California
legislator's modest proposal
to end energy crisis
California State Assemblywoman Marlene Jackson has put forth a plan to solve California's energy crisis. It is a plan that could go terribly wrong. The plan depends on a new invention, and physical labor. Two researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Michael Cavan and Tom Pinambo, have invented a helical gear drive that transfers mechanical energy very efficiently. It is nearly frictionless, and generators using it could produce twice as much energy as current technology.
Assemblywoman Jackson proposes in a bill, California 401 AF, that people walking on treadmills using this gearing system could produce enough energy to meet California's ever growing demand. She thinks this would be a great idea because it would give immigrants and other poor people a job.
This is a step down a slippery slope. Power companies would be exploiting people as beasts of burden. I am sure no one would walk on these treadmills, they would have to run. There would be taskmasters seeing to it that they did not slow down. Most "employers" of illegal immigrants are nothing more than slave drivers. They hire aliens to do grueling, dangerous jobs that no one else will take, and then call INS just before payday, so that their work was for free. Others pay so little that workers could have earned as much in a third world sweatshop, and what can they do? Illegals have no one to complain to.
Already, greedy robber barons are lining up to build treadmill farms! THE UNCOVEROR has seized the plans for one, proposed by a company calling itself Energon Thermodynamics. They don't include any kind of ventilation or safety precautions. This facility, if it were built, would be like a factory farm. In factory farms, animals are confined to tiny cubicles, wallow in their own filth, and die in alarming numbers from infectious disease. Energon would put workers into just such an environment. When this facility goes online, the workers will literally be livestock, and will die from exhaustion and heat. Since most of them will be illegal aliens anyway, Energon, and companies like them could get away with it.
Congratulations Marlene Jackson! your modest proposal will reduce people to things, and make some very evil businessmen outrageously rich. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, you lousy do-gooder!