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Using Google Earth to See Destruction
An anonymous reader writes "On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth. This new layer will tell "the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth."
On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth.
What a letdown. By "special interactive layer", I was expecting shared control of an orbiting laser cannon.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
We have to quit destroying all the mountains. We will need them to live on after all the coal we burn causes the water levels to rise due to global warming.
Paint the mountains green!
... should be that the US has a 200-800 year supply of coal, and if OPEC or anyone else in the world says "screw the US", the US can just turn around and say "screw you". Coal can be processed to make fuel too. We shouldn't sell our independence and liberty down the river for the sake of some enviromental cause. Even if we used all the coal, only the tiniest percential of mountains would even have noticable changes.
The tar sands, rebranded the oil sands a few years back, and now billed as a solution to American energy independence, is a massive environmental tragedy. Acres upon acres of strip-mined natural wetlands, and massive amounts of natural gas burned to separate the bituminous oil from the sludge. I would really like Americans to see first hand the cost of energy independence.
So, if you want to check it out, the link that should have been in the story is:
http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/
I thought Google had stuck a satellite over the middle east and had it continually taking pictures or something. Then I read the summary. Bit of a disappointment let me tell you.
What no before and after shots?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
with the sound of Appalachian Voices setting placemarks...
Password required ___________________
I dunno, I didn't see much after that. Pretty ugly.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I hereby award samzenpus the "Far Out" award for the John Denver quote on the "dept" subtitle. 8-)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Which just goes to show that coal is the debbil's work, as nothing like that would exist 'pushed up on top of the mountain' unless it was the devil's doing. Certainly it couldn't have happened by non-diabolical means in the 8000 years since the Lord(*) created the Earth.
(* The Lard Dog almighty! Praise the Lard!)
Think about it. If the T-Rex had this tool they might have been able to forstall the deforestation caused by that evil meteor. Their gradual decline and loss of way of life could have been prevented. It is really too bad Google Earth didn't exist back then.
I only wonder if Google will soon build Google TimeMachine and let people travel back to help the poor dinosaurs prevent the incredible deforestation and increases in global greenhouse gasses caused thereby.
One can only hope.
All Hail Google!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/birds-eye-v iew-of-mountaintop.html
-Ian
Don't they know that strip mining prevents forest fires?
Have you ever been to West Virginia? It's called mountaintop removal.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
I can't believe that got moded up. check out west virginia some time and tell me there aren't mountains associated with coal.
John Prine wrote it. John Denver covered it.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
As I understand it, the coal was pushed up when the tectonic plates collided. In the past, they would dig into the mountain and get it through the mine, but it is easier, cheaper, and requires fewer workers to blow off the top of a mountain and surface mine it. http://www.crmw.net/campaigns.php
The problems we have with coal are a big issue, but if you would prefer the United States rely on old dirty power sources so the coal companies can make more money instead of investing in new, cleaner technology, then you should be concerned about the people who are being affected in the area. http://www.crmw.net/campaigns.php?camp=mfe
True self sufficiency should be achieved through sustainable methods that do not harm the property of individuals and their communities. Mountain top removal harms more than the environment.
Ban mining! Let the bastards freeze in the dark!
(Apologies to the people who came up with that first)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
How can we save the earth?
Google should arm leftist guerillas in key areas with high-value ecosystems: e.g., the rain forest. In exchange for arming the guerillas, they agree to help the environments by killing poachers and blowing up companies that rape the environment.
Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.
if OPEC or anyone else in the world says "screw the US", the US can just turn around and say "screw you".
Boy, you'd think so, but we got kicked hard in the balls and now we're funding both sides in the war on terror, and not building any new fission energy plants.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was there once when I was very young. I even saw a "mountaintop removal" operation, and I also saw what the mountaintop looked like after they had put it back, they did a damn good job, I couldn't tell that there was a difference (though I am sure animals were displaced, etc.) I think all in all it wasn't too bad of a job. (I was like 12 at the time, so maybe I'm off, maybe a resident of the area would like to back up or refute my post)
I got nuthin
For those that are not really sure what layers are or what this article is about..
Assuming you have Google Earth installed..
Now it's your turn to fly over the region. I invite you to take a look at the mountaintop removal layer in the new featured content for Google Earth. Look for "Appalachian Mountaintop Removal" under the "Global Awareness" folder of the "Layers" sidebar. You can take the site tour of a mountaintop removal operation, explore the featured mountains and affected communities marked with blue flag buttons, and use the slider bar to see high resolution images of these mountains before and after mountaintop removal. To view all the locations of the over 470 mountains that have been destroyed, please visit the full featured version of the Memorial on www.iLoveMountains.org.
Coal is not usually associated with mountains.
Never heard of the Appalachia and the Appalachian Mountain range then have you? Or Black Mesa? Coal mining was extensive in both places and still is in Appalachia.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This new layer will tell "the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems.
We MUST save the mountains.... Mountains are people too, you know!
I won't be surprised if there's a follow-up posted here in a few months about Google Maps and/or other similar services being strong-armed by government/industry (likely under the guise of "protecting homeland security") into censoring environmental damaged areas from public view.
Ron
So we'll probably burn coal to make Hydrogen that we can than use to power our cars.
Actually reforming natural gas makes a better source of hydrogen than coal. The best way to produce hydrogen though may be using algae to produce it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.
Those would be some sort of impressive shoulder-fired missiles, to hit Korean fishing vessels from Peru...
Unless those Koreans are really going out of the way to get their fish, that is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.
Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts
Have you ever seen what uranium mining does? Many of those who live where it is mined are opposed to the mining, such as the Diné or Navajo and those in Saskatchewan. Aboriginals in Australia have fighting mining since before it started, the Mirrar and Jabiluka have been fighting it since at least the 1970s.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Pictures can't convey the devastation that is mountaintop removal.
If you've never heard of mountaintop removal or don't see what the big deal is, then please do check out the overlays, but nothing compares to seeing it firsthand.
Any natural destruction: earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane Katrina, pales in comparison. In all these cases, the human community may suffer great losses, structural damage, but these can all be built back in time. In mountaintop removal, the very land itself is utterly destroyed; there is nothing to build back on. The people cannot move back because the ground is unstable for decades to come. Entire ecosystems are buried along with streams and rivers in valley fills. The groundwater for miles around is poisoned with heavy metals and acidic drainage.
Every time I drive past one of these sites I get chills down spine. I am horrified that humans are capable of defiling the earth in such a manner, and all in the name of money...
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Terraforming the area does mitigate the damage to the environment significantly, although some companies have replanted the area with grass instead of trees. There has been an effort to encourage replanting of trees, but it might also be interesting to see if switchgrass could be grown there.
The largest environmental concern, however, is the production of large amounts of slurry (a water suspension of coal, sulfur, and other minerals that is created as a byproduct of the mining and cleaning process) which ends up stored near the mining site behind large dams created during the excavation process. Long-term disposal of this slurry presents a huge environmental challenge.
However, much of the political opposition to mountaintop removal mining comes from labor union pressure, since it takes far less manpower to conduct a mountaintop removal operation than to run a conventional mine.
The problem is that many of the mining companies don't last long enough to put the mountaintop back where it belongs; they remove the mountain, take out some or most of the coal, and then go bankrupt.
There's a lot of finger-pointing when this happens, usually wherein management will blame astronomically expensive union employees and contracts, and the union negotiators and employees will blame mismanagement. (I suspect the truth is a combination of both, as usual.)
But the end result is that the company will go bankrupt and the mountain will get left torn apart. The same thing happens with some strip and open-pit mining operations; I know of a few places (mostly Pennsylvania) where there are open pit mines sitting around that were supposed to have been filled in, but the companies disappeared when the mines petered out.
IMO, the solution here is to require that before the first shovelful of earth is dug, that the mining company secures a bond for the cost of the environmental cleanup and restoration. If they go bankrupt or fail to restore the area within a certain number of years, the government takes over, calls in the bond, and has someone do it for them. The beauty of this is that it doesn't create a giant "trust fund" sitting around somewhere, for sleazebag politicans to raid for their own pork-barrel purposes, and it ensures that mining companies who don't fulfill their obligations will be pushed out of the marketplace: if you blow it and a multi-billion-dollar bond gets called in, you can bet nobody is ever going to underwrite anything you do again.
I don't know if this sort of bonding is anything like current policy, but it seems like the simplest way, and one that avoids actually delving into why the mining companies fail, which is a can of worms better left sealed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
More NGOs should follow this example and use technology like Google Earth to show where they are working, and what they are doing. This gives people a better idea of where the money they donate is being spent. It also gives people a better idea of what work needs to be done, be it to protect the environment, or to reduce poverty (although the two are fundamentally linked) - this is how technology should be used to make the world a smaller place. What would be great if WWF included on the ground photos of their program activities, so people could take a virtual tour of what was being done.
The next step is for NGOs to use GIS to help them with their work. A good example which I came across was in a refugee camp in Uganda, where they plotted to locations of Cholera outbreaks, and then compared this to the location of all the wells. Some of the wells showed high concertrations of outbreaks around them, indicating that they were contaminated - and so they were closed down. This is just a basic example, GIS could be used to make really interesting correlations between education, poverty and the environment.
However I work for an NGO and know how slow they are to adopt new technology, but that's a whole different story...
the flippant nature of the conversation so far kind of disgusts me. I worked for some of these campaigns in West Virginia a couple summers ago, and what's going on down there is terrifying and, in my mind, evil.
The term isn't strip mining. This is worse. They call it Mountaintop Removal Mining, although really they destroy entire mountain ranges, then shovel the rubble into what were valleys, destroying thousands of miles of freshwater creeks. The work takes a crew of no more than a couple dozen, whereas traditional "deep" mining needs hundreds, so the jobs that the Appalachian hill culture depends on have disappeared along with drinking water, wildlife habitat, and resident's health. The destruction is complete. The mountains, their ecosystems, and the cultures they support will never return. Dirty King Coal, meanwhile, reaps unprecedented profits.
Remember, energy from coal is anything but clean. Coal plants push massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the mass extinction we all are witness to.
What's happening in Apallachia, one of Project Censored's 25 most censored stories of 2005, is a crime against humanity and the planet. I applaud Google for helping to bring attention to it. If any of you feel like helping in this struggle, www.climateaction.net/mjsb is a good place to start.
Why link a summary of content to a summary of content.
how about dropping that link right to something useful, not just another link site?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Not all mountains are of igneous origin. Some mountains are formed of heaved-up sedimentary rock. And there is a lot of coal in the deep seams of such mountains (Appalachians, Urals, no doubt others that don't come to mind offhand). Deep seams tend to be high-grade bituminous and anthracite (the result of putting sedimentary coal under pressure), which are more valuable because they burn hotter and cleaner.
Conversely, surface coal (the stuff you get from strip mines) tends to be low-grade bituminous, or worse, lignite (not-quite-coal-yet).
When I lived in Montana I heated my house with a coal stove (when it's -65F, wood just doesn't produce enough heat), and that's how I learned that coal from Montana was crap compared to coal from Wyoming, even tho the major strip mines were less than 200 miles apart. If I wanted decent coal, sometimes I had to drive down to Sheridan and pick it up off the side of the road (they'd let you do that outside the mines -- small chunks tend to fall off the trucks).
BTW when splitting coal for the stove, I often found fossilized "prints" from plants (leaves, tree rings, etc.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"You've obviously never seen the devastation caused by slurry "dams" breaking and flooding valleys with the muck. Or never had to deal with the dust generated by the mining or the pollution to the groundwater. I can guess you've never had to meet a coal truck on small country road at night in a blind curve."
You've obviously never seen Black Adder:
Rum: aah-ahhh! [strokes his hand] You have a woman's hand, milord! I'll wager these
dainty pinkies never weighed anchor in a storm.
Blackadder: Well, you're right there.
Rum: Ha ha ha. -Aah! Your skin milord. I'll wager it ne'er felt the lash of a cat 'o' nine tails,
been rubbed with salt, and then flayed off by a pirate chief to make fine stockings for his best
cabin boy.
Blackadder: How uncanny, I don't know how you do it, but you're right again.
Rum: Why should I let a stupid cockerel like you aboard me boat?
Blackadder: Perhaps for the money in my purse [holding it up]
Rum: Ha. -Aah! You have a woman's purse! [takes it from him and examines it daintily]
I'll wager that purse has never been used as a rowing-boat. I'll wager it's never had sixteen
shipwrecked mariners tossing in it.
Blackadder: Yes, right again, Rum. I must say when it comes to tales of courage I'm going to
have to keep my mouth shut.
Rum: Oh! You have a woman's mouth, milord! I'll wager that mouth never had to chew through
the side of a ship to escape the dreadful spindly killer fish.
Blackadder: I must say, when I came to see you, I had no idea I was goingt o have to eat your
ship as well as hire it. And since you're clearly as mad as a mongoose I'll bid you farewell
[gets up]
Rum: Aaah, courtiers to the Queen, you're nothing but lapdogs to a slip of a girl.
Blackadder: Better a "lapdog to a slip of a girl", than a... Git.
Rum: So you do have some spunk in you! Don't worry, laddie, I'll come, I'll come [holds out his
hand]
Blackadder: Well, let us set sail as soon as we can. [they shake] I will fetch my first mate,
and then I'll return as fast as my legs will carry me.
Rum: Ah! [pointing] You have a woman's legs, my lord! I'll wager those are legs that have
never been sliced clean off by a falling sail, and swept into the sea before your very eyes.
Blackadder: [crossly] Well, neither have yours.
Rum: That's where you're wrong
Oak Mapper is another site that shows some other negative environmental effects of the global economy, albeit less starkly visible. Oak Mapper is a webGIS that helps track the progress of Sudden Oak Death, a disease that is significantly altering the oak woodlands of California. If you download the KMZ or zoom into a marked area on the Google Maps version, you can see dead tree crowns around the site of the reported siting (the one in China Camp State Park just north north east of San Francisco has some good examples).
Internet mapping and webGIS are great tools for highlighting such environmental issues. They're also a good way to get the public involved and working with scientists. My lab runs Oak Mapper and has a number of other webGIS sites up and running that help to facilitate this connection between research and the real world. Google Earth has made our lives pretty exciting at this point!
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
For those who actually want to try out this, go to http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/. It describes which layers to turn on in Google Earth to be able to see the Appalachian mountains removal.
The World Wildlife Fund is please to be working with Google to showcase its projects. The WWF wants to do a smackdown on those who want to harm the world's wildlife. They seek to put a choke hold on companies who negatively impact those habitats. And the WWF strives to clothesline any legislation that will further endanger the most innocent of creatures on this planet.
Yeah, the wrong company won that name dispute.
Environmentalism has overextended its welcome in the public mind and it's time people talked about
the issues _behind_ environmentalism, instead of picking up a cue sheet of things to moan about from
your local environmentalist outfit.
Man-made or naturally occuring CO2, the latest science shows that neither are the cause of global
warming but a symptom. Looking at the data first the temperatures go up and _then_ CO2 lagging after
the temperature curve of hundreds of years. I suppose they prefer to talk about 470 mountains and
hills instead. Those are obviously man-made.
Don't believe me, go and watch this BBC documentary titled "The Global Warming Swindle" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU
Dr. Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace makes an appearance in that documentary so you might
want to hear it from the mouth of the horse itself.
Play on words = NOT funny
"windoze is teh suxxors" = insightful
P.S windoze is teh suxxors
News for Pinky and Brain. Stuff that matters.
Next Al Gore will overlay the whole thing with water from melting Ice Caps... He will show how Polar bears have migrated to Florida. And How all the humans have move north due to CO2 emmisions...
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
How about this one: "Keep mining! Let the bastards experience 10,000 Katrinas!"
I grew up in appalachia, and have a deep love for the mountains of which you are speaking. While I do agree with you completely that the term genocide is wildly inaccurate, and in principle, rearranging rocks is not a big deal, even when done on a big scale; I take issue with the idea that mountaintop removal has no real environmental impact.
Please note that I am FAR from an environmentalist. I believe that we need to be responsible with the environment, balancing that with the energy needs that we have. We cannot return to an agrarian society which uses only renewable resources.
Factually, abandoned mines do leave acid runoff which does affect streams. While I make no assertion that the Charleston Gazette is unbiased in this matter, the linked article also contains links to a report from the Department of Environmental Potection about the cleanup costs.
In summary, while I believe that your points are valid, it's also valid to acknowledge that a legitimate business cost is the cleanup efforts which must be undertaken after the coal is removed so that the streams are unpolluted.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
geocide is still probably pushing it, but genocide is right out.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I don't have anything against aboriginal peoples; it's just their stupid, stupid, backwards, stupid cultures that I have a problem with. The fact that they believe that their great-grandparents' claims to a piece of land have even the slightest relevance today just proves how ridiculous they are. It's the very worst sense entitlement imaginable -- a sense of entitlement to someone else's possessions. You'll never catch ME going out and suing the government to get back land that my great grandparents were too stupid to not trade for muskets.
I would hope, but doubt that it will happen, that they would also including stories of good things done about the environment. Not everything that man has done is bad for the environment, and because of the environmental movement itself, we are making positive changes. I think these should be noted. For example, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) State of the World's Forests 2001 reports that North American forest cover expanded nearly 10 million acres (4 million hectares) over the last decade. I'm sure theres lot more: land preserves, toxic sites cleaned up, etc....
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
This seems to be very one sided propaganda. Sure, any current or recent mountain top removal mining operation is going to look bad. Where are the before and after pictures of the operations from years ago that show what the reclaimed areas look like now?
_ info.asp
They've highlighted 474 Mountain top removal sites with little dragline icons saying "here look at the devastation" and yes it looks bad when shown in this way.
Here's some interesting information:
http://www.nma.org/policy/reclamation/reclamation
Sorry to be posting an AC but that's the way it is.
The Rockies, arguably North America's most well-known mountain range, are mostly sedimentary. Limestone and shale, baby!
How did the parent get modded up, exactly?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I think the problem may be one of definition. IIRC, "mountains" are caused by uplift and "hills" by erosion. What to call when both work together, like the Appalachians? Hmm, maybe "inbred?"
Anyway, here's how to put coal in a hill or mountain:
1. Coal layer in sediment.
2. Uplift.
3. Erosion.
4. Hills with coal in them.
5. Profit!
We have to keep destroying all the mountains. They get in the way of winds and make power generation less efficient.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Maybe if the game commission hadn't kicked all user groups but hunters out of the gamelands (which comprise the majority of forests in the state), they'd have a stronger group dedicated to keeping that kind of stuff from happening.
-how low cost coal energy kept families from freezing during the winter
-how low cost coal energy provided power to refrigerate food and medicine for kids
-how low cost coal energy provided power to medical equipment to save babies' lives
Nonsense, it should be modded up to +5. If only for showing that Google Earth is very useful in identifying exactly where the worst people on the planet are making their "living" by destroying everyone else's lives.
Killing those who are killing you is not "murder", it's self-defense. Killing the stockholders and executives would be far more effective than the poor slobs in the woods, though. There should be a mandatory death penalty for environmental crime above a certain scale, since you are certainly killing other people by doing things like deforesting slopes above villages, or polluting water supplies by gold mining. The President o the Phillipines said that illegal loggers were the same as terrorists and would be killed on sight, the same as terrorists. That's not "murder", and anyone who says it is simply wants to keep benefitting from his own investments in mayhem.
In 20 years, even trying to equate killing ecological destroyers with "murder" will probably get you killed. Everyone will have had relatives and friends killed slowly and painfully by environmental disasters, diseases spread by those, and etc.
If your stock portfolio holds any shares in the companies doing these things, you will have to lock your doors and taxi your children to private school in armored cars just like they do in Latin America. You'll be under constant threat of being kidnapped or killed, but it won't be "murder". It'll just be a bit rougher justice.
Yeah, "shared control of an orbiting laser cannon" that you can aim at executives and major shareholders' houses. Who cares where the destruction is? Show us who's profitting, and where they go to play golf, and attend fundraising dinners for their favorite politicans. Then produce maps to those places on demand, and hand them to really disturbed people looking to be remembered... all automatable.
No one has any right to burn ANY coal, anywhere, any more, or heavy oil like Tar Sand. The greenhouse gas alone, never mind the other pollutants, will cause the ice caps to melt and kill hundreds of millions of people, or at least send them as refugees to cause chaos everywhere. Wasn't Katrina enough of a wake up call? It was a very minor event. What happens when a third and fourth big hurricane flood New Orleans permanently and make the refugee situation permanent?
The faster the US and China get off coal, even if they have to go nuclear to do it, the better. Every other country with nuclear missles should aim them all at the coal burning plants and major mining/processing sites. The damage that would be done by destroying those with small nukes is less than the damage the coal plants do on a daily basis.
Only a deluded lunatic would think that there is such a thing as "independence" from the atmosphere.
And we mined it in the US of A for a couple centuries now without MTR. Why is it so vital to do MTR now?
From an energy perspective, someone has already brought up wind. Once you chop off the top of a mountain, there isn't anywhere to stick a windmill anymore when the coal is all gone.
What the "new breed" of mining companies that practice MTR (Massey et al) are doing isn't necessary to provide us with energy. It's pure short term greed. They want to strip all the mountains they can before enough people wake up and put a stop to it.
The UN's own local government agency, ICLEI, has settled on a Triple Bottom Line standard for accounting for local government operations. There are other entities working on management approaches to do exactly what you suggest, "to make really interesting correlations between education, poverty and the environment." The problems include the general lack of transparency in the developing world, an oral culture used to command hierarchies rather than bureaucracies operating by written rules, and no real appreciation of the role that process quality and personal integrity plays in holding the whole system together. However, there have generally been very good results in the developed world from transparency projects like Baltimore CitiStat. As you suggest, finding "high concentrations of outbreaks" of public health problems and their correlation to other problems was one of the goals. The project eventually saved more money than it cost.
Which suggests the other problem in developing countries: because they don't deal with the problem downstream, i.e. just let people die, they don't see the medical or social services costs that developed nations do, so the whole rationale for the project may fall apart due to up-front costs. It might cost only a dollar to save a life, but it costs nothing to let them die, unlike in the developed world where they'll die slowly and take up hospital beds and government medical resources. (Oh the USA is a developing nation from this perspective due to private healthcare).
Feel free to do your part for all this and turn off the gas and electric feeds to your home.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Can you imagine what Manhattan and the surronding areas looked like before the city was built?
Now it is nothing but filth and scum and serves as a breeding ground for vermin.
I would like to start an environmental task force made up of coal miners, forestry workers, ranchers, and farmers to
put pressure on congress to return it to its natural state and restrict all forms of use other than long range
photography. No hiking, biking or any other activity that would harm the natural state of the area after it is returned.
Its time we cleaned up the massive environmental catastrophes that are cities. The best folks to do it are the ones that
live at least 1000 miles from the place and plan on "someday" taking a vacation there. The folks that are in control of such
areas now are devastating them.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
For those who don't get the reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_motion_gun
(hey, I didn't make the reference; I would have compared it to the James Bond "Golden Eye" movie)
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
(hey, I didn't make the reference; I would have compared it to the James Bond "Golden Eye" movie)
The GoldenEye weapon caused an EMP blast, which, in the movie, knocked out any electronic gear in the radius. It didn't directly cause actual physical destruction of the landscape (The whole plan was to use the EMP as cover to steal cash money from the british financial system, not nuke the place from orbit)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You'll never catch ME going out and suing the government to get back land that my great grandparents were too stupid to not trade for muskets.
Would you feel the same if government killed your relatives then took the land they lived on? How about if your city hall condemned your land and gave it to someone else so they could build a multimillion dollar plant as in a case the USSC heard last year about a case in New Jersey where a city condemned some people's homes to give to a multinational corporation to build some offices. Those Justices ruled, dispite any constitutional authority, that cities can steal land from some and give it to others for no reason other than the profit motive. If individuals tried doing that they'd be called criminals, gangsters. or organized crime syndicates.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Would you say that algae farms that photosynthesize sunlight and produce hydrogen to burn to get energy is a more efficient energy path that soaking up the sunlight's energy directly with solar panels? I think not.
Ce depend, it depends. Though they are improving in efficiency solar PVs, photovoltaic, panels aren't really efficient. The best ones I've heard of are only about 22% efficient. They are good at the point of use, but if the place the energy derived is not local then an energy carrier such as hydrogen may be better than putting up transmission lines. And in some cases it is impractical forget inefficient to build landline carriers. For those who build homes away from any powerlines it's cheaper to use locally produced energy such as PV, wind generators, or hybrid systems than it is have powerlines strung out. Which is why more and more people are going Off The Grid. It cases like this PV or wind gennies make perfect sense.
Simply, you use the most appropiate tech for a given situation. Sometimes hydrogen is more appropriate and in other in other case it's pv that appropriate or another energy source is better.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If the government were trying to take ANYONE'S land now, without at least the decency to pay them the market value of the land plus some despotism surcharge and the requirement of making a "the survival of our society depends on this" argument before a jury (or other citizen committee), I'd back those people 100%. Would I expect the government to give it to their great-great-great grandchildren for no reason? To give that land to a bunch of losers that had done nothing to earn it? Absolutely not. If they want some land, they can go out and earn it, just like everyone else has to.
Yes, the natives got screwed over back during the colonial period, and it sucks. But all of the aggrieved are dead, and all of the offenders are dead. That makes it a non-issue today. No one has the right to what their parents' owned. If they have the great fortune to be born to parents that own property of value, and the even greater fortune to have those parents will that property to them, that's great. But it's by no means a guaranteed inheritance, nor is it a right of any kind. America and Canada's aboriginal peoples are NOT an aristocracy, and they are not landed by birth.
There is a gargantuan difference between asserting that the government has no right to take what is mine, and asserting that other people have no right to keep what was once in the distance past owned by my ancestors.
the government can still take a goodly chunk of it (in the form of income taxes if nothing else -- nearly all gifts qualify as income).
As of a couple of years ago what a person could give as a gift or inheritance tax free was $600,000. It was only amounts over this that was taxed. Though I'm no expert I know of this because I was told it by my sister who is a Certified Public Accountant, CPA, and her husband who is a Certified Financial Planner, CFP. Actually at this tyme of year, she works 16 hours a day 5 days a week preparing taxes. She does my taxes, I don't work and I'm on disability, and because of her job preparing others thier taxes she usually files one or two extensions on filing my taxes and doesn't have them ready 'til about August.
Any issue surrounding the dispensation of property when I die is between me and the feds. My offspring, should I have any, have ZERO claim to it, no rights whatsoever. Their offspring doubly so...
That's part of the problem, government should have nothing to do with who you leave or don't leave your property, real or not, to. The only tyme gov should get involved is when there is a dispute between different parties as to your will.
Inheritance is just a holdover from the feudal system, and it's a stupid one.
Why should I bust my ass to become wealthy so I can make it easier for my children when gov can take it away? If gov's are going to take it away I should just let the gov take care of my children as well. That thought just makes me shudder. Anything other than allowing people to choose their inheritors is nothing more than stealling from Paul to pay Peter.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Oh, I missed this when I posted my first reply, which is okay as it is a totally separate issue:
We'd probably have to dredge up some Siberian or Mongolian farmer who just happens to be the closest living relative to the very first people to cross the landbridge, and give all of North America and South America to him.
Maybe you don't know but the first inhabitants of the Americas DID NOT cross the Siberian, Alaskan land bridge from Asia to the Americas. The Americas had populations of people before the land bridge existed. Monte Verde, Chile dates from 12,500 BP (Before Present) which dates it 1,000 years before the land bridge, the Land Bridge being dated to 11,500 BP. Sp the fact is is people populated the southern most part of the Americas before the land bridge in the north existed.
FalconShould there be a Law?
the existence of property tax alone demonstrates that society retains some stake on all real estate.
I'm a bit tired now but I can answer this. Property taxes pay for local services. These include firefighting, law enforcement, and public schools. If you don't won't pay property taxes then you can pay for these services yourself. I doubt however you'll get many others to agree with you, anarchy hasn't been shown to work yet.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Tell that to those in Bosnia and Iraq who have to live with DU, Depleted Unranium.
Sheer nonsense. The radioactivity in these zones is no worse than average. The word "depleted" in "depleted uranium" should tell you something, yet I keep hearing these clueless claims all the time, mostly from tree-hugging hippies and people who have no clue what they're talking about nor any sort of qualifications to back up their assertions.
If you had bothered to read the articles I linked to you'd of read one was of a doctor not tree huggers who were concerned about cancer caused by DU and the other was a vet who served in Iraq.
I don't see what DU has to do with anything I've said.
It has a lot to do with what you said: "We can't control what goes on in Africa without invading them". Du isn't created in Africa, it's created in the US, and the UK. If the US readily spreads radioactive waste, which is what depleted uranium is, how in the world can the US expect other to not do so too? Same with nuclear weapons. Th eonly nation to ever use one does what it can to prevent other nations from developing thier own, unless it's an ally. The US gets on these countries for violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty yet the US violates it too. Part of the treaty was those nations that had them had to reduce and eventually get rid of those they had. Instead of getting rid of them or reducing the muber Bush wants to make more, those "bunker busters". There's even some calls for the US to use them against Iran. I'm still waiting to all of those stockpiles of WMDs Bush insisted Saddam had and now as Yogi Berra said, "it's deja vu all over again" as regards Iran.
Don't try to say the US can't control what other countries do, that's all Bush and Co are trying to do, tell others what they can do. They then throw a fit if their will isn't obeyed.
FalconShould there be a Law?