Awesome, thanks... I missed that one!

Can't help but to wonder about the tax consequences of this both to Watson and all Nobel prize winners.

The US already treats prestigious awards (Nobels, Olympics, etc) as taxable income.

Watson hocking his medal doesn't change much. And depending on how much of it he actually donated, he may have no actual taxable liability as a result of the sale.

PsySSA can probably name a few for you.

Probably even a few with a bit more up-to-date methods than an Austrian pervert dead some 75 years now...

Where do I get one of these bots?

I don't want the money, I just want to make sure Madison Ave doesn't have it either.

delete from dbo.FIREHOSE where submitted_by = "Bennett Haselton" ;
delete from dbo.USERS where username = "Bennett Haselton" ;
insert into dbo.banned (username, duration) select "Bennett Haselton", -1 ;

And I still failed to mention that second point, duh. For that daily fuel use, I meant to compare the lower end of the usage range, so 2.9 gallons every six to eight hours, rather than every hour.

Ah, I may have spoken poorly on two points. First, I primarily meant that small portable generators don't function as efficiently as they could. "Bigger is better", in this case, up to a point - So while I can power my house on a portable 5KW LPG in a pinch, if I had a dedicated, pad-mounted, tank-fed 10KW diesel, I could realistically expect to get more than double the fuel efficiency out of it... Except, I bought that 5KW for under a thousand, whereas a quality 10KW diesel would easily run me up to a thousand per KW. All a matter of tradeoffs. :)

If someone can reasonably live without healthcare

I honestly can't tell if you meant to agree with me, or mock me. I'd guess mocking, but wow did you miss that mark, if so. FWIW, I actually came thiiis close to using the "popularity" of mandatory health insurance as an example in that response.

And I say that as someone who supports socialized healthcare - I just consider the clusterfuck we have here in the US almost beyond belief in its uselessness. So we give tax subsidies to (some) needy people, to pay a private company so they can technically have "insurance" - With a deductible so high that it still won't save anyone who qualifies for those subsidies from medical bankruptcy if they ever actually manage to reach their deductible? And meanwhile, as someone who actually gets - sorry, past tense, "got" - halfway decent insurance through work, what has happened to my coverage? "Dingdingding" if you went with "the same thing that happens in any industry the government actively requires you to do business with - Higher prices and lower quality".

The problem is that if the rich areas start being able to mostly go off grid, the franchise provider is now screwed having to provide to the high cost areas while still also serving the low cost areas, but receiving much smaller revenue due to the roof top solar/batteries cutting usage of the grid.

If we consider subsidizing power to the poor a valuable social service, then we should state that bluntly and not beat around the bush with regulations technically disconnected from that goal. "Sure, you can go off grid, but you'll still need to pay a $25 a month tax so your neighbors can pay less". Simple as that.

Realistically, though, people already have ways around these regulations. Simplest case, AFAIK nowhere has outright banned solar installations, only either going off-grid or a grid-tie system. A mechanical cutover switch, rather than a grid-tie, satisfies both of those conditions, and counts as pretty common hardware for whole-house generator backup systems. Of course, if you think people resent their electric bills now, wait until they literally have to pay $25 a month, every month, for 0KWH. IMO, you'd find that more palatable as a feel-good tax than as a "fee" paid to companies only slightly less hated than cable and cellular carriers.

Personally, though (and I accept that you may legitimately disagree with me on this), I don't see it as necessarily beneficial to force the poor to pay $100-200 a month just because my standard of living requires electricity. If someone can reasonably live without power and can find a better use for a grand or two per year, hey, more power (no pun intended) to 'em!

Thank you for that correction, lest someone actually try it. FWIW, I meant that more rhetorically than seriously. :)

I see your point, and largely agree (and even with three days' storage, I'd still want a backup generator).

Have you ever actually run a generator for three days straight, though? I had that pleasure during a power outage about three weeks ago... Those things eat a lot of fuel; for my current rig, it will go through 20lbs of LPG in about an hour if I pretend I have normal mains service, or six to eight hours if I limit my use to the bare necessities.

Now, $90 a day for power definitely beats sitting around in the dark, pissing in a bucket, and having all the food in the fridge go bad; but only when it happens once, maybe twice a year. How often do you get a few days straight of rain, or even just heavy cloudcover? And I realize a larger diesel genny lowers the running costs drastically (at the expense of portability and up-front cost), but still talking about 5-10 gallons a day (which extends to roughly $500-1000 per month, at current prices).

No mistake, I very much support solar, and do have my own (small) grid-tie system; but without enough of a buffer to limit your generator use to that same one or two days a year, you'd do better to stay on the grid and deal with the utilities' extortionate hatred of all things renewable.

Jokes aside, I think what you describe has more to do with personality than the device.

I too held out until recently on getting a smartphone, and only made the leap because my literally 8YO flip phone wouldn't hold a charge for a full day and they stopped making new batteries for it in 2010.

And despite having a massively powerful, high resolution, always-online device in my pocket for sixteen hours a day, I find that I only do one thing with it that I didn't previously - Check my email (though I don't do it more often, just more conveniently). Other than for an incoming phone call, I have every other alert I can disable, disabled on it. I find web browsing almost unusable on it, not for speed or resolution, but simply due to screen size (hey, great, I can read Slashdot at "full size" on it... With a frickin' microscope!). I just can't imagine trying to seriously waste more than a few minutes using it to surf the web. Some cheesy games, I could maybe see, but the few I tried all drained the battery faster than a California reservoir - Thereby making it useless for its primary purpose, portably taking phone calls (and if I have it plugged in all the time, why the hell not just use a "real' computer?)

Actually, sorry, I lied - I do find it pretty convenient as a camera, too. But I don't see that as having much to do with its role as a phone/computer; rather, just one less device I need to carry around.

That seems very pessimistic. Laws requiring electricity are typically to force a minimum standard of living

Then a home solar installation should satisfy that standard, no?

Not to mention, some people consider not having electricity as a higher quality of life. Should we force the Amish to stay up late watching TV just because most Americans feel horrified that someone, somewhere might not know the latest news about the Kardashians?


pushing power to the grid is a matter of complexity and annoyance rather than greed.

Complexity? Fire up a generator at home. Use a double-male plug to connect it to an outlet. Congrats, you've just backfed power to the grid. In fact, it counts as so easy, doing what I just described actually breaks the law and makes you liable if a lineman gets injured or killed because of you (thus all grid-tie inverters either have anti-islanding protection, or a hard physical cutover).

The complexity comes entirely from billing. Suddenly, your net power usage for the month no longer accurately describes your real use of the grid. Since your local electric company doesn't care where you get your power (you pay them for transmission, the actual cost of the electric supply gets billed through them but they don't keep it), this reduces to a simple matter of greed - They have no motivation to fix their own shortcomings because they won't make any more than they would by simply blocking end-user generation.

I suppose you could fairly call that "annoyance", but y'know what? I really don't care in the least about whether the likes of PG&E or CalEd find my choices convenient. Though a utility, they still count as a for-profit company - They can either provide what the customers want, or the customers will find alternatives.

If you read carefully, you'll see that nowhere does Caldwell mention increasing privacy. Just that it counts as a top priority.

"Privacy concerns are not just tacked onto our investigations, they are baked in" makes perfect sense, and doesn't at all contradict the idea that the FBI wants backdoors into everything, or that the NSA already has them. The fact that they want backdoors is a valid privacy concern: How can they most efficiently strip the public of it.

Amazing what you can say without lying, when you carefully pick your choice of words.

Better battery technology would be an incredible benefit for some utilities. They could store some of their excess generation output at non-peak times and sell that electricity later on at times of peak demand.

Absolutely!

But... So could we. Currently, solar has become cheap enough that you can see an ROI on a grid-tie system in well under a decade (under five years if you can do most of the work yourself and just get a sign-off on final inspection from a licensed electrician). Key phrase there, however, "grid-tie" - Meaning you don't need to care whether or not your installation actually meets your home's total demand, nor do you need to care about aligning your home's production and demand curves.

In order to make going totally off-grid viable, you need the ability to cheaply and safely store somewhere in the ballpark of 100KWH (three to four days for a typical US household). Currently, that costs a small fortune in batteries, not to mention the space they take up, the weight, the outgassing, the useful lifetime, etc. If Elon turns all those problems into one pallet-sized box that sits outside your house and has one wire in from your array, and one wire out to your breaker box, all for a few grand - Suddenly a hundred million Americans have no use for the local electric company.