by Tom Baugh
So, for the rest of this work of entertaining fiction and analysis I'm going to lay aside the thought that love alone, or friendships alone, or family alone are sufficient. If this offends you, put this book down and read no further.
Instead, I am going to treat all of those great relationships as being fueled and enabled by the four resources. The measure of the quality of life for individuals, or families, is a combination of these resources (stuff, push, time and ideas) that the individual or family has at its disposal. And, this measure incorporates the relative value that each individual concerned places on each item of these resources.
Here's one example. Imagine you want to spend time with Junior teaching him how to throw a ball. So, you need some stuff (a ball, maybe a glove, and a place to play). You apply some push (you have to chuck the ball back and forth, as well as go back and forth to the place). You also need some time (got to fit it into the schedule), and ideas ("hey, Junior, put down the NintendoTM and let's go toss the old ball around"). Plus, things like not having eaten in a week can't be getting in the way, either. Nor can things like custody restrictions, nor your being behind bars.
Here's another example. Say you want to teach Junior to learn a work ethic so that he can toss it all away on some empty-headed mammal later. Maybe you want him to help out with painting the house. So, you need stuff (paint, trays, ladders, rollers, tape, edgers), apply push (that house won't paint itself or the paint doesn't just walk to your house of its own volition). You need sufficient time to do the work or to wait for Junior to paint his hand a few times. And you also need ideas about how to smear the paint around or what order to trim versus hitting the walls with the roller.
I think you have the point by now.
A mathematician might thus express quality of life as follows:
For the mathematically inclined out there, this equation states that the quality of life measure Q is expressed as a matrix of individual quality of life elements for any individual I. This measure is determined by the product of a matrix of subjective quality of life factors kS, kP and kt unique to each individual for each resource stuff, push, and time. And, multiply these factors by the respective resources for each individual, raised to the vectors rS, rP and rt power for each individual resource element, as determined by that individual's preferences.
The effect of ideas are deferred until later, and so don't appear in the expression above.
In simple terms, your quality of life is higher if you have more of those resources you care about. But the resources for which you don't care about, you could take them or leave them.
Why even present this in a complicated mathematical form? Because there is a whole body of control system theory which uses similar notation. The idea behind this control theory is that if you can model a system a certain way, then you can control your little piece of it using well-known techniques. To convert that formulation above requires a more or less straightforward linearization, but the ideas apply equally well.
Those who understand higher mathematics (if this isn't you today, please begin moving in that direction), and by extension the control theory which these make available, can understand the depth of what I mean by quality of life. And how complex that measure is, far more complex than we could imagine attempting to completely control. Some idiot somewhere always thinks he can control the economy. Apply enough planning or central control, he believes, and everyone, especially him, could live well. This idea ultimately leads to square pegs being hammered into round holes through the means of secret police and gulags. History has taught us that a centrally planned economy is just unworkable, no matter how pleasant the overseer's smile as the lash is applied.
That equation above shows the mathematician or controls engineer why central planning is unworkable. Even if you could determine all of those quality of life factors for each individual, you would have to constantly measure all the resource flows at each instant in time. You would also have to manipulate control action. Control action is trivial when you are working with a chicken plucker or a space shuttle. It stops being trivial when dealing with something as complex as a worldwide economy with about six billion or so people involved. Which is, by the way, a highly nonlinear system.
To emphasize the complexity of a planned economy, I give this talk sometimes to engineers or scientists. And I use the following title:
What Green Means to Me
or
The Application of Systems of Practically Infinite Matrices of Nonlinear Differential Equations I usually get a laugh at that. The title alone usually makes the point to anyone who knows anything about control systems.
"But wait", the collectivists shout, "our world is different now. We have computers. Stalin never had a computer. With a big enough computer and the right software, we can control anything of arbitrary complexity!"
Do you really want the guy who wrote your PC operating system to write the software which controls your happiness? He probably doesn't even speak your native language, and could hardly be expected to understand what makes you happy. Or care. Besides, this software would probably run on some Chinese piece of junk. As it were.
I consider myself one of the best in the world at that sort of thing, but I wouldn't seriously consider ever being able to get that kind of software to work. But I would be happy to take billions, or trillions, in grants for you to get me to try. But of course, that's the point, isn't it?
I would seriously doubt the credentials of anyone who thinks they are smart enough to plan the economy of even a small village. Nothing beats the distributed processing power of individuals working toward their own success.
And now the morons of the collective are thinking they know best about how hot or how cold your house should be. When they dick up something even that simple and easily understood, will their arrogance be blamed?
Nope. They will just claim that the collective needs to give them more authority. "A little more authority, or a little more control, or more marketing, or more police, or more money, and we'll have it right," they will claim. And the collective will give it to them. And the cycle will repeat, only with larger destruction.
But, as the mathematician reads this, he can at least begin to see how, theoretically, to use the differences in resources and the various quality of life matrices. And understand how individuals use them in ways to pump value from one resource and individual to another, creating value at each transaction. And that the only practical way to implement this control is to let each individual make these decisions for themselves.
This is distinct from what the elite of the monkey collective does with this knowledge. Their use for these ideas is to warp your individual preferences to convince or coerce you to assign value to resources they control. Admittedly, warping your preferences is a vastly easier way to extract value from you with little or no return effort required on their part. Sadly, twisting your preferences, otherwise known as marketing, might actually damage you in the process. More on this later.
One implication of the mathematical formulation is that each individual must have at least some of the resources stuff, push or time. Lack any one of these, and game over. At least in quality of life terms.
The Fifth Resource A fifth resource, energy, lurks out there also, but is actually a special case of stuff which can convert itself into push. A tank of diesel sitting in a tractor is stuff. But, when that diesel is burned in the engine, it transforms into push. Push which can do things like plow fields or haul wood or run over the family dog.
A solar panel is a bunch of flimsy stuff which can gather up more stuff, namely, a swarm of electron stuff we call electricity. That stuff swirls around inside some stuff which looks like a motor to make some push.
A wind turbine is a bunch of stuff arranged so that a similar squirt of electron stuff swirls around in that motor, and so on.
A nuclear power plant is a bunch of stuff arranged so that some little blobs of almost nothing sticks to some little nuggets of pimply stuff. Th
is disturbs the pimply stuff, and causes it to wobble and break into a couple of smaller nuggets of pimply stuff. This breakup releases energy and some more of those little blobs of almost nothing. And in so doing releases some heat. Heat, in turn, is actually some stuff wiggling around pushing everything. This wiggling wiggles other stuff into leaping around, which we call boiling. This leaping stuff leaps through some turbine-shaped stuff, pushing it to, in turn, push some generator-shaped stuff which squirts out electrons, and so on.
Anywho. For Cor, a cheval was a bunch of stuff which can push him around to where he wants to go or haul Og's wood out of the forest. Before Cor showed up with the chevals, there were only two sources of energy, wood and muscles. I include wives in the latter category, of course. Before the wood began to be used to cook food, saving untold generations the horrors of death by worm or rot or inability to chew, man's own muscles were the only source of energy.
So let's get this straight. Energy is pretty much a good thing. So good, in fact, that even though it is a bunch of stuff (potential energy) waiting to be turned into push (kinetic energy), we are going to treat it as a special resource. So good that it is the foundation of civilization itself.
So good, that the collective seeks at every turn to limit your access to it or your ability to create your own. Or, allows you to only have access to low-quality forms of it. Or, tries to guilt you into giving it up or ration it from you by force. Because that is the best way to control the individual.
Here is why energy is so good. Ideas are nothing on their own, but when ideas have access to energy they have limitless potential. Of the resources available to you, only ideas and energy have the ability to transform the first three, stuff, push and time. Therefore, without energy, ideas can be stopped dead in their tracks. With energy, the possibilities available to the individual are limited only by the amount of the other resources, and the quantity and quality of energy available.
Let's take a side tour for a moment to ask an important question. How does energy have a quality? The quality of energy has been explicitly defined by scientists who study and engineers who work with a branch of science known as thermodynamics. The exact definition of the quality of energy is beyond the scope of this book. But in a nutshell, energy is of higher quality if it is packaged as some convenient stuff and can push hard. Especially if it is packed real tight, like in a nutshell. Or in an atom.
Solar and wind energy seem almost like free energy. If you believe that, ask the favored solar or wind lobby of the current administration, whichever it might be when you read this, to send you some for free. Slick marketing, but the reality falls short of the promise. Both solar and wind energy are of low quality when compared to liquid fuels. The sun hardly ever shines when you need to push the most, and you can't very easily carry enough solar collectors around to do anything really useful, like plow a field. A similar rationale applies for wind energy.
Batteries are almost as bad. These let you store some of the solar and wind energy, for example, but still have a very low energy density per unit volume or weight. Batteries also can't usually be completely emptied of energy without damage, and are very expensive when compared to the amount of useable life they possess. Some kinds of batteries also wear out very quickly, while a fuel tank usually lasts the life of the machine.
Now liquid fuels, on the other hand, are high-quality energy. Liquid fuels, such as gasoline or diesel, are far better than the options above. Liquids are easy to store, portion, transport to the point of use, and meter through engines into push on command.
Solid fuels are only able to satisfy the demand of specific subsets of the applications to which liquid fuels apply. For example, fixed location power plants use a lot of solid fuels in the form of coal. But these plants have large amounts of specialized handling equipment and well-planned supply systems to process it efficiently. Ships and trains at one time used a lot of solid fuels, but even these installations were ultimately deemed too small to allow efficient handling of this type of energy. Some hobbyists today experiment with wood-fueled automobiles, but usually in anticipation of the lack of availability of liquid fuels over time. They might be right.
Gaseous fuels, such as propane, natural gas or hydrogen, share some of the benefits and limitations of liquid and solid fuels. Like liquid fuels, once you have them at a point of use, they are relatively easy to meter through an engine on command. But, transporting them to the point of use, or storing them once there, is moderately to very difficult. The difficulty of transportation and storage, both requiring compression at high pressures, are two sides of the same coin. After all, transportation of gases is usually just storage on the move.
On a molecular weight basis, the lighter the fuel, the more impractical it is to transport or store. Of all the gaseous fuels man has or will ever devise, hydrogen is the lightest of them all. This will always be true. So, despite popular mythology hyping its utility, hydrogen as the fuel of the future is an idea stillborn if for no other reason than it is hard to store.
No matter what technology might be applied to mitigate the manufacture, storage or transportation of hydrogen, these same means will produce vastly better results with the heavier fuels such as methane, propane, butane, etc., respectively. For example, a new compression or storage technique, properly modified, will more easily compress methane than hydrogen. Or compress propane more easily than both of these, or butane than any of the previous. Every time. The only limitation of application of a particular methodology to propane versus hydrogen will be laws demanded by the monkey collective to force a particular fuel into dubious application.
Hydrogen has two key advantages in its favor, though. The first advantage is that it is a great fuel for operating an electrical fuel cell. The second advantage is that, pound for pound, it produces the highest specific impulse of any other combustible fuel in the universe.
These two advantages make it the fuel of choice for generating electrical power or thrust, respectively, for spacecraft. But neither of these advantages has any meaning in the context of plowing a field, unless you are willing to fund tractors which have the expensive high-strength materials of NASA rockets. And which have to last through thirty years of rough service instead of ten minutes to space. And not blow up underneath the farmer like the Challenger or the Hindenburg.
Admittedly, this last statement was a little bit of hyperbole. The Challenger blew up because it also had oxygen tanks, and the Hindenburg was a whole other set of issues. When your hydrogen tractor or car springs a leak, it will be because of a crack in the tank. This will lead to a jet of compressed gas, which, if ignited, and it will find an ignition source, will be an unquenchable forty- or fifty-foot flare until the tank empties. Hope it isn't pointed at you, because you won't be able to see it. If you can still hear it, it is pointed the other way. If it is pointed at you, you have no ears with which to hear. At least it didn't explode.
On the other hand, when your diesel tank develops a crack, the fuel either drips on the ground, or, if at the top of the tank, does nothing. Hooray for liquids! And since your diesel tank isn't trying to store compressed gas at low temperatures, you could make it out of an old bucket in a pinch.
Like solid fuels, gaseous fuels do have a place in fixed installations. Natural gas, when transported to the point of use through pipelines, has unbeatable convenience. Shipping it through any other means really sucks. Propane and butane, being easy to liquify, are more convenient to transport, and are almost as convenient as natural gas. But, outside these key applications, gaseous fuels won't make it into the hard places which liquid fuels can.
Nuclear fission power for generating electricity is the highest quality energy source man has yet applied, which is precisely why the monkey collective wants to be shed of it. For a given weight of fuel versus energy output, only fusion or anti-matter will produce more energy. Those exotic installations are successively larger and as yet unproven in the case of the former, or absolutely impractical,
in the case of the latter. Good old nuclear fission is the king right now. Even hybrid fusion-fission systems would still draw most of their output power from fission.
Like solid and gaseous fuels, nuclear power is best used for fixed installations or distributed over a fixed network. So, it has the potential to supplant liquid fuels, freeing these for liquid fuel applications, and thus augmenting the solid or gaseous infrastructure as well as implicitly augmenting the liquid fuel supply. Each gallon of liquid fuel unburned to create electricity, because of the availability of nuclear power, is one more gallon of fuel in the tank of a tractor somewhere.
Nuclear power also has another advantage. Solid and gaseous fuels, through a couple of key related chemical processes known for about a hundred years, can be converted into high quality liquid fuels. These chemical processes are energy-intensive, and, when driven by the solid or gaseous fuel in question, consume a significant fraction of the starting material. However, if these processes were driven instead by nuclear power, and used the feedstock fuel only as process material, a much higher proportion of the feedstock could be converted into liquids.
Internet Research
Research the Fischer-Tropsch process. Nuclear power thus allows inconvenient solid or gaseous fuel feedstock to be converted into high quality liquid fuels. This country, as you know, has practically unlimited supplies of natural gas and coal. Locate a nuclearpowered conversion plant near a distribution point in West Virginia or Kentucky or Tennessee, and those railway cars can carry off liquid fuel instead of coal. This would also allow large scale scrubbers at those processing points. Centralized scrubbers can have far higher efficiency at removing pollutants rather than distributing those scrubbers to stack tops at each individual power plant which would otherwise burn that coal. Those scrubbed pollutants, primarily sulfur, would then be available in such high concentration as to be a valuable industrial product all its own.
Locate a similar nuclear-powered conversion plant near a natural gas pipeline head in Louisiana, or stranded gas in Alaska or under the seabed just about anywhere, and that natural gas can be turned into diesel or gasoline. Or propane or butane or whatever other more convenient fuel you wish.