Yeah, and if you want to be scientific about that, and be honest, you'll see that cops stop a lot more people in high crime areas, and that poor urban areas tend to have lots of crime. And that some of those poor areas have a larger black population. If those areas weren't marinated in serious crime, there wouldn't be so many warrants out, stolen cars, cars full of contraband, and the rest.

What? The people whose lives are messed up are those who have to live in areas like west Baltimore where local thugs make daily life miserable for everyone else who lives there or tries to run a business there. So yes, the cops are asked to "get results," because the absence of any results would make those areas completely lost to civilization, rather than just sucking generally. Would you rather that the cops were told NOT to arrest known violent gang members, serial assault and battery specialists, and the like? What would you have them do?

That's a very insightful way to address the substance of the matter. Obviously you're not willing to say the actual numbers or description of the situation is incorrect ... you're just mad at someone for pointing it out? I get that. But you're not really making any sort of lucid point.

What? Each year, people's wages are taxed into those programs, and funds are transferred, that year, to the people who receive it. There is no "savings account." There is no "I paid into Social Security, so I'll get X when I retire." The amount that retired/disabled people get from that entitlement program is determined legislatively each year, and if you bother to read the fine print in your SS statement, you'll see that they explicitly remind you that there is no guarantee you'll get any future benefits.

Each year, funds are transferred from the people who pay to the people who collect.

Nonsense. It's not a distraction, it's different topic than the ebb and flow of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which are transfer welfare taxes). Income taxes are what pay for all discretionary spending (the military, federal agencies like the EPA, the FAA, the FCC and a jillion other activities). There's a good reason we look at all of those differently than we do the entitlement programs.

And ... capital gains? You do realize that a whole lot of middle class people also earn capital gains, right? Directly or indirectly, through things like mutual funds. Warren Buffet's secretary can put a pizza's worth of cash every month into some investments when she's young, and can and should be looking forward to earning some money from that. You know, just like him: taking money on which she's already paid taxes, and putting it entirely at risk in an investment that stimulates the economy and if and when it happens to pay off, paying more taxes on that activity.

If Warren Buffet loses money in an investment? He doesn't get to write that off against his income taxes - he just loses it, plain and simple. But he's smart, and usually makes good investments. If he's making money, the money he risked is being put to very good use in an active economy. That's the entire reason why we reward that risk taking with a lower tax rate - because we want more of that risk taking to happen.

All of which has nothing to do with transfer entitlement taxes.

Nonsense. Well-off people pay the vast majority of the income taxes in this country. Nearly half the people in the country pay no income taxes at all (though they still get to vote on what happens to the money collected from the other people who do).

The top 5% of earners pay almost 60% of the taxes. The top 25% of earners pay over 86% of the taxes. The bottom HALF of the country pays under 3% of those taxes. So how do you come up with "never actually do pay" - ? These numbers come from the IRS. The people who cash the checks you say aren't being written.

Gore LOST in every carefully examined recount conducted in exhaustive after-the-fact tests run by a panel of journalism outlets (including some that actively opposed Bush and worked to get Gore in office). Most importantly, Gore lost in studied recounts that followed the capricious guidelines he tried to get the Florida supreme court to enforce.

No, the Supreme Court stopped a corrupt recount process, aided by a partisan state court, from continuing under unreasonable and unfair conditions. They didn't "appoint" Bush the winner, they called out Gore's cherry-picking, standards-shifting strategy for being the craven election-grab it was trying to be.

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.