Our food system would actually be more efficient and less polluting if we could. Depending on the crop, there's more energy value in the fossil fuel inputs (fertilizer, diesel, pesticides, transportation) than there is in the resulting food.

Being stationary installations well designed datacenters could often use more efficient and environmentally friendly options, like flywheels or thermal storage

Except that, to date, none of them do. Batteries are already used and understood in datacenters, so this would be a pretty easy to implement.

The inequality they are talking about is social and economic. The children from well-to-do families always have opportunities beyond those of poorer children. A precocious or "gifted" child from a wealthy family has access to all the resources necessary to realize their potential. Where can an equally gifted child from a poor family turn? Their potential is completely unrealized in the U.S.'s current educational system, even though their abilities could easily vault them and their families out of poverty and into prosperity. Meanwhile, the mediocre children and dullards from wealthy families, owing to the resources available to them, gain entrance into Harvard. This situation reinforces (social / economic) inequality and ossifies mobility. In a country that purports to be a merit society, this should be disturbing.

I don't begrudge wealthy parents doing everything they can to provide for their children - gifted or otherwise. But as a societal matter, opportunities should exist for exceptional students no matter what their economic status. It's not simply a matter of fairness or equality - we are talking about exceptional children here, by definition not the same as everyone else - but of developing the best talent for the good of all.

You can't deny coverage in a single-payer system

Oh, well, thank God I live in the United States, where we don't hold with that socialist crap. Everyone knows our health care is the best in the world. [/sarcasm]

Yes, but every since the Great Depression, when the FDIC was instituted, you could always have confidence that the dollar you deposited at the bank would still be there tomorrow (up to the fairly generous deposit limits). Similar insurance programs exist for stocks - so long as you use a recognized brokerage, who in turn uses a clearing house to execute trades, your ownership of the shares and your cash is never in question. The stocks may fail, totally wiping you out, but your ownership of them is never in doubt.

And such safeguards exist because of...wait for it...regulation.

So if you're going to make snarky comments about Americans, be sure to throw in a few about the French as well.

I thought that was obligatory no matter what the conversation is about.

John Boehner, is that you?

on NASA budgetary scales

You say that as though it is supposed to bolster your argument. NASA's budget is somewhere around $15bn/year, or about 0.5% of the total federal spending. That covers everything from advanced research to planetary exploration to human space flight. The line item for the Mars Exploration Rover program (i.e., Opportunity) is $13 million. I suspect a lot of that goes to personnel costs, some of which might be reduced through volunteer efforts. It also costs a lot to maintain the control center and the program infrastructure, which cannot be replicated through an "API and 'simple prototyping program' ". The costs associated with people coding instructions for the rover is really a small part of the program budget. The cost to create and administer some sort of volunteer program might be small compared to $15bn, but it would be quite expensive relative to costs it is trying to replace.

Solar constant approx 1300w/sqm

That's measured out in space. On the ground, under clear skies, normal to the incident rays, it's under 1000 W/m^2. Many things affect the calculations, which don't all fit neatly on the back of an envelope. For one: you can't ignore latitude and assume it's at the equator. Sambhar Salt Lake is located at about 28N, so you are already down to maybe 700 W/m^2 on horizontal ground at noon on a perfectly clear day. Second, the capture and conversion efficiency of most panels, even with anti-reflective glass, is relatively poor, meaning that you don't get much power at until the incidence angle gets above, say, 15. That will tend to make that cosine integral more like cos^2: more concentrated in the middle of the curve, much less at the tails. Third: I don't know how the weather is at this location, but surely it isn't perfectly clear every day of the year. When the monsoons come rolling through, there may be days or weeks when it is overcast. Last: there's fill-factor. You won't be able to carpet the entire area with wall-to-wall panels - there will be streets and avenues to allow any part of the array to be reached.

But NG is peaking and dispatchable as hell, unlike solar.

But NG also requires an ongoing outlay for fuel and a heft amount of maintenance. Maintenance on a photovoltaic installation is modest by comparison.

And that assumes you would want to use NG. India produces natural gas from some offshore deposits, but not near enough to power the country. The United States has produced about 20 * 10^12 ft^3 of natural gas (I apologize for the units) pretty consistently for decades. With widespread fracking, the US will hit 30 * 10^12 ft^3 pretty soon. India, by contrast, produced just 1 * 10^12 ft^3 - it's just not an abundant resource. Natural gas accounts for only about 10% of India's total energy consumption. In order to use more, they'll need to get it from abroad, which from a national strategy standpoint may not be attractive. Transporting NG is difficult and expensive, and India would have to compete with China for access to resources in Iran and the *stan countries.

There's also no risk of Fukushima/Chernobyl/Long Island/etc

I think you mean Three Mile Island

I don't think there is a nuclear eactor in NYC

Well, I don't know if it's nuclear in nature, but plenty of people might call Long Island a disaster.

(I kid, I kid)

In how many circumstances do you have a clear 20-mile line of sight to a (potential) collateral victim? From where you stand right now, how far can you go on a horizontal plane before running into something (like a building, forest, mountain) that would stop a laser? Bullets do have limited range, especially compared to a laser, but in most battle zones, a bullet or laser will both probably run into something before it has a chance to run into an unintended victim.

There are obviously many uses for this technology, but a lot has been focused on anti-missile (ballistic, surface-to-surface, etc.), in which case the beam is going to be pointingup, above the horizontal. It's not likely to be blinding anyone up in the sky.

This American Life ... is okay, but ... I find Ira Glass' creaky voice ... a little hard to listen to sometimes. Sounds like ... he's constantly nervous.

Fixed that for you. I believe they call it the Woody Allen school of acting.

The fact that tesla is doing something like this really only acknowledges that getting stranded somewhere is a real problem they have no solution for.

And rather than avoid the problem and pretend it doesn't exist - like every other electric vehicle manufacturer to date - or accept the car's limited utility, Tesla is actually doing something about it. It looks to me like they are putting out a solution. Not a perfect solution, not the only solution, but a solution that can ameliorate the problem. Is that something that should be ridiculed?

OK, so Tesla builds ONE string of charging stations approx. 150 miles apart that stretches across the US. So tell me how does that work when there are millions of Tesla cars on the road? Charging will take 40 minutes, but the line to get to charge will take 24 hrs.

Will Tesla be able to build enough fast charging stations when selling cars that cost less than $40K

Switch to decaf and chill out. Do you think the gasoline/diesel infrastructure we have today was built in just a year or two? When filling stations first showed up, they too were isolated points that couldn't be linked by the range of the available vehicles, then got strung out on transportation corridors, and only now are ubiquitous. Having a look at the rollout map, the infrastructure will cover a lot of the US's transportation corridors by the end of this year.

As for what happens when $40k electrics start rolling out - I'm not terribly concerned. The number will be small to start, and the number of vehicle trips that would actually require a supercharger station is vanishingly small. I doubt that the utilization of the existing stations now is anything above 5%. You can bet that Tesla has realtime statistics about utilization, and probably even the wait times (i.e., how many cars are queued up), and can adjust their rollout accordingly. Given the stock price, the limiting factor in the rollout certainly isn't capital, which is a good position to be in.