More importantly, you need to define how you will determine what constitutes "harm" for future cases. Otherwise some future government could use these same taxes to punish Richard Stallman for "harming" society based on their own standards.
The problem I see with trying to define data collected from Facebook and Google users as "harm" is that the data was given up willingly. For a contract to be valid, there has to be consideration - both parties have to give up something of value to the other. In the case of big data, the user gave up their data in exchange for some service. Likewise, the company gave up that service in exchange for the data. Both sides gave and received consideration, making it a valid contract. (This is why you often hear that economics is not a zero-sum game. You can make a zero-sum exchange of goods and services, which are a net benefit to both parties. e.g. I have two water bottles, you have two hamburgers. If we are both hungry and thirsty, trading one water bottle for one hamburger results in a net benefit to both of us, even though the amount of physical goods between the two of us remains the same.)
While giving up something of value could in absolute terms be considered "harm", the fact that it was given up in exchange for something received, and the fact that the person made the exchange willingly constitutes evidence that in their own opinion the exchange was a net benefit to themselves, not harm. And the justification for any tax meant to counteract the harm goes out the window.
Contrast this to surveillance and data collection done without the user's knowledge or consent. In that case, the user is unwittingly giving up the data. And if they knew the data were being collected or disseminated they might decide the exchange was not a benefit to themselves, and decide not to make the deal. In that case, you can argue that harm is being done to the users. Such is the case for companies losing data to hackers due to their lax security.
Otherwise, I use the "block caller" function and I never hear from that number again.
The problem with the current Caller ID system is that this step doesn't do what you think it does. The number you see the spam call as coming from isn't their real number. It's some random number they've put into their calling device (in many cases spoofed to appear as a local call to you). Blocking it doesn't block the telemarketer, it just blocks some random person who happened to have the number the telemarketers chose to spoof that day.
It's not quite that simple. While reducing the number of spam calls sounds like it'd be a good thing, understand that it would have consequences for you and me. The telecoms are reluctant to address it themselves because they make a good chunk of money from the telemarketers and robocallers making these calls. If the telecoms lost that revenue, they'd need to make it up elsewhere, meaning your monthly phone bill would go up. Even if your carrier already had a policy prohibiting spoofed caller ID calls, they'd have to raise their rates to compensate for the increased interconnect fees other carriers would charge them once telemarketers disappeared.
It's the same reason the Post Office sticks all those advertising flyers in your mailbox every day - the revenue they get for distributing those flyers helps defray their operating costs, keeping the cost of a first class postage stamp down. In that respect it's completely different from email spam, which is free for the sender and only inflicts additional cost onto everyone else. Most of the spam phone calls I get spoof my area code and 3-digit prefix. My area code and prefix are from a state where I used to live so nobody I regularly talk with today has them, making these calls simple to filter out. If that's all I need to do to save $10-$20 per month on my phone bill, I think it's worth the trouble of silencing these calls and ignoring them when they ring my phone.
A minimum of two cameras are needed to capture 3D images. Two will work, but you can end up with shadows. Three reduces the amount of shadowing. I suspect the optimal balance of reduced shadowing and minimizing camera expense is e cameras (2.718). So three is a better match than two.
I was hopeful the light field camera was going to be the solution. It basically turns every point on the lens into a separate camera for the purposes of capturing 3D info. But development (and interest) seems to have stagnated. Perhaps what we really need first is some means of displaying 3D images (that doesn't require wearing dorky glasses). But that's a chicken and egg problem. Regardless if whichever one comes first, either a light field or multi-camera system isnecessary if the dream of capturing holographic images is ever to become a reality.
But yeah, it seems silly to progress with this while going backwards in terms of SD slots, removable batteries, and headphone jacks. An unfortunate side-effect of high brand-loyalty resulting in the primary driving force being customer lock-in, rather than features which help the customer.
Why? Because you don't get to see the results instantly, so it forces you to slow down and think about what you are doing, and get it right in the camera.
That's actually why I switched to digital. When shooting film, I always had to keep a notebook where I wrote down all the camera and lens settings I had used for each shot on a roll of film. (Don't get me started on switching rolls mid-roll if I needed to switch from, say, 100 ISO for outdoor shots to 800 ISO for indoor at night.) Weeks later when I got the roll developed and the pictures back, I could finally cross-reference the settings I'd written down to how the picture turned out, and figure out what I did right and what I did wrong.
That huge lag period between the deciding what settings to use for a shot, and seeing the results, made learning a slow and arduous process. My first few months shooting with digital, I learned more than I had in nearly a decade of shooting film.
I do acknowledge that my "keeper" rate has gone down from about 1 in 10 shots with film to about 1 in 30 shots with digital. But that's mostly because digital photos are essentially free, so I'm bracketing or experimenting with different settings a lot more to see if I can get a better shot. Or I'm burning a lot of shots at a slow shutter speed handheld in low light, because I just need to get lucky once to get a sharp picture. That'd be a prohibitively expensive tactic with film (not to mention you won't know if/when you got a sharp shot), but it works for digital.
It's not happening because of Tesla. Tesla is actually the beneficiary, not the driver. It's happening because CARB (California Air Resources Board - they mandate emissions standards in California) has implemented a zero emissions vehicle mandate The math is a bit complex, but basically every car manufacturer needs to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) each year. In theory that's electric or hydrogen fuel cell, but right now there's only one hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the market (Toyota Mirai), so for all practical purposes it's EVs. The percentage increases each year. For 2018 it's about 2.5% (the math is a bit wonky and includes a subsection for plug-in hybrids, so it's not exact). By 2025 it's supposed to 22%.
If a manufacturer fails to sell enough EVs, they can buy ZEV credits from another company which exceeded their required percentage. That's the market Tesla is exploiting. Musk foresaw that this mandate would create a demand for ZEV credits, so he set up a company which would always have an excess number of credits to sell. In other words, every Tesla they sell makes money from the buyer, and from other car manufacturers who send some of their ICE vehicle revenue to Tesla as payment for ZEV credits. In effect, ICE vehicle sales are subsidizing Tesla.
If a manufacturer fails to sell enough ZEVs and fails to acquire enough ZEV credits, they are banned from selling vehicles in California. On top of that, about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's regulations. So the manufacturer would be banned from selling cars in those states too - roughly a third of the U.S. by population. No manufacturer wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S., so they're tripping over themselves to rush EVs to market. And if the EVs aren't selling well enough, they'll slash the prices and throw in all sorts of incentives to move them off the dealer's lots. I almost bit on a VW e-Golf lease in 2015 - no money down, $79/mo for 3 years ($2844 in total payments, excluding tax). The only reason I didn't get it was the cost to insure it basically doubled the price. There was a similar deal in Northern California for $49/mo, but I couldn't figure out how to get it down to SoCal from there with only a 85 mile range. (Since CARB only counts ZEVs sold in California, that's why these great deals are only available in California.)
In other words, the number of EVs on the road isn't being driven by Tesla or by true market demand. It's being driven by CARB setting a percentage, and car manufacturers cutting EV prices until they meet that percentage. I suspect this is part of the reason Tesla is having financial problems. I haven't seen a repeat of the awesome EV deals from the end of 2015, suggesting the automakers are managing to meet their ZEV quota. That means less demand for Tesla's ZEV credits, which means less money for Tesla per car sold. I suspect this is also part of why production of the Tesla 3 has been slow to ramp up - they want to push production into future years, when demand for ZEV credits is hopefully higher. If they produce a Tesla 3 this year, its ZEV credit is only good for this year. And if other manufacturers are meeting their ZEV quota, then all that extra Tesla 3 ZEV credit does is decrease the value of other Tesla 3 ZEV credits.
I suspect Musk is trying to hold for the yearly ZEV mandate increases. 22% ZEVs by 2025 is a very lofty goal. One that I have a hard time believing regular automakers will be able to attain. In which case demand for Tesla's ZEV credits is going to be hot, and probably enough to save Tesla from bankruptcy. If they can hold on long enough.
The wild card is that there might be a repeat of what happened in 2000. See, this isn't the first time CARB tried a ZEV mandate. They tried one in 2000. During the 1990s, automakers were put on notice that they would have to begin selling
Just like student loans drove tuitions higher. You can subsidize something on the demand side, or the supply side.
If you subsidize on the demand side, you lower the cost to buyers while keeping the price to sellers the same. Someone in the middle (government, scholarship fund, Walmart, etc) makes up the difference. The lower cost to buyers increases demand. If the product is a commodity (all versions of the product are more or less identical and interchangeable, e.g. lettuce, or oil), this increased demand spurs producers to increase production so they can sell more. Supply increases, and prices stabilize again close to what they were at before the subsidy, except now you have more supply.
That doesn't happen with education because it's not a commodity. People want to go to ivy league schools. These schools then experience increased demand without any incentive to increase supply. So they just ratchet up the price of tuition to soak up the extra money the subsidy enables people to pay them. The end result is after several decades, all you've accomplished is the right hand stealing from the left. People who qualify for the subsidy are able to go to school, at the expense of some people who don't qualify for the subsidy being unable to afford to go. The net number of students doesn't increase or increases very little. And the price of tuition increases by roughly the amount of the subsidy per student.
If you subsidize on the supply side, you're directly encouraging an increase in supply. Ivy league schools keep their tuition the same, but your subsidy allows the construction of more schools (e.g. State universities). The increased competition from having more schools drives them to figure out ways to cut expenses, and lower their tuition to attract more students.
Walmart would accomplish a lot more if they instead used this money for a fund to help construct more schools.
It makes perfect senses. You're not taking into account opportunity cost. Money you spend tackling this problem, is money you don't have available to tackle other problems.
Given a multitude of problems, and limited resources (money) for tackling those problems, you maximize the reduction in problems by applying your resources most efficiently. By tackling the worst but easiest-to-fix problems first, even if that means leaving smaller but more-costly-to-fix problems unresolved.
Your way of thinking is why we waste billions of dollars trying to make air travel safer to prevent a few hundred deaths per year, while over a million people die in car accidents every year. Or why nuclear power is a pariah, when statistically it's the safest power source man has ever invented (yes, safer than renewables). You prioritize tackling the problem which has the greatest emotional impact (i.e. in proportion to news coverage), rather than the problem which will yield the greatest numerical decrease for the smallest expenditure.
I've experienced it too. It has nothing to do with biting. It's due to a galvanic reaction between the metal in the cutlery and the fillings in your teeth. If you have fillings, and there's sufficient saliva in your mouth, and the cutlery and your fillings are far enough apart on the galvanic series, it creates a weak electrical current through your mouth and teeth which feels awful. I only noticed it when I visited a friend who served me a meal with "fancy" gold-plated cutlery, but I would imagine different people are sensitive to different levels of current.
It's similar to chewing on aluminum foil if you have fillings, except in that case the aluminum makes direct contact with your fillings so the current is much higher.
The best insulator is air (actually it's vacuum, but that's prohibitively expensive aside from thermoses). Brick is actually a worse insulator than standard wood-frame construction with fiberglass insulation in the gaps.
Brick (and masonry) just feels cooler because it takes longer to heat up in the morning due to its greater mass. The larger mass means after absorbing the same amount of sunlight, its temperature increases less. But likewise it takes longer to cool down in the evening. This may not be an undesirable trait if you're in a desert-like area where the days are hot but the nights are cold. But in climates which are consistently cold or hot (i.e. most of the world), brick and masonry are about the worst possible building materials. Their greater mass increases the amount of energy you need to use on heating or cooling (because you need to heat or cool the bricks along with the interior air space).
Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Engels predicted this in their books Das Kapital, 1876-1894. They understood the nature of capitalism in that is was a very effective system for increasing wealth inequality, i.e. it helps the rich to get richer by making the poor poorer
Marx was wrong. Being at the poverty level in the U.S. puts your income in the 84th percentile for the world. That is, if you're living in poverty in the U.S., some 80% of the world is worse off than you are.
The mistake Marx made (which you repeat) was that he assumed if inequality is increasing, that means the poor are getting poorer. i.e. inequality can only increase if the poor get poorer. But that's not true. Inequality can increase even when the poor get richer - as long as the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, inequality is increasing. That's what capitalism does. Everyone gets richer, but at inequal rates. Those who find better means of becoming more productive (whether by hard work, a good idea, or just dumb luck) end up getting disproportionately richer.
And that ultimately is why Marxism fails. By eliminating this inequality, you also eliminate the incentive for individuals to make themselves more productive. You're not going to work an extra hour plowing that field, if the fruit of your extra labor ends up distributed across the entire country resulting in everyone (including yourself) getting just 1 extra grain of wheat apiece. And if you aren't increasing your own productivity, your country is not getting any richer, and your standard of living is not increasing..
The so-called "socialist" countries in Europe aren't really socialist. They're a hybrid socialist-capitalist. Even capitalism (inequality) to maintain an incentive for people to figure out new ways to become more productive, but enough socialism to keep the level of inequality in check. The U.S. is also socialist-capitalist, but favors the capitalism side a bit more. This results in greater inequality, but also yields a higher GDP per capita (average productivity per citizen) than countries which favor the socialism side more. Neither is "right" - they're just different approaches based on how much you value higher productivity (standard of living) vs income equality.
The "Golden Age of Capitalism" as you put it happened because Henry Ford figured out that when he paid his workers more than the prevailing wage at the time, it actually increased his own wealth even more because suddenly his workers could afford to buy his cars. See, that's another thing about capitalism - it's optimized when the pay people receive is proportional to their individual contribution to the country's productivity. If a fat cat CEO is keeping his employees' wages artificially low to make himself rich, that actually hurts overall productivity. The CEO ends up wasting much of his income on non-productive toys like Ferraris and gold-plated toilet seats, whereas if the money had gone to his employees instead, they would've spent it more on essentials which would've contributed more to the economy (given other workers more work to do producing the things they buy).
Prior to Ford, workers were being underpaid. Once Ford began paying workers more, they began buying more, which created more demand for other workers to produce more, which resulted in them being paid more to fulfill that increased demand, which resulted in them buying more, etc. This feedback loop is what led to the phenomenal economic growth in the mid-20th century. Countries which overcome this hump are the leading economies in the world today. Their top 1% ($500k+/yr in the U.S.) only accounts for
It doesn't sound like anyone is denied effective treatment in the current system
The FDA is one of the toughest regulatory agencies in the world for getting a treatment approved. Thalidomide was kept out of the U.S. by the FDA, while it was approved in Europe. While that was a huge FDA success, the long-term effect has been that the FDA tends to err far on the side of caution (you cannot have a critical failure like Thalidomide if you don't approve anything).
The problem is that there are two failure modes here. If the FDA approves a drug which turns out to be dangerous, the negative effects are widespread and public. But if they don't approve a drug which turns out to be safe, there's very little negative publicity because life goes on as before. In the former case, you're counting lives which were obviously and visibly harmed. In the latter case, you're counting lives which could have been saved but weren't, and so are indistinguishable from the drug or treatment not existing. So there's a natural disparity in the visibility of the two failure modes. The optimal balance of these two failure modes is when the number of people who die or are harmed from approved drugs which turn out to be dangerous, is the same as the number of people who die or are harmed because a drug which can treat them (and will turn out to be safe) has not yet been approved.
But the the FDA success with Thalidomide has resulted in the agency trying to balance the publicity of these two failure modes, rather than balancing the number of people harmed by the two failure modes. And since publicity favors not approving drugs, the FDA has become one of the toughest pharmaceutical regulatory agencies in the world. As a result, there are effective treatments which have been approved in other developed countries like the EU, which haven't yet been approved in the U.S. Wealthier Americans simply travel abroad to seek these treatments, which is why you don't often hear about people being denied treatment.
Weeds are already becoming resistant to such glyphosate-based herbicides after "more than 20 years of near-ubiquitous use," reports Reuters.
Note that this invalidates most of the early court rulings in favor of Monsanto, which were made under Monsanto's assurance that plants could not develop resistance. And thus any crop which could survive spraying with Round-Up must be from stolen Monsanto seed. This shifted the burden of proof in Monsanto's favor. The farmer had to prove they were innocent and the seed got on their land accidentally, instead of Monsanto proving they were guilty because the farmer planted it deliberately.
The cable companies are not natural monopolies which need to be broken up by anti-trust suits. They were given their monopoly status by local governments, often in exchange for concessions like guarantees to offer service to 9x% of homes in an area, or (in the case of the previous city I lived in) straight kickbacks (x$ per home) paid to the city's general fund.
Sorry, but this is one problem caused by too much government regulation. The local governments correctly realized that allowing anyone and everyone to offer cable service would result in the telephone poles becoming unsightly and underground utility conduits becoming clogged. So they wisely limited who could provide cable service in their jurisdiction. But somewhere, somewhen, the wheels fell off - they got drunk with their own power and started handing out monopolies to the highest bidder. That's an issue the pro-regulation crowd seems to be blind to - government corruption resulting in regulations which results in net harm to society.
You're more likely to be killed by a deer. About 120 Americans are killed by deer every year. (325.7 million Americans) / (120 deaths/year) = 1 in 2.7 million chance of being killed by a deer each year. Do you wring your hands over the possibility of being killed by a deer, and hold marches to demanding the deer population be controlled?
The U.S. causes of death statistics are readily available from the CDC website. For 2015, the leading causes of death for the 15-19 year old demographic were:
3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses)
2.061 deaths - Suicide
1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related)
583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
306 deaths - Heart disease
195 deaths - Birth defects
72 deaths - Influenza (the flu)
63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases
61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases
52 deaths - Diabetes
41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth
All of these represent a greater risk to students than the 14 deaths per year from school shootings.
I think that's the idea. Nobody submits their photos because of how creepy/stupid this is. But when Facebook gets sued for helping distribute revenge porn, they tell the judge "Your Honor (or whatever they call them in the UK), we have a system in place designed to prevent exactly this type of incident from ever happening. But the victim refused to participate. Therefore the fault is entirely hers, not ours.
I browse with an extension that shows the flag of the country a site is hosted at in the URL bar. I was always nervous about using DD-WRT because for years the site was hosted in China (they changed hosts to Switzerland recently). So you shouldn't automatically trust third party firmware either. And if you're really paranoid you should be downloading source and compiling the firmware yourself. If you can trust that the source code is clean. (For those curious, OpenWRT is hosted in Germany.
Statistics favor there being no Loch Ness monster. Back in the latter half of the 1900s, about 100,000 people visited the lake each year. Only a few percent of them had cameras, and almost none of them had video cameras.
In the 2010s, about 200,000 people visited the lake each year. And nearly all of them had cameras with video capability. So statistically, you'd expect the number of photos purporting to show Nessie each year to have increased by about 100-fold, and the number of videos (i.e. mysterious ripples on the surface) to have increased 1000- or 10,000-fold.
No such increases have happened (and in fact the photographer of the most famous photo from the 1900s has come out and admitted he faked it). That makes it highly likely that there is no monster, and that most of the "sightings" in the 1900s were faked.
The statistics are that there are an insignificant number of self-driving cars on the road.
[...]
If you took all Teslas, every single model of them ever sold, adds up to about 300,000 cars. Worldwide. There are approximately 1bn vehicles in the world. That's 0.03%.
That's a common misnomer. Statistically, you don't need a very large sample to get a statistically significant sample. The fact that Teslas are 0.03% of the total is irrelevant. If you do the math, it turns out that only the number of samples matters, not the total population size. The only time population size begins to skew the statistics is when your sample size approaches the population size. OTOH sample size much smaller than the population size is just fine. So the fact that Teslas make up just 0.03% of all cars is irrelevant.
The problem with the stats on self-driving car accidents (and airliner crashes for that matter) is that these events are extremely rare. The above approximation for confidence interval assumes the probability of an event is close to 50%. When the probability of an event approaches 0% or 100%, it makes the confidence interval less precise. And the margin of error increases relative to the probability of the event happening. e.g. For a 99% confidence interval, the margin of error is 1.29 * 2 * standard error.
If you flip a coin 1000 times and get 510 heads, your margin of error with a 99% confidence interval (i.e. you're 99% sure that the coin is weighted to come out heads 51% of the time) is:
1.29*2*sqrt( (0.51*0.49/1000) = 0.04
or 51% +/- 4%
If you flip a coin 1000 times and get just 1 head, your margin of error with a 99% confidence interval (i.e. you're 99% sure that the coin is weighted to come out heads 0.1% of the time) is:
129*2*sqrt(0.001*0.999/1000) = 0.0026
or 0.1% +/- 0.26%
Your margin of error is bigger than your predicted probability
It's only thanks to the all-out stupidity and lunacy of Hitler and his goons that Germany lost despite having the most effective military force at the time.
The West doesn't like to admit it, but the Soviet Union played a huge role in stopping Hitler. After he steamrolled Europe, he got cocky and invaded Asia. The Soviets threw bodies at him (soldiers were frequently sent in unarmed and told to pick up a rifle from a comrade who'd been killed) and eventually managed to stop his army and starve it during a brutal winter. Look at the Allied military casualty figures from WWII.
U.S.: 407,300 killed, 671,800 wounded
UK: 383,700 killed, 376,239 wounded
France: 210,000, 390,000 wounded
Soviet Union: estimated 8.6 to 11.4 million killed, 14.7 million wounded
And no it wasn't because the Soviets were incompetent. Other Eastern European countries which were overrun (Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary) also suffered casualties on par with the U.S., UK, and France. And the Latvian countries lost over 10% of their total populations. If you look at German casualties, the Germans lost more than 8x as many soldiers on the Eastern front than it did on the Western front. The vast majority of the fighting happened to the east of Germany.
Yes D-Day gave the Allies a crucial Western foothold turning Europe into a two-front war (technically three-front since Italy had been invaded the previous year). But if the Soviets hadn't been keeping Hitler busy on the Eastern front, most of his armies would've been on the western beaches, and D-Day would've been a massacre.
And that's a big If, but if it was only 2 million fake comments out of 23 million submitted, then that's pretty close to the fake signature threshold used for ballot initiatives in California. If the initiative gathers more than 110% of the required minimum signatures, it's assumed that only 10% are fake and the ballot qualifies without further verification. The 10% figure is based on the number of fake signatures which turn up in a random sample of initiatives which gather less than 110% the required minimum.
Considering it was an online form, and you didn't have to lie to someone's face to "sign" it, I'm surprised the rate of fake comments wasn't higher.
That's not much different from what info is required to register to vote. Name, address, DOB, a state-issued ID (which can be obtained with just the previous three), and a signature swearing that you're a U.S.citizen and allowed to vote.
This whole thing is a Pandora's box for both sides. Insisting that the comments should be verified leaves you vulnerable to questions about why you're ok with a lower standard of confirmation for voting. Insisting that verification is unnecessary leaves you vulnerable to questions about why then you think the voter registration needs to be verified.
How about it Tesla? Batteries, ready to spread solar power plant, multiplicity of connector types on a ship, always ready go in the case of a emergency.
Geothermal has a capacity factor of about 0.7. So the 38 MW the plant is rated for generates on average (38MW)*(0.7) = 26.6 MW.
Solar at Hawaii's location (96704 zip code) has a capacity factor of about 0.124 (this takes into account night, seasons, movement of the sun, weather, maintenance, etc). So generating 26.6 MW would require (26.6 MW)/(0.124) = 215 MW of installed nameplate capacity. That would make it the 18th largest PV solar plant in the U.S.
Assuming you're using commerical 180 W/m^2 panels, this would mean 1.195 million m^2 of solar panels, or 1.195 km^2 of panels alone. Or 67 Panamax-size container ships ( 66 meters x 49 meters) completely covered on PV panels to replace this single geothermal plant.
If you allow space to account for maintenance and tilt to the angle of the sun, the PV solar plants in this capacity range seem to cover about 5-10 km^2. So now you're talking about 280-560 Panamax-sized ships with solar panels on them to replace this single geothermal plant.
Or put another way, a single Panamax-sized ship with every upward-facing surface covered in solar panels would only generate (366 meters)*(49 meters)*(180 W/m^2)*(0.124) = 400287 Watts = 0.4 MW on average at this location. The average U.S. home uses 10,766 kWh per year, or an average of (10766 kWh) / (1 year) = 1481 Watts. So your one ship would be enough to power about 270 homes. There are already 10,000 people evacuated, which if you assume 4 per home is 2500 homes.
People *vastly* overestimate the power density of solar. Mobile solar is stupid unless you can drastically reduce your power consumption. Effective use of solar requires large areas of cheap land.
For interplanetary space travel, yes. But that's not very exciting. Chemical rockets work fine for interplanetary travel on the order of years and decades at most with ion drives showing promise as a next step.
The reason the EM drive was so exciting was because of the potential for interstellar travel in reasonable timeframes (sub-100 year) without having to lug around huge quantities of propellant (mass to throw out the back to accelerate you). If it actually worked, you could power it with a nuclear reactor and accelerate away without needing any propellant (violation of conservation of momentum).
Traveling to Alpha Centauri (4.367 light years) in 100 years (assuming constant acceleration to the halfway point, decelerating the second half of the trip, and ignoring relativistic effects) would require reaching a peak speed of
d = 0.5*vavg*t
vavg = 2*d/t = 2*(4.367 c years)/(100 years) = 0.08734 c
vmax = 2*vavg = 0.17468 c = 52,368 km/s
To accelerate, you need to dump the energy you're producing into the propellant that you're ejecting in the direction opposite you're accelerating. The energy needed reach Earth's escape velocity (11.2 km/s) and to escape the solar system from Earth's orbit (16.6 km/s) are roundoff error compared to the energy needed to reach Alpha Centauri in 100 years.
Energy for Earth escape velocity = 0.5*m*(11.2 km/s)^2
Energy for solar system escape velocity = 0.5*m*(16.6 km/s)^2 = 2.2 times the energy to escape Earth
Energy to reach Alpha Centauri in 100 years = 0.5*m*(52367 km/s)^2 = 21,861,469 times the energy to escape Earth
So a trip to Alpha Centauri in 100 years would require nearly 22 million times more energy (and propellant to absorb that energy) than needed to escape Earth's gravity.
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More importantly, you need to define how you will determine what constitutes "harm" for future cases. Otherwise some future government could use these same taxes to punish Richard Stallman for "harming" society based on their own standards.
The problem I see with trying to define data collected from Facebook and Google users as "harm" is that the data was given up willingly. For a contract to be valid, there has to be consideration - both parties have to give up something of value to the other. In the case of big data, the user gave up their data in exchange for some service. Likewise, the company gave up that service in exchange for the data. Both sides gave and received consideration, making it a valid contract. (This is why you often hear that economics is not a zero-sum game. You can make a zero-sum exchange of goods and services, which are a net benefit to both parties. e.g. I have two water bottles, you have two hamburgers. If we are both hungry and thirsty, trading one water bottle for one hamburger results in a net benefit to both of us, even though the amount of physical goods between the two of us remains the same.)
While giving up something of value could in absolute terms be considered "harm", the fact that it was given up in exchange for something received, and the fact that the person made the exchange willingly constitutes evidence that in their own opinion the exchange was a net benefit to themselves, not harm. And the justification for any tax meant to counteract the harm goes out the window.
Contrast this to surveillance and data collection done without the user's knowledge or consent. In that case, the user is unwittingly giving up the data. And if they knew the data were being collected or disseminated they might decide the exchange was not a benefit to themselves, and decide not to make the deal. In that case, you can argue that harm is being done to the users. Such is the case for companies losing data to hackers due to their lax security.
The problem with the current Caller ID system is that this step doesn't do what you think it does. The number you see the spam call as coming from isn't their real number. It's some random number they've put into their calling device (in many cases spoofed to appear as a local call to you). Blocking it doesn't block the telemarketer, it just blocks some random person who happened to have the number the telemarketers chose to spoof that day.
It's not quite that simple. While reducing the number of spam calls sounds like it'd be a good thing, understand that it would have consequences for you and me. The telecoms are reluctant to address it themselves because they make a good chunk of money from the telemarketers and robocallers making these calls. If the telecoms lost that revenue, they'd need to make it up elsewhere, meaning your monthly phone bill would go up. Even if your carrier already had a policy prohibiting spoofed caller ID calls, they'd have to raise their rates to compensate for the increased interconnect fees other carriers would charge them once telemarketers disappeared.
It's the same reason the Post Office sticks all those advertising flyers in your mailbox every day - the revenue they get for distributing those flyers helps defray their operating costs, keeping the cost of a first class postage stamp down. In that respect it's completely different from email spam, which is free for the sender and only inflicts additional cost onto everyone else. Most of the spam phone calls I get spoof my area code and 3-digit prefix. My area code and prefix are from a state where I used to live so nobody I regularly talk with today has them, making these calls simple to filter out. If that's all I need to do to save $10-$20 per month on my phone bill, I think it's worth the trouble of silencing these calls and ignoring them when they ring my phone.
A minimum of two cameras are needed to capture 3D images. Two will work, but you can end up with shadows. Three reduces the amount of shadowing. I suspect the optimal balance of reduced shadowing and minimizing camera expense is e cameras (2.718). So three is a better match than two.
I was hopeful the light field camera was going to be the solution. It basically turns every point on the lens into a separate camera for the purposes of capturing 3D info. But development (and interest) seems to have stagnated. Perhaps what we really need first is some means of displaying 3D images (that doesn't require wearing dorky glasses). But that's a chicken and egg problem. Regardless if whichever one comes first, either a light field or multi-camera system isnecessary if the dream of capturing holographic images is ever to become a reality.
But yeah, it seems silly to progress with this while going backwards in terms of SD slots, removable batteries, and headphone jacks. An unfortunate side-effect of high brand-loyalty resulting in the primary driving force being customer lock-in, rather than features which help the customer.
That's actually why I switched to digital. When shooting film, I always had to keep a notebook where I wrote down all the camera and lens settings I had used for each shot on a roll of film. (Don't get me started on switching rolls mid-roll if I needed to switch from, say, 100 ISO for outdoor shots to 800 ISO for indoor at night.) Weeks later when I got the roll developed and the pictures back, I could finally cross-reference the settings I'd written down to how the picture turned out, and figure out what I did right and what I did wrong.
That huge lag period between the deciding what settings to use for a shot, and seeing the results, made learning a slow and arduous process. My first few months shooting with digital, I learned more than I had in nearly a decade of shooting film.
I do acknowledge that my "keeper" rate has gone down from about 1 in 10 shots with film to about 1 in 30 shots with digital. But that's mostly because digital photos are essentially free, so I'm bracketing or experimenting with different settings a lot more to see if I can get a better shot. Or I'm burning a lot of shots at a slow shutter speed handheld in low light, because I just need to get lucky once to get a sharp picture. That'd be a prohibitively expensive tactic with film (not to mention you won't know if/when you got a sharp shot), but it works for digital.
It's not happening because of Tesla. Tesla is actually the beneficiary, not the driver. It's happening because CARB (California Air Resources Board - they mandate emissions standards in California) has implemented a zero emissions vehicle mandate The math is a bit complex, but basically every car manufacturer needs to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) each year. In theory that's electric or hydrogen fuel cell, but right now there's only one hydrogen fuel cell vehicle on the market (Toyota Mirai), so for all practical purposes it's EVs. The percentage increases each year. For 2018 it's about 2.5% (the math is a bit wonky and includes a subsection for plug-in hybrids, so it's not exact). By 2025 it's supposed to 22%.
If a manufacturer fails to sell enough EVs, they can buy ZEV credits from another company which exceeded their required percentage. That's the market Tesla is exploiting. Musk foresaw that this mandate would create a demand for ZEV credits, so he set up a company which would always have an excess number of credits to sell. In other words, every Tesla they sell makes money from the buyer, and from other car manufacturers who send some of their ICE vehicle revenue to Tesla as payment for ZEV credits. In effect, ICE vehicle sales are subsidizing Tesla.
If a manufacturer fails to sell enough ZEVs and fails to acquire enough ZEV credits, they are banned from selling vehicles in California. On top of that, about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's regulations. So the manufacturer would be banned from selling cars in those states too - roughly a third of the U.S. by population. No manufacturer wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S., so they're tripping over themselves to rush EVs to market. And if the EVs aren't selling well enough, they'll slash the prices and throw in all sorts of incentives to move them off the dealer's lots. I almost bit on a VW e-Golf lease in 2015 - no money down, $79/mo for 3 years ($2844 in total payments, excluding tax). The only reason I didn't get it was the cost to insure it basically doubled the price. There was a similar deal in Northern California for $49/mo, but I couldn't figure out how to get it down to SoCal from there with only a 85 mile range. (Since CARB only counts ZEVs sold in California, that's why these great deals are only available in California.)
In other words, the number of EVs on the road isn't being driven by Tesla or by true market demand. It's being driven by CARB setting a percentage, and car manufacturers cutting EV prices until they meet that percentage. I suspect this is part of the reason Tesla is having financial problems. I haven't seen a repeat of the awesome EV deals from the end of 2015, suggesting the automakers are managing to meet their ZEV quota. That means less demand for Tesla's ZEV credits, which means less money for Tesla per car sold. I suspect this is also part of why production of the Tesla 3 has been slow to ramp up - they want to push production into future years, when demand for ZEV credits is hopefully higher. If they produce a Tesla 3 this year, its ZEV credit is only good for this year. And if other manufacturers are meeting their ZEV quota, then all that extra Tesla 3 ZEV credit does is decrease the value of other Tesla 3 ZEV credits.
I suspect Musk is trying to hold for the yearly ZEV mandate increases. 22% ZEVs by 2025 is a very lofty goal. One that I have a hard time believing regular automakers will be able to attain. In which case demand for Tesla's ZEV credits is going to be hot, and probably enough to save Tesla from bankruptcy. If they can hold on long enough.
The wild card is that there might be a repeat of what happened in 2000. See, this isn't the first time CARB tried a ZEV mandate. They tried one in 2000. During the 1990s, automakers were put on notice that they would have to begin selling
Just like student loans drove tuitions higher. You can subsidize something on the demand side, or the supply side.
If you subsidize on the demand side, you lower the cost to buyers while keeping the price to sellers the same. Someone in the middle (government, scholarship fund, Walmart, etc) makes up the difference. The lower cost to buyers increases demand. If the product is a commodity (all versions of the product are more or less identical and interchangeable, e.g. lettuce, or oil), this increased demand spurs producers to increase production so they can sell more. Supply increases, and prices stabilize again close to what they were at before the subsidy, except now you have more supply.
That doesn't happen with education because it's not a commodity. People want to go to ivy league schools. These schools then experience increased demand without any incentive to increase supply. So they just ratchet up the price of tuition to soak up the extra money the subsidy enables people to pay them. The end result is after several decades, all you've accomplished is the right hand stealing from the left. People who qualify for the subsidy are able to go to school, at the expense of some people who don't qualify for the subsidy being unable to afford to go. The net number of students doesn't increase or increases very little. And the price of tuition increases by roughly the amount of the subsidy per student.
If you subsidize on the supply side, you're directly encouraging an increase in supply. Ivy league schools keep their tuition the same, but your subsidy allows the construction of more schools (e.g. State universities). The increased competition from having more schools drives them to figure out ways to cut expenses, and lower their tuition to attract more students.
Walmart would accomplish a lot more if they instead used this money for a fund to help construct more schools.
It makes perfect senses. You're not taking into account opportunity cost. Money you spend tackling this problem, is money you don't have available to tackle other problems.
Given a multitude of problems, and limited resources (money) for tackling those problems, you maximize the reduction in problems by applying your resources most efficiently. By tackling the worst but easiest-to-fix problems first, even if that means leaving smaller but more-costly-to-fix problems unresolved.
Your way of thinking is why we waste billions of dollars trying to make air travel safer to prevent a few hundred deaths per year, while over a million people die in car accidents every year. Or why nuclear power is a pariah, when statistically it's the safest power source man has ever invented (yes, safer than renewables). You prioritize tackling the problem which has the greatest emotional impact (i.e. in proportion to news coverage), rather than the problem which will yield the greatest numerical decrease for the smallest expenditure.
I've experienced it too. It has nothing to do with biting. It's due to a galvanic reaction between the metal in the cutlery and the fillings in your teeth. If you have fillings, and there's sufficient saliva in your mouth, and the cutlery and your fillings are far enough apart on the galvanic series, it creates a weak electrical current through your mouth and teeth which feels awful. I only noticed it when I visited a friend who served me a meal with "fancy" gold-plated cutlery, but I would imagine different people are sensitive to different levels of current.
It's similar to chewing on aluminum foil if you have fillings, except in that case the aluminum makes direct contact with your fillings so the current is much higher.
The best insulator is air (actually it's vacuum, but that's prohibitively expensive aside from thermoses). Brick is actually a worse insulator than standard wood-frame construction with fiberglass insulation in the gaps.
Brick (and masonry) just feels cooler because it takes longer to heat up in the morning due to its greater mass. The larger mass means after absorbing the same amount of sunlight, its temperature increases less. But likewise it takes longer to cool down in the evening. This may not be an undesirable trait if you're in a desert-like area where the days are hot but the nights are cold. But in climates which are consistently cold or hot (i.e. most of the world), brick and masonry are about the worst possible building materials. Their greater mass increases the amount of energy you need to use on heating or cooling (because you need to heat or cool the bricks along with the interior air space).
Marx was wrong. Being at the poverty level in the U.S. puts your income in the 84th percentile for the world. That is, if you're living in poverty in the U.S., some 80% of the world is worse off than you are.
The mistake Marx made (which you repeat) was that he assumed if inequality is increasing, that means the poor are getting poorer. i.e. inequality can only increase if the poor get poorer. But that's not true. Inequality can increase even when the poor get richer - as long as the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer, inequality is increasing. That's what capitalism does. Everyone gets richer, but at inequal rates. Those who find better means of becoming more productive (whether by hard work, a good idea, or just dumb luck) end up getting disproportionately richer.
And that ultimately is why Marxism fails. By eliminating this inequality, you also eliminate the incentive for individuals to make themselves more productive. You're not going to work an extra hour plowing that field, if the fruit of your extra labor ends up distributed across the entire country resulting in everyone (including yourself) getting just 1 extra grain of wheat apiece. And if you aren't increasing your own productivity, your country is not getting any richer, and your standard of living is not increasing..
The so-called "socialist" countries in Europe aren't really socialist. They're a hybrid socialist-capitalist. Even capitalism (inequality) to maintain an incentive for people to figure out new ways to become more productive, but enough socialism to keep the level of inequality in check. The U.S. is also socialist-capitalist, but favors the capitalism side a bit more. This results in greater inequality, but also yields a higher GDP per capita (average productivity per citizen) than countries which favor the socialism side more. Neither is "right" - they're just different approaches based on how much you value higher productivity (standard of living) vs income equality.
The "Golden Age of Capitalism" as you put it happened because Henry Ford figured out that when he paid his workers more than the prevailing wage at the time, it actually increased his own wealth even more because suddenly his workers could afford to buy his cars. See, that's another thing about capitalism - it's optimized when the pay people receive is proportional to their individual contribution to the country's productivity. If a fat cat CEO is keeping his employees' wages artificially low to make himself rich, that actually hurts overall productivity. The CEO ends up wasting much of his income on non-productive toys like Ferraris and gold-plated toilet seats, whereas if the money had gone to his employees instead, they would've spent it more on essentials which would've contributed more to the economy (given other workers more work to do producing the things they buy).
Prior to Ford, workers were being underpaid. Once Ford began paying workers more, they began buying more, which created more demand for other workers to produce more, which resulted in them being paid more to fulfill that increased demand, which resulted in them buying more, etc. This feedback loop is what led to the phenomenal economic growth in the mid-20th century. Countries which overcome this hump are the leading economies in the world today. Their top 1% ($500k+/yr in the U.S.) only accounts for
The FDA is one of the toughest regulatory agencies in the world for getting a treatment approved. Thalidomide was kept out of the U.S. by the FDA, while it was approved in Europe. While that was a huge FDA success, the long-term effect has been that the FDA tends to err far on the side of caution (you cannot have a critical failure like Thalidomide if you don't approve anything).
The problem is that there are two failure modes here. If the FDA approves a drug which turns out to be dangerous, the negative effects are widespread and public. But if they don't approve a drug which turns out to be safe, there's very little negative publicity because life goes on as before. In the former case, you're counting lives which were obviously and visibly harmed. In the latter case, you're counting lives which could have been saved but weren't, and so are indistinguishable from the drug or treatment not existing. So there's a natural disparity in the visibility of the two failure modes. The optimal balance of these two failure modes is when the number of people who die or are harmed from approved drugs which turn out to be dangerous, is the same as the number of people who die or are harmed because a drug which can treat them (and will turn out to be safe) has not yet been approved.
But the the FDA success with Thalidomide has resulted in the agency trying to balance the publicity of these two failure modes, rather than balancing the number of people harmed by the two failure modes. And since publicity favors not approving drugs, the FDA has become one of the toughest pharmaceutical regulatory agencies in the world. As a result, there are effective treatments which have been approved in other developed countries like the EU, which haven't yet been approved in the U.S. Wealthier Americans simply travel abroad to seek these treatments, which is why you don't often hear about people being denied treatment.
Note that this invalidates most of the early court rulings in favor of Monsanto, which were made under Monsanto's assurance that plants could not develop resistance. And thus any crop which could survive spraying with Round-Up must be from stolen Monsanto seed. This shifted the burden of proof in Monsanto's favor. The farmer had to prove they were innocent and the seed got on their land accidentally, instead of Monsanto proving they were guilty because the farmer planted it deliberately.
The cable companies are not natural monopolies which need to be broken up by anti-trust suits. They were given their monopoly status by local governments, often in exchange for concessions like guarantees to offer service to 9x% of homes in an area, or (in the case of the previous city I lived in) straight kickbacks (x$ per home) paid to the city's general fund.
Sorry, but this is one problem caused by too much government regulation. The local governments correctly realized that allowing anyone and everyone to offer cable service would result in the telephone poles becoming unsightly and underground utility conduits becoming clogged. So they wisely limited who could provide cable service in their jurisdiction. But somewhere, somewhen, the wheels fell off - they got drunk with their own power and started handing out monopolies to the highest bidder. That's an issue the pro-regulation crowd seems to be blind to - government corruption resulting in regulations which results in net harm to society.
You shouldn't care about school shootings either. There have been about 250 deaths in school shootings over 18 years (non-gang, non-suicide), or about 14 per year. Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's chances of being killed in a non-gang, non-suicide school shooting in any given year are about (51 million students) / (14 deaths/year) = 1 in 3.6 million.
You're more likely to be killed by a deer. About 120 Americans are killed by deer every year. (325.7 million Americans) / (120 deaths/year) = 1 in 2.7 million chance of being killed by a deer each year. Do you wring your hands over the possibility of being killed by a deer, and hold marches to demanding the deer population be controlled?
The U.S. causes of death statistics are readily available from the CDC website. For 2015, the leading causes of death for the 15-19 year old demographic were:
3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses)
2.061 deaths - Suicide
1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related)
583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
306 deaths - Heart disease
195 deaths - Birth defects
72 deaths - Influenza (the flu)
63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases
61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases
52 deaths - Diabetes
41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth
All of these represent a greater risk to students than the 14 deaths per year from school shootings.
Falcon 9 FT payload to LEO: 22,800 kg
Ariane 64 payload to LEO: 20,000 kg
A64 launch cost: 90 million Euro = US$106 million
Even at $100 million, SpaceX is charging the U.S. government less than Ariane would be.
I think that's the idea. Nobody submits their photos because of how creepy/stupid this is. But when Facebook gets sued for helping distribute revenge porn, they tell the judge "Your Honor (or whatever they call them in the UK), we have a system in place designed to prevent exactly this type of incident from ever happening. But the victim refused to participate. Therefore the fault is entirely hers, not ours.
I browse with an extension that shows the flag of the country a site is hosted at in the URL bar. I was always nervous about using DD-WRT because for years the site was hosted in China (they changed hosts to Switzerland recently). So you shouldn't automatically trust third party firmware either. And if you're really paranoid you should be downloading source and compiling the firmware yourself. If you can trust that the source code is clean. (For those curious, OpenWRT is hosted in Germany.
Statistics favor there being no Loch Ness monster. Back in the latter half of the 1900s, about 100,000 people visited the lake each year. Only a few percent of them had cameras, and almost none of them had video cameras.
In the 2010s, about 200,000 people visited the lake each year. And nearly all of them had cameras with video capability. So statistically, you'd expect the number of photos purporting to show Nessie each year to have increased by about 100-fold, and the number of videos (i.e. mysterious ripples on the surface) to have increased 1000- or 10,000-fold.
No such increases have happened (and in fact the photographer of the most famous photo from the 1900s has come out and admitted he faked it). That makes it highly likely that there is no monster, and that most of the "sightings" in the 1900s were faked.
That's a common misnomer. Statistically, you don't need a very large sample to get a statistically significant sample. The fact that Teslas are 0.03% of the total is irrelevant. If you do the math, it turns out that only the number of samples matters, not the total population size. The only time population size begins to skew the statistics is when your sample size approaches the population size. OTOH sample size much smaller than the population size is just fine. So the fact that Teslas make up just 0.03% of all cars is irrelevant.
The problem with the stats on self-driving car accidents (and airliner crashes for that matter) is that these events are extremely rare. The above approximation for confidence interval assumes the probability of an event is close to 50%. When the probability of an event approaches 0% or 100%, it makes the confidence interval less precise. And the margin of error increases relative to the probability of the event happening. e.g. For a 99% confidence interval, the margin of error is 1.29 * 2 * standard error.
If you flip a coin 1000 times and get 510 heads, your margin of error with a 99% confidence interval (i.e. you're 99% sure that the coin is weighted to come out heads 51% of the time) is:
1.29*2*sqrt( (0.51*0.49/1000) = 0.04
or 51% +/- 4%
If you flip a coin 1000 times and get just 1 head, your margin of error with a 99% confidence interval (i.e. you're 99% sure that the coin is weighted to come out heads 0.1% of the time) is:
129*2*sqrt(0.001*0.999/1000) = 0.0026
or 0.1% +/- 0.26%
Your margin of error is bigger than your predicted probability
The West doesn't like to admit it, but the Soviet Union played a huge role in stopping Hitler. After he steamrolled Europe, he got cocky and invaded Asia. The Soviets threw bodies at him (soldiers were frequently sent in unarmed and told to pick up a rifle from a comrade who'd been killed) and eventually managed to stop his army and starve it during a brutal winter. Look at the Allied military casualty figures from WWII.
U.S.: 407,300 killed, 671,800 wounded
UK: 383,700 killed, 376,239 wounded
France: 210,000, 390,000 wounded
Soviet Union: estimated 8.6 to 11.4 million killed, 14.7 million wounded
And no it wasn't because the Soviets were incompetent. Other Eastern European countries which were overrun (Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary) also suffered casualties on par with the U.S., UK, and France. And the Latvian countries lost over 10% of their total populations. If you look at German casualties, the Germans lost more than 8x as many soldiers on the Eastern front than it did on the Western front. The vast majority of the fighting happened to the east of Germany.
Yes D-Day gave the Allies a crucial Western foothold turning Europe into a two-front war (technically three-front since Italy had been invaded the previous year). But if the Soviets hadn't been keeping Hitler busy on the Eastern front, most of his armies would've been on the western beaches, and D-Day would've been a massacre.
And that's a big If, but if it was only 2 million fake comments out of 23 million submitted, then that's pretty close to the fake signature threshold used for ballot initiatives in California. If the initiative gathers more than 110% of the required minimum signatures, it's assumed that only 10% are fake and the ballot qualifies without further verification. The 10% figure is based on the number of fake signatures which turn up in a random sample of initiatives which gather less than 110% the required minimum.
Considering it was an online form, and you didn't have to lie to someone's face to "sign" it, I'm surprised the rate of fake comments wasn't higher.
That's not much different from what info is required to register to vote. Name, address, DOB, a state-issued ID (which can be obtained with just the previous three), and a signature swearing that you're a U.S.citizen and allowed to vote.
This whole thing is a Pandora's box for both sides. Insisting that the comments should be verified leaves you vulnerable to questions about why you're ok with a lower standard of confirmation for voting. Insisting that verification is unnecessary leaves you vulnerable to questions about why then you think the voter registration needs to be verified.
Geothermal has a capacity factor of about 0.7. So the 38 MW the plant is rated for generates on average (38MW)*(0.7) = 26.6 MW.
Solar at Hawaii's location (96704 zip code) has a capacity factor of about 0.124 (this takes into account night, seasons, movement of the sun, weather, maintenance, etc). So generating 26.6 MW would require (26.6 MW)/(0.124) = 215 MW of installed nameplate capacity. That would make it the 18th largest PV solar plant in the U.S.
Assuming you're using commerical 180 W/m^2 panels, this would mean 1.195 million m^2 of solar panels, or 1.195 km^2 of panels alone. Or 67 Panamax-size container ships ( 66 meters x 49 meters) completely covered on PV panels to replace this single geothermal plant.
If you allow space to account for maintenance and tilt to the angle of the sun, the PV solar plants in this capacity range seem to cover about 5-10 km^2. So now you're talking about 280-560 Panamax-sized ships with solar panels on them to replace this single geothermal plant.
Or put another way, a single Panamax-sized ship with every upward-facing surface covered in solar panels would only generate (366 meters)*(49 meters)*(180 W/m^2)*(0.124) = 400287 Watts = 0.4 MW on average at this location. The average U.S. home uses 10,766 kWh per year, or an average of (10766 kWh) / (1 year) = 1481 Watts. So your one ship would be enough to power about 270 homes. There are already 10,000 people evacuated, which if you assume 4 per home is 2500 homes.
People *vastly* overestimate the power density of solar. Mobile solar is stupid unless you can drastically reduce your power consumption. Effective use of solar requires large areas of cheap land.
For interplanetary space travel, yes. But that's not very exciting. Chemical rockets work fine for interplanetary travel on the order of years and decades at most with ion drives showing promise as a next step.
The reason the EM drive was so exciting was because of the potential for interstellar travel in reasonable timeframes (sub-100 year) without having to lug around huge quantities of propellant (mass to throw out the back to accelerate you). If it actually worked, you could power it with a nuclear reactor and accelerate away without needing any propellant (violation of conservation of momentum).
Traveling to Alpha Centauri (4.367 light years) in 100 years (assuming constant acceleration to the halfway point, decelerating the second half of the trip, and ignoring relativistic effects) would require reaching a peak speed of
d = 0.5*vavg*t
vavg = 2*d/t = 2*(4.367 c years)/(100 years) = 0.08734 c
vmax = 2*vavg = 0.17468 c = 52,368 km/s
To accelerate, you need to dump the energy you're producing into the propellant that you're ejecting in the direction opposite you're accelerating. The energy needed reach Earth's escape velocity (11.2 km/s) and to escape the solar system from Earth's orbit (16.6 km/s) are roundoff error compared to the energy needed to reach Alpha Centauri in 100 years.
Energy for Earth escape velocity = 0.5*m*(11.2 km/s)^2
Energy for solar system escape velocity = 0.5*m*(16.6 km/s)^2 = 2.2 times the energy to escape Earth
Energy to reach Alpha Centauri in 100 years = 0.5*m*(52367 km/s)^2 = 21,861,469 times the energy to escape Earth
So a trip to Alpha Centauri in 100 years would require nearly 22 million times more energy (and propellant to absorb that energy) than needed to escape Earth's gravity.