Oh, Aus.

I thought, like, "Das Wizards von Aus".

That link is now dead but this one works and is unblocked (at least for Aus)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOuHbWidxpE

How is this different to any other social pressure pushing bullshit in other countries (US, Aus, UK).

Vocal people apply pressure to change the status quo. Look at the treatment of integrated and peaceful Muslims around the world at the moment...

It's not the Chinese gov. you have to worry about, it's Facebook, Google etc... Where the fuck do people think this evil ass data mining and social pressure started? Monetising your preferences and forcing people to bow to social (peer) pressure or face shaming. Tencent and Ali Baba are the real motivators behind this and even if China went full capitalist tomorrow, those companies would continue to promote this system and it would still work in exactly the same way.

The real horror is that we look at China and think that they are getting the short end of the stick. We need to look at ourselves. We're not free, we're consumers. We accumulate stuff and we think that equates to having choice. China is just following the sterling example set by others...

Possibly, and I'm not familiar with US law, but I know in Australia there are laws that allow proportionate responses when either defending oneself or acting in the defense of another.

The guy was attacking a helpless person with a closed fist. He got hit (and is far more able to defend himself) with, at most, a closed fist. Proportionate. That he might die as a result of the blow could be foreseen by a reasonable person (ie. manslaughter) but the fact that he is attacking someone so incapable of defending themselves, in my mind, means that someone leaping to the defense of the blind guy has considerable latitude to remove the threat to him.

At least insofar as Aus law is concerned, might be completely different in the US, but I suspect any jury would take a very dim view (no pun intended) of someone bullying a blind kid.

Is that a question or a statement (it's worded as a statement, but has a question mark at the end)?

Yes I already knew that. And...? It's no different than Australia in that particular respect. It's an aspect that I would fully expect Americans to rightfully not adopt.

Adding to above NZ allows semi-auto longarms and high capacity magazines for all firearms (basically what Australia has banned from owning), not all firearms need to be registered (unlike Australia), and they have longer licensing periods and yet they have a significantly lower firearms homicide rate and homicide rate overall. America using the NZ model as a template would be a better starting point. I wrote "template" in my previous post, perhaps "model" or "rough guide" would have been better. I don't mean copy it verbatim. I mean use it as a starting point as at least potentially workable.

Are you a citizen of NZ or Aus and are you a firearms owner in NZ or Aus?

Used to be (might still be) a brand in Aus called Matthew Lang which made a range of 5 buck a bottle liqueur muscats and ports. I've tasted much more expensive drops, but Lang was still one of the best, and at 22 y/o, goon and coon* (wine and cheese) nights were tres affordable and a great way to impress equally under funded mid 90's upper class wannabes... =)

*Fyi for American's, Coon is an Aus brand of cheese not known for quality, and yes, it has prompted some racism complaints. ; )

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

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.

The sad thing, it won't make a lick of difference.

I listen to ppl in Aus bemoaning the loss of a local manufacturing industry and other jobs because everything is getting outsourced to cheaper China or India. But they won't spend an extra cent than they have to to buy the quality product and support locals.

We are victims of our own making. If a person bullies you, you either stand up to them, ask for help, or allow it/run away from it. We sate our desire for freedom by purchasing more things we don't need, filling our lives with junk that doesn't make us happy, but distracts us momentarily from the state we are in. We don't take responsibility for allowing the rich, the corps, the gov running over us and taking away our rights. We complain on the internet but won't take to the streets, and feel like we've made a difference even as we get soaked as the hurricane blows our piss back in our face.

We are the problem. The US was founded on the grass roots movement against British imperialism. I'm an Australian and I understand that. It's not until US citizens get that and actually decide to do something about it that anything will change.

And when nothing changes and we're slaves to the corporate machine with no recourse, we'll blame everything but ourselves.

The news in Aus this morning was ridiculous...

Every paper had this on the front, and the picture showed the sharks tail as if it were a dorsal fin (ie. looking far bigger than it was) to sensationalise an already fairly exciting story...

eg. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/great-white-attacked-mick-fanning-says-andrew-fox-shark-expert/story-e6frg6n6-1227449428848

(read on for comments, speculated that it was a juvenile great white, probably 3m in length)

blocked in Aus too, I guess we didn't send enough troops?
Thanks @eric3579 btw, that link worked, heartwarming story.

good to see this being covered, it's the same in Aus too.

I think the public thing is just resignation. While traveling on the rail link from San Fran to LA (I'm from Aus), I watched what I presumed to be a crack deal go down right outside the train on a relatively clean looking platform, 2 black guys. They just don't care if they get busted or whatever because at the end of the day, it means very little to them. Nothing to lose, so why care?

Whites, on average, have a lot more to lose, so they work harder to keep their activities hidden. Doesn't hurt that you are less likely to get stopped and searched as a white drug dealer than you are as a black law abiding citizen.

; )

As an aside, look up Dr. Carl Hart's TED talk on drugs being a socio-economic problem and punishment meted out for crack (the drug of choice for poor communities) being orders of magnitude higher than the punishment for selling/buying/possession of powder cocaine (used by predominately white people...). Despite addictiveness and effect being close to equal when ingested in the same method.

L'Ame Immortelle - Aus den Ruinen (Live) has been added as a related post - related requested by Lilithia.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/LAme-Immortelle-Aus-den-Ruinen-Live