In case it isn't obvious, this idea has a problem with scale. As in, it would take several square miles of these cells to make enough water to run even the smallest hydroelectric generator for a single night, and the power produced would be such a tiny fraction as to make doing so completely pointless.
In the long run, effective government is a perfectly good answer to nearly all of society's problems. Unfortunately, too often, the long run is too long and war is the most effective government available.
Education is simply another form of government and obviously a preferable one, when possible. So don't be so quick to let them off the hook for screwing it up.
It's actually not news to me, which is the reason I restricted my statement to "huge swaths" rather than "all" of the economy. Likewise it shouldn't be news to you that over 80% of steel and 50% of aluminum in the US is recycled. Steel isn't a limited resource. Aluminum isn't a limited resource. Plastics are not limited. Energy is the only limit; and even that can be overcome. So it shouldn't be news that renewable energy and modern materials science are making 99.99999% locally-renewable production the path to prosperity for billions of people on the planet.
Centralizing is only more efficient when there is some fundamental limit to overcome, such as materials, energy, or labor. For many core aspects of the modern economy, there simply is no limiting resource beyond opportunity cost and the cost of money -- artificial scarcity. Alan Greenspan didn't regulate the economy by the price of rare earth metals. He monitored the price of scrap steel. For many tasks, the limiting factor is the structure of the production process itself, not the inputs.
A lathe is just an electric motor. You have two or three "sitting idle in the basement" already. A press is just a hydraulic cylinder. You should have at least one. A welder is just a big transformer. You can guess where that is. Add a microprocessor and some stepper motors, of which you likely have several, and you're 90% of the way to small-scale production of a vast array of goods. If you recycle your materials, there is no need for transportation. And if you do need some external input, you have access to three or four nationwide logistic transportation support networks already in the form of Wal-Mart, UPS, Amazon, etc.
You should ask yourself what resource it is that you think you're saving by doing things more "efficiently". If you're an average employed Westerner, you're not saving time; you're probably overworked. You're not saving oil or coal or natural gas -- those will all be consumed regardless of what you do. You might be saving money, but really what the hell is that anyways? Do you simply enjoy working and economizing for no reason other than to support a bunch of worthless parasites at the top of the economic pyramid?
What part of doing things in a centralized fashion is more "efficient", exactly?
You're assuming that automation has to be large-scale. That's not necessarily true. A major reason the economy today is built around large scale automation is due to structural flaws in our monetary system that promote centralization of capital. Individual automation of huge swaths of the economy is completely possible with no limitations. It just isn't economical in Dollar-denominated terms, because the Dollar isn't a measure of value but a measure of proximity to the Federal Reserve.
Is it truly optimal to create a future economy where perhaps less than 30% of people do useful work and more than 70% of people who are too dumb for anything else simply wander around between bread and circuses provided by their robot slaves?
As for this, I think you should do a bit of thorough research on the proportion of people who currently do "useful work".
the same ones that cooked up credit default swaps, aka economy killers are writing the rules for the carbon derivatives market
So, just to verify -- You do understand that credit default swaps "killed the economy" by allowing the system to take on more risk than was prudent, and then transferring that risk to future taxpayers via government bailouts.
So, are you concerned that carbon markets might suffer the same fate, by being too lax and allowing carbon producers to take on too much risk of climate change at the expense of the future generations who will have to pay for it?
Yeah, most of all I think this is really embarrassing for Northeastern. I mean, the guy wasn't even within a couple orders of magnitude of the size of bomb necessary to do serious damage to the Pentagon. Just goes to show the value of an American University degree these days.
They should run it on all the news leading up to 9/11.
Of course we don't need a supercomputer for that. Plenty of humans were able to see the signs of that coming months or even years ahead of time -- PBS specials on the evil Taliban. Bush administration officials being told the number one priority was war with Saddam. Build up of the National Guard. Bankers being told not to go to work at the WTC. Unocal pipeline plans. Hell, John McLaughlin predicted it nearly to the exact month, ten years beforehand.
"I want you to go get these news stories off my website. I want you to call these major newspapers. I want you to find out if these statements were true, by the White House, about preparing for martial law. And I want you to let them know that if there is any terrorism, we know who to blame." -Alex Jones, 7/25/01
Funny I don't see any trailers or straw bales on those. Certainly not any "compressed" straw bales, since almost everyone knows that straw bales are only compressed when they are used to carry a load, like a roof. Compressing your insulation isn't really standard practice. But since you seem to be the structural engineer here perhaps you know something we don't?
It looks like the price of a container is about $2000. Maybe that's the going rate for "abandoned" junk. I dunno.
Obviously improving the design would make it more expensive. Somehow you seem to have missed the part of my post where I point out that it might also increase the value. Like other collapsible containers. Like in the OP. Of the story we are all commenting on.
I've been thinking about shipping container architecture and the problem of empty containers for a year or so. One idea is basically to separate the rectangular frame from the side and top panels. The panels can be shipped back efficiently for re-use. The frame makes a compelling component for modular housing. They can be stacked and finished-out to create anything from a storage shed to a small apartment building. They can even be disassembled and re-combined to move or add-on. (Imagine taking your house with you when you move. Imagine building up an apartment block one unit at a time.) But you'd almost never want to keep the stock metal walls and flooring like in most of the "storage container" houses you see. They're poorly-insulated, difficult to modify, and end up looking tacky and industrial. Modular housing has a lot of potential and with a little intelligent design I think storage containers can be made more useful to this market.
Henry Ford achieved economies of scale using an assembly line, because his product was labor-constrained. Most renewable energy is technology and materials-constrained. Scaling, even with an infinite amount of labor, won't make it economical. Just ask Solyndra.
If you can make high-efficiency, you can make it cheaper and less efficient.
Not really.
But cheap oil and no national vision killed what could have been a great head start.
I'm not sure how else to explain that the price of oil has nothing to do with electricity. This insane focus on replacing oil (in transport applications) did more to harm the development and uptake of solar photovoltaics than anything.
A three-strike law should be sufficient for movies and video games. A one-strike law is for something else... trade secrets perhaps. They say the law is also on a "fast track".
I'm reading lately that the same is true of tap water. Chlorine was great, we used chlorine on everything, washing dishes, cleaning, in swimming pools, in the tap water. Unfortunately we find out decades later that chlorine in water combines to form organic carcinogens. What's the solution? Oh now we're starting to use chloramine instead, which is similarly unproven and untested and probably also produces god-knows-what kind of harmful reactions.
Realistically, no one in the world is dependent upon non-organic, GMO foods. We just use them because they are more convenient and they enable greater economies of scale. A lot of modern agriculture revolves around producing foods out of season or in monoculture or without insect damage or foods that are trendy rather than nourishing. No one is dependent upon cents-per-pound rice who wouldn't still have been dependent before it. The much larger issue is the energy used to transport food long distances. No one would die without GMO crops. Their diets would just be less varied and they would have to live closer to where food is produced and more of them would have to be farmers.
I realize that tech research is not mutually exclusive, but we can only do so much. The average European has no idea how poorly developed the US really is. Many houses are uninsulated. Roads in many areas will quickly destroy your car (unless it's a truck). Until recently, home appliances were horribly inefficient. In the last year alone, in a single state, an area half the size of Belgium burnt in wildfires. Frankly, we have bigger issues to deal with than solar power.
When an uneducated laborer can make middle-class wages framing houses, there's really little incentive to make speculative investments in unproven technology. And, like I said, electricity isn't really even an issue for the US. Liquid hydrocarbons are the issue. It was the same when Carter was in office. We've tried putting our lame auto manufacturers and airlines out of business, but our corrupt government keeps bailing them out. Frankly, if the rest of the world would stop giving us money every time our banks cause a financial crisis, perhaps we would have the correct incentives to do all the wonderful things you think we should be doing.
But your idea of massively rolling out solar tech 10 years ago is still flawed. Photovoltaics were 5 times more expensive. Inverters were 10 times more expensive. Grid-tie was highly regulated. And, for what, exactly? A little less global warming? A leg-up in a new manufacturing industry? We don't want to make stuff here. We manufacture bullshit.
And it's not like there weren't lots of incentives for solar, going back all the way to Carter. It's that it was spent on stupid shit like solar-powered road signs to tell us to "Drive Friendly". If the military had been involved, it would just have been an order of magnitude more stupid shit like solar powered lasers or something. None of that helps the consumer industry. Government spending on new tech just drives up the price and incentivizes the wrong things -- like in the case of photovoltaics we got high-efficiency flexible cells for satellites and unmanned spy drones rather than low-cost, low-efficiency cells for realistic power generation.
Of course this is the reason that the US gov't required GM to make OnStar standard equipment as part of the auto industry bailouts. Anyone who didn't see this coming deserves to be tagged and tracked like the sheeple they are.
Electricity generation is not even remotely an economic consideration in the US, and certainly wasn't 10-15 years ago. We have enough coal and natural gas to last a hundred years. Gasoline, diesel and fuel oil, on the other hand, are considerations and were *huge* issues back then.
Think about what you're saying exactly. Most businesses didn't even have ethernet 15 years ago. Which was more beneficial, telecommuting or photovoltaics?
And before the US could even begin to move millions of people out of northern cities into the southwest (creating demand for air conditioning and photovoltaic electricity) there had to be, you know, houses there first.
Motives like "let's regressively tax the poor in order to bankroll sending future generations off to die in fraudulent unnecessary wars so we can become a nation of worthless unproductive elderly, warmongering techno-fetishists, overpopulating immigrant laborers, subsidized failed banksters and pharmaceutical-grade Hopium(TM) dispensaries".
Siemens now has a banking license btw. Probably had something to do with their decision. No need to continue making stuff if you have a license to print money.
a nuclear power plant built by humans will cost about as much as the nearest competitor (natural gas)
The nearest competitor is coal. Nuclear is cost-competitive with coal. Natural gas is about an order of magnitude more expensive, because it's nearest competitor is oil.
Slashdot Mirror
In case it isn't obvious, this idea has a problem with scale. As in, it would take several square miles of these cells to make enough water to run even the smallest hydroelectric generator for a single night, and the power produced would be such a tiny fraction as to make doing so completely pointless.
In the long run, effective government is a perfectly good answer to nearly all of society's problems. Unfortunately, too often, the long run is too long and war is the most effective government available.
Education is simply another form of government and obviously a preferable one, when possible. So don't be so quick to let them off the hook for screwing it up.
It's actually not news to me, which is the reason I restricted my statement to "huge swaths" rather than "all" of the economy. Likewise it shouldn't be news to you that over 80% of steel and 50% of aluminum in the US is recycled. Steel isn't a limited resource. Aluminum isn't a limited resource. Plastics are not limited. Energy is the only limit; and even that can be overcome. So it shouldn't be news that renewable energy and modern materials science are making 99.99999% locally-renewable production the path to prosperity for billions of people on the planet.
Centralizing is only more efficient when there is some fundamental limit to overcome, such as materials, energy, or labor. For many core aspects of the modern economy, there simply is no limiting resource beyond opportunity cost and the cost of money -- artificial scarcity. Alan Greenspan didn't regulate the economy by the price of rare earth metals. He monitored the price of scrap steel. For many tasks, the limiting factor is the structure of the production process itself, not the inputs.
A lathe is just an electric motor. You have two or three "sitting idle in the basement" already. A press is just a hydraulic cylinder. You should have at least one. A welder is just a big transformer. You can guess where that is. Add a microprocessor and some stepper motors, of which you likely have several, and you're 90% of the way to small-scale production of a vast array of goods. If you recycle your materials, there is no need for transportation. And if you do need some external input, you have access to three or four nationwide logistic transportation support networks already in the form of Wal-Mart, UPS, Amazon, etc.
You should ask yourself what resource it is that you think you're saving by doing things more "efficiently". If you're an average employed Westerner, you're not saving time; you're probably overworked. You're not saving oil or coal or natural gas -- those will all be consumed regardless of what you do. You might be saving money, but really what the hell is that anyways? Do you simply enjoy working and economizing for no reason other than to support a bunch of worthless parasites at the top of the economic pyramid?
What part of doing things in a centralized fashion is more "efficient", exactly?
Infinite growth is postulated by the FED's inflation target.
You're assuming that automation has to be large-scale. That's not necessarily true. A major reason the economy today is built around large scale automation is due to structural flaws in our monetary system that promote centralization of capital. Individual automation of huge swaths of the economy is completely possible with no limitations. It just isn't economical in Dollar-denominated terms, because the Dollar isn't a measure of value but a measure of proximity to the Federal Reserve.
Is it truly optimal to create a future economy where perhaps less than 30% of people do useful work and more than 70% of people who are too dumb for anything else simply wander around between bread and circuses provided by their robot slaves?
As for this, I think you should do a bit of thorough research on the proportion of people who currently do "useful work".
the same ones that cooked up credit default swaps, aka economy killers are writing the rules for the carbon derivatives market
So, just to verify -- You do understand that credit default swaps "killed the economy" by allowing the system to take on more risk than was prudent, and then transferring that risk to future taxpayers via government bailouts.
So, are you concerned that carbon markets might suffer the same fate, by being too lax and allowing carbon producers to take on too much risk of climate change at the expense of the future generations who will have to pay for it?
What an incredibly racist thing to say.
Some of them lie because they are Irish.
Yeah, most of all I think this is really embarrassing for Northeastern. I mean, the guy wasn't even within a couple orders of magnitude of the size of bomb necessary to do serious damage to the Pentagon. Just goes to show the value of an American University degree these days.
The next war will be in space.
Or possibly at the top of a very tall mountain. Either way, most of the actual fighting will be done by robots. Our mission is clear.
They should run it on all the news leading up to 9/11.
Of course we don't need a supercomputer for that. Plenty of humans were able to see the signs of that coming months or even years ahead of time -- PBS specials on the evil Taliban. Bush administration officials being told the number one priority was war with Saddam. Build up of the National Guard. Bankers being told not to go to work at the WTC. Unocal pipeline plans. Hell, John McLaughlin predicted it nearly to the exact month, ten years beforehand.
"I want you to go get these news stories off my website. I want you to call these major newspapers. I want you to find out if these statements were true, by the White House, about preparing for martial law. And I want you to let them know that if there is any terrorism, we know who to blame." -Alex Jones, 7/25/01
What a hilarious argument. You people really are clowns.
Let's see, significant holes, wood products, moving: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgmubPdH_vA
And oh hey here's another for good measure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqEQEDKkzX4
Funny I don't see any trailers or straw bales on those. Certainly not any "compressed" straw bales, since almost everyone knows that straw bales are only compressed when they are used to carry a load, like a roof. Compressing your insulation isn't really standard practice. But since you seem to be the structural engineer here perhaps you know something we don't?
It looks like the price of a container is about $2000. Maybe that's the going rate for "abandoned" junk. I dunno.
Obviously improving the design would make it more expensive. Somehow you seem to have missed the part of my post where I point out that it might also increase the value. Like other collapsible containers. Like in the OP. Of the story we are all commenting on.
Thanks for trying, though, I guess.
I've been thinking about shipping container architecture and the problem of empty containers for a year or so. One idea is basically to separate the rectangular frame from the side and top panels. The panels can be shipped back efficiently for re-use. The frame makes a compelling component for modular housing. They can be stacked and finished-out to create anything from a storage shed to a small apartment building. They can even be disassembled and re-combined to move or add-on. (Imagine taking your house with you when you move. Imagine building up an apartment block one unit at a time.) But you'd almost never want to keep the stock metal walls and flooring like in most of the "storage container" houses you see. They're poorly-insulated, difficult to modify, and end up looking tacky and industrial. Modular housing has a lot of potential and with a little intelligent design I think storage containers can be made more useful to this market.
Henry Ford achieved economies of scale using an assembly line, because his product was labor-constrained. Most renewable energy is technology and materials-constrained. Scaling, even with an infinite amount of labor, won't make it economical. Just ask Solyndra.
If you can make high-efficiency, you can make it cheaper and less efficient.
Not really.
But cheap oil and no national vision killed what could have been a great head start.
I'm not sure how else to explain that the price of oil has nothing to do with electricity. This insane focus on replacing oil (in transport applications) did more to harm the development and uptake of solar photovoltaics than anything.
A three-strike law should be sufficient for movies and video games. A one-strike law is for something else... trade secrets perhaps. They say the law is also on a "fast track".
Hm, why do you think we haven't evolved with perfect memory? Could there be a good reason?
Glucose limitations, probably. Sugar is something of a limited resource in most of the habitable zone and throughout human history.
Well, I know that people with really hot tempers usually have bad memories.
PTSD causes both irritability and atrophy of the hippocampus.
You're addicted to food. Nicotine (most drugs, actually) is an appetite suppressant.
I'm reading lately that the same is true of tap water. Chlorine was great, we used chlorine on everything, washing dishes, cleaning, in swimming pools, in the tap water. Unfortunately we find out decades later that chlorine in water combines to form organic carcinogens. What's the solution? Oh now we're starting to use chloramine instead, which is similarly unproven and untested and probably also produces god-knows-what kind of harmful reactions.
Realistically, no one in the world is dependent upon non-organic, GMO foods. We just use them because they are more convenient and they enable greater economies of scale. A lot of modern agriculture revolves around producing foods out of season or in monoculture or without insect damage or foods that are trendy rather than nourishing. No one is dependent upon cents-per-pound rice who wouldn't still have been dependent before it. The much larger issue is the energy used to transport food long distances. No one would die without GMO crops. Their diets would just be less varied and they would have to live closer to where food is produced and more of them would have to be farmers.
I realize that tech research is not mutually exclusive, but we can only do so much. The average European has no idea how poorly developed the US really is. Many houses are uninsulated. Roads in many areas will quickly destroy your car (unless it's a truck). Until recently, home appliances were horribly inefficient. In the last year alone, in a single state, an area half the size of Belgium burnt in wildfires. Frankly, we have bigger issues to deal with than solar power.
When an uneducated laborer can make middle-class wages framing houses, there's really little incentive to make speculative investments in unproven technology. And, like I said, electricity isn't really even an issue for the US. Liquid hydrocarbons are the issue. It was the same when Carter was in office. We've tried putting our lame auto manufacturers and airlines out of business, but our corrupt government keeps bailing them out. Frankly, if the rest of the world would stop giving us money every time our banks cause a financial crisis, perhaps we would have the correct incentives to do all the wonderful things you think we should be doing.
But your idea of massively rolling out solar tech 10 years ago is still flawed. Photovoltaics were 5 times more expensive. Inverters were 10 times more expensive. Grid-tie was highly regulated. And, for what, exactly? A little less global warming? A leg-up in a new manufacturing industry? We don't want to make stuff here. We manufacture bullshit.
And it's not like there weren't lots of incentives for solar, going back all the way to Carter. It's that it was spent on stupid shit like solar-powered road signs to tell us to "Drive Friendly". If the military had been involved, it would just have been an order of magnitude more stupid shit like solar powered lasers or something. None of that helps the consumer industry. Government spending on new tech just drives up the price and incentivizes the wrong things -- like in the case of photovoltaics we got high-efficiency flexible cells for satellites and unmanned spy drones rather than low-cost, low-efficiency cells for realistic power generation.
Of course this is the reason that the US gov't required GM to make OnStar standard equipment as part of the auto industry bailouts. Anyone who didn't see this coming deserves to be tagged and tracked like the sheeple they are.
Electricity generation is not even remotely an economic consideration in the US, and certainly wasn't 10-15 years ago. We have enough coal and natural gas to last a hundred years. Gasoline, diesel and fuel oil, on the other hand, are considerations and were *huge* issues back then.
Think about what you're saying exactly. Most businesses didn't even have ethernet 15 years ago. Which was more beneficial, telecommuting or photovoltaics?
And before the US could even begin to move millions of people out of northern cities into the southwest (creating demand for air conditioning and photovoltaic electricity) there had to be, you know, houses there first.
Motives like "let's regressively tax the poor in order to bankroll sending future generations off to die in fraudulent unnecessary wars so we can become a nation of worthless unproductive elderly, warmongering techno-fetishists, overpopulating immigrant laborers, subsidized failed banksters and pharmaceutical-grade Hopium(TM) dispensaries".
Siemens now has a banking license btw. Probably had something to do with their decision. No need to continue making stuff if you have a license to print money.
a nuclear power plant built by humans will cost about as much as the nearest competitor (natural gas)
The nearest competitor is coal. Nuclear is cost-competitive with coal. Natural gas is about an order of magnitude more expensive, because it's nearest competitor is oil.