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From the Los Angeles Times:
Zen
Gov. Brown says ‘spaceship Earth’ approach will see California through drought
By MONTE MORIN, RONG-GONG LIN II AND MATT STEVENS
Even as the state struggles through an epic water crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown assured residents Tuesday that technology, adaptation and “a more elegant” way of living would ultimately preserve the California dream for generations to come.
In a broad-ranging conversation that touched on the “existential threat” posed by man-made global warming, as well as the arcane laws delineating state water rights, Brown said Californians must learn to live more frugally when it comes to their most precious resource.
Zen
If they did so, the state would not only support its current population of 39 million, but probably could accept at least 10 million more residents, he said.
“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown said. “If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way the native people lived, much less the way people do today.… You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.”
To understand long term shifts in ideology, it’s interesting to compare what Jerry Brown says now to not only what his pro-population growth father, Gov. Pat Brown, said in 1959, but to what anti-population growth Jerry himself said in the 1970s, most famously about California in its new Era of Limits when E.F. Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics” about “small is beautiful” was his mantra.
When Jerry left office in 1982, the population of California was 25 million. It’s now 39 million. But now Jerry seems fine with adding 11 million more people in California. Why?
First of all, because they would be immigrants, not Americans, especially not white Americans. Immigrants are holy.
Not Zen
Second, because we are supposed to assume that immigrants have extremely refined minimalist tastes.
Instead of wanting water-hogging lawns for their children to play on, they will, of course, install zen gravel gardens for meditating.
Instead of buying pickup trucks, they will drive Priuses, and so forth.
Do you not believe that?
Not Zen
What kind of racist are you?
You deserve a Two Days Hate on Twitter.
Third, this will create lots of billable hours for environmental consultants, environmental engineers, urban planners and the like. For example, Jerry mentioned yesterday that his proposed Bay Delta Water Conservation plan:
The proposal, Brown said, was the result of more than 1 million hours of work, and “the best that human beings, employing the best science possible, can come up with.”
Fourth, Democrats like to impose rules on people over niggling lifestyle choices. They find it fun.
Fifth, immigration helps the Democrats import ringers to win elections for them, and what’s best in life is to crush your enemies, see the Republicans driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.
In reality, California suffers from increasing marginal costs for infrastructure due to its huge population. This has been disguised in the past because far-sighted California builders like William Mulholland and Pat Brown invested in infrastructure that could support far more people than California had at the time. It was cheap to build massive amounts of infrastructure in a fairly empty state.
So, for a long time, California has been living off its patrimony.
But now, just renovating the existing infrastructure is immensely costly, much less adding more infrastructure to support a higher population due to immigration.
For example, for a half dozen years or so, I’ve been blogging about how the streets in my neighborhood are all torn up to install a new water main to replace the 100-year old Chinatown water main William Mulholland installed in 1915. In contrast, using guys with picks and shovels, aided by mules, Mulholland built his water main across the San Fernando Valley in about a year.
Mulholland’s water main has served well for a century, but it now springs leaks, and would likely fail catastrophically when The Big One Hits, threatening that Los Angeles would burn down like San Francisco did in 1906 for lack of water pressure to fight fires.
But building a replacement water main, even with modern equipment, is taking about an order of magnitude longer to finish and who knows how much more money. Why? Because the San Fernando Valley has a couple of million people in it now, and that makes the job much more complicated and costly than a century ago when the Valley was open fields for Mulholland to dig in.
Yeah, I know Ed Glaeser and Matthew Yglesias talk about how cheap higher density living is, but that’s actually only true if you have the infrastructure in the ground already to support modest increases in density. Eventually you run out of the legacy of the past. Then, adding more infrastructure in an already densely populated region is immensely expensive, assuming you have post 1960s levels of environmental regulation and a litigious population.
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California Can Afford 11 Million More Immigrants if Everybody Adopts a Zen Lifestyle
And takes navy showers.
Or in Jerry Brown’s case, skips every other day.
I always thought that the overwhelming population pressure one found in parts of China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, et al was something we should avoid. Apparently our leaders find this to be a model we should copy.
Wisdom of the east: ‘The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose’.
So if Jerry’s on board with adding 11 million more people to CA’s 39 million, he thinks a 28% increase is doable. I suppose he also thinks that same increase is acceptable for the US as a whole, which would roughly be another 90 million.
It blows my mind to see these folks who call themselves environmentalists seemingly wanting the US to be crowned the most populous nation. Don’t they realize all the top contenders for this title are essentially hellholes where those with means want to flee? It’s not like the Switzerlands and Norways of this world are all contending to become the most populous.
I don’t care if you guys take showers once a month. Just keep sending the $15 cabernets and Trader Joe’s almonds.
Can someone explain why the world’s greatest inventor and science-industrial-guru, Elon Musk, hasn’t come up with an efficient, cost-effective sea-water desalinization system yet? He does live in California, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he put his mastermind to something worthwhile?
The reason no one builds desal plants is that if they did, the state would seize their river water quota and give it to farmers. It would be giving up free water for no reason. But, probably, the cities should just do it, so they can just stop fighting with the state. It's pretty cheap. Tripling the water charge for people using enough water for lawns would probably pay for it.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @27 year old
http://carlsbaddesal.com/Replies: @Steve Sailer
http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-we-could-put-a-million-people-on-mars-within-a-century-2015-6
Another way of looking at things is that white privilege leads to over-engineering. The mars rovers had been built for 90 day missions, one lasted 6 years and the other is still going 11+years strong. They wanted to guarantee it would still work at the end of 90days. White engineers build to withstand twice the expected stress, H1Bs barely grasp concepts.Replies: @Hal
Thank the heavens for the Delta Smelt. We can’t even confront Brown and his ilk with the fact of the almost assured extinction of mega- fauna in the wild with a 50-100 million population California. Coyotes will make it, but cougar, big horn sheep, condor, I don’t think so. The holy immigrant trumps the environment.
What California needs is more reservoirs. Period.
Because it’s hard.
The first op-ed I ever published ran in the Christian Science Monitor in, I think, 1990. On the same page was an op-ed by Sen. Paul Simon (D-IL) calling for more investment in desalination research.
Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he's very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.Replies: @Sunbeam, @Romanian, @Mr. Anon, @Anonymous
But as anyone ever asked him?
"Hey, Elon, we really don't NEED a vacuum tube to Palo Alto. What we need is WATER."
Uh, too many people already. About 1.5 planet’s worth by some estimates, and that’s with current fossil fuel consumption. Overshoot means that when the system falters, we don’t “go” to exactly one planet’s worth, more like half a planet’s worth just for food, water and energy reasons alone. Then other factors kick in, like war, disease, people living in the wrong places.
Unless Jerry wants all the survivors to be Mexican or south, immigration is a bad idea. Best plan is to let Mexico have the SW including So. Calif. and draw a line from Vegas to Vegas to Ventura.
No need to legislate. Nature is doing it for us. Don’t fight nature.
What a fool! And what fools Californians are for electing him to four terms.
When I see people acting like its a crisis then I’ll believe it’s a crisis.
Like Brown letting his lawn die and forswearing air and limo travel in favor of the trains he loves so much. My leftist friends and family members fly more than I do.
niggling lifestyle choices
Triggered!!!!
Reisner’s Rule of Conceptual Inertia:
If you think big enough, you’ll never have to do it.
Increasingly complex solutions promise to overcome the problem of diminishing returns, but it is illusory. It actually increases the cost of maintaining what you have thus accelerating the decline. That’s what guy like Yglesias can never comprehend.
The Romans faced similar problems. Expansion of the empire not only paid for the cost of expansion, it resulted in a surplus. But, they reached the point where further expansion cost more than the rewards. Then the cost of maintaining what they had overwhelmed the value of keeping it, slowly draining first the surplus and then the wealth of the empire.
Back in the Seventies, when he ran for president, we called him “Governor Moonbeam.” He hasn’t matured, I see.
Great sentence.
The amount of energy used is existing desalination techniques is close to the thermodynamic limits. Maybe a factor of three. There’s really nothing to be done.
The reason no one builds desal plants is that if they did, the state would seize their river water quota and give it to farmers. It would be giving up free water for no reason. But, probably, the cities should just do it, so they can just stop fighting with the state. It’s pretty cheap. Tripling the water charge for people using enough water for lawns would probably pay for it.
The reason no one builds desal plants is that if they did, the state would seize their river water quota and give it to farmers. It would be giving up free water for no reason. But, probably, the cities should just do it, so they can just stop fighting with the state. It's pretty cheap. Tripling the water charge for people using enough water for lawns would probably pay for it.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @27 year old
How loud are desalination plants?
Of course, the zillions of babies that third-worlders are having are a threat to nothing, and nobody. They’re collectively a glorious gift to mankind, and the ecosystem.
And hordes of these third-worlders invading California is not any kind of threat at all to that state’s environment. They’re its salvation!
You can’t be a “liberal” (leftist) without being completely full of crap.
It’s not hard to imagine that the patrimony leftists are leaving us is war. Somebody’s going to have to clean up their mess.
‘Shine On You Crazy Moonbeam’
With apologies to Pink Floyd
I wonder what Governor Moonbeam will say when he loses the next primary to Hector Elizonda Mountain Dew Che Wawa? La Raza don’t like you gringo! We in charge now, Holmes!
I wonder who can replace Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi? Maybe a set of Mestizo twins? One could dye her hair blonde and the other can boycott Israel for killing Jesus!
Y’all are being a little facetious.
They’re politicians. They want to get elected.
They’re Democrats. Immigrants vote Democrat.
Imitating Bangladesh? Environmental regulation? Whatever. They just want to get re-elected.
That should tell you something about democracy.
It is worse than you think. Paul Ehrlich’s first phd student and founder of the field of Conservation Biology has no problem with flooding California with high fertility highly racialized nonwhite legal immigrant Democratic Party Voters…And one of these nowhite Legal immigrant Democratic Party Voters also happens to this guys last phd student who is the head of California’s Nature Conservancy. He is a Legal Immigrant from India.
There has been very weird s…t going on in the Conservation Biology Field for years.
Paul Ehrlich’s,Anne Ehrlich’s…and Gretchen Daly’s solution to California’s overpopulation problem:demand that Native Born White American Californians have below replacement fertility levels so that the number of highly racialized high fertility nonwhite immigrant Democratic Party Voters imported can be increased.
The Ehrlich’s are evil.
If the 1965 Immigration Reform Act had never been passed…Jerry Brown would never have been elected Governor of California for a second time.
Steve
Are you aware that Linda Ronstadt is mostly German?
Steve
This is without a doubt isteve material....Remember Mark Twain' s famous short story "The Leaping Frog of Calavaras County". Pure Native Born White American Americana...Frog Species: California Red Legged Frog(endemic endangered status)...threatened with extinction. We are talking about the intersection of Native Born White Americana and Ecology!!!! Do some googling Steve...As a Native White Californian, you have got to do it!!!!-then move on to Asian Legal Immigrants and the vicious Asian Snakehead Fish in the State of Virginia's Riparian Ecosystems...Guys, cover your nuts if you fall out of your kayak into the bucolic Potomac this weekend...yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gov. Jerry Brown 1975: Don’t ‘Dump Vietnamese’ Refugees on California
It blows my mind to see these folks who call themselves environmentalists seemingly wanting the US to be crowned the most populous nation. Don't they realize all the top contenders for this title are essentially hellholes where those with means want to flee? It's not like the Switzerlands and Norways of this world are all contending to become the most populous.Replies: @jon
It’s worse than that, many people talk favorably about an America of 500-600 million.
But how will this affect the cancellation of Don’t Trust the B—-in Apartment 23? Kristen Ritter fans need to know!
They're politicians. They want to get elected.
They're Democrats. Immigrants vote Democrat.
Imitating Bangladesh? Environmental regulation? Whatever. They just want to get re-elected.Replies: @whorefinder, @Realist
agreed. Politicians’ only long terms strategies are getting themselves elected and getting themselves more power. Everything else, they have the foresight of a toddler.
Cheaper energy, then. Better desalination economics would have a huge impact. Sahara and Arabian peninsula would be prime real estate. Great spots for solar power, incidentally. It would be pretty funny if the Arabian peninsula ran out of oil just when cheap solar becomes reality, and they maintain their energy superpower status.
YAY! My chance to hop on my favorite hobby horse!!
http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/26/lftr-desalination-from-waste-heat-part-1/
http://lftrnow.com/
Solar power is not so readily transportable as oil. There are losses in transmitting electricity.
Re reservoirs – yeah I don’t remember nearly so many of them in Cali as I noticed in DFW. Reservoirs everywhere in Texas…the res water tastes terrible, though.
Hippopotamusdrome, is that the same Mario Obledo who declared that “whitey was finished” in California during the Prop 187 debates?
There has been very weird s...t going on in the Conservation Biology Field for years.
Paul Ehrlich's,Anne Ehrlich's...and Gretchen Daly's solution to California's overpopulation problem:demand that Native Born White American Californians have below replacement fertility levels so that the number of highly racialized high fertility nonwhite immigrant Democratic Party Voters imported can be increased.
The Ehrlich's are evil.
If the 1965 Immigration Reform Act had never been passed...Jerry Brown would never have been elected Governor of California for a second time.
Steve
Are you aware that Linda Ronstadt is mostly German?Replies: @War for Blair Mountain
The California Nature Conservancy Chief Scientist:M Sanjayan…see that, Native Born White Americans will never be able to figure out how to save California’s endemic endangered species…way too stupid…legal immigrant from India to the rescue.
Steve
This is without a doubt isteve material….Remember Mark Twain’ s famous short story “The Leaping Frog of Calavaras County”. Pure Native Born White American Americana…Frog Species: California Red Legged Frog(endemic endangered status)…threatened with extinction. We are talking about the intersection of Native Born White Americana and Ecology!!!! Do some googling Steve…As a Native White Californian, you have got to do it!!!!-then move on to Asian Legal Immigrants and the vicious Asian Snakehead Fish in the State of Virginia’s Riparian Ecosystems…Guys, cover your nuts if you fall out of your kayak into the bucolic Potomac this weekend…yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!
With desalination, can you get, say, 90% of the salt out of the water much cheaper than you can get 99.9% of the salt out of the water? Does getting 90% of the salt out cost 90% as much as getting virtually all of it out, or is that cheap to do and its finishing the water off to drinking quality what’s really expensive?
I ask because there’s a fairly new golf course grass from South Africa called paspalum that can tolerate significantly more salt in its irrigation water than most other grasses. It doesn’t thrive on pure seawater, but it does well on slightly salty water. In fact, it doesn’t need much herbicides because the salt kills weeds. This means you could build golf courses, parks, lawns etc. in sunny places near the ocean (e.g., Baja California, Australia), although you would need two sets of water pipes — one for the cheap partly desalinated water, one for the expensive totally desalinated water.
Flash desalination plants have chambers in series where vacuum is used to boil at lower temperatures. Noisy. Fun noisy, but noisy. B/c rapid phase change.
Really interesting point about infrastructure. I am a fan of Glaeser, but now I have to think about how to test that idea.
This burden has also but a major crimp on the development of other drought / salt tolerant crop research. In particular the research into GMO vegetables.
Zen and Mexicans mix like oil and water and always be suspicious of people who speak about “elegant solutions”. Lord, spare me this airy, fairy bllsht.
Desalination plants are similar in “loudness” to a coal fired power plant. Lots of boilers, turbines, pumps and motors running.
You can’t go wrong making different versions of Conan’s best things in life quote.
Interesting call from the Governor. When he was beginning his terms as mayor of Oakland, Jerry had a very elegant pad in a very inelegant part of downtown Oakland in a renovated Sears building. Perhaps because of the vibrance of that part of town, or perhaps because his new wife couldn’t take it, he decamped to a place high in the hills near where I used to live. You couldn’t get much farther away from what most people think of as Oakland and still be in Oakland.
But this inelegant new pad was built at great expense to hang off the hill and runs an easy 2700+ sq. ft. Not to mention the inelegant cost of getting down to any shopping or anything–it’s an easy 10-15 minute drive to anything.
So I guess it’s elegance for thee but not me again.
Clearer now?
In 1975, Jerry Brown complained, that the federal government wanted to “dump Vietnamese on” California. “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away [to import likely Republicans especially with Asians being smarter than mestizos] and at the same time neglecting [Democratic voters] who live here”
Clearer now?
Fixed it for you.
>With desalination, can you get, say, 90% of the salt out of the water much cheaper than you can get 99.9% of the salt out of the water?<
it would be "cheaper" to collect the treated waste water and recycle it. no salinity problems. in a rational world you collect water falling in oregon and washington state and pump it south using nukes as the power source.
Yeah, coz it isn't like that water is filling any useful role in, say, filling our rivers and sustaining the ecosystems in and around those. Or keeping the saline balance and tides of the Puget Sound aligned. Or sustaining the rainforest. Or evaporating to maintain a huge portion of North America's hydrogeology.
Yeah. Just pump it all to La Raza Land. Things'll be just dandy.
My California ancestors in my lifetime used to bathe once a week, whether they needed it or not.
As for population in CA, yes, I think they are at about their limit, unless they want to start building shanties on Mount Shasta and El Capitan.
When I was in the service many years ago I saw what happens when you have too many people (East Asia.) I shudder to see that happen here. I don’t think we could ever sustain a density like India (1,000 per sq. m.) or even Germany (600 per sq. m.): too much desert, mountains, arctic areas, and fragile prairie. But I think it’s very possible we could approach China’s 365 per sq. m. If so, the US population will probably top out at about 1.3 billion, 4.25 times what we have now. I’m not happy about it, but no one seems to want to do anything to control it.
Here’s a handy chart.
So are we looking down the road at 330 million Californians?
But, hey, it's California. So everything's Archie.Replies: @Maj. Kong
And your California ancestors died of diseases caused by filth.
Is that your solution? Stink, filth, and disease?Replies: @SPMoore8, @dcite
There is a big desal plant being built right now in northern San Diego County. It is fairly expensive, but competitive with current “peak demand” water costs.
http://carlsbaddesal.com/
This drought thing is very poorly timed for me. I’ve decided to go with a “Yakushima Island” theme for my backyard. This is the wettest part of Japan and looks really pretty to me, but I think will require a fair amount of watering to get this look:
I think it is worth it.
Long term this seems like a bad idea. Over time when this salty water dries up the salt remains. Then how do you get rid of the salt?
As for population in CA, yes, I think they are at about their limit, unless they want to start building shanties on Mount Shasta and El Capitan.
When I was in the service many years ago I saw what happens when you have too many people (East Asia.) I shudder to see that happen here. I don't think we could ever sustain a density like India (1,000 per sq. m.) or even Germany (600 per sq. m.): too much desert, mountains, arctic areas, and fragile prairie. But I think it's very possible we could approach China's 365 per sq. m. If so, the US population will probably top out at about 1.3 billion, 4.25 times what we have now. I'm not happy about it, but no one seems to want to do anything to control it.
Here's a handy chart.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Olorin
And California would have, proportionally, 165 million. Except California is far more enticing to the world than North Dakota, Kansas, or Maine.
So are we looking down the road at 330 million Californians?
But, hey, it’s California. So everything’s Archie.
And we could feed them all with Soylent...err Asian Carp.
Cheaper energy, then.
YAY! My chance to hop on my favorite hobby horse!!
http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/26/lftr-desalination-from-waste-heat-part-1/
http://lftrnow.com/
it would be "cheaper" to collect the treated waste water and recycle it. no salinity problems. in a rational world you collect water falling in oregon and washington state and pump it south using nukes as the power source.Replies: @iSteveFan, @Olorin
Why give them any ideas? If they did come up with a solution for cheaper water via desalination or pumping excess water from other states, wouldn’t this just eliminate any possible limit to the levels of immigration they have planned for us? I actually welcome any constraints the current water shortage may bring. Maybe,just maybe it will curb the current levels of immigration, and get conservationists back in touch with their 1970’s roots concerning population growth.
I recall someone suggesting that using deep water pressure itself could generate the power needed to run reverse osmosis desalinization plants. That is you build a coffer dam at the needed pressure depth and let pressurized sea water force itself through the membranes. It seemed fanciful but in the North Sea there is just such a structure. A concrete oil production platform that sits on the sea floor over 1000 feet below the surface. You can go down inside it to the bottom of the ocean! What such a structure costs I have no idea but I’m sure its not cheap but a water column 1000 feet high would generate more than 430 PSI and not use a single watt of power.
Better to build open top cisterns 1,000 feet high.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @unit472
I recall someone suggesting that using deep water pressure itself could generate the power needed to run reverse osmosis desalinization plants. That is you build a coffer dam at the needed pressure depth and let pressurized sea water force itself through the membranes. It seemed fanciful but in the North Sea there is just such a structure. A concrete oil production platform that sits on the sea floor over 1000 feet below the surface. You can go down inside it to the bottom of the ocean! What such a structure costs I have no idea but I’m sure its not cheap but a water column 1000 feet high would generate more than 430 PSI and not use a single watt of power."
You would still need electricity to pump the water back to the surface, as you've used up some of that pressure head to drive the water through the filters.
Seawater has a salinity of about 3.5g/liter of mostly NaCl. Removing 90% of the salts leaves 0.35g/liter. Salt buildup renders soil infertile. Irrigating with 0.35 g/liter only means it takes ten times as long to kill the soil. The only solutions are rainfall, drought tolerant plants, or demand destruction. B/c lower the demand for almonds, etc.
Flash desalination plants have chambers in series where vacuum is used to boil at lower temperatures. Noisy. Fun noisy, but noisy. B/c rapid phase change.
In an interview a couple years ago, Musk said that he believed fusion would be easy to achieve and that he could do it if he weren’t doing other things, and that de-salination would then be very easy.
Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he’s very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.
@Steve Sailer
In an interview a couple years ago, Musk said that he believed fusion would be easy to achieve and that he could do it if he weren’t doing other things, and that de-salination would then be very easy."
Musk is a smart guy, but he is also (by reputation - I don't know him) a somewhat arrogant guy. If he thinkgs that fusion would be easy to achieve, he should start sinking some of his fortune into it. Then we could ask him again when he is twenty years older and considerably poorer.Replies: @Big Bill
Do you periodically have to flush the fields and remove the accumulated salt or does it go into the plants? At some point due to evaporation there will be plenty of dried salt at ground level, won’t there?
So the problem with desaling sea water is there is a lot of salt in there. Paspalum reports to thrive at 800-1500 PPM with 500 PPM as brackish water, you know useless for humans. Well sea water is 70,000 PPM so 90% isn’t good enough you need more like 98% and it would only work for the grass. As to cost v purity it depends but its mostly linear, for example distilled water which is common in a lot of industrial chem just isn’t that expensive. Scaling up the whole state with shore based nukes for example would be cheap it it where remotely possible, but that’s ridiculous from a political-social perspective. The other problem with salt irrigation is lowering the land value, most stuff doesn’t grow in salty soil so if you installed this in your lawn and started watering with Brawndo then you couldn’t change your mind and decide you wanted flower beds without re-soiling your yard. Same goes for wide land expanses and that gets in to cutting down your long term agri-capacity. Now I can easily California’s elite embracing such a short sighted and destructive course of action, as far as I can tell those are must haves for Cali policy that still wouldn’t make it a good idea.
Don’t Asians leave Asia and come to America to get away from the zen style?
Oh, you’re gonna get those additional 11 million immigrants, Moonbeam. And then some. But that Zen-Lifestyle thing? Not so much.
A lot of them won’t be buying any cars at all. A lot of Hispanic service workers walk or ride bikes to their jobs, simply because they can’t afford their own cars. Others take public transit or are hauled around by their employers’ trucks or vans to their construction or other related jobs. This is unlikely to change, as either they’d have to move up to higher paying, middle class jobs or their employers would have to raise their wages enough for them to afford pickups or Priuses, both of which are generally more expensive than compact cars and mid-size sedans these days.
Now I don't know how they knew they were illegals. I guess they had the Mestizo look and spoke limited to no English. But I find it interesting that two different guys from two different area departments would report such a story. I've never heard about this anywhere else.Replies: @Anonymous
Not to mention, they will not pay enough taxes to bail out the entitlement funds. Or their own SSI when their bodies wear out from hard labor 20 years from now.
it would be "cheaper" to collect the treated waste water and recycle it. no salinity problems. in a rational world you collect water falling in oregon and washington state and pump it south using nukes as the power source.Replies: @iSteveFan, @Olorin
“in a rational world you collect water falling in oregon and washington state and pump it south using nukes as the power source.”
Yeah, coz it isn’t like that water is filling any useful role in, say, filling our rivers and sustaining the ecosystems in and around those. Or keeping the saline balance and tides of the Puget Sound aligned. Or sustaining the rainforest. Or evaporating to maintain a huge portion of North America’s hydrogeology.
Yeah. Just pump it all to La Raza Land. Things’ll be just dandy.
As for population in CA, yes, I think they are at about their limit, unless they want to start building shanties on Mount Shasta and El Capitan.
When I was in the service many years ago I saw what happens when you have too many people (East Asia.) I shudder to see that happen here. I don't think we could ever sustain a density like India (1,000 per sq. m.) or even Germany (600 per sq. m.): too much desert, mountains, arctic areas, and fragile prairie. But I think it's very possible we could approach China's 365 per sq. m. If so, the US population will probably top out at about 1.3 billion, 4.25 times what we have now. I'm not happy about it, but no one seems to want to do anything to control it.
Here's a handy chart.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Olorin
“My California ancestors in my lifetime used to bathe once a week, whether they needed it or not. ”
And your California ancestors died of diseases caused by filth.
Is that your solution? Stink, filth, and disease?
No, they died in their '90's of old age. People who lived in the mountains or on the frontier did not bathe frequently. In fact, until the last couple hundred years, people bathed very rarely.
When I see people acting like its a crisis then I'll believe it's a crisis.
Like Brown letting his lawn die and forswearing air and limo travel in favor of the trains he loves so much. My leftist friends and family members fly more than I do.Replies: @Casey
It’s been a while since I’ve calculated my personal carbon footprint, but I seem to remember that the two items that matter most in the calculation by far were having children and air travel. Everything else was small potatoes in comparison.
He seems more interested in something more challenging and consequential, like putting a million people on Mars:
http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-we-could-put-a-million-people-on-mars-within-a-century-2015-6
The reason no one builds desal plants is that if they did, the state would seize their river water quota and give it to farmers. It would be giving up free water for no reason. But, probably, the cities should just do it, so they can just stop fighting with the state. It's pretty cheap. Tripling the water charge for people using enough water for lawns would probably pay for it.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @27 year old
Actually, Israel has just completed a few new desalination plants
Shouldn’t 24ahead.com be here to tell us all that if we would have followed the orders of his Generallismo Supremo de Twitter self Jerry Brown would have seen the error of his ways?
>Why give them any ideas? <
i agree with you. preface "in a rational world". no deal here
Of course it’s hard.
But as anyone ever asked him?
“Hey, Elon, we really don’t NEED a vacuum tube to Palo Alto. What we need is WATER.”
“Do you periodically have to flush the fields and remove the accumulated salt.”
I believe so.
Basically, we’ve got a breed of grass now that can deal well with a small amount of salt, like 2% of seawater. The idea would be that you can build parks, soccer fields, and golf courses on desert land overlooking the ocean, such as the 900 miles of Pacific coastline of Baja California or much of Australia … IF much of the cost of desalination using contemporary mechanical filtering technology is concentrated in removing the last few percent of salt. On the other hand, distilling water by boiling it is an all or nothing proposition. Anyway, I don’t actually understand the economics of contemporary desalination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia#Impact_reduction_and_management
It is not as if boiling is the only method of desalination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DesalinationReplies: @oh its just me
http://carlsbaddesal.com/Replies: @Steve Sailer
Natural gas is fairly cheap these days.
Seems like just the ticket for a “true genius” like Elon Musk! If it weren’t a tough nut to crack he wouldn’t be interested. Thomas Alva would have been right on it.
Casey Stengel famously said, when managing the woebegone NY Mets, “Give me men which can execute.”
What I love about Switzerland is that they have a thousand ways to keep the riff-raff out.
Jerry Brown seems bound and determined to come up with a thousand ways to keep the “men which can execute” out of California.
Oi vey…. [And I’m not even Jewish (just identify that way now & then).]
Interesting. How does the water get into a glass to drink? “Excuse me, I need a glass of water. ” Take an elevator 1,000 feet down. Gulp, gulp, gulp. Take an elevator 1,000 feet up. “Whew, that elevator ride made me thirsty!” Back to the elevator….
Better to build open top cisterns 1,000 feet high.
What's simplest and cheapest? Keep out r-selected groups. Stop subsidies for net-consuming lifestyles. There, plenty of water.Replies: @Hal
If you were back in Edison’s time, you’d probably be saying to Edison that we mostly rural farmers don’t really NEED light bulbs.
And your California ancestors died of diseases caused by filth.
Is that your solution? Stink, filth, and disease?Replies: @SPMoore8, @dcite
And your California ancestors died of diseases caused by filth.
No, they died in their ’90’s of old age. People who lived in the mountains or on the frontier did not bathe frequently. In fact, until the last couple hundred years, people bathed very rarely.
In my neck of the woods I’ve had two different firefighters, from two different departments, both tell me that they knew of illegals who have used ambulances as taxis. They say they are required to roll an ambulance on emergency calls. The patient, if awake, can request which hospital he wants to go to. They both said that they have had people request a certain hospital, then somewhere during the trip demand to be let out and walked away perfectly healthy. They concluded they were scammed into transporting the dude across the metro, but there was nothing they could have done because they have to treat every emergency call as if was the real deal.
Now I don’t know how they knew they were illegals. I guess they had the Mestizo look and spoke limited to no English. But I find it interesting that two different guys from two different area departments would report such a story. I’ve never heard about this anywhere else.
I have become convinced that there is real moral imperative and justification for
Re-Colonization
I am posting a link to a very well written and researched piece on the theme. (I also recommend you go to the home page and peruse the other pieces. There is one way down about Racism being the new Withcraft that backs up the Moldbug writing with a ton of facts and graphics in comparing the witch hunts, during the middle ages and now.) The author gives no method of accomplishing re-colonization only facts for justification.
Why Re-Colonization? Future Orientation
http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-re-colonization-future-orientation.html
In the piece he describes both inability and reasons for the sheer crap government that replaced colonial governments, the crumbling infrastructure, the horrid healthcare, the crime, and lists via graphics how many governments in Africa are absolutely dependent on aid as a significant portion of GDP, in many cases, 200% of actual domestic GDP, with a best case of Kenya having only 20%. And most of these governments are 50 years old. He goes through a long set of data and observations about the lack of future sense, of even having any sense of time, and of other cognitive issues leading to malfunctioning government and commercial sectors.
I would say in much of the same areas today that were under Colonial mandate in the past, Africa, middle east, Central America (I would even include Mexico) that there is lack of cognitive ability to govern as well as create a viable commercial sector that can create livable conditions for the people that live and hence, compel people to immigrate.
We cannot have the world move to Europe and North America. It is not environmentally viable nor culturally sustainable for us.
I say this should be the foreign policy of the alt-right, to re-establish Colonial rule in these areas. If you just began to contemplate the benefits for those places and for us you could let your imaginations run wild. Imagine the possibilities.
Musk's colony on Mars is more realistic than European colonies in Africa at this point.
The entire reason all those people are migrating is precisely because those areas are under the "Colonial rule" of contemporary international economics. Isolated Amazonian tribes aren't migrating because they still have subsistence assets like their land and hunting and gathering grounds. If a logging company wants the timber on their land and kicks them off and tells them they'll have to get "real jobs" to survive and feed themselves, then they will be migrating somewhere. When NAFTA was imposed, Mexican peasant farmers suddenly had their crops severely undercut and they lost their subsistence assets and needed to get "real jobs" flipping burgers and cutting grass.
The solution is not to deprive people of subsistence assets. This requires advanced economies to solve problems technologically, not through trade and by seeking cheaper raw materials and labor.
The issue with using a 0.3% or 0.06% solution of salt water to irrigate (as opposed to rainwater that has no salt content) is that over time as the irrigated water evaporates, the salt stays behind. Eventually even salt tolerant grass will likely be unable to grow. Then how do you fix it? Australia as you mention has problems with salinity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia#Impact_reduction_and_management
It is not as if boiling is the only method of desalination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination
Thats a really interesting one on the grass. I am involved in some water issues here in LA, and one problem with recycled wastewater is that its pretty salty. If this grass did well with it that would be a big breakthrough. The other concern is that the salts would pass through and ruin groundwater basins, which are our water bank here in socal. The ideal grass would take up the salts.
Really interesting point about infrastructure. I am a fan of Glaeser, but now I have to think about how to test that idea.
As I read these comments, the BBC world service reports that German officials say Syrian refugees, all 400,000 of them, will help to tackle a critical “skills gap” in the German labor market.
http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-re-colonization-future-orientation.htmlIn the piece he describes both inability and reasons for the sheer crap government that replaced colonial governments, the crumbling infrastructure, the horrid healthcare, the crime, and lists via graphics how many governments in Africa are absolutely dependent on aid as a significant portion of GDP, in many cases, 200% of actual domestic GDP, with a best case of Kenya having only 20%. And most of these governments are 50 years old. He goes through a long set of data and observations about the lack of future sense, of even having any sense of time, and of other cognitive issues leading to malfunctioning government and commercial sectors. I would say in much of the same areas today that were under Colonial mandate in the past, Africa, middle east, Central America (I would even include Mexico) that there is lack of cognitive ability to govern as well as create a viable commercial sector that can create livable conditions for the people that live and hence, compel people to immigrate. We cannot have the world move to Europe and North America. It is not environmentally viable nor culturally sustainable for us. I say this should be the foreign policy of the alt-right, to re-establish Colonial rule in these areas. If you just began to contemplate the benefits for those places and for us you could let your imaginations run wild. Imagine the possibilities.Replies: @Anonymous, @The Anti-Gnostic, @Romanian, @Anonymous
It’ll be done by China if it’s done at all.
Musk’s colony on Mars is more realistic than European colonies in Africa at this point.
Technically, unlike race and gender, you can be transreligious. It’s called conversion. 😉
It won’t get you bennies, though; the advantage to being Jewish arises from social networks, and if you’re not in an industry with a lot of Jews, it’s not beneficial.
You want to really solve this problem? Get someone to cut all the welfare to anyone who wasn’t here in 1964. In 6 months Los Angeles will be as White as Mayberry. But, but, we can’t elect anyone like that! So? Elections are just one way of getting things done. There are far easier and much more permanent methods of getting the leaders you want. Anyone who thinks you can’t fight City Hall better get the fuck out of America, because America wouldn’t even exist with that attitude. There is going to be a reset. Some people say it will be over their dead bodies. OK. I’d have done that anyway, but if you insist we can make it happen sooner.
Welfare statism controls social unrest, that was the goal of the Prussians who invented it. The minute you abolish Medicaid, if it were even politically possible, you would have an armed insurgency. I'm not so sure you would have a force of John Galts or the National Guard, to suppress said insurgency.
The problem with the welfare state is the social values of those creating and administering it, along with the demographics that use it. Pre-invasion Scandinavia was fairly pleasant, if suicidal.Replies: @ben tillman
I once asked some sperg on Marginal Revolution if he could concede a single limiting principle on immigration. If a billion people want to move to the US, should they? And, like the fundamentalist Christian soldiering on despite the clear logic trap, he said no, couldn’t think of any reason to limit immigration.
The density trap in action. It’s actually probably worse in NYC. I work in NYC a few days a week and the quality of the roads is horrifying. It just takes a really, really long time to do simple things in a really dense environment.
Then we are burning the candle at both ends, because these people will not generate the taxes necessary to support the infrastructure of a (formerly) technologically advanced society.
Not to mention, they will not pay enough taxes to bail out the entitlement funds. Or their own SSI when their bodies wear out from hard labor 20 years from now.
From what I have read, there is a strain of wheat (developed in Egypt no less) that needs almost no water to grow. There are also tomatoes that grow well in water with a high salt concentration (the salt doesn’t get transferred to the tomato fruit). However, both of these are “EVIL GMO!” and will likely never get approved for use due to the regulatory burden for approval placed upon them.
This burden has also but a major crimp on the development of other drought / salt tolerant crop research. In particular the research into GMO vegetables.
http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-re-colonization-future-orientation.htmlIn the piece he describes both inability and reasons for the sheer crap government that replaced colonial governments, the crumbling infrastructure, the horrid healthcare, the crime, and lists via graphics how many governments in Africa are absolutely dependent on aid as a significant portion of GDP, in many cases, 200% of actual domestic GDP, with a best case of Kenya having only 20%. And most of these governments are 50 years old. He goes through a long set of data and observations about the lack of future sense, of even having any sense of time, and of other cognitive issues leading to malfunctioning government and commercial sectors. I would say in much of the same areas today that were under Colonial mandate in the past, Africa, middle east, Central America (I would even include Mexico) that there is lack of cognitive ability to govern as well as create a viable commercial sector that can create livable conditions for the people that live and hence, compel people to immigrate. We cannot have the world move to Europe and North America. It is not environmentally viable nor culturally sustainable for us. I say this should be the foreign policy of the alt-right, to re-establish Colonial rule in these areas. If you just began to contemplate the benefits for those places and for us you could let your imaginations run wild. Imagine the possibilities.Replies: @Anonymous, @The Anti-Gnostic, @Romanian, @Anonymous
Works great, until the natives hack you to death with machetes.
I'm not necessarily in favor of "recolonization," but a West with the will to embark upon such a path, won't be seriously impeded by "natives...with machetes." The Maxim gun has various modern equivalents, you know.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
Better to build open top cisterns 1,000 feet high.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @unit472
These sperglord schemes make my head hurt. I swear some people won’t be happy until we’re all in 30 story x 30 story boxes with the solar panels and windmills over every wilderness area and the garbage piling up in the streets.
What’s simplest and cheapest? Keep out r-selected groups. Stop subsidies for net-consuming lifestyles. There, plenty of water.
1,000 ft deep osmotic filters have the problem that the filtered water is down there and we're up here.
!,000 ft tall cisterns to catch rainwater have the problems that a) rainfall doesn't need to be filtered and b) there is a shortage of rainfall.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he's very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.Replies: @Sunbeam, @Romanian, @Mr. Anon, @Anonymous
“In an interview a couple years ago, Musk said that he believed fusion would be easy to achieve and that he could do it if he weren’t doing other things, and that de-salination would then be very easy.”
See this is BS. Not real sure of Musk’s backstory, but this statement about fusion shows he doesn’t know what he is talking about. It reminds me of all the Silicon Valley types that used to take Moore’s Law and what happened with chips, and then make moaning what-if comparisons to batteries.
Some problems are intrinsically harder than others. For most of the period Moore’s Law applied to, they had a simple blueprint: make things smaller. And relatively speaking the tools they needed to do this were easy to develop.
It ain’t so simple with batteries. I’m sure that there is a big difference in the amount of money spent on chip making research, but batteries have had a ton of money thrown at them… well since before that crew came up with the integrated circuit.
Batteries do get better, but it’s not a magic bullet. It is a slow gradual slog, with 2-3% a year of getting “better.”
They will get this in a far more usable form one day, because they would be so damn useful. I could write reams about what you could do if batteries could store the equivalent power of gasoline, even at maybe 1/3 the energy density if it were cheap enough.
And to go back to Fusion, it will happen one day. But my personal hunch is it is about a century problem; I wouldn’t expect any sort of commercial plant before about 2115 or something.
So IMHO Musk does talk out of his ass at times.
“Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he’s very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.”
This statement is dead on if you look around. Solar cells get “better” at around a 7% rate a year. There is obviously a thermodynamic limit, but if you can make them cheaply it’s just more cowbell.
And in the end, other than tidal effects, everything from winds to ocean currents to riverflow on this planet is due to solar radiation anyway. You can play the little games every engineer and scientist has done at some point with the amount of solar energy incident on earth (it is an assload).
But once again, there is a limit to how useful it can be in many situations because of energy storage. And that brings us to…
Batteries. You run into this every time. Or at least energy storage. This post is getting too long, but I’m sure that nothing in it is news to some of you.
Oh yeah, well stuff like the earth’s molten core and geothermal aren’t due to the sun, but that is a long discussion, and not the place here. It just wouldn’t be as much as a gamechanger as what you can do with solar.
As an aside, I've wondered if any of those studies which purport to demonstrate how allegedly gluttonous first-world countries consume so much more energy or have larger carbon footprints than poorer third world countries have ever factored in the BTU equivalent of the solar radiation per unit area that is available to much of the third world??? Wouldn't that equal things up a bit?
Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he's very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.Replies: @Sunbeam, @Romanian, @Mr. Anon, @Anonymous
Well, things are going swimmingly for him. Why shouldn’t technology march on, when he has himself as an example modern day Da Vinci? People like him tend to live in a separate world, where the struggles are intellectual or with institutions and the necessities of life are a given, enabling them to focus on their legacy. The only down-to-Earth rich person is the one who has stolen his wealth. I am pessimistic regarding breakthrough advances, and optimistic regarding incremental advances. The economic incentives and risks associated with each support my argument.
I am pessimistic regarding breakthrough advances, and optimistic regarding incremental advances. The economic incentives and risks associated with each support my argument."
Well said. One can make the argument that there never have been any breakthrough advances - that everything is incremental.
“Works great, until the natives hack you to death with machetes.”
I’m not necessarily in favor of “recolonization,” but a West with the will to embark upon such a path, won’t be seriously impeded by “natives…with machetes.” The Maxim gun has various modern equivalents, you know.
http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-re-colonization-future-orientation.htmlIn the piece he describes both inability and reasons for the sheer crap government that replaced colonial governments, the crumbling infrastructure, the horrid healthcare, the crime, and lists via graphics how many governments in Africa are absolutely dependent on aid as a significant portion of GDP, in many cases, 200% of actual domestic GDP, with a best case of Kenya having only 20%. And most of these governments are 50 years old. He goes through a long set of data and observations about the lack of future sense, of even having any sense of time, and of other cognitive issues leading to malfunctioning government and commercial sectors. I would say in much of the same areas today that were under Colonial mandate in the past, Africa, middle east, Central America (I would even include Mexico) that there is lack of cognitive ability to govern as well as create a viable commercial sector that can create livable conditions for the people that live and hence, compel people to immigrate. We cannot have the world move to Europe and North America. It is not environmentally viable nor culturally sustainable for us. I say this should be the foreign policy of the alt-right, to re-establish Colonial rule in these areas. If you just began to contemplate the benefits for those places and for us you could let your imaginations run wild. Imagine the possibilities.Replies: @Anonymous, @The Anti-Gnostic, @Romanian, @Anonymous
I’ve been mulling over a similar idea, but one that maintains at least the appearance and legitimacy of native rule. Have a far sighted African autocrat, like Kagame, create a guild of Western experts which would recruit, on a temporary basis, skilled administrators, judges, engineers and people to get things off the ground and running better, at least, than they currently do. Similar to how ancient kings would keep high-caste slaves with important skills, like Joseph in the House of Potiphar in the Bible (the animated musical was on TV a while back so that inspired the comparison).
You get the all important White diligence, faithfulness and knowledge, but you deny them any stake in the country and keep them separate from the population, to avoid animosities. They may hate Whites, but individual White people are seen as capable and trustworthy doers. You keep the numbers down (no immigration), hire them for 2-5 year stretches, don’t allow them to bring families, put their money in a foreign escrow account pending their removal from the country and set them to work with Native observers to learn the trade. Now, this won’t exactly cover the skills gap that an African society needs before it (re)becomes an advanced nation, but it would be a huge improvement over what they currently have. It’s enough to have a competent negotiation team for resource exploitation agreements to improve the economic outcome of the process a hundred times over. That’s really low hanging fruit. Someone in charge (or as “Advisor”) of Police, of the courthouses, of key industries, of public procurement, education. The marginal value of a White is huge in these instances, especially when coupled with authority derived from a completely black leadership.
Currently, White (or East Asian) expertise in Africa is limited either to those working for companies (which have their own goals diverging from National ones) or those working for NGOs (with their own agenda, like religion and immediate reduction in suffering over long term sustainability – notice the number of doctors helping women deliver their 9th child over the number of NGOs doing family planning). Mostly, the Whites are running around like headless chickens, with no unifying vision for actually developing the country in question or any authority to do so, if they cared to. Like those Germans building this nice road in Congo, which was swallowed up by the jungle because of interference with villages collecting tolls and paying for maintenance.
My idea might be a nice way for competent elderly Whites to be productive after becoming redundant at home, and accumulating a nice retirement package, or for Baristas-in-training with 110 IQs and liberal art degrees in IQ swamped places to go somewhere they can make a difference through simple better judgment.
Better to build open top cisterns 1,000 feet high.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @unit472
Better to build open top cisterns 1,000 feet high
You may be right but there is a atmospheric pressure gradient too. Over in Dubai where they built the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa , they installed airlocks at several levels to prevent street level air from finding its way up through the building otherwise hurricane force winds would be generated inside the building as a result of this pressure gradient. This same pressure gradient could also power turbine blades to power a water pump.
You could also stick a 20 foot pipe down in your local lake (high pressure) and have water magically shooting up and out of the pipe in a huge fountain ... which also doesn't happen.
To understand why this is so, you might enjoy a course in physics or fluid dynamics.
Probably because he is too busy with SpaceX building his Mars Colonial Transporter, Falcon Heavy rocket, and planning to colonize Mars himself, Tesla Motors building the Tesla Model S, Tesla Model X, Tesla Gigafactory, and the envisaging of the Hyperloop, flying an average of 3 times a week on his private jet, which he flies himself and owning two homes in Bel-Air and having joint custody over his five sons. There are only 24 hours in a day after all. Furthermore, Gov. Moonbeam doesn’t want to be upstaged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia#Impact_reduction_and_management
It is not as if boiling is the only method of desalination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DesalinationReplies: @oh its just me
salt is even building up in the Adirondaks regions, killing fish – and that just comes from salting roads during snowstorms.
Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he's very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.Replies: @Sunbeam, @Romanian, @Mr. Anon, @Anonymous
“Anonymous says:
In an interview a couple years ago, Musk said that he believed fusion would be easy to achieve and that he could do it if he weren’t doing other things, and that de-salination would then be very easy.”
Musk is a smart guy, but he is also (by reputation – I don’t know him) a somewhat arrogant guy. If he thinkgs that fusion would be easy to achieve, he should start sinking some of his fortune into it. Then we could ask him again when he is twenty years older and considerably poorer.
“Sahara and Arabian peninsula would be prime real estate. Great spots for solar power, incidentally. It would be pretty funny if the Arabian peninsula ran out of oil just when cheap solar becomes reality, and they maintain their energy superpower status.”
Solar power is not so readily transportable as oil. There are losses in transmitting electricity.
“Romanian says:
I am pessimistic regarding breakthrough advances, and optimistic regarding incremental advances. The economic incentives and risks associated with each support my argument.”
Well said. One can make the argument that there never have been any breakthrough advances – that everything is incremental.
“Anonym says:
It is not as if boiling is the only method of desalination.”
But every method of desalination does remove salt, and something has to be done with that salt. It doesn’t simply disappear. Of course, salt is a useful substance, so that’s not necessarily bad.
“unit472 says:
I recall someone suggesting that using deep water pressure itself could generate the power needed to run reverse osmosis desalinization plants. That is you build a coffer dam at the needed pressure depth and let pressurized sea water force itself through the membranes. It seemed fanciful but in the North Sea there is just such a structure. A concrete oil production platform that sits on the sea floor over 1000 feet below the surface. You can go down inside it to the bottom of the ocean! What such a structure costs I have no idea but I’m sure its not cheap but a water column 1000 feet high would generate more than 430 PSI and not use a single watt of power.”
You would still need electricity to pump the water back to the surface, as you’ve used up some of that pressure head to drive the water through the filters.
“SteveFan says:
Why give them any ideas? If they did come up with a solution for cheaper water via desalination or pumping excess water from other states, wouldn’t this just eliminate any possible limit to the levels of immigration they have planned for us? I actually welcome any constraints the current water shortage may bring. Maybe,just maybe it will curb the current levels of immigration, and get conservationists back in touch with their 1970′s roots concerning population growth.”
Quite right.
“Build it and they will come.”
So don’t build it.
“ou have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.””
Is there any indication that the people who gave us mariachi bands, low-riders, and those ridiculous pointy-toed cowboy boots are going to exhibit a great deal of elegance, sensitivity, and sophistication?
The great thing about owning the megaphone is you can say “immigrants are great for the standard of living” on Monday and “Americans have no choice but to get used to less” on Tuesday and have them both be true. Only “hatemonger” bloggers and barroom pedants will ever mention the contradiction.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4129/4947758374_eba6eeeb8c_b.jpg
I think it is worth it.Replies: @Threecranes
It would be simpler–more Zenlike–if you just moved up to the Hoh rainforest on the Pacific side of the Olympic mountains in Washington State. Take your chainsaw and hollow out a huge cedar and live Basho-like as an enlightened, wizened gnome who has turned his weary back on the world.
I also like the look of temperate and semi tropical rain forests. Long walks through the forests with dappled sunlight shining through and mossy logs and creeks everywhere is what I miss most about living in the upper Midwest.
I am joking about an actual rainforest backyard, however we really do have the best climate for almost every plant, better than their native climates in most cases, so long as they get appropriate water.
A bunch of Scottsdale style cactus and rock gardens might be fine for a suburb with huge lots like El Cajon and Rancho Sante Fe, but not in dense parts of town. Instead, we should take advantage and let small homeowners grow what they please. Our dense and rich residential neighborhoods like La Jolla, Coronado, and Mission Hills are some of the most beautiful in the world as a result, and providing a nice residential environment to these people is more important than enriching the immigrant-importing Central Valley landowners.
It isn't that I want my water subsidized, just that I think my fellow hardworking burghers should be able to use as much water as they like on their lawns provided they are willing to pay true market rates, not the current situation where the almond and alfalfa farmers pay 1/10 if what I do.
They're politicians. They want to get elected.
They're Democrats. Immigrants vote Democrat.
Imitating Bangladesh? Environmental regulation? Whatever. They just want to get re-elected.Replies: @whorefinder, @Realist
“They’re politicians. They want to get elected.”
That should tell you something about democracy.
But I like how San Diego has less than 10 inches of rain per year, mild summers, and warm winters. Plus our demographics are, as liberals delicately say, “good.”
I also like the look of temperate and semi tropical rain forests. Long walks through the forests with dappled sunlight shining through and mossy logs and creeks everywhere is what I miss most about living in the upper Midwest.
I am joking about an actual rainforest backyard, however we really do have the best climate for almost every plant, better than their native climates in most cases, so long as they get appropriate water.
A bunch of Scottsdale style cactus and rock gardens might be fine for a suburb with huge lots like El Cajon and Rancho Sante Fe, but not in dense parts of town. Instead, we should take advantage and let small homeowners grow what they please. Our dense and rich residential neighborhoods like La Jolla, Coronado, and Mission Hills are some of the most beautiful in the world as a result, and providing a nice residential environment to these people is more important than enriching the immigrant-importing Central Valley landowners.
It isn’t that I want my water subsidized, just that I think my fellow hardworking burghers should be able to use as much water as they like on their lawns provided they are willing to pay true market rates, not the current situation where the almond and alfalfa farmers pay 1/10 if what I do.
What's simplest and cheapest? Keep out r-selected groups. Stop subsidies for net-consuming lifestyles. There, plenty of water.Replies: @Hal
Uh, I wasn’t being serious.
1,000 ft deep osmotic filters have the problem that the filtered water is down there and we’re up here.
!,000 ft tall cisterns to catch rainwater have the problems that a) rainfall doesn’t need to be filtered and b) there is a shortage of rainfall.
It is fitting that Brown is again gov during what may prove to be a prolonged drought and chronic water shortage in CA. In the early 80s I was a grad student working on long term dam and aquifier project that had been part of the multi decade water management initiatives started under Pat Brown and continued under RR. The plan outlined step by step initiatives to be developed as the population of CA grew. Thus, supplies would always remain ahead of population growth even under 3 to 5 year drought conditions. Plan ahead.
All of this had for the better part of 3 decades been a back and forth between the state resources dept, engineering firms and a couple of engineering and science dept at UCB.
We were now at a threshold of needing to develop 2 projects to meet the requirements of the 3 to 5 year supply projections. Without any meaningful discussion or debate these 2 projects were killed. In the 30 + years that have since passed, with an increase in population of at least 10 million, no serious large scale water resource projects have taken place.
It is fitting that Brown reap the harvest that he himself had sown.
“You can play the little games every engineer and scientist has done at some point with the amount of solar energy incident on earth…”
As an aside, I’ve wondered if any of those studies which purport to demonstrate how allegedly gluttonous first-world countries consume so much more energy or have larger carbon footprints than poorer third world countries have ever factored in the BTU equivalent of the solar radiation per unit area that is available to much of the third world??? Wouldn’t that equal things up a bit?
The discussion about batteries versus gasoline is good, and it suggests the major problem with trying to import more people to densely populated zones (L.A.).
IF solar power had preceded petroleum as the prime energy source, things would be different. Since electricity can be transmitted across state lines, factories would be located where the geography is suitable. Electric rail transport would be prevalent, and agriculture would have relied on natural means for preserving soil fertility instead of methane based enhancements.
Farming would be much more labor intensive.
Things we do now but could not with an electric based economy would not have developed.
BTW, energy storage at solar electric plants is accomplished through molten salt tanks, and chemical batteries play a minor role.
Perhaps Mexico could be thought of as a people battery. If not enough people, withdraw some from the battery; if too many, recharge the battery.
Is this what Jerry Brown is thinking?
Doesn’t work that way. If air (or water) naturally flowed upward from a region of higher pressure to a region of lower pressure, all the air on earth would immediately jump into outer space of its own accord because air pressure in outer space is zero (as opposed to 14.7 psi on the ground) … which it doesn’t do.
You could also stick a 20 foot pipe down in your local lake (high pressure) and have water magically shooting up and out of the pipe in a huge fountain … which also doesn’t happen.
To understand why this is so, you might enjoy a course in physics or fluid dynamics.
So are we looking down the road at 330 million Californians?
But, hey, it's California. So everything's Archie.Replies: @Maj. Kong
Far more people could be sustained in say, Michigan, than now. Detroit once held twice its current population. Water supply is for our purposes unlimited.
And we could feed them all with Soylent…err Asian Carp.
Africans rulers already do this. They hire foreign Chinese and white folks to build infrastructure and teach Africans (sorta) to maintain and operate it. The Arabs do the same thing. The foreigners just have to leave when everything’s done.
In 1965, LA had the Watts riots. In 1944, LA had the Zoot Suit riots. Both were before the introduction of the welfare state and the large-scale “disparate impact” hires.
Welfare statism controls social unrest, that was the goal of the Prussians who invented it. The minute you abolish Medicaid, if it were even politically possible, you would have an armed insurgency. I’m not so sure you would have a force of John Galts or the National Guard, to suppress said insurgency.
The problem with the welfare state is the social values of those creating and administering it, along with the demographics that use it. Pre-invasion Scandinavia was fairly pleasant, if suicidal.
@Steve Sailer
In an interview a couple years ago, Musk said that he believed fusion would be easy to achieve and that he could do it if he weren’t doing other things, and that de-salination would then be very easy."
Musk is a smart guy, but he is also (by reputation - I don't know him) a somewhat arrogant guy. If he thinkgs that fusion would be easy to achieve, he should start sinking some of his fortune into it. Then we could ask him again when he is twenty years older and considerably poorer.Replies: @Big Bill
Musk is real good at getting government to subsidize his dreamier ventures. By one accounting I read recently, all the various high tech ventures he has been involved in have cost the US government $5.9 billion. Guaranteed loans, tax abatements, subsidies for electric car purchases, etc. It’s always dreamier using OPM.
Maybe they’ll stop eating refried beans and just fry it once to save energy?
http://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-re-colonization-future-orientation.htmlIn the piece he describes both inability and reasons for the sheer crap government that replaced colonial governments, the crumbling infrastructure, the horrid healthcare, the crime, and lists via graphics how many governments in Africa are absolutely dependent on aid as a significant portion of GDP, in many cases, 200% of actual domestic GDP, with a best case of Kenya having only 20%. And most of these governments are 50 years old. He goes through a long set of data and observations about the lack of future sense, of even having any sense of time, and of other cognitive issues leading to malfunctioning government and commercial sectors. I would say in much of the same areas today that were under Colonial mandate in the past, Africa, middle east, Central America (I would even include Mexico) that there is lack of cognitive ability to govern as well as create a viable commercial sector that can create livable conditions for the people that live and hence, compel people to immigrate. We cannot have the world move to Europe and North America. It is not environmentally viable nor culturally sustainable for us. I say this should be the foreign policy of the alt-right, to re-establish Colonial rule in these areas. If you just began to contemplate the benefits for those places and for us you could let your imaginations run wild. Imagine the possibilities.Replies: @Anonymous, @The Anti-Gnostic, @Romanian, @Anonymous
What would be the point. Multinationals today don’t have much difficulty accessing the natural and labor resources of those places today.
The entire reason all those people are migrating is precisely because those areas are under the “Colonial rule” of contemporary international economics. Isolated Amazonian tribes aren’t migrating because they still have subsistence assets like their land and hunting and gathering grounds. If a logging company wants the timber on their land and kicks them off and tells them they’ll have to get “real jobs” to survive and feed themselves, then they will be migrating somewhere. When NAFTA was imposed, Mexican peasant farmers suddenly had their crops severely undercut and they lost their subsistence assets and needed to get “real jobs” flipping burgers and cutting grass.
The solution is not to deprive people of subsistence assets. This requires advanced economies to solve problems technologically, not through trade and by seeking cheaper raw materials and labor.
And takes navy showers.
Or in Jerry Brown's case, skips every other day.Replies: @Jefferson
“California Can Afford 11 Million More Immigrants if Everybody Adopts a Zen Lifestyle
And takes navy showers.
Or in Jerry Brown’s case, skips every other day.”
Occupy Wall Street would support any law that would legally force Americans to take less showers. Those far Left Wing marijuana smoking SWPL hipster hippies do not seem to be big fans of water touching their bodies on a regular basis. Their hygiene is barely any better than that of a homeless panhandler.
“They’re politicians. They want to get elected.”
The Founder’s experiment has clearly failed to take into account some factors in the modern world.
Didn’t ancient Athens sometimes just draft politicians and generals? Like with jury duty? Maybe we could pick politicians at random, then have rounds of votes to throw them out of the “jury pool”. If not enough people vote against them, they have to serve as a politician for 2 or 5 years. I don’t see how it could be much worse than the current system. But I suppose any system will fail if enough of the people aren’t invested in its success.
Can you give me some examples? I think that what you’re discussing is hiring Western companies to do stuff. Money goes out, infrastructure comes in (expensive and late), and it’s in shambles a few years later because of poor maintenance. I was talking about a different approach where the Africans get themselves some oubaas (old white bosses in South Africa) of their own to show them the ropes and make the hard decisions.
Put it back in the ocean (to diffuse) or sell it. It’s a lot better than distributing small amounts of it over large areas of arable land.
Welfare statism controls social unrest, that was the goal of the Prussians who invented it. The minute you abolish Medicaid, if it were even politically possible, you would have an armed insurgency. I'm not so sure you would have a force of John Galts or the National Guard, to suppress said insurgency.
The problem with the welfare state is the social values of those creating and administering it, along with the demographics that use it. Pre-invasion Scandinavia was fairly pleasant, if suicidal.Replies: @ben tillman
Think about it. If pre-invasion Sweden had been suicidal, pre-invasion Sweden would have been dead.
The worldview of pre-invasion Sweden, allowed the invasion. That's suicidal to the best of my understanding.
HIV-AIDS doesn't kill directly, it weakens the immune system which allows other pathogens to complete the killing.
Multikult is HIV, Islamism is TB, Africans are pneumonia, tax revenue for welfare statism is the antibodies.Replies: @ben tillman
It was a LA Times hit piece, tax abatements are what everyone gets for building big factories and locating them in a particular state. He only gets the full tax break if the factory is running at full tilt and then it would only account for about 1 percent of it’s revenue. At SpaceX, he financed three rocket engine designs and a space capsule design entirely with his own money, and only split the development costs with Uncle Sam on the fourth, he also is building his massive rocket and Mars lander with his own money. Yeah, he has benefited from the DOE loan program with Tesla, but he paid it back in full ten years early and with interest, whereas GM and Chrysler still haven’t paid back theirs and in the case of Chrysler the one from thirty years before was paid for by import quotas which effectively limited the Japanese to 20-22 percent of the market, which means American consumers guaranteed the loan by American taxpayers which are course the same people.
All of the Big 3 automakers made money hand over fist from the “voluntary quotas” on Japanese cars in the 1980’s, effectively boosting the price of their cars and saving them from financial ruin. The LA Times article also implied the tax breaks for electric cars are somehow specific to his company, but they exist in the US tax code and any manufacturer could take advantage of them by building and selling all electric cars but they don’t.
And your California ancestors died of diseases caused by filth.
Is that your solution? Stink, filth, and disease?Replies: @SPMoore8, @dcite
There’s an interesting conversation in “The Grapes of Wrath” concerning bathing. The dust-bowl migrants are talking about the recent amenities they’d been given by, I think, government attention. This included access to daily showers. One of them says when he used to take a bath once a week, he didn’t stink. Now, since he’s gotten used to taking them every day, if he doesn’t shower every day, he stinks.
I don’t know if that is because your nose just gets more sensitive when it’s attached to a cleaner body, or if something about bathing — especially hot showers — brings out more toxins and sweat. Actually people in the past did wash daily, if they were able. It was more on the order of sponge baths because total immersion was thought by some doctors to be weakening. Nevertheless, and contrary to common perceptions, well to do people in the 18th-19th centuries bathed daily. There’s a detailed description of poor Marie Antoinette standing shivering after her bath as her royal garments were passed for inspection, one by one, from one lady in waiting to the next, before they got on Marie. Every morning she had to go through that, not once a week.
Is Sweden dead yet?
The worldview of pre-invasion Sweden, allowed the invasion. That’s suicidal to the best of my understanding.
HIV-AIDS doesn’t kill directly, it weakens the immune system which allows other pathogens to complete the killing.
Multikult is HIV, Islamism is TB, Africans are pneumonia, tax revenue for welfare statism is the antibodies.
Actually it’s true that you can stink more if you don’t shower after a period of showering daily than if you shower infrequently or irregularly. When you shower every day, your skin and scalp produce more oil, which has a smell and traps odor causing agents, in order to compensate for the loss of oil when showering.
Oh good God, the game is just to turn every area in America brown.
The worldview of pre-invasion Sweden, allowed the invasion. That's suicidal to the best of my understanding.
HIV-AIDS doesn't kill directly, it weakens the immune system which allows other pathogens to complete the killing.
Multikult is HIV, Islamism is TB, Africans are pneumonia, tax revenue for welfare statism is the antibodies.Replies: @ben tillman
Sweden had no such worldview before the 1960’s (in1965, the social democratic Prime Minister of Sweden Tage Erlander said, “We Swedes live in an infinitely luckier situation. Our country’s population is homogeneous, not only in terms of race, but also in many other respects” ), and there’s no reason to think the current worldview of Sweden’s rulers is an organic expression of the nature of the Swedish people in general. The historical record seems to indicate that the idea of multiculturalism or multiracialism was injected into Swedish politics in the 1960’s by a Polish Jew named David Schwarz. The Swedish worldview was not indigenous; it was cultivated by outsiders.
It was certainly given an injection into American politics by a Swedish Swede named Gunnar Myrdal.
Where did Myrdal pick it ip?
Incidentally, Musk is unusual in that he's very optimistic about the near-term unlike the current zeitgeist.Replies: @Sunbeam, @Romanian, @Mr. Anon, @Anonymous
Musk is just waiting for the key component: generous government funding.
Even if a low cost carbon neutral desalination plant was created leftist watermelon enviromentalmarxists don’t want the saltier water that is a by product of desalination increasing the salinity of the ocean. Elon Musk realizes not only would the ideal system not be accepted but could never be profitable & that private space travel is a lot easier by comparison. Someone invented a pill you can take to avoid getting drunk when drinking booze but no one wanted it.
Another way of looking at things is that white privilege leads to over-engineering. The mars rovers had been built for 90 day missions, one lasted 6 years and the other is still going 11+years strong. They wanted to guarantee it would still work at the end of 90days. White engineers build to withstand twice the expected stress, H1Bs barely grasp concepts.
Reg Cæsar says: June 12, 2015 at 11:56 pm GMT @Hippopotamusdrom
In 1975, Jerry Brown complained, that the federal government wanted to “dump Vietnamese on” California. “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away [to import likely Republicans especially with Asians being smarter than mestizos] and at the same time neglecting [Democratic voters] who live here”
Clearer now?
Fixed it for you.
Now I don't know how they knew they were illegals. I guess they had the Mestizo look and spoke limited to no English. But I find it interesting that two different guys from two different area departments would report such a story. I've never heard about this anywhere else.Replies: @Anonymous
Actually another problem is that homeless men who have by their actions been banned from homeless shelters, will call an ambulance so they can sleep in the hospital waiting rooms especially when its cold out. Its usually the same people and ambulances wheel them through the ER to dump them in the waiting room. They do rotate through the different hospitals of a city when they wear out their welcome. They make a scene to get fed a patient tray. Along with the fact ambulances transporting like that can not serve people in real emergencies as quickly the costs are insane when they keep pretending they have something wrong that an ER should deal with. One homeless man had 20 x-ray studies done in a month before someone told him if he doesn’t actually have chest pain (which gets you in faster) you probably don’t want the radiation to all of your organs 4x a week. When you hear of a patient dying in an ER waiting room it is most likely a homeless man.
Another way of looking at things is that white privilege leads to over-engineering. The mars rovers had been built for 90 day missions, one lasted 6 years and the other is still going 11+years strong. They wanted to guarantee it would still work at the end of 90days. White engineers build to withstand twice the expected stress, H1Bs barely grasp concepts.Replies: @Hal
Ok. This is just stupid.
“Can someone explain why the world’s greatest inventor and science-industrial-guru, Elon Musk, hasn’t come up with an efficient, cost-effective sea-water desalinization system yet? He does live in California, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he put his mastermind to something worthwhile?”
Because there is no government subsidy for it.
You can do all kinds of worthless engineering projects if someone else pays for it.
Like multiculturalism!
None of this is believable. Tesla is not profitable.
1,000 ft deep osmotic filters have the problem that the filtered water is down there and we're up here.
!,000 ft tall cisterns to catch rainwater have the problems that a) rainfall doesn't need to be filtered and b) there is a shortage of rainfall.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
I got your drift. You weren’t who I was describing in my comment.
I'm not necessarily in favor of "recolonization," but a West with the will to embark upon such a path, won't be seriously impeded by "natives...with machetes." The Maxim gun has various modern equivalents, you know.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
The Maxim gun’s technological edge fades when the natives are willing to stack their own bodies up like cordwood and blow themselves up in marketplaces. How’s the French Empire doing these days?
From Leon Trotsky.
Quite well keeping the peace against radical Muslims in Mali.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Serval
OK I love you man, in a manly bro-love way.