This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.
I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.
I always envied the amount of options bass players had. Even in the 90s there were new brands starting to pop up like crazy. Lakland, Ritter, Tobias, BassLab...
With guitars, apart from the metal guitars, there's only vintage-inspired stuff with either a tune-o-matic or a Wilkinson tremolos... I'm exaggerating but that's indeed what I see for sale on my local shops.
On the other hand we do have Teuffel guitars in Germany, so maybe I should just put up and buy one from Uli Teuffel while he's still young.
My fancy basses are a Lakland and a Sandberg (also German). But even, say, Ibanez was doing a lot of interesting stuff with low-cost instruments in the 90s, and on the high end there was Alembic, Modulus, Fodera, Ken Smith, hell, even Music Man (from Leo Fender), Tobias (and later MTD). Neck-through construction, active electronics, composite bodies, fiberglass necks. I don't want all of those things in my basses, but it was exciting to be able to try them. There was so much experimentation in basses at that time, but it was pretty rare with guitars. Again, Parker seemed to be the only well-known company doing it.
My theory has been that it was that bass guitar is a new instrument. Electric bass really isn't an electric double bass, but electric guitar is an electric version of a steel-string guitar. There was a lot of history and nostalgia in guitar playing, whereas bass was this new thing.
The other part of my theory is that bass amplification demanded it to some extent. Amplifying a bass was hard at the time. And it's come so incredibly far. Guitar players still basically use the same amps they did in 1965. But bass players moved quickly from tubes to transistors, and now to class-d amplifiers, and miniaturized speakers. My 500 watt amp weighs 1.1 kg and fits in the pocket of my gig back, and my 4x5" cab which handles 400 watts of power and goes down to 35 Hz is 30 x 30 x 30 cm and weighs 9.5 kg. Those together are smaller and weigh less than my 15 watt guitar tube amp.
Man I love how pragmatic bass players are. I also have a tiny Class D for my bass (I play a bit of fretless for fun) and it's magical how much better it is than the amps I played in the past. Granted I never had an SVT, but on the other hand my back is thankful for that.
I feel like guitar players are constantly trying to get into the technology but then fashion changes. Grunge for example made everyone sell their racks and shredder guitars.
Now that I think about it, I actually had a POD bean before I even had an amplifier, but then it became unfashionable to not have tube amps among my in-group back then. On the other hand I see lots of touring bands using Kempers, Quad Cortex, Tonex, etc. so maybe the tide has turned! For now!
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
While I sort of agree that VAT exemption is a sort of subsidy it's important to remember that all other power generation typically receives the same "subsidy" because it's done by companies which don't pay VAT.
I see, but the grid operator has to collect the VAT for every kWh from the customer. I don’t pay VAT for my balcony PV and also not for the energy I get from it. That is not parity, I as a producer have an advantage here.
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.
The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.
Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
That's 0,38 Euro/W of panel power, including inverter and cable. And there might be a solid price uptick on that because of the shop that's selling it. Wholesale from specialized shops is probably much cheaper...
Just for the record, that seems to be an 860Wp "Schwaiger Balkonkraftwerk 860 Wp Wifi fähig" for €325, "inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.", but not including "Versand- & Lieferbedingungen
+ 99,99 € Versandkosten". So it's €424.99, which is €0.494 per peak watt, about five or ten times the wholesale price of just the solar module.
Yes, but you could also just drive to one of the roughly 2.000 home and garden markets and just take one of the sets home with you in your car. Or get yourself cables and an inverter and buy the cheapest panels you can find, maybe even used ones.
The thing is: Prices are falling fast and that's great for everybody.
Adderall is just speed, which also has a long history of recreational usage. It was a widely used recreational drug decades before it began being used for ADHD.
There are a few different orders within the catholic church with some of their own intellectual, practical and traditional differences. Most popes don't come from any of the orders. The last two popes did. That's historically odd. Francis had been the first one from his order ever, even though it's the largest one.
I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-)
My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)
The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
This is the standard way that kids learn to ride bikes in Europe. Apparently the English word for them is "balance bikes". Both my kids could ride one of them when they were 2.
I would always know it as a kick-bike, but yes agreed.
Our child got a kickbike for his 2nd birthday an was proficient in using it within days. From there he moved to a pedal-bike when he was around four or so. No training wheels, and no real difficulty.
“Training Wheels” are generally called “Stabilizers” outside the US. They exist and people use them.
Balance bikes also exist in the US and have for just as long as they have existed in Europe.
But this is not about either. A real bike without pedals is needed, because the transition from gliding to riding can take as little as 30 minutes. I mean, for sure, get your small child a balance bike and let them use it for fun. In my opinion, a razor scooter-type thing is even better. The key is to get the child to not worry about being slightly off-balance and instead of panicking they steer and/or lean to correct.
Years ago, I paid REI $50 for a learn-to-ride class for my oldest son. They did this remove-the-pedals thing for 100 kids in a group and had every single one of them riding in an hour with just 5 or 10 instructors. I watched the whole thing in amazement and did it on my own with each of my younger kids. It turns out that it is really easy to teach, and my youngest was riding a real bike at age 4.
> In my opinion, a razor scooter-type thing is even better.
I'm 44 and still can't ride a two-wheeled scooter. I don't know if it's harder or different from bicycles (which I have ridden regularly and enthusiastically since I was about 7), but it just won't click for me.
Not sure what I wrote that upset people so much. Do whatever works for you and/or your kids. I apologize for suggesting that there are multiple approaches to solving this problem.
Looking back, perhaps I was offensive for suggesting that Europe and America were pretty much the same on the topic of learning to ride a bicycle. If that was the issue, I do not apologize.
It isn't universal in the US. I had never heard of balance bikes until this thread. All my friends rode tricycles as toddlers then bikes with training wheels gradually adjusted higher until they were removed.
Berklee is a music school. There are some fields where being average at a decent school can still result in being pretty successful. By and large, music is not one of them. Being an average music school graduate probably means not getting to work in your field (or doing something auxiliary in it, like doing e.g. booking at a club or something). Like, if you get a degree in computer science from a top school, it's almost certain that you can find work as a computer programmer if you want to. That's not true if you get a degree in jazz guitar performance.
I wonder if being location based would be helpful? I'm not actually a heavy phone user, but I would guess that people are mainly using it as a distraction when they're at home or work, and less likely if they're out and about? (Though honestly, for me, the main thing I use my phone for at home / work is two-factor-authentication, and there it'd probably be annoying.)
Yeah, there's something off in the story. I went to public schools in one of the most poorly educated cities in the US and of course we were doing fractions when we were 7. 9th grade (admittedly "honors", so about a year ahead of non-honors students) was geometry / trigonometry. For non-honors I believe that was algebra.
