Even Harry Reid wants to spend all your money building a commuter rail from Victorville to Las Vegas.
Lyndon LaRouche wants to build MagLev trains about everywhere. . . . financed by government bonds or credit disbursements, sorta the same way Obama prints fiat currency and "invests" it in speculative financial schemes, principally because his buddies' banks are "too big to fail" but not too big to take money from us.
Well, let's look at this solar road idea from a long-term perspective. How much oil is there, who controls it and profits from it, and how much gas and diesel do we really want to use now instead of, say a hundred years from now. Asphalt roads use a lot of gravel, but they need to be "freshened" every five or ten years with a new pouring of oil/asphalt and a new layer of gravel, or a new inch or two of precisely measured gravel and tar. The highway people stand out there in orange vests, cops sit there running their red and blues, and they do lane shifts and reduced speed limits and doubled fines. . . .but black roads melt the snow a little faster than concrete ones.
We do concrete roads in some places. . . . depending on things like availability and cost of the concrete, but even concrete can buckle, crack, and get eaten up by road salts and ice freeze/thaw.
sand is one of the more common materials, but deposits of sufficient purity for making glass are much more rare than the limestone that can be used to make cement. . .. CaO/MgO powder that when mixed with the right proportions of water, sand, and gravel will make good concrete.
The economic value of the sand, gravel and cement we mine over any conveniently-measured time span far surpasses the economic value of gold, silver, rare earths, or any other mineral.. ... even steel. Less than oil, I think.
So here's how I break it all down. If you want this kind of research done by government grants, you're an idiot. If the idea has economic reality, you should shut your mouth and get out there and file your claims on sand deposits, because if it will ever be a success, some private person/s will start putting their money into it, and actually create an economic technology for it that even the government bureaucracy will eventually come home to. . . . .
right now they're talking about buried power lines, stormwater runoff pipes and reclamation plants, in-road "smart systems" and probably a lot more. . . .. As long as it's government grants funding the research it will have all sorts of trendy "selling points" with no notion of cost containment or effective use of our money.
Lyndon LaRouche wants to build MagLev trains about everywhere. . . . financed by government bonds or credit disbursements, sorta the same way Obama prints fiat currency and "invests" it in speculative financial schemes, principally because his buddies' banks are "too big to fail" but not too big to take money from us.
Well, let's look at this solar road idea from a long-term perspective. How much oil is there, who controls it and profits from it, and how much gas and diesel do we really want to use now instead of, say a hundred years from now. Asphalt roads use a lot of gravel, but they need to be "freshened" every five or ten years with a new pouring of oil/asphalt and a new layer of gravel, or a new inch or two of precisely measured gravel and tar. The highway people stand out there in orange vests, cops sit there running their red and blues, and they do lane shifts and reduced speed limits and doubled fines. . . .but black roads melt the snow a little faster than concrete ones.
We do concrete roads in some places. . . . depending on things like availability and cost of the concrete, but even concrete can buckle, crack, and get eaten up by road salts and ice freeze/thaw.
sand is one of the more common materials, but deposits of sufficient purity for making glass are much more rare than the limestone that can be used to make cement. . .. CaO/MgO powder that when mixed with the right proportions of water, sand, and gravel will make good concrete.
The economic value of the sand, gravel and cement we mine over any conveniently-measured time span far surpasses the economic value of gold, silver, rare earths, or any other mineral.. ... even steel. Less than oil, I think.
So here's how I break it all down. If you want this kind of research done by government grants, you're an idiot. If the idea has economic reality, you should shut your mouth and get out there and file your claims on sand deposits, because if it will ever be a success, some private person/s will start putting their money into it, and actually create an economic technology for it that even the government bureaucracy will eventually come home to. . . . .
right now they're talking about buried power lines, stormwater runoff pipes and reclamation plants, in-road "smart systems" and probably a lot more. . . .. As long as it's government grants funding the research it will have all sorts of trendy "selling points" with no notion of cost containment or effective use of our money.
