large corporations are rich, but most US residents and social benefit programs are not.

That all depends on what you classify as rich.

Certainly: median income isn’t amazingly rich, around here half of households have an income of $75,000 per year, or less. Not a lot when houses cost $300,000 and up.

The social benefits programs are very blurry- people who pay a lot in to social security take a lot out - if you were never fortunate enough to have a high paying job, you don’t get much.

Large corporations, by definition, flow a lot of money - some enrich their shareholders more than others.

All told, the real problem with the US is that income inequality has been going in the wrong direction (greater) for decades.

Its the Bushy “Thousand Points of Light” bullshit. Sure, there are a thousand points of light, in a country of three hundred million with five percent with serious needs of some kind or another.

The real answer is to dilute the salt back into the ocean, but even the cost of transport - whether by truck or rail or pipeline - a hundred miles and +3000’ of elevation is likely less than building and maintaining a system that distributes that salt widely enough in the ocean to have negligible ecological impact at the points of dispersal.

A thousand smaller desalination plants spread along a hundred miles of coastline each distributing 87 thousand pounds of salt per day (basically: one pound per second) would be more feasible for ocean discharge than anything you might try to do from a single point. The system would also be much more robust / less prone to critical failures. ~10% of the plants might be offline at any given time while still providing full required capacity.

Looking at those numbers, I would propose something like 500 plants, no two closer than 1000’ from each other along the coastline, each distributing up to three pounds of salt per second in a 6" outflow pipe at least 500’ offshore that’s carrying 100 gallons per minute of water with that salt dissolved therein. The discharge could be through a series of 100 1" holes spread 1’ apart. I’m sure there would be local ecological effects, but in most areas they should be minimal by the time you’re 200’ or more down-current from the outflow.

Compared to treated wastewater discharge, I think the salty water discharge would be much less impactful. There’s probably some opportunity to combine treated wastewater with the salty discharge to further treat the wastewater, though I wouldn’t want to do that in ALL the salt discharge plants (you’d want some to study the salt impact alone.)

For me, the question of how innovative it is comes down to kW input per gallon output. Doesn’t matter to me if the power in is coming from solar, coal, nuclear, or hamsters in generator wheels, the efficiency of the system still comes down to power input and space required.

MIT doesn’t lie as often as some sources.

How many suits for these kinds of blatantly fraudulent patents have actually been won? And lost?

If you have a conveniently located valley you’re not using, you can make a new great salt lake for a few years. 87 million pounds of salt sounds like a lot, but a cubic mile of salt weighs approximately 9 trillion metric tons, or about 20 quadrillion pounds, or over 600 years of salt at 87 million pounds per day.

I’m sure there are a few people (very few) who would disagree, but a quick glance at a topo map shows Shelter Valley as a possible target for a strategic sea salt reserve deposit that could serve the area for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. San Francisco bay looks like they have salt ponds in what could otherwise be valuable real-estate.

Yeah, my impression is that “country” was more of an Old Testament thing. Jesus’ experience of “country” ended poorly, on a hill, and then they wrote the New Testament about him. At least in the Old Testament you have the Hebrew nation sticking up/together for themselves, even as other countries make them miserable.

As for Christianity in the US today, it’s like being in the soda and chips aisle of a grocery store: what brand are we talking about? Most of them are bad for you, but oh so appealing.

his rhetoric led to preventable deaths

Eventually including his own, barely age 70 - no amount of money could stretch him to an average lifespan.

They’re more wrong than right. The illegality of drugs is a huge part of why it leads to crime.

How many alcoholics do you see busting car windows at 3am to steal something to pawn for a six pack?

They say “God, Family, Country” but it runs more like “Self, Family, Self, Self, God, Self, Self, Self, Country as long as it doesn’t inconvenience: Self.”

Because these people are bad, so let’s get rid of them.

Rush Limbaugh was an addict, I’d at least like to have gotten rid of him off the airwaves when his habit got out of hand (circa turn of the century…)