What confuses me is that most Americans *love* their armed forces with utmost (almost too much) pride, yet so many think that socialism is a dirty word.

The American armed forces are paid for by the taxpayer. We can't defend ourselves on an individual level as well as we can, through tax contributions, employ a permanent army to do it for us.

To me it feels like the essence of a country is socialist - our 'tribe' decided at some point to work together. Instead of us all individually walking every day to get fresh drinking water or water for washing, we chip in and buy essential infrastructure like water treatment plants and pipes, the electrical grid or sewage system. Instead of having to defend our properties and possessions all the time from intruders, we chip in and pay the police to keep order for us. Instead of individually teaching our children, we all chip in and employ experts to do the best job possible.

Whilst some of those things are available to be purchased privately if you so wish, you can't have your country without socialism.

For me, the worst sin is being against free universal health care. However well prepared or covered you think you are, all it takes is a twist of fate and you'd be in the same situation as so many others - incapable of making the money you need to buy the cure. Or caring full time for a dependent person, unable to work to pay the medical costs. That's why everyone should chip in - because any one of us, through no fault of our own, in an instant, could need access to more than we could get by ourselves.

I've been pondering this a lot recently. Basically, I am the sole supervisor of a complex money making system - I've watched the Vice President manipulate the money in strange ways to make himself look efficient - another bullet-point on his LinkedIn page. All the while I'm not making anywhere close to what I should and they refuse to give me a raise - even though I single handedly bring in about $100k every week.

So - I just started coming to work super late EVERY DAY. And when I get called out for it, or threatened I just smile and say "definitely" in a real snarky way to anything they say because I know I have their fucking ballsacks in a cage and they can't do fucking shit about it.

So in the meantime, I bought 17 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains, it's completely off the grid, solar, grey water (still get good hotspot reception for sifting). Any day now, I'm just going to walk off the job and royally fuck the slave owner capitalist scum fucks and start living like a true patriot. Can't wait.

Well, allow me to respectfully say that you (and he) are wrong.
Absolutely I would still save money without the grid. I already have paid to have a small battery bank in my system (>1KWH), so it wouldn't cost me much more to be completely grid free. As it is I barely send power to the grid, as I use most of my electricity as I produce it by doing housework during the daytime. (EDIT: If @Asmo did that, maybe just by using timers on large appliances to run them during the daytime, he would save a lot more, like up to 4.5 times as much as he saves today.) In the short run I would not save as much as I do currently, because I would need to buy more panels and a larger battery bank, and the batteries would need replacing sooner, but it would still be a huge savings in the end over buying grid power. The suggestion that it's not economically viable without the grid is simply wrong.
Once flywheels become popular, it will be far cheaper than it is today to store your own electricity, I'll probably get one to replace my batteries when they eventually die.
EDIT: A micro-hydro system could also store the power cleanly, but requires 2 large storage tanks, one raised as far as possible above the other, and a pump/turbine to move the water. For those with the space, that seems a good solution for power storage, and it's how some electric companies do it on a large scale already.

EDIT: I did the math, and to be completely grid free would cost me about $3000 more, and the upgrade would pay for itself in 2-3 years. Hmmm, now you've got me thinking.....Oh yeah, I forgot, my system can't run my large welder, the electric oven and stove together, or the hot tub directly, that's why I stuck with a grid tied system in the first place, I use too much electricity at once sometimes. Solar systems DO have some limitations, mine can only put out 6500 watts at once, max.

I think Asmo has a bigger point. You aren't counting the cost of effectively using the energy grid as a personal storage system for energy you produce. If you were to cut your line to the grid and replace it with your own storage, would you still be saving money over just being hooked up to the grid? Asmo is suggesting that you would no longer be saving money by doing that. Moreover, by pointing that out he is making the obvious extension that in that case solar is not, currently, cheaper than grid power...

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

No, my first paragraph attempts to spell out why solar PV is a dud for people who do it the worst way possible, by selling all the electricity produced at drastically reduced rates to the grid, then buying it back at exorbitant rates, you are wasting well over 75% of what you could be saving. Of course it looks bad when you waste that much.
I have no mechanism needed to make it financially viable, and the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous.
I didn't 'make time' for anything, it just so happened that my lifestyle was perfect for solar, since I already did my housework during the daytime.
I have what's called a 'time of use' meter, which means it splits the day into 3 time zones, and keeps track of what I produce vs what I use from the grid. That means I essentially do get 1:1 for my production, which never reaches the point where they owe me money, but does offset almost all the juice I use (during the daytime) At night, we use normal grid power at normal grid rates. Too bad Australia doesn't do it that way.

yes, there are costs to an array, but they are one time costs, and FAR less than what's saved. That part is simple math. My system cost around $34K after rebates, maybe $40 without them, and it saves me around $5K per year in electric costs (based on 2007 rates, which have gone up). That includes production costs, installation cost, shipping cost, permit cost, etc.
Here in the US, daytime IS peak power use time. it's when business are using the most power, and when AC units are on, so the grid uses the power I feed in without problem. Industry uses WAY more power than homes. Solar offsets them using the hydro, gas turbines, and ramping up nuclear plants during the day, when they are used the most.
If my bill is lower, it means I used less fossil fuel generated electricity, so it IS working like a charm. How do you think otherwise? it's not perfect, and doesn't erase all other production, and is not a solution to ALL energy production problems, but it is a good part of the solution, unless it's done in the least productive manner possible.

What are you talking about, 2-3X the energy input? If you actually only count the costs, not the profit made at each stage in selling/installing panels, they probably come in more like 5-10 times the energy input, with little or no carbon footprint (many factories make the panels using power produced by other panels...as in pure solar factories).
My calculations (verified by my bills) put it at <1/2 the cost of buying (mostly coal produced) electricity from the grid at 2007 prices (even without any rebates), so how do you figure coal power production is cheaper, even ignoring all the other costs/problems? Coal may give a 30 to 1 return if you ignore ALL the other costs involved in using coal. If you count them, it's more like 1 to 2, because the effects of coal are so incredibly expensive, as is the cost of digging it up, transporting it, storing it, burning it, and disposing/storing the toxic waste products.

The cost of restoring a river is far more than the value of 100% of the power generated by a dam during it's lifetime.

Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.

As a person who has solar on their roof, our bills have shown a slight decline (and I live in a tropical location with no obscuring of the panels), but that doesn't offset the cost of production (both in labour and energy input which is mostly supplied by carbon based sources). I run a 6 KW/h array which is slightly overclocked as we are capped at 5 KW/h input to the grid (at 8c KW/h sell, 36c KW/h buy). I'm looking at a ROI in ~11-15 years

There are also many studies (and not just from people who are pro nuke or anti-climate change) showing that solar PV in general, and rooftop solar specifically, is small potatoes in terms of energy returns, even when considering possible future gains in panel efficiency and storage technology.

I am not bashing solar because I don't like it, I spent the money to get an array on the roof because I think we do need to do something, but I'm not kidding myself in to believing that we're saving the planet when the vast majority of solar PV going out these days is manufactured in countries that emit enormous amounts of carbon and pay people peanuts to do the work... When, as you say, solar is heavily subsidised or has rebates offered to drive take up.

Nuke is expensive, but it returns far more energy than is invested to build it. Hydro, similarly (although Cali etc shows why hydro might be a dead end in this changing world climate). We can invest an enormous amount of time in half measures, or we can do it right, at least until we crack large scale fusion power production.

If it worked as well as it's hyped to do, huzzah, happy days. But so far, the boom is mostly hyperbole. At the very least, f#ck off subsidies/rebates etc to households and instead build huge solar PV farms with helio tracking arrays which make a better return on energy invested and basically give far more bang for buck. Or sink it all in to wind and cut back on PV. It's a feel good technology with hidden baked in carbon costs that is lulling us in to a false sense of security.

To me, imagining the universe as a "grid" of Planck-length units gets *really* interesting when you add the fourth dimension of time, also "digitized" into discrete units of Planck-time.

That can kinda mess with your head. Or mine at least.

Interesting info, but also kind of false/lame advertising.

How to break the Internet:
1) allow older hardware to keep running; can't really do anything to cause that
2) cut the cords; as he said, you couldn't cut enough to cause a problem
3) allow (?) a solar flare to happen and destroy our power grid; oh, shut up

How about:
4) wait for a huge meteor to collide with Earth and cause a mass extinction and all of mankind; boom, Internet is broken
5) wait for the next ice age

They aren't describing "how to break the Internet." It's just "things that could affect the Internet."

Jalopnik report that all three cars failed to meet the 110% qualifying time and got a penalty, they therefore start at the back of the grid:

http://blackflag.jalopnik.com/all-three-nissan-lmp1s-get-grid-penalties-at-le-mans-fo-1711067361

At least for an endurance race it's not such a big deal starting last. 24 hours is a long time to make it up, although it is hard to make up time if you're the slowest car out there.

The rumor is they're waiting out for an exclusive or timed exclusive offer from MS or Sony before announcing console release. Not that I care, I'll be playing on PC in Nov!

Looks good. Procedural level design is great news, the downside of the first was at some point you knew the layout of all the maps and it was predictable as hell. I hope they bring back some of the complexity that was missing from the recent reboot (e.g. multiple bases, base grid structure), or at least add new depth.

What are you talking about? You think Conservative politicians are good?

Here's the Conservative logic:

You a rich guy who's fucking over your workers by not paying them a living wage? Have a tax break, oh and thanks for the campaign contributions we'll find more tax breaks for you.
Oh look, those workers you aren't paying a living wage to need food stamps, let's cut food stamp funding then we'll be able to give you rich people more tax breaks.
Oh, you are moving those jobs overseas so you can keep more of the profits for yourself? Great idea, more money for you. We'll blame those jobs going overseas on the government and everyone will believe it and not blame the rich guy who moved the job overseas because being rich is good (despite what Jesus whom we pretend to like said) and government is bad.
We'll have the churches turn their backs against the teachings of Jesus and convince millions of Americans that Jesus meant the opposite and they'll vote for us thinking they are doing the Christian thing. Sure one or two people will lose faith and hate Christians [your's truly included, even if He is real, I'd rather be in Hell than be around Him or His people] because of it, but most of the faithful have been taught to accept anything the church says, so they'll all go along with the plan to fuck over the working class so that you rich people can have your great life.
We'll keep building more and more prisons, we'll turn them into profit making centers and incarcerate more people than any other nation for the good of corporate profit.
Let's make a pipeline filled with highly pollutive tar sands that will create 35 permanent full time jobs so that we can export a great deal of that oil. We'll tell people it's about "energy independence"and about all the jobs it'll create for the couple years of it's construction. We'll ignore the fact that upgrading our nations infrastructure would create far more jobs not only in the long term, but significantly more jobs in the short term as well., and that's just upgrading our electrical grid, not counting upgrading our freeways, bridges, dams, railways and the like.
Let's make more and more war, because war profits off killing a bunch of what we'll sell as savages is really good money for the rich.

Both sides have good and bad... well the left have good and bad. The right has people brainwashed into thinking they are doing good and the Lord's work...even though it's 100% opposite of what He taught... I hate myself for having ever voted and arguing for Conservative or even Libertarian "logic".

I'm intrigued by the different strategies they seem to have taken with regards to different markets.

The US market has been covered here already. Living off the grid, buffer for power outages, etc.

But they appear to market the Powerwall as a decentralized buffer system for our regional/national grid, as a means to shave off the spikes in power usage at times when both wind and solar fail to meet expectations. Seems like a virtual power plant of Powerwalls would be an alternative to gas turbine plants. Add some pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway and the Alps, and the need for standby power plants would be vastly reduced.

Additionally, they are probably aiming at the time when diminishing feed-in tariffs for PV panels make it more attractive to charge batteries instead of feeding into the grid.

However, even if they manage to sell only a handful of Powerwalls, it'll force all the other players to get off their fat asses for once. Politics managed to kill the local solar industry and the big players came up with fuck all in terms of meaningful innovation over the last years.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Siemens!