Galt's Gulch
10

EPA: Better to freeze to death than heat with wood.

Posted by ObjectiveAnalyst 10 years, 9 months ago to Government
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What is next? Will they send inspectors to your home to sniff your chimney? The EPA is once again out of control! Wood burners beware! Campfires verboten?
SOURCE URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2014/01/29/epas-wood-burning-stove-ban-has-chilling-consequences-for-many-rural-people/

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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 9 months ago
    I think the same way about RF spectrum rules. We always hear spectrum is scarce, and it is in urban areas. They could have much more permissive rules in rural areas. I think such a system will eventually be adopted.

    Look at the ISM bands-- i.e. the bands with little gov't regulation, like 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5-6GHz. They're packed! I hope they open more spectrum to intelligent sharing.

    I agree they should do this for wood heating too. And even in urban areas, you should be able to buy a pollution credit if you really want to burn wood for some reason.
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    • Posted by $ blarman 10 years, 9 months ago
      It all depends on the propagation. I'm a Ham Radio operator and the thing that most people forget is that electromagnetic signals don't limit themselves to a specific area - they just keep going until they are absorbed. So many of the rules are created to take propagation into effect. Safety is also a factor, as high-frequency waves carry more energy. Then you also have to worry about things like interference and intermodulation distortion to devices that aren't even in the same range. On top of that, you have the scientific "best uses" for a given band and the conflict between private, commercial, and governmental use, because you have to designate the band for only one of these customers. That's quite a bit to juggle.

      While I don't think it is perfect, the FCC's rules for controlling the EM spectrum are some of the few based more on science than ideology.
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      • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 9 months ago
        I just think they could be dynamic, so if a device senses it's in a rural area with little congestion, it could take more bandwidth.

        I am not saying the spectrum should be a free-for-all, but it's amazing at how well hoppers, broadband OFDM, and other services co-exist peacefully on the ISM bands. You look at an analyzer and see a 20MHz segement is free only 20% of the time. You connect to a coffee shop AP in that environment, and get >1Mbps. It's an example of people coexisting without only a few rules.
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        • Posted by $ blarman 10 years, 9 months ago
          While there is certainly possibility, the complexity of what you are talking about is enormous and subject to the characteristic frequency itself. You're not going to be able to get datalink speeds on any of the bands below Microwave simply because the frequency isn't high enough to support it. And the complexity of the components necessary to be able to scan a wide range of frequencies and automatically dial back bandwidth usage is going to mean very expensive components.

          Could it be done? Certainly. Can it be cost-effective? We'd have to see. Can it be done without government regulation? I'd like to think so, but the recent fights over bandwidth allocation have been all about money. So are you going to require civil services to pay to maintain exclusive rights to certain frequency ranges? Amateur radio certainly doesn't have the money to compete with Google, yet we serve as the backbone of communications response in times of disaster as well as for public service events.

          This seems to me to be one of the few examples where the natural laws of scarcity and allocation lend themselves to government oversight - as much as I hate to admit it.
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          • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 9 months ago
            In theory if you have enough SNR, you can cram huge amts of data in a narrow bandwidth, but in practice you're limited by the need for low-cost transceivers. So I think you're right that lower bands are not that useful. Higher frequencies in the 60GHz range, however, will be becoming more practical.

            Dynamic freq allocation is all the rage in the technical journals now. Some stuff like MIMO that sounded impractical to me 15 years ago is now cheaply deployed in many 802.11(n) chipsets. There is a huge explosion in mobile data right now. So I tend to think elements from current journal articles about spectrum sharing that sound fanciful today will come to pass.

            http://www.element14.com/community/commu...
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            • Posted by $ blarman 10 years, 9 months ago
              What you are referring to as frequency hopping isn't really - you're just automatically moving to a less congested band. True frequency hopping involves both the sender and the receiver alternating their communications frequencies on the fly. This is typically only used by governmental bodies who use it to scramble communications and make it nearly impossible to eavesdrop and requires some serious hardware - most of it restricted use.

              For mobile, what you actually need is spread-spectrum technologies because it allows for decent bandwidth for very low power consumption. That's also one of the downsides of the higher frequency bands: power consumption is at a premium.
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    • Posted by RevJay4 10 years, 9 months ago
      Agreeing to buy a "pollution credit" gives validity to the claim of GW. How does the buying of said "credit" benefit society, other than lining someone's pocket? Who would be the seller?
      Who gets to say you can burn wood, a supposed pollutant, if you just pay for it? Then you get to pollute. Doesn't make sense.
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      • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 9 months ago
        Is GW global warming? It's valid whether I give it validity or not. I can't make up facts b/c I don't like their consequences. Regarding pollution credits, we can attempt to calculate the cost of damage from pollution and then charge people for the cost. That way we don't have to make hard rules that limit pollution regardless of how useful the activity is. If someone has something that will generate billions of dollars of value to willing customers, it's worth doing some environmental damage. By the same token, if someone can clean up pollution, they could be eligible to sell the credit to the polluter. This creates a market for positive and negative externalities of production.
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    • Posted by monalisaturberville1957 10 years, 9 months ago
      That opens the door to make government even bigger. Hmmm, let me think about it. I don't think so. We should not be forced by government to do what we have to do already. Why add something else to the dirty mix?
      I am of the mind that surely there are enough of us like minded folk out there to do away with the present government that is not working and begin a new one. I believe it has been said that is what" we the people" should do. The only way to turn this country around is to gather together and do something drastic. Talking about it is not working, has not worked. We cannot step into a parallel world, we actually have to be brave enough, willing enough, courageous enough to create change.
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