USA became a western democracy because of the ownership of personal firearms, and Nazi Germany WAS a western democracy that outlawed them, leading to the abuse of the people by the government.
#8 - Personal rapid transit (PRT), done with electricity, individual rail cars travel at 300 mph erected over the interstate highway system, all controlled automatically by computer. 1000 mile travel = 3 hrs 20 minutes, which cannot be done with even jet airplanes because of the lengthy security procedures, driving to the airport, etc. which causes the airplane to take about 4 1/2 hours total. PRT would serve small communities as well as large, and carry 1 - 4 people in a very small vehicle, probably 36" high by 30" wide, allowing about 350 horsepower to achieve 300 mph for the lead PRT vehicle, subsequent vehicles in the slipstream of the 1st would use much less (IOW, its green too...). Railcars would be handled individually, being inserted at the rear end of each "train", be self-powered by electric motors in each vehicle, and switched out of the moving "train" from any position without slowing the train. No TSA security theater as this would be futile, since the way to blow up a PRT is to drive a truck full of explosives under it, and set that off. And that would only kill a very few people until the computers shut down that line. NY to LA in 10 hours without lifting you 38,000 feet high, climb into it and sleep most of the way there, as these could run at night very easily, which most airplanes do not due to noise.
If we could avoid the concentration of wealth among a few, then we could have pretty much the hoped-for life of leisure with robots meeting all our needs. Lounge by the pool with Rosie the Robot bringing the mint julips while the other robots maintain the pool, etc. Robots work the mines, robot do everything... for us... Acheivable? Probably not, there will be instead war and the attempt of the few to be the only ones with the life of leisure.
We could probably pay off the national debt from the sale of the precious metals in the asteroid Eros, although this is probably not the NEXT big thing... its a bit farther in the future than that.
And if I'm a customer, I ain't buyin' squat from overseas, and only from US manufacturers so's I can sell the stuff later. So, moving the company overseas may just result in far fewer sales.
...when you consider the other benefits such as energy independence and the price of electricity vs. the price of gasoline. Electricity is many times less expensive than gasoline, and can be produced here by a variety of methods, some of them even environmentally friendly. And before our envirowacko contingent goes off praising Europe and denigrating coal and so forth, they should examine their own role in preventing the squeaky-clean nuclear power that France mostly uses to get their electricity so clean.
The thing to do is to produce the electric cars now, and work on reducing the emissions of power generation as soon as possible. The best solution for the present is probably solar-thermal, which can even store solar energy overnight in the form of molten salt, and could possibly be viable if we can, once again, kick the envirowackos in the teeth and build the necessary power distribution necessary to get such electricity to where its needed, as well as get the land on which to build it freed up from the envirowackos in Congress (Nancy Pelosi, et. al.) that have tried to make some parts of the Mojave unavailable by law from development for solar power.
From what I've read, the reason for the foreign car companies having plants here in the USA is that _we_ are the cheap labor. With Germany having about a $66 / hr labor rate, and we having a $28 labor rate for non-unionized foreign car factories in the USA, we beat the home country handily. And of course with the trends to even lower pay, with union contracts allowing new workers to come in at $15 / hr, somewhat above poverty level for a family of 4, we just keep getting better at it. If the US had several factories on each corner of each town, the competiton for labor would take care of that, but as long as the income taxes hammer on business to the extent that they do, forget about the US "coming back." Not gonna happen with our super-high corporate taxes.
Engineers making peanuts? You betcha - Have you noticed, for instance the shortage of software engineers. Fewer and fewer students are selecting software these days. Why? Because if they're smart enough to do software, then they're smart enough to know that their job is going to go to India or China or even Russia at some point, and they'll have to become roofers or waiters or go back to school to become lawyers if they haven't saved a lifetimes' support by the time they're 39 (because they also know about the rampant age discrimination in software as well.)
Engineering shortage? Not really, there's only a shortage of engineers that will work for peanuts, and they're being imported on H1B Visas from overseas.
Pollution as another boogey-man that is going to stop the USA from winning in the manufacturing arena? Oh, please - we've revolutionized our pollution footprint with natural gas, of which we have oceans and oceans, and which has made the USA the country that has decreased pollution more than anywhere else on earth, especially in the greenhouse gas arena. The USA is going to experience a manufacturing resurgence, as workers in these 3rd-world s***-holes finally get fed up with jobs that are so bad they drive them to suicide, and then the jig will be up. If we just do something about our income tax vampire sucking the lifeblood out of American manufacturing, we can accelerate that probably 10-fold.
Oh, for cryin' out loud, its the union boogey-man. Look, the Germans have unions up the wazoo, their auto workers make about $66 / hr on average, and they still kick a** all over the automotive market. Fact: Automation-heavy industries can be unionized and it doesn't much matter because the labor costs aren't a big part of the price of the goods.
Detroit-iron cars take about 30 - 33 labor hours to build, and the (evil) union workers get something like $78 / hr in wages and benefits, and that's only $2500 or so per vehicle. Big whoop. Want to really lower the price of a US-built (car, anything...)? Get rid of the income taxes. About 22% of the selling price of most American-manufactured goods is embedded income tax expense incurred by the manufacturer. Get rid of THAT and watch the jobs come flying back to the USA. There won't be as many jobs per factory as China, due to the heavy automation, but there'll be a LOT more factories. Win-win, all we have to do is pass the Fair Tax, and quit sabotaging our own businesses.
Duh... when you replace all those bulbs initially, you SAVE THEM. Yeah, you can store them, its called a cardboard box. Put it somewhere that it won't fall off a shelf or have anything fall onto it, and you're pretty sure to have them when you move.
I've been getting woo-letters from the power company for several years now, wanting me to consent to one of these meters. Now, I find that there's yet another reason not to get them, privacy.
OK, in addition to the future threat of the gov't deciding that anything less than 82 degrees interior temperature isn't green enough for them, and having the meter turn off my electricity to prevent me from lowering the air conditioner below 82 degrees, or raising the heat above 60 degrees, or having my water heater set for more than 98.6 degrees, I get to also distribute the fact that I charge my GM Volt just as soon as I get it home, on the 240 volt charger, so as to have it ready for another trip as soon as possible.
Such a scenario would cost me about $12K for a new emergency generator - 4 cylinders, 50 Kw rating, and I'd be "testing" it every time I was home and wanted the temp below 82 degrees in the summer, or above 60 degrees in the winter, or wanted hot water sufficiently hot enough to get the stains off my shirts when I throw 'em in the washer. That would be mega-expensive. I think I'll just continue to not have the smart meter as long as I can get away with it.
True emergencies (someone bleeding) are still handled fairly well with CB and ham radios. Everything else is just convenient.
I've finally got a smart phone. Whoopie. But everything on it is simply convenient, not necessary. If the powers that be decide I can't use my phone in my car (where I mostly am when I need a phone that doesn't connect with wires) I can drop it in a heartbeat, and save myself $82 / month. Anything I want to know from the net I can stop into a McDonalds, stay in the car, have maybe an ice cream cone and a coke, and get off their free internet access.
Same thing with e-books. I don't use 'em, don't need 'em. If I want to buy a book, I buy a book. It won't cost me an expensive LCD screen if I drop it, and if I get it wet, it won't cost that much to buy another one.
The minewolf machines all seem to have a common defect. They have an operator cab. Big bomb, and the op gets a TBI? That's not acceptable. The machines should all have little antennas that communicate with a remote operator console.
Rats for demining may not be practical, but better than we have for counter-IED. Still, I'm not sure how you're going to get 'em to clear 28 miles of road in any sort of reasonable time frame.
Half a million Iraqis? According to Madeline Albright, the sanctions, absolutely necessary to keep Saddam from starting ANOTHER war in the middle east, was killing 50,000 Iraqi kids per year. That's greater than half a million Iraqis, and the war put a stop to the sanctions. And if we just walked away and allowed Saddam to start another war, he'd probably have lost 500,000 Iraqis fighting it. IOW, those Iraqis were not savable in the 1st place.
And as far as starting "wars", Iraq is the only one we started. The rest were wars as a result of others attacking us or another country we had a mutual defense treaty with, so that fits the OP's one every 5 decades.
History in the middle east? Would you rather have NOT supported anyone? The only sort of gov't anyone seems to get there is a brutal dictatorship, and if we didn't support one or the other, the Russkies would have, and all the oil would have merrily trekked off to Russia, and.... we needed the oil.
OMFG, you're going to compare Abu Gahraib (some people were embarrassed / frightened by rogue prison personnel performing unauthorized actions), CIA black prisons (where some really nasty enemies of the USA were dealt with), and listening to people who are in contact with known terrorists overseas with 6 million people exterminated during WW2? Are you insane? No, you're a "Blame America Firster" looking for an excuse.
In any conflict, and this is a conflict between the USA and people who would eliminate us if they can, some excesses are bound to occur. But genocide vs listening to some phone calls? No sense of proportion whatsoever, and someone looking for an excuse to hate Amerca.
If you don't have a shot, then you don't have a shot, and you don't fire. But if you can identify the target, then you take it out. Nobody that knows what they're doing fires wildly.
You have just repeated the same mistake that liberals have been making since the 60's, that somehow making it harder for criminals to get guns is going to affect this. First, he wasn't a criminal until he did this. Second, there are over 250 million guns in American society, so trying to prevent access to them is about like trying to prevent access to acorns in an oak forest. Not happening.
The REAL way to keep this from happening is EXACTLY the opposite. What you do is to make it EASIER for the LAW ABIDING to have guns, esp. carry them in public. A friend of mine's son is an ex Army Ranger, and absolutely deadly. Had he been there with a weapon, this guy would have been very unlikely to have gotten off a second shot. And myself, I learned from qualifying to go to Iraq last fall as a civilian sci/tech support to the Army, that I'm not a half-bad shot myself, and would have at least tried. Get people shooting back at this creep and it'd be all over in a couple seconds, like the 71 year old man that recently took out the robbers in the internet cafe. Self defense with a firearm works best.
Seriously, you're worried about producing electricity? There's just all sorts of sources that we will not have to worry about runnning out of in our lifetimes. Natural gas is a big one, and is fairly clean. And, there is solar-thermal, something we can do right now, that is inexhaustible. Wind can play a minor role, but if we ever get geothermal online, our electrical energy problems are solved. I believe it was the January 2008 issue of Scientific American that outlined a plan for the USA to go 100% solar. If we can conceive of it, we can do it... eventually...
Slashdot Mirror
USA became a western democracy because of the ownership of personal firearms, and Nazi Germany WAS a western democracy that outlawed them, leading to the abuse of the people by the government.
My Remington model 7400 .30-06 is plenty of killing power for anything on this continent. I don't need a plasma rifle for it.
#8 - Personal rapid transit (PRT), done with electricity, individual rail cars travel at 300 mph erected over the interstate highway system, all controlled automatically by computer. 1000 mile travel = 3 hrs 20 minutes, which cannot be done with even jet airplanes because of the lengthy security procedures, driving to the airport, etc. which causes the airplane to take about 4 1/2 hours total. PRT would serve small communities as well as large, and carry 1 - 4 people in a very small vehicle, probably 36" high by 30" wide, allowing about 350 horsepower to achieve 300 mph for the lead PRT vehicle, subsequent vehicles in the slipstream of the 1st would use much less (IOW, its green too...). Railcars would be handled individually, being inserted at the rear end of each "train", be self-powered by electric motors in each vehicle, and switched out of the moving "train" from any position without slowing the train. No TSA security theater as this would be futile, since the way to blow up a PRT is to drive a truck full of explosives under it, and set that off. And that would only kill a very few people until the computers shut down that line. NY to LA in 10 hours without lifting you 38,000 feet high, climb into it and sleep most of the way there, as these could run at night very easily, which most airplanes do not due to noise.
If we could avoid the concentration of wealth among a few, then we could have pretty much the hoped-for life of leisure with robots meeting all our needs. Lounge by the pool with Rosie the Robot bringing the mint julips while the other robots maintain the pool, etc. Robots work the mines, robot do everything... for us... Acheivable? Probably not, there will be instead war and the attempt of the few to be the only ones with the life of leisure.
We could probably pay off the national debt from the sale of the precious metals in the asteroid Eros, although this is probably not the NEXT big thing... its a bit farther in the future than that.
USA, 1776, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and NOT having them, Nazi Germany.
And if I'm a customer, I ain't buyin' squat from overseas, and only from US manufacturers so's I can sell the stuff later. So, moving the company overseas may just result in far fewer sales.
...when you consider the other benefits such as energy independence and the price of electricity vs. the price of gasoline. Electricity is many times less expensive than gasoline, and can be produced here by a variety of methods, some of them even environmentally friendly. And before our envirowacko contingent goes off praising Europe and denigrating coal and so forth, they should examine their own role in preventing the squeaky-clean nuclear power that France mostly uses to get their electricity so clean.
The thing to do is to produce the electric cars now, and work on reducing the emissions of power generation as soon as possible. The best solution for the present is probably solar-thermal, which can even store solar energy overnight in the form of molten salt, and could possibly be viable if we can, once again, kick the envirowackos in the teeth and build the necessary power distribution necessary to get such electricity to where its needed, as well as get the land on which to build it freed up from the envirowackos in Congress (Nancy Pelosi, et. al.) that have tried to make some parts of the Mojave unavailable by law from development for solar power.
From what I've read, the reason for the foreign car companies having plants here in the USA is that _we_ are the cheap labor. With Germany having about a $66 / hr labor rate, and we having a $28 labor rate for non-unionized foreign car factories in the USA, we beat the home country handily. And of course with the trends to even lower pay, with union contracts allowing new workers to come in at $15 / hr, somewhat above poverty level for a family of 4, we just keep getting better at it. If the US had several factories on each corner of each town, the competiton for labor would take care of that, but as long as the income taxes hammer on business to the extent that they do, forget about the US "coming back." Not gonna happen with our super-high corporate taxes.
Engineers making peanuts? You betcha - Have you noticed, for instance the shortage of software engineers. Fewer and fewer students are selecting software these days. Why? Because if they're smart enough to do software, then they're smart enough to know that their job is going to go to India or China or even Russia at some point, and they'll have to become roofers or waiters or go back to school to become lawyers if they haven't saved a lifetimes' support by the time they're 39 (because they also know about the rampant age discrimination in software as well.)
Engineering shortage? Not really, there's only a shortage of engineers that will work for peanuts, and they're being imported on H1B Visas from overseas.
Pollution as another boogey-man that is going to stop the USA from winning in the manufacturing arena? Oh, please - we've revolutionized our pollution footprint with natural gas, of which we have oceans and oceans, and which has made the USA the country that has decreased pollution more than anywhere else on earth, especially in the greenhouse gas arena. The USA is going to experience a manufacturing resurgence, as workers in these 3rd-world s***-holes finally get fed up with jobs that are so bad they drive them to suicide, and then the jig will be up. If we just do something about our income tax vampire sucking the lifeblood out of American manufacturing, we can accelerate that probably 10-fold.
Oh, for cryin' out loud, its the union boogey-man. Look, the Germans have unions up the wazoo, their auto workers make about $66 / hr on average, and they still kick a** all over the automotive market. Fact: Automation-heavy industries can be unionized and it doesn't much matter because the labor costs aren't a big part of the price of the goods.
Detroit-iron cars take about 30 - 33 labor hours to build, and the (evil) union workers get something like $78 / hr in wages and benefits, and that's only $2500 or so per vehicle. Big whoop. Want to really lower the price of a US-built (car, anything...)? Get rid of the income taxes. About 22% of the selling price of most American-manufactured goods is embedded income tax expense incurred by the manufacturer. Get rid of THAT and watch the jobs come flying back to the USA. There won't be as many jobs per factory as China, due to the heavy automation, but there'll be a LOT more factories. Win-win, all we have to do is pass the Fair Tax, and quit sabotaging our own businesses.
Duh... when you replace all those bulbs initially, you SAVE THEM. Yeah, you can store them, its called a cardboard box. Put it somewhere that it won't fall off a shelf or have anything fall onto it, and you're pretty sure to have them when you move.
I've been getting woo-letters from the power company for several years now, wanting me to consent to one of these meters. Now, I find that there's yet another reason not to get them, privacy.
OK, in addition to the future threat of the gov't deciding that anything less than 82 degrees interior temperature isn't green enough for them, and having the meter turn off my electricity to prevent me from lowering the air conditioner below 82 degrees, or raising the heat above 60 degrees, or having my water heater set for more than 98.6 degrees, I get to also distribute the fact that I charge my GM Volt just as soon as I get it home, on the 240 volt charger, so as to have it ready for another trip as soon as possible.
Such a scenario would cost me about $12K for a new emergency generator - 4 cylinders, 50 Kw rating, and I'd be "testing" it every time I was home and wanted the temp below 82 degrees in the summer, or above 60 degrees in the winter, or wanted hot water sufficiently hot enough to get the stains off my shirts when I throw 'em in the washer. That would be mega-expensive. I think I'll just continue to not have the smart meter as long as I can get away with it.
No matter what electronic gizmo decides to turn on for the last time, the physical books I have on my bookshelves will still be available to me..
True emergencies (someone bleeding) are still handled fairly well with CB and ham radios. Everything else is just convenient.
I've finally got a smart phone. Whoopie. But everything on it is simply convenient, not necessary. If the powers that be decide I can't use my phone in my car (where I mostly am when I need a phone that doesn't connect with wires) I can drop it in a heartbeat, and save myself $82 / month. Anything I want to know from the net I can stop into a McDonalds, stay in the car, have maybe an ice cream cone and a coke, and get off their free internet access.
Same thing with e-books. I don't use 'em, don't need 'em. If I want to buy a book, I buy a book. It won't cost me an expensive LCD screen if I drop it, and if I get it wet, it won't cost that much to buy another one.
The minewolf machines all seem to have a common defect. They have an operator cab. Big bomb, and the op gets a TBI? That's not acceptable. The machines should all have little antennas that communicate with a remote operator console.
Rats for demining may not be practical, but better than we have for counter-IED. Still, I'm not sure how you're going to get 'em to clear 28 miles of road in any sort of reasonable time frame.
Half a million Iraqis? According to Madeline Albright, the sanctions, absolutely necessary to keep Saddam from starting ANOTHER war in the middle east, was killing 50,000 Iraqi kids per year. That's greater than half a million Iraqis, and the war put a stop to the sanctions. And if we just walked away and allowed Saddam to start another war, he'd probably have lost 500,000 Iraqis fighting it. IOW, those Iraqis were not savable in the 1st place.
And as far as starting "wars", Iraq is the only one we started. The rest were wars as a result of others attacking us or another country we had a mutual defense treaty with, so that fits the OP's one every 5 decades.
History in the middle east? Would you rather have NOT supported anyone? The only sort of gov't anyone seems to get there is a brutal dictatorship, and if we didn't support one or the other, the Russkies would have, and all the oil would have merrily trekked off to Russia, and.... we needed the oil.
We didn't START the f'n war, they did.
Want to just sit back and NOT respond to the loss of 2 large buildings and almost 3000 lives?
OMFG, you're going to compare Abu Gahraib (some people were embarrassed / frightened by rogue prison personnel performing unauthorized actions), CIA black prisons (where some really nasty enemies of the USA were dealt with), and listening to people who are in contact with known terrorists overseas with 6 million people exterminated during WW2? Are you insane? No, you're a "Blame America Firster" looking for an excuse.
In any conflict, and this is a conflict between the USA and people who would eliminate us if they can, some excesses are bound to occur. But genocide vs listening to some phone calls? No sense of proportion whatsoever, and someone looking for an excuse to hate Amerca.
It just does not compute.
...Olympians that just kicked the world's a** in London?
Forcing? Not hardly, its just like Vista - we don't HAVE to buy it. Just keep 7.
If you don't have a shot, then you don't have a shot, and you don't fire. But if you can identify the target, then you take it out. Nobody that knows what they're doing fires wildly.
You have just repeated the same mistake that liberals have been making since the 60's, that somehow making it harder for criminals to get guns is going to affect this. First, he wasn't a criminal until he did this. Second, there are over 250 million guns in American society, so trying to prevent access to them is about like trying to prevent access to acorns in an oak forest. Not happening.
The REAL way to keep this from happening is EXACTLY the opposite. What you do is to make it EASIER for the LAW ABIDING to have guns, esp. carry them in public. A friend of mine's son is an ex Army Ranger, and absolutely deadly. Had he been there with a weapon, this guy would have been very unlikely to have gotten off a second shot. And myself, I learned from qualifying to go to Iraq last fall as a civilian sci/tech support to the Army, that I'm not a half-bad shot myself, and would have at least tried. Get people shooting back at this creep and it'd be all over in a couple seconds, like the 71 year old man that recently took out the robbers in the internet cafe. Self defense with a firearm works best.
Seriously, you're worried about producing electricity? There's just all sorts of sources that we will not have to worry about runnning out of in our lifetimes. Natural gas is a big one, and is fairly clean. And, there is solar-thermal, something we can do right now, that is inexhaustible. Wind can play a minor role, but if we ever get geothermal online, our electrical energy problems are solved. I believe it was the January 2008 issue of Scientific American that outlined a plan for the USA to go 100% solar. If we can conceive of it, we can do it... eventually...