moocowduckquack

Do you think you can you guess what it is?

edit - my edit earlier was going from 'pissed off' to 'argued with' as I realised that 'pissed off' can often imply intent to piss off.

(edited to avoid implying fault on his part)

It's news, not a brand of cereal. In theory journalists are supposed to occaisionally go and get stuff, otherwise they may as well fire them all and just get a photocopier and put marketing press releases through it. (In some papers I suspect this has already happened.)

You do both, the two activities feed into each other, the greenhouses increase air moisture down wind and help you get plants growing, which feeds back into getting more rainfall once you get a large enough area going.

You have to design for the desert: evaporation > rainfall. That means getting the water shaded asap.

That's what the fucking greenhouse is for.

"A net unidirectional and reversible force on the order of ± 3.14 milli‐Newton or 0.069% of the suspended test article mass was recorded by us in our first high frequency 2.2 MHz test article. The authors also developed a W‐E model that integrates the various engineering parameters affecting the design, construction, and performance of W‐E based MLTs for the next generation of systems. When Woodward’s (2004a, 2004b, 2005) and our test results were compared with the model’s predictions, the test results exceeded predictions by one to two orders of magnitude. Efforts are underway to understand the discrepancies and update the model. The test results imply that these devices, when fully developed, could be competitive with ion engines intended for use on satellite station keeping and/or orbital transfers."

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/proceeding/aipcp/10.106...

Is the sort of choice that has been available in markets going back as long as governments and markets have existed though, so given there has never been a complete market that fulfils your definition of a healthy market, can we just look at whether there is some general economic benefit here rather than worrying about whether it is healthy, as if it is sick, it has managed fine so far for a good few thousand years, so it can't be too bad.

Public enterprise, as we all know, is of course highly inefficient, massively expensive and badly organised. Which is why it is absolutely vital to ban it from entering industry as it would be unfair competition.

edit - I just had a look at what you are doing through your username, akvo looks pretty cool.

"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

H. L. Mencken, "Notes on Journalism"

Personally, I think that this rule being taken seriously has done more damage for US culture than just about anything else.

The UK is currently committing to building a whole new set of boiling water reactors while still having not made up its mind about the location of the UK long term waste store, which is taking a while as for reasons of politics, the government is relying on voluteerism rather than geologic suitability to decide where in the country to put it.

We did have a breeder reactor in Dounreay. It is shut down now and the surrounding beaches are off limits for a while, due to old fuel rod fragments being pumped into the sea. The management were also prosecuted for dumping solid nuclear waste in landfill.

Desalination does not intefere with rainwater harvesting. Rainwater harvesting is an entirely parallel enterprise, mostly involving accumulating very large bodies of freshwater.

Currently desalination is very energy intensive and so tends to do harm due the pollution generated from producing that energy.

These greenhouses desalinate water with a fraction of the energy requirements (pumping sea water inland takes energy, but nowhere near as much energy as you might imagine, as long as the inland end is not too far above sea level), while producing food, increasing the amount of moisture in the local area so greening that area of desert, and also increasing the amount of water available to the local municipal supply, at a rate that can be offset by the main farming business.

This is only control of water in the way that a pipe is control of water. It is continuous production of clean water in areas where that is often a problem.

It produces treatable wastes, ones that can be allowed to enter the normal economy and processed, rather than wastes we are so scared of that we can't let anybody touch them and so inject them into deep water aquifers instead.

Also, all waste comparisons I have seen people make with nuclear generally seem to only include volume of spent fuel, and not the wastes from the process of making the fuel in the first place, which are several orders of magnitude greater.

A uranium mine isn't just a fuel source, it is also part of a military arsenal at the highest level, so really it isn't that surprising to see so little care given to the externalities.

Personally I think that solar/storage is about to outcompete the pants off most everything else anyway, given the ever falling price of modules and the existence of companies like lightsail and gravitypower. http://www.lightsail.com/ http://www.gravitypower.net/

hot gravel edit; oh, and Isentropic - http://www.isentropic.co.uk/

It works when there is no rain without needing a tank big enough to last a several year long drought.

The architecture of the greenhouse acts as a solar desalinator that in testing creates more water than is needed to irrigate the plants, so it not only grows plants, but also can provide clean water in the desert.

Sometimes the we can never upgrade is part of the job description. A lot of control software for industrial systems is like that. You do not expect to be thinking about having to upgrade the core code for at least a few decades, as downtime for development and testing is obscenely expensive.