Well, you have to figure the wage suppression was worth significantly more than $5,000 per worker, heck it was probably worth between 2 and 4 times that per year and the case involves at least a half decade of bad actions, so make it 10k per worker per year and that works out to ~3.2B. It's certainly not going to bankrupt these companies but it will affect their quarterly results which might be enough to get folks attention.
I don't think using petrochemicals is evil, I think efficiency is good and that accounting for externalities is good. Furthermore I think that future generations are going to be extremely pissed at us that we've used so much of the petrochemical stock for transportation. There are so many wonderful uses for petrochemicals, from plastics to fertilizers, to pharmaceuticals where there does not exist ready alternatives that needlessly wasting them in less efficient transportation than we can reasonably engineer is a travesty. As far as the eventual decline in revenue from increased taxes, so what. We know we're nowhere near that level today because the inflation adjusted cost of the tax today is many times what is was less than a generation ago. Plus if vehicles are so efficient that they're reducing the tax take that will mean that our foreign trade balance will be better and so we can afford more funds from the general budget for infrastructure. Efficiency gains make the equation much better than zero sum.
Gas tax increases are a good pricing signal to increase fuel efficiency (better than CAFE standards or cash for clunkers). They also happen to be regressive so ideally you put in a credit to offset some percentage of the net increase to the poorest folks. I've been saying for a decade that we should have an automatic 5c per year increase in the federal gas tax, it's gentle enough that it doesn't screw over people who just bought an inefficient vehicle but the net effect is enough that future purchases will naturally tend towards more efficient vehicles. If we had started a decade ago today we'd have an extra 50c per gallon incentive to buy a more efficient vehicle and the insolvency of the highway trust fund would be another decade plus in the future.
Well, even with the future state Tesla supercharger map it will be nearly impossible to drive a Tesla from Cleveland Ohio to Cincinnati Ohio, there are no planned supercharger stations between the two cities and the distance is too far for even the largest battery pack version of the Model S to cover. Likewise there are no planned supercharger stations within range along south I77 from Cleveland. So, for my most frequent long distance trips, from home to the Florida Keys (we go every 2 years for xmas) both of the major north south corridors are out if you want to use a Tesla.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll probably pick it up at the first sale post release, summer is now my dead time for gameplay since I tend to take family vacations and go hiking instead of sitting indoors =)
It might be but I'll never know until/unless it's released on GOG because I refuse to deal with DRM more restrictive than Steam, and I'm right in their target audience as I own every game in the series from the original Kings Bounty to King's Bounty: Warriors of the North, Ice & Fire. Ubisoft can go jump in a lake until they learn to treat their paying customers correctly.
Three or four bombs won't devastate a continent. The tsar bomba, the largest device ever tested at 50MT, had a destructive overpressure radius of ~35km, enough to flatten a capital city, but hardly enough to scare a continent. Plus such large devices are impractical, you have to get a large slow bomber into enemy territory. No, a few dozen half megaton warheads like the W88 but with less precise designs (the W88 is designed to take out missile silos) would be sufficient for MAD.
Average life expectancy in China is 73.5 years, there are PLENTY of people who would remember it. It's not quite the 84.6 years of Japan, but still enough that there will be many people who were children during the rape of nanking alive today to remember it.
They were in armistice negotiations, for good reason the US and their allies wanted unconditional surrender. Plus showing the Soviets the power of our new toys kept their ambitions in check for a while.
My personal favorite is engine compression. All things being equal, the higher the compression, the better the fuel mileage and the shorter the life of engine.
I'd love some evidence for this claim, compression has been rising since the early 80's pretty much on a parallel with increased engine reliability. I know everything isn't equal as engineering has obviously gotten better over that time period, but the only direct large scale evidence I'm aware of says there's no negative correlation between compression ratio and reliability. In fact some of the least reliable engines still sold are lower compression because they're based off older designs that haven't had a good clean sheet modern replacement done yet.
It makes it more likely I'll buy a Volvo, if they can get the cost of the V60/V70 plugin hybrid out of the stratosphere I'd buy one ASAP. Front wheel efficient diesel with hybrid AWD, just about perfect. One of the biggest qualms I had when buying my current car was the fact that AWD reduces fuel economy so significantly due to reduced transmission efficiency and the weight of the drive shaft for the rear wheels. Volvo solved that by putting the electric motors in the rear of a FWD design so you get the stability improvements of AWD with an increase in efficiency. The problem right now is they're north of $70k which is stupid money, if they can produce them in China and lower the price by 50% I'm in.
Not that much higher for streaming reads and writes, the new Seagate 6TB can do 220MB/s @128KB streaming reads or writes. That works out to ~19TB/day so it would only take around 2 months to hit 1PB.
Lol, you think the majority of light truck and SUV buyers use their vehicle as a work truck?!? I bet it's under 50%. In fact the number of people who were selling almost brand new trucks and SUV's when gas first went over $4/gallon is proof that many don't actually need it. I'm not saying there aren't many folks that need a work truck or truck based SUV, or even use one for their favorite recreational activity, but there are very, very many people who buy they because they're not a minivan or station wagon.
With the coming $4.50+/gallon gas coming this summer due to the combination of Ukrain and Iraq (plus screw you, we're big oil) I think you'll see sales jump up again. I wonder how many of the folks that bought pickups this spring (the big jump in US auto sales was mostly in the light truck and SUV segment) will be wishing they had bought something with a bit better fuel economy?
All that said... yes, waaayyyy more than 10% of our high schools need to be offering the class. Every high school surely contains some students with both the aptitude and desire to take such a class.
That's what distance/online learning are supremely good for. If you don't have enough students at a single school to justify the resources to offer the class offer it through technology.
LOL, oh you're serious, let me laugh harder. If you think skipped courses due to AP credits reduce the number of hours needed to graduate at the vast, vast majority of schools you're mistaken. No, it will just let you skip an intro course and fill the hours requirement for your major for something a little less dull.
Also once a restaraunt hits that fabled 1 year mark, reservations and foot traffic diminish reather precipitously.
Let me guess, LA or NYC? Because here in Cleveland, despite having a booming number of good to great restaurants, the top few hundred places all require a reservation if you want a decent slot on a Friday or Saturday evening even though some of them have been open for decades.
Actually there's Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard J1772. In Europe, the standard is IEC 61851. The big deal is that the Tesla supercharger is a Type 3 device under the SAE standard and that allows up to 600V DC at up to 400A with a serial connection to setup the options (IEC 61851-4 mode 4 will probably be similar but 1000V DC at 400A) and AFAIK there's no other type 3/mode 4 devices out there right now and none of the other EV's would be able to handle the massive currents needed to take that kind of charging.
It's a nice gesture but AFAIK none of the other currently available designs can handle the amount of current that supercharger provides. Perhaps in 3-5 years when the other auto companies revamp their existing lineup with new designs they might decide to design around the supercharger 'standard' but I'm not holding my breath.
Republic Wireless, $25/month for unlimited talk, text, 5GB of 3G data, they have a $10 unlimited talk and text plan so the data portion is $15/month (it goes up to $40 total if you want 4G speed).
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Well, you have to figure the wage suppression was worth significantly more than $5,000 per worker, heck it was probably worth between 2 and 4 times that per year and the case involves at least a half decade of bad actions, so make it 10k per worker per year and that works out to ~3.2B. It's certainly not going to bankrupt these companies but it will affect their quarterly results which might be enough to get folks attention.
I don't think using petrochemicals is evil, I think efficiency is good and that accounting for externalities is good. Furthermore I think that future generations are going to be extremely pissed at us that we've used so much of the petrochemical stock for transportation. There are so many wonderful uses for petrochemicals, from plastics to fertilizers, to pharmaceuticals where there does not exist ready alternatives that needlessly wasting them in less efficient transportation than we can reasonably engineer is a travesty. As far as the eventual decline in revenue from increased taxes, so what. We know we're nowhere near that level today because the inflation adjusted cost of the tax today is many times what is was less than a generation ago. Plus if vehicles are so efficient that they're reducing the tax take that will mean that our foreign trade balance will be better and so we can afford more funds from the general budget for infrastructure. Efficiency gains make the equation much better than zero sum.
Gas tax increases are a good pricing signal to increase fuel efficiency (better than CAFE standards or cash for clunkers). They also happen to be regressive so ideally you put in a credit to offset some percentage of the net increase to the poorest folks. I've been saying for a decade that we should have an automatic 5c per year increase in the federal gas tax, it's gentle enough that it doesn't screw over people who just bought an inefficient vehicle but the net effect is enough that future purchases will naturally tend towards more efficient vehicles. If we had started a decade ago today we'd have an extra 50c per gallon incentive to buy a more efficient vehicle and the insolvency of the highway trust fund would be another decade plus in the future.
Well, even with the future state Tesla supercharger map it will be nearly impossible to drive a Tesla from Cleveland Ohio to Cincinnati Ohio, there are no planned supercharger stations between the two cities and the distance is too far for even the largest battery pack version of the Model S to cover. Likewise there are no planned supercharger stations within range along south I77 from Cleveland. So, for my most frequent long distance trips, from home to the Florida Keys (we go every 2 years for xmas) both of the major north south corridors are out if you want to use a Tesla.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll probably pick it up at the first sale post release, summer is now my dead time for gameplay since I tend to take family vacations and go hiking instead of sitting indoors =)
It might be but I'll never know until/unless it's released on GOG because I refuse to deal with DRM more restrictive than Steam, and I'm right in their target audience as I own every game in the series from the original Kings Bounty to King's Bounty: Warriors of the North, Ice & Fire. Ubisoft can go jump in a lake until they learn to treat their paying customers correctly.
Three or four bombs won't devastate a continent. The tsar bomba, the largest device ever tested at 50MT, had a destructive overpressure radius of ~35km, enough to flatten a capital city, but hardly enough to scare a continent. Plus such large devices are impractical, you have to get a large slow bomber into enemy territory. No, a few dozen half megaton warheads like the W88 but with less precise designs (the W88 is designed to take out missile silos) would be sufficient for MAD.
Average life expectancy in China is 73.5 years, there are PLENTY of people who would remember it. It's not quite the 84.6 years of Japan, but still enough that there will be many people who were children during the rape of nanking alive today to remember it.
They were in armistice negotiations, for good reason the US and their allies wanted unconditional surrender. Plus showing the Soviets the power of our new toys kept their ambitions in check for a while.
My personal favorite is engine compression. All things being equal, the higher the compression, the better the fuel mileage and the shorter the life of engine.
I'd love some evidence for this claim, compression has been rising since the early 80's pretty much on a parallel with increased engine reliability. I know everything isn't equal as engineering has obviously gotten better over that time period, but the only direct large scale evidence I'm aware of says there's no negative correlation between compression ratio and reliability. In fact some of the least reliable engines still sold are lower compression because they're based off older designs that haven't had a good clean sheet modern replacement done yet.
It makes it more likely I'll buy a Volvo, if they can get the cost of the V60/V70 plugin hybrid out of the stratosphere I'd buy one ASAP. Front wheel efficient diesel with hybrid AWD, just about perfect. One of the biggest qualms I had when buying my current car was the fact that AWD reduces fuel economy so significantly due to reduced transmission efficiency and the weight of the drive shaft for the rear wheels. Volvo solved that by putting the electric motors in the rear of a FWD design so you get the stability improvements of AWD with an increase in efficiency. The problem right now is they're north of $70k which is stupid money, if they can produce them in China and lower the price by 50% I'm in.
Not that much higher for streaming reads and writes, the new Seagate 6TB can do 220MB/s @128KB streaming reads or writes. That works out to ~19TB/day so it would only take around 2 months to hit 1PB.
Lol, you think the majority of light truck and SUV buyers use their vehicle as a work truck?!? I bet it's under 50%. In fact the number of people who were selling almost brand new trucks and SUV's when gas first went over $4/gallon is proof that many don't actually need it. I'm not saying there aren't many folks that need a work truck or truck based SUV, or even use one for their favorite recreational activity, but there are very, very many people who buy they because they're not a minivan or station wagon.
With the coming $4.50+/gallon gas coming this summer due to the combination of Ukrain and Iraq (plus screw you, we're big oil) I think you'll see sales jump up again. I wonder how many of the folks that bought pickups this spring (the big jump in US auto sales was mostly in the light truck and SUV segment) will be wishing they had bought something with a bit better fuel economy?
All that said... yes, waaayyyy more than 10% of our high schools need to be offering the class. Every high school surely contains some students with both the aptitude and desire to take such a class.
That's what distance/online learning are supremely good for. If you don't have enough students at a single school to justify the resources to offer the class offer it through technology.
allowing it (and its tuition) to be skipped
LOL, oh you're serious, let me laugh harder. If you think skipped courses due to AP credits reduce the number of hours needed to graduate at the vast, vast majority of schools you're mistaken. No, it will just let you skip an intro course and fill the hours requirement for your major for something a little less dull.
Also once a restaraunt hits that fabled 1 year mark, reservations and foot traffic diminish reather precipitously.
Let me guess, LA or NYC? Because here in Cleveland, despite having a booming number of good to great restaurants, the top few hundred places all require a reservation if you want a decent slot on a Friday or Saturday evening even though some of them have been open for decades.
I wonder if piratevs.ninja is taken? =)
Actually there's Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard J1772. In Europe, the standard is IEC 61851. The big deal is that the Tesla supercharger is a Type 3 device under the SAE standard and that allows up to 600V DC at up to 400A with a serial connection to setup the options (IEC 61851-4 mode 4 will probably be similar but 1000V DC at 400A) and AFAIK there's no other type 3/mode 4 devices out there right now and none of the other EV's would be able to handle the massive currents needed to take that kind of charging.
It's a nice gesture but AFAIK none of the other currently available designs can handle the amount of current that supercharger provides. Perhaps in 3-5 years when the other auto companies revamp their existing lineup with new designs they might decide to design around the supercharger 'standard' but I'm not holding my breath.
Hell I had 3 years of biology and didn't know our didn't remember the name.
You want sad? Read this, made me cry like a little girl (in the best possible way).
And ideally those controls are on the steering wheel so you don't even have to take your hands off the wheel to perform an action.
74 people not including ANY passengers in the crashed vehicles.
Republic Wireless, $25/month for unlimited talk, text, 5GB of 3G data, they have a $10 unlimited talk and text plan so the data portion is $15/month (it goes up to $40 total if you want 4G speed).