Posted on 04/15/2017 7:53:10 AM PDT by Enchante
I don't care what pushes my transportation down the road as long as it is dirt cheap and available. Petroleum, wind as in a sail, an electric motor, etc.
Nuclear is our future. And a serious upgrade to the power grid will be necessary to transport all of that “clean” power from the nuke plant to our homes and the gas/charging station.
Also, it is too bad that we still use steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. It is too bad that there isn't a process for moving electrons directly from a power source. Maybe a photocell tuned to the wavelength of energy produced from a nuclear fusion process which is probably the visible spectrum or infrared to ultraviolet— well, the spectrum of the sun. Your standard photocell is not that efficient. But it might be (or will be) as efficient or more efficient than a steam conversion process.
And few people, especially middle class voters know that they are being sold snake oil. It is up to us to educate them.
“Predatory capitalism — RE: Microsoft.”
Eh, seems more like opportunistic capitalism, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It was unfortunate they experienced no real competition for years - it would be good to see some true competition for the desktop/workstation. Steve Jobs gave them a run for their money. Even so, yes, they revolutionized our daily lives, mostly for the good.
Re: that ever-elusive thing called “balance”, the best line I ever heard about that was from, of all people, John Mellencamp:
“I know there’s a balance - I see it when I swing past”
But, as they say, it is what is it... and here we are today.
Competition is always a good idea — agreed.
Apple did offer competition but their systems were closed and ironically throttled competition. No doubt, Apple was (and is) very innovative but they hurt themselves by wanting to control their platform.
I believe that if Apple had controlled the PC market, it would not have flourished like it did and our modern world would be completely different.
I equate the early wintel PC to Ford's Model T. Dirt cheap and prolific and completely open. It drove our whole economy in ways that we will never know and provided millions of jobs and trillions dollars. It drove my old company, a major computer company, out of business. It was interesting to watch it happen from the inside and me knowing the benefits of the PC.
Just about everything in our modern lives can be traced to the origins of the PC and the industry that it created.
A workforce that is raised in American Public schools will have none of those qualities. The purpose of Education is to create dependent interchangeable work units for an industrial order controlled by central bureaucrats that was the current order n the Soviet Union 50 years ago.
Connecting two points made in the article that the author doesn't connect- artificial beef leading to 30% less agricultural area being used and exponential growth in solar energy. It seems the future of our open spaces is to be to curtail human access in favor of blanketing them with solar collectors and bird destroying light concentrators-mirrors and lenses.
That “educated work force” in America depends on the replacement of the Public Schools altogether and the elimination of Federal involvement in education.
Globalist Free Traitors™ are de industrializing the USA making money at it while the USA becomes a weaker service based economy.
Thorium reactors. They are relatively cheap, much safer, and can be miniaturized so that it is practical for a very large building to draw all its power from one in the basement.
“Technology requires an educated work force, a work force that is literate and informed and which will fight against tyranny rather than succomb to “1984” slogans and newspeak.”
That’s quite an optimistic assessment given the ubiquitous leftist bent of high tech companies and areas. While most engineers are inherently conservative, the majority of younger people do not possess even a basic understanding of science, economics, or history.
1984 may have been off as few decades, but it has been shown to be more prescient than any of Orwell’s peers would have believed. I vacillate between the promise of opportunity and complete despair at our human nature.
I got to bring one of the first IBM “micro-pc’s” home for one of the first teleworking experiences. Thing weighed about 300 lbs, I nearly killed myself trying to drag it up a flight of stairs. Little tiny amber screen, about 6x8 inches, and the screen reloaded at 512k line by painstaking line. What we have now on a smartphone is amazing.
Computers have been my living all of my adult life from data entry to becoming a SQL DBA, so I am certainly thankful for computers!
Why aren’t they pushing this instead of wind and solar.
Clearly or maybe not the fewer humans on the planet the better. Or at least that is what they believe.
I wish they were mainstreamed, then.
I worked on a data storage cabinet that was 7ft tall by 4ft wide by 4 ft deep and, when fully loaded, had a capacity of 8GB. 8GB! — a modern $10 thumb drive holds than that. No doubt that there was technological evolution in process.
Exciting times... that we live in. :)
Later
Isaac Asimov would agree with you and say it could lead to possible civilizations collapse.
One of my past professors mentioned using equipment like that when he was starting out with Coopers & Lybrand, circa 1981. As the junior man on his audit team, HE naturally was tasked with carrying them to the job site...and remembered all too well how heavy they were.
It is too bad that there isn’t a process for moving electrons directly from a power source.
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Yes this is somewhere out there. it is also one of things that will just collapse the cost of energy.
Who knows where when and how it will happen. I keep hearing it most often though in reference to fusion power.
Solar will easily surpass nuclear.
.......
Agree for now. Solar already has surpassed the 50 year old nuclear reactors.
imho both solar and nuclear should get plenty of R&D funding.
I think that 4th generation nuclear however can get costs eventually much lower than solar but for the next 7 years or so solar will be ahead and getting lower faster than nuclear.
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