A fair proportion of the time, the mathematics applied in computer science (and, probably, most other disciplines) starts with simplifying and often unrealistic assumptions.
Not that maths isn't useful, but much of the time it can't give you definitive answers for the questions you really want answers to, only somewhat related, simpler ones.
If you're not borrowing the money directly, it's money you could be using to repay your mortgage. If you're not repaying your mortgage, you could be using the money to buy a mutual fund and earn around 10-12% per year over the next couple of decades.
If your argument is that you're using money that you would have otherwise blown on booze and hookers (or, if you'd prefer, donating it to your local church), you've decided to change what you do with your money from consumption to investment. The question then becomes whether solar panels are a good investment and we're back to comparing with paying off the mortgage or putting the money in the stock market.
I'm just referring to The Fine Article, which states:
40% annual cost reductions over the last five years
and noting that these puported huge reductions in manufacturing cost, if they actually exist, haven't found their way to retail yet.
The other thing I'd like to make clear is that 3% annual cost reductions isn't going to make solar cells competitive with nuclear, wind, or solar thermal energy at any time in the next century, as all these technologies will probably reduce their costs at similar rates.
One of the keys here, is paying cash for the Solar Panels (not credit). If you finance the solar panels, your break even point will be MUCH farther out (more than 30 years) and you may not live long enough to break even with your solar purchase.
You're ignoring what your $10,000 could have been doing in the intervening period. If, say, you invested it in the Vanguard S&P 500 tracking fund, it's returned 12.26% per annum over the almost 31-year life of the fund (the returns from year to year vary greatly, obviously).
So, no, you're not "winning" by investing your cash in solar panels, you're losing big, financially, compared to the alternatives. In fact, you could buy high-quality carbon offsets out of the returns from your mutual fund and still be way out in front.
As it happens, I happen to know a fair bit about this, pal. I've done the numbers for myself, repeatedly, and no matter which way you slice and dice solar power is an economic loser at the moment, both for individuals and others seeking to reduce their carbon emissions, and the sooner more people grasp this the more progress we can actually make at tackling the issues.
As a quick illustration of the point, one of these systems costs $22,610 before freight and installation, and (depending on where you live) puts out about 20% of its peak wattage over 24 hours. That's roughly 15 kwh per day, or 5475 kwh annually - or, in round figures, about $600 worth of electricity at retail price - and, at the typical surcharges for green power, around $800. The cost of borrowing the money, just for the kit, is around about $1600 a year.
The reason why the big-central-plant generation model is still favoured by most over distributed generation is that distributed generation is way more expensive, particularly if the grid is already built.
Have you gone off-grid yourself? How much did it cost, and have you micromanaged your energy consumption to make it work? If you haven't, might I suggest you investigate the costs and then get back to us?
Assuming you live in a developed country somewhere near other people, chances are very good you have a magic technology that allows you to outsource the "keeping it on your roof" part.
It's called the electricity grid, and for most people, you can buy "green power" (that is, for every kwh you consume, the utility buys a kwh of renewables, usually wind), from it far cheaper than you can put a solar system, even a grid-connected one with net metering, on your roof.
Nuclear weapons (or, at least, the plutonium pits) are fabricated by the Department of Energy at Los Alamos National Labs. You can read about it here. There's no plausible reason for the Navy to be sneaking around with any extra HEU given that the only two things you can do with it are run submarine reactors and make bombs.
Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that putting up a list on the internet of how much nuclear fuel is being delivered to the Navy is not a good idea.
Perhaps the details of the delivery dates, times, routes and security guards is sensitive, but the quantities of nuclear fuel being used by the Navy doesn't seem to me to tell anybody anything much that's strategically sensitive - refuelling happens so rarely that it doesn't have much to do with strategic situations. Frankly, information about what the Navy is doing with diesel would be far more revealing than what they're doing with uranium.
It's not clear who came up with it, but there's an old joke about supercomputers being devices to convert computation-bound problems into I/O-bound problems.
This chip would almost certainly have the same issue in many applications - how do you get data on and off it fast enough to keep the cores full of data? Do they do anything unique to improve memory bandwidth?
Because they decided that using a once-through cooling cycle was cheaper, rather than worrying about the 0.1% of the time where they wouldn't be able to run the plant.
It's really not a big deal.
Only about 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas and need to drive twenty miles to the shops (which, incidentally, is well within the round-trip range of these vehicles).
Do you know just how much health damage the crap that comes out of your car's tailpipe does? Pollution from car exhausts cause considerably more death and injury than car accidents do, and that's with contemporary emission control rules.
So, I'm sorry, but your desire to tweak your car comes a very distant second to my desire to have safer air.
In the USA, people get to vote on all manner of different positions which, in other countries, are appointed by the government.
They not only vote for politicians, at the state and local level they vote for judges, police chiefs, chief prosecutors, chiefs of fire departments, the members of the school administration board (this is how the crazy creationists occasionally try to impose creationist textbooks on school)...and on and on it goes. In some states, there will also be a number of citizen-initiated referenda on the ballot.
I am utterly unconvinced that such a multitude of elected positions is actually a good idea, and hamstringing elected officials with CIRs is also not great (proposition 1: the government should cut taxes. Proposition 2: the government should offer more services. Hey, they both sound good, let's vote for both!), but it does create a strong logistical case for more elaborate voting technology.
Have you ever done a really long intercontinental flight?
Trust me, as hellish as being cooped up in a plane for 16 hours sounds, getting cooped up in a plane for 10 hours, then three hours in a shitty airport, then getting on the plane for another 7 hours is worse.
If you're far enough away to survive the blast, the prompt radiation dosage isn't an issue with normal-size nuclear weapons (not so with really small sub-kiloton blasts though). As long as you get the hell out of Dodge before the fallout arrives (or are lucky enough to be upwind), if you survive the blast and the resulting fires you should be OK. If you want to do the calculations yourself, try this little piece of cold war nostalgia.
Like you said, the business plan never made much sense.
But plenty of people have started businesses which, in retrospect, don't make a great deal of sense. That doesn't in itself make them frauds. Most are honest people who either weren't as smart as they thought, or were unlucky, or some combination of the two.
My music is not so important to me that I would spend more on it than your average sports car.
And in large parts of the USA you won't be able to use that sports car remotely as intended (woo-hoo, that road up to Mount Sunflower has my Ferrari convinced it's back on the Stelvio Pass...). In that case, you may as well save your money on your sports car and buy the blow-your-house-down stereo.
I wouldn't buy either, myself, but different strokes for different folks...
Foreign subsidization of corn crop production has also kept prices unnaturally low, as well as import barriers on U.S. product.
Well, if foreign governments are silly enough to subsidise corn production, I say buy it off them and take advantage of their stupidity. It's hardly a reason to get into the same idiotic game.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that maths isn't useful, but much of the time it can't give you definitive answers for the questions you really want answers to, only somewhat related, simpler ones.
If you're not borrowing the money directly, it's money you could be using to repay your mortgage. If you're not repaying your mortgage, you could be using the money to buy a mutual fund and earn around 10-12% per year over the next couple of decades.
If your argument is that you're using money that you would have otherwise blown on booze and hookers (or, if you'd prefer, donating it to your local church), you've decided to change what you do with your money from consumption to investment. The question then becomes whether solar panels are a good investment and we're back to comparing with paying off the mortgage or putting the money in the stock market.
and noting that these puported huge reductions in manufacturing cost, if they actually exist, haven't found their way to retail yet.
The other thing I'd like to make clear is that 3% annual cost reductions isn't going to make solar cells competitive with nuclear, wind, or solar thermal energy at any time in the next century, as all these technologies will probably reduce their costs at similar rates.
But the majority of Slashdot posters live in places where grid electricity is already connected.
You're ignoring what your $10,000 could have been doing in the intervening period. If, say, you invested it in the Vanguard S&P 500 tracking fund, it's returned 12.26% per annum over the almost 31-year life of the fund (the returns from year to year vary greatly, obviously).
So, no, you're not "winning" by investing your cash in solar panels, you're losing big, financially, compared to the alternatives. In fact, you could buy high-quality carbon offsets out of the returns from your mutual fund and still be way out in front.
As a quick illustration of the point, one of these systems costs $22,610 before freight and installation, and (depending on where you live) puts out about 20% of its peak wattage over 24 hours. That's roughly 15 kwh per day, or 5475 kwh annually - or, in round figures, about $600 worth of electricity at retail price - and, at the typical surcharges for green power, around $800. The cost of borrowing the money, just for the kit, is around about $1600 a year.
3% per year is a long, long way from 40% per year. Other manufactured goods have been dropping in price a lot faster.
Have a look at the graph on this page. The retail price for solar panels has been essentially static for the past few years.
The reason why the big-central-plant generation model is still favoured by most over distributed generation is that distributed generation is way more expensive, particularly if the grid is already built.
Have you gone off-grid yourself? How much did it cost, and have you micromanaged your energy consumption to make it work? If you haven't, might I suggest you investigate the costs and then get back to us?
Assuming you live in a developed country somewhere near other people, chances are very good you have a magic technology that allows you to outsource the "keeping it on your roof" part.
It's called the electricity grid, and for most people, you can buy "green power" (that is, for every kwh you consume, the utility buys a kwh of renewables, usually wind), from it far cheaper than you can put a solar system, even a grid-connected one with net metering, on your roof.
Nuclear weapons (or, at least, the plutonium pits) are fabricated by the Department of Energy at Los Alamos National Labs. You can read about it here. There's no plausible reason for the Navy to be sneaking around with any extra HEU given that the only two things you can do with it are run submarine reactors and make bombs.
Perhaps the details of the delivery dates, times, routes and security guards is sensitive, but the quantities of nuclear fuel being used by the Navy doesn't seem to me to tell anybody anything much that's strategically sensitive - refuelling happens so rarely that it doesn't have much to do with strategic situations. Frankly, information about what the Navy is doing with diesel would be far more revealing than what they're doing with uranium.
This chip would almost certainly have the same issue in many applications - how do you get data on and off it fast enough to keep the cores full of data? Do they do anything unique to improve memory bandwidth?
If they're right, maybe it can be used in the Army's application to avoid gearboxes?
Because they decided that using a once-through cooling cycle was cheaper, rather than worrying about the 0.1% of the time where they wouldn't be able to run the plant. It's really not a big deal.
Only about 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas and need to drive twenty miles to the shops (which, incidentally, is well within the round-trip range of these vehicles).
So, I'm sorry, but your desire to tweak your car comes a very distant second to my desire to have safer air.
Unless you can cut launch costs by two, possibly three orders of magnitude, it's not going to work.
So how about the DoD revive this launch technology if they're serious about the idea?
That HIV causes AIDS is established about as well as that the influenza virus causes the flu.
If you're reading Wikipedia, might I suggest the article on Koch's postulates instead?
In the USA, people get to vote on all manner of different positions which, in other countries, are appointed by the government. They not only vote for politicians, at the state and local level they vote for judges, police chiefs, chief prosecutors, chiefs of fire departments, the members of the school administration board (this is how the crazy creationists occasionally try to impose creationist textbooks on school)...and on and on it goes. In some states, there will also be a number of citizen-initiated referenda on the ballot. I am utterly unconvinced that such a multitude of elected positions is actually a good idea, and hamstringing elected officials with CIRs is also not great (proposition 1: the government should cut taxes. Proposition 2: the government should offer more services. Hey, they both sound good, let's vote for both!), but it does create a strong logistical case for more elaborate voting technology.
Trust me, as hellish as being cooped up in a plane for 16 hours sounds, getting cooped up in a plane for 10 hours, then three hours in a shitty airport, then getting on the plane for another 7 hours is worse.
If you're far enough away to survive the blast, the prompt radiation dosage isn't an issue with normal-size nuclear weapons (not so with really small sub-kiloton blasts though). As long as you get the hell out of Dodge before the fallout arrives (or are lucky enough to be upwind), if you survive the blast and the resulting fires you should be OK. If you want to do the calculations yourself, try this little piece of cold war nostalgia.
But plenty of people have started businesses which, in retrospect, don't make a great deal of sense. That doesn't in itself make them frauds. Most are honest people who either weren't as smart as they thought, or were unlucky, or some combination of the two.
And in large parts of the USA you won't be able to use that sports car remotely as intended (woo-hoo, that road up to Mount Sunflower has my Ferrari convinced it's back on the Stelvio Pass...). In that case, you may as well save your money on your sports car and buy the blow-your-house-down stereo.
I wouldn't buy either, myself, but different strokes for different folks...