We also just called it ground source when I briefly worked in the field. Although, in my experience, even though someone shells out $$$ for a "ground source heat pump" in their yard, it won't stop them from telling everyone they have geothermal.
2,557 karma · joined October 17, 2013
Strategy/Founder @ gridstatus.io
Kinda, sorta. The whole conceit behind wholesale energy markets is balancing congestion on the system by changing the locational marginal prices (LMPs). If you have a very congested line, a generator with a negative shift factor (their generation will reduce flow on the line relative to the constraint) will see high prices to turn up, while generators on the other side with positive shift factors (will put more flow on the line and exacerbate congestion), will see low-to-negative prices to turn off.
There is a lot of development in these markets (in terms of energy, capacity, and ancillary services) with respect to energy storage resources, and co-located (solar+storage) facilities. If you want to know more about that, reading up on FERC Order 841[1], and the various RTO/ISO implementations to date is a good place to start.
[1] https://www.energy-storage.news/news/ferc-order-841-us-about...
[1] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/MITEI-The-...
Here's a pretty lengthy breakdown comparison[1] of digital and film from a few years back if you wanted a read.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvia
[1] https://www.onlandscape.co.uk/2014/12/36-megapixels-vs-6x7-v...
The Smokies is a very car-friendly park (see the people just circling Cades Coves in their car amazed at some deer or a turkey) since it has no entrance fees, is the most visited park, and in an extremely car-dependent part of the country, but that means that I often found trails much, much lighter on people than places like Yosemite, which feel much more heavily traveled.
If you do this hike, go past the lodge on LeConte all the way to Myrtle Point. Better views than Cliff Tops and enough people stop at the lodge that it winnows down the people making it there even further. Most I've ever seen out there is maybe 5-6 other people, and typically it's only a 1-3 with some time totally alone if its off season or a weekday.
The most unique Smokies experience is surely the synchronous fireflies, which I've been lucky enough to see twice (once through the lottery, once through hiking in from the main road) and highly recommend.
Alum Cave to LeConte is my favorite hike in the Smokies though, even did it another time with my partner when we came back to TN to get married.
I’ve written so much documentation on Confluence where it would have been easier to just send a pdf like this :/
[0] https://www.loc.gov/photos/?fa=contributor:delano,+jack%7Clo...
Now I take the EOS 3 out specifically and only with a prime 35mm lens. The more methodical way I think about taking pictures is a nice contrast to taking a whole bunch of shots with smartphone or DSLR and then heavily curating afterwards. I just wanted a different feeling from taking photos and it's been quite fulfilling in that respect. Although breaking the habit of looking down at the back of the camera has been quite difficult.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/10/color-photos-chica...
As for Brian Phillips, if you wanted to read pieces directly adjacent to some in the book, a few of the essays were adapted from freely available longform pieces he had already written. Sea of Crises[0] is very close to the in-book essay if I remember correctly, while the piece related to Out in the Great Alone[1] in the book is more of a side story. I'm a bit envious if you haven't already happened upon those and get to read the duplicative passages for the first time in the course of the book.
Also, I couldn't help clicking through to your profile given this aside (the quality and content of which I don't expect here) and I wanted to say that I appreciate the work you're doing.
[0] https://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-ha...
[1] http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/9175394/out-grea...
"Retail choice" is the ability of individual households to buy directly from retail suppliers[2], and the history there is a bit spottier and less conclusive. It's not as widespread and participation has actually declined[3].
[1] http://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx
From the abstract:
" Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as underrepresented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many “lost Einsteins”—individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood—especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families."
[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/2/647/5218...
Not halfway through yet, but I feel pretty comfortable recommending it if you're into the topic area of this article (urban mobility, how commutes+jobs shape urban areas, etc.).
The legalization of video gambling also triggered another shift in the state’s revenues, one that led to a drop in education funding. While the bulk of video gambling revenue goes to fund Illinois Jobs Now!, most of the state’s casino revenue flows into the Education Assistance Fund, which provides grants to public elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities for building projects and other expenses.
But when video gambling became legal, gamblers no longer had to travel to the state’s 10 casinos to place a bet. Between 2013 and 2017, state revenue from casinos in Illinois declined 15 percent, from $462 million to $393 million, as income from video gambling machines grew nearly 900 percent, from $30 million to $300 million, state records show.
The cannibalization of casino revenue contributed to a 22 percent decline in the amount of money going to the Education Assistance Fund between 2013 and 2017, leaving fewer dollars for the state’s struggling schools.
Astonishingly, we can process 20 years’ worth of data, sampled every five minutes, in less than 20 seconds.
That sounds quite promising.
So the system is set up in an extremely rigid way that prevents much thought on the part of the human cogs, and if something goes wrong in the future with that seller it hurts their metrics. Seems like everyone's incentivized towards punishment here. It's not that surprising, most call center type jobs seem to have stringent to the point of absurd metrics, but this seems like a poorly balanced system.
Non-Fiction
By Adam Tooze: Crashed, and Wages of Destruction. Both excellent economic histories, the former covering the recent financial crisis and its aftermath, the latter on the Nazi economy. Tooze does an excellent job coming up with larger trends and global narratives, I'm often amazed at just how much he's able to keep in his head.
By Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law. A quick, informative, yet more than thorough enough on the factual, legal prevention that American employed over the majority of the 20th century to prevent black Americans form participating in the housing market, both personal home ownership and public housing (a major institutional driver of household wealth and success tarting in the early 20th century).
By Jeffrey Lockwood: Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. I had no idea the American frontier was home to devastating largest-in-the-world locust plagues that suddenly disappeared near the end of the 19th century.
By Peter Brannen: The Ends of the World. A great primer on mass extinctions and their often geologic causes.
By Rick Perstein: Nixonland. Still working on this one, but a deep dive into that era of American politics feels quite relevant at the moment, except that everything today feels stupid in comparison.
Fiction
By N.K. Jemisin: The Broken Earth trilogy. A really great self-contained story, extremely evocative, and the author actually puts out great books at an amazingly fast pace.
Cooking
By Stella Parks: Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts. If you like baking, and the history of iconic American baked goods this is a must have/read. Never thought I'd spend so much time on a carrot cake.
Also, it's not $425k for a single family home. It's $425k for a 60-70 year old brick or cinderblock townhome/duplex between 800-1000 sqft that was constructed as WW2-boom housing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...
[2] https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697
Although, ultimately, I reached the same conclusion. I'm from Chicago and now I live in Arlington right outside of DC. I got out as soon as my contract ended. Can't really imagine going back.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleisto...
Also there's a relatively high concentration of metro stops as is for a section that's not urban/DC core, and Potomac Yard is finally coming in in a couple years as well. Plus a pretty high commercial vacancy and a bit of marginal land that can still be developed. I mean, the dream would be they come in there and somehow spur additional transit down Columbia Pike, but that's probably a bit too much to hope for.
It's also already not easy at all to buy a home there (speaking as someone who bought a place in Arlington a few months ago), so it must not be too awful to live there.
[1] https://ggwash.org/view/68549/some-anne-arundel-county-wants...
Oil-fired and dual-fuel units in those RTOs (NYISO and ISO-NE) also make up a pretty large amount of the total installed capacity.
In one sense it's good that someone has the flexibility to maintain an asset that still has real value but a different use case than its original intention, but on the other side that money could be propping up something that doesn't really have long-term value; distorting the market by delaying entries by newer or more efficient technologies.
I remember seeing a comment the other day about how the next recession could probably/easily not be housing (the last one) or tech (the one before that), but the next big chunk of the economy that's under-studied and not well known. Maybe it's these pools of cash at the top extracting more $ from everyone below them on the global financial stage. Not sure what the failure point or mechanism would be though.
“Ten percent of buildings will collapse,” said Lucy Jones, the former leader of natural hazards research at the United States Geological Survey who is leading a campaign to make building codes in California stronger. “I don’t understand why that’s acceptable.”"
One way that reads to me is that an event over some threshold has a high probability to cause the complete collapse all of those buildings. 90% doesn't seem like a very high threshold either, if it corresponds straight out to a 1-in-10 event that seems quite bad. If it's a 90% chance of survival in a 1-in-100 event, that's better, but not great.
It's the forgotten point of reduce, reuse, recycle. People are almost always surprised when I mention that it's a ranked list, heading towards less efficacy. You might be proud of recycling, but it's the low hanging and least useful choice. Simply not using things or re-using sturdier goods is far and away the better choice in terms of waste.