No can do! That will be a super DMCA violation by then, circumventing protection features, with penalties like exile on Rura Penthe for a first offense and they get nasty after that....
..and BTW I agree with you, will be to institute selling their electricity to you the same way they have to get it, at variable rates. When they have to go get some peak power juice, the costs go way up, real fast. They might just decide to pass those fees on to you with smarter meters, maybe even down to per minute pricing. You decide to run your heaviest loads during peak power costs for them, be prepared to pay a lot more for it. It could happen! Take them a bit to get it pushed through local legislatures and PUCs, but I am sure they have well trained lobbyists for these tasks.
Is this guy adding in the few trillion (whatever, some hugemongous number of dollars) over the past few decades to keep a huge military presence in the mideast, all tax payer dollars? Or is he yet another one of those people who maintain our presence there has nothing to do with oil supply, it is just a coincidence?
I'd call that military expense an oil industry stealth subsidy and it dwarfs any ethanol subsidy or mandated cost. Dwarfs it, stomps it into the ground, not even in the same league. People who bitch about the small change ethanol subsidy always seem to conveniently leave out we run the US military in a major way as Chevron's and Exxon's bitch. That's a lot of scratch, jack.
And how about the economic impact of exporting those dollars for crude? Once a dollar leaves the nation for your crude, if it doesn't come back almost immediately, especially in diverse fashion, not just buying up government debt paper or enriching the same handful of military weapons systems companies it always has, the endless wars for endless blood profits boys, it has massive and negative compounding effect on lost productivity and wealth domestically for everyone else. Your imported crude costs several times more than what you pay for it directly at the pump in other words, because you have just screwed your economy over bad, except for a select few "golden" connected fatcat industries, plus because a lot (not all, but a lot historically) of that cash winds up in inimical and dictatorial regimes, so it is a direct threat to US security on several different levels. Put a cost on that, in dollars and blood on this Memorial Day.
If you can actually parse the article, the problem is using chintzy plastic that just doesn't work well with alcohol in some aspects of engine construction leading to major failure, because of too high a blend ratio, and that is the only single thing I agree with in his complaint list.
This is the car companies fault, directly, it is NOT a secret at all that US gasoline has had 5 or 10% ethanol in it for years now, or could have, so it should have been assumed consumers would be sticking it in the tank, and the effects of alcohols are chemically understood. They just chose to ignore it and should be forced to recall and fix those engines that fail because of their ignoring something that just about everyone knows, it is written on the pumps themselves! How could these huge companies miss that? Oh wait, I forgot, they are all run by Limo riding doofuses who don't even pump their own gas, their chauffeurs do that as they run them to and from their private jets.....
Personally, I am in favor of no more than 5% blends, or pure 100% ethanol, one or the other, with the consumer left with the choice at the dealers and at the pumps. With a 100% ethanol, they can design engines that will run quite well on it.. flex fuel engines or higher concentration blends in normal gasoline engines make no engineering sense at all. I remember this SAME EXACT ISSUE way way back when they did a big ethanol push for a few years, dang such a long time ago now,,maybe late 70s or so. Peoples fuel lines would rot out fast because of the ethanol. Now then, it wasn't their fault, they had no idea that alkyhaul would be stuck in the gasoline, but now? No way, 100% car companies fault, and oil companies as well if they cheat or screw up and make too strong a concentration blend. They made a huge point back then on insisting that 10% blends were pushing the envelope there, so stay below that. This isn't new news at all and those car companies should be stuck up against the wall over this and be forced to pay for their cheapness.
There are more hidden costs than farm subsidies once you start talking about energy sources, and let's treat these car companies as responsible adults and make them fess up to just screwing up bad and eat some of their capitalist dogfood (of course that has fallen out of favor lately, keep throwing the most tax money at the largest and most
You said you are running Linux on your laptop, and it doesn't quite work with some other stuff that I am guessing is microsoft specific? ( I am not a business software user at all so therefore I don't follow these things much at all) Then you suggest redhat should work to make it better, etc by throwing some devs at it (which costs them cash obviously) instead of spending cash on lawyers. Fair enough, that makes sense and is logical! So, here is the obvious question, I am wondering if you are then running a paid-for redhat distribution on that work laptop or not, so that you and your company are helping to pay to make linux better so it interoperates better in the work environment, or just running joe's random distro you downloaded for free, or what.
I was thinking the exact same thing about those wall street goofballs in charge of Chrysler and the Jeep brand. If ever a company could go off by themselves and prosper IF it was run by actual *enthusiasts*, there is an example right today. They've just constantly destroyed it over and over again and think they can keep charging more and more money. They've turned what was an actual niche product that worked and filled that niche, and was built very simple and rugged, that had about the best brand loyalty you can get, into "me too" bastardized yuppie SUV vehicles type company, and are driven now by people who, for the most part, are afraid to get them dirty. I mean, dang, what a waste. Here's an example, take what should be the flagship, the traditional short wheelbase good ground clearance CJ type vehicle, designed to get you from point A to B in about any terrain you can throw at it, in any weather. Where the heck is a high torque fuel efficient simple and rugged diesel option for the USA market? Unobtanium. Export they have some, and barely at medium quality and still way too expensive and complex and not as rugged as could be, but for the US, no see'um, they don't even offer that.
Sugar cane is not able to be grown in most of the US. In fact, the very largest sugar cane operations that we had are now being closed down around the Everglades in order to bring back the "sponge" wetlands for insuring better water management. Whereas corn is grown in huge geographical areas and our farmers are set up for it. I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 50 or 100 to 1, corn to cane growers.
Large monoculture requires expensive custom equipment, it is hard to go from one crop to a radically different crop in other words, and your farm itself might not be suitable, as in, you aren't going to be growing sugar cane in nebraska. You could sugar beets, but again, specialized equipment.. A regular midwest corn/soybean farm will have millions in land and equipment and rather high operating costs, just so they can net what is in essence a normal middle class wage when the season is good and the market doesn't rape them. They can't just switch to something else very easily. Ethanol production has helped to bring about at least somewhat better stability in the markets for them, guaranteed sales because the demand to use it in gasoline blends is there.
The other thing with corn is, it is not all "used up" to make ethanol, what is left over is still suitable for animal feed, and millions of tons of year get used exactly for that purpose. I don't know if that aspect of the economics is usually understood in these conversations about corn ethanol, nor do people seem to take the "backup liquid fuel insurance" adequately as "worth something", but I personally think it is. I know if we ever went through another big embargo or one of those political loons decides to *really* light up the mideast and the straits of hormuz are closed for an extended time, I would rather we had the infrastructure in place and up and running and be able to still turn out a billion gallons of ethanol, than *not*. Insurance. Put a price on that, I can't, other than it is a lot more than zero. Add that to the economic cost and it looks like a better deal then.
Because I know that is all we have for a backup. The national crude storage is the only other thing we have to rely on in an emergency, and that has to be refined, and the lag time is huge. Ethanol is loads faster, plus it can be accomplished in an emergency with some rather crude equipment, most anyplace, again, another form of insurance, diversification, especially away from vulnerable coastal areas like texas and louisianna.
Brazil can do ethanol cheaper because they have a ton of cheap human labor-I mean back breaking really cheap as in hardly anyone in the US who pushes that as an option would like to be out there doing that work with a machete in the hot sun 16 hours a day themselves (as in talk is cheap, back breaking labor is acceptable as long as someone else does it;)) for serf wages, and it is also tropical there, meaning sugar cane can be grown over large areas.
Just depends on the geography, climate and what the local labor situation is. Some areas it might be better to do palm oil or coconut oil, others perhaps canola/rapeseed, some cane, some corn, some....a big potential list. potato vodka fuel.
They are working on better biofuels all the time with breeding and so on. Who knows, maybe the algae stuff will win eventually. Switchgrass, jatropha, don't know, We need "all of the above" right now though. All the ethanol and plant based biodiesel we get now is still considered to be first generation efforts, from wherever it is sourced, it is just distilling the cheapest locally available bulk sugar stuff or pressing out oils and refining them a little. The tech will get better as long as we don't kill the biofuels industry off right now because it isn't "perfect" yet.
And that thing about corn ethanol driving up prices so poor people couldn't eat? Total crap, you can blame commodities speculators and assorted other wall street human predators for the bulk of the cost runups there and where that money gets skimmed off, just like they are doing with everything else. Another subject, for another time perhaps...
The point is, the need for desks will always be there. He has a desk that was built stout enough so it can last through generations of humans using it. One good desk can be built instead of ten chintzy ones that fall apart after a few years, like those pressed sawdust hunks of crap they push at the office supply stores now. In that sense, it is probably a pretty efficient use of the materials and multiple humans will get the benefit from it. And being steel, even when it is finally so worn out that it isn't worth fixing, the steel itself is easily recyclable, whereas pressboard is just landfill mulch.
And as for not needing to support weight, I know I can't be the only one here who has climbed on a desk to change the lightbulb overhead or to run cables through drop ceilings. Try doing that with your pressboard and little peg lock together marvel.
My personal desk I am sitting at right now is a very adeqaute and simple cobjob made from an old birch plywood and fir edging (strong) platform single bed I built years ago and now just laid across two of those similar type antique made from heavy steel filing cabinets. Yep, used it to paint the ceiling, climbed right up on the sucker, didn't need to move it, just throw a dropcloth over it. Probably could stick 1,000 lbs on the thing if I really wanted to. Would I replace it with an officemax special? Not only no but hell no!
Really, there's something to be said for building things to last in the first place, this use stuff for a short time and then throw it away is highly energy intensive and wasteful. Build/buy strong, then recycle or repurpose like I did with the bed, that's the way to save time, energy and cash.
Photovoltaics in the past decade are just finally getting to mass production scales where the costs drop fast. When they were first introduced, they cost over 10 grand a small inefficient panel and were used primarily in space missions.
Economies of scale *work*, you don't have affordable PV yet because of resistance to it from the entrenched energy monopolies and because the solar makers had to make do with leftover bad/scrap silicon wafers from the chip industries. New fabs dedicated to just PV production are coming online this year and next year.
And BTW, your grid supplied is cheap *now*, but do you have a long range contract which guarantees a price, say 10 or 20 years? And is there any amount you can give them to make it a sale instead of a long term lease where you build no equity? Do you know what it will cost you exactly then in the future with such a contract? If so, could you identify your electric company? Just wondering, I have asked this question many times now here and elsewhere on the net and haven't had any takers yet.
You can get such contracts and price guarantees with some of the alternatives. That's the point.
I know PV doesn't work in all areas all the time, but it certainly can and does work in numerous areas just fine. There is no single magic energy solution. They all have upsides and downsides, so I won't argue that.
As to corn ethanol, I was *careful* to point out is a a transitional crop to get some sort of viable market going and to get enthusaism up, such as in the article. Even the people who push corn now admit that, it is to help get established the interest in biofuels and to also insure at least some form of limited liquid fuel availability insurance in case of force majeur disruptions to traditional supplies, which can happen overnight and ruin your whole day. so no, I disagree, it isn't a boondoggle when you add in the fact it is affrordable insurance plus, me being a farmer, I knoiw the US is setup to grow corn in vast quantities and we do so every year. so at least we could maintain some supplies if needs be for a modest extended period if something bad where to happen.
I know I *personally* had to pay 10 bucks a gallon for two gallons-the limit you could get- back during the OPEC embargo, just enough gas to get home and park, and therefore not enough to go to my job the next day, said job was then lost shortly. Stuff happens. We had no biofuels industry of note back then, the choice was eat it raw and only get two gallons if you were lucky, or....screwed. I actually saw a guy purchase and pour two cases of ron rico 101 into his RV tank and drive away...you just couldn't get gas, not enough to matter anyway, and we had *no national backup*.
We have no guarantees on petroleum supply for the future, none, AND we are MUCH worse off now than back during the OPEC embargo days when it comes to that, we are forced to import a much higher percentage of our oil (and export all that cash, a lot of it going to some rather dubious regimes....) and any number of possible and credible scenarios could seriously disrupt supply to the point you would feel lucky to get gallons of anything that burned for ten bucks. Or a hundred bucks.
If the US had to go within a week from the prices we have now to ten bucks a gallon at very limited supply levels, we'd collapse if it went on more than a month or so. I don't mean just get inconvenienced, I mean collapse economically.
Domestic produced biofuels are our only credible backup fuel insurance we have now. Throw it away if you want....
Insurance is just that, and insuring alternative supplies have real but hard to quantify costs associated with them *until you need them*, then they seem quite cheap. Your other insurance for this or that costs you x-bucks a month, and you get nothing for itm, there is no ROI there, and you hope you never need it, but if you do, it pays off. Mumbling about unobtanium electric vehicles not on the market yet at all exc
Restrictive laws and regulations. Use your imagination and past examples to see how this works. Here's an example from 30 years ago. When solar PV first really became popular, it was a bear to even get a local "permit" to install it, it "didn't pass code". I had friends that personally went through that. Then the electric companies fought it constantly because they didn't want grid tied systems. Their goal is to sell you a product that can never be completely paid off, home generation is a direct threat to that business model. Small scale personal hydroelectric is possible, but it is near impossible to get it permitted, from environmental impact statements to possiblly the endangered three eyed flying newt was spotted ten miles downstream of your proposed little turbine, and so on,etc.. Now we have an alternative liquid biofuels industry with ethanol and biodiesel from traditional sources, as a first transitional step towards unbiquitous renewable liquid fuels, but a lot of interests still don't want it because "it takes food away from poor people" and "drives up costs", "hurts the environment" etc, even though it is the only viable alternative we have at the present for the existing millions and millions of ICE vehicles out there right now, leaving us always walking on eggshells wondering when the next huge price jump will come out of the blue (like it has several times over the past few years) or when the supplies might be disrupted due to some new enlarged wars in the middle east or whatever.
Look at computer software and the introduction of FOSS for another example, we are all aware of how it has been fought against at some lofty levels, and how they went about it, we've discussed that a lot here. Heck, back to vehicle, electric cars are buildable, they were just as common as any other vehicle a century ago, and we've had examples in the more recent past such as the EV1, and people *begged* to buy them, they loved them, yet they were recalled and crushed. They worked too good, they were a threat. There's a movie about it. That's why you have seen all these big car companies try to foist off those ludicrously expensive "hydrogen fuel cell cars" with small numbers of prototypes instead of just building at least some electric cars in mass quantities starting years ago. They can look like they are doing something while actually delaying tech that could be on the market. Guess who owns the patents on building large NiMH batteries, the ones we could have been using since the early 90s for electric cars and are still priced way too high to be really well adopted?
When you are talking about *disruptive technologies* and their economic impact, there is always an element of resistance from those older entrenched industries and concerns who could see their bottom line impacted negatively. They will spend what it takes (in both money and effort) overtly or covertly to at least delay and make adoption of the newer or better tech more complicated and expensive then it needs to be.
Tundra? About as fertile as it gets. It is just frozen now. The big worry is rapid release of gigatonnage of methane from that frozen tundra. If we can live through that, and that is a whopper "if", and I have serious doubts about it meselfs, the resultant areas will be quite suitable for farming (after the surface dries out a little of course, which it should if the permafrost completely melts).
Anyone who is in a business where the products can be reporesented by bits and bytes will just have to come to the realization that their world has changed radically. And that's just that.
The digital age has some seriously profound implications for society, one of them is, such products are now so close to free to copy as to be almost unmeasurable. Note I didn't say free to make the first edition, but this is replicator technology. The future got here, at least the first really large step towards a star trek type level of existence. The only way that such digital products can enjoy a high "per unit" cost like a tangible product forever is by strictly enforced and rather draconian laws, across the planet, that will force a tremendous amount of artificial scarcity into the market.
Now you have to ask, is this *really* the direction we want humanity to go in? How much do you really want to lock down computers and the net in order to be able to accomplish this goal? What percentage of the global population do you want to throw in prison, or deny them digital products because of excessive cost? (remember, not everyone makes real good developed nation styled wages).
And if they somehow manage to institute such a huge increase in the global policing forces, what about the next step, when gadgets can be made for next to nothing, then food replicated, then energy sources that anyone could theoretically get and use for next to free, and etc? How far exactly do you want to hold back such technology in order to lock in place "per unit" pricing on this or that?
Run it out a century or three, think about it, look at our rate of intellectual and technological advances, and think of the ramifications if we stay stuck in the 20th century with the business models and prices from then. Will that be progress, or will that be societal stagnation if true scarcity gets legally intertwined with artificial scarcity in order to maintain a century's ago "jobs"? How far do we go once down that path? Would you be willing to keep paying whatever 15 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity once there is some mr. fusion and we know that electricity costs could now be.000000000015 cents a kilowatt hour, but that older price got carved in stone by laws? What's the point of eliminating want and scarcity if it gets legislated against and it becomes a crime to actually use really radical new technology?
Ya, it sucks to think about having to find something else to do, but like we kept getting told, time marches on, this is a global society and business world now, some jobs are just going to fall by the way side as technology advances. How many whalers are left, a few dozen (most of them masquerading as "research scientists"), when there used to be tens of thousands of them maybe? Should society have just taken the whaling industry, shut it down but kept making everyone else shell out as much as they used to to them, even though they had switched to kerosene for their lamps or electricity?
My thoughts on this are, feel lucky you live in such an age and can enjoy the benefits "in kind" from others who also can offer really cheap and free digital bits, and try to work towards getting the tangibles next. Who knows, if we don't blow it, eventually everyone could be taken care of, cheap or free, for all their wants, and we could all just enjoy..whatever the hell we wanted to! Imagine an end to scarcity, don't be afraid of it or try to perpetuate it.
I'm in food production, tangibles, to make copies of this stuff still takes some serious work all the time, and each copy is still expensive to produce, you can't just do all the work once and get paid a thousand or a million times over and over again for it..but..when and if such a time as we can replicate food like we can replicate digital bits, fat city! I will *gladly* go find something else to do if that means we can eliminate starvation across the planet, I mean jump up and down from joy that has been developed. In the me
If you get a small freezer (around 6 cubic feet or so), it will hold a small side of beef (say if you start out with a 600 lb critter). If you get a larger freezer obviously it will hold the whole thing or an even larger animal, and you can get chest freezers upto around 26 cubic feet in most appliance stores. You can usually find a "side" or half a beaste for around a dollar a lb live weight (at least what I am seeing in the auction market news around the US), and after the packing house processes it and you pay their fees, it will work out to around 2 bucks a lb for all the various cuts, and you'll have a bit more in weight in the freezer than around half the live weight, approximately 60%. Buying in bulk like that will pay in savings for the freezer the first time, after that, it gets a lot cheaper. If you can only swing a half, obviously you'll have to find someone to go in with on the purchase, that's about the only hassle really.
Substitute the white flour pasta for something like spinach or other veggie noodles like Jerusalem artichoke pasta, and substitute half the cheese for a splash of olive oil and some sprinkled on nutritional yeast. Just keep sprinkling it on and do some slow stirring of it until it hits the texture you want.
Why don't they just hire another hundred thousand "security officers" and start setting up weigh stations at random out on the street and make people get weighed. Those that don't pass some obscure BMI chart, too fat (or too skinny, outside their perfect "norm") according to them, get fined and put on the "terrorist watch list", because they are abusing the environment and consuming more of their "fair share" and taking up "too much" of the health care system theoretically and so on. Three times someone fails their checks, they get sent to the "reeducation camps". Oh, and they get an embedded RFID chip after the first failure, "for security tracking purposes".
They got caught almost immediately stretching the truth on their latest drivel. When Pelosi and others on the anti gun side started saying "90% of guns seized in Mexico came from the US" it turned out that that 90% was a figure based only on some selected weapons the Mexican authorities decided to forward the serial numbers of. It doesn't include all weapons seized. They cherry picked the data, and that was all the first big headlines were about. Now that this has been "clarified" it went from front page to page 17 section D in the back of the paper, the typical way they deal with this sort of thing. She is also in the news lately caught lying about her first exposure to the torture practices in the various wars going on. She's a known chronic liar.
The goons do this all the time, just an observation over a lot of decades watching them now. This is such an old and tired tactic in politics and with the government it is beyond dispute for anyone paying the least bit of attention. That's not a rant, it is an *observation*.
This is obviously the most second amendment (among other amendments) unfriendly administration in a long time. They have an agenda, and they started almost immediately trying to drum up support in advance for another big anti gun push. The Mexican drug war boogieman was part of it. Now tie that in with the latest exposure of them trying to classify so many people as "domestic terrorists", those leaked law enforcement papers, I am sure you read those articles as well. Seeing a pattern yet?
Go ahead, believe the liars, your call. Me, lie to me once, maybe I'll miss it, part of life, shit happens. Lie to me hundreds of times like has been proven with government on many issues, (and I gave you two verified HUGE examples of lies as just a general reference, spoken by many government spokestards, lies that have cost millions of lives and made obscene war profits for the liars and their wallstreet drinking buddies), and you know what? I ain't gonna believe you. And anyone who might believe chronic serial liars is, like I said, naive.
Ya, and many guns smuggled down to central america by rogue CIA and other (para)military jerks during their decades long support for tin pit dictators and wannabes, like the Contras, are still down there. Plane loads and plane loads of them. The are some of the same jerks who are part of the drug smuggling cartels themselves, when they aren't running renditioned victims to torture centers or doing other stuff like smuggling opium out of afghanistan.. So in that sense, ya, some the guns originally came from the US.
I will repeat, the BULK of the firearms, especially the select fire rifles and the larger weapons, are sourced down there to begin with because they have been in the area for awhile, or are imported from overseas directly. Some come from the US lately, but nothing like what is down there already and what is being imported from asia and eastern europe directly. They are finding weapons with no serial numbers. Not ground off numbers, these are production runs, directly manufactured without the numbers to begin with for just such sales. And a lot of the other ones can be traced from official US military sales to nations down there including Mexico, then they "disappear", they don't want to talk about those, because they have no defense for the abysmal state of inter nation gun sales to regimes like the completely corrupt Mexican Army and the various police forces down there. No telling how many death squad people got trained at the school of the americas where they were pushed off as righteous and responsible "military officers" from tyrannies down there, and they then got the weapons to do that stuff. Been going on for *generations* now. Places like that are where the bulk of the weapons come from, not private US sales. Big orders, overseas where they are made, or to tyrannical regimes down there in the past. That crap that proven liars like Pelosi are repeating that 90% come from the US and from legit gun dealers and "gun show loopholes" and so on are just more big fat lies. Some do, of course, but most? Not even close.
If it-it being any official announcement about anything important- comes from a government spokestard or bureaucratic lackey, put your heavy duty skeptic hat on, because the odds are heavy you are being lied to. I mean really, how many thousands of lies, big and small, does it take to sink in that they lie more often than not? What's it gonna take? How much longer are intelligent people going to keep believing those crooks and murderers? If they have an agenda to push, something that is controversial and important to them for pushing their globalist new world order crap, they lie to push it, that is their proven and overwhelming default behavior.
Put it this way, if you believe their crap about this, you probably got sucked into the Iraqi WMD BS as well. They lied about that, they lied about the Tonkin gulf attacks, both those lies lead to big huge wars, you think they WOULDN'T lie about something lesser than that, to get their civilian disarmament agendas pushed through?
The drug cartels are rich. They get their weapons on the open (black) market by the container load, shipped directly to them or they use some of their fleet of planes or boats to bring them in. These are smugglers, remember, and *also* businessmen, they are going to pay wholesale rates direct from the manufacturer/jobber or they are stolen from the Mexican military (and the Mex military is more just an arm of the smugglers than not, same as their upper level so called "police" establishment). Do you have ANY idea -example-what a legal registered select fire AK is going for now in the US, and the hoops you have to jump through to buy and sell them? The smugglers are NOT going to be doing that and paying 3 grand for a 100 buck wholesale rifle.
There is no "gun show loophole" or legit gun dealers in the US who are selling fully automatic rifles and RPGs etc in mass quantities to be smuggled to Mexico. That is just so ludicrous as to be mega laughable. It's a stupid talking point outright lie the gun grabbers came up with. There's a few go south, that's inevitable given the nature of the business and the US insane prohibition war on some drugs, but I'd be surprised if it approached 1%, and most of those would be just fancy expensive pistols so that the various drug cartel soldiers can have little macho weapons to carry. The serious stuff is wholesale blackmarket sourced from asia and eastern europe for the most part.
Right off the bat, as in other things, one size doesn't fit everyone. With that said, the "problem" with the attached generator trailer doesn't exist, people in suburbia would park it in their garage (where it can act as an emergency home generator, something people might want anyway) and folks in town don't even have to buy them, they could be *rented* for the few times a year when they go to the grandparents, etc.
A hundred mile range pure EV is good enough for millions of drivers today, they just don't drive more than that per day. I have read average commute in the US is 33 miles. And being a pure EV, it doesn't have to tote around the ICE and fuel tank, a significant weight reduction, meaning the battery bank is now a more normal load and can be larger than the battery bank in a plug in hybrid, and the vehicle will still weigh less. And when they do need that ICE, the generator trailer, being on its own axle it is easier to tow than carry. Towing occasional decent weight is always easier than carrying, that extra axle works.
Really, there's very little downside to it and it isn't a kludge, it's a remarkably workable and common sense solution.
Cramming an ICE AND the electric drive train AND the batteries AND the liquid fuel tank all in something that is supposed to be light weight is the big kludge. It also makes the vehicle *twice* as expensive as it needs to be, and *significantly* heavier once you start talking about a plug in hybrid with even 40 miles range, let alone a hundred. Most of the time, for most people, they won't be using the generator so it wouldn't be attached, so as a purchase option or once in awhile special trip rental, there's little downside to it. With a hybrid, you are already buying the whole package anyway, jso if you split that up, with the generator part on a trailer instead of built in, you don't HAVE to haul it with you all the time.
If the range you need to drive daily is just too close to "batteries flat" stage, you don't need an electric then, just get a normal gas or diesel and be done with it (my datsun diesel pickup gets 40 mpg!) My next ride, a project vehicle, will be electric (but I will retain the diesel, I like choice), probably build one of the chevy s-10 conversion kits, they keep getting cheaper.
Another poster pointed it out up above a little in the thread. It's called a generator trailer for long trips. Short trips (we'll call it 100 miles or less) are now adequately covered with existing battery tech, thousands of home built EV rides have proven this. And AC Propulsion had an interesting variation on the genny trailer, it attached in two points and then made an inline rigid "modular hybrid" that was easy to drive with and didn't have any of the "backing up" problems that some people might have with conventional trailers. Their high performance electric car + the genny trailer still fit inside a normal parking space as well, and gave the electric car an unlimited range using conventional fuels when it was really needed, just like any other normal car.
The main reason we don't have electric vehicles right now is that it is seriously disruptive technology that really screws with and threatens most established motor vehicle manufacturers and their kissing cuzzins in the oil industry. They have fought it severely and want to keep pushing overly complicated and overly expensive "hybrids", and keep throwing one off "concept cars" at the public, because they can make more "per unit" and they make more with repairs and faster replacements with the type of vehicles they make and sell now.
EVs are so simple and robust in design compared to most gasoline cars that built in quantity they can be cheap and last easily twice as long without major repairs. Even with today's average kilowatt hour rates, it is conceivable to only have around a 2-3 cents a mile driving cost. The savings right there might pay for your insurance and eventual battery pack replacement, and then some. think about how easy it will be every 5 or ten years to "upgrade" by just getting a new battery pack that will be more powerful and lighter, etc. You won't *need* to buy a new car near as often.
Either way, the Chinese and Indian builders will win here with really cheap and "good enough" electric cars for the masses, not those lame "start at 50 grand and go up from there" models you read about. They are going to have affordable electric cars out sooner than most other nations efforts, and will be able to stomp on prices. The only other company in the running now (of the majors) for real electric vehicles is Renault/Nissan with their tie in to the Better Place project, which is developing the whole EV stack, vehicles plus charging stations plus battery pack swapout stations. They are planning on using the subsidized cellphone and plan model for this. You'll get the vehicle cheaper upfront, and buy the electricity from them with some dedicated charging card. All the other electric vehicle makers are niche and boutique makers, all with high prices and very limited production runs, like Tesla.
The above isn't off-topic, just think about the post he is replying to first, then re-read what he wrote/quoted. It is exactly on-topic. It isn't even subtle, it just works.
Yes, I meant the sender would set the priority based on the time criticality of the message and/or importance, etc., using expected adult behavior, and yes, that would include using a low priority flag if the message was in fact low(er) priority. The recipient would have to be psychic to know what priority is in advance in most cases so it would by default be mostly the sender's responsibility. And yes, I would expect the sender, anyone who I might expect to receive a voicemail from, at least in my meatspace circle of friends and relatives, to use common sense and act appropriately. If the sender abused it enough to become annoying, the recipient could have an override on any messages from them, or just block them, whatever. As to outlook, never even seen it, never used windows much at all, and never as my day to day desktop, so I have no idea how that works there.
Really. Cellphones now have enough memory for that. You shouldn't have to call back and use up airtime minutes/cost to get voicemail. It should be a user configurable setting. A priority setting would be nice as well, perhaps altering the ring, one ring means THIS IS TIME CRITICAL IMPORTANT, another is "answer when you get a chance" another could be "the voicemail is all you need, no reply necessary", along those lines.
I used to drive a fiat 850 spider. Dang *smaller* than a Nano and what a fun little car, wish I still had it. Medium zippy and got 50 MPG! I rebuilt the engine and transaxle and it was just swell. Worked fine as a commuter and although it wasn't a real hotrod, being a little bitty convertible it was a babe magnet, they'd go "cute"!! heh,. fringe benefits;)
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No can do! That will be a super DMCA violation by then, circumventing protection features, with penalties like exile on Rura Penthe for a first offense and they get nasty after that....
..and BTW I agree with you, will be to institute selling their electricity to you the same way they have to get it, at variable rates. When they have to go get some peak power juice, the costs go way up, real fast. They might just decide to pass those fees on to you with smarter meters, maybe even down to per minute pricing. You decide to run your heaviest loads during peak power costs for them, be prepared to pay a lot more for it. It could happen! Take them a bit to get it pushed through local legislatures and PUCs, but I am sure they have well trained lobbyists for these tasks.
Is this guy adding in the few trillion (whatever, some hugemongous number of dollars) over the past few decades to keep a huge military presence in the mideast, all tax payer dollars? Or is he yet another one of those people who maintain our presence there has nothing to do with oil supply, it is just a coincidence?
I'd call that military expense an oil industry stealth subsidy and it dwarfs any ethanol subsidy or mandated cost. Dwarfs it, stomps it into the ground, not even in the same league. People who bitch about the small change ethanol subsidy always seem to conveniently leave out we run the US military in a major way as Chevron's and Exxon's bitch. That's a lot of scratch, jack.
And how about the economic impact of exporting those dollars for crude? Once a dollar leaves the nation for your crude, if it doesn't come back almost immediately, especially in diverse fashion, not just buying up government debt paper or enriching the same handful of military weapons systems companies it always has, the endless wars for endless blood profits boys, it has massive and negative compounding effect on lost productivity and wealth domestically for everyone else. Your imported crude costs several times more than what you pay for it directly at the pump in other words, because you have just screwed your economy over bad, except for a select few "golden" connected fatcat industries, plus because a lot (not all, but a lot historically) of that cash winds up in inimical and dictatorial regimes, so it is a direct threat to US security on several different levels. Put a cost on that, in dollars and blood on this Memorial Day.
If you can actually parse the article, the problem is using chintzy plastic that just doesn't work well with alcohol in some aspects of engine construction leading to major failure, because of too high a blend ratio, and that is the only single thing I agree with in his complaint list.
This is the car companies fault, directly, it is NOT a secret at all that US gasoline has had 5 or 10% ethanol in it for years now, or could have, so it should have been assumed consumers would be sticking it in the tank, and the effects of alcohols are chemically understood. They just chose to ignore it and should be forced to recall and fix those engines that fail because of their ignoring something that just about everyone knows, it is written on the pumps themselves! How could these huge companies miss that? Oh wait, I forgot, they are all run by Limo riding doofuses who don't even pump their own gas, their chauffeurs do that as they run them to and from their private jets.....
Personally, I am in favor of no more than 5% blends, or pure 100% ethanol, one or the other, with the consumer left with the choice at the dealers and at the pumps. With a 100% ethanol, they can design engines that will run quite well on it.. flex fuel engines or higher concentration blends in normal gasoline engines make no engineering sense at all. I remember this SAME EXACT ISSUE way way back when they did a big ethanol push for a few years, dang such a long time ago now,,maybe late 70s or so. Peoples fuel lines would rot out fast because of the ethanol. Now then, it wasn't their fault, they had no idea that alkyhaul would be stuck in the gasoline, but now? No way, 100% car companies fault, and oil companies as well if they cheat or screw up and make too strong a concentration blend. They made a huge point back then on insisting that 10% blends were pushing the envelope there, so stay below that. This isn't new news at all and those car companies should be stuck up against the wall over this and be forced to pay for their cheapness.
There are more hidden costs than farm subsidies once you start talking about energy sources, and let's treat these car companies as responsible adults and make them fess up to just screwing up bad and eat some of their capitalist dogfood (of course that has fallen out of favor lately, keep throwing the most tax money at the largest and most
You said you are running Linux on your laptop, and it doesn't quite work with some other stuff that I am guessing is microsoft specific? ( I am not a business software user at all so therefore I don't follow these things much at all) Then you suggest redhat should work to make it better, etc by throwing some devs at it (which costs them cash obviously) instead of spending cash on lawyers. Fair enough, that makes sense and is logical! So, here is the obvious question, I am wondering if you are then running a paid-for redhat distribution on that work laptop or not, so that you and your company are helping to pay to make linux better so it interoperates better in the work environment, or just running joe's random distro you downloaded for free, or what.
I was thinking the exact same thing about those wall street goofballs in charge of Chrysler and the Jeep brand. If ever a company could go off by themselves and prosper IF it was run by actual *enthusiasts*, there is an example right today. They've just constantly destroyed it over and over again and think they can keep charging more and more money. They've turned what was an actual niche product that worked and filled that niche, and was built very simple and rugged, that had about the best brand loyalty you can get, into "me too" bastardized yuppie SUV vehicles type company, and are driven now by people who, for the most part, are afraid to get them dirty. I mean, dang, what a waste. Here's an example, take what should be the flagship, the traditional short wheelbase good ground clearance CJ type vehicle, designed to get you from point A to B in about any terrain you can throw at it, in any weather. Where the heck is a high torque fuel efficient simple and rugged diesel option for the USA market? Unobtanium. Export they have some, and barely at medium quality and still way too expensive and complex and not as rugged as could be, but for the US, no see'um, they don't even offer that.
Sugar cane is not able to be grown in most of the US. In fact, the very largest sugar cane operations that we had are now being closed down around the Everglades in order to bring back the "sponge" wetlands for insuring better water management. Whereas corn is grown in huge geographical areas and our farmers are set up for it. I'd be surprised if it wasn't something like 50 or 100 to 1, corn to cane growers.
Large monoculture requires expensive custom equipment, it is hard to go from one crop to a radically different crop in other words, and your farm itself might not be suitable, as in, you aren't going to be growing sugar cane in nebraska. You could sugar beets, but again, specialized equipment.. A regular midwest corn/soybean farm will have millions in land and equipment and rather high operating costs, just so they can net what is in essence a normal middle class wage when the season is good and the market doesn't rape them. They can't just switch to something else very easily. Ethanol production has helped to bring about at least somewhat better stability in the markets for them, guaranteed sales because the demand to use it in gasoline blends is there.
The other thing with corn is, it is not all "used up" to make ethanol, what is left over is still suitable for animal feed, and millions of tons of year get used exactly for that purpose. I don't know if that aspect of the economics is usually understood in these conversations about corn ethanol, nor do people seem to take the "backup liquid fuel insurance" adequately as "worth something", but I personally think it is. I know if we ever went through another big embargo or one of those political loons decides to *really* light up the mideast and the straits of hormuz are closed for an extended time, I would rather we had the infrastructure in place and up and running and be able to still turn out a billion gallons of ethanol, than *not*. Insurance. Put a price on that, I can't, other than it is a lot more than zero. Add that to the economic cost and it looks like a better deal then.
Because I know that is all we have for a backup. The national crude storage is the only other thing we have to rely on in an emergency, and that has to be refined, and the lag time is huge. Ethanol is loads faster, plus it can be accomplished in an emergency with some rather crude equipment, most anyplace, again, another form of insurance, diversification, especially away from vulnerable coastal areas like texas and louisianna.
Brazil can do ethanol cheaper because they have a ton of cheap human labor-I mean back breaking really cheap as in hardly anyone in the US who pushes that as an option would like to be out there doing that work with a machete in the hot sun 16 hours a day themselves (as in talk is cheap, back breaking labor is acceptable as long as someone else does it ;)) for serf wages, and it is also tropical there, meaning sugar cane can be grown over large areas.
Just depends on the geography, climate and what the local labor situation is. Some areas it might be better to do palm oil or coconut oil, others perhaps canola/rapeseed, some cane, some corn, some....a big potential list. potato vodka fuel.
They are working on better biofuels all the time with breeding and so on. Who knows, maybe the algae stuff will win eventually. Switchgrass, jatropha, don't know, We need "all of the above" right now though. All the ethanol and plant based biodiesel we get now is still considered to be first generation efforts, from wherever it is sourced, it is just distilling the cheapest locally available bulk sugar stuff or pressing out oils and refining them a little. The tech will get better as long as we don't kill the biofuels industry off right now because it isn't "perfect" yet.
And that thing about corn ethanol driving up prices so poor people couldn't eat? Total crap, you can blame commodities speculators and assorted other wall street human predators for the bulk of the cost runups there and where that money gets skimmed off, just like they are doing with everything else. Another subject, for another time perhaps...
The point is, the need for desks will always be there. He has a desk that was built stout enough so it can last through generations of humans using it. One good desk can be built instead of ten chintzy ones that fall apart after a few years, like those pressed sawdust hunks of crap they push at the office supply stores now. In that sense, it is probably a pretty efficient use of the materials and multiple humans will get the benefit from it. And being steel, even when it is finally so worn out that it isn't worth fixing, the steel itself is easily recyclable, whereas pressboard is just landfill mulch.
And as for not needing to support weight, I know I can't be the only one here who has climbed on a desk to change the lightbulb overhead or to run cables through drop ceilings. Try doing that with your pressboard and little peg lock together marvel.
My personal desk I am sitting at right now is a very adeqaute and simple cobjob made from an old birch plywood and fir edging (strong) platform single bed I built years ago and now just laid across two of those similar type antique made from heavy steel filing cabinets. Yep, used it to paint the ceiling, climbed right up on the sucker, didn't need to move it, just throw a dropcloth over it. Probably could stick 1,000 lbs on the thing if I really wanted to. Would I replace it with an officemax special? Not only no but hell no!
Really, there's something to be said for building things to last in the first place, this use stuff for a short time and then throw it away is highly energy intensive and wasteful. Build/buy strong, then recycle or repurpose like I did with the bed, that's the way to save time, energy and cash.
Photovoltaics in the past decade are just finally getting to mass production scales where the costs drop fast. When they were first introduced, they cost over 10 grand a small inefficient panel and were used primarily in space missions.
Economies of scale *work*, you don't have affordable PV yet because of resistance to it from the entrenched energy monopolies and because the solar makers had to make do with leftover bad/scrap silicon wafers from the chip industries. New fabs dedicated to just PV production are coming online this year and next year.
And BTW, your grid supplied is cheap *now*, but do you have a long range contract which guarantees a price, say 10 or 20 years? And is there any amount you can give them to make it a sale instead of a long term lease where you build no equity? Do you know what it will cost you exactly then in the future with such a contract? If so, could you identify your electric company? Just wondering, I have asked this question many times now here and elsewhere on the net and haven't had any takers yet.
You can get such contracts and price guarantees with some of the alternatives. That's the point.
I know PV doesn't work in all areas all the time, but it certainly can and does work in numerous areas just fine. There is no single magic energy solution. They all have upsides and downsides, so I won't argue that.
As to corn ethanol, I was *careful* to point out is a a transitional crop to get some sort of viable market going and to get enthusaism up, such as in the article. Even the people who push corn now admit that, it is to help get established the interest in biofuels and to also insure at least some form of limited liquid fuel availability insurance in case of force majeur disruptions to traditional supplies, which can happen overnight and ruin your whole day. so no, I disagree, it isn't a boondoggle when you add in the fact it is affrordable insurance plus, me being a farmer, I knoiw the US is setup to grow corn in vast quantities and we do so every year. so at least we could maintain some supplies if needs be for a modest extended period if something bad where to happen.
I know I *personally* had to pay 10 bucks a gallon for two gallons-the limit you could get- back during the OPEC embargo, just enough gas to get home and park, and therefore not enough to go to my job the next day, said job was then lost shortly. Stuff happens. We had no biofuels industry of note back then, the choice was eat it raw and only get two gallons if you were lucky, or ....screwed. I actually saw a guy purchase and pour two cases of ron rico 101 into his RV tank and drive away...you just couldn't get gas, not enough to matter anyway, and we had *no national backup*.
We have no guarantees on petroleum supply for the future, none, AND we are MUCH worse off now than back during the OPEC embargo days when it comes to that, we are forced to import a much higher percentage of our oil (and export all that cash, a lot of it going to some rather dubious regimes....) and any number of possible and credible scenarios could seriously disrupt supply to the point you would feel lucky to get gallons of anything that burned for ten bucks. Or a hundred bucks.
If the US had to go within a week from the prices we have now to ten bucks a gallon at very limited supply levels, we'd collapse if it went on more than a month or so. I don't mean just get inconvenienced, I mean collapse economically.
Domestic produced biofuels are our only credible backup fuel insurance we have now. Throw it away if you want....
Insurance is just that, and insuring alternative supplies have real but hard to quantify costs associated with them *until you need them*, then they seem quite cheap. Your other insurance for this or that costs you x-bucks a month, and you get nothing for itm, there is no ROI there, and you hope you never need it, but if you do, it pays off. Mumbling about unobtanium electric vehicles not on the market yet at all exc
Restrictive laws and regulations. Use your imagination and past examples to see how this works. Here's an example from 30 years ago. When solar PV first really became popular, it was a bear to even get a local "permit" to install it, it "didn't pass code". I had friends that personally went through that. Then the electric companies fought it constantly because they didn't want grid tied systems. Their goal is to sell you a product that can never be completely paid off, home generation is a direct threat to that business model. Small scale personal hydroelectric is possible, but it is near impossible to get it permitted, from environmental impact statements to possiblly the endangered three eyed flying newt was spotted ten miles downstream of your proposed little turbine, and so on,etc.. Now we have an alternative liquid biofuels industry with ethanol and biodiesel from traditional sources, as a first transitional step towards unbiquitous renewable liquid fuels, but a lot of interests still don't want it because "it takes food away from poor people" and "drives up costs", "hurts the environment" etc, even though it is the only viable alternative we have at the present for the existing millions and millions of ICE vehicles out there right now, leaving us always walking on eggshells wondering when the next huge price jump will come out of the blue (like it has several times over the past few years) or when the supplies might be disrupted due to some new enlarged wars in the middle east or whatever.
Look at computer software and the introduction of FOSS for another example, we are all aware of how it has been fought against at some lofty levels, and how they went about it, we've discussed that a lot here. Heck, back to vehicle, electric cars are buildable, they were just as common as any other vehicle a century ago, and we've had examples in the more recent past such as the EV1, and people *begged* to buy them, they loved them, yet they were recalled and crushed. They worked too good, they were a threat. There's a movie about it. That's why you have seen all these big car companies try to foist off those ludicrously expensive "hydrogen fuel cell cars" with small numbers of prototypes instead of just building at least some electric cars in mass quantities starting years ago. They can look like they are doing something while actually delaying tech that could be on the market. Guess who owns the patents on building large NiMH batteries, the ones we could have been using since the early 90s for electric cars and are still priced way too high to be really well adopted?
When you are talking about *disruptive technologies* and their economic impact, there is always an element of resistance from those older entrenched industries and concerns who could see their bottom line impacted negatively. They will spend what it takes (in both money and effort) overtly or covertly to at least delay and make adoption of the newer or better tech more complicated and expensive then it needs to be.
Tundra? About as fertile as it gets. It is just frozen now. The big worry is rapid release of gigatonnage of methane from that frozen tundra. If we can live through that, and that is a whopper "if", and I have serious doubts about it meselfs, the resultant areas will be quite suitable for farming (after the surface dries out a little of course, which it should if the permafrost completely melts).
Anyone who is in a business where the products can be reporesented by bits and bytes will just have to come to the realization that their world has changed radically. And that's just that.
The digital age has some seriously profound implications for society, one of them is, such products are now so close to free to copy as to be almost unmeasurable. Note I didn't say free to make the first edition, but this is replicator technology. The future got here, at least the first really large step towards a star trek type level of existence. The only way that such digital products can enjoy a high "per unit" cost like a tangible product forever is by strictly enforced and rather draconian laws, across the planet, that will force a tremendous amount of artificial scarcity into the market.
Now you have to ask, is this *really* the direction we want humanity to go in? How much do you really want to lock down computers and the net in order to be able to accomplish this goal? What percentage of the global population do you want to throw in prison, or deny them digital products because of excessive cost? (remember, not everyone makes real good developed nation styled wages).
And if they somehow manage to institute such a huge increase in the global policing forces, what about the next step, when gadgets can be made for next to nothing, then food replicated, then energy sources that anyone could theoretically get and use for next to free, and etc? How far exactly do you want to hold back such technology in order to lock in place "per unit" pricing on this or that?
Run it out a century or three, think about it, look at our rate of intellectual and technological advances, and think of the ramifications if we stay stuck in the 20th century with the business models and prices from then. Will that be progress, or will that be societal stagnation if true scarcity gets legally intertwined with artificial scarcity in order to maintain a century's ago "jobs"? How far do we go once down that path? Would you be willing to keep paying whatever 15 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity once there is some mr. fusion and we know that electricity costs could now be .000000000015 cents a kilowatt hour, but that older price got carved in stone by laws? What's the point of eliminating want and scarcity if it gets legislated against and it becomes a crime to actually use really radical new technology?
Ya, it sucks to think about having to find something else to do, but like we kept getting told, time marches on, this is a global society and business world now, some jobs are just going to fall by the way side as technology advances. How many whalers are left, a few dozen (most of them masquerading as "research scientists"), when there used to be tens of thousands of them maybe? Should society have just taken the whaling industry, shut it down but kept making everyone else shell out as much as they used to to them, even though they had switched to kerosene for their lamps or electricity?
My thoughts on this are, feel lucky you live in such an age and can enjoy the benefits "in kind" from others who also can offer really cheap and free digital bits, and try to work towards getting the tangibles next. Who knows, if we don't blow it, eventually everyone could be taken care of, cheap or free, for all their wants, and we could all just enjoy..whatever the hell we wanted to! Imagine an end to scarcity, don't be afraid of it or try to perpetuate it.
I'm in food production, tangibles, to make copies of this stuff still takes some serious work all the time, and each copy is still expensive to produce, you can't just do all the work once and get paid a thousand or a million times over and over again for it..but..when and if such a time as we can replicate food like we can replicate digital bits, fat city! I will *gladly* go find something else to do if that means we can eliminate starvation across the planet, I mean jump up and down from joy that has been developed. In the me
If you get a small freezer (around 6 cubic feet or so), it will hold a small side of beef (say if you start out with a 600 lb critter). If you get a larger freezer obviously it will hold the whole thing or an even larger animal, and you can get chest freezers upto around 26 cubic feet in most appliance stores. You can usually find a "side" or half a beaste for around a dollar a lb live weight (at least what I am seeing in the auction market news around the US), and after the packing house processes it and you pay their fees, it will work out to around 2 bucks a lb for all the various cuts, and you'll have a bit more in weight in the freezer than around half the live weight, approximately 60%. Buying in bulk like that will pay in savings for the freezer the first time, after that, it gets a lot cheaper. If you can only swing a half, obviously you'll have to find someone to go in with on the purchase, that's about the only hassle really.
Substitute the white flour pasta for something like spinach or other veggie noodles like Jerusalem artichoke pasta, and substitute half the cheese for a splash of olive oil and some sprinkled on nutritional yeast. Just keep sprinkling it on and do some slow stirring of it until it hits the texture you want.
Why don't they just hire another hundred thousand "security officers" and start setting up weigh stations at random out on the street and make people get weighed. Those that don't pass some obscure BMI chart, too fat (or too skinny, outside their perfect "norm") according to them, get fined and put on the "terrorist watch list", because they are abusing the environment and consuming more of their "fair share" and taking up "too much" of the health care system theoretically and so on. Three times someone fails their checks, they get sent to the "reeducation camps". Oh, and they get an embedded RFID chip after the first failure, "for security tracking purposes".
They got caught almost immediately stretching the truth on their latest drivel. When Pelosi and others on the anti gun side started saying "90% of guns seized in Mexico came from the US" it turned out that that 90% was a figure based only on some selected weapons the Mexican authorities decided to forward the serial numbers of. It doesn't include all weapons seized. They cherry picked the data, and that was all the first big headlines were about. Now that this has been "clarified" it went from front page to page 17 section D in the back of the paper, the typical way they deal with this sort of thing. She is also in the news lately caught lying about her first exposure to the torture practices in the various wars going on. She's a known chronic liar.
The goons do this all the time, just an observation over a lot of decades watching them now. This is such an old and tired tactic in politics and with the government it is beyond dispute for anyone paying the least bit of attention. That's not a rant, it is an *observation*.
This is obviously the most second amendment (among other amendments) unfriendly administration in a long time. They have an agenda, and they started almost immediately trying to drum up support in advance for another big anti gun push. The Mexican drug war boogieman was part of it. Now tie that in with the latest exposure of them trying to classify so many people as "domestic terrorists", those leaked law enforcement papers, I am sure you read those articles as well. Seeing a pattern yet?
Go ahead, believe the liars, your call. Me, lie to me once, maybe I'll miss it, part of life, shit happens. Lie to me hundreds of times like has been proven with government on many issues, (and I gave you two verified HUGE examples of lies as just a general reference, spoken by many government spokestards, lies that have cost millions of lives and made obscene war profits for the liars and their wallstreet drinking buddies), and you know what? I ain't gonna believe you. And anyone who might believe chronic serial liars is, like I said, naive.
Ya, and many guns smuggled down to central america by rogue CIA and other (para)military jerks during their decades long support for tin pit dictators and wannabes, like the Contras, are still down there. Plane loads and plane loads of them. The are some of the same jerks who are part of the drug smuggling cartels themselves, when they aren't running renditioned victims to torture centers or doing other stuff like smuggling opium out of afghanistan.. So in that sense, ya, some the guns originally came from the US.
I will repeat, the BULK of the firearms, especially the select fire rifles and the larger weapons, are sourced down there to begin with because they have been in the area for awhile, or are imported from overseas directly. Some come from the US lately, but nothing like what is down there already and what is being imported from asia and eastern europe directly. They are finding weapons with no serial numbers. Not ground off numbers, these are production runs, directly manufactured without the numbers to begin with for just such sales. And a lot of the other ones can be traced from official US military sales to nations down there including Mexico, then they "disappear", they don't want to talk about those, because they have no defense for the abysmal state of inter nation gun sales to regimes like the completely corrupt Mexican Army and the various police forces down there. No telling how many death squad people got trained at the school of the americas where they were pushed off as righteous and responsible "military officers" from tyrannies down there, and they then got the weapons to do that stuff. Been going on for *generations* now. Places like that are where the bulk of the weapons come from, not private US sales. Big orders, overseas where they are made, or to tyrannical regimes down there in the past. That crap that proven liars like Pelosi are repeating that 90% come from the US and from legit gun dealers and "gun show loopholes" and so on are just more big fat lies. Some do, of course, but most? Not even close.
If it-it being any official announcement about anything important- comes from a government spokestard or bureaucratic lackey, put your heavy duty skeptic hat on, because the odds are heavy you are being lied to. I mean really, how many thousands of lies, big and small, does it take to sink in that they lie more often than not? What's it gonna take? How much longer are intelligent people going to keep believing those crooks and murderers? If they have an agenda to push, something that is controversial and important to them for pushing their globalist new world order crap, they lie to push it, that is their proven and overwhelming default behavior.
Put it this way, if you believe their crap about this, you probably got sucked into the Iraqi WMD BS as well. They lied about that, they lied about the Tonkin gulf attacks, both those lies lead to big huge wars, you think they WOULDN'T lie about something lesser than that, to get their civilian disarmament agendas pushed through?
The drug cartels are rich. They get their weapons on the open (black) market by the container load, shipped directly to them or they use some of their fleet of planes or boats to bring them in. These are smugglers, remember, and *also* businessmen, they are going to pay wholesale rates direct from the manufacturer/jobber or they are stolen from the Mexican military (and the Mex military is more just an arm of the smugglers than not, same as their upper level so called "police" establishment). Do you have ANY idea -example-what a legal registered select fire AK is going for now in the US, and the hoops you have to jump through to buy and sell them? The smugglers are NOT going to be doing that and paying 3 grand for a 100 buck wholesale rifle.
There is no "gun show loophole" or legit gun dealers in the US who are selling fully automatic rifles and RPGs etc in mass quantities to be smuggled to Mexico. That is just so ludicrous as to be mega laughable. It's a stupid talking point outright lie the gun grabbers came up with. There's a few go south, that's inevitable given the nature of the business and the US insane prohibition war on some drugs, but I'd be surprised if it approached 1%, and most of those would be just fancy expensive pistols so that the various drug cartel soldiers can have little macho weapons to carry. The serious stuff is wholesale blackmarket sourced from asia and eastern europe for the most part.
Right off the bat, as in other things, one size doesn't fit everyone. With that said, the "problem" with the attached generator trailer doesn't exist, people in suburbia would park it in their garage (where it can act as an emergency home generator, something people might want anyway) and folks in town don't even have to buy them, they could be *rented* for the few times a year when they go to the grandparents, etc.
A hundred mile range pure EV is good enough for millions of drivers today, they just don't drive more than that per day. I have read average commute in the US is 33 miles. And being a pure EV, it doesn't have to tote around the ICE and fuel tank, a significant weight reduction, meaning the battery bank is now a more normal load and can be larger than the battery bank in a plug in hybrid, and the vehicle will still weigh less. And when they do need that ICE, the generator trailer, being on its own axle it is easier to tow than carry. Towing occasional decent weight is always easier than carrying, that extra axle works.
Really, there's very little downside to it and it isn't a kludge, it's a remarkably workable and common sense solution.
Cramming an ICE AND the electric drive train AND the batteries AND the liquid fuel tank all in something that is supposed to be light weight is the big kludge. It also makes the vehicle *twice* as expensive as it needs to be, and *significantly* heavier once you start talking about a plug in hybrid with even 40 miles range, let alone a hundred. Most of the time, for most people, they won't be using the generator so it wouldn't be attached, so as a purchase option or once in awhile special trip rental, there's little downside to it. With a hybrid, you are already buying the whole package anyway, jso if you split that up, with the generator part on a trailer instead of built in, you don't HAVE to haul it with you all the time.
If the range you need to drive daily is just too close to "batteries flat" stage, you don't need an electric then, just get a normal gas or diesel and be done with it (my datsun diesel pickup gets 40 mpg!)
My next ride, a project vehicle, will be electric (but I will retain the diesel, I like choice), probably build one of the chevy s-10 conversion kits, they keep getting cheaper.
Another poster pointed it out up above a little in the thread. It's called a generator trailer for long trips. Short trips (we'll call it 100 miles or less) are now adequately covered with existing battery tech, thousands of home built EV rides have proven this. And AC Propulsion had an interesting variation on the genny trailer, it attached in two points and then made an inline rigid "modular hybrid" that was easy to drive with and didn't have any of the "backing up" problems that some people might have with conventional trailers. Their high performance electric car + the genny trailer still fit inside a normal parking space as well, and gave the electric car an unlimited range using conventional fuels when it was really needed, just like any other normal car.
The main reason we don't have electric vehicles right now is that it is seriously disruptive technology that really screws with and threatens most established motor vehicle manufacturers and their kissing cuzzins in the oil industry. They have fought it severely and want to keep pushing overly complicated and overly expensive "hybrids", and keep throwing one off "concept cars" at the public, because they can make more "per unit" and they make more with repairs and faster replacements with the type of vehicles they make and sell now.
EVs are so simple and robust in design compared to most gasoline cars that built in quantity they can be cheap and last easily twice as long without major repairs. Even with today's average kilowatt hour rates, it is conceivable to only have around a 2-3 cents a mile driving cost. The savings right there might pay for your insurance and eventual battery pack replacement, and then some. think about how easy it will be every 5 or ten years to "upgrade" by just getting a new battery pack that will be more powerful and lighter, etc. You won't *need* to buy a new car near as often.
Either way, the Chinese and Indian builders will win here with really cheap and "good enough" electric cars for the masses, not those lame "start at 50 grand and go up from there" models you read about. They are going to have affordable electric cars out sooner than most other nations efforts, and will be able to stomp on prices. The only other company in the running now (of the majors) for real electric vehicles is Renault/Nissan with their tie in to the Better Place project, which is developing the whole EV stack, vehicles plus charging stations plus battery pack swapout stations. They are planning on using the subsidized cellphone and plan model for this. You'll get the vehicle cheaper upfront, and buy the electricity from them with some dedicated charging card. All the other electric vehicle makers are niche and boutique makers, all with high prices and very limited production runs, like Tesla.
The above isn't off-topic, just think about the post he is replying to first, then re-read what he wrote/quoted. It is exactly on-topic. It isn't even subtle, it just works.
Yes, I meant the sender would set the priority based on the time criticality of the message and/or importance, etc., using expected adult behavior, and yes, that would include using a low priority flag if the message was in fact low(er) priority. The recipient would have to be psychic to know what priority is in advance in most cases so it would by default be mostly the sender's responsibility. And yes, I would expect the sender, anyone who I might expect to receive a voicemail from, at least in my meatspace circle of friends and relatives, to use common sense and act appropriately. If the sender abused it enough to become annoying, the recipient could have an override on any messages from them, or just block them, whatever. As to outlook, never even seen it, never used windows much at all, and never as my day to day desktop, so I have no idea how that works there.
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%2C+howto%2C+html
Really. Cellphones now have enough memory for that. You shouldn't have to call back and use up airtime minutes/cost to get voicemail. It should be a user configurable setting. A priority setting would be nice as well, perhaps altering the ring, one ring means THIS IS TIME CRITICAL IMPORTANT, another is "answer when you get a chance" another could be "the voicemail is all you need, no reply necessary", along those lines.
I used to drive a fiat 850 spider. Dang *smaller* than a Nano and what a fun little car, wish I still had it. Medium zippy and got 50 MPG! I rebuilt the engine and transaxle and it was just swell. Worked fine as a commuter and although it wasn't a real hotrod, being a little bitty convertible it was a babe magnet, they'd go "cute"!! heh,. fringe benefits ;)