emille26

I have been friend zone when I was young a couple times. You meet the right people when you just focus on your own thing, not when you are trying to meet the right people. that is the way its worked out for me at least

You are right, but there are three things in play with the tax. First, we can lower peak demand through distributed generation ( including on-site natural gas plants) and energy efficiency. Most state energy efficiency programs set targets to lower peak demand. So infrastructure (on a 10-15 year planning cycle) is variable to the extent we can choose to lower peak demand rather than build more lines. New York is doing this right now with something call the REV. Second, how we bill for electricity can change peak demand. Things like time of use rates, or rates that more closely reflect the cost of delivering power at the moment can change peak demand. Third, how we tax power changes behaviour. So if as a state, or government, or individual, I want to incentivize people to lower energy usage for environmental or other policy goals, keeping rates volumetric (recovering fixed costs through usage) provides a stronger incentive to use less. If we moved towards more fixed charges (google straight-fixed variable rate design if your curious) lower energy usage does not lower my bill, so why not use more power? It also creates equity concerns if we do that. I am not taking a position on what we should be doing, just stating that there are many different ways to choose how we do it. To your point on energy storage, I agree that we really need good batteries in the future.

your analysis is really on point. power companies actually try to say everything is a fixed cost when asking for more money. In the long run, the wires and substation are actually a variable cost. In NYC instead of building a new substation, they decided to make everyone who lived there more efficient so they wouldn't need a new one. It was way cheaper (will be?) than the new substation. However, back when we needed more access to electricity, we set the system up to incentivize new construction all the time. When a power company builds something big and new, they recover the costs from the customer plus an approved rate of return. So, the best way to get more money after you already have customer saturation is to keep building new stuff. The power companies

How to deal with solar users is a mix of greed and a problem with how we pay for electricity. IDK that state's utility structure, but, there is talk across the country in nearly every state to increase the amount of fixed charges on customers bills. Right now, utilities pay for the distribution system (wires and stuff) based on how much power customers use. However, if you use less power (the utilities argue) you pay less then everyone else does for the distribution system, even though you are making it more expensive by having panels that often are net-metered. When I say every state, I mean nearly EVERY state electric company is trying to do this. They are making less money per-customer now, and in a lot of states want to move towards fixed charges that you pay just for being a customer.

I have an annoying "yes, you are correct. . .but" response for you. You are totally right if there is enough solar, that can be a problem. in a lot of places however, there is not enough solar yet for this to happen. as for that 4-5 MWs. there are a few ways. one is natural gas peaker plants, or something called demand response. big companies are contacted to curtail usage during that time period. I don't agree that coal stations are more efficient that turbine gas plants. a new gas plant is like 60% efficient compared to 30% for coal. coal used to be a lot cheaper, but the price of gas in the US actually makes gas plants cheaper than coal now in a lot of places (not all). Also, the 5 to 10 megawatts calculation you have assumes that those houses collectively generate 10 MWs of electricity, consuming half and selling half. the hole would not really be that big. most of those houses are only selling because it is at a time of day when they are not using at all (think middle of the day, september, no AC on) so they might stop delivering 5MW to the grid, but they would not be immediately using 5 MW. It also depends heavily on advanced the grid is and who the grid operator is. In TL;DR form. I agree with you, but it really does depend on the system as a whole.

I am really confused about a lot of the discussion on this thread. In the U.S. at least, how viable these are depends on what state you are in. My father put a 6 KW system on a 4,000 sq/ft house built in the 80's. This is in NJ where there are state subsidies, an SREC market that pays about $1,000 a year (big business can buy them to meet requirements) and the utility company pays him retail value per KwH delivered to the grid when not used at home. The result- his power bill hovers around $10-$60 in the summer. That does not include the value of the S-REC. mind you this is a big house, and he works from home. pay back period is 5-6 years, not 20. At low volume, this does not affect the distribution system. However, when enough people do it, utilities need to redesign how they charge for the wires that deliver electricity. Why is this good?- every MW of electricity made by customer solar is a MW that does not need to be produced at a power plant. This matters a lot in states that rely on old coal generation. In a state like PA, this is not nearly as viable yet.

Oh, thats pretty interesting. I did not think about the warranty issue. thats too bad, I would totally be down to do this

I know I am not the first person to think of this, but what is preventing me (a 'merican) from buying these and selling them oversees in a way that lets the buyer save money and me make some cash? Is shipping and the tax structure the problem? Do Euro countries have to pay VAT on "used" items purchased out of country?

Wow, as a lawyer (kind of) with a lawyer girlfriend, and lawyer friends, I gotta keep an eye on you guys making my job obsolete ! In all seriousness, though, stuff like this will have the same effect that other programs have had. Meaning that partners at law firms will need less associates and can pay them less. For example, tons of lawyers get stuck reviewing documents, its not a good gig career wise, but it can pay 30-40 bucks an hour. One day soon, that job can be done by a computer and those people will be out of a job because it will mean more profit for partners ( not sure yet how they would bill it) I think that it will take much longer for what you actually pay lawyers for to be replaced by programs (wheeling and dealing, deep understanding of legal nuances, knowing the right things to look at, intangibles that affect cases)

I am a lawyer, but this is not what I practice... BUT Apple's issue is not that it is being asked to help bruteforce this phone, but that they are being asked to change ALL phones so that they can be brute forced by the government. Apples issue is that the fix (firmware update) that the FBI wants would affect every customer, not just this one. This might give a bit more info http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35594245

I have a 3570k, asus mobo, and 8gigs (see my profile) of ram I was looking to sell, I know it has been a couple of weeks since you posted this, but shoot me a PM about your budget. I am more than willing to discount it for you.

yes I have, That why I am finding this pretty mysterious I did all of the checks I could think of, then download ROTTR, and Witcher 3. both of those gave me the "failed to launch" Then, I tried around the world in 80 days, and it worked fine. Thanks for your input so far

Yeah, I verified the cache, checked for conflicting programs, deleted appcache( as per steam support). The only thing I can think of is that, at the time I installed steam, I had not yet entered my windows Key, so it was not genuine until after in reinstalled some games. But that has never been a problem in the past.

I recently had to replace my SSD with a new one. This included doing a fresh install of windows 10. Everything was going pretty great, until i re-installed steam. I downloaded steam, however, now most of my steam games display "failed to launch(unknown error)" "failed to launch (missing executable)" I have walked through the Steam guide and done everything :https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8676-EFLX-7453 However, none of that fixed any of my problems. I have read that i need to fix my redistributable, but I am kind of unsure how to do that. Thanks in advance for anyone who can point me in the proper direction EDIT: I am not home so I have not checked, it is possible that if I accidentally created a 32bit windows bootable USB, that this would be the cause of these problems? (new AAA games do not work, ios ports do)

Havent used the define s or define r5, But i currently have a h440, up from an r4. I thought the r4 gave me much better temps and was quieter (if you are into that), so If you end up deciding between the two, go for a fractal.