I'm a little confused. If the place he's being offered a job setting up outsourcing doesn't let immigrants work there, then how is he going to work there?
Replying to this a bit late, as usual. I thought about the drainage issue. Mentioned it in my last paragraph, but had no particular solution. I'm assuming that I'd need to have a sloping barrier around three sides of the driveway with a gutte just inside that, and a drain covering the entire bottom of the driveway. Where that would drain to, I'm not 100% sure. Whether or not that's allowed to go into my cities sewer system I don't know. There are some other possibilities. I could always set up a spout and build an ice tower in my back yard. Or just dump it back there perhaps, although that still has risks of running off into the street. Maybe get one of those soft-sided above ground pools and use it as a storage tank then. I just checked and apparently you can leave them full outside all winter. It's only about 3000 gallons of water so it wouldn't really be all that much. Some would probably evaporate as well.
I did some math on this for my own driveway, which is about 30 square meters. I had a lot of fun with the impossible layer of ice on it yesterday and today. There's nothing like getting home after an 18 hour day of frantic work and getting stuck halfway onto the street and having to spend hours trying to clear things enough to get the car to move. Not to mention that something seems to have happened to my transmission during the ordeal. Keeping the driveway clear would be the best thing, but I just haven't had any time to do it, or even think about it lately. I'm thinking, for a future project, that ripping up the driveway, then putting in a driveway heating system would be a good idea.
I took the figure for the most snowfall ever in my state, 2.73 meters and the figure for the coldest day on record -38 Celsius. So that's about 82 cubic meters of snow for the whole winter on that 30 square meter driveway, which works out to about 8.2 cubic meters (I found figures saying 12 to 1 snow to water volume and settled on using 10 to 1) of water, which is about 8,200 kilograms of water (maybe a bit more at that temperature. At 4.184 kilojoules per degree Celsius per kilogram, that's 34,308.8 kilojoules for each degree Celsius. Starting at -38 degrees Celsius, it takes 1,303,734.4 kilojoules to heat the ice up to 0 degrees Celsius. Then you have to consider enthalpy of fusion, so it takes another 333.5 kilojoules per kilogram to actually melt the ice. So, that's 2,734,700 kilojoules to actually melt the ice, which is more than it took to raise it the 38 degrees. Obviously, the starting and ending temperatures matter, but clearly there isn't going to be as big a difference as you might expect on a mild day vs. a cold one. So then we might as well raise the temperature to a comfortable 27 degrees, which is a further 926,337.6 kilojoules. So, in the worst imaginable winter, my driveway would take 4,964,772 kilojoules of heat to keep clear.
That's about 1379 kilowatt hours. At $0.12 per kilowatt hour, that's about $166 for the whole winter. Efficiency losses wouldn't be that high low, since we're talking about heating here. Electric heating elements under the surface of the driveway would end up sending nearly all that energy as heat upwards. Even though, as you point out, the concrete (asphalt in the case of my driveway, but if I redid the driveway I'd probably go with concrete) is going to store heat well and you'd have to heat it for a while. However, once the ice and snow starts to melt above it, it's going to do an excellent job of absorbing that heat right back out. It will change my numbers, but I don't think by any significant degree. The real challenge is going to be figuring out where to stop applying heat because the concrete will act as a buffer and keep melting ice and snow for you for a while after you stop. I imagine temperature sensors would be able to work it out. Still, obviously it varies depending on how much snowfall you actually get. Obviously this is going to be vastly less efficient if you get a coating of ice every day rather than a smaller number of bigger snowfalls.
As a comparison, at around 121,000 kilojoules per gallon of gas, that's about 41 gallons, or about $135. For diesel/home heating oil, there's around 156,000 kilojoules in a gallon, so that's about 32 gallons of home heating oil, which comes out to about $106. At 105,506 kilojoules in a therm, that's about 47 therms of natural gas. My gas company charges about $0.81 per therm, so that's about $38 in natural gas. (As an aside, I've done the home heating oil vs natural gas comparison before and there's such a huge gap in price per unit of energy. Why then does anyone who has gas available even use home heating oil? Is there some huge difference in converting the energy to heat that I'm missing?) However, I don't think anyone makes a system to burn those fuels directly under a driveway, so you'd need to hook up a furnace in the house to water pipes running under the driveway. On the other hand, that's probably a false loss, sin
The magnetic field deflects solar wind. Solar wind strips hydrogen out of the atmosphere. Since water molecules are polarized, I wonder if floods of charged particles from mass ejections can excite them enough to fly off into space? I probably don't know enough about this to speculate. Of course, a good portion of the solar wind is hydrogen, so solar wind would also deposit it into the atmosphere. It's going to be a matter of equilibrium, like firing a high pressure hose into an already full glass of water, it won't get fuller, it will end up about a quarter full with water constantly spraying out of the glass.
As long as he's not being tried somewhere where the gaming businesses run the state, like Las Vegas, that would be an interesting criminal case. The whole point of these games is to give people the impression that skill can somehow help them win. If they then arrest people because their skills are helping them win, they have an awkward case. It's like card counting in casinos. Done with team collusion or with some other methods, it might legitimately be considered cheating. If it's just one player sitting there and evaluating the odds in their head, then it's not cheating, it's just someone playing the game the way it's meant to be played. If there's some big flaw in the game logic, it's the fault of the producers of the game, not the players who figure it out. That's what we expect from a game.
One thing that everyone, including the article, seems to be missing, or at least failing to mention, is that the lottery commissions and ticket producing companies don't care about this problem. Or at least they have little incentive to care. Same is true if the lotteries are being used to launder money. Heck, it's profit for them if they are being used to launder money. They produce a certain number of winners and a certain number of losers. As long as the whole book gets sold, it doesn't matter to them who the winners and losers are. They don't have to pay out any more money than they would otherwise. The only real problem to them is if the majority of people catch on to this and either stop playing in disgust, or start applying these techniques and, as a result, the stores are full of stacks of tickets that no-one will buy. As it stands, that's just not going to happen. How many people will read this article? And which people? The first word in the title is statistician. It has four whole syllables, quite aside from the fact that means math. The lotteries main customer base probably won't read this article. If they do, they probably won't understand it. If they do understand it, they probably still won't have enough fundamental understanding of the ideas behind it to apply it to anything other than that one ticket type. If they do, then more power to them, they're in the minority who can stop being taxed by the lottery and can start taxing their peers. The lottery commission still gets to sell the same number of tickets and pay out the same amount in prizes.
You do know that the man specialized in robbing charities, right? It is possible that he has a conscience when it comes to close family members, but none whatsoever for the rest of humanity, but I think it's more likely that he simply doesn't have a conscience.
Certainly the solar is better during the day. I was thinking that, with prices like that, you'd want to get entirely off the grid. At the moment, you just can't do that without either a large battery bank of batteries, a flywheel generator, some other exotic energy storage device, or a plain old, ordinary generator. Fuel cells would be nice, but they just don't seem to have emerged as a viable product. Other options seem to be too big for a residential home. Generators don't have to be all that smelly or noisy. The ones they make for RVs are relatively quiet, and you can stuff them in a sound dampening enclosure and put a muffler on the exhaust. They're more polluting and less efficient than centrally located large power plants, but if the electric company has raised the price to the point where local power generation is cost effective, then clearly they're doing something wrong.
All that said, I didn't realize that your power rate would go down to a reasonable rate if you switched to solar. In that case, it makes sense to switch to solar and stay on the grid. If the power prices go back up to that level again though, you might as well get a diesel generator that runs on biodiesel, or even unmodified rapeseed oil, which is currently seems to actually be cheaper than diesel (even accounting for differences in energy density), although possibly not cheaper than home heating oil (I think it's legal to use that for powering your house, but not sure). That way, you can even stay carbon neutral.
I get all that. But the fact is, you never actually gave any reasons whatsoever why it must be so.
You said that a plant takes from 1 to 2 decades to complete, that many things change during that time, and you said, without explaining why it must be so, that almost all other forms of power are more scalable.
You also pointed out that current nuclear power plants contain multiple reactors and are ongoing projects and need a small town of people to support them. Also you pointed out that they generally require lots of subsidies.
I agree with you on all of that. I think those are excellent reasons why nuclear power, as it's done now, is a bad proposition (the one thing I'm not sure of is if there are any isotopes you can only efficiently produce in those reactors that are vital industrially or in nuclear medicine).
I, for one, don't see why the US doesn't just find 2 1/2% of its land area and cover it in some sort of solar power method to produce the 3.5 TW of power it uses (not just metered residential electricity, but all of it). Even a lowball estimate of the startup costs of a nuclear power plant is probably $2 billion per gigawatt. With all the hidden costs it's probably way above that. Good numbers on solar power seem to be difficult to come by. I found some information suggesting $9 thousand per kilowatt for a residential system. You've got to be able to at least cut that in half with the economies of scale of a massive solar farm, and $4.5 billion per gigawatt is still on the same order as nuclear. With the massive maintenance of nuclear power, not to mention all of the other costs, they've got to come out at least even over the long term.
However, none of what you wrote gives any reasons why nuclear can't be done any other way. You say that I can't understand a rational argument when I see one, and I counter that you didn't actually present one. The real question isn't "are current nuclear power plants worth it?" The real question is "can something better be built?" The article is about China researching safe, low maintenance thorium reactors which could potentially be buried and simply churn out power. There may be any number of reasons why this simply isn't doable. The article doesn't even seem to be claiming there's any brand new theory of design being tested or that any significant discoveries have been made. Even if it were, I'd take it with an enormous grain of salt since the announcement would be coming from the Chinese government, which has released some pretty outrageous whoppers.
Still, if it is at all possible, then I don't think it's a bad thing. We already know that small nuclear reactors can be made and are worth it in certain situations. They're pretty much all military situations, of course. And we all know that the military considers hundreds of dollars a decent price for a gallon of gasoline (dependent on strategic value). If these reactors ever materialize then there will be a place for them. For example islands and other locales that can't be served by solar or by power lines to somewhere that is. Space is a pretty big one. If we ever get around to building a moon base, we're either going to need to put two solar farms on either side of it connected by 3500 miles of buried cable, build a giant solar mirror, or use a nuclear reactor. Even if solar is the best long term solution on the moon, a compact nuclear reactor is going to be the best way to gain a foothold to build it.
I would feel amiss if I did not reply to your post after you went to all that work to write it.
I wouldn't worry too much. I tend to get pretty verbose.
It seems your way of looking at law (or, as it were, society), is to give everyone rights and then figure out how to balance them. That is an interesting way of doing things, and it may be better, but I don't think any courts currently take that approach.
Although the courts may not take that approach, it's the one they're supposed to take. The foundations of US government is the US Constitution and its amendments. The first ten amendments are referred to as the Bill of Rights. The idea is that there are "inalienable rights" that everyone automatically possesses. If those rights come into conflict, then the courts get to do some balancing and interpretation. The constitution is full of loopholes, as well, although the spirit of the document is pretty clear in most parts. It even has some bits that probably aren't as good an idea now as they were at the time. Nevertheless the idea behind it is that it lays out explicit rights and lays out the powers of government.
Also, you said that the government cannot deprive you of life. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, but it's pretty clear they can kill you once they go through all the necessary legal steps. The supreme court has affirmed that several times, although I don't particularly like it.
That's right, the government isn't allowed to deprive you of life "without due process of law". I thought it was pretty clear. Going "through all the necessary legal steps", as you say, constitutes due process. I'm not sure how we're in disagreement on that one. The government is forbidden from directly or constructively depriving you of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Sure, they do anyway sometimes, but they're not supposed to.
There is a double standard. I'm not sure why you can't see that the government is the one applying it. They're the ones who _set_ the rules, we expect them to follow them too.
As for whether or not this is property. It's certainly not conventional property directly. On the other hand, this isn't exactly IP, as you seem to think. This has nothing to do with trade secrets, copyright, or patents. There's an argument to made, perhaps, that it's a trademark issue, since they're putting up their own site (with that one image on it). Of course, I'm against trademark applying to domain names unless the page the domain directs to is itself infringing on a trademark (using someone else's trademark to promote products, or represent them as being from that organization). The money that they paid for a registration of the domain for a set time would seem to be a form of property. In any case theft of service is generally treated as seriously as if the property were real property and is probably a felony on this scale. Aside from being theft of service, it's also a denial of service attack. If you didn't notice, the government just went after a bunch of Anonymous members for a denial of service attack.
So any argument that this is somehow ok without a warrant and some sort of judicial process is just wrong.
I do just fine on logic puzzles already. I really don't see the need for attempts to insult my intelligence based on my perfectly valid response to your post. Also, you should bear in mind that individual posts on a thread are not operating in a vacuum. You can't just respond to one part of my post and ignore the larger context and then congratulate yourself for scoring some sort of coup.
What you're ignoring is that your statement "I don't see where in the constitution you are given a right to be alive" was in response to a statement from an AC that "If you want the privilege of being allowed to drive, you can have it as long as you don't risk my constitutionally protected right to be alive."
Now I actually disagree with that statement, because driving is also a right. Driving is a right that may be curtailed for reasons of public safety, but it's still a right. Bear with me, because this has some bearing on the "right to be alive".
When you mentioned a "right to be alive", clearly that has to be interpreted slightly. Obviously the government can't guarantee you continued life. That's patently absurd as it would effectively mean a constitutional guarantee to immortality. I gave you enough credit to assume that you weren't just being an idiot when you wrote it, so it's a pity you didn't extend the same credit to me.
Anyway, if you'll notice the language of the amendment, it doesn't just say that the government can't kill you, it says you can't be "deprived of life". It doesn't even specifically say that it's only the government that can't deprive you of life (which is good, because otherwise it would open the door for a private court system that could execute people). That's actually a pretty good constitutional foundation for programs like welfare, but I'm not going to go there right now. The point is that the government can't deprive you of life either directly or constructively. If you're not sure what I mean about constructively denying the right to life, liberty and property, here are some examples:
"We're not executing you, we're just releasing you from prison 3 miles offshore."
"We're not punishing you cruelly and unusually, we're just putting you in a cell with this muscle-bound convict who has violently raped every cell mate he's had so far. Hur hur hur."
"We're not denying you your property, we've just built a wall around it on public property. Incidentally, if you try to climb the wall, you'll be thrown in jail with a convict who will rape you and then we'll execute you"
So, basically the government is not supposed to take actions that have a high chance of leading to your death. This, in fact, conflicts with some other constitutional provisions such as the military draft, and even with some constitutional rights enjoyed by others.
The law isn't written by programmers, it's written by messy lawyers, and even more more messy economists and MBAs. It's also written in some sort of mutant legal language based on interpretation by case law. It would be better if it were written in something sane with proper ideas of precedence and inheritance of legal principles with everything clearly delineated, but it isn't.
(NOTE: The paragraph following this one is the part of the argument that's actually in context with your statement as it relates to the AC you originally replied to. So, although I stand by the other parts of this post where I say that you really do have a right to be alive within the reasonable boundaries of human lifespan and factors outside the governments control, this is part where, if you can find gaping logical flaws you get to tell me that I'm a mental defective who needs to go and brush up on his thinking skills. This is where I discuss whether you have a "right to be alive" contrasted against a right to drive.)
So when legal principles conflict, "reasonableness" rules. Even if the law were well written and thought out, it still couldn't anticipate every situation. So, when your right to not be "deprived of life" reasonably conflic
The point I was trying to get across though, is that there is, actually, a right to drive. As you point out, you can ride with someone or take the bus, and that would seem to cover your right to travel except that you're also guaranteed equal protection under the law. Therefore, everyone has a basic right to drive, or they have to take it away from everyone. Now, as we've both pointed out, rights can be conditional. In the case of a right to drive, it's conditional based on safety. Too young to be considered safe or responsible (still old enough to be charged as an adult if you go for a joyride and kill someone, of course) and you don't get to exercise the right. Not competent enough to pass a driving test and you don't get to exercise the right. Proven dangerous by a court of law as a drunk driver or other menace and you don't get to exercise the right. These things are reasonable. It's even reasonable that a license can be taken away before trial, in the same way that you can be jailed before trial, provided, of course, that there's a speedy process in the judicial system, based on presumption of innocence, to appeal.
I just feel I have to speak up whenever anyone says that something that is a right is just a privilege. Also, I also have to say that, as driving is a right, then the only things that should curtail it are safety issues. So, you shouldn't lose your right to drive if you didn't pay your child support, or you didn't pay some tax, or you didn't pay a parking ticket (there may be an argument that, by having been shown to be a danger to the sanctity of public property in the form of parking spaces that you're a menace, but it falls pretty flat to me), or you're a convicted felon (for something non-driving related), etc. The fact that you can is a problem, and it's only exacerbated by people saying things like "there's no constitutional right to drive a car".
"slower speed means more time to respond to whatever may be happening" is true, all other things being equal. The trouble is, all other things won't be equal. At slower speeds, people are going to cluster closer together. If they're close enough, and the car in front of them can stop quickly enough, they'll hit it before they can react to hit the brake.
I don't really disagree that slower speeds are going to result in more safety. It's just that it's a slippery slope between speed limits set above the maximum speed cars can go and 0. At 0, you have absolute safety, but no utility. At the maximum, things aren't all that safe, but most people either can't or won't go that fast. Basically, you have a peak level of danger vs. speed limit. Set the speed limit higher than that, and things get more dangerous, but the danger isn't growing as fast as it was approaching that peak. Set the speed limit lower and things get safer, but, once again, the lower they go, the less gains in safety relative to the drop.
Ultimately the problem is that if you can find a decent sweet spot for safety vs. utility (don't forget that the speed limit also determines the carrying capacity of the road, make it too low and your road is a continuous traffic jam), it's going to be far lower than people's comfort level. Ultimately, what happens in real life is that most people drive the speed that they're comfortable with, regardless of the speed limit.
I'm not sure you're listening to what the GP was saying. He was suggesting applying principles of mass-production to building nuclear power plants and you responded by explaining how things are done now and presenting that as proof doing it a different way is unrealistic. You never actually gave a good reason why it couldn't work.
That is, in fact, what the fine article is about. China researching liquid salt thorium reactors with an eye to mass-producing safe low-maintenance plants that could even just be buried somewhere.
Printing money doesn't give you increased wealth to work with, you're right there. It can, however, give you capital to work with to create wealth. So, if you print money and use it to invest in a solar farm, the solar farm starts producing electricity, and that is real wealth. For it to work long-term, of course, that virtual money has to essentially redeem itself by the productivity of what it funds.
This is, actually, pretty much the way modern capitalism works. Banks no longer lend the money deposited into them by account holders. Instead, they simply create virtual money that they lend out. Maybe that's why savings account interest rates are so low these days? This system actually can work if it's carefully regulated and if the capital this creates is used in real, wealth-creating, ways. Trouble is, things keep being deregulated or the regulations or regulators get all fouled up. Also, more and more, it seems that capital is being used in speculative activities that generate profit without generating wealth, if you get my meaning. For example all these trading scams that basically amount to trading companies inserting themselves as the middle man in other entities trades. Supposedly they generate wealth by increasing "liquidity", but that appears to be a load of nonsense.
So, I guess I'm trying to say that printing money to get out of financial trouble isn't necessarily bad as long as the consequences are well understood by the people doing it, and they don't screw it up. On the other hand, it does seem incredibly likely that they will, in fact, screw it up.
As long as you're not ignoring important facts, then the economics will actually dictate the proper course. In other words, if you account for environmental damage, health concerns, long-term cleanup, depletion of natural resources, etc., then economics really does work. The problem is, there are too many people doing business who think that farms selling off their seed corn to earn 10% more profit is a swell idea. They're not actually doing the economics properly, but they sure do produce more profit than the other guy. Until they've completely wrecked the business, market, or economy. Then they typically move on somewhere else and point at the great results they achieved at their last post, until the business unexpectedly went south, that is.
If you're paying $.50 per KWH for electricity, you're in the range where it could be cheaper to run a gas/propane/diesel generator instead of hooking up to the grid.
What really bugs me is that, if you click on the direct link to a post, such as 35064428, it comes up with the slider set to 0 abbreviated 0 hidden, but everything is hidden! That's what's happening to me on firefox under Ubuntu anyway. If you slide the sliders all the way over to 5, and then both back to -1, then you can see everything. Clearly that's broken, though.
Not just ethylene glycol. It might or might not be detected by this system, but What about gasoline with ethanol blended into it? What if you're a drinker, and you've just taken your empties in for recycling and you got ethanol on your hands from leftover stuff in cans and bottles?
Aside from those false positives, what if it turns out that sensitive chemical sensors don't maintain their accuracy well sitting in direct sunlight in an environment too hot for human life? Ever leave your car out in the sun on a hot, sunny summer day? Anything in there exposed to direct sunlight can get up to 50 degrees celcius. In winter, it's generally below zero. How is this device supposed to remain calibrated? How much per year will it cost to have this extra car part inspected and calibrated?
If we knew more about how the sensors were supposed to work, we might have a better idea. From the linked article, I can't really tell if it's supposed to be detecting alcohol secreted in sweat, or using some particular wavelength of light to detect alcohol in the bloodstream somehow (like those oxygen monitors), or somehow monitoring blood vessels and pulse to try to detect alcohol by secondary vascular effects, etc., etc.
Aside from that, what about people who need to run their car while legally drunk or they'll die? Consider the drunk who doesn't have anyone else to drive her home and doesn't have money for a cab and there's no public transit. Also, it's the dead of winter. Will this interlock stop the engine from starting, or will it let the engine start but lock the transmission somehow? If it's the first one, then the drunk freezes to death huddled in her car. Now, consider someone partying in the woods. He and his friends are totally drunk, but not planning on going anywhere, then along comes a bear, or a forest fire, whatever. They run for the safety of the car, but can't go anywhere. In the bear scenario, the bear eats them after tearing the cars roof off. In the fire scenario, they make a run for it, but wind conditions mean that the fire is spreading faster than they can run. Sure it would be illegal for the people in these examples to drive (it may even be illegal for the one freezing to death to run the car just to get heat since "operating" a motor vehicle is a vague term). The examples are also statistical outliers. It's still an automatic death sentence in those cases, however, and some like that would happen.
The level of the offense really does matter. I can't imagine how anyone could think otherwise. You seem to be implying that it would be ok if it were a capital offense. After all, "you're still breaking the law either way".
Excessive speed certainly does make accidents more dangerous. I have to strongly disagree with your statement that lower speed limits give more time to react. It does depend a little on what you're reacting to. Clearly if a tree falls across the road in front of you or if you're in fog and a 20 car pileup suddenly comes out of the fog then you'll have better chances of avoiding it at 10 mph than at 65 mph. For the most part though, you're going to be reacting to other traffic moving along at the same speed as you. In that case, the deciding factor usually isn't how fast you're going, it's how fast you can hit the brakes. Then it's all up to how well your brakes work. That critical issue of reaction time has more to do with following distance than raw speed. In slower traffic, cars tend to draw in much closer. With lower speed limits, I think you'd have just as many accidents (car to car ones at least), but probably fewer fatalities (at least below a certain threshold).
The problem is, you're talking about a slippery slope, not some sort of absolute. Increase speed limits and you'll get more fatalities, decrease them and you'll get less, decrease them even more and you'll get less, and so forth. The problem is, you won't eliminate fatalities until you bring the speed limits down to 0 MPH (in other words, eliminate driving). You'll always be able to make the argument that making people drive more slowly will save lives, even after you've lowered speed limits below the point of practicality. Also, there won't be a linear relationship between speed and fatalities. It will be a curve, and not a steadily increasing one, either. Above a certain speed limit, fatalities won't really increase much partly because you'll hit the level at which most people are uncomfortable driving faster, not to mention the point where people hit the physical limits of their vehicles. The shape of the curve is also a moving target due to increases in technology. If someone invents super brakes with a Star Trek inertial dampening system, fatalities would soar overnight from all the cars on the roads capable of stopping on a dime being rear-ended by cars without such new systems or even cars with such new systems but who were following without enough distance to hit their brakes before passing the point the car in front stopped.
Deciding on a speed limit is a complex issue since you'll never achieve a "safe" speed limit until you eliminate driving. Even when you come up with a good consensus on practicality vs. convenience vs. safety, it will be obsoleted by advancing technology. However, you also potentially have to support 100+ years of automotive technology on modern roads along with newer, more advanced and capable cars.
Right to travel would seem to be covered under the right to liberty that cannot be deprived without due process of law laid out in the fifth amendment. There are many places in the US that you can't practically walk to given the distances involved not to mention the ones you simply can't legally walk to, since you would have to cross all kinds of non-pedestrian government-built roads. Therefore, you have a right to drive (although it's limited by age class, like many other rights) as long as that right hasn't been deprived by due process of law, otherwise the government is constructively removing your liberty by building all these roads.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not. The right to "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence is clearly delineated in the Declaration of Independence which is one of the founding documents of the United States along with the Constitution. In the Constitution itself, the right to be alive is in the Bill of Rights, in the fifth amendment where it says "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Now, the government has gotten a lot of mileage out of obfuscating what counts as "due process of law" (for example the idea that due process doesn't need to involve the judicial branch of government and that due process can occur without the person it's affecting getting to defend themselves), as well as just who due process applies to (taking it away from non-citizens on US soil, playing around with just what constitutes US soil, such as Guantanamo Bay, taking it away from US Citizens not on US soil and taking it from US Citizens who are on US soil but who are somehow argued to be allied with an enemy). Despite all this, the right to be alive is clearly there.
It's not circular reasoning, it basically boils down to a tautology. Birds are fliers because they fly. Similarly, unstable people are defined as unstable because they do unstable things. It's not really begging the question or anything like that, it's just that committing suicide in and of itself is good evidence of being unstable, and taking a bunch of people with you on purpose is even more evidence of being unstable.
That said, not all suicide bombers are going to be unstable, some of them are going to be coerced.
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I'm a little confused. If the place he's being offered a job setting up outsourcing doesn't let immigrants work there, then how is he going to work there?
Replying to this a bit late, as usual. I thought about the drainage issue. Mentioned it in my last paragraph, but had no particular solution. I'm assuming that I'd need to have a sloping barrier around three sides of the driveway with a gutte just inside that, and a drain covering the entire bottom of the driveway. Where that would drain to, I'm not 100% sure. Whether or not that's allowed to go into my cities sewer system I don't know. There are some other possibilities. I could always set up a spout and build an ice tower in my back yard. Or just dump it back there perhaps, although that still has risks of running off into the street. Maybe get one of those soft-sided above ground pools and use it as a storage tank then. I just checked and apparently you can leave them full outside all winter. It's only about 3000 gallons of water so it wouldn't really be all that much. Some would probably evaporate as well.
I did some math on this for my own driveway, which is about 30 square meters. I had a lot of fun with the impossible layer of ice on it yesterday and today. There's nothing like getting home after an 18 hour day of frantic work and getting stuck halfway onto the street and having to spend hours trying to clear things enough to get the car to move. Not to mention that something seems to have happened to my transmission during the ordeal. Keeping the driveway clear would be the best thing, but I just haven't had any time to do it, or even think about it lately. I'm thinking, for a future project, that ripping up the driveway, then putting in a driveway heating system would be a good idea.
I took the figure for the most snowfall ever in my state, 2.73 meters and the figure for the coldest day on record -38 Celsius. So that's about 82 cubic meters of snow for the whole winter on that 30 square meter driveway, which works out to about 8.2 cubic meters (I found figures saying 12 to 1 snow to water volume and settled on using 10 to 1) of water, which is about 8,200 kilograms of water (maybe a bit more at that temperature. At 4.184 kilojoules per degree Celsius per kilogram, that's 34,308.8 kilojoules for each degree Celsius. Starting at -38 degrees Celsius, it takes 1,303,734.4 kilojoules to heat the ice up to 0 degrees Celsius. Then you have to consider enthalpy of fusion, so it takes another 333.5 kilojoules per kilogram to actually melt the ice. So, that's 2,734,700 kilojoules to actually melt the ice, which is more than it took to raise it the 38 degrees. Obviously, the starting and ending temperatures matter, but clearly there isn't going to be as big a difference as you might expect on a mild day vs. a cold one. So then we might as well raise the temperature to a comfortable 27 degrees, which is a further 926,337.6 kilojoules. So, in the worst imaginable winter, my driveway would take 4,964,772 kilojoules of heat to keep clear.
That's about 1379 kilowatt hours. At $0.12 per kilowatt hour, that's about $166 for the whole winter. Efficiency losses wouldn't be that high low, since we're talking about heating here. Electric heating elements under the surface of the driveway would end up sending nearly all that energy as heat upwards. Even though, as you point out, the concrete (asphalt in the case of my driveway, but if I redid the driveway I'd probably go with concrete) is going to store heat well and you'd have to heat it for a while. However, once the ice and snow starts to melt above it, it's going to do an excellent job of absorbing that heat right back out. It will change my numbers, but I don't think by any significant degree. The real challenge is going to be figuring out where to stop applying heat because the concrete will act as a buffer and keep melting ice and snow for you for a while after you stop. I imagine temperature sensors would be able to work it out. Still, obviously it varies depending on how much snowfall you actually get. Obviously this is going to be vastly less efficient if you get a coating of ice every day rather than a smaller number of bigger snowfalls.
As a comparison, at around 121,000 kilojoules per gallon of gas, that's about 41 gallons, or about $135. For diesel/home heating oil, there's around 156,000 kilojoules in a gallon, so that's about 32 gallons of home heating oil, which comes out to about $106. At 105,506 kilojoules in a therm, that's about 47 therms of natural gas. My gas company charges about $0.81 per therm, so that's about $38 in natural gas. (As an aside, I've done the home heating oil vs natural gas comparison before and there's such a huge gap in price per unit of energy. Why then does anyone who has gas available even use home heating oil? Is there some huge difference in converting the energy to heat that I'm missing?) However, I don't think anyone makes a system to burn those fuels directly under a driveway, so you'd need to hook up a furnace in the house to water pipes running under the driveway. On the other hand, that's probably a false loss, sin
The magnetic field deflects solar wind. Solar wind strips hydrogen out of the atmosphere. Since water molecules are polarized, I wonder if floods of charged particles from mass ejections can excite them enough to fly off into space? I probably don't know enough about this to speculate. Of course, a good portion of the solar wind is hydrogen, so solar wind would also deposit it into the atmosphere. It's going to be a matter of equilibrium, like firing a high pressure hose into an already full glass of water, it won't get fuller, it will end up about a quarter full with water constantly spraying out of the glass.
As long as he's not being tried somewhere where the gaming businesses run the state, like Las Vegas, that would be an interesting criminal case. The whole point of these games is to give people the impression that skill can somehow help them win. If they then arrest people because their skills are helping them win, they have an awkward case. It's like card counting in casinos. Done with team collusion or with some other methods, it might legitimately be considered cheating. If it's just one player sitting there and evaluating the odds in their head, then it's not cheating, it's just someone playing the game the way it's meant to be played. If there's some big flaw in the game logic, it's the fault of the producers of the game, not the players who figure it out. That's what we expect from a game.
One thing that everyone, including the article, seems to be missing, or at least failing to mention, is that the lottery commissions and ticket producing companies don't care about this problem. Or at least they have little incentive to care. Same is true if the lotteries are being used to launder money. Heck, it's profit for them if they are being used to launder money. They produce a certain number of winners and a certain number of losers. As long as the whole book gets sold, it doesn't matter to them who the winners and losers are. They don't have to pay out any more money than they would otherwise. The only real problem to them is if the majority of people catch on to this and either stop playing in disgust, or start applying these techniques and, as a result, the stores are full of stacks of tickets that no-one will buy. As it stands, that's just not going to happen. How many people will read this article? And which people? The first word in the title is statistician. It has four whole syllables, quite aside from the fact that means math. The lotteries main customer base probably won't read this article. If they do, they probably won't understand it. If they do understand it, they probably still won't have enough fundamental understanding of the ideas behind it to apply it to anything other than that one ticket type. If they do, then more power to them, they're in the minority who can stop being taxed by the lottery and can start taxing their peers. The lottery commission still gets to sell the same number of tickets and pay out the same amount in prizes.
You do know that the man specialized in robbing charities, right? It is possible that he has a conscience when it comes to close family members, but none whatsoever for the rest of humanity, but I think it's more likely that he simply doesn't have a conscience.
Certainly the solar is better during the day. I was thinking that, with prices like that, you'd want to get entirely off the grid. At the moment, you just can't do that without either a large battery bank of batteries, a flywheel generator, some other exotic energy storage device, or a plain old, ordinary generator. Fuel cells would be nice, but they just don't seem to have emerged as a viable product. Other options seem to be too big for a residential home. Generators don't have to be all that smelly or noisy. The ones they make for RVs are relatively quiet, and you can stuff them in a sound dampening enclosure and put a muffler on the exhaust. They're more polluting and less efficient than centrally located large power plants, but if the electric company has raised the price to the point where local power generation is cost effective, then clearly they're doing something wrong.
All that said, I didn't realize that your power rate would go down to a reasonable rate if you switched to solar. In that case, it makes sense to switch to solar and stay on the grid. If the power prices go back up to that level again though, you might as well get a diesel generator that runs on biodiesel, or even unmodified rapeseed oil, which is currently seems to actually be cheaper than diesel (even accounting for differences in energy density), although possibly not cheaper than home heating oil (I think it's legal to use that for powering your house, but not sure). That way, you can even stay carbon neutral.
I get all that. But the fact is, you never actually gave any reasons whatsoever why it must be so.
You said that a plant takes from 1 to 2 decades to complete, that many things change during that time, and you said, without explaining why it must be so, that almost all other forms of power are more scalable.
You also pointed out that current nuclear power plants contain multiple reactors and are ongoing projects and need a small town of people to support them. Also you pointed out that they generally require lots of subsidies.
I agree with you on all of that. I think those are excellent reasons why nuclear power, as it's done now, is a bad proposition (the one thing I'm not sure of is if there are any isotopes you can only efficiently produce in those reactors that are vital industrially or in nuclear medicine).
I, for one, don't see why the US doesn't just find 2 1/2% of its land area and cover it in some sort of solar power method to produce the 3.5 TW of power it uses (not just metered residential electricity, but all of it). Even a lowball estimate of the startup costs of a nuclear power plant is probably $2 billion per gigawatt. With all the hidden costs it's probably way above that. Good numbers on solar power seem to be difficult to come by. I found some information suggesting $9 thousand per kilowatt for a residential system. You've got to be able to at least cut that in half with the economies of scale of a massive solar farm, and $4.5 billion per gigawatt is still on the same order as nuclear. With the massive maintenance of nuclear power, not to mention all of the other costs, they've got to come out at least even over the long term.
However, none of what you wrote gives any reasons why nuclear can't be done any other way. You say that I can't understand a rational argument when I see one, and I counter that you didn't actually present one. The real question isn't "are current nuclear power plants worth it?" The real question is "can something better be built?" The article is about China researching safe, low maintenance thorium reactors which could potentially be buried and simply churn out power. There may be any number of reasons why this simply isn't doable. The article doesn't even seem to be claiming there's any brand new theory of design being tested or that any significant discoveries have been made. Even if it were, I'd take it with an enormous grain of salt since the announcement would be coming from the Chinese government, which has released some pretty outrageous whoppers.
Still, if it is at all possible, then I don't think it's a bad thing. We already know that small nuclear reactors can be made and are worth it in certain situations. They're pretty much all military situations, of course. And we all know that the military considers hundreds of dollars a decent price for a gallon of gasoline (dependent on strategic value). If these reactors ever materialize then there will be a place for them. For example islands and other locales that can't be served by solar or by power lines to somewhere that is. Space is a pretty big one. If we ever get around to building a moon base, we're either going to need to put two solar farms on either side of it connected by 3500 miles of buried cable, build a giant solar mirror, or use a nuclear reactor. Even if solar is the best long term solution on the moon, a compact nuclear reactor is going to be the best way to gain a foothold to build it.
Phantonfive wrote:
I wouldn't worry too much. I tend to get pretty verbose.
Although the courts may not take that approach, it's the one they're supposed to take. The foundations of US government is the US Constitution and its amendments. The first ten amendments are referred to as the Bill of Rights. The idea is that there are "inalienable rights" that everyone automatically possesses. If those rights come into conflict, then the courts get to do some balancing and interpretation. The constitution is full of loopholes, as well, although the spirit of the document is pretty clear in most parts. It even has some bits that probably aren't as good an idea now as they were at the time. Nevertheless the idea behind it is that it lays out explicit rights and lays out the powers of government.
That's right, the government isn't allowed to deprive you of life "without due process of law". I thought it was pretty clear. Going "through all the necessary legal steps", as you say, constitutes due process. I'm not sure how we're in disagreement on that one. The government is forbidden from directly or constructively depriving you of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Sure, they do anyway sometimes, but they're not supposed to.
There is a double standard. I'm not sure why you can't see that the government is the one applying it. They're the ones who _set_ the rules, we expect them to follow them too.
As for whether or not this is property. It's certainly not conventional property directly. On the other hand, this isn't exactly IP, as you seem to think. This has nothing to do with trade secrets, copyright, or patents. There's an argument to made, perhaps, that it's a trademark issue, since they're putting up their own site (with that one image on it). Of course, I'm against trademark applying to domain names unless the page the domain directs to is itself infringing on a trademark (using someone else's trademark to promote products, or represent them as being from that organization). The money that they paid for a registration of the domain for a set time would seem to be a form of property. In any case theft of service is generally treated as seriously as if the property were real property and is probably a felony on this scale. Aside from being theft of service, it's also a denial of service attack. If you didn't notice, the government just went after a bunch of Anonymous members for a denial of service attack.
So any argument that this is somehow ok without a warrant and some sort of judicial process is just wrong.
I do just fine on logic puzzles already. I really don't see the need for attempts to insult my intelligence based on my perfectly valid response to your post. Also, you should bear in mind that individual posts on a thread are not operating in a vacuum. You can't just respond to one part of my post and ignore the larger context and then congratulate yourself for scoring some sort of coup.
What you're ignoring is that your statement "I don't see where in the constitution you are given a right to be alive" was in response to a statement from an AC that "If you want the privilege of being allowed to drive, you can have it as long as you don't risk my constitutionally protected right to be alive."
Now I actually disagree with that statement, because driving is also a right. Driving is a right that may be curtailed for reasons of public safety, but it's still a right. Bear with me, because this has some bearing on the "right to be alive".
When you mentioned a "right to be alive", clearly that has to be interpreted slightly. Obviously the government can't guarantee you continued life. That's patently absurd as it would effectively mean a constitutional guarantee to immortality. I gave you enough credit to assume that you weren't just being an idiot when you wrote it, so it's a pity you didn't extend the same credit to me.
Anyway, if you'll notice the language of the amendment, it doesn't just say that the government can't kill you, it says you can't be "deprived of life". It doesn't even specifically say that it's only the government that can't deprive you of life (which is good, because otherwise it would open the door for a private court system that could execute people). That's actually a pretty good constitutional foundation for programs like welfare, but I'm not going to go there right now. The point is that the government can't deprive you of life either directly or constructively. If you're not sure what I mean about constructively denying the right to life, liberty and property, here are some examples:
"We're not executing you, we're just releasing you from prison 3 miles offshore."
"We're not punishing you cruelly and unusually, we're just putting you in a cell with this muscle-bound convict who has violently raped every cell mate he's had so far. Hur hur hur."
"We're not denying you your property, we've just built a wall around it on public property. Incidentally, if you try to climb the wall, you'll be thrown in jail with a convict who will rape you and then we'll execute you"
So, basically the government is not supposed to take actions that have a high chance of leading to your death. This, in fact, conflicts with some other constitutional provisions such as the military draft, and even with some constitutional rights enjoyed by others.
The law isn't written by programmers, it's written by messy lawyers, and even more more messy economists and MBAs. It's also written in some sort of mutant legal language based on interpretation by case law. It would be better if it were written in something sane with proper ideas of precedence and inheritance of legal principles with everything clearly delineated, but it isn't.
(NOTE: The paragraph following this one is the part of the argument that's actually in context with your statement as it relates to the AC you originally replied to. So, although I stand by the other parts of this post where I say that you really do have a right to be alive within the reasonable boundaries of human lifespan and factors outside the governments control, this is part where, if you can find gaping logical flaws you get to tell me that I'm a mental defective who needs to go and brush up on his thinking skills. This is where I discuss whether you have a "right to be alive" contrasted against a right to drive.)
So when legal principles conflict, "reasonableness" rules. Even if the law were well written and thought out, it still couldn't anticipate every situation. So, when your right to not be "deprived of life" reasonably conflic
The point I was trying to get across though, is that there is, actually, a right to drive. As you point out, you can ride with someone or take the bus, and that would seem to cover your right to travel except that you're also guaranteed equal protection under the law. Therefore, everyone has a basic right to drive, or they have to take it away from everyone. Now, as we've both pointed out, rights can be conditional. In the case of a right to drive, it's conditional based on safety. Too young to be considered safe or responsible (still old enough to be charged as an adult if you go for a joyride and kill someone, of course) and you don't get to exercise the right. Not competent enough to pass a driving test and you don't get to exercise the right. Proven dangerous by a court of law as a drunk driver or other menace and you don't get to exercise the right. These things are reasonable. It's even reasonable that a license can be taken away before trial, in the same way that you can be jailed before trial, provided, of course, that there's a speedy process in the judicial system, based on presumption of innocence, to appeal.
I just feel I have to speak up whenever anyone says that something that is a right is just a privilege. Also, I also have to say that, as driving is a right, then the only things that should curtail it are safety issues. So, you shouldn't lose your right to drive if you didn't pay your child support, or you didn't pay some tax, or you didn't pay a parking ticket (there may be an argument that, by having been shown to be a danger to the sanctity of public property in the form of parking spaces that you're a menace, but it falls pretty flat to me), or you're a convicted felon (for something non-driving related), etc. The fact that you can is a problem, and it's only exacerbated by people saying things like "there's no constitutional right to drive a car".
"slower speed means more time to respond to whatever may be happening" is true, all other things being equal. The trouble is, all other things won't be equal. At slower speeds, people are going to cluster closer together. If they're close enough, and the car in front of them can stop quickly enough, they'll hit it before they can react to hit the brake.
I don't really disagree that slower speeds are going to result in more safety. It's just that it's a slippery slope between speed limits set above the maximum speed cars can go and 0. At 0, you have absolute safety, but no utility. At the maximum, things aren't all that safe, but most people either can't or won't go that fast. Basically, you have a peak level of danger vs. speed limit. Set the speed limit higher than that, and things get more dangerous, but the danger isn't growing as fast as it was approaching that peak. Set the speed limit lower and things get safer, but, once again, the lower they go, the less gains in safety relative to the drop.
Ultimately the problem is that if you can find a decent sweet spot for safety vs. utility (don't forget that the speed limit also determines the carrying capacity of the road, make it too low and your road is a continuous traffic jam), it's going to be far lower than people's comfort level. Ultimately, what happens in real life is that most people drive the speed that they're comfortable with, regardless of the speed limit.
I'm not sure you're listening to what the GP was saying. He was suggesting applying principles of mass-production to building nuclear power plants and you responded by explaining how things are done now and presenting that as proof doing it a different way is unrealistic. You never actually gave a good reason why it couldn't work.
That is, in fact, what the fine article is about. China researching liquid salt thorium reactors with an eye to mass-producing safe low-maintenance plants that could even just be buried somewhere.
Printing money doesn't give you increased wealth to work with, you're right there. It can, however, give you capital to work with to create wealth. So, if you print money and use it to invest in a solar farm, the solar farm starts producing electricity, and that is real wealth. For it to work long-term, of course, that virtual money has to essentially redeem itself by the productivity of what it funds.
This is, actually, pretty much the way modern capitalism works. Banks no longer lend the money deposited into them by account holders. Instead, they simply create virtual money that they lend out. Maybe that's why savings account interest rates are so low these days? This system actually can work if it's carefully regulated and if the capital this creates is used in real, wealth-creating, ways. Trouble is, things keep being deregulated or the regulations or regulators get all fouled up. Also, more and more, it seems that capital is being used in speculative activities that generate profit without generating wealth, if you get my meaning. For example all these trading scams that basically amount to trading companies inserting themselves as the middle man in other entities trades. Supposedly they generate wealth by increasing "liquidity", but that appears to be a load of nonsense.
So, I guess I'm trying to say that printing money to get out of financial trouble isn't necessarily bad as long as the consequences are well understood by the people doing it, and they don't screw it up. On the other hand, it does seem incredibly likely that they will, in fact, screw it up.
As long as you're not ignoring important facts, then the economics will actually dictate the proper course. In other words, if you account for environmental damage, health concerns, long-term cleanup, depletion of natural resources, etc., then economics really does work. The problem is, there are too many people doing business who think that farms selling off their seed corn to earn 10% more profit is a swell idea. They're not actually doing the economics properly, but they sure do produce more profit than the other guy. Until they've completely wrecked the business, market, or economy. Then they typically move on somewhere else and point at the great results they achieved at their last post, until the business unexpectedly went south, that is.
If you're paying $.50 per KWH for electricity, you're in the range where it could be cheaper to run a gas/propane/diesel generator instead of hooking up to the grid.
What really bugs me is that, if you click on the direct link to a post, such as 35064428, it comes up with the slider set to 0 abbreviated 0 hidden, but everything is hidden! That's what's happening to me on firefox under Ubuntu anyway. If you slide the sliders all the way over to 5, and then both back to -1, then you can see everything. Clearly that's broken, though.
Not just ethylene glycol. It might or might not be detected by this system, but What about gasoline with ethanol blended into it? What if you're a drinker, and you've just taken your empties in for recycling and you got ethanol on your hands from leftover stuff in cans and bottles?
Aside from those false positives, what if it turns out that sensitive chemical sensors don't maintain their accuracy well sitting in direct sunlight in an environment too hot for human life? Ever leave your car out in the sun on a hot, sunny summer day? Anything in there exposed to direct sunlight can get up to 50 degrees celcius. In winter, it's generally below zero. How is this device supposed to remain calibrated? How much per year will it cost to have this extra car part inspected and calibrated?
If we knew more about how the sensors were supposed to work, we might have a better idea. From the linked article, I can't really tell if it's supposed to be detecting alcohol secreted in sweat, or using some particular wavelength of light to detect alcohol in the bloodstream somehow (like those oxygen monitors), or somehow monitoring blood vessels and pulse to try to detect alcohol by secondary vascular effects, etc., etc.
Aside from that, what about people who need to run their car while legally drunk or they'll die? Consider the drunk who doesn't have anyone else to drive her home and doesn't have money for a cab and there's no public transit. Also, it's the dead of winter. Will this interlock stop the engine from starting, or will it let the engine start but lock the transmission somehow? If it's the first one, then the drunk freezes to death huddled in her car. Now, consider someone partying in the woods. He and his friends are totally drunk, but not planning on going anywhere, then along comes a bear, or a forest fire, whatever. They run for the safety of the car, but can't go anywhere. In the bear scenario, the bear eats them after tearing the cars roof off. In the fire scenario, they make a run for it, but wind conditions mean that the fire is spreading faster than they can run. Sure it would be illegal for the people in these examples to drive (it may even be illegal for the one freezing to death to run the car just to get heat since "operating" a motor vehicle is a vague term). The examples are also statistical outliers. It's still an automatic death sentence in those cases, however, and some like that would happen.
The level of the offense really does matter. I can't imagine how anyone could think otherwise. You seem to be implying that it would be ok if it were a capital offense. After all, "you're still breaking the law either way".
Excessive speed certainly does make accidents more dangerous. I have to strongly disagree with your statement that lower speed limits give more time to react. It does depend a little on what you're reacting to. Clearly if a tree falls across the road in front of you or if you're in fog and a 20 car pileup suddenly comes out of the fog then you'll have better chances of avoiding it at 10 mph than at 65 mph. For the most part though, you're going to be reacting to other traffic moving along at the same speed as you. In that case, the deciding factor usually isn't how fast you're going, it's how fast you can hit the brakes. Then it's all up to how well your brakes work. That critical issue of reaction time has more to do with following distance than raw speed. In slower traffic, cars tend to draw in much closer. With lower speed limits, I think you'd have just as many accidents (car to car ones at least), but probably fewer fatalities (at least below a certain threshold).
The problem is, you're talking about a slippery slope, not some sort of absolute. Increase speed limits and you'll get more fatalities, decrease them and you'll get less, decrease them even more and you'll get less, and so forth. The problem is, you won't eliminate fatalities until you bring the speed limits down to 0 MPH (in other words, eliminate driving). You'll always be able to make the argument that making people drive more slowly will save lives, even after you've lowered speed limits below the point of practicality. Also, there won't be a linear relationship between speed and fatalities. It will be a curve, and not a steadily increasing one, either. Above a certain speed limit, fatalities won't really increase much partly because you'll hit the level at which most people are uncomfortable driving faster, not to mention the point where people hit the physical limits of their vehicles. The shape of the curve is also a moving target due to increases in technology. If someone invents super brakes with a Star Trek inertial dampening system, fatalities would soar overnight from all the cars on the roads capable of stopping on a dime being rear-ended by cars without such new systems or even cars with such new systems but who were following without enough distance to hit their brakes before passing the point the car in front stopped.
Deciding on a speed limit is a complex issue since you'll never achieve a "safe" speed limit until you eliminate driving. Even when you come up with a good consensus on practicality vs. convenience vs. safety, it will be obsoleted by advancing technology. However, you also potentially have to support 100+ years of automotive technology on modern roads along with newer, more advanced and capable cars.
Right to travel would seem to be covered under the right to liberty that cannot be deprived without due process of law laid out in the fifth amendment. There are many places in the US that you can't practically walk to given the distances involved not to mention the ones you simply can't legally walk to, since you would have to cross all kinds of non-pedestrian government-built roads. Therefore, you have a right to drive (although it's limited by age class, like many other rights) as long as that right hasn't been deprived by due process of law, otherwise the government is constructively removing your liberty by building all these roads.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not. The right to "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence is clearly delineated in the Declaration of Independence which is one of the founding documents of the United States along with the Constitution. In the Constitution itself, the right to be alive is in the Bill of Rights, in the fifth amendment where it says "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Now, the government has gotten a lot of mileage out of obfuscating what counts as "due process of law" (for example the idea that due process doesn't need to involve the judicial branch of government and that due process can occur without the person it's affecting getting to defend themselves), as well as just who due process applies to (taking it away from non-citizens on US soil, playing around with just what constitutes US soil, such as Guantanamo Bay, taking it away from US Citizens not on US soil and taking it from US Citizens who are on US soil but who are somehow argued to be allied with an enemy). Despite all this, the right to be alive is clearly there.
It's not circular reasoning, it basically boils down to a tautology. Birds are fliers because they fly. Similarly, unstable people are defined as unstable because they do unstable things. It's not really begging the question or anything like that, it's just that committing suicide in and of itself is good evidence of being unstable, and taking a bunch of people with you on purpose is even more evidence of being unstable.
That said, not all suicide bombers are going to be unstable, some of them are going to be coerced.
Birds are found in the air because they are fliers.
Birds are fliers because they are found in the air.