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Tesla's home battery might lead to an energy revolution, but probably not for you.

The economics just don't make sense.

Bloomberg explains:

The noble home battery user wants independence from the grid, but a more sensible approach would be to pair rooftop panels with batteries designed to extend some solar power into the peak evening hours of electricity demand. When the battery is depleted, the homeowner would switch over to grid power. That's an idea that Tesla has been promoting: Save money by modestly extending the benefits of solar power with help from a battery.

The problem is that this kind of energy "load shifting" doesn’t save a penny for most U.S. customers, regardless of the cost of the batteries. Blame a policy known as net metering, explained in more detail below. Even in more favorable markets like Germany, the total cost for buying and installing a home battery would have to drop by almost two-thirds before load shifting would be cheaper than running rooftop panels without any batteries, according to analysis by BNEF. Tesla sees Germany and Australia as the biggest initial markets for daily-use batteries.

Even if home battery costs were to go low enough to make them economical with the current status quo, that fact in itself would likely shift the status quo.

This is already beginning to happen as some utility companies allow people with renewable power sources like solar panels to plug those sources into the grid in order to reduce their energy bills.

Another Bloomberg story from back in December reported on a couple who had added solar panels with the assumption they could connect to the grid and reduce their monthly bill to zero, only to be refused once the panels were installed:

Solar installers here estimate that hundreds if not thousands of the state’s residents are being put in solar limbo by a virtual moratorium on new connections in many parts of the company’s service area. The reason, according to the Hawaiian Electric Co.: so many Hawaiians are stampeding to solar that circuits may become oversaturated, causing voltage spikes, damaging appliances, electronics and even the utility’s equipment. The company needs more time to study the matter.

There's a suspicion, however, that it's less about the circuits and more about the economics of the wide adoption of solar over the last few years. If everyone tries to sell their electricity back to the utility companies, there's no one left around to buy it from them. We seem to be quickly approaching the inflection point, where the utility companies are going to need to start fighting solar, rather than encouraging it.

SEE ALSO: Home battery systems will be an energy revolution — but maybe not for Tesla

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NOW WATCH: This couple wants to turn America's roads into gigantic solar panels

Google Chrome is a fine browser, but that goodness comes with a number of foibles that make us want to tear down walls and run to Firefox . But as Lifehacker points out, there’s a good reason that Chrome eats up so much damn RAM—and there are solutions to help you get around it.

Read more...

June is fast approaching, so that means there will be a slew of new movies and TV shows heading to Netflix.

This coming month brings the return of "Orange is the New Black" as well as "Sense8," Netflix's latest foray into original programming.

Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to see what a Shaquille O'Neal all star comedy jam looks like, Netflix will offer a few of those as well.

Check out everything coming to Netflix in June.

Here's what you should check out on Netflix in June:

TV

"Sense8" (available 6/5)

The Wachowskis' ("The Matrix," "Cloud Atlas") first-ever TV series could restore them to their former greatness after their most recent movie, "Jupiter Ascending."

"Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." (available 6/10)

The second season of Marvel's first attempt at extending its ambitious cinematic universe to the small screen will be available on Netflix. 

"Orange is the New Black" (available 6/12)

The critically-acclaimed series that put Netflix original programming on the map returns for its third season. After a stellar second season, and an unforgettable cliffhanger, things are looking up for the new season.

"Scandal" (available 6/13)

The fourth season of Shondaland's wildly popular political drama will be avaliable to binge watch. 

Movies 

"The Aviator" (available 6/1)

Martin Scorsese's 2004 epic about the life of Howard Hughes marked his second collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio (the first was "Gangs of New York" in 2002). The film also earned Cate Blanchett her first Oscar for her entertaining performance as Katharine Hepburn.

"Nightcrawler" (available 6/10)

Now you will finally get a chance to catch up on one of the best films of 2014, which features Jake Gyllenhaal as a wildly ambitious but morally twisted man trying to break into L.A. crime journalism. Unfortunately, Gyllenhaal was not nominated for an Oscar for what is, by far, the best performance of his career. 

"Rosewater" (available 6/10)

Jon Stewart took off "Daily Show" hosting duty during the summer of 2013 to shoot this drama about a journalist (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is thrown into an Iranian prison after participating in a "Daily Show" bit. This is a great way to kick off Stewart's last few months as host; his last show will air on August 6.

"Life of Crime" (available 6/10)

This adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel is also a prequel to Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" from 1997.

Here's the full list of June releases:

Available 6/1

"Employee of the Month" (2006)
"Hidden Kingdoms" (2014)
"La Dictadura Perfecta" (2014)
"R.L. Stine's Mostly Ghostly" (2008)
"R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It" (2007)
"Sex Ed" (2014)
"Shaquille O'Neal Presents: All Star Comedy Jam: Live From Atlanta" (2013)
"Shaquille O'Neal Presents: All Star Comedy Jam: Live from Las Vegas" (2014)
"Shaquille O'Neal Presents: All Star Comedy Jam: Live from Orlando" (2012)
"The Aviator" (2004)
"The High and the Mighty" (1954)
"The Magdalene Sisters" (2002)
"The Perfect Dictatorship" (2014)

Available 6/3

"Best of Me" (2014)
"Hector and the Search for Happiness" (2014)

Available 6/5 

"Sense8" (Season 1)

Available 6/7 

"Words and Pictures" (2013)

Available 6/8 

"Grace of Monaco" (2014)

Available 6/9 

"Free the Nipple" (2014
"It's Tough Being Loved by Jerks" (2008)

Available 6/10

"Nightcrawler" (2014)
"Pretty Little Liars" (Season 5)
"Rosewater" (2014)

Available 6/11 

"Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." (Season 2)
"The Legend" (1993)
"The Legend 2" (1993)

Available 6/12 

"Champs" (2015)
"Life of Crime" (2013)
"Orange is the New Black" (Season 3)
"The Cobbler" (2014)

Available 6/13 

"Antarctica: A Year on Ice" (2013)
"Scandal" (Season 4)
"Transformers: Age of Extinction" (2014)

Available 6/15 

"Bindi's Boot Camp" (Season 1)
"Danger Mouse" (Seasons 1-10)
"Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" (2013)
"Really Me" (Seasons 1-2)
"Rodney Carrington: Laughter's Good" 
"Team Toon" (Season 1)
"Wizards vs. Aliens" (Seasons 1-3)

Available 6/16 

"Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of" (2015)
"Curious George" (2006)
"Lee Daniels' The Bulter" (2013)
"Two Days, One Night" (2014)

Available 6/17 

"Heartland" (Season 6)
"Point and Shoot" (2014)

Available 6/19 

"A Most Wanted Man" (2014)
"Some Assembly Required" 

Available 6/20 

"Cake" (2014)

Available 6/23

"Advantageous" (2015)

Available 6/24 

"Beyond the Lights" (2014)

Available 6/25 

"Ballet 422" (2014)

Available 6/26 

"Dragons: Race to the Edge" (Season 1)
"Katy Perry: The Prismatic World Tour"
"What Happened, Miss Simone?" (2015)
"Young & Hungry" (Season 2)

Available 6/27 

"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (2012)

SEE ALSO: Here's everything leaving Netflix in June

AND: Here's when all your favorite TV shows are returning this summer

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The trailer for the Wachowskis' mind-bending new Netflix series 'Sense8' has a lot of 'Matrix' in it

Stone hut on the coast of Scotland.

Contributed by Alastair Humphreys.

LG wants to make mounting your TV just as easy as sticking a magnet onto your refrigerator.

At an event earlier this week, the South Korean electronics giant showcased an incredibly thin 55-inch television with a flexible screen that you can press onto your wall using magnets.

It's just a concept, though — there's no indication when or if a product like this will actually come to market. The purpose of the announcement was really to announce LG's plans to focus on making OLED screens for products moving forward. 

The TV screen itself is less than a millimeter thick, according to CNET. For context, that's about the same thickness as a paper clip. As shown in the image below, a magnetic pad holds the flexible TV screen up to the wall.

The TV itself almost looks like paper. 

LG's new display marks yet another concept device that showcases how flexible screens could one day be implemented into everyday products.

Both LG and Samsung have been pioneering flexible display technologies over the past several years, but we have yet to really understand why gadgets with curved screens would even be necessary in the first place. A television such as the one LG showcased earlier this week begins to answer that question a little bit.

Samsung is believed to be capable of developing a fully flexible phone by 2016, a company executive said at an investor event in New York this past November, but it's unclear exactly what the advantages of a bendable phone would be. Both Samsung and LG have released phones with curved screens, but they haven't really caught on with consumers. 

SEE ALSO: Samsung's new phone with a curved screen is absolutely gorgeous, but there's one problem

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NOW WATCH: Everything you need to know before buying a 4K TV

Install something expensive in a car and thieves will find a way. At first it was catalytic converters and airbags, now it’s hybrid batteries, with a spate of break-ins reported on both coasts.

Read more...

If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the same can be said about progressivism. The best example of this found in academia where the humanities and social sciences have been so adulterated by the deceit and stupidity of left wing academics that they have become a drag on civilization.  Usually this bastardization of learning takes place with the full acquiescence of people who know better but on occasion one of these frauds and poseurs is actually nailed.

A study purporting to show that people’s views on gay marriage could change simply by meeting gay people has been retracted following revelations that its data was fabricated.

The study was published last December in Science, and prior to publication drew a great deal of attention from the American media. Vox, for instance, described the findings in the study as “kind of miraculous.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what they were, because they were apparently made up.

According to the study, people from communities hostile to gay marriage could have their opinions shift dramatically after spending just a few minutes speaking with a gay person who canvassed their neighborhood promoting gay marriage. Not only that, but this could have a spillover effect, making not just the people themselves more pro-gay but also other people who lived in the same household.

The study, among other things, lent support to the notion that those opposed to gay marriage simply don’t know or interact with open homosexuals. More broadly, it was seen as an important development in the science of how people can be convinced to change their minds on ideologically-charged issues.

Ummmm… not so much

In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author.

The author is a guy named Michael LaCour, a grad student and budding propagandist at UCLA and slated for bigger things:

According to his website, LaCour will become an assistant professor at Princeton University in July. [Update: As of 8 a.m. Eastern on 5/20/15, that mention had been removed from his site, but it is still available on theGoogle cache version.] We’ve contacted him for comment, and will update with anything we learn.

LaCour, like OJ, is still searching for the real killer:

The real beauty of this bit of academic fraud is that while anyone who knows “people” would instantly laugh at it, the left believes its own bullsh** if you throw in an equation or two and maybe a graph that isn’t too hard to read so it has that “sciency” feel. The results can be hilarious. Let’s go back to October 8, 2014, when Planned Parenthood adopted this tactic:

Smarting from defeats in state legislatures across the nation and seeing the public support for infanticide slipping, Planned Parenthood has come up with a great idea. They will send door-to-door canvassers to convince people that abortion is a good thing. What makes this canvass different from any previous efforts is that the canvassers will be women who have had abortions.

The workshops training these Willie Loman’s of Infanticide was overseen by Michael LaCour. There is a certain rich irony when one contemplates a room full of abortion activists being gaslighted by a fellow leftist into making epic asses of themselves while engaging in research fraud.  In fact, he used the results of this goat-rope as a springboard for another paper. From his CV:

And on the positive side of the ledger, anything that entertains college-age leftists and spends their money does have a positive social impact for the rest of America.

The post Scientific fraud revealed. Progressives hardest hit. appeared first on RedState.

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

The post Group Projects appeared first on Bits and Pieces.

The clock is ticking: Later this year, eBay and PayPal, together since 2002, will split into two separate, publicly-traded companies. 

In a presentation in San Francisco today, Dan Schulman — currently President and the designated post-split CEO of  PayPal — laid out his vision for why an independent PayPal is beginning from a position of strength and how it's going to continue to dominate the online payments market.

In 2014, Schulman says, PayPal brought in $8 billion in revenue, which is enough to earn a place as a Fortune 500 company. And if that's not enough, Schulman says, PayPal revenue for the last quarter was up 17% from the quarter before.

To keep that growth train going, PayPal is making its service work better with outside software developers, a traditional weak point for the company, Schulman explains. 

While PayPal was once a massive, immutable pile of code that took months to change, the company has made it a focus to "disaggregate" the platform, breaking it down into many more moving parts — which makes it easier for developers to make changes on the fly. 

If an online shopping site wants to use PayPal as the middleman to accept Apple Pay or Google Wallet online payments, more power to them, Schulman says.  The plan is that when someone clicks the PayPal button on an online shop, those other services will start to appear as payment options. 

Mobile push

The other area of big growth for PayPal is mobile payments. In 2010, mobile accounted for 1% of PayPal payments. In the past three months, it accounted for 30%. 

To push that momentum forward, PayPal's developed PayPal One Touch, a button that online businesses can put on their sites that let users order stuff in one touch. They even announced that mobile developers can build PayPal Touch into their apps, meaning that customers don't even have to leave the app to make the one-touch order.

The thinking is that if PayPal makes it easier for people to order stuff, web stores are going to want to use PayPal, and everybody wins. 

In fact, high-profile shopping startup Bigcommerce, which offers tools for quickly and easily making online stores, also announced today that it'll be making PayPal One Touch available to its 90,000+ client stores.

Everybody, that is, except for PayPal's many, many competitors: Payments startup Stripe is reported to be raising a $5 billion to take PayPal on directly, while Chinese e-retail giant Alibaba is launching its own Alipay mobile payments service. And that's only the tip of the iceberg, as other companies are also looking to expand into mobile payments. 

To increase its already-big lead in online payments, Schulman says the standalone company will have to move fast. 

"We have a lot to do to get there, we have a lot of work ahead of us," Schulman says.

Join the conversation about this story »

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