Actually, the US Federal government is also only a currency user, ever since 1913. The US Dept of the Treasury has no legal authority to create new US Dollars and should Congress remove that authority from the Federal Reserve (a pseudo-private/public institution whose owners are US banks but who is somewhat answerable to the US Congress and the President) in the middle of the mess we're seeing, it would bring about an economic panic that would dwarf any we've heretofore witnessed. Greece, Ireland, and others are all perfectly able to coin their own money at will. They need only abdicate treaties prohibiting it and fire up the printing presses. The reason they haven't done so is that it's economic suicide.
But that's all nothing but an aside. We've seen in Germany, Zimbabwe, and many others what happens when you attempt to coin your way out of a massive fiscal debt.
Since you seem to believe that sovereign debt doesn't matter so long as you control your own currency, let me ask you this: what happens when the US pays more in debt servicing than its entire annual revenue combined and we begin borrowing for 100% of spending plus x% of the debt servicing?
Technically Clinton didn't raid the Social Security trust fund. By law, all excess funds from normal operations (withholdings taken in minus benefits paid out and administrative expenses) at the end of the fiscal year are used to purchase US Treasuries. That money is then dumped into the general fund (as if it just dropped from Heaven).
This happens each and every year, by law. Clinton didn't do anything special; he just fought with the Republicans in Congress over spending (what to spend money on; not so much whether to spend tons of money) to the point that the deficit was small enough to be hidden behind this accounting sleight of hand. Clinton deserves no credit for "balancing the budget" or "creating a surplus" as neither of those statements reflect reality. At the same time, he deserves no blame for hiding the debt that created the illusory surplus since he didn't create the laws that hid the debt to make said false surplus appear.
Social Security and Medicare aren't future debt; they're CURRENT debt. They hold the same US Treasury bonds as anyone else, can sell them to anyone else, and collect on them the same as anyone else. That particular debt is merely shuffled away into "Intragovernmental Holdings".
But yes, your overall point is correct. There was no surplus anymore than I can show a surplus in my personal budget by taking out a personal loan of $100,000. "Look, ma! I had a hundred grand surplus this year!"
No he didn't. It may have existed on paper, but in reality, the total debt grew under Clinton and every other President since Eisenhower. The last time we had a real surplus (as in, we took in more money than we spent) was 1956. Don't trust me; go to the US Dept of Treasury's website and look at the numbers yourself.
A) They're not just fossil fuel powered. They're powered by a variety of sources, including clean nuclear power, hydro, and (to a much smaller extent) "renewables". See here for US sources of electricty: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Electricity_Production_the_USA.svg and recognize that in other places (like France and Canada), the majority of electricity on the power grid is from clean sources. Those countries benefit even more from moving to electric vehicles.
B) A large central fossil fuel power plant is vastly more efficient the fuel combustion engine in any car, which results in vastly less overall pollution.
C) Electric vehicles have a lot less wear and tear, which means less replacement parts need to be manufactured for them, which reduces their overall energy use.
It's as clean and safe as anything we've yet developed or even imagined. Per TWh generated, it's the safest electricity generation technology ever used on any sizable scale (including solar and wind).
Nothing is "renewable". All electricity generation requires construction of things which are not fully recyclable and which are not completely environmentally neutral.
Nuclear power requires a ridiculously small amount of fuel and we have massive amounts of it located across the globe. Even if you only look at Uranium, there's tons of it everywhere. If you look at Thorium, the idea of sustainability of it becomes an absolute joke (in the realm of us having millions of years of fuel available even if current electricity usage continue to increase without end).
Tell you what, move out of the immediate downtown area of a major US city and then let me know how well that works out for you.
The US does not have the population density in most places to make public transportation feasible. I'm not going to walk a mile to get picked up. I'm not going to stand there waiting 10 - 15 minutes (assuming the intended vehicle ever arrives) to get picked up. I'm not going to travel to a bunch of places I don't want to go which aren't on the path between where I started and where I want to go. I'm not going to step out to a transfer station to do more walking around and waiting. I'm not going to get dropped off 4 miles from my destination because no public transportation actually takes me where I need to be. I'm not going to let a 20 minute car ride turn into a 2 hour public transportation fiasco. And I'm not going to plan my entire day around the schedules of the local public transportation.
Cars aren't sustainable? They're about the only thing that is sustainable outside of NYC, DC, LA, and a few other select places in the US. Even if you have a lot of buses running around, you just can't get everywhere using them in your average suburban area and you certainly can't just go right from your start to your destination. That's not how they work. So yes; in a small number of places with very high population densities, public transportation can make more sense than cars in certain situations. In most places? It's a joke. Not even a funny joke.
Example: let's say I need to get from Frederick, MD (pretty populated place) to Ashburn, VA (VERY populated place, particularly with high tech). This is a 32.3 mile journey. By car, Google estimates it will take 45 minutes. Would you like to take a guess how long it takes on public transportation? An hour? Not a chance. Two? Not in your wildest dreams. No, after multiple changes with buses and subway lines, your 45 minute trip takes 4 hours and 57 minutes. That isn't moving between a couple cornfields across a state; that's going from one city to another in a densely populated region on the east coast of the US. 4 hours and 57 minutes. Want to know how much of a joke that is? It's faster on a bicycle! (3 hours 9 minutes). It's only a little over double the speed of walking. (10 hours 53 minutes)
the automobile as a means of personal conveyance is unsustainable no matter what you fuel you choose.
Power plants are vastly more efficient animals than your average fuel combustion engine. Your typical car wastes massive amounts of fuel on heat loss, friction of moving engine parts, and all the various things that have to be powered by the engine to keep the engine going (fuel injectors, fuel pump, air cooling, water pump, battery charging, etc), to say nothing of the straight fuel waste. Above and beyond that, you have to consider all the oil going into the car (oil changes every 3 - 5k miles), and the energy cost of manufacturing all those moving parts unique to a fuel combustion engine which wear out over time.
Even if every watt of power for your brand new Model S came from a coal fire power plant (which, statistically, it isn't), you still come out massively ahead of gasoline engine vehicle owners in terms of environmental impact. More realistically, some of the power will be coming from natural gas power plants, nuclear power plants, hydro, and even a bit of "renewable" power.
Quite honestly, if we - as a people - wanted to look at an investment that would revolutionize how we affect our environment (just speaking from a local, observable environmental impact that nobody questions) and establish real energy security (no more sending troops to die in foreign deserts - YAY!), we'd work out a 10-year plan for shutdown and replacement of all coal, oil, and natural gas power plants with nuclear power plants (with on-site fuel reprocessing, likely using the latest CANDU plants) and ramp up Tesla's (and anyone else who actually has competitive technologies) infrastructure and Bluestar technology and manufacturing. The goal would be to have electric cars with 300+ mile ranges and 5-minute swappable batteries selling for under $20k, a >75% move to these new cars across the population, properly equipped gas stations around the country strategically placed to perform the swaps as needed, quick charge stations around the country at hotels, offices, and restaurants, and a grid supplying these vehicles with power using modern nuclear plants running at peak efficiency within 10-12 years. The up-front investment would be enormous and it's virtually impossible to get the kind of solidarity required to pull off such a huge structural change in today's world, but we'd be in an absolutely incredible position moving forward in terms of our environment and our energy security.
Just for giggles, I worked out the capital costs of building sufficient ACR-1000 reactors to provide all necessary electricity in the United States (411 1200MWe reactors at estimated capital costs - including interest during build time - of $11.218 Billion each) at $4.61 Trillion US. That would replace all existing power plants, including existing nuclear power plants, with brand new ACR-1000 reactor powered plants, providing funding from design to full operation, including initial fuel and hiring/training costs. This would be a WWII level project which would put the entire nation to work and would result in massive growth both during and after completion. It would also propel the United States to the forefront of the world, technologically, and give us a whole new area of high tech manufacturing and services to export across the globe as others watch the incredible benefits unfold. We'd be the world's experts on how to make the transition out of the fossil fuel age.
A) You likely would have developed the routine of plugging in your electric car when you got home, which would mean a fully fueled vehicle each time you leave
and
B) Assuming you completely forgot to plug in your car, an 80% charge in the Tesla Model S requires about 45 minutes with the quick charge gear and they have a 5-minute battery swap at properly equipped stations. So you'd either go to the nearest swap station or you'd put your trip on hold for 45 minutes because you forgot to plug in your car.
Scenario A is far more likely. The only reason you don't think it is is because you're still thinking like a gas engine car owner. If you live on either coast, it's extremely likely that the time between trips of >150 miles is measured in months, if not years. 150 miles in a populated region is one heck of a long ways away. On the East coast, 150 will invariably take you past/through a number of very large towns and major cities.
Until battery electric vehicles become popular, stations like this won't be ubiquitous in the same way gas stations are.
Actually, gas stations with service areas on site would be the ideal places to do this work. You just throw the car up on the lift (or whatever they use), do the swap, and send them on their way. Your point is taken regarding the availability of properly equipped places right now, but they don't really need to have them all over the place immediately. We're still on the mentality of gasoline cars where you have no choice but to take the car to a special place to refill its fuel supply every so often. This car is refilled every night at home and most people (>90%) don't drive enough during nearly all of their typical driving days to worry about draining one of these cars to the point that they'd need to worry about a mid-day refill. Unlike gasoline engine vehicles, drivers of these cars will unplug their car in the morning, drive to work/school/the store/etc, then drive it home and plug it in. That'll be their daily routine for everything except long driving vacations (which may require some extra planning in the early years, depending on distance).
What you need at the start are a small number of swap-equipped gas stations easily accessible from high-traffic interstate highways in regions of high sales densities (LA, NYC, etc) and quick charge stations at similarly accessible places where people typically stop for >45 minutes (such as restaurants). The easy selling point there would be to install the quick charge stations for free at chain restaurants where white collar and upper middle class purchasers of the Model S would normally go. That then gives you some infrastructure of quick-swap stations when you just want to keep moving and quick charge stations when you want to stop for something to eat. Their next step would be to license (cheaply) the quick-swap and quick-charge technologies to other electric car makers so their way becomes the standard. The worst thing that could happen to all-electric cars would be a slew of incompatible standards wherein nobody knows which stations can actually perform a swap for your particular vehicle.
From memory (which is based on older info and might not be 100%):
1. There is an option for a 5-minute battery swap-out at properly equipped service stations and there's a quick charge option where proper charging equipment can bring the battery from 0% to 80% in 45 minutes. You would likely be more interested in the 5 minute swap in terms of a gas station replacement for long trips, but the vast majority of refills would be resolved with nightly charging, giving the advantage to this car as you can't fill your gasoline vehicle with fuel every night at home - you have to make a special stop once or twice a week and pay out a bunch of money. How often does anyone take a >160/300 mile trip? If it's all the time for you, this isn't the car for you until there are enough service stations doing the 5-minute swap to make it convenient. If you're like the 99% of people in the US and Europe who drive far less than that 99% of the time, this works just fine.
2. Expected lifespan (defined as >80% of brand-new capacity) is 8 - 10 years.
3. The batteries cost $10,000 to replace today. Their cost in 8 - 10 years is extremely difficult to anticipate, but assuming that the materials involved aren't massively more expensive, the technology will certainly be significantly cheaper and should push those prices down.
The Republican party today is not the same as the one back in Reagan's era, in fact it's changed quite a lot just in this decade alone,
What they advertise has changed; what they actually do has not. The Contract with America was virtually nothing but hot air. The only reason we got close to a balanced budget was that the Republicans in Congress and the Democratic President couldn't agree on what to spend tons of money on.
and the stuff the current Republican candidates are saying on the campaign trail is straight out of an ultra pro-corporatist anti-regulation playbook, almost identical to what the Libertarians spout, except with some added fundamentalist religion to appease the evangelical Christian voters. The current candidates have been talking a lot lately about eliminating the Dept of Education, the FAA, the FCC, and any other Federal agency that stands in the way of corporate profits. Taking the country to war, however, is still perfectly fine by them as one thing they don't want to downsize or eliminate is the DoD, and the hefty contracts for defense contractors. As for marriage and abortion stuff, again, those things don't stand in the way of corporate profits, yet they bring in votes from the evangelicals and fundies.
I would strongly disagree. The current Republican candidates (minus, to an extent, Ron Paul) give a small amount of lip service to cutting taxes and regulations because - quite frankly - it's not an issue where they can distinguish themselves from President Obama. They'll mouth some words about it to sound tough, but I don't think there's a sane person alive who actually believes Rick Perry would start dismantling major sections of government. The flub he had in that debate was not one of having the 'senior moment' we all have once in a while. The guy couldn't remember what some writer stuck on an index card for him as part of a pathetic attempt to get his name back in the news to regain momentum. Mitt Romney will happily tell you the sky is purple and he wears women's underwear if it'll gain him +1 net vote. His positions don't change; he doesn't have positions, and if you put him in a debate with President Obama it's going to sound like a damned echo chamber. Gingrich would rather tell you what 74 people have written about a topic over the last 300 years than give you anything original or firm. And quite honestly, when you look at President Obama, you can't begin to claim he hasn't bent over backwards to the point of forming a pretzel shape when it's come to big business and corporations. He's even fought for tax breaks for people up and down the line. There's nary a candidate for President in the 2012 election who isn't for tax-and-spend-but-sound-like-you-care-about-deficits-by-giving-lip-service-to-microscopic-cuts-that-keep-Washington-politicians-firmly-in-the-driver-seat-of-the-country. The only one of the bunch who's really come up with a firm position is Ron Paul in that he's strongly and consistently against both regulations AND subsidies and special government perks for big business. And again, I don't think that's because Paul is such a great guy and I don't trust him any further than I can throw him. The last guy who came into a presidential race talking about how government was the problem and not the solution ended up blowing up our deficit in a way not seen since WWII with both military and discretionary spending programs. But at least he's claiming and appears to sincerely believe that his goal is to cut down on the power and influence of the politicians in DC.
You can't begin to tell me that someone like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich believes or has any intention of implementing libertarian principles of small, limited government. You can't begin to tell me that someone like George W. Bush had a clue what those principles are. I'll bet you anything that Newt can recite the Constitution and all the Federalist papers from start to finish; but he doesn't give a damn about what
The people who call themselves libertarians - at least in the US - are functionally identical to republicans on >99% of all matters.
The same Republican Party that gave us massive expansions in Medicare, the Department of Education, and the national debt? The same Republican Party that has shown no interest in eliminating any Federal entitlement programs, the Department of Energy, the aforementioned Department of Education, or much of anything else? The same Republican Party that's been fighting for the same absurdly broad definitions of the Interstate Commerce Clause when it suited their draconian drug policies? The same Republican Party that took the country to war against Iraq despite having no evidence that Iraq was a direct threat to the United States or its citizens? The same Republican Party that continued and supported US troops being stationed in over 150 countries around the world? The Republican Party that supported the likes of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger? No Child Left Behind? Massive Federal land grabs? FCC censorship? Support for Federal marriage restrictions and Federal abortion limitations? Support for banning flag burning? Indefinite detention of American citizens captured on US soil like Jose Padilla? No Fourth Amendment protections for Americans returning to the United States? Invasive and dangerous searches at airports by security which became forcibly Federalized? Bailouts and takeovers of private businesses?
It just goes on and on and it's been going on for decades. The Republican base and the GOP itself are -NOTHING- like libertarians. Most Republicans I've seen don't have a clue what the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, and tenth Amendments are, why we have them, and why they should care about them. Democrats are certainly no better when it comes to the second, fifth, eighth, ninth, and tenth Amendments. President Obama picked up exactly where George W. Bush left off pulling the same kind of garbage, only with a more articulate spin on why shredding the Constitution is the right thing to do. Where's your hope and change? It's in Guantanamo Bay, the Obamacare insurance company giveaway, the Federal Reserve trying to run the economy behind the curtain, and the continued bailouts and stimulus that have kept us barely treading water while adding the weight of debt to our ankles and threatening to drown us all slowly and painfully.
Let me correct your statement for you: The people who call themselves the Democratic Party - at least in the US - are functionally identical to the Republican Party on >99% of all matters.
Not a one of them gives a damn about you or me. Neither of them has our interests at heart. Neither of them has or cares about solutions. The only thing they care about is selling you a promise to get your vote so they can take your money and sell your ass for a carton of Lucky's the first chance they get once they make it through the next election. They've got you playing these stupid games of blaming this group or that when all the while it is they who tug on your strings like expert puppeteers making you put on a show for their benefit.
You see, what you're missing is a very simple fact of life almost universally lost on folks thinking that government can be a force for good: government IS politicians. libertarians don't want small government because we hate the poor or because we don't want to do our part to help those around us. libertarians want small government because all governments are inherently populated with these kinds of self-serving scumbags within a few years of their formation and we want to limit the amount of damage they can do. The larger your government is, the smaller you are by comparison in the eyes of the egomaniacs who seek that kind of power. You're a tool for them to use to build a machine that enriches them and their cronies. Any good that comes from their actions is purely for PR purposes and the sheer level of damage caused is truly unimaginable.
You're missing the power of love. Also, dreams, unicorns, and magic faerie dust.
You see, things like logic, mathematics, common sense, etc just don't work when confronted with bongo drum beating unwashed poetry majors who think they can solve the world's problems by waving a sign and chanting a slogan.
If the vendor only supports Java/Weblogic/Apache 1.2.3 for their product, you don't get to install 1.2.4 until they support it. If you just decide to do it anyway, the best case scenario is they tell you they don't know the next time you come to them with a problem. The worse case scenario is they run your support agreement through a shredder and laugh at you.
Admins don't decide which versions of underlying software are supported; the vendor does. Admins don't decide which vendor's software to use; the customer does. Admins don't decide which products to push; salespeople and management do.
And if you don't ever run into compatibility issues, you're either using an extremely limited set of applications with great vendors, or you're exceedingly lucky. I've seen all manner of issues crop up with Sparc and x86, Solaris, Windows, and Linux after running "minor" updates. Sometimes it's stuff the vendor broke. Sometimes it's something the underlying software changed that the vendor's code was dependent upon. Apache's latest releases for 2.0.x and 2.2.x even break RFC compliance (granted, with reasonably good reason). Microsoft tossed patches out for Win2k3 R2 that blew up IIS. Do I just throw the latest version of everything on all the prod systems I'm maintaining? Hell no (I actually like my job); I haven't a clue what that might break in all the various applications depending on those types of underlying software. It's the vendor's job to thoroughly test their product, find and fix problems, and let me know what configurations they test with and support.
Can I just start throwing updates around all over the place and hope for the best? Sure. Will it break things that customers are using? Yes, horribly. How do I know? Because as soon as it doesn't create a support issue from the vendor, these kinds of updates get installed in dev environments first and they break things in the dev environments all the time. When they don't break things in dev, then they're promoted through the chain and don't reach a production system until they've had the living shit tested out of them. Why? Because you don't want to be the one explaining to management why you just lost the company $6 million a year for a major production outage caused by throwing in unsupported, untested code changes. It isn't about there being a 'stake in the ground'; it's about keeping things functional so the customers don't go away and leave you without a budget from which to draw a paycheck.
What you actually do instead is a) keep up with security alerts that might impact systems you're running, b) figure out if your configuration is vulnerable to specific problems, c) mitigate on your own right away in any way possible that won't affect the application when you find something that could hit you, and d) contact the vendor to start the process of squeezing an update out of them. Does it suck? Absolutely. Should vendors always keep up and get security fixes out/provide rapid response for support inclusiveness with new versions of underlying software? Absolutely. Do I get to change the business practices of multi-billion dollar a year companies providing the software and support needed to serve customers? No.
Obviously you've never worked with enterprise applications. You run off and start applying patches/updates on your own without vendor blessings (likely invalidating support contracts that cost more than your annual salary), you can (probably should) get fired. It's all fun and games cowboying your way through updates and talking about how it should all just work (in theory) right up until you break some obscure, shitty vendor code and cause a major outage, blow through the SLA, and risk the loss of a multi-million dollar customer.
Certainly there are some lazy sysadmins out there who just can't be bothered lifting a finger until something is broken and someone is complaining, but my experience is that nearly all the competent admins are hamstrung by vendors who are incompetent to a level that borders on negligence. No matter how much effort you put into design and maintenance of high-end, fault-tolerant systems, storage, network, and backup gear, bad code easily unwinds the whole thing. The users never see how solid all your stuff is and how broken all the stuff is that you're forced to implement; they only see whether their application is available and fast. Honestly, I've seen a small number of very small software vendors who are truly on the ball. Every medium to large application vendor I've dealt with has major, major problems.
There's an entire industry built around cleaning up the garbage puked out by "enterprise" application vendors so that users of said applications have something usable. To me, that's indicative of a massive problem.
Or more likely, they're contacting their software vendors to yell and scream until the vendor finally gets off their ass and agrees to provide a supported product update to fix the problem.
Out of 7,200,000 teachers (US Census 2008), you come up with a list of a couple hundred bad people and declare all of them "state sanctioned child molesters" who "spend their days preying on" their students?
The only possible compelling interest the state could claim would be protecting children from the likes of people on the list you linked, yet it's completely impossible to show how this law accomplishes that. If the law is an utter failure at preventing undesirable contact between teachers and students (and it is), then it loses the one compelling reason to even consider allowing its complete and utter disregard for the first amendment. Teachers aren't limited to Facebook and MySpace to meet and seduce their students. Believe it or not, they actually sit just a few feet apart for much of the year and nearly all of them have absolutely no interest in molesting anyone.
I can't begin to imagine a less defensible violation of the first amendment. Here we have a law which directly prohibits the free association of citizens for no justifiable reason. The prohibition does nothing to prevent inappropriate contact between students and teachers (nullifying any possible compelling reason to uphold this unconstitutional garbage) while directly attacking a right so critical to basic human liberty that the founding fathers chose to spell it out in plain English for all the world to see in the Bill of Rights. The first amendment was crafted specifically to ensure that exactly this kind of thing would never happen in this country.
Not even in the 9th Circus would this kind of absurdity pass the smell test. Assuming this makes it to the SCOTUS, the lawyer defending it is going to find the justices incredulously shaking their heads at his every word.
Booming middle class? How exactly does the middle class boom when everything they buy costs 20, 30, 40% more (or worse) because of all the taxes being passed down to them by the corporations?
Any time you want to figure out answers on corporate taxes, ask yourself a very simple question: who pays for any and all costs incurred by any given company?
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Actually, the US Federal government is also only a currency user, ever since 1913. The US Dept of the Treasury has no legal authority to create new US Dollars and should Congress remove that authority from the Federal Reserve (a pseudo-private/public institution whose owners are US banks but who is somewhat answerable to the US Congress and the President) in the middle of the mess we're seeing, it would bring about an economic panic that would dwarf any we've heretofore witnessed. Greece, Ireland, and others are all perfectly able to coin their own money at will. They need only abdicate treaties prohibiting it and fire up the printing presses. The reason they haven't done so is that it's economic suicide.
But that's all nothing but an aside. We've seen in Germany, Zimbabwe, and many others what happens when you attempt to coin your way out of a massive fiscal debt.
Since you seem to believe that sovereign debt doesn't matter so long as you control your own currency, let me ask you this: what happens when the US pays more in debt servicing than its entire annual revenue combined and we begin borrowing for 100% of spending plus x% of the debt servicing?
Technically Clinton didn't raid the Social Security trust fund. By law, all excess funds from normal operations (withholdings taken in minus benefits paid out and administrative expenses) at the end of the fiscal year are used to purchase US Treasuries. That money is then dumped into the general fund (as if it just dropped from Heaven).
This happens each and every year, by law. Clinton didn't do anything special; he just fought with the Republicans in Congress over spending (what to spend money on; not so much whether to spend tons of money) to the point that the deficit was small enough to be hidden behind this accounting sleight of hand. Clinton deserves no credit for "balancing the budget" or "creating a surplus" as neither of those statements reflect reality. At the same time, he deserves no blame for hiding the debt that created the illusory surplus since he didn't create the laws that hid the debt to make said false surplus appear.
Social Security and Medicare aren't future debt; they're CURRENT debt. They hold the same US Treasury bonds as anyone else, can sell them to anyone else, and collect on them the same as anyone else. That particular debt is merely shuffled away into "Intragovernmental Holdings".
But yes, your overall point is correct. There was no surplus anymore than I can show a surplus in my personal budget by taking out a personal loan of $100,000. "Look, ma! I had a hundred grand surplus this year!"
Clinton had a budget surplus.
No he didn't. It may have existed on paper, but in reality, the total debt grew under Clinton and every other President since Eisenhower. The last time we had a real surplus (as in, we took in more money than we spent) was 1956. Don't trust me; go to the US Dept of Treasury's website and look at the numbers yourself.
Stop worrying about the deficit or the debt. They are meaningless, red herrings.
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A) They're not just fossil fuel powered. They're powered by a variety of sources, including clean nuclear power, hydro, and (to a much smaller extent) "renewables". See here for US sources of electricty: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Electricity_Production_the_USA.svg and recognize that in other places (like France and Canada), the majority of electricity on the power grid is from clean sources. Those countries benefit even more from moving to electric vehicles.
B) A large central fossil fuel power plant is vastly more efficient the fuel combustion engine in any car, which results in vastly less overall pollution.
C) Electric vehicles have a lot less wear and tear, which means less replacement parts need to be manufactured for them, which reduces their overall energy use.
It's as clean and safe as anything we've yet developed or even imagined. Per TWh generated, it's the safest electricity generation technology ever used on any sizable scale (including solar and wind).
Nothing is "renewable". All electricity generation requires construction of things which are not fully recyclable and which are not completely environmentally neutral.
Nuclear power requires a ridiculously small amount of fuel and we have massive amounts of it located across the globe. Even if you only look at Uranium, there's tons of it everywhere. If you look at Thorium, the idea of sustainability of it becomes an absolute joke (in the realm of us having millions of years of fuel available even if current electricity usage continue to increase without end).
Tell you what, move out of the immediate downtown area of a major US city and then let me know how well that works out for you.
The US does not have the population density in most places to make public transportation feasible. I'm not going to walk a mile to get picked up. I'm not going to stand there waiting 10 - 15 minutes (assuming the intended vehicle ever arrives) to get picked up. I'm not going to travel to a bunch of places I don't want to go which aren't on the path between where I started and where I want to go. I'm not going to step out to a transfer station to do more walking around and waiting. I'm not going to get dropped off 4 miles from my destination because no public transportation actually takes me where I need to be. I'm not going to let a 20 minute car ride turn into a 2 hour public transportation fiasco. And I'm not going to plan my entire day around the schedules of the local public transportation.
Cars aren't sustainable? They're about the only thing that is sustainable outside of NYC, DC, LA, and a few other select places in the US. Even if you have a lot of buses running around, you just can't get everywhere using them in your average suburban area and you certainly can't just go right from your start to your destination. That's not how they work. So yes; in a small number of places with very high population densities, public transportation can make more sense than cars in certain situations. In most places? It's a joke. Not even a funny joke.
Example: let's say I need to get from Frederick, MD (pretty populated place) to Ashburn, VA (VERY populated place, particularly with high tech). This is a 32.3 mile journey. By car, Google estimates it will take 45 minutes. Would you like to take a guess how long it takes on public transportation? An hour? Not a chance. Two? Not in your wildest dreams. No, after multiple changes with buses and subway lines, your 45 minute trip takes 4 hours and 57 minutes. That isn't moving between a couple cornfields across a state; that's going from one city to another in a densely populated region on the east coast of the US. 4 hours and 57 minutes. Want to know how much of a joke that is? It's faster on a bicycle! (3 hours 9 minutes). It's only a little over double the speed of walking. (10 hours 53 minutes)
the automobile as a means of personal conveyance is unsustainable no matter what you fuel you choose.
Too funny.
Oops. That should be $4.52 Trillion US. I forgot to convert from Canadian dollars.
Power plants are vastly more efficient animals than your average fuel combustion engine. Your typical car wastes massive amounts of fuel on heat loss, friction of moving engine parts, and all the various things that have to be powered by the engine to keep the engine going (fuel injectors, fuel pump, air cooling, water pump, battery charging, etc), to say nothing of the straight fuel waste. Above and beyond that, you have to consider all the oil going into the car (oil changes every 3 - 5k miles), and the energy cost of manufacturing all those moving parts unique to a fuel combustion engine which wear out over time.
Even if every watt of power for your brand new Model S came from a coal fire power plant (which, statistically, it isn't), you still come out massively ahead of gasoline engine vehicle owners in terms of environmental impact. More realistically, some of the power will be coming from natural gas power plants, nuclear power plants, hydro, and even a bit of "renewable" power.
Quite honestly, if we - as a people - wanted to look at an investment that would revolutionize how we affect our environment (just speaking from a local, observable environmental impact that nobody questions) and establish real energy security (no more sending troops to die in foreign deserts - YAY!), we'd work out a 10-year plan for shutdown and replacement of all coal, oil, and natural gas power plants with nuclear power plants (with on-site fuel reprocessing, likely using the latest CANDU plants) and ramp up Tesla's (and anyone else who actually has competitive technologies) infrastructure and Bluestar technology and manufacturing. The goal would be to have electric cars with 300+ mile ranges and 5-minute swappable batteries selling for under $20k, a >75% move to these new cars across the population, properly equipped gas stations around the country strategically placed to perform the swaps as needed, quick charge stations around the country at hotels, offices, and restaurants, and a grid supplying these vehicles with power using modern nuclear plants running at peak efficiency within 10-12 years. The up-front investment would be enormous and it's virtually impossible to get the kind of solidarity required to pull off such a huge structural change in today's world, but we'd be in an absolutely incredible position moving forward in terms of our environment and our energy security.
Just for giggles, I worked out the capital costs of building sufficient ACR-1000 reactors to provide all necessary electricity in the United States (411 1200MWe reactors at estimated capital costs - including interest during build time - of $11.218 Billion each) at $4.61 Trillion US. That would replace all existing power plants, including existing nuclear power plants, with brand new ACR-1000 reactor powered plants, providing funding from design to full operation, including initial fuel and hiring/training costs. This would be a WWII level project which would put the entire nation to work and would result in massive growth both during and after completion. It would also propel the United States to the forefront of the world, technologically, and give us a whole new area of high tech manufacturing and services to export across the globe as others watch the incredible benefits unfold. We'd be the world's experts on how to make the transition out of the fossil fuel age.
Wrong, because:
A) You likely would have developed the routine of plugging in your electric car when you got home, which would mean a fully fueled vehicle each time you leave
and
B) Assuming you completely forgot to plug in your car, an 80% charge in the Tesla Model S requires about 45 minutes with the quick charge gear and they have a 5-minute battery swap at properly equipped stations. So you'd either go to the nearest swap station or you'd put your trip on hold for 45 minutes because you forgot to plug in your car.
Scenario A is far more likely. The only reason you don't think it is is because you're still thinking like a gas engine car owner. If you live on either coast, it's extremely likely that the time between trips of >150 miles is measured in months, if not years. 150 miles in a populated region is one heck of a long ways away. On the East coast, 150 will invariably take you past/through a number of very large towns and major cities.
Until battery electric vehicles become popular, stations like this won't be ubiquitous in the same way gas stations are.
Actually, gas stations with service areas on site would be the ideal places to do this work. You just throw the car up on the lift (or whatever they use), do the swap, and send them on their way. Your point is taken regarding the availability of properly equipped places right now, but they don't really need to have them all over the place immediately. We're still on the mentality of gasoline cars where you have no choice but to take the car to a special place to refill its fuel supply every so often. This car is refilled every night at home and most people (>90%) don't drive enough during nearly all of their typical driving days to worry about draining one of these cars to the point that they'd need to worry about a mid-day refill. Unlike gasoline engine vehicles, drivers of these cars will unplug their car in the morning, drive to work/school/the store/etc, then drive it home and plug it in. That'll be their daily routine for everything except long driving vacations (which may require some extra planning in the early years, depending on distance).
What you need at the start are a small number of swap-equipped gas stations easily accessible from high-traffic interstate highways in regions of high sales densities (LA, NYC, etc) and quick charge stations at similarly accessible places where people typically stop for >45 minutes (such as restaurants). The easy selling point there would be to install the quick charge stations for free at chain restaurants where white collar and upper middle class purchasers of the Model S would normally go. That then gives you some infrastructure of quick-swap stations when you just want to keep moving and quick charge stations when you want to stop for something to eat. Their next step would be to license (cheaply) the quick-swap and quick-charge technologies to other electric car makers so their way becomes the standard. The worst thing that could happen to all-electric cars would be a slew of incompatible standards wherein nobody knows which stations can actually perform a swap for your particular vehicle.
From memory (which is based on older info and might not be 100%):
1. There is an option for a 5-minute battery swap-out at properly equipped service stations and there's a quick charge option where proper charging equipment can bring the battery from 0% to 80% in 45 minutes. You would likely be more interested in the 5 minute swap in terms of a gas station replacement for long trips, but the vast majority of refills would be resolved with nightly charging, giving the advantage to this car as you can't fill your gasoline vehicle with fuel every night at home - you have to make a special stop once or twice a week and pay out a bunch of money. How often does anyone take a >160/300 mile trip? If it's all the time for you, this isn't the car for you until there are enough service stations doing the 5-minute swap to make it convenient. If you're like the 99% of people in the US and Europe who drive far less than that 99% of the time, this works just fine.
2. Expected lifespan (defined as >80% of brand-new capacity) is 8 - 10 years.
3. The batteries cost $10,000 to replace today. Their cost in 8 - 10 years is extremely difficult to anticipate, but assuming that the materials involved aren't massively more expensive, the technology will certainly be significantly cheaper and should push those prices down.
The Republican party today is not the same as the one back in Reagan's era, in fact it's changed quite a lot just in this decade alone,
What they advertise has changed; what they actually do has not. The Contract with America was virtually nothing but hot air. The only reason we got close to a balanced budget was that the Republicans in Congress and the Democratic President couldn't agree on what to spend tons of money on.
and the stuff the current Republican candidates are saying on the campaign trail is straight out of an ultra pro-corporatist anti-regulation playbook, almost identical to what the Libertarians spout, except with some added fundamentalist religion to appease the evangelical Christian voters. The current candidates have been talking a lot lately about eliminating the Dept of Education, the FAA, the FCC, and any other Federal agency that stands in the way of corporate profits. Taking the country to war, however, is still perfectly fine by them as one thing they don't want to downsize or eliminate is the DoD, and the hefty contracts for defense contractors. As for marriage and abortion stuff, again, those things don't stand in the way of corporate profits, yet they bring in votes from the evangelicals and fundies.
I would strongly disagree. The current Republican candidates (minus, to an extent, Ron Paul) give a small amount of lip service to cutting taxes and regulations because - quite frankly - it's not an issue where they can distinguish themselves from President Obama. They'll mouth some words about it to sound tough, but I don't think there's a sane person alive who actually believes Rick Perry would start dismantling major sections of government. The flub he had in that debate was not one of having the 'senior moment' we all have once in a while. The guy couldn't remember what some writer stuck on an index card for him as part of a pathetic attempt to get his name back in the news to regain momentum. Mitt Romney will happily tell you the sky is purple and he wears women's underwear if it'll gain him +1 net vote. His positions don't change; he doesn't have positions, and if you put him in a debate with President Obama it's going to sound like a damned echo chamber. Gingrich would rather tell you what 74 people have written about a topic over the last 300 years than give you anything original or firm. And quite honestly, when you look at President Obama, you can't begin to claim he hasn't bent over backwards to the point of forming a pretzel shape when it's come to big business and corporations. He's even fought for tax breaks for people up and down the line. There's nary a candidate for President in the 2012 election who isn't for tax-and-spend-but-sound-like-you-care-about-deficits-by-giving-lip-service-to-microscopic-cuts-that-keep-Washington-politicians-firmly-in-the-driver-seat-of-the-country. The only one of the bunch who's really come up with a firm position is Ron Paul in that he's strongly and consistently against both regulations AND subsidies and special government perks for big business. And again, I don't think that's because Paul is such a great guy and I don't trust him any further than I can throw him. The last guy who came into a presidential race talking about how government was the problem and not the solution ended up blowing up our deficit in a way not seen since WWII with both military and discretionary spending programs. But at least he's claiming and appears to sincerely believe that his goal is to cut down on the power and influence of the politicians in DC.
You can't begin to tell me that someone like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich believes or has any intention of implementing libertarian principles of small, limited government. You can't begin to tell me that someone like George W. Bush had a clue what those principles are. I'll bet you anything that Newt can recite the Constitution and all the Federalist papers from start to finish; but he doesn't give a damn about what
The people who call themselves libertarians - at least in the US - are functionally identical to republicans on >99% of all matters.
The same Republican Party that gave us massive expansions in Medicare, the Department of Education, and the national debt? The same Republican Party that has shown no interest in eliminating any Federal entitlement programs, the Department of Energy, the aforementioned Department of Education, or much of anything else? The same Republican Party that's been fighting for the same absurdly broad definitions of the Interstate Commerce Clause when it suited their draconian drug policies? The same Republican Party that took the country to war against Iraq despite having no evidence that Iraq was a direct threat to the United States or its citizens? The same Republican Party that continued and supported US troops being stationed in over 150 countries around the world? The Republican Party that supported the likes of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger? No Child Left Behind? Massive Federal land grabs? FCC censorship? Support for Federal marriage restrictions and Federal abortion limitations? Support for banning flag burning? Indefinite detention of American citizens captured on US soil like Jose Padilla? No Fourth Amendment protections for Americans returning to the United States? Invasive and dangerous searches at airports by security which became forcibly Federalized? Bailouts and takeovers of private businesses?
It just goes on and on and it's been going on for decades. The Republican base and the GOP itself are -NOTHING- like libertarians. Most Republicans I've seen don't have a clue what the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, and tenth Amendments are, why we have them, and why they should care about them. Democrats are certainly no better when it comes to the second, fifth, eighth, ninth, and tenth Amendments. President Obama picked up exactly where George W. Bush left off pulling the same kind of garbage, only with a more articulate spin on why shredding the Constitution is the right thing to do. Where's your hope and change? It's in Guantanamo Bay, the Obamacare insurance company giveaway, the Federal Reserve trying to run the economy behind the curtain, and the continued bailouts and stimulus that have kept us barely treading water while adding the weight of debt to our ankles and threatening to drown us all slowly and painfully.
Let me correct your statement for you:
The people who call themselves the Democratic Party - at least in the US - are functionally identical to the Republican Party on >99% of all matters.
Not a one of them gives a damn about you or me. Neither of them has our interests at heart. Neither of them has or cares about solutions. The only thing they care about is selling you a promise to get your vote so they can take your money and sell your ass for a carton of Lucky's the first chance they get once they make it through the next election. They've got you playing these stupid games of blaming this group or that when all the while it is they who tug on your strings like expert puppeteers making you put on a show for their benefit.
You see, what you're missing is a very simple fact of life almost universally lost on folks thinking that government can be a force for good: government IS politicians. libertarians don't want small government because we hate the poor or because we don't want to do our part to help those around us. libertarians want small government because all governments are inherently populated with these kinds of self-serving scumbags within a few years of their formation and we want to limit the amount of damage they can do. The larger your government is, the smaller you are by comparison in the eyes of the egomaniacs who seek that kind of power. You're a tool for them to use to build a machine that enriches them and their cronies. Any good that comes from their actions is purely for PR purposes and the sheer level of damage caused is truly unimaginable.
50 sm
You're missing the power of love. Also, dreams, unicorns, and magic faerie dust.
You see, things like logic, mathematics, common sense, etc just don't work when confronted with bongo drum beating unwashed poetry majors who think they can solve the world's problems by waving a sign and chanting a slogan.
A natural disaster of unimaginable scale that nobody thought was possible hit a nuclear power plant and not one person died.
You're right; it was a total failure.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good rant.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
If the vendor only supports Java/Weblogic/Apache 1.2.3 for their product, you don't get to install 1.2.4 until they support it. If you just decide to do it anyway, the best case scenario is they tell you they don't know the next time you come to them with a problem. The worse case scenario is they run your support agreement through a shredder and laugh at you.
Admins don't decide which versions of underlying software are supported; the vendor does.
Admins don't decide which vendor's software to use; the customer does.
Admins don't decide which products to push; salespeople and management do.
And if you don't ever run into compatibility issues, you're either using an extremely limited set of applications with great vendors, or you're exceedingly lucky. I've seen all manner of issues crop up with Sparc and x86, Solaris, Windows, and Linux after running "minor" updates. Sometimes it's stuff the vendor broke. Sometimes it's something the underlying software changed that the vendor's code was dependent upon. Apache's latest releases for 2.0.x and 2.2.x even break RFC compliance (granted, with reasonably good reason). Microsoft tossed patches out for Win2k3 R2 that blew up IIS. Do I just throw the latest version of everything on all the prod systems I'm maintaining? Hell no (I actually like my job); I haven't a clue what that might break in all the various applications depending on those types of underlying software. It's the vendor's job to thoroughly test their product, find and fix problems, and let me know what configurations they test with and support.
Can I just start throwing updates around all over the place and hope for the best? Sure. Will it break things that customers are using? Yes, horribly. How do I know? Because as soon as it doesn't create a support issue from the vendor, these kinds of updates get installed in dev environments first and they break things in the dev environments all the time. When they don't break things in dev, then they're promoted through the chain and don't reach a production system until they've had the living shit tested out of them. Why? Because you don't want to be the one explaining to management why you just lost the company $6 million a year for a major production outage caused by throwing in unsupported, untested code changes. It isn't about there being a 'stake in the ground'; it's about keeping things functional so the customers don't go away and leave you without a budget from which to draw a paycheck.
What you actually do instead is a) keep up with security alerts that might impact systems you're running, b) figure out if your configuration is vulnerable to specific problems, c) mitigate on your own right away in any way possible that won't affect the application when you find something that could hit you, and d) contact the vendor to start the process of squeezing an update out of them. Does it suck? Absolutely. Should vendors always keep up and get security fixes out/provide rapid response for support inclusiveness with new versions of underlying software? Absolutely. Do I get to change the business practices of multi-billion dollar a year companies providing the software and support needed to serve customers? No.
Obviously you've never worked with enterprise applications. You run off and start applying patches/updates on your own without vendor blessings (likely invalidating support contracts that cost more than your annual salary), you can (probably should) get fired. It's all fun and games cowboying your way through updates and talking about how it should all just work (in theory) right up until you break some obscure, shitty vendor code and cause a major outage, blow through the SLA, and risk the loss of a multi-million dollar customer.
Certainly there are some lazy sysadmins out there who just can't be bothered lifting a finger until something is broken and someone is complaining, but my experience is that nearly all the competent admins are hamstrung by vendors who are incompetent to a level that borders on negligence. No matter how much effort you put into design and maintenance of high-end, fault-tolerant systems, storage, network, and backup gear, bad code easily unwinds the whole thing. The users never see how solid all your stuff is and how broken all the stuff is that you're forced to implement; they only see whether their application is available and fast. Honestly, I've seen a small number of very small software vendors who are truly on the ball. Every medium to large application vendor I've dealt with has major, major problems.
There's an entire industry built around cleaning up the garbage puked out by "enterprise" application vendors so that users of said applications have something usable. To me, that's indicative of a massive problem.
Or more likely, they're contacting their software vendors to yell and scream until the vendor finally gets off their ass and agrees to provide a supported product update to fix the problem.
Who is advocating a teacher being able to force students to add them as friends on any social media site? Nobody.
Your argument is a strawman.
Now who's picking and choosing?
Out of 7,200,000 teachers (US Census 2008), you come up with a list of a couple hundred bad people and declare all of them "state sanctioned child molesters" who "spend their days preying on" their students?
The only possible compelling interest the state could claim would be protecting children from the likes of people on the list you linked, yet it's completely impossible to show how this law accomplishes that. If the law is an utter failure at preventing undesirable contact between teachers and students (and it is), then it loses the one compelling reason to even consider allowing its complete and utter disregard for the first amendment. Teachers aren't limited to Facebook and MySpace to meet and seduce their students. Believe it or not, they actually sit just a few feet apart for much of the year and nearly all of them have absolutely no interest in molesting anyone.
I can't begin to imagine a less defensible violation of the first amendment. Here we have a law which directly prohibits the free association of citizens for no justifiable reason. The prohibition does nothing to prevent inappropriate contact between students and teachers (nullifying any possible compelling reason to uphold this unconstitutional garbage) while directly attacking a right so critical to basic human liberty that the founding fathers chose to spell it out in plain English for all the world to see in the Bill of Rights. The first amendment was crafted specifically to ensure that exactly this kind of thing would never happen in this country.
Not even in the 9th Circus would this kind of absurdity pass the smell test. Assuming this makes it to the SCOTUS, the lawyer defending it is going to find the justices incredulously shaking their heads at his every word.
Booming middle class? How exactly does the middle class boom when everything they buy costs 20, 30, 40% more (or worse) because of all the taxes being passed down to them by the corporations?
Any time you want to figure out answers on corporate taxes, ask yourself a very simple question: who pays for any and all costs incurred by any given company?
(hint: its customers)