As a corollary, if you drive 10K mile per year, the difference between 20 mpg and 40 mpg right now is about $900 (based on the price at the pump I used this AM to gas up my car).
Over a five year period, we're talking saving $4500.
How many are willing to bet that the new, high efficiency cars will cost ONLY $4500*** more?
***: with suitable adjustments for inflation, etc.
Note also that the savings will frequently be rather less than specified, because a lot of us already drive cars getting better than 20 mpg. And improving from 30 mpg (or 40) to 55 mpg will save you considerably less on gas.
If increasing overall vehicle energy efficiency is a serious goal, this part does need to be addressed. The problem is, the most likely way government would do so is to tell you what kind of car you may buy, and/or to attach absurdly high taxes to vehicles they wish to discourage.
Luckily, we have Obamacare hitting the Supremes late this year or early next year.
If the Supremes approve Obamacare's health insurance mandate, then they will have given the green light to a (hypothetical at this point) federal law specifying the type of car people buy, how often they have to buy new cars, the whole nine yards....
If 400k people a year are willing to pay $26k USD for a Prius, imagine how many people would be willing to pay $16k USD for a 50 US MPG car?
And then imagine how few 50 mpg cars will cost as little as $16K.
Main effect of this rule will be that car dealers get to increase prices tremendously on their larger vehicles, and increase prices slightly less tremendously on their small vehicles.
If you actually need a van or pickup, you're screwed. If you don't, you're not screwed quite so hard.
Note, for reference, that they have to MAKE a fleet that has those specified averages. They don't have to actually sell a fleet that has the specified performance. If they build a shitpot full of tinkertoy cars that get 80 mpg, they can then build some comfortable sedans that get 30 mpg, and sell the sedans, while the tinkertoys rot in the dealers' lots....
Aviation? WD bought loads of these to subsidize them.
No.
The War Department bought some in WW1, and sold them off afterwards.
Between the wars, the War Department bought a relative handful of planes, mostly just to figure out what worked.
They also bought a lot in WW2 for their own use (and pretty much nationalized the airlines in that period, since they didn't have enough planes).
After WW2, some of the cargo planes were sold off, and some fighters and light bombers were given away as foreign aid, but most everything else was either cut up into scrap or put into boneyards out west (some of it is still there).
Ships? WD/DOD bought loads of them.
Umm, no.
First off, before there was a DoD, there was a War Department and a Navy Department. The War Department was the Army, the Navy Department was Navy and Marine Corps. The War Department didn't have ships of its own if the Navy Department could possibly help it. This was true to such an extent that even during WW2, the War Department could get Navy cooperation by threatening to buy their own ships and doing it...
Secondly, the only "loads of them" that the Navy Department built were the ones actually used by the Navy. Between the wars, getting money for new ships was enough problem that we entered WW2 with a sizable number of WW1 destroyers/cruisers/battleships still in use (the Arizona was a WW1 battleship, as an example).
Note that a buttload of Liberty ships were built. But they didn't belong to either War Department or Navy Department, though most of them were used to move supplies for the Army and Navy in WW2.
I'd have to give Obama at least a 6 month pass on that after he took office.
Well, and since I don't believe ANY President has any meaningful ability to do anything about the economy in general and joblessness in specific (except muck it up), I'd give him a pass on that too.
And for longer than six months, to boot.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that his stimulus package and attempts to keep unemployment low (since he claimed his attempts would keep unemployment below 8%, he's on the hook for it - never claim that you'll fix something you can't) didn't have the desired/intended effect. Hence his low approval ratings right now.
It should be noted that there have been three one term Presidents since WW2 (and one of them wasn't even elected at all - not to President, not to VP). The elected one term Presidents both lost out on a second term due to economic conditions. And Obama is headed in the same direction right now.
Course, that could change in a heartbeat if the economy takes off this next year. Which won't happen till the government stops monkeying with it and just lets things stabilize a bit.
Some radical new energy source source is needed in order to launch all the mass required to make long-term existence even reasonably safe.
Yah, we could invent something that used the energy stored in the nucleus of an atom to produce large amounts of power.
We could call it "nuclear energy", maybe.
Seriously, a fleet of four Shuttles lifted somewhere around 2500 T to orbit over their careers. If we'd wanted to make the effort, and build a new Shuttle every year, we'd have been able to put a few tens of thousands of tons into orbit by this time.
And economies of scale should have made it more cost effective the more Shuttles we had - it's not like fuel is a significant fraction of the cost of a launch.
I believe they were talking "north of 10%, and possibly 15%" before the stimulus.
Hmm, a quick Google, and I find that unemployment rates under Bush peaked at about 7% when he left office (average over his terms looks to be between 5% and 5.25%, based on a quick eyeballing of the graph).
Since then, it's been higher, though it looks like it may have peaked at about where it is now.
Note that these numbers are the official numbers, and thus don't include people who are no longer collecting unemployment.
Note further that the unemployment extensions voted into place over the last few years would tend to result in an apparently higher unemployment rate, IF people tend to be unemployed for longer than the "standard" unemployment period, but not so long as the "revised" unemployment period. Otherwise, it would tend to hide the long-term unemployed from counting as unemployed.
I wonder what SpaceX are aiming at. Is the privatization really going to be cheaper?
From their website, SpaceX is planning on selling Falcon9 Heavy launches for $80-125 million per. Since the Falcon9 Heavy has a payload of 53000 kg to LEO, sounds like they'll be charging less than $2400/kg
but I'm pretty sure Arizona isn't all that hostile an environment, though, when I think about it. Very few/ no storms (dustorms maybe), I don't think it gets earthquakes, next to no rain.
229 tornadoes in the last 58 years.
Though from the map, there are parts of the State that don't seem to have had a tornado since before 1958.
Hopefully, this tower will be built in one of those places.
The turbines are at the ground level. The height increases suction due to basic thermodynamics. New nuclear power plants are estimated to cost in the $15 Billion range, so that price is not out of scope for a power plant.
Of course, new nuclear power plants generally produce a lot more than 200 MW of electricity.
and actually it goes all the way back to Churchill and FDR, when they decided to play Emperor and carve out new nation-states on a whim.
It should be noted that, for the most part, the "carving out new nation-states on a whim" was done post WW1 by the British Foreign Minister (Winston Churchill, oddly enough).
There was also a bit of this sort of thing post WW-2, but FDR was dead then, and Churchill was kicked out of office as soon as the War ended, so it's probably his successor you should be blaming.
So you mean having your leaders killed but then fighting an insurgent war for almost 10 years wasting 100s of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. If Iran were serious about wanting to destroy the Great Satan TM this sounds like one of the better approaches.
Note that Iran lost an admitted 188000 dead (and an estimated 500K-1M dead) during their almost-eight-year-long war with Iraq.
We've lost a total of just over 6000 fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over a similar period.
Somehow, I don't think that Iran would see us losing 1/30th the number of men they lost fighting Iraq (which they couldn't defeat, but we did - twice) as a "better approach".
And this not even counting population disparities. They have 1/4 our population, and lost 30 (low end) to 160 (high end) times as many people as we did fighting in Iraq....
some of this hints at being an effort to discredit the legitimate concerns of those being vocal with concerns over nuclear power.
It should be noted that information about KGB backing of anti-nuke groups back in the day were discovered when we got a look at their archives after the USSR went away.
Note, though, that it was also apparently an unintended side-effect of an effort to promote anti-nuclear weapons fears in the West.
and they can already use liens and court judgements that yield garnishments to throw you out of your residence
Only if you buy their product and refuse to pay for it.
Which isn't quite the same as "refuse to pay your taxes"...
Regarding your second sentence, there is a big difference between a one-off payment to purchase an energy source and what the energy monopolies do in the way of raising rates/prices whenever the CEO of some corporation in the energy harvesting, generation, or distribution system or a speculator in the carbonaceous energy sources wants a new yacht for their kid...or when it appears that the American people have a couple of loose pennies to rub together...or when a "private investor group" demands higher dividends for themselves...or on a whim...or whatever drives their decision to begin gouging again.
Well, that might be true if it were a "one-off" payment. It's not. The hardware will require maintenance (which can range from cheap to more expensive than the original hardware). And the CEO's of the companies that make your hardware will have you over exactly the same (imaginary) barrel you think that the "energy monopoly" CEO's do.
By the way, to put things in perspective, your utilities (gas and electric) have lower profit margins than your ISP's do, in general. Much lower.
They also have lower profit margins than makers of things like soap, detergent, air fresheners, etc.
Or camera makers.
Or a lot of other things.
Note, by the way, that the only way your point of service power generation can approach the cost-effectiveness of paying the electric company is if you include the massive taxpayer subsidies (30% at the Federal level, last I checked. And many States offer subsidies in addition to those).
And remember that if EVERYONE decides to take advantage of those subsidies, it becomes a matter of "I'll pay for yours if you'll pay for mine - in other words, the subsidies are only meaningful if few people use them.
energy monopolies and the private taxes that they levy (they call those private taxes "profit")
It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
I am not very much up to date with American history so please remind me when was the last time tanks and fighter planes were used in the *defense* of *your* country.
Fighters: December 7, 1941.
Plus the fighting in the vicinity of Wake Island shortly thereafter.
Arguably, that could be extended to the fighting that followed immediately thereafter in the Philippines.
Tanks. Couldn't say that they ever have. Course, we never bothered with them all that much till we had to bail Europe out of that little disagreement in the early '40's.
There's no downside to having two juries, but there is a significant upside.
Note, for reference, that Richard Dawkins claiming that there is an upside to two juries doesn't actually make that true.
Until someone has actually put it to the test, it's just a hypothesis, based on the principle that everyone on a jury has a perfect memory (since you're not allowed to take notes) and are otherwise completely identical.
Note also that the purpose of a Jury is NOT to guarantee "justice", but to prevent the government from railroading people. Remember who the Judge is working for (hint: it's not you, and it's not "justice").
The US could introduce a goods and services tax at the federal level and pass the revenue to state (and ultimately) local governments.
Which would raise the price of everything, and do nothing about the online advantage.
Buying from Amazon generally means you'll pay no sales tax. If the Feds were to add a goods and services tax, everyone would pay that AND the sales tax.
Except for online retailers, of course.
Or do you really think the States will do away with their sales taxes just because the Feds hand them some free money?
Not being to flippant, just curious how big of a band of the US has cold enough weather to require heat but not enough snow to generally have your roof be white all winter anyways?
That would be about 20% of CONUS.
I've spent 20 years living in a city that gets cold in winter (yes, yes, I know - it's not cold by New England standards. But it's cold enough I need to turn the heat on), but it's only snowed three times that I can remember. And the snow was gone by lunchtime each time.
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None. They just have to build enough of them to offset the Suburbans people are going to buy instead.
As a corollary, if you drive 10K mile per year, the difference between 20 mpg and 40 mpg right now is about $900 (based on the price at the pump I used this AM to gas up my car).
Over a five year period, we're talking saving $4500.
How many are willing to bet that the new, high efficiency cars will cost ONLY $4500*** more?
***: with suitable adjustments for inflation, etc.
Note also that the savings will frequently be rather less than specified, because a lot of us already drive cars getting better than 20 mpg. And improving from 30 mpg (or 40) to 55 mpg will save you considerably less on gas.
Luckily, we have Obamacare hitting the Supremes late this year or early next year.
If the Supremes approve Obamacare's health insurance mandate, then they will have given the green light to a (hypothetical at this point) federal law specifying the type of car people buy, how often they have to buy new cars, the whole nine yards....
It's slower than highway speeds where I drive. Hopefully, your top speed is a bit higher than 72 mph....
And then imagine how few 50 mpg cars will cost as little as $16K.
Main effect of this rule will be that car dealers get to increase prices tremendously on their larger vehicles, and increase prices slightly less tremendously on their small vehicles.
If you actually need a van or pickup, you're screwed. If you don't, you're not screwed quite so hard.
Note, for reference, that they have to MAKE a fleet that has those specified averages. They don't have to actually sell a fleet that has the specified performance. If they build a shitpot full of tinkertoy cars that get 80 mpg, they can then build some comfortable sedans that get 30 mpg, and sell the sedans, while the tinkertoys rot in the dealers' lots....
No.
The War Department bought some in WW1, and sold them off afterwards.
Between the wars, the War Department bought a relative handful of planes, mostly just to figure out what worked.
They also bought a lot in WW2 for their own use (and pretty much nationalized the airlines in that period, since they didn't have enough planes).
After WW2, some of the cargo planes were sold off, and some fighters and light bombers were given away as foreign aid, but most everything else was either cut up into scrap or put into boneyards out west (some of it is still there).
Umm, no.
First off, before there was a DoD, there was a War Department and a Navy Department. The War Department was the Army, the Navy Department was Navy and Marine Corps. The War Department didn't have ships of its own if the Navy Department could possibly help it. This was true to such an extent that even during WW2, the War Department could get Navy cooperation by threatening to buy their own ships and doing it...
Secondly, the only "loads of them" that the Navy Department built were the ones actually used by the Navy. Between the wars, getting money for new ships was enough problem that we entered WW2 with a sizable number of WW1 destroyers/cruisers/battleships still in use (the Arizona was a WW1 battleship, as an example).
Note that a buttload of Liberty ships were built. But they didn't belong to either War Department or Navy Department, though most of them were used to move supplies for the Army and Navy in WW2.
Well, and since I don't believe ANY President has any meaningful ability to do anything about the economy in general and joblessness in specific (except muck it up), I'd give him a pass on that too.
And for longer than six months, to boot.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that his stimulus package and attempts to keep unemployment low (since he claimed his attempts would keep unemployment below 8%, he's on the hook for it - never claim that you'll fix something you can't) didn't have the desired/intended effect. Hence his low approval ratings right now.
It should be noted that there have been three one term Presidents since WW2 (and one of them wasn't even elected at all - not to President, not to VP). The elected one term Presidents both lost out on a second term due to economic conditions. And Obama is headed in the same direction right now.
Course, that could change in a heartbeat if the economy takes off this next year. Which won't happen till the government stops monkeying with it and just lets things stabilize a bit.
Yah, we could invent something that used the energy stored in the nucleus of an atom to produce large amounts of power.
We could call it "nuclear energy", maybe.
Seriously, a fleet of four Shuttles lifted somewhere around 2500 T to orbit over their careers. If we'd wanted to make the effort, and build a new Shuttle every year, we'd have been able to put a few tens of thousands of tons into orbit by this time.
And economies of scale should have made it more cost effective the more Shuttles we had - it's not like fuel is a significant fraction of the cost of a launch.
Or not.
First, this is a civil trial, and jail isn't an option.
Second, there's nothing linking Bush to anything, even if whatsisname DID commit election fraud.
Hmm, a quick Google, and I find that unemployment rates under Bush peaked at about 7% when he left office (average over his terms looks to be between 5% and 5.25%, based on a quick eyeballing of the graph).
Since then, it's been higher, though it looks like it may have peaked at about where it is now.
Note that these numbers are the official numbers, and thus don't include people who are no longer collecting unemployment.
Note further that the unemployment extensions voted into place over the last few years would tend to result in an apparently higher unemployment rate, IF people tend to be unemployed for longer than the "standard" unemployment period, but not so long as the "revised" unemployment period. Otherwise, it would tend to hide the long-term unemployed from counting as unemployed.
From their website, SpaceX is planning on selling Falcon9 Heavy launches for $80-125 million per. Since the Falcon9 Heavy has a payload of 53000 kg to LEO, sounds like they'll be charging less than $2400/kg
Yep, looks cheaper than $3K-$10K per kg.
Or not, since gravitational acceleration would act on both the spacecraft and your face, thus preventing the faceplant while still accelerating.
Of course, new nuclear power plants generally produce a lot more than 200 MW of electricity.
It should be noted that, for the most part, the "carving out new nation-states on a whim" was done post WW1 by the British Foreign Minister (Winston Churchill, oddly enough).
There was also a bit of this sort of thing post WW-2, but FDR was dead then, and Churchill was kicked out of office as soon as the War ended, so it's probably his successor you should be blaming.
Note that Iran lost an admitted 188000 dead (and an estimated 500K-1M dead) during their almost-eight-year-long war with Iraq.
We've lost a total of just over 6000 fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan over a similar period.
Somehow, I don't think that Iran would see us losing 1/30th the number of men they lost fighting Iraq (which they couldn't defeat, but we did - twice) as a "better approach".
And this not even counting population disparities. They have 1/4 our population, and lost 30 (low end) to 160 (high end) times as many people as we did fighting in Iraq....
It should be noted that information about KGB backing of anti-nuke groups back in the day were discovered when we got a look at their archives after the USSR went away.
Note, though, that it was also apparently an unintended side-effect of an effort to promote anti-nuclear weapons fears in the West.
Oddly, libertarians and socialists are considered to be opposite ends of the political spectrum, not slightly-left-of-far-right.
Only if you buy their product and refuse to pay for it.
Which isn't quite the same as "refuse to pay your taxes"...
Well, that might be true if it were a "one-off" payment. It's not. The hardware will require maintenance (which can range from cheap to more expensive than the original hardware). And the CEO's of the companies that make your hardware will have you over exactly the same (imaginary) barrel you think that the "energy monopoly" CEO's do.
By the way, to put things in perspective, your utilities (gas and electric) have lower profit margins than your ISP's do, in general. Much lower.
They also have lower profit margins than makers of things like soap, detergent, air fresheners, etc.
Or camera makers.
Or a lot of other things.
Note, by the way, that the only way your point of service power generation can approach the cost-effectiveness of paying the electric company is if you include the massive taxpayer subsidies (30% at the Federal level, last I checked. And many States offer subsidies in addition to those).
And remember that if EVERYONE decides to take advantage of those subsidies, it becomes a matter of "I'll pay for yours if you'll pay for mine - in other words, the subsidies are only meaningful if few people use them.
It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
Fighters: December 7, 1941.
Plus the fighting in the vicinity of Wake Island shortly thereafter.
Arguably, that could be extended to the fighting that followed immediately thereafter in the Philippines.
Tanks. Couldn't say that they ever have. Course, we never bothered with them all that much till we had to bail Europe out of that little disagreement in the early '40's.
per se.
Note, for reference, that Richard Dawkins claiming that there is an upside to two juries doesn't actually make that true.
Until someone has actually put it to the test, it's just a hypothesis, based on the principle that everyone on a jury has a perfect memory (since you're not allowed to take notes) and are otherwise completely identical.
Note also that the purpose of a Jury is NOT to guarantee "justice", but to prevent the government from railroading people. Remember who the Judge is working for (hint: it's not you, and it's not "justice").
Which would raise the price of everything, and do nothing about the online advantage.
Buying from Amazon generally means you'll pay no sales tax. If the Feds were to add a goods and services tax, everyone would pay that AND the sales tax.
Except for online retailers, of course.
Or do you really think the States will do away with their sales taxes just because the Feds hand them some free money?
That would be about 20% of CONUS.
I've spent 20 years living in a city that gets cold in winter (yes, yes, I know - it's not cold by New England standards. But it's cold enough I need to turn the heat on), but it's only snowed three times that I can remember. And the snow was gone by lunchtime each time.