And the current government is proposing to change exactly that: I don't think any party of any hue is in favour of encouraging deliberate sloth and recklessness...
Indeed, except that all the rest of us have to pick up the tab if you make *no* effort to plan ahead. I know which route I favour you taking...
I'm not big on slaving now in the hopes of being happy when I'm 80, but I'm not so selfish or silly as to assume that someone else will have me live like a king if I recklessly failed to put anything away.
Besides, as I understand UK law where I am, if I drop dead before taking my pension then my family get the contents tax free. In which case an early death can be a huge gift to any offspring. A gamble with little downside overall.
I never worked at GS and have not signed any NDAs with them, and I can freely point out that a fair chunk of people that I knew at GS were... ahem... needlessly difficult, and the good people I knew there generally did not like the environment.
Hurrah! Correct. Fraud was the core of the problem, and the fact that most of the market participants had no independent way to value what they were buying or selling (derivatives or otherwise) and acted as if that wasn't a problem. It WAS!
I sat next to and worked with one of Lehman's main credit quants and I'd say at least half of that was his view from before the implosion was visible.
Then it's clear that you haven't met many of the fun people. I saw far more empty bitching in academia (which is why I decided to exit relatively quickly with an MSc rather than a PhD) than I've encountered in finance. And the latter is closer to being a functioning meritocracy than the former, at least in IT. People who talk big but fail to deliver do get shoved out with pleasing frequency.
I've had well over a decade in finance, dotcoms, etc, etc, and most of it has been tremendous fun, with the opportunity to make my corner of the world a better place, and it has paid well.
Agreed. I work in finance and could easily earn twice what I currently do (I don't fight too hard about rates and currently only work 3 days per week) and yet I think I'm happier than if I took that extra money since I have lots of time to work on my own projects, including renewables stuff to make the world a slightly better place, and I get to see my kids much more... In fact, knowing that you aren't competing to be the richest in this sector is a blessing, and I *am* doing good stuff now, not waiting. (And being in a small house also meant that I met my zero-carbon goal sooner!)
The assertions in your last sentence are false and have no particular current scientific support. Repeating them to support a bigoted viewpoint doesn't make any of them right. Or kind. Or indeed "Christian" as I understand the term.
Homosexual attraction, like any other kind of sexual preference, is influenced by a variety of factors; most important of all of those factors is conditioning (like, allowing/encouraging yourself to think homosexual thoughts, or hanging around with homosexuals, for example).
No.
That's a persistent foul canard with no factual support which blames/punishes people for the way they were born.
If you swap over the homo- for hetero- and read it again, it would still be foul and wrong.
What about blaming people for being black or female while you're at it; that also used to be very popular.
1) Thanks for your gracious reply. Microsoft the company annoys me too, through what has been described for another company as "aggressive stupidity".
2) Thanks for recasting your answer. What annoyed me about your answer was the apparent assumption that your touchy-feely state emotional matters to us or should: this is/. not BigBrother, and I hope we do analysis and thinking here. You evidently do.
3) Paragraph breaks just seem to happen for me (they'll probably fail this time). Maybe I have "plain text" set in my preferences as the default.
And I'm distressed that you think that your profanity adds to the discussion at all.
Why is your deranged state of mind so important? Are you a CEO or President or respected scientist or commentator or indeed anyone with achievements and stature and a track record that would suggest that taking your emotional temperature would be of any value to the rest of the known universe?
I won't ask who's basement you're living in, even if this is/.
They're offsetting a completely crass centrally-subsidised energy pricing scheme which is bankrupt. You can't blame the metering for the failure for the market to be operating sensibly at all at the retail level (as I understand things).
You have some school-level physics revision to do: *energy* is lost from the lines. Power is an instantaneous measure of the rate of energy loss, but energy is what really matters in terms for the "paying" above.
And smart metering apart from anything else means so many things to different people that you can't possibly invalidate all of those concepts and their utilities, never mind what you think you're talking about.
I am in the UK. I have spent a little time looking at demand control of various flavours (industrial and domestic), wholesale and retail pricing, suppression of peak demand to reduce infrastructure costs, allowing more intermittent generation on to the grid, etc, etc. You simply cannot airily wave your hand and say "it's all crap." In fact it's already happening and useful and we're only arguing about how much and what form.
"For one thing you can simply place them 30m or so above sea level with a risk factor of 0."
Not zero, not ever zero. Never mind that a strong quake or aftershock... ahem... just like the one that happened, could topple them or simply damage an already-spinning generator assembly, what about, >30m funnelled waves, asteroids, and successively less likely but NOT ZERO probability adverse events, etc.
If you are going to take the piss out of engineers for being sloppy, etc, then hold yourself to a similar standard please.
Unless you're heating water wayyyy beyond DHW requirements, not so much. Look at my favourite "ECO-CUTE" CO2 refrigerant air-to-water devices. Indeed, pair a Sanyo HIT PV panel (module efficiency 18%+) with a Sanyo ECO-CUTE ASHP (CoP ~3).
I still "can't afford" a car. I decided that PV was more important to me over the last few years for example. And yes I see PV going up on roofs around me (and I'm working to make it happen faster).
Typical install cost of a typical 2.5kWp installation in the UK is now ~£10,000, which would probably be not far off $10,000 in the US like-for-like. That system will deliver about 50% of typical UK household's electricity consumption BTW, so you might have to double it to match a US household's usage, but conservation isn't that hard (we cut from 3x mean to 0.5x mean since 2007, see http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html for details).
I haggled my last PV system down in price by a factor of two: it's handy to know that deflation is happening and then force your installer to share their otherwise-inflated margin with you.
Apples and oranges for your solar thermal and PV: the former gathers low-grade heat and the latter high-grade electricity. 1kWh of electricity can provide far more than 1kWh of usable heat (see the definition of a heat-pumps's Coefficient of Performance) and indeed the ratio is about that between PV and thermal nominal capture efficiency. (ST is more like 50% capture efficiency AFAIK, BTW.)
And I have my (small) roof covered with PV that generates twice what we consume in a year to make us net-zero-carbon. I don't see what you think is going to go obsolete about the grid or grid-tie inverters in the next decade which should cover my financial payback (though I don't much care about that as it happens). Inverters are nothing like as expensive as you seem to imagine.
I want to promote people's ability to use the code that I publish *any way they like*, so I use a BSD-like licence: GPL would severely limit what some users could do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Your attachment to F is a matter of habit though I'm sympathetic.
0C is freezing (literally), 10C is chilly, 20C is warm, 30C is hot for example, 40C is pretty unbearable for me.
(And yes, I still do think of that as 32F, 50F, 70F, 90F, ... ahem ... HOT also.)
Rgds
Damon
tmtm;dnr?
The evidence is that cities are less (or at least no more) resource-intensive per capital than rural areas...
Besides, some of us like to be able to walk places, meet people, and aren't agricultural specialists.
Rgds
Damon
That's no way to speak of our elected representatives.
Rgds
Damon
People who liked the Communicator line?
Rgds
Damon
And the current government is proposing to change exactly that: I don't think any party of any hue is in favour of encouraging deliberate sloth and recklessness...
Rgds
Damon
Indeed, except that all the rest of us have to pick up the tab if you make *no* effort to plan ahead. I know which route I favour you taking...
I'm not big on slaving now in the hopes of being happy when I'm 80, but I'm not so selfish or silly as to assume that someone else will have me live like a king if I recklessly failed to put anything away.
Besides, as I understand UK law where I am, if I drop dead before taking my pension then my family get the contents tax free. In which case an early death can be a huge gift to any offspring. A gamble with little downside overall.
Rgds
Damon
I never worked at GS and have not signed any NDAs with them, and I can freely point out that a fair chunk of people that I knew at GS were ... ahem ... needlessly difficult, and the good people I knew there generally did not like the environment.
Rgds
Damon
Hurrah! Correct. Fraud was the core of the problem, and the fact that most of the market participants had no independent way to value what they were buying or selling (derivatives or otherwise) and acted as if that wasn't a problem. It WAS!
I sat next to and worked with one of Lehman's main credit quants and I'd say at least half of that was his view from before the implosion was visible.
Rgds
Damon
Then it's clear that you haven't met many of the fun people. I saw far more empty bitching in academia (which is why I decided to exit relatively quickly with an MSc rather than a PhD) than I've encountered in finance. And the latter is closer to being a functioning meritocracy than the former, at least in IT. People who talk big but fail to deliver do get shoved out with pleasing frequency.
I've had well over a decade in finance, dotcoms, etc, etc, and most of it has been tremendous fun, with the opportunity to make my corner of the world a better place, and it has paid well.
Rgds
Damon
Agreed. I work in finance and could easily earn twice what I currently do (I don't fight too hard about rates and currently only work 3 days per week) and yet I think I'm happier than if I took that extra money since I have lots of time to work on my own projects, including renewables stuff to make the world a slightly better place, and I get to see my kids much more... In fact, knowing that you aren't competing to be the richest in this sector is a blessing, and I *am* doing good stuff now, not waiting. (And being in a small house also meant that I met my zero-carbon goal sooner!)
Rgds
Damon
The assertions in your last sentence are false and have no particular current scientific support. Repeating them to support a bigoted viewpoint doesn't make any of them right. Or kind. Or indeed "Christian" as I understand the term.
Rgds
Damon
Homosexual attraction, like any other kind of sexual preference, is influenced by a variety of factors; most important of all of those factors is conditioning (like, allowing/encouraging yourself to think homosexual thoughts, or hanging around with homosexuals, for example).
No.
That's a persistent foul canard with no factual support which blames/punishes people for the way they were born.
If you swap over the homo- for hetero- and read it again, it would still be foul and wrong.
What about blaming people for being black or female while you're at it; that also used to be very popular.
Rgds
Damon
At least your stereotype manages nearly two whole dimensions...
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
1) Thanks for your gracious reply. Microsoft the company annoys me too, through what has been described for another company as "aggressive stupidity".
2) Thanks for recasting your answer. What annoyed me about your answer was the apparent assumption that your touchy-feely state emotional matters to us or should: this is /. not BigBrother, and I hope we do analysis and thinking here. You evidently do.
3) Paragraph breaks just seem to happen for me (they'll probably fail this time). Maybe I have "plain text" set in my preferences as the default.
Rgds
Damon
And I'm distressed that you think that your profanity adds to the discussion at all.
Why is your deranged state of mind so important? Are you a CEO or President or respected scientist or commentator or indeed anyone with achievements and stature and a track record that would suggest that taking your emotional temperature would be of any value to the rest of the known universe?
I won't ask who's basement you're living in, even if this is /.
Rgds
Damon
They're offsetting a completely crass centrally-subsidised energy pricing scheme which is bankrupt. You can't blame the metering for the failure for the market to be operating sensibly at all at the retail level (as I understand things).
Rgds
Damon
You have some school-level physics revision to do: *energy* is lost from the lines. Power is an instantaneous measure of the rate of energy loss, but energy is what really matters in terms for the "paying" above.
And smart metering apart from anything else means so many things to different people that you can't possibly invalidate all of those concepts and their utilities, never mind what you think you're talking about.
I am in the UK. I have spent a little time looking at demand control of various flavours (industrial and domestic), wholesale and retail pricing, suppression of peak demand to reduce infrastructure costs, allowing more intermittent generation on to the grid, etc, etc. You simply cannot airily wave your hand and say "it's all crap." In fact it's already happening and useful and we're only arguing about how much and what form.
Rgds
Damon
"For one thing you can simply place them 30m or so above sea level with a risk factor of 0."
Not zero, not ever zero. Never mind that a strong quake or aftershock ... ahem ... just like the one that happened, could topple them or simply damage an already-spinning generator assembly, what about, >30m funnelled waves, asteroids, and successively less likely but NOT ZERO probability adverse events, etc.
If you are going to take the piss out of engineers for being sloppy, etc, then hold yourself to a similar standard please.
Rgds
Damon
Unless you're heating water wayyyy beyond DHW requirements, not so much. Look at my favourite "ECO-CUTE" CO2 refrigerant air-to-water devices. Indeed, pair a Sanyo HIT PV panel (module efficiency 18%+) with a Sanyo ECO-CUTE ASHP (CoP ~3).
Rgds
Damon
No, I'm hitting your points on the head IMHO.
I still "can't afford" a car. I decided that PV was more important to me over the last few years for example. And yes I see PV going up on roofs around me (and I'm working to make it happen faster).
Typical install cost of a typical 2.5kWp installation in the UK is now ~£10,000, which would probably be not far off $10,000 in the US like-for-like. That system will deliver about 50% of typical UK household's electricity consumption BTW, so you might have to double it to match a US household's usage, but conservation isn't that hard (we cut from 3x mean to 0.5x mean since 2007, see http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html for details).
I haggled my last PV system down in price by a factor of two: it's handy to know that deflation is happening and then force your installer to share their otherwise-inflated margin with you.
Rgds
Damon
Sure, apathy is a great leveller. But if you put PV on your roof then there will be some on your neighbourhood.
While you've been musing, PV prices have been falling, and GWp have been installed worldwide.
I still don't own a car: does that prove that cars are useless and unchanging?
Rgds
Damon
Not on this planet, and particularly not in the UK and US.
http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
Rgds
Damon
Apples and oranges for your solar thermal and PV: the former gathers low-grade heat and the latter high-grade electricity. 1kWh of electricity can provide far more than 1kWh of usable heat (see the definition of a heat-pumps's Coefficient of Performance) and indeed the ratio is about that between PV and thermal nominal capture efficiency. (ST is more like 50% capture efficiency AFAIK, BTW.)
And I have my (small) roof covered with PV that generates twice what we consume in a year to make us net-zero-carbon. I don't see what you think is going to go obsolete about the grid or grid-tie inverters in the next decade which should cover my financial payback (though I don't much care about that as it happens). Inverters are nothing like as expensive as you seem to imagine.
Here's my site which covers what I've done: http://www.earth.org.uk/
Rgds
Damon
I want to promote people's ability to use the code that I publish *any way they like*, so I use a BSD-like licence: GPL would severely limit what some users could do with it.
Rgds
Damon