I know the difference but was not even thinking of "lead", the material. I was distracted while typing the brief post which when I typed it was timely and, I thought, of interest to the Slashdot community. I was thinking of "lead" (pronounced "leed") as in "to lead" while reading the original article in one window and composing my post in another and keeping an eye on the clock with little time before I needed to tend to something. I'm not a grammar NAZI, but this sort of error usually sticks out at me when I read it, and I would have caught it had I spent an extra moment on it. The error was one of attention rather than ignorance.
I am not offended that you flagged it. We would all benefit from being a little more careful in what we post both on matters of content and style. It was however a minor error on your part to presume ignorance when simple carelessness was a sufficient explaination. Another thing we would all benefit from is not presuming each other to be either ignorant or persons of ill will. Sometime people of goodwill simply disagree, and sometimes people of goodwill simply make a typical human error.
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." - George Washington, first President of the US
If people would spend more time reading what our founders said and wrote, and just a tiny bit less time on pop culture, we might be a little bit less messed-up. They designed the American system and left us both the operating manual (the Constitution) and their design notes (extensive writings, both for and against the choices they made see: "Federalist Papers" and "Anti-Federalist Papers" and all thier other books and writings).
Yes, Heritage (a "think tank", NOT the GOP) published a paper endorsing an individual mandate on health insurance, but you guys on the left need to become a bit more honest about waving that report around as evidence that Republicans were for the concept of "Obamacare" up until "a black guy" was for it (always that nasty little accusation of racism, from the party (the Democrats) that owned all the slaves and went on to found the KKK). ONE report from ONE "conservative" think tank does NOT establish the beliefs of the GOP any more than ONE report on ANYTHING from a "progressive" think tank establishes that as official Democrat policy. It's also important to stop accidentally failing to report that the very same Heritage organization has long published rants against individial mandates ( HERE is one example I could quickly find for this post ). Sure, Mitt Romney (in conjunction with a Democratic state legislature) did "Romneycare", but let's face it - that was in loony liberal Kennedy-land and most Republicans from the rest of the country oppose it (it was one of the biggest problems he had in winning the GOP nomination in 2012)
In October 2009 the Democrats who were then running congress by a huge majority changed the locks on the capitol hill meeting rooms so they could keep Republicans out when they wanted to. (they did this to stop Republicans exposing the involvement of Democrats in the 2008 home loan meltdown activity at Countrywide, but they then used those locked rooms to exclude Republicans from the secret healthcare reform negotiations which Obama had promised would air in their entirety live on C-SPAN)
And here's an admittedly biased link to a TEA Party site, used here to point out their frustration with the fact that the "establishment" wing (the lifetime politicians who like big government) of the GOP keeps doing SYMBOLIC votes against Obamacare but then keeps actually fully funding it. The Washington elites of both parties have done stuff like that to their base voters on many issues for decades, but the internet is exposing it.
Oh, and if you are in denial about the corporate lobbyists who climbed into bed with Obama on Obamacare, here is a link to a story explaining WHY big insurance got on board (they originally fought it, but then they got admitted to the closed-door meetings WE the public were shut out of). Also see this link on big Pharma and big Insurance climbing on board and throwing money at Democrat politicians. While many organizations and lobbying groups were involved in the "secret" negotiations, the names of most of the individuals involved are NOT known to Republicans who repeatedly demanded the names and were denied.
Let me further point out that when the Obama administration thinks a Republican governor is breaking a law, they run to the federal courts - something they have NOT done (so I cannot link to it here) to any governor over his/her refusal to create a state exchange - a tacit admission that the governors are obeying the law.
Since I have validated everything in the post you said was so full of falsehoods, whereas YOU provided NO evidence ANY of the claims was false, that previous post was the correct one and yours was the loser
Yeah, those wars cost money... but before we abandoned the place there was the hope that over the long-run we'd end-up saving money since we'd no longer need to keep providing forces to protect Saddam's neighbors from him (as we'd done for MANY years) and not need to periodically wage more limited wars to push him back into is own borders (see 1991 gulf war). Before the current drive to pull-out and abandon Afghanistan, there was the hope that enough years w/o the Taliban and with kids of both genders getting a proper education the place would become a better and more peaceful place that would prevent it being a launchpad for future violence (again, saving many billions from any future wars, post-terror attack re-building, etc)
Obama's "stimulus" law, however, borrowed-and-spent (in one law passed in one year) more money than both of Bush's wars cost in ten years... so some perspective is called for
We have dramatically reduced American military spending as a portion of the federal budget. It used to be the biggest item, now Social Security and Medicare are both bigger. The truth is that NASA's entire budget is so small it's just a "rounding error" in the federal budget. Obama could have doubled it with not much impact to the nation's budget if he had cared to do so. His one-year stimulus program could have funded NASA for 50+ years
WHY would you want all the federal people packing?
As an old guy, I remember when you could go to an airport, walk-up to the counter, buy a ticket (for cash with no ID) hand the person at the ticket counter your suitcase (which went right-onto the conveyor out to the guys who loaded the planes) and then you could walk over to the "jet way" where you handed-over the ticket and walked onto the plane. No searches, no background checks, no grope-fests, no microwaves, no x-rays, no metal detectors. Flying was convenient and a generally good experience (the worst bits were sub-par food and jet-lag). No planes were falling from the skies or crashing into buildings.
The IRS used to mostly scare people with auditors (scary-geeky guys with glasses, green eye-shades and pocket protectors)
ATF? There was a day when they did not exist, and even after that a long time when the only people who ever saw them were liquor store and gun store owners who were being periodically checked for records compliance. When they pulled the Waco-thing, I remember having conversations will friends of all political stripes and we were all shocked that the ATF had all that tactical gear, and tanks and helicopters and was capable of doing a large-scale military-style assault on any group of Americans. (The Waco people were NUTS, but the scope, equipment, and scale of the ATF was a real eye-opener at that moment)
We are being turned into a police state and the young people who've never known America to be any different, very sadly, do not even know this or more importantly feel it at a gut-level the way this old vet does. I'm one of those old guys who gets a tear in his eye when he hears the national anthem and loves to see a flag flapping in the wind and who has not understood why so many younger folks do not seem to love the country at a gut-level in the same way... but I am starting to see that the country they have grown-up knowing has been developing a very different nature than the country I have lived with. Much of it is with the un-spoken threat (the same govt using the threat is too PC to SAY the words) that if we do not do this then "crazy radical Muslims" will blow us all up. We're supposed to forget that we've had to "deal with" radical violent Muslim forces every few decades since Jefferson was president (and never before did we do it by militarizing at home). They do not want us to notice that they are the ones who invited the wave of Muslim immigrants and visitors (both legals and illegals via leaky borders and poor visa tracking). They also do not want us to remember that it was their policies on how to handle hijackers that led the people on the 9-11 flights to not immediately resist, but that no American in his/her right mind would fail to try to stop or even kill any post 9-11 hijackers (and therefore we probably need LESS airport security now than we've ever needed before) We are not supposed to notice that many of the military-style law enforcement actions inside this country are to enforce laws that used to not even be on the books.
We Americans need to be asking some very basic questions of our politicians... no matter which party they are from and no matter whether we like their other policies or not. This was easier many years ago when the government did much less, and was therefore involved in many fewer things, and therefore politicians could not say "ignore the bad things I'm doing with my left hand, becase you love what I'm doing with my right hand"
His ATF transferred THOUSANDS of so-called "Assault Weapons" to Mexican drug cartels and he claimed no personal knowledge. Then when congress demanded the documents from his Atty Gen (Eric Holder) his admin ignored the legal subpoenas (though he has jailed Americans for ignoring his subpoenas) and when things got too close to the courts, the president asserted "Executive Privilege" over all of it (something he cannot legally do if he was not personally involved from the start). Obama? Meet Nixon...
He got elected in 2008, in part, by going around denouncing Bush43 for waterboarding (done to three terror suspects, all of whom survived without permanent injury) but this Nobel Peace Prize winner has been sending drones out to convert anybody he puts on his secret "kill list" into piles of cooked sausage (often NOT in a war zone, where strikes are generally accepted a legitimate military activity)... including US citizens whom he does not think need any rights or due-process. Ah, well, Arafat got one of those nice shiny medals too...
In his 2008 presidential election run he denounced Bush43 as un-patriotic, un-American, reckless, irresponsible and immoral for having run-up about $5Trillion on debt over 8 years (which included the costs of 9-11 and the wars) but Obama has run-up approx $6.5Trillion in new debt in just four years (with no 9-11 and while eliminating the Iraq war and now ending the Afghan war) and his budget proposals have been projected by the non-partisan CBO to take the nation to over $20Trillion in debt by the end of his 2nd term.
Obama claimed Bush43's "Patriot act" was awful... but once he got in office, he doubled-down. When the act was created, it contained sunset provisions (so some would go away automatically over time) but these have been removed. He allowed the TSA to unionize (when it was created, the Dems promised as part of the deal to make it govt, rather than private, that it would remain non-union). As a result, it'll be nearly impossible to ever reform it or eliminate it. He is buddies with the Google and Facebook operators and has increased the govt intrusions into private electronic communications, coincidence?
There is only one kind of US Dollar.... Dollars are fungible... and Social Security is forbidden (by law) from investing in anything other than US debt
What this means:
1. All money collected by tax man is in the same dollars, and it all goes into the same US treasury (the idea that Social Security is something separate is a political and accounting gimmick which even the US supreme court has ruled on: They've already ruled that the fed govt is under no LEGAL obligation to pay anything to the recipients (only political pressure keeps the checks going)
2. Because money is fungible (its all units of the same stuff and if you put in extra "over here", the recipient is free to move some of his other cash around "over there") there's no way to isolate it. If you put more into Social Security, the fed govt just writes itself another IOU and puts that into Al Gore's infamous "lock box" and then moved the money over into the state dept to buy more tanks and planes for Egypt or over into the food stamp program, or into the air traffic control system etc. There's no special type of "social security dollar" that can only go into SS and just sits there on a dusty shelf waiting to be paid back out to a retiree later. 20 years from now when then-current retirees need their checks and the "lock box" IOUs need to be honored, hard-working people will have to be taxed even more.
3. Social Security only "invests" in bonds (i.e. it lends its money to the rest of the govt). This makes it the biggest enabler of deficit spending. It has to invest in SOMETHING otherwise the money would not "grow" and it would have to pay retirees less than they payed in (what they payed, minus the overhead). People in BOTH parties have historically opposed letting it invest outside of govt as it would become the worst enabler of crony-capitalism imaginable (with politicians choosing which politically-connected companies on Wall St got BILLIONS in investments and which got "frozen out" and little attention to which made the best returns). Every time, since the program started, that the GOP tried to pass laws to enable individuals to have their own accounts and choose their own (non-govt debt) investments the Dems have denounced this as "privatization" and "gambling with people's retirement money". The result: Every single dollar paid in "payroll taxes" is lent to the rest of the government to spend.
These are facts. Get used to them; you'll be living with them for the rest of your life.
If you are under 30 (and if you've seen Obama's fiscal projections) you should be VERY concerned... this is all going to fall apart in your lifetime and you will be left eating dog food and w/o healthcare. When Obamacare finishes-off the insurance programs, which it's designed to do (by capping their profits, making them provide everything people want, and making them compete with govt actors who can operate in deficit) you will be offered "single-payer" as the solution to the mess (Obama and several of his advisers are on tape saying essentially these things, though not using the term "obamacare" as they were speaking years earlier). It will sound great (seems like a no-brainer to eliminate a layer of the free-market)... but that eliminates two vital things: competition (which forces innovation and efficiency) and freedom (the option to "go somewhere else" for a service if a vendor is not performing). When a company screws-up, you can go to the govt for relief and another company for future business, but where do you go when the government screws up??? What happens when the feds are the source of your healthcare and the money runs out????? People used to feed themselves and their families, but now we have govt programs feeding the kids at school and the seniors.... but what happens when the feds can no longer print money???? The Germans ran a version of this experiment in fiscal recklessness and money-printing in the thirties... and it did not end well.
There is a basic law of the universe: Something which cannot go on forever, won't.
Obama was the one who created the "sequestration" plan (Liberal-favorite and Watergate hero journalists Bob Woodward reported this) and Obama signed it into law. Now he is demanding the GOP violate their principles as the price for avoiding sequestration... so the only way Obama will NOT chop NASA's funds is if the GOP caves-in on their principles and this might not happen; too many house Republicans have already outraged their base supporters by raising the limits on Obama's credit card over and over again (allowing him to drive-up nearly $7,000,000,000.000.00 in new debts). Obama is also the guy who tried to kill NASA's manned spaceflight capabilities; first he killed the bi-partisan Constellation program, then he shut-down shuttle operations (and ripped-up the infrastructure and tore the guts out of the orbiters (they all now have fake engines, gutted OMS pods and gutted FRCS modules) so they could never fly again). Sure, he has funded commercial cargo to ISS (this is the Bush "COTS" program, not an Obama program). Sure, he claims to be pushing "commercial" manned spaceflight (by tossing a little cash at 3 different companies), but [a] none of these companies has any firm commitment from the government (possibly why none has firm scheduled for manned flights) [b] they're not being given enough for a real program and [c] These programs are being run so slowly that none will carry anybody into orbit while Obama is in office. Congress (bi-partisan effort) forced Obama to plan to build the new SLS rocket and to keep working on the Orion capsule, but he has had his people slow-walk these programs in the apparent hope that dragging them out will frustrate congress and cause congress to cancel them (to such an extreme that the senate had to threaten legal action to get him to stop foot-dragging); there are no planned manned American space flights currently in any official NASA plan other than 1 possible flight around the moon (no landing) many yeas from now, possibly. maybe.
become the enforcer of Obamacare. In just 12 months, all Americans will be required to buy health insurance that meets Obama's specs. The IRS estimates that these policies will cost $20,000.00 per year per Adult (and $10,000.00 per year per child). If you do not buy this insurance for yourself, your spouse and your kids, you will be penalized by the IRS.... unless you are an illegal alien (they are specifically exempt from the penalty (it's right in the plain text of the law)). Oh, they do get the same care you get though if you and they show up at any hospital ER with equivalent injuries/illnesses; that's required by an earlier law that's still in force.
As for the many millions (billions now? could be I suppose) of rounds Obama has been having all the non-military agencies buy... I have heard no explanation... but it certainly dovetails interestingly with his desire to disarm the public; perhaps he is preparing to face a few million very angry people in the next couple of years and will need all the federal agents to be armed and assisting in the effort to disarm the public? (it's interesting to see so many elected democrats taking their masks off now and pushing legislation to grab guns) I do not know and I'm not one to prefer a foil hat, but there are questions that should be being asked, and would be asked if we still had any real journalists.
if we tell Obama the moon's packed with "undocumented immigrants" or people whose votes he can buy by giving them food stamps, he'll fully fund moon missions that will put Apollo to shame.
See how dumb that is? Just plain dumb.
I presume you do not like the idea that the GOP is willing to spend money on national defense (something the constitution specifically requires the Federal govt to do) but you're fine with the trillions we spend every year on social spending (which the constitution not only does not require, but arguably forbids (the constitution lists a few duties of the Federal govt and then says everything else is in the hands of the states and the citizens) ). Your comment makes a cartoon of the idea that one party is at least trying to follow the basic idea of our founding document.
you pull-into one of those fancy 1-hour charge stations and there are four cars in line ahead of you each needing a 1-hour charge????
All's well if you are the only rich guy in the county with one of these, but there's a lot here that seems not well planned, and while I'll admit somebody might be asking these questions while doing their reports and reviews, I seem to have missed it.
First, there are significant losses in the transmission of electricity over long distances; we'd be far better-off if our power plants were closer to where the power is used. The losses are likely higher than you suspect. Second, most petroleum is transported in pipes by pumps (with remarkable efficiency) for most of the distances covered over land (or in ships over water of course) This is all quite efficient. As for people using significant amounts of gas to get to gas stations? Not so much. Most people "fill up along the way". The common scenario is not to make a dedicated trip to an out-of-the-way gas station, but rather to pull-into the gas station that's right along the way (often just 30 or 40 feet detour off the path that would have been taken anyway)
if you work all day away from home and plug-in over-night then your car is most-definitely NOT charging from your solar panels. And while some people have little windmills making some electricity in rural areas, I've never seen an urban home with a massive commercial-grade windmill generator. So, no, not many people charge their electric cars on their own "clean energy" sources. As for spending extra on your electric bill for the assurance that your power company bought "your" electricity from windmills or solar panels, well you can probably count on those corporations to make you a variable-interest "ninja" home loan with balloon payment that's been chopped-up and merged into derivative financial instruments and ended-up in credit default swaps......
Let me guess: you believe this eco-marketing and you think Al Gore is fine flying on corporate jets while buying "carbon offsets" (from himself, of course)... but you thing "big oil" and "big banks" are evil and corrupt?
The NTSB did not start bashing Toyota and certainly not as part of some political action. I dislike most of our big bloated over-reaching power-mad control-freak dysfunctional federal government but the NTSB is probably the best part. They are the engineers and scientists that the government calls-in to explore the causes of transportation failures and EVERYBODY in the field of transportation recognizes them as unbiased and strictly facts-and-numbers. Both the NTSB AND NASA got involved in the Toyota car acceleration thing (Toyota, to its credit, actually was involved in asking for NASA's help in the investigations... so they were hardly victims of a plot) and the NTSB did not "finally admit" anything; They took the time they needed to fully-investigate (they sometimes take years on plane crashes, going right-down to metallurgical studies of the materials used in parts) and their investigation exonerated Toyota (whose position will now be rock-solid in any court). Without that lengthy investigation, it's likely that every drunk, sleepy or otherwise distracted driver who crashes a Toyota would be adding to the list of lawsuits claiming the car mysteriously went crazy and accelerated out of control.
Tesla may not be using the govt to beat-down any competitor, BUT they ARE using government money to compete against the other car companies, one of which (Ford) did not take a bailout and therefore deserved to be free of government-subsidized competitors
An idiot user can put just enough gas in a conventional car to get to his destination, and probably will get there (because gas indicators are generally accurate, unlike software-run progress-meters and battery-drain meters) and should the guy in a gas-powered car underestimate, he can fill up in a couple of minutes at any of a number of the ubiquitous gas stations along his path. An idiot user in a gas car can crank-up the heater on a cold day with minimal impact on driving range but the production of heat in an electric car (essentially shorting the battery through a resistor over which cabin air will be passed) is an almost pure waste of battery charge with a huge impact on driving range. An idiot user of a gas car need do nothing to it overnight at the motel in order to make it work the next day. An idiot user of a gas car has no need to follow any special instructions. For Musk to complain that the driver took a short detour... wow. Most idiots with gas cars take detours, make unplanned stops, etc. NOBODY plans their car trips like a rocket launch with checklists and procedures than must be followed carefully to avoid mission failure; maybe Musk's been spending too much mental energy at Space-X and got a few things mixed-up.
If Tesla has to put special warnings for "idiots" into their cars then they have already failed. Either their target audience consists of idiots (by their actions in installing said special warnings) OR they are so small-minded and such fanboys of their own stuff that they think anybody who thinks differently is an idiot. This is okay if you are a rich guy burning your own money but its a catastrophic error if you are a business operating in a market economy.
I have come to detest the people Bill Clinton brought to power in the government (by appointment) when he was elected and ripple-effect their proclamations and policies have had in the popular culture and mainstream media (who loved him and took cues from his administration) and the resulting destruction of intelligent dialog in America. Before "Bubba" elevated Donna Shalala from the PC hell hole that is the University of Wisconsin, Americans were free to speak their minds on any subject; people who heard what you said might not LIKE it... but everybody had been raised on the old rhyme "sticks and stones" and you were free to say it. NOW in post-Clinton America we have the "political correctness" of the UW speech codes. If you say something a leftist/liberal/progressive disagrees with he/she/it reverts to some infantile state and accuses you of "hate". like some 3-year-old, they say "why do you HATE me so much?" or they scream "you're just a HATER!" The nation has become a place where half the population seems to need diapers and pacifiers and cannot tolerate exposure to grown-up dialog.
GROW UP.
There are still some adults around. If somebody says something you do not like or that you disagree with, DEAL WITH IT. Grow up. Learn to tolerate disagreement. You are not a fountain of perfect knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes you are wrong, and there is NO HATRED INVOLVED when somebody disagrees with you. Wanna see actual "hatred"? Go to a holocaust museum and spend a few hours looking at what the NAZIS did to the Jews. Go look-up some of the grainy old photos of the innocent black men who were lynched by the Democrats in their KKK sheets. If you MUST see things in color, go back and review the video of people leaping from the WTC towers and the ghastly video of Palestinians and Iraqis celebrating.
Somebody being critical of Elon Musk's wunder car (rightly or wrongly) has NOTHING to do with HATE
Tesla is a hybrid vehicle: half political prop, half toy for the rich.
It's designed to prove that an electric car can look great, ride well, and go fast (to mislead the public into imagining an easy affordable and comfortable path to a fossil-fuel-free future). Any good engineer knew full well that an electric car could be made (some of the earliest cars were electric) and knew that modern tech and materials would mean it could now be made fast, stylish, comfortable, etc. The problem is that even with today's tech, it cannot be made cost-effective and it cannot easily be made to be as convenient. It's also likely not very "green" given that a battery is not a power source... when you plug one of those babies into the grid, there's a fair chance it's being pumped up with power generated from burning coal. It deceives gullible people into thinking it is "emissions free" because it has no tail pipe; the tail pipe is actually the smokestack of a nearby power plant (the very same smokestack whose smoke they curse when they see it on TV or the web or in print depicted as an example of big evil corporate pollution).
It's also designed to be the good-looking show-piece 4th, 5th, 10th, or 20th car of a rich person; the car you use when you want to impress certain people but that you can bypass in your big garage as you step toward your Lexus, Hummer, etc when you really need to go somewhere and your Tesla is not fully-charged or unable to complete the entire trip without a re-charge. (people take trips in cars that need a re-fill during the trip because it's a very short minor interruption in the trip to re-fill)
It's NOT something an average middle-class person could afford (in many senses of the word) to buy and have as his/her only car.
The worst part is that each and every one that rolls off the line is so cost-ineffective that it carries a taxpayer subsidy. NOT the sort of "subsidy" that "big oil" is always accused of getting (tax deductions, which most businesses can get and Tesla is probably also able to get) but actual subsidy (cash taken by force from a taxpayer and given to a politically-connected and favored business). The tax money should have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers so they could afford to pay the nearly $2.00/gallon "Obama tax" (price hike largely driven by his energy policies and money-printing Fed) that they have been paying nearly the entire time the man's been in office an funneling their money to guys like Musk
In both situations, the advocates for the tech proclaim its perfection and superior features... and when confronted with claims of its inferior performance/user-experience in the hands of a typical (non-advocate for the particular tech) user, the excuses and accusations about the user ensue. The user just did not use it right! The user is just an idiot! The user is too used to some inferior (but ubiquitous) tech. The user mislead people about his experience!
Every EE knows full-well the problems an electric car will have, most-particularly in a cold place. A proper electric car design will take these into account. This includes not only the fact the the cold batteries will under-perform, but also that the driver will want a toasty-warm cabin, may run the wipers, may use the headlights and the defroster, me use the heaters in the glass (if they exist) to melt ice accumulation, etc. It's also well-understood that, unlike a gas tank being re-filled, no car-sized battery pack will fully re-charge in a couple minutes in any climate. Why do I suspect all the "green energy" advocates would be ranting against "big oil" if they had to cool their jets for an hour or more every time they re-filled the gas tank of a car?
With both Linux and electric cars, the advocates need to drop all the defensiveness and learn from their critics.... and FIX the problems; the end-result will be a far better product that both the average user and the advocates like a lot better. There use to be a common phrase in American business: "The customer is always right". This was a very smart (in many ways) statement in a free-market economy. It was not just an admonition to employees that they should bend-over backwards to make customers happy (simultaneously keeping them from going to competitors AND creating positive word-of-mouth) but it also meant that when your customer complained about problems with your product/service you should pay attention and FIX IT. If something upsets/annoys one typical user then it will probably also affect other typical users similarly... and if you intend to sell to other typical users (who tend to be in the majority) then you are going to face the same opposition/anger/frustration/hostility over and over and over again if you insist on not fixing things and just blaming your critics.
In this case, Musk's defenders are missing the entire POINT: it's a CAR. It's advertized as a superiorcar. If the thing is a CAR, it ought to perform like a CAR (including being as tolerant of the imperfections of a typical human operator). If it's a superior car, then it should be even LESS demanding of its users and require FEWER specific instructions for how to use it to get from point A to point B. If you cannot use it in the same environment as a CAR to do the same things as a CAR with the same convenience as a CAR.... then it's an inferior product and should cost LESS than a CAR not 2X or 3X as much. PERIOD. Full-Stop.
Sure, metric makes everything simpler and it's a great benefit to idiots who failed basic math classes....... but it continues to fail in the US after even an organized propaganda effort in the schools for one very basic reason: SIZE
Simply put, an inch and a foot are very natural and convenient SIZES; we like them; they're convenient. If the guys who came up with the metric system had simply defined a cm to be the physical size of an inch, then the cm would be a handy size... a decimeter would be about a foot long (another human-friendly size) and a meter would be about 10 feet (so things like levels of structures would be by rule-of-thumb approx 1meter..... another friendly size for quick estimates) They chose, however, an arbitrary cm size that is stupidly inconvenient and unnatural and then later tried to pass-off the story that a meter was defined as a particular fraction of the circumference of the Earth, as though that meant anything or added some legitimacy (they got it wrong anyway). People who keep trying to push metric in the US always seem to think it's just a cultural issue that will be overcome by "education".... it's not. Education is for introducing new ideas, not for training people to give-up something that works and which they like, in favor of something that somebody else thinks those people need to learn to like more. Average Americans tend to just be practical and they have a system that works fine and has convenient sizes..... and it was good enough for us to use as we invented aviation, the light bulb, radio, tv, the internet, etc and as we won some World Wars, put a man on the moon, etc (in other words: the system is not just comfortable, but it has been perfectly adequate for everything we've used it for). We buy inch-thick lumber (we don't want to need to by 2.54cm-thick lumber). We like to use two-by-fours.... 5.08-by-10.16's would just be strange (while providing not enough benefit to offset the annoyance).
The simple truth is that now we all have computers and/or calculators that can easily do the math for us to convert from any system to any other system and most modern engineering is done with CAD systems that support both inches and meters, so the supposed advantage of just being able to move the decimal pt are not that important.
"Republican party were behind the legislation that created this artificial fiscal cliff as an act of political brinksmanship to impose their policies into the budget"
Not so much. President Obama had borrowed and spent more money than any president in history and he maxed-out the national credit card. When he came back for more money and demanded a rise in the "debt limit" (the limit on the national credit card) they insisted on some assurance he would cut back on the spending so there would be something left for the grandkids to inherit. As part of the compromise that gave him a higher debt limit to allow him to get through the 2012 election cycle without a government shutdown, Obama demanded the massive defense cuts in the sequestration package.... and Obama has been demanding for four years now that the nation must end all the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" (which were actually tax cuts for every taxpayer).... and all the new healthcare taxes are part of "Obamacare". In summary: Almost everything that is part of the so-called "fiscal cliff" is something Obama demanded.... and that's why the Republicans have not been able to make a deal with him (if there's no deal, most of what happens is what he wanted in the first place).
The nation is severely divided because about half the population wants the small government the Constitution provides, and the other half thinks the Constitution is an out-dated obsolete document and wants the government to do everything the majority wants; these positions are not reconcilable and the smaller government people have just recently realized that the bigger government people will never compromise (no proposed compromise ever includes smaller government or government at least not getting any bigger..... EVERY proposal by Harry Reid and President Obama has included GROWTH and TRILLIONS in new debts being heaped upon our kids and grandkids)
In previous generations, such impasses were much less severe because government was smaller and involved in less of our lives; A citizen might not like some of the things Jack Kennedy or Ron Reagan did, but most of those things had no direct impact on the citizen, who could ignore stuff and go-on with his life. Now, however, government is so huge and so involved in everything.... and president Obama is using it to force his beliefs and positions onto his opponents. Obama is leaving his opponents no way to peaceably disagree with him and ignore him. He has forced government into our healthcare, into religion (both with HHS mandates and "gay marriage") and much further into things like energy resources than previous presidents did. Under Obama, the very air we exhale is not regulated by the EPA and while they are only using that new power to kill-off the coal industry and try to slow natural gas, the power and the precedent they have set has no natural limit that will keep them from regulating everything from cow farts to bad breath. If your religious beliefs are that artificial birth control is wrong (not my personal position, but a good example), then under Kennedy or Reagan you'd not be forced to use it or to provide it for anybody else (though others might well have the freedom to get and use it) but Obama is now demanding you give-up your beliefs and provide it to others. In the past, two Americans who disagreed on that subject could agree to disagree.... but under Obama, the government is forcing one of them to violate his beliefs and pay for the other. Before somebody tries to claim he is being forced to subsidize religions he disagrees with, allow me to point out that a tax EXEMPTION is NOT the same thing as funding... a tax exemption is simply allowing some person or organization to keep his or its own money; the federal government has never required all citizens to, for example, pay tax dollars to a Methodist or Catholic church. I am not Catholic and I would be outraged if the government was requiring me to fund the Catholic church.... but I have no problem with the Catholic church being tax exempt; the government has no claim on their money. That's how such disagreements USED to work in the US. Obama supporters might think this idea of the federal government forcing people to buy stuff they find objectionable is really great (now, while their guy is in office), but they'd be outraged if G.W.Bush had ordered every American to buy every Rush Limbaugh book or buy something REALLY objectionable like CDs of country music....
Are you truly who you think you are when you are addicted to drugs?
Are the pleasures a drug-affected brain feels to be equated with other forms of pleasure?
It would be one thing to wipe-out part of a healthy brain (thereby permanently altering it) like this but it might be another matter to make such a permanent change to a brain that has already had permanent, and negative, changes made by "modern chemistry". Of course, the presence of any pre-existing damage from drugs also raises questions of true consent. Not sure how I feel on this one, but given that this is on brains already affected by drugs the morals and ethics are a bit cloudier than they might otherwise be. Personally, I find the idea of depriving a person of the ability to experience pleasure both creepy and dangerous. Should we expect future headlines about "zombie" violence in China?
Slashdot Mirror
I was in a hurry and missed it.
I know the difference but was not even thinking of "lead", the material. I was distracted while typing the brief post which when I typed it was timely and, I thought, of interest to the Slashdot community. I was thinking of "lead" (pronounced "leed") as in "to lead" while reading the original article in one window and composing my post in another and keeping an eye on the clock with little time before I needed to tend to something. I'm not a grammar NAZI, but this sort of error usually sticks out at me when I read it, and I would have caught it had I spent an extra moment on it. The error was one of attention rather than ignorance.
I am not offended that you flagged it. We would all benefit from being a little more careful in what we post both on matters of content and style. It was however a minor error on your part to presume ignorance when simple carelessness was a sufficient explaination. Another thing we would all benefit from is not presuming each other to be either ignorant or persons of ill will. Sometime people of goodwill simply disagree, and sometimes people of goodwill simply make a typical human error.
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." - George Washington, first President of the US
If people would spend more time reading what our founders said and wrote, and just a tiny bit less time on pop culture, we might be a little bit less messed-up. They designed the American system and left us both the operating manual (the Constitution) and their design notes (extensive writings, both for and against the choices they made see: "Federalist Papers" and "Anti-Federalist Papers" and all thier other books and writings).
George Soros
I see your Libertarian boogeymen, and raise you one absolutely evil slimeball (do some research, and then weep)
Yes, Heritage (a "think tank", NOT the GOP) published a paper endorsing an individual mandate on health insurance, but you guys on the left need to become a bit more honest about waving that report around as evidence that Republicans were for the concept of "Obamacare" up until "a black guy" was for it (always that nasty little accusation of racism, from the party (the Democrats) that owned all the slaves and went on to found the KKK). ONE report from ONE "conservative" think tank does NOT establish the beliefs of the GOP any more than ONE report on ANYTHING from a "progressive" think tank establishes that as official Democrat policy. It's also important to stop accidentally failing to report that the very same Heritage organization has long published rants against individial mandates ( HERE is one example I could quickly find for this post ). Sure, Mitt Romney (in conjunction with a Democratic state legislature) did "Romneycare", but let's face it - that was in loony liberal Kennedy-land and most Republicans from the rest of the country oppose it (it was one of the biggest problems he had in winning the GOP nomination in 2012)
In October 2009 the Democrats who were then running congress by a huge majority changed the locks on the capitol hill meeting rooms so they could keep Republicans out when they wanted to. (they did this to stop Republicans exposing the involvement of Democrats in the 2008 home loan meltdown activity at Countrywide, but they then used those locked rooms to exclude Republicans from the secret healthcare reform negotiations which Obama had promised would air in their entirety live on C-SPAN)
Obama did, indeed, promise Obamacare negotiations would air live on C-SPAN before he broke his promise, and journalists from across the political spectrum objected and tried to get the negotiations opened
And here's an admittedly biased link to a TEA Party site, used here to point out their frustration with the fact that the "establishment" wing (the lifetime politicians who like big government) of the GOP keeps doing SYMBOLIC votes against Obamacare but then keeps actually fully funding it. The Washington elites of both parties have done stuff like that to their base voters on many issues for decades, but the internet is exposing it.
Oh, and if you are in denial about the corporate lobbyists who climbed into bed with Obama on Obamacare, here is a link to a story explaining WHY big insurance got on board (they originally fought it, but then they got admitted to the closed-door meetings WE the public were shut out of). Also see this link on big Pharma and big Insurance climbing on board and throwing money at Democrat politicians. While many organizations and lobbying groups were involved in the "secret" negotiations, the names of most of the individuals involved are NOT known to Republicans who repeatedly demanded the names and were denied.
Let me further point out that when the Obama administration thinks a Republican governor is breaking a law, they run to the federal courts - something they have NOT done (so I cannot link to it here) to any governor over his/her refusal to create a state exchange - a tacit admission that the governors are obeying the law.
Since I have validated everything in the post you said was so full of falsehoods, whereas YOU provided NO evidence ANY of the claims was false, that previous post was the correct one and yours was the loser
Yeah, those wars cost money... but before we abandoned the place there was the hope that over the long-run we'd end-up saving money since we'd no longer need to keep providing forces to protect Saddam's neighbors from him (as we'd done for MANY years) and not need to periodically wage more limited wars to push him back into is own borders (see 1991 gulf war). Before the current drive to pull-out and abandon Afghanistan, there was the hope that enough years w/o the Taliban and with kids of both genders getting a proper education the place would become a better and more peaceful place that would prevent it being a launchpad for future violence (again, saving many billions from any future wars, post-terror attack re-building, etc)
Obama's "stimulus" law, however, borrowed-and-spent (in one law passed in one year) more money than both of Bush's wars cost in ten years... so some perspective is called for
We have dramatically reduced American military spending as a portion of the federal budget. It used to be the biggest item, now Social Security and Medicare are both bigger. The truth is that NASA's entire budget is so small it's just a "rounding error" in the federal budget. Obama could have doubled it with not much impact to the nation's budget if he had cared to do so. His one-year stimulus program could have funded NASA for 50+ years
WHY would you want all the federal people packing?
As an old guy, I remember when you could go to an airport, walk-up to the counter, buy a ticket (for cash with no ID) hand the person at the ticket counter your suitcase (which went right-onto the conveyor out to the guys who loaded the planes) and then you could walk over to the "jet way" where you handed-over the ticket and walked onto the plane. No searches, no background checks, no grope-fests, no microwaves, no x-rays, no metal detectors. Flying was convenient and a generally good experience (the worst bits were sub-par food and jet-lag). No planes were falling from the skies or crashing into buildings.
The IRS used to mostly scare people with auditors (scary-geeky guys with glasses, green eye-shades and pocket protectors)
ATF? There was a day when they did not exist, and even after that a long time when the only people who ever saw them were liquor store and gun store owners who were being periodically checked for records compliance. When they pulled the Waco-thing, I remember having conversations will friends of all political stripes and we were all shocked that the ATF had all that tactical gear, and tanks and helicopters and was capable of doing a large-scale military-style assault on any group of Americans. (The Waco people were NUTS, but the scope, equipment, and scale of the ATF was a real eye-opener at that moment)
We are being turned into a police state and the young people who've never known America to be any different, very sadly, do not even know this or more importantly feel it at a gut-level the way this old vet does. I'm one of those old guys who gets a tear in his eye when he hears the national anthem and loves to see a flag flapping in the wind and who has not understood why so many younger folks do not seem to love the country at a gut-level in the same way... but I am starting to see that the country they have grown-up knowing has been developing a very different nature than the country I have lived with. Much of it is with the un-spoken threat (the same govt using the threat is too PC to SAY the words) that if we do not do this then "crazy radical Muslims" will blow us all up. We're supposed to forget that we've had to "deal with" radical violent Muslim forces every few decades since Jefferson was president (and never before did we do it by militarizing at home). They do not want us to notice that they are the ones who invited the wave of Muslim immigrants and visitors (both legals and illegals via leaky borders and poor visa tracking). They also do not want us to remember that it was their policies on how to handle hijackers that led the people on the 9-11 flights to not immediately resist, but that no American in his/her right mind would fail to try to stop or even kill any post 9-11 hijackers (and therefore we probably need LESS airport security now than we've ever needed before) We are not supposed to notice that many of the military-style law enforcement actions inside this country are to enforce laws that used to not even be on the books.
We Americans need to be asking some very basic questions of our politicians... no matter which party they are from and no matter whether we like their other policies or not. This was easier many years ago when the government did much less, and was therefore involved in many fewer things, and therefore politicians could not say "ignore the bad things I'm doing with my left hand, becase you love what I'm doing with my right hand"
His ATF transferred THOUSANDS of so-called "Assault Weapons" to Mexican drug cartels and he claimed no personal knowledge. Then when congress demanded the documents from his Atty Gen (Eric Holder) his admin ignored the legal subpoenas (though he has jailed Americans for ignoring his subpoenas) and when things got too close to the courts, the president asserted "Executive Privilege" over all of it (something he cannot legally do if he was not personally involved from the start). Obama? Meet Nixon...
He got elected in 2008, in part, by going around denouncing Bush43 for waterboarding (done to three terror suspects, all of whom survived without permanent injury) but this Nobel Peace Prize winner has been sending drones out to convert anybody he puts on his secret "kill list" into piles of cooked sausage (often NOT in a war zone, where strikes are generally accepted a legitimate military activity) ... including US citizens whom he does not think need any rights or due-process. Ah, well, Arafat got one of those nice shiny medals too...
In his 2008 presidential election run he denounced Bush43 as un-patriotic, un-American, reckless, irresponsible and immoral for having run-up about $5Trillion on debt over 8 years (which included the costs of 9-11 and the wars) but Obama has run-up approx $6.5Trillion in new debt in just four years (with no 9-11 and while eliminating the Iraq war and now ending the Afghan war) and his budget proposals have been projected by the non-partisan CBO to take the nation to over $20Trillion in debt by the end of his 2nd term.
Obama claimed Bush43's "Patriot act" was awful... but once he got in office, he doubled-down. When the act was created, it contained sunset provisions (so some would go away automatically over time) but these have been removed. He allowed the TSA to unionize (when it was created, the Dems promised as part of the deal to make it govt, rather than private, that it would remain non-union). As a result, it'll be nearly impossible to ever reform it or eliminate it. He is buddies with the Google and Facebook operators and has increased the govt intrusions into private electronic communications, coincidence?
Need I go on?
Bush43 was a turkey... Obama is far worse
There is only one kind of US Dollar.... Dollars are fungible... and Social Security is forbidden (by law) from investing in anything other than US debt
What this means:
These are facts. Get used to them; you'll be living with them for the rest of your life.
If you are under 30 (and if you've seen Obama's fiscal projections) you should be VERY concerned... this is all going to fall apart in your lifetime and you will be left eating dog food and w/o healthcare. When Obamacare finishes-off the insurance programs, which it's designed to do (by capping their profits, making them provide everything people want, and making them compete with govt actors who can operate in deficit) you will be offered "single-payer" as the solution to the mess (Obama and several of his advisers are on tape saying essentially these things, though not using the term "obamacare" as they were speaking years earlier). It will sound great (seems like a no-brainer to eliminate a layer of the free-market) ... but that eliminates two vital things: competition (which forces innovation and efficiency) and freedom (the option to "go somewhere else" for a service if a vendor is not performing). When a company screws-up, you can go to the govt for relief and another company for future business, but where do you go when the government screws up??? What happens when the feds are the source of your healthcare and the money runs out????? People used to feed themselves and their families, but now we have govt programs feeding the kids at school and the seniors.... but what happens when the feds can no longer print money???? The Germans ran a version of this experiment in fiscal recklessness and money-printing in the thirties... and it did not end well.
There is a basic law of the universe: Something which cannot go on forever, won't.
Obama was the one who created the "sequestration" plan (Liberal-favorite and Watergate hero journalists Bob Woodward reported this) and Obama signed it into law. Now he is demanding the GOP violate their principles as the price for avoiding sequestration... so the only way Obama will NOT chop NASA's funds is if the GOP caves-in on their principles and this might not happen; too many house Republicans have already outraged their base supporters by raising the limits on Obama's credit card over and over again (allowing him to drive-up nearly $7,000,000,000.000.00 in new debts). Obama is also the guy who tried to kill NASA's manned spaceflight capabilities; first he killed the bi-partisan Constellation program, then he shut-down shuttle operations (and ripped-up the infrastructure and tore the guts out of the orbiters (they all now have fake engines, gutted OMS pods and gutted FRCS modules) so they could never fly again). Sure, he has funded commercial cargo to ISS (this is the Bush "COTS" program, not an Obama program). Sure, he claims to be pushing "commercial" manned spaceflight (by tossing a little cash at 3 different companies), but [a] none of these companies has any firm commitment from the government (possibly why none has firm scheduled for manned flights) [b] they're not being given enough for a real program and [c] These programs are being run so slowly that none will carry anybody into orbit while Obama is in office. Congress (bi-partisan effort) forced Obama to plan to build the new SLS rocket and to keep working on the Orion capsule, but he has had his people slow-walk these programs in the apparent hope that dragging them out will frustrate congress and cause congress to cancel them (to such an extreme that the senate had to threaten legal action to get him to stop foot-dragging); there are no planned manned American space flights currently in any official NASA plan other than 1 possible flight around the moon (no landing) many yeas from now, possibly. maybe.
become the enforcer of Obamacare. In just 12 months, all Americans will be required to buy health insurance that meets Obama's specs. The IRS estimates that these policies will cost $20,000.00 per year per Adult (and $10,000.00 per year per child). If you do not buy this insurance for yourself, your spouse and your kids, you will be penalized by the IRS.... unless you are an illegal alien (they are specifically exempt from the penalty (it's right in the plain text of the law)). Oh, they do get the same care you get though if you and they show up at any hospital ER with equivalent injuries/illnesses; that's required by an earlier law that's still in force.
As for the many millions (billions now? could be I suppose) of rounds Obama has been having all the non-military agencies buy... I have heard no explanation... but it certainly dovetails interestingly with his desire to disarm the public; perhaps he is preparing to face a few million very angry people in the next couple of years and will need all the federal agents to be armed and assisting in the effort to disarm the public? (it's interesting to see so many elected democrats taking their masks off now and pushing legislation to grab guns) I do not know and I'm not one to prefer a foil hat, but there are questions that should be being asked, and would be asked if we still had any real journalists.
if we tell Obama the moon's packed with "undocumented immigrants" or people whose votes he can buy by giving them food stamps, he'll fully fund moon missions that will put Apollo to shame.
See how dumb that is? Just plain dumb.
I presume you do not like the idea that the GOP is willing to spend money on national defense (something the constitution specifically requires the Federal govt to do) but you're fine with the trillions we spend every year on social spending (which the constitution not only does not require, but arguably forbids (the constitution lists a few duties of the Federal govt and then says everything else is in the hands of the states and the citizens) ). Your comment makes a cartoon of the idea that one party is at least trying to follow the basic idea of our founding document.
you pull-into one of those fancy 1-hour charge stations and there are four cars in line ahead of you each needing a 1-hour charge????
All's well if you are the only rich guy in the county with one of these, but there's a lot here that seems not well planned, and while I'll admit somebody might be asking these questions while doing their reports and reviews, I seem to have missed it.
First, there are significant losses in the transmission of electricity over long distances; we'd be far better-off if our power plants were closer to where the power is used. The losses are likely higher than you suspect. Second, most petroleum is transported in pipes by pumps (with remarkable efficiency) for most of the distances covered over land (or in ships over water of course) This is all quite efficient. As for people using significant amounts of gas to get to gas stations? Not so much. Most people "fill up along the way". The common scenario is not to make a dedicated trip to an out-of-the-way gas station, but rather to pull-into the gas station that's right along the way (often just 30 or 40 feet detour off the path that would have been taken anyway)
if you work all day away from home and plug-in over-night then your car is most-definitely NOT charging from your solar panels. And while some people have little windmills making some electricity in rural areas, I've never seen an urban home with a massive commercial-grade windmill generator. So, no, not many people charge their electric cars on their own "clean energy" sources. As for spending extra on your electric bill for the assurance that your power company bought "your" electricity from windmills or solar panels, well you can probably count on those corporations to make you a variable-interest "ninja" home loan with balloon payment that's been chopped-up and merged into derivative financial instruments and ended-up in credit default swaps......
Let me guess: you believe this eco-marketing and you think Al Gore is fine flying on corporate jets while buying "carbon offsets" (from himself, of course) ... but you thing "big oil" and "big banks" are evil and corrupt?
put away the foil hat
The NTSB did not start bashing Toyota and certainly not as part of some political action. I dislike most of our big bloated over-reaching power-mad control-freak dysfunctional federal government but the NTSB is probably the best part. They are the engineers and scientists that the government calls-in to explore the causes of transportation failures and EVERYBODY in the field of transportation recognizes them as unbiased and strictly facts-and-numbers. Both the NTSB AND NASA got involved in the Toyota car acceleration thing (Toyota, to its credit, actually was involved in asking for NASA's help in the investigations... so they were hardly victims of a plot) and the NTSB did not "finally admit" anything; They took the time they needed to fully-investigate (they sometimes take years on plane crashes, going right-down to metallurgical studies of the materials used in parts) and their investigation exonerated Toyota (whose position will now be rock-solid in any court). Without that lengthy investigation, it's likely that every drunk, sleepy or otherwise distracted driver who crashes a Toyota would be adding to the list of lawsuits claiming the car mysteriously went crazy and accelerated out of control.
Tesla may not be using the govt to beat-down any competitor, BUT they ARE using government money to compete against the other car companies, one of which (Ford) did not take a bailout and therefore deserved to be free of government-subsidized competitors
An idiot user can put just enough gas in a conventional car to get to his destination, and probably will get there (because gas indicators are generally accurate, unlike software-run progress-meters and battery-drain meters) and should the guy in a gas-powered car underestimate, he can fill up in a couple of minutes at any of a number of the ubiquitous gas stations along his path. An idiot user in a gas car can crank-up the heater on a cold day with minimal impact on driving range but the production of heat in an electric car (essentially shorting the battery through a resistor over which cabin air will be passed) is an almost pure waste of battery charge with a huge impact on driving range. An idiot user of a gas car need do nothing to it overnight at the motel in order to make it work the next day. An idiot user of a gas car has no need to follow any special instructions. For Musk to complain that the driver took a short detour... wow. Most idiots with gas cars take detours, make unplanned stops, etc. NOBODY plans their car trips like a rocket launch with checklists and procedures than must be followed carefully to avoid mission failure; maybe Musk's been spending too much mental energy at Space-X and got a few things mixed-up.
If Tesla has to put special warnings for "idiots" into their cars then they have already failed. Either their target audience consists of idiots (by their actions in installing said special warnings) OR they are so small-minded and such fanboys of their own stuff that they think anybody who thinks differently is an idiot. This is okay if you are a rich guy burning your own money but its a catastrophic error if you are a business operating in a market economy.
Wow. just, wow. My respect fro you just went way down... (kidding)
I have come to detest the people Bill Clinton brought to power in the government (by appointment) when he was elected and ripple-effect their proclamations and policies have had in the popular culture and mainstream media (who loved him and took cues from his administration) and the resulting destruction of intelligent dialog in America. Before "Bubba" elevated Donna Shalala from the PC hell hole that is the University of Wisconsin, Americans were free to speak their minds on any subject; people who heard what you said might not LIKE it... but everybody had been raised on the old rhyme "sticks and stones" and you were free to say it. NOW in post-Clinton America we have the "political correctness" of the UW speech codes. If you say something a leftist/liberal/progressive disagrees with he/she/it reverts to some infantile state and accuses you of "hate". like some 3-year-old, they say "why do you HATE me so much?" or they scream "you're just a HATER!" The nation has become a place where half the population seems to need diapers and pacifiers and cannot tolerate exposure to grown-up dialog.
GROW UP.
There are still some adults around. If somebody says something you do not like or that you disagree with, DEAL WITH IT. Grow up. Learn to tolerate disagreement. You are not a fountain of perfect knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes you are wrong, and there is NO HATRED INVOLVED when somebody disagrees with you. Wanna see actual "hatred"? Go to a holocaust museum and spend a few hours looking at what the NAZIS did to the Jews. Go look-up some of the grainy old photos of the innocent black men who were lynched by the Democrats in their KKK sheets. If you MUST see things in color, go back and review the video of people leaping from the WTC towers and the ghastly video of Palestinians and Iraqis celebrating.
Somebody being critical of Elon Musk's wunder car (rightly or wrongly) has NOTHING to do with HATE
Tesla is a hybrid vehicle: half political prop, half toy for the rich.
It's designed to prove that an electric car can look great, ride well, and go fast (to mislead the public into imagining an easy affordable and comfortable path to a fossil-fuel-free future). Any good engineer knew full well that an electric car could be made (some of the earliest cars were electric) and knew that modern tech and materials would mean it could now be made fast, stylish, comfortable, etc. The problem is that even with today's tech, it cannot be made cost-effective and it cannot easily be made to be as convenient. It's also likely not very "green" given that a battery is not a power source... when you plug one of those babies into the grid, there's a fair chance it's being pumped up with power generated from burning coal. It deceives gullible people into thinking it is "emissions free" because it has no tail pipe; the tail pipe is actually the smokestack of a nearby power plant (the very same smokestack whose smoke they curse when they see it on TV or the web or in print depicted as an example of big evil corporate pollution).
It's also designed to be the good-looking show-piece 4th, 5th, 10th, or 20th car of a rich person; the car you use when you want to impress certain people but that you can bypass in your big garage as you step toward your Lexus, Hummer, etc when you really need to go somewhere and your Tesla is not fully-charged or unable to complete the entire trip without a re-charge. (people take trips in cars that need a re-fill during the trip because it's a very short minor interruption in the trip to re-fill)
It's NOT something an average middle-class person could afford (in many senses of the word) to buy and have as his/her only car.
The worst part is that each and every one that rolls off the line is so cost-ineffective that it carries a taxpayer subsidy. NOT the sort of "subsidy" that "big oil" is always accused of getting (tax deductions, which most businesses can get and Tesla is probably also able to get) but actual subsidy (cash taken by force from a taxpayer and given to a politically-connected and favored business). The tax money should have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers so they could afford to pay the nearly $2.00/gallon "Obama tax" (price hike largely driven by his energy policies and money-printing Fed) that they have been paying nearly the entire time the man's been in office an funneling their money to guys like Musk
In both situations, the advocates for the tech proclaim its perfection and superior features... and when confronted with claims of its inferior performance/user-experience in the hands of a typical (non-advocate for the particular tech) user, the excuses and accusations about the user ensue. The user just did not use it right! The user is just an idiot! The user is too used to some inferior (but ubiquitous) tech. The user mislead people about his experience!
Every EE knows full-well the problems an electric car will have, most-particularly in a cold place. A proper electric car design will take these into account. This includes not only the fact the the cold batteries will under-perform, but also that the driver will want a toasty-warm cabin, may run the wipers, may use the headlights and the defroster, me use the heaters in the glass (if they exist) to melt ice accumulation, etc. It's also well-understood that, unlike a gas tank being re-filled, no car-sized battery pack will fully re-charge in a couple minutes in any climate. Why do I suspect all the "green energy" advocates would be ranting against "big oil" if they had to cool their jets for an hour or more every time they re-filled the gas tank of a car?
With both Linux and electric cars, the advocates need to drop all the defensiveness and learn from their critics.... and FIX the problems; the end-result will be a far better product that both the average user and the advocates like a lot better. There use to be a common phrase in American business: "The customer is always right". This was a very smart (in many ways) statement in a free-market economy. It was not just an admonition to employees that they should bend-over backwards to make customers happy (simultaneously keeping them from going to competitors AND creating positive word-of-mouth) but it also meant that when your customer complained about problems with your product/service you should pay attention and FIX IT. If something upsets/annoys one typical user then it will probably also affect other typical users similarly... and if you intend to sell to other typical users (who tend to be in the majority) then you are going to face the same opposition/anger/frustration/hostility over and over and over again if you insist on not fixing things and just blaming your critics.
In this case, Musk's defenders are missing the entire POINT: it's a CAR. It's advertized as a superior car. If the thing is a CAR, it ought to perform like a CAR (including being as tolerant of the imperfections of a typical human operator). If it's a superior car, then it should be even LESS demanding of its users and require FEWER specific instructions for how to use it to get from point A to point B. If you cannot use it in the same environment as a CAR to do the same things as a CAR with the same convenience as a CAR .... then it's an inferior product and should cost LESS than a CAR not 2X or 3X as much. PERIOD. Full-Stop.
Sure, metric makes everything simpler and it's a great benefit to idiots who failed basic math classes ....... but it continues to fail in the US after even an organized propaganda effort in the schools for one very basic reason: SIZE
Simply put, an inch and a foot are very natural and convenient SIZES; we like them; they're convenient. If the guys who came up with the metric system had simply defined a cm to be the physical size of an inch, then the cm would be a handy size... a decimeter would be about a foot long (another human-friendly size) and a meter would be about 10 feet (so things like levels of structures would be by rule-of-thumb approx 1meter..... another friendly size for quick estimates) They chose, however, an arbitrary cm size that is stupidly inconvenient and unnatural and then later tried to pass-off the story that a meter was defined as a particular fraction of the circumference of the Earth, as though that meant anything or added some legitimacy (they got it wrong anyway). People who keep trying to push metric in the US always seem to think it's just a cultural issue that will be overcome by "education" .... it's not. Education is for introducing new ideas, not for training people to give-up something that works and which they like, in favor of something that somebody else thinks those people need to learn to like more. Average Americans tend to just be practical and they have a system that works fine and has convenient sizes ..... and it was good enough for us to use as we invented aviation, the light bulb, radio, tv, the internet, etc and as we won some World Wars, put a man on the moon, etc (in other words: the system is not just comfortable, but it has been perfectly adequate for everything we've used it for). We buy inch-thick lumber (we don't want to need to by 2.54cm-thick lumber). We like to use two-by-fours .... 5.08-by-10.16's would just be strange (while providing not enough benefit to offset the annoyance).
The simple truth is that now we all have computers and/or calculators that can easily do the math for us to convert from any system to any other system and most modern engineering is done with CAD systems that support both inches and meters, so the supposed advantage of just being able to move the decimal pt are not that important.
"Republican party were behind the legislation that created this artificial fiscal cliff as an act of political brinksmanship to impose their policies into the budget"
Not so much. President Obama had borrowed and spent more money than any president in history and he maxed-out the national credit card. When he came back for more money and demanded a rise in the "debt limit" (the limit on the national credit card) they insisted on some assurance he would cut back on the spending so there would be something left for the grandkids to inherit. As part of the compromise that gave him a higher debt limit to allow him to get through the 2012 election cycle without a government shutdown, Obama demanded the massive defense cuts in the sequestration package .... and Obama has been demanding for four years now that the nation must end all the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" (which were actually tax cuts for every taxpayer) .... and all the new healthcare taxes are part of "Obamacare". In summary: Almost everything that is part of the so-called "fiscal cliff" is something Obama demanded .... and that's why the Republicans have not been able to make a deal with him (if there's no deal, most of what happens is what he wanted in the first place).
The nation is severely divided because about half the population wants the small government the Constitution provides, and the other half thinks the Constitution is an out-dated obsolete document and wants the government to do everything the majority wants; these positions are not reconcilable and the smaller government people have just recently realized that the bigger government people will never compromise (no proposed compromise ever includes smaller government or government at least not getting any bigger ..... EVERY proposal by Harry Reid and President Obama has included GROWTH and TRILLIONS in new debts being heaped upon our kids and grandkids)
In previous generations, such impasses were much less severe because government was smaller and involved in less of our lives; A citizen might not like some of the things Jack Kennedy or Ron Reagan did, but most of those things had no direct impact on the citizen, who could ignore stuff and go-on with his life. Now, however, government is so huge and so involved in everything .... and president Obama is using it to force his beliefs and positions onto his opponents. Obama is leaving his opponents no way to peaceably disagree with him and ignore him. He has forced government into our healthcare, into religion (both with HHS mandates and "gay marriage") and much further into things like energy resources than previous presidents did. Under Obama, the very air we exhale is not regulated by the EPA and while they are only using that new power to kill-off the coal industry and try to slow natural gas, the power and the precedent they have set has no natural limit that will keep them from regulating everything from cow farts to bad breath. If your religious beliefs are that artificial birth control is wrong (not my personal position, but a good example), then under Kennedy or Reagan you'd not be forced to use it or to provide it for anybody else (though others might well have the freedom to get and use it) but Obama is now demanding you give-up your beliefs and provide it to others. In the past, two Americans who disagreed on that subject could agree to disagree .... but under Obama, the government is forcing one of them to violate his beliefs and pay for the other. Before somebody tries to claim he is being forced to subsidize religions he disagrees with, allow me to point out that a tax EXEMPTION is NOT the same thing as funding... a tax exemption is simply allowing some person or organization to keep his or its own money; the federal government has never required all citizens to, for example, pay tax dollars to a Methodist or Catholic church. I am not Catholic and I would be outraged if the government was requiring me to fund the Catholic church .... but I have no problem with the Catholic church being tax exempt; the government has no claim on their money. That's how such disagreements USED to work in the US. Obama supporters might think this idea of the federal government forcing people to buy stuff they find objectionable is really great (now, while their guy is in office), but they'd be outraged if G.W.Bush had ordered every American to buy every Rush Limbaugh book or buy something REALLY objectionable like CDs of country music ....
Are you truly who you think you are when you are addicted to drugs?
Are the pleasures a drug-affected brain feels to be equated with other forms of pleasure?
It would be one thing to wipe-out part of a healthy brain (thereby permanently altering it) like this but it might be another matter to make such a permanent change to a brain that has already had permanent, and negative, changes made by "modern chemistry". Of course, the presence of any pre-existing damage from drugs also raises questions of true consent. Not sure how I feel on this one, but given that this is on brains already affected by drugs the morals and ethics are a bit cloudier than they might otherwise be. Personally, I find the idea of depriving a person of the ability to experience pleasure both creepy and dangerous. Should we expect future headlines about "zombie" violence in China?