And that's because the variable sources of power discussed here don't make up much of the power supply. Crank it up to a much larger percent and you will have problems more often.

A lot of this stuff is just off-loading costs onto electricity consumers. For example, all those businesses who can't just afford to be down for hours or days just because the "once every 20 years modest shortfall" happens again and again will need beefed up backup generators and power storage - stuff the electricity provider no longer provides.

Yea, right. Uncommon != never.

Natural processes that we happen to be extracting energy from. Just like every other form of power generation. Or water that we pumped up there (in cases of pumped storage schemes). But having said that, I echo your concerns about the considerable variability of many of the renewable energy sources and the facile and ignorant analysis described in the article.

Well, how do you explain social engineering? Just because something has the word "engineering" in it doesn't mean it goes through the full rigamarole of professional engineering standards.

Because regulations and safeguards prevent magnitude 9 earthquakes from happening. The point of regulations and safeguards is not to maintain the unicorn herd that will keep bad things from ever happening, but rather to attempt to reduce the occurrence of bad things and externalities to a level the society is willing to tolerate. Well, that and controlling peoples' behavior because your ideology mandates that the behavior is bad.

Unless that plan gets canceled or scaled back in a variety of ways. Substantial construction delays make it more likely that they're not going to get that guarantee.

And when California finally finishes its act of economic suicide, it'll be a great warning to the rest of the world should they choose to heed it.

Who's paying for it? We all have this nasty chronic disease called "life" and we'll all die of it. Arguments like this, with no consideration of cost, have a nasty built-in slippery slope to a scenario where society can't afford everyone's promised health care.

If you and your fellow sufferers have enough nasty chronic diseases and other health conditions so that society can't both pay for them and still maintain normal infrastructure (transportation, law enforcement, emergency services, national defense, etc), then you're SOL. The only distinction is whether you're SOL before or after your society falls apart.

So you're sure that your "primary goal" is to get a living wage, rather than something else such as say, a "life"?

And you don't acknowledge that there's more than one job out there. No job is perfect like no life is perfect. But that doesn't mean that you can't find work that fits well with what your actual priorities are.

Nor do you recognize that you can save the wealth you earn so that you have better choices in the future including not working at all.

Except that there is no coercion here. Just because you have needs doesn't mean someone has forced you to do any particular thing. That fear you mention is your fear not the fear of the employer.

Keep in mind also that another reasonable set of choices is look for new work, not necessarily in the same area or same field.

I'm not the one confusing unsubstantiated computer models with reality.

I looked before I posted.

In other words, contrary to the grandparent's assertion employers and everyone else are indeed hurt by this. And it's not "constant". Just because the US system is epic fail, doesn't mean the rest of the world is good. The developed world as a whole is experiencing health care cost growth that rises faster than GDP. That should be a warning sign.

"IF". If we assume you are absolutely right, then you're absolutely right. Amazing how that works.

The problem is that most people would not be satisfied with only working 20 hours. And inflation would consume whatever gains you think you were making here.

From really expensive to somewhat less really expensive. While Moore's Law might be still driving down cost of computation in theory, it doesn't apply to other things such as hardware for actually manipulating the real world.

I put that percentage at 100% in the developed world (I can't rule out slavery in the rest of the world) since that work is voluntary. "Truly willing" is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

"Could" is not the same as "will". Since we're speaking of the US system here, we could be spending half as much now with no changes at all to the system. But we're not. One has to pay attention to what's actually going on in the system.