This is exactly right. Each department would most certainly like to improve efficiencies by streamlining the workflow with IT. The problem is that implementing that IT costs money above and beyond what they've got right now. How to pay for it?
Incidentally, this would have been a great place for stimulus money. Inject money into the system right now (stimulus) in a way that lowers long term costs. Then, once it gets up and running (after months to years of defining, planning, implementing, and testing), you trim down those departments either through reassigning or through attrition.
Yeah yeah, I know around here the perception is that civil servants exist in this parallel twilight zone where they lean on shovels all day at best or interfere with individuals at worst, but that perception simply isn't reality. Some departments are better than others, often because of leadership and resource availability, just like in the private sector and the non-profit sector. Hopefully the CIO can identify opportunities and find the funding to implement savings.
On a side note, this does suggest a way to find those savings: check printing budgets over time. It seems that printing and then re-entering information may be common, and printing budgets may be helpful in identifying where these processes exist.
I suspect that you mean that, despite it being my business, too bad. That's fine -- that's your opinion. That doesn't change the reality that many things that could happen on your property impact my quality of life.
American (and, I suspect, Western) law has a long history of recognizing the impact we have on each other with respect to property. It's not just zoning laws, which limit everything from the shape of the building to where it's located on the property to what uses are permitted on the property and inside the building. Building codes require your building to meet standards with respect to safety, energy, accessibility, etc. Environmental laws prohibit certain dumping and other activities on your property, as do agricultural laws. Other laws prevent you from prohibiting for-profit companies (aka utilities) from seizing parts of your land above or below ground for their benefit. Still other laws can force you to sell your land to the government without your consent. Naturally, you're not free to do certain things to other animals, humans included, just because it's on your property -- even with their human adult sober consent. Heck, in most places you're not even allowed to be naked on your property if visible from the street.
Your property is not a sovereign land -- it's part of a larger community and jurisdiction.
Here's the thing: if you don't like the law, lobby to get it changed. Changing local law isn't hard. You've got to learn about the law, learn why somebodies thought it was a good idea in the first place, and then rally for support for the change. It takes work, but it isn't hard.
You can either throw your rant on slashdot, even though your extreme property rights viewpoint doesn't mesh with the vast majority of property owners or citizens in the western world, or you can find a specific law that you think is unjust and go out and get popular support for changing it. Me: I'm doing the latter, as I'm interested in reducing the minimum parking lot requirements in my town (eliminating the requirements aren't going to happen anytime soon, so I'll work on making things better even if the end result still isn't as perfect as I'd like).
P.S. Your "beef" is that the public doesn't vote on every law directly? Are you kidding? Welcome, welcome to American government at all levels, for the past 200+ years. Hint: politicians like being elected. If you want the law changed, make it clear to them that voters want the law changed. If the politicians don't change the law, change the politicians. That may be hard on a national level, but it's wonderfully easy on a local level.
Alabama congresscritters vote to cut taxes and argue that we should reduce government. The citizens call Obama everything from a socialist to a fascist, and argue that they are Taxed Enough Already (that's the TEA in teabagger) and that government is full of waste. Yet when the Democrats want to cut a program that hasn't produced in an effort to save money, the Alabamanites are upset?
When all costs are included, nuclear is not financially cheaper than coal. Those costs include regulatory, security, and yes, financial -- both loans and insurance. Coal plants are similar to nuclear plants in that they have long lifetimes, and tough to sell. Yet IOUs and IPPs manage to get loans to build coal and natural gas power plants, even massive ones, all the time. Banks are tight on lending to nuclear because of all of the additional risks (ranging from NIMBY to regulatory to terrorism), and to guarantee the loan is an actual subsidy, by definition. The subsidy serves to pay some of the cost (risk) of the loan, because if there is a problem the US gov't eats the loss instead of a bank. There's an entire industry build around pricing risk (the insurance industry), and so anytime a government reduces risk to others through a guarantee, they are subsidizing.
P.S. Of course a bank can foreclose on a nuclear power plant -- they could sell it to any other IOU or even an IPP. They could also structure the loan to seize some other asset instead -- a fossil fuel power plant or two, or any other asset.
Stay at home. Find a local organization that needs help -- although many more need help with simple HTML and hosting than with bigger networks. Plenty of local agencies can find a good use for counselors.
You'll spend far less money, waste far less time in transit, have a lower carbon footprint, and help your own community. I'm *sure* that there are plenty of people and organizations in your own area who need help... why not start there?
My bet is that Las Vegas zoning code specifically restricts commercial activity from hotel rooms themselves. I've never looked at the Las Vegas zoning code, but I have looked at the codes in my area of the country -- and hotels are only allowed to have certain activities in certain areas of the hotel.
Commercial activity in the rooms themselves is verboten in every code I've seen (about a dozen), although again, I've never looked at the Las Vegas zoning code (or any other Las Vegas laws that might or might not apply, including laws on lodging houses of various kinds, health codes, etc).
Given that women make up more than half of the population of the United States, and more than half of the voting population of the United States, they are most certainly not a special interest. They are the majority.
I hope you don't think of women as being a special interest, short of finding them especially interesting.
In Massachusetts, it works like this: if you don't have insurance, and if you can afford it*, then you pay an extra tax. This is to help offset the aggregate financial strain that you and other like you put on the state government who reimburses hospitals for the free care you take despite being able to afford insurance.
Now, I don't like the law, mainly because I don't like the idea of a gov't requiring me to enter in to a deal with a private company**. But, you don't go to jail... not even close. Don't let the facts get in the way of your rhetoric my friend.
* Yes, we can quibble about just how high the bar of "afford" should be. ** No, it's not like car insurance. I don't have to own a car -- I can choose to walk, cycle, ride mass transit, and bum rides. I do just that. I'm not legally even allowed to end my life in order to avoid being mandated to carry health insurance. I'm not quibbling with the wisdom of carrying insurance, but rather the gov't forcing me to enter a contract with a third party.
The payoff could be big for TV owners, said Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer. Average first-year savings from reduced electricity use would be an estimated $30 per set.
Now CA's electricity prices are higher than many states, maybe even as much as double. If the TV set costs you "a few bucks more" then you'll come out ahead thanks to the California regulations.
So, to recap: you'll save money, and you'll reduce (unnecessary) demand on the grid which will help prevent building new gas fired power plants. What's the problem again?
Obama began working for peace long before inauguration day. He fought to refine the death penalty in Illinois as a state senator to reduce chances of the innocent being put to death, and was largely responsible for brokering the deal that did just that. He worked for nuclear non-proliferation in the US Senate, working with Lugar (R-IN) for funding and policy to destroy assorted weapons. On the campaign trail, his words (yes, words!) spoke of a new American policy, one of peace.
Now, maybe you feel that those deeds are sufficient, maybe you don't. But, to suggest that his body of work under consideration can only begin once he was inaugurated president is sheer folly.
Acela isn't as fast as that, but it's arguably a bigger security issue, as it runs through Boston, NYC, Philly, and DC downtowns.
It works just like a commuter rail train. You arrive at the station. The train pulls up, you've got a few minutes to get on, tops. You get on the train, grab a seat, throw your suitcase overhead or at the end of the car, and relax. Pull out your laptop, make a call, or sit in the quiet car for relaxation.
Everything in your scenario is pure FUD. I'd bet the ridership will match that of Acela on the East Coast -- lots of business riders, often going to and from on the same day.
Waste of money? Really? At 12,000 barrels a year at $65, that's $8,000,000 saved each year. $33 million is four years worth of savings. That's a great investment, given that nautical engines have more than a four year lifespan.
Never mind that getting oil to the fueling point may require oil, troops, and other logistical expenses. Never mind that this allows the vessel to go longer without refueling, which may have it's own benefits.
If the $33M gets them the 12,000 barrels saved each year, then this will certainly pay itself back in dollars, logistical efficiency, and improved capabilities.
Becuase[sic] wind doesn't meet the needs of today's energy grid (baseline power needs, peak power needs)
Nuclear doesn't meet peak power needs either. It turns out that multiple sources can be used together -- every wind turbine spinning replaces MWh generated by gas or coal. Build enough un/negatively correlated turbines and you can count a fraction of wind generation as base. The rest replaces gas turbine output. No engineer is claiming that wind can, by itself, replace all other power demands. It can certainly play a role replacing some fossil fuel power generation, and it's nuclear waste-free!
It takes alot[sic] to maintain such a distrubuted[sic] generation system
But not so much that we can't do it. It also takes a lot to underwrite the insurance for nuclear power. So much, in fact, that nuclear power companies don't pay for it -- the US gov't does. Somehow that tidbit, a tidbit that makes nuclear power one of the most expensive options around, is rarely mentioned around here.
some people don't like the aesthetics
Some people don't like the aesthetics of coal power plant smokestacks, giant fences around nuclear plants, or what's left of the mountain after the coal or nuclear fuel is mined. No energy solution is perfect.
they grind up birds like no tomorrow.
No, no they don't. The 1980s called, and they want their built with small fast moving blades, non-monopole design, and located in bird migration routes wind turbines back.
Sure they will be nice here and there but they don't have the potential to solve the problems we have now while nuclear does.
Nuclear has the potential to be part of the solution, but it too can't solve the problem whole-hog. Nuclear isn't financially efficient now, if you try to use it for anything more than base load your efficiency drops like a rock. Solar can be used to shave some peak (in much of the world peak demand is very positively correlated with hot sunny days), wind can be used to reduce the need for fossil-based intermediate demand when it's blowing, and biomass, natural gas, and water pumped uphill (battery) can be used to make up the difference.
Enviromentalism needs to wake up and face the fact that the problem is now so bad that idealism must take a back seat to pragmatics.
The pragmatic solution is not to pooh-pooh wind. The pragmatic solution is to use a mix of non-fossil fuel approaches to (1) meet our electricity desires, while (2) reducing the amount of carbon emissions we generate as much as we can. Wind can't do all of that to maximum effect. Neither can nuclear. Neither can solar. Neither can biomass. Nor hydro. Nor natural gas. Nor whatever comes next (tidal?). But, using all of them, whenever feasible, will maximize our reduction of carbon emissions in electricity generation.
some of the increase will be in natural gas usage, but that will drive the price of natural gas upward too. The cost of installing and maintaining solar or wind won't increase. Though it's true there may be more demand for solar and wind infrastructure (cells, turbines), but even in spite of that one-time cost I suspect that the end result is that relative to the cost of generating electricity from coal and natural gas, renewable energy will get cheaper.
End result: 1a. Higher electricity prices for us. 1b. Less electricity consumption by us. 2. Less carbon emission and air pollution for us.
I'll take that trade. Before anyone objects to (1b), yes there is demand elasticity in electricity consumption. Anybody who's had a dad tell him or her to turn the damn lights off when you leave the room knows that. Anybody who's installed a more efficient light bulb, refrigerator, air conditioner, or swamp cooler knows that too.
I haven't had cable television in 7 years. I don't miss it. For the money I save, I
* Netflix
* Go to the movies
* Pay for the newspaper
* Pay the late fees on my library books
* Pay admission to museums
At the end of the day, cable isn't offering us anything we can't see already on Netflix or on youtube or hulu et al. So really -- why pay $700/yr or whatever when we can watch all the programming that we really like by pulling it instead of waiting for it to be pushed?
P.S. Take a Kill-A-Watt and check out how much electricity your cable box + DVR + ??? are using on standby and calculate the additional burden on your electric bill. I'd bet it's a combined 40W or so, good for another $50+ a year.
If everybody in the US switched to commuting in a Prius tomorrow, it would have a negligible impact on total CO2 production (the vast majority of CO2 comes from electricity generation)
Negatory. In 2002 tUSA consumed the following energy (quads) source: 8.1 nuclear power 2.6 hydro 2.3 biomass 23.2 nat gas 22.6 coal 39.2 oil
The oil goes almost universally for transportation. The coal goes almost universally for electricity [as does hydro and nuclear power]. About 20% of nat gas goes for elec, the rest for industrial and residential heat processes.
If everyone switched to a Prius tomorrow, our fuel consumption would go down by [pulled out of my butt] 60%. That means our CO2 emissions would drop by at least 30% [since nat gas, hydro, and nuke have lower C02 per unit energy]. That, sir, makes you quite wrong.
Additionally, the statement
Energy efficiency and CO2 production are only weakly related
has me scratching my head too. When we burn fossil fuels we get CO2. The energy efficiency is the percentage of CO2 that goes toward useful work is it's energy efficiency. Every joule, kWh, gallon of gas, etc that's not wasted is CO2 not spewed in the air for no useful purpose. No sir, energy efficiency and CO2 are directly related.
Finally (with asbestos underwears on) I'd remind you that nuclear power is not CO2 free. Not only is there plenty of CO2 involved in the construction of the plant itself thanks to the loads of concrete, construction equipment, etc., but the nuclear fuel doesn't come from flowers grown in the front lawn -- it has to be mined, often in Australia, and then shipped to the power plants. Less CO2 than coal? For sure. Than nat gas? Yip. But, not zero. Will nuclear power be part of the get-off-carbon solution? I'm not sure. If wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and efficiency are enough to get us by, I hope we don't build more nuclear. If those other things aren't, let the new generation of nuclear power begin, but only as much as can't be provided by these other non-carbon means which don't rely on dangerous fuels from other nations.
I gamed the rating of a movie on Netflix, just for kicks. King Kung Fu had a pretty low rating, mostly contributions of 1 star from a number of reviewers. So, to get a feel for the size of the denominator, I had about 6 or 7 friends rate it five star. Sure enough, it was enough to boost it a five tenths of a point.
Is the film any good? I dunno. It's 71 in my queue though.
Boucher is great for this post, and I'm thrilled that he'll be there. I'm also thrilled that he'll be giving up leadership of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. Boucher is a coal guy from a coal region of southwestern Virginia. He was weak on energy and environmental standards relative to the Democratic caucus.
So, this is good for Net Neutrality and other Internet issues. It's also good for climate change and other environmental issues.
P.S. Like Boucher? Click on my sig link and send him some bucks!
It's far easier to just count the votes on the day of the election during a slow time where all of the security and verification process is already in place than to set up a distinct process for absentees.
Now in some places, the ballot merely has to be postmarked by election day; those individual ballots may arrive after election day and will be counted later; that's part of the reason why initial results are preliminary and aren't made official by the secretary of state for a few weeks later.
In places where voting is done on scantron machines, they simply take the paper scantron absentee ballot, bring it in a sealed envelope to the voting precinct or ward, and sometime in the day when it's slow [usually 10-11 am or 1-3 pm] they open the envelopes and feed the ballots in to the machines.
Do you have any links, documents, or personal experience to suggest otherwise?
The Democrats aren't much different. They pander to poor people
Um, no they don't. The Democrats target working class voters. Labor, so to speak. The middle class.
If you "pander" to poor people, the middle class gets irate and votes the other way, and you lose in a landslide. If the Dems help poor people, it is out of an actual interest in helping their lives get better, not out of political benefit. Do the Dems promise government programs? Sure -- but they generally target everyone who is "not rich", and not John McCain's $4,999,999 not rich either. The Dems' programs generally target the upper-middle class right on down to the destitute.
As for gun control -- neither side panders. The conservatives stick to their principle that government regulation and intervention is bad, and the Democrats to their principle that collective good may outweigh individual harms.
If you show no cash transactions [or have no records of cash transactions], the IRS will use actuary tables to "determine" what percentage of your business should be cash, and then use your credit card records to deduce how much cash you brought in -- and they'll tax you on it. And assess penalties. And interest. And so-forth.
If you're going to cheat, just cheat a little. Cheat too much, and you're hosed.
All of the interesting IT work has been done; now it's pure voter ID and GOTV [get out the vote].
But the action is just beginning at local races. Get yourself involved in a state rep or state senate race. The budgets are tiny, so your free skills are incredibly valuable, be it for OS, database, webserver/site, even just setting up the computers, phones, and fax machines in the office.
It's true that the power of state legislators is orders of magnitude less than POTUS, but it's also true that the odds of your effort making a tangible difference in the probability of your candidate winning are orders of magnitude higher.
Keep in mind that state legislatures are the "minor leagues" for the US Congress, and that often states are the testing grounds for national legislation. More legislators of your political persuasion in your state is good for your governing philosophy over the long term, and your skills will be much more meaningful and appreciated by the local campaign.
The US has tons of limits on free speech, including but not limited to restrictions with respect to
* perjury
* profanity
* sealed courtroom/trial
* threats
* slander and libel
* classified information
* treason
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly right. Each department would most certainly like to improve efficiencies by streamlining the workflow with IT. The problem is that implementing that IT costs money above and beyond what they've got right now. How to pay for it?
Incidentally, this would have been a great place for stimulus money. Inject money into the system right now (stimulus) in a way that lowers long term costs. Then, once it gets up and running (after months to years of defining, planning, implementing, and testing), you trim down those departments either through reassigning or through attrition.
Yeah yeah, I know around here the perception is that civil servants exist in this parallel twilight zone where they lean on shovels all day at best or interfere with individuals at worst, but that perception simply isn't reality. Some departments are better than others, often because of leadership and resource availability, just like in the private sector and the non-profit sector. Hopefully the CIO can identify opportunities and find the funding to implement savings.
On a side note, this does suggest a way to find those savings: check printing budgets over time. It seems that printing and then re-entering information may be common, and printing budgets may be helpful in identifying where these processes exist.
I suspect that you mean that, despite it being my business, too bad. That's fine -- that's your opinion. That doesn't change the reality that many things that could happen on your property impact my quality of life.
American (and, I suspect, Western) law has a long history of recognizing the impact we have on each other with respect to property. It's not just zoning laws, which limit everything from the shape of the building to where it's located on the property to what uses are permitted on the property and inside the building. Building codes require your building to meet standards with respect to safety, energy, accessibility, etc. Environmental laws prohibit certain dumping and other activities on your property, as do agricultural laws. Other laws prevent you from prohibiting for-profit companies (aka utilities) from seizing parts of your land above or below ground for their benefit. Still other laws can force you to sell your land to the government without your consent. Naturally, you're not free to do certain things to other animals, humans included, just because it's on your property -- even with their human adult sober consent. Heck, in most places you're not even allowed to be naked on your property if visible from the street.
Your property is not a sovereign land -- it's part of a larger community and jurisdiction.
Here's the thing: if you don't like the law, lobby to get it changed. Changing local law isn't hard. You've got to learn about the law, learn why somebodies thought it was a good idea in the first place, and then rally for support for the change. It takes work, but it isn't hard.
You can either throw your rant on slashdot, even though your extreme property rights viewpoint doesn't mesh with the vast majority of property owners or citizens in the western world, or you can find a specific law that you think is unjust and go out and get popular support for changing it. Me: I'm doing the latter, as I'm interested in reducing the minimum parking lot requirements in my town (eliminating the requirements aren't going to happen anytime soon, so I'll work on making things better even if the end result still isn't as perfect as I'd like).
P.S. Your "beef" is that the public doesn't vote on every law directly? Are you kidding? Welcome, welcome to American government at all levels, for the past 200+ years. Hint: politicians like being elected. If you want the law changed, make it clear to them that voters want the law changed. If the politicians don't change the law, change the politicians. That may be hard on a national level, but it's wonderfully easy on a local level.
So, to recap:
Alabama congresscritters vote to cut taxes and argue that we should reduce government. The citizens call Obama everything from a socialist to a fascist, and argue that they are Taxed Enough Already (that's the TEA in teabagger) and that government is full of waste. Yet when the Democrats want to cut a program that hasn't produced in an effort to save money, the Alabamanites are upset?
Pure hypocracy.
When all costs are included, nuclear is not financially cheaper than coal. Those costs include regulatory, security, and yes, financial -- both loans and insurance. Coal plants are similar to nuclear plants in that they have long lifetimes, and tough to sell. Yet IOUs and IPPs manage to get loans to build coal and natural gas power plants, even massive ones, all the time. Banks are tight on lending to nuclear because of all of the additional risks (ranging from NIMBY to regulatory to terrorism), and to guarantee the loan is an actual subsidy, by definition. The subsidy serves to pay some of the cost (risk) of the loan, because if there is a problem the US gov't eats the loss instead of a bank. There's an entire industry build around pricing risk (the insurance industry), and so anytime a government reduces risk to others through a guarantee, they are subsidizing.
P.S. Of course a bank can foreclose on a nuclear power plant -- they could sell it to any other IOU or even an IPP. They could also structure the loan to seize some other asset instead -- a fossil fuel power plant or two, or any other asset.
Stay at home. Find a local organization that needs help -- although many more need help with simple HTML and hosting than with bigger networks. Plenty of local agencies can find a good use for counselors.
You'll spend far less money, waste far less time in transit, have a lower carbon footprint, and help your own community. I'm *sure* that there are plenty of people and organizations in your own area who need help... why not start there?
Using the premises for an unlawful purpose or act
My bet is that Las Vegas zoning code specifically restricts commercial activity from hotel rooms themselves. I've never looked at the Las Vegas zoning code, but I have looked at the codes in my area of the country -- and hotels are only allowed to have certain activities in certain areas of the hotel.
Commercial activity in the rooms themselves is verboten in every code I've seen (about a dozen), although again, I've never looked at the Las Vegas zoning code (or any other Las Vegas laws that might or might not apply, including laws on lodging houses of various kinds, health codes, etc).
Given that women make up more than half of the population of the United States, and more than half of the voting population of the United States, they are most certainly not a special interest. They are the majority.
I hope you don't think of women as being a special interest, short of finding them especially interesting.
In Massachusetts, it works like this:
if you don't have insurance, and if you can afford it*, then you pay an extra tax. This is to help offset the aggregate financial strain that you and other like you put on the state government who reimburses hospitals for the free care you take despite being able to afford insurance.
Now, I don't like the law, mainly because I don't like the idea of a gov't requiring me to enter in to a deal with a private company**. But, you don't go to jail... not even close. Don't let the facts get in the way of your rhetoric my friend.
* Yes, we can quibble about just how high the bar of "afford" should be.
** No, it's not like car insurance. I don't have to own a car -- I can choose to walk, cycle, ride mass transit, and bum rides. I do just that. I'm not legally even allowed to end my life in order to avoid being mandated to carry health insurance. I'm not quibbling with the wisdom of carrying insurance, but rather the gov't forcing me to enter a contract with a third party.
From TFA:
The payoff could be big for TV owners, said Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer. Average first-year savings from reduced electricity use would be an estimated $30 per set.
Now CA's electricity prices are higher than many states, maybe even as much as double. If the TV set costs you "a few bucks more" then you'll come out ahead thanks to the California regulations.
So, to recap: you'll save money, and you'll reduce (unnecessary) demand on the grid which will help prevent building new gas fired power plants. What's the problem again?
Obama began working for peace long before inauguration day. He fought to refine the death penalty in Illinois as a state senator to reduce chances of the innocent being put to death, and was largely responsible for brokering the deal that did just that. He worked for nuclear non-proliferation in the US Senate, working with Lugar (R-IN) for funding and policy to destroy assorted weapons. On the campaign trail, his words (yes, words!) spoke of a new American policy, one of peace.
Now, maybe you feel that those deeds are sufficient, maybe you don't. But, to suggest that his body of work under consideration can only begin once he was inaugurated president is sheer folly.
Acela isn't as fast as that, but it's arguably a bigger security issue, as it runs through Boston, NYC, Philly, and DC downtowns.
It works just like a commuter rail train. You arrive at the station. The train pulls up, you've got a few minutes to get on, tops. You get on the train, grab a seat, throw your suitcase overhead or at the end of the car, and relax. Pull out your laptop, make a call, or sit in the quiet car for relaxation.
Everything in your scenario is pure FUD. I'd bet the ridership will match that of Acela on the East Coast -- lots of business riders, often going to and from on the same day.
Waste of money? Really? At 12,000 barrels a year at $65, that's $8,000,000 saved each year. $33 million is four years worth of savings. That's a great investment, given that nautical engines have more than a four year lifespan.
Never mind that getting oil to the fueling point may require oil, troops, and other logistical expenses. Never mind that this allows the vessel to go longer without refueling, which may have it's own benefits.
If the $33M gets them the 12,000 barrels saved each year, then this will certainly pay itself back in dollars, logistical efficiency, and improved capabilities.
Becuase[sic] wind doesn't meet the needs of today's energy grid (baseline power needs, peak power needs)
Nuclear doesn't meet peak power needs either. It turns out that multiple sources can be used together -- every wind turbine spinning replaces MWh generated by gas or coal. Build enough un/negatively correlated turbines and you can count a fraction of wind generation as base. The rest replaces gas turbine output. No engineer is claiming that wind can, by itself, replace all other power demands. It can certainly play a role replacing some fossil fuel power generation, and it's nuclear waste-free!
It takes alot[sic] to maintain such a distrubuted[sic] generation system
But not so much that we can't do it. It also takes a lot to underwrite the insurance for nuclear power. So much, in fact, that nuclear power companies don't pay for it -- the US gov't does. Somehow that tidbit, a tidbit that makes nuclear power one of the most expensive options around, is rarely mentioned around here.
some people don't like the aesthetics
Some people don't like the aesthetics of coal power plant smokestacks, giant fences around nuclear plants, or what's left of the mountain after the coal or nuclear fuel is mined. No energy solution is perfect.
they grind up birds like no tomorrow.
No, no they don't. The 1980s called, and they want their built with small fast moving blades, non-monopole design, and located in bird migration routes wind turbines back.
Sure they will be nice here and there but they don't have the potential to solve the problems we have now while nuclear does.
Nuclear has the potential to be part of the solution, but it too can't solve the problem whole-hog. Nuclear isn't financially efficient now, if you try to use it for anything more than base load your efficiency drops like a rock. Solar can be used to shave some peak (in much of the world peak demand is very positively correlated with hot sunny days), wind can be used to reduce the need for fossil-based intermediate demand when it's blowing, and biomass, natural gas, and water pumped uphill (battery) can be used to make up the difference.
Enviromentalism needs to wake up and face the fact that the problem is now so bad that idealism must take a back seat to pragmatics.
The pragmatic solution is not to pooh-pooh wind. The pragmatic solution is to use a mix of non-fossil fuel approaches to (1) meet our electricity desires, while (2) reducing the amount of carbon emissions we generate as much as we can. Wind can't do all of that to maximum effect. Neither can nuclear. Neither can solar. Neither can biomass. Nor hydro. Nor natural gas. Nor whatever comes next (tidal?). But, using all of them, whenever feasible, will maximize our reduction of carbon emissions in electricity generation.
Why not support both?
some of the increase will be in natural gas usage, but that will drive the price of natural gas upward too. The cost of installing and maintaining solar or wind won't increase. Though it's true there may be more demand for solar and wind infrastructure (cells, turbines), but even in spite of that one-time cost I suspect that the end result is that relative to the cost of generating electricity from coal and natural gas, renewable energy will get cheaper.
End result:
1a. Higher electricity prices for us.
1b. Less electricity consumption by us.
2. Less carbon emission and air pollution for us.
I'll take that trade. Before anyone objects to (1b), yes there is demand elasticity in electricity consumption. Anybody who's had a dad tell him or her to turn the damn lights off when you leave the room knows that. Anybody who's installed a more efficient light bulb, refrigerator, air conditioner, or swamp cooler knows that too.
Frosted Mini Wheats -- collect nine (!) proof of purchases and get a Star Trek flash drive.
No joke. 1 GB, pre-loaded with Trek content, recommended for ages 8 and up.
I haven't had cable television in 7 years. I don't miss it. For the money I save, I
* Netflix
* Go to the movies
* Pay for the newspaper
* Pay the late fees on my library books
* Pay admission to museums
At the end of the day, cable isn't offering us anything we can't see already on Netflix or on youtube or hulu et al. So really -- why pay $700/yr or whatever when we can watch all the programming that we really like by pulling it instead of waiting for it to be pushed?
P.S. Take a Kill-A-Watt and check out how much electricity your cable box + DVR + ??? are using on standby and calculate the additional burden on your electric bill. I'd bet it's a combined 40W or so, good for another $50+ a year.
Negatory. In 2002 tUSA consumed the following energy (quads) source:
8.1 nuclear power
2.6 hydro
2.3 biomass
23.2 nat gas
22.6 coal
39.2 oil
The oil goes almost universally for transportation. The coal goes almost universally for electricity [as does hydro and nuclear power]. About 20% of nat gas goes for elec, the rest for industrial and residential heat processes.
If everyone switched to a Prius tomorrow, our fuel consumption would go down by [pulled out of my butt] 60%. That means our CO2 emissions would drop by at least 30% [since nat gas, hydro, and nuke have lower C02 per unit energy]. That, sir, makes you quite wrong.
Additionally, the statement
has me scratching my head too. When we burn fossil fuels we get CO2. The energy efficiency is the percentage of CO2 that goes toward useful work is it's energy efficiency. Every joule, kWh, gallon of gas, etc that's not wasted is CO2 not spewed in the air for no useful purpose. No sir, energy efficiency and CO2 are directly related.
Finally (with asbestos underwears on) I'd remind you that nuclear power is not CO2 free. Not only is there plenty of CO2 involved in the construction of the plant itself thanks to the loads of concrete, construction equipment, etc., but the nuclear fuel doesn't come from flowers grown in the front lawn -- it has to be mined, often in Australia, and then shipped to the power plants. Less CO2 than coal? For sure. Than nat gas? Yip. But, not zero. Will nuclear power be part of the get-off-carbon solution? I'm not sure. If wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and efficiency are enough to get us by, I hope we don't build more nuclear. If those other things aren't, let the new generation of nuclear power begin, but only as much as can't be provided by these other non-carbon means which don't rely on dangerous fuels from other nations.
I gamed the rating of a movie on Netflix, just for kicks. King Kung Fu had a pretty low rating, mostly contributions of 1 star from a number of reviewers. So, to get a feel for the size of the denominator, I had about 6 or 7 friends rate it five star. Sure enough, it was enough to boost it a five tenths of a point.
Is the film any good? I dunno. It's 71 in my queue though.
Boucher is great for this post, and I'm thrilled that he'll be there. I'm also thrilled that he'll be giving up leadership of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. Boucher is a coal guy from a coal region of southwestern Virginia. He was weak on energy and environmental standards relative to the Democratic caucus.
So, this is good for Net Neutrality and other Internet issues.
It's also good for climate change and other environmental issues.
P.S. Like Boucher? Click on my sig link and send him some bucks!
It's far easier to just count the votes on the day of the election during a slow time where all of the security and verification process is already in place than to set up a distinct process for absentees.
Now in some places, the ballot merely has to be postmarked by election day; those individual ballots may arrive after election day and will be counted later; that's part of the reason why initial results are preliminary and aren't made official by the secretary of state for a few weeks later.
In places where voting is done on scantron machines, they simply take the paper scantron absentee ballot, bring it in a sealed envelope to the voting precinct or ward, and sometime in the day when it's slow [usually 10-11 am or 1-3 pm] they open the envelopes and feed the ballots in to the machines.
Do you have any links, documents, or personal experience to suggest otherwise?
Um, no they don't. The Democrats target working class voters. Labor, so to speak. The middle class.
If you "pander" to poor people, the middle class gets irate and votes the other way, and you lose in a landslide. If the Dems help poor people, it is out of an actual interest in helping their lives get better, not out of political benefit. Do the Dems promise government programs? Sure -- but they generally target everyone who is "not rich", and not John McCain's $4,999,999 not rich either. The Dems' programs generally target the upper-middle class right on down to the destitute.
As for gun control -- neither side panders. The conservatives stick to their principle that government regulation and intervention is bad, and the Democrats to their principle that collective good may outweigh individual harms.
If you show no cash transactions [or have no records of cash transactions], the IRS will use actuary tables to "determine" what percentage of your business should be cash, and then use your credit card records to deduce how much cash you brought in -- and they'll tax you on it. And assess penalties. And interest. And so-forth.
If you're going to cheat, just cheat a little. Cheat too much, and you're hosed.
All of the interesting IT work has been done; now it's pure voter ID and GOTV [get out the vote].
But the action is just beginning at local races. Get yourself involved in a state rep or state senate race. The budgets are tiny, so your free skills are incredibly valuable, be it for OS, database, webserver/site, even just setting up the computers, phones, and fax machines in the office.
It's true that the power of state legislators is orders of magnitude less than POTUS, but it's also true that the odds of your effort making a tangible difference in the probability of your candidate winning are orders of magnitude higher.
Keep in mind that state legislatures are the "minor leagues" for the US Congress, and that often states are the testing grounds for national legislation. More legislators of your political persuasion in your state is good for your governing philosophy over the long term, and your skills will be much more meaningful and appreciated by the local campaign.
The US has tons of limits on free speech, including but not limited to restrictions with respect to
* perjury
* profanity
* sealed courtroom/trial
* threats
* slander and libel
* classified information
* treason
Expect him to talk tough to you too since Internet should be capitalized. (douchebag)