Linus Pauling was arguably the most famous chemist of the last century.
Sorry, I'd say Margaret Thatcher was the most famous chemist of the 20th Century. Although perhaps not so much for her actual chemistry...
Or his commenting on the...Fukushima diaster (which he, IMO recklessly, called the worst diaster second only to Chernobyl, even though it's far from clear that it'd be worse than Three Mile Island or Windscale at this point
The Three Mile Island incident involved a partial meltdown of a single reactor. Fukushima involves - according to the power company running the plant - the partial meltdown of several reactors, plus overheating at spent fuel pools containing 1,700 tons of highly radioactive waste (and - in the Number 4 reactor's pool - that reactor's live nuclear fuel).
It's already released far more radiation into the environment than Three Mile Island ever did.
There's no basis in fact for criticizing Kaku regarding this statement concerning Fukushima.
and certainly several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl).
A nuclear disaster could be several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl and still be the second worst nuclear disaster ever.
Reinsurers carry risks on this scale all the time.
Yeah, but the reinsurers are covering huge insurance companies, and their risk comes from massive events on a wide scale, like hurricanes and tsunami. Also, many Japanese households are self-insured.
A single nuclear plant could represent over $100 billion in liabilities, more than all but the worst natural disasters could cost. That's why they can't get private insurance, and why the utility companies turn to the taxpayers for some socialized risk to cover their privatized profits.
Oh, and I just found out - Reactor #4 apparently wasn't fueled at the time of the accident (so subtract 100 tons from the amount of fuel sitting in the reactors). That's because its fuel rods were sitting in its cooling pool, as they were conducting maintenance on the reactor. That's right, instead of having 1,700 tons of waste fuel sitting on top of the reactors, we have 1,600 tons of waste fuel and 100 tons of live nuclear fuel, sitting out in the open, with no containment.
And which building had the fire up above the reactor, from all of the hydrogen spewing out of its cooling pool?
If the rods catch fire, it'll basically be the same as Chernobyl again.
If all of the spent fuel pools boil dry and the rods catch fire and melt, it'll be a lot worse than Chernobyl. I've read there are 1,700 tons of spent fuel parked in the pools atop those reactors, plus 100 tons in each of the three operating reactors, and I'm assuming another 100 tons of spent fuel in each of the three reactors they had offline at the time of the quake. So that's 2,300 tons of highly-radioactive crap that could conceivably melt into a pool of 5,000 degree radioactive crap (2,500 degrees hotter than lava).
There's an additional fuel storage pool between two of the reactors. I have no idea how much spent fuel is in there. Almost certainly more than there is atop any single reactor. Perhaps as much as there is atop all of them.
Assuming it all melts down, it'll make Chernobyl look like a particularly malodorous Taco Bell fart.
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
Geeks seem to have the quaint notion that corporations will somehow protect themselves from exposure to massive liabilities in order to preserve themselves. But - in spite of the recent United States Supreme Court ruling to the contrary - corporations are not people. Corporations - especially the really big ones - are a vehicle which really rich and powerful people use to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Think of them as big Saturn V rockets - they burn up all of their fuel and discard most of their structure and mass in the process of delivering their real payload into financial orbit; the rich goons and wealthy investors running the operation.
There are plenty of billionaire psychopaths who are more than willing and able to destroy their "own" corporation if it can make them an extra few million dollars, provided they can skip away without being held responsible for any of the mess they leave behind. It's perfectly rational behavior, if you're a psychopath.
Mozillo over at Countrywide made $500 million dollars in a single year while shoveling fraudulent mortgages out the door like they were McDonalds hamburgers. He still has the billion plus dollars he made during his tenure running Countrywide, and he's protected by an army of lawyers and bought-and-paid-for representatives in government. He doesn't care that Countrywide was destroyed, as it served his purpose - it made him rich. The taxpayers and the customers of and investors in Countrywide have been left on the hook to clean up the mess.
You wanna trust these guys with nuclear power plants and - worse - tons of nuclear waste? Good luck with that!
But coal powerplants cause up to 13,000 - 30,000 premature deaths per year in the US alone (quick google) and in general emit more radiation over their lifetimes compared to nuclear because of the trace amounts of uranium found in coal.
Compared to nuclear plants that aren't experiencing a meltdown, maybe. If Fukushima goes up in nuclear smoke, along with the tons of spent fuel rods stored atop each reactor (who the hell approved THAT design?), it'll emit more radioactive material than every coal fired plant in recorded history. And much of it will be far more dangerous than the minuscule amounts of uranium in coal.
>Does this silly CEO really thinks we are expecting to play the same time of games on a small 3" >screen as the one we play on a full HD screen? Come on, this is a different market, and the 2 >are non exclusive.
For the moment.
In the not too distant future though, cell phones and tablets will likely support wireless HDMI and the ability to drive full-sized HD screens while functioning as a controller (or working with wireless controllers or even motion controllers). Once those become commonplace, it's hard to see how the dedicated game console survives.
That becomes especially apparent when you look at services like OnLive. Who needs a dedicated box from a specific vendor?
Actually, unionizing the TSA workers might fix this problem, since the workers are likely to be the ones most impacted by chronic exposure to higher-than-anticipated levels of radiation. A strong union would be in a much better position to square off against the politically-connected equipment manufactures than any individuals.
The President only signed the bill. It was Congress that passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. An act which is a long, long way way from "national health care". It essentially just mandates loosely-enforced regulations on insurance companies, and requires individuals to purchase health insurance. It's the same kind of healthcare reform the Republicans have been proposing for years (and actually implemented in Massachusetts).
>The president who passed a trillion dollar stimulus package?
There's nothing uniquely Democratic or Republican about that. Reagan ran up enormous deficits during his two terms in the Oval Office, when the economy was supposedly doing well. Ditto Bush and his kid. This time around a bunch of money is being spent on infrastructure instead of on thousand dollar toilet seats.
>The president who is pushing for cap-and-trade and higher taxes on "the rich"?
Uh, what higher taxes? Obama has signed into law the largest annual tax cuts in history, $282 billion over two years.
There's a warning out now for the West Cost of the US. Wave expected to hit between 7-7:30 AM PST. Only expected to be 3-4 feet high at this time. Avoid the beach.
Moving involves deposits (utilities, apartment), the rental of a moving van, fuel, insurance . . . That's a whole bunch of money for folks who don't have any.
And try getting a job without an address. It's not easy - especially in this economy.
>Not really, in current smartphones, the screen itself costs upwards of $20 I believe.
And what will a similar screen cost in 3 years? Probably $5. Tomorrow's smartphones will be as cheap as or cheaper than today's featurephones. Maybe everybody in the developing world won't be able to afford one, but hundreds of millions of people certainly will.
Motorola just announced an Android phone that can be hooked up to a docking station and connect to a monitor and full sized keyboard for use as a little computer. What happens in the developing world when your $50 smartphone can also double as your office and/or home computer? Suddenly that $50 smartphone looks like a pretty incredible deal.
Your conclusion doesn't follow the facts. If homosexuality is indeed more likely as mothers produce male offspring sequentially, that implies it's some kind of survival adaptation, one that evolved. It could confer a survival advantage for the genes by providing non-breeding siblings whose presence can help ensure the survival of their siblings' offspring.
We see examples of this kind of reproductive strategy elsewhere in other social animals. Bees and ants are two powerful examples - colonies comprised almost entirely of siblings, with only a handful (or even just one) breeding female, plus a crop of fertile offspring produced seasonally.
All true. But religious fanatics also have a long history of going to war with and exterminating other religious fanatics. So just because their population is booming now, doesn't mean it won't bust later on.
Also, these idiots can't keep up that kind of birth rate much longer - the money is gone to support that kind of population expansion. This recession has already seen birth rates in the US plunge.
Some sort of major, planet-disrupting collision was necessary well after the Earth was formed and "stable". When forming from a molten glob, all of the "interesting" stuff sinks to the core, leaving the light stuff in the crust.
Debatable. The earth re-melted, so all of the "interesting" stuff that was gonna sink, sank. Mars apparently never got whacked like that, and IIRC its crust, which is mostly basalt like our ocean basins, has more iron in it by % than ours does.
Asimov suggested that the oversized moonmight have played a vital role in developing a crust that would support life.
Maybe. But what makes you think planets with moons are rare? Terrestrial planets with moons may be rare in the Sol system - we have no idea how abundant they are in the universe as a whole.
We also don't know if planets even make up the majority of possibly habitable worlds in the universe. In our own system, there are far more good-sized moons than there are planets. Our observation of other solar systems has already revealed numerous worlds as massive as Jupiter or more massive in orbits within the habitable zone of their parent stars. Such moons would almost certainly have hefty tides, and they'd have them for far longer than Earth did.
Our neck of the woods must have once been quite violent, but since then has become quite calm.
True, but we now know that stars are typically ejected from these stellar nurseries at fairly high velocities, meaning they get clear of the novae and supernovae associated with these regions within millions or tens of millions of years. Such regions also tend to blow themselves apart over time and dissipate, halting local star formation.
even AT the speed it light it would take you hundreds of years to reach stars currently known to have planets orbiting them.
That's not true at all. *At* the speed of light time stands still, so you'd reach those stars in an instant.
Of course, you'd also gain infinite mass and become a black hole...
Now, if you only traveled near the speed of light time dilation would occur, but it wouldn't be that extreme. Still, at speeds close to the speed of light you could easily circumnavigate the known known universe within the span of a single human lifetime. You would of course return to find the earth a burned out cinder orbiting a dead star tens of billions of years in our future.
And perhaps you would be welcomed back by our distant descendants. Or by Abe Vigoda.
All those apply to Texas and yet Texas is not bankrupt and is doing far better than California.
Wrong. Texas is also going belly-up. And since they have a smaller budget and a smaller economy to begin with, it's going to get really ugly in Texas really fast.
A budget shortfall as high as $25 billion is projected as lawmakers head into the 2011 legislative session, according to estimates from economists and the comptroller's office.
The average US household uses about 1,000kW of power each month.
Yeah, but how much of that is pure unadulterated waste? Heating and cooling are the biggest chunk, and I'd hazard a guess that 50% or more of that energy is wasted, either due to inefficient heating and cooling systems or insufficient insulation. Eliminate those two issues alone and you'd get power consumption down well under 800kWh without any increase in supply.
LED lighting will be rolling out in this decade in a big way, slashing the amount of power lighting consumes from something like 10% down to well under 5%. Appliances are becoming vastly more power-efficient, so there's another few % in demand destruction we'll see hit the grid over the next decade. Water heaters are set to experience massive gains in efficiency as new technologies roll out and folks replace their existing power-hungry units with more thrifty models, and water heating accounts for something like 10% of the energy utilized in most homes.
I think it's pretty obvious that by the time electric cars become commonplace, consumers will have already slashed their electric consumption in other areas by enough to support a pretty vast fleet of electric vehicles using the existing infrastructure. Throw in more locally-generated power from solar, wind and possibly other sources (thermal depolymerization, for example) and the conversion to electric cars certainly seems pretty do-able, just based on current trends.
Solar's an option, but it uses a *lot* of real estate, which is at a premium in California
There are huge unpopulated areas of central and southern California, most of which are conveniently arid and sun-drenched. Not to mention the gazillion square miles of rooftop and parking lot in California, much of which could host solar panels. Even better, they'd be generating power where it's actually being consumed, eliminating transmission losses and easing the strain on the regional grid.
There's large swaths of desert in eastern California that'd be perfect for solar plants, but you'd run into transmission problems, because most of that territory is nowhere near where the electricity is actually needed.
There's already enormous capacity to transmit electricity east to west in Southern California. The transmission lines from the dams on the Colorado River and from Arizona's Palo Verde nuclear power plant run right through the southeastern deserts of California. I'd imagine if you put a LOT of solar panels out in the desert you'd need to bump up the transmission capacity, but it's not like every internal combustion powered car is gonna be replaced overnight. There will be decades to bring the grid up to capacity.
So what part of that list of woes is due to "free markets"?
What part? Deregulated "too big to fail" banks gambling literally trillions on debt backed by obviously worthless assets, losing it all, then turning to productive taxpayers and industries for a massive bailout.
But hey, the CEO's made off with billions - who cares if the rest of the economy is a smoldering wreck as a result. Bozillo at Countrywide cashed in to the tune of over $500 million in a single year. Now it turns out many of those mortgages Countrywide originated don't even have legitimate paperwork behind them - Countrywide was too cheap to pay employees to do it properly. B of A bought Countrywide, and the lack of legitimate documentation could mean that billions of dollars worth of mortgages they were counting on for income and as assets don't actually exist. It could easily destroy the company, assuming taxpayers aren't forced to hack up another $100 billion bailout hairball.
The funny thing is that developed countries with properly regulated banking systems are able to afford extensive social programs, retirement pensions and their military obligations. Germany seems in little danger of defaulting on their loans - in fact they're running around bailing everybody else out. The US once had similar systems, and curiously went about 70 years between economic meltdowns. Why, it's almost like there's a correlation between strict regulation and financial stability and growth . . .
When you convert your financial services sector from an engine to fund industry and progress into a crooked casino controlled by a few well-connected thieves and greedy idiots, it doesn't take long before it wrecks your entire economy, regardless of how large that economy is. We saw this play out before, in the last Great Depression.
In general I agree with what you've said up above, but I think this statement misses something more fundamental:
I don't think Apple saw their current success back when they started the iPod.
I think Steve Jobs has wanted to create a Dynabook for going on 30 years now, but the technology wasn't in place to do it right until quite recently. The iPad is something that's been in the works for decades. The iPod and the iPhone were diversions which, ironically, gave Apple a lot of the insights, the technology and the marketshare/mindshare to make the iPad possible sooner than it might have been otherwise (and more successful).
And the iPhone probably only came about because Motorola so thoroughly f*cked up their ROKR that Apple gave up on partnering with existing cell manufacturers and decided to take the risk of going it alone themselves.
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Linus Pauling was arguably the most famous chemist of the last century.
Sorry, I'd say Margaret Thatcher was the most famous chemist of the 20th Century. Although perhaps not so much for her actual chemistry...
Or his commenting on the...Fukushima diaster (which he, IMO recklessly, called the worst diaster second only to Chernobyl, even though it's far from clear that it'd be worse than Three Mile Island or Windscale at this point
The Three Mile Island incident involved a partial meltdown of a single reactor. Fukushima involves - according to the power company running the plant - the partial meltdown of several reactors, plus overheating at spent fuel pools containing 1,700 tons of highly radioactive waste (and - in the Number 4 reactor's pool - that reactor's live nuclear fuel).
It's already released far more radiation into the environment than Three Mile Island ever did.
There's no basis in fact for criticizing Kaku regarding this statement concerning Fukushima.
and certainly several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl).
A nuclear disaster could be several orders of magnitude less severe than Chernobyl and still be the second worst nuclear disaster ever.
Reinsurers carry risks on this scale all the time.
Yeah, but the reinsurers are covering huge insurance companies, and their risk comes from massive events on a wide scale, like hurricanes and tsunami. Also, many Japanese households are self-insured.
A single nuclear plant could represent over $100 billion in liabilities, more than all but the worst natural disasters could cost. That's why they can't get private insurance, and why the utility companies turn to the taxpayers for some socialized risk to cover their privatized profits.
Oh, and I just found out - Reactor #4 apparently wasn't fueled at the time of the accident (so subtract 100 tons from the amount of fuel sitting in the reactors). That's because its fuel rods were sitting in its cooling pool, as they were conducting maintenance on the reactor. That's right, instead of having 1,700 tons of waste fuel sitting on top of the reactors, we have 1,600 tons of waste fuel and 100 tons of live nuclear fuel, sitting out in the open, with no containment.
And which building had the fire up above the reactor, from all of the hydrogen spewing out of its cooling pool?
Reactor #4.
This is not good.
If the rods catch fire, it'll basically be the same as Chernobyl again.
If all of the spent fuel pools boil dry and the rods catch fire and melt, it'll be a lot worse than Chernobyl. I've read there are 1,700 tons of spent fuel parked in the pools atop those reactors, plus 100 tons in each of the three operating reactors, and I'm assuming another 100 tons of spent fuel in each of the three reactors they had offline at the time of the quake. So that's 2,300 tons of highly-radioactive crap that could conceivably melt into a pool of 5,000 degree radioactive crap (2,500 degrees hotter than lava).
There's an additional fuel storage pool between two of the reactors. I have no idea how much spent fuel is in there. Almost certainly more than there is atop any single reactor. Perhaps as much as there is atop all of them.
Assuming it all melts down, it'll make Chernobyl look like a particularly malodorous Taco Bell fart.
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
Geeks seem to have the quaint notion that corporations will somehow protect themselves from exposure to massive liabilities in order to preserve themselves. But - in spite of the recent United States Supreme Court ruling to the contrary - corporations are not people. Corporations - especially the really big ones - are a vehicle which really rich and powerful people use to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Think of them as big Saturn V rockets - they burn up all of their fuel and discard most of their structure and mass in the process of delivering their real payload into financial orbit; the rich goons and wealthy investors running the operation.
There are plenty of billionaire psychopaths who are more than willing and able to destroy their "own" corporation if it can make them an extra few million dollars, provided they can skip away without being held responsible for any of the mess they leave behind. It's perfectly rational behavior, if you're a psychopath.
Mozillo over at Countrywide made $500 million dollars in a single year while shoveling fraudulent mortgages out the door like they were McDonalds hamburgers. He still has the billion plus dollars he made during his tenure running Countrywide, and he's protected by an army of lawyers and bought-and-paid-for representatives in government. He doesn't care that Countrywide was destroyed, as it served his purpose - it made him rich. The taxpayers and the customers of and investors in Countrywide have been left on the hook to clean up the mess.
You wanna trust these guys with nuclear power plants and - worse - tons of nuclear waste? Good luck with that!
But coal powerplants cause up to 13,000 - 30,000 premature deaths per year in the US alone (quick google) and in general emit more radiation over their lifetimes compared to nuclear because of the trace amounts of uranium found in coal.
Compared to nuclear plants that aren't experiencing a meltdown, maybe. If Fukushima goes up in nuclear smoke, along with the tons of spent fuel rods stored atop each reactor (who the hell approved THAT design?), it'll emit more radioactive material than every coal fired plant in recorded history. And much of it will be far more dangerous than the minuscule amounts of uranium in coal.
(According to this USGS study done during the Clinton administration, coal doesn't typically contain any more uranium than common rocks or dirt: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html)
>Does this silly CEO really thinks we are expecting to play the same time of games on a small 3"
>screen as the one we play on a full HD screen? Come on, this is a different market, and the 2
>are non exclusive.
For the moment.
In the not too distant future though, cell phones and tablets will likely support wireless HDMI and the ability to drive full-sized HD screens while functioning as a controller (or working with wireless controllers or even motion controllers). Once those become commonplace, it's hard to see how the dedicated game console survives.
That becomes especially apparent when you look at services like OnLive. Who needs a dedicated box from a specific vendor?
Actually, unionizing the TSA workers might fix this problem, since the workers are likely to be the ones most impacted by chronic exposure to higher-than-anticipated levels of radiation. A strong union would be in a much better position to square off against the politically-connected equipment manufactures than any individuals.
>The president who passed national health care?
The President only signed the bill. It was Congress that passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. An act which is a long, long way way from "national health care". It essentially just mandates loosely-enforced regulations on insurance companies, and requires individuals to purchase health insurance. It's the same kind of healthcare reform the Republicans have been proposing for years (and actually implemented in Massachusetts).
>The president who passed a trillion dollar stimulus package?
There's nothing uniquely Democratic or Republican about that. Reagan ran up enormous deficits during his two terms in the Oval Office, when the economy was supposedly doing well. Ditto Bush and his kid. This time around a bunch of money is being spent on infrastructure instead of on thousand dollar toilet seats.
>The president who is pushing for cap-and-trade and higher taxes on "the rich"?
Uh, what higher taxes? Obama has signed into law the largest annual tax cuts in history, $282 billion over two years.
There's a warning out now for the West Cost of the US. Wave expected to hit between 7-7:30 AM PST. Only expected to be 3-4 feet high at this time. Avoid the beach.
http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/
>When you're poor, moving is just driving.
Moving involves deposits (utilities, apartment), the rental of a moving van, fuel, insurance . . . That's a whole bunch of money for folks who don't have any.
And try getting a job without an address. It's not easy - especially in this economy.
>Not really, in current smartphones, the screen itself costs upwards of $20 I believe.
And what will a similar screen cost in 3 years? Probably $5. Tomorrow's smartphones will be as cheap as or cheaper than today's featurephones. Maybe everybody in the developing world won't be able to afford one, but hundreds of millions of people certainly will.
Motorola just announced an Android phone that can be hooked up to a docking station and connect to a monitor and full sized keyboard for use as a little computer. What happens in the developing world when your $50 smartphone can also double as your office and/or home computer? Suddenly that $50 smartphone looks like a pretty incredible deal.
What is with these names, anyhow? Streak? Pad?
What's next? Stain? Chunk? Smear? Dingleberry?
>In other words, homosexuality is a birth defect
Your conclusion doesn't follow the facts. If homosexuality is indeed more likely as mothers produce male offspring sequentially, that implies it's some kind of survival adaptation, one that evolved. It could confer a survival advantage for the genes by providing non-breeding siblings whose presence can help ensure the survival of their siblings' offspring.
We see examples of this kind of reproductive strategy elsewhere in other social animals. Bees and ants are two powerful examples - colonies comprised almost entirely of siblings, with only a handful (or even just one) breeding female, plus a crop of fertile offspring produced seasonally.
All true. But religious fanatics also have a long history of going to war with and exterminating other religious fanatics. So just because their population is booming now, doesn't mean it won't bust later on.
Also, these idiots can't keep up that kind of birth rate much longer - the money is gone to support that kind of population expansion. This recession has already seen birth rates in the US plunge.
No one is forced to support a corporation
Oh, look! Another moron who's never heard of a thing called a "monopoly".
Some sort of major, planet-disrupting collision was necessary well after the Earth was formed and "stable". When forming from a molten glob, all of the "interesting" stuff sinks to the core, leaving the light stuff in the crust.
Debatable. The earth re-melted, so all of the "interesting" stuff that was gonna sink, sank. Mars apparently never got whacked like that, and IIRC its crust, which is mostly basalt like our ocean basins, has more iron in it by % than ours does.
Asimov suggested that the oversized moonmight have played a vital role in developing a crust that would support life.
Maybe. But what makes you think planets with moons are rare? Terrestrial planets with moons may be rare in the Sol system - we have no idea how abundant they are in the universe as a whole.
We also don't know if planets even make up the majority of possibly habitable worlds in the universe. In our own system, there are far more good-sized moons than there are planets. Our observation of other solar systems has already revealed numerous worlds as massive as Jupiter or more massive in orbits within the habitable zone of their parent stars. Such moons would almost certainly have hefty tides, and they'd have them for far longer than Earth did.
Our neck of the woods must have once been quite violent, but since then has become quite calm.
True, but we now know that stars are typically ejected from these stellar nurseries at fairly high velocities, meaning they get clear of the novae and supernovae associated with these regions within millions or tens of millions of years. Such regions also tend to blow themselves apart over time and dissipate, halting local star formation.
even AT the speed it light it would take you hundreds of years to reach stars currently known to have planets orbiting them.
That's not true at all. *At* the speed of light time stands still, so you'd reach those stars in an instant.
Of course, you'd also gain infinite mass and become a black hole...
Now, if you only traveled near the speed of light time dilation would occur, but it wouldn't be that extreme. Still, at speeds close to the speed of light you could easily circumnavigate the known known universe within the span of a single human lifetime. You would of course return to find the earth a burned out cinder orbiting a dead star tens of billions of years in our future.
And perhaps you would be welcomed back by our distant descendants. Or by Abe Vigoda.
But that would lead to the arrest and incarceration of rich white Republicans, not dirty nasty Mexicans. So that'll never happen.
Hey Bruce! I wasted many hours playing Sundog on the ST. Thanks!
You should make a version for the iPad!
All those apply to Texas and yet Texas is not bankrupt and is doing far better than California.
Wrong. Texas is also going belly-up. And since they have a smaller budget and a smaller economy to begin with, it's going to get really ugly in Texas really fast.
A budget shortfall as high as $25 billion is projected as lawmakers head into the 2011 legislative session, according to estimates from economists and the comptroller's office.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-taxes/2011-budget-shortfall/
The average US household uses about 1,000kW of power each month.
Yeah, but how much of that is pure unadulterated waste? Heating and cooling are the biggest chunk, and I'd hazard a guess that 50% or more of that energy is wasted, either due to inefficient heating and cooling systems or insufficient insulation. Eliminate those two issues alone and you'd get power consumption down well under 800kWh without any increase in supply.
LED lighting will be rolling out in this decade in a big way, slashing the amount of power lighting consumes from something like 10% down to well under 5%. Appliances are becoming vastly more power-efficient, so there's another few % in demand destruction we'll see hit the grid over the next decade. Water heaters are set to experience massive gains in efficiency as new technologies roll out and folks replace their existing power-hungry units with more thrifty models, and water heating accounts for something like 10% of the energy utilized in most homes.
I think it's pretty obvious that by the time electric cars become commonplace, consumers will have already slashed their electric consumption in other areas by enough to support a pretty vast fleet of electric vehicles using the existing infrastructure. Throw in more locally-generated power from solar, wind and possibly other sources (thermal depolymerization, for example) and the conversion to electric cars certainly seems pretty do-able, just based on current trends.
Solar's an option, but it uses a *lot* of real estate, which is at a premium in California
There are huge unpopulated areas of central and southern California, most of which are conveniently arid and sun-drenched. Not to mention the gazillion square miles of rooftop and parking lot in California, much of which could host solar panels. Even better, they'd be generating power where it's actually being consumed, eliminating transmission losses and easing the strain on the regional grid.
There's large swaths of desert in eastern California that'd be perfect for solar plants, but you'd run into transmission problems, because most of that territory is nowhere near where the electricity is actually needed.
There's already enormous capacity to transmit electricity east to west in Southern California. The transmission lines from the dams on the Colorado River and from Arizona's Palo Verde nuclear power plant run right through the southeastern deserts of California. I'd imagine if you put a LOT of solar panels out in the desert you'd need to bump up the transmission capacity, but it's not like every internal combustion powered car is gonna be replaced overnight. There will be decades to bring the grid up to capacity.
So what part of that list of woes is due to "free markets"?
What part? Deregulated "too big to fail" banks gambling literally trillions on debt backed by obviously worthless assets, losing it all, then turning to productive taxpayers and industries for a massive bailout.
But hey, the CEO's made off with billions - who cares if the rest of the economy is a smoldering wreck as a result. Bozillo at Countrywide cashed in to the tune of over $500 million in a single year. Now it turns out many of those mortgages Countrywide originated don't even have legitimate paperwork behind them - Countrywide was too cheap to pay employees to do it properly. B of A bought Countrywide, and the lack of legitimate documentation could mean that billions of dollars worth of mortgages they were counting on for income and as assets don't actually exist. It could easily destroy the company, assuming taxpayers aren't forced to hack up another $100 billion bailout hairball.
The funny thing is that developed countries with properly regulated banking systems are able to afford extensive social programs, retirement pensions and their military obligations. Germany seems in little danger of defaulting on their loans - in fact they're running around bailing everybody else out. The US once had similar systems, and curiously went about 70 years between economic meltdowns. Why, it's almost like there's a correlation between strict regulation and financial stability and growth . . .
When you convert your financial services sector from an engine to fund industry and progress into a crooked casino controlled by a few well-connected thieves and greedy idiots, it doesn't take long before it wrecks your entire economy, regardless of how large that economy is. We saw this play out before, in the last Great Depression.
In general I agree with what you've said up above, but I think this statement misses something more fundamental:
I don't think Apple saw their current success back when they started the iPod.
I think Steve Jobs has wanted to create a Dynabook for going on 30 years now, but the technology wasn't in place to do it right until quite recently. The iPad is something that's been in the works for decades. The iPod and the iPhone were diversions which, ironically, gave Apple a lot of the insights, the technology and the marketshare/mindshare to make the iPad possible sooner than it might have been otherwise (and more successful).
And the iPhone probably only came about because Motorola so thoroughly f*cked up their ROKR that Apple gave up on partnering with existing cell manufacturers and decided to take the risk of going it alone themselves.