Driverless car will be electric, which is ALREADY about 1/6th the cost of gasoline. That won't much increase because there's new sources of making electricity all the time - wind, solar, cheap(er) natural gas, and by that time, probably geothermal. The only way "public transportation" will even survive is if it can be used to transport vehicles such as the Hyperloop will.
Self-driving cars will make public transportation obsolete.
Lessee, do I want to drive to a public transport station, wait 5 to 15 minutes for the vehicle to get there and for me to board it, move toward my destination slower than I could have been driving it myself if there was no traffic, and disembark maybe blocks away from my final destination and have to walk 5 - 10 more minutes to get where I'm going, _OR_
Get in my driverless car, program it to take me to work, climb in the back seat and catch up on the last 1 hour of sleep, and get out within 20 feet of the front door of where I'm going, while the car then drives off to a parking lot a couple miles away and waits to be summoned via my cell phone.
What big rig? With the cargo-carrying capacity of these tubes, once they're built-out nation wide there will be no big-rigs, all cargo will move on these tubes.
"2. Why does an airplane need the TSA but his tube doesn't? Can you image what a bomb would do in that thing? Not only would it kill people but you'd shut the whole system down until it was fixed."
Because... the way to blow this up is not from the inside, its from the outside. Run a big truck full of explosive underneath the tube on I-5, boom, and the tube collapses. There's no way the TSA can do a D thing about that. Its why AmTrak doesn't attempt to search everybody, either, there's no point to it.
No, this system beats EVERYTHING in cost and in time:
NY to Pittsburgh - 311 miles, 31 minutes. Drive car to next pod. Pittsburgh to Indy, 330 miles, 33 minutes Drive car to next pod Indy to St. Louis, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod St. Louis to Joplin 260 miles, 26 minutes. Drive car to next pod Joplin to Oklahoma City, 200 miles, 20 minutes. Drive car to next pod Oklahoma City to Abilene, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod Abilene to Odessa, 160 miles, 16 minutes. Drive car to next pod Odessa to El Paso, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod El Paso to Tucson, 270 miles, 27 minutes. Drive car to next pod Tucson to Yuma, 210 miles, 21 minutes. Drive car to next pod Yuma to San Diego, 150 miles, 15 minutes. Drive car to next pod San Diego to LA, 110 miles, 11 minutes.
Total tube time of 272 minutes - 4 hours and 32 minutes, and with 1/2 hour of comfort stops at every other transfer, that adds 2 hours, with 5 minutes for the remainder of moving from one pod to the other adding about another 25 minutes, for about 6 hours and 55 minutes NY to LA. OK by me, I'd take that ride, esp. when arriving with my car. I don't have to rent a car, and nothing I could (reasonably) rent moves like my WRX, which I thoroughly enjoy. This system could put the airlines totally out of business for domestic travel. With hub-and-spoke, "you have to take a connecting flight" nonsense we have now, this would STILL be faster as most of the air travel available between most travel departure-arrival pairs, especially when you consider the advantages of leaving when you want to (1 AM if you like, find a plane that leaves at 1 AM), not screwing around with the TSA (there's no REASON to inspect PASSENGERS because the way to blow this up is not from the inside, but from the outside - drive a big truck full of, say, TATP, underneath it on I-5, "boom", and the tube collapses - no need to carry a bomb on board the train),.And supposedly a ride on that tube is $20 for each 300 mile excursion. That's about $240 to go across the country, about the same as a plane, but you get to arrive with your car. No car rental beats riding an airplane. If each ride were $50, that'd still be only $600 to get from NY to LA with your car - you can't drive it for that when you consider the nights in motels (about $70 X 4 = $280) and gasoline (3000 miles / 22 mpg X $4.00 / gallon = $545).
The TSA needs to be abolished. What they do is in absolute violation of the 4th amendment, among other reasons. The airlines can do what they do if they so desire because they are not gov't, but the gov't can't search and / or seize without probable cause of the commission of a crime.
We need to get back to being a constitutional republic, not the dictatorship that this country is turning into. Since when can a president change a law to his liking, and delay its implementation just on his own say-so? He can't, not legally, and that's dictatorship, and needs to stop yesterday. We keep rushing headlong toward Thomas Jefferson's prediction that the tree of liberty must from time to time be watered by the blood of patriots and tyrants...
Capitalism in the US is non-existent because the gov't comes tromping thru the door every year and wants 35% of everything you made. Repeal the income taxes and this too would be more than possible.
Make those airplanes run on electricity at 720 mph and we'll talk. Meanwhile, we're _still_ running out of petroleum fuels and they don't do anything but get more expensive. And look at Figure 1 in Section 3, and see that airplanes consume the most energy per passenger mile and this system consumes the absolute least energy per passenger mile.
NY to Pittsburgh - 311 miles, 31 minutes. Drive car to next pod. Pittsburgh to Indy, 330 miles, 33 minutes Drive car to next pod Indy to St. Louis, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod St. Louis to Joplin 260 miles, 26 minutes. Drive car to next pod Joplin to Oklahoma City, 200 miles, 20 minutes. Drive car to next pod Oklahoma City to Abilene, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod Abilene to Odessa, 160 miles, 16 minutes. Drive car to next pod Odessa to El Paso, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod El Paso to Tucson, 270 miles, 27 minutes. Drive car to next pod Tucson to Yuma, 210 miles, 21 minutes. Drive car to next pod Yuma to San Diego, 150 miles, 15 minutes. Drive car to next pod San Diego to LA, 110 miles, 11 minutes.
and each of those rides is $20, then you can go coast-to-coast for $240 and get there the same day, easy. That's pretty darn good, the price of an airplane ride to do the same thing.
Look at the bar graph, Figure 1, in section 3, Background. It ain't necessarily about the speed, its also about the energy use, which is lower than most anything else for passenger travel. This would probably also translate to cargo.
All you really need is the legislature to get behind it and pass a law forbidding the lawsuits, a statement of, more or less, "Sit down, shut up, we're doing this."
Where did you get 2000 tons? From the description of a vehicle-carrying hyperloop vehicle:
The overall structure weight is expected to be near 7,700 lb (3,500 kg) including the luggage compartments and door mechanism. The overall cost of the structure including manufacturing is targeted to be no more than $275,000.
>>We are in a die-off right now, many species are going extinct. Eagles would have just been another.
>We are indeed in a mass extinction event, and it's man-made. You're for continuing to drive species to extinction.
It is NOT man-made. It is natural. The do-do died off decades ago, and man had nothing to do with it. Its been going on a really long time. You can find all manner of critters just about everywhere you look that are on the verge of extinction.
>>No, laboratory pure. The current "thing" by the president is to shut down many coal-fueled power plants.
>Shutting down coal-fired plants won't make the air "lab-pure", and I agree that as many as possible should be shut down. The city-owned power company has both old coal and newer natural gas generators, and they rarely use the coal-fired one because natural gas is so cheap right now. Gas is a whole lot better than coal. Save the coal for blacksmithing.
Sure, and then the jobs associated with the coal-fired plants, and the cheaper electricity of the coal-fired plants are both lost, causing human suffering. As I said, the envirowackos don't give a F about how many they kill with their "clean air" and "clean water" zealotry.
>>So, how many years of life do these people lose compared to the coal miners that were forced into poverty and the people who need electricity having to buy it at a higher price now?
>Forced into poverty? No, lifted out of poverty. [go.com]
Forced into poverty. I was driving thru W. Va. last summer when the local radio stations were announcing the layoffs of 1200 coal miners. There ain't much else to do around W. Va, and the average coal miner is not into the few remaining economic endeavors that the rest of the country is attempting to survive on - burger flipping, stock trading, and suing each other. I'm sure many of these people are still in poverty.
>But later, members of this tightly-knit West Virginia community said Athey's close call and the tragedy that has re-exposed the dangers of coal mining doesn't detract from the allure of a profession that is beloved here.
?Athey, a 34 year-old father of four who has only donned a miner's helmet for two years, says he plans to return to work in a mine as soon as possible.
>"It's the only thing I know how to do," he said. "I don't read and write." ---
>"You can come right out of high school and make $70,000 a year," said Missy Perdue, 22, a stay-at-home mother whose husband, Jeff Perdue, Jr., 22, is a miner.
>April Athey, 28, also says she appreciates her husband's salary, despite the risks of mining, so that she can stay at home and raise the couple's four kids, including one-year-old twins.
That's the way it should be. And there are lots of dangerous jobs - logging, fishing, firefighter, cop, etc. Mining is just another. If we could get our manufacturing base back, there would be lots of less-dangerous jobs that pay a lot more, too, but envirowackos don't want factories, either. Envirowackos don't give a F about people.
>>And that's clean enough.
>Yes, I agree. The air is pretty clean most places today and I don't want to go back.
Yet, envirowackos are all about spending even more and more and more (of YOUR) money to get the last 0.0000001% of some pollutant out of something. They will ruin the country.
>>>You're a fool.
>>That's another thing I hate about envirowackos, they're rude.
>I apologize for my bluntness, but that's my opinion based on what you've written. You are full of misconceptions.
And I think you're a zealot that wants what he wants whether it actually serves man or simply makes a needle on a sensitive instrument move, or fail to move. The objective of a REAL scientist ought to be to improve the human condition, but that is not what you're concerned with. You seem to be concerned about simply spending more $$$ on "the environment" as if doing somethi
>Your worries about the price due to the lack of a US market seem to be unconfirmed.
People can make statistics support whatever position they want to, and none of those are in the least bit relevant. The facts are that if DDT were being made in quantities sufficient for protecting the millions of acres of US farmland, it would be even cheaper via economy of scale. The claim that it is "cheap" now is not relevant, since it could be cheaper still. There will always be a money limit to the usage of anything in poor countries, which may or may not include India and China now, but definitely includes Africa, and therefore cheaper DDT will result in fewer dead Africans.
>>Eagles are cool and all, but at the expense of millions of dead humans?
>You have no moral qualms against mass extinction?
We are in a die-off right now, many species are going extinct. Eagles would have just been another. Meanwhile, you simply don't know any person that died from malaria. If you were a member of a small African village and were continually losing friends and relatives to malaria, you would hate you for your bird infatuation.
>>As for the air being filthy, yeah, it was. But that's no excuse for attempting to make it laboratory pure at ridiculous expense, either.
>"Laboratory pure"?? No, simply breathable. I grew up two miles from a Monsanto plant. You could not drive past it with the windows down because the air burned your lungs. How many human lives were cut short by that? You talk about the loss of human life, my uncle died at age 60 after working at a garbage incinerator for thirty years, my dad is 82 and his other two brothers were in their eighties.
No, laboratory pure. The current "thing" by the president is to shut down many coal-fueled power plants. That will, supposedly, according to a letter to the editor locally by another zealot who is a pulmonary doctor, save 2500 lives of people with asthma. OK, I expect he's correct, and don't remember if that is "per year" but we'll assume it is. So, how many years of life do these people lose compared to the coal miners that were forced into poverty and the people who need electricity having to buy it at a higher price now? This stuff isn't free, you're going to pay a price in human suffering every time you make something more expensive, ban something, or mess with the capitalistic model that naturally attempts to make the biggest profit, which in turn attempts to make things the cheapest possible so that they can sell more of it and make more $$$. IOW, the gov't, as a whole, is a destroyer of "cheap", every time. But, getting back to "laboratory pure", NOBODY is going to have their lungs burned by what's coming out of power plants nowadays, its just envirowacko zealots attempting to get that last 0.000001% of something that will cost $$$ which in turn costs lives.
>Yes, clean air is certainly worth "ridiculous expense" especially when those who have to pay for the cleanup made obscene amounts of money with their filthy activities.
No, it is not. "Ridiculously expensive" causes poverty which costs lives.
>>Poverty will take 6 1/2 years off a person's life
>So my grandmother, who was poor all her life, would have lived to 106 instead of 99?
Maybe. Its more like some poor (out of work) schmuck catching pneumonia while living on the streets and dying at age 38, tho.
>>But their opposition to things like the XL Pipeline is insane - we need the oil
>The US will be exporting more oil than importing by 2016. We don't need to ruin virgin environments for it.
Both irrelevant statements, as exporting oil is a good thing, it does great stuff for the balance of trade which is currently a threat to our economy, and there are no virgin environments.
>>How many people die in an average oil spill?
>How many people died when the BP rig blew up? How many lives were ruined? That train accident was from human error. Human error happens.
Of course the train was human error, but with pipelines, there is less humans involved to make errors. That's why pipelines are preferable to trucking or (railing?) the oil about. The oil is going to move, you ain't gonna stop it, and the choice is to do it safer or not. As usual, envirowackos don't give a F about people, just "the environment."
>>Do I hate envirowackos? Absolutely. They bring us unnecessary human suffering.
>On the contrary, the polluters themselves cause death and suffering. Even if there had been a pipeline that trainload of fuel would have still been rolling.
Totally untrue. Moving by rail is more expensive than by pi
Eagles are cool and all, but at the expense of millions of dead humans? Yeah, I know they're mostly black, but still... I figured even the envirowackos were better than that. Maybe not.
As for the air being filthy, yeah, it was. But that's no excuse for attempting to make it laboratory pure at ridiculous expense, either.
As for the envirowackos objecting to the vaccine, they seem to find some way to object to almost everything. Hell, they object to our efforts to produce cheap energy, the lack of which has been throwing Americans into poverty for several decades, along with some other factors like the income taxes chasing jobs overseas and cross-border. Poverty will take 6 1/2 years off a person's life, and if it is experienced as a child, the years become unrecoverable. But their opposition to things like the XL Pipeline is insane - we need the oil, the world needs the oil, the more oil there is the lower the world price goes, and the worst that could happen is an oil spill. How many people die in an average oil spill? Zero. That's not like the Canadian train carrying tank cars of crude oil that broke away, rolled into a town with a curve in the tracks too fast, derailed, and killed a bunch of people. You can lay those deaths at the feet of the envirowackos, too, since if there had been a pipeline carrying that oil, it would, at worst, sprung a leak and made the ground all black and gooey in an isolated area, but we'd have just cleaned it up, patched the pipe, and continued without anyone dying. Do I hate envirowackos? Absolutely. They bring us unnecessary human suffering. They don't know the word, "moderation."
DDT is unavailable in the US, which killed the economy of scale for producing it. Only very small amounts are now produced. Producing very small amounts of anything is very expensive, which is what torpedoed wider distribution of it in poorer areas of the earth.
Maybe the envirowackos will figure out a way to torpedo the vaccine like they did DDT, so's the price goes thru the roof and becomes unaffordable for poor countries such as those in Africa, like they did for DDT. Envirowackos don't care about people, just making the planet safe for plants and animals.
Yep, that is correct. You can do the driving task mostly without thinking. People do all sorts of other stuff - smacking the kids, fighting with spouses, etc. and talking on a cell is small potatoes compared to those.
Slashdot Mirror
Driverless car will be electric, which is ALREADY about 1/6th the cost of gasoline. That won't much increase because there's new sources of making electricity all the time - wind, solar, cheap(er) natural gas, and by that time, probably geothermal. The only way "public transportation" will even survive is if it can be used to transport vehicles such as the Hyperloop will.
Self-driving cars will make public transportation obsolete.
Lessee, do I want to drive to a public transport station, wait 5 to 15 minutes for the vehicle to get there and for me to board it, move toward my destination slower than I could have been driving it myself if there was no traffic, and disembark maybe blocks away from my final destination and have to walk 5 - 10 more minutes to get where I'm going, _OR_
Get in my driverless car, program it to take me to work, climb in the back seat and catch up on the last 1 hour of sleep, and get out within 20 feet of the front door of where I'm going, while the car then drives off to a parking lot a couple miles away and waits to be summoned via my cell phone.
Yeah, I think I'll choose plan B.
What big rig? With the cargo-carrying capacity of these tubes, once they're built-out nation wide there will be no big-rigs, all cargo will move on these tubes.
"2. Why does an airplane need the TSA but his tube doesn't? Can you image what a bomb would do in that thing? Not only would it kill people but you'd
shut the whole system down until it was fixed."
Because... the way to blow this up is not from the inside, its from the outside. Run a big truck full of explosive underneath the tube on I-5, boom, and the tube collapses. There's no way the TSA can do a D thing about that. Its why AmTrak doesn't attempt to search everybody, either, there's no point to it.
No, this system beats EVERYTHING in cost and in time:
NY to Pittsburgh - 311 miles, 31 minutes. Drive car to next pod.
Pittsburgh to Indy, 330 miles, 33 minutes Drive car to next pod
Indy to St. Louis, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
St. Louis to Joplin 260 miles, 26 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Joplin to Oklahoma City, 200 miles, 20 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Oklahoma City to Abilene, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Abilene to Odessa, 160 miles, 16 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Odessa to El Paso, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
El Paso to Tucson, 270 miles, 27 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Tucson to Yuma, 210 miles, 21 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Yuma to San Diego, 150 miles, 15 minutes. Drive car to next pod
San Diego to LA, 110 miles, 11 minutes.
Total tube time of 272 minutes - 4 hours and 32 minutes, and with 1/2 hour of comfort stops at every other transfer, that adds 2 hours, with 5 minutes for the remainder of moving from one pod to the other adding about another 25 minutes, for about 6 hours and 55 minutes NY to LA. OK by me, I'd take that ride, esp. when arriving with my car. I don't have to rent a car, and nothing I could (reasonably) rent moves like my WRX, which I thoroughly enjoy. This system could put the airlines totally out of business for domestic travel. With hub-and-spoke, "you have to take a connecting flight" nonsense we have now, this would STILL be faster as most of the air travel available between most travel departure-arrival pairs, especially when you consider the advantages of leaving when you want to (1 AM if you like, find a plane that leaves at 1 AM), not screwing around with the TSA (there's no REASON to inspect PASSENGERS because the way to blow this up is not from the inside, but from the outside - drive a big truck full of, say, TATP, underneath it on I-5, "boom", and the tube collapses - no need to carry a bomb on board the train), .And supposedly a ride on that tube is $20 for each 300 mile excursion. That's about $240 to go across the country, about the same as a plane, but you get to arrive with your car. No car rental beats riding an airplane. If each ride were $50, that'd still be only $600 to get from NY to LA with your car - you can't drive it for that when you consider the nights in motels (about $70 X 4 = $280) and gasoline (3000 miles / 22 mpg X $4.00 / gallon = $545).
The TSA needs to be abolished. What they do is in absolute violation of the 4th amendment, among other reasons. The airlines can do what they do if they so desire because they are not gov't, but the gov't can't search and / or seize without probable cause of the commission of a crime.
We need to get back to being a constitutional republic, not the dictatorship that this country is turning into. Since when can a president change a law to his liking, and delay its implementation just on his own say-so? He can't, not legally, and that's dictatorship, and needs to stop yesterday. We keep rushing headlong toward Thomas Jefferson's prediction that the tree of liberty must from time to time be watered by the blood of patriots and tyrants...
Capitalism in the US is non-existent because the gov't comes tromping thru the door every year and wants 35% of everything you made. Repeal the income taxes and this too would be more than possible.
Looks like you better build a concrete wall around the support so that doesn't happen, eh?
Make those airplanes run on electricity at 720 mph and we'll talk. Meanwhile, we're _still_ running out of petroleum fuels and they don't do anything but get more expensive. And look at Figure 1 in Section 3, and see that airplanes consume the most energy per passenger mile and this system consumes the absolute least energy per passenger mile.
If they build it out so we can do this:
NY to Pittsburgh - 311 miles, 31 minutes. Drive car to next pod.
Pittsburgh to Indy, 330 miles, 33 minutes Drive car to next pod
Indy to St. Louis, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
St. Louis to Joplin 260 miles, 26 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Joplin to Oklahoma City, 200 miles, 20 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Oklahoma City to Abilene, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Abilene to Odessa, 160 miles, 16 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Odessa to El Paso, 240 miles, 24 minutes. Drive car to next pod
El Paso to Tucson, 270 miles, 27 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Tucson to Yuma, 210 miles, 21 minutes. Drive car to next pod
Yuma to San Diego, 150 miles, 15 minutes. Drive car to next pod
San Diego to LA, 110 miles, 11 minutes.
and each of those rides is $20, then you can go coast-to-coast for $240 and get there the same day, easy. That's pretty darn good, the price of an airplane ride to do the same thing.
The whole ride is about 30 minutes. No need for bathrooms.
Don't break those capsules, that is unnecessary and counterproductive. Brake them instead.
Look at the bar graph, Figure 1, in section 3, Background. It ain't necessarily about the speed, its also about the energy use, which is lower than most anything else for passenger travel. This would probably also translate to cargo.
All you really need is the legislature to get behind it and pass a law forbidding the lawsuits, a statement of, more or less, "Sit down, shut up, we're doing this."
Where did you get 2000 tons? From the description of a vehicle-carrying hyperloop vehicle:
The overall structure weight is expected to be near 7,700 lb (3,500 kg) including the luggage compartments and door mechanism. The overall cost of
the structure including manufacturing is targeted to be no more than $275,000.
>>We are in a die-off right now, many species are going extinct. Eagles would have just been another.
>We are indeed in a mass extinction event, and it's man-made. You're for continuing to drive species to extinction.
It is NOT man-made. It is natural. The do-do died off decades ago, and man had nothing to do with it. Its been going on a really long time. You can find all manner of critters just about everywhere you look that are on the verge of extinction.
>>No, laboratory pure. The current "thing" by the president is to shut down many coal-fueled power plants.
>Shutting down coal-fired plants won't make the air "lab-pure", and I agree that as many as possible should be shut down. The city-owned power company has both old coal and newer natural gas generators, and they rarely use the coal-fired one because natural gas is so cheap right now. Gas is a whole lot better than coal. Save the coal for blacksmithing.
Sure, and then the jobs associated with the coal-fired plants, and the cheaper electricity of the coal-fired plants are both lost, causing human suffering. As I said, the envirowackos don't give a F about how many they kill with their "clean air" and "clean water" zealotry.
>>So, how many years of life do these people lose compared to the coal miners that were forced into poverty and the people who need electricity having to buy it at a higher price now?
>Forced into poverty? No, lifted out of poverty. [go.com]
Forced into poverty. I was driving thru W. Va. last summer when the local radio stations were announcing the layoffs of 1200 coal miners. There ain't much else to do around W. Va, and the average coal miner is not into the few remaining economic endeavors that the rest of the country is attempting to survive on - burger flipping, stock trading, and suing each other. I'm sure many of these people are still in poverty.
>But later, members of this tightly-knit West Virginia community said Athey's close call and the tragedy that has re-exposed the dangers of coal mining doesn't detract from the allure of a profession that is beloved here.
?Athey, a 34 year-old father of four who has only donned a miner's helmet for two years, says he plans to return to work in a mine as soon as possible.
>"It's the only thing I know how to do," he said. "I don't read and write."
---
>"You can come right out of high school and make $70,000 a year," said Missy Perdue, 22, a stay-at-home mother whose husband, Jeff Perdue, Jr., 22, is a miner.
>April Athey, 28, also says she appreciates her husband's salary, despite the risks of mining, so that she can stay at home and raise the couple's four kids, including one-year-old twins.
That's the way it should be. And there are lots of dangerous jobs - logging, fishing, firefighter, cop, etc. Mining is just another. If we could get our manufacturing base back, there would be lots of less-dangerous jobs that pay a lot more, too, but envirowackos don't want factories, either. Envirowackos don't give a F about people.
>>And that's clean enough.
>Yes, I agree. The air is pretty clean most places today and I don't want to go back.
Yet, envirowackos are all about spending even more and more and more (of YOUR) money to get the last 0.0000001% of some pollutant out of something. They will ruin the country.
>>>You're a fool.
>>That's another thing I hate about envirowackos, they're rude.
>I apologize for my bluntness, but that's my opinion based on what you've written. You are full of misconceptions.
And I think you're a zealot that wants what he wants whether it actually serves man or simply makes a needle on a sensitive instrument move, or fail to move. The objective of a REAL scientist ought to be to improve the human condition, but that is not what you're concerned with. You seem to be concerned about simply spending more $$$ on "the environment" as if doing somethi
>Your worries about the price due to the lack of a US market seem to be unconfirmed.
People can make statistics support whatever position they want to, and none of those are in the least bit relevant. The facts are that if DDT were being made in quantities sufficient for protecting the millions of acres of US farmland, it would be even cheaper via economy of scale. The claim that it is "cheap" now is not relevant, since it could be cheaper still. There will always be a money limit to the usage of anything in poor countries, which may or may not include India and China now, but definitely includes Africa, and therefore cheaper DDT will result in fewer dead Africans.
And, once again, radical environmentalism kills.
>>Eagles are cool and all, but at the expense of millions of dead humans?
>You have no moral qualms against mass extinction?
We are in a die-off right now, many species are going extinct. Eagles would have just been another. Meanwhile, you simply don't know any person that died from malaria. If you were a member of a small African village and were continually losing friends and relatives to malaria, you would hate you for your bird infatuation.
>>As for the air being filthy, yeah, it was. But that's no excuse for attempting to make it laboratory pure at ridiculous expense, either.
>"Laboratory pure"?? No, simply breathable. I grew up two miles from a Monsanto plant. You could not drive past it with the windows down because the air burned your lungs. How many human lives were cut short by that? You talk about the loss of human life, my uncle died at age 60 after working at a garbage incinerator for thirty years, my dad is 82 and his other two brothers were in their eighties.
No, laboratory pure. The current "thing" by the president is to shut down many coal-fueled power plants. That will, supposedly, according to a letter to the editor locally by another zealot who is a pulmonary doctor, save 2500 lives of people with asthma. OK, I expect he's correct, and don't remember if that is "per year" but we'll assume it is. So, how many years of life do these people lose compared to the coal miners that were forced into poverty and the people who need electricity having to buy it at a higher price now? This stuff isn't free, you're going to pay a price in human suffering every time you make something more expensive, ban something, or mess with the capitalistic model that naturally attempts to make the biggest profit, which in turn attempts to make things the cheapest possible so that they can sell more of it and make more $$$. IOW, the gov't, as a whole, is a destroyer of "cheap", every time. But, getting back to "laboratory pure", NOBODY is going to have their lungs burned by what's coming out of power plants nowadays, its just envirowacko zealots attempting to get that last 0.000001% of something that will cost $$$ which in turn costs lives.
>Yes, clean air is certainly worth "ridiculous expense" especially when those who have to pay for the cleanup made obscene amounts of money with their filthy activities.
No, it is not. "Ridiculously expensive" causes poverty which costs lives.
>>Poverty will take 6 1/2 years off a person's life
>So my grandmother, who was poor all her life, would have lived to 106 instead of 99?
Maybe. Its more like some poor (out of work) schmuck catching pneumonia while living on the streets and dying at age 38, tho.
>>But their opposition to things like the XL Pipeline is insane - we need the oil
>The US will be exporting more oil than importing by 2016. We don't need to ruin virgin environments for it.
Both irrelevant statements, as exporting oil is a good thing, it does great stuff for the balance of trade which is currently a threat to our economy, and there are no virgin environments.
>>How many people die in an average oil spill?
>How many people died when the BP rig blew up? How many lives were ruined? That train accident was from human error. Human error happens.
Of course the train was human error, but with pipelines, there is less humans involved to make errors. That's why pipelines are preferable to trucking or (railing?) the oil about. The oil is going to move, you ain't gonna stop it, and the choice is to do it safer or not. As usual, envirowackos don't give a F about people, just "the environment."
>>Do I hate envirowackos? Absolutely. They bring us unnecessary human suffering.
>On the contrary, the polluters themselves cause death and suffering. Even if there had been a pipeline that trainload of fuel would have still been rolling.
Totally untrue. Moving by rail is more expensive than by pi
Eagles are cool and all, but at the expense of millions of dead humans? Yeah, I know they're mostly black, but still... I figured even the envirowackos were better than that. Maybe not.
As for the air being filthy, yeah, it was. But that's no excuse for attempting to make it laboratory pure at ridiculous expense, either.
As for the envirowackos objecting to the vaccine, they seem to find some way to object to almost everything. Hell, they object to our efforts to produce cheap energy, the lack of which has been throwing Americans into poverty for several decades, along with some other factors like the income taxes chasing jobs overseas and cross-border. Poverty will take 6 1/2 years off a person's life, and if it is experienced as a child, the years become unrecoverable. But their opposition to things like the XL Pipeline is insane - we need the oil, the world needs the oil, the more oil there is the lower the world price goes, and the worst that could happen is an oil spill. How many people die in an average oil spill? Zero. That's not like the Canadian train carrying tank cars of crude oil that broke away, rolled into a town with a curve in the tracks too fast, derailed, and killed a bunch of people. You can lay those deaths at the feet of the envirowackos, too, since if there had been a pipeline carrying that oil, it would, at worst, sprung a leak and made the ground all black and gooey in an isolated area, but we'd have just cleaned it up, patched the pipe, and continued without anyone dying. Do I hate envirowackos? Absolutely. They bring us unnecessary human suffering. They don't know the word, "moderation."
DDT is unavailable in the US, which killed the economy of scale for producing it. Only very small amounts are now produced. Producing very small amounts of anything is very expensive, which is what torpedoed wider distribution of it in poorer areas of the earth.
Maybe the envirowackos will figure out a way to torpedo the vaccine like they did DDT, so's the price goes thru the roof and becomes unaffordable for poor countries such as those in Africa, like they did for DDT. Envirowackos don't care about people, just making the planet safe for plants and animals.
Yep, that is correct. You can do the driving task mostly without thinking. People do all sorts of other stuff - smacking the kids, fighting with spouses, etc. and talking on a cell is small potatoes compared to those.
You mean I can walk and chew gum at the same time / talk while driving at the same time?
Its just a matter of learning how to do it, and specifically concentrating on driving.
In the event of a tyrannical government, circumventing regulations may be just the thing those people need.
These things may be ready to defend a classroom of first graders from someone trying to shoot them.