Do folks here understand the expense and energy use associated with desalination plants?

[MisterP]

74. it's the "quick fix" syndrome: the panacea looks so good they feel compelled to post it

Last edited Fri Feb 13, 2015, 06:18 PM - Edit history (1)

all over the place--usually just the word alone, or maybe a link to a crank site

so far I've counted: the Dvorak keyboard, the draft, pebble bed reactors, personal rapid transit, self-driving cars, Mars missions, the Hyperloop, British republicanism, intactivism, getting a Mac, getting a Dyson, metrication, Esperanto, hiding next to furniture rather than under it during a quake, term limits, cremation, geoengineering, school uniforms, cryogenics, and telecommuting: not all, but enough, of their advocates do nothing but spam their hobby-horse in every tangentially-related field

this isn't necessarily a criticism of those things or the research on it, but of their being turned into slogans that people litter everywhere without any economics, physics, or actual thinking about the issue, like a one-word hit-and-run is going to overturn our whole way of thinking

and the campaigns always promise so much that they verge into the literally-impossible (that was the Scottish referendum's problem: it got outright Fourierist): and it's always said to be a royal road out of war and poverty, always uses one-tenth the energy and costs one-tenth as real-world solutions, always lighter and stronger and faster, and is 100% downside-free