Neo-Atlantis Codex

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Rebirth of Neo-Atlantis

I’ve been mulling this over for a while.  At first I made the idiotic decision of starting with a full codex, written in order.

So, this blog is to deal with the Neo-Atlantis issues as more of an ongoing blog.

AO3

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Why 1 Country Owns 85% of These Batteries

Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage

Ha to be setup on a neighbourhood basis, but store heat from the summer in groundwater until the winter, and vice versa. Extremely low cost heating and cooling.

Only works with average moderate temperatures. I.e. warm summers and cold winters.

All it does is pump water.

Runtime: 21:02

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The Saint George is fine.

And Saint Andrew

Might as well add Saint Patrick

But, how about Saint Edward the Confessor?

Saint Thomas Becket?

Or maybe a good old fashion Saint Michael casting down Satan.

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Why We Can't Build Houses Like This Anymore

Old growth timber doesn't exist anymore, and quick grown farmed wood is far inferior.

Chestnut is largely extinct thanks to a blight.

2x4 are literally smaller.

Full-height timber doesn't exist anymore, and if it did, building codes allow it.

Structural brick is a forgotten art, and building codes often don't allow it.

Wooden laths that were plastered was replaced with gyprock.

And through it all, the artisans don't exist anymore.

Runtime: 24:19

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Solar is Free

This is an assumption a lot of people make. I made this assumption when I was younger. The difference between me and most people is that I accept evidence to the contrary. There is no place in the world where solar or wind power are grid competitive. Except maybe Denmark. This is because Denmark has an extremely low population, and (relatively) narrow straits that have consistent, offshore wind.

it is utterly amazing how people can ignore both the extremely obvious problems with solar and wind, and ignore the decades of experimentation.

Because we have been pushing for it my entire life.

Hypothetically, solar and wind require no material inputs, and as such, can hypothetically achieve better cost / KWh.

But this ignores all of the glaring problems with it, and the fact it effectively lies to the public. This is because solar and wind have a hypothetical maximum power generation. If a nuclear power plants says it's going to produce 600MWe (Megawatt electrical), since we can control the inputs, it's going to produce 600MWe, year round.

If a wind mill says it has a capacity of 20MWe, then it has 20MWe during ideal conditions. Solar array might only break 80% of it's capacity during a few hours for a few days out of the year. They are instead given a Capacity Factor, which typically ranges from 15% to 35%, over the course of a year.

This isn't to say solar and wind are useless, but they have problems.

Solar varies considerably, not just during the day, but over the course of the year, with the actual daily production dropping to maybe 20% in the winter.

Wind obviously only works when the wind is blowing.

As such, both need extensive power storage. We have a number of good ideas, but the only one actually used in any realistic amounts is hydro power storage.

I.e. you have a hydro power plant, and pump some of the water back up when power is available from your periodic sources. When the sun is shinning or the wind is blowing.

In order for this to work, you need the geographical basis for hydro power, which is one of the best power sources in the world. Where I live, we have a LOT of hydro power, but we also have costal mountains, which could produce massive amounts of wind power for extremely low costs. Naturally, we aren't doing it.

But, there is another, less obvious problem with solar and wind. The power they produce over their lifetime is only a few orders higher than the energy needed to produce them. This means that, at some point, we will likely have reached the point where it is self-sustaining, but we are not anywhere near that yet. We need baseload generation, and that is either hydro, geothermal, fossil fuels, or nuclear. Or, say, BEETD.

What can we do?

California has mandatory grid buybacks, i.e. if your house produce more power than it uses, the grid has to buy it back. Houses that have their own solar power have their own power walls, and very logically, only give back to the grid once the power wall is charged. This means that California gets a lot of grid buyback electrical power between 13:00-16:00, and little to none during the rest of the time.

So, the obvious answer is - hydroelectricity. California needs dams anyways to control water flow, to keep it consistent.

Seriously, for solar power, what California needs is storage. And California could theoretically reach a point where power generation is entirely local, or almost entirely local, with local grid balancing stations instead of local substations.

We don't have enough lithium and cobalt in the world to use for batteries, but we have iron-air batteries, salt water batteries, compressed air storage, flywheel storage, supercapacitors. Nevermind liquid salt solar thermal powerplants, that continue to produce power at night.

and *cough* LFTR *cough*

Solar also has a lot of problem with heat, and this can easily be mitigated by combining it with crops. Most crops, other than grass, evolved to grow in partial shade, and while solar powered, like solar power plants, they can, in fact, get WAY too hot. The crops cool themselves down with evaporative cooling, and both are typically placed in open places with a lot of sunlight.

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The Many Interesting Ways to do Solar Sail Ships

I love Spacedock, but it's rare for them to actually tell me something I didn't already know.

And this is one of them.

Solar Sails. Either light sails or electromagnetic sails.

Light is both a wave and a particle. It does not have mass, but does impart energy. For the record, no, we still don't have any idea how this works. Other than maybe God is doing it.

But, if you produce something large and reflective enough, and low enough mass, it will produce an outward force. A VERY small outward force.

But, one of the big problems with rockets is fuel. On ourneys through space, even our own Stellar System, rocket fuel is WAY too heavy to have constant thrust. You have a bit of a burn at the start, a bit of a burn at the end, and tiny ones periodically to correct your heading. If you take something with an extremely low thrust, but that can be maintained for the whole journey, you end up with more thrust for less fuel. This ends up with more thrust over the course of the journey. Ion Drives work the same way, which is how Voyagar. Ion Drive is how most space probes work nowdays. The problem with Light Sails is that, in order to get something that large with that low of a mass, you are basically using something that is paper thin.

Electromagnetic Sails use the Solar Winds. Stars create electrically charge particles that move away from the star, and instead of using physical sails, you can use magnets. The upsides are that you don't have to make anything as giant, as long as the magnetic field is giant. The downside is that it's active, so you need power onboard to do anything.

Solar sails could - in theory - be manipulated manually. Maybe use some sort of pseudo-solid that uses electromagnetism to maintain position, rather than physical interaction. In which case you could maybe have a material that is lighter than mythril and does not require active power to use.

Of course, the main reason we don't talk about solar sails anymore is that we don't have hard sci-fi. Even things that are somewhat hard sci-fi, like Star Wars have had any traces of the hard, grounding details excised.

I FOUND IT! I've been looking for this for 20 years.

Pretty sure this is the movie I watched on Teletoon's anime blog before they seriously shat the bed, and never recovered anime-wise.

Runtime: 10:16

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Minifacturing

Along with Hanging Gardens, one of the two key elements to a true future. Not the cyberpunk kind, by the Star Trek kind.

Unfortunately, this is best represented in two of the best modern Lovecraftian horrors:

Mass Effect

Death Stranding

Minifacturing is the combination of several technologies:

3D Printing

Automated Machining

Robotic Manufacturing

These are all technologies that we have, but have never actually combined together into a system that could be run on the small scale. Like, say, going to the local gaming shop and 3D printing your Space Marines, already coloured. Have an interface that allows you to change the billion facets of it, add your own elements, combine elements from any models you have bought, and get your army.

This would have you buy the Minifacturing schematics/instructions, (structs?), from 40k, and pay for the time, energy, and local materials at the gaming shop.

And then extend this to appliances, firearms, motor vehicles.

The pressure-bearing parts of the firearm, which are legally the firearm itself, might not be able to be minifactured. The same thing with a car's chassis.

The benefit of this is not just being able to fully customize your car, but the ability to perpetually produce components for it. Availability of components is one of the biggest things limiting the life of more reliable automobiles.

But, this would require major automobile manufacturers to acknowledge that they are designers, and that they SHOULD not have direct control of the vehicle the moment it leaves their factory.

I'm looking at you, John Deere, but this is also what crippled the newspapers, and is destroying Hollywood. They refuse to adapt, to accept their place as producers, and not instruments for societal control.

Newspapers refused to move online, and when they finally did, we had a culture of not paying for news online. Because you couldn't. The internet is for sharing, and it took the Dotcom Bubble, (and a LOT of porn), for people to figure out how to run commercial businesses online.

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Can a $1,500 Battery Replace a Powerwall?

Clickbait headline, but still important. Modular, locally networked battery packs that can plug into the wall. Since all of the plugs in the house are connected closer together, it can take power from your local power supply, i.e. solar panels, before it reaches to the grid.

Powerwalls require the entire house to be rewired through the Powerwall, and if you want any control, it has to be wired through a smart switch before going to the powerwall.

Grid - Powerwall - Smart Switch - Local Circuits, and these all have to be hard-wired. If you are building a house, you have to build the powerwall into the house, if already have one, you have to tie every circuit through the smart switch, while likely requiring a carpenter to actually install it.

Pila: Plug-and-power home batteries

Modern battery backup power & smart energy control – designed for your home

Pila is the size of a computer tower, just longer and thinner. It can plug directly into the wall, and you plug into it. It can provide hours of power backup for a single room, like say, a home entertainment centre.

If you plug multiple ones into your house, you can set them up to network. They will learn the typical power draw of whatever they are plugged into, and coordinate across the whole house. Each one has a touch-screen control, which you can connect to your phone without having to use an internet connection, which is rare nowadays. The three main benefits are:

Solar Load Balancing: This is incredibly important for Solar Power to be useful, at all. And right now, California has mandatory grid buyback of solar power without anywhere to store it. Local load balancing is important.

Time Shifting: Some regions charge more for power during peak. Which is 1000% fair, as the grid has to be designed to handle peak loads, and a lot of off-peak power is wasted.

Backup Power: From what I've seen, this is better than any other local backup or uninterruptible power supply.

Runtime: 19:14

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High mass walls keep temperature consistent.

Thatch roof allows ventilation, AND insulation.

Cellar

Larder on the north side that gets less sun, or that runs into a hill.

Cross draft.

Window Shades blocks the high summer sun but not the low winter sun.

Porous jug. Slowly weeps water that evaporates, causing evaporative cooling.

Stream running under a house's cold room.

Runtime: 17:51

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Star Trek : Yesterday’s Progressivism

Runtime: 15:16

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The Right to Own

The author of the DMCA admits he tricked Congress

The DMCA restricts bypassing digital locks. MS had a Windows release where home and professional were the exact same bitmap, just with one bit difference. Someone built a program to flip this bit, giving everyone access to the professional version.

Not only does this prevent backups and format shifting, but has been used to utterly destroy the right to own. You don't own copyrighted work anymore. You don't own any electronic device, because even if you own the hardware, you have to licence the software. Cars are released with heated seats that you need to subscribe to. Software is designed to be always online, even when the software has no need to actually be online. John Deere farming equipment will literally turn off every year if you don't pay for a new licence.

The DMCA was negotiated in treaties first, which thereby forced the US congress to pass, because it was part of THEIR own negotiated treaties. The US then went on to coerce every other country, forcing them to adopt similar policies.

And the worst part? It has sunset provisions. It's been re-passed by EVERY - SINGLE - CONGRESS. The only one that tried to stop it was Trump, whom vetoed it during the first half of his first term. The Dems had a supermajority in the second half, and were able to bypass his veto. In his second term, they made it impossible to even pass continuing resolutions for budgets, preventing Trump from doing anything about it.

Runtime: 27:04

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Prostitution

Moral issue aside, prostitutes are gigantic disease vector and become centres of crime and iniquity. So, why should they be legal?

We could go into the libertarian argue, or simply skip ahead to the more salient issue:

Banning Prostitution does - NOT - work. In any way, shape, or form. We've had prostitution before we had writing. When you teach monkeys and apes to use currency, one of the first things they do is create prostitution. Prostitution is also something that women can do with no resources. And I do mean no resources, as they don't even need clothing.

Red light districts were created by the prostitutes buying a red shade for their lamps. Any house with a red light outside was a working prostitute.

So, if you ban it, or even heavily restrict it to the point of effectively banning it, which every country using the Swedish Rule does, prostitutes move to the grey market.

The White Market is labeled, registered businesses.

The Black Market is outright illegal, if you get caught, you get to prison.

The Grey Market is not overt, and often not registered. Things like dropshipping, or collectors buying and selling enough comic books to effectively make them a store.

The difference is that grey market prostitution can hide some of the most heinous crimes in Human history. Because there is no registration, there are no controls over who does it.

The Swedish Rule does not criminalize selling your body, it criminalizes buying it, along with advertisement, and brothels, ("living off of the means of prostitution.")

What this means is that prostitutes have to be street walkers, or be good at networking, (the prostitute/courtesan distinction). The reason why Escorts are legal is that they aren't selling sex, they are selling companionship. The negotiation for the sex has to then be done in private. I used to work security for hotels. You could literally hear them negotiate. And this is the problem, because this could be done equally with someone that does not or cannot consent.

"But, that's illegal!"

Well, yeah, but there is no way for the law to distinguish between legal and illegal prostitution, from the outside.

If, however, brothels are legal, if a minor EVER goes into the brothel, someone committed a crime. Maybe it was the kid, but you instantly grab them and move them back to their parents. You can also mandate regular health screenings, condom usage, security guards, etc. Some countries with legal brothels have clinics in the brothel for the mandated regular checkups of the prostitutes.

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Universal Healthcare

A lot of Americans will look at Canadian Healthcare right now, and come to the natural conclusion that Universal Healthcare doesn't work.

The trouble is that it did work, for decades, without any issues.

So, what happened?

Healthcare is EXTREMELY expensive. We were productive enough that the numbers worked out. Since, people have developed the opinion that they don't need to earn a living. Combine this with offshoring. Combine this with regulation that makes it pointless to actually work.

Combined with infinite migrants.

The system was pushed to it's limit, and Justin Castro decided it was a good idea to flood Canada with millions of unskilled workers that don't speak English, many of whom despise our history and culture.

Rather than bringing in high-skill Filipinos, that act like Canada is heaven on earth.

Now it's impossible to get a doctor, it takes all night to get a few stitches from the hospital, and the government recommends killing yourself.

The latter is 100% globohomo bullshit. Justin Castro pushed that Canada had to be accepting of everyone's dogshit self-destructive acts. It started off with the courts deciding that you have the right to die, despite never being present anywhere in Canadian law, and ended with the Government recommending suicide, because we need to accept your lifestyle choices.

So, what happened:

Dropped below the ecnomic productivity level that would pay for it.

Our healthcare system, like all government organs, were extremely vulnerable to capture.

Infinite migrants.

People will counter with how terrible the US healthcare system is. It's Capitalism's fault.

Fascist control of the market by the government with the primary purpose of making healthcare more expensive.

Not joking, as that is legitimately the point. HMO's are mandatory, and the colossal level of bullshit regulation.

So, maybe the US could try Capitalist healthcare before condemning it.

Also, mind-bogglingly, (at least if you try to analyze it rationally), legally, the US cannot to Heathcare at the national level. It has to be done on the State level.

Which is how Canada does it.

Every - single - Blue State demanding the government create healthcare like Canada, COULD - EASILY - DO it. And not a single one, has.

What could we do?

Singapore's Provident Fund: They only take like 13% in taxes, and then, I think it's 15% put into the Provident Fund, under your name. A part of the fund is strictly designated for healthcare. So, you literally have money under your name that you are forced to save for healthcare. The removes the government.

Take any of the functional Universal Healthcare systems that are based on private insurance. Like Switzerland, Austria. Mixed systems like Germany. Local systems like Denmark.

Not dismantle the system that gave us enough abundance to allow us to pay for it.

Not bring in infinite migrants.

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Tax the Rich

Under a flat tax, the rich would pay proportional taxes. Under a progressive tax, i.e. higher tax brackets pay more, the rich pay disproportionate taxes. Most countries use the latter.

A few murders in Billionaires' Row, the Billionaires start to flee, and it turns out they were paying half of tax revenue in NYC.

But, then the Left, always, all of the time, shouts TAX THE RICH. Because one more tax will cause their failed policies to finally succeed.

Some places legitimately have a WATER RUN OFF tax.

The problem with taxing the rich, is they can afford a team of six-figure lawyers and accountants to find every conceivable way to pay taxes.

Tax Evasion is illegal.

Tax Avoidance is 100% using legal tax loopholes.

Worst-case scenario, the rich just take their money and leave. Because they probably have a megayacht and a private jet. Or they just offshore their assets to prevent them from being taxed.

The best way to tax the rich are UNAVOIDABLE taxes. Simple tax codes that don't have loopholes.

The best ways are Georgism, tax on the undeveloped value of a property, VAT, because of it's inescapability, and some tariffs, because the rich are usually the ones importing and/or exporting things. If you do this properly, this won't penalize the economy, and will likely actually benefit it.

Because every other tax punishes the economy. It creates less economic activity, which means there is less to tax, which means there is less tax revenue.

And wealth taxes are just a society-wide suicide pact.

[light-immaculate]

VAT needs to be a properly integrated Goods & Services tax to A) Have teeth B) Not disproportionately affect the poor. Georgism is the most progressive tax model. Capital gains needs a fairly large rebate in order to encourage middle class saving rather than simply pulling up the ladder. In general the tax rate is less important than the amount of taxes. The fewer taxes you have the less it punishes people who can't pay for she'll companies and tax advisors. Make it simple. Make it transparent. Make it encourage saving and reinvestment. Earmark large amounts for investment into infrastructure especially transportation, sanitation, internet and water

[neoatlantiscodex]

Tax the Rich

Under a flat tax, the rich would pay proportional taxes. Under a progressive tax, i.e. higher tax brackets pay more, the rich pay disproportionate taxes. Most countries use the latter.

A few murders in Billionaires' Row, the Billionaires start to flee, and it turns out they were paying half of tax revenue in NYC.

But, then the Left, always, all of the time, shouts TAX THE RICH. Because one more tax will cause their failed policies to finally succeed.

Some places legitimately have a WATER RUN OFF tax.

The problem with taxing the rich, is they can afford a team of six-figure lawyers and accountants to find every conceivable way to pay taxes.

Tax Evasion is illegal.

Tax Avoidance is 100% using legal tax loopholes.

Worst-case scenario, the rich just take their money and leave. Because they probably have a megayacht and a private jet. Or they just offshore their assets to prevent them from being taxed.

The best way to tax the rich are UNAVOIDABLE taxes. Simple tax codes that don't have loopholes.

The best ways are Georgism, tax on the undeveloped value of a property, VAT, because of it's inescapability, and some tariffs, because the rich are usually the ones importing and/or exporting things. If you do this properly, this won't penalize the economy, and will likely actually benefit it.

Because every other tax punishes the economy. It creates less economic activity, which means there is less to tax, which means there is less tax revenue.

And wealth taxes are just a society-wide suicide pact.

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No one who uses the terms Affordable Housing and Livable Wage actually care about the issues.

Because the issue are economic.

If the cost of housing increases faster than inflation, it's because you don't have enough houses. If you don't let people build housing, then the market can never correct itself. Most Affordable Housing initiatives turn a 2-year total build for an apartment building into a 10 year drudge through endless bureaucracy, with no guarantee of ever being allowed to build.

Livable Wage is based off of the cost of living in the area, and this is affected by countless economic factors, the biggest of which is housing supply. If you just increase the minimum wage in the area, without increasing the supply of housing, then the cost of housing will just go up, (along with the costs of everything else).

Again, if you don't have enough housing, you can never get affordable housing unless you BUILD MORE HOUSING.

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Food Animals

Every once in a while, a vegan or a communist will crawl out from under a rock, (because neither understands economics nor engineering well enough to actually build anything), and spout that the distinction between food and non-food animals is arbitrary.

When it's literally the exact opposite. The main food animals of every culture is typically the best food animals they have. If they are eating a poor food animal is probably because they don't have access to the better ones.

First off, wild protein. It really depends upon the sustainability of the harvest. Because nature is producing them naturally. It only becomes a problem when you harvest too much or restrict their range.

One of the Bible's main requirement for meat, (beasts), is that they have cloven hooves and chew their cud. Chewing their cud allows them eat grass. Grass can grow in areas where no other plant can, which means you cannot use them for agriculture. This is the majority of the world's land area. Cloven hooves excludes horses, this is because horses are actually poor food animals. They don't have enough stomachs to get a lot of nutrition. Horses are really, really, really good at running. Not as good at eating as a cow or sheep or goat. Cows are REALLY good at making meat, but sheep and goats also provide wool. This is an incredibly good rule for a desert/pastorine people.

Pigs can survive off of food waste, and forage - pretty much anywhere with trees. Roman law taxed woodlands based off how many swine you can forage. Not good for desert/pastorine people, but really good for anywhere with woods.

Chickens are mayhap the most common vertebrate in the world, because it takes 2-3 months to raise them. We've had other food birds, but none of them can compete with chickens. We used to rely a lot more on wild gamefowl, but... without any exageration, we invented the Duck Cannon. We kind of passed the threshold where we started harvesting a little too much.

Now, for predators. As a simple rule, predators make terrible food animals. Fish are the exception, because we're not raising them ourself, but land predators are trim, while herbivores are often pretty chonky, meaning they literally don't have as much meat on their bones, relative to their weight. Predators also have a lot more parasites, and you have to provide the entire food chain up to them.

AKA, cats make absolutely terrible food animals. The only reason people eat them is that they do not have access to better food animals.

There's a reason why dogs go missing during famines.

Humans are kind of the same. Aside from the fact we're raised in cages and full of hormones and antibiotics, we're also full of parasites that can really easily transfer to another Human. Biologically, cannibalism is NEVER a good idea.