Things can only begin as laissez faire. such policies will always result in the need to intervene in the end, if any regard for human well being is retained. more and more will accumulate in the hands of the few, and it will be used to guarantee more of the same, ending laissez faire and corrupting the shared institutions.

that's why ending the farce that is "free market" jargon and "less regulation" hand waving is step one. capital must exist in a well regulated environment. otherwise you cannot say you live in a democracy, as you will inevitably end up in a plutocracy. Because, money is power.

the only thing worse than laissez faire is "small government" crony capitalism using the guise of laissez faire to plunder the whole world.

Doesn't have to be corporatism. Could be "richguyism" or, as it's commonly known, Plutocracy. However, it just so happens all that money is in corporations in our current economic structure.

Oh, and it's an inevitable result of laissez faire policies when capitalism is allowed to run amok. money is power. letting it all accumulate in the hands of a few just hands the reigns of power over to them.

but he's sitting there at Score 5 Insightful in the end.

the system self-corrects to a large degree. the only big problem is that early comments are more noticeable than later ones. welcome to life in a continuous news cycle.

If you could cut your total energy bill in half by punching a few parameters into a web portal, I bet you'd find it wasn't that hard to talk people into it.

people adapt to their reality. All I'm saying is make the dirty energy pay its true cost. people will then switch much more readily due to market pressure, and we can move on with fixing the remaining issues with clean grid management, which aren't being fixed now because we're using artificially mostly cheap, dirty energy that aren't asking for those issues to be addressed.

well, one of the major problems is addressed by working on the grid and adding storage... that's the part I just noted is a very solvable issue. at the very least, very large inroads can be made without any real major infrastructure changes, just changing meters and establishing the communication protocol needed to manage loads along with demand.

that is much easier than making nuclear waste safe.

as for the problems with wind, I dunno that much about building turbines. but again, the cost for solar PV just hit grid parity over 25 years and it's dropping mightily. and, it happens to load match peak demands in most areas (summer cooling) quite nicely. but even if it doesn't match your peak in your area... again, storing thermal energy isn't hard. load shifting is easy. taking time to crank up a backup generator, no problem. You can't time shift the lights, but you sure can chill water at night instead of waiting until noon.

adding wind and other renewables to the mix just adds potential. but solar PV will be a much bigger player, I think. and nuclear will be a dinosaur.

short term energy storage is a way easier challenge to solve than hundreds of years of guarding dangerous nuclear material. Shit, I can store all the energy needed to heat or cool a house for a day in a tank of water that would easily fit in most homes. have excess energy, charge up your store.

electric cars will have these things called "batteries" that happen to store energy.

smart meters exist now. the internet exists now. energy management software exists... wait for it... now.

and, solar just reached parity with grid power in the northeast. woot! before incentives, even.

repeat after me: by the time you finished building a fancy reactor, you'd be able to utilize renewables more cheaply. good luck finding non-guaranteed private capital getting that reactor built too.

yes, it's good that record setting droughts don't impede plant growth, or contribute to desertification in any way, so your theory of a carbon rich plant shagri-la won't be threatened.

I think the fact that homeless people have found OWS encampments does not mean that the entire OWS movement should be defined by the actions of largely mentally ill people. as for shitting on cop cars, well... they've earned it.

However, our taxes pay the organized, professional forces that are, in some locations, regularly lapsing into unnecessary violence rather than dealing with groups of misdemeanor violations in any kind of rational way. They are supposed to be held to a higher regard, because we pay them to wield violent weaponry in our name... to say nothing of the power players behind them, ordering them into these situations in a paramilitary fashion.

Pretending that media coverage of OWS has been largely sympathetic to the movement is ridiculous. very little in the mainstream media outlets has shown any real understanding of the issues or any willingness to really balance the reporting, they just go for the sensationalistic headlines. just a few weeks ago, almost 1,000 simultaneous protests worldwide occurred. that was given one sentence in most stories, and then two paragraphs of the violence that occurred in Rome. Never mind the 900+ other, by any measure incredibly peaceful protests.. nope, it's all about the violence. that's the only part worth reporting, apparently.

the media is not helping OWS. it is only grabbing headlines. If the cops commit the violence, they latch on it. if any violence not exquisitely captured on filmed can then be blamed on the OWS instead, they latch on to that too. fuck your apologetics.

which means fuck-all to the end user. so this is a free market in building and selling small companies, but not so much a free market in telecommunications.

smart grid, internet-tied demand management. Use the power when it's there.

simple tanks of water in people's homes allow electricity to be converted for use as heating energy later at great efficiency (a very large amount of total energy usage for most people here in america)

your false dicotomy between nuclear and coal no longer need apply. the third option is to stop accepting externalized costs and pretending that coal and nuclear are cheap, and make them pay for their own problems, and then flip over to renewables because THEIR problems can be solved by engineering, unlike coal and nucelar's problems.

better, learning.

What do you feel has been your most effective prank to date, and why?

I design high performance heating/mechanical systems for a living... I'm not just some yahoo in this case, I actually know what I'm talking about ;)

Putting thermostats in a low load hallway is the absolute worst possible thing you can do. the only reason it's done is because most buildings are not zoned appropriately, so they see the hallways as a "compromise", and since the installer USUALLY is not doing any math or even any serious evaluation of the building the system is being installed in, it's not like they would guess any better otherwise. But the right way is to pick the room with the most intense load profile, hit that, and balance the other rooms in the zone if you must. Or, even better, zone in a way that is actually appropriate to the load.. but that's hard to do with traditional forced air and even harder in a retrofit/replacement situation.

It's true you don't want them near the supply vents. but you do want them IN AN IMPORTANT ROOM. Or... as is usually the case... you will never ensure comfort. The wiki makes some sense in some cases but it's the "rule of thumb' answer and it's why something like 80% of people are not satisfied with their heating system's performance. I would say in most cases your vents will be on outside wall areas, floor level, pointing up. put the tstat on the other side of the room, facing the outside wall. Test a location by putting a thermometer there, running the heating system, and ensuring it does not rise in temperature too quickly. or lick your finger and see if you can feel the breeze (less accurate, but another useful data point).

another horrible practice is putting ducts in attics. 90% of the time that's where they go because it's easy. but it's easily a 30% efficiency loss doing that, even with insulated ducts. That is where "conventional wisdom" and 'standard advice' gets you in the HVAC world.

the nest guys are noticing that room for improvement in this industry is huge. mostly because no one with any education has been pointed at these industries for 50 years. Not that HVAC guys are dumb... far from it... but the "best and brightest" all got pointed at 4 year colleges and never again at residential HVAC. If only the guideance counselors had any idea what a good HVAC guy can make....

Sorry, wrong parent. was responding to:

another poster notes it is related to age though, which is related to affluence and education in terms of when fatherhood commences. so it could be a consequence of natural aging exclusively, perhaps. or it could be an accumulation of environmental toxins that gets worse as you get older. Or both. Or something else entirely ;) Certainly the materials and prevalence of "new stuff" in close proximity for extended periods of time are not monolithic, but are certainly more similar amongst people of similar socioeconomic stature. In other words an engineer, architect and doctor are more likely to choose similar brands/materials/items, and to buy them new and live around them most of the time in a similar fashion than, say, an engineer and a factory worker compared to each other. I do high end mechanical design for residential homes, and I can tell you I have a lot more engineer/doctor clients than factory workers....

who knows what happens to the factory workers.. they are 12 and in china, mostly...

don't get me wrong... I could absolutely be wrong and I'm not seriously advocating this as a scholarly position. You make points that very well may be more valid. Luckily the health benefits of not sucking down VOCs is well understood so it's not like I'm advocating for, say, "forgoing vaccinations to fight autism" or other such tripe... going outside more and avoiding offgassing will benefit you whether or not it fights autism in particular. but I don't think it's *crazy* to suspect a lifestyle/environmental element is involved, if you presume that there is more than just a rise in diagnosis of autism then its rise has mirrored that of industrial society. And certainly you are not immune from autism by not being a professional.