One question, re:Teslas How is the anticorrosion coatings? If I did win the lotto and bought one would it be wise to get it Zeibarted? ( My VW was done from day one and it went back to the company with zero rust long after it would have broken in half without, IMHO ) It's steel construction, right? The same sheet metal that rusts so quickly on NY roads as you drive? ( 24 hours of salt spray testing for military gear? HAH! Try one winter in NY )
Unfortunately, "Market Forces" are short circuited by Religious Cults and the Whims of Kings. Warped, ignores, and denied, and of course, "Someone would say" there were no forces, just pressures... which actually makes sense in this application.
In one of the most hilariously one sided battles in Naval History, the Battle of Samar needs a little setup.
During the invasion of the Philippines the Japanese Navy threw the biggest battleships in the World, at the American fleet. But they ran a "come chase me" operation with their carriers first, to draw the American Battleships and Carriers away, so they could attack the invasion force. The plan worked. Sorta.
When the Yamato's fleet ran into the remaining American forces, it was a handful of small escort carriers, and destroyers. Coincidentally, the size difference between an Escort carrier and a destroyer is about the same as a Fleet Carrier, like Enterprise or Yorktown, and a heavy Cruiser.
So when the Japanese found the American force, the fact that the destroyers CHARGED them, convinced the Japanese Admiral that he'd found Fleet Carriers and Cruisers, because you'd have to be insane to attack the world's largest Battleship with a completely unarmored destroyer. In a case of supreme Irony, that mistake meant that the armor piercing shells that hit the destroyers tended to punch straight through one side and out the other, leaving a nasty jagged hole, sure, but not blowing the tiny ships into smithereens as an 18" high explosive shell meant for such unarmored targets would have.
The USS Johnston is officially the deepest wreck ever found. It likely hit the bottom at very highs speed, and considering that heavy cruisers and battleships blew the snot out of it, is in remarkable condition.
Apparently if we choose not to burn our forests for electricity in England, the Island Nation may die.
That's Green Decision making for you.
It may be most merciful to cut off power to Europe immediately, So they have time to activate alternative power before the mass casualties event this summer, when hundreds will die of heat, or this winter where tens of thousands would die of cold.
If weather patterns of the last few thousand years apply, and they do, as the numbers show, there will be famine and frozen folk unless we plan for tomorrow that really will be, instead of the lies that never come true of the Climate Con Cabal.
When, a month or year from now, the President announces a Serious Crisis That Must Be ..... For The Children!, Why would we believe her?
For example, a New Flu with terrifying numbers, or a Climate Crisis from multiple volcanic eruptions, or Polio 2 Electric Boogaloo, pouring up from Venezuela or Los Angeles.
I confess that it seems strange to just throw glass bottles out now that they aren't recycled.
In 2007, I visited a Waste Management plant in Minneapolis and they had workers picking recyclable stuff out of the regular garbage on a conveyor belt. How times have changed!
What happened is... with a buyer for glass/plastic/etc. it made sense to just sell the garbage, and the domestic recycling plants, where the stuff is actually turned back into the semi-raw materials for milk jugs, beer bottles, insulation, etc. faded away.
The collection and sorting, then mostly collection, continues, but with few places that do the actual work, and China no longer needing the Raw material, the recycling world has become a hollow shell.
And because it's a Government Job, it CAN"T go away, not for years or decades. There are Union Jobs and Government Payrolls to consider.
Remember it wasn't until Bill Clinton that the Mohair Subsidy went away. The WW2 program to insure that jeep & truck seats etc. would have a supply. When it finally got to be years since we needed it, and the voting block of Mohair producers was down to ?? "What's Mohair?" Finally you could shut down a Program. Bill also shut down the Helium Reserve, which I think was a major error, but the Navy didn't have any Airship Carriers anymore, and ( Bill got a big bribe ) party balloon suppliers apparently don't donate enough.
I also understand the Chinese government. Buying waste rags to plastics to glass to metals provided very cheap materials to industry, a kick start. And shipping was basically free. China sends East ships full of Dollar Tree Crap and the U.S. sends back ships of plastic, which gets turned into Dollar Tree Crap, sometimes with most of the nasty contaminates removed. ( Not picking on Dollar Tree, this applies to Walmart and Penny's and....)
Once you've got a solid supply of discount crude oil from the Mullahs in Iran, and your trade balance goes from "Darn, we got to spend money to keep all the peasants from starving" to "The world collapses if we don't supply their cheap stuff", it no longer is profitable to take Europe's and America's garbage.
And, of course, anyone who pointed that out years ago, ( this is not the first time ) was ignored, or kicked out, so that short term profits can be maximized the Harvard Business School Way. Tomorrow? Who cares? I'll be retired in a tax shelter.
It ain’t the balloon party people sucking up all the helium. Major industrial use. Leak detection, purging, pressurizing. Yes, shutting down the reserve was a mistake. Interestingly enough, Helium is sourced as a byproduct of oil and natural gas production. The Helium is on top.
You have to wonder what nuclear weirdness made it be there.
One of the little talked about coincidences is the natural atomic reactor in Africa. Miners were working down a seam of Uranium, when they got to a section with radically different isotopic composition, and other elements not found on either side. The same composition found in used reactor fuel.
So apparently rain water would percolate into a porous area, the water would slow the neutrons naturally emitted by the Uranium, and a chain reaction started. As the rock got hot, the water would boil off, and the reaction peter out. Lather, rinse, repeat for thousands of years.
The coincidence is timing and location. It's not far at all from early hominid fossil finds, and was leaking highly radioactive steam back before real humans show up. So it's possible that we are all Children of The Atom, without the eye beams or telekinesis, unfortunately.
It's not a widely accepted hypothesis, in part because it angers people of various beliefs, but I count it as one of those "really? You don't say?" items that might be directly responsible for us asking the questions.
Regarding Helium. We were told in 1999 by a Chem Eng prof at a UofM presentation that we were in danger of running out of argon because the nat gas reserves were so low (we get argon from nat gas). With the fracking revolution, I wonder what he thinks now? He was an obvious Greenie, so he probably thinks it's awful.
I know a guy in the air separation business. He says there’s plenty of Argon. The one percent of the atmosphere that isn’t Oxygen or Nitrogen is mostly Argon and it’s easy to get.