In addition to what slb wrote, you're only looking at cattle in America. The US is a net importer of beef (we do export significant amounts, but we import even more -- generally exporting quality products to Asia and importing cheap stuff from South America). And what other giant herds of bison outside North America are you picturing as existing historically that make you not want to look at the world cattle production as a whole? The arctic plains never supported a high ruminant density. The eurasian steppes were dominated by equines, which are not ruminants. We already covered the eastern african plains; the southern African plains aren't very different. Forested, desert, mountainous, and jungle regions tend not to support high ruminant densities (the pre-columbian estimate for deer populations in the US is 50m, and deer are much less massive than cattle). And on and on. Bison in North America were exceptional *because* of their large numbers. And if you want to diverge into talking about other ruminants, well, we need to discuss the other ruminants that we raise in huge numbers *now*, such as sheep and goats. The simple facts are that today's population of ruminants is only sustainable via modern agriculture.
And lastly, methane levels are at ~1700ppm. As evidenced by air pockets trapped in ice cores, until modern times, methane levels over the past 650 million years ranged from 400m to 700m. So *something* is causing this, whether you accept livestock's role or not.
Quit trying to change the subject. You wrote, "Tesla is the only company in the world selling production electric cars that are fully street-legal". I corrected you. You were wrong. Deal with it.
It's not a judgement call; it's a technical term. He was at the very least overweight when the accident occurred. 200 pounds and 6' is a BMI of 27.1, which is in the "Overweight" range of 25-29.9.
Your BMI charts have never applied to the entirety of the population.
So you get around the fact that he was overweight by saying that the scale is broken? Cute. Wow, wouldn't that be a great diet craze -- the "redefine what is fat" diet!
Sorry, but Atkins, at the time of his death, had heart disease and was overweight. These are the facts. Deal with them on your own time.
What part of "why put a cap on Tesla? $500 million is nothing compared to the $6billion the government flushed down the toilet when they gave it ford, nobody is going to buy a ford anytime soon regardless of the price." made you think that federal emergency loans ("bailout") was being talked about at all?
The federal government gave Ford $6B. The poster pointed that out. A subsequent poster treated them like an idiot for saying that (confusing the bailout with the ATVM loans), when in fact what the parent said was 100% correct. For the subsequent poster: FAIL.
How is giving a loan to a financially solvent private company that has a market valuation of $550B (at least as judged by Daimler) the same as the sort of giveaway that you portray it as??
Exactly. Tesla's approach is perfectly cogent. Starting a car company is a *huge* expense. Look at what Coda is having to go through to bring a new car to the US -- they mentioned that they still need to crash another *30 to 40 cars* to get certified. And that's just the half of it. There are no volume parts producers for EV components. Look at the Roadster transmission fiasco -- there literally was no multi-gear transmission in the world that would work with their motor, and when they spent a fortune trying to get a company to engineer one for them, what they ended up with couldn't take the stress.
The logical approach, then, is to piggyback as much work as you can onto that of an existing manufacturer (in this case, Lotus), focus only on what's different, and start at the high end so that you can absorb the capital costs into the vehicle price without creating sticker shock. People expect a carbon fiber car that does 0-60 in 4 seconds to be expensive. The fact that low-volume EV drivetrain components are super-expensive doesn't matter there, because so are the low-volume ICE components that they compete against.
This is the next logical step: an independently developed, not-piggybacked, luxury sedan. This means building a large-volume factory, with a chassis developed from scratch that's designed for your EV needs. Of course, this is incredibly expensive. Hence the need to raise a ton of capital. In the middle of a financial crisis.:P
Once they've retired that risk, even higher volumes/lower prices become realistic. Which is their plan with the Bluestar.
That seems to be the same approach being taken by Fisker. I think a reasonable alternative approach is that being taken by Aptera. Three wheels to skirt the federal requirements, but put a heavy *independent* focus on safety, with a vehicle that's so uber-streamlined and lightweight that it simply doesn't need a powerful drivetrain or large battery pack to perform well. Hence they can start at near the bottom of the market, where there is a lot less competition. Once they're rolling off the lines, you can expect to see from them what Tesla is doing now -- raising large amounts of money to build a factory for a more mainstream, higher volume sedan (although they'll almost certainly keep their extreme-efficiency focus).
1) It's not a grant. It's a loan. 2) The Model S is right in the price range of high-end luxury sedans (which is what they're making). 3) Tesla got the overwhelming majority of their Roadsters when there was no EV tax credit. Sure, it'll increase their Model S sales volume, but they'd still sell a ton without it. 4) The whole world is lacking in venture capital right now. It's called a financial crisis. About the only entity that investors trust to loan money to these days are major world governments. Hence, that makes them effectively the only entity able to give loans worth half a billion dollars to all but the most established large businesses. 5) If you have such a problem with half a billion dollar loan, I'd hate to see how you'd react to the $5.9 billion loan Ford just got from the same program.
If you type "Atkins heart attack" into Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky", it brings you to Snopes which confirms his heart attack. What are you smoking?
Your link didn't load. And again, even if he *did* only weigh 200 pounds or whatnot when he had his accident, for a 6' man, that's still overweight... and he still had a heart attack, congestive heart failure, and hypertension shortly before his death.
Name one thing that I wrote that is incorrect. The American Heart Association says it puts you at risk for heart disease. The American Medical Association has repeatedly gone on the attack against it. So has the American Dietetic Association. And Snopes categorizes the role of Atkin's heart problems in his death as "undetermined", citing the arguments of both sides, and links to his death certificate on The Smoking Gun. What "5 minutes on Google" are you looking at?
Irrelevant -- not all carbon is created equal. False -- growing grain for cattle consumption is not carbon neutral.
And carbon methane only has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 7 years
That's on the low end of estimates, and really, that's not a good argument. Particulate matter in the atmosphere has an even shorter atmospheric residence than methane, but would you like the world if we removed all particulate control filters from power plants and vehicles? Methane is raising our total forcing. If we stopped emitting it, the problem would go away faster than the problem of CO2 forcing if we stopped emitting it, but that doesn't change the fact that it still is causing problems as long as we keep emitting it.
Ice core records show that the abundance of CH4 in the atmosphere has ranged from around 400ppb during glacial highs to around 700ppb during interglacials during the last 650,000 years. Do you know what it is now? As of 2005, it was approximately 1,774 ppb. That's about 30% of the forcing of CO2.
Why is that we seem to have such a hard time divorcing the science from the politics and pseudoscience?
Why is it that people who denounce elements of global warming as pseudoscience have near universally not read a single peer-reviewed paper on the topics that they denounce? If you want to "focus more on science and less on politics" -- read the science!
Yeah, but the giant herds of buffalo and other large mammals has decreased by the billions over the last few thousand years. So it equals out in the end.
The historic buffalo population is estimated at 60 million. So your estimate for the current bison population is several billion negative buffalo?
One, beef and grains are not the only foods in existence. It's not a binary choice. And two, almost any health professional would tell you that a high-carb diet is preferable to a high cholesterol diet in terms of health consequences. There's a reason that the medical community was so against the Atkins diet. Atkins himself had had a heart attack, congestive heart failure, and hypertension late in his life (which he adimantly insisted had nothing to do with his high-fat diet -- really!), and it may ultimately have contributed to his death (although the primary cause appears to have been head injury). He was 6' and 258lbs at his time of death. Again, his family insists he gained 60 pounds during the coma after he fell. No, really. And even if that was the case, he'd still be "overweight" when he was injured.
I've never understood why humans drink cow's milk. It's not natural.
It is now. Most mammals become lactose-interolant after infancy; it helps discourage continued breastfeeding. Humans have evolved lactose tolerance. A diet of dairy is supported by our genes. As for what's "natural", nature has evolved all sorts of crazy feeding systems that don't involve killing the animal -- dung eaters, ants farming honeydew from aphids, flesh parasites, intestinal parasites, blood feeders, etc. Why is this particular method any less unusual than them? I'd say it's far more humane than killing the animals for food -- nature's primary modus operandi.
There have been animals around on earth a long time
Not all animals are ruminants. Ruminants release methane due to enteric fermentation. Ruminants are a relatively development on the evolutionary tree. Furthermore, our large population of them in modern times is sustained only through high density industrial agriculture. For example, probably the greatest natural landscape for large grazing herd animals today are the Serengeti and Masai Mara plains. Combined, they only support 1.5 million wildebeest. Even the massive bison herds that once spread across the entire great plains numbered at only 60 million. We raise, what, 1.3 billion cattle?
History has never seen anywhere close to as many ruminants on the surface of the earth as we have today. Thank modern industrial agriculture for that.
You saw the signs? You were there? Wow, tell me about it!
No, wait, you saw them on the news, you say? Reported from videos uploaded to YouTube and iReport? Chosen for videos that will have the most impact on American audiences? Videos of the compatriots of the iPhone-carrying net-savvy pro-western anglophones who took the videos? And you saw signs in English? You don't say...
Remind me again of how favorable an impression of the French the average American has? Not like this is anything new. Anyone heard of the Quasi-War, which we fought with France in the late 1700s?
Furthermore, it's a dumb analogy. Almost all of the British sympathizers left the US after the revolution. Are we expecting conservative Iranians to leave the country? Where to?
I see no reason why the US can't help promote general ideals (freedom of press, etc..) while not commenting on any one leader
Which we've been doing. The criticisms being leveled are that we're not doing more. They want us to state, "we stand with the protesters against the state", or even offer them material support.
It was in reference to criticism that the US government wasn't doing enough to help or encourage the protesters overturn the election and/or government.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to what slb wrote, you're only looking at cattle in America. The US is a net importer of beef (we do export significant amounts, but we import even more -- generally exporting quality products to Asia and importing cheap stuff from South America). And what other giant herds of bison outside North America are you picturing as existing historically that make you not want to look at the world cattle production as a whole? The arctic plains never supported a high ruminant density. The eurasian steppes were dominated by equines, which are not ruminants. We already covered the eastern african plains; the southern African plains aren't very different. Forested, desert, mountainous, and jungle regions tend not to support high ruminant densities (the pre-columbian estimate for deer populations in the US is 50m, and deer are much less massive than cattle). And on and on. Bison in North America were exceptional *because* of their large numbers. And if you want to diverge into talking about other ruminants, well, we need to discuss the other ruminants that we raise in huge numbers *now*, such as sheep and goats. The simple facts are that today's population of ruminants is only sustainable via modern agriculture.
And lastly, methane levels are at ~1700ppm. As evidenced by air pockets trapped in ice cores, until modern times, methane levels over the past 650 million years ranged from 400m to 700m. So *something* is causing this, whether you accept livestock's role or not.
Well, Daimler gave them 50B for 9%, indicating that Daimler thinks that Tesla's market valuation is $550M -- more than that of the loan they received.
Quit trying to change the subject. You wrote, "Tesla is the only company in the world selling production electric cars that are fully street-legal". I corrected you. You were wrong. Deal with it.
It's not a judgement call; it's a technical term. He was at the very least overweight when the accident occurred. 200 pounds and 6' is a BMI of 27.1, which is in the "Overweight" range of 25-29.9.
Your BMI charts have never applied to the entirety of the population.
So you get around the fact that he was overweight by saying that the scale is broken? Cute. Wow, wouldn't that be a great diet craze -- the "redefine what is fat" diet!
Sorry, but Atkins, at the time of his death, had heart disease and was overweight. These are the facts. Deal with them on your own time.
BYD F3DM is a hybrid,
No, it's an E-REV. Extended-Range Electric Vehicle. It has 40-60 miles of all-electric range. It just happens to *also* have an onboard generator.
The Mitsubishi MiEV is still in research phase, and I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a US version
Wrong and wrong. It's both under production and for sale now in Japan, and they've announced US plans for "before 2012".
The Subaru Stella EV is still only a concept car, though it may be sold soon in Japan. Again, good luck getting one here.
Wrong and wrong. Same as MiEV. Don't you keep up on this stuff before you post?
C Propulsion E-Box? Seriously? It's a $55K conversion kit, not a car, and it converts a crummy $15K car into a crummy $70K car.
That doesn't make your statement any less false.
In reading comprehension, obviously.
What part of "why put a cap on Tesla? $500 million is nothing compared to the $6billion the government flushed down the toilet when they gave it ford, nobody is going to buy a ford anytime soon regardless of the price." made you think that federal emergency loans ("bailout") was being talked about at all?
The federal government gave Ford $6B. The poster pointed that out. A subsequent poster treated them like an idiot for saying that (confusing the bailout with the ATVM loans), when in fact what the parent said was 100% correct. For the subsequent poster: FAIL.
How is giving a loan to a financially solvent private company that has a market valuation of $550B (at least as judged by Daimler) the same as the sort of giveaway that you portray it as??
"Fucking dumbass" back at you -- the GP never said it was bailout money. Your imagination inserted that in there.
Tesla is the only company in the world selling production electric cars that are fully street-legal.
BYD F3DM? Mitsubishi MiEV? Subaru Stella EV? AC Propulsion E-Box? Etc?
Why are you such knee-jerk ideologues? A government spending money is socialism?
It is! What, you want this country to turn into Cuba?
By the way, would you mind putting out my flaming shoe so I don't have to rely on a socialist fire department?
Exactly. Tesla's approach is perfectly cogent. Starting a car company is a *huge* expense. Look at what Coda is having to go through to bring a new car to the US -- they mentioned that they still need to crash another *30 to 40 cars* to get certified. And that's just the half of it. There are no volume parts producers for EV components. Look at the Roadster transmission fiasco -- there literally was no multi-gear transmission in the world that would work with their motor, and when they spent a fortune trying to get a company to engineer one for them, what they ended up with couldn't take the stress.
The logical approach, then, is to piggyback as much work as you can onto that of an existing manufacturer (in this case, Lotus), focus only on what's different, and start at the high end so that you can absorb the capital costs into the vehicle price without creating sticker shock. People expect a carbon fiber car that does 0-60 in 4 seconds to be expensive. The fact that low-volume EV drivetrain components are super-expensive doesn't matter there, because so are the low-volume ICE components that they compete against.
This is the next logical step: an independently developed, not-piggybacked, luxury sedan. This means building a large-volume factory, with a chassis developed from scratch that's designed for your EV needs. Of course, this is incredibly expensive. Hence the need to raise a ton of capital. In the middle of a financial crisis. :P
Once they've retired that risk, even higher volumes/lower prices become realistic. Which is their plan with the Bluestar.
That seems to be the same approach being taken by Fisker. I think a reasonable alternative approach is that being taken by Aptera. Three wheels to skirt the federal requirements, but put a heavy *independent* focus on safety, with a vehicle that's so uber-streamlined and lightweight that it simply doesn't need a powerful drivetrain or large battery pack to perform well. Hence they can start at near the bottom of the market, where there is a lot less competition. Once they're rolling off the lines, you can expect to see from them what Tesla is doing now -- raising large amounts of money to build a factory for a more mainstream, higher volume sedan (although they'll almost certainly keep their extreme-efficiency focus).
Wrong in so many ways.
1) It's not a grant. It's a loan.
2) The Model S is right in the price range of high-end luxury sedans (which is what they're making).
3) Tesla got the overwhelming majority of their Roadsters when there was no EV tax credit. Sure, it'll increase their Model S sales volume, but they'd still sell a ton without it.
4) The whole world is lacking in venture capital right now. It's called a financial crisis. About the only entity that investors trust to loan money to these days are major world governments. Hence, that makes them effectively the only entity able to give loans worth half a billion dollars to all but the most established large businesses.
5) If you have such a problem with half a billion dollar loan, I'd hate to see how you'd react to the $5.9 billion loan Ford just got from the same program.
Fail.
If you type "Atkins heart attack" into Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky", it brings you to Snopes which confirms his heart attack. What are you smoking?
Your link didn't load. And again, even if he *did* only weigh 200 pounds or whatnot when he had his accident, for a 6' man, that's still overweight... and he still had a heart attack, congestive heart failure, and hypertension shortly before his death.
Name one thing that I wrote that is incorrect. The American Heart Association says it puts you at risk for heart disease. The American Medical Association has repeatedly gone on the attack against it. So has the American Dietetic Association. And Snopes categorizes the role of Atkin's heart problems in his death as "undetermined", citing the arguments of both sides, and links to his death certificate on The Smoking Gun. What "5 minutes on Google" are you looking at?
Thing is that cows are carbon neutral.
Irrelevant -- not all carbon is created equal. False -- growing grain for cattle consumption is not carbon neutral.
And carbon methane only has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 7 years
That's on the low end of estimates, and really, that's not a good argument. Particulate matter in the atmosphere has an even shorter atmospheric residence than methane, but would you like the world if we removed all particulate control filters from power plants and vehicles? Methane is raising our total forcing. If we stopped emitting it, the problem would go away faster than the problem of CO2 forcing if we stopped emitting it, but that doesn't change the fact that it still is causing problems as long as we keep emitting it.
Ice core records show that the abundance of CH4 in the atmosphere has ranged from around 400ppb during glacial highs to around 700ppb during interglacials during the last 650,000 years. Do you know what it is now? As of 2005, it was approximately 1,774 ppb. That's about 30% of the forcing of CO2.
Why is that we seem to have such a hard time divorcing the science from the politics and pseudoscience?
Why is it that people who denounce elements of global warming as pseudoscience have near universally not read a single peer-reviewed paper on the topics that they denounce? If you want to "focus more on science and less on politics" -- read the science!
Yeah, but the giant herds of buffalo and other large mammals has decreased by the billions over the last few thousand years. So it equals out in the end.
The historic buffalo population is estimated at 60 million. So your estimate for the current bison population is several billion negative buffalo?
One, beef and grains are not the only foods in existence. It's not a binary choice. And two, almost any health professional would tell you that a high-carb diet is preferable to a high cholesterol diet in terms of health consequences. There's a reason that the medical community was so against the Atkins diet. Atkins himself had had a heart attack, congestive heart failure, and hypertension late in his life (which he adimantly insisted had nothing to do with his high-fat diet -- really!), and it may ultimately have contributed to his death (although the primary cause appears to have been head injury). He was 6' and 258lbs at his time of death. Again, his family insists he gained 60 pounds during the coma after he fell. No, really. And even if that was the case, he'd still be "overweight" when he was injured.
I've never understood why humans drink cow's milk. It's not natural.
It is now. Most mammals become lactose-interolant after infancy; it helps discourage continued breastfeeding. Humans have evolved lactose tolerance. A diet of dairy is supported by our genes. As for what's "natural", nature has evolved all sorts of crazy feeding systems that don't involve killing the animal -- dung eaters, ants farming honeydew from aphids, flesh parasites, intestinal parasites, blood feeders, etc. Why is this particular method any less unusual than them? I'd say it's far more humane than killing the animals for food -- nature's primary modus operandi.
There have been animals around on earth a long time
Not all animals are ruminants. Ruminants release methane due to enteric fermentation. Ruminants are a relatively development on the evolutionary tree. Furthermore, our large population of them in modern times is sustained only through high density industrial agriculture. For example, probably the greatest natural landscape for large grazing herd animals today are the Serengeti and Masai Mara plains. Combined, they only support 1.5 million wildebeest. Even the massive bison herds that once spread across the entire great plains numbered at only 60 million. We raise, what, 1.3 billion cattle?
History has never seen anywhere close to as many ruminants on the surface of the earth as we have today. Thank modern industrial agriculture for that.
You saw the signs? You were there? Wow, tell me about it!
No, wait, you saw them on the news, you say? Reported from videos uploaded to YouTube and iReport? Chosen for videos that will have the most impact on American audiences? Videos of the compatriots of the iPhone-carrying net-savvy pro-western anglophones who took the videos? And you saw signs in English? You don't say...
Remind me again of how favorable an impression of the French the average American has? Not like this is anything new. Anyone heard of the Quasi-War, which we fought with France in the late 1700s?
Furthermore, it's a dumb analogy. Almost all of the British sympathizers left the US after the revolution. Are we expecting conservative Iranians to leave the country? Where to?
I see no reason why the US can't help promote general ideals (freedom of press, etc..) while not commenting on any one leader
Which we've been doing. The criticisms being leveled are that we're not doing more. They want us to state, "we stand with the protesters against the state", or even offer them material support.
It was in reference to criticism that the US government wasn't doing enough to help or encourage the protesters overturn the election and/or government.