Posted on 02/26/2009 4:39:54 PM PST by EveningStar
Burn After Reading was their best in about a decade! It was nice to see them abandon ethnic caricature and see their characters anthropologically. It was also completely pitiless in its nihilism. Every single character was stupid, loathsome or some combination of the two.
Seriously, I don’t see making a movie that tells you people are morons for two hours is much of an accomplishment in this day and age. It’s a boring, college dorm attitude which pervades this movie.
It’s a lot harder to make some interesting characters. Just watching some idiots be idiots for two hours wasn’t my idea of fun, trendy philosophizing aside.
I’ve paid to watch my last Coen Brothers film.
Will they be following it up with a spot explaining why wind power is a fraud?
What’s the obssession with ideological purity. Who cares what they think about stuff like this?
I don’t know what to tell you. *I* haven’t been saying that, so I don’t care what “people” have been saying, I just calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.
I find it impossible to ignore that they have made some really bad movies which all seem to have the same problem—half-done scripts that need another rewrite.
Their best movies are solid. Those I dislike, like BURN, feel like first drafts that need major work.
I even loved ‘O Brother Where Art Though’ which a lot of people couldn’t stand. Their worst has to be ‘The Lady Killers’ which was borderline incompetent.
The trend is in that direction. Lately, the average is close to 90%. Perhaps over the last five years. Companies have spent a lot of effort to reduce outage time. Unplanned scrams frequency is way down because of enhanced reliability and improved I&C systems.
If we're ever going to move away from the use of petroleum-based fuels in the transport sector, we're going to have to do it in two ways. One could be electric substitution. But that means improving EV performance, particularly for range and environmental control (heating in winter, A/C in summer). That means a big leap in storage technology. Batteries aren't there yet and fuel cells are terribly expensive. The other would be substitution of coal-based liquid fuels for petroleum-based fuels. That means a big push on liquefaction infrastructure, and less use of coal in utility applications. I suppose NG could be used (and is being used) in the transport sector, but there are issues with energy content from an energy density viewpoint, and infrastructure concerns.
Cycling of nuclear units for baseload electricity supply could be implemented, especially if we move to the modular designs like the MHTGR I looked at many years ago. You can adjust output of those by bringing up (or down) various plant modules. I'd like to see more load-following units online also, maybe based on the EBWR or ABWR concepts. Adjusting output via recirc flow rate is a sweet way to do it.
Or we could quit foolishly leaving our resources in the ground and unused.
My point was clean coal(scrubbed of all the real sky darkening soot)exists today and is not some pipe dream waiting for some scientist in some government lab the future to invent it.
As it is in the present,solar and windmills cannot provide a fraction of our energy needs today, much less the increasing demands of the future.
Yes CO3 is not the problem but the lack of function powerplanrs will. Rolling brownouts and even blackouts will be the major issues the public will be howling about, not whether there’s enough ice at the polar icecaps.
Riots will breakout in the major cities during the summers.
“Lock and load” will be the popular phrase of the day
Well, you've just done a succinct cost-benefit summary. We just use too much coal-fired generation right now to simply switch it off. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be on some kind of intermediate and long-term path to conserve depletable resources and those that are better suited to end use, and move towards fuels that are presently best suited for baseload generation. On the latter, nuclear is the best way to go. It can displace first, gas-fired generation, and second, coal-fired generation. That helps the air and overall environmental quality, and preserves those resources for better uses. Gas for home heating and other domestic use, coal for perhaps eventual use in the transport fuels sector (liquefaction).
I agree, especially about the future will be nuclear fueled... Unless there is some dramatic new discovery in solar, wind efficiency.
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