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All we've done is created developmentally delayed individuals who are only starting to grow into adults when they go to college and get the hell away from their overprotective parents.

If you trap kids inside all day, it shouldn't be any surprise that they turn to screens to give them something to do. Allow kids the opportunity to play outside and I suspect that many of them will naturally use screens a lot less frequently.

I doubt it's entirely the parents' fault. I imagine parents are keeping their kids indoors in order to keep them away from Child Overprotective Services.

• "5 Things Everyone Did Growing Up (That Now Get You Arrested)" by Chan Teik Onn
• "5 Things Your Parents Did (They'd Be Arrested For Today)" by C. Coville
• "Neighbor calls cops, child services on Texas mom for letting son play outside" by Philip Caulfield
• "Mom Lets 4-Year-Old Play Outside, Faces Jail"
• "When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS" by Katherine Martinko

...I don't see anything changing because of this information. All developed nations are addicted to plastic. They aren't going to stop using it because we find it fish bellies. That just isn't enough incentive.

A few eco-conscious types might make token efforts at reducing their plastic consumption, but it will barely make a dent in overall consumption.

The silver lining here is that this abundance will ensure the shortest possible time for plastic-eating creatures to evolve. And, really, it's already happened.

https://www.treehugger.com/gre...

You mean the tetrapak, the cardboard that's sandwiched with plastic making it impossible to recycle?

Just because there's only 18% of it being recycled does not mean it cannot be recycled at all.

13. Making two pounds of paper requires 793 gallons of water—so think before you print!

15. Making two pounds of beef requires 4068 gallons of water. Feed for the livestock accounts for 99 percent of that massive footprint.

Source

Pair of Jeans
It takes around 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce just one pair of regular ol' blue jeans. [2]

Cotton T-Shirt
Not as bad as jeans, it still takes a whopping 400 gallons of water to grow the cotton required for an ordinary cotton shirt.

Single Board of Lumber
5.4 gallons of water are used to grow enough wood for one lumber board. [3]

Barrel of Beer
In order to process a single barrel of beer (32 gallons of booze), 1,500 gallons of water are sucked down. [3]

To-Go Latte
It takes 53 gallons to make every latte, as I've noted before:

That sugar, doesn't that have to be grown as cane first? Hm. And then there's that plastic lid, which has to be created and distributed over hundreds of miles. And doesn't plastic require a pretty vast amount of water and oil to produce? Come to think of it, there's the sleeve and the cup itself too . . .

Gallon of Paint
Takes 13 gallons of water to make.

Individual Bottled Water

This irony shouldn't be lost on anyone: it takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture the plastic for the bottle in the average commercial bottle of water.

One Ton of . . .
Steel: 62,000 gallons of water
Cement: 1,360 gallons

One Pound of . . .
Wool: 101 gallons of water
Cotton: 101 gallons
Plastic: 24 gallons
Synthetic Rubber: 55 gallons

Source

Nerds, for some values of "nerd" actually do change population growth trends. There is a direct correlation between smaller families and economic growth. There are plenty of examples, but a quick search led me to this: https://www.livescience.com/43...

According to most census estimates, an American woman had on average seven to eight children in 1800. By 1900 the number dropped to about 3.5. That has fallen to slightly more than two today.

It is also worth considering that technology allows people to live in higher density. If the entire population of the world were to live in one area at the same density as people do in New York, then the entire world population could live in a space the size of Texas. https://www.treehugger.com/sus...

The top 10 rivers that dump plastic waste into the oceans are in Africa and Asia. 6 of them are in China.

And that, dear friends, is yet another data point about "free trade." That tasty arbitrage that lets you get your iPhone 75 for cheaper than if it were produced domestically is brought to you buy a country that gives absolutely zero fucks about its environment or whether or not you're eating microplastics in your food.

Enjoy.

yes. Facts are unintentionally misleading in this era of too much information.

Urban legend has it that the weight of all the ants on earth is greater than that of any other species, yet science seems to indicate they're approximately the same.

Our livestock and pets alone dwarf the #2 life form.

Where I live there's not enough water to go around for extended showers. Saving water has become a big component of the go-green propaganda.

If there's enough water for a shower, there's enough for a super long extended shower

What is happening around the world with this.
But biofuels and garbage are not emission free; the old plant in Copenhagen had to be replaced because it exceeded European standards for dioxin and other pollutants
The EPA reports that incinerating garbage releases 2,988 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour of electricity produced. That compares unfavorably with coal (2,249 pounds/megawatt hour)

And yet,
It is amazing.
What is happening around the world with this.
In fact, it is happening in America,but slowly.

Well, we're talking about roughly 1.4 billion flashes per year, and they're not evenly distributed around the planet. As to the power of each flash, I don't know how you could get good readings and keep the sensors intact... only 10 to 20 percent of the bolts reach the ground so we need disposable balloons or something to get actual voltages. Getting amperes or wattage has to be an estimate. So, now we know that rare isotopes created... but is lightning also creating common isotopes? If so, how much and what kinds? There could be WAY more going on then these first clues indicate.
More on lightning here:
http://www.aharfield.co.uk/lightning-protection-services/about-lightning
and here:
https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/where-world-does-lightning-strike-most.html
and here:
http://geology.com/articles/lightning-map.shtml

Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.

And there you go, mixing your political position with the scientific conclusion. This is what causes science denial.

Does the science mandate your position? Are there better solutions available?

I strongly suspect that the best solution is to turn our attention to improvements in technology. This is already happening in the US with the onset of electric vehicles - this will reduce fossil fuel consumption considerably, and serve as a model and testing ground for other nations.

We then have to find energy sources to replace our current fossil fuel use.

I strongly suspect that the best solution will be rooftop solar. This is already happening in the US with the cost of rooftop solar dropping precipitously over the last 15 years.

Both of these solutions would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint, and both would benefit from improvements in technology.

Perhaps we should look to science to solve the problem, instead of identity politics?

There is a stand of aspen in Utah they estimate at 80,000 years....
https://www.treehugger.com/nat...

Err....go outside and play with their friends?

That's dangerous...

for the parents. Local law enforcement in many places seems to consider playing outside to imply parental neglect. See, for example, "Children spend less time outside than prison inmates", "When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS", "#1. Mom Arrested for Letting Children Play Outside", and "#5. Letting Kids Walk Places Alone".

Still, what between sunset and bedtime?

Err....go outside and play with their friends?

That's dangerous...

for the parents. Local law enforcement in many places seems to consider playing outside to imply parental neglect. See, for example, "Children spend less time outside than prison inmates", "When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS", "#1. Mom Arrested for Letting Children Play Outside", and "#5. Letting Kids Walk Places Alone".

Still, what between sunset and bedtime?

What do you want me to say?

Additional Cites...

As a start, let's just look at what it means to take care of your battery. This means don't charge it to more than ~80% of capacity and don't discharge below 20%.
- This takes the 73 mile range down to 73 X 80% X 80% or 46.7 miles
Next, let's assume that after 7 years, the capacity is expected to be down to 80% of the new, maximum.
- This takes the 46.7 miles down to 46.7 X 80% or 37.4 miles for 'battery-kindness"

http://www.plugincars.com/real...

"Nine bars equates to about 70 percent of remaining capacity--meaning that the effective range of a 2011 Nissan Leaf, originally rated at 73 miles, could be down to something like 50 miles."

http://www.greencarreports.com...

In theory, the range of my Leaf is 83 miles when fully charged. In practice, however, that varies widely depending on where you're going and who is driving. My wife, for example, tends to drive more aggressively than I do and she has experienced somewhat shorter range. Similarly, range drops off significantly when you go on the highway or crank the AC.

https://www.treehugger.com/car...

Where do you get that from?

This is what I was thinking of: "The Guardian is reporting that Nocera has developed a catalyst from cobalt and phosphorus which can be used to split water at room temperature", which strongly implies that other methods require higher temperatures.

These are the much higher temperatures.

From what is written here it appears to be happening in liquid water

All that abstract says is "water".

If I wear through 2 pounds of brake pads over 50,000 miles, and maybe (completely guessing here) 3 times that on the tires, I'm putting less than 10 pounds of crap on the road/in the air. That's really worst case.

During that time, I'm burning through 8,000 pounds of gas in my 50 MPG car. Since we're not interested in CO or NOx, I guess, how much fine-carbon particulate matter would that produce?

This is a mote vs. beam issue and not even worth thinking about. Such statements give excuses not to push to get cars all-electric. So this supposed expert is not helping his stated cause but hurting it. He's either an idiot or in someone's pay.

But if we have to consider this, then with electric cars come modern tractions control, so less tire spinning and loss of tire mass, autonomous driving, so less wasted movement and fast starts/stops, collision sensors, so more safety for bicyclists, autonomous/flock systems also reduce stop and go traffic, and thus reduce brake/tires wear, and while this isn't what this 'expert' is talking about, there's no engine idling which is a major polluter in stop and go traffic.

There was some buzz that EV's are harder on tires and roads, which has been shown to be biased: https://www.treehugger.com/car...

What is not known to most about the "study", is that is was conducted by a German inventor/small business owner of speciality hydraulic (fluid) hybrid technology patents and consulting company, and a 2nd year Edinburgh college student he hired as a summer intern to assist with the study and use the college's name to lend more legitimacy to the study - so no, it was not conducted by "scientists from the University of Edinburgh" as has been erroneously reported by various media outlets. (you can do your own online research into Peter Achten* and his company "INNAS - Fluid Power Innovation")'

Get the electric vehicles in place, use that as an economic lever (EVs are just plain cheaper) to get older cars and especially trucks off the road, then work on better brake pads and more bicycles.

If you're interested in the particles created by the enormous amount of fuel we burn, see this: http://www.meca.org/resources/...

Some environmentalists will oppose this because of presumed bird mortality,

Not if they're rational.

and many slash dotters who are definitely not environmentalists will oppose this because it is an energy source they hate.

Hating an energy source isn't rational.

Reality Check. Environmentalist & non-environmentalist don't hate wind turbines in significant numbers.The anti-turbine mob are all nimbys worried about spoiling their views, and old-energy shills and their useful idiots.

Police in some parts of the United States do in fact "have bigger problems going on" with respect to their pursuit of free-range children on trumped-up charges of neglect.

• 5 Things Everyone Did Growing Up (That Now Get You Arrested) by Chan Teik Onn
• 5 Things Your Parents Did (They'd Be Arrested For Today) by C. Coville
• Neighbor calls cops, child services on Texas mom for letting son play outside by Philip Caulfield
• Mom Lets 4-Year-Old Play Outside, Faces Jail by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore
• When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS by Katherine Martinko

In fact, it took a federal law in January 2016 to keep local authorities from harassing parents of children who walk to school.

... even with that benefit today, a small 2 seater piston driven aircraft will make the most obscene SUV look like a Prius efficiency wise.

Most small aircraft presently operate at 15-20 MPG, mostly because the engines are based on simple, old (and thus well-tested), fully analog designs, but it doesn't have to be that way. For example, here's a 2-seater piston-driven aircraft retrofitted with electronic ignition and fuel injection which gets better mileage than most high-efficiency cars: Hypermiling Plane Gets 45 MPG at 207 MPH. The challenge is adapting the tech improvements which have made ground vehicles so much more efficient to small aircraft without compromising safety—a fuel-injection system failure on the ground tends to be a much smaller problem than a similar failure at cruising altitude.

There have been a few, let's say, shady promises about extracting water from air, mostly coupled with crowdfunding campaigns (gee, why could that be?).

And how. Crowdfunding is a great way to grab some money from the Youtube perpetual motion gang.

The thing that is odd is that this paltry 3 liters of water with it's expensive collection materials pales in comparison with this system that will extract 42 liters per day, http://www.treehugger.com/clea... , uses wind power, and only costs 134 dollars.

These people are pikers compared to the manufacturer of that fine bit of kit.

But there are those nasty thermodynamic laws and the enthalpy of vaporization stuff going on that tend to bitchslap these devices and their supporters.

If you are driving total electric car you aren't paying fuel/road tax. A gasoline vehicle has to pay every time it fills up for road repairs bridges etc. It comes out of the tax received from tax at the pump. If you never visit the pump how are you paying your share of the road tax? If you get your propane to run your car from the big storage tank out back of your house [using a wet leg device] you are paying no road tax. Ask the farmers caught at the local livestock auction caught by state revenue people for having the wrong color diesel in their truck. Off road diesel is colored differently than road taxed diesel. http://www.treehugger.com/econ...

The driver failed to react because he was watching a video. The computer did not react at all, that's much different to not reacting in time, although I guess that some other sensors probably detected the truck when the car was 0.01ish seconds away from it.

It's the first time I've heard anyone say the turn was not legal, got a source? I read an article on it and it does not say the turn wasn't legal.Looks legal (road diagram): http://www.treehugger.com/cars...

I'm not sure if there are really good enough statistics to say autonomous cars are safer, but like you say, drivers who aren't distracted or intoxicated are safer, but if they keep developing the technology that would likely change.

I didn't think it necessary to provide links for such a well-known fact, but here you have one.

I showed links showing that you are full of shit.

You haven't. You have provided a few random, environmentally-related links none of which claim the US government was somehow not the world's most polluting organisation.

Elon wants to replace combustion based vehicles with electric. He will need tens to hundreds of Gigafactories to meet demand, plus is also prioritising Powerwalls.

This has been seriously considered.
"Just to supply auto demand you need 200 Gigafactories,"

It's worth noting that building the first factory is the hardest part because you have to design all the machines. Once it's running properly, the next the next 10 Gigafactories will be built in a fraction of the time.

The entire reason cities exist is because it's wasteful to have people separated by the amount of agricultural land needed to support them. A family of 4 needs about 2 acres (0.8 hectares) of land to grow the food needed to sustain them. Cities leveraged advances in transportation tech and a trade economy to decouple the food production from living spaces. The maximum size of a city is basically determined by the efficiency of the food transport and distribution network - the better those are, the larger the radius of land surrounding the city that can be used to feed its occupants.

Backyard and rooftop gardens are a good (and fun) way to supplement your diet with a few items which might be difficult or expensive to obtain at the grocery store. But they don't come anywhere close to putting a dent in self-sustainability. Given the premium that is placed on space is in cities, there's probably a much better use for that land area than for growing crops. The idea that you can feed yourself by planting a garden in your backyard is a delusion perpetuated by people who've never crunched the actual numbers. The entire reason the unit of an "acre" exists is because that was the amount of crop fields a single person could typically work in a day back when most everyone was living on a subsistence diet.

In other words, even if you had enough land area to actually be able to grow enough in your backyard garden to feed yourself, (1) it would be your full-time job, and (2) you would pretty much be on a starvation-level diet. For all the flak agri-business gets, they've done a remarkable job improving farming efficiency. During pre-industrial times, each farmer grew enough food to feed 1.1 people. Today, a single farmer produces enough food to feed 150 people (2.1 million farmers vs 319 million population).

Some of the things described in TFA are just plain stupid. Growing plants in shipping containers with light from LEDs? So rather than grow the plants on a farm so 100% of the sunlight reaches the plants, you're going to use 16% efficient solar panels to generate electricity to power 10% efficient LEDs so only 1.6% of the sunlight reaches the plants? Are you insane? Cannabis grow labs have to do this to evade law enforcement (in places where it's illegal), but there is no logical reason to do this for food crops.

So much for "green" power. I'm all for it, really, but let us not be deceived that "green" means at no cost. There is a real cost to everything. Tens of millions of birds (and bats) are killed the world over annually the world over.

The number of birds killed by windmills is several orders of magnitude smaller than the number killed by domestic cats. Heck FAR more birds are killed in collisions with cell phone towers than by windmills - roughly an order of magnitude more.. Bird deaths are a very minor issue especially compared with the number of deaths that will occur if we don't do anything about climate change. You're focusing on the little problem when it is the big one you should be worrying about.

my Mother-in-law streaming Hulu

She should be watching television

And spending $800[1] to time-shift over-the-air television.

my kids gaming while playing Youtube videos

make them go outside and play

For one thing, I have no idea how to make the weather suitable for that on any given day. For another, stranger danger hysteria has increased since you grew up, to the point of parents getting arrested for letting their kids walk to and from the park.[2]

the telephone works just great for talking to people

Yeah, at $6 an hour for long distance on a landline. A better suggestion might have been to downgrade from video to voice over IP, which is billed at a much lower rate than POTS long distance.

[1] Estimated price of a TiVo DVR with an All-In subscription.
[2] See "5 Things Everyone Did Growing Up (That Now Get You Arrested) by Chan Teik Onn, "5 Things Your Parents Did (They'd Be Arrested For Today)" by C. Coville, "Cops called on Texas mom for son playing outside" by Philip Caulfield, "Mom Lets 4-Year-Old Play Outside, Faces Jail" by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, and "When 'Stranger Danger' is actually the police and CPS" by Katherine Martinko.

I'm sorry, but solar panels do dramatically reduce in power on cloudy days. The absolutely do not "operate surprisingly close to the same capacity as on a non-cloudy day." Here's what a daily generation profile looks like on a day with scattered clouds. Here you can see a mixture of cloudy, sunny, and partly cloudy days.

Your statement was simply wrong.

Literally nothing you wrote in your post was correct. UV is a nearly irrelevant source of energy at the surface. Clouds do provide some UV blocking, and they're nearly opaque to IR, not just "a bit". Normal solar panels can't run on IR, and are either highly inefficient with or can't use UV at all. And no, solar panels do not "operate surprisingly close to the same capacity as on a non-cloudy day"

Boring stories, however important they may be, generate no traffic. Misleading headlines, half-truths and sensationalism on the other hand generates a lot of clicks and therefore is more profitable to post fake news, hearsay and rumors than do some actual journalistic work.

I don't so much mind clickbait headlines ("You won't believe what she wore to the beach...") because they're easy to spot for the fluff they are.

What I hate is when there's a link that shows an enticing photo that has nothing to do with the subject of the "sponsored" article.

My favorite example is the "American parasite" showing a photo of this thermal vent tubeworm.

Whoa, I think you're off by an order of magnitude.

Uh, yes. I meant kg, not tons, my bad. My source was treehugger though, not sure how serious their data is.

This one:

http://www.treehugger.com/cult...

And then the idea will take off.

The Dow solar shingles sucked. The Tesla product will probably be more like this. The European integrated roof looks quite solid, and it shouldn't be too difficult to install. Integrated solar roofs are used around the world.

They got about half of the power you'd get from putting the solar panels on a roof.

Which (= panels on a roof) is exactly what some people in (south) Korea seem to be trying to experiment with.

So put the solar panels above the roadway. Something like this but scaled up over the entire road rather than just a bike lane. The main disadvantage of roadway solar panels is that they can't be angled thus are inherently less efficient, but putting them above lets you angle them. Plus it requires no change to the road technology itself (that problem has been solved for a while).

The U.S. needs to catch up to other parts of the world in regards to tractor trailer safety. http://www.treehugger.com/cars... Hopefully mandatory side rails is one of the NHTSAâ(TM)s recommendations. We need to do as much as possible to prevent accidents but also as much as possible to mitigate the severity of accidents.

Absolutely the vast majority is red tape. The environmental lobby will not let new nuclear plants be built in the US, and it has been forever since we had a new one. They sue, they delay, they lobby, and yes, that costs an extraordinary amount of money for the power companies, to the point that they don't even bother since they can just keep burning the cheap coal and natural gas. Nuclear, if not for these approval costs, would be one of the most cost effective power sources we could possibly have.

For example, the most recent nuclear power plant to go online was the Watts Bar Plant. Construction began in 1973, it was completed in 1990, and it was activated in 1996. 23 years to start up a nuclear plant? That shows you the extent of the red tape problem, and more particularly, the problem with the environmental lobby.

Obama has recently announced plans to allow another one to be built, but the environmentalists aren't happy, and who knows if (or when) it will ever happen. Might be in the 2030s if we are lucky. And ask yourself, what else in our society requires an approval from the president just to start? What a mess...

http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...
http://www.aquionenergy.com/pr...
http://www.eosenergystorage.co...
http://www.treehugger.com/clea...

And those are just a handful of the top hits that came up when I did a search. Future technology development will certainly bring the cost down further, but we're completely capable of doing it even with current tech.

You and I know that, but Treehuggers think otherwise...

Your link doesn't really back up your claim. . .

Someone who has learned enough economics to use terms like "diminishing return" should also have been taught that knowledge capital does not apply. Does lighting someone else's candle diminish your own lit candle? It is as if you are saying that water boils at 100 C, so evaporation can only occur at 100 C. I could go to the trouble to explain/prove everything myself, or I could just point you to the textbook ("Authority") saying otherwise for brevity. At the end of the day, the onerous is on you to prove that generally accepted facts and theories are wrong.

If you could go back in time and ask people in the early 20th century what the early 21st century would be like I think they'd be surprised not by all of the technology that looks like magic to them, but with how little has really changed.

Thanks, this goes back to my point of, "If they are so advanced, then where are their giant horses!?" Technological advances have occurred in the most important areas for them to occur. That people have failed to realize where these were going to be in the past is merely a testament of their limited knowledge/foresight and says nothing of the technological progress that has taken place. Your comment here says more about yourself than anything else.

Some technologies (like nuclear) are extremely centralized, government regulated, and monopolistic. Then there are technologies that are on the opposite spectrum. The latter is improving exponentially .

Personally, I have been advocating phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for over 40 years

Maybe simply advocating is not enough?

What happened to these? Seems like they would scale up a bit easier.

http://www.academia.edu/375869...

The practice of Sky Burial was at one time, pretty common, from Anatolia to China

Even today, the Parsi people (whose ancestors came from Persia - currently known as Iran) in India still practice Sky Burial

http://www.treehugger.com/cult...

In Iran, "Towers of Silence" still exist, in remote places

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atl...

But it's more like a souped up socialist paradise where everybody has a guaranteed minimum quality of life and if they want to improve their life they can but if they don't then they won't starve to death or freeze or even have to worry about money. There are no shitty jobs, they've all been automated or replaced by replicators.

It's important to realize that such an economy is highly dependent on cheap energy. Replicator technology basically uses as much energy as a 6 megaton nuke to create a cup of Earl Grey tea (excluding the cup, saucer, and spoon). That's roughly the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear reactor operating for 9.5 months. Or $750 million worth of electricity at the average U.S. price of $0.12 per kWh.

If you look at our modern culture, it's basically the same thing. Higher standard of living is a direct result of access to cheap energy. We don't have to spend 2/3rds of our waking lives working in the fields just to grow enough food for us to eat because we have cheap energy to power machines to do the work for us. If you want to grow a garden for some of your food for entertainment, by all means do so. But don't fall for the fantasy that you can become self-sufficient by doing so. At least not with a lot of manual labor or access to cheap external energy sources to do that labor for you. (The graphic assumes about 2300 kcal/day per person. If you work the fields yourself, you're looking at more like 3500-5000 kcal/day.)

So are you implying that the release of carbon to atmosphere saved us of a global cooling? Perchance the best option would be putting aside the global warming and starting controlling the climate.

Some increase in CO2 from 280 ppm was probably a good thing to slow down the long term cooling trend but the "good" part of it probably stopped somewhere before 350 ppm. We are now over 400 ppm.

So are you implying that the release of carbon to atmosphere saved us of a global cooling? Perchance the best option would be putting aside the global warming and starting controlling the climate.

'Hidden Knowledge: Corporations; how they came into being, how they have changed, how they are run and how they are the key to the erosion of society, erosion to the rights and lifestyles of people, etc' link

"If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath using a personality diagnostic checklist by the World Health Organization."

Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom

"Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man going off of a very high cliff in his airplane, with the wings flapping, and the guys flapping the wings and the wind is in his face, and this poor fool thinks he's flying, but, in fact, he's in free fall, and he just doesn't know it yet because the ground is so far away, but, of course, the craft is doomed to crash." link

The state of Washington, and the Mythbusters would tell you that roundabouts are safer (for cars and pedestrians), cheaper to build, and more economical for drivers than either a 4-way stop, or light controlled intersection. There seem to be multiple other studies with similar results, a search for "safety of roundabouts vs. 4-way stop" brings up pages full.

I'm from MA where we have rotaries all over the place, and while I agree that in theory they are a good idea, in practice nobody knows how to use them. People routinely refuse to yield when entering, don't move left to let others enter, and ignore exit-only lanes. And that's with people who for the most part grew up with them, never mind introducing them in a new area. You can also end up with monstrosities like this, which aren't really that small compares to a couple of intersections.