There was a 4.2 earthquake in western Michigan yesterday. An earthquake that size isn't news particularly in California. It was barely news in Michigan and they don't get earthquakes that size.
There is this thing called Skype and planes.
Doesn't work, not at scale anyway. The notion that location doesn't matter is a myth. Silicon Valley is what it is precisely because the people that make it what it is are located there. Move them somewhere else and Silicon Valley doesn't exist - not as we know it. Detroit is the automotive capital of the world because of the people and companies that are located there. You cannot skype that into existence. It doesn't work. You have to have the people actually living and working there.
Personally, I'd bet on Detroit for future economic ascendance- at least for the U.S. Rent ist dirt cheap and there's a distinct artsy/berlinish vibe to the people rebuilding Detroit right now - lot's of creativity and pragmatism
Don't forget that Detroit metro has among the highest density of engineering talent in the country and has for the last 50 years. There is a LOT of technology in the area already and it's not particularly hard to find talent. The biggest problem in Detroit has historically been getting funding for ventures. There is nothing quite like the VC base there is in Silicon Valley. Of course that's true almost everywhere else
This is precisely why I won't leave California. I will never sign a non-compete contract.
That has nothing inherently to do with being in California. I've never lived much west of the Mississippi and I've never signed or even been asked to sign a non-compete in well over 20 years. While they are legal in my state they are not particularly common.
The battery is good for two things:
You missed one. A third thing it is good for is grid level load leveling. If there is storage capacity in the power network you can significantly reduce the effect of fluctuating demand to the companies generating the power. Coal and nuclear plants take a while to respond to changing demand. If demand spikes then the power stations have more time to react.
The grid is not only maintained, it is also "operated". And that cost is not fixed but depends on the amount of power you transport.
Which is exactly what I said. Consumption (delivery) of power is a variable cost. If you consume no power because you have solar panels then no cost is incurred to the power company. Maintaining the infrastructure to deliver that power is largely a fixed cost so if an end consumer wants to tie into the grid they should rightly incur their share of the cost of maintaining that infrastructure.
I buy power at point A and sell it at point B, for that I need to transport the power over minimum 2 grids, a transportation grid from A, reaching close to B and a distribution grid at B, where the customer is connected.
Those are variable costs as they vary with units of power sold.
However: there are transportation losses, 5%
Simply part of the variable cost of power sold. Similar to shoplifting losses for a retail store. It's a known part of the cost of the product being sold. If they don't sell the power then no cost is incurred to buy it or produce it.
The grid loss has to be compensated by the grid operator, hence they are the ones who have reserve power plants and balancing power plants attached to the grid. And hence transporting power over a grid costs nearly the same amount as producing it.
What price the power company pays for the power delivered to end customers and where it comes from is largely irrelevant to the end customer. Electrons are fungible assets. Whether they produce it themselves or they buy it on the spot market or buy it on contract isn't important as far as you and I are concerned. They are paying for some fixed amount of grid maintenance and some variable amount of power delivery regardless of who actually produces the power. The equation doesn't change just because they buy the power from a third party.
If you put enough PV on your home, you can eliminate your electric bill. At which point, many utilities argue, the costs of maintaining the grid (that's rolled into your electric bill, but not as a separate line item) are covered by the less-wealthy.
I'm a certified cost accountant in my day job and this argument falls flat if they are actually charging in a rational manner for their services. The cost of maintaining the grid is (or should be) a separate charge from the cost of the electricity you actually use. Maintenance is a (roughly) known fixed cost, usage is a variable cost. If the person maintains a connection to the grid it is a fairly straightforward proposition to charge them a flat rate for the privilege which covers their portion of the infrastructure maintenance. Infrastructure maintenance cost is not generally strongly dependent on usage for electricity so they don't have wear issues as a general rule. If they aren't separating charges like this then they are Doing It Wrong.
The only reason the utilities have to be upset is just that they aren't making as much money.
I dont know whether it is cost, learning difficulty, or conservativism.
In my experience it's mostly disinterest and/or fear. They haven't needed it most of their lives, they are quite set in their ways and they aren't terribly interested in learning something new. They will loudly proclaim how they "just don't get this stuff" but usually that's an excuse for not wanting to learn because their brains work fine. If it's really easy the might give it a whirl but if learning requires real effort they usually cannot be bothered.
The guys who own my company are about 70. They are quite intelligent but will repeatedly ask me the same questions ("how do I print this", etc) despite having been given the explanation plenty of times. It has nothing to do with their brain but they just don't care about the answer so they don't bother committing it to memory. Easier to just ask someone else who has bothered to care.
If you have a "choice" of one ISP it's because your local Franchise Authority (your town/village/city board usually) has opted to only grant a franchise to one company.
Wrong. It is because of economics. There simply isn't enough business available to support a competitive set of ISPs where I live. I live in a town with about 10,000 residents on the distant outskirts of a major metro area. There is zero chance that any new ISP would be able to win enough business to make the investment worth their while.
I have a phone company and a cable company both of which could offer service to my residence but do not offer equivalent service. The phone company technically provides DSL service to near me but it is FAR slower and economically a non-starter. The only other option is to go LTE through the mobile phone providers but due to data caps that too is an economic non-starter. It's just not competitive at all and there is no reasonable prospect of it becoming so no matter what my local government does.
Even if my locality were to invite every ISP in the world to come play the simple fact is that in the semi-rural area where I live there isn't enough business to support more than one or two lines to my house. Since the government does not require the ISP to be separate from the company providing the wire to the house then there is effectively no way for any new entrants to make money. The capital costs of building out their own network are astronomical so there has to be a pretty substantial company backing it and enough business they can capture to make it worth their while.
Don't blame the ISP for your local politicians' inability to stand up for you.
I don't. The economics of the situation are plain and a regulated monopoly will get me better service than any feasible set of competitors where I live. The best case I could realistically hope for is a duopoly which isn't a prospect to get excited about.
Good FCC regs would get the hell out of the way of the ISPs who -- really -- have done nothing to deserve what they're getting.
Who is your ISP? Mine is Comcast and they very much deserve to be regulated rather heavily. I have a "choice" of precisely one ISP where I live and I can assure you that they abuse the privilege. I want them to provide me a pipe to my house and get out of the way. They do not need to be in the business of determining what speed packets should be delivered to my location. Particularly if they start prioritizing their own content (Comcast owns NBC for instance) over what I actually want to watch. There is NO benefit to me as the consumer for my local telecom monopoly to not be regulated. None.
Libertarianism is about the correct amount of regulation and no more.
Which is where they go off the rails because there is no such thing as "the correct amount of regulation". There is a range of regulations that work and beyond it they don't work. There is no one right answer. You can have a more socialist country or a more capitalist one and both can work just fine. This isn't supposition on my part - there are plenty of real world examples of both. There is a range of what works. Some amount of regulation is absolutely required for a society to function. Beyond that there is a range of quantity of regulation that works. Further on you can over-regulate things to death.
The problem libertarians frequently have is they tend to confuse less regulation with being better. Sometimes that's true but frequently it isn't. It's the same mistake a lot of conservatives make regarding taxes - thinking less always equals better when that is demonstrably not true. Sometimes the regulations we have exist for very good reasons but some let ideology get in front of what actually works. You might prefer less regulation to more and that's a fine viewpoint to have but when one gets to the point where you are screeching that all regulations are bad then you no longer are arguing the facts.
If you think all regulation is bad, congratulations, you are an Anarchist.
Exactly. And thinking all regulation is good is just as stupid.
Did you ever read Jefferson's original rough draft of the Declaration? In it, he wrote England had:
I don't really care what he wrote. He remained a slave owner which says everything that needs to be said about his opinions on the matter. Jefferson was a remarkable man but also a very flawed one.
Slavery was an institution the US inherited from hits colonial days.
Inherited so enthusiastically that 100 years later we had a civil war over it and didn't get anything even remotely resembling real equality until almost 200 years later though many would argue we still aren't quite there. And we're still dealing with the effects.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all called slavery "repugnant" and "evil".
And yet Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died so clearly they didn't really believe that even if they said so. Actions speak much louder than words. Yes I'm viewing it with modern day viewpoints but the fact remains that they had the choice to free their slaves and I'm quite sure they were aware of that at the time and chose against it.
You can read up on it if you care. You may disagree with their reasoning, but their choices certainly were not "ironic".
I have read up on it and I very much disagree. Ironic, hypocritical, self serving... take your pick of description - they all fit. Yes it was a political compromise but there was nothing forcing Washington and Jefferson to continue to own slaves if they really believed it was a repugnant practice. Maybe they disliked the practice but clearly not enough to stop doing it.
If you read John Locke, as Jefferson did, and as did just about every educated, politically-minded person of the time, you'd know in what sense "equal" is being used. It's a very narrow concept. "All men are created equal" means that there is no man or group of men on earth who can claim a right to be the political rulers of anyone else.
Which is rich considering that many of the guys who were behind the writing of that document were slave owners. You're quite correct of course but the irony is rather thick.
More likely it will lead to a generation of very disappointed and disillusioned engineers, who find that real world engineering is VERY different from the kind of engineering their university taught them was the norm.
That's because many college engineering professors have absolutely no idea what engineering is like in the real world. Some have worked as actual engineers but most of them in my experience went straight into academia with its toy problems and research focus that has little to do with real world engineering. They gloss over stuff that you'll spend a lot of time doing in the real world.
Things they don't teach you in engineering school
* They don't teach nearly enough CAD which is a huge part of doing actual engineering for many engineering disciplines
* They don't teach you how to write good engineering documents and work instructions (most engineers are quite bad at this)
* They don't teach you about process improvement methods (Six Sigma, Kaizen, etc) used in the real world
* They don't teach you about budgets, accounting, cost justifications, or financing (they're REALLY bad about this one)
I could go on an on. You'll learn a lot in an engineering college curriculum but relatively little of it will be directly useful in real world engineering.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
