Apparently the police report doesn't cite Autopilot, Tesla doesn't know if Autopilot was involved, and nobody involved has actually attributed this to Autopilot. We don't know what happened here.
That said, as much as Tesla's autopilot functions *quite* well in practice, Google's LiDar is still superior. I said it was a mistake to not partner with Google, and I still stand by that.
On the other hand, Hillary is a legitimate, front-running candidate. Imprisoning her while the people are voting in her favor would be a great way for a corrupt military-intelligence agency to undermine the democratic process.
What about the interest they've collected and will collect over the lifetime of the loans they made?
From the same perspective, what about inflation? The United States pays $200 billion each year on loans. With inflation, the balance on the loans becomes a smaller percentage of the country's total expenses.
What about job growth? Technical progress reduces scarcity, allowing population expansion. With food costing 30% of the median family income in 1950 and 11% in 2015, we can have *many* more families and still have the same proportion living with food scarcity. Even the lowest standard of living has gone up, meanwhile the population has doubled, and we take 30% of their income in taxes. That's even more revenue, but the loan balances on the books don't go up.
If inflation is 2% and you take additional debt at a rate of 1.5%, your debt is going down, even as the creditors make out like bandits on all the interest you're paying.
I want to say FDR's financial and economic actions were terrible, but... I kind of understand why he did what he did. Fractional reserve banking, the social security system, and the whole span of the New Deal were the best he could do at that time; and the FRS on fiat currency model is the best monetary system currently known.
The concentration camp thing, however, is more America-is-Hitler-beta.
Seconded. I have serious issues with Sanders's proposals because he can't get them straightened out and financed properly, and his economics are crap. I've written my own universal social security proposals, starting from the government budget, with risk assessments and all the economics involved, covering impacts on employment, technical unemployment (e.g. from automation), the length of a working day, economic wealth, poverty, our welfare system, and so forth. Transitioning from the current system to something that protects jobs, stabilizes low-income families, and eliminates homelessness and hunger is *hard* without causing massive tax increases or destroying the lives of millions of American families by cutting benefits (HUD, OASDI) out from under them; even if you have a perfect final plan, you can't get it in place without designing a comprehensive way to get from here to there over the next couple decades.
Claiming Sanders's proposals are bad because they're like $SOME_GUY is just poisoning the well.
I mean, if I was going to lie, like... ever... I'd certainly lie under oath. I learned to manipulate facts and people (in a *highly* targeted sense) instead of lying, because lies are hard to control (when people discover the truth, they're hard to manipulate; when they knew it all, all of it, the whole time, because you told them, it's hard to turn them against you).
Sanders's campaign is a giant tantrum. He lost votes and he's been arguing that they should give him the nomination anyway because Hillary is a bitch. He's levied general personal attacks against the integrity of the superdelegates for siding with the votes of the people rather than what he knows is right.
Bernie can actually run against Trump; if the Superdelegates believe in earnest that Hillary can't beat Trump and Bernie can, they'll side with Bernie.
I don't think any of them have it all on-target. Trump is a disaster; Hillary is at least stable (she's been Secretary of State for a decade), but won't take important forward action; and Bernie *will* take forward action, but has no idea how, and has a lot of breaking ideas.
We're facing a Technical Renaissance-Revolution problem at this point. Our technology paradigm is about to shift dramatically. We always have constant job reduction by technical progress (fewer employees to make the same thing), and this reduces the cost (and price) of goods and moves buying power to consumer hands, resulting in more purchasing and new, replacement employment, thus stabilizing the unemployment level. If we suddenly move the pace of advancement up (e.g. "automation"), one of two things happens: the pace of new job creation stays close to the pace of job elimination (technical renaissance: the entire country, from poor to rich, all get *extremely* wealthy); or the pace of new job creation falls sharply behind, creating high unemployment and a collapsed economy (technical revolution, e.g. the Industrial Revolution).
Bernie is correct on implementing a universal basic income, and not all there on *how* to do it. He doesn't have the reasoning for it (he's crying out against the rich and rallying for the poor, rather than looking at the economic threats on the horizon). Because of this, he's misinterpreting the problem space and installing damage (pushing toward a Technical Revolution).
In essence, to lean a TRR to a Technical Renaissance, you need to slow transitional unemployment and speed up replacement employment. Replacement employment is a natural process: while some 50,000 jobs are created each month, several million people leave the labor force (retirement, etc.) and enter the labor force (graduate college) in that same time span. That means the upper end of current employment falls off, reducing the pressure on a shrinking job market in a given profession; new skilled labor enters the market, and is adapted (with lag) to the changes. Thus speeding up replacement employment only requires keeping the consumer market healthy enough to buy jobs, which is in part accomplished *by* slowing transitional unemployment.
Well-designed UBI plans such as a Citizen's Dividend (universal social security) provide both of these. The non-wage income increases the buying power of the consumer base by increasing their effective take-home per dollar: rather than your employer spending $1 to employ you and you take home $0.60, your employer spends $1 and you take home $0.85 (at the lowest end, this can be greater than unity). This helps reduce wage-labor costs. For example, an employee paid $80,000 and married in a two-adult household would take home approximately $63,000 today; and, under my plan, you could pay that same employee around $64,000 and he'd *still* take home more. This effect is highly-pronounced at the lowest wage levels, where minimum-wage workers enjoy ~50% take-home increases without a wage raise.
Bernie's plans include minimum wage raises, among other things. In a stable economy, a minimum-wage increase concentrates wealth into a small subset of low-wage workers: you lose some minimum-wage jobs as the middle- and lower-class become poorer, and roll the difference into fewer hands in the lower class, thus those who didn't lose their jobs come out financially better off. In a TRR situation, a minimum-wage raise increases the cost of human labor relative to the cost of low-labor alternatives: we replace these people with machines.
Rock wool batts are advertised as 5% asbestos today. They cost about $45 for 8 batts; fiberglass is somewhat cheaper. Rock wool has a 9.5% increase in insulation value over Asbestos, R-23 at 5.5 inches versus R-21 for Fiberglass (mind you, the comparison is not huge; the extra R2 might eliminate like 60%-70% of the remaining heat transfer R21 doesn't, but it's only like a.01% difference in total heat transfer). Rock wool is a *lot* easier to handle.
It's also cut into cubes and used as a planter for marijuana, since it holds water well.
The article is loaded, too. "So what? Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?"
The cost of an infrastructure undertaking (or anything, really) competes for labor and money from all other sources. That is to say: to pay the construction worker, consumers must buy some good or service, which generates the income for their wages; to buy that service, they must spend from their finite income pool; and, having spent that finite income on that good or service, it cannot be spent on some other service. Depending on secondary effects, this can spread costs and create poverty, which leads to death.
The up-shot is a one-time cost is eventually buffed out if it has a positive effect. New airline costs may affect the cost structure of all businesses in the form of travel, shipping, and so forth, spreading costs in a way which causes 100 additional deaths; eventually, the new infrastructure should save more than 100 lives. We're looking at an algebraic problem: when is the intersection between expense (new construction methods and new strategies make new infrastructure cheaper, thus less damaging) and advantage (the new infrastructure improves in concept, while its cost decreases, creating a crossing-over point where fewest lives are lost and the most are gained over the period of delay-plus-implementation). That's a strategic risk proposition.
People only think one step in. It's hard enough to convince people being stabbed in the arm isn't simply pain and blood and bad because the vaccination saves them from disease; and if you make an alternate proposition (vaccines cause autism), they immediately accept it without thinking further (how did we conclude vaccines cause autism? How likely is autism from vaccine?). Scammers take advantage of this regularly by making a logical proposition on false premise (alkaline diet? Kangan water? Multi-level marketing?).
Rock wool is the new technology that's replacing fiberglass. It's easier to handle and has better insulation value. It's slightly more expensive, but that's about it.
It's not as serious as all that. Some people really are content with walkable cities and public transit; there's an intersection of demands that would supply a population genuinely interested in such things, which enables a reduction of habitat destruction without the economic cost of locking up said habitat as federally-protected land. Basically, it's an opportunistic extension: instead of 1,000,000 acres of federally-protected land and 50,000,000,000 acres of pavement, you have 1,000,000 acres of federally protected land, 49,950,000,000 acres of pavement, and 50,000,000 acres of low-footprint urbanization.
Converting an existing city or other urban center is a hell of a lot of energy expenditure and manual labor. People talk a lot about automation, and they forget that all these machines reduce labor (which can destroy jobs too quickly for the market to keep up; technical renaissance versus revolution, depending on market dynamics influencing creation of new jobs). Someone needs to make the fuel, maintain the machines, and direct them on the small scale; they're not going to go assemble a city all on their own, but they will allow 1 person to lay a concrete foundation or building instead of a crew of 25. Even then, you're talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars of work to tear down and rebuild a city (including work involved in material costs--someone mined and shipped that concrete, you know).
We are expanding city centers by tearing down forestland all over the place; we also have collapsed urban centers here and there. I'm thinking in terms of displacement: rather than tearing down the woods in the low-density residential areas and scaling great big paved suburbs, we can (sometimes) build a different type of suburb. Removing a city first requires removing the people; if that happens on its own (it does, sometimes), woodlands can easily tear it apart in 20-30 years, or you can seed the process by dropping in trees. Short of that, you're not going to convert paved urban to woodland suburb.
There were late-generation 32-bit Pentium 4 models without the CMOV prefixed instructions that became standard in i586. CMOV is a processor extension. That's how radically different 32-bit real hardware can be. A 64-bit Intel or AMD processor in 32-bit mode is no less of a complete test than any actual 32-bit processor, simply because testing Pentium-2 compiled IA-32 code on an actual Pentium-2 is as much of a test for a 32-bit Pentium 4 as testing that same code on a Core i7 in 32-bit mode.
Grid tie-in makes generation location semi-moot. Transmission loss is a factor, although HVDC from generation centers to distribution centers makes remote transmission feasible. It's actually optimal to just rooftop generate in the middle of any population center, and have a substation servicing that population center convert HVDC from remote power plant to local grid AC: the power-in will supplement the rooftop solar; that solar will have very little distance to travel from source to point-of-use, reducing local total transmission loss from all sources in aggregate; and the HVDC line will experience reduced load, reducing transmission loss along the HVDC line.
I used to toy with the idea of forest-cities. These require a lot of infrastructure: construction, fire suppression, transit, and utility. Major construction is easy: Treehouse attachment bolts and treehouse suspensions allow large, single-family homes to suspend with as much as 60,000 pounds on one oak tree. Fire suppression requires inside fire-safe construction (drywall; ceilings extending into the wall to prevent fire vertical climb; flame-retardant stud and panel sheathing; fire-suppressing insulation and electrical conduit; tile or brick around fire sources, such as a stove or fireplace; place fire sources nearer the center of the house) and an outside fire suppression network (automatic misting fire suppression). Transit and utility come together: besides suspended foot-traffic paths, underground rail would provide the conduit for water main, gas, and electrical feed, run beneath or alongside the tunnel; this requires an in-tunnel digging machine, because the tunnel must be deep to avoid tree roots.
The point of all this is you'd have a power generation source necessarily far from your urban center in that layout. Solar or coal, the strategy is the same; in an urban center with a lot of rooftop solar, the strategy is *still* the same. Mind you, I like the general idea of shoving coal- and oil-hungry power plants (including power-plant factories) into the woods anyway (i.e. make them purchase a 2-mile radius of land and establish their factory in the middle), since the soot will settle and wash into the earth (cleaned by microbes, then plants) while the CO2, CO, hexane, methane, and other outputs will filter out (growing plants absorb CO and CO2; and the higher-oxygen environment will react hydrocarbons and other combustable gases more readily, producing absorbable CO2). It saves me having to breathe that crap.
(I've done a lot of work looking at fixating modern life into a low-disruption footprint as a middle ground between reserve land and urbanization. There's a market for people who want a more rural life, and even for people who want a zero-car city; urban engineering can improve the walkability and bicyclablity of cities at the expense of modern trafficability, and so I intersected these various ideas and concluded we could preserve natural habitats by engineering the no-car type cities to maximize walkability and bicyclability, while providing a maximization of modern conveniences such as subway transit to a city edge garage, and minimizing the additional costs of maintaining such an urban center. It will at least make for good scifi; although eliminating both yard work and the problem of foundation shifting is a bonus.)
Historically, the purchase price of the average new car has been a surprisingly-stable 56% of the median income. Stretching that over 5 years with a loan gets you under 20% per year. As well, there are new cars for under $20,000.
Budgeting discussions are useless without debt management discussions.
A roof is a lot more complex than "flat thing at the top of the house." It's got multiple support layers, insulation, water infiltration protection, frost protection, and so forth. A high-efficiency asphalt roof would start with rafters (roof joists) with stone wool insulation between them, an OSB roofing board, felt, tie battens, possibly a radiant barrier and counter-batten, and integrated frost barriers to prevent the roof from weakening from water vapor (humidity) infiltrating and freezing. The exact construction of the roof will vary based on roof type, insulation strategy, level of frost protection required, and so forth.
Solar thermal is where it's at. Dish sterling CSPs are running at 33% efficiency, versus 14% collection for standard-grade PVs and 19% for extremely-high-end multi-band crystal PVs. Salt towers are viable; for under-road, you can actually collect a lot of blunt, low-temperature heat, enough to warm buildings. You can concentrate this heat by running the air through a compressor with the compression chamber attached to a cooling loop, but I don't know if that will give you much gains with the power available.
I've theorized that a high-efficiency heat pump--a quantum tunneling junction, in particular--could circulate atmosphere and concentrate heat well enough to use a compressor and compressed-air engine to leverage atmosphere heat, essentially using the entire earth's atmosphere as a solar battery being charged continuously by the sun; but it's hard to derive gains even at that scale. Most armchair engineers have ignored the energy input from the sun in this setup and claimed I simply can't run one heat engine off another with a shared reservoir, which is true, but a strawman argument; of course it won't work on a cold planet in dead space!
Modern compressed-air solar storage systems actually do use a system similar to mine, with the boost source being the heat coming off the compressor, rather than raw atmosphere (i.e. a closed system--less-than-union gain, you're losing some energy). If the road is warmer than atmosphere, you have a similar system, being fed from an outside source (the sun and the heat of cars driving over it--friction and heat of deformation from rolling tires).
They're FBI and DOT numbers. Yes, I'm aware police drive on duty and somehow don't die; this might be because the presence of a police car makes other drivers alert, because police have advanced driving training, because police cars are built with better safety features, or a combination thereof. Quantifying what is often easier than quantifying why.
the company will incur a large profit that it will offshore to a country where there is no business tax.
That "large profit" is 10% at best. That was my point: the taxes on profits are a fraction of the money flowing into the country.
Sales tax is about 20% in france. So you are saying the government lose about 10%-15% of its income on tourist sales tax. That's about a billion dollar that they could get and they don't.
The French nation has $9 billion coming in from wages out of $10 billion being spent into the country. Cutting sales tax would allow tourists to buy 20% more, meaning you'd need to employ 20% more French people to supply and sell those things, meaning that money keeps flowing into the French economy. That causes population growth in France, creating more revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the police report doesn't cite Autopilot, Tesla doesn't know if Autopilot was involved, and nobody involved has actually attributed this to Autopilot. We don't know what happened here.
That said, as much as Tesla's autopilot functions *quite* well in practice, Google's LiDar is still superior. I said it was a mistake to not partner with Google, and I still stand by that.
On the other hand, Hillary is a legitimate, front-running candidate. Imprisoning her while the people are voting in her favor would be a great way for a corrupt military-intelligence agency to undermine the democratic process.
What about the interest they've collected and will collect over the lifetime of the loans they made?
From the same perspective, what about inflation? The United States pays $200 billion each year on loans. With inflation, the balance on the loans becomes a smaller percentage of the country's total expenses.
What about job growth? Technical progress reduces scarcity, allowing population expansion. With food costing 30% of the median family income in 1950 and 11% in 2015, we can have *many* more families and still have the same proportion living with food scarcity. Even the lowest standard of living has gone up, meanwhile the population has doubled, and we take 30% of their income in taxes. That's even more revenue, but the loan balances on the books don't go up.
If inflation is 2% and you take additional debt at a rate of 1.5%, your debt is going down, even as the creditors make out like bandits on all the interest you're paying.
Which one will destroy America more aggressively?
I want to say FDR's financial and economic actions were terrible, but... I kind of understand why he did what he did. Fractional reserve banking, the social security system, and the whole span of the New Deal were the best he could do at that time; and the FRS on fiat currency model is the best monetary system currently known.
The concentration camp thing, however, is more America-is-Hitler-beta.
Seconded. I have serious issues with Sanders's proposals because he can't get them straightened out and financed properly, and his economics are crap. I've written my own universal social security proposals, starting from the government budget, with risk assessments and all the economics involved, covering impacts on employment, technical unemployment (e.g. from automation), the length of a working day, economic wealth, poverty, our welfare system, and so forth. Transitioning from the current system to something that protects jobs, stabilizes low-income families, and eliminates homelessness and hunger is *hard* without causing massive tax increases or destroying the lives of millions of American families by cutting benefits (HUD, OASDI) out from under them; even if you have a perfect final plan, you can't get it in place without designing a comprehensive way to get from here to there over the next couple decades.
Claiming Sanders's proposals are bad because they're like $SOME_GUY is just poisoning the well.
I mean, if I was going to lie, like... ever... I'd certainly lie under oath. I learned to manipulate facts and people (in a *highly* targeted sense) instead of lying, because lies are hard to control (when people discover the truth, they're hard to manipulate; when they knew it all, all of it, the whole time, because you told them, it's hard to turn them against you).
Sanders's campaign is a giant tantrum. He lost votes and he's been arguing that they should give him the nomination anyway because Hillary is a bitch. He's levied general personal attacks against the integrity of the superdelegates for siding with the votes of the people rather than what he knows is right.
He's a different kind of giant child than Trump.
Bernie can actually run against Trump; if the Superdelegates believe in earnest that Hillary can't beat Trump and Bernie can, they'll side with Bernie.
I don't think any of them have it all on-target. Trump is a disaster; Hillary is at least stable (she's been Secretary of State for a decade), but won't take important forward action; and Bernie *will* take forward action, but has no idea how, and has a lot of breaking ideas.
We're facing a Technical Renaissance-Revolution problem at this point. Our technology paradigm is about to shift dramatically. We always have constant job reduction by technical progress (fewer employees to make the same thing), and this reduces the cost (and price) of goods and moves buying power to consumer hands, resulting in more purchasing and new, replacement employment, thus stabilizing the unemployment level. If we suddenly move the pace of advancement up (e.g. "automation"), one of two things happens: the pace of new job creation stays close to the pace of job elimination (technical renaissance: the entire country, from poor to rich, all get *extremely* wealthy); or the pace of new job creation falls sharply behind, creating high unemployment and a collapsed economy (technical revolution, e.g. the Industrial Revolution).
Bernie is correct on implementing a universal basic income, and not all there on *how* to do it. He doesn't have the reasoning for it (he's crying out against the rich and rallying for the poor, rather than looking at the economic threats on the horizon). Because of this, he's misinterpreting the problem space and installing damage (pushing toward a Technical Revolution).
In essence, to lean a TRR to a Technical Renaissance, you need to slow transitional unemployment and speed up replacement employment. Replacement employment is a natural process: while some 50,000 jobs are created each month, several million people leave the labor force (retirement, etc.) and enter the labor force (graduate college) in that same time span. That means the upper end of current employment falls off, reducing the pressure on a shrinking job market in a given profession; new skilled labor enters the market, and is adapted (with lag) to the changes. Thus speeding up replacement employment only requires keeping the consumer market healthy enough to buy jobs, which is in part accomplished *by* slowing transitional unemployment.
Well-designed UBI plans such as a Citizen's Dividend (universal social security) provide both of these. The non-wage income increases the buying power of the consumer base by increasing their effective take-home per dollar: rather than your employer spending $1 to employ you and you take home $0.60, your employer spends $1 and you take home $0.85 (at the lowest end, this can be greater than unity). This helps reduce wage-labor costs. For example, an employee paid $80,000 and married in a two-adult household would take home approximately $63,000 today; and, under my plan, you could pay that same employee around $64,000 and he'd *still* take home more. This effect is highly-pronounced at the lowest wage levels, where minimum-wage workers enjoy ~50% take-home increases without a wage raise.
Bernie's plans include minimum wage raises, among other things. In a stable economy, a minimum-wage increase concentrates wealth into a small subset of low-wage workers: you lose some minimum-wage jobs as the middle- and lower-class become poorer, and roll the difference into fewer hands in the lower class, thus those who didn't lose their jobs come out financially better off. In a TRR situation, a minimum-wage raise increases the cost of human labor relative to the cost of low-labor alternatives: we replace these people with machines.
In today
Holy crap who standardized this? We had P1 P2 P4 power connectors, and now it's PCIe connector vs PCIe connector!
What the fuck are you babbling about? PCIe connector is the slot on the motherboard.
Rock wool batts are advertised as 5% asbestos today. They cost about $45 for 8 batts; fiberglass is somewhat cheaper. Rock wool has a 9.5% increase in insulation value over Asbestos, R-23 at 5.5 inches versus R-21 for Fiberglass (mind you, the comparison is not huge; the extra R2 might eliminate like 60%-70% of the remaining heat transfer R21 doesn't, but it's only like a .01% difference in total heat transfer). Rock wool is a *lot* easier to handle.
It's also cut into cubes and used as a planter for marijuana, since it holds water well.
The article is loaded, too. "So what? Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?"
The cost of an infrastructure undertaking (or anything, really) competes for labor and money from all other sources. That is to say: to pay the construction worker, consumers must buy some good or service, which generates the income for their wages; to buy that service, they must spend from their finite income pool; and, having spent that finite income on that good or service, it cannot be spent on some other service. Depending on secondary effects, this can spread costs and create poverty, which leads to death.
The up-shot is a one-time cost is eventually buffed out if it has a positive effect. New airline costs may affect the cost structure of all businesses in the form of travel, shipping, and so forth, spreading costs in a way which causes 100 additional deaths; eventually, the new infrastructure should save more than 100 lives. We're looking at an algebraic problem: when is the intersection between expense (new construction methods and new strategies make new infrastructure cheaper, thus less damaging) and advantage (the new infrastructure improves in concept, while its cost decreases, creating a crossing-over point where fewest lives are lost and the most are gained over the period of delay-plus-implementation). That's a strategic risk proposition.
People only think one step in. It's hard enough to convince people being stabbed in the arm isn't simply pain and blood and bad because the vaccination saves them from disease; and if you make an alternate proposition (vaccines cause autism), they immediately accept it without thinking further (how did we conclude vaccines cause autism? How likely is autism from vaccine?). Scammers take advantage of this regularly by making a logical proposition on false premise (alkaline diet? Kangan water? Multi-level marketing?).
Rock wool is the new technology that's replacing fiberglass. It's easier to handle and has better insulation value. It's slightly more expensive, but that's about it.
It's not as serious as all that. Some people really are content with walkable cities and public transit; there's an intersection of demands that would supply a population genuinely interested in such things, which enables a reduction of habitat destruction without the economic cost of locking up said habitat as federally-protected land. Basically, it's an opportunistic extension: instead of 1,000,000 acres of federally-protected land and 50,000,000,000 acres of pavement, you have 1,000,000 acres of federally protected land, 49,950,000,000 acres of pavement, and 50,000,000 acres of low-footprint urbanization.
Converting an existing city or other urban center is a hell of a lot of energy expenditure and manual labor. People talk a lot about automation, and they forget that all these machines reduce labor (which can destroy jobs too quickly for the market to keep up; technical renaissance versus revolution, depending on market dynamics influencing creation of new jobs). Someone needs to make the fuel, maintain the machines, and direct them on the small scale; they're not going to go assemble a city all on their own, but they will allow 1 person to lay a concrete foundation or building instead of a crew of 25. Even then, you're talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars of work to tear down and rebuild a city (including work involved in material costs--someone mined and shipped that concrete, you know).
We are expanding city centers by tearing down forestland all over the place; we also have collapsed urban centers here and there. I'm thinking in terms of displacement: rather than tearing down the woods in the low-density residential areas and scaling great big paved suburbs, we can (sometimes) build a different type of suburb. Removing a city first requires removing the people; if that happens on its own (it does, sometimes), woodlands can easily tear it apart in 20-30 years, or you can seed the process by dropping in trees. Short of that, you're not going to convert paved urban to woodland suburb.
Some people have done other things with their front yard.
I think the argument is dumb.
Duuuuuuuumb.
Dumb.
Boot an AMD64 into 32-bit mode.
There were late-generation 32-bit Pentium 4 models without the CMOV prefixed instructions that became standard in i586. CMOV is a processor extension. That's how radically different 32-bit real hardware can be. A 64-bit Intel or AMD processor in 32-bit mode is no less of a complete test than any actual 32-bit processor, simply because testing Pentium-2 compiled IA-32 code on an actual Pentium-2 is as much of a test for a 32-bit Pentium 4 as testing that same code on a Core i7 in 32-bit mode.
Grid tie-in makes generation location semi-moot. Transmission loss is a factor, although HVDC from generation centers to distribution centers makes remote transmission feasible. It's actually optimal to just rooftop generate in the middle of any population center, and have a substation servicing that population center convert HVDC from remote power plant to local grid AC: the power-in will supplement the rooftop solar; that solar will have very little distance to travel from source to point-of-use, reducing local total transmission loss from all sources in aggregate; and the HVDC line will experience reduced load, reducing transmission loss along the HVDC line.
I used to toy with the idea of forest-cities. These require a lot of infrastructure: construction, fire suppression, transit, and utility. Major construction is easy: Treehouse attachment bolts and treehouse suspensions allow large, single-family homes to suspend with as much as 60,000 pounds on one oak tree. Fire suppression requires inside fire-safe construction (drywall; ceilings extending into the wall to prevent fire vertical climb; flame-retardant stud and panel sheathing; fire-suppressing insulation and electrical conduit; tile or brick around fire sources, such as a stove or fireplace; place fire sources nearer the center of the house) and an outside fire suppression network (automatic misting fire suppression). Transit and utility come together: besides suspended foot-traffic paths, underground rail would provide the conduit for water main, gas, and electrical feed, run beneath or alongside the tunnel; this requires an in-tunnel digging machine, because the tunnel must be deep to avoid tree roots.
The point of all this is you'd have a power generation source necessarily far from your urban center in that layout. Solar or coal, the strategy is the same; in an urban center with a lot of rooftop solar, the strategy is *still* the same. Mind you, I like the general idea of shoving coal- and oil-hungry power plants (including power-plant factories) into the woods anyway (i.e. make them purchase a 2-mile radius of land and establish their factory in the middle), since the soot will settle and wash into the earth (cleaned by microbes, then plants) while the CO2, CO, hexane, methane, and other outputs will filter out (growing plants absorb CO and CO2; and the higher-oxygen environment will react hydrocarbons and other combustable gases more readily, producing absorbable CO2). It saves me having to breathe that crap.
(I've done a lot of work looking at fixating modern life into a low-disruption footprint as a middle ground between reserve land and urbanization. There's a market for people who want a more rural life, and even for people who want a zero-car city; urban engineering can improve the walkability and bicyclablity of cities at the expense of modern trafficability, and so I intersected these various ideas and concluded we could preserve natural habitats by engineering the no-car type cities to maximize walkability and bicyclability, while providing a maximization of modern conveniences such as subway transit to a city edge garage, and minimizing the additional costs of maintaining such an urban center. It will at least make for good scifi; although eliminating both yard work and the problem of foundation shifting is a bonus.)
Historically, the purchase price of the average new car has been a surprisingly-stable 56% of the median income. Stretching that over 5 years with a loan gets you under 20% per year. As well, there are new cars for under $20,000.
Budgeting discussions are useless without debt management discussions.
I computed that SolarCity's savings were equivalent to 5% of what an equivalent DIY job would get me.
A roof is a lot more complex than "flat thing at the top of the house." It's got multiple support layers, insulation, water infiltration protection, frost protection, and so forth. A high-efficiency asphalt roof would start with rafters (roof joists) with stone wool insulation between them, an OSB roofing board, felt, tie battens, possibly a radiant barrier and counter-batten, and integrated frost barriers to prevent the roof from weakening from water vapor (humidity) infiltrating and freezing. The exact construction of the roof will vary based on roof type, insulation strategy, level of frost protection required, and so forth.
Roads don't wear significantly from traffic; they wear from temperature cycling and water infiltration.
Solar thermal is where it's at. Dish sterling CSPs are running at 33% efficiency, versus 14% collection for standard-grade PVs and 19% for extremely-high-end multi-band crystal PVs. Salt towers are viable; for under-road, you can actually collect a lot of blunt, low-temperature heat, enough to warm buildings. You can concentrate this heat by running the air through a compressor with the compression chamber attached to a cooling loop, but I don't know if that will give you much gains with the power available.
I've theorized that a high-efficiency heat pump--a quantum tunneling junction, in particular--could circulate atmosphere and concentrate heat well enough to use a compressor and compressed-air engine to leverage atmosphere heat, essentially using the entire earth's atmosphere as a solar battery being charged continuously by the sun; but it's hard to derive gains even at that scale. Most armchair engineers have ignored the energy input from the sun in this setup and claimed I simply can't run one heat engine off another with a shared reservoir, which is true, but a strawman argument; of course it won't work on a cold planet in dead space!
Modern compressed-air solar storage systems actually do use a system similar to mine, with the boost source being the heat coming off the compressor, rather than raw atmosphere (i.e. a closed system--less-than-union gain, you're losing some energy). If the road is warmer than atmosphere, you have a similar system, being fed from an outside source (the sun and the heat of cars driving over it--friction and heat of deformation from rolling tires).
You mean the part of the building that's in the shade of the next building over?
They're FBI and DOT numbers. Yes, I'm aware police drive on duty and somehow don't die; this might be because the presence of a police car makes other drivers alert, because police have advanced driving training, because police cars are built with better safety features, or a combination thereof. Quantifying what is often easier than quantifying why.
the company will incur a large profit that it will offshore to a country where there is no business tax.
That "large profit" is 10% at best. That was my point: the taxes on profits are a fraction of the money flowing into the country.
Sales tax is about 20% in france. So you are saying the government lose about 10%-15% of its income on tourist sales tax. That's about a billion dollar that they could get and they don't.
The French nation has $9 billion coming in from wages out of $10 billion being spent into the country. Cutting sales tax would allow tourists to buy 20% more, meaning you'd need to employ 20% more French people to supply and sell those things, meaning that money keeps flowing into the French economy. That causes population growth in France, creating more revenue.