Was the water wet?

You aren't arguing what you think you're arguing. There's no reason that performing work means that the work can't be useful in its own right.

Companies like SolarCity basically install solar systems for no money up front, and then lease them back to you for a period. For many houses, even with these fees, the SolarCity systems will save the homeowner quite a bit of money. Licenses to sell power back to the grid are usually restricted, even in states they are allowed. If you have a battery system installed, you will no longer have to sell your excess solar energy back to the grid. You'll simply be able to store it in your battery for later use. Thus, homeowners with these systems may not have to apply for licenses for their solar systems, since they will not be doing net-metering. This will allow many users to install solar panels who couldn't before. It removes the ability for utilities and/or state governments to restrict the number of homes with solar panels. This is why these batteries will likely have a huge impact.

I think this is the core question. The answer is that these problems happen all the time. For example, there's a large category of perceived problems which aren't actual problems. For example, your claim that power companies don't "add value" when in the next sentence you state exactly the value they provide - power that _everyone_ wants. Since they are actually adding considerable value, the difficult problem of the valueless power companies is easily adverted by not having existed in the first place.

Second, there are the very difficult problems that aren't your problems. I find letting people work their difficult problems out on their own is the best solution here. Among other things, it's an educational experience that allows people to solve other difficult problems they face over the course of their lives.

`Then there's the difficult problem that one makes works by messing with it. For example:

In other words, the Socialist takes their one tool in the box and whacks on the problem happily. Then when the problem results in more problems (such as your DMV example where the supposed "anti-gov't types" fail to behave according to script), there's more targets to whack on. The top-down strategy common to socialism results in all sorts of problems due to both the ignorance and venality of the policy makers as well as the crude nature of the tools.

There is a standard destructive spiral that socialism gets in. First, they create a public good. Then when the rest of the world behaves in a way as to overconsume the public good, the standard tragedy of the commons phenomenon, then a bureaucracy is set up to regulate the consumption of the public good and starts doing its own thing. Then the cycle repeats, this time with a sliver of the society trapped in this bit of waste. This is exactly a place where relatively free markets excel.

Finally, there is the continued contradiction of growing an ever more complex, opaque, powerful, and unaccountable government while saying "Sure, you have to keep an eye on things". No, you aren't keeping an eye on things. You are growing one of the largest problems of societies, known since we first had civilizations. You don't have to "keep an eye" on markets like you do on bureaucracies, whether government-based or otherwise, who have little stake in doing their job.

Don't confuse private opinion with public stance. Most of those self-avowed socialists don't hold an elected position in a moderately conservative electorate.

An obvious one is small scale experiments on oceanic plants, possibly engineered, that could sequester carbon dioxide. For example, the ideal plant would be a carbon-fixing plant that has relatively small iron and phosphorus needs and sinks once it dies. You could drop a lot of carbon into the bottom of the ocean fast with a plant like that. And if it's a huge monoculture, then eventually something will figure out how to eat it.

Yeah. Imagine if it happened on final approach.

I remember supporting an office with win95 and Access. I had tech support conversations that almost went like this:

Or nonexistent. Of course, I don't see a problem that needs fixing either.

The latest IPCC report widened the range on the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of carbon dioxide. It also backpedaled on the previous reports assertions about current and future effect of AGW on extreme weather.

It means they're solving a harder problem.

The amazing thing about Elon Musk is that when he was a student he actually lived on $1/day for a while. He said that knowing he could live on so little was quite freeing, enabling him to take more risks.

I really don't think of him as your typical billionaire.

Yeah, the only difference is that Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, two years before Space X was founded, and only just now launched his first rocket. Bezos sounds like the Justin Hammer of the commercial space industry.

Your links show predictions with large error bars. So no, they aren't very good at predicting.

Facts trump propaganda. Those links don't explain why there is a factor of three uncertainty in the long term temperature forcing of a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere or why actual climate change is coming in at the bottom of their predictions.