EVs don't need a transmission running up the length of the car
How many people have rear wheel drive any more? No one has a transmission running the length of the car unless it's an all wheel drive version. Even electric all wheel drive vehicles will have a drive shaft running the length of the car to the rear wheels. If in-wheel motors become a thing then this might be true but there are a lot of reasons why we don't see them in production cars.
So it's a wash.
No, it's not. It might be for special cases but saying "it's a wash" as a blanket statement is false.
Small price to pay for never seeing the inside of a gas station!
This is from a person that is routinely mocked for paying for my gas with cash, who (besides me) goes inside a gas station any more? Pay at pump systems have been the norm for how long now? This is not new technology.
While you are taking your leisurely 20 minute break on your 600 mile road trip I've already pumped gas, taken a piss, ordered a sandwich, and 15 minutes closer to my destination. I'll eat the sandwich while I drive. Which is assuming your 20 minute break isn't bullshit.
Insulation adds mass and volume, both of which count against you in fuel economy. You can optimize for cabin comfort or you can optimize for fuel economy, you cannot have both. Physics is physics and an internal combustion engine has gobs of waste heat for the cabin as a matter of course, electric vehicles do not. Hydrocarbon fuels have an energy density that is roughly two orders of magnitude greater than any battery technology out there. There is just no way that an electric vehicle can compete on range and time to refuel/recharge.
Once at an Apple developer conference I met a man that did the drive from Des Moines, Iowa to Cupertino, California in 24 hours. You can't do that in an electric vehicle. I don't care how many charging station are on the way. For those of you that did the math that means an AVERAGE speed of about 75 miles per hour. In the open expanses of the prairie in the middle of the night it is easy to go 90mph and not meet a single other vehicle for hours. He said he took a 2 hour nap somewhere in the middle, and it may not have been exactly 24 hours, but we are still in the ballpark of 75mph.
Those people that want to do 600 mile road trips with any regularity are not going to get an electric vehicle. A person might not be as crazy as that gentleman I met to want a gas car. If an electric vehicle takes 10 hours to get to the intended destination and the gas car does it in 9 hours then people will naturally gravitate towards the gas car.
I believe your argument works against you. The people in your example stuck out because they were strangers in a strange land, not just because they had a nice haircut and a sunny demeanor. Certainly their appearance and demeanor added to the "oddness" effect but I have my doubts that was the only reason they were given scrutiny.
A person that knows the local customs, because they are locals, would not trigger the "oddness" detector like a person that did not know those customs. People even in 2017 don't always have a smart phone. People have them lost, stolen, or broken all the time. There's still plenty of "counter culture" types that choose to do without the latest gadget.
A wealthy person with a new phone with no contacts or history?
Showing up at a border while wearing a $5000 suit does not automatically mean you have to have the latest and greatest iPhone in your pocket, or that you know how to add all your contacts and apps from your old one if you do have a new phone. As you say, there are a lot of odd people in the world.
Besides, what are they going to do about it? If you don't have a phone to search then they can't search your phone. Holding up someone at the border just because they dress nice but don't have a phone does sound like an odd way to do things. If you tell border patrol you left your phone at home because you didn't want to risk them taking it from you then they'll likely just roll their eyes ("Oh, it's one of THOSE again") and wave you through.
There still is a counter culture, and some of them don't carry cell phones.
I know you are joking* but I've run this scenario through my head and I realized that the prescription drugs I carry with me every day are quite valuable to someone looking for a quick high and/or just looking for something of value they can trade for something that can give them a quick high. They are of minimal value to me because I know I can get the prescription refilled at minimal cost to myself. If I report the theft then there is little risk of suspicion that I am selling the drugs myself. If handing over my meds makes them go away then I'll be, on the balance, happy with that outcome. There's a potential problem of convincing someone I was in fact robbed but that beats getting stabbed with a screwdriver.
*(Okay, I don't KNOW you are joking, I'll just pretend that I do.)
Why is it whenever some random government official gives a sob story about not having enough money that the immediate response is to suggest taking money from the military? Shouldn't the immediate response be asking why this person is working for the government in the first place?
I can point to the US Constitution on where it says that Congress is to raise a army, provide a navy, organize a militia, build forts, and so on. The Constitution spends a lot of verbiage on the defense of the nation and so it should be no surprise that the government spends a lot of money on the military.
Can someone point to the line in the Constitution that justifies spending anything on NASA? Or funding a mission to Mars? Did we declare war on Mars? Is that a place where we should be building a fort?
Looking at the other powers granted to the federal government I'm finding it hard to see what might justify the federal government funding a manned mission to Mars. Are we going there to establish a post office? Is someone on Mars counterfeiting US currency?
I can see the need of a civilian agency like NASA to do things like regulate the satellites launched by US entities, public and private. Perhaps even be a central agency to be responsible for the launching of government assets into space, civilian (like NOAA weather satellites), military (like reconnaissance satellites), and dual use assets (like GPS).
I think that the NASA director of human spaceflight should keep quiet or go find another job. NASA should not be in the business of launching people into space.
I might change my mind if it involves sending people like himself on a manned mission to land on the sun. Every government official that cries for my tax money is eligible for being a member of the crew. Why stop at Mars? Why not go bigger? No one has been to the sun either.
Because of its lack of mobility, medical data do not confirm the reputation of plutonium as the most deadly substance known to man. It is not as immediately harmful as many chemicals. The danger resulting from its alpha radiation does not become effective unless plutonium is present in the human body after inhalation or ingestion.
To handle it one should wear gloves, goggles, and face mask. Not that different than handling many household cleaning solvents.
ummm... Plutonium in VERY small quantities IS highly toxic, radioactive and has an incredible half life. There is a LOT of it in spent reactor fuel and it's very difficult to reprocess.
Assuming that's true, then don't eat it. Is it that hard?
It's not like this stuff is spilling all over the place. it's a solid at room temperatures. Is very dense so it's not like it blows away in the wind, if someone were stupid enough to spill some in the open. Is not soluble in water. Generally it stays where you put it.
And this part...
radioactive and has an incredible half life
Either it is highly radioactive or it has an incredibly long half life, both cannot be true. Truth is that it has an incredibly long half life, which adds further to it's stability. It's not going to decay into radon any time soon and float away.
Sure, this is nasty stuff, what is it not is a hazard for millennia.
It doesn't need to, which you would have realized if you had taken your own advice and rewatched the video you linked. The TED Talk specifically said that rooftop installations in England were getting 20W/m^2, 4x the number you quoted (which was for solar parks in England). At those numbers, home-based installations would only need to cover 5% of England in order to achieve 100% coverage of the country's energy needs. And that's ALL of the country's energy, including transportation, businesses, and home use.
Yes, of course, my mistake. I did see on his website a caveat that such efficiency in current solar panels would be impractical for mass deployment because of excessive cost. https://www.withouthotair.com/...
While it can be done, using only solar power from 5% of the nation's area, it would mean energy prices would quadruple. Keeping energy within sane prices AND using only solar would mean needing 20% of the nation's area covered in solar panels. This assumes stable prices for everything, which is impossible if demand for fossil fuels drops to zero and demand for solar goes to... I don't know, 1000 times current demand?
Even if the rest of the world was covered in England's stereotypically gloomy weather, they'd only need to have rooftop installations covering 0.7% of their land area.
I don't know why the cost of these alternatives were not mentioned in the video but they are important to discuss, perhaps the matter of cost was cut from his speech due to time constraints. He mentions this as impractical on his website. He also did not claim that any one "lever" to a carbon free future is all we should choose, only that declaring one less desirable means pulling harder on the others. I agree with this. Solar power alone cannot solve this for many reasons, the area needed is a problem, which is just one of many things that contribute to the cost.
And that's before we even get into the efficiency gains that have occurred in the five years since he gave that talk, not to mention the fact that the sun's rays are far weaker in England than they are in much of the rest of the world.
I'm not going to fret too much over the math here since we are trying to get an order of magnitude idea of the problem. You might say that covering 1% of the world in solar panels is trivial but it is not. That is a lot of area to cover and this does not include issues of storage, transport, cost, or the political issues of relying on neighboring nations for a vital resource like the energy needed to heat your homes. Ask Europe about how well relying on Russian natural gas has gone.
Efficiency gains in solar power have not been what they used to. We've not seen much gains in efficiency, but prices have gone down for the same efficiency of panels. Sadly we won't see an update on this from Dr. MacKay as he died last year.
Maybe I botched the math somewhere, but this doesn't seem nearly so far fetched as you're trying to suggest, especially since your one and only source directly contradicts your claims.
Again, not going to argue on the order of magnitude math too much. Whether this is a Texas sized problem, an Alaska sized problem, or one the size of Ohio, this is still a big problem. I see no contradiction, except perhaps in that the information provided is incomplete. The TED talk was intended to be a bird's eye view of how to address this issue, and I believe he did an excellent job. He did such an excellent job that I'd argue that one should not need another source. He gave real world numbers to make his case, and gave very conservative estimates of potential gains when extrapolating to the near future. Science is not a matter of popular opinion, it's a matter of who has the best evidence. Dr. MacKay gave plenty of evidence on his website.
You have something of a point there about updates. I'll update the computers when it is convenient for me, like I'm forced to reboot due to a power outage. I just checked and it looks like an update is waiting for a reboot on one of my Macs. It seems only Windows 10 has "critical" monthly updates that require a reboot.
Sure, XP probably has security problems where it should not be on the internet but due to their age I don't go web surfing with them a lot, and they are behind a firewall, so risks are minimal. What would anyone gain from compromising them? My high scores? They have internet access mostly just to keep their clocks accurate.
Serious question, is there something I should be doing different to keep these XP machines from becoming a security problem?
Being blocked from Trump's Twitter feed, they said, was illegal and akin to a mayor ejecting critics from city hall meetings.
There's critics and there's critics. Being kicked out from a town hall meeting for merely disagreeing with the mayor would be an outrage. Being kicked out for calling the mayor an orange haired, small handed (and we all know what that means), brainless, right wing nut job that wouldn't know how to dump piss from a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, and then proceeded to list all their "grievances" from the lack of government funded healthcare to the lack of paper towels in the ladies room, would not be an outrage.
I don't know what lead POTUS to ban these people from Twitter but I can imagine that there are some that were more than just "being critical" of POTUS.
President Trump needs to learn some care in what he sends on Twitter. He may learn in time but he's spent much of his life being free to do pretty much as he pleases. I fear this is an old habit that will be hard to break.
In my basement office I have six computers I use regularly. Two are running MacOSX, one is running Ubuntu, two are Windows XP, and one is Windows 10. I just went around the room and checked uptimes. All of them were up for more than 3 months, except the Windows 10 computer. This one computer is supposed to be pretty fast compared to the rest but it gets bogged down where I feel compelled to reboot it. It also has the nasty habit of demanding to reboot when I'm trying to get work done, but that's a different problem. After reading this I'm somewhat relieved to think I'm not doing something wrong that's making it run slow, or that I'm just imagining things.
One of the Windows XP computers claims to have been on for over 15 years. I know this is not true since it's not even that old. Does the system uptime clock rollover or something to where it cannot track uptime accurately after a few months?
I dislike rebooting or powering off computers, preferring instead to just allow them to go to sleep when I'm done with them. They tend to stay on unless there is a power outage, and the power has been unusually stable with so many lightning storms in the area. It wasn't that long ago when such lengthy periods of uninterrupted time between crashing was unheard of. I'd probably have had longer uptimes if the power had not blinked.
People may ask why I run Windows XP. It's because I have some old software that I like and it won't run on my newer Windows 10 computer. So long as the hardware keeps going I feel no need to upgrade them in any way.
People may ask why I run MacOSX. Because fuck you, that's why. I'd give a serious answer but few people ask this seriously, they just want to be snobs.
(keep out signs that will be understandable for millennia?)
I remember reading an article long ago in some science magazine about a bunch of linguists getting together to address the very issue you raised. I remembered it because it seemed so fascinating that people could conceive some kind of language that could be understood for thousands of years. What would this look like? Some sort of Egyptian hieroglyphics? Would they create a kind of Rosetta Stone with all known major languages of the time to aid in translation?
Then I found out later it was all a bunch of scaremongering bullshit.
Of the mass in spent nuclear fuel a very large portion is stable, as in not radioactive. I've read conflicting accounts on how much this is but it's somewhere between 2/3rds and 9/10ths. Then there are the actinides, formed when a heavy element like U-238 grabs a neutron but does not fission. It will form a relatively stable element with a very long half life. There are the long lived products, they have half lives even longer than the actinides, on the order of millions of years. Then there are the medium lived products, these have half lives of less than 100 years. There are no short lived products in spent nuclear fuel because they decay to something stable or medium lived before they can be removed from the reactor.
The longer the half life the less radioactive it is, just like the saying of "the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long". With so much of the mass being inert, or half lives so long it may as well be, the really dangerous stuff is pretty small and all of this stuff is effectively gone in about 300 years. After that the spent fuel is as inert as the dirt the fuel was mined from. We know how to store stuff for 300 years without having to label them with hieroglyphics.
If we allow ourselves to reprocess this then we can separate out the inert products, which can be disposed of like any inert material. It's still dangerous, like lead and mercury, but not radioactive. Most of the stuff that is radioactive is either fuel, like plutonium, or an industrial feedstock, like cesium. The teeny tiny bit that is left over can be sealed in glass and buried for 300 years just like we would if we didn't reprocess the spent fuel, only now it is a small fraction of the mass we started with.
That's a much longer post than I originally intended but I think it is important to make myself clear. There is no long term waste problem. Those that tell you there is are lying to you. I could be charitable and call them ignorant but I won't. This is not a mystery to anyone that wishes to understand the issue. There just seems to be a lot of people out there that would rather induce fear than inform.
Those are not my numbers. I got them from Dr. David MacKay who was the scientific advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He got his numbers from real world data. You might argue that his data was old but he used those numbers in a talk from 2015, so not all that old.
I also believe that you do not understand the scale of this problem. Even if much of the land, and even if it is as high as 90%, used for wind can also be used for crops then you still have the problem of covering twice the area of a nation to provide that nation with wind power. What does that much wind power look like off shore? What does that do to shipping and fishing?
I have serious doubts we've gone from 5 to 200 W/m^2 in two years for solar. Even if that is possible in places like Australia then what do those numbers look like for the rest of the world?
Do you really think the combined areas of all the rooftops in the USA would add up to the area of Alaska?
A quick Google search tells me that the area of all the structures in the USA, rooftops, parking lots, roads, and highways, would add up to an area equivalent to Ohio.
Nice try, but you are off by at least an order of magnitude.
With concentrated solar it'd have to cover an area equal to that of Texas.
If governments can just print money to fund these subsidies then why do these senators keep pleading with me for my money? I shouldn't have to give them ANY money, right?
Dr. MacKay does some math on renewable energy and the numbers are interesting. One interesting comparison is the means of measuring consumption and production of energy, both can be measured as a density of watts per square meter. In much of Europe consumption of energy is about 1W/m^2. The video uses the UK as an example but the numbers would be similar in other developed nations.
Solar power produces about 5 W/m^2, which means a nation would have to cover 20% of their land in solar PV panels to achieve a standard of living like the UK. Wind gets about half with 2.5 W/m^2. Concentrated solar does better with 20 W/m^2. Biomass is rather pathetic with 0.5 W/m^2.
What really wins out though is nuclear with 1000 W/m^2. A common gigawatt nuclear power plant fits inside one square kilometer.
I keep hearing how wind and solar are getting cheaper all the time. What happens to the price of those energy sources when they start competing for land with croplands, living spaces, and each other? As Dr. MacKay pointed out this does not have to be in your backyard, it can be in some other person's backyard. What happens though to a nation that relies on another for energy to heat their homes? I'm sure everyone can find examples on how that does not go well.
So, how much of the CO2 output can be traced to government activity? You think that all those bureaucrats turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater like Jimmy Carter did? Sure they do, in the middle of summer.
I hear so many suggest that we "just" enact a tax on fossil fuels. Then we "just" have the government subsidize windmills and electric cars. The government does not "just" do anything. The government is built of many people, all with their own intentions. Some of them not so nice.
We might get our coal tax but not get any funding for windmills. We might get our electric vehicle subsidies but no "carbon tax" on oil. If we don't get both the tax and the subsidy then you have an unsustainable system. I'm sure there are people that would like to see the government go bankrupt, but that risks funds for fire and police services. I'm sure people would love those carbon taxes, but that could just mean giving the government more money to buy bombs to drop on brown people.
Saving the environment is too important to hand over to the government.
We need to make windmills so cheap that no business can afford to buy coal. We need to make electric vehicles so awesome that everyone will be standing in line with wads of cash in hand to buy them.
You think we can just hand the government a pile of your money through taxes and then expect them to put polluting companies out of business? I'm pretty sure these companies have their own money, and bigger piles, to give to the government to make sure that does not happen.
What can end this cycle is technology. Build an electric car that beats the pants of anything that burns oil and then use the greed of these companies to work for you. They'll hand over piles of cash to buy this idea so that they can beat the other companies also competing for your dollars. The government doesn't need to be involved for this to happen. In fact I'm quite certain this would happen faster, or just as fast, if we left the government out of it.
I won't claim this is easy, only that it has a higher probability to work than all the other options.
Assuming we can get these taxes passed, how can we be sure that the government will not use those funds to fight more wars and increase human misery?
Thinking we can hand the government a wad of cash and they only use it for purely virtuous endeavors is, as you say, a "lovely" theory.
The only solution I see that gives us the assurance of a reduced CO2 output, is a technological one. If we get government involved then there are two outcomes that don't end well. First, people vote to get rid of the tax but keep the subsidies. This leaves the government with reduced funds for vital services like law enforcement. Second, we get the tax but the government fails to follow through on their promise to enforce any CO2 reductions. Instead they spend the money on more tanks for the Army because it buys some votes for some long serving senators. You seem to think that the government will take a third path, enact unpopular taxes and then spend the money on unpopular subsidies.
In a free society the people that are taxed have a say in how they are taxed. I seem to recall from history class a rather notable war fought over this about 240 to 250 years ago. You can say we need taxes and subsidies but you need people to agree to that for it to happen.
But then if you get the people to agree that they need to spend more money because reducing CO2 output is important then do you really need the government to enforce this? I would think not.
Sure, we currently have some tax incentives to stimulate the EV market. One problem with that is that they can disappear at any time because of politics. Another problem is a bunch of confidence artists go to the government and make big claims on their ability to produce electric vehicles, collect their money, and then just disappear. In the mean time a lot of people just got a bit poorer (through government taking their money), they certainly lost a bit of freedom (the money spent in ways they may not support), and a handful of con men just got richer with money they didn't earn. You might say such con men would be punished but that does not restore the public's money or freedom.
This French ban on the sale of petroleum burning cars is far enough in the future that there will be a new generation of people, voters and car buyers, and they might not like this idea. Telling them they can't have petrol cars is tyranny. If you can convince them that this EV is better than that petrol burner then that's freedom. It's also sometimes called capitalism, or just good business.
Why do you say that? Is it because knowledge of the behaviors of sheep and cattle would help them relate with Democrats?
Seriously though, do you even know what courses one must take to major in animal science? Sure, there's a couple silly sounding class names but then every major has a few. I went to an agricultural and engineering school like Texas A&M and knew students that studied Animal Science. About half were headed to go on to graduate school and get their DVM, the other half were planning on going into ranching and farming.
Make jokes if you like but it's the animal science majors that keep meat cheap and safe to eat. Taking a course called "Meats" is an important part of knowing how to do that.
I'm not so sure. The Wikipedia summary of the treaty does say that conventional weapons are allowed, only what they deem weapons of mass destruction would be prohibited.
I saw nothing to imply this space force would be in command of orbital weapons. It'd be a large and relatively independent force within the Air Force that specialized in space based military resources. That could just mean that they manage the communications, navigation, and weather satellites for the Air Force and other branches.
Also, I think you are about 40 years too late to complain about an arms race to develop space weapons. And that's being rather conservative. really. It's probably more like 60 or 70 years.
Actually, it sounds like somebody wants their own budget.
That's what I thought too.
All wars are resource wars.
And Earth orbit is a resource. The USA will want to have the means to assure that resource is available. Not just available militarily but commercially, since a strong military is necessary for a strong economy, and vice versa.
One idea that has crossed my mind every so often is the idea of something like a Coast Guard for space. The US Navy and the Coast Guard have overlapping roles, and similar structure, but the Coast Guard is regarded as much as a police force as a military one. There's rules in US law and international law on the separation of a military force and a police force. For example, having Navy officers board a foreign flagged ship can be considered an act of war but Coast Guard officers doing the same would be a matter of law enforcement.
Is it really a military force we want in this role? Or should it be more of a law enforcement force?
If this is about protecting a resource, keeping the orbits above the USA clear of threats like the Coast Guard patrols the shores to do the same, then this might be the wrong way to go about this. In time though, as orbit becomes more accessible to non-government entities, I suspect both a military and police force with space borne capability will be needed.
Slashdot Mirror
EVs don't need a transmission running up the length of the car
How many people have rear wheel drive any more? No one has a transmission running the length of the car unless it's an all wheel drive version. Even electric all wheel drive vehicles will have a drive shaft running the length of the car to the rear wheels. If in-wheel motors become a thing then this might be true but there are a lot of reasons why we don't see them in production cars.
So it's a wash.
No, it's not. It might be for special cases but saying "it's a wash" as a blanket statement is false.
using heat pumps to replace the heat and A/C
Air conditioners are heat pumps. You must be confused about some important details somewhere..
Small price to pay for never seeing the inside of a gas station!
This is from a person that is routinely mocked for paying for my gas with cash, who (besides me) goes inside a gas station any more? Pay at pump systems have been the norm for how long now? This is not new technology.
While you are taking your leisurely 20 minute break on your 600 mile road trip I've already pumped gas, taken a piss, ordered a sandwich, and 15 minutes closer to my destination. I'll eat the sandwich while I drive. Which is assuming your 20 minute break isn't bullshit.
Insulation adds mass and volume, both of which count against you in fuel economy. You can optimize for cabin comfort or you can optimize for fuel economy, you cannot have both. Physics is physics and an internal combustion engine has gobs of waste heat for the cabin as a matter of course, electric vehicles do not. Hydrocarbon fuels have an energy density that is roughly two orders of magnitude greater than any battery technology out there. There is just no way that an electric vehicle can compete on range and time to refuel/recharge.
Once at an Apple developer conference I met a man that did the drive from Des Moines, Iowa to Cupertino, California in 24 hours. You can't do that in an electric vehicle. I don't care how many charging station are on the way. For those of you that did the math that means an AVERAGE speed of about 75 miles per hour. In the open expanses of the prairie in the middle of the night it is easy to go 90mph and not meet a single other vehicle for hours. He said he took a 2 hour nap somewhere in the middle, and it may not have been exactly 24 hours, but we are still in the ballpark of 75mph.
Those people that want to do 600 mile road trips with any regularity are not going to get an electric vehicle. A person might not be as crazy as that gentleman I met to want a gas car. If an electric vehicle takes 10 hours to get to the intended destination and the gas car does it in 9 hours then people will naturally gravitate towards the gas car.
I believe your argument works against you. The people in your example stuck out because they were strangers in a strange land, not just because they had a nice haircut and a sunny demeanor. Certainly their appearance and demeanor added to the "oddness" effect but I have my doubts that was the only reason they were given scrutiny.
A person that knows the local customs, because they are locals, would not trigger the "oddness" detector like a person that did not know those customs. People even in 2017 don't always have a smart phone. People have them lost, stolen, or broken all the time. There's still plenty of "counter culture" types that choose to do without the latest gadget.
A wealthy person with a new phone with no contacts or history?
Showing up at a border while wearing a $5000 suit does not automatically mean you have to have the latest and greatest iPhone in your pocket, or that you know how to add all your contacts and apps from your old one if you do have a new phone. As you say, there are a lot of odd people in the world.
Besides, what are they going to do about it? If you don't have a phone to search then they can't search your phone. Holding up someone at the border just because they dress nice but don't have a phone does sound like an odd way to do things. If you tell border patrol you left your phone at home because you didn't want to risk them taking it from you then they'll likely just roll their eyes ("Oh, it's one of THOSE again") and wave you through.
There still is a counter culture, and some of them don't carry cell phones.
I know you are joking* but I've run this scenario through my head and I realized that the prescription drugs I carry with me every day are quite valuable to someone looking for a quick high and/or just looking for something of value they can trade for something that can give them a quick high. They are of minimal value to me because I know I can get the prescription refilled at minimal cost to myself. If I report the theft then there is little risk of suspicion that I am selling the drugs myself. If handing over my meds makes them go away then I'll be, on the balance, happy with that outcome. There's a potential problem of convincing someone I was in fact robbed but that beats getting stabbed with a screwdriver.
*(Okay, I don't KNOW you are joking, I'll just pretend that I do.)
Why is it whenever some random government official gives a sob story about not having enough money that the immediate response is to suggest taking money from the military? Shouldn't the immediate response be asking why this person is working for the government in the first place?
I can point to the US Constitution on where it says that Congress is to raise a army, provide a navy, organize a militia, build forts, and so on. The Constitution spends a lot of verbiage on the defense of the nation and so it should be no surprise that the government spends a lot of money on the military.
Can someone point to the line in the Constitution that justifies spending anything on NASA? Or funding a mission to Mars? Did we declare war on Mars? Is that a place where we should be building a fort?
Looking at the other powers granted to the federal government I'm finding it hard to see what might justify the federal government funding a manned mission to Mars. Are we going there to establish a post office? Is someone on Mars counterfeiting US currency?
I can see the need of a civilian agency like NASA to do things like regulate the satellites launched by US entities, public and private. Perhaps even be a central agency to be responsible for the launching of government assets into space, civilian (like NOAA weather satellites), military (like reconnaissance satellites), and dual use assets (like GPS).
I think that the NASA director of human spaceflight should keep quiet or go find another job. NASA should not be in the business of launching people into space.
I might change my mind if it involves sending people like himself on a manned mission to land on the sun. Every government official that cries for my tax money is eligible for being a member of the crew. Why stop at Mars? Why not go bigger? No one has been to the sun either.
Why use Delaware? It's less taxing than other states!
(add your own rimshot noise)
http://instantrimshot.com/inde...
It is not extraordinarily toxic. It's toxic, like any heavy metal, but not extraordinarily so.
http://www.radioactivity.eu.co...
Because of its lack of mobility, medical data do not confirm the reputation of plutonium as the most deadly substance known to man. It is not as immediately harmful as many chemicals. The danger resulting from its alpha radiation does not become effective unless plutonium is present in the human body after inhalation or ingestion.
To handle it one should wear gloves, goggles, and face mask. Not that different than handling many household cleaning solvents.
ummm... Plutonium in VERY small quantities IS highly toxic, radioactive and has an incredible half life. There is a LOT of it in spent reactor fuel and it's very difficult to reprocess.
Assuming that's true, then don't eat it. Is it that hard?
It's not like this stuff is spilling all over the place. it's a solid at room temperatures. Is very dense so it's not like it blows away in the wind, if someone were stupid enough to spill some in the open. Is not soluble in water. Generally it stays where you put it.
And this part...
radioactive and has an incredible half life
Either it is highly radioactive or it has an incredibly long half life, both cannot be true. Truth is that it has an incredibly long half life, which adds further to it's stability. It's not going to decay into radon any time soon and float away.
Sure, this is nasty stuff, what is it not is a hazard for millennia.
It doesn't need to, which you would have realized if you had taken your own advice and rewatched the video you linked. The TED Talk specifically said that rooftop installations in England were getting 20W/m^2, 4x the number you quoted (which was for solar parks in England). At those numbers, home-based installations would only need to cover 5% of England in order to achieve 100% coverage of the country's energy needs. And that's ALL of the country's energy, including transportation, businesses, and home use.
Yes, of course, my mistake. I did see on his website a caveat that such efficiency in current solar panels would be impractical for mass deployment because of excessive cost.
https://www.withouthotair.com/...
While it can be done, using only solar power from 5% of the nation's area, it would mean energy prices would quadruple. Keeping energy within sane prices AND using only solar would mean needing 20% of the nation's area covered in solar panels. This assumes stable prices for everything, which is impossible if demand for fossil fuels drops to zero and demand for solar goes to... I don't know, 1000 times current demand?
Even if the rest of the world was covered in England's stereotypically gloomy weather, they'd only need to have rooftop installations covering 0.7% of their land area.
I don't know why the cost of these alternatives were not mentioned in the video but they are important to discuss, perhaps the matter of cost was cut from his speech due to time constraints. He mentions this as impractical on his website. He also did not claim that any one "lever" to a carbon free future is all we should choose, only that declaring one less desirable means pulling harder on the others. I agree with this. Solar power alone cannot solve this for many reasons, the area needed is a problem, which is just one of many things that contribute to the cost.
And that's before we even get into the efficiency gains that have occurred in the five years since he gave that talk, not to mention the fact that the sun's rays are far weaker in England than they are in much of the rest of the world.
I'm not going to fret too much over the math here since we are trying to get an order of magnitude idea of the problem. You might say that covering 1% of the world in solar panels is trivial but it is not. That is a lot of area to cover and this does not include issues of storage, transport, cost, or the political issues of relying on neighboring nations for a vital resource like the energy needed to heat your homes. Ask Europe about how well relying on Russian natural gas has gone.
Efficiency gains in solar power have not been what they used to. We've not seen much gains in efficiency, but prices have gone down for the same efficiency of panels. Sadly we won't see an update on this from Dr. MacKay as he died last year.
Maybe I botched the math somewhere, but this doesn't seem nearly so far fetched as you're trying to suggest, especially since your one and only source directly contradicts your claims.
Again, not going to argue on the order of magnitude math too much. Whether this is a Texas sized problem, an Alaska sized problem, or one the size of Ohio, this is still a big problem. I see no contradiction, except perhaps in that the information provided is incomplete. The TED talk was intended to be a bird's eye view of how to address this issue, and I believe he did an excellent job. He did such an excellent job that I'd argue that one should not need another source. He gave real world numbers to make his case, and gave very conservative estimates of potential gains when extrapolating to the near future. Science is not a matter of popular opinion, it's a matter of who has the best evidence. Dr. MacKay gave plenty of evidence on his website.
All of which is to say, yes
You have something of a point there about updates. I'll update the computers when it is convenient for me, like I'm forced to reboot due to a power outage. I just checked and it looks like an update is waiting for a reboot on one of my Macs. It seems only Windows 10 has "critical" monthly updates that require a reboot.
Sure, XP probably has security problems where it should not be on the internet but due to their age I don't go web surfing with them a lot, and they are behind a firewall, so risks are minimal. What would anyone gain from compromising them? My high scores? They have internet access mostly just to keep their clocks accurate.
Serious question, is there something I should be doing different to keep these XP machines from becoming a security problem?
Being blocked from Trump's Twitter feed, they said, was illegal and akin to a mayor ejecting critics from city hall meetings.
There's critics and there's critics. Being kicked out from a town hall meeting for merely disagreeing with the mayor would be an outrage. Being kicked out for calling the mayor an orange haired, small handed (and we all know what that means), brainless, right wing nut job that wouldn't know how to dump piss from a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, and then proceeded to list all their "grievances" from the lack of government funded healthcare to the lack of paper towels in the ladies room, would not be an outrage.
I don't know what lead POTUS to ban these people from Twitter but I can imagine that there are some that were more than just "being critical" of POTUS.
President Trump needs to learn some care in what he sends on Twitter. He may learn in time but he's spent much of his life being free to do pretty much as he pleases. I fear this is an old habit that will be hard to break.
In my basement office I have six computers I use regularly. Two are running MacOSX, one is running Ubuntu, two are Windows XP, and one is Windows 10. I just went around the room and checked uptimes. All of them were up for more than 3 months, except the Windows 10 computer. This one computer is supposed to be pretty fast compared to the rest but it gets bogged down where I feel compelled to reboot it. It also has the nasty habit of demanding to reboot when I'm trying to get work done, but that's a different problem. After reading this I'm somewhat relieved to think I'm not doing something wrong that's making it run slow, or that I'm just imagining things.
One of the Windows XP computers claims to have been on for over 15 years. I know this is not true since it's not even that old. Does the system uptime clock rollover or something to where it cannot track uptime accurately after a few months?
I dislike rebooting or powering off computers, preferring instead to just allow them to go to sleep when I'm done with them. They tend to stay on unless there is a power outage, and the power has been unusually stable with so many lightning storms in the area. It wasn't that long ago when such lengthy periods of uninterrupted time between crashing was unheard of. I'd probably have had longer uptimes if the power had not blinked.
People may ask why I run Windows XP. It's because I have some old software that I like and it won't run on my newer Windows 10 computer. So long as the hardware keeps going I feel no need to upgrade them in any way.
People may ask why I run MacOSX. Because fuck you, that's why. I'd give a serious answer but few people ask this seriously, they just want to be snobs.
(keep out signs that will be understandable for millennia?)
I remember reading an article long ago in some science magazine about a bunch of linguists getting together to address the very issue you raised. I remembered it because it seemed so fascinating that people could conceive some kind of language that could be understood for thousands of years. What would this look like? Some sort of Egyptian hieroglyphics? Would they create a kind of Rosetta Stone with all known major languages of the time to aid in translation?
Then I found out later it was all a bunch of scaremongering bullshit.
Of the mass in spent nuclear fuel a very large portion is stable, as in not radioactive. I've read conflicting accounts on how much this is but it's somewhere between 2/3rds and 9/10ths. Then there are the actinides, formed when a heavy element like U-238 grabs a neutron but does not fission. It will form a relatively stable element with a very long half life. There are the long lived products, they have half lives even longer than the actinides, on the order of millions of years. Then there are the medium lived products, these have half lives of less than 100 years. There are no short lived products in spent nuclear fuel because they decay to something stable or medium lived before they can be removed from the reactor.
The longer the half life the less radioactive it is, just like the saying of "the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long". With so much of the mass being inert, or half lives so long it may as well be, the really dangerous stuff is pretty small and all of this stuff is effectively gone in about 300 years. After that the spent fuel is as inert as the dirt the fuel was mined from. We know how to store stuff for 300 years without having to label them with hieroglyphics.
If we allow ourselves to reprocess this then we can separate out the inert products, which can be disposed of like any inert material. It's still dangerous, like lead and mercury, but not radioactive. Most of the stuff that is radioactive is either fuel, like plutonium, or an industrial feedstock, like cesium. The teeny tiny bit that is left over can be sealed in glass and buried for 300 years just like we would if we didn't reprocess the spent fuel, only now it is a small fraction of the mass we started with.
That's a much longer post than I originally intended but I think it is important to make myself clear. There is no long term waste problem. Those that tell you there is are lying to you. I could be charitable and call them ignorant but I won't. This is not a mystery to anyone that wishes to understand the issue. There just seems to be a lot of people out there that would rather induce fear than inform.
Those are not my numbers. I got them from Dr. David MacKay who was the scientific advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He got his numbers from real world data. You might argue that his data was old but he used those numbers in a talk from 2015, so not all that old.
I also believe that you do not understand the scale of this problem. Even if much of the land, and even if it is as high as 90%, used for wind can also be used for crops then you still have the problem of covering twice the area of a nation to provide that nation with wind power. What does that much wind power look like off shore? What does that do to shipping and fishing?
I have serious doubts we've gone from 5 to 200 W/m^2 in two years for solar. Even if that is possible in places like Australia then what do those numbers look like for the rest of the world?
Do you really think the combined areas of all the rooftops in the USA would add up to the area of Alaska?
A quick Google search tells me that the area of all the structures in the USA, rooftops, parking lots, roads, and highways, would add up to an area equivalent to Ohio.
Nice try, but you are off by at least an order of magnitude.
With concentrated solar it'd have to cover an area equal to that of Texas.
If governments can just print money to fund these subsidies then why do these senators keep pleading with me for my money? I shouldn't have to give them ANY money, right?
if you live in a forested area solar is a no go.
Sure you can do solar energy. You just cut down the trees and salt the soil with herbicides. Plenty of solar energy that way.
I'm not serious about cutting down the trees but solar does have an energy density problem, even in the tropics.
I encourage people to watch this video: https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...
Dr. MacKay does some math on renewable energy and the numbers are interesting. One interesting comparison is the means of measuring consumption and production of energy, both can be measured as a density of watts per square meter. In much of Europe consumption of energy is about 1W/m^2. The video uses the UK as an example but the numbers would be similar in other developed nations.
Solar power produces about 5 W/m^2, which means a nation would have to cover 20% of their land in solar PV panels to achieve a standard of living like the UK. Wind gets about half with 2.5 W/m^2. Concentrated solar does better with 20 W/m^2. Biomass is rather pathetic with 0.5 W/m^2.
What really wins out though is nuclear with 1000 W/m^2. A common gigawatt nuclear power plant fits inside one square kilometer.
I keep hearing how wind and solar are getting cheaper all the time. What happens to the price of those energy sources when they start competing for land with croplands, living spaces, and each other? As Dr. MacKay pointed out this does not have to be in your backyard, it can be in some other person's backyard. What happens though to a nation that relies on another for energy to heat their homes? I'm sure everyone can find examples on how that does not go well.
So, how much of the CO2 output can be traced to government activity? You think that all those bureaucrats turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater like Jimmy Carter did? Sure they do, in the middle of summer.
I hear so many suggest that we "just" enact a tax on fossil fuels. Then we "just" have the government subsidize windmills and electric cars. The government does not "just" do anything. The government is built of many people, all with their own intentions. Some of them not so nice.
We might get our coal tax but not get any funding for windmills. We might get our electric vehicle subsidies but no "carbon tax" on oil. If we don't get both the tax and the subsidy then you have an unsustainable system. I'm sure there are people that would like to see the government go bankrupt, but that risks funds for fire and police services. I'm sure people would love those carbon taxes, but that could just mean giving the government more money to buy bombs to drop on brown people.
Saving the environment is too important to hand over to the government.
We need to make windmills so cheap that no business can afford to buy coal. We need to make electric vehicles so awesome that everyone will be standing in line with wads of cash in hand to buy them.
You think we can just hand the government a pile of your money through taxes and then expect them to put polluting companies out of business? I'm pretty sure these companies have their own money, and bigger piles, to give to the government to make sure that does not happen.
What can end this cycle is technology. Build an electric car that beats the pants of anything that burns oil and then use the greed of these companies to work for you. They'll hand over piles of cash to buy this idea so that they can beat the other companies also competing for your dollars. The government doesn't need to be involved for this to happen. In fact I'm quite certain this would happen faster, or just as fast, if we left the government out of it.
I won't claim this is easy, only that it has a higher probability to work than all the other options.
Assuming we can get these taxes passed, how can we be sure that the government will not use those funds to fight more wars and increase human misery?
Thinking we can hand the government a wad of cash and they only use it for purely virtuous endeavors is, as you say, a "lovely" theory.
The only solution I see that gives us the assurance of a reduced CO2 output, is a technological one. If we get government involved then there are two outcomes that don't end well. First, people vote to get rid of the tax but keep the subsidies. This leaves the government with reduced funds for vital services like law enforcement. Second, we get the tax but the government fails to follow through on their promise to enforce any CO2 reductions. Instead they spend the money on more tanks for the Army because it buys some votes for some long serving senators. You seem to think that the government will take a third path, enact unpopular taxes and then spend the money on unpopular subsidies.
In a free society the people that are taxed have a say in how they are taxed. I seem to recall from history class a rather notable war fought over this about 240 to 250 years ago. You can say we need taxes and subsidies but you need people to agree to that for it to happen.
But then if you get the people to agree that they need to spend more money because reducing CO2 output is important then do you really need the government to enforce this? I would think not.
Sure, we currently have some tax incentives to stimulate the EV market. One problem with that is that they can disappear at any time because of politics. Another problem is a bunch of confidence artists go to the government and make big claims on their ability to produce electric vehicles, collect their money, and then just disappear. In the mean time a lot of people just got a bit poorer (through government taking their money), they certainly lost a bit of freedom (the money spent in ways they may not support), and a handful of con men just got richer with money they didn't earn. You might say such con men would be punished but that does not restore the public's money or freedom.
This French ban on the sale of petroleum burning cars is far enough in the future that there will be a new generation of people, voters and car buyers, and they might not like this idea. Telling them they can't have petrol cars is tyranny. If you can convince them that this EV is better than that petrol burner then that's freedom. It's also sometimes called capitalism, or just good business.
Why do you say that? Is it because knowledge of the behaviors of sheep and cattle would help them relate with Democrats?
Seriously though, do you even know what courses one must take to major in animal science? Sure, there's a couple silly sounding class names but then every major has a few. I went to an agricultural and engineering school like Texas A&M and knew students that studied Animal Science. About half were headed to go on to graduate school and get their DVM, the other half were planning on going into ranching and farming.
Make jokes if you like but it's the animal science majors that keep meat cheap and safe to eat. Taking a course called "Meats" is an important part of knowing how to do that.
I'm not so sure. The Wikipedia summary of the treaty does say that conventional weapons are allowed, only what they deem weapons of mass destruction would be prohibited.
I saw nothing to imply this space force would be in command of orbital weapons. It'd be a large and relatively independent force within the Air Force that specialized in space based military resources. That could just mean that they manage the communications, navigation, and weather satellites for the Air Force and other branches.
Also, I think you are about 40 years too late to complain about an arms race to develop space weapons. And that's being rather conservative. really. It's probably more like 60 or 70 years.
Actually, it sounds like somebody wants their own budget.
That's what I thought too.
All wars are resource wars.
And Earth orbit is a resource. The USA will want to have the means to assure that resource is available. Not just available militarily but commercially, since a strong military is necessary for a strong economy, and vice versa.
One idea that has crossed my mind every so often is the idea of something like a Coast Guard for space. The US Navy and the Coast Guard have overlapping roles, and similar structure, but the Coast Guard is regarded as much as a police force as a military one. There's rules in US law and international law on the separation of a military force and a police force. For example, having Navy officers board a foreign flagged ship can be considered an act of war but Coast Guard officers doing the same would be a matter of law enforcement.
Is it really a military force we want in this role? Or should it be more of a law enforcement force?
If this is about protecting a resource, keeping the orbits above the USA clear of threats like the Coast Guard patrols the shores to do the same, then this might be the wrong way to go about this. In time though, as orbit becomes more accessible to non-government entities, I suspect both a military and police force with space borne capability will be needed.