I don't think it's just passing as white (like Marco or Ted). When white supremacist prison gangs are willing to give you enough of a pass to let you enroll, you've gone a long way towards integration.
We picture oil reservoirs like a big underground bubble of oil. You pierce it and oil jumps upwards. Some basins, like Mike's, are like that. It just needs a drill downwards.
And then you get more convoluted configurations. Earth faults might be in the way, horizontal drilling might be needed. The movie style drill is not enough. Costs go up.
At some point you need to add pressure to pump the oil up, for instance, injecting natural gas so that the pressure lifts the remain g oil. Add expenses for a compressor.
There is a point here there s still a lot of oil in the ground but you can't drill it or pump it up. Twenty years ago that oil wasn't recoverable. Fracking is a technology developed to recover hard to get oil. It is quite expensive to do fracking, probably around 60 $/bbl. but 100 $/bbl crude was ample margin, and Joe's basin is now economically profitable.
But at 40$/bl, fracking is operating at a loss. You continue pumping whatever you have under explotation, but for sure you don't bury (pun intended) any more money in the ground for new wells.
You are totally right about the "who do we like the best". Hence my fondness for a charity a (female and black) friend -and Power Plant General Manager- sponsors: Dress for Success.
Aim: Providing poor women with occasion appropriate clothing for job interviews
"What is more interesting to me is which middle class and upper-middle class parents still push their kids towards practical subjects and majors and which ones develop the attitude of “You are smart. You can study anything you want and someone will give you a job based on your intelligence.” When and why does this change happen?"
If I can play again the European card, in most universities outside the USA/UK (and less in the UK than here) you declare your major when you enroll or shortly thereafter (in my case before the end of the first of five years) and you stick to it, or start from scratch. The Oxbridge liberal arts concept of college as a rounding up of classical knowledge that all gentlemen should know to lead a gentile life is mostly lost outside the USA, but very much alive here.
So when the first born generation goes to college they witness an experience that's not like what their parents told them to expect. When the second generation goes to college, their parents expectations are now tinted by their own experience: follow your interests and be smart.
But I want to raise one other issue that I don't think has been explored much: the [alleged] antagonism between old time US blacks (descendants from antebellum slaves) and the newly arrived Afrocaribbeans and African immigrants. As far as I can tell there is little love between the two groups. Perhaps someone that knows better would agree to give his view
Related to the Oxford Journal link, you can learn a lot about racial attitudes by looking at the prison gangs in Texas and other nearby states. Texas based white supremacist gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas rule that state's prisons and have methastazed to other states. They are violently anti black, but, perhaps surprisingly, mildly favorable towards Hispanics, which get acepted in some gangs as quasi white (Hispanics have their own gangs too, of course).
I think this attitude (Hispanics are almost white, like Irish and Italians before them) will be more prevalent in the future -and the white anti Hispanic racism you see in CA and AZ (plenty of CA transplants) will become the outlier. Regretfully, I’m afraid that the white-black divide will be long with us. And, more regretfully, adding the Hispancs to the white column will actually worsen the issue, if for nothing else, because the 'Whites' will again be a majority almost everywhere
I'm European born and raised, and this might color my comment. I blame GWB.
I grew up with the background of terrorism. As a teenager I was aware that ETA bombed shopping malls, and yet I went to the mall nevertheless. I was aware that the IRA threw bombs in the street, and I went in the street. I was aware that the PLO blew planes in the air, and took my first trasatlantic flight at age two. Terrorist groups announced an escalation in attacks, and people took it seriously, attacks did happen. Perhaps there would be added security matures, like policemen looking into your bag at the metro entrance in Paris, but millions took on the metro every day with no further thought.
We were aware of terrorism. Terrorism had existed all my life growing up. Sometimes scores of people would die. We were aware it was a real risk and a real threat. And we were also aware that it was twenty times more likely we would die crossing the street in front of the house than in a terror attack.
There had been terrorism before 9/11. Oklahoma City for instance. But no one had ever said before that terrorists were an EXISTENTIAL THREAT (pardon my raising my voice) that were trying to erase our way of life. Perhaps al-Quaeda was trying to erase our way of life, but the chance of that is zero. Like the chance of ETA destroying Spain.
But GWB (or Chenney, who knows) changed all that. The government said we had to be very scared, that we had to give away precious freedoms (paid for in the XVIII century with our forefathers blood) because the danger was so huge, so monumental, that civilization itself was at stake.
Bollocks
Europeans have always seen terrorism as a criminal/police issue. Yes, sometimes a political solution might help (Though the Troubles were more a low level Civil War), but most of the time (see ETA) terrorism must be treated as another crime. We never understood the panic throes America went into, panic that the GWB adinistration fueled, and that the Obama administration has not really assuaged.
College students today were 4 or 5 years old in 9/11. They have been taught all their lives that terrorism is trying to destroy everything, and that they should cower in fear, give away their freedoms, and wait for the Authorities to give the all-clear.
So, wHy would they react different to a KKK Terrorist? (*). As far as they know, all terrorists are hellbent on destroying everything they hold dear.
They are doing exactly what they were told. Good lads. Have a cookie.
So, yes, I blame GWB for this incident.
(*)I'll laugh later about their ignorance about Dominican monks, though monasteries are few and far between in America
In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, aren't men required not to touch unknown women because they could be ritually unclean due to having their period? Is that requirement also applicable to women? Are they polluted by touching other menstruating women?
If so how can you get into a pool that has been used by unknown-possibly menstruating- women even on a sex segregated basis. Unless the segregation is total, and the pool is drained if found to be ritually unclean?
We need to define what religion is and what it is for before we say Western Secularism, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Christianity, or Budhism, or Greek Orthodoxy (you, know, the real Orthodoxy, as shown in BSG), of Islam, or Shinto, are religions.
Is religion a search of the Trascendent outside of the Natural World? A search of the Trascendent inside the Natural World? A tool to organize society? Reverence for life, or submission to a Superior being?
Is it an individual search, or must it be communal? Can I be individually religious in a society that does not impose religion communally?
As much as I think that most of what you say is sensible and reasonable, in particular, that things that are the same on paper are not the same on the ground, at the end of the day I cannot support your conclusion.
I have a similar conflict with France's (and other places )anti burqa laws. It puts Muslim women in a very difficult bind. The argument is that unless they are covered their relatives won't let their women (the word "their" used intentionally here) in the street, and society is better accommodating covered women than forcing them indoors.
As much as I regret the plight of women not allowed out, in the end, I support the ban. Our culture believes now (fortunately) that women and men have a basic equality and all options should be open to both. The purpose of the burqa is to reduce the contact between women and society. Burqa covered women are not supposed to interact with the outside society. It is basically a portable house around you. You are outside, but the walls follow you. Society should not say that this is ok, that is ok that some women are cut off from social interaction. I find that a price too high to pay to have relatives allow their women in the street.
Same in pools. If an Irani style (muslimah) bathing suit is not enough to meet your modesty requirements, then the concern is not modesty, the concern is cutting interaction between women and men. That cannot be allowed in a pluralistic society, be it Somali women or Haredi women.
I have never seen it played, but I have a well read copy. I like Camus
On second though, my teenager/young man know-it-all loved Camus and his idea that we are all alone, and we (each one of us) is all there is and all it will ever be, and that when we die, what we leave behind is worthless.
It's the same mid frame as that of the five-year old child that thinks candy existing before he was born is a complete waste.
But I still find Caligula and The Stranger (they come together in my copy) cool reads. I'd love to see it played.
I have a couple of interesting theories about why Houston developers have ignored areas closer to downtown and moved further away. I'm looking forward to an Urbanism OT post to flesh them out
i agree with your system, but I'm not sure if you can constitutionally consolidate all the objections in a single process. Right now, every single person that is going to breath the emissions of your project has a separate tort claim against it.
I would somehow create a "presumption of environmental fitness" (to call it something) for anything that has agency approval, so that your claim would have to prove that the agency approval was not granted according to the existing law before being allowed to proceed
When I moved into Houston in 1998 there were several things about the city that surprised me:
1. Even though mapwise Houston looks like a 100 mile diameter circle in reality it is more like a lot of spokes (the highways) joining spots. almost all of Houston is actually one or two mile wide strips along the highways, with nothing further away. It surprised me that it was almost impossible (or actually impossible) to go directly from point A over one highway to point B, a couple of miles away but along a different highway, through the back streets, so to speak. I had to hop on the highway, drive to the common hub and jump to the required highway all the way to B.
2. I was amazed by the enormous amounts of empty space inside Houston. I don't mean parks. I mean undeveloped land. Take a look at a population density map of Houston (http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=85a821d13a4f4502a85f71c4aae8bae8 ). There is land were cows graze a couple of miles south of downtown along the US 90 and Main Street corridors that people drive through while on a 40 miles commute to their homes.
Hell, there is one such area (approx. 4 sq. miles) about a mile from my house. Even though I live in a very desirable neighbourhood (there are houses in my block that cost 1 million - I paid 130k 11 years ago - yay gentrification) mainly because its only 10 miles from downtown, in all these years no one has developed this area 11 miles from downtown. Instead they keep going further and further away until you need a 200 miles ring to join those neighbourhoods.
3. Because everybody drives along a very limited number of highways, and there is nothing that is not located along teh highways, I cannot think of a place better suited for a commuter train system like the ones in Western Europe. Probably for much less than the cost of expanding the highways you cold have train links that would reach downtown in 15 minutes and local feeding buses from each station. To go anywhere you would take a feeder bus to the nearest station, hop on a express (two -tree stops to downtown) or milk run train if you aren't going to Downtown or the Galleria, and take another feeder bus or a cab from your end station. Bus routes would be short and frequent, trains would go along the existing highways fast from hub to hub.
There. I just described paradise on the bayou. It's incredible how easily you could turn Houston into a mass transit model city - if you wanted to.
In a previous life I worked with compressed natural gas vehicles and the safety of a natural gas high pressure cylinder in your car trunk.
Because methane was so light even firing a bullet into the tank just made a hole (which could ignite) but the gas was so light that the flame would fly upwards away from the passengers.
Obviously being at pressure helped A LOT. Also the fact that the cylinder is non flammable so the gas inside the vessel could not ignite and the flame could not propagate inside the vessel and explode.
I wonder if something similar could be set up. A vessel of fire resistant fibers (like fireman's suits) and some mechanism (like big springs - I'm flying off my pants here) that would keep the hydrogen under pressure would probably make the flame go upwards in a controlled way allowing for the blimp to land (relatively) safely.
Normally environmental assessments have several categories (three is normal in many countries). What you describe is basically the first, simplest category, affecting land use but no air or water emissions. Even those start getting messy if the land is swampy.
But once you move past land use and traffic into infrastructure projects the sky is the limit in terms of the complications that score of agencies and levels bring, and the ability of every single person to claim some sirt of injury
The Environmental approval system in the USA is crazy, and at the end of the day, much less effective than the system in place in many other countries, including many developing countries.
In the USA scores of agencies at the local, state, or federal government have authority over a little bit of the project, in many cases with overlapping jurisdiction (local and state or two different federal agencies). Then, everybody and its brother can appeal all the decisions at all levels to the judiciary, state and federal, and until the SC rules definitely or denies certiotari, nothing is settled for decades.
The different agencies involved, all with limited budget, are easy victims to regulatory capture, which is why companies both hate the process for new projects, and love it for existing ones.
in most other places all environmental approvals are centralized; there is a uniform code to be followed by everyone, which allows to identify violations more easily, and judicial review is very limited.
i'm completely in favour of having all companies pay their externalities. However, in practice, its very difficult to price the externalities of thermal power, moderately easy to price the externalities of about 80% of hydro (and hydro projects do pay for that 80%) and similarly easy to calculate the cost of a single purpose storage site like Yucca Mountain.
(Easy is doing a lot of work here, but if the nuclear industry was at risk of messing up if the calculation was wrong i'm confident the numbers would come up with better accuracy)
It can't drop there because the wires themselves cost about 5 cents, and that is almost all a fixed cost.
Your friend and your electricity invoice includes two components: the energy, provided by some generator somewhere, and the wires. At 10 cents per kWh the energy is half the bill and the wires the other half.
Your friend is getting the energy at 5 cents, which is actually great because it means that now small rooftop power generation applications can deliver energy at the same cost as large chock-full-of-economies-of-scale high efficiency generation plants. But he is really not saving anything on the energy component. All the saving he sees is in the wires portion. He has stumbled into a loophole that cannot last
The way distribution utilities (the wires in the street) work (rough approximation) is they take all the costs of building and maintaining the wires (all fixed costs) and divide it by the energy all the customers consume. Though the distribution costs are actually costs per household (it costs roughly the same to serve a big and a small house - density is the real differentiator) this arrangement allowed rich, high consumption households to subsidize poorer low consumption ones.
Enter distributed generation (roof solar panels) and you are putting the whole system in jeopardy. Your friend still expects the local utility to provide the 30% that he cannot produce, and pay them 30% of what he used to. But the costs to the utility to deliver this 30% is the same as when it delivered 100%.
As distributed generation becomes more prevalent utilities will need to move to a fixed cost per subscriber model. Your friend will see that it will have to pay roughly 50% of his old bill for the wires, plus his 5 cents for his rooftop structure plus 5 cents to the generator that provides the other 30%. Your friend's saving are just based on getting the wire service for the 30% below cost.
That doesn't mean distributed generation is bad. There are good system wide reasons why distributed generation is desirable, even at current costs. Among other things more distributed generation reduces the need for more wires (on a system wide basis, not on our actual house) and will eventually bring costs and prices downwards.
I would be ok with a system wide subsidy for distributed generation. I'm very uncomfortable with the current exploitation of an unsustainable loophole.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.06.08.W}”
I don't think it's just passing as white (like Marco or Ted). When white supremacist prison gangs are willing to give you enough of a pass to let you enroll, you've gone a long way towards integration.
"
For what it's worth, I think your understanding is correct.
Also, 50-100 years from now, the value of oil should be less as an energy source and more as plastic feedstock (so says the optimist me)
"
Danger: Non STEM person in the room!
We picture oil reservoirs like a big underground bubble of oil. You pierce it and oil jumps upwards. Some basins, like Mike's, are like that. It just needs a drill downwards.
And then you get more convoluted configurations. Earth faults might be in the way, horizontal drilling might be needed. The movie style drill is not enough. Costs go up.
At some point you need to add pressure to pump the oil up, for instance, injecting natural gas so that the pressure lifts the remain g oil. Add expenses for a compressor.
There is a point here there s still a lot of oil in the ground but you can't drill it or pump it up. Twenty years ago that oil wasn't recoverable. Fracking is a technology developed to recover hard to get oil. It is quite expensive to do fracking, probably around 60 $/bbl. but 100 $/bbl crude was ample margin, and Joe's basin is now economically profitable.
But at 40$/bl, fracking is operating at a loss. You continue pumping whatever you have under explotation, but for sure you don't bury (pun intended) any more money in the ground for new wells.
"
You are totally right about the "who do we like the best". Hence my fondness for a charity a (female and black) friend -and Power Plant General Manager- sponsors: Dress for Success.
Aim: Providing poor women with occasion appropriate clothing for job interviews
"
@saul-degraw
"What is more interesting to me is which middle class and upper-middle class parents still push their kids towards practical subjects and majors and which ones develop the attitude of “You are smart. You can study anything you want and someone will give you a job based on your intelligence.” When and why does this change happen?"
If I can play again the European card, in most universities outside the USA/UK (and less in the UK than here) you declare your major when you enroll or shortly thereafter (in my case before the end of the first of five years) and you stick to it, or start from scratch. The Oxbridge liberal arts concept of college as a rounding up of classical knowledge that all gentlemen should know to lead a gentile life is mostly lost outside the USA, but very much alive here.
So when the first born generation goes to college they witness an experience that's not like what their parents told them to expect. When the second generation goes to college, their parents expectations are now tinted by their own experience: follow your interests and be smart.
"
You are probably 95% right in my book.
But I want to raise one other issue that I don't think has been explored much: the [alleged] antagonism between old time US blacks (descendants from antebellum slaves) and the newly arrived Afrocaribbeans and African immigrants. As far as I can tell there is little love between the two groups. Perhaps someone that knows better would agree to give his view
On “Who is Afraid of the Ku Klux Klan?”
His attitude has continued unfazed to this day. He's a United Airlines Global Services (invitation only) member.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.06.08.W}”
Related to the Oxford Journal link, you can learn a lot about racial attitudes by looking at the prison gangs in Texas and other nearby states. Texas based white supremacist gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas rule that state's prisons and have methastazed to other states. They are violently anti black, but, perhaps surprisingly, mildly favorable towards Hispanics, which get acepted in some gangs as quasi white (Hispanics have their own gangs too, of course).
I think this attitude (Hispanics are almost white, like Irish and Italians before them) will be more prevalent in the future -and the white anti Hispanic racism you see in CA and AZ (plenty of CA transplants) will become the outlier. Regretfully, I’m afraid that the white-black divide will be long with us. And, more regretfully, adding the Hispancs to the white column will actually worsen the issue, if for nothing else, because the 'Whites' will again be a majority almost everywhere
On “Who is Afraid of the Ku Klux Klan?”
I'm European born and raised, and this might color my comment. I blame GWB.
I grew up with the background of terrorism. As a teenager I was aware that ETA bombed shopping malls, and yet I went to the mall nevertheless. I was aware that the IRA threw bombs in the street, and I went in the street. I was aware that the PLO blew planes in the air, and took my first trasatlantic flight at age two. Terrorist groups announced an escalation in attacks, and people took it seriously, attacks did happen. Perhaps there would be added security matures, like policemen looking into your bag at the metro entrance in Paris, but millions took on the metro every day with no further thought.
We were aware of terrorism. Terrorism had existed all my life growing up. Sometimes scores of people would die. We were aware it was a real risk and a real threat. And we were also aware that it was twenty times more likely we would die crossing the street in front of the house than in a terror attack.
There had been terrorism before 9/11. Oklahoma City for instance. But no one had ever said before that terrorists were an EXISTENTIAL THREAT (pardon my raising my voice) that were trying to erase our way of life. Perhaps al-Quaeda was trying to erase our way of life, but the chance of that is zero. Like the chance of ETA destroying Spain.
But GWB (or Chenney, who knows) changed all that. The government said we had to be very scared, that we had to give away precious freedoms (paid for in the XVIII century with our forefathers blood) because the danger was so huge, so monumental, that civilization itself was at stake.
Bollocks
Europeans have always seen terrorism as a criminal/police issue. Yes, sometimes a political solution might help (Though the Troubles were more a low level Civil War), but most of the time (see ETA) terrorism must be treated as another crime. We never understood the panic throes America went into, panic that the GWB adinistration fueled, and that the Obama administration has not really assuaged.
College students today were 4 or 5 years old in 9/11. They have been taught all their lives that terrorism is trying to destroy everything, and that they should cower in fear, give away their freedoms, and wait for the Authorities to give the all-clear.
So, wHy would they react different to a KKK Terrorist? (*). As far as they know, all terrorists are hellbent on destroying everything they hold dear.
They are doing exactly what they were told. Good lads. Have a cookie.
So, yes, I blame GWB for this incident.
(*)I'll laugh later about their ignorance about Dominican monks, though monasteries are few and far between in America
On “Does the New York Times Think There Should Be Different Rules for Jews and Muslims at Public Pools? – Tablet Magazine”
This is a non-trolling question
In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, aren't men required not to touch unknown women because they could be ritually unclean due to having their period? Is that requirement also applicable to women? Are they polluted by touching other menstruating women?
If so how can you get into a pool that has been used by unknown-possibly menstruating- women even on a sex segregated basis. Unless the segregation is total, and the pool is drained if found to be ritually unclean?
"
We need to define what religion is and what it is for before we say Western Secularism, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Christianity, or Budhism, or Greek Orthodoxy (you, know, the real Orthodoxy, as shown in BSG), of Islam, or Shinto, are religions.
Is religion a search of the Trascendent outside of the Natural World? A search of the Trascendent inside the Natural World? A tool to organize society? Reverence for life, or submission to a Superior being?
Is it an individual search, or must it be communal? Can I be individually religious in a society that does not impose religion communally?
"
veronica
As much as I think that most of what you say is sensible and reasonable, in particular, that things that are the same on paper are not the same on the ground, at the end of the day I cannot support your conclusion.
I have a similar conflict with France's (and other places )anti burqa laws. It puts Muslim women in a very difficult bind. The argument is that unless they are covered their relatives won't let their women (the word "their" used intentionally here) in the street, and society is better accommodating covered women than forcing them indoors.
As much as I regret the plight of women not allowed out, in the end, I support the ban. Our culture believes now (fortunately) that women and men have a basic equality and all options should be open to both. The purpose of the burqa is to reduce the contact between women and society. Burqa covered women are not supposed to interact with the outside society. It is basically a portable house around you. You are outside, but the walls follow you. Society should not say that this is ok, that is ok that some women are cut off from social interaction. I find that a price too high to pay to have relatives allow their women in the street.
Same in pools. If an Irani style (muslimah) bathing suit is not enough to meet your modesty requirements, then the concern is not modesty, the concern is cutting interaction between women and men. That cannot be allowed in a pluralistic society, be it Somali women or Haredi women.
On “A Thought on Art and Entertainment”
Do you mean the Camus play?
I have never seen it played, but I have a well read copy. I like Camus
On second though, my teenager/young man know-it-all loved Camus and his idea that we are all alone, and we (each one of us) is all there is and all it will ever be, and that when we die, what we leave behind is worthless.
It's the same mid frame as that of the five-year old child that thinks candy existing before he was born is a complete waste.
But I still find Caligula and The Stranger (they come together in my copy) cool reads. I'd love to see it played.
"
On a similar note, I find Madame Buttefly so heartbreakingly sad I cannot see it, hear it, or watch derivative works like M. Butterfly
Madame Buterfly was the first opera I saw, aged 14.
I wonder about this weird allergy I have. Seeing posters of that opera wets my eyes.
"
I'm dating myself (though I was two years younger than what was legally required to see it. I sneaked in with a group of older friends)
Apocalypse Now
When the lights were turned on at the end, the threatre was eerily silent. No one in a crowd of a couple hundreds wanted to be the first to move out.
Afterwards, over hamburgers, one of my friends said he wanted to kill himself at that moment.
It is an absolute masterpiece. And I can't bear the idea of seeing it again
On “Tech Linkage”
I have a couple of interesting theories about why Houston developers have ignored areas closer to downtown and moved further away. I'm looking forward to an Urbanism OT post to flesh them out
"
i agree with your system, but I'm not sure if you can constitutionally consolidate all the objections in a single process. Right now, every single person that is going to breath the emissions of your project has a separate tort claim against it.
I would somehow create a "presumption of environmental fitness" (to call it something) for anything that has agency approval, so that your claim would have to prove that the agency approval was not granted according to the existing law before being allowed to proceed
"
When I moved into Houston in 1998 there were several things about the city that surprised me:
1. Even though mapwise Houston looks like a 100 mile diameter circle in reality it is more like a lot of spokes (the highways) joining spots. almost all of Houston is actually one or two mile wide strips along the highways, with nothing further away. It surprised me that it was almost impossible (or actually impossible) to go directly from point A over one highway to point B, a couple of miles away but along a different highway, through the back streets, so to speak. I had to hop on the highway, drive to the common hub and jump to the required highway all the way to B.
2. I was amazed by the enormous amounts of empty space inside Houston. I don't mean parks. I mean undeveloped land. Take a look at a population density map of Houston (http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=85a821d13a4f4502a85f71c4aae8bae8 ). There is land were cows graze a couple of miles south of downtown along the US 90 and Main Street corridors that people drive through while on a 40 miles commute to their homes.
Hell, there is one such area (approx. 4 sq. miles) about a mile from my house. Even though I live in a very desirable neighbourhood (there are houses in my block that cost 1 million - I paid 130k 11 years ago - yay gentrification) mainly because its only 10 miles from downtown, in all these years no one has developed this area 11 miles from downtown. Instead they keep going further and further away until you need a 200 miles ring to join those neighbourhoods.
3. Because everybody drives along a very limited number of highways, and there is nothing that is not located along teh highways, I cannot think of a place better suited for a commuter train system like the ones in Western Europe. Probably for much less than the cost of expanding the highways you cold have train links that would reach downtown in 15 minutes and local feeding buses from each station. To go anywhere you would take a feeder bus to the nearest station, hop on a express (two -tree stops to downtown) or milk run train if you aren't going to Downtown or the Galleria, and take another feeder bus or a cab from your end station. Bus routes would be short and frequent, trains would go along the existing highways fast from hub to hub.
There. I just described paradise on the bayou. It's incredible how easily you could turn Houston into a mass transit model city - if you wanted to.
"
Formally known as The Grand Parkway.
I live ten miles away from work. I'm deemed to live "very close".
"
In a previous life I worked with compressed natural gas vehicles and the safety of a natural gas high pressure cylinder in your car trunk.
Because methane was so light even firing a bullet into the tank just made a hole (which could ignite) but the gas was so light that the flame would fly upwards away from the passengers.
Obviously being at pressure helped A LOT. Also the fact that the cylinder is non flammable so the gas inside the vessel could not ignite and the flame could not propagate inside the vessel and explode.
I wonder if something similar could be set up. A vessel of fire resistant fibers (like fireman's suits) and some mechanism (like big springs - I'm flying off my pants here) that would keep the hydrogen under pressure would probably make the flame go upwards in a controlled way allowing for the blimp to land (relatively) safely.
Would that work?
"
Normally environmental assessments have several categories (three is normal in many countries). What you describe is basically the first, simplest category, affecting land use but no air or water emissions. Even those start getting messy if the land is swampy.
But once you move past land use and traffic into infrastructure projects the sky is the limit in terms of the complications that score of agencies and levels bring, and the ability of every single person to claim some sirt of injury
"
The Environmental approval system in the USA is crazy, and at the end of the day, much less effective than the system in place in many other countries, including many developing countries.
In the USA scores of agencies at the local, state, or federal government have authority over a little bit of the project, in many cases with overlapping jurisdiction (local and state or two different federal agencies). Then, everybody and its brother can appeal all the decisions at all levels to the judiciary, state and federal, and until the SC rules definitely or denies certiotari, nothing is settled for decades.
The different agencies involved, all with limited budget, are easy victims to regulatory capture, which is why companies both hate the process for new projects, and love it for existing ones.
in most other places all environmental approvals are centralized; there is a uniform code to be followed by everyone, which allows to identify violations more easily, and judicial review is very limited.
"
That would take care of a lot of waste, but not all of it.
But we should recycle indeed
"
i'm completely in favour of having all companies pay their externalities. However, in practice, its very difficult to price the externalities of thermal power, moderately easy to price the externalities of about 80% of hydro (and hydro projects do pay for that 80%) and similarly easy to calculate the cost of a single purpose storage site like Yucca Mountain.
(Easy is doing a lot of work here, but if the nuclear industry was at risk of messing up if the calculation was wrong i'm confident the numbers would come up with better accuracy)
"
It can't drop there because the wires themselves cost about 5 cents, and that is almost all a fixed cost.
Your friend and your electricity invoice includes two components: the energy, provided by some generator somewhere, and the wires. At 10 cents per kWh the energy is half the bill and the wires the other half.
Your friend is getting the energy at 5 cents, which is actually great because it means that now small rooftop power generation applications can deliver energy at the same cost as large chock-full-of-economies-of-scale high efficiency generation plants. But he is really not saving anything on the energy component. All the saving he sees is in the wires portion. He has stumbled into a loophole that cannot last
The way distribution utilities (the wires in the street) work (rough approximation) is they take all the costs of building and maintaining the wires (all fixed costs) and divide it by the energy all the customers consume. Though the distribution costs are actually costs per household (it costs roughly the same to serve a big and a small house - density is the real differentiator) this arrangement allowed rich, high consumption households to subsidize poorer low consumption ones.
Enter distributed generation (roof solar panels) and you are putting the whole system in jeopardy. Your friend still expects the local utility to provide the 30% that he cannot produce, and pay them 30% of what he used to. But the costs to the utility to deliver this 30% is the same as when it delivered 100%.
As distributed generation becomes more prevalent utilities will need to move to a fixed cost per subscriber model. Your friend will see that it will have to pay roughly 50% of his old bill for the wires, plus his 5 cents for his rooftop structure plus 5 cents to the generator that provides the other 30%. Your friend's saving are just based on getting the wire service for the 30% below cost.
That doesn't mean distributed generation is bad. There are good system wide reasons why distributed generation is desirable, even at current costs. Among other things more distributed generation reduces the need for more wires (on a system wide basis, not on our actual house) and will eventually bring costs and prices downwards.
I would be ok with a system wide subsidy for distributed generation. I'm very uncomfortable with the current exploitation of an unsustainable loophole.
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