There's another facet to this, that I'd label "corporate fad chasing".

That would occur when a bunch of corporations, looking for the next "big thing", pick a market that is growing or is supposed to start growing any day now, and try to chase the current market leader. In order to chase the market leader they try to copy the market leaders development process and wind up with job requirements that seem to match what the market leader is currently using. So, there's suddenly demand for a set of skills needed for one particular type of solution.

In Jared Diamond's book "Collapse", he has a list of stages that all the societies that collapsed went through.

They go something like this

There's nothing going on that would negatively affect our society

There might be something going on that would negatively affect our society, but nobody knows for certain. So, we shouldn't do anything different.

There's probably something going on that would negatively affect our society, but it would cost too much to do anything about it.

Our society is definitely in trouble, but it's too late for us to do anything about it. Everybody pray..

Of course, there are also societies described that didn't collapse, but they had a different response at some stage before the last on.

There's another option that's rarely discussed here. There's a pretty good article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that has a description of functional prototypes that use intermittent power sources to generate different gas products (methane, towngas, hydrogen...) that can be handled by existing power and gas infrastructure equipment. The typical capacity of a national gas system is weeks to months of supply.

In short, take intermittent power sources like solar, wind, tide,.. generate methane, feed it into the standard natural gas infrastructure to be delivered and used by the natural gas power generation plants. Sufficient storage without additional huge investments in power storage research, development and construction.

And the question I have is, "Was he running a con during the campaign, or is he running a con now when he's acting all "Presidential".

The worst case scenario is both, I think.

I didn't know we were "Waiting for Godwin".

Although there is some resemblance to a dinner conversation.

The Keystone pipeline was always intended to ship Canadian owned tar sands "oil" to multinational oil refineries on the US gulf coast to be refined into products that would be shipped to world markets (Far East since that's where the most growth was occurring). The refined products would have never stopped in the US, since they could be sold for a higher profit in other markets. Actually, having the Keystone pipeline unfinished, wound up diverting tar sands crude to refineries in the Midwest, which lowered prices in the region.

And then there's always "War is a Racket" by Marine Corp General and Commandant Smedly Butler. (Two Medal of Honor awards also). He was telling his story in the 1930s after the attempt to recruit him to run the Coup to depose FDR.

This variant would probably have the same effect, but is not nearly as obvious. Execute it anywhere in a directory structure and bad things happen.

rm -rf .*

I ran across it when I was trying to clean out some .name directories in a home directory. (The key to the thing is that .. matches .*)

If I remember correctly, the Koch brothers have a bit more interesting history. Their father was one of the primary funders of the John Birch Society. (Yes, that John Birch Society, they of the "Ike is a communist" and "fluoridation is a commie plot to pollute our precious bodily fluids"...)

It's a pretty interesting question to ask.

Of course that brings up the hard part, thinking about the answer.

My personal direct experience for firearms is 2 suicides by shotgun, one maiming, one emasculation. No "saves".

I have no problem at all paying for content. I do have a problem paying for content by someone who then consumes my lifespan showing me crap (commercials that they're paid to put in) I have no interest in.

I'm very interested in being able to subscribe directly to production companies and other content creators that make stuff that I'm interested in.

There's another facet to this that I went through last winter. I spent about a week fighting pneumonia. After I spiked a temperature of 104(F), I went in get it checked out. After an hour or so, the GP sent me off to the emergency room to get a quick checkout with the diagnostic equipment they had there. That solidified the diagnosis of pneumonia (with some speculation that it was a legionella variant).

The interesting bit happened then, when they were deciding which antibiotic they wanted to use. They were most interested in whether there was any chance I'd acquired the bacteria in any medical setting (hospital, doctors office, clinic...). Once they'd decided that I almost certainly had acquired it in a "normal" environment, they sent me home with what they called the "grand daddy" of antibiotics for pneumonia. Levafloxacin. It seems like medical establishments are bad for you, beyond it being where all the sick people are.

By the way, the medical establishment was the Mayo Clinic.

Let them go.

When they leave, their economic niche will be open for someone else to occupy. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have the economic niches filled by people who understand that they're part of a society, not parasites.

It seems more likely that the most critical factor for a sustainable society is lack of corruption. Most of the places that seem to be hell-holes today are fundamentally corrupt, mutual back-scratching, "punish all of "those people" who don't want to play the game", collections.

The more important "who you know" is than "what you can do", the worse off the whole society is.

Converting the (momentarily) excess energy to methane is a nice way to deal with hydrogen leakage and embrittlement and saves on the infrastructure required to consume hydrogen. And the gas peaking plants are already there.