Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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Short sightedness
[Read the article: The technology that will save humanity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Even in a world where our primary source of energy is burning dead dinosaurs, allowing everyone to breed as much as they like is the most ridiculous and unnatural thing we do. We have done away with natural selection. Some sort of selection process has to replace it in a world with finite resources. Restricting all women to having no more than 2 children is the only sufficiently arbitrary system we're likely to come up with.
It's mind boggling to me that with the finite nature of our resources (even hydrogen) becoming more apparent by the day, we are still fixated on Earth-bound solutions to our problems. Space based solar energy would be thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of times more efficient than any earth based solution. Plentiful (not limitless) supplies of all the elements needed to manufacture anything are available in the asteroid belt. And space based manufacturing removes the biggest source of pollution from our biosphere.
But instead of investing in space and nanotechnology, here we sit trying to support unrestrained population growth with corn and hot water. Prolonging the inevitable instead of coming up with real solutions. As long as we get through the next 100 years it will be someone else's problem, right?
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@Mike Sulzer
[Read the article: The technology that will save humanity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That solution uses, for the most part, existing technology. Throw in nanotech and the abilitity to develop super strong superconducting cables and efficiency approaches 100%. Putting the collectors out in space eliminates roughly 62 kilometers of atmosphere and gets you a lot more energy than terestrial collectors to start with.
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@Mike Sulzer
[Read the article: The technology that will save humanity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No, this isn't Larry Niven. And it's unlikely that we will ever build a 200 mile long cable from a single molecule. Not impossible, but unlikely. But it is likely (even probable) that nanotech will give us superconducting materials that are strong enough to do the job.
Of course, an affordable room temperature superconductor would solve the transmission loss issue for terrestrial power as well.
The atmosphere absorbs a lot of solar energy, one of the reasons we can live here. Putting collectors in space increases the amount of energy they can collect. This is not a new idea, just one that has never gained any traction because energy was cheap.
Microwaves are inefficient. Energy diminishes as a product of distance from the source. Superconductors, by definition, are perfectly efficient, or as near to perfect as is possible in an imperfect universe. The energy would be evenly distributed throughout the entire mass of the cable, with nearly no loss. So the net gain would be whatever the transmission loss for a microwave system would end up as. 70%?
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When he said they cling
[Read the article: Bitter as hell in Pennsylvania]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He meant they cling to them as an issue, not as a lifestyle decision. As was obvious to anyone who heard him and wasn't trying to take the most negative connotation.
Guns don't matter in this race. No one is going to take them away. Religion doesn't matter, unless you want your religion to become the state religion or to teach our kids pseudo science in public schools. But that's all anyone is talking about now, isn't it?
The most remarkable thing about all of this is how Obama pretty much refuses to attack Hillary - and there is more than enough there to attack. I think if she loses the primary or the general election, we are watching the end of HRC's political career. Thank God. Obama, on the other hand, will still have a party to back him if he doesn't get it done this time around.
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@Barrister
[Read the article: Bitter as hell in Pennsylvania]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Who created the policies and negotiated the deals that allowed all those jobs to leave?
The people of Pennsylvania aren't stupid enough to think the government had nothing to do with it.
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@Barrister
[Read the article: Bitter as hell in Pennsylvania]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Definitely agree that there used to be a sense of ethics among employers in this country that is (for the most part) gone.
NAFTA didn't help the American worker. The Bush policy of increasing the number of H1-B visas and extending them even as Americans were being laid off didn't help, and although that didn't affect blue collar workers it has hurt the middle class.
But you are right, you can't point the finger at a single person or administration. Every administration in the last 30 years has become increasingly beholden to corporate interests, and corporations are the only ones who have benefited from any of this. Government stopped doing its job.
You tax what you want to discourage, and subsidize what you want to encourage. Why don't we have taxes on offshoring labor and manufacturing? I understand the free market arguments against such taxes. And I'd be all for them if we lived in a perfect world with perfect markets, but we don't. Our policies have been incredibly destructive to our middle class and, frankly, suicidal in the long term.
I'd be completely amazed if the people of Pennsylvania weren't bitter. I'm bitter, and I've actually done pretty well through all of this. Watching my country get dismantled and sold to the highest campaign contributor while Americans suffer pisses me off.