Well, that is how they stay competitive with all the other subsidized industries.
In theory, the government subsidies are intended to further social goals that the free market cannot adequately address without regulation.
In practice, the government subsidies are treats that the political powers (such as congressmen) hand out to economic powers (such as favored contributors).
Since our economic powers have evolved into multinational corporations that actively oppose our social goals and purposely subvert our cultural values, this means that the government subsidies are quite often doing the exact opposite of what they are nominally intended to do.
More like a human-guided scythe, cutting through damn near every obstacle during an accident - especially human bodies that are outside of the precious Tesla cockpit.
I think you might have written the best advertising material for the car so far.
It's amazing how ineffective American greens are, really. Look at what environmentalist lobbies accomplish in places like Germany and the Netherlands and then look at our flock of self-sabotaging knuckleheads.
Not only do our loudest greens never accomplish anything politically, they also somehow manage to get themselves blamed for everything their enemies do, whether it's relicensing obsolete and soon-to-fail nuclear plants or blocking needed pipelines. Total knuckleheads! Well, except for Elon Musk's crew, those guys do seem to have a clue, I'll admit.
Naturally the pro-we-ignore-the-earths-climate-has-changed-over-millions-of-years crowd cry foul. I cannot ever recall a group of scientists like these folks be so opposed and go to the lengths they do to squelch any and all dissenting views. That is not science but fanaticism.
I do see a group of fanatics at work, but I'm afraid they aren't scientists. Science is carrying on with business as usual, and squabbling over who is right or wrong is a normal part of the process. The scientific method thrives on criticism and dissent, and insisting that a conclusion must proceed from valid premises and data is not "squelching dissent". Some climatologists are raising objections to both Pielke's methodology and his data cherrypicking - and that's what science does, it hones reasoning through criticism. No conspiracies required.
But if you like conspiracies, remember this is slashdot, where there's no lack of right-wing astroturfers standing by to mod any anti-science or pro-nuclear diatribe as "insightful". That conspiracy is a lot more credible.
Why do they think this is a matter for governments to decide?
Ooh, talking points! Let me try! Wait. OK, I've got it!
Every one of the world's mysteries can be explained by proper understanding of the Elvis Factor.
Man, there's a lot of unexplained phenomenon out there in the world. Lot of things people say What the heck's going on?
Let me tell ya!
Who built the pyramids? ELVIS! Who built Stonehenge? ELVIS!
Yeah, man you see guys walking down the street pushing shopping carts and you think they're talking to Allah, they're talking to themself. Man, no they're talking to ELVIS! ELVIS! ELVIS!
You know whats going on in that Bermuda Triangle? Down in the Bermuda Traingle Elvis needs boats. Elvis needs boats. Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis Elvis needs boats!
I liked the fact that George W. Bush drove the price of petroleum up to suit his corporate puppeteers, even though I didn't really like the way he went about it (far too much torture and sadism).
We need the price of dirty energy to be high enough that clean energy can get the capital investments it needs to reach infrastructure parity (and plutocrat parity). When T. Boone Pickens starts building windfarms, you know you're on the right track. So I'll be happy to help you make a killing in dirty energy market bubbles, my friend, and I hope you have fun spending it, too.
No need to donate, just stop using electricity altogether - that should offset the use of coal more than the amount you might donate would. Not only would doing so show that you're really serious about the environment, it's a far more reasonable and realistic proposal than shutting down the sole power source for a vast majority of the global population.
I already don't use any coal-generated electricity, thanks. Took that step a dozen or more years ago.
Somehow it has not resulted in the shutdown of any coal mines. Go figure! Something about supply and demand and cost interrelationships.
Or, to put it another way, infinitesimally reducing demand isn't really in any way equivalent to infinitesimally contributing to a blockade of supply.
We can't say for sure, of course; lacking mind-reading prowess we'll have to judge the regulatory powers-that-be by what they do and say.
But currently the government is trying to clamp down even harder on the distribution of the painkillers that some of us actually require (in my case, only occasionally, thank God). Their stated reason is that when patients are prescribed narcotic painkillers, and the government makes it harder to get narcotics, many of these patients then turn to heroin, because it is more readily and cheaply obtained. Then, many of these sufferers become heroin addicts, which in turn causes harm to their families, their communities, and themselves.
The government regulators bluntly state that this process means there should be more restrictions on prescription painkillers. Try, for example, this google search.
So, they know that as they restrict access to painkillers, and make use of heavy doses of painkillers more dangerous and harmful, they are actively driving pain sufferers towards illegal heroin use. They know this, and they say so. So the response is to increase restrictions on painkillers? Judging them by their actions, these people have a strong desire to do harm, specifically by pushing people suffering extreme pain into the heroin trade.
Either that, or they are incredibly, dangerously stupid.
I know you were kidding, but that's what my backup is.
I have five large crates of CDs sitting in a cellar - and that's my backup of my music collection. Of course, my music collection is only about 250 GB of FLAC files, not 2 TB... if the guy's not generating his own video, it's hard to imagine where he'd get 2 TB of legally owned content without any sort of initial distribution media.
Right - so whats the systemic problem? Under-educated politicians? A culture which dismisses individual achievement and hard science?
We have a political system beholden to an economic system that rewards and empowers sociopaths. New Jersey just outlawed direct sale of Tesla automobiles, to give just one example.
...and no power on Earth could tell whether their blankly indifferent eyes were shutters protecting hidden treasures at the bottom of shafts no longer to be mined, or were merely gaping holes of the parasites's emptiness never to be filled...
The focus of prisons (from my limited observation) is rarely to rehabilitate.
In the United States, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 explicitly states that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation. In other words, according to both Congress and the Supreme Court, prison is useless for rehabilitation, and judges are legally barred from considering prison as a rehabilitative measure. Our official incarceration policy exists solely to punish behavior, never to correct it or prevent future crimes. This has always seemed to me like the keystone of the "Reagan Revolution", with Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan allying to fundamentally derail the American Dream of an optimally free society, so it seems very appropriate that it was passed in 1984.
The reason everybody is so up in arms is that the opiate is not mixed with acetominophen. The only purpose of putting acetominophen in an opiate painkiller is to make it so it will fry your liver if you take more of it than it was designed for. Basically, such drugs are designed to be deliberately fatal to addicts. So much for "do no harm".
I don't know why you got modded "flamebait". My current doctor and my previous one both told me exactly the same thing. They said they can't prescribe opiates without acetaminophen or their practices will systematically harassed by the government's drug warriors, and they can't help people if they are driven out of business.
Dr. Brad Galer, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Zogenix, says "Zogenix is working on an abuse-deterrent version of Zohydro that should become available in three years."
To me, that says as soon as they add toxicity it'll be acceptable. Because in the USA, the goal of punishing addicts has become more important than the goal of helping people in pain. Authoritarianism is ascendant over compassion.
We, as human beings, only use 3 - 5% of our *NATURAL* brain capacity.
Your assignment for today is to find out where this statement originated. Extra credit will be awarded if you can manage to tie in Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy and Cyril Burt's twin studies.
The National Science Board's biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators , consistently finds that the U.S. produces many more STEM graduates than the workforce can absorb. Meanwhile, employers say managers are struggling to find qualified workers in STEM fields. What explains these apparently contradictory trends?
If a great many "STEM graduates" are not actually qualified to do real creative work in high tech, that would be a sufficient explanation.
Automobile user interfaces have become increasingly complex and de-standardized as computerization reaches into the driver's seat. The major vendors don't seem to care about possible legal liabilities of designing inherently dangerous UIs.
Google has enticed Honda, GM and Audi to join the Open Automotive Alliance, but that project seems more oriented towards selling android and nVidia products than providing an objectively better car OS.
Do you see a future where a real Free (or at least Open Source) car operating system is a reality, or do you think the car makers will just continue to create unsafe and unstandardized vehicle UIs indefinitely?
But you know, if merely punishing people stopped them from complying with rules we'd be living in paradise. Our punishment-oriented culture serves to gratify the sadism of our rulers, and doesn't really do much to prevent crime. In real life the most effective way to prevent crime is to ensure the availability of rewarding work... and hospital paperwork, I have to tell you, is the opposite of rewarding labor.
The USA has always had megacorps that were willing to attack scientists in order to keep on poisoning the people of the USA.
See, for example, how Kehoe, Kettering and Midgely (working for GM, DuPont and the Ethyl Corporation) attacked the reputations and careers of whistle-blowing scientists (like Patterson, Landrigan and Needleman) in order to hide the horrific effects of lead poisoning. The high toxicity of lead was known in the 19th century, and well quantified by the mid-1930s, but hidden from the US public until the 1970s by a concerted corporate disinformation campaign.
In just the last century, we increased our exposure to lead in the environment by 625 times and the effects are going to last for several more generations at least. This poisoning of generations of children, with literally many millions of victims, was done to maximize corporate profits for America's ruling class. And in today's political climate - with Reagan corporatist Obama actually considered to be left-wing or even socialist - you can expect this sort of behavior will continue.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let me know when automobile waste has a half-life equivalent to that of nuclear waste, then.
It's a false equivalency. Yes, coal and oil subsidies are bad, but that doesn't mean the Bush/Cheney nuclear subsidies aren't substantially worse.
Nuclear was on the way out until Cheney stepped in and threw regulated capitalism out the window in favor of Soviet-style centralized economic decisionmaking.
In theory, the government subsidies are intended to further social goals that the free market cannot adequately address without regulation.
In practice, the government subsidies are treats that the political powers (such as congressmen) hand out to economic powers (such as favored contributors).
Since our economic powers have evolved into multinational corporations that actively oppose our social goals and purposely subvert our cultural values, this means that the government subsidies are quite often doing the exact opposite of what they are nominally intended to do.
I think you might have written the best advertising material for the car so far.
It's amazing how ineffective American greens are, really. Look at what environmentalist lobbies accomplish in places like Germany and the Netherlands and then look at our flock of self-sabotaging knuckleheads.
Not only do our loudest greens never accomplish anything politically, they also somehow manage to get themselves blamed for everything their enemies do, whether it's relicensing obsolete and soon-to-fail nuclear plants or blocking needed pipelines. Total knuckleheads! Well, except for Elon Musk's crew, those guys do seem to have a clue, I'll admit.
I do see a group of fanatics at work, but I'm afraid they aren't scientists. Science is carrying on with business as usual, and squabbling over who is right or wrong is a normal part of the process. The scientific method thrives on criticism and dissent, and insisting that a conclusion must proceed from valid premises and data is not "squelching dissent". Some climatologists are raising objections to both Pielke's methodology and his data cherrypicking - and that's what science does, it hones reasoning through criticism. No conspiracies required.
But if you like conspiracies, remember this is slashdot, where there's no lack of right-wing astroturfers standing by to mod any anti-science or pro-nuclear diatribe as "insightful". That conspiracy is a lot more credible.
Ooh, talking points! Let me try! Wait. OK, I've got it!
Every one of the world's mysteries can be explained by proper understanding of the Elvis Factor.
Man, there's a lot of unexplained phenomenon
out there in the world.
Lot of things people say
What the heck's going on?
Let me tell ya!
Who built the pyramids?
ELVIS!
Who built Stonehenge?
ELVIS!
Yeah, man you see guys
walking down the street
pushing shopping carts
and you think they're talking to Allah,
they're talking to themself.
Man, no they're talking to ELVIS!
ELVIS! ELVIS!
You know whats going on in that Bermuda Triangle?
Down in the Bermuda Traingle
Elvis needs boats.
Elvis needs boats.
Elvis Elvis Elvis
Elvis Elvis Elvis
Elvis needs boats!
Again, works for me!
I liked the fact that George W. Bush drove the price of petroleum up to suit his corporate puppeteers, even though I didn't really like the way he went about it (far too much torture and sadism).
We need the price of dirty energy to be high enough that clean energy can get the capital investments it needs to reach infrastructure parity (and plutocrat parity). When T. Boone Pickens starts building windfarms, you know you're on the right track. So I'll be happy to help you make a killing in dirty energy market bubbles, my friend, and I hope you have fun spending it, too.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's a smugapocalypse!
Funny that you assume I have habits that need changing, though. Nobody's burnt coal on my behalf in more than 20 years.
"Doin' right ain't got no end, Fletcher."
My teenage son got PAX tickets before the acts were announced and he's kind of bummed that you're not on the show list.
Works for me!
Sometimes cynicism is a comfort, I guess.
I already don't use any coal-generated electricity, thanks. Took that step a dozen or more years ago.
Somehow it has not resulted in the shutdown of any coal mines. Go figure! Something about supply and demand and cost interrelationships.
Or, to put it another way, infinitesimally reducing demand isn't really in any way equivalent to infinitesimally contributing to a blockade of supply.
We can't say for sure, of course; lacking mind-reading prowess we'll have to judge the regulatory powers-that-be by what they do and say.
But currently the government is trying to clamp down even harder on the distribution of the painkillers that some of us actually require (in my case, only occasionally, thank God). Their stated reason is that when patients are prescribed narcotic painkillers, and the government makes it harder to get narcotics, many of these patients then turn to heroin, because it is more readily and cheaply obtained. Then, many of these sufferers become heroin addicts, which in turn causes harm to their families, their communities, and themselves.
The government regulators bluntly state that this process means there should be more restrictions on prescription painkillers. Try, for example, this google search.
So, they know that as they restrict access to painkillers, and make use of heavy doses of painkillers more dangerous and harmful, they are actively driving pain sufferers towards illegal heroin use. They know this, and they say so. So the response is to increase restrictions on painkillers? Judging them by their actions, these people have a strong desire to do harm, specifically by pushing people suffering extreme pain into the heroin trade.
Either that, or they are incredibly, dangerously stupid.
I know you were kidding, but that's what my backup is.
I have five large crates of CDs sitting in a cellar - and that's my backup of my music collection. Of course, my music collection is only about 250 GB of FLAC files, not 2 TB... if the guy's not generating his own video, it's hard to imagine where he'd get 2 TB of legally owned content without any sort of initial distribution media.
Where's the damn kickstarter?
We have a political system beholden to an economic system that rewards and empowers sociopaths. New Jersey just outlawed direct sale of Tesla automobiles, to give just one example.
In the United States, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 explicitly states that imprisonment is not an appropriate means of promoting correction and rehabilitation. In other words, according to both Congress and the Supreme Court, prison is useless for rehabilitation, and judges are legally barred from considering prison as a rehabilitative measure. Our official incarceration policy exists solely to punish behavior, never to correct it or prevent future crimes. This has always seemed to me like the keystone of the "Reagan Revolution", with Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan allying to fundamentally derail the American Dream of an optimally free society, so it seems very appropriate that it was passed in 1984.
I don't know why you got modded "flamebait". My current doctor and my previous one both told me exactly the same thing. They said they can't prescribe opiates without acetaminophen or their practices will systematically harassed by the government's drug warriors, and they can't help people if they are driven out of business.
Dr. Brad Galer, executive vice president and chief medical officer at Zogenix, says "Zogenix is working on an abuse-deterrent version of Zohydro that should become available in three years."
To me, that says as soon as they add toxicity it'll be acceptable. Because in the USA, the goal of punishing addicts has become more important than the goal of helping people in pain. Authoritarianism is ascendant over compassion.
Your assignment for today is to find out where this statement originated. Extra credit will be awarded if you can manage to tie in Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy and Cyril Burt's twin studies.
If a great many "STEM graduates" are not actually qualified to do real creative work in high tech, that would be a sufficient explanation.
Automobile user interfaces have become increasingly complex and de-standardized as computerization reaches into the driver's seat. The major vendors don't seem to care about possible legal liabilities of designing inherently dangerous UIs.
Google has enticed Honda, GM and Audi to join the Open Automotive Alliance, but that project seems more oriented towards selling android and nVidia products than providing an objectively better car OS.
Do you see a future where a real Free (or at least Open Source) car operating system is a reality, or do you think the car makers will just continue to create unsafe and unstandardized vehicle UIs indefinitely?
sed 's/complying with/breaking/' <previous post >coherent post
That'll teach me to use preview mode... oh well, at least the link worked.
Don't worry, there's no lack of authoritarian punishment built into the system.
But you know, if merely punishing people stopped them from complying with rules we'd be living in paradise. Our punishment-oriented culture serves to gratify the sadism of our rulers, and doesn't really do much to prevent crime. In real life the most effective way to prevent crime is to ensure the availability of rewarding work... and hospital paperwork, I have to tell you, is the opposite of rewarding labor.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but that's the opposite of what the rich people who control our legislatures are paying for.
They pulled the ladder up behind them on purpose; they don't want an egalitarian society.
Yeah, my dog gets pretty crazy after 40 ounces of malt liquor too.
The USA has always had megacorps that were willing to attack scientists in order to keep on poisoning the people of the USA.
See, for example, how Kehoe, Kettering and Midgely (working for GM, DuPont and the Ethyl Corporation) attacked the reputations and careers of whistle-blowing scientists (like Patterson, Landrigan and Needleman) in order to hide the horrific effects of lead poisoning. The high toxicity of lead was known in the 19th century, and well quantified by the mid-1930s, but hidden from the US public until the 1970s by a concerted corporate disinformation campaign.
In just the last century, we increased our exposure to lead in the environment by 625 times and the effects are going to last for several more generations at least. This poisoning of generations of children, with literally many millions of victims, was done to maximize corporate profits for America's ruling class. And in today's political climate - with Reagan corporatist Obama actually considered to be left-wing or even socialist - you can expect this sort of behavior will continue.