I can't believe they got permission from all the roof owners.
*promote

Wombat burrows are no fucking joke. If you ever find yourself curious, do not go in one. If the wombat is out of its burrow and comes back to find you in there, it will stand up in the hole and press its back to the roof, trapping you in.

You suffocate and die a very slow death.

Do not enter them.

THEY RUINED MY ROOF *ban

Mother of god, every day that roof must get painted white.

Did you see either of these?

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/goodbye-middle-class-51-percent-of-all-american-workers-make-less-than-30000-dollars-a-year.html

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/26/overcrowding-sharing-bed-housing

If you add the EPI's more detailed analysis of what the lowest basic budget for a family of four is in different parts of the US, the first link turns from depressing into outright infuriating.

As for the second link, I'll keep my comment as simple as it should be: a roof over your head is a fundamental right if you value human dignity at all, so that shit is fucked up beyond belief.

1. Of course the authorities should investigate, but we also expect media to critically investigate what they report. They don't always do a decent job of it, but neither do the authorities. By reporting publicly, media helps provide transparency on both the events they report on and on what the authorities are doing / not doing. Naturally it's problematic when this becomes a business model, rewarding tragic scoops, but that's hard to avoid without state-run media.

2. Publishing the names of victims and perpetrators is a dicy media concern regardless of whether somebody sees it as a 'reward' or not. At some point you draw the line and set policy, and then it's unethical to go back across the line just because a specific perpetrator gets off on hearing his name mentioned. You set your policy as a means to serve the public as well as possible, not as a means of rewarding or punishing bad guys.

3. Regardless of whether they mention his name or not, the tragedy is that I don't remember his name. Not because he deserves to be remembered or not, but because this happens so frequently that the names blur. There's no way I'll remember his name, or Dylann Roof's, or Vesper Flanagan's, this time next year - it'll just blur into 'all the shootings that happen all the time'.

Want want want want want......WANT!

I really wish they would make a version with a roof so it could be used in the rain. I'm just nuts enough to want one as a daily driver, but since I live in what's technically a 'rain forest' (one where it's not raining much lately, but that's besides the point) a car with no roof or windows doesn't cut it.

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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... =)

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.

While I am 100% on board with the "carbon bad, not carbon good, global warming = real, made by man and a real prick of a problem" message, the biggest fault made by people like Maher etc in prosecuting their case to the "sceptics" is reliance on bad information.

For example, the sums have been done on solar and wind, and generally speaking, wind is only borderline viable for supporting a society (and that's only if you don't add the cost of some form of buffering/storage). Solar, particularly home roof grade, is fucking awful, and essentially a waste of time compared to tracking mass production arrays. In terms of energy to build/install/maintain/remove, it barely pays for itself. Solar thermal is also more efficient (helios arrays etc), but the two best bang for buck technologies for producing massive amounts of power at a very low carbon cost are nuclear and hydro.

And they are two technologies that people seem to want to get rid of. Germany shuttered it's nuke capability after Fukushima (and added more coal capacity). Italy's solar market has fallen in a heap, France is almost carbon neutral only because it is predominately nuke powered. One of the original climate change warriors, Dr. James Hansen of Nasa, is fully supportive of nuclear power, and get's constantly lambasted by green types because they do not want nuclear power to play a part.

Refutation of solid science and willful ignorance is not solely the province of people who deny climate change, and it's no less deplorable.

Calling them idiots? This coming from a person not understanding the job they are performing. The two on the roof are relieving pressure in the building as well as creating ingress and egress points, ingress for the water and egress for the fire pressure.

Building fires create a serious amount of pressure due to the expanding air in a very confined, and pretty well insulated, environment. This is the same actions you see firefighters breaking out windows to expel a large portion of said pressure. It also allows a fire to expand in a more controlled and less volatile way (see: explosive backdrafts).

The guy using the 'poker' is looking for structural weakness, both for the safety of the crew on the roof, as well as the 'cutter' to have the most direct access to the higher 'heat areas'.