and terrorism really hasn't changed much
Conrad's "The Secret Agent" from 1907, and set in 1886, fits depressingly well into current circumstances.
From wikipedia:
In modern times, The Secret Agent is considered to be one of Conrad's finest novels. The Independent calls it "[o]ne of Conrad's great city novels"[22] whilst The New York Times insists that it is "the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism".[23] It is considered to be a "prescient" view of the 20th century, foretelling the rise of terrorism, anarchism, and the augmentation of secret societies, such as MI5. The novel is on reading lists for both secondary school pupils and university undergraduates.
I don't agree with the "foretelling" bit on wikipedia, since Tzarist Russia had all of the above in spades in 1907 and Conrad IMHO wasn't trying to foretell anything. It's just the current situation is closer to Tzarist Russia than we would like.
Every time I've read some Tom Clancy I've wished he's read that earlier spy novel and taken it as a cue to either lift his game or give up.
this is a wonderful time for the Republicans to create all kinds of crazy ridiculous stuff
I wonder if it will distract people from their efforts to shut down the government financially during a time of war not far back? If the Democrats tried that we'd be hearing screams of "Treason" for the next three decades.
Probably because all of the automatic bill-verification stuff would fail if the design is completely different.
Coins don't have this issue because they can be recognized by size and weight.
A hurricane destroying such a windmill would need to be at least two times stronger than the strongest hurricane we have on records
Yes, I'm just providing an artificial example of a short life for the windmills, but they still beat tiny diesel things even with such a short life.
I really womder why the power that wind plant is generating is so expensive
Yes, retail price not price of production. In Australia for an example we've got some of the cheapest to produce non-hydro electricity in the world but the retail price is close to the most expensive - a consequence of having the regulators profit from the industry they are supposed to regulate. That is one of the things making household solar very popular with in some cases pay back times under five years.
something is getting subsidized.
You forgot the cable to the mainland to sell electricity to other folks. Having an order of magnitude more customers spreads those costs a bit more. What are a mere 1800 customers going to do with all those MW anyway?
It could be argued that linking to the grid would have the same effect of driving down the costs for those customers but there hasn't been enough incentive until now to build the link.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.