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When the US Government Built Ultra-Safe Cars
Jalopnik has a piece on a mostly forgotten piece of automotive history: the US government built a fleet of ultra-safe cars in the 1970s. The "RSV" cars were designed to keep four passengers safe in a front or side collision at 50 mph (80 kph) — without seat belts — and they got 32 miles to the gallon. They had front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, and gull-wing doors. Lorne Greene was hired to flack for the program. All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands. "Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry [in 1990] contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books. ... 'I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,' said [the manager of one of the vehicles' manufacturers]."
...flying cars!
Sounds of Wayne's World ringing out....
Is that even real? Most cars from that era I remember hearing about got a solid 8 MPG...
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Seriously, wtf?
of an AMC Pacer and a Delorean
Keep passengers safe from a 50 MPH t-bone. Without them wearing any restraints. Give me a fucking break.
Right up there with the water burning carburetor.
Just look at the near fanatical destruction of the blueprints and prototypes of the canadian supersonic Avro Arrow combat jet back in the 50's. This car design getting buried is clearly another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.
Thank you, libertarians.
It's the one that also got 100mpg due to the fuel vaporizing carburetor. :)
... if they put them into production. I bet they could make them for a pretty cheap price now as well. Maybe the Obama administration should start manufacturing them to help pay the national debt!
Maybe it's the pin striping and white/gray color or maybe I'm just crazy, but I see a lot of Star Trek in that car. Especially TNG style.
I wonder if they got any inspiration for the designs used in the show from it.
Gullwing doors are great. I own a delorean and here are a few things I've noticed.
One, I don't have to worry about how close someone parks, I only need 11 inches to open the door.
Two, if it is raining, the door tends to keep my seat more dry and myself as there is less movement out of the way of the door to get around and in as you would do with a normal door.
With the engine being mounted in the mid to rear end, you have a firewall that would get pushed into the flat of your back if you are against it assuming hit from behind. Having a head on collision the delorean's front will crumple as it is just empty storage space. Current cars the engine get's shoved into the firewall which then has a chance to crumple the footwell area that your feet are in.
It is sad that two cars, both with designs to benefit people, have either been destroyed or had their reputation destroyed so no-one would contemplate building anything that even looks like it or has safety features.
I'm sure others can point out even more similarities and benefits.
Could it fly?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
People consistently rant that newer cars don't seem to be getting significantly better mileage ratings than older vehicles.
Problem is you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison because in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the EPA changed the standards for the mileage test to be more realistic (more stringent).
For example, in the old EPA tests, you could run your test without the air conditioner running even if the car had it. New EPA tests require that the AC is run for a certain portion of the test unless the car doesn't have any AC unit.
Also, in general, engine power outputs have gone up significantly since the 1980s and mid-1990s while keeping the same gas mileage.
So a vehicle that scored 32MPG in the 1970s might only be able to score 20-25 MPG on the new EPA tests.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What's its zero to sixty time? Top speed? How fast would this car get you laid?
I don't care about gull-wings or any other kind of wings unless the damned car is going to fly with them.
Have gnu, will travel.
When you elect people that axiomatically believe that government can't do anything right, you get people that intentionally do government badly. Whether it's automobile safety, maintaining an a healthy and stable economy, or maintaining worker and environmental safety standards.
You wouldn't hire a janitor that said he was morally opposed to cleanliness and didn't believe that brooms worked. Why would you be shocked when everything goes to hell when you hire someone that says they don't believe government?
This sounds like the prequel to "Who killed the electric car?" Where Big Oil = Gov't.
If government develops things, then it is tax payer money.
If what was developed gets distroyed, or hidden for no apparent reason, other than lobby or corporate pressure than that is TREASON.
TREASON is punishable by death...
Since one can not become politician on "competence" only, but on slimyness mostly, one has to accept he fact that the governors are not thinking like sane and technical minded people do... We have to accept this, and then find ways to live with it by regulating it :-) (i love that word)
To regulate this, I propose the introduction of death penalty for incompetence at political missions and corruption...
Really, if you want all this stuff, you can go buy a Passat, or an Accord with a bit lower mileage. That rig from the 70's wouldn't pass emissions tests today, so it would have to get heavier and the mileage would go down. A 70's Honda engine isn't exactly what people are looking for when they need to get on an Interstate, so you couldn't sell them easily either. Giant bumpers are nice until you need to parallel park in Chinatown.
I totally want a Delorean, emotionally, but I'm not actually going to buy one for daily driving - I was in a roll-over accident once; side-opening doors are nice.
Really, though, somebody should FOIA the plans and build a factory and see what happens, any patents have expired. Prove that Reagan's goons were wrong...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Thanks, Ronnie.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
I've heard of threads getting Godwin'd..... but this one had it in the summary.
Doesn't that, by itself, mean that no further replies are necessary?
I have a '77 that I want to now fit with lambo doors!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'd argue it is in our interest to control progress. If we advance too rapidly, control by the state is compromised and order can not be maintained.
As an example: the Internet of the late 90's was a terrible time for control! You could pretty much post whatever you wanted wherever you wanted without retribution from rights holder. Now that we have appropriate laws in place, we can circumvent such things almost as fast as they are posted.
To think that the destruction of efficient motoring and safety designs, factor efficient energy sources, or wide-scale utility broadband was anything other than purposeful, is ludicrous. The people must be governed, poorly mind you, but governed none-the-less. Progress of any kind outside of a controlled rate would be disaster. You all should know this by now.
Godwin strikes right in the summary. This thing never even had a chance.
There are dozens of cars from the late 70s with that kind of mileage:
http://www.mpgomatic.com/2007/10/08/super-cheap-high-mpg-cars-1978-1981/
Not the least of which being the Toyota Corolla, the most popular car of all time. I used to have a Mazda 323 from 1980 or so that got 45 mpg at 55mph or less, which was great until I ruined it by changing the oil and not tightening the plug sufficiently.
And, given the choice between "unimpressive performance" and "living to see your children grow up," it's amazing people continue to be so shortsighted. Investment in vehicle safety could save far more lives than the war on terror.
Lifetime chance of dying in a car accident: 1 in 83
Lifetime chance of dying of terrorist acts: 1 in 45,000
Lifetime chance of dying of a lightning strike: 1 in 80,000
http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/11/dont-be-terrorized
So what are we supposed to take from this article? That the Federal government and the automakers colluded to suppress this technology? What could they possibly have to gain? In the 70's Volvo proved that safety sells cars. Since then every car manufacturer knows that you can't sell a car with a reputation for being unsafe.
Watch the movie: "Who Killed the Electric Car". The original EV1 made by GM in the 1990's had a brilliant design and several very advanced (for it's time) features. not only did they take them all back, they destroyed every one. i, for one, believe the conspiracy. they just don't want us to know how awesome cars can actually be.
I'd assumed that the old MPG ratings were gamed by manufacturers to reflect higher-than-real-world performance myself. But I've recently been measuring the MPG of my '97 Geo Prizm (set the mileage counter when I fill up, record gallons-to-top at the next fill up, divide first figure by second) and I've been seeing numbers that range from 29 to 37 mpg. If you look at the fueleconomy.gov ratings, that's not only closer to old rating system, it exceeds it.
I suppose there may be factors from vehicle maintenance to how it's driven to what's kept inside, but it's an old car at this point (200k+), I don't think I've done anything special with it, I probably have more than the usual amount of stuff in the thing, and doubt I drive much more conservatively or efficiently than the average.
Tweet, tweet.
They really did a hatchet job on this car - I find _nothing_ about it on wikipedia.
The Experimental Safety Vehicle is close. The comparison to book burning seems to be pretty close to the mark...
Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy. It is disheartening to hear that, once again, politicians supported by industry killed an effort to do what's good for the public interest.
Best regards.
Well said.
are always wrong. Why? Simple: that many people just can't keep a secret. This is a complete load of crap, or at least such a stretch of the truth as to be no different from said load. This is just another excuse for poor losers to make groundless accusations against Reagan and other winners. "They made a car that ran on water, man, but the government shut it down!"
another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.
If it's not straight out fiction.
Maybe you've heard this one, folks, but I think it's time to tell it again:
If Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, An Efficient Government, and a Private Corporation are at a four way intersection, and in the center, there is a nice crisp 100 dollar bill, who will get to the money first?
The Private Corporation, of course, because the first three are figments of your imagination! Ha!
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
Tweet, tweet.
Ronald Reagan was a senile old coot they propped up to look good on TV but otherwise he did nothing for the United States.
You think I'm kidding? The current debt crisis starting hitting us under his watch. Nixon may have been a crook, but at least he was parsimonious. Reagan never saw a military spending bill he didn't like...except ones that were too small. Tax cuts? He had plenty. Spending Cuts? I remember what the BRAC was. People protested it.
It's true. People will protest spending cuts. They will protest higher taxes.
Accordingly, people are stupid.
Seriously--
Well, at least when it transforms into the 4-door sedan mode anyway.
Check it out, around 1 minute
Let us not forget the Tucker Torpedo was ahead of its time as well. We all know what happened to them.
I'm a BBS orphan in a blogging world.
Prior to the oil price shocks and the recession of the early 70's, the trend for consumers was for bigger cars. The 60's were a time of increasing affluence. The price of gas was below 50 cents a gallon. Mileage wasn't a big concern for many.
An additional factor was the sudden rise of air pollution in major cities. I lived in the NYC area and can attest to the miserable air quality.
So, Detroit was tooled up with big cars and big V8's when the recession hit. At a time when sales were down and money got tight, the auto industry was dealing with the need to lower air pollution standards and improve fuel economy. Vegas, Pintos, Gremlins and other vehicles were rapidly designed and brought to market. In the case of the larger cars, the automakers simply de-tuned the engines to get them to comply with emissions standards. In many cases, all you needed to do was change the timing chain to restore most of the performance. Those engines were also fine-tuned using many new controls, mostly actuated by manifold vacuum. Again, all this had to be done at a time when revenues at automakers were down. The results were slipshod.
The foreign automakers, especially the Japanese, were already completely tooled for high mileage vehicles. Doing the work to lower emissions was easier for the smaller engines. They gained market share with better cars, and the American automakers continued to lose market share.
By the mid-80's the American automakers started to get their mojo back. Car quality (including performance) returned. I drive a 1986 Ford Mustang with a high performance V8 that gets more than 25 mpg on the highway and has low emissions. I think Detroit had known how to do this for a long time, but there was no profit in it. It's also well known that the oil companies had allied themselves with the car companies to resist fuel economy standards.
In my opinion, corporations have way too much influence in our political system.
Best regards.
I've heard of threads getting Godwin'd..... but this one had it in the summary.
Doesn't that, by itself, mean that no further replies are necessary?
by the continuing use and misuse of something a lawyer said in a Usenet post, what, 20 years ago?
A single invocation of a Nazi comparison, in the original post/article no less, is NOT running afoul of the Magic Pixie Dust of the Godwin Line. And it isn't even a comparison to Nazism in general, just an analogy to one particular thing that they did; rewriting history by obfuscating the truth. Some bad things that people do today *gasp* realy can be as bad as some bad things done by Hitler's government; not every comparison is an automatic beeline to the Holocaust.
Get over yourselves and these witty "OMG GODWIN!" bon mots.
Why are the lib'ruls always going after us poor Repubbicans? Sob!
When a government sponsored program resulted in a private group building ultra-safe cars.
The government didn't build or design anything. You wouldn't claim the sponsors of the X-prize built/designed the products that came from that.
Her ideas bordered on crazy so I would not take much of what she claims as real.
She hated motorcycles and wanted to mandate changes, here is one idea:
http://www.motorcycleproject.com/motorcycle/text/claybrk.html
More like the FDA burning books written by Wilhelm Reich.
Anyone else notice that the article doesn't list how much the cost?
Learn about Photography Basics.
Sure, it has all those fancy features, but could it have sold for $10,000 in the 70's? Could it sell for $20,000 now? Did it cost a million per car in the 70's? Cost is an extremely important factor here.
Ultra-safe, 32 MPG, $100,000 to build? I'm just guessing but I wouldn't be surprised if they were wholly unmarketable due to cost.
And of course, I didn't read the article.
"compared to the Nazis burning books."
Get off it, Joan. Please.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In Denmark there's a so-called "council for more traffic safety", financed by the state. They keep track of where accidents happen and initiate public campaigns. Last year, 406 out of a population of app. 5.5 million died in a traffic accident. So that's about half the probability of being killed compared to the numbers for the US in the article you quote, but still 0.57% over a lifetime of 78 years.
That's actually a bit scary, I had no idea it was so high.
Hi, I'm here from the Democrats, and I'm here to spend a lot of money and prove the government can't do anything right.
*Huey's Imagination*
Huey Freeman: Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9-11. Thank you for your time and good night.
White People: Oh my God! [screaming and panicking ensue]
*Huey's Reality*
Huey Freeman: I'm tryin' to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil. Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names has six letters? 6-6-6? Man, doesn't that offend you?
White People: Aw, he's so cute!
The enemies of Democracy are
Reagan and Bush two likable puppet-POTUS for the masses that big-biz pwned.
Only fools believe the USA is a democratic meritocracy or capitalist nation.
Education has many "Open" technology tools, content, infrastructure... available, which could provide cost effective learning experiences to all USA children that would equal any private school and rival many in the world. National standards should start with a national curriculum supported by Open/Free school books developed and approved by the top 10 or 20 major university education departments. A nation in crisis must educate children to be the best possible citizens, but in the USA we let Texas develop USA school books for most USA public schools. No wounder, why I and so many other folks are high school drop outs, and proportionally so few are not dead or in jail.
Big-biz C*Os, their politicians, and the entitled privileged have made US the joke of current history with corporate welfare, legal kick-backs-by-proxy, social-club-nepotism/bigotry.... Education economically separate but equal is a national tragedy. Military duty and national service (man, woman, gay, handicap...) when not a legal obligation, culturally inclusive, and personal responsibility indicates the dawn before the fall of the nation (Carthage, Rome, Germany...). Bring back and expand the DRAFT to include USAll as a nations of people, end the master-slave relationship.
PS - USMC@17yo1969+Honorable1971Discharge
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Which "rig from the '70s" would pass any modern emissions test?
None - modern cars need to be heavier to literally carry the weight of regulation. The point being, the mileage stated for this car isn't valid for modern comparisons without accounting for the differences required.
This isn't true. Emissions control equipment added less than 50 lb to the cars.
The reason cars were heavier back then were attributable to a number of causes:
1. the design process was not as optimized as it is now. Nowadays computer-based design tools simulations can determine where material (metal or otherwise) is needed for strength or structural needs, and where added material does not contribute to strength. In the 1970s and before, things just had to be built with heavier material to allow enough engineering safety factor in the design.
2. Thin high strength sheet steel was prohibitively expensive. You can only make a sheet of metal as thin as the largest piece of dirt in the metal (all metal has some dirt or oxidation inclusions in it, it's a fact of life). Steelmaking technology has advanced to where it is now possible to make a thinner sheet of steel (due to improvements in processing that remove much of the dirt or prevent its formation in the first place) using higher-strength alloys. This allows lower weight of the body stampings (fenders, body, doors, etc.).
3. Many cars were "conventionally engineered" - they had separate body and chassis, like a truck. With the advent of optimized body structure design and higher-strength materials modern unibody cars are stronger than the body-on-frame vehicles they replaced.
The weight of emissions-control equipment was limited to a catalytic converter, air pump, hoses, some wiring and maybe a simple computer the size of a thick paperback novel. Not enough to make as big of a difference as you suggest. Modern cars carry far more wiring weight, heavier computers, and they still have catalytic converters.
A pure EV using even (relatively) cheap batteries today can suffice for your day to day commuter, recharging at night at home. For long trips trips, there is this concept, the range extending generator trailer.
If you need to do that sort of hundreds a mile a day driving, no, EVs are not for you. Under one hundred miles a day, which hits like 90% of most folk's driving, the tech is here now and a number of places have after market kits to convert cars and light trucks. Run you around 20 grand or so plus the donor vehicle you get used, then you decide what flavor of batteries you want to invest in first. Kits for like a ford ranger or chevy s-10 or some sedan, all sorts have been made so far. And you can put together your own generator trailer for that trip to see the relatives, etc., just stop and fillerup like normal at any gas station.
Waiting for the three hundred mile range on batteries and five minute recharge option, that I see people saying all the time, means they really aren't interested in them unless they are a millionaire or close to it and can get like a tesla or something with their toy budget, and you still won't get a five minute recharge.
But, 50 -100 mile range and falling into the normal joe sixpack range of cost for a new midrange normal vehicle, you can do it now. You can't do it brand new from some dealer, it will be years and years before they get that cheap, but you *can* do it with the kits.
http://www.google.com/search?electric+conversion+kits
Well I don't know if "people" are stupid, but you sure are, Bub. Reagan pulled us out of a godawful economic train wreck known as the Carter administration. He did this while also TERMINATING the Soviet Union because they couldn't come close to matching American productivity. It was imbeciles such as Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and now Obama who have wrecked the US economy by exporting all production and building a collossal all encompassing welfare state.
Twits like you who belittle Reagan's intellect obviously have never listened to those who knew him personally during that period. People from both sides of the political spectrum. They uniformly found him a physically and mentally very active and vital individual.
I'm a big-government supporter myself, but my guess is that the people whom you refer to actually *like it* when everything goes to shit. That's the way it looks to me, anyway. Those people prefer to have a problem than to allow the government to solve it.
If we find out these things could fly, I'll be very, very angry. Very angry indeed.
They gave us all the love after all. Mothballing and destroying usable technology prototypes because they * could * undermine private car companies, alan greenspan and his 'hands off business' ideology that he himself admitted that was plainly wrong, testifying in front of senate committee in regard to wall street catastrophe just a year ago, corporate rape, outsourcing, everything we have come to love.
you gotta thank the man. pray a little prayer for him, before you go to bed tonight. make sure he rests 'well' in the afterlife.
Read radical news here
It makes sense when you realize that the "clean" janitor screams at you for an hour if you miss the waste basket and introduces a charge to use the bathroom to keep people from making a mess. Oh, and somehow the place doesn't really look any cleaner...
Beyond the basic "what makes you think people who want to run everything will therefore be good at it" question, you big government types need to remember that no matter what you do, the giant rambling apparatus you create *will* later be driven by someone who completely disagrees with you. The benevolent dictator idea only really works when you've got a perfect system for choosing dictators.
Reagan wasn't small government, he just talked about small government.
The government has grown tremendously over the last 50 years, and has accelerated the last 30 years.
I guess we'll see how it all works out, no point arguing with the current crop of Big Government EuroSocialist SlashDotters. I remember when this place used to be kind of a libertarian hang out, now it's like an alternate reality.
PS: How's that big government thing working out in Europe? I mean who could have seen that fail, amirite? Oh, wait - anyone could have seen that coming. And don't give me any bullshit about it being because they can't devalue their currency. They're failing fast because of overspending. Currency devaluation is just stalling the inevitable, like what will happen in the US.
All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands.
The government did something right, then it came back and did something wrong to cover up the fact that they'd done something right.
Typical.
If there is anyone who still trusts the government to do the right thing, got some ocean front property in Arizona for you.
Display some adaptability.
I suggest you move to an EU member state, if you happen to be in the US. I hear things are going great over there. Enjoy the scenic riots and the long march towards chaos as their unsustainable economies collapse under their own weight!
I watched the Reagan administration destroy the large Carter administration solar power program at JPL in 1981, so this does not surprise me at all. They literally did not want any competition for petroleum.
I want that guy's name off of National Airport in the worst way.
People like you make me angry. You're so stupid
I'm not stupid, but apparently I need to work on my deadpan delivery.
Either that, or Tom Lehrer was right when he said satire is obsolete.
Tweet, tweet.
Yeah, Germany is plunging into anarchy as I type this!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Beyond the basic "what makes you think people who want to run everything will therefore be good at it"
That's not the question I posed. The question was, "What makes you think people that don't want to do a job, and don't believe that the job should even be done, would be good at doing the job?"
I love how you dismiss this as "big government." It's not. It's EFFECTIVE government. Something that's been sorely missing for 30 years.
Funny, there aren't in riots in Germany, france, or even scary "socialist" Norway. Seems to be just those few where the glorious private sector and Wall Street Whiz Kids encouraged more and more government debt and then bet against them is where the problems are.
God bless Wall Street!
Stalin and Hitler were not all that far to the left/right but they were both about the same level of authoritarian. go look them up on the chart. Its not a left/right false dialemma its a 2D system not a 1D spectrum; the best model is 2D and we only hurt ourselves trying to cram a 1D line into a 2D plane without losing a great deal of IMPORTANT information.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Ahaha. I love misplaced sarcasm. I said "long march". And Germany's screwed too.
Christ, I thought the US had problems but we're pretty far down in the list of Debt/GDP ratios.
The EU will come crashing down, denying this is simply willful idiocy. Some of the states will come out better than others, but there's going to be a shitload of upheaval no matter what.
Funny, the shit hasn't hit the fan yet. Greece and Spain are the early (and small) failures. Germany's debt/GDP ratio is skyrocketing. I did say "long march". It's not going to happen this month, this year, or probably even in the next 3 years. But that shit is going to collapse under its own weight.
Norway... you're serious? Nobody gives a shit about Norway, it's tiny (about the population of Alabama) and has lots of oil money. Norway, I mean tell me you're joking right?
Volvos had a lot of these same characteristics and didn't look like Pacers--though they were "boxy, but safe"--through the '70's, 80's and most of the 1990's.
Then Ford Corp. bought controlling interest in Volvo and that was that.
How's the libertarian response to the oil disaster going? Had to have the government step in did we?
Europe was hit less hard by the crash than the US, but don't let facts get in the way of your dogma. Idiot.
I'm not libertarian, I'm kind of a socially left Republican or a fiscally right Democrat. Nice stawman though, jackoff. I think hard core libertarians are as delusional as communists. Neither approach works in real life.
As for facts, I'm not talking about the "crash" you dipshit. I'm talking about the simple fact that the EU will fail because ever escalating debt is unsustainable, and ever escalating debt with a currency that's very hard to manipulate is just idiotic. Hope they have fun with their worker's paradise of social programs, because they're going to be fucking the ground within the next 10 years.
FU the 2 people in the back seat are dead in any crash. Wow I'm sooooo impressed with GEO technology(pick any crap car, KIA, mazda, ford, blah, blah, guess what you are still dead, what can't comment now? Oh, that's right your're DEAD!) It only took you 40 years to get to the same standard??? WTF. Old news, young people think they are smarter than their elders, blah, blah, same old story. Funny how we will be in a world war again because the youngins are soooooooo smart. Die MFs you are so smart anyway.
Way up to the top right [+5, Insightful][+5, Informative].
Unfortunately, the "elected officials" you can choose from differ only in which corporate backers they represent as front men. The Corporations have the real influence and power when they want it. The politicians are just talking heads.
Why, yes, I am a bit cynical about democracy as a system, and I do feel that Corporations are inherently amoral, and thus often (small e) evil, why do you ask?
I think we need some very radical changes in the way politicians are financed, elected and observed while in office. Absolutely no corporate financing (even by proxy) might be a good start, but its unrealistic.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Obama believes in government, and it shows... his BP disaster response has been so very effective! He cleaned everything up in days. Unlike George W., whose Katrina response failed because he didn't believe in government enough.
Jimmy also installed solar panels on the White House roof, but Regan ripped them out. Reagan was bought and sold by Big Oil, Big Coal, and the formerly Big Three Auto companies.
You're absolutely right. The government can get things right, just look at how it handled Hurricane Katr... er, wait a minute, a Repug was in charge. But look at how well the government handled the Gulf oil spill! A mere forty day response time! What can't our tax dollars do?!!
... monitor offshore oil drilling and respond to emergencies...?
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Sounds like the same old story that got Oppenhiemer. After witchhunting him out of making any further meaningful contribution after ww2 USA finally figured out they were stabbing* themselves in the foot beaten to first sattelite launch. USA decided needed him and wasn't a mad commo and asked him back to meaningful research.
*yes 'stabbing' - shooting would be obvious and not painful to watch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
I thought the problem with the EV1 was that it was too expensive to be worthwhile.
Just to explain where I'm coming from, back in the 80s as an adolescent I was severely influenced by left wing politics. Indeed, I lived in the Netherlands and over there Reagan was criticised for anything he did. It was left wing fashion and I was influenced by it. But eventually the internet came to my rescue and I learned that there were more sides to a story and that people scorned by the populists actually had valid reasons to choose the way they do and that the matter is not to agree but to respect opinions. The left wings bigots realised only much later what Reagan's influence brought to the world.
So, coming from a left wing background and having thought things over quite a lot, I resolve that Reagan killing off the project is a very sane thing to do. It is NOT the task of a government but of private business to improve technology. A government should merely provide conditions in which healthy competition results in better products for our society. (Healthy meaning good businesses thrive scum bag bastard parasite business are demotivated.)
And with respect to the car at hand, what incentive would manufacturers have to build better cars when a government funded project -with whom you really cannot compete- comes up with a radical new car? I also strongly doubt if every facet of the car is really taken care of. It looks horrible and I wouldn't be surprised if there would be some reason by which the car eventually would be unsaleable and thus becoming a financial liability.
Competition for businesses and policy making for governments. Praise to Reagan!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This is my first post here, but I just had to comment. EMISSIONS. EMISSIONS EMISSIONS EMISSIONS. Efficiency of a car is a balance between how much you're willing to pollute the atmosphere and how much fuel you want to use for every mile. The higher temperature the fuel hits as its burning up in the cylinders, the nastier stuff that starts to get released into the atmosphere. Nitrogen starts to become more reactive at these temperatures and you get some compounds that can do some pretty serious environmental damage. Sure, these cars might have gotten good gas mileage for their time, but I'd be willing to bet they never would have passed an emissions test. If we didn't have these emissions restrictions and environmental concerns, we'd have a much larger limit on where we could be at today.
are we still required to come up with a car analogy?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Ill bite.
"When you elect people that axiomatically believe that government can't do anything right, you get people that intentionally do government badly."
I used to hold this view until I took economics courses and got in the real world. It is not that I oppose government more than I believe in the power of the private sector. When an economic problem exists the market will recover itself best with minimal interference from the government. Case in point, look at the current recession? If banks do not have capital people save because the result is a recession. When people save then banks have capital again and the problem corrects itself. When product A is in short supply and too expensive then the market creates competitors that make an alternative.
Do I think worker safety and environmental standards are not important? I think they are. However, if you have insane environmental standards then businesses will leave and go to China and hurt all of us.
I think with the free market that most actions that the government takes only hurts us most of the time. I think if we let all the big banks fail the risky schemes on wall street would end. ... mark my words another recession is coming from these sharks with derivatives and gold.
What we need right now is less government, less regulations on workers, less taxes, and less lawsuits so we can bring jobs back to the US. We can't stop globalization so we need to compete with EVERYONE. That is not possible right now and this is pretty bad.
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You fail to mention how, in Europe, "left" is the American republican/conservative, and "right" is the American "democrat" (because democrat has changed the past few years from liberal to progressive/socialist). You are just simple mixing up words here.
I thought I remembered the correct numbers in export per GDP. I have no interest in the raw numbers, because with per GDP numbers you have no context.
(Exports per GDP for 2007)
China is #89
USA is #179
Raw exports (2009)
China #1 (GDP of 4.5 trillion)
Germany #2 (GDP of 3.5 trillion)
America #3 (GDP of 14.2 trillion)
The point remains. China is whipping our ass already, and have only developed a small portion of their economy. We're about to experience the joy of being England at the turn of the 20th Century.
Then I'd mount each of the 4 motorized wheels on a more narrow frame, with each able to turn. No nonsense about changing the turning configuration (like the Lull forklift). That's been tried, and the confusion is worse than anything. But you get maximum effectiveness by turning all four, for minimum effort and angle.
Now, I'd minimize the effective cross-sectional area, by staggering the seats. No two persons' shoulders need conflict, if one person's shoulders are next to the feet of the next person. Space savings can then go to either additional safety (side air bags, foam padding) or reduced drag. That said, I'd make up to 4 rows of 2 seats, allowing it to be a full family size vehicle. Make them heavily reclined (as for a sports car), and you will again minimize drag. That would make the car 12' long.
Although I'd probably use an underframe similar to a Ford F150 of C-bars, the main body I would build out of bicycle-helmet style styrofoam, with kevlar and Nomex applied to the outside of the body to make it strong.
After this, I'd swap out the luggage area for batteries. Sell the car with SLAs as standard, with the replacements always being Lithium Ion Phosphate. That way, as the SLAs wear out, they will be replaced with longer-life, non-explosive, higher-range batteries. As the owner saved money on his gas, he'd be able to increase the range of the car. The front, I would swap out for a low-power gasoline generator. If the owner knows that he'll be driving farther than his range, he fires up the generator as his first option.
Now, the undercarriage: since all the exhaust systems are no longer needed, we can make that smooth. In fact, with a little care, you can put a 4.25' x 10' x 3" storage area down there, so that the owner can transport sheet rock, plywood, or whatnot.
Do all that, and I think I'd have a car that was moderately useful to me, a real gas saver (but, as you say, apples and oranges... just as with the Prius, you can't really tell what the mileage is), and quite safe.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
And you are positively clueless here. This long-running bad joke about how a devolving argument can be magically declared dead by the invocation of "Nazi" was dumb in 1990 and dumb today.
Add to that the fact that these days Godwin does nothing but provide a legal shield to the Wikipedia's hosting of child porn, and all we have is a pathetic CP'er who isn't nearly as witty as he thinks he is, propped up by witless regurgitators like you.
Case in point, look at the current recession? If banks do not have capital people save because the result is a recession. When people save then banks have capital again and the problem corrects itself. When product A is in short supply and too expensive then the market creates competitors that make an alternative.
That's quite an interesting example you've chosen. The roots of recession trace themselves back to the deregulation of financial sector. We have the repeal of Glass-Steagall that allowed the largest banks to underwrite the CDOs and the mortgage backed securities that caused the mess. We also have very people that derailed the world economy continuing to say how "they know better" and off balance sheet structured investments should remain off the record, even though there the very same instruments that Enron used to hide their debt. (More on Enron later.) We have the deregulation in the 80s that ushered in ARMs which caused the Savings & Loan collapse and appeared again in this banking collapse. Without oversight, we now have the financial advisors who are paid by their clients to given them advice, lying to their clients because the advisors are betting that the client will lose money on the investments.
Should we have bailed out the big banks? My initial reaction like everyone is a big "no," but the fact is that they alone account for a significant fraction of GDP. We simply can't let that evaporate. What should have been done, and still could be done, is to simply cap the size of the banks. You can't be "too big to fail," if you're not too big to start. But of course the brain trust on Wall Street and the conservative think tanks say that this would be "too much" and we should simply let these people continue to be rewarded for their expertise. But of course these are the same folks that say that by allowing the largest purchaser of prescription drugs to negotiate prices like every other purchaser, that would now be a government price control.
Enron showed us how the deregulation of the energy markets led to rampant manipulation of prices and energy supplies, most notably in California.
Even these last two months with the Deepwater Horizon and the West Virginian mine disaster, we've seen how deregulation and intentionally lax oversight has led to safety equipment not being tested, inspection reports being filled in by the inspectee.
You say that "the real world" and an introductory economics class taught you that the only way to succeed is to compete is to race to the bottom, and that regulation and safety standards cost jobs. Well the thing is, as someone that has lived in "the real world" all his life, has learned that there's this little thing called "data." We've heard these same complaints for over a hundred years, and yet whenever regulations are imposed, the economy continue to grow, sometimes even faster than before(!). History simply doesn't back this up this claim.
You claim we need "less taxes" but taxes are at the lowest rate in 50 years. FIFTY YEARS! We have less taxes, and yet the economy sucks as hard as every. So that's not the problem. You talk about "less lawsuits," but why shouldn't someone be held responsible for their actions?
You say we should race to the bottom. Well, I've been boogey man China. It's shit. You have bought into the false choice that we can either voluntarily submit to birth defects and carcinogen soups or we can have birth defects and carcinogen soups thrust upon us. That's not the way how history has taught us that economics actually work.
For all your talk about "the real world," you haven't actually examined it. You've only been paying attention to a cartoon version of it. The deregulators have consistently been spectacularly wrong.