Making statements on Japanese culture based on Iron Chef is only slightly less ridiculous than basing it based on Dragonball Z. Your average Japanese person probably hasn't eaten fish ice cream. The point of the show is to show off creativity in cooking, so you get dishes that have never before seen a dinner plate and probably never will again. Iron Chef America makes some crazy dishes, I'd be surprised if there hasn't been some type of meat ice cream or sorbet on it (I wouldn't know, I could never get into the American version).
True, they eat some seafood that we don't. Why anyone decided squid was a good thing to fry up on a stick and eat is beyond me, and I was quite weirded out to see octopus tentacle in a supermarket. But most of the odd Japanese foods are seafood, which makes sense considering how much coast they have. If you ask me, eating unagi is much more sane than eating sheep heart, liver and lungs (aka haggis). And I really don't want to know what parts of the chicken go into delicious chicken nuggets.
Anyway in my experience, they're not fond of Root Beer. They say it tastes "like the dentists office" whatever that means. So there's at least one food that we eat that weirds them out.
As long as you're using printing technology to place cells over the wound, why not add pigments and voila! Instant tatoo!
I'm not a skin expert, it's my understanding that the top layer of skin cells are completely dead and sloughing off, so you couldn't just spray pigment onto healthy skin and expect it do do anything besides rub off. More likely, you'd have to remove the epidermis if you were doing this intentionally and not as a skin graft (in which case the skin has been removed and that's the problem.)
So it wouldn't be instant, you'd have to burn off the skin, which would be far more painful than a regular tattoo.
Anyway, what's more interesting is that you might be able to pattern cells that express different colors. A "cellular tattoo". I'd think it would also not fade like regular tattoos can, since the cells themselves would be continuously making the color, depending on how you did it. But there's at least one other problem there, the transgenic part.
If you were to just stick a gene for purple into the cell's genome with a retrovirus, you'd get purple cells. But the transgene gets inserted at random. If you were to implant them back into you, that color may have been inserted into an important gene for preventing cancer, and you'd get something like purple melanoma. No good. As I understand it, there are methods for putting transgenes into specific areas of the genome (relating to homologous recombination), so you could be sure you weren't causing cancer, but all the techniques I've heard of have such low efficiencies that it would be hideously expensive. Like, even moreso than a traditional tattoo.
And actually, now that I think about it, a smarter way of doing it would probably involve induced pluripotency, you could take some cells, cause them to become ipsc (the "fake" stem cells you may have heard about), use homologous recombination to get the pigment expressed in a safe place, select for those purple cells, expand them, induce them to start turning into skin cells, and then use this cell printer tech to make a pattern on the site (after the epidermis has been removed.)
That's three different technologies that haven't been fully developed yet or approved by the FDA, so it will be a while, and I can't see that ever getting into the price range of a normal tattoo. Also, I'm not an expert in any of those multiple fields. Interesting to think about though.
I don't know about Iraqi insurgents, but I have heard of islamic terrorists hiding behind women and children before in battle. And it's not a state secret that shooting innocent human shields is something one should avoid.
Concealing an RPG is something they'd also probably have a keen awareness of even without this confirmation. It has to be taken for granted that even the dumbest insurgent knows "If I can see the helicopter, the helicopter can see me."
Parents believe their kids won't have sex just like most children think their parents don't have sex. It is often a very strange subject for either to discuss at home. My dad's whole discussion was: if you have questions, just ask me. I had obviously a bunch and still did not ask them. And that is why the school is a good place to discuss the birds and the bees.
That's a very good point I had n ever thought about. Educating your kids at home won't work because no kid wants to ask their parents things like "Can girls get pregnant from anal sex?" Which is just one question that came up in sex ed classes early on in high school. Barring the school from educating the students means the students are going to ask other students who are not much more knowledgeable than they are, blind leading the blind.
The hypocrisy in US in unbelievable. Violence and killing people is all okay in TV, but when it's teaching persons about natural human function like sex it's all bad and must be hidden.
To be fair, I think most parents are correct in thinking that their high-schooler is more likely to have sex than flip out and kill people.
I believe they're quite incorrect in assuming that if kids don't know how to have sex safely though, they won't have sex. I think most of the gap in their logic there is filled in with discomfort over thinking of their children as young adults with urges, and nonsense about sex being immoral.
Okay, in retrospect I really should have gone with a car metaphor rather than mentioning a microsoft product or a console of any type. Left myself open to at least three populations of fanboys there.
The graphics and lack of exclusive devlopers... you really went that extra mile to make that the most ridiculous console post I've read on slashdot. I did mention I had a wii, right? Exclusive developers? If I were a shareholder of MS, that might upset me
I bet you just can't wait for Microsoft to crap out another one of those retarded Halo games with that leaping shiny green Power Ranger.
Wait, the next Halo will star the Green Power Ranger... and you WOULDN'T want that?!?
I'm prepared to say that you are some type of zombie if a combination of alien slaughter and power rangers doesn't interest you.
how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows?
You're saying a dual boot system shouldn't count as a user?
I own a wii. It's been unplugged for over a year and I play the 360 every day, but I am still a wii owner. Similarly, it seems to me if you have a dual boot system with ubuntu and windows, you're still an ubuntu user. Maybe there are ubuntu purists out there who would look down on you for that and would care to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
I'd wonder more about the second part you hinted at:
I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops.
Would you count as 3 users for this number? This article mentions that fedora counts unique IP addresses, if it said how the ubuntu number was found, I missed it.
Rule of thumb: if classified information is leaked, and no one can explain why it was classified in the first place, then it should never have been classified.
Troop locations? No. Security codes? No. Reveals an undiscovered weakness in the Army's defenses? I'm pretty sure everyone realizes that helicopters are vulnerable to RPGs already, especially those who would be interested in that.
Seriously, someone suggest why what I'm looking at should be secret to protect our troops. Play devil's advocate. I haven't even heard a -bad- reason why this should be classified. What, the callsigns haven't changed, and they're worried an insurgent will get on the comm and tell them to bomb the wrong place?
This is not anything that should have been classified, whoever released it was doing a everyone a service by breaking that law and exposing this criminal act.
WikiLeaks is telling us how to interpret the video. I thought the whole point of "leaks" were to get information out there, and let us decide what it means.
Reminds me of scientific papers. You present the data in figures, the proof is supposed to be right there on the page, but the lesson might not jump out at you from just the picture, you need to be told that is a strand of DNA that is compacted in the presence of protein X. So you say "This shows DNA compacted in the presence of protein X" and then the picture. Experts who have the background knowledge to judge that for themselves will in fact be able to judge that for themselves. People who are interested but wouldn't know compacted DNA from fuzz can be mislead, but just the figure itself will look like nothing to them.
Similarly, when I watched that video, I didn't pick out any details. I saw a van get shot to pieces, and could tell that there were people wandering around. Is that a camera or an RPG? Don't ask me, when I first watched the video, I didn't notice an object either way. The chatter, is that the pilot trying to find an excuse to kill some people, or just usual pilot talk that he might use were he asking permission to land? Again, no clue. Nothing of the context is in the video either. I think it's important to note that these guys were reporters, and there were 2 children in there, I wouldn't have been able to pick that out.
So no, I don't think wikileaks offering their interpretation on this is out of line since there's so little information to the uninitiated in the actual video. If they were making unsupported interpretations, the data is right there to refute.
So back in January of this year they were advertising they had this encrypted via twitter. This army report from 2008 was called "Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?"
Anyone want to bet on whether or not by 2012 we'll see a document from the army with a very similar title (replacing the dash with "is" and lacking a question mark)?
I hope they find out who leaked this and put them in a locked cell. Releasing classified material puts all of our American soldiers in danger -- not to mention our country.
How? Were we counting on the terrorists thinking they would be completely safe, on base if you will, if they were unarmed, in a van with kids? Or are you implying the bad guys didn't know we had helicopters with guns?
I think all those reasons you mentioned are reasons to fear the Chinese or to a lesser extent, Russians, not communists as a whole.
You mean, other than the track record that two of the main communist nations murdered millions of their own people just last century
That's a good reason to fear your own government, not communism. If your government does describe itself as communist, then yes, that's a good reason, but most Americans don't actually live in China or obviously the Soviet Union. Furthermore, it should be obvious that it's possible to be communist without advocating the government killing millions of people.
have an ideology that preaches expanding their system worldwide?
That's only different from capitalism in that capitalism -does it- rather than preaches about it first.
And the fact that both of those countries (despite the fall of official communism in Russia) also have nukes which are probably, right now, aimed at American cities?
So the fact that non-communist Russia has nukes pointed at us is a reason to fear communism outside of Russia? When we have nukes still pointed right back?
I was under the impression that the PS2 compatibility on the fat PS3 was hardware, not software emulation. I'm basing that entirely on a gamestop employee telling me several years ago that the reason the 360 didn't support all XBOX games was that it was software emulation, wheras the PS3 basically had a PS2 stuck inside of it.
I suspect that the reason they don't put a software emulation out for all PS3s is that they don't want to spend the money to, or can't make it perfect. All else being equal, a lot of people would obviously choose a PS3 that could emulate -some- PS2 games rather than one that couldn't, but the console demographic being what it is, if it could play 85% of the PS2 games out there, the players who wanted games from that 15% would make a lot of noise about it. Another potential reason is of course selling ports of PS2 games.
Obviously, who knows the real reasons outside of sony, but my money would be on one or both of those reasons.
Yes, because Venezuela is the country we need to worry about.
Indeed. One wonders why some people are still so irrationally afraid of communists, real or imagined. I don't think much of Chavez, but he's not stupid or comic-book evil, the threat of being nuked was probably never on his top ten reasons not to attack the US.
You're deciding for people when it's okay to drive what kind of vehicle, defining particular exceptions which of course, if codified into law, would need layers upon layers of clarifications and loopholes.
Yeah, we already do that. Try registering a drag racer for street use, or a semi truck for personal use, and you'll see what I mean. Layers of clarification and loopholes already exist.
Don't worry about it, just sit there and assume that you in your almighty wisdom can in fact account for every scenario, just taking for granted that everyone should bow to your will. This isn't a game of Civilization and it isn't a banana republic. In a free society we don't handle things that way.
My standards for suggesting something on slashdot are lower than I expect for actual law. I'm not going to write a thousand page draft for revamping the vehicle registration code for posting here.
This is much closer to a game of civilization than a legislative body.
Until those who are driving around overweight behemoths are made to pay for their huge negative externalities. E.g. with mandatory sentences for manslaughter every time they bump into a smaller car and kill someone, increased taxes, etc. It's hardly fair that those who do the responsible thing are penalized
Yeah, it's totally fair to mandatorily throw a trucker in jail when someone plows their Miata into the rear of the truck and decapitates themself.
I agree that automatic manslaughter would be excessive, and mandatory minimums in law are almost always a stupid idea, but turing didn't seem to be suggesting that everytime there was an accident involving an oversized vehicle and a fatality, that the oversized vehicle should be charged. Seems like he was saying "when the oversized vehicle is at fault."
Also, i'd give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't mean do this for commercial vehicles like semi trucks, since one: there's no choice there, you want to ship stuff it only makes sense to put it on trucks or trains, and two, that would pretty much ensure that in a week, more than half our citizens would starve. And there's also the fact that professional truck drivers undoubtedly have far fewer accidents than personal vehicles. I'm going to assume instead he meant personal Hummers and other huge SUVs not actually designed for or used for off-road use. Can we all agree that those are nothing more than tacky hazards and should be paying quite a bit in taxes?
Considering that cars are one of the few products that are still manufactured in the US, I'd say it could be a bad thing. A country that thinks that it can survive on imports without making anything itself is going to get exactly what it deserves: bankrupcy.
I think tightening emissions rules are a far cry from saying we're no longer going to be exporting cars. For one thing, this sounds like it's only going to affect cars brought into the US, foreign made or otherwise. Will this affect US exports? I have no clue.
Anyway, if the US economy is killed, it probably won't be because of the auto industry, and if it is, it won't be because americans can't buy fuel inefficient cars.
Lastly, I disagree with the notion that economic planners making decisions that turn out poorly means the entire nation's citizens -deserve- the consequences. Hypothetically, in what sense would a bankrupt farmer "deserve" economic ruin if it was caused by free market economics he probably was opposed to?
Slashdot Mirror
Making statements on Japanese culture based on Iron Chef is only slightly less ridiculous than basing it based on Dragonball Z. Your average Japanese person probably hasn't eaten fish ice cream. The point of the show is to show off creativity in cooking, so you get dishes that have never before seen a dinner plate and probably never will again. Iron Chef America makes some crazy dishes, I'd be surprised if there hasn't been some type of meat ice cream or sorbet on it (I wouldn't know, I could never get into the American version).
True, they eat some seafood that we don't. Why anyone decided squid was a good thing to fry up on a stick and eat is beyond me, and I was quite weirded out to see octopus tentacle in a supermarket. But most of the odd Japanese foods are seafood, which makes sense considering how much coast they have. If you ask me, eating unagi is much more sane than eating sheep heart, liver and lungs (aka haggis). And I really don't want to know what parts of the chicken go into delicious chicken nuggets.
Anyway in my experience, they're not fond of Root Beer. They say it tastes "like the dentists office" whatever that means. So there's at least one food that we eat that weirds them out.
Answer: stop eating fish. Sorry.
Because cows and pigs are any better than farmed fish?
If this is just another vegan scheme to convert us all, I swear I'll, uh, well, enjoy some bacon and make fun of you while doing it...? I got nothing.
As long as you're using printing technology to place cells over the wound, why not add pigments and voila! Instant tatoo!
I'm not a skin expert, it's my understanding that the top layer of skin cells are completely dead and sloughing off, so you couldn't just spray pigment onto healthy skin and expect it do do anything besides rub off. More likely, you'd have to remove the epidermis if you were doing this intentionally and not as a skin graft (in which case the skin has been removed and that's the problem.)
So it wouldn't be instant, you'd have to burn off the skin, which would be far more painful than a regular tattoo.
Anyway, what's more interesting is that you might be able to pattern cells that express different colors. A "cellular tattoo". I'd think it would also not fade like regular tattoos can, since the cells themselves would be continuously making the color, depending on how you did it. But there's at least one other problem there, the transgenic part.
If you were to just stick a gene for purple into the cell's genome with a retrovirus, you'd get purple cells. But the transgene gets inserted at random. If you were to implant them back into you, that color may have been inserted into an important gene for preventing cancer, and you'd get something like purple melanoma. No good. As I understand it, there are methods for putting transgenes into specific areas of the genome (relating to homologous recombination), so you could be sure you weren't causing cancer, but all the techniques I've heard of have such low efficiencies that it would be hideously expensive. Like, even moreso than a traditional tattoo.
And actually, now that I think about it, a smarter way of doing it would probably involve induced pluripotency, you could take some cells, cause them to become ipsc (the "fake" stem cells you may have heard about), use homologous recombination to get the pigment expressed in a safe place, select for those purple cells, expand them, induce them to start turning into skin cells, and then use this cell printer tech to make a pattern on the site (after the epidermis has been removed.)
That's three different technologies that haven't been fully developed yet or approved by the FDA, so it will be a while, and I can't see that ever getting into the price range of a normal tattoo. Also, I'm not an expert in any of those multiple fields. Interesting to think about though.
I don't know about Iraqi insurgents, but I have heard of islamic terrorists hiding behind women and children before in battle. And it's not a state secret that shooting innocent human shields is something one should avoid.
Concealing an RPG is something they'd also probably have a keen awareness of even without this confirmation. It has to be taken for granted that even the dumbest insurgent knows "If I can see the helicopter, the helicopter can see me."
Parents believe their kids won't have sex just like most children think their parents don't have sex. It is often a very strange subject for either to discuss at home. My dad's whole discussion was: if you have questions, just ask me. I had obviously a bunch and still did not ask them. And that is why the school is a good place to discuss the birds and the bees.
That's a very good point I had n ever thought about. Educating your kids at home won't work because no kid wants to ask their parents things like "Can girls get pregnant from anal sex?" Which is just one question that came up in sex ed classes early on in high school. Barring the school from educating the students means the students are going to ask other students who are not much more knowledgeable than they are, blind leading the blind.
If and when they cancel Super Mario Galaxy 2.
In fact I think it broke the peg clean off.
A condom may not have helped you there if it broke off rather than rotted off.
The hypocrisy in US in unbelievable. Violence and killing people is all okay in TV, but when it's teaching persons about natural human function like sex it's all bad and must be hidden.
To be fair, I think most parents are correct in thinking that their high-schooler is more likely to have sex than flip out and kill people.
I believe they're quite incorrect in assuming that if kids don't know how to have sex safely though, they won't have sex. I think most of the gap in their logic there is filled in with discomfort over thinking of their children as young adults with urges, and nonsense about sex being immoral.
Okay, in retrospect I really should have gone with a car metaphor rather than mentioning a microsoft product or a console of any type. Left myself open to at least three populations of fanboys there.
The graphics and lack of exclusive devlopers... you really went that extra mile to make that the most ridiculous console post I've read on slashdot. I did mention I had a wii, right? Exclusive developers? If I were a shareholder of MS, that might upset me
I bet you just can't wait for Microsoft to crap out another one of those retarded Halo games with that leaping shiny green Power Ranger.
Wait, the next Halo will star the Green Power Ranger... and you WOULDN'T want that?!?
I'm prepared to say that you are some type of zombie if a combination of alien slaughter and power rangers doesn't interest you.
how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows?
You're saying a dual boot system shouldn't count as a user?
I own a wii. It's been unplugged for over a year and I play the 360 every day, but I am still a wii owner. Similarly, it seems to me if you have a dual boot system with ubuntu and windows, you're still an ubuntu user. Maybe there are ubuntu purists out there who would look down on you for that and would care to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
I'd wonder more about the second part you hinted at:
I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops.
Would you count as 3 users for this number? This article mentions that fedora counts unique IP addresses, if it said how the ubuntu number was found, I missed it.
We shouldn't, maybe, but we do because money is an illusion.
You mean how you can fold bills just right and tilt it and it looks like the president is smiling or frowning???
You have no idea why it was classified.
Rule of thumb: if classified information is leaked, and no one can explain why it was classified in the first place, then it should never have been classified.
Troop locations? No. Security codes? No. Reveals an undiscovered weakness in the Army's defenses? I'm pretty sure everyone realizes that helicopters are vulnerable to RPGs already, especially those who would be interested in that.
Seriously, someone suggest why what I'm looking at should be secret to protect our troops. Play devil's advocate. I haven't even heard a -bad- reason why this should be classified. What, the callsigns haven't changed, and they're worried an insurgent will get on the comm and tell them to bomb the wrong place?
This is not anything that should have been classified, whoever released it was doing a everyone a service by breaking that law and exposing this criminal act.
WikiLeaks is telling us how to interpret the video. I thought the whole point of "leaks" were to get information out there, and let us decide what it means.
Reminds me of scientific papers. You present the data in figures, the proof is supposed to be right there on the page, but the lesson might not jump out at you from just the picture, you need to be told that is a strand of DNA that is compacted in the presence of protein X. So you say "This shows DNA compacted in the presence of protein X" and then the picture. Experts who have the background knowledge to judge that for themselves will in fact be able to judge that for themselves. People who are interested but wouldn't know compacted DNA from fuzz can be mislead, but just the figure itself will look like nothing to them.
Similarly, when I watched that video, I didn't pick out any details. I saw a van get shot to pieces, and could tell that there were people wandering around. Is that a camera or an RPG? Don't ask me, when I first watched the video, I didn't notice an object either way. The chatter, is that the pilot trying to find an excuse to kill some people, or just usual pilot talk that he might use were he asking permission to land? Again, no clue. Nothing of the context is in the video either. I think it's important to note that these guys were reporters, and there were 2 children in there, I wouldn't have been able to pick that out.
So no, I don't think wikileaks offering their interpretation on this is out of line since there's so little information to the uninitiated in the actual video. If they were making unsupported interpretations, the data is right there to refute.
Doesn't Man = Nature? :P
It depends on how you dispose of your waste.
Leaving it wherever: Nature
Flush: Man
Flinging it: Funny
Burying it in gravel: Nature, but with an air of superiority
So back in January of this year they were advertising they had this encrypted via twitter. This army report from 2008 was called "Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?"
Anyone want to bet on whether or not by 2012 we'll see a document from the army with a very similar title (replacing the dash with "is" and lacking a question mark)?
I hope they find out who leaked this and put them in a locked cell. Releasing classified material puts all of our American soldiers in danger -- not to mention our country.
How? Were we counting on the terrorists thinking they would be completely safe, on base if you will, if they were unarmed, in a van with kids? Or are you implying the bad guys didn't know we had helicopters with guns?
I think all those reasons you mentioned are reasons to fear the Chinese or to a lesser extent, Russians, not communists as a whole.
You mean, other than the track record that two of the main communist nations murdered millions of their own people just last century
That's a good reason to fear your own government, not communism. If your government does describe itself as communist, then yes, that's a good reason, but most Americans don't actually live in China or obviously the Soviet Union. Furthermore, it should be obvious that it's possible to be communist without advocating the government killing millions of people.
have an ideology that preaches expanding their system worldwide?
That's only different from capitalism in that capitalism -does it- rather than preaches about it first.
And the fact that both of those countries (despite the fall of official communism in Russia) also have nukes which are probably, right now, aimed at American cities?
So the fact that non-communist Russia has nukes pointed at us is a reason to fear communism outside of Russia? When we have nukes still pointed right back?
I was under the impression that the PS2 compatibility on the fat PS3 was hardware, not software emulation. I'm basing that entirely on a gamestop employee telling me several years ago that the reason the 360 didn't support all XBOX games was that it was software emulation, wheras the PS3 basically had a PS2 stuck inside of it.
I suspect that the reason they don't put a software emulation out for all PS3s is that they don't want to spend the money to, or can't make it perfect. All else being equal, a lot of people would obviously choose a PS3 that could emulate -some- PS2 games rather than one that couldn't, but the console demographic being what it is, if it could play 85% of the PS2 games out there, the players who wanted games from that 15% would make a lot of noise about it. Another potential reason is of course selling ports of PS2 games.
Obviously, who knows the real reasons outside of sony, but my money would be on one or both of those reasons.
So what, we shouldn't worry about it? That's how the Iranian cylons will win!
If you (my next door neighbor) kill my family by purposefully spreading rat poison in our fresh vegetable garden
Why do I get the feeling that in your head, this is more than just a hypothetical scenario?
Yes, because Venezuela is the country we need to worry about.
Indeed. One wonders why some people are still so irrationally afraid of communists, real or imagined. I don't think much of Chavez, but he's not stupid or comic-book evil, the threat of being nuked was probably never on his top ten reasons not to attack the US.
there remain many a crazy nation that will gladly blow us to oblivion.
With nukes? That might be why he reserved the right to nuke countries with nukes of their own.
You're deciding for people when it's okay to drive what kind of vehicle, defining particular exceptions which of course, if codified into law, would need layers upon layers of clarifications and loopholes.
Yeah, we already do that. Try registering a drag racer for street use, or a semi truck for personal use, and you'll see what I mean. Layers of clarification and loopholes already exist.
Don't worry about it, just sit there and assume that you in your almighty wisdom can in fact account for every scenario, just taking for granted that everyone should bow to your will. This isn't a game of Civilization and it isn't a banana republic. In a free society we don't handle things that way.
My standards for suggesting something on slashdot are lower than I expect for actual law. I'm not going to write a thousand page draft for revamping the vehicle registration code for posting here.
This is much closer to a game of civilization than a legislative body.
Until those who are driving around overweight behemoths are made to pay for their huge negative externalities. E.g. with mandatory sentences for manslaughter every time they bump into a smaller car and kill someone, increased taxes, etc. It's hardly fair that those who do the responsible thing are penalized
Yeah, it's totally fair to mandatorily throw a trucker in jail when someone plows their Miata into the rear of the truck and decapitates themself.
I agree that automatic manslaughter would be excessive, and mandatory minimums in law are almost always a stupid idea, but turing didn't seem to be suggesting that everytime there was an accident involving an oversized vehicle and a fatality, that the oversized vehicle should be charged. Seems like he was saying "when the oversized vehicle is at fault."
Also, i'd give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't mean do this for commercial vehicles like semi trucks, since one: there's no choice there, you want to ship stuff it only makes sense to put it on trucks or trains, and two, that would pretty much ensure that in a week, more than half our citizens would starve. And there's also the fact that professional truck drivers undoubtedly have far fewer accidents than personal vehicles. I'm going to assume instead he meant personal Hummers and other huge SUVs not actually designed for or used for off-road use. Can we all agree that those are nothing more than tacky hazards and should be paying quite a bit in taxes?
Considering that cars are one of the few products that are still manufactured in the US, I'd say it could be a bad thing. A country that thinks that it can survive on imports without making anything itself is going to get exactly what it deserves: bankrupcy.
I think tightening emissions rules are a far cry from saying we're no longer going to be exporting cars. For one thing, this sounds like it's only going to affect cars brought into the US, foreign made or otherwise. Will this affect US exports? I have no clue.
Anyway, if the US economy is killed, it probably won't be because of the auto industry, and if it is, it won't be because americans can't buy fuel inefficient cars.
Lastly, I disagree with the notion that economic planners making decisions that turn out poorly means the entire nation's citizens -deserve- the consequences. Hypothetically, in what sense would a bankrupt farmer "deserve" economic ruin if it was caused by free market economics he probably was opposed to?