The scheme is not as much about price arbitrage as about smoothing demand.

There's more demand for energy during the evenings than during the mornings, and price differences will never be able to eliminate that. No one will turn off their lights in the evening to turn them on during the morning, no matter what the prices are.

The effect of energy storage are to allow a steady supply, like wind, to be used when it's most needed. Storage would be even more important if solar energy is used, for obvious reasons.

The problem is that people aren't satisfied with having all they need, they want to have the same as the other guy.

Right now, we live in a society of undreamed riches to people in centuries past. Even a homeless guy on the street can get more by diving in the dumpster than a person could get by hard work a couple of centuries ago.

But no one would be satisfied by that. They want the same or better standard of living as their neighbor. Inequality is widely perceived as a major societal problem. However, a society where everyone is absolutely equal is impossible, by definition.

Take real estate, for instance. Who would get the beach front home? The penthouse apartment? There are natural limits to equality.

When people work, some of them will work harder to obtain what they want, others are satisfied with laying on the couch and watch TV. Human society needs some form of merit accounting.

You present an interesting model, but whether it works as you expect or not depends on the parameters.

For instance, you say "Sexual selection (that is, natural selection by way of how mates are chosen) is highly sensitive...". Exactly how much is it sensitive? Let's say two people of opposite genders meet by chance, how is the probability that they will mate affected by whatever parameter you are studying?

No one knows exactly the answer to these questions, because society is so complex. It's very hard to isolate the relevant parameters, and don't even think you can measure them to get numerical results with any accuracy.

When people create detailed mathematical models of society, they get wildly different answers from their simulations because no one knows the relevant parameters or their numerical values. That's why you get so many conflicting opinions on the economy, no one really knows what they are talking about.

You sound like the pope talking about masturbation. Yes, it's a sin, according to your opinion.

It was the policies enacted during the Clinton government that created the situation that led to the bubble in real estate.

What "puts the risk into bundles" is a Government-Sponsored Enterprise. It's not the "greedy, ruthless, careless" bankers that do it. It's the democratically elected federal government of the United States who is responsible for that.

It was the regulations that created a bubble in the housing market that caused it, which amounts to the same thing. People who know nothing about financial markets trying to manipulate things. It's not "Wall Street" that makes mistakes, it's the politicians who try to regulate it who cause shit to happen.

Of course they did. When you apply the principles mentioned in the books I posted above, which a couple of dimwit moderators termed "flamebait", it doesn't matter if the market plunges, you are out by then.

You only lose in the market if you ignore the signs it gives. A good investor knows how to detect early signs that the market is going down and cuts his losses in time to avoid the worst of it. By correctly applying the technical analysis of the market you may not win every time, but when you lose it will be a small loss, when you win it's a big win, in the end it averages in your favor.

The first methodical studies of market dynamics were done by Charles Dow in the late nineteenth century. Since then there have been many people who studied the behavior of te market with mathematical tools. The only people who lose money in the market are those who try to play it without knowing the tools.

As in every other human activity, ignorance is a hindrance.

However, what is different in financial markets, is that so many people pretend to know something about it without going to the trouble of learning the basics. Why is it that OWS and other people think they have the right to point out the supposed shortcomings of the market if they don't know shit about it?

We all need money to live, knowledge about finances and the way markets work should be a basic requirement for everyone.

Start by reading this book.

This one is somewhat simpler and easier to read, but it still is a very good and useful introduction to the market.

There's no big deal in making money in the market, the simple fact is that, like in any other profession, you must learn the trade before you get in.

People like those "Occupy Wall Street" hipsters preaching about the market are like the pope preaching about sex. You must try to learn about things before you can have an opinion on them.

Oh, it's an app for the phone?

At first I thought about something like a hose and a plastic bag.

You'll probably get much more bang for the buck, for the watts, and for the physical space, if you use GPUs.

There are video cards with 4000 processing cores available for under $400, look for HD7970x2. That is $0.10 for each core. No way a cluster of small computers will beat that.

The authors of Freakonomics raised a correlation with abortion legalization after Roe vs. Wade in 1973.

The most likely answer is that there is no single cause for the reduction in crime, but my bet would be in some cultural influence, not anything related to the physical environment.

Belonging to gangs stopped being "cool".

It's not a monopoly because the source code is public and available for anyone to use.

If Microsoft wants the full power of Android, they are free to create their own Android phone, provided they comply to the licensing agreement.

Huh, what? All my USB devices are formatted as ext3 or ext4. I don't need no FAT on my devices, FAT is obsolete, not USB mass storage.

Years ago, they split the company in two. The part that did the original work in electronics that started in the 1930s became Agilent. The part that specializes in selling printer ink kept the HP brand.

At least, the newspaper has all the armed guards' names and addresses.

Bad luck film producer. Plans to make the major science fiction film of the year, releases it in the same year as The Terminator.

Yes, unfortunately.

That 1% of tablets are the only ones that can open MS-Word documents correctly. They are a POS, but people will buy them if only for MS-Office compatibility.

The evil with an illegal monopoly is in letting it happen to begin with. Microsoft is now leveraging their old secret standard file formats to impose an inferior product on the market.