Since the electric bill came today, I noticed the local rate is $0.035/kwh.
Those areas of the country are not magical, they do exist. The Leaf has enough range (if it's real) to use to commute to work too, although the last 250' hill climb to get the last 2 miles home does worry me a bit. Until that is proven out, I'll keep the Aveo and the motorcycle.
By the way, the two second place finishers would both be considered motorcycles, or possibly trikes, in this state. It's definitely time to rethink what is a motorcycle. Two wheels in front and one in back should make it a car by my thinking, not a trike, which requires a different endorsement than a motorcycle, and is also not a car.
The estimates are based on reserves from the 60's. That's when we quit looking for more uranium because we had already found more than anyone could use. Then after TMI, there was even less incentive to prospect for more. 40 years after we quit looking, we still have not run out. Since seven to ten years of reserves are a desire state in the mining business (I used to work in it) what does that tell you about the state of reserves in 1970?
If you are really worried, several new uranium deposits have been found in Nevada while looking for gold. If the price goes up and stays there, people will start looking for uranium again, and they will find it. We looked for it for 30 years (1940 to 1970) with mule and pick technology, and found enough to last for 80 years. There is more out there than you think.
"(at the time, I was racking up debt, which I am now paying off)."
Not to quibble too much, but if you were racking up debt, you were not living sustainably. Since generating an income requires an energy input, your lack of income was suppressing your energy footprint.
I'm also puzzled by why your income disqualifies you from living in a smaller place. They don't have small apartments for those who do not get government subsidies? It just sounds odd. Unless your job requires you to entertain at home, and that sets the minimum house/apartment size. (For example, I can't seat more than 6 in my dining room.)
"At what point will it become cheaper to just turn our massive coal deposits into usable petroleum?"
The logistics and capital required won't let the cost of coal to liquids come down that far if you insist on maintaining business as usual. The problem is the sheer scale of oil production and use.
However, if all you want is enough liquid fuel to keep the trains, ships, and last-mile delivery trucks running, that is entirely doable. If you want enough oil-like stuff to keep the chemical industry going that will also be doable. Synthetic chemistry started with coal tar, and it can return there.
Agriculture can grow enough fuel to run itself on 10% of the arable land, less than it would take to feed draft animals. When the natural gas runs out, stranded wind power can produce nitrogen fertilizers, so that is manageable as well.
Civilization is not going to crash and burn, or at least it doesn't have to. But we do seem to have built more complexity that we can maintain both privately and publicly, and that excess is going to have to scrapped and salvaged.
"and there is a good chance your house has 60-80 feet of it from the pole to the NT1"
That made me grin. About 3 years ago they replaced the little round tin box with a "new" network interface device because they no longer carried the equipment to troubleshoot through the little round tin box.
Now that Verizon has sold the landlines to Frontier, I expect they will milk the cash cow for few years, then give up when they find out how much work it is to keep underground lines working in the frost zone.
And yes, there is no twist at all in the lines that go to that network interface device.
I hope they fixed the paper; the map in the quickview version has the Great Salt Lake in Colorado, and Utah just south of Oregon. The text talks about Nevada, but someone messed up the map.
"Hydrogen gas, however, is a particular pain in the ass."
I work at a chemical plant that uses hydrogen in the process. I second your opinion. It also is a great generator of static electricity, so even though it is technically not self igniting, half the time it still seems to catch on fire out the vent stack.
It's only virtue is that the leaks go up, so if the vent fans are running it won't have time to build up an explosive bubble before it departs.
"But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person"
Not to mention the chemistry lab, the distillation column in the Chem. E building, the fire assay furnaces in the mining building, the lasers in physics, and the entire barn full of animals in agriculture.
It's not all book-learning and the domain of pure thought the Liberal Arts majors think that college should be.
And isn't that the point of a back country trip? To disconnect from the incessant buzz of modern life and all the electronics?
The simple precautions in the parent post are all you really need, plus common sense and some experience. Once you know what you are doing you can even do a singleton. A week in the back country with no other contact with another human is very relaxing. (Yes, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory said I am an introvert.)
"if the official dioxin-exposure limits are set unreasonably low"
Yes and no. They are based on animal studies, and are well done and replicable. BUT, the animals used are short lifetime species, as in lab rats. Dioxin is pure hell guinea pigs, and amazingly toxic to rats and many other animals. However, humans seem to be highly resistant to it, probably because of our advanced liver that comes with the long lifespan. The chimpanzee and human genome differ most in the brain, and the liver. The first is obvious, the second wasn't.
Similarly, benzo-a-pyrene is deadly to rodents, and a flavor enhancer (as in grilled meat) to humans.
But even if humans can tolerate dioxin, cleaning out the rest of the ecosystem is not such a great idea. It makes setting the "safe" level a challenge.
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
Impressive lack of "getting it" all right;
Jone, et. al. demand that the entire world economy as well as the social structures be rebuilt into a new system defined entirely by Jones, et. al, based on the data and models produced by Jones, et. al., and no one else is allowed to look at or validate anything.
That's not science, that's a religion. It may well be across the border between a religion and a cult.
Note that I'm working from a process control perspective in a chemical plant, but 90% of data written is never read again sounds about right for when things are going well. It's when something goes wrong and you have to figure out what went wrong at exactly what time and what the regulatory consequences were that having all that previously unread data suddenly becomes very interesting indeed.
And also when you start looking at a system in detail to see if you can increase output, or change a composition, all that usually ignored data becomes very valuable.
"will all be about the fight to successfully manage the earth"
And you got it in one, once you add the part that it's even more about managing people, as in dictatorship.
You will decide what car (if any) I get to drive, you will decide what I eat, when I'll be allowed to have kids, what medical care I'm eligible for, and so on.
That's the not so hidden agenda that riles up people so well. I don't know if you intend to be one of the new slavemasters or not, but someone is pushing for that role. Richard Heinberg is very open about using "Government means" to "encourage" 50 million people to move out to newly confiscated and redistributed lands to take up organic subsistence farming.
As for him, in his own words (I do give him full points for honesty)
"Many people (this includes him) who are doing this necessary work (leading others on the path of righteousness as defined by him) will be unable immediately to put much effort into building alternative, off-grid dwellings, and may have to continue using computers and jet transport, at least in modest ways. "
He will milk the system for every luxury he can get because he has to show the true path to the 50 million new eco-serfs who are being marched out into the country at bayonet point.
"Rather than a new peasantry that spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new population of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology--in short, the whole range of pursuits that make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile."
As if subsistence farmers have time for anything other than subsistence. And you are never more than two bad years from starvation. See the Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan, who has a much more realistic view of subsistence farming, or the opening act of said book;
"Until you realize that the last reader for it will be extinct in 20."
Not necessarily. They still make turntables for LP records. Also, if the specification is well documented, then someone can always build a reader if it really matters. File formats are likely to be more troublesome.
The Sheldon National Antelope Refuge is that area.
The environmentalists will fight it to the end. The land outside the refuge is all Federal, and it will take 10 years to permission to begin the EIS. then another 10 years minimum to finish that and be ready to start construction.
If we are lucky, Congress will decide to start selling all that Federal Land so they can fund their pork and/or SS for awhile longer, then you might see some activity.
There is a lot of nice scenery out there, once you calibrate to desert values. I used to live in Winnemucca, and still sort of miss it. I'd move back for a geothermal project.
"Every time your boss hands you some new responsibility ask him "which of my current responsibilities should I push to the bottom of my prioritized list so that I can take on this new responsibility?" Be persistent... he needs to provide an answer."
I saw another version of this advice several years ago, and it has proven to be among the best tidbits I've run across. I have been working for two (or more) bosses for several years now. On occasion, I have to get both of them in the same office and launch them at each other. Bosses set the priorities, that is their job. Don't them weasel out of it. It has never taken more than a half an hour for the three of us to sort out the priorities. (Don't be bashful about beating them with the company mantra either, Safety, Quality, Production, in my case. Oh, you are willing to cut corners on quality to make the production rate? No problem, please repeat that while speaking clearly into the pen...) In other words, put it in writing, and then a hard copy of that email comes home with me to the Get Out of Jail Free Collection. They don't pay me nearly enough to be the Designated Felon, so I take care to not be exposed to that role.
Be realistic too. (Why yes, I can do foo, it will increase costs 50 cents per kilogram.) (I work at a chemical plant.) "ACK!" they say, "Maybe we should reevaluate foo." And sometimes they gulp and say, "But we simply must have foo, go ahead with the plan." That is their call, so don't argue the point. For some reason they keep me far away from marketing, so there is no way I can know what the customers want other than what the bosses tell me.
Boss Management is an integral part of your job. Give it the attention it deserves.
"I don't remember ever asking BP to drill for oil." Actually you did, unless you live a life without using oil, plastics, non-organic food, paper, a good many medicines, and no metals or lumber. Oil is everywhere.
"I don't remember ever asking anyone to drill in an unsafe manner."
"There's plastics that are coal derived... Melamine can be synthesized from coal products... Phenolic... other stuff.."
The chemical industry started with coal tar (aniline dyes in particular). It can go back there if we have to. 29 dead men vs 11 dead men and a fried ecosystem makes the trade off calculations interesting to say the least.
"Just about the only thing which is likely to kill Microsoft is if they can't pry everyone off of XP "
True enough. IS was ready to shift us over to Windows 7 and the CEO said "NO!" So it looks like we'll be on XP until the depression ends. Or MS is going to have to cut their price.
If OSI (Oil Systems Inc) were to port their PI package to Linux, we might even go that way. A lot of the other special software that used to be windows-only now works in a browser window, so that's not much of a barrier any more. And some more software is being replaced by SAP, so that is on it's way out as well.
"That's not only wrong, it's nonsense! First, the Norse Settlement [wikipedia.org] died out in the early to middle Fifteenth Century, two hundred years before the Maunder Minimum... "
You are correct. Although the northern Norse settlement died out first about 100 years before the southern one. They went down due to the same cooling trend that hit Europe in the 1300's.
"The Great Famine of 1315–1317 (occasionally dated 1315-1322) was the first of a series of large scale crises that struck Europe early in the fourteenth century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. "
Slashdot Mirror
Since the electric bill came today, I noticed the local rate is $0.035/kwh.
Those areas of the country are not magical, they do exist. The Leaf has enough range (if it's real) to use to commute to work too, although the last 250' hill climb to get the last 2 miles home does worry me a bit. Until that is proven out, I'll keep the Aveo and the motorcycle.
By the way, the two second place finishers would both be considered motorcycles, or possibly trikes, in this state. It's definitely time to rethink what is a motorcycle. Two wheels in front and one in back should make it a car by my thinking, not a trike, which requires a different endorsement than a motorcycle, and is also not a car.
The estimates are based on reserves from the 60's. That's when we quit looking for more uranium because we had already found more than anyone could use. Then after TMI, there was even less incentive to prospect for more. 40 years after we quit looking, we still have not run out. Since seven to ten years of reserves are a desire state in the mining business (I used to work in it) what does that tell you about the state of reserves in 1970?
If you are really worried, several new uranium deposits have been found in Nevada while looking for gold. If the price goes up and stays there, people will start looking for uranium again, and they will find it. We looked for it for 30 years (1940 to 1970) with mule and pick technology, and found enough to last for 80 years. There is more out there than you think.
"(at the time, I was racking up debt, which I am now paying off)."
Not to quibble too much, but if you were racking up debt, you were not living sustainably. Since generating an income requires an energy input, your lack of income was suppressing your energy footprint.
I'm also puzzled by why your income disqualifies you from living in a smaller place. They don't have small apartments for those who do not get government subsidies? It just sounds odd. Unless your job requires you to entertain at home, and that sets the minimum house/apartment size. (For example, I can't seat more than 6 in my dining room.)
"At what point will it become cheaper to just turn our massive coal deposits into usable petroleum?"
The logistics and capital required won't let the cost of coal to liquids come down that far if you insist on maintaining business as usual. The problem is the sheer scale of oil production and use.
However, if all you want is enough liquid fuel to keep the trains, ships, and last-mile delivery trucks running, that is entirely doable. If you want enough oil-like stuff to keep the chemical industry going that will also be doable. Synthetic chemistry started with coal tar, and it can return there.
Agriculture can grow enough fuel to run itself on 10% of the arable land, less than it would take to feed draft animals. When the natural gas runs out, stranded wind power can produce nitrogen fertilizers, so that is manageable as well.
Civilization is not going to crash and burn, or at least it doesn't have to. But we do seem to have built more complexity that we can maintain both privately and publicly, and that excess is going to have to scrapped and salvaged.
"and there is a good chance your house has 60-80 feet of it from the pole to the NT1"
That made me grin. About 3 years ago they replaced the little round tin box with a "new" network interface device because they no longer carried the equipment to troubleshoot through the little round tin box.
Now that Verizon has sold the landlines to Frontier, I expect they will milk the cash cow for few years, then give up when they find out how much work it is to keep underground lines working in the frost zone.
And yes, there is no twist at all in the lines that go to that network interface device.
I hope they fixed the paper; the map in the quickview version has the Great Salt Lake in Colorado, and Utah just south of Oregon. The text talks about Nevada, but someone messed up the map.
Just be a really good box-pusher.
"Just how stupid do you have to be to need a giant letter grade on a car? "
Don't ask questions that you don't really want to know the answer to.
"Hydrogen gas, however, is a particular pain in the ass."
I work at a chemical plant that uses hydrogen in the process. I second your opinion. It also is a great generator of static electricity, so even though it is technically not self igniting, half the time it still seems to catch on fire out the vent stack.
It's only virtue is that the leaks go up, so if the vent fans are running it won't have time to build up an explosive bubble before it departs.
"Well, in other news, it is illegal to collect your own rainwater in Washington state."
Happily, not true, which is actually surprising considering how power-mad the Dept of Ecology usually is.
"On October 12, 2009, Ecology issued an Interpretive Policy Statement clarifying that a water right is not required for rooftop rainwater harvesting."
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wr/hq/rwh.html
Where they do care is if you intend to catch the rain in one watershed, then move it to another watershed, a restriction that actually makes sense.
"But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person"
Not to mention the chemistry lab, the distillation column in the Chem. E building, the fire assay furnaces in the mining building, the lasers in physics, and the entire barn full of animals in agriculture.
It's not all book-learning and the domain of pure thought the Liberal Arts majors think that college should be.
"Assume you will *not* have any communication."
And isn't that the point of a back country trip? To disconnect from the incessant buzz of modern life and all the electronics?
The simple precautions in the parent post are all you really need, plus common sense and some experience. Once you know what you are doing you can even do a singleton. A week in the back country with no other contact with another human is very relaxing. (Yes, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory said I am an introvert.)
"if the official dioxin-exposure limits are set unreasonably low"
Yes and no. They are based on animal studies, and are well done and replicable. BUT, the animals used are short lifetime species, as in lab rats. Dioxin is pure hell guinea pigs, and amazingly toxic to rats and many other animals. However, humans seem to be highly resistant to it, probably because of our advanced liver that comes with the long lifespan. The chimpanzee and human genome differ most in the brain, and the liver. The first is obvious, the second wasn't.
Similarly, benzo-a-pyrene is deadly to rodents, and a flavor enhancer (as in grilled meat) to humans.
But even if humans can tolerate dioxin, cleaning out the rest of the ecosystem is not such a great idea. It makes setting the "safe" level a challenge.
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
Impressive lack of "getting it" all right;
Jone, et. al. demand that the entire world economy as well as the social structures be rebuilt into a new system defined entirely by Jones, et. al, based on the data and models produced by Jones, et. al., and no one else is allowed to look at or validate anything.
That's not science, that's a religion. It may well be across the border between a religion and a cult.
Note that I'm working from a process control perspective in a chemical plant, but 90% of data written is never read again sounds about right for when things are going well. It's when something goes wrong and you have to figure out what went wrong at exactly what time and what the regulatory consequences were that having all that previously unread data suddenly becomes very interesting indeed.
And also when you start looking at a system in detail to see if you can increase output, or change a composition, all that usually ignored data becomes very valuable.
"will all be about the fight to successfully manage the earth"
And you got it in one, once you add the part that it's even more about managing people, as in dictatorship.
You will decide what car (if any) I get to drive, you will decide what I eat, when I'll be allowed to have kids, what medical care I'm eligible for, and so on.
That's the not so hidden agenda that riles up people so well. I don't know if you intend to be one of the new slavemasters or not, but someone is pushing for that role. Richard Heinberg is very open about using "Government means" to "encourage" 50 million people to move out to newly confiscated and redistributed lands to take up organic subsistence farming.
As for him, in his own words (I do give him full points for honesty)
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/189
"Many people (this includes him) who are doing this necessary work (leading others on the path of righteousness as defined by him) will be unable immediately to put much effort into building alternative, off-grid dwellings, and may have to continue using computers and jet transport, at least in modest ways. "
He will milk the system for every luxury he can get because he has to show the true path to the 50 million new eco-serfs who are being marched out into the country at bayonet point.
And this one is really a riot: http://energybulletin.net/node/22584
"Rather than a new peasantry that spends all of its time in drudgery, we could look forward to a new population of producers who maintain interests in the arts and sciences, in history, philosophy, spirituality, and psychology--in short, the whole range of pursuits that make modern urban life interesting and worthwhile."
As if subsistence farmers have time for anything other than subsistence. And you are never more than two bad years from starvation. See the Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan, who has a much more realistic view of subsistence farming, or the opening act of said book;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315-1317
Yes, I grew up on a farm, and even with Friend Diesel and Friend Hydraulic System, it's not easy.
"Until you realize that the last reader for it will be extinct in 20."
Not necessarily. They still make turntables for LP records.
Also, if the specification is well documented, then someone can always build a reader if it really matters. File formats are likely to be more troublesome.
The Sheldon National Antelope Refuge is that area.
The environmentalists will fight it to the end. The land outside the refuge is all Federal, and it will take 10 years to permission to begin the EIS. then another 10 years minimum to finish that and be ready to start construction.
If we are lucky, Congress will decide to start selling all that Federal Land so they can fund their pork and/or SS for awhile longer, then you might see some activity.
There is a lot of nice scenery out there, once you calibrate to desert values. I used to live in Winnemucca, and still sort of miss it. I'd move back for a geothermal project.
"Every time your boss hands you some new responsibility ask him "which of my current responsibilities should I push to the bottom of my prioritized list so that I can take on this new responsibility?" Be persistent... he needs to provide an answer."
I saw another version of this advice several years ago, and it has proven to be among the best tidbits I've run across. I have been working for two (or more) bosses for several years now. On occasion, I have to get both of them in the same office and launch them at each other. Bosses set the priorities, that is their job. Don't them weasel out of it. It has never taken more than a half an hour for the three of us to sort out the priorities. (Don't be bashful about beating them with the company mantra either, Safety, Quality, Production, in my case. Oh, you are willing to cut corners on quality to make the production rate? No problem, please repeat that while speaking clearly into the pen...) In other words, put it in writing, and then a hard copy of that email comes home with me to the Get Out of Jail Free Collection. They don't pay me nearly enough to be the Designated Felon, so I take care to not be exposed to that role.
Be realistic too. (Why yes, I can do foo, it will increase costs 50 cents per kilogram.) (I work at a chemical plant.) "ACK!" they say, "Maybe we should reevaluate foo." And sometimes they gulp and say, "But we simply must have foo, go ahead with the plan." That is their call, so don't argue the point. For some reason they keep me far away from marketing, so there is no way I can know what the customers want other than what the bosses tell me.
Boss Management is an integral part of your job. Give it the attention it deserves.
"Mind you, 18 inches is about the right reading distance for me"
I have three "right reading distances" to chose from. (trifocals). I'm sure one of them will work fine.
"I don't remember ever asking BP to drill for oil."
Actually you did, unless you live a life without using oil, plastics, non-organic food, paper, a good many medicines, and no metals or lumber. Oil is everywhere.
"I don't remember ever asking anyone to drill in an unsafe manner."
Now that statement is entirely reasonable.
"There's plastics that are coal derived... Melamine can be synthesized from coal products... Phenolic... other stuff.."
The chemical industry started with coal tar (aniline dyes in particular). It can go back there if we have to. 29 dead men vs 11 dead men and a fried ecosystem makes the trade off calculations interesting to say the least.
"Just about the only thing which is likely to kill Microsoft is if they can't pry everyone off of XP "
True enough. IS was ready to shift us over to Windows 7 and the CEO said "NO!" So it looks like we'll be on XP until the depression ends. Or MS is going to have to cut their price.
If OSI (Oil Systems Inc) were to port their PI package to Linux, we might even go that way. A lot of the other special software that used to be windows-only now works in a browser window, so that's not much of a barrier any more. And some more software is being replaced by SAP, so that is on it's way out as well.
"That's not only wrong, it's nonsense! First, the Norse Settlement [wikipedia.org] died out in the early to middle Fifteenth Century, two hundred years before the Maunder Minimum... "
You are correct. Although the northern Norse settlement died out first about 100 years before the southern one. They went down due to the same cooling trend that hit Europe in the 1300's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315–1317
"The Great Famine of 1315–1317 (occasionally dated 1315-1322) was the first of a series of large scale crises that struck Europe early in the fourteenth century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. "
Clinton cut nothing from the budget. Newt Gingrich did he cutting.
And yes, the current deficit's are technically Pelosi's.
Article 1:
Section 7 - Revenue Bills, Legislative Process, Presidential Veto
All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.