I understand and we do that with composted manure here (chicken litter), huge mass quantities of it. We have a dedicated custom spreader truck for that. This is what we do on our both our pastures and our hayfields. I also use some in my personal garden. I also understand about the petrochemicals, and I agree with you long term it's nuts, but short term it is what we have. I support people buying more locally and more sustainable from organic farmers.
I am way more in favor of biochar production and getting that down into the soil to develop tilth though. It lasts longer (centuries quite literally), remains stable longer, works better, etc than just cultivation, although I am in favor of light surface cultivation, for seasonal weed control, with the crops that you can do that with during the season, row crops. Freaking wheat, stuff like that, I have no idea how to do that, never investigated how organic wheat guys keep weeds under control...have to find out because I am cluless there. I tried to grow a little, just for a hoot, it greew quite well, but man it gets weedy fast, then when it comes to harvest you get way too much weeds mixed in with it to make it worthwhile to separate.
Anyway, just for soil tilth, the biochar as the next "green revolution step" is what I would like to see done with all that huge cubic miles of wood and brush that burns up all the time out west. It also helps better than anything else to help maintain soil moisture, another critical aspect out there and most every place else. They can do *small controlled burns* after harvest to improve the soil and kill off diseases and repleish those things that need to burn to reproduce, and also allow continuous rotating thinning with the goat herds, just expand that practice as well, it's already being done.
I also like our practical nuclear fusion conversion tech, because it scales from massive baseload sized all the way down to joe homeowner size, and he can OWN his own means of production, get it *paid off*, not be in thrall and servitude forever and two days to BIG Corrupt Co., and have both future economic security along with future production security, that can't be mucked around wuth by forces outside his control.
To that end, I have started true "investing" in my own sources, we now have both solar PV and a small wind genny. The genny is currently not being used, but I retain it as an emergency backup. Where we lived previously it was practical, higher elevation in the mountains, but were we are now solar PV is where it is at. That and we use sustainable biofuel, our home heating is primarily wood now, where previously it was a combo of electric and propane. I have to do maintenance all the time, fix fences, clean the creek, etc, where falling trees and branches break stuff or could interfere with the cross creek barricade fence thing I made to keep the beefers in and not wandering around the neighbors yards eating their flowers and stuff (happened before..most embarrassing and hard to get them back in), so I thought might as well use the stuff as long as I have to cut big amounts of it all the time. Works quite well, and is very comfortable and cozy and I do not have to rely on some local energy monopoly for my supply, plus frees up loads of cash. win/win/win for me and is carbon neutral, plus nice healthy exercise with a lot of "resistance training" HAHAH! Big tree trunk chunks get pretty hea
*Just* in the US, *just* in year 2008, 8.3 gigawatts (8,358 megawatts) of wind power went in. There was more before, more this year, and more is coming. You may dismiss it if you want to, but that's a hefty amount in most anyone's book, and world wide it is much larger. China for instance is installing even more than that.
There's no single one technology that will be the "energy fix" or the silver bullet. It will require "all of the above", plus more.
(above is my simple reply, below is more in depth if you'd care to read it, I just like writing)
To me, and this is just my personal opinion, nuclear has one *extremely serious flaw* (besides being overhyped how cheap it is when they can't get private insurance and a whole lot of them do NOT have decommissioning funds available and will be needing "bailouts" most likely, and so on), it is inherently a very contentious technology globally, and we face the prospect of an enlarged middle eastern war, that also has the potential to go to nuclear weapons, over who has access to nuclear technology. Said war would also immediate severely hurt the global crude liquid fuels supply, driving prices to unheard of levels,(as in the fast price rises last summer would be a joke in comparison) as a significant part of the global supply passes daily through the Hormuz Strait, which would instantly be one of the hottest battlefields ever in the case of an attack on Iran, who aren't pushovers like the decimated Iraq military were. They have significantly more, and significantly better quality, anti ship and anti armor and anti aircraft capability. Just some of their good anti ship missiles can hit targets with the best protection available, the Israelies found that out the last time they went into lebanon. The silkworm, the sunburn and the super sunburn, and they might have the squall rocket torpedo as well. And such a war over who has access to nuke tech or not is a real issue that must be taken into consideration when discussing nuke tech in general. This possibility of war over nuclear tech is in the headlines daily. The two aspects of nuclear technology simply can't be seperated realistically. If you can do one, you can do the other without much more effort, they are entwined. This is a problem, and head under the covers and ignoring it won't make this pretty serious boogieman go away.
On the other hand, no one is going to war over wind power (or solar). No one cares. It is a complete and total non issue. Which is quite attractive in these days of high tech war potential. No one is threatening any one else with severe economic sanctions or outright armed attacks over windpower anyplace. No one cares who has windpower or not. You don't need armed guards for the next several centuries to guard windpower "waste". You don't need cadres of soldiers with antiaircraft missiles ringing windpower development labs or production facilities or installed towers. You don't need international "inspectors" taking note of your windpower development. No need to hide stuff in bunkers and engage in global brinksmanship. No need to be the big international hypocrite because you have windpower tech, but the dude over there, or so you claim, can't be "trusted" with it, even though you are the only one to ever use "aggressive windpower" in a weapons of mass destruction attack.
And so on, you get the drift there I'm sure.
Economically, if a few of your thousands of windchargers go down or the wind isn't blowing someplace, pfft, again, a non issue, whereas, if your one nuke plant shuts down for repairs or maintenance, an entire huge city worth of power is lost for the duration. Just last year we came this close to a pretty bad cascading failure event from one nuke plant having problems in Florida. And the Japanese have found out that a lot of the "industry standards for safety" are inadequate when it comes to big earthquakes, an
No new powerplants? They are going in daily, just new designs that don't burn coal. They are called windchargers and the commercial ones are a megawatt to 2.5 megawatt, and they are designing even larger ones, both for onshore and offshore use. Going up all over the planet. And they are building a variety of both solar thermal commercial sized plants, and even a few quite large solar PV plants, and who knows how many smaller home sized systems go in daily, which will give us eventually millions and millions of points of production, not just a thousand controlled by bigelectroco.. These are new paradigm powerplants, just like all these new private space projects are pushing the envelope there as well.
When it comes to both energy, and space travel, and biotech, these are *exciting times*, after being stuck in the doldrums for a few decades.
Just seems that getting cheaper and cleaner energy sources for the nation would be a positive move for any politician long range, jerkoff or not..off to google...
I just found out why, they caught the mafia running the wind business there and shut it down, any additional funding, why they investigate. Just google "italy, wind power" and you'll see a variety of news articles on it. They are doing things like taking the gov cash, then not doing much with it, "fixing" the permitting system, and sabotaging other wind companies-destroying towers- that won't pay them protection money, stuff like that.
They've been battling that mafia gang corruption for years, I am surprised the people there put up with it. Just have a one day "stomp 'em flat with extreme prejudice" national exercise and get it over with.
Anti self defense apologists, those who say that humans shouldn't have the ability for self defense against crooks and badguys, that it is only the state's business, that it isn't "civilized" to be proactive in your own and your community's defense, frequently point to some delusion they have about the US "wild wild west" days.
Historically, that's inaccurate, crime was much worse by and large in the larger and more established eastern big cities then in the frontier west. Gangs and badguys did *not* last very long back then if they got caught, the locals just whacked them, and that was that. The people knew who their local criminals were, and life was too tough and hard to put up with bogus crap like that or wait for some far away ineffective government to "do something" about it.
Of course, once it gets to the point that all aspects of your government are corrupt, and there's little diff between the private criminals and the public ones..you're screwed, then you are REQUIRED historically to have a national ad-lib "stomp 'em flat day".
Usually it is rather *messy*, but it's been proven it needs to happen once in awhile.
Governments ALWAYS eventually get totally criminally corrupt, because of basic human psychology. Sociopaths and megalomaniacs gravitate to positions of power,(same happens in big business as well..) then surround themselves with other "official" people who are also sociopaths and megalomaniacs, right down to the local level, up and down and sideways through their bureaucracy and organization.
This is the number #1 reason people should *never* put up with the governments disarming them, no matter what bullshit reasons they give. That is always the last big step before complete totalitarianism takes over and things get really really bad. And it doesn't matter what the government call themselves as per description, right, left, centrist, democratic, benevolent monarch, whatever..all that academic wanking voodoo crap is just convenient labels designed to obfuscate reality and keep their "subjects" cowed and complacent. "Why, we aren't corrupt badguys, we call ourselves a democracy, and look, there are 'elections"!
Yah, sure...whatever. You're the "benevolent peoples socialist royal democratic representation and organized delicious organic donut bakers 'government' Vote for us!"
The time scale differs in all the historical records for heinous dictatorships to evolve in governments, but not that outcome, it's just inevitable.
Advanced rocket designs and navigation, etc just have too much military dual use potential to them to just wing it out public domain..unfortunately. Otherwise I agree with you, proly quite a bit of wheel reinventing going on now that really doesn't have to be. I think *most* government funded research should be open sourced, especially anything pertaining to medicine, but not that.
Look at what they do for professional sports stadiums every weekend. Heck, look downstream from there,at how much public property tax money is used across the nation to brainwash little kids and get them addicted and operate those same pro sports farm teams in the public school system (which is all they are, subsidized farm teams).
If you got the cash and "the juice", what is public can become private *real quick*.
Some places have the deposit, some don't, and as you can see, even *with* a five cent deposit, most people think so little of that that they still toss them. Without a deposit, they are mostly all tossed. Some get scavenged and recycled, some don't, and many of the people who scavenge and recycle don't even bother with the buhzillions of food cans now that have steel tops and the rest of the can is aluminum. Thye'd have to cut the tops off and rinse out the cans so they don't bother.
Now ME, I just see them as fun targets, especially if you fill them with water so you get a big splasharooni from a hit;)
Anyway, the point was I can't see us running out of aluminum soon, besides what is already here and could be recycled, the planet has plenty of bauxite.
Heck, out west in the desert, they have *thousands* of old junk airplanes made from aluminum sitting around. And the coming thing for new airplane construction is to go to carbon fiber and not use so much aluminum. I don't think goog will have any problems sourcing material for a big mirror project.
and hey, since when is 60 "old"!?! heheheh we call that "middle aged" now.
When you consider it is still so cheap that billions of aluminum beverage and food products cans are just thrown away daily? Tons of them aren't even recycled, just tossed.
And here's what could happen, a solar/aluminum/mirror "breeder" facility. The first solar mirror thermal plant on a big scale is tasked with just making the aluminum, from scrap or bauxite, then right next door is the fab for making the mirrors. They only have to pay full price for the first one, after that the price falls fast because the power source is free.
Did they drop support because they couldn't get it to work well, or is it working well enough that no subsidies are needed anymore? Or is Italy just broke and dropping a lot of governmental spending in general?
There is a middle ground that apparently hasn't been tried much yet by the perpetual copyright and DRM crowd. The current practice with the entertainment cartel is to charge a per unit price that is grossly distorted upwards. They want to maintain some level of cash transferred "per unit" that doesn't adequately reflect the reproduction costs, it's inflated severely. They are still living way in the past when it really DID cost them a lot of money to make a "copy for sale". It just ain't that way any more, yet their per unit pricing hasn't changed much.
Especially when you look at digital copies of this or that, but it still applies to data bits on a stamped plastic disk as well. Just *perhaps* if they had tracked technological innovation better, and seriously dropped what they charged, they could have maintained similar profits by merely increasing their sales using the "economy of scale" model. And, at the same time, not alienated their customers so much.
A *buck* for a few megs of download for *one* tune? Out to lunch. Ridiculously over priced, how about 5 cents or so? That might be like one cent bandwith, 4 cents profit. I don't know exactly but it would be something like that. I mean, do those media cartel goofballs REALLY think and expect that people are going to fill up their multi gigabyte capacity tune players at a buck a song? What is that, what it costs to buy a freeking brand new car to do that legally? Are they just crazy, or stupid, or both? And they wonder why a lot of their potential customers are abandoning that pricing model being offered?
10-20 bucks for less than a dollar worth of stamped plastic and some printed up cardboard? Try two or three bucks instead. And I *know* it can be done for that price at new retail level, I have bought old TV show stuff brand new on DVD for that at chinamart before. Just sell a lot more copies at a more reasonable price, because people are more apt to buy and not peg leg it when it isn't obviously blatant price gouging.
I hope near all of 'em. I'm for emergency spending cuts and elimination of several agencies outright (department of education, the endownment for the arts, the BATFE, the DEA just for starters)..and if I was made doofus commander clerk in chief, I'd can the Fed, actually just seize it and nationalize it, and dump the IRS totally and come up with a better way to fund government, such as DIRECTLY and eliminate that insane stupid medieval hold over "tax" BS middleman shuffle they got going on now, which serves as a conduit for carrot and stick social engineering action against the population, and which has nothing to do with "funding government".
. Just the dang interest on this stupid and not needed *at all* debt is a killer, it's completely out of control, 9 trillion to *13 trillion smackers* in the hole in JUST ONE YEAR, and our entire GDP is only 14 odd trillion. Nuts. And that's only what they admit to..the dang Fed is holding out on releasing info and are scared witless if the audit the fed bill passes. And they should be.
Nasa I think has some national security and long range practical R&D science value, I wouldn't get rid of it, but they need a bath, a haircut, and a "stern talking to" as well. In the immortal words of Dean Wormer: "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son"
Along with the entrenched "war" blood profits industry that Ike warned us about, another out of control rathole to siphon money into. The cold war was over a long time ago, when does the "peace dividend" kick in? Oh ya, that's right, NEVER, hurts profits and political military types careers "in service" then their "botton line" when they go from there directly into working for the defense contractors. Oh, no conflict of interest there, not a bit....
And don't get me going on them treasonous greed soaked big gambling banks they've been funding.. whoops too late, it happened...if EVER some industry needed to eat their own free market capitalist dogfood, they are the ones. Big heaping steenking bowls of it, breakfast, lunch and dinner and for dessert. Again, if I was pen wielding goofball in chief, every big navy ship we got, one big huge chain around manhattan, tow it out to sea and sink that mofo. Start over then with just a touch more rationality...
When it comes to the national governmental budget and this total and complete war on the productive middle class's wallet (what's left of it now)..I'm for the government and their overlord controllers, wallstreet, calling an immediate cease fire, having them apologize profusely and beg forgiveness, and then discussing war reparations, as an alternative to the people winning this war being waged on them, and having war crimes tribunals against those predators (which I would almost rather see happen just for kosmic karma purposes).
(dislaimer: I am both a commercial farmer, a long time private organic gardener-since the 50s-, and also a long time alternate energy enthusiast and experimenter and user-since the 60s-, that's why I chime in on these topics and threads. I am not a software programmer, so I don't comment there much...although I do read some of those threads for funzies and to see if a little of that knowledge can slop over easy.. I do not profess to be the ultimate expert, I learn new stuff every single day, but I have more than a passing level of knowledge on these various subjects I comment on here..else I wouldn't, there wouldn't be any point to it.)
*Some* of that waste ag biomatter is plowed in, but a lot of it is ground up now and used for inexpensive and barely functional alleged "nutritional" bulk roughage in animal feed. They DON'T plow it under in a lot of cases because it is a tradeoff, they found they have less diseases that way, and if you go two years in a row with your big commercial crop and it gets wiped out from diseases and/or pests, etc, sorry, you are now in debt and seriously bankrupt and ain't gonna be farmin no mo.
Right now on this farm, I mean this experiment starts next week with the next flock "right now", we are using a form of really cheap to get waste biomass-sunflower seed hulls- that normally just get more or less tossed into animal feed just to get rid of them or dumped on hillsides for erosion control or something- in an authorized by our upstream company experiment to replace/augment some normally much more expensive and getting harder to get wood shavings we use for absorbent bedding in the poultry houses. It could just as easily go into making ethanol when they get that rough cellulose enzymes and bioreactive agents tech down better (said research going on in dozens of labs right now). Then it very well could be put to fuel use instead, as it would be worth more for that.
Really big farms (such as where we sourced those hulls from) now have gone to "no till", they rarely if ever plow anymore, at most they use a very little fast surface cultivation, and a lot of them don't even do that, they just spray various chemicals and fertilizers and rotate crops. Plant, spray, harvest, do it again. And that's in transition as well, ag industry evolves as it needs to. Now some of the newer tech I like, some I don't, but it is way too varied to comment on in a single thread, and this will be long enough as it is.
Biofuel tech is exploding, it is going in several different directions right now, and a lot of it is quite promising, so I will have to just 100% disagree with your dismissal of biofuels for the future, just to get that out of the way.
Biofuels are quite practical solar fusion power.
These biofuels and solar PV and solar thermal are the ONLY forms of practical fusion power we have now, or are *likely* to have in the next buncha decades given the status of the results of the last several decades on man made fusion power, like with magnetic and plasma and laser whatever gee whizz sci fi containment bubbles and so on.
As such, they really are our best hope right now for developing affordable-enough and sustainable and carbon neutral liquid transportation fuels that can be introduced easily full strength or in blends into our already existing and extremely expensive to replace right now liquid fuel based entire "transportation stack"
. So that's why I disagree with you so much. They *are* working so far, and it shows more promise, and just thousands of dedicated scientists and technicians are working on it to get it better, and it will continue to get better because of that.
Here's an example right now where it is going good and expanding, jatropha seed oil for biodiesel in India. It's just a fast growing weed, it grows readily in scrub land they have there in abundance where you really can't grow anything with any food value, especially if you can't irrigate, yet it thri
News organizations today are becoming unprofitable because they not only have to support the actual journalists, but a BIG overhead of managers and "investors". Is there a real need anymore for this huge expensive middleman layer between the originator of the news article and the reader? This is just like record labels and musicians, it's in a big transition period and it's fairly obvious that a lot of those jobs in that industry are now technically obsolete and should and are going to go away eventually.
We already have the next gen news model, still in the baby crawling stage in a long term historical timeframe, it just needs more shaking out and tweaking,and that is regular bloggers who do a good job, and their "pay" is mostly the same thing they like, news and views from other people. This is called economically an "in kind" payment.
It is the primary source of wealth transference in the open source software world right now, you get paid "in kind" by getting to use other's open source code contributions, which you then tweak and modify to be used in your regular non software business to "make money".
There's still room for "cash" payments, but we really need to eliminate as much as possible all the unnecessary middle man skimming that goes on to make it affordable enough to be self sustaining. Digital products are *cheap* to make copies of, practically zero, so it is inevitable that this will have to be reflected in the "price".
Various jobs and industries have disappeared or been changed radically over human history, you just have to adapt and move on if you find one business model is unsustainable, and do something else, and that's just that.
I know I had to do it, after *several* factory jobs I had, as a much younger guy, got outsourced, I just gave up, admitted reality, moved on to something completely different, then I had to do that again, then again. I've had to change major careers now three times and am on my fourth, which is totally unrelated to the previous three types of work to "make money". Stuff just freakin' changes, and *that's it*, you do not have an exclusive right to always make the same money you used to make doing the same job, and trying to legislate this into existence or come up with some lame wild ass scheme to try and perpetuate it is just slap dumb, it just borks things all up and you'll fail anyway.
That goes for individuals, as well as entire huge industries. (that's why they should have let those casino gambling banks fail and go normally bankrupt, then society and the real market would have sorted out what those involved 'quant' derived paper financial pseudo products were really worth....which ain't near what they claim they are worth on paper)
Digital products of all kinds are our first true ubiquitous "star trek" level replicator technology. If we screw this up with restrictions or trying to maintain completely stupid and obsolete jobs, what will happen when we have tangible goods cheap replicators?
Maintaining a hideously convoluted and stupid artificial scarcity of any sort of products will cause people to route around these restrictions, and that is just that. It doesn't work with "illegal" tangible products, it didn't work with alcohol restrictions, it isn't working with other dry or leafy products restrictions, despite a huge effort and laws and draconian penalties, and it is *not* going to work with mostly intangible digital products either.
If they make "news" too expensive or restricted in order to maintain some huge middleman distribution model from the last previous few centuries, it will get routed around. They are beating their heads against the wall on this one. All that will happen with their expensive news is that a sort of "News-peg-legger bay" will show up.
People say "well, it costs money to go send some reporter over to warzoneistan to report on the news" and similar to that, I'll counter that with saying there are ALRE
Which one is it again, which federal agency claims they just slap get too much money? So much that they give a lot of it back and tell congress "please, stop giving us so much money, we have more than enough to do this job"?
Just wondering, because I never heard of any agency claiming they had enough loot. All of them to the best of my recollection have always wanted more money saying they *need* it to "do their jobs".
I think it was also "much harder working with much less political BS and slacking off" back then. Just a guess though...Nasa is a federal bureaucracy,,it functions the same as all other federal bureaucracies therefore, the nature of the beast. The longer any bureaucracies stay in existence, the slower and less efficient they become, and it inevitably costs more to get the same amount of work done that they did when they first were created. Committees to schedule meetings where they will decide which committees should have a meeting and when and so on.
Not to say no work gets done, obviously it does, but back then nasa was new and exciting and hadn't been around long enough to build up typical government bloat. More workers who really worked, less management and political commissars walking around sucking up budget costs in busywork mc jobs.
Just throwing that out as a possibility, because I see no proof that Nasa is different from other long standing governmental organizations now.
Combined with more efficient vehicles,(a LOT more efficient, it's possible today with bog standard today's tech, every place BUT the US has a much wider choice of better mileage vehicles) and electric vehicles, and using what petroleum we have in blends with advanced biofuels, we could get by on a reduced petroleum supply load for even longer.
And telecommuting, a few tens of billion in better data infrastructure could eliminate the need for hundreds of billions worth in commuting costs and pollution., which is cheaper and easier, transporting some electrons, or millions of meat sacks in heavy steel boxes twice a day?
Giant office towers that are there just so folks can sit in front of a computer screen are *rather wasteful*, when folks can stay home and sit in front of a computer screen. All that commuting and having to keep those huge buildings running, proly 3/4ths wasted right there just because a lot of these companies haven't had the right incentive (that would be clubs to the head to get them to wake up) and cut loose from the Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchitt 1700s mentality of the necessity of BEING at the office all the time, and make better use of the tech we have now and enter the 21st century. Plus think of the sheer millions of man hours that could be saved not riding in a car or bus or train or even a dang bicycle back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to work.
We can go a long ways to dropping petroleum (and coal and natgas and..) demand without sacrificing any cool modern way of life, just by doing things smarter instead oif perpetuating obsolete tech because a few already rich people can skim so much profit from it. Heck, we could probably get by with very few new powerplants if they adjusted building codes (and mortgage loan approvals) to require a lot more insulation. The bulk of our electricity use is heating and cooling, and I know that this demand/requirement level can be dropped drastically, I used to be in that biz for a while, retrofitting for more energy efficiency.
You can read a scosh about it here, superinsulation. It's amazing, you got to see it to believe it almost. You can get some serious savings by just *using* tech that has already been developed decades ago. It ain't sexy for wallstreet skimmers and gamblers that much, so it isn't pushed "in the market" as it could be, or for academic wanking research, but it IS possible. No new nuthin needs to be invented or funded by vulture capitalists or needs "government studies". Just double or triple our generic 50s and 60s level insulation that exists in millions of homes and buildings, along with a few other tweaks like better windows and doors and so on, and you'd be surprised how that works out for the electric bill.
Easy enough done with a simple one page legislative bill and decent and credible sized tax credits, extended for some years. It could create a million new and actually *useful* jobs and save hundreds of billions in energy costs and dramatically reduce air pollution. But no one big company could get a monopoly on it, not a lot of patents to troll with, etc, so it ain't pushed, and dang sure the energy companies don't push it, cuts directly into the ole bottom line there. Lip service at best, they push what I would term 1/4 ass efforts, not even half assed. And they call that "good cents". I call it deliberate misdirection and marketing propaganda.
You want to see what really could be accomplished today, with both housing and transportation, check out some of the designs at the solar decathlon competition.
Rare metals, who knows. If it gets down to national survival, there's a buhzillion acres in federal land (parks and etc) that are currently off limits to mining, but that could change fast.
And we are just scratching the surface on R&D with biofuels. Corn (any cheap sugars) ethanol and soybean (and many other crops) biodiesel are mere first gen efforts, they work right now but are resource and cash expensive. Once next gen gets rolling, like with engineered algae and waste biomass conversion and so on, which could be combined with solar and wind power to run the conversion facilities, we could have liquid transportation fuels for a long time, indefinitely really, as long as we also keep working on better efficiencies and get a lot of the commuter cars running on electricity, and save the liquid fuels more for long haul trucking and ag machinery and aircraft uses etc..
I never said those symptoms didn't exist back then, of course they did, most young kids and especially boys for some reason had them, me included. Just that they weren't considered ADD or a malady. I never took speed then though, so can't comment if it would have calmed me down or not, but I can tell you for several years as a young guy I only really slept much *every other night* I had so much spare energy. That is 100% the honest truth, did that for years, all the way until my late 20's I'd sit up and read. I was resting, but not sleeping.
The "remedy" back then for hyperactivity and lack of focus in class, etc., was to encourage a lot more sports and vigorous outdoor activity, plus healthier food, more raw fruits and veggies, etc. Ya, we had junk food back then as well.
Which would probably do wonders today, seeing as how the practice of eating almost exclusively junk food and pre packaged heavily laced with assorted non food chemicals the modern diet has become. I call that food junk food as well, and the bulk of the population, kids included, only eat junk food. I would imagine there are kids out there now who primarily eat just the junkiest of food, which are mostly saturated fats, corn syrup, food additives and dyes, preservatives, etc etc with very little actual food nutrition to it. It looks like food, they sell it as "food", but it's BS profits at any cost chemicals with some food sprinkles in it, sold in over advertised and overpackaged "packages" full of "fun colors"..
We as humans are designed to eat mostly raw and/or very simple basic foods. You get a host of problems healthwise when you don't. And it really is that simple in a lot of cases. You see it in adults, you see it in kids, the rise of gross obesity, ADD stuff, diabetes, hardening of the arteries in teens, etc. Heck, I had a lady boss once in a wheelchair, with the shakes, I forget which, she had MS or MD..anyway, she was simply a soda addict, diet soda, you never saw her without a huge glass of diet crap she was sucking on. I told her, "worth a shot, lay off that diet pop, or any pop, switch to water and fruit juice, do it for one month, see what happens". She DID do that, and actually was starting to get better when I moved and lost track. she could get out of the chair easier and she said she felt loads better. Simple diet change, get the crap out, give you bod a chance to be normal.
Kids today also take a lot more "shots" then we used to take, perhaps that is a contributory reason for this surge as well.
But I still think a lot of it is misdiagnosed and a part of that is the forced politically correct extreme feminization of young males, they are told they are "sick" when they act like young boys. I didn't bring that up at first, but bet I am right on that, given the PC makeup of most modern public school systems.
Here's another example of this run amok correctness and medical mental health *pure* propaganda misdiagnosis. I am a heavy 2nd amendment supporter, as such I keep up with the news and so on there. Back then, you could bring your.22 or shotgun to school with you to go shooting with friends after school, etc, just put it in your locker. It was NO big deal, absolutely not (and no school massacres either) we did it all the time. Now, a kid *drawing a picture of an army dood, maybe his dad or uncle, with a rifle*..it becomes "zero tolerance" panic time, he is classed as a potential little terrorist or something, sent home immediately, picture confiscated for evidence, all sorts of emergency panic time crap are thrown at him, he gets "detained" by the paramilitary thug patrolling the halls, all negative stuff he now gewts to absorb. It is drummed into his head "guns R bad, you must be sick". And all these big news school massacres? Check the facts, pretty much all committed by kids forced drugged, on "legal" prescribed psychoactive drugs. Coincidence? That's the only thing different from now and then..
This "if" scenario wouldn't be all that bad. Not at all.
IF Microsoft was found to be engaging in RICO, long term constant skullduggery and mischief in the marketplace, bribes, kickbacks, collusions, intimidations, installing rootkits and spyware, etc,etc, and they lost their corporate charter...the government could just take the goods-same as they take any crooks goods away from them, and either sell them at auction or just the physical plant and then take the IP and just slap the source code out under a public domain license or something like that and do the same with their patents. Note, this isn't "going bankrupt" this is busted for being racketeers.
Now all those ex employees after the corporation is dissolved could hang out their "MS Xpert" shingle doing repairs and customizations, security companies would be hired to find bugs and do patches, etc, perhaps several forks of their OS and applications might occur, etc. Small transition period, but I just don't see any showstoppers here.
All the code running now will not just automagically stop running should they be put out of business for being chronic serial bad guys at the management level. Look at all the holdouts still running XP and office 2003 and so on, right now, because they don't really *need* anything else, it is functional enough. All they need is some security patches now and then and new drivers for new hardware. Big freekin deal. There would be zero business lost in the greater community, none whatsoever. there would be *changed* business, but no business of any note would be lost if this theoretical real demand is really there.
The government does this sort of thing with small time and even medium sized crooks all the time, take their fancy cars and cash and money laundering businesses and so on, then sell it at auction and just keep any cash they seize, so why not with the largest crooks and their stuff?
Is there some magic line the government can't cross when it comes to seizing ill gotten gains? I am not aware of any such "law".
And if all these skilled devs and programmers and so on who work directly for Microsoft are even half as good as they say they are, and the demand for continuing MS software is as you say, then all the same people now working for MS should have very little problem finding alternative employment more or less doing exactly what they are doing now..but just not for microsoft, inc.
As for shareholders pfffttt..I fart in their general direction. And I had chili tonight. I am really tired of that old meme like their steenking profits are a "get out of any responsibility at all" excuse for any corporate actions whatsoever, screw em! If they can't be assed enough to do "due diligence" on their alleged employees and their conduct or misconduct, said employees would be the board and upper management at Microsoft, after not just years but DECADES of some pretty serious *hints* that a lot is going on under the surface level that might not be on the up and up, and they keep ignoring it and ignoring it and ignoring it, well who cares, society has *no legal, ethical or moral responsibility whatsoever* to do it for them.
I see no downside at all to busting big fat crooks and crooked companies. And it's better for it TO happen, and the sooner the better, example, enron, worldcom, etc.
Don't let that rot keep festering away. As soon as it is evident, cut it out and sterilize the surrounding tissue before it spreads. The sooner the better. "Too big to fail" is the lamest and stupidest reason out there to excuse or even support such crooked enterprises (also see: casino bankster gangsters).
Now, you need to learn some history, and from people who were there, such as me, and there are plenty of other boomers here who can tell you similar.. All this one quarter or one third of young males were not "diseased" back then like they are termed now back when I was a kid. It didn't exist, this was known as normal childhood stuff and they get over it given a chance. This is a *new* thing they thought up for profit, it is just reclassified as a disease where they force addict them to *speed* for a *cure* and the poor little dude's brains get permanently warped from the drugging during their critical development stage, and they grow up thinking they are sick when all they are is just being normal little boys. Same as a lot of adults now are finally faked out into taking prozac and similar because of "stress". Geez loweez, how did humans we ever make it to the late twentieth century without this crap.
Now I'll be the first to admit that *some* people really need the chemical help, I will not dispute that at all, but such a HUGE proportion of the children, and now the adults? No freekin way, not even close, it's a scam, and the more they inflict it on people the more "normal" it gets to think of your child as "diseased" because some expert claims they are, said expert profiting handsomely from the diagnosis, then some big pharmco for "the cure", same as they will tell YOU that.
We managed hundreds of millions of kids to get through school, starting with our first schools way back when the nation was first established, going all the way until the very late twentieth century, without the state and state approved for profit medical industrial establishment forcing them to become addicted to drugs..how did we do that then? The answer is obvious, this is a newly created mostly scam "disease".
If there's HUGE money and power involved, corruption occurs, it just happens. No one class of employment or guild or profession is "immune" to that corruption either, we are all human. A lot of modern medical stuff is just great, a lot of it is a scam and just designed to separate you from your cash. Same as any other stockholder driven, for-profit, nothing matters but seeing bigger numbers on your quarterly reports industry. Just is, is all. Get your swine flu shot, the one where they got a special law passed so they aren't responsible and you can't sue them for anything bad happening down the road. Ya, that shot. More billion$.
Sorry, I am just jaded, after decades of seeing corrupt industry and government and them working hand in glove...you get jaded. And it has only gotten worse over the years, not better, despite every election cycle liar A or liar B says vote for them and things will get better. Bah, and humbug
That the past studies were fudged beyond belief in order to create hundreds of new "treatments" for a host of newly created "maladies". The psychiatric field in particular seems to be rather fond of calling something a disease based on..whatever crap they dream up. Like kids, especially little boys, actually acting like little boys. Now they are "diseased" with adhd and add and need to be forced drugged. People undergoing normal stress are "diseased", like our ancestors way back had it easy having to drag home the mastodon steaks and protect themselves from sabre toothed tigers with flint tipped sticks. No, that wasn't "stressful" at all, nope...
These traditional coal plants...seems to me they could be repurposed to burn dried wood, which is carbon neutral at least. You look at out west, every season, it never skips, we get all these news reports of one buhzillion acres going up in smoke, a total waste. No matter *what* we do, it seems this stuff is gonna burn up anyway, so we might as well create-back a lot of logging jobs and make use of it and improve the forests by managing them better. We don't have to scrap the coal burning infrastructure then, at least not right away, and can turn a liability-drought ravaged forests and now all those pines being killed by the pine beetle-into an energy production asset. Some of them anyway, I am also in favor of some really large biochar facilities, and again, perhaps some coal plants could be re-engineered into production of biochar along with the electricity. So we'd have solar thermal, perhaps a windfarm in the same area to take advantage of the transmission lines, the coal, the wood scraps, and biochar, all at the same complex, with the goal of eventually phasing out the coal. Maybe, just a thought..
Gadgets get old fast in our culture, and people move on to the next thing, meaning the old gadgets drop in price severely, and poorer folks can get them then.
He's proven you can stick a full bloat linux distro on the thing, perhaps a few years from now when kindles start to get boring to richer short attention span people and they hit ebay for ten bucks, a lot will get repurposed because of this initial work in porting.
Just a thought..because I'm one of those folks who waits until the richer dudes get the prices down on this, that and the other because they've moved on. A kindle today, too much, I have other priorities, a few years from now at ultracheap? I'd take one to fool around with it and make a cheap and lightweight ebook reader and browser. Or stick a zillion recipes on it and refrigerator magnets and give it to ye aulde ladee as a gift to have in the kitchen..something
I pretty much stay at the raw, bleeding, screaming dripping edge of five to ten years ago;) shoot..I heard they got *cameras* on cellphones now..and they play music too... who woulda thunked it....
I just recently found out about the FF plugin autopager, and both links in the story worked flawless. What a smooth and useful add-on. Now if there was a way to lock FF autoscrolling, so you could set your reading speed and then let go of the mouse....
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I understand and we do that with composted manure here (chicken litter), huge mass quantities of it. We have a dedicated custom spreader truck for that. This is what we do on our both our pastures and our hayfields. I also use some in my personal garden. I also understand about the petrochemicals, and I agree with you long term it's nuts, but short term it is what we have. I support people buying more locally and more sustainable from organic farmers.
I am way more in favor of biochar production and getting that down into the soil to develop tilth though. It lasts longer (centuries quite literally), remains stable longer, works better, etc than just cultivation, although I am in favor of light surface cultivation, for seasonal weed control, with the crops that you can do that with during the season, row crops. Freaking wheat, stuff like that, I have no idea how to do that, never investigated how organic wheat guys keep weeds under control...have to find out because I am cluless there. I tried to grow a little, just for a hoot, it greew quite well, but man it gets weedy fast, then when it comes to harvest you get way too much weeds mixed in with it to make it worthwhile to separate.
Anyway, just for soil tilth, the biochar as the next "green revolution step" is what I would like to see done with all that huge cubic miles of wood and brush that burns up all the time out west. It also helps better than anything else to help maintain soil moisture, another critical aspect out there and most every place else. They can do *small controlled burns* after harvest to improve the soil and kill off diseases and repleish those things that need to burn to reproduce, and also allow continuous rotating thinning with the goat herds, just expand that practice as well, it's already being done.
As to energy, have to disagree on this topic as pertains to nuclear fission. I am in favor of nuclear energy-fusion, but not fission, except for a very few really restricted niche applications (submarines, spacecraft, etc). Fission has too many unsolvable problems and is a leading source of some really bad geopolitical tensions that could, and quite very well *might*, lead to global war, which then could..well..you know. Just ain't worth it to me to chance that..
I also like our practical nuclear fusion conversion tech, because it scales from massive baseload sized all the way down to joe homeowner size, and he can OWN his own means of production, get it *paid off*, not be in thrall and servitude forever and two days to BIG Corrupt Co., and have both future economic security along with future production security, that can't be mucked around wuth by forces outside his control.
To that end, I have started true "investing" in my own sources, we now have both solar PV and a small wind genny. The genny is currently not being used, but I retain it as an emergency backup. Where we lived previously it was practical, higher elevation in the mountains, but were we are now solar PV is where it is at. That and we use sustainable biofuel, our home heating is primarily wood now, where previously it was a combo of electric and propane. I have to do maintenance all the time, fix fences, clean the creek, etc, where falling trees and branches break stuff or could interfere with the cross creek barricade fence thing I made to keep the beefers in and not wandering around the neighbors yards eating their flowers and stuff (happened before..most embarrassing and hard to get them back in), so I thought might as well use the stuff as long as I have to cut big amounts of it all the time. Works quite well, and is very comfortable and cozy and I do not have to rely on some local energy monopoly for my supply, plus frees up loads of cash. win/win/win for me and is carbon neutral, plus nice healthy exercise with a lot of "resistance training" HAHAH! Big tree trunk chunks get pretty hea
*Just* in the US, *just* in year 2008, 8.3 gigawatts (8,358 megawatts) of wind power went in. There was more before, more this year, and more is coming. You may dismiss it if you want to, but that's a hefty amount in most anyone's book, and world wide it is much larger. China for instance is installing even more than that.
There's no single one technology that will be the "energy fix" or the silver bullet. It will require "all of the above", plus more.
(above is my simple reply, below is more in depth if you'd care to read it, I just like writing)
To me, and this is just my personal opinion, nuclear has one *extremely serious flaw* (besides being overhyped how cheap it is when they can't get private insurance and a whole lot of them do NOT have decommissioning funds available and will be needing "bailouts" most likely, and so on), it is inherently a very contentious technology globally, and we face the prospect of an enlarged middle eastern war, that also has the potential to go to nuclear weapons, over who has access to nuclear technology. Said war would also immediate severely hurt the global crude liquid fuels supply, driving prices to unheard of levels,(as in the fast price rises last summer would be a joke in comparison) as a significant part of the global supply passes daily through the Hormuz Strait, which would instantly be one of the hottest battlefields ever in the case of an attack on Iran, who aren't pushovers like the decimated Iraq military were. They have significantly more, and significantly better quality, anti ship and anti armor and anti aircraft capability. Just some of their good anti ship missiles can hit targets with the best protection available, the Israelies found that out the last time they went into lebanon. The silkworm, the sunburn and the super sunburn, and they might have the squall rocket torpedo as well. And such a war over who has access to nuke tech or not is a real issue that must be taken into consideration when discussing nuke tech in general. This possibility of war over nuclear tech is in the headlines daily. The two aspects of nuclear technology simply can't be seperated realistically. If you can do one, you can do the other without much more effort, they are entwined. This is a problem, and head under the covers and ignoring it won't make this pretty serious boogieman go away.
On the other hand, no one is going to war over wind power (or solar). No one cares. It is a complete and total non issue. Which is quite attractive in these days of high tech war potential. No one is threatening any one else with severe economic sanctions or outright armed attacks over windpower anyplace. No one cares who has windpower or not. You don't need armed guards for the next several centuries to guard windpower "waste". You don't need cadres of soldiers with antiaircraft missiles ringing windpower development labs or production facilities or installed towers. You don't need international "inspectors" taking note of your windpower development. No need to hide stuff in bunkers and engage in global brinksmanship. No need to be the big international hypocrite because you have windpower tech, but the dude over there, or so you claim, can't be "trusted" with it, even though you are the only one to ever use "aggressive windpower" in a weapons of mass destruction attack.
And so on, you get the drift there I'm sure.
Economically, if a few of your thousands of windchargers go down or the wind isn't blowing someplace, pfft, again, a non issue, whereas, if your one nuke plant shuts down for repairs or maintenance, an entire huge city worth of power is lost for the duration. Just last year we came this close to a pretty bad cascading failure event from one nuke plant having problems in Florida. And the Japanese have found out that a lot of the "industry standards for safety" are inadequate when it comes to big earthquakes, an
No new powerplants? They are going in daily, just new designs that don't burn coal. They are called windchargers and the commercial ones are a megawatt to 2.5 megawatt, and they are designing even larger ones, both for onshore and offshore use. Going up all over the planet. And they are building a variety of both solar thermal commercial sized plants, and even a few quite large solar PV plants, and who knows how many smaller home sized systems go in daily, which will give us eventually millions and millions of points of production, not just a thousand controlled by bigelectroco.. These are new paradigm powerplants, just like all these new private space projects are pushing the envelope there as well.
When it comes to both energy, and space travel, and biotech, these are *exciting times*, after being stuck in the doldrums for a few decades.
Just seems that getting cheaper and cleaner energy sources for the nation would be a positive move for any politician long range, jerkoff or not..off to google...
I just found out why, they caught the mafia running the wind business there and shut it down, any additional funding, why they investigate. Just google "italy, wind power" and you'll see a variety of news articles on it. They are doing things like taking the gov cash, then not doing much with it, "fixing" the permitting system, and sabotaging other wind companies-destroying towers- that won't pay them protection money, stuff like that.
They've been battling that mafia gang corruption for years, I am surprised the people there put up with it. Just have a one day "stomp 'em flat with extreme prejudice" national exercise and get it over with.
Anti self defense apologists, those who say that humans shouldn't have the ability for self defense against crooks and badguys, that it is only the state's business, that it isn't "civilized" to be proactive in your own and your community's defense, frequently point to some delusion they have about the US "wild wild west" days.
Historically, that's inaccurate, crime was much worse by and large in the larger and more established eastern big cities then in the frontier west. Gangs and badguys did *not* last very long back then if they got caught, the locals just whacked them, and that was that. The people knew who their local criminals were, and life was too tough and hard to put up with bogus crap like that or wait for some far away ineffective government to "do something" about it.
Of course, once it gets to the point that all aspects of your government are corrupt, and there's little diff between the private criminals and the public ones..you're screwed, then you are REQUIRED historically to have a national ad-lib "stomp 'em flat day".
Usually it is rather *messy*, but it's been proven it needs to happen once in awhile.
Governments ALWAYS eventually get totally criminally corrupt, because of basic human psychology. Sociopaths and megalomaniacs gravitate to positions of power,(same happens in big business as well..) then surround themselves with other "official" people who are also sociopaths and megalomaniacs, right down to the local level, up and down and sideways through their bureaucracy and organization.
This is the number #1 reason people should *never* put up with the governments disarming them, no matter what bullshit reasons they give. That is always the last big step before complete totalitarianism takes over and things get really really bad. And it doesn't matter what the government call themselves as per description, right, left, centrist, democratic, benevolent monarch, whatever..all that academic wanking voodoo crap is just convenient labels designed to obfuscate reality and keep their "subjects" cowed and complacent. "Why, we aren't corrupt badguys, we call ourselves a democracy, and look, there are 'elections"!
Yah, sure...whatever. You're the "benevolent peoples socialist royal democratic representation and organized delicious organic donut bakers 'government' Vote for us!"
The time scale differs in all the historical records for heinous dictatorships to evolve in governments, but not that outcome, it's just inevitable.
Advanced rocket designs and navigation, etc just have too much military dual use potential to them to just wing it out public domain..unfortunately. Otherwise I agree with you, proly quite a bit of wheel reinventing going on now that really doesn't have to be. I think *most* government funded research should be open sourced, especially anything pertaining to medicine, but not that.
Look at what they do for professional sports stadiums every weekend. Heck, look downstream from there,at how much public property tax money is used across the nation to brainwash little kids and get them addicted and operate those same pro sports farm teams in the public school system (which is all they are, subsidized farm teams).
If you got the cash and "the juice", what is public can become private *real quick*.
Some places have the deposit, some don't, and as you can see, even *with* a five cent deposit, most people think so little of that that they still toss them. Without a deposit, they are mostly all tossed. Some get scavenged and recycled, some don't, and many of the people who scavenge and recycle don't even bother with the buhzillions of food cans now that have steel tops and the rest of the can is aluminum. Thye'd have to cut the tops off and rinse out the cans so they don't bother.
Now ME, I just see them as fun targets, especially if you fill them with water so you get a big splasharooni from a hit ;)
Anyway, the point was I can't see us running out of aluminum soon, besides what is already here and could be recycled, the planet has plenty of bauxite.
Heck, out west in the desert, they have *thousands* of old junk airplanes made from aluminum sitting around. And the coming thing for new airplane construction is to go to carbon fiber and not use so much aluminum. I don't think goog will have any problems sourcing material for a big mirror project.
and hey, since when is 60 "old"!?! heheheh we call that "middle aged" now.
lawn, git, etc
When you consider it is still so cheap that billions of aluminum beverage and food products cans are just thrown away daily? Tons of them aren't even recycled, just tossed.
And here's what could happen, a solar/aluminum/mirror "breeder" facility. The first solar mirror thermal plant on a big scale is tasked with just making the aluminum, from scrap or bauxite, then right next door is the fab for making the mirrors. They only have to pay full price for the first one, after that the price falls fast because the power source is free.
Did they drop support because they couldn't get it to work well, or is it working well enough that no subsidies are needed anymore? Or is Italy just broke and dropping a lot of governmental spending in general?
There is a middle ground that apparently hasn't been tried much yet by the perpetual copyright and DRM crowd. The current practice with the entertainment cartel is to charge a per unit price that is grossly distorted upwards. They want to maintain some level of cash transferred "per unit" that doesn't adequately reflect the reproduction costs, it's inflated severely. They are still living way in the past when it really DID cost them a lot of money to make a "copy for sale". It just ain't that way any more, yet their per unit pricing hasn't changed much.
Especially when you look at digital copies of this or that, but it still applies to data bits on a stamped plastic disk as well. Just *perhaps* if they had tracked technological innovation better, and seriously dropped what they charged, they could have maintained similar profits by merely increasing their sales using the "economy of scale" model. And, at the same time, not alienated their customers so much.
A *buck* for a few megs of download for *one* tune? Out to lunch. Ridiculously over priced, how about 5 cents or so? That might be like one cent bandwith, 4 cents profit. I don't know exactly but it would be something like that. I mean, do those media cartel goofballs REALLY think and expect that people are going to fill up their multi gigabyte capacity tune players at a buck a song? What is that, what it costs to buy a freeking brand new car to do that legally? Are they just crazy, or stupid, or both? And they wonder why a lot of their potential customers are abandoning that pricing model being offered?
10-20 bucks for less than a dollar worth of stamped plastic and some printed up cardboard? Try two or three bucks instead. And I *know* it can be done for that price at new retail level, I have bought old TV show stuff brand new on DVD for that at chinamart before. Just sell a lot more copies at a more reasonable price, because people are more apt to buy and not peg leg it when it isn't obviously blatant price gouging.
I hope near all of 'em. I'm for emergency spending cuts and elimination of several agencies outright (department of education, the endownment for the arts, the BATFE, the DEA just for starters)..and if I was made doofus commander clerk in chief, I'd can the Fed, actually just seize it and nationalize it, and dump the IRS totally and come up with a better way to fund government, such as DIRECTLY and eliminate that insane stupid medieval hold over "tax" BS middleman shuffle they got going on now, which serves as a conduit for carrot and stick social engineering action against the population, and which has nothing to do with "funding government".
. Just the dang interest on this stupid and not needed *at all* debt is a killer, it's completely out of control, 9 trillion to *13 trillion smackers* in the hole in JUST ONE YEAR, and our entire GDP is only 14 odd trillion. Nuts. And that's only what they admit to..the dang Fed is holding out on releasing info and are scared witless if the audit the fed bill passes. And they should be.
Nasa I think has some national security and long range practical R&D science value, I wouldn't get rid of it, but they need a bath, a haircut, and a "stern talking to" as well. In the immortal words of Dean Wormer: "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son"
Along with the entrenched "war" blood profits industry that Ike warned us about, another out of control rathole to siphon money into. The cold war was over a long time ago, when does the "peace dividend" kick in? Oh ya, that's right, NEVER, hurts profits and political military types careers "in service" then their "botton line" when they go from there directly into working for the defense contractors. Oh, no conflict of interest there, not a bit....
And don't get me going on them treasonous greed soaked big gambling banks they've been funding.. whoops too late, it happened...if EVER some industry needed to eat their own free market capitalist dogfood, they are the ones. Big heaping steenking bowls of it, breakfast, lunch and dinner and for dessert. Again, if I was pen wielding goofball in chief, every big navy ship we got, one big huge chain around manhattan, tow it out to sea and sink that mofo. Start over then with just a touch more rationality...
When it comes to the national governmental budget and this total and complete war on the productive middle class's wallet (what's left of it now)..I'm for the government and their overlord controllers, wallstreet, calling an immediate cease fire, having them apologize profusely and beg forgiveness, and then discussing war reparations, as an alternative to the people winning this war being waged on them, and having war crimes tribunals against those predators (which I would almost rather see happen just for kosmic karma purposes).
HTH
(dislaimer: I am both a commercial farmer, a long time private organic gardener-since the 50s-, and also a long time alternate energy enthusiast and experimenter and user-since the 60s-, that's why I chime in on these topics and threads. I am not a software programmer, so I don't comment there much...although I do read some of those threads for funzies and to see if a little of that knowledge can slop over easy.. I do not profess to be the ultimate expert, I learn new stuff every single day, but I have more than a passing level of knowledge on these various subjects I comment on here..else I wouldn't, there wouldn't be any point to it.)
*Some* of that waste ag biomatter is plowed in, but a lot of it is ground up now and used for inexpensive and barely functional alleged "nutritional" bulk roughage in animal feed. They DON'T plow it under in a lot of cases because it is a tradeoff, they found they have less diseases that way, and if you go two years in a row with your big commercial crop and it gets wiped out from diseases and/or pests, etc, sorry, you are now in debt and seriously bankrupt and ain't gonna be farmin no mo.
Right now on this farm, I mean this experiment starts next week with the next flock "right now", we are using a form of really cheap to get waste biomass-sunflower seed hulls- that normally just get more or less tossed into animal feed just to get rid of them or dumped on hillsides for erosion control or something- in an authorized by our upstream company experiment to replace/augment some normally much more expensive and getting harder to get wood shavings we use for absorbent bedding in the poultry houses. It could just as easily go into making ethanol when they get that rough cellulose enzymes and bioreactive agents tech down better (said research going on in dozens of labs right now). Then it very well could be put to fuel use instead, as it would be worth more for that.
Really big farms (such as where we sourced those hulls from) now have gone to "no till", they rarely if ever plow anymore, at most they use a very little fast surface cultivation, and a lot of them don't even do that, they just spray various chemicals and fertilizers and rotate crops. Plant, spray, harvest, do it again. And that's in transition as well, ag industry evolves as it needs to. Now some of the newer tech I like, some I don't, but it is way too varied to comment on in a single thread, and this will be long enough as it is.
Biofuel tech is exploding, it is going in several different directions right now, and a lot of it is quite promising, so I will have to just 100% disagree with your dismissal of biofuels for the future, just to get that out of the way.
Biofuels are quite practical solar fusion power.
These biofuels and solar PV and solar thermal are the ONLY forms of practical fusion power we have now, or are *likely* to have in the next buncha decades given the status of the results of the last several decades on man made fusion power, like with magnetic and plasma and laser whatever gee whizz sci fi containment bubbles and so on.
As such, they really are our best hope right now for developing affordable-enough and sustainable and carbon neutral liquid transportation fuels that can be introduced easily full strength or in blends into our already existing and extremely expensive to replace right now liquid fuel based entire "transportation stack"
. So that's why I disagree with you so much. They *are* working so far, and it shows more promise, and just thousands of dedicated scientists and technicians are working on it to get it better, and it will continue to get better because of that.
Here's an example right now where it is going good and expanding, jatropha seed oil for biodiesel in India. It's just a fast growing weed, it grows readily in scrub land they have there in abundance where you really can't grow anything with any food value, especially if you can't irrigate, yet it thri
News organizations today are becoming unprofitable because they not only have to support the actual journalists, but a BIG overhead of managers and "investors". Is there a real need anymore for this huge expensive middleman layer between the originator of the news article and the reader? This is just like record labels and musicians, it's in a big transition period and it's fairly obvious that a lot of those jobs in that industry are now technically obsolete and should and are going to go away eventually.
We already have the next gen news model, still in the baby crawling stage in a long term historical timeframe, it just needs more shaking out and tweaking,and that is regular bloggers who do a good job, and their "pay" is mostly the same thing they like, news and views from other people. This is called economically an "in kind" payment.
It is the primary source of wealth transference in the open source software world right now, you get paid "in kind" by getting to use other's open source code contributions, which you then tweak and modify to be used in your regular non software business to "make money".
There's still room for "cash" payments, but we really need to eliminate as much as possible all the unnecessary middle man skimming that goes on to make it affordable enough to be self sustaining. Digital products are *cheap* to make copies of, practically zero, so it is inevitable that this will have to be reflected in the "price".
Various jobs and industries have disappeared or been changed radically over human history, you just have to adapt and move on if you find one business model is unsustainable, and do something else, and that's just that.
I know I had to do it, after *several* factory jobs I had, as a much younger guy, got outsourced, I just gave up, admitted reality, moved on to something completely different, then I had to do that again, then again. I've had to change major careers now three times and am on my fourth, which is totally unrelated to the previous three types of work to "make money". Stuff just freakin' changes, and *that's it*, you do not have an exclusive right to always make the same money you used to make doing the same job, and trying to legislate this into existence or come up with some lame wild ass scheme to try and perpetuate it is just slap dumb, it just borks things all up and you'll fail anyway.
That goes for individuals, as well as entire huge industries. (that's why they should have let those casino gambling banks fail and go normally bankrupt, then society and the real market would have sorted out what those involved 'quant' derived paper financial pseudo products were really worth....which ain't near what they claim they are worth on paper)
Digital products of all kinds are our first true ubiquitous "star trek" level replicator technology. If we screw this up with restrictions or trying to maintain completely stupid and obsolete jobs, what will happen when we have tangible goods cheap replicators?
Maintaining a hideously convoluted and stupid artificial scarcity of any sort of products will cause people to route around these restrictions, and that is just that. It doesn't work with "illegal" tangible products, it didn't work with alcohol restrictions, it isn't working with other dry or leafy products restrictions, despite a huge effort and laws and draconian penalties, and it is *not* going to work with mostly intangible digital products either.
If they make "news" too expensive or restricted in order to maintain some huge middleman distribution model from the last previous few centuries, it will get routed around. They are beating their heads against the wall on this one. All that will happen with their expensive news is that a sort of "News-peg-legger bay" will show up.
People say "well, it costs money to go send some reporter over to warzoneistan to report on the news" and similar to that, I'll counter that with saying there are ALRE
Which one is it again, which federal agency claims they just slap get too much money? So much that they give a lot of it back and tell congress "please, stop giving us so much money, we have more than enough to do this job"?
Just wondering, because I never heard of any agency claiming they had enough loot. All of them to the best of my recollection have always wanted more money saying they *need* it to "do their jobs".
I think it was also "much harder working with much less political BS and slacking off" back then. Just a guess though...Nasa is a federal bureaucracy,,it functions the same as all other federal bureaucracies therefore, the nature of the beast. The longer any bureaucracies stay in existence, the slower and less efficient they become, and it inevitably costs more to get the same amount of work done that they did when they first were created. Committees to schedule meetings where they will decide which committees should have a meeting and when and so on.
Not to say no work gets done, obviously it does, but back then nasa was new and exciting and hadn't been around long enough to build up typical government bloat. More workers who really worked, less management and political commissars walking around sucking up budget costs in busywork mc jobs.
Just throwing that out as a possibility, because I see no proof that Nasa is different from other long standing governmental organizations now.
At current recovery rates and tech level, yes, but that will get better, there's more there, and they are still finding big fields elsewhere, like the recent big gulf discovery..and who knows what they have squirreled away in the arctic, either known about and kept secret, or still to be found.
Combined with more efficient vehicles,(a LOT more efficient, it's possible today with bog standard today's tech, every place BUT the US has a much wider choice of better mileage vehicles) and electric vehicles, and using what petroleum we have in blends with advanced biofuels, we could get by on a reduced petroleum supply load for even longer.
And telecommuting, a few tens of billion in better data infrastructure could eliminate the need for hundreds of billions worth in commuting costs and pollution., which is cheaper and easier, transporting some electrons, or millions of meat sacks in heavy steel boxes twice a day?
Giant office towers that are there just so folks can sit in front of a computer screen are *rather wasteful*, when folks can stay home and sit in front of a computer screen. All that commuting and having to keep those huge buildings running, proly 3/4ths wasted right there just because a lot of these companies haven't had the right incentive (that would be clubs to the head to get them to wake up) and cut loose from the Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchitt 1700s mentality of the necessity of BEING at the office all the time, and make better use of the tech we have now and enter the 21st century. Plus think of the sheer millions of man hours that could be saved not riding in a car or bus or train or even a dang bicycle back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to work.
We can go a long ways to dropping petroleum (and coal and natgas and..) demand without sacrificing any cool modern way of life, just by doing things smarter instead oif perpetuating obsolete tech because a few already rich people can skim so much profit from it. Heck, we could probably get by with very few new powerplants if they adjusted building codes (and mortgage loan approvals) to require a lot more insulation. The bulk of our electricity use is heating and cooling, and I know that this demand/requirement level can be dropped drastically, I used to be in that biz for a while, retrofitting for more energy efficiency.
You can read a scosh about it here, superinsulation. It's amazing, you got to see it to believe it almost. You can get some serious savings by just *using* tech that has already been developed decades ago. It ain't sexy for wallstreet skimmers and gamblers that much, so it isn't pushed "in the market" as it could be, or for academic wanking research, but it IS possible. No new nuthin needs to be invented or funded by vulture capitalists or needs "government studies". Just double or triple our generic 50s and 60s level insulation that exists in millions of homes and buildings, along with a few other tweaks like better windows and doors and so on, and you'd be surprised how that works out for the electric bill.
Easy enough done with a simple one page legislative bill and decent and credible sized tax credits, extended for some years. It could create a million new and actually *useful* jobs and save hundreds of billions in energy costs and dramatically reduce air pollution. But no one big company could get a monopoly on it, not a lot of patents to troll with, etc, so it ain't pushed, and dang sure the energy companies don't push it, cuts directly into the ole bottom line there. Lip service at best, they push what I would term 1/4 ass efforts, not even half assed. And they call that "good cents". I call it deliberate misdirection and marketing propaganda.
You want to see what really could be accomplished today, with both housing and transportation, check out some of the designs at the solar decathlon competition.
It will get more expensive, but we still have significant oil reserves
Rare metals, who knows. If it gets down to national survival, there's a buhzillion acres in federal land (parks and etc) that are currently off limits to mining, but that could change fast.
And we are just scratching the surface on R&D with biofuels. Corn (any cheap sugars) ethanol and soybean (and many other crops) biodiesel are mere first gen efforts, they work right now but are resource and cash expensive. Once next gen gets rolling, like with engineered algae and waste biomass conversion and so on, which could be combined with solar and wind power to run the conversion facilities, we could have liquid transportation fuels for a long time, indefinitely really, as long as we also keep working on better efficiencies and get a lot of the commuter cars running on electricity, and save the liquid fuels more for long haul trucking and ag machinery and aircraft uses etc..
I never said those symptoms didn't exist back then, of course they did, most young kids and especially boys for some reason had them, me included. Just that they weren't considered ADD or a malady. I never took speed then though, so can't comment if it would have calmed me down or not, but I can tell you for several years as a young guy I only really slept much *every other night* I had so much spare energy. That is 100% the honest truth, did that for years, all the way until my late 20's I'd sit up and read. I was resting, but not sleeping.
The "remedy" back then for hyperactivity and lack of focus in class, etc., was to encourage a lot more sports and vigorous outdoor activity, plus healthier food, more raw fruits and veggies, etc. Ya, we had junk food back then as well.
Which would probably do wonders today, seeing as how the practice of eating almost exclusively junk food and pre packaged heavily laced with assorted non food chemicals the modern diet has become. I call that food junk food as well, and the bulk of the population, kids included, only eat junk food. I would imagine there are kids out there now who primarily eat just the junkiest of food, which are mostly saturated fats, corn syrup, food additives and dyes, preservatives, etc etc with very little actual food nutrition to it. It looks like food, they sell it as "food", but it's BS profits at any cost chemicals with some food sprinkles in it, sold in over advertised and overpackaged "packages" full of "fun colors"..
We as humans are designed to eat mostly raw and/or very simple basic foods. You get a host of problems healthwise when you don't. And it really is that simple in a lot of cases. You see it in adults, you see it in kids, the rise of gross obesity, ADD stuff, diabetes, hardening of the arteries in teens, etc. Heck, I had a lady boss once in a wheelchair, with the shakes, I forget which, she had MS or MD..anyway, she was simply a soda addict, diet soda, you never saw her without a huge glass of diet crap she was sucking on. I told her, "worth a shot, lay off that diet pop, or any pop, switch to water and fruit juice, do it for one month, see what happens". She DID do that, and actually was starting to get better when I moved and lost track. she could get out of the chair easier and she said she felt loads better. Simple diet change, get the crap out, give you bod a chance to be normal.
Kids today also take a lot more "shots" then we used to take, perhaps that is a contributory reason for this surge as well.
But I still think a lot of it is misdiagnosed and a part of that is the forced politically correct extreme feminization of young males, they are told they are "sick" when they act like young boys. I didn't bring that up at first, but bet I am right on that, given the PC makeup of most modern public school systems.
Here's another example of this run amok correctness and medical mental health *pure* propaganda misdiagnosis. I am a heavy 2nd amendment supporter, as such I keep up with the news and so on there. Back then, you could bring your .22 or shotgun to school with you to go shooting with friends after school, etc, just put it in your locker. It was NO big deal, absolutely not (and no school massacres either) we did it all the time. Now, a kid *drawing a picture of an army dood, maybe his dad or uncle, with a rifle*..it becomes "zero tolerance" panic time, he is classed as a potential little terrorist or something, sent home immediately, picture confiscated for evidence, all sorts of emergency panic time crap are thrown at him, he gets "detained" by the paramilitary thug patrolling the halls, all negative stuff he now gewts to absorb. It is drummed into his head "guns R bad, you must be sick". And all these big news school massacres? Check the facts, pretty much all committed by kids forced drugged, on "legal" prescribed psychoactive drugs. Coincidence? That's the only thing different from now and then..
This "if" scenario wouldn't be all that bad. Not at all.
IF Microsoft was found to be engaging in RICO, long term constant skullduggery and mischief in the marketplace, bribes, kickbacks, collusions, intimidations, installing rootkits and spyware, etc,etc, and they lost their corporate charter...the government could just take the goods-same as they take any crooks goods away from them, and either sell them at auction or just the physical plant and then take the IP and just slap the source code out under a public domain license or something like that and do the same with their patents. Note, this isn't "going bankrupt" this is busted for being racketeers.
Now all those ex employees after the corporation is dissolved could hang out their "MS Xpert" shingle doing repairs and customizations, security companies would be hired to find bugs and do patches, etc, perhaps several forks of their OS and applications might occur, etc. Small transition period, but I just don't see any showstoppers here.
All the code running now will not just automagically stop running should they be put out of business for being chronic serial bad guys at the management level. Look at all the holdouts still running XP and office 2003 and so on, right now, because they don't really *need* anything else, it is functional enough. All they need is some security patches now and then and new drivers for new hardware. Big freekin deal. There would be zero business lost in the greater community, none whatsoever. there would be *changed* business, but no business of any note would be lost if this theoretical real demand is really there.
The government does this sort of thing with small time and even medium sized crooks all the time, take their fancy cars and cash and money laundering businesses and so on, then sell it at auction and just keep any cash they seize, so why not with the largest crooks and their stuff?
Is there some magic line the government can't cross when it comes to seizing ill gotten gains? I am not aware of any such "law".
And if all these skilled devs and programmers and so on who work directly for Microsoft are even half as good as they say they are, and the demand for continuing MS software is as you say, then all the same people now working for MS should have very little problem finding alternative employment more or less doing exactly what they are doing now..but just not for microsoft, inc.
As for shareholders pfffttt..I fart in their general direction. And I had chili tonight. I am really tired of that old meme like their steenking profits are a "get out of any responsibility at all" excuse for any corporate actions whatsoever, screw em! If they can't be assed enough to do "due diligence" on their alleged employees and their conduct or misconduct, said employees would be the board and upper management at Microsoft, after not just years but DECADES of some pretty serious *hints* that a lot is going on under the surface level that might not be on the up and up, and they keep ignoring it and ignoring it and ignoring it, well who cares, society has *no legal, ethical or moral responsibility whatsoever* to do it for them.
I see no downside at all to busting big fat crooks and crooked companies. And it's better for it TO happen, and the sooner the better, example, enron, worldcom, etc.
Don't let that rot keep festering away. As soon as it is evident, cut it out and sterilize the surrounding tissue before it spreads. The sooner the better. "Too big to fail" is the lamest and stupidest reason out there to excuse or even support such crooked enterprises (also see: casino bankster gangsters).
Now, you need to learn some history, and from people who were there, such as me, and there are plenty of other boomers here who can tell you similar.. All this one quarter or one third of young males were not "diseased" back then like they are termed now back when I was a kid. It didn't exist, this was known as normal childhood stuff and they get over it given a chance. This is a *new* thing they thought up for profit, it is just reclassified as a disease where they force addict them to *speed* for a *cure* and the poor little dude's brains get permanently warped from the drugging during their critical development stage, and they grow up thinking they are sick when all they are is just being normal little boys. Same as a lot of adults now are finally faked out into taking prozac and similar because of "stress". Geez loweez, how did humans we ever make it to the late twentieth century without this crap.
Now I'll be the first to admit that *some* people really need the chemical help, I will not dispute that at all, but such a HUGE proportion of the children, and now the adults? No freekin way, not even close, it's a scam, and the more they inflict it on people the more "normal" it gets to think of your child as "diseased" because some expert claims they are, said expert profiting handsomely from the diagnosis, then some big pharmco for "the cure", same as they will tell YOU that.
We managed hundreds of millions of kids to get through school, starting with our first schools way back when the nation was first established, going all the way until the very late twentieth century, without the state and state approved for profit medical industrial establishment forcing them to become addicted to drugs..how did we do that then? The answer is obvious, this is a newly created mostly scam "disease".
BTW, please, you just never know, run to see your doctor right now, throw gobs of cash on the counter, and in a trembling shaky desperate and hysterical voice beg them to RIGHT NOW see if the purple pill with chartreuse polka dots is *right for you*! Hurry up, you might have it! Whatever *it* is! Look out, it's spreading, why half your neighbors might have *it* already! And rest assured, these esteemed professionals would never abuse a position of trust and "scientific studies" for mere money in the tens of billions, that's just a *coincidence*.
If there's HUGE money and power involved, corruption occurs, it just happens. No one class of employment or guild or profession is "immune" to that corruption either, we are all human. A lot of modern medical stuff is just great, a lot of it is a scam and just designed to separate you from your cash. Same as any other stockholder driven, for-profit, nothing matters but seeing bigger numbers on your quarterly reports industry. Just is, is all. Get your swine flu shot, the one where they got a special law passed so they aren't responsible and you can't sue them for anything bad happening down the road. Ya, that shot. More billion$.
Sorry, I am just jaded, after decades of seeing corrupt industry and government and them working hand in glove...you get jaded. And it has only gotten worse over the years, not better, despite every election cycle liar A or liar B says vote for them and things will get better. Bah, and humbug
That the past studies were fudged beyond belief in order to create hundreds of new "treatments" for a host of newly created "maladies". The psychiatric field in particular seems to be rather fond of calling something a disease based on..whatever crap they dream up. Like kids, especially little boys, actually acting like little boys. Now they are "diseased" with adhd and add and need to be forced drugged. People undergoing normal stress are "diseased", like our ancestors way back had it easy having to drag home the mastodon steaks and protect themselves from sabre toothed tigers with flint tipped sticks. No, that wasn't "stressful" at all, nope...
(lawn, git off, etc)
These traditional coal plants...seems to me they could be repurposed to burn dried wood, which is carbon neutral at least. You look at out west, every season, it never skips, we get all these news reports of one buhzillion acres going up in smoke, a total waste. No matter *what* we do, it seems this stuff is gonna burn up anyway, so we might as well create-back a lot of logging jobs and make use of it and improve the forests by managing them better. We don't have to scrap the coal burning infrastructure then, at least not right away, and can turn a liability-drought ravaged forests and now all those pines being killed by the pine beetle-into an energy production asset. Some of them anyway, I am also in favor of some really large biochar facilities, and again, perhaps some coal plants could be re-engineered into production of biochar along with the electricity. So we'd have solar thermal, perhaps a windfarm in the same area to take advantage of the transmission lines, the coal, the wood scraps, and biochar, all at the same complex, with the goal of eventually phasing out the coal. Maybe, just a thought..
Gadgets get old fast in our culture, and people move on to the next thing, meaning the old gadgets drop in price severely, and poorer folks can get them then.
He's proven you can stick a full bloat linux distro on the thing, perhaps a few years from now when kindles start to get boring to richer short attention span people and they hit ebay for ten bucks, a lot will get repurposed because of this initial work in porting.
Just a thought..because I'm one of those folks who waits until the richer dudes get the prices down on this, that and the other because they've moved on. A kindle today, too much, I have other priorities, a few years from now at ultracheap? I'd take one to fool around with it and make a cheap and lightweight ebook reader and browser. Or stick a zillion recipes on it and refrigerator magnets and give it to ye aulde ladee as a gift to have in the kitchen..something
I pretty much stay at the raw, bleeding, screaming dripping edge of five to ten years ago ;) shoot..I heard they got *cameras* on cellphones now..and they play music too... who woulda thunked it....
Here's another good way to use trees to capture and store extra carbon, plus dramatically improve the soil and help with water issues. Biochar
I just recently found out about the FF plugin autopager, and both links in the story worked flawless. What a smooth and useful add-on. Now if there was a way to lock FF autoscrolling, so you could set your reading speed and then let go of the mouse....