Can someone offer a short and simple explanation for why abnormally cold weather doesn't mean "global warming is a myth"?
No.
Because our understanding of atmospheric thermodynamics is pathetically incomplete. Someone might be able to outline one of many hypothesis in simple terms. But the odds are that it will be short lived as scientists discover yet one more factor that they hadn't thought of yet.
Atmospheric science is interesting and is a field worthy of further study. But we are nowhere near using it to make any sort of useful predictions, let alone as the basis for economic policy.
As others have pointed out, marketing and engineering costs are very domain dependent. And the comparison across industries doesn't tell you much.
Better metric: look at engineering vs legal costs. How much does your company spend to build something correctly vs defend a crappy design later in court. Still, this will be domain specific.
Our underground systems are in a constant state of flood. They are designed to work that way. If you need to work in a vault, you have to pump it out first.
Don't you mean occupy? Or are you admitting that Israel is taking land by force?
I have no problem with Israel occupying Palestinian territories from which rockets are fired. They can do for as long as it takes for the attacks to stop as far as I am concerned. But its not their land to settle.
The Sinai was returned to Egypt as a condition of a peace treaty. And the Golan Heights will be returned to Syria based on the same.
What is the push-back from the 'customer' using this data?
If it is an end customer who can't understand the diagrams or a subcontractor that can't implement the design, then get them in the loop with a customer feed back survey.
Anonymize the authors of the various components and ask them (the customers) to provide feedback. If they think the work is crap, let them say so. If they can deal with it, then OP is being too picky. Yes, there is an issue of professionalism. Neat work leaves a better impression with the customer. But a well structured customer survey can capture this aspect as well. And management can decide whether it is worth their investing in resources to polish the product beyond the minimum required to just make it work.
And that kids is why you have random audits. Pick random stuff and check it's right. It won't be. Now identify and _fix_ the cause of whatever error you found.
Until you get push back from the people affected by the audit. We started out with a simple scoring system: How many customers were not assigned to grid numbers. Compliance immediately shot up to 100% when engineers could poke in any old grid number. Local branch management got their reward bonus.
Then, some smart engineer at HQ noted that some of the data didn't make sense. You can't connect a megawatt of customer load to a 15 kVA transformer. So they sent out reports. But had they gone and taken back the bonuses, the affected managers would have screamed. So there was another bonus for bringing the over/underloaded reports below some error rate. And that was done (in many cases) by lazy engineers taking the list of transformers with zero customers and moving customers off overloaded units. Sitting at their desks, with highlighter pens. Not by field-checking the accuracy. So when those reports were cleaned up, another bonus was paid. And the database was still full of shit. Its a game. And pretty soon, management tired of paying bonuses while the data remained polluted.
But its unfair of me to pick on the local power company alone. When I went to work for Boeing, it was the same thing all over again. Management got points for their engineers making data entries. Anything would do, so long as the blank got filled in and the end of month report showed a zero error rate. Just hope someone was contentious enough to chase down the bad data before that airplane actually rolled out the factory door.
Maybe they can use the smart grid to pinpoint damage more accurately?
My joking about overhead lines aside, this is precisely the goal. Of course, this assumes that the rest of the utilities' record keeping and event reporting infrastructure isn't hosed.
Seriously, if everyone (or even a significant fraction of the population) rode one of these, pedestrians would be scattering in terror. Even the local mall, whose security people used to ride these, largely stopped. There were too many near misses (and a few collisions) where the incompatibilities between these modes of transportation conflicted.
My power company installed 'smart meters' and an r.f. control and data acquisition grid over a decade ago.
Several decades ago, I used to work for them. Back then, we began a task to build a database of customers, transformers, distribution lines and substation circuits. All with the idea of eventually implementing such a system. Customers records were linked to a 'grid number' which was tied to their serving transformer, circuit and substation. These grid numbers are actually put on every pole (and other physical asset) in the company.
One of my engineering tasks was to review and correct errors in the database. At times, reports were generated that showed one small transformer feeding 50 or 100 customers (impossible without burning it up). A quick field review showed that many customers had been assigned to a few grid numbers many miles away. My suspicion was that some engineers were completing their paperwork sitting in a bar and these grid numbers were the ones visible out the front window.
Fast forward to a few years ago: My cabin (build recently) lost power when a tree took out my service line during a large storm. After doing repairs, I called the power company (I no longer worked for for the past few decades). I told the service rep that I would be ready to have the transformer re-energized. She said, "Sorry. We have to wait for the other customers on that transformer to have their services inspected." Well, I happen to be down a long, lonely road. And my cabin is the only one feeding from that point. I know this because that used to be my business. I explained this to the c.s.r. She said, "But the computer says..."
"The computer's data is screwed up. It was screwed up 20 years ago when I worked there. It still is. Send a lineman out to put the fuse back in." She did.
If this little anecdote reflects the current state of even a fraction of our utility infrastructure, its going to take much more than a few smart meters to straighten this mess out.
Once upon a time, power utilities ran their lines overhead. One result of this is that trees falling in storms and other similar events would disrupt power. Thankfully, this construction technique has been abandoned in all but a few third world countries.
Back a few jobs ago, I was given a 'company owned device' (a pager) to take home when I was on call. But I was compensated for that duty. Otherwise, when I left the company premises, I was effectively incommunicado. Later on, I worked for another outfit that thought employees were supposed to be reachable 24/7, at the bosses whim. We had company pagers to carry when we were in the factory, but we left them in our desks after working hours. They wanted our phone numbers, so I gave them the land line number. Chat with my answering machine all you want.
I see the requirement to purchase your own mobile device as a back door way to ensuring that you will be reachable 24/7. Without compensation.
"...to accommodate unconventionals like natural gas...will be enormously difficult"
I stopped right there. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Conversion to natural gas is trivially simple and is going on rapidly as gas prices drop. The new generation can practically be dropped in in place of old coal plants. And it can be brought on line much faster than coal can when electrical loads rise. So it's a no brainer.
Yeah, solar is a different issue. But solar is tiny compared to potential natural gas capacity.
Undersea mining of methane hydrate may present some technical difficulties. But not to the electrical grid. Once that methane source is piped onto shore, its just natural gas and can be plugged into the existing infrastructure.
So we have to prevent that from happening. No doubt, there will be a unique hardware reset key, available upon request from the manufacturer. Which means key management and a record of who legally owns each weapon.
No thanks. If you want to register guns, just say so.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone offer a short and simple explanation for why abnormally cold weather doesn't mean "global warming is a myth"?
No.
Because our understanding of atmospheric thermodynamics is pathetically incomplete. Someone might be able to outline one of many hypothesis in simple terms. But the odds are that it will be short lived as scientists discover yet one more factor that they hadn't thought of yet.
Atmospheric science is interesting and is a field worthy of further study. But we are nowhere near using it to make any sort of useful predictions, let alone as the basis for economic policy.
This should cut down on claims payouts.
Fine. But how does moving Jewish settlers into the land help out with that scenario?
Test drive?
As others have pointed out, marketing and engineering costs are very domain dependent. And the comparison across industries doesn't tell you much.
Better metric: look at engineering vs legal costs. How much does your company spend to build something correctly vs defend a crappy design later in court. Still, this will be domain specific.
Citation Needed.
Our underground systems are in a constant state of flood. They are designed to work that way. If you need to work in a vault, you have to pump it out first.
The UN is saving its energy for the vi/emacs dispute.
Mod parent up and let the bullets fly.
Annex?
Don't you mean occupy? Or are you admitting that Israel is taking land by force?
I have no problem with Israel occupying Palestinian territories from which rockets are fired. They can do for as long as it takes for the attacks to stop as far as I am concerned. But its not their land to settle.
The Sinai was returned to Egypt as a condition of a peace treaty. And the Golan Heights will be returned to Syria based on the same.
What is the push-back from the 'customer' using this data?
If it is an end customer who can't understand the diagrams or a subcontractor that can't implement the design, then get them in the loop with a customer feed back survey.
Anonymize the authors of the various components and ask them (the customers) to provide feedback. If they think the work is crap, let them say so. If they can deal with it, then OP is being too picky. Yes, there is an issue of professionalism. Neat work leaves a better impression with the customer. But a well structured customer survey can capture this aspect as well. And management can decide whether it is worth their investing in resources to polish the product beyond the minimum required to just make it work.
And that kids is why you have random audits. Pick random stuff and check it's right. It won't be. Now identify and _fix_ the cause of whatever error you found.
Until you get push back from the people affected by the audit. We started out with a simple scoring system: How many customers were not assigned to grid numbers. Compliance immediately shot up to 100% when engineers could poke in any old grid number. Local branch management got their reward bonus.
Then, some smart engineer at HQ noted that some of the data didn't make sense. You can't connect a megawatt of customer load to a 15 kVA transformer. So they sent out reports. But had they gone and taken back the bonuses, the affected managers would have screamed. So there was another bonus for bringing the over/underloaded reports below some error rate. And that was done (in many cases) by lazy engineers taking the list of transformers with zero customers and moving customers off overloaded units. Sitting at their desks, with highlighter pens. Not by field-checking the accuracy. So when those reports were cleaned up, another bonus was paid. And the database was still full of shit. Its a game. And pretty soon, management tired of paying bonuses while the data remained polluted.
But its unfair of me to pick on the local power company alone. When I went to work for Boeing, it was the same thing all over again. Management got points for their engineers making data entries. Anything would do, so long as the blank got filled in and the end of month report showed a zero error rate. Just hope someone was contentious enough to chase down the bad data before that airplane actually rolled out the factory door.
Maybe they can use the smart grid to pinpoint damage more accurately?
My joking about overhead lines aside, this is precisely the goal. Of course, this assumes that the rest of the utilities' record keeping and event reporting infrastructure isn't hosed.
And I ran into it with my Segway.
Seriously, if everyone (or even a significant fraction of the population) rode one of these, pedestrians would be scattering in terror. Even the local mall, whose security people used to ride these, largely stopped. There were too many near misses (and a few collisions) where the incompatibilities between these modes of transportation conflicted.
My power company installed 'smart meters' and an r.f. control and data acquisition grid over a decade ago.
Several decades ago, I used to work for them. Back then, we began a task to build a database of customers, transformers, distribution lines and substation circuits. All with the idea of eventually implementing such a system. Customers records were linked to a 'grid number' which was tied to their serving transformer, circuit and substation. These grid numbers are actually put on every pole (and other physical asset) in the company.
One of my engineering tasks was to review and correct errors in the database. At times, reports were generated that showed one small transformer feeding 50 or 100 customers (impossible without burning it up). A quick field review showed that many customers had been assigned to a few grid numbers many miles away. My suspicion was that some engineers were completing their paperwork sitting in a bar and these grid numbers were the ones visible out the front window.
Fast forward to a few years ago: My cabin (build recently) lost power when a tree took out my service line during a large storm. After doing repairs, I called the power company (I no longer worked for for the past few decades). I told the service rep that I would be ready to have the transformer re-energized. She said, "Sorry. We have to wait for the other customers on that transformer to have their services inspected." Well, I happen to be down a long, lonely road. And my cabin is the only one feeding from that point. I know this because that used to be my business. I explained this to the c.s.r. She said, "But the computer says ..."
"The computer's data is screwed up. It was screwed up 20 years ago when I worked there. It still is. Send a lineman out to put the fuse back in." She did.
If this little anecdote reflects the current state of even a fraction of our utility infrastructure, its going to take much more than a few smart meters to straighten this mess out.
Once upon a time, power utilities ran their lines overhead. One result of this is that trees falling in storms and other similar events would disrupt power. Thankfully, this construction technique has been abandoned in all but a few third world countries.
Back a few jobs ago, I was given a 'company owned device' (a pager) to take home when I was on call. But I was compensated for that duty. Otherwise, when I left the company premises, I was effectively incommunicado. Later on, I worked for another outfit that thought employees were supposed to be reachable 24/7, at the bosses whim. We had company pagers to carry when we were in the factory, but we left them in our desks after working hours. They wanted our phone numbers, so I gave them the land line number. Chat with my answering machine all you want.
I see the requirement to purchase your own mobile device as a back door way to ensuring that you will be reachable 24/7. Without compensation.
Sir,
We select the 0.3 percent of revenue payment option. We have enclosed a check for $0.00 to cover all past and future expected revenue.
Signed, The FreeTards
" ...to accommodate unconventionals like natural gas ...will be enormously difficult"
I stopped right there. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Conversion to natural gas is trivially simple and is going on rapidly as gas prices drop. The new generation can practically be dropped in in place of old coal plants. And it can be brought on line much faster than coal can when electrical loads rise. So it's a no brainer.
Yeah, solar is a different issue. But solar is tiny compared to potential natural gas capacity.
Undersea mining of methane hydrate may present some technical difficulties. But not to the electrical grid. Once that methane source is piped onto shore, its just natural gas and can be plugged into the existing infrastructure.
Whoops!
Trouble is, we are the ones that get hit in the ass by it.
I have drawn a red line. Do not cross it or I shall draw another.
"What party balloons?", he replies in a squeaky voice.
So we have to prevent that from happening. No doubt, there will be a unique hardware reset key, available upon request from the manufacturer. Which means key management and a record of who legally owns each weapon.
No thanks. If you want to register guns, just say so.