Solar panels failing after six years

by philg

Why let the amateurs at the power company generate and deliver power in exchange for a monthly subscription fee when you can go into the power generation business yourself?

A local friend (and MIT PhD in EECS!) put solar panels on his roof six years ago, responding to the massive government handouts on offer at the time (thanks, fellow Massachusetts taxpayers!). Roughly half of the panels have now failed, casualties of squirrels, UV light, etc.

Given the rising cost of labor (a bundle of wages and health care expenses), will it turn out that America’s big rooftop solar experiment was a colossal failure from a total lifecycle cost perspective?

Already it seems to me that single-family homes are unaffordable for a typical family because the cost and challenge of bringing contractors in to maintain all of the systems has been growing every year. Adding an electricity generation plant on the roof makes this problem worse.

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Why don’t all government contractors identify as women?

by philg

From “Should You Get Certified As A Woman-Owned Small Business?”:

Generally-speaking, if you’re thinking about working with the government in any way, then getting it’s worth at least looking into getting certified as a women-owned small business (WOSB). You can do this through the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce or another approved third-party certifier. The benefits of getting certified as a WOSB include being able to pursue public sector work and any “set-asides” the government has. Every year, the U.S. government aims to award at least five percent of its contract funds to women-owned small business.

A question for Pride Month: If a person currently identifying as a “man” owns and operates a small company (“small” for the Defense Department is fewer than 500 employees) that does business with the government, why not switch to identifying as a “woman” so that the company qualifies for favorable treatment as a Women-Owned Small Business?

The Federal set-asides for “women” were set up under a different conception of the term. With $17+ billion at stake, why not a trip to the DMV to ask for a change from male to female?

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Government agriculture bureaucrats object to living anywhere near a farm

by philg

From CNN: “Employees turn their back on Agriculture secretary over being relocated to Kansas City”

Apparently one thing that they learned at the USDA is that one should try to avoid living in an agricultural region of the U.S.!

(Kansas is awesome for general aviation enthusiasts. A $200,000 (used) Piper Malibu with the extended tanks STC can reach anywhere in the Lower 48 nonstop from Kansas.)

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  • before agreeing to any move across state lines, a wise American will check the respective family law regimes that apply: Missouri versus D.C., Maryland, or Virginia. (Child support profits are more likely to be capped in Missouri compared to the winner-take-all jurisdictions in the D.C. metro area; a Missouri court is also more likely to award 50/50 parenting time to children, thus resulting in a huge reduction in child support cashflow if both parents work)
  • before picking a house in the Kansas City area, it would also be worth checking Kansas family law, which is dramatically different than Missouri’s (i.e., the definitions of “justice” and “best interest of a child” are completely different on either side of the state line)
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Climate change has made Guatemala unlivable…

by philg

… which is why 20 times as many people now live there compared to 1900 when the Earth hadn’t been trashed (estimated 17.5 million today versus 885,000 before CO2 poisoned everything).

A 1960s-style famine article from the New York Times: “‘Food Doesn’t Grow Here Anymore. That’s Why I Would Send My Son North.’ A stark choice for some Guatemalans: watch crops wither, and maybe die with them, or migrate”:

I have heard from innumerable Guatemalans that the most fundamental driver of emigration is desperation — and, to an extent that most Americans don’t appreciate, this desperation often reflects drought and severe weather linked to climate change. … climate change is aggravating the desperation.

So the paradox is that American carbon emissions are partly responsible for wretchedness in Guatemala that drives emigration, yet when those desperate Guatemalans arrive at the U.S. border they are treated as invaders.

Get ready to welcome your new neighbors:

“The great majority of these kids will migrate,” Luis Armando Jiménez, principal of a rural middle school, told me as he pointed to his students in the courtyard. “There is not enough rain, so their only option is to migrate.”

The author who says that humans cannot thrive in Guatemala, Nicholas Kristof, was born in 1959. Wikipedia says that that the number of humans living in this unlivable country has more than tripled since then.

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New Englanders: Father’s Day weekend at the tank museum

by philg

New England’s latest museum to open is the American Heritage Museum in Hudson/Stow, Massachusetts. It is run by the long-established Collings Foundation, which owns priceless warbirds and classic cars, but shows off a new collection of armored vehicles.

It is a great museum any time (passionate and knowledgeable volunteer guides bring the machines alive), but especially great this coming weekend when they’re having the “Tanks, Wings, and Wheels” event.

[It is currently not simple to buy a membership at the front desk, so if you want to get an annual membership, sign up via the web site.]

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Lifting body airliner

by philg

One of the topics that we cover in the Aerodynamics lecture within our MIT Private Pilot Ground School (link to all of the slides and videos) is the industry inertia that results in all airliners looking more or less the same: tube plus wings.

It turns out that this is not an efficient way to build an airplane. The most fuel-efficient approach is a “lifting body” in which the fuselage is optimized to produce lift. With aluminum-and-rivet construction these probably haven’t made sense commercially, but now that airliners (e.g., Airbus A350 and Boeing 787) are made from composites, the complex shapes of a lifting body airliner might not be dramatically more expensive to fabricate.

Who is crazy enough to try to turn the academic dream into a commercial reality? KLM:

The Dutch national airline announced that it is helping fund the development of the Flying-V, a lifting-body-esque flying wing aircraft designed by Delft University of Technology student Justus Benad.

The designers say the Flying-V will use 20% less fuel than an Airbus A350 while carrying about the same number of passengers, 314. Roelof Vos, project leader at TU Delft, highlights the Flying-V’s efficiency as an important component of an industry eventually headed toward electric propulsion. According to CNN, Vos claims that ”aviation is contributing about 2.5% of global CO2 emissions, and the industry is still growing, so we really need to look at more sustainable airplanes. We cannot simply electrify the whole fleet, as electrified airplanes become way too heavy and you can’t fly people across the Atlantic on electric airplanes—not now, not in 30 years. So we have to come up with new technologies that reduce fuel burn in a different way.”

These folks are taking the long view:

A flying prototype is promised by October 2019, but the design isn’t expected to enter service until 2040.

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Trump Hotel in D.C. is rated #1 in TripAdvisor

by philg

While doing a bit of research for an upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., I found the following in TripAdvisor:

Bad (but fake?) news for folks, such as the attorney general of Maryland, who are suing the Donald over the emoluments clause of the Constitution:

  • The Trump International Hotel is #1 out of 147 hotels!
  • Travelers’ Choice
  • Certificate of Excellent!

Why is this bad? From AP:

Frosh and Racine, both Democrats, say hotels in Maryland and Washington have been harmed because foreign and state government officials are more likely to stay at Trump’s hotel in an attempt to curry favor with the Republican president.

Trump can argue that people are staying there simply because the hotel is ranked #1 by guests.

[As a virtuous citizen of Massachusetts, I plan to boycott this establishment, leased in 2012 and opened in 2016, and stay in a $200/night hotel instead.]

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Regulation of aviation in Europe

by philg

One thing that isn’t unionized in the European Union is regulation of aviation. All of the member nations belong to the ICAO and there is an EU agency (EASA) that does most of the same stuff as our FAA. However, there is yet another layer of regulation on a per-country basis. “They can’t be less restrictive than ICAO, but they can add restrictions,” said a local pilot. “Every time a plane takes off, the Irish Aviation Authority considers that it has failed.”

It sounds reasonable for a country to have its own FAA-style agency. But Ireland’s population is 4.7 million. Should Metro Atlanta or South Carolina have its own FAA? Estonia, with a population of 1.3 million, also has its own aviation regulatory authority (can there be more than a handful of airplanes based in Estonia?).

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Keep obscure languages (such as Irish) alive via free videogames?

by philg

My Irish host’s son is just finishing what we would call high school. At great cost to the Irish taxpayer and himself he is now fluent in Irish. I asked whether this had any practical value. “Not really,” he replied. “There are only about 80,000 speakers of Irish.” Had he ever used Irish outside of the classroom or organized immersion program? “No.” Would he be able to use Irish to shop at the local supermarket or any other nearby merchant? “Not a chance.”

Did the Irish language have any communication value? I.e., among those 80,000 speakers were there any who did not speak English? “Maybe somewhere on the Aran Islands you could find one person.”

How can he possible maintain his fluency under these circumstances?

One idea: Dedicate 1 percent of the current Irish instruction budget to developing video games and apps that require reading, writing, listening, and speaking Irish. Give them away free. Refuse to make a version in any other language, no matter how popular a game becomes. If successful, maybe young people in China will learn Irish so as to be able to enjoy the games.

Readers: Could this work? Would it be more cost-effective than other methods of keeping a mostly-dead language alive?

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Flight school and airline careers starting in Ireland

by philg

On a recent trip to Ireland I visited National Flight Centre, one of the country’s two full-scale flight schools.

Lufthansa decided to abandon cloud-plagued Germany and train all of its ab initio pilots in Arizona. How can it work to learn to fly in Ireland, famous for rain?

One part of the answer is simulator time. The school has several sophisticated non-motion sims, one of which has a full 737-800 cockpit (Ryanair uses this plane). Of the 220 required hours of training for a “frozen ATPL“, 80 may be accomplished in a simulator. (On reaching 1,500 hours of flying experience, presumably gained in the right seat of a B737 or A320, the ATP becomes “unfrozen”.)

Students start as young as 17, though roughly half already have college degrees. They pay 82,000 euros for an 18-month program and, upon graduation, can work for any airline within the EASA umbrella (all of Europe, Turkey, etc.; does not include Qatar, Dubai, or China, all of which would require a license conversion). Starting salary at Ryanair for these 140-hour heroes is roughly 70,000 euros per year (depends on the base). Other European airlines pay in the same ballpark.

(What about Americans who want to escape the cruel dictatorship of Donald Trump? The American ATP can convert by doing 650 hours of home study through National Flight Centre, taking 14 exams (on site), and getting an Irish Class 1 medical. Budget for two trips to Ireland, a couple of weeks on the ground there total, and less than $10,000 out of pocket.)

Job prospects currently are awesome, with Ryanair alone hiring nearly 1,000 pilots per year.

The school is very well-organized, comparable to the best university-run U.S. schools. Instructors are a mixture of young enthusiasts and retired airline captains. Airplanes are dispatched with a GPS tracker and a flat-screen TV next to the front desk shows all aircraft positions. A web-based system keeps track of every lesson and the instructor’s evaluation. There is a nice restaurant overlooking the runway for relaxing between classes.

(It is vastly more difficult to start an airline career in the U.S. due to the 1,000/1,500-hour minimum. Also, the first job for a white or Asian male U.S. pilot will be in a regional jet, not a Boeing or Airbus (opportunities are better for members of victim groups, but there is no relief from the statutory minimum hours requirement).)

More: nfc.ie

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