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Comment Re:Go wireless (Score 1) 324

Find someone who can get 50mb+ cable/dsl that is near your subdivision and put up a mesh network connecting the homes with that site. Get a VPS that is geographically near you or in the normal path for your internet traffic with sufficient ip addresses that you tunnel back to your subdivision. Instant ISP, the cable/dsl guys will just see tons of VPN traffic and never know....

Comment Re:Too bad (Score 1) 277

Does Canada have some form of energy assistance that Theo can apply for to keep the power on in his garage? Many US states have programs that cap power under 7% of your income if you are poor as I assume he is with the lack of donations paying his bills, surly Canada does as well.

Comment Re:Minimal ghg impact (Score 3, Interesting) 314

I looked at several ethanol proposals back in the 2000's, every single one I took a pass on investing in because it was obvious that I would loose my shirt the second the government pulled the rug. These things, just like wind, have never been or never could be profitable without the subsidy. Anyone who was dumb enough to invest in these things deserves to lose their shirt. I completely gave up on renewable energy in 2008 when it was clear to me that no one wanted real solutions, just government handouts. I saw several technologies and processes never built because they were profitable on their own and everyone wanted something with a government handout attached.

Another major issue is with renewable power generation that isn't wind or solar. I can list off 10 projects that the utilities conspired to kill because they would be able to drive down the price of electricity in an area forcing them to shut down their legacy generation due to oversupply. The wind/solar mandate is the culprit in many of these cases as they have no choice but to buy X amount of wind/solar and they have to buy at the public market (electricity is traded electricity on a market based system in regional markets) so anything other than what they have and the feds require is a major threat for them.

Comment Re:Diesel is a better solution (Score 1) 314

People need to stop projecting their values and worldview on valueless lying politicians whose worldview is you could never imagine. Many smart and decent people assume that politicians (usually the ones on the team they support) are also smart, decent, and share their values. Where in fact they may be smart, they are not decent and care nothing for the greater good, only their own good disguised as the greater good, open your eyes.

Comment Re:Why subsidize? (Score 1) 1030

All production subsidies are bad.

Letting someone write off a oil well in one year (due to high failure rates) or adjusting the depreciation schedule as production declines (Depletion) are not subsidies they are needed parts of our tax system. Just as the other so called subsidies keep the price under pressure keeping oil profits (9% margin is considered great in that business) up by filling the strategic petroleum reserve and low income heating assistance, are really helping someone other than the oil co's.

Whenever someone says the GOP or the Dems are/dont/* it is usually clear they have no idea whats going on and are only interested in a false right/left paradigm and have failed to see that there is no difference between the two except the exact same set of lies.

Comment Why subsidize? (Score 1, Insightful) 1030

If solar is doing so great then why does it need subsidies? Thats what the GOP doesn't like, not that such a thing exists, but that the government creates distortions in the economy by picking winners before the race starts. Old school republicans and libertarians both distaste government intervention. Solar will eventually become cost effective without subsidies, lets wait for that to happen.

Comment modernize the telco deregulation (Score 2) 569

In the US telco companies are required to lease their plant at wholesale rates to competitive exchange carriers. This deregulation is what gave us unlimited long distance and voip. In most areas of the country DSL that can be leased on a wholesale basis is quite slow based in technology issues. CLEC's are mostly stuck buying bare wires from the customer premise to the local telco exchange, putting the loop distance in the ADSL range. They have kept CLEC's out of their VDSL and fiber products due to how the telco deregulation law was written. If we want faster broadband we need to modernize the telco deregulations to include cable companies and vdsl/fiber products. There is no reason who comcast can not lease several blocks of 12 channels to competitors on a wholesale basis to run docsis 3 over. Comcast and other cable co's are very inefficient with their bandwidth and with SDV and an all digital cable system there should be no issues.

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