Ha! That was the backstory of the watchable but still marginal "The Colony" -- an attempt to geoengineer climate goes haywire, inducing a planet wide ice age.

...is asking them for an opinion really meaningful?

Any sufficiently sophisticated Chinese security security product to be of any use will either be compromised by the Chinese government "in the interest of domestic social harmony" or for national security/military/espionage.

We're power pigs at this house due to all the DVRs, computers, etc, something like 33kWh per day based on the month's total consumption.

With some extensive re-wiring of the power panel to move high-load devices (AC, washer/dryer, dishwasher, possibly even the gas furnace blower motor) to another panel, the 10kW unit MIGHT be useful to keep the fridge and lights going during a short-term power outage. Sadly I think the computers would have to get shut off to even get 12 hours out of it.

With the rewiring necessary, I'm not sure it's even cost competitive with a natural gas generator. 16kW units with automatic transfer switches are around $3600 and will run the entire house, including high power stuff, indefinitely.

Where I live, it's all kind of moot. I can count on one hand the number of outages we've had in the last 16 years on one hand and only one was long enough to even justify a trip to the dry ice store to keep the fridge from melting.

If it was even remotely more common (1-2 times per year, 24 hours) one of the Honda suitcase generators would probably be more effective just to keep the fridge going or maybe the gas furnace blower. Beyond that level of frequency or duration I think a natural gas generator would be useful.

First, none of these things move forward without some enthusiast buy-in. Loads of things are stupid from a strict dollar-efficiency perspective but people still do them anyway. Computers held fairly low value in terms of dollar efficiency for decades, but enthusiasts found them worthwhile and helped move that industry forward.

Second, you confuse cost and value. You know the cost of the utility power and the off-grid generation and storage components but you don't know the value to the consumer of being off-grid. What you see as a splurge they may see as some kind of inherent value.

At the end of the day, it's price fixing and price fixing doesn't really work without some kind of draconian controls.

I'm sure there's a fixed exchange rate for Iranian currency to prop up the local currency. China gets away with it, well, because China.

My assumption is that a level 1 employee who excels at their job gets promoted to level 2, repeating that cycle until they get to the level where they no longer excel at their job and receive no more promotions.

I think it's debatable whether an employee at their plateau level of promotion is merely good enough or actually incompetent. It's probably both and circumstantial. Someone promoted to their plateau may be just good enough not to get terminated immediately but not good enough to retain the position long term when faced with a superior replacement.

And its probably this kind of self-aware incompetence which traps managers into hiring underachievers. Their personal success requires their underlings to be good enough but not good enough to challenge them, which I imagine is only magnified down the line.

How is the dollar or any currency used as a peg currency?

I don't see why a country couldn't just say "Our currency, the fubar is pegged at the rate of 10 fubars to the bitcoin." Anyone needing to conduct transactions in fubars would have to then buy 10 fubars for one bitcoin.

The only way this works, though, is for the government to restrict transactions in other currencies and only allow the national bank under their control buy foreign currencies. I think some get even more draconian, forcing travelers to trade all their foreign currency at entry to the local currency at the official exchange rate and then sell you your own currency back at exit.

Of course this doesn't stop black markets for currency, every country with an official exchange rate has them, more so if the official exchange rate is greatly detached from reality. But these can be dangerous and you may find you detached from your freedom.

While I support net neutrality as a concept and as a form of regulation (with a big dash of hope, too), none of this would be an issue if there was any competition for residential high speed internet access.

Caps, quotas, asymmetry, prohibitions on "servers", crippling of web sites like Netflix -- none of this would be happening at all if there was meaningful high speed Internet competition. Providers who did this would be gutted by the market for vendors who didn't do these things. This is all rent-seeking behavior by monopolists, and worse, by monopolists whose business model can see its own funeral on the calendar.

And the lack of viable competition in most markets is why regulation is necessary, otherwise the monopolists would just keep manipulating the market.

That's an interesting idea. Could we have used all the shuttle money to have launched enough stuff to have a huge space station in orbit by now, possibly with a large interplanetary ship we assembled in space?

Or does stuff in space kind of rot away into unusableness and what we'd really have is a huge floating derelict that wouldn't be fixable?

What I mean is, does a public news-ticker kind of short message service fill such an obvious need/value that even if Twitter(tm) didn't exist it would ultimately exist anyway?

What you mean is that releasing the earnings after hours allows all the big guys to dump shares first, minimizing their losses, and everyone else wondering if they should eat the now-massive losses on what they hold or just keep holding and hope it goes up again.

With the rise in satellite television and the appearance of eight zillion satellite dishes, I thought that local regulation of them got slapped down because they fell under the FCC's domain and were exempt from local regulation.

I think the biggest problem with usage billing would be "I fell asleep watching ... and now I have to pay for what I didn't see."

It wouldn't surprise me to see a mix of base fee for regular content and then an on-demand fee for "premium" content. Heck. HBO could do that now and sell HBO Now for non-current seasons for some price less than what they would sell it for past seasons and the current new programs.

Hooray for Verizon for trying to challenge the fucked up cable system. Maybe, just maybe, they see end of "cable" as a thing when anything can be streamed instead and want to stave this off by making at least kind of sane channel choices available.

Well, kind of. I think they made a lot of this mess for themselves. I think the TV channel sources saw the cable companies successfully ratchet up the prices continuously and figured they needed to be in on that money bandwagon. Enter in all the must-carry bundles and tier requirements and all the bullshit that got us to 800 channels of nothing for $150/month (and not even HBO, damnit).

And the cable companies didn't care because they could just pass off the costs to their customers through ever higher prices and announce "Wow! We've added even more high value content, ESPN Classic 4 -- all those great historic bocce tournaments from the 1950s".

And both the channel providers and the cable companies got fat and sassy.

And now everyone hates cable, hates paying $150/month for a bunch of channels they never watch and is dropping it as fast as they can.