+1 Dune reference

It's not surprising that herds of cows have a social structure. They're herd animals. It may be hard to see in a feeding pen situation without this kind of tracking, but when they have a lot of room to move around, groups form. It's a bit harder to see this in a group of uniformly bred dairy cattle, though.

Horse herd social structure is well understood. There are buddies, little groups, and an overall hierarchy. If you want to see the hierarchy, set out food buckets, one at a time, and see who eats first. The order will usually be the same each time you do this.

Even chickens have a "pecking order".

Under Amazon's retail agreement, the publisher's set the book price that amazon paid. Amazon then set the price for customers - amazon had various prices for books, rather than a flat rate. Some were loss leaders - a common enough tactic in the retail world, big book chains do it all the time - but amazon's ebook division was profitable on its own merits - something a DOJ investigation confirmed. That's not dumping, and there were other competitors in the ebook space that were also profitable. If the publishers weren't happy with their margins - which were comparable to other retail models - they were fully entitled to go to amazon and negotiate new retail rates individually, just like they do with other book retailers.

Apple looked at that model, saw they weren't going to make their usual profit margin, and went to the big publishers. Apple said 'we'll let you set the final customer price, we'll take 30%, and an agreement that you won't let any other seller undercut us'. The publishers saw this is as a chance to raise prices and make more profit, and stitch up amazon at the same time. The publishers went to amazon all around the same time, and said, 'these are the new terms. Agree to them, or no more ebooks'. Given Amazon then was facing a choice between no ebooks at all, and the new terms, they rolled over.

Collusion to raise prices is illegal, for very good reason - it defeats the purpose of free markets, that of delivering the best product for the lowest price. And that was what they did. Higher prices across the board, more profit for apple and the big publishers, with no improvement to the product, through collusion. If the publishers wanted higher prices, they could have charged them to amazon individually; or set up their own book store with higher prices. And that would have been competition. But they chose not to compete in the marketplace, but arrange a back-room stitchup deal to raise prices for customers. And all the publishers have now settled with the DoJ for doing so.

Apple could have competed with Amazon; there was nothing stopping them setting their own prices, and making it so easy to use that people would use them instead even if they were more expensive for some books. Or offer other value-added services. Or shock, actually compete on price, it's not like apple was some startup tight on cash! They chose not to do any of that. And now they have to pay for the harm they did - which was artificially higher prices for books. They didn't increase competition; they made a deal with the publishers to lock in a higher profit margin for themselves and nobble their competitors at the same time. That's the exact opposite of competition.

Yet, the science around sales and marketing is far more useful than any physical science.

Sales and marketing is a basic function of all life. Animals broadcast themselves to find mates. You sell yourself when making social connections, as you are doing right now when you comment on these boards.

The knowledge within the article is going to be more rewarding to you than what you'll find in any physics journal.

It is only the most douchey, self-hating libertarian that feels they are above the role of sales and marketing that is fundamental to life. Those guys are complete losers, and completely happy about being losers. You'll find it a lot within outcast subcultures, such as nerds.

Compare this to more socially dominant alpha groups, such as fashionistas, where they actually closely follow news reports on which supermodel received which advertising campaign.

They do that because they understand that advertising and marketing represents a basic purpose of life.

Meanwhile, nerdy libertarians absolutely hate advertising themselves, because they think they're deserve social status without sales and marketing to go along with it.

The real world ramifications of the nerds hatred of sales and marketing including losing funding for the sciences, such as when the Superconducting Supercollider was canceled back in the 90's because scientists just couldn't kiss politician ass. They just simply couldn't do it.

If you nerds had any social IQ whatsoever, (instead of just sitting around being awesome by yourselves, because you're obviously so awesome!), you would be absolutely following articles like these.

What makes you think I'm not an engineer myself?

The "no wind" on an entire grid shit and the assumption that if stuff is offline it has to be because the energy source is unavailable for a start. A fairly dim first year student wouldn't be going on like that.

Slashdot, where some fucking idiot accountant with a fixation on a topic decides to try to play one-up on engineers by regurgitating what they can find with google but not understand. Here's a hint kid. I knew most of this stuff before Google existed.

Ever thought about wind turbines are easy to take offline and thermal is not?
You are still not answering about that 60GW but instead attempted to distract with graphs showing far less than that and rubbery figures projecting into the future, some childish attempt to "blind with science" since it still doesn't indicate what you pretend it does. I'd rather read an interesting discussion instead of lies from "no wind" little shits like you who forget that this is a technical audience. Why not tell us about the band you are listening to or some other thing you actually know about?

I'm gonna respond to your only verifiable claim

WTF?
I'm the one calling you out on your bullshit "there is no wind anywhere" rubbish and your "60GW of interconnect" lie. I've been too busy rubbing your face in your own filth and asking you to put up or stop lying to make any claims of my own.

Or in the case where a fool is being called out and properly labelled before he is taken seriously. One guess which case this is Mr "no wind anywhere". We both know what you are and nobody else is paying attention by this point.

Your reading comprehension needs some work

Nice little attempt at bullying a kiddie but sorry - not going to work, picked all that up most likely thirty years before you were born from your childish attitude. You can't use that to wriggle out of putting up "60" on at least a couple of occasions.

I kinda doubt that

I don't care if you are calling me a liar on my experience, I already have zero respect for your childishness and pretended stupidity to set me up as a strawman - it was me informing you that your bluff was not going to work.

For the record I don't think much of wind as an energy source since there's so much maintainance but it does fill a niche. What I don't like is armchair zealots ignoring reality when it's convenient to push a point. No wind anywhere? What crap! Why should I remain silent when someone is pushing that line to try to bully someone else?

If you are not being serious then you are either far more stupid than is likely or dishonest. I hate how this place is now infested with "end justifies the means" little shits like you.

Throughout the rest of my posts my tone was always reserved and measured

I came in after the "wind is not blowing anywhere" game so I obviously missed all of that. Try playing the "this is not the real me" trick on somebody who was born yesterday and it may just work.

What's with the name calling and vitriol?

I replied to one of your posts where you were calling others liars while dispensing fantasy yourself. What did you expect?

nameplate installed capacity (29.06 GW

How is that sixty?

I have done my homework

Clearly not.


WTF is it with you armchair "one true energy" zealots? You seem to have got a lot worse in the decade since I was working in the electricity generating industry. Why is any lie justified as long as it pushes "the message"? Get back to fucking marketing or whatever you get up to and leave the solution of not having all your energy eggs in one basket to the engineers who have to deal with reality instead of making shit up.

one of the largest countries in Europe = "little patch of Germany"

Obviously I meant the small coastal area where the windmills are sited. You cannot possibly be as stupid as you pretend so why try that tactic? Pretended stupidity may work in comedy but it's very annoying elsewhere.

Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant? Is there even that much wind capacity available at any time? That much of the German total generating capacity available of around 170GW is wind? I find it very difficult to believe so you'll need more than a postage stamp sized cherry picked graph to be convincing, especially after your "get wind from another continent" and similar bleatings of idiocy.
Just give up on this fantasy and use something real to push your point - it may not be as dramatic but you won't be making enemies of everyone that is not a full on nuclear zealot.

You may be more than 1/3 wind but that's the only thing here that is.