I pay attention to how the inside of my head works. Extreme introspection. I'm kind of obsessed with knowledge, learning, and optimization, so it's become a sort of nervous tick.
The brain is an intuitive tool: you can pick it up and use it to reasonable effect without learning how. As with most intuitive tools, you can use it to *great* effect if you have better understanding of technique. This is why some people have shitty handwriting, and others are scribbling out professional-grade calligraphy just by using a slant pen: continuous cycles of practicing, of examining the results, and of recognizing and deliberately correcting your mistakes leads to picking up a slant pen and writing a thousand-dollar wedding invitation.
I'm the guy who learned to make wedding invitations while everyone else was learning to write barely-legible cursive.
The systems simulator is just my own constant tool: whenever I approach a problem, I simulate it. If I'm playing a video game, I'm looking at the sprites on the screen in terms of their direction and speed of travel, and accounting for any known behaviors: I see where things *will* be *simultaneously*, instead of just their current position, direction, speed, and maybe path. I instantly know if things will intersect. The same goes for real-world physics, although that domain is more complex *and* has variables I can't always measure, as well as many I don't often interact with and can't readily project. I do the same in economics, loosely correlating changes with the pressures they put on other changes and shifting the whole system at once. I manipulate data structures in my head when coding, essentially emulating an abstract representation of a computer processor.
Some of those are more or less abstract, and more or less accurate. I'm *very* good with video games--no surprise there. Real-world physics has the stated problems: don't know all variables, haven't observed every aspect in great detail; I can catch a ball for the same reason you can, but I can't fire a sniper rifle because I need a *lot* of time to (poorly) simulate wind resistance against a bullet. Economics is actually a pretty simple system, as long as you're dealing with billions of people and not dozens. Computer programs are like economics: analyzing the *whole* program is hard, and you have to do it in pieces with propagating effects--this is generally a good strategy.
Einstein was a scientist, yet he acted like a philosopher: he sat, thought, made a bunch of shit up, and somehow turned out right. He wasn't pulling experiments in a research lab; people are so amazed by Einstein partly because nearly everything he declared as truth--stuff he was *right* about--was impossible to test in his time. We're only now getting the equipment and the opportunity to vaguely identify that Einstein *might* have been correct, and that evidence exists which is fully explained by his theories, but not necessarily which would lead us to synthesize those same theories without a nudge in the right direction. Where do you think he got it from?
I suspect Einstein had a version of my own internal simulator, one he put to use more effectively than I. Given a strong grasp of physics in that era, he could have readily generated new theories based on a few seconds of examining a behavior in his head--a behavior which would be perfectly in line with reality, even if he didn't understand it--and start working out the mechanics. All he'd have to do is keep his mouth shut until he had a solid model, and then note any flaws or limitations to avoid being outright wrong.
Einstein declared quantum physics a load of horse shit. Given a strong grasp of modern theory, I bet he'd emit a ton of useful conjecture--most of which would be right. I know my own simulators work faster-than-realtime and with perfect accuracy on physics (real and video game, only to the extent I have contact experience) and economics; Einstein's stream of groundbreaking theories shows he was never shy about running the system in his head and explaining how it works, and he was *very* good at it.
I wish I could simulate other people better. I can do it pretty well, but not well enough to implement strong social control. I *have* been able to injure people by determining their psychological weaknesses and attacking them with a few well-placed words, but it's nothing like some of my prior acquaintances could do, gaining the favor of literally anyone they spoke with. I've got some of the theory; I may have to go out into... public, I guess... and just chew through people at bars and book shops, talking to random strangers until I can consistently draw friends. It seems like a huge waste of time; nobody's goal-focused, and they idly chatter without a point.
Yes. Einstein theorized that spacetime is curved around objects, and so an object, once settled, should have this curvature around it rather than a wave to project. That said, it's like ideal gas laws or my economic theories of wealth: everything *approaches* a certain state, but pushing a piston down into a 1L bottle of gas doesn't instantly make tho whole volume obey ideal gas. You get an average, with high pressure at the point you inserted the force, which then reduces as it compresses stuff further down--a wave. The whole universe taking its time adjusting to a shift in pressure on the spacetime fabric would be a wave as well.
It's a comparison to make scale. It's like when you compare radiation to the radiation output of a banana, since nobody has an understanding of radiation levels.
How much land is 6,000 acres? It sounds like a lot. Depending on how you think about it, it is or it isn't. It's a lot of housing space; it's not really a lot of farm land--it's enough to feed 6,000 people for a year. Honeybees can forrage 80,000 acres if they travel 5 miles from the hive.
That's a bit different when you scale out: powering Europe in this way requires land space the size of two U.S. states. In terms of arable farm land, it'd be enough to feed only about 4-5 million people (a small U.S. state like Maryland); in terms of housing, you could stick apartments for nearly 2 billion people in that space, although that's impractical (you aren't going to have one giant apartment complex the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island with no super markets or workplaces in sight). Of course we'd scatter these things all across the continent in little pieces.
Solar PV has essentially zero maintenance cost once installed.
"Essentially zero" turns out to be non-zero, and the lag and lead costs of each maintenance event are multiplied by the number of installations. Now "essentially zero" becomes "essentially millions".
Plus, with the benefit of the power being produced where it is actually used, you eliminate the cost of building and maintaining the vast majority of infrastructure that would be required for a central plant.
Except you still need that infrastructure to provide baseband power. If you generate enough solar to power the whole world 24/7, you need power storage, which is *also* cheaper centralized, and so you need a way to get power from all these spread out generation facilities to a storage facility. If you over-generate power, you're losing it and wasting effort building, installing, and maintaining solar panels; to reduce this cost, you need an infrastructure to move that power back and forth between generation cites--rooftops.
It turns out we already have that infrastructure, so the point on building it is moot. You still have to account for maintenance: is maintaining infrastructure cheaper or more expensive than installing and maintaining incrementally more overgeneration and storage facilities at every single individual home (because you absolutely need that infrastructure if even one home doesn't generate their own power)?
The land in question is already being used for something else: housing
Maybe you should try applying reading comprehension above the level of a brain-damaged retard. I suggest you learn to read white space; this may help when someone compares and contrasts two separate options by putting one in one paragraph and one in another paragraph. If that fails, you can always go back and use the grouped information to identify boundaries from their context."
You've done neither of these, but instead read a discussion comparing two different things in two different paragraphs each starting with a different name for the thing being described as if the attributes of each thing applied to one thing. For example:
Ducks are fowl. They like to fly, they eat fish, and they can swim in water.
Pigs are swine. They wallow in mud and eat god damn anything. Oddly enough, they can also swim.
Your response: "God dammit! Ducks don't wallow in mud; they swim on lakes!"
Go back to first grade and ask them to teach you to read. Really read. I understand they may need to bring in an army of special education professionals, but reading will change your life.
You're producing *at* the point of use.
This wide-area installation is not producing at the point of use, unless they need a huge amount of power.
No, that's explaining the difference between pissing in your cornflakes and pissing in the ocean.
When the statement, "When you spread it out", was made, you were describing pissing in little droplets all over the ocean, instead of pissing in one place.
What kind of "wide-spread" and what kind of "management" do you think you need on roofs?
Cleaning them when birds shit all over them, cleaning them when there's dust on them, cleaning them when the rain churns the dust and bits of dead leaves into a mud caking, replacing burned-out panels, and so forth. You're supposed to inspect your rooftop solar array a few times a year--not very frequently--and inspecting 10 acres of panels scattered across hundreds of roofs requires one of two things: an outside maintenance man to drive from site to site (transit cost) *or* each homeowner to set aside tools and preparation time to perform the inspection themselves. Having those panels in one installation means your maintenance crew can handle it as one condensed block operation, which incurs less time waste; all things are produced via labor time, so time waste is the basic source of loss of wealth in an economy.
Total cost in relation to what? Placing the same installation not on a roof, but on a "thing"?
In relation to expending the same amount of labor, including all useful labor and all waste incurred, on completing all the maintenance tasks *plus* producing other useful goods and services. Instead of 10,000 hours spent maintaining solar panels, you spend 8,000 hours maintaining solar panels and 2,000 hours making high-tech footware, and in total you expend the same cost while coming out with more useful product.
How is that different from building a coal plant
It's not. If you ran your house off a coal-fueled dynamo in your back yard or a gas-line generator, you'd pay more, even if the generator were as efficient as the main power dynamo feeding your electrical service (minus the loss in transit). That's because you'd have to pay the additional for the shipping of coal (truck) or gas (pipeline) through a more complex, labor-intensive distribution system, incurring more labor time to distribute the commodity and thus requiring the payment of wages to that labor. You'd also have to pay the additional cost involved in many-small-parts manufacture over few-large-parts manufacture, and in maintenance of the system--maintenance which requires transit of the maintenance technician to all these scattered generation plants, and which has to happen in a frequency multiplied across the number of installations.
As a common tactic among firefighters to contain incidents is by opening a hole in the roof for ventilation, Willette said, the density of solar panels can make it impossible for firefighters to create that hole.
And if the firefighter is opening up the hole from below and doesn’t know that solar panels are installed on the roof, that creates another shock hazard, he added.
Some municipalities allow covering one side of a gabled roof with no setbacks because the firefighters can cut open the other side of the roof; many municipalities require a three-foot setback from the edge of the roof.
No it does not. The line is already there. Or how does the roof, on which you place the plant, got its power so far?
Transmission of solar power from a roof to a house across a 8 gauge electrical line of a length of 30 feet from the panel to the electrical box does not incur as much loss as transmission of solar power from a solar farm across 400 miles of power line. At 345,000 volts, a line carrying 1GW of power across 100 miles has a loss of 4.5%; losses in the USA average over 6%. 8 gauge wire coming 30 feet down from the roof into your panel will experience a loss of about 2% if carrying the full load of a 6KW array; if it's carrying one phase (three wire: a 240VAC system with a center tap to the neutral bar, +120V connected t
The point was the desert is a highly complex and fragile ecological habitat. You don't just pave over it because there's nothing but dust and sand there.
Uh. The maximization of the growth of wealth raises the standard-of-living, which reduces the total human suffering and enables the creation of welfare systems and stable economies. That means less poverty--less homelessness, less hunger, less disease. Are you claiming that reducing the proportion of a population facing death and suffering is not objectively better?
Is a serial killer's value system not objectively worse than your own?
Small bug fixes and reactions to emerging issues tend to get more scrutiny. People ask questions like, "Is this the best way to fix this bug?"
Large architectural improvements tend to affect important parts of the project, and either serve or *threaten* an immediate project need. These draw scrutiny. Broad clean-up doesn't. New features can go either way, depending on the project, since some like to argue against including any feature the one or two main contributors don't personally see as important.
It's not encouraging. You don't have the option to opt out. If you don't go to college, the deck is instantly stacked against you.
if you go to college in today's world without planning on getting a degree that earns you money then you are wasting your time and money.
You mean a degree in... whatever the hot job is today?
Good idea. I can speculate on the job market, just like I can speculate on the stock market. Then, when I come out, I'll find there's demand for 600,000 jobs of type X, and that me and 16 million others spent the last 4 years in college for job X. Then, hopefully, I'll be one of the 1 in 27 who actually gets hired... hopefully early, too, since more hundreds of thousands of people who went to college for Job X are coming out of college every year.
If you go to college and the other people don't, you'll get a nice, high-paying job, and they won't. [If you rat and he doesn't, you go free and he goes to jail for 20 years].
If you don't go to college and other people do, you don't have the skills to compete for the same hot job. [If you don't rat and he does, you go to jail for 20 years.]
If you and everyone else goes to college, you're all competing for the same job, and have to bid low salaries and poor benefits to plead for employment--if you can get hired at all. [If you both rat, you go to jail for 10 years.]
If *nobody* goes to college without a job secured in hand, there's a labor shortage, and businesses have to do something to encourage you; of course, *everyone* has to give up the opportunity to skip ahead by going to college to get ahead of everyone else. [If neither of you rats, you both get 5 years, which means you pass up the opportunity to go free in the hopes that the other guy will *also* pass up the opportunity to go free.]
Your most optimal choice is to go to college [rat out].
The difference is everyone having independent access to college creates a different employment market situation than almost nobody having that independent access. Employers have to change their behavior, and can't place the same pressure upon employees. They have to select a different tactic, using their speculation [insider trading on the job market] to hire entrants and work the training and education required into their career paths. They then have an employee who is valuable to the company (valuation), and so will need to carry out more effective retention strategies (salaries, benefits--imagine having a pension!).
You don't have the choice to opt for that market. Your only valid choice is to go to college like everyone else, unless you want to castrate yourself instead. Fuel the labor oversupply machine by speculating on what jobs will exist in the broad job market, rather than by zeroing in on a single specific business and analyzing its growth and its technical needs as they follow that growth. That's really what it comes down to: you, an individual, must speculate on the behavior of the *whole* *market* of many businesses, determining what job will eventually be most valued; whereas a business need only speculate on its own growth in its own market, and then hire entrants and begin training them to fill those needs as they approach. When enough skilled labor is floating around, leaving jobs here and moving there, they'll *stop* training people--and if you went to college for that job anyway, you'd find there aren't jobs out there for *you*, but rather for one of the many professionals currently trying to fill a limited number of slots.
You can't have it both ways. Choose: efficient selection of career path with a guaranteed job backing you *before* you start investing your time and effort (and the labor and wealth available in the economy) into developing yourself as part of the workforce; OR the freedom to ignore all that bullshit and select what *you* think will be a viable career path in the future, hoping there will be a job there for you when you come out the other side
The problems with deploying on roof spaces are numerous. Wide-spread management incurs higher total cost. Interference with roof operations (e.g. repair) increases total cost. Up-front costs are placed on consumers, instead of amortized through service from a generation facility (i.e. poor folk can't install solar panels; rich folk can, and *extremely* rich folk can front the money for installation of solar panels to supply poor folk). Up-front costs are higher in total, due to the need to shuffle electricians around. Regulatory compliance makes the ROI for any given individual low, as roof space is smaller. Regulations to minimize roof space exist because solar panels provide a serious hazard when firefighters try to vent heat and toxic gases via a cut on the roof.
The problems with deploying in wide area are large. Land use is inefficient. Transmission to point-of-use incurs more loss. Start-up costs and risks are both large, thus deployment is difficult to back.
When you spread it out - as is the optimal arrangement for solar power anyway - it virtually vanishes.
That's another way of saying, "You close your eyes and pretend it's not there."
When insulating houses with rigid foam paneling, builders frequently use thermally-broken fasteners. That is: there is not a continuous connection between an outside-facing metal surface and an inside-facing metal surface. This is because they use one nail every 6 inches, or 4,800 nails to fasten rigid insulation to wooden sheathing across a 30 foot x 40 foot wall. That provides a six square foot radiator plugged directly into your house by a distributed 0.7 square foot metal rod. It's not much, but it is a six inch metal bridge into your house; you have to blow enough warm air across that to keep that six inches of your wall room-temperature constantly, which means you lose quite a bit of heat (up to 10% with steel, much less with stainless steel) out that hole (for every 0.1kW, it's 72kWh or $10-$15/month of loss; it can near a third or more of a kW in extremely low outdoor temperatures).
Do you want to cut down 5 million acres of forest or 5 million acres of forest? For that matter, do you want to cut down 5 million acres of forest in one spot, or do this in little pockets and cut away another 3 million acres of forest so they don't cast shade on your solar panels?
For distributed version control systems like git, mercurial, bazaar, bitkeeper, and darcs, there's no central repository. You can have an authoritative source, which is just like every other source aside from a fancy name tag. A pull request is a request to pull (and merge) a branch from another repository.
However I feel that the hyperbole has started to go in the other direction concerning the job markets in STEM as of late.
That's irrelevant to my point. People see a societal provision for independent access to college as a freedom: it grants you choice. You can choose to go to college, to become a doctor, to become a programmer, to become an accountant. I tend to describe it as the Prisonner's Dilemma: having the choice *necessarily* means you will face a less-optimal outcome, and your *best* individual choice is the one that overall produces the *least-optimal* outcome for everyone affected.
It's like if the government gave everyone free food laced with opiates, and put a high tax on non-opiated food. Now you can get food, but you'll have the severe health issues of long-term opium addiction; you can get non-opiated food, if you're rich as living fuck. Nobody wants the government to take away their access to food.
I vaguely cite historical economics--right back to hunter-gatherers, feudalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the like--when discussing economics. I don't work from modern or classical economic theories; those theories are all wrong, in the same fashion that any established theory is always wrong. I've made better ones which more completely explain the same factors, and most of the existing behaviors in the established theory fall under my explanations.
It is useful for a lot of reasons.
every teacher taught history as a critical thinking course and did a lot of analysis and gave proper social context. A poor history class would just teach you a bunch of facts.
You can't understand socio-political-economic context without the facts behind that context. How can you understand the context of the Industrial Revolution without understanding that skilled workers were a sort of middle-class, and that the powered machines created around 80% unemployment even as far as 60 years out? You may think you understand all that, and then what? Side with the Luddites, and recognize the modern threat of automation? This leads you to miss something critical: we're *always* reducing jobs, just like the Industrial Revolution; and we create new jobs at the same time. Faster, and you raise unemployment; more slowly and you lower it.
Facts can be forgotten or become no longer valid, but concepts are eternal.
A hit-or-miss system in which you invest years of effort at high costs to instill something one can learn in a half hour is a waste of money. We should work on teaching methods of thinking.
True, but the Government can declared that land "nature reserve." It's different when you build a gigantic industrial factory over the entire span of land, milling down trees and compacting the soil until there's nothing left.
We already lock up millions of acres of land as protected in the United States; since we see this as an important management action, it makes sense to position nuclear generation facilities in areas where we're semi-confident we'd like to protect that land. That is: treat protected land as non-binary, recognize land that we only barely accept for development (because of its importance as undeveloped land), and then put a nuclear plant there. Then the land is both protected *and* developed: it's left in its natural state, but used as a nuclear buffer zone.
This assumes the risk of a nuclear accident has larger general consequences than the (partial) loss of the protected land surrounding the plant.
Still, a 7,000MW plant takes up 1,100 acres; a 160MW plant takes up 6,100 acres. Every 25 acres around that nuclear plant represents one of those 6,100 acre solar plants; 6100 acres of land consumed by nuclear would represent almost 243 of those solar generation facilities.
So it would require 1/243 of the land area; and we can partially discount most of that area by declaring it nature reserve, with the discount relative to the degree to which we would have considered the land an important nature reserve otherwise.
Comparison with arable land and with living space lets you identify how much land 6,000+ acres is. How about I just tell you I can build a more efficient plant on a span of 1,000 plutons?
For reasons I've never understood, CSP salt towers are usually about 17% efficient; Photovoltaics range from 15% for your standard fare to 19% for top-end panels. By contrast, parabolic reflectors using a dish pointed at a small sterling engine mounted where a radio dish would place its satellite receiver have efficiencies as high as 31%. They're more maintenance (thus more expensive power) than a salt tower, and only generate during the day; salt towers might generate 1/4 or 1/5 as much power, but continue generating that output for twice as long, giving some night-time power and roughly half the total generation.
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I pay attention to how the inside of my head works. Extreme introspection. I'm kind of obsessed with knowledge, learning, and optimization, so it's become a sort of nervous tick.
The brain is an intuitive tool: you can pick it up and use it to reasonable effect without learning how. As with most intuitive tools, you can use it to *great* effect if you have better understanding of technique. This is why some people have shitty handwriting, and others are scribbling out professional-grade calligraphy just by using a slant pen: continuous cycles of practicing, of examining the results, and of recognizing and deliberately correcting your mistakes leads to picking up a slant pen and writing a thousand-dollar wedding invitation.
I'm the guy who learned to make wedding invitations while everyone else was learning to write barely-legible cursive.
The systems simulator is just my own constant tool: whenever I approach a problem, I simulate it. If I'm playing a video game, I'm looking at the sprites on the screen in terms of their direction and speed of travel, and accounting for any known behaviors: I see where things *will* be *simultaneously*, instead of just their current position, direction, speed, and maybe path. I instantly know if things will intersect. The same goes for real-world physics, although that domain is more complex *and* has variables I can't always measure, as well as many I don't often interact with and can't readily project. I do the same in economics, loosely correlating changes with the pressures they put on other changes and shifting the whole system at once. I manipulate data structures in my head when coding, essentially emulating an abstract representation of a computer processor.
Some of those are more or less abstract, and more or less accurate. I'm *very* good with video games--no surprise there. Real-world physics has the stated problems: don't know all variables, haven't observed every aspect in great detail; I can catch a ball for the same reason you can, but I can't fire a sniper rifle because I need a *lot* of time to (poorly) simulate wind resistance against a bullet. Economics is actually a pretty simple system, as long as you're dealing with billions of people and not dozens. Computer programs are like economics: analyzing the *whole* program is hard, and you have to do it in pieces with propagating effects--this is generally a good strategy.
Einstein was a scientist, yet he acted like a philosopher: he sat, thought, made a bunch of shit up, and somehow turned out right. He wasn't pulling experiments in a research lab; people are so amazed by Einstein partly because nearly everything he declared as truth--stuff he was *right* about--was impossible to test in his time. We're only now getting the equipment and the opportunity to vaguely identify that Einstein *might* have been correct, and that evidence exists which is fully explained by his theories, but not necessarily which would lead us to synthesize those same theories without a nudge in the right direction. Where do you think he got it from?
This isn't hard. Don't say stupid shit.
I suspect Einstein had a version of my own internal simulator, one he put to use more effectively than I. Given a strong grasp of physics in that era, he could have readily generated new theories based on a few seconds of examining a behavior in his head--a behavior which would be perfectly in line with reality, even if he didn't understand it--and start working out the mechanics. All he'd have to do is keep his mouth shut until he had a solid model, and then note any flaws or limitations to avoid being outright wrong.
Einstein declared quantum physics a load of horse shit. Given a strong grasp of modern theory, I bet he'd emit a ton of useful conjecture--most of which would be right. I know my own simulators work faster-than-realtime and with perfect accuracy on physics (real and video game, only to the extent I have contact experience) and economics; Einstein's stream of groundbreaking theories shows he was never shy about running the system in his head and explaining how it works, and he was *very* good at it.
I wish I could simulate other people better. I can do it pretty well, but not well enough to implement strong social control. I *have* been able to injure people by determining their psychological weaknesses and attacking them with a few well-placed words, but it's nothing like some of my prior acquaintances could do, gaining the favor of literally anyone they spoke with. I've got some of the theory; I may have to go out into... public, I guess... and just chew through people at bars and book shops, talking to random strangers until I can consistently draw friends. It seems like a huge waste of time; nobody's goal-focused, and they idly chatter without a point.
Yes. Einstein theorized that spacetime is curved around objects, and so an object, once settled, should have this curvature around it rather than a wave to project. That said, it's like ideal gas laws or my economic theories of wealth: everything *approaches* a certain state, but pushing a piston down into a 1L bottle of gas doesn't instantly make tho whole volume obey ideal gas. You get an average, with high pressure at the point you inserted the force, which then reduces as it compresses stuff further down--a wave. The whole universe taking its time adjusting to a shift in pressure on the spacetime fabric would be a wave as well.
Citrix, VMWare View, etc.
It's a comparison to make scale. It's like when you compare radiation to the radiation output of a banana, since nobody has an understanding of radiation levels.
How much land is 6,000 acres? It sounds like a lot. Depending on how you think about it, it is or it isn't. It's a lot of housing space; it's not really a lot of farm land--it's enough to feed 6,000 people for a year. Honeybees can forrage 80,000 acres if they travel 5 miles from the hive.
That's a bit different when you scale out: powering Europe in this way requires land space the size of two U.S. states. In terms of arable farm land, it'd be enough to feed only about 4-5 million people (a small U.S. state like Maryland); in terms of housing, you could stick apartments for nearly 2 billion people in that space, although that's impractical (you aren't going to have one giant apartment complex the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island with no super markets or workplaces in sight). Of course we'd scatter these things all across the continent in little pieces.
It's a huge waste of land. I think you know that.
Solar PV has essentially zero maintenance cost once installed.
"Essentially zero" turns out to be non-zero, and the lag and lead costs of each maintenance event are multiplied by the number of installations. Now "essentially zero" becomes "essentially millions".
Plus, with the benefit of the power being produced where it is actually used, you eliminate the cost of building and maintaining the vast majority of infrastructure that would be required for a central plant.
Except you still need that infrastructure to provide baseband power. If you generate enough solar to power the whole world 24/7, you need power storage, which is *also* cheaper centralized, and so you need a way to get power from all these spread out generation facilities to a storage facility. If you over-generate power, you're losing it and wasting effort building, installing, and maintaining solar panels; to reduce this cost, you need an infrastructure to move that power back and forth between generation cites--rooftops.
It turns out we already have that infrastructure, so the point on building it is moot. You still have to account for maintenance: is maintaining infrastructure cheaper or more expensive than installing and maintaining incrementally more overgeneration and storage facilities at every single individual home (because you absolutely need that infrastructure if even one home doesn't generate their own power)?
The land in question is already being used for something else: housing
Doesn't look like it to me.
Maybe you should try applying reading comprehension above the level of a brain-damaged retard. I suggest you learn to read white space; this may help when someone compares and contrasts two separate options by putting one in one paragraph and one in another paragraph. If that fails, you can always go back and use the grouped information to identify boundaries from their context."
You've done neither of these, but instead read a discussion comparing two different things in two different paragraphs each starting with a different name for the thing being described as if the attributes of each thing applied to one thing. For example:
Ducks are fowl. They like to fly, they eat fish, and they can swim in water.
Pigs are swine. They wallow in mud and eat god damn anything. Oddly enough, they can also swim.
Your response: "God dammit! Ducks don't wallow in mud; they swim on lakes!"
Go back to first grade and ask them to teach you to read. Really read. I understand they may need to bring in an army of special education professionals, but reading will change your life.
You're producing *at* the point of use.
This wide-area installation is not producing at the point of use, unless they need a huge amount of power.
No, that's explaining the difference between pissing in your cornflakes and pissing in the ocean.
When the statement, "When you spread it out", was made, you were describing pissing in little droplets all over the ocean, instead of pissing in one place.
Deserts are fragile, complex habitats.
What kind of "wide-spread" and what kind of "management" do you think you need on roofs?
Cleaning them when birds shit all over them, cleaning them when there's dust on them, cleaning them when the rain churns the dust and bits of dead leaves into a mud caking, replacing burned-out panels, and so forth. You're supposed to inspect your rooftop solar array a few times a year--not very frequently--and inspecting 10 acres of panels scattered across hundreds of roofs requires one of two things: an outside maintenance man to drive from site to site (transit cost) *or* each homeowner to set aside tools and preparation time to perform the inspection themselves. Having those panels in one installation means your maintenance crew can handle it as one condensed block operation, which incurs less time waste; all things are produced via labor time, so time waste is the basic source of loss of wealth in an economy.
Total cost in relation to what? Placing the same installation not on a roof, but on a "thing"?
In relation to expending the same amount of labor, including all useful labor and all waste incurred, on completing all the maintenance tasks *plus* producing other useful goods and services. Instead of 10,000 hours spent maintaining solar panels, you spend 8,000 hours maintaining solar panels and 2,000 hours making high-tech footware, and in total you expend the same cost while coming out with more useful product.
How is that different from building a coal plant
It's not. If you ran your house off a coal-fueled dynamo in your back yard or a gas-line generator, you'd pay more, even if the generator were as efficient as the main power dynamo feeding your electrical service (minus the loss in transit). That's because you'd have to pay the additional for the shipping of coal (truck) or gas (pipeline) through a more complex, labor-intensive distribution system, incurring more labor time to distribute the commodity and thus requiring the payment of wages to that labor. You'd also have to pay the additional cost involved in many-small-parts manufacture over few-large-parts manufacture, and in maintenance of the system--maintenance which requires transit of the maintenance technician to all these scattered generation plants, and which has to happen in a frequency multiplied across the number of installations.
Never heard about such a fire fighting technique.
It's well-known.
As a common tactic among firefighters to contain incidents is by opening a hole in the roof for ventilation, Willette said, the density of solar panels can make it impossible for firefighters to create that hole.
And if the firefighter is opening up the hole from below and doesn’t know that solar panels are installed on the roof, that creates another shock hazard, he added.
Some municipalities allow covering one side of a gabled roof with no setbacks because the firefighters can cut open the other side of the roof; many municipalities require a three-foot setback from the edge of the roof.
No it does not. The line is already there. Or how does the roof, on which you place the plant, got its power so far?
Transmission of solar power from a roof to a house across a 8 gauge electrical line of a length of 30 feet from the panel to the electrical box does not incur as much loss as transmission of solar power from a solar farm across 400 miles of power line. At 345,000 volts, a line carrying 1GW of power across 100 miles has a loss of 4.5%; losses in the USA average over 6%. 8 gauge wire coming 30 feet down from the roof into your panel will experience a loss of about 2% if carrying the full load of a 6KW array; if it's carrying one phase (three wire: a 240VAC system with a center tap to the neutral bar, +120V connected t
The point was the desert is a highly complex and fragile ecological habitat. You don't just pave over it because there's nothing but dust and sand there.
Uh. The maximization of the growth of wealth raises the standard-of-living, which reduces the total human suffering and enables the creation of welfare systems and stable economies. That means less poverty--less homelessness, less hunger, less disease. Are you claiming that reducing the proportion of a population facing death and suffering is not objectively better?
Is a serial killer's value system not objectively worse than your own?
Arabs don't exist, right. Neither do Egyptians. Myths of a fantasy land where people live in the desert.
Small bug fixes and reactions to emerging issues tend to get more scrutiny. People ask questions like, "Is this the best way to fix this bug?"
Large architectural improvements tend to affect important parts of the project, and either serve or *threaten* an immediate project need. These draw scrutiny. Broad clean-up doesn't. New features can go either way, depending on the project, since some like to argue against including any feature the one or two main contributors don't personally see as important.
It's not encouraging. You don't have the option to opt out. If you don't go to college, the deck is instantly stacked against you.
if you go to college in today's world without planning on getting a degree that earns you money then you are wasting your time and money.
You mean a degree in... whatever the hot job is today?
Good idea. I can speculate on the job market, just like I can speculate on the stock market. Then, when I come out, I'll find there's demand for 600,000 jobs of type X, and that me and 16 million others spent the last 4 years in college for job X. Then, hopefully, I'll be one of the 1 in 27 who actually gets hired... hopefully early, too, since more hundreds of thousands of people who went to college for Job X are coming out of college every year.
If you go to college and the other people don't, you'll get a nice, high-paying job, and they won't. [If you rat and he doesn't, you go free and he goes to jail for 20 years].
If you don't go to college and other people do, you don't have the skills to compete for the same hot job. [If you don't rat and he does, you go to jail for 20 years.]
If you and everyone else goes to college, you're all competing for the same job, and have to bid low salaries and poor benefits to plead for employment--if you can get hired at all. [If you both rat, you go to jail for 10 years.]
If *nobody* goes to college without a job secured in hand, there's a labor shortage, and businesses have to do something to encourage you; of course, *everyone* has to give up the opportunity to skip ahead by going to college to get ahead of everyone else. [If neither of you rats, you both get 5 years, which means you pass up the opportunity to go free in the hopes that the other guy will *also* pass up the opportunity to go free.]
Your most optimal choice is to go to college [rat out].
The difference is everyone having independent access to college creates a different employment market situation than almost nobody having that independent access. Employers have to change their behavior, and can't place the same pressure upon employees. They have to select a different tactic, using their speculation [insider trading on the job market] to hire entrants and work the training and education required into their career paths. They then have an employee who is valuable to the company (valuation), and so will need to carry out more effective retention strategies (salaries, benefits--imagine having a pension!).
You don't have the choice to opt for that market. Your only valid choice is to go to college like everyone else, unless you want to castrate yourself instead. Fuel the labor oversupply machine by speculating on what jobs will exist in the broad job market, rather than by zeroing in on a single specific business and analyzing its growth and its technical needs as they follow that growth. That's really what it comes down to: you, an individual, must speculate on the behavior of the *whole* *market* of many businesses, determining what job will eventually be most valued; whereas a business need only speculate on its own growth in its own market, and then hire entrants and begin training them to fill those needs as they approach. When enough skilled labor is floating around, leaving jobs here and moving there, they'll *stop* training people--and if you went to college for that job anyway, you'd find there aren't jobs out there for *you*, but rather for one of the many professionals currently trying to fill a limited number of slots.
You can't have it both ways. Choose: efficient selection of career path with a guaranteed job backing you *before* you start investing your time and effort (and the labor and wealth available in the economy) into developing yourself as part of the workforce; OR the freedom to ignore all that bullshit and select what *you* think will be a viable career path in the future, hoping there will be a job there for you when you come out the other side
Yes, but there are a *lot* of roof spaces.
The problems with deploying on roof spaces are numerous. Wide-spread management incurs higher total cost. Interference with roof operations (e.g. repair) increases total cost. Up-front costs are placed on consumers, instead of amortized through service from a generation facility (i.e. poor folk can't install solar panels; rich folk can, and *extremely* rich folk can front the money for installation of solar panels to supply poor folk). Up-front costs are higher in total, due to the need to shuffle electricians around. Regulatory compliance makes the ROI for any given individual low, as roof space is smaller. Regulations to minimize roof space exist because solar panels provide a serious hazard when firefighters try to vent heat and toxic gases via a cut on the roof.
The problems with deploying in wide area are large. Land use is inefficient. Transmission to point-of-use incurs more loss. Start-up costs and risks are both large, thus deployment is difficult to back.
When you spread it out - as is the optimal arrangement for solar power anyway - it virtually vanishes.
That's another way of saying, "You close your eyes and pretend it's not there."
When insulating houses with rigid foam paneling, builders frequently use thermally-broken fasteners. That is: there is not a continuous connection between an outside-facing metal surface and an inside-facing metal surface. This is because they use one nail every 6 inches, or 4,800 nails to fasten rigid insulation to wooden sheathing across a 30 foot x 40 foot wall. That provides a six square foot radiator plugged directly into your house by a distributed 0.7 square foot metal rod. It's not much, but it is a six inch metal bridge into your house; you have to blow enough warm air across that to keep that six inches of your wall room-temperature constantly, which means you lose quite a bit of heat (up to 10% with steel, much less with stainless steel) out that hole (for every 0.1kW, it's 72kWh or $10-$15/month of loss; it can near a third or more of a kW in extremely low outdoor temperatures).
Do you want to cut down 5 million acres of forest or 5 million acres of forest? For that matter, do you want to cut down 5 million acres of forest in one spot, or do this in little pockets and cut away another 3 million acres of forest so they don't cast shade on your solar panels?
It means their code is less-important and so is not scrutinized as hard.
For distributed version control systems like git, mercurial, bazaar, bitkeeper, and darcs, there's no central repository. You can have an authoritative source, which is just like every other source aside from a fancy name tag. A pull request is a request to pull (and merge) a branch from another repository.
Everyone else is arguing that it's a desert and there's nothing there but sand. This thread is potato.
Deserts have the most fragile and complex ecosystems on the planet. Solar installations in some deserts are extincting endangered species of turtles.
Mowing down swaths of rainforest has no downsides compared to putting solar panels in deserts.
Learn to add and subtract by Soroban.
However I feel that the hyperbole has started to go in the other direction concerning the job markets in STEM as of late.
That's irrelevant to my point. People see a societal provision for independent access to college as a freedom: it grants you choice. You can choose to go to college, to become a doctor, to become a programmer, to become an accountant. I tend to describe it as the Prisonner's Dilemma: having the choice *necessarily* means you will face a less-optimal outcome, and your *best* individual choice is the one that overall produces the *least-optimal* outcome for everyone affected.
It's like if the government gave everyone free food laced with opiates, and put a high tax on non-opiated food. Now you can get food, but you'll have the severe health issues of long-term opium addiction; you can get non-opiated food, if you're rich as living fuck. Nobody wants the government to take away their access to food.
Everyone's answer is to put it in deserts. Why don't we just cut down rain forests and put it there? The sun's better.
History is very important for political reasons.
I vaguely cite historical economics--right back to hunter-gatherers, feudalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the like--when discussing economics. I don't work from modern or classical economic theories; those theories are all wrong, in the same fashion that any established theory is always wrong. I've made better ones which more completely explain the same factors, and most of the existing behaviors in the established theory fall under my explanations.
It is useful for a lot of reasons.
every teacher taught history as a critical thinking course and did a lot of analysis and gave proper social context. A poor history class would just teach you a bunch of facts.
You can't understand socio-political-economic context without the facts behind that context. How can you understand the context of the Industrial Revolution without understanding that skilled workers were a sort of middle-class, and that the powered machines created around 80% unemployment even as far as 60 years out? You may think you understand all that, and then what? Side with the Luddites, and recognize the modern threat of automation? This leads you to miss something critical: we're *always* reducing jobs, just like the Industrial Revolution; and we create new jobs at the same time. Faster, and you raise unemployment; more slowly and you lower it.
Facts can be forgotten or become no longer valid, but concepts are eternal.
A hit-or-miss system in which you invest years of effort at high costs to instill something one can learn in a half hour is a waste of money. We should work on teaching methods of thinking.
True, but the Government can declared that land "nature reserve." It's different when you build a gigantic industrial factory over the entire span of land, milling down trees and compacting the soil until there's nothing left.
We already lock up millions of acres of land as protected in the United States; since we see this as an important management action, it makes sense to position nuclear generation facilities in areas where we're semi-confident we'd like to protect that land. That is: treat protected land as non-binary, recognize land that we only barely accept for development (because of its importance as undeveloped land), and then put a nuclear plant there. Then the land is both protected *and* developed: it's left in its natural state, but used as a nuclear buffer zone.
This assumes the risk of a nuclear accident has larger general consequences than the (partial) loss of the protected land surrounding the plant.
Still, a 7,000MW plant takes up 1,100 acres; a 160MW plant takes up 6,100 acres. Every 25 acres around that nuclear plant represents one of those 6,100 acre solar plants; 6100 acres of land consumed by nuclear would represent almost 243 of those solar generation facilities.
So it would require 1/243 of the land area; and we can partially discount most of that area by declaring it nature reserve, with the discount relative to the degree to which we would have considered the land an important nature reserve otherwise.
If you had a method of scribbling stuff down that took just as long and retained twice as much in your head, would you do that instead?
Comparison with arable land and with living space lets you identify how much land 6,000+ acres is. How about I just tell you I can build a more efficient plant on a span of 1,000 plutons?
Building in a desert has its own problems.
For reasons I've never understood, CSP salt towers are usually about 17% efficient; Photovoltaics range from 15% for your standard fare to 19% for top-end panels. By contrast, parabolic reflectors using a dish pointed at a small sterling engine mounted where a radio dish would place its satellite receiver have efficiencies as high as 31%. They're more maintenance (thus more expensive power) than a salt tower, and only generate during the day; salt towers might generate 1/4 or 1/5 as much power, but continue generating that output for twice as long, giving some night-time power and roughly half the total generation.