Massachusetts Gains Foothold in Offshore Wind Power, Long Ignored in US (nytimes.com) 174
New Bedford hopes to soon be the operations center for the first major offshore wind farm in the United States, bringing billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs to the town and other ports on the East Coast. The New York Times: On Wednesday, that effort took a major step forward as the State of Massachusetts, after holding an auction, selected a group made up of a Danish investment firm and a Spanish utility to erect giant turbines on the ocean bottom, beginning about 15 miles off Martha's Vineyard. This initial project will generate 800 megawatts of electricity, roughly enough to power a half a million homes. At the same time, Rhode Island announced it would award a 400-megawatt offshore wind project to another bidder in the auction.
The groups must now work out the details of their contracts with the states' utilities. "We see this not just as a project but as the beginning of an industry," Lars Thaaning Pedersen, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, which was awarded the Massachusetts contract, said in an interview. Offshore wind farms have increasingly become mainstream sources of power in Northern Europe, and are fast becoming among the cheapest sources of electricity in countries like Britain and Germany. Those power sources in those two countries already account for more than 12 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity.
The groups must now work out the details of their contracts with the states' utilities. "We see this not just as a project but as the beginning of an industry," Lars Thaaning Pedersen, the chief executive of Vineyard Wind, which was awarded the Massachusetts contract, said in an interview. Offshore wind farms have increasingly become mainstream sources of power in Northern Europe, and are fast becoming among the cheapest sources of electricity in countries like Britain and Germany. Those power sources in those two countries already account for more than 12 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity.
Ignored? HAH!! (Score:5, Informative)
Champagne Socialists (*cough*Ted Kennedy*cough*) have been fighting this for YEARS, afraid that it will spoil the precious views out of their sea-side mansions...
Ted Kennedy was a lot of things (Score:3)
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All your link proves is he preferred drinking to voting...Can't blame him for that.
Of the ones he bothered showing up for (on the first page), all but 2 are handouts. One of those was a pure partisan power grab (DC 'voting'). The other was removing immunity from telcos for aiding the NSA, which was pure 'ass cover'.
Sure they aren't overtly 'marxist', but 'socialist' has a broader definition.
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One of those was a pure partisan power grab (DC 'voting').
Giving US citizens, who are taxed just like the rest of us, representation in congress is a partisan power grab? Get out of here with that crap. It's ridiculous that they haven't had representation since day one.
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Complete historical ignorance.
The solution, to the extent one is needed, is to cede pure residential land back from DC to Maryland (IIRC, whichever state DC was carved out of in the first place). But leave the federal government living in it's zone. This solution is also better as it just kills the corrupt abomination known as DC city government, puts DC schools and local services into competent hands.
It's a partisan power grab.
Never said I liked Ted Kennedy (Score:2)
Re:Never said I liked Ted Kennedy (Score:4, Insightful)
Which flavor of socialist? Many hate each other. What makes you the judge? A Maoist would say: 'you aren't'.
All socialists are _not_ Marxists.
Better idea: Ask folks that lived under socialism what they think about socialism. Yeah, yeah, 'no true scotsman'. Sell it somewhere else. Marxism is broken, the police state is inevitable, built right in.
Re:Never said I liked Ted Kennedy (Score:5, Informative)
Better idea: Ask folks that lived under socialism what they think about socialism.
I've lived under socialism, and I really liked it. Free healthcare, free education, no one living on the streets. Quite substantial taxes, but you felt people got something back for the taxes, and especially those who needed it the most.
Of course, as you say, there are many flavours of socialism. This was a social democracy with the socialist worker's party having a clear majority for several decades.
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I can't help but notice you don't claim to live there NOW...you must not like it as much as you say.
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I can't help but notice you don't claim to live there NOW...you must not like it as much as you say.
I got married to a monolingual person (i.e. American).
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Dodge the issue...that's fine. You had a choice, you choose to live where life is better.
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Ask the guy dying of easily curable diseases in the gutter what he thinks of capitalism.
Or maybe just accept that extremes of anything tend to be bad. Right now the best counties to live in are all socialist.
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Vote with your feet! Most foot owner-operators disagree with you.
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You seem to have forgotten, "socialist" doesn't mean what it used to mean. These days "socialist" means anyone who isn't a conservative, just like "fascist" means anyone who isn't a liberal.
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The next generation of Kennedys is _even_stupider_. Comes with old money.
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Rich cunts get progressively more inbred with each generation. And the Kennedys have been rich for a lot of generations.
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Can see it from LAND. They don't want to view ruined when they helicopter over to their yachts.
Re:Ignored? HAH!! (Score:4, Informative)
Solar is dirt cheap, cheap enough for everyone's roof,
For values of "everyone" that excludes those who don't have a south facing roof, those who have trees, mountains or buildings around them, or those who live far enough from the equator that sunlight is weaker due to the atmosphere, and scarce in the winter half of the year.
offshore wind is a scam
Eppur si soffiare.
Denmark currently produces around 42% of all the country's electricity through wind, most of it offshore. By 2020, this is expected to pass 50%.
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Won't happen (Score:2)
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$$$$$$$$$$$$ + NIMBY = 0% chance of it happening.
I haven't studied the wind patterns off the Atlantic seaboard, but it seems like they could go a little north and try the Maine coastline, perhaps? Is it about visibility for their project?
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It's offshore.
How is it in or near anyone's backyard?
I mean, I guess the wind farm will be visible from shore, but it's my understanding it'd still be pretty far out. People live closer to all kinds of city infrastructure that is *FAR* more visibility occluding than that.
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I haven't studied the wind patterns off the Atlantic seaboard, but it seems like they could go a little north and try the Maine coastline, perhaps?
And spoil the view from the Bush family compound on the coast of Maine . . . ?
$$$$$$$$$$$$ + NIMBY = 0% chance of it happening.
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They won't be able to build windfarms that close to Marthas Vineyard. If you have ever been there, you know why.
I'm honestly surprised it's legal. In my home city, wind power is illegal. What little information I found on the subject when I looked into it pointed to lobbying by special interest groups interested in protecting birds.
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Wind turbines are not a threat to birds (Score:4, Informative)
What little information I found on the subject when I looked into it pointed to lobbying by special interest groups interested in protecting birds.
Which is one of the more bullshit arguments one can make against wind power since wind turbines kill rather few birds. Cell phone towers actually kill far more birds [usatoday.com] than wind turbines do but I don't see people complaining about those. And cats kill orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines.
From the link
"Wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds annually — a small fraction compared with the estimated 6.8 million fatalities from collisions with cell and radio towers and the 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion deaths from cats, according to the peer-reviewed study by two federal scientists and the environmental consulting firm West Inc."
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Wind turbines aren't created equal in terms of bird safety. Fast-spinning ones with many blades, usually short ones, are quite dangerous. However, the amount of energy gained from the length of the blade increases at a cubic exponential rate, so the huge three-bladed turbines that rotate relatively slowly are actually the most effective solution for generating energy *and* are fairly safe for birds. The trope of the dangerous bird blender is really oil industry astroturf.
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So, enough wind turbines for a minute fraction of the electricity needed kills ~5% of the number of birds as are killed by the cast number of cell towers scattered hi
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And cats kill orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines.
I think cats kill a very different kind of bird than wind turbines. I am pretty certain that the number of hawks and eagles killed by house cats is very close to zero in comparison. Taking out predators seems to me to be more likely to matter in the ecosystem balance picture.
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From the same article:
The wind energy industry has occasionally been at odds with conservation groups because of bird deaths. They clashed in December [2017] when the Obama administration, eager to promote non-polluting renewable energy as a way to address climate change, announced a new federal rule that allows wind farms to lawfully kill bald and golden eagles under 30-year permits.
I doubt domestic cats are killing bald eagles, and they sure as hell aren't getting federal permits to do so for the next 3 decades.
Spectacularly missing the point (Score:2)
I didn't see any mention of per capita in that article.
You seem to have missed the point. Domestic cats kill 4 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more birds than wind turbines. Two orders of magnitude more birds die from flying into STATIC towers than are killed by rotor blades. There is NO evidence that wind turbines present any meaningfully increased risk to birds especially given that there is zero chance of there ever being as many wind turbines as there are cell towers.
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You make a very good argument here. Thank you for actually contributing to the conversation, this is a breakthrough for slashdot!
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European companies (Score:1)
...the State of Massachusetts, after holding an auction, selected a group made up of a Danish investment firm and a Spanish utility ....
And our current administration's policy is to promote 19th century while the rest of the World forges ahead in the 21st century.
Solar cells from China and wind turbines from Europe and other renewable energy.
Cost Rica has wind power - you know, a Third World sh...
Some of us need to get over this nostalgia for an America that never existed and get up to speed because we ARE behind in many areas.
Life changes - it's a fact - and trying to keep the status quo always fails.
New Bedford??? (Score:2)
End of an era (Score:1)
Many fond memories of roblimo from the way early days of slashdot while I was in college. Wonderful open minded being, please watch over us
Yhcrana
We're closing a nuclear plant nearby (Score:2)
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>it could probably be a cheaper option too.
I don't think so. If anything, newer nuclear power plants get MORE expensive per kwh produced.
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When you look at pictures of Pilgrim power on Google Maps, you can see where they store the spent fuel rods. They're almost on top of the shoreline: https://goo.gl/maps/yB8EG8AYNk... [goo.gl]
I'm not really opposed to nuclear, but the politics on all sides makes it a poor option. The anti-nuclear crowd blocks legitimate research, and the pro-nuclear crowd doesn't want to do what's needed to keep radiation contained. Even worse, we can't get the politics together to move our nuclear waste to safer storage, so it just
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Unless you were being facetious, you're wrong [ourworldindata.org]. Nuclear is actually the safest of major energy sources.
The first flaw in the argument you present is that it assumes that the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters are under control when they are not. Flippantly the article discards the destruction of the residents community as "induced stress from the evacuation process" whilst ignoring the other vectors of transgenic disease and pregnancies that fail to come to term.
The second flaw in the article is there is no metric to quantify the damage to the human genome caused by nuclear power as the mechanisms that cause
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So apparently wind, solar, and hydro aren't "major energy sources."
They aren't. They generate very small amounts of power, and require those evil fossil fuel base-load power plants to even be considered.
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They aren't. They generate very small amounts of power,
Growing faster than any other kind of power.
and require those evil fossil fuel base-load power plants to even be considered.
False [theconversation.com], and also, storage systems can do the job as well and are getting cheaper all the time.
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Growing faster than any other kind of power.
And still miniscule.
False [theconversation.com], and also, storage systems can do the job as well and are getting cheaper all the time.
So what major power grid relies solely on renewables, doesn't use nuclear, coal, natgas, or other "bad" fuel sources for base load?
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Miniscule? In many countries renewables have overtaken nuclear.
Besides, you've got it the wrong way around. The whole "base load" concept only exists because of coal (and late nuclear) power plants. Everything else is load following in the first place. Without coal and nuclear there is simply no need for base load.
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"So what major power grid relies solely on renewables, doesn't use nuclear, coal, natgas, or other "bad" fuel sources for base load?" - same answer to previous
there are at least 40 cities claiming 100% renewable power which is not bad in such a short time and considering the knock backs r
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Hydro is NOT considered a renewable is some states? ROFL, more fool them
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Why Martha's Vineyard (Score:2)
I don't know much of anything about that section of the country, but what is the magnetic attraction that Matha's Vineyard has for offshore windfarms? I've heard about the NIMBY effect blocking windfarms there for years, but the east coast of the US is an awfully long stretch of "offshore" for there to be such a kerfuffle about this one place. I'd expect strings of windmills to be used as replacements for buoys emmanating from New York harbor to create traffic lanes at this point (the masts would be usefu
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Thumb in the eye of the limousine liberals living in the vineyard. They SHOULD 'eat their own dogshit'.
The left eats itself...it's a feature.
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LOL, you think criminal politicians actually prosecute each other.
That's quaint.
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Trump is the odd guy out. The DNC and RNC have enough to send each other to prison, at any time. They are just trying to add Trump to the MAD circle.
Nothing will come of it. Because the libs wet dream is: 'As much dirt on Trump as on Clinton.' Even if they get that, they are just back to where politics started.
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Exactly; "If we prosecute them, they might turn around and prosecute us!"
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Answer: Martha's Vinyard's attraction for wind power production is the combination of fantastic winds (capacity factors for similar new builds in Europe's offshore are in the 60%+ range, equal to coal generators), shallow waters even far offshore (i.e., easy construction), and its close geographic proximity to both the Boston and NYC demand hubs.
IOW: high wholesale prices, cheap install costs, and high capacity factors (i.e., high output per wind turbine) = profit!
UK and Germany and offshore wind power.... (Score:2)
That bit should have been left off the summary, if whomever were really trying to make a case.
The amount of offshore windpower they attribute to the UK and Germany (combined) amounts to 0.0035% of all the electricity produced in those two countries.
In other words, it's a rounding error, not a significant factor....
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I read your calculated figure and thought "that can't be right".
However, my feeling means nothing, so let's take a look at the 'actual' numbers (Well, I'm going to have to make some simplifying assumptions, because the most recent (2018) data didn't seem to be available):
This page [ofgem.gov.uk] lists the mix of energy generation in the UK, by quarter. I'll use the last entry, Q4 for 2017:
Total (unitless) generated: 90.2.
Total (unitless) renewables generated: 18.33.
Using the spreadsheet linked to on this page [www.gov.uk] shows us tha
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Wind, in total, is 37% of 'British' renewable energy (in 2009). The rest is Hydro, biomass and biogas. British solar?..They have sun in England? When?
About 3.
Easy statistical lies to fuck with these numbers, (include/don't include) Scotland. England is flat, English drunks in squirrel wheels have much more generation potential than English hydro. The generation potential of Scottish drunks is virtually unlimited.
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Like the post I replied to, you've stated a number but provided no reference. although, unlike that post, your figure looks to be in the right ballpark at least.
However, I'm not sure of your point.
Using the data table I linked to in my original response it's easy to see that while generation from hydro remained pretty much unchanged (5.2 -> 5.76), biogas roughly tripled from 2009 to 2017 (9.57 -> 27.21) and the power generated from wind and solar over the same period increased greater than sixfold (9.
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As many cites as you provided...
My point is you are overstating wind by 2.5x.
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My point is you are overstating wind by 2.5x.
An interesting assertion.
Would you care to back that up with some logic demonstrating where I've gone wrong in my calculations?
Or perhaps provide a link of your own, backing your point of view? Of course I'd prefer a cite that's more authoritative than that of the government regulator responsible for overseeing electrical generation within the UK, but I'm not entirely sure who that would be... Perhaps you could provide an answer to that too?
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Offshore wind generated 2.7% of the power in Germany in 2017, but offshore wind is just starting now. All renewables were at 33.3%. Source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... [ag-energiebilanzen.de]
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Thank you.
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offshore wind produce 2.7% of all electricity in Germany in 2017. Source: https://www.ag-energiebilanzen... [ag-energiebilanzen.de]
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OP said "of all electricity produced" by those two countries, not what they actually used. Fun fact, some countries produce more energy than they use so they can sell it to other countries.
His math may be off (haven't checked), but yours is on another planet alltogether.
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There's also a need for more power independence in parts of Europe, to reduce reliance on Russia.
We'll see if it falls through. (Score:2)
Once the NIMBYs stick their oars in.
Ahem. (Score:2)
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, please. The copy editor at the Times ought to know this. Sheesh, the quality of journalism these days.
(Trivia contest time: how many other commonwealths are there and what are their names?)
OK, get back to ranting about NIMBYs, Kennedys (live or dead), wind farm subsidies, fossil fuel cronys, and how the Illuminati are poisoning the oceans.
On-shore first (Score:2)
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I work for a company that have been installing offshore turbine since 1995, and the first turbines are still running.
The conditions inside a wind turbine nacelle is comparable to the conditions inside a machine room in a large ship.
When the turbine is operating, or have been within the last 48 hours, the temperature inside is higher than outside, and the dew-point.
The intake filters remove salt mists.
Dehumidifiers remove moist from the air when powered up after grid loss.
Surfaces are designed to withstand 6
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Also, salt spray drops off very quickly with altitude. Typical offshore turbines are more than 100 meters above sea level, and the biggest are over 200 meters ASL. Up that high, the amount of salt in the air is negligible.
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Every power source requires expensive maintenance. They're all extremely expensive, and clearly not viable if you think about it too much. Ie, hydro is extremely expensive to build for the first time, and they constant maintenance. Coal fired plants are not as expensive the first time but they are very hard to maintain, dangerous for the workers (unless you spend even more money on silly safety issues), they've got turbines to keep running, toxins to figure out where to dump, and these days you need to d
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Your not German, or you'd know how much they pay for electricity.
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(B) I guess Germany is paying a lot more for electricity than they realize.
Electricity in Germany is hecka expensive. They are a shining example of what NOT to do: Don't let politicians make technical decisions, and don't do massive roll-outs of immature technology.
Shutting down their nukes was insane. Building new nukes may not make sense, but the main reason is the enormous capital expense in the construction and startup, and the costs of the shutdown and cleanup. But for Germany, those were all sunk costs. They had stable, operating nukes, generating clean reliable power.
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Electricity is expensive but only part of the price is due to the feed-in tariff for renewables. That this is paid for from the electricity price was intentional to reduce demand and avoid a rebound effect. It was also highly successful strategy as Germany is credited for bringing down the price for renewables. Nuclear also got a lot of subsidies from general taxes - this is not better. The energy transition in Germany is supported by large parts of the population, was discussed for decades, and well planne
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Whale oil was good enough for great granddad, so it's good enough for me!
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I know... I complain all the time about not having a beach at my house, and nobody listens. It's so unfair.
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Don't forget the non-monetary costs, because some cheaper power options are not good for the public as they pollute too much. Only feasible if you assume the fossil fuels will last forever and that you never have to pay for cleanup or mitigation. They won't last forever so alternatives MUST be found and used.
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Initially, almost all major power plants were amazingly expensive, and many did use government help to get things going. Or at least they got big tax write-offs, nothing makes some utilities happier than to bitch about taxes in public and then accepting tax breaks under the table.
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Utilities have always used "peaker" plants. These only run during peak usage, or for unexpected demand, they are being turned on and off on a regular basis. There's experience in turning on and off these plants with short delays, and experience in estimating additional capacity is needed. These are generally the dirtiest plants also as well as being expensive. If they can use fewer peaker plants due to occasional wind power then that's a good thing.
Solar for sure reduces the need for turning on more peak
Re: Danish investement firm, Spanish utility (Score:4, Interesting)
Offshore is much more expensive. Why deploy offshore when you still have untapped onshore?
In Europe, they live sitting in each others laps, so no room, offshore it is.
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Vastly?
No. They both suck, as far a capacity factors go.
There are some onshore locations with better wind then some offshore locations. You general point isn't true.
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Kids change you
Does APK have children? I'd bet against it - while there are all kinds of tastes out there, there must be a limit to how much craziness that women can put up with. Mustn't there?
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I wouldn't be too sure. I see some guys who are absolutely nuts and impossible to get along with, and they seem happily married. I suspect part of the cause is that they don't talk about "work". She doesn't understand what a hosts file is or how it's better or worse than adblock, and she's not on slashdot, so she doesn't know about the crazy. I've also seen couples where both are bonkers. Or women who just put up with it because they were raised to always be submissive to their husband and never questi
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Big standing turbines like they use in wind farms wouldn't really work in cities for safety reasons and helicopters, but you could a bunch of smaller ones in long tubes and mount those on the sides of the roof.