Read everything you can about The Fair Tax. If we passed the Fair Tax, we would supercharge our economy, full employment would be achieved probably within 2 years, and we would be the #1 economic engine on the planet. Prosperity would be restored, and we could accept immigrants to any extent we wanted, because we would be able to put all of them to work in a revitalized manufacturing industry. They try to say that there's no silver bullet, but there is, and it is the Fair Tax.
Better mental health care that will work, in these instances, is the ability to come grab the guy that is clearly off his rocker and lock him up. They used to be able to do that, but under the emotionally-driven, touchy-feely Carter adminsitration, they conducted "deinstitutionalization", which resulted in homeless people on the streets 'cuz they can't or don't want to care for themselves, and these mass shootings - and probably other stuff that we're not so much noticing.
Its not low labor costs. Its US income tax rates, that were, BTW, just raised again. You can't expect to come tromping into US companies with your tax handgun drawn and leave with 44% of their profits and have them survive international competition.
The solution? Repeal absolutely ALL the income taxes, every one including corporate, individual, self-employment, capital gains, inheritance, gift, alternative minimum, social security, medicare, every one of them, and the 16th Amendment, and instead pass the Fair Tax, a tax on retail goods and services for sale. That'll set the foreigners back on their heels, as US industry loses a whale of a lot of cost in their operations, and the foreigners don't. We can mine our own rare earths, if the gov't would just get the H out of the way...
Oh, the school shooter can't get in the school? Hahahahahahaha! The last one just shot out the (glass) door. Got windows in the place? He'll come in thru a window, maybe shooting it out. Put bars on the windows? There's "Murphy's Laws of Combat" that states, "Make it tough for the enemy to get in and... you can't get out!" That's like in a fire, or some terrorist poison gas attack, or whatever. And besides, do you want your school to look like a prison? Yeah, how about some 20 ft. high chain link with razor wire on top, hmmmm???? Pretty... not... Then you get to consider the school shooter that makes his way to the office, where the ID tracker is, and looks up EXACTLY where his ex-girlfriend is within the building, and goes there and shoots her, after shooting those that were using / protecting the access to the tracker. Whole thing is a can of worms and a huge overkill in my opinion.
are these school officials going to be allowed to go in trying to control every movement and thought that a student might possibly have or make? And how much money are the taxpayers going to have to provide in order to pay for this draconian, futuristic BS?
We didn't have this nonsense when I went to school and nobody died. Yeah, some guys got away with smoking in the boys room. BFD. This is spending money just to be spending money, I think. Its a "just say no" situation.
There is no reason to repeat the same mistake twice. 15 - 20 years ago, there was a big push to get the USA on the metric system. It failed miserably, as the average American refused to attempt to think in terms of the Kilometers to Kansas City or the millimeters a wrench was measured in. THE PEOPLE just flat rejected change. They just didn't want to be bothered. Get over it, we are stuck with English measurements.
No, irresponsible unstable people owning guns is not the problem. Irresponsible unstable people getting access to guns is the problem. Here, reality sets in. The reality is that there are 300 million guns in American society, and only 315 million people. Therefore, practically everyone knows where to borrow or steal a gun for the purpose of committing a massacre, they don't have to own it. Odds are, the weapons for the next five mass murders are already purchased, and sitting in someone's closet, or under someone's bed, or even in someone's gun safe where it will be retrieved and given to this irresponsible unstable person under the ruse of going plinking or maybe coyote hunting. You just can't prevent ANYONE having access to guns without locking them up. That's just a fact. Either lock 'em up, or have everyone else capable of defending against some nut-job with a gun, because the nut-job will always be able to get a gun from somewhere.
The solution is to completely repeal absolutely every income tax on the books, and then the 16th Amendment that allows what is simple theft by the government to exist. We stopped the draft because it was wrong. We should stop the income taxes because they are wrong, again being simple theft, which is wrong.
The thing to do is to replace the income taxes with the Fair Tax, which taxes new goods and services sold at retail. In that scheme, no businesses are taxed. That is as it should be, since these taxes harm businesses, but we can only tax such businesses if they do business in the USA. That is a great incentive to business to NOT do business in the USA, which they take to its logical conclusion and work to set up their manufacturing operations in foreign countries, resulting in a job scarcity in our country. In short, the income taxes are tearing this country apart, and have been ever since the rest of the world recovered from WW2 and began being able to compete with us. First textiles went to Italy and other places in the 60's, followed by consumer electronics in the late 60's and 70's, followed by great harm being done to steel and auto industries in the 80s, and then great impact to the intellectual industries like software in the late 90's to present as software development went to places like India and Russia. Income taxes in the USA are at the bottom of all of this. Their repeal would get a lot of these jobs to come back to the USA.
Do I get this right, that 1 guy is allowed to program something, and then review it? If so, that is a broken process. Nobody can review their own stuff as well as another person that has to learn the code and can ask, "What is this mold?"
Yep, I do make choices, and I have the time, too. Plus, I like driving, and additionally, am good at it. One of the best times of my life was winning the 1987 1 Lap of America - 9000 miles in 10 days. Sooo... the driving is no problem, so why fly and be annoyed by all that stuff, and have your rights violated (the TSA is in absolulte violation of the 4th Amendment) just to be treated like cattle?
They just keep piling it on, adding reasons not to have anything to do with air travel.
Having to pay big $$$ for parking at a lot that is still a 10 minute bus ride from the terminal Having to wait maybe 15 minutes for that bus Having to wait maybe 15 minutes for that bus at 24 degrees or 105 degrees Overpriced food at terminals TSA stealing stuff from your luggage TSA thinking they have the right to lay hands on you TSA thinking they have the right to x-ray you (only my Dr. and dentist...) Late planes Late planes when you have to catch a connection 1/2 hr sprints thru big airports 'cuz your plane was late for the connection Lost luggage 45 minutes to retrieve luggage after plane lands Arriving 2 hrs early 'cuz of TSA Narrow airplane seats Fees for blankets Fees for pillows Fees for food Fees for checked baggage Fees for carry on baggage Having to rent a car when you get there Paying for wi-fi in the airport
Have given up flying for anyplace I can get to with my car. About the only good thing left about flying and airports is Cinnabon.
Our country is far larger than the European countries, and our freight rail is massively expansive, and the envy of the world. NOBODY ELSE has wired up power for anything like it.
we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable You are crawling around in poverty because 99% of your countries wealth is owned by 1% of its people.
Wrong. Its because pinhead environmentalists are attacking the sources of cheap fossil fuels.
by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap, Last time I checked, you still use coal. And your energy is still cheap. What exactly are you mourning about?
"O" is using the EPA to make coal impossibly expensive. Just a few months ago, 1200 miners were laid off because of this, and we lost their production of coal. This is going to continue, and electrical prices are going to (continue to) rise.
and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, Fracking is expensive, that is why gas prices are rising. On top of that, the USA has no "normal" gas reserves anymore. So you need to import. Another reason why it is expensive. Environmental issues set aside...
No gas reserves? You are totally wrong, wrong, wrong. We have OCEANS of gas.
and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power,
Solar power can be distributed with the current grid. You don't need a new grid for that. Your claim is idiocy.
You're crazy. Solar is best generated in the desert southwast. You then have to get it to the rest of the country. Ever hear of IR loss? Radiative loss? Minimizing those means building million-volt or more electrical "hi" lines, that will take lots of money and years to complete. Using anything else will result in most of the power produced being used to heat the electrical distribution wires of AC low-voltage distribution, as well as radiating a lot of the power into outer space.
and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high
How does a railway make everyone poor? Europe has an excellent railway net, and as far as I can tell most people are considered rich...
Europe isn't the United States. You really show your ignorance of things tech here. We have a much lower population density, and vast expanses with few people that want to travel thru them. So, building rails there is necessary, but won't generate a commensurate income to pay them off. And when you get to places like California, you have exactly the opposite problem, with TOO MANY people living where the rails have to go, resulting in huge costs in litigation to acquire the right of way, as well as extremely high costs to compensate the current owners of this land. Then, after you get all that done, you don't have riders because we're currently at least moderately prosperous, so much so that people drive their cars to wheverer they're going, and incidentally compare favorable with 200 mph trains that run on schedules, since that slows everything down, while people can leave for a distant destination at 4 AM, maybe 3 - 4 hours before the train is scheduled to leave for the same destination. And on and on, people have lots of reasons for not riding trains, the biggest being that the fare would be several times as much as it would take to simply drive the distance. In order to make even some people ride it, the fare has to be lowered, so that's where the gov't subsidy comes in - making the fare artificially low. We're better off just not building such trains.
speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't How do you know it costs millions per mile and no one is using it? You have no railways right now, so claiming anything about costs or usage if you had them is... speculation at best.
People do studies before they build things. They ask people "what if" questions. There's been a proposal to build HS rail in Florida for decades, but it gets killed every time when the results of the surveys of the people that MIGHT ride it mostly say they'd dr
No, _reducing_ CO2 does not fit the definition of "stop." You then bring up a bunch of technologies that are incapable of supplying the same amount of energy as fossil fuels, which means you are talking thru your hat. There are no electric tractors, and their production at a reasonable price is not possible (yet.) Locomotives in the USA run on diesel. It would be decades before they could be converted to external electrical power and we don't have batteries like that, either. Stringing overhead wires for locomotives that run hundreds of miles is a LOT of wire, and it is expensive, as well as its installation being expensive. Not financially doable. And it appears I know a whale of a lot more about reality, and what can be done within its confines than you do.
No strawman - these environmentalists keep trying insane schemes like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade nonsense, and suing every form of energy production to attempt to kill it all as effectively as possible. There's no other conclusion to be drawn except that they want everyone to go back and live in caves, and burn wood to heat them because they're trying to deprive society of coal, natural gas, oil, etc. You may be able to tell that I'm really sick of it, because it harms prosperity, which is absolutely necessary if we are to have the money to actually solve the problem. And, thanks to natural gas fracking, we're actually converting the coal fired power plants to natural gas, as it is getting really cheap, and OBTW it is MUCH cleaner. The USA has made the greatest headway into actually reducing CO2, more than any other country, due to the natural gas boom. But the environmentalists are still trying to stop it.
Environmentalists make no sense, they are never FOR anything that WORKS NOW, but always try to stop EVERYTHING. They even had Nancy Pelosi attempting to lock up the Mojave Desert so no one could put solar farms on it, and just a few weeks ago the Obama administration put millions of acres of western shale off limits to development. (We should be in for 4 more years of recession, as this guy placates the loony left that abhors advancement and prosperity.)
Stop spewing CO2 into the air? How do you do that? Mass genocide? People _need_ the energy we get from these sources of CO2 you want to stop in order to live. We cannot support the population of the USA while going back to farming without fossil-based fertilizers and working the land with animals instead of powerful fossil-fueled tractors, or moving the proceeds of that farming with diesel trucks and locomotives to get it to market. We cannot go about our lives at the standard of living you talk about without burning fossil fuels in the only modes of conveyance that we own. The idiotic AGW alarmists were telling us 10 years ago that we had to spend $50 trillion to "mitigate" this problem and the resultant scheme would only have lowererd the temperature increase by a degree or degree and a half by the year 2100, and not really fix the problem. No one has even proposed an actual way to completely fix the problem. But no matter, they want to spend more money than we have to continue their doomed-to-failure schemes.
goes unpurseud because, if it worked, it'd wreck things for those attempting to gain control of everyone's lives (and money) with their scarecrow. That approach would, if actually developed, give us pre-industrial-revolution levels of CO2. That would be a disaster for the doomsayers, and so we don't hear a peep about making it work. No, lets just get rid of our cars, take public transportation, and go back to living in caves.
Anyone really serious about fixing the problem would get their PHD's in some STEM areas of study, get their butts into some laboratories, and start trying to make things like those work, as well as, politically, stop trying to wreck the world's economies by opposing absolutely everything we try to do to make our lives better and promote the prosperity that will provide the abundance of resources necessary to actually develop ways to stop using CO2 generting energy sources. IOW, we're not going to successfully develop solar electricity, distribute it all over the country, develop the magic battery to make electric cars really viable, and so forth if we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap, and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power, and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't subsidies infinitely into the future, and you take away money for research on how to do the very things you want to do that may actually, maybe, someday be able to solve the problem. Prosperity is our best weapon to combat the problem technologically, but everything the AGW alarmists are doing work to diminish our chances of actually being successful by removing the monetary resources necessary for the research to solve the problem.
Yeah, their socialistic plan to use the global warming scarecrow to attempt to cart boatloads of money out of developed nations into 3rd-world money pits has had it cover blown repeatedly. Their adamant stance against anything geo-engineering is evidence of what they're up to since such geo-engineering would short-circuit their plans to redistribute wealth. Oh, and we're going to do some tree-hugging, in spite of the fact that they DIE and then they release their carbon back into the air in carbonaceous gases that decompose into CO2... c'mon...
The panels become the things sticking out of your spleen in a really high wind. The panels are expensive, the batteries are expensive if you're trying to go off-grid, which OUGHT to be everybody's goal, the batteries take up square feet somewhere, and you have to be an electronic tech to fix the thing when some transistor shorts out someplace. You have to keep them free of the snow, clean the pollution off them periodically. Neither the batteries nor the panels last forever, and have to be replaced from time to time. Even the expensive ones aren't going to power the unusual things people do, like arc welding, and I'm really not into giving up _anything_ just for the only unique feature these things have: "Conversation Piece." You're SOL if its overcast a lot, and as a kid in northwestern Ohio I remember seeing the sun go behind clouds in mid-November and not seeing it again 'til about the end of January. I don't think the whole idea will be worth pursuing, ever.
Not interested in giving up anything for the "benefit" of going solar. When solar will provide the 200 amp service my utility does, and have SOME kind of advantage over them, something significant, I'll be interested. But I don't think it'll have a price advantage, ever, nor a reliability advantage, nor any other advantage beyond "conversation piece."
Ain't. The solar panels will become the things that penetrate your spleen in a high wind, and the lead batteries are toxic all by themselves, let alone the hydrogen they generate threatening to blow you up. And, if you live along the coast and have a storm surge, they'll give you chlorine gas to kill you as well.
My electric bill: $70 winter, $140 summer. So, at about $100 average, that's 100 months, or 8+ years to equal $10K. Then there is sweeping the snow off it after big storms, tending the batteries, replacing the batteries and the solar panels when they both wear out, etc. Not worth the hassle. Electric don't work now, just call the power company, and THEY go out in the storm and do something about it.
Now, if a homeowner could somehow execute the solar thermal concept of melting a large amount of salt, and using it to make steam and turn turbines, THAT requires NO BATTERIES and NO parts that need periodic replacement. Theoretically the parts involved are fairly low-tech, and ought to pretty much last forever save maybe changing bearings every now and then. But that would require a lot of land that most people don't have.
Slashdot Mirror
Read everything you can about The Fair Tax. If we passed the Fair Tax, we would supercharge our economy, full employment would be achieved probably within 2 years, and we would be the #1 economic engine on the planet. Prosperity would be restored, and we could accept immigrants to any extent we wanted, because we would be able to put all of them to work in a revitalized manufacturing industry. They try to say that there's no silver bullet, but there is, and it is the Fair Tax.
Better mental health care that will work, in these instances, is the ability to come grab the guy that is clearly off his rocker and lock him up. They used to be able to do that, but under the emotionally-driven, touchy-feely Carter adminsitration, they conducted "deinstitutionalization", which resulted in homeless people on the streets 'cuz they can't or don't want to care for themselves, and these mass shootings - and probably other stuff that we're not so much noticing.
Its not low labor costs. Its US income tax rates, that were, BTW, just raised again. You can't expect to come tromping into US companies with your tax handgun drawn and leave with 44% of their profits and have them survive international competition.
The solution? Repeal absolutely ALL the income taxes, every one including corporate, individual, self-employment, capital gains, inheritance, gift, alternative minimum, social security, medicare, every one of them, and the 16th Amendment, and instead pass the Fair Tax, a tax on retail goods and services for sale. That'll set the foreigners back on their heels, as US industry loses a whale of a lot of cost in their operations, and the foreigners don't. We can mine our own rare earths, if the gov't would just get the H out of the way...
Oh, the school shooter can't get in the school? Hahahahahahaha! The last one just shot out the (glass) door. Got windows in the place? He'll come in thru a window, maybe shooting it out. Put bars on the windows? There's "Murphy's Laws of Combat" that states, "Make it tough for the enemy to get in and... you can't get out!" That's like in a fire, or some terrorist poison gas attack, or whatever. And besides, do you want your school to look like a prison? Yeah, how about some 20 ft. high chain link with razor wire on top, hmmmm???? Pretty... not... Then you get to consider the school shooter that makes his way to the office, where the ID tracker is, and looks up EXACTLY where his ex-girlfriend is within the building, and goes there and shoots her, after shooting those that were using / protecting the access to the tracker. Whole thing is a can of worms and a huge overkill in my opinion.
are these school officials going to be allowed to go in trying to control every movement and thought that a student might possibly have or make? And how much money are the taxpayers going to have to provide in order to pay for this draconian, futuristic BS?
We didn't have this nonsense when I went to school and nobody died. Yeah, some guys got away with smoking in the boys room. BFD. This is spending money just to be spending money, I think. Its a "just say no" situation.
There is no reason to repeat the same mistake twice. 15 - 20 years ago, there was a big push to get the USA on the metric system. It failed miserably, as the average American refused to attempt to think in terms of the Kilometers to Kansas City or the millimeters a wrench was measured in. THE PEOPLE just flat rejected change. They just didn't want to be bothered. Get over it, we are stuck with English measurements.
The nut-job will find a less-hardened target.
No, irresponsible unstable people owning guns is not the problem. Irresponsible unstable people getting access to guns is the problem. Here, reality sets in. The reality is that there are 300 million guns in American society, and only 315 million people. Therefore, practically everyone knows where to borrow or steal a gun for the purpose of committing a massacre, they don't have to own it. Odds are, the weapons for the next five mass murders are already purchased, and sitting in someone's closet, or under someone's bed, or even in someone's gun safe where it will be retrieved and given to this irresponsible unstable person under the ruse of going plinking or maybe coyote hunting. You just can't prevent ANYONE having access to guns without locking them up. That's just a fact. Either lock 'em up, or have everyone else capable of defending against some nut-job with a gun, because the nut-job will always be able to get a gun from somewhere.
This is not the solution at all.
The solution is to completely repeal absolutely every income tax on the books, and then the 16th Amendment that allows what is simple theft by the government to exist. We stopped the draft because it was wrong. We should stop the income taxes because they are wrong, again being simple theft, which is wrong.
The thing to do is to replace the income taxes with the Fair Tax, which taxes new goods and services sold at retail. In that scheme, no businesses are taxed. That is as it should be, since these taxes harm businesses, but we can only tax such businesses if they do business in the USA. That is a great incentive to business to NOT do business in the USA, which they take to its logical conclusion and work to set up their manufacturing operations in foreign countries, resulting in a job scarcity in our country. In short, the income taxes are tearing this country apart, and have been ever since the rest of the world recovered from WW2 and began being able to compete with us. First textiles went to Italy and other places in the 60's, followed by consumer electronics in the late 60's and 70's, followed by great harm being done to steel and auto industries in the 80s, and then great impact to the intellectual industries like software in the late 90's to present as software development went to places like India and Russia. Income taxes in the USA are at the bottom of all of this. Their repeal would get a lot of these jobs to come back to the USA.
Do I get this right, that 1 guy is allowed to program something, and then review it? If so, that is a broken process. Nobody can review their own stuff as well as another person that has to learn the code and can ask, "What is this mold?"
I Ain't A-Workin' Here No More...
Yep, I do make choices, and I have the time, too. Plus, I like driving, and additionally, am good at it. One of the best times of my life was winning the 1987 1 Lap of America - 9000 miles in 10 days. Sooo... the driving is no problem, so why fly and be annoyed by all that stuff, and have your rights violated (the TSA is in absolulte violation of the 4th Amendment) just to be treated like cattle?
They just keep piling it on, adding reasons not to have anything to do with air travel.
Having to pay big $$$ for parking at a lot that is still a 10 minute bus ride from the terminal
Having to wait maybe 15 minutes for that bus
Having to wait maybe 15 minutes for that bus at 24 degrees or 105 degrees
Overpriced food at terminals
TSA stealing stuff from your luggage
TSA thinking they have the right to lay hands on you
TSA thinking they have the right to x-ray you (only my Dr. and dentist...)
Late planes
Late planes when you have to catch a connection
1/2 hr sprints thru big airports 'cuz your plane was late for the connection
Lost luggage
45 minutes to retrieve luggage after plane lands
Arriving 2 hrs early 'cuz of TSA
Narrow airplane seats
Fees for blankets
Fees for pillows
Fees for food
Fees for checked baggage
Fees for carry on baggage
Having to rent a car when you get there
Paying for wi-fi in the airport
Have given up flying for anyplace I can get to with my car. About the only good thing left about flying and airports is Cinnabon.
Our country is far larger than the European countries, and our freight rail is massively expansive, and the envy of the world. NOBODY ELSE has wired up power for anything like it.
we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable
You are crawling around in poverty because 99% of your countries wealth is owned by 1% of its people.
Wrong. Its because pinhead environmentalists are attacking the sources of cheap fossil fuels.
by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap,
Last time I checked, you still use coal. And your energy is still cheap. What exactly are you mourning about?
"O" is using the EPA to make coal impossibly expensive. Just a few months ago, 1200 miners were laid off because of this, and we lost their production of coal. This is going to continue, and electrical prices are going to (continue to) rise.
and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, ...
Fracking is expensive, that is why gas prices are rising. On top of that, the USA has no "normal" gas reserves anymore. So you need to import. Another reason why it is expensive. Environmental issues set aside
No gas reserves? You are totally wrong, wrong, wrong. We have OCEANS of gas.
and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power,
Solar power can be distributed with the current grid. You don't need a new grid for that. Your claim is idiocy.
You're crazy. Solar is best generated in the desert southwast. You then have to get it to the rest of the country. Ever hear of IR loss? Radiative loss? Minimizing those means building million-volt or more electrical "hi" lines, that will take lots of money and years to complete. Using anything else will result in most of the power produced being used to heat the electrical distribution wires of AC low-voltage distribution, as well as radiating a lot of the power into outer space.
and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high
How does a railway make everyone poor? Europe has an excellent railway net, and as far as I can tell most people are considered rich ...
Europe isn't the United States. You really show your ignorance of things tech here. We have a much lower population density, and vast expanses with few people that want to travel thru them. So, building rails there is necessary, but won't generate a commensurate income to pay them off. And when you get to places like California, you have exactly the opposite problem, with TOO MANY people living where the rails have to go, resulting in huge costs in litigation to acquire the right of way, as well as extremely high costs to compensate the current owners of this land. Then, after you get all that done, you don't have riders because we're currently at least moderately prosperous, so much so that people drive their cars to wheverer they're going, and incidentally compare favorable with 200 mph trains that run on schedules, since that slows everything down, while people can leave for a distant destination at 4 AM, maybe 3 - 4 hours before the train is scheduled to leave for the same destination. And on and on, people have lots of reasons for not riding trains, the biggest being that the fare would be several times as much as it would take to simply drive the distance. In order to make even some people ride it, the fare has to be lowered, so that's where the gov't subsidy comes in - making the fare artificially low. We're better off just not building such trains.
speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't ... speculation at best.
How do you know it costs millions per mile and no one is using it? You have no railways right now, so claiming anything about costs or usage if you had them is
People do studies before they build things. They ask people "what if" questions. There's been a proposal to build HS rail in Florida for decades, but it gets killed every time when the results of the surveys of the people that MIGHT ride it mostly say they'd dr
No, _reducing_ CO2 does not fit the definition of "stop." You then bring up a bunch of technologies that are incapable of supplying the same amount of energy as fossil fuels, which means you are talking thru your hat. There are no electric tractors, and their production at a reasonable price is not possible (yet.) Locomotives in the USA run on diesel. It would be decades before they could be converted to external electrical power and we don't have batteries like that, either. Stringing overhead wires for locomotives that run hundreds of miles is a LOT of wire, and it is expensive, as well as its installation being expensive. Not financially doable. And it appears I know a whale of a lot more about reality, and what can be done within its confines than you do.
No strawman - these environmentalists keep trying insane schemes like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade nonsense, and suing every form of energy production to attempt to kill it all as effectively as possible. There's no other conclusion to be drawn except that they want everyone to go back and live in caves, and burn wood to heat them because they're trying to deprive society of coal, natural gas, oil, etc. You may be able to tell that I'm really sick of it, because it harms prosperity, which is absolutely necessary if we are to have the money to actually solve the problem. And, thanks to natural gas fracking, we're actually converting the coal fired power plants to natural gas, as it is getting really cheap, and OBTW it is MUCH cleaner. The USA has made the greatest headway into actually reducing CO2, more than any other country, due to the natural gas boom. But the environmentalists are still trying to stop it.
Environmentalists make no sense, they are never FOR anything that WORKS NOW, but always try to stop EVERYTHING. They even had Nancy Pelosi attempting to lock up the Mojave Desert so no one could put solar farms on it, and just a few weeks ago the Obama administration put millions of acres of western shale off limits to development. (We should be in for 4 more years of recession, as this guy placates the loony left that abhors advancement and prosperity.)
Stop spewing CO2 into the air? How do you do that? Mass genocide? People _need_ the energy we get from these sources of CO2 you want to stop in order to live. We cannot support the population of the USA while going back to farming without fossil-based fertilizers and working the land with animals instead of powerful fossil-fueled tractors, or moving the proceeds of that farming with diesel trucks and locomotives to get it to market. We cannot go about our lives at the standard of living you talk about without burning fossil fuels in the only modes of conveyance that we own. The idiotic AGW alarmists were telling us 10 years ago that we had to spend $50 trillion to "mitigate" this problem and the resultant scheme would only have lowererd the temperature increase by a degree or degree and a half by the year 2100, and not really fix the problem. No one has even proposed an actual way to completely fix the problem. But no matter, they want to spend more money than we have to continue their doomed-to-failure schemes.
But geo-engineering such as this approach:
http://phys.org/news199005915.html
goes unpurseud because, if it worked, it'd wreck things for those attempting to gain control of everyone's lives (and money) with their scarecrow. That approach would, if actually developed, give us pre-industrial-revolution levels of CO2. That would be a disaster for the doomsayers, and so we don't hear a peep about making it work. No, lets just get rid of our cars, take public transportation, and go back to living in caves.
Anyone really serious about fixing the problem would get their PHD's in some STEM areas of study, get their butts into some laboratories, and start trying to make things like those work, as well as, politically, stop trying to wreck the world's economies by opposing absolutely everything we try to do to make our lives better and promote the prosperity that will provide the abundance of resources necessary to actually develop ways to stop using CO2 generting energy sources. IOW, we're not going to successfully develop solar electricity, distribute it all over the country, develop the magic battery to make electric cars really viable, and so forth if we're crawling around in poverty because some environmental pinheads have made energy unavailable by opposing coal we could use now to keep energy cheap, and fracking we can use now to keep energy cheap, and million-volt power distribution we could start building now to distribute future solar power, and all the advancements necessary to maybe someday do what the AGW alarmists want to do. Make everyone poor by building idiotic high speed rail at millions of dollars per mile that nobody's going to ride and will require gov't subsidies infinitely into the future, and you take away money for research on how to do the very things you want to do that may actually, maybe, someday be able to solve the problem. Prosperity is our best weapon to combat the problem technologically, but everything the AGW alarmists are doing work to diminish our chances of actually being successful by removing the monetary resources necessary for the research to solve the problem.
Yeah, their socialistic plan to use the global warming scarecrow to attempt to cart boatloads of money out of developed nations into 3rd-world money pits has had it cover blown repeatedly. Their adamant stance against anything geo-engineering is evidence of what they're up to since such geo-engineering would short-circuit their plans to redistribute wealth. Oh, and we're going to do some tree-hugging, in spite of the fact that they DIE and then they release their carbon back into the air in carbonaceous gases that decompose into CO2... c'mon...
You got it! I'd never, ever buy a house someplace that there's an HOA. Ever.
Solar power?
The panels become the things sticking out of your spleen in a really high wind. The panels are expensive, the batteries are expensive if you're trying to go off-grid, which OUGHT to be everybody's goal, the batteries take up square feet somewhere, and you have to be an electronic tech to fix the thing when some transistor shorts out someplace. You have to keep them free of the snow, clean the pollution off them periodically. Neither the batteries nor the panels last forever, and have to be replaced from time to time. Even the expensive ones aren't going to power the unusual things people do, like arc welding, and I'm really not into giving up _anything_ just for the only unique feature these things have: "Conversation Piece." You're SOL if its overcast a lot, and as a kid in northwestern Ohio I remember seeing the sun go behind clouds in mid-November and not seeing it again 'til about the end of January. I don't think the whole idea will be worth pursuing, ever.
Not interested in giving up anything for the "benefit" of going solar. When solar will provide the 200 amp service my utility does, and have SOME kind of advantage over them, something significant, I'll be interested. But I don't think it'll have a price advantage, ever, nor a reliability advantage, nor any other advantage beyond "conversation piece."
Ain't. The solar panels will become the things that penetrate your spleen in a high wind, and the lead batteries are toxic all by themselves, let alone the hydrogen they generate threatening to blow you up. And, if you live along the coast and have a storm surge, they'll give you chlorine gas to kill you as well.
Forever.
My electric bill: $70 winter, $140 summer. So, at about $100 average, that's 100 months, or 8+ years to equal $10K. Then there is sweeping the snow off it after big storms, tending the batteries, replacing the batteries and the solar panels when they both wear out, etc. Not worth the hassle. Electric don't work now, just call the power company, and THEY go out in the storm and do something about it.
Now, if a homeowner could somehow execute the solar thermal concept of melting a large amount of salt, and using it to make steam and turn turbines, THAT requires NO BATTERIES and NO parts that need periodic replacement. Theoretically the parts involved are fairly low-tech, and ought to pretty much last forever save maybe changing bearings every now and then. But that would require a lot of land that most people don't have.
You'd rather NOT know that the IED or the fertilizer is there????