Psychology is an offensive science: people don't believe psychology is anything more than voodoo. This lets them stay quite comfortable in their control over their mind, instead of admitting it may have some uncontrollable science behind it.
10% of cancer studies are reproducible? Well that's just science. 50% of psychology studies are reproducible? Psychology is no more real than chance; every study is a coin toss, and nothing is real.
Climate science papers are probably way wonkier than psychology, but people cling to those because of politics. Don't think it's because they're enlightened or concerned or whatever; it's because they want a club to attack a social group outside their identity so the can stand up in their loin cloths and shout "OGG BIG STRONG MAN!"
You're not getting this. They already have a non-exclusive contract. They have a choice between multiple vendors. They can go CDW, or off the HP contract, or from Dell, for the same part. They have an account with each of these, so you just requisition and go.
They don't have an account with Amazon or Newegg, so there's 18 layers of bureaucracy to go through to buy a $40 hard drive.
Although that theoretically could be made part of a IT hardware support contract, you can bet that will affect the cost of a support contract
This does not apply because nothing in the existing contract--in the contract that was actually negotiated in the real, non-hypothetical world--says you can't go to Newegg for parts. It's just a pain in the ass because you have to file a bunch of forms with your boss and purchasing.
The SeaTitan 10MW wind turbine designed by American energy technologies company AMSC is currently the biggest wind turbine in the world. [...] AMSC is currently negotiating with potential partners to build and commercialise the SeaTitan 10MW wind turbines.
That one's not in production yet.
The ST10 offshore wind turbine designed and developed by the Norwegian technology company Sway, is the world's second biggest wind turbine. It has a power output of 10MW, is equipped with a rotor of 164m diameter, has a 2rpm nominal speed and blades 67m in length. [...] Sway Turbine is looking for potential partners to commercialise the ST10 turbine technology.
Looking to commercialize this one, too.
French energy company Areva's 8MW wind turbine, launched in November 2013, is the world's third biggest wind turbine by rated capacity. [...] The turbine's prototype is scheduled to be installed in 2015, while commercial production is expected to begin in 2018.
This is the third-highest-nameplate-capacity turbine in the world, behind the two 10MW ones that haven't even gone into production yet. This one is looking for a prototype test in 2015, and maybe commercial production in 2018.
Shit this big doesn't exist yet. No single 10MW turbine exists yet. You're claiming you've got single 25MW turbines installed, when they don't exist either. Do you also have Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny over there, and a functional warp drive and space fold generator?
No, in total. Those calculations were based on actual, measured output power of real installations, not nameplate ratings.
That is to say: the turbines are rated 63kW in that installation, and generate 19kW; those solar panels are rated 45,000 kW, and generate 9,000kW. 9,000 is more than 19.
Square arcres are irrelevant, as you simply farm around the wind mills as usually.
One: The installable capacity in an area is low. That is: if you want to power an adjacent 15 square mile city, you need a 9,000 square mile area instead of a 2 square mile area. (Numbers not to scale, but you get the idea.)
In other words: You need to find and control a hell of a lot of land to build the same wind generation capacity as solar; and the local weather patterns often aren't advantageous.
Two: The vast majority of wind generation installations are dedicated, non-agricultural farms. Your argument is akin to saying that marriage doesn't restrict your sex life because you can just have sex with college schoolgirls as usual: that's not actually common, even if your one buddy's wife lets him bring home strays.
A typical off shore wind mill in germany is 25MW nameplate
SheerWind claimed to have invented a new turbine vortex system in 2013 that looks like a giant funnel and sucks 25MW out of 2mph wind by converting it into 40mph wind; it's not in production.
In June of 2015--that is, two months ago--Japan unveiled a 220 meter (721 feet for us barbarians) wind tower, the highest-output in the world. Its nameplate output is 7MW.
B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
Actually, those decisions were made when they selected their contracts. They now have these endless procurement processes which they should probably shorten.
The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding. Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
places where free or heavily subsidized higher education has been the norm for decades look a lot less like serfdoms than places where it hasn't.
I'm sorry, but could you elaborate? I've been hearing things like, "People out of college can't find jobs," or, "Salaries are being pushed down." What about, "Employers are cutting benefits"?
In a world where 74% of STEM degree owners don't work in STEM fields, and where 50% of engineers aren't employed as engineers (mostly, services (retail, McDonalds), social services (garbage man), and so forth), people still believe being a viable piece of labor means getting a job. They don't understand that jobs demand labor; labor does not demand jobs. Laborers may open their mouth and demand, DEMAND someone give them a job, but nobody is going to create a job just to coddle you.
The visible, actual situation is exactly what everyone complains about: employers plan 2-3 years ahead for who to hire, and allocate budget. Once they've pushed everyone into so much unpaid (salaried!) overtime they can't sustain business operations anymore, they start the hiring process. 50 engineers apply, and they pick through them for the most submissive, least-troublesome, lowest-salaried applicant they can find. If you cause any grief, management fires you and gets another one.
We have lots of puppies; if this one shits on the floor, I'll tie a rock to it and throw it in a river, and then go to the pet shop to get another one that's better trained. They only cost $20.
There are a number of effects of simply eliminating all government college programs.
The first, up front, is that people cannot immediately send themselves to college. This diminishes the skilled labor pool, creating those weird late-90s issues where programmers make $250k and keep getting sniped away from businesses.
This leads to a situation where a business can't accomplish its strategic goals. THE BUSINESS... CANNOT... ACCOMPLISH ITS GOALS. That hurts businesses. They need 10 engineers and find 3; the engineers are expensive; and other businesses hire them away.
To remedy this, those 2-3 year projections become preparatory. Businesses must hire whoever is floating in the market--which isn't fucking much of anyone--and, usually, just hire an entrant to take up slack. It's the old apprenticeship model: you don't know god damn shit, so we have to pass you the kind of time-consuming task that takes forever, but that you'd have to work deliberately to fuck up by the numbers, and meanwhile send you to college on our dime. At least our engineers aren't spending 4 hours of the day carrying sheet metal back and forth; we pay them $120k, get a minimum wage worker to do that shit. The dude we're training to be an engineer may as well make himself useful.
By the time you've got your new engineer into the swing of things, you've invested a lot of time and effort into this employee. Three months gets a big return, six months gets you less than twice as much of a return, one year gets you less than double what investing six months gets, and eventually then the long tail begins to stretch out; by the time you've started getting serious return, which may only be 6-12 months, you've invested too much into this employee to simply dump him. It's doable, sure; but it's a poor value proposition because the employee is now valuable to the company.
What does all this mean, really?
First off, it means you don't go to college unless there's actually a job waiting for you. That eliminates the sheer waste of building an excess specialized labor force.
Second, it means you go to college on someone else's dime. For this, businesses take much less risk than an individual: they have a good idea of what their needs will be in 3-5 years, whereas an individual has to predict market growth and demand and supply (who else is going to college for IT? Where exactly are the jobs?).
Instead, we should teach students how to effectively process information even when it's not in their preferred style.
(Trimmed for grammar.)
This is part of why the modern flurry of political attention to education disturbs me greatly. I champion teaching people to use their brains: the brain is a tool, and any person can learn executive functions, mental mathematics, and mnemonics techniques. Learning these tools and techniques gives any individual strong grounds for academic and real-world performance: there are no super-brain geniuses, but only those of us who have learned techniques, or who have obsessions which drive us to know things others don't and to think in a way others do not think. That means our brains are wired just like Donald Trump's and Larry the Cable Guy's, and we figured out how to flip the right switches.
Instead, everyone is convinced teaching first graders programming will instantly build a master race of critical thinkers with strong problem solving skills and an armored plating of logic.
The other part of my dismay is free and otherwise government-supported independent access to college education is the greatest tool to institute broad serfdom I can think of. It's exactly what I would push for, as a ginormous corporation, to enable me to reduce salaries, strip benefits, abuse my employees, and eliminate any responsibility to build a workforce. We should drop all public efforts to get everyone into college, and focus on K-12.
There are decision systems you can use to make clean, traceable decisions. Analytical hierarchy is basically a pile of shit; pugh matrices evolve to weighted pugh matrices, which then evolve to attribute-baselined weighted pugh matrices--what Kepner-Tregoe claims as their "decision analysis" process.
Pugh matrices take a baseline alternative and rate each alternative as better, worse, or similar to it. Weighted pugh matrices specify, numerically, how important each attribute is. The KT Decision Analysis system selects, for each attribute, which alternative provides best for that feature, marking it a score of "10" to be multiplied against the weight of importance of the attribute, while marking all other alternatives proportionally less based on how incompletely they stand up to the one which best accomplishes that need.
The last decision analysis system makes for an argument about how important each attribute is, first, thus driving the bureaucratic process to determine requirements in detail. This includes "Go" and "No-Go" requirements, which an alternative must provide in full or else it is not an eligible choice. Once the requirements are set, it's a matter of discussing, technically, which best fulfill each need, and to what degree each competing alternative falls short of that model option.
There are other systems more useful for manipulating the process to favor your political leanings and backroom deals. One I've seen only a few times, pushed by its inventor, claimed to eliminate all complexities of decision making, is to ignore all negative attributes and list the advantages of each alternative. The alternative with the greatest number of bullet points is the best, because it has so many good things going for it. This decision system ignores your requirements and lets you gloss over the applicability of a selection by talking up all of its irrelevant good points, which for example may allow you to select a guitar over a piano when deciding what kind of keyboard instrument (piano, organ, synthesizer) to buy. I reject its usefulness entirely--unsurprisingly, the only person who really takes it seriously is the guy trying to make money from $4000 conferences teaching people how to make decisions.
Regardless, it is possible to structure a productive, efficient, bureaucratic process which naturally drives good decision making and creates a paper trail through which to analyze a decision and understand, in hindsight, why it was made in the first place, even identifying what information was considered, why it was considered, and how other critical information was missed.
I agree with you that no-bid contracts have their own issues, and we could not safely go to more no-bid contracts without something like these decision making processes; however, I do not believe minor purchases should fall under contract work, and so such things, where you are able and not contracted to not purchase replacements from another vendor, should not be restricted to the short list of suppliers you happen to have contracts with, all of which are in competition with each other anyway. At the very least, if you have two contracted suppliers who can both provide the same goods, there is no reason your contracts should restrict you from just grabbing shit from Newegg.
Taken to an extreme, avoiding vendor lock-in--commanding vendors to supply systems which interoperate with the applicable, *existing* standards as any off-the-shelf systems do--is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if the vendors are looking to razor-and-blade a contract with below-cost major components and high-margin maintenance parts; let them sell you an enormous SAN system at an actual profit, and then freely move between vendors for hard drives and RAM modules. It will save money.
Providing misleading cues disjoint from the actual event allows you to build multiple correlations. They showed no correlation between symptoms and EMR, but strong correlation between symptoms and perception of EMR.
Yes, and project management, properly-tracked procurements, and approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it, and then buy drives on Amazon to load up an empty SAN chassis and mount storage through an HBA. If the drives meet spec--not "oh these are cheap, they'll probably explode under load," but "We were going to get WD Caviar Black drives from HP, but Amazon sells them for $80 instead of $350; we're buying them from Amazon and self-insuring because we have 400 of them"--then go for it.
The turbines are typically spaced 7 diameters apart, which for one of those 7kW turbines is 2900 feet. In a 441 acre square plot, you can fit nine turbines. Solar in a 441 acre plot generates a fuckload more power.
A single windmill produces 25MW... 4 of them is 100MW...
Oh really?
GE Renewable Energy is the world's leading wind turbine supplier with wind turbines with rated capacities ranging from 1.6 MW-3.2 MW.
The V164 8MW turbine is the latest addition to the to top 10 list. The Vestas V164 came online in January 2014, nearly three years after the project was first unveiled in London. Curiously for an offshore turbine, the V164 is geared. Other notable features include a 80 metre-long blades and a lightweight nacelle that won the design innovation category in Windpower Monthly's annual wind turbine awards. The first machine has been installed for testing at the Danish national wind turbine test centre at Osterild.
The biggest on-shore turbine is a 7MW deal. That's 7MW of nameplate output, which of course you don't actually get--in the same way you get more out of solar, but not 100% of the nameplate 100% of the time.
How far apart are turbines?
According to JHU, the newest wind farms typically use turbines with rotor diameters of about 300 feet. Currently, turbines on large wind farms are spaced about seven rotor diameters apart.
So, on those dense, dedicated wind turbines, they're 2100 feet apart. An acre is 208 x 208 feet--43560 square feet. That means four rotors are spaced at the extreme corners of 100 acre square areas. The biggest land rotors are 7MW, so that's, oh... 28MW in 100 acres, or 0.28MW/acre of peak nameplate output. Of course, that 7MW Enercon has a rotor diameter of 127 meters (416 feet), so you'd space them 2916 feet apart--a 14 x 14 acre square, 196 acres, producing 28MW, or 0.14MW per acre. Of course, when you stretch it out, you don't bump them up next to each other; a grid of 3x3 would space across 21 x 21 acre square area, each acre with a unit edge of 208 feet, or a total of 441 acres generating 63MW, or 0.14MW/acre, when winds are high and constant.
My rooftop solar array, on a 900 square foot roof, has a rated output of 7kW and an actual output of 1.1kW. The same panels stretched out over 1 acre would have an actual output of 16kW, and a nameplate rated output of 103kW. Stretched across the 441 acres of that wind farm, they'd generate an actual output of 7.2MW (7,200kW).
Every single pillar for a wind mill uses up a 5x5 meter area.
If I took that same stretch of 441 acres and put nine 5x5 meter arrays in the same place as the wind turbines, I would have an actual generation of 0.92MW, and a theoretical of 5.8MW. This is why I said wind farms are not inefficient, but ineffective: they're spaced far and wide even on dedicated wind farms--you know, the majority of wind farms, which are not farms--and the average farm in the US is, oddly enough, 441 acres, enough for nine wind turbines.
The United States has the potential to install a total 10,500 gigawatts of wind generation capacity. It has the potential to install 200,000 gigawatts of solar generation capacity. Solar is just a more efficient use of land, getting everything closer together. Solar is to wind what nuclear is to coal: a small installation with the output of 20 large installations.
I use so little energy that it doesn't make sense for me though
I'm actually ramping up my electricity usage by getting a split system heat pump instead of gas, to eliminate all gas space heating. I don't want to produce more electricity than I use, because I pay taxes and transmission fees on every kWh of electricity I consume: if I send energy back, it's worth about 7 cents per kWh less than if I would otherwise reasonably consume it. That means going from an $120 gas bill to consuming $60 worth of electricity, doubling my electricity usage, allows me to derive a better profit from a PV array by evading the taxes inherent in that $60 worth of electricity rather than selling it back to the grid unused for $40.
Electric dryer, electric heat pump, electric heat pump water heater, gas stove. Imagine having a plug-in electric vehicle (an extra 180kWh per month--300 mile range on the 60kWh battery, and I fill my 300 mile gasoline tank 3 times).
The only actual farmland I've seen with wind turbines eschew dense packing for broad spread, making wind power not only opportunistic, but low-density. Not inefficient, but ineffective: generating a megawatt here or there is different than generating hundreds of megawatts.
In other words: faced with dedicating a square of land to a wind farm or dedicating a square of land to solar, a dedicated solar array will produce 8 times as much output. Faced with not dedicating a square of land, you can usually get better output from a PV cell--farmland being an exception, since the PV produces more shade; wind turbines of practical size placed on street lighting would not generate nearly as much power as PV panels of the same space usage on the same street lighting.
I could theoretically generate 800W of wind power at my house, or 7,000W of solar using just my roof space. That's an 800W output residential turbine that might run at 34% of its output (in my case, it'd actually be 8%; Texas gets 34% in well-placed installations), producing an actual 2380kWh (in my case specifically, about 561kWh); the 7kW PV array (theoretical 24 hour max output: 61000kWh) will generate, in practice, 9850kWh on average. Were my lot vacant, it may fit two wind turbines (4700kWh); it would take four at the high-capacity output of a Texas wind farm to meet what my solar panels do in just my roof space--which is 900 square feet on a 4500 square foot lot (capable of generating 49,250kWh of output if it were blanketed in solar panels, instead of 4,700kWh blanketed in wind turbines; and my panels aren't two-axis tracking, but fixed axis monocrystaline at 15.7% efficiency, at a sub-optimal azimuth).
Farms with turbines are like slapping a wind turbine in my back yard and producing that projected 2,400kWh per year. They spread their turbines more widely than my back yard, but also use bigger turbines. Even a dense, dedicated wind farm is blown out of the water by a dense, dedicated solar farm.
My state taxes energy producers (factories, foundries, and power plants) $300 per MWh generated. A MWh of solar/wind gets a credit which can bypass this tax. The credits are transferable, so there's an exchange on which to sell them; utility companies have been paying $198 per credit as of late, up from $168. I usually project them as $150.
13,000 acres of solar power become something like 2 acres of nuclear power. Nuclear is 1GW like 90% of the time (Texas's main plant has a hard time maintaining that, and goes as low as 89.1% some years). Solar is supposed to be 28%-30%.
That 8 acres per MW is 1MW average, which means 13,000 acres of solar produce the same output as 2 acres of nuclear, but only run 30% of capacity while nuclear runs about 90% of capacity. The installed capacity of that 1MW is like 3-4MW.
Capacity is weird. It's not just the amount of time, but the amount of output. A solar panel running 50% of the time at 30% of nameplate output would run at 15% capacity availability.
Off-shore wind farms, as I've said, cost twice as much per unit power generated as solar. Solar's land usage is much smaller (2%-13%, depending on who you ask).
I'm getting a 7kW kit with microinverters (fuck string inverters). According to PVWatts, which my state uses to decide how many energy credits to give you for generation (rather than reading your actual generation statistics) for arrays under 10kW, I'll generate 9,842kWh/year on average, saving $1772 in electricity costs (including transmission fees, per-kWh taxes, etc.), plus about 10 SRECs selling for between $150 and $200 each (they're selling for $200 now!)--another $1500.
With the 30% ITC and the $1,000 MD grant, the ROI is 2.5 years. $8,000 base cost just about, $3,000 yearly return.
You can't pack wind turbines closely together to create a dense, purposed wind farm. To produce a wind farm, you must secure mineral rights (the mineral being wind) to an enormous land area--say, 300,000 acres instead of about 13,000. That means you must either lease the right to use the footprint of the windmill, or dual-purpose your farm. Farm equipment can't just roll clear through a wind turbine, so will need to navigate around the turbine; this means more labor, and possibly difficult problems if the turbines are close enough together; not to mention the problem of reaching the turbine with heavy equipment for maintenance, driving through the soy and corn.
The land area demanded by a solar farm is much smaller. Management is much less labor-intensive, and doesn't spill over into agricultural management while you try to dual-use the land. Solar farms can reside on land which isn't suitable for agriculture. Solar farms involve many fewer pieces of industrial equipment. Off-shore wind farms cost twice as much as PV or on-shore wind, which means the small land footprint of solar reduces both the need for off-shore facilities and the size (and expense) of any theoretical off-shore facility.
Texas wind power output ranges from 60 to 120 acres per MW. That means the wind is blowing 4-8 times as much in Scottland. Texas has 12,000 megawatts of installed wind power generation capacity, but generated 36,000 megawatt hours of wind power in 2013--that means wind power provided 4.1 megawatts, or 34.1% availability. That means you've installed a plant that you think could work 24 hours per day, if only the wind were blowing in the right direction; it will not be blowing, or be blowing in the wrong direction (modern wind turbines don't have this problem to as much of a degree, if any), 2/3 of the time, and you don't know when until the power goes out.
With solar, you know the sun is out during the day. You know when sunrise is. You know when sunset is. You can predict storm fronts and know ahead of time when clouds are coming, so you can crank up your baseline power. Its availability is quite nearly the availability of the sun--which is so reliable in its punctuality that you could literally set your watch by it, UNLIKE THE WIND WHICH SHOWS UP WHENEVER IT FUCKING FEELS LIKE IT.
The problem is output per area. Large solar installations use 8 acres per MW, with the sun only out for part of the day, and varying insolation per year; while large wind installations use, at the extreme, 14 acres per MW. Wind average is 85 acres per MW; the most efficient are 14, 23, 25, 29, 30, 37, and so forth. There are a handful under 50 acres per MW, and many over 100, some as high as 300 acres per MW.
As for the fluffy argument, solar is predictable for the whole year; wind is not.
I'll try a moderately-long-winded explanation to avoid something frivolous and short.
Back in 1950, the cost of our Welfare system--Social Security OASDI, food stamps, unemployment, housing assistance, the lot--was 1.5% of total IRS-reported adjusted gross income (AGI), including all business and individual income. That's the tax base. The system I describe would have cost 120%-135% to achieve what I want--that means it costs more than all the income in the United States.
In 2013, the Welfare system reached a cost of 17.2%. For my system, the cost ascribed was 17%. I derived my cost projections from market numbers--the actual prices of things, which includes the profit margin--plus a risk margin on each (adding 30% for apartment rent, 200% for food, and so forth), as well as an 8% margin on top the whole lot. That's a one-time computation: I don't make provisions for repeat analysis and scaling; an observation of the origins and development of the wealth of nations indicates the amount required will steadily decrease, and so the system becomes more stable (and the living conditions improve) if you leave the amount taken as fixed.
Putting aside transitional plans intended to prevent economic degradation by, for example, simply ripping Social Security pensions out of the hands of seniors, the funding is simple. Welfare services make up 36% of Government spending, 42% of taxes, and 52% of all income taxes. I simply suggest cutting away 52% of all income taxes; applying a 17% flat tax on top (similar to OASDI, but only upon income, with no cap); and then adjusting the tax system to balance it back out as it was.
This has a few implications.
Firstly, our tax brackets currently don't account for OASDI. Above $10,000 income, you pay 10%, plus 6.2% OASDI, plus 1.45% HI (for medicare/medicaid). Excluding HI (because I don't do anything to it), I'm looking at a scope of 16.2% taxes for that first bracket. When you get up to the social security cap, you go from a tax bracket of 34.2% to 28%; until $411,500 of income, your tax bracket doesn't cross 34.2% again (it moves from 33% to 35% at that income level). When I reshuffle the income taxes, I don't account for this: the bottom bracket is 17%--it becomes 0%, plus the 17% Dividend funding tax--while the brackets all the way up total (including the Dividend tax) to the IRS income tax brackets, avoiding that 34.2% to 28% transition at $118k. The top bracket moves to 43% from 39.6%.
Second, the OASDI tax is an income and a payroll tax: you pay 6.2% on your paycheck, and your employer pays an additional 6.2% of your paycheck in payroll taxes. I move this to income taxes, reducing the cost per employee: businesses aren't charged on employee wages, but on profit. They will, of course, attempt to shelter as much of their profit as possible; however, they already do that, and I cut back the income taxes before applying the 17% Dividend tax on top, so the situation doesn't functionally change from the situation in which I computed my projections.
Third, costs of State welfare drop to counterbalance the Federal welfare costs. This almost completely compensates for the amount of taxes reduced from the middle class (income below $118k) and applied instead to the top bracket. While you can argue for the value of an actually progressive tax system instead of one with higher taxes on the middle-class than on the rich, I don't have the "tax the living fuck out of rich people" mentality and prefer to minimize the impact. It's basically 1 to 1 here, though: what's offset is the additional cost in Federal taxes, plus maybe 0.2%; that burden on the middle class is shifted straight upwards, and those people at the top *are* paying more.
The break-even point is actually $625,000 of income; below that, you actually have more money than you would under our existing tax system. Poor people making, say, our $8.25 minimum wage (40 hours for 52 weeks) are pulling $17,160 with a $6,000 standard deduction, and so pay $1,900 wh
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Double-blind experiments are an integral part of science. Why do experiments need to be double-blind?
Psychology is an offensive science: people don't believe psychology is anything more than voodoo. This lets them stay quite comfortable in their control over their mind, instead of admitting it may have some uncontrollable science behind it.
10% of cancer studies are reproducible? Well that's just science. 50% of psychology studies are reproducible? Psychology is no more real than chance; every study is a coin toss, and nothing is real.
Climate science papers are probably way wonkier than psychology, but people cling to those because of politics. Don't think it's because they're enlightened or concerned or whatever; it's because they want a club to attack a social group outside their identity so the can stand up in their loin cloths and shout "OGG BIG STRONG MAN!"
You're not getting this. They already have a non-exclusive contract. They have a choice between multiple vendors. They can go CDW, or off the HP contract, or from Dell, for the same part. They have an account with each of these, so you just requisition and go.
They don't have an account with Amazon or Newegg, so there's 18 layers of bureaucracy to go through to buy a $40 hard drive.
Although that theoretically could be made part of a IT hardware support contract, you can bet that will affect the cost of a support contract
This does not apply because nothing in the existing contract--in the contract that was actually negotiated in the real, non-hypothetical world--says you can't go to Newegg for parts. It's just a pain in the ass because you have to file a bunch of forms with your boss and purchasing.
Japan officially unveiled today its 7 megawatt (MW) wind turbine, the world’s largest offshore turbine to date. It is slated to be operational by September [of 2015].
Let's also look at contenders.
The SeaTitan 10MW wind turbine designed by American energy technologies company AMSC is currently the biggest wind turbine in the world. [...] AMSC is currently negotiating with potential partners to build and commercialise the SeaTitan 10MW wind turbines.
That one's not in production yet.
The ST10 offshore wind turbine designed and developed by the Norwegian technology company Sway, is the world's second biggest wind turbine. It has a power output of 10MW, is equipped with a rotor of 164m diameter, has a 2rpm nominal speed and blades 67m in length. [...] Sway Turbine is looking for potential partners to commercialise the ST10 turbine technology.
Looking to commercialize this one, too.
French energy company Areva's 8MW wind turbine, launched in November 2013, is the world's third biggest wind turbine by rated capacity. [...] The turbine's prototype is scheduled to be installed in 2015, while commercial production is expected to begin in 2018.
This is the third-highest-nameplate-capacity turbine in the world, behind the two 10MW ones that haven't even gone into production yet. This one is looking for a prototype test in 2015, and maybe commercial production in 2018.
Shit this big doesn't exist yet. No single 10MW turbine exists yet. You're claiming you've got single 25MW turbines installed, when they don't exist either. Do you also have Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny over there, and a functional warp drive and space fold generator?
No, in total. Those calculations were based on actual, measured output power of real installations, not nameplate ratings.
That is to say: the turbines are rated 63kW in that installation, and generate 19kW; those solar panels are rated 45,000 kW, and generate 9,000kW. 9,000 is more than 19.
Square arcres are irrelevant, as you simply farm around the wind mills as usually.
One: The installable capacity in an area is low. That is: if you want to power an adjacent 15 square mile city, you need a 9,000 square mile area instead of a 2 square mile area. (Numbers not to scale, but you get the idea.)
In other words: You need to find and control a hell of a lot of land to build the same wind generation capacity as solar; and the local weather patterns often aren't advantageous.
Two: The vast majority of wind generation installations are dedicated, non-agricultural farms. Your argument is akin to saying that marriage doesn't restrict your sex life because you can just have sex with college schoolgirls as usual: that's not actually common, even if your one buddy's wife lets him bring home strays.
A typical off shore wind mill in germany is 25MW nameplate
SheerWind claimed to have invented a new turbine vortex system in 2013 that looks like a giant funnel and sucks 25MW out of 2mph wind by converting it into 40mph wind; it's not in production.
In June of 2015--that is, two months ago--Japan unveiled a 220 meter (721 feet for us barbarians) wind tower, the highest-output in the world. Its nameplate output is 7MW.
NO 25MW NAMEPLATE WINDMILL EXISTS.
You're either lying, stupid, or both.
B) Carry out a Bulshet-Hokey determination analysis process, with the help of a consultant.
Actually, those decisions were made when they selected their contracts. They now have these endless procurement processes which they should probably shorten.
The concept of no-bid contracts versus endless bidding wars is separate from this bureaucratic procurement process. You've conflated the spot purchase of a hard drive, which doesn't need any sort of contract bid, with a comment made about contract bidding. Your argument is thus ridiculous and unfounded.
places where free or heavily subsidized higher education has been the norm for decades look a lot less like serfdoms than places where it hasn't.
I'm sorry, but could you elaborate? I've been hearing things like, "People out of college can't find jobs," or, "Salaries are being pushed down." What about, "Employers are cutting benefits"?
In a world where 74% of STEM degree owners don't work in STEM fields, and where 50% of engineers aren't employed as engineers (mostly, services (retail, McDonalds), social services (garbage man), and so forth), people still believe being a viable piece of labor means getting a job. They don't understand that jobs demand labor; labor does not demand jobs. Laborers may open their mouth and demand, DEMAND someone give them a job, but nobody is going to create a job just to coddle you.
The visible, actual situation is exactly what everyone complains about: employers plan 2-3 years ahead for who to hire, and allocate budget. Once they've pushed everyone into so much unpaid (salaried!) overtime they can't sustain business operations anymore, they start the hiring process. 50 engineers apply, and they pick through them for the most submissive, least-troublesome, lowest-salaried applicant they can find. If you cause any grief, management fires you and gets another one.
We have lots of puppies; if this one shits on the floor, I'll tie a rock to it and throw it in a river, and then go to the pet shop to get another one that's better trained. They only cost $20.
There are a number of effects of simply eliminating all government college programs.
The first, up front, is that people cannot immediately send themselves to college. This diminishes the skilled labor pool, creating those weird late-90s issues where programmers make $250k and keep getting sniped away from businesses.
This leads to a situation where a business can't accomplish its strategic goals. THE BUSINESS... CANNOT... ACCOMPLISH ITS GOALS. That hurts businesses. They need 10 engineers and find 3; the engineers are expensive; and other businesses hire them away.
To remedy this, those 2-3 year projections become preparatory. Businesses must hire whoever is floating in the market--which isn't fucking much of anyone--and, usually, just hire an entrant to take up slack. It's the old apprenticeship model: you don't know god damn shit, so we have to pass you the kind of time-consuming task that takes forever, but that you'd have to work deliberately to fuck up by the numbers, and meanwhile send you to college on our dime. At least our engineers aren't spending 4 hours of the day carrying sheet metal back and forth; we pay them $120k, get a minimum wage worker to do that shit. The dude we're training to be an engineer may as well make himself useful.
By the time you've got your new engineer into the swing of things, you've invested a lot of time and effort into this employee. Three months gets a big return, six months gets you less than twice as much of a return, one year gets you less than double what investing six months gets, and eventually then the long tail begins to stretch out; by the time you've started getting serious return, which may only be 6-12 months, you've invested too much into this employee to simply dump him. It's doable, sure; but it's a poor value proposition because the employee is now valuable to the company.
What does all this mean, really?
First off, it means you don't go to college unless there's actually a job waiting for you. That eliminates the sheer waste of building an excess specialized labor force.
Second, it means you go to college on someone else's dime. For this, businesses take much less risk than an individual: they have a good idea of what their needs will be in 3-5 years, whereas an individual has to predict market growth and demand and supply (who else is going to college for IT? Where exactly are the jobs?).
Third, your training is actually in line with cur
Instead, we should teach students how to effectively process information even when it's not in their preferred style.
(Trimmed for grammar.)
This is part of why the modern flurry of political attention to education disturbs me greatly. I champion teaching people to use their brains: the brain is a tool, and any person can learn executive functions, mental mathematics, and mnemonics techniques. Learning these tools and techniques gives any individual strong grounds for academic and real-world performance: there are no super-brain geniuses, but only those of us who have learned techniques, or who have obsessions which drive us to know things others don't and to think in a way others do not think. That means our brains are wired just like Donald Trump's and Larry the Cable Guy's, and we figured out how to flip the right switches.
Instead, everyone is convinced teaching first graders programming will instantly build a master race of critical thinkers with strong problem solving skills and an armored plating of logic.
The other part of my dismay is free and otherwise government-supported independent access to college education is the greatest tool to institute broad serfdom I can think of. It's exactly what I would push for, as a ginormous corporation, to enable me to reduce salaries, strip benefits, abuse my employees, and eliminate any responsibility to build a workforce. We should drop all public efforts to get everyone into college, and focus on K-12.
There are decision systems you can use to make clean, traceable decisions. Analytical hierarchy is basically a pile of shit; pugh matrices evolve to weighted pugh matrices, which then evolve to attribute-baselined weighted pugh matrices--what Kepner-Tregoe claims as their "decision analysis" process.
Pugh matrices take a baseline alternative and rate each alternative as better, worse, or similar to it. Weighted pugh matrices specify, numerically, how important each attribute is. The KT Decision Analysis system selects, for each attribute, which alternative provides best for that feature, marking it a score of "10" to be multiplied against the weight of importance of the attribute, while marking all other alternatives proportionally less based on how incompletely they stand up to the one which best accomplishes that need.
The last decision analysis system makes for an argument about how important each attribute is, first, thus driving the bureaucratic process to determine requirements in detail. This includes "Go" and "No-Go" requirements, which an alternative must provide in full or else it is not an eligible choice. Once the requirements are set, it's a matter of discussing, technically, which best fulfill each need, and to what degree each competing alternative falls short of that model option.
There are other systems more useful for manipulating the process to favor your political leanings and backroom deals. One I've seen only a few times, pushed by its inventor, claimed to eliminate all complexities of decision making, is to ignore all negative attributes and list the advantages of each alternative. The alternative with the greatest number of bullet points is the best, because it has so many good things going for it. This decision system ignores your requirements and lets you gloss over the applicability of a selection by talking up all of its irrelevant good points, which for example may allow you to select a guitar over a piano when deciding what kind of keyboard instrument (piano, organ, synthesizer) to buy. I reject its usefulness entirely--unsurprisingly, the only person who really takes it seriously is the guy trying to make money from $4000 conferences teaching people how to make decisions.
Regardless, it is possible to structure a productive, efficient, bureaucratic process which naturally drives good decision making and creates a paper trail through which to analyze a decision and understand, in hindsight, why it was made in the first place, even identifying what information was considered, why it was considered, and how other critical information was missed.
I agree with you that no-bid contracts have their own issues, and we could not safely go to more no-bid contracts without something like these decision making processes; however, I do not believe minor purchases should fall under contract work, and so such things, where you are able and not contracted to not purchase replacements from another vendor, should not be restricted to the short list of suppliers you happen to have contracts with, all of which are in competition with each other anyway. At the very least, if you have two contracted suppliers who can both provide the same goods, there is no reason your contracts should restrict you from just grabbing shit from Newegg.
Taken to an extreme, avoiding vendor lock-in--commanding vendors to supply systems which interoperate with the applicable, *existing* standards as any off-the-shelf systems do--is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if the vendors are looking to razor-and-blade a contract with below-cost major components and high-margin maintenance parts; let them sell you an enormous SAN system at an actual profit, and then freely move between vendors for hard drives and RAM modules. It will save money.
Providing misleading cues disjoint from the actual event allows you to build multiple correlations. They showed no correlation between symptoms and EMR, but strong correlation between symptoms and perception of EMR.
Yes, and project management, properly-tracked procurements, and approval processes make sense; bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't. I'd just as soon have them start troubleshooting, identify the problem, carry out a Kepner-Tregoe decision analysis to figure on how to address it, and then buy drives on Amazon to load up an empty SAN chassis and mount storage through an HBA. If the drives meet spec--not "oh these are cheap, they'll probably explode under load," but "We were going to get WD Caviar Black drives from HP, but Amazon sells them for $80 instead of $350; we're buying them from Amazon and self-insuring because we have 400 of them"--then go for it.
The turbines are typically spaced 7 diameters apart, which for one of those 7kW turbines is 2900 feet. In a 441 acre square plot, you can fit nine turbines. Solar in a 441 acre plot generates a fuckload more power.
A single windmill produces 25MW ... 4 of them is 100MW ...
Oh really?
GE Renewable Energy is the world's leading wind turbine supplier with wind turbines with rated capacities ranging from 1.6 MW-3.2 MW.
The V164 8MW turbine is the latest addition to the to top 10 list. The Vestas V164 came online in January 2014, nearly three years after the project was first unveiled in London. Curiously for an offshore turbine, the V164 is geared. Other notable features include a 80 metre-long blades and a lightweight nacelle that won the design innovation category in Windpower Monthly's annual wind turbine awards. The first machine has been installed for testing at the Danish national wind turbine test centre at Osterild.
The biggest on-shore turbine is a 7MW deal. That's 7MW of nameplate output, which of course you don't actually get--in the same way you get more out of solar, but not 100% of the nameplate 100% of the time.
How far apart are turbines?
According to JHU, the newest wind farms typically use turbines with rotor diameters of about 300 feet. Currently, turbines on large wind farms are spaced about seven rotor diameters apart.
So, on those dense, dedicated wind turbines, they're 2100 feet apart. An acre is 208 x 208 feet--43560 square feet. That means four rotors are spaced at the extreme corners of 100 acre square areas. The biggest land rotors are 7MW, so that's, oh... 28MW in 100 acres, or 0.28MW/acre of peak nameplate output. Of course, that 7MW Enercon has a rotor diameter of 127 meters (416 feet), so you'd space them 2916 feet apart--a 14 x 14 acre square, 196 acres, producing 28MW, or 0.14MW per acre. Of course, when you stretch it out, you don't bump them up next to each other; a grid of 3x3 would space across 21 x 21 acre square area, each acre with a unit edge of 208 feet, or a total of 441 acres generating 63MW, or 0.14MW/acre, when winds are high and constant.
My rooftop solar array, on a 900 square foot roof, has a rated output of 7kW and an actual output of 1.1kW. The same panels stretched out over 1 acre would have an actual output of 16kW, and a nameplate rated output of 103kW. Stretched across the 441 acres of that wind farm, they'd generate an actual output of 7.2MW (7,200kW).
Every single pillar for a wind mill uses up a 5x5 meter area.
If I took that same stretch of 441 acres and put nine 5x5 meter arrays in the same place as the wind turbines, I would have an actual generation of 0.92MW, and a theoretical of 5.8MW. This is why I said wind farms are not inefficient, but ineffective: they're spaced far and wide even on dedicated wind farms--you know, the majority of wind farms, which are not farms--and the average farm in the US is, oddly enough, 441 acres, enough for nine wind turbines.
The United States has the potential to install a total 10,500 gigawatts of wind generation capacity. It has the potential to install 200,000 gigawatts of solar generation capacity. Solar is just a more efficient use of land, getting everything closer together. Solar is to wind what nuclear is to coal: a small installation with the output of 20 large installations.
I use so little energy that it doesn't make sense for me though
I'm actually ramping up my electricity usage by getting a split system heat pump instead of gas, to eliminate all gas space heating. I don't want to produce more electricity than I use, because I pay taxes and transmission fees on every kWh of electricity I consume: if I send energy back, it's worth about 7 cents per kWh less than if I would otherwise reasonably consume it. That means going from an $120 gas bill to consuming $60 worth of electricity, doubling my electricity usage, allows me to derive a better profit from a PV array by evading the taxes inherent in that $60 worth of electricity rather than selling it back to the grid unused for $40.
Electric dryer, electric heat pump, electric heat pump water heater, gas stove. Imagine having a plug-in electric vehicle (an extra 180kWh per month--300 mile range on the 60kWh battery, and I fill my 300 mile gasoline tank 3 times).
This really looks like a farm.
The only actual farmland I've seen with wind turbines eschew dense packing for broad spread, making wind power not only opportunistic, but low-density. Not inefficient, but ineffective: generating a megawatt here or there is different than generating hundreds of megawatts.
In other words: faced with dedicating a square of land to a wind farm or dedicating a square of land to solar, a dedicated solar array will produce 8 times as much output. Faced with not dedicating a square of land, you can usually get better output from a PV cell--farmland being an exception, since the PV produces more shade; wind turbines of practical size placed on street lighting would not generate nearly as much power as PV panels of the same space usage on the same street lighting.
I could theoretically generate 800W of wind power at my house, or 7,000W of solar using just my roof space. That's an 800W output residential turbine that might run at 34% of its output (in my case, it'd actually be 8%; Texas gets 34% in well-placed installations), producing an actual 2380kWh (in my case specifically, about 561kWh); the 7kW PV array (theoretical 24 hour max output: 61000kWh) will generate, in practice, 9850kWh on average. Were my lot vacant, it may fit two wind turbines (4700kWh); it would take four at the high-capacity output of a Texas wind farm to meet what my solar panels do in just my roof space--which is 900 square feet on a 4500 square foot lot (capable of generating 49,250kWh of output if it were blanketed in solar panels, instead of 4,700kWh blanketed in wind turbines; and my panels aren't two-axis tracking, but fixed axis monocrystaline at 15.7% efficiency, at a sub-optimal azimuth).
Farms with turbines are like slapping a wind turbine in my back yard and producing that projected 2,400kWh per year. They spread their turbines more widely than my back yard, but also use bigger turbines. Even a dense, dedicated wind farm is blown out of the water by a dense, dedicated solar farm.
Or the tech changed.
My state taxes energy producers (factories, foundries, and power plants) $300 per MWh generated. A MWh of solar/wind gets a credit which can bypass this tax. The credits are transferable, so there's an exchange on which to sell them; utility companies have been paying $198 per credit as of late, up from $168. I usually project them as $150.
If its such a problem, why is wind the fastest growing energy source in history?
Politics, inherently marketing. Makes for good arguments for grants and loans.
13,000 acres of solar power become something like 2 acres of nuclear power. Nuclear is 1GW like 90% of the time (Texas's main plant has a hard time maintaining that, and goes as low as 89.1% some years). Solar is supposed to be 28%-30%.
That 8 acres per MW is 1MW average, which means 13,000 acres of solar produce the same output as 2 acres of nuclear, but only run 30% of capacity while nuclear runs about 90% of capacity. The installed capacity of that 1MW is like 3-4MW.
Capacity is weird. It's not just the amount of time, but the amount of output. A solar panel running 50% of the time at 30% of nameplate output would run at 15% capacity availability.
Off-shore wind farms, as I've said, cost twice as much per unit power generated as solar. Solar's land usage is much smaller (2%-13%, depending on who you ask).
I'm getting a 7kW kit with microinverters (fuck string inverters). According to PVWatts, which my state uses to decide how many energy credits to give you for generation (rather than reading your actual generation statistics) for arrays under 10kW, I'll generate 9,842kWh/year on average, saving $1772 in electricity costs (including transmission fees, per-kWh taxes, etc.), plus about 10 SRECs selling for between $150 and $200 each (they're selling for $200 now!)--another $1500.
With the 30% ITC and the $1,000 MD grant, the ROI is 2.5 years. $8,000 base cost just about, $3,000 yearly return.
You can't pack wind turbines closely together to create a dense, purposed wind farm. To produce a wind farm, you must secure mineral rights (the mineral being wind) to an enormous land area--say, 300,000 acres instead of about 13,000. That means you must either lease the right to use the footprint of the windmill, or dual-purpose your farm. Farm equipment can't just roll clear through a wind turbine, so will need to navigate around the turbine; this means more labor, and possibly difficult problems if the turbines are close enough together; not to mention the problem of reaching the turbine with heavy equipment for maintenance, driving through the soy and corn.
The land area demanded by a solar farm is much smaller. Management is much less labor-intensive, and doesn't spill over into agricultural management while you try to dual-use the land. Solar farms can reside on land which isn't suitable for agriculture. Solar farms involve many fewer pieces of industrial equipment. Off-shore wind farms cost twice as much as PV or on-shore wind, which means the small land footprint of solar reduces both the need for off-shore facilities and the size (and expense) of any theoretical off-shore facility.
Texas wind power output ranges from 60 to 120 acres per MW. That means the wind is blowing 4-8 times as much in Scottland. Texas has 12,000 megawatts of installed wind power generation capacity, but generated 36,000 megawatt hours of wind power in 2013--that means wind power provided 4.1 megawatts, or 34.1% availability. That means you've installed a plant that you think could work 24 hours per day, if only the wind were blowing in the right direction; it will not be blowing, or be blowing in the wrong direction (modern wind turbines don't have this problem to as much of a degree, if any), 2/3 of the time, and you don't know when until the power goes out.
With solar, you know the sun is out during the day. You know when sunrise is. You know when sunset is. You can predict storm fronts and know ahead of time when clouds are coming, so you can crank up your baseline power. Its availability is quite nearly the availability of the sun--which is so reliable in its punctuality that you could literally set your watch by it, UNLIKE THE WIND WHICH SHOWS UP WHENEVER IT FUCKING FEELS LIKE IT.
They're some of the least-efficient plants. A few at 37 acres/MW, some at 100+ acres/MW.
There's actually a comparison of land usage for a nuclear power plant as a wind farm or solar farm.
The problem is output per area. Large solar installations use 8 acres per MW, with the sun only out for part of the day, and varying insolation per year; while large wind installations use, at the extreme, 14 acres per MW. Wind average is 85 acres per MW; the most efficient are 14, 23, 25, 29, 30, 37, and so forth. There are a handful under 50 acres per MW, and many over 100, some as high as 300 acres per MW.
As for the fluffy argument, solar is predictable for the whole year; wind is not.
I'll try a moderately-long-winded explanation to avoid something frivolous and short.
Back in 1950, the cost of our Welfare system--Social Security OASDI, food stamps, unemployment, housing assistance, the lot--was 1.5% of total IRS-reported adjusted gross income (AGI), including all business and individual income. That's the tax base. The system I describe would have cost 120%-135% to achieve what I want--that means it costs more than all the income in the United States.
In 2013, the Welfare system reached a cost of 17.2%. For my system, the cost ascribed was 17%. I derived my cost projections from market numbers--the actual prices of things, which includes the profit margin--plus a risk margin on each (adding 30% for apartment rent, 200% for food, and so forth), as well as an 8% margin on top the whole lot. That's a one-time computation: I don't make provisions for repeat analysis and scaling; an observation of the origins and development of the wealth of nations indicates the amount required will steadily decrease, and so the system becomes more stable (and the living conditions improve) if you leave the amount taken as fixed.
Putting aside transitional plans intended to prevent economic degradation by, for example, simply ripping Social Security pensions out of the hands of seniors, the funding is simple. Welfare services make up 36% of Government spending, 42% of taxes, and 52% of all income taxes. I simply suggest cutting away 52% of all income taxes; applying a 17% flat tax on top (similar to OASDI, but only upon income, with no cap); and then adjusting the tax system to balance it back out as it was.
This has a few implications.
Firstly, our tax brackets currently don't account for OASDI. Above $10,000 income, you pay 10%, plus 6.2% OASDI, plus 1.45% HI (for medicare/medicaid). Excluding HI (because I don't do anything to it), I'm looking at a scope of 16.2% taxes for that first bracket. When you get up to the social security cap, you go from a tax bracket of 34.2% to 28%; until $411,500 of income, your tax bracket doesn't cross 34.2% again (it moves from 33% to 35% at that income level). When I reshuffle the income taxes, I don't account for this: the bottom bracket is 17%--it becomes 0%, plus the 17% Dividend funding tax--while the brackets all the way up total (including the Dividend tax) to the IRS income tax brackets, avoiding that 34.2% to 28% transition at $118k. The top bracket moves to 43% from 39.6%.
Second, the OASDI tax is an income and a payroll tax: you pay 6.2% on your paycheck, and your employer pays an additional 6.2% of your paycheck in payroll taxes. I move this to income taxes, reducing the cost per employee: businesses aren't charged on employee wages, but on profit. They will, of course, attempt to shelter as much of their profit as possible; however, they already do that, and I cut back the income taxes before applying the 17% Dividend tax on top, so the situation doesn't functionally change from the situation in which I computed my projections.
Third, costs of State welfare drop to counterbalance the Federal welfare costs. This almost completely compensates for the amount of taxes reduced from the middle class (income below $118k) and applied instead to the top bracket. While you can argue for the value of an actually progressive tax system instead of one with higher taxes on the middle-class than on the rich, I don't have the "tax the living fuck out of rich people" mentality and prefer to minimize the impact. It's basically 1 to 1 here, though: what's offset is the additional cost in Federal taxes, plus maybe 0.2%; that burden on the middle class is shifted straight upwards, and those people at the top *are* paying more.
The break-even point is actually $625,000 of income; below that, you actually have more money than you would under our existing tax system. Poor people making, say, our $8.25 minimum wage (40 hours for 52 weeks) are pulling $17,160 with a $6,000 standard deduction, and so pay $1,900 wh