Grr. My numbers are way off-- they are way to optimistic. I've been looking at running AC from solar and the numbers for that were 16000 without batteries for just the window AC (which is $100 per year, not per month). 9000 of panels if you have 1000 of batteries.
So the pay off was more like 1600 months, not 160 months.
I will probably still get some- just like I get computers that I know don't make financial sense.
but right now, it is probably more effective to *invest* the $50k and use the interest income to pay your electric bill than it is to purchase a solar system. unless you are physically distant from the grid.
SOME people who knew how to game the system were given $35,000 dollars of other people's money, from a limited pool of money set aside for that purpose, artificially lowering the cost of their purchase. Even after the $35,000 theft from other people, you still had to have $15,000 of your own money to use this program so it was basically reserved for upper middle class people living in $300k+ houses.
I want solar. I follow solar news on a regular basis. It is NOT affordable yet. It costs $16000 to produce about $100 of electricity. That's a 160 month payoff for most people. And by 160 months, you've gone through TWO sets of batteries and possibly have had to replace your inverter and at least a few of your panels.
Do you realize the odds of ZERO people arguing is very low and the fact that there is no counter argument is probably good evidence of some systematic problem with the data (Like any articles that don't have the "correct" opinion are not accepted or the scientists are not given tenure by their universities).
With computers, there are often ways you can get hints of the underlying data stream if you overload the data streams in certain ways. And there are those pesky frequent changes to the basic laws of the universe or even how things look.
Of course if we presume an inhabitant forgets these things every patch, then it works.
And this is what all adherents of Last Tuesdayism believe.
Even to a non-believer, it is pretty clear that the "god meme" is of benefit to its followers.
You can speculate on why, but if atheism was going to make a group of people proliferate large scale, it probably would have by now.
On the plus side: If you both believe in the same god and that religion has good values then you can trust other believers easier than random strangers and so lower your transaction costs.
On the minus side: If another person does not believe, it is a lot easier to say they are not human at all and so now you can easily kill them without guilt and take their stuff (and even rape their women like Mose's army did so you have more kids that follow your religion).
And you know... even my opinion that universities have liberal bias is *someone* suspect as I know it is pushed as part of the religious conservative agenda to swing universities past the middle way back to the right.
yes, I'm in favor of birth defects. They are evidence of our continued mutation and genetic variation and some of those mutations will be good while others are bad. Without mutation and genetic variation, we would probably suffer horribly or even become extinct the next time a new disease that preys on us comes along. In fact many diseases that we "cure", we really just breed around all those who die (so the disease is a lot less dangerous).
yes, I'm in favor of theft and murder. Of course, I don't personally want to be robbed or killed. Nor do I want most people to be robbed or killed. But there are circumstances where both are the only way out. As entrenched powers take control of a society you finally are often left with the choice of dying or killing and robbing those in control of society.
yes, I'm in favor of famine. Without famine, those who have very bad world-views would not naturally be kept in check. Famine controls those who overbreed their area's ability to support them, those who engage in wacky behavior like killing farmers for political reasons, and those who strip the land through unwise farming practices.
So I guess rape is the only one I would find hard to support. However, I think that it is a viable reproductive strategy in some settings. For example if you were unattractive and there was no birth control, then it might be the only way you could reproduce. There is a fair amount of evidence that humans are partially wired for it (such as Rape of the Sabine women and in the Book of Moses where they kill the men and children of a conquered city and take the women with god's approval). I would think most conquerers throughout history engaged in those practices. So we are talking thousands of years of history where it was expected vs less than 2000 years where it is bad. I think it is extremely unlikely that any of us lack genes of rapists and women who bonded with them in us.
However, I think the parent post was trying to ironically make your same point and poking at people who say "natural things are all good" and you failed to see his irony.
Purely from an evolutionary standpoint- if an action causes your genes to be passed on and become widespread then it is good. There were a lot of utopian religious societies in early america who felt sex of any kind was bad. Those that succeeded best all failed when the last members died.
A fairly trivial search turns up: More than 90 percent of donations from University employees this election cycle have gone to liberal causes, as Princeton joins peer institutions in reinforcing the image of a left-leaning ivory tower.
The universities Stanford, Harvard, Oxford all have strongly left-wing reputations. Colleges were basically taken over by the left in the 60's and 70's. I personally find the left to be just as likely to suppress views and people they don't like as religious conservatives.
We have a strong division between left wing universities (make many conservative statements and you will fail to get tenure or get fired) and scientists who at the least are strongly backed by corporations after they make conservative statements and at the worst are employees of the corporations.
I trust the scientific method. I find it harder to trust scientists the older I get. Maybe because the low-hanging fruit of easy hard factual scientific wins is gone and now so much of it is soft and ambiguous and subject to interpretation. Also, so much of science on these issues impacts so many people that governments, political groups, and businesses are messing with the process strongly.
On the global warming thing- it could be us. It could be the Sun. It could be the galactic clouds we pass through.
Additionally, it could be good (we certainly don't want to go back to the mini-ice age and years without summer) and it could be bad (with droughts settling across all major crop growing areas, flooding of cities and coastal destruction).
Oil will become more expensive and other energy forms will naturally become better options.
Right now we are forcing ourselves to $5.00 per gallon of energy when we could be getting gas for $2.89 per gallon.
I look at solar energy once a year. Right now, you are better served to take the same money and put it in a bank and use the interest to pay your electric bill than you are to buy a solar system and pay an electrician to grid tie your house.
Just to run a small window AC is $8 grand with batteries you have to replace every 5-7 years. A small window AC currently costs $80 per year to run... so in 100 YEARS the solar panels would pay for themselves.
The regret with oil is all the other things we could be doing with it besides burning it.
Bob Carter is *quoted* in the article and appears to be a shill for Exxon (or someone who agrees with them for his own reasons) but the article is written by Tom Harris.
There is no paper trail for Tom Harris that I could find.
It is hard to translate our costs to their costs but since they are reported to be working 15 hour days, they are essentially working full time just to cover living costs.
Normally housing costs should cover about 25% of a persons income and food another 25% (depending on how well they eat of course).
If college student worked 15 hours a day at minimum wage with no overtime- that would be about 50 dollars a day after taxes-- or about 1500 per month. But the article also indicates they work more than 5 days a week. So say they should be earning about 1800 bucks of purchasing power a month in US terms. As I said, it's hard to translate but it sounds like they are making a lot less than that in local purchasing terms for working as much as they are.
I think some wages are exploitive and counterproductive and I think these qualify.
Possibly- or they may have done a Nike and put on a blindfold so they wouldn't see 13 year olds working 12 hour shifts. (As happened with Nike (see "The Corporation" for some of the "workers").
No but you are absolved of guilt if you pay fair market prices to a contractor who says they do not use sweatshop illegal immigrants one step above slaves and then they secretly do so anyway.
But if you pay $500 to get a new garage built, you know going in that something is not kosher and so you are culpable.
That and the fact that they have held their currency at about 70% of it's fair market value since 2000. There have been articles in the WSJ since then saying that when the chinese allow their currency to float, it will go up about 50%.
Compression is getting tighter and the amount of data isn't increasing.
Now- if you are talking HD, I agree the space increases but probably less than 1% of people will really have the monitor, distance, and eyesight to see enough difference between HD and DVD to care.
Oh yes, I totally agree there and extend it to the entire north and south american continents. You had people with no disease resistance and spears fighting people with guns and smallpox. The proverbial fish in a barrel.
Slashdot Mirror
Grr.
My numbers are way off-- they are way to optimistic. I've been looking at running AC from solar and the numbers for that were 16000 without batteries for just the window AC (which is $100 per year, not per month). 9000 of panels if you have 1000 of batteries.
So the pay off was more like 1600 months, not 160 months.
I will probably still get some- just like I get computers that I know don't make financial sense.
but right now, it is probably more effective to *invest* the $50k and use the interest income to pay your electric bill than it is to purchase a solar system. unless you are physically distant from the grid.
One point...
Ppl have bought solar panels for their home.
is really
SOME people who knew how to game the system were given $35,000 dollars of other people's money, from a limited pool of money set aside for that purpose, artificially lowering the cost of their purchase. Even after the $35,000 theft from other people, you still had to have $15,000 of your own money to use this program so it was basically reserved for upper middle class people living in $300k+ houses.
I want solar. I follow solar news on a regular basis. It is NOT affordable yet. It costs $16000 to produce about $100 of electricity. That's a 160 month payoff for most people. And by 160 months, you've gone through TWO sets of batteries and possibly have had to replace your inverter and at least a few of your panels.
If our mythical energy source only produced *heat* or *water vapor* it would STILL be a problem given 6 billion people.
There are almost no problems today that would not be solved by reducing the population down to about 2.5 billion people.
We are most likely beyond the earth's carrying capacity for humans is the fundamental problem.
Do you realize the odds of ZERO people arguing is very low and the fact that there is no counter argument is probably good evidence of some systematic problem with the data (Like any articles that don't have the "correct" opinion are not accepted or the scientists are not given tenure by their universities).
That's not necessarily true.
With computers, there are often ways you can get hints of the underlying data stream if you overload the data streams in certain ways. And there are those pesky frequent changes to the basic laws of the universe or even how things look.
Of course if we presume an inhabitant forgets these things every patch, then it works.
And this is what all adherents of Last Tuesdayism believe.
Even to a non-believer, it is pretty clear that the "god meme" is of benefit to its followers.
You can speculate on why, but if atheism was going to make a group of people proliferate large scale, it probably would have by now.
On the plus side:
If you both believe in the same god and that religion has good values then you can trust other believers easier than random strangers and so lower your transaction costs.
On the minus side:
If another person does not believe, it is a lot easier to say they are not human at all and so now you can easily kill them without guilt and take their stuff (and even rape their women like Mose's army did so you have more kids that follow your religion).
And you know... even my opinion that universities have liberal bias is *someone* suspect as I know it is pushed as part of the religious conservative agenda to swing universities past the middle way back to the right.
I'll bite.
yes, I'm in favor of birth defects.
They are evidence of our continued mutation and genetic variation and some of those mutations will be good while others are bad. Without mutation and genetic variation, we would probably suffer horribly or even become extinct the next time a new disease that preys on us comes along. In fact many diseases that we "cure", we really just breed around all those who die (so the disease is a lot less dangerous).
yes, I'm in favor of theft and murder.
Of course, I don't personally want to be robbed or killed. Nor do I want most people to be robbed or killed. But there are circumstances where both are the only way out. As entrenched powers take control of a society you finally are often left with the choice of dying or killing and robbing those in control of society.
yes, I'm in favor of famine.
Without famine, those who have very bad world-views would not naturally be kept in check. Famine controls those who overbreed their area's ability to support them, those who engage in wacky behavior like killing farmers for political reasons, and those who strip the land through unwise farming practices.
So I guess rape is the only one I would find hard to support.
However, I think that it is a viable reproductive strategy in some settings. For example if you were unattractive and there was no birth control, then it might be the only way you could reproduce. There is a fair amount of evidence that humans are partially wired for it (such as Rape of the Sabine women and in the Book of Moses where they kill the men and children of a conquered city and take the women with god's approval). I would think most conquerers throughout history engaged in those practices. So we are talking thousands of years of history where it was expected vs less than 2000 years where it is bad. I think it is extremely unlikely that any of us lack genes of rapists and women who bonded with them in us.
However, I think the parent post was trying to ironically make your same point and poking at people who say "natural things are all good" and you failed to see his irony.
Purely from an evolutionary standpoint- if an action causes your genes to be passed on and become widespread then it is good. There were a lot of utopian religious societies in early america who felt sex of any kind was bad. Those that succeeded best all failed when the last members died.
Sigh...
A fairly trivial search turns up:
More than 90 percent of donations from University employees this election cycle have gone to liberal causes, as Princeton joins peer institutions in reinforcing the image of a left-leaning ivory tower.
The universities Stanford, Harvard, Oxford all have strongly left-wing reputations. Colleges were basically taken over by the left in the 60's and 70's. I personally find the left to be just as likely to suppress views and people they don't like as religious conservatives.
We have a strong division between left wing universities (make many conservative statements and you will fail to get tenure or get fired) and scientists who at the least are strongly backed by corporations after they make conservative statements and at the worst are employees of the corporations.
I trust the scientific method. I find it harder to trust scientists the older I get. Maybe because the low-hanging fruit of easy hard factual scientific wins is gone and now so much of it is soft and ambiguous and subject to interpretation. Also, so much of science on these issues impacts so many people that governments, political groups, and businesses are messing with the process strongly.
On the global warming thing- it could be us. It could be the Sun. It could be the galactic clouds we pass through.
Additionally, it could be good (we certainly don't want to go back to the mini-ice age and years without summer) and it could be bad (with droughts settling across all major crop growing areas, flooding of cities and coastal destruction).
Not really.
Oil will become more expensive and other energy forms will naturally become better options.
Right now we are forcing ourselves to $5.00 per gallon of energy when we could be getting gas for $2.89 per gallon.
I look at solar energy once a year. Right now, you are better served to take the same money and put it in a bank and use the interest to pay your electric bill than you are to buy a solar system and pay an electrician to grid tie your house.
Just to run a small window AC is $8 grand with batteries you have to replace every 5-7 years.
A small window AC currently costs $80 per year to run... so in 100 YEARS the solar panels would pay for themselves.
The regret with oil is all the other things we could be doing with it besides burning it.
To be honest,
I don't trust either of them.
A lot of environmentalists have an anti-human or anti-western civilization agenda.
Just about everyone who has come out strongly against global warming turns out to be funded by a vested interest.
We live in a world where the news articles we see are created by corporations.
It is very hard to know the truth any more.
This is not correct.
Bob Carter is *quoted* in the article and appears to be a shill for Exxon (or someone who agrees with them for his own reasons) but the article is written by Tom Harris.
There is no paper trail for Tom Harris that I could find.
It is hard to translate our costs to their costs but since they are reported to be working 15 hour days, they are essentially working full time just to cover living costs.
Normally housing costs should cover about 25% of a persons income and food another 25% (depending on how well they eat of course).
If college student worked 15 hours a day at minimum wage with no overtime- that would be about 50 dollars a day after taxes-- or about 1500 per month. But the article also indicates they work more than 5 days a week. So say they should be earning about 1800 bucks of purchasing power a month in US terms. As I said, it's hard to translate but it sounds like they are making a lot less than that in local purchasing terms for working as much as they are.
I think some wages are exploitive and counterproductive and I think these qualify.
Possibly- or they may have done a Nike and put on a blindfold so they wouldn't see 13 year olds working 12 hour shifts. (As happened with Nike (see "The Corporation" for some of the "workers").
Set me up with another Irish coffee barkeep, heavy on the Irish!
No but you are absolved of guilt if you pay fair market prices to a contractor who says they do not use sweatshop illegal immigrants one step above slaves and then they secretly do so anyway.
But if you pay $500 to get a new garage built, you know going in that something is not kosher and so you are culpable.
How is this Apple's responsibility?
because they are paying the slave owners and keeping the profits while pretending to be a great moral company.
In truth, they don't want to know the details- they just want the product and unrealistically low prices and found someone who could meet the bid.
Libertarian philosophy is a wonderful policy between relative equals.
It breaks down horribly when the parties involved are not roughly equal.
For people who have the choice of "be a slave or starve", it is an especially
unworkable philosophy.
There is no justification for dormitory style living quarters to cost 50% of the average income.
That sounds suspiciously high.
I think Apple is basically using slave labor which has been prettied up with a few fictions.
That and the fact that they have held their currency at about 70% of it's fair market value since 2000. There have been articles in the WSJ since then saying that when the chinese allow their currency to float, it will go up about 50%.
By allowing them to work under these conditions we undermine our own jobs.
The faster their working conditions come to parity with ours, the sooner we stop having our jobs shipped to them.
If they were making $400 a month, then inflation would drive up their cost of living and affect wages in the entire country.
Ah, but I'm a casual writer of a quick off the cuff post not an editor or a content creator.
And I don't habitually u'se apostrophe's incorrectly.
Thank you.
The entire question was ruined by that one idiot word.
I can understand if a casual poster let's loose with a few loose looses.
But the *editor* and creators of content should spell the word correctly or they just
come across as ignorant.
What really doesn't make sense is that "loose" is LONGER than "lose".
And it's not spelled like it sounds.. "Looze" which I could also understand.
So it is inefficient AND sounds different than the word is spoken.
Movies need less space in my experience.
Compression is getting tighter and the amount of data isn't increasing.
Now- if you are talking HD, I agree the space increases but probably less than 1% of people will really have the monitor, distance, and eyesight to see enough difference between HD and DVD to care.
Oh yes, I totally agree there and extend it to the entire north and south american continents.
You had people with no disease resistance and spears fighting people with guns and smallpox.
The proverbial fish in a barrel.