If as a GP stated the plant is only 550MW, that is two large natural gas turbines equivalent. There is about 4x the staffing cost for the nuclear plant, at least double the insurance cost, and at least triple the ongoing maintenance costs with nuclear. The fuel cost is about 10% though.
The "right" solution would be to try and build a new, larger reactor on the same site that could have better economies of scale. Alternatively, you could build one of the "micro" reactors on the site in the 250MW range that would have lower operating costs.
You are still stuck with the economic problem that the cost for any project will never pay off. So, since the utility's costs are higher, it will end up being passed on to rate payers either way.
Fundamentally it is different because modes of common failure are much less severe. If Amazon takes a hit to one facility, it is going to load up other facilities.
No, most companies can't take full control of their infrastructure. But, they can diversify across two providers, and try to ensure that there is no major work in common change control windows. In a perfect world, you would have hosted services that support 100% of your peak needs, plus a hot disaster recovery site in your own facility that can handle your full average load.
Unfortunately, I am sure that there is some sorry company out there that says "Let's PM all of our generators at the same time this weekend!"
In my extremely limited understanding of the matter, if the transaction volume of bitcoins increases then the exchange rate becomes less artificial, and faith in the currency is established. Right now, it trades more as a penny stock from what I can tell. As long as you can exchange bitcoins for goods and services, they have value; if the price you pay in bitcoins is more favorable than the price you would pay in another currency, you are incentivized to spend bitcoins.
Unfortunately, the barrier seems to be that enough people need to have and use bitcoins to keep the economy moving, which doesn't seem to happen.
Wow.... You know what I really want... Trusted Computing Platform for SCADA. Because, hey... If I don't have verifiable challenge-response between a sensor and controller, how can I really trust it. Maybe they can even make the Thunderbiolt connector the standard, with authentication for all the cables! That would be great... Then we could just blame system failure in a bug on the authentication layer!
The need for interoperability is where most of the problems seem to come from. Properly securing and making a system truly bulletproof just isn't always justified.
That was an asinine decision in retrospect. But, at the time, the construction industry was flush with cash and likely thought they could charge a little extra.
At least the technology isn't there yet to build a five-mile long bridge in China, test it, and float it over to the US, set it in place, and be done. At that point, it won't be loss of $200MM to the local economy, it will be $7B.
Sometimes that idea of "spending to make" is utterly retarded, and one of the scenarios is when you are deep deep in the red and cannot afford the consequences of losing out on the risk you are taking.
The risks are ever diminishing as you get deeper into debt below your net worth. Taking measured risks is ok, but the extra components are knowing what the potential reward is, and understanding any second and third order risks (such as the losing your car and not being able to get any other work).
California is spending money to keep jobs in-state. They will recover half the money they spend through sales tax revenue from the equipment purchase. The remaining $3,400 per employee will hopefully be recovered in income taxes, at least over a 2-3 year period. If there happens to be any economic ripple effect then the payback will be much faster.
Selling a kidney for money to start a business from the ground up on the other hand...
A real ground is nice, but if you are working with an ESD strap, please make sure to have all the bench outlets on GFCI!!
Don't do anything really really stupid like driving a ground rod just for your lab and tying your ground pin to that; make sure it is bonded to the main ground.
Feature X is worth $Y. If it takes two months to complete, the value might not be there. If the manager thinks it is 10 man-days of effort, putting 20% down just to find out it will actually far exceed the budget might not be worthwhile.
Of course, the manager gets into these issues by overstepping their own knowledge and committing to things beyond their own expertise.
I do it all the time, and have no issues with it because I know I am hopefully accurate in a +/-25% range. You can't make "management" decisions without understanding implications. You get into analysis paralysis if you insist on having all the information because there is no such thing as "all the information."
That said, something that you need to understand if it is a $10k investment vs a $40k investment needs an appropriate amount of thought put into it. I would try to keep the effort under $400, but not expect it to be done in 10 minutes.
A "neighbor" of mine is running for Congress as an "independent." Coincidentally, he worked hard to change the primary system to an "open" primary. Statistically, he should represent the values of myself and my neighborhood quite well-- arguably too well as this neighborhood represents less than 5% of the district-- let's say 30,000 people.
His priorities are no better aligned with the direction that the country needs to go than his opponent, and neither have positions that align to my personal priorities.
Given that this is almost a best-case scenario (his opponent is from a very different neighborhood though), how can more districts and representatives help the problem? It is the two-party system, election finance, and legislative process (bills that can't be read, lobbyists) that need to be solved for anything else to have a meaningful impact.
Our first asterisk box was a nice dogshit solution built by someone with half a clue (namely myself). Total, we put $5k into hardware, ~100 hours of our own time (call that $14k), and $2,000 on consulting time to get it up and running. Spent another $2k over four years with minor maintenance, and phased it out with a new enterprise-grade server and PRI card for another $6k and $2k in consulting time.
The joys of a small business are that sometimes you can only afford the dogshit solution until you can justify the business case for fancy things like hardware RAID, hot swap drives, redundant power supplies, etc. Even if it is only $1-2k up front, the incremental value of "better" may be much less.
A PRI starts to make sense after 8 trunks, at which point you completely eliminate the damn patch blocks by staying all digital. The analog phones are cheaper to buy and have the same lifespan as the VoIP phones, but the simplicity of someone just moving their phone when they change desks and no IT time is required quickly pays for that initial premium.
Our Asterisk installation does have one PITA analog gateway because we were too cheap to buy new conference phones, but the big lesson we learned was to keep things consistent. We use all Aastra phones, as the Polycom phones were inconsistent when we tried to deploy.
Deploying asterisk ourselves for our company had a payback period of four months compared to Centrex, despite three or four botched consultant efforts. Upgrading our system four years later had a payback period of twelve months. Choosing Asterisk over Panasonic was an eight month payback if I recall correctly (math was harder since the moves/adds/changes played a bigger role).
That said, despite living in one of the biggest cities in the US, finding an asterisk "expert" was an intolerable pain in the ass. Myself and one partner learned the system, and taught our IT consultant how to use it.
In its six years of operation, we had one crash and one issue after a power failure due to a configuration problem.
My recommendation is to list out minimal features that you must have to go live, and a prioritized wish list for future work. Hosted VOIP was nearly as expensive as Centrex, and you still needed to buy the pipe.
The problem with that is who is the futures contract written with? If it is a financial contract (paper instrument only), the writer needs to actually have the assets to purchase the product in some fiat currency and accept the risk of fluctuations both in bit coin value and the underlying commodity. It would be a huge risk, except for the fact that bit coins are "guaranteed" to go up in value over time, so the contracts should be worthless in the end barring too much volatility in the underlying commodity.
The other option is that an actual producer of some commodity would want bit coins in exchange for their stuff, and would want to guarantee how many bit coins they could get in the future. That would actually work, but I doubt Chevron will be selling oil futures in bitcoins.
The heat shrink cellophane window weatherproofing worked pretty well for me-- it will give you a pretty good idea of what higher performance windows can achieve, since it is isolated from the window frame.
You might also want to consider replacing drywall with QuietRock, but I think that his mainly for higher frequencies. You can fur out on resilient channels as well, but that eats up pretty much space.
The buck stops here. The executive is the responsible party for local operation. Legal filings would indicate the same. It works the same in the US. An executive's only out is if the offense is the action of another individual rather than a department or such.
It is simple-- Word's track changes on steroids. How much more than that do you really need to explain-- beyond working on a single "document," it works across all "documents" at the same time, but without mangling the report or needing to "accept changes" for each line of code.
For the cost of a flight to Bangkok, $400, and three hours of your time, you can have an EKG, stress test, blood/urine/stool tests, abdominal ultrasound, and a handful of other tests. That three hours includes the time required to process the lab results and have a consultation with the doctor. (Bumrungrad Hospital's health check program.)
Just did mine yesterday. When you factor in lost time at work trying to get all the visits and tests complete, the $1,600 with the flight isn't that bad.
Get two geographically diverse cheap hosts rather than a single expensive host, and be one of dozens or more VMs on their hardware. Round robin on your DNS. Add more hosts as needed. If there is transactional information needed then it can get harder.
More and more things move this direction. Compliance with different filing requirements for any small (incorporated) business are a mess, so a business with gross revenues of $100k needs to spend $2-10k in managing all the filings. The question becomes twofold: does this filing serve a useful purpose, or is it excessive regulation. I am starting to think the latter; if you are doing electronic filings, use them to simplify the process.
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If as a GP stated the plant is only 550MW, that is two large natural gas turbines equivalent. There is about 4x the staffing cost for the nuclear plant, at least double the insurance cost, and at least triple the ongoing maintenance costs with nuclear. The fuel cost is about 10% though.
The "right" solution would be to try and build a new, larger reactor on the same site that could have better economies of scale. Alternatively, you could build one of the "micro" reactors on the site in the 250MW range that would have lower operating costs.
You are still stuck with the economic problem that the cost for any project will never pay off. So, since the utility's costs are higher, it will end up being passed on to rate payers either way.
Wait... is this the same country that "life in prison" for murder is 10 years?
Fundamentally it is different because modes of common failure are much less severe. If Amazon takes a hit to one facility, it is going to load up other facilities.
No, most companies can't take full control of their infrastructure. But, they can diversify across two providers, and try to ensure that there is no major work in common change control windows. In a perfect world, you would have hosted services that support 100% of your peak needs, plus a hot disaster recovery site in your own facility that can handle your full average load.
Unfortunately, I am sure that there is some sorry company out there that says "Let's PM all of our generators at the same time this weekend!"
No, the issue is that the equipment has a 10-year design life, but the software has a five year design life.
In my extremely limited understanding of the matter, if the transaction volume of bitcoins increases then the exchange rate becomes less artificial, and faith in the currency is established. Right now, it trades more as a penny stock from what I can tell. As long as you can exchange bitcoins for goods and services, they have value; if the price you pay in bitcoins is more favorable than the price you would pay in another currency, you are incentivized to spend bitcoins.
Unfortunately, the barrier seems to be that enough people need to have and use bitcoins to keep the economy moving, which doesn't seem to happen.
Wow.... You know what I really want... Trusted Computing Platform for SCADA. Because, hey... If I don't have verifiable challenge-response between a sensor and controller, how can I really trust it. Maybe they can even make the Thunderbiolt connector the standard, with authentication for all the cables! That would be great... Then we could just blame system failure in a bug on the authentication layer!
The need for interoperability is where most of the problems seem to come from. Properly securing and making a system truly bulletproof just isn't always justified.
That was an asinine decision in retrospect. But, at the time, the construction industry was flush with cash and likely thought they could charge a little extra.
At least the technology isn't there yet to build a five-mile long bridge in China, test it, and float it over to the US, set it in place, and be done. At that point, it won't be loss of $200MM to the local economy, it will be $7B.
The risks are ever diminishing as you get deeper into debt below your net worth. Taking measured risks is ok, but the extra components are knowing what the potential reward is, and understanding any second and third order risks (such as the losing your car and not being able to get any other work).
California is spending money to keep jobs in-state. They will recover half the money they spend through sales tax revenue from the equipment purchase. The remaining $3,400 per employee will hopefully be recovered in income taxes, at least over a 2-3 year period. If there happens to be any economic ripple effect then the payback will be much faster.
Selling a kidney for money to start a business from the ground up on the other hand...
A real ground is nice, but if you are working with an ESD strap, please make sure to have all the bench outlets on GFCI!!
Don't do anything really really stupid like driving a ground rod just for your lab and tying your ground pin to that; make sure it is bonded to the main ground.
Feature X is worth $Y. If it takes two months to complete, the value might not be there. If the manager thinks it is 10 man-days of effort, putting 20% down just to find out it will actually far exceed the budget might not be worthwhile.
Of course, the manager gets into these issues by overstepping their own knowledge and committing to things beyond their own expertise.
I do it all the time, and have no issues with it because I know I am hopefully accurate in a +/-25% range. You can't make "management" decisions without understanding implications. You get into analysis paralysis if you insist on having all the information because there is no such thing as "all the information."
That said, something that you need to understand if it is a $10k investment vs a $40k investment needs an appropriate amount of thought put into it. I would try to keep the effort under $400, but not expect it to be done in 10 minutes.
A "neighbor" of mine is running for Congress as an "independent." Coincidentally, he worked hard to change the primary system to an "open" primary. Statistically, he should represent the values of myself and my neighborhood quite well-- arguably too well as this neighborhood represents less than 5% of the district-- let's say 30,000 people.
His priorities are no better aligned with the direction that the country needs to go than his opponent, and neither have positions that align to my personal priorities.
Given that this is almost a best-case scenario (his opponent is from a very different neighborhood though), how can more districts and representatives help the problem? It is the two-party system, election finance, and legislative process (bills that can't be read, lobbyists) that need to be solved for anything else to have a meaningful impact.
Our first asterisk box was a nice dogshit solution built by someone with half a clue (namely myself). Total, we put $5k into hardware, ~100 hours of our own time (call that $14k), and $2,000 on consulting time to get it up and running. Spent another $2k over four years with minor maintenance, and phased it out with a new enterprise-grade server and PRI card for another $6k and $2k in consulting time.
The joys of a small business are that sometimes you can only afford the dogshit solution until you can justify the business case for fancy things like hardware RAID, hot swap drives, redundant power supplies, etc. Even if it is only $1-2k up front, the incremental value of "better" may be much less.
A PRI starts to make sense after 8 trunks, at which point you completely eliminate the damn patch blocks by staying all digital. The analog phones are cheaper to buy and have the same lifespan as the VoIP phones, but the simplicity of someone just moving their phone when they change desks and no IT time is required quickly pays for that initial premium.
Our Asterisk installation does have one PITA analog gateway because we were too cheap to buy new conference phones, but the big lesson we learned was to keep things consistent. We use all Aastra phones, as the Polycom phones were inconsistent when we tried to deploy.
Deploying asterisk ourselves for our company had a payback period of four months compared to Centrex, despite three or four botched consultant efforts. Upgrading our system four years later had a payback period of twelve months. Choosing Asterisk over Panasonic was an eight month payback if I recall correctly (math was harder since the moves/adds/changes played a bigger role).
That said, despite living in one of the biggest cities in the US, finding an asterisk "expert" was an intolerable pain in the ass. Myself and one partner learned the system, and taught our IT consultant how to use it.
In its six years of operation, we had one crash and one issue after a power failure due to a configuration problem.
My recommendation is to list out minimal features that you must have to go live, and a prioritized wish list for future work. Hosted VOIP was nearly as expensive as Centrex, and you still needed to buy the pipe.
The problem with that is who is the futures contract written with? If it is a financial contract (paper instrument only), the writer needs to actually have the assets to purchase the product in some fiat currency and accept the risk of fluctuations both in bit coin value and the underlying commodity. It would be a huge risk, except for the fact that bit coins are "guaranteed" to go up in value over time, so the contracts should be worthless in the end barring too much volatility in the underlying commodity.
The other option is that an actual producer of some commodity would want bit coins in exchange for their stuff, and would want to guarantee how many bit coins they could get in the future. That would actually work, but I doubt Chevron will be selling oil futures in bitcoins.
The heat shrink cellophane window weatherproofing worked pretty well for me-- it will give you a pretty good idea of what higher performance windows can achieve, since it is isolated from the window frame.
You might also want to consider replacing drywall with QuietRock, but I think that his mainly for higher frequencies. You can fur out on resilient channels as well, but that eats up pretty much space.
The buck stops here. The executive is the responsible party for local operation. Legal filings would indicate the same. It works the same in the US. An executive's only out is if the offense is the action of another individual rather than a department or such.
It is simple-- Word's track changes on steroids. How much more than that do you really need to explain-- beyond working on a single "document," it works across all "documents" at the same time, but without mangling the report or needing to "accept changes" for each line of code.
Biggest challenge after interpreting the results is to know where to point it and what needs further analysis.
For the cost of a flight to Bangkok, $400, and three hours of your time, you can have an EKG, stress test, blood/urine/stool tests, abdominal ultrasound, and a handful of other tests. That three hours includes the time required to process the lab results and have a consultation with the doctor. (Bumrungrad Hospital's health check program.)
Just did mine yesterday. When you factor in lost time at work trying to get all the visits and tests complete, the $1,600 with the flight isn't that bad.
Abdominal ultrasounds are pretty interesting.
Awe c'mon... They have been preparing for that day for six years... The icon is a map to their office.
Get two geographically diverse cheap hosts rather than a single expensive host, and be one of dozens or more VMs on their hardware. Round robin on your DNS. Add more hosts as needed. If there is transactional information needed then it can get harder.
Would you walk if it was for tax reporting software to maximize deductible expenses and limit tax liability?
This stuff exists. The rule is generally pretty clear on the line between fraud and "optimizing."
More and more things move this direction. Compliance with different filing requirements for any small (incorporated) business are a mess, so a business with gross revenues of $100k needs to spend $2-10k in managing all the filings. The question becomes twofold: does this filing serve a useful purpose, or is it excessive regulation. I am starting to think the latter; if you are doing electronic filings, use them to simplify the process.