There is nothing more evil in this world than solar panels. Do you know why that is? It's because oil does two or even three trillion in global revenues annually. That's why.

The US is absolutely dependent upon oil not for transportation but for the foundation of its economy and military power which go hand-in-hand:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/u169xi/if_the_us_dollar_is_no_longer_the_currency_which/

The powers that be in the US would have you believe that solar panels are made from the unborn fetuses of sex trafficked slaves. . . no --it's worse than that-- they're made of murdered puppies tied up in bags and drowned in a river. Solar panels are made of children's tears. Solar panels hate Santa Claus. The real cause of Covid is solar panels. Solar panels murder sea otters for fun and beat baby snow seals with clubs. Solar panels said your mama's ass is fat. Solar panels eat all the cookies and leave none for anybody else. Goddam those fucking solar panels. There is nothing as evil as a solar panel!

Keep your eye on the ball here --solar power is uniquely evil. The manipulation is so plain. Apple products? Oh, we wouldn't want to hurt the tech market with tariffs. Solar though? Oh fuck yeah. Democrats and Republicans alike will slap them with tariffs in a heartbeat and tell you that they're made from the kidneys of sex trafficked children etc.

How does this insanity persist? Easy --follow the money. The US is third place after Saudi Arabia and Russia in the list of the world's oil producers. The US military is entirely dependent on oil. The name of the game is oil, oil, oil. Did I mention oil?

The world consumes 88 million barrels of oil per day. Poof! Its goes up in smoke literally and then tomorrow you burn another 88 million barrels. That's about seven billion dollars per day every freakin' day --two, three trillion a year just in revenues at the pump. Global semiconductor revenues are not even 600 billion which is less revenue than insurance. Tech is just a game compared to the oil money.

The only things that can compare to oil in terms of revenue and value are real estate, finance and banking. Tech is a bit player in the global economy but it's sexy so it's in the news all the time. The only time the knives come out is for anything that threatens oil.

Here is what all these synthetic protein stories miss though: this was done long ago and shot down by the retailers. The retailers won't carry these products unless they are priced at a level that keeps them more expensive than conventional alternatives.

These alternatives can be sold on the shelves of existing retailers, but they can't be sold at a price that will hurt the sales of existing meat and dairy. Now that might sound like some kind of wild conspiracy theory if it weren't for the fact that we can point to technology very similar to that mentioned in this piece that was tried long ago and pushed out by the retailers. It was originally developed in the 1960s. It was also based on a methane gas feedstock using fungus to produce protein. The product was generically called mycoprotein:

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

And it was brought to market in the UK under the brand name Quorn starting in the 1980s after the government funded technology was transferred to a private company:

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

But the part that they leave out of the Wikipedia article is why this product was over-priced. The company failed once already because their sales were so poor and this was due to the high price. The high price was not because of the manufacturing cost, it was because the retailers refused to carry a product that would cannibalize their meat, dairy and egg sales. They would only carry it if it was expensive and in that case everyone would win --except the customers. The customers are what's really for dinner in the eye of the retailer and you can't change that and simultaneously allow the retailers to be in the driver's seat. If you think someone is prepared to take the retailers out of the driver's seat. I'd like to know their name.

I think in the US, Bernie Sanders might have been such a guy but we saw what happened to him. Just like cheap protein alternatives, politicians like Bernie Sanders are not allowed by the guys who are in control and those are the billionaires who own the retail shops you buy stuff at. They're the real enemy and unfortunately they are also your boss. What you gonna do about it? I think the answer is you're gonna pay whatever they tell you to pay and that means you're not going to see the drama that the guy who wrote this piece is predicting. Look to the past to see the future.

In fact, I've discussed this with the Planning Department in San Diego and they were very excited about the idea and offered to work with me on the permits if I was serious about installing the equipment. So, that's a bit of a real-world counterpoint to the California hate. I think California is overly regulated on many fronts but if you actually sit down with the regulators they're not necessarily your enemy.

For most of California, though, desalination is the way to go. It's only in the far eastern deserts that an alternative could gain a foothold and with tariffs on solar nothing based on renewable energy is going to happen in any case.

If the power is from a renewable resources such as solar, then what's the problem? Obviously the costs are a huge challenge, but if someone wanted to invest in such a system then why would it be immoral or make them a "weirdo" to do so? That's a strong value judgement with little justification.

You use the term "drawing" huge amounts of power as if it has to be extracted from somebody else as if they were vampires sucking the blood of their neighbors. If the power is from the sun, why should it be anybody's concern?

Well that last part is a bit hasty. I would agree that phase change systems are already well explored and it is true that high humidity (and temperatures) make dehumidification much more efficient. But it is also true that dehumidifiers in fact do work and can extact moisure from the air in significant quantities.

The scammy stuff in my opinion are the ones that claim to work with no energy input or passive water collectors. Those are gimmicks that only work in ideal circumstances and produce very little moisture and still require significant maintenance.

On the other hand, powering heavy duty compressors with renewable energy is a very different story. In this case, there is no question that the technology is effective and very real in the here and now. The catch in this latter case is the cost and that would include things like, for instance, tariffs that artificially increase those costs. I would say there is a big leap from something being too expensive in the current market snapshot to "This is not a viable solution and will never be." That's too big of a jump.

Moreover, a dehumidifier isn't engineered for maximzing water production, it is engineered to reduce humidity and it happens to create water as a waste product in this process. Simply looking at a compressor powered dehumidifier and saying that it is impractical for producing water at a large scale is a small-minded way of looking at the situation. That device is not intended for water production, it merely suggests an interesting possiblity.

With a large compressor and a very large condensor array coupled with dessicants there is no question that water can be extracted from desert air much like the scenario shown in in the Star Wars movies on the planet Tatooine. Making such systems affordable is a serious challenge but writing it off as completely impractical is going too far. Anyone with a dehumidifier can see that it's possible.

There are dozens of alternatives. The skyhook is a cool concept but you also can have a "virtual" space elevator which is simply a beam of concentrated energy such as laser or microwave beam that a vehicle "climbs" by utilizing the energy in the beam. In this case the elevator is not a physical cable but a beam of energy.

This virtual space elevator concept happens to be a perfect fit for beamed energy from geosynchronous orbit which, in turn, would be much easier to put in place from a lunar base than to launch from the Earth. So you start with a lunar base, make a beamed energy station in GEO from orbiting slabs of lunar bedrock and then you have your virtual space elevator at the same time.

There are other approaches as well and they can all be mixed together. It's beyond doubt that going into orbit will be as common as crossing the ocean in a jetliner today. It will be something that ordinary people will do on vacation just as they might fly from the US to Europe today. When you think about it, crossing an ocean is an astounding thing to do but it's no big deal and going into orbit or the moon and beyond will be the same in time. Like everybody else, I wish that time was a little bit closer than it seems to be though.

You can go straight to the source and read academic journals directly. It's great for your vocabulary and you get a sense of what is really going on. While many journals are paywalled, there are plenty with open access policies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-access_journals

Here is another collection:

Directory of Open Access Journals sorted by Science topics in English only

And yes, in many cases they are illustrated.

I don't get the hate. You can talk about trains all you like but the US is already committed to a suburban layout and this didn't just happen with cars. It was already the case in the era of horses that people would live outside of town and only come into the city to shop periodically. This trend towards suburbs is not recent and impossible to unwind. People who grew up in the suburbs and moved to the city love to whine about it but the burbs aren't going away any time soon. If you live downtown, take the subway by all means but it won't work for suburbs where large portions of the population live.

Electrifying roads is the most sensible thing in the world. There are all these comments saying that it is an "old idea" as if this somehow demonstrates that it is flawed. Battery powered vehicles is also an old idea. Solar panels were invented in the 1950s --so what? Being an idea that has been in circulation for some time doesn't imply anything about its practicality.

Charging in motion with inductive chargers is a great idea that is a perfect match with electric vehicles and it is pretty much inevitable that we'll end up with both widespread electric vehicles and wireless charging roadways because both those idea make perfect sense.

Yeah, gee, how in the world would we ever find a way to generate more power? I mean it's not like we could just have the Commerce Department lift the tariffs on solar panels or anything extreme like that. Seems that there is no reasonable solution.

I have zero experience or inside knowledge on this but I would guess that you've answered your own question basically which is that the whole thing is too dynamic for a solution like that to work. Pantograph wires are fine for light rail mass transit where the route never changes but an open pit mine is almost certainly changing constantly. Think of it as a landfill in reverse. This idea clearly would not work in a landfill. A mine is the opposite case.

Yeah, that's right, it's a tool. The tools that are collectively referred to as "AI" are useful and can be used to create some very magical illusions and even achieve some practical goals but so can a water pump or a tank of compressed air. We don't pretend that a water pump is a living creature despite the fact that it can produce effects that mimic the human heart.

I was walking in the hills one day and I kept thinking I was hearing some wild animal hissing at me and it was freaking me out. But after a while, I realized it was a water pipe along the side of the road that had been punctured in places which were making the hissing noises. It's easy to fool people into thinking that inanimate tools are alive because our imaginations are quite active and we're easily misled into thinking that there is an "intelligence" behind phenomena which are strictly mechanical. This is doubly true when someone is trying to convince you that what you're seeing is the result of magic.

This is often discussed in the literature of the colonial era. It was not uncommon for European colonists to terrorize the people with gimmicks designed to trick the local inhabitants into believing they had super powers using simple steam engines, winches, pulleys and other mechanical devices or chemical tricks like fireworks to create magic demons that only they could control. The character Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness was one example but there are many instances describing this practice repeated over and over because it was a common ploy centuries ago that is too tempting to let go of. Tell the gullible, naive onlookers that you possess magical powers and they will bow down. The tech aristocracy is trying to use this same strategy to keep the peasants invested in their magical AI powers in a time when they know quite clearly that the well is running dry.

As if generalized AI and "Super-intelligent AI" were just around the corner. I have bad news for the author, CMOS computer hardware is reaching its ultimate limits at a time when so-called AI is still merely a joke.

The ability to rapidly scan a database of pre-formatted license plates is not the same thing as super-intelligence. Fast processing of simple information has long been an impressive function of electronic computers even back in the analog days and it's part of how they captured the public imagination early on. So adding and subtracting lists of numbers is something that computers can do much faster than a person can. That's not intelligence though. The word "intelligent" itself is fraught with inconsistencies and assumptions.

Facial imaging processing is hyped up as if machines are becoming "aware" of people but this is still just database tricks and it still fails much of the time. The major reason that facial recognition is so dangerous is that false positives happen endlessly. There is no intelligence in such technologies, just tricks that mostly don't work but easily fool gullible audiences when demonstrated in controlled circumstances.

Computers are cool, I'm a geek myself and I use programs like Blender that can do amazing physics simulations which really are jaw-dropping and make for seductive eye candy. Neural networks can do some crazy cool stuff and electronic music was taking the art world in new directions since distortion and synthesizers were first developed. But none of that is intelligence, they're cool tools enabling new experiences and the results are exciting and fun but they're still merely illusions.

Hmm, I wonder how much time you spend in Taiwan to say such a thing. For those of us who were here in the 90s when the Mainlanders were lobbing missiles over Taipei, that is an oddly ignorant statement to make. If we go back decade-by-decade we learn that the Chinese have been actively bombing islands claimed by Taiwan ever since WWII ended and only stopped temporarily when threatened with nuclear annihilation.

No, the CCP has never been "fine" with Taiwan's existence. The hostility towards Tsai is mostly just down to chauvinistic bigotry. Anger about a woman in power or anything that has to do with Taiwan's politics has nothing to do with the aggression. The reason for focusing on Taiwan is completely domestic to China. The leadership in China fears its own population and needs to manufacture an external threat to justify its existence. This has nothing to do with Taiwan's politics and everything to do with the internal power struggles of the CCP which is increasingly doubling down on bad bets.

In 1979 a Toyota Celica base model was $3000 new. In that year, a Chevy Impala was going for about twice that retail.

If we are looking to the 70s Japanese invasion as the model then these cars had better be top-notch quality at about half the price. Otherwise, this has nothing to do with what happened in the 70s with Japan.