Batteries might compete with solar panels for cost.

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I can't quite tell what is what, exactly, yet. Panels are in these units, batteries in those, and other components offer yet their own units of capacity. Still, just from looking here and here, and guessing a bit, it looks like batteries could easily be similar in cost on up to several times the cost of solar panels. That might make them impossible to include in my system. Then again, it is all pie-in-the-sky at the moment. Only the possibility exists. I did see this battery, but it doesn't indicate if it is actually nickel iron, here is one that is "only" $1,000 per, here is $66,000 dollars, not including the ties. I actually about choked when I first saw the batteries that cost a thousand. Then I saw the ones that, well, were more. And somehow I felt better? Something like that.

Now, there are problems with nickel iron. They do last forever, but they also seem to have rather slow recharge and discharge rates. Now, what that really means in terms of a system is another matter. Longevity though? There are nickel iron batteries that have been in use for 68 years and going. They were invented by Edison, yes, that Edison, while he was trying to develop electric cars. Oh, you thought electric cars were a "new invention". Ah well. No, I knew about electric cars. I just didn't know about the particular batteries they tried, or had forgotten. Yes, I've read about such things. As a young one, I was all hopeful and cheery about the future sci-tech mags and books promised. Then becoming a history buff, I began looking at where these promises came from. Usually history held the beginnings of notions. Man has created very little save enacting what other men could only consider in their times. Even the first computer, a numerical device, was developed before technology could abide it, then the son of the man actually built one when technology advanced enough. But at such a cost as to be useless.

We are very little different from those days when I was but a boy. The incompetence is the same, only complexity has been elevated, so instead of living in a make-do world, we live in a disposable one. We, instead of rising to the pinnacle of reason have sunk to the edge of extinction. If nothing else, everything is kept up through the skin of our teeth and one or two major failings will bring the house of cards down upon our heads so fast we won't be able to recover. When cashiers can't count change, when mechanics can't fix or even diagnose because they are dependent upon electronic gadgets to understand other gadgets and confused by how that works, and when all manufacturing is based on computer systems, which if I had to say, are artificially kept running because the bugs in the systems are so many, vast, and unrelenting that nothing actually runs as it should nor would computers last a week without nearly constant fudging. What a future.

One way or another we will go back. How far back? It depends on how well we can use what we have remaining to us when all else fails to hold the barbarians in check. I would guess the best regression possible would be to the 1950's. The worst? The dark ages. Ah, but these things come and go. It is only a matter of time, assuming we survive in the first place, which means assuming no nukes, which means you best pray we figure out how to stop Iran. A nation whose president believes he needs to help the end times arrive. With or without him, we are going back. Even then survival is not assured.

Too many peoples are hooked-up, hooked-in, and jacked around. They have no means of survival when pushing paper or stamping plans will no longer bring food to their plate or provide a home in which to live. This will be harder still on women who won't be able to compete for the materials of life that requires hard work. Women will understand the world in which much of what they call chauvinism, if not created then instituted by a queen, was mandated. And they will understand why, and why they aren't equal. Still, as much of a grin as that and some other parts would bring to my face, I hope I am dead by then. There is a reason ancient civilizations were abandoned in days, moments even. The edge of extinction takes a great deal of idiocy to create, decades, centuries, millennia of hard work too, and just a few things to enact. *blink*

That, as I have heard said, "don't confront me none...". I am here, now, and will do what I can to ensure what I can. I am just converting from the cricket who croaked to the ant who survived, if at a turtles pace. Then again, I suppose the turtle did beat the rabbit. Such is the way of things. A bit more sleep, I think. That must have been one heck of a dream I just had. Never mind.