Electric companies have a huge investment in their current physical plant.

Any plant built in the last 10 years won't be paid off for another 10 to 20 years.

Solar and wind power combined with durable, inexpensive batteries has the potential to be "cheap enough" that people will avoid electrical companies and the "network effect" that benefits them will be lost.

You see it with AT&T now. When everyone had a landline, prices were lower. As fewer people have a landline, the per customer cost of maintaining the physical lines goes up.

I.e. if the fixed cost of serving an area is 1 million a year (for workers and materials) (either electrical or telephone) and 100,000 people in the area use your service, the cost per customer is $10. Your utility bill is $50 in the winter and $150 in the summer. If that drops to 50,000 customers- the fixed cost is up to $20. If that drops to 25,000 customers- the fixed cost is up to $40.

Where you "rolled in" the fixed cost before-- now you either need to raise rates or raise your fixed cost.

But as your rates increase to $90 in the winter and $180 in the summer-- it makes more sense for people to go to solar and wind power. As you drop to 10,000 customers in the same geographical area-- you are up to $100 per customer in fixed costs and now the monthly bill is $150 to $250 and it really makes sense to go to solar.

add to that the fact that solar has dropped from 10x the cost of generated power to 4x the cost of generated power in about the last 12 years alone and the future trend is solar power fundamentally cheaper than generated power. Plus there is already 2x cost solar panels-- it's just that germany has bought current and future production two years out for their industrial scale solar plants.

And yes- electrical utilities are starting to lobby very hard against solar. Removing subsidies, adding costs, adding regulations to make it more expensive to go solar, and altering laws so they can break out the fixed cost so grid tied solar customers will pay their full share of the fixed costs (which are currently partially held in the variable rates).

Semi Hard SF for the win... again. Read this when I was very young.

http://quillandkeyboard.blogsp...

Quote:
Mutant 59 is an excellent example of the British specialty; the quiet catastrophe. By altering one small part of the normal world, removing plastic, Pedler and Davis set into motion a series of events that wreck ever-expanding circles of devastation. As plastic insulation vanishes, wires spark and fires break out. Airliners crash or explode in midair. Submarines vanish. Gas leaks from sealless lines. The entire infrastructure of London literally decays. It's a truly frightening scenario that makes one realise just how the failure of something we take for granted can imperil our entire civilisation.

Using every tool in the tool box seems objectively better than only using one tool in the tool box.

If someone wrote a C++ or Java program only using "if then" statements with no objects and ignored objects, case statements, while statements, for loops with conditional exits, etc., I would judge their code to be worse and their mastery of the language to be lower on an objective basis.

If someone writes an adventure with a tool kit that has 7 tools and they only use the one tool over and over, I objectively judge their mastery to be lower. I agree that whether the adventure they create is fun or not is subjective.

A wider use of tools is more likely to result in a better scenario however. I say that from experience writing adventure scenarios for decades.

I can't see how you come to the conclusion that a richer experience would be a more boring game. Your statement here seems biased to me. You might want to reconsider it.

I agree with your comments on the article. Someone posted just above here that the actual results were more what I would have expected to see from past experience.

* Worst was a boy.
* Average of girls was better than the average of boys.
* Best was a boy.

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They also posted the actual triggers above too.

When the player arrives in area
When someone says a line
When someone gets and item
When someone is killed
When something walks into trigger
When something walks out of trigger
Every six seconds

I think several of them would make for a more interesting game. In the scenarios I write, I use...

When a player is in an area, when someone gets an item, when someone is killed, when someone walks into a trigger, When someone walks out of a trigger, and every X seconds. My X varies from 8 seconds to 90 seconds. I don't use "when someone says a line" because minecraft isn't amenable to that or I haven't learned how to do that yet if there is a way.

What I meant was... why did 100% of the girls do better than 100% of the boys?

I would have expected overlap between the two populations.

In similar studies, the average of the females was higher than the average of the males but the extremes of the males were lower and higher than the extremes of the females.

I'm guessing they had things like...

Trigger
Character says "Xxxxx".
Character attacks.
Character is damaged.
Character places objects on table.
Character gives objects to NPC.
Character is hungry.
Character is wielding X when close to a spot.

For some reason, the boys only used the 1st trigger and the result was a stereotypical "prompt/respond" roleplaying game.

Using the other triggers would provide a less stereotypical experience.

Not sure why all the girls did well and all the boys did badly. That seems off.

Perhaps there was a particular girl who "got it" and showed the other girls how to use the other triggers or shared code and made it easier for them to figure it out. Perhaps the teacher prompted the girls in some way.

In any case, the girls did better in this case-- perhaps some will turn out to be major names and the experience has to bolster their confidence.

Interesting result.

It will be interesting to see if any of the girls in the class go on to be the next Caitlin Colgrove, Adele Goldberg or Barbara Liskov.

However, I'd expect more of a bell curve in both genders with the average for girls being better than the average for boys. If the girls uniformly did better and the boys uniformly did worse, that sounds strange.

Never admit to knowing what jury nullification is.

The prosecutor will ask. It's not really a fair question for them to ask so you should ignore the question. Any honest answer means you lose your right to jury nullification as a counterbalance for unjust/unfair laws.

Likewise, if you are actually on a jury and decide to use jury nullfication...
Do not tell any other jury about it.
Do not say you have decided on nullification. Simply say based on the facts, you have reasonable doubt. Stick with it until the judge ends the case due to a hung jury.

Different people with different personal experiences can look at the same facts and come to different conclusions.*

If you are part of a group who regularly sees and reads about the police beating and killing other members of your group including 12 year old children (and a 7 year old girl was shot in the head and killed by police in a raid on an incorrect address in the last couple months) then you are going to WEIGHT facts regarding the GOOD INTENT of the police officer differently.

Also, our entire system is based the trust of the governed. Why the hell should blacks trust our system when they are under represented and when black st louis police officers say in interviews that st louis police are racist?

Why should they trust police when the police pick up a mixed group of young black and white children and then arrest the black children while calling the parents of the white girl to pick her up tell the black children that "trash goes in the back." (again recently within the last few months).

---
*(also consider discussion be tween religious and irreligious people who view the same facts and come to wildly different conclusions).

I think this is a new level. Considering they can see pre-drafts, edits, etc. which previously were lost and all you saw was what was sent or saved.

It may be suitable for banks, but it is going to raise the cost of business for everyone.
It's probably overkill for many businesses AND will simply drive people who have ill intent to other communications methods.

You said: "I am plenty white, and the assertion that I am unable to listen to evidence and come to an impartial decision is ridiculous."

That's not the point man. and it's not what I wrote.

If all blacks on the jury voted to indict, then the white votes against indictment will have no credibility with the population. Especially if ALL of them voted against indictment.

Use your head, man.

Because otherwise, I don't think the answer of a 67% white grand jury is acceptable to a town that is 67% black and patrolled by a police force that's about 94% white and which hires people who are from other police departments which were shut down because they were too racist.

If at least one black voted not to indict then it gives the process some legitimacy.
If all three voted not to indict then the answer will probably be accepted eventually.

If you are wealthy and conservative, it's just to be expected as it is in your own self interest.

If you are poor and conservative, what the hell are you thinking? Why are you cutting your own throat so a few wealthy people can have lower taxes, lower estate taxes, and ship your jobs overseas if not ask you to build a stage so they can climb up on it and fire you?

Stock prices are ultimately related to related earnings than demand.

If a move like this suppresses stock prices such that the stock price vs earnings returns a predictably higher annual rate of return, then others will buy the stock until it returns to an the stock price vs earnings returns to an average annual rate of return.

I think you misunderstand him.

If person "B" sets up a rule saying your are spam (or "enough" person "B"s) then general heuristics of their spam filters may filter you as spam from all yahoo users.