It's Coober Pedy. The people that live there are so enthusiastic about their little town they're known as "Coober Pedyphiles" to outsiders.

Coober Pedy is actually quite an interesting place. It's first and foremost an opal mining town but makes bank from tourism these days as well. It's a convenient stopping point halfway between Adelaide and the central city of Alice Springs. Also, the town is known for underground living - a lot of residents and a number of hotels are underground, due to the fact that the AVERAGE daily maximum in January is 98.1F, with a historical max of 116.8. Even in the middle of winter in July, it has hit 86.2F.

I like this picture proudly displayed on its Wiki page:



That counts as "scenic" in the north of SA, a region characterised by hundreds of miles of absolutely nothing at all.

Edit: I've been there once btw, but as so young a child that I barely remember. I vaguely remember staying in an underground hotel. It's one of those places that is cool as a tourist I guess, but as a local there is no reason to ever go there.

so it's basically arizona?

No golf carts in picture. Def not Arizona.

Don't know why people are freaking out about this anyway. The pope met with lots of prisoners.

The actual carbon footprint of nuclear is hard to estimate as well. But there are very large up front emissions from construction (concrete production) and mining the fuel. Solar has considerably lower emissions and wind much lower than solar. Nuclear has its place, but it's not the best option.

Solar and wind are not options for replacing most of our carbon-intensive power generation though. That's the point. In 5 or 10 years, they might be significant contributors, but we're not going to live in a country where 80% of power comes from solar. We could easily be living in a country where 80% of power comes from nuclear. That could have been the case 30 years ago.

Germany was at 26% for solar in 2014 and will probably make 30% this year. If they can do that, we can easily do 50%, which along with wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass, and conservation are more than enough.

We sort of already went over this in the energy thread, but it really seems that human living standards are pretty tightly correlated to the amount of energy we have easy access to. I don't doubt that solar and other established renewables could meet the current per human demand for energy in time, but economic growth and standard of living increase demands a steadily increasing use of energy. Of course we can achieve part of this effect by increasing the efficiency with which we currently use energy, but can that really be all? I don't see an economic revolution like the industrial revolution happening without some sort of explosion in energy access that could (seemingly) only come from nuclear fission or fusion.

Kind of a bold prediction that we can do twice as much proportionally as the country that does more than any other country, isn't it? The reality is that solar is subsidized in China when it's manufactured, subsidized here when it's installed, and subsidized by the existence of nonrenewable grid power while it's operating, and it's still a niche product. Sure if there are continuing revolutions in panel cost and someone invents some miracle storage device, solar could be huge, but we just don't know how to run an electricity grid that's based on solar. We do know how to run a grid that's based on nuclear and we have for many decades.

Conservation is of course huge. Really huge. Not "doing fewer things" (though that could be fine too), but just wasted energy like industrial waste heat. Huge. It's more than half our energy that is just flat out wasted.

Talk is the Pope gonna fire the Archbishop that brought her because of the PR nightmare.

At first I was like, "lol baseless Renton assertion", but then I thought hey, let's check this out. So I took the top 50 countries by per capita energy consumption and compared it to the top 50 countries by HDI. That narrowed it down to 37 countries that appeared on both lists so ruh roh, correlation problem! But let's plot this out and look at the trend lines.

Not really because we have a much better solar resource and a lot more open flat land, and even for rooftops a lot bigger flatter roofs.

Solar panels also get a 30% tariff coming out of China.

All energy is subsidized in lots of ways.

Solar prices have fallen way more than they've been subsidized and are continuing to fall fast.

"it's still a niche product" was true yesterday, it really isn't true today and sure won't be true tomorrow. This is changing incredibly fast and if you formed that opinion a few years ago it's way out of date.



6.2GW was added in 2014, which is double the 2012 additions (the most recent on that chart).

LOL the liberal media won't address how violent Muslims are, amirite?

Denmark uses less than half the energy per capita as the US. Mostly it just takes trying.

Elon Musk demonstrated in his presentation the area of solar panels needed to provide energy for the entire United States. It was a tiny piece of Texas.

lol what a terrible ****ing statistical argument. If you put in all the lower countries you're going to fill in the bottom of the graph. There's clearly some effect, and there's clearly diminishing returns.

Suzzer, your team's offensive line is bad and you should feel bad.

I was going to troll the chef planets gameday chat but decided against it.

Feel free to present data that backs up Renton's assertion.

That would require work like this matters; and you know I'm right already.

Reading between the headlines I think I stumbled on some earth shaking news.

Today Gawker.com reported that President Obama's oldest daughter is looking at colleges.

I remembered this quote from President Obama.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ted-an-update/

“It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.”
–President Obama, remarks at White House, Jan. 22, 2014

so I was very surprised to see that that the majority of the schools are co-ed.

I thought ok maybe the children of presidents get life long secret service protection.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...t-of-his-life/

Nope
His daughters will not be protected after January 2017.

The only way this makes sense if Obama is planning on running for another term. I don't know how else to explain it.

OBAMA 2016

LOL Doug what sort of forum did you think you were posting that in where your rape culture denialism would be seen as a cutting gotcha against that libtard hypocrite?

But wow, what a window into the "mind" of a Trump voter, holding a grudge over Obama using the 1 in 5 survey.

Dear libtards,

If campus sexual assault is real and not just a feminist ploy to suspend bros who **** drunk, regretful sluts... how come you still send your daughters to college?

GOTCHA