The following is fiction and meant as satire. Any resemblance between what is written and real, live, people is entirely coincidental except, of course, when it isn’t.
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a King named Berrywart. King Berrywart ruled the people of Unis, a relatively small kingdom located somewhere near France. Where exactly the French won’t say having been defeated in battle many times by the King’s small, but vicious army of armored marmosets and pike carrying ostriches. Many a battlefield had been well fertilized with the contents gleaned from French pantaloons left behind in retreat after retreat by the Grand Armée.
But French bashing is not really part of our fable. I just threw it in there because it’s fun.
King Berrywart had enormous problems. Some clever lad had constructed a vehicle that used turnip juice as fuel. The turnipmobile changed everyone’s way of life in Unis. No longer did people walk to the market. Now they drove their vehicles. This presented difficulties because parking became a bitch downtown plus have you ever smelled burning turnips?
Needless to say, with the immense popularity of the turnipmobile, the production of turnips became a top priority in the Kingdom. Several very clever peasants banded together in a loose alliance and essentially took over the entire production of turnips. They forced other peasants who were growing turnips out of business by charging a pittance for turnip juice, thus making it impossible for the smaller turnip growers to make a profit. They were absolutely ruthless.
These clever peasants also controlled the process which turned turnips into turnip juice. And while they competed amongst each other for customers, they were able to keep the price of turnip juice stable by refining just enough juice to satisfy the ever growing demand of the people for fuel.
The peasants became very rich. They wore rags imported from France. They lived in the finest of mud huts with floors made from the softest straw. The results were predictable. Other peasants who did not produce turnips and were forced into wearing old rags imported from Uruguay and living in small, dank, mud huts with dirt floors were jealous. They grumbled darkly about “conspiracy” and complained about the smell.
Now there were two political parties in Unis. For a long time, the Demon party controlled the Commons with the Pibble party in opposition. And while the Demons took campaign contributions from the rich peasants, they enacted all sorts of laws to make their lives and livelihoods difficult. First, in order to improve the parking downtown, the Demons imposed a tax on juice at the turnip press. The Demons built several parking garages (which almost immediately began to fall apart thanks to bid rigging, payoffs, shoddy materials, and an incompetent builder whose only qualification was that he was the brother in law of the head of the Demon party). Then they passed regulations that forced the rich peasants to remove the bad smell from the turnip juice when it burned. This proved to be easier said than done and their costs to refine turnip juice skyrocketed.
Of course, the rich peasants were forced to pass on these increased costs to the people of Unis. Not only that, they were forced to cut back production of turnips due to other regulations passed by the Demon controlled Commons. They were told they couldn’t grow turnips in certain fields because it spoiled the view of the mountains for some wealthy friends of the Demons. This forced the rich peasants to increase their yield per acre of turnips which added to the cost of the juice.
Then, a group of poor peasants petitioned the Commons to have the rich peasants remove several of the refining facilities because they were unsightly and smelled very, very bad. Always willing to pander to the voters (it’s how they stayed in power for so long), the Demons forced the refineries to close. And when the rich peasants asked if they could build other refineries to replace them, the Demons laughed them out of the Commons.
Needless to say, the rich peasants had to keep raising the price of turnip juice just to maintain their profits.
Finally, a new day dawned in Unis as the Pibble party wrested control of the Commons from the Demons. Seen as the rich peasant’s best friends, the Pibble party promised all sorts of relief for the their friends in the turnip business. They promised to let them grow turnips in fields that blocked the view of the mountains for some of the Demon’s wealthy contributors. They promised to ease up on the smell regs. They promised a lot but nothing ever came of their promises.
Time passed. The world changed. Now everyone was driving turnipmobiles. The rich peasants were forced to import more and more turnip juice from abroad just so that the people of Unis could be supplied with the vital fuel. But the supply from abroad was unreliable. Some peasants in far away Dinnerplate were willing to pay more for turnip juice so more supplies from abroad went there rather than Unis. Since the rich peasants had to buy turnip juice at the inflated price, the cost of juice at the press in Unis started to skyrocket.
This proved too much for the poor peasants in Unis who demanded that the Pibble party do something – anything – to bring the cost of turnip juice down. The Demons, seeing an opening, skewered the Pibble party for allowing the rich peasants to make enormous profits. Rather than try and explain that the rich peasant’s profits were necessary so that more domestic turnips could be grown and refined, the Pibble party turned on the rich peasants and demanded an investigation. The rich peasants were a little bemused. After all, it was the Commons that had forced this situation on everyone with their stupid, shortsighted, and ignorant turnip policies.
King Berrywart was befuddled. A former turnip grower himself, he sympathized with the rich peasants but was also sympathetic to his friends in the Pibble party. “We must give the people relief!” he cried. “We will give one hundred wartmarks (known as “wammers”) to all taxpaying citizens of Unis to help in this crisis.”
The kingdom’s economists did a double take when Berrywart made that announcement. They tried to follow the logic of Berrywart’s thinking but were unable to do so. Berrywart wanted to collect the tax on turnip juice, have the Kingdom’s tax bureaucrats count it, and then have them issue one hundred wammers to each taxpaying citizen? The economists figured such a program would cost at least 133 wammers per citizen which would add to the already ballooning deficit being run by the Kingdom. Why not just suspend the tax, they wondered?
Meantime, the Demons had a better idea (politically speaking, that is). If the Pibble party could pander to the people then the Demons could up the ante. “Let’s tax the excess profits on turnip juice,” they cried triumphantly. This had the advantage of playing to the ignorance of the people of Unis about how turnips are grown and refined while making them sound like they’re “doing something about the problem.”
Of course, all the scheming and planning by the Pibbles and the Demons did not produce one additional drop of turnip juice. So the price remained high. And the people?
The people of Unis took out their frustrations at the polls in November. And which party do you think suffered the most?
UPDATE
Powerline has the skinny on the Republican “plan” to save the nation.
7:56 am
Rick,
Allegory isn’t really your calling…better stick to the punditocracy.
It was funny, though.
9:24 am
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:
The Democrats are to blame for the root causes of gas prices. Both parties are pandering to the people to look like they’re doing something when they’re not. The Democrats are currently out-pandering the Republicans.
Rick’s solution is remove oil regulations and let Oil companies drill and refine wherever and however they want. I couldn’t tell if the deregulation in the story included cutting direct and indirect subsidies to the industry, but I would like to assume it does.
9:51 am
The first entrepanuer who created artificial shortages to bolster the price of product was Cecil Rhodes. When the discoveries of pipe mines in South Africa resulted in a flood of diamonds reaching the Europeans, the price of diamonds droped to less than 50 cents a carrot. Shiploads were taken back out to sea and dropped into the ocean. Cecil got all the miners together and covinced them to tie the number of diamonds in the marketplace to the number of mairrages occuring. Diamonds were also found in Ziare and Russia.
10:05 am
In the nineteen ninetys a group of people got together and built a machine that generates electricity from sunight (or any source of heat above 84 degrees. This could be used to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen to propel our cars. The government and your turnip people got together and determined that this machine needed to be stopped as it would undermine the control turnips gave them with regards to the economy. As this was essentially a perpetual motion machine, the need for turnips would be limited to lubrication, plastics and medicines.
They convinced the world that the machine created a hole in the sky so the machine was banned.
10:09 am
I offer this end to your story because truth is stranger than fiction.
10:27 am
You could add in there that the need for dams, nuclear and fossil fueled power generating plants would be eliminated. The wires that we string all over the place to decorate our skyline could be torn down. Pipelines in Alaska and huge tankersip disasters waiting to happen could be averted and removed…
What would all these people do who rely on our ecological nightmare for employment?
10:59 am
We are traped in this web…
11:17 am
The Demons built several parking garages (which almost immediately began to fall apart thanks to bid rigging, payoffs, shoddy materials, and an incompetent builder whose only qualification was that he was the brother in law of the head of the Demon party).
Do you live in The Principality, by any chance?
11:19 am
Fausta:
No. I’m the neutral story teller.
11:23 am
Offshore America Off-Limits to Oil Drilling
Most of America’s offshore area is currently off limits to offshore oil drilling. It is simply not on the market. Everyone knows about ANWAR and that critics of ANWAR claim that drilling there will not make any difference. Well sure, not by itself, bu…
11:47 am
Wont Leve Naim,
I remember at the end of the 90s there was great expectations of a perpetual motion machine that would revolutionize travel. It would mean never having to rely on fuel again. Well, when the Segway scooter/Ginger was released we learned it was powered by a battery. As for the water powered car? It was years away. Plus, any good chemist knows that both hydrogen gas and oxygen gas are highly volatile. There is a danger of releasing that. Stanley Meyer was came out with the idea of a water powered car in 1996. He was found to be a fraud.
see here:http://www.phact.org/e/dennis4.html
“Stanley Meyer 1996 claimed to have a water powered car and was also big on mixing Christianity and patriot politics in with fringe science. Meyer was found guilty of fraud after his Water Fuel Cell was tested before an Ohio judge. It is rare for an inventor to be prosecuted for an invention that does not work, but Meyer’s problem was that he had been selling “dealerships”, offering investors the “right to do business’’ in Water Fuel Cell technology. Meyer refused to allow anyone else to measure his device. Dennis Lee invested in him. He died in early 1998.Stanley Meyers gets locked up for phony water powered cars.”
here is another link to check out:
http://www.phact.org/e/dennis.html
12:22 pm
Sven,
Never heard of this Dennis guy.
He may have heard about us though. I wonder if he was in Arizona when we were putting this thing together.
A patent was filed and that could be how he got his ideas.
We built a machine and it works like this:
Draw a circle, it repesents a closed pipeline. At the top of the circle the pipe comes in contact with heat, sun, geothermal, etc. Freon expands rapidly from a liquid state to a gas at 84 degrees. This gas is pushed through the pipe into the ground where the temperatue is about 53 degrees almost everywhere. The gas returns to it’s liquid state and the pipe heads upward again. Somewhere on this pipe is located a generator that produces aproximately 6 times the energy to run a typical household.
If this Dennis guy had invested the money to develope this machine, he could have with a lot less than is implied by the site you sent me to says that he got.
The guy who financed the freon generator patented it shortly before freon was blamed for the hole in the ozone layer around Antartica. He died of an apparent heart attack and his wife lost the home, which he had mortgaged to pay for this little experiment. I don’t know what happened to the machine prototype but I do know this Dennis guy didn’t get it because if he had they would have seen that it worked.
12:30 pm
Also,
Gasoline is highly flamable and yet we cart it around in the back of most of our cars.
The trouble with water powered cars is that it takes much more power to split the water molecule into its two seperate components than could be produced by a pocess mounted on a moving vehicle. But if it could be done at home…
12:43 pm
Rick Said: “The people of Unis took out their frustrations at the polls in November. And which party do you think suffered the most?”
Now suppose that the left coast of Unis fell from within from a Fifth Column of those French. Which party do you think would suffer most in November?
Please see http://linknzona.blogspot.com
1:38 pm
I wonder if this Dennis Lee got control of the prototype somehow?
When freon was outlawed it effectivly ended the economical viability of the generator because of the quantity needed to operate a machine of the size that would be mounted on a house. Although the freon is encapsulated inside and would not be released into the atmosphere, you could not get the necessary freon as it is unlawful at this time.
Just because this Dennis Lee is using the technology to rip people off doesn’t mean it didn’t work. It proves that by making freon illegal it can’t be made.
2:55 pm
The machine you describe sounds like a simple heat-pump to me. You still need a powered pump to move the freon around and other mechanicals to extract the heat, make the electricity, etc. Overall, unless the temperature differential is pretty large, you end up putting more energy in than you would get back.
4:56 pm
Gasoline is highly flamable but not as flamable as Hydrogen. Remember the Hindenberg? Oxygen is flamable as well. If you remember your chemistry, combing hydrogen gas and oxygen gas creates water, but after a great amount of energy is released. Your concept is interesting. You are essentially creating a piston with freon. I need see the calculations to believe in it. I wonder if you could use another liquid that has a medium temperature vaporization point?
9:10 pm
I wonder if you could use another liquid that has a medium temperature vaporization point?
Actually, almost anything would work. Put water under a vaccuum and it will boil at room temperature. Maybe turnip juice would make a good substitute for Freon.
That heat pump idea is not new. Been around for centuries. Carnot described way back in the early 1800’s. d’Arsonval thought up a system that used the heat form the sun and the cool of deep ocean water. It’s been tried on a large scale in tropical islands (Cuba and Hawaii).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion
But typical efficiency is only 1%-3%. So you have a relatively big cost of startup for a small amount of energy – especially on a small scale.
Since you have moving parts, there is maintenance cost and hastle. (Somewhere, you will have to break the seal on the closed tube to maintain the turbine.)
When the ground is used for cooling, it doesn’t conduct heat very well. The heat buildup will reduce efficiency.
But one more thing. Notice the names involved with the heat pumps—Carnot and d’Arsonval. They’re French. The French invented the Laws that limit the heat engines. It’s not the oil companies supressing the patent, it’s the French.
11:21 am
As a bush supporter I believe in high gas prices. This is capitalism plain and simple, and all this hysteria about “price gouging” from the moonbats is just what they deserve. I want to commend real americans like you in the nuthouse for staying the course while others bail out and abandon their conservative principles. I believe in the moral authority of dick cheney, tom delay, and jerry falwell. I am also in favor of the project for the new american century and I think we should proceed with our mission now that we have elected our government in Iraq. george bush is the greatest leader that we deserve, and I am hopeful that he will somehow be able to serve another four years because it is not a good idea to change horses in midstream. Iran must be subdued in order for us to be safe and only george bush has the guts and the moral authority to drop nuclear weapons on them. We also need him to step in and stop all these protests that are ruining this country. I think that being illegal and a protester should result in immediate deportation regardless of citizenship. If you have nothing to hide you should be ok with the spy program as well. George had to deny that he was the leaker because too many peoples cover would have been blown had he admitted up front that the leak had come from him. karl and dick would be in prison and we need them to help keep the country fine tuned.
11:25 am
Pretty lame attempt at satire. More exaggeration please.
Instead of saying “george bush is the greatest leader that we deserve, and I am hopeful that he will somehow be able to serve another four years” you could have written something like “George Bush is my God and we should annoint him King.”
Otherwise, one could mistake you for a real Bush lover instead of the sorry excuse for a moonbat that you are.
4:22 pm
Please turn this into a children’s book so that we can explain the economy and politics to the children. Thanks !
10:49 pm
When a liquid turns into a gas it occupies many times the space it did as a liquid. Water becomes steam and steam expands at a ratio of aproximatly 17,000 to 1. With reed valves you can limit the direction of flow and that is the source of the force that pushes the freon back into the ground or water or whatever source you have for cooling the freon. We burned up 3 generators before we found a way control or slow down the process.
Scientists, studying the tape of the Hindenberg disaster have concluded that what caught fire was the agent used to weather proof the skin of the Hindenberg. If the hydrogen had ignited the explosion would have been far worse.
Part of the secret of the system has to do with the workings of the turbine.
It isn’t ownership of the patent that has stymied developement. It is the outlawing of freon and the huge cost imposed by this that has stopped this thing.
11:17 pm
The people of Unis took out their frustrations at the polls in November. And which party do you think suffered the most?
By: Rick Moran at 7:13 am | Permalink | Comments & Trackbacks (22)
And the answer is NIETHER because the people were more interested in who was voted off the latest UNIS idol show anywho the people suffered and the pander train rolled on and on and on.
11:51 pm
You know, I’ve been talking about this thing for years and it is going nowhere. If I didn’t believe it could solve a huge set of problems caused by our uses of fossil fuels and hydro power and nuclear fission I’d have given up years ago.
As it is I’m getting older. There is one person left who still hopes to get something for the effort invested…
I just want to see some serious money spent to either locate the origional prototype or redo it. I mean none of the people involved were rocket scientists. I’m just tired of the whole thing.
It’s funny how time changes how you feel or think about things. I used to want to be part of something that really took off and made it big. At the time of the machine’s developement I was working on an internet access machine with one other person seperate from the freon thing but that is how I linked into that. The internet thing looked very promising until AOL went free and all the lines got tied up so no one could get on until their time was gone. We had to pull out our machines until we could solve the server problem and a couple of other ones like killing the keyboard until they were on so they couldn’t change the modem settings.
GTE signed up all the airports so we got blocked by the big boys… I think one of our investors ratted us out for a big payoff. I won’t name any names but John Straus of Zircon, the company that manufactures and distributes the stud sensor got the idea for that one from another person who had a booth in one of those new product shows where he was showing it along with a video demonstration. John went out and bought a piece of balsa wood and a can of black spray paint, produced a video that showed him ostensibly using it to locate studs on one sided wall and opened his own booth to see what kind of interest there was in it. There was tons. So he called up his R&D people and they actually made one that worked and with all his millions he went into production in silicon valley until they moved their plant to Mexico to find cheaper labor.
Anyway I’m older now and my outlook has been knocked down enough. If someone was to find a way to redo what has been done and it put a big dent in the status quo. I’d be very happy… One thing more…Never file for a patent until you are far enough into production and distribution so that they can’t steal your idea. You can’t patent an idea, only the technolgy.