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Bitcoin, STEAM degrees, Yellowstone, Nuclear power
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Podcast #30, FULL VERSION:
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Let’s Go Brandon (Blocker). I wonder
what percentage of neo-liberals listening to this show have no idea what “Let’s
go Brandon” means Dbach?
$100 invested in Bitcoin in 2009 would be
worth $62 myn today. The market cap of Bitcoin is $1 tyn. Several
years ago, on this show David, I dismissed crypto currencies because I didn’t
understand them, and because I was (and am not now) allowed to buy them for my
clients. Clearly, I was wrong about crypto’s. BUT this is NOT a
solicitation to buy or sell Bitcoin or any other crypto currency.
A guy named Preston Cooper analyzed 30,000
different bachelor’s degree programs for return on investment.
He found that 28% of those degrees have a
net negative return.
He also found that programs in engineering,
computer science, economics and nursing all yield a high return on investment,
increasing their students’ net lifetime earnings by $500,000.
But, a majority of degrees in art, music,
philosophy and psychology leave their AVERAGE students worse off financially.
One of the nation’s highest-return programs
is the computer-science major at Harvard University. This degree has an
expected value of more than $3 million. But attending the nation’s most elite
school is no guarantee of financial security. Harvard’s ethnic and gender
studies program leaves its students worse off by around $47,000 on average,
according to my estimates.
My school, SUNY Maritime College, offers
the highest mid-career earnings which is to say that 10 yrs after graduation,
the avg graduate earns some $175,000/yr. But…it’s a military school, so
it is not for everyone.
explain to me what the party that created
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare are going to do to rescue
those programs which will be insolvent:
SS: dies in 2033
Medicare: becomes inoperable in 2026
Medicaid; 2026-2030
JELLYSTONE:
A guy named Jacob Borden wrote an excellent
piece in the journal a couple of weeks ago about the Jellystone Caldera.
The Yellowstone caldera has exploded 3x
previously. The last such eruption was 631,000 years ago; the one before
that was 669,000 years prior. It’s not a matter of if it’ll erupt but
when. NASA’s JPL found in a 2017 study that the devastation of such an
eruption would exceed that of an asteroid 1½ miles wide crashing to Earth.
That is ¼ the size of the asteroid that rendered the dinosaurs extinct.
In 2014 the U.S. Geological Survey modeled
the likely ash distribution from a Yellowstone super-eruption. They found that
the ash radius would reach New York, with as much as 3½ inches of ash falling
as far east as Lincoln, Neb. Cropland across the U.S. and Canada would be
destroyed, and the release into the atmosphere of sulfate aerosols would create
a global “volcanic winter” lasting generations.
Fortunately, the JPL also points to a potential
solution—horizontal drilling for geothermal energy extraction—that would siphon
off excess energy, producing enough electricity to power as many as 20 million
homes for a few thousand years at only 10 cents a kilowatt-hour. That’s less
than Texans paid for electricity in 2019. Considering that the energy in the
Yellowstone caldera is carbon-free, you have to wonder why we aren’t already
doing it.
In my opinion the reason we aren’t already
doing it is simple; it makes common sense. More to the point, how do you
justify controlling people’s lives and taxing us into oblivion by providing
what would be inexpensive and carbon- free energy?
The specific reason we aren’t tapping the
caldera for energy is the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970. The law was meant to
spur the use of geothermal resources for energy production, but it
categorically excluded national parks from development. The technology
available at the time would have destroyed park ecosystems. But geothermal
methods have improved over the last 50 years. Horizontal drilling in particular
can be used to reach energy sources miles from where a well is bored into the
earth, almost completely eliminating the ground-level impact directly above
geothermal resources.
A volcanic winter would create global mass
starvation and the effect on America of Yellowstone’s caldera erupting would be
far worse. For the sake of everyone, Congress should amend the Geothermal Steam
Act to allow the responsible extraction of energy from national parks. It may
be the best way to make sure Yellowstone survives.
THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX, PART 2 (WSJ):
I maintain that any climate containment
strategy that does not include nuclear power is not to be taken seriously.
“Politics seems to have become inimical to
critical thinking, and nowhere is this more obvious than climate change.
Politicians peddle apocalypse and demand that Americans accept skyrocketing
gasoline and home heating costs, rolling blackouts and brownouts, endless
subsidies for uneconomic vehicles and power generation, and on and on.
Wishful thinking and flawed assumptions are
the order of the day. Climate models minimize the fact that humans process 375
tyn thoughts/day, and therefore assume that humans will fail to adapt to
changing conditions, instead allowing floodwaters to rise unabated, wildfires
to burn, and farms to fail. The U.S. contribution to global greenhouse-gas
emissions is substantial but falling. By 2025, it could be 14% to 18% below
2005 levels. The U.S. should not put on a self-destructive show for the rest of
the world.
Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that
over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining,
transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste, the greenhouse-gas
emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and
one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and
around 1/400th as much as solar.
For our podcast “In My Right Mind”, PJ and
I estimated it would take every square inch of South Dakota and Montana covered
w/ windmills and solar panels to replace all of our energy needs in this
country.
For any given power output, the amount of
raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent
solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to
dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This
includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in
landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce a
half-ounce of waste. Even including the Chernobyl disaster, human mortality
from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times
as many lives.
Although the federal government tends to
resist nuclear power, many nuclear technologies are being investigated and
funded by private capital including molten-salt reactors, liquid-metal
reactors, advanced small modular reactors (SMR’s), microreactors and much more.
More than 70 development projects are under way in the U.S., with many designs
intended to create assembly-line construction facilities to simplify and
standardize testing, licensing and installations. One appealing approach is to
replace large-scale facilities with many smaller but safer, cheaper and
more-manageable ones. The $10 billion 10-year planning and implementation cycle
for a large nuclear plant can be cut in half with a small modular reactor and
another half with a microreactor.
We could deploy SMRs today if we could
surmount the negative propaganda about the nuclear industry. Microreactors
could generate between 1 and 20 megawatts of power (enough to provide
electricity to 500 to 20,000 homes) while needing to refuel only once every
five to 10 years. They are air-cooled, capable of being shut down rapidly with
no risk of radioactive release and occupy small spaces.
If we can get past the political hurdles,
microreactors can be used in diverse applications such as charging stations for
electrical vehicles and propulsion for large commercial ships. They could also
power data centers, large factories, desalination plants and more. Heat
generation is essential for many manufacturing processes, and microreactors can
provide that directly without burning fossil fuels. It is worth noting that the
U.S. Navy has employed shipboard nuclear reactors for more than 50 years with
no significant problems or mishaps.
Nuclear power is cheap, efficient,
extremely reliable and nearly carbon-free. New designs, including smaller
reactors, drastically reduce the risk of large-scale radioactive contamination.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/12/how-much-youd-have-today-if-you-invested-100-in-bitcoin-in-2009.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rat
https://www.rollcall.com/2021/02/10/these-47-house-democrats-are-on-the-gops-target-list-for-2022/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/03/social-security-insolvency/
https://cebtralpainnervecenter.com/when-will-medicaid-program-run-out-of-money/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-summit-to-nowhere-glasgow-cop26-joe-biden-11635543010
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