Human scrape bloodfish?

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.

Thank you for the engine video ! I liked that, the size of those machines are insane and that machine that was scraping the metal away/plaining was really cool to see it shave the matal away no problem. That video led me to this video and I think YOU may like it :

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I think to be more fair to Germany, the way I see it isn't that German's are complaining about their own benefits being poor by comparison. I don't even see it as German's complaining that Greece's was too rich by comparison. Your point of Greek spending it's money as it wishes stands.

I think the very legitimate side for Germany is that if Greece wanted to borrow German money for those benefits that Germany would like to see that money someday paid back. More over, if Greece is now too poor to pay that money back and is asking for even more loans to scrape by, Germany isn't exactly an ogre in demanding some spending/taxation changes from Greece first so there is some hope at least the new loans will be paid back.

Greece's current finance minister doesn't even seem to deny much of this. Rather in accepting it, he points out that in spite of these debt obligations from the past, if Greece is forced to abide by them, the resulting collapse of Greece will similarly do nothing to help pay back the debts that are outstanding. Basically that Germany and other creditors are going to take the loss regardless, and maybe it's in everyone's best interests to find a road where Greece doesn't become a failed state.

You also gotta consider that paper burns the surface with friction before breaking the surface of the skin. However I think the culprit is still location, location, location. I can get scrapes around all areas of my skin, but finger tips where most sensory nerves are clustered are generally cut by something blunt that I have pressed into hard enough.

Ugh. Wish I somehow was privy to information like that... Thanks for finding that, eric.

Fuck their API bullshit. I'm just scraping the YT video page for the duration now.

Fixed.

I must be getting old because the first thing that came to my mind is "I'm glad I don't live on that street having to hear these jackasses scrape their overgrown Big Wheels down the hill day in and day out."

Yes, but that (up to and including a completely blown engine) is generally seen as preferable to careening at high speed into a large object like a tree, overpass, or another car. And/or the near misses, scrape damage, and missing wheel seen here.

How much do the little coins go for?
I may want to buy one.
(I'll just scrape up some pocket change....)

Obviously fake, you can even hear the magnet scrape as he moves it underneath the table.

Why should I get angry at a donkey? Or is Al Queda scraping the bottom of the barrel now?

Oh man, that moment when the board starts to wiggle.. Scary feeling and you can't stop that vibration once it starts, you know it's bail time.

I had to once bail from 50km/h back in the eighties, the moment my feet touched the ground on that speed, man... I took two strides and went over ten meters with each and they HURT, "BLAM, BLAM".. But staid upright, small scrapes from tunnel wall and very very sore soles. Didn't go for top speed after that one. Speed was measured as there were a very busy roadway parallel and the minimum speed is 50km/h in that point, usually more.. And we were passing cars... No helmets, no kneepads, just fingerless gloves, t-shirt and jeans. It is a small miracle i'm still alive.

You might have a point if the entire system wasn't rigged to create lower socioeconomic people...

Stagnant wages, government protectionism to convince everyone it's still okay, huge companies employing tens of thousands on pay that doesn't get them above the poverty line.

There is a huge strata in the US demographic where people are scraping by day to day and literally grasp at straws just to get a normal life, not a rich one. And when their kids grow up? Will their parents be able to chip in for tuition, or will they still be servicing their own student loans?

ps. You're confusing greed with desire, or even need. Greed is sitting down to dinner and taking everyone else's meal. Desire is wanting to be at least fucking invited to the table. Need is being left out in the cold for so long you're starving to death. It's fucking hard to be greedy when you have almost nothing.

That is quoted once in the whole clip. The number has hovered between $0.70-$0.85 for the last few decades that the issue has been talked about openly.

Where do you get the impression that Oliver is arguing about equal pay for dissimilar jobs at any point in the entire segment? I do not see that at any point. If that were true, obviously that would be ridiculous. The goal here is equality, not up-ending the whole system of employment.

Lastly, as it's said plainly in the first few minutes of the clip: "Equal pay for equal work". There are two points I would like to make here:
1) that's clearly not an argument for inequality in favor of work compensation for women over men, and
2) If we *really* wanted to pay people equally for their work, mexican migrants who pick our vegetables every season, movers, factory-workers, carpenters and any other manual-labor jobs would be living the highlife in their gated communities with million-dollar homes, and most CEO's, wallstreet bankers, and office joe's would be scraping by in the 'burbs.