That's a bunch of bullshit. People understood the external "costs" of coal and gas for a long time now. There's a wide and deep consensus that the costs are worth it. People knew that coal created the endless "fog" in London. That coal fires killed many. That respiratory diseases were common. The "cost" of not having the coal was a live of cold, starvation, and disease.
What of the external costs of wind power? We know that there are some. People just seem to ignore those. Failing to be able to name them is a failure in comprehension, or willful ignorance.
If we take coal and gas out of the picture then comes nuclear. Those that think nuclear is unacceptable because of the "external cost" now leave society to starve. In the dark. If they don't freeze to death first.
A generous subsidy deal from the Scottish government made the project viable.
It's not "their" money that's being spent, it's other people's money. I don't have a problem if people want to invest their own money in an energy project. I have a problem when it's my money spent on an energy project.
I don't live in Scotland and I don't pay Scottish taxes so this does not affect me directly. As long as this stupid idea stays there I'll still be disappointed in the Scottish taxpayers getting sucked into this but it's no real cost to me. When/if this comes to the USA then I see it as a problem.
Honest businessmen take their ideas to investors to fund a project. They will make a case and if they can convince the people with the money that the risk is worth the potential reward then things happen. Dishonest businessmen take their ideas to governments. Senators don't care about making good investments, they are looking to buy campaign donations with taxpayers' money. These kind of investments are money laundering schemes.
These wind subsidies just lead to corruption, expensive energy, higher taxes, and often times little real CO2 reductions to show for it. When the wind blows the utilities are forced by law to pay the wind farms for that energy whether they need it or not. Also while the wind blows the coal plants are still burning coal even if they are not producing any electricity. The boilers need to be kept hot or they'll take hours to days come back on line after the wind stops. If the boilers are allowed to cool then a lot of coal needs to be burned to get them back to temperature, while they produce no electricity. Alternatively when the wind stops blowing something has to make up for the lost power, this is usually gas turbines. Gas turbines burn twice as much fuel compared to combined cycle plants for the same energy produced.
Unless this wind is coupled with some sort of energy storage, "smart grid", and/or other means to match the load to this shifting supply there is going to be a lot of CO2 burned, wind blowing or not.
Every time I see wind power deployed there will be someone that does an honest story on the CO2 released and it's, nothing changed, an increase, or the wind simply did not blow enough to make a difference but the windmill owners still demand payment.
I say fuck them. If they can't figure out how to make a profit on this then they can go bankrupt. Part of the bankruptcy deal is cleaning up the mess they made in the ocean. Make the site better than it was before. Oh, and pay back what they took for the "jump start" money, because that money is for winners. There's just one lump of money and it could grow a little every year. The first one to consistently turn a profit keeps the money. After that we've demonstrated that wind is profitable and no further government investment is needed.
We've had nukes for 60 years now. Any idea when you expect that to happen?
When the government stops regulating nuclear power like it did 60 years ago.
I watched a YouTube talk about the state of affairs on fourth generation reactors and this person in the know said that in the federal regulations under the heading of air cooled reactors is a blank page. If the reactor is not a solid fuel, water cooled, water moderated, reactor the government simply lacks the means to create a license for it.
The Democratic Party has been the primary holdup to new regulations in nuclear power since the Carter administration. The Democrats lost big in the last election. I'm seeing good things possible in nuclear power from Trump, Pence, and Perry. I don't know if I can "expect" anything but this is something we have not seen since modern air cooled reactors were more than a theory. We saw air cooled nuclear reactors in the time Nixon was POTUS but he killed the development to help out his political buddies in California where they were developing water cooled reactors, the kind capable of making nuclear weapons.
The only reason nuclear power is so expensive is because of the regulations. Democrats have been saying nuclear power is dead because it costs too much, which gives them an excuse to not write new regulations. Nuclear power has been caught in this death spiral for at least four decades. As soon as the shackles are loosened enough that just one nuclear power plant can be completed then we will see them built by the dozens like we did in the 1970s. At that point the argument that nuclear power is too expensive to work is demonstrably false.
Fourth generation nuclear power plants are air cooled. No water needed.
Nuclear power takes less resources per energy produced than wind or solar. Wind takes ten times as much steel and concrete per installed megawatt than nuclear. I've had people ask where all that concrete goes, it goes in the ground. To hold up that big windmill takes a very large and heavy anchor in the ground. Wind and solar may be cheaper than nuclear now (it's not but we'll assume it does for argument sake) but how long will that last?
The costs in nuclear are in engineering and regulation. Once that is figured out then nuclear still wins on how much concrete needs to be poured for the energy produced. This includes solar. What do you think keeps all those solar panels from blowing away in the wind? Concrete, steel, and aluminum. There is a limit on the costs and that is in materials. Nuclear needs one tenth the materials for the same power and energy compared to wind and solar.
How much will it cost to use nukes?
In time it will cost one tenth as much as just about anything else.
Where do you think the materials for wind and solar power come from? You think that stuff is not mined in open pits? You think that making PV panels and rare earth magnets for windmills do not produce toxic waste?
These "biosphere loving" Democrats are going to get us all killed with the environmental disaster that is wind and solar power. I've seen the math on how much mining and land would be needed to replace nuclear with wind, solar, and energy storage, and it looks real good for nuclear.
How much does that cost? Out here in the Midwest there is not a whole lot of places to pump water up a hill. Building a raised lake or whatever would cost a lot of money, take a lot of valuable land, and be a hazard to the environment.
None of that pesky issue of what to do with the waste or site of a nuclear reactor, or leaking mine, or cask.
Let's assume that is true, how much land would that take? How does that land area compare to the land we'd have to flood to store the energy we'd need? How does that compare to the land that would be flooded from global warming induced sea level rise?
We know how to manage nuclear waste but Democrats have been holding up all attempts to do so. It seems to me that if we compare the threats that nuclear power pose compared to global warming, or the environmental disaster that is "alternative energy", nuclear power wins every time..
Do you know what physicians call "alternative medicine" that works? They call it "medicine". The reason we call wind and solar power "alternative" is because it does not work.
Around 33,000 people are shot to death each year in the USA.
I see you've been getting your statistics from the gun grabbers. Of those 30,000 "gun deaths" half are suicides. I don't see a need to fly a drone over to the scene because some depressed fucker put a hole in his head. Such people aren't much of a threat to the public and once that shot is fired there is no need to be in a hurry to pick up the pieces.
Out of those 33,000, less than 50 per year are killed as part of a Columbine/Aurora/SanBernardino style shooting spree.
Of the roughly 13000 murders every year about 8,000 of them are from firearms. In those cases where someone is intent on taking as many people with them to the grave they choose a group of people that are not likely to be armed. As you say these incidences are rare and flying a drone to the scene and hoping it would be effective does seem like wishful thinking.
When it comes to drug dealers fighting over territory, muggings, and other single victim crime, I don't see a drone as much help either. They'll maybe find the victim a few seconds sooner but the criminal will be gone and lost in the crowd even before the drone gets there. What would be helpful in the cases of the single and multiple victim crimes are more armed people. People being able to shoot back would also help for the many cases where the assailant is armed with something other than a firearm. The drones can still come, if you like, only now they'll be picking up what's left of the fucker that pulled a knife thinking he'd rape someone.
My understanding is that suppressors are incredibly easy to get in Commonwealth countries (where the guns are harder to obtain).
That is my understanding as well. Not only are they incredibly easy to obtain it is considered "rude" to not have one.
This is the story I was told on the history of the restrictions on firearm suppressors. The laws restricting gun ownership really started in the USA (and in many nations around the world really) in the 1920s and 1930s. World War One had ended and people had access to a lot of surplus weapons. There was a government concern of another public uprising like what happened around the world in the events leading to the war, and the Great Depression was starting. The prohibition on alcohol didn't help as that led to a lot of black market crime.
In the USA a law passed on the restrictions on firearm ownership in 1934. The publicly stated reason for restricting firearm suppressors was to limit poaching. This became a problem as poor people could more easily afford a one time expense of a suppressed rifle in order to turn cheap war surplus ammunition into meat. This had little to do with reality since there was plenty of wildlife then and few law enforcement in large segments of the USA. A more likely situation was to deter assassination of unpopular government officials, and to better find anyone that made such an attempt.
In the UK they had a different problem, rats. People wanted to kill the rats but also not get woken up whenever someone shot a rat in the night. The UK was much more urban than the USA so keeping the guns quiet was of a greater concern. I'm sure that there was a concern of an assassination attempt on government officials but the people that owned guns then tended to be people of the wealthy class, and they were not likely to be a threat.
He said that, in his opinion, geoengineering was one of the stupidest ideas he'd ever heard of, but that not studying it was even stupider.
Huh? Don't people generally study a topic so they can do something with that information later?
Assuming people are producing CO2 at a rate that is geologically significant then reducing CO2 with the goal of reversing the effect we've had on the environment is geoengineering. We might not normally call it that but that is what it is.
I think back to when my sister graduated with a civil engineering degree. The degree was offered by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. I thought that was odd. I graduated from the same school with an engineering degree a few years prior and there was no such department then. There was a Department of Civil Engineering but I heard nothing of environmental engineering. It seems they realized at some point that they should call it what it was because people were doing Environmental Engineering for a long time. Only recently they thought people should focus on it enough that they'd separate civil projects like roads from environmental projects like dams. It seems over 100 schools in the USA made a similar realization.
I think studying geoengineering and not doing anything with that knowledge is pretty stupid. There's nothing inherently wrong with learning something, I guess. I'd think that if someone was going to invest their precious time and money in a formal education in a topic they should do so with the intention of improving their life with that knowledge and getting some return on that investment.
You don't think that these gunshot detectors have any deterrent value? There's a lot of studies that show people are less likely to commit a crime if they think they could get caught.
For a college statistics course I thought I'd do a study on the correlation between gun laws and crime, since that is a topic of some popularity lately. What I found was a positive correlation between gun restrictions and incidences of rape and murder. The more laws restricting gun ownership the more likely people were going to get raped or murdered. We hear a lot about "gun laws" and "gun crime" but I'm more interested in laws and crime.
Gun laws aren't really about guns, they are about rights. People have the right to defend themselves and restrictions on guns restrict that right. Less freedom means more crime.
We hear the same things about how gun ownership does not save lives because so few gun owners shoot criminals. You think that maybe criminals don't like getting shot so they avoid gun owners?
That's another thing about my statistics assignment, it showed a correlation between gun ownership and property crimes. That makes some sense. Criminals don't like getting shot so when people are armed they don't mug people, they wait until they leave home and steal their stuff. Still not ideal but fewer people get hurt this way. This is also difficult to prove since the police arrive only after the crime was reported.
I do think you are right about these gunshot detectors but didn't finish the thought. If the gunshot detectors only alert the police after the criminals have left the scene then how do we make sure armed people are on the scene as the crime happens? We know that the scene of the crime there will be two people, the assailant and the victim. The answer then, IMHO, is to arm the potential victims.
Don't take my statistical analysis as any kind of evidence, others have done the same kind of study and posted the results. Remember that the problem is "crime" and not "gun crime". If the study does not count all murders but instead "gun homicides" then they lie to you twice over. The first lie is to leave out murders with non-firearm weapons, I don't care if the murder was with a gun, knife, or lead pipe. The second lie is to include justified self defense shootings as a "gun homicide". Shooting in self defense is technically a "gun homicide" but it is not a crime. The goal should be to reduce crime, not necessarily shootings.
That would be useless against the kind of criminal that is most problematic right now, the kind that do not care if they get caught because they are on a suicidal mission.
You can get a view of the scene if you like but that's not going to solve the problem. What's likely to solve the problem is people able to shoot back.
Israel had a problem with school shootings until they decided to put armed men guarding the schools. The last "successful" (if you can call it that) school shooting that I could find when I last bothered to look was at a bible school library. These future ministers were having a study group when some idiot thought he could shoot up the place. The students returned fire with their own guns. I recall three students died as did the assailant.
The lawmakers in DC right now are having a debate about the continued ban on people being able to carry weapons there because of that charity baseball game Congress was holding. This would not normally be considered a high risk event but DC police happened to be there that day. It could have been much worse. What bothers me is that Congress didn't consider this a possibility until after it happened to them. Shit like this happens every day in the USA.
Unless this drone is carrying explosives and lands on the murderer's head before self detonating then I think flying drones just waiting for someone to get shot is a bad idea. If crime is so bad that drones are flying around to see someone get shot then something went wrong long ago.
There's lots of common handgun ammunition that is subsonic. The.45 Colt and.45 ACP come to mind immediately because I have sidearms chambered for those cartridges. There's also plenty of "specialty" sub-sonic ammunition for other common cartridges like 9mm. There's even subsonic rifle ammunition that is not too hard to find.
I've seen the reasons for these subsonic cartridges to exist in the modern era. First is that they are cheap. It takes less metal and allows for lower tolerances for subsonic ammunition. Second is that there seems to be a lot of people doing cowboy action shooting and other hobbies that like the old style guns. Supersonic ammunition is a fairly recent development, especially for handguns. Third, for a firearm suppressor to work properly subsonic ammunition must be used.
The.45 ACP is apparently quite popular among the special forces types because it can be effectively suppressed. It bothers me when I see people that will make YouTube videos that "show" how ineffective firearm suppressors are by putting one on a gun and fire off supersonic ammunition. I can tell that the ammunition is supersonic by it's distinctive "crack" as it leaves the barrel. Both sides do it too. The "pro-gun" people will want to show that guns can still be detected by things like these shot detectors. The "anti-gun" side do this to show that no one would want them since they don't work, therefore they can be banned, or something.
One thing that I wonder about is the number of false negatives. People talk about the false positives with things like firecrackers or something being detected as a shot but what of a shot that was not detected? Isn't that a thing? I remember reading somewhere of someone that shot another and not waking sleeping children in the next room by wrapping a revolver with a pillow. Had to have been something subsonic like a.45 Colt or.38 Special.
I have to wonder if the criminals will figure this out. Wrapping a revolver in a pillow might be rather conspicuous but there might be other ways to suppress the noise with something to the point it would not be detected by these shot spotters. In the US federal law the possession of a firearm suppressor is tightly controlled. Using a firearm suppressor in the commission of a crime can get a 30 year sentence. I'd think though that in the interest of getting away with murder someone might not be all that concerned about an additional 30 year sentence.
There is a movement in the USA to get firearm suppressors regulated like shotguns (no fees, must be 18 years old, show ID, not have a criminal history, done with 5 minute phone call) instead of like machine guns ($200 tax, fingerprints, extensive background check, 2 years wait for processing, signatures from sheriff, psychiatrist, and your mom, and usually involves a lawyer to get the paperwork in order). This movement is growing because of the obvious hearing protection advantages from suppressors. If that happens then criminals could get them more often by theft, falsifying records, straw purchase, etc.
I'm not a fan of banning suppressors because criminals might use them in a crime. If that were true then we'd be banning a lot of things because criminals use them to harm others. I'm just thinking of how ineffective these shot spotter devices could be in the not too distant future. I think people are relying too much on government and technology to save them from what they fear. That's just not healthy thinking, IMHO.
It seems that both are covered. For a short time after college I lived with someone that had a past DUI. When the insurance company found this out (I think that the other guy had insurance from the same company) I got a phone call. I was told that I am not to allow my housemate to drive my car. Not a big deal since I had my car and he had his. I do recall some situation where I ended up driving his car to do something but that was very unusual. I'm a big guy, in the 1% of height, and he drove a new Honda or some other import. I did not fit it well. He wasn't short by any means but inside the 90 to 95% in height. The couple inches different made it uncomfortable in the Honda compared to my Mercury. He didn't liike my Mercury since he considered it ancient.
Anyway, even though both of us were insured, as were our respective vehicles, there was a condition that I could not have that person drive my "Flintstone's" car. The insurance company made no restriction on the other way, there was no prohibition on my driving his car even though my insurance would not have covered as much of the damage had I been in an accident.
It's not like my driving record was flawless. In college I totaled three cars, and put a couple good sized dents in a fourth. Bad weather was a factor in one case. An improperly installed temporary traffic light and a speeding foreign driver contributed to the other. The other case was me falling asleep at an intersection where the driver ahead of me stopped at the light but I did not. That intersection had problems and was not long after regraded, rumble strips installed, and an all way stop instead of the light. There were two or three speeding tickets in the time as well. Spread out over fives years of college and internships and not enough piled up in time to matter much. My housemate getting a DUI in high school though followed him for years.
Had I got the license plate scanned while driving my housemate's car it would come up as insured by him. It would have been more likely driven by the owner or the owner's girlfriend. Maybe she got a phone call like I did. Now that I think about it I don't recall my housemate ever driving her car.
I have a few guesses as to why they don't have this problem in Denver but they do in Phoenix. One you point out is that Denver likely has longer runways. Why not extend the runways in Phoenix then? Likely because this happens so infrequently that they did not want to go through the expense of extending the runway. I got to talking to an engineer that works on airports. As I recall the runways are dug something like 30 feet into the dirt and filled with concrete. That's a lot of concrete to make up for a few hours of inconvenience every few years. This is not your typical concrete and the surface is engineered for keeping traction in all kinds of weather. Every extra foot of that runway must be very expensive.
Another possibility is that airports in Phoenix are older and with improvements in optimizing airframes over the years for some norm the margins got slimmer. This means that over time the airplanes needed longer runways but the airport couldn't extend the runway even if they wanted to. Old airports tend to have the city build up around it and pen it in from expanding.
It could also be that nothing changed physically but the rules under which they operate did. It could be that somewhere in the world an airplane didn't quite make it off the runway in the heat so the FAA decided that the rules on the safety margins had to be changed. It's quite possible every aircraft that wanted to take off could do so, and in the recent past the FAA would have allowed it. But because of a desire to maintain an abundance of caution the FAA grounded those flights.
I recall someone pointing out that we have not seen a commercial jet crash that resulted in fatalities since 2001. We've seen big planes crash since then but no deaths. We've seen people die in plane crashes but not on a major airline on a regularly scheduled flight. I think the FAA would like to keep it that way as long as possible.
That sounds about right, thanks. I was off by 4 decades, 1 crew member, and I forgot that the fourth warning the pilots overrode was a stall speed alarm.
I wish I could remember enough details to do a proper search for a proper citation but I recall seeing on TV something about an airplane crash because the pilots ignored one too many warnings. The story goes something like this....
A couple of pilots were flying a commercial jet with only one other crew member aboard. I'm not sure why the plane was empty but it gave the pilots some freedom to pull a stunt for bragging rights. This happened in the 1960s I believe, it was fairly early in the history of commercial flight anyway. The stunt they wanted to pull was hit some altitude that few pilots could achieve at the time and with no passengers on board it made the plane light enough to do so, at least in theory. Also to do this they had to push the engines a bit since flight time and fuel were limited.
As I recall the first warning was pretty minor, something like safe climb rate being exceeded. That alarm was disabled and they continued. Then they got an engine overheat warning, that was also disabled. Then the second engine started to overheat, again the warning was disabled. The next warning, again as I recall, was something they definitely should not have ignored but they did. Not having yet reached the altitude they set out to they had pushed the engines to the point of failure. Both engines died, they were unable to restart either, and a plane that was perfectly functional when it took off was now a twisted wreck. All three on board died.
Why didn't the plane force the throttles back? Why weren't the warnings more "stern"? Why didn't the plane detect the impending engine failure and descend to a safe altitude and speed? I don't know if current aircraft would or could do such a thing. The failure was in the pilots' desire to pull a stunt and they paid the price for it.
The Tesla driver pushed the limits like those hotdog pilots and suffered the same fate. I put no blame on Tesla, the fault is solely on the driver. The idiot driver should take all the blame here, if only because he exceeded the posted speed limit.
If someone knows the which plant crash I referred to and could tell me what it was I'd appreciate letting me know.
Silicon powder is useful in cast iron foundries but it cannot be reused for the construction of new photovoltaic cells as it still contains a certain percentage of glass.
Only one of them was actually enslaved in our country.
I don't care what country you are referring to, no one race has been the only one enslaved. The word "slave" is derived from "slav" as in the peoples that live in the Caucasus region. "Caucasus" is where "Caucasian" came from, as in white people. Lots of Irish slaves were in America but in time the economics of enslaving them reduced their numbers. Buying slaves from African tribes just became cheaper is all.
Did one race predominate in slavery? Sure. That does not mean other races did not exist in slavery.
I didn't find "honkey" in my dictionary but "honky" is. By censoring "honky" it would also remove things like "honky nut" and "honkytonk" which have no negative connotations to a specific set of people. Well, people might not like honkytonks but the word itself isn't really offensive. Unless the word "honkey" has some attachment to it than an alternative spelling of "honky" then it would be difficult to filter out. I can't think of any off-hand but it may also end up as a part of a longer non-offensive word.
I can say "spic"...
That would also filter out unoffensive terms like "spic and span" or common words like "spice".
I can say "wop"....
That would filter out "swop" which is a lesser used spelling of "swap", as well as possibly other words it may make a part.
I can say "chink"...
That's a word that is synonymous with sliver, clink, shard, crack, or flaw. It can also be found as a part of "pachinko" and possibly other words.
I can say "gook"...
That's a word synonymous with slime, sludge, goop, or gunk.
And none of these seem to get censored by slashdot.
Why the special treatment of ni--gger?
That word is not a part of other non-offensive words. It has no other non-offensive meaning. Words like "ass" and "shit" can be parts of other words and therefore are difficult to censor without rendering common conversation difficult to read.
I'm not defending the censoring of any word, only the logistical difficulty of filtering the examples you gave.
The group says $5.4 million is a misuse of taxpayer funds when the city has other needs, such as infrastructure and public safety.
I'd think that building a publicly accessible fiber optic network does in fact meet the definition of infrastructure. I'd also think that providing a means for communication for the public does add to public safety.
Once you create a continent-wide power grid load balancing gets a lot easier and the need for storage shrinks dramatically.
How much is this continent wide power grid going to cost to build and maintain? I know we already have some very large electric grids but there is a reason that they are still separate.
Then there is still the issue of wind and solar having capacity factors somewhere around 30%. Meaning that for every gigawatt of capacity built the grid sees only 1/3 of a gigawatt-year annually. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas have capacity factors of about 90%, which means 9/10 of a gigawatt-year annually for every gigawatt of capacity.
People get all excited when there's a news article on how solar is cheaper than coal when they really mean the cost of the new install of solar capacity is lower than that of coal capacity. That's nothing to get excited about. When it gets to be 1/3rd the price then we can get excited. Until that happens solar is not going to replace coal in any real way. All the solar power we have now are government subsidized money pits or privately funded greenwash advertising.
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It's not different. Energy of any kind should not be subsidized.
and many of the costs are externalized.
That's a bunch of bullshit. People understood the external "costs" of coal and gas for a long time now. There's a wide and deep consensus that the costs are worth it. People knew that coal created the endless "fog" in London. That coal fires killed many. That respiratory diseases were common. The "cost" of not having the coal was a live of cold, starvation, and disease.
What of the external costs of wind power? We know that there are some. People just seem to ignore those. Failing to be able to name them is a failure in comprehension, or willful ignorance.
If we take coal and gas out of the picture then comes nuclear. Those that think nuclear is unacceptable because of the "external cost" now leave society to starve. In the dark. If they don't freeze to death first.
A generous subsidy deal from the Scottish government made the project viable.
It's not "their" money that's being spent, it's other people's money. I don't have a problem if people want to invest their own money in an energy project. I have a problem when it's my money spent on an energy project.
I don't live in Scotland and I don't pay Scottish taxes so this does not affect me directly. As long as this stupid idea stays there I'll still be disappointed in the Scottish taxpayers getting sucked into this but it's no real cost to me. When/if this comes to the USA then I see it as a problem.
Honest businessmen take their ideas to investors to fund a project. They will make a case and if they can convince the people with the money that the risk is worth the potential reward then things happen. Dishonest businessmen take their ideas to governments. Senators don't care about making good investments, they are looking to buy campaign donations with taxpayers' money. These kind of investments are money laundering schemes.
These wind subsidies just lead to corruption, expensive energy, higher taxes, and often times little real CO2 reductions to show for it. When the wind blows the utilities are forced by law to pay the wind farms for that energy whether they need it or not. Also while the wind blows the coal plants are still burning coal even if they are not producing any electricity. The boilers need to be kept hot or they'll take hours to days come back on line after the wind stops. If the boilers are allowed to cool then a lot of coal needs to be burned to get them back to temperature, while they produce no electricity. Alternatively when the wind stops blowing something has to make up for the lost power, this is usually gas turbines. Gas turbines burn twice as much fuel compared to combined cycle plants for the same energy produced.
Unless this wind is coupled with some sort of energy storage, "smart grid", and/or other means to match the load to this shifting supply there is going to be a lot of CO2 burned, wind blowing or not.
Every time I see wind power deployed there will be someone that does an honest story on the CO2 released and it's, nothing changed, an increase, or the wind simply did not blow enough to make a difference but the windmill owners still demand payment.
I say fuck them. If they can't figure out how to make a profit on this then they can go bankrupt. Part of the bankruptcy deal is cleaning up the mess they made in the ocean. Make the site better than it was before. Oh, and pay back what they took for the "jump start" money, because that money is for winners. There's just one lump of money and it could grow a little every year. The first one to consistently turn a profit keeps the money. After that we've demonstrated that wind is profitable and no further government investment is needed.
Yes, the Royal Marines like their meat fresh.
Lyft lets you specify that the car have a giant pink mustache?
I've heard Lyft advertise for drivers but I'm not doing that if I have to put a stupid mustache on my car. What would that do to my gas mileage?
We've had nukes for 60 years now. Any idea when you expect that to happen?
When the government stops regulating nuclear power like it did 60 years ago.
I watched a YouTube talk about the state of affairs on fourth generation reactors and this person in the know said that in the federal regulations under the heading of air cooled reactors is a blank page. If the reactor is not a solid fuel, water cooled, water moderated, reactor the government simply lacks the means to create a license for it.
The Democratic Party has been the primary holdup to new regulations in nuclear power since the Carter administration. The Democrats lost big in the last election. I'm seeing good things possible in nuclear power from Trump, Pence, and Perry. I don't know if I can "expect" anything but this is something we have not seen since modern air cooled reactors were more than a theory. We saw air cooled nuclear reactors in the time Nixon was POTUS but he killed the development to help out his political buddies in California where they were developing water cooled reactors, the kind capable of making nuclear weapons.
The only reason nuclear power is so expensive is because of the regulations. Democrats have been saying nuclear power is dead because it costs too much, which gives them an excuse to not write new regulations. Nuclear power has been caught in this death spiral for at least four decades. As soon as the shackles are loosened enough that just one nuclear power plant can be completed then we will see them built by the dozens like we did in the 1970s. At that point the argument that nuclear power is too expensive to work is demonstrably false.
Fourth generation nuclear power plants are air cooled. No water needed.
Nuclear power takes less resources per energy produced than wind or solar. Wind takes ten times as much steel and concrete per installed megawatt than nuclear. I've had people ask where all that concrete goes, it goes in the ground. To hold up that big windmill takes a very large and heavy anchor in the ground. Wind and solar may be cheaper than nuclear now (it's not but we'll assume it does for argument sake) but how long will that last?
The costs in nuclear are in engineering and regulation. Once that is figured out then nuclear still wins on how much concrete needs to be poured for the energy produced. This includes solar. What do you think keeps all those solar panels from blowing away in the wind? Concrete, steel, and aluminum. There is a limit on the costs and that is in materials. Nuclear needs one tenth the materials for the same power and energy compared to wind and solar.
How much will it cost to use nukes?
In time it will cost one tenth as much as just about anything else.
Where do you think the materials for wind and solar power come from? You think that stuff is not mined in open pits? You think that making PV panels and rare earth magnets for windmills do not produce toxic waste?
These "biosphere loving" Democrats are going to get us all killed with the environmental disaster that is wind and solar power. I've seen the math on how much mining and land would be needed to replace nuclear with wind, solar, and energy storage, and it looks real good for nuclear.
Renewables+Pumped Storage=Baseload
How much does that cost? Out here in the Midwest there is not a whole lot of places to pump water up a hill. Building a raised lake or whatever would cost a lot of money, take a lot of valuable land, and be a hazard to the environment.
None of that pesky issue of what to do with the waste or site of a nuclear reactor, or leaking mine, or cask.
Let's assume that is true, how much land would that take? How does that land area compare to the land we'd have to flood to store the energy we'd need? How does that compare to the land that would be flooded from global warming induced sea level rise?
We know how to manage nuclear waste but Democrats have been holding up all attempts to do so. It seems to me that if we compare the threats that nuclear power pose compared to global warming, or the environmental disaster that is "alternative energy", nuclear power wins every time..
Do you know what physicians call "alternative medicine" that works? They call it "medicine". The reason we call wind and solar power "alternative" is because it does not work.
Around 33,000 people are shot to death each year in the USA.
I see you've been getting your statistics from the gun grabbers.
Of those 30,000 "gun deaths" half are suicides. I don't see a need to fly a drone over to the scene because some depressed fucker put a hole in his head. Such people aren't much of a threat to the public and once that shot is fired there is no need to be in a hurry to pick up the pieces.
Out of those 33,000, less than 50 per year are killed as part of a Columbine/Aurora/SanBernardino style shooting spree.
Of the roughly 13000 murders every year about 8,000 of them are from firearms. In those cases where someone is intent on taking as many people with them to the grave they choose a group of people that are not likely to be armed. As you say these incidences are rare and flying a drone to the scene and hoping it would be effective does seem like wishful thinking.
When it comes to drug dealers fighting over territory, muggings, and other single victim crime, I don't see a drone as much help either. They'll maybe find the victim a few seconds sooner but the criminal will be gone and lost in the crowd even before the drone gets there. What would be helpful in the cases of the single and multiple victim crimes are more armed people. People being able to shoot back would also help for the many cases where the assailant is armed with something other than a firearm. The drones can still come, if you like, only now they'll be picking up what's left of the fucker that pulled a knife thinking he'd rape someone.
My understanding is that suppressors are incredibly easy to get in Commonwealth countries (where the guns are harder to obtain).
That is my understanding as well. Not only are they incredibly easy to obtain it is considered "rude" to not have one.
This is the story I was told on the history of the restrictions on firearm suppressors. The laws restricting gun ownership really started in the USA (and in many nations around the world really) in the 1920s and 1930s. World War One had ended and people had access to a lot of surplus weapons. There was a government concern of another public uprising like what happened around the world in the events leading to the war, and the Great Depression was starting. The prohibition on alcohol didn't help as that led to a lot of black market crime.
In the USA a law passed on the restrictions on firearm ownership in 1934. The publicly stated reason for restricting firearm suppressors was to limit poaching. This became a problem as poor people could more easily afford a one time expense of a suppressed rifle in order to turn cheap war surplus ammunition into meat. This had little to do with reality since there was plenty of wildlife then and few law enforcement in large segments of the USA. A more likely situation was to deter assassination of unpopular government officials, and to better find anyone that made such an attempt.
In the UK they had a different problem, rats. People wanted to kill the rats but also not get woken up whenever someone shot a rat in the night. The UK was much more urban than the USA so keeping the guns quiet was of a greater concern. I'm sure that there was a concern of an assassination attempt on government officials but the people that owned guns then tended to be people of the wealthy class, and they were not likely to be a threat.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
He said that, in his opinion, geoengineering was one of the stupidest ideas he'd ever heard of, but that not studying it was even stupider.
Huh? Don't people generally study a topic so they can do something with that information later?
Assuming people are producing CO2 at a rate that is geologically significant then reducing CO2 with the goal of reversing the effect we've had on the environment is geoengineering. We might not normally call it that but that is what it is.
I think back to when my sister graduated with a civil engineering degree. The degree was offered by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. I thought that was odd. I graduated from the same school with an engineering degree a few years prior and there was no such department then. There was a Department of Civil Engineering but I heard nothing of environmental engineering. It seems they realized at some point that they should call it what it was because people were doing Environmental Engineering for a long time. Only recently they thought people should focus on it enough that they'd separate civil projects like roads from environmental projects like dams. It seems over 100 schools in the USA made a similar realization.
I think studying geoengineering and not doing anything with that knowledge is pretty stupid. There's nothing inherently wrong with learning something, I guess. I'd think that if someone was going to invest their precious time and money in a formal education in a topic they should do so with the intention of improving their life with that knowledge and getting some return on that investment.
You don't think that these gunshot detectors have any deterrent value? There's a lot of studies that show people are less likely to commit a crime if they think they could get caught.
For a college statistics course I thought I'd do a study on the correlation between gun laws and crime, since that is a topic of some popularity lately. What I found was a positive correlation between gun restrictions and incidences of rape and murder. The more laws restricting gun ownership the more likely people were going to get raped or murdered. We hear a lot about "gun laws" and "gun crime" but I'm more interested in laws and crime.
Gun laws aren't really about guns, they are about rights. People have the right to defend themselves and restrictions on guns restrict that right. Less freedom means more crime.
We hear the same things about how gun ownership does not save lives because so few gun owners shoot criminals. You think that maybe criminals don't like getting shot so they avoid gun owners?
That's another thing about my statistics assignment, it showed a correlation between gun ownership and property crimes. That makes some sense. Criminals don't like getting shot so when people are armed they don't mug people, they wait until they leave home and steal their stuff. Still not ideal but fewer people get hurt this way. This is also difficult to prove since the police arrive only after the crime was reported.
I do think you are right about these gunshot detectors but didn't finish the thought. If the gunshot detectors only alert the police after the criminals have left the scene then how do we make sure armed people are on the scene as the crime happens? We know that the scene of the crime there will be two people, the assailant and the victim. The answer then, IMHO, is to arm the potential victims.
Don't take my statistical analysis as any kind of evidence, others have done the same kind of study and posted the results. Remember that the problem is "crime" and not "gun crime". If the study does not count all murders but instead "gun homicides" then they lie to you twice over. The first lie is to leave out murders with non-firearm weapons, I don't care if the murder was with a gun, knife, or lead pipe. The second lie is to include justified self defense shootings as a "gun homicide". Shooting in self defense is technically a "gun homicide" but it is not a crime. The goal should be to reduce crime, not necessarily shootings.
That would be useless against the kind of criminal that is most problematic right now, the kind that do not care if they get caught because they are on a suicidal mission.
You can get a view of the scene if you like but that's not going to solve the problem. What's likely to solve the problem is people able to shoot back.
Israel had a problem with school shootings until they decided to put armed men guarding the schools. The last "successful" (if you can call it that) school shooting that I could find when I last bothered to look was at a bible school library. These future ministers were having a study group when some idiot thought he could shoot up the place. The students returned fire with their own guns. I recall three students died as did the assailant.
The lawmakers in DC right now are having a debate about the continued ban on people being able to carry weapons there because of that charity baseball game Congress was holding. This would not normally be considered a high risk event but DC police happened to be there that day. It could have been much worse. What bothers me is that Congress didn't consider this a possibility until after it happened to them. Shit like this happens every day in the USA.
Unless this drone is carrying explosives and lands on the murderer's head before self detonating then I think flying drones just waiting for someone to get shot is a bad idea. If crime is so bad that drones are flying around to see someone get shot then something went wrong long ago.
There's lots of common handgun ammunition that is subsonic. The .45 Colt and .45 ACP come to mind immediately because I have sidearms chambered for those cartridges. There's also plenty of "specialty" sub-sonic ammunition for other common cartridges like 9mm. There's even subsonic rifle ammunition that is not too hard to find.
I've seen the reasons for these subsonic cartridges to exist in the modern era. First is that they are cheap. It takes less metal and allows for lower tolerances for subsonic ammunition. Second is that there seems to be a lot of people doing cowboy action shooting and other hobbies that like the old style guns. Supersonic ammunition is a fairly recent development, especially for handguns. Third, for a firearm suppressor to work properly subsonic ammunition must be used.
The .45 ACP is apparently quite popular among the special forces types because it can be effectively suppressed. It bothers me when I see people that will make YouTube videos that "show" how ineffective firearm suppressors are by putting one on a gun and fire off supersonic ammunition. I can tell that the ammunition is supersonic by it's distinctive "crack" as it leaves the barrel. Both sides do it too. The "pro-gun" people will want to show that guns can still be detected by things like these shot detectors. The "anti-gun" side do this to show that no one would want them since they don't work, therefore they can be banned, or something.
One thing that I wonder about is the number of false negatives. People talk about the false positives with things like firecrackers or something being detected as a shot but what of a shot that was not detected? Isn't that a thing? I remember reading somewhere of someone that shot another and not waking sleeping children in the next room by wrapping a revolver with a pillow. Had to have been something subsonic like a .45 Colt or .38 Special.
I have to wonder if the criminals will figure this out. Wrapping a revolver in a pillow might be rather conspicuous but there might be other ways to suppress the noise with something to the point it would not be detected by these shot spotters. In the US federal law the possession of a firearm suppressor is tightly controlled. Using a firearm suppressor in the commission of a crime can get a 30 year sentence. I'd think though that in the interest of getting away with murder someone might not be all that concerned about an additional 30 year sentence.
There is a movement in the USA to get firearm suppressors regulated like shotguns (no fees, must be 18 years old, show ID, not have a criminal history, done with 5 minute phone call) instead of like machine guns ($200 tax, fingerprints, extensive background check, 2 years wait for processing, signatures from sheriff, psychiatrist, and your mom, and usually involves a lawyer to get the paperwork in order). This movement is growing because of the obvious hearing protection advantages from suppressors. If that happens then criminals could get them more often by theft, falsifying records, straw purchase, etc.
I'm not a fan of banning suppressors because criminals might use them in a crime. If that were true then we'd be banning a lot of things because criminals use them to harm others. I'm just thinking of how ineffective these shot spotter devices could be in the not too distant future. I think people are relying too much on government and technology to save them from what they fear. That's just not healthy thinking, IMHO.
It seems that both are covered. For a short time after college I lived with someone that had a past DUI. When the insurance company found this out (I think that the other guy had insurance from the same company) I got a phone call. I was told that I am not to allow my housemate to drive my car. Not a big deal since I had my car and he had his. I do recall some situation where I ended up driving his car to do something but that was very unusual. I'm a big guy, in the 1% of height, and he drove a new Honda or some other import. I did not fit it well. He wasn't short by any means but inside the 90 to 95% in height. The couple inches different made it uncomfortable in the Honda compared to my Mercury. He didn't liike my Mercury since he considered it ancient.
Anyway, even though both of us were insured, as were our respective vehicles, there was a condition that I could not have that person drive my "Flintstone's" car. The insurance company made no restriction on the other way, there was no prohibition on my driving his car even though my insurance would not have covered as much of the damage had I been in an accident.
It's not like my driving record was flawless. In college I totaled three cars, and put a couple good sized dents in a fourth. Bad weather was a factor in one case. An improperly installed temporary traffic light and a speeding foreign driver contributed to the other. The other case was me falling asleep at an intersection where the driver ahead of me stopped at the light but I did not. That intersection had problems and was not long after regraded, rumble strips installed, and an all way stop instead of the light. There were two or three speeding tickets in the time as well. Spread out over fives years of college and internships and not enough piled up in time to matter much. My housemate getting a DUI in high school though followed him for years.
Had I got the license plate scanned while driving my housemate's car it would come up as insured by him. It would have been more likely driven by the owner or the owner's girlfriend. Maybe she got a phone call like I did. Now that I think about it I don't recall my housemate ever driving her car.
I have a few guesses as to why they don't have this problem in Denver but they do in Phoenix. One you point out is that Denver likely has longer runways. Why not extend the runways in Phoenix then? Likely because this happens so infrequently that they did not want to go through the expense of extending the runway. I got to talking to an engineer that works on airports. As I recall the runways are dug something like 30 feet into the dirt and filled with concrete. That's a lot of concrete to make up for a few hours of inconvenience every few years. This is not your typical concrete and the surface is engineered for keeping traction in all kinds of weather. Every extra foot of that runway must be very expensive.
Another possibility is that airports in Phoenix are older and with improvements in optimizing airframes over the years for some norm the margins got slimmer. This means that over time the airplanes needed longer runways but the airport couldn't extend the runway even if they wanted to. Old airports tend to have the city build up around it and pen it in from expanding.
It could also be that nothing changed physically but the rules under which they operate did. It could be that somewhere in the world an airplane didn't quite make it off the runway in the heat so the FAA decided that the rules on the safety margins had to be changed. It's quite possible every aircraft that wanted to take off could do so, and in the recent past the FAA would have allowed it. But because of a desire to maintain an abundance of caution the FAA grounded those flights.
I recall someone pointing out that we have not seen a commercial jet crash that resulted in fatalities since 2001. We've seen big planes crash since then but no deaths. We've seen people die in plane crashes but not on a major airline on a regularly scheduled flight. I think the FAA would like to keep it that way as long as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That sounds about right, thanks. I was off by 4 decades, 1 crew member, and I forgot that the fourth warning the pilots overrode was a stall speed alarm.
I wish I could remember enough details to do a proper search for a proper citation but I recall seeing on TV something about an airplane crash because the pilots ignored one too many warnings. The story goes something like this....
A couple of pilots were flying a commercial jet with only one other crew member aboard. I'm not sure why the plane was empty but it gave the pilots some freedom to pull a stunt for bragging rights. This happened in the 1960s I believe, it was fairly early in the history of commercial flight anyway. The stunt they wanted to pull was hit some altitude that few pilots could achieve at the time and with no passengers on board it made the plane light enough to do so, at least in theory. Also to do this they had to push the engines a bit since flight time and fuel were limited.
As I recall the first warning was pretty minor, something like safe climb rate being exceeded. That alarm was disabled and they continued. Then they got an engine overheat warning, that was also disabled. Then the second engine started to overheat, again the warning was disabled. The next warning, again as I recall, was something they definitely should not have ignored but they did. Not having yet reached the altitude they set out to they had pushed the engines to the point of failure. Both engines died, they were unable to restart either, and a plane that was perfectly functional when it took off was now a twisted wreck. All three on board died.
Why didn't the plane force the throttles back? Why weren't the warnings more "stern"? Why didn't the plane detect the impending engine failure and descend to a safe altitude and speed? I don't know if current aircraft would or could do such a thing. The failure was in the pilots' desire to pull a stunt and they paid the price for it.
The Tesla driver pushed the limits like those hotdog pilots and suffered the same fate. I put no blame on Tesla, the fault is solely on the driver. The idiot driver should take all the blame here, if only because he exceeded the posted speed limit.
If someone knows the which plant crash I referred to and could tell me what it was I'd appreciate letting me know.
More shouting and still no citations. You obviously do not know how photovoltaic cells are made.
So, you can't be bothered to find a citation so you shout the lie louder.
My citations:
http://www.greenmatch.co.uk/bl...
Silicon powder is useful in cast iron foundries but it cannot be reused for the construction of new photovoltaic cells as it still contains a certain percentage of glass.
http://earth911.com/eco-tech/r...
Panels contain metals, such as lead, copper, gallium and cadmium; an aluminum frame
I'm pretty sure that lead and cadmium are heavy metal that people don't want in their drinking water.
These are recent articles so you can try to tell me someone figured it out since then but I won't believe you unless you give a citation.
how dumb do you think I am?
Do you really want an answer?
Only one of them was actually enslaved in our country.
I don't care what country you are referring to, no one race has been the only one enslaved. The word "slave" is derived from "slav" as in the peoples that live in the Caucasus region. "Caucasus" is where "Caucasian" came from, as in white people. Lots of Irish slaves were in America but in time the economics of enslaving them reduced their numbers. Buying slaves from African tribes just became cheaper is all.
Did one race predominate in slavery? Sure. That does not mean other races did not exist in slavery.
I can say "cracker"...
A cracker is also an item of food.
I can say "honkey"...
I didn't find "honkey" in my dictionary but "honky" is. By censoring "honky" it would also remove things like "honky nut" and "honkytonk" which have no negative connotations to a specific set of people. Well, people might not like honkytonks but the word itself isn't really offensive. Unless the word "honkey" has some attachment to it than an alternative spelling of "honky" then it would be difficult to filter out. I can't think of any off-hand but it may also end up as a part of a longer non-offensive word.
I can say "spic"...
That would also filter out unoffensive terms like "spic and span" or common words like "spice".
I can say "wop"....
That would filter out "swop" which is a lesser used spelling of "swap", as well as possibly other words it may make a part.
I can say "chink"...
That's a word that is synonymous with sliver, clink, shard, crack, or flaw. It can also be found as a part of "pachinko" and possibly other words.
I can say "gook"...
That's a word synonymous with slime, sludge, goop, or gunk.
And none of these seem to get censored by slashdot.
Why the special treatment of ni--gger?
That word is not a part of other non-offensive words. It has no other non-offensive meaning. Words like "ass" and "shit" can be parts of other words and therefore are difficult to censor without rendering common conversation difficult to read.
I'm not defending the censoring of any word, only the logistical difficulty of filtering the examples you gave.
The group says $5.4 million is a misuse of taxpayer funds when the city has other needs, such as infrastructure and public safety.
I'd think that building a publicly accessible fiber optic network does in fact meet the definition of infrastructure. I'd also think that providing a means for communication for the public does add to public safety.
Not the best argument in my estimation.
Once you create a continent-wide power grid load balancing gets a lot easier and the need for storage shrinks dramatically.
How much is this continent wide power grid going to cost to build and maintain? I know we already have some very large electric grids but there is a reason that they are still separate.
Then there is still the issue of wind and solar having capacity factors somewhere around 30%. Meaning that for every gigawatt of capacity built the grid sees only 1/3 of a gigawatt-year annually. Coal, nuclear, and natural gas have capacity factors of about 90%, which means 9/10 of a gigawatt-year annually for every gigawatt of capacity.
People get all excited when there's a news article on how solar is cheaper than coal when they really mean the cost of the new install of solar capacity is lower than that of coal capacity. That's nothing to get excited about. When it gets to be 1/3rd the price then we can get excited. Until that happens solar is not going to replace coal in any real way. All the solar power we have now are government subsidized money pits or privately funded greenwash advertising.