Venus is hot, but it's not *that* hot... ;)

NASA is getting there

It most definitely is not. Are you being deliberately obtuse?

one can do for more than a few minutes before shit implodes and burns

You clearly didn't read anything I wrote, so why should I even bother responding? (A) Literally nobody was talking about settling the surface, and (B) It's been repeatedly pointed out that basically indefinite lifespans can be achieved for surface vehicles, as backed up by peer-reviewed research from NASA. And "christoban on Slashdot disagrees with peer-reviewed research from NASA" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

B) building floating cities, which would probably take another century of engineering and investment before we could do so reliably.

We were flying balloons on Venus almost 40 years before we flew a helicopter on Mars. We directly sampled Venus's atmosphere 4 years before we sampled Mars. We successfully landed and transmitted data either 1 or 6 years (depending on your definition) from the surface of Venus vs. Mars.

Your incredulity about levels of difficulty doesn't translate to actual levels of difficulty.

Yes, it took specific legislation to ban them in blue states. However, "right to work" laws, as present in red states, already banned them, just not explicitly, more "your employment contract cannot bind you after you cease working for that employer".

IE, what I've seen a couple times, they have to keep the employee "employed' for the non-compete period, including paying them.

That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.

I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long

The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.

You build of a thickness that the yield point at the design temperature is well above the amount of pressure-induced stress. The Venera probes' pressure vessels - uninsulated - hit surface temperature quite quickly (indeed, mostly during the descent itself). This did not make them crush, because their engineers were not morons who didn't do the math first when determining the probes' required specs.

All probes are designed to their environment. There is nothing magical about the nominal 92 MPa / 464 C of Venus's mean surface (note: this is for the mean surface; the highlands are significantly lower pressure and significantly cooler) that makes it impossible while, say, designing a lander to operate in the cryogenic conditions of Titan or whatnot is easy. This is 1960s tech. Steel alloys usually melt at up to 1400 C or so. Titanium at 1670 C. Tungsten at 3422 C. Some ceramics don't decompose until nearly 4000C. And pressure increases melting points. Now, it's not just the melting point that matters - higher temperatures mean lower yield strengths, so you have to design with the high temperature yield strengths in mind, not room temperature ones. But the simple fact is that various alloys and compounds can operate fine at WAY above Venus surface temperatures. It's not even close. The pressure vessel needed for the Venera probes was just a thin skin.

And to repeat: if the stress doesn't don't go above the yield point, the time to crushing is infinite. Same as any other pressure vessel, from aerosol cans to propane tanks to spacecraft in space (-1 atm).

And I'll repeat: with the same trivially-simple 1960s-tech method as the Venera probes, you can get surface residence times of a couple hours. With heat pumps, indefinitely. And "Baron_Yam at Slashdot" isn't going to override the actual NASA researchers who have worked on this topic.

The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength

The fact that you think that rock can be "baked to incredible strength" is itself a boggling concept. Not even accounting for the fact that we can literally see sand and gravel in the Venera images, and the Venera probes literally took surface samples. We can see dunes from orbit on radar. Just the very concept that you think that if you heat rock to a couple hundred celsius that makes it super hard, when the rock formed from vastly-hotter lava. Heat makes rock softer, not harder. And subliming away compounds or chemically eroding rocks makes them weaker, not stronger.

From a bulk composition perspective, Venus's surface is mostly just basalt - though there's some probable rhyolitic flows in places, possibly some unusual flows rare or nonexistent on Earth, and there's speculation that some of the highlands may contain residual granitic continental crust. The specific details of said rocks can be quite interesting, but from a bulk perspective, it's like oceanic crust. We know this because we've literally sampled it..

Well, I suppose I could have shoved an "annually" in there. Sometimes I have a problem with missing words, and slashdot is harsh on that - I need a few hours to days to get what I've written out of my head so I don't insert them automatically, thus completely missing it. Lacking the ability to edit my posts...

In this case, because the income tax is reconciled on an annual basis, that the poverty line numbers are on an annual basis, etc... I just had "annual" as just assumed to be obvious.

Spending above the poverty line being the part effectively taxed is part of the core idea though? I mean, do you want a core idea reduced to, as you put it earlier, a footnote?

Well yes. That's describing what would be taxed under the proposal.

Really, at this point it might have been faster to just hit up the site I linked and read the actual proposal. It would have answered all these questions.

I wouldn't call the breakthrough "recent", but batteries now make sense for at least part of the solution. If they manage to cut the cost in half again, it might start pushing things like pumped hydro into being uneconomic.

The real trick, I think, would be to have much more battery than necessary to soak up the negative power cost situations. That way, you use it for load balancing all the time - but you only charge up close to 100% when power starts getting close to negative, justifying the extra wear. Assuming they use a battery chemistry subject to wear - there are cheap batteries out there that are extremely durable that don't have significant wear from full charging, they're just too big and heavy for EVs.

I'd imagine that, at most, you'd idle the plant only when electricity is at the peak.

There's two major forms of desalination - distilling and reverse osmosis. Distilling I think has the lower equipment cost, but higher operating cost. RO is more expensive equipment wise, but cheaper energy wise - but you want electricity to run the pumps. Distillation can be run mostly on any heat, so straight resistive electricity is normally too expensive/wasteful for it.

The problem I see is that idling the RO system is an expensive waste of RO time. With Distillation, the efficient systems do all sorts of tricks to scavange as much heat as they can - such as cooling the outgoing water with the incoming water. Not necessarily kind to power interruptions.

However, depending on how severe the spikes are, it can still be worth it. Maybe you do a RO setup where it does less power intensive maintenance tasks when power is expensive. Or you might just turn the power of the motors down - you produce less water that way, but from what I remember, the loss is not linear. IE 50% power might produce 60% as much water.
With distillation, maybe you install alternate thermal sources, or maybe a thermal storage bank so that when electricity is expensive, you just don't use it - you can run the pumps and heaters and such later.

Permitting: Sounds like a California problem to me. Self imposed. Such a feature, if implemented by the car manufacturer, should be relatively cheap to permit.
Additional appliances and wiring needed: The requirement of additional appliances and wiring should actually be minimal. If you have a dedicated car charger, that should be all the equipment needed to to V2G. It should be mostly software changes. Maybe an inverter in the charger. That said, EVs generally contain a relatively massive 3 phase inverter designed to run the induction motor for the wheels. It's flexible enough that 50/60 hz@240V should be no problem for it.

And you go by laws of average for having vehicles plugged in. If there's money to be had, more people will try to plug in around those times, of course.

Hmm... Peak power is generally right after people get home from work and get to work on dinner and such.

Let's say that we're in a reasonable future world with the following characteristics:
1. Batteries, including BEV batteries, are considerably cheaper.
1a. However, powerwalls are still not entirely common.
2. Vast majority of cars on road are BEV.
3. So much solar has been installed that daytime power is cheaper than night time.
4. Infrastructure has caught up with the changes.
4a. The vast majority of people who drive to work can charge at work, during the day time.
4b. V2G is "standard".

So a standard user situation could be such:
They get up in the morning, do morning stuff, and drive to work in their EV. They then plug in at work, where they have roughly 6-8 hours to charge.
They drive home with a more or less full battery (we might knock off a few percent to preserve the battery more).
They plug in when they get home, because in ~20 minutes, electricity is about to get expensive as everybody else gets home and turns on everything - TV, computer, HVAC, stove, oven, microwave, etc...
Their vehicle automatically does V2G so the house doesn't have to pay those expensive rates. This works because BEV batteries have advanced to the point that they're cheap and durable enough that battery wear is not a significant expense.
Once that power spike is over, the car monitors electricity rates, and charges enough to meet the needs of the next day, with appropriate safety margin, if necessary.
The owner drives to work, the EV might be at half charge or so. Doesn't matter much, they'll top off at work during their shift, when power is cheap because the parking lot is covered in solar panels or such.

That's a lot of text to not mention the need to build floating cities and not die on the surface, which even NASA has not been able to do for more than a few minutes

In case you didn't notice, NASA also hasn't built cities on Mars either, despite spending two orders of magnitude more money on it in recent decades than Venus.

Anyway, we don't need the most Earthlike atmosphere, we need to survive in an environment where we actually know how to do that.

Which requires creating Earthlike conditions. Starting with reasonably Earthlike conditions certainly is a good start.

It might make more sense to use the hydrogen to produce methane, which is considerably easier to store and manage.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

While desalination is a great use of excess power, this is not an easy thing to do because the places where the water is needed are inland. Obviously it doesn't make sense to pump desalinated water 180 miles uphill from the Gulf of California to Phoenix, what you really want to do is to use desalinated water at the places nearer the coast so they can stop relying on the river water that comes from the mountain west, so the southwest can use more of it (and so the mountain west can keep more of it for our own use). But while you could get some benefit from getting the coastal cities using desalinated water, their use actually isn't that significant. The bulk of the water goes to California farmlands, and those are in a belt 70-100 miles from the coasts, and there are mountains in between. Not terribly tall ones, but enough to make pumping the water challenging.

None of this means what you say isn't a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be built to make it work. Big coastal desalination plants, big pipelines from those plants, fed by big pumps, and either additional reservoirs or perhaps large tanks in the mountains to buffer the water supply -- though only after peak supply rises to the point that it exceeds demand. Heh. That's exactly the same situation as with intermittent, renewable power, just shifted to water. Water is a lot easier to store, of course, but you still have to build the infrastructure to store it.

So, this is a good idea, but it's an idea that will take years, probably a decade, to realize... and we have excess power now. Of course, starting by tackling the easier problem of using desalinated water in the coastal cities while the infrastructure is built out and scaled up makes sense.