No, but I know many people who have a gun "for self defense" who live in rural areas with nearly no, or no violent crime rate other than domestic violence which is actually made worse by gun ownership. They aren't out shooting innocent people. But they are living in a form of fear.
We don't lock our doors. the cops occasionally have something to do in our area, but it's rare. Living life in preparation for an exceedingly unlikely event is paranoia. Paranoia may increase survivability for a very small number of people for whom the very unlikely becomes a reality, but if you aren't one of them, it makes your life worse.
Watching the news makes us americans paranoid. I live in maine and the few violent crimes we do have get plenty of airplay. You'd think it was common if you just watched the news and didn't think too deeply. It's easy to forget that the stories we are hearing are ALL of them, and there are a lot of people in this state who have never even heard a gunshot fired other than during hunting season or target practice.
The fantasy the OP was referring to was the fantasy that most of us outside of major metro areas are ever, ever, ever going to want or need a gun for defense. Within major metro areas, it would be easier and better to call a cop and run.
it's not a straw man to illustrate the limits of the free market theory you are doggedly clinging to in spite of all rational evidence that it doesn't work. it does have limits. It has limits when one side is far more invested in the outcome than the other (medicine, fire fighting) or when one side has far more information about the transaction than the other (practically all professional services).
There is no external, unnatural, government force at work that prevents your magic solutions from coming to light today, even in a code environment: it doesn't happen, because it *can't* happen, because the knowledge requirement for it TO happen would require everyone involved to have professional level understanding of multiple disciplines... not because no one ever thought about doing a private house inspection service before. They already exist: they just aren't up to the true task that codes cover already.
Again, removing codes would have no impact on my business whatsoever. It would, however, have a huge and detrimental effect to the quality of the housing stock, our national energy usage, the health of occupants of buildings of all types in ways both overt and insidious, fire related deaths and destruction, water resource management in sensitive areas, pollution, and our economy as a result of all of these problems.
nice ad hominem there. I have no vested interest in codes: I run on the "Quality" end of the spectrum, and I'm not a builder. I design high end heating systems... everything I do exceeds code minimum significantly. I would likely be "hired as an expert" in your new paradigm. There is always a market for people who know their craft, and frankly, I know mine well enough not to worry.
Your premise is wildly flawed because you apparently have no idea how the construction industry works. If you did, you'd know how silly your entire idea is. "hiring an expert" for every aspect of a home purchase is simply not feasible, and having documentation for them to review on the aspects of the building no longer in view is unlikely at best.
the very best you could ever hope for is that the free market would generate, independently, third party verification services that, in the end, would be basically identical to current code inspection infrastructure. a general "jack of all trades" inspecting a system for best practices by following prescribed checklists, once in awhile getting a really good one who knows some aspect of the building science far better than most. Insurance companies would require such an inspection for acceptable insurance rates and you'd be in exactly the same boat you're in now. but that's BEST case. Worst case is that does NOT happen, and all the hack work out there triples in volume overnight as builders and sellers and current home owners work the information disparity between them and potential purchasers.
I'll remind you most homes are built to code minimum right now. That's not coincidence. That is what the market will bear, mostly because the consumer has no idea what a good deal is or not has only very limited abilities to find the information they need to make an informed decision, and there is NO WAY to get expert verification on all the important aspects of a home purchase.
Hell, you're moving to a new neighborhood. you don't know the contractors there you could even hire for inspection, who's reputable, who's really good? People who have lived in areas their whole lives don't even know this... until AFTER they have had to work with several contractors typically. Heck, I exist primarily because people can't find people they trust on the ground where they live for this kind of work already!
Home buying is far too complicated, far too restricted by available supply and location and non-quality factors, and far too big-ticket and long-term to expect free market solutions will just solve all major problems. Codes are, by a HUGE margin, the easiest way to ensure a bare minimum of safety and performance expectation is guaranteed in the market.
and that's important, as we figured out many years ago when buildings burning down took out entire neighborhoods because of a lack of fire safety codes. Well, "we" meaning everyone except libertarians, who of course would prefer we all haggle with a couple of different fire departments on the site of our burning house fire on who was going to put it out and for how much instead of, say, pulling our kids out.
bullshit. I've been involved with the building industry for those two decades, and I've worked extensively with buildings in all age ranges. I know what the "quality" you speak of has been. while it goes down in the boom times, of course, it's not that great outside of booms either.
you simply can't have a dedication to quality when the purchaser doesn't really know what they are buying, the person doing the building almost never has a vested interest in quality, and the educational load to make a typical purchaser "know better" is wildly high. here's a secret you may not know: building science (and all related disciplines) have enough to learn that even professionals in the field often don't know all that much.
gov regs always have problems. but some basic things like fire codes, energy codes and the like have been proven winners. they are not perfect, nothing is, but they are way, way better than the nothing you propose. We used to have nothing. It didn't work. in reality, we need people to be able to avoid having to train as high end home builders just to buy a home.
I mean seriously. You're saying home buyers should know all the best practices required with *pool construction* and should review all that documentation when buying a home with a pool. There are about a dozen other major areas of knowledge they would never get through to learn FIRST that are far more important. Your entire premise is wildly out of tune with anything ever achievable in the market.
that's ridiculous. the vast majority of homeowners could never possibly be well educated enough about all the stuff that could be short-cut invisibly in home building as to render the idea that "you'd have to maintain documentation" quite silly. Especially when huge numbers of homes are built in boom periods when there isn't adequate housing... and stick around for 100+ years after the build finished profiteering.
you have an awful lot of faith in this free market of yours. I'm here to tell you.... neck deep in the building industry 30+ years after the first "energy crisis"... you're crazy.
You know how much of the country's building stock uses code minimum insulation (in name, but usually poorly installed)? nearly all of it. why? because usually the people building do not have a vested interest in the outcome and their clients are largely not educated enough to even know what the difference is... any single thing that increases the cost of the house is largely attacked by large scale builders because it reduces their potential bottom line. their calculation is simply:
How much can you afford for a house? - How cheaply can I build a house you will buy? = $Profit$
and capitalize on every bit of ignorance every single homeowner has because to guard against it you'd have to be a professional in every trade used in building a house. I know residential energy, so I know the shortcuts taken there. They are present in nearly every house.
Now, I can cue the dozen tricks you could come up with to solve all these issues. I'll save you the trouble: it doesn't happen. Sure we could, might, in some other world self-organize the entire building market to allow potential buyers to be perfectly informed (or even know if they are or are not perfectly informed) about a house.
But that world is not this one. If it was, it would have happened ALREADY. Nothing is stopping the market from acting more decisively to inform homeowners. it did not. THUS WE INVENTED CODES INSTEAD OF WAITING ANY LONGER
it's a rational response making society truly useful instead of standing around with our hands in our pockets while the next round of cost cutting allows entire developments to burn to the ground because someone wanted to squeeze two extra lots out of their parcel and save on plumbing costs.
bull. cross pollination uses normal plant growth processes. Direct gene manipulation does not.
One has been occurring since the beginning of time. One has been occurring for about twenty years at best. that's not a real number, but the point remains.
Find me an instance of a previously safe variety of food suddenly resulting in a variety that causes long term, but not immediately noticeable, damage in an organism, simply by using standard techniques like cross pollination or selective breeding (not chemical techniques).
Oddly enough, that's not very likely.
If your argument is that we also use other, dangerous, poorly understood methods to manipulate genes other than basically organic methods, I'm with you there. I wouldn't differentiate between them and GMO. but this has not being going on for "thousands of years" as you've said. just the last hundred or so, at most.
natural mutation and variation doesn't seem to have ever developed the kinds of issues we see with, say, chemical enhancements to pesticides or in fertilizer.
If I, as a consumer, wish to avoid GM food, I should have that right. Maybe I just wish to avoid it for political reasons. Maybe I wish to take my chances with the "oh so scary" normal mutations of plant rather than brand new methods invented in my lifetime. My reason doesn't even matter: I should have a right to make that decision for myself. To make that decision, I must be informed.
A company having the ability to prevent me from accessing that information is simply abhorrent. It's as anti-free market as could possibly be. Never mind an affront to the rights of people to determine for themselves what they consider to be acceptable or not acceptable risks.
I have no idea what the effects of GM are. I don't really care, either. I would prefer not to gamble, and instead continue to eat the same basic foodstuffs we've been eating for eons with just natural variation or, at best, variations that occur within the realm of normal evolutionary processes. for the most part, of course, I don't refuse GM food as a rule, I would just prefer to limit exposure. and I don't really care if you think that is rational or not, though I think immediate faith in the safety of new forms of genetic manipulation is a bit irrational, personally. History shows us we rarely understand the full downside of new tech of any kind until long after it is introduced into the "wild". Ignoring that is definitely irrational.
we've been seriously getting into the genome for all of about ten years now, and you claim that "genes don't care what organism they came from"?
I claim that the entire science of modern genetics is in its infancy. Maybe you should take just a little dose of humility, in light of all the chemical "advances" we made over the last century that we now find may also be making us sick. We were promised better living through chemicals, and sometimes that's true, but that doesn't mean that it's the "safe route". Organic food is safer than non-organic food, and every year more studies prove it. All those chemicals were "tested" as well.
replanting the potatoes that made it longer into the fall the next time around is not even in the same league as direct manipulation of genes. Nor is selecting for positive traits. Creating traits that no plant has ever seen before *just might* have ramifications we don't yet understand. Check that: I'd posit it's almost CERTAIN to have ramifications we don't yet understand. We simply haven't been doing it long enough to understand what we are really doing. the interactions between genes is known only to be incredibly complex, barely understood, and only a part of the overall puzzle that is biological interaction.
wow, lost the forest for the trees. hard to save $8k in one year with a $2080/year gas bill on the line. *ahem*... cough cough.
with past figures cost of operating for electricity that is 75% more efficient than gas would be about $600. Six year payback and $3k cheaper given $8k replacement every 8 years.
with the lease all owners of the car bear the cost of the battery replacement. EVEN IF if increases the cost of ownership, it does so evenly, predictably. the Predictability is key. I can figure "this car costs X dollars a month to run plus maintenance" with little regard for what additional the maintenance might be if there are no real big ticket items to consider. That predictability will make the perceived value of the car pretty straightforward for a purchaser. pay attention to the very important work, "perceived" there, which is critical to resale value.
with purchased batteries, only the one holding the "hot potato" at replacement time bears that cost. so anyone considering buying it must consider a single several thousand dollar replacement into their plan. rational, reasonable or not, they will usually subtract that value from what they would have been willing to pay for the car. You see this in home buying constantly: set the price, and subtract out the "necessary repairs" in many cases.
If you don't see a difference between those two scenarios, then I have a 120k mileage minivan I'd like to sell you. You can average out the cost of ownership in your head to calculate probability, and I'll just hope you ignore the clunking in the transmission.
Whether it changes the overall economics of the car in its cradle to grave operating costs is irrelevant to any particular buyer unless that buyer is going to actually own it cradle to grave, unless it changes it to such a degree as to cross some other tipping point (like making it cheaper to run gas, for instance).
Most people are happier not gambling with new technology. that's why the resale value plummets. not because the overall distributed cost of the batteries makes the economics poor. even at an $8k replacement (with no trade in value on the battery pack, I guess) a $40/week gas bill would see that pay back in a year, roughly, taking a swing at a 75% efficiency benefit, $3/gallon gas and 0.12/kwh electricity. that's an amazing payback rate. even half or quarter that is totally acceptable if there are any other benefits of reduced maintenance as their should be with EVs.
Anyone doing that math would be unlikely to have the battery pack economics change their buying pattern, as long as they can qualify for a loan or have the cash. but we're talking about regular consumers here. many people are challenged to do even just a basic payback calculation with a predictable, steady operating cost handed to them, but a lot more can do that rationally than will rationally dissect the replacement value of a battery pack they know nothing about, with little track record, vs the cost of gas which they already live with.
not true. by leasing the batteries, it's a cost of operation just like gas is for a gas car. You don't see cars devalue because you have to fill the tank occasionally. Obviously the cost of operation has an impact on both value and resale value, but it's predictable and even.
on the other hand, if you buy batteries that require replacement en masse, you are playing roullette. you then deduct the full cost of the battery pack from the value of the car if you are buying near the replacement time, just as when you buy a car near a major mile-stone mileage point you might take into account likely replacement costs for certain major components of the car that are likely to come up soon like the exhaust or what have you. Then the full cost of that battery pack must be borne out by you, new owner, even if you're only going to own the car for 2 or 3 or 5 years. the cost/benefit of then buying that car goes down.
I think "battery lease" makes a hell of a lot of sense. removes any guesswork or trepidation about batterylife. I guess the question is... does the *car manufacturer* have that same trepidation about assuming the risk?
If they charge too much without making a couple of phone calls, that's true.
but you forget that there are a limited number of serious oil players in the world. they all have a finite resource they are interested in maximizing the value of.
what possible advantage would it be for them to pump it out as fast as possible at the lowest possible margin when they could simply slow it down a bit and multiply their margin many times over? especially when all it takes is informal agreement not to drop the price too much and EVERYONE involved can be super rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams until the oil runs out? you seriously think they are interested in making it run out faster, for less money?
free markets never live long, because after a certain amount of consolidation occurs, syndicates form whether officially or not and pricing is more or less controlled by a few players from that point on.
so if they sold a plastic liner that was guaranteed to give you cancer, but it was cheap, that would be ok because fuck it, they should have known better?
it's about diminishing returns. at some point, more money doesn't help that much. and the whole point is that they are not thankful for the money: they are who they are, not who they are paid to be. they are then beholden only to their constituency.
I think most people agree that there is too much "money in politics". but then talk about public financing to basically destroy that as a major problem, and wooooo boy, that's "socialism"!
first, again, I would point out that it is not "rules against bribery" that end corruption. We have "rules against bribery" too. other countries have very strict campaign rules and they include large doses of PUBLIC FINANCING. that's a key element.
here, we make politicians raise their own money to campaign. they have to raise it from somewhere. that's why it's complicated to figure out what is a "bribe" and what isn't here, because we FORCE our politicians to, as you would call it, "take bribes" legally. I'm promoting the end of it. I don't think you or your mods even understand what I'm talking about judging by your responses.
Nobody just "got rid of corruption" because they are so great and noble. it takes at the very least a structural change in the way elections are run to reduce corruption.
also, if you think corruption doesn't happen because you don't read about it, you're pretty naive. you may very well have lower rates of corruption, but please stop acting like the problem is nonexistent.
the cost is largely about buying media time though. I'm saying make media give time for public campaigns. they use public airwaves or are owned publicly, they should be harnessed to provide a basic community service which is to inform the public.
a combination of that and public financing would both reduce the cost of campaigning and largely remove money from the equation.
the point is that you can minimize the damage money can do in politics. this will minimize corruption, since being corrupt then offers no advantage to campaigning and keeping your job. Nothing *eliminates* corruption. You can only minimize it. it's like the 'war on drugs' in that respect.
I believe many of those other countries have public financing as a very important part of their corruption reduction scheme. it's illegal to take bribes here too, it's just a lot harder to differentiate between what is a bribe and what is a "campaign contribution" or other such legally allowed transaction.
I don't think that's necessary. I believe it's been shown in studies that there is a basic threshold for monetary expenditures in elections: below that, and your message doesn't reach the whole electorate well enough. but beyond that point, more money doesn't help.
we will never keep money out of politics. there is just too many ways to give gifts, favors, contributions, bribes, you name it.
However, we CAN make political survival not dependent on private money. the answer is public campaign financing to adequate levels for well qualified candidates, coupled with free access to the airwaves for set amounts of time for well qualified candidates. I wouldn't even be opposed to some legislated mandate for airtime/space in any media outlet owned by a public corporation.
if that were done, private money may still buy favor to some degree, but at least clean politicians wouldn't be handicapped compared to ones that are happily bought and paid for.
double the cost of electricity. do it nearly all renewably. accept that doubled electricity costs are the costs of SAFE, SUSTAINABLE, CLEAN power. and call that the baselines requirement of civilized power generation. If it's too expensive to do with safe, clean, sustainable power, it's too expensive to do, period.
oil is for plastic. and less and less of that as time goes on.
it can absolutely be done.
nuclear power in a best case scenario still leaves us guarding a pile of dangerous material (not just toxic, but dangerous to allow to fall into the wrong hands) for hundreds of years. that's a burden you'd place on countries and generations not even conceived of yet, through circumstances no one on earth can plausibly predict including very real possibilities of major societal collapses (thus leaving such material basically unguarded). That ignores any risks or danger in procuring, processing, reprocessing, and in the actual power generation itself. Never mind non-meltdown problems such as the radioactive material leak occurring in vermont right now and moving towards ground water supplies for communities in 3 states.
that is a risk. it's one that doesn't trouble my life or your life, probably... we can probably assume that we could keep it safe for 50 years. maybe. but hundreds? that's unlikely.
Forget risk. we don't need it, as long as we get over the need for energy to be dirt cheap. double the cost of electricity, covert everything to it or to fuels produced with it, and let's get on with a clean, safe future. soon.
the US is the one running totally unsustainable trade deficits by engaging in elective wars during times of prosperity when we should instead be paying down our debt to prepare for the bad times.
don't worry. they will manage to find some mid-level patsy they can throw under the bus. he may do some time and probably finds himself well taken care of, somehow, when he gets out.
shit, drug dealers and gang members consider jail time part of the job. it is not difficult to expect that megacorporations with billions in profit at stake might have enough benefits available to coerce a few people to take a similar fall without ratting.
the question is... and I agree with you on the problem with the corporate system... even without it, could you ever really hold decision makers liable? or could they always find a "human shield" to take the blame in return for an appropriate level of compensation?
wow, that is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read. If anything you could say that same thing about capitalism, where the goal is nothing but amassing wealth, which is power, and is generally most easily achieved through destruction.
but you drink that kool aid (tm). It's got electrolytes!!!
Every religion has its wacko violent side. the question is entirely, is the religion in a place that has conditions that promote violent and extreme behaviour. Even here in the US, when we go into recession hate group activity rises. Imagine if the US were a near perpetual war zone because of both local and foreign competing interests. Things would be different. They would be like the middle east, except instead of the Taliban it would be WBC and Stormfront battling for supremacy.
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No, but I know many people who have a gun "for self defense" who live in rural areas with nearly no, or no violent crime rate other than domestic violence which is actually made worse by gun ownership. They aren't out shooting innocent people. But they are living in a form of fear.
We don't lock our doors. the cops occasionally have something to do in our area, but it's rare. Living life in preparation for an exceedingly unlikely event is paranoia. Paranoia may increase survivability for a very small number of people for whom the very unlikely becomes a reality, but if you aren't one of them, it makes your life worse.
Watching the news makes us americans paranoid. I live in maine and the few violent crimes we do have get plenty of airplay. You'd think it was common if you just watched the news and didn't think too deeply. It's easy to forget that the stories we are hearing are ALL of them, and there are a lot of people in this state who have never even heard a gunshot fired other than during hunting season or target practice.
The fantasy the OP was referring to was the fantasy that most of us outside of major metro areas are ever, ever, ever going to want or need a gun for defense. Within major metro areas, it would be easier and better to call a cop and run.
it's not a straw man to illustrate the limits of the free market theory you are doggedly clinging to in spite of all rational evidence that it doesn't work. it does have limits. It has limits when one side is far more invested in the outcome than the other (medicine, fire fighting) or when one side has far more information about the transaction than the other (practically all professional services).
There is no external, unnatural, government force at work that prevents your magic solutions from coming to light today, even in a code environment: it doesn't happen, because it *can't* happen, because the knowledge requirement for it TO happen would require everyone involved to have professional level understanding of multiple disciplines... not because no one ever thought about doing a private house inspection service before. They already exist: they just aren't up to the true task that codes cover already.
Again, removing codes would have no impact on my business whatsoever. It would, however, have a huge and detrimental effect to the quality of the housing stock, our national energy usage, the health of occupants of buildings of all types in ways both overt and insidious, fire related deaths and destruction, water resource management in sensitive areas, pollution, and our economy as a result of all of these problems.
nice ad hominem there. I have no vested interest in codes: I run on the "Quality" end of the spectrum, and I'm not a builder. I design high end heating systems... everything I do exceeds code minimum significantly. I would likely be "hired as an expert" in your new paradigm. There is always a market for people who know their craft, and frankly, I know mine well enough not to worry.
Your premise is wildly flawed because you apparently have no idea how the construction industry works. If you did, you'd know how silly your entire idea is. "hiring an expert" for every aspect of a home purchase is simply not feasible, and having documentation for them to review on the aspects of the building no longer in view is unlikely at best.
the very best you could ever hope for is that the free market would generate, independently, third party verification services that, in the end, would be basically identical to current code inspection infrastructure. a general "jack of all trades" inspecting a system for best practices by following prescribed checklists, once in awhile getting a really good one who knows some aspect of the building science far better than most. Insurance companies would require such an inspection for acceptable insurance rates and you'd be in exactly the same boat you're in now. but that's BEST case. Worst case is that does NOT happen, and all the hack work out there triples in volume overnight as builders and sellers and current home owners work the information disparity between them and potential purchasers.
I'll remind you most homes are built to code minimum right now. That's not coincidence. That is what the market will bear, mostly because the consumer has no idea what a good deal is or not has only very limited abilities to find the information they need to make an informed decision, and there is NO WAY to get expert verification on all the important aspects of a home purchase.
Hell, you're moving to a new neighborhood. you don't know the contractors there you could even hire for inspection, who's reputable, who's really good? People who have lived in areas their whole lives don't even know this... until AFTER they have had to work with several contractors typically. Heck, I exist primarily because people can't find people they trust on the ground where they live for this kind of work already!
Home buying is far too complicated, far too restricted by available supply and location and non-quality factors, and far too big-ticket and long-term to expect free market solutions will just solve all major problems. Codes are, by a HUGE margin, the easiest way to ensure a bare minimum of safety and performance expectation is guaranteed in the market.
and that's important, as we figured out many years ago when buildings burning down took out entire neighborhoods because of a lack of fire safety codes. Well, "we" meaning everyone except libertarians, who of course would prefer we all haggle with a couple of different fire departments on the site of our burning house fire on who was going to put it out and for how much instead of, say, pulling our kids out.
bullshit. I've been involved with the building industry for those two decades, and I've worked extensively with buildings in all age ranges. I know what the "quality" you speak of has been. while it goes down in the boom times, of course, it's not that great outside of booms either.
you simply can't have a dedication to quality when the purchaser doesn't really know what they are buying, the person doing the building almost never has a vested interest in quality, and the educational load to make a typical purchaser "know better" is wildly high. here's a secret you may not know: building science (and all related disciplines) have enough to learn that even professionals in the field often don't know all that much.
gov regs always have problems. but some basic things like fire codes, energy codes and the like have been proven winners. they are not perfect, nothing is, but they are way, way better than the nothing you propose. We used to have nothing. It didn't work. in reality, we need people to be able to avoid having to train as high end home builders just to buy a home.
I mean seriously. You're saying home buyers should know all the best practices required with *pool construction* and should review all that documentation when buying a home with a pool. There are about a dozen other major areas of knowledge they would never get through to learn FIRST that are far more important. Your entire premise is wildly out of tune with anything ever achievable in the market.
that's ridiculous. the vast majority of homeowners could never possibly be well educated enough about all the stuff that could be short-cut invisibly in home building as to render the idea that "you'd have to maintain documentation" quite silly. Especially when huge numbers of homes are built in boom periods when there isn't adequate housing... and stick around for 100+ years after the build finished profiteering.
you have an awful lot of faith in this free market of yours. I'm here to tell you.... neck deep in the building industry 30+ years after the first "energy crisis"... you're crazy.
You know how much of the country's building stock uses code minimum insulation (in name, but usually poorly installed)? nearly all of it. why? because usually the people building do not have a vested interest in the outcome and their clients are largely not educated enough to even know what the difference is... any single thing that increases the cost of the house is largely attacked by large scale builders because it reduces their potential bottom line. their calculation is simply:
How much can you afford for a house?
- How cheaply can I build a house you will buy?
= $Profit$
and capitalize on every bit of ignorance every single homeowner has because to guard against it you'd have to be a professional in every trade used in building a house. I know residential energy, so I know the shortcuts taken there. They are present in nearly every house.
Now, I can cue the dozen tricks you could come up with to solve all these issues. I'll save you the trouble: it doesn't happen. Sure we could, might, in some other world self-organize the entire building market to allow potential buyers to be perfectly informed (or even know if they are or are not perfectly informed) about a house.
But that world is not this one. If it was, it would have happened ALREADY. Nothing is stopping the market from acting more decisively to inform homeowners. it did not. THUS WE INVENTED CODES INSTEAD OF WAITING ANY LONGER
it's a rational response making society truly useful instead of standing around with our hands in our pockets while the next round of cost cutting allows entire developments to burn to the ground because someone wanted to squeeze two extra lots out of their parcel and save on plumbing costs.
it's called taxes, and most of us already pay them.
bull. cross pollination uses normal plant growth processes. Direct gene manipulation does not.
One has been occurring since the beginning of time. One has been occurring for about twenty years at best. that's not a real number, but the point remains.
Find me an instance of a previously safe variety of food suddenly resulting in a variety that causes long term, but not immediately noticeable, damage in an organism, simply by using standard techniques like cross pollination or selective breeding (not chemical techniques).
Oddly enough, that's not very likely.
If your argument is that we also use other, dangerous, poorly understood methods to manipulate genes other than basically organic methods, I'm with you there. I wouldn't differentiate between them and GMO. but this has not being going on for "thousands of years" as you've said. just the last hundred or so, at most.
natural mutation and variation doesn't seem to have ever developed the kinds of issues we see with, say, chemical enhancements to pesticides or in fertilizer.
If I, as a consumer, wish to avoid GM food, I should have that right. Maybe I just wish to avoid it for political reasons. Maybe I wish to take my chances with the "oh so scary" normal mutations of plant rather than brand new methods invented in my lifetime. My reason doesn't even matter: I should have a right to make that decision for myself. To make that decision, I must be informed.
A company having the ability to prevent me from accessing that information is simply abhorrent. It's as anti-free market as could possibly be. Never mind an affront to the rights of people to determine for themselves what they consider to be acceptable or not acceptable risks.
I have no idea what the effects of GM are. I don't really care, either. I would prefer not to gamble, and instead continue to eat the same basic foodstuffs we've been eating for eons with just natural variation or, at best, variations that occur within the realm of normal evolutionary processes. for the most part, of course, I don't refuse GM food as a rule, I would just prefer to limit exposure. and I don't really care if you think that is rational or not, though I think immediate faith in the safety of new forms of genetic manipulation is a bit irrational, personally. History shows us we rarely understand the full downside of new tech of any kind until long after it is introduced into the "wild". Ignoring that is definitely irrational.
Wow, really?
we've been seriously getting into the genome for all of about ten years now, and you claim that "genes don't care what organism they came from"?
I claim that the entire science of modern genetics is in its infancy. Maybe you should take just a little dose of humility, in light of all the chemical "advances" we made over the last century that we now find may also be making us sick. We were promised better living through chemicals, and sometimes that's true, but that doesn't mean that it's the "safe route". Organic food is safer than non-organic food, and every year more studies prove it. All those chemicals were "tested" as well.
replanting the potatoes that made it longer into the fall the next time around is not even in the same league as direct manipulation of genes. Nor is selecting for positive traits. Creating traits that no plant has ever seen before *just might* have ramifications we don't yet understand. Check that: I'd posit it's almost CERTAIN to have ramifications we don't yet understand. We simply haven't been doing it long enough to understand what we are really doing. the interactions between genes is known only to be incredibly complex, barely understood, and only a part of the overall puzzle that is biological interaction.
wow, lost the forest for the trees. hard to save $8k in one year with a $2080/year gas bill on the line. *ahem*... cough cough.
with past figures cost of operating for electricity that is 75% more efficient than gas would be about $600. Six year payback and $3k cheaper given $8k replacement every 8 years.
with the lease all owners of the car bear the cost of the battery replacement. EVEN IF if increases the cost of ownership, it does so evenly, predictably. the Predictability is key. I can figure "this car costs X dollars a month to run plus maintenance" with little regard for what additional the maintenance might be if there are no real big ticket items to consider. That predictability will make the perceived value of the car pretty straightforward for a purchaser. pay attention to the very important work, "perceived" there, which is critical to resale value.
with purchased batteries, only the one holding the "hot potato" at replacement time bears that cost. so anyone considering buying it must consider a single several thousand dollar replacement into their plan. rational, reasonable or not, they will usually subtract that value from what they would have been willing to pay for the car. You see this in home buying constantly: set the price, and subtract out the "necessary repairs" in many cases.
If you don't see a difference between those two scenarios, then I have a 120k mileage minivan I'd like to sell you. You can average out the cost of ownership in your head to calculate probability, and I'll just hope you ignore the clunking in the transmission.
Whether it changes the overall economics of the car in its cradle to grave operating costs is irrelevant to any particular buyer unless that buyer is going to actually own it cradle to grave, unless it changes it to such a degree as to cross some other tipping point (like making it cheaper to run gas, for instance).
Most people are happier not gambling with new technology. that's why the resale value plummets. not because the overall distributed cost of the batteries makes the economics poor. even at an $8k replacement (with no trade in value on the battery pack, I guess) a $40/week gas bill would see that pay back in a year, roughly, taking a swing at a 75% efficiency benefit, $3/gallon gas and 0.12/kwh electricity. that's an amazing payback rate. even half or quarter that is totally acceptable if there are any other benefits of reduced maintenance as their should be with EVs.
Anyone doing that math would be unlikely to have the battery pack economics change their buying pattern, as long as they can qualify for a loan or have the cash. but we're talking about regular consumers here. many people are challenged to do even just a basic payback calculation with a predictable, steady operating cost handed to them, but a lot more can do that rationally than will rationally dissect the replacement value of a battery pack they know nothing about, with little track record, vs the cost of gas which they already live with.
not true. by leasing the batteries, it's a cost of operation just like gas is for a gas car. You don't see cars devalue because you have to fill the tank occasionally. Obviously the cost of operation has an impact on both value and resale value, but it's predictable and even.
on the other hand, if you buy batteries that require replacement en masse, you are playing roullette. you then deduct the full cost of the battery pack from the value of the car if you are buying near the replacement time, just as when you buy a car near a major mile-stone mileage point you might take into account likely replacement costs for certain major components of the car that are likely to come up soon like the exhaust or what have you. Then the full cost of that battery pack must be borne out by you, new owner, even if you're only going to own the car for 2 or 3 or 5 years. the cost/benefit of then buying that car goes down.
I think "battery lease" makes a hell of a lot of sense. removes any guesswork or trepidation about batterylife. I guess the question is... does the *car manufacturer* have that same trepidation about assuming the risk?
If they charge too much without making a couple of phone calls, that's true.
but you forget that there are a limited number of serious oil players in the world. they all have a finite resource they are interested in maximizing the value of.
what possible advantage would it be for them to pump it out as fast as possible at the lowest possible margin when they could simply slow it down a bit and multiply their margin many times over? especially when all it takes is informal agreement not to drop the price too much and EVERYONE involved can be super rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams until the oil runs out? you seriously think they are interested in making it run out faster, for less money?
free markets never live long, because after a certain amount of consolidation occurs, syndicates form whether officially or not and pricing is more or less controlled by a few players from that point on.
so if they sold a plastic liner that was guaranteed to give you cancer, but it was cheap, that would be ok because fuck it, they should have known better?
"that should work out well"...
that's not a free market solution. that is opting out of the market entirely to meet your needs because the free market has not.
it's about diminishing returns. at some point, more money doesn't help that much. and the whole point is that they are not thankful for the money: they are who they are, not who they are paid to be. they are then beholden only to their constituency.
it's interesting.
I think most people agree that there is too much "money in politics". but then talk about public financing to basically destroy that as a major problem, and wooooo boy, that's "socialism"!
cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing.
first, again, I would point out that it is not "rules against bribery" that end corruption. We have "rules against bribery" too. other countries have very strict campaign rules and they include large doses of PUBLIC FINANCING. that's a key element.
here, we make politicians raise their own money to campaign. they have to raise it from somewhere. that's why it's complicated to figure out what is a "bribe" and what isn't here, because we FORCE our politicians to, as you would call it, "take bribes" legally. I'm promoting the end of it. I don't think you or your mods even understand what I'm talking about judging by your responses.
Nobody just "got rid of corruption" because they are so great and noble. it takes at the very least a structural change in the way elections are run to reduce corruption.
also, if you think corruption doesn't happen because you don't read about it, you're pretty naive. you may very well have lower rates of corruption, but please stop acting like the problem is nonexistent.
the cost is largely about buying media time though. I'm saying make media give time for public campaigns. they use public airwaves or are owned publicly, they should be harnessed to provide a basic community service which is to inform the public.
a combination of that and public financing would both reduce the cost of campaigning and largely remove money from the equation.
did you finish reading my post?
the point is that you can minimize the damage money can do in politics. this will minimize corruption, since being corrupt then offers no advantage to campaigning and keeping your job. Nothing *eliminates* corruption. You can only minimize it. it's like the 'war on drugs' in that respect.
I believe many of those other countries have public financing as a very important part of their corruption reduction scheme. it's illegal to take bribes here too, it's just a lot harder to differentiate between what is a bribe and what is a "campaign contribution" or other such legally allowed transaction.
I don't think that's necessary. I believe it's been shown in studies that there is a basic threshold for monetary expenditures in elections: below that, and your message doesn't reach the whole electorate well enough. but beyond that point, more money doesn't help.
we will never keep money out of politics. there is just too many ways to give gifts, favors, contributions, bribes, you name it.
However, we CAN make political survival not dependent on private money. the answer is public campaign financing to adequate levels for well qualified candidates, coupled with free access to the airwaves for set amounts of time for well qualified candidates. I wouldn't even be opposed to some legislated mandate for airtime/space in any media outlet owned by a public corporation.
if that were done, private money may still buy favor to some degree, but at least clean politicians wouldn't be handicapped compared to ones that are happily bought and paid for.
double the cost of electricity. do it nearly all renewably. accept that doubled electricity costs are the costs of SAFE, SUSTAINABLE, CLEAN power. and call that the baselines requirement of civilized power generation. If it's too expensive to do with safe, clean, sustainable power, it's too expensive to do, period.
oil is for plastic. and less and less of that as time goes on.
it can absolutely be done.
nuclear power in a best case scenario still leaves us guarding a pile of dangerous material (not just toxic, but dangerous to allow to fall into the wrong hands) for hundreds of years. that's a burden you'd place on countries and generations not even conceived of yet, through circumstances no one on earth can plausibly predict including very real possibilities of major societal collapses (thus leaving such material basically unguarded). That ignores any risks or danger in procuring, processing, reprocessing, and in the actual power generation itself. Never mind non-meltdown problems such as the radioactive material leak occurring in vermont right now and moving towards ground water supplies for communities in 3 states.
that is a risk. it's one that doesn't trouble my life or your life, probably... we can probably assume that we could keep it safe for 50 years. maybe. but hundreds? that's unlikely.
Forget risk. we don't need it, as long as we get over the need for energy to be dirt cheap. double the cost of electricity, covert everything to it or to fuels produced with it, and let's get on with a clean, safe future. soon.
that's the EU. Sweden appears to be doing quite well and at least wikipedia is calling it "sustainable". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sweden
the US is the one running totally unsustainable trade deficits by engaging in elective wars during times of prosperity when we should instead be paying down our debt to prepare for the bad times.
don't worry. they will manage to find some mid-level patsy they can throw under the bus. he may do some time and probably finds himself well taken care of, somehow, when he gets out.
shit, drug dealers and gang members consider jail time part of the job. it is not difficult to expect that megacorporations with billions in profit at stake might have enough benefits available to coerce a few people to take a similar fall without ratting.
the question is... and I agree with you on the problem with the corporate system... even without it, could you ever really hold decision makers liable? or could they always find a "human shield" to take the blame in return for an appropriate level of compensation?
wow, that is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read. If anything you could say that same thing about capitalism, where the goal is nothing but amassing wealth, which is power, and is generally most easily achieved through destruction.
but you drink that kool aid (tm). It's got electrolytes!!!
Every religion has its wacko violent side. the question is entirely, is the religion in a place that has conditions that promote violent and extreme behaviour. Even here in the US, when we go into recession hate group activity rises. Imagine if the US were a near perpetual war zone because of both local and foreign competing interests. Things would be different. They would be like the middle east, except instead of the Taliban it would be WBC and Stormfront battling for supremacy.