We already had the Manhattan Project. What we have to do now is get serious about the energy source it came up with.
Meanwhile, renewables can be applied in ways suited to their individual characteristics, Hydro is still king of the renewables: the only baseload source, and really good at load following. Put solar on all those square miles of suburban rooftops, mitigating their draw on the grid. Use wind for such things as desalinating ocean water, where the power fluctuations don't matter.
Japanese labor protests are even more stylized. To begin with, they are scheduled long in advance for a specific block of days in springtime, so that businesses can prepare for the event. Thousands of protesters carry colorful red flags as tourists snap away with the new cameras they just bought at the Akihabara Marketplace (just try that in Ferguson!). When they graffito labor slogans on walls and trains, they paint each kanji on a separate sheet of white paper, duct-taped in place so there is no damage to public infrastructure.
Doing work on the Sabbath, even carrying one's child to the temple, is a violation of Talmudic law. What to do, in a practical modern society? The Hasidim came up with a Talmudic hack. Because work inside 'private' spaces such as homes or temples is permitted, they define entire cities as virtually indoors by setting up symbolic wire boundaries next to important roads into the delimited area.
Could city ordinances be used in this way as a hack on our secular legal code to define symbolic indoor space to fly drones? The designation could be applied to parkland that is safely out of near-ground aviation pathways.
Slacking, you say? During that time we have only been sending probes to every planet, plus Pluto, asteroids and now a comet. So far, manned programs have been a vestigial part of space exploration as a whole. Now that manned programs are going private, astronauts will be able to assume levels of personal risk that have not been possible since Apollo.
Right now, that's true. But as the cost of digging deeper escalates and the minerals get more scarce, there will inevitably be a time when the cost of resources from space will drop below the cost of terrestrial mining.
Long before that, we're going to see steadily increasing local use of space resources, such as habitats and solar arrays on the Moon made from lunar materials.
Statistical distortion much? In the 1600s there was no industrialization yet, so all Europeans were poor except for a tiny elite. By 1947 most Europeans had a reasonable level of income, even so soon after the bloodiest war in history. Meanwhile India suffered from centuries of religious war between the Hindu and the you-know-whos, and the man British excuse for staying was actually the knowledge that of they were to leave, the two factions would annihilate each other.
Once Britain hit on the idea of isolating the Religion of Pieces in a new Stone Age country of its own, India could safely become independent and, after the usual failed experiment with Communism, start industrializing.
Because we have not been farming most species for very long, there have been a lot of early problems with fish farming. This should not deter us from getting better at it. If the ultra-green New Zealanders can do it, so can we.
Autonomous cars will probably cost considerably more than 'manual' cars, but will last longer, for the same reasons that automatic transmissions last longer than manual trannies. This will drive more users to ditch the cost of ownership in favor of the rental model.
Hunting and gathering works only for small human populations. That's why the one place where advanced western societies are still hunting and gathering, at sea, has led to a horrendous problem of fish depletion. For the good of the oceans we need to ban use of that stupid "Wild Caught" label on fish and get good at aquaculture.
But what we discovered in the Middle East is that those dictators were all that was keeping religious psychos at bay. Now we're scrambling to groom a new generation of dictators to set the Middle East right again.
When China gives foreign aid they're practicing Colonialism Lite, and in the long term that's a good thing. Remember the boost India got from British law, civil organization, and railroad engineering?
For you reading-impaired types, the points being made were: respect local culture, allow local entrepreneurship to flourish in possibly unexpected ways, and approach developing world societies as whole systems, rather than focusing in isolation on the funding and engineering of your playground pump.
But watch that first point, because sometimes you just have to stand up and demand that some aspect of local culture be changed if any progress is going to occur. If this author were to encounter a society that practiced FGM on its women, would be consider it progress if he could convince the locals to perform the procedure with anesthesia under sterile conditions, rather than with a piece of broken glass?
I would like to see Google go into direct competition with the EU. Incorporate as a sovereign nation within Silicon Valley, in the same way as Vatican City. Issue its own currency. Build California a nice set of high-speed trains. Everybody wins.
So herewith, a repost: If we really are changing the climate, we're already geoengineering, so why not geoengineer the world back to normal? The biggest problem with doing so would be defining "normal". Russia and Canada like the world a little warmer, and are not going to appreciate our refreezing it.
We have not gotten close enough to either moon yet to do the research it takes to decide what kind of lander to send. The first missions we should send would be orbiters that get close enough to characterize the surface of both bodies.
After all those years of one-off nuclear projects that kept being redesigned in the middle of construction, the US came up with the AP-1000 as a standard. If we fixed our legal system to make standard infrastructure designs immune to junk lawsuits, what utility wouldn't want to build to the standard? Even as things are, the newest plants just permitted in the US are AP-1000s. This is also the design that China is now using.
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We already had the Manhattan Project. What we have to do now is get serious about the energy source it came up with.
Meanwhile, renewables can be applied in ways suited to their individual characteristics, Hydro is still king of the renewables: the only baseload source, and really good at load following. Put solar on all those square miles of suburban rooftops, mitigating their draw on the grid. Use wind for such things as desalinating ocean water, where the power fluctuations don't matter.
This begs the question, would any true Scotsman set foot on a slippery slope?
There. Three logical fallacies in one.
Yes, 1T hybrids are the sweet spot right now.
Japanese labor protests are even more stylized. To begin with, they are scheduled long in advance for a specific block of days in springtime, so that businesses can prepare for the event. Thousands of protesters carry colorful red flags as tourists snap away with the new cameras they just bought at the Akihabara Marketplace (just try that in Ferguson!). When they graffito labor slogans on walls and trains, they paint each kanji on a separate sheet of white paper, duct-taped in place so there is no damage to public infrastructure.
They compare the isotopic ratios in the rock with those observed by our various landers and crawlers on Mars.
Out of fear, we will accept that Symantec will now be so bloated that most Windows PCs will never finish booting up.
A thousand years? We may even have a stable, well-liked version of Windows by then.
Doing work on the Sabbath, even carrying one's child to the temple, is a violation of Talmudic law. What to do, in a practical modern society? The Hasidim came up with a Talmudic hack. Because work inside 'private' spaces such as homes or temples is permitted, they define entire cities as virtually indoors by setting up symbolic wire boundaries next to important roads into the delimited area.
Could city ordinances be used in this way as a hack on our secular legal code to define symbolic indoor space to fly drones? The designation could be applied to parkland that is safely out of near-ground aviation pathways.
Drone eruvin, here we come!
Slacking, you say? During that time we have only been sending probes to every planet, plus Pluto, asteroids and now a comet. So far, manned programs have been a vestigial part of space exploration as a whole. Now that manned programs are going private, astronauts will be able to assume levels of personal risk that have not been possible since Apollo.
Right now, that's true. But as the cost of digging deeper escalates and the minerals get more scarce, there will inevitably be a time when the cost of resources from space will drop below the cost of terrestrial mining.
Long before that, we're going to see steadily increasing local use of space resources, such as habitats and solar arrays on the Moon made from lunar materials.
Statistical distortion much? In the 1600s there was no industrialization yet, so all Europeans were poor except for a tiny elite. By 1947 most Europeans had a reasonable level of income, even so soon after the bloodiest war in history. Meanwhile India suffered from centuries of religious war between the Hindu and the you-know-whos, and the man British excuse for staying was actually the knowledge that of they were to leave, the two factions would annihilate each other.
Once Britain hit on the idea of isolating the Religion of Pieces in a new Stone Age country of its own, India could safely become independent and, after the usual failed experiment with Communism, start industrializing.
Because we have not been farming most species for very long, there have been a lot of early problems with fish farming. This should not deter us from getting better at it. If the ultra-green New Zealanders can do it, so can we.
Free clue: the Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to driving.
Autonomous cars will probably cost considerably more than 'manual' cars, but will last longer, for the same reasons that automatic transmissions last longer than manual trannies. This will drive more users to ditch the cost of ownership in favor of the rental model.
It's like Mississippi, but with lots of honeymooners.
Hunting and gathering works only for small human populations. That's why the one place where advanced western societies are still hunting and gathering, at sea, has led to a horrendous problem of fish depletion. For the good of the oceans we need to ban use of that stupid "Wild Caught" label on fish and get good at aquaculture.
But what we discovered in the Middle East is that those dictators were all that was keeping religious psychos at bay. Now we're scrambling to groom a new generation of dictators to set the Middle East right again.
When China gives foreign aid they're practicing Colonialism Lite, and in the long term that's a good thing. Remember the boost India got from British law, civil organization, and railroad engineering?
For you reading-impaired types, the points being made were: respect local culture, allow local entrepreneurship to flourish in possibly unexpected ways, and approach developing world societies as whole systems, rather than focusing in isolation on the funding and engineering of your playground pump.
But watch that first point, because sometimes you just have to stand up and demand that some aspect of local culture be changed if any progress is going to occur. If this author were to encounter a society that practiced FGM on its women, would be consider it progress if he could convince the locals to perform the procedure with anesthesia under sterile conditions, rather than with a piece of broken glass?
We're talking about low-cost unmanned balloons, so why not use hydrogen? H2 does not have as major a leakage problem as does He, with its tiny atoms.
Now who was the genius who came up with that name?
I would like to see Google go into direct competition with the EU. Incorporate as a sovereign nation within Silicon Valley, in the same way as Vatican City. Issue its own currency. Build California a nice set of high-speed trains. Everybody wins.
So herewith, a repost: If we really are changing the climate, we're already geoengineering, so why not geoengineer the world back to normal? The biggest problem with doing so would be defining "normal". Russia and Canada like the world a little warmer, and are not going to appreciate our refreezing it.
And neither does it say "Whoosh" in the Good Book.
We have not gotten close enough to either moon yet to do the research it takes to decide what kind of lander to send. The first missions we should send would be orbiters that get close enough to characterize the surface of both bodies.
After all those years of one-off nuclear projects that kept being redesigned in the middle of construction, the US came up with the AP-1000 as a standard. If we fixed our legal system to make standard infrastructure designs immune to junk lawsuits, what utility wouldn't want to build to the standard? Even as things are, the newest plants just permitted in the US are AP-1000s. This is also the design that China is now using.