When you study Chinese history, you realize the “Middle Kingdom” has no problem being shunned. In fact, they often view it as a badge of honor and an indication that they’re not like all the rest of those barbarians.
Edwardelinski… I’d be interested to see what article you refer to, when you talk about Virginia Beach getting in front of the problem.
I was talking to a relative who lives near the north shore on the mouth of the Chesapeake bay (just east of the bay bridge tunnel). There’s major dune erosion there, and Virginia Beach’s response is to put some 300’ of sand in front of the dune. However, to even have the right to do that, they have to obtain deeds for the waterfront where they will operate. So there’s been a lot of legal back-and-forth, but it’s going forward.
I’m not really sure that’s the best solution – one really wants to ask why there has been a problem, and try to address more natural and self-maintaining solutions. For example, I think there is one mangrove tree that can handle our climate. Maybe we’d want that – or maybe we would do well to try to start up some coral colonies. Some researchers at the VIMS/William and Mary I think are really trying to do that, IIRC.
What, more specifically, were you thinking about?
Peter Coutu of The Virginian Pilot.I am unable to access without paying for it.I read over the summer.The sunshine flooding reminded me of Miami.Hope that helps.
Doug,
I've been to the seashore a lot. Practically spent my summers there as a kid. My great aunt had a house on Long Beach Island, NJ just in from the beach. My godfather had a house on a lagoon in Beach Haven West. My sister has a house on the beach in Seaside Park. None of them are on stilts. Along the Jersey Shore, for years, there were next to no houses on stilts. I do remember seeing my first house on stilts in Rehoboth Beach Delaware in 1979 though. In recent years, I'm sure more are being built on stilts. From my sister's house in Seaside Park, you could see the roller coaster that washed into the sea when Super Storm Sandy hit. But NONE of the houses along that beach or in a house or two or even in a block or two was on stilts. I've been on beaches on the West Coast, the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, Hawaii, Bahamas, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Columbia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands, New Zealand, Australia, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Russia, Italy, Greece, Croatia, and Turkey. The vast majority of homes were NOT on stilts. So they goes your beach and stilt hypothesis.
Do you think the topographical maps are wrong and there is a geographical anomaly in the region of Obama's house?
Do you think Google Maps is wrong?
Do you think the real estate listing is for the wrong location?
Doug, lots of things defy common sense. Where I grew up, there was a flood plain behind our house. Federal law prohibited building on it. But they built on it anyway. Someone's palm obviously got greased. We warned the people looking at these houses that they would have flooding. In defiance of common sense, they bought them anyway. Guess what? They would up with swimming pools for basements. So much for common sense.
Do you think Obama and his lawyers and advisors are immune from making errors and dumb choices? If so, he would probably be the first politician in history to fall into this category.
Do you think real estate pros would never try to unethically sell a property that would put millions in their pockets? If so, time to wake up to the real world around you.
Doug, it's OK to make a mistake and admit you're wrong. Really it is. We've all made mistakes, myself included. I'm sure you didn't get a 100 on every test you took in school. But the biggest mistake you can make is not recognizing one when you've made it and repeating the process over and over again.
The point is, when we have leaders (of any political party) who virtue signal but fly everywhere in private jets, own homes with massive carbon foot prints, and buy beachfront property in the light of proselytzing about rising ocean levels, why should people listen to them, believe them, or follow them.
I want a leader like a Patton who led by example and swam an icy river in Europe during WW2 to show his soldiers how it was done.
https://history.army.mil/events/cah2017/docs/day03/Hymel_Patton-Sure_River.pdf
As Chris wrote:
The Extinction Rebellion folks already discovered that in the UK there’s no such thing as democracy or rule of law. Without a warrant the police just bashed in the door of their rented flat, arrested everyone on the pre-crime charge of planning to do something in the future (“suspicion of conspiracy to cause public nuisance”), and took all of their equipment.This is quite similar to what Charles Hugh Smith has experienced with Twitter, Facebook and Google.
... This is straight out of Kafka: an unaccountable, all-powerful, completely opaque bureaucracy arbitrarily bans your Twitter followers from retweeting a link to your original, copyrighted content.... This is exactly like the Soviet Union, where citizens were routinely tossed in the gulag for having "anti-Soviet thoughts." ...[users] are not presented with evidence of their "crimes" nor are they given a chance in a transparent, fairly administered process to contest their "guilty" verdict. As for Facebook: direct links from Facebook users to oftwominds.com dropped by 90% last year over the course of a few days... Having been put on a list of sites deemed "guilty of anti-Soviet thoughts" by propagandists purporting to reveal propaganda [PropOrNot], I've been shadow-banned and censored without any recourse or opportunity to contest my sentence in the Big Tech gulag. This is how Big Tech silences us, quietly, without any evidence, without any hearing, without any recourse, in secret extra-legal proceedings where we are refused the opportunity to question our accuser and contest the "evidence," if any.And John Brennen dropped this wonderful bombshell:
[F]ormer CIA Director John Brennan clarifies exactly how the deep state sees "due process"... In an interview on MSNBC, Brennan, unblinkingly states that "people are innocent, you know, until alleged to be involved in some kind of criminal activity."What I am leading up to is the suspicion that Peak Prosperity may at some point be declared a "terrorist organization" and something like -- guilty of "radicalizing the youth." (Ya know--anyone who doesn't think that an obvious implosion demolition is a natural event is under Russian influence and all that.) Protecting the public may require blocking the PP website. This community is valuable to me. Communication networks may need to shift to shortwave radio at some point. I wish that I had more expertise in what kind of equipment and network could keep us connected after the internet is shut down.
This video is so true and personally experiencing these situations is both maddening and frightening. I think I may have written previously about our run-in in our office building with a state elevator inspector who changed his mind, back and forth, about the regulations, each time costing us thousands of dollars. Also, in my former profession, physical therapy, which treats Medicare patients and therefore is regulated by Medicare code, there are conflicting laws. A dual credentialed PT/attorney friend informed me in the past that there were 50,000 pages to this code (and probably more now). We are expected to know all these rules and regulations. But if you actually read every page of code and understood it, you’d have time for little else in your life. In fact, my friend told me that the top Medicare attorneys in the country don’t even know them all. Yet because of these conflicting laws, technically, that means every Medicare provider is in violation of Federal law. The consequences of being charged with such a violation can be devastating. And yet, the laws remain as they are, perched to take down anyone the Federal government may have in their sights on any given day for whatever reason. Sand_puppy’s concerns stated above are very real and are likely to become of increasingly greater significance in years to come as government seizes progressively more control and searches for progressively more revenue, be it in the form of fees, taxes, fines, or penalties. The drain on time, productivity, and finances and the level of stress it produces in this country is enormous.
Sandman, I went through this same thought process about 5 years ago and went out and got my advanced amateur radio license (AK4VO)
Here are some observations/conclusions (we talked about this about a year or two ago already so this may be a repeat)
- amateur radio communications are all listened to and cannot be in secret code, or for commercial purposes
- the most important part of any system (unless you are using VHF/UHF repeaters to bounce your signal through a tower system which is not peer to peer) is the antenna. Spend effort to make/obtain the best antenna possible as that generally limits the most, unless you use the infrastructure of repeater towers to get a high frequency VHF or UHF signal out past line of sight. (but the point is to avoid infrastructure I think)
- for peer to peer communications (direct connections) 7-21 MHz bands are best. Voice SSB can be done for regional group voice chats at 1.6 or 3.5MHZ bands up to a few hundred miles and higher MHz for longer distances at night, but summer conditions with lightening storms can really block or limit things.
- I recommend getting a receiver and to listen in to regional chat sessions organized by existing prepper groups (on an assigned frequency and time each member checks in and reports radio conditions).
with a good quality antenna use either an old fashioned radio such as a TECSUN with SSB capability or else a Software Defined Radio that connects to your computer. Later get a license (it is extremely easy these days) and a transmitter/transceiver. Many such as myself buy a Japanese all band (ca. 1.6MHz to ca. 50MHz bands) transceiver (yaesu, icom etc) with a 100 watt output. - It would be extremely valuable if someone at PP with advanced software skills could look at the software defined radio dongles out there and helped select a simple and low cost way to connect an antenna to a laptop using software to get excellent reception in a manner that anyone could do it, from the myriad products and experiences reported. In recent years very good reliable but SLOW text digital modes have become popular based on SSB wherein many communicate in text virtually around the world on only 50 watts. But it is best to start with exploring how to receive. My vision is that all members of a group would be able to receive using a 25$ investment into software defined radio but only a few would have the skills to maintain high power transmitters (such as up to 1500 watts) to get messages out.
The “techguy” named person on this blog site disagreed basically with many of my comments the last time I opined on this subject. But I think that he was mostly thinking about short distance (less than 1000 miles, generally less than a few hundred miles and more specifically tens of miles without extensive infrastructure) using VHF/UHF frequencies that are line of sight and use repeater infrastructure to extend further. There is a real art to this stuff which involves learning about physics and especially geophysics of the upper atmosphere for point to point long range communication if you want to avoid infrastructure. I bought two sets of high power equipment and various antennas etc but am not spending time on this because no particular need now. Maybe after two or three more years I will provide a high powered text service, if anyone were interested in joining with me. Software defined radio has made great strides to allow low cost sensitive reception and efficient (but slow) text modes are advancing all the time…
73 Mots
And if China actually starts to show they care, maybe we can do more.You mean more than the nothing we're doing now? BTW, that's exactly what China is saying: let's see you do something, then we'll do something. Can you see that this is a problem on all sides, and that your attitude is part of the problem? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnudgOC9D5Y
Google earth says the Obama Mansion is at 3m elevation.3m = 9ft, so that's more than enough to keep the property above sea level for 100-200 years. Move on, this is a non-issue.
When you study Chinese history, you realize the “Middle Kingdom” has no problem being shunned. In fact, they often view it as a badge of honor and an indication that they’re not like all the rest of those barbarians.Um, no. That's not how global trade works. China is not an island, their populace cannot buy all their products, and without extensive international trade it would collapse into one of the bloody revolutions that feature throughout its history.
Thank you for your kind comments.
My point differs from what you are saying. I said that most people in the world are achieving a better life and are using renewables for a better life. Now. The majority on the planet. Not the 8.8%.
The majority I refer to spends much more of their time with family and neighbors and less time driving cars aimlessly and buying imported stuff that they don’t need (compared to the American or 8.8% first worlders). An inspection of the majority of the world’s population and how they adapt to renewables has value.
Nepal gets almost all of its electricity from renewables (water power) and their living standard are increasing, in large part due to this. Most countries including the US rely on China for solar electric as well as virtually all (if not all) the transistors and other hardware to manipulate and distribute that energy.
Renewables create surplus energy. In the case of solar electric, the low (less than 10 EROI) reported studies included crazy factors such as extensive earth moving, concrete pouring, security guards, lawyering, banking, etc, and converting the outrageous monetary payments for such directly into BTU energy. Such payments are much lower outside the 8.8% and not necessary. My own discovery was that most (more than 75%) of the infrastructure to USE solar electric (based on 100 year old AC grid technology) is not needed and improperly decreases the surplus from solar electric by at least a factor of two (as measured by the EROI studies which convert $ spent on buying and replacing devices directly into more energy consumed before getting surplus.)
I don’t know about wind but solar and water provide surplus energy, and furthermore, the efficiency of manufacture is decreasing so that the price of solar is decreasing exponentially. I analyzed “do the numbers” for a poorly cited EROI case on this blog a long time ago yet the same paper was trotted out again last year for the incorrect proposition that solar electric does not produce any significant surplus energy. That surplus energy is generally higher quality than from fossil. So the sun doesn’t shine sometimes, a process has to slow down or stop, like my air conditioning automatically shuts down when clouds go overhead. Aluminum smelting shuts down when the water power drops. A manufacturing friend of mine replaced natural gas for electric recently due to superior ability to control and recycle the heat used in manufacture. Regarding nitrogen fixation, we need to get back to using microbes in the soil. We need to let go of the American dream of overcoming nature or replacing nature with high energy processes. Seeing that the majority of the world improve and adopt renewables more completely than we (Americans) do is a great step towards the humility needed.
Mots-
A good hardware-software platform for integrating with - pretty much any DIY project is the Raspberry Pi. I have one - it is $35, plus extra for a case, and extra for a flash drive. They run on small amounts of power, and they have this GPIO interface that lets you talk to all sorts of oddball interfaces.
It is a broadcom 4-core ARM8 processor running at 1.5 ghz; I think that’s 1500 times faster (with 3 more cores) than the computer I first started using an embarrassingly long time ago as an undergrad.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-4-specs-benchmarks/
I got mine about 6 months ago. I think it is pretty neat. And they’d do well in a low power environment since they have a reasonable amount of CPU, but they don’t use much power, so they’d last a long time on a relatively small UPS battery.
There are very low power versions too for substantially cheaper prices. I just got the “high end unit” because - well, it was $35, so why not?
Check out all the hardware interfaces they have.
If you supplied your own keyboard and a monitor, you could have a low power/low cost computer. Probably a bit clunky but…did I mention low cost? And a “chat app” that received messages from your low bitrate receiver wouldn’t be too hard to write, I’m guessing.
You could add a little external blinky light that the Pi could turn on when messages arrived.
Davefairtex, you are absolutely right. I really need to learn Linux, thanks for the encouragement. I note that many people need to get away from Microsoft/Google/Apple and that the latest version of Raspberry Pi (4) is a powerful alternative computer. I need to work on this…
As a small, self-contained single board computer with a dozen different interfaces, it could provide a reasonable interface to whatever product you are constructing. Customize it yourself, tack on a display, maybe have keypad (or maybe a cheap touch screen) and…really its pretty reasonable. You would probably need a modest battery to provide the 5v @ 2.5A.
https://www.lifewire.com/ways-to-power-your-raspberry-pi-4092246
I have mine attached to a ridiculously large UPS. “It will never die”, which is the point. It is running critical systems management for my project, and so it has to last through “however long” the power failure lasts.
(Battery management: also part of linux/pi, although sadly I couldn’t get my particular UPS to talk reliably to the Pi - but I found a way to do it remotely)
UI isn’t the strength of linux, but - it is probably “good enough.” My UI is “ssh”, which, since I’m a server guy, is all I ever really want anyway.
Yeah, Raspberry Pi is great! Off and on, for a couple of years, I’ve been experimenting with using a Pi and a small wifi access point for an entirely local (non-Internet-based) communication center. The Pi hosts a small web server and Sqllite database and a mobile app I wrote using the Ionic framework. (Well, it’s more of a responsive web site - you don’t have to install it as an app.) After the Pi boots up, anyone within wifi range can connect to “local.net” with their mobile device’s web browser (which won’t be good for much else if the SHTF, right?) and use the discussion forums on my “web site” (all local to the Pi, not on an Internet server) to exchange info, upload pictures, send personal messages to other users. Eventually, I want to power the system from a 12V battery.
I’ve got all the software running, now I’m working through reliability issues - sometimes the Pi just hangs - can’t ssh to it or anything - and I have to power off/on, which sometimes does bad things to the file system.
Um, no. That’s not how global trade works. China is not an island, their populace cannot buy all their products, and without extensive international trade it would collapse into one of the bloody revolutions that feature throughout its history.Theoretical ideals of global trade aside, China has, on numerous occasions throughout history, isolated itself. While isolation is certainly not optimal for trade, they have survived for 4,000 years. That says something, revolutions or not. Can you recall any historical incidents in modern history where ALL nations successfully shunned a single nation? I can't ... because it's never happened. The country on the outs will inevitably have some allies and some neutral countries that will trade with it. Their trade situation wouldn't be as favorable as if they had free and unrestricted trade but they'll still survive. Human nature and the desire by some to make a buck regardless of the ethics or the morality of a situation guarantees that they will not be shunned 100%. But let's say there's enough economic pressure exerted to begin creating an unstable domestic situation. The Chinese leadership has a choice. They can let rising discontent among citizens to be expressed internally through civil strife and possible revolution. Or they can direct that discontent externally. Which do you think they'll choose? My bet would be they'll direct the anger of their citizens outward, most likely towards one or more of the entities that are shunning them or their proxies. Geopolitical considerations suggest that they will not direct it to a country that is on their borders, especially countries with strong past and present political alliances, such as North Korea or Vietnam. China wants to maintain a certain geographical buffer. Also, most Southeast Asian countries bordering China need China since it is the primary market for their products so the likelihood of those countries shunning China is minuscule. China will most likely direct violent energies to a country from which they are separated by water and also a country with which they have had a gripe in the past. The two most obvious candidates are Taiwan and Japan. Do you think Russia will shun China given the present balance of power in the world? Unlikely. Russia will either ally with them or supply them with weapons, raw materials, food, etc. necessary for when China goes to war. Also, I don't think you've considered the Chinese mindset. They aren't about to let anyone push them around, especially the West and Japan (given past intervention in Chinese affairs by those parties at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, the Sino-Japanese Wars, WW2, the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, etc.). So while shunning China is a theoretical possibility, in the real world, it will most likely fail abysmally and may, in fact, be strongly counterproductive and create even greater problems (since nothing pollutes like war, especially a nuclear war). Coercing through negative incentives won't work with the Chinese but coaxing via positive incentives might.
We’re going down the rabbit hole of how to get China to reduce emissions, but first perhaps we should answer the question “How much of China’s emissions are directly related to it’s net exports, mainly to the west?”
China’s trade surplus is about 2.6% of GDP.
How much of their emissions are them driving around their own country, providing goodies for their own citizens, generating electricity for their own cities (most of which is done using coal! omg!) vs assembling computers for the West?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
I agree with ao about “shunning China”. They do a fantastic job of bribing everyone in government in every targeted country to support them. They are very, very smart.
“Somehow” Hunter Biden got $1.5 billion dollars to manage. From China. And old Joe: “oh heck, China, they’re not a problem.” Western politicians are very open to bribes; Obama’s $65 million “book deal”, Hunter’s $1.5 billion management “because he’s just that good” - but I don’t mean to be singling out the Dems. It is both parties, and they are bribed by both corporations as well as foreign governments. Trump is the very first US President to really negotiate with China in a tough, realistic way. Why do we think that is?
Sure. We’ll all shun China. Except those that won’t because they’ve been bribed. Or coerced. This is a superpower we are talking about, not some banana republic we can hose at will. And they get a vote as to how this “shunning” thing turns out.
We should focus on converting what we can to electrics; trains, and what not, per Hirsch, to prepare for the decline in oil production that will happen when shale peaks out. Heck, China is doing electric buses - in a really big way. We could do that too. Why are they doing this? I’m certain they are aware of peak oil, and are dutifully executing on a transition plan, like all rational countries should be doing. Maybe we should follow their lead?
Hirsch Report.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-shift-to-electric-bus-it-s-china-ahead-of-u-s-421-000-to-300
Psebby
This is great, you are using a Linux based system to set up a local intranet wifi. I want to hear more, and would like to see a detailed explanation posted on a website.
In this context I note that a friend from Europe recently built a link for me to extend my wi fi (at about 400 Mb/sec data rate using a Ubiquiti NS-5ACL Nanostation 5AC Loco 5Ghz Outdoor Wireless AC Bridge/CPE) more than a kilometer to an adjacent island. A raspberry pi based system of expandable service area local wifi seems like an extremely worthwhile activity of the sort that sandman was wondering about in his recent post (how to adapt to a world where the internet becomes less useful). I can send you info on my ubiquiti wifi expansion system if you like but imagine that there are many alternatives out there. I want to hear more on this topic.