Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
If you operate energy storage on a commercial basis, you buy power when it is cheap, store it, and sell it when it is expensive.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Johnsonian Conservatives have an odd definition of "democracy".
Indeed.
It was also posted by the old Leave.EU account.
They are apparently shitting themselves that Brexit dies with BoZo
It will do.
Brexit is the unflushable turd of British politics, but we will have to wait some time until someone with a bog brush and clothes peg on their nose pushes it round the u-bend of British history.
Johnsonian Conservatives have an odd definition of "democracy".
It's just the entitlement of party members. I thought Conservatives believed in representational democracy and following the rules, it's all pretty darn clear.
Plus, they spent years seeing what happens when a party is led by someone its MPs do not want and they think 'yep, that's what we should do'?
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
It's highly difficult but not impossible to write an entire book that is scary. Shirley Jackson did it in The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty did it in The Exorcist, Susan Hill sort of did it in The Woman in Black (which is flawed but has that genius killer ending). After that, hmm
Short stories are generally better at inducing dread without inducing disbelief. The Monkey's Paw is probably the scariest thing ever written. It's all of 8 pages long
Nightmares are "better" when they are short
The Monkey's Paw definitely packs a terrifying punch. If you're going to write a horror novel, I don't think it can be just a horror novel. I think George Martin sums it up very well with this:
“Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.
But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”
I think the best horror stories I've read are:
The Monkey's Paw, by WW Jacobs. The Mezzotint, and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, by MR James The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, by Poe The Pear Shaped Man and In The Lost Lands, by George Martin The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Color Out of Space, by Lovecraft I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
I've read the first three, but none of the others. Good list. Thankyou
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe I am missing something?
It reduces the offiicial figure as energy bills are 'in the basket', it does nothing to actually reduce rising costs elsewhere and in April it massively jumps unless we commit another 30 billion or so into this massaging of the truth
Exterior insulation is done a lot on council and housing association properties in the UK, and I believe there have been schemes to get grants to do it on private homes. Not suitable for every house, but the properties it does get done on generally look smarter as a result.
Good luck finding a decent installer who knows how to avoid the pitfalls like insufficient ventilation and who isn't already booked up so far in advance they're not taking on any new customers, though...
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe I am missing something?
You are.
1. Inflation is an artificial stat when you think about it. 2. To the extent that it measures how much things are costing Joe Public, energy is a big (and getting bigger) slice of that; so energy costs rightly have a big influence on inflation measures. 3. Benefits uplift and a whole host of other things will be driven by the official inflation rate, and rightly so because those on benefits spend a large proportion of their income on heating and electricity.
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe I am missing something?
It reduces the offiicial figure as energy bills are 'in the basket', it does nothing to actually reduce rising costs
Thanks. I guess it reduces the CPI which is the "consumer" price but the reality is the UK economy is still facing the actual inflation that the subsidy is "hiding".
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
Unless you are Stephen King of course. The Shinning. Now there was a scary book.
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe I am missing something?
It reduces the offiicial figure as energy bills are 'in the basket', it does nothing to actually reduce rising costs
Which affects some complicated stuff round government debt, I believe.
It also depends on how much gets transferred over to other costs as energy companies smash business instead. That gets passed on to us, eventually.
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe I am missing something?
You are.
1. Inflation is an artificial stat when you think about it. 2. To the extent that it measures how much things are costing Joe Public, energy is a big (and getting bigger) slice of that; so energy costs rightly have a big influence on inflation measures. 3. Benefits uplift and a whole host of other things will be driven by the official inflation rate, and rightly so because those on benefits spend a large proportion of their income on heating and electricity.
So not only is is poorly targeted, because wealthy households will use more energy, it also penalises those on benefits in the long run.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
It's highly difficult but not impossible to write an entire book that is scary. Shirley Jackson did it in The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty did it in The Exorcist, Susan Hill sort of did it in The Woman in Black (which is flawed but has that genius killer ending). After that, hmm
Short stories are generally better at inducing dread without inducing disbelief. The Monkey's Paw is probably the scariest thing ever written. It's all of 8 pages long
Nightmares are "better" when they are short
The Monkey's Paw definitely packs a terrifying punch. If you're going to write a horror novel, I don't think it can be just a horror novel. I think George Martin sums it up very well with this:
“Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.
But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”
I think the best horror stories I've read are:
The Monkey's Paw, by WW Jacobs. The Mezzotint, and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, by MR James The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, by Poe The Pear Shaped Man and In The Lost Lands, by George Martin The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Color Out of Space, by Lovecraft I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Actually I will add one more full length scary novel
Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, which doesn't even try to be a horror/ghost story, particularly, but which induces that horrible shapeless unease of the best horror stories, all the way through. Deeply unsettling, and beautifully written
All this complicated mechanisms proposed for dealing with gas hikes but why cannot there simply be a negative VAT rate applied?
I've been banging on for several weeks that the simplest solution was a simple %age off all bills. With an increase in UC. Encourages less use. Which must happen. Simple to administer. Doesn't distort the market. It's expensive, yes. But so is every other solution.
The alternative is a progressive sliding scale of unit charges. First X units at one rate, next Y units at a higher price, and next Z units at an even higher rate.
Encourages frugal usage, and most poorer households are smaller. There might need to be some regional variation too.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
Unless you are Stephen King of course. The Shinning. Now there was a scary book.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
I don't think it's possible to track electrons like that. If you're running a wind farm or a solar farm, you generate electricity and sell it into the grid at whatever the going rate is (or whatever you managed to negotiate as a rate). Then you're done, and out of the picture: you got paid. If you're a storage system like a battery, you both buy electricity from the grid to store, and later sell electricity to the grid, again at the going or negotiated rate. You don't care whether the electricity you're storing was generated by wind farm, nuclear or gas -- you're just going to aim to buy low and sell high.
Thanks to you (and Sandy). That seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that's why so many water pumping schemes are stalled without the investment they need. There is virtually no margin.
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Maybe I am missing something?
It reduces the offiicial figure as energy bills are 'in the basket', it does nothing to actually reduce rising costs
Thanks. I guess it reduces the CPI which is the "consumer" price but the reality is the UK economy is still facing the actual inflation that the subsidy is "hiding".
Yep. Although, to take the example of food inflation. On that, in isolation, we are better off than most of the EU at the moment
Johnsonian Conservatives have an odd definition of "democracy".
Indeed.
It was also posted by the old Leave.EU account.
They are apparently shitting themselves that Brexit dies with BoZo
It will do.
Brexit is the unflushable turd of British politics, but we will have to wait some time until someone with a bog brush and clothes peg on their nose pushes it round the u-bend of British history.
It's the hope that's killing you isn't it dear hearts?
Yeah, yeah. Framed as teachers skiving again. It's such a cushy number nae bugger will do it for very long. The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray. I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September. We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority). Still nowt. Target is 14 days. Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come. Another shambles.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Reminds me of an early Asimov story called the six billion names of god. The premise was that man was on earth to write out these names. Someone thought that a computer program could do this in days (this was the 50s) so he did. And then the stars started going out...
Unless there's a very similar story by him it seems that might be a Clarke story.
I recall the name only because of a reference to it in the DVD commentary from one of my favourite Futurama episodes*
*sorry to break it to PB, but turns out I'm a nerd.
That does read like it from the summary. I would have sworn that it was in the early Asimov series which bristle with ideas. But I read them both at the same time about 45 years ago so my memory has let me down. Again. Sigh. Senility is fast approaching, no doubt.
I found Clarke's "Nine Billion Names" annoying when I first read it, and haven't changed my mind since. But the story that follows it in my collection, "Refugee", is great fun. (The Prince of Wales is smuggled on board an American space ship so he can finally get into space.) And "Security Check", though implausible, is worth reading, along with "A Question of Residence".
A more general point: When reading Asimov's fiction, I often find it "bumpy"; I run into sentences and paragraphs that need re-writing. When reading Heinlein's fiction, I find bumps of the opposite kind; his characters often say things that are too clever. And Clarke? What I have read of his doesn't have either problem; his writing is smooth.
(Full disclosure: I am one of those who think his earlier "Against the Fall of Night" is better than hsi revision, "The City and the Stars">
I found Clarke's "Nine Billion Names" annoying when I first read it, and haven't changed my mind since. But the story that follows it in my collection, "Refugee", is great fun. (The Prince of Wales is smuggled on board an American space ship so he can finally get into space.) And "Security Check", though implausible, is worth reading, along with "A Question of Residence".
A more general point: When reading Asimov's fiction, I often find it "bumpy"; I run into sentences and paragraphs that need re-writing. When reading Heinlein's fiction, I find bumps of the opposite kind; his characters often say things that are too clever. And Clarke? What I have read of his doesn't have either problem; his writing is smooth.
(Full disclosure: I am one of those who think his earlier "Against the Fall of Night" is better than hsi revision, "The City and the Stars">
I think Childhood's End was my favourite of his although the Fountains of Paradise was very clever. I am sure that the latter will happen one day. I was not such a fan of his short stories as a whole but there are of course exceptions.
More vomit inducing Mother Theresa Truss front pages from the DE . The Tories are the biggest threat to the Union yet the DE is bigging up the Maggie clone as being the savior.
More vomit inducing Mother Theresa Truss front pages from the DE . The Tories are the biggest threat to the Union yet the DE is bigging up the Maggie clone as being the savior.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
The people who own the storage buy the electricity from the grid and then sell it back to the grid. So they will buy when there is an excess, and electricity is cheap, and sell when vice versa, and profit from the price difference.
This is one reason why long-term storage of electricity is impractical. If you can store cheap nuclear electricity at night and sell it at day, then your income is the difference in the daily extremes of energy price, multiplied by the volume of electricity stored, multiplied by the number of days.
However, if you are shifting electricity from a windy week to a calm week then you will receive roughly one-fourteenth the income.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
It's highly difficult but not impossible to write an entire book that is scary. Shirley Jackson did it in The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty did it in The Exorcist, Susan Hill sort of did it in The Woman in Black (which is flawed but has that genius killer ending). After that, hmm
Short stories are generally better at inducing dread without inducing disbelief. The Monkey's Paw is probably the scariest thing ever written. It's all of 8 pages long
Nightmares are "better" when they are short
The Monkey's Paw definitely packs a terrifying punch. If you're going to write a horror novel, I don't think it can be just a horror novel. I think George Martin sums it up very well with this:
“Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.
But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”
I think the best horror stories I've read are:
The Monkey's Paw, by WW Jacobs. The Mezzotint, and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, by MR James The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, by Poe The Pear Shaped Man and In The Lost Lands, by George Martin The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Color Out of Space, by Lovecraft I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
That's largely true. Sometimes people think a story is deep just because it's sad, or scary because it's relentless, and there's a place for sheer hopelessness, but you just get darkness induced apathy if there is no variation. Despair hits harder in stories with some hope, the darkness hits harder where there is some light.
We need peaks and troughs of emotion or it's just exhausting and lacks any weight because it's not even real.
I found Clarke's "Nine Billion Names" annoying when I first read it, and haven't changed my mind since. But the story that follows it in my collection, "Refugee", is great fun. (The Prince of Wales is smuggled on board an American space ship so he can finally get into space.) And "Security Check", though implausible, is worth reading, along with "A Question of Residence".
A more general point: When reading Asimov's fiction, I often find it "bumpy"; I run into sentences and paragraphs that need re-writing. When reading Heinlein's fiction, I find bumps of the opposite kind; his characters often say things that are too clever. And Clarke? What I have read of his doesn't have either problem; his writing is smooth.
(Full disclosure: I am one of those who think his earlier "Against the Fall of Night" is better than hsi revision, "The City and the Stars">
The line There is a last time for everything is good though.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Do you see a border around the Central Belt in the chart?
The Central Belt isn't a region on that chart, it is swallowed up by the rest of the wilderness that is Scotland, while the borders are pretty much wilderness just not as much as Scotland and are a pale shade of blue too so that kind of proves the point.
If the Central Belt was a section in isolation that might make some meaningful comparisons possible, but it isn't.
We have a string of potential by elections, I make it up to six!!! Uxbridge, Somerton and Frome, North East Somerset, Tanworth, North Yorkshire, cannot see Sunak remaining after he is beaten, and dear old Mid Bedfordshie.
Comments
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/19507181/three-day-school-week-classes-cut-energy-teacher-salaries/
No cap.
Brexit is the unflushable turd of British politics, but we will have to wait some time until someone with a bog brush and clothes peg on their nose pushes it round the u-bend of British history.
Plus, they spent years seeing what happens when a party is led by someone its MPs do not want and they think 'yep, that's what we should do'?
On the other...
1. Inflation is an artificial stat when you think about it.
2. To the extent that it measures how much things are costing Joe Public, energy is a big (and getting bigger) slice of that; so energy costs rightly have a big influence on inflation measures.
3. Benefits uplift and a whole host of other things will be driven by the official inflation rate, and rightly so because those on benefits spend a large proportion of their income on heating and electricity.
It also depends on how much gets transferred over to other costs as energy companies smash business instead. That gets passed on to us, eventually.
Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, which doesn't even try to be a horror/ghost story, particularly, but which induces that horrible shapeless unease of the best horror stories, all the way through. Deeply unsettling, and beautifully written
Encourages frugal usage, and most poorer households are smaller. There might need to be some regional variation too.
Although, to take the example of food inflation. On that, in isolation, we are better off than most of the EU at the moment
Framed as teachers skiving again.
It's such a cushy number nae bugger will do it for very long.
The crisis in schools is another thing not yet visible in the urgent in tray.
I have remarked on PB before that I've been thinking about going back into teaching for September.
We are now six weeks since my application for a DBS (I've had one before, and have moved once since, in the same Police authority).
Still nowt. Target is 14 days.
Thinking of giving up and doing summat else. Have had positive responses for potential employment from several schools, but they can't just wait for my DBS to come, with no position filled. Or not come.
Another shambles.
A more general point: When reading Asimov's fiction, I often find it "bumpy"; I run into sentences and paragraphs that need re-writing. When reading Heinlein's fiction, I find bumps of the opposite kind; his characters often say things that are too clever. And Clarke? What I have read of his doesn't have either problem; his writing is smooth.
(Full disclosure: I am one of those who think his earlier "Against the Fall of Night" is better than hsi revision, "The City and the Stars">
This is one reason why long-term storage of electricity is impractical. If you can store cheap nuclear electricity at night and sell it at day, then your income is the difference in the daily extremes of energy price, multiplied by the volume of electricity stored, multiplied by the number of days.
However, if you are shifting electricity from a windy week to a calm week then you will receive roughly one-fourteenth the income.
We need peaks and troughs of emotion or it's just exhausting and lacks any weight because it's not even real.
The Central Belt isn't a region on that chart, it is swallowed up by the rest of the wilderness that is Scotland, while the borders are pretty much wilderness just not as much as Scotland and are a pale shade of blue too so that kind of proves the point.
If the Central Belt was a section in isolation that might make some meaningful comparisons possible, but it isn't.
Uxbridge, Somerton and Frome, North East Somerset, Tanworth, North Yorkshire, cannot see Sunak remaining after he is beaten, and dear old Mid Bedfordshie.