5 Ideas for today: Modular rural home, blimp bus, gloryrights, public nuclear plant, surveillance of police

1) Blimp Bus:

The advantage of the B Bus is that it travels in an efficient straight line from point A to point B. It doesn't waste energy on friction with the ground or time from waiting in traffic. The ride is relatively more silent than a standard bus. It's also smooth as you wont be feeling jolts and bumps from road contact. The B Bus is safe as it travels just a few stories away from the ground and has its inner gas compartments compartmentalized for extra safety. It wont roll over or be hit by anything. The surface of the B Bus is coated in solar panels for extra energy and it can even partially store lightning strikes for additional power. The view of course is superior to one from land travel. The costs of B Buses drop with mass production and automation (it's easier to not have a driver on B Bus than a standard bus). At first of course, these would be used for traditionally long bus journeys to areas where MagLevs and other trains don't go.



2) High Tech Modular House for Rural Areas:

Levittown showed how military style techniques can be applied to affordable housing. A 21st century modular home is cheap to manufacture, replace, and recycle. Kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms, etc are mass produced in a factory and then driven or airlifted by an industrial blimp to their destination. Poorer families can acquire a house in one extra large module. Modules are built "off the grid ready" with solar panels and clean water from air systems. A buyer modifies a module before buying the way one does a Dell computer and its parts. Since the price of a laptop went from thousands of dollars to 35 dollars (India also produced the world's cheapest car as well), mass production stands to do the same for housing. Entertainment and furniture systems can be added, subtracted, or reconfigured within individual modules. When one's kitchen becomes obsolete, the whole thing can be sold like a used car and replaced while keeping the rest of the house. This housing is not made of wood. People buy mass produced cars, yachts, and computers and there is no reason to not do the same for homes. It's about time to apply space tech for hyper efficient land living.

3) Gloryrights instead of Copyrights:

Napoleon said that men will give up their lives for a piece of colored ribbon (medals and such). In both ancient and modern civilizations, people were often awarded with triumphs and honors to great effect. It is now apparent that copyrights often stifle technological and scientific progress by killing the traditional open exchange among scientists. Why should a scientist share his research with his peers if it is more profitable to join a corporation where this information will be secretively used to bolster the employer's profit margins?

A gloryright system gives the often introverted geeky scientists and inventors what they crave most, access to international attention (and thus feeling of empowerment) and correspondence with equals. Say a person invents such and such and is given Silver Gloryright. SG automatically allows the person who received it to appear and be interviewed on various popular programs, participate in high level panel discussions, get interviewed by famous personalities, meet high level people, etc. Sure they may miss out on being able to sell their invention to their employer but some material reward is likely to find this person within Gloryright system anyway. A Gold Gloryright brings additional perks. Here is an excellent book on how modern patents and copyrights are hurting local communities and traditional research.

4) Big cities controlling their own power supply and certain factories:

A city over a million people is a powerful unit. Its government should own a power plant and a few factories that produce needed drugs (not just generic, see gloryrights above) and other goods for the citizenry. The government of NYC, an entity more populous than Sweden, is entitled to its own small nuclear fission plant, factories that make clothing for employees and the needy, vertical farming constructs, etc. This dramatically reduces logistical chains and cuts out political middlemen, enhances the power base of the city government vis a vis the state/province, and allows self sufficiency in case things go wrong in other regions of the country. Libertarians and socialists alike will appreciate decentralization through empowering smaller political units with their own factories. A large city is also in a very good position to bargain and negotiate better for what it needs in terms of raw materials.


5) Ritualistic surveillance of the public by individual citizens:

This can be turned on all the time or get activated when a crime or legal encounter is happening. Imagine if a person's car got stopped by a police officer. Immediately the person activates micro cameras and audio listening devices in his clothing and car. These devices record, encrypt, and stream the entire encounter to the person's personal computer, his lawyer, and other places throughout the world (like youtube which then sends out alert to people who like to watch that type of stuff in real time for signs of abuse). Such a system will reduce crime and force politeness and civilization on both the users and those they encounter (whether private or public employees). If citizens are going to be watched by corporate and government entities, then they must watch them back twice as hard while sharing anything interesting in a decentralized publicly available format.

Energy Economics Behind Food Digestion

Since digestion takes energy, it is helpful to think about the "cost to revenue ratio" (fuel efficiency) of foods that we eat


We all realize on some level that food is very similar to a drug. When hunger sets in, withdrawal symptoms become apparent. Confusion, decreased mental functioning, weakness, nausea, unpleasant moods, negative perception of the world/humanity, etc. When we finally get a chance to eat again, what we all want is for the molecular building blocks within food to reach and become part of our key bodily systems as quickly and efficiently as possible. There are simple mathematics behind digesting fuel that should be kept in mind.

Digestion takes caloric energy. Eating food drains us to a degree that is dependent on the resistance of the food to intestinal acids. If the food is more difficult to digest it'll take more bodily energy to break it into molecular building blocks for the body. This in turn will result in one's body not operating at peak levels. Here's 2 examples to illustrate (the numbers are randomly selected for clear cut demonstration):

A) A deep fried blob of meat is stuffed with 1000 units of energy and it takes the body 500 units of energy to break it down over a period of 5 hours. This produces an average of 100 units of energy per hour for the body over 5 hours (1000-500)/5. The average ratio of energy cost to revenue is 1 to 2. If this food is dumped into a ravenous energy deprived body, then energy will be pulled from other areas of the body to begin the digestion. This will be manifest with muscle tiredness, coldness (energy diverted from heating systems to the stomach), and even lack of tangible cognitive improvement within first hour after eating. Thus the initial ratio of energy cost to revenue can even cancel each other out. Not the drug "fix" one is looking for. We want to squeeze more out of our business.

B) A bowl of cold quinoa salad with various nuts and berries is only stuffed with 500 units of energy. It takes 100 units of energy to digest it over 1 hour. Body gets 400 units of energy in this time. Ratio of energy cost to revenue here is 1 to 5. Since the powerful acids in the stomach can immediately rip apart the cold salad into building blocks, this means a rapid huge boost of energy from acceleration of cognitive and physical functioning. Molecular building blocks are quickly transported via blood stream to reinforce every key system in the body. The negatives of such a quick and efficient fix is that the energy high wears off after an hour leading to rather rapid onset of hunger and noticeable physiological slowdown. The business is very profitable but has to be fed at a breakneck rate that is not always sustainable.

Proper utilization of energy economics in food can allow an individual to achieve the equivalent of a coffee boost (from nutritious food that has weak cell lining allowing the body to make short work of it). Our bodies are the most complex wonderful machines we have access to. Do we put nasty poorly treated gasoline into a high end sports car? No, since we understand that it requires immediate high performance. An advanced jet airplane requires specialized jet fuel for maximum ratio of energy cost to revenue.

So why do many people treat their bodies worse than they treat their cars? Besides the socioeconomic factors behind it, there are also practical considerations. Food that is less efficient to digest has a release of energy that can be described as "extended release" in pharmacological terminology. A slice of pepperoni pizza will provide hours of inefficiently acquired energy. Of course if one has a powerful metabolism, one can pump lots of high energy inefficient food into the system and even get a caloric rush after some digestion has already occurred. Combined with the fact that such foods are often solid liquor buffers, it becomes a no brainer. Fuel like quinoa will not only be a poor buffer but its effects will constantly and annoyingly run out. Nobody wants to carry a grain basket with them. Of course in the long term, the heavy fuel will corrode/clog up the system and become increasingly counterproductive as the human machine is now expanding energy units to support heavier weight with all the health ailments associated with it.

However when it comes to day to day life and wanting to be at peak cognitive and emotional levels, digestive efficiency has to be kept in mind. Proper combination of the two types of fuel can result in relatively quick onset of good cheer and solid functioning (energy release from say, quinoa being immediately rerouted to help neutralize weakening from digestion of heavy fuel) without a crash or desire for an afternoon siesta.

Post-Industrial Society = Beyond Idiocy

Reindustrialization is the best way to repair damage to earth. Terraforming deserts, building new ecosystems, MagLev trains, redesigned cities, nuclear and space based power. Not neofeudalist deindustrialization

Early 21st century was supposed to have been one of high speed trains zipping between continents, hypersonic air travel, 3 hour workdays or 2 workday weeks, increasingly colonized space, completely reimagined cities, mechanized infrastructure, and large scale terraforming of the planet to turn deserts into farmland (as well as creating new ecosystems where they weren't previously by building new desalination water infrastructure). All of this would be supported by first the increasingly more advanced fission reactors and then fusion reactors complimented by a large network of satellites beaming energy down to earth.

So what happened? Why do people actually believe the corporate media (when they stopped believing it in many other areas) in that the only way forward is for educated people to shovel mule manure, compost food, live in sustainable shacks with solar panels on them, ride in bicycles made from recycled garbage, and to devolve back to 19th century living while actually advocating that poorest people of the earth never even experience the 20th? Was it THAT easy for rich people to fill the meaningless nihilistic existence of educated westerners by replacing Jesus Christ with mother earth (environment) as their object of dedication?

Middle classes always pick up on cues from the ruling oligarchy on what to think, how to behave, and what obsessions to have. There is little regard to the fact of some of these cues often being propaganda of control. Eventually the propaganda trickles down to the poorest sectors of society through community role model emulation.

This appears to be the case with the concepts of "conservation", "post-growth economy", and "post-industrial world" (where most of 7 billion homo sapiens are all magically white collar innovator businessmen [!] living on a decentralized renewable power grid). The world's people are now supposed to make all necessary personal sacrifices and live in balance with nature as a punishment for their rulers having wiped out and poisoned large swaths of the biosphere.

It is now western oligarchy's barely concealed desire for the proletariat (anybody living paycheck to paycheck rather than from capital gains, roughly 99% of planetary population) to devolve to use of slower transport and more provincial community living. They would love nothing more than for people to return to horse and carriage (or its bicycle equivalent) and to spend a large chunk of the day and their caloric energy "conserving", recycling/reusing trash, making their own organic food, self-flagellation for sins against the planet, and creating pottery/trinkets to sell to each other. The rich themselves would of course live on large gated estates spread around the world, fly on advanced personal vehicles, have increasingly stronger healthier bodies through genetic engineering/cybernetics, etc. Globalization would homogenize the world's poor into an interchangeable mass just as it does the same with their neofeudal lords.

This is not an exaggeration. Post-growth and post-industrial means exactly that when rich man's stooges like Gordon Brown mention it: arrested development of heavy industry (such as creation of new comfortable futuristic cities and supporting large scale infrastructure). Most of the human herd is to enter an "equilibrium" and see an end to major annual increases in quality of life. The world is to enter a period of gradually declining population with younger poor people worshiping and sacrificing for mother earth while living in "harmony" with it. They would all do demeaning service sector jobs like being each others bartender, taking care of the elderly that outvote them, and grooming the large playground (planet earth) for the enjoyment of the concealed oligarchy.

Such a scheme is so absurd that it will probably collapse before being internalized as a value by most educated westerners and their children. The reason for that is that all the key problems of the world require exponential increase in heavy industry to be solved. Western world can  most definitely outsource all its industry abroad but the planet itself can never be post-industrial in that by definition that would mean large famines and vengeful outbursts of violence. Only more industry can create the energy necessary to feed all, provide comfortable housing for all, and to otherwise fulfill United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The collapse of the Copenhagen conference on stifling industrial growth in the poorest region of the world showed complete rejection of Western neofeudalism by Asia, South America, and Africa. These people want to live and they want to live well. Chinese and Russian leaderships completely understand the malice of post-industrial concepts since their own societies only got off their knees through rapid expansion of heavy industry, high tech, assembly plants, and construction of powerful new power sources. Since Beijing and Moscow understand how real economy works, they will increasingly take global leadership from the weakening, hypocritical, moralizing, incompetent and malicious hands of Westerners (whose only solutions to Africans for instance seem to be more environmentally friendly and sustainable slums). Chinese have done more for Africa in recent years than all the western money poured into the black holes of corrupt officials ever did. That is, they built new infrastructure in exchange for commodities rather than distributing drugs and food.

We obviously need to stop (and then reverse) mass ecological destruction and to decrease the use of carbon based fuels. The solution is not to succumb to luddite anti-human and anti-progress drivel by brainwashed millionaires with finance or law degrees. The only solution is terraforming the lifeless regions of the globe through dramatic increases in nuclear power production and corresponding high tech heavy industry:

1) Utilization of the newly available power (solar and geothermal have their places to complement the atomics) for expansion of the biosphere (alongside conservation) through bringing water to hundreds of thousands of square miles of all the world's desert. We can make endless lifeforms live where they weren't able to before. There are ways of introducing certain fungi breeds which create soil which in turn allows new ecosystems to be created. For the price of one month of occupation in Afghanistan or Iraq, brand new forests can be created where they haven't been able to live before. Working via collaborative central planning with Chinese, Russians, and Indians, Westerners can systematically eliminate deserts, restore and enrich topsoils, desalinate water for entire regions, and allow small and medium sized animals to thrive in the new territories.

2) Systematic destruction and recycling of abandoned urban sprawls and suburban areas to create building materials for more compact medium sized cities of the future (these new cities would most likely utilize modular design for rapid replacement of their neighborhoods every certain number of years). Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of earth for ecosystems can be opened up this way. Former highways and roads can be hiking trails once they are ripped out.

3) Implementation of mass high speed MagLev train lines between the new cities to make cars, buses, and airplanes seem like a wasteful way to travel.

4) Opening up lunar colonization for helium 3 mining to feed earth based fusion reactors.

Humanity currently has the technologies already available to make all of these things happen. If any of this sounds too fantastical then the oligarchy has already won. Some terraforming has been possible and done as early as 1930s. In his amazing inauguration speech, FDR mentioned that without a vision, the people perish. Devolving back to a simpler 19th century life on an organic plantation run by
"eco friendly" corporations is not a vision. It is surrender and invitation for control and mass global suffering at the hands of the same people who damaged the ecosystem to begin with. Only grand new 21st century assembly lines churning out powerful new machines can help restore what the older industrial methods have helped to destroy. We can't repair the damage with a plow in hand and a wind farm here and there. Seven billion people are asking for more.

Real Economy is Physical

Economics is an engineering challenge. In its current form, economics can't be salvaged from its total failure and pseudo-science status and should be replaced by engineering to prevent near future starvation for large swaths of humanity. Also a 5 point plan to save the planet ;)


The Wall Street vs Main Street dichotomy has been so overused in the news that it is sickening. It is time to replace this loaded married couple terminology with another. The first reason for this is that WS vs MS split has now become a political slogan and a heuristic and thus does not promote thoughtfulness. The second more important reason is that it obscures the reality of what the real economy is.

"Wall Street" has come to symbolize just meaningless paper shuffling gambling that is the financial sector. "Main Street" apparently includes everything else such as telemarketing, McDonalds service, prostitution, web design, and of course industrial production. Politicians tend to lump service industry like catering (and other demeaning unpleasant tasks that poor people are forced into to not die of starvation or exposure) and actual industry like engine part manufacture together. Since financial sector is a service sector (smart people overworking in mind numbing meaningless tasks to make the rich richer) we see how WS vs MS is not a real dichotomy at all due to the enormous overlap in classification.


Will the real economy please stand up?

I have written how the field of economics the way we know it today is so wasteful and separated from real empirical investigation as to require the term stupid. Any Western Economics 101 course will still dutifully inform that it is a study on how to deal with allocation of finite resources. In that, economists not only failed but have made the global situation much worse. Western economists are not only as ideological as Soviet economists were but have now devolved to the level of historians who study past moves made by powerful/wealthy people. When they are not busy defending themselves as real scientists through utilization of advanced statistics (to study decisions made by oligarchs as if they were orbits of planets) they are cheerleaders and cautious financial planners for rich people who don't like to think. An analogy can be made with French generals confident that the Maginot line will hold against the tried and true offensive methods. It is no surprise that in the latest crisis of capitalism, most people regardless of their class have lost money. Economics today is not only failing the poor but a large portion of the very rich as well (who then find themselves one day with only the grand stories of their parents).

The term economics has been tainted to such a degree that it may be too late to reclaim it. Lets look at the definition of another word and see if it has any application to dealing in a world of finite material and human resources.

"Engineering - The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property."

Now we're getting somewhere. It appears that economists have wanted to be engineers all along but at some point wandered off into the land of the stupid in an effort to create some ideological justification for the Cold War (follow the money trail of rich people or their puppet government organs funding the research of these brave "scientists"). Of course after a couple of generations (of economics being a creative attempt to demonstrate to the world why Western oligarchy should continue) this mutated pseudo-science has become entrenched. Youngsters on the scene either would not be hired to teach if they disagreed with the pseudo-science faculty or wanted to demonstrate how much of the nonsense they understand and thus left their brain at the door to please the older generations of these so called academics.

Most people assume that the point of economic advice would be to make everybody better off materially in the end. This means make everybody in either one nation, region, or the whole world have more access and control over resources which in turn would make the average human being on the planet healthier, more educated, happier, and better able to make use of his or her physiological talents for self-actualization or profit.

Only engineering can do that. Humanity's only way of dealing with finite resources is to better utilize these resources. This requires ever rising level of energy available to humanity to operate machines. The process is very simple:

1) Always develop new ways to make construction of power plants faster and cheaper. One assumes mass scale production of parts to make power plants. The goal is to pop them out like one does a supercomputer with periodic retooling as better machines to make parts are invented (Japanese lead the way currently in replacing even the cheapest of human assembly line workers so factories can run almost full time).

2) Keep increasing production of ever more efficient and powerful power plants.

3) Utilize ever rising levels of energy to extract, refine/recycle, and put into use ever rising quantity of natural resources for mass construction of high tech farms throughout the world. With enough energy and materials enclosed farming with artificial sunshine/weather control is more than possible from the Sahara desert to the frozen tundras. Keep increasing numbers and quality of these farms until vast majority of people spend almost no caloric energy and productive time working to feed themselves. Keep in mind that organic chemical free food in these farms is only a question of cheap energy and materials. There is absolutely no need to send food thousands of miles across the planet and stuff it full of preservatives so this mummified food survives the journey.

4) Utilize same rising level of energy and labor freed from farming to build ever rising number of high tech places of learning throughout the world. Keep improving the efficiency of these places of learning as one does the farms. One assumes a type of modular construction so parts of the places of learning and the high tech farms can be recycled every few years and replaced with newer systems.

5) Utilize the mind power of billions of newly educated people to build better systems of power plant part production to keep churning out more energy generating sources and to reorganize socioeconomics to that end.

Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat until the solar system is colonized and humanity is in a post-scarcity transhuman world. Keep constructing better energy sources beyond this point as well naturally.

All human politics should be directed towards power generation. This means more engineers and scientists in government instead of lawyer playboys. Chinese leadership is full of engineers and this is reflected in China's growth rate. Current batch of economists should be driven out of government policy decision making as one would drive out the clergy giving advise to the government. Every government should have an engineering ministry and we should hear of "president's engineering advisers" instead of economic advisers. This is the only way to prevent large scale starvation for a large part of humanity in the relatively near future (not even mentioning maintaining living standards).

The side effects of such energy driven policy would of course be the possibility of other engineering marvels in the aid of construction of the power plants and places of learning. Some examples are frictionless magnetic levitation transport methods. Even today, high speed trains are already cutting into airline profits as seen by 80% drop in airfares in parts of China. To make full circle, the goal of economics should always have been to allow humans to spend next to zero caloric energy on travel, food, education, safe/pleasant shelter, etc. Instead humanity saw a worsening of their situation where even people in the Western oligarchies spend a lot of their caloric energy to get paper to exchange for traveling from point A to point B. If this continues only the rich will be able to have relatively pleasant transcontinental travel (with the poor being crammed into large slow moving ships like in the 19th century if they scrape enough for a ticket).

The goal of all governments historically is to constantly raise the minimum level of material comfort for their citizenry. This means an energy driven policy. Governments that fail in this goal are always replaced sooner or later. The transition period from today to tomorrow will require all efforts towards nuclear power. Even the American oligarchs understand the precariousness of their position as shown by president Obama's adoption of McCain's nuclear energy policy in his state of the union speech. Yes, solar has to be pursued but only as a bell and whistle to the nuclear power plant production. If one looks at how much land area is needed for wind/solar (and power needed to extract resources to then make parts for the wind/solar machines) to make as much energy one modern power plant, there is no contest. Green tech today is but another bubble for Wall Street and is a dead end economically and environmentally (solar for instance requires enormous amount of water that could be used to produce nutrient rich food).

Nuclear energy power plants provide the most energy bang for the energy buck. Building them is better/cleaner for the planet and the only chance humanity has to live until fusion reactors and space based power supplies are constructed and are operational. It is no wonder that British oligarchy are completely against them as they want to promote "conservation" rather than expansion and thus preservation of the current nasty neo-feudal world order. Americans in the 1950s understood the possibilities of nuclear power and that is why they thought we'd be in a drastically different place today as a species. If we stop listening to economists and expose them as the charlatans that they are, it is still possible. The only main street is material industrial production with energy generation as primary focus.