We were the first to mine coal, drill for oil, extract deposits of rare earths, and precious metals.
Citation needed.
Consider the well known fact (to any one with any familiarity with the history of mining) that the grades of major ores that are being mined have steadily declined as the richer ores are exhausted.
When humans started working metals started very rich sources of critical metals, like copper, were available on and near the surface of the Earth.
in Michigan. This is a rich vein of copper ore called the Keweenaw copper that dates from the Precambrian era 600 million years ago, about the time of the first multi-cellular life. Rich high veins of critical scarce materials did not get exploited until people showed up.
We have natural polymers - amber - that are 320 million years old. Made of biologically active compounds these are far less resistance to decompostion to modern polymers. Nothing is ever going to eat teflon.
We have direct evidence from a natural experiment here.
Amber.
This is a natural polymer that forms by cross-linking of terpenes in tree resin. Being made of biological materials it is far more prone to natural biochemical attack than our synthetics yet we have amber that dates to the Carboniferous Era, 320 million years ago. Modern synthetics are far more resistant to decomposition than amber is.
Anything cut into bedrock will be around as long as the bedrock is - it has to entirely erode away to make it disappear. Road and railway cuts, by their positioning, are inherently exposed to erosion though through granite you are looking at hundreds of millions of years as you say (the Black Hills stand above the High Plains for this reason). Bit we commonly cut foundations of large buildings into bedrock. Once these building disappear the rectangular holes in bedrock fill with debris, and will get buried under sediment. These can be preserved for extremely long times, even if erosion eventually removes the sediment the original bedrock will then have to erode.
There are a lot of countries with the technology to build nuclear power reactors, if they choose to. Most of France's electrical power comes from nuclear power.
Now. Provide a list of every molten salt power reactor operating in the world.
Heck how many are currently under construction? Planned? Proposed?
Well, consulting the reactor type menu - that option does not exist. Not one has ever been built. Not one is under construction. Not one is planned. Not one is proposed.
If molten salt reactors are "the silver bullet that we desperately need" why is no one anywhere in the world even proposing building one? And without a single operating unit, how can one conclude they have properties - including cost - superior to every existing design?
The fact of the matter is this type of reactor has become a hobby-horse of nerd-dom based on theoretical advantages, but ignoring the enormous list of real, practical obstacles of building a successful commercial model. A good place to start is do materials that will withstand 40 years of the corrosive effects of molten salt even exist? How much do candidate materials cost? If you look into these issues, the reasons no one wants to build one becomes clear.
The funny thing about MSR is that the US had experimental reactors running and had tons of knowledge about them, but it was more or less deep sixed since LWR was the way to go so the military could get their fissionables for atomic weapons.
No country has ever produced "fissionables" for atomic weapons with a LWR.
A big issue is this: Coal has been steadily automating its mining systems. In 1950 underground mining was at the rate of 0.68 tons per man hour and surface mining was at the rate of 1.9 tons/manhour. By 2011 underground mining was at the rate of 2.76 tons/man hour and surface mining was at 8.8 tons/man hour. There were productivity peaks in 2003 of 4.04 and 10.75 tons/man hour.
Furthermore underground coal is only about 1/3 of U.S. production, and it is steadily declining. As the market for coal shrinks those high-labor cost underground mines are going to close first.
Coal production is down by 25% of the last few years, and no one expects the trend-line to change, least of all coal companies who have not bid for one new lease in the last few years. The have instead been abandon leases they have already sunk some money into.
They solve the spin up time problem by just running the plants all the time whether power is needed or not, then selling the power they don't need to their neighbors over the grid.
That is nonsense. We have no strange spin up times where coal can not handle it.
Coal plants have lots of issues with starting up quickly. 23% of all coal plant cold start-up events fail (produce no electricity). These failed start-ups persist for a median of 4 hours before being retried, though the average is 8 hours (i.e. a substantial number persist much longer). Of the start-ups that succeed the average start-up time from the beginning of combustion to producing power is about 8 hours.
Coal plants are strictly base load plants, unable to deal with load fluctuation on a scale significantly shorter than a day.
OTOH, natural gas peaking plants start-up in a matter of minutes.
And: coal is down ot 40% of our power mix.
And: we still produce 10%-12% of oir power by nuclear.
The Koch family empire was built on oil. Fred Koch's founding business was an oil refinery, and the present day Kochs run a diversified petrochemical business.
These are good points, and I have some experience with haggling in foreign countries. It usually works well enough, and in some ways better as you note.
But observe that even under fixed pricing some these flexibilities of haggling are still not unusual especially when dealing directly with the individual store owner. I am sure we have all had experiences with owners offering to knock something off the price for various reasons, offering informal deals in the spot and the like.
I posted above about the special religious and social conditions that influenced the Quakers. I forgot to add, having a population that was almost completely literate had something to do with it also.
One key to this innovation is to really try to understand the motivation from a personal level. The existing practice required the Quaker store owner to try to haggle with the customer for every transaction - which consists in some sense of an effort of two parties to deceive each other about what one is willing to pay or accept. And the Quakers greatly emphasized strict personal honesty - so this was a frequent unpleasant experience that they wanted removed.
Additionally in a close knit community different people paying different prices is a source of social tension. Shop owners no doubt experienced customers - people of the community they knew - wanting the same price some other person of the community that they knew received. If this happens very often the temptation to simply set the same price in practice becomes strong. And if you do that why not just write it down and save the owner some time, and halt unwanted attempts to haggle.
Talk of "axioms" is irrelevant (and it should be noted that axioms are by their nature arbitrary). Although such an argument could appeal to a modern urban intellectual individualist, it would have appeared bizarre to an 18th Century close knit community devoted to personal moral improvement.
Interestingly the Quakers were also one the prime originators of the anti-slavery movement. Before the mid-18th century the notion that slavery might be intrinsically immoral was an extreme fringe notion. Slavery was generally accepted socially, legally, and religiously.
Well, these are the lies the right-wing ACs tell themselves to feel good inside.
Here is a question for you. In the 50 states, where do you think California ranks in terms of the fraction of its citizen population who leave each year?
Number one? Number five? Number ten?
It is number forty nine. Only one state has a population less likely to leave. The OC Register is a famously right-wing paper by the way.
And those leaving the state are not the "rich people fleeing" that exist in the fantasies of the right, but are people whose incomes are by and large below the state average - the less successful.
One of tells in these schemes (this is at least the fourth such scheme to be advanced by right-wing billionaires in recent years, two of them with Russian support) is that they do not respect country boundaries. It is not a matter of like minded counties wanting to separate themselves. Instead these schemes have the new inland "red states" cut deep salients into existing coastal urban counties to grab a chunk of the blue urban economy to pay their bills.
The man proposing this wants to apply the cracking and packing methodology of gerrymandering to the entire state to gerrymander the senate, which is otherwise impossible - something that has had the right-wing gnashing its teeth for years.
If you look at Draper's actual proposals they have this common pattern - a large majority of the blue urban areas along the coast get cracked out and packed into one state that is nearly 100% blue - this gets rid of most the state's blue majority.
The more rural, inland part of the state is then split into multiple states (down to two, from the previous five in his last scheme) each of which have a slight red majority. But each of these inland red states get a chunk of blue urban voters (for example Long Beach by itself gets carved out of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area) to provide the revenue to support the new red state - kind of like a hostage being forced to pay the bills of its captors. Because, heavens!, you can't expect these red counties who value their "freedom" to have to pay for their own services!
Result adding four new reliable right-wing senators to the Senate.
Hmm... is not ridiculous that the three states of Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota have a combined population of only 2/3 of one percent of nation? Clearly they should be required to merge to form one state. You must agree right?
Ah, the right wing is always trying to cook up new rules to grant themselves more power.
I believe his question is trying to get across the idea "what not build them inside cities". The answer would be cost per square foot of land is still higher in cities.
Since the U.S. is the largest advanced economy in the world - this is the final fall-back argument of everyone trying to deny that what works everywhere else in the world just absolutely cannot possible never ever work in the United States. Because at some unexplained, unspecified, undocumented size it will suddenly fail -
just because.
The U.S. accounts for no more that 45% of medical R&D spending. This figure is 6 years old, and the article is about the steady downward trend of this share, so it is almost certainly lower today. Even at 40%, say, it is the largest share of any single nation, and significantly more than the U.S. share of the world's total GDP (25%), but the claim that the rest of world are "freeloaders" is BS.
Yes, the stuff about hot peppers literally causing physical lesions as if they were thermally hot is folklore. Capsaicin stimulates nerves via the TRPV1 receptor that also responds to heat, and so gives the sensation of burning. It causes no physical changes directly.
As another poster here has noted rare idiosyncratic rashes can occur, but lots of things can cause rashes in some people, it is really an immune system abnormality in the victim.
I've heard speculation that if 20% of people switch to electric it won't be profitable for most service stations to provide petrol which would accelerate the switchover process dramatically.
Doesn't sound like Informed speculation. In 2016 there were 268.8 million vehicles were registered in the U.S. (this is all vehicles not just passenger cars, but the math is pretty much the same). This is similar to saying that gas stations were not profitable when there were only 215 million - which was 1996.
The number of gas stations in the U.S. has actually dropped a lot of over the last 25 years, from 210,000 to 122,000 over roughly the same period as the business moved to the convenience store with lots of pumps model (fewer traditional "service stations", which are now only about 20% of gas selling places), adapting to handle much larger numbers of vehicles daily.
No matter the exact number of vehicles on the road, gas stations have been profitable businesses in large numbers selling them gas. Also consider the sunk cost of those buried gas tanks and pump equipment, the permitting required (storing somewhat toxic combustible materials in large amounts), and the stations set up for this are going to keep selling it as long as there are huge numbers of buyers - i.e. 80% of car owners.
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We were the first to mine coal, drill for oil, extract deposits of rare earths, and precious metals.
Citation needed.
Consider the well known fact (to any one with any familiarity with the history of mining) that the grades of major ores that are being mined have steadily declined as the richer ores are exhausted.
When humans started working metals started very rich sources of critical metals, like copper, were available on and near the surface of the Earth.
Consider the Old Copper Complex
in Michigan. This is a rich vein of copper ore called the Keweenaw copper that dates from the Precambrian era 600 million years ago, about the time of the first multi-cellular life. Rich high veins of critical scarce materials did not get exploited until people showed up.
We have natural polymers - amber - that are 320 million years old. Made of biologically active compounds these are far less resistance to decompostion to modern polymers. Nothing is ever going to eat teflon.
We have direct evidence from a natural experiment here.
Amber.
This is a natural polymer that forms by cross-linking of terpenes in tree resin. Being made of biological materials it is far more prone to natural biochemical attack than our synthetics yet we have amber that dates to the Carboniferous Era, 320 million years ago. Modern synthetics are far more resistant to decomposition than amber is.
Anything cut into bedrock will be around as long as the bedrock is - it has to entirely erode away to make it disappear. Road and railway cuts, by their positioning, are inherently exposed to erosion though through granite you are looking at hundreds of millions of years as you say (the Black Hills stand above the High Plains for this reason). Bit we commonly cut foundations of large buildings into bedrock. Once these building disappear the rectangular holes in bedrock fill with debris, and will get buried under sediment. These can be preserved for extremely long times, even if erosion eventually removes the sediment the original bedrock will then have to erode.
Eastasia.
There are a lot of countries with the technology to build nuclear power reactors, if they choose to. Most of France's electrical power comes from nuclear power.
Now. Provide a list of every molten salt power reactor operating in the world.
Heck how many are currently under construction? Planned? Proposed?
Let me make is super-easy. Here is a list of every operating, under construction, planned, and proposed power reactor in the entire world- 447 of them. Which ones are molten salt reactors?
Even easier, here is a database of every power reactor ever built in the entire world, which includes a breakdown by type Now how many molten salt reactors are on this list?
Well, consulting the reactor type menu - that option does not exist. Not one has ever been built. Not one is under construction. Not one is planned. Not one is proposed.
If molten salt reactors are "the silver bullet that we desperately need" why is no one anywhere in the world even proposing building one? And without a single operating unit, how can one conclude they have properties - including cost - superior to every existing design?
The fact of the matter is this type of reactor has become a hobby-horse of nerd-dom based on theoretical advantages, but ignoring the enormous list of real, practical obstacles of building a successful commercial model. A good place to start is do materials that will withstand 40 years of the corrosive effects of molten salt even exist? How much do candidate materials cost? If you look into these issues, the reasons no one wants to build one becomes clear.
Amusing that the right-wingers here vote an accurate, factual discussion of the actual splitting California schemes of Draper "troll".
Can't take the light of day can you? Sad.
The funny thing about MSR is that the US had experimental reactors running and had tons of knowledge about them, but it was more or less deep sixed since LWR was the way to go so the military could get their fissionables for atomic weapons.
No country has ever produced "fissionables" for atomic weapons with a LWR.
A big issue is this: Coal has been steadily automating its mining systems. In 1950 underground mining was at the rate of 0.68 tons per man hour and surface mining was at the rate of 1.9 tons/manhour. By 2011 underground mining was at the rate of 2.76 tons/man hour and surface mining was at 8.8 tons/man hour. There were productivity peaks in 2003 of 4.04 and 10.75 tons/man hour.
Furthermore underground coal is only about 1/3 of U.S. production, and it is steadily declining. As the market for coal shrinks those high-labor cost underground mines are going to close first.
Coal production is down by 25% of the last few years, and no one expects the trend-line to change, least of all coal companies who have not bid for one new lease in the last few years. The have instead been abandon leases they have already sunk some money into.
They solve the spin up time problem by just running the plants all the time whether power is needed or not, then selling the power they don't need to their neighbors over the grid. That is nonsense. We have no strange spin up times where coal can not handle it.
Coal plants have lots of issues with starting up quickly. 23% of all coal plant cold start-up events fail (produce no electricity). These failed start-ups persist for a median of 4 hours before being retried, though the average is 8 hours (i.e. a substantial number persist much longer). Of the start-ups that succeed the average start-up time from the beginning of combustion to producing power is about 8 hours.
Coal plants are strictly base load plants, unable to deal with load fluctuation on a scale significantly shorter than a day.
OTOH, natural gas peaking plants start-up in a matter of minutes.
And: coal is down ot 40% of our power mix.
And: we still produce 10%-12% of oir power by nuclear.
Eh? No. In 2017 it coal power production was 30%, nuclear was 20%.
Get a damn clue and stop spreading FUD.
Maybe you should start looking up actual data and providing citations.
The Koch family empire was built on oil. Fred Koch's founding business was an oil refinery, and the present day Kochs run a diversified petrochemical business.
These are good points, and I have some experience with haggling in foreign countries. It usually works well enough, and in some ways better as you note.
But observe that even under fixed pricing some these flexibilities of haggling are still not unusual especially when dealing directly with the individual store owner. I am sure we have all had experiences with owners offering to knock something off the price for various reasons, offering informal deals in the spot and the like.
I posted above about the special religious and social conditions that influenced the Quakers. I forgot to add, having a population that was almost completely literate had something to do with it also.
One key to this innovation is to really try to understand the motivation from a personal level. The existing practice required the Quaker store owner to try to haggle with the customer for every transaction - which consists in some sense of an effort of two parties to deceive each other about what one is willing to pay or accept. And the Quakers greatly emphasized strict personal honesty - so this was a frequent unpleasant experience that they wanted removed.
Additionally in a close knit community different people paying different prices is a source of social tension. Shop owners no doubt experienced customers - people of the community they knew - wanting the same price some other person of the community that they knew received. If this happens very often the temptation to simply set the same price in practice becomes strong. And if you do that why not just write it down and save the owner some time, and halt unwanted attempts to haggle.
Talk of "axioms" is irrelevant (and it should be noted that axioms are by their nature arbitrary). Although such an argument could appeal to a modern urban intellectual individualist, it would have appeared bizarre to an 18th Century close knit community devoted to personal moral improvement.
Interestingly the Quakers were also one the prime originators of the anti-slavery movement. Before the mid-18th century the notion that slavery might be intrinsically immoral was an extreme fringe notion. Slavery was generally accepted socially, legally, and religiously.
US citizens stream out of these states...
Well, these are the lies the right-wing ACs tell themselves to feel good inside.
Here is a question for you. In the 50 states, where do you think California ranks in terms of the fraction of its citizen population who leave each year?
Number one? Number five? Number ten?
It is number forty nine. Only one state has a population less likely to leave. The OC Register is a famously right-wing paper by the way.
And those leaving the state are not the "rich people fleeing" that exist in the fantasies of the right, but are people whose incomes are by and large below the state average - the less successful.
One of tells in these schemes (this is at least the fourth such scheme to be advanced by right-wing billionaires in recent years, two of them with Russian support) is that they do not respect country boundaries. It is not a matter of like minded counties wanting to separate themselves. Instead these schemes have the new inland "red states" cut deep salients into existing coastal urban counties to grab a chunk of the blue urban economy to pay their bills.
The man proposing this wants to apply the cracking and packing methodology of gerrymandering to the entire state to gerrymander the senate, which is otherwise impossible - something that has had the right-wing gnashing its teeth for years.
If you look at Draper's actual proposals they have this common pattern - a large majority of the blue urban areas along the coast get cracked out and packed into one state that is nearly 100% blue - this gets rid of most the state's blue majority.
The more rural, inland part of the state is then split into multiple states (down to two, from the previous five in his last scheme) each of which have a slight red majority. But each of these inland red states get a chunk of blue urban voters (for example Long Beach by itself gets carved out of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area) to provide the revenue to support the new red state - kind of like a hostage being forced to pay the bills of its captors. Because, heavens!, you can't expect these red counties who value their "freedom" to have to pay for their own services!
Result adding four new reliable right-wing senators to the Senate.
Hmm... is not ridiculous that the three states of Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota have a combined population of only 2/3 of one percent of nation? Clearly they should be required to merge to form one state. You must agree right?
Ah, the right wing is always trying to cook up new rules to grant themselves more power.
I believe his question is trying to get across the idea "what not build them inside cities". The answer would be cost per square foot of land is still higher in cities.
Ah, good to see you advancing the need for non-profits in this part of society and the economy!
Ah yes, the magical "scaling" argument.
Since the U.S. is the largest advanced economy in the world - this is the final fall-back argument of everyone trying to deny that what works everywhere else in the world just absolutely cannot possible never ever work in the United States. Because at some unexplained, unspecified, undocumented size it will suddenly fail - just because.
The U.S. accounts for no more that 45% of medical R&D spending. This figure is 6 years old, and the article is about the steady downward trend of this share, so it is almost certainly lower today. Even at 40%, say, it is the largest share of any single nation, and significantly more than the U.S. share of the world's total GDP (25%), but the claim that the rest of world are "freeloaders" is BS.
... an entire ecosystem of 3D objects that users will be able to interact with ...
I already have an entire ecosystem of 3D objects I am trying not to interact with while I am driving.
One of my favorites. I would love to have Groening drawn "space coyote" sketch.
Yes, the stuff about hot peppers literally causing physical lesions as if they were thermally hot is folklore. Capsaicin stimulates nerves via the TRPV1 receptor that also responds to heat, and so gives the sensation of burning. It causes no physical changes directly.
As another poster here has noted rare idiosyncratic rashes can occur, but lots of things can cause rashes in some people, it is really an immune system abnormality in the victim.
I've heard speculation that if 20% of people switch to electric it won't be profitable for most service stations to provide petrol which would accelerate the switchover process dramatically.
Doesn't sound like Informed speculation. In 2016 there were 268.8 million vehicles were registered in the U.S. (this is all vehicles not just passenger cars, but the math is pretty much the same). This is similar to saying that gas stations were not profitable when there were only 215 million - which was 1996.
The number of gas stations in the U.S. has actually dropped a lot of over the last 25 years, from 210,000 to 122,000 over roughly the same period as the business moved to the convenience store with lots of pumps model (fewer traditional "service stations", which are now only about 20% of gas selling places), adapting to handle much larger numbers of vehicles daily.
No matter the exact number of vehicles on the road, gas stations have been profitable businesses in large numbers selling them gas. Also consider the sunk cost of those buried gas tanks and pump equipment, the permitting required (storing somewhat toxic combustible materials in large amounts), and the stations set up for this are going to keep selling it as long as there are huge numbers of buyers - i.e. 80% of car owners.