I guess the general public is NOT going to know that the bank robbers or kidnappers are driving a maroon Chevy van with license "IGOTAWAY" and be able to call 911 when it crosses an intersection in front of them. No worries, the cops don't really need help from the general public...
Science of the future will find better ways of dealing with it than bankrupting ourselves trying to remove carbon from all we do.
Science of the present already has cheap ways of dealing with the warming itself.
The MODELS used to predict the disaster are just that: MODELS. Since there's no reason to suspect they're any better than current weather models that cannot much predict thing more than 4 days in advance, then there is no reason to believe that they can accurately predict the calamities that they do.
These MODELS have not successfully predicted past behavior, and have no explanation for the fact that there has been no warming since 1997.
The trend in transportation, one of the bigger CO2 injectors, is toward electric cars which will cure much of the problem. The final solution is battery operated cars and trucks where batteries are ultimately charged with solar-thermally generated electricity that can run all night and for several days on molten salt, and work without PV panels that "wear out" over time and require scarce rare earth materials that may not be available into the future.
All we have to do is give this problem time, and the solution will happen because it is a good economic idea, not because we need to bankrupt society to stop mining coal NOW, stop burning anything NOW, stop using internal combustion automobiles NOW.
What we need to do is to move the Eros asteroid o where we can smelt all those metals (including a lot of gold) into pure form, then get them all back on earth (without accidentally killing ourselves or the planet.) There's probably enough precious metals in it to literally pay off the national debt.
The "exclusive product" may be the same product, only built with metal instead of plastic! How nice would this be - no more little broken plastic doors and plastic cable rewinders on your canister vacuum, for instance, but durable metal parts that you don't have to fuss with, and don't have to worry how long the warranty is or whether you should by an in-house extended warranty, 'cuz you know in ain't gonna break. Its like my Subaru, which must be bulletproof the way it wears - the only in-warranty failure was the little squeaker that sounds when you lock and unlock the door. There hasn't been much else that's failed out of warranty either, and I'm on mile 197,000 on a 2005 WRX. Drive it pretty hard, too. Bulletproof trans. Put that kind of quality in a Target or Sears store, bring back customers like the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
The technology isn't ready right now. No way is a robot driver going to be smart enough to handle all situations - we need actual, for-real artificial intelligence that you can carry on a conversation with, and it is "aware" of the real world and can make the right decision, such as recognizing what things really are, and if things somehow go south, hit the soft thing rather than the strong thing - a snowbank rather than a tree, for instance.
Really useful robot drivers are probably 10 - 20 years away.
There's no way in H that you could maintain enough attention to the road when the robot is driving to "catch" a mistake the robot makes. If the robot makes a mistake at freeway speeds, you're going to crash, that's all there is to it.
Me, I'm going to tell the robot where to go, then crawl into the back seat and go to sleep. No sense waiting 12 hours to go 800 miles or so while fighting boredom, motion sickness, and the terror of the robot following other vehicles within inches for aerodynamic advantage.
If you want a truly progressive tax system, then you want the Fair Tax. (www.fairtax.org)
The Fair Tax is a consumption tax, with a "prebate" that sends enough money to each citizen with a social security number to pay the Fair Tax on all expenses up to his poverty level. So, no person pays a penny of Fair Tax.
On the other end of the scale, the Fair Tax is the only tax ever proposed that can target "old money", that is _not_ part of a rich person's income. How does it do that? It is a consumption tax, so everything that the rich buy, they get to pay about 30% extra on, which goes directly to the US treasury.
So, take that $70 million yacht that John Kerry bought. That would generate $21 million in Fair Tax. However, JK, from his tax statements that he's revealed as a politician, only makes about $4 million a year, on which he has paid as little as 13%. His wife, when her taxes were released, was found to have made about $5.5 million, and paid 26% on it, for about a $1.04 million tax burden. Together, they're at about $1.755 million for a year of taxes. But by buying that yacht, they would pay about as much tax as 12 years of their income taxes.
That's a truly progressive income tax - it really hits the rich hard, and the poor don't pay at all.
Other benefits are that, according to Fair Tax research, we would have a 3% unemployment rate 2 years after enacting the Fair Tax.
You are right. The cure, at least partially, is the Fair Tax. (www.fairtax.org). It replaces the income taxes, all of them, with a consumption tax. It would revitalize manufacturing in America if it were to become law.
I don't suppose anyone noticed that they roused 8,000 workers to be producing, eventually, 10,000 iPhones per day? Why is that? I mean, the 1.25 / iPhones per worker per day? I'll tell you why, it is because they are using people like they use machines.
This is not the American way to produce things. The American way to produce things is to automate the process, and use 250 workers to produce those 10,000 iPhones / day, with the help of computer-controlled machines to do it.
Why don't we do it? It has nothing to do with the American worker. What it has to do with is income taxes and regulations. Income taxes are sabotaging America's ability to compete both at home and abroad, and these income taxes have help in doing this by the over-regulation from the Federal gov't, much of which is from the EPA.
You will note in ANY newspaper description of ANY attempt to build ANYTHING in the USA, there are ALWAYS a phalanx of environmentalists that are against it. And, they usually get their way. That's a big reason why no one wants to even TRY to build here.
If you study the Fair Tax (www.fairtax.org) you find that their research shows that 22% of the selling price of American-manufactured goods is composed of passed-thru income tax expenses incurred by American manufacturers. That's a lot. In contrast, look at the auto industry, where the workers, according to the newspaper reports several years ago when they were going bankrupt it was revealed that these auto workers were costing companies a total of $78 / hr. It only takes 30 - 33 labor hours to build a car in the US, tho, so that is only about $2,500 or so of the selling price that can be attributed to worker expenses. And with 22% of the selling price being taxes, then a $20K car would have about $4,400 of embedded income taxes, a $30K car about $6,600 of embedded income taxes, and, say, a $40K SUV having $8,800 of embedded income taxes.
Put another way, with only 30 hours or so of labor, if they paid the workers $20 / hour more, it would only raise the price of the vehicle $600.
So, really, its not the workers. Its the gov't that's at the bottom of it, and its/our corrosive methodology of collecting taxes.
Fair Tax research also indicates that if the Fair Tax was adopted, and the income taxes totally repealed as called for by the legislation proposing the Fair Tax, there would be an economic expansion of biblical proportions within the USA, and an unemployment rate of 3% within 2 years. 10 - 14 trillion dollars of American money sequestered overseas for the purpose of hiding from the US income taxes would come back home, and the building of factories would begin. 10 - 14 trillion dollars is far beyond any stimulus that the US gov't can approach, but it would be free to America if we were willing to treat our entrepreneurs and businesses right.
$7 / gallon, in our country that is roughly 3000 miles "wide" and 2000 miles "high", will devastate our economy if we have to pay it. We should advance electric car technology with all possible haste, to fend off the day when the American economy is forced into total collapse by energy prices that just cannot be paid.
Suggest you look at natural gas fired electricity as a bridge to the future, where the future will be solar and geothermal and wind and tidal and anything-but-carbon-based. But it _is_ in the future, we can't do it now, but we can get ready for it by having a transportation infrastructure that makes it worthwhile to reseach large-scale renewable energy.
If the price of electricity doubles, then the electric cars will only go five times as far on the same amount of money instead of 10 times as far, for a $7/gal gasoline price and a 40 mpg car.
But the price of electricity won't double because most states have a "public utilities commission" that regulates prices.
And why should the price go up? The current rate of electricity now builds new power plants, new transmission lines, and so forth, so when electric companies double their sales from the extra power they're selling to electric car owners, they should basically be doubling the money available to build power plants and distribution systems.
35 mpg city/40 mpg highway on gasoline alone, after the battery is flat.
Y'all are gonna appreciate cars like this when gas gets to $7 / gallon, which it will, and this car will go 40 miles for seventy cents of electricity, and it takes $7 to go the same distance in a 40 mpg car, and $14 to do it in a 20 mpg car.
that there are games that don't require a computer at all, and have been enjoyed unchanged since ancient times? Chess.
As for computer games, FPS jones is fulfilled by Quake III which amazingly still works on Win 7, without a key CD being in the drive. I play it multiple times per day and have done so for years. New game? We don't need no steenkin' new game...
is to write a check, stuff it in an envelope, and drop it into the US Mail to pay your bills. Offline. Making withdrawals means drive to the bank, use your passbook, withdraw cash. If there's any computer viruses involved in those, it won't be YOUR fault and should be protected by FDIC insurance. Hopefully.
The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job and try to stay ahead of inflation, cope with dumbass bosses and backstabbing co-workers, and probably have your job shipped to China anyway. OTOH, if you retain control of it, you get to sell it, retire, live in a nice house, use your time exactly how you see fit, and don't have to please anyone else that's not also a loved one.
As long as there are annual reviews, and you want to look like superprogrammer, and the management (typically) doesn't give a F about comments, its in your interest not to document as much as possible, so only YOU can fix it. Then you look great when you find bugs that someone else has already spent 17 hours trying to figure out how your mystery code works, and you'll get the bonus and he won't.
And, of course, you want them to know they are in a big pile of doo-doo if they fire you, since you're _THE_ one that "knows" the code...
Its just another illustration of rewarding individual performance in a setting that is inherently a team effort. With everyone trying to look good individually, collaboration is priority #2.
Awright, I was looking for something like this to answer...
I'll tell you how it's America. Its America 'cuz we, the boneheaded, think it is all so grand to "tax somebody else, not me" and get all wild about taxing the rich, taxing industry, and... causing the situations we see here.
How's that? Well, if you study what the Fair Tax researchers have found, you'll find that 22% of the price of everything made in America, approximately, is composed of costs inflicted on industry by the income taxes. That is a cumulative number of the costs of the 2nd-highest corporate income tax in the world, the payroll taxes of the workers that make their labor more expensive, the individual income taxes of the workers that make their labor more expensive, capital gains taxes that make investment money more scarce for industry, etc. etc.
We've closed something like 40,000 factories between 2001 and 2009, and it's been going on for decades. While other countries have wised up and lowered their business taxes, we have kept ours in the stratosphere. As a result, our exports are too expensive, our domestic products are too expensive, and people all over the world have agreed to buy anything but American for the most part.
Want to fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax replaces the corrosive income tax with a consumption tax, and uses a prebate mechanism to make it a true progressive tax, unlike the income taxes that, via the payroll taxes of Social Security and Medicare, combined with that 22% of the price of American goods that, when bought by a poor person, constitute a tax on that poor person of up to 37.3% (15.3% SS/Medicare + 22% embedded corporate income taxes.) of the 1st dollar he make all the way thru his entire paycheck. Due to the prebate, poor people never pay a penny of Fair Tax.
The Fair Tax would additionally cause an economic boom of biblical proportions in the US, with Fair Tax researchers predicting a 3% unemployment rate within 2 years after passage. We could get most of these homeless people good jobs, so they would not be homeless any more. But the more we delay, the more misery there will be. We have to do something, quick, and the Fair Tax is the most promising thing we could do.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the general public is NOT going to know that the bank robbers or kidnappers are driving a maroon Chevy van with license "IGOTAWAY" and be able to call 911 when it crosses an intersection in front of them. No worries, the cops don't really need help from the general public...
Because:
Science of the future will find better ways of dealing with it than bankrupting ourselves trying to remove carbon from all we do.
Science of the present already has cheap ways of dealing with the warming itself.
The MODELS used to predict the disaster are just that: MODELS. Since there's no reason to suspect they're any better than current weather models that cannot much predict thing more than 4 days in advance, then there is no reason to believe that they can accurately predict the calamities that they do.
These MODELS have not successfully predicted past behavior, and have no explanation for the fact that there has been no warming since 1997.
The trend in transportation, one of the bigger CO2 injectors, is toward electric cars which will cure much of the problem. The final solution is battery operated cars and trucks where batteries are ultimately charged with solar-thermally generated electricity that can run all night and for several days on molten salt, and work without PV panels that "wear out" over time and require scarce rare earth materials that may not be available into the future.
All we have to do is give this problem time, and the solution will happen because it is a good economic idea, not because we need to bankrupt society to stop mining coal NOW, stop burning anything NOW, stop using internal combustion automobiles NOW.
What we need to do is to move the Eros asteroid o where we can smelt all those metals (including a lot of gold) into pure form, then get them all back on earth (without accidentally killing ourselves or the planet.) There's probably enough precious metals in it to literally pay off the national debt.
The "exclusive product" may be the same product, only built with metal instead of plastic! How nice would this be - no more little broken plastic doors and plastic cable rewinders on your canister vacuum, for instance, but durable metal parts that you don't have to fuss with, and don't have to worry how long the warranty is or whether you should by an in-house extended warranty, 'cuz you know in ain't gonna break. Its like my Subaru, which must be bulletproof the way it wears - the only in-warranty failure was the little squeaker that sounds when you lock and unlock the door. There hasn't been much else that's failed out of warranty either, and I'm on mile 197,000 on a 2005 WRX. Drive it pretty hard, too. Bulletproof trans. Put that kind of quality in a Target or Sears store, bring back customers like the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
Let your fingers do the walking thru the yellow pages, learn the facts, find it fast!
The technology isn't ready right now. No way is a robot driver going to be smart enough to handle all situations - we need actual, for-real artificial intelligence that you can carry on a conversation with, and it is "aware" of the real world and can make the right decision, such as recognizing what things really are, and if things somehow go south, hit the soft thing rather than the strong thing - a snowbank rather than a tree, for instance.
Really useful robot drivers are probably 10 - 20 years away.
There's no way in H that you could maintain enough attention to the road when the robot is driving to "catch" a mistake the robot makes. If the robot makes a mistake at freeway speeds, you're going to crash, that's all there is to it.
Me, I'm going to tell the robot where to go, then crawl into the back seat and go to sleep. No sense waiting 12 hours to go 800 miles or so while fighting boredom, motion sickness, and the terror of the robot following other vehicles within inches for aerodynamic advantage.
"You are not required to tell the truth during a police investigation,"
What was it that Martha Stewart actually went to prison for? Lying to investigators, I believe.
If you want a truly progressive tax system, then you want the Fair Tax. (www.fairtax.org)
The Fair Tax is a consumption tax, with a "prebate" that sends enough money to each citizen with a social security number to pay the Fair Tax on all expenses up to his poverty level. So, no person pays a penny of Fair Tax.
On the other end of the scale, the Fair Tax is the only tax ever proposed that can target "old money", that is _not_ part of a rich person's income. How does it do that? It is a consumption tax, so everything that the rich buy, they get to pay about 30% extra on, which goes directly to the US treasury.
So, take that $70 million yacht that John Kerry bought. That would generate $21 million in Fair Tax. However, JK, from his tax statements that he's revealed as a politician, only makes about $4 million a year, on which he has paid as little as 13%. His wife, when her taxes were released, was found to have made about $5.5 million, and paid 26% on it, for about a $1.04 million tax burden. Together, they're at about $1.755 million for a year of taxes. But by buying that yacht, they would pay about as much tax as 12 years of their income taxes.
That's a truly progressive income tax - it really hits the rich hard, and the poor don't pay at all.
Other benefits are that, according to Fair Tax research, we would have a 3% unemployment rate 2 years after enacting the Fair Tax.
Income should not be taxed at all - it is totally counterproductive. We can tax other things: (www.fairtax.org)
You are right. The cure, at least partially, is the Fair Tax. (www.fairtax.org). It replaces the income taxes, all of them, with a consumption tax. It would revitalize manufacturing in America if it were to become law.
I don't suppose anyone noticed that they roused 8,000 workers to be producing, eventually, 10,000 iPhones per day? Why is that? I mean, the 1.25 / iPhones per worker per day? I'll tell you why, it is because they are using people like they use machines.
This is not the American way to produce things. The American way to produce things is to automate the process, and use 250 workers to produce those 10,000 iPhones / day, with the help of computer-controlled machines to do it.
Why don't we do it? It has nothing to do with the American worker. What it has to do with is income taxes and regulations. Income taxes are sabotaging America's ability to compete both at home and abroad, and these income taxes have help in doing this by the over-regulation from the Federal gov't, much of which is from the EPA.
You will note in ANY newspaper description of ANY attempt to build ANYTHING in the USA, there are ALWAYS a phalanx of environmentalists that are against it. And, they usually get their way. That's a big reason why no one wants to even TRY to build here.
If you study the Fair Tax (www.fairtax.org) you find that their research shows that 22% of the selling price of American-manufactured goods is composed of passed-thru income tax expenses incurred by American manufacturers. That's a lot. In contrast, look at the auto industry, where the workers, according to the newspaper reports several years ago when they were going bankrupt it was revealed that these auto workers were costing companies a total of $78 / hr. It only takes 30 - 33 labor hours to build a car in the US, tho, so that is only about $2,500 or so of the selling price that can be attributed to worker expenses. And with 22% of the selling price being taxes, then a $20K car would have about $4,400 of embedded income taxes, a $30K car about $6,600 of embedded income taxes, and, say, a $40K SUV having $8,800 of embedded income taxes.
Put another way, with only 30 hours or so of labor, if they paid the workers $20 / hour more, it would only raise the price of the vehicle $600.
So, really, its not the workers. Its the gov't that's at the bottom of it, and its/our corrosive methodology of collecting taxes.
Fair Tax research also indicates that if the Fair Tax was adopted, and the income taxes totally repealed as called for by the legislation proposing the Fair Tax, there would be an economic expansion of biblical proportions within the USA, and an unemployment rate of 3% within 2 years. 10 - 14 trillion dollars of American money sequestered overseas for the purpose of hiding from the US income taxes would come back home, and the building of factories would begin. 10 - 14 trillion dollars is far beyond any stimulus that the US gov't can approach, but it would be free to America if we were willing to treat our entrepreneurs and businesses right.
Yeah, they are.
$7 / gallon, in our country that is roughly 3000 miles "wide" and 2000 miles "high", will devastate our economy if we have to pay it. We should advance electric car technology with all possible haste, to fend off the day when the American economy is forced into total collapse by energy prices that just cannot be paid.
Suggest you look at natural gas fired electricity as a bridge to the future, where the future will be solar and geothermal and wind and tidal and anything-but-carbon-based. But it _is_ in the future, we can't do it now, but we can get ready for it by having a transportation infrastructure that makes it worthwhile to reseach large-scale renewable energy.
If the price of electricity doubles, then the electric cars will only go five times as far on the same amount of money instead of 10 times as far, for a $7/gal gasoline price and a 40 mpg car.
But the price of electricity won't double because most states have a "public utilities commission" that regulates prices.
And why should the price go up? The current rate of electricity now builds new power plants, new transmission lines, and so forth, so when electric companies double their sales from the extra power they're selling to electric car owners, they should basically be doubling the money available to build power plants and distribution systems.
I don't really see the problem here.
35 mpg city/40 mpg highway on gasoline alone, after the battery is flat.
Y'all are gonna appreciate cars like this when gas gets to $7 / gallon, which it will, and this car will go 40 miles for seventy cents of electricity, and it takes $7 to go the same distance in a 40 mpg car, and $14 to do it in a 20 mpg car.
that there are games that don't require a computer at all, and have been enjoyed unchanged since ancient times? Chess.
As for computer games, FPS jones is fulfilled by Quake III which amazingly still works on Win 7, without a key CD being in the drive. I play it multiple times per day and have done so for years. New game? We don't need no steenkin' new game...
is to write a check, stuff it in an envelope, and drop it into the US Mail to pay your bills. Offline. Making withdrawals means drive to the bank, use your passbook, withdraw cash. If there's any computer viruses involved in those, it won't be YOUR fault and should be protected by FDIC insurance. Hopefully.
The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job and try to stay ahead of inflation, cope with dumbass bosses and backstabbing co-workers, and probably have your job shipped to China anyway. OTOH, if you retain control of it, you get to sell it, retire, live in a nice house, use your time exactly how you see fit, and don't have to please anyone else that's not also a loved one.
As long as there are annual reviews, and you want to look like superprogrammer, and the management (typically) doesn't give a F about comments, its in your interest not to document as much as possible, so only YOU can fix it. Then you look great when you find bugs that someone else has already spent 17 hours trying to figure out how your mystery code works, and you'll get the bonus and he won't.
And, of course, you want them to know they are in a big pile of doo-doo if they fire you, since you're _THE_ one that "knows" the code...
Its just another illustration of rewarding individual performance in a setting that is inherently a team effort. With everyone trying to look good individually, collaboration is priority #2.
Awright, I was looking for something like this to answer...
I'll tell you how it's America. Its America 'cuz we, the boneheaded, think it is all so grand to "tax somebody else, not me" and get all wild about taxing the rich, taxing industry, and... causing the situations we see here.
How's that? Well, if you study what the Fair Tax researchers have found, you'll find that 22% of the price of everything made in America, approximately, is composed of costs inflicted on industry by the income taxes. That is a cumulative number of the costs of the 2nd-highest corporate income tax in the world, the payroll taxes of the workers that make their labor more expensive, the individual income taxes of the workers that make their labor more expensive, capital gains taxes that make investment money more scarce for industry, etc. etc.
We've closed something like 40,000 factories between 2001 and 2009, and it's been going on for decades. While other countries have wised up and lowered their business taxes, we have kept ours in the stratosphere. As a result, our exports are too expensive, our domestic products are too expensive, and people all over the world have agreed to buy anything but American for the most part.
Want to fix it? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax replaces the corrosive income tax with a consumption tax, and uses a prebate mechanism to make it a true progressive tax, unlike the income taxes that, via the payroll taxes of Social Security and Medicare, combined with that 22% of the price of American goods that, when bought by a poor person, constitute a tax on that poor person of up to 37.3% (15.3% SS/Medicare + 22% embedded corporate income taxes.) of the 1st dollar he make all the way thru his entire paycheck. Due to the prebate, poor people never pay a penny of Fair Tax.
The Fair Tax would additionally cause an economic boom of biblical proportions in the US, with Fair Tax researchers predicting a 3% unemployment rate within 2 years after passage. We could get most of these homeless people good jobs, so they would not be homeless any more. But the more we delay, the more misery there will be. We have to do something, quick, and the Fair Tax is the most promising thing we could do.
Diesel.
'Cuz it weighed less than 2000 lbs.
12.5 cents at 8.5 cents per KwH like around here will propel the Chevy Volt for 7.35 miles.