Slashdot Mirror

Our current economic system has created existential risks by discounting the risks of centralization and just-in-time production and just-barely-works systems without huge margins of resiliency. One tragedy-in-the-making example is the USA recently selling off its emergency strategic grain supplies.
http://ppjg.me/2010/11/12/usda...
http://articles.latimes.com/20...

The USA could as a nation be putting in place a more distributed resilient production system (including indoors food production or even space habitats) to ensure the safety of its citizenry even under huge unexpected disasters. The USA has chosen not too because it does not fit with the current economic dogma that discount such "black swan" existential risks. Hurricane Katrina is an example of failure to systemically plan for obvious serious weather-related risks, Given that example, it is unlikely we can expect the USA to plan for even rarer risks like supervolcanoes, solar flares, pandemics, rogue AI technology, asteroid strikes, economic meltdown, civil war, or whatever else. Still, if you add up all the rare risks, taken together, the probability of some sort of "black swan" event may not otherwise be as rare as one might expect -- and they can all be addressed to some extent by creating a more resilient decentralized infrastructure and promoting more cooperation among people (rather than competition).

I find that situation frustrating because I find issues about resiliency to be very interesting civil defense problems to think about (e.g. my OSCOMAK idea), but the current notion of national security is focused on intrinsic unilateral military might, not intrinsic mutual resilient security. The "Lifeboat Foundation" and "The Living Universe Foundation" though are examples of some groups that have concerns in this area -- but with little funding and lots of competition for that funding compared with the effectively trillion US dollars a year the USA spends (or effectively incurs) annually for military-oriented defense.

Like George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/a...
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield [or a three foot deep ash field...]"

A resilient infrastructure coincidentally is also more compatible with "democracy" since there can't be real political democracy without some level of financial and material independence for the citizenry. At least the Maker movement is a bit of hope there. As are the changing economics of indoor agriculture given LED lights and robotics, even without potentially cheaper energy supplies if either hot fusion or LENR/QuantumEnergy/ColdFusion turns out to be workable.

http://marketrealist.com/2013/10/shutdown-101-perceived-wealth-distribution-isnt-reality/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Health care disparities would presumably reflect that too, to some extent. But a deeper issue is how health is more than access to "sick care", What you eat, how much you worry, where you can live, whether you have time for self-education and exercise, these are also big factors, and those connect to at least a certain level of wealth.

The USA is really confused about that, in part because of decades of propaganda funded by very selfish people.

On global issues, see:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey/
http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/
http://www.gapminder.org/GapminderMedia/wp-uploads/Results-from-the-Ignorance-Survey-in-the-US..pdf

Meanwhile, China is about to land a robot on the moon!

As George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Get a balance exercise ball to replace your chair. Keep your chair for the first couple of months as it will take some time until your back is strong enough to sit on one for the entire day. In the end, the working position is just as comfortable as a chair but you spend a large part of the day working your core (not strenuously, but it adds up.)

These are the ones that many people in my office have (adjust size according to your height.)

"The problem is that there are hostile, sometimes crazy, nations that have nuclear weapons"

Like the USA? :-) If not today, maybe after the next election? What about a country that has institutionalized torture, that has about a quarter of its population food insecure, that is becoming completely dependent on other countries for consumer goods, and that is blowing up people around the world with killer robots, is sane?

You may be unable to see the forest of my point for the trees of your strategic reply, perhaps because you are caught up in short-term thinking about the rationality of military planning (each point making sense by itself) while missing the overall increasing systematic risk? That is the kind of thinking that lead to the recent global economic crisis --- every local economic decision making sense locally, but then the whole house of cards collapsing as the system collectively passes some phase change boundary (like heated water starting to turn into steam). Like pollution, increasing systemic risk is an externality often unaccounted for in local decision making (whether economically or militarily).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is based on rationality at all levels of the system (except that the whole approach is crazy for reasons I mention below). You just said there are crazy people out there. So MAD will not work. It can not keep working indefinitely for exactly the reasons you mention ("hostile, sometimes crazy"). Seriously, why should a crazy leader of either North Korea or the USA not just start nuking other countries because they think they are on some mission from god or something and everyone else is to terrified to stop them? Example:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
"George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month."

Another source from before Bush's election:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
"''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.'' "

You're also ignoring the bigger issue is that WMDs is no longer purely a national problem. Like has happened so many times before, the technologies like nuclear weapons, designer plagues, nanotech, cyberwarfare, or killer robots, that once were only in the control of big countries are going to eventually filter down to the average small country or even small group or individual. Our entire military doctrine is out-of-sync with emerging 21st century realities.

Or, as George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

An essay I wrote on that general issue:
"Problems of the MAD doctrine, their consequences, and positive alternatives"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/browse_thread/thread/6b18338b6b947931
"The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) wi

(and I highly doubt that absolute morals exist in the first place)

Reminds of a Terry Pratchett quote, a conversation between Death and his granddaughter (sort of), Susan:

'All right,' said Susan. 'I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

"REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE"

'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little- "

"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES"

'So we can believe the big ones?"

"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING"

'They're not the same at all!"

"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- "

Death waved a hand. "AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED"

'Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point---"

"MY POINT EXACTLY"

I agree this could be provided cheaper, but you underestimated the solar power requirements by a long shot.

The solar panel suggested in your link is an 18-watt ($175) solar panel, and is inadequate to charge the 60-Ah battery included with the Xantrex Xpower 1500 Powerpack. A complete charge would take several days of full sun.

The Lenovo & Dell packages include a 110-watt solar panel, which sells for about $6-700 dollars at Real Goods or Mr. Solar.

For $1500, you could by a decent laptop for $1000, and then assemble your fun $300 solar/battery kit.

BP just realizes that there's tons of good PR to be made from appeasing to the "greenie weenie" demographic (you know, the ones that pat themselves on the back for buying over-priced pesticide-free terrycloth bathrobes from catalogs like Gaiam). I doubt that any of the oil producers are truly interested in any of these alternative oil sources, unless they plan on patenting them to get a piece of the pie.

I currently live in Indonesia, where people commonly burn rubbish - including farmers who burn the husks from rice production. Although this certainly isn't the most environmental form of waste management, I feel that if they are already burning rubbish, at least they could collect the energy from the burning?

I just found these online: 12 LED fits in bulb socket

Don't put out a lot of light but might be good for some situations.

Well, perhaps it's not generally applicable enough to be considered a "solution" so let's call it a "solar consideration" instead.

Anyway, although I was disappointed when Real Goods became part of Gaiam, they at least still have a decent selection of solar power devices, some of which (as I understand it) can power your laptop directly. Under the right conditions, this would easily allow you to keep the system powered for many more hours than the typical laptop battery would provide (although, for DVD watching, the darker environment that may be desired for viewing would be counterproductive for watching on solar power).

Anyway, just something to think about, and certainly Real Goods is not the only source of such items. I recently bought a small solar battery recharger from Silicon Solar, for example, and some of the products in their catalog would probably be workable for this too.

(Many caveats apply, of course, including the size/portability/convenience of the solar power device.)

Free energy as in speech already exists, if you know where to look for it. :)

Generator Joe has quite a few.

Bowers Power has some as well.

Google knows all

Propane generators can usually be powered by natural gas as well. They have lower emissions than gas or diesel generators, are generally quieter, and can also be a lot cheaper in operating costs. I don't know if that makes your TCO lower than just hooking into the power grid, but free energy as in speech is here and now. But it's not free as in beer, and the cost to set it up is much higher than just getting an account with your utility guys.

Now for ways to reduce your costs. Most homes already have natural gas powered heaters, so we'll ignore heating this time.

These guys sell propane-powered replacement for appliances that are typically electric these days. Replace your fridge, dryer, and washer, and that knocks out 90% of your electric bill (except for air conditioning).

For air conditioning, I didn't find anything outside just replacing the source of electricity to the air conditioner.

Of course, if you live in a dry climate, swamp coolers are pretty nice.

Buck_Wild wrote:
I think that all new TVs need to be attachable to a treadmill, and exercise bike, a stair climber, etc. that wil shut the device down if a certain cadence or time limit is not met.

Perhaps this bicycle-powered generator will help you:

http://www.gaiam.com/retail/product.asp?product_id =17330

And here's a guy who built his own:

http://users.erols.com/mshaver/bikegen.htm