I think you miss the point of references to Hitler and Bush.
It is not that Bush is assumed to be as evil and dangerous as Hitler. It is instead a concern that many of his policies and tactics bear a striking resemblence to some of those used by Hilter when he began his diasterous takeover of the German nation.
Tactics such as:
Using an unrelated attack as a justification for invasion of another country.
Using the same attack as justification for severly curbing domestic civil liberties, allowing for secret, unlimited detentions, and greatly expanded spying on citizens, for example.
Invoking God in declaring an all out war on "terrorists", then using it as justification for most subsequent policies.
Consoliding all federal security and intelligence services into a single centrally-controlled bureaucracy to protect "the homeland".
Breaking down barriers between govenment and corporations, bringing in heads of major corporations into postions of power throughout the government and letting them control government policy.
Does that mean Bush and Cheney and company are planning to do that in America? No that is not implied. However, if they or someone following them did want to do that, their policies have made it much more likely to succeed.
And that is something we all should be concerned about.
1. Oil reserve numbers are mumbo-jumbo. Most countries consider their actual reserve numbers (which are only a guess anyway) as state secrets and give out whatever figure suits their political or economic purposes. For example, in the 80s when OPEC changed its rules to base production quotas on each country's "proven reserves", miraculously many country's reserve numbers doubled overnight. The upshot is, we don't know how much oil is left, but it is probably lower than current estimates.
2. To understand the trend toward energy scarcity, you have to understand the concept of net energy. Net energy is how much usable energy you get after you expend all the energy required to locate, drill, pipe, ship, refine and deliver the energy. This includes paying for dry holes, funding basic research in locating and extraction technologies, building deepwater drilling rigs (and refining the steel they are made of), paying the overhead of your oil company (HR departments, clerks, acountants, riggers, drivers, etc. plus buildings, vehicles, etc.)--all the expenses that are required to keep your oil extraction business going. Mostly these costs are expressed in dollars, but they translate to energy expended that must be subtracted from energy recovered.
In the 1930s net energy ratio was in the range of 100+ barrels reaped for each one spent. Today the ratio is less than 1 in 10 and dropping steadily.
Those who worship the market as the answer to all problems need to understand this. It is not just a matter of spending more "money" to get each new barrel of oil, it is a matter of spending more oil to get the next barrel than it cost to get the last one--a classic example of diminishing returns.
And I suppose they "hate us because we're free". Why can't kill-hungry folks like yourself ever acknowledge that there is cause and effect in these things?
The U.S. is and has been an empire that is seeking to exert effective control over every valuable resource and every person on the planet. They exert force to this end using a wide range of instruments: Wal-Mart, Wall St., the World Bank, the G8, the WTO, the UN Security council, the CIA, USAID and other foreign "aid" programs, all the way to cruise missile strikes, threats of nuclear attack and direct military conquest and occupation.
This global empire even has a name: it goes by the grand moniker "Our Interests" (i.e. "we must bomb these civilians to protect our interests").
This may seem a glorious adventure and noble cause to you, but to the millions whose lives are diminished or destroyed by this aggression, I suspect it looks simply greedy, self serving and evil.
When one is being harmed, one attempts to abate that harm. The more we harm people, the more they fight back. Why is that so hard to understand?
When our empire has blocked all legitimate avenues for fighting back against its acts (i.e. political, economic, or military) the only remaining options are illegitimate, such as terrorism and sabotage.
Or do you expect people to simply acquiesce to whatever conditions we feel like imposing on them? Should people be expected to surrender their lives, well being, economic opportunities and human dignity to the caprices of the hungry empire? Should they be good little slaves and "set on the front porch singing spirituals" while we count the swag?
What the fuck would you do, were the shoe on the other foot? I suspect you would fight for your rights, your way of life and your family in any way you had to. That is what human beings do! So don't try to cast it as evil when other people do it.
If you really want to reduce terrorism against the U.S., a great place to start would be to take our foot off the neck of the rest of the world. We spend about 50% of our federal budget on the military (counting veterans benefits and interest on military-related debt) and have bases in 180 countries. We sell more arms than any other country, and have the largest stockpiles of WMDs of any country. We routinely and knowingly kill civilians with our "targetted strikes", such as the one last week that killed 22 (most of them women and children) in a residential neighborhood in Iraq where they "suspected" a resistance leader might happen to be (he wasn't).
If we would stop trying to have it all our way and end the dirty dealing and (dare I say it) terrorism that we effect daily, I believe that anti-U.S. terrorism would become an insignificant problem (it would not be completely eliminated, any more than disease, crime, or child abuse could ever be completely eliminated).
America is a rich land blessed with many advantages. We can live well and actually BE the kind of beacon for the rest of the world that we like to say we are, if we can get our masters in Washington and Wall St. give up on their sick dream of world empire.
The false-patriot warmongers like to say that our wars are to protect our freedom and our way of life. But actually, I can think of no more certain way to destroy the real promise of this country and the hopes of its citizens than to continue this ever-accelerating rush to empire by force.
To fight them and their misguided agenda is the finest form of patriotism.
And I am sick of the claim that any particular military intervention is not done for economic reasons because it costs more than that one situation might pay (i.e. Panama, Haiti, Grenada, etc.)
In fact, these "police actions" are just that--in order to keep the overall system in line, you make a conspicuous example of anyone who refuses to play along with the dictates of our global corporate empire. Anyone else who was thinking about breaking "the law" (i.e. that we get to access your raw materials, your labor and your markets on terms we dictate) gets a clear message of what will happen to them if they do.
In much the same way that McDonalds spends the money to buy out, at a loss, any US franchise that appears poised to have a union get in (see the book Fast Food Nation for details), the U.S. must take these losses in order to keep the overall world trade and investment system working the way they want it to.
In the case of Iraq, there is an additional motive. We are approaching the end of plentiful oil in the coming decades. The US government and the corporations who own it are well aware that controlling who does and doesn't get access to oil will be the preeminant lever of geopolitical power. And depletion trends show that the importance of the Middle East oil relative to overall world supply will grow significantly.
Iraq's oil itself is tremendously valuable, but that is only one aspect. Having political control and substantial permanent military bases in a country that is at the center of the middle east geographically and also a major player in OPEC, gives them an unprecidented ability to exert control over the region and the oil industry.
They want to be in a position to control the spigot and decide who gets oil and who doesn't. For that, they would gladly pay many times the current $200 Billion / 715 soldier price.
Besides, the other aspect always glossed over in this kind of discussion is this: The billions being spent are not the dollars of the companies and politicians that will reap the benefits from the policy. It is our (the US taxpayer's) money. They are more than happy to spend our money and our lives to make themselves richer.
I agree with your general observation . I have made my living using and administering computers since 1983, so I know pretty well how to get them to do what I want. Sometimes I like to spend time tweaking and improving them, but mostly I use them as tools.
I like good tools. That is why I much prefer a product (Like MacOSX) where someone has lavished attention on deciding what should be there, presenting it cleanly, and making sure that it all works seamlessly.
If they missed something that I need, I can add it to an already well designed system. This is far better IMHO than either starting from scratch and throwing together an ad-hoc collection of functions together or the "lets include everything" approach common in many Linux distributions.
This is more than just an issue of whether something is cheaper than fossil fuels today. It is about what kind of life any of us can expect in the coming decades. For example, if you look a little closer at the link between abundant oil, food and population, you see that they are way more closely correlated than is generally considered.
Our planet now supports 6.3 billion people. To feed them, we industrially generate as much nitrogen (in the form of chemical fertilizers produced from natural gas) as the biosphere produces naturally. Essentially, we use our unrenewable fossil fuel "capital" to make the planet produce approximately twice as much food as it could using the renewable "income" of solar radiation and natural nutrient cycles.
According to a study by David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro found that 10 kcal of exosomatic (non-muscle-power) energy are required to produce 1 kcal of food delivered to the consumer in the U.S. food system. This includes packaging and all delivery expenses, but excludes household cooking). We spend 10 times the fossil-fuel energy that we get back in food energy.
What happens when that fossil fuel "capital" is used up? Suddenly we can't support 6 billion people. Estimates of population size supportable under normal solar input range between 2 and 3 billion.
Further, an increasing number of people believe that we are much further down the slope of oil depletion than is generally acknowledged by goverments and oil companies. Many believe that we have already reached peak supply, while demand continues to soar. For example, it has been over 20 years since more oil was discovered in a year than was consumed that year. In that environment, energy intensive practices (including energy driven food production) will become economically unfeasible. I expect to see the effects of this becoming significant in the next 10 years.
So if one were to check up on these assertions (as I have tried to do) and conclude them credible (as I have), there is a frightening conclusion to be drawn. As the oil runs out over the coming decades, somehow at least 50% of the human population will need to be eliminated.
How this happens is up to us. We can go for a "last man standing" strategy (as I think the Bush Admin necons are trying today) where force is used to ensure that we maintain our industrial power and luxury lifestyle up to the very end, by condemning weaker nations to war and famine. Or we could try to ratchet things down more methodically and fairly and possibly achive a soft landing worldwide. This would mean changes to every aspect of human affairs, to seek solutions that allow us to continue human society using a fraction of the energy we use today, and with every effort made toward humanely lowering birthrates below replacement levels.
I frankly think that the latter option is the least likely of all, given the way things work in our world.
Still, it changes the entire framework of the argument when these assertions are considered--it is not so much about whether one particular option is more economically advantageous in today's market than it is a question of what can we do to preserve any kind of desirable human society as our current system becomes impossible to sustain over the next 10-40 years.
See the article Eating Fossil Fuels for a detailed treatment of this topic, or the book The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg for a more comprehensive analysis.
I bought a Sony T616 after I got my 2004 Toyota Prius because the Prius supports handsfree phone access through Bluetooth.
I can just get in the car with the phone in my pocket. If a call comes in, it show up on the car's touchscreen and I touch an icon to pick it up. It mutes the stereo and the call audio comes through the stereo speakers. The microphone is in the mirror. Sound quality is great.
For outbound, I can transfer my phone's contacts into the car's contacts by bluetooth, then one-touch dial from the car's touchscreen.
In general I have been very happy with the phone. It is small, but aesthetically pleasing to both eye and touch. Controls are big enough and the joystick thingy is a pretty effective device for quick navigation.
My reception in the SF bay area (with AT&T) has been very good--I have not seen a dropped call yet (at least none that I think came from my end of the conversation). That is way better than my previous Verizon service.
I also got a very good deal on the phone. I bought two (one for me and one for my wife) at the Good Guys and, after the rebates, they ended up giving ME $50 per phone with service activation.
And while were at it, if I hear one more rant about how government is wasteful, corrupt, etc. I will scream.
Any human organization (public or private) that scales beyond a few dozen individuals will suffer operational inefficiency. I contend that these inefficiencies are similar between public and private sector organizations.
What is different between them is that profit seeking private sector organizations prey upon the public sector, seeking to extract a disproportionate share of dollars to enrich themselves. The reverse is true to a much lesser extent.
In the vast majority of cases, government "ineffiency" simply means that some unscruplous "free market" contractor or recipient of benefits has been able to cheat the system and get away with the spoils.
Govenment organizations then (appropriately) modify regulations to prohibit this gaming of the system in the future.
At this point the private sector starts complaining about "burdensome" regulations. IMHO, this generally means "It is too hard to cheat the system to my profit so I want less regulation".
Why not just admit that this a dynamic inherent in any human social system and stop pretending that any one system (like the "free-market") will address it effectively.
I think what people fail to grasp is that the hybrid system exists primarily for the purpose of recovering the energy of motion of the car and reusing it. Ordinary cars make ZERO use of this energy, except to squander it as heat in the brakes or uselessly compressing air in the cylinders during deceleration.
This is like pedaling your bike up a hill, then getting off and walking it down the other side. In a hybrid, the energy you spent going up the hill is transfered into the battery on your way back down, and is thus available to let you climb the next hill for free. The only losses (aside from the usual wind speed and friction losses that apply to all cars) are efficiency losses in the recovery system, which are fairly small.
This is why Hybrids like the Prius get BETTER mileage in the city, because they can recover energy from starts and stops, but cannot recover it from wind resistance on the highway.
This kind of system makes so much sense, it is embarrassing that we have spent the last 100 years using twice the fuel we need to do the same job.
And to those who feel that the hybrids are some kind of crippled yuppie guilt machine, I say wake up.
The 2004 Prius is a mid-size, 5 passenger car with all of the amenities of many luxury cars (wireless hands-free entry, voice operated heater/radio/navigation system, 9 speaker JBL stereo, ABS, stability control, side curtain airbags, wireless hands-free cellphone interface for bluetooth enabled cellphones, etc.) and is a pleasing, sporty looking 5-door hatchback. It goes zero to 60 in 10 seconds (about the same as a 4 door Camry). With all this, it gets 60 MPG in the city and 55 on the highway. It sells for between $20-25K depending on options.
I say cars like this are possibly the best cars ever built, from the standpoint of value, usability, efficiency and fun.
The only thing they don't do is cater to the bizarre idea (long promoted by the auto industry and their lap dogs at the car magazines) that everyone should want their daily transportation to perform like a race car. But that is another rant;-)
I have DSL in the SF Bay Area through sonic.net which uses SBC as the DSL carrier. On my bill they list the SBC "passthrough billing" for the circuit as $39. Sonic.net charges an additional 17.95 for hosting the account (I have the 384-1.5Mb speed rather than the minimum 128-384, but I believe the pricing is comparable).
If SBC charges the ISPs a higher wholesale price for the "bare circuit" than they charge retail customers for the circuit and hosting, then I consider this a predatory monopolistic practice which is obviously designed to drive out competition. By temporarily "dumping" service at a loss, SBC can create a future where they will be able to dicate any pricing and terms of service they want (much like the cable companies do now with their service).
I totally support what this lawsuit represents--a last hope to keep the internet open through diverse channels (ISPs) rather than allowing it to be under the total control of a few cable and telecom monopolies.
If you don't want a future where your ISP can block what ports you use, disallow operation of servers or sharing of your capacity over wireless, or even potentially what sites you are allowed to access, then you too should support this lawsuit and send your business to alternative ISPs.
It occurs to me that this is a major slap in the face of Microsoft and possibly represents Apple's first major move toward severing its (already lukewarm) ties with MS.
Replace IE, get rid of the need for PowerPoint for all of those iBook/TiBook roadwarrier "switchers" out there and (next) release a branded, supported port of StarOffice, OpenOffice or KDE office apps.
Suddenly Apple has no dependence on any MS apps and the dynamic between the companies changes significantly.
I heard on a radio program this morning that there was water detected in the Yucca site that had traces of radioactive clorine that was linked to a 1950s nuclear bomb test. In essence, what this implies is that this water has percolated down from the surface in less than the 50 years since this kind of bomb was first detonated. It can be probably be assumed that water will continue to percolate at a similar rate of speed down to the water table below the site.
Initially the government criteria for site selection was that the site itself should provide the majority (I think they said 90% but look it up) of the containment with casks providing additional backup.
Once it was discovered that the site is actually porous enough to move water 2000 feet deep in 50 years, the DOE changed their 17 year old selection criteria by simply removing the the requirement for the site itself to perform containment.
Second, decaying radioactive materials produce heat. Can anyone say what kind of heat buildup will occur inside the cave with 77,000 tons of material? I don't know the answer, but I assume the effect is not insignificant.
Therefore, if the site itself is not performing effective isolation of the material, and the containers are in an environment with water and eleveated heat levels, how much can we trust the containers not to corrode?
Again, I do not know the answer, but I am made distinctly nervous by the way the DOE keeps lowering the standards to meet the site's flaws. I makes me question whether they are serious about actually solving the containment problem or are just trying to get it built whether or not it causes problems for the next generations.
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It is not that Bush is assumed to be as evil and dangerous as Hitler. It is instead a concern that many of his policies and tactics bear a striking resemblence to some of those used by Hilter when he began his diasterous takeover of the German nation.
Tactics such as:
Using an unrelated attack as a justification for invasion of another country.
Using the same attack as justification for severly curbing domestic civil liberties, allowing for secret, unlimited detentions, and greatly expanded spying on citizens, for example.
Invoking God in declaring an all out war on "terrorists", then using it as justification for most subsequent policies.
Consoliding all federal security and intelligence services into a single centrally-controlled bureaucracy to protect "the homeland".
Breaking down barriers between govenment and corporations, bringing in heads of major corporations into postions of power throughout the government and letting them control government policy.
Does that mean Bush and Cheney and company are planning to do that in America? No that is not implied. However, if they or someone following them did want to do that, their policies have made it much more likely to succeed.
And that is something we all should be concerned about.
2. To understand the trend toward energy scarcity, you have to understand the concept of net energy. Net energy is how much usable energy you get after you expend all the energy required to locate, drill, pipe, ship, refine and deliver the energy. This includes paying for dry holes, funding basic research in locating and extraction technologies, building deepwater drilling rigs (and refining the steel they are made of), paying the overhead of your oil company (HR departments, clerks, acountants, riggers, drivers, etc. plus buildings, vehicles, etc.)--all the expenses that are required to keep your oil extraction business going. Mostly these costs are expressed in dollars, but they translate to energy expended that must be subtracted from energy recovered. In the 1930s net energy ratio was in the range of 100+ barrels reaped for each one spent. Today the ratio is less than 1 in 10 and dropping steadily.
Those who worship the market as the answer to all problems need to understand this. It is not just a matter of spending more "money" to get each new barrel of oil, it is a matter of spending more oil to get the next barrel than it cost to get the last one--a classic example of diminishing returns.
The U.S. is and has been an empire that is seeking to exert effective control over every valuable resource and every person on the planet. They exert force to this end using a wide range of instruments: Wal-Mart, Wall St., the World Bank, the G8, the WTO, the UN Security council, the CIA, USAID and other foreign "aid" programs, all the way to cruise missile strikes, threats of nuclear attack and direct military conquest and occupation.
This global empire even has a name: it goes by the grand moniker "Our Interests" (i.e. "we must bomb these civilians to protect our interests").
This may seem a glorious adventure and noble cause to you, but to the millions whose lives are diminished or destroyed by this aggression, I suspect it looks simply greedy, self serving and evil.
When one is being harmed, one attempts to abate that harm. The more we harm people, the more they fight back. Why is that so hard to understand?
When our empire has blocked all legitimate avenues for fighting back against its acts (i.e. political, economic, or military) the only remaining options are illegitimate, such as terrorism and sabotage.
Or do you expect people to simply acquiesce to whatever conditions we feel like imposing on them? Should people be expected to surrender their lives, well being, economic opportunities and human dignity to the caprices of the hungry empire? Should they be good little slaves and "set on the front porch singing spirituals" while we count the swag?
What the fuck would you do, were the shoe on the other foot? I suspect you would fight for your rights, your way of life and your family in any way you had to. That is what human beings do! So don't try to cast it as evil when other people do it.
If you really want to reduce terrorism against the U.S., a great place to start would be to take our foot off the neck of the rest of the world. We spend about 50% of our federal budget on the military (counting veterans benefits and interest on military-related debt) and have bases in 180 countries. We sell more arms than any other country, and have the largest stockpiles of WMDs of any country. We routinely and knowingly kill civilians with our "targetted strikes", such as the one last week that killed 22 (most of them women and children) in a residential neighborhood in Iraq where they "suspected" a resistance leader might happen to be (he wasn't).
If we would stop trying to have it all our way and end the dirty dealing and (dare I say it) terrorism that we effect daily, I believe that anti-U.S. terrorism would become an insignificant problem (it would not be completely eliminated, any more than disease, crime, or child abuse could ever be completely eliminated).
America is a rich land blessed with many advantages. We can live well and actually BE the kind of beacon for the rest of the world that we like to say we are, if we can get our masters in Washington and Wall St. give up on their sick dream of world empire.
The false-patriot warmongers like to say that our wars are to protect our freedom and our way of life. But actually, I can think of no more certain way to destroy the real promise of this country and the hopes of its citizens than to continue this ever-accelerating rush to empire by force. To fight them and their misguided agenda is the finest form of patriotism.
In fact, these "police actions" are just that--in order to keep the overall system in line, you make a conspicuous example of anyone who refuses to play along with the dictates of our global corporate empire. Anyone else who was thinking about breaking "the law" (i.e. that we get to access your raw materials, your labor and your markets on terms we dictate) gets a clear message of what will happen to them if they do.
In much the same way that McDonalds spends the money to buy out, at a loss, any US franchise that appears poised to have a union get in (see the book Fast Food Nation for details), the U.S. must take these losses in order to keep the overall world trade and investment system working the way they want it to.
In the case of Iraq, there is an additional motive. We are approaching the end of plentiful oil in the coming decades. The US government and the corporations who own it are well aware that controlling who does and doesn't get access to oil will be the preeminant lever of geopolitical power. And depletion trends show that the importance of the Middle East oil relative to overall world supply will grow significantly.
Iraq's oil itself is tremendously valuable, but that is only one aspect. Having political control and substantial permanent military bases in a country that is at the center of the middle east geographically and also a major player in OPEC, gives them an unprecidented ability to exert control over the region and the oil industry.
They want to be in a position to control the spigot and decide who gets oil and who doesn't. For that, they would gladly pay many times the current $200 Billion / 715 soldier price.
Besides, the other aspect always glossed over in this kind of discussion is this: The billions being spent are not the dollars of the companies and politicians that will reap the benefits from the policy. It is our (the US taxpayer's) money. They are more than happy to spend our money and our lives to make themselves richer.
I like good tools. That is why I much prefer a product (Like MacOSX) where someone has lavished attention on deciding what should be there, presenting it cleanly, and making sure that it all works seamlessly.
If they missed something that I need, I can add it to an already well designed system. This is far better IMHO than either starting from scratch and throwing together an ad-hoc collection of functions together or the "lets include everything" approach common in many Linux distributions.
Our planet now supports 6.3 billion people. To feed them, we industrially generate as much nitrogen (in the form of chemical fertilizers produced from natural gas) as the biosphere produces naturally. Essentially, we use our unrenewable fossil fuel "capital" to make the planet produce approximately twice as much food as it could using the renewable "income" of solar radiation and natural nutrient cycles.
According to a study by David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro found that 10 kcal of exosomatic (non-muscle-power) energy are required to produce 1 kcal of food delivered to the consumer in the U.S. food system. This includes packaging and all delivery expenses, but excludes household cooking). We spend 10 times the fossil-fuel energy that we get back in food energy.
What happens when that fossil fuel "capital" is used up? Suddenly we can't support 6 billion people. Estimates of population size supportable under normal solar input range between 2 and 3 billion.
Further, an increasing number of people believe that we are much further down the slope of oil depletion than is generally acknowledged by goverments and oil companies. Many believe that we have already reached peak supply, while demand continues to soar. For example, it has been over 20 years since more oil was discovered in a year than was consumed that year. In that environment, energy intensive practices (including energy driven food production) will become economically unfeasible. I expect to see the effects of this becoming significant in the next 10 years.
So if one were to check up on these assertions (as I have tried to do) and conclude them credible (as I have), there is a frightening conclusion to be drawn. As the oil runs out over the coming decades, somehow at least 50% of the human population will need to be eliminated.
How this happens is up to us. We can go for a "last man standing" strategy (as I think the Bush Admin necons are trying today) where force is used to ensure that we maintain our industrial power and luxury lifestyle up to the very end, by condemning weaker nations to war and famine. Or we could try to ratchet things down more methodically and fairly and possibly achive a soft landing worldwide. This would mean changes to every aspect of human affairs, to seek solutions that allow us to continue human society using a fraction of the energy we use today, and with every effort made toward humanely lowering birthrates below replacement levels.
I frankly think that the latter option is the least likely of all, given the way things work in our world.
Still, it changes the entire framework of the argument when these assertions are considered--it is not so much about whether one particular option is more economically advantageous in today's market than it is a question of what can we do to preserve any kind of desirable human society as our current system becomes impossible to sustain over the next 10-40 years.
See the article Eating Fossil Fuels for a detailed treatment of this topic, or the book The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg for a more comprehensive analysis.
I can just get in the car with the phone in my pocket. If a call comes in, it show up on the car's touchscreen and I touch an icon to pick it up. It mutes the stereo and the call audio comes through the stereo speakers. The microphone is in the mirror. Sound quality is great.
For outbound, I can transfer my phone's contacts into the car's contacts by bluetooth, then one-touch dial from the car's touchscreen.
In general I have been very happy with the phone. It is small, but aesthetically pleasing to both eye and touch. Controls are big enough and the joystick thingy is a pretty effective device for quick navigation.
My reception in the SF bay area (with AT&T) has been very good--I have not seen a dropped call yet (at least none that I think came from my end of the conversation). That is way better than my previous Verizon service.
I also got a very good deal on the phone. I bought two (one for me and one for my wife) at the Good Guys and, after the rebates, they ended up giving ME $50 per phone with service activation.
I would recommend the phone to anyone.
And while were at it, if I hear one more rant about how government is wasteful, corrupt, etc. I will scream.
Any human organization (public or private) that scales beyond a few dozen individuals will suffer operational inefficiency. I contend that these inefficiencies are similar between public and private sector organizations.
What is different between them is that profit seeking private sector organizations prey upon the public sector, seeking to extract a disproportionate share of dollars to enrich themselves. The reverse is true to a much lesser extent.
In the vast majority of cases, government "ineffiency" simply means that some unscruplous "free market" contractor or recipient of benefits has been able to cheat the system and get away with the spoils.
Govenment organizations then (appropriately) modify regulations to prohibit this gaming of the system in the future.
At this point the private sector starts complaining about "burdensome" regulations. IMHO, this generally means "It is too hard to cheat the system to my profit so I want less regulation".
Why not just admit that this a dynamic inherent in any human social system and stop pretending that any one system (like the "free-market") will address it effectively.
I think what people fail to grasp is that the hybrid system exists primarily for the purpose of recovering the energy of motion of the car and reusing it. Ordinary cars make ZERO use of this energy, except to squander it as heat in the brakes or uselessly compressing air in the cylinders during deceleration.
;-)
This is like pedaling your bike up a hill, then getting off and walking it down the other side. In a hybrid, the energy you spent going up the hill is transfered into the battery on your way back down, and is thus available to let you climb the next hill for free. The only losses (aside from the usual wind speed and friction losses that apply to all cars) are efficiency losses in the recovery system, which are fairly small.
This is why Hybrids like the Prius get BETTER mileage in the city, because they can recover energy from starts and stops, but cannot recover it from wind resistance on the highway.
This kind of system makes so much sense, it is embarrassing that we have spent the last 100 years using twice the fuel we need to do the same job.
And to those who feel that the hybrids are some kind of crippled yuppie guilt machine, I say wake up.
The 2004 Prius is a mid-size, 5 passenger car with all of the amenities of many luxury cars (wireless hands-free entry, voice operated heater/radio/navigation system, 9 speaker JBL stereo, ABS, stability control, side curtain airbags, wireless hands-free cellphone interface for bluetooth enabled cellphones, etc.) and is a pleasing, sporty looking 5-door hatchback. It goes zero to 60 in 10 seconds (about the same as a 4 door Camry). With all this, it gets 60 MPG in the city and 55 on the highway. It sells for between $20-25K depending on options.
I say cars like this are possibly the best cars ever built, from the standpoint of value, usability, efficiency and fun.
The only thing they don't do is cater to the bizarre idea (long promoted by the auto industry and their lap dogs at the car magazines) that everyone should want their daily transportation to perform like a race car. But that is another rant
I have DSL in the SF Bay Area through sonic.net which uses SBC as the DSL carrier. On my bill they list the SBC "passthrough billing" for the circuit as $39. Sonic.net charges an additional 17.95 for hosting the account (I have the 384-1.5Mb speed rather than the minimum 128-384, but I believe the pricing is comparable).
If SBC charges the ISPs a higher wholesale price for the "bare circuit" than they charge retail customers for the circuit and hosting, then I consider this a predatory monopolistic practice which is obviously designed to drive out competition. By temporarily "dumping" service at a loss, SBC can create a future where they will be able to dicate any pricing and terms of service they want (much like the cable companies do now with their service).
I totally support what this lawsuit represents--a last hope to keep the internet open through diverse channels (ISPs) rather than allowing it to be under the total control of a few cable and telecom monopolies.
If you don't want a future where your ISP can block what ports you use, disallow operation of servers or sharing of your capacity over wireless, or even potentially what sites you are allowed to access, then you too should support this lawsuit and send your business to alternative ISPs.
It occurs to me that this is a major slap in the face of Microsoft and possibly represents Apple's first major move toward severing its (already lukewarm) ties with MS.
Replace IE, get rid of the need for PowerPoint for all of those iBook/TiBook roadwarrier "switchers" out there and (next) release a branded, supported port of StarOffice, OpenOffice or KDE office apps.
Suddenly Apple has no dependence on any MS apps and the dynamic between the companies changes significantly.
Initially the government criteria for site selection was that the site itself should provide the majority (I think they said 90% but look it up) of the containment with casks providing additional backup. Once it was discovered that the site is actually porous enough to move water 2000 feet deep in 50 years, the DOE changed their 17 year old selection criteria by simply removing the the requirement for the site itself to perform containment.
Second, decaying radioactive materials produce heat. Can anyone say what kind of heat buildup will occur inside the cave with 77,000 tons of material? I don't know the answer, but I assume the effect is not insignificant.
Therefore, if the site itself is not performing effective isolation of the material, and the containers are in an environment with water and eleveated heat levels, how much can we trust the containers not to corrode?
Again, I do not know the answer, but I am made distinctly nervous by the way the DOE keeps lowering the standards to meet the site's flaws. I makes me question whether they are serious about actually solving the containment problem or are just trying to get it built whether or not it causes problems for the next generations.