I wonder how important that actually is. Google, for example, has English-speaking offices in Germany, France and Switzerland. Having English as the native language makes it easy to recruit locals, but for high-skill jobs you're likely expecting people to relocate anyway, and Paris is a lot easier to persuade people to move to than Cork.
You assumed 1kw/m^2 which is wildly wildly optimistic.
You really should read the entire post before you reply. I started with that as an initial approximation and then refined it to assume daylight hours and solar panel efficiency. You seem to have skipped from the start to the end and completely ignored all of the bit in the middle with the actual calculations.
The first computer I had with 512MB of RAM ran Windows 2000, StarOffice, Visual Studio, and Netscape Communicator, with WinAMP playing music in the background. It didn't run them all at the same time, but it typically had 2-3 of them running at once. The monitor was only 1024x768, and wasn't using a compositing windowing system so I realise the requirements for the graphics will be higher on a modern phone, but is 512MB really such a small amount for a device that's typically running a single user-facing application at any given time?
There was a study a little over 10 years ago that measured productivity in a variety of 'knowledge worker' applications and concluded that productivity peaks at about 20 hours per week, then plateaus to about 40, and then drops off. This is particularly noticeable in something like programming, where a small mistake made when tired and not thinking straight can lead to 10 hours of debugging the next week. People who work a solid 4-5 hours a day are likely to be a lot more productive than people who are physically present and trying to work for 10.
A lot of that was due to market forces pushing coal out and natural gas in as a fuel of choice. So thereâ(TM)s no evidence a tax would change things
These two are contradictory. Fossil fuels were phased out because they were not price-competitive with the alternatives. A tax that made them even less price competitive would therefore be expected to increase the rate and degree to which they were phased out.
I wonder if the tipping point will come when off-the-shelf solar is cheap enough that it's the go-to for developing countries. I did some work a while ago with a non-profit in Tanzania and I they ended up deploying solar panels and batteries in a bunch of places because that gave them a more reliable power supply than the mains electricity. I smaller villages, they haven't run out grid power and they probably now won't because local solar generation is a lot cheaper. The big win for solar in this context is the low infrastructure cost. A lower panel is cheaper than a diesel generator and doesn't need you to have a supply chain for the fuel.
That didn't seem right at first glance to me, so I've run the numbers:
According to the DBEIS report, the UK consumed about 1.6PWh in 2017. That works out at a little under 200GW average load. As a starting very rough cut, let's assume 100% efficient solar power, which gives 1kW per square metre. That means we'd need 200,000,000 square metres of solar panels (assuming 24 hours of sunshine), or a square roughly 15km on each side covered in solar panels. Now, of course, we don't get sunshine 24 hours a day, and the weather is often pretty miserable, so let's say we get 6 hours a day. That brings the size of our square up to almost 30km. Now let's look at efficiency. Commercial panels are now around 20% efficient, so that brings us up to a 60x60km square (3,600 square kilometres) of solar panels to power the UK.
The land area of the UK is estimated to to be 241,930 square kilometres, so we're looking at around 1.5% of the total land area of the UK covered in solar panels. That's quite a lot, but it doesn't seem impossible, particularly as solar isn't the only form of renewable generation and that would be coupled with hydro (lots of rainy mountains in Scotland and Wales) and wind. The storage issue is probably more pressing than the land area. If you drive through rural bits of the UK, you'll already see quite a few farmers have started deploying solar panels in a few of their fields because they're making more money from selling the power than from the crops.
Why this implication? Hot implies high temperature, wind is caused by temperature differences. Wind is often highest in the summer, because more energy is being pumped into the atmosphere by the sun and causes air to move around. Texas appears to have higher average wind speeds from February to July, lower speeds from August to January, but not by a very large margin (20%).
A huge part of Ireland's economy is a result of being a country that has lower corporation tax rates[1] than most of western Europe, good connections to the rest of the EU, and is part of the common market and so can import / export with the rest of the EU without any tariffs or customs inspections. Remove them from the EU, and expect to see most big businesses leave.
[1] Not threatened by this ruling. They can keep their 12.5% rate for everyone, just not the special Apple 0.005% rate.
Nope, the EU is enforcing Irelands tax laws on Ireland. Corporation tax rates in the EU are 9-35%, with around 15-25% in most places where you'd actually want to set up a company. Corporation tax rates in Ireland are 12.5% and 25% for trading and non-trading income. Apple's tax rate in Ireland is 0.005%. The EU is simply saying that Apple has to pay corporation tax at the rate that the Irish tax code defines it, not at a special Apple rate.
That argument makes no sense at all. Ireland has low corporation tax rates. Their tax rate of 12.5% is one of the lowest in the EU. This makes Ireland attractive to multinationals that want to have a single presence in the EU and put their corporate income in a low-tax country. This is completely fine, within the rules of the EU, and no one is objecting to it.. They then offered a special deal to Apple, where they would pay only 0.005% tax. This is in violation of the state aid laws, that don't allow special deals for individual companies. It would probably be fine for Ireland to have a 0.005% tax rate for all tech companies, but it's not fine for them to have a special rate just for Apple, because that distorts the market and gives Apple a big competitive advantage over competitors that have to pay the 12.5% rate.
Yes, because leaving the EU is working out so well for the UK, I'm sure it will work out even better for a country with a much smaller economy, a large chunk of which is based on being a convenient place for multinational corporations to put their EU presence.
Yes, they can. It is entirely fine for Ireland to set their corporation tax rate to zero. It is not, however, fine for Ireland to set Apple's tax rate to 0.005% (not a typo), but keep everyone else's at 25/12.5%(non-trading income / trading income), because that's state aid to a specific company. This is in violation of the free trade treaties that Ireland signed with the EU, which (try to) guarantee a level playing field for companies competing within the single market.
An EU study published a couple of years ago and quietly ignored until a couple of months ago concluded that, aside from a very small number of very popular things for a short window after release, there was no impact on revenues from piracy.
I didn't find that at all surprising. There are basically four kinds of people in the relevant markets:
People that can't afford the product at all. If these pirate, you lose nothing and you might gain from word-of-mouth advertising. They will often be able to afford not to pirate when they are older, so getting them interested in your products may be a good long-term investment.
People with a massive sense of entitlement that will pirate if it's at all possible and hate the idea of actually paying for a thing that they enjoy. You don't lose much from these people pirating, because they're not going to pay anyway. They're annoying, but basically nothing you do will make them into paying customers and anything that you try will negatively impact people in the next category.
People that want to pay a reasonable amount for the product in a form that they can enjoy, but will pirate if it's overpriced / inconvenient / not available. These are the ones that you should be focusing on, because these are the ones that you can turn into paying customers if you remove the DRM, delayed releases, region locking, and other impediments.
People who won't pirate at all. You also need to be careful about these ones, because for them piracy isn't the alternative, giving up your product entirely is. If someone stops paying a cable subscription and pirates your show (for example) then there's a good chance that you can get them back as a customer later. If, on the other hand, they stop watching TV entirely, then you're much less likely to get them back. Again, customer-hostile policies are likely to push these ones away.
Remember how the music industry said that DRM-free music downloads would kill the industry? And how, when Apple and Amazon started offering DRM-free much downloads their profits jumped to record highs?
Depends on how often you buy beans. Ground coffee starts to lose its flavour after a few days. If you're buying the coffee weekly, that's fine. If you want to buy a month's supply, then having a grinder at home will improve the quality noticeably. I typically get a couple of months worth of beans when the ones I like are discounted (the place I buy them from does 10-20% off every couple of months) and they still taste good freshly ground after they've been in the cupboard for that time. I grind the coffee at home and take a week's worth into work in an airtight container and can taste the difference by the end of the week.
The problem isn't the people who spend $5 on a cup of coffee as a luxury, the problem is the people that spend $5/day on Starbucks coffee because they think $5 is cheap, don't realise that they're spending 10% of their disposable income on coffee, and then complain that they can't afford other luxuries.
I've had several acquaintances that fall into this category: they'll buy coffee-shop coffee every day (sometimes multiple times), or other small recurring expenses that don't add much to their quality of life but do add up to a big chunk over the year, and then complain that they can't afford small luxuries that cost far less than their recurring habit.
I just looked on amazon, you can get a coffee grinder as cheap as $6
That's probably a blade grinder, which splatters the oil all over the inside of the machine rather than leaving it with the grinds. You're better off buying pre-ground coffee than using one of those.
and a coffee press as cheap as $5
You probably want to pay 2-3 times that. I had a couple that were about that price and both died of thermal shock (pouring boiling water into them first thing in the morning caused the glass to break - having broken glass and boiling water explode over the kitchen is not a very fun start to the day). That said, you probably can get away with a lot less than $100 for both the grinder and the machine. The Aeropress is pretty cheap and produces very nice coffee.
Because the second best[*] way to reduce bitterness while still having a strong coffee is to use a fast brewer that reduces the time the grounds are exposed to hot water, it also means using more beans
Are you sure about that? Faster brews tend to get the bitter flavours but lose the richness. I drink a mocha / mysore blend and leave it in a cafetiere for about 10-15 minutes and get a rich but not very bitter cup. When I was in a lab with others who had similar coffee tastes to myself, we used a drip filter machine. Both methods have lots of time with the water exposed to the coffee. In contrast, if I try to use the same beans in the espresso machine at work I end up with something bitter and weak.
I wonder how much people just don't think about how much things cost. $2.50 is a sufficiently small amount that it's not worth keeping track of. $2.50 a couple of times a day feels psychologically like it's still in the noise. Over $1,200 per year feels a lot more, but it's not until you do the calculation that you realise how much you're spending. If at that price it still does seem worth it, great, but it might not be the best way of translating $1,200 into an improvement in your quality of living.
For coffee, the real difference is likely the capital cost. If you like espresso, then it costs a few hundred dollars to get a good machine. Even if you like filtered coffee (which is about the cheapest to produce) then you get a much better cup if you grind your own beans, which means buying a grinder as well as whatever you're using to make coffee, which can add up to a hundred dollars or so. In contrast, tea can be made with just a ten dollar kettle.
Of course, this argument goes out of the window with places like Starbucks, where their entire business model revolves around making terrible coffee and then selling you syrups and creams to disguise the taste.
I'm not sure how you get to $850. Assuming one cup a day, it's $913/year. Assuming only week days, it's $652/year. Assuming two cups per week day, it's $1,300. $1,300/year is a sizeable chunk of change, particularly since a lot of businesses will happily install a coffee machine and pay for beans if it saves them lost productivity from people popping out to buy coffee.
There are lots of things that are cheaper at home. Drinking a beer at home is a lot cheaper than drinking one at the pub, for example. You're not just paying for the drink, you're paying for the use of a big space where you can talk to other people. The problem isn't $2.50 coffee (actually, I'd be astonished if I could buy coffee that cheap around here), it's buying $2.50 coffee every day. Even once a day each week, that's $50/month on coffee. Two coffees a day and it's $100/month. Give that up, and you can afford a nice holiday somewhere, or pay back your mortgage earlier.
You are easily frightened. If you click on most of it, it will launch the app store and show you a big banner telling you how awesome Apple thinks High Sierra is. If you click on the 'later' button, it will go away and bug you later. If you click on the 'install' button, it will launch the installer, which will then give you an option to cancel the installation. Which one of these possible outcomes causes a reaction of deathly fear?
I'm not sure. This is really a local privilege escalation vulnerability. These are bad, but they're also not uncommon. I can't remember a single OS X / macOS security update that that didn't fix at least one of these (especially since Google's Project Zero started looking for them). The big difference for this one is that it's easy to explain to a non-technical user.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how important that actually is. Google, for example, has English-speaking offices in Germany, France and Switzerland. Having English as the native language makes it easy to recruit locals, but for high-skill jobs you're likely expecting people to relocate anyway, and Paris is a lot easier to persuade people to move to than Cork.
You assumed 1kw/m^2 which is wildly wildly optimistic.
You really should read the entire post before you reply. I started with that as an initial approximation and then refined it to assume daylight hours and solar panel efficiency. You seem to have skipped from the start to the end and completely ignored all of the bit in the middle with the actual calculations.
The first computer I had with 512MB of RAM ran Windows 2000, StarOffice, Visual Studio, and Netscape Communicator, with WinAMP playing music in the background. It didn't run them all at the same time, but it typically had 2-3 of them running at once. The monitor was only 1024x768, and wasn't using a compositing windowing system so I realise the requirements for the graphics will be higher on a modern phone, but is 512MB really such a small amount for a device that's typically running a single user-facing application at any given time?
There was a study a little over 10 years ago that measured productivity in a variety of 'knowledge worker' applications and concluded that productivity peaks at about 20 hours per week, then plateaus to about 40, and then drops off. This is particularly noticeable in something like programming, where a small mistake made when tired and not thinking straight can lead to 10 hours of debugging the next week. People who work a solid 4-5 hours a day are likely to be a lot more productive than people who are physically present and trying to work for 10.
A lot of that was due to market forces pushing coal out and natural gas in as a fuel of choice. So thereâ(TM)s no evidence a tax would change things
These two are contradictory. Fossil fuels were phased out because they were not price-competitive with the alternatives. A tax that made them even less price competitive would therefore be expected to increase the rate and degree to which they were phased out.
I wonder if the tipping point will come when off-the-shelf solar is cheap enough that it's the go-to for developing countries. I did some work a while ago with a non-profit in Tanzania and I they ended up deploying solar panels and batteries in a bunch of places because that gave them a more reliable power supply than the mains electricity. I smaller villages, they haven't run out grid power and they probably now won't because local solar generation is a lot cheaper. The big win for solar in this context is the low infrastructure cost. A lower panel is cheaper than a diesel generator and doesn't need you to have a supply chain for the fuel.
According to the DBEIS report, the UK consumed about 1.6PWh in 2017. That works out at a little under 200GW average load. As a starting very rough cut, let's assume 100% efficient solar power, which gives 1kW per square metre. That means we'd need 200,000,000 square metres of solar panels (assuming 24 hours of sunshine), or a square roughly 15km on each side covered in solar panels. Now, of course, we don't get sunshine 24 hours a day, and the weather is often pretty miserable, so let's say we get 6 hours a day. That brings the size of our square up to almost 30km. Now let's look at efficiency. Commercial panels are now around 20% efficient, so that brings us up to a 60x60km square (3,600 square kilometres) of solar panels to power the UK.
The land area of the UK is estimated to to be 241,930 square kilometres, so we're looking at around 1.5% of the total land area of the UK covered in solar panels. That's quite a lot, but it doesn't seem impossible, particularly as solar isn't the only form of renewable generation and that would be coupled with hydro (lots of rainy mountains in Scotland and Wales) and wind. The storage issue is probably more pressing than the land area. If you drive through rural bits of the UK, you'll already see quite a few farmers have started deploying solar panels in a few of their fields because they're making more money from selling the power than from the crops.
When it's hot, and therefore not windy
Why this implication? Hot implies high temperature, wind is caused by temperature differences. Wind is often highest in the summer, because more energy is being pumped into the atmosphere by the sun and causes air to move around. Texas appears to have higher average wind speeds from February to July, lower speeds from August to January, but not by a very large margin (20%).
[1] Not threatened by this ruling. They can keep their 12.5% rate for everyone, just not the special Apple 0.005% rate.
Nope, the EU is enforcing Irelands tax laws on Ireland. Corporation tax rates in the EU are 9-35%, with around 15-25% in most places where you'd actually want to set up a company. Corporation tax rates in Ireland are 12.5% and 25% for trading and non-trading income. Apple's tax rate in Ireland is 0.005%. The EU is simply saying that Apple has to pay corporation tax at the rate that the Irish tax code defines it, not at a special Apple rate.
That argument makes no sense at all. Ireland has low corporation tax rates. Their tax rate of 12.5% is one of the lowest in the EU. This makes Ireland attractive to multinationals that want to have a single presence in the EU and put their corporate income in a low-tax country. This is completely fine, within the rules of the EU, and no one is objecting to it.. They then offered a special deal to Apple, where they would pay only 0.005% tax. This is in violation of the state aid laws, that don't allow special deals for individual companies. It would probably be fine for Ireland to have a 0.005% tax rate for all tech companies, but it's not fine for them to have a special rate just for Apple, because that distorts the market and gives Apple a big competitive advantage over competitors that have to pay the 12.5% rate.
Yes, because leaving the EU is working out so well for the UK, I'm sure it will work out even better for a country with a much smaller economy, a large chunk of which is based on being a convenient place for multinational corporations to put their EU presence.
Yes, they can. It is entirely fine for Ireland to set their corporation tax rate to zero. It is not, however, fine for Ireland to set Apple's tax rate to 0.005% (not a typo), but keep everyone else's at 25/12.5%(non-trading income / trading income), because that's state aid to a specific company. This is in violation of the free trade treaties that Ireland signed with the EU, which (try to) guarantee a level playing field for companies competing within the single market.
An EU study published a couple of years ago and quietly ignored until a couple of months ago concluded that, aside from a very small number of very popular things for a short window after release, there was no impact on revenues from piracy.
I didn't find that at all surprising. There are basically four kinds of people in the relevant markets:
Remember how the music industry said that DRM-free music downloads would kill the industry? And how, when Apple and Amazon started offering DRM-free much downloads their profits jumped to record highs?
You make a good point, I'd feel very silly wearing my Gentleman's Single-use Unlubricated Monocles at home!
Depends on how often you buy beans. Ground coffee starts to lose its flavour after a few days. If you're buying the coffee weekly, that's fine. If you want to buy a month's supply, then having a grinder at home will improve the quality noticeably. I typically get a couple of months worth of beans when the ones I like are discounted (the place I buy them from does 10-20% off every couple of months) and they still taste good freshly ground after they've been in the cupboard for that time. I grind the coffee at home and take a week's worth into work in an airtight container and can taste the difference by the end of the week.
The problem isn't the people who spend $5 on a cup of coffee as a luxury, the problem is the people that spend $5/day on Starbucks coffee because they think $5 is cheap, don't realise that they're spending 10% of their disposable income on coffee, and then complain that they can't afford other luxuries.
I've had several acquaintances that fall into this category: they'll buy coffee-shop coffee every day (sometimes multiple times), or other small recurring expenses that don't add much to their quality of life but do add up to a big chunk over the year, and then complain that they can't afford small luxuries that cost far less than their recurring habit.
I just looked on amazon, you can get a coffee grinder as cheap as $6
That's probably a blade grinder, which splatters the oil all over the inside of the machine rather than leaving it with the grinds. You're better off buying pre-ground coffee than using one of those.
and a coffee press as cheap as $5
You probably want to pay 2-3 times that. I had a couple that were about that price and both died of thermal shock (pouring boiling water into them first thing in the morning caused the glass to break - having broken glass and boiling water explode over the kitchen is not a very fun start to the day). That said, you probably can get away with a lot less than $100 for both the grinder and the machine. The Aeropress is pretty cheap and produces very nice coffee.
Because the second best[*] way to reduce bitterness while still having a strong coffee is to use a fast brewer that reduces the time the grounds are exposed to hot water, it also means using more beans
Are you sure about that? Faster brews tend to get the bitter flavours but lose the richness. I drink a mocha / mysore blend and leave it in a cafetiere for about 10-15 minutes and get a rich but not very bitter cup. When I was in a lab with others who had similar coffee tastes to myself, we used a drip filter machine. Both methods have lots of time with the water exposed to the coffee. In contrast, if I try to use the same beans in the espresso machine at work I end up with something bitter and weak.
I wonder how much people just don't think about how much things cost. $2.50 is a sufficiently small amount that it's not worth keeping track of. $2.50 a couple of times a day feels psychologically like it's still in the noise. Over $1,200 per year feels a lot more, but it's not until you do the calculation that you realise how much you're spending. If at that price it still does seem worth it, great, but it might not be the best way of translating $1,200 into an improvement in your quality of living.
For coffee, the real difference is likely the capital cost. If you like espresso, then it costs a few hundred dollars to get a good machine. Even if you like filtered coffee (which is about the cheapest to produce) then you get a much better cup if you grind your own beans, which means buying a grinder as well as whatever you're using to make coffee, which can add up to a hundred dollars or so. In contrast, tea can be made with just a ten dollar kettle.
Of course, this argument goes out of the window with places like Starbucks, where their entire business model revolves around making terrible coffee and then selling you syrups and creams to disguise the taste.
I'm not sure how you get to $850. Assuming one cup a day, it's $913/year. Assuming only week days, it's $652/year. Assuming two cups per week day, it's $1,300. $1,300/year is a sizeable chunk of change, particularly since a lot of businesses will happily install a coffee machine and pay for beans if it saves them lost productivity from people popping out to buy coffee.
There are lots of things that are cheaper at home. Drinking a beer at home is a lot cheaper than drinking one at the pub, for example. You're not just paying for the drink, you're paying for the use of a big space where you can talk to other people. The problem isn't $2.50 coffee (actually, I'd be astonished if I could buy coffee that cheap around here), it's buying $2.50 coffee every day. Even once a day each week, that's $50/month on coffee. Two coffees a day and it's $100/month. Give that up, and you can afford a nice holiday somewhere, or pay back your mortgage earlier.
I am deathly afraid of clicking by accident
You are easily frightened. If you click on most of it, it will launch the app store and show you a big banner telling you how awesome Apple thinks High Sierra is. If you click on the 'later' button, it will go away and bug you later. If you click on the 'install' button, it will launch the installer, which will then give you an option to cancel the installation. Which one of these possible outcomes causes a reaction of deathly fear?
I'm not sure. This is really a local privilege escalation vulnerability. These are bad, but they're also not uncommon. I can't remember a single OS X / macOS security update that that didn't fix at least one of these (especially since Google's Project Zero started looking for them). The big difference for this one is that it's easy to explain to a non-technical user.