Alternative Alshmertative

The Myth of Alternative Power and Hydroelectric Storage

“ Every time I get into a debate about “alternative” energy I point out it can’t be used for baseline power because it can’t provide reliable power, and it can’t provide reliable power because you can’t store the electricity that it episodically generates. Immediately, someone will say, “We can use hydraulic storage!” ”

“ Hydraulic storage is basically a hydroelectric dam on a small or large scale, except instead of using water brought by a watershed, the water is pumped up behind the dam with pumps powered by the generator whose energy output you want to store. For example, you would have electric pumps powered by solar panels or wind turbines, the idea being that when the wind or cloud-free days produced a surplus of power (or you built in surplus capacity) the pumps would pump water from a lower reservoir uphill into a higher storage reservoir. The electricity would be stored as the potential energy in the elevated water. When you needed the power back, you would drain the water back downhill through turbines just like a hydroelectric damn. Now, this certainly works and it has been done on a small scale. However, it will never, ever be a real-world, large-scale solution that can make alternative power work. Why? Well, let’s just do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.[Chicago Boyz Shannon Love continued] ”

Renaldo Christie?

Can it be ...?

Renaldo rides again -- with a Joisey accent?

After seeing this title  all day yesterday, I finally got around to reading N.J. gov. sets tone for US.  Upon taking office Christie declared a state of emergency, signing an executive order that froze spending, and then, in eight weeks, cutting $13 billion in spending. In March he presented to the Legislature his first budget, which cuts 9 percent of spending, including more than $800 million in education funding; seeks to privatize numerous government functions; projects 1,300 layoffs; and caps tax increases. Teachers unions are incensed, fighting Christie’s proposal that — in order to avoid cuts to education — teachers accept a one-year wage freeze and contribute 1.5 percent to the generous-by-every-standard healthcare plans they now enjoy for free. Christie is adamant about lowering taxes. After taxes were raised 115 times in the last eight years, he said the wealthy are tapped out. Property taxes rose nearly 70 percent in the last decade, and studies show top earners — the 1 percent of taxpayers paying 40 percent of income tax — are fleeing the Garden State. The goal is not just to crawl out of crisis but ultimately to lead, said Christie in his budget address. “If we make the tough decisions now, we will be one year ahead of 80 percent of the states in the race to economic growth. If we fail to act, we will fall even further behind ... by going first, we can become first.” ” Wow.  Before turning in, I checked e-mail.  A blogger, whose judgments about people I find entirely copacetic (save for a curious lapse with left-tard Ezra Klein?)sent this memo (in its entirety). “ Re: GIRL BONERZ http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/13/video-chris-christie-destroys-reporter-for-calling-him-confrontational/ ” There are very few, if any, Republicans who earn girl bonerz.  The party is loaded with grievously ambitious pretenders who, while adept at responding to shifts in the political winds, never display the skill to tack into them.  By my count, along with Sarah Palin, Christie makes two.  Let us pray.

I'm so happy, I'm so happy and witty and gay - wtf?

USA UAS USA

After David Mamet (below) I came across this.  I call it dessert. Democrats on Prozac “ Growing up in America in the seventies and eighties, I really had no concept of geography or international relations. My public and private school educations managed to avoid the whole concept of the world outside of the United States, with the exception of England and the Soviet Union. I was aware that France and Canada existed, to be fair, and I had heard of Mexico.  However, I was taught about other things, like the coming Ice Age, recycling, and how overpopulation would have so outstripped the food supply by the year 2000 that most people would be retarded due to malnutrition. Somehow, the teachers managed to sneak basic arithmetic and a reading list into the curriculum mandated by the government and assisted by the teachers's [sic] union, so I grew up a functional citizen. My extracurricular interests included reading, girls and cars. I continued through college, marriage, running a business, fatherhood, divorce and remarriage, blissfully ignorant of the larger context of things. It wasn't until 9/11 that I started to wake up to the world of geopolitics.911attack.jpg The morning of 9/11 I received a call from my stepfather saying, "They've flown a plane into the World Trade Center." Since I was running a business from a desk, and had an internet connection, I started to read. I went to the Drudge Report site, and was able to access and read every newspaper's analysis of events. After about a week, I started to notice that different papers had different viewpoints. In some cases, widely divergent opinions were put forth as the truth. What was this? Wasn't the news objective? My first lesson was that the news is far from objective. I found myself reading the Wall Street Journal and nodding my head in agreement. I could follow the logic. It made sense and bore a relation to how reality worked in my experience. When I read the New York Times I found my head spinning. The logic didn't hold and the premises were bizarre. The conclusions were twisted versions of reality. I gradually came to realize I was a Republican. I found myself a partisan, not because my parents or my University professors indoctrinated me, but because what the crazy Right Wingers were saying made sense. ” Did you get this far?  “ I tried to talk to my friends and family about all of this, and some of them understood what I was saying. These were the same happy and well-adjusted Republicans as above. They did not engage in name-calling, character assassination, lying or complaining, and none of them were on Prozac. Some people, though, did not understand, and I found myself under withering fire from people I loved, who just could not understand how I could be so wrong, and tried their best to correct my thinking. Their attempts at correction, however, all failed, largely because they sounded the same and used the same rhetorical techniques. I soon learned of the concept of "talking points." ” Go back then.  It's the ultimate validation of your own experience and conclusions.   It's Payoff!  By the way, Prozac isn't supposed to make you feel good, per se.  It's supposed to temper mood swings.  Cut out the spikes that make you want to nuke Vermont, and stuff. Prozac, Ritalin, red whiskey and a good woman make you feel good. Okay, no more long stuff from me today.  You're welcome.

Feeling Good All Over

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

It bothers me when people I otherwise admire for their talent go and ruin it by broadcasting liberal political views, and in the process choke all the joy from the thing.  The notion that one person can, at once, be brilliant and an idiot doesn't compute, so I run from it.  Al Franken is a prime example. While David Mamet never quite grabbed me,  I hated Glengarry Glen Ross for example, his word smithing and intellectual abilities were always evident.  No more so than in this Village Voice polemic; his renouncement of Liberalism. “ As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart. These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio." This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong. ” What will happen, I predict, is that all the "Hollywooders" who worshiped at his altar yesterday, will of a sudden conclude Mamet has experienced brainal infarct, and stop reading when they hit my exampled ¶. Too bad, because the ensuing dialectic could change everything for the better, given that his natural audience are much responsible for the current state of things.  Still, I feel phuking GREAT!

Learning Bot

Blog Bot For the Politically Unobservant

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