Viewing profile — ccalloway

The thing about burning gas for heat in your home is that it's either very clean, or there is something seriously wrong with your system. There is no scope for it causing 'respirat…

Obviously my original example, "saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance" perfectly fits your definition of econ…

You didn't directly address anything I said in my post or explain why you think I am poorly informed.. I used to work for National Grid in the Miliband era; I worked, among other t…

That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, where…

But for most of the time, the marginal cost of electricity is the same across the UK. The transmission network is not usually maxed out, and this means that generation anywhere can…

But by framing it as a problem of 'curtailment', it looks like a problem which gets worse and worse, the more oversupply of wind capacity that we have. In actual fact, this does no…

This isn't a real economic loss. Claiming it is, is tantamount to saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance.

There is a hierarchy of time availability of power supply: 1. power available when you want it, and you can choose on the fly 2. power available when you want it as long as you kno…

You are absolutely right. Building pylons through much of England means dealing with highly organized NIMBYism - from people who care a lot about their local 'environment' but very…

It can be designed for, but it wasn't designed for when current UK nukes were built; they were intended to replace baseline coal plant.

The deformity in the general population affects 0.24% of male babies, so 0.12% of the population.

This does explain why Playstations are not dynamically priced, but it fails to explain why concert tickets are not dynamically priced.

By this definition everything that can be resold is dynamically priced. The GP was trying to explain why airline tickets, but not consumer goods, are dynamically priced when sold b…

The problem with this is that a person who makes a mistake when doing something is much more likely than someone else to make a mistake when evaluating that same piece of work.

It bears no relation to the risk of revenue loss for the airline. It is based on demand. An airline runs hundreds of flights a day, and it knows that a certain percentage are going…

Tickets for the theater and for concerts are also generally sold for considerably below the price that the market will bear, with enormous effort put into ineffectively preventing …

2 is roughly 10^(0.3) Suppose that you take powers of 2, and then divide by 10 if it's greater than 10. 2^7 ~= (10^(0.3))^7 = 10^2.1 --> 10^(2.1 mod 1) = 10^0.1 2^4 ~= (10^(0.3))^4…

We only know about the ones that get caught.

The hunters said 'a tree might fall on you and kill you'? This is supposed to be a nugget of ancient wisdom. Now it turns out it's actually a coconut falling out of the tree? Are y…

or perhaps the main difference between Papua New Guinea and the GP's location is that people feel entitled to make up weird questionable stories about PNG and not about their place…

It seems like 1:5000 is not an accurate probability, but just a number which he chose in order to convince himself that sleeping under a tree was not a risky activity. But he chose…

M = string length and M = number of different possible values are very, very different. One is the exponential of the other.

It makes some sense. You don't want to accidentally make some of your edits on one version and some of them on the other version. That would mean that you end up with wrong data, a…

By the notion of distance from the article (great circle distance around the earth), Lisbon to New York is considerably shorter than the current record.

Well, no. The shortest rail distance between two points is very very short, because you can choose the two points very close to one another.