It would cost close to a Billion dollars and take up nearly 70 square miles of land to use wind to produce the equivalent amount of power as the smallest nuclear reactor in the country.
We have absolutely no idea what affect a windfarm of that size would have on the environment. If we had enough farms to power the entire country? Again, we have no idea, but the effect would likely be dramatic. You can't take that kind of energy out of our weather systems and expect mother nature to roll over and take it.
We've deforested far larger chunks of land without causing blood to rain down from the sky, and there are multiple countries that have re-forested areas larger than 70 square miles.
China is aggressively planting trees everywhere it can. Since Y2k, they've added ~11,500 square miles of forest per year. Part of those 11,500 square miles of forests are an attempt to stop the Gobi desert's southern and eastward creep. China's been doing a shitty job with their foresting efforts, but 70 square miles is childs play compared to what's happening around the globe.
The "free market" is not involved. UK government policy to reduce carbon drives both the adoption of wind, which we learn does not produce expected output, and deliberately inflates gas cost while lowering heating benefits to reduce demand, producing fuel poverty.
The articles you linked don't support these claims.
Fuel povertyis government policy. Connection complete.
Jeremy Cape, investment director at 54,000-home Affinity Sutton, warns of a 'triple whammy' that will likely hit social tenants as welfare reforms begin to reduce household income, energy prices rise and available funding to combat fuel poverty drops. 'This could lead to an increase in fuel poverty with few means of getting people [social tenants] out. We need a more flexible approach to ECO so that itâ(TM)s about making the green deal work,' he says.
It sounds like rising energy price are one factor contributing to "fuel poverty" and nothing you linked spells out the direct connection between carbon taxes and the increase in prices. This is relevant because I don't see why the total 4 billion pound sterling of carbon taxes that are raised from everyone in England should go to the fraction of households in fuel poverty. I'm not really disputing your claims, but you haven't backed them up and you've provided a source with information that weakens your argument.
My reading is that 'austerity, increased prices from the carbon tax, and more austerity' are fucking over the British. As usual, the poorest suffer the most. Were you expecting something else to happen when government funding gets cut? We're lucky in the USA that the sequester was put off until after the peak of winter, or we'd be seeing the exact same story here.
Us penguins use our penguin research to try and extrapolate how we should help African Swallows. No wonder our attempts at shaping non-Western countries has spectacularly and repeatedly failed.
So long as BTC is difficult to come by and those who value it are willing to exchange it solely based on perceived (or real-world) value, then BTC will thrive, and with increasing scarcity, rise in value.
Just wait until someone forks bitcoin by starting with a new seed.
And if you look at pictures of the crash, the engine block got caught in those steel cables at the bottom.
The safety officials are probably much more interested in how those tires got loose, because they've been dual tethered to the cars since a crash in 1993 launched a tire into the parking lot of a track.
NASCAR has had an ongoing program of safety upgrades to the barriers and once they figure out what happened and how to prevent another penetration, it'll push forward their timeline for upgrading the fences.
NASCAR: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
Youtube: "Our partners and users do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they contain content which is copyright infringing, which is why we have reinstated the videos."
Youtube has more or less admitted that NASCAR committed perjury by filing the DMCA claim. Should be a slam dunk court case. Right?
By law, the cuts must be equally applied to each program, project, and activity within an account, thereby not allowing agencies to use their discretion.
You seem to be implicitly assuming that there is XY% of each program within every agency that can be trivially cut. You would be the hero of Washington if you could write down a list of all the people that can be fired without reducing each program's ability to meet its goals.
This is why we'll never see a de-funding of things like the IRS, anything else related to core government operations, or "governing body" luxuries. Why do we not talk about cutting money from Health and Human Services? Why do we not talk about defunding the Social Security Administration (even though the bulk of the funding to the SSA doesn't even make it to recipients of SS?)
Holy fucking shit. Who the hell defunds the IRS? Do you have another suggestion on how the government should be run? Bakesales and PBS funding drives? The IRS is by far the most efficient government agency for dollars spent vs dollars collected.
And pray tell, why does one defund the Social Security Trust Fund? The trust fund that gets all its money from the social security payroll tax and not from anything else? Or are we just ignoring the historical events that led to the creation of the Social Security Administration?
God help our children and their children (due to the drastic increase in size/number of government employees in the past 4 years, there'll be a lot more people waiting in line for their pensions and fewer people to fill 'em).
Drastic increase? [Citation Needed]
(Spoiler Alert: There has been no drastic increase) You really need to join us in the fact based world. The only "hard, baked on crud" you need to deal with are the layers of ideology clouding your vision.
a quarter of a megawatt. whoop-de-fucking doo. instead of pissing away money on this popcorn popper, why don't we invest in something that can drive progress and civilization forward, like thoruim reactors?
I'm sure there was some asshole who said the exact same thing about nuclear power as you're saying about this coal power technology. Or do you think gigawatt nuclear reactors sprung fully formed from Zeus' head?
What to do with it long term is another problem. But its a problem you would have anyway, so having the CO2 handed to you all contained is better than where we are today.
There are plenty of industrial uses for CO2 and carbon. Having it handed to you on a platter is great news.
The researchers are about to take their technology to the next level: a larger-scale pilot plant is under construction at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville, AL. Set to begin operations in late 2013, that plant will produce 250 thermal kilowatts using syngas.
From 25 kw to 250kw Sounds like they're scaling it up.
Cheap labor republicans and democrats are the worst. Their policies have lead the country to unprecedented concentrations of wealth and the destruction of the middle class.
There is always someone willing to do the same job for less pay and longer hours. The end result may look good for Wall Street, but it is bad for the country. Destroying worker protections leads to pre-union conditions, not a post-union-free-market-utopia.
"but if, and only if, you ensure that externalities are built in, "
I don't really see how you can ensure that externalities are "built in" (or priced in) without regulation. And even if you can, IMO, it's better to prevent negative externalities than to pay off the afflicted bystanders afterwards.
In many ways, the controversy over genetically engineered crops is the agricultural equivalent to the controversies surrounding evolution, climate change, and vaccines.
What? It's impossible to maintain our civilization without vaccines. Evolution is a pillar of the biological sciences. Climate change controversy is being generated by the same people that told us cigarettes were good for our health.
GMO crops are a choice, not a science. It's harder to feed the world without them, but not impossible.
For finer detail you notice that Schmidt has file a âoeplanâ to sell 2.4b over the next year. That plan gets handed over to a 3rd outside party so Schmidt is removed from the timing and execution of said plan. So, at this point everybody on a level playing field.
One game executives can play is to have several "plans" at any one time. These plans can be suspended and resumed as needed, in order to match actions to the stock price.
It lets them use their insider knowledge and deflect scrutiny by saying "look, I have a plan approved by the SEC!"
Combine the two ideas and you have to wonder if there are people with an agenda to kill fracking no matter what the facts are as opposed to ensuring fracking is done sensibly.
If the fracking industry wanted fracking to be done sensibly, you wouldn't have to ask that question
But I suspect that it would not ameliorate the problem since damage and returns are built into the cost of doing business and the shippers have no incentive to correct the problem any moer than they have..
The problem is that the guys loading the trucks can only go so fast. BUT, since time is money, the shippers run the sorting machines at highspeed, and the loaders are forced to treat your package like a football in order to meet their quotas and keep boxes from piling up.
So it isn't that the damages and returns are built into the cost of doing business, it's that (for the shipper) the damages and returns cost less than the profits from destroying every N-th package.
The easy solution is to simply not buy the product if you think it's bad.
We regulate businesses and proucts so that there are minimum levels of good in the world.
Ask yourself which is better for you and me: 1. Products that cannot be resold, thus violating the right of resale, and leading to a class action lawsuit 2. A regulating agency that prevents such a product from reaching the market
From a business standpoint, the first is better, as long as the settlement preventing harm from reaching the people remains the same.
No, that's just a strawman created by left wing ideologues. In fact, what's objectionable about these kinds of so-called "health and safety laws" is that they often serve the interests of big powerful businesses and hurt the interests of most people, by increasing prices, reducing choices, and increasing barriers to entry.
That generic "regulation is stifling competition" claptrap ignores why we regulate. The argument applies equally to food safety as it does to building codes and it isn't a compelling argument in any case.
Higher prices, higher barriers to entry, and less choice are the price we pay for a safer life. Otherwise, we can go back to the good old days when rivers caught on fire, entire blocks of buildings burned down because of a stray candle, and horse meat was a large component of beef products. Oh wait, we're still working on that last one.
This is the computer chip in the Mars Rover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 Specifically, they're using two *133Mhz chips rated for 1 Megarad. 1 Megarad is about double the hardening they actually required, but I'm guessing they overspecced so that the Mars Science Laboratory will outlast its planned mission length.
Anyways, if you're in low earth orbit (like the space station) you can get away with radiation tolerant electronics. But out in cold hard space, without the earth's atmosphere, you need radiation hardened electronics. *Not 200Mhz as so many articles are quoting
Most satellites and space based processors are no more successful at hardening than your garden variety laptops. They just program them better and watch for memory errors.
What? If it was that simple, we'd be using modern processes, instead of technology that debuted in 1997. Instead, it's quite the opposite, where a modern 24nm process is impossible to harden to the same strength as an old 150nm process.
Do the bottom 50% of income households pay zero income taxes? zero federal taxes? zero taxes?
You wouldn't trust a guy who runs around breaking windows and complaining about a crime wave. Why would you trust guys who run around cutting income taxes and then complaining that half the country doesn't pay income taxes?
As someone who routinely fact checks and is appalled at the gross inaccuracies out there (not just the twisting or cherry picking, but simply wrong) I, for one, welcome our new robotic fact checking overlord(s).
It's not enough to verify the answer to a question. You should always be looking at the question itself, because within it is great opportunity to shape the answer that is generated.
CTIA [Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association] explained that the practice of locking cell phones is an essential part of the wireless industry's predominant business model, which involves subsidizing the cost of wireless handsets in exchange for a commitment from the customer that the phone will be used on that carrier's service so that the subsidy can eventually be recouped by the carrier. CTIA alleged that the industry has been plagued by âoelarge scale phone trafficking operationsâ that buy large quantities of pre-paid phones, unlock them, and resell them in foreign markets where carriers do not subsidize handsets.
1. The industry business model is selling subsidized phones in exchange for a multi-year contract. Most carriers have early termination fees that are prorated the longer you stick to your contract, which directly reflects the cost of the subsidized phone they sold you. The carrier could care less what happens to that phone, as long as I hold to my contract or pay the ETF.
2. If there is a big problem with pre-paid phones, then craft the unlocking exemption to exclude prepaid phones.
The CTIA must have gotten their guidance from the copyright industry, where singular counts of infringement are treated the same as large scale criminal enterprises.
Slashdot Mirror
It would cost close to a Billion dollars and take up nearly 70 square miles of land to use wind to produce the equivalent amount of power as the smallest nuclear reactor in the country.
We have absolutely no idea what affect a windfarm of that size would have on the environment. If we had enough farms to power the entire country? Again, we have no idea, but the effect would likely be dramatic. You can't take that kind of energy out of our weather systems and expect mother nature to roll over and take it.
We've deforested far larger chunks of land without causing blood to rain down from the sky,
and there are multiple countries that have re-forested areas larger than 70 square miles.
China is aggressively planting trees everywhere it can. Since Y2k, they've added ~11,500 square miles of forest per year.
Part of those 11,500 square miles of forests are an attempt to stop the Gobi desert's southern and eastward creep.
China's been doing a shitty job with their foresting efforts, but 70 square miles is childs play compared to what's happening around the globe.
The "free market" is not involved. UK government policy to reduce carbon drives both the adoption of wind, which we learn does not produce expected output, and deliberately inflates gas cost while lowering heating benefits to reduce demand, producing fuel poverty.
The articles you linked don't support these claims.
Fuel poverty is government policy. Connection complete.
Jeremy Cape, investment director at 54,000-home Affinity Sutton, warns of a 'triple whammy' that will likely hit social tenants as welfare reforms begin to reduce household income, energy prices rise and available funding to combat fuel poverty drops. 'This could lead to an increase in fuel poverty with few means of getting people [social tenants] out. We need a more flexible approach to ECO so that itâ(TM)s about making the green deal work,' he says.
It sounds like rising energy price are one factor contributing to "fuel poverty" and nothing you linked spells out the direct connection between carbon taxes and the increase in prices.
This is relevant because I don't see why the total 4 billion pound sterling of carbon taxes that are raised from everyone in England should go to the fraction of households in fuel poverty.
I'm not really disputing your claims, but you haven't backed them up and you've provided a source with information that weakens your argument.
My reading is that 'austerity, increased prices from the carbon tax, and more austerity' are fucking over the British.
As usual, the poorest suffer the most. Were you expecting something else to happen when government funding gets cut?
We're lucky in the USA that the sequester was put off until after the peak of winter, or we'd be seeing the exact same story here.
Us penguins use our penguin research to try and extrapolate how we should help African Swallows.
No wonder our attempts at shaping non-Western countries has spectacularly and repeatedly failed.
So long as BTC is difficult to come by and those who value it are willing to exchange it solely based on perceived (or real-world) value, then BTC will thrive, and with increasing scarcity, rise in value.
Just wait until someone forks bitcoin by starting with a new seed.
And if you look at pictures of the crash, the engine block got caught in those steel cables at the bottom.
The safety officials are probably much more interested in how those tires got loose, because they've been dual tethered to the cars since a crash in 1993 launched a tire into the parking lot of a track.
NASCAR has had an ongoing program of safety upgrades to the barriers and once they figure out what happened and how to prevent another penetration, it'll push forward their timeline for upgrading the fences.
NASCAR: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
Youtube: "Our partners and users do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they contain content which is copyright infringing, which is why we have reinstated the videos."
Youtube has more or less admitted that NASCAR committed perjury by filing the DMCA claim.
Should be a slam dunk court case. Right?
By law, the cuts must be equally applied to each program, project, and activity within an account, thereby not allowing agencies to use their discretion.
You seem to be implicitly assuming that there is XY% of each program within every agency that can be trivially cut.
You would be the hero of Washington if you could write down a list of all the people that can be fired without reducing each program's ability to meet its goals.
This is why we'll never see a de-funding of things like the IRS, anything else related to core government operations, or "governing body" luxuries. Why do we not talk about cutting money from Health and Human Services? Why do we not talk about defunding the Social Security Administration (even though the bulk of the funding to the SSA doesn't even make it to recipients of SS?)
Holy fucking shit. Who the hell defunds the IRS?
Do you have another suggestion on how the government should be run? Bakesales and PBS funding drives?
The IRS is by far the most efficient government agency for dollars spent vs dollars collected.
And pray tell, why does one defund the Social Security Trust Fund?
The trust fund that gets all its money from the social security payroll tax and not from anything else?
Or are we just ignoring the historical events that led to the creation of the Social Security Administration?
God help our children and their children (due to the drastic increase in size/number of government employees in the past 4 years, there'll be a lot more people waiting in line for their pensions and fewer people to fill 'em).
Drastic increase? [Citation Needed]
(Spoiler Alert: There has been no drastic increase)
You really need to join us in the fact based world.
The only "hard, baked on crud" you need to deal with are the layers of ideology clouding your vision.
This only proves that the ways and will of God is ineffable. To even suggest it's evolution in action is blasphemy.
Hold on now, I have uncontestable proof that God has eff'ed me over many times.
Or is that claim considered blasphemy as well?
Almost every byproduct of coal burning except the CO2 is a viable commodity these days.
Then why are there so many multi-million gallon fly ash ponds that can be seen from space?
a quarter of a megawatt. whoop-de-fucking doo. instead of pissing away money on this popcorn popper, why don't we invest in something that can drive progress and civilization forward, like thoruim reactors?
I'm sure there was some asshole who said the exact same thing about nuclear power as you're saying about this coal power technology.
Or do you think gigawatt nuclear reactors sprung fully formed from Zeus' head?
What to do with it long term is another problem. But its a problem you would have anyway, so having the CO2 handed to you all
contained is better than where we are today.
There are plenty of industrial uses for CO2 and carbon.
Having it handed to you on a platter is great news.
The researchers are about to take their technology to the next level: a larger-scale pilot plant is under construction at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville, AL. Set to begin operations in late 2013, that plant will produce 250 thermal kilowatts using syngas.
From 25 kw to 250kw
Sounds like they're scaling it up.
Cheap labor republicans and democrats are the worst.
Their policies have lead the country to unprecedented concentrations of wealth and the destruction of the middle class.
There is always someone willing to do the same job for less pay and longer hours.
The end result may look good for Wall Street, but it is bad for the country.
Destroying worker protections leads to pre-union conditions, not a post-union-free-market-utopia.
"Often times the market can sort it out"
"but if, and only if, you ensure that externalities are built in, "
I don't really see how you can ensure that externalities are "built in" (or priced in) without regulation.
And even if you can, IMO, it's better to prevent negative externalities than to pay off the afflicted bystanders afterwards.
In many ways, the controversy over genetically engineered crops is the agricultural equivalent to the controversies surrounding evolution, climate change, and vaccines.
What?
It's impossible to maintain our civilization without vaccines.
Evolution is a pillar of the biological sciences.
Climate change controversy is being generated by the same people that told us cigarettes were good for our health.
GMO crops are a choice, not a science.
It's harder to feed the world without them, but not impossible.
Plant something from the marshmallow family and you'll get honey that tastes like marshmallows.
It's really a bit crazy when you first try it.
For finer detail you notice that Schmidt has file a âoeplanâ to sell 2.4b over the next year. That plan gets handed over to a 3rd outside party so Schmidt is removed from the timing and execution of said plan. So, at this point everybody on a level playing field.
One game executives can play is to have several "plans" at any one time.
These plans can be suspended and resumed as needed, in order to match actions to the stock price.
It lets them use their insider knowledge and deflect scrutiny by saying "look, I have a plan approved by the SEC!"
Combine the two ideas and you have to wonder if there are people with an agenda to kill fracking no matter what the facts are as opposed to ensuring fracking is done sensibly.
If the fracking industry wanted fracking to be done sensibly, you wouldn't have to ask that question
But I suspect that it would not ameliorate the problem since damage and returns are built into the cost of doing business and the shippers have no incentive to correct the problem any moer than they have..
The problem is that the guys loading the trucks can only go so fast.
BUT, since time is money, the shippers run the sorting machines at highspeed, and the loaders are forced to treat your package like a football in order to meet their quotas and keep boxes from piling up.
So it isn't that the damages and returns are built into the cost of doing business, it's that (for the shipper) the damages and returns cost less than the profits from destroying every N-th package.
The easy solution is to simply not buy the product if you think it's bad.
We regulate businesses and proucts so that there are minimum levels of good in the world.
Ask yourself which is better for you and me:
1. Products that cannot be resold, thus violating the right of resale, and leading to a class action lawsuit
2. A regulating agency that prevents such a product from reaching the market
From a business standpoint, the first is better, as long as the settlement preventing harm from reaching the people remains the same.
Did you read the OP's comment?
No, that's just a strawman created by left wing ideologues. In fact, what's objectionable about these kinds of so-called "health and safety laws" is that they often serve the interests of big powerful businesses and hurt the interests of most people, by increasing prices, reducing choices, and increasing barriers to entry.
That generic "regulation is stifling competition" claptrap ignores why we regulate.
The argument applies equally to food safety as it does to building codes and it isn't a compelling argument in any case.
Higher prices, higher barriers to entry, and less choice are the price we pay for a safer life.
Otherwise, we can go back to the good old days when rivers caught on fire,
entire blocks of buildings burned down because of a stray candle,
and horse meat was a large component of beef products.
Oh wait, we're still working on that last one.
This is the computer chip in the Mars Rover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
Specifically, they're using two *133Mhz chips rated for 1 Megarad.
1 Megarad is about double the hardening they actually required,
but I'm guessing they overspecced so that the Mars Science Laboratory will outlast its planned mission length.
Anyways, if you're in low earth orbit (like the space station) you can get away with radiation tolerant electronics.
But out in cold hard space, without the earth's atmosphere, you need radiation hardened electronics.
*Not 200Mhz as so many articles are quoting
Most satellites and space based processors are no more successful at
hardening than your garden variety laptops. They just program them better and watch for memory errors.
What? If it was that simple, we'd be using modern processes, instead of technology that debuted in 1997.
Instead, it's quite the opposite, where a modern 24nm process is impossible to harden to the same strength as an old 150nm process.
Do the bottom 50% of income households pay zero income taxes? zero federal taxes? zero taxes?
You wouldn't trust a guy who runs around breaking windows and complaining about a crime wave.
Why would you trust guys who run around cutting income taxes and then complaining that half the country doesn't pay income taxes?
As someone who routinely fact checks and is appalled at the gross inaccuracies out there (not just the twisting or cherry picking, but simply wrong) I, for one, welcome our new robotic fact checking overlord(s).
It's not enough to verify the answer to a question.
You should always be looking at the question itself,
because within it is great opportunity to shape the answer that is generated.
CTIA [Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association] explained that the practice of locking cell phones is an essential part of the wireless industry's predominant business model, which involves subsidizing the cost of wireless handsets in exchange for a commitment from the customer that the phone will be used on that carrier's service so that the subsidy can eventually be recouped by the carrier. CTIA alleged that the industry has been plagued by âoelarge scale phone trafficking operationsâ that buy large quantities of pre-paid phones, unlock them, and resell them in foreign markets where carriers do not subsidize handsets.
1. The industry business model is selling subsidized phones in exchange for a multi-year contract.
Most carriers have early termination fees that are prorated the longer you stick to your contract,
which directly reflects the cost of the subsidized phone they sold you.
The carrier could care less what happens to that phone, as long as I hold to my contract or pay the ETF.
2. If there is a big problem with pre-paid phones, then craft the unlocking exemption to exclude prepaid phones.
The CTIA must have gotten their guidance from the copyright industry, where singular counts of infringement are treated the same as large scale criminal enterprises.
Boy is he going to be surprised when he finds out that the government owns almost all the roads too.