Exactly. When you get down into the details (just like a relationship), "it's complicated" is the accurate description of how the economy works.

But the point remains: the simplistic statement by anonymous coward, "When the federal reserve increases the supply of money, inflation is the net result really is not accurate. It's not that simple. Even in the simple case, it's not that simple.

Yes, valid point. When money, and goods, move in and out of the economy via trade with other nations, the equation of the money supply has to take account of that as well. The correction can go either way-- if other nations (or individuals in other nations) are stockpiling US dollars, that is inherently deflationary

The principle is essentially the same, though.

Try calling your local National Guard unit, see if you can talk them into using a CH-47 to move it for you as a training exercise. After all, the National Guard needs the training anyway, so give them something in the real world to practice on. Just emphasize that you need it for disaster preparedness.

Not exactly. The (money supply) times (velocity of money) equals (cost of goods), times (production rate).

So, if the amount of money increases but velocity of money and the production rate (amount of goods produced per unit time) stay the same, the result is inflation.

However, conversely, if the production rate increases but the money supply and velocity of money does not, then the cost of goods decreases-- that's deflation. (Note that this is production rate, not productivity: production rate equals productivity time population times employment fraction.)

A steady economy is one in which the money supply increases exactly at a rate equal to the production rate-- in this case, the cost of goods stays constant (assuming that the velocity of money doesn't change).

Wait, I want to change my order...

Well, but it was also a car Ferdinand Porsche designed.
So, if you've ever said, I wish I could buy a Porsche-- well, you can.

(the one I want is the Schwimmwagen, though!)

Say, that's a nice site. Wish I had mod points, I'd moderate you "informative".

Interesting. I don't always want to be messing with my DNS setting every time I get a 404 not found.

What is needed is a quick way to temporarily try using a different DNS, to see whether that's the problem.

I will say the same for you,

Exactly.

Rated power is important, since it tells you how much a panel can produce. But don't confuse that with the amount of power the panels do produce.

No.

Solar panels are rated for capacity in "peak watts". That means: the solar panel will produce one watt under an illumination of 1 kW/m2. 1 kW per square meter is, roughly, the intensity at noon on a cloud free day.

If the illumination is not 1 kW/m2: it will not produce one watt.

If it is cloudy, a 1-kW solar panel will not produce 1 kW of electrical output. If it is after sunset, a 1-kW solar panel will not produce 1 kW. Time of day and cloudiness determine the power output.

That is correct. You can chose which way to tilt your panel, which will set what time you produce peak power. It's not always best to tilt at the angle to maximize integrated power.

For a tracking collector, that's probably about right. For a fixed-tilt collector, the loss is a bit more than that. The output goes as cosine of the angle, times the air mass factor (which to first order we can neglect). Since the sun moves 15 per hour, going from noon to 15:00 you lose by cosine of 45, 0.707 (about 30%).

40% is a rather selective reading of that article. The article you link states:

"Now, the International Energy Agency has weighed in with a report on integrating renewables. It finds that, as long as intermittent power sources are under 10 percent of the total energy use, they can essentially be added for free."

That's pretty close to what I just said. (The article is talking about wind plus solar, while I was discussing solar alone). It goes on to talk about higher penetration:

"The report lumps wind and solar into a category it terms "variable renewable energy" and then it says "Things start to change as the fraction of power generated by VREs approaches 20 percent, and there are definitely new challenges as it reaches 30 to 40 percent."

So: I said solar is excellent at market penetration up to 10%, and this article says for solar plus wind together the cost changes at power fraction up to 20%, with "new challenges" as it reaches 30 to 40%.

I'd say we're saying the same thing.

As for the 40% you quote, the article says "that would require substantial reshaping of the rest of the grid--something that's much easier to do outside of mature economies."

The U.S is a mature economy, so that part isn't talking about us.

A "watt", for solar, means one watt of electrical production at noon on a cloud free day.

Since peak power usage (in the US) tends to be in the afternoon, that's excellent up to about 10% market penetration Above that, you need energy storage, which is currently not cost effective, although there are several systems that are coming along in the future and look good. However, storage adds to the cost-- it's no longer a dollar a watt if you have to operate and pay for a storage system.

Solar is also less effective in winter (shorter days) and in locations with significant overcast.

Solar is great-- for some utility applications. The true answer is, there is room for multiple approaches to technology development.

That's misleading. Social Security is paid for with Social Security withholding-- it actually pays more into the budget than it pays out.

Likewise, Medicare is paid for by a separate fund, which goes into the medicaid trust fund..

Right. Alice can differentiate between Bob reading the message and a Man in the Middle interception, because to intercept the message, the man in the middle has to read the quantum bit -- that is, in the photon case, measure the polarization-- and reading it destroys it. The Man in the Middle can't then send on a copy of the quantum bit, because of the quantum no-cloning theorem. She can send a photon polarized in a way identical to the way she read the photon-- but that only works if the receiver, Bob, happens to choose the same polarization to measure that the Man in the Middle chose to measure.

There is, however, a footnote to this. Eve actually can clone the photon (cloning photons is what a laser does). But she can't clone it perfectly-- or, more specifically, she can't be sure that the "cloned" photon is actually a copy of the original, or a spurious ("spontaneous emission") photon that happens to be in the same place. So, if she clones the photon, and measures one copy, and sends the other copy on, this shows up as noise in the signal-- exactly the same as stray light. So, Eve can read some of the message, if she's sufficiently clever, but how much is limited by how much noise the people communicating will accept in the signal without realizing that they are tapped.

The obligatory xkcd