I hate Nazis. I really really hate Nazis. People willing to round up innocent men, women, and children, and kill them are demonic.
I hate the KKK. I grew up in a predominately Catholic community and I'd hear stories from my dad and grandparents about the KKK holding rallies. They were outnumbered, and they knew this, so they'd play nice without the masks. They'd be a lot of bark with no bite but in other areas of the USA they'd kill Catholics. Not many people are aware of this but the KKK likely strung up as many Catholics in trees as they did blacks. So, I really hate the KKK. I remember David Duke doing some national tour and ending up in the area to do some speech. A lot of people showed up to hear the idiot talk. I guess he thought he'd get some support in a place that was 99% white, but failed the most basic of demographic testing and seems to have not realized that the crowd was 80%+ Catholic.
I hate these people and they deserve to burn in hell. What I hate more is restrictions on one's ability to express themselves as they wish. Should David Duke have come around here to speak? Not really, but that's just a failure to recognize his audience. He spoke and he had every right to speak. He got on the local evening news and I got to see all the stunned faces at what he was saying. The guy is an idiot and I'm not going to stop him from exposing his idiocy.
You "Anti-Fa" people out there need to learn a bit from the quiet resistance that David Duke met 25 or so years ago. As I recall no one raised a sign. Certainly no one raised a fist. Everyone I saw listened to the nonsense and then ignored the bastard. That's what I see a lot on the left/right political spectrum, the left want to shut people up and the right wants them to keep talking. If "hate speech" is such a terrible idea then why fear it being spoken?
So, there's my hate speech rant. I hate the Nazis, I hate the KKK, and I hate people that want to stop "hate speech". This isn't about "hate speech", this is about stopping the political competition from speaking and that should never be tolerated.
Why don't we stop that? You do hate subsidies don't you?
I do hate subsidies. Had we stopped subsidizing wind and solar so much we'd have a level playing field on the energy markets and we'd be seeing investments in energy that can keep the lights on without being a drain on the economy. We'd also likely see California invest in water desalination plants so they wouldn't have this self imposed water shortage.
There's lots of far drier places in the world that seem to be able to turn a desert into farmland. It boggles the mind that California can't do this as well. I don't care how few people are farming this land, or how much effect it has on the economy. Denying them water and driving them out will solve nothing. California is being run into the ground by state and local governments incapable of providing basic services such as keeping people from shitting in the streets. The California government will hand out heroin needles but deny you a drinking straw.
Go ahead, end those subsidies. Then see how well that wind and solar power works for you. Japan tried doing without nuclear power and they got wise to that real quick. You can't get clean air and cheap energy without nuclear power. California isn't an island like Japan and so they can survive under this delusion of a nuclear free society for a while with imported energy. That will not go well in the long run.
That which cannot continue will not continue. California is on a path that cannot continue. They can find a new path now and prevent far greater damage, or keep going until something simply breaks and it all comes down around their ears.
It's possible I'm both racist and ignorant. Oh, and sexist. Probably sexist too. Because I'm a man, with skin so white it's nearly translucent, therefore I must be ignorant, racist, and sexist. Oh, and homophobic too, I almost forgot about that.
I've been accused of so many things that it means nothing any more. How about instead of providing insults you provide some information?
The BBC has been giving some reporting on this and they aren't exactly a small time blog known for right wing conspiracy theories. https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
The government is planning to take land from people without compensation, and amending the constitution to make it "legal". This will have long lasting effects on people in the country that produce food and conduct business. We've seen how things like this play out and it never goes well. There will be food shortages, unemployment, and all the "fun times" that come with both. This is simply blatant racism against the white minority and it will not go well for South Africa and their neighbors.
I do wonder about these stories... I mean, murder is obviously already illegal.
And people do illegal things. When it comes to women getting abused and murdered it may be wise for women to protect themselves against law breakers. I suggest getting one of those noise makers that can get people's attention. I understand Smith and Wesson makes a nice one, called the "LadySmith". It can carry 5 noise making cartridges in a compact and simple to operate device. It's not exactly cheap but I have seen it get very good reviews.
Do taxi medallions have some special anti-murder properties, to make regular taxis safer than these services?
Yes, and no. Nothing "magical" about them but the government that issues them will keep an eye on the owners, and the people that own the medallions aren't likely to be fly by night losers that kill their passengers. This is merely one means to offer oversight and market forces to keep getting from one place to another safer.
What's happened is that we're seeing a kind of battle between old taxi services and new business models that provide much the same services. Both will have to adapt to compete and we will all benefit from it.
If only there was a pill people could take to help.
There's pills for that, and condoms, and all kinds of things to limit population growth. Oh, you mean vitamins? That works too. Or we could make sure people eat more meat, which was suggested in the article.
I'm pretty sure much of the issues of starvation in the world is due to tyrants running their countries into the ground.
Expect the next nation to be overwhelmed by tyranny and the starvation that follows to be South Africa. They seem to think that European descendants that owned farmland for centuries is racist and so the government is just going to take their land. Well, those families owned the land because they know how to farm it. You remove the farmers from the land they cultivated with care and handed down over generations, then hand that land to people that don't know how to farm that land, and you will see food scarcity. In centuries past this might mean a nation getting sent back to the stone age but now it will probably mean wealthy nations coming in to feed everyone, proclamations of "mistakes were made" but no one will get punished, and no one will learn anything.
These land grabs in South Africa should be considered crimes against humanity and the people doing this be severely punished. We don't hear much about this in popular media because that would mean pointing out that people with dark skin can be racist.
There's no shortage of nutrition in the world that wasn't caused by idiots in government. I'm pretty sure that global warming is the fault of idiots in government too.
however, i wonder why this is such a big problem in China, i never hear about uber rapes/murders in US/EU.
I've heard of rapes and murders related to Uber, taxi services, and the like, before in the USA. It's usually the driver that's the victim though. You can run the drivers through a background check but the passengers then become the unknown factor.
It's not like background checks are infallible. I've heard of people passing background checks only to buy guns and shoot up schools and churches. I've seen outright criminal behavior, or just plain creepy behavior that might not technically be illegal, by police, fire, teachers, military, and so on that passed background checks. Even so a background check will reduce repeats of bad behavior.
Oh, and often I hear people mocking the USA on its high prison population. Well, the tendency for the USA to put criminals in prison, and keep them there for a while, might be why such incidents are rare. Think about that.
must admit that i've never used these services, so can somebody explain how they prevent these things from happening?
They learned to do criminal checks on people after some drivers were caught molesting women. I recall reading about at least one of these incidents on Slashdot before. My guess is that in the USA young women are able to easily obtain OC spray, knives, handguns, stun guns, and other tools of self defense with relative ease, and the low life scum that might consider taking advantage of these women think twice before trying anything.
It appears that Uber and Lyft ban passengers and drivers from being armed but there's no real way to enforce that. My guess is that the low life scum know this as well.
You are right that California could do nuclear now, but you are wrong that they will.
Given enough time they will. I suppose that it's possible some new technology will come in the future to change this path but given the trends over the time since we discovered nuclear power it seems quite clear that this is how we will power the future. It will probably take 10 years for nuclear power to really get going now that we just got started again with a 45 year break in new construction. Japan realized pretty quickly the futility of abandoning nuclear power. California might have some options to play with for the next few years but those will run out due to costs and availability.
Too many people oppose nuclear in California. They would literally rather have intermittent power failures.
That might be a majority opinion among the population but the people that want to get work done can't tolerate this. They will fix this, and adopt nuclear power to do it, or see industry move out.
I grew up on a dairy farm, and back then power outages were almost assured in any heavy storm so we took precautions. Long stretches of overhead lines are vulnerable to lightning, ice, wind, drunk drivers hitting rotted wood poles, and so on. The outages were inconvenient but we could still get work done on diesel power. I worked in a call center when a lightning strike knocked out power for a while. Again it was inconvenient but the diesel generators kicked in and we got back to work shortly. The California dairy farmers might tolerate these power outages because their power needs are different than a call center. The call centers, and other places that need a lot of computers and communications, will deal with power outages with diesel generators, big ones, or simply move the whole operation out of state. If California wants clean air and their technology industry then they will adopt nuclear power sooner or later.
New battery technology will be invented and they will use it, or they will fail.
I'm sure that they will use this new battery technology, and charge them up with nuclear power. Until fourth generation nuclear becomes the norm we'll be stuck with old existing second generation nuclear and the third generation nuclear that's coming online now, and these rely on steam to turn that heat from fission into electricity. Steam power doesn't handle rapid changes in load well, this will mean batteries nearby to even out the load in the near future. Even after fourth generation nuclear comes, which promises a far improved ability to load follow, batteries might come in handy for load following that's cheaper than dialing down a reactor and for providing backup in case of something going wrong. For example an earthquake or a wildfire might take out a power line and require backup until the line is repaired. Also, they will need batteries to manage their supply from wind and solar as they do now. I agree that it's batteries or failure.
I just read an article on Ambri Inc. They are offering a new kind of battery that they claim is far cheaper than anything Tesla and others can offer. It's a molten metal technology so it's not suited for cell phones and electric vehicles, but it would be great on managing peaks and valleys on a grid with changing supply and demand. This is where I expect California to get their batteries.
Batteries can make unreliable power reliable but they do not provide power themselves. Nuclear power is very reliable on it's own and so need far fewer batteries than unreliable wind and sun. This means nuclear and batteries will be in California's future.
You seem to be unclear on the relative abundance of sand vs coal and uranium.
You seem to be unclear on the amount of energy we are able to extract from coal and uranium compared to sand. You seem able to search Wikipedia as well as I am, go look it up. It's not like these elements are evenly distributed in the crust, nature did a lot of work concentrating them for us.
I see you really want to turn the topic to nuclear.
Yep, kind of like how you keep bringing up solar. Seems we both have our own funny habits.
Maybe Russia will be able to get by on Krocadyl exports.
You seem to know something of this. That explains your commentary.
Only one of those is renewable, that is, infinitely available. Never mind clean, that's another issue.
Nuclear is renewable by any honest definition you can come up with to define a renewable energy source. Also as clean as solar, again by any honest definition of clean that might apply to solar power.
Hey, give me a break, coal is so over. Everybody knows that.
Coal is over, I'm quite certain of that. It is going to take a long time to fade away though.
You aren't a trumpist by any chance, are you?
No, I play the upright bass. I'm not sure how or why this is relevant.
This is the kind of outcome I would expect in an unregulated industry. That doesn't mean we need government involvement, but it does mean some kind of assurance to the customers of a product that is safe.
I remember a short anecdote of a vegetable farmer being interviewed on the topic of government inspectors. He said the government inspectors he could handle, it was the inspectors from the restaurants and grocers that were brutal. Where's the equivalent on this new trend in taxi services? Is there a way to check on the drivers beyond a checkbox on the app on not being murdered on the way to one's destination?
What is just maddening about this was the comment in one of the articles on how we shouldn't have to expect women to defend themselves but instead expect men to not abuse women. Well, sorry folks, that's simply not going to happen. People will have to be able to defend themselves, men and women, because not everyone looks at the social contract on good behavior with the same eyes. Should men behave themselves? Absolutely. When (not if) one of them don't then they should expect a face full of OC spray, a few grams of lead sent at great speed into vital organs, a several thousand volt surprise, or some other means to deter their crimes. Just knowing that such defensive measures are possible have a deterrent effect on their own.
I do see free market forces at work. If this company can't get it's act together and make people feel safe using their services then I can expect them to go out of business. If you want a cheap ride then you can take your chances with a company that doesn't check out their drivers before sending them to pick you up.
If any state in the USA wants energy that is cheap, clean, safe, reliable, feasible in the short term, and with promise to stay that way in the long term, then they must invest heavily in wind, hydro, and nuclear. Oh, almost forgot, with a little bit of natural gas to speed things along on cleaning things up until something better comes along.
California has been going backwards with their unreasonable hating on nuclear power. Maybe some of this is justified with seismic activity in the state but there are means to address this.
What is exceedingly frustrating is that the politicians that made this promise will not be in office to see it through. This is no different than Obama signing a pledge to have the USA reduce it's carbon footprint only days before he left office. He didn't even bother to make it binding in any way by sending it to Congress.
If these politicians were smart then they'd be doing wind, hydro, and nuclear right now. If they were honest on following through then the pledges on making this happen would be within their terms in office.
I'd like to see a politician make a JFK style promise, "in this decade", once in a while. Anything longer beyond 10 years is outside the power of any politician to promise anything. A promise on the scale of 10 years is having a working plan in 2 years, 2 more for breaking ground, 2 for building something tangible, 2 for testing, and 2 for making it happen. On this scale we can see it happen and call them on it if the milestones haven't been reached.
The video on that Bloomberg article spent a lot of time explaining the "experience curve" and how it can improve performance and bring down costs on renewable energy. That same thing applies to nuclear power. Nuclear power costs keep rising because it is rare for anyone to build more than a handful of any one kind of reactor. If the US federal government would just allow people to get this experience, and keep it, by issuing licenses for new reactors more than once in a decade then nuclear power could experience the benefits of this experience curve too.
Solar power was once far too expensive until people decided to make long term investments in bringing down costs. If the politicians in California made this kind of investment then they could enjoy this from nuclear power just as they could from solar. By betting everything in solar plus batteries they set themselves on a path with no competition, and therefore only a bunch of people in industry working to maximize on tax credits against other companies in the solar market instead of making something that can thrive outside California mandates. Pit solar, nuclear, wind, and hydro against each other in a free market means near assurance of reaching their goal. Betting everything on solar and storage is just setting themselves up to fail.
Right, sand that is "free" for anyone to just dig up from the ground, like uranium and coal. Sand that will have to be processed into PV cells, just like we must process any ore into something useful. Then placed on structures built of steel and concrete, just like any power plant is built of steel and concrete. Then wired together with wires of copper and aluminum, like any other source of electricity. This all costs money, requires mining from the earth, just like any energy source. The difference is that getting energy from coal and uranium requires far less mining with more usable energy created.
Energy from the sun is no more "free" than energy from anything else. Thinking that solar power is "free" suggests a drug addled mind.
Cost of solar will continue to decrease by 20% for each doubling of capacity.
Exponential growth in any real system is not sustainable. This will end.
Any upward blip in petroleum price will only accelerate the solar capacity curve.
Of that I have no doubt. It will also encourage investments in wind, hydro, nuclear, and whatever else we can think of to displace coal and oil.
It's ramping up faster than anybody dreamed, especially BP, and especially Putin.
Again, exponential growth cannot be sustained. This will end. The only question is what limit solar will hit first.
Adding to the upcoming misery: Russia supplies nothing to the solar industry.
But they do export uranium and nuclear power technology. Russia will do just fine in this, perhaps even come out ahead.
China on the other hand, is doing very well, not to mention already having the world's largest and fastest growing installed capacity.
China also announced a plan to dominate in the nuclear energy market. All that proves is that nations like Russia and China are not placing the future of their nations on the promise of solar power. They are taking a true "all the above" energy strategy. Any nation that wishes to survive the impending collapse of the petroleum markets, and solar hitting the wall on it's current exponential growth, would be wise to invest in every energy technology we can think of.
There is nothing nearby due to current propulsion/distance limitations. We don't have any rationale for going to Mars right now except bragging rights and it would inevitably cost lives to achieve. What's the purpose now?
Because it's there. The same reason go to climb mountains or dive in the sea. Mars is just a higher mountain or deeper ocean.
A smokescreen for other things.
I'm sure that it is. I'm not sure how that makes any difference on people wanting to try. In fact some hidden motive only makes more people want to try, and do so with greater vigor.
Face it, the sun is setting on the fossil fuel era, and on the petroleum economies. The future belongs to renewables and batteries.
I've seen the future, and it's not powered by solar collectors. I've seen the math on the silicon, copper, aluminum, iron, and so many other materials that would have to be mined for making the solar panels, the structures to hold them up, and the wires to connect them all. I've also seen the numbers on the mining needed for a future powered by nuclear power. The difference is quite stark. The materials needed for solar power is far greater than that needed for nuclear, an order of magnitude greater. That's with current technology and nuclear power is only improving.
Now, you'll respond that solar power technology is also improving, and I will not dispute that. What we have now though is nuclear power having a head start on solar power in most every metric that is an order of magnitude ahead, and growing.
Here's all I ask of the solar power advocates, let's end all the energy subsidies and let the market choose. No subsidies for wind, or for solar, or for oil, coal, natural gas, or uranium/ If what you say is true that the future is in solar power and batteries then you should not have a problem with this, that we'll get there anyway because solar power is such a superior source of energy.
The solar advocates I've talked to would never even consider ending the solar power subsidies. I know why, because that would be a blow for solar that it might never recover from. All nuclear power advocates want is the opportunity to try. They don't want money any more, they just want permission to experiment. If nuclear power is a dead end, which I assume you believe, then where is the harm in proving this beyond all doubt with money from private investors?
I've seen the future, and it's bright from nuclear powered lights.
If you want Houston back in the thick of space missions, start voting for a reduction in military budgets and a transfer of funding into the sciences.
Or, talk to the DOD about building a US Space Force facility in Houston.
Or, Texas can fund it's own space program. If that sounds silly to you then consider that Texas has more people and money than many nations on the planet, and some of those nations smaller than Texas sent stuff into space. The government doesn't have to fund everything, just make some deals with private companies to get them to launch from there and use Houston as a base of operations.
Just voting money out of the military and into space exploration won't necessarily make missions to the moon orbit around Houston. If they want to be in on the deal then they need to make an offer that NASA cannot refuse. I'm thinking that means government spending on the state, county, and municipal levels, not federal. Texas is a big state but they don't have enough votes to divert federal funds on their own.
When it comes down to it the REAL money isn't in the budget for NASA, or even in the total budget for the federal government. The real money is in the private sector. Get private businesses interested in missions to the moon, make Houston a good place to do business, and people will be standing in line to hand out money.
The sun that falls from the sky is worthless for doing actual valuable work without machines to collect, convert, divert, store, and transmit it. The sun is no more free energy than the coal buried in the ground. If you want to maintain that sun is "free" energy then I will maintain that coal and uranium is also "free" energy by the same argument. The difference is that the uranium and coal in the ground is a store of energy that can be drawn from at any time and in any weather. That cannot be said of solar power. Storing that solar power fro when it fails to fall from the sky costs money, and therefore is even further from "free".
Earth to you: the future powered by wind and sun is already here.
Powering a nation on wind and hydro for a minute or two in the middle of the night on a holiday is far from a future powered by "free" energy.
What rock do you live under?
I'd like to ask you, what color is the sky on your planet?
Electricity is fungible and that is how these companies can "go green" so cheaply. They can buy hydro power from Tennessee, solar power from Arizona, and wind power from Oklahoma (where I hear the wind comes sweeping down the plain) only because large amounts of cheap electricity come from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. We can easily get to 10 % or 20% from wind and sun, but that next 10% will be more expensive and more difficult, and the next 10% more expensive still. Getting to 100% would be possible only with great expense, likely far more than we could afford.
I keep hearing about "all the above" energy plans but they rarely include nuclear power. If the goal is to get cheap, clean, reliable, and low CO2 energy in the USA then nuclear power must be part of "all the above". Not doing so will mean failure.
These announcements on companies buying "green" energy are just PR, they do next to nothing on making the world more "green". If they were serious about lowering their CO2 output then they'd be announcing an investment in nuclear power, but that's the "n-word" that shall not be mentioned in polite company.
Just like everyone else, they'll get it from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The difference is that they will buy "tariffs" to offset this use later.
In other words this is just an accounting trick like all the other tech companies that made similar announcements to buy "green energy". If these companies were serious about electricity that was green, cheap, and reliable, then they'd be investing in nuclear power. But there's a bunch of idiots out there, like in GreenPeace, that have a rabid hatred for anything "nu-ku-lar" that any such announcement would backfire on them. So, they make happy mouth noises to please investors and the snowflakes and we all pretend this isn't just another pointless PR announcement to prop up the stock price.
The wind and sun as sources of energy are as "free" as coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Just like wind and sun all you have to do is build the machines to collect this energy and turn it into a form we find useful.
If the wind and sun is "free" then everything we use for energy is "free".
Another problem is that we can't just pile up wind and solar energy into a storage bin like we can coal and uranium. Coal and uranium are already stored up for us in the dirt. We can draw from this store at any rate we choose, when we choose. Given the vastness of the supply of this store of energy, especially in uranium, it's as limitless as wind and sun could ever promise to be. Solar power gets real expensive at night, while coal and uranium cost just the same. Well, coal and uranium tends to get a bit cheaper at night, but that's more on the limits of our technology than any real change in our ability to dig it up from the ground.
The wind and sun may be free but the machines to harvest and store this energy are not. Good luck with your plans on a future powered by wind and sun.
Ag takes up 90% of developed water in CA while making up less than 2% of California's economy.
Right! Dammit, those farmers are just taking all that water and wasting it... on food.
We need to cut off this waste. Because it's not like people can't just get their fruits and vegetables from somewhere else. And those people in other places need to stop wasting water on food too. NO MORE IRRIGATION!
What will happen is Ag will lose some of their water allocations because, economically, they are not important enough to the state.
Seriously, have you thought this through? If you drive out agriculture then you drive out the people that grow your food. These plans to "save the planet" seem to have no consideration on the impact that will have on the suffering it can impose on real and actual people.
You can drive out technology companies from California and they'll do fine somewhere else. If you drive out the people that grow food they can't just go out to some salt flats and grow apples there.
These idiots that want to "save the planet" don't seem to think much of saving the people from starvation.
Germany has been real good about "greenwashing" their coal. You see they buy up a bunch of sawdust and woodchips from lumber mills in the American southeast. They then load it all up on ships that burn bunker fuel, when it reaches German ports they load it onto diesel fuel powered trucks and trains, then burn this "green fuel" with their brown coal and pretend that they've lowered their CO2 footprint.
They do this same "greenwashing" at the physical plant where I went to university. They burn "agricultural waste" with the coal for heating, cooling, and electricity on campus. They then get to pretend they made things "green" by diverting valuable material that used to be used for fertilizer and erosion control and turning it to worthless ash.
I swear that these idiots that want to "save humanity from itself" are going to get us all killed. They are taking food and burning it. Civilizations collapsed from this.
Clean power, bad news for Russia. End of the petroleum age. End of petroleum economy. The Russian mafia has a plan of course.
Yes, of course they have a plan. I've seen their secrets and the plan is simply diabolical. They intend to sell coal, oil, and natural gas cheaper than wind and solar energy. Those bastards! What could we ever do to stop them?
Oh, I know. Maybe we could find a way to get wind and solar to be cheaper than the energy the world buys from Russia. Oh, and maybe start building more nuclear power plants for cheap, clean, and domestic, energy. Because, you know, maybe it just might work.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate Nazis. I really really hate Nazis. People willing to round up innocent men, women, and children, and kill them are demonic.
I hate the KKK. I grew up in a predominately Catholic community and I'd hear stories from my dad and grandparents about the KKK holding rallies. They were outnumbered, and they knew this, so they'd play nice without the masks. They'd be a lot of bark with no bite but in other areas of the USA they'd kill Catholics. Not many people are aware of this but the KKK likely strung up as many Catholics in trees as they did blacks. So, I really hate the KKK. I remember David Duke doing some national tour and ending up in the area to do some speech. A lot of people showed up to hear the idiot talk. I guess he thought he'd get some support in a place that was 99% white, but failed the most basic of demographic testing and seems to have not realized that the crowd was 80%+ Catholic.
I hate these people and they deserve to burn in hell. What I hate more is restrictions on one's ability to express themselves as they wish. Should David Duke have come around here to speak? Not really, but that's just a failure to recognize his audience. He spoke and he had every right to speak. He got on the local evening news and I got to see all the stunned faces at what he was saying. The guy is an idiot and I'm not going to stop him from exposing his idiocy.
You "Anti-Fa" people out there need to learn a bit from the quiet resistance that David Duke met 25 or so years ago. As I recall no one raised a sign. Certainly no one raised a fist. Everyone I saw listened to the nonsense and then ignored the bastard. That's what I see a lot on the left/right political spectrum, the left want to shut people up and the right wants them to keep talking. If "hate speech" is such a terrible idea then why fear it being spoken?
So, there's my hate speech rant. I hate the Nazis, I hate the KKK, and I hate people that want to stop "hate speech". This isn't about "hate speech", this is about stopping the political competition from speaking and that should never be tolerated.
Why don't we stop that? You do hate subsidies don't you?
I do hate subsidies. Had we stopped subsidizing wind and solar so much we'd have a level playing field on the energy markets and we'd be seeing investments in energy that can keep the lights on without being a drain on the economy. We'd also likely see California invest in water desalination plants so they wouldn't have this self imposed water shortage.
There's lots of far drier places in the world that seem to be able to turn a desert into farmland. It boggles the mind that California can't do this as well. I don't care how few people are farming this land, or how much effect it has on the economy. Denying them water and driving them out will solve nothing. California is being run into the ground by state and local governments incapable of providing basic services such as keeping people from shitting in the streets. The California government will hand out heroin needles but deny you a drinking straw.
Go ahead, end those subsidies. Then see how well that wind and solar power works for you. Japan tried doing without nuclear power and they got wise to that real quick. You can't get clean air and cheap energy without nuclear power. California isn't an island like Japan and so they can survive under this delusion of a nuclear free society for a while with imported energy. That will not go well in the long run.
That which cannot continue will not continue. California is on a path that cannot continue. They can find a new path now and prevent far greater damage, or keep going until something simply breaks and it all comes down around their ears.
It's possible I'm both racist and ignorant. Oh, and sexist. Probably sexist too. Because I'm a man, with skin so white it's nearly translucent, therefore I must be ignorant, racist, and sexist. Oh, and homophobic too, I almost forgot about that.
I've been accused of so many things that it means nothing any more. How about instead of providing insults you provide some information?
The BBC has been giving some reporting on this and they aren't exactly a small time blog known for right wing conspiracy theories.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
The government is planning to take land from people without compensation, and amending the constitution to make it "legal". This will have long lasting effects on people in the country that produce food and conduct business. We've seen how things like this play out and it never goes well. There will be food shortages, unemployment, and all the "fun times" that come with both. This is simply blatant racism against the white minority and it will not go well for South Africa and their neighbors.
I do wonder about these stories ... I mean, murder is obviously already illegal.
And people do illegal things. When it comes to women getting abused and murdered it may be wise for women to protect themselves against law breakers. I suggest getting one of those noise makers that can get people's attention. I understand Smith and Wesson makes a nice one, called the "LadySmith". It can carry 5 noise making cartridges in a compact and simple to operate device. It's not exactly cheap but I have seen it get very good reviews.
Do taxi medallions have some special anti-murder properties, to make regular taxis safer than these services?
Yes, and no. Nothing "magical" about them but the government that issues them will keep an eye on the owners, and the people that own the medallions aren't likely to be fly by night losers that kill their passengers. This is merely one means to offer oversight and market forces to keep getting from one place to another safer.
What's happened is that we're seeing a kind of battle between old taxi services and new business models that provide much the same services. Both will have to adapt to compete and we will all benefit from it.
If only there was a pill people could take to help.
There's pills for that, and condoms, and all kinds of things to limit population growth. Oh, you mean vitamins? That works too. Or we could make sure people eat more meat, which was suggested in the article.
I'm pretty sure much of the issues of starvation in the world is due to tyrants running their countries into the ground.
Expect the next nation to be overwhelmed by tyranny and the starvation that follows to be South Africa. They seem to think that European descendants that owned farmland for centuries is racist and so the government is just going to take their land. Well, those families owned the land because they know how to farm it. You remove the farmers from the land they cultivated with care and handed down over generations, then hand that land to people that don't know how to farm that land, and you will see food scarcity. In centuries past this might mean a nation getting sent back to the stone age but now it will probably mean wealthy nations coming in to feed everyone, proclamations of "mistakes were made" but no one will get punished, and no one will learn anything.
These land grabs in South Africa should be considered crimes against humanity and the people doing this be severely punished. We don't hear much about this in popular media because that would mean pointing out that people with dark skin can be racist.
There's no shortage of nutrition in the world that wasn't caused by idiots in government. I'm pretty sure that global warming is the fault of idiots in government too.
however, i wonder why this is such a big problem in China, i never hear about uber rapes/murders in US/EU.
I've heard of rapes and murders related to Uber, taxi services, and the like, before in the USA. It's usually the driver that's the victim though. You can run the drivers through a background check but the passengers then become the unknown factor.
It's not like background checks are infallible. I've heard of people passing background checks only to buy guns and shoot up schools and churches. I've seen outright criminal behavior, or just plain creepy behavior that might not technically be illegal, by police, fire, teachers, military, and so on that passed background checks. Even so a background check will reduce repeats of bad behavior.
Oh, and often I hear people mocking the USA on its high prison population. Well, the tendency for the USA to put criminals in prison, and keep them there for a while, might be why such incidents are rare. Think about that.
must admit that i've never used these services, so can somebody explain how they prevent these things from happening?
They learned to do criminal checks on people after some drivers were caught molesting women. I recall reading about at least one of these incidents on Slashdot before. My guess is that in the USA young women are able to easily obtain OC spray, knives, handguns, stun guns, and other tools of self defense with relative ease, and the low life scum that might consider taking advantage of these women think twice before trying anything.
It appears that Uber and Lyft ban passengers and drivers from being armed but there's no real way to enforce that. My guess is that the low life scum know this as well.
There's a US space force already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
With the possibility of a new branch of the military comes the possibility of new facilities for it. Houston might be a good place for that.
You are right that California could do nuclear now, but you are wrong that they will.
Given enough time they will. I suppose that it's possible some new technology will come in the future to change this path but given the trends over the time since we discovered nuclear power it seems quite clear that this is how we will power the future. It will probably take 10 years for nuclear power to really get going now that we just got started again with a 45 year break in new construction. Japan realized pretty quickly the futility of abandoning nuclear power. California might have some options to play with for the next few years but those will run out due to costs and availability.
Too many people oppose nuclear in California. They would literally rather have intermittent power failures.
That might be a majority opinion among the population but the people that want to get work done can't tolerate this. They will fix this, and adopt nuclear power to do it, or see industry move out.
I grew up on a dairy farm, and back then power outages were almost assured in any heavy storm so we took precautions. Long stretches of overhead lines are vulnerable to lightning, ice, wind, drunk drivers hitting rotted wood poles, and so on. The outages were inconvenient but we could still get work done on diesel power. I worked in a call center when a lightning strike knocked out power for a while. Again it was inconvenient but the diesel generators kicked in and we got back to work shortly. The California dairy farmers might tolerate these power outages because their power needs are different than a call center. The call centers, and other places that need a lot of computers and communications, will deal with power outages with diesel generators, big ones, or simply move the whole operation out of state. If California wants clean air and their technology industry then they will adopt nuclear power sooner or later.
New battery technology will be invented and they will use it, or they will fail.
I'm sure that they will use this new battery technology, and charge them up with nuclear power. Until fourth generation nuclear becomes the norm we'll be stuck with old existing second generation nuclear and the third generation nuclear that's coming online now, and these rely on steam to turn that heat from fission into electricity. Steam power doesn't handle rapid changes in load well, this will mean batteries nearby to even out the load in the near future. Even after fourth generation nuclear comes, which promises a far improved ability to load follow, batteries might come in handy for load following that's cheaper than dialing down a reactor and for providing backup in case of something going wrong. For example an earthquake or a wildfire might take out a power line and require backup until the line is repaired. Also, they will need batteries to manage their supply from wind and solar as they do now. I agree that it's batteries or failure.
I just read an article on Ambri Inc. They are offering a new kind of battery that they claim is far cheaper than anything Tesla and others can offer. It's a molten metal technology so it's not suited for cell phones and electric vehicles, but it would be great on managing peaks and valleys on a grid with changing supply and demand. This is where I expect California to get their batteries.
Batteries can make unreliable power reliable but they do not provide power themselves. Nuclear power is very reliable on it's own and so need far fewer batteries than unreliable wind and sun. This means nuclear and batteries will be in California's future.
You seem to be unclear on the relative abundance of sand vs coal and uranium.
You seem to be unclear on the amount of energy we are able to extract from coal and uranium compared to sand. You seem able to search Wikipedia as well as I am, go look it up. It's not like these elements are evenly distributed in the crust, nature did a lot of work concentrating them for us.
I see you really want to turn the topic to nuclear.
Yep, kind of like how you keep bringing up solar. Seems we both have our own funny habits.
Maybe Russia will be able to get by on Krocadyl exports.
You seem to know something of this. That explains your commentary.
Only one of those is renewable, that is, infinitely available. Never mind clean, that's another issue.
Nuclear is renewable by any honest definition you can come up with to define a renewable energy source. Also as clean as solar, again by any honest definition of clean that might apply to solar power.
Hey, give me a break, coal is so over. Everybody knows that.
Coal is over, I'm quite certain of that. It is going to take a long time to fade away though.
You aren't a trumpist by any chance, are you?
No, I play the upright bass. I'm not sure how or why this is relevant.
This is the kind of outcome I would expect in an unregulated industry. That doesn't mean we need government involvement, but it does mean some kind of assurance to the customers of a product that is safe.
I remember a short anecdote of a vegetable farmer being interviewed on the topic of government inspectors. He said the government inspectors he could handle, it was the inspectors from the restaurants and grocers that were brutal. Where's the equivalent on this new trend in taxi services? Is there a way to check on the drivers beyond a checkbox on the app on not being murdered on the way to one's destination?
What is just maddening about this was the comment in one of the articles on how we shouldn't have to expect women to defend themselves but instead expect men to not abuse women. Well, sorry folks, that's simply not going to happen. People will have to be able to defend themselves, men and women, because not everyone looks at the social contract on good behavior with the same eyes. Should men behave themselves? Absolutely. When (not if) one of them don't then they should expect a face full of OC spray, a few grams of lead sent at great speed into vital organs, a several thousand volt surprise, or some other means to deter their crimes. Just knowing that such defensive measures are possible have a deterrent effect on their own.
I do see free market forces at work. If this company can't get it's act together and make people feel safe using their services then I can expect them to go out of business. If you want a cheap ride then you can take your chances with a company that doesn't check out their drivers before sending them to pick you up.
I went into considerable detail on this a couple days ago here:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
If any state in the USA wants energy that is cheap, clean, safe, reliable, feasible in the short term, and with promise to stay that way in the long term, then they must invest heavily in wind, hydro, and nuclear. Oh, almost forgot, with a little bit of natural gas to speed things along on cleaning things up until something better comes along.
California has been going backwards with their unreasonable hating on nuclear power. Maybe some of this is justified with seismic activity in the state but there are means to address this.
What is exceedingly frustrating is that the politicians that made this promise will not be in office to see it through. This is no different than Obama signing a pledge to have the USA reduce it's carbon footprint only days before he left office. He didn't even bother to make it binding in any way by sending it to Congress.
If these politicians were smart then they'd be doing wind, hydro, and nuclear right now. If they were honest on following through then the pledges on making this happen would be within their terms in office.
I'd like to see a politician make a JFK style promise, "in this decade", once in a while. Anything longer beyond 10 years is outside the power of any politician to promise anything. A promise on the scale of 10 years is having a working plan in 2 years, 2 more for breaking ground, 2 for building something tangible, 2 for testing, and 2 for making it happen. On this scale we can see it happen and call them on it if the milestones haven't been reached.
The video on that Bloomberg article spent a lot of time explaining the "experience curve" and how it can improve performance and bring down costs on renewable energy. That same thing applies to nuclear power. Nuclear power costs keep rising because it is rare for anyone to build more than a handful of any one kind of reactor. If the US federal government would just allow people to get this experience, and keep it, by issuing licenses for new reactors more than once in a decade then nuclear power could experience the benefits of this experience curve too.
Solar power was once far too expensive until people decided to make long term investments in bringing down costs. If the politicians in California made this kind of investment then they could enjoy this from nuclear power just as they could from solar. By betting everything in solar plus batteries they set themselves on a path with no competition, and therefore only a bunch of people in industry working to maximize on tax credits against other companies in the solar market instead of making something that can thrive outside California mandates. Pit solar, nuclear, wind, and hydro against each other in a free market means near assurance of reaching their goal. Betting everything on solar and storage is just setting themselves up to fail.
You're on crack, solar panels are mostly sand.
Right, sand that is "free" for anyone to just dig up from the ground, like uranium and coal. Sand that will have to be processed into PV cells, just like we must process any ore into something useful. Then placed on structures built of steel and concrete, just like any power plant is built of steel and concrete. Then wired together with wires of copper and aluminum, like any other source of electricity. This all costs money, requires mining from the earth, just like any energy source. The difference is that getting energy from coal and uranium requires far less mining with more usable energy created.
Energy from the sun is no more "free" than energy from anything else. Thinking that solar power is "free" suggests a drug addled mind.
Cost of solar will continue to decrease by 20% for each doubling of capacity.
Exponential growth in any real system is not sustainable. This will end.
Any upward blip in petroleum price will only accelerate the solar capacity curve.
Of that I have no doubt. It will also encourage investments in wind, hydro, nuclear, and whatever else we can think of to displace coal and oil.
It's ramping up faster than anybody dreamed, especially BP, and especially Putin.
Again, exponential growth cannot be sustained. This will end. The only question is what limit solar will hit first.
Adding to the upcoming misery: Russia supplies nothing to the solar industry.
But they do export uranium and nuclear power technology. Russia will do just fine in this, perhaps even come out ahead.
China on the other hand, is doing very well, not to mention already having the world's largest and fastest growing installed capacity.
China also announced a plan to dominate in the nuclear energy market. All that proves is that nations like Russia and China are not placing the future of their nations on the promise of solar power. They are taking a true "all the above" energy strategy. Any nation that wishes to survive the impending collapse of the petroleum markets, and solar hitting the wall on it's current exponential growth, would be wise to invest in every energy technology we can think of.
Unless you're planning to turn central valley into a huge reservoir, hydro isn't going to cut it.
You mean put Sacramento under several hundred feet of water? Tell me more.
There is nothing nearby due to current propulsion/distance limitations. We don't have any rationale for going to Mars right now except bragging rights and it would inevitably cost lives to achieve. What's the purpose now?
Because it's there. The same reason go to climb mountains or dive in the sea. Mars is just a higher mountain or deeper ocean.
A smokescreen for other things.
I'm sure that it is. I'm not sure how that makes any difference on people wanting to try. In fact some hidden motive only makes more people want to try, and do so with greater vigor.
Face it, the sun is setting on the fossil fuel era, and on the petroleum economies. The future belongs to renewables and batteries.
I've seen the future, and it's not powered by solar collectors. I've seen the math on the silicon, copper, aluminum, iron, and so many other materials that would have to be mined for making the solar panels, the structures to hold them up, and the wires to connect them all. I've also seen the numbers on the mining needed for a future powered by nuclear power. The difference is quite stark. The materials needed for solar power is far greater than that needed for nuclear, an order of magnitude greater. That's with current technology and nuclear power is only improving.
Now, you'll respond that solar power technology is also improving, and I will not dispute that. What we have now though is nuclear power having a head start on solar power in most every metric that is an order of magnitude ahead, and growing.
Here's all I ask of the solar power advocates, let's end all the energy subsidies and let the market choose. No subsidies for wind, or for solar, or for oil, coal, natural gas, or uranium/ If what you say is true that the future is in solar power and batteries then you should not have a problem with this, that we'll get there anyway because solar power is such a superior source of energy.
The solar advocates I've talked to would never even consider ending the solar power subsidies. I know why, because that would be a blow for solar that it might never recover from. All nuclear power advocates want is the opportunity to try. They don't want money any more, they just want permission to experiment. If nuclear power is a dead end, which I assume you believe, then where is the harm in proving this beyond all doubt with money from private investors?
I've seen the future, and it's bright from nuclear powered lights.
If you want Houston back in the thick of space missions, start voting for a reduction in military budgets and a transfer of funding into the sciences.
Or, talk to the DOD about building a US Space Force facility in Houston.
Or, Texas can fund it's own space program. If that sounds silly to you then consider that Texas has more people and money than many nations on the planet, and some of those nations smaller than Texas sent stuff into space. The government doesn't have to fund everything, just make some deals with private companies to get them to launch from there and use Houston as a base of operations.
Just voting money out of the military and into space exploration won't necessarily make missions to the moon orbit around Houston. If they want to be in on the deal then they need to make an offer that NASA cannot refuse. I'm thinking that means government spending on the state, county, and municipal levels, not federal. Texas is a big state but they don't have enough votes to divert federal funds on their own.
When it comes down to it the REAL money isn't in the budget for NASA, or even in the total budget for the federal government. The real money is in the private sector. Get private businesses interested in missions to the moon, make Houston a good place to do business, and people will be standing in line to hand out money.
Yah, no. Coal doesn't fall on you from the sky.
The sun that falls from the sky is worthless for doing actual valuable work without machines to collect, convert, divert, store, and transmit it. The sun is no more free energy than the coal buried in the ground. If you want to maintain that sun is "free" energy then I will maintain that coal and uranium is also "free" energy by the same argument. The difference is that the uranium and coal in the ground is a store of energy that can be drawn from at any time and in any weather. That cannot be said of solar power. Storing that solar power fro when it fails to fall from the sky costs money, and therefore is even further from "free".
Earth to you: the future powered by wind and sun is already here.
Powering a nation on wind and hydro for a minute or two in the middle of the night on a holiday is far from a future powered by "free" energy.
What rock do you live under?
I'd like to ask you, what color is the sky on your planet?
Electricity is fungible and that is how these companies can "go green" so cheaply. They can buy hydro power from Tennessee, solar power from Arizona, and wind power from Oklahoma (where I hear the wind comes sweeping down the plain) only because large amounts of cheap electricity come from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. We can easily get to 10 % or 20% from wind and sun, but that next 10% will be more expensive and more difficult, and the next 10% more expensive still. Getting to 100% would be possible only with great expense, likely far more than we could afford.
I keep hearing about "all the above" energy plans but they rarely include nuclear power. If the goal is to get cheap, clean, reliable, and low CO2 energy in the USA then nuclear power must be part of "all the above". Not doing so will mean failure.
These announcements on companies buying "green" energy are just PR, they do next to nothing on making the world more "green". If they were serious about lowering their CO2 output then they'd be announcing an investment in nuclear power, but that's the "n-word" that shall not be mentioned in polite company.
Just like everyone else, they'll get it from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The difference is that they will buy "tariffs" to offset this use later.
In other words this is just an accounting trick like all the other tech companies that made similar announcements to buy "green energy". If these companies were serious about electricity that was green, cheap, and reliable, then they'd be investing in nuclear power. But there's a bunch of idiots out there, like in GreenPeace, that have a rabid hatred for anything "nu-ku-lar" that any such announcement would backfire on them. So, they make happy mouth noises to please investors and the snowflakes and we all pretend this isn't just another pointless PR announcement to prop up the stock price.
Hint: sun rays are free. The wind is free.
The wind and sun as sources of energy are as "free" as coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Just like wind and sun all you have to do is build the machines to collect this energy and turn it into a form we find useful.
If the wind and sun is "free" then everything we use for energy is "free".
Another problem is that we can't just pile up wind and solar energy into a storage bin like we can coal and uranium. Coal and uranium are already stored up for us in the dirt. We can draw from this store at any rate we choose, when we choose. Given the vastness of the supply of this store of energy, especially in uranium, it's as limitless as wind and sun could ever promise to be. Solar power gets real expensive at night, while coal and uranium cost just the same. Well, coal and uranium tends to get a bit cheaper at night, but that's more on the limits of our technology than any real change in our ability to dig it up from the ground.
The wind and sun may be free but the machines to harvest and store this energy are not. Good luck with your plans on a future powered by wind and sun.
Given the rate of development of new nuclear power technology I expect by 2046 that grid batteries will be considered an idea best left in the 2030s.
Ag takes up 90% of developed water in CA while making up less than 2% of California's economy.
Right! Dammit, those farmers are just taking all that water and wasting it... on food.
We need to cut off this waste. Because it's not like people can't just get their fruits and vegetables from somewhere else. And those people in other places need to stop wasting water on food too. NO MORE IRRIGATION!
What will happen is Ag will lose some of their water allocations because, economically, they are not important enough to the state.
Seriously, have you thought this through? If you drive out agriculture then you drive out the people that grow your food. These plans to "save the planet" seem to have no consideration on the impact that will have on the suffering it can impose on real and actual people.
You can drive out technology companies from California and they'll do fine somewhere else. If you drive out the people that grow food they can't just go out to some salt flats and grow apples there.
These idiots that want to "save the planet" don't seem to think much of saving the people from starvation.
Only if we wash the coal really well first.
Germany has been real good about "greenwashing" their coal. You see they buy up a bunch of sawdust and woodchips from lumber mills in the American southeast. They then load it all up on ships that burn bunker fuel, when it reaches German ports they load it onto diesel fuel powered trucks and trains, then burn this "green fuel" with their brown coal and pretend that they've lowered their CO2 footprint.
They do this same "greenwashing" at the physical plant where I went to university. They burn "agricultural waste" with the coal for heating, cooling, and electricity on campus. They then get to pretend they made things "green" by diverting valuable material that used to be used for fertilizer and erosion control and turning it to worthless ash.
I swear that these idiots that want to "save humanity from itself" are going to get us all killed. They are taking food and burning it. Civilizations collapsed from this.
Clean power, bad news for Russia. End of the petroleum age. End of petroleum economy. The Russian mafia has a plan of course.
Yes, of course they have a plan. I've seen their secrets and the plan is simply diabolical. They intend to sell coal, oil, and natural gas cheaper than wind and solar energy. Those bastards! What could we ever do to stop them?
Oh, I know. Maybe we could find a way to get wind and solar to be cheaper than the energy the world buys from Russia. Oh, and maybe start building more nuclear power plants for cheap, clean, and domestic, energy. Because, you know, maybe it just might work.