A vertical, hot air suspended, accelerator tunnel

Here's an open source Idea for you.

Suppose you were to create a very large, say 20 to 30 meters inside diameter, wire mesh tube. And suppose further that the wire used would be carbon nano tube conductors coiled around one of the new magnetic materials being worked on now. Wouldn't what you ended up with be an electromagnetic tunnel?

Let us then continue speculating what you might do with this electromagnet tunnel.

Suppose you used however many hot air lifting bodies it might require to lift this tunnel up to as high as such atmospheric buoyancy might allow. And once at that altitude you then powered it up to be the longest electromagnet tunnel ever created. If you then put a platform in side with its own electromagnets in it, but with an opposite polarity, wouldn't it be possible to create your own vertical, linear accelerator?

If you could, and you could get this thing to hang at at least 20 kilometers, or more, wouldn't you also be able to launch some very significant payloads into orbit? Or, on another tact, wouldn't such an electromagnet mesh pipe be the perfect way to make a space elevator out of?

You materials and engineering gurus out there need to start thinking about how you might go about making this mesh. Maybe with some 3D printing on a whole new scale?

Put your data in the cloud. But wait. Isn't that where the lightning is?

This was an extra ordinary event to be sure. The thing is, when you live in extraordinarily accelerating complexity, such events become something other than extra ordinary. No matter what you assume might be unlikely today may be something else tomorrow.

And trust me when I tell you that, as a programmer, one of the things that really fries your bacon is coding upon assumptions in future contingencies. And they are almost always the assumptions you are least aware of. Which can make even finding the source of the problem quite problematic.

Four Lightning Strikes in Belgium Erase Google Customer Data

The easy answer here is: Don't worry, the Republicans will find a way.

Of course the real question ought to be why would you even want to try, but being in touch with reality was never one of their strong points.

Rand Paul: 'How Do You Out-Trump the Irrational?'

Bankers refusing new sources of capital? Can we expect to be hearing from Rod Serling soon?

Submitted for your amazment. Not only might Trump be an actual candidate for president, bankers are truning away significant new capital flows. What's next? Will Ann Coulter suddenly announce she's gay and then marry Rosie O'Donnell?

Pot Risk vs. Profit: Bankers Cautious of Marijuana Dispensaries

Join the Trump Chump Brigade and you too can have certainty on a stick

Don't cloud your mind with confusing specifics. He certainly doesn't. And best of all, he still gets to make money at it. And you get to suck on a brand with confidence that he'll spend your money making that brand even more tasteless than ever before.

In N.H., Donald Trump Skips Policy Specifics, Focuses on Jeb Bush Attacks

See also:

Trump’s $1 Land Deal With a Corrupt Mayor

As well as:

Donald Trump is a bombastic disaster: A video guide to his 14 most ludicrous campaign moments

This is just one example of what happens to work when all that is valued is low cost efficiency

Behind the Alarming Expose on Amazon's Workplace CultureThe New York Times' expose on Amazon's labor practices has put the company on the defense. One former employee said colleagues cried at their desks.

See also:

We are all “Ambots” now: Jeff Bezos just perfected the “burn and churn” philosophy that’s sucking American workers dry

For all its revolutionary rhetoric, Amazon is just an outsize example of what plagues our entire approach to work

Dehumanizing nonsense as a garnish to our daily plate of bullshit

What this really misses, however, is not only the true value most of these people provide to our economy, but the constant input of perspective of what it means to be away from the turmoil they faced in their home land. Turmoil that, for the most part, our history of mucking about in the nations of their birth has caused. Tens of thousands of children at our borders because they have no parents, or home life, to grow up with. Older workers desperate to do anything so as to provide for families torn apart by poverty we're only beginning to viscerally understand, and by drug lords, or despots, our policies, and dependencies, have created.

That we are then treated to the spectacle of blowhards, and idiots, presenting these people as scape goats for all of our institutional problems, is the first step a nation takes towards the kind of dehumanization that created concentration camps, gas chambers, and industrial sized crematoria ovens, as a final bow to insanity as a solution for anything.

And let us not also forget that our institutional problems are also of our own making. We do so by continuing to participate in cruel farce that electrified Capitalism has made of a supposedly democratic republic.

How can you even begin to talk about value when a few have determined that ever more imaginary counters, held in the magical ether of computers, and vast networks of processing nodes, with their huge accumulations of same, are all that matters. All of it racing around at the speed of light via reasoning engines we have ever an ever decreasing understanding of. Providing a bottom line that the only thing that anybody still understands at all is that such accumulations still equate to power.

But still out government as "Reality TV" plays on. The blowhards and idiots are treated as real entities by our media and we lap it up as just more distracting entertainment. America's got talent alright. A spectacular talent for living in that river in Egypt.

Deporting Undocumented Would Take Texas-Size Economic Bite: Study