barney54

56 ms·

631.
by barney54 11y ago
Pop Quiz: Did sales of electric cars grow or decrease in 2015 compared to 2014. Answer: http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/ What about sales of ICEs? http://www.zacks.com/stock/ne
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by barney54 11y ago
Why do you assume electric cars and batteries have no hidden costs? You don't see these costs when you see electric cars, but the cost are real: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-...
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by barney54 11y ago
Where is the evidence that renewables have driven the crash in oil prices? There is only a tiny bit of competition between renewables and oil. In the U.S. less than 1% of electricity is generated from oil. Oil is used as a transportation fu
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by barney54 11y ago
The article is a bit misleading with it's focus on "generation capacity" as opposed to "production." Consider the situation in the U.S. The latest data shows that natural gas increased it's share of electricity
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by barney54 11y ago
Not true. If you want to have electricity, only when the wind blows or only when the sun shines, that is true. Otherwise, you need thermal (coal, nat gas, nuke) generation to produce electricity when you want it.
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by barney54 11y ago
These are important stories to hopefully make people thing more critically about not only the value of college, but the value of your degree. For example, a degree in journalism today doesn't really seem to convey much value.
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by barney54 11y ago
For me, I paid th TSA Danegeld for the ease of travel, especially when traveling with children. The Pre-Check lines are great and makes you forget about how terrible the TSA is. Yes you have to pay and give them information, but they have t
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by barney54 11y ago
But this also assumes that the zero bound is a problem for monetary policy. Personally, I believe it is a feature not a bug to have a zero lower bound.
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by barney54 11y ago
It probably has been solved. Generally speaking, minimums are against the agreements the stores have with credit card processors. But the stores use minimums anyway.
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by barney54 11y ago
Why is there no turning back? Why not let people choose for themselves instead of limiting choices you don't think are good for them?
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by barney54 11y ago
City planners are enamored with building stuff. That's why they want to build subways and light rail systems instead of bus rapid transport. Building stuff is more permanent and facilitates other building--like apartment building or of
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by barney54 11y ago
This reminds me of a fantastic picture of Kim Dotcom: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/kim-dotcom-is-tot... It is over-the-top and ridiculous--just like Kim Dotcom.
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by barney54 11y ago
For example, in California new hydro is not considered a renewable source for purposes of achieving their renewable electricity standard.
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by barney54 11y ago
Developing countries are following China's example because it works. Renewables such as solar and wind are expensive and can't keep the lights on. People in developing countries want "real electricity, not fake electricity&qu
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by barney54 11y ago
This is a bit of a misleading headline. He resigned because his renewable energy bets weren't paying off and his company was losing money as a result.
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by barney54 11y ago
Only now in 2015 the FBI fullfills FOIA requests electronically? That is incredible backward. I thought the Department of Interior was bad because they couldn't do global email searches on even global searches within a specific Bureau,
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by barney54 11y ago
Why do you think there is a greater shortage of oil than of rare earths? The point with both is the extraction. The U.S. has a lot of oil wells, but there is only one working rare earth mine in the U.S. http://gizmodo.com/th
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by barney54 11y ago
The first part of "giving back" is to give people a quality product in the first place that makes people's lives better. During the financial crisis we saw a lot of shady behavior from the financial sector that might not have
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by barney54 11y ago
Tesla's claim that they will producing batteries in a net-zero factory is almost certainly not true. They could do it by using their batteries and solar panels, but they almost certainly won't do that because they want reliability
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by barney54 11y ago
How many years until a robot like this will cut your grass, weed the lawn, and weed your flowerbeds?
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by barney54 11y ago
Only difference between UK coal phaseout and 'business as usual' is that a couple of old plants might shut a couple of years early. Source: https://twitter.com/countcarbon/status/667467474280062976
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by barney54 11y ago
What are you responding to? Did someone on HN write that about Muslims?
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by barney54 11y ago
The market is efficient, but only on the long run. People making decisions like this make the market efficient by storing oil when it is cheap (or when it appears to be cheap).
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by barney54 11y ago
Mining coal in Australia in the 21st century is not lawless. It does not "ruin the ecology." It has CO2 impacts to be sure, but does not ruin the ecology. On the plus side it provides indispensable, low-cost, electricity for poor
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by barney54 11y ago
One of the biggest problems with this idea of producing lots of food in urban areas in that urban land is very expensive and transportation will only become more efficient over time. So why are we obsessing on reducing transportation distan
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by barney54 11y ago
It sounds especially inefficient when you consider the bad example brought up in the article--apples. There is a reason apples are mass-produced--lots of land and the right climate conditions. You can't grow too many apples in urban ar
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by barney54 11y ago
Is that a joke?
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by barney54 11y ago
Load following is a technical issues--nukes are limited in the amount they can load-follow. But winds cannot load follow at all and solar can help some, but doesn't necessarily help cover peak daily load. For example, yesterday in Cali
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Bob Lutz thinks Tesla has some serious challenges ahead(popularmechanics.com)
1 points by barney54 11y ago|0 comments
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by barney54 11y ago
Naw. I like the extra light in the afternoon. I'd vote for permanent double daylight savings time.

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