If electrical heat is used then they will be in the same boat as the high costs will be for heating during the day rather than cooling.
No, the sun (which is very very warm) comes out during the day.
How many businesses do you know that can shift their hours out of the 9AM to 5PM range?
Probably a lot, with the right incentive.
Even if it was possible to shift the schedule, how many people would want to work nights when they could do the same job during the day?
Even today, people work the graveyard shift when they could do the same job during the day for less pay.
How many people do you think will wait till past midnight to cook dinner?
Electrical demand doesn't have just one huge flat peak that ends at midnight. It looks more like a sine wave. All someone needs to do is avoid the very highest peaks of the sine wave.
...in some climates, heat/ac are not really optional.
Before homes had air conditioning, people used to go to the movie theater to cool off. Today, there's no stopping people from doing something similar, or hanging out at a friend's house (and returning the favor another day) in order to save money.
Price food at a million dollars a meal and there will technically be no shortage but there will be mass famine.
If there's so little food that you have to price it at a million dollars a meal in order to prevent a shortage, then you can't blame the price for creating a famine.
Now you're saying this won't happen after all, since people can save money in winter and can thus keep on using electricity when they need it (peak hour).
A person who doesn't change his or her electrical usage patterns would pay the same, in the long term. But time of use pricing creates an incentive to conserve during times of peak demand.
...until industrial production is affected by the skyrocketing costs...
All they have to do is shut down a few production machines during times of peak electrical usage. The workers can take a nap during that time, or that time could mark a shift change. It wouldn't destroy the economy.
So as the days get hotter an air conditioning user will be using much more peak priced energy than off peak priced energy and their electrical bill will go up.
And when summer ends, as the days get cooler, the reverse occurs. Over the course of a full year, the average electric bill would stay the same.
What about businesses who only operate during peak price time? They will not get much discount from off-peak price because they do not use it.
If they only operate during peak price, it's because there isn't enough of an incentive to shift their operating hours. This changes that.
In the case of electricity, the only option is to use less.
Time-of-use pricing gives people an additional option: shift heavy electrical usage (such as laundry and cooking and dishes) to the off-peak periods in order to save money. Giving people additional ways to save money is a good thing, right?
Reviewing 154 growing seasons' worth of data on various crops grown on rain-fed and irrigated land in the United States, University of California-Davis agricultural scientist Bill Liebhardt found that organic corn yields were 94 percent of conventional yields, organic wheat yields were 97 percent, and organic soybean yields were 94 percent. Organic tomatoes showed no yield difference.
For all the whining I hear about "Viral" and "Anti Business" licenses the various *BSD projects sure do have a meager adoption (Buisness, home, free or otherwise) compared to their GPL counterparts (Linux).
I used to work in a tech support call center for a consumer electronics company. We offered free unlimited tech support on any product we sold for one year. Outside of that year, we only provided free support for faulty hardware.
The way we achieved this when we didn't know at the start of the call whether it was a real hardware problem or a usage issue was to immediately bill for the call, if it was outside of the support period. Then if the issue turned out to be the fault of the product, we would issue a refund for the call.
The effect of testing has diminishing returns on software quality. At some point it will become cheaper to fix bugs after the software is released than to test to perfection. Some customers demand perfection the first time, while others don't. For example, avionics software tends to be biased toward the "test to perfection" side, while general applications can usually be fixed after deployment at low cost.
It's programmed to fit on a particular machine with a particular OS/tools. These wear out.
But not the software.
The media the software sits on degrades, and can occasionally corrupt.
But not the software.
The APIs eventually change.
If your customer wants you to make your software work with new APIs, then that's a new feature which they can be expected to pay for. It's not a bug in your software.
If your software doesn't work on a new version of Windows, it's either because (1) there was always a bug in your software which didn't manifest itself in the old version of Windows, or (2) something changed in the OS that requires changes in the software to work (for example, for security reasons), or (3) a bug in Windows.
The first case is a bug that always existed in your software, so it doesn't fall under "ongoing maintenance." The second case is a new requirement ("make it work under the new version of Windows"), and new features don't qualify as "ongoing maintenance." The third case is also outside of your control.
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No, the sun (which is very very warm) comes out during the day.
Probably a lot, with the right incentive.
Even today, people work the graveyard shift when they could do the same job during the day for less pay.
Electrical demand doesn't have just one huge flat peak that ends at midnight. It looks more like a sine wave. All someone needs to do is avoid the very highest peaks of the sine wave.
Who suggested lowering the supply of something? Not me.
Please reread the last paragraph of my first post in this thread to find out why this would not be the case.
Yes, and that's what setting the price just high enough so that demand falls to the level of supply would prevent.
Before homes had air conditioning, people used to go to the movie theater to cool off. Today, there's no stopping people from doing something similar, or hanging out at a friend's house (and returning the favor another day) in order to save money.
If there's so little food that you have to price it at a million dollars a meal in order to prevent a shortage, then you can't blame the price for creating a famine.
A person who doesn't change his or her electrical usage patterns would pay the same, in the long term. But time of use pricing creates an incentive to conserve during times of peak demand.
All they have to do is shut down a few production machines during times of peak electrical usage. The workers can take a nap during that time, or that time could mark a shift change. It wouldn't destroy the economy.
And when summer ends, as the days get cooler, the reverse occurs. Over the course of a full year, the average electric bill would stay the same.
If they only operate during peak price, it's because there isn't enough of an incentive to shift their operating hours. This changes that.
Time-of-use pricing gives people an additional option: shift heavy electrical usage (such as laundry and cooking and dishes) to the off-peak periods in order to save money. Giving people additional ways to save money is a good thing, right?
You read the first paragraph that I wrote. Now read the second.
There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until demand falls to the level of supply. We've known for hundreds of years that prices set below the going rate determined by supply and demand is the cause of shortages.
The increased peak hour revenue could be used to lower off-peak electricity prices so that people pay on average the same as before.
False:
Just like organic agriculture.
We already have enough food for our needs. Any more will only facilitate growth, but growth for its own sake isn't a virtue.
$19k per job plus a 20% chance of winning free room and board for a few years doesn't sound so bad. Sign me up!
Actually, OSX (Darwin BSD) is nearly twice as popular as Linux (9.0% vs. 4.9%).
I want one that will connect with my friends online and overlay everyone's silhouettes on the screen and send their voices through the speakers.
I used to work in a tech support call center for a consumer electronics company. We offered free unlimited tech support on any product we sold for one year. Outside of that year, we only provided free support for faulty hardware.
The way we achieved this when we didn't know at the start of the call whether it was a real hardware problem or a usage issue was to immediately bill for the call, if it was outside of the support period. Then if the issue turned out to be the fault of the product, we would issue a refund for the call.
The effect of testing has diminishing returns on software quality. At some point it will become cheaper to fix bugs after the software is released than to test to perfection. Some customers demand perfection the first time, while others don't. For example, avionics software tends to be biased toward the "test to perfection" side, while general applications can usually be fixed after deployment at low cost.
But not the software.
But not the software.
If your customer wants you to make your software work with new APIs, then that's a new feature which they can be expected to pay for. It's not a bug in your software.
If your software doesn't work on a new version of Windows, it's either because (1) there was always a bug in your software which didn't manifest itself in the old version of Windows, or (2) something changed in the OS that requires changes in the software to work (for example, for security reasons), or (3) a bug in Windows.
The first case is a bug that always existed in your software, so it doesn't fall under "ongoing maintenance." The second case is a new requirement ("make it work under the new version of Windows"), and new features don't qualify as "ongoing maintenance." The third case is also outside of your control.
Why can't it be both?
Your analogy doesn't work because software doesn't wear out like most things do.
Why did he use a router? A hub should have sufficed.
They're trying to, but they're getting resistance for that, too: With few exceptions, teachers' unions fight against efforts to ground teacher evaluation in data and simultaneously resist giving administrators the discretion to remove teachers.
Unemployed, or underpaid? Tough choice...
No, the answer is $48k. Guess I'm not the only one to make a simple math error today. :-)