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tkdguy

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I've looked into adding solar before this, but the numbers just didn't add up for me (I don't really use enough power to justify the purchase/lease of the panels). Most of the various companies that are laying off people were building their economic model on some really shaky assumptions. First, they assumed that they would be granted access to the power grid to sell back power without any additional connection fees for the maintenance of the grid (that's what the "40% tax" appears to be). Second, they assumed that they could sell power at the retail rate for the next several decades, instead of the wholesale rate that other energy producers get. As we've seen with this decision by the regulators, those were some dangerous long-term assumptions.

 

I'd also like to note that this really isn't an off-grid movement right now; in this case, if the homeowners were truly off-grid, they wouldn't be able to sell excess power back during the day, and buy power from NV Energy during the night. That might change in the future, if the solar companies include storage systems like Powerwalls, but that's not the current economic model.

 

That's not to say that there wasn't some kind of political shenanigans going on about all of this. I'm guessing that it might make Governor Sandoval's approval ratings dip, but he won't be running for re-election (due to term limits), so that's probably not a great concern for him.

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I basically assume that all major sports leagues are corrupt: we have franchises generating huge amounts of money, that operate as legal quasi-monopolies, but which are exempt from the kind of oversight that we expect for businesses and financial institutions. Moreover, they are allowed to operate as cartels. At the same time the code of conduct that they used to run on in the pre-franchise era has been scrapped. Frankly, it would be a miracle if any of them were not corrupt.

 

cheers, Mark

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Yeah, I'm hoping our TN contingent can shed some more light on this case. :(

 

 

 

I'm in another part of the state so it is news to me as well, but from what I gather, the volunteers were found trying to help another volunteer who got injured somehow. The missing boy vanished when hiking the woods with his grandmother so, depending on the terrain, he could still be in the wilderness. We've got a lot of green in this state.

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An Oregon legislator is set to propose annexing eastern Washington and Oregon to Idaho. It'll never happen, and his reasoning makes me uneasily think of the ill effects of gerrymandering, but amusing

http://komonews.com/news/local/lawmaker-to-pitch-idea-to-join-eastern-parts-of-oregon-washington-with-idaho

There's really strong impediments to this in the federal Constitution. West Virginia was partitioned from Virginia while the latter was unable to respond (engaged in trying to get out of the Union), while AFAIK the detachment of Maine from Massachusetts went on uncontested. This idea of repartitioning WA is hardly new ... I remember it coming up repeatedly even 45 years ago, when I was in high school outside Spokane, and it wasn't new then.

 

It also was a really popular idea with the neo-Nazis, to sever off eastern WA, northern ID, and (sometimes) bits of MT and OR, amalgamate it into one entity, secede from the US (or ZOG as they referred to it) and make a new Reich so they could kill whomever they felt like killing.

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There's really strong impediments to this in the federal Constitution. West Virginia was partitioned from Virginia while the latter was unable to respond (engaged in trying to get out of the Union), while AFAIK the detachment of Maine from Massachusetts went on uncontested. This idea of repartitioning WA is hardly new ... I remember it coming up repeatedly even 45 years ago, when I was in high school outside Spokane, and it wasn't new then.

 

It also was a really popular idea with the neo-Nazis, to sever off eastern WA, northern ID, and (sometimes) bits of MT and OR, amalgamate it into one entity, secede from the US (or ZOG as they referred to it) and make a new Reich so they could kill whomever they felt like killing.

 

Look, I'm from Maine. There's a reason that Massachusetts didn't put up a fight. Probably the same reason that the Aroostook War resulted in the Brits saying, "Whatever. Keep it."

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