No, I'd much rather get behind President Trump and "Make America Great Again" by creating an economy where everyone has an opportunity to get a good job and take care of themselves. The best helping hand that a person has is attached to their wrist. THEN we can use a much diminished welfare state to handle the ones that for some reason _can't_ hold a good job. But the welfare state is just shared misery - socialism is always like that - and a healthy economy is a much better approach for maximal prosperity.
People treating the associated costs of converting away from cheap coal and other dirty sources of energy as an inconvenience and people who don't like the inconvenience or additional expense as simply selfish.
No, no, no.
This is a matter of life and death. If you raise the price of energy, you plunge more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking can take up to 7 years off your life, but living in poverty can take 10. People in poverty get poor nutrition, little or no preventive medical care, exposure to both the elements and criminal attacks because they're sleeping on a steam grate in an alley and freezing or getting beaten up by another person in poverty that wants to steal their shoes, and so forth. It isn't just that you might have to choose to carpool in order to afford to get to work 50 miles away each day, its that some poor schmuck died today because electricity went from 12.5 cents per KwH to 25 cents per KwH and they couldn't afford that and the rent too, and so were out living on the street and got mugged by a guy with a big knife, and bled to death in minutes. Yes, that's a death from poverty, because otherwise he would have been inside his house with a locked door between himself and the guy with the knife.
I actually wonder if ANY of the proponents of the pain and suffering of "doing something" about global warming stop to calculate how many people they'll kill doing it, and whether those people they kill will exceed in number the people that would be killed by the global warming if we instead did nothing.
OBTW I saw a headline a day or 2 ago that USA carbon emissions went down again for 2017, while the rest of the world's went up. Just sayin'...
I had Econ 101, but it didn't address individual pricing of products. The course that did was given by the engineering college and was called Engineering Economy. In it we learned that pricing was a delicate balancing act between how much it cost to produce something, and how much our competition that was producing essentially the same thing was selling it for. We learned we couldn't just decide to sell it at a certain price and gain or lose profit by raising or lowering that price. Profit is the difference between the price and the cost of production times the number of widgets we sell. The number of widgets we sell depends on the public demand for them. if we are producing Coca Cola and decide to charge $1.25 a bottle in a machine that is sitting next to a Pepsi machine that is charging $1.20 a bottle, we won't necessarily make more money, because the public will overwhelmingly choose to drink Pepsi when faced with the 2 machines because they can save a nickel. Of course if we can produce something that is significantly better than the competition in its performance, perhaps it is a much lighter battery for the same energy storage, we may be able to charge a lot more than the competition when selling it to markets that are sensitive to the weight of the battery, such as electric cars or possibly airplanes. An electric car is going to accelerate faster and go farther on the same amount of electrical storage if the battery is 200 lbs lighter. People will pay for a 200 lb reduction in a battery that might otherwise weigh 1000 lbs. But there is always a sweet spot of pricing that, if you raise the price too high, people will decide to put up with the heavier battery anyway and then won't buy yours, and your overall profit will decrease. The significant exception to all this is luxury items, where people buy something BECAUSE it is expensive, so if you lower the price of the Cadillac to where too many people can afford it, it is no longer exclusive, and loses that value to the people that were purchasing a status symbol.
And that's as much as I remember form the course I took 35 years ago, but believe it still applies. So, yeah, you get rid of income tax expenses to industry, they produce something for less expense to them, and then they start thinking about increasing their market share by lowering the price of the thing they are manufacturing. If a Toyota FJ Cruiser is $35K and a similarly appointed Jeep Cherokee is $35K, and then the 22% of the selling price of things built in the USA that is attributable to income taxes goes away, and Jeep lowers their price by half that (there's some significant amount of that tax expense that they can't recover), the Jeep Cherokee then is priced at 11% less, or $3,850 less, or $31,150. So you have 2 vehicles that are nearly identical in capability but one is $35K and the other is $31.15K, which one do you buy? Jeep's market share will go thru the roof until Toyota scrambles to find a way to lower their price or somehow make their car more desirable for a different reason. If income taxes were totally nuked in the USA - individual, corporate, capital gains, payroll, alternative minimum, estate, gift, self-employment, etc... Toyota would scramble to build FJ Cruisers in the USA (they may do that anyway - the FJ Cruiser in the example was simply assumed to be built in Japan.) But US taxes hurt US industry? You bet.
that people get all sideways about a 10% tax on imported phones, but when we lower corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, which will lower the price of AMERICAN goods, then its supposedly a "tax cut for the rich." What's rich about millions of phone buyers that could get an American phone for less money because the company is not sending so much $$$ to Washington, and can therefore lower the price on their phones and cause more people to choose their phones instead of the Chinese phones? Taxes are taxes, whether they're tariffs or income taxes, and no corporation has ever, does now, or ever will pay corporate income taxes. They simply COLLECT them, from us, when they raise prices of their goods, lower their workers' pay, or cut stock dividends in order to have the $$$ to send to Washington. Duh... of the 2, I'll take tariffs, since it benefits American companies by keeping the gov't from coming after corporate income to get the tax money.
The leftist agenda is to enslave the people to be able to tell them what to do, how to live, etc. Live in "no cars" communities where you have to walk 3 blocks to where you park your car, use bicycles when you're back is screaming with the latest arthritis attack, eat what they tell you (see Michelle O's school lunch nonsense for that one), etc. etc. Leftists just want to control you and don't want you to be able to resist their doing it. The litmus test for "liberal" is "anti-gun." They want to take them so you can't shoot their asses off when they tell you that you have to live in a 900 sq. ft. apartment instead of your house on an acre because it's somehow "good for the environment." My house on an acre has geothermal heat and an electric bill that the 900 sq. ft. apartment probably doesn't achieve 'cuz it's electric resistance heated. Yeah, the left has an agenda, and you're guaranteed not to like it.
Yes, cheaply. I just recently ran onto a fellow who is quitting his job, as he's getting abused at $11.50 an hour as a cook. That's outrageously low pay for a skilled workman of any sort, and being a moderate Republican that does not toe the party line concerning minimum wages, I think that it ought to be $15 / hr. But anyway, people like him, when the world goes to ultra-expensive cars just because they're electric, are going to be in poverty, or further into poverty, and here's a clue: Poverty kills. It isn't just inconvenient, but people die because they're poor. They don't get enough to eat, they don't get the right kinds of things to eat, they exist in poorly heated homes or not cooled homes in the deep south, they don't get access to preventive medicine, some are even homeless which exposes them both to the weather and to criminal attack. I've read that while smoking can take 7 years off your life, living in poverty can take 10. So, while electric everything may be an inconvenient expense for me, it will be a life-or-death situation for millions of others that don't have a nice pension and annuity and a bit of Social Security after a career as an engineer.
No, I say "no fair" simply dismissing avoiding expense as a selfish luxury. It's extremely important to a lot of people. An electric society is desireable, but only if it doesn't kill a bunch of people by throwing them into poverty.
Ahhh... respondant has to be a liberal, as it has all the telltale signs - name calling... no actual solution... etc...
Meanwhile, the OP of this subthead that just got called an idiot has it right - we currently have no technologically viable way NOT to burn the fossil fuels that we've been burning. We just don't know how. We can't build a solar solution until we can store the electricity, and we do not have the "magic battery" that will do that. Neither do we have said magic battery that will allow for viable electric cars, "viable" being defined as "just as cheap" and "will go just as far in a day of driving as my own car" which current electrics will not. Why not? Because while even the most expensive, best performing electrics will travel at the same speeds for maybe 300 miles, I refuel in 5 minutes or less, and they have to stop for over half an hour to get a partial charge. My 1st day of a vacation is usually marked by a big initial push to get to the attraction I'm destined for, and so the 1st day is sometimes 800 - 1200 miles of driving. Just can't do that to match my leaving from Eastern Virginia and sleeping in Texas before midnight. Maybe someday, but not today.
We're building out wind and solar for the grid as fast as we can, and hopefully some smart guy will invent a magic battery to really make them work. Fingers crossed. But until it happens, we have absolutely no alternative but to burn the fossil fuels that we're burning. We have to manufacture things, we have to grow food and then transport it, we have to burn the fuel just to get to work or play. And of course our play is someone else's work, so if they say we shouldn't play, then those providing the playgrounds - movie theaters, etc. will lose their work and impact the economy.
What we need to do it _stop_ burning fossil fuels altogether. I think we'll get there, but only if the economy is allowed to remain healthy enough to have the $$$ left over for research - battery research - and eventually produces the magic battery (or supercapacitor...)
I'm not exposed to everyone else in my car. If I want to play Fox News on the Sirius / XM all the way to wherever I'm going, I can, and don't have to annoy anyone else with it, nor be annoyed if they want to play hip-hop.
I can take things I might need with me, without having to carry them all over the place. If I want to have an extra coat or something, I can chuck it in the back seat, and if I don't need it, I can leave it there. If I do need it, like the asshat that turns down the air conditioning to 68 degrees, I can go get it.
I'm not quite as exposed to the criminal element. If I'm female and someone wants to rape me, I don't have to outrun them with my feet which might be in heels anyway. I can mash the accelerator and challenge them to catch me. If they do catch me, I then have a 4000 lb weapon and may run over their asses.
I can eat in the car. Prohibited on most transit systems.
I bring along a personal, private shelter with my car if I've got some down time. What to do when there are breaks in "life", like classroom in-between times? I go to the car, where I've also brought a book, and read. Or listen to the radio. Yeah, without the (painful... I've never found a comfortable set of) earbuds. Full over-the-ear headphones are too bulky to be carrying all over when using transit, but I don't need 'em when I crank the Bose 8-speaker in my new Ford Edge ST.
If the transit system is too warm or too cold, its tough shit, I'm just going to be uncomfortable. If my car is too warm or too cold, I can fix it immediately.
If anyone goes on strike, my car still works. Transit sometimes stops for that.
Want transit to work? Design one that fixed these things. First thing is repeal all the damned gun laws, so that I don't have to worry so much about the odd rapist if I'm female, or roving gangs if I'm male or female, and don't need a 4000 lb weapon or a personal means to flee. Make eating on the train possible, or even convenient, and make listening to your own entertainment easy and accepted and private - make spaces for each person to use - extra fee and you can step into a compartment, close the door, and treat it like your car. Design transit spaces to accommodate shoving a thumb drive into a USB port and listening to one's own music, and wire the transit so it can receive whatever radio or TV that one might want to listen to. Etc. People like cars for lots and lots of different reasons, and transit hasn't even tried to compete. They're going to have to, eventually.
Low earth orbiting means the latency problem won't be a problem, and you can use 'em to do your First Person Shooter games with low ping times. Will require some waiting, but you can't wire up Canada before Elon Musk / Toney Stark / Iron Man launches his 10,000+ satellites. Hey, when you've got rockets that work and are much cheaper than anyone else's, you can do s*** like that...
"Say the hijacker is holding the flight attendant hostage. I shoot at him but hit the flight attendant."
Your fault for taking a shot like that without being a certified expert marksman. What you really do is shoot the SOB from behind, which in a large population of potentially armed defenders, the bad guy cannot neutralize. Or he's standing right beside you as he's holding the stewardess hostage, and you put one up thru his ribcage and right into his heart from 6 inches away.
"Ultimately, I'm afraid more guns means more shooting and more gun deaths."
As Ghandi said, "Fear is the enemy. We think it is hate, but it is fear." We do horrific things because we are afraid, and disarming victims is one of them. Yes, there will undoubtedly be mistakes from time to time, but contrast that with a mental case with a couple semiauto pistols wading thru Virginia Tech and killing 32 innocents, and then himself. I have a friend who is an ex-Army Ranger, of college age at the time, who if he had been armed in one of these classrooms, the gunman would not have gotten a second shot, as this guy is absolutely deadly with any kind of firearm.
"To go back to the school shooting, remember that some schools already have armed guards. Columbine's Deputy engaged the shooters and missed. Parkland's Deputy never even engaged."
Columbine's 2 cops were cops, doing cop-things, and not where they needed to be, which was inside the school. One was out in the parking lot, and engaged the shooters from a distance without effect. The other was out running radar near the school, making revenue from the city but not protecting the students inside the building. And some of the problems with armed guards in schools that armed citizens in schools don't have are that everyone who is a potential shooter knows who to shoot first since they are wearing a uniform, there are always too few of them because they are expensive, they have other interests that can occupy their attention to the detriment of their ability to assist when a shooter does appear (like being gone, running radar to make the city some $$$$). Armed citizens in the schools do not have these problems - potential attackers have no idea how many enemy guns there are, who has them, and from which direction a defense will be mounted, nobody has to pay them to do it, and they have no reason to be anywhere else but inside the school where they may be needed to return fire should it occur.
"And you hear all the time about cops with itchy trigger fingers who shoot people that clearly pose no threat to them. Imagine you're the good guy with a gun defending against the bad guys with guns, when the cops roll up. How do you expect them to know that you're not one of the bad guys?"
Very easy. Cops, because they are good guys with rules, are required to shout, "Police, drop the gun" and you do it because you're the good guy. That's how they know. The bad guys will likely turn and attempt to fire at them, which is how they know that those people are the bad guys. Of course by the time the cops get there, you've already defended the kids and the perp is lying there bleeding, and you've reholstered your weapon anyway and probably giving the perp some 1st aid if you've gotten control of your hate for his attempt to harm your students.
"So more people carrying guns means more accidental deaths,"
Pure conjecture unsupported by reality.
" far more irresponsible (drunk/crazy/violent) gun users endangering everybody."
A fantasy propagated by the idea that somehow gun control laws work. Again, gun control laws only affect good guys. If this potential drunk / crazy / violent guy is a bad guy, he's going to have a gun if it pleases him to have a gun. The bad guys are bad guys because they ignore laws, and make no exception for gun laws. If they want to be armed, the will be. The only thing gun laws do is to create helpless victims. They should all be repealed.
Do I want to arm them? No. Do I believe that any attempt to keep them from being armed short of incarceration is futile? Yes.
OK, they're unfit for military service, but they're fully permitted to get behind the wheel of a 4000 weapon which is the terrorist's newest weapon of choice, a weapon that can be made to drive down a sidewalk and kill multiple people, and the only defense those people might have could be to turn around and put a bullet in his brain before he can run them down. So I want those potential victims to have a chance. Making laws to tell them they have to go forth as prey I believe to be wrong, and the root cause of much of our current mischief. Repeal all the gun laws. Maybe pay a little more attention to exactly who is allowed to run free among us. But just don't make most people into helpless victims.
Skyjackings were the result of the general prohibition of ordinary law abiding citizens bringing guns onto planes, although it wasn't as effectively enforced as it is now. Sooo... the bad guy was still the only one on the scene with a gun, and the planes went to Cuba. Repeatedly. Again, its the frickin' rules that did it,
A couple guys with box cutters cannot now get the airplane to crash into a building, but they can still take it out of the sky like they did Flt. 93. If citizens were able to fight back, in other than a suicidal offensive, they wouldn't even be able to do that.
All these gun laws are pointless, as the more of them they make, the WORSE things get, not better. School shootings and mass shootings are all the result of good citizens being rendered helpless when 1 evil gun is present. These laws should all be repealed.
Here's the conspiracy theory - all these laws go in one direction, toward the eventual confiscation of privately owned firearms. A California Democrat politician proposed confiscation just last week, and one of the California Senators, Feinstein or Boxer, not sure, said it sort of under her breath a few years ago - "If it were up to me, I'd say, "Turn 'em all in, Mr. and Mrs. America." " And its not a theory, it is real.
The ultimate thrust is that someone who is trying to disarm you is attempting to do something to you, not something for you. The historic result of confiscations has been genocide and slavery. Its happened twice already in America, just ask the Indians and the blacks under Jim Crow. We "conspiracy theorists" are determined that it is not going to happen again. And if you want a for-real shooting war, just try and take our guns. Molan Labe, motherfucker.
As for who the conspiracy theorists are, some of us are retired DoD who worked on weapons software and own the basements we may choose to live in, or not, and have never had AOL.
I mean, with damned near every computer in every movie I've seen over the last 10 - 15 years having an apple logo on it, you mean that "just happened" and wasn't the result of some big product placement contract?
Like school shootings, skyjackings are the result of our over 25,000 gun laws that disarm the "good guys" and don't do anything at all about bad guys with guns. The metal detactors scare the bad guys into not trying to smuggle guns onto the airplane, but if a bad guy wants a gun on an airplane bad enough, he'll get a gun on an airplane.
The real solution to both skyjackings and school shooting is to simply repeal all the gun laws, and let the good guys go armed in public. 9/11 would have been impossible, some citizen would have offed these pukes before they could have finished the sentence, "This is a skyjacking." No, bullet holes in aircraft fuselages do _not_ cause explosive decompression, they make a little how, and some mechanism that pressurizes the plane adjusts the flow to compensate for the small leak. Could some stray bullet hit an innocent? Yep, but planes would not have killed over 3000 people on 9/11/2001. Good trade, I think.
And OBTW, repealing all the damned gun control laws would cost the gov't $0, removing all the metal detectors at the airports would cost the gov't $0, and allowing all the teachers, janitors, teacher's assistants, school office workers, principals, etc. at the nation's schools would cost the gov't $0. There's no monetary reason not to do this.
And DB Cooper wouldn't have finished his sentence either before beginning to resemble swiss cheese.
How do we get the right to prosecute a foreign national doing things in a foreign country that are protected by our own first amendment? Really don't understand this.
...but had somewhere to go and driving was ill advised for several reasons, so I flew.
Everything that could be annoying was annoying. I'm back, and hopefully there will be no repeat of such special circumstances and will be able to drive wherever I need to go for the rest of my life. I need to go from Virginia to Alaska next year, as well as Virginia to Tucson, Virginia to La Crosse, and hopefully Virginia to Las Vegas depending on how well I do in the poker tournament next year. Drive drive drive. Love it. See the country. Don't get abused by the TSA and airlines.
And just ordered 3 books to get better at that poker thing. Was at a week of various poker tournaments at the Orleans in Las Vegas last week and had the time of my life. Work? Totally unnecessary. Oh, and I misspoke above, not 5 years retired, but 7 - retired on the last day of 2011, Dec 31st, a few weeks after coming back from Iraq for the last time (civilian sci-tech advisor to Army EOD.) Have been absolutely ecstatic about not having to get up and go somewhere and do something for which I'll get criticized and so forth - work has always sucked, always will suck, because of that. This is the life, and if I ever decide to add to my income, it'll be something where no one has the right to criticize my output - maybe extra $$$ by being good at poker, or maybe winning photo contest or something, but... never employment. Never again...
Just plain wrong. Retired for 5 years. I go to movies, play poker, exercise, repeat. I have a few other distractions and absolutly none of them qualify as work. I'm not bored out of my mind, I have a lot of fun online and in the other endeavors already mentioned. Work is nowhere close to necessary, and that's a fact.
I said I saw a pie chart that said that coal and natural gas were producing electricity approximately equally in the USA. I can't know whether or not it is correct. I don't know what the pie chart measured or what your reference is measuring, I just said I saw such a pie chart.
Do either or both of these measurements restrict themselves to energy produced for electricity only, or is the coal expended in smelting iron also included in one or the other? Is coal used in cement production - not sure - and if so, was it measured by either source? Don't know again, but we're producing a whale of a lot of cement. Wait, a quick google search says, "Coal is used in cement production." Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner. That'd be a whale of a lot of coal. Does the pie chart measure that and the quoted website not measure it? I don't know.
I'm not lying, I just said I saw a pie chart. Its just one way to look at the question, and I still think I'm correct that coal will continue to diminish and natural gas will continue its ascendency because it is cheaper for electrical production.
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
ARTICLE I, SECTION 9, CLAUSE 5
Otherwise, you have to transport it somehow, and that's the best we can do. The ship would do well to convert to NG power if it is hauling it regularly. Maybe it already is. I don't know.
Saw a pie chart a day or 2 ago that shows natural gas and coal are about equal now in the US market. And since natural gas is now cheaper than coal to build and run, US use of coal will continue to diminish. That, BTW, is the absolutely best way to replace polluting sources, by replacing them with cheaper things that don't pollute. IOW, don't pass a law against something, pass a law that helps create cheaper but cleaner resources and no, that doesn't mean subsidize something, because that is just the people paying more for something through taxes. No, REALLY make it cheaper - make something that is intrinsically cheaper. That's now natural gas. Hopefully some smart guy will build the 90% efficient solar cell, and these guys will perfect their air compression technique and we'll get 100% clean power.
What's the best way to move from coal to natural gas outside the USA? By fracking the F out of the oceans of natural gas reserves that the USA has, and selling it to the furriners... Its a win-win - they get cheaper electricity and the world gets less CO2 and other nasty shit in the air. Trump just did that by harrassing Angela Merkle, the German prime minister, into canceling her country's gas pipeline to Russia, and instead building liquified natural gas seaports for import of LNG by ships from... the USA. We better get to fracking every square inch if we want to reduce pollution.
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No, I'd much rather get behind President Trump and "Make America Great Again" by creating an economy where everyone has an opportunity to get a good job and take care of themselves. The best helping hand that a person has is attached to their wrist. THEN we can use a much diminished welfare state to handle the ones that for some reason _can't_ hold a good job. But the welfare state is just shared misery - socialism is always like that - and a healthy economy is a much better approach for maximal prosperity.
People treating the associated costs of converting away from cheap coal and other dirty sources of energy as an inconvenience and people who don't like the inconvenience or additional expense as simply selfish.
No, no, no.
This is a matter of life and death. If you raise the price of energy, you plunge more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking can take up to 7 years off your life, but living in poverty can take 10. People in poverty get poor nutrition, little or no preventive medical care, exposure to both the elements and criminal attacks because they're sleeping on a steam grate in an alley and freezing or getting beaten up by another person in poverty that wants to steal their shoes, and so forth. It isn't just that you might have to choose to carpool in order to afford to get to work 50 miles away each day, its that some poor schmuck died today because electricity went from 12.5 cents per KwH to 25 cents per KwH and they couldn't afford that and the rent too, and so were out living on the street and got mugged by a guy with a big knife, and bled to death in minutes. Yes, that's a death from poverty, because otherwise he would have been inside his house with a locked door between himself and the guy with the knife.
I actually wonder if ANY of the proponents of the pain and suffering of "doing something" about global warming stop to calculate how many people they'll kill doing it, and whether those people they kill will exceed in number the people that would be killed by the global warming if we instead did nothing.
OBTW I saw a headline a day or 2 ago that USA carbon emissions went down again for 2017, while the rest of the world's went up. Just sayin'...
I had Econ 101, but it didn't address individual pricing of products. The course that did was given by the engineering college and was called Engineering Economy. In it we learned that pricing was a delicate balancing act between how much it cost to produce something, and how much our competition that was producing essentially the same thing was selling it for. We learned we couldn't just decide to sell it at a certain price and gain or lose profit by raising or lowering that price. Profit is the difference between the price and the cost of production times the number of widgets we sell. The number of widgets we sell depends on the public demand for them. if we are producing Coca Cola and decide to charge $1.25 a bottle in a machine that is sitting next to a Pepsi machine that is charging $1.20 a bottle, we won't necessarily make more money, because the public will overwhelmingly choose to drink Pepsi when faced with the 2 machines because they can save a nickel. Of course if we can produce something that is significantly better than the competition in its performance, perhaps it is a much lighter battery for the same energy storage, we may be able to charge a lot more than the competition when selling it to markets that are sensitive to the weight of the battery, such as electric cars or possibly airplanes. An electric car is going to accelerate faster and go farther on the same amount of electrical storage if the battery is 200 lbs lighter. People will pay for a 200 lb reduction in a battery that might otherwise weigh 1000 lbs. But there is always a sweet spot of pricing that, if you raise the price too high, people will decide to put up with the heavier battery anyway and then won't buy yours, and your overall profit will decrease. The significant exception to all this is luxury items, where people buy something BECAUSE it is expensive, so if you lower the price of the Cadillac to where too many people can afford it, it is no longer exclusive, and loses that value to the people that were purchasing a status symbol.
And that's as much as I remember form the course I took 35 years ago, but believe it still applies. So, yeah, you get rid of income tax expenses to industry, they produce something for less expense to them, and then they start thinking about increasing their market share by lowering the price of the thing they are manufacturing. If a Toyota FJ Cruiser is $35K and a similarly appointed Jeep Cherokee is $35K, and then the 22% of the selling price of things built in the USA that is attributable to income taxes goes away, and Jeep lowers their price by half that (there's some significant amount of that tax expense that they can't recover), the Jeep Cherokee then is priced at 11% less, or $3,850 less, or $31,150. So you have 2 vehicles that are nearly identical in capability but one is $35K and the other is $31.15K, which one do you buy? Jeep's market share will go thru the roof until Toyota scrambles to find a way to lower their price or somehow make their car more desirable for a different reason. If income taxes were totally nuked in the USA - individual, corporate, capital gains, payroll, alternative minimum, estate, gift, self-employment, etc... Toyota would scramble to build FJ Cruisers in the USA (they may do that anyway - the FJ Cruiser in the example was simply assumed to be built in Japan.) But US taxes hurt US industry? You bet.
Well, I had a class in college that addressed the pricing of widgets for sale and that isn't it. Its called competition.
that people get all sideways about a 10% tax on imported phones, but when we lower corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, which will lower the price of AMERICAN goods, then its supposedly a "tax cut for the rich." What's rich about millions of phone buyers that could get an American phone for less money because the company is not sending so much $$$ to Washington, and can therefore lower the price on their phones and cause more people to choose their phones instead of the Chinese phones? Taxes are taxes, whether they're tariffs or income taxes, and no corporation has ever, does now, or ever will pay corporate income taxes. They simply COLLECT them, from us, when they raise prices of their goods, lower their workers' pay, or cut stock dividends in order to have the $$$ to send to Washington. Duh... of the 2, I'll take tariffs, since it benefits American companies by keeping the gov't from coming after corporate income to get the tax money.
But those bitches are expensive...
The leftist agenda is to enslave the people to be able to tell them what to do, how to live, etc. Live in "no cars" communities where you have to walk 3 blocks to where you park your car, use bicycles when you're back is screaming with the latest arthritis attack, eat what they tell you (see Michelle O's school lunch nonsense for that one), etc. etc. Leftists just want to control you and don't want you to be able to resist their doing it. The litmus test for "liberal" is "anti-gun." They want to take them so you can't shoot their asses off when they tell you that you have to live in a 900 sq. ft. apartment instead of your house on an acre because it's somehow "good for the environment." My house on an acre has geothermal heat and an electric bill that the 900 sq. ft. apartment probably doesn't achieve 'cuz it's electric resistance heated. Yeah, the left has an agenda, and you're guaranteed not to like it.
Yes, cheaply. I just recently ran onto a fellow who is quitting his job, as he's getting abused at $11.50 an hour as a cook. That's outrageously low pay for a skilled workman of any sort, and being a moderate Republican that does not toe the party line concerning minimum wages, I think that it ought to be $15 / hr. But anyway, people like him, when the world goes to ultra-expensive cars just because they're electric, are going to be in poverty, or further into poverty, and here's a clue: Poverty kills. It isn't just inconvenient, but people die because they're poor. They don't get enough to eat, they don't get the right kinds of things to eat, they exist in poorly heated homes or not cooled homes in the deep south, they don't get access to preventive medicine, some are even homeless which exposes them both to the weather and to criminal attack. I've read that while smoking can take 7 years off your life, living in poverty can take 10. So, while electric everything may be an inconvenient expense for me, it will be a life-or-death situation for millions of others that don't have a nice pension and annuity and a bit of Social Security after a career as an engineer.
No, I say "no fair" simply dismissing avoiding expense as a selfish luxury. It's extremely important to a lot of people. An electric society is desireable, but only if it doesn't kill a bunch of people by throwing them into poverty.
Ahhh... respondant has to be a liberal, as it has all the telltale signs - name calling... no actual solution... etc...
Meanwhile, the OP of this subthead that just got called an idiot has it right - we currently have no technologically viable way NOT to burn the fossil fuels that we've been burning. We just don't know how. We can't build a solar solution until we can store the electricity, and we do not have the "magic battery" that will do that. Neither do we have said magic battery that will allow for viable electric cars, "viable" being defined as "just as cheap" and "will go just as far in a day of driving as my own car" which current electrics will not. Why not? Because while even the most expensive, best performing electrics will travel at the same speeds for maybe 300 miles, I refuel in 5 minutes or less, and they have to stop for over half an hour to get a partial charge. My 1st day of a vacation is usually marked by a big initial push to get to the attraction I'm destined for, and so the 1st day is sometimes 800 - 1200 miles of driving. Just can't do that to match my leaving from Eastern Virginia and sleeping in Texas before midnight. Maybe someday, but not today.
We're building out wind and solar for the grid as fast as we can, and hopefully some smart guy will invent a magic battery to really make them work. Fingers crossed. But until it happens, we have absolutely no alternative but to burn the fossil fuels that we're burning. We have to manufacture things, we have to grow food and then transport it, we have to burn the fuel just to get to work or play. And of course our play is someone else's work, so if they say we shouldn't play, then those providing the playgrounds - movie theaters, etc. will lose their work and impact the economy.
What we need to do it _stop_ burning fossil fuels altogether. I think we'll get there, but only if the economy is allowed to remain healthy enough to have the $$$ left over for research - battery research - and eventually produces the magic battery (or supercapacitor...)
Cars work because:
I'm not exposed to everyone else in my car. If I want to play Fox News on the Sirius / XM all the way to wherever I'm going, I can, and don't have to annoy anyone else with it, nor be annoyed if they want to play hip-hop.
I can take things I might need with me, without having to carry them all over the place. If I want to have an extra coat or something, I can chuck it in the back seat, and if I don't need it, I can leave it there. If I do need it, like the asshat that turns down the air conditioning to 68 degrees, I can go get it.
I'm not quite as exposed to the criminal element. If I'm female and someone wants to rape me, I don't have to outrun them with my feet which might be in heels anyway. I can mash the accelerator and challenge them to catch me. If they do catch me, I then have a 4000 lb weapon and may run over their asses.
I can eat in the car. Prohibited on most transit systems.
I bring along a personal, private shelter with my car if I've got some down time. What to do when there are breaks in "life", like classroom in-between times? I go to the car, where I've also brought a book, and read. Or listen to the radio. Yeah, without the (painful... I've never found a comfortable set of) earbuds. Full over-the-ear headphones are too bulky to be carrying all over when using transit, but I don't need 'em when I crank the Bose 8-speaker in my new Ford Edge ST.
If the transit system is too warm or too cold, its tough shit, I'm just going to be uncomfortable. If my car is too warm or too cold, I can fix it immediately.
If anyone goes on strike, my car still works. Transit sometimes stops for that.
Want transit to work? Design one that fixed these things. First thing is repeal all the damned gun laws, so that I don't have to worry so much about the odd rapist if I'm female, or roving gangs if I'm male or female, and don't need a 4000 lb weapon or a personal means to flee. Make eating on the train possible, or even convenient, and make listening to your own entertainment easy and accepted and private - make spaces for each person to use - extra fee and you can step into a compartment, close the door, and treat it like your car. Design transit spaces to accommodate shoving a thumb drive into a USB port and listening to one's own music, and wire the transit so it can receive whatever radio or TV that one might want to listen to. Etc. People like cars for lots and lots of different reasons, and transit hasn't even tried to compete. They're going to have to, eventually.
Canada's gov't is right to stay out of this. Why? Because it's expensive and unnecessary.
Elon Musk is going to "wire" the world with over 10,000 low earth orbiting satellites:
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/s...
Low earth orbiting means the latency problem won't be a problem, and you can use 'em to do your First Person Shooter games with low ping times. Will require some waiting, but you can't wire up Canada before Elon Musk / Toney Stark / Iron Man launches his 10,000+ satellites. Hey, when you've got rockets that work and are much cheaper than anyone else's, you can do s*** like that...
Is a scramjet drone flying at mach 17... get that perishable around the world in short order.
"Say the hijacker is holding the flight attendant hostage. I shoot at him but hit the flight attendant."
Your fault for taking a shot like that without being a certified expert marksman. What you really do is shoot the SOB from behind, which in a large population of potentially armed defenders, the bad guy cannot neutralize. Or he's standing right beside you as he's holding the stewardess hostage, and you put one up thru his ribcage and right into his heart from 6 inches away.
"Ultimately, I'm afraid more guns means more shooting and more gun deaths."
As Ghandi said, "Fear is the enemy. We think it is hate, but it is fear." We do horrific things because we are afraid, and disarming victims is one of them. Yes, there will undoubtedly be mistakes from time to time, but contrast that with a mental case with a couple semiauto pistols wading thru Virginia Tech and killing 32 innocents, and then himself. I have a friend who is an ex-Army Ranger, of college age at the time, who if he had been armed in one of these classrooms, the gunman would not have gotten a second shot, as this guy is absolutely deadly with any kind of firearm.
"To go back to the school shooting, remember that some schools already have armed guards. Columbine's Deputy engaged the shooters and missed. Parkland's Deputy never even engaged."
Columbine's 2 cops were cops, doing cop-things, and not where they needed to be, which was inside the school. One was out in the parking lot, and engaged the shooters from a distance without effect. The other was out running radar near the school, making revenue from the city but not protecting the students inside the building. And some of the problems with armed guards in schools that armed citizens in schools don't have are that everyone who is a potential shooter knows who to shoot first since they are wearing a uniform, there are always too few of them because they are expensive, they have other interests that can occupy their attention to the detriment of their ability to assist when a shooter does appear (like being gone, running radar to make the city some $$$$). Armed citizens in the schools do not have these problems - potential attackers have no idea how many enemy guns there are, who has them, and from which direction a defense will be mounted, nobody has to pay them to do it, and they have no reason to be anywhere else but inside the school where they may be needed to return fire should it occur.
"And you hear all the time about cops with itchy trigger fingers who shoot people that clearly pose no threat to them. Imagine you're the good guy with a gun defending against the bad guys with guns, when the cops roll up. How do you expect them to know that you're not one of the bad guys?"
Very easy. Cops, because they are good guys with rules, are required to shout, "Police, drop the gun" and you do it because you're the good guy. That's how they know. The bad guys will likely turn and attempt to fire at them, which is how they know that those people are the bad guys. Of course by the time the cops get there, you've already defended the kids and the perp is lying there bleeding, and you've reholstered your weapon anyway and probably giving the perp some 1st aid if you've gotten control of your hate for his attempt to harm your students.
"So more people carrying guns means more accidental deaths,"
Pure conjecture unsupported by reality.
" far more irresponsible (drunk/crazy/violent) gun users endangering everybody."
A fantasy propagated by the idea that somehow gun control laws work. Again, gun control laws only affect good guys. If this potential drunk / crazy / violent guy is a bad guy, he's going to have a gun if it pleases him to have a gun. The bad guys are bad guys because they ignore laws, and make no exception for gun laws. If they want to be armed, the will be. The only thing gun laws do is to create helpless victims. They should all be repealed.
Do I want to arm them? No. Do I believe that any attempt to keep them from being armed short of incarceration is futile? Yes.
OK, they're unfit for military service, but they're fully permitted to get behind the wheel of a 4000 weapon which is the terrorist's newest weapon of choice, a weapon that can be made to drive down a sidewalk and kill multiple people, and the only defense those people might have could be to turn around and put a bullet in his brain before he can run them down. So I want those potential victims to have a chance. Making laws to tell them they have to go forth as prey I believe to be wrong, and the root cause of much of our current mischief. Repeal all the gun laws. Maybe pay a little more attention to exactly who is allowed to run free among us. But just don't make most people into helpless victims.
Skyjackings were the result of the general prohibition of ordinary law abiding citizens bringing guns onto planes, although it wasn't as effectively enforced as it is now. Sooo... the bad guy was still the only one on the scene with a gun, and the planes went to Cuba. Repeatedly. Again, its the frickin' rules that did it,
A couple guys with box cutters cannot now get the airplane to crash into a building, but they can still take it out of the sky like they did Flt. 93. If citizens were able to fight back, in other than a suicidal offensive, they wouldn't even be able to do that.
All these gun laws are pointless, as the more of them they make, the WORSE things get, not better. School shootings and mass shootings are all the result of good citizens being rendered helpless when 1 evil gun is present. These laws should all be repealed.
Here's the conspiracy theory - all these laws go in one direction, toward the eventual confiscation of privately owned firearms. A California Democrat politician proposed confiscation just last week, and one of the California Senators, Feinstein or Boxer, not sure, said it sort of under her breath a few years ago - "If it were up to me, I'd say, "Turn 'em all in, Mr. and Mrs. America." " And its not a theory, it is real.
The ultimate thrust is that someone who is trying to disarm you is attempting to do something to you, not something for you. The historic result of confiscations has been genocide and slavery. Its happened twice already in America, just ask the Indians and the blacks under Jim Crow. We "conspiracy theorists" are determined that it is not going to happen again. And if you want a for-real shooting war, just try and take our guns. Molan Labe, motherfucker.
As for who the conspiracy theorists are, some of us are retired DoD who worked on weapons software and own the basements we may choose to live in, or not, and have never had AOL.
I mean, with damned near every computer in every movie I've seen over the last 10 - 15 years having an apple logo on it, you mean that "just happened" and wasn't the result of some big product placement contract?
Like school shootings, skyjackings are the result of our over 25,000 gun laws that disarm the "good guys" and don't do anything at all about bad guys with guns. The metal detactors scare the bad guys into not trying to smuggle guns onto the airplane, but if a bad guy wants a gun on an airplane bad enough, he'll get a gun on an airplane.
The real solution to both skyjackings and school shooting is to simply repeal all the gun laws, and let the good guys go armed in public. 9/11 would have been impossible, some citizen would have offed these pukes before they could have finished the sentence, "This is a skyjacking." No, bullet holes in aircraft fuselages do _not_ cause explosive decompression, they make a little how, and some mechanism that pressurizes the plane adjusts the flow to compensate for the small leak. Could some stray bullet hit an innocent? Yep, but planes would not have killed over 3000 people on 9/11/2001. Good trade, I think.
And OBTW, repealing all the damned gun control laws would cost the gov't $0, removing all the metal detectors at the airports would cost the gov't $0, and allowing all the teachers, janitors, teacher's assistants, school office workers, principals, etc. at the nation's schools would cost the gov't $0. There's no monetary reason not to do this.
And DB Cooper wouldn't have finished his sentence either before beginning to resemble swiss cheese.
How do we get the right to prosecute a foreign national doing things in a foreign country that are protected by our own first amendment? Really don't understand this.
...but had somewhere to go and driving was ill advised for several reasons, so I flew.
Everything that could be annoying was annoying. I'm back, and hopefully there will be no repeat of such special circumstances and will be able to drive wherever I need to go for the rest of my life. I need to go from Virginia to Alaska next year, as well as Virginia to Tucson, Virginia to La Crosse, and hopefully Virginia to Las Vegas depending on how well I do in the poker tournament next year. Drive drive drive. Love it. See the country. Don't get abused by the TSA and airlines.
And just ordered 3 books to get better at that poker thing. Was at a week of various poker tournaments at the Orleans in Las Vegas last week and had the time of my life. Work? Totally unnecessary. Oh, and I misspoke above, not 5 years retired, but 7 - retired on the last day of 2011, Dec 31st, a few weeks after coming back from Iraq for the last time (civilian sci-tech advisor to Army EOD.) Have been absolutely ecstatic about not having to get up and go somewhere and do something for which I'll get criticized and so forth - work has always sucked, always will suck, because of that. This is the life, and if I ever decide to add to my income, it'll be something where no one has the right to criticize my output - maybe extra $$$ by being good at poker, or maybe winning photo contest or something, but... never employment. Never again...
Just plain wrong. Retired for 5 years. I go to movies, play poker, exercise, repeat. I have a few other distractions and absolutly none of them qualify as work. I'm not bored out of my mind, I have a lot of fun online and in the other endeavors already mentioned. Work is nowhere close to necessary, and that's a fact.
I said I saw a pie chart that said that coal and natural gas were producing electricity approximately equally in the USA. I can't know whether or not it is correct. I don't know what the pie chart measured or what your reference is measuring, I just said I saw such a pie chart.
Do either or both of these measurements restrict themselves to energy produced for electricity only, or is the coal expended in smelting iron also included in one or the other? Is coal used in cement production - not sure - and if so, was it measured by either source? Don't know again, but we're producing a whale of a lot of cement. Wait, a quick google search says, "Coal is used in cement production." Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner. That'd be a whale of a lot of coal. Does the pie chart measure that and the quoted website not measure it? I don't know.
I'm not lying, I just said I saw a pie chart. Its just one way to look at the question, and I still think I'm correct that coal will continue to diminish and natural gas will continue its ascendency because it is cheaper for electrical production.
Export fees are unconstitutional.
"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
ARTICLE I, SECTION 9, CLAUSE 5
Otherwise, you have to transport it somehow, and that's the best we can do. The ship would do well to convert to NG power if it is hauling it regularly. Maybe it already is. I don't know.
Saw a pie chart a day or 2 ago that shows natural gas and coal are about equal now in the US market. And since natural gas is now cheaper than coal to build and run, US use of coal will continue to diminish. That, BTW, is the absolutely best way to replace polluting sources, by replacing them with cheaper things that don't pollute. IOW, don't pass a law against something, pass a law that helps create cheaper but cleaner resources and no, that doesn't mean subsidize something, because that is just the people paying more for something through taxes. No, REALLY make it cheaper - make something that is intrinsically cheaper. That's now natural gas. Hopefully some smart guy will build the 90% efficient solar cell, and these guys will perfect their air compression technique and we'll get 100% clean power.
What's the best way to move from coal to natural gas outside the USA? By fracking the F out of the oceans of natural gas reserves that the USA has, and selling it to the furriners... Its a win-win - they get cheaper electricity and the world gets less CO2 and other nasty shit in the air. Trump just did that by harrassing Angela Merkle, the German prime minister, into canceling her country's gas pipeline to Russia, and instead building liquified natural gas seaports for import of LNG by ships from... the USA. We better get to fracking every square inch if we want to reduce pollution.
...but what we really, really, really need is storage for vehicle propulsion. Still a battery, or maybe a supercapacitor, is required.