While I believe that CO2 has a role in the planet's temperature, I also believe that, practically, there's not a damned thing we can do about our emissions right now, not without a worse effect of killing a lot of people by making them poor and throwing them into poverty, which kills too. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is likely to take 10. So, we really need to do things cheaply.
The weird case of passenger vehicles is dictated by personal finance. That guy that buys the 7,500 pound Suburban has a particular use that requires a 7,500 pound Suburban. That use may only be 2 or 3 times a year, but he needs it, so he buys a Suburban. The rest of the time, he still has a 7,500 pound Suburban to go get groceries, get to work, go to the movies, and go fishing. If the guy could also afford a Chevy Volt, then whee, problem mostly solved, but otherwise, he's driving a 7,500 lb Suburban.
Wanna fix that? Suspend the damned safety-Nazi nonsense that says that cars have to survive 60 mph crashes, so 1800 lb sports cars can be built again and be fun to drive with 1.6 liter engines, and get maybe 50 mpg with modern technology sans the weight. My current "sports sedan" is a turbo Subaru WRX, that gets decent mileage with the 2 liter engine, but would probably be another 10 mpg if it weighed 2000 lbs instead of 3200.
And by "doing nothing", I mean that the gov't should do nothing. Why? Because there are armies of private industry scientist who are all working furiously in an attempt to be the 1st that makes a magic battery work or a solar panel be near 100% efficiency, and so forth. We don't need the gov't getting involved and passing a lot of laws that look good to the unwashed masses but in actuality get in the way of the work of those scientists. I think the scientists will be successful, eventually, even tho it might take 50 years. 50 years will be soon enough if we can get to leave the oil, gas, and coal in the ground for everything except petrochemicals.
There is absolutely no affordable alternative to burning fossil fuels right now, and for the foreseeable future.
This is a lie, and willfully repeating it makes you party to the lie.
It is a lie only in technical terms. When I said fossil fuels, I meant fuels for internal combustion engines. Biofuels simply use a biological process to act on organic matter to produce fuels containing carbon that are then burned in internal combustion engines and emit CO2. We have to stop emitting CO2. That means we're looking for total electrification.
So, how to generate clean energy? We can't. Yet.
Another lie. Thin film solar panels last 10-20 years and repay their energy investment in under 3. PV panels would repay their energy investment in under 7 years back in the 1970s. Since the invention of the MPPT inverter, it has been feasible to build inexpensive storage arrays.
And solar is available for only a few hours a day and at peak efficiency only when the sun is unobstructed by clouds. At other times, we need (cheap) energy storage that we do not have. Therefore this methodology is currently unviable for replacing the common sources of electricity involving fossil or nuclear fuels.
The best thing to do is wait.
If all you're going to do is gaze at your navel, at this point you might as well put your head down a little farther and kiss your ass goodbye.
Waiting means allowing all those scientists who are working furiously at the behest of the left's boogeyman, greed, to be the 1st to make electricity viable for all things currently fueled by fossil fuels or nuclear power. They are working furiously to find the magic battery, and they are working furiously to raise the efficiency and longevity of solar panels. If we wait for that, we're going to get it. Gov't action on this is most likely to simply get in their way. So doing nothing is doing something - Lee Iacocca said, "Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way." Waiting would be getting out of the way.
Well, liberalville was in reference to the anti-gun atmosphere, which Ohio also shares. I'm from Ohio too, and most of the time that I've been hit by car interior thieves its been in Toledo. 70's and 80's, mostly.
And of course you don't want open carry 'cuz then you have to be Arnold to be strong enough to retain it if someone sees it and decides to try to take it away from you. Concealed is the way to go, so's people don't see it and try to take it from you and shoot you with it.
You sound like you're really stuck out there in Liberalville, with getting ripped off every time you turn around. Move to Virginia. About every 3rd person I talk to tells me they're carrying, and I suppose if anyone F's with them, it will earn them a bullet. I have radios in my car, antennas on it all over the place, one car is a red Subaru WRX and the other a new Jeep, and people just don't mess out here as much. Don't ask me. But I like it.
Can't say why your car gets targeted when it is displaying no stealables inside. I stopped getting broken into via the "messy car defense." That is, I kept newspapers and coats / hoodies in the car, and if there was anything in the car I thought would be interesting to a thief, I threw a newspaper or a coat over it. Has worked great for me for about 20 years. Car is a mess, but the mess is all mine, and its the same mess when I come out of the movie or bar or wherever as the mess I left it in when I went in.
The objective is to get to the destination with my (268 horsepower, all-wheel-drive) rally car for 2 road rallies. Can't rent anything like it, and the car was already set up for the rallying anyway - lots of mods for time and distance measuring, as the rallies were TSD, or Time-Speed-Distance rallies. Had a great time. But needed to get there with _my_ car to have the best chance of winning.
None are actually vacations, as I'm retired. No, I'm not living with the temperature turned down to "frostbite" and eating dog food, I have a nice pension, an annuity bought with the proceeds of a 401k-like structure, and a little Social Security. I travel a lot, or at least used to, as I was rallying with the Sports Car Club of America. I was going to a road rally in Tucson from Virginia when I did that 800 miles. I've been other places this year, too. Intend to be in St. Louis rallying in November. Rich? Nope, but not poor, either.
Nope. There's armies of scientists attempting to solve the battery and clean energy problems, and will eventually be successful, most probably. They DON'T need a bunch of meddlesome laws to do it. The incentive is already there, because they're going to be fabulously rich if they succeed. They are racing to be the 1st with the magic battery and the 100% efficient solar cell. Making a bunch of laws on the subject is more likely to screw things up than help.
They unfortunately abandoned the real solution, changing out the depleted battery for a fully charged one. When they were promising that, I was interested. But the superchargers now do not fully charge the battery in that 1/2 hour, so you don't get your full 300 miles. I was pretty much at my limit at 800 miles, so if I had to throw 3 or 4 1/2 hour charge sessions in there, I'd have gotten maybe 600 - 650 miles instead of 800. That means an extra motel going to Tucson, which means another $100, maybe more.
I'm waiting for the real solution, it is coming. No, actually I will probably never see it, as I'm 71. They'll get it working the day after I croak. But for the state of the environment in the year 2100, I think it will be sufficiently perfected and we'll be leaving the carbon in the ground as far as fuels are concerned. Lubricants and petrochemicals will still be a market for the oil, but we won't have to burn it to get from point A to point B.
The problem is taking 8 hours to recharge the car. We can't fast-charge yet like we can fuel a car with gasoline. We need to be able to do that and we can't. So electric cars are not truly viable yet.
You seem to think that passing a law is going to do something great for the planet. It won't. There is absolutely no affordable alternative to burning fossil fuels right now, and for the foreseeable future. We don't need to "reduce" fossil fuel use, we need to stop, and leave them in the ground. No law is going to achieve that. Only determined men and women in white coats living in laboratories have a chance to do that. We don't know how to store electricity sufficiently to use in in automotive _or_ grid electrical usages. We just don't. When someone figures that out, then they have to figure out how to generate it without generating CO2. People keep hollering that nukes generate way too much CO2 by the concrete that is used for their construction - approx 400,000 cubic feet, but you know what? Those wind machines have a minimum of 250 cubic yards of concrete in each of their foundations, and so far there are 52,000 of them that equal about the same output, 8 gigawatts, as the largest nuke complex which is somewhere in Japan. There's supposedly 7 reactors in that one, so figure 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete, but the 52,000 wind machines already have 13 million cubic feet of concrete. The CO2 is released when concrete is manufactured and calcium carbonate, CaCO3 is reduced to lime and CO2, which gets vented. Maybe it could be sequestered, but that would likely dramatically raise the cost. But anyway, 8 Gigwatts isn't anywhere close to our grid usage right now, and if we add all our cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, railroad locomotives, and so forth, there would be a wind generator in every outdoor photograph taken in the borders of the USA including the National Parks.
So, how to generate clean energy? We can't. Yet. Clean energy looks a lot like geothermal, but we'd have to be able to drill a hole deep enough pretty much everywhere, and we don't know how to drill that deeply yet.
Meanwhile, this damned CAFE gov't meddling in the marketplace will have the usual results of making things more expensive. Making things more expensive creates poor people, costs the gov't in welfare payments, increases Federal gov't borrowing, and prevents those not in poverty from nevertheless buying new cars because they're too expensive. They keep the old ones that pollute more, get less gas mileage, and defeat the main objectives of cleaner and more efficient. Unintended consequences.
The best thing to do is wait. There is absolutely huge incentive already to make electric cars work, as well as electric everything-else. Why? Becuase electricity is cheap compared to fossil fuels. If you could get a fully functional electric car, it would have a fuel cost equivalent of around low 1-dollar-a-gallon range. Maybe $1.12 / gallon equivalent for an electric. It would also have insane torque making it a virutal race car, and people would LOVE their electric cars, as long as they could do my 1st day of vacation this year, which was an 800 mile drive. Left Virginia, I think it was Arkansas where I first stopped, just short of Texas. Make electric cars that can do that, they'll sell like hotcakes and you won't need the gov't telling anyone what to do. The market will force it. And trying to tell people what to do before the science is ready to support it will just cause misery and probably make the air dirtier and burn more fossil fuels instead of less because of the old cars still on the road that wouldn't be if new ones weren't insanely expensive because they're electric before electric is ready.
or any gun is not something to worry about. Guns are most useful for defense. They are unnecessary for the murderer. The murderer has a wide variety of implements to use to commit murder. Want to murder one guy? Knife, pushing out a high window, blackjack, most anything that can be made at home with a sharp edge or swingable mass. No problem, there will always be instruments to kill with.
The gun is the victim's weapon. The gun is the only thing that is portable enough and powerful enough to overcome the surprise attack of the murderer. Sometimes. A sneak attack with a swung mass is probably still going to win, but is at least more dangerous to the murderer if the victim is armed and maybe detects the attack beforehand, turns around and busts a cap in his ass.
We would would be waaaaaay better off if the 25,000+ US gun laws were _all_ repealed tonight. Tomorrow the world, or at least the US would be a far more dangerous thing for the criminals, and about the same amount of danger for the victims, since the gun control laws all have one thing in common, they do not work, not even a little bit. Any law saying a criminal can't have a gun is useless, because they're criminals and by definition don't obey laws. You say you don't want this ex-felon to have a gun? Fine, put him back in prison, its the only way to stop him from having a gun. Meanwhile, make his depredations absolutely as difficult as possible, since any victim, or any good samaritan bystander, can make his life much shorter if he attempts to harm someone.
And its so funny, on the tube after a mass shooting, some brainless twit will say, "Way back in the 60's and 70's, we didn't have all these mass shootings, we've had 1000's of new gun control laws since then, and now we have mass shootings all over the place. What changed?" Well, duh, they TV twit answered his own question right in its text, the 1000's of new gun control laws is want changed. They disarmed the 1st responders. The 1st responders are not someone you call on the telephone, they're the people that happen to be on the scene at the outset of the shooting. They are all unarmed due to dumbass gun control laws. In the 60's, even the kids, the high school kids, would have a gun in their car or truck to go hunting with on the way home from school, or participate in a shooting team match. Now the victims are defenseless, the mass shooters know it, and... you have a mass shooting every week or 2, with nobody to blame but ourselves for making all these counterproductive gun laws.
...to attempt to control every nook and cranny of your life.
Doing that turns a 1/2 hour lunch into a 1 hour lunch while you walk or drive to someplace you like, and so your time out the door is another 1/2 hour later, and that sucks. Probably will make the waits for service in the restaurants longer too as 1000's of new customers stress the ability of the kitchen to be able to turn out that much food in that short of a time.
Yep, most of the movies aren't that great, and they're not trying all that hard either. Why not? Because people will go see Batman XXV, or Jaws 50, or whatever, so its a formula that is likely to pay for the production costs. One-off artsy films trying to be great are very difficult to do and require rare talent, so rare that they often just flop 'cuz that talent is rare, and those that try and aren't rare talents produce ho-hum stuff that people don't go to, or don't go to a 2nd time or buy or rent the DVD. But when you "see everything", there's that one that you go to, don't know a thing about because there haven't been any trailers, and... it is excellent. That's what makes seeing everything worth it.
Every now and then you get a really good one. Rent "Bad Samaritan." No, you probably didn't see it, it was unadvertised, had no trailers, and was in the theater for maybe a week or 2, can't remember for sure. But it was one of the best films I've seen this year, and scary as hell all the way through. That's what going to the movies and seeing everything is about, the rare gem.
I'm probably the reason they're in trouble, because, "I see everything." Not really, I don't go to the ones that are "Too stupid for words." That would be stuff like "Dumb and Dumber" or this current thing with the Abba songs, "Mamma Mia." The trend toward female-centric movies where the men are either idiots or irrelevant are a turn-off and that's one of 'em. The biggest notable disappointment in the last year was the Star Wars flick with all the important positions being female, and the males were mostly idiots or irrelevant. Having battle commanders being female, pretty much all of 'em, isn't even believable - the gals just don't aspire to such positions in sufficient numbers to turn out to be the best at it and be placed in command over guys who have studied / play-acted it / and aspired to it ever since the could go forth sans diapers.
But anyway, I'm going to have to pay for the major movies? What else is new, I see those mostly as IMAX and/or 3D anyway which isn't covered and never has been by MP. I see all the new movies as they open, and probably achieve a state of having seen everything that's playing in town by Monday. So, they are not going to be as lucrative as they were? 'Sall right, I made my $105.35 yearly subscription back in about 6 weeks of admission prices I didn't pay. If the yearly had been $400, I'd still be making $$$, and I'd probably still have bought it. Maybe MP should have several tiers of usage, with people like me paying more, and those not paying more being limited to, say, 2 non-IMAX, non-3D movies a week and for a higher $ than $105.35 / yr. I actually saw all this nonsense coming, and got the yearly since lots of stuff they're doing to the monthly people would be a violation of the contract for yearly people. I've been much less affected as a result.
So, this last January, when all the oscar-hopefuls that officially opened in December hit the local theaters, I spent $85 in admission to movies. Yeah, I track that stuff. $65 the next month. MP is going to be a savings for me pretty much no matter what they do, and if they are paying for movies like "Bad Samaritan" that came thru last month, was there for maybe a week, and almost nobody saw, but was absolutely excellent and scary as hell throughout, and I saw twice, I'll still be "winning." Just hope they can hang on.
If you go to the movies often, you know how many minutes are ads and previews. In fact, as I have noticed pretty much everywhere, ads occur before the official starting time, and previews occur after tha official starting time. Locally, the Regal has 20 minutes of previews, and the Paragon has 10. Not sure about Marquee as I don't go to it that often, but I think its about 10.
OTOH, I don't much mind what's going on on the screen as I am fine with paying attention to my phone right up to the start of the actual movie. Probably playing Words With Friends or browsing Facebook. But I just enjoy the moviegoing experience - go sit in the dark for 2 - 4 hours, depending on how early I get there and how long it is (Return of the King? ), eat without having to prepare the food (popping the popcorn, for instance), and leave without having to clean up. Very convenient, and who knows I might run into someone I know, too. Twice in the last 7 days.
Hopefully MP can get their act together. I am using them to maximum advantage since I see nearly everything.
...things Apple for their scurrilous business practices (If you have to ask, you just haven't been paying attention...) I would not be buying something without a headphone jack.
The USA is not well-served. There's millions of people, I expect, not-in-cities and far off the cable routes that just don't have access other than the damned geosynchro satellites, which means they're useless for some specific applications like first person shooter games, anything else requiring quick response. There's plenty of people in my own county which don't have the cable access, and have to rely on lesser means. The county is even getting involved in providing service to everybody. I'm concerned because the cable I do have works great, and I don't want a gov't-run thing making my cable economically unviable. I could even lose cable TV, and don't want to, and cable phone. Don't want to lose that either.
So... LEO satellites. Yeah, there's millions of Americans that could use that. Make it broadband enough, and cable TV, sat, and phone could all be nuked for wireless. Don't think that much bandwidth exists, tho.
...by simply disconnecting it from USB. Completely corrupted. Got it back by reformatting, but the data was toast. You simply yank it out with a risk of losing everything on it. Stupid computer says its in use, I simply shut down, disconnect, reboot. I won't ever just disconnect again.
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While I believe that CO2 has a role in the planet's temperature, I also believe that, practically, there's not a damned thing we can do about our emissions right now, not without a worse effect of killing a lot of people by making them poor and throwing them into poverty, which kills too. Smoking will take maybe 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is likely to take 10. So, we really need to do things cheaply.
The weird case of passenger vehicles is dictated by personal finance. That guy that buys the 7,500 pound Suburban has a particular use that requires a 7,500 pound Suburban. That use may only be 2 or 3 times a year, but he needs it, so he buys a Suburban. The rest of the time, he still has a 7,500 pound Suburban to go get groceries, get to work, go to the movies, and go fishing. If the guy could also afford a Chevy Volt, then whee, problem mostly solved, but otherwise, he's driving a 7,500 lb Suburban.
Wanna fix that? Suspend the damned safety-Nazi nonsense that says that cars have to survive 60 mph crashes, so 1800 lb sports cars can be built again and be fun to drive with 1.6 liter engines, and get maybe 50 mpg with modern technology sans the weight. My current "sports sedan" is a turbo Subaru WRX, that gets decent mileage with the 2 liter engine, but would probably be another 10 mpg if it weighed 2000 lbs instead of 3200.
And by "doing nothing", I mean that the gov't should do nothing. Why? Because there are armies of private industry scientist who are all working furiously in an attempt to be the 1st that makes a magic battery work or a solar panel be near 100% efficiency, and so forth. We don't need the gov't getting involved and passing a lot of laws that look good to the unwashed masses but in actuality get in the way of the work of those scientists. I think the scientists will be successful, eventually, even tho it might take 50 years. 50 years will be soon enough if we can get to leave the oil, gas, and coal in the ground for everything except petrochemicals.
There is absolutely no affordable alternative to burning fossil fuels right now, and for the foreseeable future.
This is a lie, and willfully repeating it makes you party to the lie.
It is a lie only in technical terms. When I said fossil fuels, I meant fuels for internal combustion engines. Biofuels simply use a biological process to act on organic matter to produce fuels containing carbon that are then burned in internal combustion engines and emit CO2. We have to stop emitting CO2. That means we're looking for total electrification.
So, how to generate clean energy? We can't. Yet.
Another lie. Thin film solar panels last 10-20 years and repay their energy investment in under 3. PV panels would repay their energy investment in under 7 years back in the 1970s. Since the invention of the MPPT inverter, it has been feasible to build inexpensive storage arrays.
And solar is available for only a few hours a day and at peak efficiency only when the sun is unobstructed by clouds. At other times, we need (cheap) energy storage that we do not have. Therefore this methodology is currently unviable for replacing the common sources of electricity involving fossil or nuclear fuels.
The best thing to do is wait.
If all you're going to do is gaze at your navel, at this point you might as well put your head down a little farther and kiss your ass goodbye.
Waiting means allowing all those scientists who are working furiously at the behest of the left's boogeyman, greed, to be the 1st to make electricity viable for all things currently fueled by fossil fuels or nuclear power. They are working furiously to find the magic battery, and they are working furiously to raise the efficiency and longevity of solar panels. If we wait for that, we're going to get it. Gov't action on this is most likely to simply get in their way. So doing nothing is doing something - Lee Iacocca said, "Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way." Waiting would be getting out of the way.
Well, liberalville was in reference to the anti-gun atmosphere, which Ohio also shares. I'm from Ohio too, and most of the time that I've been hit by car interior thieves its been in Toledo. 70's and 80's, mostly.
And of course you don't want open carry 'cuz then you have to be Arnold to be strong enough to retain it if someone sees it and decides to try to take it away from you. Concealed is the way to go, so's people don't see it and try to take it from you and shoot you with it.
You sound like you're really stuck out there in Liberalville, with getting ripped off every time you turn around. Move to Virginia. About every 3rd person I talk to tells me they're carrying, and I suppose if anyone F's with them, it will earn them a bullet. I have radios in my car, antennas on it all over the place, one car is a red Subaru WRX and the other a new Jeep, and people just don't mess out here as much. Don't ask me. But I like it.
Can't say why your car gets targeted when it is displaying no stealables inside. I stopped getting broken into via the "messy car defense." That is, I kept newspapers and coats / hoodies in the car, and if there was anything in the car I thought would be interesting to a thief, I threw a newspaper or a coat over it. Has worked great for me for about 20 years. Car is a mess, but the mess is all mine, and its the same mess when I come out of the movie or bar or wherever as the mess I left it in when I went in.
What insurance is for. Nobody's f'd with my car for decades... A good train station lot will be secure with patrols...
You're not going to telecommute your part in turning out the day's tonnage of new steel - we're bringing back manufacturing, remember?
Needed to get there with _my_ car which was special-modified for what I was doing there, explained in a response above in this thread.
The objective is to get to the destination with my (268 horsepower, all-wheel-drive) rally car for 2 road rallies. Can't rent anything like it, and the car was already set up for the rallying anyway - lots of mods for time and distance measuring, as the rallies were TSD, or Time-Speed-Distance rallies. Had a great time. But needed to get there with _my_ car to have the best chance of winning.
None are actually vacations, as I'm retired. No, I'm not living with the temperature turned down to "frostbite" and eating dog food, I have a nice pension, an annuity bought with the proceeds of a 401k-like structure, and a little Social Security. I travel a lot, or at least used to, as I was rallying with the Sports Car Club of America. I was going to a road rally in Tucson from Virginia when I did that 800 miles. I've been other places this year, too. Intend to be in St. Louis rallying in November. Rich? Nope, but not poor, either.
Nope. There's armies of scientists attempting to solve the battery and clean energy problems, and will eventually be successful, most probably. They DON'T need a bunch of meddlesome laws to do it. The incentive is already there, because they're going to be fabulously rich if they succeed. They are racing to be the 1st with the magic battery and the 100% efficient solar cell. Making a bunch of laws on the subject is more likely to screw things up than help.
They unfortunately abandoned the real solution, changing out the depleted battery for a fully charged one. When they were promising that, I was interested. But the superchargers now do not fully charge the battery in that 1/2 hour, so you don't get your full 300 miles. I was pretty much at my limit at 800 miles, so if I had to throw 3 or 4 1/2 hour charge sessions in there, I'd have gotten maybe 600 - 650 miles instead of 800. That means an extra motel going to Tucson, which means another $100, maybe more.
I'm waiting for the real solution, it is coming. No, actually I will probably never see it, as I'm 71. They'll get it working the day after I croak. But for the state of the environment in the year 2100, I think it will be sufficiently perfected and we'll be leaving the carbon in the ground as far as fuels are concerned. Lubricants and petrochemicals will still be a market for the oil, but we won't have to burn it to get from point A to point B.
The problem is taking 8 hours to recharge the car. We can't fast-charge yet like we can fuel a car with gasoline. We need to be able to do that and we can't. So electric cars are not truly viable yet.
You seem to think that passing a law is going to do something great for the planet. It won't. There is absolutely no affordable alternative to burning fossil fuels right now, and for the foreseeable future. We don't need to "reduce" fossil fuel use, we need to stop, and leave them in the ground. No law is going to achieve that. Only determined men and women in white coats living in laboratories have a chance to do that. We don't know how to store electricity sufficiently to use in in automotive _or_ grid electrical usages. We just don't. When someone figures that out, then they have to figure out how to generate it without generating CO2. People keep hollering that nukes generate way too much CO2 by the concrete that is used for their construction - approx 400,000 cubic feet, but you know what? Those wind machines have a minimum of 250 cubic yards of concrete in each of their foundations, and so far there are 52,000 of them that equal about the same output, 8 gigawatts, as the largest nuke complex which is somewhere in Japan. There's supposedly 7 reactors in that one, so figure 2.8 million cubic yards of concrete, but the 52,000 wind machines already have 13 million cubic feet of concrete. The CO2 is released when concrete is manufactured and calcium carbonate, CaCO3 is reduced to lime and CO2, which gets vented. Maybe it could be sequestered, but that would likely dramatically raise the cost. But anyway, 8 Gigwatts isn't anywhere close to our grid usage right now, and if we add all our cars, trucks, ships, airplanes, railroad locomotives, and so forth, there would be a wind generator in every outdoor photograph taken in the borders of the USA including the National Parks.
So, how to generate clean energy? We can't. Yet. Clean energy looks a lot like geothermal, but we'd have to be able to drill a hole deep enough pretty much everywhere, and we don't know how to drill that deeply yet.
Meanwhile, this damned CAFE gov't meddling in the marketplace will have the usual results of making things more expensive. Making things more expensive creates poor people, costs the gov't in welfare payments, increases Federal gov't borrowing, and prevents those not in poverty from nevertheless buying new cars because they're too expensive. They keep the old ones that pollute more, get less gas mileage, and defeat the main objectives of cleaner and more efficient. Unintended consequences.
The best thing to do is wait. There is absolutely huge incentive already to make electric cars work, as well as electric everything-else. Why? Becuase electricity is cheap compared to fossil fuels. If you could get a fully functional electric car, it would have a fuel cost equivalent of around low 1-dollar-a-gallon range. Maybe $1.12 / gallon equivalent for an electric. It would also have insane torque making it a virutal race car, and people would LOVE their electric cars, as long as they could do my 1st day of vacation this year, which was an 800 mile drive. Left Virginia, I think it was Arkansas where I first stopped, just short of Texas. Make electric cars that can do that, they'll sell like hotcakes and you won't need the gov't telling anyone what to do. The market will force it. And trying to tell people what to do before the science is ready to support it will just cause misery and probably make the air dirtier and burn more fossil fuels instead of less because of the old cars still on the road that wouldn't be if new ones weren't insanely expensive because they're electric before electric is ready.
First day of my first vacation this year was 800 miles. Yeah, people drive farther than 1 tank of gas.
or any gun is not something to worry about. Guns are most useful for defense. They are unnecessary for the murderer. The murderer has a wide variety of implements to use to commit murder. Want to murder one guy? Knife, pushing out a high window, blackjack, most anything that can be made at home with a sharp edge or swingable mass. No problem, there will always be instruments to kill with.
The gun is the victim's weapon. The gun is the only thing that is portable enough and powerful enough to overcome the surprise attack of the murderer. Sometimes. A sneak attack with a swung mass is probably still going to win, but is at least more dangerous to the murderer if the victim is armed and maybe detects the attack beforehand, turns around and busts a cap in his ass.
We would would be waaaaaay better off if the 25,000+ US gun laws were _all_ repealed tonight. Tomorrow the world, or at least the US would be a far more dangerous thing for the criminals, and about the same amount of danger for the victims, since the gun control laws all have one thing in common, they do not work, not even a little bit. Any law saying a criminal can't have a gun is useless, because they're criminals and by definition don't obey laws. You say you don't want this ex-felon to have a gun? Fine, put him back in prison, its the only way to stop him from having a gun. Meanwhile, make his depredations absolutely as difficult as possible, since any victim, or any good samaritan bystander, can make his life much shorter if he attempts to harm someone.
And its so funny, on the tube after a mass shooting, some brainless twit will say, "Way back in the 60's and 70's, we didn't have all these mass shootings, we've had 1000's of new gun control laws since then, and now we have mass shootings all over the place. What changed?" Well, duh, they TV twit answered his own question right in its text, the 1000's of new gun control laws is want changed. They disarmed the 1st responders. The 1st responders are not someone you call on the telephone, they're the people that happen to be on the scene at the outset of the shooting. They are all unarmed due to dumbass gun control laws. In the 60's, even the kids, the high school kids, would have a gun in their car or truck to go hunting with on the way home from school, or participate in a shooting team match. Now the victims are defenseless, the mass shooters know it, and... you have a mass shooting every week or 2, with nobody to blame but ourselves for making all these counterproductive gun laws.
...to attempt to control every nook and cranny of your life.
Doing that turns a 1/2 hour lunch into a 1 hour lunch while you walk or drive to someplace you like, and so your time out the door is another 1/2 hour later, and that sucks. Probably will make the waits for service in the restaurants longer too as 1000's of new customers stress the ability of the kitchen to be able to turn out that much food in that short of a time.
Liberalville is a terrible place to live...
Yep, most of the movies aren't that great, and they're not trying all that hard either. Why not? Because people will go see Batman XXV, or Jaws 50, or whatever, so its a formula that is likely to pay for the production costs. One-off artsy films trying to be great are very difficult to do and require rare talent, so rare that they often just flop 'cuz that talent is rare, and those that try and aren't rare talents produce ho-hum stuff that people don't go to, or don't go to a 2nd time or buy or rent the DVD. But when you "see everything", there's that one that you go to, don't know a thing about because there haven't been any trailers, and... it is excellent. That's what makes seeing everything worth it.
Every now and then you get a really good one. Rent "Bad Samaritan." No, you probably didn't see it, it was unadvertised, had no trailers, and was in the theater for maybe a week or 2, can't remember for sure. But it was one of the best films I've seen this year, and scary as hell all the way through. That's what going to the movies and seeing everything is about, the rare gem.
I'm probably the reason they're in trouble, because, "I see everything." Not really, I don't go to the ones that are "Too stupid for words." That would be stuff like "Dumb and Dumber" or this current thing with the Abba songs, "Mamma Mia." The trend toward female-centric movies where the men are either idiots or irrelevant are a turn-off and that's one of 'em. The biggest notable disappointment in the last year was the Star Wars flick with all the important positions being female, and the males were mostly idiots or irrelevant. Having battle commanders being female, pretty much all of 'em, isn't even believable - the gals just don't aspire to such positions in sufficient numbers to turn out to be the best at it and be placed in command over guys who have studied / play-acted it / and aspired to it ever since the could go forth sans diapers.
But anyway, I'm going to have to pay for the major movies? What else is new, I see those mostly as IMAX and/or 3D anyway which isn't covered and never has been by MP. I see all the new movies as they open, and probably achieve a state of having seen everything that's playing in town by Monday. So, they are not going to be as lucrative as they were? 'Sall right, I made my $105.35 yearly subscription back in about 6 weeks of admission prices I didn't pay. If the yearly had been $400, I'd still be making $$$, and I'd probably still have bought it. Maybe MP should have several tiers of usage, with people like me paying more, and those not paying more being limited to, say, 2 non-IMAX, non-3D movies a week and for a higher $ than $105.35 / yr. I actually saw all this nonsense coming, and got the yearly since lots of stuff they're doing to the monthly people would be a violation of the contract for yearly people. I've been much less affected as a result.
So, this last January, when all the oscar-hopefuls that officially opened in December hit the local theaters, I spent $85 in admission to movies. Yeah, I track that stuff. $65 the next month. MP is going to be a savings for me pretty much no matter what they do, and if they are paying for movies like "Bad Samaritan" that came thru last month, was there for maybe a week, and almost nobody saw, but was absolutely excellent and scary as hell throughout, and I saw twice, I'll still be "winning." Just hope they can hang on.
If you go to the movies often, you know how many minutes are ads and previews. In fact, as I have noticed pretty much everywhere, ads occur before the official starting time, and previews occur after tha official starting time. Locally, the Regal has 20 minutes of previews, and the Paragon has 10. Not sure about Marquee as I don't go to it that often, but I think its about 10.
OTOH, I don't much mind what's going on on the screen as I am fine with paying attention to my phone right up to the start of the actual movie. Probably playing Words With Friends or browsing Facebook. But I just enjoy the moviegoing experience - go sit in the dark for 2 - 4 hours, depending on how early I get there and how long it is (Return of the King? ), eat without having to prepare the food (popping the popcorn, for instance), and leave without having to clean up. Very convenient, and who knows I might run into someone I know, too. Twice in the last 7 days.
Hopefully MP can get their act together. I am using them to maximum advantage since I see nearly everything.
Breathing is illegal...
...things Apple for their scurrilous business practices (If you have to ask, you just haven't been paying attention...) I would not be buying something without a headphone jack.
The USA is not well-served. There's millions of people, I expect, not-in-cities and far off the cable routes that just don't have access other than the damned geosynchro satellites, which means they're useless for some specific applications like first person shooter games, anything else requiring quick response. There's plenty of people in my own county which don't have the cable access, and have to rely on lesser means. The county is even getting involved in providing service to everybody. I'm concerned because the cable I do have works great, and I don't want a gov't-run thing making my cable economically unviable. I could even lose cable TV, and don't want to, and cable phone. Don't want to lose that either.
So... LEO satellites. Yeah, there's millions of Americans that could use that. Make it broadband enough, and cable TV, sat, and phone could all be nuked for wireless. Don't think that much bandwidth exists, tho.
...by simply disconnecting it from USB. Completely corrupted. Got it back by reformatting, but the data was toast. You simply yank it out with a risk of losing everything on it. Stupid computer says its in use, I simply shut down, disconnect, reboot. I won't ever just disconnect again.
Steelmaking... but then it probably wouldn't be "waste" heat...