Well what do you think is the likelyhood that anyone who defends themselves against one of these thugs is going to avoid being convicted of murder?

There wasn't much implied by my comment. About all I can say is that the authorities are certainly stupid enough to try something like outlawing Bitcoin, but more likely they will create layer upon layer of new regulations that no one understands. The end result will be further ambiguity, which is perfect for the .gov because the objective these days seems to be to have so many laws with so many interpretations that you can basically bust anyone for anything if don't happen to like them.

I personally think there should be free and competing money systems, and governments should use other means for generating income, that don't require totalitarianism to enforce, as is the case with the current tax system(s).

I don't think it's as simple as wealth controlling the power structure. Certainly there are a lot of wealthy people with a lot of power, whether directly or behind the scenes, but there are also many wealthy who are just as much at risk of being victimized by the situation as you or I.

Making profits is evil! We should get free infinite bandwidth and healthcare. The government should make it that way. And by the way, don't mess with my personal liberties.

As long as most people are stupid enough to exist in such states of cognitive dissonance, then the situation is simply hopeless.

Well, you didn't beat it. But you're one of the few to be in the position of having a moral right to criticize it.

There is a logic to it. By voting for one or the other, we legitimize them.

But you win too if you can actually grasp the implications of this truth. Not that there is any obvious practical solution. But if you get this then you can clearly understand why our current governing structures are such a threat to free society (free society != society without rules). And you will see how narrowly constrained is the thinking of political "progressives," "conservatives," and ironically, even libertarians.

If you have a science/engineering mindset, you may begin to realize that there is something seriously amiss with the situation:

We are trying to control society by using blunt force, when we haven't even the crudest working predictive model for human behavior, much less collective behavior.

It takes a great deal of arrogance, ignorance, and cognitive dissonance to persist at advocating the "state." It becomes virtually impossible if you get this. It's kind of like an "awakening." Once you see it, you can never unsee it.

Don't get confused by people who tell you that if you don't have a way to fix it, then there's no use pointing out how wrong the status quo is.

When something is inherently wrong, it is absolutely correct to cease doing it. Regardless of whether you know what to do instead. Why must you do anything at all?

Make it a felony.

No. Nearly every state has made it a crime to defend yourself against a police officer, even if that officer is threatening your life while violating your constitutionally guaranteed rights.

At nearly every turn, you are just plain fucked.

If my arithmetic is right, this thing can run for 14 hrs? Ie, about 52GWh of stored energy. This is awesome! We'd need about 150 of these to solve the "storage problem" wholesale for the entire US.

No, HVDC is good enough. You don't need 99% efficiency at 10x the cost of 90% efficiency. It's just not worth it. Besides, I doubt the efficiency of superconductors with their associated refrigeration would be competitive with HVDC anyway, or why else is it that HVDC is the market leader for long haul transmission right now?

Simpler tech. wins. HVDC is simple, in the sense that the failure modes are rather localized and not terribly difficult to repair and/or design in some redundancy to mitigate so as to achieve very high reliability. All you need is some spare power electronic converter channels at both ends, and if you loose one you can switch to another in a few seconds, while the remaining channels handle the short term surge load.

Blow one seal on a superconducting line, and the whole thing is down for a long time before it's fixed and cooled back down, assuming that the loss of cooling didn't result in vaporizing a part of the line that you now have to go searching for and dig up.

A common misconception: "Scientific facts have been over turned time and time again."

No scientific facts have ever been overturned, because there are no scientific facts. You are only partially correct about theories.

There are scientific laws, theories, and hypotheses. Scientific laws, which were once theories, have been supported by so many years of consistent observational data that the confidence bounds on their correctness are so tight that it is essentially impossible that they will ever be falsified.

As such, NO scientific laws have ever been overturned. Rather, for ex. Newton's laws of motion, were REFINED by quantum mechanics and relativity so that the laws continue to work correctly at extremes of observability that weren't available to Newton. But over the domain in which Newton's laws were formulated, they are still valid to within any desired tolerance. So they are just as correct today as when Newton expressed them, and they have been that way since the beginning of time and will remain so until the universe is over. The same is true of Maxwell's equations, the gas laws, the laws of thermodynamics, and every other law that I can't recall.

Evolution is a theory, which means that it doesn't have the confidence levels of a law, but is supported by a huge wealth of consistent observations and basically no falsifying ones. That means that even if inconsistencies are observed, they will be subtle and change only our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, but not the overall basic thesis. It is remotely possible that some evidence will be found that will completely overturn evolution, but it is so remote that you are more likely to die by getting struck by lightning twice on the day a cure for cancer is announced, and after you just won the lottery.

Also importantly, there are basically no competing theories to evolution that are supported by even a shred of *reproducible,* non-circularly speculative, evidence. No, the writings in some book are not evidence, because there is no basis to establish that your favorite novel which states "the contents of this novel are the truth" is any more truthful than any other supposedly self-proving novel written by anybody at all.

Global warming, or whatever it's called these days, and many of the pronouncements of the medical science establishment, such as that you should eat lots of carbs and low fat in order to reduce the likelyhood of getting heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, are hypotheses that are to be seriously questioned. In the latter case, it's looking like the evidence is already becoming clear that it is just plain wrong, and killing people to boot. But because of entrenched interests, there will be resistance to admitting fault and correcting the errors for as long as possible.

These should serve as stern warnings to those who proclaim that the "science is established" for their favorite, political and social identity-reinforcing scientifico-ideologies, that while the *scientific method* is indeed infallible, and is no doubt (along with mathematics) one of the crown jewels of human intellectual accomplishment, the implementation of that method by humans is in no way perfect. Even peer-reviewed research is highly fallible.

Even in the case where the science may indeed be right, such as with global warming which I think is most likely being accelerated by humans and which will probably have undesirable consequences (of highly uncertain magnitude) unless we do something different, it is important not to confuse the scientific realities with the practical realities.

Just because you may be technically correct, it is still possible that there is no way to fix it because of factors which are not amenable to technological control and optimization. For ex., anyone with a brain can predict that the most likely outcome of any of the existing proposed political solutions to global warming are likely to both not solve the problem, and make matters generally worse for the human condition due to furthering the evolution of the global technocratic totalitarian governance model. If the only way to get your way is a large scale war and the use of force at every level of society, is that really a better world to live in than one in which we just keep burning the carbon until the coastal cities are innundated? I'm personally more terrified of political disasters than slow motion natural ones, even if initiated by man.

Likewise with nuclear fission power, the problems are not technical. It is perfectly possible within the capabilities of the engineering disciplines to implement nuclear fission power with closed/breeding fuel cycles so as to power our civilization relatively safely for the next few eons.

But it isn't practically possible to solve the human problems that will make such an engineering goal impossible to realize. When you factor this into the analysis (along with a brief view at any chart showing the capital costs of solar PV vs. coal power generation vs. time), you will reach the conclusion that the costs of "simple" technology (which nuclear fission with a closed fuel cycle is about as far away from as you can get, even farther perhaps than D-T fusion) are preferrable because their practicality is so much greater.

There is a far better chance of being able to succeed, as a society, at sustainably powering ourselves for ex. by covering most of our rooftops and 2000-3000 square kilometers of south western USA with solar PV, distributing the power with HVDC, and storing 1/3 of it overnight in distributed batteries, flywheels, waterbeds, and other thingamabobs, than through a similarly large in scale, but incredibly more complex (due to the safety and security issues involved) implementation of full-scale closed-cycle nuclear fission to completely replace our fossil energy sources.

It's the fact that about half or more of the population is so scientifically illiterate that they actually believe stuff like this, that is leading me, at my age, to begin to just not care anymore. I'm just going to goof off for the few years I might have left on this world.

Look, if these f*cking self-powered generators are real, and are so f*cking simple to build that some guy can build one in his garage (which must be true, since there are literally 1000s of these videos out there) then why the f*ck aren't they making them and selling them? Or even disconnecting their own houses from the grid--without some hidden generator/fuel source going on behind the fraudulent scenes)?

WHAT is stopping these things from being sold at every hardware store and all over Amazon, with 5 star reviews saying "It powers my whole home, I cancelled my utility connection, and when there was a minor break down, the manufacturer sent the repair guy a few hours after I called and had me back up in no time! Love it! Would buy again."

Lemme guess, some "conspiracy" by "big oil" or some other claptrap, right?

The answer of course is that these self-powered generators are bullshit, and the people who believe they work idiots, and the people who believe they made one that works scarier still, with most of them knowing full well that it is bullshit, but they are just sociopathic criminals who hope to defraud others, knowing that most people are stupid enough to believe in these generators, along with other fairy tails, so perhaps there should even be a special exemption in the law that prevents charging them for defrauding people who seriously just plain deserve it.

WTF are you talking about, they work on completely different neurotransmitter systems and by different mechanisms (one an agonist, the other an antagonist). How can you even make meaningful comparisons of such apples and oranges?

The problem with cocaine is that it's short lived, and the brain's dopamine circuit activity undershoots when it wears off, leaving one with an awful depressing crash.

Cocaine is nothing but a novelty, though one that sheds valuable light on the workings of the brain.

Someone figured out that something structurally similar could have similar effects and synthesized methylphenidate (in an time when you could do it in your basement, administer it to your wife, and have it all be legal)! Just imagine how much scientific progress in drug and neuro-scientific discovery has been inhibited by the war on drugs.

MPH is much slower to take effect, and slower to wear off, and so has more of the good effects of a moderate dose of cocaine, with much less of the bad effects. Hence, it is a useful drug for ADHD, whereas cocaine could never be.

And so WHY can't the kid do what isn't interesting and can do what is interesting?

The shortcomings of the medical establishment are not a valid counterpoint to the the scientific facts of ADHD. Yes the psychiatrists have fucked things up by probably over-diagnosing. But people try to claim that ADHD doesn't exist because the psychs. made it up and because "there's no diagnostic test for it." The psychs. should be taken to task by the neuro-scientists for screwing up public understanding terribly. But, there are also the religious and the psycho-cult (Scientologists) with their anti-psychiatry crusade.