Well what about burning morons to generate electricity.
Could be tricky controlling those at the front of the line though…
If you really want to use the unemployed to solve the energy problem, just employ them as pedicab drivers and replace some city taxis. It’s not that far-fetched; they just started using the Velotaxi in Kyoto.
And you think cab drivers are rude now 
Maybe a high-tech system would be more efficient than exercise bikes
The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion… we’ll have all the energy we would ever need.
We just need a way to keep the moron’s minds occupied. Hmmm. How about…
Nah, that wouldn’t work.
Sorry for the nitpick, but not all humans use 2000kcal a day. More or less depending on the person. 2000 is what is recommended on those labels on food, but I have a strong suspicion that is for those with sit down jobs. I have cut down to 2500 calories at my job (I do count calories, not estimate) to lose fat, and I am having some energy problems. I am only 5’9 187lbs. My basal metabolic rate is almost 2000 calories. (1950 or so) 2000 calories for a midget on a treadmill perhaps…
While we haven’t settled on the exact amount of energy per moron per day, we now have a range of answers and ideas on how to it.
All we need now to answer the original question, is agreement on the amount of energy for that small city and division.
So far, so good, but we’re only half done to actually implement the concept.
How do we identify and assemble this number of additional morons(beyond the posters in this thread) to make it work?
I love this board.
I just can’t stop laughing at this thread.
Quite true, I was just going by 2000 because it was convenient and I didn’t have a better number.
Also, despite my love for the Matrix (I had it on DVD almost a year before I bought a DVD player), 25000 BTU is more than 6300 kilocalories per day. I doubt you could get a human body, with no muscles in a physically vegitative state, to produce that much heat.
And I alredy made a Matrix ref, heresiarch, so neener.
This is just anecdotal, but I think it would take fewer Mormons to power a city than morons. It’s just anecdotal though. I have no cites.
By my estimate, it would take 1,425,000,000 morons to supply the US with enough power to run all our cities…
You know, I have never seen a better argument for human cloning.
As for feeding that many I have a simple solution. Feed them Soylent Green.
I agree with cheswolf. We could simply feed the unproductive morons to the productive ones. How many calories are in the average moron, anyway?
For some unknown reason, it appears that there hasn’t been much research done into the caloric value of your average moron.
As always, we can guess. Most of the weight of your average moron is calorie-free water, and there’s also bones. Taking an average of 20% body fat times a 73 kilo moron, we get 14600 grams of fat. 9 kilocalories per gram gives us 131400 kilocalories.
So if you could convert just the fat of one Soylent Moron directly into electricity, you’d get almost 153 kilowatt hours.
I’ll let someone else figure out how long it would take for 1,425,000,000 morons to eat each other. The later morons would be more muscle and less fat, so the energy density would taper off as the morons get in shape.
But what if it’s an Amish city, then you would only need a couple of Mormons…
I think something that is being missed is that using these “morons” as they are called to generate electricity in most any way would be too ineffcient.
So why not increase their efficiency? Put them to do the tasks directly which the electricity would have been used for.
Example: doing dishes by hand, instead of using the dishwasher. Hanging clothes on the line, instead of tumble-drying. Vacuuming with a bissel, working as rickshaw drivers, loaders. Replace assembly line station components with more workers, thus reducing overall economic efficiency but reducing power requirements.
Hellfire, based on some energy efficiency and utilization studies I’ve done for the average American household - you would get more energy savings by having one of these persons follow one’s ass around all day, turning off lights and appliances that aren’t needed - compared to putting them on the treadmill.
But Anthracite, these are MORONS we are talking about. They would only screw up the complicated tasks you have suggested. Broken dishes, ripped laundry, badly assembled products would all result. At least with treadmills the task is simple enough…
No, we’d never be able to produce enough for all of them, although it might be a partial solution. Instead, we should rewrite all farm subsidies to encourage the production of food for the moron clones.
But come to think of it, just producing ethanol instead would probably be more energy-efficient.