So, the corruption you're worried about is something that you think will be fixed by trashing a liquor store? By looting and burning the local CVS? By burning down an almost completely senior center being built specifically to improve the local quality of life in that crappy neighborhood?

Yes, the democrats that have been running that city for decades have plenty to answer for in the way of imperfect services being rendered. But unless you think it's the city government's role to step in between two people and prevent pregnancy from occurring, or to follow thousands of kids around to make sure they actually bother to go to school, then what exactly is it you're proposing? Who is it that starts and populates violent local gangs? Who is it that kills the vast majority of those who die in that area, and scares those who aren't involved out of doing anything about it? Why is it that businesses don't see any point in risking their money to launch a venture in such a neighborhood - perhaps because they can't find employable local people to actually work there, and can't find a market for their goods and services in an area that's filled with abandoned buildings and fatherless kids running drug markets?

The problem isn't government corruption, the problem is in thinking that what amounts to a poisonous local culture is the government's area of responsibility. Those neighborhoods are crap because the people that live there can't keep their own kids under control long enough to turn them into viable members of human civilization. And those that do have the wherewithal to do so leave (along with whatever economic activity they might have represented) because the local culture is completely toxic to their kids' success.

A few thousand reduced-to-ashes New Yorkers might, if they were alive, argue with your dismissal of their deaths at the hands of radical jihaddis as being non-proximate, and shadowy. They are indeed quite literally dead. Multiple very non-shadowy attempts (some very successful) by the same and related groups to kill other people, in large numbers, have also happened since then.

Which, of course, is BS and not at all how it actually happened. Which you know.

They guy who observed the mold's properties was terrible at communicating his thoughts about it, and had trouble getting help from chemists to stabilize the important stuff. TEN YEARS go buy, and other researchers get the work done. Then THEY travel to the US to find drug manufacturers that might be interested in taking on the complex task of mass production.

You know, pretty much the opposite of your troll list.

Just like penicillin.

The POWER required has to match, input to output. On that count, I will agree with you. In that regard, it's synchronous. And if I want to grid-tie an inverter, the inverter must be able to match voltage, frequency and phase to what is being supplied to the house. And yes, when you change the load applied to an AC generator, the frequency will vary slightly, but they have feedback mechanisms on those to keep frequency within a very narrow range. But the electricity reaching my home is coming from multiple power plants; if this one varied frequency significantly, it would throw it out-of-sync with that one, hence the feedback and regulation of same.

May I direct your attention to this article? I know for a fact that the rural electrical coop, to which I'm attached, is sending out well over 1 kV to the transformer outside my house. The transformer is converting it to 240VAC 60 Hz split-phase, and it's compensating for the fact that the 2, 120 VAC channels in my home are not perfectly balanced. So the transformer is fairly sophisticated, in that regard. But sending 240 VAC split-phase long distance is going to require some VERY thick lines to avoid resistance losses. They avoid this by transmitting very high voltages (some places, over 1 megaVolt) and keeping the current down. That minimizes transmission losses. The distances involved STILL get some significant losses, but they'd be FAR worse if they were transmitting 240 VAC, long-distance.

It's one thing to sell a battery. Musk is selling the complete package:

• battery
• rectifier and inverter, such that the battery can interface to the AC power in the home
• charge controller, such that rectified DC power can go into/out of the batteries without overdoing it

The lithium batteries he's using aren't exactly cheap; you're quite right that lead-acid batteries are cheaper. But the electronics needed to interface the batteries to the home add considerably to the price. And a good charge controller, with lithium batteries, will get a lot more charge/discharge cycles, meaning it will last a lot longer than lead-acid batteries.

IIUC, he's going for a system which will work, reliably, mostly invisibly, for over a decade. That takes some engineering. To make a battery last longer, you typically only discharge it part of the way. Let's say you go for 80% Depth of Discharge. That means you need 1.25 x as much battery capacity but you will get a lot more charge/discharge cycles out of it than 100% (that will kill a lithium battery, typically in < 100 cycles). Going to 66% DoD will require 1.5 x as many batteries but give you considerably more charge/discharge cycles. No word on what DoD level he's charging/discharging the batteries.

I have a Camry Hybrid. It has NIMH batteries. The system does about 25% DoD, meaning that the batteries really don't store much. But they last and last and last.

They don't care. But in the Court of Public Opinion, where they need a win if they're going to get what they want, that pushes a LOT of people's buttons. If I believe that Climate Change is a hoax, PV is regarded as a waste of money. The notion that I, who do NOT have PV on my home, may be subsidizing the grid for someone who does ... So they play that card.

I don't know that it's inherently more difficult. It IS, however, a very DIFFERENT skillset. And just because I'm good at communicating with a computer (programming) doesn't mean I'm good at communicating with management. Indeed, if the Programmers' Stone is to be believed, programmers and managers are very different in how they comprehend stuff, not to mention how they communicate.

The truly gifted can speak both languages. Most of us speak only one. And we don't even realize there IS another way to comprehend/communicate. If/when we do, though, it result can be wonderful.

IMHO, the things every programmer-promoted-to-management needs to know are found in that link and in The Mythical Man-Month. I, routinely, run into situations where management still hasn't learned the lessons from that book. And life for me, as a programmer with ZERO interest in going into management, would be so much better if they would learn from that tome.

Save it for what?

To try to bring it home to Earth? Where we have no means to recover it and bring back to the the surface? Even if we did, to put it in some museum, so elementary school kids on a field trip can look at it and go "whatever?" After it's been exposed to years of hard radiation in space, closer to the Sun?

Seriously. Save it for what? Better to let it finish it's job and become its own monument. Maybe, someday, another probe will get to see it. We sure as hell won't.

Many of the utility companies, such as the ones in Arizona and Hawaii, are griping about people adding solar PV to their homes. These people have, typically, used Net Metering; any power they produce in excess of what they consume at any moment is fed back into the grid and, when their demand exceeds their supply, they draw from the grid. The utility company gets to "reimburse" them for the power they contribute. In some areas (California), 1 kWh contributed during peak hours = > 1 kWh they can withdraw during off-peak hours. But that's pretty generous; most power companies don't even like 1 : 1.

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. The poor are subsidizing the grid for the wealthy, they argue. And they argue, further, that they should be able to charge people who are using Net Metering even if they ARE producing as much power as they're consuming.

Where I live, I pay a monthly connection charge ( < $20 / month) + $0.085 / kWh. In short, my electrical co-op breaks these out as separate line items on the bill. Even if I put in enough PV to go Net Zero, so long as I'm connected to the grid, I'm at least paying the monthly connection charge. The Arizona utility wanted a connection charge / kWh installed PV, to the point that the homeowners who installed the PV ended up paying the same, without or without the PV. In short, they wanted to eliminate any incentive to add PV and connect to the grid. They did get approval for a connection charge / kWh installed, but it was a fraction of what they wanted.

In Hawaii, where power is routinely $0.39 / kWh (it's made, largely, from imported petroleum), solar PV and Net Metering are so widespread that entire neighborhoods are producing excess power during the height of the day. It's to the point where HECO gets to veto whether or not you can add PV to your home; you have to get permits from them and they're getting harder to acquire. Because the transformers which convert distributed power (typically lower frequency and higher voltage) to the household power (60 Hz / 240 VAC split-phase) are made to work efficiently, one-way. Going the other way, they are considerably less efficient. If you are a net producer and your neighbor is a larger, net consumer, you're supplying your neighbor and the local transformer simply converts less power going into that neighborhood. When the entire neighborhood is a net producer, the transformer has a problem. So they limit how much power can be produced in each neighborhood.

I used to think this was all about the power/utility companies trying to defend their bottom line. That's still part of it, but I've come to realize there are technical reasons, too. Installing efficient, bi-directional transformers would require:

1. installing a second, bi-directional transformer
2. taking down the power to an entire neighborhood while they switch over
3. decommissioning and moving the old transformer

at considerable expense. And that latter part, well, you KNOW they're not going to let their executives and/or shareholders eat that cost. And many utilities are regulated, such that they have to get approvals for rate increases. Which aren't easy to get. So there's technical reasons AND financial reasons for the utilities to grip.

Put a battery pack on your home, like one of these. Get an inverter which feeds excess to the battery and NEVER exports to the grid. The power company loses their only technical reason to gripe, because you are no longer doing Net Metering. At that point, it's all about the Benjamins.

Indeed, if you get to the point where your home is truly Net Zero, long-term, you can go completely off-grid. At which point they no longer have a say in the matter.

Iran, or their armed and funded proxies?

Because of their frequently asserted world view and actions.

Right. It's too much trouble. That's why they send material and support to others to do it for them.

So, should China have had any power to influence the lives of people in Japan when Japan started its whole Pacific Rim debacle some decades ago? Should the people of Eastern Europe have considered it just too rude to think about modifying the capabilities or behavior of their friendly neighbors, the Ottomans, as those neighbors gathered up a head of steam and sought to spread their friendly culture westward?

Do you live in a country that begins its legislative sessions with group chants about the destruction of other countries? Does your country aggressively support groups that state their objective of slaughtering others specifically because of their religion and/or heritage, and then indeed actually go and help them do it? Do you really think that the world isn't connected, and that people bent on an apocalyptic world view aren't a good fit for having the leverage of nuclear weapons as they seek to control, among other things, major global shipping lanes?

Do you think that just because you don't think someone else should be able to impact your life, that that will actually stop someone who thinks you should be killed for allowing your daughter to read, or for trimming your beard, etc., from not exactly seeing the world in a way reciprocal with you? Being an isolationist doesn't work when someone trapped in a brutal, medieval, theocratic mindset thinks you're suitable only for death, and thinks that isolationism by others is for the weak, and is to be exploited.

Methanol is part of the process. But it's not the end of the process.

Gasoline and diesel aren't good for you, if you get physical exposure to them. Methanol makes them look like water, by comparison. There's a reason why very, VERY few places use methanol as a fuel. It's a potent neurotoxin, very carcinogenic and exposure to the vapors from it can cause permanent blindness.

They create methanol, as an intermediate step in the process, but they process it further to make it into longer-hydrocarbon-chain fuels. The main component of diesel is one of them. Not as clean, but much safer.

I'm partial to DiMethyl Ether (DME). Chemically similar to propane/LPG, and equipment for storing/transporting LPG works fine for storing/transporting DME. Propane heaters, stoves, etc. run on DME without further modification. Cars which are converted to run on LPG run, with no further modification, on DME. It works well in diesel engines, too (better than propane/LPG; as with a spark-ignition engine, some conversion is necessary). And it's a good turbine fuel. Yes, you need propane-like tanks (DME needs about 5 bar pressure to liquify) but it burns really clean. Indeed, since it has no carbon chains (formula: CH3-O-CH3), diesel engines can burn this and have ZERO particulate emissions. Russia and Japan have been making it from Natural Gas for a couple decades, because both countries have significant "stranded" natural gas supplies and DME is easier to ship and store.