I get your point, if I have 20 acres, losing a .5 acre strip across the property isn't that much relatively speaking. But the 20% of the property owners are saying no and will be forced to give up parts of their land.

Currently the payoff period for an LED bulb is well over 10x the payoff period for solar panels (and that's ignoring batteries and inverters which will have to be replaced 2-3 times during the payoff period).

Insulation-- okay if you are low on it. Don't have good figures for it tho.

I went to LED and ignoring the 13x lifespan vs incandescent, my bill dropped noticeably. I pay about $50 a month for 8 months a year and then $120 for 3 months and $150 for 1 month for a 2000sq foot house.

I used to pay about $20 a month more (tho I still had a few $50 months) when I was using incandescent bulbs. So that's an LED bulb paid off about every 20 days. I figure incandescents were both consuming more electricity AND they were pumping more heat in to the house that had to be cooled back down (at more cost).

I Greatly prefer 3100K led bulbs . They are simliar in color to incandescent bulbs.

I have crazy levels of insulation. About 24" in the attic of blown in stuff by the prior owner. It's sort of unbelievable they put in so much. I really can't see how it was cost effective for them.

I cannot even begin to count the number of commenters here who pushed HTML5 as the best way to end, once and for all, those incredibly invasive and annoying Flash ads.

You got exactly what you were asking for.

So long as business is on the web, there will never, ever, ever be a technological "solution" to online advertising. There's simply too much money at stake for that to happen.

Hippocratic oath is "do no harm"

If you think your patient will be harmed by the nocebo effect, then you have to bullshit them.

In a high tech world, we can no longer afford to be governed by the innumerate, technically challenged and the uneducated. Democracy as currently constructed is failing.

Agreed. The CLI of gpg is horrible. There are some semi-acceptible GUI variants, not least Enigmail, and a good UI is is definitely going to be required if you are going to get general acceptance.

But the main reasons it continues to not get used are

0) Math* is hard!
1) The rise of webmail
2) Inverse network effects

* encryption being a subset of math.

0) It's hard to explain to people that they need encryption, how it works, what it is. People think email is secure! The "envelope" iconography is very misleading - email is more like a postcard, delivered by a random selection of disreputable postmen.

1) Webmail makes it much harder to do encrypted mail because to make it secure you'd have to install browser plugins. None of the webmail providers want to make one, because it will destroy their revenue stream of monetizing the analysis of your mail traffic.

2) If you want to actually use (G)PG(P) your recipient also has to grok it, install software to use it, and you have to exchange keys. This is a massive hurdle to overcome for all but the most dedicated cryptonerds. Until there is a majority of people who want to use encrypted mail, that will carry on being the case.

There are projects attempting to overcome some of these hurdles ; you have the likes of keybase.io that takes some of the sting out of key exchange (and verification).

But!

Until encryption comes with the communications software you are using out of the box, is enabled by default, interoperates with everything properly, and forces you to configure it to even use it, the vast mass people won't use it. And this is well known by the SIGINT agencies who view people actually using encryption AT ALL as a red flag that they should look closer at.

Actual FTE jobs created are about 2 years at 1,950 jobs. Many of the jobs are for 4 or 8 months and seasonal.

Permanent jobs created will be under three dozen. Check politifact.

That's one more reason why the oil companies want a pipeline. Much cheaper to operate. Lots less jobs. Truckers and railroad unions will lose jobs when the pipeline is built.

Mainly, I just don't see the government taking the 20% of the property along the line from people who don't want to sell. I'm surprised conservatives are for that.

So it's not really going to create jobs... and it's probably going to increase the price of that oil when prices go back up ( not for several years to eight years tho and it may increase the oil glut holding prices down a while more until supply goes up).

I don't really care if they build it or not. But it is very "stinky".

Shale wells have much shorter life spans and lower investments than traditional wells.

By hedging, they can come online rapidly whenever the price rises- pump out the presold oil and then wait until the price drops again.

It would mean less job stability for sure tho and that would effect rampup time some.

But prices are unlikely to get over $100 again for 6-8 years. It was held artificially high for too long.

Now that the alternative technologies have been invented, they can be optimized. They wouldn't have been invented yet if oil prices had been allowed to fluctuate in the past.

Interesting read, thanks! So true, you comments reflect the adage "taxes are the price we pay for civilization..." And also, capitalism tends toward privatizing gains and socializing costs...

If you see my other posts above though, I am not concerned about the technology to feed the world even without the Haber process (and perhaps better without it). As at this link, we have the technology through organic farming:
"Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?"
http://www.worldwatch.org/node...

Whether we have the political will is a different issue, with so many vested interests in the current synthetic-chemical-based agricultural system.

Another aspect of this craziness:
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

I agree wholeheartedly that the eBook experience *could* be much better than physical books, but it isn't.

As an experiment, I recently picked up a reader and tried it (Sony eReader). Here's what I found:

1. .) The contrast is lousy, it's reading with a piece of slightly frosted glass between you and the text
2. .) The reflected glare is awful. You can't read wearing a white shirt, for example.
3. .) Every time the system powers up it has to run through the database making a hash of each file it finds. This can take upwards of an hour, depending on the number and complexity of items, and during which the system cannot be used.
4. .) It always shows PDFs at "fill the screen" resolution, which means that the margins of the original page are always visible, which means that most of the display area is wasted. I can "zoom" individual pages, but to go to the next page I have to get out of zoom and then reapply the zoom to the next page.
5. .) Using the "small-medium-large" setting scales the font, but not the formatting. Characters and words become larger, but the "breaks" at the original margins are still there, meaning that the lines break at odd places and waste much of the display area.
6. .) Finding a specific place in a book is time consuming and inefficient. The first 30 physical pages of a book are usually things I want to skip (contents, publisher, title page, foreward, &c) and going forward to find the transition from meta to actual content is tedious. You can't just say "go to the start of text". In a real book you flib forward/back at high speed until the character of the pages change.
7. .) Finding a referenced diagram, equation, or image is nigh impossible. Flipping forward (or back) 3 pages to see a chart of graph is easy in a physical book - you just put your finger in that place and you can go back-and-forth whenever you need.
8. .) Reading scientific papers where the charts/diagrams are at the end of the document is highly inconvenient.
9. .) Finding a specific place *mentioned* in a book is nigh impossible. If the contents say "Chapter 5 is on page 120", then you have to go to *physical* page 120 and then flip forward or back until you find what you're looking for. If the contents say "figure 120" and you're looking at "figure 4", it's too time consuming to find it. (I'm currently reading a book in PDF format that does this.)

10. All in all, I haven't used my eReader much.

    It might be OK for narrative stories, light paperback reading that you can do in a dentist's office, and if it's a modern eBook written with proper formatting, but for anything remotely sophisticated it's insufficient.

Human waste includes urine, which is part of "night soil".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

But yes, "night soil" could only be part of a system. But there are other parts, as mentioned in a section quoted at the end.

I don't know about England specifically, or later years, but this says:
"Population and Economy : From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth"
https://books.google.com/books...
"According to official Chinese statistics, by the middle of the 18 century, population density was already over 500 people per cultivated sq. km (see Liang 1980: 400, 546). While these numbers are undoubtedly exaggerated owning to under-registration of cultivated acreage (ho 1995), the contrast with 18th-cent. Europe, where 1 sq. km of cultivated acreage supported 70 people, is quite extreme (see Braudel 1981a: 56-64)."

Much of China is just not that cultivated because of mountains and deserts and such (especially in the West).

Organic agriculture is indeed information and labor intensive -- which is why robotics will revolutionize it -- including robots to pick specific insects off of plants.

On fertilizer loss, see:
http://www.wri.org/our-work/pr...
"Between 1960 and 1990, global use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer increased more than sevenfold, while phosphorus use more than tripled. Studies have shown that fertilizers are often applied in excess of crop needs (MA 2005). The excess nutrients are lost through volatilization (when nitrogen vaporizes in the atmosphere in the form of ammonia), surface runoff (Figure 2), and leaching to groundwater. On average, about 20 percent of nitrogen fertilizer is lost through surface runoff or leaching into groundwater (MA 2005). Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and nitrogen in manure that is spread on fields is also subject to volatilization. Under some conditions, up to 60 percent of the nitrogen applied to crops can be lost to the atmosphere by volatilization (University of Delaware Cooperative Extension 2009); more commonly, volatilization losses are 40 percent or less (MA 2005). A portion of the volatilized ammonia is redeposited in waterways through atmospheric deposition. Phosphorus, which binds to the soil, is generally lost through soil erosion from agricultural lands."

Comparisons to medicine... Don't get me started. :-) Doctors typically have only a few hours of education about nutrition over the course of several years of study, yet poor nutrition is the root of most Western disease. So, the whole medical community is (profitably for itself) misdirecting its efforts as far as priorities. Sure there is much alternative medicine that is bogus, but the parts based on nutritional research (e.g. Dr. Fuhrman's work) is quite good overall. Yet it is not mainstream. What is mainstream is stuff like "stents", which studies actually show are mostly worthless. For example:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

Same for many other aspects of profit-driven science... I collected some examples here, with one example quote:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." (Marcia Angell)"

Why should mainstream agriculture be any different? Monsanto and the like all have huge profits on the line convincing farmers they need the agricultural equivalent of "stents" and so on... That includes heavy influences in political subsidies and control of research at land grant agricultural schools. And agricultural commodity prices are overall so low in the USA that most farmers need to take off-farm day jobs to pay the bills, and selling the farm land at an appreciated value is pretty much just a retirement plan, with farming a way to keep taxes low on the land. It's a crazy business in that sense. And meanwhile the USA has sold off all of its national grain reserves due to free market fundamentalism and a privatization emphasis and such among our legislators... Its just plain madness. Meanwhile the USA spends (or incurrs) about a trillion US dollars a year on "defense", but it does not have any security of the most basics like good food!

BTW, the rest of this quotes from a document on whether organic farming can feed the world (and bear in mind the suggestion that many organic crops are superior in nutritional quality because of the micro-nutrient issue):
http://www.worldwatch.org/node...
====
The only people who think organic farming can feed the world are delusional hippies, hysterical moms, and self-righteous organic farmers. Right? Actually, no. A fair number of agribusiness executives, agricultural and ecological scientists, and international agriculture experts believe that a large-scale shift to organic farming would not only increase the world's food supply, but might be the only way to eradicate hunger.

There are actually myriad studies from around the world showing that organic farms can produce about as much, and in some settings much more, than conventional farms. Where there is a yield gap, it tends to be widest in wealthy nations, where farmers use copious amounts of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides in a perennial attempt to maximize yields. It is true that farmers converting to organic production often encounter lower yields in the first few years, as the soil and surrounding biodiversity recover from years of assault with chemicals. And it may take several seasons for farmers to refine the new approach.

But the long-standing argument that organic farming would yield just one-third or one-half of conventional farming was based on biased assumptions and lack of data. For example, the often-cited statistic that switching to organic farming in the United States would only yield one-quarter of the food currently produced there is based on a U.S. Department of Agriculture study showing that all the manure in the United States could only meet one-quarter of the nation's fertilizer needs-even though organic farmers depend on much more than just manure.

More up-to-date research refutes these arguments. For example, a recent study by scientists at the Research Institute for Organic Agriculture in Switzerland showed that organic farms were only 20 percent less productive than conventional plots over a 21-year period. Looking at more than 200 studies in North America and Europe, Per Pinstrup Andersen (a Cornell professor and winner of the World Food Prize) and colleagues recently concluded that organic yields were about 80 percent of conventional yields. And many studies show an even narrower gap. Reviewing 154 growing seasons' worth of data on various crops grown on rain-fed and irrigated land in the United States, University of California-Davis agricultural scientist Bill Liebhardt found that organic corn yields were 94 percent of conventional yields, organic wheat yields were 97 percent, and organic soybean yields were 94 percent. Organic tomatoes showed no yield difference.

More importantly, in the world's poorer nations where most of the world's hungry live, the yield gaps completely disappear. University of Essex researchers Jules Pretty and Rachel Hine looked at over 200 agricultural projects in the developing world that converted to organic and ecological approaches, and found that for all the projects-involving 9 million farms on nearly 30 million hectares-yields increased an average of 93 percent. A seven-year study from Maikaal District in central India involving 1,000 farmers cultivating 3,200 hectares found that average yields for cotton, wheat, chili, and soy were as much as 20 percent higher on the organic farms than on nearby conventionally managed ones. Farmers and agricultural scientists attributed the higher yields in this dry region to the emphasis on cover crops, compost, manure, and other practices that increased organic matter (which helps retain water) in the soils. A study from Kenya found that while organic farmers in "high-potential areas" (those with above-average rainfall and high soil quality) had lower maize yields than nonorganic farmers, organic farmers in areas with poorer resource endowments consistently outyielded conventional growers. (In both regions, organic farmers had higher net profits, return on capital, and return on labor.)

Contrary to critics who jibe that it's going back to farming like our grandfathers did or that most of Africa already farms organically and it can't do the job, organic farming is a sophisticated combination of old wisdom and modern ecological innovations that help harness the yield-boosting effects of nutrient cycles, beneficial insects, and crop synergies. It's heavily dependent on technology-just not the technology that comes out of a chemical plant.

High-Calorie Farms

So could we make do without the chemical plants? Inspired by a field trip to a nearby organic farm where the farmer reported that he raised an amazing 27 tons of vegetables on six-tenths of a hectare in a relatively short growing season, a team of scientists from the University of Michigan tried to estimate how much food could be raised following a global shift to organic farming. The team combed through the literature for any and all studies comparing crop yields on organic farms with those on nonorganic farms. Based on 293 examples, they came up with a global dataset of yield ratios for the world's major crops for the developed and the developing world. As expected, organic farming yielded less than conventional farming in the developed world for most food categories, while studies from the developing world showed organic farming boosting yields. The team then ran two models. The first was conservative in the sense that it applied the yield ratio for the developed world to the entire planet, i.e., they assumed that every farm regardless of location would get only the lower developed-country yields. The second applied the yield ratio for the developed world to wealthy nations and the yield ratio for the developing world to those countries.

"We were all surprised by what we found," said Catherine Badgley, a Michigan paleoecologist who was one of the lead researchers. The first model yielded 2,641 kilocalories ("calories") per person per day, just under the world's current production of 2,786 calories but significantly higher than the average caloric requirement for a healthy person of between 2,200 and 2,500. The second model yielded 4,381 calories per person per day, 75 percent greater than current availability-and a quantity that could theoretically sustain a much larger human population than is currently supported on the world's farmland. (It also laid to rest another concern about organic agriculture; see sidebar at left.)

The team's interest in this subject was partly inspired by the concern that a large-scale shift to organic farming would require clearing additional wild areas to compensate for lower yields-an obvious worry for scientists like Badgley, who studies present and past biodiversity. The only problem with the argument, she said, is that much of the world's biodiversity exists in close proximity to farmland, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. "If we simply try to maintain biodiversity in islands around the world, we will lose most of it," she said. "It's very important to make areas between those islands friendly to biodiversity. The idea of those areas being pesticide-drenched fields is just going to be a disaster for biodiversity, especially in the tropics. The world would be able to sustain high levels of biodiversity much better if we could change agriculture on a large scale."

Badgley's team went out of the way to make its assumptions as conservative as possible: most of the studies they used looked at the yields of a single crop, even though many organic farms grow more than one crop in a field at the same time, yielding more total food even if the yield of any given crop may be lower. Skeptics may doubt the team's conclusions-as ecologists, they are likely to be sympathetic to organic farming-but a second recent study of the potential of a global shift to organic farming, led by Niels Halberg of the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, came to very similar conclusions, even though the authors were economists, agronomists, and international development experts. ...

  Sidebar one:

Enough Nitrogen To Go Around?

In addition to looking at raw yields, the University of Michigan scientists also examined the common concern that there aren't enough available sources of non-synthetic nitrogen-compost, manure, and plant residues-in the world to support large-scale organic farming. For instance, in his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil argues that roughly two-thirds of the world's food harvest depends on the Haber-Bosch process, the technique developed in the early 20th century to synthesize ammonia fertilizer from fossil fuels. (Smil admits that he largely ignored the contribution of nitrogen-fixing crops and assumed that some of them, like soybeans, are net users of nitrogen, although he himself points out that on average half of all the fertilizer applied globally is wasted and not taken up by plants.) Most critics of organic farming as a means to feed the world focus on how much manure-and how much related pastureland and how many head of livestock-would be needed to fertilize the world's organic farms. "The issue of nitrogen is different in different regions," says Don Lotter, an agricultural consultant who has published widely on organic farming and nutrient requirements. "But lots more nitrogen comes in as green manure than animal manure."

Looking at 77 studies from the temperate areas and tropics, the Michigan team found that greater use of nitrogen-fixing crops in the world's major agricultural regions could result in 58 million metric tons more nitrogen than the amount of synthetic nitrogen currently used every year. Research at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania showed that red clover used as a winter cover in an oat/wheat-corn-soy rotation, with no additional fertilizer inputs, achieved yields comparable to those in conventional control fields. Even in arid and semi-arid tropical regions like East Africa, where water availability is limited between periods of crop production, drought-resistant green manures such as pigeon peas or groundnuts could be used to fix nitrogen. In Washington state, organic wheat growers have matched their non-organic neighbor's wheat yields using the same field pea rotation for nitrogen. In Kenya, farmers using leguminous tree crops have doubled or tripled corn yields as well as suppressing certain stubborn weeds and generating additional animal fodder.

The Michigan results imply that no additional land area is required to obtain enough biologically available nitrogen, even without including the potential for intercropping (several crops grown in the same field at the same time), rotation of livestock with annual crops, and inoculation of soil with Azobacter, Azospirillum, and other free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria. ...

Indeed.

My ex-wife is a paediatrician. She ought to know better. But she has a skewed perception of risk, because she deals with the tragic cases all day long.

Typo: "especially away from agriculture" should be "especially away from livestock agriculture"

"And where does nitrogen in food come from?"

It's in part a cycle -- land to humans to waste to land. Only in part as nitrogen can oxidize to go back to the air, so it needs to get fixed again by bacteria.

"Very little fertilizer is lost in modern agriculture in relative terms."

First, 40% of food in the USA is wasted. So, all that fertilizer is wasted. Food produced closer to home might not incur so much waste.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

But that is not what I meant. This is what I meant:
http://www.scientificamerican....
"Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones"
The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation"

"Pathogens are not a problem, they are outcompeted by soil bacteria during composting."

Composting doesn't always get everything, as compost piles have edges and heat zones, and all that depends on careful management. Also, compost is contaminated by chemicals people dispose in the waste stream (chemicals from home darkrooms used to be a big issue) and also pharmaceuticals flushed down toilets.

"China's population grew 3 _times_ during the last century virtually without increasing the land use, because of the fertilizers and pesticides."

The fact that China's population may now need more inputs given growth in the last century since the Haber process does nothing to invalidate that they managed large (but not quite so large) populations for 3900 years before that without the Haber process. What that shows is that alternatives have worked. China is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. If they could do it, it shows the US could do it and other countries could do it.

"Still won't work. You'll need livestock for manure (to concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients). "

I agree that much current "organic agriculture" is dependent on livestock manure from conventional farming which is based mostly on feeding conventionally farmed grain (not pasture grass) to animals, and so there is a big nitrogen input there. That said, given a change in land uses patterns (especially away from agriculture), and with more nutrient recycling, and with intercropping and crop rotations and ground up rock dust, likely we could feed the planet well without the Haber process. I'll admit it would be good to back that with more numbers.

"And agricultural robots are a pipe dream."

Did you do the slightest research on them?
"Are agricultural robots ready? 27 companies profiled"
http://robohub.org/are-agricul...

"Unlike you, I actually helped to grow my own food (lean years after the USSR collapse) so I appreciate the amount labor required for that."

I'm sorry you had to go through that involuntarily due to crazy geopolitics and economics that cause that crisis. Still, you can't compare what you presumably had to do with limited tools and limited materials and limited information in a (probably) limited climate on impoverished soils with what is really possible with good tools, abundant materials, abundant information, in a good climate on well prepared soils.

Still, how do you know what foods I've grown or what I've studied?

"And I also worked with the Great Evil (Monsanto) on actual modern agriculture to appreciate the difference."

I see. I'll try not to assume that context might explain a lot. :-) Still, at the very least, it may be something like how someone who works with Microsoft products a lot might never think that open source software is possible or even better sometimes? Have you studied organic agriculture? Have you read Widdowson's book?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...