We have two choices: we can be free, or we can be safe. These are mutually exclusive. And in the United States of America, the only correct choice is to be free.
False dilemma. Those are not mutually exclusive and you are ludicrously over-simplifying reality. There is a spectrum between freedom and safety and we have to decide where on that spectrum to be. Complete freedom and perfect safety are both impossible ideals that are incompatible with a civilized society not to mention the laws of physics.
You are aware that Android is currently dominating the mobile market?
You'd have to live under a rock to not know how Android is doing. What is your point? Google makes virtually no money from Android directly.
You're also quite wrong. Google have a huge stake in GIS and have become one of the worlds leading imagery providers, so much to the point that they now have their own satellites (GeoEYE).
Which is entirely consistent with their search driven advertising business. That's not a distraction. That's a core business for them and really it is a cost center. They bought that so that they could enhance their local search.
Google is extremely diversified, so much so they could survive the complete destruction of their advertisement business.
Google is barely diversified at all. You haven't actually looked at any of their financial statements. Google makes close to 95% of their revenue from advertising. Fourth quarter 2014 they made $46 billion in revenue and $43.6 of that came from advertising. Google would be bankrupt if their advertising business disappeared.
If you want to see what an actual diversified company looks like go look at Berkshire Hathaway or General Electric. Hell, even Microsoft is more diversified than Google. Despite all the hype, Google is pretty much a one trick pony. It's a REALLY good trick but they don't have a second one right now. Their main saving grace is that they have so much cash in the bank that they could buy their way into a new line of business if they needed to. But they haven't developed anything in house that meaningfully changes the fact that virtually all their revenue comes from advertising.
So is diverting water from thousands of miles away. So is trying to turn desert into grassland when it REALLY wants to be desert.
It's energy intensive
No argument there but it does have the advantage of not being affected by seasonal variations or climate change and the cost is known and consistent.
they're ugly as sin
Who cares? It's an industrial building and odds are you don't even have to be close to it. You can pretty the building up if it really bothers you.
it results in bad-tasting water
Umm, bullshit. Water is water. You can filter it to make it taste fine or terrible.
it pollutes the oceans with saline
Again bullshit. The salt is already in the ocean and the amount we would add back to it is inconsequential. We're not reducing the amount of water in the ocean by a meaningful amount.
the resulting water still needs to be pumped hundreds of miles to be used
Exactly the same as it is now. Do you think water comes out of your tap by magic?
Yes really. A small town is fine. A city of 1million+ in the middle of a desert is an absurdity.
Yes, Phoenix and Tucson have added to our natural water supplies by diverting some of the Colorado River,
"Some"? The Colorado River doesn't even reach the ocean anymore. ALL of it gets diverted. Not just by Phoenix to be fair but really there is no reason the diversion to Phoenix should even be necessary at all.
The communities have existed for a VERY long time.
Not with 1.5 million people they haven't. Phoenix existing as a small city is fine. At it's current size is not.
I dare say it's far easier to deal with water conservation in the desert here, then the floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, frosts, tornados, mudslides and other forms of natural disasters found in other parts of the country that we are quite immune to, thank you very much.
I think you have no idea what living in other parts of the country is actually like if you think those things are huge problems most of the time. Plus we aren't sucking down massive amounts of power for air conditioning for most of the year and diverting entire rivers to support a huge city in a place where there is no justification for a huge city to exist. I've been to Phoenix. Nice enough town. But it should be no more than 1/10th it's current size.
I haven't seen any evidence yet that Google isn't interested in huge distractions from their primary business.
Google hasn't done anything that would qualify as a huge distraction. Yes they go off on all sorts of tangents but none of them are giant, bet the business, diversions. Nothing that would harm their core advertising business. Even Android is really nothing more than a defensive play to ensure they cannot get locked out of the mobile market by Apple and Microsoft. Certainly nothing they have done is a distraction to the degree getting into the car making business would be.
I work in manufacturing and am working on my second decade in the auto manufacturing industry. Google REALLY does not want to get into this business outside of providing some technology. There really is nothing they would gain by doing so. I think they could provide some real value by providing ways for cars to communicate and provide information better but I just see no point in them actually pounding metal. It would just be a dumb business decision for them.
I.e. Tesla only exists thanks to corporate welfare, in which billionaires get generous loans from struggling average Joes.
Substitute Tesla for GM or Chrysler and you could say the exact same thing.
The difference however is that GM and Chrysler provide a huge number of jobs both at themselves and their suppliers for those "struggling average Joes". Without them the Joes would have been much worse off. You really do not want to know how big a blow to the economy it would have been if they had not received bailout loans. Tesla on the other hand is a promising small company that needed a cash bridge to get their next product to market. They paid the loan off early and are looking like they might be a huge success so it's unclear to me what the problem is in the case of Tesla.
As such, there is no reason to believe that they will not consider building their own cars. And if they were to do so, I am guessing that they will Work with Tesla to make their own.
There is a very good reason to believe they will not consider building their own cars. The reason is economics. Cars are a generally low margin business with huge capital requirements. The engineering and manufacturing are something Google has absolutely no expertise or advantage in. A VERY profitable large car manufacturer has profit margins around 8-10% (see Porsche or Toyota) and most are somewhere between 0-5% most of the time. Google right now has profit margins around 25%. If they got into the car business in any sort of meaningful way their profit margins would drop like a rock along with their share price. They would be jumping into a cutthroat business that they have zero advantage or experience in. Even if they bought a company like GM outright, it would be basically nothing but a huge distraction from their primary business. A company like Tesla they could manage because it is so small but eventually they would probably sell it off.
While Google has the financial means to get into the car business if they wanted to, they would be insane to do so. I could easily see them providing technology used in cars but I don't see any (sane) reason why they would actually want to make cars themselves.
By your logic we should only produce anything were all the raw input materials happen to be locally available.
I argued nothing of the sort. The key word there is SUSTAINABLE. We already divert massive amounts of water to California and other ludicrous places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and they use much of what they have rather badly. Much of the agriculture that takes place there could be done elsewhere if needed. I think the notion of diverting massive amounts of water from the Pacific northwest or elsewhere is simply stupid because there are alternatives that are much simpler.
Diverting large amounts of fresh water thousands of miles damages a natural ecosystem to sustain an unnatural one. It's not a sane use of scarce resources. Climates change and beyond a certain point fighting it becomes pointless.
The largest reservoir in the U.S. is located just outside of Las Vegas (Hoover Dam [wikipedia.org]). Why do they need water from the Mississippi?
Lake Meade is getting rather low and has been dropping since 1983. This is partly due to to climate variability/change and significantly due to human usage.
The real answer is that we do NOT need to divert water from the Mississippi or Great Lakes. We need to reduce the human demand for water in the middle of a desert to a sustainable level. If that means that Las Vegas become uninhabitable then so be it.
So then, we should avoid building cities in the Great Lakes region, where it gets really cold in winter and people have to use natural gas that was mined in Texas and the Dakotas?
Nice bit of absurd reductionism. There's nothing wrong with SOME diversion and trade of a natural resource. But there is something VERY wrong with doing it when you have a limited resource like fresh water that is being used badly. You might have an argument if it weren't for the absurdly stupid uses of water in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and even in big parts of California.
There's this thing called comparitive advantage.
I don't think you understand what comparative advantage actually means. Comparative advantage is why two places can produce the same good and have it be economically beneficial to both even though one has an absolute price advantage. It has little to do with why building large cities in the middle of the desert is bat-shit crazy.
The southwest has tons of potential for producing solar energy, let's not shut down development there yet.
A bunch of solar plants do not require a city with the population of Phoenix to exist in the middle of a desert. Rather than diverting water so we can have fountains in front of the Bellagio hotel and lush golf courses in the desert, how about we actually make sane use of the water we have before you start draining the Great Lakes.
If CA is short a percent or two in its water supply, Nestle might be a big deal. Otherwise, it's meaningless....
When you are in the middle of a drought (which California is) it very quickly becomes meaningful. One or two percent is not trivial even in times of plenty. During a drought it becomes even more ludicrously wasteful than bottled water normally is, which is really saying something.
First, most of California agriculture is not in desert. Those areas tend to be rather low on rainfall, but not low enough to qualify as a desert.
If they don't have enough water to the degree that they are thinking about insane schemes like piping it from Washington then it is a distinction without a difference.
Second, presence of water is not the only reason to grow something in a particular region. Southern California happens to be famous for a pleasant climate and a lot of sunny days.
You are correct that there are other factors besides water availability in play. Soil composition, climate, location, transportation, etc all matter. But the water IS a critical component. If you have to pipe in more than can be sustained then it is NOT a good idea to do so. This includes times when there is a drought.
How about taking the fresh river water as it is about to dump into the Pacific, and pipe it through the ocean in poly blend pipes that are easy to install and repair... a leak would do no damage
You mean except for the salt getting into your freshwater supply when you inevitably spring a leak? (Think osmotic gradient) You mean except for altering the ecosystem of the river delta? You would have to have some pretty huge pipes (or REALLY high pressure) to take a meaningful amount of water to where it is wanted. It is NOT trivial to pipe a significant percentage of the outflow of a river somewhere else.
I don't mean to be overly harsh because the idea does have some charm to it but there are some pretty serious issues in play with such a scheme. I have a hard time believing that it would make more sense than simply building some large scale desalination plants close to where the water is needed. You would still have to pipe the water across land at some point anyway.
Or here's an idea. Don't build in areas where there isn't much water. Wipe Las Vegas and Phoenix off the map because there is NO reason there should be large metropolitan areas in the middle of a desert. I've even heard ridiculous ideas like diverting water from the Mississippi basin or the Great Lakes to make sure the idiots in Las Vegas can fill their swimming pools. Those cities are prime examples of doing something because we can without considering whether we should.
To get back on topic, there is NO way a $30 billion pipeline makes more sense than some very large scale desalination plants. If they need the water that badly then there is literally a whole ocean of it on the coast of California. You can buy a LOT of desalination for that kind of cheddar.
But this article specifically mentions beer tabs, which just turned 50 years old, and have nothing to do with the Native Americans. Unless I'm missing something here...
You're missing the fact that someone used the fact that pull tabs aren't actually terribly old to get in an irrelevant troll about how the USA isn't that old itself compared with Europe, conveniently forgetting that the history of the Americas goes way back before Europeans got involved.
Give me a break, it's not hard to date American campgrounds. The whole damn country is less than 250 years old. You guys act like we're carbon dating shit here.
We AREcarbondating things on this side of the pond. American history goes back WAY before Columbus wandered across the Atlantic.
The United States as a nation-state may not go back quite as far as some European countries but only a racist idiot would think that history is just the documented history of white people of European heritage. People have been in the Americas for 20,000+ years. And the United Kingdom as we know it today is barely older than the USA so don't get so high and might about how deep European history is.
Only in America could something only 50 years old be considered an "historic" artefact, archaeologically.
Only people who lack comprehension of history would be so arrogant as to think something has to pass an arbitrarily long age to be of historic interest. I used to own an auction company so I've been a dealer in historic artifacts. Some stuff is historically interesting even though it isn't very old. Other stuff is very old and of very little historical interest or significance.
That's the 1960's, people. Elsewhere, it's not even considered antique unless it's from 1915 or before
The word antique has no specific connotation of date or time. It simply means old. The exact date is irrelevant.
This is what happens when you have only 500 years of recorded history and ignore anything that happened before then.
Oh well I guess we should all feel inferior because our history wasn't written down as well on this side of the pond. [/sarcasm] People were here 20,000+ years ago and it doesn't get ignored. We simply don't know as much about them because there is less data available. Go study the Mayan ruins or Cahokia mounds and then tell us again how there is nothing of archeological interest over here.
I watched Time Team once, where they do an archaeological dig live on TV, The American episode was so dull because they basically couldn't touch anything. All the "history" was the top inch of soil.
Then they were digging in the wrong place. There are tens of thousands of years of history here if you actually know what you are doing and where to look.
One of the biggest reasons automtive grade electronics in cars are so much more expensive than commerical grade electronics is the wider range of operating conditions. For instance, the autos need components than work just as reliably in Georgia summers as Montana winters.
Most consumer electronics will work just fine inside the vehicle cabin. (Engine bay and weather exposed areas is a different story) My company does automotive wiring and consumer electronics wiring and the differences in thermal and vibration and other performance specs are just not all that huge for the most part. Sometimes some increased temperature specs for engine bay stuff and being self-extinguishing can matter but that's not a big cost burden in most cases. I do the quoting and am both the engineer and accountant at our company so I know the numbers well.
No, most of the cost is simply design and volume related. Let me give you an example or two. We make a wire harness that has a grommet on it. We make two versions of it and the only difference is the size of the grommet. Why two versions? Because the engineers and Buick and the engineers and Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to each other and standardize on a single grommet for both platforms. So we get a worse price because we have to buy two different grommets instead of a single one at a lower price. We also have some connectors on the harness. Instead of picking an off the shelf connector they decided to go with a custom connector despite it providing no performance benefit. So we have to buy 50,000 custom connectors with a 4 month lead time instead of using a standard connector carried by every distributor in North America for less money. Plus the volumes of production are a few hundred thousand. Sounds like a lot but compared to consumer electronics its almost nothing. Apple sells more iphones in a day than the number of harnesses we'll make this year. Volume drives discounts.
So where should someone entering the workforce for the first time find the money to buy his first car to get him back and forth to his first job?
Someone just entering the workforce is likely to have minimal credit history and probably wouldn't be able to get a loan of any substantial size without a co-signer. It's not hard to get a junker for a few thousand dollars. I drove several for my early years in the workforce.
If you have to finance then do what you have to do. I did starting out. But do not keep an auto loan for a moment longer than necessary. It's almost always a bad financial decision.
This is deliberate on the part of the car manufacturers. The last thing they want is standards which allow third parties to undermine the profits they make in selling repairs and selling new cars. Total cost of ownership is well hidden.
I work in the industry. I can assure you that you are thinking malice where incompetence is MUCH better explanation. I've worked with engineers and executives directly at GM and Ford and several others. There is not a master plan for most of what they do. They are not that competent and certainly not that clever. You have to understand the design cycles and processes. Cars take 2-4 years to get designed and then the majority of the design is effectively frozen for 4-8 years. It takes an act of congress to get them to change a production part once a PPAP is completed and production has started.
They actually could make a lot more money by standardizing components and sub-systems and providing interfaces for third parties to work with. They just culturally do not know how to do this. They are too paranoid, too set in their ways and too slow for the most part. Their internal business culture reacts to changes and industry outsiders like an immune system forcing an allergy attack.
Personally, I bought a new car because I'm keeping it until it dies. It's likely to have a longer life with me taking care of it from the beginning than if I bought it used.
I understand the logic though whether or not it is a sensible decision depends heavily on how much you paid.
I put a down payment on it and financed the rest for 48 months at 1.99%. I didn't have to, as I had the money to buy it outright.
That is actually quite sensible. 2% interest is darn close to free money so I think that is a smart decision to finance given that you didn't actually have to. I would have strongly considered doing the same thing.
That being said, both of us are in unique positions where we have options.
True but a lot of people buy far more expensive cars than they really can justify if they are being objective about it. A good example is pickup trucks. Ford and GM make the majority of their profits from large trucks with terrible gas mileage. The prices for these vehicles is much higher than their utility to the buyers would justify AND very few of the buyers actually utilize the full capabilities of the vehicle. Yet people buy droves of $30-50K+ F150 pickups. They do it for self image and because they can rather than because it is an objectively sensible decision.
A capitalist decided, on his own, without government interference, to increase pay.
Which is the exception that proves the rule. How many CEOs do you see arguing FOR an increase in minimum wage? They could voluntarily do it but very few actually do. CEO pay has increased FAR more than the average pay of the workers lower down so any argument that CEOs will decide to en-mass increase wages is pretty much delusional.
The owner decided to do this of his own free will, regardless of what his motive was. That's the point of freedom. You're allowed to choose.
And most will choose not to of their own free will. That's the problem. If we made taxes optional, how many people do you think would pay? If we eliminated work safety rules do you think best practices would be followed? Real freedom isn't the absence of rules and obligations because society cannot function without them. Real freedom is being able to have a meaningful say in what those rules and obligations are and should be. Real freedom isn't depending on the beneficence of a single CEO deciding one day to be a nice guy.
Under socialism, your choices are far more limited. As with most forms of collectivism, either things are mandatory or they're prohibited.
Tell you what. Take a trip to Europe sometime. The EU is by many measures the largest economy in the world. The standard of living in most of the EU is quite high compared to much of the rest of the world. Most governments in the EU have what is generally acknowledged to be a somewhat socialist ideology - certainly in comparison to the USA. And yet they have good health care, good GDP per-capita, world class businesses and manufacturing and art and sport, and are among the most successful societies on the globe politically, economically, militarily and socially. All while "socializing" certain aspects of their society and what do you know, it works if you don't take it to the extreme of communism.
Here's the point of all that. We ALL depend on each other. You can argue about how much sharing is a good thing but you cannot argue that all sharing can be optional. It simply will not work. Some folks simply are more willing to acknowledge this fact than others. You can argue about how much sharing is a net benefit to society but the argument Socialism = Bad is just stupid. EVERY society has some amount of socialism to it and it cannot be otherwise.
Capitalism allows business owners and leaders to CHOOSE to make decisions like this. Socialism forces them to do it.
Every civilized country engages in socialism. The only difference is in the degree to which they do it. A society which does not will rapidly fall apart. If you have a job it is because a lot of other people worked very hard to make it possible - even if you work for yourself. We require people pay taxes and minimum wages and other things because it benefits us all. While you can take it too far, we're certainly in no danger of that here in the US.
Liberals don't really understand the importance of this distinction.
Liberals understand that the real world isn't a place where we can afford to pretend we don't depend on each other. Share a little and everyone benefits. It is possible to both share too little and share too much. Personally I think the sharing too little is the worse of the two options.
I guess that's fine as long as you know your car is badly under-performing what is possible.
They knew how to make good cars in 1982...
Could not disagree more. I've owned cars from that era and grew up driving cars from the 70s and 80s, both foreign and domestic. They were mostly total crap compared to what is available today. If you got 100,000 miles out of a car from the early 80s you were doing well. American cars in particular from that time were almost universally crap with terrible reliability, terrible fuel economy, poor handling and ridiculously poor construction and build quality. "Knew how to make good cars in 1982"? Don't make me laugh.
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We have two choices: we can be free, or we can be safe. These are mutually exclusive. And in the United States of America, the only correct choice is to be free.
False dilemma. Those are not mutually exclusive and you are ludicrously over-simplifying reality. There is a spectrum between freedom and safety and we have to decide where on that spectrum to be. Complete freedom and perfect safety are both impossible ideals that are incompatible with a civilized society not to mention the laws of physics.
You are aware that Android is currently dominating the mobile market?
You'd have to live under a rock to not know how Android is doing. What is your point? Google makes virtually no money from Android directly.
You're also quite wrong. Google have a huge stake in GIS and have become one of the worlds leading imagery providers, so much to the point that they now have their own satellites (GeoEYE).
Which is entirely consistent with their search driven advertising business. That's not a distraction. That's a core business for them and really it is a cost center. They bought that so that they could enhance their local search.
Google is extremely diversified, so much so they could survive the complete destruction of their advertisement business.
Google is barely diversified at all. You haven't actually looked at any of their financial statements. Google makes close to 95% of their revenue from advertising. Fourth quarter 2014 they made $46 billion in revenue and $43.6 of that came from advertising. Google would be bankrupt if their advertising business disappeared.
If you want to see what an actual diversified company looks like go look at Berkshire Hathaway or General Electric. Hell, even Microsoft is more diversified than Google. Despite all the hype, Google is pretty much a one trick pony. It's a REALLY good trick but they don't have a second one right now. Their main saving grace is that they have so much cash in the bank that they could buy their way into a new line of business if they needed to. But they haven't developed anything in house that meaningfully changes the fact that virtually all their revenue comes from advertising.
Desalinization is expensive.
So is diverting water from thousands of miles away. So is trying to turn desert into grassland when it REALLY wants to be desert.
It's energy intensive
No argument there but it does have the advantage of not being affected by seasonal variations or climate change and the cost is known and consistent.
they're ugly as sin
Who cares? It's an industrial building and odds are you don't even have to be close to it. You can pretty the building up if it really bothers you.
it results in bad-tasting water
Umm, bullshit. Water is water. You can filter it to make it taste fine or terrible.
it pollutes the oceans with saline
Again bullshit. The salt is already in the ocean and the amount we would add back to it is inconsequential. We're not reducing the amount of water in the ocean by a meaningful amount.
the resulting water still needs to be pumped hundreds of miles to be used
Exactly the same as it is now. Do you think water comes out of your tap by magic?
Oh, really?
Yes really. A small town is fine. A city of 1million+ in the middle of a desert is an absurdity.
Yes, Phoenix and Tucson have added to our natural water supplies by diverting some of the Colorado River,
"Some"? The Colorado River doesn't even reach the ocean anymore. ALL of it gets diverted. Not just by Phoenix to be fair but really there is no reason the diversion to Phoenix should even be necessary at all.
The communities have existed for a VERY long time.
Not with 1.5 million people they haven't. Phoenix existing as a small city is fine. At it's current size is not.
I dare say it's far easier to deal with water conservation in the desert here, then the floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, frosts, tornados, mudslides and other forms of natural disasters found in other parts of the country that we are quite immune to, thank you very much.
I think you have no idea what living in other parts of the country is actually like if you think those things are huge problems most of the time. Plus we aren't sucking down massive amounts of power for air conditioning for most of the year and diverting entire rivers to support a huge city in a place where there is no justification for a huge city to exist. I've been to Phoenix. Nice enough town. But it should be no more than 1/10th it's current size.
I haven't seen any evidence yet that Google isn't interested in huge distractions from their primary business.
Google hasn't done anything that would qualify as a huge distraction. Yes they go off on all sorts of tangents but none of them are giant, bet the business, diversions. Nothing that would harm their core advertising business. Even Android is really nothing more than a defensive play to ensure they cannot get locked out of the mobile market by Apple and Microsoft. Certainly nothing they have done is a distraction to the degree getting into the car making business would be.
I work in manufacturing and am working on my second decade in the auto manufacturing industry. Google REALLY does not want to get into this business outside of providing some technology. There really is nothing they would gain by doing so. I think they could provide some real value by providing ways for cars to communicate and provide information better but I just see no point in them actually pounding metal. It would just be a dumb business decision for them.
I.e. Tesla only exists thanks to corporate welfare, in which billionaires get generous loans from struggling average Joes.
Substitute Tesla for GM or Chrysler and you could say the exact same thing.
The difference however is that GM and Chrysler provide a huge number of jobs both at themselves and their suppliers for those "struggling average Joes". Without them the Joes would have been much worse off. You really do not want to know how big a blow to the economy it would have been if they had not received bailout loans. Tesla on the other hand is a promising small company that needed a cash bridge to get their next product to market. They paid the loan off early and are looking like they might be a huge success so it's unclear to me what the problem is in the case of Tesla.
As such, there is no reason to believe that they will not consider building their own cars. And if they were to do so, I am guessing that they will Work with Tesla to make their own.
There is a very good reason to believe they will not consider building their own cars. The reason is economics. Cars are a generally low margin business with huge capital requirements. The engineering and manufacturing are something Google has absolutely no expertise or advantage in. A VERY profitable large car manufacturer has profit margins around 8-10% (see Porsche or Toyota) and most are somewhere between 0-5% most of the time. Google right now has profit margins around 25%. If they got into the car business in any sort of meaningful way their profit margins would drop like a rock along with their share price. They would be jumping into a cutthroat business that they have zero advantage or experience in. Even if they bought a company like GM outright, it would be basically nothing but a huge distraction from their primary business. A company like Tesla they could manage because it is so small but eventually they would probably sell it off.
While Google has the financial means to get into the car business if they wanted to, they would be insane to do so. I could easily see them providing technology used in cars but I don't see any (sane) reason why they would actually want to make cars themselves.
By your logic we should only produce anything were all the raw input materials happen to be locally available.
I argued nothing of the sort. The key word there is SUSTAINABLE. We already divert massive amounts of water to California and other ludicrous places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and they use much of what they have rather badly. Much of the agriculture that takes place there could be done elsewhere if needed. I think the notion of diverting massive amounts of water from the Pacific northwest or elsewhere is simply stupid because there are alternatives that are much simpler.
Diverting large amounts of fresh water thousands of miles damages a natural ecosystem to sustain an unnatural one. It's not a sane use of scarce resources. Climates change and beyond a certain point fighting it becomes pointless.
The largest reservoir in the U.S. is located just outside of Las Vegas (Hoover Dam [wikipedia.org]). Why do they need water from the Mississippi?
Lake Meade is getting rather low and has been dropping since 1983. This is partly due to to climate variability/change and significantly due to human usage.
The real answer is that we do NOT need to divert water from the Mississippi or Great Lakes. We need to reduce the human demand for water in the middle of a desert to a sustainable level. If that means that Las Vegas become uninhabitable then so be it.
So then, we should avoid building cities in the Great Lakes region, where it gets really cold in winter and people have to use natural gas that was mined in Texas and the Dakotas?
Nice bit of absurd reductionism. There's nothing wrong with SOME diversion and trade of a natural resource. But there is something VERY wrong with doing it when you have a limited resource like fresh water that is being used badly. You might have an argument if it weren't for the absurdly stupid uses of water in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and even in big parts of California.
There's this thing called comparitive advantage.
I don't think you understand what comparative advantage actually means. Comparative advantage is why two places can produce the same good and have it be economically beneficial to both even though one has an absolute price advantage. It has little to do with why building large cities in the middle of the desert is bat-shit crazy.
The southwest has tons of potential for producing solar energy, let's not shut down development there yet.
A bunch of solar plants do not require a city with the population of Phoenix to exist in the middle of a desert. Rather than diverting water so we can have fountains in front of the Bellagio hotel and lush golf courses in the desert, how about we actually make sane use of the water we have before you start draining the Great Lakes.
If CA is short a percent or two in its water supply, Nestle might be a big deal. Otherwise, it's meaningless....
When you are in the middle of a drought (which California is) it very quickly becomes meaningful. One or two percent is not trivial even in times of plenty. During a drought it becomes even more ludicrously wasteful than bottled water normally is, which is really saying something.
First, most of California agriculture is not in desert. Those areas tend to be rather low on rainfall, but not low enough to qualify as a desert.
If they don't have enough water to the degree that they are thinking about insane schemes like piping it from Washington then it is a distinction without a difference.
Second, presence of water is not the only reason to grow something in a particular region. Southern California happens to be famous for a pleasant climate and a lot of sunny days.
You are correct that there are other factors besides water availability in play. Soil composition, climate, location, transportation, etc all matter. But the water IS a critical component. If you have to pipe in more than can be sustained then it is NOT a good idea to do so. This includes times when there is a drought.
How about taking the fresh river water as it is about to dump into the Pacific, and pipe it through the ocean in poly blend pipes that are easy to install and repair... a leak would do no damage
You mean except for the salt getting into your freshwater supply when you inevitably spring a leak? (Think osmotic gradient) You mean except for altering the ecosystem of the river delta? You would have to have some pretty huge pipes (or REALLY high pressure) to take a meaningful amount of water to where it is wanted. It is NOT trivial to pipe a significant percentage of the outflow of a river somewhere else.
I don't mean to be overly harsh because the idea does have some charm to it but there are some pretty serious issues in play with such a scheme. I have a hard time believing that it would make more sense than simply building some large scale desalination plants close to where the water is needed. You would still have to pipe the water across land at some point anyway.
Or here's an idea. Don't build in areas where there isn't much water. Wipe Las Vegas and Phoenix off the map because there is NO reason there should be large metropolitan areas in the middle of a desert. I've even heard ridiculous ideas like diverting water from the Mississippi basin or the Great Lakes to make sure the idiots in Las Vegas can fill their swimming pools. Those cities are prime examples of doing something because we can without considering whether we should.
To get back on topic, there is NO way a $30 billion pipeline makes more sense than some very large scale desalination plants. If they need the water that badly then there is literally a whole ocean of it on the coast of California. You can buy a LOT of desalination for that kind of cheddar.
But this article specifically mentions beer tabs, which just turned 50 years old, and have nothing to do with the Native Americans. Unless I'm missing something here...
You're missing the fact that someone used the fact that pull tabs aren't actually terribly old to get in an irrelevant troll about how the USA isn't that old itself compared with Europe, conveniently forgetting that the history of the Americas goes way back before Europeans got involved.
Give me a break, it's not hard to date American campgrounds. The whole damn country is less than 250 years old. You guys act like we're carbon dating shit here.
We ARE carbon dating things on this side of the pond. American history goes back WAY before Columbus wandered across the Atlantic.
The United States as a nation-state may not go back quite as far as some European countries but only a racist idiot would think that history is just the documented history of white people of European heritage. People have been in the Americas for 20,000+ years. And the United Kingdom as we know it today is barely older than the USA so don't get so high and might about how deep European history is.
Only in America could something only 50 years old be considered an "historic" artefact, archaeologically.
Only people who lack comprehension of history would be so arrogant as to think something has to pass an arbitrarily long age to be of historic interest. I used to own an auction company so I've been a dealer in historic artifacts. Some stuff is historically interesting even though it isn't very old. Other stuff is very old and of very little historical interest or significance.
That's the 1960's, people. Elsewhere, it's not even considered antique unless it's from 1915 or before
The word antique has no specific connotation of date or time. It simply means old. The exact date is irrelevant.
This is what happens when you have only 500 years of recorded history and ignore anything that happened before then.
Oh well I guess we should all feel inferior because our history wasn't written down as well on this side of the pond. [/sarcasm] People were here 20,000+ years ago and it doesn't get ignored. We simply don't know as much about them because there is less data available. Go study the Mayan ruins or Cahokia mounds and then tell us again how there is nothing of archeological interest over here.
I watched Time Team once, where they do an archaeological dig live on TV, The American episode was so dull because they basically couldn't touch anything. All the "history" was the top inch of soil.
Then they were digging in the wrong place. There are tens of thousands of years of history here if you actually know what you are doing and where to look.
One of the biggest reasons automtive grade electronics in cars are so much more expensive than commerical grade electronics is the wider range of operating conditions. For instance, the autos need components than work just as reliably in Georgia summers as Montana winters.
Most consumer electronics will work just fine inside the vehicle cabin. (Engine bay and weather exposed areas is a different story) My company does automotive wiring and consumer electronics wiring and the differences in thermal and vibration and other performance specs are just not all that huge for the most part. Sometimes some increased temperature specs for engine bay stuff and being self-extinguishing can matter but that's not a big cost burden in most cases. I do the quoting and am both the engineer and accountant at our company so I know the numbers well.
No, most of the cost is simply design and volume related. Let me give you an example or two. We make a wire harness that has a grommet on it. We make two versions of it and the only difference is the size of the grommet. Why two versions? Because the engineers and Buick and the engineers and Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to each other and standardize on a single grommet for both platforms. So we get a worse price because we have to buy two different grommets instead of a single one at a lower price. We also have some connectors on the harness. Instead of picking an off the shelf connector they decided to go with a custom connector despite it providing no performance benefit. So we have to buy 50,000 custom connectors with a 4 month lead time instead of using a standard connector carried by every distributor in North America for less money. Plus the volumes of production are a few hundred thousand. Sounds like a lot but compared to consumer electronics its almost nothing. Apple sells more iphones in a day than the number of harnesses we'll make this year. Volume drives discounts.
So where should someone entering the workforce for the first time find the money to buy his first car to get him back and forth to his first job?
Someone just entering the workforce is likely to have minimal credit history and probably wouldn't be able to get a loan of any substantial size without a co-signer. It's not hard to get a junker for a few thousand dollars. I drove several for my early years in the workforce.
If you have to finance then do what you have to do. I did starting out. But do not keep an auto loan for a moment longer than necessary. It's almost always a bad financial decision.
This is deliberate on the part of the car manufacturers. The last thing they want is standards which allow third parties to undermine the profits they make in selling repairs and selling new cars. Total cost of ownership is well hidden.
I work in the industry. I can assure you that you are thinking malice where incompetence is MUCH better explanation. I've worked with engineers and executives directly at GM and Ford and several others. There is not a master plan for most of what they do. They are not that competent and certainly not that clever. You have to understand the design cycles and processes. Cars take 2-4 years to get designed and then the majority of the design is effectively frozen for 4-8 years. It takes an act of congress to get them to change a production part once a PPAP is completed and production has started.
They actually could make a lot more money by standardizing components and sub-systems and providing interfaces for third parties to work with. They just culturally do not know how to do this. They are too paranoid, too set in their ways and too slow for the most part. Their internal business culture reacts to changes and industry outsiders like an immune system forcing an allergy attack.
Personally, I bought a new car because I'm keeping it until it dies. It's likely to have a longer life with me taking care of it from the beginning than if I bought it used.
I understand the logic though whether or not it is a sensible decision depends heavily on how much you paid.
I put a down payment on it and financed the rest for 48 months at 1.99%. I didn't have to, as I had the money to buy it outright.
That is actually quite sensible. 2% interest is darn close to free money so I think that is a smart decision to finance given that you didn't actually have to. I would have strongly considered doing the same thing.
That being said, both of us are in unique positions where we have options.
True but a lot of people buy far more expensive cars than they really can justify if they are being objective about it. A good example is pickup trucks. Ford and GM make the majority of their profits from large trucks with terrible gas mileage. The prices for these vehicles is much higher than their utility to the buyers would justify AND very few of the buyers actually utilize the full capabilities of the vehicle. Yet people buy droves of $30-50K+ F150 pickups. They do it for self image and because they can rather than because it is an objectively sensible decision.
A capitalist decided, on his own, without government interference, to increase pay.
Which is the exception that proves the rule. How many CEOs do you see arguing FOR an increase in minimum wage? They could voluntarily do it but very few actually do. CEO pay has increased FAR more than the average pay of the workers lower down so any argument that CEOs will decide to en-mass increase wages is pretty much delusional.
The owner decided to do this of his own free will, regardless of what his motive was. That's the point of freedom. You're allowed to choose.
And most will choose not to of their own free will. That's the problem. If we made taxes optional, how many people do you think would pay? If we eliminated work safety rules do you think best practices would be followed? Real freedom isn't the absence of rules and obligations because society cannot function without them. Real freedom is being able to have a meaningful say in what those rules and obligations are and should be. Real freedom isn't depending on the beneficence of a single CEO deciding one day to be a nice guy.
Under socialism, your choices are far more limited. As with most forms of collectivism, either things are mandatory or they're prohibited.
Tell you what. Take a trip to Europe sometime. The EU is by many measures the largest economy in the world. The standard of living in most of the EU is quite high compared to much of the rest of the world. Most governments in the EU have what is generally acknowledged to be a somewhat socialist ideology - certainly in comparison to the USA. And yet they have good health care, good GDP per-capita, world class businesses and manufacturing and art and sport, and are among the most successful societies on the globe politically, economically, militarily and socially. All while "socializing" certain aspects of their society and what do you know, it works if you don't take it to the extreme of communism.
Here's the point of all that. We ALL depend on each other. You can argue about how much sharing is a good thing but you cannot argue that all sharing can be optional. It simply will not work. Some folks simply are more willing to acknowledge this fact than others. You can argue about how much sharing is a net benefit to society but the argument Socialism = Bad is just stupid. EVERY society has some amount of socialism to it and it cannot be otherwise.
Capitalism allows business owners and leaders to CHOOSE to make decisions like this. Socialism forces them to do it.
Every civilized country engages in socialism. The only difference is in the degree to which they do it. A society which does not will rapidly fall apart. If you have a job it is because a lot of other people worked very hard to make it possible - even if you work for yourself. We require people pay taxes and minimum wages and other things because it benefits us all. While you can take it too far, we're certainly in no danger of that here in the US.
Liberals don't really understand the importance of this distinction.
Liberals understand that the real world isn't a place where we can afford to pretend we don't depend on each other. Share a little and everyone benefits. It is possible to both share too little and share too much. Personally I think the sharing too little is the worse of the two options.
My car has no computers at all, and I like it.
I guess that's fine as long as you know your car is badly under-performing what is possible.
They knew how to make good cars in 1982...
Could not disagree more. I've owned cars from that era and grew up driving cars from the 70s and 80s, both foreign and domestic. They were mostly total crap compared to what is available today. If you got 100,000 miles out of a car from the early 80s you were doing well. American cars in particular from that time were almost universally crap with terrible reliability, terrible fuel economy, poor handling and ridiculously poor construction and build quality. "Knew how to make good cars in 1982"? Don't make me laugh.