The end is near

[wdmw]

I agree that these guys don't have a shot in hell.  That's why I've abstained from the last few elections.

You always have a responsibility to vote! Even here in Canada prominent community leaders take your attitude and it is sad.

Not voting is called voter apathy and says I'm happy with the status quo. You have a responsibility to spoil your vote.

In apartheid South Africa where the election districts were rigged whites were told by the passive liberal educators to spoil there vote as a form of protest. It wasn't untilled the apartheid government had overwhelming spoil voters did they hold a referendum, to compromise on principles and negotiate with terrorists.  

Not voting is not saying you are happy with the status quo.  Quite the opposite, it's a refusal to give your consent.

[1714972831]

1714972831

[Zarathustra]

...
You are a dreamer. This is science fiction, written by austrian aristocrats. I know these theories very well, and in my former life I was an Austrian as well, until I realised that it is ahistoric science fiction. Real stateless communities in the rain forests 'produce' about the same amount as they did 10'000 years ago. Governed, collectivist societies produce about hundred fold the amount which was generated only 100 years ago. That's the difference, which the dreamers suppress.

The trouble is they also waste 99 times the amount. Mostly its to support a system that's become the victim of it's own success and had to invent new ways of wasting time and energy just to create employment. We're only in the equivalent of the steam age of robotics and automation, that productivity's going to go up another hundred fold and it will probably take less than 100 years. By that time the current system will be broken beyond repair, bureaucracy's already reached the point where its having to oppose and contradict its self to keep growing. God only knows what can replace it though, it's nice to think we can all be happy and free and hug trees all day but some greedy bastard will just end up with a monopoly on trees.

It will end as all civilised societies ended: with a collapse. I call it Tainter's Law. It ends by the diminishing return on additional investment in additional complexity. The difference to earlier collapses is the fact, that today 500 nuclear reactors will blow its nuclear inventory around the northern part of the planet as soon as nobody will cool them anymore.

[deadweasel]

Not voting is not saying you are happy with the status quo.  Quite the opposite, it's a refusal to give your consent.

IMO a spoiled vote does that more effectively.

The system has to die to be reborn.  It's doing that now.  Vote, don't vote, no matter.

[MoonShadow]

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"

[MoonShadow]

It will end as all civilised societies ended: with a collapse. I call it Tainter's Law. It ends by the diminishing return on additional investment in additional complexity. The difference to earlier collapses is the fact, that today 500 nuclear reactors will blow its nuclear inventory around the northern part of the planet as soon as nobody will cool them anymore.

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.

[justusranvier]

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?

In the longer term we've got to stop encasing the fuel and fission products inside a flammable metal (zirconium) and surrounding them with a ready source of hydrogen (water). Commercial reactors and the waste they produce really are a disaster waiting to happen.

Switch to a liquid fuel design using stable fluoride salts as a medium and you get fuel and waste that requires higher temperatures than decay heat can produce to stay in liquid form. In the event of an accident the entire mass cools and freezes into an inert solid instead of catching on fire.

[RodeoX]

We seem to have a problem deciding on how it will happen. But at least we can all agree that we have hopelessly screwed up the world. 

[Anenome5]

My mom cursed me out for saying this, but my opinion is capitalism sucks a big one.

Nah, you're wrong on that score. Your mistake is to think that what you're seeing in the US is capitalism / a free market. It's not. You're seeing crony capitalism, ie: business allied with lawmakers for their own advantage. And yeah, it sucks, but don't blame capitalism, if anything blame government collusion with business. If you removed government there could be no cronyism, thus it's government, not capitalism, at fault here.

I don't think socialism is the way to go, but maybe it is best in a world where we are all lazy asses who like robots to do things for us.

Any such prosperity will be produced by a free market, not socialism.

[Anenome5]

For that matter, one solution is to build caissons on the ocean floor and use power during the day to pump water out and air in to these giant caissons. When you later need that power back out, you start letting water in which pumps air out at very high pressure, driving a generator. Voila, constant power as needed.

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.

Yeah, that's the main issue there. You can also do that with large bays that have a narrow inlet.

[Anenome5]

You have a strange conception of the state's role in production.

To be more exact, you're conflating property and rights protection (law and police) and dispute resolution (courts) with the state.

But you don't need the state to provide any of those things. Law can be crowd-source or agreement based, ie: polycentric-law. No societal entity needs to have a monopoly on law production, that's just the way things have been largely until now. There's no reason for it to stay that way, and an alternative may (and probably will) be far better.

Similarly, courts and police can be privately provided on the market and due to changed incentives of the market will probably be far better.

Stateless communities often also had no rights protection, law, or courts. But it's possible to create not a state nor a stateless community, but rather the ideal is a self-governed community, and by that I mean one where each individual rules himself and himself alone. Not a community which uses a collective body to govern the whole--no, I mean a community where each individual has sovereign control of himself and no one else. A truly individualist society. This has never existed because we never had the ideas explicit to try it until modern time.

You are a dreamer. This is science fiction, written by austrian aristocrats. I know these theories very well, and in my former life I was an Austrian as well, until I realised that it is ahistoric science fiction. Real stateless communities in the rain forests 'produce' about the same amount as they did 10'000 years ago.[/quote]
They don't have advanced specialization or any concept of capital investment. Of course they produce little to nothing. What relevance does that have, at all, to what I'm talking about here. Correlation is not causation. I'm not talking about a stateless society, I'm talking about a society where every-person is their own state, their own sovereign. It's a subtle difference but try to catch the rub. Stateless clans in rainforests typically operate in a form of savage socialism--not extreme political individualism such as I suggest. They are virtually opposite situations.

Governed, collectivist societies produce about hundred fold the amount which was generated only 100 years ago.

No, we've had governed, collectivist societies for literally thousands of years and they never produced what we have now. It was economic individualism that produced the modern world, not government action on society as you seem to suggest. Name a place more governed than ancient Egypt or China--these places didn't produce highly.

That's the difference, which the dreamers suppress.

Deny is a better term. I don't think you know your economic history.

As I explained in another thread already: Any society is by definition collectivist.

That's far too general a statement. A society is collectivist when it holds that the group must be put before the individual. A society is individualist when it holds that the individual's rights can stand against group desires.

A society is either or, it is not innately either. Rights protections are innately individualist, for instance.

The opposite of society and collectivism is the self-sufficient community.

False. You've stated one of the common misconceptions about anarchy. Anarchy is not against cooperation, it is against compulsory cooperation. Thus anarchy is not against division of labor and cooperation in terms of companies, it's against being forced to work with X and the like.

The rest of your quote is useless to respond to since it's predicated on this misunderstanding, so I'll ignore it.

[MoonShadow]

For that matter, one solution is to build caissons on the ocean floor and use power during the day to pump water out and air in to these giant caissons. When you later need that power back out, you start letting water in which pumps air out at very high pressure, driving a generator. Voila, constant power as needed.

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.

Yeah, that's the main issue there. You can also do that with large bays that have a narrow inlet.

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.

[notme]

For that matter, one solution is to build caissons on the ocean floor and use power during the day to pump water out and air in to these giant caissons. When you later need that power back out, you start letting water in which pumps air out at very high pressure, driving a generator. Voila, constant power as needed.

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.

Yeah, that's the main issue there. You can also do that with large bays that have a narrow inlet.

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.

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

[firefop]

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

This has now become an interesting conversation!

What about making a huge direct solar desalination plant at the output of the drainage - Then we don't mess with the humidity of the region or effect weather at all... and could pipe clean water somewhere...

[MoonShadow]

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

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

[MoonShadow]

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

This has now become an interesting conversation!

What about making a huge direct solar desalination plant at the output of the drainage - Then we don't mess with the humidity of the region or effect weather at all... and could pipe clean water somewhere...

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

[justusranvier]

This has now become an interesting conversation!

Not really.

All of that infrastructure and land for a measly 200 MW is insane. Even if it was 2 GW that would hardly be worth the effort.

[Adrian-x]

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

Don't be so pessimistic, this is a good idea.

The real answer is we won't put it back, instead we'll collect it sell it on an exchange, create demand by promoting consumption and call it money. We can start a forum called sodiumtalk.org and blog about how it is the future of money.

[MoonShadow]

This has now become an interesting conversation!

Not really.

All of that infrastructure and land for a measly 200 MW is insane. Even if it was 2 GW that would hardly be worth the effort.

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.

[MoonShadow]

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

Don't be so pessimistic, this is a good idea.

The real answer is we won't put it back, instead we'll collect it sell it on an exchange, create demand by promoting consumption and call it money. We can start a forum called sodiumtalk.org and blog about how it is the future of money.

And the past of money.  There is a reason we have the term, "not worth his salt".

[Adrian-x]

And the past of money.  There is a reason we have the term, "not worth his salt".

Salary is derived from earning salt, it was good money then and will be again. Money 0.7.9