View 778 Sunday, June 16, 2013

Rumors abound as to how we will be involved in our new little war in Syria. We are about to subsidize al Qaeda, against whom we are in a formal war if we assume that our War on Terror has an actual opponent to be at war with, against the government of Syria which as the support of Hezbollah and Russia. I don’t know how this ends, but it is easy to predict some results: things will go badly for someone. There will be civilian casualties with a teddy bear involved. The US will be blamed for it. Eventually someone will win. If they don’t hate us, there will be a subsidized terror program designed to install a government that does hate us.

Our enemies are shooting at each other.

Jerry-

Has it been considered that the Sunni Shiite conflict has been suppressed since colonial times? And that our enemies are basically shooting at each other?

Could Obama be trying to balance the sides and keep the young men fighting each other and wasting energy and hate on each other. Last face off was Iran/Iraq war 1980-1988. I was in high school (and hence oblivious), but I don’t recall that being a time when we were concerned about terrorism. Facing down Russia, yes.

The strategy has been used, and filed in the back of my head is the notion that it is unpredictable and risky. But could it be the strategy? Could it be Putin’s strategy to encourage their Muslim minorities to send off the young hotheads to . . . I confess the temptation to insert something about David and Goliath and blood in the sands and I really must stop.

But, freely quoted "I will have more freedom of action after I am re-elected." And on Fox News Sunday Britt Hume noted that Whitehouse strategy for presidential exposure seems to have changed in the last few weeks. NSA basically sent out the press secretary to the Sunday shows. Hmm. . .

David Schierholz

Playing balance of power games, subsidizing one enemy to fight another, is a game of high risk and high skill.

Roberta doesn’t compact her Outlook.pst file often and the result is that today we got the dreaded corrupt pst message instructing us to run scanpst. That works – it’s running now and I assume it will run to completion and all will be well since it always has worked for me – but first you have to get it working. Windows and Outlook between work to make that difficult. First off, although the error message tells you to run scanpst.exe, you will not easily find scanpst on your Windows machine. The new and improved Windows search program sucks dead bunnies through a straw. Roberta’s computer had never heard of scanpst and told me to go away. Microsoft Help was as helpful as usual, which is not very. Since Roberta’s system was installed with everything using the default places you’d think this would be easy, but the Microsoft Find can’t find many program files. It doesn’t think it should let you know they exist.

Eventually I figured out where scanpst resides, which is in the same place the outlook startup file resides, hidden away in a deep drill; once you find the scanpst file you can click on it to open it, and browse for the outlook.pst file it needs to scan. Good luck on that one. It’s buried deep in the users area. Fortunately the actual path is given in the error message that sent you doing this task, so if you kept it alive can find where the pst file is hidden; if you didn’t you can try to start Outlook again, which will produce the error message again. This time keep it. Now start scanpst.exe again because the program can’t work if any part of outlook is open. Now browse down and down and down until you find the outlool.pst file, and Bob’s your uncle.

The default place for scanpst.exe is in program files (or program files x86 on a 64 bit machine) Microsoft Office/Office 12/ for Office 7. There are other folders for other versions of Office. Whoever thought up the Microsoft default folder scheme must have had access to controlled substances and a wicked sense of humor.

When Work Disappears – Excellent essay and comments

Dear Jerry,

Megan McArdle had an excellent essay Friday on the point that you have been making for decades: What happens when work opportunities disappear for those who most struggle to be employed?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/14/when-work-disappears.html

Jim Ransom

Good essay. Recommended.  Thanks.

The free trade people, the comprehensive immigration reform people, the unions, the ruling cless and all its branches, and almost everyone else have been talking past each other on these points for years to no effect.

One would presume that “social scientists” would at some point see that as Moore’s Law continues the need for low skill work other than personal service vanishes into automation, and that a “Better Safety Net” translates into a large part of the population living off the dole and enjoying television. I believe back when historians studies history they called I Bread and Circuses, perhaps spiced with subsidized drugs. A nation with a large voting bloc that knows it does no useful work – I vote the X Party for a living – often develops undesirable character traits. We have known this for a long time, but it is now not politically correct to say so.

And we are still discovering what is in the Affordable Health Act, which turns out to be incentive to eliminate much of the health care that is already afforded.

We live in interesting times. And we have yet to discover what else is in the Act that we had to pass so that would could find out what’s in it. Sometimes I think they put things in the DC water supply several years ago and are now getting around to doping the water in Fairfax County.

View 777 Saturday, June 15, 2013

Russell Seitz has been thinking again:

THE END OF OBSCURITY

Dear Jerry :

As we have both experienced the often-frustrating reality of ‘original archival research’ in the great libraries of the world, I want to report that change is in the dusty air. It used to be the case that the more distant events were in time, the less the likelihood of retrieving novel information about them. The problem was not the lack of ancient records, but their sheer abundance.

There is nothing novel about the latest NSA privacy scandal- the tendency of state bureaucracies and courts to gather and hoard information about citizens is as old as time, and it is from the court’s own realization of the horrors of information retrieval in bottomless archival pits that modern statutes of limitation have arisen.

The consequence of manuscript hoarding was to sink most of the historical record in oceans of trivia deep enough to drown all but the most persevering scholars. You could easily spent a month in the archives or the stacks retrieving just one new kilobyte to add to the sum of history, and far more of that time would be spent flipping through thousands of cards in a paper catalogue than reading the few documents you elected to retrieve.

Nowhere was this problem more evident than in the dozens of Staatsbibliotek holding the gathered sum of paper once held in the archives of the 300-odd principalities and city-states that preceded the unification of Germany under Bismarck. This archival opacity did not pass un-noticed, and a few decades ago many foundations, like Volkswagen, committed future cash flows to synoptic efforts to map both archives and archaeology with equally Teutonic thoroughness. In short, they decided to upload the middle Ages,

But as the foundation subsidized scanning began, something unexpected happened. Computer search software got smarter at a pace eclipsing Moore’s Law, and the project began to run ahead of schedule, as software fixes reduced the redundancy of uploading the same documents from many different archives, creating a positive feedback that eliminated multiple record entries that wasted scholarly reading time. So while a generation ago, it could take a lifetime of scholarly stack time to find enough new material to extend history by a handful of pages, the intellectual productivity of the paper chase has soared.

Today anybody can go online and find material that holds new meaning in a matter of hours rather than months

Forget the fast forwarding of history by technological change – we are experiencing the acceleration of historiography, and just as personalized medicine is rapidly arising from the now completed sequencing of the human genome, the nearly completed indexing of deep historical time has begun to personalize history in an unanticipated way. Our ancestors’ distant lives are swimming into three-dimensional focus in the newly illuminated archival depths.

Once all the curious could hope for was dry genealogy, filtered through imperfect recall, and linear parish records decimated by everything from the Thirty Years War to the Blitz. But as the new search algorithms chew on the whole surviving record, they keep spitting out startling vignettes of cases, events and conflicts that though centuries old, come with names attached, names that until now, were, for lack of automate indexing, for all practical purposes permanently forgotten. The old rule of thumb was to expect the average ancestral trail to fade and go cold in the ten generations or so it took for mice, bookworms or lightening to strike out parochial records.

No longer- we are witnessing a sort of historiographical phase transition, as opaque archives melt down into pools of data clear enough to see the bottom, inviting even amateurs to dive in to look for and surprisingly often find pieces of history with their family’s names on them, or even spot familiar faces in the long dead crowds, for the Great Uploading does not stop at all the words the archivists can scan. It aspires to include every image of the last millennium. Here’s a splendid book length example of what one worthy amateur medievalist, Jeffrey Hull ,has done with such a freshly scanned manuscript

http://www.thearma.org/pdf/Fight-Earnestly.pdf <http://www.thearma.org/pdf/Fight-Earnestly.pdf>

Overlawyered modernity may owe much to defendant’s strong desire not to have to defend themselves by having plaintiffs hack at them unarmored to let God sort out the torts, but we owe even more to the archival software hackers who have so abruptly brought transparency to the not-so-recent past.

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

And a note

Jerry, the scanned Ms that got me stated on this subject, because it contained the startling images of the 1370 Seitz-Theobald Munich fight is the Bayerische Staats Bibliothek onlone facsimile of De Arte Athletica , by Paul Hector Mair, a printed and illustrated 1542 book based on 14th and 15th century illuminated manuscripts and incunabuli , in his case including Sigismund Mesisterlin’s 1457 Augsberg Chronik. http://www.thearma.org/essays/Theobald-versus-Seitz.pdf

It may intrigue you to know that the judge of the 1370 trial, Stephan II, Duke of Bavaria and vogt of Swabia and Alsace married Elisabeth of Sicily, a daughter of Frederick III of Sicily <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_III_of_Sicily> and Eleanor of Anjou <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Anjou> , also known as Isabel of Aragon. As if to prove my very brief essay’s point, I didn’t even have to ask- the Teutonically Thorough hyperlinks just up and told me.

SO the equivalent of the NSA has recorded much of the  High Middle Ages, and it is being made available to the world – and we can conclude that similar sources will be available to historians of our era.  Just when did this begin, I wonder?

What did you search on that started you thinking on this? I am formatting now, but I want to be thorough

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

It began with the report in a Harvard hard copy of Gaines’ New York Gazette that in 1778 a Major Seitz was stationed in the city at the head of a regiment from his native Hesse-Cassell.

Intrigued by the fratricidal possibility of his running in to Lt. Charles Seitz of the Continental Army, I began a Googling and soon discovered that

1. the major had made colonel and ended up heading the Regiment von Seitz , and briefly commanding the British garrison in Halifax Nova Scotia, where he has been safely buried in the crypt of St. Pauls Church. <http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=70849504&PIpi=43433355> , beneath an explanatory hatchment, since expiring in 1782 Wanting to know if he was a for real Freiherr, or bumped up from Ritter like von Steuben when he achieved field rank,

2. There was a second Hanoverian Major named Seitz, this one from Wurttemburg, who died of his war wounds aboard the ship returning him to England and was buried at sea off the Scilly Isles.

I entered the late ‘Colonel de Seitz’ s full name, and shazam , in chronological order their appeared every one of the name in uploaded history, commencing with the Seitz von Altheim acquitted in the 1370 trial by combat– I had no idea there were so many.

I think the cutest thing about the scanning software that’s been deployed is that it tells all the librarians to stop if they try to scan a second copy of something already uploaded elsewhere– , which enormously speeds the process, since on average, I’d guess that ten or more of the hundreds of institutions involved may hold surviving copies of the same work. This assures that for the first time in archival history , _most _ of what they are putting up is of some historical novelty– they are literally making the past new.

Russell

I wonder how far back the records in Normandy go…

Formats.

The projects for uploading the various historiographically-significant records and images are, at least within the demense of each individual project, utilizing self-consistent file formats, thus making it relatively easy to search and correlate the data.

However, the records of our computerized era, starting from the 1960s, are quite the opposite – a veritable Cloud of Babel.

The irony is that thanks to the efforts of these scholars and the corporate donors who made their work possible, we can perform combinatorial analysis of data from centuries past, we have problems reading storage devices and parsing file formats from a mere 20 years ago.

Progress?

Roland Dobbins

climate

Nice to see that you agree with so many others that climate warming is all just a product of grant favoritism.

I guess those rising sea levels aren’t going to be a problem for you. You’ll be dead before Florida and Louisiana is washed away.

Henry Stipple

Every now and again I post an example of why I do not allow unedited contributions to my site.  I am certain Mr. Stipple believed he was contributing to rational discussion.

Of course sea levels have been rising for millennia, due to the melting of glacial ice and the rise of land that had been under the ice.  How much the sea levels are rising and more to the point why they rise is a complex matter.  I agree that I will be dead well before Florida and Louisiana have been washed away but I don’t see how that is relevant to discussing rational industrial policies on energy generation.  We know that the climate has been warming since 1776 when the guns of Ticonderoga were brought across the frozen Hudson to General Washington in Haarlem Heights. We also know that a good bit of the warming since that time took place before 1880.  Beyond that we aren’t dealing with observations but models and beliefs.  But that is too complex a concept to be expressed in one snarky sentence.

I recall during the 70’s and well into the 80’s the concern at the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was the coming Ice Age.  I recall Gus Spaeth one of Carter’s environmental advisors and on the White House Staff telling a AAAS meeting that the reason we had to store nuclear wastes so carefully was that he feared a return of the Ice Age and he would not want the return of the glaciers to spread nuclear waste across the land.  When it was pointed out to him that if your house were under a kilometer of ice you might have a larger problem than contamination by the4 actinides left in the nuclear waste he really had little to say in answer.

I welcome rational debate but I do not accept proof by repeated assertion as evidence.

U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

Companies are “trusted partners” of our spy agencies? What does this mean?

Our corporate and governmental overlords are collaborating. Where will this lead? With such collaboration there is no counterbalancing force. I fear Lord Acton’s observation about power – something our Constitution was designed to prevent.

The Constitution. Sic transit Gloria mundi.

Ed

I happened to think of this tonight and realized that a good half of my readers will never have read it nor had it read to them; and that’s a pity.  General Wolfe, being rowed up the river the night before the Battle of Quebec settled whether North America would be French or English, recited this to those in his boat, and said he would rather have written those lines than take Quebec on the morrow.  It is not likely to be required in today’s schools, which is a shame.

"ELEGY WRITTEN IN
A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD"

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

 

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault
If Memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E’en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of th’ unhonour’d dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, —

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;

‘There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

‘Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.

‘One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

‘The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.’

The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.

By Thomas Gray (1716-71).

View 777 Thursday, June 13, 2013

WAR

Go back a few years. Imagine a CIA plot to get Iran which considers us the Great Satan and hates us, to declare war on al Qaeda and expend blood and treasure on exterminating al Qaeda – which long ago declared war on us, and which is the most easily defined enemy in our War of Terror. Imagine that al Qaeda might be induced to expend its resources fighting Hezbollah and Iran. Imagine that we could get our enemies to fight each other using whatever weapons they could muster, and expend their blood and treasure on exterminating each other, so that neither had very much to spend on killing Americans.

Come to the present, where that is happening. Israel after careful consideration has stayed out of the Syrian civil war on the grounds that the Assad Family has kept the peace with Israel for decades, while al Qaeda attacks Israelis. Imagine that somehow the trick has been made to work, and our enemies fight each other in a war in which the United States has no describable national interest.

Now imagine that having achieved that result we decide to enter the war.

Obama to step up military support of Syrian rebels

President Barack Obama has authorised sending weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time, U.S. officials said, after the White House disclosed that the United States has conclusive evidence President Bashar Assad’s government used chemical weapons against opposition forces trying to overthrow him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10119836/Obama-to-step-up-military-support-of-Syrian-rebels.html

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that one should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. The problem comes when the incompetence is so grossly incompetent that one begins to wish for more competent malice…  Anatol France once said that a thief in power is to be preferred to a fool, for a thief may upon occasion take a vacation.

We have no national interest in Syria, and we have no obligations.  The Assad regime has been more tolerant of Christians and Bahai minorities than al Qaeda anywhere al Qaeda is in power. The rebels against Assad recently beheaded a 15 year old boy – after a trial – on a charge of blasphemy and insulting the Prophet. The al Qaeda insurgents have no chance of winning without powerful Western support, but they can make the war drag on a long time, neutralizing both Hezbollah and al Qaeda or at least slowing them down.  Whereupon the United States will give aid and comfort to our enemies no matter which side we choose to support.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, but one need not choose to support incompetence.

Obama apparently is rushing to enter his third war, and one in which we have few allies and no national interests at all. We do so on the basis of far less intelligence evidence about Assad’s use of Sarin than we had of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Becky Gerritson, Tea Party activist, in testimony to the House of Representatives concerning IRS harassment of the Watumpka, Alabama Tea Party:

“I am not here as a serf or vassal. I am not begging my lords for mercy. I am a born free American woman, wife, mother, and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my well-being and monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. You post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty. And you have faltered.

“This was a willful act of intimidation to discourage a point of view. What the government did to our little group in Watumpka, Alabama was un-American. It isn’t a matter of fining or arresting individuals. The individuals who sought to intimidate us were acting as they thought they should in a government culture that has little respect for its citizens. Many of the agents and agencies of the federal government do not understand that they are servants of the people. They think they are our masters, and they are mistaken.”

Speak Truth to Power, the Youth Movement says. Becky Gerritson of the Watumpka Alabama Tea Party has just done so. We should all be cheering.

: USA Supports al-Qaeda

The American people need constant reminding that we spawned and continue to work with al-Qaeda.  Here is the latest:

<.>

The Obama administration has concluded that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government used chemical weapons against the rebels seeking to overthrow him and, in a major policy shift, President Obama has decided to supply military support to the rebels, the White House announced Thursday.

</>

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57589252/u.s.-syria-used-chemical-weapons-crossing-red-line/

<.>

A Syrian rebel group’s pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda’s replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group’s influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the Western-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.

</>

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/11/syria-al-qaeda-connection/2075323/

Oceania is at war with East Asia; Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. 

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Access To Energy

Jerry,

You wrote, "The worst of it is that we didn’t need to put tax money into nuclear power. We needed only to end useless regulation and endless hearing and rehearing and reregulation." It would not hurt to stop federal subsidization of the fossil fuel industries (corporate tax breaks, sub-value land leases, etc.) that skew the economics of carbon energy sources. I don’t like paying more for energy, but I certainly don’t want to pay the tax subsidies for these corporations or borrow the money from China to pay for them. At least if I am paying more for my energy, it is in proportion to what I use, not in proportion to what my income is.

Kevin L Keegan

Of course I agree.

Home solar panels

Hi Jerry,

Much like Nuclear Fusion power, home roofing as solar panels always seems to be 10 years out. I used to work for our local utility, and microgeneration via rooftop solar panels was on the horizon back then. The economics are pretty complex. Roofing materials now can reach 50 year lifespans (even in hail prone areas). Aside from the currently high cost in producing the initial panels (more on that below), you run into the longevity of the solar materials (20 years) and the degradation of the panels over time (when used as shingles). So a solar roof would cost 3-4x a regular roof, and last less than half as long.

One advantage though, is that you get much higher square footage, so some of the new lower-efficiency, much cheaper, printed/flexible cells are an option. The hard part is getting a durable coating that can survive both UV and physical damage over a long period of time.

The utility I worked at was thinking that these would replace peak-load generation (which almost always is within daylight hours), but you’re exactly right. It does nothing for base load generation needs – and that’s the stuff under assault (coal is by far the most cost efficient). Battery technology hasn’t advanced far enough to put storage in the home – you’d need a separate shed to hold them, and they don’t last very long. Higher capacity units (lithium for example) are far too expensive and finicky. Large-scale capacitors might work, but they don’t do very well in high temperatures and tend to fail, well, in interesting ways.

The potential is there – and without the government interfering the market, we’d see a lot more innovation.

Cheers,

Doug

P.S. Side note on the lithium batteries – I flew the 787 twice this month. It’s an *AMAZING* aircraft – a completely different flight experience. Large windows that dim, higher humidity, lower O2 pressure, and much much much quieter. I’m spoiled!

Solar power panel costs have come down dramatically (and would come down more if the government were not putting a protective tariff on them, and in many places (depending on sunshine, what the home power is used for, local power rates, etc.) it is economical to do home rooftop solar.  One want to work the numbers for one’s situation,  Carefully.  It’s still close.

New Nuclear Power Plants are Currently Under Construction in USA

Hi Jerry-

Your comments about nuclear power seem to imply that no new construction is underway in the USA. Yet other sources indicate that new plants are being constructed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/business/energy-environment/nuclear-powers-future-may-hinge-on-georgia-project.html?pagewanted=all

Best,

-Steve=

They are, but not many. The permits cost more than the actual construction, and it is never certain that a certificate allowing operation will ever be obtained.

View 777 Wednesday, June 12, 2013

I have been caught up in other matters. In searching for something else, I found this. It was originally written in 1983 and it is still relevant.

Mercenaries and Military Virtue

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/virtue.html

Subj: Elon Musk interview – Dragon thruster glitch and recovery details

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sumVEEAZ_w

Why did three of the four thruster pods fail? The three that failed had check valves of an improved design. 8-\

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

The greens could not be happier about the closure of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which has never exposed anyone off site to any danger.

From Access to Energy

“Government energy suppression has cost the American people the greatest windfall of prosperity ever offered to any civilization in human history.

“Had the government not suppressed the development of nuclear power, our national gross domestic product would be more than double its current value and the standard of living of our people – especially the poor and the middle classes – would would be twice as high as it is today.

“Instead, we find our country with very serious economic problems, with a large part of our productive industries lost abroad, and with our landscape increasingly littered with windmills, which are little more than false advertising propaganda for an economically useless technology”

Alas it is all true. The worst of it is that we didn’t need to put tax money into nuclear power. We needed only to end useless regulation and endless hearing and rehearing and reregulation. Note that China has more than 50 nuclear plants under construction. The low cost energy from those will drive a thriving economy. The United States will have windmills, and some rooftop solar panels.

Home rooftop solar power for home consumption in daytime can even make economic sense for the user, so long as they are willing to adjust to being without much power on cloudy days, and don’t run the air conditioner at night.  Batteries are of course out of the question: at night you use the power grid.  But none of this will get the United States out of economic doldrums.  Solar panels are now cheap enough that in some places individual home owners may find them a good investment. Look at Access to Energy, or so some on line homework; and understand that you will never have power at night from solar panels without very expensive batteries.

Industrial power comes from large central plants, and that will continue for decades absent a really astounding breakthrough in low temperature fusion technology. although low cost natural gas can help decentralize a bit.

As I have said for many years, low cost energy is the solution to nearly all US economic and pollution problems.  Do not think that those who run the Department of Energy do not know this. They have a different agenda. If you have not read A Step Farther Out, I think you will like it.  It has held up well.

Low cost energy freely available and freedom are the sure keys to a wealthy society.  Wealthy societies can afford to be generous with all including the least productive.