In my opinion, town-owned utilities are a good idea only if a town is fairly small. Where the population is large, the utilities become isolated from marketplace feedback. Corruption and lack of incentives to improve the service lead to stagnation.
FWIW, TDS is an aggregator of small telephone companies. In an effort to cut costs, they are closing local offices and attempting to run things from a central location. In so doing, they are losing local knowledge (like what services they already have in place !!!) They are acting in a stupid and self-destructive manner, and consequently losing business to better-run competitors.
Whenever a hurricane hits the gas prices shoot up a buck because the republicans killed off the regulations on oil speculation, and refuse to punish oil cos when they go-a-gouging.
When a hurricane hits, there is a serious likelihood of reduced supplies of gasoline, a likelihood which often becomes reality. When supply dramatically exceeds demand, supplies run out. Do you want an area just hit by a hurricane to have no gasoline supplies for ambulances and medivac helicopters? If so, then just make it illegal to increase prices.
Your implied criticism of market economics is either ignorant or vicious. The alternative to rising prices of critical supplies in emergencies is death, and fools like you encourage such action.
The correct answer is "proper regulation".. the kind that places big business and the government at loggerheads.
The proper situation is the recognition and enforcement of rights. The presumption that business (and especially big business) is in opposition to individuals and that the government protects individuals by attacking businesses is patently absurd. In most daily life, the government acts to violate rights and steal from individuals and businesses.
Eventually the sun will burn out and everything on earth will have long since died. Your stupid greeny sustainability won't stop that, it'll only keep people from being happy.
You're writing about current technology with a single fuel, hydrogen. There are other types of fuel cells and technology isn't static. What if a methane fuel cell proved feasible, and the catalyst was something cheap like iron filings? Suddenly all your arguments will be invalidated by progress.
The Wrights published their flights and marketed their airplanes. They developed them into a successful business.
Pearse worked in obscurity.
Flights of Adler's steam powered airplanes were not well-publicized and the French government kept results of the 1897 flight secret for a while.
Consequently, the momentum of publicity has kept the Wright's name in the forefront. I do not intend to diminish the accomplishments of Adler and Pearse.
_ It's only reasonable to exclude "flights" outside the atmosphere, otherwise we'll have to make special rules to exclude the moon and man-made satellites from consideration. If you aren't continuously using the atmosphere for aerodynamic lift, you're not flying.
An ice age is a period of time where ice persists outdoors throughout the year, somewhere. Since we still have polar ice caps, we are still in an ice age .
Sigh... you have to understand what you're reading. Incandescents range up to about 5% efficient (about 2.5% of the maximum possible lumens per watt). CFLs are generally 20% efficient (10% of maximum possible lumens per watt). So CFLs are 4X as efficient as (300% more efficient than) incandescents. ___ 300% more efficient (relatively) but only 20% efficient (absolutely).
The only "unforgiveable" is false data and isn't forgiven.
Well, then, we've got a new "unforgiveable": A trend-displaying program that takes non-trending data and produces a trending output. That's precisely what happened with the headline-producing program that generated "hocky-stick" trends from multiple sets of random data. It's either a deliberate fraud or astonishingly careless programming
The "Pentagon Papers" and similar cases could not be enjoined for reaons that were as much political as legal. The huge political pressures for the release of the papers could not be defeated. The confidential classification was BS, and everyboby knew it; if you read the PP you saw nothing there that wasn't already believed to be common knowledge. Furthermore, at the time the actual leaker (who had taken an oath not to release classified data) was unknown. All the newspapers did was pass along the already compromised information.
People who get security clearances are given annual lectures on the importance of not blabbing and some of the law involved. It's prior restraint and properly so. People's lives are at stake.
Although what the Rosenbergs did was more spying than public speech, if atom bomb details had been published in the NYT they still would have gotten the death penalty, and again properly so. It was treason.
Right or wrong, ff you don't like the zoning laws, change them or move.
If I've ever seen flamebait, this is it. The trite challenge "if you don't like a law, change it" assumes a person should mount a huge effort to change something which should not be there in the first place, with little likelihood that his effort would succeed. The burden of moving, which might involve selling and buying houses at substantial loss, is not a trivial or just result, either.
The article says 1500 chemicals and the implication is small containers. If we assume 4 ounce bottles, that's 47 gallons. That's NOT "a fuel load larger than a 200 gallon fuel tank".
Many chemicals aren't particularly flammable. I have close to 100 bottles of photographic chemicals, which are about evenly split between inorganic and organic. AFAIK none of them is a fire hazard, and many are no more flammable than table salt.
Using appropriate CMOS technology, scaling speed (and voltage) down to brain rates, would change power dissipation by at least 10^-8. Melting is not a problem.
The brain's advantage is that it is reconfigurable in a way that semiconductors are not. Over years, a go player will rebuild a portion of his brain into a partially optimized machine
In modern times, they'll give consent to be sued when somebody in the critical path has an axe to grind favoring the suit. This is frequently seen in "environmental" cases.
Oh good, another complex mechanical system to fail. When this one goes, either your CPU melts or temp sensors shut down your system until you replace it.
My experience with Opera is that it is much slower than Firefox. Consequently, I only use Opera when Firefox won't render properly. Otherwise, waiting 40 seconds to see a page that renders in 20 seconds in Firefox isn't worth the trouble.
Intel varies between making lots of money and making even more than that. AMD varies between losing lots of money and making a little bit. This has been going on for a long time. If it continues, AMD dies.
If libraries and header files stayed in the same place, it would help. The driver for my Samsung QL-85G worked under RedHat 8, but by Fedora 6 essential files for compiling the source had been scattered to many new places. It took several hours to find them all.
The claim that high tension lines can cause cancer has pretty much been disproven. At ground level the electric and magnetic fields are not excessive, and the currents they induce in people are minimal. Sparks across insulators on these lines may produce some ozone, which is not a good thing, but has not proven to be a significant problem.
Superconducting cables would tend to run at lower voltages and higher currents for the same power level, because they are insulated with solids which cost more money for higher voltages (instead of air which is free). The wires will be closer together because the voltages are lower; this tends to reduce the radiated field. Because the wires are enclosed away from air, no ozone is generated.
Much of the interference caused by high tension lines is due to the fact that these lines are open to the air. They have to be supported on insulators, which collect dust and are susceptible to condensation and rain. A wet conductive path develops on the insulator, and the high voltage sparks along that path, causing interference. The sparks heat up the water, which evaporates, removing the conductive path. More moisture accumulates: repeat cycle. You can even hear this happening if you walk by high voltage lines on a foggy night.
Superconducting lines will not have this effect because they are fully jacketed: no conductive paths to form and break down.
Long Island has a population of about 7.5 million. Using only the Throg's Neck and Whitestone bridges, using only cars and assuming 3 persons per car, and assuming all lanes set to outbound, 2.5 million people could be evacuated per day: 3 days to empty the island. That ignores other bridges (Triborough, Brooklyn, Verrazano Narrows, etc.) and tunnels (Midtown, etc.), subways and trains. The eastern part of the island doesn't need big highways; it's not heavily populated. Most of the people live in Brooklyn and Queens and Nassau county.
Why would you want to evacuate the Island? Any disaster that affected the whole island would damage Manhattan, eastern New Jersey, and Southern Connecticut also: there's nowhere to go. A major hurricane can't affect L.I. like New Orleans: L.I. isn't built below the ocean. A big huricane knocks down trees in suburban L.I., floods south shore communities and damages a few houses, but that's it. Urban areas are largely unaffected. L.I. is spacious compared to N.O.: areas of severe damage will not cover the whole island.
ExxonMobil has gotten fed up with idiot attacks on oil companies, so they're going to spin off their retail business (although the gas stations will be able to use the brand name for the foreseeable future).
Your discussion of altruism is clueless.
Many corporations contribute generously to charities. This makes them less profitable, and as a stockholder, I find this practice reprehensible. They do it anyway, because they are run by people whose philosophies tell them that it's the right thing to do.
According to the article you cite, we reached a (local) MINIMUM in the early 1990s and solar influx has been increasing, due to cleaner air. Ironically, cleaner air (particulates) probably increases global warming.
Given that engine efficiencies are considerably better than they were 40 years ago, I'm surprised that aircooled engines haven't made a comeback in passenger cars. Simpler, no coolant to leak or maintain, lighter.
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In my opinion, town-owned utilities are a good idea only if a town is fairly small. Where the population is large, the utilities become isolated from marketplace feedback. Corruption and lack of incentives to improve the service lead to stagnation.
FWIW, TDS is an aggregator of small telephone companies. In an effort to cut costs, they are closing local offices and attempting to run things from a central location. In so doing, they are losing local knowledge (like what services they already have in place !!!) They are acting in a stupid and self-destructive manner, and consequently losing business to better-run competitors.
When a hurricane hits, there is a serious likelihood of reduced supplies of gasoline, a likelihood which often becomes reality. When supply dramatically exceeds demand, supplies run out. Do you want an area just hit by a hurricane to have no gasoline supplies for ambulances and medivac helicopters? If so, then just make it illegal to increase prices.
Your implied criticism of market economics is either ignorant or vicious. The alternative to rising prices of critical supplies in emergencies is death, and fools like you encourage such action.
The proper situation is the recognition and enforcement of rights. The presumption that business (and especially big business) is in opposition to individuals and that the government protects individuals by attacking businesses is patently absurd. In most daily life, the government acts to violate rights and steal from individuals and businesses.
Eventually the sun will burn out and everything on earth will have long since died. Your stupid greeny sustainability won't stop that, it'll only keep people from being happy.
You're writing about current technology with a single fuel, hydrogen. There are other types of fuel cells and technology isn't static. What if a methane fuel cell proved feasible, and the catalyst was something cheap like iron filings? Suddenly all your arguments will be invalidated by progress.
The Wrights published their flights and marketed their airplanes. They developed them into a successful business.
Pearse worked in obscurity.
Flights of Adler's steam powered airplanes were not well-publicized and the French government kept results of the 1897 flight secret for a while.
Consequently, the momentum of publicity has kept the Wright's name in the forefront. I do not intend to diminish the accomplishments of Adler and Pearse.
_ It's only reasonable to exclude "flights" outside the atmosphere, otherwise we'll have to make special rules to exclude the moon and man-made satellites from consideration. If you aren't continuously using the atmosphere for aerodynamic lift, you're not flying.
An ice age is a period of time where ice persists outdoors throughout the year, somewhere. Since we still have polar ice caps, we are still in an ice age .
Sigh... you have to understand what you're reading. Incandescents range up to about 5% efficient (about 2.5% of the maximum possible lumens per watt). CFLs are generally 20% efficient (10% of maximum possible lumens per watt). So CFLs are 4X as efficient as (300% more efficient than) incandescents. ___ 300% more efficient (relatively) but only 20% efficient (absolutely).
Well, then, we've got a new "unforgiveable": A trend-displaying program that takes non-trending data and produces a trending output. That's precisely what happened with the headline-producing program that generated "hocky-stick" trends from multiple sets of random data. It's either a deliberate fraud or astonishingly careless programming
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Getting a lot of radioactive material into a small place accelerates the reaction. In the extreme, that's how A-bombs work.
The "Pentagon Papers" and similar cases could not be enjoined for reaons that were as much political as legal. The huge political pressures for the release of the papers could not be defeated. The confidential classification was BS, and everyboby knew it; if you read the PP you saw nothing there that wasn't already believed to be common knowledge. Furthermore, at the time the actual leaker (who had taken an oath not to release classified data) was unknown. All the newspapers did was pass along the already compromised information.
People who get security clearances are given annual lectures on the importance of not blabbing and some of the law involved. It's prior restraint and properly so. People's lives are at stake.
Although what the Rosenbergs did was more spying than public speech, if atom bomb details had been published in the NYT they still would have gotten the death penalty, and again properly so. It was treason.
If I've ever seen flamebait, this is it. The trite challenge "if you don't like a law, change it" assumes a person should mount a huge effort to change something which should not be there in the first place, with little likelihood that his effort would succeed. The burden of moving, which might involve selling and buying houses at substantial loss, is not a trivial or just result, either.
The article says 1500 chemicals and the implication is small containers. If we assume 4 ounce bottles, that's 47 gallons. That's NOT "a fuel load larger than a 200 gallon fuel tank".
Many chemicals aren't particularly flammable. I have close to 100 bottles of photographic chemicals, which are about evenly split between inorganic and organic. AFAIK none of them is a fire hazard, and many are no more flammable than table salt.
Using appropriate CMOS technology, scaling speed (and voltage) down to brain rates, would change power dissipation by at least 10^-8. Melting is not a problem.
The brain's advantage is that it is reconfigurable in a way that semiconductors are not. Over years, a go player will rebuild a portion of his brain into a partially optimized machine
In modern times, they'll give consent to be sued when somebody in the critical path has an axe to grind favoring the suit. This is frequently seen in "environmental" cases.
Oh good, another complex mechanical system to fail. When this one goes, either your CPU melts or temp sensors shut down your system until you replace it.
My experience with Opera is that it is much slower than Firefox. Consequently, I only use Opera when Firefox won't render properly. Otherwise, waiting 40 seconds to see a page that renders in 20 seconds in Firefox isn't worth the trouble.
Intel varies between making lots of money and making even more than that. AMD varies between losing lots of money and making a little bit. This has been going on for a long time. If it continues, AMD dies.
If libraries and header files stayed in the same place, it would help. The driver for my Samsung QL-85G worked under RedHat 8, but by Fedora 6 essential files for compiling the source had been scattered to many new places. It took several hours to find them all.
The claim that high tension lines can cause cancer has pretty much been disproven. At ground level the electric and magnetic fields are not excessive, and the currents they induce in people are minimal. Sparks across insulators on these lines may produce some ozone, which is not a good thing, but has not proven to be a significant problem.
Superconducting cables would tend to run at lower voltages and higher currents for the same power level, because they are insulated with solids which cost more money for higher voltages (instead of air which is free). The wires will be closer together because the voltages are lower; this tends to reduce the radiated field. Because the wires are enclosed away from air, no ozone is generated.
Much of the interference caused by high tension lines is due to the fact that these lines are open to the air. They have to be supported on insulators, which collect dust and are susceptible to condensation and rain. A wet conductive path develops on the insulator, and the high voltage sparks along that path, causing interference. The sparks heat up the water, which evaporates, removing the conductive path. More moisture accumulates: repeat cycle. You can even hear this happening if you walk by high voltage lines on a foggy night.
Superconducting lines will not have this effect because they are fully jacketed: no conductive paths to form and break down.
Detroit uses a superconducting link with one of their generators.
Long Island has a population of about 7.5 million. Using only the Throg's Neck and Whitestone bridges, using only cars and assuming 3 persons per car, and assuming all lanes set to outbound, 2.5 million people could be evacuated per day: 3 days to empty the island. That ignores other bridges (Triborough, Brooklyn, Verrazano Narrows, etc.) and tunnels (Midtown, etc.), subways and trains. The eastern part of the island doesn't need big highways; it's not heavily populated. Most of the people live in Brooklyn and Queens and Nassau county.
Why would you want to evacuate the Island? Any disaster that affected the whole island would damage Manhattan, eastern New Jersey, and Southern Connecticut also: there's nowhere to go. A major hurricane can't affect L.I. like New Orleans: L.I. isn't built below the ocean. A big huricane knocks down trees in suburban L.I., floods south shore communities and damages a few houses, but that's it. Urban areas are largely unaffected. L.I. is spacious compared to N.O.: areas of severe damage will not cover the whole island.
In short: get real.
ExxonMobil has gotten fed up with idiot attacks on oil companies, so they're going to spin off their retail business (although the gas stations will be able to use the brand name for the foreseeable future).
Your discussion of altruism is clueless.
Many corporations contribute generously to charities. This makes them less profitable, and as a stockholder, I find this practice reprehensible. They do it anyway, because they are run by people whose philosophies tell them that it's the right thing to do.
According to the article you cite, we reached a (local) MINIMUM in the early 1990s and solar influx has been increasing, due to cleaner air. Ironically, cleaner air (particulates) probably increases global warming.
Given that engine efficiencies are considerably better than they were 40 years ago, I'm surprised that aircooled engines haven't made a comeback in passenger cars. Simpler, no coolant to leak or maintain, lighter.