# Deregulate This!

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deregulate-this/27116>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [July 27, 2000, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deregulate-this/27116 "2000-07-27T23:01:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\
**Post date:** [August 3, 2000, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deregulate-this/27116/41 "2000-08-03T02:31:18Z")

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I know exactly how we can solve all of our rent-control and slow construction problems:

Arenak.

It’s a transparent substance that appears in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s _Skylark_ series of novels. It’s made of dirt-cheap ingredients, can be molded into place like clay and then hardened by application of a tiny bit of salt water, and when hardened is 500 times stronger than the strongest steel. You could build an earthquake-proof skyscraper out of a tiny amount of arenak over the course of a few days – and since it’s transparent, you wouldn’t even have to decide ahead of time where to put the windows! (Said windows now being unbreakable, of course.) With 20-story buildings being cheaper than most 2-story buildings now, rent will be so cheap that rent control will no longer be necessary. And with such short construction times, building new power plants will be a snap.

I say it’s high time our materials engineers got to work on making arenak a reality!

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