Well googling around most people come up with figures a little lower than yours although admittedly a little higher than the one I first quoted. It's still a hell of a lot less than your 500x claim. People don't drive with their foot on the floor all the time, and from what I can tell a 30 minute commute seems to be closer to the average.
Even if we assume that we'd need to generate three times the current level, which feels about right to me, given that most of the charging would be done at night it doesn't seem to be a huge problem.
How do you get from your car figures (which seem high) to your 500x current capacity (which seems ludicrous)?
Where on earth do you get the idea that we's need a grid with 500 times the capacity of the current one?
According to this each car would be the equivalent of about a third of a house. Since most of them would presumably be recharged overnight when normal usage is low I can't see that being an unsurmountable problem.
Most of the oil we currently use goes into transportation. If we switch to electric cars and don't use oil to produce the electricity that saves a huge amount. Even with your 'urban sprawl and big box shopping centres' the majority of the oil used is due to moving people not goods. We can carry on using oil for trucks and ships and still cut down hugely.
It may well take many decades to change things but we almost certainly have many decades to change things. Electric cars are about to take off in a huge way, here in the UK Nissan are about to start building the Leaf which I am absolutely sure will be a massive hit. Petrol over here is nearly $10 a gallon so the incentive to switch to electric is huge.
I'm not nonchalantly waving away all the issues, I'm just optimistic that we are moving in the right direction and have the time necessary to get where we need to be. We shouldn't be burning oil it's too useful, but I think pretty soon we won't be.
I know there is a difference but they could have just redefined GMT rather than coming up with another name altogether. UTC doesn't even work as an acronym, it's just some French plot to wipe Greenwich from history.
Well we live in a democracy and people keep voting for parties that have it in their manifesto. Personally I'd pay the licence fee for the radio alone. Radio with adverts is hell.
You are way too pessimistic. We have a lot of oil, certainly enough to build electric cars which can then run on something other than oil.
Long distance transport can be done via water or trains or simply by petrol based trucks, we don't have to completely do away with them.
Natural gas will indeed run out, but once you add the Shale gas to our reserves we have plenty of decades left to figure out how to replace fossil fuels. Thorium reactors, Pebble Bed reactors, Fusion reactors or just massive solar panels in deserts, there are plenty of options and plenty of time to perfect them.
Current nuclear power is only uneconomical if you buy into the completely excessive costs of decommissioning. You just can't compare the old generation reactors with the kind we would build now. Eventually governments will realise this and build lots of safer cleaner reactors.
Countries that don't have any ambitions to build nuclear weapons have no problem building nuclear plants. You're clutching at straws using the proliferation argument.
The biggest problems I see us facing are water shortages in certain parts of the world, possibly leading to food shortages as currently a lot of food production relies on unsustainable drilling for water. Again though the solution is to build more power plants so we can desalinate the sea.
Hmm, you can generate electricity from gas and pretty soon cars are going to go electric for most commuter journeys at least.
You can also run cars directly from gas.
You have a point about plastics but the main issue is energy and we have plenty of coal and gas for that. With cheap enough energy we could recycle a lot of the buried plastic if we needed to. Anyway if we reduce the demand for burning oil we have more left for plastics.
Oil in fertilisers is a bit of a myth. We don't really need oil to produce fertilisers, we just need energy so again coal or gas would do fine.
You sound a bit negative really with your 'so called "developed" countries' comment. Cheer up mate. Even if you are worried about Global Warming as I am, I'm pretty sure that Thorium or Pebble Bed reactors combined with renewables will keep us going till Fusion comes along and solves our energy problems.
I take your point but in England the football hooliganism tended to be pretty organised and the types of people involved are probably the closest we get to the gang culture in the US.
Your sports crowds are more like our Cricket and Rugby crowds where we have no problems at all. Football has a much wider appeal however and consequently includes a rougher section of society too.
I'm not in favour of guns but I'm pretty sure they would make hooliganism less likely.
In England the problem has pretty much subsided, even when it was a real issue it didn't typically involve the general public, just those who wanted a fight having a fight.
God I hate Slashdot sometimes. I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to this and for some reason it has disappeared. I need to learn to stop writing straight into the site.
Anyway what I said in brief was, I have no problem with death, the size of the universe or the fact that I'll be forgotten. I didn't use to be alive, the universe is impressive, and although we do seem hardwired to want to leave an impressive legacy, we all differ as to what that entails and being remembered isn't a big part of mine.
Not having any control over my own actions is a different matter altogether and I disagree with your idea that we could go on much as before if it was convincingly proved that we had no free will. this is a matter of opinion though.
Penrose's main argument, although it does seem he now thinks Free Will is probably an illusion, stemmed from some basic facts which haven't changed even if his opinion has. Releativity and QM are mutually incompatable as formulated at the moment. QM also has an unexplained wave function collapse which requires an observer whose form is never explained. There are therfore plenty of holes in our current theories to allow for a free agents.
My other point was to refute the idea that any explanation of Free Will could not be scientific. We could investigate what it takes for a consciouss entity to arise. I would fully expect that we couls come up with a theory that explains different degrees of consiousness that would allow different amount of free action on the universe. Ultimatley there would be a model that allowed for a conscious entity to make a decision and we couldn't predict that decision but we live with seemingly random events such as particle decay at the moment without giving up on Physics.
The thing is, if you don't lock up or at least try to treat serial killers, then they're pretty likely to kill again.
This only makes sense if you think we still have Free Will. If we don't we have no choice about what we do with the knowledge that we don't.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that anyone who thinks they don't believe in Free Will is a simpleton. That is clearly untrue. I just wonder whether they have really thought through what it entails, and why you are so convinced.
I've just replied to another post about this though and I haven't much time. Gonna go and drink some more special sauce.
Unless you are hunting with weapons you've made yourself you may as well just buy the meat in a supermarket, you're no closer to primitive man.
The world needs fewer aggressive males not more, and any aliens capable of invasion are probably going to be able to cope with a few gun nuts like you.
Time was almost every American family lived off the land. Then they were exterminated by Europeans with guns and germs. There is no going back.
I really don't know one way or another whether free-will exists or not. Personally I find it a somewhat meaningless argument. if we don't have free will, we must still ultimately act as if we do.
It's a strange thing to find meaningless since it is an argument about whether your life actually has a meaning.
If we don't have free will, we can only act as if we do if that's what was predetermined or happens due to random factors, we have no choice about it.
One issue I have with your interpretation is that you keep saying that we may as well act as if we believe we have free will even if we don't.
I've seen this 'argument' a lot and it makes no sense. if we don't have free will then you have no choice in how you act. It suggests to me that those people that think they don't believe in free will actually do, they just don't like to admit it as it means they too believe in your special sauce.
No getting away from the fact that there is nothing in our current laws of Physics that suggest we are anything but predetermined.
I had a fairly long argument with a guy a few weeks ago on here. I'm not especially clued up on the terminlogy although I have read Penrose and Dennett. It seems to me though that there are basically two sides to this entire argument. Those who believe in Free Will rightly point out that it requires something beyond our current Physics. In fact something incredibly radical that is akin to the 'Spiritual'.
If you don't believe in Free Will you are going to sya that's unnecessary bollocks and everything can be explained by turing machines and deterministic physics.
Most rational non religious types tend to instinctively fall into the 'no free will' camp as you can see from any Slashdot article that discusses consciousness. I don't think they've really thought through what that means though, it's just that they are unwilling to accept that we might be missing something so fundamental from our current understanding of Physics.
As I've pointed out before though, if there is no free will then I had to write this and you have to write whatever you're about to write.
He basically argued that human's can actually 'understand' Godel's incompleteness theory in a way that an algorithm could not. This allows them to say things about whether an algorithm will terminate that a Turing machine couldn't
It all boils down to whether you believe in Free Will or not. If you do you have to admit there is something missing from Physics. if you don't you don't.
Football's not really corrupt. The players are too well paid at the top level to allow for much individual corruption. Italy's league is a bit dodgy but then the whole country is corrupt so what do you expect.
The governing body FIFA that decide where the World Cup will be held, now they are corrupt.
It's also the most popular sport in the world so although you may think it is boring, that's just your opinion. Maybe if they wore metal helmets and stopped every five seconds to have a discussion you'd prefer it?
Depends where you live. In a lot of countries tenants have a lot of rights, but in England where I live you can be forced to move with about 6 months notice.
Your maths is wrong anway. On a mortgage I am likely to pay back about 165% of what I borrow. However my payments are not subject to inflation so effectively the costs come down every year. If you rent you get a small saving (not even true in the case of the UK) each month at the beginning but your rent carries on going up at the rate of inflation.
Any interest on the savings that you are suggesting by renting are likely to be similar to this hidden saving since mortgage rates are pretty competitive and savings rates are pretty poor. Once you factor in the fact that I own the house at the end it is a no brainer.
Slashdot Mirror
It works in the rest of the world
Well googling around most people come up with figures a little lower than yours although admittedly a little higher than the one I first quoted. It's still a hell of a lot less than your 500x claim. People don't drive with their foot on the floor all the time, and from what I can tell a 30 minute commute seems to be closer to the average.
Even if we assume that we'd need to generate three times the current level, which feels about right to me, given that most of the charging would be done at night it doesn't seem to be a huge problem.
How do you get from your car figures (which seem high) to your 500x current capacity (which seems ludicrous)?
Where on earth do you get the idea that we's need a grid with 500 times the capacity of the current one?
According to this each car would be the equivalent of about a third of a house. Since most of them would presumably be recharged overnight when normal usage is low I can't see that being an unsurmountable problem.
You got any figures to back up your claim?
Most of the oil we currently use goes into transportation. If we switch to electric cars and don't use oil to produce the electricity that saves a huge amount. Even with your 'urban sprawl and big box shopping centres' the majority of the oil used is due to moving people not goods. We can carry on using oil for trucks and ships and still cut down hugely.
It may well take many decades to change things but we almost certainly have many decades to change things. Electric cars are about to take off in a huge way, here in the UK Nissan are about to start building the Leaf which I am absolutely sure will be a massive hit. Petrol over here is nearly $10 a gallon so the incentive to switch to electric is huge.
I'm not nonchalantly waving away all the issues, I'm just optimistic that we are moving in the right direction and have the time necessary to get where we need to be. We shouldn't be burning oil it's too useful, but I think pretty soon we won't be.
I know there is a difference but they could have just redefined GMT rather than coming up with another name altogether. UTC doesn't even work as an acronym, it's just some French plot to wipe Greenwich from history.
Well we live in a democracy and people keep voting for parties that have it in their manifesto. Personally I'd pay the licence fee for the radio alone. Radio with adverts is hell.
You are way too pessimistic. We have a lot of oil, certainly enough to build electric cars which can then run on something other than oil.
Long distance transport can be done via water or trains or simply by petrol based trucks, we don't have to completely do away with them.
Natural gas will indeed run out, but once you add the Shale gas to our reserves we have plenty of decades left to figure out how to replace fossil fuels. Thorium reactors, Pebble Bed reactors, Fusion reactors or just massive solar panels in deserts, there are plenty of options and plenty of time to perfect them.
Current nuclear power is only uneconomical if you buy into the completely excessive costs of decommissioning. You just can't compare the old generation reactors with the kind we would build now. Eventually governments will realise this and build lots of safer cleaner reactors.
Countries that don't have any ambitions to build nuclear weapons have no problem building nuclear plants. You're clutching at straws using the proliferation argument.
The biggest problems I see us facing are water shortages in certain parts of the world, possibly leading to food shortages as currently a lot of food production relies on unsustainable drilling for water. Again though the solution is to build more power plants so we can desalinate the sea.
Hmm, you can generate electricity from gas and pretty soon cars are going to go electric for most commuter journeys at least.
You can also run cars directly from gas.
You have a point about plastics but the main issue is energy and we have plenty of coal and gas for that. With cheap enough energy we could recycle a lot of the buried plastic if we needed to. Anyway if we reduce the demand for burning oil we have more left for plastics.
Oil in fertilisers is a bit of a myth. We don't really need oil to produce fertilisers, we just need energy so again coal or gas would do fine.
You sound a bit negative really with your 'so called "developed" countries' comment. Cheer up mate. Even if you are worried about Global Warming as I am, I'm pretty sure that Thorium or Pebble Bed reactors combined with renewables will keep us going till Fusion comes along and solves our energy problems.
There is a lot of Shale Gas though.
It causes a huge amount of mental problems.
I'm in favour of legalisation but don'e pretend it's 100% safe
The Royal College Of Psychiatrists
Well Greece owes France £150,000,000,000 so I think they might have a bit of a problem.
I take your point but in England the football hooliganism tended to be pretty organised and the types of people involved are probably the closest we get to the gang culture in the US.
Your sports crowds are more like our Cricket and Rugby crowds where we have no problems at all. Football has a much wider appeal however and consequently includes a rougher section of society too.
You Americans have guns.
I'm not in favour of guns but I'm pretty sure they would make hooliganism less likely.
In England the problem has pretty much subsided, even when it was a real issue it didn't typically involve the general public, just those who wanted a fight having a fight.
Isn't it actually more likely that the person who found it was honest.
I know of a few people who've lost their phones and recovered them because the person who found it called some of their friends using the phone.
If you lock it it's probably less likely you'll get it back.
But you'd always be saving someone's life. People don't just buy kidneys for their kidney collection.
My Step Dad might need a new kidney in a few years and it's made me realise that this ban on selling them is wrong. People are dying needlessly.
God I hate Slashdot sometimes. I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to this and for some reason it has disappeared. I need to learn to stop writing straight into the site.
Anyway what I said in brief was, I have no problem with death, the size of the universe or the fact that I'll be forgotten. I didn't use to be alive, the universe is impressive, and although we do seem hardwired to want to leave an impressive legacy, we all differ as to what that entails and being remembered isn't a big part of mine.
Not having any control over my own actions is a different matter altogether and I disagree with your idea that we could go on much as before if it was convincingly proved that we had no free will. this is a matter of opinion though.
Penrose's main argument, although it does seem he now thinks Free Will is probably an illusion, stemmed from some basic facts which haven't changed even if his opinion has. Releativity and QM are mutually incompatable as formulated at the moment. QM also has an unexplained wave function collapse which requires an observer whose form is never explained. There are therfore plenty of holes in our current theories to allow for a free agents.
My other point was to refute the idea that any explanation of Free Will could not be scientific. We could investigate what it takes for a consciouss entity to arise. I would fully expect that we couls come up with a theory that explains different degrees of consiousness that would allow different amount of free action on the universe. Ultimatley there would be a model that allowed for a conscious entity to make a decision and we couldn't predict that decision but we live with seemingly random events such as particle decay at the moment without giving up on Physics.
The thing is, if you don't lock up or at least try to treat serial killers, then they're pretty likely to kill again.
This only makes sense if you think we still have Free Will. If we don't we have no choice about what we do with the knowledge that we don't.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that anyone who thinks they don't believe in Free Will is a simpleton. That is clearly untrue. I just wonder whether they have really thought through what it entails, and why you are so convinced.
I've just replied to another post about this though and I haven't much time. Gonna go and drink some more special sauce.
Unless you are hunting with weapons you've made yourself you may as well just buy the meat in a supermarket, you're no closer to primitive man.
The world needs fewer aggressive males not more, and any aliens capable of invasion are probably going to be able to cope with a few gun nuts like you.
Time was almost every American family lived off the land. Then they were exterminated by Europeans with guns and germs. There is no going back.
I really don't know one way or another whether free-will exists or not. Personally I find it a somewhat meaningless argument. if we don't have free will, we must still ultimately act as if we do.
It's a strange thing to find meaningless since it is an argument about whether your life actually has a meaning.
If we don't have free will, we can only act as if we do if that's what was predetermined or happens due to random factors, we have no choice about it.
I guess I believe in your special sauce.
One issue I have with your interpretation is that you keep saying that we may as well act as if we believe we have free will even if we don't.
I've seen this 'argument' a lot and it makes no sense. if we don't have free will then you have no choice in how you act. It suggests to me that those people that think they don't believe in free will actually do, they just don't like to admit it as it means they too believe in your special sauce.
It means being able to choose.
No getting away from the fact that there is nothing in our current laws of Physics that suggest we are anything but predetermined.
I had a fairly long argument with a guy a few weeks ago on here. I'm not especially clued up on the terminlogy although I have read Penrose and Dennett. It seems to me though that there are basically two sides to this entire argument. Those who believe in Free Will rightly point out that it requires something beyond our current Physics. In fact something incredibly radical that is akin to the 'Spiritual'.
If you don't believe in Free Will you are going to sya that's unnecessary bollocks and everything can be explained by turing machines and deterministic physics.
Most rational non religious types tend to instinctively fall into the 'no free will' camp as you can see from any Slashdot article that discusses consciousness. I don't think they've really thought through what that means though, it's just that they are unwilling to accept that we might be missing something so fundamental from our current understanding of Physics.
As I've pointed out before though, if there is no free will then I had to write this and you have to write whatever you're about to write.
He basically argued that human's can actually 'understand' Godel's incompleteness theory in a way that an algorithm could not. This allows them to say things about whether an algorithm will terminate that a Turing machine couldn't
It all boils down to whether you believe in Free Will or not. If you do you have to admit there is something missing from Physics. if you don't you don't.
I do by the way so I'm on Penrose's side.
Football's not really corrupt. The players are too well paid at the top level to allow for much individual corruption. Italy's league is a bit dodgy but then the whole country is corrupt so what do you expect.
The governing body FIFA that decide where the World Cup will be held, now they are corrupt.
It's also the most popular sport in the world so although you may think it is boring, that's just your opinion. Maybe if they wore metal helmets and stopped every five seconds to have a discussion you'd prefer it?
Depends where you live. In a lot of countries tenants have a lot of rights, but in England where I live you can be forced to move with about 6 months notice.
Your maths is wrong anway. On a mortgage I am likely to pay back about 165% of what I borrow. However my payments are not subject to inflation so effectively the costs come down every year. If you rent you get a small saving (not even true in the case of the UK) each month at the beginning but your rent carries on going up at the rate of inflation.
Any interest on the savings that you are suggesting by renting are likely to be similar to this hidden saving since mortgage rates are pretty competitive and savings rates are pretty poor. Once you factor in the fact that I own the house at the end it is a no brainer.
So I live somewhere small for 25 years saving my money, so when I'm 50 I can buy a family house and have some kids?
Genius.
You ever thought maybe all of those people getting mortgages aren't as stupid as you think they are?