the pilot did not wake up that morning and prepare himself to kill a bunch of civi's.
If he didn't he's incredibly naive.
The suicide bomber meticulously goes though ceremony preparing himself, selects the busiest bus, the most crowded market, or the most painful target thats a huge difference than the soldier.
And if China invaded you'd just sit on your ass while they destroyed entire towns. Or maybe you'd pray with your family, read a few passages from the bible, and go find the softest target you could successfully destroy.
But to say that things in Afghanistan were *better* under the Taliban is either a pathetic F'ing joke, or proof you've jumped the shark. They (the Taliban) made shows of shooting women in soccer stadiums for daring to learn to read, or earning money... banned speech, music, and every other freedom you can imagine but hey at least there were no drug problems right..
The GP is barking up the wrong tree of course, but it doesn't matter to the civilian if they are shot in the head by a local religious nut or burned alive by a firebomb or crushed inside of a home. The fact is that after we wrecked Afghanistan just to bleed the Russians and left the country in ruins (spending half a trillion dollars on war and then zero on reconstruction), the Taliban had the power vacuum necessary to take over. People had no freedom, but they were alive, and not getting constantly shot at.
In fact, they're the only government that ever stopped the opium trade. And we gave them $43 million dollars to thank them for it just before September 11th. That's how good our intelligence is, and how little we care about the plight of any downtrodden masses.
Your point about the deficit is what? I never disputed that Reagen increased it dramatically.
You insinuated that his economic policy "was the norm" which isn't true, demonstrated by the doubling of the deficit, as far as I can see, the only time it's doubled when we aren't at war. If you don't believe me, look up debate at the time over his policies, labeled "voodoo economics" by Bush I.
And "this budget does not have the force of law" pretty much sums up my point niceless. thanks for lending my argument some authenticity.
Again, you insinuated that the President does not have anything to do with the budget. You can weasel your way with some narrower definition, but that's simple dishonesty.
The President does set the budget. The Congress negotiates with him and ratifies it, and then it becomes law.
To me Obama is just another old white man.
It's a narrow choice, but it's a choice. McCain and his cabinet would probably be filled with the same people who aren't able to deal with the realities of diplomacy, the basics of financial planning, and the courage to lead in a post-petroleum economy. They pander to people who believe the earth has an infinite supply of everything, and that killing Muslim civilians will somehow help with the problems of Muslim extremism.
The Iraq war is the best possible scenario for religious fundamentalists. The have pictures of dead Muslims to pass around, an excellent environment for cultivating new psychopaths, and a good place to train them. The orphaned children alone represent tens of thousands of new possible recruits.
You're spouting the same nonsense that kept us in the Vietnam War, only this time we're actually going to lose some valuable resources if we are forced to leave Iraq. But don't worry your pretty little head. We have four permanent military installations that we will only abandon after our currency finally crashes from our national deficit and staggering military spending. The democracy we're pretending to support in Iraq is just like the one we helped the British with in Iran back in the 50s. And we all know how well that turned out.
As soon as the $300 checks sent out to the Sunni mercenaries who have switched tactics for the moment cease to arrive, the "pre-surge" violence levels will return overnight. To quote one Shia resident, the terrorists have become the police, but for how long? Peace in Iraq is extraordinarily expensive, and soon we won't be able to afford it.
Some folks can't learn lessons from history. I just hope the rest of the western world learns that destroying Arab secular nationalism always leads to the formation of religious fundamentalist groups. The PLO became Hamas, Lebanese turned to Hezbollah, the Afghanis turned to the Taleban, and the Iraqis have turned to al Qaeda. They don't just roll over and die, and in fact Hezbollah are the first military organization to have defeated the Israelis in a ground assault. If they had any comparable equipment, you'd see a different attitude towards Lebanon, just as the nuclear armed North Koreans got diplomacy instead of bayonets. It has made it clear to the rest of the world that we will leave you alone if you have a nuclear arsenal.
If you think that the arabs are to blame for the conditions that allow terrorism to become acceptable to their culture, your history books must be pretty thin and biased.
Reagen started with a 2.5% deficit. He doubled it to 5%.
The President sets the framework for the budget.
The President is required to submit to Congress a proposed budget by the first Monday in February. Although this budget does not have the force of law, it is a comprehensive examination of federal revenues and spending, including any initiatives recommended by the President, and is the start of extensive interaction with Congress.
The Federal Budget affects everyone. If Federal funding drops, the States may have to pick up the slack. It was balanced because Clinton simply cut military spending, an act he's constantly derided for now despite it's solid fiscal foundation. Both parties are far to the right, but the Republicans have simply become an absurdity in comparison with the standard for politics in the 21st century. The fact that a lie about a sex act got more attention than administration-wide corruption and lies about the pretext for the invasion of Iraq is a sad testament to how far we haven't come from our Puritan roots.
I'm not blaming W. I'm blaming all the people he brought back from the cabinets of his father and Reagan. That's the only reason I'm voting Obama - just to get the non-elected old white men who have a knack for spending money we don't have on wars we don't need to wage, and the chance to see some leadership change in the Pentagon. Hopefully men who favor diplomacy over illegal wars of aggression.
As far as I can tell, our deficit goes down we're not invading other countries, which is pretty easy to understand. We're fueling a worldwide arms race, mostly because the government contracts which are given out to local economies are turning us into a nation obsessed with military spending. Politicians can't afford to let the jobs go away, and at the same time we can't afford to spend over half of our discretionary budget on war toys.
It's true that the information in the market, in most cases, provides enough benefit in naturally competitive environments to make state run enterprises a bad idea.
However, when you look at some things, they simply can't be privatized. US health care is more expensive than any other in the world, and is not the best. People break out anecdotes of "Oh, this one guy had to wait six months to get his knee replaced." Guess what... they still got it replaced for free. You can still whip out a credit card and go to private health care, but the rest of the population gets the medical care they need for far less money, instead of waiting until it's a life or death emergency that taxes the system much more than cheaper preventative care given away for free.
Just because our politicians are inept doesn't mean all politicians are. Perhaps we need a change in who we vote for rather than hoping privatization will help somehow.
In that case the US Government should fire everyone, since we're 9.5 trillion in the hole. The deficit spending popularized by Reagan, which cut out social programs, raised military spending, and lowered taxes for the wealthy, is just one of the internally flawed principles that passes as economic policy under "conservative" government.
An appropriate response would be to cut spending across the board, and probably reduce the trillion or so dollars a year we spend on military research and wars, which would be around 100 billion if in line with what the rest of the world spends. Instead, we've more than doubled our military spending since 2001, and our currency has steadily declined because of our refusal to address this very basic issue.
America has enormous wealth, but it's currently being squandered by the same chickenhawks who increased the deficit in the 80s with military spending, saber rattling, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Their names might sound familiar: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.
I'll be laughing my ass of when the Chinese knock you off your land and say, "Look at that white trash. Just sits in his trailer all day and drinks. Can you believe they could only support 300 million people on their land?"
Natives worked less hours, had cleaner air, water, food, and lived sustainably. It's better than we seem capable of. But you probably measure wealth in dollars. How's that been treating you lately? 401K looking good? Oh, and that lack of road thing is probably refuted by every piece of archeology in the western hemisphere, unless your definition of road needs asphalt, in which case there were no roads until the 20th century. Which seems kind of inaccurate.
I imagine your kids are getting some kind of education!
...the concentration of wealth has nothing to do with who controlled the land and resources of this country which were taken by force.
We did it, and we still benefit from the economic prosperity of our forefathers. Stop trying to pretend that you'd be where you are without the trampling of indigenous people. Just because you don't want to feel bad isn't excuse enough.
Of course, this doesn't apply if you are the minority or descendant of the oppressed where you live. But that's doubtful given your opinion on the matter.
How many more years are we going to rob Native Americans of livelihood? Sad fact is, most of the populace will be celebrating Columbus day, not even aware that Native Americans are still the poorest in the nation.
Here's an idea: estimate the value of all real estate in the US and start paying some reparations to the surviving family members. Or at least give them some decent infrastructure since we destroyed their civilization. And if you meet them, they aren't even angry about it... they're probably some of the most patriotic people I've ever met.
Fuck writing your congressman. If you live near a reservation, call them and ask how you can help.
My point was precisely that the free market does provide a built-in cost for the depletion of finite resources...
As long as the government isn't complicit in subsidizing infrastructure for corporate gain instead of public insurance. Which is pretty rare.
What you're witnessing with the war on renewables is the death throes of growth capitalism. Space is limited, and the market is going to implode once you see quarter after quarter of low growth.
The market will produce sugar can at the cost of the rain forest (though cattle ranching causes far more deforestation). Sad but true fact...
Oh well, we're destroying the planet? Instead, what if buying from non-sustainable corporations were ruled illegal, or international trade was returned to bilateral trade? Of course there are timelines and issues of international oversight, but that sounds a lot better than letting the world kill itself for a lack of planning.
On the self-censorship of media, I think you and I have a very different view of the media...
Indeed! You don't read about complaints of high taxes because we have some of the lowest in the world, and most wealthy people realize they have too much. Adam Smith stated in the Wealth of Nations that you have to disproportionately tax the wealthy in order to keep an economy moving. Otherwise, what's the incentive to invest and keep track of money? When you have an income of 250,000 and the government takes forty percent, your lifestyle doesn't change that much - you have a house, car, food, luxury items. When you make an income of 25,000 and the government takes forty percent, you probably can't raise more than one child before having to turn to welfare.
The fact is, that everyone contributes to the infrastructure that makes it possible to do business in the US. Without the millions of middle and lower classes, the upper classes would have no way to make the obscene amounts that they make. I'm mostly referring here to the top half percent who own nearly half of the trade on Wall Street.
So, I say, give back, or get out. No company is going to have trouble finding a spot for million dollar salaries. No corporation is irreplaceable, and most of them are poorly run in the first place.
Way back to the media issue, it's no secret that you will be fired if you step out of line with the message the editor wants to put out there. If the NYT or Star! magazine get a scoop on their biggest advertiser dumping chemicals into the Hudson and killing half the eastern seaboard's wetlands, they don't run it until they're sure it's going to break anyway. This is just common sense, just like American papers aren't going to go out of their way to really question the motives of the government in the same manner they do for external entities.
If you look through history, that's pretty much the way it works. There are totalitarian states where if you don't follow the official line, you're going to be punished severely. Take U.S. dependencies in Central America, some of the worst. In El Salvador, intellectuals who continued to call for peace negotiations and democracy weren't treated nicely. The conservative archbishop, Oscar Romero, who had become "a voice for the voiceless," was assassinated to begin the decade of the 1980s. This decade ended with the murder of six leading intellectuals at the Jesuit University in San Salvador. Their brains were blown out by U.S.-armed and trained members of an elite battalion, which by then had killed tens of thousands of people. Well, that's what it takes to try and be free and honest in a client state of the U.S. If you did a poll of educated Americans and asked them to name the leading Latin American intellectuals whose brains were blow out by our elite forces, essentially no one will have heard of them or remember the incident. If it had been six intellectuals in Czechoslovakia or Poland at the same time, you'd know their names. -
I would not place the fault for high health care costs in the free market... What our system needs is a greater return to free-market ideals, in such places as HSAs coupled with HDHP's(i.e. insurance that protects against unplanned medical needs, instead of routine ones), not greater socialization and removal of what few price signals we have left.
America has the most expensive health care of any western country, and it's the only one that isn't highly regulated. This isn't a coincidence, but more of a reflection that the benefit of economic incentive isn't quite right when it comes to basic human services, which are modern needs -- running water and sewer, electricity, telecommunications, and health care. There are so many sources of food that it's not a problem at the moment.
I would not call the sub-prime crisis a failure... The sub-prime bailout through government guarantees is a horrible misstep
This is par for the course in globalist capitalism. In my opinion, if your company requires government assistance and not by design, the private company ceases to exist. All accounting is opened up, the IRS gets to dive in and sue anyone found embezzling or co-mingling funds, and then the non-essential assets are auctioned off to make sure the workers get their promised pensions. When white collar criminals steal someone's retirement, they deserve nothing less than life in prison or under house arrest, after all of their assets have been seized.
Loans being harder to get is not a bad thing... It is a natural consequence of people ending up on the wrong side of the risk/reward ratio.
The problem is that the mortgage companies were well aware that these people didn't qualify, and sold them the loans anyway, purely based on greed, exploiting loop holes in regulation. This is one of the missing pieces in capitalism - companies do not have to care about any particular customer, just enough of them so they aren't attacked by a mob. And if they really screw it up, the top level management escapes with hundreds of millions of dollars for a few years worth of what they consider work before the whole scheme collapses.
I am not an unreserved supporter of the free market. Regulation is required where society bears costs but does not gain benefits. The incentives... [are] fully feasible for non-essential resources such as education and health care and, yes, oil
I'd rather pay higher taxes for health care than for wars, and health care is considerably less expensive. When a profit is made when people are sick instead of when people are healed, you can see what kind of problem can develop. I can't imagine a non-gameable system where you get a thousand dollars for healing someone, so health care must operate on a cost plus expenses paradigm. There's no way you can have a cost-plus company in charge of a public need without huge amount of regulation or outright state-run hierarchies. Germans have a nice mix - doctors are given budgets, so there is a rationing mechanism, but their service is free to the end user, who doesn't hesitate to call about a bump before it becomes full blown cancer.
With oil, the Europeans got it exactly right. They artificially inflated the price to actually cover the cost of roads and oil infrastructure, and so they use a third of it. America could have developed the same way, with much tighter urban planning, had it not been for the greed of growth capitalism.
I agree that money works, but the current technological platform of our society will demand a new set of rules for capitalism. For the first time there are virtual goods and services that have an untouchable upper limit of production, enormous technological advances that will eliminate the need for humans as a means of production, and corporations that have power that rivals those of democratic states.
In the documentary "The Corporation", the important point is made that genomes are
Straight free-market capitalism provides no built-in costs for long term environmental destruction or exhaustion of finite resources.
Therefore, if it is profitable to take the Amazon rain forest and destroy it for sugar cane and farming, thereby causing irreparable damage to the ecology of the entire earth, it will be done and is acceptable to "the market" if not the people who can no longer survive.
Oil companies are aware that the combination of conservation and renewable energy sources will put them out of business. So, for the same reason they bought and subsequently dismantled mass transit in the 50s, they will continue to spread fear and disinformation about the feasibility and benefits of new energy sources. They've been profiting off of inefficiency and government-assisted lock-ins for decades, and they're not going to stop unless the public demands it.
And if your faith in an unregulated market isn't shaken by the constant failures (great depression, sub-prime crisis, inflated health care costs, self-censorship of media) then your priorities are quite different from mine.
Yes, markets work for many things. But not for everything. If you really believe otherwise, push for the privatization of water. You'll be quickly reminded of why we don't hand industry the keys to the liquor cabinet without reminding them that we are watching.
There are many different kinds of storage for energy. The sun is where ALL earth energy originates. Period. If you can't live on a parcel of land and live off of the energy contained within it, you don't live sustainably. That being said, we don't all have to live in the desert or underwater... the energy resources of an entire nation can be distributed fairly efficiently to it's population.
This article said it would cost 420b in subsidies to make it cost effective to change 35% of the energy to a renewable form by 2050. Let's assume they're way off, and it costs twice as much. So we end up with 2.5 trillion dollars to get us switched over completely. Hell, just double it again to be sure. So five trillion dollars... which could easily be paid by halving our war budget for only ten years, and about twenty if we aren't wasting it on a war.
If we're not willing to pay that price, then we probably deserve to slip into history with a whimper.
Conservation yields more benefits than anything else, as does a sensible immigration and birth control policy -- incentives that reward, but not so much as to punish those with different lifestyles.
I understand your trepidation, but being a deer in headlights isn't a rational response to our predicament. There are many roads to success, but only one to failure, and that's apathy.
Nuclear may be a good option, and one that I'd pick over coal/shale any day. Hydrogen is, of course, a solution in search of a problem. It's use as an energy storage unit for solar is one possible application.
The preferred nuclear option is the enormous amount of the sun's energy that hits our planet every day. Now, if you think the earth will be affected by wind power, I'd ask what steps you've taken to prevent forestation for fear of environment damage.
I keep hearing solar isn't economically viable. Feel free to point me to any recent study you'd like. That's only when the cost of ruining earth's life supporting biosphere is zero. That's the one side of the equation missing in this capitalist question - how much does it cost to take something out of the earth that can never be replaced, especially when you're going to change it from a valuable energy storage unit into thin air and pollution? I think it should cost a great deal.
Let me address a few issues that you seemed to have found in your ass.
Not to mention, do you REALIZE the amount of pollution solar panels incur during manufacturing?
Who said solar panels? What about simple Sterling engines? What about simple thermal storage? For instance, if you live in a decently sunny area, you can have free hot showers for life with a big black barrel and a hose. Less sunny parts of the country can use wind or geothermal.
Not to mention that most of the world doesn't get nearly enough sun to make this worthwhile. Not to mention the potential ecological impact you'll have when you deny the ground a great deal of heat.
So the earth doesn't get enough sun to support life. Here's quote from page one of a Google search: "All the energy stored in Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from just 20 days of sunshine." I welcome any study to the contrary. And the vast majority of earth being comprised of molten rock is in danger because of solar panel shade? Are you actually serious?
You've been baited by companies who's very existence is dependent on your willingness to do absolutely nothing about switching to renewable energy sources. Next time you utter the words "nanny state," remember you're its favorite child.
You're expressing the WORST argument for not drilling. Oil companies know better than ANYONE precisely how much it costs to get a drop out of the ground. Do you really think they would be pushing to drill in other areas if drilling where they already have leases were cost effective - particularly at the pace prices have been growing for the past 3 years?
Oil companies may be leveraging the crisis to get more drilling rights. Either way, they either get more places to drill, or the price keeps going up. Nothing forces them to drill as they watch their assets tick up as fast as the dollar signs on a fuel pump.
Do you REALLY think that those "evil" oil companies just want to be mean to everyone and run rampant and pillage? They're out to make the most cost-effective dollar by drilling for oil.
In the past, they've overthrown democratic governments, killed thousands of people, and destroyed the environment for a profit, mostly using the military forces of the US and England to do so. They're out to make money, bottom line, no matter what the side effects are. An economy tied to their whim is a wet dream come true.
Think about it this way - they AREN'T drilling on those leases because they WON'T make any money doing it....and I would trust their word on how much money they make off of oil than yours, unless you're some sort of petro-economic engineering expert.
Alright, so you trust companies making billions of dollars with histories of violence, government corruption, and self-interested conquest, but people protecting the environment or looking for non-finite energy solutions are part of some conspiracy?
We've got plenty of ways to do it... more drilling, more shale, more coal to gasoline, more nuclear... liberals just don't like those options
There's another "groupthink" situation approaching mankind that does actually threaten our way of life. And that's believing that the earth has endless resources. Finite means finite! No matter how much stuff the earth has, there's no such thing as "virtually" infinite. We'll have the sun's energy for billions of years - which is a long time, but still not infinite, especially when you think about how much energy falls on the surface of the earth on a daily basis. How long will any of those coal/shale/oil solutions last?
"Oh! We're running out of oil. Use natural gas. Oh! We're running out of natural gas, how about coal? Oh! We're running out of coal, how about..." Eventually you run out of stuff. Why waste those valuable energy stores when we can go ahead and make the move to renewable energy sources and maintain our standard of living? If there's a huge volcanic eruption in 50 years (and we're long overdue), and our sun-based energy is severely diminished, aren't you going to feel a bit stupid having used all of those easily accessible resources up because it saved the trouble of switching early? It's penny wise and pound foolish.
This seems very interesting and I hope it goes well for them. But I can't help but feel there are simpler solutions.
Yeah. How about using less stuff? It works 100% of the time, is 100% effective, anyone can do it, it uses current technology, and you can start right now. Sure, I love computers. But I only have one. I like TV, but I decided to save money and just watch shows through the web instead of getting cable and buying a TV. I love driving my car, but I try not drive unnecessarily. (As a side benefit I was able to cancel my gym membership and get exercise and commute at the same time.) I like steak, but I only eat red meat a few times a month because it's so damaging to the environment. I could do much more, but the important thing is getting started, and I've realized that my quality of life has improved with my reduction of material goods and extraneous entertainment.
Not saying the R&D should cease... but at some point we have to ask ourselves, "How much is enough?" The planet simply could not support a world full of Americans. The fact that this doesn't appear to alarm us is a grave indicator of our stewardship of spaceship Earth.
People are curious by default. But you can't make money on reveling in scientific breakthroughs. Since money is the only measure of success in our culture, R&D that doesn't directly translate into more capital is ignored and often ridiculed, though almost all real breakthroughs are performed through the state sector (through funding to universities or even directly by DARPA).
Billions upon billions are spent convincing people to buy products they don't need with money they don't have. It's all fun and games until the currency crashes and the environment is left in ruins.
My my. Swap CentaurHauls for AuthenticAMD, and Nano's performance magically jumps about 10 percent. Swap for GenuineIntel, and memory performance goes up no less than 47.4 percent. This is not a test error or random occurance; I benchmarked each CPUID multiple times across multiple reboots on completely clean Windows XP installations. The gains themselves are not confined to a small group of tests within the memory subsystem evaluation, but stretch across the entire series of read/write tests. Only the memory latency results remain unchanged between the two CPUIDs.
Whoops! I wonder what they'll have to say about that...
Stop selling weapons to Africa. Join the ICC to put those in jail who do sell weapons to Africa. Help them become self sufficient instead of just sending them cash. The US Economy alone could cut it's war budget by 10% and feed the whole continent. (I factor in nuclear research, the Dept of Homeland Security, and all other actually war related expenses for a total of one trillion dollars per year.)
The reality is that we don't want to help Africans because we don't care about Africans. Rwanda? Darfur? Give our leaders a call when you can find some better natural resources to exploit, and then our march of freedom will spread southward. Otherwise we'll keep people like Nelson Mandela on our terrorist watch lists along with anyone else who dares to oppose pro-American governments.
Cars need roads, parking lots, garages, maintenance, highways, bridges, fuel infrastructure.... the list goes on.
Imagine if you take a city, freeze all urban sprawl construction and zoning, remove redundant highways, parking lots, and take the immense amount of space saved and turn it into parks and localized farming communities. Use sensible zoning so people can walk or bike to most places of interest. Demolish a few highway lanes and put rail down instead. You can still get from city to city via train, you can still get to your local places of commerce, and we can all stop sending money to murderous dictatorships that we tacitly support and sometimes war with.
It's a sensible solution that is incredibly unpopular because of the people who make trillions of dollars supporting a transportation infrastructure that is no longer our best option.
You can't entirely eliminate a road system, but you can make it so no one but delivery trucks need to use them. And I haven't found anyone who says they enjoy sitting in traffic, or growing up with asthma due to poor air quality in otherwise clean cities.
"[Chomsky] is one of the most deluded people in the history of published political literature."
Cite one example.
That I own an SUV has nothing to do with the poor African on the other side of the planet.
But it does have something to do with our current trouble in the middle east, our dependence on outside parties, and our declining currency. Try to stay with the subject matter. The US and Britain have been invading oil-rich countries since WWI. If OPEC cut off even a portion of their supply to us, it would severely damage our economy.
That's why our currency has been falling consistent with the rise of the price of oil and our growing deficit continues due to our involvement in Iraq. It makes us less competitive with every other more efficient national economy.
If everyone gave up every luxury and transferred everything to the poor, all we would have is more poor people. Nearly all poverty is covered by two causes: 1) self choice, and 2) lack of political freedom and political infrastructure.
Your concept of wealth is truly depressing. If you define poverty as a non-western lifestyle, you're right. People don't voluntarily give up local control over resources in order to make a small portion of their society more wealthy.
I believe in rationality above all else. Doing something that is useless is worse than doing nothing at all, because you delude yourself that you're having an effect, rather than considering what might have a better effect.
So tell me how using less resources can be worse than using more resources, from a purely economical standpoint.
What you don't understand is that resources are effectively unlimited. You won't understand this, but here's an example: we will NEVER run out of oil. NEVER. I mean, not in a million years. Why? Because oil just gets more expensive to get out of the ground until something else becomes cheaper.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument and to provide a handicap for your grasp of the meaning of the word finite, that we won't run out of oil "in a million years."
So why keep an infrastructure that is completely wasteful and inefficient? Why are you so dogmatically attached to the way you transport yourself? Why would you want to weaken our future by continuing with idiotic zoning and transportation policies that have us using three times the amount of oil of the average European? Do you consider Europe to be uncivilized?
We will never run out of energy. We are surrounded by enormous amounts of energy! Sometimes it'll get more expensive, but then something else will come along to produce more energy.
The energy you're using to putz around in is incredibly dense and valuable, representing about one hundred tons of plant material buried for millions of years. We may need it for things in the future besides hauling thousands of pounds of metal for your enjoyment.
Whatever solution you propose to replace gasoline, it will have to be matched with a very efficient transportation infrastructure. It will not include your truck.
I bet you think that things have never been worse than they are now.
No, I think they are better because most people who are informed about the situation agree that there is still time to make the transition from an oil-based society to one with reasonable energy needs met by clean energy sources.
Let me put it this way. If every one in the world used only one gallon of gas per day, and there is twice as much oil is we believe there is left on earth (1 trillion barrels), we'd be slap out of it in 36 years.
Energy is going to become more expensive, because cheap energy isn't going to be around for much longer, as we deplete oil, coal, and gas. Since there are 3000 oil calories expended to deliver one calorie of food, people will be paying much more just to survive. We need to find more efficient ways to transport ourselves and grow our food, and we need to start sooner rather than later.
You seem to believe the marketers who are telling you that driving a $60,000 vehicle or drinking a $5 cup of coffee is improving your life.
It isn't.
The things you consider civilization are the most worthless parts of it. Clean water is going to be worth much more in one hundred years than your rusted SUV. Clean air will be worth more than your house that was built out of cheap wood and sheetrock, which will likely be demolished sixty years after it was built. The ability to grow food will be worth more than the electronics that will end up in the rubbish pile.
Because of our lifestyle decisions, we are now unable to meet the needs of our own infrastructure. Maybe you like living at the end of the leash held by the world's oil companies and nationalized dictatorships, but I think it's incredibly short sighted.
You see, there was a time in this country when sacrifice and conservatism were noble. When we pulled together to get out of the Great Depression, and pulled together to retool our economy for WWII, and pulled together to provide right for all of our citizens in the 60s and 70s. The "gloom-and-doomers" are the people who see problems and deal with them rather than sticking their heads in the sand.
Yes, I own a car, which gets only 30mpg. But I live four miles from where I work, and I bike there four out of five days every week. I recycle what I can even though it costs me money. I try to spend my money with companies that are good stewards of the environment, so if I have children, I can look them in the eye and tell them that I have saved some real wealth for them: the right to clean water, clear air, and a food supply that doesn't give them cancer.
Maybe you live far away from your job and mass transit isn't an option. Perhaps you do need to use an eight cylinder engine everywhere you go. But if you're going to ignore the very real problems our society is facing, you need to realize that you are that shithead who shows up to party but never buys any booze and never helps clean up. You are a douche bag, and everyone knows it and hates you. If you can live with that, then good for you.
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the pilot did not wake up that morning and prepare himself to kill a bunch of civi's.
If he didn't he's incredibly naive.
The suicide bomber meticulously goes though ceremony preparing himself, selects the busiest bus, the most crowded market, or the most painful target thats a huge difference than the soldier.
And if China invaded you'd just sit on your ass while they destroyed entire towns. Or maybe you'd pray with your family, read a few passages from the bible, and go find the softest target you could successfully destroy.
But to say that things in Afghanistan were *better* under the Taliban is either a pathetic F'ing joke, or proof you've jumped the shark. They (the Taliban) made shows of shooting women in soccer stadiums for daring to learn to read, or earning money... banned speech, music, and every other freedom you can imagine but hey at least there were no drug problems right..
The GP is barking up the wrong tree of course, but it doesn't matter to the civilian if they are shot in the head by a local religious nut or burned alive by a firebomb or crushed inside of a home. The fact is that after we wrecked Afghanistan just to bleed the Russians and left the country in ruins (spending half a trillion dollars on war and then zero on reconstruction), the Taliban had the power vacuum necessary to take over. People had no freedom, but they were alive, and not getting constantly shot at.
In fact, they're the only government that ever stopped the opium trade. And we gave them $43 million dollars to thank them for it just before September 11th. That's how good our intelligence is, and how little we care about the plight of any downtrodden masses.
Since you have faith in fictional narratives instead of reality, I think American politicians suit you just fine as they are.
Your point about the deficit is what? I never disputed that Reagen increased it dramatically.
You insinuated that his economic policy "was the norm" which isn't true, demonstrated by the doubling of the deficit, as far as I can see, the only time it's doubled when we aren't at war. If you don't believe me, look up debate at the time over his policies, labeled "voodoo economics" by Bush I.
And "this budget does not have the force of law" pretty much sums up my point niceless. thanks for lending my argument some authenticity.
Again, you insinuated that the President does not have anything to do with the budget. You can weasel your way with some narrower definition, but that's simple dishonesty.
The President does set the budget. The Congress negotiates with him and ratifies it, and then it becomes law.
To me Obama is just another old white man.
It's a narrow choice, but it's a choice. McCain and his cabinet would probably be filled with the same people who aren't able to deal with the realities of diplomacy, the basics of financial planning, and the courage to lead in a post-petroleum economy. They pander to people who believe the earth has an infinite supply of everything, and that killing Muslim civilians will somehow help with the problems of Muslim extremism.
The Iraq war is the best possible scenario for religious fundamentalists. The have pictures of dead Muslims to pass around, an excellent environment for cultivating new psychopaths, and a good place to train them. The orphaned children alone represent tens of thousands of new possible recruits.
You're spouting the same nonsense that kept us in the Vietnam War, only this time we're actually going to lose some valuable resources if we are forced to leave Iraq. But don't worry your pretty little head. We have four permanent military installations that we will only abandon after our currency finally crashes from our national deficit and staggering military spending. The democracy we're pretending to support in Iraq is just like the one we helped the British with in Iran back in the 50s. And we all know how well that turned out.
As soon as the $300 checks sent out to the Sunni mercenaries who have switched tactics for the moment cease to arrive, the "pre-surge" violence levels will return overnight. To quote one Shia resident, the terrorists have become the police, but for how long? Peace in Iraq is extraordinarily expensive, and soon we won't be able to afford it.
Some folks can't learn lessons from history. I just hope the rest of the western world learns that destroying Arab secular nationalism always leads to the formation of religious fundamentalist groups. The PLO became Hamas, Lebanese turned to Hezbollah, the Afghanis turned to the Taleban, and the Iraqis have turned to al Qaeda. They don't just roll over and die, and in fact Hezbollah are the first military organization to have defeated the Israelis in a ground assault. If they had any comparable equipment, you'd see a different attitude towards Lebanon, just as the nuclear armed North Koreans got diplomacy instead of bayonets. It has made it clear to the rest of the world that we will leave you alone if you have a nuclear arsenal.
If you think that the arabs are to blame for the conditions that allow terrorism to become acceptable to their culture, your history books must be pretty thin and biased.
Reagen started with a 2.5% deficit. He doubled it to 5%.
The President sets the framework for the budget.
The President is required to submit to Congress a proposed budget by the first Monday in February. Although this budget does not have the force of law, it is a comprehensive examination of federal revenues and spending, including any initiatives recommended by the President, and is the start of extensive interaction with Congress.
The Congressional Budget Process
The Federal Budget affects everyone. If Federal funding drops, the States may have to pick up the slack. It was balanced because Clinton simply cut military spending, an act he's constantly derided for now despite it's solid fiscal foundation. Both parties are far to the right, but the Republicans have simply become an absurdity in comparison with the standard for politics in the 21st century. The fact that a lie about a sex act got more attention than administration-wide corruption and lies about the pretext for the invasion of Iraq is a sad testament to how far we haven't come from our Puritan roots.
I'm not blaming W. I'm blaming all the people he brought back from the cabinets of his father and Reagan. That's the only reason I'm voting Obama - just to get the non-elected old white men who have a knack for spending money we don't have on wars we don't need to wage, and the chance to see some leadership change in the Pentagon. Hopefully men who favor diplomacy over illegal wars of aggression.
As far as I can tell, our deficit goes down we're not invading other countries, which is pretty easy to understand. We're fueling a worldwide arms race, mostly because the government contracts which are given out to local economies are turning us into a nation obsessed with military spending. Politicians can't afford to let the jobs go away, and at the same time we can't afford to spend over half of our discretionary budget on war toys.
It's true that the information in the market, in most cases, provides enough benefit in naturally competitive environments to make state run enterprises a bad idea.
However, when you look at some things, they simply can't be privatized. US health care is more expensive than any other in the world, and is not the best. People break out anecdotes of "Oh, this one guy had to wait six months to get his knee replaced." Guess what... they still got it replaced for free. You can still whip out a credit card and go to private health care, but the rest of the population gets the medical care they need for far less money, instead of waiting until it's a life or death emergency that taxes the system much more than cheaper preventative care given away for free.
Just because our politicians are inept doesn't mean all politicians are. Perhaps we need a change in who we vote for rather than hoping privatization will help somehow.
In that case the US Government should fire everyone, since we're 9.5 trillion in the hole. The deficit spending popularized by Reagan, which cut out social programs, raised military spending, and lowered taxes for the wealthy, is just one of the internally flawed principles that passes as economic policy under "conservative" government.
An appropriate response would be to cut spending across the board, and probably reduce the trillion or so dollars a year we spend on military research and wars, which would be around 100 billion if in line with what the rest of the world spends. Instead, we've more than doubled our military spending since 2001, and our currency has steadily declined because of our refusal to address this very basic issue.
America has enormous wealth, but it's currently being squandered by the same chickenhawks who increased the deficit in the 80s with military spending, saber rattling, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Their names might sound familiar: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
(Just because you don't like the source doesn't mean the numbers aren't real.)
Just checking.
I'll be laughing my ass of when the Chinese knock you off your land and say, "Look at that white trash. Just sits in his trailer all day and drinks. Can you believe they could only support 300 million people on their land?"
Natives worked less hours, had cleaner air, water, food, and lived sustainably. It's better than we seem capable of. But you probably measure wealth in dollars. How's that been treating you lately? 401K looking good? Oh, and that lack of road thing is probably refuted by every piece of archeology in the western hemisphere, unless your definition of road needs asphalt, in which case there were no roads until the 20th century. Which seems kind of inaccurate.
I imagine your kids are getting some kind of education!
...the concentration of wealth has nothing to do with who controlled the land and resources of this country which were taken by force.
We did it, and we still benefit from the economic prosperity of our forefathers. Stop trying to pretend that you'd be where you are without the trampling of indigenous people. Just because you don't want to feel bad isn't excuse enough.
Of course, this doesn't apply if you are the minority or descendant of the oppressed where you live. But that's doubtful given your opinion on the matter.
Some of the poorest in the nation. The African American population still has the lowest household income.
...especially if you're wealthy, WASPy, and in the hole for billions of dollars due to your idiotic business leadership.
How many more years are we going to rob Native Americans of livelihood? Sad fact is, most of the populace will be celebrating Columbus day, not even aware that Native Americans are still the poorest in the nation.
Here's an idea: estimate the value of all real estate in the US and start paying some reparations to the surviving family members. Or at least give them some decent infrastructure since we destroyed their civilization. And if you meet them, they aren't even angry about it... they're probably some of the most patriotic people I've ever met.
Fuck writing your congressman. If you live near a reservation, call them and ask how you can help.
My point was precisely that the free market does provide a built-in cost for the depletion of finite resources...
As long as the government isn't complicit in subsidizing infrastructure for corporate gain instead of public insurance. Which is pretty rare.
What you're witnessing with the war on renewables is the death throes of growth capitalism. Space is limited, and the market is going to implode once you see quarter after quarter of low growth.
The market will produce sugar can at the cost of the rain forest (though cattle ranching causes far more deforestation). Sad but true fact...
Oh well, we're destroying the planet? Instead, what if buying from non-sustainable corporations were ruled illegal, or international trade was returned to bilateral trade? Of course there are timelines and issues of international oversight, but that sounds a lot better than letting the world kill itself for a lack of planning.
On the self-censorship of media, I think you and I have a very different view of the media...
Indeed! You don't read about complaints of high taxes because we have some of the lowest in the world, and most wealthy people realize they have too much. Adam Smith stated in the Wealth of Nations that you have to disproportionately tax the wealthy in order to keep an economy moving. Otherwise, what's the incentive to invest and keep track of money? When you have an income of 250,000 and the government takes forty percent, your lifestyle doesn't change that much - you have a house, car, food, luxury items. When you make an income of 25,000 and the government takes forty percent, you probably can't raise more than one child before having to turn to welfare.
The fact is, that everyone contributes to the infrastructure that makes it possible to do business in the US. Without the millions of middle and lower classes, the upper classes would have no way to make the obscene amounts that they make. I'm mostly referring here to the top half percent who own nearly half of the trade on Wall Street.
So, I say, give back, or get out. No company is going to have trouble finding a spot for million dollar salaries. No corporation is irreplaceable, and most of them are poorly run in the first place.
Way back to the media issue, it's no secret that you will be fired if you step out of line with the message the editor wants to put out there. If the NYT or Star! magazine get a scoop on their biggest advertiser dumping chemicals into the Hudson and killing half the eastern seaboard's wetlands, they don't run it until they're sure it's going to break anyway. This is just common sense, just like American papers aren't going to go out of their way to really question the motives of the government in the same manner they do for external entities.
If you look through history, that's pretty much the way it works. There are totalitarian states where if you don't follow the official line, you're going to be punished severely. Take U.S. dependencies in Central America, some of the worst. In El Salvador, intellectuals who continued to call for peace negotiations and democracy weren't treated nicely. The conservative archbishop, Oscar Romero, who had become "a voice for the voiceless," was assassinated to begin the decade of the 1980s. This decade ended with the murder of six leading intellectuals at the Jesuit University in San Salvador. Their brains were blown out by U.S.-armed and trained members of an elite battalion, which by then had killed tens of thousands of people. Well, that's what it takes to try and be free and honest in a client state of the U.S. If you did a poll of educated Americans and asked them to name the leading Latin American intellectuals whose brains were blow out by our elite forces, essentially no one will have heard of them or remember the incident. If it had been six intellectuals in Czechoslovakia or Poland at the same time, you'd know their names.
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I would not place the fault for high health care costs in the free market... What our system needs is a greater return to free-market ideals, in such places as HSAs coupled with HDHP's(i.e. insurance that protects against unplanned medical needs, instead of routine ones), not greater socialization and removal of what few price signals we have left.
America has the most expensive health care of any western country, and it's the only one that isn't highly regulated. This isn't a coincidence, but more of a reflection that the benefit of economic incentive isn't quite right when it comes to basic human services, which are modern needs -- running water and sewer, electricity, telecommunications, and health care. There are so many sources of food that it's not a problem at the moment.
I would not call the sub-prime crisis a failure... The sub-prime bailout through government guarantees is a horrible misstep
This is par for the course in globalist capitalism. In my opinion, if your company requires government assistance and not by design, the private company ceases to exist. All accounting is opened up, the IRS gets to dive in and sue anyone found embezzling or co-mingling funds, and then the non-essential assets are auctioned off to make sure the workers get their promised pensions. When white collar criminals steal someone's retirement, they deserve nothing less than life in prison or under house arrest, after all of their assets have been seized.
Loans being harder to get is not a bad thing... It is a natural consequence of people ending up on the wrong side of the risk/reward ratio.
The problem is that the mortgage companies were well aware that these people didn't qualify, and sold them the loans anyway, purely based on greed, exploiting loop holes in regulation. This is one of the missing pieces in capitalism - companies do not have to care about any particular customer, just enough of them so they aren't attacked by a mob. And if they really screw it up, the top level management escapes with hundreds of millions of dollars for a few years worth of what they consider work before the whole scheme collapses.
I am not an unreserved supporter of the free market. Regulation is required where society bears costs but does not gain benefits. The incentives... [are] fully feasible for non-essential resources such as education and health care and, yes, oil
I'd rather pay higher taxes for health care than for wars, and health care is considerably less expensive. When a profit is made when people are sick instead of when people are healed, you can see what kind of problem can develop. I can't imagine a non-gameable system where you get a thousand dollars for healing someone, so health care must operate on a cost plus expenses paradigm. There's no way you can have a cost-plus company in charge of a public need without huge amount of regulation or outright state-run hierarchies. Germans have a nice mix - doctors are given budgets, so there is a rationing mechanism, but their service is free to the end user, who doesn't hesitate to call about a bump before it becomes full blown cancer.
With oil, the Europeans got it exactly right. They artificially inflated the price to actually cover the cost of roads and oil infrastructure, and so they use a third of it. America could have developed the same way, with much tighter urban planning, had it not been for the greed of growth capitalism.
I agree that money works, but the current technological platform of our society will demand a new set of rules for capitalism. For the first time there are virtual goods and services that have an untouchable upper limit of production, enormous technological advances that will eliminate the need for humans as a means of production, and corporations that have power that rivals those of democratic states.
In the documentary "The Corporation", the important point is made that genomes are
Straight free-market capitalism provides no built-in costs for long term environmental destruction or exhaustion of finite resources.
Therefore, if it is profitable to take the Amazon rain forest and destroy it for sugar cane and farming, thereby causing irreparable damage to the ecology of the entire earth, it will be done and is acceptable to "the market" if not the people who can no longer survive.
Oil companies are aware that the combination of conservation and renewable energy sources will put them out of business. So, for the same reason they bought and subsequently dismantled mass transit in the 50s, they will continue to spread fear and disinformation about the feasibility and benefits of new energy sources. They've been profiting off of inefficiency and government-assisted lock-ins for decades, and they're not going to stop unless the public demands it.
And if your faith in an unregulated market isn't shaken by the constant failures (great depression, sub-prime crisis, inflated health care costs, self-censorship of media) then your priorities are quite different from mine.
Yes, markets work for many things. But not for everything. If you really believe otherwise, push for the privatization of water. You'll be quickly reminded of why we don't hand industry the keys to the liquor cabinet without reminding them that we are watching.
There are many different kinds of storage for energy. The sun is where ALL earth energy originates. Period. If you can't live on a parcel of land and live off of the energy contained within it, you don't live sustainably. That being said, we don't all have to live in the desert or underwater... the energy resources of an entire nation can be distributed fairly efficiently to it's population.
This article said it would cost 420b in subsidies to make it cost effective to change 35% of the energy to a renewable form by 2050. Let's assume they're way off, and it costs twice as much. So we end up with 2.5 trillion dollars to get us switched over completely. Hell, just double it again to be sure. So five trillion dollars... which could easily be paid by halving our war budget for only ten years, and about twenty if we aren't wasting it on a war.
If we're not willing to pay that price, then we probably deserve to slip into history with a whimper.
Conservation yields more benefits than anything else, as does a sensible immigration and birth control policy -- incentives that reward, but not so much as to punish those with different lifestyles.
I understand your trepidation, but being a deer in headlights isn't a rational response to our predicament. There are many roads to success, but only one to failure, and that's apathy.
Nuclear may be a good option, and one that I'd pick over coal/shale any day. Hydrogen is, of course, a solution in search of a problem. It's use as an energy storage unit for solar is one possible application.
The preferred nuclear option is the enormous amount of the sun's energy that hits our planet every day. Now, if you think the earth will be affected by wind power, I'd ask what steps you've taken to prevent forestation for fear of environment damage.
I keep hearing solar isn't economically viable. Feel free to point me to any recent study you'd like. That's only when the cost of ruining earth's life supporting biosphere is zero. That's the one side of the equation missing in this capitalist question - how much does it cost to take something out of the earth that can never be replaced, especially when you're going to change it from a valuable energy storage unit into thin air and pollution? I think it should cost a great deal.
Let me address a few issues that you seemed to have found in your ass.
Not to mention, do you REALIZE the amount of pollution solar panels incur during manufacturing?
Who said solar panels? What about simple Sterling engines? What about simple thermal storage? For instance, if you live in a decently sunny area, you can have free hot showers for life with a big black barrel and a hose. Less sunny parts of the country can use wind or geothermal.
Not to mention that most of the world doesn't get nearly enough sun to make this worthwhile. Not to mention the potential ecological impact you'll have when you deny the ground a great deal of heat.
So the earth doesn't get enough sun to support life. Here's quote from page one of a Google search: "All the energy stored in Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas is matched by the energy from just 20 days of sunshine." I welcome any study to the contrary. And the vast majority of earth being comprised of molten rock is in danger because of solar panel shade? Are you actually serious?
You've been baited by companies who's very existence is dependent on your willingness to do absolutely nothing about switching to renewable energy sources. Next time you utter the words "nanny state," remember you're its favorite child.
You're expressing the WORST argument for not drilling. Oil companies know better than ANYONE precisely how much it costs to get a drop out of the ground. Do you really think they would be pushing to drill in other areas if drilling where they already have leases were cost effective - particularly at the pace prices have been growing for the past 3 years?
Oil companies may be leveraging the crisis to get more drilling rights. Either way, they either get more places to drill, or the price keeps going up. Nothing forces them to drill as they watch their assets tick up as fast as the dollar signs on a fuel pump.
Do you REALLY think that those "evil" oil companies just want to be mean to everyone and run rampant and pillage? They're out to make the most cost-effective dollar by drilling for oil.
In the past, they've overthrown democratic governments, killed thousands of people, and destroyed the environment for a profit, mostly using the military forces of the US and England to do so. They're out to make money, bottom line, no matter what the side effects are. An economy tied to their whim is a wet dream come true.
Think about it this way - they AREN'T drilling on those leases because they WON'T make any money doing it....and I would trust their word on how much money they make off of oil than yours, unless you're some sort of petro-economic engineering expert.
Alright, so you trust companies making billions of dollars with histories of violence, government corruption, and self-interested conquest, but people protecting the environment or looking for non-finite energy solutions are part of some conspiracy?
How naive are you?
We've got plenty of ways to do it... more drilling, more shale, more coal to gasoline, more nuclear... liberals just don't like those options
There's another "groupthink" situation approaching mankind that does actually threaten our way of life. And that's believing that the earth has endless resources. Finite means finite! No matter how much stuff the earth has, there's no such thing as "virtually" infinite. We'll have the sun's energy for billions of years - which is a long time, but still not infinite, especially when you think about how much energy falls on the surface of the earth on a daily basis. How long will any of those coal/shale/oil solutions last?
"Oh! We're running out of oil. Use natural gas. Oh! We're running out of natural gas, how about coal? Oh! We're running out of coal, how about..." Eventually you run out of stuff. Why waste those valuable energy stores when we can go ahead and make the move to renewable energy sources and maintain our standard of living? If there's a huge volcanic eruption in 50 years (and we're long overdue), and our sun-based energy is severely diminished, aren't you going to feel a bit stupid having used all of those easily accessible resources up because it saved the trouble of switching early? It's penny wise and pound foolish.
This seems very interesting and I hope it goes well for them. But I can't help but feel there are simpler solutions.
Yeah. How about using less stuff? It works 100% of the time, is 100% effective, anyone can do it, it uses current technology, and you can start right now. Sure, I love computers. But I only have one. I like TV, but I decided to save money and just watch shows through the web instead of getting cable and buying a TV. I love driving my car, but I try not drive unnecessarily. (As a side benefit I was able to cancel my gym membership and get exercise and commute at the same time.) I like steak, but I only eat red meat a few times a month because it's so damaging to the environment. I could do much more, but the important thing is getting started, and I've realized that my quality of life has improved with my reduction of material goods and extraneous entertainment.
Not saying the R&D should cease... but at some point we have to ask ourselves, "How much is enough?" The planet simply could not support a world full of Americans. The fact that this doesn't appear to alarm us is a grave indicator of our stewardship of spaceship Earth.
People are curious by default. But you can't make money on reveling in scientific breakthroughs. Since money is the only measure of success in our culture, R&D that doesn't directly translate into more capital is ignored and often ridiculed, though almost all real breakthroughs are performed through the state sector (through funding to universities or even directly by DARPA).
Billions upon billions are spent convincing people to buy products they don't need with money they don't have. It's all fun and games until the currency crashes and the environment is left in ruins.
Reading through that article, I found this:
My my. Swap CentaurHauls for AuthenticAMD, and Nano's performance magically jumps about 10 percent. Swap for GenuineIntel, and memory performance goes up no less than 47.4 percent. This is not a test error or random occurance; I benchmarked each CPUID multiple times across multiple reboots on completely clean Windows XP installations. The gains themselves are not confined to a small group of tests within the memory subsystem evaluation, but stretch across the entire series of read/write tests. Only the memory latency results remain unchanged between the two CPUIDs.
Whoops! I wonder what they'll have to say about that...
Here's one way to do it.
Stop selling weapons to Africa. Join the ICC to put those in jail who do sell weapons to Africa. Help them become self sufficient instead of just sending them cash. The US Economy alone could cut it's war budget by 10% and feed the whole continent. (I factor in nuclear research, the Dept of Homeland Security, and all other actually war related expenses for a total of one trillion dollars per year.)
The reality is that we don't want to help Africans because we don't care about Africans. Rwanda? Darfur? Give our leaders a call when you can find some better natural resources to exploit, and then our march of freedom will spread southward. Otherwise we'll keep people like Nelson Mandela on our terrorist watch lists along with anyone else who dares to oppose pro-American governments.
Cars need roads, parking lots, garages, maintenance, highways, bridges, fuel infrastructure.... the list goes on.
Imagine if you take a city, freeze all urban sprawl construction and zoning, remove redundant highways, parking lots, and take the immense amount of space saved and turn it into parks and localized farming communities. Use sensible zoning so people can walk or bike to most places of interest. Demolish a few highway lanes and put rail down instead. You can still get from city to city via train, you can still get to your local places of commerce, and we can all stop sending money to murderous dictatorships that we tacitly support and sometimes war with.
It's a sensible solution that is incredibly unpopular because of the people who make trillions of dollars supporting a transportation infrastructure that is no longer our best option.
You can't entirely eliminate a road system, but you can make it so no one but delivery trucks need to use them. And I haven't found anyone who says they enjoy sitting in traffic, or growing up with asthma due to poor air quality in otherwise clean cities.
"[Chomsky] is one of the most deluded people in the history of published political literature."
Cite one example.
That I own an SUV has nothing to do with the poor African on the other side of the planet.
But it does have something to do with our current trouble in the middle east, our dependence on outside parties, and our declining currency. Try to stay with the subject matter. The US and Britain have been invading oil-rich countries since WWI. If OPEC cut off even a portion of their supply to us, it would severely damage our economy.
That's why our currency has been falling consistent with the rise of the price of oil and our growing deficit continues due to our involvement in Iraq. It makes us less competitive with every other more efficient national economy.
If everyone gave up every luxury and transferred everything to the poor, all we would have is more poor people. Nearly all poverty is covered by two causes: 1) self choice, and 2) lack of political freedom and political infrastructure.
Your concept of wealth is truly depressing. If you define poverty as a non-western lifestyle, you're right. People don't voluntarily give up local control over resources in order to make a small portion of their society more wealthy.
I believe in rationality above all else. Doing something that is useless is worse than doing nothing at all, because you delude yourself that you're having an effect, rather than considering what might have a better effect.
So tell me how using less resources can be worse than using more resources, from a purely economical standpoint.
What you don't understand is that resources are effectively unlimited. You won't understand this, but here's an example: we will NEVER run out of oil. NEVER. I mean, not in a million years. Why? Because oil just gets more expensive to get out of the ground until something else becomes cheaper.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument and to provide a handicap for your grasp of the meaning of the word finite, that we won't run out of oil "in a million years."
So why keep an infrastructure that is completely wasteful and inefficient? Why are you so dogmatically attached to the way you transport yourself? Why would you want to weaken our future by continuing with idiotic zoning and transportation policies that have us using three times the amount of oil of the average European? Do you consider Europe to be uncivilized?
We will never run out of energy. We are surrounded by enormous amounts of energy! Sometimes it'll get more expensive, but then something else will come along to produce more energy.
The energy you're using to putz around in is incredibly dense and valuable, representing about one hundred tons of plant material buried for millions of years. We may need it for things in the future besides hauling thousands of pounds of metal for your enjoyment.
Whatever solution you propose to replace gasoline, it will have to be matched with a very efficient transportation infrastructure. It will not include your truck.
I bet you think that things have never been worse than they are now.
No, I think they are better because most people who are informed about the situation agree that there is still time to make the transition from an oil-based society to one with reasonable energy needs met by clean energy sources.
Let me put it this way. If every one in the world used only one gallon of gas per day, and there is twice as much oil is we believe there is left on earth (1 trillion barrels), we'd be slap out of it in 36 years.
Energy is going to become more expensive, because cheap energy isn't going to be around for much longer, as we deplete oil, coal, and gas. Since there are 3000 oil calories expended to deliver one calorie of food, people will be paying much more just to survive. We need to find more efficient ways to transport ourselves and grow our food, and we need to start sooner rather than later.
You seem to believe the marketers who are telling you that driving a $60,000 vehicle or drinking a $5 cup of coffee is improving your life.
It isn't.
The things you consider civilization are the most worthless parts of it. Clean water is going to be worth much more in one hundred years than your rusted SUV. Clean air will be worth more than your house that was built out of cheap wood and sheetrock, which will likely be demolished sixty years after it was built. The ability to grow food will be worth more than the electronics that will end up in the rubbish pile.
Because of our lifestyle decisions, we are now unable to meet the needs of our own infrastructure. Maybe you like living at the end of the leash held by the world's oil companies and nationalized dictatorships, but I think it's incredibly short sighted.
You see, there was a time in this country when sacrifice and conservatism were noble. When we pulled together to get out of the Great Depression, and pulled together to retool our economy for WWII, and pulled together to provide right for all of our citizens in the 60s and 70s. The "gloom-and-doomers" are the people who see problems and deal with them rather than sticking their heads in the sand.
Yes, I own a car, which gets only 30mpg. But I live four miles from where I work, and I bike there four out of five days every week. I recycle what I can even though it costs me money. I try to spend my money with companies that are good stewards of the environment, so if I have children, I can look them in the eye and tell them that I have saved some real wealth for them: the right to clean water, clear air, and a food supply that doesn't give them cancer.
Maybe you live far away from your job and mass transit isn't an option. Perhaps you do need to use an eight cylinder engine everywhere you go. But if you're going to ignore the very real problems our society is facing, you need to realize that you are that shithead who shows up to party but never buys any booze and never helps clean up. You are a douche bag, and everyone knows it and hates you. If you can live with that, then good for you.