"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.... Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.... The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"
Writes Annaliese Griffin, in "Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians" (NYT).
Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it! And it's always nice to discover an opinion piece in the New York Times that nudges us to think about it.
Did you know it could "free" us from having meat in every meal? Did you realize your excess money was enslaving you to eating meat 3 times a day?
Am I missing the tone? Could this be intentional humor? I mean... "exciting vegetables." As we used to say in the 70s... Call and they'll come to you/Covered with dew/Vegetables dream of responding to you...
Posts
105 comments:
"exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini"
Let's all go *wild* and eat squash!
hmmm, i Suppose inflation COULD drive us to some kinda extreme things..
Maybe inflation will drive us to harvest democrats and use THEM for protein?
I mean, things COULD happen; right?
It's like they deliberately skipped out on trying to have any insight.
It's true that necessity is the mother of invention; it's likely that some real innovations will be spurred by the current problems we face. It's just that the *reason* those innovations will be spurred is because being poor SUCKS, and we will put in some level of effort to prevent these issues from making us poorer.
Serious Point (in the form of a question)
You know what country has Almost NO obesity? The same one with an almost total vegetarian diet!
The same one where inflation IS NOT a problem!!
That's right! The People's Democratic Republic of (North) Korea!!
If ONLY we could ALL live like They do!!
They don't have Any civil discord either!! Their people All Think With ONE Mind!!
Let them eat zukes! That didn't work well for Marie Antoinette.
Are you not enjoying The Great Reset?
There may be authoritarian (or quasi-authoritarian) figures on the right, but the left is full of totalitarians.
I'll take an authoritarian (who wants only personal power) over a totalitarian (who wants to control all aspects of everything) any day of the week.
All you have to do is ask. Call it by name.
"Hi there, Fred. You're a handsome avocado." Isn't that great!
If it weren't for those tiresome people who won't THINK differently... (we're much too polite to say the rest)
Big smile!
Show of hands among the carnivores here:
How many of you would be willing to make a sacrifice and start hunting and eating reporters, beginning with Annaliese Griffin?
Looking up her photo, and I don't recommend it, leads me to the conclusion that her years of smugness and likely drug and alcohol abuse wouldn't leave her 'in the pink', but hey...it's inflation...sacrifices are necessary.
It's amazing what one can do with a little creative butchery, an electric smoker, and some Mauls. I bet she'd go well with Mexican corn on the cob and a jellyfish salad.
Rid us of these do-gooders that want to prescribe our lives.
“ Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"
Lol. This falls under both the headings of “forcing the normie serfs to live like slaves so we can jet to Cabo while virtue signaling” AND the “Funemployment! and Staycations are Awesome!” propaganda articles the whore media write to prop up the left. It is unbelievable to me that people fall for this stuff. Again and again. They are like abused wives that want to be gaslit.
I find it impossible to accept anyone who finds zucchini "exciting" as an authoritative source on food.
When they start marketing meat to taste like vegetables, we will then be free from having to eat meat, because why buy meat when what you really want to eat is a carrot. I wonder how tigers will feel about it.
Not just the Mothers. Must have been in the California air in the 1960s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO05ZgGI7Q0&t=2s
"{exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini"
Eggplant I'm not sure about, but it depends what you do with the zucchini.
Like most Americans, I do not find President Biden exciting.
This idiot doesn't realize that inflation will drive us further towards high-calorie, low-cost junk, and not to some veggie nirvana. But we'll have an equivalent to peanut butter or some such nonsense...
our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump.
Riiiight. Take a quick-and-easy-to-prepare, satisfying, reasonably decent-for-you meal like spaghetti and meatballs or a meat sauce with a salad. (Keto people, back off - I'm talking about a fully mainstream meal choice that the harried 2-career household or single parent can prepare for family members of all ages, and expect no one to develop a nutritional deficiency or get exhausted or feel super hungry after because of lack of bulk, calories, or, yes, carbs.) What are you going to use to replace the meat, for quick, high quality protein? Meat substitutes are more expensive, some of them are problematic to people like (I presume, based only on probabilities) this writer because of The Dreaded GMOs, and flat-out vegetable sources of protein like beans and nuts require more and/or more arcane preparation and more commonly cause digestive issues than cooked meat.
I did make a delicious walnut Bolognese recently - but I don't work (for money), and man, it took a long time.
But this woman wants your ordinary American family, in the demographic hit hardest by food price inflation, to merrily hit up the pages of Saveur for their latest "plant-based eating" recipes.
Or is she just such a Democrat True Believer that she has to do her best to use her platform to make a virtue out of necessity? And she's actually sneaking paté from the SubZero after midnight?
I try not to be this sarcastically dismissive of my philosophical opposite numbers, but it took me a whole minute to retrieve my eyes from where they rolled up in my head at this.
Simply becoming a vegan is not going to save the planet or help us deal with inflation. All foods are produced by farmers and ranchers using diesel equipment and it’s transported to the stores by diesel trucks. Until something meaningful is done about rising fuel prices, food prices will continue to rise.
“ Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"”
Ramen noodles until we become a majority-minority country, then rice and beans.
I don't know what you folks are seeing, but fruit veggie costs at the store seem to have risen more meat. Hamburger, chicken, pork, and steak have not gone up as much, and something in each category is always on sale.
Vegetables and fruit require a lot of oil to produce...tilling, planting, fertilizer and fertilizing, weed management, harvest. Then of course it all needs to be stored and then trucked to distributors who then truck it to grocers.
The price of vegetables isn't all that low either. I'd argue you are better off buying more concentrated nutrition in a cheap cut of meat than $2 a head for the small, wimpy looking lettuce I bought last week.
Starvation is an infallible cure for obesity.
Let them eat zukes! That didn't work out well for Marie Antoinette.
In 1980 I visited Vilnius with my wife, whose parents were refugees from Lithuania after WWII. We were visiting the extended family. One sister-in-law, the daughter of a Communist Party official, had been allowed to travel to East Germany, and reported on her experience. She said, "Can you believe it? In Germany they eat meat practically every day."
Her listeners were astounded by the revelation. My appreciation for capitalism blossomed that day.
I will note that food is incredibly cheap in the USA, compared to what I've seen in Europe, when you measure the costs as a percentage of average income.
In economics, these are called inferior goods. Investopedia has a convenient definition: "An inferior good is an economic term that describes a good whose demand drops when people's incomes rise. These goods fall out of favor as incomes and the economy improve as consumers begin buying more costly substitutes instead."
When the price of normal goods (e.g. animal proteins) rise, we substitute with inferior goods like legumes. While it's nice that the NYT writers are discovering basic economics concepts, the rest of us should not forget that if most of us had our cost-free preference we would likely consume animal or dairy proteins with almost every meal. Presidents used to win elections promising "a chicken in every pot," now we are back to being promised lentils, always for "our own good."
Poverty is the mother of opportunity.
There are several problems with vegetarianism. One, undernourishment, malnourishment... people... persons are not ruminants. Two, methane emissions are a first-order forcing of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling... warming... change. Three, think of the calves who will be discriminated. Four, think of the plants - who - will be discriminated. Five, progressive prices forced by single/central/monopolistic solutions are fungible. Six, choice... not that Choice. People... persons are omnivores, with cause. Stay organic, baby.
Or, as the Davos Men like to say, The Great Reset. As we return to a world powered solely by the sun and wind (i.e., 14th Century), how fitting that the vast majority are forced to adopt the eating habits of the peasantry. Kinda goes with the Black Plague lock-downs and the wrathful rants of our Green Saint, Holy Greta.
The Left never rests. Just leave us alone.
And let's be totally honest and rigorous in our thinking. If everyone in America drove an EV and was a vegan, it wouldn't make one bit of difference to the planet.
To the extent that carbon dioxide is the proximate cause of global warming (it isn't), the bulk of the world's carbon dioxide is generated by China and India. Go bother those people.
"asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change"
It would be nice if they would ask, but of course they don't. They're in the business of telling us to change our habits, without even a please or a thank you. Because they feel entitled to rule us plebes, us deplorables, you know.
That's why they beat the drum for every emergency, every crisis, every 'existential' threat they can dream up, and then some. Don't let a crisis go to waste, that's their motto. Grab the power, never let go. Scratch a vegetarian, find a fascist underneath. Vegans? Even worse.
They need to work on their PR, though. "Exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini." That's the best they can do? That won't work.
"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal, and automobiles..."
The problem here is the inability of warmists to define and measure climate change.
In 1856, Eunice Foote described filling glass jars with water vapor, carbon dioxide, and air, and comparing how much they heated up in the sun.
“The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas,” she writes, using the contemporary term for carbon dioxide.
“The receiver containing the gas became itself much heated – very sensibly more so than the other – and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling.”
This limited, over-simplified, and totally misunderstood experiment graduated to become global warming and when cooling trends appeared in our lives, the name of this unscientific look at the weather that surrounds us became global climate change.
Supposedly, this climate change wrought heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, and disease outbreaks. Ocean levels were raised, and hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and tornados were suddenly more violent and more frequent. Snow and ice melts were endangering our ice-covered poles. None of this happens to be true, but what was supposedly causing all this? In 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall borrowed Eunice Foote's experimental discovery calling it the "greenhouse effect", which totally underpins the so-called science of climate change.
Unsurprisingly, there is as yet no incontrovertible proof either of the greenhouse effect or its connection with alleged global warming. In fact, there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect: it is an impossibility. The statement that so-called greenhouse gases, especially CO2, contribute to near-surface atmospheric warming is in glaring contradiction to well-known physical laws relating to gas and vapor, as well as to general caloric theory. And the coup de grâce: Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not track back to temperature change; there is no statistical relationship and there never has been one.
But global warming, the world's greatest killer of living creatures is nothing but a ghost. As for the effect of weather changes on living conditions, perhaps it is best to speak to your God - because altering the atmospheric conditions of our planet is fortunately above and beyond man's capability.
Ahhh ... the new "funemployment."
Everything in service to the state over at the NYT. Didn't one of their writers get a Pulitzer Prize for denying a famine?
Walter Mondale, or someone?
Soylent Green is people!
I was talking with my left wing cousin in law about Norman Borlaug. When I mentioned my astonishment that this man was probably personally responsible for saving over a billion people from starvation, her response was that this was unfortunate since the planet can't handle too many people. Don't think that the inflation and economic destruction being directed from the White House isn't intentional.
Vegetarianism will DESTOY the planet, not save it.
I'm an agronomist with over 40 years' experience, having worked, lived, and taught on three continents, with close professional contacts on two more. Moreover, I have 35 years' experience as a production organic farmer at a significant commercial scale. These vege-heads quite simply have no idea what they'ren talking about.
Immense swaths of Earth are not suitable for producing that great healer of soil ... GRASS. Humans cannot obtain nourishment directly from grass. Fact of life. There are, however, these amazing solar-powered grass combines to harvest the crop and make it nutritionally available to people. They're called cattle, and bison, and water buffalo, and sheep, and goats, and so on.
I detest feedlots, and they're as harmful to to the animals as to the planet, but no rational person can blame cattle any more than we can blame guns for shootings, or airplanes for terroriost attacks. Animals do more to heal the planet than all the environmental activists combined.
Personally speaking, I would prefer to eat like the French do. I doubt that it would have much of an impact on climate change, but I also doubt that embracing (i.e., devouring) vegetables would have much impact, either.
For a bracing review of how humans will react to climate change, see this talk by Stuart Kirk, the head of responsible investing at HSBC. Talk about inconvenient truths! It got the speaker suspended by his employer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfNamRmje-s
Nothing against vegans, provided they can shut up about it. It certainly can be healthy. My son's family is vegetarian but his wife works hard to make sure they eat well. I've never had any complaints about any meals at their house.
Their daughter, after playing pretty serious club volleyball for 5-6 years starts engineering school this fall on a full athletic scholarship. (Straight A's, K-12 didn't hurt, either. Yeah, I'm bragging. Sue me.)
My church (SDA) discourages, but does not forbid, meat and lots of members are vegetarian. Most seem pretty healthy to me.
So getting away from meat can be a healthy diet.
But why should I want to? I like meat.
More importantly, what they Hell right does anyone have to force me to be vegetarian?
That is the thing that really annoys me.
They can fuck right off.
John LGKTQ Henry
This is sort of thought on the Environmental Left has been around for decades. Probably the best known preacher of environmental limitarianism is George Monbiot of The Guardian. He, at least, has been honest that any real environmentalism will require a major reduction in the standard of living for the inhabitants of the 1st World.
At least, Monbiot wants to leave us "excess eaters" alive, unlike some of the more radical Deep Ecologists/
File this load of bunkum from the New York Times alongside the classic piece from the Los Angeles Times a doze or so years ago babbling about the joys of "funemployment". That came during what Obama grandly called the "Great Recession".
I will admit that the writer has a certain sense of humor when she gushes about the "exciting" eggplant and zucchini. We'll see what she thinks if she is fed just those two things for a straight 30 days. Oh, she can have some water as well.
Potatoes again? How spiritual! How cleansing! Saul Bellow in his novel Ravelstein, about his friend Allan Bloom, rings changes on a joke. Dwight Macdonald spent his time with New York intellectuals, but he was often the richest of them, having an independent income. At least once a fellow writer in the Depression said he was completely broke, and didn't know where his next meal was coming from. Dwight said: you may have to do what we all have to do from time to time: cut a coupon. In the same time period, a man was going door to door hoping for food, possibly in return for work. At one home a lady opened the door and the man simply said: lady, I haven't eaten for three days. She said: young man, sometimes you simply have to make the effort.
.
I'm reminded of the old Tom Tomorrow cartoon spoofing corporate mouthpieces trying to convince the public that which is bad is really quite beneficial: Toxic Waste Is Good For You
.
Has she considered the climatic advantages of suicide? She could make a little rubber sarcophagus and sequester her own carbon.
when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.
Stopped reading right there because anybody who thinks that is an ignorant moron.
"Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it!"
This is necessarily part of the prog end game. The transition to electrified transportation depends on completely unrealistic assumptions about mining and renewable energy supplies. Without massive nuclear investment, a green economy cannot possibly sustain our current standard of living. Therefore, the prog battle against climate change requires lowering the standard of living--less driving, less AC, less less access to less stuff, less life.
Inflation is caused by government policy. It should turn us off to the idea that government spending is an unbridled force for good and that the misnamed "elites" in this country know what the fuck they're talking about or doing. They don't. The more power they steal for themselves, the more they fuck everything up for the rest of us.
Of course, leftists never want to miss an opportunity to scold and lecture regular people that what they like is bad in some unspecified (and probably false) way, whether it be guns or cars or meat. Our betters will get all the sustenance they need and never go without armed security, all paid for by the rest of us.
Since T. R. Malthus created the fear of certain starvation because of population increase faster than food production that has been used by evil rulers as a virtue signal pretense for intentionally starving masses of people to death. The Malthusian formulae is start with a familiar famine that weakens the people so that a pandemic can finish off any survivors.
Today the world government dudes are Malthusians all the way down. They got their plandemic started early just to get rid of Trump.Now the insane BS Global Warming fear is being used to stop the oil and gas production so that farmers and truckers are stopped from food supply and famine can catch up. One way or another these elite guys want world population reduced to half a billion. Their traditional use of war has been reduced by the threat of nuclear weapons. But Ukraine- Russia has been escalated anyhow. Maybe the elites want a nuclear war that they believe they will survive.
Reminds me of the trendsetter in taking advantage of your poverty, Clark Griswold's brother in law from Kansas in "National Lampoon's Vacation: "I don't know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper. I think it's great all by itself"
This is simply the democraticals latest iteration of "Funemployment" where the disaster the democraticals have purposely and knowingly created is spun as some wonderful outcome.
I'm surprised these "rocket scientists" havent dredged up their "Summer of Recovery" lies that they repeated like lemmings for the 7 last years of the "sort of a god" obambi's admin.
Annaliese is an idiot. Another Biden voter heard from.
Are we back to the "eat bugs" stage again? They really do try so hard.
Inflation is for poor people, of course.
Every Biden screw-up has a silver lining.
So by extension of this idiot's thought process, mass shootings must be good. You know .... population reduction for the good of the planet.
When they start marketing meat to taste like vegetables
......and using a clever marketing name like Soylent Green.
It’s fruits and nuts, all the way down, at the NYT.
And of course a veggie in the Oval Office.
"“ Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, "
Um, how does that not describe the world now? Who is forcing anyone to eat meat?
""exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini"
Let's all go *wild* and eat squash!"
I have always liked butternut squash, with butter and a dash of salt.
Eggplant - maybe in eggplant parmesan.
Zucchini - my favorite is to add flour, sugar, eggs, butter, cocoa powder, chocolate chips, etc., pour into a bread pan and bake in the oven until done.
I grew up with parents who experienced some of the Great Depression (for you youngsters, that was during the years 1929-1939.) I was taught quite a few ways to be frugal. (Like grow your own meat - but we were on a farm.) Wait until things start being rationed. They had that during WWII and my mom saved the cover of the ration book. (Coupons were all used up, of course.)
The local Fleet Farm is already trying to cash in on people growing their own food. Every year since I can remember they had a "Fleet" discount on their garden seeds right off the bat. Not this year. No sale on their live garden plants yet. They still have a large inventory sitting in their garden center. The big tomato plants that already have tomatoes look rather sickly, but they still want full price.
Gas is up to $4.60/gal. in my nearby little town. It has never been that high since gas has been sold there. It will be interesting to see where the breaking point occurs in this country.
Does Annaliese Griffin know (or even care) that the '70s also brought increased use of vegetable oils (omega-6 oceans, dontchaknow) and added sugar to food to replace the animal fat being stripped out. This trend arguably ushered in the obesity epidemic beginning around 1980. At least that's the thinking I follow.
I still remember the Native American woman pushing Mazola Corn Oil ("the goodness of Maize" and cholesterol-free). I remember John Houseman intoning, "Nooooooooooo cholesterol" as he peddled Puritan Oil.
So she wants to save the planet while continuing to ruin American health. Can you dig it?
By the way, kudos to Quaestor at 1:55.
So the Democratic pitch to the American people is higher gas bills, higher prices for food, clothing and anything moved by truck will be a permanent feature of life? And we're better off because higher prices will reduce consumption of goods that the ultra-Woke despise? This is seriously stupid.
Why not argue that inflation devalues debt? So the argument goes --
1. Joe Biden's policies have initiated a red hot phase of inflation.
2. Debtors pay back their lenders with money worth much less than it was when they originally borrowed it. Debtors, including college grads with worthless degrees and shopaholics with massive credit card debt, are better off.
3. Higher inflation also reduces the real value of the government’s massive debt. That's a big plus for Republicans who blow up the deficit whenever they get elected!
4. Finally, higher inflation increases the tax burden on capital investment due to lack of inflation indexing. People like the Koch brothers, Elon Musk and Johnny Depp will holler but who cares?
This was the basis for William Jennings Bryan's Free Silver Movement. I can also see Biden fusing inflation with populist rhetoric. So this is Biden's sales pitch --
"Yes my policies have super charged inflation! But this inflation is a lifeline for struggling families paying a mortgage [with a fixed rate] or a single mom who can barely afford her student loan payments."
The catch is convincing people that their wages are keeping pace with inflation.
I eagerly await my upcoming impoverishment so that I can go back to eating the exciting grains and festive lentils that gave me diabetes! With any luck I will spiral into a quick death and thus cease to be an imposition on our Sacred Planet.
Gilbar said: "Maybe inflation will drive us to harvest democrats and use THEM for protein?"
Thanks for the laugh---imagining a bunch of Democrats tied to stakes, like tomato plants, ripening to perfection. Talk about a Field of Dreams!
Socialism's subtext: lower your expectations.
A Malthusian ignoramus and a shill for a failed and destructive administration. Charming.
The economy, the shortages, inflation, supply chain. $7.00 gas and $7 hamburger is exactly the goals Democrats have been campaigning on. How many times have you heard 'transition' in the last 48 hours
You have to be a fool to think Biden handlers is going to do anything ameliorate any of these conditions
"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when"
the left-wing scumbags pushing those policies are not personally impacted by them.
FIFY
Do you support "gun control"? Then you'd better NEVER have any armed people protecting you. No cops, no military, no private security, nothing.
If you get to be protected by guns, then so do we. OUR guns
Do you claim to care about climate change? Then you'd better NEVER fly first class, or fly in a private plane.
No, I don't care how many "carbon offsets" you buy, how many trees you plant. you can do that without the flying
The purpose of carbon taxes is to "change people's behavior", which is to say "to take away their ability to do things they'd like to do".
If you are doing those things, then you need to STFU about anyone else doing them.
The future
Family relations became strained 30+ years ago when my sister in law served a pizza for a family dinner, a pizza topped with an excess of her backyard garden's zucchini crop. Haven't trusted her since.
Vegetables are generally delivered by truck. Them veggies ain't getting any cheaper, either, Honey.
I love when they say planet instead of world or earth.
Without it, I don't think I could grasp the big picture.
Yet somehow when you speculate that the Democrats are purposely trying to impoverish the middle class, you're a sonspiracy theorist.
My first thought was "Soylent Green" but it's been mentioned twice already. Sharp commenters!
"imagining a bunch of Democrats tied to stakes, like tomato plants, ripening to perfection. Talk about a Field of Dreams!"
Farmer Vincent? Is that you?
"Motel Hell is a 1980 American comedy horror film directed by Kevin Connor[2] and starring Rory Calhoun, Nancy Parsons, and Nina Axelrod. The plot follows farmer, butcher, motel manager, and meat entrepreneur Vincent Smith, who traps travelers and harvests them for his human sausages.
Because of its low budget, the original intent was to make a serious horror film, with moments of disturbing wit and irony. It is often seen as a satire of modern horror films such as Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motel_Hell
America last.
Ooops- wrong thread…
No, it’s not.
Only one response to this. GFY
It seems like only yesterday when resident buffoon gadfly was expounding on the wonders of Biden's Earpiece's economic miracle with ever so slight inflation being just a transitory blip on the inevitable soaring economic trajectory......
"Maybe inflation will drive us to harvest democrats and use THEM for protein?"
Democrats are edible?
Are you sure?
Not Sure said...
I find it impossible to accept anyone who finds zucchini "exciting" as an authoritative source on food.
****************
For years I've prepared ONE zucchini recipe for the family, featuring shrimp in an Indian tomato/garlic/ginger/cumin sauce. The trick is not to overcook the zucchini, but instead leave it with a little "crunch".
Delish. But anything else with zucchini? Boring.
It seems like it's not enough to make people scrimp and do without. They have to be made to like it, to appreciate and love Big Brother.
The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil.
It's hard enough to make lentils palatable. Nothing is going to make them tasty or delectable, let alone exciting.
Motel Hell is a 1980 American comedy horror film directed by Kevin Connor and starring Rory Calhoun, Nancy Parsons, and Nina Axelrod.
Comic cannibalism isn't unheard of in films. Eating Raoul. The Last Supper. Delicatessen. Eat the Rich. I can't imagine large audiences really enjoyed them, but I suppose there are enough cannibals out there to make the films profitable.
High gas prices could "free" us to walk. High cost of health care could "free" us to exercise. The high cost of assuring fair elections could free us to live under a one party utopia.
Elon Musk is already generating solar power in space and beaming it to earth to point of use. He didn't invent the technology, Telstar was doing it 60 years ago.
But starlink is doing it from low orbit apparently successfully.
What happens when he scales the satellites up from generating kilowatts to gigaawatts and starts beaming megawatts instead of microwatts?
Tesla, the man, not the car demoed this 120 years ago.
Pretty much All existing earth based generation will be obsolete.
Co2 "pollution" will cease to exist.
Something I fear will not cease to exist is the climate change scammers.
John LGKTQ Henry
My best meals are meat, vegetables, and berries for dessert. So my advice on managing inflation at the supermarket is to keep buying meat but cut down on the processed foods.
"Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians"
Chapter MMXVIII, "The World Will Be A Better Place Once Everybody Is Enlightened Like Me".
"Should"? GFY
John henry said...
Elon Musk is already generating solar power in space and beaming it to earth to point of use. He didn't invent the technology, Telstar was doing it 60 years ago.
***********************
WTF????
Telstar was an early communications satellite with a transponder used to convey TV, radio and computer data over very long distances..
It had noting to do with "generating solar power" ----the Sun does that all by itself---nor did it store solar energy, nor did it transfer that energy back to Earth.
Wahchoosmokin'?
A year ago whole beef tenderloins were $85 at the nearest Walmart.
They went up to $135 over the winter, but are back down to $85 again.
Annaliese can enjoy her bugs and quinoa, but I know what's for dinner around here this summer.
John henry said...
Elon Musk is already generating solar power in space and beaming it to earth to point of use. He didn't invent the technology, Telstar was doing it 60 years ago.
*****************
OK, I'll bite:
Please explain how Musk's satellites, which are very small, do that.
Here's an image showing them packed into their delivery stage:
https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/starlink2-1-stack.jpg
Next, tell us how such tiny satellites could possibly add significantly large amounts to the existing solar energy hitting the Earth every second?
How do they gather and store solar energy, then focus and beam it to Earth?
Then explain how the DC power from these satellites could be economically transformed into 120 AC.
Then tell us about clouds, and the utility of such low-orbit satellites when they, or the Earth below, are in the dark?
For our betters to know whether inflation is a curse or a blessing, they must first remind themselves of the political party of the current president. Since the current resident is a democrat, inflation is a good thing, and there are multiple ways of reflecting on this blessing. Among them, the use of inflation to bludgeon the population into accepting some of the left's more loony ideas, such as the "climate crisis", and adapting their behavior to fit leftist dogma. Cringeworthy doesn't begin to describe this article.
Left Bank of the Charles: very good.
Common ground. Who knew:0)?
"Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change" Poverty is great. Let's have more of it. Jeepers. What could be more evil?
Jaore: high gas prices could free us to walk...
Yup.
There's a good bit in "God Emperor of Dune" where the emperor explains that, despite the availability of various advanced forms of transport, a "population on foot is easier to control".
My best meals are meat, vegetables, and berries for dessert. So my advice on managing inflation at the supermarket is to keep buying meat but cut down on the processed foods.
Left Bank, indeed - but I grew up in a household managed by one parent who, himself, grew up with a career mom who didn't like to cook and one parent who is a very impatient cook who takes all sorts of non-viable shortcuts (microwaving chicken instead of sauteeing it is a favorite). Not everyone possesses either the skills, or the desire to learn, to cook delicious food from basic ingredients.
I love to cook and bake, and I enter the middle aisles of the grocery store pretty much only to buy spices, oils sand vinegars, some pasta (which is more fun to make but takes time and commitment), and basic pantry staples like rice and beans and one jarred salsa that we like. But I am fortunate to be married to a well-employed person and I have no career ambition.
When I hear my liberal friends complain about gas prices (roughly $6 per gallon here in the San Francisco area) I remind them of Steven Chu's remarks about needing to pay as much as Europeans. And that this has been openly stated Dem party policy for many years.
Cue fish-out-of-water expressions...
Telstar had solar collectors for power.
You're right, of course, solar power comes from the sun and is collected or harvested or whatever word you want to use by solar panels on satellites. Just like on earth.
Telstar, it was transmitting energy to earth. Very small, microwatt, levels but it was sending power to earth where it is collected in parabolic antennas amplified and used for communication.
Just like Starlink, though Starlink is low, non-geosynchronous orbit and the solar panels, transmission and earth reception have improved tremendously since then.
Starlink satellites are pretty small. @650lbs OTOH, Telstar only weighed 170# But they are launched a couple dozen at a time so there is no reason that one big satellite could not be launched.
And the Falcon Heavy, supposed to be approved this month for routine launches, carries 70 tons (140m#) to low orbit, 25 tons to geosynchronous. So Musk already has the capability to launch big satellites and will soon have capability to launch enormous ones.
He can harvest enormous amounts of solar energy.
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(Cont)
So he can generate huge amounts of power in space from solar. Nothing new in that technology.
He can beam small amounts of power to earth. Again, nothing new, though he does seem to have found some improvements. Let's call this signal power to distinguish it from utility scale energy power.
Nikola Tesla was beaming power (multi-KW) wirelessly 120 years ago. The technology was fairly straightforward. Doing it practically was beyond the tech of the times. It still is but we are getting closer.
I suspect that if Musk has it in his head to do this, we are 5-10 years from a practical, working, system being rolled out.
Converting AC to DC and back to AC is trivial and common. There are a number of transmission systems that generate AC, convert it to high voltage DC, transmit it long distances then convert it back to HV AC and transform it down to 480/240/120 VAC/60HZ.
China recently built an 800,000VDC transmission line more than 2,000 miles long.
Power comes into the US from Canada as 700 (or so) volt DC and is converted to AC. This avoids synchronization issues between the 2 countries. Japan, which has 50hz in the north and 60hz in the south, transmits HVDC to allow interconnection and has been for 100 years or more.
DC is also a lot cheaper and more efficient to transmit.
Search High Voltage DC transmission for more than you will probably ever want to know.
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John LGKTQ Henry
(Cont)
This is a good article on the state of the art of wireless power generation.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-critical-look-at-wireless-power
A number of interestng links in the article.
One other thing, how badly do clouds affect your communications by satellite? Not at all?
Same thing with power transmission. It will be electrical (generically speaking) not light. Clouds are invisible to it.
John LGKTQ Henry
This inflation is an opportunity to impoverish the Americans into virtue. All to make people get that gentle feeling of moral smugness. Like the stereotypical church lady.
effinayright said...
John henry said...
Elon Musk is already generating solar power in space and beaming it to earth to point of use. He didn't invent the technology, Telstar was doing it 60 years ago.
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OK, I'll bite:
Please explain how Musk's satellites, which are very small, do that.
My guess is that the satellites have solar power panels that they use to run themselves.
Raido waves are energy.
Now, an actual SPS (Solar Power Satellite) system requires satellites with much bigger panels.
More importantly, it requires targets on the ground that can take the high energy beams, and distribute them to the electric grid.
But I've been reading about the potential of those for the last 40+ years.
One of the challenges / dangers of them is that they can also be used to power orbital weapons. Which means they could quickly become targets. People tend not to want to build expensive targets.
Some numbers:
11 pounds to low earth orbit gets you 4 pounds to geosynchronous orbit (LEO to GEO). Classically you want your SPS satellites in GEO
SpaceX Falcon Heavy can get 120k to 141k pounds to LEO
https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power
A Microwave transmitting SPS at 180 million pounds, receiver 3 - 10 km in diameter, sends gigawatts
OTOH, a Laser transmitting satellite in LEO and about 20k pounds. 1 - 10 megawatts, bean is about 2 meters in diameter so you can have much smaller receivers, and a Falcon Heavy can take up 6 or 7 of them for $150 million
So if you can get 50 megawatts out of your 6 - 7 satellites, then your launch cost is $3 per watt
The average residential electricity rate in the U.S. is 13.83 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
A constant 1 watt is 8.76 kwh a year, which at current prices is $1.20 a year
So in less than 3 years you've paid for the lift, now of course you have to pay for the satellite itself, ground side transmission, etc.
Why isn't Musk in this business? Well:
https://www.electricrate.com/solar-energy/price-per-kwh/
The national average cost per watt of solar PV is currently $2.76 per watt. This is the historic minimum price.
That works ~12 hours a day, whereas the space based is closer to 24. And it may be that the laser satellites have gotten better.
But being able to beam power to Earth will hit a regulatory nightmare, which means at minimum Musk won't do this before there's a Republican in the White House.
But someone else could try
Mezzrow quoted me and then asked:
"imagining a bunch of Democrats tied to stakes, like tomato plants, ripening to perfection. Talk about a Field of Dreams!"
Farmer Vincent? Is that you? }}}}
Nope, I'm just an humble attorney with an abiding love of beefsteak tomatoes.
Yes inflation, $100/ fillup, $1.00/egg is such a wonderful opportunity. Democrats actually think they are going to shove the new green deal down our throat and their propaganda outlets are going to telll us it is raining while we are being pissed on.
This inflation is the PLAN. They are trying to shove the new green deal via executive order. Our only hope is to destroy the democrat party and salt the earth.
’…you have to pay for the satellite itself….
Satellite economics was my career for three decades, and said cost - even with the resultant economies of scale - would render a power generating constellation non competitive versus terrestrial rates. I’d estimate time on station for those satellites at less than seven years; further diminishing their competitiveness.
Not trying to be an ass or anything - and I appreciate your methodology.
You know what makes vegetables exciting? Bacon. Bacon wrapped grilled asparagus. Stir fried zucchini with bacon. Bacon bits in a spinach salad. Bacon!
Around here, people are always sharing deer meat. If you let them hunt on your land, you can expect a few packages delivered from the butchery.
I worry about prion diseases. Maybe I shouldn't. I have no idea.
Not a big fan of the flavor. I'd prefer wild rabbits and boar but have never found a way to acquire either. But my Bambi Bolognese is to die for. And yes, TaiJohnDo, it wouldn't be without the addition of diced pancetta, Italian bacon.
When I lived in Florida during the big freeze, millions of fish froze in the water and got stuck in the mangroves as it warmed at low tide because their sense of direction had been destroyed by being semi-frozen. It was apocalyptic but delicious to pluck live fish from trees. They were mostly narrow, bony, undesirable ones. But you could make Asian fish balls out of them.
Survivalist farmers recommend growing just four things: sweet potatoes, collards or kale, grain (not sweet) corn, and winter squash. Salad is out of the question. So is zucchini. It's just water. The people living five to an apartment in NYC are out of luck. They'll have to eat each other. On the plus side, their rent will probably go down.
Well, they used to say a little suffering is good for the soul. Lots suffering to come. Thanks, Joe. You and your 81M voters.
Beasts of England said...
Not trying to be an ass or anything - and I appreciate your methodology.
Same here. It may be that solar power satellites will turn out to be something that just doesn't economically work. Which will surprise me. But it won't be the first time :-)
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