Ha. Had the most monotone professor, world renowned in his particularly dry and boring field, but he put the Ben Stein teacher drone to shame.

There were apocryphal-seeming stories of students falling asleep in upper-level grad classes of his. Only seeming, because they sound unlikely, unless you ever took one of his classes.

Case 1: 3 or 4 students, one fell asleep, and at end of lecture prof shushed students, and turned out lights and crept out, leaving him asleep. Case 2: single student made it to lecture, fell asleep, professor kept teaching. Sounds unlikely, but I have on good authority (passersby).

Agree, for any HARD class. E.g., upper-level undergrad and grad-level theoretic courses in your (engineering)department/major. You scribble every last greek character in every equation from the board, in a desperate attempt to try to get down every jot of information (also verbal explanations). You read over your notes later to 'unpack' and store the knowledge, because you were writing so fast you were only using the short-short-term buffer of memory. Before the exam, you recopy your notes neatly, and then you magically can reproduce any arcane derivation on demand. And then again, years later, in preparation for the comprehensive exam.

I happen to work for the largest public power utility. Sorry to rain on your parade, but tranmission and distribution losses generally account for around 2-5% of power 'usage'. Probably closer to the 2% side of things when you are considering an industrial/commercial load.

Also, depending on the particular middle man you're thinking of, generally utilities' residential customers basically subsidize business customers. The utilities soak residential customers in order to give corporate rates at or slightly below costs to encourage business (and thus, residential) growth.

Businesses (esp. power intensive) decide where to locate with energy cost as a factor, human beings, not so much. So you've got to offer better industrial rates (especially to high load factor businesses such as data centers) than your neighboring utilities, otherwise the grass will be greener on the other side of your fence.

These boxes are claimed to be twice as efficient as their gas turbines equivalents. But gas turbines, while being cheap to build (comparatively!), are the most expensive to run, and are generally only brought online to meet peak demands. So half the cost of running a gas turbine might still be expensive compared to cost averaged over the entire generation mix (hydro, nuclear, and fossil being much cheaper in a variable cost sense). See also my previous comment about residential customers subsidizing commercial ones.

Finally, I wonder how 'green' these boxes really are? I mean, compared to gas turbines? Carbon goes in, so it must come back out. Maybe in a more easily sequesterable form?

I don't know what you self-named conservatives sit around smoking as you dream up these ridiculous strawmen, but, if I may speak for all liberals and progressives, we never slandered your patriotism. It seems you are projecting your own tendencies upon us. It does not make you a traitor to oppose universal health care. It just reveals that you are an ignorant jackass.