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Because I can't switch to another electric supplier. I did (I switched to a 100% solar-wind-hydro-geothermal supplier, meaning they need to ensure there's at least enough of said power produced to cover all of their customers), but the main utility continues to charge me for just having electricity.

Basically, the utility company for my area supplies everyone with electricity and gas. There is only one utility company. For every unit of electricity or gas, they charge you a few pennies of transport fee. On top of the transport fee, they also charge you $30 "customer fee". So if you use 0 gas and 0 electricity, you pay $30; if you use 10 gas and 200 electricity, you pay $8 + $11 + $30, plus either the main utility's commodity gas and electricity costs OR your electricity and gas suppliers's commodity gas and electricity cost.

It costs $30/mo to have an account with the local utility.

Markup on what? There's no markup on anything here; there's charging you for shit you don't even get. BGE charges me $33/mo just to be a customer, even if I turn off my main breaker and gas.

The "incentives" actually make solar panels expensive. If you get a $2000 subsidy for $3000 solar panels, retailers will start raising prices to $5000. You still get $3000 solar panels, but you have a perception of getting a good deal by getting $2000 back. This is why JC Penny has sales all the time: they tried for 10 years to drop the practice of marking $20 items up to $100 and running constant $80 sales, and they lost a shitton of business; switched back to showing sales off inflated prices, and they regained a shitton of business EVEN WHEN ITEMS WERE MORE EXPENSIVE UNDER THE SALE MODEL.

As for power wholesale versus retail, they should calculate your bill by net power units. If you provide 1000kWh and consume 1000kWh, they shouldn't charge you 1000x 12c and pay you 1000x 8c. You already pay about $60/mo for infrastructure ($30 of customer fees, plus infrastructure usage fees).

Take a look at the audiobook for Moonwalking with Einstein. It's uh. There's a line about Bill Clinton copulating with a basketball; that may be a little out of bounds. By necessity, the author makes some touchy references to things.

It's an amusing book, but also a valuable summary of a huge body of knowledge that boils down to one important fact: the human mind, with all its variation, has fixed capabilities. Every person can, through application of effort, develop an incredible memory, mental mathematics skills, great expertise with musical instruments, a solid understanding of engineering, and so forth; in short, every human being is a ready-made genius. The mind is a tool which itself requires skill to use.

Old and new memory techniques, mental math strategies, and study techniques allow us to maximize the use of our mind. Textbook study profits greatly from the SQ3R study method (all modern methods are effectively SQ3R with different names); mnemonics enhance any formal and informal study; anyone who learns mental math through soroban and anzan methods will quickly become a human calculator. Ericsson's research into expertise tells us that a person learns rapidly when they analyze their difficulties and flaws as matters of inappropriate technique, focus on improving those weaknesses, and practice in a way which targets such skills while giving constant and immediate feedback--in short, knowing exactly when we're doing it wrong and why it's wrong gives us the ability to correct and rapidly improve our abilities. It only takes application of technique.

Humans are different. Our experiences shape us; sometimes, brain damage or genetic and biological imperatives shape us. Women think differently than men; asians have different cultural interests than europeans; but we all have the ability to deliberately bestow upon ourselves any skill we wish. Normal humans can even emulate strange humans: synesthesia can be simulated, and this simulation can be leveraged to improve memory; distinct personalities can be created inside the mind by force of will, and a writer or actor can shape coherent, independent characters and complex interactions from these imaginary individuals; artists train themselves to dull the left prefrontal cortex, making themselves capable of the amazing feats of brain damaged savants. Anything one human can do, another can do.

I use a Kindle, and have noticed the same. If I want to read text books, I need physical books; for stream data (fantasy novels), I use Kindle.

The location information is visual. The space on the book, the depth into the book, and so forth. It's also serial: cross-referencing involves flipping back to the physical space in which the book should have the correct information, and then recognizing if the information you find is older or newer, and correcting position.

Well he could have been experiencing severe suicidal depression due to his asshole friends not recognizing his psychiatric burn-out, and turned to marijuana as a coping mechanism. I've done similar, but without involving any drugs;sleep for 18 hours a day isolates me from the world better than psychotropics.

Yeah, I know. Marijuana in vogue, alcohol falling out of favor.

Their argument is that you take like 1/20 the amount of alcohol needed to kill you (20 beers = death) versus 1/1000 the amount of THC needed to kill you (1000 joints = death), therefor alcohol is worse for you than marijuana. That's a very unscientific approach.

It's part of the propaganda movement to ban alcohol for anyone under the age of 25.

The temperature also dropped.

Honestly, the whole "Climate Change" thing was to explain that "it's not really global warming"; now they want to stop climate change by cooling the earth. ... So. Global Warming.

This kind of tampering would be a disaster.

Mental instability, irrationality, and other issues would cause global nuclear destruction. Hostility is a problem. On the other hand, aggression is the driver that prevents the world from stagnating; remove aggression entirely and nobody would even mate, causing a collapse of the human species.

You mean Gap Sickness?

I'm sure you could make a movie adaptation that wasn't horse shit unrelated to the book; however, a TV series is more suited. We really need long-run drama TV series where each episode carries an hour and a half of content to capture the story in a lot of really good books.

Ants and bees are aggressive as all fuck. Honeybees are notable for being docile, and only certain subspecies at that; honeybees, the most successful organism second only to ants, are among the most violent and aggressive motherfuckers in existence, with the Megapsis species able to quickly kill a human if annoyed, and some of the smaller African apsis species prone to violent and fatal attacks in which they chase you forever and sting you until you die. The more docile species have been propagated by human effort.

Or, you know, Ben Carson.

No, it's stupidity coming from a fool who has no idea what he's talking about. He's a cosmologist and a quantum physicist, not a social scientist.