lovemenot

It's just a traditional learning curve. More similar to panel than cmos.

The reason we are getting steady cost reduction is steady volume increase in production.

For decades we have been massively under-served in PV production volume. Even now, we are still somewhere in the middle of that S-curve.

I haven't seen such data, but panel in the early C20th probably followed a similar learning curve to PV now.

>> Am I getting that right?

Yes, pretty much.

And in the interest of adding a further meta-layer, your synopsis might have benefitted from an unattributed paraphrased section from the article.

Not to excuse such behaviour, but it can be explained in part by minimising time sucking emissions which are typically most noxious when a ICE is accelerating. So these jerks wishing to get upwind of accelerating tail-pipes is rational, even if selfish.

Many shops in surrounding districts such as Asakusabashi specialise in samples of various other types of products. For instance one might sell beads and another umbrellas. Like in a department store, the shops tend to be clustered functionally, so walking sticks might be near umbrellas.

These stores around Asakusabashi are actually "show rooms" for national distribution networks.

I approve of the use of talented non-white actors in British period dramas, such as David Copperfield. It is obvious that the person's skin colour is ahistorical for the role. But it doesn't matter. We the audience are tacitly invited to look past this detail. It seems a little incongruous for about ten seconds, then just disappears into their fine performance.

Both reasons are in fact correct, but only one person here is accusing the other of being wrong and spreading lies. Please be more circumspect in your language.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-min...

Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.

But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”

Everybody always was the star in their show. That's almost certainly true for non-human creatures too.

To a degree, mass media undermined that foundation.

I get that this story may be apocryphal, but if so it is surely widely disseminated by now. I even wondered about factuality as I wrote my comment, yet I knew of no evidence to the contrary.

You didn't provide any substantial counterpoint. So what was the point you were making?

>> I think this is a genius move for Airbnb. Make it easier for _other_ companies to operate in a similar way so that _their_ employees can travel and live in an... Airbnb!

Yes. Like the story of Ford doubling the wages it paid to factory workers in 1920s. So that those workers could afford a car, and the whole economy eventually followed suit.

Kalzumeus spoke about "Tokyo" to represent Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and other large regional cities.

As you might expect, these Tokyo-like cities are much more expensive at their centre than at their periphery. Nevertheless, I imagine your eyes may water when you find out just how much more so. I only know one of these cities well, and to be fair only in land values not in rentals.

In absolute amounts, Tokyo itself is of course more unequal than smaller big cities. But the relative value distribution is perhaps fairly consistent across Tokyo-like cities.

Within Tokyo-city, very central regions (Minato-ku) are valued at 4X over central urban districts (Nakano-ku), which in turn, are 8X more expensive to buy than the least valuable outer-Tokyo districts (Hachioji-shi). So there's a 32X differential in land values within that city's borders.

Now, let's zoom out from the city itself. Within just a few hours drive or rail journey, we can easily get to 300X land values: $300 in Minato buys the same area of land worth around $1 in a fairly central district of a fairly large town in Nagano. Parts of mountains obviously go for much cheaper than land in these towns, but I don't have good market data for that. My guess is a further 5X - 10X.

Undoubtedly, it is more than 1,000 times, and perhaps sometimes as much as 10,000X, more expensive to buy a plot of land in Japan, than another plot of the same size just 500Km - 1,000Km away.

One may reasonably dispute these figures in detail. I did try to be conservative. Nevertheless, they are certainly right in the order of magnitude.

Getting back to your point, I would say that in spite of the wonderful societal benefits of world-class transportation within and between cities, if the goal was to achieve ball-park economic parity across the regions then that policy in Japan has been a failure. Income & expenditure? Sure ... all of Japan looks pretty consistent. Property valuation? ... the discrepancy is almost unfathomable.

Same intuition here.

Assuming no miscommunication or subterfuge, perhaps it can be explained by a large number of bits flipped by a single ray and/or a preponderance of rays, each flipping a small number of bits. If the satellite's shielding design was poor, there could have been a lot of exposure from a single event, such as a solar flare.

Or perhaps just a single bit of code was flipped and it began writing to protected areas of memory.

To someone not in USA, this somehow resembles Second-ammendment type discussions.

We have an apologist for why it shouldn't be so bad. It should be getting better soon. And the law allows it. And please protect yourself.

From elsewhere in the world: it is nowhere near so bad where I am. This is probably something largely unique to USA.

None of your BlueTruth goes into my ears.

If a steam turbine could operate at those higher temperatures it would be more efficient. But it cannot do so under any reasonable condition. If you want the higher efficiency from storing high grade heat energy, it's not feasible to use a steam turbine.

Think of the steam turbine as a baseline. Like rating a vehicle in horse power.

Please don't take it personally. YOU are still welcome. YOU are not a fast-moving, noisy, smelly, ugly, large, heavy metal box.

Other people who also self-identity as ME matter too. THEY will still welcome YOU. absent the brum-brum which, in aggregate with other brum-brums, is a massive annoyance to THEM.

Even framing shopping as a weekly activity is inherently car-biased.

A family of four consumes more in a week than could realistically be hand-carried in a single trip by both parents.

Better to do shorter and more frequent visits on foot or bicycle. Combined with delivery services which are much more resource efficient than private cars for this purpose.

>> Nothing in the definition of a nurse implies female.

Unfortunately it's not a great example with which to make this point. Before Florence Nightingale, a nurse was a person who was employed to suckle your babies. Of course 100% were female.

Wet nurse was a later coining to differentiate the two meanings.

Pre-covid, the majority of tourists were from China and East Asia in general. Given their need to isolate upon re-entry, not many of these will be returning very soon.

I am not a sociologist, but I would think morality of Japanese, such as returning lost items, is just a particular case of their general propensity to follow rules.

It helps explain why we in Japan can have nice things.

It's a few tens of kilometers. Not significant.

None whatsoever. But that is exactly the point of reaffirming their claim now. Russia can choose to climb down over something insignificant in order to gain a potential ally. Japan would thereby become a credible broker for peace.

Yes. I bought a M1 Macbook Air a couple of months ago. Living in a cold climate, I came to realise this is an unexpected drawback in the winter.

... and yet you used an expression that seems unnecessarily idiomatic and parochial (British right?). I can easily imagine someone in Asia struggling to fit that literal expression to your intended meaning.

>> any day of the week

English has a similar confusion with the word hotel. A loan-word from French, the correct indefinite article is counterintuitive. An hotel, a house.

The news here is that there's a forest in Singapore. I thought the space inside Changhi airport must be the only jungle left.

>> Nobody is arguing ...

Nobody here is arguing that. FUD is a real thing. Be careful not give them ammunition.

There's a widely-held belief that the energy cost of PV production is largely outweighed the benefits from PV usage.

This may have been somewhat more true in the past, but I believe the energy payback period is now less than 24 months, on a PV device that should last over 20 years.

We must pay attention to weighing up the relative costs to environmental destruction by one cause (production and disposal of PV) against its most common alternative (continued fossil fuel usage).

There have been both blunt and sharp political forces in play. As far as I know, CIA never operated this way in northern Nigeria, yet that was one of the anti-vax hold-outs where polio was kept alive.

You are welcome.

My wording of retort may have been a little too strong.

>> I wasn’t being anywhere near as unkind as I think you think I was being,

That's not for you to say. I only said I thought the comment was mildly unkind. Neither of us knows how it might have been taken by the actual object persons though. Nor the lurkers.

My worry is the cooling effect that a large amount of indirect and minor snark could have on sensitive people. Individually ever-so-slightly, yet en masse broadly deterring them from a culture which seems permeated in it. Such as (to my mind) science.

Linguistic sexual dimorphism.

Many men on this thread seem surprised at just how "male" they seem to be. Perhaps tech-awareness has become a defining trait of maleness, just as a large musculature has become mostly redundant.