You can build thousands of new nuke plants, and eventually, all that past "trapped" heat in "fossil uranium" that is released in the fission process makes its way to the atmosphere as it is used in electrical devices all over. Uranium energy is just as much sequestered now left in the ground and ignored as coal or oil are, if they were left in the ground. And a lot (most of them?) of the nuke plants use water cooling, and guess which is a stronger greenhouse gas, even more than CO2? That's right, H2O, water vapor, and the hotter the water, the more it evaporates. So at point of origin for the water cooled nuke plants you get both massive heat release at either the cooling towers or at their downstream cooling water source, a river or ocean pipe, etc., plus extra "unnatural" water vapor release, a "greenhouse" gas, then downstream all the various devices that use the electricity produced dump heat by the..x-megawatt, whatever the plant puts out that supplies them (do a conversion to a thermal equivalent). More heat + more greenhouse gas. Even the air cooled plants will still cause warming as the entire natural structure of the earth that already exists despite of any human additions works to trap in heat, the way the atmosphere is anyway.
So unless they can come up with a way to make nuclear "cold" or even "heat-neutral" electricity, you'll still get a significant rise in global temps from using nukes, on a direct linear scale, as you add one, more global warming.
..you just aren't going to be getting federal funding for it. One might think the combined wallets of the coal and electricity selling corporations might be able to pony up all the cash themselves....
..to trade convenience for the possibility of general widespread and undetected and impossible to unravel fraud, and if the younger generations cant be arsed to go volunteer to insure election integrity, then I guess "you" (any instance of "you" is used in general terms for this response, nothing personal) deserve hacked elections and keep "voting" in corrupt bastard A or B every time, after the media's controllers "select" those two people for you. Heck,why don't we just cut to the chase, the superbowl and video gaming and the latest episode of "24" and Britnney and Paris newz are all more important, why even have pesky elections in the first place, we should just let our elite betters and superiors run our lives for us and just tell us what is going to happen,so we can shuffle off to do their bidding. Yes massah, we done had de elecshuns and youse be duh winnah agin! Ain't dat sumpin!
When we see places around the world where people will physically *walk* for a day or two to get the polls, and I see responses like this... counting is too hard and only the old folks have "the time" or inclination to do it....and don't get me wrong, I believe everything you say about how it is mostly older folks who do the volunteering, and yes, it takes some time to do accurate hand counts, I see this myself..that isn't the point, the point is those are both symptoms of a greater evil, just the lack of any sort of enthusiasm or acknowledgment of how precious the right to actually vote is and have fair elections and some sort of legitimate and effective citizen voice, and how much it is demonized, laughed at, ignored, ridiculed, and simply dismissed unless we can "speed it up".. it's just...it's freekin embarassing...I am *ashamed* of my own nation sometimes, just how lazy and uncaring we have collectively gotten. Even with mostly computerized voting we can't even get around half the voting age population to even *bother* to vote anyway. It's like "who cares"? Voting is just too inconvenient any longer, it interferes with "quality" time....or something. Let's speed it up and have the computers run by the power establishment feudalists vote for us, they can do it faster and none of that messy "thinking" or "doing" required.
The real bottom line is..the fascists have won once the "we the people" folks give up and don't care any longer.
Sorry, no computers need be involved at all, open source or closed source or some hybrid. You shouldn't need to be a programmer to verify the count as a volunteer at the end of the day. Any scheme that uses even "open source" software that is "justified" by saying "you can look at the code yourself" is still flawed as most people are not able to read code and understand it, and you still have no idea what happens during and after the election, you would have to stop and analyze the code every single step of the ballot trail. Skip a step = opportunity for compromise with a follow up coverup to hide the tracks. That's two big fat flaws in the idea, and either one is enough to rule out using computerized voting. And if you say "well, this scheme a,b,c uses a paper trail so it is mo bettah!!", so what's the point again then? Just *use the paper trail* as the primary way to vote for the election in the first place, skip the thousand buck computers and rube goldberg nonsense in the first place, including those stupid punch cards with "chads", they aren't needed either. If it takes "too long to count", here's an idea, a full 24 hour voting period, and it can even be a mandated federal holiday for that matter, so no one needs to miss work to go vote, no matter what shift they work or any other excuse.
I love computers, like most folks here have owned them for years and owned quite a few of them, but for elections, I like a plain ballot box and normal paper ballots.
"Open source" with elections is, I am sure, being pushed by well meaning folks, but if falls exactly under the "if your main tool use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you" syndrome. It just ain't needed, tons of other projects out there could use the dev help instead.
Thanks for the answer! I was just suspicious of three "cuts" in a row during this time of both geopolitical uncertainty and also some rather severe market pressure. There appears to be gathering forces there to detach the various local currencies from a strict dollar peg and go to a bundled basket of currencies.
I haven't seen anything but their say so that the cut was an accident. It could have been deliberate to slow down middle eastern stock market transactions, to try and avert a meltdown...just sayin'.... or something else. Could be a lot of things. I don't know but so far ain't buying the story as advertised. It might be true, but it smells bad. We have one report that says ships got "ordered" to go anchor in an unusual place..this is a clear WTF? episode then. Why they do that? Plausible deniability excuse some "ships anchor" did it?
Whenever there is a HUGE screwup, judging by past historical references and parallels,.... with big business or governments, it pays to reject the first official "explanation".
Just wondering, what options would you like to see? When I am having a hard time with google, I make use of the negative/do not show - modifier, helps eliminate all the first few pages spam that way by seeing what their search term words are and dumping those. It takes two steps that way, because you have to check it out first, whatever they are using, but then usually gives much better results on the second "real" search then.
The owner is a friend of mine and offers nuclear emergency gear and some information. Related to this topic, good stuff, I own some in the "be prepared" mode I have adopted many years ago. ki4u.com
Best I recall, that I bought, 12.9 during a local price war, but normally it was closer to 20 cents depending on octane level. Of course, it was all full service then too, plus you get schmooz, free steak knives (no kidding) coffee mugs, trading stamps, stupid crap like that. and almost all gas stations were repair garages. The worst was during the opec embargo, two gallons at ten bucks a gallon, just enough to get home, park, go to the pawnshop and buy two bicycles at 50 bucks apiece. Lucky to get them, too, all the new bikes around town had already sold out. In 99 we had the bulk farm tank filled up at 79 cents a gallon (the diesel tank was a scosh cheaper), then used some gas treatment, that tank lasted us a few years and was still burnable down to the dregs (although I ran the last 50 gallons or so through a filter first). (Pri-G gas treatment, D for the diesel, good stuff, works as advertised)
Buses and trains are out of the weather. Go be homeless for awhile and find out how easy or not it is to actually find someplace to crash where you won't freeze or be sozked in rain. I have seen homeless people use them a lot just for a dry and warm place to catch some sleep (I used buses and trains for more than a decade in a large US city), just like they use libraries or cheap movie houses sometimes, if they can scrape up a few bucks, it is still cheaper by far than the cheapest rent you can find.
I can see their point. Here's a guy has no feet, so gets mechanical do-dad add-ons. They work quite well, and I am glad technology is able to help the guy and people in similar situations, but he is now modified to an unreasonable competitive advantage compared to plain joe normal runners. How about guys who have no functional lower half of their body? They run wheelchair marathons, and some of those guys are way faster on some courses than the normal runners, so they run completely separate class. I give the guy props for being a good athlete, but I think the officials made a good call there as well. He can still compete, but not in that class of Olympics event. Just like they announced this week they have the new bionic arms now, same guys who built the bionic hand, so let one of those guys participate in world wrist wrestling championships, or let them do the shotput at the olympics? Wouldn't be even close to being fair.
Now if they want to offer an "unlimited class" Olympics, sure, go for it, who cares, all the drugs, steroids, performance enhancing surgery and implants and attachments and mechanical bolt ons and assorted androidiness you want. Top fuel, anything goes. Probably get better ratings than the "normal" Olympics... imagine "stilt man" with the titanium leg stretcher implants and the high jump, walks up, steps over a ten foot bar, stuff like that.
"Solar power isn't free enough free energy for you?"...ya, it is OK, I own half a dozen panels now myself, and would like to see everyone get enough to run at least one of their home computers through a decent sized home whole circuit UPS deal, but keep thinking we can do better than even that. A few years ago some guys were kicking around some experiments they were doing and having some success with using wrapped fencing-a place to build up the charge-, and some car parts, sparkplugs with a big gap and a normal coil, and getting some useful electricity into car batteries, but I have lost track on any more updates of those experiments. Basically the static charge built up enough until it could jump the gap, it pulsed into the batteries. *Very* preliminary work to be sure, but getting enough to go forward and see how it could be tweaked better/safer, etc.
As to Tesla and whatnot...guess I'd have to see some hard proof if anyone on Slashdot is really equivalent-to or better-than Tesla over all in the thinking outside the box realm in order to have some standing to debunk him. He was convinced he could get usable power from some earth versus atmosphere potential, with some geomagnetic lines of force thrown into the stew there. That we can't do it yet effectively does not negate the fact that *he* thought it was quite possible. I tend to fall on the side of the megabranez with track records and good street cred. He wasn't normal genius level smart, he was *scary* genius level smart, like everyone else was sorta like a lemur or something;)
Ya, that was me and the editorial comment with the bad weather on the ocean potential. I am wondering just perchance if a similar deal could be constructed with the potential between atmospheric static electricity and the ground. Or something, geomagnetic lines of force and other sorts of physics and geology voodoo. Just wondering. I just keep having the nagging feeling that someplace with Tesla's brain involved there is a fast and easier way around all of this energy question stuff. Like it is right there an inch away staring us in the face and we just aren't or refuse-to see it.
You are correct on the medical issues! I have also read one of the faster growth aspects to healthcare in the US is "medical tourism", going over seas for alternative therapies or surgeries, because it is either available there but not here and/or much cheaper.
US society could address this issue along with a host of other issues if they valued education/science/engineering as much as they do professional sports and movies. College education is absurdly expensive right now, for any field, let alone going all the way to a medical degree. You might *think* that subsidizing such educations might be considered a good idea, something society should "invest" in, but apparently not...
And too bad about africa and the brain drain, perhaps they should work on rational nationalism and pride in nation and so on first. Give them some inducements to stay as well, simple stuff, guaranteed free house and say no taxes for young people willing to stay and work after their degree. Something like that anyway.. I honestly don't understand why people don't want to try and work and make their own nations/areas better, it is an alien concept to me. I am just against the "me,me,me bottom line rules!" philosophy a lot of folks seem to have, like the accumulation of money is *the* most important thing in the whole world. I am an old square I guess, want to make what we have better, not willing to abandon ship so easily just to make a few bucks more some place else or by compromising ethics, etc.
Maybe on slashdot it is thin, but I cover it on Technocrat.net,(along with a host of other alternative energy subjects). The latest reference article I put up just a few days ago and discussion here Otec
I agree with a lot of that. I am firmly in the camp of open pollination seed and no patenting for that stuff, etc. I am in ag but am a contrarian to a lot of conventional farmers, I recognize how much the major distributors and packers game the system, Believe me, I know, my check is artificially small because of some of those gents and the way the system is setup now. But that takes nothing away from my observation as to "that is how the equipment deal" is set up now, we have the bulk of the huge farmers set up to grow specialized crops, and a lot of the equipment is not easily transferable to different crops, and it is quite spendy. We got a lot of farmers already up and running for corn and soybeans and canola/rapeseed, so that is what the first biofuel crops are going to be coming from primarily. Wishful thinking is not going to change this, and anyone is free to go and try and get into farming and do it otherwise, especially the new energy farming but it is expensive to start out. In other words, complaining on the internet is cheap, actually going out and doing different is hard, you have to be dedicated, hard working and quite handy with your finances. I am trying to do both, I have roundly dissed monsanto et all numerous times here and other forums.
If I wasn't where I am now, and was going to do it fresh, I'd do it in stages and first look to some land that falls into the "good enough" wind category for a commercial wind tower or 6, then get that up and running, so you got a good check constantly coming in (even sharing with your VC investors) that will cover land payments and your other equipment, then go on and do some more radical and modern farming, both food and energy. Having your own massive electricity for more or less cheap/free onsite is a nice bonus there.
This whole farms as the new energy OPEC is still in the very early wild wild west days, plenty of room for new thinking and guys with some sound and sustainable ideas to step in and make their mark I think.
I agree with you on the sugar beets, but sort of disagree on the "why" of corn right now. The primary reason for the corn is because that is what we have the highest numbers of big farmers set up to grow with the equipment at hand, and that stuff just ain't cheap. Corn and soybeans, ethanol and biodiesel. We are in a transition stage now to all the various biofuels, so I wouldn't worry about it being corn forever, it just happens to be the handiest one we have right now. We are still at the 286 level with biofuels, it will get better, and in probably a roughly similar time frame.
There are two good positives here, energy demands are just always going to be going up,so this biofuels idea will be continued to be worked on, and farmers love to farm, because it is a hard job, and if they didn't love it, they wouldn't do it, there are any number of easier ways to make a buck. So it will work out.
In fact, a ton of the good innovations and tweaking with biofuels are going on right now in real world deployments directly on farms for fuel use on-site, because they are so tied to energy availability and costs. They are the serious beta tester devs right now for all of this...so I say support them in general terms, let them sort this out better, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Society is right now asking a minuscule percentage of the population to double their output, in two critical areas, food and now they are going to be tasked with being the liquid energy producers as well. This is an incredibly HUGE undertaking, and I think it is more than fair that the rest of society, who will be the primary beneficiaries of the food and now energy production, be prepared to cut loose a few dollars for this effort, to offer a bit of understanding and acceptance of the size of these projects in total and realize there will be failures as well as successes along this new energy path, and to give them a chance to tweak it out better without a lot of condemnation and outright dissin'.
No other segment of our society has been tasked with a doubling or tripling of their projected work load en masse like the farmers have now accepted to attempt. The closest historical parallel we have would the durable goods manufacturers-with a much higher workforce total and much higher governmental support structure- who had to gear up and run triple time, plus alter product lines drastically, for the world war 2 effort. The coming transition to mostly biofuels as conventional petroleum sources become more iffy and more dear, is at least of such a scale the way it is being projected now.
Slashdot Mirror
You can build thousands of new nuke plants, and eventually, all that past "trapped" heat in "fossil uranium" that is released in the fission process makes its way to the atmosphere as it is used in electrical devices all over. Uranium energy is just as much sequestered now left in the ground and ignored as coal or oil are, if they were left in the ground. And a lot (most of them?) of the nuke plants use water cooling, and guess which is a stronger greenhouse gas, even more than CO2? That's right, H2O, water vapor, and the hotter the water, the more it evaporates. So at point of origin for the water cooled nuke plants you get both massive heat release at either the cooling towers or at their downstream cooling water source, a river or ocean pipe, etc., plus extra "unnatural" water vapor release, a "greenhouse" gas, then downstream all the various devices that use the electricity produced dump heat by the ..x-megawatt, whatever the plant puts out that supplies them (do a conversion to a thermal equivalent). More heat + more greenhouse gas. Even the air cooled plants will still cause warming as the entire natural structure of the earth that already exists despite of any human additions works to trap in heat, the way the atmosphere is anyway.
So unless they can come up with a way to make nuclear "cold" or even "heat-neutral" electricity, you'll still get a significant rise in global temps from using nukes, on a direct linear scale, as you add one, more global warming.
That is the first completely different possibility I have read. Good job.
..you just aren't going to be getting federal funding for it. One might think the combined wallets of the coal and electricity selling corporations might be able to pony up all the cash themselves....
When we see places around the world where people will physically *walk* for a day or two to get the polls, and I see responses like this... counting is too hard and only the old folks have "the time" or inclination to do it....and don't get me wrong, I believe everything you say about how it is mostly older folks who do the volunteering, and yes, it takes some time to do accurate hand counts, I see this myself..that isn't the point, the point is those are both symptoms of a greater evil, just the lack of any sort of enthusiasm or acknowledgment of how precious the right to actually vote is and have fair elections and some sort of legitimate and effective citizen voice, and how much it is demonized, laughed at, ignored, ridiculed, and simply dismissed unless we can "speed it up".. it's just...it's freekin embarassing...I am *ashamed* of my own nation sometimes, just how lazy and uncaring we have collectively gotten. Even with mostly computerized voting we can't even get around half the voting age population to even *bother* to vote anyway. It's like "who cares"? Voting is just too inconvenient any longer, it interferes with "quality" time....or something. Let's speed it up and have the computers run by the power establishment feudalists vote for us, they can do it faster and none of that messy "thinking" or "doing" required.
The real bottom line is..the fascists have won once the "we the people" folks give up and don't care any longer.
Sorry, no computers need be involved at all, open source or closed source or some hybrid. You shouldn't need to be a programmer to verify the count as a volunteer at the end of the day. Any scheme that uses even "open source" software that is "justified" by saying "you can look at the code yourself" is still flawed as most people are not able to read code and understand it, and you still have no idea what happens during and after the election, you would have to stop and analyze the code every single step of the ballot trail. Skip a step = opportunity for compromise with a follow up coverup to hide the tracks. That's two big fat flaws in the idea, and either one is enough to rule out using computerized voting. And if you say "well, this scheme a,b,c uses a paper trail so it is mo bettah!!", so what's the point again then? Just *use the paper trail* as the primary way to vote for the election in the first place, skip the thousand buck computers and rube goldberg nonsense in the first place, including those stupid punch cards with "chads", they aren't needed either. If it takes "too long to count", here's an idea, a full 24 hour voting period, and it can even be a mandated federal holiday for that matter, so no one needs to miss work to go vote, no matter what shift they work or any other excuse.
I love computers, like most folks here have owned them for years and owned quite a few of them, but for elections, I like a plain ballot box and normal paper ballots.
"Open source" with elections is, I am sure, being pushed by well meaning folks, but if falls exactly under the "if your main tool use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you" syndrome. It just ain't needed, tons of other projects out there could use the dev help instead.
Thanks for the answer! I was just suspicious of three "cuts" in a row during this time of both geopolitical uncertainty and also some rather severe market pressure. There appears to be gathering forces there to detach the various local currencies from a strict dollar peg and go to a bundled basket of currencies.
What are the stock market traders saying there? Has this had an impact at all?
I haven't seen anything but their say so that the cut was an accident. It could have been deliberate to slow down middle eastern stock market transactions, to try and avert a meltdown...just sayin'.... or something else. Could be a lot of things. I don't know but so far ain't buying the story as advertised. It might be true, but it smells bad. We have one report that says ships got "ordered" to go anchor in an unusual place..this is a clear WTF? episode then. Why they do that? Plausible deniability excuse some "ships anchor" did it?
Whenever there is a HUGE screwup, judging by past historical references and parallels,.... with big business or governments, it pays to reject the first official "explanation".
gets rid of a ton of commercial sites quickly
your search term/words, -sale, -price, -special
Just wondering, what options would you like to see? When I am having a hard time with google, I make use of the negative/do not show - modifier, helps eliminate all the first few pages spam that way by seeing what their search term words are and dumping those. It takes two steps that way, because you have to check it out first, whatever they are using, but then usually gives much better results on the second "real" search then.
The owner is a friend of mine and offers nuclear emergency gear and some information. Related to this topic, good stuff, I own some in the "be prepared" mode I have adopted many years ago. ki4u.com
Best I recall, that I bought, 12.9 during a local price war, but normally it was closer to 20 cents depending on octane level. Of course, it was all full service then too, plus you get schmooz, free steak knives (no kidding) coffee mugs, trading stamps, stupid crap like that. and almost all gas stations were repair garages. The worst was during the opec embargo, two gallons at ten bucks a gallon, just enough to get home, park, go to the pawnshop and buy two bicycles at 50 bucks apiece. Lucky to get them, too, all the new bikes around town had already sold out. In 99 we had the bulk farm tank filled up at 79 cents a gallon (the diesel tank was a scosh cheaper), then used some gas treatment, that tank lasted us a few years and was still burnable down to the dregs (although I ran the last 50 gallons or so through a filter first). (Pri-G gas treatment, D for the diesel, good stuff, works as advertised)
So close, but no cigar. Vehicle should have been Nanovehicle.
Buses and trains are out of the weather. Go be homeless for awhile and find out how easy or not it is to actually find someplace to crash where you won't freeze or be sozked in rain. I have seen homeless people use them a lot just for a dry and warm place to catch some sleep (I used buses and trains for more than a decade in a large US city), just like they use libraries or cheap movie houses sometimes, if they can scrape up a few bucks, it is still cheaper by far than the cheapest rent you can find.
How Would You Make a Distributed Office System? Me? I am old fashioned, plain old traditional oak, well worked, using my leet router skillz.
Run folding@home or something instead of shutting them down. Turn it into a societal asset.
I can see their point. Here's a guy has no feet, so gets mechanical do-dad add-ons. They work quite well, and I am glad technology is able to help the guy and people in similar situations, but he is now modified to an unreasonable competitive advantage compared to plain joe normal runners. How about guys who have no functional lower half of their body? They run wheelchair marathons, and some of those guys are way faster on some courses than the normal runners, so they run completely separate class. I give the guy props for being a good athlete, but I think the officials made a good call there as well. He can still compete, but not in that class of Olympics event. Just like they announced this week they have the new bionic arms now, same guys who built the bionic hand, so let one of those guys participate in world wrist wrestling championships, or let them do the shotput at the olympics? Wouldn't be even close to being fair.
Now if they want to offer an "unlimited class" Olympics, sure, go for it, who cares, all the drugs, steroids, performance enhancing surgery and implants and attachments and mechanical bolt ons and assorted androidiness you want. Top fuel, anything goes. Probably get better ratings than the "normal" Olympics... imagine "stilt man" with the titanium leg stretcher implants and the high jump, walks up, steps over a ten foot bar, stuff like that.
"Solar power isn't free enough free energy for you?"...ya, it is OK, I own half a dozen panels now myself, and would like to see everyone get enough to run at least one of their home computers through a decent sized home whole circuit UPS deal, but keep thinking we can do better than even that. A few years ago some guys were kicking around some experiments they were doing and having some success with using wrapped fencing-a place to build up the charge-, and some car parts, sparkplugs with a big gap and a normal coil, and getting some useful electricity into car batteries, but I have lost track on any more updates of those experiments. Basically the static charge built up enough until it could jump the gap, it pulsed into the batteries. *Very* preliminary work to be sure, but getting enough to go forward and see how it could be tweaked better/safer, etc.
;)
As to Tesla and whatnot...guess I'd have to see some hard proof if anyone on Slashdot is really equivalent-to or better-than Tesla over all in the thinking outside the box realm in order to have some standing to debunk him. He was convinced he could get usable power from some earth versus atmosphere potential, with some geomagnetic lines of force thrown into the stew there. That we can't do it yet effectively does not negate the fact that *he* thought it was quite possible. I tend to fall on the side of the megabranez with track records and good street cred. He wasn't normal genius level smart, he was *scary* genius level smart, like everyone else was sorta like a lemur or something
Ya, that was me and the editorial comment with the bad weather on the ocean potential. I am wondering just perchance if a similar deal could be constructed with the potential between atmospheric static electricity and the ground. Or something, geomagnetic lines of force and other sorts of physics and geology voodoo. Just wondering. I just keep having the nagging feeling that someplace with Tesla's brain involved there is a fast and easier way around all of this energy question stuff. Like it is right there an inch away staring us in the face and we just aren't or refuse-to see it.
it involves the thinkers, the doers and the middlemen, and three (planned but only one built and launched) vast spaceships......
You are correct on the medical issues! I have also read one of the faster growth aspects to healthcare in the US is "medical tourism", going over seas for alternative therapies or surgeries, because it is either available there but not here and/or much cheaper.
US society could address this issue along with a host of other issues if they valued education/science/engineering as much as they do professional sports and movies. College education is absurdly expensive right now, for any field, let alone going all the way to a medical degree. You might *think* that subsidizing such educations might be considered a good idea, something society should "invest" in, but apparently not...
And too bad about africa and the brain drain, perhaps they should work on rational nationalism and pride in nation and so on first. Give them some inducements to stay as well, simple stuff, guaranteed free house and say no taxes for young people willing to stay and work after their degree. Something like that anyway.. I honestly don't understand why people don't want to try and work and make their own nations/areas better, it is an alien concept to me. I am just against the "me,me,me bottom line rules!" philosophy a lot of folks seem to have, like the accumulation of money is *the* most important thing in the whole world. I am an old square I guess, want to make what we have better, not willing to abandon ship so easily just to make a few bucks more some place else or by compromising ethics, etc.
...we really only need to launch one third of the population....
Maybe on slashdot it is thin, but I cover it on Technocrat.net,(along with a host of other alternative energy subjects). The latest reference article I put up just a few days ago and discussion here Otec
I agree with a lot of that. I am firmly in the camp of open pollination seed and no patenting for that stuff, etc. I am in ag but am a contrarian to a lot of conventional farmers, I recognize how much the major distributors and packers game the system, Believe me, I know, my check is artificially small because of some of those gents and the way the system is setup now. But that takes nothing away from my observation as to "that is how the equipment deal" is set up now, we have the bulk of the huge farmers set up to grow specialized crops, and a lot of the equipment is not easily transferable to different crops, and it is quite spendy. We got a lot of farmers already up and running for corn and soybeans and canola/rapeseed, so that is what the first biofuel crops are going to be coming from primarily. Wishful thinking is not going to change this, and anyone is free to go and try and get into farming and do it otherwise, especially the new energy farming but it is expensive to start out. In other words, complaining on the internet is cheap, actually going out and doing different is hard, you have to be dedicated, hard working and quite handy with your finances. I am trying to do both, I have roundly dissed monsanto et all numerous times here and other forums.
If I wasn't where I am now, and was going to do it fresh, I'd do it in stages and first look to some land that falls into the "good enough" wind category for a commercial wind tower or 6, then get that up and running, so you got a good check constantly coming in (even sharing with your VC investors) that will cover land payments and your other equipment, then go on and do some more radical and modern farming, both food and energy. Having your own massive electricity for more or less cheap/free onsite is a nice bonus there.
This whole farms as the new energy OPEC is still in the very early wild wild west days, plenty of room for new thinking and guys with some sound and sustainable ideas to step in and make their mark I think.
I agree with you on the sugar beets, but sort of disagree on the "why" of corn right now. The primary reason for the corn is because that is what we have the highest numbers of big farmers set up to grow with the equipment at hand, and that stuff just ain't cheap. Corn and soybeans, ethanol and biodiesel. We are in a transition stage now to all the various biofuels, so I wouldn't worry about it being corn forever, it just happens to be the handiest one we have right now. We are still at the 286 level with biofuels, it will get better, and in probably a roughly similar time frame.
There are two good positives here, energy demands are just always going to be going up,so this biofuels idea will be continued to be worked on, and farmers love to farm, because it is a hard job, and if they didn't love it, they wouldn't do it, there are any number of easier ways to make a buck. So it will work out.
In fact, a ton of the good innovations and tweaking with biofuels are going on right now in real world deployments directly on farms for fuel use on-site, because they are so tied to energy availability and costs. They are the serious beta tester devs right now for all of this...so I say support them in general terms, let them sort this out better, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Society is right now asking a minuscule percentage of the population to double their output, in two critical areas, food and now they are going to be tasked with being the liquid energy producers as well. This is an incredibly HUGE undertaking, and I think it is more than fair that the rest of society, who will be the primary beneficiaries of the food and now energy production, be prepared to cut loose a few dollars for this effort, to offer a bit of understanding and acceptance of the size of these projects in total and realize there will be failures as well as successes along this new energy path, and to give them a chance to tweak it out better without a lot of condemnation and outright dissin'.
No other segment of our society has been tasked with a doubling or tripling of their projected work load en masse like the farmers have now accepted to attempt. The closest historical parallel we have would the durable goods manufacturers-with a much higher workforce total and much higher governmental support structure- who had to gear up and run triple time, plus alter product lines drastically, for the world war 2 effort. The coming transition to mostly biofuels as conventional petroleum sources become more iffy and more dear, is at least of such a scale the way it is being projected now.