1.) Rate of return is only low if you assume that energy rates (and inflation) are flat, which is historically inaccurate. If you consider a $20k system that generates $1000/yr in electricity, you should assume about a 5% annual increase in the value of the electricity produced... that means you're generating $2500 in electricity at the end of 20 years, with $35k total ROI for $15k profit. And, in this case, the higher inflation goes, and the higher energy prices go, the better your ROI is. Your payoff is year 14 with no tax credit, year 10 with a tax credit (in this scenario).

2.) Risk goes both ways. If you do solar + battery (which is the only way it comes from Tesla, who is also the lowest price around in most cases) you have just removed several categories of risk from your life. The setup could literally save your life in the case of a heat wave (or hard freeze) that knocks out the grid, but even being more modest, if it keeps the HVAC fan running in the winter it could pay for itself in a single outage event by preventing pipes freezing and flooding your home. Extreme weather and grid failures are both becoming more common. Solar systems are made with solid-state components with high reliability and generally graceful degradation... so your panels will be less efficient after 20 years, but will still likely be working. Also, I just sold a house with installed solar, I paid $27k, got a $8k tax rebate, and was paid $14k for it on the sale of the home thanks to being credited for it by the appraiser. Counting the $1800 a year it saved me over 3 years, and I broke even or came out slightly ahead, even with a worst-case scenario of a sale shortly after install.

3.) If you rely on net-metering to hit your ROI, you've sized the system wrong. In most places, you get paid wholesale prices for electricity produced, but you get charged retail price for electricity consumed. Size your system so that you generate 80-90% of your electricity demand and that entire risk becomes irrelevant.

Rooftop solar is a huge reduction in many important categories of risk. It allows you to completely disregard inflation - the more inflation skyrockets, the better your ROI. Solar + electric car means that your transportation budget doesn't change whether gas is $1/gallon or $10/gallon. It makes you more resilient to the expensive and possibly life-threatening risks of extreme weather and grid outages.

Any investment has risk, but the ROI on solar kicks the shit out of stocks, bonds, or crypto over the past couple years, and simultaneously provides peace of mind benefits and real-world utility.

Crazy that you go around extolling the virtues of science and then make a completely unfounded assertion like this one! Nature absolutely CAN be beat, and IS beat, all the time, especially when it's a highly specific task. Technology has allowed us to travel faster, higher, and with larger vehicles than anything in the natural world. Computers regularly solve mathematical problems in minutes that wouldn't be solved if all of humanity spent their lifetimes doing calculations.

When the challenge is highly ambiguous and nonspecific, something like "replicate the human mind", then technology tends to struggle - it's an ill-defined, poorly understood, general problem. When it's something specific, like "grow a meat-like protein cheaply in large quantities", and there are no physical barriers involved, it's only a matter of money and time investment before it's solved. Particularly because in this case, what matters isn't that it actually replicates the functions of muscle, veins, and sinew, it just needs to come close to replicating the experience of eating meat. This problem is already largely solved, it just needs to be scaled.

I don't know if you all have noticed, but the Amazon recommendation engine has been completely replaced with sponsored recommendations... in other words, ads.

Once upon a time, shopping on Amazon was an enjoyable experience, because you would search for one product, read about it, and have useful recommendations provided for alternative products or useful accessories to consider. Since then, they've wiped out the recommender widgets entirely, and replaced them with similar-looking widgets, but they are just dozens of identical products with varied brand names and colors, and every single one of them has a "sponsored" tag.

So where Amazon used to help shoppers find exactly the product they need from a wide variety of options, they've since gotten greedy, started forcing sellers to pay to even show up in recommendations and first-page search results, and replaced useful tools with redundant ads. Sellers have to pay to show up in search, pay to show up in recommendations, pay to be part of prime, and then probably pay for SEO and a fake review shop to game their rating, otherwise they won't sell a thing. Same old story of greed ruining the very thing that made a business successful to begin with.

Farmers are often just trying to survive from one year to the next, and often are just doing what those before them did. Never underestimate the ability of an industry trend to lead huge masses of people down a self-destructive deadend, particularly if the worst consequences won't really be felt for years.

The difference with farming is, if farming fails, everybody starves. There's no resource that's simultaneously so important and so easily damaged as the soil.

So, a couple things that aren't made clear in the summary:

New elements are generally synthesized using particle accelerators... the elements that have yet to be discovered (or at least, experimentally confirmed) generally aren't encountered in day-to-day life because they are extremely unstable, sometimes having half-lives in the nanosecond range.

So, this is a new accelerator facility in the US, which is pretty exciting and will hopefully be a tremendous asset for scientists and engineers for years to come... there are only a handful of said facilities currently in the US, and most of them are several decades old, and maintenance is a serious struggle. That said, even the existing accelerators continue to do some impressive science, including discovery and verification of new elements. In the beam cave at the LBNL cyclotron, for instance, for many years they have had a periodic table up on the wall where scientists add their newly discovered elements with a sharpie. :)

That's not the complete metric to make your decision on though. Really, you want to compare ((cost of engineering a self-landing first stage) + N*(cost of fuel per landing)) to (cost of engineering helicopter capture) + N*(cost of helicopter capture per landing)).

When you include the engineering and development costs, the helicopter method almost certainly comes out cheaper for the first several launches... hard to say what the precise count is, though. 10, 20?

What they need is the simplest engineering possible to improve their profitability and let them start learning about reusability (how do the engines hold up, etc) for an interim period until Neutron comes online. I bet that the helicopter method comes out way cheaper in the total analysis vs spending a ton of money trying to engineer first stage landing on a vehicle that will be obsolete soon anyway.

The real news is that Elon Musk (or anybody at all) follows Slashdot on Twitter. Who knew anybody was still paying attention to a website populated only by curmudgeonly grognards?

KSR called heat waves in India in Ministry For The Future, where he actually takes a pretty realistic look at the likeliest near term future on a warming planet. Of course, his is more extreme, where a heat wave is accompanied by extreme humidity, lasts for weeks, leading to grid collapse, and with wet bulb temps above human body temperature, millions of people slowly cook alive over the course of days.

I certainly hope that's not what happens, but it starts to look like an inevitability if this keeps up.

Thanks for revealing yourself as someone with no conscience to speak of.

If a small sacrifice that will have a very minor impact on your quality of life (driving a more efficient vehicle, paying 1% more for renewable energy, etc) isn't something you're willing to contemplate, even if it could help today's children and future humans have a dramatically better quality of life, that's just another way of saying you don't have a conscience, or have suppressed it so far that it's practically nonexistent.

Same line of reasoning would mean that you are entitled to steal/murder/rape if you benefit from it and can get away with it, or that you are morally entitled to ignore a drowning child. After all, if the only negative impact is for someone else, then go ahead! You do you.

Some of us believe we have a responsibility to leave things better than we found them, or at least make a small attempt at doing so.

Fixed that for you. People get offended about petty stuff all the time, always have, always will. We just have to stop wasting our precious brain cycles on paying attention to them.

The soil is a living ecosystem of microorganisms, and soil is required for crops to grow - when it disappears, that means the microorganisms are killed and only dead, barren dirt or rock are left, which can't support crops.

So, the long term implications are that eventually, the soil is gone, the land is completely exhausted and has no fertility left, farmland becomes unproductive, and we have massive famine.

Those laws already exist. We know, because people who try to fraudulently vote, by voting in two counties, or trying to vote for dead relatives, get caught regularly by the system.

Completely false. Provide some EVIDENCE or STFU. Again, we regularly catch fraudsters, and more often than not they are idiotic Trumpsters who believe that vote fraud is commonplace and easy to pull off. They get a quick education about how effective the system actually is when they get caught easily and arrested.

Your completely unsubstantiated claims would make Putin proud, comrade.

Actually, this is something that the numbers bear out, according to multiple studies by" the professionals".

https://www.motortrend.com/new...

This is showing EV fleet cost per mile being about 40% less than ICEV fleet cost, before accounting for fuel. So yes, for any entity that gives a shit about profit, or the environment, or the health of people who breath in the general vicinity of these things, EVs are the obvious choice.

That's exactly why this is an idiotic decision. Especially for long-term fleet operations with a low median for daily mileage and frequent stop/starts, you are going to pay far more in the long run for fuel, maintenance, and repairs with in ICEV. This is bad for the climate, bad for the USPS budget, and bad for stamp prices in the long run.

More efficiency, less regulation (the already own the canals), less evaporation - it's things like this that show there's really a tremendous amount of low-hanging fruit to do things far better than we currently do. If people would stop the doom and gloom + political infighting and focused more on this type of problem solving we could really make some progress.