From TFA:

So while a shortcut down a sleepy street might not be a problem in a place like Des Moines or even Detroit, it's a different story in a city that last year was again ranked No. 1 for the nation's most time-consuming traffic jams.

Why wouldn't it be a problem for those of use not living in Trendville? It was a hell of a problem here in a town much smaller (37k) than either Detroit (681k) or Des Moines (203k) where cars would speed (during non rush hour) down a neighborhood street or pack it bumper to bumper (during rush hour) to cut around a stop light - especially when the elementary school one more street over was letting out and the area was filled with kids walking home. It finally took a kid getting hit (though thankfully not seriously injured) before the city stopped "studying the problem" and got around to blocking one end of the street.

The Apollo programme was 4% of GDP, by itself.

4% of the Federal budget, not GDP - and even then, it only touched that value for two years.

Books are portrait, I'll give you that. But you unfold them into a landscape A5-ish or large book with multiple columns (because of the difficulty of printing very near the gutter in the middle).

The sheets of paper are flat when they're printed - it's no more difficult to print near where the gutter will be when the pages are folded and cut than for any other part of the sheet. But that nitpick aside, though they open to landscape, with few exceptions (full page spreads) we deal with them as two side-by-side portrait format chunks.
 

Photographs? Mostly landscape and certainly specified in landscape size and cameras are mostly designed for landscape operation (except when making portraits - for which we shockingly use them portrait!)

Anyone from the serious hobbyist up uses landscape or portrait interchangeably as the composition demands. (The composition, not the subject.)

This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector

who is this "us" he is talking about? because with just a little thought, you quickly realized these "billions of dollars" are just transfers from the (assumed) wealthy building owners to the less wealthy contractors and workers.

Who is this us? The not-wealthy lady running a photography studio whose rent just went up to pay for the refits. (And her customers.) And the not-wealthy guy renting an apartment. And the not wealthy family running a little convenience store. And that's just the not-wealthy renters. The not-wealthy owners of the buildings their businesses are in or they reside in aren't in any better situation. (This may come as a surprise to you, but people outside the 1% can and do own buildings.)

I was thinking he sounds more like the kind of parent who forces his kid to do _________, so the parent can relive their glory years and bask in the reflected glory. Baseball, beauty pageants, dance, piano, football, video games... it the act that matters, not the activity.

You just set up a industrial park next to your data center, build in some heat transfer systems and offer the waste heat as value add for a bit of $ into whatever medium the customer wants (air, water, etc). In no time at all you will have all sorts of setups that require heat for their industrial use

Very unlikely. What comes out of a data center is diffuse, low grade heat. Maybe useful for running a dehydrator or drying system, maybe replacing building heating systems... but not much more as the temperature is too low.
 

This is one thing the Scandinavians and Germans have always understood, once you make the heat you might as well use it because it's damned foolish just to waste it. They use waste heat all the time for community driven heating and for all sorts of things and it probably ends up saving all kinds of money.

It's common in Scandinavia because of the climate - but not many people live in that cold of a climate. (The equivalent latitudes in the America's are way the hell up in Canada.) Geography matters.

With massive proven returns on the dollar we need to more than double NASA's budget.

[[Citation needed]] - from an independent source, not just one that repeats NASA's propaganda spin.

Depending on what kind of usage you want to cover

No it doesn't, it depends on the power usage of the house - unless you expect the residents to go into power saving mode every night and every time there's cloudy weather.
 

My household uses a bit less than 10kWh per day

Googling about, that shows you well below the American average (roughly 30KWh/day). And even with a full 30KWh battery... I haven't seen the sun in six days. (Not at all unusual for this time of year.)

Hence the ongoing need for baseload.

Those utilities are not envisioning the fact that all that power savings that is "eating into their profits" today is energy they can sell to tomorrow's customers. Why? Because populations grow over time, and they grow quite quickly. Instead of bitching about the paper loss they think they are seeing, they should be celebrating the fact that they don't have to build more power-plants and infrastructure for 10-20 years and will be able to serve a much larger base with the same infrastructure.

The problem here isn't short term thinking - it's that you're utterly clueless. If the population goes up, capacity still has to go up - because the utility has to have the capacity to supply the grid when renewable sources aren't available. If you have twice the population, you have twice the night time load - and you need twice the daytime capacity available for cloudy days, for deeply cold days, etc... etc...

Not to mention that in many urban areas, a good chunk of that growth will go into apartments - which don't have sufficient roof space for solar to offset a significant part of consumption.

Renewable power sources are not magic, and they are a supplement, not a replacement, for baseload capacity.

If a car can have a 85KWh battery then why can't a house have a 10KWh battery?

I never said they couldn't - I said they'd be expensive. (And 10KWh isn't very much.)
 

The price of batteries is set to plummet due to mass scale production of electric cars which need the batteries

Which means that if you add additional demand for batteries for houses... the prices are going to go right back up. (Supply and demand, simple economics.) And even "plummeted" prices are still very expensive - into five figures.

What planet are you from? No utility I'm aware of gives away power for free. Not to mention you completely ignored the required to cover periods when solar is providing sufficient power during the day. (Etc... etc...) You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

They have good reason to be nervous... They'll still be on the hook to provide full power when solar is producing less than peak capability or isn't producing at all, but there's little chance they'll be allowed to significantly raise their rates. This works out to being required to maintain full generating and transmission capacity with sharply reduced revenue.
 
Not to mention that very few people installing subsidized and/or cheap solar panels will spend the money to install unsubsidized and expensive battery capacity. That's long been a deep flaw in the thinking of solar power supporters - that they can have their cake and eat it too, the unspoken assumption that the utilities will always be there and will always have the capacity to make up any lack. You get what you pay for folks, TANSTAAFL.

Four CAD drawings are not worth getting excited about. When the number gets above 4 million, we're probably talking some serious information about the carrier.

Depends on *which* four drawings they are and the purpose you intend to put them to. Four drawing doesn't sound like much to uninitiated, but the right four drawings can be very valuable to the professional and/or the knowledgeable. For example, a drawing showing the locations of ammunition magazines, [aviation] fuel bunkers, the reactor spaces, and the engines rooms shows you location of the most important spaces. Add a drawing of the armor arrangement on top of that, and now you can analyze where you might want to put a limpet mine or pull a boat loaded with explosives alongside for maximum possible effect. (Etc... etc...)
 
Four million drawings *sounds* impressive, but in reality 3,999,900 of those drawings will be completely boring stuff of not much use or interest to anyone except the shipyard building the carrier and any future shipyard overhauling the carrier. The remaining hundred? They're the ones that guys with bad intentions want because analyzing them shows potential vulnerable spots. Even if someone wants the plans to analyze to build their own carrier...., they only want/need a fraction of the total number of drawings. (The detailed arrangement of the berthing spaces, or the layout of the kitchen, or the as-installed electrical diagram for the lighting system really aren't much use.)
 
Disclaimer: Former USN Submarine Service - I spent a *lot* of time looking at ship's drawings....

Which is a fascinating thought, because let's face it: Controlling people's sexuality, has a lot more to do with cultural and especially religiously ingrained norms, than it has to do with any kind of harm.

And her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?

Well, those contacts do wear down and require require regular maintenance as do the rails themselves. That such maintenance was done is the reason you were able to get to work.