Technology Review is MIT’s alumni rag. I’m secretary for the Class of 1982 and part of my job is getting alums to write in regarding their recent activities. To spur discussion I asked them to comment on the September/October issue of the magazine. But now I think that it would be fun to open things up to readers here. The message to my classmates:
Who wants to eat food that has been doused in RNAi? And, more importantly, can spray-on RNA for crops improve spray-on tans for pale MIT grads?
How about the MIT battery nerds who left American taxpayers and investors with a $500 million hole in their pockets via A123? (who could have known that Chinese lithium-ion battery manufacturers were also capable of innovating?) Is their new company, 24M (page 21), going to prove the old adage that “this time it is different”?
How about Amazon’s new robot-stuffed warehouse? As U.S. labor costs rise (health insurance increases, more complex regulation, litigation costs to defend against various employment-related lawsuits, $15/hour minimum wage), do robots give big companies a further edge over small companies? How will your workplace change in response to higher labor costs? What about your household? (see $15 minimum wage and Obamacare impact on home siding for some ideas)
What about the page 88 article on solar that says rooftop solar isn’t competitive even if solar cells were free? (due to the cost of other stuff) Does that mean we must limit our solar use to Burning Man? (see http://tinyurl.com/2015BurningManPG for my slideshow from the event or youtube if you want to learn everything important about Burning Man in 2 minutes, 45 seconds) Does this change the way you think about rooftop solar or do we still love it for the showing-off-to-the-neighbors value?
Tech Review has told us a lot about driverless cars. How would they actually change the economics of your enterprise? How would they change your personal life?
What do you all think about the articles in this issue of Tech Review?
Tech Review — You’ve given us too much to consider in one bite. Here’s my 2¢ on “Paying for Solar Power” by David Rotman (MIT editor/author). C-SPAN should run a presentation of the piece given by the author (David R.) – on a loop 24/7. Energy is not only a fundamental concept in physics, it’s the most important topic of this century. Most people don’t understand the difference between “installed capacity” and actual generation after you apply the relevant (local) “capacity factor.” The endemic ignorance surrounding renewable hype is costing the country a fortune. Worse, in addition to squandering time and money, it delays the inevitable sobering detox required to plan and pursue a realistic energy policy. In a word, natural gas – natural gas fired steam turbines, natural gas direct burn peaking turbines, and natural gas fuel cells.
New England is starved for nat gas. High orbit hypoxic greens won’t let nat gas pipelines come through their neighborhood. If I were Czar I’d cut them from the grid and give them a wind wheel and a few solar panels. Darwin will do the rest on a long, calm, subzero January night.
rooftop solar
I just installed a 20-watt solar-powered attic exhaust fan in the gable vent of my FL home. Two 18-inch x 18-inch solar panels mount on the roof and power the fan. It runs smooth and powerful during daylight hours, and lowers the temp in my attic and, in turn, my second floor living space by 5 degrees. $200 for the kit off Amazon.
Phil, with respect to the article on solar energy and whether or not solar panels are just for “showing off to your neighbors” (a nice provocative statement that helped motivate me to read the article)… doesn’t it bother you at all that the author never once mentions the “cost” of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere? Yes I know there is no carbon tax, but it’s not hard to estimate what such a tax would (or should) look like. That’s the problem I find with articles of this nature… they assume that people only act based on on-of-pocket costs (homo economicus?). Perhaps there are those in world who recognize that CO2 emissions aren’t free. I wish the author hadn’t ignored this point… a clear omission in my view.