The key difference was that every little thing Trump did was held up by the media (and the Republican establishment) as a harbinger of the end of modern civilization if Trump were to get elected.
Which turned out to be what a lot of voters wanted. Every winning candidate wins because of a coalition of voters, but the key to the Trump coalition are people who find the status quo ante to be intolerable, and wanted to see it destroyed. Bannon compared himself to Lenin. Now that component of voters is quite diverse too; not every one of them envisioned the same status quo post. In other words they're not all white supremacists, although Democrats like to cast them as such.
colluding with the DNC on debate prep, colluding with the DNC on subverting Sanders' campaign
Which is not a crime. It's not even against party rules. Have you read the parties' bylaws? I have. If you read carefully you'll see that the national committees are not intended to be neutral and fair. They're *power centers*. The way you deal with them is you seize them. The way you seize them is you court the people who put sweat into the party: who worked their way up from precinct captain to state committee, or who stood for office and won. In other words the party establishment.
Only naive people think the primary process is fair and democratic, or even supposed to be fair. What it is is an attempt to create a hybrid of popular democracy and the old smoke-filled rooms where presidential candidates were selected up until the 1970s.
Specifically, we tried to get colleges and universities to adopt new methods of andragogy in addition to lecture.
The reason is that for most students lecture isn't very effective. Their retention drops of rapidly as the lecture gets longer, to the point where when you are approaching the 1 hour mark almost nobody is retaining anything being said. Basically long lectures are a huge waste of a lot of people's time.
It's also important to understand that students are different from each other in their learning strengths and weaknesses. I, for example, can sit in a lecture hall for hours on end and remember almost everything. I'm an oddball. People like me have traditionally been seen as "bright", but life experience has taught me that I'm not *that* much smarter than most of the people around me. What I and people like me am are, is unusually good at retaining lecture material. That's a massive advantage in a lecture-based educational system.
Don't get me wrong. Being an information sponge is a tremendous asset in real life. But I think academia over-selects for people like me, and makes people who don't happen to have this peculiar talent work harder for the same results.
But a more diverse way of teaching would also benefit oddballs like me. When people talk about "learning styles" they usually mean "I shouldn't be forced to learn in ways that are hard for me." Actually, you should be challenged to learn in ways that don't come naturally to you, just not 100% of the time. It's important to become a versatile learner, able to adapt to the situation. Playing to your strength all the time is limiting.
I actually AM from Massachusetts, and having worked all around the country it's not really a mystery to me. It's educational attainment. Over 40% of residents here have a bachelor's degree, and 18% have a graduate degree. We also have -- going by test scores -- the best K-12 schools. Consequently a lot of things just work better here because people are somewhat better prepared for their jobs.
Which is not to say an educated person in Massachusetts is better than an educated person in Arkansas. Or even that an educated person is somehow *morally* better than an uneducated one. But things do run better when a higher proportion of workers can read instructions and do basic math.
Well, if your cat lived on wild critters, they'd have no carbon impact. It's feeding them meat that is produced by energy-intensive concentrated feeding operations that generates CO2.
You could reduce a lot of the carbon impact of your pet by feeding it from a locally produced beef, e.g. a meat share from a local farmer's co-op. You could also feed it less popular cuts that are essentially by-products of producing steaks. I hear dogs really like beef heart, and organ meats are actually an important part of a wild canine's diet.
If feeding dogs food you prepare yourself seems extreme, well I suppose it is. I had a colleague once who had a side business breeding border collies for dog sports; she prepared all of her dogs' food from scratch. A dog living off commercial dog food is like a person trying to survive on chips and soda.
In any case, lets put this in perspective. The study says that 160 million pets in the US have the same impact as 13 million cars; using that ratio the 263 million cars in the US have the carbon impact of 3.2 billion pets.
I once heard a comedian put it this way: People from Massachusetts are the French of America. They think they're better than everyone, but nobody else can see why.
The problem is that "how much exposure" may not be the right question.
The plutonium was inhaled. Which means we're now talking about chemistry and physiology, not just physics. Inhalation is not like getting irradiated from an external source, the exact chemical form of plutonium (oxide? nitrate?) makes a difference because it determines where it goes. Is it excreted? Does it stay in the lungs? Does it migrate somewhere else?
So it's not easy to come up with a single number which characterizes the seriousness of inhaled plutonium, because it's not just the intensity of the radiation that matters, it's the exact places it goes in the body and how long it stays there.
Boomer here. You sound like a Gen X'er who's having a little difficulty with the generational succession thing; let me help you out.
On the plus side, your're older and wiser now. Congratulations. That's something you should feel proud of.
On the minus side you are no longer cool. You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight. Yesterday you and your cohort were on top of the world, the center of attention, the apple of the media's eye; but when you woke up to day you didn't realize it, but you'd become the generational equivalent of a fish left out on the counter over a hot summer's night.
So the millennials have discovered something you've known all along. You laugh, and look around and notice nobody is laughing with you. That's because you haven't figured it out yet: knowledge isn't cool until someone cool knows it. And that's not you. Nor for practical purposes anyone else over 30.
Now I suppose you could console yourself with the idea that the millennials will learn this very same lesson, but I say wish them well and let them enjoy their fleeting moment as the center of the universe, because soon you'll be feeling the icy winds of mortality at your back. That's a reminder to focus on what's important.
And what people think of you just isn't very important. What people think of other people is even less so.
Yes, I was surprised that the prankster thought Bossert had "expertise". He's a lawyer.
Now a lot of lawyers are very smart, and the best are information sponges who do manage to acquire impressive depth of knowledge in fields outside the law. But Bossert's only security experience was working as Deputy Homeland Security Advisor under Bush, a position he was utterly unqualified for; as for experience he picked up in that position, this was a period when the department was new and notorious for security theater and expensive boondoggles. Oh, yes he did serve as Director of Infrastructure Protection under Bush as well, during a period where nothing significant was accomplished.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if he got suckered by a phishing campaign.
Bonus points if you use a vague adjective to convince your audiophile friends that music sounds better over a shielded cable. Tell them, I don't know, that shielding the delicate audio signal from RF interference yields sound that is more "palpable".
In some ways what we're dealing with here is a lack of clarity -- at least among the mass of voters.
Health care spending in the US has increased faster than inflation every year since around 1960, but think about how different medicine was in 1960. In 1960 there were no MRIs or CAT scans. Chemotherapy for cancer was experimental. Heart valve replacement wasn't an option, nor was hip or knee replacement. There was no Viagra, no statins for high blood pressure, very little that could be done about diabetes. The famous catch phrase was "take two aspirin and call me in the morning", because a lot of medicine amounted to keeping a patient comfortable and hoping he'd get better on his own.
So it's no surprise we're paying more: we're getting more. And if someone who has no health care coverage comes into a hospital sick, we will use that full armamentarium of cures on them because we want our hospitals to value life above profit. But when a patient goes medically bankrupt, somebody still has to pay, and that somebody is everyone.
Under the circumstances there is only one way to spend less: use less. And since we don't want to stop treating sick indigent people, what we have to do is keep everyone healthier: manage chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, and detect diseases like cancer early, before heroic measures are called for.
Our failure to keep people healthy is why other countries that spend far less than us, and have less technology than us, have better healthcare outcomes. Once you're very sick, the US is a great place to be treated; but it's not so great if you don't want to get sick in the first place.
The Atlantic was founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadworth Longfellow, and Henry Wadworth Longellow among others. For much of the 20th century it was a kind of New England counterpart to the upstart (1925) New Yorker. Then in 1999 it was sold to a self-proclaimed neocon businessman and a few years later moved from its historic headquarters in Boston's North End to Washington DC., and hit a low point in 2013 when it published paid content from the Church of Scientology.
The "Emerson Collective" is named for Ralph Waldo Emerson (evidently), so this seems to signal a movement o return the magazine to its roots.
Bullshit. Look up the etymology of "partisan". Also this is supposedly science. If someone uses names of elements for chemical compounds in a scientific context, I must assume they don't know what they're talking about.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know any actual professional scientists. You assume scientists talk like your middle school science teacher. They don't.
"Carbon" and "Nitrogen". If it is unclear in context, "atomic carbon" and "atomic nitrogen", or (if appropriate) "molecular nitrogen".
If this seems like a PITA, think of language as something like a compression algorithm. You want to represent the commonest cases in the fewest bits. This might make uncommon cases require more bits to represent. In other words people balance the convenience of omitting "dioxide" frequently with inconvenience of adding "atomic" occasionally.
This is how people *actually use language. Attempts to make their semantics less context-dependent have consistently failed in the face of convenience.
We call them "Carbon Monoxide" and "Nitrogen Dioxide". If we are in a context where the only carbon compound we could possibly be interested in is "Carbon Monoxide", then among people who share that context and work closely together it is highly likely those will be abbreviated to "Carbon" and "Nitrogen", and in context it will be perfectly clear although obscure to outsiders.
This is a natural process called "polysemy" and it is part of how non-mutually understandable human languages eventually arise. Natural and inevitable as it is, it flies in the face how "good" students are taught to think about using words, which is to use them "correctly". There's a lot to be said for that, but ultimately the idea of "correct" is built on a foundation of sand.
But that hasn't stopped people from trying to make language more precise, but unfortunately all of those efforts have failed. You might be interested in John Wilkins Philosophical Language, which figures in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novels. Here's an interesting tidbit: the one useful product that has come out of those failed efforts is the thesaurus. Roget's Thesaurus started out as an attempt to develop a concept index (technically speaking, an ontology) for conducting semantically precise discussions of "philosophical" (then including scientific) matters.
Well, I think the immediate application will be to be able to have children who won't have to worry about developing Huntington's and other genetic diseases where we can zero in on a single gene, or perhaps several genes.
But the things that make a human admirable or superior are nigh-imperfect aren't going to translate into genes in any way we will be able to figure out anytime soon.
One of the big surprises when the human genome was decoded is that it is far, far smaller than anyone had suspected. We expected over 100,000 protein-encoding genes, we found fewer than 20,000. What this means is that the way DNA directs the undifferentiated cells of a blastula to turn into a human isn't anything like reading a blueprint, where there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between a part of the blueprint and the actual end result. It's more like the Mandelbrot set, where an immensely complex and unexpected landscape emerges from very terse instructions.
So I don't think we'll be able to edit peoples genes to make them successful, or intelligent; not anytime soon at least. We'd probably be able to tweak features like eye color, although that may have unintended consequences. Changing a single behavior like liking to eat meat is questionable; food likings are largely a product of culture and habituation. Brute force methods, say disabling the glutamate receptors on the tongue, are likely to have unintended consequences.
It'd be interesting to know whether such a contract would be legal under EU law, which (unlike US law) explicitly recognizes a fundamental right to individual privacy.
If you look into privacy cases, you'll see that expectation of privacy is an important factor. If you are going to monitor your employees' keystrokes, the only way it could possibly be reasonable is if you're up front about it. That way they know that the pissed-off email they draft but never send (a bad idea in any case) will still be read by the boss.
What the rule really needs to be is no spying on workers unless there's something to find. Of course if you knew there's something to find, there'd be no reason to spy on workers.
Consider the word "Jack"; it can refer to a playing card, it can be a person's name, it can be an electrical socket, it can be a lifting machine, it can be a flag, or it can be a variety of cheese. On the face of it this should make the word confusing. But it's not.
Words are not like variables in a programming language. Just as human grammar is context-sensitive, so are the meanings of words. So people in-the-know understand that a "carbon tax" isn't levied on, say, a diamond.
If we were talking about pure rainwater falling directly into bodies of water, it would. But we're talking about runoff. After that initially pure water runs over the land it's not so pure by the time it reaches a natural water body.
Take an empty cup and fill it from a city gutter during a heavy rain. Now drink it. Not an attractive proposition, is it?
In the case of eutrophication, we're worried about fertilizers applied to crops and lawns. This is in the form of various highly soluble nitrogen and phosphorous salts which are highly soluble and readily washed away. People use these highly soluble compounds because they stimulate rapid plant growth. These do the same thing for microorganisms when they reach a marine or fresh water body.
It's called synecdoche. Calling businessmen "suits" and supporters "partisans" is referring to a whole by using a part. By the same token we refer to carbon dioxide as "carbon" and NO3- as "nitrogen".
In context is is perfectly clear to someone who actually understands what the whole is. To those who do not understand what the whole is calling the whole by its proper name is unlikely to be enlightening.
Still, you're talking about minor variations in configuration. A completely different drive system is a whole nother kettle of fish. And you'll be amortizing the costs of producing ICE's and transmissions over far fewer units, which means costs will be higher.
It's basically the mirror image of what we have today, where the number of electric drives sold is relatively small. If as many electric cars were sold as ICE cars, the cost would plummet.
Slashdot Mirror
The key difference was that every little thing Trump did was held up by the media (and the Republican establishment) as a harbinger of the end of modern civilization if Trump were to get elected.
Which turned out to be what a lot of voters wanted. Every winning candidate wins because of a coalition of voters, but the key to the Trump coalition are people who find the status quo ante to be intolerable, and wanted to see it destroyed. Bannon compared himself to Lenin. Now that component of voters is quite diverse too; not every one of them envisioned the same status quo post. In other words they're not all white supremacists, although Democrats like to cast them as such.
colluding with the DNC on debate prep, colluding with the DNC on subverting Sanders' campaign
Which is not a crime. It's not even against party rules. Have you read the parties' bylaws? I have. If you read carefully you'll see that the national committees are not intended to be neutral and fair. They're *power centers*. The way you deal with them is you seize them. The way you seize them is you court the people who put sweat into the party: who worked their way up from precinct captain to state committee, or who stood for office and won. In other words the party establishment.
Only naive people think the primary process is fair and democratic, or even supposed to be fair. What it is is an attempt to create a hybrid of popular democracy and the old smoke-filled rooms where presidential candidates were selected up until the 1970s.
Specifically, we tried to get colleges and universities to adopt new methods of andragogy in addition to lecture.
The reason is that for most students lecture isn't very effective. Their retention drops of rapidly as the lecture gets longer, to the point where when you are approaching the 1 hour mark almost nobody is retaining anything being said. Basically long lectures are a huge waste of a lot of people's time.
It's also important to understand that students are different from each other in their learning strengths and weaknesses. I, for example, can sit in a lecture hall for hours on end and remember almost everything. I'm an oddball. People like me have traditionally been seen as "bright", but life experience has taught me that I'm not *that* much smarter than most of the people around me. What I and people like me am are, is unusually good at retaining lecture material. That's a massive advantage in a lecture-based educational system.
Don't get me wrong. Being an information sponge is a tremendous asset in real life. But I think academia over-selects for people like me, and makes people who don't happen to have this peculiar talent work harder for the same results.
But a more diverse way of teaching would also benefit oddballs like me. When people talk about "learning styles" they usually mean "I shouldn't be forced to learn in ways that are hard for me." Actually, you should be challenged to learn in ways that don't come naturally to you, just not 100% of the time. It's important to become a versatile learner, able to adapt to the situation. Playing to your strength all the time is limiting.
I actually AM from Massachusetts, and having worked all around the country it's not really a mystery to me. It's educational attainment. Over 40% of residents here have a bachelor's degree, and 18% have a graduate degree. We also have -- going by test scores -- the best K-12 schools. Consequently a lot of things just work better here because people are somewhat better prepared for their jobs.
Which is not to say an educated person in Massachusetts is better than an educated person in Arkansas. Or even that an educated person is somehow *morally* better than an uneducated one. But things do run better when a higher proportion of workers can read instructions and do basic math.
Well, if your cat lived on wild critters, they'd have no carbon impact. It's feeding them meat that is produced by energy-intensive concentrated feeding operations that generates CO2.
You could reduce a lot of the carbon impact of your pet by feeding it from a locally produced beef, e.g. a meat share from a local farmer's co-op. You could also feed it less popular cuts that are essentially by-products of producing steaks. I hear dogs really like beef heart, and organ meats are actually an important part of a wild canine's diet.
If feeding dogs food you prepare yourself seems extreme, well I suppose it is. I had a colleague once who had a side business breeding border collies for dog sports; she prepared all of her dogs' food from scratch. A dog living off commercial dog food is like a person trying to survive on chips and soda.
In any case, lets put this in perspective. The study says that 160 million pets in the US have the same impact as 13 million cars; using that ratio the 263 million cars in the US have the carbon impact of 3.2 billion pets.
I once heard a comedian put it this way: People from Massachusetts are the French of America. They think they're better than everyone, but nobody else can see why.
The problem is that "how much exposure" may not be the right question.
The plutonium was inhaled. Which means we're now talking about chemistry and physiology, not just physics. Inhalation is not like getting irradiated from an external source, the exact chemical form of plutonium (oxide? nitrate?) makes a difference because it determines where it goes. Is it excreted? Does it stay in the lungs? Does it migrate somewhere else?
So it's not easy to come up with a single number which characterizes the seriousness of inhaled plutonium, because it's not just the intensity of the radiation that matters, it's the exact places it goes in the body and how long it stays there.
Boomer here. You sound like a Gen X'er who's having a little difficulty with the generational succession thing; let me help you out.
On the plus side, your're older and wiser now. Congratulations. That's something you should feel proud of.
On the minus side you are no longer cool. You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight. Yesterday you and your cohort were on top of the world, the center of attention, the apple of the media's eye; but when you woke up to day you didn't realize it, but you'd become the generational equivalent of a fish left out on the counter over a hot summer's night.
So the millennials have discovered something you've known all along. You laugh, and look around and notice nobody is laughing with you. That's because you haven't figured it out yet: knowledge isn't cool until someone cool knows it. And that's not you. Nor for practical purposes anyone else over 30.
Now I suppose you could console yourself with the idea that the millennials will learn this very same lesson, but I say wish them well and let them enjoy their fleeting moment as the center of the universe, because soon you'll be feeling the icy winds of mortality at your back. That's a reminder to focus on what's important.
And what people think of you just isn't very important. What people think of other people is even less so.
Yes, I was surprised that the prankster thought Bossert had "expertise". He's a lawyer.
Now a lot of lawyers are very smart, and the best are information sponges who do manage to acquire impressive depth of knowledge in fields outside the law. But Bossert's only security experience was working as Deputy Homeland Security Advisor under Bush, a position he was utterly unqualified for; as for experience he picked up in that position, this was a period when the department was new and notorious for security theater and expensive boondoggles. Oh, yes he did serve as Director of Infrastructure Protection under Bush as well, during a period where nothing significant was accomplished.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if he got suckered by a phishing campaign.
Bonus points if you use a vague adjective to convince your audiophile friends that music sounds better over a shielded cable. Tell them, I don't know, that shielding the delicate audio signal from RF interference yields sound that is more "palpable".
In some ways what we're dealing with here is a lack of clarity -- at least among the mass of voters.
Health care spending in the US has increased faster than inflation every year since around 1960, but think about how different medicine was in 1960. In 1960 there were no MRIs or CAT scans. Chemotherapy for cancer was experimental. Heart valve replacement wasn't an option, nor was hip or knee replacement. There was no Viagra, no statins for high blood pressure, very little that could be done about diabetes. The famous catch phrase was "take two aspirin and call me in the morning", because a lot of medicine amounted to keeping a patient comfortable and hoping he'd get better on his own.
So it's no surprise we're paying more: we're getting more. And if someone who has no health care coverage comes into a hospital sick, we will use that full armamentarium of cures on them because we want our hospitals to value life above profit. But when a patient goes medically bankrupt, somebody still has to pay, and that somebody is everyone.
Under the circumstances there is only one way to spend less: use less. And since we don't want to stop treating sick indigent people, what we have to do is keep everyone healthier: manage chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, and detect diseases like cancer early, before heroic measures are called for.
Our failure to keep people healthy is why other countries that spend far less than us, and have less technology than us, have better healthcare outcomes. Once you're very sick, the US is a great place to be treated; but it's not so great if you don't want to get sick in the first place.
The Atlantic was founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadworth Longfellow, and Henry Wadworth Longellow among others. For much of the 20th century it was a kind of New England counterpart to the upstart (1925) New Yorker. Then in 1999 it was sold to a self-proclaimed neocon businessman and a few years later moved from its historic headquarters in Boston's North End to Washington DC., and hit a low point in 2013 when it published paid content from the Church of Scientology.
The "Emerson Collective" is named for Ralph Waldo Emerson (evidently), so this seems to signal a movement o return the magazine to its roots.
Bullshit. Look up the etymology of "partisan". Also this is supposedly science. If someone uses names of elements for chemical compounds in a scientific context, I must assume they don't know what they're talking about.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know any actual professional scientists. You assume scientists talk like your middle school science teacher. They don't.
Somehow I doubt that will convince anyone. But if it did, that person wouldn't be the sharpest tool in the box.
"Carbon" and "Nitrogen". If it is unclear in context, "atomic carbon" and "atomic nitrogen", or (if appropriate) "molecular nitrogen".
If this seems like a PITA, think of language as something like a compression algorithm. You want to represent the commonest cases in the fewest bits. This might make uncommon cases require more bits to represent. In other words people balance the convenience of omitting "dioxide" frequently with inconvenience of adding "atomic" occasionally.
This is how people *actually use language. Attempts to make their semantics less context-dependent have consistently failed in the face of convenience.
We call them "Carbon Monoxide" and "Nitrogen Dioxide". If we are in a context where the only carbon compound we could possibly be interested in is "Carbon Monoxide", then among people who share that context and work closely together it is highly likely those will be abbreviated to "Carbon" and "Nitrogen", and in context it will be perfectly clear although obscure to outsiders.
This is a natural process called "polysemy" and it is part of how non-mutually understandable human languages eventually arise. Natural and inevitable as it is, it flies in the face how "good" students are taught to think about using words, which is to use them "correctly". There's a lot to be said for that, but ultimately the idea of "correct" is built on a foundation of sand.
But that hasn't stopped people from trying to make language more precise, but unfortunately all of those efforts have failed. You might be interested in John Wilkins Philosophical Language, which figures in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novels. Here's an interesting tidbit: the one useful product that has come out of those failed efforts is the thesaurus. Roget's Thesaurus started out as an attempt to develop a concept index (technically speaking, an ontology) for conducting semantically precise discussions of "philosophical" (then including scientific) matters.
Well, I think the immediate application will be to be able to have children who won't have to worry about developing Huntington's and other genetic diseases where we can zero in on a single gene, or perhaps several genes.
But the things that make a human admirable or superior are nigh-imperfect aren't going to translate into genes in any way we will be able to figure out anytime soon.
One of the big surprises when the human genome was decoded is that it is far, far smaller than anyone had suspected. We expected over 100,000 protein-encoding genes, we found fewer than 20,000. What this means is that the way DNA directs the undifferentiated cells of a blastula to turn into a human isn't anything like reading a blueprint, where there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between a part of the blueprint and the actual end result. It's more like the Mandelbrot set, where an immensely complex and unexpected landscape emerges from very terse instructions.
So I don't think we'll be able to edit peoples genes to make them successful, or intelligent; not anytime soon at least. We'd probably be able to tweak features like eye color, although that may have unintended consequences. Changing a single behavior like liking to eat meat is questionable; food likings are largely a product of culture and habituation. Brute force methods, say disabling the glutamate receptors on the tongue, are likely to have unintended consequences.
It'd be interesting to know whether such a contract would be legal under EU law, which (unlike US law) explicitly recognizes a fundamental right to individual privacy.
If you look into privacy cases, you'll see that expectation of privacy is an important factor. If you are going to monitor your employees' keystrokes, the only way it could possibly be reasonable is if you're up front about it. That way they know that the pissed-off email they draft but never send (a bad idea in any case) will still be read by the boss.
What the rule really needs to be is no spying on workers unless there's something to find. Of course if you knew there's something to find, there'd be no reason to spy on workers.
Consider the word "Jack"; it can refer to a playing card, it can be a person's name, it can be an electrical socket, it can be a lifting machine, it can be a flag, or it can be a variety of cheese. On the face of it this should make the word confusing. But it's not.
Words are not like variables in a programming language. Just as human grammar is context-sensitive, so are the meanings of words. So people in-the-know understand that a "carbon tax" isn't levied on, say, a diamond.
It's both.
If we were talking about pure rainwater falling directly into bodies of water, it would. But we're talking about runoff. After that initially pure water runs over the land it's not so pure by the time it reaches a natural water body.
Take an empty cup and fill it from a city gutter during a heavy rain. Now drink it. Not an attractive proposition, is it?
In the case of eutrophication, we're worried about fertilizers applied to crops and lawns. This is in the form of various highly soluble nitrogen and phosphorous salts which are highly soluble and readily washed away. People use these highly soluble compounds because they stimulate rapid plant growth. These do the same thing for microorganisms when they reach a marine or fresh water body.
It's called synecdoche. Calling businessmen "suits" and supporters "partisans" is referring to a whole by using a part. By the same token we refer to carbon dioxide as "carbon" and NO3- as "nitrogen".
In context is is perfectly clear to someone who actually understands what the whole is. To those who do not understand what the whole is calling the whole by its proper name is unlikely to be enlightening.
Still, you're talking about minor variations in configuration. A completely different drive system is a whole nother kettle of fish. And you'll be amortizing the costs of producing ICE's and transmissions over far fewer units, which means costs will be higher.
It's basically the mirror image of what we have today, where the number of electric drives sold is relatively small. If as many electric cars were sold as ICE cars, the cost would plummet.
Or perhaps a phallic victory.
And only a fool would care if s/he/? made the stockholders money.