Exactly. The primary purpose of the current generation of hybrids is to make their smug owners FEEL like they are helping the environment. And since there was apparently a pretty big untapped market selling feel good cars to pompous greens
Shall we discuss the meta-smugness of people who enjoy nothing more than justifying their own thoughtless lifestyles by criticizing other peoples' efforts to be more responsible?
It's always a lot easier to sit back, do nothing, and criticize, isn't it? Tell you what, if you're riding a bike to work every day, then you can make fun of hybrid owners. Until then, your pot remains blacker than their kettle.
For the forseeable future we (the US) will be getting 55-60% of our electricity off of coal and 20% off of nuclear power.
Depends on whether you forsee a few more hurricane-Katrina type events lighting a fire under the asses of people who prefer living above water... it wouldn't take many of those to get most coal plants shut down.
Major downside is that your A/C turns off every time you stop or slow down at a red light.
Not necessarily... you could always keep draining the tank a little bit just to keep the cab cooled. Sure it would lessen your mileage/range a bit, but regular A/C does the same thing and nobody seems to mind much...
On a slightly more serious note, violence _does_ solve problems.
True, it can, in certain very specialized scenarios. That doesn't mean it's effective in general -- because it almost always causes more problems than it solves. e.g. before you committed violence, you had somebody who was a problem to you. After the violence, that somebody is (maybe) out of your hair, but now all his friends and family are pissed off and likely to do violence to you in the near future. Now you have multiple new problems.
Let me put it this way: how many times have you used violence to solve a problem this year? How many times have you used non-violent methods to solve your problems instead? Do you think your situation would be better right now if you had used violence to try and solve all your problems this year? What if everybody around you had used violence to solve their problems?
Or, more succinctly... if you really think violence is a good way to solve problems, you can buy a house in Baghdad cheap and see what life is like when that's the preferred strategy;^)
what about all those folks that convert turkey farm offal into fuel?
That's cool and all... but in the end what we need is something that can be scaled up to replace fossil fuels. I don't think there are enough turkeys around for that:^)
Presumably by making it easier to convert non-fossil energy into fuel.
If we had an easy way to turn sun/wind/nuclear/hydro/tidal/etc energy into petroleum, we could just use "renewable gasoline" instead, and be carbon-neutral that way... but AFAIK we don't.
Our president's intentions to take down Saddam after 9/11 don't change the fact that we, America and probably most of the first world, are pussies. Have you ever been in a fight? I've never been in a fight.
Is "pussies" another word for "civilized, decent human beings"? If so, then I'm glad that we (and most of the world) are pussies. Violence is an ineffective way to solve problems.
Now if we could find something that kills off English sparrows and starlings in large numbers. Honeybees at least provide honey, but nobody can think of anything that those two kinds of birds are good for.
The Chinese tried that.... city officials were annoyed by all the flocks of birds infesting their cities, so they put out some poison to kill all the birds. It worked great, in a few weeks all the birds were dead. The next year the city was practically buried under swarms of insects.
Turns out that birds are a very useful way to control the insect population...
So you're saying the goverment will start to wholesale doctor up evidence against random citizens? To what end?
No, but I think it would be very tempting for the government to start using the data it gathers on everybody(!) for political purposes. (e.g. "Joe Schmoe goes to AA meetings on Thursdays and is having an affair with his secretary; they meet at the No-Tell Motel every other Friday night and prefer their sex doggy-style. We'll just file that information away for now, in case Joe Schmoe ever runs for office or ends up in a position of power and we need to 'lean on' him a little"). Blackmail can be a very effective way of getting people to do what you want without anybody else ever knowing about it. Or the government can just use it to keep tabs on the whereabouts of their political opponents... in fact they do this already, just on a much smaller scale because they are limited by available manpower.
While I agree that government needs more accountability, I just don't see the V for Vendetta future. No supreme rule ever lasts.
V for Vendetta was indeed overstated (it was based on a comic book for heaven's sake!) but history has shown over and over again that left to their own devices, governments can and will do all kinds of nasty things. Power corrupts, and giving the government unrestricted access to everyone's personal details gives them a lot of power.
I don't need advanced CCTV cameras to violate your rights. Get that through your head.
Of course not. But it sure makes it a lot easier to do it wholesale.
In the real world, things aren't determined by what is theoretically possible, but by what is economically feasible. Ubiquitous CCTV cameras make wide-scale person tracking economically feasible, and that is the key.
By analogy: You don't need a nuclear bomb to kill everyone in Chicago.... given enough time and effort, you could do it with a machete. But once you have a nuclear bomb, it becomes a whole lot more likely that you can pull it off, and thus a whole lot more likely that you will try.
This is not true. First the party in power has to write a law that makes it a crime to have such a name. Then they have to convince the democratically elected House of Commons to pass it. Then they have to convince the House of Lords to pass it. Then they have to convince the Queen to give her assent
Ah, well see here in the States we have a much more efficient system. It works like this: First, the House of Representatives passes a law, say, to protect an endangered species of turtle. Then the Senate passes a similar law, and then a committee gets together to smooth out the differences between the two versions. Then the final results are sent to the White House, where the President signs the law, and adds a "signing statement" that indicates that he will interpret the law to mean that he can imprison everyone whose last name begins with an "A".
Of course, there is the possibility that 5 or 10 years later the Supreme Court will rule the President's "interpretation" of the law to be unconstitutional, but by then all of those traitorous A-people will be safely rotting away in Gitmo.
I never said people have no privacy, nor should they expect it. I said if you're exposing your secrets to the world, don't expect them to be private.
Right now I (and I suspect most people) feel free to leave the house without worrying that the government (or anyone else) will be watching me the entire time and compiling a dossier on my movements for later possible use against me. I (and again, most people) would like to retain that freedom.
You don't know what you've lost until it's gone, and when the day comes that you have to think through the potential political implications of leaving the house every morning, you'll really miss your old de-facto privacy.
Steve Jobs really is a badass! I played hardball once in high school; broke my leg, three ribs, and four fingers. I hope the engineers weren't too severly hurt...
Note the use of quotes, indicating [that global warming is] a ficticious topic.
Wouldn't it be nice if that were true? Then we wouldn't have anything to worry about, we could just go back to shopping and MTV and everything would be just peachy.
Unfortunately, the existence of man-caused global warming isn't just the concensus view of the scientific community anymore; now even the oil companies and (gasp!) the Bush administration admit the existence of the problem: the evidence is that irrefutable. So if you want to continue with your head in the sand, go ahead... the few leftover people in denial are irrelevant anyway.
Piece of buttered toast taped to the back of a cat... need I say more?
Doesn't the toast need to be taped to the cat's feet instead? If the toast is taped to the cat's back, the cat will simply land on its feet and walk away with the toast intact (since the toast never touches the floor at all, the buttered-side-down rule would not be invoked)
Regarding car culture as social engineering: in this case, there was no outside influence - the society itself wished to embrace this, and the capitalist engine of our society was more than happy to provide the means to do so.
In the USA, at least, the Interstate Highway System was (and still is, IIRC) the most expensive government project ever undertaken. It wasn't just the free market that made cars so practical, the government played a huge part. If that's not social engineering, I don't know what is.
That said, both you and the other poster are half-right: finding more and better energy sources is "the solution", but finding more efficient ways to use the energy budget we have now is also "the solution". They aren't mutually exclusive; we can (and will probably need to) do both. One way or another we will live within our energy budget -- the laws of physics demand it. Whether we make that happen gracefully or not depends on how innovative and flexible we are.
The number ONE problem we have is batteries going dead overnight in the cold. You can trickle charge them or put a warmer on them to prevent it, but if the entire car runs on battery I would imagine the battery life to be very poor.
Keep in mind that on an electric car, the battery is MUCH bigger than the battery on a gasoline-powered car. That means that (a) the battery's capacity is much larger, and therefore the percentage of that capacity required for the battery to keep itself warm is much less, and (b) the battery's volume-to-surface-area ratio is smaller, therefore the battery won't lose heat as rapidly. So in a "pure" electric car, this may be less of a problem than you'd think.
There is enough uranium in the earth to last us billions of years at our current rate of consumption. The only issue is how much it costs to get it out.
That's not the only cost. There is also the cost of refining the uranium, transporting it, keeping it secure against natural disasters and human mistakes and misbehaviour, the cost of safely storing the waste products (presumably forever), and you have to factor in the increased potential risks of nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and environmental catastrophe. As always, the devil is in the details, and it could well be that once all the costs are factored in, nuclear ends up being more expensive than the alternatives. (I'm not saying it is, just that you have to look at the big picture)
Great, so you have to lay a cable all the way down the street to your car to charge it up? I can't see that taking off
A lot of people (particularly the kind of people who can afford an electric car at the moment) keep their car in a garage where there is usually an electrical outlet.
That said, most streets also have power available for the street lights, etc... it might be feasible at some (distant) point to add curbside electrical outlets as well.
Onsite storage isn't an option for that kind of demand and the grid as it currently exists simply can't do it either.
Well, in the worst case (hurricane emergency, all the power lines are down), you still have those big underground gas tanks... use some of that gas to power a generator to make the electricity you need. Inefficient, but doable.
Slashdot Mirror
Shall we discuss the meta-smugness of people who enjoy nothing more than justifying their own thoughtless lifestyles by criticizing other peoples' efforts to be more responsible?
It's always a lot easier to sit back, do nothing, and criticize, isn't it? Tell you what, if you're riding a bike to work every day, then you can make fun of hybrid owners. Until then, your pot remains blacker than their kettle.
This article will be of great help in their noble quest to redefine reality to fit their cultural preferences!
Depends on whether you forsee a few more hurricane-Katrina type events lighting a fire under the asses of people who prefer living above water... it wouldn't take many of those to get most coal plants shut down.
Not necessarily... you could always keep draining the tank a little bit just to keep the cab cooled. Sure it would lessen your mileage/range a bit, but regular A/C does the same thing and nobody seems to mind much...
Translation: my organizations' computers are not secure enough to safely access the Internet. This is somehow Google/Yahoo/MSN's fault.
True, it can, in certain very specialized scenarios. That doesn't mean it's effective in general -- because it almost always causes more problems than it solves. e.g. before you committed violence, you had somebody who was a problem to you. After the violence, that somebody is (maybe) out of your hair, but now all his friends and family are pissed off and likely to do violence to you in the near future. Now you have multiple new problems.
Let me put it this way: how many times have you used violence to solve a problem this year? How many times have you used non-violent methods to solve your problems instead? Do you think your situation would be better right now if you had used violence to try and solve all your problems this year? What if everybody around you had used violence to solve their problems?
Or, more succinctly... if you really think violence is a good way to solve problems, you can buy a house in Baghdad cheap and see what life is like when that's the preferred strategy
That's cool and all... but in the end what we need is something that can be scaled up to replace fossil fuels. I don't think there are enough turkeys around for that
Presumably by making it easier to convert non-fossil energy into fuel.
If we had an easy way to turn sun/wind/nuclear/hydro/tidal/etc energy into petroleum, we could just use "renewable gasoline" instead, and be carbon-neutral that way... but AFAIK we don't.
Is "pussies" another word for "civilized, decent human beings"? If so, then I'm glad that we (and most of the world) are pussies. Violence is an ineffective way to solve problems.
The Chinese tried that.... city officials were annoyed by all the flocks of birds infesting their cities, so they put out some poison to kill all the birds. It worked great, in a few weeks all the birds were dead. The next year the city was practically buried under swarms of insects.
Turns out that birds are a very useful way to control the insect population...
No, but I think it would be very tempting for the government to start using the data it gathers on everybody(!) for political purposes. (e.g. "Joe Schmoe goes to AA meetings on Thursdays and is having an affair with his secretary; they meet at the No-Tell Motel every other Friday night and prefer their sex doggy-style. We'll just file that information away for now, in case Joe Schmoe ever runs for office or ends up in a position of power and we need to 'lean on' him a little"). Blackmail can be a very effective way of getting people to do what you want without anybody else ever knowing about it. Or the government can just use it to keep tabs on the whereabouts of their political opponents... in fact they do this already, just on a much smaller scale because they are limited by available manpower.
While I agree that government needs more accountability, I just don't see the V for Vendetta future. No supreme rule ever lasts.
V for Vendetta was indeed overstated (it was based on a comic book for heaven's sake!) but history has shown over and over again that left to their own devices, governments can and will do all kinds of nasty things. Power corrupts, and giving the government unrestricted access to everyone's personal details gives them a lot of power.
Of course not. But it sure makes it a lot easier to do it wholesale.
In the real world, things aren't determined by what is theoretically possible, but by what is economically feasible. Ubiquitous CCTV cameras make wide-scale person tracking economically feasible, and that is the key.
By analogy: You don't need a nuclear bomb to kill everyone in Chicago.... given enough time and effort, you could do it with a machete. But once you have a nuclear bomb, it becomes a whole lot more likely that you can pull it off, and thus a whole lot more likely that you will try.
Ah, well see here in the States we have a much more efficient system. It works like this: First, the House of Representatives passes a law, say, to protect an endangered species of turtle. Then the Senate passes a similar law, and then a committee gets together to smooth out the differences between the two versions. Then the final results are sent to the White House, where the President signs the law, and adds a "signing statement" that indicates that he will interpret the law to mean that he can imprison everyone whose last name begins with an "A".
Of course, there is the possibility that 5 or 10 years later the Supreme Court will rule the President's "interpretation" of the law to be unconstitutional, but by then all of those traitorous A-people will be safely rotting away in Gitmo.
Isn't sentencing people who have committed crimes the whole point of the criminal justice system?
Right now I (and I suspect most people) feel free to leave the house without worrying that the government (or anyone else) will be watching me the entire time and compiling a dossier on my movements for later possible use against me. I (and again, most people) would like to retain that freedom.
You don't know what you've lost until it's gone, and when the day comes that you have to think through the potential political implications of leaving the house every morning, you'll really miss your old de-facto privacy.
Yeah, but can he throw furniture?
I think what really keeps Mr. Jobs awake at night is that someone might port BitTorrent to the iPhone.
Wouldn't it be nice if that were true? Then we wouldn't have anything to worry about, we could just go back to shopping and MTV and everything would be just peachy.
Unfortunately, the existence of man-caused global warming isn't just the concensus view of the scientific community anymore; now even the oil companies and (gasp!) the Bush administration admit the existence of the problem: the evidence is that irrefutable. So if you want to continue with your head in the sand, go ahead... the few leftover people in denial are irrelevant anyway.
Doesn't the toast need to be taped to the cat's feet instead? If the toast is taped to the cat's back, the cat will simply land on its feet and walk away with the toast intact (since the toast never touches the floor at all, the buttered-side-down rule would not be invoked)
In the USA, at least, the Interstate Highway System was (and still is, IIRC) the most expensive government project ever undertaken. It wasn't just the free market that made cars so practical, the government played a huge part. If that's not social engineering, I don't know what is.
That said, both you and the other poster are half-right: finding more and better energy sources is "the solution", but finding more efficient ways to use the energy budget we have now is also "the solution". They aren't mutually exclusive; we can (and will probably need to) do both. One way or another we will live within our energy budget -- the laws of physics demand it. Whether we make that happen gracefully or not depends on how innovative and flexible we are.
Keep in mind that on an electric car, the battery is MUCH bigger than the battery on a gasoline-powered car. That means that (a) the battery's capacity is much larger, and therefore the percentage of that capacity required for the battery to keep itself warm is much less, and (b) the battery's volume-to-surface-area ratio is smaller, therefore the battery won't lose heat as rapidly. So in a "pure" electric car, this may be less of a problem than you'd think.
That's not the only cost. There is also the cost of refining the uranium, transporting it, keeping it secure against natural disasters and human mistakes and misbehaviour, the cost of safely storing the waste products (presumably forever), and you have to factor in the increased potential risks of nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and environmental catastrophe. As always, the devil is in the details, and it could well be that once all the costs are factored in, nuclear ends up being more expensive than the alternatives. (I'm not saying it is, just that you have to look at the big picture)
A lot of people (particularly the kind of people who can afford an electric car at the moment) keep their car in a garage where there is usually an electrical outlet.
That said, most streets also have power available for the street lights, etc
Well, in the worst case (hurricane emergency, all the power lines are down), you still have those big underground gas tanks... use some of that gas to power a generator to make the electricity you need. Inefficient, but doable.
In fact, the Tesla car does exactly this.... there is a heater in the battery area that will keep the batteries from becoming too cold.