How much is the connection fee compared to a typical electricity bill? I'm betting it's just some trivial bookkeeping thing, not a full infrastructure cost accounting. As a general rule, the distribution infrastructure is nearly as expensive as the marginal per-kilowatt generation cost - less in cities, more in the countryside. A person with a net-metering of zero should have an electricity bill in the ballpark of half that of a typical household (less in-town, more in the countryside).

Everything you wrote is irrelevant. If they're running your meter forward when you buy and backward when you sell, then you're getting the same price for purchase and sale. If you use X kilowatts and sell X kilowatts, in most places with net metering, your bill is free, or nearly so. THis should not be, because you're still moving a lot of power back and forth over a lot of expensive hardware, and relying on very expensive infrastructure to ensure that you stay powered at night. All of this hardware costs about as much in terms of amortized capital costs and ongoing maintenance costs as the actual generation of electricity at a power plant. You should be responsible for bearing your share of this cost.

People should agree to accept responsibility for their share of the infrastructure costs, infrastructure that they're clearly using just as much if not more than other customers, and instead argue on other issues that could benefit them, such as time-of-use valuation of electricity.

if something happens to the connection on my line I typically have to pay for it

I am, of course, obviously not talking about the couple dozen meters of wire from your house to the grid. I'm talking about the grid itself. If you want to disconnect your home's grid connection from the grid, by all means, you should then be under no obligation to pay for grid construction and maintenance. But as long as you want to use it, you should be paying for it.

Where are you getting wholesale vs. retail? I said "actual market price". Same price figure whether you're buying or selling. Or if you're talking about existing net metering implementations, perhaps there are some out there that charge different rates for buying and selling, but I've never run into such companies. The typical use case is simply a "run the meter backwards when they sell, forwards when they buy" calculation.

So since it's clearly no big deal, no different from working at MacDonalds, who's the last guy who bought your a** and what'd you think of the f***?

Prostitution is something by and large that people turn to when they're starving and they can't get that job at MacDonalds or in a coal mine. If they even had a choice in the matter, versus people who are trafficked (and yes, trafficking is a very big thing - especially in Europe, where I am).

See above. I live in Iceland. There is no relevant "conservative puritanical" element here. Our previous prime minister was a lesbian and it didn't even factor into the campaign. Gay pride is one of our country's largest annual festivals, attended by nearly a third of the population (big family event). There's pretty much no such thing as dating without sleeping with someone, it's an alien concept. The typical way people get together here is to meet (usually while drunk), sleep together, get to know each other while sleeping together more in subsequent days / weeks, and then they may actually start going out on "dates" and sleeping with others becomes frowned upon. When a couple has been together for a long time, people don't start asking "when are you going to get married", it's "when are you going to have kids". 80-90% of first children are born out of wedlock, 60-70% of children all together. Sex is a complete non-issue here - it's pretty much just expected that if you're an adult, you're sleeping with someone, and people really don't give a rat's arse.

And it's still a big f*ing issue for someone to decide to sell themselves. Yeah, come on over here and lecture my friend about how it's no big deal, no different from going to work. You think he hasn't been trying really f'ing hard to get regular work and doesn't really f'ing want a regular job instead? But oh no, going and whoring yourself to strangers is totally the same thing! Why, I'm sure you do it for spending money after work, right? Because it's totally no big deal, right? Who's the last guy who bought you? What'd you think of the f***?

Nice job with the assumptions, but I actually live in Iceland (probably one of the least prudish countries on the planet), not the US, so try again.

It depends on how you measure it. For example, here it says that solar is rapidly nearing cost parity except in places where restrictions and fees on net metering are in replace. But it's only fair that there should be such fees.

Part of the reason for this battle in the US is the stupid way US consumers are billed, you usually pay a single per-kWh fee. Here in Iceland our electricity bills are broken down into a "distribution fee", for the infrastructure, and a "generation fee", for the power. Surprise surprise, all of that infrastructure costs some serious money, about as much as the cost of generation itself. If a person uses solar and net-meters out at zero, they're still using all of that infrastructure (unless they're off-grid, but nobody's arguing that off-grid is anywhere near price parity). Even more than that you're relying on the existence and functionality of power plants to keep the lights on during the day. If everyone did like you, then there'd have to be instead of power plants massive daytime-energy-storage buffers, be they batteries, pumped hydro, etc (in addition to all of the wires, transformers, etc).

Now if you don't have to pay the utility, who exactly is supposed to fund this stuff? It's not cheap.

Yes, many US states require free net metering and power resale. It's the law, so utilities have to do it. But all you're doing at the time being is transferring the solar-generators' share of the infrastructure costs onto the non-solar-generators share. So when you report that these people can "break even", is that really a fair comparison?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big solar fan. And I think that to reach true parity subsidies - such as these free net metering laws - are a great way to help get solar to that point. But let's not kid ourselves, it is a subsidy.

(Things would be a lot less controversial if you'd properly break up your power bills into distribution vs. generation costs. Personally I think bills should be even further broken down to time intervals over the course of the day and have the purchase / sale price of electricity match the actual market price for that time. It'd be a big boon for solar users, at least in warm places with low to moderate market penetration where midday electricity is expensive and nighttime electricity is cheap)

Actually, the statistics are precisely opposite. The lower the turbine and the higher the RPM, the more birds it kills, while the higher the turbine and the lower the RPM (aka, the wider the blade radius), the fewer birds it kills. Also, tower design plays a major role. Those truss-style towers popular with small-scale turbines are the worst, as birds see them as potential perches / roosts.

The worst wind farm in the US for bird deaths by far is Altamont Pass, especially their older turbines, which look like this. They're pretty much a bird cuisinart, they kill thousands of raptors every year and have had a significant impact on California's bird of prey population, while most wind farms have an irrelevant impact on bird populations.

There is a such thing as people who want to be killed and eaten by cannibals, but that doesn't mean that the general case of people being killed and cannibalized is a happy relation of choice. No, most people in the sex industry do not want to be there. This is shown time and time again in international studies. Why the heck do you think sex trafficking exists?

The concept of a sex industry packed full of people who secretly lust after pleasing you is just part of the image people profitting from the industry want to sell customers on. It's marketing, not reality. Sex workers by choice absolutely do exist, but they're a very small minority. Most are there because of desperation, and a disturbing number in some places are not there of choice (a very common tactic is tricking people from poorer countries to travel to wealthier countries with promises of regular work, only to have them find out after they arrive that the work available to them is sex work and they have no means to get back to their home country nor any form of support network in a country they know nothing about).

Oh, no, I'm totally sure that the "particular and very specific claim about her personal life" that they wanted to dox her on has absolutely nothing to do with her sex life. Surely not. It's probably about what brand of coffee she drinks or something.

But it seems some "feminist" think that any job where women are in sex service means women are object or something

Right, I mean, in what way could having people oggle your body like a piece of meat or choose which person to buy from a catalog be interpreted as objectification? Pish, stupid feminists!

to sell their body on their own, and *exploit* the men for all their money worth

Sure, because that's totally the general case, right? Sorry, but as someone who's known several people who've worked in the sex industry, and is currently watching a friend struggle with choosing between starving or have his daughter have a "whore" (his words) as a father (he's straight, in case it matters... not like it actually does), this "prostitution is an empowering industry of choice" meme rings really f*ing hollow to me.

(to head you off, yes, I have been trying to help him, and am probably the only reason that he hasn't had to resort to it so far)

Right, because there's nobody more oppressed and powerless in the US, more incapable of handling PR, than corporations, right?

Those evil journalists! We should just assassinate them all with polonium! Especially ones that mention that they find a company working with an escort service to be sexist!

I don't care if she wrote that she feels Uber is in league with Satan , Doxxing Journalists Is Never Acceptable. And the reason for the focus on her in particular is because, and I quote, "In particular, Michael wished to target Pando founder Sarah Lacy after her publication’s repeated attacks against Uber." It says that right there in TFA. And in the article linked by the TFA, wherein Emil apparently went on at length about his rage against Sarah.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.

Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

It's such a F'ing gamergate attitude. Female journalist finds something you do sexist? Reveal details of her personal life - that'll teach the f*ing c*** to shut up, right?

Only very high pressure hydrogen stations can pull off such rapid fills, more common lower pressure stations can take several times longer.

And as much as I don't want a large tank of an extremely combustible gas (yes, it's far, far more combustible than gasoline, see above), near me, I really don't want the same amount of hydrogen at extreme pressures.

And it's so pointless. The hydrogen fuel cycle is so wasteful that it defeats its purpose right off the bat.

SOFCs are neat, but they have long warmup times and are bulky. They're efficient in continuous operation but wasteful in short operation. They're not really ideally suited to vehicles.