This may be true today but it is likely not always going to be true. Hydrogen is available in a huge number of compounds, many of which are considered to be waste and are net costs on the various producers. No doubt every single one of them is going to be examined to see if there is a cheap way of converting that waste stream into a profit stream.
I saw a practical real life example of that with anti-freeze. One year you could get a bottle from the shop for $2-$3 and the next was $10-$12. When I asked what gives, they explained that glycol (the main effective ingredient) was a mining waste and that last year the only bidders for it were the anti-freeze companies and they didn't even buy all of the available supply. Somebody else found a use for it and in mass quantities so the price got bid up 3-5 fold.
There's some interesting work in bacteria produced hydrogen, there's mountains of waste feces produced by animal husbandry, Archer Danield Midland et al. will no doubt find the cheapest way to turn crops to hydrogen, and so on and so on.
Natural gas may currently be the most practical and economic method but that crown is not secure and you shouldn't bet too hard on it maintaining the lead.
There are some emerging alternatives for hydrogen production, like bacterial production. If you can get a cell to excrete it at greater efficiencies than solar cells can make electricity to electrolyze it, you've got a winner there.
My point is that it's a little early in the game to come to *any* conclusions. What's the name of the game? Find enough energy to run the entire globe on a 1st world lifestyle. A little clue, the energy companies, already know that there's not enough fossil fuel out there to win the game using only fossil fuel so Bush is being true to his contributors by pushing for nuclear and hydrogen and all the rest of the alternatives that will be coming up. It just so happens that he'll also be true to his oath of office and the people of the United States at the same time so you could call this politics at its best.
Walking through Grand Central Station in NYC exposes you to more radiation than standing at the front gate of a nuclear plant running full steam. The granite they used to build the train station is slightly radioactive.
Actually, the graphite designs that the Soviets use are very conducive to weapons production but at a cost in safety. There are only 3 graphite type reactors in the US, all DOE plants, all explicitly there for weapons production. Light water reactors are inherently inefficient at weapons production.
We've recently, and unilaterally, cut our strategic nukes by 2/3rds. I suspect that reworking the nuclear materials from those weapons would be a lot easier than some sneaky civilian nuke conversion program.
I seem to recall a coal plant near Chicago had a very impressive series of explosions (coal dust apparently can explode under certain conditions). That plant is very close to I80/I94 as it rounds the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Fortunately, casualties did not extend to the highway zone. They could have. This was 2000, if I remember right.
Unfortunately, the problem of nuclear power in the US is largely based on fears of litigation, being sued to death. Nobody wants to plow money into a field with well organized opponents who will drag you into court every other week until you run out of money.
The real solution, of course, is tort reform, to go to a loser pays system where foolish, ill-conceived lawsuits result in significant financial cost to those who insist on bringing them. But the trial lawyers would be starving in the streets and since trial lawyers are more influential than unions, minorities, or the poor in today's Democrat party we're not going to see loser pays until there's a Republican President with a 60 vote Republican majority in the Senate and a comfortably Republican House. That'll be 2004 if Al Sharpton gets the nomination but probably not otherwise.
Since we're running against the clock, the Republicans, led by GW Bush are pushing incremental tort reform in doses that they think will pass while working around the areas that won't pass with corporate welfare.
As a libertarian, I think it sucks. It's less efficient, distortive in its own right, and its only real advantage is that it's better than the other alternative on the table, doing nothing until we have massive energy spikes as 3rd and 2nd world countries start having significant portions of their huge populations convert to 1st world style energy consumption levels.
It's more of a regionalism IMO. I remember Carter having the same pronunciation of the word (and being made fun of it) so it might be a southernism. Since Pres. Carter was a Democrat he was painted as a southern hayseed for it instead of an idiot as Pres. Bush get's libeled.
The elephant in the room is that there currently isn't enough energy available to have the world live on 1st world level energy consumption. With countries being bludgeoned into having decent economies all around the world, everybody is going to bid up the price of energy tremendously if there aren't significant new sources found.
The energy giants have come on board with the idea of hydrogen being the common denominator with everything geared to consume it (or electricity made from it) and energy sources geared to producing it. Thus you have pig farmers and corn growers as hydrogen producers on the side. But even reusing methane and shifting ethanol to hydrogen, you don't have enough. So nuclear ends up having to be rehabilitated to get us across the stop gap until about 20-25 years from now when we can start bringing orbital power stations on line (where solar's promise truly is) on the back of low cost lift systems like the space elevator we've been hearing about.
The article itself, from the title line on, is a hit piece on President Bush and his efforts to fix this huge problem without anybody panicking or even much noticing that the entire world economy might go off the cliff in a decade if we don't fix the energy crunch that's coming.
When sales go soft, they still encourage piracy to firm up their marketshare. I saw this last year at a retail store that encouraged a friend of mine (he needed windows) to buy academic office because "nobody checked". The next week I read in an interview with MS' Office division chief that this was official MS policy specifically to firm up sales numbers.
Generally, the fair market value is acceptable for tax purposes. In this case, that would be the retail price. I'm not an accountant though so you should double check with your own.
Actually, the Board has a fiduciary duty to maximize value for the shareholders and if they are caught intentionally lowering profits without *very* good reason, they can be heavily fined or even go to jail. The company itself is not liable as a legal person (thus you are technically right) but the management team as individuals have a duty (within the bounds of obeying the law) to maximize shareholder value.
The cost to MS for most charity donation will be far less than the 20% you list in your example. If a charity runs a youth program and has a computer lab with 20 computers, the license costs might be $100*20=$2000 but the media/manuals costs won't be $400 because MS will just send a disk and a certificate granting 20 licenses. You actually get less printed documentation and artwork with the volume licenses.
The tax savings will far exceed costs both for media and for program administration. For a profitable company like Microsoft, IT product donation is actually a net positive on their balance sheet even when you discount goodwill and mindshare benefits down to $0.
We used to heat our homes with wood and make furniture with it. Now we just make furniture (and paper, and homes, etc). Removing one use for a resource means that other uses can either use more of that resource or can utilize it at a lower price.
I don't think we're likely to ever stop completely where it comes to petrochemicals as some uses will end up commercially viable with artificially produced oil. The point is to remove uses, drag out the availability, and fund the scientists to cheapen the production costs of artificial petroleum until we aren't hanging under the sword of Damocles when it comes to petroleum.
The entire point of my post is that it is a multi-source fuel. If you own a pig farm, you've just turned a pain in the butt waste product into a nice secondary revenue stream. If you live close to that farm, your hydrogen might come from there. If you live further away, near hoover dam, your hydro-power plant might produce hydrogen instead of letting water flow through without generating electricity because there is no need. Bio-hydrogen will provide a part of the solution, certainly not all of it. The different options will shake themselves out in the market and we're likely to have several new sources of energy that aren't tapped today or are even viewed as nasty waste products.
One final note, hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. There's a lot to gain by switching and not just in variety of fuel source.
Imperfect competition leads to the effect of bidding up labor to be slowed down and distorted, not to their elimination. No matter how much the business owners try to make labor negotiations an us v. them environment with the business owners having all the cards, the truth is that exceptional workers have always and will always continue to be poached from one another. This happens at all levels (I saw it once when a CompUSA did a mass poaching of an Office Max store).
In a boom, the bosses run out of workers to hire cheaply and general wage rates rise even for unspectacular employees. And bosses find they can't hold onto their current low-wage employees because they quit and go someplace else as a new hot employee. Eventually, the boom ends as well as the job hopping but everybody knows that as soon as the economy picks up, the same process will pick right up with it.
The question was put wrongly. Would the government permit a non-profit corporation to put a wi-fi tower on that same hill? If the outlying areas would pony up the money, they should be able to get a tower up and have broadband without having any sort of need to municipalize it. The problem comes from government ladling out hidden subsidies.
Try again as a non-profit and see if you get a better answer.
If this process is going to stay expensive then it makes sense to roll the cost into mortgages and lay fiber into entire subdivisions at construction. If the price is rapidly going to get cheaper, it makes sense to wait a few years and do it then. Either way, the current painful state will pass.
Unfortunately, the French stuck all the smart people in the *objectively less efficient sector*. The problem with govt. isn't only the quality of people in the system but the system itself. In the private sector when a dispute between a customer and the company goes bad, the ultimate resolution is the customer leaves, depriving the company of revenue. The company can't do anything more to the customer. In the public sector, the ultimate result of a customer situation gone as bad as it can is a govt. fine, imprisonment, or outright violence, even death. This is because they're the government and have the right to kill people by the nature of being a government.
Now companies *can* buy governments to either commit violence for them or to look the other way while they commit their own violence but absent corruption it's not an inherent part of the system.
The end result of this systemic difference is a point or two of systemic advantage when it comes to economic growth on the Anglosphere side and a France that has lost its greatness, pride, and place in the world.
The problem with the idea of endless worker slavery is that it ignores the fact that eventually labor is no longer plentiful and companies bid up the price on it as much as any other business input. Beyond that, labor does tend to differentiate its pricing based on worker treatment. If you have two equivalently paid jobs, the one that features working for a bad boss will simply not be your choice.
Good treatment of workers lowers labor costs and more and more businesses are figuring that out.
Prices going up drives production up by new producers entering the market and it drives demand down by conservation and switching to alternatives. Not all uses of gas can only be fulfilled by gas and those that can save money by switching will do it.
In the end, it looks like we're all going to switch to hydrogen and then everybody will have a large variety of potential suppliers from the bio-people who get bacteria to make it to agriculturalists who get it from animal and plant byproducts to oil and gas companies who get it from oil and natural gas. The multi-fuel aspect of it all will smooth out the pricing curves because fewer and fewer people will be stuck with limited sources of energy.
The Swiss are more armed than the US who are more armed than the UK. The crime rates are inversely proportional with Switzerland being most safe, the US holding the median ground and the UK being least safe.
Does this make you think a bit?
A further thought, until the UK in recent years went on a disarmament binge, it had a much lower crime rate. How many graves in the UK are needlessly filled each year because of that is for others to study. For some reason the UK government has declined to make a study of it.
When your C3I system is largely shut down due to US actions, you might not know that. You might also not know which two of the recepients of the three chem attack missions are receiving the attentions of their only two cleanup units and target those two for followup action thus degrading their cleanup capabilities.
The PRC projects itself in a long-term confrontation with the US. The idea that it might have agents in our combat forces is not too farfetched. Now imagine in 5-10 years a satellite link can not only be man-portable but can pass inspection and be carried in the field. Mate your US comm gear to the PRC comm gear and you have an opening into SIPRNet that can be exploited.
The PRC doesn't want a direct confrontation with the US though. The downlink is in N. Korea. Heck, it could be in Boise for that matter so long as the PRC can stay clear of the mess. From the downlink it gets routed to the intelligence HQ of the opposing side and all of a sudden they hear what we're saying courtesy of a 3rd party who is closer to technical parity but doesn't want direct confrontation at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
That is more like 2H20 + energy => 2H2 + O2
There's supposed to be a photosynthesis path for H2 production now but I haven't seen it in all its chemical glory. Now that would be interesting.
This may be true today but it is likely not always going to be true. Hydrogen is available in a huge number of compounds, many of which are considered to be waste and are net costs on the various producers. No doubt every single one of them is going to be examined to see if there is a cheap way of converting that waste stream into a profit stream.
I saw a practical real life example of that with anti-freeze. One year you could get a bottle from the shop for $2-$3 and the next was $10-$12. When I asked what gives, they explained that glycol (the main effective ingredient) was a mining waste and that last year the only bidders for it were the anti-freeze companies and they didn't even buy all of the available supply. Somebody else found a use for it and in mass quantities so the price got bid up 3-5 fold.
There's some interesting work in bacteria produced hydrogen, there's mountains of waste feces produced by animal husbandry, Archer Danield Midland et al. will no doubt find the cheapest way to turn crops to hydrogen, and so on and so on.
Natural gas may currently be the most practical and economic method but that crown is not secure and you shouldn't bet too hard on it maintaining the lead.
There are some emerging alternatives for hydrogen production, like bacterial production. If you can get a cell to excrete it at greater efficiencies than solar cells can make electricity to electrolyze it, you've got a winner there.
My point is that it's a little early in the game to come to *any* conclusions. What's the name of the game? Find enough energy to run the entire globe on a 1st world lifestyle. A little clue, the energy companies, already know that there's not enough fossil fuel out there to win the game using only fossil fuel so Bush is being true to his contributors by pushing for nuclear and hydrogen and all the rest of the alternatives that will be coming up. It just so happens that he'll also be true to his oath of office and the people of the United States at the same time so you could call this politics at its best.
Walking through Grand Central Station in NYC exposes you to more radiation than standing at the front gate of a nuclear plant running full steam. The granite they used to build the train station is slightly radioactive.
No, calling me an idiot is slanderous. Libel is for the written word.
Actually, the graphite designs that the Soviets use are very conducive to weapons production but at a cost in safety. There are only 3 graphite type reactors in the US, all DOE plants, all explicitly there for weapons production. Light water reactors are inherently inefficient at weapons production.
We've recently, and unilaterally, cut our strategic nukes by 2/3rds. I suspect that reworking the nuclear materials from those weapons would be a lot easier than some sneaky civilian nuke conversion program.
I seem to recall a coal plant near Chicago had a very impressive series of explosions (coal dust apparently can explode under certain conditions). That plant is very close to I80/I94 as it rounds the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Fortunately, casualties did not extend to the highway zone. They could have. This was 2000, if I remember right.
The daily death toll of coal is well known.
Unfortunately, the problem of nuclear power in the US is largely based on fears of litigation, being sued to death. Nobody wants to plow money into a field with well organized opponents who will drag you into court every other week until you run out of money.
The real solution, of course, is tort reform, to go to a loser pays system where foolish, ill-conceived lawsuits result in significant financial cost to those who insist on bringing them. But the trial lawyers would be starving in the streets and since trial lawyers are more influential than unions, minorities, or the poor in today's Democrat party we're not going to see loser pays until there's a Republican President with a 60 vote Republican majority in the Senate and a comfortably Republican House. That'll be 2004 if Al Sharpton gets the nomination but probably not otherwise.
Since we're running against the clock, the Republicans, led by GW Bush are pushing incremental tort reform in doses that they think will pass while working around the areas that won't pass with corporate welfare.
As a libertarian, I think it sucks. It's less efficient, distortive in its own right, and its only real advantage is that it's better than the other alternative on the table, doing nothing until we have massive energy spikes as 3rd and 2nd world countries start having significant portions of their huge populations convert to 1st world style energy consumption levels.
It's more of a regionalism IMO. I remember Carter having the same pronunciation of the word (and being made fun of it) so it might be a southernism. Since Pres. Carter was a Democrat he was painted as a southern hayseed for it instead of an idiot as Pres. Bush get's libeled.
The elephant in the room is that there currently isn't enough energy available to have the world live on 1st world level energy consumption. With countries being bludgeoned into having decent economies all around the world, everybody is going to bid up the price of energy tremendously if there aren't significant new sources found.
The energy giants have come on board with the idea of hydrogen being the common denominator with everything geared to consume it (or electricity made from it) and energy sources geared to producing it. Thus you have pig farmers and corn growers as hydrogen producers on the side. But even reusing methane and shifting ethanol to hydrogen, you don't have enough. So nuclear ends up having to be rehabilitated to get us across the stop gap until about 20-25 years from now when we can start bringing orbital power stations on line (where solar's promise truly is) on the back of low cost lift systems like the space elevator we've been hearing about.
The article itself, from the title line on, is a hit piece on President Bush and his efforts to fix this huge problem without anybody panicking or even much noticing that the entire world economy might go off the cliff in a decade if we don't fix the energy crunch that's coming.
When sales go soft, they still encourage piracy to firm up their marketshare. I saw this last year at a retail store that encouraged a friend of mine (he needed windows) to buy academic office because "nobody checked". The next week I read in an interview with MS' Office division chief that this was official MS policy specifically to firm up sales numbers.
Generally, the fair market value is acceptable for tax purposes. In this case, that would be the retail price. I'm not an accountant though so you should double check with your own.
Actually, the Board has a fiduciary duty to maximize value for the shareholders and if they are caught intentionally lowering profits without *very* good reason, they can be heavily fined or even go to jail. The company itself is not liable as a legal person (thus you are technically right) but the management team as individuals have a duty (within the bounds of obeying the law) to maximize shareholder value.
The cost to MS for most charity donation will be far less than the 20% you list in your example. If a charity runs a youth program and has a computer lab with 20 computers, the license costs might be $100*20=$2000 but the media/manuals costs won't be $400 because MS will just send a disk and a certificate granting 20 licenses. You actually get less printed documentation and artwork with the volume licenses.
The tax savings will far exceed costs both for media and for program administration. For a profitable company like Microsoft, IT product donation is actually a net positive on their balance sheet even when you discount goodwill and mindshare benefits down to $0.
We used to heat our homes with wood and make furniture with it. Now we just make furniture (and paper, and homes, etc). Removing one use for a resource means that other uses can either use more of that resource or can utilize it at a lower price.
I don't think we're likely to ever stop completely where it comes to petrochemicals as some uses will end up commercially viable with artificially produced oil. The point is to remove uses, drag out the availability, and fund the scientists to cheapen the production costs of artificial petroleum until we aren't hanging under the sword of Damocles when it comes to petroleum.
The entire point of my post is that it is a multi-source fuel. If you own a pig farm, you've just turned a pain in the butt waste product into a nice secondary revenue stream. If you live close to that farm, your hydrogen might come from there. If you live further away, near hoover dam, your hydro-power plant might produce hydrogen instead of letting water flow through without generating electricity because there is no need. Bio-hydrogen will provide a part of the solution, certainly not all of it. The different options will shake themselves out in the market and we're likely to have several new sources of energy that aren't tapped today or are even viewed as nasty waste products.
One final note, hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. There's a lot to gain by switching and not just in variety of fuel source.
Imperfect competition leads to the effect of bidding up labor to be slowed down and distorted, not to their elimination. No matter how much the business owners try to make labor negotiations an us v. them environment with the business owners having all the cards, the truth is that exceptional workers have always and will always continue to be poached from one another. This happens at all levels (I saw it once when a CompUSA did a mass poaching of an Office Max store).
In a boom, the bosses run out of workers to hire cheaply and general wage rates rise even for unspectacular employees. And bosses find they can't hold onto their current low-wage employees because they quit and go someplace else as a new hot employee. Eventually, the boom ends as well as the job hopping but everybody knows that as soon as the economy picks up, the same process will pick right up with it.
The question was put wrongly. Would the government permit a non-profit corporation to put a wi-fi tower on that same hill? If the outlying areas would pony up the money, they should be able to get a tower up and have broadband without having any sort of need to municipalize it. The problem comes from government ladling out hidden subsidies.
Try again as a non-profit and see if you get a better answer.
If this process is going to stay expensive then it makes sense to roll the cost into mortgages and lay fiber into entire subdivisions at construction. If the price is rapidly going to get cheaper, it makes sense to wait a few years and do it then. Either way, the current painful state will pass.
Unfortunately, the French stuck all the smart people in the *objectively less efficient sector*. The problem with govt. isn't only the quality of people in the system but the system itself. In the private sector when a dispute between a customer and the company goes bad, the ultimate resolution is the customer leaves, depriving the company of revenue. The company can't do anything more to the customer. In the public sector, the ultimate result of a customer situation gone as bad as it can is a govt. fine, imprisonment, or outright violence, even death. This is because they're the government and have the right to kill people by the nature of being a government.
Now companies *can* buy governments to either commit violence for them or to look the other way while they commit their own violence but absent corruption it's not an inherent part of the system.
The end result of this systemic difference is a point or two of systemic advantage when it comes to economic growth on the Anglosphere side and a France that has lost its greatness, pride, and place in the world.
The problem with the idea of endless worker slavery is that it ignores the fact that eventually labor is no longer plentiful and companies bid up the price on it as much as any other business input. Beyond that, labor does tend to differentiate its pricing based on worker treatment. If you have two equivalently paid jobs, the one that features working for a bad boss will simply not be your choice.
Good treatment of workers lowers labor costs and more and more businesses are figuring that out.
Prices going up drives production up by new producers entering the market and it drives demand down by conservation and switching to alternatives. Not all uses of gas can only be fulfilled by gas and those that can save money by switching will do it.
In the end, it looks like we're all going to switch to hydrogen and then everybody will have a large variety of potential suppliers from the bio-people who get bacteria to make it to agriculturalists who get it from animal and plant byproducts to oil and gas companies who get it from oil and natural gas. The multi-fuel aspect of it all will smooth out the pricing curves because fewer and fewer people will be stuck with limited sources of energy.
The Swiss are more armed than the US who are more armed than the UK. The crime rates are inversely proportional with Switzerland being most safe, the US holding the median ground and the UK being least safe.
Does this make you think a bit?
A further thought, until the UK in recent years went on a disarmament binge, it had a much lower crime rate. How many graves in the UK are needlessly filled each year because of that is for others to study. For some reason the UK government has declined to make a study of it.
When your C3I system is largely shut down due to US actions, you might not know that. You might also not know which two of the recepients of the three chem attack missions are receiving the attentions of their only two cleanup units and target those two for followup action thus degrading their cleanup capabilities.
Here's a threat for you.
The PRC projects itself in a long-term confrontation with the US. The idea that it might have agents in our combat forces is not too farfetched. Now imagine in 5-10 years a satellite link can not only be man-portable but can pass inspection and be carried in the field. Mate your US comm gear to the PRC comm gear and you have an opening into SIPRNet that can be exploited.
The PRC doesn't want a direct confrontation with the US though. The downlink is in N. Korea. Heck, it could be in Boise for that matter so long as the PRC can stay clear of the mess. From the downlink it gets routed to the intelligence HQ of the opposing side and all of a sudden they hear what we're saying courtesy of a 3rd party who is closer to technical parity but doesn't want direct confrontation at the moment.