Convenience - Never have to stop at a gas station for your normal travels. No need to change the oil every 3-6k miles. Brake Pads that can be expected to last the life of the car, assuming a driver that doesn't panic stop all the time. Pay 1/5 the amount per 300 mile charge than 10 gallons of gas. (figures: $.08 per kw/h for 60kw/h, 30mpg@~$2.50/gallon)
No pollution along the path of your drive. Get fancy and you have one hell of an UPS available to power your house during an outage. Add a generator trailor for more storage and unlimited range(as long as gasoline is available) for those long trips.
I'd be driving an electric right now if it wasn't for the extreme price of entry.
It'd help if it would be a 3/4 of a price of a normal car.
My personal tolerance would be closer to 1/2-1/4 the price of a normal car. You're giving up a LOT of trunk space for that vehicle, good luck fitting a baby in there, and it's under the motorcycle safety rules(IE pretty much none) for safety during an accident. It looks like they're doing some things, but I'm not sure how well it'll pan out when it has to share roads with SUVs and Semis.
The biggest problem is it is small and the soccer-moms will never go for it
Then it DOESN'T MEET CONSUMER DEMAND. Look, I have a small car. I've been frustrated with the available trunk space a number of times. It's to the point that I'm looking for a cheap truck that I can take on supply runs. I can understand why people with kids would want a larger vehicle. I can imagine that putting a kid into a car seat in today's low-riding vehicles to be a pain in the butt. You'd have a hard time fitting a weeks worth of groceries in it, forget the luggage needed for a visit to the grandparent's house.
It'd work as a commuter vehicle, but that's part of the problem. Cars today aren't used just as commuter vehicles. You can't just shoot for 70% of consumer's demands today and expect to sell many cars when for a few thousand more you can get 99-100%.
For another example, my mother is currently suffering from a syndrome that makes getting up difficult. She ended up buying a midsize SUV simply because she could no longer climb out of most cars.
It'd work as a second vehicle, a dedicated commuter. But then again, so won't a used Geo Metro.
To put it another way, 1000 times my 'normal' dosage of H2O would most likely be fatal to me.
Yet they still say I should drink more water.
Iron, Calcium, various vitamens are all necessary for healthy life, yet a dose of a 1000 times more than FDA recommended is harmful for a number of them. Salt- A necessary substance, is harmful in greater doses.
I'm not about to install quicktime on this computer, so I'll have to take your word on it.
Still, shifting people over to a three wheel car* is going to take some serious, serious work. Another point is that I'm not disputing that an electric car can be produced, I'm worried that the battery isn't what they claim it is.
That doesn't mean that they can't produce and electric car, using 'substitute' batteries for their test of concept. Early EV1s were powered by lead-acid, then they upgraded to NiMH. Now we're looking into LiIon.
Can an electric car be made? It's already been done many times Can a electric car be made that'll satisfy your typical commuter's needs? Yep Can an electric car that meets those needs be produced economically? Now there's the question.
Swapping out all those batteries would still be a HUGE investment even if it's done at a service station level. Right now families that refuel their vehicles only spend a few minutes with the teller paying for the gas, if that, what with automated credit machines on most stations today.
Now you're talking about swapping out a battery pack weighing hundreds of pounds and reprocessing it instead of having a tanker pull up and dump more fuel into the tanks every so often.
'Most consumers' would want their charge to be 'instant' or 'not needed'. Still, they'd be able to climb back into their car and listen to a tune or two before they're done. Heck, put the charging station at a restraunt and have a meal while it's charging.
At less than $5 for a 'full' charge capable of going 300 miles, the restraunt could just fold it into the bill, or even offer it free with meal purchase.
An electric heater is comparably cheap to the structure needed to utilize coolant for your heating. As for the 'better' part, well - think about this. You just got into your car, turned it and the heat on. In your electric car now you're reducing your range, yes, but you also have heat NOW, not in ~10 minutes when the car's engine has warmed up enough.
Solution - I take advantage of the plugs at work to 'top off' my car.;)
Generally you get the same advantage with an electric during operation as gasoline engines, though not as much. The very fact that it's operating generates heat. Still, in our areas electrics will remain the providence of people who own garages or as summer vehicles for the time being.
A car takes between 20 to 200 horsepower to run. One horsepower equals about 750 watts. So that's about 15KW to 150KW per hour of running time.
First, you forget that a car doesn't use all of it's power constantly. A gasoline engine has a huge margin over what's needed to maintain a car's speed just to enable quick acceleration. Second, Watts are a power measure, not an energy measure. The only reason you need to worry about power when it comes to batteries is that they can only release so much power at a time.
Still, due to the wonders that is the efficiency of a electric motor(90+%) and regenerative braking, you can generally get by with 1/2 - 1/3 the horsepower rating for an electric vehicle over a gasoline one. The problem has always been one that the amount of energy you can stuff into a gas tank is orders of magnitude than a similar size or weight of batteries. Electric - Great motor, lousy storage, Hydrocarbon - Fantastic storage, lousy motor.'
Another wierdness is that gasoline engines are rated by their maximum horsepower, whereas an electric motor is rated at it's continous duty cycle. That means that you can 'undersize' the engine even more, because it's quite possible to run many motors at 300% for short periods of time. This is because the main problem with overdriving an electric motor is simply the motor's capability to disperse heat. You can safely overdrive it for short periods, as long as you don't fry the engine. Larger engines use heavier wire, reducing heat generation and increasing heat dispersion capabilities. Larger motor's are also more efficient on average though, so reducing below a certain level doesn't gain you much.
So an electric car can get by with a much smaller engine than a gasoline one(just overdrive during acceleration, controlled by the computer).
As for the wattage required, the tesla roadster takes 110 watt-hours on average for a kilometer. As the article noted, the roadster is 'performance tuned', not 'economy tuned'. Still, it's a smaller vehicle, incabable to holding the cargo average users would ask of a primary car.
That would be.176 kw/h per mile. For a 300 mile charge(It's what my 30mpg car with a 10gal tank can do), you'd need a battery capable of holding 52.8 kw/h. Let's call it 60 kw/h. To charge that in 1 hour would require 272 amps @ 220 volts. Yuck. Hello 0000 wire. 3.3kA for a 5 minute charge. Now we're talking silly. Let's kick it up to 600Volts. Ah, much better @100 amps for a 1 hour charge, though 1.3kA is still high. A 1% waste at that level would still be 13amps@600volts=7.8kw, or about 5 hairdryers. Doable with fans. Wouldn't want it to be much higher though.
I think they're counting on an activly cooled extremely high voltage battery, that's still more efficient than stuff on the market today.
It's called recycling. The rods, which are classified as 'waste' right now, are actually 90+% recyclable into new fuel rods. This is even without going into technologies like breeders and fast reactors.
The problem with recycling is that the rods, fresh from the reactor, are so radioactive any measures taken with them are expensive. My solution: Let them sit in the reactor pond/onsite storage for 40-60 years, at which point they're less than 1% as radioactive as when they came out, making recycling them much less a pain in the butt. This does many things, including vastly reducing the amount of uranium we need to mine(reducing pollution on that end), and leaving you with high-level waste that's more radioactive, but decays faster. So you store it for a number of years before vitrifying it, so there's a whole lot less radiation to weaken the glass substrate.
Still, I have some concerns that this battery will turn out to be vaporware in the end. It's too revolutionary for me to not be cautious about it. I'd be happier with a GM press release. Of cour
Maybe it wasn't 1260 core-years of the average client, but the best computer they could have otherwise been able to afford. Toss in double or triple redundency for security and accuracy* and there you go.
*because SETI at home discovered some asses hacked the clients to artificially raise their score.
If you looked at the note down in the bottom, you'd see that I noted that it costs money. And not just $40.5k. There are also per DVD costs for macrovision at the least, and at this point macrovision only 'protects' against copying with a VCR, not copying in a computer. Even then, a $50 piece of hardware will fix that right up(and restore signal quality to a varying degree from 'not much' to 'not noticeable'). Needless to say, CSS is broken to the point of uselessness.
Like most analogies, it ultimately breaks down. Still, the RIAA/MPAA marketing models are increasingly flawed.
That doesn't mean that they have to get out of the movie(blacksmithing) making business. It's just that they have to realize that they're not going to sell physical media products such as VHS tapes and DVDs forever. DRM isn't working, giving only months of protection in this case. Most of the anime DVDs I purchase don't have DRM. They have empty keys and the macrovision bit isn't set*. Why? The Anime companies took a look at their target market and figured out that DRM A: Annoys their customer base, and B: said customer base is on average technically skilled enough that DRM is less than an annoyance to their copying efforts. Yet they can still make money on sales.
Music content is shifting away from CDs to online, why shouldn't movies? Heck, I'd love to be able to purchase a movie online, then download it to my computer/DVR to watch while I do something else. It'd be faster than netflix and not require so much personal time as a rental place that I have to drive to(not to mention better selection).
Most people are willing to pay money for a legitimate product as long as it's competitive with the real one. Generally the legitimate producer has advantages of superior quality, the ability to advertise, operate a real storefront, etc... Illegal producers have the advantage of not having to create the material, allowing them to be cheaper.
The MPAA/RIAA have both messed up in their attempts to move into the market niche currently taken by pirates(online), by their insistance on using DRM, as it has in some cases managed to give the pirates an advantage: Their version's superior. One example was a couple DVDs released by disney that had 5 minutes of non-skippable advertising before the movie could be played. Another would be MP3's downloaded off the internet vs the commercial CD which attempts to silently install a back-door DRM that leaves a mile-wide vulnerability in your system. For that matter, storing movies on a TB size DVR type device vs having hundreds of DVDs that you have to physically search through to find the video you want to see.
*setting it costs $, and since the companies found that it's effectivness in preventing copying approached zero, decided not to waste the money.
Um, us sophisticated/. types may not buy them, but people must, otherwise the stores wouldn't continue to stock them.
My idea for this is to turn it around. Not only can you store music on those sticks, you can also store movies. So let's split the share between movie and music makers. But wait! You can also store copyrighted pictures, so we have to compensate painters and other 2d artists. Don't forget books! We gotta compensate them too. Don't forget application writers.
In other words, if you have a copyrighted work registered at the copyright office, you're entitled to a share of the proceeds from this program.
RIAA, MPAA, etc... Enjoy your $10k check. For your entire stock, for the year.
I'm a rich guy, and I can get all the money that I can use for almost anything at all. But I've met plenty of people who are too poor to really partake in the capitalist system, because they don't have access to capital.
I'm not a rich guy and I can also get money for pretty much whatever. Of course, I have a history of paying my bills on time, repaying debts, etc... I use my credit cards like a check card, they're paid off in full each month. We're not much of a credit risk. Bums/Homeless are.
The problem with giving loans to the poor(bums aside) is that there's generally a reason they're poor besides simple lack of money/income. They frequently have poor money management skills which raise the chances of the lender not getting his money back. This increased risk results in an increased interest rate(to make up for the chance of loosing money). In extreme cases the interest rate required to make up for the risk makes a loan unfeasable.
In extreme cases like homeless; that's where you're looking at outright aid, not loans.
It tends to end up being complicated, but in general the more money available for investment the lower the interest rate for any given risk category/time period will be. People will be able to afford riskier loans, etc...
It's not a zero sum game.
That factory that doesn't make sense at 8% interest may make perfect sense at 5%.
Besides, it does tend to trickle down. Ask yourself this - Is it better for the rich to become poorer, or for both the rich and the poor enjoy increased wealth? Do you think that you'd be better of in the bottom 10% bracket today or in the 1930's?
Money that winds up in banks is still inacessible to most people
Actually, it's quite accessable. To prove it just go in for a loan to buy a car or house. A portion of the funds of checking/savings accounts are kept available for withdrawals, but the rest go out for loans.
Furthermore, that money is unavailable for consumer spending by regular spending, which is a major driver of the economy
Investing the money is about the best you can do, because that means that your effort goes towards expanding the infrastructure of business, which increases productivity*.
As others have stated, there's numerous questions about what just went on, the judge squashing the defense, for example, not allowing the rest of the transcript of the conversation involving the missile to be presented.
Imagine an organization that has no problems lying to authorities, as a group, rehearsing their stories, etc...
I use abortion protestors as an example because they're frequently the worst behaved protestors out there and have been known to descend into violence.
In order to match them he'd have to do more than some yelling and handing out pamphlets. Even if he did follow some members home, it's still not to the level that abortion protestors will go to. Heck include PETA in that list of out of control protestors that don't get anything near this level of punishment. They've been known to set up in front of people's houses.
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But in the sweetener study, they were forcing the equivalent of a thousand packets of the stuff through them a day.
And a dose wasn't a serving, it was the expected daily dose of a fairly heavy user.
Convenience - Never have to stop at a gas station for your normal travels. No need to change the oil every 3-6k miles. Brake Pads that can be expected to last the life of the car, assuming a driver that doesn't panic stop all the time. Pay 1/5 the amount per 300 mile charge than 10 gallons of gas. (figures: $.08 per kw/h for 60kw/h, 30mpg@~$2.50/gallon)
No pollution along the path of your drive. Get fancy and you have one hell of an UPS available to power your house during an outage. Add a generator trailor for more storage and unlimited range(as long as gasoline is available) for those long trips.
I'd be driving an electric right now if it wasn't for the extreme price of entry.
It'd help if it would be a 3/4 of a price of a normal car.
My personal tolerance would be closer to 1/2-1/4 the price of a normal car. You're giving up a LOT of trunk space for that vehicle, good luck fitting a baby in there, and it's under the motorcycle safety rules(IE pretty much none) for safety during an accident. It looks like they're doing some things, but I'm not sure how well it'll pan out when it has to share roads with SUVs and Semis.
The biggest problem is it is small and the soccer-moms will never go for it
Then it DOESN'T MEET CONSUMER DEMAND. Look, I have a small car. I've been frustrated with the available trunk space a number of times. It's to the point that I'm looking for a cheap truck that I can take on supply runs. I can understand why people with kids would want a larger vehicle. I can imagine that putting a kid into a car seat in today's low-riding vehicles to be a pain in the butt. You'd have a hard time fitting a weeks worth of groceries in it, forget the luggage needed for a visit to the grandparent's house.
It'd work as a commuter vehicle, but that's part of the problem. Cars today aren't used just as commuter vehicles. You can't just shoot for 70% of consumer's demands today and expect to sell many cars when for a few thousand more you can get 99-100%.
For another example, my mother is currently suffering from a syndrome that makes getting up difficult. She ended up buying a midsize SUV simply because she could no longer climb out of most cars.
It'd work as a second vehicle, a dedicated commuter. But then again, so won't a used Geo Metro.
To put it another way, 1000 times my 'normal' dosage of H2O would most likely be fatal to me.
Yet they still say I should drink more water.
Iron, Calcium, various vitamens are all necessary for healthy life, yet a dose of a 1000 times more than FDA recommended is harmful for a number of them. Salt- A necessary substance, is harmful in greater doses.
It's quantity that makes the poison.
I'm not about to install quicktime on this computer, so I'll have to take your word on it.
Still, shifting people over to a three wheel car* is going to take some serious, serious work. Another point is that I'm not disputing that an electric car can be produced, I'm worried that the battery isn't what they claim it is.
That doesn't mean that they can't produce and electric car, using 'substitute' batteries for their test of concept. Early EV1s were powered by lead-acid, then they upgraded to NiMH. Now we're looking into LiIon.
Can an electric car be made? It's already been done many times
Can a electric car be made that'll satisfy your typical commuter's needs? Yep
Can an electric car that meets those needs be produced economically? Now there's the question.
*Going by the main image on their site.
Swapping out all those batteries would still be a HUGE investment even if it's done at a service station level. Right now families that refuel their vehicles only spend a few minutes with the teller paying for the gas, if that, what with automated credit machines on most stations today.
Now you're talking about swapping out a battery pack weighing hundreds of pounds and reprocessing it instead of having a tanker pull up and dump more fuel into the tanks every so often.
Well, that moves into the realm of an idiot light and emergency charger that can plug into a 110 outlet.
The tow truck should be able to charge the car fairly easily to get you a few miles to a more powerful charging station.
Besides, a OMG I ran outa fuel! situation costing more isn't much of a detractor for the idea.
2 gauge? Try 000 or better for fast charging.
2 gauge would be for your home charger that takes ~8 hours.
Makes me wish for room-temperature superconductor wires.
'Most consumers' would want their charge to be 'instant' or 'not needed'. Still, they'd be able to climb back into their car and listen to a tune or two before they're done. Heck, put the charging station at a restraunt and have a meal while it's charging.
At less than $5 for a 'full' charge capable of going 300 miles, the restraunt could just fold it into the bill, or even offer it free with meal purchase.
Uhh... Yes it is. Imagine a battery replacement progam on the order of garbage replacement needs. Then figure the reprocessing... Ugly.
Your average family would go through a battery every week. 2 vehicles@200 miles/week each.
An electric heater is comparably cheap to the structure needed to utilize coolant for your heating. As for the 'better' part, well - think about this. You just got into your car, turned it and the heat on. In your electric car now you're reducing your range, yes, but you also have heat NOW, not in ~10 minutes when the car's engine has warmed up enough.
;)
Solution - I take advantage of the plugs at work to 'top off' my car.
Generally you get the same advantage with an electric during operation as gasoline engines, though not as much. The very fact that it's operating generates heat. Still, in our areas electrics will remain the providence of people who own garages or as summer vehicles for the time being.
A car takes between 20 to 200 horsepower to run. One horsepower equals about 750 watts. So that's about 15KW to 150KW per hour of running time.
.176 kw/h per mile. For a 300 mile charge(It's what my 30mpg car with a 10gal tank can do), you'd need a battery capable of holding 52.8 kw/h. Let's call it 60 kw/h. To charge that in 1 hour would require 272 amps @ 220 volts. Yuck. Hello 0000 wire. 3.3kA for a 5 minute charge. Now we're talking silly. Let's kick it up to 600Volts. Ah, much better @100 amps for a 1 hour charge, though 1.3kA is still high. A 1% waste at that level would still be 13amps@600volts=7.8kw, or about 5 hairdryers. Doable with fans. Wouldn't want it to be much higher though.
First, you forget that a car doesn't use all of it's power constantly. A gasoline engine has a huge margin over what's needed to maintain a car's speed just to enable quick acceleration. Second, Watts are a power measure, not an energy measure. The only reason you need to worry about power when it comes to batteries is that they can only release so much power at a time.
Still, due to the wonders that is the efficiency of a electric motor(90+%) and regenerative braking, you can generally get by with 1/2 - 1/3 the horsepower rating for an electric vehicle over a gasoline one. The problem has always been one that the amount of energy you can stuff into a gas tank is orders of magnitude than a similar size or weight of batteries. Electric - Great motor, lousy storage, Hydrocarbon - Fantastic storage, lousy motor.'
Another wierdness is that gasoline engines are rated by their maximum horsepower, whereas an electric motor is rated at it's continous duty cycle. That means that you can 'undersize' the engine even more, because it's quite possible to run many motors at 300% for short periods of time. This is because the main problem with overdriving an electric motor is simply the motor's capability to disperse heat. You can safely overdrive it for short periods, as long as you don't fry the engine. Larger engines use heavier wire, reducing heat generation and increasing heat dispersion capabilities. Larger motor's are also more efficient on average though, so reducing below a certain level doesn't gain you much.
So an electric car can get by with a much smaller engine than a gasoline one(just overdrive during acceleration, controlled by the computer).
As for the wattage required, the tesla roadster takes 110 watt-hours on average for a kilometer. As the article noted, the roadster is 'performance tuned', not 'economy tuned'. Still, it's a smaller vehicle, incabable to holding the cargo average users would ask of a primary car.
That would be
I think they're counting on an activly cooled extremely high voltage battery, that's still more efficient than stuff on the market today.
Yeah, my idea's pretty simple:
It's called recycling. The rods, which are classified as 'waste' right now, are actually 90+% recyclable into new fuel rods. This is even without going into technologies like breeders and fast reactors.
The problem with recycling is that the rods, fresh from the reactor, are so radioactive any measures taken with them are expensive. My solution: Let them sit in the reactor pond/onsite storage for 40-60 years, at which point they're less than 1% as radioactive as when they came out, making recycling them much less a pain in the butt. This does many things, including vastly reducing the amount of uranium we need to mine(reducing pollution on that end), and leaving you with high-level waste that's more radioactive, but decays faster. So you store it for a number of years before vitrifying it, so there's a whole lot less radiation to weaken the glass substrate.
Still, I have some concerns that this battery will turn out to be vaporware in the end. It's too revolutionary for me to not be cautious about it. I'd be happier with a GM press release. Of cour
Maybe it wasn't 1260 core-years of the average client, but the best computer they could have otherwise been able to afford. Toss in double or triple redundency for security and accuracy* and there you go.
*because SETI at home discovered some asses hacked the clients to artificially raise their score.
If you looked at the note down in the bottom, you'd see that I noted that it costs money. And not just $40.5k. There are also per DVD costs for macrovision at the least, and at this point macrovision only 'protects' against copying with a VCR, not copying in a computer. Even then, a $50 piece of hardware will fix that right up(and restore signal quality to a varying degree from 'not much' to 'not noticeable'). Needless to say, CSS is broken to the point of uselessness.
Like most analogies, it ultimately breaks down. Still, the RIAA/MPAA marketing models are increasingly flawed.
That doesn't mean that they have to get out of the movie(blacksmithing) making business. It's just that they have to realize that they're not going to sell physical media products such as VHS tapes and DVDs forever. DRM isn't working, giving only months of protection in this case. Most of the anime DVDs I purchase don't have DRM. They have empty keys and the macrovision bit isn't set*. Why? The Anime companies took a look at their target market and figured out that DRM A: Annoys their customer base, and B: said customer base is on average technically skilled enough that DRM is less than an annoyance to their copying efforts. Yet they can still make money on sales.
Music content is shifting away from CDs to online, why shouldn't movies? Heck, I'd love to be able to purchase a movie online, then download it to my computer/DVR to watch while I do something else. It'd be faster than netflix and not require so much personal time as a rental place that I have to drive to(not to mention better selection).
Most people are willing to pay money for a legitimate product as long as it's competitive with the real one. Generally the legitimate producer has advantages of superior quality, the ability to advertise, operate a real storefront, etc... Illegal producers have the advantage of not having to create the material, allowing them to be cheaper.
The MPAA/RIAA have both messed up in their attempts to move into the market niche currently taken by pirates(online), by their insistance on using DRM, as it has in some cases managed to give the pirates an advantage: Their version's superior. One example was a couple DVDs released by disney that had 5 minutes of non-skippable advertising before the movie could be played. Another would be MP3's downloaded off the internet vs the commercial CD which attempts to silently install a back-door DRM that leaves a mile-wide vulnerability in your system. For that matter, storing movies on a TB size DVR type device vs having hundreds of DVDs that you have to physically search through to find the video you want to see.
*setting it costs $, and since the companies found that it's effectivness in preventing copying approached zero, decided not to waste the money.
those music CD-Rs that nobody buys
/. types may not buy them, but people must, otherwise the stores wouldn't continue to stock them.
Um, us sophisticated
My idea for this is to turn it around. Not only can you store music on those sticks, you can also store movies. So let's split the share between movie and music makers. But wait! You can also store copyrighted pictures, so we have to compensate painters and other 2d artists. Don't forget books! We gotta compensate them too. Don't forget application writers.
In other words, if you have a copyrighted work registered at the copyright office, you're entitled to a share of the proceeds from this program.
RIAA, MPAA, etc... Enjoy your $10k check. For your entire stock, for the year.
I'm a rich guy, and I can get all the money that I can use for almost anything at all. But I've met plenty of people who are too poor to really partake in the capitalist system, because they don't have access to capital.
I'm not a rich guy and I can also get money for pretty much whatever. Of course, I have a history of paying my bills on time, repaying debts, etc... I use my credit cards like a check card, they're paid off in full each month. We're not much of a credit risk. Bums/Homeless are.
The problem with giving loans to the poor(bums aside) is that there's generally a reason they're poor besides simple lack of money/income. They frequently have poor money management skills which raise the chances of the lender not getting his money back. This increased risk results in an increased interest rate(to make up for the chance of loosing money). In extreme cases the interest rate required to make up for the risk makes a loan unfeasable.
In extreme cases like homeless; that's where you're looking at outright aid, not loans.
It tends to end up being complicated, but in general the more money available for investment the lower the interest rate for any given risk category/time period will be. People will be able to afford riskier loans, etc...
It's not a zero sum game.
That factory that doesn't make sense at 8% interest may make perfect sense at 5%.
Besides, it does tend to trickle down. Ask yourself this - Is it better for the rich to become poorer, or for both the rich and the poor enjoy increased wealth? Do you think that you'd be better of in the bottom 10% bracket today or in the 1930's?
Money that winds up in banks is still inacessible to most people
Actually, it's quite accessable. To prove it just go in for a loan to buy a car or house. A portion of the funds of checking/savings accounts are kept available for withdrawals, but the rest go out for loans.
Furthermore, that money is unavailable for consumer spending by regular spending, which is a major driver of the economy
Investing the money is about the best you can do, because that means that your effort goes towards expanding the infrastructure of business, which increases productivity*.
*minus waste, of course.
The Phelps family vs. Scientology. THAT would be the ultimate cock-fight.
I'd PAY to see that happen.
As others have stated, there's numerous questions about what just went on, the judge squashing the defense, for example, not allowing the rest of the transcript of the conversation involving the missile to be presented.
Imagine an organization that has no problems lying to authorities, as a group, rehearsing their stories, etc...
I use abortion protestors as an example because they're frequently the worst behaved protestors out there and have been known to descend into violence.
In order to match them he'd have to do more than some yelling and handing out pamphlets. Even if he did follow some members home, it's still not to the level that abortion protestors will go to. Heck include PETA in that list of out of control protestors that don't get anything near this level of punishment. They've been known to set up in front of people's houses.
What always got me was the trust ones 'Site XXX want's to install/run Y'. Yes/No/Always. My thought was 'Where's the fricken never button?'.