And that is exactly my point.  200 MW is hardly worth the effort of all that geoengineering.  Despite the fact that it would pay economic and ecological dividends, both in actual power and in local climate mitigation, for 10K years or more.  We simply don't, as humans, think out that far.  We discount the value of such a massive construction to our great-to-the-power-of-whatever-grandchildren.  If we can't get a net positive return on investment within out own lifetimes, we don't see the value in it.  This is the short term thinking that afflicts the human race with some of it's greatest flaws.  There is a 'food forest' in Vietnam that has produced food for humans for 300+ years, almost without human labor to maintain it.  There is a theory that the Great Pyramid in Giza was not a burial site at all, but an elaborate water works construction; from an age prior to the Egyption culture when the local climate was much wetter.

http://atlaspub.20m.com/giza/pg5.htm

http://sentinelkennels.com/Research_Article_V41.html

http://www.thepump.org/

BAsicly a massive ram pump, used to send the water of the "Upper Nile" (which no longer exists) great distances.  A similar 'ram pump' construction was once proposed to push a portion of the water flowwing down the Mississippi River West across the Great Plains, although today the Mississippi River basin has enough trouble maintaining a shipping depth.

Humanity just has real problems thinking in such long range terms, even when the benefit to our decendents is certain.  One reason that a space elevator is never going to be built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran




http://www.septa.org/fares/pass/independence.html

BTW, roads were never public land or publicly maintained before the foundation of the USPS, which provided funds and legal status for the public development of "postal roads".  Today, all roads are postal roads.  Makes one wonder how we ever had roads before the USPS.

http://matternet.us/

http://www.incrediblehlq.com/


http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/10great/2009-09-03-apple-farms_N.htm

http://www.huberwinery.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Consumer_%26_Industrial#Appliance_Park

GE's appliance park was the original 'industrial park'.  How did it get it's name, might you ask?  From the 50 acres of company maintained parkspace on the East side of the employee parking lot provided to the public free of charge.  Eventually the city parks department took over maintaince of the privately owned park, and since then portions have been sold off to other companies; so little of the original park remains, but my point is that we used to do things this way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltmore_Estate

The Biltmore estate is ran as a private park, but there is some fees depending upon what exactly you want to do.  Walking the gardens is still free.  And yes, it's still privately owned.

http://bernheim.org/

Berhiem Forest is a private park of huge proportions in Kentucky that is as large as many state parks.  It was priavely oned once, and now it's owned and maintained by a fountation that the original owner stipulated in his will shall forever be a public park, and shall forever be free to access.  The Bernhiem foundation does receive some state tax funds indirectly via state agriculture education subsidies, as it's the primary location for aborists to study in Kentucky.  True to their word, all of the forest is hike accessible during daylight summer hours; but there are portions that are so difficult to access, no one besides the arborists are known to have ventured there in years.

My point is this, we can and often do these very public things privately today.  Whether or not these privately owned public spaces accept public funds today or not, they aren't dependent on the support, or likley even the existance, of the state.

Like Los Vegas? Nah, they don't really need drinking water that bad.

Who cares?  How do you think the salt flats got that way to begin with?  It was once much like the Dead Sea.

You're talking about tidal power generation, I'm not here.  Still, tidal generation is an excellent example of what I'm talking about.  The few naturally occurring ideal places to put a tidal generator are all owned by people who don't want you to touch their ocean view.  They don't want you blocking their yachts from entering or exiting the bay either.  And the environmentalists don't want you to alter the shape of other coastlines, even if the benefits could possiblely outweight the massive costs of construction work on any foreseeable timescale.

What I was taliking about was literally a controlled drain of the PAcific Ocean into the saltflats.  No dependency on weather patterns or the orbit of the moon.  24/7 power generation so long as the output water was at or lower than the average evaporation rate of Death VAlley, which is considerable.  Power forever, literally, so long as the pipes and gensets are maintained; in the same sense that most hydroelectric plants are power forever, so long as they are not damaged and the run of the river remains the same.  Difference only in which direction is the source and sink.  Again, it will never happen.  NIMBY all but garrantees that large scale geoengineering projects are imposssible, no matter the cost/benefit analysis of it all.

That's not capitalism.  That's communism.

And around and around we go, where we stop, nobody knows.

REally?  So what you're saying is this; even if crumbs had not long ago earned his treatment, we should prevent that which comes around from going around because you somehow are innocent, and must deserve to be protected from offense?  Did I get that part right?

I'm just saying, the reputation of she who is offeneded is at least as important as the offenseive material itself; particularly when she isn't the intended target.

This is a rediculous idea.  Again, nuclear power industry accidents across all of the history of the world do not exceed the amount of radioactive material that is launched into the atmostphere by the worlds coal plants in a single year, and we have been burning coal for almost 200 years, and seriously powering industry with it for over 100 years.  Modern nuke plants don't really 'blow', and even if 100 of them had leakage accidents similar to what happened in Japan (very, very unlikely) we still wouldn't exceed what humanity has already dosed our environment with over the past 100+ years.  That plant had a quadruple redundant emergency cooling system, which we now know isn't quite good enough for a 1:10K year tsumami wave.  It's certainly more than enough for a global economic breakdown, since the idea is to give the enginneers time to put the reactor and hot fuel rods into a longer term stable state.  For some designs (undamaged) this simply involves lowering a neutron shield that waits inside the reactor, and the heat level will slowly reduce to the point that additional water supply is no longer pressing.  For some designs this actually requires that some (all?) of the hot fuel be removed by very well trained operators and placed into open storage pools, with or without neutron shielding between the rods.  Most of the open storage pools are not designed to collect rainwater for level maintaince, but do you really think that should it become obvious, the engineers can't arrange such things for most or all of the power plants?

Furthermore, not all radiation, or radioactive materials, are equal risks.  There is a persistant background radiation in our lives that is completely natural, and it's certainly higher than a layman would assume.  All concrete is mildly radioactive for the same reason that all coal is mildly radioactive, because all rocks contain some trace amount of thorium.  It's just that common.

Recent post by Dmitry Orlov, highly relevent to this thread.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2013/06/life-outside-mental-comfort-zone.html#more

EDIT:  A quote highly relevent to those who engage in this thread, perhaps myself included...

"the brain of the body politic seems to have had its corpus callosum severed (that's the crossbar switch between the two hemispheres of the brain that allows them to act as a unit). Each side thinks that it represents the whole even as the two sides have all but lost the ability to communicate with each other"

And chickens.  Corn makes for a fine chicken dinner after about four months.

I suppose that it really matter what one means by "collapse".  I'm of the opinion that markets can't collapse by their nature, they either grow or decline, but never cease.  Even the classic 'buggy whip' market never completely died after the invention of the "horseless carriage", as there are still niche markets such as hobby mini-horse carriage racing and the Amish/Anabaptists that require them for practical transportation.  The survivability of markets notwithstanding, your own personal economy could very well 'collapse' if one is not careful.  And there is some risk that it could collapse even if one is careful.  When the bovine fecal matter finally makes contact with the rotary cooling device, I doubt anyone west of The Hamptons is going to completely avoid it.

Another solution would be to build huge culverts to funnel the Pacific Ocean from San Diego to the Salt Flats, which happens to be about 200' below sea level and was an inland sea itself that finally dried up a few thousand years ago.  A few water turbines near the Salt Flats, and with the evaporation rate of the area, easily 100 Megawatts or more for as long as we like.  More, if we decide that an inland sea would be a good thing to have there.  It would alter the immediate environment, increasing humidity, cloud cover, and rainfall for several hundred miles around.

Not that the NIMBY crowd would let something like that happen either.

Wow. You're response is to cite a theoretical method, and present it as a near term viable solution.  Solar antennas might one day power nanites, but even then the tech might be a bit out of reach.


You're dreaming.  TAbletop fusion is closer to a productive stage than solar antenna tech.

Mmmm, Soylent Green....

That thought is like opening up a fortune cookie after a great meal, and all it says is "That wasn't chicken".

I wholely reject your absurd distortion of the terms in use. 

But even then, I can lay one down for you...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

Yes they were a matrilineal society (and a matriarchial one, IMHO) and yes they did trade internally and externally.

They were stateless, both by the true defintion of the term, and your's as well.

So this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

And this http://mises.org/daily/1121

Or this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_anarchism#Religious_Jewish_anarchism

or this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture#Culture_and_trade

Are not both capitalisitic and stateless socieites?  A note on that last one, since it's not widely known.  Not much is known about the Hallstatt culture, mostly due to the combined effects there being now known written language associated with the culture and that history, while not really written by them, is heavily edited by the victors.  The Hallstatt were not victors.  But two thinkgs are known to be hard facts about the Hallstatt culture, 1) they honored no rulers and thus were leaderless, and during the age that also made them stateless by the dominat definition (they respected no king, paid no taxes and fought no wars) and 2) they traded with their neighbors, particularly mined salt.

You would win that bet, I'm sure.

Fair enough.  Your thread is your thread.  Work it out between yourselves, or not as you may prefer.  Again, I'm no one's counselor. 

I did so deliberately, because any lying or defamation is generally irrelevant to my point here.  I know about your reputation, and it's as good as anyone else's.  That said, I've personally been burned by several former forum members who spent a great deal of time building up said reputations.  I'm not saying that you're one of those people, I honestly don't know.  But nor does it matter, because I've learned the hard way that trust should be hard earned when money is involved. 

BTW, I (we) don't get all the trolls mostly because what you might consider trolling, I might consider to be just an angry customer, or a joke, or just an artist.  Just because it's at your expense, doesn't mean that it's trolling.  To get deleted, it generally has to be offensive to many (if not most) people, and lack any redeeming value such as entertainment value or a rational dissenting opinion; which is why I've never deleted any of your posts TECSHARE, despite the fact that your username ends up running across the reporting system more than most.   I'm not here to keep the peace, and I'm no one's counselor.

Oh, don't get me wrong.  They can be made elsewhere, just not in any volume, nor at any price, that works economicly.  There are also other techniques, but they are more expensive, too bulky or otherwise have some other downside to their employment.  Which is why we use photovoltics as the most common method of solar power, it's the best choice among known techniques.  Solar power will come when it's economicly competitive, but for many reasons (including resource availability) it's not possible to do more than about 4% of the US total grid in solar.  In most counties, the 'net metering' laws that exist to favor the small, home solar installation are void if more than 1% of productive capacity is solar; because beyond that point the negative effects of distributed and unreliable power sources upon the grid become too large for the power company to ignore.  They would either have to have control of those power sources, able to disconnect them; or at least be able to highly predict their total output capacity at least an hour in advance.  Look up the term 'spinning reserve' with regard to grid power systems, and you might understand the problem with unpredictable renewable power to the power company.

They have been rediscovered.  Sepp Holzer, from Austria, is generally considered the single most influential person in the modern permaculture movement.  And he didn't think of the idea, he's just a very talented farmer who's family ranch is above 1500 meters above sea level.  He either had to figure it all out, or his family farm would fail.  He has literally proven several agriculture 'facts' to be false; such as it's impossible to grow fruit trees above 1000 meters above sea level.  It only takes one example to disprove such things, while Sepp has literally grown hundreds of fruit trees to fruiting above 1500 meters, of many different species and varieties.

His family farm didn't fail.