This should be news to no one. The high sin/public health tax on alcohol (theories of the tax vary) is a key and very prominent feature of public alcohol policy. Most people feel it should be heavily taxed - public discussion of the issue is limited almost exclusively to whether it should be higher still. Powdered alcohol will be regulated no differently.

Neither is the powdered alcohol solid alcohol. It is all the same.

I remember powdered alcohol being test marketed back then. Didn't know if it ever went big. This is 40 year old "food" technology.

FWIW I think ethanol along with many other alcohols can be vaporized without combusting. Personally I have done some kitchen chemistry with isopropanol. While evaporating it in a smallish room, it built up to a noticeable odor in the room and I think the buzz I got was a little more than placebo. Kinda like drinking the stuff, or huffing correction fluid or acetone. Not that I recommend doing any of this - but airborne delivery of alcohol seems plausible. probably would irritate the fuck out of your throat

Here you go..

http://pure-gas.org/

It's worth trying a tankful and seeing how your car performs.

duckduckgo for "real gasoline" or "pure gasoline" and you will find stations in your state that sell gasoline without ethanol.

I recently started using ddg as well as google since google tailors the results and profiles me and sometimes I want to see a raw search result. (My other option would be to go to the library and use google there). The creepy bit is that their profile works whether I'm logged in or not.

What a boon for boozer backpackers: all the buzz but a tenth of the weight!

They are asking the government for a rate change, because the government sets the prices. Does that sound like free market to you?

If it WERE free market, customers would probably be charged based on the cost to serve them. If solar customers demand less from the utility, they pay less. It would certainly make you think twice about moving into the country, to some place where you have ten or twenty acres, though - installing and maintaining a mile of towers and lines for each customer would be expensive.

If they can cook up a crazy story about WMD and yellow cake and make that fly, it should be fairly easy to show some actual child soldiers and massacred villages. Add a few children starving because the despot grabbed all the foreign aid and it's a done deal.

People can certainly do that. Having priced such systems a couple of times, I don't know why anyone who has access to utility power would spend huge piles of money on batteries that only last a few years, though. Maybe if there was a law forcing their neighbours to PAY them to waste money on expensive, toxic batteries.

The token connection fee, $2 or whatever, isn't significant. Get a cost quote to build power poles and run lines out to this guy's ranch and tell me $2 makes any difference whatsoever to the discussion.

If the connection fee were a) significant and b) based on the actual cost to run utilities to that particular customer, then you'd have a point. That, and if the utility were not forced to buy power they can't use. In some areas, utilities have to shunt power to ground, throwing it away, on sunny days - but they still have to buy the solar power they have no use for and have to pay to dispose of it.

TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.

You are absolutely right. You should start sending me that $500 / month you're saving for retirement. In 20 years, I'll send the exact same amount back. There is no reason you should be getting that gain from your mutual fund.

Oh, I forgot. You're clueless, so you're probably not saving for retirement, but rather expecting the government to take the money I save and give it to you. Anyway, just loan me $1,000. I'll pay you back in 20 years. The interest rate? What do you mean interest rate? Why would you expect a return?

That WOULD be fair, for everyone to cover their share of the cost, what it actually costs to provide service to them. It's not politically possible, though, because residential bills would jump much higher. For years now, residential rates have been heavily subsidized by business customers. Outside of cities, it can cost hundreds of thousands to run lines several miles to serve a few households that have acreage. Suzy the barrel racer isn't going to pay $50,000 for the power to her house and barn.

Making it fair (everyone pays their own costs) would result in 500 happy companies for every 100,000 pisses off households (voters).

Did you click "reply" on the wrong post, because it doesn't sound like you read mine.

Let's pretend for a moment that solar can actually work on a large scale, maybe some new solar panel comes out that's 500% efficient. So most companies install solar panels. Therefore, the power company doesn't have to generate ANY power around noon. They save boatloads of money, right? They don't need to generate that peak power. (Not on sunny days, anyway, they still need to maintain the capacity.)

Okay, so the utility is now spending less. They are also billing most customers $0. They have zero revenue. Explain to me how you run a large utility without any money.