Thanks for that. That really helps improve the perspective.

It sounds as if the real win would be to build functionality into the device. Many refrigerators use the freezer as a cold store. The objects inside are frozen, and there's more latitude to lower the temperature still more without further damage as long as it remains frozen.

So you could lower the setpoint when electricity is cheap, then use that to drive the refrigerator when electricity is expensive.

I don't know if this is feasible or cost-effective; it would require more electronics (my fridge is dumb) and more engineering.

Is there really that much room in the deadband on a refrigerator that we can save significant amounts of electricity? We're talking about food spoilage here; letting the food get above 40F can be potentially lethal.

I'm not an engineer, but I am a cook, and we are extremely careful about the amount of time food spends in the danger zones. We're cautious, to be sure, but we have to consider the case of the most-susceptible people. I don't know how much room there is to slacken the parameters, and I'm sure there's some, but I'd need to see some numbers to know if the risks we're running are worth the savings we'd get. A fridge costs something like $150 per year to run, which is significant, but you'd need to demonstrate that we can save a hefty percentage of that to make it worth messing with.

That graph is plotting months, rather than years. Those are monthly spikes rather than yearly ones. (Spikes in the differential over the long-term average for that month, so you don't end up seeing the seasonal swings.) The number being discussed in the article is the global mean temperature for the entire year. Other years had higher spikes but this past one had the highest yearly mean.

Thanks for the analysis, but why would it be lighter than a conventional train?

You compare it to the monorail, but at the least it's going to have to support the tube plus the train cars itself. The tube is static rather than dynamic load, which will make things a bit easier, but it still seems like the pillars will have to be a good deal stronger than the ones in the picture. Is it simply that new materials and not having to share tracks with existing trains allow for different, lighter construction? Or the fact that it's passengers and not cargo?

I'm all for Elon Musk, and he's succeeded so often that I'm going to assume he hasn't overlooked the obvious. (I even own a bit of Tesla stock.) But I'm concerned that it might be too optimistic, and that when reality kicks in it will lose the large advantage that's needed to overcome the entrenched resistance.

And even if it were to eventually... it certainly isn't right now. Your privacy has been invaded for weeks or months. That is a fait accompli; no market reaction can undo that.

That's the thing I find baffling about the libertarian fantasists. Even if in some kind of long-term it were to eliminate some kind of abuse, it can't reverse the effects of that abuse. Pollutants stay in the environment. People injured by dangerous products remain injured. Patients who die from counterfeit medicines stay dead. You can't sue your way whole.

There are many other reasons why the market isn't nearly as frictionless as libertarian theorists like to imagine. But right here, in this case, we've got an example: you will never regain the privacy that you lost because of this. Even if you switch providers, and that forces them to change the policy, it won't return the privacy you've already lost. Markets simply aren't frictionless, and that friction makes the notion that "the market fixes everything" just plain false.

That's not to say we need infinite regulations on everything. The right level of regulation is difficult and complex, and has to be worked out as a compromise. I'm just pointing out that "oh, it'll all be OK, we never need to do anything at all" isn't a helpful contribution to that compromise.

I thought the idea of Uber wasn't to be cheaper, but more convenient. They have more drivers out working than the taxis, since it's a part-time job rather than a full-time job, and can attract drivers at surge times with higher fees.

According to http://www.businessinsider.com..., a taxi is actually cheaper than Uber in New York, and about even after tipping. But the real win is not having to hail a cab or deal with the unreliable dispatching service. They use GPS more effectively to provide better feedback. They're also a single service, rather than dozens of cab companies.

I suspect that the cabs could provide much better service by incorporating part of Uber's business model. It's a bit disturbing to me that they seem to want to win based primarily on requiring a regulation limiting the number of cars. Not that Uber is playing nicely, at least not from what I read on teh intarwebz, and if so I'd be happy to see them beaten out by somebody who will be less predatory.

And yet people go out of their way to mine them. That's why I find bitcoins so distasteful. If they were nothing more than an algorithm for cryptographically-encrypted checking accounts, denominated in the same currency I'd always been using, I'd be all for it.

Instead, it not only creates its own currency, but proceeds to hand it out for (effectively) free to early adopters, and others for the value of devoting computers and electricity to it. The fans generally have a personal interest in it, not just to improve the transfer of value but to bolster the currency they invented for the purpose. They're seeking the currency for its own value, not entirely dissimilar to hoarding it, and inventing that value in the process.

Like I said, if somebody were to craft their own blockchain and use it solely as a transfer medium, that would indeed be extremely useful. Our current transfer system is abominable. There are probably even ways to use it as a single-currency to reduce international fees. But the idea of having them sell it to me, having put in no significant work for the value they've supposedly created, is of no interest to me.

Oddly, some people don't seem to want their representatives to be smarter than they are. They want their representatives to be approachable and more like them. I also see a lot of people (including in this thread) campaigning for direct democracy.

Representation is partly about removing the day-to-day swing of the masses; the US legislature is deliberately divided between a house that is replaced very frequently and one that is more aloof. But I think it's also about the pragmatic effect of composing legislation. Legislation is never really binary; it's full of compromises and details. It would be difficult to assemble a majority coalition around any one bill rather than thousands of variants.

At the very least, that means you end up with parties. And it's difficult to conceive of how you'd do the negotiations with a full country-sized electorate. There are ways to do it; ballot propositions are really laws done by a direct majority. But it often turns out badly, and few really understand what they're voting on.

Ya know, I'm not so sure about that. The whole premise of democracy is that we are, collectively, smarter than any of us individually. Somehow, the average of the guesses comes out as closer to the truth than any of the guesses. Uninformed voters on one side of the issue cancel out uninformed voters on the other side of the issue.

There's a lot of reason to be dubious about that, but to be frank, the vast majority of voters are very uninformed about practically every issue. Any significant topic requires years or decades of study to be really expert on. And most voters will go in with nothing more than they've read in the newspaper, or worse, on TV. Take any topic you actually know in detail; do you think that any reporter has ever understood it? Here on Slashdot we regularly complain about how science and technology are misrepresented and misunderstood. Do you really think that reporting on energy issues, the economy, or foreign affairs is any better?

I'm always glad for people to want to know more, but practically everybody goes into the voting booth with a massive case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, convinced that they know the topic far better than they actually do. The whole point of democracy is to try to take that into account. Usually, we're actually voting for people to represent us, and they often know it a bit better than we do (or at least, they have advisers who do), but in the end we're really just hoping that the representative on the side of the truth will have slightly more followers than the representative who has it wrong. Democracy is designed to expose a slight bias towards reality, even if few of the individuals involved can actually justify that bias.

I'd love to live in a meritocracy where only the best experts are making decisions... but who's going to pick those experts? I'd be happy if it were me, but I bet you wouldn't be. Democracy is the closest thing I've ever seen to a fair way to pick. And if so, it only works because everybody gets to take their best guess. I suspect that the ones who know enough to know that they don't know very much are better qualified to take their guess than those who don't even know that they don't know.

Especially when you've got a news media which gets its best viewership by telling them how smart they are and that all of the smart people agree with them. They're the most dangerous voters of them all, and they vote in droves. And I can't think of any fair way to keep them out of the polls. So everybody might as well go out and vote.

Obama, by himself, can't do anything legislatively. As I explained above, the Democrats couldn't do anything by themselves except during a brief period in 2009, during which time they managed to produce one epoch-making piece of legislation.

It's true that Democrats don't work well together, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The Democratic party represents a number of different points of view. The health care bill that we did get is driven by the fact that a number of Democrats are genuinely uncomfortable with single-payer legislation. You can call that "in the pockets of big business" but they were genuinely reflecting their constituents desires (as demonstrated by the fact that most of them got creamed anyway by accusations of "soshulizm" in the next election). The Democrats' big-tent mentality is what wins them the Presidency; Republican insistence on ideology is keeping them from scoring a national majority.

The Republicans have been seen as highly effective, but only in banding together as the "party of no". You're going to see them produce little to no real legislation over the next two years, unless they radically change. The few positive ideas they have are not broadly acceptable (lowering taxes on the wealthy, eliminating social safety nets). You'll notice that they haven't been touting any alternative to the ACA, and if they try to repeal without replacing they'll find that a lot of people like actual provisions of the act. (The one they don't like is the one that pays for it, and I'd be tickled to see them eliminate *just* the coverage requirement, which would be hilarious.)

Now the Democrats get to spend two years filibustering everything the Republicans try to do (primarily eliminating environmental and safety regulations) and look more or less unified in the process. They still won't look unified, because they've got more than enough votes for the filibuster, which means that some Senators who imagine their seats are vulnerable will cross lines, but they'll be there when they need to be. And that's as the Democrats come into what should be a strong 2016, as they take back some seats that they shouldn't have lost in the 2010 wave election (just as the Republicans last year took back some seats they shouldn't have lost in 2008).

Which returns us to a Democratic Senate, probably a Democratic President, and probably a Republican House come 2017. At which point the Democrats will again fail to push a liberal agenda because they're not really a liberal party, and haven't been for a very long time. They're the party of everybody driven away by the batshit right-wing agenda of the Republicans.

Well... there is the competition from the other TV suppliers, who will try to undercut them in order to get the business for a slightly reduced profit margin.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sniff. I kill me.

No, seriously... I don't expect that this is going to dramatically cut bills on average. Some people will pay less; some will pay more. The total amount of money that consumers are willing to spend on their TV won't change, and this doesn't alter either the supply or the demand.

The cable and satellite companies do compete with each other, a little. Customers who do watch a lot of channels are going to want to continue their package deals, and won't want to pay higher prices. The customers who want individual channels will probably find that that prices are pretty high, and while they can threaten to switch to their competitor, they too will be willing to sacrifice their bottom line only so far to attract that customer. So expect it to be pretty high from both providers.

When was that, exactly? The Democrats haven't had control of the House since 2010. They did have a brief period where they had a veto-proof majority, back in 2009, but that only lasted a couple of months (after the Minnesota election was finally resolved, and before Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by a Republican). They devoted that time to health care. They didn't expect to maintain that advantage long, though they didn't expect it to end quite so soon.

Since then, there has been no chance of anything passing. Nothing has passed since then, aside from naming a few post offices and re-authorizing existing laws. I agree that the Democrats don't expect this bill to pass, and that this is more publicity stunt than serious attempt at legislation, but they might well be willing to pass it (or something like it) if they could. But they can't; the last Congress was the least productive in history and this Congress may manage to be even worse.

It's short only because it's telling the FCC to do the real work. The key bit is:

A lot of major laws are like that. The law itself grants some kind of authority to an executive branch department, and they come up with the regulations that implement that authority. That can often run into many thousands of pages, and they can change literally every single day. Regulated industries often have employees whose sole job it is to ensure that they're in compliance with the regulations.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Congress aren't experts in the domain. The executive branch employees are (or at least, are supposed to be). They work with the industry experts to clarify all of the corner cases and vaguenesses that make up any complex issue. And the issues are complex; they often seem simple to outsiders but only because they don't know what they're looking at. The same thing probably happens in your job.

The departments aren't completely unsupervised. They report, ultimately, to Presidential appointees, who have to be approved by Congress and produce regular reports to the Congress. And when things go wrong, they get hauled in front of Congress to explain themselves.

Er, digression aside... what would have happened were the bill to pass (it won't) is that the FCC would produce a lengthy set of regulations, which would surely provoke all kinds of outrage as the actual nitty-gritty details are less pleasant than the overall sentiment. In fact, I'd say that they're aware that it won't pass, which is why they get to make it so vague. Real bills, the kind where they want to strictly limit the authority of the departments to get exactly what they want, are the result of compromises within the legislature and are usually much more detailed. You can get the details in legislation or in regulation; the former is more permanent and the latter is more flexible, which can be good or bad depending on your point of view of the matter at hand. But there will be details, and they're going to be voluminous.