Our Vice Moron at it Again

Imagine, in just a few years, solar shingles on your brand new custom house (all you high school graduates) that cost no more than regular shingles, that will power everything in your house, heating, AC the whole deal.  Imagine crops that don’t need soil (OK, maybe hydroponics) and no water (oops) and no fertilizer.  Magic crops.  “Literally just around the corner.”


And of course none of that can happen if the eeevil Republicans are in power.  Only more of ‘bama’s stash money can make the magic happen.  The private markets?  Meh.  All that’s done is fail continuously for 200+ years, apparently.  What’s been happening in the last few years– that’s the ticket, Baby.


Now if kids actually learned science, physics, biology or basic economics, they’d laugh that gibbering idiot off the podium.  This is where our Soviet-style education system comes in.  Of course now anyone can look up maximum and average available energy per unit area at their latitude at various times of the year, and the efficiency of the best PV panels, take into account the problem of tracking, or in the case of your magic roof shingles the lack of tracking, and so on.  And naturally, to get the most out of your magic solar roof shingles you’ll have to cut down the trees that shade your house, increasing the AC load.  Or maybe not, being as they’re magic and all.


He had a teleprompter, so I have to assume that he didn’t make that up as he went along.  There had to have been some planning behind it.


The Moron in Chief, to make himself look better by comparison, had pick the stupidest fool he could find I guess, and then put him out there to show the contrast, such as it is.

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10 thoughts on “Our Vice Moron at it Again

  1. I always ask the solar people this question: What if I want to work at night? (which can get to be pretty long around here). That usually shuts them up. Either that or they mention batteries, at which point it’s easy to point out that kind of technology just isn’t there yet.

  2. Well, SURE the battery tech is there – they fully support opening up more domestic lead mines, right? RIGHT? And, of course, arsenic mines for the gallium-ARSENIDE PV panels, right? RIGHT?

  3. “The Moron in Chief, to make himself look better by comparison, had pick the stupidest fool he could find I guess, and then put him out there to show the contrast, such as it is.”

    Vice-Idiot is what’s known as “assassination insurance”. Who could possibly consider him to be an improvement?

  4. When I saw “solar shingles” I though we were talking about some kind of embarrassing flareup. Then again, embarrassing flareup is a pretty accurate description for uncle Joe.

  5. Lead-acid batteries can’t take enough charge cycles to be useful, and you would need a ton of them unless you were running a very minimalistic setup. Expensive to install, expensive to replace every couple of years.

  6. Publius; More than a ton, I should think. Several tons more likely. You’re gonna want an output of what, around 5 to 10KW at 120 and 240V for an average house? You’ll need a pretty righteous inverter too, unless you convert everything in your house to run on DC. And in winter here, when the sun is rarely seen, you’ll be storing power on a seasonal basis, which means many more tons of batteries and acres of PV panels. So if the PV panels were free, your house will still cost a hell of a lot more, for all that extra hardware, which then has to be maintained, and you’ll need several more acres of land to cover completely with PVs. So you can then hire some Mexicans to clean your PV panels once a week. Ever seen how dirty things can get when they sit outside all the time? Hey, more jobs. And there’s the snow removal.

    And your neighbor’s structures and trees had damned well better not shade your property. That’s energy theft, that is. We can’t have any trees, because every square inch will have to used for PVs. That’ll open up a whole new class of legal profession– energy deprivation suits.

    Forget all that. Instead I’ll take the magic crops that don’t need soil, water, or nutrients. So you all better be voting Democrat or we’ll lose the magic.

    Joe; tell your dad he should develop his land into a themepark resort, hotel casino, brothel and golf course, ’cause “just around the corner”, farmland as such will be totally worthless. Our food will materialise out of thin air in one of those Star Trek replicators, powered by the sun. Hay, maybe we can get our batteries and solar panels out of that same, solar powered replicator. Yeah; that’d be sweet.

  7. I find the idea of hydroponics–particularly aeroponics–rather fascinating…I haven’t yet set up an aeroponics garden, but I hope to do so someday though. Once I get it working, I’ll then turn my mind on talking those pesky plants out of their demand for water and nutrients!

    As expensive as it would be to set up an entire aeroponics farm, I have a solution for that, too: I’m going to set up my farm on the moon, where such expenses are necessary for survival! And I won’t have to worry about that stupid weather problem, either, because I’ll have straight sunlight twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week! And when the sun flares up, that’s extra energy for me and my plants! How cool is that?

    Oh, wait, I only get two weeks like that. The other two weeks will be in utter darkness. And the energy from those solar flares is that scary cancer-inducing radio-active energy. Oh, great, why does reality have to intrude? I know! It’s because I’m not a Democrat!

  8. Liberalism: Thermodynamics be damned, “it can’t be done” is not an acceptable answer!

  9. Publius, Lyle: I guess I should have used the “facetious” font. I’m well aware that while technically they would work, there are practical problems, as you pointed out. Zinc-air batteries might be a better choice, but similar problems still apply.

  10. Wow the local news shows only repeated the “solar shingles” bit, which is a bit rich given that radical solar systems have been around for 30+ years now and generally they help but don’t solve any problems, plus they are costly to install, maintain, and repair. And I’m interested in how I can run a whole new electrical system into my house through my roof without any additional cost of just hiring a few guys with pneumatic nail guns to tack up fresh shingles.

    Still it REALLY got rich with the magic plants that disobey the laws of conservation of matter. Also I chuckled at the fact that he’s pushing that old “Magic Carburetor” myth, which is so old it references a part that isn’t even ON modern cars these days.

    Re-generating organs is a possibility, but we’re still in our infancy. Likely the first organ to be “cloned” from the donor’s stem cells will be liver tissue because its really just a big gland with a very simple structure that has no mechanical use. You can make a liver that looks like a liver, or make one that just looks like a big livery-basketball, or make it heart-shaped for valentine’s day.

    Same with things like tendons and bone tissue, they could be molded to maintain a shape needed for transplant. But now all the organ systems, tissue types, and mechanical processes that are found in a limb that may have been lost in the war, that’s a LONG way off.

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