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.

The inch came from the yt description... strangely the millimetre came from Jalopnik, their writers do seem quite civilised.

I've tried to explain to my children that an inch is 25.4mm, and made exactly 25.4mm around the 2nd world war, but they don't understand why anyone would want to use such a strange and odd measure.

I didn't even try to explain the barleycorns.

Oh yeah, and I liked the vid too.

That isn't a tourist, that's a german license plate on the car. What this guy does is obviously intentional. There is no way he couldn't notice the big fucking red firetruck with lights and sirens going. Also, that's not a panic reaction either, that is pure assholery right there. It goes against every normal, responsible, civilised driving-behaviour.
If I were behind the steering wheel of that truck, I would've forced him out of the way. With my big ass truck.

The fact that we haven't been contacted or seen any activity at all is evidence that we haven't been contacted or seen any activity. That's all.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There are plenty of highly plausible explanations for this, documented in the video and also in my comment above.

I don't think you're grasping how big the universe is. There could easily be millions of advanced civilisations in the universe and they would be so far apart as to never even see each other.

Upvote for Galacduck!

My bet is that there's probably quite a lot of life out there. I'd be willing to put money on the possibility of life even within our solar system (Europa maybe?).

But equally, most of it is probably very simple. Evolution is an energy intensive process, and we are lucky that earth has an abundance of energy.

So let's say there 1,000,000 planets with life. It's quite possible that the chances of complex life arising are low, such that there might only be 10,000 planets with anything above single-celled organisms and maybe < 100 with intelligent life. So let's say that all 100 of these civilisations make it to our level of technology and a few maybe even beyond.
They would all probably be ~1000 light years from their next nearest neighbour.

Then there's the issue of timing. They might have evolved and died out a long time ago. It's possible that we will one day get a message from another civilisation that's already gone extinct and the message was sent millennia ago.

Given all that coupled with the incredibly brief period of time we've actually been listening, I'd be far more surprised if we had made contact.

Unless someone invents FTL, then everything changes.

Interesting comment on Bill Mitchell's MMT blog:

"You cannot take away hope of decent living from young people. Pushing harder won’t make them entrepreneurs. It will make them literally explode with hatred – directed against the West and the Western civilisation as a whole. One cannot defeat poisonous ideology by dropping more and more bombs on Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya etc. Dropping bombs makes the ideology of hatred only stronger. The only way to defeat IS is to restore hope to people here – including the South-Western suburbs of Sydney."

How can America call itself a civilised nation if this is how it treats it's needy? As an outsider it's great to see the success of Obama care. The way America treats it's citizens seems bizarre. Paid maternity anyone? Very strange.

I think the lady makes a very good point about damage being done to sex relations, and often times it seems the internet-generation feminist is actually not interested whatsoever in equality and is more accurately described a misandrist.

Very recently in my own country we had a number of famous feminists fighting to get rid of "page 3 girls" - semi nude models in tabloid newspapers. It never happened, but even as it was happening there were page 3 models complaining because it meant they'd be out of a job they enjoyed and got paid well for. No woman OR man should feel forced to take their clothes off in public for any reason, and in fact that is the case as these people are not slaves but career models by choice. What was actually happening was a prudish approach to human sexuality had been disguised as an equality thing; and the language was always of course referring to the little girls - because if you disagree with little girls having to grow up to go topless you're a certified monster and pervert.

That kind of shit really detracts from the things that are seriously unfair such as, most obviously, the pay gap. No woman should get paid less for the same job. There's no "rape culture" that i've ever heard of if your sample size includes greater than 1000 people in the west, and terms like that detract from the argument again - if you want to talk rape culture then look to India, where there is (and needs to be more) attention on changing the attitudes of the male community towards females because of horrific acts taking place.. almost commonplace. And to India's credit there was a big campaign tied into their favourite sport, with social media involvement and obviously most men proudly wearing symbols and stuff. There are parts of that society that has issues that could do with feminism.

But this is the profession of being offended. You have to drum up publicity, it has to be viral, or you don't get paid. You don't get a column in the newspaper or the mag, you don't get enough hits on your youtube to make enough money. Not if you talk about the pay gap or the gender inequality in less "civilised?" societies.. no, you do that by talking about the tits on page 3. Or espousing something unfair and incendiary; something someone will want to argue with. Nothing that fits with common sense. These people are self publicists - they will make a spelling error on a tweet to encourage others to call them stupid, correct them, essentially RETWEET AND REPLY AND FOLLOW AND LIKE!

Whether or not Sarkeesian(?) should have commented, there is a point well made in this video. I've been on the receiving end of something disguised as feminism in the past, and all it did was make me wary of anyone under 30 that calls themselves a feminist. Before i can establish whether that means misandrist, i have to establish common ground, because i'm a feminist too. What we need is more decorum and less extremism. You can't change the world without the help of both sexes, why alienate each other?

It's a demonstration of human nature, really. That's exactly how human men are genetically encoded to treat women.

I'd argue that our genetic encoding would make us treat women as resources and in a much more violent fashion too.

I think the "don't hit a girl" attitude is a construct of our societal/cultural nature and it's an attempt to civilise the animal instinct to "take a mate" without regard to the females wishes at all.

I would imagine that over a long period of time, this was an important first step. Yes, it's still misogynistic, but I'm guessing it's preferable to simply fighting over females and then mating with them.

But you'd hope that we'd have moved past that by now.

Otherwise, you're just an animal that happens to walk upright.

It would be nice if we were animals that had learned how to think as well, but I fear Terry Pratchett got it right with this quote:

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

If black americans really do have any kind of tendency towards being poorly educated or poorly civilised, is it because they have only very recently been allowed to have any education or any part in civilisation. And i'm not necessarily willing to accept that premise, because there similarly plenty of white americans who are also extremely poorly educated and poorly civilised. I know that because i caught honey boo-boo on TV once. It doesn't help that your legal system is inherently racist as evidenced by the shocking prison statistics for black americans; whitey made sure that 'black people' crime is highly punishable and 'white people' crime isn't. Just listen to what this man has to tell you.

Your advice to someone who lives in bad area is "Buy a house in a nice area?" OMFG I NEVER THOUGHT OF THIS!!! Why don't starving people in third world countries just move house? Why don't people who live in warzones move? Why don't the Palestinians just move? Why don't isolated, terrified old ladies move out of dangerous apartment blocks and council estates? Why don't abused women just leave their husbands? Why don't abused children just run away and tell a policeman? Why don't .... you just shut the fuck up? Honestly, better to keep silent and have people think you're stupid and racist than to share your blindingly idiotic comments and remove all doubt.

They are born there, they can't afford to move, they are supporting family who live there (and can't afford to move), they can't get a job anywhere else, they can't go to school anywhere else, there's no one particularly educated amongst them to help them out? Any of the above and millions more reasons (that i don't know because i never experienced it, nor did you)?

Black people were treated like sub-humans, murdered in the street without comment and for no particular reason, beaten, tortured, forced to work, forced to fight, bred for strength and most of all.... kept in the fucking dark about everything, because stupid slaves are easier to control.

Generation after generation of being bred for work traits; intelligence systematically discouraged. So anyone who's around now was raised by people who were raised by people with no education, property or hope through no fault of their own. Add to that inherent racism as explained CLEARLY to you by this video. So the black people today are a product of their environment. And in a way, that excuses you for being a disgusting, poorly-educated, ignorant racist because the apple never falls far from the tree... and you're not worth any more of my time.

To the religious, we are alone and we are it, and many are quite happy to drive nothing other than a stake through further human accomplishment by putting limits on those who would try. I think the discovery that we're alone would make that worse, but that's nothing to worry about because you can't prove that.... otherwise we'd have proof God doesn't exist. (Merry Christmas!)

There's another alternative that sits so uncomfortably with me, and that's if light speed is the limit and there's no circumventing it. The reason it doesn't sit well with me is that it means effectively intelligent life will always exist in isolation, the only hope being that civilisations pick up ancient transmissions from other civilisations. It is inevitable in my mind that there is life out there of some kind, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be tangible to us. I feel like that would be a tragedy beyond shakespeare.. inevitable cosmic loneliness.

I appreciate that there is a strong point to be made about protecting young girls from body image issues and being pressured into looking or being a certain way, i think it's unfair to put that on her decision here.

She IS influenced by society in that she sees clothes in her day-to-day life and decides what she thinks looks best of those. My point being - what is the alternative? Who has the right to decide what to show her and what not to show her of the world, and why, and how will they starve her of music, art, film and friends without hurting her growth?

She will be raised in a relatively affluent civilisation and be able to make her own decisions for the rest of her life, she presumably won't be forced into marriage or slavery, and she'll buy clothes that she feels comfortable wearing, that fit to the style of the times.

I know you have a point, i hope you might acknowledge i have one also. We are all influenced in our choices and preferences by our culture - that is life - why feel sorry for her for thinking that the bikini is the nicest looking clothing item that she's seen? Would you feel sorry for her that she hasn't seen enough hairstyles to choose something less like Britney, for example? At that age, i say she is thinking without regard for attraction of the opposite sex and entirely on what she prefers (if i know 5 year olds), out of what she's seen in her short time.

I haven't seen your fix, but I do know that the two versions of that song posted here had swapped over from how they were originally posted.

Once I'm back in more civilised climes I will have a look... I just wanted to let you know of the risk of fixing one and then thinking the two were the same.

My thought had been that as long as both versions were here it wasn't terribly important whether they were the right way around Otherwise I'd have swapped them over myself.

You're 100% spot on, and that along with systemic corruption from top to bottom of politics and business (..but i repeat myself..) is going to be the legacy of this era - the Age of Deception. We MUST look good, we CANNOT afford to admit wrong.. these are phrases that should be anathema to politicians and public services, but they are words that literally define the modern statesman.

And as the supposed greatest amongst us, people flock to their example and are rewarded for doing so. We need both a psychological revolution, so we stop the rot of our civilisation, but also a physical one, because those in power are absolutely not going to relinquish it or even reduce their grip.

Why on Earth should we allow people who show themselves to be incompetent continue to hold the reins? We need a way to hold these people to account for their words and actions.

On the subject of feces, I am reminded of an aspect of the Uygur/Harris debate that I wanted to pick up.

As they were discussing torture, Harris was rather convinced of his understanding that death would be worse than having your holy book mistreated or being sprayed with (fake) menstrual blood.

This fails to appreciate a major drive behind the use of torture: to "reset" a human mind, to have the subject betray whatever is most sacred to him/her. The torture at Gitmo/Baghram was directly aimed at one of the most defining aspects of their victims' personalities, namely their religious beliefs.

All of this was beautifully illustrated in Southern America when the torturers' aim was to completely negate the societies' strong sense of solidarity by forcing selected people to betray one another, by putting them into either-you-or-them situations. As horrible as death is, to have the core of your very being negated by force is, in fact, worse for quite a significant percentage of people, as proven by those who would rather endure torture/death than deny what made them human.

They manage to wipe a human's mind alright, as you can see by the mindless husks in those torture camps that were once human beings. And by setting them up as examples, entire societies are reprogrammed.

The more "civilised" version of it would be the treatment of whistleblowers. It sends ripples through society, just like its uglier cousin, inducing a chilling effect that I would at some point love to see quantified.