Asimov via Hari Seldon pointed out that history has great inertia. It takes a long time -or a lot of people- for it to change.
Hence people are willing to carry on for quite some time until finally they change their mind.
The same great great grandchildren of the burghers that cheered Louis XIV for abasing the nobility voted for the execution of Louis XVI
Venezuela's case is extremely interesting. I lived there for many years though I left in 1998 months before the first Chavez election. I can tell you that 10 years before Chavez it was clear to me where the country was going to, and why. And two years later I had a discussion with some people about why Chavez was not going anywhere (contrary to their assertion that the regime couldn't last more than a year more). I was right.
Now the Mandate of Heaven has been finally lost in Venezuela. But the transition won't be easy. Prophesies about what will happen in Venezuela can be obtained here in exchange for six-packs of a good IPA. If after ten years I am wrong, i'll repay the beer with a reasonable accrued interest.
But the Mandate of Heaven can be and is lost, when the Government's fails to minimally guarantee the rights of all the polity's components. There is a limit to what you can let nobles, or soldiers, or tax collectors, get away with.
I have a preference to throw the polluted waters from my tannery (or, because I'm very SWPL, my tofu factory.
Any restrictions of throwing the untreated process waste water is a navy loss for me and my freedom. The fact that the city downstream doesn't like to drink polluted water is just government imposition.
Of course, they could sue me. Or actually, my LLC, JoeSal Stinky Tofu Manufacturers. The few assets my LLC has cannot in any way cover the environmental damages so it goes bankrupt.
The old LLC is no longer I go home and set up a new LLC, JoeSal Even Stinkier Tofu Manufacturers, and keep on doing the same. The river stays poisoned. The Gods of Libertarianism have been satisfied.
I think the Nash Equilibrium model is accurate. Even from a theoretical point of view, the Government, as uber-coordinating body has the mandate to make sure no other coordinating body can maximize their wins at the expense of the other players, or impose undue xternalities on third parties.
No government in recorded history has ever argued that the settling of competing interests and reaching a statewide equilibrium was not their core mandate. This is the Mandate from Heaven, that granted rightful authority. They might have been lousy about it, but they never argued that government was just organized pillage.
It's worth remembering that, as Europe progressed from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, the middle and lower classes wholeheartedly supported the expansion of the Royal Power versus the local aristocracy. This is as true of Bourbon France as it is of Tudor England(*) or Habsburg Spain. The King's mandate covered the welfare of the whole country, whereas the barons were all for themselves.
(*) The fact that in England the barons won in the Glorious Revolution and the country failed to settle into an absolute monarchy like the rest of Europe is another interesting story. Eventually, England reached democracy faster than other countries, but in the meantime the barons had the ability to impose substantial burdens on the rest of the population. See the Enclosure of the Commons, for instance
We are going into the deep end here when we say "absent the Government". I think it is more accurate to say that they have existed "with the Government in the background, but not directly involved". After all, a corporation's articles of incorporation implicitly assume that there is a Government somewhere.
We don't know what "absent the Government" looks like because historically there is no known case of "absent the Government", even if the Government is the chieftain of a band of roving hunter-gatherers
They had a Charter. And, in the end, they were taken over by the Government Government because their objective (more money to them) started running afoul of other competing concerns (which can be more or less be summarized as welfare of the local population)
The Spanish Colonial empire started in the same vein granting charters to individual explorers/conquerors, who committed to certain obligations vis-a-vis the crown and the local population (which were also legally subjects of the Spanish crown). By 1550 it was obvious that the Chartered Persons (Encomenderos) were focused on their private interest and would not abide by the agreed obligations. The Crown then took direct control (as direct as crossing the Atlantic in the XVI century could be). Bad as it might have been, it was an improvement.
As a coordinating entity, the Government is slightly better both in theory and in practice because it has to balance the interests of all the parties in the AREMA PLUS the interests of those that are not a party to AREMA (for instance: customers). Recent case in point are the new regulations for crude carrying train wagons, bitterly opposed by the freight companies for whom Lac-Mégantic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster ) is a sad externality.
The fact that historically the Government has done a very bad job of coordinating doesn't change the fact that, historically, private associations of interested parties have been worse
AREMA was established in 1997 though as an amalgamation of older associations that go back to the 1880s.
AREMA standards are mandatory in the USA (and Canada btw). I guess it has nothing to do with the government.
And of course the federal government had nothing to do with establishing the railways across America. It was all built from the county upwards. It was all county land grants all the way.
My point is not that AREMA is or is not a government entity. The IEEE isn't either. My point is that post 1830 you could no longer have a world in which most decisions could be made at the county level because barely anybody got to travel to the next county.
"The proliferation of federal law is new and creeping toward absurdity. Law enforcement increases in the various bureaus express the type of ‘from above’ command structure the new type of ‘liberal representative democracy’ needs to keep it’s top down ideology from collapse."
New in the sense of barely 150 years old, give or take a score of decades.
Once you got to the point where people in my valley (or my piece of flat as a pancake plain) interacted with people from the other valleys, you had to have coordination, and the Federal structure started to creep in.
You want a train in your town? Well, we need to know at what time the train should come in, so no longer the time could be set by noon is when the church steeple casts no shadow, and you had to coordinate the time in Anyvillage, OH with the time the train left New York City; federalism. And you want the rails to be the same: federalism. And you now start buying your guns from a factory somewhere in PA: federalism. And you want the bullets you buy in your village to work in your PA made gun: federalism. And you want those bloody Indians kept at bay: federalism.
It's ironic that the Constitution was not 30 years old that the world of the Founders, where 99% of the people stayed put in the community where they were born, was gone for ever. The Industrial Revolution, the steam boats and trains, and international commerce destroyed thAt world completely. Thus people born in the palace of Versailles before the American and French Revolutions (and the Montgolfier hot air balloon) would travel through Europe by train before their death (King Louis Philippe (1773-1850) for instance).
It doesn't matter how localist the Founding a Fathers envisioned the country to be, by the next generation it was clear that the smallest functional polity was the whole country.
I'm sorry but I think you have it exactly backwards.
The expected Trump loss will be business as usual: "We lost because we didn't nominate a true conservative".
There is no succesor to tap the Trump constituency because there is no one (to my knowledge) that has both the enormous name recognition and the ability to self fund a primary run.
There are several names that can have an appeal similar to Trump's, Sarah Palin for instance, but she would need donors to keep her viable. True, Trump mostly did not need to self fund because the press did his campaign for him, but I think that was a happy surprise for him. A Trump ver 2.0 can't really count on that.
Once you are bound to donor money, be it Koch's , Adelson's, or the One Million Mum's, you are bound to policies (tax cuts for the rich, Middle East wars, LGBT discrimination in the name of religion) that are really not what Trump voters care about of want. And you will have a couple more cycles of this.
What would really shock the Elephant would be a Trump win in the general. What would come out after four years, I cannot even imagine, but it won't be the same.
I joined Enron (reluctantly, that's another story) at the peak of its run, in early 2000. I lived the downfall, the bankruptcy and the post bankruptcy. The latter was probably the most interesting part.
Formally I ended employment in what was still Enron after several name changes in early 2014
To say that Cruz strategy re delegates was perfectly correct and by the book is just like saying your gay partner covered as spouse in your employer provided insurance is a perfect stranger to you.
It's an accurate reading of the laws and rules, with the intention to reach the opposite objective. And most people will tell you the rules be dammed, the intention was wrong
1. I'm an Enrom alumni. I was an Enron employee at bankruptcy, and one of the few that continued to be employed during the Chapter 11 and onwards into the successor companies, through 2014. A very interesting, and not well known, story on its own.
2. I always thought the shares were overvalued. Hence I would always ask for my bonus to be cash only (most people asked for shares). We did get some payments as options or shares (401k) matching for instance) where cash was not an option, but on bankruptcy day my portafolio was almost Enron free. To me it as obvious the companywas not worth $80/shareAt its peak i thought it should be worth $50 tops. And I spent my whole tenure waiting for a market correction (that zoomed past my eyes when it came)
3. What surprised me most when I joined Enron was the almost paranoid emphasis on ethics (I kid you not). This emphasis really became paranoid during the Chapter 11 and in the succesor companies. We were never allowed to forget our original sin. We had to be double squiggly clean because someone would always throw "you are Enron with another name" to our face.
4. What happened in Enron was really a matter of very few bad apples, really, really, really, pushing the letter of the rules vs the logical interpretation. To my mind, the funniest is a legal opinion from Vinson and Elkinns (which is as guilty as Arthur Andersen or more, in this matter) that ruled that the gay partner of one of the company treasurers, who shared Hs address, and got domestic benefits from Enron, was a total stranger for legal purposes, and should be treated as a non related third party because gay marriage was not legal in Texas. So he took the place of one of Fastow's aunts (too close) in a special purpose vehicle. Of course, AA signed on this totally legal, totally accurate, interpretation, because REALLY Texas law did not regognize any relationship between gay partners. The guy was a total stranger. The law was satisfied. The financial statements were true and accurate. They always were. Even The Economist magazine acknowledged this at the time.
5. I never met Fastow. i worked in the building next door (which was actually the nice one - the Enron building was cramped to Indian slum levels, that's why they were building the second building). But I have friends in Enron that did and none liked him. He was a bully indeed, so I am told.
6. But surprisingly, I have two acquaintances outside of Enron that knew Fastow socially (they don't know each other, as far as I know). They both would vouch at the time of the bankruptcy that he is and was a most wonderful person, charitable, humble, religious, friendly. They had only good words about him and were shocked when his Enron person a came to light.
Apparently this Fastow was there all the time. He just was too smart for his own good. I'm glad he is in the path now.
I think I understand the challenges the white working class face, at least the economic ones.
But it might be my globalize do outlook, but it seems to me that they are very similar, it not the same, as the challenges to black and Hispanic working class. The Detroit and Flint manufacturing collapse probably hurt blacks worse than whites, for instance.
The Democrats put forward proposal after proposal (stimulus, Meficaid expansion, $15/HR, etc.) aimed at helping the Working Class in toto, white, black and Hispanic. And time after time the Shite Working Class chose to reject those proposals. They vote to repeal the Meficaid Expansion in KY, for goodness sake.
So either the WWC has not yet forgiven the Democratic Party for the Civil Rights Act, or they are opposed to policies that help them AND people other than them, or they are willing to starve rather than get help from those smug post modern globalized liberals like me because I am disrespecting them. At the end is all mostly the same thing: there is a cultural gap between the WWC and vast sections of the country, a gap that has been exploited for the benefit of policies that do zilch for the WWC.
And I don't know how to bridge that gap. But part of the solution probably involves the WWC to, on its own, start moving away from being against all of us that are not them. And that is a very tall order, culture wise
Or you could go with the racial blindness that is currently de rigueur in the UK, in which black or white or Asian actors play any role irrespectively
Which I find silly and off putting
Some months ago I saw a Restoration comedy in London's National Theatre, in which the leading female character. A rich, titled, heiress, was a beautiful black young lady. The fact that her mother and her no good blondish drunkard brother were white didn't seem to faze anyone (except me - I could not suspend my disbelief enough to accept that they were mother and daughter)
Without diminishing the thespian merits of the actress, can we at least keep all members of the same family reasonably of the same race, and of a race that matches the story? I don't want to see Brad Pitt play Shaka Zulu just because he is a great actor. And I don't want Idris Elba play a Viking.
For sure, we can and should write better stories involving all races, and I'm happy to have s black person play a role where race is meaningless (Dr. Who for instance), but not when it is anachronistic, anageographic, or anafamilysh.
There is loads of real life working applications, and loads of info, but very little of it has been done in the USA. I'll try to find a couple of good examples today and will post the links here, so keep an eye
Run of river technically means that there is no reservoir (you might have a small reservoir that allows you hourly regulation for peak shaving purposes)
In real life applications you tend to have two very different technologies:
Very low flow, relatively high head, mostly applied in distributed generation, producing 0.5-10 MW (*). They tend to use Pelton turbines, which are not under pressure (they derive from the traditional European mill water wheels
Very low to zero head, very high flow, Kaplan turbines placed where there is a constant flow available, like the Danube River, or large piped water systems (the Panama Canal turbines the water that flows between sluices por power production). Kaplan turbines is a fancy name for ship propellers running backwards, water flowing makes it spin it instead of the propeller's spin pushing the water away.
Neither are subject to large pressures or cavitation problems, which are behind most turbine failure or maintenance issues, so the maintenance is very easy. Pelton turbines though are easily eroded by particulates carried in the water. However the maintenance is very easy, replacing individual eroded buckets.
Not much. The electric car is way more efficient in converting electricity to movement, but thermal power generation efficiency (50% on a good day), plus T&D losses brings you more or less to the same place. Adding renewables to the electricity mix helps of course, but this won't be the game changer.
Nuclear is the only power generation technology I'm not really familiar with, but there are several aspects about nuclear power that are negatives from a utility perspective:
1. Nuclear power all-in (fixed plus variable) prices are not competitive in the current markets. Variable prices are zero, but fixed are extremely high. The current market prices does not cover total costs of a new plant, plus....
2. Projects rarely come in time and budget, which adds to 1, plus
3. Nuclear plants are large, inflexible and must be run at the base. This crowds out other low cost technologies that could actually be scheduled. In other words, nuclear has to be combined with very flexible yet expensive generation that can actually follow the load, and the total system cost might be higher than in a non nucleR case, plus
4. None, of almost none, nuclear plant provisions the decommissioning and clean up costs. If you did, the fixed costs would kill your project.
1-3 might be resolved through engineering: a different technology might be cheaper, and might bring forth plants that can be ramped up and down. But 4 is a socialization of private costs.
The fact is that very few private utilities or traditional independent power companies are interested in developing new nuclear projects. Most, if not all, being constructed now are being developed by state owned utilities (like EDF) or guaranteed by the state.
Nuclear power today is not commercially competitive. We might decide that climate change makes it necessary, but let's be clear that it represents an added cost to the consumers or to society vs other alternatives, including renewables.
That I do not know, but I would guess that yes, at some point the output (volume or temperature) does not justify the drilling.
Geo resources are truly renewable because the rain water percolates down and replenishes the source. El Salvador plants have been operating for 40 years without loss of resource
On “WTF Texas?”
Houston normally
Currently in Panama because of a family issue
"
Asimov via Hari Seldon pointed out that history has great inertia. It takes a long time -or a lot of people- for it to change.
Hence people are willing to carry on for quite some time until finally they change their mind.
The same great great grandchildren of the burghers that cheered Louis XIV for abasing the nobility voted for the execution of Louis XVI
Venezuela's case is extremely interesting. I lived there for many years though I left in 1998 months before the first Chavez election. I can tell you that 10 years before Chavez it was clear to me where the country was going to, and why. And two years later I had a discussion with some people about why Chavez was not going anywhere (contrary to their assertion that the regime couldn't last more than a year more). I was right.
Now the Mandate of Heaven has been finally lost in Venezuela. But the transition won't be easy. Prophesies about what will happen in Venezuela can be obtained here in exchange for six-packs of a good IPA. If after ten years I am wrong, i'll repay the beer with a reasonable accrued interest.
"
But the Mandate of Heaven can be and is lost, when the Government's fails to minimally guarantee the rights of all the polity's components. There is a limit to what you can let nobles, or soldiers, or tax collectors, get away with.
"
I have a preference to throw the polluted waters from my tannery (or, because I'm very SWPL, my tofu factory.
Any restrictions of throwing the untreated process waste water is a navy loss for me and my freedom. The fact that the city downstream doesn't like to drink polluted water is just government imposition.
Of course, they could sue me. Or actually, my LLC, JoeSal Stinky Tofu Manufacturers. The few assets my LLC has cannot in any way cover the environmental damages so it goes bankrupt.
The old LLC is no longer I go home and set up a new LLC, JoeSal Even Stinkier Tofu Manufacturers, and keep on doing the same. The river stays poisoned. The Gods of Libertarianism have been satisfied.
"
I think the Nash Equilibrium model is accurate. Even from a theoretical point of view, the Government, as uber-coordinating body has the mandate to make sure no other coordinating body can maximize their wins at the expense of the other players, or impose undue xternalities on third parties.
No government in recorded history has ever argued that the settling of competing interests and reaching a statewide equilibrium was not their core mandate. This is the Mandate from Heaven, that granted rightful authority. They might have been lousy about it, but they never argued that government was just organized pillage.
It's worth remembering that, as Europe progressed from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, the middle and lower classes wholeheartedly supported the expansion of the Royal Power versus the local aristocracy. This is as true of Bourbon France as it is of Tudor England(*) or Habsburg Spain. The King's mandate covered the welfare of the whole country, whereas the barons were all for themselves.
(*) The fact that in England the barons won in the Glorious Revolution and the country failed to settle into an absolute monarchy like the rest of Europe is another interesting story. Eventually, England reached democracy faster than other countries, but in the meantime the barons had the ability to impose substantial burdens on the rest of the population. See the Enclosure of the Commons, for instance
On “Jack Move”
Cue Battlestar Galactica
All of this has happened before and will happen again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOy3RNyWME
On “WTF Texas?”
We are going into the deep end here when we say "absent the Government". I think it is more accurate to say that they have existed "with the Government in the background, but not directly involved". After all, a corporation's articles of incorporation implicitly assume that there is a Government somewhere.
We don't know what "absent the Government" looks like because historically there is no known case of "absent the Government", even if the Government is the chieftain of a band of roving hunter-gatherers
"
No, let's not!!!!!!!
"
They had a Charter. And, in the end, they were taken over by the Government Government because their objective (more money to them) started running afoul of other competing concerns (which can be more or less be summarized as welfare of the local population)
The Spanish Colonial empire started in the same vein granting charters to individual explorers/conquerors, who committed to certain obligations vis-a-vis the crown and the local population (which were also legally subjects of the Spanish crown). By 1550 it was obvious that the Chartered Persons (Encomenderos) were focused on their private interest and would not abide by the agreed obligations. The Crown then took direct control (as direct as crossing the Atlantic in the XVI century could be). Bad as it might have been, it was an improvement.
As a coordinating entity, the Government is slightly better both in theory and in practice because it has to balance the interests of all the parties in the AREMA PLUS the interests of those that are not a party to AREMA (for instance: customers). Recent case in point are the new regulations for crude carrying train wagons, bitterly opposed by the freight companies for whom Lac-Mégantic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster ) is a sad externality.
The fact that historically the Government has done a very bad job of coordinating doesn't change the fact that, historically, private associations of interested parties have been worse
"
You just sent me back to my Electromagnetic Theory class in college.
I kept saying: Arghh!!!! Stop wasting my time. Perfect spheres of charge and infinite cylinders and planes of current do not exist!!!!!!!!!
Little I knew that the approximation of an electrical engine to a perfect cylinder of current is fishing close :-)
"
AREMA was established in 1997 though as an amalgamation of older associations that go back to the 1880s.
AREMA standards are mandatory in the USA (and Canada btw). I guess it has nothing to do with the government.
And of course the federal government had nothing to do with establishing the railways across America. It was all built from the county upwards. It was all county land grants all the way.
My point is not that AREMA is or is not a government entity. The IEEE isn't either. My point is that post 1830 you could no longer have a world in which most decisions could be made at the county level because barely anybody got to travel to the next county.
"
"The proliferation of federal law is new and creeping toward absurdity. Law enforcement increases in the various bureaus express the type of ‘from above’ command structure the new type of ‘liberal representative democracy’ needs to keep it’s top down ideology from collapse."
New in the sense of barely 150 years old, give or take a score of decades.
Once you got to the point where people in my valley (or my piece of flat as a pancake plain) interacted with people from the other valleys, you had to have coordination, and the Federal structure started to creep in.
You want a train in your town? Well, we need to know at what time the train should come in, so no longer the time could be set by noon is when the church steeple casts no shadow, and you had to coordinate the time in Anyvillage, OH with the time the train left New York City; federalism. And you want the rails to be the same: federalism. And you now start buying your guns from a factory somewhere in PA: federalism. And you want the bullets you buy in your village to work in your PA made gun: federalism. And you want those bloody Indians kept at bay: federalism.
It's ironic that the Constitution was not 30 years old that the world of the Founders, where 99% of the people stayed put in the community where they were born, was gone for ever. The Industrial Revolution, the steam boats and trains, and international commerce destroyed thAt world completely. Thus people born in the palace of Versailles before the American and French Revolutions (and the Montgolfier hot air balloon) would travel through Europe by train before their death (King Louis Philippe (1773-1850) for instance).
It doesn't matter how localist the Founding a Fathers envisioned the country to be, by the next generation it was clear that the smallest functional polity was the whole country.
On “How To Fix a Broken Elephant: A Recipe for Electoral Health In Six Incredibly Difficult Steps”
@north
I'm sorry but I think you have it exactly backwards.
The expected Trump loss will be business as usual: "We lost because we didn't nominate a true conservative".
There is no succesor to tap the Trump constituency because there is no one (to my knowledge) that has both the enormous name recognition and the ability to self fund a primary run.
There are several names that can have an appeal similar to Trump's, Sarah Palin for instance, but she would need donors to keep her viable. True, Trump mostly did not need to self fund because the press did his campaign for him, but I think that was a happy surprise for him. A Trump ver 2.0 can't really count on that.
Once you are bound to donor money, be it Koch's , Adelson's, or the One Million Mum's, you are bound to policies (tax cuts for the rich, Middle East wars, LGBT discrimination in the name of religion) that are really not what Trump voters care about of want. And you will have a couple more cycles of this.
What would really shock the Elephant would be a Trump win in the general. What would come out after four years, I cannot even imagine, but it won't be the same.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.05.04.W}”
Hehe. I can be easily twisted to talk about me.
I joined Enron (reluctantly, that's another story) at the peak of its run, in early 2000. I lived the downfall, the bankruptcy and the post bankruptcy. The latter was probably the most interesting part.
Formally I ended employment in what was still Enron after several name changes in early 2014
"
To say that Cruz strategy re delegates was perfectly correct and by the book is just like saying your gay partner covered as spouse in your employer provided insurance is a perfect stranger to you.
It's an accurate reading of the laws and rules, with the intention to reach the opposite objective. And most people will tell you the rules be dammed, the intention was wrong
"
Thank you for the Fastow link.
For what is worth
1. I'm an Enrom alumni. I was an Enron employee at bankruptcy, and one of the few that continued to be employed during the Chapter 11 and onwards into the successor companies, through 2014. A very interesting, and not well known, story on its own.
2. I always thought the shares were overvalued. Hence I would always ask for my bonus to be cash only (most people asked for shares). We did get some payments as options or shares (401k) matching for instance) where cash was not an option, but on bankruptcy day my portafolio was almost Enron free. To me it as obvious the companywas not worth $80/shareAt its peak i thought it should be worth $50 tops. And I spent my whole tenure waiting for a market correction (that zoomed past my eyes when it came)
3. What surprised me most when I joined Enron was the almost paranoid emphasis on ethics (I kid you not). This emphasis really became paranoid during the Chapter 11 and in the succesor companies. We were never allowed to forget our original sin. We had to be double squiggly clean because someone would always throw "you are Enron with another name" to our face.
4. What happened in Enron was really a matter of very few bad apples, really, really, really, pushing the letter of the rules vs the logical interpretation. To my mind, the funniest is a legal opinion from Vinson and Elkinns (which is as guilty as Arthur Andersen or more, in this matter) that ruled that the gay partner of one of the company treasurers, who shared Hs address, and got domestic benefits from Enron, was a total stranger for legal purposes, and should be treated as a non related third party because gay marriage was not legal in Texas. So he took the place of one of Fastow's aunts (too close) in a special purpose vehicle. Of course, AA signed on this totally legal, totally accurate, interpretation, because REALLY Texas law did not regognize any relationship between gay partners. The guy was a total stranger. The law was satisfied. The financial statements were true and accurate. They always were. Even The Economist magazine acknowledged this at the time.
5. I never met Fastow. i worked in the building next door (which was actually the nice one - the Enron building was cramped to Indian slum levels, that's why they were building the second building). But I have friends in Enron that did and none liked him. He was a bully indeed, so I am told.
6. But surprisingly, I have two acquaintances outside of Enron that knew Fastow socially (they don't know each other, as far as I know). They both would vouch at the time of the bankruptcy that he is and was a most wonderful person, charitable, humble, religious, friendly. They had only good words about him and were shocked when his Enron person a came to light.
Apparently this Fastow was there all the time. He just was too smart for his own good. I'm glad he is in the path now.
On “In Defense of Trump’s Voters”
I think I understand the challenges the white working class face, at least the economic ones.
But it might be my globalize do outlook, but it seems to me that they are very similar, it not the same, as the challenges to black and Hispanic working class. The Detroit and Flint manufacturing collapse probably hurt blacks worse than whites, for instance.
The Democrats put forward proposal after proposal (stimulus, Meficaid expansion, $15/HR, etc.) aimed at helping the Working Class in toto, white, black and Hispanic. And time after time the Shite Working Class chose to reject those proposals. They vote to repeal the Meficaid Expansion in KY, for goodness sake.
So either the WWC has not yet forgiven the Democratic Party for the Civil Rights Act, or they are opposed to policies that help them AND people other than them, or they are willing to starve rather than get help from those smug post modern globalized liberals like me because I am disrespecting them. At the end is all mostly the same thing: there is a cultural gap between the WWC and vast sections of the country, a gap that has been exploited for the benefit of policies that do zilch for the WWC.
And I don't know how to bridge that gap. But part of the solution probably involves the WWC to, on its own, start moving away from being against all of us that are not them. And that is a very tall order, culture wise
On “The Whiteness of Westeros”
Or you could go with the racial blindness that is currently de rigueur in the UK, in which black or white or Asian actors play any role irrespectively
Which I find silly and off putting
Some months ago I saw a Restoration comedy in London's National Theatre, in which the leading female character. A rich, titled, heiress, was a beautiful black young lady. The fact that her mother and her no good blondish drunkard brother were white didn't seem to faze anyone (except me - I could not suspend my disbelief enough to accept that they were mother and daughter)
Without diminishing the thespian merits of the actress, can we at least keep all members of the same family reasonably of the same race, and of a race that matches the story? I don't want to see Brad Pitt play Shaka Zulu just because he is a great actor. And I don't want Idris Elba play a Viking.
For sure, we can and should write better stories involving all races, and I'm happy to have s black person play a role where race is meaningless (Dr. Who for instance), but not when it is anachronistic, anageographic, or anafamilysh.
On “In Search of Anthropocene Ethics”
There is loads of real life working applications, and loads of info, but very little of it has been done in the USA. I'll try to find a couple of good examples today and will post the links here, so keep an eye
"
Run of river technically means that there is no reservoir (you might have a small reservoir that allows you hourly regulation for peak shaving purposes)
In real life applications you tend to have two very different technologies:
Very low flow, relatively high head, mostly applied in distributed generation, producing 0.5-10 MW (*). They tend to use Pelton turbines, which are not under pressure (they derive from the traditional European mill water wheels
Very low to zero head, very high flow, Kaplan turbines placed where there is a constant flow available, like the Danube River, or large piped water systems (the Panama Canal turbines the water that flows between sluices por power production). Kaplan turbines is a fancy name for ship propellers running backwards, water flowing makes it spin it instead of the propeller's spin pushing the water away.
Neither are subject to large pressures or cavitation problems, which are behind most turbine failure or maintenance issues, so the maintenance is very easy. Pelton turbines though are easily eroded by particulates carried in the water. However the maintenance is very easy, replacing individual eroded buckets.
"
Below 50 $/MWh all-in. That compares with a not too efficient. gas fired combined cycle.
Me too, my mouth hit the floor when I saw those numbers.
And wind at 70 $/MWh is also incredible. Ten years ago it could barely break 100
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Not much. The electric car is way more efficient in converting electricity to movement, but thermal power generation efficiency (50% on a good day), plus T&D losses brings you more or less to the same place. Adding renewables to the electricity mix helps of course, but this won't be the game changer.
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Nuclear is the only power generation technology I'm not really familiar with, but there are several aspects about nuclear power that are negatives from a utility perspective:
1. Nuclear power all-in (fixed plus variable) prices are not competitive in the current markets. Variable prices are zero, but fixed are extremely high. The current market prices does not cover total costs of a new plant, plus....
2. Projects rarely come in time and budget, which adds to 1, plus
3. Nuclear plants are large, inflexible and must be run at the base. This crowds out other low cost technologies that could actually be scheduled. In other words, nuclear has to be combined with very flexible yet expensive generation that can actually follow the load, and the total system cost might be higher than in a non nucleR case, plus
4. None, of almost none, nuclear plant provisions the decommissioning and clean up costs. If you did, the fixed costs would kill your project.
1-3 might be resolved through engineering: a different technology might be cheaper, and might bring forth plants that can be ramped up and down. But 4 is a socialization of private costs.
The fact is that very few private utilities or traditional independent power companies are interested in developing new nuclear projects. Most, if not all, being constructed now are being developed by state owned utilities (like EDF) or guaranteed by the state.
Nuclear power today is not commercially competitive. We might decide that climate change makes it necessary, but let's be clear that it represents an added cost to the consumers or to society vs other alternatives, including renewables.
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That I do not know, but I would guess that yes, at some point the output (volume or temperature) does not justify the drilling.
Geo resources are truly renewable because the rain water percolates down and replenishes the source. El Salvador plants have been operating for 40 years without loss of resource
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El Salvador, which is the case I am deeply familiar with, the wells are 2,000-2,500 mts deep (6,500-8,000 ft)
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