Not bothering with the “OT alert” thing, since OT has completely taken over lately…
Killian, #586–
Women going to work is good if they wish. Same for men. But in no way does it indicate an improvement for the typical person because the extra income from a second earner has been absorbed by debt and inflation.
Well, sure, and also by inflated consumer standards among those who have the money. Apparently it is now ‘normal’ to spend upwards of a grand on a highly capable smartphone every couple of years, and if you want to buy a new auto, it’s easy to spend amounts that would once have bought you a house (and even occasionally might still, if you can find a property ‘distressed’ enough.)
But I’d say that it’s certainly an improvement for the women, who are not forced into a position of dependency, as was structurally the case Once Upon A Time. Nigel’s right; a bad marriage can be a whole lot worse than none at all.
…since many [edubloggers] see the truth up close and personal at work every day.
Boy, I feel so inadequate, with my mere 2 or 3 days a week in public classrooms! But I wonder when E-P last saw one?
The human mind can barely drink from that firehose; taking it all in just isn’t possible.
How singularly lacking in humor! Perhaps that has something to do with E-P’s myopia.
But a decade after “Rosie the Riveter”.
Who was a government propaganda tool aimed at sustaining and enhancing war production, unrelated to feminism except ex-post facto. Apparently E-P believes deeply in “Kinde und Kuche,” even if “Kirche” only gets a tip of the hat.
“Boy, what those pesky women might not get up to…”
You don’t have to be omniscient to read the enemy’s agenda in their own words.
Uh, last time I checked the Communist Manifesto was not a feminist document.
You have to be somewhat more sophisticated to understand what’s going on in the feminist program to “deconstruct” the family…
I would suggest that reading philosphies asserting that the concept of “justice” is relevant to families as attempts to “deconstruct” the family is much closer kin to paranoia than to perception.
Public school teachers are PUBLIC EMPLOYEES. They are public servants by definition. If they pursue their own interests they have a conflict of interest.
Nonsense. “Employees” are certainly allowed to pursue their own interests, whether in public or private employment. Yes, public and private interests must be balanced, but that works both ways. The employees must consider the good of their employer, but the employer has a reciprocal obligation. And neither can do so without communication.
So teachers are NOT professionals? They do not select their own methods and working conditions? Nice of you to admit it.
An outstandingly dumb attempted ‘gotcha,’ since I’ve been saying all along that teachers should be treated more as professionals. And yes, that would include more ability to “select their own methods and working conditions…” Teachers today are subject to amazing amounts of micromanagement from both administrators and legislators. It’s very often highly unhelpful.
/OT
The big thing was the Bruce Point refurbishment, with units 1 and 2 coming back on-line in 2012. Nanticoke shut down in 2013 and Thunder Bay in 2014.
By which time Nanticoke, by far the largest remaining coal facility, was at a fraction of its previous production anyway:
YOUR OWN SOURCE confirms my claim that “renewables” must be underpinned by something sitting on a large stockpile of energy.
Nothing of the sort. It certainly illustrates that the first economies to get to 100% renewable mostly got there via a strong component of hydro, but it does nothing to ‘prove’ that that is a necessary requirement.
In NO case was the primary energy supply an unreliable, un-buffered flow of wind or solar energy… precisely what the “Green New Deal” demands that we somehow survive on.
No, that is not what the GND calls for. It calls for 100% renewable energy, but the ‘unbuffered’ bit is complete invention. It’s also not what I’ve called for in this discussion, and as such, it’s a classic instance of strawman argumentation.
When you cite a source in opposition to me, and it confirms everything I’ve been saying, you are proving that you are either grossly dishonest or grossly incompetent. Which is it?
Given that the premise of the question is a compound logical fallacy, I don’t think any ‘proof’ that may be involved has anything to do with me.
nigeljsays
Those people fascinated with the Authoritarian Personality Type should google “Moral Foundations Theory”.
Epidemiological studies and the aftermath of Chernobyl say otherwise.
Assertion without evidence that anyone outside the Soviet bloc was affected.
There have been years of epidemiological studies done in areas of naturally high radiation such as Ramsar and Kerala. The “abnormalities” found have not increased mortality or morbidity. Many hot springs where people have bathed for centuries are loaded with radium and radon (the inspiration for Radithor), and radiophobic Germany and Austria pay for medical patients to spend time in radon-rich mines for their health. If nobody is harmed by such natural radiation nobody was harmed by Chernobyl (or any other) releases at the same level or below.
@571:
It says that people in that industry want to preserve that industry. What a SHOCKER!
It says that people in the industry know that the propaganda is a pack of lies, unlike e.g. teachers who leave the business because of rampant psychological and outright physical abuse.
@572:
In South Carolina just before secession 58% of the population were slaves. And in any case, does the exact number matter?
It matters that you have to exaggerate, and completely ignore that slavery was ubiquitous world-wide at the time. Slavery of Africans continued in Saudi Arabia into the 1960’s (trafficing of African slaves to Arabia began right about the time of Islam), and slavery is endemic in India, China and Africa to this day.
You can stop trying to guilt-trip us Americans over it now. We don’t owe anyone.
You said things were better when most people were yeoman farmers; I pointed out that in that time, a lot of people were actual slaves.
Can you not tell the difference between a yeoman farmer and a slave? You’re not exactly showing it here. Just because someone lived at the same time as something else happened doesn’t mean they have any association with it, let alone responsibility for it… no matter how convenient it is for you to try to tar them with it.
Insult my father again and you and I can meet somewhere and settle this personally, you stupid, smug bastard.
You brought him into this discussion, not me. Now that you have threatened me I am justified in putting you down like a rabid dog if I ever meet you, and I am equipped, trained and insured for such possibilities. In other words, it’s your funeral. Last, as someone whose father was here one day and dead the next without warning, you can take your pose of fake moral outrage and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @595, Finlands schools are publicly funded and they do just fine. The evidence on charter schools is a bit mixed.
However regardless of who owns / runs the education system it makes sense to have 1) well qualified teachers, ie with degrees. We put all our best and brightest into things like law and its crazy, and 2) pay teachers well which will of course help attract well qualified people.
But clearly badly performing teachers should be fired.
Yeah we are having classroom discipline problems in NZ. Maybe getting rid of corporal punishment was a mistake. Although I saw teachers abuse this and that was partly why they got rid of it.
Education, immigration and feminism is interesting but getting off topic. Lets wrap it up and move on.
Slavery was a massive and hideous moral evil, disfiguring the US in multiple ways
Are you under the impression that slavery was unique to US South? That it was not practiced by most pre-industrial farming cultures, including the ancient Greeks and the “native Americans” conquered by Europeans? That e.g. the Cherokee had enough African slaves to have their own slave revolts? That it is not mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments without the moral baggage you place on it, and is sanctioned by Islam to this day? I don’t like slavery but outside the West it’s not my problem; as long as it continues in so many places I am not going to accept one iota of blame for it, especially from someone who may trace his own ancestry to slave traders as BPL might and Barack Hussein Obama certainly does.
Did it escape your notice that people from places where slavery continues are trying to get to the USA? It’s a really weird variety of oppression if literally millions want to enjoy it. I can see the attraction of being able to ruin somebody and get a bunch of money by calling them “racist”, though.
it’s also one the legacy of which continues to do so via ongoing cultural distortions including ‘implicit bias’ and ‘systemic racism.’
Both legal fictions engineered to enrich slimy lawyers. Do we get no credit for 5 decades of affirmative action, and repeated lowering of qualification bars to make that “leg up” ever easier to get without putting forth effort or showing actual ability? If massive inequality persists despite this, it confirms that the claimed causes thereof were lies from the beginning. We can stop blaming white people for it now.
you think that it was BPL’s father’s fault that credit card companies had gender-based discrimination as standard policy?
I expect EVERY credit-card company to terminate accounts when the person whose ability to pay backs up their side of the agreement dies, whether the secondary card holder is a friend, a child or a spouse. There are a host of ways to establish ability to pay, such as having bank accounts and being the beneficiary of a life insurance policy. The prepared have long used them.
Does he know that migrants quite often arrive with cellphones?
Do you know that it’s possible for someone to have a cell phone, but have never lived outside a wattle-and-daub hut or seen a water faucet let alone a flush toilet?
Or that there is a significant migration pathway from the Old World to the US via Brazil and then overland through Mexico, which obviously means that migrants must negotiate airports?
They negotiate airports the same way young children do: with assistance. Illiterates aren’t going to find their gates by themselves, or get to a bus station using maps they can’t read and hiring transport in languages they don’t speak. There is a big network of “humanitarians” (human trafficers) who handle all that for them. They use names like Pueblo Sin Fronteres.
Hasn’t he noticed that every single migrant is clothed in basically the sort of garb you’d find at any random mall in America?
Haven’t you asked yourself how such clothing gets to places which have nothing resembling malls? It’s shipped in by aid agencies, putting local producers out of work. I understand that it’s common for the unsalable commemorative gear of the losing team in a championship to be tossed into containers and “donated” overseas within days of the game. This results in e.g. Africans wearing the names and logos of teams they’ve never heard of and can’t even read. It also fools people like you into thinking they’re just like us.
has he failed to notice that every single migrant getting here on their own, and a great many of the tiny minority being brought in via the formal refugee resettlement process, has managed, often with very few material resources, to negotiate journeys of thousands of miles?
Do you remember the “caravan” that was a big thing in the news last year? Those people didn’t walk except for the cameras; they travelled in hired buses. And yes, they had handlers too. They did not get here on their own, nor are their tales of “oppression” their own either. They’re carefully crafted sob stories to get them unmerited benefits, starting with admission to the USA.
nigeljsays
Kevin McKinney @610 I agree except we had plenty of women entering the workforce, and both partners working, well before credit cards and easy hire purchase became a big “thing”. I suppose its one factor of many at best.
nigeljsays
Killian @586 said “Women going to work is good if they wish. Same for men. But in no way does it indicate an improvement for the typical person because the extra income from a second earner has been absorbed by debt and inflation.”
Just want to clarify I said in my response that “debt had nothing to do with it” I was referring to why both parents chose to work in the first place. Mum’s were entering the workforce in numbers before credit cards and hire purchases became really easy to obtain. I suppose in hindsight a few more entered the workforce just so they can take on more debt to buy stuff. Temptation and all that.
Like I said inflation is low these days and the numbers show wages a bit ahead of inflation where I live. It maybe different in America. So apologies if I wasnt clear.
Debt does absorb wages but it also buys goods and services.
David B. Bensonsays
Barton Paul Levenson @600 — All 4 of those countries have a large hydro component to the power grid. Denmark’s is in Norway.
nigeljsays
EP @597, Al Bundy was referring to intelligence as in IQ levels, not peoples political intelligence if there is such a thing. So you get a strawman award.
Anyway you make good by posting something from Psychology Today, a decent publication. I read it regularly. But its a stretch to say altruism spreading beyond family and trible is somehow a bad thing, or “pathalogical”.
In the past altruism was related to the immediate family or tribe but its changing and perhaps this is a natural out growth of a globalising world and breaking down of barriers, our common shared future, and better understanding of people generally. Evolution is a process, it doesn’t ‘stop’. ( I can see you grimacing at all this…don’t worry you will recover)
Of course taxes are sometimes used for altruistic purposes, even to help other countries. I don’t buy into the taxation is theft idea, it doesnt really stand up to scrutiny, but we do have to be careful about foreign aid. Make sure it gets to the right places and that projects actually get built. Libs and Cons would presumably find common ground with that.
And remember altruism has both good social and good economic pay backs longer term.These have been much discussed.
Nemesissays
@David B. Benson, #600
“I advocate an appropriately large fraction of nuclear power plants, witnessing the success in France.”
Smile, facing the 3rd consecutive severe drought year in Europe right now in 2020, groundwater tables dwindling rapidly for the recent 10 – 15 years. Sure, nuclear power… or maybe more methane gas (hehe, lots of it available quickly) or maybe more renewables… in the future… a shit, lets just bern more oil and coal. The entire funny discussion will be obsolete in the near term future. The entire discussion is a ghost debate, we are ghosts on the way to nowhere.
P.S.:
We have seen NO WINTER 2019/2020 in Europe so far. Recent temperatures in Germany up to fuckin +15°C during the recent 2 weeks and still NO winter.
… now walk on, murmuring ghosts, walk on to Nowhere, keep on swaying towards Neverland…
Al Bundysays
EP: Reaction speed is positively correlated with intelligence.
AB: Yep. And Muhammed Ali’s reaction speed trounced yours. He was “rated” at something like 79. You’re obviously lower?
EP: Most teachers are public employees paid from taxes; the man with a trade-school diploma and a business is an entrepreneur whose income depends on satisfied customers. Who has a greater moral right to their money?
Who, ultimately, made smarter use of their time on this planet? Does anything stop women from going to trade school? If women look down on trade schools while pursuing counterproductive masters degrees, does that not confirm that women pursue status to destructive levels?
AB: We’re getting to the point of inability to converse.
NO. A plumber who works for a plumbing company is NOT an entrepreneur. He’s a grunt laborer with some training.
That women choose careers that are productive beyond financial compensation while men choose low productivity but highly compensated jobs is NOT proof that women are inferior and deserve less. It’s evidence that amoral and immoral behavior can twist society.
And Nigel, please try to think of Others. Yeah, gloat about your access to healthcare. I’m an American inventor. So I don’t have access to healthcare.
There is this remarkable (if not surprising) failing of logic from the rote-learning community that rants about Common Core and all that diversity stuff.
I read that the counting-dots method was adopted as a measure to “close the gap” because it’s the method used… in Haiti. The average IQ in Haiti is 67, 3 points below the level designated “retarded”. Methods used to get concepts through to literal retards should not be imposed on the bright, or even the normal.
If all someone is going to do is stand in front of a classroom and have the kids recite multiplication tables, what exactly is the necessary qualification?
There are some foundational facts you just have to memorize. One-digit multiplication tables are in that category.
You need to know the multiplication tables to do anything useful. You also have to know things like the associative and distributive properties in order to teach arithmetic. Multiplication and addition are commutative, subtraction and division are not. You have to know the difference to teach the difference.
You have to know long division to be able to divide polynomials. A calculator won’t cut it.
I certainly score above the engineers
Yeah, right. You can do neither trig nor algebra, and you think you’re smarter than people who commonly bypass freshman calculus by taking the AP exam? You’re a joke, which is why I’ve been laughing at you for months now.
Why don’t you tell us your SAT math score, if you think we’d be all impressed?
Ray Ladburysays
David, I don’t consider you strident. You are a bit more enthusiastic about nukes than I am, but I suspect, some level will be inevitable now that we have exhausted all our safety margins for decarbonization.
EP, however is not atypical of many pro-nuke obsessives. Their real goal is attacking environmentalists rather than solving the energy puzzle.
More specifically, capacitors provide leading (or negative) reactive power to cancel out the following (positive) reactive power of motors.
The convention is that capacitors generate reactive power (current leads voltage), and inductors consume reactive power (current lags voltage). You could reverse the convention and it would all come out the same; the only reason we say electrons are negative is that somebody chose a convention before we knew what electrons were.
1) why does this seem to conflict with Zebras textbook explanation talking about capacitors storing magnetic energy? Or is it two sides of the same coin?
It is exactly two sides of the same coin.
I’m not going to dig up the specific comment link, but I explained this some pages back. Think of zebra’s tank circuit with a capacitor and an inductor connected between the top and bottom “nodes”. Say that you add a switch in the top connection (adding a 3rd node) and pre-charge the capacitor, then you close the switch instantaneously. The capacitor smoothly discharges into the inductor, which converts the electric field energy in the capacitor dielectric to magnetic energy until the capacitor voltage goes down through zero and goes negative. Then the magnetic energy of the inductor works against the increasing back-voltage of the capacitor, charging the capacitor and losing current/energy until the current reaches zero and the capacitor voltage reaches its negative peak. Then you have your exact starting condition, just with the sign reversed. And it smoothly reverses itself the same way until it is back the way it began. The oscillation frequency f is equal to ω/2π and ω=√(1/LC)
The key insight is that at the resonant frequency, the current coming out of the capacitor is always equal to the current going into the inductor. There is no extra current to go anywhere; they are always balanced and cancel out.
2) what is the physical mechanism that allows a capacitor to form leading edge (negative) reactive power?
It has two sets of plates separated by a dielectric insulator (which can be air or something like mylar or mica or even an oxide layer on aluminum or tantalum foil). If you apply a voltage between them, electrons accumulate on the negative side and are driven away from the positive side by electrostatic repulsion. The net charge remains zero or close.
The expression for the stored charge is Q = Cv, where Q is in coulombs, C is in farads and v in volts. As you can see, at zero voltage Q is zero, and it rises linearly with v. This means that as the AC waveform crosses zero going upward, there is the maximum positive current into the capacitor because that is when the voltage increases the fastest. Current falls to zero when the voltage peaks and reverses. This is the exact opposite of the current into a pure inductor, which reaches maximum after half a cycle of pushing on it. If you get them equal and opposite, they cancel out.
nigeljsays
Why both partners in relationships tend to work these days. I said originally “we just expect so much more these days, like larger homes and more technology, and better healthcare and someone has to fund this hence both parents typically work.” Of course this is true. Yes its often funded with debt, but I never said it wasn’t. Nobody forces people to buy large screen televisions.
What Al Bundy said is true a lot of what we do is low value paper pushing, but we are still purchasing those services.
Inflation is low so I don’t see that as much of a factor forcing both partners to work. People needing debt just to survive is true in some cases but beside the point.
Working class people have seen their pay go backwards in some countries like America. I concede that is a factor that would push both partners in working class households to work in America. Newsflash: I don’t live in America. Not everyone lives in America. Its not the centre of the world. We have a different sort of crisis probably pushing a few more women to work, the few that dont already, namely very exorbitant housing prices.
Women should be free to choose like others mention. And we should remove barriers and not discriminate.
Most of the article was devoted to nuclear power plants ramping output up and down to deal with wind and solar intermittency, especially when there’s not enough wind and solar power, and the article stated nuclear power plants can do this, and in fact some are being used to do this right now.
It doesn’t make any sense to do that, but the people in charge lack the imagination and technical chops to find uses for the excess power. Such dump loads would let nuclear, wind and PV co-exist on the grid and displace more fossil fuel. I have a concept in the patent process for doing exactly that, and I need to get back to it.
Secondly my father was diagnosed with cancer due to exposure to radiation from the Nagasaki bomb blast. He was in the army radio corps, and was in Nagasaki shortly after the bomb blast, 2 weeks I think.
Ironically, he probably got the cancer from chemical exposure or the like. The rule of thumb for fallout radiation is the “rule of 7”: the fallout radiation drops by a factor of 10 when the time since blast goes up by a factor of 7. After 7 hours the radiation has fallen to 10%, and after 49 hours it’s fallen to 1%. 2 weeks post-blast it would be down to almost 0.1%, which doesn’t have any kind of acute effects including erythema. There is no documented ill effect of radiation exposures too low to cause erythema.
As for “why nuclear?”, it isn’t really about the technology. He actually offers no suggestion as to how to achieve a transition
Yeah, right you little doofus. Way back @418 I said we could build something like 2 430 MW(t) units a day, like Liberty ships. We fuel the first ones with ex-weapons fissiles, then reprocess used fuel from reactor cooling pools and dry casks until that stuff is gone, then mine and enrich more uranium to start new units until our reprocessing excess catches up to the pace of new builds. I calculated that it might take around 600,000 tons of new uranium minus whatever we can recover from existing inventories to fully repower the USA. That is less than 10% of world resources, so definitely doable. Once the system is running it needs no more uranium enrichment; it can run for centuries on our stocks of depleted uranium and recovered uranium from used fuel, scaling up at maybe 2%/year.
You can either plunk these things down on brownfield sites to re-power old steam turbine plants, or (after proving that they are walk-away safe) put them inside cities to provide both electricity and hot water heat. Either way you’d want to run them at 100% 24/7 except for maintenance. The “excess” generation would be best used (1) killing petroleum demand by charging PHEVs and BEVs, (2) replacing natural gas and LPG via heat pumps, and then (3) going to various dump loads which upgrade low-value resources to replace other fossil fuels. Hydrogen doesn’t even rate except as a chemical feedstock, and you might be able to make everything you need as a byproduct of chlorine production.
Sigh. Massive renewables kick starting in the 1970’s? A few solar panels on roofs and experimental wind farms? I don’t see it.
Because you’re not looking at the results.
The first controlled nuclear chain reaction was done in 1942. 43 years later is 1985; in that year, nuclear electric power accounted for 383,691 out of 2,473,002 GWh of net generation, or 15.5% of the total… despite years of fighting from “environmentalists” and the fossil interests. That SAME year was 44 years after the debut of the Smith-Putnam wind turbine, yet wind accounted for just 6 GWh.
In the last full year on record (2018), wind generated just 6.53% (272,650 out of 4,174,398 GWh) of US electric consumption despite decades of heavy subsidies. Despite equally heavy opposition, the closure of multiple plants and the start of just ONE new plant in this century, nuclear generated 19.33%.
Photovoltaic cells date back to Charles Fritts in 1884. That is 136 years ago. Concentrating solar thermal also dates back to the 1800’s. The origin of wind turbines is lost in the mists of time. If they’re going to save us, what’s taking them so damn long?
Renewables only started to gain a bit of traction after the climate problem emerged in the 1990s
There was a LOT of activity in the USA long before that; the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 pushed a lot of pre-commercial research. 20 years after that was 1995, which was also 54 years after the Smith-Putnam turbine went on-grid. Which yielded results faster?
In contrast nuclear power started in America around 1960 and was hugely favoured
That favor didn’t last even 20 years; well before the 20th anniversary of Shippingport coming on-line in 1958, the US nuclear industry was under a regime that can only be described as persecutorial. I’ll let you read all about it here, as I have nothing to add to what Cohen so cogently wrote:
The thing is to subsidise both renewables and nuclear power equally
Bad move, as subsidies encourage wasteful energy consumption. We should tax fossil carbon and let everything else compete on a level playing field, on which unreliables (dependent on fossil fuel for backup) will be at a disadvantage. You can tell that the anti-nukes are afraid of this, because they want subsidies for wind and solar but NOT a carbon tax.
Schedules are developed with future operations in mind. If refueling is currently scheduled once every X “opportunities” and the nuke’s burn rate drops I’m thinking the engineers would be intelligent enough to change the refueling schedule to once every Y opportunities.
There is also the utilization of a very big, expensive capital asset with a lot of fixed costs. The variable cost of fuel is relatively small. Since the whole program of “going renewable” relies upon capturing and making productive use of surpluses, we should be insisting that this happen NOW and just let the nuclear plants do what they do best: run flat-out to supply the base load. Decarbonize now, worry about “sustainability” later.
ramping up and down is what flywheels and batteries do.
Flywheels are good for minutes, batteries for a handful of hours. If you’ve got batteries, it makes far more sense to put them in vehicles than sitting at a substation somewhere. We have far cheaper ways of storing hours and days of energy for the grid, such as hot molten “solar salt”.
Your arguments rarely give voice to any other than a Pure White view.
E-P 584: there are NO “renewable” success stories that aren’t dominated by hydro.
BPL: Denmark, Portugal, Iceland, Spain.
Denmark: only 60.5% RE, of which 4917 out of 30,522 GWh of generation (16.1%) was biomass (burning other countries’ pelletized forests, mostly).
Iceland: 100% RE, 72.6% hydro, 5068 GWh (27.3%) geothermal, just 9 GWh (0.05%) wind and no solar.
Spain: only 38.1% RE on the grid. Spain produced 21% of electric generation from nuclear in 2016.
Further, that’s just electric power; essentially none of the non-electric energy consumption is non-fossil. You’re confirming my assertion. Again. Give up yet? Learn to do math. Better yet, learn to THINK instead of repeating narrative talking points.
IF you can. I doubt this; most people don’t have the mental agility to break free of social consensus and actually look at facts independently. For this crime, the consensus expels them.
Who was it who said “when you find yourself in the majority, it is time to reform”? I’m there, man. Why aren’t you with me?
Al Bundysays
EP: If liberals were truly intelligent,
AB: they wouldn’t confuse intelligence and wisdom? Oops, you failed :-)
To go on an irrelevant sideshow in order to distract focus from a scientific truth is piss poor debating style. Might work on conservatives, though…
And to state that intelligent liberals are more subjected to and/or less resistant to brainwashing than stupid conservatives is a howler! (Take a glance at a Trump rally to see brainwashing and Newspeak in action)
Face facts. Like most Conservatives you’re non-creative. But your grand memory allows you to compensate for your disability to a reasonable degree…
…for a (pardon my French) Conservative.
(And my opinion of EP’s skills exceeds this post’s flavor, but the rancidity of his flavor swamps all.)
Mr. Know It Allsays
Mitigation under attack: Tesla EVs under investigation by NHTSA:
551 – Kevin
““For the power sector, the target is 100 per cent renewable electricity production by 2040.””
That’s FAKE NEWS. The earth will end in 11.5 years – AOC, smartest whipper-snapper walkin’ said so! :)
561 – nigelj
““Causes and consequences of eastern Australia’s 2019-20 season of mega-fires””
One consequence will likely be few fires in those same areas for a while. ;)
563 – Al Bundy
“mrkia, note that your vape video begins in the middle of an argument. Look at that maga-guy’s face. He just said something to hook a victim. You look up to predators, mrkia? (A real question)”
He was probably refused service by the intolerant leftist so he grabbed his phone and started recording. Predators are awesome:
563 – Al Bundy
“Liberals are about a standard deviation more intelligent than conservatives.”
Then why is it that liberals don’t know which restroom they should use?
568 – EP
“Pretty much the entire West has such a crisis of confidence we can’t even keep out primitive tribes-people who have to be taught how to use flush toilets, light switches and even doorknobs. Lots don’t speak our languages and are effectively unemployable,…”
574 – Kevin
“Slavery was a massive and hideous moral evil, disfiguring the US in multiple ways, which was BPL’s point. And yes, it’s also one the legacy of which continues to do so via ongoing cultural distortions including ‘implicit bias’ and ‘systemic racism.’”
No one denies slavery is evil; that’s why Republicans freed the slaves in the Civil War, but perhaps if leftists remove all the historical monuments of the period, we can forget that inconvenient fact. FYI: The US received less than 10% of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
Kevin: Nigel’s right; a bad marriage can be a whole lot worse than none at all.
AB: The most ironic form of child abuse is committed by many couples who stay together “for the children”
To what? Experience and accept Hell as normal life?
Humans recreate their horrors, but the players and actions often invert, so by running from one nightmare one finds and clings to its anti
zebrasays
#599 David Benson,
In one sense, it might be you who are exceptional, because you are at least willing to admit that a market system for electricity generation can work, although it obviously pains you.
Ray is probably correct that online nuclear proponents mostly fall into two categories:
1. Obvious Fossil Fuel trolls, who are using a false-flag argument to bash renewables.
2. People like EP, who would bash renewables even if nuclear didn’t exist, because they don’t fit into his unimaginative worldview.
In a sense, FF generation and nuclear are “natural allies”; they represent the monopolistic approach that stifles innovation and competition. In economic terms, both are rent-seeking, and both involve externalities of various types. And yes, they both hate hippies and greenies.
And the universal characteristic of nuclear proponents is this:
They can never explain how to get all the plants built in the USA.
France did actual Socialism. In the US, even the most trivial action in any area by the Government is branded “socialism” and rejected.
E-P 604: Now that you have threatened me I am justified in putting you down like a rabid dog if I ever meet you, and I am equipped, trained and insured for such possibilities.
E-P 606: someone who may trace his own ancestry to slave traders as BPL might
BPL: Bzzzzzt! Wrong! My ancestors came here from eastern Europe after slavery was abolished. You are more likely to trace your ancestry to slave traders than I am. You’re the one who “won’t accept an iota of blame for it,” as if the original discussion was “who to blame” rather than “the past was better when we [white people] were all yeoman farmers.”
DBB 609: All 4 of those countries have a large hydro component to the power grid. Denmark’s is in Norway.
BPL: Denmark had 20% of its power coming from wind twenty years ago, and now it’s 47%. As that fraction goes up, I expect they will need less power from outside the country, don’t you?
BPL: I’ve pointed out before that IQ increases rapidly when parents are better educated and better nutrition and opportunities are available. I cited the peer-reviewed literature. You are stuck in the idea that IQ is genetic destiny, so you can maintain your self-image as a superior Aryan. Apparently you missed the past half century of debate over the meaning and utility of IQ as a measure of intelligence.
E-P 623: Who was it who said “when you find yourself in the majority, it is time to reform”? I’m there, man. Why aren’t you with me?
BPL: Because I think you’re a horrible excuse for a human being. You’re racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-environmentalist, condescending, smug, insulting, and generally offensive.
BPL: E-P, and you, seem to imply heavily that it doesn’t matter. And are you completely unaware of the “Neo-Confederate” movement in the US, to which E-P probably belongs?
Adam Leasays
616: “Why both partners in relationships tend to work these days.”
Renting is little better, since renting involves paying the landlord’s monthly mortgage bill plus extra for profit, and some slack to cover the risk to the landlord of having to do repairs.
When house prices keep increasing and more and more people cannot afford to get on the property ladder, rents increase in price (people have to live somewhere). This fuels the buy-to-let train by those wealthy enough to afford multiple properties, who then let them out for profit (there is plenty of demand), and also financially gain from the increasing value of the property (which some use to supplement their pension in retirement).
Humans recreate their horrors, but the players and actions often invert, so by running from one nightmare one finds and clings to its anti…
Sad and true. I occurs to me that though that was written in the context of all the OT social stuff we’ve been discussing lately, it would be worth pondering the ways that dictum applies to climate issuses, too.
zebrasays
#613 EP,
“SAT math score”
I’m more interested in now than decades ago. I’ve given you several tests, and you have not done well at all. Here’s your response on the “reading comprehension” test:
Source:
“A capacitor helps to improve the power factor by relieving the supply line of the reactive power. The capacitor achieves this BY storing the magnetic reversal energy.”
Your interpretation:
“He QUOTES THE FUNCTION OF THE CAPACITOR (“relieving the supply line of the reactive power”) but FOCUSES ON THE INCIDENTAL ENERGY STORAGE (which I acknowledged waaaay back @247 with the proviso “not energy storage devices per se” (IOW, they do some of that but that isn’t essential to their purpose).”
Now, I gave you the opportunity to explain how storing energy “isn’t essential to their purpose” or “incidental” makes any sense when, “relieving the supply line” is their function, and they “achieve it by storing the energy”.
You still haven’t answered.
I might expect an ESL student to get the very clear language from the source mixed up, or one who had cognitive issues, or perhaps was on drugs. But a True American Stable Genius like yourself should be eager to enlighten us on why this apparently deranged response is, after all, correct.
(Without long ranting digressions from the actual question, one would hope.)
Let’s get past this and then we can discuss math education.
Killiansays
Just want to clarify I said in my response that “debt had nothing to do with it” I was referring to why both parents chose to work in the first place.
The idiot speaks again. No, misogynyst, these are facts.
All gains from second incomes have been eaten up by expanded sunk costs (housing, health care, child care, etc.) and debt. People have toys and homes largely due to debt. Then they get more debt as they struggle to keep those paid. While many women have wanted to work, the fact is they also had to unless they wanted to live on mac and cheese, never vacation, send their kids to school in rags, etc.
Your beliefs about facts do not counter the facts themselves.
Asshat.
Killiansays
Re #601 Kevin McKinney said I’m a misogynyst, too!
Well, sure, and also by inflated consumer standards among those who have the money.
Among those who have the money? Pay attention. I didn’t say the upper middle class, I said the “typical person.” The “typical person” has no savings to speak of and would be homeless within months if they lost their job.
But I’m sure women love you minimizing their sacrifices and that the 1% love your justification of the crap system they control.
Apparently it is now ‘normal’ to spend upwards of a grand on a highly capable smartphone every couple of years
Stop trying to score points like your little anklebiter.
and if you want to buy a new auto
That’s not debt for all but a tiny fraction of people? Are you out of your freaking mind to even raise that point given the parameters of my comments? And what percent of the auto market is new each year? About 6.6%. You’re right! Everyone’s buying new cars all the damned time and using no debt to do so! And guess what? 2% get repossessed. More debt.
it’s easy to spend amounts that would once have bought you a house (and even occasionally might still, if you can find a property ‘distressed’ enough.)
You could buy a house for 5k not all that long ago. Not germane. And, we aren’t talking about 300k cars for freaking sakes… jesus… anklebiter2, Kevin? You really want o be that kind of guy?
But I’d say that it’s certainly an improvement for the women, who are not forced into a position of dependency
Sorry, no Straw Men allowed, ab2. I said myself, “that want to.” We aren’t talking about the issue of ACCESS to work, genius, we are taking about what has happened to the income.
“…as was structurally the case Once Upon A Time.”
And once upon a time you weren’t engaging in unintelligent anklbiting. Things change.
Nigel’s right; a bad marriage can be a whole lot worse than none at all.
Straw Man horsecrap. How does one have tow incomes if not married? The points raised had zero to do with even one of the points you and he raised.
Nothing of the sort. It certainly illustrates that the first economies to get to 100% renewable mostly got there via a strong component of hydro, but it does nothing to ‘prove’ that that is a necessary requirement.
Let me get this straight. You (1) admit that hydro was key to all successful decarbonization efforts (and accidents, like France), and (2) you can’t provide even a single counterexample, but (3) you insist that this doesn’t constitute any sort of “proof”.
Feh. I’m from Missouri: SHOW ME.
Hadn’t it occurred to you that unless the “balancing” generation is something carbon-free (hydro and geothermal are pretty much the only candidates with the requisite endurance), it’s got to be something fossil-fired? (The planet doesn’t care about our definition of “renewable”.) The logic is inescapable. How can you deny it?
No, that is not what the GND calls for. It calls for 100% renewable energy, but the ‘unbuffered’ bit is complete invention.
Here’s what your source says:
“Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”
Looks like enough loopholes to drive a container ship through, especially the use of “power” rather than “energy” which appears to limit its scope to the electric grid. Adding more carbon-free buffering would require things like massive new water impoundments behind new dams, and that’s not happening. In other words, it’s vaporware.
its a stretch to say altruism spreading beyond family and trible is somehow a bad thing, or “pathalogical”.
It’s pathological when it puts the distant and alien “other” in front of nation, family and even self. Dickens called this “telescopic philanthropy” in his characterization of Mrs. Jellyby:
“Don’t be frightened!” said Mr Guppy, looking in at the coach-window. “One of the young Jellybys been and got his head through the area railings!”
“O poor child,” said I; “let me out, if you please!”
“Pray be careful of yourself, miss. The young Jellybys are always up to something,” said Mr Guppy.
I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened and crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression that his skull was compressible by those means. As I found (after pacifying him), that he was a little boy, with a naturally large head, I thought that, perhaps where his head could go, his body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of extrication might be to push him forward. This was so favourably received by the milkman and beadle, that he would immediately have been pushed into the area, if I had not held his pinafore, while Richard and Mr Guppy ran down through the kitchen, to catch him when he should be released. At last he was happily got down without any accident, and then he began to beat Mr Guppy with a hoop-stick in quite a frantic manner.
Nobody had appeared belonging to the house, except a person in pattens, who had been poking at the child from below with a broom; I don’t know with what object, and I don’t think she did. I therefore supposed that Mrs Jellyby was not at home; and was quite surprised when the person appeared in the passage without the pattens, and going up to the back room on the first floor, before Ada and me, announced us as, “Them two young ladies, Missis Jellyby!” We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs Jellyby’s presence, one of the poor little things fell down-stairs—down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise.
Mrs Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces, as the dear child’s head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!
“I am very glad indeed,” said Mrs Jellyby in an agreeable voice, “to have the pleasure of receiving you. I have a great respect for Mr Jarndyce, and no one in whom he is interested can be an object of indifference to me.”
We expressed our acknowledgments, and sat down behind the door where there was a lame invalid of a sofa. Mrs Jellyby had very good hair, but was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it. The shawl in which she had been loosely muffled, dropped on to her chair when she advanced to us; and as she turned to resume her seat, we could not help noticing that her dress didn’t nearly meet up the back, and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace—like a summer-house.
The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only very untidy but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we followed the poor child who had tumbled down-stairs: I think into the back kitchen, where somebody seemed to stifle him.
But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking, though by no means plain girl, at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen, and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink. And, from her tumbled hair to her pretty feet, which were disfigured with frayed and broken satin slippers trodden down at heel, she really seemed to have no article of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition or its right place.
“You find me, my dears,” said Mrs Jellyby, snuffing the two great office candles in tin candlesticks which made the room taste strongly of hot tallow (the fire had gone out, and there was nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), “you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies, and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.”
As Ada said nothing, but looked at me, I said it must be very gratifying.
“It is gratifying,” said Mrs Jellyby. “It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day. Do you know, Miss Summerson, I almost wonder that you never turned your thoughts to Africa.”
This application of the subject was really so unexpected to me that I was quite at a loss how to receive it. I hinted that the climate—
“The finest climate in the world!” said Mrs Jellyby.
“Indeed, ma’am?”
“Certainly. With precaution,” said Mrs Jellyby. “You may go into Holborn, without precaution, and be run over. You may go into Holborn, with precaution, and never be run over. Just so with Africa.”
I said, “No doubt.” – I meant as to Holborn.
“If you would like,” said Mrs Jellyby, putting a number of papers towards us, “to look over some remarks on that head, and on the general subject, which have been extensively circulated, while I finish a letter I am now dictating—to my eldest daughter, who is my amanuensis-”
The girl at the table left off biting her pen, and made a return to our recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky.
“I shall then have finished for the present,” proceeded Mrs Jellyby with a sweet smile, “though my work is never done….”
I’m sure you can think of plenty of people doing the same thing today. The virtue-signallers holding “REFUGEES WELCOME” signs are prime examples.
Killiansays
Re #589 anklebiter said
Killian @586 creates an entire forest of straw people and multiple misconceptions.
“The “rich” countries are rich at the top. Virtually all of the wealth created since 1970 has gone to the 1%. Real income for Americans rose a TOTAL of 4% over that same time despite productivity rising significantly.”
So what? Total strawman. I wasn’t even talking about anything related to inequality.
1. You clearly do not understand the Straw Man Fallacy. 2. You specifically talked about rich countries, more women working and that making countries richer. That you think greater debt equals wealth show what an utter idiot you are.
Not a Straw Man, a rebuttal to your stupid comments.
It’s common knowledge there is massive wealth inequality. I’ve written formal submissions to political parties suggesting policies to counter this problem.
Suuuure you have. Let me see, 1. Git thos liddle ladees back in der kitchen! Theys makin too muches moneis and weez gettin too rich. 2. See #1.
“Women going to work is good if they wish. Same for men. But in no way does it indicate an improvement for the typical person because the extra income from a second earner has been absorbed by debt and inflation.”
I disagree in part. Debt has nothing to do with the issue.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Consumer debt in the U.S. has grown by 25 percent in five years and doubled since the turn of the century…
Consumers in southern states hold more debt as a proportion of their income than other regions in the U.S. … [Note: Also many of the poorest.]
…The average American household held $533 in debt and earned $30,300 in 1950, not including mortgages. In 2018, households had $31,420 worth of debt relative to a median income of $78,646.
In 2018, 7 in 10 borrowers who didn’t pay the full balance on their credit debt paid $113 billion in credit card interest and fees, up from $74.5 billion in 2013.
Revolving debt, comprised mainly of credit card debt, increased 24,500 percent since 1970, adjusting for inflation.
You’re *useless* on these pages. As to your inflation point:
Inflation has been low since the 1990s the very period we are talking about where both partners increasingly work.
Yet, debt exploded. Figure it out, genius.
Inflation was higher in the 1970s when one parent worked. I will only accept that inflation is at most one minor contributing factor.
What is wrong with your head? I said nothing about inflation being a major part of anything. I said debt and inflation. The far greater issue is debt. But inflation helps drive that. BUT, the point, and what you completely missed in your anklebiting frenzy, was that I juxtaposed *real income* versus those two issues and it’s near non-existent rise while 1% wealth went through the roof and productivity made huge increases. That is, we have worked harder for less and made the very rich very, very much richer.
The reasons both husbands and wives work these days are multifaceted. The evidence is obvious. We tend to have more material goods and larger houses these days.
Stupid. No. The fact is as I stated in another post just posted: Those non-discretionary costs have risen to a majority of income where they used to be a manageable fraction. Housing, childcare, utilities, transportation, etc., things we must spend on, became much higher since the early ’70’s.
Shush, anklebiter. You know nothing. Never have, never will. Regurgitate, bastardized by you, others’ knowledge elsewhere.
“Had more women gone to work AND incomes risen steadily AND minimum wage merely kept up with inflation, you have a 99% that was virtually all middle class.”
Probably true but completely beside the point.
It is exactly the point. Your claim is bullshit. Women going to work did not make countries richer, it made them poorer – if one thinks of “them” as being The People – because now The People carry debt, not savings.
“Again, you fail to “get” it. “Your veiled misogyny (extreme feminists) should get you banned.”
You realize that this problem is easily dealt with using a bit of engineering? If river flows are too low, pump groundwater to the condensers to both lower the inlet temperature and boost the flow. If the outlet temp is too high, forced-draft cooling towers can lower it. Aquifers near the river will recharge naturally.
We have seen NO WINTER 2019/2020 in Europe so far. Recent temperatures in Germany up to fuckin +15°C during the recent 2 weeks and still NO winter.
I’m seeing the same when the polar vortex is wandering elsewhere; there was snow in early November followed by weeks of thaw up to about New Year’s. The vortex is wandering here right now and there’s about 6 inches of white crap on the ground that I need to get out and get rid of.
The forecast is for thaw conditions again in a few days.
Their real goal is attacking environmentalists rather than solving the energy puzzle.
Wrong. I attack the fake environmentalists whose real goal is getting rid of nuclear energy in order to make the world “safe” for fossil fuels (and nothing else). That list includes Amory Lovins, Mark Z. Jacobson and the authors of the Energiewende.
Everyone who takes FF money must be considered dirty. Jacobson is sponsored by the Precourt Institute, endowed by oil baron Jay Precourt. It’s no wonder that his “roadmap” (a roadmap to nowhere, dissected in detail by Clack et al.) says we can do it without nuclear power. Unfortunately his model had a little fraud problem in it, in that it assumed that hydro output can be increased on the order of 10 times its nameplate rating. He also assumed that transmission wouldn’t cause any difficulties. This is academic misconduct at the very least.
Know what’s a pretty solid solution to the USA’s part of the energy puzzle? 3.3 TW of emissions-free heat at 550°C. We have the resources, we just need to use them.
That women choose careers that are productive beyond financial compensation
Turning out “high-school graduates” who can’t even read their own diplomas is “productive”? How about taking 13 years to teach what used to be covered in 9?
while men choose low productivity but highly compensated jobs is NOT proof that women are inferior and deserve less.
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner
One little substitution and you’ve got our society pegged.
Face facts. Like most Conservatives you’re non-creative.
I was listed as sole inventor on 2 US patents before I was 35. I’m working on 3 possibly-patentable twists on a specific idea that fell in front of me. One is for waste-to-fuel, one is for destruction of toxic waste, and the last and likely most important is for upgrading of biomass to advanced biofuels with a secondary revenue stream from a completely different industry. I’m working on waste-to-fuel right now because it seems likely to be profitable soonest; people will bring feedstock to you and pay you to take it.
You think I’m uncreative because I insist that no scheme which doesn’t respect the laws of physics can possibly work. The people who don’t heed that always fail, often in spectacular fashion. Creativity lies in finding the loopholes to get what you want within the laws of physics and chemistry. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
I’m not a “conservative”. Some ways I’m radical, some ways I’m a flaming reactionary. So-called “conservatives” can’t even conserve the ladies’ restroom, let alone the habitability of our only planet. If we’re going to actually conserve anything, it’ll take radical measures. Have you ever seen me shrink back from the magnitude of the problem? I not only think bigger than you do, I probably think bigger than you can. If we’re going to solve this we need to meet it head-on, and those who can’t or won’t are out of the fight already. So get out of the way.
Mr. Know It Allsays
619 – DBB
From your linked article: “After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation.”
That article was some wild-eyed dreaming – wonder if the author is naive enough to actually believe it? ;)
Lots of bickering above about teaching methods, etc. Much of public school in the USA is now child abuse – the lack of learning is preparing the kids to fail. Problems are many and include not being able to fire incompetent unionized, government teachers and administrators, top-down command and control from the feds including failed teaching methods like common core math as just one example:
Here we have a professor from Stanford! attempting to justify and explain the abject blithering idiocy of common core math – an idiocy that is scary in it’s depth and destructiveness. DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO ATTEND PUBLIC SCHOOL IN THE USA!!!
623 – Al Bundy
“And to state that intelligent liberals are more subjected to and/or less resistant to brainwashing than stupid conservatives is a howler!”
Seriously? ROFLMAO! Irrefutable proof that you are wrong:
EP: nobody is harmed by such natural radiation nobody was harmed by Chernobyl (or any other) releases at the same level or below.
AB: Interesting how information that causes your point to crumble (or require advancement) evaporates instead of assimilates. An error of technique.
The issue isn’t external radiation. The issue is concentrated bits of internal radiation that reinjure the same tissue over extended periods.
Keep up. It would make interacting with you more fun and productive. To be clear: nobody is disagreeing with your irrelevant factoid about diffuse external radiation.
Killiansays
The nukees will be happy, the marketees will be happy, yet neither will be happy at the call for massive reductions in consumption.
Engineer-Poet @615, thanx for that information on capacitors and PFC, it is actually really helpful and makes sense. I did figure out the two sides of the same coin issue, expressed in hindsight back at comment 594.
God I hate that feeling of not fully understanding. I just have to get to the bottom of things like scratching an itch. Please understand my knowledge of PFC was zero a couple of weeks ago. Literally.
nigeljsays
Al Bundy @623 says “Like most Conservatives you’re (EP) non-creative”. The exception proves the rule. EP looks very creative with engineering. Maybe not so much with social policy.
Al Bundysays
EP: Do the math and tell me where I’m wrong.
AB: Do the sociological/psychological analysis and tell me when you’ve ever been right.
Al Bundysays
EP,
You’re right about how school way back when was absolute torture for folks like us. I’m of the impression that things are better now.
I came up with a rough outline for a new education system. It integrates students of various intellects in a way that fosters working relationships across mental classes while challenging all the kids’ minds. I’m going to start an email discussion with Kevin about it. I think you’d provide a lot of value added.
Not bothering with the “OT alert” thing, since OT has completely taken over lately…
Killian, #586–
Well, sure, and also by inflated consumer standards among those who have the money. Apparently it is now ‘normal’ to spend upwards of a grand on a highly capable smartphone every couple of years, and if you want to buy a new auto, it’s easy to spend amounts that would once have bought you a house (and even occasionally might still, if you can find a property ‘distressed’ enough.)
But I’d say that it’s certainly an improvement for the women, who are not forced into a position of dependency, as was structurally the case Once Upon A Time. Nigel’s right; a bad marriage can be a whole lot worse than none at all.
E-P, #596–
OT ALERT!
‘Proved’ by asserting it.
…since many [edubloggers] see the truth up close and personal at work every day.
Boy, I feel so inadequate, with my mere 2 or 3 days a week in public classrooms! But I wonder when E-P last saw one?
How singularly lacking in humor! Perhaps that has something to do with E-P’s myopia.
Who was a government propaganda tool aimed at sustaining and enhancing war production, unrelated to feminism except ex-post facto. Apparently E-P believes deeply in “Kinde und Kuche,” even if “Kirche” only gets a tip of the hat.
“Boy, what those pesky women might not get up to…”
Uh, last time I checked the Communist Manifesto was not a feminist document.
I would suggest that reading philosphies asserting that the concept of “justice” is relevant to families as attempts to “deconstruct” the family is much closer kin to paranoia than to perception.
Nonsense. “Employees” are certainly allowed to pursue their own interests, whether in public or private employment. Yes, public and private interests must be balanced, but that works both ways. The employees must consider the good of their employer, but the employer has a reciprocal obligation. And neither can do so without communication.
An outstandingly dumb attempted ‘gotcha,’ since I’ve been saying all along that teachers should be treated more as professionals. And yes, that would include more ability to “select their own methods and working conditions…” Teachers today are subject to amazing amounts of micromanagement from both administrators and legislators. It’s very often highly unhelpful.
/OT
By which time Nanticoke, by far the largest remaining coal facility, was at a fraction of its previous production anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanticoke_Generating_Station#Plant_operations
(Thunder Bay only had a peak output of ~309 MW.)
Nothing of the sort. It certainly illustrates that the first economies to get to 100% renewable mostly got there via a strong component of hydro, but it does nothing to ‘prove’ that that is a necessary requirement.
No, that is not what the GND calls for. It calls for 100% renewable energy, but the ‘unbuffered’ bit is complete invention. It’s also not what I’ve called for in this discussion, and as such, it’s a classic instance of strawman argumentation.
Given that the premise of the question is a compound logical fallacy, I don’t think any ‘proof’ that may be involved has anything to do with me.
Those people fascinated with the Authoritarian Personality Type should google “Moral Foundations Theory”.
BPL wrote @570:
Assertion without evidence that anyone outside the Soviet bloc was affected.
There have been years of epidemiological studies done in areas of naturally high radiation such as Ramsar and Kerala. The “abnormalities” found have not increased mortality or morbidity. Many hot springs where people have bathed for centuries are loaded with radium and radon (the inspiration for Radithor), and radiophobic Germany and Austria pay for medical patients to spend time in radon-rich mines for their health. If nobody is harmed by such natural radiation nobody was harmed by Chernobyl (or any other) releases at the same level or below.
@571:
It says that people in the industry know that the propaganda is a pack of lies, unlike e.g. teachers who leave the business because of rampant psychological and outright physical abuse.
@572:
It matters that you have to exaggerate, and completely ignore that slavery was ubiquitous world-wide at the time. Slavery of Africans continued in Saudi Arabia into the 1960’s (trafficing of African slaves to Arabia began right about the time of Islam), and slavery is endemic in India, China and Africa to this day.
You can stop trying to guilt-trip us Americans over it now. We don’t owe anyone.
Can you not tell the difference between a yeoman farmer and a slave? You’re not exactly showing it here. Just because someone lived at the same time as something else happened doesn’t mean they have any association with it, let alone responsibility for it… no matter how convenient it is for you to try to tar them with it.
You brought him into this discussion, not me. Now that you have threatened me I am justified in putting you down like a rabid dog if I ever meet you, and I am equipped, trained and insured for such possibilities. In other words, it’s your funeral. Last, as someone whose father was here one day and dead the next without warning, you can take your pose of fake moral outrage and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Engineer-Poet @595, Finlands schools are publicly funded and they do just fine. The evidence on charter schools is a bit mixed.
However regardless of who owns / runs the education system it makes sense to have 1) well qualified teachers, ie with degrees. We put all our best and brightest into things like law and its crazy, and 2) pay teachers well which will of course help attract well qualified people.
But clearly badly performing teachers should be fired.
Yeah we are having classroom discipline problems in NZ. Maybe getting rid of corporal punishment was a mistake. Although I saw teachers abuse this and that was partly why they got rid of it.
Education, immigration and feminism is interesting but getting off topic. Lets wrap it up and move on.
Kevin McKinney wrote @574:
Are you under the impression that slavery was unique to US South? That it was not practiced by most pre-industrial farming cultures, including the ancient Greeks and the “native Americans” conquered by Europeans? That e.g. the Cherokee had enough African slaves to have their own slave revolts? That it is not mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments without the moral baggage you place on it, and is sanctioned by Islam to this day? I don’t like slavery but outside the West it’s not my problem; as long as it continues in so many places I am not going to accept one iota of blame for it, especially from someone who may trace his own ancestry to slave traders as BPL might and Barack Hussein Obama certainly does.
Did it escape your notice that people from places where slavery continues are trying to get to the USA? It’s a really weird variety of oppression if literally millions want to enjoy it. I can see the attraction of being able to ruin somebody and get a bunch of money by calling them “racist”, though.
Both legal fictions engineered to enrich slimy lawyers. Do we get no credit for 5 decades of affirmative action, and repeated lowering of qualification bars to make that “leg up” ever easier to get without putting forth effort or showing actual ability? If massive inequality persists despite this, it confirms that the claimed causes thereof were lies from the beginning. We can stop blaming white people for it now.
I expect EVERY credit-card company to terminate accounts when the person whose ability to pay backs up their side of the agreement dies, whether the secondary card holder is a friend, a child or a spouse. There are a host of ways to establish ability to pay, such as having bank accounts and being the beneficiary of a life insurance policy. The prepared have long used them.
Do you know that it’s possible for someone to have a cell phone, but have never lived outside a wattle-and-daub hut or seen a water faucet let alone a flush toilet?
They negotiate airports the same way young children do: with assistance. Illiterates aren’t going to find their gates by themselves, or get to a bus station using maps they can’t read and hiring transport in languages they don’t speak. There is a big network of “humanitarians” (human trafficers) who handle all that for them. They use names like Pueblo Sin Fronteres.
Haven’t you asked yourself how such clothing gets to places which have nothing resembling malls? It’s shipped in by aid agencies, putting local producers out of work. I understand that it’s common for the unsalable commemorative gear of the losing team in a championship to be tossed into containers and “donated” overseas within days of the game. This results in e.g. Africans wearing the names and logos of teams they’ve never heard of and can’t even read. It also fools people like you into thinking they’re just like us.
Do you remember the “caravan” that was a big thing in the news last year? Those people didn’t walk except for the cameras; they travelled in hired buses. And yes, they had handlers too. They did not get here on their own, nor are their tales of “oppression” their own either. They’re carefully crafted sob stories to get them unmerited benefits, starting with admission to the USA.
Kevin McKinney @610 I agree except we had plenty of women entering the workforce, and both partners working, well before credit cards and easy hire purchase became a big “thing”. I suppose its one factor of many at best.
Killian @586 said “Women going to work is good if they wish. Same for men. But in no way does it indicate an improvement for the typical person because the extra income from a second earner has been absorbed by debt and inflation.”
Just want to clarify I said in my response that “debt had nothing to do with it” I was referring to why both parents chose to work in the first place. Mum’s were entering the workforce in numbers before credit cards and hire purchases became really easy to obtain. I suppose in hindsight a few more entered the workforce just so they can take on more debt to buy stuff. Temptation and all that.
Like I said inflation is low these days and the numbers show wages a bit ahead of inflation where I live. It maybe different in America. So apologies if I wasnt clear.
Debt does absorb wages but it also buys goods and services.
Barton Paul Levenson @600 — All 4 of those countries have a large hydro component to the power grid. Denmark’s is in Norway.
EP @597, Al Bundy was referring to intelligence as in IQ levels, not peoples political intelligence if there is such a thing. So you get a strawman award.
Anyway you make good by posting something from Psychology Today, a decent publication. I read it regularly. But its a stretch to say altruism spreading beyond family and trible is somehow a bad thing, or “pathalogical”.
In the past altruism was related to the immediate family or tribe but its changing and perhaps this is a natural out growth of a globalising world and breaking down of barriers, our common shared future, and better understanding of people generally. Evolution is a process, it doesn’t ‘stop’. ( I can see you grimacing at all this…don’t worry you will recover)
Of course taxes are sometimes used for altruistic purposes, even to help other countries. I don’t buy into the taxation is theft idea, it doesnt really stand up to scrutiny, but we do have to be careful about foreign aid. Make sure it gets to the right places and that projects actually get built. Libs and Cons would presumably find common ground with that.
And remember altruism has both good social and good economic pay backs longer term.These have been much discussed.
@David B. Benson, #600
“I advocate an appropriately large fraction of nuclear power plants, witnessing the success in France.”
Hehe, sweet dreamerz on the way to Hell:
https://www.reuters.com/article/france-drought-nuclearpower/edf-curbs-fessenheim-2-nuclear-reactor-output-due-to-dry-weather-idUSL8N1X63FD
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nuclear-reactors-shut-down-edf-europe-heat-wave-a8477776.html
Smile, facing the 3rd consecutive severe drought year in Europe right now in 2020, groundwater tables dwindling rapidly for the recent 10 – 15 years. Sure, nuclear power… or maybe more methane gas (hehe, lots of it available quickly) or maybe more renewables… in the future… a shit, lets just bern more oil and coal. The entire funny discussion will be obsolete in the near term future. The entire discussion is a ghost debate, we are ghosts on the way to nowhere.
P.S.:
We have seen NO WINTER 2019/2020 in Europe so far. Recent temperatures in Germany up to fuckin +15°C during the recent 2 weeks and still NO winter.
… now walk on, murmuring ghosts, walk on to Nowhere, keep on swaying towards Neverland…
EP: Reaction speed is positively correlated with intelligence.
AB: Yep. And Muhammed Ali’s reaction speed trounced yours. He was “rated” at something like 79. You’re obviously lower?
EP: Most teachers are public employees paid from taxes; the man with a trade-school diploma and a business is an entrepreneur whose income depends on satisfied customers. Who has a greater moral right to their money?
Who, ultimately, made smarter use of their time on this planet? Does anything stop women from going to trade school? If women look down on trade schools while pursuing counterproductive masters degrees, does that not confirm that women pursue status to destructive levels?
AB: We’re getting to the point of inability to converse.
NO. A plumber who works for a plumbing company is NOT an entrepreneur. He’s a grunt laborer with some training.
That women choose careers that are productive beyond financial compensation while men choose low productivity but highly compensated jobs is NOT proof that women are inferior and deserve less. It’s evidence that amoral and immoral behavior can twist society.
And Nigel, please try to think of Others. Yeah, gloat about your access to healthcare. I’m an American inventor. So I don’t have access to healthcare.
So, not really, but sod off.
And the ankle-biter gets all full of himself @576:
The list of people “ranting” about Common Core includes people who’ve been following the field closely for decades. There are people who say that the concept of “arrays” is fundamental but what they miss is once the student gets it, continued use of drawing and counting dots is an utter waste of time. It bores the kids to tears and makes them hate school.
I read that the counting-dots method was adopted as a measure to “close the gap” because it’s the method used… in Haiti. The average IQ in Haiti is 67, 3 points below the level designated “retarded”. Methods used to get concepts through to literal retards should not be imposed on the bright, or even the normal.
There are some foundational facts you just have to memorize. One-digit multiplication tables are in that category.
You need to know the multiplication tables to do anything useful. You also have to know things like the associative and distributive properties in order to teach arithmetic. Multiplication and addition are commutative, subtraction and division are not. You have to know the difference to teach the difference.
You have to know long division to be able to divide polynomials. A calculator won’t cut it.
Yeah, right. You can do neither trig nor algebra, and you think you’re smarter than people who commonly bypass freshman calculus by taking the AP exam? You’re a joke, which is why I’ve been laughing at you for months now.
Why don’t you tell us your SAT math score, if you think we’d be all impressed?
David, I don’t consider you strident. You are a bit more enthusiastic about nukes than I am, but I suspect, some level will be inevitable now that we have exhausted all our safety margins for decarbonization.
EP, however is not atypical of many pro-nuke obsessives. Their real goal is attacking environmentalists rather than solving the energy puzzle.
nigelj wrote @581:
The convention is that capacitors generate reactive power (current leads voltage), and inductors consume reactive power (current lags voltage). You could reverse the convention and it would all come out the same; the only reason we say electrons are negative is that somebody chose a convention before we knew what electrons were.
It is exactly two sides of the same coin.
I’m not going to dig up the specific comment link, but I explained this some pages back. Think of zebra’s tank circuit with a capacitor and an inductor connected between the top and bottom “nodes”. Say that you add a switch in the top connection (adding a 3rd node) and pre-charge the capacitor, then you close the switch instantaneously. The capacitor smoothly discharges into the inductor, which converts the electric field energy in the capacitor dielectric to magnetic energy until the capacitor voltage goes down through zero and goes negative. Then the magnetic energy of the inductor works against the increasing back-voltage of the capacitor, charging the capacitor and losing current/energy until the current reaches zero and the capacitor voltage reaches its negative peak. Then you have your exact starting condition, just with the sign reversed. And it smoothly reverses itself the same way until it is back the way it began. The oscillation frequency f is equal to ω/2π and ω=√(1/LC)
The key insight is that at the resonant frequency, the current coming out of the capacitor is always equal to the current going into the inductor. There is no extra current to go anywhere; they are always balanced and cancel out.
It has two sets of plates separated by a dielectric insulator (which can be air or something like mylar or mica or even an oxide layer on aluminum or tantalum foil). If you apply a voltage between them, electrons accumulate on the negative side and are driven away from the positive side by electrostatic repulsion. The net charge remains zero or close.
The expression for the stored charge is Q = Cv, where Q is in coulombs, C is in farads and v in volts. As you can see, at zero voltage Q is zero, and it rises linearly with v. This means that as the AC waveform crosses zero going upward, there is the maximum positive current into the capacitor because that is when the voltage increases the fastest. Current falls to zero when the voltage peaks and reverses. This is the exact opposite of the current into a pure inductor, which reaches maximum after half a cycle of pushing on it. If you get them equal and opposite, they cancel out.
Why both partners in relationships tend to work these days. I said originally “we just expect so much more these days, like larger homes and more technology, and better healthcare and someone has to fund this hence both parents typically work.” Of course this is true. Yes its often funded with debt, but I never said it wasn’t. Nobody forces people to buy large screen televisions.
What Al Bundy said is true a lot of what we do is low value paper pushing, but we are still purchasing those services.
Inflation is low so I don’t see that as much of a factor forcing both partners to work. People needing debt just to survive is true in some cases but beside the point.
Working class people have seen their pay go backwards in some countries like America. I concede that is a factor that would push both partners in working class households to work in America. Newsflash: I don’t live in America. Not everyone lives in America. Its not the centre of the world. We have a different sort of crisis probably pushing a few more women to work, the few that dont already, namely very exorbitant housing prices.
Women should be free to choose like others mention. And we should remove barriers and not discriminate.
nigelj wrote @585:
It doesn’t make any sense to do that, but the people in charge lack the imagination and technical chops to find uses for the excess power. Such dump loads would let nuclear, wind and PV co-exist on the grid and displace more fossil fuel. I have a concept in the patent process for doing exactly that, and I need to get back to it.
Ironically, he probably got the cancer from chemical exposure or the like. The rule of thumb for fallout radiation is the “rule of 7”: the fallout radiation drops by a factor of 10 when the time since blast goes up by a factor of 7. After 7 hours the radiation has fallen to 10%, and after 49 hours it’s fallen to 1%. 2 weeks post-blast it would be down to almost 0.1%, which doesn’t have any kind of acute effects including erythema. There is no documented ill effect of radiation exposures too low to cause erythema.
And the ankle-biter tries practicing psychology without a license @588:
Yeah, right you little doofus. Way back @418 I said we could build something like 2 430 MW(t) units a day, like Liberty ships. We fuel the first ones with ex-weapons fissiles, then reprocess used fuel from reactor cooling pools and dry casks until that stuff is gone, then mine and enrich more uranium to start new units until our reprocessing excess catches up to the pace of new builds. I calculated that it might take around 600,000 tons of new uranium minus whatever we can recover from existing inventories to fully repower the USA. That is less than 10% of world resources, so definitely doable. Once the system is running it needs no more uranium enrichment; it can run for centuries on our stocks of depleted uranium and recovered uranium from used fuel, scaling up at maybe 2%/year.
You can either plunk these things down on brownfield sites to re-power old steam turbine plants, or (after proving that they are walk-away safe) put them inside cities to provide both electricity and hot water heat. Either way you’d want to run them at 100% 24/7 except for maintenance. The “excess” generation would be best used (1) killing petroleum demand by charging PHEVs and BEVs, (2) replacing natural gas and LPG via heat pumps, and then (3) going to various dump loads which upgrade low-value resources to replace other fossil fuels. Hydrogen doesn’t even rate except as a chemical feedstock, and you might be able to make everything you need as a byproduct of chlorine production.
https://www.monbiot.com/2020/01/10/saving-our-bacon/
Part of a solution is to eat simple. No, simpler than you imagined.
nigelj writes @592:
Because you’re not looking at the results.
The first controlled nuclear chain reaction was done in 1942. 43 years later is 1985; in that year, nuclear electric power accounted for 383,691 out of 2,473,002 GWh of net generation, or 15.5% of the total… despite years of fighting from “environmentalists” and the fossil interests. That SAME year was 44 years after the debut of the Smith-Putnam wind turbine, yet wind accounted for just 6 GWh.
In the last full year on record (2018), wind generated just 6.53% (272,650 out of 4,174,398 GWh) of US electric consumption despite decades of heavy subsidies. Despite equally heavy opposition, the closure of multiple plants and the start of just ONE new plant in this century, nuclear generated 19.33%.
Photovoltaic cells date back to Charles Fritts in 1884. That is 136 years ago. Concentrating solar thermal also dates back to the 1800’s. The origin of wind turbines is lost in the mists of time. If they’re going to save us, what’s taking them so damn long?
There was a LOT of activity in the USA long before that; the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 pushed a lot of pre-commercial research. 20 years after that was 1995, which was also 54 years after the Smith-Putnam turbine went on-grid. Which yielded results faster?
That favor didn’t last even 20 years; well before the 20th anniversary of Shippingport coming on-line in 1958, the US nuclear industry was under a regime that can only be described as persecutorial. I’ll let you read all about it here, as I have nothing to add to what Cohen so cogently wrote:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
You might think so, but you’re wrong.
Bad move, as subsidies encourage wasteful energy consumption. We should tax fossil carbon and let everything else compete on a level playing field, on which unreliables (dependent on fossil fuel for backup) will be at a disadvantage. You can tell that the anti-nukes are afraid of this, because they want subsidies for wind and solar but NOT a carbon tax.
I’ve got nothing to say to Thomas @593 except to say that he’s obviously got his head screwed on right.
And Al Bundy writes @598:
There is also the utilization of a very big, expensive capital asset with a lot of fixed costs. The variable cost of fuel is relatively small. Since the whole program of “going renewable” relies upon capturing and making productive use of surpluses, we should be insisting that this happen NOW and just let the nuclear plants do what they do best: run flat-out to supply the base load. Decarbonize now, worry about “sustainability” later.
Flywheels are good for minutes, batteries for a handful of hours. If you’ve got batteries, it makes far more sense to put them in vehicles than sitting at a substation somewhere. We have far cheaper ways of storing hours and days of energy for the grid, such as hot molten “solar salt”.
Do the math and tell me where I’m wrong.
BPL disingenuously writes @600:
Denmark: only 60.5% RE, of which 4917 out of 30,522 GWh of generation (16.1%) was biomass (burning other countries’ pelletized forests, mostly).
Iceland: 100% RE, 72.6% hydro, 5068 GWh (27.3%) geothermal, just 9 GWh (0.05%) wind and no solar.
Spain: only 38.1% RE on the grid. Spain produced 21% of electric generation from nuclear in 2016.
Further, that’s just electric power; essentially none of the non-electric energy consumption is non-fossil. You’re confirming my assertion. Again. Give up yet? Learn to do math. Better yet, learn to THINK instead of repeating narrative talking points.
IF you can. I doubt this; most people don’t have the mental agility to break free of social consensus and actually look at facts independently. For this crime, the consensus expels them.
Who was it who said “when you find yourself in the majority, it is time to reform”? I’m there, man. Why aren’t you with me?
EP: If liberals were truly intelligent,
AB: they wouldn’t confuse intelligence and wisdom? Oops, you failed :-)
To go on an irrelevant sideshow in order to distract focus from a scientific truth is piss poor debating style. Might work on conservatives, though…
And to state that intelligent liberals are more subjected to and/or less resistant to brainwashing than stupid conservatives is a howler! (Take a glance at a Trump rally to see brainwashing and Newspeak in action)
Face facts. Like most Conservatives you’re non-creative. But your grand memory allows you to compensate for your disability to a reasonable degree…
…for a (pardon my French) Conservative.
(And my opinion of EP’s skills exceeds this post’s flavor, but the rancidity of his flavor swamps all.)
Mitigation under attack: Tesla EVs under investigation by NHTSA:
https://www.carcomplaints.com/news/2020/tesla-unintended-acceleration-complaints-petition.shtml
Some folks are having winter – looks like fun. Are we naming winter storms now?
https://www.wunderground.com/video/top-stories/winter-storm-jacob-blasts-the-plains-midwest-and-northeast-with-snow
551 – Kevin
““For the power sector, the target is 100 per cent renewable electricity production by 2040.””
That’s FAKE NEWS. The earth will end in 11.5 years – AOC, smartest whipper-snapper walkin’ said so! :)
561 – nigelj
““Causes and consequences of eastern Australia’s 2019-20 season of mega-fires””
One consequence will likely be few fires in those same areas for a while. ;)
563 – Al Bundy
“mrkia, note that your vape video begins in the middle of an argument. Look at that maga-guy’s face. He just said something to hook a victim. You look up to predators, mrkia? (A real question)”
He was probably refused service by the intolerant leftist so he grabbed his phone and started recording. Predators are awesome:
https://www.wunderground.com/video/top-stories/5-mountain-lions-in-california-driveway-caught-on-camera
563 – Al Bundy
“Liberals are about a standard deviation more intelligent than conservatives.”
Then why is it that liberals don’t know which restroom they should use?
568 – EP
“Pretty much the entire West has such a crisis of confidence we can’t even keep out primitive tribes-people who have to be taught how to use flush toilets, light switches and even doorknobs. Lots don’t speak our languages and are effectively unemployable,…”
The US House of Representatives will take ’em:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB9JWd0ifPw
EP, #568 was an outstanding post. Nailed it.
574 – Kevin
“Slavery was a massive and hideous moral evil, disfiguring the US in multiple ways, which was BPL’s point. And yes, it’s also one the legacy of which continues to do so via ongoing cultural distortions including ‘implicit bias’ and ‘systemic racism.’”
No one denies slavery is evil; that’s why Republicans freed the slaves in the Civil War, but perhaps if leftists remove all the historical monuments of the period, we can forget that inconvenient fact. FYI: The US received less than 10% of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#New_World_destinations
US Slavery statistics:
https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm
Kevin: Nigel’s right; a bad marriage can be a whole lot worse than none at all.
AB: The most ironic form of child abuse is committed by many couples who stay together “for the children”
To what? Experience and accept Hell as normal life?
Humans recreate their horrors, but the players and actions often invert, so by running from one nightmare one finds and clings to its anti
#599 David Benson,
In one sense, it might be you who are exceptional, because you are at least willing to admit that a market system for electricity generation can work, although it obviously pains you.
Ray is probably correct that online nuclear proponents mostly fall into two categories:
1. Obvious Fossil Fuel trolls, who are using a false-flag argument to bash renewables.
2. People like EP, who would bash renewables even if nuclear didn’t exist, because they don’t fit into his unimaginative worldview.
In a sense, FF generation and nuclear are “natural allies”; they represent the monopolistic approach that stifles innovation and competition. In economic terms, both are rent-seeking, and both involve externalities of various types. And yes, they both hate hippies and greenies.
And the universal characteristic of nuclear proponents is this:
They can never explain how to get all the plants built in the USA.
France did actual Socialism. In the US, even the most trivial action in any area by the Government is branded “socialism” and rejected.
E-P 604: Now that you have threatened me I am justified in putting you down like a rabid dog if I ever meet you, and I am equipped, trained and insured for such possibilities.
BPL: You can try.
E-P 606: someone who may trace his own ancestry to slave traders as BPL might
BPL: Bzzzzzt! Wrong! My ancestors came here from eastern Europe after slavery was abolished. You are more likely to trace your ancestry to slave traders than I am. You’re the one who “won’t accept an iota of blame for it,” as if the original discussion was “who to blame” rather than “the past was better when we [white people] were all yeoman farmers.”
DBB 609: All 4 of those countries have a large hydro component to the power grid. Denmark’s is in Norway.
BPL: Denmark had 20% of its power coming from wind twenty years ago, and now it’s 47%. As that fraction goes up, I expect they will need less power from outside the country, don’t you?
E-P 613: The average IQ in Haiti is 67
BPL: I’ve pointed out before that IQ increases rapidly when parents are better educated and better nutrition and opportunities are available. I cited the peer-reviewed literature. You are stuck in the idea that IQ is genetic destiny, so you can maintain your self-image as a superior Aryan. Apparently you missed the past half century of debate over the meaning and utility of IQ as a measure of intelligence.
E-P 623: Who was it who said “when you find yourself in the majority, it is time to reform”? I’m there, man. Why aren’t you with me?
BPL: Because I think you’re a horrible excuse for a human being. You’re racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-environmentalist, condescending, smug, insulting, and generally offensive.
KIA 624: No one denies slavery is evil
BPL: E-P, and you, seem to imply heavily that it doesn’t matter. And are you completely unaware of the “Neo-Confederate” movement in the US, to which E-P probably belongs?
616: “Why both partners in relationships tend to work these days.”
In the UK, this is a significant reason:
https://www.ogilvyandsneyd.co.uk/the-astonishing-relationship-between-wages-and-property-prices/
Renting is little better, since renting involves paying the landlord’s monthly mortgage bill plus extra for profit, and some slack to cover the risk to the landlord of having to do repairs.
When house prices keep increasing and more and more people cannot afford to get on the property ladder, rents increase in price (people have to live somewhere). This fuels the buy-to-let train by those wealthy enough to afford multiple properties, who then let them out for profit (there is plenty of demand), and also financially gain from the increasing value of the property (which some use to supplement their pension in retirement).
More here:
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/11826/inflation/why-does-the-cost-of-living-keep-rising/
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/16366/inflation/why-is-cost-of-living-in-uk-so-expensive/
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/apr/13/rip-off-britain-everything-expensive
http://www.pricedout.org.uk/why
https://www.theweek.co.uk/98201/why-are-uk-trains-so-expensive
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/25/living-costs-rising-faster-for-uks-poorest-families-than-richest
https://www.expatica.com/uk/about/basics/cost-of-living-in-the-uk-1167475/
Can be summed up by saying the cost of living in the UK is high, and in many cases it is near impossible to raise a family on one income.
#625, AB–
Sad and true. I occurs to me that though that was written in the context of all the OT social stuff we’ve been discussing lately, it would be worth pondering the ways that dictum applies to climate issuses, too.
#613 EP,
“SAT math score”
I’m more interested in now than decades ago. I’ve given you several tests, and you have not done well at all. Here’s your response on the “reading comprehension” test:
Source:
“A capacitor helps to improve the power factor by relieving the supply line of the reactive power. The capacitor achieves this BY storing the magnetic reversal energy.”
Your interpretation:
“He QUOTES THE FUNCTION OF THE CAPACITOR (“relieving the supply line of the reactive power”) but FOCUSES ON THE INCIDENTAL ENERGY STORAGE (which I acknowledged waaaay back @247 with the proviso “not energy storage devices per se” (IOW, they do some of that but that isn’t essential to their purpose).”
Now, I gave you the opportunity to explain how storing energy “isn’t essential to their purpose” or “incidental” makes any sense when, “relieving the supply line” is their function, and they “achieve it by storing the energy”.
You still haven’t answered.
I might expect an ESL student to get the very clear language from the source mixed up, or one who had cognitive issues, or perhaps was on drugs. But a True American Stable Genius like yourself should be eager to enlighten us on why this apparently deranged response is, after all, correct.
(Without long ranting digressions from the actual question, one would hope.)
Let’s get past this and then we can discuss math education.
Just want to clarify I said in my response that “debt had nothing to do with it” I was referring to why both parents chose to work in the first place.
The idiot speaks again. No, misogynyst, these are facts.
All gains from second incomes have been eaten up by expanded sunk costs (housing, health care, child care, etc.) and debt. People have toys and homes largely due to debt. Then they get more debt as they struggle to keep those paid. While many women have wanted to work, the fact is they also had to unless they wanted to live on mac and cheese, never vacation, send their kids to school in rags, etc.
Your beliefs about facts do not counter the facts themselves.
Asshat.
Re #601 Kevin McKinney said I’m a misogynyst, too!
Well, sure, and also by inflated consumer standards among those who have the money.
Among those who have the money? Pay attention. I didn’t say the upper middle class, I said the “typical person.” The “typical person” has no savings to speak of and would be homeless within months if they lost their job.
But I’m sure women love you minimizing their sacrifices and that the 1% love your justification of the crap system they control.
Apparently it is now ‘normal’ to spend upwards of a grand on a highly capable smartphone every couple of years
Riiiiight… because that’s the true average cost of the phones in use. https://www.technewsworld.com/story/85981.html
Not.
Stop trying to score points like your little anklebiter.
and if you want to buy a new auto
That’s not debt for all but a tiny fraction of people? Are you out of your freaking mind to even raise that point given the parameters of my comments? And what percent of the auto market is new each year? About 6.6%. You’re right! Everyone’s buying new cars all the damned time and using no debt to do so! And guess what? 2% get repossessed. More debt.
it’s easy to spend amounts that would once have bought you a house (and even occasionally might still, if you can find a property ‘distressed’ enough.)
You could buy a house for 5k not all that long ago. Not germane. And, we aren’t talking about 300k cars for freaking sakes… jesus… anklebiter2, Kevin? You really want o be that kind of guy?
But I’d say that it’s certainly an improvement for the women, who are not forced into a position of dependency
Sorry, no Straw Men allowed, ab2. I said myself, “that want to.” We aren’t talking about the issue of ACCESS to work, genius, we are taking about what has happened to the income.
“…as was structurally the case Once Upon A Time.”
And once upon a time you weren’t engaging in unintelligent anklbiting. Things change.
Nigel’s right; a bad marriage can be a whole lot worse than none at all.
Straw Man horsecrap. How does one have tow incomes if not married? The points raised had zero to do with even one of the points you and he raised.
Damned fools…
See ya ’round, ab2.
Kevin McKinney wrote @602:
Let me get this straight. You (1) admit that hydro was key to all successful decarbonization efforts (and accidents, like France), and (2) you can’t provide even a single counterexample, but (3) you insist that this doesn’t constitute any sort of “proof”.
Feh. I’m from Missouri: SHOW ME.
Hadn’t it occurred to you that unless the “balancing” generation is something carbon-free (hydro and geothermal are pretty much the only candidates with the requisite endurance), it’s got to be something fossil-fired? (The planet doesn’t care about our definition of “renewable”.) The logic is inescapable. How can you deny it?
Here’s what your source says:
Looks like enough loopholes to drive a container ship through, especially the use of “power” rather than “energy” which appears to limit its scope to the electric grid. Adding more carbon-free buffering would require things like massive new water impoundments behind new dams, and that’s not happening. In other words, it’s vaporware.
nigelj writes @610:
It’s pathological when it puts the distant and alien “other” in front of nation, family and even self. Dickens called this “telescopic philanthropy” in his characterization of Mrs. Jellyby:
I’m sure you can think of plenty of people doing the same thing today. The virtue-signallers holding “REFUGEES WELCOME” signs are prime examples.
Re #589 anklebiter said
Killian @586 creates an entire forest of straw people and multiple misconceptions.
“The “rich” countries are rich at the top. Virtually all of the wealth created since 1970 has gone to the 1%. Real income for Americans rose a TOTAL of 4% over that same time despite productivity rising significantly.”
So what? Total strawman. I wasn’t even talking about anything related to inequality.
1. You clearly do not understand the Straw Man Fallacy. 2. You specifically talked about rich countries, more women working and that making countries richer. That you think greater debt equals wealth show what an utter idiot you are.
Not a Straw Man, a rebuttal to your stupid comments.
It’s common knowledge there is massive wealth inequality. I’ve written formal submissions to political parties suggesting policies to counter this problem.
Suuuure you have. Let me see, 1. Git thos liddle ladees back in der kitchen! Theys makin too muches moneis and weez gettin too rich. 2. See #1.
“Women going to work is good if they wish. Same for men. But in no way does it indicate an improvement for the typical person because the extra income from a second earner has been absorbed by debt and inflation.”
I disagree in part. Debt has nothing to do with the issue.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/report-credit-card-debt-increases-by-percent-since/article_28ef1aee-0bb5-11ea-b75c-abb27681170e.html
You’re *useless* on these pages. As to your inflation point:
Inflation has been low since the 1990s the very period we are talking about where both partners increasingly work.
Yet, debt exploded. Figure it out, genius.
Inflation was higher in the 1970s when one parent worked. I will only accept that inflation is at most one minor contributing factor.
What is wrong with your head? I said nothing about inflation being a major part of anything. I said debt and inflation. The far greater issue is debt. But inflation helps drive that. BUT, the point, and what you completely missed in your anklebiting frenzy, was that I juxtaposed *real income* versus those two issues and it’s near non-existent rise while 1% wealth went through the roof and productivity made huge increases. That is, we have worked harder for less and made the very rich very, very much richer.
The reasons both husbands and wives work these days are multifaceted. The evidence is obvious. We tend to have more material goods and larger houses these days.
Stupid. No. The fact is as I stated in another post just posted: Those non-discretionary costs have risen to a majority of income where they used to be a manageable fraction. Housing, childcare, utilities, transportation, etc., things we must spend on, became much higher since the early ’70’s.
Shush, anklebiter. You know nothing. Never have, never will. Regurgitate, bastardized by you, others’ knowledge elsewhere.
“Had more women gone to work AND incomes risen steadily AND minimum wage merely kept up with inflation, you have a 99% that was virtually all middle class.”
Probably true but completely beside the point.
It is exactly the point. Your claim is bullshit. Women going to work did not make countries richer, it made them poorer – if one thinks of “them” as being The People – because now The People carry debt, not savings.
“Again, you fail to “get” it. “Your veiled misogyny (extreme feminists) should get you banned.”
Hilarious.
No, it’s not. Not even a little.
Nemesis writes @611:
You realize that this problem is easily dealt with using a bit of engineering? If river flows are too low, pump groundwater to the condensers to both lower the inlet temperature and boost the flow. If the outlet temp is too high, forced-draft cooling towers can lower it. Aquifers near the river will recharge naturally.
I’m seeing the same when the polar vortex is wandering elsewhere; there was snow in early November followed by weeks of thaw up to about New Year’s. The vortex is wandering here right now and there’s about 6 inches of white crap on the ground that I need to get out and get rid of.
The forecast is for thaw conditions again in a few days.
Ray Ladbury misses the point @614:
Wrong. I attack the fake environmentalists whose real goal is getting rid of nuclear energy in order to make the world “safe” for fossil fuels (and nothing else). That list includes Amory Lovins, Mark Z. Jacobson and the authors of the Energiewende.
Everyone who takes FF money must be considered dirty. Jacobson is sponsored by the Precourt Institute, endowed by oil baron Jay Precourt. It’s no wonder that his “roadmap” (a roadmap to nowhere, dissected in detail by Clack et al.) says we can do it without nuclear power. Unfortunately his model had a little fraud problem in it, in that it assumed that hydro output can be increased on the order of 10 times its nameplate rating. He also assumed that transmission wouldn’t cause any difficulties. This is academic misconduct at the very least.
Know what’s a pretty solid solution to the USA’s part of the energy puzzle? 3.3 TW of emissions-free heat at 550°C. We have the resources, we just need to use them.
Al Bundy writes @612:
Turning out “high-school graduates” who can’t even read their own diplomas is “productive”? How about taking 13 years to teach what used to be covered in 9?
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner
One little substitution and you’ve got our society pegged.
And Al Bundy makes me laugh @623:
I was listed as sole inventor on 2 US patents before I was 35. I’m working on 3 possibly-patentable twists on a specific idea that fell in front of me. One is for waste-to-fuel, one is for destruction of toxic waste, and the last and likely most important is for upgrading of biomass to advanced biofuels with a secondary revenue stream from a completely different industry. I’m working on waste-to-fuel right now because it seems likely to be profitable soonest; people will bring feedstock to you and pay you to take it.
You think I’m uncreative because I insist that no scheme which doesn’t respect the laws of physics can possibly work. The people who don’t heed that always fail, often in spectacular fashion. Creativity lies in finding the loopholes to get what you want within the laws of physics and chemistry. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
I’m not a “conservative”. Some ways I’m radical, some ways I’m a flaming reactionary. So-called “conservatives” can’t even conserve the ladies’ restroom, let alone the habitability of our only planet. If we’re going to actually conserve anything, it’ll take radical measures. Have you ever seen me shrink back from the magnitude of the problem? I not only think bigger than you do, I probably think bigger than you can. If we’re going to solve this we need to meet it head-on, and those who can’t or won’t are out of the fight already. So get out of the way.
619 – DBB
From your linked article: “After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation.”
That article was some wild-eyed dreaming – wonder if the author is naive enough to actually believe it? ;)
Lots of bickering above about teaching methods, etc. Much of public school in the USA is now child abuse – the lack of learning is preparing the kids to fail. Problems are many and include not being able to fire incompetent unionized, government teachers and administrators, top-down command and control from the feds including failed teaching methods like common core math as just one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYFolsI9GxU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLCO6pG6JDY
Here we have a professor from Stanford! attempting to justify and explain the abject blithering idiocy of common core math – an idiocy that is scary in it’s depth and destructiveness. DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CHILD TO ATTEND PUBLIC SCHOOL IN THE USA!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwYYa5h95mg
Common core is dangerous stuff:
https://www.democratsagainstunagenda21.com/common-core-is-agenda-21.html
623 – Al Bundy
“And to state that intelligent liberals are more subjected to and/or less resistant to brainwashing than stupid conservatives is a howler!”
Seriously? ROFLMAO! Irrefutable proof that you are wrong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfgIawRDQM4
Comments on that one are AWESOME! :) More:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDYNVH0U3cs
EP: nobody is harmed by such natural radiation nobody was harmed by Chernobyl (or any other) releases at the same level or below.
AB: Interesting how information that causes your point to crumble (or require advancement) evaporates instead of assimilates. An error of technique.
The issue isn’t external radiation. The issue is concentrated bits of internal radiation that reinjure the same tissue over extended periods.
Keep up. It would make interacting with you more fun and productive. To be clear: nobody is disagreeing with your irrelevant factoid about diffuse external radiation.
The nukees will be happy, the marketees will be happy, yet neither will be happy at the call for massive reductions in consumption.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/event-horizon-a-climate-in-crisis-with-steve-keen/id1453085489?i=1000462989017
Engineer-Poet @615, thanx for that information on capacitors and PFC, it is actually really helpful and makes sense. I did figure out the two sides of the same coin issue, expressed in hindsight back at comment 594.
God I hate that feeling of not fully understanding. I just have to get to the bottom of things like scratching an itch. Please understand my knowledge of PFC was zero a couple of weeks ago. Literally.
Al Bundy @623 says “Like most Conservatives you’re (EP) non-creative”. The exception proves the rule. EP looks very creative with engineering. Maybe not so much with social policy.
EP: Do the math and tell me where I’m wrong.
AB: Do the sociological/psychological analysis and tell me when you’ve ever been right.
EP,
You’re right about how school way back when was absolute torture for folks like us. I’m of the impression that things are better now.
I came up with a rough outline for a new education system. It integrates students of various intellects in a way that fosters working relationships across mental classes while challenging all the kids’ minds. I’m going to start an email discussion with Kevin about it. I think you’d provide a lot of value added.
So if you want to join me (and hopefully Kevin) email me at ManyAndVaried@hotmail.com