Really not liking the Satya Nadella era of Microsoft.
Really not liking the fact that corporations have grown so powerful that we now refer to them using the same language used for the leaders of countries.
Nazis most certainly were populists, or at least posed as populists. Hitler didn't win power by proclaiming he was going to kill all the Jews or invading the rest of Europe, he got in because he promised to make Germany great again, to go after all the elements of German society that made it weak, and make everyone who he viewed as Germany's enemies pay for what they had done. While Mein Kampf had some pretty strong hints as to what he was thinking in the long-term, it wasn't until he had successfully remilitarized the Rhineland that he felt Germany could take on Europe, and it wasn't until he had abandoned all other means of getting rid of the Jews that the Final Solution was floated.
So yes, Trump is a lot like Hitler, in some respects at least. The populism, the finding of easy targets to scapegoat for all the ills, the rhetoric about how he will make his nation great and restore its glory. He's walked a few steps down the road of Hitler, the only real difference being that whatever else Hitler was, Hitler was capable of actual long-term thinking, planning, and political acumen. Trump appears to possess no such capabilities. What he does have in common with Hitler is the ability to say the unsayable and convince his followers that the unsayable is only unsayable because the enemies of the people don't want it said.
This election is about a lot of things but I don't think scapegoating minorities is even in the top 3. It comes down to one simple idea for me- The insider Hillary will oil the machine, and the outsider Trump will throw a wrench into it. The problem for me, and maybe a lot of people, is that obviously the system isn't working, so oiling it is just more of the same corporate rub-and-tug baloney. On the other hand, maybe throwing a wrench into the machine little too much- the system could probably be fixed if the legislative branch wasn't so dysfunctional. The real tragedy is that the Executive Branch race is causing such a stir when most of the big problems with our government are in the heavily-gerrymandered, highly-corrupt legislative branch.
Is there any level of stupidity that will finally convince the man is a simpering retard?
Trump's use of language is pretty amazing. He manages to come across as so sloppy in his selection of wrong words that his supporters can think, "He didn't really mean that, literally." It gives them license to imagine that Trump "really" meant whatever is in that supporter's own head. So, when Trump detractors see him make racist, economically irrational, or politically naive statements, his fans get to hear exactly what they want to hear.
I have no idea if he's doing this intentionally or if it's an accident of his 6th-grade vocabulary, but it's fascinating. If the PR people can figure out how he does it, I have no doubt that we'll see a new wave of politicians replacing the old-style non-statement with Trump-style reverse-projection.
Politicians are basically salespeople who sell themselves. They sell themselves to lobbyists, they sell themselves to their peers, and lastly (and least importantly) they sell themselves to voters. They sell themselves in a certain way because they are politicians and politicians have a certain way of doing that.
Trump has successfully sold himself to municipal planners and leaders to get his projects built. He has sold himself to investment groups, individuals, and banks. And he sells himself to average people who buy or rent his properties. Trump is one of the world's most successful time share salesman and arguably a branding "expert". The way he sells himself is completely different than most politicians.
The problem with these sales tactics is that they are a bit like magic- once you understand the trick, it doesn't work anymore. By using a completely different rulebook, Trump is forcing people to pay attention to the tricks that he uses, and compare them to the tricks that other politicians use. Many/most of the tricks that Trump and all politicians use are straight out of a business Negotiation 101 course.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Hyperloop PR is getting a bit ahead of their actual potential?
Is it too much to ask to see a short section of Hyperloop actually built before talking about building a long section underground or the ocean?
As a child, I thought that those pneumatic tubes in the supermarket were the most awesome thing ever. (I still think that they are really cool!) And I think the hyperloop is a fantastic idea, but I would like to see concerns credibly addressed: (1) how will shifts in the tube alignment due to ground motion be addressed, (2) how will you pull a vacuum over a 1000-mile length of tubing, (3) what will it really feel like to be confined in a small windowless tube?, (4) instabilities are a big problem with aerodynamics - how much will the passenger be shaken around? (5) If there is a problem during transportation and the passenger-section of the tube gets stuck and loses pressure, the passengers will die in a vacuum right? (I know this is similar to an airplane failing, but dying underground, strapped into a dark tube seems even more unpleasant!)
My opinion is that the Hyperloop people are really doing their concept a disservice by not verifying that this concept will actually yield something usable for people at a small scale (either a short full-scale length or a sub-scale model) before proposing a huge investor-driven concept. It makes it seem like more of a boondoggle than an actual engineering concept.
I agree it is a boondoggle, but they need to talk about long-distance travel from the beginning because that is the only use case that makes any economic sense. The time spent stopping at stations, even for just 1 or 2 minutes, really kills the average speed.
Having spent considerable time in Japan, where high-speed rail is very common, hyperloop is a solution to a problem that has already been solved. High speed rail in Japan competes directly with domestic air travel. Pricing is very similar and total transit times are roughly the same. It almost comes down to personal preference or whatever direction the last-minute pricing has trended. Building a completely different system, that will almost certainly be more expensive than high speed rail is one of those engineering tangents that is technically impressive but functionally overcomplicated and not economically justified.
We need more high speed rail in this country, but finding the right routes will be key. I don't believe there is any serious consideration of this- it is usually "which congressperson is most powerful or negotiates the biggest favor". Another huge problem is that driving in the USA is too cheap. Driving from Tokyo to Osaka leaving at 2PM costs roughly $180 in tolls, and gasoline costs roughly $4.50 a gallon. An adult high speed rail ticket Tokyo-Osaka costs about $145 and takes 1/3 to 1/2 the time, depending on traffic. A flight is roughly comparable to the train for price, time, and schedule availability. Unless you have a carload of people or just love driving, driving that route doesn't make sense. Until driving is considerably more expensive in the US, we will never have good mass transit.
But I am not sure what system or software can take advantage of it. Personally I want to see progress being made on quantum computing for consumer lever stuff.
If you have an application where you can calculate many possible solutions independant of each other, and then choose the best one, this kind of processor might be useful. Quantum computers are very strong for that kind of application, so I see it being a stepping stone to quantum computing.
And meanwhile, in the real world, electric planes are a real thing, actually rather popular in the light aircraft world, and a market that's growing by leaps and bounds every year. And actually have excellent performance vs. price figures compared to their ICE equivalents. Ranges are usually similar to those of electric cars, 150-400km.
Can we ditch with the old battery-energy-density-versus-fuel-energy-density canard, as if a gallon of petrol is an entire vehicle? Even the long-range versions of the Model S, the batteries are only a third of the vehicle weight. There are other parts to a vehicle. An electric motor the size of a roomba has the power output of an entire typical gasoline engine in a typical passenger car. And you can ditch the transmission and a lot of other hardware as well. And it's only logical that this size difference would be the case. Electric motors have vastly less heat to dissipate - heat dissipation means mass. Electric motors have vastly fewer parts; complexity equals mass. Electric motors create force directly applied as torque on a driveshaft linkage (or even directly on the wheel), while ICEs produce it as pressurized gas, change that to linear momentum, then change that to rotational. Obviously the latter is going to cost you signfiicantly in terms of mass.
This headline makes it sound like electric airplanes are new. They're not. They're not even in the one-off-prototype stage, there are a number of serial producers out there. The market is expected to be over 22 billion a year three years from now. I'm not sure I believe it's going to scale up that fast, but it most definitely is growing. It's not even just small manufacturers, even Airbus is currently tooling up to market their E-Fan.
I'm sure we will have electric planes but they will almost certainly remain the domain of small aircraft. The car analogy works well. Electric cars make sense but electric 18-wheelers don't and probably never will. A radical and fundamental shift in how we move cargo and people is more likely to me than an electric A330.
I kind of get the solar/wind power buyers who pay more. There are a smattering of people for whom paying extra for "renewable" power has some religious meaning even though the actual power they use may be from non-renewable sources. Fine. We salute your noble personal sacrifice for the cause of sustaining renewable energy.
What I completely don't get is why someone would be an *Apple" renewable power buyer. I see renewable as the basic "brand" here and don't understand why anyone would specify Apple power. Even device fandom doesn't explain it to me.
This looks mostly like a set of corporate constructs to lessen the regulatory burden and increase Apple's flexibility to both sell its excess power and maximize whatever financial advantages it has in terms of tax structure.
It seems to me like one of the weird side effects of massive profitability and lack of investment in product diversity or expansion is that some companies seem to be drifting into almost financial company status, where the business imperative shifts to structural tactics to expand profitability versus expanding the existing core business.
GE kind of did this a decade or so ago, where its finance unit became so important to the business that some people thought the company should be evaluated as a financial company not a manufacturer.
That's exactly what it is. Deregulation of the electricity market sent us on this path in many states. Deregulation created new job titles like "Energy Trader" and "Energy Market Analyst". Such people get paid very handsomely to play the energy market exactly as if it were a stock market.
Setting up a "power company" doesn't even require physical infrastructure of any kind anymore. You can set up the appropriate legal entities, purchase electricity in bulk wholesale, market your "service" to the public, and sell to individual consumers all from the comfort of your home office. The Texas electricity supplier market is full of such "paper" utilities. Every state is a little different, but that appears to be the mechanism by which Apple is doing this.
As far as I know, it is very unusual for a company to sell their excess power like this. A more common arrangement is to have a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), which is basically a contract to buy X MW-h at Y price for a term of Z years (10-20 years generally). Then, if the company has excess electricity, it sells to the grid at the wholesale price. There is often ample opportunity for making huge profits using this method since the PPA price can, and often is, much lower than market rate. This allows entities such as large hospitals to run on PPA power most of the time, use their emergency generators for emergencies, but also fire up their generators on days when the market electricity price is very high for extra cash. This type of structure is good for the market since it gives critical electricity users reliable and redundant power options, and also gives the grid excess emergency capacity.
As someone in the industry, this development of a company selling electricity directly to consumers is somewhat troubling. These "paper" utilities cause enough problems- many of them use confusing and predatory marketing and pricing plans. I truly believe we need to sort out those deregulation issues before we allow even more non-utility companies to enter the fray. Electricity used to be a trusted market, where people may have paid too much, but the pricing was honest and everyone generally got the same deal. All the nontraditional players entering the market are turning it into something more like the life insurance market where the sleaziest sales teams are the biggest winners.
The problem is that Waze has a reason to exist. The problem is cities, counties and states that allow two day road repairs to take six months. If they'd make the construction crews do their job correctly, Waze would cease to exist within a few months, because the main thruways wouldn't be clogged up all the time and nobody would care.
It costs more money to do road repairs on a short schedule. All vendors involved need to commit to specific dates/times to make that happen. That tends to increase bids since vendors can't schedule their portion around other work. Someone needs to coordinate and manage the job more closely and actively compared with a "slow" repair. If vendors are to be held to deadlines, someone needs to coordinate between the vendors and keep track of delays. Delays often lead to disputes so lawyers and higher management often needs to get more involved. Those things cost money.
Some places see the value in spending that money. Other places don't. Every project much bigger than a pothole fill should have a traffic analysis and the disruption to the public measured in man-hours wasted. If the (man-hours wasted * $5/hour) is greater than the cost of doing the project "fast", then the project should be done fast. That's the right way to determine this. I get the impression that this is rarely done.
for the road to handle a certain amount of traffic. In theory if more traffic was expected more money would be spent.
Actually, if this continues, I imagine what will happen is what happened in my old neighborhood.
I used to live in a large city that had a lot of residential neighborhoods, and traffic was terrible so people would be tempted to cut through them rather than taking major routes.
What happened was -- the city adopted a series of rules to actively tie up traffic on residential streets, in an escalating chain of snarling effects.
I forget what all the stages were, but it was something like:
- put in more crosswalks, add warning signs, make lanes narrower
- put in speed zones, create turning restrictions and commercial vehicle restrictions
- create more one-way streets, have one-way streets terminate in consecutive blocks forcing traffic to wind around in a serpentine fashion
- if there's still too much traffic, then the badness really started: deliberate choking points, raised intersections, speed humps, etc.
- and finally the ultimate measures: turn streets into random cul-de-sacs by closing off ends of blocks, or in worst case scenarios institute mid-block street closures
I know a number of municipalities do this sort of stuff deliberately already to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods, but it tends mostly to be large cities. If Waze continues to route traffic this way, believe me -- more and more municipalities will catch on and start doing this stuff.
And having lived in a neighborhood like this for several years, I can say it's a pain in the neck. I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking.
But it was still much better than having rush-hour traffic going by my front door every morning and evening. The money won't be spent to improve these streets -- it will be to set up barriers to make these streets so awful that people will rather sit in traffic on the highway.
We need to find a balance here. I've lived in both Milwaukee and Houston. The bulk of Milwaukee is a relatively old city (developed before 1950) and is dominated by the grid system. I had about 8 different commute routes available to me when I lived there, despite living only 4 miles away from work. Zoning was mostly a good thing and commercial properties were often located near or in residential areas.
Houston outside of 610 is dominated by post-1970s city planning. Residential areas have a lot more disjointed roads, dead ends, cul-de-sacs, and entry on a limited number of sides of the area. I have about 4 different commutes available on my 15 mile commute, and they substantially overlap. I have no choice but to use certain highways or face enormous detours. Zoning seems completely out of control and developers seem to be able to do whatever they want, including building properties in the suburbs with completely inadequate parking, flood, traffic, or noise considerations.
The big problem I see is that the Houston road transit system is not very linear from large to small, and the post-1970s planning style is far too car-dominant. We need big highways, small residential surface streets, and everything in between. Houston doesn't plan for that. It is problematic to design efficient junctions or access between big roads/highways and small residential streets. There should be a middle-size road between them so that the big road doesn't have a high-traffic driveway every 100ft. A somewhat linear progression from small->large roads is needed, but this is not considered in many parts of the US. Medium-size roads are too big for developers to be responsible, but too small for matching federal funds to be allocated, which seems to be the main consideration when building or improving roads these days. Maybe we should do the responsible thing and raise gas taxes while oil prices are still very low.
Funny, when I lived in Japan I remember construction on some roads that had started before I arrived and was still going on when I left, seven years later.
Japan may be a model of efficiency in some (limited) ways, but this certainly wasn't one, in my experience.
That sounds like a difference between a major new-building project and maintenance.
I worked in Kawasaki for about 6 months total several years back. On one 3-months stay, I would walk to work in the morning and be confused that several areas on my commute seemed to have different (new) pavement compared to the night before. This happened enough times that I was certain I was not imagining things. Finally one day I had to stay out late and didn't get back home until 11PM. I was surprised by the flurry of activity- the street was half dug up, trucks were arriving and departing with materials and equipment, and crews were quickly working on piping/cables buried under the street. The next morning when I walked to the train station, it was as if it had never happened. The dug-up areas were all covered with fresh asphalt patches and there was barely a trace of recent construction. No equipment, no cones, no nothing. This happened every night the entire time I was there and I hardly noticed.
Some projects can be done like this, and some can't. In Houston, they routinely shut down highway flyover ramps from 10PM to 5AM for periodic maintenance and inspection. A different ramp gets shut down just about every weekend, but if you're like most people, you are home between 10PM and 5AM, and may never be affected. On the other hand, Houston has other projects which do linger and disrupt traffic for years. It depends on the type of work needed to be done.
Unless 3.2 billion is just walking around money...
That doesn't matter. Nest was just some existing technology cobbled together and wrapped with a very fancy bow. The only reasons to spend that much money would be-
1. The technology was actually worth that much as-is
2. The technology could provide that much value by increasing other businesses
2b. The data that could be collected would be worth that much
3. It would be worth that much to keep the technology out of the hands of a competitor
I really doubt any of those reasons hold up, and probably didn't hold up from the beginning. Even if they were after data, they could have simply paid 10,000 people $1,000 each to install a device in their homes for 1/320th of the Nest acquisition cost. A dollar overpaid for Nest is a dollar that didn't go to shareholders or to something, anything more worthwhile. The fact that $3.2B is probably couch change for Google is not relevant. It is still gross mismanagement to the tune of $3.2B.
I feel so very, very small. My passwords are better than that. My security is better than that. I know I have skills on various OSs, I can code in a dozen languages, I have bashed together many personal projects that worked... And yet Zuckerberg is successful and I am not. He his rich, and I am not. He has a family, and I never will. Not only I am too poor to afford it, but I could never even have a girlfriend. I'm too shy and awkward, and none of my technical savvy can help me when it comes to social skills. I have none. I would give all of that technical know-how just to be accepted. Just to be... One of those guys people like to have around. To be liked and loved. But this is never going to be. Goodbye.
Were you born with technical ability? Do you think that social skills are an inate ability? We all have various handicaps that make learning some tasks easier than others, but technical and social skills are both learned. Tackling the biggest shortcomings in one's knowledge and persona is a lot more difficult than filling up on knowledge that comes easy. But I would argue that it is a lot more beneficial. You may never be a suave salesman, but improving your sales skills from "nonexistant / unworkable" to "marginal / passable" would likely benefit you immensely. Confidence and trustworthiness can be faked, and will get you at least halfway there.
Taking an acting class may help also. The people I know who are well-known for being liked are just good salesmen and/or actors. Their real character is hidden and they put up a facade. The facade changes depending on who they are dealing with at the moment. The role they play is whatever the other person needs to in order to establish trust. I don't approach customers as dj245 anymore. dj245 himself was not adequate for some of the work that I have to do, so I invented some people who are. I examine the situation, determine what kind of character the customer expects and would be able to deal with the problem most effectively, and then I take on that character. I pretend to be something that I am not. Using real people (with the skills to do a good job) as inspiration for my characters is a useful tactic. Even though I am not that good of an actor, it seems to work. I am not limited to the meek and shy person I used to be. I am the sum of all the characters that I can play. None of them are the best in the industry, but they can get me through almost any situation.
Sure, U6 is dismal, but that doesn't define a depression. The trick there is that BLS keeps redefining "the basket" of goods for the CPI calculation. The CPI doesn't go up because while the price of beef has tripled, the price of LCD TV's has fallen by 10x, so the BLS considers that to even out (I kid you not)
Holy cow, I was looking at refrigerator prices the other day. I last bought a top-of-the-line unit (no icemaker because I'm not insane, but otherwise high-end) in 2002. The prices today are more than triple for a similar level of product.
Are you really comparing apples and apples? Refrigerators are one item that I have seen go nuts in the last 10 years with premium features. The "basic fridge" is still available but the entire market has shifted upwards in pursuit of higher sales. Some of the energy-saving regulations may be adding cost as well- variable speed drives on the compressor motor and additional insulating materials definitely add cost.
Same thing is going on in the auto industry. The cars today are not the same as the cars of 10 years ago. The basic model might still be on the lot, but what was considered "loaded" a decade ago is almost standard package today. I can't recall the last time I was in a vehicle without electric windows. Additional regulation and safety features play a part, but consumer expectations have grown also.
It depends on to what extent you can adapt your electricity usage to take advantage of excess electricity during the daytime.
In much of the US, peak electrical usage is during the summer, due to air conditioning loads. The worst heating loads are on sunny days at mid-day, and it turns out to be relatively simple to design air conditioners to store cool for a few hours*, so you can adapt the air conditioning electrical usage to use energy in the mid day and then continue cooling houses during the evening and early night. This makes sense if the electrical price includes time-dependent pricing.
For other load profiles, it may or may not make sense.
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*water has high heat capacity (as well as high latent heat of fusion) and thus stores cool very well; and is both cheap and environmentally benign.
This is generally not correct, although it varies with the location and the electricity market. The highest demand is generally around 4-6PM in many locations- business and offices are still completely open and not on "night mode", restaurants are highly active due to the mealtime rush, and many people are also getting home and cooking, taking showers, and generally using electricity.
The temperature may be higher during midday to 2PM but most people are at work during that time. Summer electricity load is often strongly influenced by AC usage, but "what people are doing at any given moment" is an even greater influence. Making assumptions based on "it's really hot and AC is a big load" is not a bad place to start, but it isn't correct.
A carbon price is a proxy for the missing external costs of coal power, so it helps raise the wholesale price to better reflect its true cost (which is around double current wholesale prices). This alone encourages alternatives - both demand for carbon-neutral alternative power, and investment in further renewable generation.
But of course, the revenue from that didn't vanish; it was funneled back into industry adaption schemes and consumer tax cuts. And it worked, driving emissions down significantly, until it was repealed in 2014 (at which point they immediately started rising again.
You mention industry adaption schemes like that's a bad thing. It's a required thing. You can't legislate someone out of business and not provide an exit strategy. That's a good way for them to fight you tooth and nail the entire way. People will lose their jobs if/when coal goes away. As a coal/natural gas worker, I've been to many former coal towns and poverty, drug abuse, and crime are very quick to creep in when the coal money runs out. We're talking about intentionally destroying lives and communities here.
The green movement is winning. I can't stop that, nobody can. It is inevitable. I have to give the environmentalists credit, they fought persistently over a long period of time. They won, or they will win. But now it is very important that we take care of those who will be harmed by the transition. If coal-free truly is "better for all of us in the long run", then surely the green movement can afford some compassion for those who found themselves on the opposite side of the argument. It isn't anyone's fault they were born to parents who live(d) in a coal town. Most people would not choose that life if they had another option. If sinking the coal boat needs to happen, common decency demands that we rescue the victims on that boat.
I'll be sure to let the management of my apartment complex know that is an option. I'm sure they will be thrilled and will jump on that immediately. Perhaps they can even convince Google to wire up the neighborhood! Even though Google Fiber isn't available in Houston, I bet they can make it happen.
government caused this problem by not allowing wages to settle at $5/hour
All wages at $5 an hour do is make the rest of us support the workers via the social safety nets.
And if you take the social safety nets away, then you have people who are earning $200/week for 40 hours labor.
That means no medical care, rent is impossible to pay in many circumstances, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Even as it stands now, we subsidize those corporations with our taxes; that's the only thing that makes the wages they pay now survivable in any real sense of the word in any urban environment. Small town or country living, maybe you can make some kind of sane go of it for less than $10/hour, but it's definitely the exception, not the rule.
For McDonald's and the like, when the cost of functionally adequate automation falls below the cost of employment, they're going to move to automation. We either figure out how to handle the consequences ahead of time, or we take the beating when it happens without any fallback position. My guess is that it will probably be the latter, inasmuch as politics-as-usual always seem to target only the nearest term headlights-in-the-tunnel.
Also... speaking now with my AI researcher hat on: I think it's a slam dunk that the automation that will suit the fast food service industries is going to arrive very, very soon. With other service industries soon to follow. This problem is basically on our doorstep right now. Most people fail to see it because it represents a paradigm shift - things will be as they have never been before in history, and it's just very difficult to imagine fundamental changes in one's worldview that have no precedent.
Grab the popcorn and lock your doors. Show's going to start shortly.
There are limits to automation. I can't begin to guess where those limits might be for the food service industry, but automation in food service won't be a quick revolution. It will take many years to push on those limits.
As an example, we run a machine shop. Most of our machines are automated, some completely and some less so. The technology exists for us to replace one or more of machinists (~$30/hr plus benefits) with robots that pick up product from one machine, and move it to another. We could replace some of our 3 and 4-axis CNC machines with 5-axis machines that can turn raw material into nearly-finished product and eliminate multiple operations. We could purchase 5-axis polishing machines to polish the parts after machining and replace hand-polishing. Only some of these things make sense financially however, and automated manufacturing is a very mature industry.
Some of the things that are predicted for automated food service will happen very soon. Some will happen decades from now. And some will never happen.
The coal industry has been gutted over the last 10-15 years due to economics and government regulations. Thousands of people lost their jobs. I work in the industry but there is no sense complaining about it. It's a done deal. Some politicians paid lip service to training and developing alternative industries. Yet there is very little financial support for actually making that happen. The green movement won. Congratulations to them, they fought a very good fight and were very convincing and persistent. Political winners rarely take care of the losers, however. I don't expect any significant special assistance for coal industry workers, and the best that food service workers can probably hope for is to be allowed to go on disability for the rest of their lives. That's just the way it is.
Except that it's not a straight-up comparison between the employee and the machine. When the machine doesn't make fries, it's idle. When the employee doesn't make fries, they're cleaning, etc.
When the employee makes fries, he makes a mess. When a properly designed machine makes fries, it won't. A decent machine will be largely self-cleaning. The employee has to clean the fryolator nightly (if only to de-sludge and replace filters, and put the same shit oil back.) And then he has to clean the wall behind the machine, and the floor under the machine. At least, you pray that this happens nightly. During my stint in fast food, that was the practice, but it does not happen everywhere.
You're damned right it's not a straight-up comparison. The machine reduces your cleaning needs in the bargain.
You can't just design a machine that doesn't need to be cleaned. Everything that touches food needs to be cleaned. Food has to be removed from all the cracks and crevices. There are invariably parts of the machine which are more difficult to clean than others. It is inevitable, and those parts have to be cleaned too. Not doing this is asking for trouble- it is the main reason for the Blue Bell Listeriosis outbreak and countless other food recalls.
I agree that machines could be designed to reduce cleaning, but cleaning of automated food service equipment is a nontrivial and very important part of the operation. Taking the humans out of the work can actually cause unsanitary conditions. Most humans wouldn't use a spatula to flip burgers if the spatula was very dirty. They would clean it, or get another one. The machine is going to keep going because that's what it was programmed to do. The automated burger flipping mechanism may be buried inside the machine where it can't even be seen.
Those who say "we're going to build our economy by bringing back manufacturing" are deluding themselves. Those who vote for those people are also deluding themselves. (yes, this is a not so veiled Trump reference)
Why are such people deluded? A strong manufacturing sector seems to be working fine for Germany. The difference is that they don't just pay lip service, they implemented good training programs, apprenticeships, change labor laws to make the bar for terminating a worker more reasonable, etc. Their politicians got it done. You can doubt that US politicians can accomplish something like that (they probably can't), but it isn't delusional in principle.
The helpful folks at AT&T would like to remind you that they have a great Uverse cable package too....should your HBO Now/Sling/Hulu accounts be causing you to go over their new broadband caps.
I logged into my account, and as a Uverse internet-only customer in Houston, I am now under a cap. I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
Predictably, I have an option in my account now to "add TV to get unlimited data".
It is precisely these sort of records that can do us the most mischief - those that government enforcers and some kinds of other interested parties would be most likely to use against us. We must demand to especially see these records and others like them and to be allowed to correct or at least file protest on any that we find inaccurate. In some cases we need to sue against misuse of information voluntarily given in one context in another context in ways never justified against our own interests.
Personally I'm getting sick and tired of all these records NOT being used for the benefit and convenience of the people. The government aught to know who my kids are. The government knows that I am married and the name of my wife. I filed a form when those life events happened. The government knows how much I make every year, because my employer reports that information. They know where I keep my investments, and how much I have, because Vanguard reports that information to them. They know if I own a house or not, how many cars I own, etc. But you would never know that. Every time I interact with the government it is like talking to someone with amnesia.
Maybe some people like the fact that the government is so unorganized, but to me it is a complete waste of my time and tax dollars. A huge amount of money could be saved by eliminating all the government workers responsible for collecting, entering, and processing information again and again and again as if it was never collected before. For a country that is supposedly high tech and the most advanced in the world, our government's IT projects look very primative and poorly managed when compared to the initiatives that are taking place in Estonia.
to ask for the refund, however, when a larger number of customers started asking for the refund, then it was no longer cost-effective.
I agree. Once of those things we lost due to other companies leaching off of them.
If that happened for every sell, then there would never be price drops.
My price doesn't go up if the cost is raised. Why should it go down if lowered?
In general, I agree with you, but Amazon has set up a system where it is easy to play games with pricing. I've seen differences depending on if I am logged in or not, which account I am logged in under, whether I am logged in on a "prime" account or not, and other shenanigans. Prices seem to sometimes be higher or lower depending on how long something has been in a wish list or cart. Amazon and their vendors are certainly gaming the system (which they created for their own benefit) and showing no mercy, fairness, or common courtesy in the pursuit of separating me from my hard-earned money. You can be assured that these pricing games are not for your benefit. In that kind of environment, why wouldn't a person use every means available to try to get a the best possible deal?
Even waste heat itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most attempts at desalination have concentrated on reverse osmosis. This requires mostly electrical energy to drive the pumps. But desalination via evaporation and distillation requires mostly heat energy. States like California where fresh water is in short supply could couple up power generation stations and electrolysis factories with evaporative desalination stations, and a lot of that energy "wasted" as heat would actually be used for something productive.
Many desalinization plants do use a evaporative process. It is usually done under vacuum since that lowers the energy required even further. It can only be used as a first step in the treatment process- the water is still slightly salty and may have other contaminants after evaporative treatment.
The facilities that are serious about the desalination process use gas turbines with boilers on the back end to generate electricity and steam at ~1050F and 2400-3200psi, followed by a steam turbine to reduce the steam pressure and temperature, and the desalination initial process uses relatively low pressure steam. Then they have the reverse osmosis banks. This is a complicated process but it is the most efficient way to do things. There are countless enormous facilities in the middle east based on this basic process.
Current US freight rail standards have maximum train weights of 286-315k short tons. Also the test track has a 2000' (600m) rise.
Now, I can easily imagine them using special beefy cars (no suspension as they'll never reach any kind of speed), extra heavy duty rails, etc. And parallel tracks/trains would also be easy to install.
As opposed to the cost of pumped hydro, this seems like it's cheaper, and easier to add more capacity as need develops.
I really doubt that it is cheaper. Pumped storage has fewer moving parts, and those parts are mostly centralized into a pump/turbine house. Maintenance is easier and adding N+1 redundancy involves only a small part of the system- the pump/turbine. Piping systems do need maintenance, but usually only very rarely if water chemistry is good. A train has hundreds of bearings that need lubrication periodically, brake systems with moving parts, intercar connections, etc. Every moving part is an extra item that must be maintained. Labor costs in the USA are high enough that minimizing the number of maintenance items and centralizing them is a very important consideration. Pumped hydro definitely has it's problems, especially in locating or building a suitable site, but from a maintenance perspective, it is far superior.
There are a lot of private investors in these kinds of projects now. If they are taking government development money, it likely means that they couldn't secure private funding. That often points to a technology which is not competitive without subsidies. Big utilities are willing to take gambles with innovative green energy projects, despite what some want you to believe. The numbers have to add up though.
Smallpox vaccine is NOT made from smallpox. It is made from cowpox. In fact, the word "vaccine" is Latin for "from cows".
There may be good scientific reasons to keep the smallpox samples, but making vaccines is not one of them.
The actual virus would be helpful in making vaccines, if we ever needed to do that again. If there ever was a smallpox outbreak in the future, it would probably be a variant that is similar to, but not the same as, the old virus. Having the "old" virus around could be a significant help in studying a new variant and devising a vaccine. We may have scientific techniques in the future that work very well for that kind of task, but which require an actual sample. We just don't know what the future will bring. Keeping this stuff locked away but available if needed is an insurance policy against a pile of unknown unknowns.
Slashdot Mirror
Really not liking the Satya Nadella era of Microsoft.
Really not liking the fact that corporations have grown so powerful that we now refer to them using the same language used for the leaders of countries.
Nazis most certainly were populists, or at least posed as populists. Hitler didn't win power by proclaiming he was going to kill all the Jews or invading the rest of Europe, he got in because he promised to make Germany great again, to go after all the elements of German society that made it weak, and make everyone who he viewed as Germany's enemies pay for what they had done. While Mein Kampf had some pretty strong hints as to what he was thinking in the long-term, it wasn't until he had successfully remilitarized the Rhineland that he felt Germany could take on Europe, and it wasn't until he had abandoned all other means of getting rid of the Jews that the Final Solution was floated.
So yes, Trump is a lot like Hitler, in some respects at least. The populism, the finding of easy targets to scapegoat for all the ills, the rhetoric about how he will make his nation great and restore its glory. He's walked a few steps down the road of Hitler, the only real difference being that whatever else Hitler was, Hitler was capable of actual long-term thinking, planning, and political acumen. Trump appears to possess no such capabilities. What he does have in common with Hitler is the ability to say the unsayable and convince his followers that the unsayable is only unsayable because the enemies of the people don't want it said.
This election is about a lot of things but I don't think scapegoating minorities is even in the top 3. It comes down to one simple idea for me- The insider Hillary will oil the machine, and the outsider Trump will throw a wrench into it. The problem for me, and maybe a lot of people, is that obviously the system isn't working, so oiling it is just more of the same corporate rub-and-tug baloney. On the other hand, maybe throwing a wrench into the machine little too much- the system could probably be fixed if the legislative branch wasn't so dysfunctional. The real tragedy is that the Executive Branch race is causing such a stir when most of the big problems with our government are in the heavily-gerrymandered, highly-corrupt legislative branch.
Is there any level of stupidity that will finally convince the man is a simpering retard?
Trump's use of language is pretty amazing. He manages to come across as so sloppy in his selection of wrong words that his supporters can think, "He didn't really mean that, literally." It gives them license to imagine that Trump "really" meant whatever is in that supporter's own head. So, when Trump detractors see him make racist, economically irrational, or politically naive statements, his fans get to hear exactly what they want to hear.
I have no idea if he's doing this intentionally or if it's an accident of his 6th-grade vocabulary, but it's fascinating. If the PR people can figure out how he does it, I have no doubt that we'll see a new wave of politicians replacing the old-style non-statement with Trump-style reverse-projection.
Politicians are basically salespeople who sell themselves. They sell themselves to lobbyists, they sell themselves to their peers, and lastly (and least importantly) they sell themselves to voters. They sell themselves in a certain way because they are politicians and politicians have a certain way of doing that.
Trump has successfully sold himself to municipal planners and leaders to get his projects built. He has sold himself to investment groups, individuals, and banks. And he sells himself to average people who buy or rent his properties. Trump is one of the world's most successful time share salesman and arguably a branding "expert". The way he sells himself is completely different than most politicians.
The problem with these sales tactics is that they are a bit like magic- once you understand the trick, it doesn't work anymore. By using a completely different rulebook, Trump is forcing people to pay attention to the tricks that he uses, and compare them to the tricks that other politicians use. Many/most of the tricks that Trump and all politicians use are straight out of a business Negotiation 101 course.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Hyperloop PR is getting a bit ahead of their actual potential?
Is it too much to ask to see a short section of Hyperloop actually built before talking about building a long section underground or the ocean?
As a child, I thought that those pneumatic tubes in the supermarket were the most awesome thing ever. (I still think that they are really cool!) And I think the hyperloop is a fantastic idea, but I would like to see concerns credibly addressed: (1) how will shifts in the tube alignment due to ground motion be addressed, (2) how will you pull a vacuum over a 1000-mile length of tubing, (3) what will it really feel like to be confined in a small windowless tube?, (4) instabilities are a big problem with aerodynamics - how much will the passenger be shaken around? (5) If there is a problem during transportation and the passenger-section of the tube gets stuck and loses pressure, the passengers will die in a vacuum right? (I know this is similar to an airplane failing, but dying underground, strapped into a dark tube seems even more unpleasant!)
My opinion is that the Hyperloop people are really doing their concept a disservice by not verifying that this concept will actually yield something usable for people at a small scale (either a short full-scale length or a sub-scale model) before proposing a huge investor-driven concept. It makes it seem like more of a boondoggle than an actual engineering concept.
I agree it is a boondoggle, but they need to talk about long-distance travel from the beginning because that is the only use case that makes any economic sense. The time spent stopping at stations, even for just 1 or 2 minutes, really kills the average speed.
Having spent considerable time in Japan, where high-speed rail is very common, hyperloop is a solution to a problem that has already been solved. High speed rail in Japan competes directly with domestic air travel. Pricing is very similar and total transit times are roughly the same. It almost comes down to personal preference or whatever direction the last-minute pricing has trended. Building a completely different system, that will almost certainly be more expensive than high speed rail is one of those engineering tangents that is technically impressive but functionally overcomplicated and not economically justified.
We need more high speed rail in this country, but finding the right routes will be key. I don't believe there is any serious consideration of this- it is usually "which congressperson is most powerful or negotiates the biggest favor". Another huge problem is that driving in the USA is too cheap. Driving from Tokyo to Osaka leaving at 2PM costs roughly $180 in tolls, and gasoline costs roughly $4.50 a gallon. An adult high speed rail ticket Tokyo-Osaka costs about $145 and takes 1/3 to 1/2 the time, depending on traffic. A flight is roughly comparable to the train for price, time, and schedule availability. Unless you have a carload of people or just love driving, driving that route doesn't make sense. Until driving is considerably more expensive in the US, we will never have good mass transit.
But I am not sure what system or software can take advantage of it. Personally I want to see progress being made on quantum computing for consumer lever stuff.
If you have an application where you can calculate many possible solutions independant of each other, and then choose the best one, this kind of processor might be useful. Quantum computers are very strong for that kind of application, so I see it being a stepping stone to quantum computing.
And meanwhile, in the real world, electric planes are a real thing, actually rather popular in the light aircraft world, and a market that's growing by leaps and bounds every year. And actually have excellent performance vs. price figures compared to their ICE equivalents. Ranges are usually similar to those of electric cars, 150-400km.
Can we ditch with the old battery-energy-density-versus-fuel-energy-density canard, as if a gallon of petrol is an entire vehicle? Even the long-range versions of the Model S, the batteries are only a third of the vehicle weight. There are other parts to a vehicle. An electric motor the size of a roomba has the power output of an entire typical gasoline engine in a typical passenger car. And you can ditch the transmission and a lot of other hardware as well. And it's only logical that this size difference would be the case. Electric motors have vastly less heat to dissipate - heat dissipation means mass. Electric motors have vastly fewer parts; complexity equals mass. Electric motors create force directly applied as torque on a driveshaft linkage (or even directly on the wheel), while ICEs produce it as pressurized gas, change that to linear momentum, then change that to rotational. Obviously the latter is going to cost you signfiicantly in terms of mass.
This headline makes it sound like electric airplanes are new. They're not. They're not even in the one-off-prototype stage, there are a number of serial producers out there. The market is expected to be over 22 billion a year three years from now. I'm not sure I believe it's going to scale up that fast, but it most definitely is growing. It's not even just small manufacturers, even Airbus is currently tooling up to market their E-Fan.
I'm sure we will have electric planes but they will almost certainly remain the domain of small aircraft. The car analogy works well. Electric cars make sense but electric 18-wheelers don't and probably never will. A radical and fundamental shift in how we move cargo and people is more likely to me than an electric A330.
I kind of get the solar/wind power buyers who pay more. There are a smattering of people for whom paying extra for "renewable" power has some religious meaning even though the actual power they use may be from non-renewable sources. Fine. We salute your noble personal sacrifice for the cause of sustaining renewable energy.
What I completely don't get is why someone would be an *Apple" renewable power buyer. I see renewable as the basic "brand" here and don't understand why anyone would specify Apple power. Even device fandom doesn't explain it to me.
This looks mostly like a set of corporate constructs to lessen the regulatory burden and increase Apple's flexibility to both sell its excess power and maximize whatever financial advantages it has in terms of tax structure.
It seems to me like one of the weird side effects of massive profitability and lack of investment in product diversity or expansion is that some companies seem to be drifting into almost financial company status, where the business imperative shifts to structural tactics to expand profitability versus expanding the existing core business.
GE kind of did this a decade or so ago, where its finance unit became so important to the business that some people thought the company should be evaluated as a financial company not a manufacturer.
That's exactly what it is. Deregulation of the electricity market sent us on this path in many states. Deregulation created new job titles like "Energy Trader" and "Energy Market Analyst". Such people get paid very handsomely to play the energy market exactly as if it were a stock market.
Setting up a "power company" doesn't even require physical infrastructure of any kind anymore. You can set up the appropriate legal entities, purchase electricity in bulk wholesale, market your "service" to the public, and sell to individual consumers all from the comfort of your home office. The Texas electricity supplier market is full of such "paper" utilities. Every state is a little different, but that appears to be the mechanism by which Apple is doing this.
As far as I know, it is very unusual for a company to sell their excess power like this. A more common arrangement is to have a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), which is basically a contract to buy X MW-h at Y price for a term of Z years (10-20 years generally). Then, if the company has excess electricity, it sells to the grid at the wholesale price. There is often ample opportunity for making huge profits using this method since the PPA price can, and often is, much lower than market rate. This allows entities such as large hospitals to run on PPA power most of the time, use their emergency generators for emergencies, but also fire up their generators on days when the market electricity price is very high for extra cash. This type of structure is good for the market since it gives critical electricity users reliable and redundant power options, and also gives the grid excess emergency capacity.
As someone in the industry, this development of a company selling electricity directly to consumers is somewhat troubling. These "paper" utilities cause enough problems- many of them use confusing and predatory marketing and pricing plans. I truly believe we need to sort out those deregulation issues before we allow even more non-utility companies to enter the fray. Electricity used to be a trusted market, where people may have paid too much, but the pricing was honest and everyone generally got the same deal. All the nontraditional players entering the market are turning it into something more like the life insurance market where the sleaziest sales teams are the biggest winners.
The problem is that Waze has a reason to exist. The problem is cities, counties and states that allow two day road repairs to take six months. If they'd make the construction crews do their job correctly, Waze would cease to exist within a few months, because the main thruways wouldn't be clogged up all the time and nobody would care.
It costs more money to do road repairs on a short schedule. All vendors involved need to commit to specific dates/times to make that happen. That tends to increase bids since vendors can't schedule their portion around other work. Someone needs to coordinate and manage the job more closely and actively compared with a "slow" repair. If vendors are to be held to deadlines, someone needs to coordinate between the vendors and keep track of delays. Delays often lead to disputes so lawyers and higher management often needs to get more involved. Those things cost money.
Some places see the value in spending that money. Other places don't. Every project much bigger than a pothole fill should have a traffic analysis and the disruption to the public measured in man-hours wasted. If the (man-hours wasted * $5/hour) is greater than the cost of doing the project "fast", then the project should be done fast. That's the right way to determine this. I get the impression that this is rarely done.
for the road to handle a certain amount of traffic. In theory if more traffic was expected more money would be spent.
Actually, if this continues, I imagine what will happen is what happened in my old neighborhood.
I used to live in a large city that had a lot of residential neighborhoods, and traffic was terrible so people would be tempted to cut through them rather than taking major routes.
What happened was -- the city adopted a series of rules to actively tie up traffic on residential streets, in an escalating chain of snarling effects.
I forget what all the stages were, but it was something like:
- put in more crosswalks, add warning signs, make lanes narrower - put in speed zones, create turning restrictions and commercial vehicle restrictions - create more one-way streets, have one-way streets terminate in consecutive blocks forcing traffic to wind around in a serpentine fashion - if there's still too much traffic, then the badness really started: deliberate choking points, raised intersections, speed humps, etc. - and finally the ultimate measures: turn streets into random cul-de-sacs by closing off ends of blocks, or in worst case scenarios institute mid-block street closures
I know a number of municipalities do this sort of stuff deliberately already to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods, but it tends mostly to be large cities. If Waze continues to route traffic this way, believe me -- more and more municipalities will catch on and start doing this stuff.
And having lived in a neighborhood like this for several years, I can say it's a pain in the neck. I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking.
But it was still much better than having rush-hour traffic going by my front door every morning and evening. The money won't be spent to improve these streets -- it will be to set up barriers to make these streets so awful that people will rather sit in traffic on the highway.
We need to find a balance here. I've lived in both Milwaukee and Houston. The bulk of Milwaukee is a relatively old city (developed before 1950) and is dominated by the grid system. I had about 8 different commute routes available to me when I lived there, despite living only 4 miles away from work. Zoning was mostly a good thing and commercial properties were often located near or in residential areas.
Houston outside of 610 is dominated by post-1970s city planning. Residential areas have a lot more disjointed roads, dead ends, cul-de-sacs, and entry on a limited number of sides of the area. I have about 4 different commutes available on my 15 mile commute, and they substantially overlap. I have no choice but to use certain highways or face enormous detours. Zoning seems completely out of control and developers seem to be able to do whatever they want, including building properties in the suburbs with completely inadequate parking, flood, traffic, or noise considerations.
The big problem I see is that the Houston road transit system is not very linear from large to small, and the post-1970s planning style is far too car-dominant. We need big highways, small residential surface streets, and everything in between. Houston doesn't plan for that. It is problematic to design efficient junctions or access between big roads/highways and small residential streets. There should be a middle-size road between them so that the big road doesn't have a high-traffic driveway every 100ft. A somewhat linear progression from small->large roads is needed, but this is not considered in many parts of the US. Medium-size roads are too big for developers to be responsible, but too small for matching federal funds to be allocated, which seems to be the main consideration when building or improving roads these days. Maybe we should do the responsible thing and raise gas taxes while oil prices are still very low.
Funny, when I lived in Japan I remember construction on some roads that had started before I arrived and was still going on when I left, seven years later.
Japan may be a model of efficiency in some (limited) ways, but this certainly wasn't one, in my experience.
That sounds like a difference between a major new-building project and maintenance.
I worked in Kawasaki for about 6 months total several years back. On one 3-months stay, I would walk to work in the morning and be confused that several areas on my commute seemed to have different (new) pavement compared to the night before. This happened enough times that I was certain I was not imagining things. Finally one day I had to stay out late and didn't get back home until 11PM. I was surprised by the flurry of activity- the street was half dug up, trucks were arriving and departing with materials and equipment, and crews were quickly working on piping/cables buried under the street. The next morning when I walked to the train station, it was as if it had never happened. The dug-up areas were all covered with fresh asphalt patches and there was barely a trace of recent construction. No equipment, no cones, no nothing. This happened every night the entire time I was there and I hardly noticed.
Some projects can be done like this, and some can't. In Houston, they routinely shut down highway flyover ramps from 10PM to 5AM for periodic maintenance and inspection. A different ramp gets shut down just about every weekend, but if you're like most people, you are home between 10PM and 5AM, and may never be affected. On the other hand, Houston has other projects which do linger and disrupt traffic for years. It depends on the type of work needed to be done.
Unless 3.2 billion is just walking around money...
That doesn't matter. Nest was just some existing technology cobbled together and wrapped with a very fancy bow. The only reasons to spend that much money would be-
1. The technology was actually worth that much as-is
2. The technology could provide that much value by increasing other businesses
2b. The data that could be collected would be worth that much
3. It would be worth that much to keep the technology out of the hands of a competitor
I really doubt any of those reasons hold up, and probably didn't hold up from the beginning. Even if they were after data, they could have simply paid 10,000 people $1,000 each to install a device in their homes for 1/320th of the Nest acquisition cost. A dollar overpaid for Nest is a dollar that didn't go to shareholders or to something, anything more worthwhile. The fact that $3.2B is probably couch change for Google is not relevant. It is still gross mismanagement to the tune of $3.2B.
I feel so very, very small. My passwords are better than that. My security is better than that. I know I have skills on various OSs, I can code in a dozen languages, I have bashed together many personal projects that worked... And yet Zuckerberg is successful and I am not. He his rich, and I am not. He has a family, and I never will. Not only I am too poor to afford it, but I could never even have a girlfriend. I'm too shy and awkward, and none of my technical savvy can help me when it comes to social skills. I have none. I would give all of that technical know-how just to be accepted. Just to be... One of those guys people like to have around. To be liked and loved. But this is never going to be. Goodbye.
Were you born with technical ability? Do you think that social skills are an inate ability? We all have various handicaps that make learning some tasks easier than others, but technical and social skills are both learned. Tackling the biggest shortcomings in one's knowledge and persona is a lot more difficult than filling up on knowledge that comes easy. But I would argue that it is a lot more beneficial. You may never be a suave salesman, but improving your sales skills from "nonexistant / unworkable" to "marginal / passable" would likely benefit you immensely. Confidence and trustworthiness can be faked, and will get you at least halfway there.
Taking an acting class may help also. The people I know who are well-known for being liked are just good salesmen and/or actors. Their real character is hidden and they put up a facade. The facade changes depending on who they are dealing with at the moment. The role they play is whatever the other person needs to in order to establish trust. I don't approach customers as dj245 anymore. dj245 himself was not adequate for some of the work that I have to do, so I invented some people who are. I examine the situation, determine what kind of character the customer expects and would be able to deal with the problem most effectively, and then I take on that character. I pretend to be something that I am not. Using real people (with the skills to do a good job) as inspiration for my characters is a useful tactic. Even though I am not that good of an actor, it seems to work. I am not limited to the meek and shy person I used to be. I am the sum of all the characters that I can play. None of them are the best in the industry, but they can get me through almost any situation.
Sure, U6 is dismal, but that doesn't define a depression. The trick there is that BLS keeps redefining "the basket" of goods for the CPI calculation. The CPI doesn't go up because while the price of beef has tripled, the price of LCD TV's has fallen by 10x, so the BLS considers that to even out (I kid you not)
Holy cow, I was looking at refrigerator prices the other day. I last bought a top-of-the-line unit (no icemaker because I'm not insane, but otherwise high-end) in 2002. The prices today are more than triple for a similar level of product.
Are you really comparing apples and apples? Refrigerators are one item that I have seen go nuts in the last 10 years with premium features. The "basic fridge" is still available but the entire market has shifted upwards in pursuit of higher sales. Some of the energy-saving regulations may be adding cost as well- variable speed drives on the compressor motor and additional insulating materials definitely add cost.
Same thing is going on in the auto industry. The cars today are not the same as the cars of 10 years ago. The basic model might still be on the lot, but what was considered "loaded" a decade ago is almost standard package today. I can't recall the last time I was in a vehicle without electric windows. Additional regulation and safety features play a part, but consumer expectations have grown also.
It depends on to what extent you can adapt your electricity usage to take advantage of excess electricity during the daytime.
In much of the US, peak electrical usage is during the summer, due to air conditioning loads. The worst heating loads are on sunny days at mid-day, and it turns out to be relatively simple to design air conditioners to store cool for a few hours*, so you can adapt the air conditioning electrical usage to use energy in the mid day and then continue cooling houses during the evening and early night. This makes sense if the electrical price includes time-dependent pricing.
For other load profiles, it may or may not make sense.
----- *water has high heat capacity (as well as high latent heat of fusion) and thus stores cool very well; and is both cheap and environmentally benign.
This is generally not correct, although it varies with the location and the electricity market. The highest demand is generally around 4-6PM in many locations- business and offices are still completely open and not on "night mode", restaurants are highly active due to the mealtime rush, and many people are also getting home and cooking, taking showers, and generally using electricity.
The temperature may be higher during midday to 2PM but most people are at work during that time. Summer electricity load is often strongly influenced by AC usage, but "what people are doing at any given moment" is an even greater influence. Making assumptions based on "it's really hot and AC is a big load" is not a bad place to start, but it isn't correct.
A carbon price is a proxy for the missing external costs of coal power, so it helps raise the wholesale price to better reflect its true cost (which is around double current wholesale prices). This alone encourages alternatives - both demand for carbon-neutral alternative power, and investment in further renewable generation.
But of course, the revenue from that didn't vanish; it was funneled back into industry adaption schemes and consumer tax cuts. And it worked, driving emissions down significantly, until it was repealed in 2014 (at which point they immediately started rising again.
You mention industry adaption schemes like that's a bad thing. It's a required thing. You can't legislate someone out of business and not provide an exit strategy. That's a good way for them to fight you tooth and nail the entire way. People will lose their jobs if/when coal goes away. As a coal/natural gas worker, I've been to many former coal towns and poverty, drug abuse, and crime are very quick to creep in when the coal money runs out. We're talking about intentionally destroying lives and communities here.
The green movement is winning. I can't stop that, nobody can. It is inevitable. I have to give the environmentalists credit, they fought persistently over a long period of time. They won, or they will win. But now it is very important that we take care of those who will be harmed by the transition. If coal-free truly is "better for all of us in the long run", then surely the green movement can afford some compassion for those who found themselves on the opposite side of the argument. It isn't anyone's fault they were born to parents who live(d) in a coal town. Most people would not choose that life if they had another option. If sinking the coal boat needs to happen, common decency demands that we rescue the victims on that boat.
I'll be sure to let the management of my apartment complex know that is an option. I'm sure they will be thrilled and will jump on that immediately. Perhaps they can even convince Google to wire up the neighborhood! Even though Google Fiber isn't available in Houston, I bet they can make it happen.
All wages at $5 an hour do is make the rest of us support the workers via the social safety nets.
And if you take the social safety nets away, then you have people who are earning $200/week for 40 hours labor.
That means no medical care, rent is impossible to pay in many circumstances, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Even as it stands now, we subsidize those corporations with our taxes; that's the only thing that makes the wages they pay now survivable in any real sense of the word in any urban environment. Small town or country living, maybe you can make some kind of sane go of it for less than $10/hour, but it's definitely the exception, not the rule.
For McDonald's and the like, when the cost of functionally adequate automation falls below the cost of employment, they're going to move to automation. We either figure out how to handle the consequences ahead of time, or we take the beating when it happens without any fallback position. My guess is that it will probably be the latter, inasmuch as politics-as-usual always seem to target only the nearest term headlights-in-the-tunnel.
Also... speaking now with my AI researcher hat on: I think it's a slam dunk that the automation that will suit the fast food service industries is going to arrive very, very soon. With other service industries soon to follow. This problem is basically on our doorstep right now. Most people fail to see it because it represents a paradigm shift - things will be as they have never been before in history, and it's just very difficult to imagine fundamental changes in one's worldview that have no precedent.
Grab the popcorn and lock your doors. Show's going to start shortly.
There are limits to automation. I can't begin to guess where those limits might be for the food service industry, but automation in food service won't be a quick revolution. It will take many years to push on those limits.
As an example, we run a machine shop. Most of our machines are automated, some completely and some less so. The technology exists for us to replace one or more of machinists (~$30/hr plus benefits) with robots that pick up product from one machine, and move it to another. We could replace some of our 3 and 4-axis CNC machines with 5-axis machines that can turn raw material into nearly-finished product and eliminate multiple operations. We could purchase 5-axis polishing machines to polish the parts after machining and replace hand-polishing. Only some of these things make sense financially however, and automated manufacturing is a very mature industry.
Some of the things that are predicted for automated food service will happen very soon. Some will happen decades from now. And some will never happen.
The coal industry has been gutted over the last 10-15 years due to economics and government regulations. Thousands of people lost their jobs. I work in the industry but there is no sense complaining about it. It's a done deal. Some politicians paid lip service to training and developing alternative industries. Yet there is very little financial support for actually making that happen. The green movement won. Congratulations to them, they fought a very good fight and were very convincing and persistent. Political winners rarely take care of the losers, however. I don't expect any significant special assistance for coal industry workers, and the best that food service workers can probably hope for is to be allowed to go on disability for the rest of their lives. That's just the way it is.
Except that it's not a straight-up comparison between the employee and the machine. When the machine doesn't make fries, it's idle. When the employee doesn't make fries, they're cleaning, etc.
When the employee makes fries, he makes a mess. When a properly designed machine makes fries, it won't. A decent machine will be largely self-cleaning. The employee has to clean the fryolator nightly (if only to de-sludge and replace filters, and put the same shit oil back.) And then he has to clean the wall behind the machine, and the floor under the machine. At least, you pray that this happens nightly. During my stint in fast food, that was the practice, but it does not happen everywhere.
You're damned right it's not a straight-up comparison. The machine reduces your cleaning needs in the bargain.
You can't just design a machine that doesn't need to be cleaned. Everything that touches food needs to be cleaned. Food has to be removed from all the cracks and crevices. There are invariably parts of the machine which are more difficult to clean than others. It is inevitable, and those parts have to be cleaned too. Not doing this is asking for trouble- it is the main reason for the Blue Bell Listeriosis outbreak and countless other food recalls.
I agree that machines could be designed to reduce cleaning, but cleaning of automated food service equipment is a nontrivial and very important part of the operation. Taking the humans out of the work can actually cause unsanitary conditions. Most humans wouldn't use a spatula to flip burgers if the spatula was very dirty. They would clean it, or get another one. The machine is going to keep going because that's what it was programmed to do. The automated burger flipping mechanism may be buried inside the machine where it can't even be seen.
Those who say "we're going to build our economy by bringing back manufacturing" are deluding themselves. Those who vote for those people are also deluding themselves. (yes, this is a not so veiled Trump reference)
Why are such people deluded? A strong manufacturing sector seems to be working fine for Germany. The difference is that they don't just pay lip service, they implemented good training programs, apprenticeships, change labor laws to make the bar for terminating a worker more reasonable, etc. Their politicians got it done. You can doubt that US politicians can accomplish something like that (they probably can't), but it isn't delusional in principle.
The helpful folks at AT&T would like to remind you that they have a great Uverse cable package too....should your HBO Now/Sling/Hulu accounts be causing you to go over their new broadband caps.
I logged into my account, and as a Uverse internet-only customer in Houston, I am now under a cap. I'm not sure how they can unilaterally do this without revisiting the contract.
Predictably, I have an option in my account now to "add TV to get unlimited data".
It is precisely these sort of records that can do us the most mischief - those that government enforcers and some kinds of other interested parties would be most likely to use against us. We must demand to especially see these records and others like them and to be allowed to correct or at least file protest on any that we find inaccurate. In some cases we need to sue against misuse of information voluntarily given in one context in another context in ways never justified against our own interests.
Personally I'm getting sick and tired of all these records NOT being used for the benefit and convenience of the people. The government aught to know who my kids are. The government knows that I am married and the name of my wife. I filed a form when those life events happened. The government knows how much I make every year, because my employer reports that information. They know where I keep my investments, and how much I have, because Vanguard reports that information to them. They know if I own a house or not, how many cars I own, etc. But you would never know that. Every time I interact with the government it is like talking to someone with amnesia.
Maybe some people like the fact that the government is so unorganized, but to me it is a complete waste of my time and tax dollars. A huge amount of money could be saved by eliminating all the government workers responsible for collecting, entering, and processing information again and again and again as if it was never collected before. For a country that is supposedly high tech and the most advanced in the world, our government's IT projects look very primative and poorly managed when compared to the initiatives that are taking place in Estonia.
to ask for the refund, however, when a larger number of customers started asking for the refund, then it was no longer cost-effective.
I agree. Once of those things we lost due to other companies leaching off of them.
If that happened for every sell, then there would never be price drops.
My price doesn't go up if the cost is raised. Why should it go down if lowered?
In general, I agree with you, but Amazon has set up a system where it is easy to play games with pricing. I've seen differences depending on if I am logged in or not, which account I am logged in under, whether I am logged in on a "prime" account or not, and other shenanigans. Prices seem to sometimes be higher or lower depending on how long something has been in a wish list or cart. Amazon and their vendors are certainly gaming the system (which they created for their own benefit) and showing no mercy, fairness, or common courtesy in the pursuit of separating me from my hard-earned money. You can be assured that these pricing games are not for your benefit. In that kind of environment, why wouldn't a person use every means available to try to get a the best possible deal?
Even waste heat itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most attempts at desalination have concentrated on reverse osmosis. This requires mostly electrical energy to drive the pumps. But desalination via evaporation and distillation requires mostly heat energy. States like California where fresh water is in short supply could couple up power generation stations and electrolysis factories with evaporative desalination stations, and a lot of that energy "wasted" as heat would actually be used for something productive.
Many desalinization plants do use a evaporative process. It is usually done under vacuum since that lowers the energy required even further. It can only be used as a first step in the treatment process- the water is still slightly salty and may have other contaminants after evaporative treatment.
The facilities that are serious about the desalination process use gas turbines with boilers on the back end to generate electricity and steam at ~1050F and 2400-3200psi, followed by a steam turbine to reduce the steam pressure and temperature, and the desalination initial process uses relatively low pressure steam. Then they have the reverse osmosis banks. This is a complicated process but it is the most efficient way to do things. There are countless enormous facilities in the middle east based on this basic process.
Current US freight rail standards have maximum train weights of 286-315k short tons. Also the test track has a 2000' (600m) rise.
Now, I can easily imagine them using special beefy cars (no suspension as they'll never reach any kind of speed), extra heavy duty rails, etc. And parallel tracks/trains would also be easy to install.
As opposed to the cost of pumped hydro, this seems like it's cheaper, and easier to add more capacity as need develops.
I really doubt that it is cheaper. Pumped storage has fewer moving parts, and those parts are mostly centralized into a pump/turbine house. Maintenance is easier and adding N+1 redundancy involves only a small part of the system- the pump/turbine. Piping systems do need maintenance, but usually only very rarely if water chemistry is good. A train has hundreds of bearings that need lubrication periodically, brake systems with moving parts, intercar connections, etc. Every moving part is an extra item that must be maintained. Labor costs in the USA are high enough that minimizing the number of maintenance items and centralizing them is a very important consideration. Pumped hydro definitely has it's problems, especially in locating or building a suitable site, but from a maintenance perspective, it is far superior.
There are a lot of private investors in these kinds of projects now. If they are taking government development money, it likely means that they couldn't secure private funding. That often points to a technology which is not competitive without subsidies. Big utilities are willing to take gambles with innovative green energy projects, despite what some want you to believe. The numbers have to add up though.
Smallpox vaccine is NOT made from smallpox. It is made from cowpox. In fact, the word "vaccine" is Latin for "from cows".
There may be good scientific reasons to keep the smallpox samples, but making vaccines is not one of them.
The actual virus would be helpful in making vaccines, if we ever needed to do that again. If there ever was a smallpox outbreak in the future, it would probably be a variant that is similar to, but not the same as, the old virus. Having the "old" virus around could be a significant help in studying a new variant and devising a vaccine. We may have scientific techniques in the future that work very well for that kind of task, but which require an actual sample. We just don't know what the future will bring. Keeping this stuff locked away but available if needed is an insurance policy against a pile of unknown unknowns.