Why? because most school administrators love overstepping their authority, and being jerks. One the things they have been trying to do is prevent students from eating "junk-food", so given their nature, they would like to try to prevent this at home. At some local schools, they ripped out all the good food and replaced it with "organic" crud. No one ate it, and all just rotted - so they were forced to go back to the "junk-food". School administrators have no checks and balances on their authority, and behave as one would expect. It's a window into what would happen if there were no checks and balances on the president (no supreme court, senate, house, etc.). It should also be noted that some students are actually sick, or were actually sick (me), and needed to pop prescription drugs, including commonly abused ones. I don't want to know what that's like in normal school.
It's a poor measure of performance. It has been picked because it's something people can relate to. For gas cars, all four variables are linear with each other (I.E., double the gas used per mile, double the CO2 production). Cost MPG, when used, is even worse - because the cost of gasoline varies. With electric cars, those parameters are not linear with each other, or vary randomly. For example, suppose we plug the electron guzzling hummer in to a solar panel, and plug the smartkart into a coal powerplant. What's better? Now the pollution MPG measure is completely broken.
People have been proposing a system where electric vehicles are rated in terms of kilowatt-hours per hundred miles. One thing good about this system is that it uses kilowatt-hours, so we can easily calculate the other figures (cost of electricity is known, emissions data can be found). The problem with this scheme is that it is the inverse of the current scheme, so bigger = worse. In the current scheme bigger = better. You could rate cars in terms of miles per kilowatt-hour, or MPK, but then you get really small values (Tesla Roadster = 4 MPK). When you add in plug-in hybrids, you just make the even worse.
if yes, then you admit to something about this "life" concept is real
No, you don't. Just that the concept of a person is real, and that it is worth preserving. You could say the same thing about cars or robots or bricks or whatever.
As a materialist (both economic and scientific), I would argue the rules of formal logic are represented as information stored in our brains, stored by the relative positions and energies of the fundamental particles that make up our brains. So, words are not immaterial because they are data, which is a set positions of fundamental particles. Of course our material words can be interpreted by our brains as stating that the immaterial exists. HEAD EXPLODES.
Here's an article (and it's part II) on the Aptera management crisis. Basically, a standard issue Wall Street scammer got in a destroyed everything. She previously planned one of the "one of the largest accounting frauds in US history" according to the SEC.
How about the opposite approach? How about a huge all-American SUV filled with literally a ton of batteries. For example, imagine a Hummer H3 filled with 1 ton of nickel-iron batteries. It would go about 150 miles on a charge at 65 mph. If we could apply modern techniques to making the battery, we could get it for a very low price. This would bust down the primary obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles: cost and battery durability.
There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars. The first and easiest is to pass an asshat tax. Drive an off road vehicle and never go off road(or worse one which couldn't actually go off road) you pay, got a truck and you don't put stuff in the back you pay, drive a hummer you pay quadruple. That'd get the ridiculous wastes of fuel off the road(or at least generate enough revenue that we can do something about the other solutions).
Instead, let's put that unused carrying capacity to use - hauling tons of at first lead-acid and later nickel-iron batteries to power the vehicle. When people actually need the carrying capacity, they disconnect the wires, remove the batteries, and go back to the way those lovely SUV's and Pickups were before. These cars will get better MPG than Priuses, bicycles (huge energy cost in the food production and shipping), and be represent real change. I call this idea the "redneck hybrid". Keep in mind that to fuel the average driver's EV, you would need just $2500 worth of solar panels - fuel forever.
There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars.
The easiest way would be to build some huge integral fast reactor powerplants, and use all the ultra-cheap electricity to electrolyse water to produce hydrogen, capture CO2, and combine the CO2 with the hydrogen to make oil. It would also eliminate CO2 from the powergrid, and solve all the world's energy problems in one shot. Maybe China, or Japan will do it and sell us all our fuel. That requires just as much public approval and legislative wrangling as all your ideas, and will actually solve and permanently eliminate the problem, instead of just reducing it by some (debatable) amount.
Yes, that's true, but were talking about MPG equivalents here. There are at least four different types of "MPG":
1. cost MPG (cost per mile)
2. CO2/pollution MPG (kg emissions per mile)
3. energy MPG (joules per mile)
4. real MPG (miles per gallon of real gas consumed)
The pollution, energy, and real MPG of EV's are all significantly lower than equivalent gasoline cars. The problem is that the cost effect does not recover the initial added cost of the vehicle. This is because batteries are simply too expensive, especially when the issue of battery wear-out is figured in. So, we have to reduce the cost of batteries - cut out the middle-men, remove rare materials, automate manufacturing, and most importantly, decrease purity requirements.
They're factoring in CO2 emissions from average grid power. That means you mostly get MPG figures greater than 100. However, if you have solar or wind charging, then it is virtually infinite (you have to take in to account EROEI). You also have to take into account the energy cost of the batteries, and the issue of battery wear-out. If you charge from nuclear, you get a million MPG or more - of uranium fuel.
It's actually the same in Berkley. You see, Berkley, and other nuclear free zones in CA like Santa Cruz get about %16 or more of their electricity from nuclear power. That power comes from the south at Diablo Canyon. Only %9.4 of the electricity comes from non-hydro renewables (mostly wind and biomass). The result comes from dirty old gas and coal.
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The world will be dragged kicking and screaming into the atomic age.
I'm sorry. Paris Hilton? GW Bush? There are tens of thousands of trust fund recipients born every year who do not have to work for what they have.
I agree with Mr. Buffet, there should be a high inheritance tax - people should work for their money.
Corruption undermines markets. If you tell me you believe that cheating is part of the game, then both you and Ayn Rand lack what used to be called integrity.
Cheating should not be part of the game - that is why, as you can see in my previous post, I support the public financing of election. But, I live in the real world, and have to deal with real situations - that is why I was giving you a way to create change. It's also ironic that you mention Ayn Rand, because one of the main characters in Atlas Shrugged runs a mass transit company (I do agree with some of what Rand said, but that all government interference is bad).
Efficiency means delivering the most good to the most people for the least amount of resources.
But how do you determine the most good? As many people see an SUV as the most good, and I'm confident everyone in the world can drive one without hurting the planet.
Communism doesn't work, nor does unregulated Capitalism.
Which is why I'm for neither.
The Third Way, in my opinion, is libertarian socialism, which may be a bridge to even better ideas possible once we've got that down.
I use to be a bit of libertarian socialist, but now I am for regulated capitalism (fourth way?).
Unfortunately, the United States has a poisoned intellectual culture that must burn itself out in one way or another before actual change can occur. You can't even have a reasonable discussion with people who are propagandized from birth to hate certain words, at least not until their reality has shown itself to be an illusion.
Your philosophy has a major marketing problem - you need to use different words for it. You have to adapt to the people and culture around you when your market ideas and products. Think about how all those evil big corps marketed their lovely SUVs and duplicate it for your philosophy.
Until that day arrives, I am going to live in some more democratic areas of the world. At least my taxes won't be used to kill innocent people in order to preserve the Empire.
Why don't you try doing something constructive instead of just hate hate hate? I'm a proud part of the evil empire that provides food aid, hosts the American red cross, allowed Igor Sikorsky to start his business (saving by some estimates, up to a million people with helicopter), etc, etc. My country has done bad things, like the Iraq war, some imperialist stuff in the Philippines, racism/KKK stuff, etc. Ironically, the Carnegie that you talked about being no different than a Duke was a member of the anti-imperialist league. We can strive to be better. But overall, we've been pretty good. A lot of the bad stuff that we did was extremely popular at the time and would be voted for in a democracy. Where do you consider "more democratic" than the United States? I'm not saying there aren't more democratic places, but I'm curious to see your list.
Can't wait for copponex transport. BTW, what do you think of that Bauer's transport business?
The problem is that most 16-year olds will have different interests and levels of emotional maturity than their 18-year old classmates will.
Most is exactly the problem with your arguments. Most will go to highschool. This lets those who are ahead on the maturity curve to move ahead and skip the insanity. I think young people need to interact with people of all ages. The best way I've found to do this was to go to hobby clubs intended for adults and late work.
The social aspects of both high school and college are just as important as the educational aspects.
People always talk about the social aspects - a common complaint about homeschooling. When will someone quantify them and study them?
Those who miss out on the social experiences often regret it later.
I don't regret missing out on the drugs, gangs, bullying, sports, and other nonsense.
That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old.... Most of them are just not mature enough to handle that.
This attitude is really a problem among school officials. I'm a homeschooler, now in highschool, which for me is a good community college. When I was in homeschool middle school and elementary school, the local independent study program was inside the local highschool (you go there every two weeks or so to report progress). The highschool was basically a prison - no one could leave - and there were lots of gangs and like. What happened was that the teens got rebellious, the admins cracked down, and then the kids got more rebellious. This loop continued and eventually reached it reached maximum - 1984-like conditions with drugs and gangs everywhere. One friend actually left this highschool for another highschool - because she's Hispanic and real, honest, neo-nazis where causing problems and threatening violence in the school. The problem is that people treated the teens like children, and they reacted to such treatment as any sane person would expect. I'm so glad and lucky I avoided this whole mess by being a homeschooler.
I'm in community college now, and started at the same time I would have entered highschool. I was a little immature at first, but it did not show through socially - I could literally feel myself warping forward in maturity. It has been wonderful. I learned lots of things, and discovered a passion I never knew I had: chemistry and alternative energy (I was just a computer guy before). I got along with people, have college-aged friends, and in general had fun. Being a nerd here is like being a jock in highschool.
I then got a job at a Silicon Valley start-up (we've had our products here on/.), which has been fun. I've learned lots there, and it's been a lot better than working as a fast-food server. It also caused me to really consider business.
I think the US education system needs way less sports, less english, less arts, more science, more business, and most importantly more labs and experimental studies. We also need to lose the "everyone's a winner attitude", because it does not work in the real world. We need to lose the pro-team attitude, and all the positive thinking self-help style stuff. Universities meet with business leaders, determine their needs, and then plan accordingly. Highschool, middle school, and elementary school teachers and admins should meet with the business leaders and the college folks, determine their needs, and plan accordingly. In addition, we need to be aware of the fact that we will need more universities, and more funding. China is building at least a hundred new universities to crank out skilled workers. We're going to need to do the same.
Come on, now. People choose cars over mass transit and self-locomotion when they have no other choice. Look at any well-served mass transit city, anywhere in the world.
Yes. That is why I asked you and the people like you to practically think about how to change that.
The people who want the prestige of the car and want to spend the extra money make that choice, but nearly everyone else ignores it.
Not true. Cars are a major symbol of prestige and many people view them as a status symbol. If you want them to go away, you'll have to change that through marketing. I'm sorry if I'm overgeneralising, but I go to school with many people with views similar to yours, and they have
trouble seeing why anyone could disagree with them. Can you see the world through other people's eyes?
The dominance of cars in the US is due to a number of factors, not the least of which is poor zoning and the intentional destruction of mass transit systems in the 50s across America.
The poor zoning is due to NIMBYism. Try to build a factory or something like that in the US - you simply can't. That, among other reasons is why factories are moving to china. The transport thing actually happened, it seems, unfortunately. That is why I believe in the public financing of elections.
As far as democracy is concerned, you seem to miss the point of voting entirely. If you believe in dollar votes, then where is the equality when a few hundred people are born with billions of votes and millions of others with none?
Maybe because I don't believe in equality? I believe in an intellectual elite, and capitalism to select the elite. I believe in government checks and balances to prevent people from stealing and scamming. I also believe in government controlled infrastructure, and the busting of monopolies.
Do you really think there's a difference between a Marquis and a Duke and a Carnegie?
There is a huge difference. A Marquis or a Duke is chosen by birthright, and (s)he grows up doing nothing. Carnegie, Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs, and Woz were all born in poor to middle class households, and worked their way up. This means that they are skilled people who know things about the world and have actually achieved something.
The answer is to use the vote to get infrastructure funds spent in the interest of the people it serves rather than the interest of real estate developers and road contractors.
Because they made money and got in power. After you start your mass transit company, you will be bribing the senate to support your stuff.
If we spent 40 billion a year on rail and buses instead of highways, we'd have a rail system just as good as in other places in the world.
Then if it is going to be a government infrastructure change, be a politician or encourage some to run with that as their platform.
If I went public, I could raise the funds, but then I'd be back to the problem of divestment if I ever did anything that didn't increase short term profits for shareholders.
The point was that their are types of mass transit (like buses) that are profitable short-term. This money can be re-invested later in trains and more expensive stuff. I was suggesting that you read books, blogs, and other writings by people who (lived|are living) "car-free" and see what kind of services they need. Some of this stuff could even be software. Here is an example of such a business: Bauer's Intelligent Transportation.
Remember, there's no money in efficiency on a societal level. That's why the business leaders and their lobbyists are terrified of single payer health care, mass transit, and direct college loans.
What is efficiency? What does it mean? If I understand correctly, the most "effici
The market can answer the question he asked. If the almost all questions are reducible to "How can I increase short term profit for my shareholder?", if you think hard enough. And when you figure it out, you'll be rich.
Why don't you try to create services to reduce the number of cars in the world? Like carpool services, buses, trains, etc.? You can make money and save the environment. Try it - you'll like it.
The problem is that the market is a form of democracy, albeit a little bit hacky one. The market tells us that most people want to drive cars, not sit around in trains and buses, riding bicycles all day.
So here is your business plan:
1. offer services such as bicycle repair, carpool services, buses, etc, etc.
2. create advertising, books, TV shows, get celebrities to go car-free.
3. use this to create an image that car-freeness is cool.
4. create mass transit, trains, etc.
There is a possible set of investments here if you think through the process. Notice the huge potential for profits here. Think about city car share and zipcar - they are a start for what you want. While you are doing this, I will try to make (indirectly) solar powered SUV's and cars. We will let the market, and by extension the people, decide.
Your sig:
"The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky"
You could rule the corps if you start your business today.
What happens depends on the atmosphere the stuff is in. In air, it breaks down into a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and some other stuff - the mixture called producer gas. If you hose it in to a car engine, it will run, and you will be driving a wood powered car. This was used in some parts of Europe during the wars - people modded their cars with hastily constructed gasifiers and drove around on the wood. They were a pain to work with (starting you car was a 5 minute process, etc). Then, later, people started to use a coal-to-liquids process to make oil via a similar process. They sent a mixture of oxygen and water in with the coal (works for biomass too). This makes syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. You run that over catalysts to produce various fuels.
This is indeed a DIY-able experiment - and I have not done it. I would love to try it out, but I want to make sure I am comfortable with the whole process, and do everything safely. Here's someone else trying the first experiment I would try: tin can gasifier. Some people have made gasifiers themselves big enough to power cars (although they're really heavy and take up the whole trunk, etc). Search for them if you are interested.
Yes, it does require hydrogen. However, you have a great source right there: the biomass. Biomass contains carbon and hydrogen in a different ratio than gasoline. It is rather easy to go back and forth between the two via the reaction:
H2O + CO <-> CO2 + H2
So, to get hydrogen, just add water. Don't worry, when you produce the biogasoline, you get at least some of the water back. Gasifiers are quite efficient.
WTOP mentioned that the Obama administration is pushing for more Nuke plants.
Yes, one of Obama's major donors is the nuclear industry. For once, corruption has operated in our favor. You could use the cooling channels to produce algae, and 14 acres offers a lot of biogasoline per year. General atomics and some others are looking at putting a thermochemical engine to produce hydrogen and then gasoline from the nuclear plant. See thermochemical hydrogen production. The engine can use high temperature heat, then the steam turbines can kick in and make electricity. The heat flow path from the sum of the ideas is:
Yes, the enzymes lower the energy required, so it happens at an appreciable rate at room temperature. They won't help with gasification because the enzymes would be converted to fuel too. Gasification can produce fuels like gasoline, which is usable in more cars than ethanol. It can also produce other petroleum products, like plastic.
Haber process via solar thermal is a good idea. Currently, ammonia is made by heating natural gas with water (not oil/petrol) to make hydrogen, purifying the hydrogen, and then running the Haber process. Some natural gas is burned to heat up the gas used in the process. This could be replaced with solar heat. The Haber process itself requires heat too, it could come from solar. We could also replace the natural gas with hydrogen from these thermochemical engines, and then we would be fossil fuel free. Ammonia is needed for everything.
Keep in mind that gasoline is the best method to store hydrogen. Ammonia is the best method to store hydrogen that does not contain carbon. So, if you want hydrogen fuel, those are your choices. Of course, the fuel cell is too expensive.
Yes it does. In Canada, most electricity is produced by hydroelectricity, which is CO2 free. Here in CA, about %43 of my electricity comes from nuclear + renewables.
The feedstock ({corn cobs|sawdust|whatever}) will have to be transported from {the farm|the sawmill|wherever} where currently it just collects or is burned. The feedstock is bulky and if it has high moisture content it is heavy. They are talking about large facilities, so the transport distance will be appreciable. How much effect will this have on the energy efficiency budget?
We'll use wood as an example for the following math. The average truck consumes about 0.019 gallons of gasoline per ton*mile. Wood has a raw energy density of 130 gallons of gasoline per ton. So, a truck full of wood could go about 4200 miles on the wood contained inside. Of course, this assumes 100% wood to fuel conversion efficiency (75% more likely). So what you really have is that you ship the wood 3150 miles in a truck and still get energy. A different way to look at it is that for every mile you go, you use up 0.03 percent of the energy content of the wood. Of course, trucks are quite inefficient compared to trains and boats, so a train or boat would use up about ten times less. In reality you would have a mixture of trucks, trains and boats (truck it to the train or boat). Now, one thing about this enzyme process is that it can be done on a smaller scale, so you won't have so much shipping. You can ship the stuff across the country and it seems like your okay.
There will be a distillation stage in production, which requires a heat source. Where will they get this heat?
Either by burning the feedstock, or using mirrors to concentrate solar power. It is bad to burn the ethanol to get energy, because it is less efficient (you've gone through a step where energy was lost). It would be bad if they had to burn natural gas. Using wind for this purpose is also possible, however, solar produces heat cheaper. I would rather use the excess electricity (which is scarcer than excess heat) to produce fuels like aluminum, zinc, and iron, and to recharge plug in cars. You could also use the waste heat from a coal power plant or whatever.
There must be some waste from this process. What is the nature of this waste, and will it be difficult to dispose of safely?
There won't be any waste that is more dangerous than the feedstock. The waste will be some icky residues and little bits of the feedstock that were not convertible. This would be a good thing to burn for distillation heating.
According to my trusty Synthetic Fuels book (Probstien and Hicks), the total energy content of waste biomass produced in the year 2000 was between 0.064 and 0.152 trillion gallons of gasoline. The US used 0.4 trillion gallons of oil in the year 2007. So, the waste biomass can provide a significant fraction. It would be interesting to see what the same waste energy figure was for the year 2007. It would be better to gasify all that waste and and run it through a gas-to-liquids process than use enzymes to process it (It would be more efficient, cheaper, and produce higher quality fuel).
This is quite clever. I think this idea could work for on land algae farms as well.
My idea was to use extremophile algae as the fuel algae. One of the big problems with algae fuel is that high purity is required. Unwanted algae could get in and dilute out your nice species, and you'll be stuck. By using extremophiles, one creates conditions hostile to all life but the wanted algae species (there are a lot of microbial lifeforms in the air that will eat algae, and we need to stop 'em from getting in). If you could find algae that grow in a strong base, you get three advantages: 1: nothing else grows there, 2: carbon dioxide is scrubbed out of the air and feed to the algae, 3: water is pulled out of the air by the strong base. This means you don't have to mess around with water, cleaning out unwanted species, or carbon dioxide feeds.
Also, we should use gasification of the algae biomass to produce biogasoline instead of oil presses/ethanol fermentation. It's more efficient, uses the whole plant, and produces higher quality fuel.
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Why? because most school administrators love overstepping their authority, and being jerks. One the things they have been trying to do is prevent students from eating "junk-food", so given their nature, they would like to try to prevent this at home. At some local schools, they ripped out all the good food and replaced it with "organic" crud. No one ate it, and all just rotted - so they were forced to go back to the "junk-food". School administrators have no checks and balances on their authority, and behave as one would expect. It's a window into what would happen if there were no checks and balances on the president (no supreme court, senate, house, etc.). It should also be noted that some students are actually sick, or were actually sick (me), and needed to pop prescription drugs, including commonly abused ones. I don't want to know what that's like in normal school.
Glad I'm a homeschooler.
It's a poor measure of performance. It has been picked because it's something people can relate to. For gas cars, all four variables are linear with each other (I.E., double the gas used per mile, double the CO2 production). Cost MPG, when used, is even worse - because the cost of gasoline varies. With electric cars, those parameters are not linear with each other, or vary randomly. For example, suppose we plug the electron guzzling hummer in to a solar panel, and plug the smartkart into a coal powerplant. What's better? Now the pollution MPG measure is completely broken.
People have been proposing a system where electric vehicles are rated in terms of kilowatt-hours per hundred miles. One thing good about this system is that it uses kilowatt-hours, so we can easily calculate the other figures (cost of electricity is known, emissions data can be found). The problem with this scheme is that it is the inverse of the current scheme, so bigger = worse. In the current scheme bigger = better. You could rate cars in terms of miles per kilowatt-hour, or MPK, but then you get really small values (Tesla Roadster = 4 MPK). When you add in plug-in hybrids, you just make the even worse.
if yes, then you admit to something about this "life" concept is real
No, you don't. Just that the concept of a person is real, and that it is worth preserving. You could say the same thing about cars or robots or bricks or whatever.
immaterial rules of formal logic
As a materialist (both economic and scientific), I would argue the rules of formal logic are represented as information stored in our brains, stored by the relative positions and energies of the fundamental particles that make up our brains. So, words are not immaterial because they are data, which is a set positions of fundamental particles. Of course our material words can be interpreted by our brains as stating that the immaterial exists. HEAD EXPLODES.
A tragic end to an amazing vehicle.
Here's an article (and it's part II) on the Aptera management crisis. Basically, a standard issue Wall Street scammer got in a destroyed everything. She previously planned one of the "one of the largest accounting frauds in US history" according to the SEC.
How about the opposite approach? How about a huge all-American SUV filled with literally a ton of batteries. For example, imagine a Hummer H3 filled with 1 ton of nickel-iron batteries. It would go about 150 miles on a charge at 65 mph. If we could apply modern techniques to making the battery, we could get it for a very low price. This would bust down the primary obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles: cost and battery durability.
There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars. The first and easiest is to pass an asshat tax. Drive an off road vehicle and never go off road(or worse one which couldn't actually go off road) you pay, got a truck and you don't put stuff in the back you pay, drive a hummer you pay quadruple. That'd get the ridiculous wastes of fuel off the road(or at least generate enough revenue that we can do something about the other solutions).
Instead, let's put that unused carrying capacity to use - hauling tons of at first lead-acid and later nickel-iron batteries to power the vehicle. When people actually need the carrying capacity, they disconnect the wires, remove the batteries, and go back to the way those lovely SUV's and Pickups were before. These cars will get better MPG than Priuses, bicycles (huge energy cost in the food production and shipping), and be represent real change. I call this idea the "redneck hybrid". Keep in mind that to fuel the average driver's EV, you would need just $2500 worth of solar panels - fuel forever.
There are really only a few ways of practically reducing emissions from cars.
The easiest way would be to build some huge integral fast reactor powerplants, and use all the ultra-cheap electricity to electrolyse water to produce hydrogen, capture CO2, and combine the CO2 with the hydrogen to make oil. It would also eliminate CO2 from the powergrid, and solve all the world's energy problems in one shot. Maybe China, or Japan will do it and sell us all our fuel. That requires just as much public approval and legislative wrangling as all your ideas, and will actually solve and permanently eliminate the problem, instead of just reducing it by some (debatable) amount.
Yes, that's true, but were talking about MPG equivalents here. There are at least four different types of "MPG":
1. cost MPG (cost per mile)
2. CO2/pollution MPG (kg emissions per mile)
3. energy MPG (joules per mile)
4. real MPG (miles per gallon of real gas consumed)
The pollution, energy, and real MPG of EV's are all significantly lower than equivalent gasoline cars. The problem is that the cost effect does not recover the initial added cost of the vehicle. This is because batteries are simply too expensive, especially when the issue of battery wear-out is figured in. So, we have to reduce the cost of batteries - cut out the middle-men, remove rare materials, automate manufacturing, and most importantly, decrease purity requirements.
That wooooosssssshhhhh is a lot more pleasant at 30 mph than at 861 mph, ain't it?
They're factoring in CO2 emissions from average grid power. That means you mostly get MPG figures greater than 100. However, if you have solar or wind charging, then it is virtually infinite (you have to take in to account EROEI). You also have to take into account the energy cost of the batteries, and the issue of battery wear-out. If you charge from nuclear, you get a million MPG or more - of uranium fuel.
Even bricks are aerodynamic in a vacuum - that really sucks if you worked so hard making your car aerodynamic.
It originally clocked in at 861 MPH and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today.
Not only eco-friendly, it leaves some fighter aircraft in the dust! How do they prevent the sonic boom?
It's actually the same in Berkley. You see, Berkley, and other nuclear free zones in CA like Santa Cruz get about %16 or more of their electricity from nuclear power. That power comes from the south at Diablo Canyon. Only %9.4 of the electricity comes from non-hydro renewables (mostly wind and biomass). The result comes from dirty old gas and coal.
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The world will be dragged kicking and screaming into the atomic age.
I'm sorry. Paris Hilton? GW Bush? There are tens of thousands of trust fund recipients born every year who do not have to work for what they have.
I agree with Mr. Buffet, there should be a high inheritance tax - people should work for their money.
Corruption undermines markets. If you tell me you believe that cheating is part of the game, then both you and Ayn Rand lack what used to be called integrity.
Cheating should not be part of the game - that is why, as you can see in my previous post, I support the public financing of election. But, I live in the real world, and have to deal with real situations - that is why I was giving you a way to create change. It's also ironic that you mention Ayn Rand, because one of the main characters in Atlas Shrugged runs a mass transit company (I do agree with some of what Rand said, but that all government interference is bad).
Efficiency means delivering the most good to the most people for the least amount of resources.
But how do you determine the most good? As many people see an SUV as the most good, and I'm confident everyone in the world can drive one without hurting the planet.
Communism doesn't work, nor does unregulated Capitalism.
Which is why I'm for neither.
The Third Way, in my opinion, is libertarian socialism, which may be a bridge to even better ideas possible once we've got that down.
I use to be a bit of libertarian socialist, but now I am for regulated capitalism (fourth way?).
Unfortunately, the United States has a poisoned intellectual culture that must burn itself out in one way or another before actual change can occur. You can't even have a reasonable discussion with people who are propagandized from birth to hate certain words, at least not until their reality has shown itself to be an illusion.
Your philosophy has a major marketing problem - you need to use different words for it. You have to adapt to the people and culture around you when your market ideas and products. Think about how all those evil big corps marketed their lovely SUVs and duplicate it for your philosophy.
Until that day arrives, I am going to live in some more democratic areas of the world. At least my taxes won't be used to kill innocent people in order to preserve the Empire.
Why don't you try doing something constructive instead of just hate hate hate? I'm a proud part of the evil empire that provides food aid, hosts the American red cross, allowed Igor Sikorsky to start his business (saving by some estimates, up to a million people with helicopter), etc, etc. My country has done bad things, like the Iraq war, some imperialist stuff in the Philippines, racism/KKK stuff, etc. Ironically, the Carnegie that you talked about being no different than a Duke was a member of the anti-imperialist league. We can strive to be better. But overall, we've been pretty good. A lot of the bad stuff that we did was extremely popular at the time and would be voted for in a democracy. Where do you consider "more democratic" than the United States? I'm not saying there aren't more democratic places, but I'm curious to see your list.
Can't wait for copponex transport. BTW, what do you think of that Bauer's transport business?
We are all John Galt.
The problem is that most 16-year olds will have different interests and levels of emotional maturity than their 18-year old classmates will.
Most is exactly the problem with your arguments. Most will go to highschool. This lets those who are ahead on the maturity curve to move ahead and skip the insanity. I think young people need to interact with people of all ages. The best way I've found to do this was to go to hobby clubs intended for adults and late work.
The social aspects of both high school and college are just as important as the educational aspects.
People always talk about the social aspects - a common complaint about homeschooling. When will someone quantify them and study them?
Those who miss out on the social experiences often regret it later.
I don't regret missing out on the drugs, gangs, bullying, sports, and other nonsense.
That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old. ... Most of them are just not mature enough to handle that.
This attitude is really a problem among school officials. I'm a homeschooler, now in highschool, which for me is a good community college. When I was in homeschool middle school and elementary school, the local independent study program was inside the local highschool (you go there every two weeks or so to report progress). The highschool was basically a prison - no one could leave - and there were lots of gangs and like. What happened was that the teens got rebellious, the admins cracked down, and then the kids got more rebellious. This loop continued and eventually reached it reached maximum - 1984-like conditions with drugs and gangs everywhere. One friend actually left this highschool for another highschool - because she's Hispanic and real, honest, neo-nazis where causing problems and threatening violence in the school. The problem is that people treated the teens like children, and they reacted to such treatment as any sane person would expect. I'm so glad and lucky I avoided this whole mess by being a homeschooler.
/.), which has been fun. I've learned lots there, and it's been a lot better than working as a fast-food server. It also caused me to really consider business.
I'm in community college now, and started at the same time I would have entered highschool. I was a little immature at first, but it did not show through socially - I could literally feel myself warping forward in maturity. It has been wonderful. I learned lots of things, and discovered a passion I never knew I had: chemistry and alternative energy (I was just a computer guy before). I got along with people, have college-aged friends, and in general had fun. Being a nerd here is like being a jock in highschool.
I then got a job at a Silicon Valley start-up (we've had our products here on
I think the US education system needs way less sports, less english, less arts, more science, more business, and most importantly more labs and experimental studies. We also need to lose the "everyone's a winner attitude", because it does not work in the real world. We need to lose the pro-team attitude, and all the positive thinking self-help style stuff. Universities meet with business leaders, determine their needs, and then plan accordingly. Highschool, middle school, and elementary school teachers and admins should meet with the business leaders and the college folks, determine their needs, and plan accordingly. In addition, we need to be aware of the fact that we will need more universities, and more funding. China is building at least a hundred new universities to crank out skilled workers. We're going to need to do the same.
Come on, now. People choose cars over mass transit and self-locomotion when they have no other choice. Look at any well-served mass transit city, anywhere in the world.
Yes. That is why I asked you and the people like you to practically think about how to change that.
The people who want the prestige of the car and want to spend the extra money make that choice, but nearly everyone else ignores it.
Not true. Cars are a major symbol of prestige and many people view them as a status symbol. If you want them to go away, you'll have to change that through marketing. I'm sorry if I'm overgeneralising, but I go to school with many people with views similar to yours, and they have trouble seeing why anyone could disagree with them. Can you see the world through other people's eyes?
The dominance of cars in the US is due to a number of factors, not the least of which is poor zoning and the intentional destruction of mass transit systems in the 50s across America.
The poor zoning is due to NIMBYism. Try to build a factory or something like that in the US - you simply can't. That, among other reasons is why factories are moving to china. The transport thing actually happened, it seems, unfortunately. That is why I believe in the public financing of elections.
As far as democracy is concerned, you seem to miss the point of voting entirely. If you believe in dollar votes, then where is the equality when a few hundred people are born with billions of votes and millions of others with none?
Maybe because I don't believe in equality? I believe in an intellectual elite, and capitalism to select the elite. I believe in government checks and balances to prevent people from stealing and scamming. I also believe in government controlled infrastructure, and the busting of monopolies.
Do you really think there's a difference between a Marquis and a Duke and a Carnegie?
There is a huge difference. A Marquis or a Duke is chosen by birthright, and (s)he grows up doing nothing. Carnegie, Gates, Page, Brin, Jobs, and Woz were all born in poor to middle class households, and worked their way up. This means that they are skilled people who know things about the world and have actually achieved something.
The answer is to use the vote to get infrastructure funds spent in the interest of the people it serves rather than the interest of real estate developers and road contractors.
Because they made money and got in power. After you start your mass transit company, you will be bribing the senate to support your stuff.
If we spent 40 billion a year on rail and buses instead of highways, we'd have a rail system just as good as in other places in the world.
Then if it is going to be a government infrastructure change, be a politician or encourage some to run with that as their platform.
If I went public, I could raise the funds, but then I'd be back to the problem of divestment if I ever did anything that didn't increase short term profits for shareholders.
The point was that their are types of mass transit (like buses) that are profitable short-term. This money can be re-invested later in trains and more expensive stuff. I was suggesting that you read books, blogs, and other writings by people who (lived|are living) "car-free" and see what kind of services they need. Some of this stuff could even be software. Here is an example of such a business: Bauer's Intelligent Transportation.
Remember, there's no money in efficiency on a societal level. That's why the business leaders and their lobbyists are terrified of single payer health care, mass transit, and direct college loans.
What is efficiency? What does it mean? If I understand correctly, the most "effici
Why don't you try to create services to reduce the number of cars in the world? Like carpool services, buses, trains, etc.? You can make money and save the environment. Try it - you'll like it.
The problem is that the market is a form of democracy, albeit a little bit hacky one. The market tells us that most people want to drive cars, not sit around in trains and buses, riding bicycles all day.
So here is your business plan:
1. offer services such as bicycle repair, carpool services, buses, etc, etc.
2. create advertising, books, TV shows, get celebrities to go car-free.
3. use this to create an image that car-freeness is cool.
4. create mass transit, trains, etc.
There is a possible set of investments here if you think through the process. Notice the huge potential for profits here. Think about city car share and zipcar - they are a start for what you want. While you are doing this, I will try to make (indirectly) solar powered SUV's and cars. We will let the market, and by extension the people, decide.
Your sig:
"The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky"
You could rule the corps if you start your business today.
What happens depends on the atmosphere the stuff is in. In air, it breaks down into a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and some other stuff - the mixture called producer gas. If you hose it in to a car engine, it will run, and you will be driving a wood powered car. This was used in some parts of Europe during the wars - people modded their cars with hastily constructed gasifiers and drove around on the wood. They were a pain to work with (starting you car was a 5 minute process, etc). Then, later, people started to use a coal-to-liquids process to make oil via a similar process. They sent a mixture of oxygen and water in with the coal (works for biomass too). This makes syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. You run that over catalysts to produce various fuels.
This is indeed a DIY-able experiment - and I have not done it. I would love to try it out, but I want to make sure I am comfortable with the whole process, and do everything safely. Here's someone else trying the first experiment I would try: tin can gasifier. Some people have made gasifiers themselves big enough to power cars (although they're really heavy and take up the whole trunk, etc). Search for them if you are interested.
Yes, it does require hydrogen. However, you have a great source right there: the biomass. Biomass contains carbon and hydrogen in a different ratio than gasoline. It is rather easy to go back and forth between the two via the reaction:
H2O + CO <-> CO2 + H2
So, to get hydrogen, just add water. Don't worry, when you produce the biogasoline, you get at least some of the water back. Gasifiers are quite efficient.
WTOP mentioned that the Obama administration is pushing for more Nuke plants.
Yes, one of Obama's major donors is the nuclear industry. For once, corruption has operated in our favor. You could use the cooling channels to produce algae, and 14 acres offers a lot of biogasoline per year. General atomics and some others are looking at putting a thermochemical engine to produce hydrogen and then gasoline from the nuclear plant. See thermochemical hydrogen production. The engine can use high temperature heat, then the steam turbines can kick in and make electricity. The heat flow path from the sum of the ideas is:
Nuclear heat -> Thermochemical engine -> Turbines -> Misc Process Heating -> Algae
When this happens, I will be driving an atomic powered car.
Yes, the enzymes lower the energy required, so it happens at an appreciable rate at room temperature. They won't help with gasification because the enzymes would be converted to fuel too. Gasification can produce fuels like gasoline, which is usable in more cars than ethanol. It can also produce other petroleum products, like plastic. Haber process via solar thermal is a good idea. Currently, ammonia is made by heating natural gas with water (not oil/petrol) to make hydrogen, purifying the hydrogen, and then running the Haber process. Some natural gas is burned to heat up the gas used in the process. This could be replaced with solar heat. The Haber process itself requires heat too, it could come from solar. We could also replace the natural gas with hydrogen from these thermochemical engines, and then we would be fossil fuel free. Ammonia is needed for everything. Keep in mind that gasoline is the best method to store hydrogen. Ammonia is the best method to store hydrogen that does not contain carbon. So, if you want hydrogen fuel, those are your choices. Of course, the fuel cell is too expensive.
Yes it does. In Canada, most electricity is produced by hydroelectricity, which is CO2 free. Here in CA, about %43 of my electricity comes from nuclear + renewables.
The feedstock ({corn cobs|sawdust|whatever}) will have to be transported from {the farm|the sawmill|wherever} where currently it just collects or is burned. The feedstock is bulky and if it has high moisture content it is heavy. They are talking about large facilities, so the transport distance will be appreciable. How much effect will this have on the energy efficiency budget?
We'll use wood as an example for the following math. The average truck consumes about 0.019 gallons of gasoline per ton*mile. Wood has a raw energy density of 130 gallons of gasoline per ton. So, a truck full of wood could go about 4200 miles on the wood contained inside. Of course, this assumes 100% wood to fuel conversion efficiency (75% more likely). So what you really have is that you ship the wood 3150 miles in a truck and still get energy. A different way to look at it is that for every mile you go, you use up 0.03 percent of the energy content of the wood. Of course, trucks are quite inefficient compared to trains and boats, so a train or boat would use up about ten times less. In reality you would have a mixture of trucks, trains and boats (truck it to the train or boat). Now, one thing about this enzyme process is that it can be done on a smaller scale, so you won't have so much shipping. You can ship the stuff across the country and it seems like your okay.
There will be a distillation stage in production, which requires a heat source. Where will they get this heat?
Either by burning the feedstock, or using mirrors to concentrate solar power. It is bad to burn the ethanol to get energy, because it is less efficient (you've gone through a step where energy was lost). It would be bad if they had to burn natural gas. Using wind for this purpose is also possible, however, solar produces heat cheaper. I would rather use the excess electricity (which is scarcer than excess heat) to produce fuels like aluminum, zinc, and iron, and to recharge plug in cars. You could also use the waste heat from a coal power plant or whatever.
There must be some waste from this process. What is the nature of this waste, and will it be difficult to dispose of safely?
There won't be any waste that is more dangerous than the feedstock. The waste will be some icky residues and little bits of the feedstock that were not convertible. This would be a good thing to burn for distillation heating.
According to my trusty Synthetic Fuels book (Probstien and Hicks), the total energy content of waste biomass produced in the year 2000 was between 0.064 and 0.152 trillion gallons of gasoline. The US used 0.4 trillion gallons of oil in the year 2007. So, the waste biomass can provide a significant fraction. It would be interesting to see what the same waste energy figure was for the year 2007. It would be better to gasify all that waste and and run it through a gas-to-liquids process than use enzymes to process it (It would be more efficient, cheaper, and produce higher quality fuel).
This is quite clever. I think this idea could work for on land algae farms as well.
My idea was to use extremophile algae as the fuel algae. One of the big problems with algae fuel is that high purity is required. Unwanted algae could get in and dilute out your nice species, and you'll be stuck. By using extremophiles, one creates conditions hostile to all life but the wanted algae species (there are a lot of microbial lifeforms in the air that will eat algae, and we need to stop 'em from getting in). If you could find algae that grow in a strong base, you get three advantages: 1: nothing else grows there, 2: carbon dioxide is scrubbed out of the air and feed to the algae, 3: water is pulled out of the air by the strong base. This means you don't have to mess around with water, cleaning out unwanted species, or carbon dioxide feeds.
Also, we should use gasification of the algae biomass to produce biogasoline instead of oil presses/ethanol fermentation. It's more efficient, uses the whole plant, and produces higher quality fuel.