No-one wants more catastrophes like Enron, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Fuck the baby.
There's plenty of people out there who want another Enron.
They just want it to be easier to not get caught. These individuals sponsor pro-deregulation articles at hack mills like Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, and bribe their congressmen to give them tax cuts and contracts, and stronger IP law, and defanged regulatory oversight.
Republicans want deregulation, because it makes it easier to steal. Republican Culture of Corruption.
NOTHING. Because there's nothing you CAN do. The neoMcCarthyites will have you thrown in Guantanamo if you even talk about or plan to do anything meaningful. And even if you could try something meaningful, you're up against the most powerful military in the world, whose upper-echelons have been stacked with highly idealistic religious wingnuts.
Unless you have a whole lot of money, you're not going to influence ANY politician, Democrat OR Republican. And, depressingly, most of your countrymen are so craven on the terrorism issue, that they don't really care about this NSA tapping deal. Today's poll numbers confirm that. (however, Bush seems to have dropped a point).
You could always leave America, but then you'd become a victim of it's foreign policy.
The American thing to do, is to try to educate people, use enlightenment principles, logic, reason, to try to get other voters to understand what's happening. But folks - we've been fighting that battle since the Republicans caused the Great Depression. The more sophisticated and powerful and consolidated the mass-media becomes (including the internet, now that we're no longer going to enforce net neutrality), the harder this battle is going to become.
Lately, I've been thinking that the only thing to do is stock up on marshmallows, sit back, and roast them as the American empire goes up in flames.
By it's very nature, you can't measure the benefits of SOX.
Without SOX, we don't have enough information to even know how much corporate fraud is going on. So how the hell do you measure what the cost of that is?
WITH SOX, because of the reporting requirements, fraudsters have to change their behavior, perhaps even behave honestly. That's worth a great deal, because as you see recently, the DJIA has begun to creep back up after it's 4-year flatness, because people didn't trust the market, because after Enron, Worldcom, etc. they all knew that the market was rigged by scam artists. So they put their money into housing. Now it's commodities, especially precious metal and petroleum. But some of that's coming back to the DJIA, because at leeast a small sense of trust in the market has returned.
I don't know about the rest of y'all, but in the last bubble, there was such a high labor demand, that if a person could switch on a computer, they could get a salary of $70k/yr. If you were more competent, you could get more. And the icing on the cake was that they were handing out stock options like candy, to everyone, even the janitors. And NASDAQ was doing so well - frankly, I bought a house I would never have had a chance at getting into otherwise (though I totally screwed up how I structured my stock sales, so I got fucked by the IRS, and wasn't able to really take advantage of what would have been about $1 million worth of options).
Many techies were seriously debating whether there was any point to higher education because of this tight labor situation.
Nowadays, it's very different. Most of us feel lucky just to have jobs. My salary has finally caught up with what it was in 1998. Only now, I'm not getting stock options.
We're most certainly not in the midst of another tech bubble. My take on this is that most likely, the reason for recent higher earnings has been due to the NSA buying lots of hard drives. When they've got enough, we'll be right back in the 2000-2003 toilet.
The political strategy of Karl Rove, is to use the compliant media - absolutely DESPERATE for any kind of controversial story to sell ad space, increase revenue, to spread the word about any kind of dirt on the man everyone loves to hate; George W Bush.
Everyone loves to hate him, because he's a fuckup. And he's stinking filthy rich, never worked for it. The absolute antithesis of epicurianism. He drives liberals fucking crazy, because he's everything a liberal hates.
So he creates a little story about something related to something that Bush has done, only he makes it look illegal, when technically, due to some obscure loophole or conservative interpretation of law or the constitution, it's actually legal. And he calls up his buddies in the press, the Judy Millers, the Chris Mathews, etc. and says - hey, have I got a story for you - (or one of your more liberal friends in the same media organization) - however he gets it going.
What do you think "10 million phone conversations recorded a day" (oops, I mean 10 million pen-registers a day) means? It means that what Bush is doing - based on the PATRIOT ACT, is technically legal. The So-Called Liberal media has been swatting at Bush madly all day long, and pundits are furiously describing speeches he made where he talked about obeying the law wrt court orders and such. I'm certain that the timing of this story has something to do, as well, with the Goss resignation and Hayden appointment, given Hayden's stewardship of this NSA program. Too much coincidence.
So the point of all this is - Rove feints with a "fake" Bush is evil story. The Liberals scream and yell, and over react. They can't help it - they've been given incomplete, if not false information. It brews and bubbles for a few days, or weeks, or months, then the FULL story with all the facts get out, and the Liberals end up losing the argument, and looking like asses.
Remember Rathergate? We all thought we finally had the proof that Bush was a deserter. Until the proof turned out to be a forgery. Who forged it? (My guess: Rove) Where's the REAL evidence that he was or was not a deserter? (My guess: Shredded decades ago, duh!) What was the final outcome? (Dan Rather, Liberal media Icon resigns in disgrace - noone dares question Bush's military service ever again in serious public debate).
Remember Plamegate? Bush SAID he would fire the leaker. We were all hoping that that meant, Cheney would be fired, or Libby would be fired, or Karl Rove would be fired. Then after a very costly investigation, an indictment which is explained away as "bad memory" (remember Iran-Contra?) and then the TRUTH finally comes out: BUSH is the leaker - because he de-classified Plame. Technically legal. The outcome? Bush still got his war, Libby's case will probably be dismissed, or he'll be pardoned - G.Gordon Liddy spent time behind bars for his Watergate Role, and he's making buttloads on the talk-show and book-signing circuit. And Liberals are "technically wrong" again, because technically, Bush didn't break the law.
This whole NSA scandal thing sounds exactly the same. Huge controversey made over a story that is changing every time we hear about it. Public debate rages over whether he has the right to do this (when "this" isn't even really defined yet), or whether we have a right to question during a "war", (whether or not you agree on the premise, execution, or whether we're technically at "war"). In the end, I'm afraid we're going to find out that what Bush is doing, is technically legal (or if it's illegal, those facts will never become known) - and that a lot of Liberal pundits, and moderate conservatives, or even hard conservatives who have lost faith, are going to look like chumps, and congress will end up even MORE impotent and irrelevant, and Bush will have more clout to do whatever he wants.
Some people think that this rove-a-dope tactic is a demonstration of Karl Rove's "evil genius". I disagree. People are gullible. They still trust the media. Th
Unions depend a lot on Brotherhood, and office people generally just aren't like that.
Right on.
I wouldn't mind a Union to increase MY bargaining power, and protect MY rights.
But on the other hand, I shudder to think of paying union-dues to do the same for my incompetent co-workers. (Unfortunately, I'm not joking. Not one bit).
Seriously, I have never understood the thing that IT people have for sucking down caffeine all day long.
It's really about consumer choice and addiction.
I'm a caffeine addict. I can quit. But if I quit, I have to not have ANY caffeine ever, or I'm drawn back in. But when I was quit - I often found myself in a situation where I had to choose between a carbonated/caffinated/diet drink, a carbonated/noncaffinated/sugar drink, or plain tap water.
If I had to choose between the three, I would choose the caffinated drink. The sugar is bad, I can't stand the sweet, and it's just bad for me. And tap water is uncarbonated. At the grocery store, there's sparkling water, but it's almost always 2 to 3 times more expensive than the carbonated water sold with diet soda syrup and caffeine laced in. Go figure.
If every restaurant I ate at, and every store I shopped at, had a PLAIN carbonated water option, and sold it for the same price as their pop, I wouldn't consume caffeine either.
I'm of the opinion that we are doomed as a people if we can't get out government out of the business of trying to protect us from ourselves. The governments job is to protect us from outsiders and each other.
Governments have been protecting people from themselves since Hammurabi's time (x000 B.C.). So, when exactly is this "doom" supposed to arrive? IMO - it already arrived, and it's here to stay. Is it a good thing? I don't think so. Will it "extinct" humanity? I don't think anything's going to prevent that eventuality.
George Washington grew hemp on his plantation. His farmer's journal says so. And it specifically states that he took the effort to separate the female plants from the males. Which is something you do if you are specifically breeding it for potency. This is not an urban legend. The passage is there in his journal - I googled it years back, you can tool.
"Industrial Hemp" is low THC. I've heard that it's not possible to smoke enough to actually get high. Cannabis has been specially bred by humans (for at least 5000 years if not more) to produce both high and low THC varieties.
The argument put forth by Republican congressmen in the past 6 months or so that all the legalization efforts that states have tried need to be STOPPED by federal law, because Cannabis plants are supposedly a lot more potent and powerful than they used to be in the 1960's is complete bullshit. Of course it *seems* more powerful when you're 50 years old, have abused your liver with alcohol, and haven't smoked it since you were a teenager.
I've got an acquaintance (who is an avid Anne Coulter reader and Bush supporter) who smokes more pot on a daily basis than anyone I've ever known. And that includes from back when I was in Art School. I would say that he definately has a psychological dependency on it. He has three kids, and said he would kick their asses if he caught them smoking pot.
He believes it's dangerous and should be illegal. He also frequently drives with open liquor. Of course, I can't do that stuff at all, because I get tested at work.
And I'm trying to carefully undo the damage that D.A.R.E. programs have done to my kids' thinking. While his kids are homeschooled, and aren't even exposed to D.A.R.E.
Does the qualification 'stoner' include Henry Ford and Rudolph Diesel?
Maybe not, but I'm sure it includes Carl Sagan - well known stoner, and gullible idiot. Yep.
The set of people who are the most gullible that I know of are Rush Limbaugh listeners, who are told that all drug addicts are a threat to society and should be thrown in prison.
My biggest criticism of Pimental has to do with; For Ethanol he goes to ridiculous lengths to find energy to plug into his calculations. (ie. it costs X calories to build the tractor to farm the land to grow the corn, so this is included in his calculations).
For Petroleum, he ignores the obvious cost of equipment and lives (and jet-fuel) that goes into securing oil resources around the globe. The fact that such global military dominance has a side-benefit of political power should have no bearing on the fact that, if we weren't addicted to foreign oil, we would not have spent $300 Billion in bombs, planes, helicopters, tanks, APCs, and human lives, over the past 3 years trying to control this resource.
There's really two issues here (aside from the spelling/grammar nazism):
If you include the costs of the energy required to make the equipment that would be used to increase ethanol production to replace gasoline, yes, ethanol takes more energy to produce than gasoline. Of course, this calculation does not include the cost of equipment and human lives to secure petroleum resources in the Middle East to produce gasoline.
In other words, this "Ethanol is a net energy sink" argument is utter bullshit.
However, the other issue - "miles per gallon" - of course. A 20 gallon tank of ethanol takes you less far than a 20 gallon tank of gasoline. About 15% less far. So what? A 20 gallon tank of diesel (petro or bio) takes you farther than a 20 gallon tank of gasoline, (plus, producing petrodiesel from crude is a more efficient process than producing gasoline from crude), but you don't see everyone flocking to diesel.
Why? Because diesel (petro) is a horrible polluter. (and doesn't offer the cold-weather flexibility of gasoline). But compared to Ethanol, gasoline is a horrible polluter. Gasoline puts carbon into the atmosphere. Ethanol extracts carbon from the atmosphere in it's production phase, and puts it back in the combustion phase.
So the gp poster has a point, but it wasn't clear which one he was talking about. With regard to the production issue - that argument is bs. With regard to the energy-density issue - that problem is resolved by using flex-fuel vehicles. Burn ethanol for commuting the 20 miles to and from your daily job. Burn gasoline when you're driving cross country to see the folks in Florida, if you absolutely MUST have that 400-mile-between-fill-ups range. (or buy a diesel, and get a 600-mile-between-fill-ups range all the time, and run it on biodiesel to eliminate net-carbon dioxide, particulates, and sulfur oxides from the emissions).
Oh don't worry, we have a free market, in oil, and vital competition.
So I'm sure that one of these companies is going to lower prices to capture marketshare, or maybe invest all those profits in expanding capacity by building refineries. Sure, they've been making profits like this since 1999 when oil started it's climb from $20/bbl. and haven't started building refineries for the past 5 years. But just wait. Any day now, the invisible hand will get it's thumb out of it's butt, and get to work. It's got to. 'Cause we're in a free market. Right?
I would be terrified going that fast in a beetle. Even a newbeetle. Not without some serious ground-effects and a spoiler. The aerodynamics of that car probably don't create a lot of useful downforce. Never mind whether the suspension, tires, and brakes can handle that kind of speed.
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No-one wants more catastrophes like Enron, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Fuck the baby.
There's plenty of people out there who want another Enron.
They just want it to be easier to not get caught. These individuals sponsor pro-deregulation articles at hack mills like Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, and bribe their congressmen to give them tax cuts and contracts, and stronger IP law, and defanged regulatory oversight.
Republicans want deregulation, because it makes it easier to steal. Republican Culture of Corruption.
I agree - it's very disheartening.
But what are you going to DO about it?
NOTHING. Because there's nothing you CAN do. The neoMcCarthyites will have you thrown in Guantanamo if you even talk about or plan to do anything meaningful. And even if you could try something meaningful, you're up against the most powerful military in the world, whose upper-echelons have been stacked with highly idealistic religious wingnuts.
Unless you have a whole lot of money, you're not going to influence ANY politician, Democrat OR Republican. And, depressingly, most of your countrymen are so craven on the terrorism issue, that they don't really care about this NSA tapping deal. Today's poll numbers confirm that. (however, Bush seems to have dropped a point).
You could always leave America, but then you'd become a victim of it's foreign policy.
The American thing to do, is to try to educate people, use enlightenment principles, logic, reason, to try to get other voters to understand what's happening. But folks - we've been fighting that battle since the Republicans caused the Great Depression. The more sophisticated and powerful and consolidated the mass-media becomes (including the internet, now that we're no longer going to enforce net neutrality), the harder this battle is going to become.
Lately, I've been thinking that the only thing to do is stock up on marshmallows, sit back, and roast them as the American empire goes up in flames.
By it's very nature, you can't measure the benefits of SOX.
Without SOX, we don't have enough information to even know how much corporate fraud is going on. So how the hell do you measure what the cost of that is?
WITH SOX, because of the reporting requirements, fraudsters have to change their behavior, perhaps even behave honestly. That's worth a great deal, because as you see recently, the DJIA has begun to creep back up after it's 4-year flatness, because people didn't trust the market, because after Enron, Worldcom, etc. they all knew that the market was rigged by scam artists. So they put their money into housing. Now it's commodities, especially precious metal and petroleum. But some of that's coming back to the DJIA, because at leeast a small sense of trust in the market has returned.
I don't know about the rest of y'all, but in the last bubble, there was such a high labor demand, that if a person could switch on a computer, they could get a salary of $70k/yr. If you were more competent, you could get more. And the icing on the cake was that they were handing out stock options like candy, to everyone, even the janitors. And NASDAQ was doing so well - frankly, I bought a house I would never have had a chance at getting into otherwise (though I totally screwed up how I structured my stock sales, so I got fucked by the IRS, and wasn't able to really take advantage of what would have been about $1 million worth of options).
Many techies were seriously debating whether there was any point to higher education because of this tight labor situation.
Nowadays, it's very different. Most of us feel lucky just to have jobs. My salary has finally caught up with what it was in 1998. Only now, I'm not getting stock options.
We're most certainly not in the midst of another tech bubble. My take on this is that most likely, the reason for recent higher earnings has been due to the NSA buying lots of hard drives. When they've got enough, we'll be right back in the 2000-2003 toilet.
My idea is to go to the countries where the wages are low and unionize them.
In some of these countries, that's a good way to end up a target of a death squad.
Google "Negroponte" "Death Squad" and "Nicaragua" sometime.
When China starts making packaged houses (just like furniture) and shipping it to Walmarts, then you will see the effect on construction jobs here...
Or when the oil price boom drives up demand for housing in Texas such that they can bring in illegals and hire them for construction jobs then. . .
The political strategy of Karl Rove, is to use the compliant media - absolutely DESPERATE for any kind of controversial story to sell ad space, increase revenue, to spread the word about any kind of dirt on the man everyone loves to hate; George W Bush.
Everyone loves to hate him, because he's a fuckup. And he's stinking filthy rich, never worked for it. The absolute antithesis of epicurianism. He drives liberals fucking crazy, because he's everything a liberal hates.
So he creates a little story about something related to something that Bush has done, only he makes it look illegal, when technically, due to some obscure loophole or conservative interpretation of law or the constitution, it's actually legal. And he calls up his buddies in the press, the Judy Millers, the Chris Mathews, etc. and says - hey, have I got a story for you - (or one of your more liberal friends in the same media organization) - however he gets it going.
What do you think "10 million phone conversations recorded a day" (oops, I mean 10 million pen-registers a day) means? It means that what Bush is doing - based on the PATRIOT ACT, is technically legal. The So-Called Liberal media has been swatting at Bush madly all day long, and pundits are furiously describing speeches he made where he talked about obeying the law wrt court orders and such. I'm certain that the timing of this story has something to do, as well, with the Goss resignation and Hayden appointment, given Hayden's stewardship of this NSA program. Too much coincidence.
So the point of all this is - Rove feints with a "fake" Bush is evil story. The Liberals scream and yell, and over react. They can't help it - they've been given incomplete, if not false information. It brews and bubbles for a few days, or weeks, or months, then the FULL story with all the facts get out, and the Liberals end up losing the argument, and looking like asses.
Remember Rathergate? We all thought we finally had the proof that Bush was a deserter. Until the proof turned out to be a forgery. Who forged it? (My guess: Rove) Where's the REAL evidence that he was or was not a deserter? (My guess: Shredded decades ago, duh!) What was the final outcome? (Dan Rather, Liberal media Icon resigns in disgrace - noone dares question Bush's military service ever again in serious public debate).
Remember Plamegate? Bush SAID he would fire the leaker. We were all hoping that that meant, Cheney would be fired, or Libby would be fired, or Karl Rove would be fired. Then after a very costly investigation, an indictment which is explained away as "bad memory" (remember Iran-Contra?) and then the TRUTH finally comes out: BUSH is the leaker - because he de-classified Plame. Technically legal. The outcome? Bush still got his war, Libby's case will probably be dismissed, or he'll be pardoned - G.Gordon Liddy spent time behind bars for his Watergate Role, and he's making buttloads on the talk-show and book-signing circuit. And Liberals are "technically wrong" again, because technically, Bush didn't break the law.
This whole NSA scandal thing sounds exactly the same. Huge controversey made over a story that is changing every time we hear about it. Public debate rages over whether he has the right to do this (when "this" isn't even really defined yet), or whether we have a right to question during a "war", (whether or not you agree on the premise, execution, or whether we're technically at "war"). In the end, I'm afraid we're going to find out that what Bush is doing, is technically legal (or if it's illegal, those facts will never become known) - and that a lot of Liberal pundits, and moderate conservatives, or even hard conservatives who have lost faith, are going to look like chumps, and congress will end up even MORE impotent and irrelevant, and Bush will have more clout to do whatever he wants.
Some people think that this rove-a-dope tactic is a demonstration of Karl Rove's "evil genius". I disagree. People are gullible. They still trust the media. Th
Okay - I don't understand.
If Swing is good, and Eclipse is good, but Eclipse uses SWT which breaks interoperablity, is there a way to use Swing with Eclipse?
Unions depend a lot on Brotherhood, and office people generally just aren't like that.
Right on.
I wouldn't mind a Union to increase MY bargaining power, and protect MY rights.
But on the other hand, I shudder to think of paying union-dues to do the same for my incompetent co-workers. (Unfortunately, I'm not joking. Not one bit).
No. That's post-1776 thinking.
Interesting. Thanks.
Seriously, I have never understood the thing that IT people have for sucking down caffeine all day long.
It's really about consumer choice and addiction.
I'm a caffeine addict. I can quit. But if I quit, I have to not have ANY caffeine ever, or I'm drawn back in. But when I was quit - I often found myself in a situation where I had to choose between a carbonated/caffinated/diet drink, a carbonated/noncaffinated/sugar drink, or plain tap water.
If I had to choose between the three, I would choose the caffinated drink. The sugar is bad, I can't stand the sweet, and it's just bad for me. And tap water is uncarbonated. At the grocery store, there's sparkling water, but it's almost always 2 to 3 times more expensive than the carbonated water sold with diet soda syrup and caffeine laced in. Go figure.
If every restaurant I ate at, and every store I shopped at, had a PLAIN carbonated water option, and sold it for the same price as their pop, I wouldn't consume caffeine either.
Unfortunately, you can get sodas for $.25/can in bulk.
You never find deals like that on carbonated water, flavored or otherwise.
Mr. Hurst owned vast tracts of forrest in the Pacific NW & felt threatened by that.
I don't know if I buy that.
Why didn't he just buy some farmland and grow hemp instead?
It's not like we don't have other uses (demand) for wood.
I'm of the opinion that we are doomed as a people if we can't get out government out of the business of trying to protect us from ourselves. The governments job is to protect us from outsiders and each other.
Governments have been protecting people from themselves since Hammurabi's time (x000 B.C.). So, when exactly is this "doom" supposed to arrive? IMO - it already arrived, and it's here to stay. Is it a good thing? I don't think so. Will it "extinct" humanity? I don't think anything's going to prevent that eventuality.
One more thing about potency:
George Washington grew hemp on his plantation. His farmer's journal says so. And it specifically states that he took the effort to separate the female plants from the males. Which is something you do if you are specifically breeding it for potency. This is not an urban legend. The passage is there in his journal - I googled it years back, you can tool.
Gene-splicing not necessary.
"Industrial Hemp" is low THC. I've heard that it's not possible to smoke enough to actually get high. Cannabis has been specially bred by humans (for at least 5000 years if not more) to produce both high and low THC varieties.
The argument put forth by Republican congressmen in the past 6 months or so that all the legalization efforts that states have tried need to be STOPPED by federal law, because Cannabis plants are supposedly a lot more potent and powerful than they used to be in the 1960's is complete bullshit. Of course it *seems* more powerful when you're 50 years old, have abused your liver with alcohol, and haven't smoked it since you were a teenager.
I've got an acquaintance (who is an avid Anne Coulter reader and Bush supporter) who smokes more pot on a daily basis than anyone I've ever known. And that includes from back when I was in Art School. I would say that he definately has a psychological dependency on it. He has three kids, and said he would kick their asses if he caught them smoking pot.
He believes it's dangerous and should be illegal. He also frequently drives with open liquor. Of course, I can't do that stuff at all, because I get tested at work.
And I'm trying to carefully undo the damage that D.A.R.E. programs have done to my kids' thinking. While his kids are homeschooled, and aren't even exposed to D.A.R.E.
Yes. We live in backwards-world.
Does the qualification 'stoner' include Henry Ford and Rudolph Diesel?
Maybe not, but I'm sure it includes Carl Sagan - well known stoner, and gullible idiot. Yep.
The set of people who are the most gullible that I know of are Rush Limbaugh listeners, who are told that all drug addicts are a threat to society and should be thrown in prison.
My biggest criticism of Pimental has to do with;
For Ethanol he goes to ridiculous lengths to find energy to plug into his calculations. (ie. it costs X calories to build the tractor to farm the land to grow the corn, so this is included in his calculations).
For Petroleum, he ignores the obvious cost of equipment and lives (and jet-fuel) that goes into securing oil resources around the globe. The fact that such global military dominance has a side-benefit of political power should have no bearing on the fact that, if we weren't addicted to foreign oil, we would not have spent $300 Billion in bombs, planes, helicopters, tanks, APCs, and human lives, over the past 3 years trying to control this resource.
There's really two issues here (aside from the spelling/grammar nazism):
If you include the costs of the energy required to make the equipment that would be used to increase ethanol production to replace gasoline, yes, ethanol takes more energy to produce than gasoline.
Of course, this calculation does not include the cost of equipment and human lives to secure petroleum resources in the Middle East to produce gasoline.
In other words, this "Ethanol is a net energy sink" argument is utter bullshit.
However, the other issue - "miles per gallon" - of course. A 20 gallon tank of ethanol takes you less far than a 20 gallon tank of gasoline. About 15% less far. So what? A 20 gallon tank of diesel (petro or bio) takes you farther than a 20 gallon tank of gasoline, (plus, producing petrodiesel from crude is a more efficient process than producing gasoline from crude), but you don't see everyone flocking to diesel.
Why? Because diesel (petro) is a horrible polluter. (and doesn't offer the cold-weather flexibility of gasoline).
But compared to Ethanol, gasoline is a horrible polluter. Gasoline puts carbon into the atmosphere. Ethanol extracts carbon from the atmosphere in it's production phase, and puts it back in the combustion phase.
So the gp poster has a point, but it wasn't clear which one he was talking about. With regard to the production issue - that argument is bs. With regard to the energy-density issue - that problem is resolved by using flex-fuel vehicles. Burn ethanol for commuting the 20 miles to and from your daily job. Burn gasoline when you're driving cross country to see the folks in Florida, if you absolutely MUST have that 400-mile-between-fill-ups range.
(or buy a diesel, and get a 600-mile-between-fill-ups range all the time, and run it on biodiesel to eliminate net-carbon dioxide, particulates, and sulfur oxides from the emissions).
Use a call-tracking system, and have the user submit formal requests.
Define policy so that only properly submitted requests will result in support.
Justify it as a tool to accurately track time spent on issues, and number of issues to assist with resource allocation.
You'll never have to do support again.
Oh don't worry, we have a free market, in oil, and vital competition.
So I'm sure that one of these companies is going to lower prices to capture marketshare, or maybe invest all those profits in expanding capacity by building refineries. Sure, they've been making profits like this since 1999 when oil started it's climb from $20/bbl. and haven't started building refineries for the past 5 years. But just wait. Any day now, the invisible hand will get it's thumb out of it's butt, and get to work. It's got to. 'Cause we're in a free market. Right?
I would be terrified going that fast in a beetle. Even a newbeetle. Not without some serious ground-effects and a spoiler. The aerodynamics of that car probably don't create a lot of useful downforce. Never mind whether the suspension, tires, and brakes can handle that kind of speed.
Aw - "done right" would have been a 55 beetle fitted with a vintage engine from a Messerschmit-262.