I would suggest taking a look at the 8760-hour output of the NREL PV Watts program; it is enlightening. For me, if I sized a PV array at 150% capacity (best-day production vs average demand), I would need 80 hours of generator backup per year if my battery were sized for 3-days demand. If I have 7-days, I would only need a generator for 4 hours per year of generator.

The bottom line is that you need substantial excess capacity and a huge geographic diversity to be able to get by on renewables alone. Think 400% or so. That is incredibly inefficient.

The cable connection at the lightning connector has failed on me several times, specifically because the connector stays connected to the device. The removal force exceeds the strength of the cable. Yes, I understand you shouldn't pull from the cable, but the connector body is sometimes too small to get a good hold on.

As an Apple customer, I am quite happy they ditched the "30-pin" connector and went with the reversible lightning connector. One less thing to fiddle with when charging my phone. Nice to see USB picking up the feature, even if it is a couple years later with implementations still not available.

That said, the cable/connector interface on the lightning cables is not nearly strong enough for the insertion/removal force required. It will be interesting to see if the USB design will work better in that regard, as the shield does provide some mechanical latching.

Use speaker phone. Once you are on speaker, there is no assumption of privacy. Once there is no assumption of privacy, then you can record... at least in California.

Not just documentation about the automation, but also making sure that the original mind-numbing manual process is properly documented! I would also say there should be an intermediate level of documentation between the manual process and the automated process indicating how it ideally should work.

When today's needs change, having the path to work back to how the original came to be is critical.

For reference, a big excavator today for mining can go over 40 cubic meters

CO2 causes acidification of the oceans, which is a much bigger problem than the greenhouse effect, and will happen much sooner than the point where atmospheric CO2 levels become toxic to humans.

Some people are bad with money and make stupid life decisions. No wage or training will fix it.

My office manager makes almost $75k, and financed a used car at 19% interest, even after I explained how to calculate the interest to her. She is 40 and a grandma. She gets a bonus and uses it to buy seasons pass at a theme park. I think a few country songs were written about her....

That actually isn't true. Bringing action against an employer is easy and free for the employee, and the penalties are severe. What the current system does is encourage employers to make their employees live in fear so they will be too intimidated to file an action-- battered wife syndrome essentially.

No clue how to improve it, but right now an honest, good faith mistake could bankrupt a company.

There are plenty of citizens who are afraid of reporting abuses. There are no simple solutions; the reality is that employers need to act ethically and morally in their treatment of employees. (Good luck with that.) Reality is that people take the easy way out and make decisions on short term outcomes only.

Raising the minimum wage hurts me as an employer, despite the fact that we don't pay anyone less than twice (California) minimum wage. The issue for us in making sure we can classify engineers as exempt (salaried) employees. Only employees at over twice the minimum wage are eligible to be exempt status, and it would mean that some entry-level engineers would need to be classified as non-exempt. This brings in the mandatory breaks, lunches, and workplace rules that are inappropriate for a professional environment.

Sure, you can say pay them more, but that really doesn't solve the problem; it just makes it unattractive to hire people that aren't stars. We can have some engineers that are mediocre; not all tasks need stars. Hopefully we can turn them into stars in time, but that requires some discount in pay to be attractive.

You have obviously never dealt with copier maintenance. You can make it break whenever you want; there is even a scheduling routine built into the system for the technicians. The only reason to sell the toilet will be the service contract...

Reverse power flow at the primary substation level is an issue, but even moreso is the idea that you push 4x the current during peak generating periods that you would normally consume.

To make distributed generation work you need: distributed energy storage; capacity-responsive demand; or a high level of diversity in sources. It is difficult to get the diversity with solar except in partly cloudy conditions during the day, and the economics of small wind turbines are difficult to reconcile.

It is hard for me to imagine how nuclear provides compatibility with renewable; the compatibility always comes in the form of energy storage which smooths out the load profile. The best use-case is to have enough batteries to supply your loads from late afternoon through bedtime, and switch to utility to bridge through the night, maybe with a little small-scale wind thrown in at night.

Most people under 50 today will have 40+ year working careers. Do you really want 20-30 different employers over that time?

My personal experience is everyone has a different timer inside, and tends to change jobs on 1.5-2 year, 4-5 year, or 7-10+ year cycles. It is hard for people to break those cycles. Shorter cycles tend to be more performance-based; getting caught over-selling capabilities, and longer cycles are more complacency. People that do project-based work are a little different in rationale, but same kind of timers.

My advice is generally to leave a bad work environment quickly, but try to improve the work environment first before giving up.

As an employer, I avoid people that jump around because it is too expensive to recruit, train, bring people up to speed, and phase them out. If I don't think someone will be around for at least 3 years then they face an uphill battle.

Best way of managing those issues I have seen is to project on a whiteboard, markup there, while someone independent is marking up the PDF files electronically. When the discussion is finished, project up the markup PDF.

I agree with the parent's general process, but I do have meetings each week myself with 30 attendees and quite literally a ream of paper printed for each person. The actual drawings aren't re-printed for each meeting, but an updated 75-page schedule, 150-page RFI log, and 200-page submittal log is provided to each attendee, along with about 25 pages of meeting minutes and current issues.

It is hard to have a more efficient set-up, as the meeting is basically a coordination meeting for 5 different paper-pushers from different companies. Paper quickly becomes the lowest-common denominator. (Really pissing me off is the fact that the three people from my company all need to scan the documents afterwards to pick up their individual notes!)

If I was running the meeting, I would require a 2-page summary from each paper-pusher on open items, and have a projector that can be used to provide additional information when needed. Distribute the whole package electronically before the meeting and let people figure out how the heck they want to deal with the information themselves.