I must disagree. You can bike, you can ride a moped. You can move closer. Any other argument gives too much credence to your desire to avoid inconvenience.
Nukes are a transitional solution. They are better than oil, but not by much. I disagree with your supposition that we cannot make alternatives work. We have no choice but to increase our renewables and reduce our individual footprints.
For decades we have complacently consumed oil and it's now we're having to play catch up. We need to really get serious about providing alternatives. And likely it will be 50 alternatives but at least we will know that we have accounted for the entire waste stream.
I am not wedded to any one technology. Glad to hear they have tested the alternatives and figured out better approaches.
You say you're against any government funding of research? An easy position to take in the abstract. So, you're against the Space Program, NASA, Student Loans, Mortgage Interest Deductions, any public welfare spending. If you are advocating something, it's better to give it a real test rather than allowing a ridiculous idea to linger in the sunlight of pseudo acceptability. You don't want Cancer Research to be funded. You don't want to help the poor. You should be against any and every feature of the tax code rather than a straight percentage. Each of these government programs--including the EPA and the US Park Service--have no business being in existence according to your viewpoint. ["I don't think ANY business or research should be funded by the government."]
I am in no way saying that we can go cold turkey on oil. No, we just need to stop giving a single advantage in the tax code or the legal system to anything about oil. Let oil fend for itself, including for pollution remediation, then we'll really see how "valuable" petroleum is. Surely, there would be disruption, but the reality is it's warranted. People should not continue to kill off this planet as fast as they can. It's time to step in and say "enough".
Just consider the entire waste stream of every solution. That's all. Right now, oil exploration and oil-company land acquisition is heavily tax subsidized. Tell them they need to pay to remove the exact amount of carbon they release, or don't emit any carbon.
The current generation and the ones that came before have been forwarding the bill for our pollution to our children and grandchildren. Well, the bills are coming do to us. Each and every person who defends the status quo wants to continue forwarding that bill to their own grandchildren.
Downsizing is the obvious solution, dude. Having already done that, I can say it's painless. You really need all that stuff? You real proud of having spent your money on that bedroom set? Your garage full of old stuff you bought and now question what the hell you were doing? You with an HD TV, you tickled pink about all those old TVs laying around? That's your "stuff"?
Marvelous comments. This contained some science I hadn't heard about, thermocracking of water instead of electrolysis. I'm all for it. Keep the ideas coming. Build anything even possible. Do POCs for each and test like crazy. As long as the waste stream of any option is considered, I'm all for it.
The subway goes everywhere. You have complete freedom. After I have paid my $81.00 for the month, I can go anywhere in New York City, including Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. If I want to pay a few dollars, I can hop on trains to anwhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Last Christmas, I took a train to Philadelphia. It was easy on the environment.
When you complain that I ignore your facts, it's because they are not germane. If the pollution of oil is the problem, questions of alleged supply or not pertinent to the problem, they are not important or germane. That's why I ignore them. So, you can resume ad hominem attacks to your heart's content, but it does not comprise an argument. Exxon Valdez was not a good thing to have happened. If there is more drilling, then there will be environmental damage. If not at the site, then the oil when it is burned is damaging, poisoning the environment. Nobody disputes that damage.
Instead, they try to justify continuing damage under some non-existent argument.
"Hell, show me the Greenpeace office in Russia and they are 2nd World"
Noting that I did live in St. Petersburg, Russia [1997] and that I speak Russian, I can say from my personal experience that nobody in Russia is happy about the pollution there. The people there understand how the dirty air and foul water is killing them. They see the cancer clusters and early mortalities.
When you simply agreed that oil is not a long term solution, you, lost your argument and the rest was fluff. Of course, the private oil industry will continue to claw and scrape every last drop of oil out of the earth. Of course, they will undoubtedly get better at it. Let the private
companies explore all they want--how could we stop them from doing it? You're missing the emphasis of my entire point which is: Focus on new supplies. Remove tax breaks of any kind, anywhere for the oil-exploration industry. Let it entirely ride on its own merits. If any oil-industry pollution is found, clean it up and send them a bill. That's the only thing they understand.
If we have energy problems now, then all of you who choose to have a house in the suburbs, a car that you can drive around for fun, deserve to pay out the ass for gas. You still get off cheaply. We all pay taxes to clean up all the Superfund sites that are petrochemical related.
When you, again, resort to the irrelevant point of the oil supply, I have no alternative but to roll my eyes and wonder why you can't see beyond that red herring. Supply is not the point. Pollution is. Whether or not there is an infinite supply of oil is not the point. We need to get on something that is renewable. Those of you who bought McMansions out in the suburbs are, in a word, fucked.
The POINT is not the PRESENCE of the oil but, rather, the POLLUTION of the oil. When they find a batch of bad commodity--a freighter of moldy wheat, a herd of steers with Mad-Cow Disease, they don't decide to finish them off. They discard them. To complete the analogy (for those of you who were not paying attention), we recognize that petroleum is poisoning the earth. We need to get off this stuff as fast as possible. I want a president who is NOT beholding to the oil industry, like John McCain is. I want a president who is closer to understanding that oil is bad shit.
China may indeed drill for oil outside Cuba but, again, how do two wrongs make a right? We see that oil is not good for us, considering the air, groundwater, geopolitics, funding of oil wars, creation of excess plastics, ad infinitum.
(Slashdot is one of my news sources, Mr Steeped in Stereotypes.)
Fair question if I am a flack, but I am not. I am just irritated with the big lie we have been sold.
When I lived in Iowa City, I rode a bicycle to and from work daily. In Houston, I did have a car but I took the bus. In Salt Lake City, which is building light rail, I drove and rode a bicycle. It is so ridiculously easy to go long distances daily on a bike that I find it interesting you even make the argument.
As for your dire situation, having bought a house way the hell out in the Suburbs... Well, I believe there was a line in "Animal House" that sums up your situation in the suburbs. "You fucked up. Live with it." Aren't you Conservatives so hell bent on giving sway to the market? Well, here's your market: you bought a big house out in the middle of East Bum Fuck Egypt, and now that has turned out to be a stupid move... And, again, tell me why your mistake is my problem? Would you be on the edge of your chair to help me if I had made a mistake that cost me a lot of money? I don't think so.
Though as an aside I 110% agree with your viewpoint that the Indians have stolen and copied from US, that is beside the point of oil. We need to put all our research money on a "Manhattan Project" style effort to get renewable technology on line. Then, we refuse to buy materials that were made by polluting.
I find it amusing how you Conservatives or Libertarians think that 2 Wrongs = 1 Right. Just because India and China are also fouling the environment, that somehow forms an argument for us to continue polluting?
Are you older than seven years old?
Can you not see how this is a ludicrous argument?
I take note that you do not attempt to defend what a wonderful effect the oil lifestyle is doing to our environment. You know oil is bad but you just don't want to have a little less comfort. You are so addicted to your stuff, that you're willing to bequeath to your and my kids a lot dirties planet. A planet that has changed obviously as a detrimental effect of our actions. You know that we're fouling up this planet and you're fine with it. You're fine with it. Can't give up your "stuff".
Well, if you want the convenience then you should have to pay out the ass for it. That's your only real defense. If our environment can't take it, then you need to suffer and like it.
One point: you desalinate BY electrolysis. Then a smaller volume of brine is sent back to the ocean, to dissipate.
And any ideas are just that: ideas. I love how you are so quick to reject a possible, i.e. electromagnetic energy. Remember Tesla? We need to consider every idea.
I'm sure that McCain is ready to offer some ideas that he think will placate the left [in the same way that Bush lied in 2000, saying he would support CO2 reductions and then during his presidency he worked as hard as possible to do the exact opposite]. The reality is, McCain has oil-industry lobbyists working for him and so I do not trust him to oppose his oil-industry friends. I do not think we should spend another government-funded or supported dime on finding new sources of oil. Can't you even see two feet in front of your face that oil is bad for this planet?
You're like petroleum addicts who are going to quit, but just one more barrel. You're St. Augustine saying "God, make me chase--but not yet, not yet!" Well, we've gotten enough damage from you me firsters.
News Flash for you, dude. Our entire economy is government managed. Unless you're willing to eliminate the FDIC, the Fed, the SEC, the IRS and all of the governmental organizations that separate us from the French Revolution, you're already living with lots of artificial markets.
I only think that we should lean our collective interest away from oil, which clearly is not healthy in the long term.
New York is NOT centrally located. People travel from all over to get here. I have a one-hour commute from one end of the B train to Manhattan, every day. The difference is I move my body, not a big hunk of metal. I read during that hour and it's not that bad. NYC has a great transit system because it had no choice. We' damn fools for building suburbs so spread out. NYC is spread out but the population density is such that you do not have a yard and a garage and you have much less fractional cost to commute. An unlimited subway pass for a month in NYC is $81.00. How much do you spend on Gas, Insurance, maintenance, parking and tickets over a month? I rest my case.
SLC when I lived there was getting the message and building light rail as fast as possible.
Houston, on the other hand
was building super highways as fast as possible.
I agree that many communities are spread out--but that is the problem. We should not be enabling the mistakes but rectifying them. The mistake WAS building so spread out.
I had a car for decades but you find out that you can become healthier and less frazzled by getting rid of your car. I myself did it. Everybody in NYC uses these ubiquitous hand carts that make it easy to grocery shop. There are fewer fat people here because everybody walks between subway stations. You may like your stuff, pal, but this planet cannot take much more. You should have your freedom to own your stuff and you should pay for the true cost of owning that stuff. From now on, pollution must be accounted for. Why do you think you should be allowed to buy cheap goods that pollute the environment? You know if gas was priced to account for the filth it introduces into our air and water, it would be much more expensive. If you are willing to pay the real cost of that pollution, go right ahead and buy your stuff. But don't expect our children to pay the true costs.
The reason none of these things have gone on line is because of the attitudes of people like you. There has been no concerted investment, ala the Manhattan Project. In lieu of any concentrated, directed effort to achieve a goal, nothing gets accomplished.
The sun shines reliably for a large fraction of the day--why not invest in that?
I find it curious how your standards of acceptability change: in the case of the alternatives available: switch grass, solar, wind, you play the pessimist. In the case of oil available off the coasts, suddenly you're an optimist. The US Department of Energy [you know, the one with all the Bush appointees in it] has said that 1.) offshore oil will not enter the supply chain for ten years minimum, not "a couple years" [implying 2], as you allege.
Next you toss out the red-herring [meaning irrelevant] point of the Chinese drilling in Cuba--a claim which has been shown to be false so clearly that former GOP Candidate Rudy Guilliani himself uses future tense to describe this alleged problem, which is still a red herring. Do two wrongs make a right? [China allegedly drilling around Cuba and the US drilling off Florida?]
Again, when you address the oil industry, it's all solid to you. When it comes to alternatives, it's "pie-in-the-sky". What are you, an oil-industry flack? You reluctant to learn new things or something?
Though Nuclear does have the benefit of no greenhouse gases, it still has the same fundamental problem that oil does: it's business model is predicated on NOT dealing with its wastes! We STILL doe not have a solution to the incredibly toxic wastes we've been generating for decades. The only solution is to hide the waste. You think this is a viable alternative? Or, are you a Nuclear Energy devotee who has some business interest in that industry. When you advocate dirty technologies, how can we take you seriously?
By the way, I lived in Houston and there is mass transit which I used while working for HP
. And the solution is not--duh--biking 30 miles, it's moving closer to your work and downsizing your stuff.
As I can re-iterate: I have lived all over the United States and this model in NYC is the only one I see as being viable. I've lived and commuted in Omaha, Phoenix, Houston, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City. I always chose to live as close as possible to work.
Such name calling as labeling environmentalism "psychobabble" is convincing fewer and fewer people, my friend. The babble is coming from you fools who seem to prefer fouling your own nests.
Sorry to disappoint you. I'm about as national as you can get: Born and raised in Nebraska, lived in Iowa, Arizona, Texas, Ohio and Utah before I ever stepped foot, recently, in New York. Funny how facile comments like the one you just made can be shown to be so ludicrous.
WE just had a spill caused by human stupidity and penny pinching [oil tanker in the Mississippi that leaked all that heavy oil after a barge hit it] and so I have no faith in the Prince-William-Sound fouling oil industry to not have major accidents and ruin our common coastlines and all the wildlife and environments that live there.
You're missing the point entirely. Oil is not a long-term solution. Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply. We have clearly had something change in our weather patterns. We know oil is a fossil fuel that is destined to run out. Look at them flailing in China to clean up their air in time for the Olympics. Oil is just bad all around.
So, according to your view, it is the best choice to direct our attention towards squeezing out those last few drops of oil, which--according to the 80-20 rule--will be the hardest, most expensive and lease safe of all? You're short sighted. To use an analogy that would be understood by all the slashdotters, you're the guy whose advocating that we rebuild our company's systems in COBOL rather than Java/.NET/ or whatever newer. Coal and oil do not need time or attention wasted on them. They are dirty, and only enrich a few people at the top of coal companies. We need diverse and varied sources of energy that are renewable. We need to try several things and let the marketplace choose which ones are the best.
The real problem is that the oil industry is allowed to dump a byproduct of their commodity into the atmosphere and the waterways without accounting for that damage. If you accounted for the damage oil is doing to our environment, and made oil companies sell their product while paying for that damage, we would all see that the current petroleum-oriented economy is terrible.
Anybody who roots for more oil drilling is just some deluded troglodyte who really doesn't care what happens to this world as long as they can get rich in it, and "have theirs". Well, we've had enough of people who are willing to get theirs even if it means they have to go out late Saturday nights and tip over a 50-gallon-drum of toxic waste into the local creek. If it saves them some money, they're all for it. We've had enough of that type of bastard.
You have the right to your stuff--if you're willing to pay out the ass for it. That's what it's coming to, you know. NYC nearly implemented congestion pricing like London already has. That means you would have had to pay $11.00 just to enter Lower Manhattan. Owning a car is not going to get cheaper. Let the market convince you that you don't need your stuff. That's the American way.
We should not spend another penny aiding or abetting the Petroleum industry. Every penny of public-funded research should go towards research of alternatives to oil and gasoline.
Electromagnetic energy taken from the ionosphere/
Seawater desalination by solar-cell-powered electrolosis, generating hydrogen.
Vast swaths of the Western US need to get covered with wind farms.
Oil is yesterday. McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil. What he and the GOP don't like is the obvious need to encourage commuting by bicycle and public transit--as we have here in NYC--so that people like me can gleefully sell their cars and live without one. This style of low-impact life, where you're not always dragging around a big metal car with you, does not offer as many profit opportunities. Corporations don't like a low-stuff life because they can't take as much of our money away, then.
I'm delighted and gratified that you've had good experiences with outsourcing. As I said, I have not. As you yourself intimated, it's really hard to manage these projects.
When I was with HP long ago, we asked that our offshore resources create some entity beans for us (CMP). I started to see every CMP entity bean with the same beginning few lines:
xxx {
Connection con = null;
PreparedStatement ps = null;
ResultSet rs = null;
If you know your EJB CMP Entity Beans, you know that those three statements have no place being in a Container-managed Persistence bean. Yet, each and every one contained those exact same variables that were not ever used. Why? Because they were copying and pasting stuff they did not understand.
When I was with UnitedHeathGroup, we offshored a lot of work with exact models provided. It had to be rewritten stateside.
If I implied that the entire world is uncreative, I misspoke. I specifically meant India.
And though now there are pockets of wealth in India, you MUST admin that proportionally it is still a dirt-poor country.
I stand by my experience, however unpleasant it is for you to hear.
Well, in my eleven years as a software developer, my experience does not agree with yours. You have to admit that the vast majority of software innovations have come from the US. I have worked on numerous offshoring projects and have found the lack of creativity from our indian developers to be breathtaking. We invariably had to silently rewrite all the code from India. They were well able to follow a pattern that had been established but ask them to invent a design? Good luck.
You call India a nuclear power. True enough. However, the photos I see of India invariably show mud streets and vast numbers of poor, uneducated people. India is still a third-world country.
Slashdot Mirror
you are = you're
I must disagree. You can bike, you can ride a moped. You can move closer. Any other argument gives too much credence to your desire to avoid inconvenience.
Nukes are a transitional solution. They are better than oil, but not by much. I disagree with your supposition that we cannot make alternatives work. We have no choice but to increase our renewables and reduce our individual footprints.
For decades we have complacently consumed oil and it's now we're having to play catch up. We need to really get serious about providing alternatives. And likely it will be 50 alternatives but at least we will know that we have accounted for the entire waste stream.
I am not wedded to any one technology. Glad to hear they have tested the alternatives and figured out better approaches.
You say you're against any government funding of research? An easy position to take in the abstract. So, you're against the Space Program, NASA, Student Loans, Mortgage Interest Deductions, any public welfare spending. If you are advocating something, it's better to give it a real test rather than allowing a ridiculous idea to linger in the sunlight of pseudo acceptability. You don't want Cancer Research to be funded. You don't want to help the poor. You should be against any and every feature of the tax code rather than a straight percentage. Each of these government programs--including the EPA and the US Park Service--have no business being in existence according to your viewpoint. ["I don't think ANY business or research should be funded by the government."]
I am in no way saying that we can go cold turkey on oil. No, we just need to stop giving a single advantage in the tax code or the legal system to anything about oil. Let oil fend for itself, including for pollution remediation, then we'll really see how "valuable" petroleum is. Surely, there would be disruption, but the reality is it's warranted. People should not continue to kill off this planet as fast as they can. It's time to step in and say "enough".
Just consider the entire waste stream of every solution. That's all. Right now, oil exploration and oil-company land acquisition is heavily tax subsidized. Tell them they need to pay to remove the exact amount of carbon they release, or don't emit any carbon.
The current generation and the ones that came before have been forwarding the bill for our pollution to our children and grandchildren. Well, the bills are coming do to us. Each and every person who defends the status quo wants to continue forwarding that bill to their own grandchildren.
Downsizing is the obvious solution, dude. Having already done that, I can say it's painless. You really need all that stuff? You real proud of having spent your money on that bedroom set? Your garage full of old stuff you bought and now question what the hell you were doing? You with an HD TV, you tickled pink about all those old TVs laying around? That's your "stuff"?
Marvelous comments. This contained some science I hadn't heard about, thermocracking of water instead of electrolysis. I'm all for it. Keep the ideas coming. Build anything even possible. Do POCs for each and test like crazy. As long as the waste stream of any option is considered, I'm all for it.
The subway goes everywhere. You have complete freedom. After I have paid my $81.00 for the month, I can go anywhere in New York City, including Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. If I want to pay a few dollars, I can hop on trains to anwhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Last Christmas, I took a train to Philadelphia. It was easy on the environment.
When you complain that I ignore your facts, it's because they are not germane. If the pollution of oil is the problem, questions of alleged supply or not pertinent to the problem, they are not important or germane. That's why I ignore them. So, you can resume ad hominem attacks to your heart's content, but it does not comprise an argument. Exxon Valdez was not a good thing to have happened. If there is more drilling, then there will be environmental damage. If not at the site, then the oil when it is burned is damaging, poisoning the environment. Nobody disputes that damage.
Instead, they try to justify continuing damage under some non-existent argument.
"Hell, show me the Greenpeace office in Russia and they are 2nd World"
Noting that I did live in St. Petersburg, Russia [1997] and that I speak Russian, I can say from my personal experience that nobody in Russia is happy about the pollution there. The people there understand how the dirty air and foul water is killing them. They see the cancer clusters and early mortalities.
When you simply agreed that oil is not a long term solution, you, lost your argument and the rest was fluff. Of course, the private oil industry will continue to claw and scrape every last drop of oil out of the earth. Of course, they will undoubtedly get better at it. Let the private
companies explore all they want--how could we stop them from doing it? You're missing the emphasis of my entire point which is: Focus on new supplies. Remove tax breaks of any kind, anywhere for the oil-exploration industry. Let it entirely ride on its own merits. If any oil-industry pollution is found, clean it up and send them a bill. That's the only thing they understand.
If we have energy problems now, then all of you who choose to have a house in the suburbs, a car that you can drive around for fun, deserve to pay out the ass for gas. You still get off cheaply. We all pay taxes to clean up all the Superfund sites that are petrochemical related.
When you, again, resort to the irrelevant point of the oil supply, I have no alternative but to roll my eyes and wonder why you can't see beyond that red herring. Supply is not the point. Pollution is. Whether or not there is an infinite supply of oil is not the point. We need to get on something that is renewable. Those of you who bought McMansions out in the suburbs are, in a word, fucked.
Water.
The POINT is not the PRESENCE of the oil but, rather, the POLLUTION of the oil. When they find a batch of bad commodity--a freighter of moldy wheat, a herd of steers with Mad-Cow Disease, they don't decide to finish them off. They discard them. To complete the analogy (for those of you who were not paying attention), we recognize that petroleum is poisoning the earth. We need to get off this stuff as fast as possible. I want a president who is NOT beholding to the oil industry, like John McCain is. I want a president who is closer to understanding that oil is bad shit.
China may indeed drill for oil outside Cuba but, again, how do two wrongs make a right? We see that oil is not good for us, considering the air, groundwater, geopolitics, funding of oil wars, creation of excess plastics, ad infinitum.
(Slashdot is one of my news sources, Mr Steeped in Stereotypes.)
Fair question if I am a flack, but I am not. I am just irritated with the big lie we have been sold.
When I lived in Iowa City, I rode a bicycle to and from work daily. In Houston, I did have a car but I took the bus. In Salt Lake City, which is building light rail, I drove and rode a bicycle. It is so ridiculously easy to go long distances daily on a bike that I find it interesting you even make the argument.
As for your dire situation, having bought a house way the hell out in the Suburbs... Well, I believe there was a line in "Animal House" that sums up your situation in the suburbs. "You fucked up. Live with it." Aren't you Conservatives so hell bent on giving sway to the market? Well, here's your market: you bought a big house out in the middle of East Bum Fuck Egypt, and now that has turned out to be a stupid move... And, again, tell me why your mistake is my problem? Would you be on the edge of your chair to help me if I had made a mistake that cost me a lot of money? I don't think so.
Though as an aside I 110% agree with your viewpoint that the Indians have stolen and copied from US, that is beside the point of oil. We need to put all our research money on a "Manhattan Project" style effort to get renewable technology on line. Then, we refuse to buy materials that were made by polluting.
I find it amusing how you Conservatives or Libertarians think that 2 Wrongs = 1 Right . Just because India and China are also fouling the environment, that somehow forms an argument for us to continue polluting?
Are you older than seven years old?
Can you not see how this is a ludicrous argument?
I take note that you do not attempt to defend what a wonderful effect the oil lifestyle is doing to our environment. You know oil is bad but you just don't want to have a little less comfort. You are so addicted to your stuff, that you're willing to bequeath to your and my kids a lot dirties planet. A planet that has changed obviously as a detrimental effect of our actions. You know that we're fouling up this planet and you're fine with it. You're fine with it. Can't give up your "stuff".
Well, if you want the convenience then you should have to pay out the ass for it. That's your only real defense. If our environment can't take it, then you need to suffer and like it.
One point: you desalinate BY electrolysis. Then a smaller volume of brine is sent back to the ocean, to dissipate. And any ideas are just that: ideas. I love how you are so quick to reject a possible, i.e. electromagnetic energy. Remember Tesla? We need to consider every idea.
I'm sure that McCain is ready to offer some ideas that he think will placate the left [in the same way that Bush lied in 2000, saying he would support CO2 reductions and then during his presidency he worked as hard as possible to do the exact opposite]. The reality is, McCain has oil-industry lobbyists working for him and so I do not trust him to oppose his oil-industry friends. I do not think we should spend another government-funded or supported dime on finding new sources of oil. Can't you even see two feet in front of your face that oil is bad for this planet?
You're like petroleum addicts who are going to quit, but just one more barrel. You're St. Augustine saying "God, make me chase--but not yet, not yet!" Well, we've gotten enough damage from you me firsters.
Point taken: the entire petroleum industry needs to change. I have merely focused on oil in the interest of a unified argument
.
News Flash for you, dude. Our entire economy is government managed. Unless you're willing to eliminate the FDIC, the Fed, the SEC, the IRS and all of the governmental organizations that separate us from the French Revolution, you're already living with lots of artificial markets.
I only think that we should lean our collective interest away from oil, which clearly is not healthy in the long term.
New York is NOT centrally located. People travel from all over to get here. I have a one-hour commute from one end of the B train to Manhattan, every day. The difference is I move my body, not a big hunk of metal. I read during that hour and it's not that bad. NYC has a great transit system because it had no choice. We' damn fools for building suburbs so spread out. NYC is spread out but the population density is such that you do not have a yard and a garage and you have much less fractional cost to commute. An unlimited subway pass for a month in NYC is $81.00. How much do you spend on Gas, Insurance, maintenance, parking and tickets over a month? I rest my case.
SLC when I lived there was getting the message and building light rail as fast as possible.
Houston, on the other hand
was building super highways as fast as possible.
I agree that many communities are spread out--but that is the problem. We should not be enabling the mistakes but rectifying them. The mistake WAS building so spread out.
I had a car for decades but you find out that you can become healthier and less frazzled by getting rid of your car. I myself did it. Everybody in NYC uses these ubiquitous hand carts that make it easy to grocery shop. There are fewer fat people here because everybody walks between subway stations. You may like your stuff, pal, but this planet cannot take much more. You should have your freedom to own your stuff and you should pay for the true cost of owning that stuff. From now on, pollution must be accounted for. Why do you think you should be allowed to buy cheap goods that pollute the environment? You know if gas was priced to account for the filth it introduces into our air and water, it would be much more expensive. If you are willing to pay the real cost of that pollution, go right ahead and buy your stuff. But don't expect our children to pay the true costs.
The reason none of these things have gone on line is because of the attitudes of people like you. There has been no concerted investment, ala the Manhattan Project. In lieu of any concentrated, directed effort to achieve a goal, nothing gets accomplished.
The sun shines reliably for a large fraction of the day--why not invest in that?
I find it curious how your standards of acceptability change: in the case of the alternatives available: switch grass, solar, wind, you play the pessimist. In the case of oil available off the coasts, suddenly you're an optimist. The US Department of Energy [you know, the one with all the Bush appointees in it] has said that 1.) offshore oil will not enter the supply chain for ten years minimum, not "a couple years" [implying 2], as you allege.
Next you toss out the red-herring [meaning irrelevant] point of the Chinese drilling in Cuba--a claim which has been shown to be false so clearly that former GOP Candidate Rudy Guilliani himself uses future tense to describe this alleged problem, which is still a red herring. Do two wrongs make a right? [China allegedly drilling around Cuba and the US drilling off Florida?]
Again, when you address the oil industry, it's all solid to you. When it comes to alternatives, it's "pie-in-the-sky". What are you, an oil-industry flack? You reluctant to learn new things or something?
Though Nuclear does have the benefit of no greenhouse gases, it still has the same fundamental problem that oil does: it's business model is predicated on NOT dealing with its wastes! We STILL doe not have a solution to the incredibly toxic wastes we've been generating for decades. The only solution is to hide the waste. You think this is a viable alternative? Or, are you a Nuclear Energy devotee who has some business interest in that industry. When you advocate dirty technologies, how can we take you seriously?
By the way, I lived in Houston and there is mass transit which I used while working for HP
. And the solution is not--duh--biking 30 miles, it's moving closer to your work and downsizing your stuff.
As I can re-iterate: I have lived all over the United States and this model in NYC is the only one I see as being viable. I've lived and commuted in Omaha, Phoenix, Houston, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City. I always chose to live as close as possible to work.
Such name calling as labeling environmentalism "psychobabble" is convincing fewer and fewer people, my friend. The babble is coming from you fools who seem to prefer fouling your own nests.
Sorry to disappoint you. I'm about as national as you can get: Born and raised in Nebraska, lived in Iowa, Arizona, Texas, Ohio and Utah before I ever stepped foot, recently, in New York. Funny how facile comments like the one you just made can be shown to be so ludicrous.
WE just had a spill caused by human stupidity and penny pinching [oil tanker in the Mississippi that leaked all that heavy oil after a barge hit it] and so I have no faith in the Prince-William-Sound fouling oil industry to not have major accidents and ruin our common coastlines and all the wildlife and environments that live there. You're missing the point entirely. Oil is not a long-term solution. Why waste another dime on trying to extend the supply. We have clearly had something change in our weather patterns. We know oil is a fossil fuel that is destined to run out. Look at them flailing in China to clean up their air in time for the Olympics. Oil is just bad all around. So, according to your view, it is the best choice to direct our attention towards squeezing out those last few drops of oil, which--according to the 80-20 rule--will be the hardest, most expensive and lease safe of all? You're short sighted. To use an analogy that would be understood by all the slashdotters, you're the guy whose advocating that we rebuild our company's systems in COBOL rather than Java/.NET/ or whatever newer. Coal and oil do not need time or attention wasted on them. They are dirty, and only enrich a few people at the top of coal companies. We need diverse and varied sources of energy that are renewable. We need to try several things and let the marketplace choose which ones are the best. The real problem is that the oil industry is allowed to dump a byproduct of their commodity into the atmosphere and the waterways without accounting for that damage. If you accounted for the damage oil is doing to our environment, and made oil companies sell their product while paying for that damage, we would all see that the current petroleum-oriented economy is terrible. Anybody who roots for more oil drilling is just some deluded troglodyte who really doesn't care what happens to this world as long as they can get rich in it, and "have theirs". Well, we've had enough of people who are willing to get theirs even if it means they have to go out late Saturday nights and tip over a 50-gallon-drum of toxic waste into the local creek. If it saves them some money, they're all for it. We've had enough of that type of bastard.
You have the right to your stuff--if you're willing to pay out the ass for it. That's what it's coming to, you know. NYC nearly implemented congestion pricing like London already has. That means you would have had to pay $11.00 just to enter Lower Manhattan. Owning a car is not going to get cheaper. Let the market convince you that you don't need your stuff. That's the American way.
Oil is yesterday. McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil. What he and the GOP don't like is the obvious need to encourage commuting by bicycle and public transit--as we have here in NYC--so that people like me can gleefully sell their cars and live without one. This style of low-impact life, where you're not always dragging around a big metal car with you, does not offer as many profit opportunities. Corporations don't like a low-stuff life because they can't take as much of our money away, then.
I'm delighted and gratified that you've had good experiences with outsourcing. As I said, I have not. As you yourself intimated, it's really hard to manage these projects. When I was with HP long ago, we asked that our offshore resources create some entity beans for us (CMP). I started to see every CMP entity bean with the same beginning few lines: xxx { Connection con = null; PreparedStatement ps = null; ResultSet rs = null; If you know your EJB CMP Entity Beans, you know that those three statements have no place being in a Container-managed Persistence bean. Yet, each and every one contained those exact same variables that were not ever used. Why? Because they were copying and pasting stuff they did not understand. When I was with UnitedHeathGroup, we offshored a lot of work with exact models provided. It had to be rewritten stateside. If I implied that the entire world is uncreative, I misspoke. I specifically meant India. And though now there are pockets of wealth in India, you MUST admin that proportionally it is still a dirt-poor country. I stand by my experience, however unpleasant it is for you to hear.
Well, in my eleven years as a software developer, my experience does not agree with yours. You have to admit that the vast majority of software innovations have come from the US. I have worked on numerous offshoring projects and have found the lack of creativity from our indian developers to be breathtaking. We invariably had to silently rewrite all the code from India. They were well able to follow a pattern that had been established but ask them to invent a design? Good luck. You call India a nuclear power. True enough. However, the photos I see of India invariably show mud streets and vast numbers of poor, uneducated people. India is still a third-world country.
Which is why I fear for our country when this generation grows up. I should have explained that I was speaking of my generation.