Frank Landis

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• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Just when the thread was about dead, here's an interesting newspaper article about the problem of "resource shuffling." https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/government/in-rush-to-buy-clean-energy-coal-and-gas-have-hidden-role/ What apparently happened was that a rural county sold off some of its hydropower electricity at a fairly high rate to...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I'm noticing, and right now I've got the thankless task of telling spec builders how they're screwing up by building track homes oriented every old which way, with the difference paid for in air conditioning. By the way, what do...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  As a random aside, here's what being under a green sky really means (tl;dr: head for shelter). Also, here's a different take on to create sky colors on alien worlds (my favorite Orion's Arm essay)....
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Simplistically, removing water from air that is hot and humid will make it more comfortable, so this is a useful approach in the wet tropics. Since it's possible for air to get hot and humid enough to be lethal for...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I'd point out that you can make all sorts of weird comparisons by selectively choosing comparison dates. In Pinker's example, 1965 is when oil production is really ramping up, as was the production of subdivisions, while right now we're in...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I agree with Vimes' boots. That's why I bought a couple of kukri knives from Himalayan Imports. They're made from recycled metal, rated to last 50 years, and have a warranty as long as the company's still in business and...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  To Frank Landis (#520): yes, precisely. Horses? Look at the problems Victorian London had :-) I stand by my opinion that our priorities (in the 'West') should be to reduce our resource demands, minimise the environmental cost of the WHOLE...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Water's a problem for any power plant, whether it's cooling a heated system (basically, providing a cool place for all that heat to go to so that you can get some useful work out of it), or washing the gunk...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Lake Mead's an interesting problem, and it's worth looking up the "dead pool" issue. The problem is that Lake Mead is the primary water source for Las Vegas. The water intake that goes to Las Vegas sits at 895' elevation,...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  It's also worth noting that collapse is unlikely to the complete, and a residual population of a billion isn't unreasonable. The problem is that if it is a disease-based collapse there's likely to be quarantines and some areas will be...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Well, yeah. No. As I wrote in Hot Earth Dreams, my vision of civilization shattering (I'm trying to avoid all the collapse theory because that gets problematic, IMHO) boils down to a phrase from Halting State: systems fail, people die....
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Oh, and speaking of sadness, it appears that now that San Onofre is being decommissioned, they're having trouble with the storage canister design. This is the same plant that closed because they reportedly decided to install flawed power generators that...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Well, the statements about not feeding trolls still apply, but let's talk about the counterfactual: Nuclear California. Where oh where do we put them atoms... I know, we'll put nukes along the shorelines. Oh wait, that land is already over...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Why do you care about mortality rates? After all, you posted above, "Well, yes the prerequisite for carrying out substantial anthropomorphic CO2 removal from the atmosphere is stop digging up coal and pumping oil and natural gas and burning it...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Let's say you use 5 Joules of solar energy to extract 4 Joules of Keragen. That gives you an EROI of 0.8. Yes it wastes 1 Joule of energy, but it still may work out commercially. By asking this question,...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  As I noted above, the classic sign of a bubble is "this time it's different." The false analogy of "Look kids no matter what historical era tickles your weird little heart, be it medival or dark age or hunter gatherer...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  So, why are we pushing people to build houses with more steel. Why not use wood composites that actually sequester carbon? That's one example of many. You can have fun trying to figure out the ecology of carbon fiber systems....
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  That sounds, if I may be intensely patronizing, as: a) intensely afraid, on the notion that, unless we keep doing what we're doing, then everything will fall apart. and, b) based on the inherent notion that society is a bubble...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  You missed the curve. The argument was that coal would come back because otherwise everyone would freeze to death in the dark. Now someone's saying that coal will come back because in the summer it'll be too hot and everyone...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  It's also worth, more fundamentally, considering how many people of the 7.4 billion people on the planet are in danger of freezing to death, when you make blanket statements about what *everybody* is going to do....
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  What I learned from the Peak Oil "fiasco" (after thinking about it for a bit): --The market isn't driven by physical constraints, at least in the short (sub-decadal) term. --The notion that people find more efficient ways of making oil...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I'd suggest the crowd that's thinking about finding a low-quality salt mine somewhere in a desert for storage are on the right track. One problem with Nevada right now is that there are huge fights over groundwater, which various speculators...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Given the way subsoil rights are dealt with in the Dakotas, this was probably an appropriate response. The technical issues are not the problem, but the way the people interpreting the laws favor the interests of big corporations over the...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Oddly, I think industry disagrees with your estimates of coal. For example, it's more likely that Powder River has 40 years of coal, not 500. It's a fairly honest and well-known truism that people exaggerate fossil fuel reserves by an...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  There's this interesting fallacy in your reasoning: modern humans have been around for ca. 300,000 years, and the majority of people live in places where freezing to death is not a possibility. Moreover, while the use of coal sporadically dates...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Nope, because if the algae dies, sinks to the bottom, takes up all the oxygen as it goes down, and decomposes anoxically, then you've got a dead zone in the deep and methane bubbling out, meaning you've replaced your CO2...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Nope. Your assumption here is the rough equivalent of the 1950s industrial adage of buying engineers by the acre to solve any problem. Yes, if there is a technological solution, buying engineers by the acre increases the likelihood of finding...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  The point about humanure is that actually about source separation, which is one of the great bugbears of waste disposal. There are any number of possible systems for recycling stuff, and people on solid waste boards get bombarded with dozens...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  I'd strongly suggest reading Taleb's book. You've redefined the black swan concept for your own purposes, and that doesn't lead to good communication. You might also be interested in Taleb's book Fooled by Randomness, which is where I think you...
• Commented on Test Case
  I'm waiting for the IoT eLiability camera system (only 23 cameras per vehicle! Plus logging for, like, everything. And a stingray to scoop up local data traffic) so that the ambulance chasers, excuse me, autonomous vehicle online legal services, can...