Its common slang, at lest in the US. I'm guessing it has roots from either the past newspaper industry 'dropping' their new edition or military supply drops.
Our company pays for employee coffee. We have coffee machines in every breakroom with coffee and cream and sugar available. It has been found to increase productivity and reduce the number of coffee breaks that employees take. $11,000 for coffee seems awfully low, honestly.
I can see one side of mandating these connections. Say you're building a house and decide its going to be off-grid solar and water in North Carolina. Like 99% of the population, you don't buy the house outright and have a mortgage on it. You lose your job, you default and the house goes into foreclosure. The connection of these utilities is important to a lot of people who might buy your home since it's seen as a necessary amenity by many, so the bank or the homebuyer is now on the hook for those setups, even though you didn't own the home outright. To these people, buying a car without these connections is like buying a car without tires on it.
While true that they don't need special equipment for a small number of homes, they will have to spend quite a bit on the grid if that number continues to rise because the grid is currently designed for central, not distributed, power generation. Someone mentioned it in another thread, but separating the 'grid connection' cost from the power cost is the best solution to this and is done in other countries. The power companies who don't use this method are essentially treating the grid as a cost center, and I think that's why solar terrifies them. Hopefully they'll figure it out sooner or later.
This could be a case of mistaken nomenclature. Sure, it sounds like its just a guy that won't talk, but I doubt they put everyone on there that doesn't talk or the list would be a mile long, which is what they're trying to avoid. However, that guy, thats always around crime and has been questioned regarding 10 gang incidents, but is supposedly not in the gang, and won't talk? It signifies affiliation. It also points out which areas are under severe threat from gang intimidation.
I don't know, they didn't really go into too much detail about the term, but its mentioned alongside gang activities, so that's my guess. Point is that we're being really pedantic about two words that weren't expounded upon as a reason to scrap what appears to be a pretty level-headed approach to prosecution. Sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me.
The monkey studies on this was really interesting. The same toy disposition even effected sexes of monkeys, repeatable in more than one study. It proves that there's a biological aspect behind this predisposition. Of course, we're all wired differently and that doesn't mean everyone SHOULD have those same predisposition, it just explains why a 'normal' behavior exists.
One anecdote does not make it a random bug, multiple reviewers have mentioned the bug as well and it is considered a serious issue for the PC platform by many, not just me. Some people seem to think it has to do with the physics calculations in the game or a problem with the game's lighting engine (which changes daytime based on the length the game has been open). It happens regardless of settings, you can play at high/high with everything else on and it happens, or medium/low with everything off (what I'm running at now) and it happens. VRAM usage has been ruled out too, one tester got the settings lower than the card's VRAM and still got the bug while staring up at the sky and even in the menus. It only starts up after a fast travel or cutscene, so it can be mitigated (for a while) by restarting the game and hoping it doesn't pop up again. Sometimes it shows up again after one cutscene, other times it doesn't show up for 5 hours.
This bug is the result of garbage QA, and ubisoft should be ashamed for the crap they released. I feel dirty for even buying it.
I know that the fuel has a lot of usable energy left that could be used in politically toxic reactors. I'm curious how difficult it is to transport that stuff? I know we use cooling ponds ad current reactors, is that the stuff that's the most lucrative in breeder reactors? How do you transport that kind of material? Or is the good breeder fuel just the stuff that has been moved the casks/etc that doesn't get so hot and volatile.
I have it, and I have a really good computer with two GTX 770's in SLI. Regardless of whether I play the game in single or SLI mode, no matter what the settings are, there is a game-crippling bug that pops up randomly and forces you to restart the game to make it playable. Its every 4-5 seconds you get a masssive quarter-second stutter and your vision flips if you play with a mouse. People with low end hardware, high end hardware, low and high settings all have this problem. If you encounter it and try to play through it its the most unbearable existence in gaming ever.
This is on top of the light flickering issue, the stuck issues (I experienced one last night after the recent patch), and everything else. It is completely unacceptable that I'm having to play the game on low just to make it functional and have to restart it every hour or two if the stutterbug pops up. It is, without a doubt, the buggiest game I've ever bought.
What a crock of shit man. Drop the partisan politics and learn about checks and balances. The executive branch shouldn't be legislating, no matter what party.
The amount of draw in cold locations is not obvious because a lot of people use gas for heating instead of electric. Total energy usage is greater when the heat/ac is on, regardless of location, but total electricity usage is not. The transition to renewables means less gas is also a given, so its important to look at it from a power perspective.
That said, the Florida example is a terrible one, I'm guessing you don't live there? The sun sets close to 8 PM in the middle of the summer, the layover of peak usage is because the house is still being cooled down by AC.
Part of the highway trust fund deals with expanding capacity, which is directly related to the quantity, not damage, the vehicles produce. If we didn't have cars on the road, we wouldn't need such a massive network of roads with high capacity. In that sense, there has to be a mod on the calculation based purely on the existence of more traffic on the road, not just its weight.
Normally, I do. Last year I bought Black Flag around new years for like $35 and enjoyed it immensely, and I bought Bioshock Infinite during the summer steam sale for like $10. I guess ubisoft they bought some good karma with black flag and I was too trusting, shame on me. I thought the other guy's post on this thread talking about how a bad/good release in a franchise effects the next iteration's sales was very apropos. I feel I fell into that trap.
I have the same processor as you too, am playing at 1080p and the game is installed on an SSD and is played on Windows 7. I had to jump AA down to FXAA (post-processing, not real AA), disable bloom, disable ambient occlusion, and notch down a few other settings, vaguely recall shadow and lighting, but haven't played in two days so I'm not sure. Oddly, switching from fullscreen to borderless windowed (I have two monitors) improved performance, when in all cases the opposite should happen.
Every couple seconds the game has a small 'hiccup' for a few frames which is visibly noticeable and jarring. It makes smooth gameplay virtually impossible. I find it so unbearable I am not willing to play the game until its fixed. Also, I've experienced a lot of the position glitching issues you mentioned. They crop up most when climbing/descending. At one point, I was climbing on a ledge that had a ledge 'undercarriage' if you will, and the character only made it halfway up, got stuck in the undercarriage, and slowly slipped down into the pile of enemies I was running from. Not fond memories of the original Counter Strike clipping issues with vehicles on servers came to mind.
Problem is the game plays like shit no matter what hardware you're using. The claim against AMD is unfounded because a GTX770, a near-flagship card, can't play the game worth a damn, even with lowered settings. I can't beleive I wasted money buying that garbage.
A $500 graphics card and a high end processor making it playable is not acceptable. I have a GTX770 and an i5 (3.4ghz) and it plays like garbage, no matter if I lower the settings significantly. The game hiccups every 5 seconds or so noticeably and suffers random spikes during big action, making it difficult to keep track of your character. There are several beautiful games with not-so-lower graphics that have come out in the past couple years that I can run over 100FPS. Thief, Tomb Raider, Skyrim with 4k textures and mods, Battlefield 4, among others.
AC:U is a poorly designed peice of shit. If it was designed better, you'd be getting more performance with your current hardware. I bought it early because I thought Black Flag was excellent, serves me right I guess.
Only if you live in one of the states in which they have a physical presence. This refers to someone like me, who pays no sales tax to Newegg because they don't have a presence in my state.
Not sure what the emphasis of the Delaware registration is. Delaware is well-known to be the best place in the US to register a business. Most companies of any appreciable size are registered in Delaware.
Just curious, are you on the west coast? Something I noticed is that these newsline stories tend to focus on companies headquartered on the west coast. I just looked, and apparently California is only ~7% black. I wonder if diversity is a bit stronger in different areas, maybe an east coast IT company? Of course, this brings up the topic of lack of hispanics in IT out there, but that's another story.
Speaking of hippies and uniforms, The stoner/hippie subset in the late 90's made me see it. My brother would always go for that kind of odd stuff that fit that style, and I thought it was fairly unique, until I dropped them off at a Phish concert. He may have looked different among his peers at high school, but damned if they all didn't look exactly the same at that concert. Desheveled hair usually in a white-guy-fro fashion, birkenstocks everywhere, and band/tyedye/simple t-shirts with ragged looking khaki colored shorts. Another example was the goth stuff, while each one may look a little different, as a group they all looked the same. Saw that when downtown after a concert ended.
I agree entirely, and that's what I was referencing when I mentioned that it could compete on performance. A full realization of SteamOS would be huge for linux, but consensus seems to be it is dead in the water. I really wish it'd take off because none of the other console makers have been daring enough to work touchpad-style input into a controller, which is the one thing that could bring RTSes and other strategy games to the console successfully. It would also make FPSes bearable to anyone whose ever used a mouse. I realize there would be a tearning curve, but the analog joystick input is inherently limited and the circle touchpad breaks that input glass ceiling currently in place.
Until Linux can bring something compelling to the table, gaming on linux is only done for one of three reasons: -Convenience, people who use a linux box as their main box and don't like switching to another OS for their games (SMALL market but growing) -Politics, people who feel strongly enough about open source to write out any other OS as an option -Novelty, people who enjoy tinkering with the OS and the freedom it offers, and want to make it work if possible
Gaming is, at its very basic roots, about immersion. You can't immerse yourself with graphical artifacts, having to fight to make games work on your platform, and having limited options on what you're able to play. You shouldn't have to work to be able to play, that's only enjoyable for the tinkerers of the world or if (20 years ago) that was the only option. Its no longer 1995 guys. Until linux can offer something that is worth considering, it is not a direct competitor. "It's open source" is only a valid to a small subset invested in the politics of it, and is currently the only thing Linux has going for it other than cost. Very few are going to consider open source a heavily weighted bullet point on the pros/cons list vs other platforms. Theoretically, Linux could compete on cost or performance, and more recently the vanishingly small possibility of Valve exclusives with SteamOS. Until it can do so without the downsides, its not going anywhere.
The number of people who exclusively use linux is vanishingly small precisely because linux is rarely capable of standing on its own for all of any given user's needs. Until that's addressed, people will have their second PC/Console/DualBoot/MAC for gaming, and linux will be seen as an inferior choice because more work and less product plague the platform compared to your alternative.
I realize the worst case scenarios he was mentioning were in reference to storm surges, the problem is the lack of reality in the suggestions to stop climate change. Its already happening and sea levels will likely go up 2 feet by 2100. Here's where it gets tricky: amortize the cost of mitigating disaster in these areas to those 84 years. Its called levees, its not that hard, its expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the alternative.
The alternative is to turn back time, because we dont have the technology or global consensus to stop climate change. Imagining anything else is living in fantasy land. There are countries who have a vested interest in economic growth for stability (china, brazil), countries who would actually benefit from climate change (russia), countries whose very livelihood is tied up in the current demands (OPEC). nothing that will prevent the sea level from rising till 2100 will succeed unless all parties involved cooperate.
So, next option: we lead by example and exert pressure. Doing so requires the countries that do so to sacrifice their economic growth without guarantee that it will slow down the change because developing countries are ramping up their economies on dirty coal and oil. if anything, it stagnates co2 at the cost of the world economic growth.
why is economic growth so important? Because the best way to deal with climate change is to outcompete fossil fuels. development in fusion, fission, solar, wind, and geothermal are a must. We can't get rid of a significant portion of fuel use anyway until we get compact baseload level power for freighters, so advances in power production or storage are vital to stemming fuel usage. overly punitive approaches to mitigating climate change only result in less ability to react should our predictions be wrong. it is also worth noting that one of the first things to go in tough times is R&D, so implementing onerous restrictions on ourselves could cause damage as well.
look at how far we've come in 100 years in terms of tech and as a society. some of the things we can do today like large building projects take fractions of manpower, time, and effort to acheive. hell, we were barely just flying and driving 100 years ago. where will we be in 50 years? Probably in a better position to manage the issue than we are now. Even if we arent? We can still build those damn levees for far less than the cost of implementing heavy restrictions now. I have confidence in human ability to adapt and engineer out of our problems.
now, 'worst case' predictions might happen so we should prepare? This is what i have a problem with. You sound like a doomsday prepper. I doubt you build bunkers and several year stockpiles because there might be a global war in the future, do you? Thats what the alarmist argument sounds to anyone with a decent grasp on the time scales involved. Im not saying we shouldnt implement reachable goals to help slow things down, but the drastic requests of many proponents are just assinine and ruin good potential results. you have to factor in the lack of control countries have on a global scale, the momentum already behind things as they are, and the damage that mitigation efforts will have to the current and future economy. it only serves to distract from real efforts that can be done.
Closed cabs are great in theory, but sometimes in practice they don't work out too well for many applications. I commonly see open bed trucks used in rural/dirty jobs such as landscaping, construction, and farming/ranching. It usally doesn't make economic sense for a person in those professions to own two vehicles, and they need easy open access to materials in the bed or small machinery (in the case of four-wheelers or specific landscaping machines). Some jobs, like the Cable Guy or Electrician or HVAC dude, yeah, they can't use an open bed, but that's what the Sprinter is for. Also of note, you're playing like 30% more up front for that closed bed.
Disclaimer, I don't and probably never will own a truck, but my Mother does for her small landscaping business. Mulch, pine needles, stone, the aerator, and so on sound like a miserable existence in a Sprinter for her line of work.
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Its common slang, at lest in the US. I'm guessing it has roots from either the past newspaper industry 'dropping' their new edition or military supply drops.
Our company pays for employee coffee. We have coffee machines in every breakroom with coffee and cream and sugar available. It has been found to increase productivity and reduce the number of coffee breaks that employees take. $11,000 for coffee seems awfully low, honestly.
I can see one side of mandating these connections. Say you're building a house and decide its going to be off-grid solar and water in North Carolina. Like 99% of the population, you don't buy the house outright and have a mortgage on it. You lose your job, you default and the house goes into foreclosure. The connection of these utilities is important to a lot of people who might buy your home since it's seen as a necessary amenity by many, so the bank or the homebuyer is now on the hook for those setups, even though you didn't own the home outright. To these people, buying a car without these connections is like buying a car without tires on it.
While true that they don't need special equipment for a small number of homes, they will have to spend quite a bit on the grid if that number continues to rise because the grid is currently designed for central, not distributed, power generation. Someone mentioned it in another thread, but separating the 'grid connection' cost from the power cost is the best solution to this and is done in other countries. The power companies who don't use this method are essentially treating the grid as a cost center, and I think that's why solar terrifies them. Hopefully they'll figure it out sooner or later.
This could be a case of mistaken nomenclature. Sure, it sounds like its just a guy that won't talk, but I doubt they put everyone on there that doesn't talk or the list would be a mile long, which is what they're trying to avoid. However, that guy, thats always around crime and has been questioned regarding 10 gang incidents, but is supposedly not in the gang, and won't talk? It signifies affiliation. It also points out which areas are under severe threat from gang intimidation.
I don't know, they didn't really go into too much detail about the term, but its mentioned alongside gang activities, so that's my guess. Point is that we're being really pedantic about two words that weren't expounded upon as a reason to scrap what appears to be a pretty level-headed approach to prosecution. Sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me.
The monkey studies on this was really interesting. The same toy disposition even effected sexes of monkeys, repeatable in more than one study. It proves that there's a biological aspect behind this predisposition. Of course, we're all wired differently and that doesn't mean everyone SHOULD have those same predisposition, it just explains why a 'normal' behavior exists.
One anecdote does not make it a random bug, multiple reviewers have mentioned the bug as well and it is considered a serious issue for the PC platform by many, not just me. Some people seem to think it has to do with the physics calculations in the game or a problem with the game's lighting engine (which changes daytime based on the length the game has been open). It happens regardless of settings, you can play at high/high with everything else on and it happens, or medium/low with everything off (what I'm running at now) and it happens. VRAM usage has been ruled out too, one tester got the settings lower than the card's VRAM and still got the bug while staring up at the sky and even in the menus. It only starts up after a fast travel or cutscene, so it can be mitigated (for a while) by restarting the game and hoping it doesn't pop up again. Sometimes it shows up again after one cutscene, other times it doesn't show up for 5 hours.
This bug is the result of garbage QA, and ubisoft should be ashamed for the crap they released. I feel dirty for even buying it.
I know that the fuel has a lot of usable energy left that could be used in politically toxic reactors. I'm curious how difficult it is to transport that stuff? I know we use cooling ponds ad current reactors, is that the stuff that's the most lucrative in breeder reactors? How do you transport that kind of material? Or is the good breeder fuel just the stuff that has been moved the casks/etc that doesn't get so hot and volatile.
I have it, and I have a really good computer with two GTX 770's in SLI. Regardless of whether I play the game in single or SLI mode, no matter what the settings are, there is a game-crippling bug that pops up randomly and forces you to restart the game to make it playable. Its every 4-5 seconds you get a masssive quarter-second stutter and your vision flips if you play with a mouse. People with low end hardware, high end hardware, low and high settings all have this problem. If you encounter it and try to play through it its the most unbearable existence in gaming ever.
This is on top of the light flickering issue, the stuck issues (I experienced one last night after the recent patch), and everything else. It is completely unacceptable that I'm having to play the game on low just to make it functional and have to restart it every hour or two if the stutterbug pops up. It is, without a doubt, the buggiest game I've ever bought.
What a crock of shit man. Drop the partisan politics and learn about checks and balances. The executive branch shouldn't be legislating, no matter what party.
The amount of draw in cold locations is not obvious because a lot of people use gas for heating instead of electric. Total energy usage is greater when the heat/ac is on, regardless of location, but total electricity usage is not. The transition to renewables means less gas is also a given, so its important to look at it from a power perspective.
That said, the Florida example is a terrible one, I'm guessing you don't live there? The sun sets close to 8 PM in the middle of the summer, the layover of peak usage is because the house is still being cooled down by AC.
Part of the highway trust fund deals with expanding capacity, which is directly related to the quantity, not damage, the vehicles produce. If we didn't have cars on the road, we wouldn't need such a massive network of roads with high capacity. In that sense, there has to be a mod on the calculation based purely on the existence of more traffic on the road, not just its weight.
Normally, I do. Last year I bought Black Flag around new years for like $35 and enjoyed it immensely, and I bought Bioshock Infinite during the summer steam sale for like $10. I guess ubisoft they bought some good karma with black flag and I was too trusting, shame on me. I thought the other guy's post on this thread talking about how a bad/good release in a franchise effects the next iteration's sales was very apropos. I feel I fell into that trap.
I have the same processor as you too, am playing at 1080p and the game is installed on an SSD and is played on Windows 7. I had to jump AA down to FXAA (post-processing, not real AA), disable bloom, disable ambient occlusion, and notch down a few other settings, vaguely recall shadow and lighting, but haven't played in two days so I'm not sure. Oddly, switching from fullscreen to borderless windowed (I have two monitors) improved performance, when in all cases the opposite should happen.
Every couple seconds the game has a small 'hiccup' for a few frames which is visibly noticeable and jarring. It makes smooth gameplay virtually impossible. I find it so unbearable I am not willing to play the game until its fixed. Also, I've experienced a lot of the position glitching issues you mentioned. They crop up most when climbing/descending. At one point, I was climbing on a ledge that had a ledge 'undercarriage' if you will, and the character only made it halfway up, got stuck in the undercarriage, and slowly slipped down into the pile of enemies I was running from. Not fond memories of the original Counter Strike clipping issues with vehicles on servers came to mind.
Problem is the game plays like shit no matter what hardware you're using. The claim against AMD is unfounded because a GTX770, a near-flagship card, can't play the game worth a damn, even with lowered settings. I can't beleive I wasted money buying that garbage.
A $500 graphics card and a high end processor making it playable is not acceptable. I have a GTX770 and an i5 (3.4ghz) and it plays like garbage, no matter if I lower the settings significantly. The game hiccups every 5 seconds or so noticeably and suffers random spikes during big action, making it difficult to keep track of your character. There are several beautiful games with not-so-lower graphics that have come out in the past couple years that I can run over 100FPS. Thief, Tomb Raider, Skyrim with 4k textures and mods, Battlefield 4, among others.
AC:U is a poorly designed peice of shit. If it was designed better, you'd be getting more performance with your current hardware. I bought it early because I thought Black Flag was excellent, serves me right I guess.
Only if you live in one of the states in which they have a physical presence. This refers to someone like me, who pays no sales tax to Newegg because they don't have a presence in my state.
All I want for Christmas is merit-based politics instead of partisan scorekeeping. Is that too much to ask?
Unfortunately, yes :(
Not sure what the emphasis of the Delaware registration is. Delaware is well-known to be the best place in the US to register a business. Most companies of any appreciable size are registered in Delaware.
Just curious, are you on the west coast? Something I noticed is that these newsline stories tend to focus on companies headquartered on the west coast. I just looked, and apparently California is only ~7% black. I wonder if diversity is a bit stronger in different areas, maybe an east coast IT company? Of course, this brings up the topic of lack of hispanics in IT out there, but that's another story.
Speaking of hippies and uniforms, The stoner/hippie subset in the late 90's made me see it. My brother would always go for that kind of odd stuff that fit that style, and I thought it was fairly unique, until I dropped them off at a Phish concert. He may have looked different among his peers at high school, but damned if they all didn't look exactly the same at that concert. Desheveled hair usually in a white-guy-fro fashion, birkenstocks everywhere, and band/tyedye/simple t-shirts with ragged looking khaki colored shorts. Another example was the goth stuff, while each one may look a little different, as a group they all looked the same. Saw that when downtown after a concert ended.
I agree entirely, and that's what I was referencing when I mentioned that it could compete on performance. A full realization of SteamOS would be huge for linux, but consensus seems to be it is dead in the water. I really wish it'd take off because none of the other console makers have been daring enough to work touchpad-style input into a controller, which is the one thing that could bring RTSes and other strategy games to the console successfully. It would also make FPSes bearable to anyone whose ever used a mouse. I realize there would be a tearning curve, but the analog joystick input is inherently limited and the circle touchpad breaks that input glass ceiling currently in place.
Until Linux can bring something compelling to the table, gaming on linux is only done for one of three reasons:
-Convenience, people who use a linux box as their main box and don't like switching to another OS for their games (SMALL market but growing)
-Politics, people who feel strongly enough about open source to write out any other OS as an option
-Novelty, people who enjoy tinkering with the OS and the freedom it offers, and want to make it work if possible
Gaming is, at its very basic roots, about immersion. You can't immerse yourself with graphical artifacts, having to fight to make games work on your platform, and having limited options on what you're able to play. You shouldn't have to work to be able to play, that's only enjoyable for the tinkerers of the world or if (20 years ago) that was the only option. Its no longer 1995 guys. Until linux can offer something that is worth considering, it is not a direct competitor. "It's open source" is only a valid to a small subset invested in the politics of it, and is currently the only thing Linux has going for it other than cost. Very few are going to consider open source a heavily weighted bullet point on the pros/cons list vs other platforms. Theoretically, Linux could compete on cost or performance, and more recently the vanishingly small possibility of Valve exclusives with SteamOS. Until it can do so without the downsides, its not going anywhere.
The number of people who exclusively use linux is vanishingly small precisely because linux is rarely capable of standing on its own for all of any given user's needs. Until that's addressed, people will have their second PC/Console/DualBoot/MAC for gaming, and linux will be seen as an inferior choice because more work and less product plague the platform compared to your alternative.
I realize the worst case scenarios he was mentioning were in reference to storm surges, the problem is the lack of reality in the suggestions to stop climate change. Its already happening and sea levels will likely go up 2 feet by 2100. Here's where it gets tricky: amortize the cost of mitigating disaster in these areas to those 84 years. Its called levees, its not that hard, its expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the alternative.
The alternative is to turn back time, because we dont have the technology or global consensus to stop climate change. Imagining anything else is living in fantasy land. There are countries who have a vested interest in economic growth for stability (china, brazil), countries who would actually benefit from climate change (russia), countries whose very livelihood is tied up in the current demands (OPEC). nothing that will prevent the sea level from rising till 2100 will succeed unless all parties involved cooperate.
So, next option: we lead by example and exert pressure. Doing so requires the countries that do so to sacrifice their economic growth without guarantee that it will slow down the change because developing countries are ramping up their economies on dirty coal and oil. if anything, it stagnates co2 at the cost of the world economic growth.
why is economic growth so important? Because the best way to deal with climate change is to outcompete fossil fuels. development in fusion, fission, solar, wind, and geothermal are a must. We can't get rid of a significant portion of fuel use anyway until we get compact baseload level power for freighters, so advances in power production or storage are vital to stemming fuel usage. overly punitive approaches to mitigating climate change only result in less ability to react should our predictions be wrong. it is also worth noting that one of the first things to go in tough times is R&D, so implementing onerous restrictions on ourselves could cause damage as well.
look at how far we've come in 100 years in terms of tech and as a society. some of the things we can do today like large building projects take fractions of manpower, time, and effort to acheive. hell, we were barely just flying and driving 100 years ago. where will we be in 50 years? Probably in a better position to manage the issue than we are now. Even if we arent? We can still build those damn levees for far less than the cost of implementing heavy restrictions now. I have confidence in human ability to adapt and engineer out of our problems.
now, 'worst case' predictions might happen so we should prepare? This is what i have a problem with. You sound like a doomsday prepper. I doubt you build bunkers and several year stockpiles because there might be a global war in the future, do you? Thats what the alarmist argument sounds to anyone with a decent grasp on the time scales involved. Im not saying we shouldnt implement reachable goals to help slow things down, but the drastic requests of many proponents are just assinine and ruin good potential results. you have to factor in the lack of control countries have on a global scale, the momentum already behind things as they are, and the damage that mitigation efforts will have to the current and future economy. it only serves to distract from real efforts that can be done.
Closed cabs are great in theory, but sometimes in practice they don't work out too well for many applications. I commonly see open bed trucks used in rural/dirty jobs such as landscaping, construction, and farming/ranching. It usally doesn't make economic sense for a person in those professions to own two vehicles, and they need easy open access to materials in the bed or small machinery (in the case of four-wheelers or specific landscaping machines). Some jobs, like the Cable Guy or Electrician or HVAC dude, yeah, they can't use an open bed, but that's what the Sprinter is for. Also of note, you're playing like 30% more up front for that closed bed.
Disclaimer, I don't and probably never will own a truck, but my Mother does for her small landscaping business. Mulch, pine needles, stone, the aerator, and so on sound like a miserable existence in a Sprinter for her line of work.