Comment Re:The 21st Century is (Score 1) 360
Of course when I mentioned 'parent' and 'GP' in the above post I meant from the perspective of the post I was replying to, so 'GP' and 'GGP'
Of course when I mentioned 'parent' and 'GP' in the above post I meant from the perspective of the post I was replying to, so 'GP' and 'GGP'
That teacher made no effort to make the distinction between the actions of people in the past, and the young white men in the room.
It is weird how you got all that ranting out of some uncited event. How do you even know you are talking about the same event the previous poster was talking about?
The parent started off generally addressing the question at the end of the GP and moved on to a more specific personal example in the same general manner. This is not the typical
In typical
PS: I have mod points, but if IMO I modded the parent troll it would just get another +1 insightful for following a now "standard pattern" for good scores on
I can't believe I get modded troll and GP gets +5 insightful for successfully attacking a strawman and calling me an idiot. Maybe it's time to join the ranks of those that say
Most news reports of people going off-grid in America ends up with them...not having proper safe level of quality of living.
You read/hear about the horror stories... If one builds a place to code (which is wise in any case), there shouldn't be any issues for the most part.
So that's what happened to Richard Stallman. Just kidding, just kidding.
You have it 100% backwards. The current fossil fuel based energy economy is built on a foundation of taxpayer subsidies.
I do know this and am not a supporter of oil or gas. It's just that the major players in solar power are not that benign either, and it could be that the solar companies are much the same as the gas and oil companies you dislike -- just that they are not in control yet. The idea of replacing one broken system with another doesn't appeal to me and I don't see anywhere here any real progress or money for research and development to get there. Instead there is a 'feel good' factor that seems to apply and a bunch of people with little or no scientific backgrounds running amok, shouting their opinions everywhere, thinking they are doing good for the world. I just feel sad that there is not much focus on real physics research into energy and serious policy discussions.
...In short, you're an idiot.
I used to be a university student too. There are life lessons that everyone learns for themselves that I think you have yet to learn and won't do from me. There's a reason why people shift from being radical and in support of something as a group (like 'environmentalism' or 'anti-corporatism') over time to a more moderate way of thinking. Sometimes young people (or young mentally) are taken for a ride when they think they are doing the right thing.
Why not fund research into energy storage technologies so when the grid is overloaded, the energy can be saved and used later?
Personally I would love to see storage technology being really worked on. Things like nano batteries that physicists like Michio Kaku sometimes talks about would be really nice and blow out of the water all of our current technology. This or many other types of real improvements would make solar power useful, but solar would still really limit our use of electricity if deployed as a replacement for coal/nuclear. This is because solar is just a waste product of fusion in the sun, and fusion or matter/anti-matter power is IMO what we really should be aiming for. Maybe in the meantime we could look to see how much uranium/thorium is on asteroids that are in elliptic orbits around the sun for mining (as they would have left our solar system anyway). Solar just seems backwards to me </rant>.
I also wanted to point out that those groups that cry the loudest about large companies profiteering and attempt to change public opinion should be scrutinized as well -- because they may well be very similar. These groups generally have many resources at their disposal and look after their own interests to other people's detriment. I think it is important to note that few people in leadership positions in greenie groups have any scientific background and many might in fact be hostile towards scientific progress.
Good old greenies are at it again. If you force taxpayers to subsidise solar power installations for people well off to afford them (e.g. most greenies) you are contributing to wealth inequality. At least if you want to do this it would make sense to use a more efficient means of power production. You have to wonder how we might be better off if instead research and development was not cut off from nuclear power technologies by these various rich greenie groups that often bring in 100 million a year in revenue or are endowed with large trust funds.
I think the parent is right on the money. Women's groups and ethnic rights groups are just the 'useful idiots of the West' on this. Only people that will get ahead from all this are people already ahead.
As a manager in IT, I used to go out of my way to hire attractive women in CS, but they are just super rare. They hardly exist, and the smart ones are very expensive.
I've seen the job ads:
WANTED: COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
Job spec:
(Goodbye karma)
The United States, or, rather, its corporate citizens, benefited from trade with South Africa, but they eventually sided with the divestment movement and hit South Africa where it hurt.
I don't claim it's a likely outcome, but if my government keeps behaving like a bully, there has to be some major blowback eventually.
From the wikipedia article it shows that this was primarily backed by religious people in the US and not the politicians of the time in government. Today South Africa has a policy of Black Economic Empowerment which is essentially a tit-for-tat policy that further puts into law race differences and somehow benefits a "Chinese" looking person who may come into the country fresh today over a local "white person" who is being "reverse discriminated" against. Whilst not as bad as Zimbabwe's policies, the sentiments are similar, and you wonder how race can still be an issue there when in most places in the west it doesn't matter at all. Perhaps South Africa could have been today in a much better shape if it just went out of Aparteid on commercial and trade foundations and actually enshrined into law equality for all.
Cheapest might be to learn from the Soviet example where several competing departments tried to come up with an idea or implementation and more optimum solution sort of came out naturally as a result. Given the number of firsts the Soviets had of the USA it might be much faster as well. Funny how the USA has had an almost authoritarian system in place for managing projects in space since the start of NASA and they don't embrace a more free-market approach.
Wind turbines produces little steady electrical current, and even if you go with peak energy production from these things and couple with solar there is a cost to the environment. A large wind farm that produces any sort of useful amount of electricity for private or industrial consumption takes the wind out of the environment as a system in the same way that damming a river takes the water out. You have a "dead zone" where there is little wind and above you have a much higher flow of wind, which can only lead to the wind above pushing down over some distance from the wind farm to fill the void and dumping down inland (because if you put the things too far out you would need really long cables). This would increase the temperature inland and has the potential to change weather patterns close to the surface of the earth (where is of course most important to us living there). Here's a video in the crazy greenie sinister tone, but might be what future environmentalists have to deal with.
The environmental impacts of large scale wind energy production are pretty much completely untested for and could potentially be very bad. There has been little actual scientific research, and this has been almost entirely due to moneyed "greenie" groups (a single group in the US brings in yearly 100m dollars in income!) opposition to performing basic research in a proper scientific study.
Another thing to remember is that the moon was much closer in the past and is slowly drifting away from the Earth. Tidal influences on the moon and earth system would have been much greater in the period it is thought the moon was formed.
Doh. I even misspell 'spelling'. Okay. I'm going to get spell check in Firefox working again.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
