Look at one of those maps that shows population density by geographic area. See the overwhelming preference for living near coastlines? Desalination on a large scale would get new supplies of water to people where they are most concentrated. If the fourteen million people of greater Los Angeles no longer needed to suck water from as far away as Wyoming, the inland supply would be perfectly adequate for the local population. Resources like the Oglalla Aquifer would once more be an adequate buffer for inland wet/dry cycles.
There is no shortage of water in the world as a whole, and human activities do not "use up" water. It's the most infinitely reusable resource there is. We just need to get serious about desalination. In places like California, cranking out fresh water might be a better use for windfields than trying to shoehorn fluctuating amounts of power into the grid. The new graphene process can be far more efficient than traditional R-O (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/graphene-water-desalination-0702.html)
But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists," because their whole agenda is fewer people, subsisting in increasingly primitive conditions. If they could engineer a plague that would wipe us all out, they would do it.
A key factor in human survival is our ability to eat virtually anything. Cricket flour tastes surprisingly good and can be made into a variety of products which do not in any way resemble the original source: http://chapul.com/
Crickets have almost the protein content of beef and use less than half the feed. Best of all, they consume almost no water.
Actually, you're totally free to generate your own electricity if you think the utility is charging too much. I know several people, well-off retired engineers in a sunny climate, who have sunk a great deal of personal capital into residential solar, and love tinkering with their systems.
The fact that the great majority of people do NOT take this option testifies to the economy of scale of grid-distributed energy.
Ye olde "cutthroat competition" argument. Consumers win when this actually happens, but nobody has the capital to keep selling below cost indefinitely. We see this argument trotted out by old, small, dowdy downtown shops that suddenly have to deal with the opening of a new Walmart out by the Interstate. WM is not selling below cost; it just does a more effient job of selling mass market goods.
But now look at any place where Walmart has built a new location: it brings massive traffic, and a whole new generation of small specialty shops springs up right next to it: bright, clean, up-to-date places where real people like to shop. There are fast-food restaurants in the WM, but a market for upscale specialty eateries arises next door. WM sells cheap groceries, but the best place to put a new Sprouts or Hadley's is...right next to the Walmart.
An example of this effect: Bell Road at 59th Avenue, Glendale, AZ..
Monopolies cannot arise in a free market, because for any lucrative business, competition always springs up. To get monopoly power today, you have to take government officials out for squab and cigars, and arrange for the force of law to prevent others from competing with you. GE and Comcast became monopolies by doing exactly that. When they impose self-serving restrictions on your ability to stream their content, they enforce high prices and restrictive policies.
IBM is not a good example at all for your argument, because it never had a monopoly, even in the mainframe days. I can remember the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell) as competitors. IBM prospered during this time because its mainframes were actually better than anyone else's. As computers went mini and then micro, all vestiges of IBM's market power disappeared, and it never came back.
Now let's look at an actual modern monopoly: the medical industry. It's ludicrously overpriced because pharma companies use the FDA's enforcement powers to keep competition of the market and to even prevent consumers from shopping around for the same drugs being offered in lower-cost markets.
Drug and device testing is a vital function, but if we stripped the FDA of its power to keep products off the market, making its approvals advisory, not mandatory, and to allow consumers to shop around, medicine would slide down the learning curve just as semiconductors did, and in general become as cheap and innovative as the IT industry. People would still be free to take a conservative approach and buy only FDA-approved products, but those willing to a little more adventurous would enjoy vastly lower prices.
And did you know that in most states it is illegal for a consumer to get a list of hospital prices for various procedures? This is a classic application of governmental monopoly power, and is the reason why even a routine appendectomy varies wildly in price from one hospital to another.
"Priorities" is the traditional argument against having the US government explore space. For s private company, it's their own goddamn business. This is why robber barons are good, not evil. In the nineteenth century they gave us steel mills and railroads - and just as a hobby incidental, a whole system of public libraries. May this century's robber barons take us to Mars.
Meanwhile, the Democrats won't go because space exploration probably involves 'radiation' of some sort - and did you know that all astronauts have been vaccinated? There is no telling what deadly changes in mental state this might be causing!
Precisely why lowering the Wanapum pool in a controlled manner before it breaches would dramatically reduce the probability that anything would happen to all those cubic kilometers. There will be increased flow through the other dams for a time until this is accomplished, but no net change in the other pool levels.
That would have been a great service model, which is why it couldn't possibly last. Fox TV, and now ABC, limit the free recent episodes to viewvers who can "verify" their cable service. In both cases, you can only "verify" if you have an account with a tiny list of services that are mostly unknowns. I get these stations through one of the nation's largest cable providers, but it's never in the select list. Torrents, here I come.
You can bet that as soon as some inventor hands a plate of vat-grown chicken to PETA and claims the prize, that PETA's general membership will turn it down as being "artificial." The foodies will spurn it for the same reason, no matter how good the taste becomes, and will have loads of fun ridiculing it in the fashion-magazine columns and on their obscure little cable channels.
When such meats are made, they will appeal to people who are concerned specifically about the ethics of factory farming, and will probably win some of these folks back from vegetarianism. But PETA, no.
We could do exactly that if Warren Buffett and other railroad men would invest what it takes to run freight athigh speed. If we could achieve that it would not only take freight off the highway and claw back more business from containerships, but new markets for passenger runs that share lines with freight might suggest themselves.
I'm aware that those US reactors were NRC-approved, but under the US system that is just the start of a twenty-year process of legal challenges by every "environmental" activist cabal known to hypochondria. Remember, those same activists added several years to the build for the Ivanpah solar plant in California. On nuclear, their whole strategy is to keep imposing years of gratuitous delay while the bonding interest keeps steadily clicking upward. Then they can claim that nuclear "costs too much" because of the extra cost their own pettifoggery imposes. With the same strategy, they could make a single family house cost ten million dollars.
Western journalists, fricasseed as they have been in the anti-technology faith they absorbed in the Seventies, are the ones fanning the irrational fear. The Japanese have a history of being a lot more rational about engineering risk, which is why they will restart their reactors long before we get around to building the first of our own new-generation designs.
Having an instrument sensitive enough to detect the low emissivities cited in this article will do a lot of good, especially given that the average human body crackles day and night with about 7000 Bq of background.
So on a river with so many dams, including some far bigger than the Wanapum, lowering the Wanapum pool as far as possible is not going to affect the overall flow that much.
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Look at one of those maps that shows population density by geographic area. See the overwhelming preference for living near coastlines? Desalination on a large scale would get new supplies of water to people where they are most concentrated. If the fourteen million people of greater Los Angeles no longer needed to suck water from as far away as Wyoming, the inland supply would be perfectly adequate for the local population. Resources like the Oglalla Aquifer would once more be an adequate buffer for inland wet/dry cycles.
As does your statement and, in particular, your handle.
(cough)bison(cough)...
There is no shortage of water in the world as a whole, and human activities do not "use up" water. It's the most infinitely reusable resource there is. We just need to get serious about desalination. In places like California, cranking out fresh water might be a better use for windfields than trying to shoehorn fluctuating amounts of power into the grid. The new graphene process can be far more efficient than traditional R-O (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/graphene-water-desalination-0702.html)
But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists," because their whole agenda is fewer people, subsisting in increasingly primitive conditions. If they could engineer a plague that would wipe us all out, they would do it.
A key factor in human survival is our ability to eat virtually anything. Cricket flour tastes surprisingly good and can be made into a variety of products which do not in any way resemble the original source:
http://chapul.com/
Crickets have almost the protein content of beef and use less than half the feed. Best of all, they consume almost no water.
Actually, you're totally free to generate your own electricity if you think the utility is charging too much. I know several people, well-off retired engineers in a sunny climate, who have sunk a great deal of personal capital into residential solar, and love tinkering with their systems.
The fact that the great majority of people do NOT take this option testifies to the economy of scale of grid-distributed energy.
Ye olde "cutthroat competition" argument. Consumers win when this actually happens, but nobody has the capital to keep selling below cost indefinitely. We see this argument trotted out by old, small, dowdy downtown shops that suddenly have to deal with the opening of a new Walmart out by the Interstate. WM is not selling below cost; it just does a more effient job of selling mass market goods.
But now look at any place where Walmart has built a new location: it brings massive traffic, and a whole new generation of small specialty shops springs up right next to it: bright, clean, up-to-date places where real people like to shop. There are fast-food restaurants in the WM, but a market for upscale specialty eateries arises next door. WM sells cheap groceries, but the best place to put a new Sprouts or Hadley's is...right next to the Walmart.
An example of this effect: Bell Road at 59th Avenue, Glendale, AZ..
Monopolies cannot arise in a free market, because for any lucrative business, competition always springs up. To get monopoly power today, you have to take government officials out for squab and cigars, and arrange for the force of law to prevent others from competing with you. GE and Comcast became monopolies by doing exactly that. When they impose self-serving restrictions on your ability to stream their content, they enforce high prices and restrictive policies.
IBM is not a good example at all for your argument, because it never had a monopoly, even in the mainframe days. I can remember the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell) as competitors. IBM prospered during this time because its mainframes were actually better than anyone else's. As computers went mini and then micro, all vestiges of IBM's market power disappeared, and it never came back.
Now let's look at an actual modern monopoly: the medical industry. It's ludicrously overpriced because pharma companies use the FDA's enforcement powers to keep competition of the market and to even prevent consumers from shopping around for the same drugs being offered in lower-cost markets.
Drug and device testing is a vital function, but if we stripped the FDA of its power to keep products off the market, making its approvals advisory, not mandatory, and to allow consumers to shop around, medicine would slide down the learning curve just as semiconductors did, and in general become as cheap and innovative as the IT industry. People would still be free to take a conservative approach and buy only FDA-approved products, but those willing to a little more adventurous would enjoy vastly lower prices.
And did you know that in most states it is illegal for a consumer to get a list of hospital prices for various procedures? This is a classic application of governmental monopoly power, and is the reason why even a routine appendectomy varies wildly in price from one hospital to another.
Because we've done it before. We even built a city there, which we called Las Vegas.
I, on the other hand, feel no need to be nice in responding to Luddite swill.
Your exact argument could have been used circa 1500 in opposing exploration and development of the Americas.
"Priorities" is the traditional argument against having the US government explore space. For s private company, it's their own goddamn business. This is why robber barons are good, not evil. In the nineteenth century they gave us steel mills and railroads - and just as a hobby incidental, a whole system of public libraries. May this century's robber barons take us to Mars.
ADD 1 TO THIS GIVING THAT WITH ONE CARBON COPY TO (Accounting AND Marketing BUT NOT InternalAudit).
Job security...
Meanwhile, the Democrats won't go because space exploration probably involves 'radiation' of some sort - and did you know that all astronauts have been vaccinated? There is no telling what deadly changes in mental state this might be causing!
And besides, this may our last chance to get to Europa before the hordes of Chinese tourists.
Or we could find a way to induct the virus into the SEIU, thereby rendering it ineffective.
Precisely why lowering the Wanapum pool in a controlled manner before it breaches would dramatically reduce the probability that anything would happen to all those cubic kilometers. There will be increased flow through the other dams for a time until this is accomplished, but no net change in the other pool levels.
That would have been a great service model, which is why it couldn't possibly last. Fox TV, and now ABC, limit the free recent episodes to viewvers who can "verify" their cable service. In both cases, you can only "verify" if you have an account with a tiny list of services that are mostly unknowns. I get these stations through one of the nation's largest cable providers, but it's never in the select list. Torrents, here I come.
You can bet that as soon as some inventor hands a plate of vat-grown chicken to PETA and claims the prize, that PETA's general membership will turn it down as being "artificial." The foodies will spurn it for the same reason, no matter how good the taste becomes, and will have loads of fun ridiculing it in the fashion-magazine columns and on their obscure little cable channels.
When such meats are made, they will appeal to people who are concerned specifically about the ethics of factory farming, and will probably win some of these folks back from vegetarianism. But PETA, no.
We could do exactly that if Warren Buffett and other railroad men would invest what it takes to run freight athigh speed. If we could achieve that it would not only take freight off the highway and claw back more business from containerships, but new markets for passenger runs that share lines with freight might suggest themselves.
Let's all hope that no "stakeholders" with a direct line to the Ninth Circuit show up when we least expect it.
And sorry for the unclosed tag.
I'm aware that those US reactors were NRC-approved, but under the US system that is just the start of a twenty-year process of legal challenges by every "environmental" activist cabal known to hypochondria. Remember, those same activists added several years to the build for the Ivanpah solar plant in California. On nuclear, their whole strategy is to keep imposing years of gratuitous delay while the bonding interest keeps steadily clicking upward. Then they can claim that nuclear "costs too much" because of the extra cost their own pettifoggery imposes. With the same strategy, they could make a single family house cost ten million dollars.
Western journalists, fricasseed as they have been in the anti-technology faith they absorbed in the Seventies, are the ones fanning the irrational fear. The Japanese have a history of being a lot more rational about engineering risk, which is why they will restart their reactors long before we get around to building the first of our own new-generation designs.
Having an instrument sensitive enough to detect the low emissivities cited in this article will do a lot of good, especially given that the average human body crackles day and night with about 7000 Bq of background.
So on a river with so many dams, including some far bigger than the Wanapum, lowering the Wanapum pool as far as possible is not going to affect the overall flow that much.
It will be if those tank drivers are using Apple Maps.