Real-estate is already taxed in most places in America. Most European countries also tax cars based on their engine's size.
Same as before:tax authorities do NOT tax the car. they tax the buyer on the transaction, and there's some form of "possession tax". that's not a tax on assets. If it were a tax on the car, a car owned for example by a deceased penniless owner would still pay tax, and above all, it would be economically capable of paying such tax. but it does not: even taxes related on car possession tax the owner, not a car.
Bear in mind that these kind of stamp duties bear no relation of the use of public resources that using a car entails: If I want to tax for that, I'd tax the fuels, and that's exactly what governments do. when they do anything else, like "taxing cars based on engine size", they are simply meddling in people choices unrelated to use of resources and so on. I think that it's "politically convenient" to set up a labor intensive organization to collect and check a taxation which could and is more efficiently collected in another way, and above all it is unrelated to usage, income of the owner, efficiency gains and so on.
It's a common error in European fiscal policy that assets can be taxed. In reality only financial savings and income are taxed, and the final percentage applied is variously disguised as "capital gains tax", or other quibbles. to clarify further: for an asset to be taxed, in my small world of financial analyst, it must either produce a taxable financial income, which is then taxed, or it must be an acceptable mean of exchange with no or negligible frictional costs. Houses are only an indexation parameter in taxes, since no tax authority whatsoever accepts a lien on 10 square feet as payment: they want hard cash. If the owner-occupier of a house had the opportunity or willingness to put the house in a separate company, it would be clearer still: the company would never make one cent, and it would be taxed on a fictional rent, which by itself is part of the owner's income. Therefore, the owner's income is taxed twice.
So, on bitcoins, the problem is magnified: if it is a mean of exchange, like banknotes, by itself it should not be taxed. the relevant transactions could be taxable, but not the means of exchange: after all, if I buy a car by bank draft or money transfer I do not pay either X or Y depending on how I paid. the effort of the authorities is to preserve the monopoly on fiat currency, that's it.
went through that with my mother. she went through a bout of being insane, but not enough not to ask me to kill her. And I had to say I could not, while both she and I knew it was not the case. Thankfully, she passed away relatively quickly, but I do not think there are crimes bad enough to warrant this as a penalty.
Here in Italy, the only form of broadcast HDTV content is via pay channels. I see them stealing a page out of the mobile phone companies, and include the TV in their contract, so that the early exit penalty would be paying off the TV. they get more consistent revenues, and the HDTV producers "Eat" the retailing margin, or they split.
Only problem, as a consumer, would be if they get the producers to include the ability "brick" the TV remotely (for non payment, for instance) and/or include some proprietary encryption.
I think that's precisely why Apple is being investigated here, what's mere avoidance in other countries sounds like it may well be evasion in Italy.
that's exactly the case. the judiciary in Italy have given an enormously lax interpretation of abuse of law, to the extent that it is in the sole and retrospective interpretation of the tax authorities to say what the law actually intended years ago. Mind you, that leads to byzantine tax laws, since the legislator has no interest whatsoever to do it right the first time.
I am italian, I am not a tax expert but have been involved in these things for professional purposes, and I think that this is the usual govvie blackmail. Apple does not produce anything in Italy; the local subsidiary is involved in marketing, and own and operates a relatively small number of own brand stores. By "own brand", read: 1. the company selling the goods is really Apple; 2. it always will have its European headquarters in the most favourable tax place, and no, it will not be Italy. deal with it.
so, what is Apple really doing in Italy? practically nothing that it could not do on line: delivering standardized goods to customers. No personalizations, no customer service. So, in a pinch, Apple could leave Italy altogether, tell my daughter to buy the new Iphone on their internet site, free delivery to the home by UPS, and show Italian tax authorities the finger. Results? LESS tax revenues in Italy. Smart, uh?
For those not aware, the real swindle is in Ireland: profits of the Irish subsidiary, which would normally be taxed at an outrageous 12,5% Irish tax rate, are trasferred tax free to Bahamas. So the Irish would have two grounds to do something, because that's the de facto legal residence of the subsidiary, and because Apple would not probably get a better deal elsewhere.
As a Washington State resident, there are many counties that are wood only heating. Pierce and Tacoma have large suburbs and are not exactly off the grid living. They are bigger and can force the smaller population to upgrade. The counties like Stevens, Ferry and Okanogan are mostly wood heated homes. I have no real numbers but out of the 39 counties in Washington, I'd say at least 1/2 have majority of wood only heated homes, we still are a big wild state.
My mothers county has many people that are wood only, and if they went around giving $1000 dollar fines for people burning, they would tar and feather and hold a recall election. Those urban counties are gray haired monsters who know each other and would put pressure to any elected official.
Those poor gray haired women are the Majority of voters, tell them they cant heat their homes. Most of these people live in urban areas that dont have fire departments, police or or trash pick up. Tacoma I'd say is much different, its urban sprawl.
I think that in some parts, the stoves would smoke cloudier for some days, and then they would not be seen again.
in assassin's creed if you kill 3 civilians then the level ends. i think this is a fair approach. of course in GTA if you kill a civilian then you get his money and his car, although that's not a war crime so much as a regular crime. I don't play the CoD type games so I don't know how they address the issue.
in these games, you can dress up as a petty tyrant or rogue state and get to ignore any UN sponsored regulation, unless you have an hand in designing it.
Isn't it better to stop looking for excuses why not to upgrade the energy (re)distribution infrastructure? Over a large area, there's sun or wind somewhere most of the time, definitely more often than over a small area. Perhaps it's time to stop thinking locally.
Even thinking locally, with an efficient enough panel you'll still get meaningful energy output during a rain storm. It's not total darkness during these conditions, and supplemented with battery backup to even out the load during lean times you should be fine.
That being said, I still prefer ideas like the liquid salt plant outside of Seville. Focus the sun's light with mirrors to a giant thermal battery and use that to power turbines.
want an economic proof that the molten salt storage is a Rube Goldberg ? there are lots of situation, predating the solar craze, where an economic way of storing and releasing energy in bulk would come in handy, and molten salt technologies date back to the late 1950ies. But no one used them, even when "Global warming" was not in the vocabulary and baseload generators were way more efficient at producing low cost energy than peak generators. in most situation, it's better to use a generator at peak capacity 24/7, make it smaller and use storage, than have a bigger one and hover between 90% and 100%. I surmise that the Seville plant gets most of its efficiency from not using solar cells with all the attendant efficiency losses at the panel and trasmission level and use electrical energy to raise temperature in the salt, which I gather is perfectly possible technically. But that's a non sequitur: it's still a problem of energy availability.
Reflectors aren't weightless, and neither are the extensive heat removal systems that will be required to cool a concentrated solar cell in space. I've never seen a representation of a satellite with anything but unconcentrated cells.
Pssst - Although not guaranteed, if they get 44.7% efficiency at 300x normal sunlight... They probably do similarly under 1x sunlight. Claims like the one made don't describe a requirement for that efficiency, they describe an extreme under which the cells can still perform. As in "oooh, we only need one $1000 panel and 297 $10 mirrors, rather than 297 $150 panels"
......And, 297 times the surface, plus the added wiring etc. Only way to measure in a meaningful way is fixed cell, no concentrators, 10+ days during the equinox. Ah, do not forget diesel generators or batteries to guarantee continuous output, will ya?
Can someone explain this to me in idiot? I don't see what the problem is, nor why I should care.
problem:someone made mony using insider information, which is AFAIK a federal crime of felony;
solution: go old school and suspend trading in securities, including bonds and government bonds, from 15 minutes before a potentially market moving news dissemination, to half an hour afterwards.
this was widely used in equity markets before the socalled "liberalizations" came about. Oh, while we're at it, go back to force trading on official markets, of any securities liable to go exchanged in private hands and/or end up in instruments which end up in private hands. No dark pools, no proprietary trading , or other comparable things.
Problem solved.
It is my taxpayer money, and I will gladly pay for that compared to other things. Instead of paying $10,000 to the federal government, I got a bigger refund and only had to pay $7,000 last year because I put some solar panels on my roof and reduced the amount of coal and fracking natural gas I use.
I'll let your money go towards those things like big oil subsidies, corporate bank bailouts, and militarized police.
It's the taxpayers' money. and no one tells them the whole truth. Maybe they can afford it, maybe not. we're not talking about Holliwood actors buying a Tesla to do something for the environment, even if in my fit of rage i'd like to go there wearing a T shirt saying "you just made everything costlier for the rest of us". we're talking about "let them eat cakes"
That's the point, you don't have to use Solar as baseline, especially in the southern half of the country where the demand load is during daylight hours, for air conditioning, not at night, for heat. You use something else for base load, but your demand load during daylight hours dwarfs the amount of power needed for nighttime base load.
If the friggin' various governments would get their heads out of their asses, they'd provision for residential solar with the same degree of government assistance that the power utilities get, and they'd force the utilities into fair market prices for the energy they get from residential solar systems. As it stands right now, the residence is compensated at the lowest price per KWh that the power company charges its customers during the middle of the night when power is cheapest, even though it's distributing that power during the peak of demand, getting three or four times that price from customers. And on top of that, they're wanting to add an extra charge to the bills of residences with solar panels, claiming that they're losing revenue because of those solar panels.
Screw. them.
Here in Italy, it's the other way around. Solar producers gets the highest rate, if they are hybrid producer/consumer they are paid on Gross, not Net (i.e., I produce 50 Kw and consume 30 Kw, I get the revenue on 50 at the high rate and pay normal rates on the 30 consumed), and therefore the utilities are to all intent and purposes unsubsidised.
Thanks for the info, I thought more or less everywhere the model was similar: consumers subsidise solar power. the total here is 10 Bn. Euros per year, and most of it is paid by small/medium businesses.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not just nuclear power plants that generate revenues. Where I live, there's a large wind farm that pays millions a year of other taxpayers' money through council and business taxes: they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.
There, fixed it for you. and recall that the prim promoters of wind and solar brush the necessity of backup, on-call generation under the taxpayer's carpet as well.
Do not think that I am a dr. Strangelove or something: I am just trained in analysing economic alternatives where my money and livelihood are on the table, and there's no taxpayer whom I can pass the buck to. I'd love to see a comprehensive, "all side effects in" study of such things, but all are more or less ass backwards things:" Since renewable energy is good per se, we'll subsidise it to the tune of [insert number of billion Euros here] each year, and therefore it achieves grid parity".
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean. That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty. Not to mention the enormous costs of the structures and transportation of the fuel and whatever.
The amount of money we have spent on Nuclear was a waste compared to much greater advances we could have made in solar to achieve the same output.
Clean or not, in solar Vs. Nuclear one big problem remains, which has conveniently left out of every economic equation: who pays for continuous availability? if any solar plant had to contract as baseline, i.e. find and/or build conventional plants to meet output at night or in bad weather, they'd be up brown creek without a paddle. After all, conventional plants have to state to the grid output and availability at the auction.
I am Italian,and I always read books written in English in the original language. Over the years, I think I bought the "S" in Bezos. As soon as Ebooks came out, I thought about ways to get the books I bought in paper version electronically, and I expected Amazon to offer something like that. After all, they know every book I bought off them over the years, and that I own a Kindle. It does not strike me as such a big insight to offer me, for a fee, my whole library in E-book form.
According to the summary, 30,000 Europeans were killed in car accidents, it doesn't say how many were high speed, but even if only 10% were, that is 3,000 people, about the number killed on 9/11 in the US. The US went to war because those deaths were viewed as being for no good reason. Are traffic fatalities because of reckless high speed driving any better?
yes, because the human mind is programmed to underestimate risks for an individual when he feels he has control over the situation, and to overestimate it in the opposite case. I once met Nassim Taleb, and he told me that most of the fatalities of 9/11 happened after the event; of all the people who renounced flying in favour of driving, a number died simply because even counting the horror, flying is safer than driving. So, when you have something like traffic fatalities, in which:
1. the individual is fully in the loop: 2. the yearly number is high, but the occurences are sparse and average fatalities per accident are low;
3. the frequency is high enough to make it seem an "everyday" occurrence;
the average joe registers "no signal".
the incidence of no.3 is particularly curious, but remember mad cow disease; it started a global scare because the occurrence of the malady in the UK went fro about 70 cases per year to about double, on a 50 millionish population. Want to know how many people die from insect puncture each year?
This can't be right, solar doesn't work, Germany is too far north, the lights must go off every night, PV is a stupid technology, nuclear is the only way!!1 How can this be happening, it must be a liberal media lie put out by the scientifically illiterate eco-nazis... it... it just can't...
And effectively, you are right. renewables, and solar in particular, have a problem of load balancing. they either produce, or they don't, but you cannot flick a switch and produce more energy because the grid wants it. AFAIK no well thought out study has been produced on the costs imposed on other operators and on the system because of this. For example, imagine that while you are happily producing (and consuming: the grid has no meaningful storage capacity) those Terawatts, a naughty cloud interferes: somebody else must be able to substitute solar energy production with something else, which by the way cannot be nuclear, because the ramp time must be near instantaneous, nor coal: so you end up building, at somebody else's expense, a huge park of gas turbines, which are the only viable alternative, in term of ramp time and production capacity.
The BIG snag is that instead of having solar producer either buying the turbine themselves, or contracting for on demand energy to cover a fixed supply, you offload the costs to the "Evil" traditional utilities. The consumer thinks that solar can be viable, at least after huge capital tax breaks, and everyone wins.
A nuclear torpedo does not need to hit.
It only needs to explode close by.
Claiming it only had the yield to kill one ship is just nonsense.
Think about something of the power of an hiroshima bomb.
It easily kills a whole carrier group a dozen times over.
a nuclear tipped torpedo, must, in order:
1. be actively directed onto the target by a stealth sub platform, or be self directed (assuming the carrier has been pinpointed beforehand; 2.evade decoys and active countermeasures, like other torpedoes launched against it; 3. positively identify the primary target, in a target rich environment; 4. get close enough; 5. explode;
Then, since it is quite impossible to hide the use of a nuclear warhead, the powers that be must be ready for a nuclear exchange with the only country that used them in anger. Good luck. And anyway, a nuclear warhead is a model of precision.....so, even a small damage would render the warhead unable to function properly, or at the margin totally non-operational. On the contrary, many military conventional explosives are "deaf", i.e. they do not detonate if you shoot through them.
Pravda has a very good article on how weak the US is in the Pacific Rim, with the main reason that the carrier fleets don't get sunk is because China doesn't really care about the "floating circuses" -- groups of ships which are defenseless against long range sub attacks.
and this information is from the people who were the hapless targets of a neologism, "hull shot", where a NATO sub came so close to a Soviet sub that it was able to shoot photos of the hull. So no, Chinese subs are not , repeat not, the most important danger to Carrier groups. Anti ship missiles are another matter, and China reportedly has fielded a system off Taiwan.
Moreover, China DOES care about the carriers. All its bragging about the adjacent seas cannot be based on "sea denial", but on "sea control". And "sea control", i.e. the ability to conduct more or less unrestricted naval operations, including landings, in an area of interest, is exponentially costlier than seas denial. Just to cite an example, the amount of Chines Naval assets necessary to ensure the blue water operations of China's only aircraft carrier could leave most of China without a meaningful naval presence.
So am I correct in inferring that no one really takes Article 9 very seriously any more?
No, and this is another victory for reality over idealism. History is chock full of those, or at least, of the dead bodies of the hapless victims of ill advised good faith. For reference, see "this is an era of peace", "open covenants openly arrived at", etc. For an explanation why tough, nobody beats General Von Mannerheim, who was quoted as saying, when asked why Finland should have a standing army: "Every country has an Army. Either its own, or an army of occupation"
Slashdot Mirror
Real-estate is already taxed in most places in America. Most European countries also tax cars based on their engine's size.
Same as before:tax authorities do NOT tax the car. they tax the buyer on the transaction, and there's some form of "possession tax". that's not a tax on assets. If it were a tax on the car, a car owned for example by a deceased penniless owner would still pay tax, and above all, it would be economically capable of paying such tax. but it does not: even taxes related on car possession tax the owner, not a car.
Bear in mind that these kind of stamp duties bear no relation of the use of public resources that using a car entails: If I want to tax for that, I'd tax the fuels, and that's exactly what governments do. when they do anything else, like "taxing cars based on engine size", they are simply meddling in people choices unrelated to use of resources and so on. I think that it's "politically convenient" to set up a labor intensive organization to collect and check a taxation which could and is more efficiently collected in another way, and above all it is unrelated to usage, income of the owner, efficiency gains and so on.
It's a common error in European fiscal policy that assets can be taxed. In reality only financial savings and income are taxed, and the final percentage applied is variously disguised as "capital gains tax", or other quibbles.
to clarify further: for an asset to be taxed, in my small world of financial analyst, it must either produce a taxable financial income, which is then taxed, or it must be an acceptable mean of exchange with no or negligible frictional costs. Houses are only an indexation parameter in taxes, since no tax authority whatsoever accepts a lien on 10 square feet as payment: they want hard cash. If the owner-occupier of a house had the opportunity or willingness to put the house in a separate company, it would be clearer still: the company would never make one cent, and it would be taxed on a fictional rent, which by itself is part of the owner's income. Therefore, the owner's income is taxed twice.
So, on bitcoins, the problem is magnified: if it is a mean of exchange, like banknotes, by itself it should not be taxed. the relevant transactions could be taxable, but not the means of exchange: after all, if I buy a car by bank draft or money transfer I do not pay either X or Y depending on how I paid. the effort of the authorities is to preserve the monopoly on fiat currency, that's it.
went through that with my mother. she went through a bout of being insane, but not enough not to ask me to kill her. And I had to say I could not, while both she and I knew it was not the case. Thankfully, she passed away relatively quickly, but I do not think there are crimes bad enough to warrant this as a penalty.
Here in Italy, the only form of broadcast HDTV content is via pay channels. I see them stealing a page out of the mobile phone companies, and include the TV in their contract, so that the early exit penalty would be paying off the TV. they get more consistent revenues, and the HDTV producers "Eat" the retailing margin, or they split.
Only problem, as a consumer, would be if they get the producers to include the ability "brick" the TV remotely (for non payment, for instance) and/or include some proprietary encryption.
Well in this case, apparently not.
I think that's precisely why Apple is being investigated here, what's mere avoidance in other countries sounds like it may well be evasion in Italy.
that's exactly the case. the judiciary in Italy have given an enormously lax interpretation of abuse of law, to the extent that it is in the sole and retrospective interpretation of the tax authorities to say what the law actually intended years ago. Mind you, that leads to byzantine tax laws, since the legislator has no interest whatsoever to do it right the first time.
I am italian, I am not a tax expert but have been involved in these things for professional purposes, and I think that this is the usual govvie blackmail.
Apple does not produce anything in Italy; the local subsidiary is involved in marketing, and own and operates a relatively small number of own brand stores. By "own brand", read:
1. the company selling the goods is really Apple;
2. it always will have its European headquarters in the most favourable tax place, and no, it will not be Italy. deal with it.
so, what is Apple really doing in Italy? practically nothing that it could not do on line: delivering standardized goods to customers. No personalizations, no customer service. So, in a pinch, Apple could leave Italy altogether, tell my daughter to buy the new Iphone on their internet site, free delivery to the home by UPS, and show Italian tax authorities the finger. Results? LESS tax revenues in Italy. Smart, uh?
For those not aware, the real swindle is in Ireland: profits of the Irish subsidiary, which would normally be taxed at an outrageous 12,5% Irish tax rate, are trasferred tax free to Bahamas. So the Irish would have two grounds to do something, because that's the de facto legal residence of the subsidiary, and because Apple would not probably get a better deal elsewhere.
As a Washington State resident, there are many counties that are wood only heating. Pierce and Tacoma have large suburbs and are not exactly off the grid living. They are bigger and can force the smaller population to upgrade. The counties like Stevens, Ferry and Okanogan are mostly wood heated homes. I have no real numbers but out of the 39 counties in Washington, I'd say at least 1/2 have majority of wood only heated homes, we still are a big wild state.
My mothers county has many people that are wood only, and if they went around giving $1000 dollar fines for people burning, they would tar and feather and hold a recall election. Those urban counties are gray haired monsters who know each other and would put pressure to any elected official.
Those poor gray haired women are the Majority of voters, tell them they cant heat their homes. Most of these people live in urban areas that dont have fire departments, police or or trash pick up. Tacoma I'd say is much different, its urban sprawl.
I think that in some parts, the stoves would smoke cloudier for some days, and then they would not be seen again.
42
in assassin's creed if you kill 3 civilians then the level ends. i think this is a fair approach. of course in GTA if you kill a civilian then you get his money and his car, although that's not a war crime so much as a regular crime. I don't play the CoD type games so I don't know how they address the issue.
in these games, you can dress up as a petty tyrant or rogue state and get to ignore any UN sponsored regulation, unless you have an hand in designing it.
Where do you find unamed people? I doubt very small babies would make good security folks.
How can they be unnamed?
They are all named Johnson !!
"[...]but as far as the EU is concerned, this is all about a reduction of waste"
I wonder how many times they shuffled between Strasbourg and Bruxelles while they decided that I do not need three 15 EUR chargers.
Isn't it better to stop looking for excuses why not to upgrade the energy (re)distribution infrastructure? Over a large area, there's sun or wind somewhere most of the time, definitely more often than over a small area. Perhaps it's time to stop thinking locally.
Even thinking locally, with an efficient enough panel you'll still get meaningful energy output during a rain storm. It's not total darkness during these conditions, and supplemented with battery backup to even out the load during lean times you should be fine.
That being said, I still prefer ideas like the liquid salt plant outside of Seville. Focus the sun's light with mirrors to a giant thermal battery and use that to power turbines.
want an economic proof that the molten salt storage is a Rube Goldberg ? there are lots of situation, predating the solar craze, where an economic way of storing and releasing energy in bulk would come in handy, and molten salt technologies date back to the late 1950ies. But no one used them, even when "Global warming" was not in the vocabulary and baseload generators were way more efficient at producing low cost energy than peak generators.
in most situation, it's better to use a generator at peak capacity 24/7, make it smaller and use storage, than have a bigger one and hover between 90% and 100%. I surmise that the Seville plant gets most of its efficiency from not using solar cells with all the attendant efficiency losses at the panel and trasmission level and use electrical energy to raise temperature in the salt, which I gather is perfectly possible technically. But that's a non sequitur: it's still a problem of energy availability.
Reflectors aren't weightless, and neither are the extensive heat removal systems that will be required to cool a concentrated solar cell in space. I've never seen a representation of a satellite with anything but unconcentrated cells. Pssst - Although not guaranteed, if they get 44.7% efficiency at 300x normal sunlight... They probably do similarly under 1x sunlight. Claims like the one made don't describe a requirement for that efficiency, they describe an extreme under which the cells can still perform. As in "oooh, we only need one $1000 panel and 297 $10 mirrors, rather than 297 $150 panels"
......And, 297 times the surface, plus the added wiring etc. Only way to measure in a meaningful way is fixed cell, no concentrators, 10+ days during the equinox. Ah, do not forget diesel generators or batteries to guarantee continuous output, will ya?
Can someone explain this to me in idiot? I don't see what the problem is, nor why I should care.
problem:someone made mony using insider information, which is AFAIK a federal crime of felony;
solution: go old school and suspend trading in securities, including bonds and government bonds, from 15 minutes before a potentially market moving news dissemination, to half an hour afterwards.
this was widely used in equity markets before the socalled "liberalizations" came about. Oh, while we're at it, go back to force trading on official markets, of any securities liable to go exchanged in private hands and/or end up in instruments which end up in private hands. No dark pools, no proprietary trading , or other comparable things.
Problem solved.
It is my taxpayer money, and I will gladly pay for that compared to other things. Instead of paying $10,000 to the federal government, I got a bigger refund and only had to pay $7,000 last year because I put some solar panels on my roof and reduced the amount of coal and fracking natural gas I use.
I'll let your money go towards those things like big oil subsidies, corporate bank bailouts, and militarized police.
It's the taxpayers' money. and no one tells them the whole truth. Maybe they can afford it, maybe not. we're not talking about Holliwood actors buying a Tesla to do something for the environment, even if in my fit of rage i'd like to go there wearing a T shirt saying "you just made everything costlier for the rest of us". we're talking about "let them eat cakes"
That's the point, you don't have to use Solar as baseline, especially in the southern half of the country where the demand load is during daylight hours, for air conditioning, not at night, for heat. You use something else for base load, but your demand load during daylight hours dwarfs the amount of power needed for nighttime base load. If the friggin' various governments would get their heads out of their asses, they'd provision for residential solar with the same degree of government assistance that the power utilities get, and they'd force the utilities into fair market prices for the energy they get from residential solar systems. As it stands right now, the residence is compensated at the lowest price per KWh that the power company charges its customers during the middle of the night when power is cheapest, even though it's distributing that power during the peak of demand, getting three or four times that price from customers. And on top of that, they're wanting to add an extra charge to the bills of residences with solar panels, claiming that they're losing revenue because of those solar panels. Screw. them.
Here in Italy, it's the other way around. Solar producers gets the highest rate, if they are hybrid producer/consumer they are paid on Gross, not Net (i.e., I produce 50 Kw and consume 30 Kw, I get the revenue on 50 at the high rate and pay normal rates on the 30 consumed), and therefore the utilities are to all intent and purposes unsubsidised.
Thanks for the info, I thought more or less everywhere the model was similar: consumers subsidise solar power. the total here is 10 Bn. Euros per year, and most of it is paid by small/medium businesses.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not just nuclear power plants that generate revenues. Where I live, there's a large wind farm that pays millions a year of other taxpayers' money through council and business taxes: they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.
There, fixed it for you. and recall that the prim promoters of wind and solar brush the necessity of backup, on-call generation under the taxpayer's carpet as well.
Do not think that I am a dr. Strangelove or something: I am just trained in analysing economic alternatives where my money and livelihood are on the table, and there's no taxpayer whom I can pass the buck to. I'd love to see a comprehensive, "all side effects in" study of such things, but all are more or less ass backwards things:" Since renewable energy is good per se, we'll subsidise it to the tune of [insert number of billion Euros here] each year, and therefore it achieves grid parity".
I have read that nuclear is not really net clean. That the mining and preparation of the nuclear fuel is quite carbon dirty. Not to mention the enormous costs of the structures and transportation of the fuel and whatever. The amount of money we have spent on Nuclear was a waste compared to much greater advances we could have made in solar to achieve the same output.
Clean or not, in solar Vs. Nuclear one big problem remains, which has conveniently left out of every economic equation: who pays for continuous availability? if any solar plant had to contract as baseline, i.e. find and/or build conventional plants to meet output at night or in bad weather, they'd be up brown creek without a paddle. After all, conventional plants have to state to the grid output and availability at the auction.
I am Italian,and I always read books written in English in the original language. Over the years, I think I bought the "S" in Bezos. As soon as Ebooks came out, I thought about ways to get the books I bought in paper version electronically, and I expected Amazon to offer something like that.
After all, they know every book I bought off them over the years, and that I own a Kindle. It does not strike me as such a big insight to offer me, for a fee, my whole library in E-book form.
you assume the effect is ended, which does not strike a particular chord with me. My wife, for one, is now scared of flying.
[...]
According to the summary, 30,000 Europeans were killed in car accidents, it doesn't say how many were high speed, but even if only 10% were, that is 3,000 people, about the number killed on 9/11 in the US. The US went to war because those deaths were viewed as being for no good reason. Are traffic fatalities because of reckless high speed driving any better?
yes, because the human mind is programmed to underestimate risks for an individual when he feels he has control over the situation, and to overestimate it in the opposite case.
I once met Nassim Taleb, and he told me that most of the fatalities of 9/11 happened after the event; of all the people who renounced flying in favour of driving, a number died simply because even counting the horror, flying is safer than driving.
So, when you have something like traffic fatalities, in which:
1. the individual is fully in the loop:
2. the yearly number is high, but the occurences are sparse and average fatalities per accident are low;
3. the frequency is high enough to make it seem an "everyday" occurrence;
the average joe registers "no signal".
the incidence of no.3 is particularly curious, but remember mad cow disease; it started a global scare because the occurrence of the malady in the UK went fro about 70 cases per year to about double, on a 50 millionish population. Want to know how many people die from insect puncture each year?
This can't be right, solar doesn't work, Germany is too far north, the lights must go off every night, PV is a stupid technology, nuclear is the only way!!1 How can this be happening, it must be a liberal media lie put out by the scientifically illiterate eco-nazis... it... it just can't...
And effectively, you are right. renewables, and solar in particular, have a problem of load balancing. they either produce, or they don't, but you cannot flick a switch and produce more energy because the grid wants it. AFAIK no well thought out study has been produced on the costs imposed on other operators and on the system because of this.
For example, imagine that while you are happily producing (and consuming: the grid has no meaningful storage capacity) those Terawatts, a naughty cloud interferes: somebody else must be able to substitute solar energy production with something else, which by the way cannot be nuclear, because the ramp time must be near instantaneous, nor coal: so you end up building, at somebody else's expense, a huge park of gas turbines, which are the only viable alternative, in term of ramp time and production capacity.
The BIG snag is that instead of having solar producer either buying the turbine themselves, or contracting for on demand energy to cover a fixed supply, you offload the costs to the "Evil" traditional utilities. The consumer thinks that solar can be viable, at least after huge capital tax breaks, and everyone wins.
A nuclear torpedo does not need to hit. It only needs to explode close by. Claiming it only had the yield to kill one ship is just nonsense. Think about something of the power of an hiroshima bomb. It easily kills a whole carrier group a dozen times over.
a nuclear tipped torpedo, must, in order:
1. be actively directed onto the target by a stealth sub platform, or be self directed (assuming the carrier has been pinpointed beforehand;
2.evade decoys and active countermeasures, like other torpedoes launched against it;
3. positively identify the primary target, in a target rich environment;
4. get close enough;
5. explode;
Then, since it is quite impossible to hide the use of a nuclear warhead, the powers that be must be ready for a nuclear exchange with the only country that used them in anger. Good luck. And anyway, a nuclear warhead is a model of precision.....so, even a small damage would render the warhead unable to function properly, or at the margin totally non-operational. On the contrary, many military conventional explosives are "deaf", i.e. they do not detonate if you shoot through them.
Pravda has a very good article on how weak the US is in the Pacific Rim, with the main reason that the carrier fleets don't get sunk is because China doesn't really care about the "floating circuses" -- groups of ships which are defenseless against long range sub attacks.
and this information is from the people who were the hapless targets of a neologism, "hull shot", where a NATO sub came so close to a Soviet sub that it was able to shoot photos of the hull. So no, Chinese subs are not , repeat not, the most important danger to Carrier groups. Anti ship missiles are another matter, and China reportedly has fielded a system off Taiwan.
Moreover, China DOES care about the carriers. All its bragging about the adjacent seas cannot be based on "sea denial", but on "sea control". And "sea control", i.e. the ability to conduct more or less unrestricted naval operations, including landings, in an area of interest, is exponentially costlier than seas denial. Just to cite an example, the amount of Chines Naval assets necessary to ensure the blue water operations of China's only aircraft carrier could leave most of China without a meaningful naval presence.
So am I correct in inferring that no one really takes Article 9 very seriously any more?
No, and this is another victory for reality over idealism. History is chock full of those, or at least, of the dead bodies of the hapless victims of ill advised good faith. For reference, see "this is an era of peace", "open covenants openly arrived at", etc.
For an explanation why tough, nobody beats General Von Mannerheim, who was quoted as saying, when asked why Finland should have a standing army: "Every country has an Army. Either its own, or an army of occupation"