Well, that depends on how you count. A single coal unit really maxes out at about 1200-1300MW, although these are pretty rare. More typical is a unit in the size range of 400-900MW. Note that the viability point is somewhere 150-300MW right now in the US for a coal plant. Anything smaller will have a hard time making money right now given economies of scale and the low low price of natural gas. Multiple small units still aren't cost-effective. You need the big machine to make money nowadays in the US. Many coal plants have multiple units on site.

As for gas power plants, they are at 1000MW now, and have been. Turkey Point uses 3 gas turbines and 1 steam turbine in one "block" to produce around 1150MW, and was completed in 2007. 2 on 1 (2 gas turbines, 1 steam turbine) blocks are more common in the industry. Recently gas turbines have increased in size to the point where this can also break 1000MW. The Mitsubishi G and J class turbines, Siemens H class turbine, and GE's 7HA.02, are all of the size to build 1000MW+ natural gas power blocks. Keep in mind that for a typical unit of this size, each gas turbine will put out around 300-350MW, and as a rule of thumb, the steam cycle can utilize the waste heat to recover about 50% of the MW of the gas turbines. So for a typical large gas turbine plant in the most-common 2 on 1 configuration, there are 330MW from each of the 2 gas turbines, plus another ~330MW from the steam turbine, for a total of around 1000MW. That's without additional duct firing (burning additional fuel in the waste heat recovery boiler), which most US gas plants utilize since gas is so cheap here.

I strongly doubt that. Even a little familiarity with the industry would cause you to conclude the exact opposite. Natural gas in the USA is CHEAP. Natural gas in Europe and Asia is roughly 4x more expensive. Even Russian natural gas, in Russia, costs about 3x more than US natural gas. The problem is that shipping natural gas long distances is expensive if no pipeline exists. Ocean shipping of natural gas relies on cryogenically cooling the gas into a liquid, which is energy-intensive (expensive). Then, on the ocean journey, the ship either must burn or discard all of the evaporating gas, or expend even more energy with an on-board liquification plant.

Natural gas in the USA will continue to be produced in North America and consumed in North America. Even if the Chinese can solve the transportation problem, they will sell to their domestic market first, Japan/Korea second, Europe third, South America and Africa fourth, and only then would it make any sense to try to undercut the staggeringly cheap USA natural gas. The only loser with China getting strong into fracking would be Russia, and the environment.

I had a couple time-lapse videos which I made from an in-car video camera. Obviously they were sped up from the source speed, because watching a 6 hour car ride in 3 minutes is a lot more entertaining than watching in real-time. They looked great at 60fps but were dreadful at 30 fps. So dreadful, in fact, that I removed them from Youtube long ago.

Must be nice. The fall and the spring are my busy seasons, and I do a lot of traveling in both. I have traveled the past 6 or so election days. I tried to get a Texas absentee/vote by mail ballot and it is incredibly difficult. Unless you are in the military or can prove that you're handicapped, you can't have one. A suspicion that "I won't be in town" isn't good enough.

Sure enough, my boss called me an hour ago and I am on flying tomorrow and won't be in town to vote. Maybe I can get lucky and find an early voting station but my schedule probably won't allow for that.

Broadcast to everyone at the same time? You mean like Multicast? How did they ever get that working right on all the myriad of different router models?

There are people who would want to live in such places, and there are people who would rather not. My company has 3 offices, head office/repair facility in rural Missouri, manufacturing facility in Houston, and a sattelite office in the country of Colombia. There was no way they could entice me to live in rural Missouri, but they were flexible enough to allow me to work in Houston. They got the person they wanted for the job, and I got a job.

There are lots of companies, though, who are not flexible. Stipulating that employees must live in a place they don't want to artificially limits their pool of potential labor. It also fosters resentment among employees who don't want to live there but really need a job. Companies are shooting themselves in the foot in the name of saving a few bucks. My company has millions of dollars of equipment including welding, machining, rigging, tooling, trucks to move the equipment around, etc. Yet most of the value of the company walks out the door every night. Our differentiator is in the quality of our people, and we attract quality people because we give them a lot of rope and look out for their needs.

With tech jobs there's no geographical need to pick a particular location other than space, power, bandwidth, and the happiness and loyalty of your workforce.

You just contradicted yourself. Western shipyards aren't limited on space. If you have the demand, you can always get more space / capabilities / labor / raw materials. They are limited by demand.

Not really, the numbers are larger but the math is very well understood. This is a very mature industry, perhaps the oldest manufacturing industry in the world. People have been building boats for thousands of years. Ship's aren't redesigned every time one is built either. The bulk of a ship is the exact same "U" profile. Design it once, copy it all down the length of the ship. The bow and the stern are the only complex parts, but contribute little to strength. The bow and stern are generally proven designs which are taken "off the shelf" and adapted to the application with only slight changes. Chopping off the back end of a ship (accommodation, engineering, and propulsion area), refurbishing it, and welding it to a brand new ship hull is not uncommon. Unlike with pleasure craft and cars, "style" has approximately 0 design influence in large ships. Everyone is honing in on the most hydrodynamic designs and you can't copyright the math which describes the curves on a ship.

I'm onboard the Tolteca right now, built in 1954/1955. When we were in drydock, the only difference between this ship and ships built much more recently is the distinct lack of a bulbous bow, and the use of diesel propulsion engines instead of a steam turbine.

Because it adds cost. When a ship has reached the end of its useful life, it's value is approximately the (ship mass * the price of steel). Labor in 3rd world countries is so cheap that it doesn't factor into the equation much. You would never see any return on that investment.

Maybe someone thought they were being clever, but in reality they are just very ignorant. Bananas are almost always transported by vertically-integrated companies who own their own ships. It's like this because generally Bananas are coming from a port which has little to ship aside from bananas, and the bananas generally go to a small number of special ripening warehouses where they ripen for a while. They're a kind of special cargo, not a general cargo to be put on any container ship. Just as an example, Dole owns at least 6 ships. Chiquita and the other banana companies almost always have their own ships too.

Gee, thanks a lot. You just made good stereo seem terrifically exciting. I have single sided deafness and can never expereince stereo. Nobody, even doctors or audiologists, ever really explained what I am missing out on. Maybe they were being kind.

Women aren't looking for a yes/no answer when they ask if their clothes are unflattering. They are trying to open a conversation on the subject of their entire look, including what is working, what is not working, and what elements are working together well, or clashing. They are not looking for you to "kill their question" as efficiently as possible. They are trying to invite detailed discussion and analysis.

Well, maybe they looked at impact. For decades, LEDs were only used for status lights, power lights, and some other things. Switching from mini-incandecent bulbs for these purposes didn't really change much in the grand view of things. Switching out household lighting from incandecent to blue/white LED saves thousands of megawatts of electricity, and enables many impoverished people to have electric light for the first time ever. I went to North Korea this year and even in very remote areas with clearly impoverished people, solar panels, batteries, and LED lighting were very common. Bringing light to the people like that would be a lot more difficult without LED lighting.

And if you think that inexpensive, efficient lighting is not a big deal, try living without it for a week. The availability of inexpensive lighting has become so embedded in Western society that we can't imagine life without it. Think about what that means to the billions of poor people all over the world who are getting, or have gotten it, for the first time.

Read what the parent wrote- " the poor penetration of 5 GHz". Meaning it does not go through walls or other obstacles very well. Which is true. And a problem with deploying 5Ghz networks.

They can't even track a single US person with a single US passport. I took a trip to North Korea earlier this year. My father is an immigration inspector and looked at my record. According to the US government, I had a pleasant 10 days in Beijing.