The Dutch are experts at keeping sea water out, they would be doing big biz, all from boats of course.
Last edited:
A million people
A million people or so should be able to live in that situation just fine. We will first lose butterflies, bees, hummingbirds and a few other species. That will cut the food supply down to fractions of the current level. There will be diseases, famines, floods, etc etc ... a few million people who will be whittled down over a few decades to about a million.
Cool.
Srinath.
A million people or so should be able to live in that situation just fine. We will first lose butterflies, bees, hummingbirds and a few other species. That will cut the food supply down to fractions of the current level. There will be diseases, famines, floods, etc etc ... a few million people who will be whittled down over a few decades to about a million.
Cool.
Srinath.
Oddly I think that is a red herring as well
You release more co2 by the time you plug in your tesla and walk to your house than this entire topic has LOL ... LOL included.
Cool.
Srinath.
You release more co2 by the time you plug in your tesla and walk to your house than this entire topic has LOL ... LOL included.
Cool.
Srinath.
/maybe that's the plan, I will call it the 1%ers master plan, I'm sure they can pay the gardeners to pollinate by hand.
Maybe the Innuit and the siberians
If we calculate that 1% as the residents of Siberia and Yukon territory and northern europe and the alps and himalayas ... yea sure.
Your swiss bank account and 300 rental buildings in NYC aint gonna do you much good when you and all those buildings are under 30 ft of water.
I'm being optimistic and skeptical ... I'm sure Donald Trump will find a way to buy up most of Alaska ... hey, Sarah Palin already there ...
Cool.
Srinath.
If we calculate that 1% as the residents of Siberia and Yukon territory and northern europe and the alps and himalayas ... yea sure.
Your swiss bank account and 300 rental buildings in NYC aint gonna do you much good when you and all those buildings are under 30 ft of water.
I'm being optimistic and skeptical ... I'm sure Donald Trump will find a way to buy up most of Alaska ... hey, Sarah Palin already there ...
Cool.
Srinath.
Puts the environmental awareness of the Swiss in a whole new perspective.
(they'd all be eaten within a week after the flood, right after the grated cheese herd)
I will be on my smoky mountain island , looking out on the tenness SEA 
.
Oceans will acidify ... the CO2 will do that and reduce the fisheries before
the planet warms 10C.
Texas will be another SEE to fish in (it's on it's way now).
Good ol' ELON and the 1%'ers will be in their "Elysium" habitat.
Speaking of that flick , it seems more on line with our present
rush to dystopia.
OS
.Oceans will acidify ... the CO2 will do that and reduce the fisheries before
the planet warms 10C.
Texas will be another SEE to fish in (it's on it's way now).
Good ol' ELON and the 1%'ers will be in their "Elysium" habitat.
Speaking of that flick , it seems more on line with our present
rush to dystopia.
OS
Nope ... for another take on what gets done, try this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_pcuTk77Y4 ...
From tomorrow's WSJ, Holman Jenkins opines:
There is often a large difference between what people imagine they are doing and what they are actually doing. Especially in politics, any relationship between the effect of policy, the goal of policy and the stated goal is often incidental to the point of randomness.
Adding to the complexity, the doers themselves are often confused about the relationship between rhetoric and reality.
Which naturally brings us to a new biography of Elon Musk, whose entrepreneurial energy is a marvel; the world would be better off if there were more like him, even if a “nonstop horrible” childhood was a precursor to his adult achievements. That said, the “change the world” stuff, let alone the “save humanity” stuff, that fills Ashlee Vance’s admired “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” is a tad overdone.
Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof. GM rolled out its EV1 electric car in 1996. Mr. Musk has been selling back to affluent, middle-aged baby boomers their own youthful ideals in the shape of roof panels and plug-in cars. These items sell not because the moment is ripe to transition the world economy to solar but as vanity trinkets for the rich that even the rich wouldn’t buy without a large helping of taxpayer money.
Yes, Mr. Musk deserves credit for organizing his enterprises and getting them off the ground. The bureaucratic obstacles to starting a car business are especially daunting. And his Tesla Model S is a lovely object and wonderful machine.
Nowhere in Mr. Vance’s book, though, does the figure $7,500 appear—the direct taxpayer rebate to each U.S. buyer of Mr. Musk’s car. You wouldn’t know that 10% of all Model S cars have been sold in Norway—though Tesla’s own 10-K lists the possible loss of generous Norwegian tax benefits as a substantial risk to the company.
Barely developed in passing is that Tesla likely might not exist without a former State Department official whom Mr. Musk hired to explore “what types of tax credits and rebates Tesla might be able to drum up around its electric vehicles,” which eventually would include a $465 million government-backed loan.
And how Tesla came by its ex-Toyota factory in California “for free,” via a “string of fortunate turns” that allowed Tesla to float its IPO a few weeks later, is just a thing that happens in Mr. Vance’s book, not the full-bore political intrigue it actually was.
The fact is, Mr. Musk has yet to show that Tesla’s stock market value (currently $32 billion) is anything but a modest fraction of the discounted value of its expected future subsidies. In 2017, he plans to introduce his Model 3, a $35,000 car for the middle class. He expects to sell hundreds of thousands a year. Somehow we doubt he intends to make it easy for politicians to whip away the $7,500 tax credit just when somebody besides the rich can benefit from it—in which case the annual gift from taxpayers will quickly mount to several billion dollars each year.
Mother Jones, in a long piece about what Mr. Musk owes the taxpayer, suggested the wunderkind could be a “bit more grateful, a bit more humble.” Unmentioned was the shaky underpinning of this largess. Even today’s politicized climate modeling allows the possibility that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is far less than would justify incurring major expense to change the energy infrastructure of the world (and you certainly wouldn’t begin with luxury cars). Were this understanding to become widespread, the subliminal hum of government favoritism could overnight become Tesla’s biggest liability.
Mr. Musk’s other enterprise is SpaceX, about which it’s possible to be a lot more admiring. Any government is going to be a buyer of services; it’s only sensible that Washington buy more of its space services from competitive private contractors rather than try to produce them in-house by NASA.
As Mr. Musk has maintained (and so have we), humanity’s ultimate preservation is a legitimate government interest. He’s not the first to suggest that dramatically reducing the cost of earth orbit is a key to future space endeavors. He isn’t the only dot-com millionaire to turn his attention to space.
If he succeeds, though, in delivering his cheap, reusable heavy-lift vehicle, vast new possibilities will open up. Fifty years from now if there are hotels and factories in orbit, they may well be SpaceX hotels and factories. If a human outpost materializes on Mars, it may well be a SpaceX outpost. If human intelligence has safely spread beyond the solar system when the next errant rock comes along, Mr. Musk may well be one of those whom distant posterity will thank—along with H.G. Wells, Robert Goddard, Neil Armstrong, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Zubrin, Mr. Spock and many others.
But all this is a long way off. Let’s hope Mr. Musk isn’t distracted by too many biographers in the meantime.
There is often a large difference between what people imagine they are doing and what they are actually doing. Especially in politics, any relationship between the effect of policy, the goal of policy and the stated goal is often incidental to the point of randomness.
Adding to the complexity, the doers themselves are often confused about the relationship between rhetoric and reality.
Which naturally brings us to a new biography of Elon Musk, whose entrepreneurial energy is a marvel; the world would be better off if there were more like him, even if a “nonstop horrible” childhood was a precursor to his adult achievements. That said, the “change the world” stuff, let alone the “save humanity” stuff, that fills Ashlee Vance’s admired “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” is a tad overdone.
Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof. GM rolled out its EV1 electric car in 1996. Mr. Musk has been selling back to affluent, middle-aged baby boomers their own youthful ideals in the shape of roof panels and plug-in cars. These items sell not because the moment is ripe to transition the world economy to solar but as vanity trinkets for the rich that even the rich wouldn’t buy without a large helping of taxpayer money.
Yes, Mr. Musk deserves credit for organizing his enterprises and getting them off the ground. The bureaucratic obstacles to starting a car business are especially daunting. And his Tesla Model S is a lovely object and wonderful machine.
Nowhere in Mr. Vance’s book, though, does the figure $7,500 appear—the direct taxpayer rebate to each U.S. buyer of Mr. Musk’s car. You wouldn’t know that 10% of all Model S cars have been sold in Norway—though Tesla’s own 10-K lists the possible loss of generous Norwegian tax benefits as a substantial risk to the company.
Barely developed in passing is that Tesla likely might not exist without a former State Department official whom Mr. Musk hired to explore “what types of tax credits and rebates Tesla might be able to drum up around its electric vehicles,” which eventually would include a $465 million government-backed loan.
And how Tesla came by its ex-Toyota factory in California “for free,” via a “string of fortunate turns” that allowed Tesla to float its IPO a few weeks later, is just a thing that happens in Mr. Vance’s book, not the full-bore political intrigue it actually was.
The fact is, Mr. Musk has yet to show that Tesla’s stock market value (currently $32 billion) is anything but a modest fraction of the discounted value of its expected future subsidies. In 2017, he plans to introduce his Model 3, a $35,000 car for the middle class. He expects to sell hundreds of thousands a year. Somehow we doubt he intends to make it easy for politicians to whip away the $7,500 tax credit just when somebody besides the rich can benefit from it—in which case the annual gift from taxpayers will quickly mount to several billion dollars each year.
Mother Jones, in a long piece about what Mr. Musk owes the taxpayer, suggested the wunderkind could be a “bit more grateful, a bit more humble.” Unmentioned was the shaky underpinning of this largess. Even today’s politicized climate modeling allows the possibility that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is far less than would justify incurring major expense to change the energy infrastructure of the world (and you certainly wouldn’t begin with luxury cars). Were this understanding to become widespread, the subliminal hum of government favoritism could overnight become Tesla’s biggest liability.
Mr. Musk’s other enterprise is SpaceX, about which it’s possible to be a lot more admiring. Any government is going to be a buyer of services; it’s only sensible that Washington buy more of its space services from competitive private contractors rather than try to produce them in-house by NASA.
As Mr. Musk has maintained (and so have we), humanity’s ultimate preservation is a legitimate government interest. He’s not the first to suggest that dramatically reducing the cost of earth orbit is a key to future space endeavors. He isn’t the only dot-com millionaire to turn his attention to space.
If he succeeds, though, in delivering his cheap, reusable heavy-lift vehicle, vast new possibilities will open up. Fifty years from now if there are hotels and factories in orbit, they may well be SpaceX hotels and factories. If a human outpost materializes on Mars, it may well be a SpaceX outpost. If human intelligence has safely spread beyond the solar system when the next errant rock comes along, Mr. Musk may well be one of those whom distant posterity will thank—along with H.G. Wells, Robert Goddard, Neil Armstrong, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Zubrin, Mr. Spock and many others.
But all this is a long way off. Let’s hope Mr. Musk isn’t distracted by too many biographers in the meantime.
Elon Musk is just the biggest in the line of people that say ... if we can bypass all the gubbamint red tape, and use all the research they did, and if we cut out the middle man, and wash our hands off servicing the product, and have no pension, retirement, medical and legacy expenses ... we can deliver it cheaper ...
I also really think the word "visionary" is thrown about too easily for people who add nothing, or worse ... negative. To me the visionary is the guy that says ... almonds, grapes, cherries and lemons and pineapples and oranges ... all can grow in CA, and most of them can only grow in CA. Software, technology and other man made things can grow anywhere, maybe we should have CA grow food, and we can set up shop in Montana (just an example, you can pick any non food friendly/or other special locale of your choice) and we can write software there.
I can see the disruptive good in a "new company" mainly comes at the expense of old workers ... cos new companies dont have none.
Cool.
Srinath.
I also really think the word "visionary" is thrown about too easily for people who add nothing, or worse ... negative. To me the visionary is the guy that says ... almonds, grapes, cherries and lemons and pineapples and oranges ... all can grow in CA, and most of them can only grow in CA. Software, technology and other man made things can grow anywhere, maybe we should have CA grow food, and we can set up shop in Montana (just an example, you can pick any non food friendly/or other special locale of your choice) and we can write software there.
I can see the disruptive good in a "new company" mainly comes at the expense of old workers ... cos new companies dont have none.
Cool.
Srinath.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.