Why do we willingly accept swimming pools, bathtubs and electrical outlets...l
There is a movement to put fences around swimming pools to prevent toddlers from falling in. Electrical plugs outlets have child safety plugs. We are OK with technology that restricts access to these things and that is very similar to smart guns.
Nowadays, code requires new construction to use electrical sockets with automatic shutters to prevent kids sticking things in the slots. Oddly, the National Outlet Manufacturers' Association did not lobby Congress to vote down this assault on our freedoms.
Ignoring the hypothetical scenarios, the question boils down to this: what do we actually gain from all the added complexity that this tech will add to the gun? Is the perceived increase in safety only nominal or is it substantial? Does DRM for a gun make the gun more or less useful? I'd say that that DRM for a gun always makes it less useful, EVEN if it stops a perp from stealing a gun and using it against the owner.
Perhaps we should just start calling a spade a spade here. It's not "smart gun technology", it's DRM for your gun.
Leave us not forget the "gun lobby", in the form of the NRA, won't even permit addition of taggants to gunpowder or other explosives, to allow identification. https://www.nraila.org/article...
Leave us not forget the "gun lobby", in the form of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the NRA's less reasonable sibling, based most ironically in Newtown, CT) won't even permit microstamping technology to be mandated, wherein the brass casing gets imprinted with the serial number of the gun when fired, to enable tracing after a crime has been committed. Hard to figure exactly how that would make it harder for lawful people to acquire firearms, lead to government confiscating your guns, make using the gun in non-criminal situations more problematic, or even add much to the cost. The guy who has the patent has said anyone could use it free. Apparently it's just way beyond the bounds of current technology. Who knew? http://www.sfgate.com/news/art... Even though it turns out Tasers leave their IDs behind when they're used. (Who knew?) https://news.vice.com/article/... Even though it's been demonstrated. http://microstamp.blogspot.com...
I dunno about you but I'd gladly take the tradeoff of a gun that fires 99.999% of the time when I want it to if it also fires 0% of the time if someone wrestles it out of my grasp or some less responsible member of the household somehow manages to get a hold of it and starts messing around with it.
In testing, the armatix iP1 failed more like 50% of the time. Would you buy a gun that costs between 3 and 5 times what a dumb handgun costs and fails that often? Also, it apparently requires 15 minutes before first bullet on boot up, are you willing to wait that long to defend yourself?
No one is against smart guns. People are against unreliable, and expensive "smart" guns, and against state mandates for their use.
A couple of years ago, self-driving cars were an insanely blue-sky concept. Now they're talking like we'll be seeing them in production by 2020. Maybe it's all hype. But apparently huge leaps in development of unlikely technology is where we're at these days.
I guess you missed the part where that lady bought a gun to defend herself against her abusive husband who then took it out of her hands in a struggle and shot her with it. Would you care to explain how any of your snark addresses that?
Ironically, the number of women who actually shoot an abusive spouse is very low; less than the number who do get shot by the gun they acquired to defend themselves. And of course the number of abusive wives who shoot a husband is also very low. Perhaps the easiest idea is a smart gun that won't function when it senses a Y chromosome holding it.
I dunno about you but I'd gladly take the tradeoff of a gun that fires 99.999% of the time when I want it to if it also fires 0% of the time if someone wrestles it out of my grasp or some less responsible member of the household somehow manages to get a hold of it and starts messing around with it.
So perhaps you should properly secure your firearms if there are others in your household at any time that may do something stupid with them. Safes were invented eons ago; there's no need to bring modern technology into the equation. Smart guns will not prevent your abusive spouse problem. There are already 300+ million regular guns in existence in this country alone. You'd have to somehow get rid of all of those, and then completely prevent some abuse asshole from getting his own smart gun. Good luck with that. More technological solutions for a societal problem.
Arguably, the fraction of firearm homicides most avoidable in the US is "crimes of passion" "temporary insanity" type stuff, including both suicides and domestic violence type (or friend violence) cases, often with substance abuse involved; where there is no plan to kill or to use a weapon for robbery or other purpose, but one person assaults another (or himself) on the spur of the moment with whatever is at hand; and the effectiveness of a firearm makes it lethal. The kind where the perpetrator is found standing over the body staring blankly. (not in suicides, though).
Because essentially all domestic violence homicides involve a handgun kept loaded and unlocked and easily accessible. Apparently people who are insanely enraged at their spouse can't even be bothered to load a handgun that was available but unloaded.
Of course, that also applies to accidental shootings by 2 year olds, etc. but there really aren't a lot of those.
The question is, how exactly do you get it across to people that maybe keeping a loaded pistol on the kitchen table isn't a great idea.
Do you have any statistics about smart guns failing? I have some stats I pulled out of somewhere that say smart guns are 105% more reliable than normal guns so that's definitely something police would want.
Doesn't that mean that their failure rate is less than zero?
States like NJ who already have laws on the books mandating all guns sold in the state must use smart tech once it becomes widely available
NJ's law isn't even "widely available". It's "30 months after ONE model is available for sale". Police are completely exempted, of course. So let's say that I create a system that works, sort of. It's $2k for a.22lr pistol, and the pistol can't be anything stronger because the shock from firing calibers.380 and up is enough to destroy the electronics.
30 months after that, even if NOBODY else has released such a pistol, legally speaking, my firearm would be the only one legal to sell in NJ. Restricting everybody to a $2k.22.
Modern cars are safer, but not because of their computers. They are safer because of extra airbags, crumple zones and improved seat belts. Their computers just mean that when they fail you can't fix them yourself anymore.
When three law of robotics are programmed into car computers, safety will improve.
Well there's the problem of police guns getting stolen and police guns being grabbed and used against the officers. Smart guns are a valid solution to that. Cars are much more complex (with extra points of failure), but modern smarter cars are much safer than older non-smart cars, no reason to believe the same wouldn't happen with guns.
Read (private) detective story couple of weeks ago. Don't remember title or author. Bad guy gets detective's gun, tries to shoot him. Gun blows up in bad guy's hand. Later, detective explains: gun (some model of revolver I can't remember, a Colt maybe?) has reputation of blowing up when cylinders get worn; so he bored out all cylinders a tiny bit, stuck a layer of power down onto the back of the cylinder somehow; don't remember if he blocked the barrel or used blanks or what. So anyway, the idea is the gun is going to blow up if taken from him and fired at him. "But what do you do when you need to shoot?" Detective pulls other gun from ankle holster.
The place i live now is a Flat rate unless i use more than 90SqM of water, then they charge me more (i can fill my swimming pool 3 times with that amount)
When i lived in the small city, they charged me as i used the water. no flat rate. my ater bill there was significantly smaller than where i live now. (like $30 a month, as opposed to $100 a month)
Huh. that latter leads to the strange situation where the utility nags you to conserve and use less, then when everybody's conserving and using less the utility has to raise the rates to keep in business.
A steam engine?? Its one of the most inefficient engines types ever designed. You have to put a huge amount of energy in to get water up to boiling point before you can get any useful energy out and most of the rest of what you do put in is lost as heat before it can do any useful work anyway.
The steam engine was fine in an era with plentiful coal when no one cared about any kind of pollution , never mind greenhouse gases, but in the 21st century its a complete non starter.
they have this stuff called insulation now that lets you put a huge amount of energy into water, and keep it at that temp with a minimal input of energy. look into it, it will revolutionize your home water heater,
plus i'm not sure "one of the most inefficient engine types ever designed" would not be one that has a cooling system with a big radiator attached to siphon off a lot of energy from the burning fuel to keep it from melting.
That works fine for trains and boats, but here on roads we need to occasionally stop.
In cities we need to stop a lot, therefore the pollution from engines is worse. A steam or stirling engine isn't going to help much here when I need power right the heck now, not in five minutes when the engine heats up. Hybrid engines are more smooth on power use since you can divert energy into the batteries and get it back quick without taxing the gas engine. Even trains do this.
But in that case, you might as well go full electric and eliminate the heat engine entirely.
if there were any way to store energy as efficiently as liquid hydrocarbons (or even compressed/liquefied gaseous hydrocarbons) the world would change A Lot. and the spinoffs would be tremendous also, like cellphones that go for 48 hours between charges or something.
what's all this about diesel being dirty? just because vin diesel plays a rough around the edges guy in the movies does not mean he does not keep up personal hygiene. I'm sure he's as clean as many Europeans and i don't know why they would outlaw him!!
That's not true: you should just treat it as more of a Chevy Volt-style hybrid system, where the ECU is designed to let the battery discharge to the point that the engine will run long enough that it spends a good proportion of it at normal operating temperature. (Plus, if you do that then you can size the engine for average output instead of peak output, i.e., smaller, which means it'll come up to temp even faster.)
heating up the catalyst is one of the frontiers of auto design now, alright. thus the migration of catalysts over the past years from beneath the floorboards to right after the exhaust ports. i read somewhere (so it must be true) that the majority of the pollution from modern cars is produced in the brief interval after cold start (which implies that letting it idle might actually not be worse than turning it off) and that manufacturers are experimenting with electrically heated catalytic coverters
The only recycling of exhaust that a turbocharger does, is that it uses the pressure of exhaust gasses to spin a turbine to compress the intake air. No exhaust gas is ever re-introduced into the intake, as that would completely coat the charge pipe in soot, ruin any O2 sensors, coat the inside of any intercooler that is present and decrease it's operating efficiency, and deprive the engine of oxygen for combustion per unit volume.
Indeed. in an engine which doesn't accelerate, turbo lag isn't a problem, so a giant turbocharger can be used to generate huge intake boost without big inertia penalty; this works even better with a diesel (or other direct injection engine it seems to me) because you can use a lot of cam overlap to ensure good breathing without blowing a lot of your fuel out the exhaust during the overlap. so you end up harvesting a lot of energy from the exhaust which would otherwise be wasted, in some ways, a really efficient big industrial turbocharged diesel can be viewed as the diesel itself just being a source of exhaust for the turbo. and of course providing a place where you can tap into the system mechanically and actually get some energy out of it.
Well, except for the part where we're destroying huge swaths of forests/rain forests and that acidification of the ocean is killing off huge amours of the algae that would normally yum up some extra CO2
S, yes, as a matter of fact, CO2 IS a problem
oh you liberals, always so dour looking at the down side of progress. look on the advantages of rising CO2 levels globally; whole oceans made up of seltzer! literally! who wouldn't like that?
Are you serious? Yes, NoX is affected by sunlight - it creates ozone. Very unhealthy.
The OP's point is not that NOx isn't noxious, it's that it isn't persistent. The ozone created by sunlight on NOX is unstable and breaks down quickly. If we stopped pumping NOx into the atmosphere, it and its byproducts would all be gone in a matter of weeks. The same can't be said of CO2.
and it's relatively localized. what happens in beijing stays in beijing, so to speak.
i meant you had the better understanding of the process (physical/engineering), not that i had a better understanding of the process. I'm humble that way.
That's not how urea works. Urea is used uniquely to reduce NOx by reacting to produce H2O and N2. They have zero effects on particulate matter. Particulate matter is a direct byproduct of incomplete combustion (any combustion) that takes place regardless of post-combustion treatments (like urea injection). The only "solution" in used for particulate is simply a trap, which blocks all but the smaller particles. When the filter is saturated, extra diesel fuel is injected in it and additional high temperature combustion within the filter breaks down the particulate to fine stuff. The fine stuff that now seems to be the problem. Bottom line: industry tried to mitigate an intrinsic problem of diesel cars and by doing so they created new problems. The only real solution is mve past diesel. Heck even old style gas engine are better, mostly when coupled with e-motors (as in hybrids).
yeah, better understanding of the process. it's marketing driven, as everything ends up being. VW saw itself in competition with toyota for global domination of the auto market. it saw toyota as staking out the hybrid car franchise; it saw its opening as owning the diesel franchise, the idea being that they could achieve equal mileage and emissions with diesel without the hybrid's added "user abrasion", i.e. excess hardware and weight and expense. to that end, the goal had to be to reduce user abrasion from the diesel; so when the emissions standards for NOx required either urea injection or another technology, they turned away from urea because the added requirements of a urea tank and periodic urea purchase and fill constituted said user abrasion, and their initial success in the whole computer modulated richness catalysis (not the official name, i just made that up) led them to believe they could ride that pony to the finish line.
in a healthy organization, when the folks making that last bit happen realized it couldn't be done, at least by them given the parameters they had to work with, that information would have filtered up the management chain and one of the preceding decisions would be changed. in a pathological organization, which is probably the majority of large companies, information is a one way downwards transfer; i tell you what i want, and you don't tell me the laws of physics don't permit it, because my boss is telling me what he wants and i don't get to tell him the laws of physics don't permit it. and thinks the laws of physics trump his bosses' wishes gets fired, and i'd rather that be you than me.
the day your boss tells you to do "do whatever you have to do to make this happen, failure is not an option" is the day you have the choice between quitting, getting fired, and ending up stammering while being interviewed by a reporter as to what made you commit some crime or other.
Your comments highlight the crux of the problem. Back in the day, inefficient (read truck like) diesel were shooting out black smoke. That particulate is large in size (10 or 100 of microns) that you actually "see". Improvements in efficiencies (both in combustion and trapping) made modern "clean engines" reduced the size of particulate to few microns. Those are much more difficult to see. Yet they are far more dangerous. Large particulate is trapped in your upper respiratory tract, the fine stuff gets deep in your lungs, often bioaccumulaating like abspestos does. You know how the stoey goes. Not because you don't see it it means it's not there...
Next time stick a paper towel on the exhaust of your cold diesel and leave it there for a few minutes. Look at the color. Now you have somerhing to "see".
True. Same deal as the old "marijuana is more carcinogenic than tobacco!' scare. But the particles are large and, as you say, susceptible to efficient filtration by the upper respiratory system which routinely coughs such stuff up, cigarettes as currently manufactured produce much smaller particles which penetrate much further and are retained essentially indefinitely.
"Funny, I've never seen ANY kind of visible smoke coming out of my new diesel sedan, even under hard revving"
Thats because you're at the front driving it.
Haven't seen any smoke coming out of diesels built in the last decade at least for a while, including Mercedes, VWs, and Detroit pickup trucks. And I notice them.
Shh, don't tell them that, they'll ban all combustion! If you can classify every product of a chemical reaction as pollution, it's not that far fetched. Which of these isn't a greenhouse gas: A) CO2, B) H20? Well that's all you need to know about environmentalists today.
"Excuse me, you're screwing up the planet" "Well how else can I go fast? It's a free country! You can't tell me not to screw up the planet! "
Slashdot Mirror
Why do we willingly accept swimming pools, bathtubs and electrical outlets ...l
There is a movement to put fences around swimming pools to prevent toddlers from falling in. Electrical plugs outlets have child safety plugs. We are OK with technology that restricts access to these things and that is very similar to smart guns.
Nowadays, code requires new construction to use electrical sockets with automatic shutters to prevent kids sticking things in the slots. Oddly, the National Outlet Manufacturers' Association did not lobby Congress to vote down this assault on our freedoms.
Ignoring the hypothetical scenarios, the question boils down to this: what do we actually gain from all the added complexity that this tech will add to the gun? Is the perceived increase in safety only nominal or is it substantial? Does DRM for a gun make the gun more or less useful? I'd say that that DRM for a gun always makes it less useful, EVEN if it stops a perp from stealing a gun and using it against the owner.
Perhaps we should just start calling a spade a spade here. It's not "smart gun technology", it's DRM for your gun.
Leave us not forget the "gun lobby", in the form of the NRA, won't even permit addition of taggants to gunpowder or other explosives, to allow identification. https://www.nraila.org/article...
Leave us not forget the "gun lobby", in the form of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the NRA's less reasonable sibling, based most ironically in Newtown, CT) won't even permit microstamping technology to be mandated, wherein the brass casing gets imprinted with the serial number of the gun when fired, to enable tracing after a crime has been committed. Hard to figure exactly how that would make it harder for lawful people to acquire firearms, lead to government confiscating your guns, make using the gun in non-criminal situations more problematic, or even add much to the cost. The guy who has the patent has said anyone could use it free. Apparently it's just way beyond the bounds of current technology. Who knew? http://www.sfgate.com/news/art... Even though it turns out Tasers leave their IDs behind when they're used. (Who knew?) https://news.vice.com/article/... Even though it's been demonstrated. http://microstamp.blogspot.com...
I dunno about you but I'd gladly take the tradeoff of a gun that fires 99.999% of the time when I want it to if it also fires 0% of the time if someone wrestles it out of my grasp or some less responsible member of the household somehow manages to get a hold of it and starts messing around with it.
In testing, the armatix iP1 failed more like 50% of the time. Would you buy a gun that costs between 3 and 5 times what a dumb handgun costs and fails that often? Also, it apparently requires 15 minutes before first bullet on boot up, are you willing to wait that long to defend yourself?
http://www.americas1stfreedom....
No one is against smart guns. People are against unreliable, and expensive "smart" guns, and against state mandates for their use.
A couple of years ago, self-driving cars were an insanely blue-sky concept. Now they're talking like we'll be seeing them in production by 2020. Maybe it's all hype. But apparently huge leaps in development of unlikely technology is where we're at these days.
I guess you missed the part where that lady bought a gun to defend herself against her abusive husband who then took it out of her hands in a struggle and shot her with it. Would you care to explain how any of your snark addresses that?
Ironically, the number of women who actually shoot an abusive spouse is very low; less than the number who do get shot by the gun they acquired to defend themselves. And of course the number of abusive wives who shoot a husband is also very low.
Perhaps the easiest idea is a smart gun that won't function when it senses a Y chromosome holding it.
I dunno about you but I'd gladly take the tradeoff of a gun that fires 99.999% of the time when I want it to if it also fires 0% of the time if someone wrestles it out of my grasp or some less responsible member of the household somehow manages to get a hold of it and starts messing around with it.
Or the abusive spouse problem:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/having-a-gun-in-the-house-doesnt-make-a-woman-safer/284022/
Smart guns would prevent that.
So perhaps you should properly secure your firearms if there are others in your household at any time that may do something stupid with them. Safes were invented eons ago; there's no need to bring modern technology into the equation. Smart guns will not prevent your abusive spouse problem. There are already 300+ million regular guns in existence in this country alone. You'd have to somehow get rid of all of those, and then completely prevent some abuse asshole from getting his own smart gun. Good luck with that. More technological solutions for a societal problem.
Arguably, the fraction of firearm homicides most avoidable in the US is "crimes of passion" "temporary insanity" type stuff, including both suicides and domestic violence type (or friend violence) cases, often with substance abuse involved; where there is no plan to kill or to use a weapon for robbery or other purpose, but one person assaults another (or himself) on the spur of the moment with whatever is at hand; and the effectiveness of a firearm makes it lethal. The kind where the perpetrator is found standing over the body staring blankly. (not in suicides, though).
Because essentially all domestic violence homicides involve a handgun kept loaded and unlocked and easily accessible. Apparently people who are insanely enraged at their spouse can't even be bothered to load a handgun that was available but unloaded.
Of course, that also applies to accidental shootings by 2 year olds, etc. but there really aren't a lot of those.
The question is, how exactly do you get it across to people that maybe keeping a loaded pistol on the kitchen table isn't a great idea.
Yes http://www.americas1stfreedom....
The first few models of dumb guns weren't all that great either.
Do you have any statistics about smart guns failing? I have some stats I pulled out of somewhere that say smart guns are 105% more reliable than normal guns so that's definitely something police would want.
Doesn't that mean that their failure rate is less than zero?
States like NJ who already have laws on the books mandating all guns sold in the state must use smart tech once it becomes widely available
NJ's law isn't even "widely available". It's "30 months after ONE model is available for sale". Police are completely exempted, of course. So let's say that I create a system that works, sort of. It's $2k for a .22lr pistol, and the pistol can't be anything stronger because the shock from firing calibers .380 and up is enough to destroy the electronics.
30 months after that, even if NOBODY else has released such a pistol, legally speaking, my firearm would be the only one legal to sell in NJ. Restricting everybody to a $2k .22.
Does that apply to used weapon sales as well?
Modern cars are safer, but not because of their computers. They are safer because of extra airbags, crumple zones and improved seat belts. Their computers just mean that when they fail you can't fix them yourself anymore.
When three law of robotics are programmed into car computers, safety will improve.
Well there's the problem of police guns getting stolen and police guns being grabbed and used against the officers. Smart guns are a valid solution to that. Cars are much more complex (with extra points of failure), but modern smarter cars are much safer than older non-smart cars, no reason to believe the same wouldn't happen with guns.
Read (private) detective story couple of weeks ago. Don't remember title or author. Bad guy gets detective's gun, tries to shoot him. Gun blows up in bad guy's hand. Later, detective explains: gun (some model of revolver I can't remember, a Colt maybe?) has reputation of blowing up when cylinders get worn; so he bored out all cylinders a tiny bit, stuck a layer of power down onto the back of the cylinder somehow; don't remember if he blocked the barrel or used blanks or what. So anyway, the idea is the gun is going to blow up if taken from him and fired at him. "But what do you do when you need to shoot?" Detective pulls other gun from ankle holster.
Depends on where you are.
The place i live now is a Flat rate unless i use more than 90SqM of water, then they charge me more (i can fill my swimming pool 3 times with that amount)
When i lived in the small city, they charged me as i used the water. no flat rate. my ater bill there was significantly smaller than where i live now. (like $30 a month, as opposed to $100 a month)
Huh. that latter leads to the strange situation where the utility nags you to conserve and use less, then when everybody's conserving and using less the utility has to raise the rates to keep in business.
A steam engine?? Its one of the most inefficient engines types ever designed. You have to put a huge amount of energy in to get water up to boiling point before you can get any useful energy out and most of the rest of what you do put in is lost as heat before it can do any useful work anyway.
The steam engine was fine in an era with plentiful coal when no one cared about any kind of pollution , never mind greenhouse gases, but in the 21st century its a complete non starter.
they have this stuff called insulation now that lets you put a huge amount of energy into water, and keep it at that temp with a minimal input of energy. look into it, it will revolutionize your home water heater, plus i'm not sure "one of the most inefficient engine types ever designed" would not be one that has a cooling system with a big radiator attached to siphon off a lot of energy from the burning fuel to keep it from melting.
That works fine for trains and boats, but here on roads we need to occasionally stop.
In cities we need to stop a lot, therefore the pollution from engines is worse. A steam or stirling engine isn't going to help much here when I need power right the heck now, not in five minutes when the engine heats up. Hybrid engines are more smooth on power use since you can divert energy into the batteries and get it back quick without taxing the gas engine. Even trains do this.
But in that case, you might as well go full electric and eliminate the heat engine entirely.
if there were any way to store energy as efficiently as liquid hydrocarbons (or even compressed/liquefied gaseous hydrocarbons) the world would change A Lot. and the spinoffs would be tremendous also, like cellphones that go for 48 hours between charges or something.
what's all this about diesel being dirty? just because vin diesel plays a rough around the edges guy in the movies does not mean he does not keep up personal hygiene. I'm sure he's as clean as many Europeans and i don't know why they would outlaw him!!
That's not true: you should just treat it as more of a Chevy Volt-style hybrid system, where the ECU is designed to let the battery discharge to the point that the engine will run long enough that it spends a good proportion of it at normal operating temperature. (Plus, if you do that then you can size the engine for average output instead of peak output, i.e., smaller, which means it'll come up to temp even faster.)
heating up the catalyst is one of the frontiers of auto design now, alright. thus the migration of catalysts over the past years from beneath the floorboards to right after the exhaust ports. i read somewhere (so it must be true) that the majority of the pollution from modern cars is produced in the brief interval after cold start (which implies that letting it idle might actually not be worse than turning it off) and that manufacturers are experimenting with electrically heated catalytic coverters
What the fuck are you talking about? I don't know what "built stronger" means, and diesel engines most certainly do not need to be turbocharged.
built ford tough! what? no? sorry, never mind.
The only recycling of exhaust that a turbocharger does, is that it uses the pressure of exhaust gasses to spin a turbine to compress the intake air. No exhaust gas is ever re-introduced into the intake, as that would completely coat the charge pipe in soot, ruin any O2 sensors, coat the inside of any intercooler that is present and decrease it's operating efficiency, and deprive the engine of oxygen for combustion per unit volume.
Indeed. in an engine which doesn't accelerate, turbo lag isn't a problem, so a giant turbocharger can be used to generate huge intake boost without big inertia penalty; this works even better with a diesel (or other direct injection engine it seems to me) because you can use a lot of cam overlap to ensure good breathing without blowing a lot of your fuel out the exhaust during the overlap. so you end up harvesting a lot of energy from the exhaust which would otherwise be wasted, in some ways, a really efficient big industrial turbocharged diesel can be viewed as the diesel itself just being a source of exhaust for the turbo. and of course providing a place where you can tap into the system mechanically and actually get some energy out of it.
Why would acidification hurt algae?
because algae are notoriously liberals.
Well, except for the part where we're destroying huge swaths of forests /rain forests and that acidification of the ocean is killing off huge amours of the algae that would normally yum up some extra CO2
S, yes, as a matter of fact, CO2 IS a problem
oh you liberals, always so dour looking at the down side of progress. look on the advantages of rising CO2 levels globally; whole oceans made up of seltzer! literally! who wouldn't like that?
The OP's point is not that NOx isn't noxious, it's that it isn't persistent. The ozone created by sunlight on NOX is unstable and breaks down quickly. If we stopped pumping NOx into the atmosphere, it and its byproducts would all be gone in a matter of weeks. The same can't be said of CO2.
and it's relatively localized. what happens in beijing stays in beijing, so to speak.
i meant you had the better understanding of the process (physical/engineering), not that i had a better understanding of the process. I'm humble that way.
That's not how urea works. Urea is used uniquely to reduce NOx by reacting to produce H2O and N2. They have zero effects on particulate matter. Particulate matter is a direct byproduct of incomplete combustion (any combustion) that takes place regardless of post-combustion treatments (like urea injection). The only "solution" in used for particulate is simply a trap, which blocks all but the smaller particles. When the filter is saturated, extra diesel fuel is injected in it and additional high temperature combustion within the filter breaks down the particulate to fine stuff. The fine stuff that now seems to be the problem. Bottom line: industry tried to mitigate an intrinsic problem of diesel cars and by doing so they created new problems. The only real solution is mve past diesel. Heck even old style gas engine are better, mostly when coupled with e-motors (as in hybrids).
yeah, better understanding of the process. it's marketing driven, as everything ends up being. VW saw itself in competition with toyota for global domination of the auto market. it saw toyota as staking out the hybrid car franchise; it saw its opening as owning the diesel franchise, the idea being that they could achieve equal mileage and emissions with diesel without the hybrid's added "user abrasion", i.e. excess hardware and weight and expense. to that end, the goal had to be to reduce user abrasion from the diesel; so when the emissions standards for NOx required either urea injection or another technology, they turned away from urea because the added requirements of a urea tank and periodic urea purchase and fill constituted said user abrasion, and their initial success in the whole computer modulated richness catalysis (not the official name, i just made that up) led them to believe they could ride that pony to the finish line.
in a healthy organization, when the folks making that last bit happen realized it couldn't be done, at least by them given the parameters they had to work with, that information would have filtered up the management chain and one of the preceding decisions would be changed.
in a pathological organization, which is probably the majority of large companies, information is a one way downwards transfer; i tell you what i want, and you don't tell me the laws of physics don't permit it, because my boss is telling me what he wants and i don't get to tell him the laws of physics don't permit it. and thinks the laws of physics trump his bosses' wishes gets fired, and i'd rather that be you than me.
the day your boss tells you to do "do whatever you have to do to make this happen, failure is not an option" is the day you have the choice between quitting, getting fired, and ending up stammering while being interviewed by a reporter as to what made you commit some crime or other.
Your comments highlight the crux of the problem. Back in the day, inefficient (read truck like) diesel were shooting out black smoke. That particulate is large in size (10 or 100 of microns) that you actually "see". Improvements in efficiencies (both in combustion and trapping) made modern "clean engines" reduced the size of particulate to few microns. Those are much more difficult to see. Yet they are far more dangerous. Large particulate is trapped in your upper respiratory tract, the fine stuff gets deep in your lungs, often bioaccumulaating like abspestos does. You know how the stoey goes. Not because you don't see it it means it's not there... Next time stick a paper towel on the exhaust of your cold diesel and leave it there for a few minutes. Look at the color. Now you have somerhing to "see".
True. Same deal as the old "marijuana is more carcinogenic than tobacco!' scare. But the particles are large and, as you say, susceptible to efficient filtration by the upper respiratory system which routinely coughs such stuff up, cigarettes as currently manufactured produce much smaller particles which penetrate much further and are retained essentially indefinitely.
"Funny, I've never seen ANY kind of visible smoke coming out of my new diesel sedan, even under hard revving"
Thats because you're at the front driving it.
Haven't seen any smoke coming out of diesels built in the last decade at least for a while, including Mercedes, VWs, and Detroit pickup trucks. And I notice them.
Shh, don't tell them that, they'll ban all combustion! If you can classify every product of a chemical reaction as pollution, it's not that far fetched. Which of these isn't a greenhouse gas: A) CO2, B) H20? Well that's all you need to know about environmentalists today.
"Excuse me, you're screwing up the planet"
"Well how else can I go fast? It's a free country! You can't tell me not to screw up the planet! "