I was discussing the Dick Tracy wrist radio of the 1950s comics. One day it was impossible, the next day it was part of the inevitable future. William Shockley, one of those who was on our side on racial differences later, invented the transistor. One no longer needed a vacuum tube and the minimum rather substantial power needed for it.
If we found a battery which was an equal improvement on our present truly primitive ones, the same thing would happen. Right now there is lots of argument over nuclear power and so forth, but when we can produce energy anywhere and put it in cartable batteries, places will be found and new energy sources would explode into existence.
Coal and iron were resources countries fought over in 1914. Now we have more of both than we need. A cartable battery would do the same thing to oil.
#1 by Dave on 07/06/2007 - 12:02 pm
It is easy to predict that the world will one day rely on batteries that we can only imagine. There is enormous investment in this project right now.
But again basics matter: The rising price of oil is mostly an artifact of currency devaluation, not a shortage of oil. It has been very rare throughout history that there has been a shortage of any commodity except in catastrophes and war. Sometimes an economic boom creates upward pricing pressures not due to currency devaluation.
Governments finance their activities through currency devaluation.
The wealthy among us do not hold their wealth in currency because currency is structurally designed by the governments that issue currencies to depreciate, instead they hold it in a form that permits them to maintain a constant or increasing claim on future outputs, such as in trophy real estate or in equity interests in genuinely valuable businesses.
The whole system is deeply racial. The plantation masters in this system are mostly racial elites, whether White, Jew, or Asian. They love all the bitching about “oil shortages” and “the high price of fuel”. It only means that the multitudes of peons out there have to work harder to get by.
The brown skinned among us, being only capable of minimal intellectual achievement, have no means to procure shelter from this system except through government employment and benefits.
That is why brown skinned people are so heavily political. Government employment and benefits are the only means they have to escape enslavement by the private sector plantation. But the more brown skinned people in government or living through government, the more currency depreciation.
Welcome to the third world.
#2 by BoardAd on 07/06/2007 - 12:12 pm
Bob, This revolution has already arrived with little fanfare.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:MIT_Nanotube_Super_Capacitor
De Walt also has a 36 volt battery I know modelers are riping apart to power their planes because its the best on the market and isn’t volatile like Lithium Polymer.
#3 by Simmons on 07/06/2007 - 2:39 pm
I’m gonna go get into my hovermobile and fly down to the store when I’m done posting about technofixes as messiah. We white men gave away the store as Spengler predicted, so I summise we get back to the basics and start asking the right questions and stop acting if we are still colonial government for the darkies.
#4 by AFKAN on 07/06/2007 - 6:18 pm
Bob’s point might be seen in a more subtle light, and that is the effect of technological shift on economic transformation; a simple example is the Rural Electrification Administration, and more complex – and much more useful example – is the development of the automobile, and the support complexes (petroleum distribution, mechanics) for it.
When my grandfather came home from WWII, he returned with his mustering-out money to the farm that had seven children, and no electricity. Grandma made him pay to have the REA run a power line back to the farm, and purchased an electric washing machine.
This one simple device freed up more time than anything she could imagine, and she invested that time in better raising her children. her new-found freedom from drudgery was balanced by her sense of responsibility.
One and all learned from this simple example in force amplification. More power means greater opportunities to do your duty.
The automobile, and its accompanying support complex, is a fascinating example of how transforming technologies transform society dramatically, in a very short time.
There is a larger, RACIAL component to the issues; they only took place in the WHITE societies of the industrial West.
Dave made a very important point, and that is the difference between money – usually defined as a fiat currency – and wealth. The Elite’s focus on wealth, the nature of which changes from place to place. Money is fundamentally, as Bernard Lietaer noted, a social contract.
Thus, the people (*ahem*) of Zimbabwe have all manner of money, but the indicia of wealth are pretty much beyond them.
Poor people know WHAT something costs; wealthy people, who see and understand “wealth” as the abstract concept it is, know WHY something costs what it does, and what the alternatives are. Their children read textbooks on valuation methodologies, whereas the children of the poor don’t read, at all, past the level they need to to fulfill their basic economic functions.
Thus, for instance, when the OPEC destination Embargo of 73-74 hit, many of my peers blamed “the Arabs,” in spite of the fact that we received virtually no oil from Arabian states.
My International Relations professor saw it somewhat differently:
We paid for their oil with gold in the form of US dollars with a fixed conversion rate into gold. We inflated the money supply to pay for the Vietnam War, and the War on Poverty. When the overseas dollars were presented to be redeemed for gold (France was known for this), the US gold supply dropped precipitously. When Nixon closed the gold window, ending mandatory redemption of green pieces of paper for the yellow metal, the Arabs – and their financiers – discovered they were being paid with green pieces of paper that were depreciating in value. To restore the value of their oil, they required more green pieces of paper for each barrel of oil.
The gold/oil/USD ratios have been remarkably useful in describing shifts in relationships, and thus valuations, between these commodities. (Perhaps, in the century before us, clean water will be included in the various indices of national wealth.)
The larger issues, of course, is that the Creative RACE can transform economic systems to serve them, rather than transforming themselves to serve the economic system.
#5 by Mark on 07/09/2007 - 5:50 pm
Hey Bob, when you were a young man they were still using the old acid in the glass tank as battery, weren’t they? That was before Edison if I remember my history. You didn’t know Edison did you? What about Marconi? Now there was a real inventor. Anyone who could give women and liberals the apparatus to complain to us through the airwaves has got to be a god in my book.
#6 by Larry Longacre on 07/10/2007 - 6:34 pm
Edison batteries were nickel-iron and used a caustic alkali electrolyte. Acid would destroy them. Some made before WWII are still in service.
#7 by Mark on 07/12/2007 - 6:09 pm
Larry, are these Bob-era — er, I mean, Edison era batteries any better than today’s?
#8 by Larry Longacre on 07/13/2007 - 10:36 pm
Larry, are these Bob-era — er, I mean, Edison era batteries any better than today’s?
Depends on your definition of “better”. Certainly their potential lifespan is higher than any modern secondary battery. But their energy density and peak current are both poor. NiCd is no more expensive and unlike NiFe had superb peak current, although it won’t last forty or fifty years.
NiFe was used on the railroad because they were physically very rugged-rail service is tough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-iron_battery