It wouldn't be surprising; ISPs add a fee for everything.

My neighborhood only has one supplier, Consolidated Communications. They are godawful. They charge to much and their equipment always goes down. Eventually after a number of complaints from the neighbors, they sent some technicians out who figured out the problems were all on their side, and a bunch of equipment was bad. Lo and behold, everybody's bill now has a $3.50 maintenance fee on it. So basically in order to get the service I originally agreed to, I am having to pay more each month to get it. What a load of crap.

This is what's wrong when companies are allowed to operate as unregulated monopolies. Free market only works with an informed populace and viable competition. With ISPs there is rarely either.

IAAEE. Since sea water is a very good conductor, you would be hard pressed to put "30MW of into the sea." Assuming these are generating at 13.8 kV, and they somehow had their lineside terminals dunked in sea water, you would get a lot of noise and steam followed by the generator protection relays kicking in in like a cycle and a half. Call it 25 ms. The excitation to the generators would be shut off and the voltage would quickly dwindle. You'd have a bunch of fucked up equipment, and anybody in the immediate area might be exposed to electrocution and arc flash hazards, but there wouldn't be noticeable impact to the rest of the ocean. Hell, the generator itself would probably be OK.

Short circuit calculations are something that any power generation place deals with all the time. When you are shorted, you get a lot of current, but not a lot of volts, so your power will go down substantially. Just like when you accidentally drop a screwdriver across a battery. You get a spark, damage the battery, maybe take out some ESD sensitive components, but by and large the rest of the components on the board are OK. There's just no way for the energy to get out to the rest of the world.

In order to get 30MW of electricity actually into the sea water, well... I'm not exactly sure how you could do it. This sounds like a job for Randall Munroe, honestly. You'd probably have to only dunk one phase in the drink. Then you could at least get a little time before the ground fault and unbalanced load relays kick in. You could run the sea water through very long PVC pipes, essentially turning the water into a 30MW heater, and that would raise the temperature of the water. But that's not exactly what you have in mind. Besides, that's sort of like what other power plants do with their waste heat. They dump it into a cooling water body, although not quite at that level you're talking about.

This exact same topic was covered in Frontline's special on North Korea over a year ago. Their point of contact was Jiro Ishimaru of Asiapress who was sneaker netting USBs over the border. They even took a video of people trying to watch on a tiny screen and having to shut everything down whenever they heard someone outside.

The documentary also touched on humanitarian issues as much as it could using a secret camera. Sad stuff. Great thing to watch. Occasionally you can catch it streaming on Netflix but it seems to not be available right now.

Obama invented "repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth"?! That's gotta be the most subtle Godwin's Law ever.

Don't they already have an exercise app on the iPhone that gets all passive-aggressive when you don't use it?

Are you daft? If the goal was to ship to China, why would they go through the US, when they could just pipe it to Vancouver?

You'll run afoul of the "but.. but.. freeeee market!!" crowd. They don't understand that sometimes the way "the market" (us, consumers, citizens) deals with shitty companies is by telling "the government" (still us, voters, citizens) to impose regulations, especially suggestions like yours. These are things that a well-functioning free market would need to properly educate the consumers. Not that we'd make the right choices anyway, but at least we wouldn't have anybody to blame but ourselves. You might also want to look up TANSTAGI.

But make sure you don't mix up the left and right earplugs, or else everything sounds backwards. $12 for a pair of earplugs? Might as well buy one of those $10k audio cables while you're at it.

As a corrosion coatings engineer, I can tell you that this already happens. It's the whole reason I have a job. You see those green pipes going down the road on a flatbed truck? That's fusion bonded epoxy (powder coating) on plain jane steel pipes. There are several places that FBE coat their rebar before putting it in concrete structures, like you suggested. Combine a good corrosion coating with some healthy cathodic protection, and you can tremendously increase the lifespan of your infrastructure.

However, there are a lot of snake oil salesmen that try to claim "nano" coatings, when really their just dipping the steel in silane or electroplating it or any number of things that look fancy. They probably do help corrosion, but they are no more "nano" than bailing wire and bubble gum. Unfortunately for them, I'm friends with a PhD in advanced material sciences, and it's pretty easy for her to sift through the BS.

Yep, that's the only option. There's nothing between doing nothing and that option. It's all we have. And if anyone starts to talk about mitigation strategies, planning ahead of time or devoting a single cent of taxpayer money toward preparing for it, we are just all going to have a meltdown and throw a tantrum with teabags on our hats. Thank god we have these strawman arguments for what these ivory tower Oxford elitists are telling us to do: eliminate the human race to protect the human race. I cannot believe they would actually come to that conclusion but there it is, right in the article. Those environmentalists will have us starving in mud huts by the end of the month if we just sit by and let this academic report go unabated and without criticism!

*tortured sigh*

Not that far from the truth.

I only put about 1 microgram of E.coli (about 1,000,000 cells) into this five gallon jug of water. That's like 0.000000005% of the mass of the water. Do you want to drink it?

I know! We could connect it using one of those $10,000 directional audio ethernet cables. It won't allow packets from the TV to the internet, just the other way around.