In reply to this comment by Trancecoach:
Of course, Haliburton is in the top three of the most heinous corporations in the world and they are behind this nightmare.

Same themes, same players, over and over and over again. Reminds me of a documentary I saw last month called Gasland.

http://videosift.com/video/Gasland-An-Expos-of-US-Natural-Gas-Drilling-Practices

edit: whoops - meant to post that on the vid, not your profile.

Okay..since my sarcasm didn't quite drive the point home, I'll explain why this is a misguided idea:

Tanning Salons
-Vitamin D is synthesized in the body after exposure to sunlight. Anyone living far enough from the equator is bound to be deficient in Vitamin D. In fact, go ahead and plot cancer incidence by latitude and you'll see what I mean. Vitamin D prevents cancer and heart disease.

Beef
- Read about Vilhjalmur_Stefansson. In the early 1900s he underwent a scientific study where he ate nothing but meat for a year...and came out healthier than when he went in. Also read about all-meat diets and ketosis. Prolonged ketosis is a cure for diabetes, heart disease and cancer - not to mention periodontal disease. In scientific studies, terminally ill patients who were so far gone they were beyond "medical science" had their tumors go into remission and even clear up completely on a ketosis diet. Cancer cells have a lot of insulin receptors - they respond to glucose, take away the glucose and the cancer starves. Read about it.

Pork
- Same as beef.

Alcohol
- In many countries, 1 in 3 people have some form of mental illness sometime in their lives. Alcohol helps a lot of people cope with society. How the hell do you think I cope with all the (50% of the population) sub-100 IQ zombies walking around?

Oil used for deep-frying
- Fat is not unhealthy. Cholesterol does not cause heart disease, nor is it a good predictor of those who will get heart disease. Only ~3% of arterial plague is cholesterol by composition - the vast majority is calcium. Vitamin D helps regulate calcium...this goes back to the tanning salons.

Gasoline -- especially because it gives people an incentive to WALK when they're going less than 2 miles to a store, instead of driving.
- I don't think the cost of gasoline has ever factored into a lazy persons decision of whether to walk. The burning of fossil fuels and the creation of air pollution is a national health hazard (akin to me walking up and dumping toxic waste on you) and so YES this should be taxed because pollution is a hidden cost of industry; but the funds shouldn't go to Medicare they should go to giant air-scrubbers which help de-pollute the air.

Coal
- Same as gas

Natural Gas
- Same as coal.

Sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup, Junk Food in general, & Cigarettes
- Okay, maybe you have some kind of argument here because these are legitimately detrimental to your health, but only used in excess. So unless you find a way to tax "excess" or define "excess" I can't see an argument for taxing the stray cigarette or potatoe chip.

"With the creation of the maser in 1954, the promise of unlocking unlimited sources of fusion atomic energy from the heavy hydrogen in sea water and consequently the availability of unlimited social power was a possibility only decades away."

Energy resources and the ability to control those resources to control populations is the linchpin for those who would maintain power and empire-Since the 50's the planet has had the technological capacity to work to achieve this, yet we still float along using oil, coal, natural gas, and fucking fusion reactors (idiocy) etc., as the primary means of producing energy.
Why?? Did the world suddenly stop spinning in one direction and fall into a retrograde orbit? Do the agencies in control of releasing information to the general public continue to suppress not only this information while feeding us disinformation??-This practice does not suddenly disappear simply because wars are fought and won, they are maintained because they work to keep empires alive and viable.

Compile a list of names of anyone who has introduced theories who have been methodically and systematically repressed or lambasted, and you will find a pattern. Nikola Tesla, Wilhelm Reich, Viktor Schauberger, Thomas Townsend Brown, Eugene Mallove, Stanley Meyer, most of whom were killed or forced into seclusion, are just a short and rather famous list of mavericks in the quest for energy alternatives in use since the onset of the industrial era. What about the average joes who have managed to create from parts in their sheds, devices which increase the efficiency of fuel engines? Most are bought out or disappear shortly after the public manages t oget wind of their successes. Accident?? Coincidence?? TO BELIEVE THIS IS FOLLY, THE WORST KIND....DENIAL-is only there because the information needed to make proper conclusions is repressed, altered, or driven out as insanity or hogwash.

Control energy, control mankind, it's simple. We have had free or incredibly cheap and renewable energy for some time now, but assholes who think they know what is best for the planet hold all the keys, and have put all the locks in place. It is the task of everyone to become locksmiths.

This comment interested me so I did a little morning time research. You are right in stating that this technology has been out there for a long time. One of the major down falls of conventional SOFC's are that they require a high operating temperature. The efficiency of SOFC's limitations lie in the material they use because of the high operating temperatures. The bloom box claims to have solved this problem with a fairly cost effective solution for what materials to use (melted sand = glass?). They were always made from ceramic before, I don't know what improvements glass have over ceramics. I don't know if their claims are all true. Too early to tell since it was just "released".

That all being said, I don't understand what the hoopla is about, either. You'd still need to bring some sort of natural gas to each "bloom box". Let's say tomorrow, we took out all the power plants and replaced every home and business with one of these devices. Let's say they operate at 70% efficiency (10% more than traditional SOFC's), would this be more energy efficient than a power plant. Would it cost us any less natural resources to run our planet? Those questions are a little more difficult to find out. Gotta do some more research on power plants. Somebody with a degree have any insight?>> ^joedirt:
You guys are total suckers and idiots.
This is like ancient technology. It is just a solid oxide fuel cell.
The only thing interesting is that they have existing fuel cell installs at eBay and google.
This won't be cheap or better. All it does is capture the big green energy investors and also it uses tax rebates in places like California to let rich people subsidize their electricity.

I'd consider getting one, when they come out - if the numbers add up. Where I live electricity is relatively cheap and natural gas is relatively expensive.

I could definitely see utility companies buying these to put in substations, much earlier than in "every home". Or perhaps natural gas providers selling electricity back to power companies.

It's still a strange answer...it seems terribly unlikely that the cell works on both natural gas and pure hydrogen, but on the second look you're probably right about it being an editing issue. Even this view reinforces my belief that little trustworthy information can be gleaned from this video. 60 Minutes blew it...at best, they butchered the science and the claims being made...at worst, they're promoting a fraud.

I could see some minor gains by shortening the transmission distance. But according to wikipedia, transmission losses in 1995 were estimated at 7.2%. That doesn't leave a lot of gains to be made there. It's a bit tougher to dig out trustworthy numbers for just what sort of efficiency fossil fuel plants are getting today...and I'm fading too fast to dig much farther tonight. KrazyKat, where did your find your efficiency and price info?

Please please please please please please please please please please please please let this be real...

I am a skeptic, but this could really be the way to transform the planet. Don't worry about the cost folks. If what he said about the materials used is accurate, economies of scale will have them affordable within a decade. Remember that computers went form hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were manufactured a few at a time. Then when they transitioned to homes, they went down to thousands, and now just a few hundred.

The question is fuel. If it is really 1/3rd of the cost, that bodes well. And I'd need a few more technical references on the emissions. If it uses natural gas, it's probably clean. And that remark about 'solar' was edited weird. It obviously can't use solar as a fuel.

All in all, sounds too good to be true. I hope I'm wrong.

It's not a fraud. It uses natural gas, and the conversion rate (cubic feet of gas to kilowatts) is much better than a gas turbine electric generator. In fact, it's more than 3 times more efficient. But there are two problems:

First, the cost of electricity will vary depending on the cost of natural gas. In the last two years the cost of gas has varied from $2.50 to $14.00 per thousand cubic feet.

The second problem is the cost. They said that one unit costs $700,000 bucks. But they plan to bring the price down to $3,000. For 3,000 it would be a great deal. But that seems unrealistic. If they can't bring the price down it would take hundreds of years to break even on the cost.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It runs on natural gas, which something like 50% of US homes already have. If they can get the unit cost down, it looks really promising.>> ^RadHazG:
Hell its got me interested. But the skeptic did have a point in GE and the other utility companies probably going along the same route once (if) this gets big enough.
My only other question is that it still needs a fuel of some kind. Granted those big companies have access to all those diverse fuels, I wonder how the average consumer is going to get that stuff. Aside from the folks who perhaps already have natural gas lines for cooking.

Hell its got me interested. But the skeptic did have a point in GE and the other utility companies probably going along the same route once (if) this gets big enough.

My only other question is that it still needs a fuel of some kind. Granted those big companies have access to all those diverse fuels, I wonder how the average consumer is going to get that stuff. Aside from the folks who perhaps already have natural gas lines for cooking.

It's actually pointless to introduce the solar energy input into the equation at all Crake. The sun has shone and will shine for far longer than human beings will ever manage to survive on this planet. When I and many others look at agricultural reform we look at those aspects of the food production chain that humans can control and can change. The 'facilitation' you talk about is the entire crux of the modern day agricultural dilemma. There are an infinite number of ways that facilitation could happen, and the concern and debate is whether or not the road industry has chosen for us is the one that will bare the most fruit. Clearly it has not. The reasons, myriad, I don't want to write a thesis on the sift.

And I agree, when you start looking at government crop subsidies the energy calculation does lose its relevance. Why? Because you have jumped a 100 steps up a chain that was problematic at its root. The agricultural subsidy issue is a whole other Pandora's box.

Again, it's not the Haber process itself that is unsustainable, it is the entire industrial agricultural framework. The Haber process's dependence on natural gas is problematic, and even with future technological developments aside, it's a reductionist solution that undermines the multitude of complimentary farming techniques that could naturally introduce nitrogen into the soil. It's the kind of simplified agricultural solution that corporate agribusiness monopolies love, and it's this mutual reinforcement that causes concern. Again, the Haber process is a small piece of huge puzzle, we digress.

And with regards to future developments, let me illustrate why future developments are almost irrelevant to many of the problems at hand. In India for example there is a 500 year old tradition of aquaculture, for shrimp specifically. Most of the farms are small, local and sustainably run using various aquaculture farming methods (if you are interested you could read up on the Bheri system of aquaculture, just one of the many traditional systems).

This 'third world' farming technique as some might call it is just as profitable and has yields just as large as the more intensive commercial and industrial aquaculture methods. It has stood the test of time and it also forms the back bone of India's shrimp export economy, the largest in the world.

Industrial shrimp farming has had dismal success around the world. Taiwan, China, Mexico, Ecuador, all these countries have had huge issues keeping commercial shrimp farming sustainable. Wherever commercial shrimp farming has been tried, it has failed to a large degree, usually due to major disease outbreaks. That's why the call it the 'rape and run' industry.

Isn't it strange that the more industrial shrimp farms are introduced in India (due to government subsidies and incentives), the more 'environmental issues' they have to deal with that just didn't exist with the 'traditional third world systems' . . . mangrove destruction, drinking water pollution (from antibiotics and pesticides add to the shrimp ponds to minimize disease) , salinization of groundwater, etc.

Now you might argue with me that the solution to this problem potentially lies with future developments . . . a better antibiotic maybe, perhaps genetically engineering shrimp to be more resistant to disease and pollution, etc, or maybe the solution lies in adopting farming techniques that have been slowly perfected for the last 500 years and are proven to work, where the only interventions that could be made were natural ones and success was determined by how well you could maintain a balanced relationship with your local ecosystem. It is these farming systems and the mindset that they embody that I would like to see the world adopt, improve upon and gravitate towards.

Pinning your hopes for improvement on future developments and technology is totally misguided, especially when the core of the modern industrial agricultural foundation is so rotten. I have nothing against technology, but I'm not going to let the problems, born of brutish and unsophisticated industrial thinking, be overlooked by a corporate apologist futurist mindset. I'm not implying that's how you feel about the issue, but that the stance that many people have. There is an utter lack of holistic thinking in the industrial agricultural world (and everywhere else pretty much) and the direction it is leading us in is potentially frightening.

^first of all, i don't think it's fair to measure the energy calculation in joules.

Solar income is by far the biggest energy contribution to the production of crops, not any human factor. we're merely facilitating a nice opportunity for the plants to convert photons to food, because we can't to that ourselves. so the whole thing rests on our metabolism being "wasteful", energy-wise.

Another reason strict caloric calulation is meaningless for farming, is that the US and EU are subsidizing their domestic agriculture industry with billions of dollars, making farming methods and yields completely divorced from the financial success of a farmer.
Here, I can mostly speak from experience in the EU, where subsidies are often given for weird, counterintuitive behavior, meant to satisfy other goals than production, such as specific, fashionable environmental concerns ("preserve hedges and enclosures!"), or simply to preserve employment in that sector. Talk about wasteful.

And why isn't the haber process sustainable? Because it's dependent on fossil fuels? it only gets the hydrogen part from natural gas, the nitrogen comes from the atmosphere. A lot of people are spending lot of money these days on developing efficient, large scale, renewable hydrogen production, such as electrolysis machines running off solar/wind/nuclear power.
When people talk about "sustainable", they often forget to take into account future developments, and proceed to make gloomy prognoses based on current technology (see: Thomas Malthus)

Ahw this video makes ecotards cry.

It's quite simple and I believe it was stated by a Saudi sheik "The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones, The Oil Age won't end because we run out of oil"

This means that long before oil runs out we will have a better way to power the world. And it will take long for all the oil to run out, much longer than the ecos predict. There a vast amounts of oil in tar sands and shales. Huge new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of South American countries. Beyond oil there are still higher reserves of natural gas and coal.

If we don't want to have to resort to geo-engineering to restore a warming climate we must find an alternative to fossil fuels long before they run out. So what do we have, wind, water and sun. Only the sun could reasonably provide all the energy we need after a huge industrial effort to build these things in place like the Sahara.
However we also have nuclear energy. There are vast amounts of Uranium that are waiting to be discovered once the demand for Uranium increases. Using a Thorium reactor you could breed and burn fissile material out of Thorium. This process yields much less long lived waste because you basically burn up most of the radioactive materials. Also Thorium is three times as plentiful as Uranium.
This gives Fusion a lot of time to get its act together and finally deliver on the promise of nearly boundless energy.

Creating fertilizer doesn't need fossil fuels. All it needs is nitrogen, hydrogen and high pressures and temperatures (energy).
Al machines can still run on clean fuel cells which were charged with power delivered by the above processes of energy generation.

I'm quite optimistic, I think we are heading for a bright future if we invest in alternative energy and don't fuck up the World too much in the time it takes to get to that goal.

>> ^thinker247:
While I am one to never believe anything my government tells me, I find it highly improbable that anybody but the 19 hijackers caused the events of September 11th. But to play devil's advocate, let me for a minute suspend my belief and agree with the "truthers" that my government perpetrated an act of terrorism against itself.
Why?
In order to invade Afghanistan to plunder its oil? We already had bin Laden on the FBI's Most Wanted List for the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. We easily could have invaded under the pretense of finding and extracting bin Laden (and the Taliban and al-Qaeda), because that's exactly what we did after September 11th.
In order to invade Iraq under the banner of anti-terrorism? Hussein had already defied U.N. weapons inspectors for over a decade and Bush was never the type to ask permission, so we didn't need September 11th to justify illegally invading a sovereign nation. We did it anyway.
In order to enact greater restrictions upon the citizens by inducing their fear response? Hell, as a general populace we're lemmings. The Bush administration certainly did not need to kill 3000 people in order to take away our liberties. We gladly give them up whenever anybody in authority asks.
I have yet to hear a rational answer to the question of "Why?" But I'm all ears.


niiiice.
ask a question and then propose possible hypothesis which of course you then dismantle.
let me preface this by stating i am not a "truther" and am not as convinced as my friend rougy is concerning 9/11.
that being said,the US government has never,in my opinion,given this a proper investigation.
let me give you an example:
lewinsky and the impeachment of bill clinton =168 million dollars.
9/11 investigation=6 million dollars
and lets be clear here.the governments version of what happened on 9/11 is itself a conspiracy theory and one that does not hold up well under closer scrutiny.
who is responsible? i do not know and neither do you but i think it prudent to not only ask questions but be allowed to ask those questions.
agree?
now...
as for YOUR question thinker247.
why?
i presume you are asking for motive.
ok.
1.lusitania
2.reichsthag
3.gulf of tonkin
these are all false flag operations and all preceded war.WW!,WW2 and vietnam respectively.i could mention the oil embargo on japan but that is a lengthy conversation.
what ARE the motives for war?
they have always been unequivocally about:
1.land/labor/resources/trade
how does a government,crown or ruling entity get its poorest,least educated and therefore most expendable to go fight and die for something the ruling class wishes?
1.propaganda.
which creates a "fighting spirit".
for thousands of years religion was the impetus to create this spirit but for the last hundred years it has been nationalism but it is ALWAYS the F>E>A>R that is the true driving force.
now that we have established a basis for war let us get to the heart of your question.
since i am not privy to secret documents i must make my answer based on conjecture.i shall do my best.
why would the US government use 9/11 (by action or by proxy) to change 200 years of national defensive posturing to one of "pre-emptive" and declare a war,not on any person or nation but one against an ephemeral opponent?the "war on terror".
1.war is HUGE business and the DOD has been one of the top 10 lobbyists since 1962.
2.saddam hussein,having been bombed for over 10 years straight(fact,look it up) along with sanctions and that ridiculous "oil for food" threatened to change iraq's oil transactions from the american dollar to the euro(fact,look it up)which would have cost the US billions if not trillions.seeing that every oil transaction is done in american dollars.it is the world reserve currency (not for much longer).
3.uzbekisthan has one the last and richest oil and natural gas left in the world.a pipeline which was denied by turkey (that has since changed,but for europes benefit,not america) is being built right now...
where?
ill give ya a guess.
iraq.
and do you know where it will lead into?
want to try another guess?
afghanistan.

those are just a few off the top of my head.i could take the time to be more concise and specific but this is a comment section.
maybe we have differing political philosophies thinker247.i do not trust government nor power because that power historically has ALWAYS attempted to garner more power for itself at the expense of liberty,freedom and the common good of society.
so while i dont think the US government attacked the twin towers,i believe they ALLOWED it.
what evidence do i have? none.and any evidence we could have gotten has been destroyed.
but i was military for a number of years and unless they have gotten lazy and stupid there is no way that would have happened.
could i be wrong?you betcha.
but unlike you i do not trust government and neither should you because historically,governments will abuse whatever powers they have and take your rights away as fast as they are allowed to.
might i recommend:
1.bryzinski "the grand chessboard"
2.naomi klein "the shock doctrine"
3.chalmers johnson "blowback"
hell...just go the PNAC website they practically lay it out for you and that minority controlled the government for 8 years.
history is the greatest teacher and it is your friend.
i have enjoyed this conversation thinker247.

>> ^calculadoru:
If this saved vast amounts of gas, by preventing it from burning, then how will they be able to pump it out again, after the nuclear explosion?
Just saying.


The underground natural-gas deposit here is probably massive and covers a wide area. Just drill another shaft somewhere in the vicinity and plunk another well on it once you hit gas again.