Foreign Aid made up only 0.98% of the US budget. More then 80% of that was for Iraq and Afghanistan. When you bomb a country into the dark ages you better do something to help the people living there or in 20 years you'll have another 9/11. If the US hadn't abandoned Afghanistan after it's US backed war against USSR communism, 9/11 would have never happened. Harsh but it's true.

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I don't think our bombs did that. I'm pretty sure they were in the "dark ages" _before_ we got there.

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I'm pretty sure they had hospitals, schools, electricity, running water and telephones. They even had pharmaceutical manufacturing producing anti bionics before they were mistakenly bombed as potential WMD production sites. The deaths of thousands have been attributed to lack of proper medicines and clean drinking water. Congrats.

As a whole the country will likely be better off in the long run but not without help and not without a high price.

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I believe they are running a refrigeration system with a series of coils like you would have in your freezer. That is were you get the heat exchange from, not actually blasting air through the sand.

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Actually, in reading that, I think I am wrong, and so is the author. It sounds like they will be pumping something like a glycol in pipes underneath the sand to pipes further down below to absorb the heat out of the top sand. This is almost like what they did with the big dig in Boston, where they sunk pipes into the ground and injected super cooled liquid to freeze the ground so they could tunnel through it. So the sand will be cool, and the blowers will cool it off further. They make no mention of a refrigeration/exchange system, but rather an aborber, which makes it seem like it's somewhat passive.

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Also, I don't think there is an efficient way to draw cool air out of the soil several feet below, since there isn't that much "air" down there. Heat exchange is a function of temperature difference. It is harder to pipe "cool" out of something, since heat flows towards the cooler zone/object/whatever.

To do this quickly enough, you would need refrigeration, and a massive cooling bill.

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Correct, the heat will flow towards the cold. So the heat from the sand is transferred/absorbed into the liquid in the pipes. The pipes run a loop from just under the sand to deeper underground, where they lose some of the heat they picked up into the ground, and the cycle continues. Some buildings do the same thing by running a glycol system. They pump the glycol through the building, and excess heat is "captured" by the glycol, and then runs through pipes that "vent" the heat through cooling towers to the outside. It doesn't have to be "quick", as the temps drop overnight, so you would be maintaining a temp as opposed to dropping the temp rapidly.

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