You'll never know until you throw all the money at keeping one person from dying.
And I mean ALL the money. After all, health care is a human right! Who are we to deny someone their right to live, even if that life costs a hundred billion dollars an hour?
To say otherwise is to put a price tag on human life. If you don't want to spend a hundred billion an hour, then how much is that life worth? Who gets to make THAT decision? One would think it should be the family, by applying their own accumulated savings, or those of some charity (remember when hospitals used to be charity organizations?).
And that depends on the type of installation. A photovoltaic system can be expected to last at least that long. Who knows with this thing. I bet the tower collapses from metal fatigue in 10-15 year.
You didn't understand the argument. My point is that there are much cheaper, more easily deployable solar power solutions than this boondoggle. Specifically, solutions that don't require a bajillion acres of desert, ie simple solar panels that have a QUICKER payback, meaning more money sooner.
I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know the difference between power and energy.
A watt is a unit of power, which is analogous to current. You divide the total cost of the project by the number of watts. A watt-hour is worth something like $0.0001.
On a solar installation that costs $3.50 per watt, it takes 35,000 hours to break even, assuming no operating costs. That is almost exactly 4 years. Not bad for a solar installation, but pretty terrible when compared to the installed cost of $2 for the newest generation of cheap solar cells. These don't have to be centralized either.
But then, the point is that it ISN'T super cheap. It's $3.50/watt. You can buy commercial panels for less than that on a retail level. They might as well have paid for people to put panels on their roofs. It would probably have made a lot more sense than building this huge complex in the middle of nowhere and shipping the electricity to somewhere--which itself has a cost.
Wait, the total cost is then about $3.50 per watt? Christ, they should have just subsidized cheap panel purchases. If this kind of scale up can't create more economy than that, then this approach is not going to work.
The money would have been better spent on outfitting solar power manufacturers with solar cells, so people stop complaining about how solar panels are really fossil fuels. Some people just don't understand the difference between marginal costs (like fuel that is dug out of the ground), and capital costs (solar panels that pull power from the sky so long as they last). This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.
Uhh, because A, it works, and I use in in a semi-rural area, and B, it is MUCH less expensive. What part of unlimited everything for $35-50 didn't you understand?
Yes, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can claim everyone has a right to live in a giant mansion that floats in the sky and be served unicorn blood cocktails in glasses made of unobtanium, but that doesn't make those real rights. If anyone actually observed those "rights", they would spend billions of dollars keeping 140 year olds alive, no-one would buy clothes, they would just demand that they be given to them, and everyone would get enormously fat at government mandated all-you-can-eat feeding troughs.
Positive rights are always provided by theft, which is a violation of true, negative rights.
No, you have a right not to be put in prison. That right can be taken away by a jury of your peers in accordance with the law. The government, a non-person entity, does not have rights, and therefore can be required to provide an attorney to a defendant prior to taking away their rights.
There are NO positive rights, only negative rights. You have a right not to be stolen from or murdered. You do NOT have a right to have stuff given to you, because that implies that there is a right to take that thing from someone else. Such "rights" lead straight to hell.
If you want to argue for net neutrality, fine, but arguing that someone must take on the role of Santa Claus is just asinine, and highly destructive if such mandates carry the force of law and the threat of violence from the state which follows.
Not really. Boost has unlimited talk text and internet for $50/month. Pay on time for 6 months, and they knock the bill down $5. Keep paying on time, and it will bottom out at $35/month.
I just don't understand why anyone would use ATT's shitty service when there is one that is so very much better that is readily available.
You are drawing the wrong analogies. Our "modern conveniences" A, take a lot longer to learn than a week given someone who has never been exposed to any form of technology, and B. are time savers that allow us to pursue higher forms of learning. The fact that we don't have to spend years learning extremely difficult algebra, instead only learning the basics that are in fact used in life, means that we can move on to learn calculus. The fact that we don't waste time learning Latin and Greek means we can learn some other language, whether that is Spanish, French, Chinese, or C.
Christ, you claim that evolution is "simple and obvious". Sure, the basics are. So are the basics of algebra. That test isn't over basic algebra, and you should be learning more than basic "survival of the fittest" in high school. You should be learning about basic genetics, how traits are expressed, etc.
Modern politics being screwed up has nothing to do with the general level of education! We are more educated than we have ever been in history. Politics is screwed up because it has taken the false premise that people don't mind being stolen (both in terms of taxes and debt accumulated in their name) from so long as they get services in return to the absolute limit.
What is lacking now compared to then is only education in economics. Keynes introduced us to voodoo economics, where government spending (especially on military purposes) is a remedy for all ills, much like human sacrifice was the remedy for all ills to the Aztecs. Now as then, it has been taken too far, and has left us a bankrupt shell of a society with festering hatred toward the government coming from around the world.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. There hasn't been a new nuclear installation in this country in more than 30 years, to my knowledge.
What should be banned is light water reactors. Those were NEVER a good idea for non-ship based reactors. Instead, we should be building hundreds of pebble bed reactors, whose safety systems neither have nor require moving parts, and can in fact be safely run for decades with no human intervention. Have a few breeder reactors to produce large amounts of power, but far away from population centers, and VERY CAREFULLY, to get new fuel, even.
US dollar coins have 7 cents worth of metal in them. Does that mean they are fraudulent?
Also, there is this thing called "minting costs". There is this other thing called "numismatic value". Look them up. No one lost any money on buying a Liberty Dollar. Well, except those who didn't get their orders filled because the US government stole their silver.
So I guess American silver eagles, released by the US Mint, are a scam too, since they have a face value of $1, while they are currently trading for about $40?
Slashdot Mirror
You'll never know until you throw all the money at keeping one person from dying.
And I mean ALL the money. After all, health care is a human right! Who are we to deny someone their right to live, even if that life costs a hundred billion dollars an hour?
To say otherwise is to put a price tag on human life. If you don't want to spend a hundred billion an hour, then how much is that life worth? Who gets to make THAT decision? One would think it should be the family, by applying their own accumulated savings, or those of some charity (remember when hospitals used to be charity organizations?).
This is not the free market. This is fascism. Knowing the difference might just save your life one day.
You must be new here.
I wonder if it would be possible to pulse magnetism through a long ribbon, creating a no moving parts lift mechanism for a space elevator?
And that depends on the type of installation. A photovoltaic system can be expected to last at least that long. Who knows with this thing. I bet the tower collapses from metal fatigue in 10-15 year.
You didn't understand the argument. My point is that there are much cheaper, more easily deployable solar power solutions than this boondoggle. Specifically, solutions that don't require a bajillion acres of desert, ie simple solar panels that have a QUICKER payback, meaning more money sooner.
Watt is power, watt*hr is energy. Knowing the difference might just make you not look like an idiot in an internet discussion.
I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know the difference between power and energy.
A watt is a unit of power, which is analogous to current. You divide the total cost of the project by the number of watts. A watt-hour is worth something like $0.0001.
On a solar installation that costs $3.50 per watt, it takes 35,000 hours to break even, assuming no operating costs. That is almost exactly 4 years. Not bad for a solar installation, but pretty terrible when compared to the installed cost of $2 for the newest generation of cheap solar cells. These don't have to be centralized either.
Apparently I was off by a factor of 10.
But then, the point is that it ISN'T super cheap. It's $3.50/watt. You can buy commercial panels for less than that on a retail level. They might as well have paid for people to put panels on their roofs. It would probably have made a lot more sense than building this huge complex in the middle of nowhere and shipping the electricity to somewhere--which itself has a cost.
They are only producing 10 kW per acre. That's pretty shitty, in my book.
Wait, the total cost is then about $3.50 per watt? Christ, they should have just subsidized cheap panel purchases. If this kind of scale up can't create more economy than that, then this approach is not going to work.
The money would have been better spent on outfitting solar power manufacturers with solar cells, so people stop complaining about how solar panels are really fossil fuels. Some people just don't understand the difference between marginal costs (like fuel that is dug out of the ground), and capital costs (solar panels that pull power from the sky so long as they last). This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.
Uhh, because A, it works, and I use in in a semi-rural area, and B, it is MUCH less expensive. What part of unlimited everything for $35-50 didn't you understand?
Yeah, that's not expensive.
Yes, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can claim everyone has a right to live in a giant mansion that floats in the sky and be served unicorn blood cocktails in glasses made of unobtanium, but that doesn't make those real rights. If anyone actually observed those "rights", they would spend billions of dollars keeping 140 year olds alive, no-one would buy clothes, they would just demand that they be given to them, and everyone would get enormously fat at government mandated all-you-can-eat feeding troughs.
Positive rights are always provided by theft, which is a violation of true, negative rights.
No, you have a right not to be put in prison. That right can be taken away by a jury of your peers in accordance with the law. The government, a non-person entity, does not have rights, and therefore can be required to provide an attorney to a defendant prior to taking away their rights.
Nice try though.
There are NO positive rights, only negative rights. You have a right not to be stolen from or murdered. You do NOT have a right to have stuff given to you, because that implies that there is a right to take that thing from someone else. Such "rights" lead straight to hell.
If you want to argue for net neutrality, fine, but arguing that someone must take on the role of Santa Claus is just asinine, and highly destructive if such mandates carry the force of law and the threat of violence from the state which follows.
Not really. Boost has unlimited talk text and internet for $50/month. Pay on time for 6 months, and they knock the bill down $5. Keep paying on time, and it will bottom out at $35/month.
I just don't understand why anyone would use ATT's shitty service when there is one that is so very much better that is readily available.
You are drawing the wrong analogies. Our "modern conveniences" A, take a lot longer to learn than a week given someone who has never been exposed to any form of technology, and B. are time savers that allow us to pursue higher forms of learning. The fact that we don't have to spend years learning extremely difficult algebra, instead only learning the basics that are in fact used in life, means that we can move on to learn calculus. The fact that we don't waste time learning Latin and Greek means we can learn some other language, whether that is Spanish, French, Chinese, or C.
Christ, you claim that evolution is "simple and obvious". Sure, the basics are. So are the basics of algebra. That test isn't over basic algebra, and you should be learning more than basic "survival of the fittest" in high school. You should be learning about basic genetics, how traits are expressed, etc.
Modern politics being screwed up has nothing to do with the general level of education! We are more educated than we have ever been in history. Politics is screwed up because it has taken the false premise that people don't mind being stolen (both in terms of taxes and debt accumulated in their name) from so long as they get services in return to the absolute limit.
What is lacking now compared to then is only education in economics. Keynes introduced us to voodoo economics, where government spending (especially on military purposes) is a remedy for all ills, much like human sacrifice was the remedy for all ills to the Aztecs. Now as then, it has been taken too far, and has left us a bankrupt shell of a society with festering hatred toward the government coming from around the world.
I had a great joke for this thread, but I forgot what it was.
You say that as if they haven't already.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. There hasn't been a new nuclear installation in this country in more than 30 years, to my knowledge.
What should be banned is light water reactors. Those were NEVER a good idea for non-ship based reactors. Instead, we should be building hundreds of pebble bed reactors, whose safety systems neither have nor require moving parts, and can in fact be safely run for decades with no human intervention. Have a few breeder reactors to produce large amounts of power, but far away from population centers, and VERY CAREFULLY, to get new fuel, even.
Not to mention PRIVATE roads.
I actually laughed at that. Mod parent up.
Coinflation.com
US dollar coins have 7 cents worth of metal in them. Does that mean they are fraudulent?
Also, there is this thing called "minting costs". There is this other thing called "numismatic value". Look them up. No one lost any money on buying a Liberty Dollar. Well, except those who didn't get their orders filled because the US government stole their silver.
So I guess American silver eagles, released by the US Mint, are a scam too, since they have a face value of $1, while they are currently trading for about $40?
Shill more.
Wrong again, bub. Gold and silver gains are taxed at the punitive "collectables" rate, not the light "capital gains" rate that FOREX is taxed at.
But hey, feel free to continue your campaign of disinformation. It's a "free" country, after all.