"that unless we drastically cut our standard of living, reduce energy consumption, etc. the world will turn into a ball of flame." There is no such narative. But nice strawman.
The actual narrative goes: "To avoid bad outcomes, we should replace archaic 19th century technologies with the best 21st century technologies and capitalise on 200 years of scientific progress". Coincidentally that would imply *raising* our standard of living - and using energy more efficiently, not reducing consumption significantly (though when combined with increased efficiency reducing consumption doesn't actually imply doing any less work - it means achieving the same goals cheaper).
So you not only fail at science, but at basic economics as well. Improved efficiency can only raise standards of living and make goods and services more affordable. Energy is a *cost* reducing that cost while maintaining the same outcomes makes us all *better* off. That this also means getting rid of the 99% of the cost of fossil fuels which are in externalities is a huge bonus - both in the immediate term for the current externalities like respiratory illnesses caused by them and in the longer term for externalities like climate change.
The problem with your argumentum-ad-consequentum fallacy is that you're fighting against something where all the side effects and additional consequences are extremely *good* things. Hell - even if climate change was a complete hoax (which would be basically impossible) then those other side effects would still make this an investment with guaranteed returns a billion times more than it costs. Private investors would be reticent to invest much in there - because the entrenched nature of fossil fuels make it risky to bet against and because most of the profit won't go to the investors but to everybody else. But we have long ago invented a tool we can use to invest in things that would be good for everybody to have but may not be profitable for private industry to provide: it's called "government".
Your whole argument falls appart if they never pre-emptively said anything. The text was there. Now it's not. If they don't say anything about it and never have - then it hasn't "told" anybody anything, if people draw implications from it, that's THEIR responsibility - not reddits.
Funny how the single most awesome subreddit on all of reddit throughout all this history is/r/kerbalspaceprogram - and just so happens to be widely known as the nicest one. People being nice, being respectful to one another does not in any way diminish the capacity for meaningful debate or intelligent conversation or hamper any of the useful things about free speech at all. If anything it actually assists those things by inviting more people to participate.
Your mistake is to think that government involvement is a factor.
Anywhere money changes hands is fertile grounds for corruption, the larger the sums - the more fertile the ground. Government is not immune to this - but neither is it more susceptible than any other organisation which signs contracts. No. Really. It isn't.
The only thing the libertarian small government idea achieves is an explosion in private corruption - because among the first things to go when a government is made smaller is those divisions that exist to prevent that.
In either version the guy at the bottom gets screwed - but in the big government version they can often get screwed a great deal less because unlike a business a government is accountable to voters - not share-holders. This is why the "big government" economies of Northern Europe works exceptionally well. And why corruption in them is exceptionally low - yet companies from those countries are regularly caught in corruption scandals in other countries.
In fact, on the contrary, the statistics belie even your original "justified by nothing but what I think is common sense" claim: the most corrupt governments in the world today are also among the smallest. If anything -the exact opposite seems to be true - the larger a government is, the harder it becomes to hide conspiracies and corruption. Small governments that have represent a very tiny portion of GDP must by definition also have fewer checks and balances (since those make a government bigger by existing) - and simply by employing less people, as a simple matter of mathematical fact the number of potential whistleblowers and actual dedicated civil servants are reduced as well, and those have zero impact below a certain threshold. Larger governments have enough people that simple statistics ensure some of them will be in the right place to stop the most egregious abuses in time.
You can look at South Africa right now - where the very corrupt president today basically got nailed in the constitutional court and ordered to pay back taxpayer money used to enhance his private homestead and disguised as "security upgrades". The path that led to this victory for the rule of law in the court began almost 2 years ago with a report by the Public Protector's office. One of those kinds of divisions in a government that you can only have if the government is big enough to have offices which are not required (and indeed specifically exempted) from reporting to parliament or the cabinet on it's activities and has constitutionally guaranteed independence (so no other organs of state can dictate to them how to spend their resources). It's a libertarian worst nightmare for such an instittution to exist and be funded with taxpayer money. But this institution exists for the sole purpose of investigating possible corruption or wrong-doing in other organs of state (all of them - including the police and military), collect evidence, and then file public reports which all voters get to read - and it's recommendations have rule of law. If criminal conduct is found - then the police and prosecutors are *required* to charge those named - if she finds funds are owed back, then even the president is required to pay it (as the court today confirmed) and, in fact, failing to do so counts as dereliction of the duties of his office, which is pretty solid grounds for parliament to impeach him (which may yet happen).
Big government is a requirement for something you guys never seem to appreciate the value off: competing interests. The more competing interests you have in one government, the less likely and less egregious corruption becomes - because there is always somebody with a lot to gain by exposing your bad behavior.
And if they did go out of business, do you honestly believe that something new (and likely better) would not arise to replace them ?
Your fear is basically an appeal to tradition fallacy: we've always done it this way so we know it works. But that's a logical fallacy. There is almost nothing humans do that can't be done better, sometimes the only way to discover what better looks like is to get rid of the current system entirely first.
Microsoft was basically the only company to buy a "unix license for linux" from SCO back in the day (mostly to keep the fight going and undermine their competition) so suing them now would be idiotic even by SCO standards. Don't bite the hand that fed you and all that.
What does his love for the taste of cock have to do with the fact that he's a complete idiot ? Lots of idiots eat pussy too. More actually, which is a bigger problem because the straight idiots breed (rather more often in fact since they can't figure out how to use birth control).
Of course the uncopyrightable nature of API's have irked many a corporation before, and seems to particularly irk them when Linux is involved in any way. Just look at the current Oracle/Google case over Java vs Dalvik.
The sad reality is that crime and lawsuits are, by a massive margine, the largest profit centers there are - so pretty much every corporation ends up doing lots of both. Just making products customers want to buy will make you rich... but it won't make you THE RICHEST - and nothing less will do for the kind of people who run them.
- One way to think about it: if all crime was done by one company, that company would make more money every year than the top 50 fortune 500 companies combined. Thats a massive percentage of the entire global GDP. There's absolutely no way all that money can be laundered unless two other things are true (it's literally mathematically impossible for them to be false): 1) Every major corporation must be including a fairly significant chunk of that money in their annual earnings (where it already looks legitimate). 2) Pretty much every large bank is complicite in the laundering of the rest. So when companies like HSBC get caught laundering money for terrorists, don't be shocked - they are not doing anything that every other bank wasn't doing as well - they just got caught.
Of course the pretty sucky part of having damn near a quarter of all global profits made from crime is that crime has victims - but since nearly every single victim is poor, who cares about them right ?
I've never seen that on Linux. In fact I've hardly ever seen it on a modern Unix. The one where I saw it a *lot* was HPUX. A zombie process on at least some HPUX versions was basically unkillable, it just flat-out ignored a -9.
Now let me give you some maths you seem to be ignoring. I'm on a nuclear powered grid right now. If I put home solar on - enough to go off-grid - it would pay for itself entirely in electricity savings *before* the first time I have to replace the batteries - and with the cost reductions over that same period it will pay for the replacement in less than a year.
That's the current maths - and I live in a country where solar gets no subsidies whatsoever while both coal and nuclear are heavily subsidized.
Because whether a number is impressive depends on context. A trillion sounds like a big number but a trillion hydrogen atoms is about a trillionth of a gram.
Chinas nuclear investment would be impressive if it stoodby itself but ceases to be so when compared to it solar investment (the topic under discussion). In 15 years it would equal less than half what solar will reach in 5. Thats less than 1/6th the growth rate of solar - not impressive.
Interestingly it was done at the frequencies he had in mind. Early crystal diode radios often worked without a local power source. An antenna is basically a conductor that gains an electric current from induction from electromagnetic waves. The frequency of the current matches the wave so you can interpret signals from it. Those radios were able to run on just the current from radio wave induction into the antenna. But they were tiny, needed very little power and could only tune AM. You get microcurrents at the levels radio works at. At the levels you would need to power household devices you would utterly drown out everything else (hence I said the communications revolution couldnt happen) and you probably would kill people. Microwave works better because you can focus it on such a narrow band. That means you can send a signal strong enough to power your satelite without killing every other transmitter or roasting your neighbours. Power over wifi is a modernday commercial household techmology using Tessla's idea. It also only works for very tiny ultra low power electronics.
I think there can be no greater irony than citing an Austrian School economist to call somebody else ignorant.
A school of economics that is so heterodox it's effectively ignore. That is completely anti-empiricism and thus refuses to improve or adjust it's views in line with empirical data or results, yet persists in making predictions about the real world and when they invariably fail to come true never corrects it's theories - instead suddenly remembering that "empiricism" is somehow bad. A schools of economics whose central theme includes the Austrian-Business-Cycle-Theory according to which recessions are a result of previous bad investment - and thus a *good* thing (and fuck the millions of people who suddenly can't pay the bills or starve), that advocates at all points for society to use the bare minimum labor possible yet at the SAME TIME advocates for the complete abholition of the social safety net so even as it destroys most jobs it removes any means of surviving without one - and has absolutely no backup plan for situations where the labour demand is simply less than the supply. The ABCT not only utterly fails to explain actual recessions and depressions, or offer any way to mitigate their occurrence or impacts, by painting them as a positive recovery step - it kills people. Even Milton Friedman, that champion of the Chicago School - which is nothing but the Austrian school in a fancier suit-once stated that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is probably the only economic theory to have done more harm to the world than communism (which you should read as coming from a Chicagoan with THAT level of anti-communist bias). Considering that you are sitting here spouting the ABCT as if it's fact instead of an unscientific and brutally cruel ideology - let's just say if I'm ever driven to abandon pacifism and start killing specific dangerous people for the sake of saving many others, you'd be on my list.
Of course the Austrian school does all this in the name of reducing prices for consumers - while utterly ignoring the fact that nearly every consumer is also a WORKER and thus helping consumers by screwing workers is the ultimate in a self-defeating idea (things being cheaper does not benefit you one bit if you also earn less - lowering costs for consumers is ONLY beneficial when accompanied by HIGHER average wages - which is actually sustainable since those wages means there are actually a lot more people who can afford the goods you make). That has stated that "nothing stops workers from organizing themselves, buying the companies they work at and forming cooperatives - and that the fact that they don't proves the benefits of hierarchical business owners ruling over workers models" - while ignoring that lots and lots of workers do exactly that and that "nothing" is flagrant lie, lots of things prevent that- including how long it would take most workers, even collectively to save up a fraction of what it would cost to buy their company from their employers and, again those annoying empirical facts, that frequently cooperations are formed when workers take over businesses that were abandoned by their former owners - and then successfully and profitably run these democratic profit-sharing cooperatives in the exact same economies where the capitalist owner-rules model was unable to run the business profitably or keep it affloat. In the biggest example of that - nearly all the businesses in Argentina went bankrupt in 2007, the owners mostly fled the country with their wealth and left the businesses abandoned, and then workers took them over. Today more than 20-thousand cooperations exist in Argentina representing the vast majority of the country's GDP, providing almost all employment - and the higher incomes they generate has allowed each of them to provide the others with customers so they all thrive. Thriving in the same economic conditions where the model Friedman so disparaged had utterly failed for all of them.
And just to make it all even more ridiculously stupid... every single person
Just curious... how would two-way microwave transmission compare ? Say you beam your excess up to a satelite which beams it down to another country ? I suspect the launch costs alone would be prohibitive and anybody who drives through the beam is going to be pissed... but I'm just curious.
Tesla for all his genius didn't know what we know today. Sure you could use induction to transmit power, but to do it over any significant range you would be producing RF that would have made the communications revolution impossible - and killed a great many people.
We do have some technologies which were developed much later that are essentially the same end-goal but they are very niche in their uses. Microwave power transmission is an example. It works fine for point-to-point line-of-sight transmission where cables are impractical (a good likely candidate for powering certain space missions in the near future with the huge advantage that your big energy sources can stay on the ground and you don't have to carry them to orbit) - but can you imagine beaming power to our homes using microwaves ? People tend not to take too kindly to being boiled alive...
Geothermal is fantastic, it's green and very much a favorite of environmentalists - it just isn't available very widely. Where it exists, it's great and a lot of places that have the potential for it and aren't using it really ought to start, but the vast majority of the world is just too geologically unstable for it. There is exactly one active volcano on my entire continent and that's further away from my country than Moscow is from London. There's just no way shipping geothermal from there could compete with even the hydro we get from our closest neighbors (who have high mountains and big dams) and even that provides only a fraction of our power. The bulk is still coal with one nuclear plant.
The grand irony is that I live in one of the most sunshine rich states on earth and yet solar still hasn't gotten much government assistance - nearly all solar installations are individual private ones. It's improving slowly but we could gain so much from investing in it properly. A country with an energy crisis which we could solve entirely in 2 years using solar, yet somehow we're flirting with more nuclear (by, of all companies, the people who built Chernobyl) which would not have it's first generator online for at least 20 years... and that's assuming it doesn't run over estimates which would be a global historical first.
Nuclear has another problem: time. In all of history not a single nuclear plant has ever been built on-budget or on-time, and currently even the best Nuclear projects have time-frames of 5 to 10 years which in reality ends up at 15 to 20. You can build solar for the same capacity in 2 years. So over the time it actually takes to build a nuclear plant, you can create ten times that much in solar capacity for a fraction of the cost.
The "space" issue you raise isn't actually an issue at all since solar is almost entirely deployed in space we already have and which are otherwise wasted like rooftops and parking lots. The labor isn't actually a major factor since it's a once-off cost, you need lots of hands to construct it (but not much more than nuclear of the same capacity) but it doesn't actually cost much more because nuclear requires a lot of PHD level engineers during the construction process while solar is almost entirely manual labor. Furthermore the cost is much better amortized and the market is far more competitive. Nuclear because it's big projects can only be done by very big companies (or governments). Solar installation is already dominated by small businesses. Competition is good for consumers remember.
And on running cost - solar beats nuclear by a massive margin. Maintaining even a big dedicated solar farm is extremely low-labor (and the vast majority of solar is rooftop installations which have zero day-to-day maintenance happening, maybe the odd electrician showing up once every 2 years or so), while nuclear requires a large complement of highly trained (i.e. expensive) staff around at all times. That alone is a huge cost. Then there is fuel-cost. Sure nuclear uses it's fuel with great efficiency (even if some 80% of the energy released is wasted - and this is why they need so much cooling) but it still needs fuel. That fuel is expensive, not very widely available and perhaps the single most ecologically destructive thing in the world to mine (Uranium mines do far more damage where they are built than even coal mines do). Solar doesn't use any running fuel at all.
I just can't come up with any scenario where nuclear can remain competitive over the long term. The "storage at night" problem is factored out a hundred times over by the things that won't improve with technology - not least of which that nuclear will always be overbudget and overtime. This is not an attribute of nuclear - it's an attribute of all large-scale construction projects and nuclear cannot escape that. Never yet has a large stadium or giant bridge or huge and impressive dam been built on-time or on-budget either. Megaprojects are by their very nature always late and always over-budget. They are just too complex to ever accurately estimate the real cost or time (too many things can go wrong so inevitably a lot of things *will* go wrong and you can't know what- it's logically impossible to plan for the unpredictable). Of course you could try to add up all the things you know about that could cause costs or delays - and quote a worst-case scenario budget but that will never happen in the real world. In the real world companies tendering for megaprojects will want to have the best quote - so that means they will deliberately underestimate (or exclude) anything unpredictable and any budgets for unforeseens, the buyers are usually governments and they have every incentive to *believe* that impossible-best-case-scenario quote since they have to sell the megaproject to voters and taxpayers in turn - which means convincing them it will have great benefits (and exaggerating those is not unusual) and underplaying the costs (in money and time) are both to the politicians advantage. So there is nobody in the decision-making chain with an incentive to estimate the worst-case scenario and weigh up the worst-case benefits against that. If there was, pretty much no megaprojects would ever get built. No moon landing. No Hoover damn, hell no Niagara Falls hydrostation (which as the first major generator of the US grid was
Except that 1) China is not planning to provide power for planet earth, just for China - so you need to compare with China's energy demands, not the World's energy demands. 2) The 15GW is not the current capacity nor the intended end capacity, that's just how much more they want to add every year (and it's the bottom of the scale).
So to put it in actual perspective - if 15-20 up to 321 is enough for fully 1/7th of the world's population, then every other country could invest a tiny fraction of that and go full solar.
So your proposal is to destroy academic freedom ? Nice little win/win for the right there. Either they have an excuse to ignore science without stating their appeal-to-consequences fallacy too loudly or an excuse to excise from academia all ideas they do not approve off.
If those are the only choices we have we dont deserve to avert this crises. If thats all our society is capable off then it deserves to be destroyed and make way for the next one - with all the terrible bloodshed and suffering that entails. A word of warning though: in that scenario todays conservatives would be in about the same boat as monarchists were during the American revolution. Blamed for all the suffering caused by the system they supported - but without the relative law and order of that time to protect them. Humanity is about due for a second enlightenment. The only question is if that will happen in a relatively peaceful cultural evolution... or in the aftermath of a heads on spikes regression to barbarism. The number one determinant is whether we can sufficiently contain CO2 emissions to avoid the worst disasters. If we cant then the results are large scale hunger, water shortages and mass displacement. Historical none of those have ever failed to trigger a brutal war. All three at once all over the world ? If climate change kills 1% of us, just 1, 80% will kill each other. Our history makes that utterly clear.
Slashdot Mirror
"that unless we drastically cut our standard of living, reduce energy consumption, etc. the world will turn into a ball of flame."
There is no such narative. But nice strawman.
The actual narrative goes: "To avoid bad outcomes, we should replace archaic 19th century technologies with the best 21st century technologies and capitalise on 200 years of scientific progress".
Coincidentally that would imply *raising* our standard of living - and using energy more efficiently, not reducing consumption significantly (though when combined with increased efficiency reducing consumption doesn't actually imply doing any less work - it means achieving the same goals cheaper).
So you not only fail at science, but at basic economics as well. Improved efficiency can only raise standards of living and make goods and services more affordable. Energy is a *cost* reducing that cost while maintaining the same outcomes makes us all *better* off.
That this also means getting rid of the 99% of the cost of fossil fuels which are in externalities is a huge bonus - both in the immediate term for the current externalities like respiratory illnesses caused by them and in the longer term for externalities like climate change.
The problem with your argumentum-ad-consequentum fallacy is that you're fighting against something where all the side effects and additional consequences are extremely *good* things. Hell - even if climate change was a complete hoax (which would be basically impossible) then those other side effects would still make this an investment with guaranteed returns a billion times more than it costs. Private investors would be reticent to invest much in there - because the entrenched nature of fossil fuels make it risky to bet against and because most of the profit won't go to the investors but to everybody else. But we have long ago invented a tool we can use to invest in things that would be good for everybody to have but may not be profitable for private industry to provide: it's called "government".
Your whole argument falls appart if they never pre-emptively said anything. The text was there. Now it's not. If they don't say anything about it and never have - then it hasn't "told" anybody anything, if people draw implications from it, that's THEIR responsibility - not reddits.
Funny how the single most awesome subreddit on all of reddit throughout all this history is /r/kerbalspaceprogram - and just so happens to be widely known as the nicest one.
People being nice, being respectful to one another does not in any way diminish the capacity for meaningful debate or intelligent conversation or hamper any of the useful things about free speech at all. If anything it actually assists those things by inviting more people to participate.
We cant mock bigots anymore ?
Your mistake is to think that government involvement is a factor.
Anywhere money changes hands is fertile grounds for corruption, the larger the sums - the more fertile the ground. Government is not immune to this - but neither is it more susceptible than any other organisation which signs contracts. No. Really. It isn't.
The only thing the libertarian small government idea achieves is an explosion in private corruption - because among the first things to go when a government is made smaller is those divisions that exist to prevent that.
In either version the guy at the bottom gets screwed - but in the big government version they can often get screwed a great deal less because unlike a business a government is accountable to voters - not share-holders. This is why the "big government" economies of Northern Europe works exceptionally well. And why corruption in them is exceptionally low - yet companies from those countries are regularly caught in corruption scandals in other countries.
In fact, on the contrary, the statistics belie even your original "justified by nothing but what I think is common sense" claim: the most corrupt governments in the world today are also among the smallest. If anything -the exact opposite seems to be true - the larger a government is, the harder it becomes to hide conspiracies and corruption. Small governments that have represent a very tiny portion of GDP must by definition also have fewer checks and balances (since those make a government bigger by existing) - and simply by employing less people, as a simple matter of mathematical fact the number of potential whistleblowers and actual dedicated civil servants are reduced as well, and those have zero impact below a certain threshold. Larger governments have enough people that simple statistics ensure some of them will be in the right place to stop the most egregious abuses in time.
You can look at South Africa right now - where the very corrupt president today basically got nailed in the constitutional court and ordered to pay back taxpayer money used to enhance his private homestead and disguised as "security upgrades". The path that led to this victory for the rule of law in the court began almost 2 years ago with a report by the Public Protector's office. One of those kinds of divisions in a government that you can only have if the government is big enough to have offices which are not required (and indeed specifically exempted) from reporting to parliament or the cabinet on it's activities and has constitutionally guaranteed independence (so no other organs of state can dictate to them how to spend their resources). It's a libertarian worst nightmare for such an instittution to exist and be funded with taxpayer money.
But this institution exists for the sole purpose of investigating possible corruption or wrong-doing in other organs of state (all of them - including the police and military), collect evidence, and then file public reports which all voters get to read - and it's recommendations have rule of law. If criminal conduct is found - then the police and prosecutors are *required* to charge those named - if she finds funds are owed back, then even the president is required to pay it (as the court today confirmed) and, in fact, failing to do so counts as dereliction of the duties of his office, which is pretty solid grounds for parliament to impeach him (which may yet happen).
Big government is a requirement for something you guys never seem to appreciate the value off: competing interests. The more competing interests you have in one government, the less likely and less egregious corruption becomes - because there is always somebody with a lot to gain by exposing your bad behavior.
It's the hookers that er hooked you, isn't it ?
And if they did go out of business, do you honestly believe that something new (and likely better) would not arise to replace them ?
Your fear is basically an appeal to tradition fallacy: we've always done it this way so we know it works. But that's a logical fallacy. There is almost nothing humans do that can't be done better, sometimes the only way to discover what better looks like is to get rid of the current system entirely first.
Some of the little boys who were born on the day this case was filed have had their first wet dreams by now - and still it drags on.
Microsoft was basically the only company to buy a "unix license for linux" from SCO back in the day (mostly to keep the fight going and undermine their competition) so suing them now would be idiotic even by SCO standards. Don't bite the hand that fed you and all that.
What does his love for the taste of cock have to do with the fact that he's a complete idiot ? Lots of idiots eat pussy too. More actually, which is a bigger problem because the straight idiots breed (rather more often in fact since they can't figure out how to use birth control).
Of course the uncopyrightable nature of API's have irked many a corporation before, and seems to particularly irk them when Linux is involved in any way. Just look at the current Oracle/Google case over Java vs Dalvik.
The sad reality is that crime and lawsuits are, by a massive margine, the largest profit centers there are - so pretty much every corporation ends up doing lots of both. Just making products customers want to buy will make you rich... but it won't make you THE RICHEST - and nothing less will do for the kind of people who run them.
- One way to think about it: if all crime was done by one company, that company would make more money every year than the top 50 fortune 500 companies combined. Thats a massive percentage of the entire global GDP. There's absolutely no way all that money can be laundered unless two other things are true (it's literally mathematically impossible for them to be false):
1) Every major corporation must be including a fairly significant chunk of that money in their annual earnings (where it already looks legitimate).
2) Pretty much every large bank is complicite in the laundering of the rest. So when companies like HSBC get caught laundering money for terrorists, don't be shocked - they are not doing anything that every other bank wasn't doing as well - they just got caught.
Of course the pretty sucky part of having damn near a quarter of all global profits made from crime is that crime has victims - but since nearly every single victim is poor, who cares about them right ?
I've never seen that on Linux. In fact I've hardly ever seen it on a modern Unix. The one where I saw it a *lot* was HPUX. A zombie process on at least some HPUX versions was basically unkillable, it just flat-out ignored a -9.
Purely because I just bought a second property and did a bunch of repairs and lack the capital right now. Within a year or two I will be.
Now let me give you some maths you seem to be ignoring. I'm on a nuclear powered grid right now. If I put home solar on - enough to go off-grid - it would pay for itself entirely in electricity savings *before* the first time I have to replace the batteries - and with the cost reductions over that same period it will pay for the replacement in less than a year.
That's the current maths - and I live in a country where solar gets no subsidies whatsoever while both coal and nuclear are heavily subsidized.
Simply put, nuclear cannot compete.
Because whether a number is impressive depends on context. A trillion sounds like a big number but a trillion hydrogen atoms is about a trillionth of a gram.
Chinas nuclear investment would be impressive if it stoodby itself but ceases to be so when compared to it solar investment (the topic under discussion). In 15 years it would equal less than half what solar will reach in 5. Thats less than 1/6th the growth rate of solar - not impressive.
Interestingly it was done at the frequencies he had in mind. Early crystal diode radios often worked without a local power source. An antenna is basically a conductor that gains an electric current from induction from electromagnetic waves. The frequency of the current matches the wave so you can interpret signals from it. Those radios were able to run on just the current from radio wave induction into the antenna. But they were tiny, needed very little power and could only tune AM. You get microcurrents at the levels radio works at. At the levels you would need to power household devices you would utterly drown out everything else (hence I said the communications revolution couldnt happen) and you probably would kill people. Microwave works better because you can focus it on such a narrow band. That means you can send a signal strong enough to power your satelite without killing every other transmitter or roasting your neighbours. Power over wifi is a modernday commercial household techmology using Tessla's idea. It also only works for very tiny ultra low power electronics.
I think there can be no greater irony than citing an Austrian School economist to call somebody else ignorant.
A school of economics that is so heterodox it's effectively ignore. That is completely anti-empiricism and thus refuses to improve or adjust it's views in line with empirical data or results, yet persists in making predictions about the real world and when they invariably fail to come true never corrects it's theories - instead suddenly remembering that "empiricism" is somehow bad. A schools of economics whose central theme includes the Austrian-Business-Cycle-Theory according to which recessions are a result of previous bad investment - and thus a *good* thing (and fuck the millions of people who suddenly can't pay the bills or starve), that advocates at all points for society to use the bare minimum labor possible yet at the SAME TIME advocates for the complete abholition of the social safety net so even as it destroys most jobs it removes any means of surviving without one - and has absolutely no backup plan for situations where the labour demand is simply less than the supply. The ABCT not only utterly fails to explain actual recessions and depressions, or offer any way to mitigate their occurrence or impacts, by painting them as a positive recovery step - it kills people. Even Milton Friedman, that champion of the Chicago School - which is nothing but the Austrian school in a fancier suit-once stated that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is probably the only economic theory to have done more harm to the world than communism (which you should read as coming from a Chicagoan with THAT level of anti-communist bias).
Considering that you are sitting here spouting the ABCT as if it's fact instead of an unscientific and brutally cruel ideology - let's just say if I'm ever driven to abandon pacifism and start killing specific dangerous people for the sake of saving many others, you'd be on my list.
Of course the Austrian school does all this in the name of reducing prices for consumers - while utterly ignoring the fact that nearly every consumer is also a WORKER and thus helping consumers by screwing workers is the ultimate in a self-defeating idea (things being cheaper does not benefit you one bit if you also earn less - lowering costs for consumers is ONLY beneficial when accompanied by HIGHER average wages - which is actually sustainable since those wages means there are actually a lot more people who can afford the goods you make).
That has stated that "nothing stops workers from organizing themselves, buying the companies they work at and forming cooperatives - and that the fact that they don't proves the benefits of hierarchical business owners ruling over workers models" - while ignoring that lots and lots of workers do exactly that and that "nothing" is flagrant lie, lots of things prevent that- including how long it would take most workers, even collectively to save up a fraction of what it would cost to buy their company from their employers and, again those annoying empirical facts, that frequently cooperations are formed when workers take over businesses that were abandoned by their former owners - and then successfully and profitably run these democratic profit-sharing cooperatives in the exact same economies where the capitalist owner-rules model was unable to run the business profitably or keep it affloat. In the biggest example of that - nearly all the businesses in Argentina went bankrupt in 2007, the owners mostly fled the country with their wealth and left the businesses abandoned, and then workers took them over. Today more than 20-thousand cooperations exist in Argentina representing the vast majority of the country's GDP, providing almost all employment - and the higher incomes they generate has allowed each of them to provide the others with customers so they all thrive. Thriving in the same economic conditions where the model Friedman so disparaged had utterly failed for all of them.
And just to make it all even more ridiculously stupid... every single person
Just curious... how would two-way microwave transmission compare ? Say you beam your excess up to a satelite which beams it down to another country ? I suspect the launch costs alone would be prohibitive and anybody who drives through the beam is going to be pissed... but I'm just curious.
Tesla for all his genius didn't know what we know today. Sure you could use induction to transmit power, but to do it over any significant range you would be producing RF that would have made the communications revolution impossible - and killed a great many people.
We do have some technologies which were developed much later that are essentially the same end-goal but they are very niche in their uses. Microwave power transmission is an example. It works fine for point-to-point line-of-sight transmission where cables are impractical (a good likely candidate for powering certain space missions in the near future with the huge advantage that your big energy sources can stay on the ground and you don't have to carry them to orbit) - but can you imagine beaming power to our homes using microwaves ? People tend not to take too kindly to being boiled alive...
Geothermal is fantastic, it's green and very much a favorite of environmentalists - it just isn't available very widely. Where it exists, it's great and a lot of places that have the potential for it and aren't using it really ought to start, but the vast majority of the world is just too geologically unstable for it. There is exactly one active volcano on my entire continent and that's further away from my country than Moscow is from London. There's just no way shipping geothermal from there could compete with even the hydro we get from our closest neighbors (who have high mountains and big dams) and even that provides only a fraction of our power. The bulk is still coal with one nuclear plant.
The grand irony is that I live in one of the most sunshine rich states on earth and yet solar still hasn't gotten much government assistance - nearly all solar installations are individual private ones. It's improving slowly but we could gain so much from investing in it properly. A country with an energy crisis which we could solve entirely in 2 years using solar, yet somehow we're flirting with more nuclear (by, of all companies, the people who built Chernobyl) which would not have it's first generator online for at least 20 years... and that's assuming it doesn't run over estimates which would be a global historical first.
So by 2030 they will have *half* as much capacity in nuclear as they will have in solar by 2020 ?
Not very impressive.
Nuclear has another problem: time.
In all of history not a single nuclear plant has ever been built on-budget or on-time, and currently even the best Nuclear projects have time-frames of 5 to 10 years which in reality ends up at 15 to 20.
You can build solar for the same capacity in 2 years. So over the time it actually takes to build a nuclear plant, you can create ten times that much in solar capacity for a fraction of the cost.
The "space" issue you raise isn't actually an issue at all since solar is almost entirely deployed in space we already have and which are otherwise wasted like rooftops and parking lots. The labor isn't actually a major factor since it's a once-off cost, you need lots of hands to construct it (but not much more than nuclear of the same capacity) but it doesn't actually cost much more because nuclear requires a lot of PHD level engineers during the construction process while solar is almost entirely manual labor.
Furthermore the cost is much better amortized and the market is far more competitive. Nuclear because it's big projects can only be done by very big companies (or governments). Solar installation is already dominated by small businesses. Competition is good for consumers remember.
And on running cost - solar beats nuclear by a massive margin. Maintaining even a big dedicated solar farm is extremely low-labor (and the vast majority of solar is rooftop installations which have zero day-to-day maintenance happening, maybe the odd electrician showing up once every 2 years or so), while nuclear requires a large complement of highly trained (i.e. expensive) staff around at all times. That alone is a huge cost.
Then there is fuel-cost. Sure nuclear uses it's fuel with great efficiency (even if some 80% of the energy released is wasted - and this is why they need so much cooling) but it still needs fuel. That fuel is expensive, not very widely available and perhaps the single most ecologically destructive thing in the world to mine (Uranium mines do far more damage where they are built than even coal mines do). Solar doesn't use any running fuel at all.
I just can't come up with any scenario where nuclear can remain competitive over the long term. The "storage at night" problem is factored out a hundred times over by the things that won't improve with technology - not least of which that nuclear will always be overbudget and overtime. This is not an attribute of nuclear - it's an attribute of all large-scale construction projects and nuclear cannot escape that. Never yet has a large stadium or giant bridge or huge and impressive dam been built on-time or on-budget either. Megaprojects are by their very nature always late and always over-budget. They are just too complex to ever accurately estimate the real cost or time (too many things can go wrong so inevitably a lot of things *will* go wrong and you can't know what- it's logically impossible to plan for the unpredictable). Of course you could try to add up all the things you know about that could cause costs or delays - and quote a worst-case scenario budget but that will never happen in the real world. In the real world companies tendering for megaprojects will want to have the best quote - so that means they will deliberately underestimate (or exclude) anything unpredictable and any budgets for unforeseens, the buyers are usually governments and they have every incentive to *believe* that impossible-best-case-scenario quote since they have to sell the megaproject to voters and taxpayers in turn - which means convincing them it will have great benefits (and exaggerating those is not unusual) and underplaying the costs (in money and time) are both to the politicians advantage. So there is nobody in the decision-making chain with an incentive to estimate the worst-case scenario and weigh up the worst-case benefits against that. If there was, pretty much no megaprojects would ever get built. No moon landing. No Hoover damn, hell no Niagara Falls hydrostation (which as the first major generator of the US grid was
Except that
1) China is not planning to provide power for planet earth, just for China - so you need to compare with China's energy demands, not the World's energy demands.
2) The 15GW is not the current capacity nor the intended end capacity, that's just how much more they want to add every year (and it's the bottom of the scale).
So to put it in actual perspective - if 15-20 up to 321 is enough for fully 1/7th of the world's population, then every other country could invest a tiny fraction of that and go full solar.
So your proposal is to destroy academic freedom ? Nice little win/win for the right there. Either they have an excuse to ignore science without stating their appeal-to-consequences fallacy too loudly or an excuse to excise from academia all ideas they do not approve off.
If those are the only choices we have we dont deserve to avert this crises. If thats all our society is capable off then it deserves to be destroyed and make way for the next one - with all the terrible bloodshed and suffering that entails. ... or in the aftermath of a heads on spikes regression to barbarism. The number one determinant is whether we can sufficiently contain CO2 emissions to avoid the worst disasters. If we cant then the results are large scale hunger, water shortages and mass displacement. Historical none of those have ever failed to trigger a brutal war. All three at once all over the world ? If climate change kills 1% of us, just 1, 80% will kill each other. Our history makes that utterly clear.
A word of warning though: in that scenario todays conservatives would be in about the same boat as monarchists were during the American revolution. Blamed for all the suffering caused by the system they supported - but without the relative law and order of that time to protect them.
Humanity is about due for a second enlightenment. The only question is if that will happen in a relatively peaceful cultural evolution
If only the country where deniers have the most seats in government was not also the largest per capity CO2 emitter.