Sold a lot of those things back during the first big energy crisis then tax credits deal back in the 80s. They were basically *free* then if you had enough taxes taken out, so it was an easy sell. Carter sucked on most issues, but for energy, he was our top prez ever, and IF we had followed through with those goals from back then, we'd be doing a lot better today.
Ya, they work well. There's a lot of nice solar thermal stuff that people forget about it, only thinking about solar PV. In fact, my first solar project was a swimming pool heater in the 60s. How about solar ovens for cooking and water purification? I have some of that stuff, too, along with my PV.
There's a lot of it being done small scale in places like India and Pakistan, a lot of households run on biogas, but in areas with stacks of regulations, etc, it is not quite as popular. The hoop jumping requirements are Olympic caliber. On big scales it takes good quality expensive materials,as it tends to eat up steel. I've done it on a small scale, made some test runs using junk plumbing parts and tubs and old barrels, that's it. You do get good burnable gas relatively easy, it's those fine picky points of engineering that need to be sorted out and where the big costs lie.
In the US, the most common biogas harvesting is methane extraction from old dumps. On farms so far there are some examples, but it's just too expensive for most guys to build. There's a lot of interest to be sure, but once they look at the costs and regs, the enthusiasm drops fast. Even just composting on large scales is expensive and has some serious regs associated with it, and the fines for non compliance are bankruptcy class quickly.
We have three large scale litter composting sheds here, large scale as in hundreds of tons total at any given time being composted, and they have to be approved design, covered buildings, and once you jump through those expensive hoops to get that built, then you have new buildings that just add to your local taxes. Oh, then you need a hundred grand and up big loader, and one or two smaller bob cat loaders just to rearrange the composting litter. Then some spreader trucks, which ain't cheap either. More expense, more taxes and insurance, etc. So you try to do good, and they charge you more for that effort.
The government makes it almost a no win situation with that in other words. We've looked into shifting to biogas..ain't happening right now.
Start paying farmers more for their products than the wall street speculators get for server entry shuffling and flash trades, etc. on commodities....we'll talk. We'd have the re$ource$ then to do stuff like this more, and most farmers would love to go for it, because energy costs are killer, and farmers just love building *neat shit*. We are outdoor and equipment nerds. Our gadgets are big and expensive, so that means they have to pay, else you can't afford them. Nothing is pocket change, nothing. Everything is always "man this just sucks" expensive just to purchase or build, then ongoing maintenance, which is a huge set of overlapping projects all the time and repairs, etc.. Our farm has medium beefy data center energy costs, some thousands of bucks a week depending on weather extremes for electricity and propane. And you really can't chance, nor do they like to offer, any huge loans for this stuff, as one bad season, etc, could wipe you out completely. Ain't worth the risk, you most likely couldn't get the loan anyway, catch 22 and a half there.
My bottom line is, It got real old some years back to constantly be beat on by urban elitists who defend every single thing about megaurban life and just dump on the people and culture who really make it all possible in the rural and suburban areas. Just got tired of hearing I am not green because I don't ride some bus or subway. Gets real old reading that if you drive a truck you are some baby seal killer. On and on it never ends. If it was race based or gender based, it would be regarded as hate speech, but as long as it's regional based, well, you can just dump on those yokel teabaggers all day long. Just gets to me, can't stand that near racist crap. We don't have an "ist" name for it, but it is similar to racism. It just sucks. Gets me pretty fairly annoyed.
I've made it a strict point to research major macro economics and also small scale microeconomics, which I practice myself, as well as being in the personal sovereignty/practical preparedness/survivalist movement. I'm a veteran of the civil rights and anti war movements of the past. I've been into alternative energy as a practitioner and enthusiast since the late 60s. I've been a political activist and have seen first hand how both the R and D parties are corrupt as hell at the top and seek to keep the nation divided and conquered, and especially as how they have been compromised by those urban bankster gangsters, who are the biggest pack of liars and traitors this nation has ever had to endure.
I think it is OK if people voluntarily wish to live in such large urban environments, I just want them to *know* that their lifestyle exists because of serious ongoing, chronic and criminal exploitation of "flyover" country, pure imperialism. Just to slap down some of the smugness. The..arrogance...it is just *sickening*. Like I said, I have lived extensively in all three general major living areas. but, on careful anaylsis, moved back rural. For a variety of reasons, the primary one is you can have a sustainable life here that isn't based on conmans lies. I understand the excitement and allure of the big city, been there, decade and a half, was into it..but...I couldn't stop thinking about larger matters and it made me LOOK and research..then I got alarmed and just moved. I saw way too many signs of coming economic collapse-which has started in earnest now and is snowballing- and the following social unrest. Social unrest-to put it politely-always follows major economic collapse. To one degree or another. I think the next stage is going to be pretty bad. That knob will go to 11.
You can't have a local-close geographical economy without wealth creation, and you can't service wealth *before it is created*. The big urban areas right now are existing on the bubbliest of all bubbles, it is *unsustainable* as it is. This goes beyond being green or not, this goes into raw existence. Your huge cities *are going to collapse* because of this big lie they sold. They have sold a bill of goods to the people there that this is possible by using the false promise of credit and debt, and getting people to equate debt with wealth, which it is not, and by outright stealing most of the wealth created in the interior and away from the megacities, and *that* is being negated because of the huge shift of manufacturing due to global fast capital wage arbitrage by those looters and pirates.
It's falling apart man, fair warning. I bailed from living metro 11 years ago because I saw it-it being economic collapse to be followed by "social unrest"- coming and warned people about it. And still am. Warning! Beep beep beep! Did you see what happened to Dubai some months back?? Megaopolis of the future! Crashed hard...didn't take too long either. Because it was built on lies and IOUs.
*Most* large urban areas are like that now, just a little behind, that's all.
What I don't understand is why a major linux outfit hired a non linux guy for this important position. They are saying that on the entire globe, six billion plus people, only this mac osx guy could fill these shoes. Seems a slap in the face to all the linux people out there who could have done this job and loved it, and brought more linux experience, and that mindset, to the boardroom table.
More shared resources, and more infrastructure: The denser the city, the easier it is to roll out a mass transit system that serves a significant number of people. In a dense city, one fire brigade can protect the property of a quarter million people. A sewer system covering a square mile might serve 20x more people in an urban center than in a suburban neighborhood.------A lot of times a mass transit system isn't needed, even in the country. My personal commute consists of walking out the door, then I am "at work". My sewer system is a cheap effective and simple septice tank, and a lot of our "waste" is immediately recycled on site. My main "energy waste by-products", woodash, go directly on our organic garden for instance. And eventually I'll be going to a dry composting toilet, but I am not there yet, but headed that way. Some of our gray water just goes to water the lawn now.
Smaller dwellings: Lighting, heating, and cooling a small apartment is generally going to be cheaper than providing the same services for a rural home. Even better, apartments stack atop each other, providing levels of insulation that you could never find in a standalone house----we live in about 700 square feet, and our largest utility bill, measured in therms, is for heating, and we do 98% of that with wood, which is as carbon neutral as you can get, and it comes from onsite. My cooling bill in the hot summer consists of a large oak shade tree and a couple cheap window fans, we don't even own an air conditioner. As for food, we grow well over 50% of our food onsite, again, no need to even walk to the deli or grocery store, we walk to the kitchen cabinets or freezer or in season to our garden, a shorter distance than even city dwellers, and I have my own beef, poultry, eggs, and fish from the pond. I've been adding to our solar array over the years, and sometime we'll be able to reduce our need for grid supplied completely. In an emergency, we are self powered now as it is, at reduced load. Granted, still on the grid, but chipping away at it. You don't have the roofspace for enough solar PV to handle all those people in the megaopolis, not even close, not even with the new ultra efficient panels. As to insulation and efficiency, you can construct superinsulation or earth bermed housing which will meet or exceed your energy conservation efforts with stacked, but I will give you a point there, I am familiar with that effect, it does work to an extent, especially the folks in the middle of the apt building. Been there, done that meselfs.. And transportation needs are slowly going to be shifting to all electric and biofuels, which we can produce onsite out in the sticks. So we can walk, or if we need to drive, we will be self powered. Personal transportation IS our "mass transit". On our schedule, not a schedule that consists of "one size fits no one exactly well".
And there's always horses;) Still get used a lot around here, although I don't have one yet. I do have a guard donkey though, hahahaha! Donkeys by nature will attack wild strange dogs and coyotes, something we need to protect our herd. Some folks use Llamas for that as well. And I *walk*, several miles a day, 7 days a week. HYalf is for work, half is for pleasure, for entetainment. Doesn't cost much in terms of energy, no artificial lighting needed.
More services are available within walking distance.---those services are available because the necessary materials and infrastructure for them has to be constantly trucked in, wired in, piped in. Please don't negate these costs, they are critical. Your services wouldn't exist, could not be done, for very long without those imports. *Proxy driving* again, huge amounts of proxy driving must be done elsewhere for those urban services to be able to exist. Name a service, I can tell you (at least in part readily) what driving needs to be done outside the big city so that you can walk to it. If that driving isn't done, your service will collapse and not be doable for very long.
Maybe that dude is an architect who can design something good, but he has no idea whatsoever what it takes to sustain a city and the people there.
'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.'"
That's just a complete steaming pile of crap.
There's a rather inhumane experiment that has been performed many times down through history that proves this without any doubt whatsoever. It's repeatable, it is completely scientific and valid, you will get the same results over and over.
Wall a city off, or besiege it, whatever, so that no external sources are brought in. Now, see how well these "low impact" people do. Big hint, they starve, run out of fuel, run out of water, etc.
Big city dwellers, whether in the scrap constructed slums or the penthouses or in the apartments in between, use the same amount of resources, it is just one or more steps removed from where they are at, they are using all the land, energy, resources, etc, that anyone else is, just by proxy and delivery truck or delivery wire or delivery freight train or delivery pipeline, and to a large extent by economic exploitation, forced true wealth transference, from other folks, outside of the city, via their physical labor and governmental theft and/or severe underpayment or compensation of natural resources.
They don't "exist" in any real sense divorced from outside the city resources. That's some fairy tale I have seen repeated many times by people with no clue whatsoever. Typically I'll read some drivel like "well, I get by with just walking or using my pogo stick or riding the tube, so there, I R just so much greener and "low impact" than you are!!".
Just clueless. Completely misses how stuff works or where things come from or what real energy and resources are really needed in order so that they can commute by skateboard or rickshaw or "shared taxi" and "live".
These slum dwellers exist on scrap from what stuff is imported to the more affluent urban dwellers. Remove those imports, eventually even the scrap waste users "go broke", their wealth becomes depleted, and their existence becomes *completely untenable*. Sure they recycle, so do a lot of other people outside the city, so what's the point there, you can only recycle if you live in a city??
And here's another clue, most of those people in the green slums work as hard as they can in order to get the heck out of that "green" slum, because they live there and know it major league *sucks*.
And a lot of them would have never moved to some urban slum or existence in the first place if their rural areas weren't run into the ground economically in the first place by urban centric internal exploitation and colonialism or imperialistic policies. They get their resources stripped bare by governmental and business exploitation, it gets shipped to these big cities, then they become desperate, move to where what were their resources got shipped to.
Colonialism doesn't necessarily have to mean as the only definition that nation A goes and takes over and exploits nation B, it frequently means nation A subset b urban scene exploits the heck out of nation A subset c rural areas and peoples. and they can be so overly exploited that they become desperate refugees, even if they get a few bones thrown back at them by the urban scene, it frequently won't be enough.
That hasn't worked very well with digital products. When consumers were faced with a two cent to manufacture product with a price tag of ten to hundreds of dollars, they rebelled and set up their own black market "digital fabs" to make more affordable copies of digital products, because they couldn't get a fair price. The digital products price fixing cartel got into action and outright *bought* enough government laws and enforcement to try to keep their outrageous prices up, and to punish the "independent producers". Still on-going today. They *haven't* adjusted the cost down to way more reasonable levels, they adjusted the laws and law enforcement way up in their favor to maintain price fixing and an insane last century business model based on a per-unit pricing structure that was based on a tangible copy, not a cheap to reproduce digital copy.
Demand for digital products is always really high, and in the modern world you just can't say "don't buy them" because those sorts of products ARE what helps make the modern world, but outrageous cartel price fixing combined with co-opting and corrupting government, across the board, has skewed the natural market that should exist tremendously. You can say "don't buy them", and not do that yourself, but what about when your enforced tax monies go to pay outrageous digital products cost? You are being forced to buy them. How about when you shop for anything else, and you know some of the price you are paying is going to also pay for way over priced digital products that are used in the production, distribution and final sale of some other good or service? You simply can't avoid paying these inflated prices in day to day normal living, whether you want to or not, because it has been carved into lawstone that you *must*.
At 12:00, go to the dollar store, find the biggest one dollar regular watch with a band they have. Now buy one buck worth of velcro strips in the same store. Velcro your regular phone to the front of the watch. That leaves three bucks for lunch. Show off to your buds at work all afternoon your new high tech wristwatch cellphone;)
You need to make use of the slashdot journal system, and friend's lists. The front page here is not the total scene, there is quite a robust community of writers here going way back, and although there was the "great exodus" of journalists some years ago, it is building back up. I get a lot of interesting things to read and engage in "spirited debates" with other hard core journalists here, heh, from guys here who like to write, plus I write. I do a lot on geoeconomics and alt energy (I think I have the most with "the almighty buck" submissions tag), just not quite in the ~approved style~ for front page submission, err..because I like my developed style better, it suits *me* better, so I don't bother submitting them to the front page, although everything winds up on the firehose anyway. In my journal, I don't need to get approved, it just..shows up. Here's an example for this article on the solar breakthrough
It has all the relevant info, which is the link itself to the academic press release, not to some place that just rewrites that release, for no apparent benefit other than to sell ads on some page..and that's all that is really needed, the link, then on to the comments. It isn't official front page "styled" though. I could do them that way, but..I don't care about that, we have enough front page styled articles that are mostly just copy/paste from the real link.
Anyway, if you are into alt energy and economics, and also practical preparedness, which is my big real side interest, talk a walk through my past journal entries.
I think the worst one is when there are no apparent differences between government and corporation, which we apparently have now with the the Fed/treasury/casino banks. It's one entity, and the same guys run things, just jump around into different divisions and job titles within that corporacracy. And in that sphere it is a monopoly, and it's illegal to compete, and it looks to me way more it was created from private corrupting the public, getting their monopoly that way.
I'll agree with you on over/mis-regulation..I did preface saying that I am by nature a small government guy. A few good quality tools can be better than a box full of crappy tools that don't do what they are designed to do and break easy.
I'd have a smidgen more respect for these uberrich guys when they talk about the environment and energy if I saw them like taking sail boats when they cross the ocean instead of private jets, or ride a bicycle to the TED conference, or..OK..at least drive a car personally that is fueled by carbon recyclable cellulose derived ethanol, or hemp biodiesel, anything that can be done now.. Or better, he's a big computer guy, why not give the speech via teleconferencing instead, no need to move heavy meatbags at all when you can move cheaper electrons (Pet peeve of mine, millions commuting daily to go sit in front of a computer screen...then they go back home where there is..a computer screen...geezzz).
Want to make a point? Lead by example, *then* talk about it, then go ahead and lecture people on what "they" need to do. Want to save energy and encourage green living? Lead by example, not by lecture. Want to cut your carbon footprint way down? How about starting with not living in a mansion the size of a small village in the third world. Stuff like that.
Man that sucks. Eight years in the pokey. And still in! If it comes out that toyota execs knew about this problem, and that looks to be the case more and more, that they got rehired ex regulators to help them "pass", said execs need as much prison time as this poor dude got..or more. If his car was one of the bogus ones I mean. Wonder if the car still exists to inspect?
As to hundreds of computers running cars today, with 50-100 million lines of code..maybe we should rethink that better. Just because you can, doesn't always mean you should.
That's the same policy they have in the US for public oil and gas, some "honor system", the pumpers tell the government what they owe..uh huh
I think that's nuts. I would rather that public oil and gas be sold at a rationed level at cost plus a little for administration and contracted refining to the US public. Or just left in the ground for future use, say there's some giant emergency and we can't get much from foreign sources. Nice to have a stash. Just bank it where it sits, in case we really need it later. Our "commons" have been sold off cheap for generations, this sucks. I mean, look what we do now, sell off cheap "on the honor system" public oil, then turn around and re-buy oil on the market and shoot it down some old salt mines for our "national oil reserve" stash. Say whut?? Ain't this kinda just retarded? How about just know there's a lot some place in some fields, have the wells already to go, then plug it up until such a time as there is an emergency. They we don't need to go buy any..because we already got it..in the ground!
Clinton signed the law repealing glass steagall. Whether a veto by him would have been overturned is moot, he still signed the thing. They should have called it the "let wall street and the casino bank hustlers go crackhead apeshit with your money" act. That's one of the biggees, not the only, but one, of the reasons we are in an economic mess now.
I'm a small government guy by nature, but some regulations are always in order. Pure anarchy market forces lead to monopolies and cartels, and that's about it. Because predatory crooks rise to the top levels of giving orders.. and that's business and ggovernment, both.
That's why there needs to be oversight, and why we need more pure government "kick em all out!" efforts occasionally, and why we need but don't have yet "corporate death penalities". The crooks eventually take over, it always happens, not much you can do to prevent it, so all you can do is slow them down a little. And even then, with oversight and slowing them down, they eventually get firmly entrenched at all the order giving levels, so you have no choice other than starting over again from scratch. Very broadly historically speaking of course.
That's the problem with all the various solar concentrators, they tend to concentrate the heat range of the spectrum as well as the light range they need. Figure out a cheap and easy way to beat that, and you might get rich. Practical solar concentrators exist, so that isn't a problem then, for the ones that are designed for that, as thermal concentrators. PV does not like excessive heat, it runs better cooler.
The resistance to it (outside of pure ideological) is coming mostly from people seeing how other federally run programs work or, more accurately, don't work. The US has tons of government "things" that just don't work, are a big fat waste of time and money, say for instance, the entire federal department of education, and the war on some drugs. We got by swell when the fed dept edu didn't exist.
As to medical, as an example, talk to some older combat vets how their federally run health care has been handled. For every one good story you'll hear ten horror stories. For instance, I have a good friend who had to wait over *thirty years* for the government to admit that yes, he did in fact have pretty nasty dioxin poisoning from agent orange. He then got a lot of back disability and some proper care. Not like his obvious bad chloracne he had the whole time was any clue to the docs there...
Health coverage in the US used to be cheap and affordable for most, even with low paying crappy jobs. I mean I distinctly remember this. I'll skip prices, mostly because you won't believe me, and just relate hours worked, 5 hours a week at a lower paid blue collar job covered it fully. Not mid middle class or higher, lower near entry level wages. It changed to way more expensive after medicare and medicaid got started.
We could stand some health care reform here, but European or Canadian styled just isn't going to work very well. And especially in this economy where they have been hell bent for leather to kill off wealth creation manufacturing jobs. No money=I don't care how many laws they pass, they won't be able to afford it. The US is *already* freeking bankrupt now as it is. Just *servicing* the debt we have now is hugemongous. We just don't need a single penny more government expense. We need to get a handle on that before we go thinking up more new ways to spend money. We need real wealth creation JOBS as the first ten priorities before we need anything else from the feds. Not service jobs, not more government employees, solid real wealth CREATION jobs.
Cheaper healthcare here could be garnered a number of ways, right off the bat, open up the dang medical schools, get those costs down, and start pumping out GPs, and get them in little towns all over, so people don't have to rely on expensive hospital visits for minor stuff. Maybe come up with a new classification for entry level minor care doctor that is an easier and cheaper schooling option, a first call care guy. Get more nurse practioners out there, which are similar. Open up insurance to more competition. Open up the generic drugs. Open source ANYTHING that uses one penny tax dollars for research. Make that open source viral. Stop letting the pharmcos get away from shifting one minor molecule on drugs to get perpetual patent extensions.
Stuff like that. I even thought a big national daily lottery with half the proceedings going to pay out the winners and the other half to fund open source medical research would be spiffy. I bet they could rake in tens of millions of bucks daily just with that, all voluntary. How about X-prizes for actual *cures* instead of symptom treatments?
They'd have to do it once, just eat the costs of the lawsuit, and then bounce the lot of them. They are elected, get rid of the entire schoolboard and administration and any spiers, anyone who remotely turned those cams on to gawk (and you know that probably happened) and start from scratch with people who aren't so intrusively lame. This is *seriously* wrong on so many level it ain't funny. A buncha them mofos need to see the inside of a pokey over this as well.
What he said is true. Engines have to be designed to function well with ethanol fuels. It's not *terribly* different from pure gasoline, but enough it has to be taken into consideration. The octane is higher, gallon for gallon, so you have to deal with that, and the gaskets and seals and fuel lines, etc have to be able to withstand the more-corrosive effects of alcohol. Regular car engines today can handle up to a ten percent blend, after that you can have problems if they haven't been engineered for alcohol fuels in the first place.
Most modern cars today can handle it better, and a lot of flex fuel cars are out there now that can handle up to e-85 blend. Small engines are lagging, and just tons of people with boats that have fiberglass fuel tanks have had serious problems with their carbs getting gunked up with fiberglass gunk that got dissolved because of ethanol in the fuel. A lot of small engines like mowers and weedeaters, etc are also having problems now that the normal ethanol blend is ten percent, and soon to be higher in some places. I've had to fix several, the gas lines just rot, turn to mush. Fast, too, within one season for some I have seen. Freaking dangerous as well, I had one on a gravity fuel feed portable generator that rotted on me and I didn't pick up on it until *I was running the thing and the fuel line just glopped off* and dumped raw gas on the running generator.
Tell ya whut, that was a pucker factor 10 for a few seconds there. I mashed that off button and ran like crazy the other way. Lucked out, it didn't catch, but it could have.
I have since gone around and replaced in advance every single small engine fuel line I have, which is quite a few little engines.
With that said, I am in favor of biofuels, and see corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel as just a transition step. It's needed to get the ball rolling and that is what opur farmers are setup to grow in mass quantities anyway, so it is natural they went that way. It ain't permanent, so I wish folks would stop worrying so much about it. It's an agricultural evolutionary process, that's all. Brazil uses cane, we have way more corn, etc. We'll get there with different crops eventually, and the work needs to be done now and the nation's fleet gradually converted over so they can run on these alternative fuels.
I am way in favor of getting rid of the *stupid beyond belief* ban we have on industrial hemp production. that would be a spiffy cross product alternative crop. You can get fuels, food, fiber, cellulose for paper, plastics, all sorts of stuff from it. Yields per acre are rather impressive as well, and it is easy to grow.
I'm also in favor or legalizing the "other" hemp like plant as well, for medicinal or alternate reality uses. I see no sense in not learning from prohibition history.
And you have an irrational core assumption that people without land are even able to exist, let alone thrive or be "wealthy". That's scientifically impossible really. You have a lot of land per person, just it is removed a step. You don't have people existing totally on some teeny tiny piece of land, their "share" of the land is removed some geographical distance, but it is still necessary for them to exist. You aren't seeing the huge quantities of land that are necessary to keep big cities functional, and the people "out there" who need to do a lot of work out on that land to provide you with everything you need, nor attaching much importance to what those folks needs are.
Those people out there and the land out there provide you with 100% of your tangible human needs, all of it, every single bit of it.
If you keep politically marginalizing those people "out there", as I tried to point out with this red/blue conflict and split politically, eventually they are going to stop supplying you, either from desire to just stop, or because they won't be able to because of imposed political and economic realities. You can look in history books to see what this means exactly and here's a clue, it ain't pretty.
And this is what is happening today with the political emphasis being counter weighted heavily towards concentrated population centers, and the political minimizing of what the "other" areas really represent in terms of day to day importance, and what the people "out there" think is important and need. You can ignore it or claim it doesn't exist or just isn't that important, etc, but I think that's just silly. And those maps prove this major split exists, it shouldn't be ignored.
Go back again and read some more history, this problem, identified by some smart guys way way back, was addressed with the combination of both senators and representatives, but it isn't quite working any more, there's a *lot* of fail there and a lot of political disagreement and outright hostility that keeps growing.
I'm just proposing we take a new and more logical look-see at the situation and try to fix some problems before they hit harder, that's all. We have a necessary social and economic symbiosis that is fractured today, and badly, and that split is widening, and the historical parallel eventual outcome falls into the "this just totally sucks" category. For all of the above, everyone.
You are seeing the red state/blue state sort-of lie. We don't really have that division as much as we have red areas, primarily rural and suburban, and blue areas, primarily major metropolitan areas. You can see it on the larger election maps, most fixate on the entire statewide breakdown and how the vote went in total there, but if you look at it state by state by state, the same red/blue split shows up, and it is primarily urban versus "other".
So what happens is the metro areas in most of the states dominate politics, they have the edge in population a little bit, in most states now, and institute policies and laws that never really fit their *entire* respective states. What you said about Illinois and Chicago is true facts, the same applies to like NYC and the rest of NY, or here where I am, Atlanta versus the rest of the state.
Here is an interesting site that breaks this political split down more with various maps and corrected projections. It is quite interesting and there are links to more detailed analysis. The gist of it is, in the big elections and the general political pull of the nation, it is urban versus everyone else all the time. It fluctuates a little bit, but not much really.
The quickest way to see it on that page is first look at the normal state by state red/blue split (this is a look at the 2008 election), then scroll down to the first "Election results by county" map. The differences are very easy to see there and profoundly obvious.
Causes all sorts of problems all the time, and will continue to do so. And it isn't fair either way you look at it, from either perspective. There really needs to be a different political arrangement, so the major urban areas can have various laws that fit them much better, but without insisting on the same exact laws in the rural areas, and vice versa. As in maybe drop the notion of the political boundaries we have now and switch to what the boundaries really are, smallish city-states and huge "other than that" states as separate political entities.
We have federal and state governments that keep trying to hammer square pegs into round holes and it just doesn't work very well, there is no real compromise even possible that would work and be more acceptable to all concerned.
And it's not like this wasn't anticipated back at the beginning of our Union, this was the original idea with having both senators and representatives, instead of just representatives...That fix didn't last long, primarily I think because they didn't think it through far enough ahead in time to the point where there would be so many multi million person large cities, inside virtually every state in the nation. They thought it would remain like less populated states versus more populated, not realizing the political split would fall inside every single state for the same reasons, that urban realities are just different from the rural and suburban.
I used dialup from 1995 until just recently, so I don't care about that, that's a non issue to me about something like this, it is still usable if you turn images off and use adblock plus and noscript. The other thing is..it's the principle. We keep having problems with ISPs and so on from them being dinks, if you get an opportunity to fight back and give 'em a bloody nose, from them being just slap wrong about things, it your duty as a netizen to do so-IMO.
I mean, heck with it, I have had to deal with lawsuits before, going up against "big names", etc..you just do it. If you are in the right..you just do it. I even acted as my own attorney, and have won every time. Ya, it took a lot of my "spare time" learning proper procedure and whatnot..still worth it. You just can't go through life getting pushed around by bullies. I'm a nerd, they tried that when I was a nerdling back in school..heck with it, learned to fight, that's it, put some big jocks down on the ground eventually, dudes who had near a foot in height and a hundred lbs on me, left them hurtin' bad with near flat faces and cracked ribs. Most satisfying...
Bullies never expect it, they expect you to roll over, cower, just take whatever they want to dish out, whether it's a physical bully or some corporation bully. Fight back!
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Sold a lot of those things back during the first big energy crisis then tax credits deal back in the 80s. They were basically *free* then if you had enough taxes taken out, so it was an easy sell. Carter sucked on most issues, but for energy, he was our top prez ever, and IF we had followed through with those goals from back then, we'd be doing a lot better today.
Ya, they work well. There's a lot of nice solar thermal stuff that people forget about it, only thinking about solar PV. In fact, my first solar project was a swimming pool heater in the 60s. How about solar ovens for cooking and water purification? I have some of that stuff, too, along with my PV.
There's a lot of it being done small scale in places like India and Pakistan, a lot of households run on biogas, but in areas with stacks of regulations, etc, it is not quite as popular. The hoop jumping requirements are Olympic caliber. On big scales it takes good quality expensive materials,as it tends to eat up steel. I've done it on a small scale, made some test runs using junk plumbing parts and tubs and old barrels, that's it. You do get good burnable gas relatively easy, it's those fine picky points of engineering that need to be sorted out and where the big costs lie.
In the US, the most common biogas harvesting is methane extraction from old dumps. On farms so far there are some examples, but it's just too expensive for most guys to build. There's a lot of interest to be sure, but once they look at the costs and regs, the enthusiasm drops fast. Even just composting on large scales is expensive and has some serious regs associated with it, and the fines for non compliance are bankruptcy class quickly.
We have three large scale litter composting sheds here, large scale as in hundreds of tons total at any given time being composted, and they have to be approved design, covered buildings, and once you jump through those expensive hoops to get that built, then you have new buildings that just add to your local taxes. Oh, then you need a hundred grand and up big loader, and one or two smaller bob cat loaders just to rearrange the composting litter. Then some spreader trucks, which ain't cheap either. More expense, more taxes and insurance, etc. So you try to do good, and they charge you more for that effort.
The government makes it almost a no win situation with that in other words. We've looked into shifting to biogas..ain't happening right now.
Start paying farmers more for their products than the wall street speculators get for server entry shuffling and flash trades, etc. on commodities....we'll talk. We'd have the re$ource$ then to do stuff like this more, and most farmers would love to go for it, because energy costs are killer, and farmers just love building *neat shit*. We are outdoor and equipment nerds. Our gadgets are big and expensive, so that means they have to pay, else you can't afford them. Nothing is pocket change, nothing. Everything is always "man this just sucks" expensive just to purchase or build, then ongoing maintenance, which is a huge set of overlapping projects all the time and repairs, etc.. Our farm has medium beefy data center energy costs, some thousands of bucks a week depending on weather extremes for electricity and propane. And you really can't chance, nor do they like to offer, any huge loans for this stuff, as one bad season, etc, could wipe you out completely. Ain't worth the risk, you most likely couldn't get the loan anyway, catch 22 and a half there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas
My bottom line is, It got real old some years back to constantly be beat on by urban elitists who defend every single thing about megaurban life and just dump on the people and culture who really make it all possible in the rural and suburban areas. Just got tired of hearing I am not green because I don't ride some bus or subway. Gets real old reading that if you drive a truck you are some baby seal killer. On and on it never ends. If it was race based or gender based, it would be regarded as hate speech, but as long as it's regional based, well, you can just dump on those yokel teabaggers all day long. Just gets to me, can't stand that near racist crap. We don't have an "ist" name for it, but it is similar to racism. It just sucks. Gets me pretty fairly annoyed.
I've made it a strict point to research major macro economics and also small scale microeconomics, which I practice myself, as well as being in the personal sovereignty/practical preparedness/survivalist movement. I'm a veteran of the civil rights and anti war movements of the past. I've been into alternative energy as a practitioner and enthusiast since the late 60s. I've been a political activist and have seen first hand how both the R and D parties are corrupt as hell at the top and seek to keep the nation divided and conquered, and especially as how they have been compromised by those urban bankster gangsters, who are the biggest pack of liars and traitors this nation has ever had to endure.
I think it is OK if people voluntarily wish to live in such large urban environments, I just want them to *know* that their lifestyle exists because of serious ongoing, chronic and criminal exploitation of "flyover" country, pure imperialism. Just to slap down some of the smugness. The..arrogance...it is just *sickening*. Like I said, I have lived extensively in all three general major living areas. but, on careful anaylsis, moved back rural. For a variety of reasons, the primary one is you can have a sustainable life here that isn't based on conmans lies. I understand the excitement and allure of the big city, been there, decade and a half, was into it..but...I couldn't stop thinking about larger matters and it made me LOOK and research..then I got alarmed and just moved. I saw way too many signs of coming economic collapse-which has started in earnest now and is snowballing- and the following social unrest. Social unrest-to put it politely-always follows major economic collapse. To one degree or another. I think the next stage is going to be pretty bad. That knob will go to 11.
You can't have a local-close geographical economy without wealth creation, and you can't service wealth *before it is created*. The big urban areas right now are existing on the bubbliest of all bubbles, it is *unsustainable* as it is. This goes beyond being green or not, this goes into raw existence. Your huge cities *are going to collapse* because of this big lie they sold. They have sold a bill of goods to the people there that this is possible by using the false promise of credit and debt, and getting people to equate debt with wealth, which it is not, and by outright stealing most of the wealth created in the interior and away from the megacities, and *that* is being negated because of the huge shift of manufacturing due to global fast capital wage arbitrage by those looters and pirates.
It's falling apart man, fair warning. I bailed from living metro 11 years ago because I saw it-it being economic collapse to be followed by "social unrest"- coming and warned people about it. And still am. Warning! Beep beep beep! Did you see what happened to Dubai some months back?? Megaopolis of the future! Crashed hard...didn't take too long either. Because it was built on lies and IOUs.
*Most* large urban areas are like that now, just a little behind, that's all.
Read my latest journal? It links to this: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailou
What I don't understand is why a major linux outfit hired a non linux guy for this important position. They are saying that on the entire globe, six billion plus people, only this mac osx guy could fill these shoes. Seems a slap in the face to all the linux people out there who could have done this job and loved it, and brought more linux experience, and that mindset, to the boardroom table.
More shared resources, and more infrastructure: The denser the city, the easier it is to roll out a mass transit system that serves a significant number of people. In a dense city, one fire brigade can protect the property of a quarter million people. A sewer system covering a square mile might serve 20x more people in an urban center than in a suburban neighborhood.------A lot of times a mass transit system isn't needed, even in the country. My personal commute consists of walking out the door, then I am "at work". My sewer system is a cheap effective and simple septice tank, and a lot of our "waste" is immediately recycled on site. My main "energy waste by-products", woodash, go directly on our organic garden for instance. And eventually I'll be going to a dry composting toilet, but I am not there yet, but headed that way. Some of our gray water just goes to water the lawn now.
Smaller dwellings: Lighting, heating, and cooling a small apartment is generally going to be cheaper than providing the same services for a rural home. Even better, apartments stack atop each other, providing levels of insulation that you could never find in a standalone house----we live in about 700 square feet, and our largest utility bill, measured in therms, is for heating, and we do 98% of that with wood, which is as carbon neutral as you can get, and it comes from onsite. My cooling bill in the hot summer consists of a large oak shade tree and a couple cheap window fans, we don't even own an air conditioner. As for food, we grow well over 50% of our food onsite, again, no need to even walk to the deli or grocery store, we walk to the kitchen cabinets or freezer or in season to our garden, a shorter distance than even city dwellers, and I have my own beef, poultry, eggs, and fish from the pond. I've been adding to our solar array over the years, and sometime we'll be able to reduce our need for grid supplied completely. In an emergency, we are self powered now as it is, at reduced load. Granted, still on the grid, but chipping away at it. You don't have the roofspace for enough solar PV to handle all those people in the megaopolis, not even close, not even with the new ultra efficient panels. As to insulation and efficiency, you can construct superinsulation or earth bermed housing which will meet or exceed your energy conservation efforts with stacked, but I will give you a point there, I am familiar with that effect, it does work to an extent, especially the folks in the middle of the apt building. Been there, done that meselfs.. And transportation needs are slowly going to be shifting to all electric and biofuels, which we can produce onsite out in the sticks. So we can walk, or if we need to drive, we will be self powered. Personal transportation IS our "mass transit". On our schedule, not a schedule that consists of "one size fits no one exactly well".
And there's always horses ;) Still get used a lot around here, although I don't have one yet. I do have a guard donkey though, hahahaha! Donkeys by nature will attack wild strange dogs and coyotes, something we need to protect our herd. Some folks use Llamas for that as well. And I *walk*, several miles a day, 7 days a week. HYalf is for work, half is for pleasure, for entetainment. Doesn't cost much in terms of energy, no artificial lighting needed.
More services are available within walking distance.---those services are available because the necessary materials and infrastructure for them has to be constantly trucked in, wired in, piped in. Please don't negate these costs, they are critical. Your services wouldn't exist, could not be done, for very long without those imports. *Proxy driving* again, huge amounts of proxy driving must be done elsewhere for those urban services to be able to exist. Name a service, I can tell you (at least in part readily) what driving needs to be done outside the big city so that you can walk to it. If that driving isn't done, your service will collapse and not be doable for very long.
Many city dwellers don'
Maybe that dude is an architect who can design something good, but he has no idea whatsoever what it takes to sustain a city and the people there.
'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.'"
That's just a complete steaming pile of crap.
There's a rather inhumane experiment that has been performed many times down through history that proves this without any doubt whatsoever. It's repeatable, it is completely scientific and valid, you will get the same results over and over.
Wall a city off, or besiege it, whatever, so that no external sources are brought in. Now, see how well these "low impact" people do. Big hint, they starve, run out of fuel, run out of water, etc.
Big city dwellers, whether in the scrap constructed slums or the penthouses or in the apartments in between, use the same amount of resources, it is just one or more steps removed from where they are at, they are using all the land, energy, resources, etc, that anyone else is, just by proxy and delivery truck or delivery wire or delivery freight train or delivery pipeline, and to a large extent by economic exploitation, forced true wealth transference, from other folks, outside of the city, via their physical labor and governmental theft and/or severe underpayment or compensation of natural resources.
They don't "exist" in any real sense divorced from outside the city resources. That's some fairy tale I have seen repeated many times by people with no clue whatsoever. Typically I'll read some drivel like "well, I get by with just walking or using my pogo stick or riding the tube, so there, I R just so much greener and "low impact" than you are!!".
Just clueless. Completely misses how stuff works or where things come from or what real energy and resources are really needed in order so that they can commute by skateboard or rickshaw or "shared taxi" and "live".
These slum dwellers exist on scrap from what stuff is imported to the more affluent urban dwellers. Remove those imports, eventually even the scrap waste users "go broke", their wealth becomes depleted, and their existence becomes *completely untenable*. Sure they recycle, so do a lot of other people outside the city, so what's the point there, you can only recycle if you live in a city??
And here's another clue, most of those people in the green slums work as hard as they can in order to get the heck out of that "green" slum, because they live there and know it major league *sucks*.
And a lot of them would have never moved to some urban slum or existence in the first place if their rural areas weren't run into the ground economically in the first place by urban centric internal exploitation and colonialism or imperialistic policies. They get their resources stripped bare by governmental and business exploitation, it gets shipped to these big cities, then they become desperate, move to where what were their resources got shipped to.
Colonialism doesn't necessarily have to mean as the only definition that nation A goes and takes over and exploits nation B, it frequently means nation A subset b urban scene exploits the heck out of nation A subset c rural areas and peoples. and they can be so overly exploited that they become desperate refugees, even if they get a few bones thrown back at them by the urban scene, it frequently won't be enough.
That hasn't worked very well with digital products. When consumers were faced with a two cent to manufacture product with a price tag of ten to hundreds of dollars, they rebelled and set up their own black market "digital fabs" to make more affordable copies of digital products, because they couldn't get a fair price. The digital products price fixing cartel got into action and outright *bought* enough government laws and enforcement to try to keep their outrageous prices up, and to punish the "independent producers". Still on-going today. They *haven't* adjusted the cost down to way more reasonable levels, they adjusted the laws and law enforcement way up in their favor to maintain price fixing and an insane last century business model based on a per-unit pricing structure that was based on a tangible copy, not a cheap to reproduce digital copy.
Demand for digital products is always really high, and in the modern world you just can't say "don't buy them" because those sorts of products ARE what helps make the modern world, but outrageous cartel price fixing combined with co-opting and corrupting government, across the board, has skewed the natural market that should exist tremendously. You can say "don't buy them", and not do that yourself, but what about when your enforced tax monies go to pay outrageous digital products cost? You are being forced to buy them. How about when you shop for anything else, and you know some of the price you are paying is going to also pay for way over priced digital products that are used in the production, distribution and final sale of some other good or service? You simply can't avoid paying these inflated prices in day to day normal living, whether you want to or not, because it has been carved into lawstone that you *must*.
At 12:00, go to the dollar store, find the biggest one dollar regular watch with a band they have. Now buy one buck worth of velcro strips in the same store. Velcro your regular phone to the front of the watch. That leaves three bucks for lunch. Show off to your buds at work all afternoon your new high tech wristwatch cellphone ;)
Wasn't sure what that was. For people who don't know, here is the write up on the emate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300
You need to make use of the slashdot journal system, and friend's lists. The front page here is not the total scene, there is quite a robust community of writers here going way back, and although there was the "great exodus" of journalists some years ago, it is building back up. I get a lot of interesting things to read and engage in "spirited debates" with other hard core journalists here, heh, from guys here who like to write, plus I write. I do a lot on geoeconomics and alt energy (I think I have the most with "the almighty buck" submissions tag), just not quite in the ~approved style~ for front page submission, err..because I like my developed style better, it suits *me* better, so I don't bother submitting them to the front page, although everything winds up on the firehose anyway. In my journal, I don't need to get approved, it just..shows up. Here's an example for this article on the solar breakthrough
http://slashdot.org/~zogger/journal/246084
It has all the relevant info, which is the link itself to the academic press release, not to some place that just rewrites that release, for no apparent benefit other than to sell ads on some page..and that's all that is really needed, the link, then on to the comments. It isn't official front page "styled" though. I could do them that way, but..I don't care about that, we have enough front page styled articles that are mostly just copy/paste from the real link.
Anyway, if you are into alt energy and economics, and also practical preparedness, which is my big real side interest, talk a walk through my past journal entries.
I think the worst one is when there are no apparent differences between government and corporation, which we apparently have now with the the Fed/treasury/casino banks. It's one entity, and the same guys run things, just jump around into different divisions and job titles within that corporacracy. And in that sphere it is a monopoly, and it's illegal to compete, and it looks to me way more it was created from private corrupting the public, getting their monopoly that way.
I'll agree with you on over/mis-regulation..I did preface saying that I am by nature a small government guy. A few good quality tools can be better than a box full of crappy tools that don't do what they are designed to do and break easy.
It's very odd. Sometimes I wonder how prosecutors can deal with this sort of thing.
I'd have a smidgen more respect for these uberrich guys when they talk about the environment and energy if I saw them like taking sail boats when they cross the ocean instead of private jets, or ride a bicycle to the TED conference, or..OK..at least drive a car personally that is fueled by carbon recyclable cellulose derived ethanol, or hemp biodiesel, anything that can be done now.. Or better, he's a big computer guy, why not give the speech via teleconferencing instead, no need to move heavy meatbags at all when you can move cheaper electrons (Pet peeve of mine, millions commuting daily to go sit in front of a computer screen...then they go back home where there is..a computer screen...geezzz).
Want to make a point? Lead by example, *then* talk about it, then go ahead and lecture people on what "they" need to do. Want to save energy and encourage green living? Lead by example, not by lecture. Want to cut your carbon footprint way down? How about starting with not living in a mansion the size of a small village in the third world. Stuff like that.
Man that sucks. Eight years in the pokey. And still in! If it comes out that toyota execs knew about this problem, and that looks to be the case more and more, that they got rehired ex regulators to help them "pass", said execs need as much prison time as this poor dude got..or more. If his car was one of the bogus ones I mean. Wonder if the car still exists to inspect?
As to hundreds of computers running cars today, with 50-100 million lines of code..maybe we should rethink that better. Just because you can, doesn't always mean you should.
That's the same policy they have in the US for public oil and gas, some "honor system", the pumpers tell the government what they owe..uh huh
I think that's nuts. I would rather that public oil and gas be sold at a rationed level at cost plus a little for administration and contracted refining to the US public. Or just left in the ground for future use, say there's some giant emergency and we can't get much from foreign sources. Nice to have a stash. Just bank it where it sits, in case we really need it later. Our "commons" have been sold off cheap for generations, this sucks. I mean, look what we do now, sell off cheap "on the honor system" public oil, then turn around and re-buy oil on the market and shoot it down some old salt mines for our "national oil reserve" stash. Say whut?? Ain't this kinda just retarded? How about just know there's a lot some place in some fields, have the wells already to go, then plug it up until such a time as there is an emergency. They we don't need to go buy any..because we already got it..in the ground!
Clinton signed the law repealing glass steagall. Whether a veto by him would have been overturned is moot, he still signed the thing. They should have called it the "let wall street and the casino bank hustlers go crackhead apeshit with your money" act. That's one of the biggees, not the only, but one, of the reasons we are in an economic mess now.
I'm a small government guy by nature, but some regulations are always in order. Pure anarchy market forces lead to monopolies and cartels, and that's about it. Because predatory crooks rise to the top levels of giving orders.. and that's business and ggovernment, both.
That's why there needs to be oversight, and why we need more pure government "kick em all out!" efforts occasionally, and why we need but don't have yet "corporate death penalities". The crooks eventually take over, it always happens, not much you can do to prevent it, so all you can do is slow them down a little. And even then, with oversight and slowing them down, they eventually get firmly entrenched at all the order giving levels, so you have no choice other than starting over again from scratch. Very broadly historically speaking of course.
That's the problem with all the various solar concentrators, they tend to concentrate the heat range of the spectrum as well as the light range they need. Figure out a cheap and easy way to beat that, and you might get rich. Practical solar concentrators exist, so that isn't a problem then, for the ones that are designed for that, as thermal concentrators. PV does not like excessive heat, it runs better cooler.
Sorry to disappoint, I only do journal entries, not front page submissions. You would have gotten your fix sooner. This link for yet another amazing solar breakthrough that will get buried like the rest of them was from a few days ago.
Perhaps what is needed is the benevolent dictator model, before something can be called "android".
Perhaps.
The resistance to it (outside of pure ideological) is coming mostly from people seeing how other federally run programs work or, more accurately, don't work. The US has tons of government "things" that just don't work, are a big fat waste of time and money, say for instance, the entire federal department of education, and the war on some drugs. We got by swell when the fed dept edu didn't exist.
As to medical, as an example, talk to some older combat vets how their federally run health care has been handled. For every one good story you'll hear ten horror stories. For instance, I have a good friend who had to wait over *thirty years* for the government to admit that yes, he did in fact have pretty nasty dioxin poisoning from agent orange. He then got a lot of back disability and some proper care. Not like his obvious bad chloracne he had the whole time was any clue to the docs there...
Health coverage in the US used to be cheap and affordable for most, even with low paying crappy jobs. I mean I distinctly remember this. I'll skip prices, mostly because you won't believe me, and just relate hours worked, 5 hours a week at a lower paid blue collar job covered it fully. Not mid middle class or higher, lower near entry level wages. It changed to way more expensive after medicare and medicaid got started.
We could stand some health care reform here, but European or Canadian styled just isn't going to work very well. And especially in this economy where they have been hell bent for leather to kill off wealth creation manufacturing jobs. No money=I don't care how many laws they pass, they won't be able to afford it. The US is *already* freeking bankrupt now as it is. Just *servicing* the debt we have now is hugemongous. We just don't need a single penny more government expense. We need to get a handle on that before we go thinking up more new ways to spend money. We need real wealth creation JOBS as the first ten priorities before we need anything else from the feds. Not service jobs, not more government employees, solid real wealth CREATION jobs.
Cheaper healthcare here could be garnered a number of ways, right off the bat, open up the dang medical schools, get those costs down, and start pumping out GPs, and get them in little towns all over, so people don't have to rely on expensive hospital visits for minor stuff. Maybe come up with a new classification for entry level minor care doctor that is an easier and cheaper schooling option, a first call care guy. Get more nurse practioners out there, which are similar. Open up insurance to more competition. Open up the generic drugs. Open source ANYTHING that uses one penny tax dollars for research. Make that open source viral. Stop letting the pharmcos get away from shifting one minor molecule on drugs to get perpetual patent extensions.
Stuff like that. I even thought a big national daily lottery with half the proceedings going to pay out the winners and the other half to fund open source medical research would be spiffy. I bet they could rake in tens of millions of bucks daily just with that, all voluntary. How about X-prizes for actual *cures* instead of symptom treatments?
They'd have to do it once, just eat the costs of the lawsuit, and then bounce the lot of them. They are elected, get rid of the entire schoolboard and administration and any spiers, anyone who remotely turned those cams on to gawk (and you know that probably happened) and start from scratch with people who aren't so intrusively lame.
This is *seriously* wrong on so many level it ain't funny. A buncha them mofos need to see the inside of a pokey over this as well.
What he said is true. Engines have to be designed to function well with ethanol fuels. It's not *terribly* different from pure gasoline, but enough it has to be taken into consideration. The octane is higher, gallon for gallon, so you have to deal with that, and the gaskets and seals and fuel lines, etc have to be able to withstand the more-corrosive effects of alcohol. Regular car engines today can handle up to a ten percent blend, after that you can have problems if they haven't been engineered for alcohol fuels in the first place.
Most modern cars today can handle it better, and a lot of flex fuel cars are out there now that can handle up to e-85 blend. Small engines are lagging, and just tons of people with boats that have fiberglass fuel tanks have had serious problems with their carbs getting gunked up with fiberglass gunk that got dissolved because of ethanol in the fuel. A lot of small engines like mowers and weedeaters, etc are also having problems now that the normal ethanol blend is ten percent, and soon to be higher in some places. I've had to fix several, the gas lines just rot, turn to mush. Fast, too, within one season for some I have seen. Freaking dangerous as well, I had one on a gravity fuel feed portable generator that rotted on me and I didn't pick up on it until *I was running the thing and the fuel line just glopped off* and dumped raw gas on the running generator.
Tell ya whut, that was a pucker factor 10 for a few seconds there. I mashed that off button and ran like crazy the other way. Lucked out, it didn't catch, but it could have.
I have since gone around and replaced in advance every single small engine fuel line I have, which is quite a few little engines.
Here, take yer pick...
http://www.google.com/search?q=ethanol+rots+fuel+lines
With that said, I am in favor of biofuels, and see corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel as just a transition step. It's needed to get the ball rolling and that is what opur farmers are setup to grow in mass quantities anyway, so it is natural they went that way. It ain't permanent, so I wish folks would stop worrying so much about it. It's an agricultural evolutionary process, that's all. Brazil uses cane, we have way more corn, etc. We'll get there with different crops eventually, and the work needs to be done now and the nation's fleet gradually converted over so they can run on these alternative fuels.
I am way in favor of getting rid of the *stupid beyond belief* ban we have on industrial hemp production. that would be a spiffy cross product alternative crop. You can get fuels, food, fiber, cellulose for paper, plastics, all sorts of stuff from it. Yields per acre are rather impressive as well, and it is easy to grow.
I'm also in favor or legalizing the "other" hemp like plant as well, for medicinal or alternate reality uses. I see no sense in not learning from prohibition history.
And you have an irrational core assumption that people without land are even able to exist, let alone thrive or be "wealthy". That's scientifically impossible really. You have a lot of land per person, just it is removed a step. You don't have people existing totally on some teeny tiny piece of land, their "share" of the land is removed some geographical distance, but it is still necessary for them to exist. You aren't seeing the huge quantities of land that are necessary to keep big cities functional, and the people "out there" who need to do a lot of work out on that land to provide you with everything you need, nor attaching much importance to what those folks needs are.
Those people out there and the land out there provide you with 100% of your tangible human needs, all of it, every single bit of it.
If you keep politically marginalizing those people "out there", as I tried to point out with this red/blue conflict and split politically, eventually they are going to stop supplying you, either from desire to just stop, or because they won't be able to because of imposed political and economic realities. You can look in history books to see what this means exactly and here's a clue, it ain't pretty.
And this is what is happening today with the political emphasis being counter weighted heavily towards concentrated population centers, and the political minimizing of what the "other" areas really represent in terms of day to day importance, and what the people "out there" think is important and need. You can ignore it or claim it doesn't exist or just isn't that important, etc, but I think that's just silly. And those maps prove this major split exists, it shouldn't be ignored.
Go back again and read some more history, this problem, identified by some smart guys way way back, was addressed with the combination of both senators and representatives, but it isn't quite working any more, there's a *lot* of fail there and a lot of political disagreement and outright hostility that keeps growing.
I'm just proposing we take a new and more logical look-see at the situation and try to fix some problems before they hit harder, that's all. We have a necessary social and economic symbiosis that is fractured today, and badly, and that split is widening, and the historical parallel eventual outcome falls into the "this just totally sucks" category. For all of the above, everyone.
You are seeing the red state/blue state sort-of lie. We don't really have that division as much as we have red areas, primarily rural and suburban, and blue areas, primarily major metropolitan areas. You can see it on the larger election maps, most fixate on the entire statewide breakdown and how the vote went in total there, but if you look at it state by state by state, the same red/blue split shows up, and it is primarily urban versus "other".
So what happens is the metro areas in most of the states dominate politics, they have the edge in population a little bit, in most states now, and institute policies and laws that never really fit their *entire* respective states. What you said about Illinois and Chicago is true facts, the same applies to like NYC and the rest of NY, or here where I am, Atlanta versus the rest of the state.
Here is an interesting site that breaks this political split down more with various maps and corrected projections. It is quite interesting and there are links to more detailed analysis. The gist of it is, in the big elections and the general political pull of the nation, it is urban versus everyone else all the time. It fluctuates a little bit, but not much really.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/
The quickest way to see it on that page is first look at the normal state by state red/blue split (this is a look at the 2008 election), then scroll down to the first "Election results by county" map. The differences are very easy to see there and profoundly obvious.
Causes all sorts of problems all the time, and will continue to do so. And it isn't fair either way you look at it, from either perspective. There really needs to be a different political arrangement, so the major urban areas can have various laws that fit them much better, but without insisting on the same exact laws in the rural areas, and vice versa. As in maybe drop the notion of the political boundaries we have now and switch to what the boundaries really are, smallish city-states and huge "other than that" states as separate political entities.
We have federal and state governments that keep trying to hammer square pegs into round holes and it just doesn't work very well, there is no real compromise even possible that would work and be more acceptable to all concerned.
And it's not like this wasn't anticipated back at the beginning of our Union, this was the original idea with having both senators and representatives, instead of just representatives...That fix didn't last long, primarily I think because they didn't think it through far enough ahead in time to the point where there would be so many multi million person large cities, inside virtually every state in the nation. They thought it would remain like less populated states versus more populated, not realizing the political split would fall inside every single state for the same reasons, that urban realities are just different from the rural and suburban.
I used dialup from 1995 until just recently, so I don't care about that, that's a non issue to me about something like this, it is still usable if you turn images off and use adblock plus and noscript. The other thing is..it's the principle. We keep having problems with ISPs and so on from them being dinks, if you get an opportunity to fight back and give 'em a bloody nose, from them being just slap wrong about things, it your duty as a netizen to do so-IMO.
I mean, heck with it, I have had to deal with lawsuits before, going up against "big names", etc..you just do it. If you are in the right..you just do it. I even acted as my own attorney, and have won every time. Ya, it took a lot of my "spare time" learning proper procedure and whatnot..still worth it. You just can't go through life getting pushed around by bullies. I'm a nerd, they tried that when I was a nerdling back in school..heck with it, learned to fight, that's it, put some big jocks down on the ground eventually, dudes who had near a foot in height and a hundred lbs on me, left them hurtin' bad with near flat faces and cracked ribs. Most satisfying...
Bullies never expect it, they expect you to roll over, cower, just take whatever they want to dish out, whether it's a physical bully or some corporation bully. Fight back!