There are most definitly still cells. While your standard home portable phone usually only has one transmitter, 'cellular' phones can make use of a vast network of stations, transition between stations more or less seamlessly, etc... The transition to digital didn't affect that at all.
With more towers they can give better coverage to more users while transmitting using less power for each cell tower.
For that matter, they used the term 'cellular network' when describing a wireless computer network using multiple 802.11a/g routers. Lots of users in a small area? You can place more routers closer together and turn down the transmission power so routers on the same frequency don't interfere with each other.
Funny, I had the same reaction. But I don't recall there being wifi in my classrooms.
I'd argue the same, but I never got much beyond the headache/fatigue/nausea stages.
This reminds me of the kid who ended up in the hospital three times. It turns out that his mother bought some pants in a discount sale which had been exposed to some chemicals (I think pesticides). They desperately tracked the other pants down, only to find that all the other kids were fine... Because the pants had been washed. She had been the only one who didn't wash them.
Still, there's plenty of possibilities for the teacher's illness in the school besides the network. Anything from a transient illness to mold to unknown allergy to downright psychological.
If nothing else, building a prototype is often needed for proof-of-concept, even if the prototype is ineconomical, you can have valid hopes that by studying the operation of a test prototype will allow you to gather the knowledge to build economical production models.
Experimentation is usually part of the development process. Who knows, it might not be economical right now, but in the future the equations could change. Fresh water more expensive, fuel more expensive(making solar cheaper in relation), new materials and methods make producing the thing cheaper.
I stand corrected. On the other hand, I'd have to ask how automatic is really is if paperwork has to be submitted. I mean, if the lawyers don't submit paperwork, would it just sit in limbo forever or would the courts go 'no complaints, sentence stands'.
I think added capacity is the simplest part to explain...
Removing the shuttle saves 68 tons for the thing empty, 108 tons loaded.
Add in the 25 tons that's the maximum payload the shuttle can lift, and it gets real easy to believe they can lift almost a 100 tons by redesigning the shuttle lift platform a bit to remove the need for the shuttle. You loose some tons because one of the things they have to do is move the shuttle's engines to the central tank.
There's no practical reason why we couldn't make a space station type module, or even a Bigelow one, into a satellite servicer with the addition of thrusters, which could be refueled by supply missions.
You don't do lab work in a 'shuttle', you do it on a station which stays up there. You launch and recover people using lighter and therefore cheaper vehicles.
it still would make large valuable contributions to astronomy.
On the other hand, as others have already stated technology has progressed to the point that ground telescopes are meeting and exceeding the Hubble's capabilities.
If for the cost of a servicing mission you can set up a ground observatory that can meet or exceed the hubble's capabilies and cost less to maintain, it makes no sense to keep the hubble operational.
Now, if you take those funds and dedicate them to replacing hubble with something that will again put space telescopes ahead of ground ones, that'd be great.
I wouldn't. But if they're going to be a valid threat to DeBeers they have to be indistinguishable, at least in fashions available with a simple magnifying glass.
Remember, the DeBeers won by artificial scarcity and a huge marketing effort. If it can be distinguished, they'll try to lever a 'natural is better' just like pearls.
"Oh, the actual purity, color, and clarity is lower with a natural diamond, but natural is natural, so it's more valuable!!!"
Speaking of science, how come nobody complains that we're using up all the oxygen? I mean, it takes O2 to make CO2, right? Where does is come from? Why doesn't anybody ever talk about that?
Enquiring minds would like to know. Seeing as how I require oxygen to continue living, shouldn't that be a concern as well?
How much energy is used around the world to provide food for the US?? How much energy is used around the world to provide goods for the US??
The USA is a net food exporter, so the question would be how much energy does the USA use to feed the rest of the world. As for the providing goods to the USA, that is a valid question.
Of course we use more energy than the world average, as does the europeans and anybody else industrialized. A peasant* doesn't use much energy.
*I use the term to mean more or less subsidence level farmers.
Anyway, the cost of the Hubble was $1.5B at time of launch (excluding all the operating and maintenance costs since then). If we assume the replacement cost would be about that much (less design cost, but in 2006 dollars it would be costlier - let's figure that's a wash), then another shuttle mission would be well worth it over a replacement Hubble telescope.
Then again, you'd also have to figure that they can update/improve many parts of the replacement satellite that they can't do with the old satellite. So you'd be getting a better satellite for that $500 million.
While the marginal cost per mission might be $60 million, the fact is that there's not much lifespan left on the shuttle bodies, thus including a chunck of the billion is a good idea. We also have limited shuttle frames, so we have to decide which missions are the most important, and ISS usually wins.
The 1 billion launch cost for the shuttle, combined with advances in ground observatory systems is what has led me to believe that our best solution if we are going to have an orbital telescope/observation system is to design a new one and launch a new one. Retire the hubble.
Even at the size of a schoolbus, a properly designed replacement satellite would still be a whole lot lighter than the shuttle, and safer in that you won't be launching people in it to go out in a space suit to conduct maintenance and repairs.
Spend some of the money saved developing a proper replacement for the shuttle.
I expect a stop-loss policy would trash that rule PDQ.
Why? They had the policy during wartime when they were busily drafting people.
Oh, and it's not three PH's and you're able to get out, it's three PH's and you have the option of transfering to a non-combat area.
I imagine that regrowing a limb and retraining you on the usage of it would be something that'll take years. The nerve endings are never quite the same...
Oh, and you'll never really get combat troops until you realize that there have been documented cases of injured escaping from the hospital in order to return to combat with their unit. That there are people who still want to deploy and fight after loosing limbs.
I'd have make a cautionary remark here that this could be taking the remarks out of context. Power Plants, even nuclear ones, don't have 100% uptime. There could be comments before that about a something requiring repair that means the steamer has to be shut down.
Part of the problem would be California preventing new powerplants in the name of being 'green' and allowing the shutdown of even a few plants to cause problems.
That's not to say that Enron executives aren't crooks.
All this will mean is more work. Retirement at 85 until you can get SS benefits? No thank you. Lifespan is pretty ok right now. We need better quality, not quantity of life.
Have you heard about the coming problems with SS? To many people living too long, not enough kids(upcoming workers) consuming too much SS, driving it bankrupt. SS is a pyramid scheme that worked when there were 20 workers per retiree. It's approaching a 1-1. It's unsustainable.
Think about this: It pretty much takes 18-26 years to train a worker today. People are often spending 20 years or more while retired. Increasing the working period would be a good thing for sustainability. For one thing, with another 10 years it'd be much easier for you to save up for your own retirement.
Average Lifespan: 85(made up) Growth/Training: 20 years Retirement at 65: 20 years retirement You're essentially having to pay half your income to support the other periods. Add another 15 years of working life, and you'd reduce your burden each working year by a third.
If we were given potentially infinite lifespans(I remember something about accidental death would tend to limit average age to around 600), I wouldn't see why we couldn't have an almost expected multi-year vacation/retraining/career move every 20.
I think that you missed the point. The idea is that you want [i]more[/i] of these people, but you're not allowed to prevent people from breeding. So you'd be encouraging these people to have a lot of children. They help balance out the lesser qualified that are substantially likely to need more medical care per year on average, cost the same to train yet drop sooner.
By not paying people money to have kids, you'd tend to limit the number they have in industrial societies. Look at Europe, without lifting a finger they have negative population growth. They're below replacement.
Fears about overpopulating the planet is so '80's man.;)
That's why it's [i]with qualifiers[/i]. I think you'd be better off working on eliminating altheimers and other genetic disorders at first, whether they show up early or late. Basically, focus on extending the average useful lifespan. Something like 'How many of your great-grandparents survived and were still able to function without regular assistance until they were 80?', 'Are all your grandparents still alive?'
It wouldn't be too difficult to come with with a.1% of the population that's not consistantly dumb(easier than trying to limit it to 'smart' folks), no history of a laundry list of conditions to include things like altheimers and diabetes, don't drop of heart attacks at 40-60, etc. Better yet, make it a matrix where you can trade off advantages and disadvantages.
Sure, it'd take several generations for the effects to be seen, but I think that you'd fairly quickly have a section of population that has a markably better chance of making it to a hundred.
Sure, we can treat a diabetic with a couple hundred dollars of medical supplies a month, but the question would be why deliberatly create a human that needs it when the normal healthy adult needs it only sporatically?
They need to bring back the "Working Sample" requirement. Before they can get the patent they have to be able to produce an implimentation of the design.
I'm not saying the patent can't be somewhat generic. Just because you use materials X and Y doesn't mean that your patent can't still be valid if company B comes out with a product that uses X and almost identical to Y material Z instead, especially if they used your patent to develop it.
And those jobs are not limited to the crappiest, teenager jobs. As I have said, I first learned about this when I was looking for a job in New Orleans, back in 2000. I stood in line for more than 3 hours, with other ADULTS looking for real work, and this, was all so I could sit down at a terminal and look through all the available jobs, just like everyone else. And the jobs paid between $$ and $5 an hour. Yes, this was an official State employment agency. Yes, it was the same place where you filled out your Unemployment forms. If the job doesn't pay enough, DON'T TAKE IT. Get more education, learn a skill, move if you have to. Statistically speaking, minimum wage laws do more to create unemployment than improve standards of living for the poorest paid. When you increase minimum wage, businesses frequently drop the amount of minimum wage labor they hire. Rather than clean the store every night, they might just sweep and to the extensive cleaning every other night, and so on. The local McDonalds fires their bun toaster (actually happened around the last minimum wage increase when I worked for them as a teen), and goes to a 'pre-toasted' bun.
For other industries, it provides a push to outsource. Why hire a worker I gotta pay $10/hour here for when I can hire one in China/India for $10/day?
How would you feel if milk tripled in price to $12 a gallon?
Depends upon why it tripled. I might not like it, but if half the milk cows had to be put down and their milk discarded because of a disease for example, I'd understand it. You see, I don't generally deal with 'feelings' I deal with facts. And the fact is, there are market forces at work. There's only so much oil at any given price point.
Another fact is that the poorest segment of society, those that don't take advantage of available education oportunities, that don't make themselves more valuable than a minimum-skill minimum wage earner, their lives are going to be more precarious, their finances more fragile, their life is going to suck compared to somebody who took advantage of education opertunities and made something of themselves and earn more than minimum wage.
Hint: I rarely earned minimum wage even as a teen, and was in a state that only matches federal minimum. Did I get a raise when they raised it? Nope. But prices rose all around me, so I instantly had less earning power.
I'd wonder how many of them were small televisions meant for the kids/kitchen/bedroom type situations. I think that the smallest HDTV that's not actually a computer monitor or intended for special use I've seen is a 27".
Besides, 41% of the TV market is HUGE, like GP said, especially since an HDTV generally costs twice as much as a SDTV of the same size(though the difference gets smaller as the TV gets larger).
Think back to tape vs CD, VCR vs DVD, CRT vs LCD. Each one had a multiyear period where the market share of the new product was a bit larger, the penetration a bit more, until it was in the majority.
Comparing gas prices to other commodities seems to be a little odd. Let's say Mr. Smith has a car with a 15 gallon tank. In the Heyday of only a dollar a gallon, that was a nice tidy, simple $15 dollar fillup. Today, at $3.30 a gallon, that's $49.50. Ok, that's only an increase of $34.50. But back in creaky old 1998, when you could still get Gasoline for under a buck a gallon... EVERYTHING else did not also cost 3 times less than it does now. We don't make 3 times as much money now as we did in 1998.
Is weekly really that accurate of an estimate? I fill up about every other week, and I only have a ten gallon tank. Is less than $40 a week really that much of a killer? I spend more on games/movies.
Of course, the killer is that although gas prices have tripled, we still have 6 states in the US that do not have ANY minimum wage regulations. http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm [dol.gov] Arizona, Louisana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Back in 1998, you could and DID find jobs that paid $4 or $5 an hour (not some backwoods ranch hiring stall muckers...
And you'll generally find most of those jobs are of the high school teenager type. Unless you're a waiter or other wierd category, federal minimum is $5.15/hour. In addition, increasing mimimum wage does more to unemploy those workers than it helps them out(the rise in cost of basic services generally wipes the manadated 'raise' out).
I'm talking about mainstream jobs in major cities like Phoenix or New Orleans or Jackson or Mobile or Nashville or Charleston. Now, if you happen to live, work, and struggle in one of these states, paying three times as much for gasoline has probably moved you into publlic transportation. Why? Because you can STILL wait in line at the Employment office for 3 hours, to browse through jobs that pay $4 to $5 an hour. Except it costs you 3 times as much in fuel to go job hunting.
Then don't take the job. It's obviously not worth that much to the potential employer if they're only willing to pay that much. Either that or they have a labor pool that is willing to take those terms. Let them suffer with not having any employees. The New Orleans tourist industry has had to substantially increase their pay in order to attract workers since the hurricane. As for public transportation, sure it sucks, but isn't part of the deal with oil is that cheap sources of it are running out, so we need to wean ourselves from it? The more people taking mass transit the better. Enough people take it, it can actually start saving money and resources. Service will improve, getting more people to take it.
That 3x modifier also applies to home heating oil too
Then heat with something other than oil. Get a couple electric space heaters. Insulate your house more. Wear more clothing and keep the house cooler. Note: This is conservation, which will reduce the demand, reducing the cost of the cost of the product.
Are you aware that diesels once competed in races? And not truck/semi races either.
With today's turbodiesels, it'd be entirely possible to satisfy your desire for a two door sports car with a diesel. It might not have quite the performance on a track, but for any non-felony street use it'd be plenty.
I've driven a modern diesel van. I couldn't tell the difference between it and a gasoline engine. It started like a gasoline, ran like a gasoline, didn't smell, etc...
European turbodiesels are a great thing. I'm american, and I'd be quite willing to buy one here if it was offered in a trim I'm interested in.
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There are most definitly still cells. While your standard home portable phone usually only has one transmitter, 'cellular' phones can make use of a vast network of stations, transition between stations more or less seamlessly, etc... The transition to digital didn't affect that at all.
With more towers they can give better coverage to more users while transmitting using less power for each cell tower.
For that matter, they used the term 'cellular network' when describing a wireless computer network using multiple 802.11a/g routers. Lots of users in a small area? You can place more routers closer together and turn down the transmission power so routers on the same frequency don't interfere with each other.
Funny, I had the same reaction. But I don't recall there being wifi in my classrooms.
I'd argue the same, but I never got much beyond the headache/fatigue/nausea stages.
This reminds me of the kid who ended up in the hospital three times. It turns out that his mother bought some pants in a discount sale which had been exposed to some chemicals (I think pesticides). They desperately tracked the other pants down, only to find that all the other kids were fine... Because the pants had been washed. She had been the only one who didn't wash them.
Still, there's plenty of possibilities for the teacher's illness in the school besides the network. Anything from a transient illness to mold to unknown allergy to downright psychological.
If nothing else, building a prototype is often needed for proof-of-concept, even if the prototype is ineconomical, you can have valid hopes that by studying the operation of a test prototype will allow you to gather the knowledge to build economical production models.
Experimentation is usually part of the development process. Who knows, it might not be economical right now, but in the future the equations could change. Fresh water more expensive, fuel more expensive(making solar cheaper in relation), new materials and methods make producing the thing cheaper.
I stand corrected. On the other hand, I'd have to ask how automatic is really is if paperwork has to be submitted. I mean, if the lawyers don't submit paperwork, would it just sit in limbo forever or would the courts go 'no complaints, sentence stands'.
Saddam wasn't tried in an American or even International court. He was tried by an Iraqi court. I wouldn't count on anything being automatic.
I think added capacity is the simplest part to explain...
Removing the shuttle saves 68 tons for the thing empty, 108 tons loaded.
Add in the 25 tons that's the maximum payload the shuttle can lift, and it gets real easy to believe they can lift almost a 100 tons by redesigning the shuttle lift platform a bit to remove the need for the shuttle. You loose some tons because one of the things they have to do is move the shuttle's engines to the central tank.
There's no practical reason why we couldn't make a space station type module, or even a Bigelow one, into a satellite servicer with the addition of thrusters, which could be refueled by supply missions.
You don't do lab work in a 'shuttle', you do it on a station which stays up there. You launch and recover people using lighter and therefore cheaper vehicles.
it still would make large valuable contributions to astronomy.
On the other hand, as others have already stated technology has progressed to the point that ground telescopes are meeting and exceeding the Hubble's capabilities.
If for the cost of a servicing mission you can set up a ground observatory that can meet or exceed the hubble's capabilies and cost less to maintain, it makes no sense to keep the hubble operational.
Now, if you take those funds and dedicate them to replacing hubble with something that will again put space telescopes ahead of ground ones, that'd be great.
I wouldn't. But if they're going to be a valid threat to DeBeers they have to be indistinguishable, at least in fashions available with a simple magnifying glass.
Remember, the DeBeers won by artificial scarcity and a huge marketing effort. If it can be distinguished, they'll try to lever a 'natural is better' just like pearls.
"Oh, the actual purity, color, and clarity is lower with a natural diamond, but natural is natural, so it's more valuable!!!"
Speaking of science, how come nobody complains that we're using up all the oxygen? I mean, it takes O2 to make CO2, right? Where does is come from? Why doesn't anybody ever talk about that?
Enquiring minds would like to know. Seeing as how I require oxygen to continue living, shouldn't that be a concern as well?
How much energy is used around the world to provide food for the US?? How much energy is used around the world to provide goods for the US??
The USA is a net food exporter, so the question would be how much energy does the USA use to feed the rest of the world. As for the providing goods to the USA, that is a valid question.
Of course we use more energy than the world average, as does the europeans and anybody else industrialized. A peasant* doesn't use much energy.
*I use the term to mean more or less subsidence level farmers.
Anyway, the cost of the Hubble was $1.5B at time of launch (excluding all the operating and maintenance costs since then). If we assume the replacement cost would be about that much (less design cost, but in 2006 dollars it would be costlier - let's figure that's a wash), then another shuttle mission would be well worth it over a replacement Hubble telescope.
Then again, you'd also have to figure that they can update/improve many parts of the replacement satellite that they can't do with the old satellite. So you'd be getting a better satellite for that $500 million.
While the marginal cost per mission might be $60 million, the fact is that there's not much lifespan left on the shuttle bodies, thus including a chunck of the billion is a good idea. We also have limited shuttle frames, so we have to decide which missions are the most important, and ISS usually wins.
The 1 billion launch cost for the shuttle, combined with advances in ground observatory systems is what has led me to believe that our best solution if we are going to have an orbital telescope/observation system is to design a new one and launch a new one. Retire the hubble.
Even at the size of a schoolbus, a properly designed replacement satellite would still be a whole lot lighter than the shuttle, and safer in that you won't be launching people in it to go out in a space suit to conduct maintenance and repairs.
Spend some of the money saved developing a proper replacement for the shuttle.
I expect a stop-loss policy would trash that rule PDQ.
Why? They had the policy during wartime when they were busily drafting people.
Oh, and it's not three PH's and you're able to get out, it's three PH's and you have the option of transfering to a non-combat area.
I imagine that regrowing a limb and retraining you on the usage of it would be something that'll take years. The nerve endings are never quite the same...
Oh, and you'll never really get combat troops until you realize that there have been documented cases of injured escaping from the hospital in order to return to combat with their unit. That there are people who still want to deploy and fight after loosing limbs.
From what I've heard, they can pretty much clone skin now. The problems now are grafting it and growing enough of it fast enough.
They can culture skin artificially, as well as use various mechanical methods to 'stretch it'.
I'd have make a cautionary remark here that this could be taking the remarks out of context. Power Plants, even nuclear ones, don't have 100% uptime. There could be comments before that about a something requiring repair that means the steamer has to be shut down.
Part of the problem would be California preventing new powerplants in the name of being 'green' and allowing the shutdown of even a few plants to cause problems.
That's not to say that Enron executives aren't crooks.
All this will mean is more work. Retirement at 85 until you can get SS benefits? No thank you. Lifespan is pretty ok right now. We need better quality, not quantity of life.
Have you heard about the coming problems with SS? To many people living too long, not enough kids(upcoming workers) consuming too much SS, driving it bankrupt. SS is a pyramid scheme that worked when there were 20 workers per retiree. It's approaching a 1-1. It's unsustainable.
Think about this: It pretty much takes 18-26 years to train a worker today. People are often spending 20 years or more while retired. Increasing the working period would be a good thing for sustainability. For one thing, with another 10 years it'd be much easier for you to save up for your own retirement.
Average Lifespan: 85(made up)
Growth/Training: 20 years
Retirement at 65: 20 years retirement
You're essentially having to pay half your income to support the other periods. Add another 15 years of working life, and you'd reduce your burden each working year by a third.
If we were given potentially infinite lifespans(I remember something about accidental death would tend to limit average age to around 600), I wouldn't see why we couldn't have an almost expected multi-year vacation/retraining/career move every 20.
I think that you missed the point. The idea is that you want [i]more[/i] of these people, but you're not allowed to prevent people from breeding. So you'd be encouraging these people to have a lot of children. They help balance out the lesser qualified that are substantially likely to need more medical care per year on average, cost the same to train yet drop sooner.
;)
By not paying people money to have kids, you'd tend to limit the number they have in industrial societies. Look at Europe, without lifting a finger they have negative population growth. They're below replacement.
Fears about overpopulating the planet is so '80's man.
That's why it's [i]with qualifiers[/i]. I think you'd be better off working on eliminating altheimers and other genetic disorders at first, whether they show up early or late. Basically, focus on extending the average useful lifespan. Something like 'How many of your great-grandparents survived and were still able to function without regular assistance until they were 80?', 'Are all your grandparents still alive?'
.1% of the population that's not consistantly dumb(easier than trying to limit it to 'smart' folks), no history of a laundry list of conditions to include things like altheimers and diabetes, don't drop of heart attacks at 40-60, etc. Better yet, make it a matrix where you can trade off advantages and disadvantages.
It wouldn't be too difficult to come with with a
Sure, it'd take several generations for the effects to be seen, but I think that you'd fairly quickly have a section of population that has a markably better chance of making it to a hundred.
Sure, we can treat a diabetic with a couple hundred dollars of medical supplies a month, but the question would be why deliberatly create a human that needs it when the normal healthy adult needs it only sporatically?
They need to bring back the "Working Sample" requirement. Before they can get the patent they have to be able to produce an implimentation of the design.
I'm not saying the patent can't be somewhat generic. Just because you use materials X and Y doesn't mean that your patent can't still be valid if company B comes out with a product that uses X and almost identical to Y material Z instead, especially if they used your patent to develop it.
And those jobs are not limited to the crappiest, teenager jobs. As I have said, I first learned about this when I was looking for a job in New Orleans, back in 2000. I stood in line for more than 3 hours, with other ADULTS looking for real work, and this, was all so I could sit down at a terminal and look through all the available jobs, just like everyone else. And the jobs paid between $$ and $5 an hour. Yes, this was an official State employment agency. Yes, it was the same place where you filled out your Unemployment forms.
If the job doesn't pay enough, DON'T TAKE IT. Get more education, learn a skill, move if you have to. Statistically speaking, minimum wage laws do more to create unemployment than improve standards of living for the poorest paid. When you increase minimum wage, businesses frequently drop the amount of minimum wage labor they hire. Rather than clean the store every night, they might just sweep and to the extensive cleaning every other night, and so on. The local McDonalds fires their bun toaster (actually happened around the last minimum wage increase when I worked for them as a teen), and goes to a 'pre-toasted' bun.
For other industries, it provides a push to outsource. Why hire a worker I gotta pay $10/hour here for when I can hire one in China/India for $10/day?
How would you feel if milk tripled in price to $12 a gallon?
Depends upon why it tripled. I might not like it, but if half the milk cows had to be put down and their milk discarded because of a disease for example, I'd understand it. You see, I don't generally deal with 'feelings' I deal with facts. And the fact is, there are market forces at work. There's only so much oil at any given price point.
Another fact is that the poorest segment of society, those that don't take advantage of available education oportunities, that don't make themselves more valuable than a minimum-skill minimum wage earner, their lives are going to be more precarious, their finances more fragile, their life is going to suck compared to somebody who took advantage of education opertunities and made something of themselves and earn more than minimum wage.
Hint: I rarely earned minimum wage even as a teen, and was in a state that only matches federal minimum. Did I get a raise when they raised it? Nope. But prices rose all around me, so I instantly had less earning power.
I'd wonder how many of them were small televisions meant for the kids/kitchen/bedroom type situations. I think that the smallest HDTV that's not actually a computer monitor or intended for special use I've seen is a 27".
Besides, 41% of the TV market is HUGE, like GP said, especially since an HDTV generally costs twice as much as a SDTV of the same size(though the difference gets smaller as the TV gets larger).
Think back to tape vs CD, VCR vs DVD, CRT vs LCD. Each one had a multiyear period where the market share of the new product was a bit larger, the penetration a bit more, until it was in the majority.
I happened to check out Walmart's selection a couple days ago.
Over half of their HDTVs had HDMI that I noticed.
Comparing gas prices to other commodities seems to be a little odd. Let's say Mr. Smith has a car with a 15 gallon tank. In the Heyday of only a dollar a gallon, that was a nice tidy, simple $15 dollar fillup. Today, at $3.30 a gallon, that's $49.50. Ok, that's only an increase of $34.50. But back in creaky old 1998, when you could still get Gasoline for under a buck a gallon... EVERYTHING else did not also cost 3 times less than it does now. We don't make 3 times as much money now as we did in 1998.
Is weekly really that accurate of an estimate? I fill up about every other week, and I only have a ten gallon tank. Is less than $40 a week really that much of a killer? I spend more on games/movies.
Of course, the killer is that although gas prices have tripled, we still have 6 states in the US that do not have ANY minimum wage regulations. http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm [dol.gov] Arizona, Louisana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Back in 1998, you could and DID find jobs that paid $4 or $5 an hour (not some backwoods ranch hiring stall muckers...
And you'll generally find most of those jobs are of the high school teenager type. Unless you're a waiter or other wierd category, federal minimum is $5.15/hour. In addition, increasing mimimum wage does more to unemploy those workers than it helps them out(the rise in cost of basic services generally wipes the manadated 'raise' out).
I'm talking about mainstream jobs in major cities like Phoenix or New Orleans or Jackson or Mobile or Nashville or Charleston. Now, if you happen to live, work, and struggle in one of these states, paying three times as much for gasoline has probably moved you into publlic transportation. Why? Because you can STILL wait in line at the Employment office for 3 hours, to browse through jobs that pay $4 to $5 an hour. Except it costs you 3 times as much in fuel to go job hunting.
Then don't take the job. It's obviously not worth that much to the potential employer if they're only willing to pay that much. Either that or they have a labor pool that is willing to take those terms. Let them suffer with not having any employees. The New Orleans tourist industry has had to substantially increase their pay in order to attract workers since the hurricane. As for public transportation, sure it sucks, but isn't part of the deal with oil is that cheap sources of it are running out, so we need to wean ourselves from it? The more people taking mass transit the better. Enough people take it, it can actually start saving money and resources. Service will improve, getting more people to take it.
That 3x modifier also applies to home heating oil too
Then heat with something other than oil. Get a couple electric space heaters. Insulate your house more. Wear more clothing and keep the house cooler. Note: This is conservation, which will reduce the demand, reducing the cost of the cost of the product.
Are you aware that diesels once competed in races? And not truck/semi races either.
With today's turbodiesels, it'd be entirely possible to satisfy your desire for a two door sports car with a diesel. It might not have quite the performance on a track, but for any non-felony street use it'd be plenty.
I've driven a modern diesel van. I couldn't tell the difference between it and a gasoline engine. It started like a gasoline, ran like a gasoline, didn't smell, etc...
European turbodiesels are a great thing. I'm american, and I'd be quite willing to buy one here if it was offered in a trim I'm interested in.