produces 75% of my electricity over the course of a year. I live in a mild climate (Northern California), but am near the coast and subject to frequent fog, especially in summer.
Your best investment would be replacing your most inefficient appliances and hvac equipment, increasing insulation and taking a look at any particularly wasteful ways in which you use energy. Doing that could probably cut that figure in half, with a modest investment and minimal changes in lifestyle. Then take a look at solar.
Optimizing for energy efficiency can be a very satisfying game to play. But unlike many such tech hobbies (hot-rodding, building game systems, etc.) it actually saves money. Try it!
I keep hearing this assumption, spouted endlessly by corporations and their mouthpieces in goverment, think tanks and the press, that of course reducing CO2 will hurt the economy.
It is similar to the argument made endlessly by industry that (seat belts, CAFE mileage standards, anti-pollution regs, workplace safety standards, minimum wage, social security, 5 day work week, etc., etc.) will destroy all profits, kill trillions of jobs and reduce us to living like depression era Okies.
Where is the evidence to back this up? It seems to me that the evidence shows the very opposite--that socially-responsible regulations like these have benefits not only for society at large, but in many cases for industries as well.
Today, the U.S. economy sends about $250 billion a year to overseas oil suppliers (15 million barrels per day @ about $45 per barrel). We spend another several hundred billion on oil industry subsidies and military expenditures to keep the cheap oil flowing (to us).
What if we invested that kind of money into retrofitting our homes, cities, transportation systems and manufacturing facilities for energy efficiency and as much self generation (solar, wind, biomass) as possible?
We could create millions of jobs, increase our portfolio of technological expertise and the scientists and engineers to support it, greatly increase our national security (saving additional trillions over time), and start to clean up not only the very real potential risks from global warming, but also from pollution, and the health effects that come with it.
We could do the right thing for the environment and have a good economic outcome--probably one better than what we can expect from our current path of letting other countries take over our manufacturing so we can buy their goods with borrowed money (can you think of a better way to put our country into decline?).
OK, If this is such a great idea, why doesn't this happen now? Because all of our government policies are structured to encourage the status quo. Under those conditions, no one can compete with the subsidized Oil Economy, just like free farmers in the south couldn't compete with slaveowners. Once it became illegal to own slaves, those free farmers then could compete and probably even had an advantage.
Of course some industries would be harmed by this changeover. Capital and profits would shift to different sectors of the economy. But that is exactly what the conservative market-worshippers are always touting as the great thing about markets--they can adapt efficiently to changing conditions.
It is a legitimate function of government to send signals to markets by enacting policies that redirect commercial activity in directions a majority of members of that society want it to go (remember, humans invented markets to serve them, not the other way around). When you do this at a micro-level, that is a planned economy and most of us agree that does not work too well. However when you do it at a macro level, setting high level policies and then letting the markets handle the details of reallocating resources, that can work pretty well.
The path to disaster, is to let those who currently dominate a market system use their monopoly powers, media ownership and political influence to lock things down and keep society from evolving to new and more appropriate solutions as conditions change.
Kyoto or not, it makes sense to shift away from our low efficiency, artifically-cheap oil economy. Those of you railing against Kyoto might want to take a step back and check to make sure that the positions you are defending are in fact what you want for your world. There is so much well-financed activity by the dominant industries to inject their message into mainstream thinking, that it is easy to find oneself arguing their position for them.
Are you a human being or a corporation? If the former, think hard about where your interests lie. Despite what they would have you believe, there is a good chance that your interests and those of the corporations are actually quite different.
Some skeptics of solar energy claim that it takes more energy to make a photovoltaic module (PV) than it can ever produce in its lifetime. The truth is that PVs typically recoup their embodied energy in two to four years. According to an article published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), today's single and multicrystalline modules have an energy payback of about four years, and thin-film modules about two years. Most PV modules in the field are made from hyper-pure crystalline silicon. Purifying and crystallizing the silicon consumes the most energy in making these PVs. Thin-film PVs are made from considerably less semiconductor material, and therefore have less embodied energy in them. Most of the energy consumed is in the thin-film surface. The aluminum frame on any PV accounts for about six months of its payback time. Solar energy is an amazing technology considering that PVs go on to produce clean, pollution-free energy for at least 25 to 30 years after they have achieved payback.
For more information on energy payback, see the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Web site (www.nrel.gov) and Karl Knapp & Theresa Jester's article titled "PV Payback"in HP80. --Eric Grisen eric.grisen@homepower.com
Also, concerns about lifetime and hail resistance are red herrings. Most panels are warranted for full rated output for at least 20 years and most have performed well beyond those timeframes. Also all panels are UL tested to meet UL hail resistance specifications (which I believe covers hail up to 2" in diameter).
Finally, no one bitches when a gas-fired generator fails to recoup its energy cost of manufacture--it requires billions of additional therms of natural gas over its operating lifetime to produce electricty and never pays back its manufacturing energy cost. It is disingenuous to ask that only of solar (and odd since solar can actually do it!
Well said and the application of this principle is being repeated with the rampant suppression of truth in Iraq.
Take Falluja; Are you aware that among the first acts of the U.S. in their assault on
the people who live in Falluja was to bomb 2 small hospitals and capture
and shut down the main Falluja General hospital, removing patients from
their beds and ejecting or arresting them (kind of reminds me of what they
claimed Saddam did in Kuwait "dumping babies out of incubators"--only that
turned out to be a lie).
The reason? According to the NY Times, quoting an anonymous senior
government official, the hospital was judged "a center of propaganda" on
civilian casualties: "This time around, the American military intends to
fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one
of the insurgents' most potent weapons."
The knowledge that they are killing hundreds of civilians is "propaganda"
so it must be suppressed. The killing won't be suppressed--just the
ability for the rest of us to find out about it. Stalin would be proud. (and by the way, since when are hospitals, water systems, electric plants, and
ambulances "military targets"? They are not. Attacking these are war
crimes, against both international and U.S. law).
Back to the original point, the state wants to attack Iraq for reasons of its own, and they are apparently willing to commit ongoing war crimes to do it. If the american people actually understood what is being done in their name, I seriously doubt that many would support it. Thus, the government tries to control the information and perception, thereby subverting democracy. They systematically deny citizens the information they need to make an informed decision about whether the policy should continue.
BTW, If you want to get a glimpse past the information blockade about Falluja and see for yourself, see the pictures at: http://www.fallujapictures.blogspot.com/.
Your numbers on oil are good and they bring into focus the main point missing in this topic: There is no alternative technology that can come close to matching the energy we derive from oil and natural gas.
Cheap oil and gas have been like winning the lottery--we got many hundreds of thousands of years worth of solar energy inputs concentrated into a convenient portable form. The problem is, like most lottery winners, we have wasted most of our bonanza and will end up overextended and in debt.
The days of oil are coming to an end much more quickly than is generally acknowledged. Many petroleum geologists expect the peak of oil production to occur within the next 3-5 years (even BP has recently announced that they think oil will peak between 2010 and 2020). From that day on, the amount available for use goes down every year forever. That has incredible consequences for a species that has let its population expand to meet its available food (that is, oil) supply and which has invested nearly all of its energy windfall into building infrastructure and systems that cannot operate without cheap and plentiful oil.
Feel free to continue the futile debate about how to match our lottery-winnings-level energy usage, but when you are done why don't you turn to something more real and pressing--how do we restructure our industrial society to operate on one half or one quarter of the energy we use now and maintain food, housing, fresh water, transportation, safety and any kind of economic livelihood for the 6.4 billion people now living?
This process starts soon--possibly before your cell phone contract expires. And the most likely first effect is an economic meltdown that will leave us hard pressed to finance and build any significant numbers of the energy replacement "alternatives" so vociferously touted here.
It is not to say that we shouldn't be looking at the next alternatives, but we need to set the parameters of the design--what is the best way to start making the transition from systems that depend on fading inherited oil wealth and build ones that can run on yearly energy income.
The electronic systems that are out there now are 100 times more verifiable than most princints in the country. Some of which are operated out of the homes and living rooms of citizens. Despite their flaws, systems that are recently installed and used are less like to cause spoilage, easier to use, easier to maintain, and easier to operate by poll workers.
I can't imagine how you could draw this conclusion. The Evoting systems in use today mostly have NO AUDIT TRAIL, aside from writing the vote count into two different data tables. Both the voting terminals and the central vote counting software run on Windows PCs and use standard MDB (Access-type) databases that are not encrypted. The software is closed source and is "certified" by commercial labs who have no published standards, who do not evaluate security issues, and whose results are trade secrets available only to the company who makes the machines (and pays for the test). See BlackBoxVoting.org for details of how this testing works.
The big difference between these systems and traditional systems is auditability--on the old systems, there is a paper ballot, which gives the ability to go back later and try to detect fraud. In E-voting systems fraud can rarely be detected because the only "record" is a value stored in a read/write disk file that supposedly reflects a real-time event (the voter making their choice).
This is not to say that it isn't possible to do computer based voting securely, but the system design must start with auditablilty as a priority. See the system they designed at OpenVotingConsortium.org which is an open source, low cost, simple system that give most of the benefits of E-voting (like ease of use, results checking, access for the disabled, etc.) without the risks of electronic tallys. How? They use the computer's touchscreen interface to produce a printed, barcoded ballot which becomes the only official record of the vote. These ballots are pre-checked for consistency before they are cast (no overvotes), are near-guaranteed machine readable (no hanging chads or stray marks) and can be verfied manually to ensure that the printed choices match the barcodes that are used to tally the votes.
I define "working people" as those who get nearly all of their income from their own labor (as opposed to investment income) and who have to spend the majority of their income simply to provide for the basics of living--food, shelter, a way to get to work, health care, etc.
It is not really of the essence whether a wealthy person (i.e. a person with significant disposable income) earns the money or not. The more significant point is one of simple human needs.
Our society has agreed that we want certain government services that the citizens will contribute to. We have decided that we want roads and fire stations and not having people dying in the streets when they are too old to work anymore, and we have to pay for those things somehow. That payment system is called taxation.
If you take 10 thousand dollars in taxes from a "working" person, you are likely to impact their ability to keep their home or pay for their medical care--critical human needs.
If you take that amount or larger from a wealthy person, their human needs remain untouched--only their ability to purchase additional luxuries or status enhancing items (elaborate home, premium car, home theater, etc.) is threatened.
It seems to me that is a significant difference, especially when you are approaching the question in terms of what is fair or moral, as the poster was.
As others here have said, the limits to oil have more to do with the maximum rate at which it can be reliably extracted than the absolute amount in the ground.
There are some very credible reasons to believe that we are at or very near peak supply rate.
See this report from Petroleum Review (a respected oil industry publication) which looks at currently-known new oil discoveries and when they are expected to come on-line. The upshot is that there will be some supply growth until 2007, but after that there is almost nothing on the horizon.
This may represent the point of oil supply peak.
After that, if you want to some new development (build more cars, grow more food, air condition more buildings) you will have to take oil supply away from some existing use to do it. This could happen by investing in higher efficiencies for existing uses or by dropping energy-intensive discretionary activities (like pleasure airline travel, FedEx shipping or importing food from distant lands).
It does mean, however, that it will be extremely difficult to maintain economic growth. As our entire economic system is based on constant growth (for example, a recession is where growth happens at a lower rate than desired), this should cause major dislocations if not actual economic collapse.
It gets even worse when you consider that oil supply will not stay at peak rate, but will steadly decline year after year from depletion, so these dislocations will have to occur over and over as the supply shrinks.
And for those who say the new discoveries are fading only becuase of a lack of investment, I must say that seems like wishful thinking. The oil industry has never been known for leaving potential profits sitting untapped simply because they don't feel like investing. I think they know something they are not ready to tell us...
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Even if you have solar, and even if you use zero net KWH of energy, your bill is still full of a bunch of different charges that you cannot avoid. These various fixed and distribution-based charges are what pay for the grid infrastructure. Solar only lets you avoid (some of) the supply charges, I.e. the charges for the actual KWH. I have several neighbors with efficient homes and solar arrays who generate all their net energy and even send extra energy back to the grid, but they still have to pay nearly $17 per month in these unavoidable fees. That's fair--they pay for the benefits of having the grid to buy from and sell to as needed. But please can you shills for the power company lobby stop pretending that solar folks are not paying their share of grid expenses.
This, and the the previous poster's point about using a temporary shift in fuel price as a basis for a long-term decision, show that there is a kind of desperate denial in place for many Americans.
They were sold the big dream and are unwilling to see the simple truth; the dream of an easy, middle class life for most Americans is gone. The SUV is their symbol that they still have the kind of economic freedom that a widely-shared national prosperity used to offer. The inconvenient truths that it will cost them outrageous amounts of money to fuel, and that it will probably need major repairs long before the 7 year loan is paid off are comfortably far away when they are in the showroom buying their toy.
Why is the dream gone? That is a whole nother' thread that covers many parallel trends.
But one overarching factor is that the overall pie is stagnant or shrinking. Aside from the unproductive shenanigans of the finance parasites, and a similar milking of trillions of dollars through the for-profit health care system, plus the temporary fracking bubble that drills most of its wells at a loss using other sucker's money, there really aren't many growing sectors of the economy. We've lost many of the productive activities that had broadly-shared economic multipliers.
I'm not sure why that is exactly, but I suspect that it is driven by the inexorable decline in the ease of extraction of energy and all forms of raw materials. The easy oil and gas, the rich deposits of minerals, the virgin forests holding hundreds of years worth of stored growth, the teeming fisheries are all nearly gone. And the easy wealth goes with it.
So rather than clinging to the illusion that our lives will continue to be about which status-enhancing consumer product we should buy next, we probably should start looking at what elements are actually required to have a satisfying life without the pumped-up economic circus.
I'll give a hint--it's not about what you buy, its more about who you love and who can trust you to do what you say you will.
There is a strict diet called the GAPS Diet that both of these families followed and they began to see substantive changes within months, and ongoing improvements over a couple of years that have really allowed these kids to blossom.
This is not hearsay. I knew these kids before and I know them after, and they have improved dramatically.
We started with some cheesy radio links and have moved up in speed over the years to where we now have a direct fiber connection to a local ISP. We are currently buying 50MB symmetrical service for data, and that is sufficient to allow widespread streaming of Netflix for our residents (we don't have access to cable TV here, but a few folks have satellite). We added VOIP phone service a few years back, which the same ISP sells us over a separate set of fibers to avoid call quality issues. We have local servers for email, community website stuff and for the VOIP service (using the excellent SIPx open source software). We use open source PFSense software running on a low-power ALIX box as our central firewall & DHCP server.
We charge $30 for Internet and $30 for phone, with unlimited domestic long distance, which includes a small margin that allows us to accumulate funds for maintenance and improvements. These prices are considerably lower than people here would pay for equivalent services, and people are pretty happy with the quality. The system is maintained by a small team of volunteer geeks, and our residents understand that we won't necessarily jump out of bed to fix a problem--we'll do the best we can, but don't guarantee 100% service levels. We don't enforce any bandwidth caps per-household, and that has not been a problem.
This kind of thing is entirely feasible, as long as you have a core group of geeks that consider it something they are interested in putting some time into. We have saved our residents many tens of thousands of dollars over the years, keeping that money circulating in our local community instead of shipping it off to some corporate behemoth. And for those of us who do the work, we generally find it an engaging and enjoyable use of our time, and find it satisfying to provide a useful service to our neighbors.
Oh, and I concur with an earlier poster--if you do it, do it wired. Provide one jack to each condo, and let the owners distribute around their rooms as they see fit. You might provide some wireless access in common spaces.
I hate university magazine technology boast articles...
How many times in the last 30 years have we seen this exact kind of boom and bust in the computer memory business?
There seems to be a 4-5 year cycle of high prices, over investment in production, and price crash. You see similar cycles in disk drives, LCD screens and other components. I suspect it is endemic to businesses that have massive capital costs for each technology iteration.
Yet we don't hear people saying that computers aren't viable simply because memory suppliers are having challenges timing market demand cycles.
As I read the comments for this topic, what stands out is that there are a bunch of arbitrary and conflicting interpretations of the "right" place to put things on a Unix/Linux system, each of which is justified by some sacred "historical reasoning" (even though no one can ever agree on said reasoning).
And that is the problem. Why should I have to know which arbitrary approach happened to be followed by a particular distro or installed package?
I don't have touchy geek pride or a need to whip out my big nerd phallus at parties--I just want the systems I manage or use to be reasonably robust and consistent. I don't care who wins--I just don't want all the variations.
There are already several comanies working on multi-core ARM chips for servers, because they believe that will be the most power-efficient way to handle big workloads. Here is one product announcement from the day after ARM 64 was announced:
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Applied Micro Circuits Corp. fired a shot across the bow of Intel, demonstrating the first 64-bit ARM server processor here. The X-Gene chip is the first of an array of competitors that will attack Intel's multi-billion dollar server franchise with cheaper, lower power ARM SoCs.
AMCC's X-Gene packs multiple 3 GHz cores complaint with the ARM 64-bit V8 architecture announced today at ARM Tech Con. The cores are quad-issue, out-of-order superscalar designs. The chip also sports Ethernet MACs, PCI Express and Serial ATA linked on an 80 GByte/second fabric.
The company showed a working version in an FPGA emulation it will ship in January. Silicon will sample in the second half of 2012.
While many Slashdotters happily wave away its real-world problems (waste, decommissioning, uninsurability, capital intensiveness, fuel supply, terrorism, non-distributed grid model, construction lead time and yes, slight potential for massive damage to life and property in a large geographic area) as irrelevant, many others are less sanguine. And that is not just because they are idiots--they look at the factors, weigh them and draw different conclusions.
And there are alternatives that might well be better. A recent study by the California Energy Commission that looks at estimated costs of 21 types of energy generation facilities estimates that a gen-3 Westinghouse AP1000 1,000 MW Pressurized Water Reactor would generate electricity in 2018 (the first year any of them could be expected to reach operational status) for between $0.17/kWh and $0.34/kWh.
The cost of solar PV today is already competitive with the high end of that range, and is dropping at a rapid pace.
This comes on the heels of another new report showing that the free-market insurance costs for nuclear would add from ($0.20/kWh) to a staggering $3.40/kWh.
If costs are the same or lower for renewable energy technologies that have numerous benefits and far fewer risks, why would rational people choose nuclear?
I looked at various Asterisk-based distributions for the residential phone system I run in my condo complex, and I found them all to feel pretty messy and hacked together. I kept looking and found SipXecs (http://sipfoundry.org), which is an amazingly polished open source project used in many companies.
It has a completely-integrated web management interface that controls all aspects of system config and operation. It is highly scalable, allows for clustering, comes pre-integrated to support SIP trunks from many carriers and phone devices from many vendors. It includes voicemail, IM, ACD (call center functionality), all completely managed through the web interface, and provides a user web portal as well for allowing access to these features plus call routing rules, phone directories, etc.
Architecturally SipX is cleaner, I think, than Asterisk, and is fully SIP-based. Calls between phones on a SipX switch pass their audio directly to each other, rather than passing through the switch, as is the case in Asterisk. Integration for SIP trunks is built-in. However if you need to use physical phone lines, SipX connects through external SIP gateway hardware from many vendors, rather than depending on the messy integration of cards into the server itself.
I now run phone service for myself and 25 of my neighbors for less than half of what we were paying, with way better features. Many SipX installations scale easily to hundreds of users.
Check http://ekmmetering.com./ They sell simple metering units that can either meter small (up to 30 amp, I think) circuits directly, or any size circuit using external current sensor rings. You can chain together a number of meters with simple 2-wire serial connections and attach them to a net-connected controller. The controller can be read from anywhere with a simple TCP socket call or they provide a free app that does it. The app runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. I plan to use their stuff for a networked submetering system for the co-op I live in, to allow us to consolidate down from 30 utility meters (which cost $14 per month just to be hooked up) down to 4 meters. This will also allow us to share and net-meter a large solar array we are developing.
One individual is not threatened--he could just move when his ecosystem gets unworkable, although he would have a hell of a time selling his old assets(who would buy them?) and buying new ones somewhere else.
The problem is, when this happens to hundreds of millions or billions of people all at the same time, where do they all go? Into your cozy niche?
Not to mention the problem of losing many of the investments of thousands of years of civilization, when cities are made unusable due to rising coastal waters and tidal estuaries, failing water supplies or the repeated damage of extreme weather events. What is the economic hit of losing Manhattan or London, or Tokyo?
Sure, some people will be OK, but do you really think we can maintain our economic growth, our just-in-time global industrial systems, our political stability and the rule of law under such stresses?
Maybe, but why would anyone think so, when tiny little fluctuations in the economies of single countries (like the runs on currencies in Mexico, Thailand, Russia, etc.) end up causing huge global disruptions. Don't you think a systemic change in the physical viability of large areas of the planet might knock a point or two off the old DOW?
This seems to be a key point that is obfuscated or ignored by deniers. That there are gigantic sinks of fossil carbon, in addition to the fossil fuels we bring up, that have been sequestered safely under the conditions prevelant during all of human civilization. Many of these are predicted to, or have already begun being released, as global temperatures rise. Positive feedback means the more it happens, the more it will happen, until the system spirals wildly out of control.
Example of this are the permafrost areas at the edge of the Northern polar region, the Methane Clathrates, reversal of the Amazon rain forest from a carbon sink to a source, and the greater absorption of heat from sunlight as melting ice and snow changes Earth's albedo.
And here is what is meant by irreversible--that these feedback loops will accelerate and cause massive disruption in time scales directly relevant to human civilization--i.e. the next few centuries, at least. Deniers like to bring up crap about there having been massive changes in temp all throughout the billions of years of the fossil record, so we should all relax. That is true, but in each case, these changes caused massive dislocation or extinction of the dominant plant and animal species of that time.
We're talking about what happens to this particular race of animals that is here spending its time reading and writing Slashdot postings. It is disingenuous for deniers to claim some lofty halo of wisdom that transcends mere human-centric concerns, especially when, for the most vociferous of them (such as the paid lackeys of Exxon-Mobile), they are more concerned with making a buck in the next fiscal quarter than they are about the concerns of even the humans alive today, much less those not yet born.
See the Adam device from Notion Ink. It will ship with a Pixel Qi screen that works in reflective mode (like the e-ink screen on a Kindle) in sunlight. However, unlike e-ink, it can also run in full color with normal video-friendly refresh rates, just by turning on the backlight. You get the best of both worlds, including very low power usage when running in reflective mode. On most Pixel Qi devices this switching on and off of the backlight can be done manually or automatically with an ambient light sensor. The Adam device runs Android, rather than a direct Linux OS.
I think "vast sums of money in government handouts" is a bit overblown. The entire budget for the U.S. National Institute of Science (NIST) is about $640 million for 2008. According to this summary, about $5 million of that was set aside for "Measurements and Standards for the Climate Change Science Program" (although NASA and NOAA probably spend a lot more). Exxon Mobil alone is making 10 billion dollars of profit (not revenue) every 3 months. Who is getting the "vast sums of money"?
;-). It is suicidal when applied to a population approaching 7 billion armed with technology, a market-driven mythology of infinite growth, and 10 million gallons a minute of oil equivalent fossil energy (to put this number into perspective, one gallon of gasoline provides usable energy equivalent to about 2 months worth of human physical labor. Thus, every minute, fossil fuels provide the equivalent energy of over 200 billion extra humans working).
I suspect this fear of environmentalists is mostly just a fear that someone will try to tell you what you should (or should not) do, and you might not like what they say. That is understandable. However, the mentaility of the lone rugged individualist "doin what I want with MY land" has always been a false abstraction even when people were spread thin, as no piece of land exists in isolation from the rest (unless you happen to live in the biosphere project
And why the hyperbole of "Gaia-worship-by-force"? Most enviromentalists I know are exquisitely practical in their thinking. They see systems in operation that SIMPLY CANNOT BE SUSTAINED OVER TIME and treat this as a problem to be solved. I suspect that you too would acknowledge, if asked in a respectful manner and encouraged to extrapolate things you already observe or believe, that things cannot go on this way much longer. Environmentalists look for workable solutions to this dilemma that can be applied early enough that there is some hope of having an effect before critical natural systems reach a point where they essentially fail to operate. Mostly they want to start by leveling the playing field for alternatives, or by giving them a minor start-up boost to help overcome the inertia of entrenched approaches.
As for Gaia worship, yes, environmentalists frequently look to biological systems for guidance. This is because they are the only systems known that can continue to operate successfully for extended time periods without catastrophic failure. Properly cared for farmland can be (and has been) productive for tens or hundreds of generations WITH NO EXTERNAL INPUTS except for the input of the sun and the natural distribution mechnisms of the water, carbon and other cycles. No technological solution ever devised can come close to doing this (the majority of farming done today is an industrial process for turning petroleum and natural gas into food--see The Omnivore's Dilemma for a good exploration of this).
Again, I ask, what is the program? Because one's personal unease with the consequences being a sprawling race on a fragile lifeboat is no substitute for a workable plan.
So what exactly are the skeptics here advocating? The status-quo?
That would mean defending continuation of current policies encouraging technological inefficiency and subsidies to giant centralized fossil energy producers. Can you explain why that is a good thing?
Are you really against a policy of encouraging efficiency, diversifying and distributing energy production nearer to sources, and increasing local self-sufficiency for food and household goods? For that is the starting point of most thoughtful responses to these issues.
Even if there were no danger of human-induced climate change and peaking of fossil energy supplies, this approach has the potential to make it a cleaner, safer, richer (in both the human sense, and the Bill Gate$ sense) and more equitable world. A world more likely to get passed-on in reasonably-decent condition to the next generation, and one that can degrade gracefully (rather than catastrophically) if the climate and energy shit does hit the fan.
Why then is decentralization and diversity on the internet something to passionately fight for, but the same qualities in energy policy something you want to fight against.
This kind of approach is a win-win for everyone except a few big energy conglomerates. It saddens me to hear so many smart people parroting the manufactured controversy of PR people on both sides, instead of thinking about solutions that improve things either way.
Let's do the things we can agree on first, then if things projected by the doomsayer's camp continue to firm up, we can start to argue about the tougher ones.
I think the point many are missing is that it is valuable to find ways to do useful things like refrigeration without elaborate industrial infrastructure.
People take for granted how complex (and ultimately fragile) are our first world networks for raw materials, purified materials, machine tools, energy for manufacture, skilled engineering and labor, transportation, finance and trade. A breakdown at any of these levels can make complex machinery impossible to manufacture.
And without spare parts and service skills, any complex machine can quickly turn into an inert lump.
Try to picture being stranded in the desert and finding a brand new Toyota Land Rover that is complete with everything except spark plugs. Not going to do you much good, is it?
Your best investment would be replacing your most inefficient appliances and hvac equipment, increasing insulation and taking a look at any particularly wasteful ways in which you use energy. Doing that could probably cut that figure in half, with a modest investment and minimal changes in lifestyle. Then take a look at solar.
Optimizing for energy efficiency can be a very satisfying game to play. But unlike many such tech hobbies (hot-rodding, building game systems, etc.) it actually saves money. Try it!
It is similar to the argument made endlessly by industry that (seat belts, CAFE mileage standards, anti-pollution regs, workplace safety standards, minimum wage, social security, 5 day work week, etc., etc.) will destroy all profits, kill trillions of jobs and reduce us to living like depression era Okies.
Where is the evidence to back this up? It seems to me that the evidence shows the very opposite--that socially-responsible regulations like these have benefits not only for society at large, but in many cases for industries as well.
Today, the U.S. economy sends about $250 billion a year to overseas oil suppliers (15 million barrels per day @ about $45 per barrel). We spend another several hundred billion on oil industry subsidies and military expenditures to keep the cheap oil flowing (to us).
What if we invested that kind of money into retrofitting our homes, cities, transportation systems and manufacturing facilities for energy efficiency and as much self generation (solar, wind, biomass) as possible?
We could create millions of jobs, increase our portfolio of technological expertise and the scientists and engineers to support it, greatly increase our national security (saving additional trillions over time), and start to clean up not only the very real potential risks from global warming, but also from pollution, and the health effects that come with it. We could do the right thing for the environment and have a good economic outcome--probably one better than what we can expect from our current path of letting other countries take over our manufacturing so we can buy their goods with borrowed money (can you think of a better way to put our country into decline?).
OK, If this is such a great idea, why doesn't this happen now? Because all of our government policies are structured to encourage the status quo. Under those conditions, no one can compete with the subsidized Oil Economy, just like free farmers in the south couldn't compete with slaveowners. Once it became illegal to own slaves, those free farmers then could compete and probably even had an advantage.
Of course some industries would be harmed by this changeover. Capital and profits would shift to different sectors of the economy. But that is exactly what the conservative market-worshippers are always touting as the great thing about markets--they can adapt efficiently to changing conditions.
It is a legitimate function of government to send signals to markets by enacting policies that redirect commercial activity in directions a majority of members of that society want it to go (remember, humans invented markets to serve them, not the other way around). When you do this at a micro-level, that is a planned economy and most of us agree that does not work too well. However when you do it at a macro level, setting high level policies and then letting the markets handle the details of reallocating resources, that can work pretty well.
The path to disaster, is to let those who currently dominate a market system use their monopoly powers, media ownership and political influence to lock things down and keep society from evolving to new and more appropriate solutions as conditions change.
Kyoto or not, it makes sense to shift away from our low efficiency, artifically-cheap oil economy. Those of you railing against Kyoto might want to take a step back and check to make sure that the positions you are defending are in fact what you want for your world. There is so much well-financed activity by the dominant industries to inject their message into mainstream thinking, that it is easy to find oneself arguing their position for them.
Are you a human being or a corporation? If the former, think hard about where your interests lie. Despite what they would have you believe, there is a good chance that your interests and those of the corporations are actually quite different.
As quoted in Home Power Magazine
Some skeptics of solar energy claim that it takes more energy to make a photovoltaic module (PV) than it can ever produce in its lifetime. The truth is that PVs typically recoup their embodied energy in two to four years. According to an article published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), today's single and multicrystalline modules have an energy payback of about four years, and thin-film modules about two years. Most PV modules in the field are made from hyper-pure crystalline silicon. Purifying and crystallizing the silicon consumes the most energy in making these PVs. Thin-film PVs are made from considerably less semiconductor material, and therefore have less embodied energy in them. Most of the energy consumed is in the thin-film surface. The aluminum frame on any PV accounts for about six months of its payback time. Solar energy is an amazing technology considering that PVs go on to produce clean, pollution-free energy for at least 25 to 30 years after they have achieved payback.
For more information on energy payback, see the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Web site (www.nrel.gov) and Karl Knapp & Theresa Jester's article titled "PV Payback"in HP80. --Eric Grisen eric.grisen@homepower.com
Also, concerns about lifetime and hail resistance are red herrings. Most panels are warranted for full rated output for at least 20 years and most have performed well beyond those timeframes. Also all panels are UL tested to meet UL hail resistance specifications (which I believe covers hail up to 2" in diameter).
Finally, no one bitches when a gas-fired generator fails to recoup its energy cost of manufacture--it requires billions of additional therms of natural gas over its operating lifetime to produce electricty and never pays back its manufacturing energy cost. It is disingenuous to ask that only of solar (and odd since solar can actually do it!
Take Falluja; Are you aware that among the first acts of the U.S. in their assault on the people who live in Falluja was to bomb 2 small hospitals and capture and shut down the main Falluja General hospital, removing patients from their beds and ejecting or arresting them (kind of reminds me of what they claimed Saddam did in Kuwait "dumping babies out of incubators"--only that turned out to be a lie).
The reason? According to the NY Times, quoting an anonymous senior government official, the hospital was judged "a center of propaganda" on civilian casualties: "This time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons."
The knowledge that they are killing hundreds of civilians is "propaganda" so it must be suppressed. The killing won't be suppressed--just the ability for the rest of us to find out about it. Stalin would be proud. (and by the way, since when are hospitals, water systems, electric plants, and ambulances "military targets"? They are not. Attacking these are war crimes, against both international and U.S. law).
Back to the original point, the state wants to attack Iraq for reasons of its own, and they are apparently willing to commit ongoing war crimes to do it. If the american people actually understood what is being done in their name, I seriously doubt that many would support it. Thus, the government tries to control the information and perception, thereby subverting democracy. They systematically deny citizens the information they need to make an informed decision about whether the policy should continue.
BTW, If you want to get a glimpse past the information blockade about Falluja and see for yourself, see the pictures at: http://www.fallujapictures.blogspot.com/.
Cheap oil and gas have been like winning the lottery--we got many hundreds of thousands of years worth of solar energy inputs concentrated into a convenient portable form. The problem is, like most lottery winners, we have wasted most of our bonanza and will end up overextended and in debt.
The days of oil are coming to an end much more quickly than is generally acknowledged. Many petroleum geologists expect the peak of oil production to occur within the next 3-5 years (even BP has recently announced that they think oil will peak between 2010 and 2020). From that day on, the amount available for use goes down every year forever. That has incredible consequences for a species that has let its population expand to meet its available food (that is, oil) supply and which has invested nearly all of its energy windfall into building infrastructure and systems that cannot operate without cheap and plentiful oil.
Feel free to continue the futile debate about how to match our lottery-winnings-level energy usage, but when you are done why don't you turn to something more real and pressing--how do we restructure our industrial society to operate on one half or one quarter of the energy we use now and maintain food, housing, fresh water, transportation, safety and any kind of economic livelihood for the 6.4 billion people now living?
This process starts soon--possibly before your cell phone contract expires. And the most likely first effect is an economic meltdown that will leave us hard pressed to finance and build any significant numbers of the energy replacement "alternatives" so vociferously touted here.
It is not to say that we shouldn't be looking at the next alternatives, but we need to set the parameters of the design--what is the best way to start making the transition from systems that depend on fading inherited oil wealth and build ones that can run on yearly energy income.
I can't imagine how you could draw this conclusion. The Evoting systems in use today mostly have NO AUDIT TRAIL, aside from writing the vote count into two different data tables. Both the voting terminals and the central vote counting software run on Windows PCs and use standard MDB (Access-type) databases that are not encrypted. The software is closed source and is "certified" by commercial labs who have no published standards, who do not evaluate security issues, and whose results are trade secrets available only to the company who makes the machines (and pays for the test). See BlackBoxVoting.org for details of how this testing works.
The big difference between these systems and traditional systems is auditability--on the old systems, there is a paper ballot, which gives the ability to go back later and try to detect fraud. In E-voting systems fraud can rarely be detected because the only "record" is a value stored in a read/write disk file that supposedly reflects a real-time event (the voter making their choice).
This is not to say that it isn't possible to do computer based voting securely, but the system design must start with auditablilty as a priority. See the system they designed at OpenVotingConsortium.org which is an open source, low cost, simple system that give most of the benefits of E-voting (like ease of use, results checking, access for the disabled, etc.) without the risks of electronic tallys. How? They use the computer's touchscreen interface to produce a printed, barcoded ballot which becomes the only official record of the vote. These ballots are pre-checked for consistency before they are cast (no overvotes), are near-guaranteed machine readable (no hanging chads or stray marks) and can be verfied manually to ensure that the printed choices match the barcodes that are used to tally the votes.
It is not really of the essence whether a wealthy person (i.e. a person with significant disposable income) earns the money or not. The more significant point is one of simple human needs.
Our society has agreed that we want certain government services that the citizens will contribute to. We have decided that we want roads and fire stations and not having people dying in the streets when they are too old to work anymore, and we have to pay for those things somehow. That payment system is called taxation.
If you take 10 thousand dollars in taxes from a "working" person, you are likely to impact their ability to keep their home or pay for their medical care--critical human needs.
If you take that amount or larger from a wealthy person, their human needs remain untouched--only their ability to purchase additional luxuries or status enhancing items (elaborate home, premium car, home theater, etc.) is threatened.
It seems to me that is a significant difference, especially when you are approaching the question in terms of what is fair or moral, as the poster was.
There are some very credible reasons to believe that we are at or very near peak supply rate. See this report from Petroleum Review (a respected oil industry publication) which looks at currently-known new oil discoveries and when they are expected to come on-line. The upshot is that there will be some supply growth until 2007, but after that there is almost nothing on the horizon.
This may represent the point of oil supply peak. After that, if you want to some new development (build more cars, grow more food, air condition more buildings) you will have to take oil supply away from some existing use to do it. This could happen by investing in higher efficiencies for existing uses or by dropping energy-intensive discretionary activities (like pleasure airline travel, FedEx shipping or importing food from distant lands).
It does mean, however, that it will be extremely difficult to maintain economic growth. As our entire economic system is based on constant growth (for example, a recession is where growth happens at a lower rate than desired), this should cause major dislocations if not actual economic collapse.
It gets even worse when you consider that oil supply will not stay at peak rate, but will steadly decline year after year from depletion, so these dislocations will have to occur over and over as the supply shrinks.
And for those who say the new discoveries are fading only becuase of a lack of investment, I must say that seems like wishful thinking. The oil industry has never been known for leaving potential profits sitting untapped simply because they don't feel like investing. I think they know something they are not ready to tell us...