The actual problem is really Slashdot, as in sitting here reading it instead of going out and hoeing the weeds, pushing an unpowered lawn mower back and forth, riding your bicycle 20 miles to and 20 miles back from work, etc.
I have memorizerd the calorie content of everything I normally eat, and stick it in a spreadsheet every day along with the calories burned by the exercises I do. I'm fairly sedentary, doing a lot of reading of Slashdot, Facebook, a local forum, the Drudgereport, and playing some occasional games. I'm 6' and 225 lbs, and my metabolism is 1800 calories a day as calculated over time in the spreadsheet.
Now, to lose weight, I have attempted exercise alone. That is, eat normal, exercise buns off. I could, at one point, exercise 1000 calories on an elliptical crosstrainer in an hour, and 1600 calories in about an hour and 40 minutes. I can't do it every day or my joints will get sore. I lost about 10 lbs over a year like that, because I kept getting interrupted by vacations (exercise is difficult after driving 14 hours on the road), getting sick, getting hurt (mainly back muscle pulls) and so just 10 lbs happened. I then tried cutting back calorie intake and exercising, which was working, when I was interrupted by: 1) getting sick and then 2) getting injured and then 3) a 3 week vacation and 4) Getting hurt again and 5) getting sick again. Then, I worked on a project to rallymaster 2 SCCA National Rallies, and I'm a terrible multitasker, so only had time for the rallies, and was too tired / distracted to exercise.
The rallies are completed, the events ran, were a great success, but I've lost all my aerobic fitness and now 600 calories on the crosstrainer is about my limit for the time being. I'll get it back, but its a few weeks away, I think. Meanwhile, my doctor discovered a vitamin D deficiency which might maybe have something to do with all the sicknesses, dunno. That's easily handled with the OTC vitamins available, so as soon as I get the aerobic capacity back, I'll get on Nutrisystem, which I know works and worked before when I lost about 25 lbs which I gained all back and then some, and will attempt to lose about 35 this time in about 3 - 4 months. I think it'll work.
But just saying "just do it" isn't quite so simple. Stuff happens, stuff gets in the way, and DAMN it is difficult. I guess the key is to never give up...
>When we burn fossil fuel, we increase the amount of C02 level in the atmosphere, triggering what is called by many "Global Warming".
Mythical. Hasn't been any "warming" for over 15 years.
>When we don't want to burn fossil fuel, and turn to Nuke, we end up having radioactive waste that can last very very long time.
Because we're too damn stupid to reprocess it and use it over again like the French.
>And when we turn to the wind, the birds (including the eagles) ending up having to pay.
Yep, and there's no practical way to prevent it. But because liberals are in love with "green" energy, this will continue.
>A much more simple way is to cut down on our wasteful lifestyle.
Here comes the "Sit home in the dark and freeze" solution.
>Do we need to turn our home into a greenhouse every winter ?
Naw, we can dial the heat down to just enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and see how many more people catch pneumonia.
>Do we need to turn the same house into an igloo every summer ?
Naw, nobody really _needs_ air conditioning, just ask all those old people that die of the heat every summer 'cuz they can't afford the electricity for it.
>And to those "electric car" fanbois, listen up. Do we really need electric "CAR" ? I mean, do we need a VERY HEAVY VEHICLE, even if they are electrically driven, to get us from point A to point B ? Look at the weight of the electric cars. They are NOT THAT MUCH DIFFERENT from the fossil-fuel cars, weighting more than 1 ton. What is the average weight of a human being ? 50/60 kilo? Why do we need something that weight A FUCKING TON to deliver something that weight 50/60 ton ?
Because the safety nazis, almost as bad as the envirowackos, have declared that cars have to be able to crash at the speed of light and nobody gets so much as a headache over it. That's why the Geo Metro of decades ago, with a 3 cylinder engine and a very light weight, was getting 49 mpg without any batteries, and cars today that weigh like Mt. Everest don't get that much. We should pair up an envirowacko with a safety nazi, and hang both with the same rope from a lightpole. Then repeat until the problems go away.
An electric car could cost more initially and still be viable, because electricity is the equivalent of about 60 cents a gallon gasoline. Buy an expensive vehicle, and then cheap out on the fuel costs for the next 5 - 10 years. If they could cure the other problems of range and how long it takes to refuel, I'd be interested.
There's of course the range of an electric, and then there's how long it takes to "refuel." If you buy one, you have to have a 2nd regular gas car if you want to go on a driving vacation like I did earlier this year - Virginia -> Arizona -> Colorado -> Missouri -> Virginia. There just wasn't time to stop every 300 miles for 8 hours to recharge a battery.
We need someone to invent the "magic battery" that will let a car drive 300 miles and then recharge in a couple minutes and be cheap and not to big or heavy. Someone does that, we'll have 18 wheelers running on electricity.
But then we'll have a new problem. The electrical grid and generating capacity will have to be wildly expanded. Nuclear is probably the only choice to provide that much power, enough to move every car and truck and locomotive and ship using electricity instead of fossil fuels. It'll be incredibly expensive but still cheaper than fossil fuels due to the inherent efficiency of electricity vs. the heat engines burning fossil fuel.
Yep - I hate thieves in all their forms, and this screwball idea that downloading other people's work and just using it isn't stealing is insane. They shouldn't simply be blocking sites, they should be sending a few hundred thousand people to jail until the public gets the idea that this is a bad idea. Fer cryin' out loud, large groups of people spend months or even years of their lives producing wondrous entertainment, maybe something like Avatar, you can get it for a mere $20 at the store, and... you're so cheap that $20 is too much for you? Get a life, pony up, and be a citizen instead of a public enemy.
Education system, Hell! Its a simple lack of need. When's the last time you NEEDED to speak or understand another language? Never? Yep, that's my experience.
I care about tailgating because if I have to stop suddenly (or the driverless car has to stop suddenly) then there's going to be an accident and I might get killed. I wouldn't trust that everyone is just going to do 55 because you and a few others are. I used to go everywhere at 85 when the limit was 55 - I figured if I was going to get a ticket anyway for doing 67, I might as well make some real time. The only way I slow down is if the road is actually blocked. If the driverless cars are all poking along in the right lane, I'll be doing 80 in the left lane(s).
BTW, who is going to buy a car that will only do 55 when they can retain their regular car and do 80, and get to their destination much sooner?
The speed limit is (the laughable) 55 mph, the traffic is doing the (routine) 80. What speed does the autonomous car drive? If 55, it won't get a ticket but will probably get hit in the rear and you'll get killed. If 80, they'll probably wake you up from the back seat and give you a ticket.
I'm not going to get beaten and robbed by a passenger in my car. I can play any song I want as loud as I want in my car. I can smoke, drink, and sing in my car. I am not going to have a crazed gunman tromp thru the aisle of my car and shoot 50 people. I can control the temperature of my car I will not be prohibited from carrying a personal protection weapon in my car I'm not going to go deviating all over H's half acre picking up and dropping off passengers. I can stop halfway home in my car, and buy 50 lbs of groceries I can arrive at work with 50 lbs of crap such as mechanics tools without lugging them - they're in the trunk.
You have to realize that you don't have a "contract" with the gov't like you do with the insurance company. The insurance company you can sue if they don't do what they're supposed to. With the gov't providing the healthcare, you're essentially in a veterinary medicine situation, with you as the animal and the gov't as the owner, deciding what care you get, when you get it, and how comfortable it is going to be. I call that slavery, myself, whether I technically have to work or not. I will oppose every turn toward having the gov't in charge of healthcare that I can.
I'll tell you. Its the gov't propagating them. Why? Because DaVinci machines are expensive, and the gov't means to take over all healthcare eventually. But does it want to be paying for surgery with a DaVinci machine, or would it rather have you suffer a longer recovery over many weeks from having your gut cut open and a surgeon's hands probing deep into it to find and remove your cancerous prostate gland? That's a lot cheaper, so the gov't doesn't care about your recovery time.
I had DaVinci surgery to remove my prostate on a Tuesday, and went to the theater to see, "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull" on the following Friday. I could have "pushed" myself back to work after 2 weeks, but waited 3 and felt very good when getting back.
Surgery is dangerous no matter how you do it, so it is not hard to find where something went wrong with or without a machine. While sitting around home recovering, I went to the DaVinci manufacturer's website, and saw stats on how many doctors were trained on the machine by locality. My single state of Virginia had 8,800 doctors trained to do robotic surgery with the machine. And then I looked at Canada, that shining star of gov't-run healthcare, that had 6,800 doctors trained on the machine for the entire country. Gov't's don't care about your additional weeks of laying in bed recovering, they only care about how cheap it is for them.
Yeah, tell me about it. Al Maliki is trying to get us to come back to Iraq right now, 'cuz he's up to his ass in Al Qaeda. So he didn't want that status of forces agreement that would have kept troops in his country even yet. I think he's going to die soon. Gonna happen like that a lot around the globe. Don't bother to call when the tanks roll across YOUR border...
You're dreaming. There are no electric farm implements, we haven't invented the batteries for that. Want to run utility lines to the fields? Bread would be $35 / loaf, and for a 40 HP tractor you'd be looking at 440 3-phase which would probably electrocute more farmer's kids with access to it than he can produce in a lifetime. If we do invent the batteries for that, they will be found mostly in highway vehicles, which if you calculate out the power requirements to completely convert highway transport to battery operated vehicles (as I have, roughly), we'd have to build something like 1,300 of what is our currently largest nuclear power plant, located in Arizona. You up for that? You are NEVER going to get enough solar / wind to exist to power our needs, even if you can see wind turbines all the way to the horizon in every square inch of the country. Not gonna happen. And if someone tried, all the green obstructionists would holler about the birds that would be driven extinct and the power wires "just because" (since power wires are totally benign.)
If oil prices rise and remain high (how much higher do you want them? They're ALREADY high...), near-universal poverty would reign across the land. Our society runs on cheap energy, and without it, there is not enough life support for everyone at an affordable price. It takes lots of oil to produce the things we need to live, especially food. We need it to work the fields, produce the fertilizer, produce the pesticides so we can eat it instead of the bugs, process it, and transport it. Make that more expensive, and more people are thrown into poverty. Poverty takes somewhere around 6 1/2 years off your life. So, expensive energy is deadly, too.
Wages in the US are NOT among the highest of any other country, that is a lie that they've told us as an excuse for not doing anything about the offshoring of jobs, yet German auto workers average about $66 an hour,l while ours are now below $33 and falling. The reason for offshoring is the income taxes, which if abolished would return the USA to world dominance in manufacturing and near-universal prosperity. But the politicians like the power that the IRS gives them to screw with our lives, so getting rid of the income tax is difficult.
Uh, that would be "cut FEDERAL GOV'T spending on education", "cut FEDERAL GOV'T spending on health care," etc. Get the frappin' gov't the H out of having its fingers in everything and give the free market a chance to operate and our wants and needs will be met. Get the gov't out of the habit of taxing INCOME and we'll be prosperous beyond what we can currently imagine. There's other things to tax, but taxing income is taxing prosperity. As RR said, "If you want less of something, tax it" and that has worked superbly to spread poverty across the land.
Well, if we didn't have to defend the entire rest of the world from all the bad guys, we wouldn't have to spend big $$$ for defense. And, we're about to stop that, so the next time your neighbor comes rolling across your border with tanks, think about defending your own damn selves rather than calling the USA to come do it for you. A week or 2 ago the Saudis broke diplomatic relations with the US because _we_ didn't go in and do something about Syria. F them! They want something done, they should get some of their own damn troops together and go do it themselves. They've got all our money from the oil sales anyway, so they can afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
The production of the flying car has always been just 10 years in the future, for about 60 years now. Wonder if this is the same situation.
The actual problem is really Slashdot, as in sitting here reading it instead of going out and hoeing the weeds, pushing an unpowered lawn mower back and forth, riding your bicycle 20 miles to and 20 miles back from work, etc.
I have memorizerd the calorie content of everything I normally eat, and stick it in a spreadsheet every day along with the calories burned by the exercises I do. I'm fairly sedentary, doing a lot of reading of Slashdot, Facebook, a local forum, the Drudgereport, and playing some occasional games. I'm 6' and 225 lbs, and my metabolism is 1800 calories a day as calculated over time in the spreadsheet.
Now, to lose weight, I have attempted exercise alone. That is, eat normal, exercise buns off. I could, at one point, exercise 1000 calories on an elliptical crosstrainer in an hour, and 1600 calories in about an hour and 40 minutes. I can't do it every day or my joints will get sore. I lost about 10 lbs over a year like that, because I kept getting interrupted by vacations (exercise is difficult after driving 14 hours on the road), getting sick, getting hurt (mainly back muscle pulls) and so just 10 lbs happened. I then tried cutting back calorie intake and exercising, which was working, when I was interrupted by: 1) getting sick and then 2) getting injured and then 3) a 3 week vacation and 4) Getting hurt again and 5) getting sick again. Then, I worked on a project to rallymaster 2 SCCA National Rallies, and I'm a terrible multitasker, so only had time for the rallies, and was too tired / distracted to exercise.
The rallies are completed, the events ran, were a great success, but I've lost all my aerobic fitness and now 600 calories on the crosstrainer is about my limit for the time being. I'll get it back, but its a few weeks away, I think. Meanwhile, my doctor discovered a vitamin D deficiency which might maybe have something to do with all the sicknesses, dunno. That's easily handled with the OTC vitamins available, so as soon as I get the aerobic capacity back, I'll get on Nutrisystem, which I know works and worked before when I lost about 25 lbs which I gained all back and then some, and will attempt to lose about 35 this time in about 3 - 4 months. I think it'll work.
But just saying "just do it" isn't quite so simple. Stuff happens, stuff gets in the way, and DAMN it is difficult. I guess the key is to never give up...
Duh... then the dumba$$ birds would fly into the wire and be killed, like they do with buildings...
>You should move to a warmer city where you don't need to be so wasteful.
Typical liberal, tells everyone else how to live.
>When we burn fossil fuel, we increase the amount of C02 level in the atmosphere, triggering what is called by many "Global Warming".
Mythical. Hasn't been any "warming" for over 15 years.
>When we don't want to burn fossil fuel, and turn to Nuke, we end up having radioactive waste that can last very very long time.
Because we're too damn stupid to reprocess it and use it over again like the French.
>And when we turn to the wind, the birds (including the eagles) ending up having to pay.
Yep, and there's no practical way to prevent it. But because liberals are in love with "green" energy, this will continue.
>A much more simple way is to cut down on our wasteful lifestyle.
Here comes the "Sit home in the dark and freeze" solution.
>Do we need to turn our home into a greenhouse every winter ?
Naw, we can dial the heat down to just enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and see how many more people catch pneumonia.
>Do we need to turn the same house into an igloo every summer ?
Naw, nobody really _needs_ air conditioning, just ask all those old people that die of the heat every summer 'cuz they can't afford the electricity for it.
>And to those "electric car" fanbois, listen up. Do we really need electric "CAR" ? I mean, do we need a VERY HEAVY VEHICLE, even if they are electrically driven, to get us from point A to point B ? Look at the weight of the electric cars. They are NOT THAT MUCH DIFFERENT from the fossil-fuel cars, weighting more than 1 ton. What is the average weight of a human being ? 50/60 kilo? Why do we need something that weight A FUCKING TON to deliver something that weight 50/60 ton ?
Because the safety nazis, almost as bad as the envirowackos, have declared that cars have to be able to crash at the speed of light and nobody gets so much as a headache over it. That's why the Geo Metro of decades ago, with a 3 cylinder engine and a very light weight, was getting 49 mpg without any batteries, and cars today that weigh like Mt. Everest don't get that much. We should pair up an envirowacko with a safety nazi, and hang both with the same rope from a lightpole. Then repeat until the problems go away.
Yep, go directly to jail, pirate. Play by the rules, and that won't happen. That is all...
An electric car could cost more initially and still be viable, because electricity is the equivalent of about 60 cents a gallon gasoline. Buy an expensive vehicle, and then cheap out on the fuel costs for the next 5 - 10 years. If they could cure the other problems of range and how long it takes to refuel, I'd be interested.
Tesla 0 - 60 about 4.6 seconds. How fast do you want to go, anyway?
There's of course the range of an electric, and then there's how long it takes to "refuel." If you buy one, you have to have a 2nd regular gas car if you want to go on a driving vacation like I did earlier this year - Virginia -> Arizona -> Colorado -> Missouri -> Virginia. There just wasn't time to stop every 300 miles for 8 hours to recharge a battery.
We need someone to invent the "magic battery" that will let a car drive 300 miles and then recharge in a couple minutes and be cheap and not to big or heavy. Someone does that, we'll have 18 wheelers running on electricity.
But then we'll have a new problem. The electrical grid and generating capacity will have to be wildly expanded. Nuclear is probably the only choice to provide that much power, enough to move every car and truck and locomotive and ship using electricity instead of fossil fuels. It'll be incredibly expensive but still cheaper than fossil fuels due to the inherent efficiency of electricity vs. the heat engines burning fossil fuel.
Yep - I hate thieves in all their forms, and this screwball idea that downloading other people's work and just using it isn't stealing is insane. They shouldn't simply be blocking sites, they should be sending a few hundred thousand people to jail until the public gets the idea that this is a bad idea. Fer cryin' out loud, large groups of people spend months or even years of their lives producing wondrous entertainment, maybe something like Avatar, you can get it for a mere $20 at the store, and... you're so cheap that $20 is too much for you? Get a life, pony up, and be a citizen instead of a public enemy.
Not the reason.
The real reason that most of the mines are anywhere-but-the-USA is our highest-on-the-planet corporate income tax.
Pass the Fair Tax, which eliminates all income taxes, and watch an economic boom of Biblical proportions occur in the USA.
Education system, Hell! Its a simple lack of need. When's the last time you NEEDED to speak or understand another language? Never? Yep, that's my experience.
I care about tailgating because if I have to stop suddenly (or the driverless car has to stop suddenly) then there's going to be an accident and I might get killed. I wouldn't trust that everyone is just going to do 55 because you and a few others are. I used to go everywhere at 85 when the limit was 55 - I figured if I was going to get a ticket anyway for doing 67, I might as well make some real time. The only way I slow down is if the road is actually blocked. If the driverless cars are all poking along in the right lane, I'll be doing 80 in the left lane(s).
BTW, who is going to buy a car that will only do 55 when they can retain their regular car and do 80, and get to their destination much sooner?
The speed limit is (the laughable) 55 mph, the traffic is doing the (routine) 80. What speed does the autonomous car drive? If 55, it won't get a ticket but will probably get hit in the rear and you'll get killed. If 80, they'll probably wake you up from the back seat and give you a ticket.
My car is so much better than a bus:
I'm not going to get beaten and robbed by a passenger in my car.
I can play any song I want as loud as I want in my car.
I can smoke, drink, and sing in my car.
I am not going to have a crazed gunman tromp thru the aisle of my car and shoot 50 people.
I can control the temperature of my car
I will not be prohibited from carrying a personal protection weapon in my car
I'm not going to go deviating all over H's half acre picking up and dropping off passengers.
I can stop halfway home in my car, and buy 50 lbs of groceries
I can arrive at work with 50 lbs of crap such as mechanics tools without lugging them - they're in the trunk.
To be able to converse with the professor?
You have to realize that you don't have a "contract" with the gov't like you do with the insurance company. The insurance company you can sue if they don't do what they're supposed to. With the gov't providing the healthcare, you're essentially in a veterinary medicine situation, with you as the animal and the gov't as the owner, deciding what care you get, when you get it, and how comfortable it is going to be. I call that slavery, myself, whether I technically have to work or not. I will oppose every turn toward having the gov't in charge of healthcare that I can.
Well, _I_ got DaVinci surgery via Blue Cross, so I guess the answer is yes.
I'll tell you. Its the gov't propagating them. Why? Because DaVinci machines are expensive, and the gov't means to take over all healthcare eventually. But does it want to be paying for surgery with a DaVinci machine, or would it rather have you suffer a longer recovery over many weeks from having your gut cut open and a surgeon's hands probing deep into it to find and remove your cancerous prostate gland? That's a lot cheaper, so the gov't doesn't care about your recovery time.
I had DaVinci surgery to remove my prostate on a Tuesday, and went to the theater to see, "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull" on the following Friday. I could have "pushed" myself back to work after 2 weeks, but waited 3 and felt very good when getting back.
Surgery is dangerous no matter how you do it, so it is not hard to find where something went wrong with or without a machine. While sitting around home recovering, I went to the DaVinci manufacturer's website, and saw stats on how many doctors were trained on the machine by locality. My single state of Virginia had 8,800 doctors trained to do robotic surgery with the machine. And then I looked at Canada, that shining star of gov't-run healthcare, that had 6,800 doctors trained on the machine for the entire country. Gov't's don't care about your additional weeks of laying in bed recovering, they only care about how cheap it is for them.
Yeah, tell me about it. Al Maliki is trying to get us to come back to Iraq right now, 'cuz he's up to his ass in Al Qaeda. So he didn't want that status of forces agreement that would have kept troops in his country even yet. I think he's going to die soon. Gonna happen like that a lot around the globe. Don't bother to call when the tanks roll across YOUR border...
You're dreaming. There are no electric farm implements, we haven't invented the batteries for that. Want to run utility lines to the fields? Bread would be $35 / loaf, and for a 40 HP tractor you'd be looking at 440 3-phase which would probably electrocute more farmer's kids with access to it than he can produce in a lifetime. If we do invent the batteries for that, they will be found mostly in highway vehicles, which if you calculate out the power requirements to completely convert highway transport to battery operated vehicles (as I have, roughly), we'd have to build something like 1,300 of what is our currently largest nuclear power plant, located in Arizona. You up for that? You are NEVER going to get enough solar / wind to exist to power our needs, even if you can see wind turbines all the way to the horizon in every square inch of the country. Not gonna happen. And if someone tried, all the green obstructionists would holler about the birds that would be driven extinct and the power wires "just because" (since power wires are totally benign.)
If oil prices rise and remain high (how much higher do you want them? They're ALREADY high...), near-universal poverty would reign across the land. Our society runs on cheap energy, and without it, there is not enough life support for everyone at an affordable price. It takes lots of oil to produce the things we need to live, especially food. We need it to work the fields, produce the fertilizer, produce the pesticides so we can eat it instead of the bugs, process it, and transport it. Make that more expensive, and more people are thrown into poverty. Poverty takes somewhere around 6 1/2 years off your life. So, expensive energy is deadly, too.
Wages in the US are NOT among the highest of any other country, that is a lie that they've told us as an excuse for not doing anything about the offshoring of jobs, yet German auto workers average about $66 an hour,l while ours are now below $33 and falling. The reason for offshoring is the income taxes, which if abolished would return the USA to world dominance in manufacturing and near-universal prosperity. But the politicians like the power that the IRS gives them to screw with our lives, so getting rid of the income tax is difficult.
Uh, that would be "cut FEDERAL GOV'T spending on education", "cut FEDERAL GOV'T spending on health care," etc. Get the frappin' gov't the H out of having its fingers in everything and give the free market a chance to operate and our wants and needs will be met. Get the gov't out of the habit of taxing INCOME and we'll be prosperous beyond what we can currently imagine. There's other things to tax, but taxing income is taxing prosperity. As RR said, "If you want less of something, tax it" and that has worked superbly to spread poverty across the land.
Well, if we didn't have to defend the entire rest of the world from all the bad guys, we wouldn't have to spend big $$$ for defense. And, we're about to stop that, so the next time your neighbor comes rolling across your border with tanks, think about defending your own damn selves rather than calling the USA to come do it for you. A week or 2 ago the Saudis broke diplomatic relations with the US because _we_ didn't go in and do something about Syria. F them! They want something done, they should get some of their own damn troops together and go do it themselves. They've got all our money from the oil sales anyway, so they can afford it.