"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
"Robert Green" wrote:

Ho, ho, ho - are they ever going to get their turn in the barrel. As
much
as they appear to control their population, the current "Arab Spring"
shows
that when it's time for revolution, it's like a really bad case of
diarrhea.
Ain't no stopping it. What I am most curious about is how organized
labor
will evolve in China. There will come a time when they will face union
trouble and I doubt they will handle it appropriately. They're already
well
along in the "farms to city" movement that we experienced nearly 100
years
ago. Interesting times await us all. India is not far behind and has
been
particularly successful in eating our IT lunch. Outsourcing is so
well-known that there's an eponymous TV sitcom.

China also is looking at a Demographic bubble that is going to make
our own with the baby boomers look like a minor hiccup. The one child
policy has two rather interesting things to look at. One, is that the
worker to retiree ratio is going to be even worse than in the US. So,
there is going to be quite a bit of intergenerational concerns. Two, the
one child policy has resulted in a disparity in the male/female ratio.
I, for one, wouldn't want to try to govern a citizenship made up largely
of extremely horny young men (grin).

Horniness seems to be a strong factor in their real estate market. Chinese
women don't consider a man "marriageable" unless he has a nice apartment or
home. At some point I expect there will the kind of social trouble the
authorities won't be able to control. We get glimpses of the unrest
simmering below the surface from time to time, though, before the government
locks them down. Those types of societies reach flash points rather
quickly. I can't prove it, but as Firesign Theater once said "when you put
on the nose, it grows." Chinese capitalism is on an inevitable collision
course with their socialist governing structure. I believe once you have
TVs, internet, PC's, cars and all the other benefits of capitalism, your
mind and attitudes slowly change from those sanctioned by the PLA to those
more in line with Donald Trump.

Another thing that people seem to gloss over is the fact that the
civilian powers have used the economic boom to pay off the honchoes of
the PLA. A fairly large part of the economy is owned by the People's
Liberation Army. This alone adds a rather interesting twist to your
discussion on the organized labor movement. The other will be what is
the reaction of the PLA if their income falls during an inevitable
recession.

A capitalistic underclass with a socialistic ruling class. It's almost the
reverse of the US "checks and balances" government. It's unbalanced to
begin with and should start shaking like a flywheel with a broken bearing.
I think it will happen in this decade, and maybe even very soon. I just
read an article on their acquisition, through typically sneaky means, of
ski-jump jets and their launchers, from Russian through the Ukraine. It's
like Buffalo Bill putting on the skin of his victim. They are re-animating
the serious threat that the USSR once was/might have been by buying their
SotA mil HW and tweaking it. By all account, they are damn good tweakers,
too.

I have to admit I cringed when Boehner said today (about abortion) "we will
not spend taxpayer money on the taking of human life." That makes it clear
he believes only American lives have value because we're spending a lot of
taxpayer moolah to kill mostly goatherders and farmers. The Pentagon is
fighting video game wars now, and is loving the opportunity to fine-tune its
drone and remote action capabilities. We're at a number of very dangerous
junctures. Pakistan is going to turn on us in a big way, and soon.

My experience with the modeling of possible post-nuke scenarios tells me
that it's probably impossible to understand the totality of the
consequences, especially in the US. Things morph so quickly that the
further out you look, the more wildly inaccurate your projections will
be.
Short of a time machine to actually go forward and look (reminds me of a
great Simpson's episode with raining donuts) something will always
appear
that throws a monkey wrench in the predictions.

YOu see the same thing with the econ models that are used by the
government when doing any kind of research. They did not foresee the
surpluses during Clinton and then even after the surpluses had peaked
the models used for budgeting were calling for surpluses as far as the
eye could see.

One of my more highly paid skills was the ability to examine models and
study designs and find the gaping holes in them, or so said my boss. My
wife is more succinct: "You find fault in everything."

Mostly, the holes were related to bad assumptions. As you've noted, it's
almost a given that forecasters and modelers will embed subconscious bias
into their designs (all trees grow . . .). AIG modelers threw out the Great
Depression as too much of an outlier. The fact that they did not want to
even THINK the market could crash that hard again made it easier for them to
rationalize out the part they didn't like.

Modelers who base their assumptions on five of the most unusual years in
economic history are bound to get into trouble. They clearly were biased
towards endless revenue because subconsciously, they know they're building
the model to justify more spending. It's really a vicious cycle and the
more letters our modelers had after their names, the more it seems they
would defend fairly obviously biased assumptions to the death.

One really contentious item concerned how lethally irradiated soldiers and
workers would react to knowing they had been poisoned with only days to
live. You couldn't do any real-world testing to see how people would react.
(Well, I am sure we could assemble a test team from AHR.) g

You could do social preference analysis with group after group, but the
answers were all over the map with people breaking into two clear camps:
the resigners and the revengers. It was not until Chernobyl that any
real-world data entered that process, even obliquely. Eventually, it was
decided that soldiers would mostly be revengers and civilians a mix of
revengers and resigners.

I had hoped solar energy was that industry that would fuel lots of new
growth, but apparently not. The worst part about focusing on high speed
rail
was a) it was already done and b) we are not a train nation. In solar,
we
could have at least funded labs to find better materials and given jobs
to
researchers. This gets back to the issue of long term forecasts. One
things for sure, solar is getting less efficient in one vector, and the
longer we delay the worse it gets. The sky is getting slightly darker
year
by year. It's not very much but it's measurable.

Solar energy is largely pie in the sky and probably always will be.

I have to take exception with that for a number of reasons. First, it's a
bad pun. (-: Our existence is "solar powered" starting from the oxygen we
breathe coming from cyanobacteria in the ocean a long, long time ago that
began making oxygen long before a tree ever existed. Nature makes its way
quite nicely on sunlight and lots of modern aircraft design is based on how
"nature does it."

The claims of "it could never work" remind me of what I heard when
introducing PC networks into businesses run by DEC or AS400's. "They'll
never be fast enough or capable enough to replace midframes and minis." Oh,
but they were. Eventually. I recall so clearly a Bell Lab engineer telling
us the limit of modem speed would never exceed 4800 BPS because POTS
bandwidth was too narrow to ever support more. Of course, that was
disproved totally just a few years later and the bandwidth expanded
dramatically through innovation.

So based on theoretical solar efficiencies, we still have quite a ways to go
when it comes to improving efficiency. Recently there have been substantial
improvements in manufacturing techniques that will serious reduce the cost.

Other efficiencies will assist solar in becoming more useful. Incredibly
powerful new motor magnets, vastly more efficient lighting and new forms of
batteries have made things run by electricity require less and less power.
LED lighting in the home is something that could be powered quite nicely
with existing solar technology. More of these synergies will help lessen
our per capita demand. T

Just like in business, every percentage point helps. The more juice that
comes from solar, the less we need to depend on dirty sources. Solar is
remarkably clean compared to everything else. I think that's a very, very
big point in its favor. We need to take all the other subsidies the Feds
pump out that have outlived their usefulness and divert them to solar
research so we can own the patents and licensing rights - true energy
independence.

Even at much higher efficiencies, it will not be useful except as a
adjunct to the coal, NG, or nuke fired base plants. The physics, even at
100% efficiency which ain't gonna happen, won't support it for more than
a tens or so of a percent.

It's like the joke "I don't have to outrun the bear, just you." I think
that any contribution is important. The benefits of even offloading a
little demand from the grid will compound themselves in time.

Once again, if the Germans are into it full throttle and they were the ones
to come out best from the Great Recession, I think it bears more
investigation. More than something like Obama's pet high speed trains which
involve tremendous subsidies to start, lots of money to maintain and require
a social conversion to a train riding rather than car driving nation. Good
luck with that, Mr. President. It's almost as weak as saying we needed to
invade Afghanistan to deny Al-Qaeda a base. So they packed up and moved to
Waziristan where we can't go without starting a war with Pakistan.

I would choose #4. The big problem now is actual v. theoretical
efficiency
but chasing that goal is not as glam as putting a man on the moon or
cloning
a dog. The sunlight that falls on an average lot is impressive. Right
now
we harness a tiny percent of that radiation which means there's lot of
room
for improvement. The Germans are solaring up like crazy and they
survived
the Great Recession better than most. To paraphrase yet another movie
"I'll
have what they're having."

I have a different definition of impressive than you do, I guess
(grin). But even at insanely high efficiencies, you still run into night
and cloudy days and how to keep the efficiencies high as the sun moves
around the sky in the various seasons.

The thing to keep in mind is that it's not yet a replacement technology, but
an adjunct to the power sources we use now. Lower the demand on coal
plants, even a little, and you're cutting back on emissions. Since demand
peaks in the summer and summer is when solar is most efficient, I see a lot
of "back fill" potential.

Charge up batteries during the day to recharge your electric car overnight.
It's probably going to take solar shingles and shed tops that are of much
higher efficiency than we've got right now. I know the payback curves are
poor, but my electric rate has jumped so much in the last decade that I
believe that building a realistic model g of power use and rate increases,
payback will come much sooner than predicted.

Next house will definitely have solar shingles.

--
Bobby G.