I'm about 20 pounds over my 'ideal' weight. However, to try to get there requires restricting my diet to an extreme point and results in my body doing the whole slowdown thing to make it even harder and me feel like crud.
So focus more on the exercise (i.e., stop driving) and less on the diets. It may be tough at first, but soon you'll start to feel better than you have in a long, long time.
Also, dieting is stupid. Just be sensible about what you eat. The number one most important thing is not to buy unhealthy snacks and keep them in your home. A little discipline at the supermarket goes a long, long, long way.
To summarize, somehow riding mass transit is far healthier than driving. So, you sit your butt down in mass transit, or you sit your butt down in a car. I don't see the difference. You could try to nitpick
No nitpicking required.
Most people live farther from the transit stop (especially if they take a train) than from where they park their car.
And most people's offices are farther from the transit stop (especially if they take a train) than from the car park in the basement.
So while you personally may have parked your car across town once, that doesn't illustrate the typical situation.
Also, of course, riding trains often involves climbing stairs.
P.S. I live on the 24th floor of a highrise. My girlfriend has just instituted a "no riding up in the lift unless carrying groceries" policy. If I don't plan my day well I can be climbing 120 flights of stairs (which happened yesterday). Try THAT kind of exercise built into your routine in a suburb.
The difference in congestion levels between Singapore and here (Kuala Lumpur, a few hours up the road, with no sensible congestion measures) is huge. Traffic almost always flows at a reasonable pace in the ERP areas in Singapore, no matter what time of day.
A few quick excerpts from the wikipedia article I linked, for those too lazy to click: "The deducted amount is dependent on the time and location (varying from S$0.25 to S$3.00 for passenger cars). No toll is imposed during off-peak hours." "The ERP system, although understandably unpopular among most road users, has helped to tweak road usage patterns since its implementation. The LTA reported that road traffic decreased by nearly 25,000 vehicles during peak hours, with average road speeds increasing by about 20%. Within the restricted zone itself, traffic has gone down by about 13% during ERP operational hours, with vehicle numbers dropping from 270,000 to 235,000. It has been observed that car-pooling has increased, while the hours of peak vehicular traffic has also gradually eased and spread into off-peak hours, suggesting a more productive use of road space."
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I've lived in Sydney without a car as well, I never found it a hassle. Actually it seemed liberating when I heard the tales of some of the car owners.
When I lived in the CBD (George St, next to Hoyt's, $80pw for a three bedroom rooftop flat if that helps you date it, alas the building is gone now) it was of course very easy. Woolies across the road and great train/bus connections at Town Hall. The office was a 2 minute walk.
But also, way out in Randwick, where the only tall building in sight was the UNSW library off in the distance, it was easy. Again, ample bus service (buses to town every 10 minutes most of the time), multiple supermarkets within reasonable walking distance.
There is really nothing greater than going to work under your own power every morning. It's incredibly relaxing, it's "free" exercise (no trip to the gym or special efforts), and it's often faster than driving (particularly if you're cycling). You also save heaps of money.
Very stupid and very annoying idea!
It fails to account for the fact that spammers use fake FROM-addresses, and stupid &%@! SMTP servers bounce the email to the fake FROM-address. I receive around 10000 bounced spam-emails per day of this type because one spammer somewhere decided to use my domain as a fake FROM-address.
Just discard the email. Don't bounce!
How did this get marked insightful? Sending a temporary failure SMTP response code is not a bounce, and should not result in the generation of a bounce message except from psychotic MTAs.
I'm sorry, what debate? I am not aware of anyone who denies that the world has been getting warmer.
Or have you been listening to the oil companies' scientists-for-hire again? The same ones who just got finished cashing the cheques they received for saying that smoking cures cancer?
Loans are fine in Islam. Like with all religious rules, you just have to invent a different way to execute them. In the case of Islamic banking, others have already gone into details of typical arrangements.
I often wonder whether these people really think God is some sort of Heavenly law professor who will reward them for coming up with tricky technicalities to evade his commands.
Or, as I suspect, is it just that they want what they want, but they want their neighbours to think they are devout, so they take a few extra steps for appearance's sake along the way?
Actually, it didn't keep people offline in Asia. It just made international Internet connections incredibly slow.
+5 Informative???
It kept plenty of people offline in Asia. The existence of some people in Asia who weren't kept offline doesn't mean that it didn't keep people offline.
Here in Malaysia, the greater internet was pretty much inacessible that first night for anyone on the main TMnet backbone. It came and went over the next week, and it's really only yesterday that things are more or less back to normal (except with 10% packet loss where it's normally 0%).
Is it something you can buy? Did you get it for free, without approval of the people selling it, and not as a gift? Then it's stealing.
People sell water. I can get it for free, without the approval of the people selling it, and not as a gift. Just wait for it to rain. It's not the same molecules of water that people are selling, but it's the same stuff and my use and enjoyment of it is identical.
People sell copies of Shakespeare plays. I can get them for free, without the approval of the people selling them, and not as a gift. They're in the public domain.
When someone takes something that you have, and you subsequently don't have it anymore, that's stealing.
When someone copies something that you have, and you still have it after that, that's copying. It may also be illegal, or immoral, or distasteful, but it's not stealing. Not every offense is "stealing". I do not "steal" your dog's life if I kill it. I do not "steal" your home's structural integrity if I burn it down.
As long as you use deliberately misleading terminology in an effort to make your demagogic arguments, it is very difficult to take you seriously.
The US doesn't control every ISP . I'm sure they will find a way.
Nope, the US just has to pass a law compelling backbone providers to null-route the Pirate Bay's netblocks and they're off the net. Every significant backbone provider, and certainly every one within reach of Roughs Tower, has enough presence in the US that they'll find it more important to follow that law than to stick up for the Pirate Bay.
There's only one way that an underground organisation can survive on the net in the long haul. And that's by creating a parallel net that rides in the nooks and crannies of the existing one. Steganography, constant motion, and other obfuscation can create a virtual Sealand that is effectively immune from the jurisdiction of nations because it cannot be localised.
The article's constant harping on the other beliefs of the person who filed the initial complaint is an attempt to use an ad-hominem to discredit all opposition to Gore's controversial position. That is a transparent piece of propaganda, and it saddens me to see so many Slashdot posters echoing it.
Though the first one to complain may have other beliefs with which you disagree, those beliefs are apparently not what drove the school board's decision.
The fact that he believes the earth to be 14000 years old does not automatically discredit everything he says. Each factually-toned claim someone makes is inherently true or false regardless of what you think of the speaker. I am sure Hardison is correct about some things once in a while.
However, his belief does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is an idiot. Since we have limited time and effort to expend on scrutinising people's statements, it highlights the fact that his require more scrutiny than most.
Regardless of your opinion of the veracity of the several claims made in the film, it is clear that the film itself is a propaganda piece promoting one side of a partisan political argument - the side taken by the Democratic party and its spoksman on the issue: the losing candidate in a national election where the country was almost exactly split.
A political party's support for a particular point of view is not sufficient to make it a partisan view.
A partisan view is by definition subjective. And an objective scientific statement of science is an objective scientific statement. It does not become less objective just because the Republicans have a cynical financial interest in publicly disagreeing with it.
If I start a political party and start proclaiming that 1+1=3, does that mean that 1+1=2 is suddenly a "partisan" claim?
SORBS, in their infinite wisdom, deem my address to be dynamic because it is part of a permanently leased dynamic range, so they block me, and therefore I cannot send email to anyone using two of the major ISP's in Australia.
What halfass ISP are you using that doesn't provide its customers with an SMTP forwarder for just this very purpose?
It's now 4:30am, and the situation via London is considerably better - 700ms pings and 20% packet loss. But I imagine that when everyone wakes up in a few hours, the link will once again be clogged and we will all return to mourning the loss of the Taiwan cable.
How wrong I was. We now have a route via Hong Kong and Japan on NTT. 500ms pings to USA, 0% packet loss.
The culture of computing needs to change throughout Asia
As long as a copy of Windows costs more than someone earns in a month (6 months in some countries), piracy is not going away.
Microsoft have stood their ground and refused to employ market-sensitive pricing, and I think this will remain the sticking point. I understand concerns about arbitrage... at least for countries like Malaysia where they'd be selling an English-language version; I wouldn't expect a Thai version of XP to be a big grey market import item in the USA or Europe. Still, I'm surprised they've been so completely inflexible.
They did release some preposterous discount version of XP in a few high-piracy markets, but it was so crippled that I can't imagine anyone would use it. The general take on it seemed to be that it was just plain insulting.
There's always Linux, but people are spoiled on the soft colours and pretty blinkenlights in Windows. And the network effect has taken hold long ago - everyone else uses Windows, so who wants to be the odd man out and have to learn something new? Plus, Red Hat is more expensive than XP here ($5 vs $3), since it comes on more CDs.
service to other parts of SE Asia is diminished or cut off.
Here in Malaysia, the internet pretty much disappeared around 2am yesterday (26 hours ago). I went to sleep, figuring it was just a local outage.
The next morning, it still wasn't really working, which is unusual. Most internet users here are English speakers and US content is in high demand, so all most people care about is connectivity to American servers. Some traceroutes showed that the normal crystal-clear 300ms transpacific route from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles had become a 2000ms epic voyage via west Asia, London, and the Atlantic, with 75% packet loss. This is apparently the only backup option that the national ISP has arrangements for.
Later in the day, people started to realize that routes to Thailand and Australia (and from those countries onward) were unaffected by this, so many in Malaysia have begun using public HTTP proxy servers in those two countries. Web site performance thay way is pretty much as good as before the outage. That's no help for SSH, VoIP, SMTP, and the like, though. And I imagine it'll start to get blocked by the proxy operators if it continues for a few more days - Malaysians are a nerdy and bandwidth-ravenous bunch.
It's now 4:30am, and the situation via London is considerably better - 700ms pings and 20% packet loss. But I imagine that when everyone wakes up in a few hours, the link will once again be clogged and we will all return to mourning the loss of the Taiwan cable.
Singapore is in the same boat as Malaysia, though they are - as usual - a bit more on the ball and were able to come up with better-performing alternate links more quickly.
Indonesia is also affected, though I understand there are formalised arrangements via Australia.
Nobody knows or cares about Brunei, but if I had to guess, I'd say they are probably completely dependent on Malaysia for IP connectivity.
North of here (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) connectivity does not seem to be significantly impacted.
No idea about the Philippines, but it's usually safe to assume they have gotten the worst of any unpleasant situation.
I'm just telling you facts: there are large IP blocks serving Hong Kong, much of China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., that are, for me and my users, a source of essentially nothing but spam and endless cracking attempts. So until that ratio changes to something more like what I see out of, say, Brazil or Germany, it pretty much all just gets stopped.
I think it's worth considering the reasons for this.
While there's a lot of bandwidth over here in Asia, there are a lot of people who prefer Asian-language content. So they are disproportionately likely to focus a lot of their deliberate attention on Asian web sites and services.
Meanwhile, an awful lot of people in these parts are using pirated versions of Windows and antivirus software, and may not have the greatest command of English. So they are not as likely to be protected against invasions of their machines, or to follow freely-available instructions for safe computing.
The result is that Windows PCs over here are a huge playground for American spammers. They get their backdoor software installed on the machines and then use them to fire buttloads of spam back across the Pacific at the USA. Meanwhile, everyone talks about those "Asian spammers".
Now, I understand that this discussion doesn't change the fact that you find blackholing Asian IP ranges to be effective in a certain way. But it's always useful to think of the big picture - it may even provide the basis for real solutions.
It's one thing to allow the states autonomy on matters delegated to them by the terms of federation.
It's quite another to have the federation structured in such a way that creates a warped balance of power, to the detriment of the vast majority of citizens of the federated entities.
Being from rural West Virginia, I'd hardly agree with your characterization of people from smaller states as "a net drain on the government". I don't think those people from country towns are any more likely than people from cities to be welfare cases or whatever.
It's a well-established fact that urban areas are net contributors and rural areas are net drains (if you'd like, I can google up some references for you). And this is most likely a consequence of the arrangement in the Senate, one that has a very small number of people getting a lot of resources from a far larger number, to no benefit that I can really understand.
I would agree that the Senate has some serious problems, but the equal representation for every state isn't one of them. It's one of the few protections smaller states have in the federal system.
This presupposes that states matter. I don't see why they should.
What matters are various groups of people that have aligned interests, regardless of what side of the state line they are standing on.
I can understand the rationale for a more senior chamber with longer terms that sits between the lower house and the lawbooks. That can surely be accomplished without allocating 5x votes to someone in a country town who is a net drain on the government, than to someone in a city who is a net contributor.
For example, you could do it with national elections, and require that someone has served at least 2 terms in the House before they are eligible to run. Having them be elected nationally would probably be too many names for the public to keep track of, but you could at least make sure that the voting units were fairly distributed. One way might be to break the country into 10 groups based on the final digit of their SSN, and each group gets to elect 10 Senators from a pool of candidates with the same SSN digit.
You want to solve the country's problems, it starts with the Senate. As implemented, it gives the federal government a powerful pro-inbred-hick bias, by giving the 25 people in North Dakota the same amount of upper-house voting mojo as the 25 million people in California.
230 years ago, this was an effective way to get tiny little states on board in a federation with great big states. But today, the states are more alike than they are different. What differences remain, are primarily functions of proximity and geography rather than raw population: Is it a greater cultural change to go from upstate New York to Vermont, or from Idaho to West Virginia?
The system divides people up into arbitrary groups with arbitrary borders and then gives much more power to some than others. Specifically, it rewards the misanthropic who would actually choose to live in the low-population hellhole states.
A simple cost-benefit analysis would determine if a manufacturer would make more profit by producing more energy efficient equipment. If so, then yes but still you and I would end up paying more money out of our pockets for it.
You have neglected the fact that we also pay for pollution and energy waste, which the manufacturer has, at best, limited economic incentive to minimize (barring intervention by the state).
As long as your analysis is based on the profit and loss of Smith's traditional discrete economic actors, it will fail to account for a great many costs, and your sums will not add up.
The megastore near me sells two-burner countertop gas stoves for $5 and up (YMMV depending on where in the world you are). Drill a 1/2" hole in the counter, stick a propane tank underneath it, and presto, no much ass-sucking electric cooking. Yank out the heating elements and cover the infernal thing with butcherblock, and at least it will finally be good for something.
Slashdot Mirror
So focus more on the exercise (i.e., stop driving) and less on the diets. It may be tough at first, but soon you'll start to feel better than you have in a long, long time.
Also, dieting is stupid. Just be sensible about what you eat. The number one most important thing is not to buy unhealthy snacks and keep them in your home. A little discipline at the supermarket goes a long, long, long way.
No nitpicking required.
Most people live farther from the transit stop (especially if they take a train) than from where they park their car.
And most people's offices are farther from the transit stop (especially if they take a train) than from the car park in the basement.
So while you personally may have parked your car across town once, that doesn't illustrate the typical situation.
Also, of course, riding trains often involves climbing stairs.
P.S. I live on the 24th floor of a highrise. My girlfriend has just instituted a "no riding up in the lift unless carrying groceries" policy. If I don't plan my day well I can be climbing 120 flights of stairs (which happened yesterday). Try THAT kind of exercise built into your routine in a suburb.
What about Singapore's Electronic Road Pricing?
The difference in congestion levels between Singapore and here (Kuala Lumpur, a few hours up the road, with no sensible congestion measures) is huge. Traffic almost always flows at a reasonable pace in the ERP areas in Singapore, no matter what time of day.
A few quick excerpts from the wikipedia article I linked, for those too lazy to click: "The deducted amount is dependent on the time and location (varying from S$0.25 to S$3.00 for passenger cars). No toll is imposed during off-peak hours." "The ERP system, although understandably unpopular among most road users, has helped to tweak road usage patterns since its implementation. The LTA reported that road traffic decreased by nearly 25,000 vehicles during peak hours, with average road speeds increasing by about 20%. Within the restricted zone itself, traffic has gone down by about 13% during ERP operational hours, with vehicle numbers dropping from 270,000 to 235,000. It has been observed that car-pooling has increased, while the hours of peak vehicular traffic has also gradually eased and spread into off-peak hours, suggesting a more productive use of road space."
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I've lived in Sydney without a car as well, I never found it a hassle. Actually it seemed liberating when I heard the tales of some of the car owners.
When I lived in the CBD (George St, next to Hoyt's, $80pw for a three bedroom rooftop flat if that helps you date it, alas the building is gone now) it was of course very easy. Woolies across the road and great train/bus connections at Town Hall. The office was a 2 minute walk.
But also, way out in Randwick, where the only tall building in sight was the UNSW library off in the distance, it was easy. Again, ample bus service (buses to town every 10 minutes most of the time), multiple supermarkets within reasonable walking distance.
There is really nothing greater than going to work under your own power every morning. It's incredibly relaxing, it's "free" exercise (no trip to the gym or special efforts), and it's often faster than driving (particularly if you're cycling). You also save heaps of money.
How did this get marked insightful? Sending a temporary failure SMTP response code is not a bounce, and should not result in the generation of a bounce message except from psychotic MTAs.
I'm sorry, what debate? I am not aware of anyone who denies that the world has been getting warmer.
Or have you been listening to the oil companies' scientists-for-hire again? The same ones who just got finished cashing the cheques they received for saying that smoking cures cancer?
When can we expect the announcement about Pirate Bay trying to buy one of the new islands?
Loans are fine in Islam. Like with all religious rules, you just have to invent a different way to execute them. In the case of Islamic banking, others have already gone into details of typical arrangements.
I often wonder whether these people really think God is some sort of Heavenly law professor who will reward them for coming up with tricky technicalities to evade his commands.
Or, as I suspect, is it just that they want what they want, but they want their neighbours to think they are devout, so they take a few extra steps for appearance's sake along the way?
Nonsense, you just have to plan ahead. Wanna buy some prime oceanfront land in Philadelphia?
+5 Informative???
It kept plenty of people offline in Asia. The existence of some people in Asia who weren't kept offline doesn't mean that it didn't keep people offline.
Here in Malaysia, the greater internet was pretty much inacessible that first night for anyone on the main TMnet backbone. It came and went over the next week, and it's really only yesterday that things are more or less back to normal (except with 10% packet loss where it's normally 0%).
People sell water. I can get it for free, without the approval of the people selling it, and not as a gift. Just wait for it to rain. It's not the same molecules of water that people are selling, but it's the same stuff and my use and enjoyment of it is identical.
People sell copies of Shakespeare plays. I can get them for free, without the approval of the people selling them, and not as a gift. They're in the public domain.
When someone takes something that you have, and you subsequently don't have it anymore, that's stealing.
When someone copies something that you have, and you still have it after that, that's copying. It may also be illegal, or immoral, or distasteful, but it's not stealing. Not every offense is "stealing". I do not "steal" your dog's life if I kill it. I do not "steal" your home's structural integrity if I burn it down.
As long as you use deliberately misleading terminology in an effort to make your demagogic arguments, it is very difficult to take you seriously.
Nope, the US just has to pass a law compelling backbone providers to null-route the Pirate Bay's netblocks and they're off the net. Every significant backbone provider, and certainly every one within reach of Roughs Tower, has enough presence in the US that they'll find it more important to follow that law than to stick up for the Pirate Bay.
There's only one way that an underground organisation can survive on the net in the long haul. And that's by creating a parallel net that rides in the nooks and crannies of the existing one. Steganography, constant motion, and other obfuscation can create a virtual Sealand that is effectively immune from the jurisdiction of nations because it cannot be localised.
The fact that he believes the earth to be 14000 years old does not automatically discredit everything he says. Each factually-toned claim someone makes is inherently true or false regardless of what you think of the speaker. I am sure Hardison is correct about some things once in a while.
However, his belief does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is an idiot. Since we have limited time and effort to expend on scrutinising people's statements, it highlights the fact that his require more scrutiny than most.
A political party's support for a particular point of view is not sufficient to make it a partisan view.
A partisan view is by definition subjective. And an objective scientific statement of science is an objective scientific statement. It does not become less objective just because the Republicans have a cynical financial interest in publicly disagreeing with it.
If I start a political party and start proclaiming that 1+1=3, does that mean that 1+1=2 is suddenly a "partisan" claim?
What halfass ISP are you using that doesn't provide its customers with an SMTP forwarder for just this very purpose?
How wrong I was. We now have a route via Hong Kong and Japan on NTT. 500ms pings to USA, 0% packet loss.
As long as a copy of Windows costs more than someone earns in a month (6 months in some countries), piracy is not going away.
Microsoft have stood their ground and refused to employ market-sensitive pricing, and I think this will remain the sticking point. I understand concerns about arbitrage... at least for countries like Malaysia where they'd be selling an English-language version; I wouldn't expect a Thai version of XP to be a big grey market import item in the USA or Europe. Still, I'm surprised they've been so completely inflexible.
They did release some preposterous discount version of XP in a few high-piracy markets, but it was so crippled that I can't imagine anyone would use it. The general take on it seemed to be that it was just plain insulting.
There's always Linux, but people are spoiled on the soft colours and pretty blinkenlights in Windows. And the network effect has taken hold long ago - everyone else uses Windows, so who wants to be the odd man out and have to learn something new? Plus, Red Hat is more expensive than XP here ($5 vs $3), since it comes on more CDs.
Here in Malaysia, the internet pretty much disappeared around 2am yesterday (26 hours ago). I went to sleep, figuring it was just a local outage.
The next morning, it still wasn't really working, which is unusual. Most internet users here are English speakers and US content is in high demand, so all most people care about is connectivity to American servers. Some traceroutes showed that the normal crystal-clear 300ms transpacific route from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles had become a 2000ms epic voyage via west Asia, London, and the Atlantic, with 75% packet loss. This is apparently the only backup option that the national ISP has arrangements for.
Later in the day, people started to realize that routes to Thailand and Australia (and from those countries onward) were unaffected by this, so many in Malaysia have begun using public HTTP proxy servers in those two countries. Web site performance thay way is pretty much as good as before the outage. That's no help for SSH, VoIP, SMTP, and the like, though. And I imagine it'll start to get blocked by the proxy operators if it continues for a few more days - Malaysians are a nerdy and bandwidth-ravenous bunch.
It's now 4:30am, and the situation via London is considerably better - 700ms pings and 20% packet loss. But I imagine that when everyone wakes up in a few hours, the link will once again be clogged and we will all return to mourning the loss of the Taiwan cable.
Singapore is in the same boat as Malaysia, though they are - as usual - a bit more on the ball and were able to come up with better-performing alternate links more quickly.
Indonesia is also affected, though I understand there are formalised arrangements via Australia.
Nobody knows or cares about Brunei, but if I had to guess, I'd say they are probably completely dependent on Malaysia for IP connectivity.
North of here (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) connectivity does not seem to be significantly impacted.
No idea about the Philippines, but it's usually safe to assume they have gotten the worst of any unpleasant situation.
I think it's worth considering the reasons for this.
While there's a lot of bandwidth over here in Asia, there are a lot of people who prefer Asian-language content. So they are disproportionately likely to focus a lot of their deliberate attention on Asian web sites and services.
Meanwhile, an awful lot of people in these parts are using pirated versions of Windows and antivirus software, and may not have the greatest command of English. So they are not as likely to be protected against invasions of their machines, or to follow freely-available instructions for safe computing.
The result is that Windows PCs over here are a huge playground for American spammers. They get their backdoor software installed on the machines and then use them to fire buttloads of spam back across the Pacific at the USA. Meanwhile, everyone talks about those "Asian spammers".
Now, I understand that this discussion doesn't change the fact that you find blackholing Asian IP ranges to be effective in a certain way. But it's always useful to think of the big picture - it may even provide the basis for real solutions.
It's one thing to allow the states autonomy on matters delegated to them by the terms of federation.
It's quite another to have the federation structured in such a way that creates a warped balance of power, to the detriment of the vast majority of citizens of the federated entities.
It's a well-established fact that urban areas are net contributors and rural areas are net drains (if you'd like, I can google up some references for you). And this is most likely a consequence of the arrangement in the Senate, one that has a very small number of people getting a lot of resources from a far larger number, to no benefit that I can really understand.
This presupposes that states matter. I don't see why they should.
What matters are various groups of people that have aligned interests, regardless of what side of the state line they are standing on.
I can understand the rationale for a more senior chamber with longer terms that sits between the lower house and the lawbooks. That can surely be accomplished without allocating 5x votes to someone in a country town who is a net drain on the government, than to someone in a city who is a net contributor.
For example, you could do it with national elections, and require that someone has served at least 2 terms in the House before they are eligible to run. Having them be elected nationally would probably be too many names for the public to keep track of, but you could at least make sure that the voting units were fairly distributed. One way might be to break the country into 10 groups based on the final digit of their SSN, and each group gets to elect 10 Senators from a pool of candidates with the same SSN digit.
You want to solve the country's problems, it starts with the Senate. As implemented, it gives the federal government a powerful pro-inbred-hick bias, by giving the 25 people in North Dakota the same amount of upper-house voting mojo as the 25 million people in California.
230 years ago, this was an effective way to get tiny little states on board in a federation with great big states. But today, the states are more alike than they are different. What differences remain, are primarily functions of proximity and geography rather than raw population: Is it a greater cultural change to go from upstate New York to Vermont, or from Idaho to West Virginia?
The system divides people up into arbitrary groups with arbitrary borders and then gives much more power to some than others. Specifically, it rewards the misanthropic who would actually choose to live in the low-population hellhole states.
You avoid higher energy costs and costs associated with increased pollution (health etc.).
You have neglected the fact that we also pay for pollution and energy waste, which the manufacturer has, at best, limited economic incentive to minimize (barring intervention by the state).
As long as your analysis is based on the profit and loss of Smith's traditional discrete economic actors, it will fail to account for a great many costs, and your sums will not add up.
The megastore near me sells two-burner countertop gas stoves for $5 and up (YMMV depending on where in the world you are). Drill a 1/2" hole in the counter, stick a propane tank underneath it, and presto, no much ass-sucking electric cooking. Yank out the heating elements and cover the infernal thing with butcherblock, and at least it will finally be good for something.