Insulation will help in both directions, but it's largely not an option for existing buildings.
Why not? They have roof space and what's wrong with wall cladding on walls that get a lot of sun? Plastic foam, some sort of thin backing, glue and paint is how it's done.
That's 65% of the legacy buildings you would need to effectively reconstruct
No. Minor modifications are not reconstruction.
It's a prime example of "low hanging fruit" where buildings that were not designed for the climate can be altered a bit to remove obvious flaws.
The subway isn't an issue, except to say that, operating on electricity
Mass transit versus gridlock. Getting a lot more people on trains going to where they want to go gets a lot of vehicles off the street, and those ones still left on the street can move at a decent speed and use less fuel to get where they are going. A full train uses hardly any energy per person to move them, so if you can give people a good reason to ride on a train that cuts down on energy usage a lot - thus "reducing carbon" but it's best to just use energy consumption to consider things.
it's just "carbon shifting" to move the greenhouse gas generation elsewhere
Even if it was that (which it isn't) that can be a very good idea. It was the entire idea behind suggesting electric cars in California and other places where air pollution from vehicles is a serious issue. Do that energy shifting to a place where the exhaust goes through a scrubber, then out of a high stack a long way from the city and that can be a major health benefit versus people choking on smog - so even if there is no reduction in carbon dioxide output you still have an improvement. Add actual reduction and you have even more of a win. Get a lot of those people on an electric train/tram/bus and the roads are no longer so congested with idling engines creating smog.
Common sense says that living in cities is going to limit the amount of resources required per person. Most cities massively defy common sense and become huge energy sinks due to poor planning or a complete lack in some situations. Sometimes it's as easy as painting a roof to go from needing AC to not. Sometimes it's as easy as a duct to change that hot roofspace air with cold basement air. Putting a thin tinting film on a thousand windows can financially pay for itself over a summer and last for decades.
This is the easy stuff. Going from not thinking of the summer heat at all to doing something about it is the low hanging fruit. A coastal city with a hot summer has buildings designed for a midwest winter.
Nice little joke, but some of the people that tend to "debate" nuclear energy on this site are almost pathologically quick to take offence and I've had to put disclaimers on even the most neutral of statements to avoid long and boring flamefests.
I see no difference between the design of USA toilets and Australian toilets
The interior shape of the bowl is completely different.
If your toilet doesn't work when it's flushed you should fix your toilet rather than blaming the government
WTF is that coming from? Oh the EU stuff above - sometimes a good idea can be pushed a bit too hard into areas where it isn't but I'll bet the above poster will find that there are exceptions to the "mandate" if they look hard enough.
There are plenty of places with water restrictions on their toilets which don't seem to be having a shitty problem.
It's just a situation where the defining leader of the market was something that needed a shitload of water to get rid of a load of shit. After that there's the normal resistance to change and a half-arsed solution. Australia is only really flushed with success because widespread adoption of flush toilets happened later so a more capable design could be developed and be introduced without having to compete with "what they should look like".
Which then just moves it to a different government department. Taxes can be spent on stuff other than giving a couple of guys millions for consulting on waterboarding, Star Trek set designers for the NSA and paying for dead wood executives on the FEMA payroll you know.
It doesn't matter how good a negotiator you are if the company you apply for has a criteria that people who ask for more than a certain figure are not going to get it. Some places even delight in going for the worst negotiator since it's the "lowest bid". After being laid off, having a needy girlfriend and prepared to take anything in my field I ended up in that situation - bad choice in the long term not the sort of people you want to stay with (eg. only way to get time off, let alone a salary rise, is to quit and work elsewhere).
The big clues are right there in the summary. It's probably doable without a vast amount of effort since a lot of it will come down to insulation, ducting and awnings or similar window shading. There is already a subway in place so improvements there come down to better equipment instead of expensive tunnelling or land aquistion. What makes 40% or so possible is buildings constructed with no thought for energy consumption in some cases need only minor modifications to for a major reduction in use. We've seen that in other place with "no-brainers" such as painting a roof white making a major difference to AC use. It's not hard to use less if a lot is being thrown away.
Taking a neutral position, in that case it just means some cheapskate didn't design the cooling system to match the government requirements and that it's not being properly enforced. Having a lake large enough to get the cooling water temperature down before it ends up back in the river is one of the many reasons why nuclear has such a large capital cost - the benefit of running really hot means you have to pass a lot of water through it.
I don't understand why they would want to reduce reliance on nuclear power
Because they had already decided a few years ago to stop building new plants mainly due to high capital cost and an unwillingness to put the money up at the time. Some other energy sources can be built a bit at a time so there is less money needed up front even if the total is more per megawatt. They are also not building any new hydro.
3%? Only if you redefine nuclear waste to mean something completely and utterly different to technical usage. It's not just the fuel rods that have to be handled with care. The majority of nuclear waste is low grade stuff that has come in contact with the fuel but is not fuel itself, those pesky neutrons tend to break things. The low grade waste is not so difficult to deal with as the high grade waste, but pretending it does not exist is counterproductive and just will make people oppose your viewpoint once they find out they have been tricked. Let's please consider things in terms of reality and not redefinition word games.
but they sure as hell aren't going to be tearing down the ones the have already.
Time, neutron bombardment, corrosion etc do that whether we like it or not. Eventually it gets to the point where it is cheaper to build a new one than keep the old one going.
You've got the wrong end of the stick. The above poster mentioned Australia because water scarcity is far more of an issue there than even in California. For the purposes of saving water Australian toilets are superior simply because it was a mandated design criteria while it isn't with your cobbled together situation of high flow bowls and low flow cisterns. The entire thing is designed to deal with the job (pun intended) instead of the extra of a low flow cistern added on as an afterthought. There is NOTHING in that post above about "the superiority of white Australia" or "Right-wingers" - and the amusing thing about your reaction is that it was a "socialist" government body that set the standard and demanded a better design than you are used to.
In the USA they have a different standard design of toilet bowl, probably for historical reasons (ie. always done it that way), and combining it with a cistern used elsewhere apparently does not work very well at all. Getting a better toilet may be beyond what the normal suppliers can do. The lesson, for the millionth time in engineering, is if you change one part of the design you may need to change another. Not doing that means a low flow cistern with a bowl that needs a high flow cistern sucks with a low fibre diet.
By not building new capacity as the old is retired it is going to shrink, and by not committing to new construction some years ago this policy was effectively already in place. I expect people to note before replying that nothing in that statement is against or for nuclear power, just an observation of the situation. If you have a thin skin either way please scratch it elsewhere.
No, I am thinking of it as a large company with decent communication instead of what it appears to be in this case as a bunch of smaller companies stuck together with glue and very poor communication.
or male employees who are slightly more likely to watch the same TV shows as the rest of the team.
The point should be to have competency derived from getting the best you can get from a wide range of sources instead of having no better ability to get stuff done than a college club. That way lies "heck of a job Brownie!" and similar fuckups.
why would a CS grad specifically have heard of a Fourier transform
If they want to do anything useful in scientific or engineering software they will need to know that and about a years worth of maths subjects on top of it. It's a reason why scientists and engineers with little programming background are writing fairly crappy software because it's the alternative is it not working at all.
Someone like her is needed to write commercial geophysical software, but it's all being done in India by recent graduates in incredibly slow and crappy Java. It's not that Java is inherently an insane choice compared with the C and FORTRAN code it's replacing, just the poor results of outsourcing.
Ever heard of Texas Instruments? A lot of computer technology grew out of geophysics. With a doctorate it's almost certain that her project involved writing her own software. Geophysics is really about using computers to do stuff with signals and relate it to what is under the ground. For certain classes of problems an applied scientist is going to be a far better programmer than a computer scientist purely because of their mathematical background, if that's what the solution needs. I've even met CS grads who have never heard of a Fourier transform, which is fine for some stuff but a handicap for others until they get up to speed with whatever a project requires (which may be never if it requires a couple of years of study in mathematics).
However, 4 times is indicating very strongly that a policy or managerial decision at a rank above that of the recruiters is occuring. It's very likely that she is correct about it being based on age but the recruiters were not informed of that policy being applied by a higher level of management. Either way it's a fuckup all round putting someone through the same time and money wasting process four times instead of looking up the records of previous interviews.
Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Guess what? That is life and reality, and passing a law doesn't change that.
Yes but then you get cesspits like the Enron energy traders with that sort of monoculture. A bit of variety keeps people in touch with reality. Yes, it happens, but it's a danger sign to either stay away or get variety in your life elsewhere. A "tightly focussed" group is likely to get blindsided by what people who don't live in the pockets of their twin sees as common sense.
The real question is why ANYONE would want to work with people who did not like them
If they are good at what they do then you don't have to like them. This weird concept that every single person in a workplace has to be the ideal drinking buddy is completely fucked up. A bit of professionalism goes a long way and can keep people who do not like each other from having a horrible work environment or "a life of despair".
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Why not? They have roof space and what's wrong with wall cladding on walls that get a lot of sun? Plastic foam, some sort of thin backing, glue and paint is how it's done.
No.
Minor modifications are not reconstruction.
It's a prime example of "low hanging fruit" where buildings that were not designed for the climate can be altered a bit to remove obvious flaws.
Mass transit versus gridlock. Getting a lot more people on trains going to where they want to go gets a lot of vehicles off the street, and those ones still left on the street can move at a decent speed and use less fuel to get where they are going. A full train uses hardly any energy per person to move them, so if you can give people a good reason to ride on a train that cuts down on energy usage a lot - thus "reducing carbon" but it's best to just use energy consumption to consider things.
Even if it was that (which it isn't) that can be a very good idea. It was the entire idea behind suggesting electric cars in California and other places where air pollution from vehicles is a serious issue. Do that energy shifting to a place where the exhaust goes through a scrubber, then out of a high stack a long way from the city and that can be a major health benefit versus people choking on smog - so even if there is no reduction in carbon dioxide output you still have an improvement. Add actual reduction and you have even more of a win. Get a lot of those people on an electric train/tram/bus and the roads are no longer so congested with idling engines creating smog.
Common sense says that living in cities is going to limit the amount of resources required per person. Most cities massively defy common sense and become huge energy sinks due to poor planning or a complete lack in some situations. Sometimes it's as easy as painting a roof to go from needing AC to not. Sometimes it's as easy as a duct to change that hot roofspace air with cold basement air. Putting a thin tinting film on a thousand windows can financially pay for itself over a summer and last for decades.
This is the easy stuff.
Going from not thinking of the summer heat at all to doing something about it is the low hanging fruit. A coastal city with a hot summer has buildings designed for a midwest winter.
Nice little joke, but some of the people that tend to "debate" nuclear energy on this site are almost pathologically quick to take offence and I've had to put disclaimers on even the most neutral of statements to avoid long and boring flamefests.
The interior shape of the bowl is completely different.
WTF is that coming from?
Oh the EU stuff above - sometimes a good idea can be pushed a bit too hard into areas where it isn't but I'll bet the above poster will find that there are exceptions to the "mandate" if they look hard enough.
It's just a situation where the defining leader of the market was something that needed a shitload of water to get rid of a load of shit. After that there's the normal resistance to change and a half-arsed solution. Australia is only really flushed with success because widespread adoption of flush toilets happened later so a more capable design could be developed and be introduced without having to compete with "what they should look like".
Which then just moves it to a different government department.
Taxes can be spent on stuff other than giving a couple of guys millions for consulting on waterboarding, Star Trek set designers for the NSA and paying for dead wood executives on the FEMA payroll you know.
Depends on the workplace. In a typical office it's bad news, in a government office of most types very bad news, in mining, who gives a fuck?
It doesn't matter how good a negotiator you are if the company you apply for has a criteria that people who ask for more than a certain figure are not going to get it. Some places even delight in going for the worst negotiator since it's the "lowest bid". After being laid off, having a needy girlfriend and prepared to take anything in my field I ended up in that situation - bad choice in the long term not the sort of people you want to stay with (eg. only way to get time off, let alone a salary rise, is to quit and work elsewhere).
The big clues are right there in the summary. It's probably doable without a vast amount of effort since a lot of it will come down to insulation, ducting and awnings or similar window shading. There is already a subway in place so improvements there come down to better equipment instead of expensive tunnelling or land aquistion.
What makes 40% or so possible is buildings constructed with no thought for energy consumption in some cases need only minor modifications to for a major reduction in use. We've seen that in other place with "no-brainers" such as painting a roof white making a major difference to AC use.
It's not hard to use less if a lot is being thrown away.
The above poster was pretending it applied to total waste and not just the fuel, so you are discussing something different to the topic of the thread.
Taking a neutral position, in that case it just means some cheapskate didn't design the cooling system to match the government requirements and that it's not being properly enforced. Having a lake large enough to get the cooling water temperature down before it ends up back in the river is one of the many reasons why nuclear has such a large capital cost - the benefit of running really hot means you have to pass a lot of water through it.
Because they had already decided a few years ago to stop building new plants mainly due to high capital cost and an unwillingness to put the money up at the time. Some other energy sources can be built a bit at a time so there is less money needed up front even if the total is more per megawatt. They are also not building any new hydro.
3%? Only if you redefine nuclear waste to mean something completely and utterly different to technical usage. It's not just the fuel rods that have to be handled with care. The majority of nuclear waste is low grade stuff that has come in contact with the fuel but is not fuel itself, those pesky neutrons tend to break things. The low grade waste is not so difficult to deal with as the high grade waste, but pretending it does not exist is counterproductive and just will make people oppose your viewpoint once they find out they have been tricked. Let's please consider things in terms of reality and not redefinition word games.
Time, neutron bombardment, corrosion etc do that whether we like it or not. Eventually it gets to the point where it is cheaper to build a new one than keep the old one going.
You've got the wrong end of the stick. The above poster mentioned Australia because water scarcity is far more of an issue there than even in California. For the purposes of saving water Australian toilets are superior simply because it was a mandated design criteria while it isn't with your cobbled together situation of high flow bowls and low flow cisterns. The entire thing is designed to deal with the job (pun intended) instead of the extra of a low flow cistern added on as an afterthought.
There is NOTHING in that post above about "the superiority of white Australia" or "Right-wingers" - and the amusing thing about your reaction is that it was a "socialist" government body that set the standard and demanded a better design than you are used to.
In the USA they have a different standard design of toilet bowl, probably for historical reasons (ie. always done it that way), and combining it with a cistern used elsewhere apparently does not work very well at all. Getting a better toilet may be beyond what the normal suppliers can do.
The lesson, for the millionth time in engineering, is if you change one part of the design you may need to change another. Not doing that means a low flow cistern with a bowl that needs a high flow cistern sucks with a low fibre diet.
By not building new capacity as the old is retired it is going to shrink, and by not committing to new construction some years ago this policy was effectively already in place.
I expect people to note before replying that nothing in that statement is against or for nuclear power, just an observation of the situation. If you have a thin skin either way please scratch it elsewhere.
No, I am thinking of it as a large company with decent communication instead of what it appears to be in this case as a bunch of smaller companies stuck together with glue and very poor communication.
The point should be to have competency derived from getting the best you can get from a wide range of sources instead of having no better ability to get stuff done than a college club. That way lies "heck of a job Brownie!" and similar fuckups.
So as soon as a "difficult" person shows up at work you quit? I do not think you practice the stupidly simplistic line that you are preaching.
If they want to do anything useful in scientific or engineering software they will need to know that and about a years worth of maths subjects on top of it. It's a reason why scientists and engineers with little programming background are writing fairly crappy software because it's the alternative is it not working at all.
Someone like her is needed to write commercial geophysical software, but it's all being done in India by recent graduates in incredibly slow and crappy Java. It's not that Java is inherently an insane choice compared with the C and FORTRAN code it's replacing, just the poor results of outsourcing.
Ever heard of Texas Instruments? A lot of computer technology grew out of geophysics. With a doctorate it's almost certain that her project involved writing her own software. Geophysics is really about using computers to do stuff with signals and relate it to what is under the ground.
For certain classes of problems an applied scientist is going to be a far better programmer than a computer scientist purely because of their mathematical background, if that's what the solution needs. I've even met CS grads who have never heard of a Fourier transform, which is fine for some stuff but a handicap for others until they get up to speed with whatever a project requires (which may be never if it requires a couple of years of study in mathematics).
However, 4 times is indicating very strongly that a policy or managerial decision at a rank above that of the recruiters is occuring. It's very likely that she is correct about it being based on age but the recruiters were not informed of that policy being applied by a higher level of management.
Either way it's a fuckup all round putting someone through the same time and money wasting process four times instead of looking up the records of previous interviews.
Yes but then you get cesspits like the Enron energy traders with that sort of monoculture. A bit of variety keeps people in touch with reality.
Yes, it happens, but it's a danger sign to either stay away or get variety in your life elsewhere. A "tightly focussed" group is likely to get blindsided by what people who don't live in the pockets of their twin sees as common sense.
If they are good at what they do then you don't have to like them. This weird concept that every single person in a workplace has to be the ideal drinking buddy is completely fucked up. A bit of professionalism goes a long way and can keep people who do not like each other from having a horrible work environment or "a life of despair".