Most of the solar installations in Texas in the last year are grid-tie systems. When the grid goes down, they stop providing power.

During the Snowpocalypse, my home went for 4.5 days without electricity and an overlapping 4.5 days without water, for a total of 7 days reduced function. I was decently prepared. Unlike a lot of my neighbors, I have a gas stove top, that I was able to use to keep the house in the upper 50s. So when it thawed, I didn't have broken pipes. About half the homes on my street were flooded in the aftermath, and two nearby apartment complexes only recently moved tenants back in.

I also had a couple of small solar panels (10W and 20W), a few UPSes (my neighborhood has frequent brownouts), and I was able to keep a few devices and my network running for the duration. But, I was absolutely out of reserve when the power came back on.

By late last summer, I had a limited off-grid system capability of running my refrigerator or network for a couple of days. I've now got 600W of panels on top of what was a wooden swing set (permits are needed for the roof mount, even without grid connection), and two 400aH battery banks, so both the fridge and the network are running off of DIY solar. I'm using an automatic transfer switch, so the grid is the backup UPS to that system. It has been a couple of weeks since it tripped over to the grid. 400W more would cover the shorter days of the year.

I'm now torn between continuing to incrementally add to this system, and paying someone to handle the permits for a larger grid-tie system on my roof. I've been told by others that the permitting process for individuals is lengthy and nearly insurmountable in my area, otherwise, I'd be straight to hiring an electrician for the connections and doing most of the other work myself.

The dose makes the poison.

Try buying something as simple and straightforward as vinegar and oil salad dressing, that doesn't have added sugar. It is hard not to overdose if you use processed foods in the US.

Part of the benefits package that they have contracted too be paid is additional education during and after service. A major point of the article is that it might have broader societal advantages if that educational benefit could be used on coder schools.

It is how America West went bankrupt.

In '98, I took contract in San Francisco, continued to live in Austin. I bought a couple of round trip tickets for the first weekends I was coming home, and they were the last ones I paid for. I got nearly 18 months of free travel (except for my time in airports), because I was willing to be bumped at least once on pretty much any leg of any flight. The gate people thought I was great to work with. They could never pay for a hotel, but I had a laptop and they would let me run a power strip so that I could keep working. My family and boss knew that I was going to eventually get home or back at the office.

to explain the Fermi Paradox?

So how do I parse these "liberal guys" from CATO, published in Forbes, saying that oil and gas firms get special tax breaks?

"Another significant tax break allows companies to accelerate the deductions of the costs of labor and various other inputs associated with drilling oil or gas wells. Now, there's nothing wrong with deducting the cost of doing business from one's tax bill. In other industries these expenses would be capitalized and deducted over time as income is earned. But in the oil and gas sector, the tax code allows oil and gas firms to deduct 70% of these expenses in the very first year of a well's operation and the remainder over the next five years."

Or this guy over at The Volokh Conspiracy claiming that:

"The best example is the percentage depletion allowance which, as applied in some cases, enables oil companies greater depreciation than the value of the initial investment."

Because, I wouldn't want to look dumb and uneducated, thereby hurting my claim.

The service was made a little less decent when marketing REMFs sold the brass on the "warrior" terminology.

One of the highlights of my career was pulling a trick out of my geek toolbox to keep a combat unit mobile one sunny afternoon. When the Top commented "That is how you soldier," it meant more to me than any of the fruit salad ever pinned on my greens.

My understanding is that Apple makes some bonuses contingent on no leaks having occurred for a product rollout. Someone talks, no one involved with the project gets the bonus. If that happens in this case, he may need police protection.

Assuming that this guy is an otherwise valued employee, as a manager or co-worker, I would make the case to keep him: Fire him and the product release story will be about the guy who got fired. Keep him and he gets mentioned, but he will never lose anything of any value ever again.

He doesn't get a bonus, he does get every other shit detail until Scotland plays the U.S. in the World Cup finals (your teams may vary), and the standard for "met expectations" gets moved up a notch to "makes his manager and co-workers look insanely great every single moment of every single day."

But, I don't run a multi-$Billion corporation.

At least, that was what worked in Alien Rescue http://alienrescue.edb.utexas.edu/, a problem based learning game.

Declining the encounter is telling the officer that you are not consenting or agreeing to participating in the contact with them voluntarily, and directly informing them of your intention to leave without further consensual interaction.

The reason to decline explicitly is to avoid implying consensual (voluntary) participation after they didn't clearly answer your question.

You may end up being detained or arrested (the second and third categories of interactions, along with consensual), but it forces an answer to the original question "Am I free to go?" And it establishes the latest moment that those events could have occurred.

The sequence of events can be very important. If you have "volunteered" something in consensual conversation, there was no need to inform you of your post-arrest Miranda rights.

"Am I free to go" can (often does) result in a practiced non-answer, where the answer should be "yes."

In which case "I decline the encounter" is the appropriate follow up.

My background is more in rhetoric than science, and that there is what we rhetoricians like to call a straw man. You got the small and large all swapped around, then beat up on an argument that wasn't being made. The argument I have heard made, that concerns me, is that large changes in CO2 concentration result in small temperature changes that can have dramatic impacts.

To summarize,

Apparently neither of us is a lawyer.