Because their mission isn't to return a profit
436 karma · joined September 7, 2010
As soon as anyone frames sustainability challenges in terms of the earths "carrying capacity" they are revealing a bias that is unhelpful. Even if you accept the premise that the earth does have some 'maximum population' then so what? It's a useless proposition -- what are you going to do, force everyone to only have one child, that is unsustainable as China discovered.
Luckily, as the parent pointed out, overpopulation is not a problem. The rate of growth continues to decrease, and global populations will peak in my lifetime.
Transmission and distributed generation accounts for half the cost of electricity. The question for our electricity future is distributed versus centralized generation, and distributed will probably win.
This is a question about how distributed energy generation with battery storage shifts more and more loads to the edges of the grid, and onto private networks.
And then, relating to back to the question of whether nuclear is compatible with renewable energy, the question becomes how does this trend affect what technologies make the most sense?
Big expensive nuclear makes a lot of sense in an environment where all the loads are on are centrally managed and planned grid with either guaranteed rates of return, or steady wholesale electricity prices, but this is not what the future looks like.
Firstly, there is the traditional concern of the green movement with nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear advocates say these concerns are misplaced because of nuclear technology innovations (although its not clear how close the new technology is to wide deployment).
Secondly, there is an economic and free-market concern. Nuclear power plants generally only get built in highly regulated, centrally planned electricity markets with a great deal of Government financial support.
The projects to build them, at least in modern Western states, tend to be complex, expensive and prone to overruns. These projects generally need the plants to run all the time with guaranteed rates for the business case to stack up.
This is entirely at odds with solar and wind, which are highly democratised -- your Aunty can put solar on her roof -- and even when deployed at 'grid scale' tend to suck the profits out of wholesale electricity markets, because they have the lowest short-run costs and always out bid other energy sources.
In deregulated electricity markets renewables plus gas beat nuclear on price. We need storage to push gas out of the market.
From Wikipedia: A unique exclusive process of imagery capturing, processing and publishing is used. Traditionally, high resolution aerial imagery has to be captured by a low altitude flying aircraft, then the data is manually processed and stitched together digitally to create a PhotoMap, a slow process which can take months to complete. nearmap speeds up this process by using their own engineered camera capture equipment, named a 'HyperPod', which is attached to Cessna 210 light aircraft, which fly at a high altitude, enabling entire cities to be captured in a day or two. Once the imagery is captured, it is processed through super computers which run software known as 'HyperVision' which automatically processes and stitches together the many individual photographs captured into one virtually seamless PhotoMap. These PhotoMaps are then hosted on nearmap's end user web portal, known as 'MapBrowser'. Along with traditional top-down photography, the HyperPod is also able to capture oblique aerial photographs from 4 different angles and digital elevation model data at the same time.
Trade exposed heavy industry was largely sheltered from the tax. In fact some argued the free permits were actually going to deliver windfall profits. There was a story recently about the closure of Alcoa's Point Henry aluminium smelter, but the company denied there was any link to the carbon tax.
By implementing these policies Apple can show leadership and influence their peers and support the clean energy industry. This is the right thing to do.
C2 is another resource worth checking out. C2 is the original "wiki". While its not always coherent and will structured, there are some real gold nuggets here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectOrientedProgramming
Another tool to consider, although I haven't used it personally is Tableau Desktop (http://www.tableausoftware.com/). It is especially good at helping you understand your data if you are more of a visual person.
By the way, as evidence of global warming, repeated snowless winters in Detroit would not be especially more convincing than the huge amount of evidence we already have.
You don't have to wait to observe the effects of climate change. Where I come from - the south-west of Western Australia - when compared to the 70s, rainfall levels are way down, stream flows into dams are way down, number of hot days per year are up, and average temperatures are up.
This is a particularly wicked problem for enterprises that have built a lot of custom line-of-business systems that are inextricably tied up in Microsoft's technology.