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.

Actually, no they weren't! Apparently thy were killed by dogs more than people for meant. And we all know that dogs will eat just about anything...

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.

Do we really want the O'Hare runways to look like the LA freeway system at peak times?

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.

s/kept/put/

In 1953 they had a democratically elected, very westernized government. The US and UK staged a coup when that government wasn't generous enough with "our" oil.

Worked out about as well as all our other efforts to tell the rest of the world how to run their countries.

I dunno, maybe they'll get nukes and the warmongers will have to find another country to bomb?

Or, who knows, maybe we could get attacked by Saudi-sponsored terrorists again?

What's good for Disney is good for America. Or at any rate, good for the Americans who matter.

I recently read that Southern California Edison replaced its whole 500-strong IT staff with H1Bs. However, details are scarce. Several US senators have called for an investigation, but the feds are refusing on the grounds that no one hurt by it filed a complaint.

The US economy is screwed anyway. The H1B saga is just one more issue in the decades-long trend of converting the economy into shareholders and people who flip burgers for shareholders. Once the rich have skimmed all the cream, they'll go find another country to screw - or at least one that actually makes stuff they can buy with their winnings.

In my experience, upper management's views on who is easily replaceable don't usually conform very well to reality.