Yes, this is the best diagnosis of the problem. I administered a network and a few hundred users in the late 90s. Since then I have worked in unrelated careers for two fortune 500 companies and I am still more capable of diagnosing a problem than any frontline it support I have seen at either. Given what I can see of network support, I would bet on me there given a week to get up to speed as well. Users who don't know much about computing in general in the CS sense, thinking of my current boss, can spot uselessness and incompetence. Also, incompetence breeds bloat according to the principles of a war of attrition (throw enough men and equipment into the confused battle and eventually someone is bound to do something right).

Old Timer? Please... $400 for 16 MB of Ram established my rule of thumb that you should always spend $400 for ram to get enough. That held pretty much the entire time I was in IT in the 90s. Then I didn't build a computer for a few years and when I went back to build one I found that $400 worth of ram was preposterous and the number was more like $200 then...

Ron Paul ... is a Republican who votes and caucuses with them in the US House...

"baseline" isn't quite right, if I even understand what you are saying...

The concept is "baseload" and that is nothing more than straight economics saying if you have dirt cheap generation you should run it all the time. Also, traditional electric generation operates most efficiently and effectively if it is set at its maximum level of output and never moved. Again, there is no clinging to a concept there, it is straight economics.

Now, could there be new technology that disrupts that model? Perhaps, but storage is not cost effective yet and I am highly suspicious of the example below of the "small local power company". Small and local likely means they are tethered to and balanced by something larger and traditional...

Nuclear is a slightly different story. Many nuclear plants were not really designed to balance with the power grid. They were designed to go from offline straight to their maximum load, and then back down when they were ready to refuel in about two years. Also, Nuclear is usually an order of magnitude in variable cost cheaper than fossil generation, and so there is no reason absent minimum loading issues for it to regulate. Nuclear variable cost is dirt cheap. Nuclear fixed cost is a potentially different issue...

In general, though, I (sitting in South Texas) think it is likely you have it exactly right that the whole thing is a scam and a game.

Most of what I have read does a pretty thorough job of debunking the original post. The only thing I have seen missing (maybe not reading enough comments...) is legal. Two points:

First: if the company directly controls email, maintaining attorney/client privilege is not too difficult. Also, company controlled email can be set up so as to easily enforce retention rules and to be searchable to produce in discovery. Both extend to documents under company control on company computers. This is also why the reply about employees showing up with their own laptops probably doesn't work, though there is other good content in that reply. Example: Even though my company did recently move from BB for everyone to "get your own phone", the company email is still basically under company control and they by contract have the right to remote wipe my phone (which I can then restore everything from my computer if need be, except if there is a reason not my Exchange connection without them doing it...). You can't extend that and the legal protections of ownership to an employee owned laptop. With a contractor, it really is different since data sharing and responsibilities can be spelled out in the service agreement (note, not employment contract...).

Second: software licenses are cheaper and easier to enforce at the company level rather than the personal level, and you can by putting some thought into it enforce uniformity. The contracting is just so much cleaner than trying to control employee laptops to some kind of uniform standard.

Not quite. China has the cheapest processing infrastructure from mining to processing to lax environmental regulations.

The real vision is Toyota's who realize they need to engineer solutions that do not depend on rare earths...

Mom: "So, you fly around the country and meet with all these people, but what do you actually do?"

Me: "Uhhh.... I fly around the country and meet with a bunch of people. I don't know. I guess I am doing it well, I got a good review..."

Definitely a Dilbert moment....

They have been talking about the thing in Galena for eight years at least and it has gone nowhere. Getting one installed would probably cut the approval time for the next, but you have a long way to go from eight years to anything commercial... Galena certainly isn't vulnerable to tsunami, and I have no idea if it is in an earthquake zone (maybe permafrost would cause your boom?), but your comment about the paperwork and approvals is spot on. Galena is perhaps the only place where it makes sense to beat their heads against the paperwork that long, since there really isn't a viable alternative that far into the middle of nowhere.

The moral of this meltdown scenario is don't put nukes that require active safety or safety systems that can be overwhelmed by tsunami in a vulnerable area.

As others point out, he wanted to solve transport fuels with Natural Gas and electricity with Wind (and maybe he had some water play; I have no idea as to that but that wouldn't surprise me in the least if it were true).

The point is that any solution to motor fuels that does not move towards electricity from the mains powering transport is a red-herring. This includes the Pickens plan of NG, and stuff like powering vehicles through H2. Exxon likes that because they know it is BS and if we concentrate on H2, we are stuck on oil. The two primary problems with NG are 1) fueling vehicles with CNG requires specialized and difficult to use equipment on which the operator must be trained (no self service) and 2) the capital expense of retrofitting the entire fuel distribution system is uneconomic. The current price of NG indicates that Pickens was right that there is enough of the stuff domestically to cost effectively replace oil on a btu basis, but the btu cost is only a small part of the total compared with the capital. Pickens was either inhumanly cynical in his plan or misunderstood the distribution capital and expense component (which I actually think is the case, maybe I am naive but I do take the old dude at face value when he said he wanted to solve a problem).

The problem with wind is hot day = high pressure = no wind is a usual equation. The only solution to electricity that is currently viable from the standpoint of fuel independence or carbon independence is Nuclear (and really efficient supercritical coal to replace less efficient coal as long as it is on a MW for MW basis and not incremental). I also think there must be a place for rooftop solar, but I am not close enough to that to understand why the economics are still out of whack. It seems to me that the subsidies directed to wind would be better directed to small scale solar (you get the power when you need it with rooftop solar).

The real problem is that utility executives are lemmings that all want to run off the same cliff at the same time. SCE happens to think they are the leader in providing to the electric car industry, and they have been keeping their heads down in the California battles lately. PG&E has had several messes on their hands between that proposition in June and San Ramon, and since CA is likely to lead in adoption, it is a CA utility that the rest of the industry will look to and so SCE gets it by default.

SCE has been wringing their hands for years and posturing themselves to the electric car and plug in hybrid as an excuse to demand distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get for years. That is what the other utility executives see. They see hand-wringing that can posture for distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get through their utility commissions for years due to opposition to increasing rates. Utility rates are worse than even the usual political sausage factory. Maybe the consumer groups and enviros will go for the rate increases if packaged with the plug in car. That is the whole reason for all the utility company angst. It is manufactured for the theater of public, and public utility commission, opinion.

The manufactured angst is their current cliff, just like downsizing was in the 90's.

In their defense, maybe they are right. Maybe they really haven't had the money in the distribution accounts to pay for upgrades. I know more than 99.995% of the people out there about power rates in general, but that still leaves at least the 1000 or so people spread throughout the IOUs that actually understand their own individual rates and how they affect their accounts down to the GL. You would go insane if you actually tried to understand that from the outside rather than just understand how it affects your house or facility.

To a couple of other points.

1) The power distribution, and transmission, equipment installed thirty to sixty years ago was so preposterously overengineered at the time that it is still cranking along nicely. In the words of my primary high voltage expert "a cool transformer is a happy transformer". By and large they can sit there well past the apex of the failure curve and keep going indefinitely. The stuff that is in the air and on the ground is by and large fine until it fails, and easy to replace when it does. All of the handwringing about the smart grid is also largely a bunch of BS. The grid is a lot smarter than you would know from the outside. The problem is and was broken regulation. The way utilities used to make money was they built new generation to serve new load. Transmission only existed to get the hostage generation to the hostage load. The transmission system was not previously regulated in such a way that would lead to what America has needed for years, which is the super-highway concept of high voltage lines that would allow markets to properly function. It really isn't even regulated properly now.

2) Continuing the theme, deregulation was not the problem in California. A deregulated electricity market looks nothing like a deregulated market for most other commodities. A deregulated market for electricity exists in multiple and overlapping frameworks of regulation. The problem in CA was the regulated model they selected for their deregulated market. They took the mostly functional British model and applied it to California. What they did not understand was that in Britain there was a) a massive oversupply and b) a utility industry that was so broken that the utilities had a built in ability for utilities to do things like "install meters" and make money. Since California is in a net import situation, and had meters, the market conditions had nothing to do with their model. The proximate cause of the so called "energy crisis" also was actually physical. It was the explosion on the El Paso pipeline in 2000 that jacked up prices and limited supply in CA even ahead of the general massive NG spike. Those two factors (lack of available supply and the general NG market) drove conditions in the CA market to cause a credit crisis for the unregulated and regulated players both. But, the credit crisis was caused by the bad market design. Without all three of those things (supply, price and credit), the CA market would have survived intact. However, make no mistake, the crisis was bankruptcy of PG&E and near bankruptcy of SCE (SDG&E was in better shape) and therefore the real problem that leads to bankruptcy is credit. It was improper regulation, not deregulation, that caused the "crisis".

This bit of the thread is the only reply that makes sense to me. I did this myself 12 years ago personally supporting 150 users, about half were homebrew by me and half were OEM of some sort (dell, gw2k back when they were a real company, apple - yes in that day..., other stuff). I had no problems with the stuff I built because I knew exactly what was in it. There is no telling what component Dell will change out from day to day even if meeting your standard spec. The only place I would pick an OEM and not deviate would be for laptop support. Fixed desktop and low-end server you are best building yourself.

Even though I have been out of IT, I have kept my eye on it. My biggest reservation I would have about recommending a similar strategy (abandon Dell) at my company is I think the IT staff is not competent to pull it off (and that is far afield from my current assignment). Yes, there is a hidden cost in assembly that you need to assign man hours to ($100 an hour from a post below is probably reasonable), but if you do it right the cost of change is zero (meaning extra "management" or whatever costs not in your breakeven between build and OEM) and the cost of maintenance should decrease considerably. Maybe you break even up front (considering that you might have to over order, but if you really do 1000 systems at once, you can go low on replacement parts initially I would think) and make money on reduced maintenance. That is, if you and your people are competent. If they are incompetent, you are going to be paying for it no matter what...

18 months seems really short to me too... I would think a reasonable spec machine should last three to four years at least.

Where's Fibonacci?