Scale

I was recently fooling around with Wolfram Alpha, especially in regards to the whole feed the oceans thing I wanted to do. The following preposterous things were discovered:

• The cost would be about $100 million for the first run, then $50 million after that
• Getting the carbon levels down to the way they were when I was a child would triple the biosphere
• Reversing the carbon to pre-industrial levels would increase it to ten times

These numbers give me a headache. By tripling the biosphere, I mean that imagine every fish there is in the world. Now imagine three times as many. Three times as many seagulls. Three times as many whales. Three times as many squids. Three times as many sea cucumbers. And sooner or later, it works back to the land, and you have three times as many crows, and three times as many snakes, and three times as many owls, and mice, and cows.

Meanwhile for me, an unexpected expense that came up that amounted to my entire paycheck for a two-week period threw everything through a loop for a month.

The big numbers are discouraging, but the journey of a million miles begins with a single step. Even stopping things from getting worse makes it that much easier to get around to making things better.

A critical shortage

Recently we have run out of a critical supply. No, there's still enough oil for the moment, the electric grid is working fine, at least in my area of the world, and there's no shortage of food where distribution is not being deliberately sabotaged. We're short of IP addresses.
When the current familiar IP scheme that you're used to was invented in 1981, networked computers were kind of rare. It was though that the 4 billion addresses possible under the system could never possibly be used up, since networked computers were primarily owned by governments and major educational institutions. In the early days, addresses were handed out like candy, with groups getting a class A (everything starting with one particular number, like all addresses starting with 12".) all to themselves just because. In addition, the entire 127 block (from 127.0.0.1 to 127.255.255.255) were all allocated to "loopback" meaning "Don't actually use the network because it's right in this computer right here." You should only need one address for that.
Later, when more and more countries were going online, it became apparent that since there were 5 billion people in the world, who all wanted to go online, and only 4 billion possible addresses, that something would have to give. More justification had to be given to be assigned large blocks of addresses instead of small ones.
This was then made worse by devices, as well as individual people and servers, also wanting IP addresses for projects like an Internet-connected refrigerator. (The refrigerator can report its state to, say, the grocery store, so instead of you ordering milk, the refrigerator does it for you.)
By last year, justification had to be given to get any sort of IP address at all. Groups with large allocations were asked to give them back. This faired poorly -- generally the response was to come up with dumber and dumber schemes to "prove" why ownership of their entire allocation was "necessary." Some organizations did in fact give their blocks back, most notably Stanford University.
So next month, we run out completely. If you want to go online -- well, too bad, all slots are full. Now what?
Thankfully, this whole thing was seen well in advance, and a new specification, IPv6 was written in 1998. (version 5 was a beta that turned out to not be very useful.) IPv6 increased the address size by four times, which due to the way that computers stores numbers, exponentially increases the possible addresses. IPv6 has enough addresses to give every atom in the solar system, if not the visible universe, its own unique address. I won't say that running out is impossible -- I suppose that in the deep future we could develop some sort of teleportation and quantum entanglement technology that makes us have a galaxy-spanning empire of hexadecitellions of people, but it won't happen anytime soon unless we're REALLY stupid about how we allocate addresses.
To use IPv6, your operating system has to support it, your software has to support it, and your ISP has to support it. Generally the las step is the sticking point. My company offers browsing customers a hybrid stack, where you have an IPv6 address, but IPv4-only websites will see you as this one address that the ISP has reserved. That address is a node that understands both protocols, and can route between the two.
China is the most excited by this news, as when IPv4 was first written, most of China didn't have electricity, much less computers, and so they were allocated extremely few IP addresses. Since pretty much everyone in China wants to go online, they need to go IPv6, or it's just not going to happen.
Everyone should try to go to IPv6, but there are some transition costs, and I think we're going to have to struggle with it for quite a while, and the pain is higher because we waited so long.

Solvay Environmental Fix

I just found out that with unlimited energy, it would take me only two chemical processes to end global warming forever.

1. Haber-Bosch Process

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch's chemical process revolutionized modern agriculture by making endless amounts of Ammonia, thus taking away the limitation that agriculture used to have of the supply of Nitrogen in the soil, formerly limited to various animal poops, and maybe possibly composts. This has vastly increased the carrying capacity of the earth, and one fifth of the food on your pantry's shelves is directly due to this.

Most industrial versions use natural gas for the hydrogen, but I'll be taken Haber's original, less polluting version (since I'm using unlimited energy as a conceit), electrically split water.

2. Solvay Process

The Solvay process makes baking soda. If you're not from the US, the baking soda in your local grocery store was made this way. It uses Ammonia to split up salt water, then absorbs CO2, resulting in Ammonium chloride and baking soda. Most commercial uses of this process then reclaim the Ammonia, because it is more expensive, and because Calcium chloride draws less attention when you throw it out, because it doesn't smell like solidified pee. I'll be using Hou Debang's variation on the process, which doesn't bother with the Calcium step.

With these two processes combined, I can solidify air, and both of these processes are automated, so once set up, they would continue to run no matter what I was doing. To truly end global warming, I'd have to send the baking soda off world, and I can use part of the components to do this.

An old recipe for "Heavy duty" batteries was to put a carbon rod between two plates of Zinc, and fill the difference between them with Ammonium Chloride. Each individual cell is fairly weak, but you can chain them together until you can produce huge amounts of power. Getting several pounds of Zinc, I produce enough batteries to power a railgun, and rocket the baking soda off to Mars, or some other place in need of Carbon.

And should I need to recover the carbon, I will get the cheapest plonk that I can get a hold of, bubble it for 3 months, and then pour that vinegar onto the baking soda. Presto.

CEOs and Free Speech

And lo, suddenly politics hijacks everything.

A major story brewing in the US news is about the Mozilla foundation, who just hired a new CEO. They then had a massive shitstorm over that CEO's political activities, which included large donations to California's Proposition 8, a political measure to ban gay marriage that ultimately was found to be against the state constitution and thus discarded.

Most of the stink came from the Mozilla employees, who are quite diverse, and some of them are, yes, gay. The project exists in Silicon Valley, a very competitive environment where recruiting talent is bitterly contested, and companies need every advantage they get to keep employees, as well as not piss them off too badly. Once this became public, though, various business libertarians, gay rights activists, gay rights opponents, and a million other interest groups weighed in.

I'm of two minds. On one hand, I thought that Proposition 8 was an abomination, brought forth and paid for by hostile interests outside the state, (especially from Utah) that it was a step backwards for society, back to when people wanted to pretend that gay people didn't exist, and that any sexuality other than married sex for the explicit purpose of creating children was unacceptable. It also drew questions about the fairness of a person who supported that, though to his credit the CEO has stated that he does intend to treat his gay employees just like his straight employees.

On the other, it irks me the way that businesses are treated as personal fiefdoms with wanky personal interests enforcing orthodoxies. I know I would be personally outraged to be discriminated against, passed up for promotion, or fired, merely because of a private opinion. Is someone's politics truly relevant to the running of a company, and is even asking a step back to the bad old days of nepotism?

Another issue is that the position of CEO is largely seen as the public face of the company. Unlike most positions, the work doesn't stop when you go home for the day. Even after your time in the offices, you're writing press releases, you're doing charitable works, you're doing everything in your power to make everyone like you, and to be seen as someone who can be trusted. It's a deficiency of freedom that most of us would find completely unacceptable, but that's why you make the big bucks. I will never be a CEO, because aside from my general odd-ness, my lack of Christianity makes me unacceptable to the American public.

Your thoughts would be appreciated, though this is a sensitive topic, and a large amount of tact will be required.

EDIT: Somewhat after this occurred, the CEO resigned from his position.

Weather control

I recently read that trees planted in an alpine environment benefit twice.   Once from the tree's normal metabolic habits, and twice because the roots reach into previously sealed rock, exposing oliveine and similar minerals to weathering.   This gives me an idea.
We dig massive holes into the mountains.   After a year's time, we fill the hole back up, ending with a sapling.   This maximizes weathering, resulting in the best possible carbon sink for the area.