...
To understand my point, (if you've read the paper), consider if they had been Ayn Rand disciples instead of modern democrats. It would have been just as easy to create the model in terms 'producers' and 'leaches,' and deriving whatever conclusion you want from that.
Please, please put this model together and publish this study. I am begging you!
All it would take is a month or two of time by a few Libertarian nerds who want to strut their math modelling stuff.
I would truly love to see some Libertarians create a precise quantitative model of how they think societies and economies work for the rest of us to examine and critique.
Along this same line - I notice that you apparently believe resource use is an arbitrary and biased component to include in a model. Considering availability and use of resources is the most fundamental component of any economic or ecological system this seems a very odd objection. Ditto the idea that the distribution of resources (a second-order manifestation of resource use) is also invalid. How does Ayn Rand's words render them irrelevant? Do the "producers" conjure resources out of thin air?
Try the cynical angle on this. This deal is a howler - he would be hanging out an "Industry Shill" shingle at the start of his tenure if he gave this merger a pass. A truly smart savvy operative would use this to make his "public rep", nixing an outrageous scheme, and giving a nice speech about it. Then with his newly minted regulatory cred, he can give a pass on tons of other stuff and still argue that he is working for the people.
It takes around 9 billion to build a replacement Nuke for a Coal plant. Solar, yeah right -- no base load on solar! There are hundreds of coal plants. Even if you switched to natural gas it would cost around 1-2 billion apiece! 50 BILLION is enough to fund the closing of maybe 5% of the coal plants in the country without human factors.
You're link does not support you claim about the cost of coal conversion - because coal and natural gas are not even mentioned in that nuclear power article.
According to Babcock and Wilcox, a company that also "works in the energy sector", the cost of conversion of coal is $50-$75 per kW, or about $30 to $45 million for an an average 550 MW coal fired plant, 1/40 of your unsourced (made up?) cost.
According to B&W the entire cost of 100% conversion would only be about half of the $50 billion.
...because how are you going to run a blast furnace without coal?
A tiny amount of coal (as these things go) mined in the U.S. is used to produce steel in the U.S. these days (about 1% of the billion tons mined annually).
That's needed even to recycle iron and steel.
No it isn't. That would contaminate perfectly good steel. They use electric arc furnaces for that.
According to Babcock and Wilcox, a major company that performs coal to natural gas conversions, the cost of converting a plant per kW from coal to gas is $50 to $75, or about one hundred times cheaper than installing new nuclear capacity.
At that rate retiring all 338 GW of coal capacity would cost $17 to $25 billion, leaving $25B to $33B of "walking around money". Sweet!
Replaced by more coal plants. Seriously, that's what would happen.
Seriously, this is nonsense. The main way coal plants are going to disappear is that they will be converted to natural gas or replaced by new natural gas plants, which is already happening, This is simply accelerates the natural trend.
Existing plants are converted to natural gas, causing energy prices to remain constant or go down modestly....
And the thing is, at least with modern equipment coal burns as clean as Natural Gas.
Really? Got a link?
Since natural gas produces one percent of the sulfur emission of an average coal plant even a technology that was 95% effective in capturing the sulfur should still leave coal as being grossly more polluting for sulfur. Clean coal sites are asserting the current state of the art in production is only 90% effective. So no, it isn't.
For three, coal works efficiently and predictably at far smaller scale than most energy technologies. Many of the locations coal services today cannot be practically services by other generation methods.
I think you have that backwards. Coal plants under around 250MW are generally not profitable, and a vast majority of this size have been shut down already. The bar is moving towards 500MW as being economically viable.
Indeed, the average coal fired plant is already 550 MW and getting larger as small units are replaced by natural gas.
> when it comes to talk about cutting these subsidies, the "big oil" boyz are all against it.
I don't know what "subsidies" you're referring to. I've never seen this in any formal statement from a major oil company. Exxon remains one of the world's biggest taxpayers, with an effective tax rate of 46% of gross margin. In 2013, they paid $30.6 billion in sales-based taxes, $33.2 billion in other taxes, and $24.3 billion in income taxes. (That is, those taxes were included in the price of Exxon's products.)....
In other words - Exxon DID NOT PAY THEM because THEY WEREN'T TAXES levied on Exxon!
It would be as if a sales tax you paid upon buying an iPad was claimed to be really a tax on Apple. Basically for every dollar than Exxon actually pays in taxes it is claiming $6 of taxes that other people pay that are in some way related to the sale and use of their product. Even Hollywood would laugh at this fake accounting.
Perhaps Philip Morris should be claiming all of the sales taxes being levied on their products, and anything connected with the use of tobacco, including quitting aids sold OTC, and the property taxes paid by cancer clinics.
... The economic structure of energy is why coal is still king, and buying out the current players won't change that.
Come again? It most certainly would change things - the coal fired plant would be converted to natural gas plants as their fuel supply disappears, after which no market for coal-for-power would exist. Conversion from coal to natural gas is straightforward. Coal is already is already begin replaced by natural gas, even with no special incentive or program natural gas will exceed coal power production in 20 years. As long as we can produce enough natural gas there is no reason why a wholesale conversion of the industry could not be accomplished in 10 years.
For two, the cost of shutting that industry down does not cover the cost of starting new energy industries to replace it. Or were we just going to go without 37% of our electricity?
Natural gas exploration and production is a profitable business. This "cost" will be covered by the natural gas producers who will get very, very rich(er) in meeting the new demand. They are just dying to thrown into that "briar patch". Try again.
For three, coal works efficiently and predictably at far smaller scale than most energy technologies. Many of the locations coal services today cannot be practically services by other generation methods.
OMG! What utter nonsense! Coal is not a "small scale" technology. Coal plants are typically huge facilities, partly because they require expensive environmental controls, and require special facilities for handling the immense volumes of solid coal, and partly because the must be located far from population centers anyway (a "clean" coal plant is still filthy). There are 7000 power plants in the U.S. but only 615 are coal fired (8.8%) which have 37% of the U.S. generating capacity because they are, on average 6 times larger than other types of power plants.
The real small scale power technology is what is already replacing coal (slowly) - natural gas. Small natural gas peaking plants are often located in residential neighborhoods.
(On a related note - this is the method that conservatives have recently been asserting is the right way slavery should have been ended. Slave owners should have been bought out at full cost! Will they agree that this is reasonable solution to a modern problem?)
I bought one of the OLPCs (actually two, as part of the "give one get one" charity program) for my daughter who was in the target age group at the time - and shortly thereafter I also bought an EEPC running Linux. The result - user acceptance of the EEPC blew the OLPC into the weeds. The OLPC was on minor novelty value, and that was all. The Atom processor on the EEPC smoked the Geode of course, and the native apps has far better performance of course than the Python programs on the OLPC, but the real kicker was this: the EEPC let my daughter do thins she actually wanted to do! What a concept!
It is sad to such a significant amount of money and creativity being poured into a such a "broken by design" project. You pick the slowest processor out there (since low power consumption was apparently a pre-eminent goal of the project). But then you put very inefficient software on it. And it is not even a good app suite!
...
SDI was itself a con-game and threw the USSR into debt spiral as they attempted to outspend the US on systems...
SDI was a fairy tale, true, but ascribing the collapse of the Soviet Union to it is also a fairy tale. The Soviet Union was already heavily overspending on defense before Reagan was elected. By the 1970s they had developed a completely militarized economy - the civilian economy was little more than a way of disposing of goods that failed to meet military standards (a permanent "war surplus" economy). And it was a staggeringly inefficient economy. The economic outputs of Soviet industry were worth less than their raw material inputs (i.e. if the Soviet has simply sold their raw materials on the world market, they would have generated more revenue than their own economy did).
The most comprehensive study of the economic collapse of the USSR The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System by Ellman and Kontorovich (1992) interviewed, or had write-ups prepared by, many of the economic leaders of the USSR soon after its collapse. Far from being the key factor to the collapse of the USSR, or even figuring prominently, SDI does not even come up as a topic! The SDI program did not trigger any major new Soviet military spending initiatives at all (notice that people advancing this notion never cite a single example).
Except for one thing though: you need much more uranium-233 to build a fission-style nuclear weapon than uranium-235. Needing more fissile material means a much heavier nuclear bomb, and makes it not very practical for ballistic missiles and you don't want a heavier bomb on today's jet combat planes.
This is false. The critical mass of U-233 is substantially less than U-235, it is about the same as plutonium which is the preferred material for modern light implosion bombs.
... I can't talk about "Plato" the telescope and not have people confuse it with Plato the philosopher.
Easily fixed. Just have everyone start calling him by what the Classical Greeks actually called the philosopher, which was "Platon" (not "Plato"). Either that or start calling him by his birth-name Aristocles.
" Prove that the algorithm works. That's your proof. (Run the program a few times, so the probability of errors in the output is close to zero"
"probably true" is NOT a prove.
This isn't a probabilistic 'proof' - it is straight-up deterministic: the SAT result proves it true. Period.
The poster above is alluding to the fact that a random software error could occur that gives the same result erroneously. Thus running the program is used to show that this isn't the case at all.
To assert that a lengthy, complex mathematical proof entirely written by a human is absolutely true requires you to believe the human is incapable of error (Wile's proof of the FLT ran 150 pages and this is not exceptional). The probability that a proof-author and a few successive reviewers could miss a mistake is astronomically greater than the chance of multiple random computer error corrupting the SAT calculation.
Following the link in the summary I discover that EA is being slapped around for delivering bad products at unreasonable costs (before their rating inflation scam). I was surprised.
It is quite true that the End of Moore's Law (sort of) is making the desktop market shaky. But all the more reason to not take a mallet and give one of its remaining legs (user familiarity) a nasty gratuitous whack and force the market down farther and faster. It will be interesting to see if the sales curve improves after the Windows 9 release.
You're not going to understand anything if you use that movie for a source. What the movie doesn't tell you that the changes in CO2 follow the changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, indicating that the causal relationship has flowed (during the 800,000 years of data from those ice cores) mostly (if not entirely) from temperature to CO2....
In a word: no. It does indicate that initial temperature increases precede the initial increase in CO2, but I expect you have probably heard of feed-back loops - though you pretend to be ignorant of them here. The initial warming is actually pretty well modeled by regular predictable orbital variations, but they cannot account for the subsequent dramatic increasing warming, for that you need the feedback from massive CO2 releases (warming tundra and all that).
This graph is an interesting example of how increases (or decreases) CO2 have preceded warming (or cooling) during the last 1500 years or so, a period of more interest to us now since we are not dealing with the end of an ice age. What is especially amusing about this graph is that it was put together and promoted by a denialist, who attempted to obfuscate the subject with a glaringly misdrawn pair of arrows, attempting to conflate the end of the Medieval Warm Period with the unrelated Little Ice Age. Lookin at the graph a CO2 spike definitely precedes the MWP by a few decades, and the LIA by about a century. Causality indicates CO2 leading the warming or cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
... To understand my point, (if you've read the paper), consider if they had been Ayn Rand disciples instead of modern democrats. It would have been just as easy to create the model in terms 'producers' and 'leaches,' and deriving whatever conclusion you want from that.
Please, please put this model together and publish this study. I am begging you!
All it would take is a month or two of time by a few Libertarian nerds who want to strut their math modelling stuff.
I would truly love to see some Libertarians create a precise quantitative model of how they think societies and economies work for the rest of us to examine and critique.
Along this same line - I notice that you apparently believe resource use is an arbitrary and biased component to include in a model. Considering availability and use of resources is the most fundamental component of any economic or ecological system this seems a very odd objection. Ditto the idea that the distribution of resources (a second-order manifestation of resource use) is also invalid. How does Ayn Rand's words render them irrelevant? Do the "producers" conjure resources out of thin air?
... A ray of hope so thin strains my credulity.
Try the cynical angle on this. This deal is a howler - he would be hanging out an "Industry Shill" shingle at the start of his tenure if he gave this merger a pass. A truly smart savvy operative would use this to make his "public rep", nixing an outrageous scheme, and giving a nice speech about it. Then with his newly minted regulatory cred, he can give a pass on tons of other stuff and still argue that he is working for the people.
Mod up please! One of the more informative comments on this thread.
(I did like the "wretched nit" insult at the top though.)
It takes around 9 billion to build a replacement Nuke for a Coal plant. Solar, yeah right -- no base load on solar! There are hundreds of coal plants. Even if you switched to natural gas it would cost around 1-2 billion apiece! 50 BILLION is enough to fund the closing of maybe 5% of the coal plants in the country without human factors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
You're link does not support you claim about the cost of coal conversion - because coal and natural gas are not even mentioned in that nuclear power article.
According to Babcock and Wilcox, a company that also "works in the energy sector", the cost of conversion of coal is $50-$75 per kW, or about $30 to $45 million for an an average 550 MW coal fired plant, 1/40 of your unsourced (made up?) cost.
According to B&W the entire cost of 100% conversion would only be about half of the $50 billion.
If this starts getting any traction, I need to start buying coal company stocks....
If you were genuinely smart you would by natural gas stocks.
...because how are you going to run a blast furnace without coal?
A tiny amount of coal (as these things go) mined in the U.S. is used to produce steel in the U.S. these days (about 1% of the billion tons mined annually).
That's needed even to recycle iron and steel.
No it isn't. That would contaminate perfectly good steel. They use electric arc furnaces for that.
According to Babcock and Wilcox, a major company that performs coal to natural gas conversions, the cost of converting a plant per kW from coal to gas is $50 to $75, or about one hundred times cheaper than installing new nuclear capacity.
At that rate retiring all 338 GW of coal capacity would cost $17 to $25 billion, leaving $25B to $33B of "walking around money". Sweet!
Replaced by more coal plants. Seriously, that's what would happen.
Seriously, this is nonsense. The main way coal plants are going to disappear is that they will be converted to natural gas or replaced by new natural gas plants, which is already happening, This is simply accelerates the natural trend.
Existing plants are converted to natural gas, causing energy prices to remain constant or go down modestly....
There. FTFY.
And the thing is, at least with modern equipment coal burns as clean as Natural Gas.
Really? Got a link?
Since natural gas produces one percent of the sulfur emission of an average coal plant even a technology that was 95% effective in capturing the sulfur should still leave coal as being grossly more polluting for sulfur. Clean coal sites are asserting the current state of the art in production is only 90% effective. So no, it isn't.
That's what statists say. But they don't offer any solutions for the people who will freeze to death next winter.
Because people will be forbidden to heat their home with any other fuel?
What clap-trap.
It's the main reason we mine coal, it's cheap energy. Without it energy prices would skyrocket.
Which is why natural gas is already replacing it at equal cost, or at a savings?
For three, coal works efficiently and predictably at far smaller scale than most energy technologies. Many of the locations coal services today cannot be practically services by other generation methods.
I think you have that backwards. Coal plants under around 250MW are generally not profitable, and a vast majority of this size have been shut down already. The bar is moving towards 500MW as being economically viable.
Indeed, the average coal fired plant is already 550 MW and getting larger as small units are replaced by natural gas.
> when it comes to talk about cutting these subsidies, the "big oil" boyz are all against it.
I don't know what "subsidies" you're referring to. I've never seen this in any formal statement from a major oil company. Exxon remains one of the world's biggest taxpayers, with an effective tax rate of 46% of gross margin. In 2013, they paid $30.6 billion in sales-based taxes, $33.2 billion in other taxes, and $24.3 billion in income taxes. (That is, those taxes were included in the price of Exxon's products.)....
In other words - Exxon DID NOT PAY THEM because THEY WEREN'T TAXES levied on Exxon!
It would be as if a sales tax you paid upon buying an iPad was claimed to be really a tax on Apple. Basically for every dollar than Exxon actually pays in taxes it is claiming $6 of taxes that other people pay that are in some way related to the sale and use of their product. Even Hollywood would laugh at this fake accounting.
Perhaps Philip Morris should be claiming all of the sales taxes being levied on their products, and anything connected with the use of tobacco, including quitting aids sold OTC, and the property taxes paid by cancer clinics.
...Power companies won't be too keen on this idea unless there is a technology waiting to step in and fill the void. Which there isn't;...
Which there is. Natural gas. Surely you have heard of it.
... The economic structure of energy is why coal is still king, and buying out the current players won't change that.
Come again? It most certainly would change things - the coal fired plant would be converted to natural gas plants as their fuel supply disappears, after which no market for coal-for-power would exist. Conversion from coal to natural gas is straightforward. Coal is already is already begin replaced by natural gas, even with no special incentive or program natural gas will exceed coal power production in 20 years. As long as we can produce enough natural gas there is no reason why a wholesale conversion of the industry could not be accomplished in 10 years.
For two, the cost of shutting that industry down does not cover the cost of starting new energy industries to replace it. Or were we just going to go without 37% of our electricity?
Natural gas exploration and production is a profitable business. This "cost" will be covered by the natural gas producers who will get very, very rich(er) in meeting the new demand. They are just dying to thrown into that "briar patch". Try again.
For three, coal works efficiently and predictably at far smaller scale than most energy technologies. Many of the locations coal services today cannot be practically services by other generation methods.
OMG! What utter nonsense! Coal is not a "small scale" technology. Coal plants are typically huge facilities, partly because they require expensive environmental controls, and require special facilities for handling the immense volumes of solid coal, and partly because the must be located far from population centers anyway (a "clean" coal plant is still filthy). There are 7000 power plants in the U.S. but only 615 are coal fired (8.8%) which have 37% of the U.S. generating capacity because they are, on average 6 times larger than other types of power plants.
The real small scale power technology is what is already replacing coal (slowly) - natural gas. Small natural gas peaking plants are often located in residential neighborhoods.
(On a related note - this is the method that conservatives have recently been asserting is the right way slavery should have been ended. Slave owners should have been bought out at full cost! Will they agree that this is reasonable solution to a modern problem?)
I bought one of the OLPCs (actually two, as part of the "give one get one" charity program) for my daughter who was in the target age group at the time - and shortly thereafter I also bought an EEPC running Linux. The result - user acceptance of the EEPC blew the OLPC into the weeds. The OLPC was on minor novelty value, and that was all. The Atom processor on the EEPC smoked the Geode of course, and the native apps has far better performance of course than the Python programs on the OLPC, but the real kicker was this: the EEPC let my daughter do thins she actually wanted to do! What a concept!
It is sad to such a significant amount of money and creativity being poured into a such a "broken by design" project. You pick the slowest processor out there (since low power consumption was apparently a pre-eminent goal of the project). But then you put very inefficient software on it. And it is not even a good app suite!
... SDI was itself a con-game and threw the USSR into debt spiral as they attempted to outspend the US on systems...
SDI was a fairy tale, true, but ascribing the collapse of the Soviet Union to it is also a fairy tale. The Soviet Union was already heavily overspending on defense before Reagan was elected. By the 1970s they had developed a completely militarized economy - the civilian economy was little more than a way of disposing of goods that failed to meet military standards (a permanent "war surplus" economy). And it was a staggeringly inefficient economy. The economic outputs of Soviet industry were worth less than their raw material inputs (i.e. if the Soviet has simply sold their raw materials on the world market, they would have generated more revenue than their own economy did).
The most comprehensive study of the economic collapse of the USSR The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System by Ellman and Kontorovich (1992) interviewed, or had write-ups prepared by, many of the economic leaders of the USSR soon after its collapse. Far from being the key factor to the collapse of the USSR, or even figuring prominently, SDI does not even come up as a topic! The SDI program did not trigger any major new Soviet military spending initiatives at all (notice that people advancing this notion never cite a single example).
Except for one thing though: you need much more uranium-233 to build a fission-style nuclear weapon than uranium-235. Needing more fissile material means a much heavier nuclear bomb, and makes it not very practical for ballistic missiles and you don't want a heavier bomb on today's jet combat planes.
This is false. The critical mass of U-233 is substantially less than U-235, it is about the same as plutonium which is the preferred material for modern light implosion bombs.
... I can't talk about "Plato" the telescope and not have people confuse it with Plato the philosopher.
Easily fixed. Just have everyone start calling him by what the Classical Greeks actually called the philosopher, which was "Platon" (not "Plato"). Either that or start calling him by his birth-name Aristocles.
" Prove that the algorithm works. That's your proof. (Run the program a few times, so the probability of errors in the output is close to zero"
"probably true" is NOT a prove.
This isn't a probabilistic 'proof' - it is straight-up deterministic: the SAT result proves it true. Period.
The poster above is alluding to the fact that a random software error could occur that gives the same result erroneously. Thus running the program is used to show that this isn't the case at all.
To assert that a lengthy, complex mathematical proof entirely written by a human is absolutely true requires you to believe the human is incapable of error (Wile's proof of the FLT ran 150 pages and this is not exceptional). The probability that a proof-author and a few successive reviewers could miss a mistake is astronomically greater than the chance of multiple random computer error corrupting the SAT calculation.
Following the link in the summary I discover that EA is being slapped around for delivering bad products at unreasonable costs (before their rating inflation scam). I was surprised.
I though it might be because of their proven history of abusive labor practices. Oh well, EA management apparently only respects the Almighty Dollar.
It is quite true that the End of Moore's Law (sort of) is making the desktop market shaky. But all the more reason to not take a mallet and give one of its remaining legs (user familiarity) a nasty gratuitous whack and force the market down farther and faster. It will be interesting to see if the sales curve improves after the Windows 9 release.
You're not going to understand anything if you use that movie for a source. What the movie doesn't tell you that the changes in CO2 follow the changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, indicating that the causal relationship has flowed (during the 800,000 years of data from those ice cores) mostly (if not entirely) from temperature to CO2. ...
In a word: no. It does indicate that initial temperature increases precede the initial increase in CO2, but I expect you have probably heard of feed-back loops - though you pretend to be ignorant of them here. The initial warming is actually pretty well modeled by regular predictable orbital variations, but they cannot account for the subsequent dramatic increasing warming, for that you need the feedback from massive CO2 releases (warming tundra and all that).
This graph is an interesting example of how increases (or decreases) CO2 have preceded warming (or cooling) during the last 1500 years or so, a period of more interest to us now since we are not dealing with the end of an ice age. What is especially amusing about this graph is that it was put together and promoted by a denialist, who attempted to obfuscate the subject with a glaringly misdrawn pair of arrows, attempting to conflate the end of the Medieval Warm Period with the unrelated Little Ice Age. Lookin at the graph a CO2 spike definitely precedes the MWP by a few decades, and the LIA by about a century. Causality indicates CO2 leading the warming or cooling.
Whoosh!
....We can't tax the rich since they have the ability to control TAX POLICY...
There. Fixed that for you.