What the Heroin Industry Can Teach Us About Solar Power (bbc.com) 151
ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world's opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. "Solar is by far the most significant technological change" in the region for decades, says Dr. Mansfield, author of the report (PDF). The first solar panels were introduced there in 2013. More recently, solar panel installations have doubled every year, and now stand at 67,000. In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, solar panels are stacked in the market in great piles three stories high. For an up-front cost of $5,000, farmers can buy panels and a pump to irrigate their fields, and then there are virtually no running costs. "All this water is making the desert bloom," says Richard Brittan, a former British soldier whose company, Alcis, specializes in satellite analysis of what he calls "complex environments."
$5,000 is a lot of money -- the average dowry is $7,000 -- but the panels pay for themselves within two years. Farmers used to rely on diesel, which was more costly, unreliable and adulterated, which led to frequent machinery breakdowns. This "is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet. There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change -- or any other ethical consideration, for that matter. This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit. It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin. What does this tell us about solar power? That is simple. The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign 'green' technology. "Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world," reports the BBC. (Those consequences: far more opium in the world; water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.)
$5,000 is a lot of money -- the average dowry is $7,000 -- but the panels pay for themselves within two years. Farmers used to rely on diesel, which was more costly, unreliable and adulterated, which led to frequent machinery breakdowns. This "is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet. There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change -- or any other ethical consideration, for that matter. This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit. It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin. What does this tell us about solar power? That is simple. The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign 'green' technology. "Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world," reports the BBC. (Those consequences: far more opium in the world; water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.)
Seems like an opportunity to hit up Shark Tank (Score:3, Funny)
Why not stirling engines? (Score:5, Interesting)
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it's not cheaper, as evidenced by the use of solar power rather than your hypothetical but non-existent solution.
So they can deploy "air wells". (Score:5, Funny)
... water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.
(Imminent environmental catastrophe. Film at eleven.)
Now that energy is getting cheap, if the water table gets low they can just deploy "air wells". Suck some water out of the air with a bit of energy, water the plants with it. They use it for their life cycles and put it back into the air. Round and round and the water table can recover at its own convenience.
There are several ways to do this, with various amounts of energy input per unit water output. More efficient ways are being developed even as we post to and read from slashdot.
High tech is like high explosives. If you still have a problem after its use, it's usually because you didn't use enough of it.
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I can't tell if you're serious or not. Hopefully not.
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Humidity is pretty low in Afghanistan during the warm summer months. I would be surprised if there were enough extractable water in the air to water much of anything.
Humidity in 10-15 years (Score:3)
I think the idea of the parent poster is that after 10-15 years, if you have pumped enough water for the water table to be menaced, that would mean there is now a lot more humidity generater by all this "bloom" that TFS mentions, i.e.: the desert of Afghanistan will not look that much deserty within a decade and you could start considering concentrating humidity from the air.
I.e.: all the pumped water has to go somewhere (converting the desert into a grassland that grows poppy) and this is the somewhere whe
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>I.e.: all the pumped water has to go somewhere
What do you think plants are made out of? Mostly water and CO2,which have now been chemically converted to nice stable cellulose (plus sugars, opium, etc). If you compost it it will gradually be broken back down into water and CO2 by molds, but that can be a very slow process and tends to leave a lot of it as organic material in the soil.
I don't know poppies well, but if they thrive in the desert they probably don't "exhale" a lot of water, and like you sa
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Water condensation tech isn't going to improve dramatically. It's limited by the laws of thermodynamics.
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It could potentially work if you can create a captive water cycle. That would mean building a lot of greenhouses and basically trapping all the water that evaporates away from the crops. Sometimes the solution to problems caused by technology really is more and better technology. I would suggest desalinating ocean water, but Afghanistan is land-locked, so they would need to source that through a neighboring country, which would leave them dependent on that country.
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The only way to transform a landscape permanently is to plant woods.
Regarding water, they could build pipelines into Himalaya, but ATM I think all those countries are still to busy with the aftermath of the colonizations and cold war.
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The water of the Himalayas is already being contested over by India, China, Pakistan, etc.
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Not really, most of it simply flows down rivers and then "is gone".
With water management there is enough for everyone (and more).
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For certain, small, values of "permanently".
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Well, I doubt plate tectonics can move Afganistan to a place where it became green.
But it is not really impossible after all it bottom line only needs enough rain at the right time.
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Meanwhile, gigantic, multi-segmented, non-chordatic, non-arthropodic organism fusing silicon-dioxide to create fragrant, hallucinogenic, consciousness increasing chewing gum, take over and the Bedouins ride them to victory against the infidels.
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The relative humidity in a desert might be 25% during the day and 50% at night. That's why there can be dew in the early predawn hours, which some desert animals rely on to survive.
There's not much water there, but it's there, and if you put energy in you can presumably recover some of it. Whether it's practical to recover enough to support agriculture is an entirely different question.
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As someone who grew up in Southern California, 25-50% sounds really high.
Today in Kabul it's 'sunny with a few clouds', high of 94F, and 11% humidity. That's closer to what I'd expect.
That's just one tiny data point - but I do wonder where you got your 25-50% numbers.
I think it's pretty hard (lots of energy) to pull moisture out of the air at 11% humidity.
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It's probably correct, at some part of the night. Deserts can get pretty cold at night, and relative humidity is highly temperature sensitive.
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Clear skies let a lot of energy to be dumped into space, which is why dew can form even at 50% humidity. There are some experimental thin-film techs that really good at passively dumpting heat into space. Even then, the thermodynamics aren't on your side. You have to dissipate a lot of heat to get any amount of water.
Re:So they can deploy "air wells". (Score:5, Funny)
What they really need is a droid that can speak the binary language of moisture vaporators.
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Technology to extract moisture from the air, even at fairly low RH exists. The problem with this is what you extract is likely to be low in mineral content. If you water long enough with distilled water, you could leach a lot of minerals out of the soil. It would be the opposite of the problems you get when you use slightly saline well water. If the two technologies were equal in cost, they could alternate--salinate, rinse, salinate, rinse... It might be sustainable but the humidity to water tech is a l
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>Technology to extract moisture from the air, even at fairly low RH exists
And gold can be refined from sea water, but it's not profitable. Using that much of the available solar energy in a dry climate like Afghanistan will likely consume the sunlight needed by the crops.
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>If you water long enough with distilled water, you could leach a lot of minerals out of the soil.
To... where? Some water way sink below plant roots, but mostly in the desert you try to water lightly enough that the plants can "drink" it all before it sinks too deep. For distilled (or any other) water... you dissolve some of the minerals out of the soil, but when the water is absorbed the minerals either get left in the soil or absorbed into the plants. And any minerals absorbed into the plants get r
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Rainwater is also low in mineral content. The sort of leaching that you're worried about takes thousands of years because nutrient ions tend to be bound to the surfaces or soil particles. Whereas saline irrigation can cause problems in a few years absent enough natural rainfall to drive out excess salts.
Re:So they can deploy "air wells". (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that energy is getting cheap, if the water table gets low they can just deploy "air wells". Suck some water out of the air with a bit of energy, water the plants with it.
The problem is energy expenditure. The basic thermodynamic laws require conducting away at least 2260 kJ per kilogram of water (latent heat of vaporization). I'd estimate that in Afghanistan conditions this can be done at about 200% efficiency with a heat pump, so let's round it to 1MJ per kilogram of water.
1kWh is 3.6MJ, so a 1kW solar panel in optimal conditions will produce around 4 liters of water per hour. If we take the quoted $5000 price, this will work out to a 10kW system. So we're looking at just 40 liters per hour from a $5000 system.
This is not enough for any real agriculture, by at least two orders of magnitude.
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A always, no idea way americans always gets that wrong: this is not a law of thermodynamics but a chemical law, about evaporation :P pffft.
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No, it is not. And yes I'm pedantic about physical and chemistry laws. :P
However I prefer to call it dogmatic
Re:So they can deploy "air wells". (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So they can deploy "air wells". (Score:5, Interesting)
(Imminent environmental catastrophe. Film at eleven.)
Now that energy is getting cheap, if the water table gets low they can just deploy "air wells". Suck some water out of the air with a bit of energy
The first thing that is likely to happen is a drilling race to deepen the wells. Similar to what is happening with Pistachio farmers [npr.org] in California.
Market forces provide incentive to use more water when wells run dry, and a few winners make a lot of money as the surrounding community suffers.
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For low-humidity agriculture (AKA deserts), one solution was pumping sea water into a 800m tall sprinkler.
We like to think of pollution as somebody else's problem, or the cost of doing business. There's little incentive to create 'green' technology.
No, it's an example of eliminating the middle-man: Particularly those turning a good product into garbage, in the name of Profits.
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"water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate."
It's ok, at that point it will be held to be conclusive proof that global warming is happening and we should all be taxed more to pay for (whatever is the new Solyndra) to "fix" it.
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If they're going to go to all this trouble, they should start pumping seawater into shallow inland basins. Let it evaporate. Sell the sea salt at extremely high prices as a boutique item to gullible Americans that think NaCl from seawater is any different than NaCl from a mine. Then, you'd have extra humidity at ground level for the "air wells" to work.
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Afghanistan is several hundred miles from any ocean.
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And is also very high :P
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If you're going to all that trouble, you might as well put the water trenches in a plastic tube, and capture the high humidity air to feed directly into your refrigerator/dehumidifier.
But where do you get that "sea water"? It's not like you're dealing with a large organization here, this is lots of individual small farmers and a bunch of merchants. And they're doing something technically illegal, at least in most of the surrounding countries.
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Energy isn't getting that cheap. And the amount of energy you have to remove from water vapor to get it to condense is fixed and constant.
Migration isn't the concern.... (Score:5, Funny)
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We insource again. Bring the jobs back home!
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Wall Street and the banksters will need to look for a new source of money to launder.
When the Taliban shut down 90+ percent of the opium growing in Afghanistan (the only regions still growing it were our "allies" the Northern Warlords) Colombia and Mexico were quick to pick up the slack. Then Shrub invaded and made the country safe for opium growers again and every years since has been a new record for production.
and now mr burns can get the cops to bust solar ho (Score:2)
and now mr burns can get the cops to bust solar homes
remember before the US invasion (Score:2)
Re:remember before the US invasion (Score:5, Insightful)
You might also notice how little islamist terrorism was going on in Iraq while Saddam was still there.
Or, in other words, given the success of our war on terror and war on drugs, we should maybe declare a war on affordable healthcare...
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On the face of it, there was little Islamic terrorism under Saddam, but now we know that his regime was being infiltrated by Islamic nutjobs. It was only a matter of time before they whacked him and had control of the entire state...at least until those other Islamic nutjobs in Iran decided to infiltrate because the Islamic nutjobs running the joint would have been the wrong kind of Islamic nutjobs for the Iranians.
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Well, thank god we went in and saved them the trouble!
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At least for those that don't need it, yes.
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Competition? In the insurance industry? You're joking, right? It's a cartel, they all compare prices to each other all the time, and adjust to the maximum the market can bear. Why would they undercut each other, when by acting cooperatively they can not only maximize their income but control the healthcare industry in its entirety? Why do you think the US has the highest medical insurance costs in the world? It certainly isn't because of the paper doily of regulation, which is only for looks. Every o
Re: remember before the US invasion (Score:2)
We have high prices on new medication for the first 20 years until the patent runs out. Then many other companies produce the same medication for a very low price. These products are called generics. There are many companies in the world which produce pharmaceutical products, some specialized only in producing generics.
No one in the world really understands your high prices and what
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Like I said, the insurance companies are a cartel that cooperates to set prices industry-wide. Additionally they take profits based on costs, not efficiency, so high costs and major inefficiencies lead to higher profits. If you get 10% profit on every transaction (don't remember the actual number now) do you think the industry is going to be happier if a procedure costs $100 or $2000?
Agreed (Score:2)
Saddam was keeping the area stable. The only sad part is he had to use murderous tactics because its the only method that works over there. Ask anyone who lived in Iraq if life was better under Saddam, the answer is always yes.
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They had managed to come together in a stable democracy - which we overthrew to install a puppet dictator that wouldn't cozy up to their Soviet neighbors during the World Wars.
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Hey, we had to do something after that towelhead overthrew the puppet we had next door!
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There is nothing wrong in farming opium and making heroine from it.
What is wrong is to declare Heroine illegal in your country and as such feed the middle men an absurd profit. Or do you really think any of the farmers there is "rich"?
We had a case in Germany 20 years ago in Stuttgart, they captured a high profile pusher who had heroine worth of $2,000,000 in a suitcase.
So when the police president was interviewed and asked if he is proud about catching that guy, he answered: "Not really. Street price of He
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we should maybe declare a war on affordable healthcare...
The Republicans are waaaaay ahead of you...
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The war on terror got us more terror, the war on drugs got us more drugs. So where is our more of affordable healthcare?
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Involving politicians is supposed to lower the cost of something???
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It was supposed to be Obamacare but the insurance companies helped write the laws so guess who benefited from that? Oh yay I have insurance for $500 per month! Oh how much is the deductible? $8000 you say? Splendid! Can't wait to use these benefits. Oh and if you like your doctor you can keep them? Bullshit. Oh your existing insurance policy you can keep that too? Bullshit. My retired parents were forced to buy a more expensive one-size-fits-all policy that covered childbirth among other unneeded items.
This
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The insurance industry-designed healthcare plan should have kept its original moniker, Romneycare. Remember when Democrats were outraged that Romney was going to make the poorest people in Massachusetts pay for healthcare or be fined? Just a few years later they were proclaiming that it was the greatest thing to happen to the common worker. Those who claim that there is only one major political party in the Untied States with two factions aren't actually correct, but it seems every year that they're gett
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I look at it in a similar way. Republicans and Democrats receive a paycheck with the same signature on it. They all play for the same team.
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The war on terror got us more terror, the war on drugs got us more drugs. So where is our more of affordable healthcare?
Didn't Trump start the war on affordable healthcare? That would be good news then.
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when the afghanistan opium trade had all but been stamped out by the taliban? Now there is more than there ever has been!
It wasn't stamped out. It was put on hold for one year. Literally the next year production picked right back up and maintained the curve, that one year aside.
So this is what they mean (Score:3, Funny)
"The desert"! Unlike the past 3000 years! (Score:2)
My dad did a documentary about the region.
They had an extensive set of canals there for 3000 years, that kept everything green and paradisaic!
Until the Soviets and then Taliban destroyed it!
People grew huge seedless watermelons there before we even heard of the fruit, let alone the seedlss variant.
But with the dryness, growing crops became hard and expensive.
And to survive, they chose to sell Heroin.
My dad interviewed a cop there, who had special orders from the top, to burn all heroin fields. But he knew p
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I don't think the irrigations systems are destroyed, but ppl lost the knowledge how to utilize them.
Many deserts are actually covered with ancient underground irrigation systems, as in South America or Iran.
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There was talk a few years ago about setting up a plant to process the opium into medical grade morphine in Afghanistan as a way of (a) taking it away from the heroin market; (b) bringing more jobs to the area. I haven't heard whether that went anywhere. I wouldn't expect it to be a stunning success, except possibly in causing a bit more of the street price of heroin to trickle back to the opium farmers, but it was an interesting idea.
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Sorry, but you're wrong about the water from the Himalayas being available in the future. It's already being contested for by local powers, like China and India. The lower glaciers are melting fast, and the higher you go, the smaller the volume of water / ft. of elevation. I can well believe that in 30 years water will be a real problem.
What the heroin industry can teach us? (Score:2)
Nothing new.
Photovoltaic panels have been a proven solution for off-grid applications for decades.
But most of humanity lives densely enough to have a grid. And photovoltaics are still a nearly invisible slice in the grid energy pie.
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And photovoltaics are still a nearly invisible slice in the grid energy pie.
Doesn't look invisible to me... [wikipedia.org]
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Any lie good enough...
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That duck curve article disproves your assertion. The Maximum power peak isn't affected (lowered) at all by the solar power sources. Since that peak occurs later in the day when solar power is no longer available. Depending on where you are, the primary cost of your power is capital costs. Financing the equipment needed to deliver power from source to customers. And solar doesn't appear to be lowering that at all. Furthermore, since solar is offsetting the midday energy delivery, that represents a reduction
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Who said anything about the peak? You said that "photovoltaics are still a nearly invisible slice in the grid energy pie". I showed that as of 2018, more than half of California's electricity at midday comes from solar (overwhelmingly photovoltaics), and a significant fraction of the electricity averaged over the whole day. That's not "near invisible".
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No, it does not disprove his assertion.
Your point was that solar power is close to meaningless, while his wiki link clearly shows it is not.
The U.S. “War on Drugs” in Afghanistan (Score:1)
The Taliban totally shutdown opium production until the US invaded to liberate Afghanistan from the Afghan people.
The U.S. “War on Drugs” in Afghanistan [researchgate.net]
Re: The U.S. “War on Drugs” in Afghani (Score:3)
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Who Profits from the Drug Trade? [geopoliticalmonitor.com]
They gloss over one important fact (Score:4, Insightful)
They are trying to argue that unsubsidized solar panels are paying for themselves in two years providing irrigation on opium farms in Afghanistan, but they are forgetting they are talking about an exceptionally high-profit crop, not corn or soybeans.
They want you to think that this 'proves' solar panels (even when not subsided) are cheaper than the alternatives. The reality is that they are very effective for particular applications where power mains aren't available and used to create additional high-margin crops like opium.
Capitalism (Score:2)
Re: What lesson are they going for again? (Score:3, Informative)
Afghans don't use Heroin.
They have been smoking natural organic opium there for millennia. Not even at high dosages.
Just like a cigarette or beer to relax in the evening.
Heroin is crap. Like Fentanyl. Or Krokodil. Artificial, way too intense, crap.
Re: What lesson are they going for again? (Score:5, Informative)
Fun fact: opium smoking remained the leading form of illicit opiate consumption in the US up into the 1920s when import restrictions made it more difficult to obtain, giving the purer Heroin an advantage in illicit trade. This is in spite of morphine and heroin being legal over the counter up until the early 1900s.
It's interesting how drug use often exists organically for a long time at low doses/concentrations and only shifts to more concentrated varieties as the result of prohibition and law enforcement pressure.
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Well, there was also laudanum, a pain relieving syrup given to teething babies. I'm not sure how harmless it was, but given the hysteria I'm also not convinced that those babies grew up addicted.
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I read a great book about the history of opiate use in the US about 5 years ago, I had to get it via interlibrary loan from a University and I wish I could remember the title.
Laudanum and paregoric were common as patent medicines and laudanum was abused, but laudanum wasn't really a "drug of abuse" as much as it was "misused" by people who became dependent on it, often women who were given it to treat PMS, generic emotional disorders or post-partum injuries from childbirth. Often the overriding element in
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Well, there was also laudanum, a pain relieving syrup given to teething babies. I'm not sure how harmless it was, but given the hysteria I'm also not convinced that those babies grew up addicted.
I've read quite a lot on the subject and laudenum was never really used in children but the myth has truth. Basically some sources claimed laudenum but they confused it for weaker equivalent paregoric. You're correct in that paregoric was routinely used in children (and adults) though and without much issue in many cases too. Even with stronger laudenum use in adults there was only a small subset of folks who abused it serially it seems whilst many seemed to treat it like a medicine and use appropriately. M
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Re: shock (Score:2)
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It's not completely stupid, it's just more expensive than in places with high insolation. The advantages of on-site production may still make it worthwhile for some use cases, for example
Countries need an energy *mix* -- all sources have their pros and cons.
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Afghanistan isn't particularly near the equator. It's latitude is from about the middle of Texas to the middle of Colorado.
GHI is in the Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California region.
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Our neighbors have a negative electrical bill 10 months of a year, and Seattle is only a couple hours from the Canadian border.
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This is not just a stationary application, but an application closely tied to insolation. The more the sun shines, the more irrigation water you need and vice versa.
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Beat everything else in price when there is absolutely NO infrastructure.
If the US did not have a nation spanning electric grid, already in place, everyone outside the major cities would be completely energy self-dependent. The Afghanis are looking at the cost of solar panels vs the cost of running diesel generator using dirty fuel vs the cost of building an infrastructure that terrorist will regularly blow up then paying the power company. In the US, we are looking at the cost solar panels, vs the cost o
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Fortunately, for water-pumping purposes you don't need batteries - just dump water on the crops while the sun is shining.
Or, if you want more control over when watering occurs you can store the water in above-ground tanks, a.k.a. gravity batteries, which are extremely cheap. Elevate the tanks and you can even get some of the stored energy back when you use the water, generating electricity from the falling water.
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There's a point where solar is cheaper. Batteries are still very goddamn expensive unfortunately.
And that crossover point continues to creep toward the grid side of the equation. I have crappy power where I live. The lines are there, but the power bounces on a regular basis. I'm looking at solar to reduce my power bill, but also to get more stable power. If the batteries weren't so expensive, it would be a done deal already.
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CROFLOL! "That ceremier guy", "cmr|mar" and now "modesto" which is a reference to being modest as well as a reference to California, thus completely ignoring where he really lives! You dudes are just hilarious!