They're looking at moving away from using silicon as a substrate. I can't remember if artificial diamond or something else is the proposed replacement.
If you get Merck and GSK turning out high-quality (read: lower risk) drugs, available by prescription, you've solved the problem without expanding the power of government.
Personally, I love picking on Bayer for this.
After all, they are the holder of the original Heroin patent. I like to say that Bayer could drive all the illegal heroin dealers out of business in a month if it was legal and they wanted to.
Heroin is a nightmare, and heroin addicts cannot exercise the same judgment that other drug users can.
Can't find it at the moment, but it came out in a famous surgeon's memoirs that he was a heroin addict.
Presuming the following: 1. Heroin purchase and usage is legal 2. Heroin is cheap* 3. The drug is medical grade - of very highly controlled quality, potency, and purity.
If the user is able to get his drug cheaply enough that he doesn't have to commit crimes to get it, and it's controlled such that he knows precisely how much he's injecting(street stuff varies from 10%-70% pure) and it's cut with safe substances so he's not screwing himself up by injecting powdered milk into his veins, I think it'd tend to be a LOT safer, and probably enable quite a few addicts to live more normal lives with a controlled addiction.
Then again, by commercializing it(while banning advertising) you'd also take out a LOT of the profit and motivation to get others hooked on it to increase your profits. It's no longer cool, a gateway drug, etc...
I'll agre in principal that some drugs probably shouldn't be legalized, but the sciences behind determining which drugs are more harmful are so distorted by politics I'm not sure which ones. I'm tempted to say meth - but a LOT of that damage is caused more because the drugs are so impure and contaminated due to being made in bathtub/kitchen processes, not properly controlled commercial quality drug labs.
*I've read that it can be had in a legal environment at lower cost than aspirin
I think that his point was that many governemnt aid programs are nailed to the government definition of poverty. If you lower the poverty line, fewer people qualify for those programs.
On the other hand, I never heard that Bush or Clinton did lower the income necessary to be considered below poverty, so I'll ask for a source there. I figure it's probably more of a 'raised the level slower than we would have otherwise' deal.
Personally, I'm all for the USA outright legalizing drugs - the problem with only decriminalizing small amounts is that you leave the distribution channels illegal, which means you still get organized crime doing it with all the attendant problems - turf warfare, unsafe/uneven adulteration, etc...
My goal, honestly enough, is you being able to go to a drug den, buy your heroin or crack and use it there in a 'lock-in' type situation where you're not allowed out until sober.
I'd allow home usage as well for people who've demonstrated a moderate ability to not screw up while high on the stuff.
Do you have a working link to that bike clamp deal? The link you associated with it lead to an article talking about soaring parking costs, but doesn't mention bicycles at all.
I don't understand the modern viewpoint that cars are evil, and their usage should be discouraged.
I don't think they're evil, but in the inner cities and certain other areas their usage should be discouraged for the simple reason of congestion. Your U-haul/grocery car is a lot more useful if you can actually get a close spot. Otherwise a high quality handcart might be the best choice. Heck, bring back delivery. It's happening down in florida - give the store a list and they deliver it.
The old mechanical meters invented in the 1920s may not be sexy, but they get the job done, and as this article demonstrates the new meters are not any better.
Well, personally I think they need to go wireless and be able to take debit cards, or at least issue tokens if you're going to charge more than $1/15 minutes. Mechanical meters can't handle bills too well and their coin slots would fill up quickly.
That said, I hope the voters win in their lawsuit, and failing that vote out the incumbents and vote in people who'll make the lease hell on CPM until CPM says screw it and sells the lease back.
Well, I considered leaving it at GooberToo's excellent answer.
Sure, turbodiesels still taper off at a lower RPM than gasoline engines, but the important thing about turbochargers is that they increase power availability at high rpms, by providing more air.
Increasing effective top end is one of the biggest improvements to diesels going, and really helps diesels in the performance side. Also helps the efficiency and pollution side as well.
Then there's always the 104 octane that Citgo sells up here for the racers at $5 something a gallon (as it's leaded gasoline)
I seriously doubt it's leaded. It'll have relatively expensive additives and be from a slightly different part of the refinery stack, but it's not going to have lead in it unless it's actually AVGAS.
Likewise, its far easier to ramp up torque with diesel than it is rpms. Conversely, for gas engines, its far easier to ramp up rpm than torque because of fuel limitations (octane constraints). That's why you traditionally see high rpm gas engines and low rpm diesel engines.
The problem with building high RPM diesels is getting it enough air. Thus why you see so many turbo-diesel engines.
Conventional gasoline engines inject a mixture of gasoline and air into the engine, increasing both as you up the throttle.
Diesel engines, though, ignite off of pressure. That means for every rotation a certain amount of air needs to be shoved into the cyliner each cycle for proper operation. Thus, a gasoline engine exerting the same amount of actual horsepower at 3k RPM and at 6k RPM would be consuming about the same amount of air. A diesel engine in the same situation will be sucking twice as much air at 6k as at 3k. Given the higher compression requirements, this can quickly become significant. The turbo helps a lot, though I've seen some wierd stuff like diverting part of the exhaust back into the cylinders as well.
So don't let people blow smoke up your tail pipe. Diesel engines have a lot to offer. The days of low power, noisy, smoggy. and black smoke, rattle traps have long been gone from the diesel world.
My thought as well. I keep hoping my next car is a diesel.
There is no reason to accept that petroleum is inherently cleaner than diesel.
Just a nitpick, but in this case I think gasoline would be a better word to use than petroleum. Petrol if you're European.
Gasoline and Diesel are refined from petroleum. Both are distilled from oil.
Eh, I understand what you're saying and agree with it.
I'll also point out that SULEV standards are designed for gasoline engines- diesel emissions don't meet the standards because while they come in under on a number of pollutive emissions, they also bust some caps for pollutants that are inherently higher for diesel engines. European regulations recognize this and adapt, US ones don't.
When you actually consider the harmful effects, the differences between the two become a wash.
I saw what I think are two logic problems in your post.
First, we're not talking about Cheesy Poofs vs Cheesy Poofs. We're more like talking about Cheese and Pasteurized process cheese product. Like it or not, a SUV has abilities that a Sedan doesn't. For that matter, bigger vehicles have benefits over smaller ones - capacity, if nothing else.
Second, while the savings aren't as big of a deal for an individual, it does become important when you're talking about a government program - where you have to realize that getting somebody out of their 18mpg truck and into a 22 mpg truck (because they actually require a truck, even if only in their mind), is better than getting a dude out of his 30mpg sedan into a 36mpg mild hybrid. So any subsidization program that wants to actually save the most gas for the dollar will look to get the efficiency of the trucks up first.
Which is why I've always wondered why we get such tiny hybrids - there's a lot more money to be saved putting hybrid systems into larger vehicles like UPS/Fedex trucks and busses than compact cars.
If you care about your money and your planet, you'll pick the highest-mpg vehicle that suits your need.
Problem, highest mpg != to most economic, especially when you look at hybrids. Depending on your driving habits, it's quite possible that the hybrid, despite having a higher mpg, won't pay itself off faster than the vehicle will wear out, or statistically be taken out by a crash.
That's great for your capital costs, but you are confusing recurring and capital costs. You are talking about spending tens of thousands of dollars in capital costs to save a couple hundred per year. If you are looking to save money, don't look towards diesels or hybrids.
He's looking to trade in a 1987 car for a 2009 one. His current vehicle is 22 years old, so there may be maintenance issues cropping up. Oil, filters, belts and such should still be easy to get, but people who can rebuild carbs are getting rarer and more expensive.
Now, the choice of diesel can be a smart one. For example, I mostly drive highway miles. Right smack in the Diesel efficiency range, I'd be better off avoiding the hybrids though. It all depends on his driving habits.
Oh, and a 17 to 19 mpg improvement wouldn't be enoug - from the site it's 3.5k for '4 to 10 mpg increase', 4.5k for more than 10.
Of course, he was probably talking about the truck rules, which would mean that the SUV would have to qualify under the truck class. Many today don't.
Why doesn't the 1987 Plymouth qualify? To much mileage? We'd need the model and preferably the engine size to tell more. Plugging in a Reliant, 2.5L, 3 spd auto, you get 3 mpg too much. Ouch...
Personally, I would have subtracted like.5 mpg per year of age beyond 10, just to bias the program towards getting rid of the old ones. Of course, there's nothing preventing commodore64 from buying the volkswagon anyways, he just doesn't get $3.5-4.5k from the feds for buying a foreign car.
Fridges have the biggest improvements, yes, but combined with modern cleaning agents so you can wash in cold water more often, clothes washers have improved quite a bit, if you're willing to spend the money you can get a heat pump/dehumidifying dryer, my dishwasher uses less juice and my oven is better insulated.
I wasn't worrying so much about the vacuum, though they've improved that in the non-baseline models as well, mostly to make them quieter while retaining efficiency.
Even furnaces have gotten better - going from 70-80% efficient to often over 90%.
Basically, I was trying to say that we've moved into the realm of reducing returns - any further reductions power usage WILL require sacrifice, and people don't generally want to do that.
But a class action lawsuit isn't going to do you much good if the company itself is going out of business, which would be one of the prime reasons for an authentication server to go out of business.
Personally, businesses pushing so much for this stuff tends to piss me off and start making rules like 'If you put DRM in it, and the DRM fails for whatever reason for a legitimate user, the user is entitled to a full refund'. And 'If the DRM requires a central server, and you shut it down, you have to provide a version that works without the server or refund everyone's money'.
I'd agree, though the fat wouldn't need to be added; all McD's needs to do is ensure their ground beef has the proper fat content before cooking to meet their standards.
There will also be a bit of fat in the bun, not many breads don't have some sort of oil in them, and raised bread requires salt.
I think that what he means is that there are no bad carbs in the sense that while they have different effects on the body, none are harmful unless consumed in excess. Of course, your typical big mac w/fries(and all of McD's competitor's equivalents) pushes or even busts the daily requirements/limits for your typical person.
For example, sugars will tend to result in a faster rush of energy followed by a crash. No problems in eating some of that - but eat a candy bar and drink a soda and a kid might be high for 10 minutes then looking for food again - even though all of those calories haven't been consumed.
You're probably looking at 'empty' carbs, IE carbs that don't offer other significant nutrition, yet are so easy to digest that our body's hunger mechanisms don't really acknowledge them in appetite control.
Species variation is completely different to "organic" foods.
True.
Sustainable practices like crop rotation are still not used by these "organic" farmers, they think they can still treat the land with the same contempt that chemical farmers do. It doesn't give any benefit to the consumer at all, merely ups the price and ignores the problems to start with.
I live in farm country, and you'll have to trust me on this, but even the non-organic types today spent a LOT of effort on sustainability. The amount of farmland has actually shrunk a bit in the last few decades - there's no more land to move to. The local radio station has talks about various rotation schemes, and the local public television station has whole seminars on the topic, not to mention things like more sustainable cattle growth schemes - like how to maximize hay usefullness. Saw one recently on how to manipulate cattle grazing to improve the fields.
Yield - well, that's profit. Organics can actually be worse for the environment because of increased energy usage, from manual or mechanical weeding, for example. They're already more expensive than the standard varieties. A lower yield can easily be the difference between somebody going organic or sticking with the standard stuff because the organic is just so much more expensive.
Personally, I'd say that I'd like to see more varieties, but I'm not going to demand organic. Organic, at least right now, is a fuzzy label - one person's 'organic' isn't 'organic' enough for somebody else, there's varieties. Localvores, etc...
To be more precise, the waste would have a shorter half life. What does that mean? More dangerous in the first year, much less dangerous in the 20th, radiation wise.
Something with a half life of 100 years vs one with a halflife of 10.
Radiation Year 1: 1 vs 10, Year 100:.5 vs.01
I am sick to death of nuclear proponents throwing breeder reactors around like they are the Second Coming or something. At some point it'd be nice if someone just said "hey... we're using too much power... we need to find ways to cut back on that" instead of "full speed ahead! Breeder reactors!"
Conservation GOOD. However, look at some of our proposed conservation efforts - plug-in hybrids and electric cars rather than gasoline engines. Heat pumps vs traditional hydrocarbon fired furnaces.
Notice a trend? We can cut our actual energy usage by an order of magnitude, but because we're concentrating on eliminating hyrdocarbons such as oil and coal we actually INCREASE our usage of electricity.
Look at energy star - my appliances generally use a fraction of the equivalents my parents used when I was a kid. I buy energy star. BUT, populations are still rising, we still need power, we have populations in China and India who are moving away from lifestyles not unknown in the 12th century towards 1st world living standards and the accompanying energy usage.
Every American and European could use an order of magnitude less energy and the world would STILL use more energy if the rest of the world simply caught up with our new, lower, energy usage level.
So we still need power. Us nuclear proponents by and large see that there's plenty of support for wind, solar, tidal is unproven, etc... Thus we support nuclear power. We still need a mix of power, after all. There's studies out there that say that the power grid can't handle more than 30% renewables.
My power mix: 1. Nuclear - Baseload, charging electric vehicles at night 2. Wind - Baseload again, put a number of users such as hybrid drivers, electric water heaters, some heating/cooling systems on a 'off-peak' system that, instead of shutting off during high demand(peak), also shut off during low supply due to low winds. 3. Solar - AC systems during the day and such. 4. Hydro - capable of providing moderating ability, but you'll probably still end up running some nuclear plants in a load following mode. 5. Other - probably less than 10% of the mix, consisting of geothermal, natural gas standby, cogeneration plants, etc...
1) they are not clean, because 2) the waste they produce is even deadlier than regular nuclear waste, and 3) they're not a solution for the current problem of what to do with the current waste as that waste is stored all over, and can't safely be transported
3. It can be safely transported, but we don't have a politically acceptable spot to put it yet, so why move it? Besides, the difficulties in moving the stuff is mostly political as well. It's also a problem that reduces itself by just waiting. Arsenic, mercury, etc... Won't go away with time. 2. More dangerous for a shorter period of time. Isn't most of the complaints about nuclear waste that it remains dangerous for thousands of years? Breeder waste starts out more radioactive, but that doesn't even last a single human generation. After that, it's LESS radioactive. Don't forget that we'd be generating 1/10th or less of the stuff per GWh produced. 1. It's clean because the stuff isn't released. Compared to coal plants that spew a LOT of their waste into the atmosphere.
Further, if we gave the clean alternative energies a fair chance, they'd end up producing cheaper energy than fission in a very short time, a decade, two at most.
People have been saying that for decades. I'm not holding my breath, but if yo
There's a difference between properly decommissioned, IE posing no real risk, and the level of decommissioning that the 'green whackos' want, which would result in a site likely cleaner than before man ever built there.
Kinda like the whole Yucca Mountain debacle. I've always figured that whatever we put in there our descendants would be hauling out within a century to reprocess and burn again.
The remaining stuff - like the contaminated steel, isn't as big of a problem.
Even if you used the steel to build a skyscraper, CONGRESS likely gets more radiation exposure from the natural radioactivity of the granite and marble used in the construction of the congress building than workers would from the beams.
It's not profitable up against dirty coal or natural gas.
Pass any carbon dioxide reduction program with teeth and those will no longer be as profitable. Traditional dirty coal is already banned except for grandfathered plants, and clean coal plants are costing as much as a nuclear plant - and that's before you figure in the daily fuel costs or the extra expense of carbon capture.
Natural gas, well, we'll run out of that quickly enough.
Wind and Solar suffer from the problem that they're not demand based and they generally cost even more than nuclear once you figure in their relatively lousy capacity factor - a Nuclear power plant will produce 90+% of it's faceplate rating year in and year out - Sun and Wind generators are generally around 30%, some lucky sites closer to 50%, but they're relatively rare.
On the other hand, nuclear power plants are definitely in it for the long haul, so conservative index funds are probably their best bet. I'm willing to bet the 'not enough money' is using very conservative estimates for future earnings and very pessimistic values for how much it'll cost to decommission.
Personally, I'd be building a bunch of new nuclear reactors to help compliment the other green sources. Nuclear power provides power when YOU want it, and it's very economical compared to the other green sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, the website doesn't even bother to collect the statistics for the questions.
He's using the leading questions as a debating tool, not collecting good statistics.
Man, it's been a while since somebody noticed/blew up about my sig.
For the record, it's not my site, I just like it.
They're looking at moving away from using silicon as a substrate. I can't remember if artificial diamond or something else is the proposed replacement.
If you get Merck and GSK turning out high-quality (read: lower risk) drugs, available by prescription, you've solved the problem without expanding the power of government.
Personally, I love picking on Bayer for this.
After all, they are the holder of the original Heroin patent. I like to say that Bayer could drive all the illegal heroin dealers out of business in a month if it was legal and they wanted to.
Heroin is a nightmare, and heroin addicts cannot exercise the same judgment that other drug users can.
Can't find it at the moment, but it came out in a famous surgeon's memoirs that he was a heroin addict.
Presuming the following:
1. Heroin purchase and usage is legal
2. Heroin is cheap*
3. The drug is medical grade - of very highly controlled quality, potency, and purity.
If the user is able to get his drug cheaply enough that he doesn't have to commit crimes to get it, and it's controlled such that he knows precisely how much he's injecting(street stuff varies from 10%-70% pure) and it's cut with safe substances so he's not screwing himself up by injecting powdered milk into his veins, I think it'd tend to be a LOT safer, and probably enable quite a few addicts to live more normal lives with a controlled addiction.
Then again, by commercializing it(while banning advertising) you'd also take out a LOT of the profit and motivation to get others hooked on it to increase your profits. It's no longer cool, a gateway drug, etc...
I'll agre in principal that some drugs probably shouldn't be legalized, but the sciences behind determining which drugs are more harmful are so distorted by politics I'm not sure which ones. I'm tempted to say meth - but a LOT of that damage is caused more because the drugs are so impure and contaminated due to being made in bathtub/kitchen processes, not properly controlled commercial quality drug labs.
*I've read that it can be had in a legal environment at lower cost than aspirin
I think that his point was that many governemnt aid programs are nailed to the government definition of poverty. If you lower the poverty line, fewer people qualify for those programs.
On the other hand, I never heard that Bush or Clinton did lower the income necessary to be considered below poverty, so I'll ask for a source there. I figure it's probably more of a 'raised the level slower than we would have otherwise' deal.
Personally, I'm all for the USA outright legalizing drugs - the problem with only decriminalizing small amounts is that you leave the distribution channels illegal, which means you still get organized crime doing it with all the attendant problems - turf warfare, unsafe/uneven adulteration, etc...
My goal, honestly enough, is you being able to go to a drug den, buy your heroin or crack and use it there in a 'lock-in' type situation where you're not allowed out until sober.
I'd allow home usage as well for people who've demonstrated a moderate ability to not screw up while high on the stuff.
Do you have a working link to that bike clamp deal? The link you associated with it lead to an article talking about soaring parking costs, but doesn't mention bicycles at all.
I don't understand the modern viewpoint that cars are evil, and their usage should be discouraged.
I don't think they're evil, but in the inner cities and certain other areas their usage should be discouraged for the simple reason of congestion. Your U-haul/grocery car is a lot more useful if you can actually get a close spot. Otherwise a high quality handcart might be the best choice. Heck, bring back delivery. It's happening down in florida - give the store a list and they deliver it.
The old mechanical meters invented in the 1920s may not be sexy, but they get the job done, and as this article demonstrates the new meters are not any better.
Well, personally I think they need to go wireless and be able to take debit cards, or at least issue tokens if you're going to charge more than $1/15 minutes. Mechanical meters can't handle bills too well and their coin slots would fill up quickly.
That said, I hope the voters win in their lawsuit, and failing that vote out the incumbents and vote in people who'll make the lease hell on CPM until CPM says screw it and sells the lease back.
Well, I considered leaving it at GooberToo's excellent answer.
Sure, turbodiesels still taper off at a lower RPM than gasoline engines, but the important thing about turbochargers is that they increase power availability at high rpms, by providing more air.
Increasing effective top end is one of the biggest improvements to diesels going, and really helps diesels in the performance side. Also helps the efficiency and pollution side as well.
Looking up their website, 3 of their 5 gasoline products are indeed leaded.
Then there's always the 104 octane that Citgo sells up here for the racers at $5 something a gallon (as it's leaded gasoline)
I seriously doubt it's leaded. It'll have relatively expensive additives and be from a slightly different part of the refinery stack, but it's not going to have lead in it unless it's actually AVGAS.
Racing fuel hasn't been leaded for years.
Likewise, its far easier to ramp up torque with diesel than it is rpms. Conversely, for gas engines, its far easier to ramp up rpm than torque because of fuel limitations (octane constraints). That's why you traditionally see high rpm gas engines and low rpm diesel engines.
The problem with building high RPM diesels is getting it enough air. Thus why you see so many turbo-diesel engines.
Conventional gasoline engines inject a mixture of gasoline and air into the engine, increasing both as you up the throttle.
Diesel engines, though, ignite off of pressure. That means for every rotation a certain amount of air needs to be shoved into the cyliner each cycle for proper operation. Thus, a gasoline engine exerting the same amount of actual horsepower at 3k RPM and at 6k RPM would be consuming about the same amount of air. A diesel engine in the same situation will be sucking twice as much air at 6k as at 3k. Given the higher compression requirements, this can quickly become significant. The turbo helps a lot, though I've seen some wierd stuff like diverting part of the exhaust back into the cylinders as well.
So don't let people blow smoke up your tail pipe. Diesel engines have a lot to offer. The days of low power, noisy, smoggy. and black smoke, rattle traps have long been gone from the diesel world.
My thought as well. I keep hoping my next car is a diesel.
There is no reason to accept that petroleum is inherently cleaner than diesel.
Just a nitpick, but in this case I think gasoline would be a better word to use than petroleum. Petrol if you're European.
Gasoline and Diesel are refined from petroleum. Both are distilled from oil.
Eh, I understand what you're saying and agree with it.
I'll also point out that SULEV standards are designed for gasoline engines- diesel emissions don't meet the standards because while they come in under on a number of pollutive emissions, they also bust some caps for pollutants that are inherently higher for diesel engines. European regulations recognize this and adapt, US ones don't.
When you actually consider the harmful effects, the differences between the two become a wash.
I saw what I think are two logic problems in your post.
First, we're not talking about Cheesy Poofs vs Cheesy Poofs. We're more like talking about Cheese and Pasteurized process cheese product. Like it or not, a SUV has abilities that a Sedan doesn't. For that matter, bigger vehicles have benefits over smaller ones - capacity, if nothing else.
Second, while the savings aren't as big of a deal for an individual, it does become important when you're talking about a government program - where you have to realize that getting somebody out of their 18mpg truck and into a 22 mpg truck (because they actually require a truck, even if only in their mind), is better than getting a dude out of his 30mpg sedan into a 36mpg mild hybrid. So any subsidization program that wants to actually save the most gas for the dollar will look to get the efficiency of the trucks up first.
Which is why I've always wondered why we get such tiny hybrids - there's a lot more money to be saved putting hybrid systems into larger vehicles like UPS/Fedex trucks and busses than compact cars.
If you care about your money and your planet, you'll pick the highest-mpg vehicle that suits your need.
Problem, highest mpg != to most economic, especially when you look at hybrids. Depending on your driving habits, it's quite possible that the hybrid, despite having a higher mpg, won't pay itself off faster than the vehicle will wear out, or statistically be taken out by a crash.
That's great for your capital costs, but you are confusing recurring and capital costs. You are talking about spending tens of thousands of dollars in capital costs to save a couple hundred per year. If you are looking to save money, don't look towards diesels or hybrids.
He's looking to trade in a 1987 car for a 2009 one. His current vehicle is 22 years old, so there may be maintenance issues cropping up. Oil, filters, belts and such should still be easy to get, but people who can rebuild carbs are getting rarer and more expensive.
Now, the choice of diesel can be a smart one. For example, I mostly drive highway miles. Right smack in the Diesel efficiency range, I'd be better off avoiding the hybrids though. It all depends on his driving habits.
Oh, and a 17 to 19 mpg improvement wouldn't be enoug - from the site it's 3.5k for '4 to 10 mpg increase', 4.5k for more than 10.
Of course, he was probably talking about the truck rules, which would mean that the SUV would have to qualify under the truck class. Many today don't.
Why doesn't the 1987 Plymouth qualify? To much mileage? We'd need the model and preferably the engine size to tell more. Plugging in a Reliant, 2.5L, 3 spd auto, you get 3 mpg too much. Ouch...
Personally, I would have subtracted like .5 mpg per year of age beyond 10, just to bias the program towards getting rid of the old ones. Of course, there's nothing preventing commodore64 from buying the volkswagon anyways, he just doesn't get $3.5-4.5k from the feds for buying a foreign car.
Huh, I was taught by my grandfather and other cooks that the salt is required as a moderator for the yeast.
Better keep LOTS of evidence and a good lawyer on retainer when they send you a bill...
Are you sure appliances use that much less?
Fridges have the biggest improvements, yes, but combined with modern cleaning agents so you can wash in cold water more often, clothes washers have improved quite a bit, if you're willing to spend the money you can get a heat pump/dehumidifying dryer, my dishwasher uses less juice and my oven is better insulated.
I wasn't worrying so much about the vacuum, though they've improved that in the non-baseline models as well, mostly to make them quieter while retaining efficiency.
Even furnaces have gotten better - going from 70-80% efficient to often over 90%.
Basically, I was trying to say that we've moved into the realm of reducing returns - any further reductions power usage WILL require sacrifice, and people don't generally want to do that.
But a class action lawsuit isn't going to do you much good if the company itself is going out of business, which would be one of the prime reasons for an authentication server to go out of business.
Personally, businesses pushing so much for this stuff tends to piss me off and start making rules like 'If you put DRM in it, and the DRM fails for whatever reason for a legitimate user, the user is entitled to a full refund'. And 'If the DRM requires a central server, and you shut it down, you have to provide a version that works without the server or refund everyone's money'.
I'd agree, though the fat wouldn't need to be added; all McD's needs to do is ensure their ground beef has the proper fat content before cooking to meet their standards.
There will also be a bit of fat in the bun, not many breads don't have some sort of oil in them, and raised bread requires salt.
Same deal with the cheese & pickle.
I think that what he means is that there are no bad carbs in the sense that while they have different effects on the body, none are harmful unless consumed in excess. Of course, your typical big mac w/fries(and all of McD's competitor's equivalents) pushes or even busts the daily requirements/limits for your typical person.
For example, sugars will tend to result in a faster rush of energy followed by a crash. No problems in eating some of that - but eat a candy bar and drink a soda and a kid might be high for 10 minutes then looking for food again - even though all of those calories haven't been consumed.
You're probably looking at 'empty' carbs, IE carbs that don't offer other significant nutrition, yet are so easy to digest that our body's hunger mechanisms don't really acknowledge them in appetite control.
Species variation is completely different to "organic" foods.
True.
Sustainable practices like crop rotation are still not used by these "organic" farmers, they think they can still treat the land with the same contempt that chemical farmers do. It doesn't give any benefit to the consumer at all, merely ups the price and ignores the problems to start with.
I live in farm country, and you'll have to trust me on this, but even the non-organic types today spent a LOT of effort on sustainability. The amount of farmland has actually shrunk a bit in the last few decades - there's no more land to move to. The local radio station has talks about various rotation schemes, and the local public television station has whole seminars on the topic, not to mention things like more sustainable cattle growth schemes - like how to maximize hay usefullness. Saw one recently on how to manipulate cattle grazing to improve the fields.
Yield - well, that's profit. Organics can actually be worse for the environment because of increased energy usage, from manual or mechanical weeding, for example. They're already more expensive than the standard varieties. A lower yield can easily be the difference between somebody going organic or sticking with the standard stuff because the organic is just so much more expensive.
Personally, I'd say that I'd like to see more varieties, but I'm not going to demand organic. Organic, at least right now, is a fuzzy label - one person's 'organic' isn't 'organic' enough for somebody else, there's varieties. Localvores, etc...
and producing LESS but MORE DEADLY waste!
To be more precise, the waste would have a shorter half life. What does that mean? More dangerous in the first year, much less dangerous in the 20th, radiation wise.
Something with a half life of 100 years vs one with a halflife of 10.
Radiation Year 1: 1 vs 10, Year 100: .5 vs .01
I am sick to death of nuclear proponents throwing breeder reactors around like they are the Second Coming or something. At some point it'd be nice if someone just said "hey... we're using too much power... we need to find ways to cut back on that" instead of "full speed ahead! Breeder reactors!"
Conservation GOOD. However, look at some of our proposed conservation efforts - plug-in hybrids and electric cars rather than gasoline engines. Heat pumps vs traditional hydrocarbon fired furnaces.
Notice a trend? We can cut our actual energy usage by an order of magnitude, but because we're concentrating on eliminating hyrdocarbons such as oil and coal we actually INCREASE our usage of electricity.
Look at energy star - my appliances generally use a fraction of the equivalents my parents used when I was a kid. I buy energy star. BUT, populations are still rising, we still need power, we have populations in China and India who are moving away from lifestyles not unknown in the 12th century towards 1st world living standards and the accompanying energy usage.
Every American and European could use an order of magnitude less energy and the world would STILL use more energy if the rest of the world simply caught up with our new, lower, energy usage level.
So we still need power. Us nuclear proponents by and large see that there's plenty of support for wind, solar, tidal is unproven, etc... Thus we support nuclear power. We still need a mix of power, after all. There's studies out there that say that the power grid can't handle more than 30% renewables.
My power mix:
1. Nuclear - Baseload, charging electric vehicles at night
2. Wind - Baseload again, put a number of users such as hybrid drivers, electric water heaters, some heating/cooling systems on a 'off-peak' system that, instead of shutting off during high demand(peak), also shut off during low supply due to low winds.
3. Solar - AC systems during the day and such.
4. Hydro - capable of providing moderating ability, but you'll probably still end up running some nuclear plants in a load following mode.
5. Other - probably less than 10% of the mix, consisting of geothermal, natural gas standby, cogeneration plants, etc...
1) they are not clean, because
2) the waste they produce is even deadlier than regular nuclear waste, and
3) they're not a solution for the current problem of what to do with the current waste as that waste is stored all over, and can't safely be transported
3. It can be safely transported, but we don't have a politically acceptable spot to put it yet, so why move it? Besides, the difficulties in moving the stuff is mostly political as well. It's also a problem that reduces itself by just waiting. Arsenic, mercury, etc... Won't go away with time.
2. More dangerous for a shorter period of time. Isn't most of the complaints about nuclear waste that it remains dangerous for thousands of years? Breeder waste starts out more radioactive, but that doesn't even last a single human generation. After that, it's LESS radioactive. Don't forget that we'd be generating 1/10th or less of the stuff per GWh produced.
1. It's clean because the stuff isn't released. Compared to coal plants that spew a LOT of their waste into the atmosphere.
Further, if we gave the clean alternative energies a fair chance, they'd end up producing cheaper energy than fission in a very short time, a decade, two at most.
People have been saying that for decades. I'm not holding my breath, but if yo
There's a difference between properly decommissioned, IE posing no real risk, and the level of decommissioning that the 'green whackos' want, which would result in a site likely cleaner than before man ever built there.
Kinda like the whole Yucca Mountain debacle. I've always figured that whatever we put in there our descendants would be hauling out within a century to reprocess and burn again.
The remaining stuff - like the contaminated steel, isn't as big of a problem.
Even if you used the steel to build a skyscraper, CONGRESS likely gets more radiation exposure from the natural radioactivity of the granite and marble used in the construction of the congress building than workers would from the beams.
It's not profitable up against dirty coal or natural gas.
Pass any carbon dioxide reduction program with teeth and those will no longer be as profitable. Traditional dirty coal is already banned except for grandfathered plants, and clean coal plants are costing as much as a nuclear plant - and that's before you figure in the daily fuel costs or the extra expense of carbon capture.
Natural gas, well, we'll run out of that quickly enough.
Wind and Solar suffer from the problem that they're not demand based and they generally cost even more than nuclear once you figure in their relatively lousy capacity factor - a Nuclear power plant will produce 90+% of it's faceplate rating year in and year out - Sun and Wind generators are generally around 30%, some lucky sites closer to 50%, but they're relatively rare.
On the other hand, nuclear power plants are definitely in it for the long haul, so conservative index funds are probably their best bet. I'm willing to bet the 'not enough money' is using very conservative estimates for future earnings and very pessimistic values for how much it'll cost to decommission.
Personally, I'd be building a bunch of new nuclear reactors to help compliment the other green sources. Nuclear power provides power when YOU want it, and it's very economical compared to the other green sources.