Month: August 2018

The Stock Market Is Shrinking. That’s a Problem for Everyone. | The New York Times

Source: The Stock Market Is Shrinking. That’s a Problem for Everyone. | The New York Times, by Jeff Sommer

When I say “shrinking,” I’m using a specific definition: the reduction in the number of publicly traded companies on exchanges in the United States. In the mid-1990s, there were more than 8,000 of them. By 2016, there were only 3,627, according to data from the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Because the population of the United States has grown nearly 50 percent since 1976, the drop is even starker on a per-capita basis: There were 23 publicly listed companies for every million people in 1975, but only 11 in 2016, according to Professor René Stulz.

In 2015, for example, the top 200 companies by earnings accounted for all of the profits in the stock market, according to calculations by Kathleen Kahle, a professor of finance at the University of Arizona, and Professor Stulz. In aggregate, the remaining 3,281 publicly listed companies lost money.

Traceability | Communications of the ACM

Source: Traceability | Communications of the ACM, by Vinton G. Cerf

The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society. The tension with privacy protection leads to the idea that only under appropriate conditions can privacy be violated. By way of example, consider license plates on cars. They are usually arbitrary identifiers and special authority is needed to match them with the car owners (unless, of course, they are vanity plates like mine: “Cerfsup”). This is an example of differential traceability; the police department has the authority to demand ownership information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that issues the license plates. Ordinary citizens do not have this authority.
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If we are to accomplish the simultaneous objectives of protecting privacy while apprehending those engaged in harmful or criminal behavior on the Internet, we must find some balance between conflicting but desirable outcomes. … In most societies today, it is accepted that we must be identifiable to appropriate authorities under certain conditions (consider border crossings, traffic violation stops as examples). While there are conditions under which apparent anonymity is desirable and even justifiable (whistle-blowing, for example) absolute anonymity is actually quite difficult to achieve and might not be absolutely desirable given the misbehaviors apparent anonymity invites.

The 3 Levels of Wealth | A Wealth of Common Sense

Source: The 3 Levels of Wealth | A Wealth of Common Sense, by Ben Carlson

On a recent episode of How I Built This with Guy Raz, Butterfield was asked how this enormous wealth has impacted his life. He told Raz, “beyond a certain level of wealth it doesn’t make your life any better.”

He went on to list what he considers to be the three levels of wealth:

  1. Level 1. I’m not stressed out about debt: People who no longer have to worry about their credit card debt or student loans.
  2. Level 2. I don’t care what stuff costs in restaurants: How much you spend on a particular meal isn’t impacted by your finances.
  3. Level 3. I don’t care what a vacation costs: People who don’t care how expensive the hotel is or which flight they go on.

This was a new way of looking at this and it got me thinking about where most Americans find themselves on this scale.

 

How might you list wealth classes based on lifestyle and quality-of-life features?

Why a Typical Home Solar Setup Does Not Work With the Grid Down – And What You Can Do About It | Syonyk’s Project

Source: Why a Typical Home Solar Setup Does Not Work With the Grid Down – And What You Can Do About It | Syonyk’s Project, by Russell Graves

The biggest problem is that they’re very easy to drive into voltage collapse (and therefore power collapse) if you draw beyond the peak power they can produce at the current temperature and illumination. This is an example IV (current/voltage) curve out of the datasheet from my panels – it’s one I had laying around. The numbers don’t matter, because all solar panels work this way – just with different numbers on the scales.


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The peak power (maximum power point) on the panel comes slightly past the start of the drop in voltage, and the available power drops very rapidly as you go past that point into the voltage collapse. At both the short circuit point (0V, plenty of amps) and the open circuit voltage (0 amps, plenty of volts), the panels are producing zero usable power. …

You need batteries in an off grid system for two reasons: Energy storage is the obvious reason, but they also cover peak power demands. … Worth noting on batteries: They suffer age related degradation as well as as cycle based degradation. You cannot keep any battery alive forever, even if you don’t use it. … Let me offer a general guideline on batteries: Any time you put any sort of battery into a power system, the system will never “pay for itself.” There may be specialty cases where this isn’t true, but it’s a solid first order approximation you should be aware of.

Why have I written all this? To explain (hopefully) that the reason most solar power systems won’t work off grid has literally nothing to do with power companies being evil and demanding that you buy their power. It has everything to do with the system not being designed to run off grid. Why are they designed that way? Because it’s cheaper. Period. A microinverter based system is substantially cheaper than anything with batteries (which will need regular replacement), and that’s what people get installed when they want a reasonably priced bit of rooftop solar to save money on their power bill.

Here’s How America Uses Its Land | Bloomberg

Source: Here’s How America Uses Its Land | Bloomberg, by Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby

The 1.9 billion acres of the lower 48 U.S. states categorized into pasture, forest, cropland, special use (including wilderness, parks, and military bases), miscellaneous (including rural residential, wetlands, deserts, and golf courses), and urban areas, at 250,000 acres per square.

 

What would this map infographic look like if the U.S. produced its power entirely from renewable energy sources?