I'm sure it will, and in doing so could expose the radioactive material in the engineering sections to the sea. I'm not particularly concerned with that since the ocean is quite large, is already "contaminated" with naturally occurring radioactive elements, and adding whatever is inside the ship can only be a rounding error in estimating the radiation that would be in the sea. I'm just thinking that there would be considerable international outcry in dropping 100,000 tons of scrap metal and radioactive waste in a subduction zone.
We've dumped aircraft carriers on the sea floor before, but only after they've been stripped of anything that might be considered a threat to sea life, and the sunken hulk was then intended to become a habitat for sea life to occupy. This has never been done with a nuclear powered ship. Well, Russia may have done this but that gets back to my concerns of creating an international incident.
Why are they decommissioning these anyways, instead of maintaining them? It seems like an insane waste to be continually building new vessels and shredding old ones.
They scrap them because the reactors run out of fuel, and the equipment on board get out of date. It costs nearly one billion dollars to do a mid-life refuel and refit on an aircraft carrier. Each carrier is built with the intent to sail for 50 to 60 years with a mid-life refuel and refit. One big problem with these older aircraft carriers is that they were built with the electrical loads of the time. There's a lot more electronics on board modern navy ships. Maybe they can upgrade the reactors but then there is the problem of removing the heat. The heat load comes not from just the upgraded reactors but in cooling the occupied spaces with all the new electronics.
New aircraft carriers have different weapons, and there are spaces designed to accommodate these weapons. Weapons like the Phalanx or Goalkeeper CIWS are designed to be just bolted to the deck, and need very little in modifications to the ship. Weapons like missile launch tubes, defensive laser systems, and electronic warfare systems, often need significant changes. When it comes to electronic warfare the shape of the ship is important to counteract radar detection, that cannot be changed cheaply. The old steam catapults are not suited to the launching of the much lighter unmanned drones that the Navy and Marines like to use. They are also not suited to heavier aircraft they'd like to launch in the future. Updating the steam catapults would be very expensive, and using more modern electric driven catapults only adds to the electricity generation shortage they already have.
Maybe, just maybe, they could re-purpose the carrier into a launch platform for helicopters. This means they don't need the outdated steam catapults. This means that the space used by the catapults, arrested recovery systems, and so forth, could be used for weapons and updating other systems. But then you have a helicopter carrier that's twice the size of what the Navy sails now as a helicopter carrier, which limits where it can go and makes it a much larger target in wartime.
Just keeping the ship on "mothball" status costs money. This means finding a place to park a 100,000 ton ship, keep curious kids and spies from snooping around, and keep the rust and weather from sinking it.
I recall seeing several plans over the years of people wanting to use decommissioned aircraft carriers for various projects. Even then there is the problem that the reactors are out of fuel. Either the reactors need more fuel, which involves cutting holes in the hull to do, or the reactors need to be removed, which means cutting even larger holes and likely would render it no longer sea worthy. Maybe the reactor sections could just be sealed off and the ship rendered an unpowered hulk, but then it's a floating nuclear waste site with no idea on where that might end up if it left the hands of the US Navy.
I completely understand why the Navy is continually decommissioning old vessels and building new ones. What's been happening though is that the Navy has been building ships with longer operational life spans built in. A small ship in the past might expect to last only 10 or 20 years, now they keep them afloat for 40 years. Larger ships, like aircraft carriers, might last 40 years but now they intend to keep them sailing for at least 60 years. Submarines though are both highly specialized and under considerable stresses, their operational life span seems to have topped out at 30 years.
Everything is recyclable if you put enough energy into it. When it costs more in energy to recycle versus what it would cost in just getting more material elsewhere is when recycling becomes pointless. If we want to see more recycling then we need cheaper energy.
Until then breaking up junk into pieces and dropping the bits in a hole in the ground is a perfectly viable means of disposal. We are not going to run out of places to dig a hole any time soon. When we have the technology to recycle this stuff and not lose money/energy/resources to do so then we know where to find it and dig it up.
I'm now convinced that you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with some construct of your imagination. I already agreed with you that the right of self defense does not mean people can murder without punishment. I'm trying to make it clear to you that gun control in the USA has gone one step too far with these recent blocking of sharing 3D printer files. That's not 2nd Amendment territory any more, this is infringement on the 1st Amendment.
Here's another thing, I'd like to see where you get this idea of an overwhelming dislike of the NRA. I saw a recent fundraiser for a march against the NRA. Go have a look on how much money they raised for the protest. https://www.gofundme.com/natio...
A whole $70 on a national fundraiser. The NRA likely makes more money on a single order of overpriced t-shirts and "tactical" pants on their website.
I don't care what you say, the National Rifle Association is not the bad guy here. Perhaps you could start understanding this by reading some of the things that the NRA has written. This might be a good place to start: https://www.nraila.org/article...
Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3-D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRAâ(TM)s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.
The NRA supports laws barring people from producing undetectable firearms. It's already illegal to make an undetectable firearm. It's illegal for felons, drug dealers, illegal aliens, and others law breakers like them, to possess any firearm. It's illegal to murder people. It's illegal to threaten people with a firearm. It's illegal to carry a firearm into a school. I don't know what you want because it seems that what so many claim we need in laws restricting gun ownership and use already exists. What I don't want to see is a law barring the posting of drawings on the internet, that's simply a step too far.
You really don't understand what your insistence on unregulated gun ownership is going to cost all of us, do you?
Do you understand the cost? We now are seeing the government and private companies so scared of unregistered guns that they are willing to violate the most basic rights of the freedom to speak, communicate, and express ourselves. We have TSA agents denying people to board a plane because they have a t-shirt with a picture of a gun on it.
There are laws against certain kinds of people from having guns. People like those with a felony record, illegal aliens, those dishonorably discharged from the military, fugitives from justice, those deemed mentally incompetent by a court, and perhaps a few others. I'm fine with that, on some level at least. Here's what I'm not fine with, taking this to the point that it is infringing on the law abiding citizen to speak freely.
Killing people is bad. Yep. Shooting people so they die is bad. I'm with you. Bad people owning guns is bad. I'm with you so long as we keep "bad people" narrow. Bad people making guns is bad. Sure, and again so long as we keep this definition narrow. Bad people getting plans to make a gun is bad. Um, now we are getting into some real fuzzy territory. Good people can't have plans for a gun because then bad people might get them too. Okay, this is off the deep end. This is so far removed from the intent to keep people safe that it's now potentially illegal for people to even discuss how firearms function.
How do you get children to be safe around cars? Well, you explain to them what they look like and what they can do. How do you make a young adult into a safe driver? You go into further detail on how a car works. To show how to check tire pressure, check oil levels, and change a burnt out indicator light bulb, there must be detailed drawing of these parts to get the point across efficiently. Well, how do you keep children safe around firearms? You show them what they look like and explain how they work. How do you make sure future police, teachers, and medics know how to secure a firearm? You go into detail on how they work. We aren't going to free the world of firearms any more than we are of cars. By banning even drawings of firearms from public distribution we are making the world less safe.
To make this clear, there is a very fine line between a document on how to secure a firearm to keep it safe and a document on how to construct one. If these drawings are of sufficient detail so that a police officer, medic, teacher, parent, or other person can know how to secure a firearm to keep them safe from children then they are detailed enough to make one. Keeping these documents from the public are not keeping anyone safe.
50 years ago we saw the Gun Control Act of 1968 get passed into law. Many of the reasons for it passing were because of the Black Panther Party being formed in California a few years earlier. This was spreading quickly and there were bands of armed Black men patrolling the streets to maintain order because the police were not keeping people safe. The police could not arrest someone for carrying a weapon, and they could not stop anyone from buying one, since there was no law against it.
What had been established in previous laws and court cases is that the police couldn't bar a Black person from getting a gun but they could require a person to submit to a background check based on character. The GCA68 alone didn't allow for the disarming of minorities, but it set rules on restricting sales across state lines. State laws then predominated. What happened then is states started passing laws on registering firearms, which until 1968 firearms were not required to have serial numbers and registration was impossible without serial numbers. The states would then not allow someone to register a firearm, and therefore not own one legally, unless they were deemed of the right "character" to do so. This is how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was kept disarmed.
Gun control is racist. The roots of gun control come out of slavery. The earliest gun control laws were meant to keep slaves as slaves, even after slavery was officially abolished. When Blacks started to fight for their equality under the law then states started passing laws restricting gun ownership. One of the first things to go was mail order of guns, because the person making the order might be a Black man. Then gun shops had to be licensed to sell guns, and if their "papers were not in order" then the government could shut them down. I'll let you guess who got checked most often on paperwork violations.
What we are seeing now are politicians so scared of Black men getting guns that they are not only willing to continue these racist laws but veer into the territory of violating the right of the people to speak, communicate, or peaceably assemble.
Yep, 90 years ago alcohol was considered more dangerous than a mail order Thompson submachine gun. Now they are so scared of an unregistered single shot pistol that they are willing to take the right to communicate freely and chuck it in the toilet.
You planning to water the tree of liberty with the blood of more schoolchildren? I hear that's all the rage with the well-regulated militia these days.
The "well regulated militia" was intended to be a guard against the spilling of children's blood. What we got instead was a ban on good people being armed on school grounds. Now we see children getting murdered unopposed while "the people that keep us safe" cower outside. I don't want armed guards in schools, they cost money and history shows they are not effective. I want armed parents in schools. It costs nothing to do, just tell the parents they have to pay for all the training and background checks. Many states do this already with a concealed weapons permit. If they have one of those then I consider them more qualified to stop children from getting murdered than someone with a badge.
Let the parent's organize it, they'll work out scheduling and such. I'd bet they'd even bring donuts and coffee for the school staff. If someone dares threaten the children in the school then watch out as armed moms and dads take charge. Don't think I don't want the police involved with my comment on them cowering outside, I do want the police there. They do very good jobs of taking reports and locking up bad people. I just want to see children being protected by people that give a damn.
Here's the deal with your comments on "well regulated militia", gun laws will become meaningless very soon. We can't stop people from getting guns any more, this development of 3D printed guns is just the latest means for people to skirt the law. You want to stop schoolkids from being murdered? Then put good guys with guns inside the school before the bad guys with guns get there. Since we don't know when the bad guys will come then that means the good guys with guns get there before the children do every morning, and they don't leave until the last child has left that afternoon.
The USA is the only developed nation that has a firearm crime rate equivalent to third world nations or war zones.
But what are the TOTAL crime rates? I keep hearing about "gun crime" but I don't care if people are getting shot, clubbed, stabbed, or throttled to death.
Here's another problem with comparing murder rates in the USA with other nations, the USA is a federation. Like the European Union the USA is a collection of independent states. Each state has their own rules on guns. The USA does have some terrible murder rates, but you can't blame the laws in Utah for crimes in New York. Putting all the states in the same umbrella as an example of "gun crime" is about as sensible as blaming Spain for crime in Germany. Also remember the scale of this, there are more people in US states that a lot of people around the world don't even think about, like North Carolina, than in some European nations, like Sweden. If you want to compare apples to apples then you need to compare individual states within the US to other nations.
The murder rate in New Hampshire is 1/10th that of Louisiana. Go compare the gun laws in both those states. Here's a hint, one state requires a permit to carry a concealed handgun, and the other does not.
Gun laws have very little to do with crime rates. Look at Missouri, very lax in gun laws and lots of crime. Vermont also has very lax gun laws, but yet 1/4 the murder rate of Missouri. It's almost as if there is no correlation between gun laws and crime rates.
Here's an idea, if you want to stop crime then put criminals in prison. That seems to be working for a lot of places. If gun restrictions stopped murders then Venezuela would be the safest place on Earth.
...does shutting down the internet just lead to more unrest? Wouldn't a better strategy be, "Eithiopia is footing the bill to make Netflix free during peak protest hours"?
Loss of the internet can mean several things. Maybe it's the government shutting things down, or maybe they just got their internet from Sprint or Mediacom. Blaming this on the government could be dismissed as rumor if the communications are disrupted, because verifying anything over the usual communications channels is impossible. This is especially true if such disruptions are routine. I don't know how reliable their internet might be in Ethiopia, but if it is so fragile that the government can shut it down so easily then it's possible the flunkies from Sprint and Mediacom are running things and loss of internet access is common.
As I recall such things happening in the past, and in other nations, is that people would coordinate government protests over social media, websites, and so forth. By disrupting internet access these protests are uncoordinated. The rapid and anonymous communications from internet access means that the government has difficulty in breaking up crowds. Perhaps a more sophisticated government could spread misinformation through these same channels to confuse protesters but if pulling the plug on the internet is possible then that is a far easier means to disrupt the communications.
Good enough against sheepherders from a military perspective. But it's completely useless against any sort of real advecary. For any semi-competent air defence it's easy pickings.
Define "semi-competent air defense". These solar powered airplanes can fly for days at altitudes of 70,000 feet. That means that they can take off from just about anywhere in the world, reaching altitude in a safe area, then fly over to the battlefield and loiter. Most commercial aircraft have a maximum altitude of 45,000 feet or less. Some military jets can go higher than that 45,000 feet but only by restricting their weapon payload and maneuverability. The few aircraft designed to go that high are recon jets, and they have no weapons, that's assuming they could engage a target that's moving at subsonic speed while they are going Mach 3.
Because so few aircraft fly above 45,000 feet there are few anti-aircraft systems designed to engage a target that high. This altitude is in the territory of anti-ballistic missile or anti-satellite weaponry. The US military has such weapons, as do many allies. China doesn't have such capability, not yet anyway. Russia might have it, but they lost a lot of ability to keep making these weapons over the decades.
Here's a short video telling a tale on what happens when an Iranian F-4 fighter jet tries to shoot down an American surveillance drone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
These "semi-competent" air forces will not be going against a solitary drone flying overhead. They will have to get through the air defenses that come with that drone to shoot it down. Being at such a high altitude is in itself a very good self defense mechanism, it is out of reach of most every military aircraft and most every anti-aircraft system in existence, and leaves a lot of room between it and the ground for defensive aircraft to fly.
The problem is twofold: first of all, Europe fucked up Africa enough that it still hasn't recovered (same with the Middle East).
The second part is that quite often their own government screws them over.
Let's assume for the moment that I agree with you. Let's assume the problems with Africa started with European influence, and the governments in Africa are inefficient and corrupt. So, how do we fix it?
Do we fix this by allowing waves of immigrants from Africa into Europe? How does that resolve the problems? Seems to me that allowing refugees to leave these shit hole nations might be a good means to resolve the immediate problem of people being mistreated, but so long as these corrupt governments are allowed to exist they will continue to drive more and more people out of Africa. Who is going to bring viable governments to Africa? These same Europeans that fucked them over? Maybe these refugees should return. But then they'd return "spoiled" from European influence, no? Maybe they aren't "spoiled" but can return with an education of how a free nation can operate.
I could even argue that allowing refugees to flee to Europe is bad for Africa, or at least a greater cost to everyone for less benefit. Taking someone from a place in which they are accustomed and have family, and putting them in place with a different climate, language, and culture, is very stressful. This movement is very expensive, in both resources consumed and in lives lost. We should demand they stay for their own sake. The problems of a corrupt government is not resolved by fleeing it, it is resolved by fighting it. If Europe wants to help these people then they should not take them in, they should provide the resources they need in Africa to create free nations.
But we can't stand the idea of Europeans going in to help restore order in Africa, because that might be considered another colonial invasion. So, instead of correcting for past errors, we do what's "politically correct" and allow corrupt African governments to continue killing and driving out people.
Blaming Europe for the problems does nothing to bring a resolution. Especially if these accusations come with handcuffs to prevent an effective resolution. Okay, fine, Europe broke it. So then just maybe we should allow Europe to fix it. I'm guessing they might just go along with this because it's not cheap to take in all these refugees, it would be better for both Africa and Europe if Europe was allowed to go in and fix the problems.
If the argument is that Europe should stay out of this then I can agree with that. Staying out of it should then include refusing to take in refugees because, so the claims are, that it was European influence on these peoples that caused the problems. By keeping these refugees out then they are being "saved" from European influence.
They did do their research, only they left that part to the last paragraph of the article.
Also, he noted that the Bermuda Triangle, which is one of the most heavily trafficked parts of any ocean, doesn't actually see a statistically unlikely rate of disappearances. âoeAccording to Lloyds of London and the US coast guard, the number of planes that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis,â Dr Karl told News.com.
I remember seeing this in some TV show about the Bermuda Triangle. They talked about "killer waves" and "methane clouds" that would destroy ships and kill the engines in airplanes. But then at the end of the program they talked about how these phenomenon are not unique to the area, which "sunk" the entire idea of this being a particularly dangerous part of the sea.
I thought the methane clouds idea was very interesting. What would happen is a "burp" of methane from deep in the ocean could come up randomly in front of an airplane. The cause of the "burp" would likely be a seismic shift in the ocean floor which would release some pressure on a "sludge" of liquefied methane on the ocean floor, from decayed plants or what had seeped up from the earth and liquefied by the pressure, and turn it to a gas bubble. This bubble would get very large as it rose and when it popped up to the surface it would create this cloud of water and methane that could deprive oxygen to an airplane engine. Someone flying low and slow, which often happens in recreational and military airplanes, could mean being left with little time to react before hitting the water. Having multiple engines in this case wouldn't help because all engines would be deprived of oxygen at the same time. For this to happen though would be a very tiny chance of someone flying low to the sea, the bubble happen right in front of them, and be sufficiently large to kill all the engines. The chances are small but given enough time it could happen.
I don't see it being too useful for military because it's too light to have any real defence and it would probably be highly vulnerable to solar flare disruption events.
I disagree, I see this as highly valuable for the military. One problem the military has is keeping communications over a battlefield. If this airplane can provide internet access to far off places then it can provide communications to and from a battlefield and among those on the battlefield.
Also of military value would be the other planned use for this airplane, providing imagery. Knowing where the friends and foes are located would be quite valuable. Drones were quite effective in previous conflicts to direct artillery, if this can stay in the air for days instead of hours then that would be very valuable. This could likely provide weather reporting with a different instrument package.
This thing flies so high and for so long they call it a "pseudo-satellite". One problem with satellites is that they are too high to look through clouds, get something lower and more can be seen. Another problem with satellites is they keep moving. They come over the target, and then they aren't over the target. A "pseudo-satellite" can be parked where it's needed and when it's needed.
Panels on the roof of a house provide shadow, they don't cause need for more cooling.
They also provide shade in the winter, when I want the sun to warm my house. Trees are better for summer shade and in the autumn they lose their leaves and let the sun warm my house. People need more trees, not more solar panels.
Strange that your panels lose so much power when "warmed" a bit, why don't you buy modern state of the art panels instead of junk?
Because if you actually did some research on this there are two kinds of solar cells, ones that are highly efficient and ones that handle heat better. The solar car competition was barred from using space grade PV cells, as that was deemed an unfair advantage to the well funded programs and did not demonstrate the performance of what people might expect of solar panels for consumers. The sponsors of the solar car competitions wanted to "sell" solar power on Earth. I'm sure that space grade panels handle the heat very well, but they are astronomically expensive.
That would spare us a lot of your misinformed posts.
Citation needed.
BTW: if I had AC, the summer temperature would probably 24C in my house. I really don't like to wear a suit or a long sleeved shirt in summer and change dress to get outside.
I do have AC and I tend to keep the house at 28C during the day, but cool it down to 25C at night. My concern is mostly to keep the humidity under 50%, which keeps the house very comfortable.
the Soviet Union orbited nuclear weapons in space back in the 60's/70's.
They did not, but they did put an armed space station into orbit. There was a cannon on board one manned space station, a cannon much like the anti-aircraft cannons on navy ships. It was fired once as a test before the station was de-orbited, no one was sure what would happen if they had to fire the cannon so no crew was on board for the test firing.
It was this armed Soviet space station that may have lead to the US Strategic Defense Initiative, a program to defend against space based weapons. This lead the Soviets to spend more money on space based weapons, and likely led to the bankruptcy of the government and the fall of the Soviet Union. People later found out that SDI was mostly a fake, they wanted to goad the Soviets into military spending that the US politicians knew that they could not afford. I say "mostly" fake because the US federal government did still spend a lot of money on missile defense, just none of which was based in orbit.
We now see China, North Korea, Iran, and other nations trying to build their own intercontinental missiles. The need for a space force didn't end with the fall of the Soviet Union, it only spread out more widely. Do these new threats carry the same weight as that from the Soviets? Perhaps, perhaps not. What seems clear is that at some point there will be an adversary to the USA that will be capable of launching space based weapons, and the USA should be prepared. Alternatively, the creation of a US space force will again goad other nations into spending themselves into bankruptcy in trying to keep up with the USA.
Open air Brayton cycle turbines would be used on high temperature molten salt reactors. They don't use any water, they use air. I'm having difficulty finding a good source for how this would work. Perhaps this is a good introduction: https://www.nuclear-power.net/...
We aren't going to run out of air, even though water might be scarce in certain times and places. Even if the air is a bit warm at 50C the heat for the turbines would come from a molten salt reactor or molten metal cooled reactor which would run somewhere around 1000C. Any loss of output with such a power plant from a hot day would be a rounding error.
That's relevant when the panels can get to be 65C in the sun even if air temperature is 40C to 45C. The PV electrical output drops not by the air temperature but by the panel temperature. Efficiency drops by about 0.5% for each degree above 25C. With panel temperature at 65C that means 80% maximum output. If the panel is at 65C then so is the roof on your house, and that heat needs to be removed to keep people inside comfortable. That heat is removed by air conditioning, which needs electricity.
If you have 18 hours of sun then you need 18 hours of cooling. Even then when the sun goes down the air outside might be 35C, and you'll need cooling in the house until it's 20C or so outside which might not happen until well past midnight. Maybe that can be done with wind power but heat likes to diminish the winds. I've seen heat waves before, lots of hot sun and not much wind.
The thermal cycles on hot days can stress the PV cells, leading to cracks that permanently reduce the output of that cell. A damaged cell can lead to further damage with stresses on adjacent cells in the circuit, since this cell is no longer matched with the rest in that string. Kind of like how a bad cell in a battery can stress the other cells and lead to total failure.
I worked on a solar car in college. Hot and sunny days were bad for the car, we wanted some clouds to keep the temperature down. If we had water we'd spray the panels when we could to lower the temperature and wash off dirt. In a drought you don't have water for that.
The city is fighting services that offer a means for people to get where they want to go at a price that they are willing to pay. So, what exactly is the problem?
I hate the whole concept of a minimum wage. The minimum wage has been and always will be zero dollars. No law will change that.
Let's say I start a volunteer ferrying service. I post my phone number and website so people can find it, and I say I'll carry you door to door in the city. I offer to carry people in my car for nothing, but if they offer me a "tip" then I'm not going to refuse. If people ask for what kind of "tip" I expect then I'll give a quick estimate of my time, fuel, wear on the vehicle, and some "buffer" above that to make it worth my time.
I basically just described how Uber and Lyft got started, as ride share programs to reduce congestion and share on the costs of the ride. Both have evolved into a kind of taxi service once people figured out that they could make a small but not insignificant income by volunteering to take people where they wanted to go. It might be below minimum wage if the hours are calculated but then it's better than making nothing at all.
Go ahead New York, go and regulate these services. All that means is another one will come in to take their place. They might structure their business plan to avoid the rules, or simply ignore them because enforcement is impossible. You want to tell people that they can't drive a friend to the airport? Good luck with that.
I keep getting phone calls, shit in the mail, and even some dude walking door to door, all trying to up sell me to more services from Mediacom. Every time they ask I tell them the same thing, I don't want more services for more money, I want to be able to keep what I have for the same price. Every year it seems they offer new plans with more "gigs", more channels, more phone doodads, and at a higher price. All I want is a reliable internet connection, and not have my costs go up. It would be nice if my costs go down once in a while, like my costs for other services have, but just staying the same is okay too.
There was a time I wanted more speed, more data per month, and so on, but I've reached what I needed. I got grandfathered in at my last fee rate but my speed went up with the switch to DOCSIS 3.0. This might be why they bother me so much, I'm not making them money on the old fee schedule. Well, suck it. If I had to pay on the new fee schedule then I'd be getting the "gigs" and speed I need for the price I pay now from a cellular internet provider.
I've stayed with Mediacom this far only because the phone company keeps telling me that fiber will be coming "real soon" and I figured I'd just switch when it got here. Well, it's been taking far too long now. I haven't had a lot of choices until the cellular companies started upgrading their networks around here. Now I'm thinking of telling the wired services to all go to hell and I'll just get one of those cellular hotspots for my house. If I switch now I'd get just as many "gigs" and probably even faster data, for just a few dollars more per month. I'm thinking "real soon" Mediacom will have one less customer.
One reason the situation wasnâ(TM)t worse in Germany, of course, was the large number of solar arrays. But even their output is negatively impacted during heat waves; efficiency drops by up to 0.5 percent per degree Celsius â" and the panel temperature counts, not the air. Fortunately, temperatures in Germany still do not rise as much as they do in Spain, where the effect was greater.
Also no mention of reduced wind energy production from the heat wave. It doesn't take much to find news articles on European wind output dropping, especially in UK and Germany that made large investments in wind power recently.
When temperatures rise every electrical generation system we have in common use is affected. Thermal plants that boil water will often have to reduce output or shutdown because the cooling water exceeds minimums of safety and/or environmental impact. Wind sees lowered output due to weather patterns that come with a heat wave. Solar PV output is reduced since the panels get less efficient in heat. Hydro sees lowered output from evaporation out of reservoirs.
The least effected is natural gas turbines, because they operate at such high temperatures that the hot air doesn't mean much on the heat sink side. If we saw similar high temperatures in nuclear, which fourth generation designs can reach, then we'd see nuclear still operating in the heat.
Over the course of a year nuclear produces about 10% of our power, wind about 30% and renewables in total over 40%.
Germany has between 9 and 10 GW of operating nuclear power capacity. Germany also has 5 GW of hydro, 40 GW of solar PV, and 50 GW of wind turbine, in operating electrical generation capacity. So ten times the installed renewable capacity produced only four times the energy of nuclear.
Look at France on the other hand, 65% of all power comes from nukes... they will probably shut down 20% - 30% of them during August... and buy coal power on the European market. So much for your beloved nuclear power.
France has over 60 GW of electrical generation capacity from nuclear, which produces over 80% of its electricity. France has 25 GW of hydro producing over 10% of its electricity. France has over 10 GW of installed wind and solar producing less than 10% of its electricity.
It should be no surprise if France shifts from nuclear to coal. Unreliable energy like wind, water, and sun, cannot keep up with nuclear and coal.
Slashdot Mirror
Pressurized salt water will eat that ship up.
I'm sure it will, and in doing so could expose the radioactive material in the engineering sections to the sea. I'm not particularly concerned with that since the ocean is quite large, is already "contaminated" with naturally occurring radioactive elements, and adding whatever is inside the ship can only be a rounding error in estimating the radiation that would be in the sea. I'm just thinking that there would be considerable international outcry in dropping 100,000 tons of scrap metal and radioactive waste in a subduction zone.
We've dumped aircraft carriers on the sea floor before, but only after they've been stripped of anything that might be considered a threat to sea life, and the sunken hulk was then intended to become a habitat for sea life to occupy. This has never been done with a nuclear powered ship. Well, Russia may have done this but that gets back to my concerns of creating an international incident.
Why are they decommissioning these anyways, instead of maintaining them?
It seems like an insane waste to be continually building new vessels and shredding old ones.
They scrap them because the reactors run out of fuel, and the equipment on board get out of date. It costs nearly one billion dollars to do a mid-life refuel and refit on an aircraft carrier. Each carrier is built with the intent to sail for 50 to 60 years with a mid-life refuel and refit. One big problem with these older aircraft carriers is that they were built with the electrical loads of the time. There's a lot more electronics on board modern navy ships. Maybe they can upgrade the reactors but then there is the problem of removing the heat. The heat load comes not from just the upgraded reactors but in cooling the occupied spaces with all the new electronics.
New aircraft carriers have different weapons, and there are spaces designed to accommodate these weapons. Weapons like the Phalanx or Goalkeeper CIWS are designed to be just bolted to the deck, and need very little in modifications to the ship. Weapons like missile launch tubes, defensive laser systems, and electronic warfare systems, often need significant changes. When it comes to electronic warfare the shape of the ship is important to counteract radar detection, that cannot be changed cheaply. The old steam catapults are not suited to the launching of the much lighter unmanned drones that the Navy and Marines like to use. They are also not suited to heavier aircraft they'd like to launch in the future. Updating the steam catapults would be very expensive, and using more modern electric driven catapults only adds to the electricity generation shortage they already have.
Maybe, just maybe, they could re-purpose the carrier into a launch platform for helicopters. This means they don't need the outdated steam catapults. This means that the space used by the catapults, arrested recovery systems, and so forth, could be used for weapons and updating other systems. But then you have a helicopter carrier that's twice the size of what the Navy sails now as a helicopter carrier, which limits where it can go and makes it a much larger target in wartime.
Just keeping the ship on "mothball" status costs money. This means finding a place to park a 100,000 ton ship, keep curious kids and spies from snooping around, and keep the rust and weather from sinking it.
I recall seeing several plans over the years of people wanting to use decommissioned aircraft carriers for various projects. Even then there is the problem that the reactors are out of fuel. Either the reactors need more fuel, which involves cutting holes in the hull to do, or the reactors need to be removed, which means cutting even larger holes and likely would render it no longer sea worthy. Maybe the reactor sections could just be sealed off and the ship rendered an unpowered hulk, but then it's a floating nuclear waste site with no idea on where that might end up if it left the hands of the US Navy.
I completely understand why the Navy is continually decommissioning old vessels and building new ones. What's been happening though is that the Navy has been building ships with longer operational life spans built in. A small ship in the past might expect to last only 10 or 20 years, now they keep them afloat for 40 years. Larger ships, like aircraft carriers, might last 40 years but now they intend to keep them sailing for at least 60 years. Submarines though are both highly specialized and under considerable stresses, their operational life span seems to have topped out at 30 years.
Everything is recyclable if you put enough energy into it. When it costs more in energy to recycle versus what it would cost in just getting more material elsewhere is when recycling becomes pointless. If we want to see more recycling then we need cheaper energy.
Until then breaking up junk into pieces and dropping the bits in a hole in the ground is a perfectly viable means of disposal. We are not going to run out of places to dig a hole any time soon. When we have the technology to recycle this stuff and not lose money/energy/resources to do so then we know where to find it and dig it up.
I'm now convinced that you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with some construct of your imagination. I already agreed with you that the right of self defense does not mean people can murder without punishment. I'm trying to make it clear to you that gun control in the USA has gone one step too far with these recent blocking of sharing 3D printer files. That's not 2nd Amendment territory any more, this is infringement on the 1st Amendment.
Here's another thing, I'd like to see where you get this idea of an overwhelming dislike of the NRA. I saw a recent fundraiser for a march against the NRA. Go have a look on how much money they raised for the protest.
https://www.gofundme.com/natio...
A whole $70 on a national fundraiser. The NRA likely makes more money on a single order of overpriced t-shirts and "tactical" pants on their website.
I don't care what you say, the National Rifle Association is not the bad guy here. Perhaps you could start understanding this by reading some of the things that the NRA has written. This might be a good place to start:
https://www.nraila.org/article...
Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3-D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRAâ(TM)s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.
The NRA supports laws barring people from producing undetectable firearms. It's already illegal to make an undetectable firearm. It's illegal for felons, drug dealers, illegal aliens, and others law breakers like them, to possess any firearm. It's illegal to murder people. It's illegal to threaten people with a firearm. It's illegal to carry a firearm into a school. I don't know what you want because it seems that what so many claim we need in laws restricting gun ownership and use already exists. What I don't want to see is a law barring the posting of drawings on the internet, that's simply a step too far.
You really don't understand what your insistence on unregulated gun ownership is going to cost all of us, do you?
Do you understand the cost? We now are seeing the government and private companies so scared of unregistered guns that they are willing to violate the most basic rights of the freedom to speak, communicate, and express ourselves. We have TSA agents denying people to board a plane because they have a t-shirt with a picture of a gun on it.
There are laws against certain kinds of people from having guns. People like those with a felony record, illegal aliens, those dishonorably discharged from the military, fugitives from justice, those deemed mentally incompetent by a court, and perhaps a few others. I'm fine with that, on some level at least. Here's what I'm not fine with, taking this to the point that it is infringing on the law abiding citizen to speak freely.
Killing people is bad. Yep. Shooting people so they die is bad. I'm with you. Bad people owning guns is bad. I'm with you so long as we keep "bad people" narrow. Bad people making guns is bad. Sure, and again so long as we keep this definition narrow. Bad people getting plans to make a gun is bad. Um, now we are getting into some real fuzzy territory. Good people can't have plans for a gun because then bad people might get them too. Okay, this is off the deep end. This is so far removed from the intent to keep people safe that it's now potentially illegal for people to even discuss how firearms function.
How do you get children to be safe around cars? Well, you explain to them what they look like and what they can do. How do you make a young adult into a safe driver? You go into further detail on how a car works. To show how to check tire pressure, check oil levels, and change a burnt out indicator light bulb, there must be detailed drawing of these parts to get the point across efficiently. Well, how do you keep children safe around firearms? You show them what they look like and explain how they work. How do you make sure future police, teachers, and medics know how to secure a firearm? You go into detail on how they work. We aren't going to free the world of firearms any more than we are of cars. By banning even drawings of firearms from public distribution we are making the world less safe.
To make this clear, there is a very fine line between a document on how to secure a firearm to keep it safe and a document on how to construct one. If these drawings are of sufficient detail so that a police officer, medic, teacher, parent, or other person can know how to secure a firearm to keep them safe from children then they are detailed enough to make one. Keeping these documents from the public are not keeping anyone safe.
50 years ago we saw the Gun Control Act of 1968 get passed into law. Many of the reasons for it passing were because of the Black Panther Party being formed in California a few years earlier. This was spreading quickly and there were bands of armed Black men patrolling the streets to maintain order because the police were not keeping people safe. The police could not arrest someone for carrying a weapon, and they could not stop anyone from buying one, since there was no law against it.
What had been established in previous laws and court cases is that the police couldn't bar a Black person from getting a gun but they could require a person to submit to a background check based on character. The GCA68 alone didn't allow for the disarming of minorities, but it set rules on restricting sales across state lines. State laws then predominated. What happened then is states started passing laws on registering firearms, which until 1968 firearms were not required to have serial numbers and registration was impossible without serial numbers. The states would then not allow someone to register a firearm, and therefore not own one legally, unless they were deemed of the right "character" to do so. This is how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was kept disarmed.
Gun control is racist. The roots of gun control come out of slavery. The earliest gun control laws were meant to keep slaves as slaves, even after slavery was officially abolished. When Blacks started to fight for their equality under the law then states started passing laws restricting gun ownership. One of the first things to go was mail order of guns, because the person making the order might be a Black man. Then gun shops had to be licensed to sell guns, and if their "papers were not in order" then the government could shut them down. I'll let you guess who got checked most often on paperwork violations.
What we are seeing now are politicians so scared of Black men getting guns that they are not only willing to continue these racist laws but veer into the territory of violating the right of the people to speak, communicate, or peaceably assemble.
Yep, 90 years ago alcohol was considered more dangerous than a mail order Thompson submachine gun. Now they are so scared of an unregistered single shot pistol that they are willing to take the right to communicate freely and chuck it in the toilet.
You planning to water the tree of liberty with the blood of more schoolchildren? I hear that's all the rage with the well-regulated militia these days.
The "well regulated militia" was intended to be a guard against the spilling of children's blood. What we got instead was a ban on good people being armed on school grounds. Now we see children getting murdered unopposed while "the people that keep us safe" cower outside. I don't want armed guards in schools, they cost money and history shows they are not effective. I want armed parents in schools. It costs nothing to do, just tell the parents they have to pay for all the training and background checks. Many states do this already with a concealed weapons permit. If they have one of those then I consider them more qualified to stop children from getting murdered than someone with a badge.
Let the parent's organize it, they'll work out scheduling and such. I'd bet they'd even bring donuts and coffee for the school staff. If someone dares threaten the children in the school then watch out as armed moms and dads take charge. Don't think I don't want the police involved with my comment on them cowering outside, I do want the police there. They do very good jobs of taking reports and locking up bad people. I just want to see children being protected by people that give a damn.
Here's the deal with your comments on "well regulated militia", gun laws will become meaningless very soon. We can't stop people from getting guns any more, this development of 3D printed guns is just the latest means for people to skirt the law. You want to stop schoolkids from being murdered? Then put good guys with guns inside the school before the bad guys with guns get there. Since we don't know when the bad guys will come then that means the good guys with guns get there before the children do every morning, and they don't leave until the last child has left that afternoon.
The USA is the only developed nation that has a firearm crime rate equivalent to third world nations or war zones.
But what are the TOTAL crime rates? I keep hearing about "gun crime" but I don't care if people are getting shot, clubbed, stabbed, or throttled to death.
Here's another problem with comparing murder rates in the USA with other nations, the USA is a federation. Like the European Union the USA is a collection of independent states. Each state has their own rules on guns. The USA does have some terrible murder rates, but you can't blame the laws in Utah for crimes in New York. Putting all the states in the same umbrella as an example of "gun crime" is about as sensible as blaming Spain for crime in Germany. Also remember the scale of this, there are more people in US states that a lot of people around the world don't even think about, like North Carolina, than in some European nations, like Sweden. If you want to compare apples to apples then you need to compare individual states within the US to other nations.
The murder rate in New Hampshire is 1/10th that of Louisiana. Go compare the gun laws in both those states. Here's a hint, one state requires a permit to carry a concealed handgun, and the other does not.
Gun laws have very little to do with crime rates. Look at Missouri, very lax in gun laws and lots of crime. Vermont also has very lax gun laws, but yet 1/4 the murder rate of Missouri. It's almost as if there is no correlation between gun laws and crime rates.
Here's an idea, if you want to stop crime then put criminals in prison. That seems to be working for a lot of places. If gun restrictions stopped murders then Venezuela would be the safest place on Earth.
...does shutting down the internet just lead to more unrest? Wouldn't a better strategy be, "Eithiopia is footing the bill to make Netflix free during peak protest hours"?
Loss of the internet can mean several things. Maybe it's the government shutting things down, or maybe they just got their internet from Sprint or Mediacom. Blaming this on the government could be dismissed as rumor if the communications are disrupted, because verifying anything over the usual communications channels is impossible. This is especially true if such disruptions are routine. I don't know how reliable their internet might be in Ethiopia, but if it is so fragile that the government can shut it down so easily then it's possible the flunkies from Sprint and Mediacom are running things and loss of internet access is common.
As I recall such things happening in the past, and in other nations, is that people would coordinate government protests over social media, websites, and so forth. By disrupting internet access these protests are uncoordinated. The rapid and anonymous communications from internet access means that the government has difficulty in breaking up crowds. Perhaps a more sophisticated government could spread misinformation through these same channels to confuse protesters but if pulling the plug on the internet is possible then that is a far easier means to disrupt the communications.
Good enough against sheepherders from a military perspective. But it's completely useless against any sort of real advecary. For any semi-competent air defence it's easy pickings.
Define "semi-competent air defense". These solar powered airplanes can fly for days at altitudes of 70,000 feet. That means that they can take off from just about anywhere in the world, reaching altitude in a safe area, then fly over to the battlefield and loiter. Most commercial aircraft have a maximum altitude of 45,000 feet or less. Some military jets can go higher than that 45,000 feet but only by restricting their weapon payload and maneuverability. The few aircraft designed to go that high are recon jets, and they have no weapons, that's assuming they could engage a target that's moving at subsonic speed while they are going Mach 3.
Because so few aircraft fly above 45,000 feet there are few anti-aircraft systems designed to engage a target that high. This altitude is in the territory of anti-ballistic missile or anti-satellite weaponry. The US military has such weapons, as do many allies. China doesn't have such capability, not yet anyway. Russia might have it, but they lost a lot of ability to keep making these weapons over the decades.
Here's a short video telling a tale on what happens when an Iranian F-4 fighter jet tries to shoot down an American surveillance drone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
These "semi-competent" air forces will not be going against a solitary drone flying overhead. They will have to get through the air defenses that come with that drone to shoot it down. Being at such a high altitude is in itself a very good self defense mechanism, it is out of reach of most every military aircraft and most every anti-aircraft system in existence, and leaves a lot of room between it and the ground for defensive aircraft to fly.
The problem is twofold: first of all, Europe fucked up Africa enough that it still hasn't recovered (same with the Middle East).
The second part is that quite often their own government screws them over.
Let's assume for the moment that I agree with you. Let's assume the problems with Africa started with European influence, and the governments in Africa are inefficient and corrupt. So, how do we fix it?
Do we fix this by allowing waves of immigrants from Africa into Europe? How does that resolve the problems? Seems to me that allowing refugees to leave these shit hole nations might be a good means to resolve the immediate problem of people being mistreated, but so long as these corrupt governments are allowed to exist they will continue to drive more and more people out of Africa. Who is going to bring viable governments to Africa? These same Europeans that fucked them over? Maybe these refugees should return. But then they'd return "spoiled" from European influence, no? Maybe they aren't "spoiled" but can return with an education of how a free nation can operate.
I could even argue that allowing refugees to flee to Europe is bad for Africa, or at least a greater cost to everyone for less benefit. Taking someone from a place in which they are accustomed and have family, and putting them in place with a different climate, language, and culture, is very stressful. This movement is very expensive, in both resources consumed and in lives lost. We should demand they stay for their own sake. The problems of a corrupt government is not resolved by fleeing it, it is resolved by fighting it. If Europe wants to help these people then they should not take them in, they should provide the resources they need in Africa to create free nations.
But we can't stand the idea of Europeans going in to help restore order in Africa, because that might be considered another colonial invasion. So, instead of correcting for past errors, we do what's "politically correct" and allow corrupt African governments to continue killing and driving out people.
Blaming Europe for the problems does nothing to bring a resolution. Especially if these accusations come with handcuffs to prevent an effective resolution. Okay, fine, Europe broke it. So then just maybe we should allow Europe to fix it. I'm guessing they might just go along with this because it's not cheap to take in all these refugees, it would be better for both Africa and Europe if Europe was allowed to go in and fix the problems.
If the argument is that Europe should stay out of this then I can agree with that. Staying out of it should then include refusing to take in refugees because, so the claims are, that it was European influence on these peoples that caused the problems. By keeping these refugees out then they are being "saved" from European influence.
They did do their research, only they left that part to the last paragraph of the article.
Also, he noted that the Bermuda Triangle, which is one of the most heavily trafficked parts of any ocean, doesn't actually see a statistically unlikely rate of disappearances. âoeAccording to Lloyds of London and the US coast guard, the number of planes that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis,â Dr Karl told News.com.
I remember seeing this in some TV show about the Bermuda Triangle. They talked about "killer waves" and "methane clouds" that would destroy ships and kill the engines in airplanes. But then at the end of the program they talked about how these phenomenon are not unique to the area, which "sunk" the entire idea of this being a particularly dangerous part of the sea.
I thought the methane clouds idea was very interesting. What would happen is a "burp" of methane from deep in the ocean could come up randomly in front of an airplane. The cause of the "burp" would likely be a seismic shift in the ocean floor which would release some pressure on a "sludge" of liquefied methane on the ocean floor, from decayed plants or what had seeped up from the earth and liquefied by the pressure, and turn it to a gas bubble. This bubble would get very large as it rose and when it popped up to the surface it would create this cloud of water and methane that could deprive oxygen to an airplane engine. Someone flying low and slow, which often happens in recreational and military airplanes, could mean being left with little time to react before hitting the water. Having multiple engines in this case wouldn't help because all engines would be deprived of oxygen at the same time. For this to happen though would be a very tiny chance of someone flying low to the sea, the bubble happen right in front of them, and be sufficiently large to kill all the engines. The chances are small but given enough time it could happen.
I don't see it being too useful for military because it's too light to have any real defence and it would probably be highly vulnerable to solar flare disruption events.
I disagree, I see this as highly valuable for the military. One problem the military has is keeping communications over a battlefield. If this airplane can provide internet access to far off places then it can provide communications to and from a battlefield and among those on the battlefield.
Also of military value would be the other planned use for this airplane, providing imagery. Knowing where the friends and foes are located would be quite valuable. Drones were quite effective in previous conflicts to direct artillery, if this can stay in the air for days instead of hours then that would be very valuable. This could likely provide weather reporting with a different instrument package.
This thing flies so high and for so long they call it a "pseudo-satellite". One problem with satellites is that they are too high to look through clouds, get something lower and more can be seen. Another problem with satellites is they keep moving. They come over the target, and then they aren't over the target. A "pseudo-satellite" can be parked where it's needed and when it's needed.
Perhaps you want to look at the numbers, and not only the ranking
What would that show except that Germany is dependent on China for building up their solar power industry?
Panels on the roof of a house provide shadow, they don't cause need for more cooling.
They also provide shade in the winter, when I want the sun to warm my house. Trees are better for summer shade and in the autumn they lose their leaves and let the sun warm my house. People need more trees, not more solar panels.
Strange that your panels lose so much power when "warmed" a bit, why don't you buy modern state of the art panels instead of junk?
Because if you actually did some research on this there are two kinds of solar cells, ones that are highly efficient and ones that handle heat better. The solar car competition was barred from using space grade PV cells, as that was deemed an unfair advantage to the well funded programs and did not demonstrate the performance of what people might expect of solar panels for consumers. The sponsors of the solar car competitions wanted to "sell" solar power on Earth. I'm sure that space grade panels handle the heat very well, but they are astronomically expensive.
That would spare us a lot of your misinformed posts.
Citation needed.
BTW: if I had AC, the summer temperature would probably 24C in my house. I really don't like to wear a suit or a long sleeved shirt in summer and change dress to get outside.
I do have AC and I tend to keep the house at 28C during the day, but cool it down to 25C at night. My concern is mostly to keep the humidity under 50%, which keeps the house very comfortable.
the Soviet Union orbited nuclear weapons in space back in the 60's/70's.
They did not, but they did put an armed space station into orbit. There was a cannon on board one manned space station, a cannon much like the anti-aircraft cannons on navy ships. It was fired once as a test before the station was de-orbited, no one was sure what would happen if they had to fire the cannon so no crew was on board for the test firing.
It was this armed Soviet space station that may have lead to the US Strategic Defense Initiative, a program to defend against space based weapons. This lead the Soviets to spend more money on space based weapons, and likely led to the bankruptcy of the government and the fall of the Soviet Union. People later found out that SDI was mostly a fake, they wanted to goad the Soviets into military spending that the US politicians knew that they could not afford. I say "mostly" fake because the US federal government did still spend a lot of money on missile defense, just none of which was based in orbit.
We now see China, North Korea, Iran, and other nations trying to build their own intercontinental missiles. The need for a space force didn't end with the fall of the Soviet Union, it only spread out more widely. Do these new threats carry the same weight as that from the Soviets? Perhaps, perhaps not. What seems clear is that at some point there will be an adversary to the USA that will be capable of launching space based weapons, and the USA should be prepared. Alternatively, the creation of a US space force will again goad other nations into spending themselves into bankruptcy in trying to keep up with the USA.
Open air Brayton cycle turbines would be used on high temperature molten salt reactors. They don't use any water, they use air. I'm having difficulty finding a good source for how this would work. Perhaps this is a good introduction:
https://www.nuclear-power.net/...
We aren't going to run out of air, even though water might be scarce in certain times and places. Even if the air is a bit warm at 50C the heat for the turbines would come from a molten salt reactor or molten metal cooled reactor which would run somewhere around 1000C. Any loss of output with such a power plant from a hot day would be a rounding error.
That's relevant when the panels can get to be 65C in the sun even if air temperature is 40C to 45C. The PV electrical output drops not by the air temperature but by the panel temperature. Efficiency drops by about 0.5% for each degree above 25C. With panel temperature at 65C that means 80% maximum output. If the panel is at 65C then so is the roof on your house, and that heat needs to be removed to keep people inside comfortable. That heat is removed by air conditioning, which needs electricity.
If you have 18 hours of sun then you need 18 hours of cooling. Even then when the sun goes down the air outside might be 35C, and you'll need cooling in the house until it's 20C or so outside which might not happen until well past midnight. Maybe that can be done with wind power but heat likes to diminish the winds. I've seen heat waves before, lots of hot sun and not much wind.
The thermal cycles on hot days can stress the PV cells, leading to cracks that permanently reduce the output of that cell. A damaged cell can lead to further damage with stresses on adjacent cells in the circuit, since this cell is no longer matched with the rest in that string. Kind of like how a bad cell in a battery can stress the other cells and lead to total failure.
I worked on a solar car in college. Hot and sunny days were bad for the car, we wanted some clouds to keep the temperature down. If we had water we'd spray the panels when we could to lower the temperature and wash off dirt. In a drought you don't have water for that.
... the more slip between your fingers.
The city is fighting services that offer a means for people to get where they want to go at a price that they are willing to pay. So, what exactly is the problem?
I hate the whole concept of a minimum wage. The minimum wage has been and always will be zero dollars. No law will change that.
Let's say I start a volunteer ferrying service. I post my phone number and website so people can find it, and I say I'll carry you door to door in the city. I offer to carry people in my car for nothing, but if they offer me a "tip" then I'm not going to refuse. If people ask for what kind of "tip" I expect then I'll give a quick estimate of my time, fuel, wear on the vehicle, and some "buffer" above that to make it worth my time.
I basically just described how Uber and Lyft got started, as ride share programs to reduce congestion and share on the costs of the ride. Both have evolved into a kind of taxi service once people figured out that they could make a small but not insignificant income by volunteering to take people where they wanted to go. It might be below minimum wage if the hours are calculated but then it's better than making nothing at all.
Go ahead New York, go and regulate these services. All that means is another one will come in to take their place. They might structure their business plan to avoid the rules, or simply ignore them because enforcement is impossible. You want to tell people that they can't drive a friend to the airport? Good luck with that.
I keep getting phone calls, shit in the mail, and even some dude walking door to door, all trying to up sell me to more services from Mediacom. Every time they ask I tell them the same thing, I don't want more services for more money, I want to be able to keep what I have for the same price. Every year it seems they offer new plans with more "gigs", more channels, more phone doodads, and at a higher price. All I want is a reliable internet connection, and not have my costs go up. It would be nice if my costs go down once in a while, like my costs for other services have, but just staying the same is okay too.
There was a time I wanted more speed, more data per month, and so on, but I've reached what I needed. I got grandfathered in at my last fee rate but my speed went up with the switch to DOCSIS 3.0. This might be why they bother me so much, I'm not making them money on the old fee schedule. Well, suck it. If I had to pay on the new fee schedule then I'd be getting the "gigs" and speed I need for the price I pay now from a cellular internet provider.
I've stayed with Mediacom this far only because the phone company keeps telling me that fiber will be coming "real soon" and I figured I'd just switch when it got here. Well, it's been taking far too long now. I haven't had a lot of choices until the cellular companies started upgrading their networks around here. Now I'm thinking of telling the wired services to all go to hell and I'll just get one of those cellular hotspots for my house. If I switch now I'd get just as many "gigs" and probably even faster data, for just a few dollars more per month. I'm thinking "real soon" Mediacom will have one less customer.
Just remove this meaningless social construct that is gender from the study and the problem goes away.
German imports a lot of solar panels from China.
https://www.popsci.com/solar-p...
China is the largest source of imports to Germany.
https://tradingeconomics.com/g...
I really wonder why idiots on /. always claim such bullshit.
Yes, I wonder.
Solar PV output drops with heat.
https://energytransition.org/2...
One reason the situation wasnâ(TM)t worse in Germany, of course, was the large number of solar arrays. But even their output is negatively impacted during heat waves; efficiency drops by up to 0.5 percent per degree Celsius â" and the panel temperature counts, not the air. Fortunately, temperatures in Germany still do not rise as much as they do in Spain, where the effect was greater.
Also no mention of reduced wind energy production from the heat wave. It doesn't take much to find news articles on European wind output dropping, especially in UK and Germany that made large investments in wind power recently.
Here's one example of such a news report:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
When temperatures rise every electrical generation system we have in common use is affected. Thermal plants that boil water will often have to reduce output or shutdown because the cooling water exceeds minimums of safety and/or environmental impact. Wind sees lowered output due to weather patterns that come with a heat wave. Solar PV output is reduced since the panels get less efficient in heat. Hydro sees lowered output from evaporation out of reservoirs.
The least effected is natural gas turbines, because they operate at such high temperatures that the hot air doesn't mean much on the heat sink side. If we saw similar high temperatures in nuclear, which fourth generation designs can reach, then we'd see nuclear still operating in the heat.
Over the course of a year nuclear produces about 10% of our power, wind about 30% and renewables in total over 40%.
Germany has between 9 and 10 GW of operating nuclear power capacity. Germany also has 5 GW of hydro, 40 GW of solar PV, and 50 GW of wind turbine, in operating electrical generation capacity. So ten times the installed renewable capacity produced only four times the energy of nuclear.
Look at France on the other hand, 65% of all power comes from nukes ... they will probably shut down 20% - 30% of them during August ... and buy coal power on the European market. So much for your beloved nuclear power.
France has over 60 GW of electrical generation capacity from nuclear, which produces over 80% of its electricity. France has 25 GW of hydro producing over 10% of its electricity. France has over 10 GW of installed wind and solar producing less than 10% of its electricity.
It should be no surprise if France shifts from nuclear to coal. Unreliable energy like wind, water, and sun, cannot keep up with nuclear and coal.