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REAL_REASONS

                                              October 22, 2009
                                              October  9, 2013

An interesting thing about the
Solar Power Satellite idea...       POWER_SATS

While I tend to like it,
more typical solar power   Or at least, they did tend to
freaks tend to hate it.    hate it, back in the 70s when    It hasn't gotten
                           the idea was being discussed.    much play in
                                                            recent decades,
  The original dream of solar power                         as our horizons
  revolved around it's decentralized                        continue to shrink.
  character, it was bound up with a
  back-to-nature sentiment of the
  hippie era that was only beginning
  to fade in the mid-70s.

  The average solar power enthusiast        I wonder if this attitude
  felt deeply disturbed by the idea         might shift in the
  of large scale, centralized power         increasingly New Urban era
  facilities like SPS-- it struck           we're living in...  Cities
  them as just another bid to retain        are Cool now, and along with
  corporate control.                        that the fear of large
                                            industrial plants might fade.
    What you might hope would be
    a purely technical question                      And that old dream of
    instead gets settled by what                     getting out from under
    kind of person you are.                          the big corporations          
                                                     seems both more                                             
           PSYCHSOPHY                                implausible and perhaps       
                                                     pointless to most.

       But no doubt, one of the                      (And myself, I'm not so
       reasons I favor nuclear                       happy about that either.)
       power is because of my own                                   
       social biases.                                                      
                                                                           
       I used to hang around with                                          
       the kinds of phyicists and     NUKES       
       engineers who design and                                        
       operate these facilities --       
       in fact I used to be one.         
                                         
       You just can't make them seem like        (Staggeringly slow,
       satanic mills to someone like me.         inefficient bureaucracies,
                                                 on the other hand...)


    Technical decisions are often
    social decisions in disguise.
                                     THE_PERL_AFFAIR


              Samuel Floriman had a criticism of the
              Whole Earth Catalog: it ignored the
              large, already established collective     FLORID
              enterprises.

              The Whole Earth Catalog would
              tell you how to learn about
              something, by say, ordering a           "Whole Earth Catalog
              book, but it would not ever              was basically a
              suggest that you should enter            Libertarian bible."
              into a University program.
                                                             --Stewart Brand,
              It was important for everything                  circa mid-naughts.
              to be homespun, if not new and
              revolutionary.

              Floriman's take was that
              they were assuming that the
              "personal trip" is all
              that's important,




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