Ask HN: How can I start a business to generate electricity?
You know what I sunk in on recently?  The whole thing about &quot;efficiency&quot; is really &quot;use less copper&quot; which is really &quot;negreate Chile out of its rightful money&quot;.  And in fact the main uses of copper during the 19th century were telegraphs and copper hulls, and then in the 20th century power lines and telephone lines, electrification and communication.  But always, always, these guys wanted to use less and less copper.  Like nothing.  Substitute for aluminum!  Yeah.<p>So what happened in the late 60&#x27;s early 70&#x27;s when <i>OPEC</i>, the copper predecessor of petroleum <i>OPEP</i>, in English called OPEC, was successfully cornering the market on copper.  And people went apeshit!  Like USG said no more pennies because people were melting down pennies.  Melt value it&#x27;s called in currencies.  So that&#x27;s when they substituted with zinc for the inside of the penny--still a bad deal these days because you still need a layer of copper on the shell of the penny, that&#x27;s a money loser for USG.  Speaking neutrally in this case, USG is a neutral term even the US Embassy to Russia uses on its website.  United States Government.  Anyway.  Like USG can lose some money but they can&#x27;t <i>blow</i> money especially not in the direction of an antagonistic Marxist democratic winner president.  So...the pennies got hollowed out--and again those pennies are worth 5¢ still, bad deal, just not a terrible deal like it was before.  Could have been worth a quarter, fucks up the whole system.<p>There is a system.  System doesn&#x27;t want to talk about there being a system, but there&#x27;s a system.  And it needs integrity, which I like to give it, because when there is no integrity <i>all Hell breaks loose.</i><p>So that&#x27;s one way you could win.  Do away with all that flamboyant high-voltage shit and do voltages humans can tolerate, like household voltages, just using a lot more copper.  Lots more.  Take the USG out of your equation, buy copper, hey it&#x27;s a precious metal, it&#x27;s an exotic metal, you&#x27;re clearly not politically aligned with negreating Chile, Peru, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Arizona, and Mexico right?  And copper in your wires is a great investment.  Copper hasn&#x27;t had a bull run in ages.  Again, very niggardly buyers who through golps of state (coups d&#x27;etat), highly negreated commodity.  Very political.  In fact for copper wire thickness it&#x27;s not an optimum to use the thin wires they use out there, it&#x27;s calculated based on interest rates and metal prices, and then there&#x27;s the political layer.  Get wires as thick as whale-hunting rope, six inches diameter, go for it.  More efficient at every voltage, can use lower voltage, less liability insurance, go for it.  Electricity can&#x27;t leak onto more copper.<p>There&#x27;s caveats.  Although you should also do your own experiments to verify, don&#x27;t get everything from a single pipe because then you&#x27;re destined to suck it.  That goes for electricity generation as well, you can give people options, maybe jump in during a disaster, when too-efficient (not effective) power generators go offline.<p>And study up.  Be an autodidact if you wish, but be solid.  Work through like three books, working out all the exercises, with only minor gaps.<p>OK so you get one of those books from an <i>Elmer</i>, which is a common baby name in the 1890&#x27;s I think, meaning an old-timer who&#x27;s seen all kinds of shit.  All kinds.  And in addition to all that shit of all kinds, seen a lot of the same shit over and over.  In Japan people respect this level of repetition, in America no you gotta be a movie star and always do radically different stuff in a single respectable line of business perpertually...forget the American.  So in Japan a sushi apprentice must cook rice for ten years before he gets promoted to a chef.  That has worth!  You end up knowing the rice so perfectly...every detail, the times, the temps, the water, the purity of the water, tap water or non-effed-up water (F&#x27;ing as in F the letter for Fluorine).  Like I just tried cooking rice and fucked up hardcore, it burned into the pot, because I didn&#x27;t know the bottom of the rice had charred while the top was soggy.<p>So get that Elmer.<p>And then, read those books.  And then you know what why don&#x27;t you verify experiments, read about Tesla&#x27;s experiments verify them, there&#x27;s shit going on there, there&#x27;s political stuff reaching into the physics, it&#x27;s not flat physics.  Know that a friend whose judgment is ground truth said Newton&#x27;s physics formulae didn&#x27;t check out.  Like at all.<p>Maybe we&#x27;re in a Riemann geometry insofar as the laws of spacetime physics.<p>But in the meantime, be very very independent, find beauty is simply and solely how little resistance there is to verification.<p>And start strong, get worn out, struggle to death.  Then you&#x27;ll get a second chance.