The oil isn't boiling though, is it? Doesn't oil smoke before it boils... at least at 1 atm? Since it is hotter than 100C, anything with water in it (say food) added to the fryer 'boils' instantly though.

Since the oil is already much hotter than water's boiling point, I don't see any advantage to increasing the pressure? Except keeping the boiling water in the food item a tad longer, I guess...?

Sanders' isn't a deep fryer though, or at least it wasn't. The whole point is he didn't want the chicken to be deep fried, but pan fried (which was too bloody slow)... Hence the compromise of pressure-pan frying.

Never worked at a KFC, so I'm googling it, and it sure looks like a deep fryer, though...

Yeah, longer straight chain stuff should be pretty much harmless, but aromatics tend to be carcinogenic, irritant, stink, etc. (though it depends on the chemical in question, it's not a rule.)

Short alkanes aren't very good either, being very flammable and toxic, but aren't carcinogenic afaik. As the carbon chains get longer they become benign (with the greatest risk being that of getting them in your lungs - hard to get out, causing some sort of pneumonia like illness).

Normal kerosene (in north america, at least), is about 15-20% aromatics IIRC, which is why it has an odor. More refined variants for lanterns don't. Same deal with (pharmaceutical) mineral oil, or vaseline. harmless, but they come from the same stock as kerosene, and they are all 'petroleum distillates'.

Er, no, long term sustainable off earth colonization is far from established technology. Landing on mars isn't even a very established technology.

I guess Apollo managed to ramp up in 7 years, but that's still an absurdly compact time-table for a tiny venture. I want to see success, and be optimisitic, but this feels like a "too good to be true, so it probably isn't" pipe dream.

Oh man, I didn't think about it until now, but "every 2 years" makes absolutely no sense. They'd be launching at furthest approach. They'll turn year long trips into multi-year trips, and all the provisioning that will require.

I know, I know, everyone is going to be dogpiling Mars One for feasability, but...
The shoestring budget they'll get out of crowdsourcing and a TV show will launch people into space just long enough to kill them.

Windows doesn't do that anymore either. It gives the user an option to invoke autoruns, but doesn't trigger them.

Attacks on USB tend to target the drivers these days, not the OS.

Well, I know what that published unprecedented energy density results in the journal of plasma physics. I'm not aware of any meetings they attended, though.

Here's a new summary for you:

Tiny fusion project that's functionally pretty cheap wants more money, and publishes some promising, but uncertain results.

I could use that same summary for several different projects today.

And more rapidly perpetuated. And more easily forgiven.

Smug, self-indulgent nonsense.

I value knowledge as essentially my top life priority. I feel it's one of the things that makes us human. That doesn't mean I'm not ignorant of tons of information.

The correct accounting would be that you should be charged retail rates for what you draw out of the grid, but reimbursed only at wholesale rates for what you feed into the grid, like any other power producer who feeds into the grid is paid.

If you had read the second half of my post, you would have learned two facts.

First, for the annual surpluses, that's exactly what happens: I get paid wholesale rates. But not just any wholesale rates; I get paid Palo Verde off-peak average rates for some period of time, less a transmission fee. That's basically the cheapest power there is.

Second, you would have learned that I'm generating the most of my power during the highest peak demands, when they're not only charging customers the highest but oftentimes paying more than they're charging their customers to meet peak demands. (They make up for it during other hours, of course, but we're discussing the time periods when I'm putting more in than I'm taking out.) And and at night when I have my highest draws from the grid, that's when their cheapest baseload generators are idling.

Put those two together, and, even if it weren't for the annual surplus that they credit my account for at bargain-basement wholesale rates, they'd still be profiting hugely from me. Even though it's a kWh-for-kWh credit swap, the kWhs they get from me are the most expensive there are (maximum peak green-generated) and the kWhs I get from them are the cheapest there are (overnight nuclear-generated baseload).

Cheers,

b&

Because they are usually required to pay customers a lot more for feed-in power than they can generate it for, with no allowance for their internal cost overheads, etc.

Absolutely false -- horribly false.

On a day-to-day and month-to-month accounting basis, my utility (Salt River Project in Arizona) gives me a kWh-for-kWh credit. If I generate 20 kWh during the day, use 15 kWh during the day, and another 5 kWh during the night, I have net zero usage.

Surpluses are carried over day-to-day and month-to-month. If I have a net debit at the end of the month, I'm charged the regular rate for that electricity. If I have a surplus, it's carried over to the next month.

Once a year, in the spring, if I have a net surplus, SRP credits my account and resets the surplus to zero. And I generate about half again as much as I consume -- enough to power my not-yet-purchased electric vehicle -- so they credit me a fair amount every year. It's enough to pay the basic connection fee for about half the year, in fact, so I only even pay that for about six months per year.

But.

Rather than crediting me at the $0.12 / kWh typical residential retail rate, or the $0.25+ / kWh they purchase peak summer power (which is when I'm generating most of my surplus electricity), they pay me about $0.02 / kWh.

By my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, they're now profiting from me almost as much as I used to pay them in total. As in, what used to be their gross receipts from me is now their net.

What business wouldn't be thrilled with such a business model?

So, do please stop spreading the lies of the Koch Brothers. The poor widdle utilities aren't being hurt by the solar meanies -- quite the opposite. They're making money from us, hand over fist.

They're just a bunch of greedy sick fucks who want to roast the goose that's laying the golden eggs, is all.

Cheers,

b&

I live in the Valley of the Sun, and most of the southern half of my roof is covered in solar panels. I generate about half again as much electricity as I consume. This is by design; the plan is to get an electric vehicle in the not-too-terribly-distant future, and my excess generation capacity is enough that I should be able to drive for basically free. And the whole thing will pay itself off in about seven years total; if you remember the Rule of 70, that works out to about a 10% annual rate of return on my investment.

My utility provider is SRP; it was APS who was taking Koch Brothers money to fuck over their customers.

I've got a really good thing going for myself, obviously, but SRP is also making a nice profit off of me. My peak generation coincides with peak demand here. At the same time as they sell my electricity to my neighbors at $0.14 / kWh, they're paying twice that to spool up diesel generators...and they're paying me about $0.02 / kWh for my surplus. And I've signed over all my green credits to them, as well. Sweet deal for both of us, and I'm glad for it to be that way -- that's how good business profits are supposed to work.

If, however, APS's original proposal went into effect and SRP adopted it or something similar for themselves...well, at that point, I'd tell them to fuck off, get a battery system, and drop off the grid entirely. Changing the equation like that would wipe out any financial advantage I get from my investment and hugely profit the utility -- and, remember, I'm already far and away the most profitable customer they have on the block. It would really suck to have to pay again for a battery system; I've got better things I could do with that money. But I'd much rather invest that money in real physical goods that provide me with actual benefits (including, in this case, having the lights stay on should the grid ever go down) than throw gobs of money for no good reason at greedy profiteering corporate CEOs.

I can assure you, if the utilities keep up this sort of thing...well, they'll "protect" their profits for a little while, but it won't be long before people start dropping off the grid in droves. And that will be a bad thing for everybody -- but, most of all, for the utilities.

Cheers,

b&