Social Security has always been a pay-as-you-go system, regardless of the public's general misconception about it as "savings" or "investment". The current version of it, adopted from the recommendations of the 1983 Greenspan commission, does have the Boomer generation overpay -- but the commission's plan, which Congress promised to follow, was that the rest of the federal government would run a balanced budget, the national debt would slowly roll over into the SS trust fund, and when the Boomers retired those bonds would be paid for by borrowing from the public again. About the time the last of the Boomers died, the SS trust fund and the US public debt would sit where they were in the mid 1980s, adjusted for population, inflation, and productivity gains. Except for the balanced budget part, things are playing out very close to the commission's forecasts.
After the Boomers, the system reverts to complete pay-as-you-go, requiring a stable 6.2% of GDP. Everyone's forecasts for outlays shows them to be stable, from the SSA itself to the most conservative think tanks. Unfortunately, the commission assumed that future gains from productivity would be shared across the entire spectrum of income; if that had happened, the debate we would be having today would be regarding a permanent small adjustment of the SS tax rates down. But the productivity gains for the last 20 years have been largely captured by those making more than the SS cap, so are not being taxed. A small change in the cap formula, phased in over a decade, would erase the problem entirely.
Productivity gains are why it's not a Ponzi scheme. If you don't include such gains, you simply get the wrong answer.
The word I'm hearing from friends at CES is that the most common question being asked of the makers of the new tablets is, "What's your market look like when Apple brings out the iPad II and drops the price for the base model of the original to $299?" A lot of business types seem to think that's likely sometime this year...
In 1975,
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln computer science department got a 16-bit minicomputer.
The hard disk drive took up the bottom couple of feet of a rack.
The thing I remember about it was not the storage capacity,
but the time it took to spin up.
In order to help maintain a constant speed,
the unit had a 30-40 pound steel disk mounted on the shaft below the disk platters
to provide rotational inertia.
Took somewhere between two and three minutes to bring that sucker up to speed.
Up on the shelf here is a laptop with a 386SX, originally purchased in 1992. The last time I had it out was about six months ago, and it still booted. Manchester Computer Center Linux distribution and Bellcore's MGR windowing system running on the monochrome 640x480 passive matrix LCD display.
Almost caused a riot with it on a flight from New Jersey to Denver one night in early 1993, I think it was. I had it out on the seatback tray, editing a text document filled with formatting commands modeled after troff in one window using something vi-like, and compiling something sizable in another. Nothing fancy, but troff and scrolling make output are distinctive. A guy walking back from the restroom at the rear of the plan suddenly stops and YELLS down the length of the plane, "Hey! This guy's got UNIX running on a LAPTOP!" The next thing I knew there were a half dozen guys hanging over the back of my seat, all asking questions at the same time. The flight attendants were NOT happy.
Absolutely correct.
The debate is not about whether internet access service should be regulated,
but how to regulate it.
For various reasons,
the FCC decided initially that it would be regulated as an "information service" rather than as a "communication service."
I was involved in the industry at the time,
and while I understood the reasons why the FCC made that choice,
I argued that this would be a serious mistake in the long term.
When I had the opportunity to discuss matters with senior management,
I advised them that they should act as if
there were basic internet access and separate information services,
even though they were not required to.
I argued that their choice was to behave as if
basic internet access
(here's your IP address, and everyone gets honest best-effort packet delivery service)
were a communication service,
or someday they would have that behavior imposed on them by the government.
And if they waited until the behavior was imposed from the outside,
it would be much more painful than doing it from the beginning.
I wasn't making a statement about whether biased traffic shaping was good or bad;
I was simply predicting what would happen.
For a lot of years
the big ISPs behaved in a manner that kept the basic communication service intact.
Only in the last few years have
they become egregious about traffic shaping and blocking.
And sure enough,
here comes the regulation.
And it's going to be painful, and it's going to be ugly,
but it is inevitable that the big ISPs will be required to behave as if internet access is a basic communication service.
When I was younger, I did a number of projects in APL.
Typing speed was more likely to be characters-per-minute, not WPM.
For the most part,
touch-typing APL is a null concept;
almost everyone spends a fair amount of time hunting for the particular special symbol that they need.
APL might be the only programming language where
it would be faster to scribble stuff on a touchscreen with a stylus
than to use a keyboard:^)
So they shut down enough capacity so that they had to rely on very expensive plants.
One of the big expenses that deregulation was supposed to do away with was the excess generating capacity that vertically-integrated monopolies kept on hand in order to meet their reliability targets. Economists at the Cato Institute -- a pro-free-market bunch if there ever was one -- have now concluded that for a free market to avoid the kind of behavior you mention, there has to be extra generating capacity available. In fact, they conclude that you need more excess capacity to make a free market work properly than the old integrated utilities kept on hand.
Other than in relatively obscure papers, they don't run around telling people that a free market in electricity is probably an inferior approach, but they have quit actively supporting electricity deregulation.
Oddly enough, I am driven to use the self-checkout at the grocery because of the incompetence of the baggers, and the stores' antagonism towards letting you pack your own bags at the regular checkout lines. On a typical stop, I can pack everything I have except one light bulky item -- eg, the multi-roll package of toilet paper -- in my canvas bag, the bag sits nice and stable, and nothing gets crushed. With the store baggers, maybe three things go in the canvas bag and the rest is in half-filled plastic bags. Sadly, I expect them to put the melon on top of the potato chips.
McDonald's has no indicators and gets chaos. Among other problems, it is frequently difficult to tell (unless you ask) which people in the crowd have ordered and are waiting for their food, and which are waiting to order.
Burger King and Wendy's have rails/chains that clearly indicate single queue with multiple servers and have no problems. And there's a clear separation between those waiting to order and those waiting for food.
BK and Wendy's certainly appear to be getting more production out of their employees.
It's very common to see the person taking drive-through orders at BK or Wendy's step to an idle inside cash register,
offer "I can help the next person here,"
and take one order before they go handle a car.
At McD's,
the drive-through person doesn't dare do that because once they make the offer,
half the line will jump to the newly opened register.
Being thrown into real analysis after just one quarter of study in proofs is extremely rough going.
Much of the first couple of semesters of the PhD track in economics is spent bringing students up to
the level of math used in the field.
In effect, they are tossed into at least the beginnings of real analysis,
and many of them do find it "extremely rough going."
I had both BS and MS degrees in math and an applied math field,
and thought that the proofs we were asked to do were relatively straightforward.
A couple of the students who were struggling asked me, "But how do you figure out where to start?"
I realized then that you do develop some sort of intuition over the years
about how you might approach a particular problem.
As a former math major who has always struggled to learn physical skills, I sympathize. OTOH, a million years of evolution emphasized the things the people in the gym were doing: run, throw, hit the target. Not to mention that many biologists credit the success of our distant ancestors on the African plains with their ability to sweat, thereby remaining cool during intense and extended physical activity. The opportunity to sit still and solve more abstract problems has only existed for the last few thousand years.
If Wikipedia included ads, would I even know? I regularly visit a number of sites that I know have ads, but I know only because of the occasional user comment that a particular ad is offensive. I don't see the ads because my browser blocks them. I started blocking ads not because I found them objectionable, but because waiting for six different overloaded servers to deliver the d*mned things slowed things down a lot. Is there reason to believe that Wikipedia's ads would be resistant to blocking?
...still has desks, offices and workplaces for a reason.
Yep.
Pundits talk like most people are purely consumers of content, not creators.
At least in the white-collar world,
though,
almost everyone is a content creator when they're at work.
It may be short-lived content with an audience of only a handful of people,
but I don't think people will be happy if told that
they need to prepare that six-page spreadsheet on their smartphone.
A tablet or a smartphone may be a useful and valuable adjunct to a PC,
but for a lot of people it's not a replacement.
The boundaries for the three synchronized regions in the US, and the HVDC interties between them, are all well east of the Rockies. TTBOMK, there are currently no HVDC links that cross the Rockies. The proposed Transwest Express project would cross the Rockies with HVDC in Wyoming, but with the intent of carrying Wyoming wind power west to Las Vegas and southern California, all within the Western Interconnection (much as the Pacific Intertie uses HVDC to transport hydro power from Oregon/Washington to LA). The proposed High Plains Express project would cross the Rockies in New Mexico, but that's an AC system, again all within the Western Interconnection. The Tres Amigas superstation, if built, would be HVDC tieing all three interconnect regions together, but I believe that the HVDC portion would be confined to the station grounds rather than being long-distance.
When I was in college, the physics prof got tired of students asking if they could bring this, or that, or whatever, to the exams. He finally declared that anything you could carry in under your arm was okay. One of the students was a 300+ pound offensive lineman on the football team, and walked into the exam carrying a TA under his arm like a textbook.
Per USDA figures, there were about 765 million chickens slaughtered in the US last year. The major share of the "fat" is probably the oil used to fry things. The US produces something over 12 million metric tons of fats and oils per year, about 70% of that vegetable oils. Back-of-the-envelope, 12 million metric tons of the stuff is on the order of 3 billion gallons.
Yep,
in a calorie-sparse hunter-gatherer existence,
a taste for meat, fat, and sugar—
all with a very high calorie density—
is a Good Thing.
In a calorie-rich sedentary society, not so much.
All the big companies are infringing on each others' IP these days. Whether they're infringing or not is not the important thing, it's whether they decide it's worth it to sue.. it's like a giant game of chess.
Been there, done that.
Back in the day,
when electronics patents were dominated by a handful of US companies with big labs,
they ended up simply cross-licensing all their patents to each other
in order to avoid the game.
That left the big players in great shape,
as they didn't have to worry about getting tripped up by patent holders with
pockets deep enough to pursue long drawn-out court cases.
Made it tough on the little guys, though.
One has to wonder if this is the first step of several.
The App Store for the iThingies effectively disallows all interpreted languages.
Will they make the same choice for the Mac store?
What happens to, for example, python and perl for OS X?
...remember that another widely-used on-demand service called "cable TV" has already figured out the bundling concept and applied it viciously. (Ever wish you could just buy ESPN and SciFi?)
This is a subject I know something about. Cable TV pricing for ESPN is complex, because ESPN has multiple revenue streams. ESPN advertising revenues depend not only on the number of actual viewers, but on the number of potential viewers as well. The price sheets are tightly-held secrets, but a cable company with 16 million subs (subscribers) buying bundles that include ESPN pays much less per-sub to ESPN than a cable company with only a million subs buying such bundles. A la cart is even worse. A big operator like Comcast or DirecTV may pay $4 per month per sub for each sub buying the channel as part of the bundles. If it is only available as an a la cart service, the charge may be $12-16 per month, paid directly by the sub. When we looked at it several years ago, the break-even point was surprisingly low, around three-four channels, particularly if they were sports channels.
The sports channels, ESPN in particular, have insane costs to cover. ESPN paid $8.8B for Monday Night Football rights the last time the NFL negotiated their contracts. 3.5 hours/week, 17 weeks/yr, a small number of years, $8.8B. Takes a big a la cart charge to cover that.
The fact that you don't know the difference between editing and copy-editing speaks volumes about what you don't know about publishing. Editing is a valuable contribution to the publishing process and can make the difference between a mid-shelf and blockbuster book. I don't know what books you've been reading, but aside from "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo", I can't remember the last time I read the kinds of errors you describe. Outside of a self-published book, that is.
The last several in the Honorverse sequence, whether written with a co-author or not, have had problems: numerous homonym errors (well, technically homophones) and missing words in particular. These are big-budget books; failure to catch errors that are obvious on (at least my) first reading seems a significant disservice to those paying the bills.
That said, editing is indeed a valuable service provided by publishers. In the self-published world, there will almost certainly be some number of published books that are mediocre, that could have been quite good with the assistance of a good editor. Hell, even a good agent can provide valuable opinions about story lines that don't work, areas that need expansion, stuff to cut, etc.
Well, in most agencies there are a number of appointive posts at the top, not just the very head. Eg, various assistant secretaries and under secretaries are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and serve at the pleasure of the President. Then there is the hybrid case of appointive positions that have fixed terms (eg, the members of the FCC).
It's also worth pointing out that the federal civil service, which many regard as a serious problem because it makes it hard to fire people without cause, was imposed as the solution to a worse problem: wholesale firings of the professional staff whenever the Administration changed hands, and replacement with people who might have zero experience but had the right "political" qualifications.
How far down to push appointive positions is a hard question. Should the head of FEMA, within the Dept of Homeland Security, be an appointee or a civil service professional? FEMA used to be considered a joke, poorly run and incapable of executing. Bill Clinton appointed a head who had extensive experience in emergency management at the state level, and who is generally regarded as having turned the agency around. George Bush appointed someone with no prior experience in the field, and the agency quickly returned to joke status.
At least for two of the three installations, including the PV, it would be more accurate to say that the National Park Service (the White House and grounds are a national park) installed solar panels on a maintenance building as part of regularly scheduled roof repairs. The Parks Service routinely considers adding solar when such repairs are done, and has made similar installations at a number of locations (eg, this one at Mt. Rainier). It seems unlikely that the President, or anyone high in his administration, weas even aware that the decision was being made.
Which is not a bad thing; whether the NPS does this type of installation on a maintenance building is not high on my list of decisions I want the President to spend any time on:^)
Its awesome that it can run on diesel, biofuel, natural gas, or LP. I wonder if it can run on a combination, or if you can only have one type of fuel at a time.
I would guess that getting multiple fuels into the single tank simultaneously
would be the biggest problem
(the turbine probably doesn't care a lot).
Standard diesel fueling methods assume that you can
simply pour the fuel into the tank and
vent the displaced air out the same opening.
LPG and CNG assume a sealed system with the fuel introduced
under pressure.
I would assume that switching between
CNG/LPG operation and diesel/biodiesel operation would require
at least a controlled purging of the tank.
It might also require some mechanical changes
to make sure that the opening normally used for diesel fueling
is strong enough to withstand the 3,000 PSI or greater
pressure that CNG will be stored at.
Even mixing CNG and LPG might be problematic,
as normal LPG filling equipment work at much lower pressures than CNG.
Slashdot Mirror
Social Security has always been a pay-as-you-go system, regardless of the public's general misconception about it as "savings" or "investment". The current version of it, adopted from the recommendations of the 1983 Greenspan commission, does have the Boomer generation overpay -- but the commission's plan, which Congress promised to follow, was that the rest of the federal government would run a balanced budget, the national debt would slowly roll over into the SS trust fund, and when the Boomers retired those bonds would be paid for by borrowing from the public again. About the time the last of the Boomers died, the SS trust fund and the US public debt would sit where they were in the mid 1980s, adjusted for population, inflation, and productivity gains. Except for the balanced budget part, things are playing out very close to the commission's forecasts.
After the Boomers, the system reverts to complete pay-as-you-go, requiring a stable 6.2% of GDP. Everyone's forecasts for outlays shows them to be stable, from the SSA itself to the most conservative think tanks. Unfortunately, the commission assumed that future gains from productivity would be shared across the entire spectrum of income; if that had happened, the debate we would be having today would be regarding a permanent small adjustment of the SS tax rates down. But the productivity gains for the last 20 years have been largely captured by those making more than the SS cap, so are not being taxed. A small change in the cap formula, phased in over a decade, would erase the problem entirely.
Productivity gains are why it's not a Ponzi scheme. If you don't include such gains, you simply get the wrong answer.
The word I'm hearing from friends at CES is that the most common question being asked of the makers of the new tablets is, "What's your market look like when Apple brings out the iPad II and drops the price for the base model of the original to $299?" A lot of business types seem to think that's likely sometime this year...
In 1975, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln computer science department got a 16-bit minicomputer. The hard disk drive took up the bottom couple of feet of a rack. The thing I remember about it was not the storage capacity, but the time it took to spin up. In order to help maintain a constant speed, the unit had a 30-40 pound steel disk mounted on the shaft below the disk platters to provide rotational inertia. Took somewhere between two and three minutes to bring that sucker up to speed.
Up on the shelf here is a laptop with a 386SX, originally purchased in 1992. The last time I had it out was about six months ago, and it still booted. Manchester Computer Center Linux distribution and Bellcore's MGR windowing system running on the monochrome 640x480 passive matrix LCD display.
Almost caused a riot with it on a flight from New Jersey to Denver one night in early 1993, I think it was. I had it out on the seatback tray, editing a text document filled with formatting commands modeled after troff in one window using something vi-like, and compiling something sizable in another. Nothing fancy, but troff and scrolling make output are distinctive. A guy walking back from the restroom at the rear of the plan suddenly stops and YELLS down the length of the plane, "Hey! This guy's got UNIX running on a LAPTOP!" The next thing I knew there were a half dozen guys hanging over the back of my seat, all asking questions at the same time. The flight attendants were NOT happy.
Absolutely correct. The debate is not about whether internet access service should be regulated, but how to regulate it. For various reasons, the FCC decided initially that it would be regulated as an "information service" rather than as a "communication service." I was involved in the industry at the time, and while I understood the reasons why the FCC made that choice, I argued that this would be a serious mistake in the long term.
When I had the opportunity to discuss matters with senior management, I advised them that they should act as if there were basic internet access and separate information services, even though they were not required to. I argued that their choice was to behave as if basic internet access (here's your IP address, and everyone gets honest best-effort packet delivery service) were a communication service, or someday they would have that behavior imposed on them by the government. And if they waited until the behavior was imposed from the outside, it would be much more painful than doing it from the beginning. I wasn't making a statement about whether biased traffic shaping was good or bad; I was simply predicting what would happen.
For a lot of years the big ISPs behaved in a manner that kept the basic communication service intact. Only in the last few years have they become egregious about traffic shaping and blocking. And sure enough, here comes the regulation. And it's going to be painful, and it's going to be ugly, but it is inevitable that the big ISPs will be required to behave as if internet access is a basic communication service.
When I was younger, I did a number of projects in APL. Typing speed was more likely to be characters-per-minute, not WPM. For the most part, touch-typing APL is a null concept; almost everyone spends a fair amount of time hunting for the particular special symbol that they need. APL might be the only programming language where it would be faster to scribble stuff on a touchscreen with a stylus than to use a keyboard :^)
One of the big expenses that deregulation was supposed to do away with was the excess generating capacity that vertically-integrated monopolies kept on hand in order to meet their reliability targets. Economists at the Cato Institute -- a pro-free-market bunch if there ever was one -- have now concluded that for a free market to avoid the kind of behavior you mention, there has to be extra generating capacity available. In fact, they conclude that you need more excess capacity to make a free market work properly than the old integrated utilities kept on hand.
Other than in relatively obscure papers, they don't run around telling people that a free market in electricity is probably an inferior approach, but they have quit actively supporting electricity deregulation.
Oddly enough, I am driven to use the self-checkout at the grocery because of the incompetence of the baggers, and the stores' antagonism towards letting you pack your own bags at the regular checkout lines. On a typical stop, I can pack everything I have except one light bulky item -- eg, the multi-roll package of toilet paper -- in my canvas bag, the bag sits nice and stable, and nothing gets crushed. With the store baggers, maybe three things go in the canvas bag and the rest is in half-filled plastic bags. Sadly, I expect them to put the melon on top of the potato chips.
BK and Wendy's certainly appear to be getting more production out of their employees. It's very common to see the person taking drive-through orders at BK or Wendy's step to an idle inside cash register, offer "I can help the next person here," and take one order before they go handle a car. At McD's, the drive-through person doesn't dare do that because once they make the offer, half the line will jump to the newly opened register.
Much of the first couple of semesters of the PhD track in economics is spent bringing students up to the level of math used in the field. In effect, they are tossed into at least the beginnings of real analysis, and many of them do find it "extremely rough going." I had both BS and MS degrees in math and an applied math field, and thought that the proofs we were asked to do were relatively straightforward. A couple of the students who were struggling asked me, "But how do you figure out where to start?" I realized then that you do develop some sort of intuition over the years about how you might approach a particular problem.
As a former math major who has always struggled to learn physical skills, I sympathize. OTOH, a million years of evolution emphasized the things the people in the gym were doing: run, throw, hit the target. Not to mention that many biologists credit the success of our distant ancestors on the African plains with their ability to sweat, thereby remaining cool during intense and extended physical activity. The opportunity to sit still and solve more abstract problems has only existed for the last few thousand years.
If Wikipedia included ads, would I even know? I regularly visit a number of sites that I know have ads, but I know only because of the occasional user comment that a particular ad is offensive. I don't see the ads because my browser blocks them. I started blocking ads not because I found them objectionable, but because waiting for six different overloaded servers to deliver the d*mned things slowed things down a lot. Is there reason to believe that Wikipedia's ads would be resistant to blocking?
Let's not leave out the US, still consuming double the amount of India each year.
Yep. Pundits talk like most people are purely consumers of content, not creators. At least in the white-collar world, though, almost everyone is a content creator when they're at work. It may be short-lived content with an audience of only a handful of people, but I don't think people will be happy if told that they need to prepare that six-page spreadsheet on their smartphone. A tablet or a smartphone may be a useful and valuable adjunct to a PC, but for a lot of people it's not a replacement.
The boundaries for the three synchronized regions in the US, and the HVDC interties between them, are all well east of the Rockies. TTBOMK, there are currently no HVDC links that cross the Rockies. The proposed Transwest Express project would cross the Rockies with HVDC in Wyoming, but with the intent of carrying Wyoming wind power west to Las Vegas and southern California, all within the Western Interconnection (much as the Pacific Intertie uses HVDC to transport hydro power from Oregon/Washington to LA). The proposed High Plains Express project would cross the Rockies in New Mexico, but that's an AC system, again all within the Western Interconnection. The Tres Amigas superstation, if built, would be HVDC tieing all three interconnect regions together, but I believe that the HVDC portion would be confined to the station grounds rather than being long-distance.
Best similar case...
When I was in college, the physics prof got tired of students asking if they could bring this, or that, or whatever, to the exams. He finally declared that anything you could carry in under your arm was okay. One of the students was a 300+ pound offensive lineman on the football team, and walked into the exam carrying a TA under his arm like a textbook.
Per USDA figures, there were about 765 million chickens slaughtered in the US last year. The major share of the "fat" is probably the oil used to fry things. The US produces something over 12 million metric tons of fats and oils per year, about 70% of that vegetable oils. Back-of-the-envelope, 12 million metric tons of the stuff is on the order of 3 billion gallons.
Yep, in a calorie-sparse hunter-gatherer existence, a taste for meat, fat, and sugar— all with a very high calorie density— is a Good Thing. In a calorie-rich sedentary society, not so much.
Been there, done that. Back in the day, when electronics patents were dominated by a handful of US companies with big labs, they ended up simply cross-licensing all their patents to each other in order to avoid the game. That left the big players in great shape, as they didn't have to worry about getting tripped up by patent holders with pockets deep enough to pursue long drawn-out court cases. Made it tough on the little guys, though.
One has to wonder if this is the first step of several. The App Store for the iThingies effectively disallows all interpreted languages. Will they make the same choice for the Mac store? What happens to, for example, python and perl for OS X?
This is a subject I know something about. Cable TV pricing for ESPN is complex, because ESPN has multiple revenue streams. ESPN advertising revenues depend not only on the number of actual viewers, but on the number of potential viewers as well. The price sheets are tightly-held secrets, but a cable company with 16 million subs (subscribers) buying bundles that include ESPN pays much less per-sub to ESPN than a cable company with only a million subs buying such bundles. A la cart is even worse. A big operator like Comcast or DirecTV may pay $4 per month per sub for each sub buying the channel as part of the bundles. If it is only available as an a la cart service, the charge may be $12-16 per month, paid directly by the sub. When we looked at it several years ago, the break-even point was surprisingly low, around three-four channels, particularly if they were sports channels.
The sports channels, ESPN in particular, have insane costs to cover. ESPN paid $8.8B for Monday Night Football rights the last time the NFL negotiated their contracts. 3.5 hours/week, 17 weeks/yr, a small number of years, $8.8B. Takes a big a la cart charge to cover that.
The last several in the Honorverse sequence, whether written with a co-author or not, have had problems: numerous homonym errors (well, technically homophones) and missing words in particular. These are big-budget books; failure to catch errors that are obvious on (at least my) first reading seems a significant disservice to those paying the bills.
That said, editing is indeed a valuable service provided by publishers. In the self-published world, there will almost certainly be some number of published books that are mediocre, that could have been quite good with the assistance of a good editor. Hell, even a good agent can provide valuable opinions about story lines that don't work, areas that need expansion, stuff to cut, etc.
Well, in most agencies there are a number of appointive posts at the top, not just the very head. Eg, various assistant secretaries and under secretaries are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and serve at the pleasure of the President. Then there is the hybrid case of appointive positions that have fixed terms (eg, the members of the FCC).
It's also worth pointing out that the federal civil service, which many regard as a serious problem because it makes it hard to fire people without cause, was imposed as the solution to a worse problem: wholesale firings of the professional staff whenever the Administration changed hands, and replacement with people who might have zero experience but had the right "political" qualifications.
How far down to push appointive positions is a hard question. Should the head of FEMA, within the Dept of Homeland Security, be an appointee or a civil service professional? FEMA used to be considered a joke, poorly run and incapable of executing. Bill Clinton appointed a head who had extensive experience in emergency management at the state level, and who is generally regarded as having turned the agency around. George Bush appointed someone with no prior experience in the field, and the agency quickly returned to joke status.
At least for two of the three installations, including the PV, it would be more accurate to say that the National Park Service (the White House and grounds are a national park) installed solar panels on a maintenance building as part of regularly scheduled roof repairs. The Parks Service routinely considers adding solar when such repairs are done, and has made similar installations at a number of locations (eg, this one at Mt. Rainier). It seems unlikely that the President, or anyone high in his administration, weas even aware that the decision was being made.
:^)
Which is not a bad thing; whether the NPS does this type of installation on a maintenance building is not high on my list of decisions I want the President to spend any time on
I would guess that getting multiple fuels into the single tank simultaneously would be the biggest problem (the turbine probably doesn't care a lot). Standard diesel fueling methods assume that you can simply pour the fuel into the tank and vent the displaced air out the same opening. LPG and CNG assume a sealed system with the fuel introduced under pressure. I would assume that switching between CNG/LPG operation and diesel/biodiesel operation would require at least a controlled purging of the tank. It might also require some mechanical changes to make sure that the opening normally used for diesel fueling is strong enough to withstand the 3,000 PSI or greater pressure that CNG will be stored at. Even mixing CNG and LPG might be problematic, as normal LPG filling equipment work at much lower pressures than CNG.