"If we wait until it's too late we'll wait forever, and then it will be too late."
"Too late" does not occur within our lifetimes. Some of us alive today will see this problem solved.
"If we wait until energy is $cheap (for an undefined value of $cheap) we'll wait forever, and then it will be too late."
It will not be "too late" within our lifetimes, but we are not "waiting" and are moving with all deliberate speed to ramp up solar and wind. 1000's of wind generators have been and are being built, and progress on solar is advancing and costs of obtaining solar electricity are falling. Our tough nut to crack is the "magic battery" that will allow economical electric cars rather than cars from high-priced brands like Tesla and Porsche.
"It we wait until all the uninvented inventions are all invented we'll wait forever, and then it will be too late."
We're not waiting. We're inventing them right now.
"The only thing we can guarantee is that if we never start we will never finish."
We started a long time ago, and progress is steady and successes are numerous. The big challenge, the "magic battery", has numerous announcement of yet another high capacity battery, but as yet we don't have such a battery suitable for automotive use. However, the near-monthly announcement of yet another "breakthrough" in this area is eventually going to bear fruit, and we will have our electric cars. At that point, we will be in sight of the ultimate solution of never digging anything out of the ground to fuel our energy demands again.
"Teaching ourselves to be more efficient in what we do and how we use energy will only help to reduce waste. And with less waste we there is more to go around. Conflating starting to do *anything* about our CO2 addiction with the starvation and death of poor third world babies is simply a cynical, evil, lazy, and corrupt non sequitur fallacy"
Did I say anything about 3rd world babies? No, I was talking about the 49 million Americans ALREADY in poverty, in part because of misguided, overly-expensive "solutions" to misguided and sometimes not-existent "environmental problems" that make everything they must purchase more expensive. Save _American_ lives by proceeding reasonably, without having one's hair set afire by alarmist advocates with broken computer programs predicting doom and gloom unless we do exactly as _they_ say. Our solutions will appear as the by-product of efforts to achieve cheaper energy, which will soon be solar and wind, as that tech has a lot of improvement possibility left in it. Internal combustion, and fossil fuel produced energy do not.
The public transportation proponents are attempting to solve the wrong problem.
We are not all going to and from work all the time. Often, we're living in DC and we're packing the kids into the car and the luggage and maybe a set of tools into the trunk and going to Grandma's in South Carolina to visit and fix up a few things around her house over the weekend.
Now describe to me how a train is going to help with the 3 suitcases and the portable air compressor and paint gun with 5 quarts of satin white? Gonna lug that onto a train? No, you're not, you're going to be sitting in traffic with everyone else, especially on Sunday night when I-95 thru the Fredericksburg, Va. area comes to a near-halt with all the traffic (those people aren't going to work or coming from it, either) and the Harry W. Nice bridge on US 301 between Virginia and Maryland over the Potomac is backed up 5 miles with the very same sort of traffic for points north.
That's the problem to solve. Not everyone is moving around to go to work. Some are working on Grandma's house, others have 300 lbs of scuba gear / tanks / etc. or maybe a ski-doo or maybe all of the above. We need to stop the knee-jerk to "public transportation" because it just doesn't work all the places that cars and trucks work. Build some more roads, damnit, and yeah, lets robotize the cars. We want to go to sleep in the back seat and truck bed, so when we get to Grandma's, we're ready to attack the painting, or ready to hit the beach with the ski-doo...
Century? 300 Years? Freeman Dyson, the most brilliant physicist on the planet, has said not to worry about it, because in 50 - 60 years or so we're going to have the energy from renewable sources problem licked, we will dig nothing out of the ground for our energy, and put no CO2 into the atmosphere. At that point, CO2 concentrations will start down, and our problems of too-cold winters will just be beginning (He didn't say the part about the too-cold winters, that's just my speculation. )
The point is that 1) There's not a damn thing we can do about this right now, because we don't have the tech to leave the carbon in the ground and that's what we need to do, and 2) we have centuries to fix this, and will probably do so in 50 - 60 years.
So, not to worry, and especially don't go creating millions of new people in poverty by raising fossil fuel costs when people still need cheap energy to live, heat their homes, air condition, and move around in cars. Making all that more expensive just plunges the barely-hanging-on off the edge of the cliff, into poverty. What's more dangerous than smoking? Living in poverty, which will take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only likely to take 7 years off your life. So, lets get people out of poverty, promote prosperity, and solve this problem with all due haste, but not so quick that it hurts people.
They will have to attack neighboring states to "make a hole" and most of the neighboring states are quite strong, militarily. Getting them to commit suicide via inadvisable military endeavors, esp. when they will have no supply lines because growing food will become impossible at the higher temperatures may also not be a bad thing. They all die in a war they start that when they could have just shown up at the border, hat in hand, begging for asylum that would most assuredly be granted, would scatter them, and make them much more concerned with their situation than with killing everyone in the world that is not Muslim.
There won't be any war there because there won't be any people there. What part of "uninhabitable" are you having trouble with?
And as far as war goes, we can beat them in a straight-up war. As Bill O'Reilly has said repeatedly, "General Patton could destroy all of ISIS in a week." Its the damn Jihad nonsense, the cowardly war against civilians that has to be stopped. Making them all refugees would be a great start.
Making that area of the world uninhabitable might not be a bad thing, considering the cockroaches that live there already. Scatter them like the tower of babel. Give them something to do beside Jihad! Works for me.
What I always want to know is even with unlimited money, just what do you think you could do about "global warming?" Our whole society runs on energy, and without it our crops don't get grown and they don't get to market. The fuels to make electricity require energy to move them from the oil or coal fields to the generators where they are turned into electricity. And cars and trucks run on oil, there are millions and millions of cars, and nobody has invented the "magic battery" to allow us to run them without emitting.
And if you try to spend unlimited money, you end up throwing people out of work. They go into poverty. What is more dangerous to your health than smoking? Living in poverty is more dangerous than smoking as it can take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only "good" for a 7 year reduction in lifespan. Plus, those kids that are living in poverty and experiencing undernourishment will have their brains fail to develop fully, and this damage cannot be reversed later.
And since the Chinese and the Indians don't give a flying F about the global warming scarecrow, they are going to continue to dig coal like it is going out of style. That means that the rest of the world that considers themselves "sane" will have to go to zero emissions. We can't do it. We don't have that tech yet. We may never get that tech. The only way we could achieve zero emissions is kill a really significant portion of the population and go back to animal-powered subsistence farming like the 1800's, but of course the lifespans would be like the 1800's. Izzat what we want to do? And, as many scientists claim, the AGW theory may yet be a hoax, and if so, we could kill millions for nothing.
People can whine about global warming all day, but unless they have a SOLUTION, I don't want to hear it. "Doing a little bit" that is insanely costly and doesn't amount to 0.05 degrees of reduction is just torturing the citizens for no good reason. I want a full-up, "completely stop the warming" solution or I say we don't spend a damned dime toward it. Half measures just harm all.
I'm 68, and have lived much of my life without portable electronics and some of my life even without TV. In all time frames, a car was absolutely necessary to my happiness. Walking / bicycling (I've never tried horseback riding) are PITAs, and cars are where both utility and fun reside.
but there's probably enough energy in the Yellowstone magma chambers to 100% power all our (humanity's - the world's) energy requirements for absolutely everything we do. Tapping it fully, MAYBE we could keep it from getting any hotter. Suspicious we could not construct enough heat sinks to actually cool it at all, its too big.
About 10 years ago I was forgetting where I was on my way to work, not remembering whether I had made the turn from one road onto another, etc. I fixed it with aerobic exercise on an elliptical crosstrainer at my health club. Got up to an hour and 1000 calories of exercise, which helped with keeping weight under control, too. Just a thought if you'd like to try that. Oxygen to the brain, I think is probably at work with the exercise thing. I just know I have to keep exercising, or I'm going to go all to hell and prolly won't be able to remember my name eventually.
I'm 68, and literally keep a highlighter in my pocket, a yellow one. (but don't need instructions to get around... ) I pull it out every now and then when I get a piece of paper with a phone number on it or an address that I want to be able to find on the page easily, and swipe some yellow on that. Highlighters are just cool!
I road rally with the Sports Car Club of America, and can get anyone anywhere with a set of rally instructions. That's why I thought of this. Don't know if it would work with someone having memory problems, but its something to try is all.
Create a set of instructions to be executed in numerical order:
1) Leave the dining hall using the big white double doors.
2) Continue to the Sidewalk intersection with the flower pot in the middle.
3) Take the rightmost sidewalk
4) Go left on the sidewalk just after the building with number "289A"
5) Enter the building marked 289A at the 3'rd sidewalk entrance.
and so forth.
Print up a few hundred of these for the trip to and trip from each of the points he has to go to. When following these instructions, he can mark off each one with, say, a highlighter to let himself know at what part of the journey he is, in case he forgets. You could even make up these instructions with visual cues, such as photographs of what the closeby landscape should look like at any point.
Dunno if it'll work, I've never worked with people losing these cognitive abilities. All I can say is give it a try.
The planes will probably be flying themselves by that time too.
Really, this thing better be backed up to the hilt, 'cuz if it went down and all ATC were to cease, those planes aloft would be unlikely to be able to coordinate themselves to a safe landing and not be hitting each other.
Still didn't explain how you're going to produce food, move it and other commodities, and get people down the road for billions of vehicle miles using only "clean" energy at a price that we can afford. Doesn't happen without the magic battery. No magic battery, and the gov't can get involved all it wants, and people will still starve, and become pauperized, unless using fossil fuels.
But then explain exactly what you think you're going to do about it. You can build all the wind machines and solar farms you like, and even 100 more big nukes, and you know what? It won't power your cars and trucks down the road.
But it has to power your cars and trucks down the road, because without them, commerce, and most significantly food production and delivery stops. We have one viable way to get everyone where they need to go and that is the individual automobile and truck. And that absolutely, positively requires oil until someone invents the magic battery to make electric cars and trucks happen. But the magic battery most be cheap and small and cheap and lightweight and cheap and high capacity and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap. If it ain't cheap, then Joe Lunchbucket as well as Farmer Brown can't afford it and all the aforementioned bad stuff happens. But we do not have the magic battery, and we may never get the magic battery. Someone has to invent it, and it is not known to be even possible until someone actually does it.
No magic battery ever? Then we have to figure out a way to use grid electricity to power all our vehicles everywhere. That probably can't be done either, and if so, we probably all die when "cheap enough" oil energy no longer exists. So, the best thing all the leftist enviro-whiners can do is to quit whining, get their PHD's in electrochemistry, and get their butts into a lab somewhere and invent for us the magic battery. Otherwise, we're pretty much screwed at some point.
I said, "By the gov't." If I come into your home, you have the right, but the gov't doesn't. If YOU have an airplane, YOU have the right, but the gov't doesn't. Customs is different because you don't necessarily have the right to cross the border. You have the right to travel, tho, and the gov't searching everyone traveling by airplane is illegal under the 4th Amendment. The airlines could set up such security and do it just fine, they aren't the gov't. But the gov't doing it is illegal under the 4th amendment.
Disallowing weapons is not a good thing. If the passengers on flight 93, as well as the other planes had been armed, they would easily have overwhelmed the terrorists. Our best security would be to encourage concealed carry of weapons onto airplanes, so the bad guys wouldn't know from where the threat to their plans would come. They would have to assume that every passenger on the airplane who is not a child has a gun. In actuality, maybe 10% would be armed, but that's a lot of people to thwart your plans if you're a terrorist.
Uh, yeah it is, at least being transported without being searched by the gov't is a right. Judge Napolitano on Fox News went into great detail about this, with what they are doing being absolutely positively illegal with respect to the 4th amendment. The gov't just can't legally do what they're doing. The AIRLINES can institute, pay for, and run a TSA-like security system, but not the gov't.
Short of prison-like strip searches, what they're trying to do is likely impossible. The old joke about "No carry on luggage and everybody flies naked" is probably the only thing that would really work, except that they'd have to use a second plane to fly the baggage in case there's a bomb in the luggage, which they will also miss. The 2nd plane should probably have a crew of 1 or 2 and ejection seats...
So, now the security theater is going to become unbearable again, and I'm going to KEEP driving where I want to go. Sold my car a couple weeks ago - 3 years and 2 months old, with 124,000 miles on the odometer because I've BEEN driving wherever I wanted to go, and there were some really long trips in there most of the way across the country that were repeated several times a year. Fortunately, I love to drive and loathe gov't intrusion, but the reason I drove, and took trains, is the TSA. Otherwise, I would have flown.
"DO ABOUT IT?" I want to hear what you think you can do about it...
We can do a whale of a lot that severely affects industry, impoverishes millions more Americans and even others around the world if we can convince them to go along with the global warming religion, and cause death and destruction on a super-wide scale. But will it even slow the warming?
Of course not. The CO2 is in the atmosphere to stay for a really long time. Getting it to come down would mean leaving our oil, gas, coal, etc. in the ground, and that's just plain impossible if humanity is to survive. We need the energy from those fossil fuels to power our vehicles. There's no nuke plant or solar farm that's going to put a viable car down the road. A "viable" car is a CHEAP car that EVERYONE that can afford a car now can afford it also. There is no such animal now. There may never be such an animal, it depends on the invention of the "magic battery." The "magic battery" is cheap and small and cheap and energy dense and cheap and environmentally rugged and cheap and lightweight and cheap. There's no magic battery now and there may never be. It may be impossible. Yet we need vehicles and we need them to move to get people and goods from where they are to where they need to be.
And we need the energy to power our society, in the form of grid electricity. That has a slim hope of being 100% solar + wind + geothermal + nuclear + tidal + etc. that doesn't use fossil fuels. Someday. In the really distant future, at a really high price. It too will create millions in poverty because of the rise in the price of electricity. What's worse for your health than smoking? Living in poverty. It will take 7 - 10 years off your life. Yeah, we can "save the planet" if we're all ready to commit suicide, but short of that, we don't have a prayer of "doing something" about CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon taxes will only enrich governments and impoverish citizens, but we still need to move goods and people to where they need to be, so we still need vehicles, so we still need oil. As long as we're burning oil, its still going to put CO2 into the atmosphere.
So, c'mon, other than continuously whining about "doing something" about AGW, what do you think you can do about it, really? Destroy industry and enrich governments and impoverish citizens? You can do that but it won't help "global warming" a damned bit.
You rarely know someone is a rapist until they grab you. Then, if possible, you draw your weapon, reach behind you, stick the gun in his ribs and blast away. If you can get some distance between you and him, its still not likely to be far enough for a marksmanship challenge, although people _do_ miss in some amazingly simple shooting situations.
Ladies always taking a couple friends along when venturing out will solve this. Their names are Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
It has been proven over and over that citizens carrying the means of self defense greatly deters violent attack against them. The fatal flaw in this is the "defenseless victim" being present. Eliminate the defenseless victim by allowing her some effective defense. Only firearms are effective in all situations. Some a-hole hopped up on PCP won't even notice pepper spray. Tasers fail if the perpetrator is wearing heavy clothing like a parka. Only a firearm is capable of 100% effective defense.
The flaw is that the foreigners are coming for a limited number of jobs and are exploited by the Visa system that doesn't allow them to compete for wages lest they be unemployed for a couple microseconds and thus get deported.
What we do is pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax will increase GDP a predicted 10.5% the 1st year, and then achieve full employment the 2nd year. After that, we can then throw open the immigration to any and all who wish to come. When they get here, they 1) will plan to stay and 2) market themselves to the highest bidder.
Since jobs will be plentiful under the Fair Tax, which does not tax corporate profits and therefore makes the USA the world's biggest and best tax haven, our only problem then will be to become equally skilled with the foreigners. That shouldn't be a problem. With the USA returning to making most of the worlds' products, we should be able to employ all who want a job.
"Right there is the problem with the USA."HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE ME!!!!" "
Exactly. Its none of you're F'n business. And it's every individual's right to use as much energy has he or she can pay for.
Comparing UK to US is apples and oranges. Our transportation alone is going to require vastly more energy because the country is almost 3000 miles "wide" and 1500 miles "tall." There's lots of open areas with very sparse population. This makes things like public transportation near impossible to do economically.
As for heating an individual home, the midwest this year and many days where the HIGH temperature for the day was something like seven below zero, and that was fahrenheit. UK has something called the North Atlantic Drift that comes from the Caribbean and helps warm it.
Yeah, my own winter-time KwH is around 1700 per month right now, but this place is all-electric, too - water heating, house heating, water well pumping, electric cooking, etc. etc. Match it if you can - remember, no using natural gas, oil, etc. to heat. I don't think you can. I have about 1700 sq. ft. and here all by myself, out in the boonies. No natural gas to use, which would be far cheaper.
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"If we wait until it's too late we'll wait forever, and then it will be too late."
"Too late" does not occur within our lifetimes. Some of us alive today will see this problem solved.
"If we wait until energy is $cheap (for an undefined value of $cheap) we'll wait forever, and then it will be too late."
It will not be "too late" within our lifetimes, but we are not "waiting" and are moving with all deliberate speed to ramp up solar and wind. 1000's of wind generators have been and are being built, and progress on solar is advancing and costs of obtaining solar electricity are falling. Our tough nut to crack is the "magic battery" that will allow economical electric cars rather than cars from high-priced brands like Tesla and Porsche.
"It we wait until all the uninvented inventions are all invented we'll wait forever, and then it will be too late."
We're not waiting. We're inventing them right now.
"The only thing we can guarantee is that if we never start we will never finish."
We started a long time ago, and progress is steady and successes are numerous. The big challenge, the "magic battery", has numerous announcement of yet another high capacity battery, but as yet we don't have such a battery suitable for automotive use. However, the near-monthly announcement of yet another "breakthrough" in this area is eventually going to bear fruit, and we will have our electric cars. At that point, we will be in sight of the ultimate solution of never digging anything out of the ground to fuel our energy demands again.
"Teaching ourselves to be more efficient in what we do and how we use energy will only help to reduce waste. And with less waste we there is more to go around. Conflating starting to do *anything* about our CO2 addiction with the starvation and death of poor third world babies is simply a cynical, evil, lazy, and corrupt non sequitur fallacy"
Did I say anything about 3rd world babies? No, I was talking about the 49 million Americans ALREADY in poverty, in part because of misguided, overly-expensive "solutions" to misguided and sometimes not-existent "environmental problems" that make everything they must purchase more expensive. Save _American_ lives by proceeding reasonably, without having one's hair set afire by alarmist advocates with broken computer programs predicting doom and gloom unless we do exactly as _they_ say. Our solutions will appear as the by-product of efforts to achieve cheaper energy, which will soon be solar and wind, as that tech has a lot of improvement possibility left in it. Internal combustion, and fossil fuel produced energy do not.
The public transportation proponents are attempting to solve the wrong problem.
We are not all going to and from work all the time. Often, we're living in DC and we're packing the kids into the car and the luggage and maybe a set of tools into the trunk and going to Grandma's in South Carolina to visit and fix up a few things around her house over the weekend.
Now describe to me how a train is going to help with the 3 suitcases and the portable air compressor and paint gun with 5 quarts of satin white? Gonna lug that onto a train? No, you're not, you're going to be sitting in traffic with everyone else, especially on Sunday night when I-95 thru the Fredericksburg, Va. area comes to a near-halt with all the traffic (those people aren't going to work or coming from it, either) and the Harry W. Nice bridge on US 301 between Virginia and Maryland over the Potomac is backed up 5 miles with the very same sort of traffic for points north.
That's the problem to solve. Not everyone is moving around to go to work. Some are working on Grandma's house, others have 300 lbs of scuba gear / tanks / etc. or maybe a ski-doo or maybe all of the above. We need to stop the knee-jerk to "public transportation" because it just doesn't work all the places that cars and trucks work. Build some more roads, damnit, and yeah, lets robotize the cars. We want to go to sleep in the back seat and truck bed, so when we get to Grandma's, we're ready to attack the painting, or ready to hit the beach with the ski-doo...
Century? 300 Years? Freeman Dyson, the most brilliant physicist on the planet, has said not to worry about it, because in 50 - 60 years or so we're going to have the energy from renewable sources problem licked, we will dig nothing out of the ground for our energy, and put no CO2 into the atmosphere. At that point, CO2 concentrations will start down, and our problems of too-cold winters will just be beginning (He didn't say the part about the too-cold winters, that's just my speculation. )
The point is that 1) There's not a damn thing we can do about this right now, because we don't have the tech to leave the carbon in the ground and that's what we need to do, and 2) we have centuries to fix this, and will probably do so in 50 - 60 years.
So, not to worry, and especially don't go creating millions of new people in poverty by raising fossil fuel costs when people still need cheap energy to live, heat their homes, air condition, and move around in cars. Making all that more expensive just plunges the barely-hanging-on off the edge of the cliff, into poverty. What's more dangerous than smoking? Living in poverty, which will take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only likely to take 7 years off your life. So, lets get people out of poverty, promote prosperity, and solve this problem with all due haste, but not so quick that it hurts people.
They will have to attack neighboring states to "make a hole" and most of the neighboring states are quite strong, militarily. Getting them to commit suicide via inadvisable military endeavors, esp. when they will have no supply lines because growing food will become impossible at the higher temperatures may also not be a bad thing. They all die in a war they start that when they could have just shown up at the border, hat in hand, begging for asylum that would most assuredly be granted, would scatter them, and make them much more concerned with their situation than with killing everyone in the world that is not Muslim.
There won't be any war there because there won't be any people there. What part of "uninhabitable" are you having trouble with?
And as far as war goes, we can beat them in a straight-up war. As Bill O'Reilly has said repeatedly, "General Patton could destroy all of ISIS in a week." Its the damn Jihad nonsense, the cowardly war against civilians that has to be stopped. Making them all refugees would be a great start.
Making that area of the world uninhabitable might not be a bad thing, considering the cockroaches that live there already. Scatter them like the tower of babel. Give them something to do beside Jihad! Works for me.
Oh, here we go again. Gloom and doom, etc. etc.
What I always want to know is even with unlimited money, just what do you think you could do about "global warming?" Our whole society runs on energy, and without it our crops don't get grown and they don't get to market. The fuels to make electricity require energy to move them from the oil or coal fields to the generators where they are turned into electricity. And cars and trucks run on oil, there are millions and millions of cars, and nobody has invented the "magic battery" to allow us to run them without emitting.
And if you try to spend unlimited money, you end up throwing people out of work. They go into poverty. What is more dangerous to your health than smoking? Living in poverty is more dangerous than smoking as it can take up to 10 years off your life. Smoking is only "good" for a 7 year reduction in lifespan. Plus, those kids that are living in poverty and experiencing undernourishment will have their brains fail to develop fully, and this damage cannot be reversed later.
And since the Chinese and the Indians don't give a flying F about the global warming scarecrow, they are going to continue to dig coal like it is going out of style. That means that the rest of the world that considers themselves "sane" will have to go to zero emissions. We can't do it. We don't have that tech yet. We may never get that tech. The only way we could achieve zero emissions is kill a really significant portion of the population and go back to animal-powered subsistence farming like the 1800's, but of course the lifespans would be like the 1800's. Izzat what we want to do? And, as many scientists claim, the AGW theory may yet be a hoax, and if so, we could kill millions for nothing.
People can whine about global warming all day, but unless they have a SOLUTION, I don't want to hear it. "Doing a little bit" that is insanely costly and doesn't amount to 0.05 degrees of reduction is just torturing the citizens for no good reason. I want a full-up, "completely stop the warming" solution or I say we don't spend a damned dime toward it. Half measures just harm all.
I'm 68, and have lived much of my life without portable electronics and some of my life even without TV. In all time frames, a car was absolutely necessary to my happiness. Walking / bicycling (I've never tried horseback riding) are PITAs, and cars are where both utility and fun reside.
but there's probably enough energy in the Yellowstone magma chambers to 100% power all our (humanity's - the world's) energy requirements for absolutely everything we do. Tapping it fully, MAYBE we could keep it from getting any hotter. Suspicious we could not construct enough heat sinks to actually cool it at all, its too big.
About 10 years ago I was forgetting where I was on my way to work, not remembering whether I had made the turn from one road onto another, etc. I fixed it with aerobic exercise on an elliptical crosstrainer at my health club. Got up to an hour and 1000 calories of exercise, which helped with keeping weight under control, too. Just a thought if you'd like to try that. Oxygen to the brain, I think is probably at work with the exercise thing. I just know I have to keep exercising, or I'm going to go all to hell and prolly won't be able to remember my name eventually.
I'm 68, and literally keep a highlighter in my pocket, a yellow one. (but don't need instructions to get around... ) I pull it out every now and then when I get a piece of paper with a phone number on it or an address that I want to be able to find on the page easily, and swipe some yellow on that. Highlighters are just cool!
I road rally with the Sports Car Club of America, and can get anyone anywhere with a set of rally instructions. That's why I thought of this. Don't know if it would work with someone having memory problems, but its something to try is all.
Why not try ancient tech, pencil and paper.
Create a set of instructions to be executed in numerical order:
1) Leave the dining hall using the big white double doors.
2) Continue to the Sidewalk intersection with the flower pot in the middle.
3) Take the rightmost sidewalk
4) Go left on the sidewalk just after the building with number "289A"
5) Enter the building marked 289A at the 3'rd sidewalk entrance.
and so forth.
Print up a few hundred of these for the trip to and trip from each of the points he has to go to. When following these instructions, he can mark off each one with, say, a highlighter to let himself know at what part of the journey he is, in case he forgets. You could even make up these instructions with visual cues, such as photographs of what the closeby landscape should look like at any point.
Dunno if it'll work, I've never worked with people losing these cognitive abilities. All I can say is give it a try.
The planes will probably be flying themselves by that time too.
Really, this thing better be backed up to the hilt, 'cuz if it went down and all ATC were to cease, those planes aloft would be unlikely to be able to coordinate themselves to a safe landing and not be hitting each other.
Still didn't explain how you're going to produce food, move it and other commodities, and get people down the road for billions of vehicle miles using only "clean" energy at a price that we can afford. Doesn't happen without the magic battery. No magic battery, and the gov't can get involved all it wants, and people will still starve, and become pauperized, unless using fossil fuels.
But then explain exactly what you think you're going to do about it. You can build all the wind machines and solar farms you like, and even 100 more big nukes, and you know what? It won't power your cars and trucks down the road.
But it has to power your cars and trucks down the road, because without them, commerce, and most significantly food production and delivery stops. We have one viable way to get everyone where they need to go and that is the individual automobile and truck. And that absolutely, positively requires oil until someone invents the magic battery to make electric cars and trucks happen. But the magic battery most be cheap and small and cheap and lightweight and cheap and high capacity and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap. If it ain't cheap, then Joe Lunchbucket as well as Farmer Brown can't afford it and all the aforementioned bad stuff happens. But we do not have the magic battery, and we may never get the magic battery. Someone has to invent it, and it is not known to be even possible until someone actually does it.
No magic battery ever? Then we have to figure out a way to use grid electricity to power all our vehicles everywhere. That probably can't be done either, and if so, we probably all die when "cheap enough" oil energy no longer exists. So, the best thing all the leftist enviro-whiners can do is to quit whining, get their PHD's in electrochemistry, and get their butts into a lab somewhere and invent for us the magic battery. Otherwise, we're pretty much screwed at some point.
I said, "By the gov't." If I come into your home, you have the right, but the gov't doesn't. If YOU have an airplane, YOU have the right, but the gov't doesn't. Customs is different because you don't necessarily have the right to cross the border. You have the right to travel, tho, and the gov't searching everyone traveling by airplane is illegal under the 4th Amendment. The airlines could set up such security and do it just fine, they aren't the gov't. But the gov't doing it is illegal under the 4th amendment.
Disallowing weapons is not a good thing. If the passengers on flight 93, as well as the other planes had been armed, they would easily have overwhelmed the terrorists. Our best security would be to encourage concealed carry of weapons onto airplanes, so the bad guys wouldn't know from where the threat to their plans would come. They would have to assume that every passenger on the airplane who is not a child has a gun. In actuality, maybe 10% would be armed, but that's a lot of people to thwart your plans if you're a terrorist.
" transport on the system is not a right."
Uh, yeah it is, at least being transported without being searched by the gov't is a right. Judge Napolitano on Fox News went into great detail about this, with what they are doing being absolutely positively illegal with respect to the 4th amendment. The gov't just can't legally do what they're doing. The AIRLINES can institute, pay for, and run a TSA-like security system, but not the gov't.
Short of prison-like strip searches, what they're trying to do is likely impossible. The old joke about "No carry on luggage and everybody flies naked" is probably the only thing that would really work, except that they'd have to use a second plane to fly the baggage in case there's a bomb in the luggage, which they will also miss. The 2nd plane should probably have a crew of 1 or 2 and ejection seats...
So, now the security theater is going to become unbearable again, and I'm going to KEEP driving where I want to go. Sold my car a couple weeks ago - 3 years and 2 months old, with 124,000 miles on the odometer because I've BEEN driving wherever I wanted to go, and there were some really long trips in there most of the way across the country that were repeated several times a year. Fortunately, I love to drive and loathe gov't intrusion, but the reason I drove, and took trains, is the TSA. Otherwise, I would have flown.
"DO ABOUT IT?" I want to hear what you think you can do about it...
We can do a whale of a lot that severely affects industry, impoverishes millions more Americans and even others around the world if we can convince them to go along with the global warming religion, and cause death and destruction on a super-wide scale. But will it even slow the warming?
Of course not. The CO2 is in the atmosphere to stay for a really long time. Getting it to come down would mean leaving our oil, gas, coal, etc. in the ground, and that's just plain impossible if humanity is to survive. We need the energy from those fossil fuels to power our vehicles. There's no nuke plant or solar farm that's going to put a viable car down the road. A "viable" car is a CHEAP car that EVERYONE that can afford a car now can afford it also. There is no such animal now. There may never be such an animal, it depends on the invention of the "magic battery." The "magic battery" is cheap and small and cheap and energy dense and cheap and environmentally rugged and cheap and lightweight and cheap. There's no magic battery now and there may never be. It may be impossible. Yet we need vehicles and we need them to move to get people and goods from where they are to where they need to be.
And we need the energy to power our society, in the form of grid electricity. That has a slim hope of being 100% solar + wind + geothermal + nuclear + tidal + etc. that doesn't use fossil fuels. Someday. In the really distant future, at a really high price. It too will create millions in poverty because of the rise in the price of electricity. What's worse for your health than smoking? Living in poverty. It will take 7 - 10 years off your life. Yeah, we can "save the planet" if we're all ready to commit suicide, but short of that, we don't have a prayer of "doing something" about CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon taxes will only enrich governments and impoverish citizens, but we still need to move goods and people to where they need to be, so we still need vehicles, so we still need oil. As long as we're burning oil, its still going to put CO2 into the atmosphere.
So, c'mon, other than continuously whining about "doing something" about AGW, what do you think you can do about it, really? Destroy industry and enrich governments and impoverish citizens? You can do that but it won't help "global warming" a damned bit.
You rarely know someone is a rapist until they grab you. Then, if possible, you draw your weapon, reach behind you, stick the gun in his ribs and blast away. If you can get some distance between you and him, its still not likely to be far enough for a marksmanship challenge, although people _do_ miss in some amazingly simple shooting situations.
Yeah, pretty much, it dramatically lowers blood pressure pretty much immediately and unconsciousness results.
Ladies always taking a couple friends along when venturing out will solve this. Their names are Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
It has been proven over and over that citizens carrying the means of self defense greatly deters violent attack against them. The fatal flaw in this is the "defenseless victim" being present. Eliminate the defenseless victim by allowing her some effective defense. Only firearms are effective in all situations. Some a-hole hopped up on PCP won't even notice pepper spray. Tasers fail if the perpetrator is wearing heavy clothing like a parka. Only a firearm is capable of 100% effective defense.
The flaw is that the foreigners are coming for a limited number of jobs and are exploited by the Visa system that doesn't allow them to compete for wages lest they be unemployed for a couple microseconds and thus get deported.
What we do is pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax will increase GDP a predicted 10.5% the 1st year, and then achieve full employment the 2nd year. After that, we can then throw open the immigration to any and all who wish to come. When they get here, they 1) will plan to stay and 2) market themselves to the highest bidder.
Since jobs will be plentiful under the Fair Tax, which does not tax corporate profits and therefore makes the USA the world's biggest and best tax haven, our only problem then will be to become equally skilled with the foreigners. That shouldn't be a problem. With the USA returning to making most of the worlds' products, we should be able to employ all who want a job.
"Right there is the problem with the USA."HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE ME!!!!" "
Exactly. Its none of you're F'n business. And it's every individual's right to use as much energy has he or she can pay for.
Comparing UK to US is apples and oranges. Our transportation alone is going to require vastly more energy because the country is almost 3000 miles "wide" and 1500 miles "tall." There's lots of open areas with very sparse population. This makes things like public transportation near impossible to do economically.
As for heating an individual home, the midwest this year and many days where the HIGH temperature for the day was something like seven below zero, and that was fahrenheit. UK has something called the North Atlantic Drift that comes from the Caribbean and helps warm it.
Yeah, my own winter-time KwH is around 1700 per month right now, but this place is all-electric, too - water heating, house heating, water well pumping, electric cooking, etc. etc. Match it if you can - remember, no using natural gas, oil, etc. to heat. I don't think you can. I have about 1700 sq. ft. and here all by myself, out in the boonies. No natural gas to use, which would be far cheaper.