Cash for clunkers was for individuals...whats you're point?
That's certainly not the excuse the government gave. They said it was for the environment and the economy. Of course it was really for the politicians.
Not if you're in the middle of a huge ressesion with a pile of EXCESS inventory already rotting on dealer lots.
Go check for yourself - it was the most popular cars that were predominantly sold, and those are being replenished.
Random testing along with metal detectors, milimeter scan, etc is a better way
It's still not significantly protective (>40% of test goods get through) and imparts a massive cost. There is no good way because there is no real problem. People proved that over a field in AZ. And now all the cockpit doors are hardened so 'small pointy things' are not a threat. Heck, put five smart people in a room and they'll figure out a few protocols for getting past security.
So we're trading our liberty and money for absolutely nothing in return.
FYI, Gardner (the author) has a podcast now. If you can get past his obsession with punk and The Prisoner, he has some very good insights and does a great job at logical deconstruction. He got fired from his radio job (IMO) for not letting a politician weasel out of a 2nd Amendment question.
it's always "protect the children" I spent all of my childhood past the age of 8 online and did I get abducted? did I become a horrible person? no did I become much more resourceful and patient in understanding computers? yes did I learn? yes enough ideas without statistics I say
Yes, but consider that if you hadn't you'd have had time for learning how to use the Shift key, and how to punctuate.
Obama has demonstrated even less interest in the Constitution than Bush.
The key difference here was that Bush was too foolish to understand the Constitution - Obama has said in interviews that he believes the negative reciprocity upon which the Constitution is based is flawed, and that we ought to have a system of positive rights.
if you want to go changing that there needs to be a damn good reason
I don't have any first-hand experience, but according to the BBC story when one enters a native-script domain name into one's browser, the domain name is entered normally (for the locale) and then to enter, e.g., ".in", one needs to press a key combination to shift the keyboard into latin-mode, then, enter the two letters, then shift the keyboard back into native mode.
It's a usability problem. I sure would be annoyed if.com had to be rendered in Kanji on my system.
Any competent security specialist will tell you that using an established encryption algorithm is always the wise choice. Did the people behind WiFi simply lack competence?
Yeah, so route your wireless to the public Internet only and VPN into your corporate LAN. Software is easier to fix.
I think the GP was talking about replacing a gas car with an electric one. At any rate my point was that cars already built have already "spent" their portion of the environment, so its irrelevent to the calculation.
Yes, if you're considering a car, but not if you're considering a national fleet - they don't last forever. If you throw out cars before they're used up, you have to build more cars. If you move cars out of inventory, they'll get replaced with freshly manufactured cars.
But rather than have government do the job, I think I would simply called Verizon on the phone and said, "We want FiOS and and have the 70% of the population willing to buy it." Corporations have the expertise and experience to do the job, which politicians lack, so let corporations handle it.
That's how it would work in a free market. I've explored this with my town. Comcast wants $60,000 per mile of cable pull. I've consulted with private cable contractors, and this is more than 10x their cost, which is a way of saying, "no", even though they have to say, "yes".
Our next franchise agreement won't use "reasonable cost" as its criteria, it'll be a hard number.
Your kidding, right? Do you ride the bus? Buses run on Diesel (mostly.) which pays road tax.
I appreciate the nod to embedded taxes, it's often ignored at the debater's peril, but in many States, government gets its petroleum fuel from a separate, tax-free, source. If it's a private bus, absolutely, but most mass transit is socialized.
because people have been brain washed with the 'all government things are bad' everything else good, regardless of the facts" mentality of the neo cons.
Your terminology might be mixed up. Neo-cons are ardent supporters of the military industrial complex and big government.
Look at an private service that doesn't continue to make good profit growth. Either it goes away, or if it maintains becomes horrible in the terms of service and maintenance.
Why would this not be a good venue for a co-op or non-profit?
For you libertarians out that, I suggest you look at what happened at the beginning of the industrial age before government intervention.
You can't point to an agrarian society and say, "oh, look, that's all about the government and the march of technology and advances in common law interpretation are immaterial".
If you prefer more recent examples, look at what removing restriction from the financial system did.
Do you mean the 40,000 new regulations passed on the financial industry between Enron and the 2008 Crash? One can certainly claim "mis-regulation", but then we're back to mere incompetence.
that means that you could have significant activity on the Moon by the time Ares V hypothetically would be developed.
Well, that's an argument money can't buy - if we were to decide today to do it, would anybody know what to do? I guess what I'm asking is if they're holding off on planning a moon base until the rocket seems like it will be ready, or if the rocket is holding up the program currently. I won't pretend to know what kinds of supplies we need to start sending to the Moon in preparation for base assembly, but somebody must have worked this through. On the other hand, ISS systems failures don't bode well - I keep asking people why they can't 'just' put a submarine in orbit.
Do we have the technology to do lift from LEO to LTO now?
Incremental investment in commercial space launch is in my view far superior to NASA competing with commercial launch.
Agreed. In the current political climate, it does make sense to get everything out of NASA that can be, before they get fatally defunded. I'm planning to buy a moon vacation one day.
but the vast majority of cars seem to be in the 300-500 mile range
Yes, but gas stations are everywhere.
but that said I don't think I've ever driven the maximum range of my fuel tank without wanting to stop for a while, whether it's for a meal or to try to get some circulation in my legs again!
So, this is a function of charge time. I stop for 10 minutes at rest areas to get the legs moving. I usually (OK, never) want to stop for an hour or two for this purpose. Most people aren't willing to carefully plan their itineraries to align recharging stations with meal breaks, calculate ranges, account for detours, traffic, etc.
How about driving for 250-300 miles, then stopping for dinner for an hour while the car charges?
Yeah, I mentioned this in a parallel comment. I think this is exactly the end-game. The mid-game is the trick right now. When every restaurant, grocery store, and movie theatre has charging spaces, we're home-free.
Also bear in mind that this is a sports roadster, it's not really designed for epic road trips. If you wanted that, you'd get something bigger (and probably cheaper!) which would have more batteries, so a longer range.
Cars wear sitting around too you know. And since the environment cost was already paid, trading a gasoline powered car for an electric one saves one year of having that car spit out pollution.
sure, but Cash for Clunkers wasn't about electric cars, it was about very moderate improvements in mileage, but some economists argue total pollution output was increased since new cars are driven further.
If you're really trading out a gas car for an electric car, then there's a win. But the GP was talking about adding an electric car to the family fleet, so I think we're agreeing here.
The problems with increasing efficiency has been that engines are being required to be tuned/built to reduce pollution, not gas mileage
Don't cleaner-burning engines necessarily have to accomplish more complete combustion? So, shouldn't that imply more available power?
safety systems and construction that increase weight
Yeah, but we were talking about a 2-ton Citron here - you can get a Minivan for that weight these days.
and increased consumer requirements for acceleration and top speed.
Ah, yes, there are some absurd ones these days. There was really nothing wrong with my '85 Camry which had 115 horses, fewer by time I owned it, and a practical ceiling of 90MPH. Let's see, at 2600lbs then, a new one is 3400 lbs, divide, times 115.. 150. Well a new one is in the 160's - I suppose that's not too crazy (yeah, I'm assume horsepower is proportional to torque for the sake of lazy argument).
I really wonder how much affordable cars could get if they were built for normal conditions.
I haven't read that. Perhaps you can provide a reference?
Googling again, the *combined* rocket and payload cost was estimated at $2B, but a 2004 Air Force estimate put a launch at $250M and there was one reference to the NRO launch portion costing $400M. $1.6B for the satellite? - wow. $400M in 2009 dollars sounds similar to the 2004 Air Force number, perhaps it's in the ballpark. They're talking about $350-500M for Ares V launches in 2018 - probably safe to double that as a government projection.
And launch frequency trumps greater payload size.
Only if the costs are proportional, though, right? If one can do 7 Delta IV launches for the cost of 1 Ares V launch, then there *is* a strong argument. Costs ought to be figured out to probably 2040 or so and include Mars mission capability.
Because Apollo landed mass on the Moon that you could use to build a moon base. Googling around, I also found the Apollo LM truck. Basically, it's an unmanned version of the Apollo lunar module that could land 5 tons of cargo on the Moon.
So, if the Ares V can put 70 tons on the Moon you'd need to go to a 14:1 ratio?
So we have to count on the Ares I whose first stage (a variation of the Shuttle solid rocket booster) has a failure rate of somewhere around 1 in 300.
Isn't the point of 'the variation' to make it simpler and less prone to failure?
Plus that rocket just so happens to duplicate the capabilities of the Delta IV Heavy and the near future Atlas V Heavy.
So why did the NASA study conclude the Ares I was 2x safer than a Delta IV solution? Just BS for the sake of perpetuating the program?
I'm not a big fan of any attempt by NASA to compete directly with existing or near future US commercial launch capability.
I'd like to see NASA lean on commercial ventures as heavily as possible, but as I understood their argument there was nothing safe enough to be used in place of the Ares I and nothing big enough to be used in place of the Ares V. NASA does use commercial vehicles frequently, right?
Ah, interesting - what do you figure is the limiting factor? I've heard politicians talking about "20 by 20" (20% by year 2020), but obviously I have no reason to believe them.
Ah, that's perfect. If it's under a half hour, I can charge up while I'm eating lunch. The range really just needs to be good enough to get between meals at 75MPH.
Yeah, but it's not a cheap rocket either. I read the NRO paid a billion for their launch.
You'd be better off planning lunar missions with the Delta IV Heavy than with Ares V.
According to this Ares V is being designed with 7x the lift of the Delta IV. So you'd have to run 7:1 Delta IV's:Ares V, and there'd be some things just to big to lift.
My take is that four to five Delta IV launches could put up the Apollo mission, for example.
That seems likely, but we're trying to build a moon base here, so what does it matter if we could do Apollo?
And if you have redundant copies of the various components (command, service, and lunar modules) as well as the crew
Right, so that's the other trick - the Delta IV is (theoretically, granted) twice as likely to kill the crew. I'm not impatient enough for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Cash for clunkers was for individuals...whats you're point?
That's certainly not the excuse the government gave. They said it was for the environment and the economy. Of course it was really for the politicians.
Not if you're in the middle of a huge ressesion with a pile of EXCESS inventory already rotting on dealer lots.
Go check for yourself - it was the most popular cars that were predominantly sold, and those are being replenished.
Random testing along with metal detectors, milimeter scan, etc is a better way
It's still not significantly protective (>40% of test goods get through) and imparts a massive cost. There is no good way because there is no real problem. People proved that over a field in AZ. And now all the cockpit doors are hardened so 'small pointy things' are not a threat. Heck, put five smart people in a room and they'll figure out a few protocols for getting past security.
So we're trading our liberty and money for absolutely nothing in return.
FYI, Gardner (the author) has a podcast now. If you can get past his obsession with punk and The Prisoner, he has some very good insights and does a great job at logical deconstruction. He got fired from his radio job (IMO) for not letting a politician weasel out of a 2nd Amendment question.
You would deprive us of hundreds, if not thousands, of leaked nude photos of famous celebs just to save a little DNA?!?!? Are you insane, man????
Y'know, there's a reason that there aren't really that many pin-up girls or porn stars. Be careful what you wish for - Michael Moore flies too.
Why should the government have to control what kids have access to?
So the parents have more time for American Idol. Next question?
it's always "protect the children" I spent all of my childhood past the age of 8 online and did I get abducted? did I become a horrible person? no did I become much more resourceful and patient in understanding computers? yes did I learn? yes enough ideas without statistics I say
Yes, but consider that if you hadn't you'd have had time for learning how to use the Shift key, and how to punctuate.
Obama has demonstrated even less interest in the Constitution than Bush.
The key difference here was that Bush was too foolish to understand the Constitution - Obama has said in interviews that he believes the negative reciprocity upon which the Constitution is based is flawed, and that we ought to have a system of positive rights.
I had used Firefox until I got a nastygram from the admin about it being unauthorized.
run away!
the company purchasing them can't find a home for
one would suppose they're not offering enough money, perhaps calculating their ROI on a short-term budget. The Chinese are patient.
if you want to go changing that there needs to be a damn good reason
I don't have any first-hand experience, but according to the BBC story when one enters a native-script domain name into one's browser, the domain name is entered normally (for the locale) and then to enter, e.g., ".in", one needs to press a key combination to shift the keyboard into latin-mode, then, enter the two letters, then shift the keyboard back into native mode.
It's a usability problem. I sure would be annoyed if .com had to be rendered in Kanji on my system.
Any competent security specialist will tell you that using an established encryption algorithm is always the wise choice. Did the people behind WiFi simply lack competence?
Yeah, so route your wireless to the public Internet only and VPN into your corporate LAN. Software is easier to fix.
I think the GP was talking about replacing a gas car with an electric one. At any rate my point was that cars already built have already "spent" their portion of the environment, so its irrelevent to the calculation.
Yes, if you're considering a car, but not if you're considering a national fleet - they don't last forever. If you throw out cars before they're used up, you have to build more cars. If you move cars out of inventory, they'll get replaced with freshly manufactured cars.
But rather than have government do the job, I think I would simply called Verizon on the phone and said, "We want FiOS and and have the 70% of the population willing to buy it." Corporations have the expertise and experience to do the job, which politicians lack, so let corporations handle it.
That's how it would work in a free market. I've explored this with my town. Comcast wants $60,000 per mile of cable pull. I've consulted with private cable contractors, and this is more than 10x their cost, which is a way of saying, "no", even though they have to say, "yes".
Our next franchise agreement won't use "reasonable cost" as its criteria, it'll be a hard number.
Your kidding, right? Do you ride the bus? Buses run on Diesel (mostly.) which pays road tax.
I appreciate the nod to embedded taxes, it's often ignored at the debater's peril, but in many States, government gets its petroleum fuel from a separate, tax-free, source. If it's a private bus, absolutely, but most mass transit is socialized.
because people have been brain washed with the 'all government things are bad' everything else good, regardless of the facts" mentality of the neo cons.
Your terminology might be mixed up. Neo-cons are ardent supporters of the military industrial complex and big government.
Look at an private service that doesn't continue to make good profit growth. Either it goes away, or if it maintains becomes horrible in the terms of service and maintenance.
Why would this not be a good venue for a co-op or non-profit?
For you libertarians out that, I suggest you look at what happened at the beginning of the industrial age before government intervention.
You can't point to an agrarian society and say, "oh, look, that's all about the government and the march of technology and advances in common law interpretation are immaterial".
If you prefer more recent examples, look at what removing restriction from the financial system did.
Do you mean the 40,000 new regulations passed on the financial industry between Enron and the 2008 Crash? One can certainly claim "mis-regulation", but then we're back to mere incompetence.
that means that you could have significant activity on the Moon by the time Ares V hypothetically would be developed.
Well, that's an argument money can't buy - if we were to decide today to do it, would anybody know what to do? I guess what I'm asking is if they're holding off on planning a moon base until the rocket seems like it will be ready, or if the rocket is holding up the program currently. I won't pretend to know what kinds of supplies we need to start sending to the Moon in preparation for base assembly, but somebody must have worked this through. On the other hand, ISS systems failures don't bode well - I keep asking people why they can't 'just' put a submarine in orbit.
Do we have the technology to do lift from LEO to LTO now?
Incremental investment in commercial space launch is in my view far superior to NASA competing with commercial launch.
Agreed. In the current political climate, it does make sense to get everything out of NASA that can be, before they get fatally defunded. I'm planning to buy a moon vacation one day.
but the vast majority of cars seem to be in the 300-500 mile range
Yes, but gas stations are everywhere.
but that said I don't think I've ever driven the maximum range of my fuel tank without wanting to stop for a while, whether it's for a meal or to try to get some circulation in my legs again!
So, this is a function of charge time. I stop for 10 minutes at rest areas to get the legs moving. I usually (OK, never) want to stop for an hour or two for this purpose. Most people aren't willing to carefully plan their itineraries to align recharging stations with meal breaks, calculate ranges, account for detours, traffic, etc.
How about driving for 250-300 miles, then stopping for dinner for an hour while the car charges?
Yeah, I mentioned this in a parallel comment. I think this is exactly the end-game. The mid-game is the trick right now. When every restaurant, grocery store, and movie theatre has charging spaces, we're home-free.
Also bear in mind that this is a sports roadster, it's not really designed for epic road trips. If you wanted that, you'd get something bigger (and probably cheaper!) which would have more batteries, so a longer range.
An excellent point.
and so on.
Don't forget "encouraging nuclear war in the Middle East to drive up the value of Russian oil".
Cars wear sitting around too you know. And since the environment cost was already paid, trading a gasoline powered car for an electric one saves one year of having that car spit out pollution.
sure, but Cash for Clunkers wasn't about electric cars, it was about very moderate improvements in mileage, but some economists argue total pollution output was increased since new cars are driven further.
If you're really trading out a gas car for an electric car, then there's a win. But the GP was talking about adding an electric car to the family fleet, so I think we're agreeing here.
The problems with increasing efficiency has been that engines are being required to be tuned/built to reduce pollution, not gas mileage
Don't cleaner-burning engines necessarily have to accomplish more complete combustion? So, shouldn't that imply more available power?
safety systems and construction that increase weight
Yeah, but we were talking about a 2-ton Citron here - you can get a Minivan for that weight these days.
and increased consumer requirements for acceleration and top speed.
Ah, yes, there are some absurd ones these days. There was really nothing wrong with my '85 Camry which had 115 horses, fewer by time I owned it, and a practical ceiling of 90MPH. Let's see, at 2600lbs then, a new one is 3400 lbs, divide, times 115.. 150. Well a new one is in the 160's - I suppose that's not too crazy (yeah, I'm assume horsepower is proportional to torque for the sake of lazy argument).
I really wonder how much affordable cars could get if they were built for normal conditions.
I haven't read that. Perhaps you can provide a reference?
Googling again, the *combined* rocket and payload cost was estimated at $2B, but a 2004 Air Force estimate put a launch at $250M and there was one reference to the NRO launch portion costing $400M. $1.6B for the satellite? - wow. $400M in 2009 dollars sounds similar to the 2004 Air Force number, perhaps it's in the ballpark. They're talking about $350-500M for Ares V launches in 2018 - probably safe to double that as a government projection.
And launch frequency trumps greater payload size.
Only if the costs are proportional, though, right? If one can do 7 Delta IV launches for the cost of 1 Ares V launch, then there *is* a strong argument. Costs ought to be figured out to probably 2040 or so and include Mars mission capability.
Because Apollo landed mass on the Moon that you could use to build a moon base. Googling around, I also found the Apollo LM truck. Basically, it's an unmanned version of the Apollo lunar module that could land 5 tons of cargo on the Moon.
So, if the Ares V can put 70 tons on the Moon you'd need to go to a 14:1 ratio?
So we have to count on the Ares I whose first stage (a variation of the Shuttle solid rocket booster) has a failure rate of somewhere around 1 in 300.
Isn't the point of 'the variation' to make it simpler and less prone to failure?
Plus that rocket just so happens to duplicate the capabilities of the Delta IV Heavy and the near future Atlas V Heavy.
So why did the NASA study conclude the Ares I was 2x safer than a Delta IV solution? Just BS for the sake of perpetuating the program?
I'm not a big fan of any attempt by NASA to compete directly with existing or near future US commercial launch capability.
I'd like to see NASA lean on commercial ventures as heavily as possible, but as I understood their argument there was nothing safe enough to be used in place of the Ares I and nothing big enough to be used in place of the Ares V. NASA does use commercial vehicles frequently, right?
and turned in about 45 UK mpg. Not bad for a car that weighs the thick end of two tons...
wow, our efficiency seems to be regressing then. Bring back the 80's tech?
2-5% by 2020 is probably all we can support.
Ah, interesting - what do you figure is the limiting factor? I've heard politicians talking about "20 by 20" (20% by year 2020), but obviously I have no reason to believe them.
Ah, that's perfect. If it's under a half hour, I can charge up while I'm eating lunch. The range really just needs to be good enough to get between meals at 75MPH.
Delta IV Heavy launches now.
Yeah, but it's not a cheap rocket either. I read the NRO paid a billion for their launch.
You'd be better off planning lunar missions with the Delta IV Heavy than with Ares V.
According to this Ares V is being designed with 7x the lift of the Delta IV. So you'd have to run 7:1 Delta IV's:Ares V, and there'd be some things just to big to lift.
My take is that four to five Delta IV launches could put up the Apollo mission, for example.
That seems likely, but we're trying to build a moon base here, so what does it matter if we could do Apollo?
And if you have redundant copies of the various components (command, service, and lunar modules) as well as the crew
Right, so that's the other trick - the Delta IV is (theoretically, granted) twice as likely to kill the crew. I'm not impatient enough for that.