Actually, Soyuz is the very spacecraft that I had in mind that is limited to ~100 pound payload downmass or so. There just isn't any significant mass reserve in it besides the ability to land with a crew of three, nor is there any significant volume for it.
Unless the crew consists of three people each weighing 33 kilograms (73 pounds) or less, the downmass is more than 100 kg.
There's no spacecraft other than SpaceX's at the moment with a downmass capacity in the 100+ pound region.
Soyuz.
Yeah, let us now compare capabilities a 7 year old rocket/ship to another with over 50 years of history. Soyuz can carry three astronauts at most to ISS, and is a single purpose ship.
The post to I was responding was about downmass capacity.
The statement was incorrect: Soyuz--as you pointed out-- routinely brings down three astronauts, which is a down mass of a lot more than 100 pounds.
The fact that Soyuz has "over 50 years of history" and Dragon doesn't was not brought up in the statement to which I was responding, so I didn't mention it.
Crew Dragon can carry 7, and also some cargo making the transportation to station cheaper overall.
I think you make the point quite well that government is not well equipped to offer innovation and efficiency. The best things happen when.gov just gets out of the way and let's people create.
Yes... and no.
Some history: The young innovative rocket company SpaceX had made claims that it had designed the most reliable booster ever built, one that would have a 99.9% reliability right from the very first flight... and then blew up their first three launches. When they finally got one to work, the fourth launch, they were out of money, and nobody but Kazakhstan was willing to fly on vehicles with a demonstrated reliability record of 25% (and even Kazakhstan wouldn't have, except that they had already bought the launch.)
The only people willing to trust SpaceX... was NASA. Back when SpaceX had a record of three failures, no successes, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to design and build Falcon-9: NASA's anchor tenancy allowed SpaceX to attract other funding, and other customers.
This is not news: Elon Musk credits NASA with saving SpaceX.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-would-be-no-spacex-and-its-brilliant-boat-landing/
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/14/8605597/elon-musk-discusses-spacex-tesla-near-bankruptcy
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/836443541001797632
So, when you say the best things happen when.gov gets out of the way, perhaps you should say, the best things happen when.gov works in partnership with innovators.
Yup, after the moon landings, the American space program fell apart at the seams. They lost three times more people in the space program than Russia.
Uh, yes, but that's a bit misleading, since as of the end of the shuttle program, the American space program had launched five times more people into space than the Russian program. We tend to forget how large the shuttle was and how routine the launches were, but do recall that the total number of crewmembers of all 135 space shuttle missions was 833-- that's more than the total of all the people launched by all the other launch vehicles put together.
SX has launched 43 times with 1 launch failure ( and a partial ).
Huh? What are you talking about? SpaceX failed in its first three launches. You can hardly call that "only one launch failure (and a partial)".
I admire that: the best way to push the boundaries is to fail, and then learn from the failures. But learning from the failures means: don't pretend that failures didn't happen.
So, two out of 44 failed-- that comes to a demonstrated 95.5% success rate, very close to what the AC said, "that the average reliability of orbital rockets historically sits currently at 94%."
Quite a bit less in payments than what others ask for, and what "more limitations"? There's no spacecraft other than SpaceX's at the moment with a downmass capacity in the 100+ pound region.
Humans are causing global warming but so is everything else. Everything affects everything else.
That statement is so vague as to be almost meaningless, but, yes, for a restricted set of "everything", it is true.
The vagueness lies in the unaddressed question, how much global warming is caused by humans, and what is the effect of that? The answer is, an estimated 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees of global warming is caused by humans due to each doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the air, and the effects of that are hard to calculate, but will definitely include sea level rise, shifts of growing areas, and very likely changes in the severity of storms.
The "true" part, however, is also important to keep in mind: anthropogenic global warming does not occur instead of natural causes of variation; it is in addition to natural causes of variation. There will still be natural flucturations on top of the more or less steady increase in temperature due to human actions.
Amazon is using the classic monopolist approach: sell at unbeatably low prices until you drive the competition out of business. At that point, with no competition you can raise your prices to whatever you like, and, with no competition, people have to pay.
Civil forfeiture without any trial violates the bill of rights. Not just Kim Dotcom, either, the government should't be able to take stuff from anybody without due process, merely by asserting that they think maybe that person had committed a crime.
Prisons consider phone calls to be a money fountain. Basically, they are squeezing money out of prisoners trying to keep connections with family.
Many many studies have shown that the single thing that is most important to reducing recidivism is that the prisoners have ties to family and community OUTSIDE of the people they meet in prison. So, basically, the main effect of high cost of phone calls home is to INCREASE crime.
The whole bit about criminals running criminal enterprises with cell phones is mostly a distraction. The prisons want to delete cell phones purely because their monopoly on phoning home makes them tons of cash. If criminals were running criminal enterprises on cell phones, the solution would be a wiretap.
from the article: Cellphones are prized because they allow inmates to avoid privatized jailhouse phone and visitation services that charge up to $15 for a two-minute call home to friends and family. "Inmates call their mothers like most of us do on holidays," said Dr. John Shaffer, former executive deputy secretary for the Pennsylvania Corrections Department.
The significant problem with prisons is that the guards are paid almost nothing, and as a result, many of the people who are applying are people who can't get other jobs. And the incentive to break the rules to make a few dollars is high.
It is worth keeping in mind that Germany went through the Nazi take-over, and at the end of the world war, it was the United States (and the allies with us) that took away free speech in Germany, making it illegal to advocate Nazism.
If you're wondering why the European Union (dominated by Germany) doesn't protect freedom of speech, blame the Nazis. And blame us.
In other words, they looked for the issues causing division in America, and hammered on them.
This same shit happened in my country, but the real reason was to divert public attention from politicians looting the treasury.
What country is that?
It's not always the dasterdly Russians at the door. What I love the most is that there is actually no proof.
The site believes the ads were probably purchased by Russian entities
Go into any court in the world and say "probably" and you are going to be shown the door, but in the court of public opinion it's proof enough.
Since we haven't seen the ads nor the evidence that they were Russian in origin, I can't offer a definitive opinion, and neither can you-- but it would be my expectation that yes, Facebook is able to track down the origin country of people purchasing ads.
Ask people living in New Hampshire about how fake those claims are. Every election, you'll see hundreds of cars with MA plates driving around polling areas.
I take it you've never been to New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, when it's not an election you'll also see hundreds of cars with MA plates driving around. And hundreds of New Hampshirites incessantly complaining about them.
They literally bus in voters.
If they bus in voters they wouldn't need cars with MA plates, would they.
If the concern is foreign actors meddling with the U.S. election, shouldn't Facebook be turning over to Congress all political ads purchased on Facebook by foreigners for viewing in the U.S.?
They are turning over the ads that were requested by the congressional investigation.
According to the link you posted, it said that the Russians trolls purchased ads purportedly plugging Black Lives Matter "to stir up fear and cause political chaos in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, during the 2016 presidential election." That was the very first sentence in the link you posted. These ads were not "Democrats colluding with Russia," they were Russians attempting to foment discontent and disruption.
Further down in the link you posted: "The ad, which was first posted in late 2015 or early 2016, appeared to support the social justice movement — but sources said it could also be seen as depicting it in a negative light. “This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” explained Steve Hall, former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst.... In addition to the BLM posts, sources told CNN that the Russians were pushing ads that promoted gun rights and the Second Amendment — as well as warnings about undocumented immigrants."
In other words, they looked for the issues causing division in America, and hammered on them.
I was replying to both the parent (first comment) and also your comment on it (second comment).
I did assume that slashdotters recognize the doubled quote-bar to show when it is the grandparent being quoted and commented on, and the single quote bar showing that it is the immediately preceding comment being quoted and commented on. Possibly some newer slashdotters in fact don't understand the quote protocol, but they can glance upward to see who said what.
I suppose I could have made two separate comments, but since the two were immediately adjacent, one comment doesn't fork the threads quite as badly.
If that's the case, 100 million diesel cars translates into 10-20 million gasoline cars NOT on the road in Europe (from the carbon emissions perspective). If you believe in anthropogenic global warming at all, that massive reduction in carbon emissions would greatly outweigh the cost to society
I'd like to see that calculation, please. I'd like to see your method of quantifying the costs to society.
of 5,000 presumably ill people dying slightly sooner than they would have due to NOx.
5,000 deaths per year. And your statement "presumably ill" people means: people with asthma and people who have the flu or pneumonia.
I actually think that people with asthma still deserve to live. "Let's kill them, they're presumably ill" is not acceptable reasoning to me.
Perhaps you don't remember this far back, but "global cooling" actually was the widely hyped fear back in the 1960s and part of the 1970s.
No, it wasn't. That claim is something deniers say all the time, but it just isn't true. Here, for example, is the American Meteorological Society: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...
I know a lot of people today (many of whom were born in the 1980s or even the 1990s!) will wrongly claim that it was only "the media" pushing those claims back then, but the media was just reporting on what those in various scientific fields were claiming.
I was born in the 1950s, and you are wrong.
It wasn't until into the 1970s that the "global warming" hype really started up.
Wrong again. Here's the American Institute of Physics's history of Global Warming: https://history.aip.org/climat... -- the effect has been known for well over a century.
I remember the greenhouse effect being discussed in my science classes back in high school. Of course, back then it was "here's an effect that, if we keep on burning fossil fuels, might be measurable sometime by the 1990s or 2000" (which seemed impossibly far in the future back then.) Well, guess what: we kept on burning fossil fuels, the 1990s and then 2000 came, and the effect was measurable.
When it became clear by the late 1990s that we weren't really seeing any significant warming, the name was changed again to the much vaguer "climate change".
Wrong, and wrong. We were seeing significant warming by the late 1990s (check the data), and the name was changed by the Bush administration in order to get people less excited about the effect.
This is convenient, because it allows any normal variation in the Earth's dynamic, chaotic, and unpredictable weather systems to be claimed to be evidence of this alleged "climate change".
Now, on that one I'll agree with you: it annoys me when people attribute weather events to global warming. No single weather event, no hot summer in one location, no warm winter in another location, can be particularly attributed to global warming. Global warming is real, and is well understood-- but it is a long-term, global phenomenon. It is not a local thing.
Its even worse than that. NOx reacts with Methane to remove it from the atmosphere, and Methane is much MUCH worse that CO2 with regards to greenhouse effects.
News flash: oxygen reacts with methane to remove it from the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides are 0.00003% of the atmosphere. Oxygen is 20% of the atmosphere. Putting more nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere has a negative effect on health, but doesn't reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere enough to notice.
Estimates vary, however the accepted figure appears to be that the net effect of global diesel use is 20% net cooling effect.
Another news flash: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
So yes, Diesel contributes to global cooling! Climate change! Disaster!
To repeat: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
(Also, lightning creates about the same amount of NOx as small vehicles, and both are much less than shipping, aircraft, or heavy industry..)
Lightning produces some nitrogen oxides. Specifically, "over the United States lightning accounts for only about 5 percent of the total U.S. nitrogen oxide annual emissions and about 14 percent of the total emissions in July."
And lightning-produced nitrogen oxides are randomly distributed through the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides produced by automobiles are concentrated where the most automobiles are, which coincidentally happens to be where people live. Lightning-produced nitrogen oxides are important to global atmospheric chemistry, but they're not a major player in pollution.
https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Soyuz is the very spacecraft that I had in mind that is limited to ~100 pound payload downmass or so. There just isn't any significant mass reserve in it besides the ability to land with a crew of three, nor is there any significant volume for it.
Unless the crew consists of three people each weighing 33 kilograms (73 pounds) or less, the downmass is more than 100 kg.
There's no spacecraft other than SpaceX's at the moment with a downmass capacity in the 100+ pound region.
Soyuz.
Yeah, let us now compare capabilities a 7 year old rocket/ship to another with over 50 years of history. Soyuz can carry three astronauts at most to ISS, and is a single purpose ship.
The post to I was responding was about downmass capacity. The statement was incorrect: Soyuz--as you pointed out-- routinely brings down three astronauts, which is a down mass of a lot more than 100 pounds.
The fact that Soyuz has "over 50 years of history" and Dragon doesn't was not brought up in the statement to which I was responding, so I didn't mention it.
Crew Dragon can carry 7, and also some cargo making the transportation to station cheaper overall.
If we're comparing to vehicles that haven't flown yet, we'd have to also add Boeing CST "Starliner", NASA Orion and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser, among others
I think you make the point quite well that government is not well equipped to offer innovation and efficiency. The best things happen when .gov just gets out of the way and let's people create.
Yes... and no.
Some history: The young innovative rocket company SpaceX had made claims that it had designed the most reliable booster ever built, one that would have a 99.9% reliability right from the very first flight... and then blew up their first three launches. When they finally got one to work, the fourth launch, they were out of money, and nobody but Kazakhstan was willing to fly on vehicles with a demonstrated reliability record of 25% (and even Kazakhstan wouldn't have, except that they had already bought the launch.)
The only people willing to trust SpaceX... was NASA. Back when SpaceX had a record of three failures, no successes, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to design and build Falcon-9: NASA's anchor tenancy allowed SpaceX to attract other funding, and other customers.
This is not news: Elon Musk credits NASA with saving SpaceX.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/without-nasa-there-would-be-no-spacex-and-its-brilliant-boat-landing/
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/14/8605597/elon-musk-discusses-spacex-tesla-near-bankruptcy
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/836443541001797632
So, when you say the best things happen when .gov gets out of the way, perhaps you should say, the best things happen when .gov works in partnership with innovators.
Yup, after the moon landings, the American space program fell apart at the seams. They lost three times more people in the space program than Russia.
Uh, yes, but that's a bit misleading, since as of the end of the shuttle program, the American space program had launched five times more people into space than the Russian program. We tend to forget how large the shuttle was and how routine the launches were, but do recall that the total number of crewmembers of all 135 space shuttle missions was 833-- that's more than the total of all the people launched by all the other launch vehicles put together.
SX has launched 43 times with 1 launch failure ( and a partial ).
Huh? What are you talking about? SpaceX failed in its first three launches. You can hardly call that "only one launch failure (and a partial)".
I admire that: the best way to push the boundaries is to fail, and then learn from the failures. But learning from the failures means: don't pretend that failures didn't happen.
Even it you meant "Falcon-9" and not "SX", you can only count "1 launch failure" if you ignore the one that exploded on the pad. That was only a year ago, so you'd think people would remember. https://www.space.com/33929-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-explodes-on-launch-pad.html
So, two out of 44 failed-- that comes to a demonstrated 95.5% success rate, very close to what the AC said, "that the average reliability of orbital rockets historically sits currently at 94%."
If you want reliability, go with Atlas-V. But you will pay for it: moving up from 95 percent to pushing 100% costs a lot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/03/23/why-the-most-maligned-rocket-in-the-world-is-also-one-of-the-most-reliable
Cars and rockets are fine but the Hyperloop is definitely a pipe dream.
I see what you did there.
It's nice to see some levity.
Quite a bit less in payments than what others ask for, and what "more limitations"? There's no spacecraft other than SpaceX's at the moment with a downmass capacity in the 100+ pound region.
Soyuz.
What I'm more interested in here is, has California codified who has liability for accidents involving self-driving cars?
Humans are causing global warming but so is everything else. Everything affects everything else.
That statement is so vague as to be almost meaningless, but, yes, for a restricted set of "everything", it is true.
The vagueness lies in the unaddressed question, how much global warming is caused by humans, and what is the effect of that? The answer is, an estimated 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees of global warming is caused by humans due to each doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the air, and the effects of that are hard to calculate, but will definitely include sea level rise, shifts of growing areas, and very likely changes in the severity of storms.
The "true" part, however, is also important to keep in mind: anthropogenic global warming does not occur instead of natural causes of variation; it is in addition to natural causes of variation. There will still be natural flucturations on top of the more or less steady increase in temperature due to human actions.
This guy was a major asshole. I hope when he gets out, his terms of parole include "never allowed to touch a computer for any reason."
Amazon is using the classic monopolist approach: sell at unbeatably low prices until you drive the competition out of business. At that point, with no competition you can raise your prices to whatever you like, and, with no competition, people have to pay.
1 ...
...
2
3. Profit!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/forfeiture-without-due-process/2011/12/22/gIQAckn3WP_story.html?utm_term=.2bb81d9378c5
https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-still-seizure-without-proper-due-process-1453321983
Prisons consider phone calls to be a money fountain. Basically, they are squeezing money out of prisoners trying to keep connections with family.
Many many studies have shown that the single thing that is most important to reducing recidivism is that the prisoners have ties to family and community OUTSIDE of the people they meet in prison. So, basically, the main effect of high cost of phone calls home is to INCREASE crime.
The whole bit about criminals running criminal enterprises with cell phones is mostly a distraction. The prisons want to delete cell phones purely because their monopoly on phoning home makes them tons of cash. If criminals were running criminal enterprises on cell phones, the solution would be a wiretap.
from the article: Cellphones are prized because they allow inmates to avoid privatized jailhouse phone and visitation services that charge up to $15 for a two-minute call home to friends and family. "Inmates call their mothers like most of us do on holidays," said Dr. John Shaffer, former executive deputy secretary for the Pennsylvania Corrections Department.
The significant problem with prisons is that the guards are paid almost nothing, and as a result, many of the people who are applying are people who can't get other jobs. And the incentive to break the rules to make a few dollars is high.
If you're wondering why the European Union (dominated by Germany) doesn't protect freedom of speech, blame the Nazis. And blame us.
This same shit happened in my country, but the real reason was to divert public attention from politicians looting the treasury.
What country is that?
It's not always the dasterdly Russians at the door. What I love the most is that there is actually no proof.
Go into any court in the world and say "probably" and you are going to be shown the door, but in the court of public opinion it's proof enough.
Since we haven't seen the ads nor the evidence that they were Russian in origin, I can't offer a definitive opinion, and neither can you-- but it would be my expectation that yes, Facebook is able to track down the origin country of people purchasing ads.
Ask people living in New Hampshire about how fake those claims are. Every election, you'll see hundreds of cars with MA plates driving around polling areas.
I take it you've never been to New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, when it's not an election you'll also see hundreds of cars with MA plates driving around. And hundreds of New Hampshirites incessantly complaining about them.
They literally bus in voters.
If they bus in voters they wouldn't need cars with MA plates, would they.
If the concern is foreign actors meddling with the U.S. election, shouldn't Facebook be turning over to Congress all political ads purchased on Facebook by foreigners for viewing in the U.S.?
They are turning over the ads that were requested by the congressional investigation.
Trump will shamelessly sling mud without any regard to truth at anyone or thing he sees as a threat.
Actually, I have to say that this is true of almost every politician.
There may have once been a time when politics may have not meant flinging mud without regard to truth, but it was a long time ago.
except that it is.. http://nypost.com/2017/09/27/r... Even admitted to by CNN itself, which you can watch live here http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/2...
According to the link you posted, it said that the Russians trolls purchased ads purportedly plugging Black Lives Matter "to stir up fear and cause political chaos in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, during the 2016 presidential election." That was the very first sentence in the link you posted. These ads were not "Democrats colluding with Russia," they were Russians attempting to foment discontent and disruption.
Further down in the link you posted: "The ad, which was first posted in late 2015 or early 2016, appeared to support the social justice movement — but sources said it could also be seen as depicting it in a negative light. “This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” explained Steve Hall, former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst.... In addition to the BLM posts, sources told CNN that the Russians were pushing ads that promoted gun rights and the Second Amendment — as well as warnings about undocumented immigrants."
In other words, they looked for the issues causing division in America, and hammered on them.
The key sentence is the last sentence in TFA:
"It’s too bad that other popular browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera) weren’t included in the assessment."
I was replying to both the parent (first comment) and also your comment on it (second comment).
I did assume that slashdotters recognize the doubled quote-bar to show when it is the grandparent being quoted and commented on, and the single quote bar showing that it is the immediately preceding comment being quoted and commented on. Possibly some newer slashdotters in fact don't understand the quote protocol, but they can glance upward to see who said what.
I suppose I could have made two separate comments, but since the two were immediately adjacent, one comment doesn't fork the threads quite as badly.
Exactly. My understanding is that diesels are 10%-20% more efficient (energy produced per unit of carbon burned).
True, but gasoline engines are getting better. http://www.popularmechanics.co...
If that's the case, 100 million diesel cars translates into 10-20 million gasoline cars NOT on the road in Europe (from the carbon emissions perspective). If you believe in anthropogenic global warming at all, that massive reduction in carbon emissions would greatly outweigh the cost to society
I'd like to see that calculation, please. I'd like to see your method of quantifying the costs to society.
of 5,000 presumably ill people dying slightly sooner than they would have due to NOx.
5,000 deaths per year. And your statement "presumably ill" people means: people with asthma and people who have the flu or pneumonia.
I actually think that people with asthma still deserve to live. "Let's kill them, they're presumably ill" is not acceptable reasoning to me.
Perhaps you don't remember this far back, but "global cooling" actually was the widely hyped fear back in the 1960s and part of the 1970s.
No, it wasn't. That claim is something deniers say all the time, but it just isn't true. Here, for example, is the American Meteorological Society: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...
I know a lot of people today (many of whom were born in the 1980s or even the 1990s!) will wrongly claim that it was only "the media" pushing those claims back then, but the media was just reporting on what those in various scientific fields were claiming.
I was born in the 1950s, and you are wrong.
It wasn't until into the 1970s that the "global warming" hype really started up.
Wrong again. Here's the American Institute of Physics's history of Global Warming: https://history.aip.org/climat... -- the effect has been known for well over a century.
I remember the greenhouse effect being discussed in my science classes back in high school. Of course, back then it was "here's an effect that, if we keep on burning fossil fuels, might be measurable sometime by the 1990s or 2000" (which seemed impossibly far in the future back then.) Well, guess what: we kept on burning fossil fuels, the 1990s and then 2000 came, and the effect was measurable.
When it became clear by the late 1990s that we weren't really seeing any significant warming, the name was changed again to the much vaguer "climate change".
Wrong, and wrong. We were seeing significant warming by the late 1990s (check the data), and the name was changed by the Bush administration in order to get people less excited about the effect.
This is convenient, because it allows any normal variation in the Earth's dynamic, chaotic, and unpredictable weather systems to be claimed to be evidence of this alleged "climate change".
Now, on that one I'll agree with you: it annoys me when people attribute weather events to global warming. No single weather event, no hot summer in one location, no warm winter in another location, can be particularly attributed to global warming. Global warming is real, and is well understood-- but it is a long-term, global phenomenon. It is not a local thing.
Its even worse than that. NOx reacts with Methane to remove it from the atmosphere, and Methane is much MUCH worse that CO2 with regards to greenhouse effects.
News flash: oxygen reacts with methane to remove it from the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides are 0.00003% of the atmosphere. Oxygen is 20% of the atmosphere. Putting more nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere has a negative effect on health, but doesn't reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere enough to notice.
Estimates vary, however the accepted figure appears to be that the net effect of global diesel use is 20% net cooling effect.
Another news flash: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
So yes, Diesel contributes to global cooling! Climate change! Disaster!
To repeat: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
(Also, lightning creates about the same amount of NOx as small vehicles, and both are much less than shipping, aircraft, or heavy industry..)
Lightning produces some nitrogen oxides. Specifically, "over the United States lightning accounts for only about 5 percent of the total U.S. nitrogen oxide annual emissions and about 14 percent of the total emissions in July."
And lightning-produced nitrogen oxides are randomly distributed through the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides produced by automobiles are concentrated where the most automobiles are, which coincidentally happens to be where people live. Lightning-produced nitrogen oxides are important to global atmospheric chemistry, but they're not a major player in pollution. https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...