Uh, a hair dryer needs 1250 watts, that's almost two horsepower. For a hair dryer. Do you see where maybe your idea of the scale of energy is maybe off?
I use, at most, around 450 kWh/mo, which is 625 Watts continuous or 0.83 horsepower. I'm accounting for some battery storage for short term spikes, but the scale isn't too far off. Given conversion losses, I could easily live with a 2 hp steam engine as my sole energy source.
The average US house consumes 920 kWh/mo or 1.7 hp. I think you have real problems if you couldn't make do with, say, a 10 hp steam engine even without battery storage. So it's within an order of magnitude at least.
There are examples of direct solar heating systems that are profitable without being particularly efficient. You've seen greenhouses. Commercial CHP systems are not as efficient as electric plants, but they are profitable.
And you've seen it for all sorts of other things. You probably use a washing machine instead of professional cleaners. You probably drive a car instead of riding the bus. Hell, you probably live in a single-family house instead of an apartment building. None of those are more efficient.
If you're trying to argue that modifying some technology to make it more efficient will necessarily make it cost less per unit of energy, then that is patently false. I can make any thermoelectric device more efficient by making it out of diamonds and gold, but that won't make it cheaper. Any technology with a different efficiency is a different technology, full stop. If all we care about is cost/energy, there are lots of factors more important than efficiency to consider.
smaller turbines are less efficient
With CHP systems, turbine efficiency doesn't matter. You can heat your house or your hot tub with the 20% more waste heat that a small turbine generates. In fact, a small system can be more efficient as well as cheaper than a larger one by utilizing the 60% waste heat produced.
Smaller components can be built on assembly lines, using automated processes, instead of in a one-off fashion. This can make them less expensive and more reliable. Smaller components can be sourced from multiple producers, leveraging market forces to lower costs and increase quality. Smaller systems are also easier to finance, and can be more resistant to fraudulent investment schemes, legal barriers and market manipulation.
These are all more important factors to consider with renewable energy than mere efficiency. But cost is clearly the biggest factor. And it should be plainly obvious that the relationship between cost and efficiency is tenuous at best.
The laws of physics may say otherwise, but the laws of economics say that the price you pay will be at least 4x the true cost due to transport and middle-men. So even if you're half as efficient as they are, you'll come out ahead.
Collector size has nothing to do with cost. Sugar cane is one of the least efficient forms of renewable energy we have, with collector efficiency under 1%. Yet it profitably produces several orders of magnitude more energy than solar panels with 40% efficiency.
It doesn't have anything to do with the amount of heat loss. That just affects sizing. Heat pump efficiency depends on the temperature differential between outside and inside.
And I'm including the efficiency of electricity generation via fossil fuels in my statement. That should be obvious, since the thermodynamic efficiency of the heat pump alone can be upwards of 400%. Also, comparing the efficiency of renewable energy generation to fossil fuels is pointless.
It sort of depends on the climate. In a mild winter, a heat pump can approach the efficiency of the best small-scale furnaces. And with the low transport cost of electricity, it is obviously more convenient. But when it's really cold, heat pumps don't work well and electric heat isn't very efficient.
Plus, I think there're huge economies of scale at play here -- steam generators are more efficient at larger sizes, etc.
Hi, I'm here to point out that efficiency means nothing when your fuel is free, and that cost is all that matters. Just like I do in every other renewable energy story.
Let me re-arrange some of your assumptions for you. Because you aren't too far off.
Some people rely on capital. Some people rely on labor.
Capital, which consists of technology and resources and energy, is directly proportional to affluence. Labor is inversely proportional.
Those who rely on capital make future generations better off by leaving capital behind. Those who rely on their children make future generations worse off by forcing them into labor and depriving them of capital.
Being urban or agrarian has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of urban shopkeepers and restauranteurs who rely on their children's labor, and plenty of agrarian farmers who cede their children vast amounts of capital.
Mothers are not "rewarded" because they tend to create consumers instead of capital. Military members tend to destroy capital and produce nothing, spending vast amounts on unnecessary fraudulent wars. Police also tend to produce more harm than good, which is probably the reason society is not interested in "rewarding" them.
Teachers are an interesting case and I won't get into all the reasons they are not rewarded.
Once you have a house and an SUV, and maybe a motor home, what else do you want?
What the hell kind of question is this? I want a robot army and a heated pool and a jetpack and a gold toilet and a bunch of stripper girlfriends. And I want to eat steak and sushi and organic vegetables every day produced from my renewable-energy-powered fish-farm/ranch/year-round-greenhouse.
Because population growth will stop
Developed country population growth will not stop without closed borders, which is not politically fashionable. Developing country population growth will not stop without massive increases in wealth, which has real physical limits. Barring epidemics or massive warfare, how do you envision population growth stopping? Because nowhere on Earth is it stopping voluntarily.
innovation will stop the shortages, and wealth will grow
"Innovation" currently goes almost exclusively into creating new consumer trinkets, healthcare and military applications which destroy wealth, increase lifespan and consumption, and create resource shortages.
There is for all piratical purposes unlimited amounts of oil in the planet.
Well, for piratical purposes, I suppose you can always plunder until you have enough oil. So I guess from that perspective, you will never run out.
From a more humanist perspective, however, oil is a finite resource.
There has never been a non-localized shortage on earth in history.
Not yet. So what will you call it when global production peaks? Will that be a localized shortage too, since we can always move to Titan if we want more?
We just need the same stuff the South Africans currently use to turn coal into diesel.
What, iron? We have that. It isn't economically viable. And it will never produce enough liquid fuel to provide for the level of transportation we currently enjoy. You realize that coal will peak also, and isn't unlimited?
Population grows exponentially. "Affluence" will peak once we reach the limit of exploitable resources on Earth. "Technology level" (whatever that means exactly) will peak given a large enough supply-shock to send researchers heading for the hills. You do the math.
Some are sprays. There are actually dozens of different types, mostly due to the pharmaceutical companies' vast experience in slightly modifying known drugs in order to maintain patent coverage. This also means that, every time they create a new one, they get several years to sell it and pretend that it has no ill-effects before studies are done and it is either banned or the lawsuits start rolling in.
And, yes, that name means these drugs are similar to nicotine. They are literally spraying our food with drugs that are known to be harmful and addictive to humans, and calling it "pesticide". George W. Bush hamstrung the EPA and tried to cover the whole thing up because he was a blatant whore for the pharma-chemi-troleum industry along with being the single most completely worthless president in US history.
This should also lay to rest some of the more vehement rhetoric about 'grey goo' disasters; if there were going to be a 'grey goo' scenario, bacteria would have done it aeons ago.
Humans have created more "grey goo" than bacteria ever could. Don't underestimate us.
So, lemme get this straight. You're against copying music, because you create music. But you're for copying drugs, because you use drugs?
Just think of it this way. If more people do drugs, then there would be more people creating music. More competition means fewer people buying your music. And that means you would have less money for lava lamps.
So, as you can see, it's clearly in your interest to be against free drugs.
People who take care of the aged and infirm add little if anything to capital, but they add to quality of life.
The "service economy" is one of the most blatant examples of economic fallacy in existence. People trading low-skill work with each other absolutely is, at best, a zero-sum game. It makes no one but middle-men better off and is in fact completely pointless if not destructive.
The point of creating more and more wealth is so that the *wealth* can take care of people instead of being consumed by people whose sole "raison d'etre" is to do pointless make-work.
We have more resources at our disposal than we've ever had. The problem is in how they're distributed.
The problem is that they are distributed at all instead of still existing as a virgin monolithic mass waiting to be exploited by workers under the delusion that they contribute anything of value whatsoever to the process of resource depletion other than speed.
Usually the people on the bottom are the ones who are actually physically doing the labor and "being productive"
Doing physical labor has fuck-all to do with being productive. That's the entire point. But, yes, make-work is endemic to the US managerial class as well. In fact, they appear to be specially selected for their ability to do, and create, the most make-work possible.
I am not aware of us emptying any of our prisons to send inmates over to Iraq...
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's fairly common in the US for petty criminals to be told "join the military or go to jail" during times of war. But, nowadays, prisoners cost less than soldiers, so it isn't as common as it once was.
Please do define, what resources the middle-class exploited & depleted in the US that caused the downfall of the US middle class? I would suggest the move towards globalism has done more to harm the middle-class
It's nearly every resource: topsoil, metal ores, forests, oil. We're rapidly working on depleting the coal, fresh water, phosphates, fisheries. It doesn't matter whether you want to call it "globalism" or not, but the fact remains that workers in other countries can now exploit their natural resources more effectively than we can, so they have more work opportunities than we do.
Can you give some hard examples where the US can reinvent itself
Sure, here are some ways to make the US economy less of a total joke, in no particular order:
Instate moderate across-the-board import tariffs.
Eliminate the FED. Peg the dollar to some amount of hydrogen or electricity.
Create a global dollar-based electronic micropayment system.
Eliminate the IRS. Tax consumption, not production or innovation.
Stop subsidizing the auto manufacturers. No one needs any more of their hideous over-priced junk.
Same goes for banks or any other business that fails.
Stop subsidizing loans for higher-ed.
Subsidize exercise and healthy eating instead of prescription drugs and healthcare.
Reduce the maximum workweek until unemployment is at frictional levels. Task the Dept. of Labor with managing this, or create a new independent agency.
Tax fossil fuel usage, heavily. Use the proceeds to subsidize nuclear power plant construction.
Tax nuclear power (on an energy basis). Distribute half the proceeds as basic income. Use the rest to subsidize the production of renewable energy tech.
Mandate telecommuting as an option for any job that doesn't have to be performed on-site.
Tax reproduction as a negative externality. Heavily tax or outlaw reproduction beyond replacement.
Give every household a reprap or open-design CNC machine that can make consumer goods and parts from recycled scrap. Mandate recycling.
Put energy production in every house/backyard: solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind, geothermal, biodiesel, biogas, co-generation; it doesn't matter what. Mandate efficiency and renewability.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice to dismiss feudalism as necessarily leading to inequality or inherently unjust, especially considering the state of modern production technologies and their impact on the working class. For all it's faults, feudalism provides an individualistic economic system realistically capable of providing for all members of a society even in the absence of large-scale trade and finance.
While I agree with your sentiment, and most of your analysis, I'm not sure that we agree on root causes, ie. conspiracy of the elite. A democracy dominated by a working middle class is such an historical aberration that it's important to recognize alternate, more fundamental, explanations for it's decline.
Human work can be separated into two types: productive work and make-work. These should need no definition. Productive work is that which produces capital. Make-work is that which limits the destruction of capital. For most of human civilization, make-work has dominated. In fact, make-work could historically be considered to be the "sine qua non" of human civilization. There has nearly always been a glut of worthless people in all societies who need busy-work to keep them from destroying the tiny bit of progress eeked-out by the rest.
Make-workers gravitate towards low-skilled government-subsidized work such as construction and social services, security and government industries. They built the pyramids. They conquered Europe several times over. They built thousands of miles of transportation infrastructure, mostly by hand. But they consumed many times more resources than they ever saved or produced. They are paid more than they would in a productive position relative to their skills, yet cost less to society than they would if left to their own devices.
The important distinction is that make-workers have very little real political power, aside from their willingness to stop doing busy-work and start destroying things instead. To counter this, societies have developed simple mechanisms for eliminating make-workers who cannot be controlled: wars and prisons. Those who display a tendency to cause destruction are sent to prison. When the prisons fill up or become burdensome, prisoners are sent to war. If they come back with more resources than they left with, they are greeted as heroes. If not, they are ridiculed and minimalized.
In my view, middle-class democratic worker's paradises arise only for a short time, as the consumption of newly discovered resources enables make-workers to become productive workers temporarily. They then gain a modicum of political influence, proportional to the value of their work in exploiting the resource as quickly as possible. When the resource is consumed, work loses value, make-work again dominates, and democracy subsides.
The United States arose to exploit the natural resources of the Americas. Workers here had an extremely good deal, and lots of political power, up until the exact moment at which those resources were economically depleted. That was probably more than 20 years ago. It's time to recognize this fact, move on, and establish more efficient modes of production, rather than trying to re-erect a democratic worker's paradise without the resources to support one.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, a hair dryer needs 1250 watts, that's almost two horsepower. For a hair dryer. Do you see where maybe your idea of the scale of energy is maybe off?
I use, at most, around 450 kWh/mo, which is 625 Watts continuous or 0.83 horsepower. I'm accounting for some battery storage for short term spikes, but the scale isn't too far off. Given conversion losses, I could easily live with a 2 hp steam engine as my sole energy source.
The average US house consumes 920 kWh/mo or 1.7 hp. I think you have real problems if you couldn't make do with, say, a 10 hp steam engine even without battery storage. So it's within an order of magnitude at least.
1 horsepower isn't enough to run a house.
Okay, 5 horsepower then.
You still don't want the thermal mass in or near your house. A thousand degrees is enough to make paper and wood instantly catch fire.
Probably not in a densely-populated area, but your self-cleaning oven reaches 900 degrees so it's not anything to get hysterical about.
There are examples of direct solar heating systems that are profitable without being particularly efficient. You've seen greenhouses. Commercial CHP systems are not as efficient as electric plants, but they are profitable.
And you've seen it for all sorts of other things. You probably use a washing machine instead of professional cleaners. You probably drive a car instead of riding the bus. Hell, you probably live in a single-family house instead of an apartment building. None of those are more efficient.
Efficiency directly affects cost.
If you're trying to argue that modifying some technology to make it more efficient will necessarily make it cost less per unit of energy, then that is patently false. I can make any thermoelectric device more efficient by making it out of diamonds and gold, but that won't make it cheaper. Any technology with a different efficiency is a different technology, full stop. If all we care about is cost/energy, there are lots of factors more important than efficiency to consider.
smaller turbines are less efficient
With CHP systems, turbine efficiency doesn't matter. You can heat your house or your hot tub with the 20% more waste heat that a small turbine generates. In fact, a small system can be more efficient as well as cheaper than a larger one by utilizing the 60% waste heat produced.
Smaller components can be built on assembly lines, using automated processes, instead of in a one-off fashion. This can make them less expensive and more reliable. Smaller components can be sourced from multiple producers, leveraging market forces to lower costs and increase quality. Smaller systems are also easier to finance, and can be more resistant to fraudulent investment schemes, legal barriers and market manipulation.
These are all more important factors to consider with renewable energy than mere efficiency. But cost is clearly the biggest factor. And it should be plainly obvious that the relationship between cost and efficiency is tenuous at best.
The laws of physics may say otherwise, but the laws of economics say that the price you pay will be at least 4x the true cost due to transport and middle-men. So even if you're half as efficient as they are, you'll come out ahead.
You don't need a turbine. You could run a small steam engine, around a horsepower or so.
Collector size has nothing to do with cost. Sugar cane is one of the least efficient forms of renewable energy we have, with collector efficiency under 1%. Yet it profitably produces several orders of magnitude more energy than solar panels with 40% efficiency.
It doesn't have anything to do with the amount of heat loss. That just affects sizing. Heat pump efficiency depends on the temperature differential between outside and inside.
And I'm including the efficiency of electricity generation via fossil fuels in my statement. That should be obvious, since the thermodynamic efficiency of the heat pump alone can be upwards of 400%. Also, comparing the efficiency of renewable energy generation to fossil fuels is pointless.
It sort of depends on the climate. In a mild winter, a heat pump can approach the efficiency of the best small-scale furnaces. And with the low transport cost of electricity, it is obviously more convenient. But when it's really cold, heat pumps don't work well and electric heat isn't very efficient.
Yes of course. It could even be used to create mirrors for more solar towers. The whole damn thing could be self-replicating.
If the salt cools into a solid, you'd never get it flowing again.
It's common to use simple electric heat-tracing to liquify the salts on start-up.
Plus, I think there're huge economies of scale at play here -- steam generators are more efficient at larger sizes, etc.
Hi, I'm here to point out that efficiency means nothing when your fuel is free, and that cost is all that matters. Just like I do in every other renewable energy story.
Let me re-arrange some of your assumptions for you. Because you aren't too far off.
Some people rely on capital. Some people rely on labor.
Capital, which consists of technology and resources and energy, is directly proportional to affluence. Labor is inversely proportional.
Those who rely on capital make future generations better off by leaving capital behind. Those who rely on their children make future generations worse off by forcing them into labor and depriving them of capital.
Being urban or agrarian has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of urban shopkeepers and restauranteurs who rely on their children's labor, and plenty of agrarian farmers who cede their children vast amounts of capital.
Mothers are not "rewarded" because they tend to create consumers instead of capital. Military members tend to destroy capital and produce nothing, spending vast amounts on unnecessary fraudulent wars. Police also tend to produce more harm than good, which is probably the reason society is not interested in "rewarding" them.
Teachers are an interesting case and I won't get into all the reasons they are not rewarded.
Once you have a house and an SUV, and maybe a motor home, what else do you want?
What the hell kind of question is this? I want a robot army and a heated pool and a jetpack and a gold toilet and a bunch of stripper girlfriends. And I want to eat steak and sushi and organic vegetables every day produced from my renewable-energy-powered fish-farm/ranch/year-round-greenhouse.
Because population growth will stop
Developed country population growth will not stop without closed borders, which is not politically fashionable. Developing country population growth will not stop without massive increases in wealth, which has real physical limits. Barring epidemics or massive warfare, how do you envision population growth stopping? Because nowhere on Earth is it stopping voluntarily.
innovation will stop the shortages, and wealth will grow
"Innovation" currently goes almost exclusively into creating new consumer trinkets, healthcare and military applications which destroy wealth, increase lifespan and consumption, and create resource shortages.
Now let's see some math
Here's some math for you:
Affluence = (Energy * Resources * Technology) / (Population * Labor)
Technology is taxed. Affluence is taxed. Population growth and labor are subsidized. Resources tend towards zero. What is the outcome?
There is for all piratical purposes unlimited amounts of oil in the planet.
Well, for piratical purposes, I suppose you can always plunder until you have enough oil. So I guess from that perspective, you will never run out.
From a more humanist perspective, however, oil is a finite resource.
There has never been a non-localized shortage on earth in history.
Not yet. So what will you call it when global production peaks? Will that be a localized shortage too, since we can always move to Titan if we want more?
We just need the same stuff the South Africans currently use to turn coal into diesel.
What, iron? We have that. It isn't economically viable. And it will never produce enough liquid fuel to provide for the level of transportation we currently enjoy. You realize that coal will peak also, and isn't unlimited?
Impact = (Population * Affluence) / (Technology Level)
Population grows exponentially. "Affluence" will peak once we reach the limit of exploitable resources on Earth. "Technology level" (whatever that means exactly) will peak given a large enough supply-shock to send researchers heading for the hills. You do the math.
The pesticide is a seed coating?
Some are sprays. There are actually dozens of different types, mostly due to the pharmaceutical companies' vast experience in slightly modifying known drugs in order to maintain patent coverage. This also means that, every time they create a new one, they get several years to sell it and pretend that it has no ill-effects before studies are done and it is either banned or the lawsuits start rolling in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid
And, yes, that name means these drugs are similar to nicotine. They are literally spraying our food with drugs that are known to be harmful and addictive to humans, and calling it "pesticide". George W. Bush hamstrung the EPA and tried to cover the whole thing up because he was a blatant whore for the pharma-chemi-troleum industry along with being the single most completely worthless president in US history.
This should also lay to rest some of the more vehement rhetoric about 'grey goo' disasters; if there were going to be a 'grey goo' scenario, bacteria would have done it aeons ago.
Humans have created more "grey goo" than bacteria ever could. Don't underestimate us.
Sorry, I don't consider a virus that primarily damages tobacco plants to be a scourge.
It affects all nightshades, including tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.
Whatever floats your boat.
So, lemme get this straight. You're against copying music, because you create music. But you're for copying drugs, because you use drugs?
Just think of it this way. If more people do drugs, then there would be more people creating music. More competition means fewer people buying your music. And that means you would have less money for lava lamps.
So, as you can see, it's clearly in your interest to be against free drugs.
Heh, time for your shot. Let's see, how much morphine do you need, "a squared" plus "b squared" equals, oh, hell, 5 cc!
capitalism won't work when we automatize most of the jobs
It will work if you own capital.
People who take care of the aged and infirm add little if anything to capital, but they add to quality of life.
The "service economy" is one of the most blatant examples of economic fallacy in existence. People trading low-skill work with each other absolutely is, at best, a zero-sum game. It makes no one but middle-men better off and is in fact completely pointless if not destructive.
The point of creating more and more wealth is so that the *wealth* can take care of people instead of being consumed by people whose sole "raison d'etre" is to do pointless make-work.
We have more resources at our disposal than we've ever had. The problem is in how they're distributed.
The problem is that they are distributed at all instead of still existing as a virgin monolithic mass waiting to be exploited by workers under the delusion that they contribute anything of value whatsoever to the process of resource depletion other than speed.
Usually the people on the bottom are the ones who are actually physically doing the labor and "being productive"
Doing physical labor has fuck-all to do with being productive. That's the entire point. But, yes, make-work is endemic to the US managerial class as well. In fact, they appear to be specially selected for their ability to do, and create, the most make-work possible.
I am not aware of us emptying any of our prisons to send inmates over to Iraq...
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's fairly common in the US for petty criminals to be told "join the military or go to jail" during times of war. But, nowadays, prisoners cost less than soldiers, so it isn't as common as it once was.
Please do define, what resources the middle-class exploited & depleted in the US that caused the downfall of the US middle class? I would suggest the move towards globalism has done more to harm the middle-class
It's nearly every resource: topsoil, metal ores, forests, oil. We're rapidly working on depleting the coal, fresh water, phosphates, fisheries. It doesn't matter whether you want to call it "globalism" or not, but the fact remains that workers in other countries can now exploit their natural resources more effectively than we can, so they have more work opportunities than we do.
Can you give some hard examples where the US can reinvent itself
Sure, here are some ways to make the US economy less of a total joke, in no particular order:
I think you're doing yourself a disservice to dismiss feudalism as necessarily leading to inequality or inherently unjust, especially considering the state of modern production technologies and their impact on the working class. For all it's faults, feudalism provides an individualistic economic system realistically capable of providing for all members of a society even in the absence of large-scale trade and finance.
While I agree with your sentiment, and most of your analysis, I'm not sure that we agree on root causes, ie. conspiracy of the elite. A democracy dominated by a working middle class is such an historical aberration that it's important to recognize alternate, more fundamental, explanations for it's decline.
Human work can be separated into two types: productive work and make-work. These should need no definition. Productive work is that which produces capital. Make-work is that which limits the destruction of capital. For most of human civilization, make-work has dominated. In fact, make-work could historically be considered to be the "sine qua non" of human civilization. There has nearly always been a glut of worthless people in all societies who need busy-work to keep them from destroying the tiny bit of progress eeked-out by the rest.
Make-workers gravitate towards low-skilled government-subsidized work such as construction and social services, security and government industries. They built the pyramids. They conquered Europe several times over. They built thousands of miles of transportation infrastructure, mostly by hand. But they consumed many times more resources than they ever saved or produced. They are paid more than they would in a productive position relative to their skills, yet cost less to society than they would if left to their own devices.
The important distinction is that make-workers have very little real political power, aside from their willingness to stop doing busy-work and start destroying things instead. To counter this, societies have developed simple mechanisms for eliminating make-workers who cannot be controlled: wars and prisons. Those who display a tendency to cause destruction are sent to prison. When the prisons fill up or become burdensome, prisoners are sent to war. If they come back with more resources than they left with, they are greeted as heroes. If not, they are ridiculed and minimalized.
In my view, middle-class democratic worker's paradises arise only for a short time, as the consumption of newly discovered resources enables make-workers to become productive workers temporarily. They then gain a modicum of political influence, proportional to the value of their work in exploiting the resource as quickly as possible. When the resource is consumed, work loses value, make-work again dominates, and democracy subsides.
The United States arose to exploit the natural resources of the Americas. Workers here had an extremely good deal, and lots of political power, up until the exact moment at which those resources were economically depleted. That was probably more than 20 years ago. It's time to recognize this fact, move on, and establish more efficient modes of production, rather than trying to re-erect a democratic worker's paradise without the resources to support one.