The big gamble for online retailing is sudden increases in shipping costs*. Any planetary wildcard, say a sudden huge war centered around the straits of hormuz... could double petroleum prices within days. Then perhaps individual delivery of individual online purchased items might actually cost more than bulk purchases going to the local stores at the mall where the consumers might drive once, but stop at several stores and make several purchases. You just don't know and have zero guarantees there. Delivery of (relatively cheap) items that are still currently profitable for the online retailer and affordable and desirable by the consumer might all of a sudden cost more just for the shipping than the entire purchase price, which would collapse the online guy in favor of back to the brick and mortar guy.
I don't retail, but if I did I think I might like to always have both business presences, "just in case", and to cater to people's preferences.
*that and whenever joe government gets real serious about collecting online taxes, which will probably happen sometime.
They are pretty primeval to be sure, that was the point, they have a few focused tasks. Even with the domestic chickens roosters have been known to be fairly fierce fighters, hence the deal with chicken fights around the world. I was just noting that something like that, totally wild and large, would be quite the predator.
We have a small flock of what I now call the "cluckeraptors", because they certainly *act* like I imagine dinosaurs would act. I mean, they may be small and feathery and soft looking, but watch them run around the yard and interact with each other and you can see how utterly ruthless and focused they are. A few primary drives to them and not much else. For instance if one of them gets injured or the least bit "off" or ill, the others will be merciless with them, it's like they can't stand weakness and translate that to "food". Fascinating to watch really. Lean down close and look a rooster right in the eye, you can see the miniature power there. If they were say ten feet tall or larger, yes indeedy they would be serious nasty predators.
yes, that would be better along with legalizing the growing of industrial hemp, and further research into cellulosic ethanol. The last two would allow ethanol (and many other products) from different land, so called "marginal" land that isn't being used effectively right now.
In addition, pure electric vehicles combined with the "solar carport" idea could go a long way to helping the transportation sector. The studies say the average commute is something like 33 miles round trip, a distance easily reached with existing and cheaper battery tech. We need good pure electric vehicles-not expensive hybrids, cheap pure electrics- sitting on the carlots now, and not those hundred grand sportscars either, just regular plain vanilla commuter cars. We need some *choice* in the marketplace. For longer trips, to give them unlimited range, the small tow behind generator trailer.
...any of the small distros like..damn small? They might still work, or like slax might be even better. I think for the most part though, today, RAM is more important than CPU speed. I know up to last year I was still using a 200 pentium pro and after I crossed the quarter gig of RAM size it ran fedora (1 and 2) OK.
Farmers have NOT practiced CROSS SPECIES selective breeding for centuries. There is simply no comparison between what is being done now with "GM" and what has been done since farming began with just trying to develop more adapted and useful plants. We are getting crops introduced now that are chimeric basically, they would *never* occur in nature no matter what, and no one has any idea at all what the long term effects will be, just the corporations go on the default assumption anything they do with GM is "safe" and it is up to some bureaucrats (in the revolving door industry/government money shuffle) and consumers to do the long term testing.
I think that is pretty stupid.
The only "safety standards" that could apply and would work in the cases of cross species "products" would be generational long studies maintained in highly secure airtight labs, and even then it should be a default until hugely proven otherwise that they could possibly be as harmful as developed bioweapons.
And I am not a luddite, I have just been a gardener and farmer for now more than half a century, and I tell you, some of what they are doing is scarier to me than nuclear weapons proliferation to nutjob nations. because the potential for a mass "whoops" screw up is simply *huge*. Heck's windchimes, just the "normal" invasive species screwups humans have done, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes just accidentally, has been destructive enough. I spend enough of my time as it is now just trying to deal with multiflora rose, japanese privet and kudzu, let alone trying to deal with stuff that has been bred on purpose to be herbicide "resistant". To me, it is good science and common sense to be WAY skeptical of a lot of the GM production that is going on now, and I personally take it as a default that if it is laboratory manufactured it is suspect immediately. I save my own seeds, have done so for decades, and none of what I grow is harmful. Those guys can't make that claim with a straight face, because they don't know, this is all pretty much new science what is going on, and it is coming way too fast and hard and with too much "this quarter's profit" mentality behind it for there to be safety claims from their side of any true merit.
yes -> "As for the military presence that's a completely different thing."....so I said no, it is a direct energy cost. It isn't different at all, it is a cost for making sure that some big US oil companies can continue with their energy cartel action. They get a massive mercenary force to protect their interests paid for by the US tax payer and wrapped up in a flag and false patriotism, encouraged by media propaganda and bribed off "energy insiders" government sock puppets at the very highest levels. And they are this close right now to ripping off the bulk of iraq's oil instead of letting the poor people there use it for their rebuilding.
It's because once Dell starts offering linux, then the DRIVERS for all the various hardware and games, etc, will follow and *everyone* who runs linux in general will benefit. Dell and HP are the big kahunas with desktops, the entire industry will sit up and take notice that "Linux has arrived" once their linux offerings are common place. The peripheral industry is not impressed enough with the small tier 3 linux -capable computer vendors right now, a lot of them just totally ignore linux or offer some token crappy drivers, etc., but with Dell they will have to take notice and do something about it.
You can't really with a straight face say our huge decades long and expensive military presence and cost in the middle east has nothing to do with oil. Yes, it IS an energy cost that is hidden inside of general taxes and *should* be included in calculating what energy really costs. And it is considerable, both in terms of dollars and in terms of blood.
Iraq-evile tyrannical dictator-also an ocean of oil, man we need a huge war there to save those folks! Cost, over a trillion before they are done most likely
Zimbabwe-evile tyrannical dictator-no oil-ho hum, another harsh press release condemning evile dictator policies and so forth, cost, a few dollars
Just a coincidence they chose iraq? I don't think so....
perhaps, but it wouldn't be near as much fun, and you need a lot of background examples in order to get the impression across of what a clear and dangerous precedent this is for technology/humans in general. If you wait until things get real bad, it sucks to try and change it, that's why I gave examples, real world examples.
If they get away with restricting advanced tech now-even just cheap digital copies, what will they stop at? The tech to make extremely cheap digital copies is sort of like the magic 200 MPG carburetor-but it exists, it's real. That they are trying to get away with it, restricting it, crippling it by law and on purpose, is very dangerous for the future, if you care about things like that. And it is not primarily because "they" have something to lose, it is because all of society has something to lose by allowing that precedent.
Now I am old enough and ornery enough and imbued with a certain sense of basic right and wrong. And as such, some of the things I did when I was younger was I walked in protest marches where the bullshit laws said people of a certain color could not use certain public facilities or go into certain open to the public businesses. Yes, that was "the law" back then and the pigs tried to enforce it, sometimes extremely violently, on orders from their masters, their pig political bosses and pig lawyers and pig "businessmen" who were worried about their pig "profits" should "the law" change, or some other weirdo crap they spewed. The law needed to be violated en masse once it became apparent the system was corrupt and so hopelessly broken that the only actions left to take was either break the law peacefully as possible or break the law violently and have a revolution. I can say it got close probably.
Back before my time, they tried to enforce "no, you can't ever have a drink, for any reason", and that was "the law", and the law was bullshit and it needed to be violated, en masse, and it was, because of basic human nature, that humans can see when things get to the "fuck you, that is total bullshit" stage. Humans can have a drink if they want to. I don't drink, don't like it, did for a long time but just quit, grew tired of it and prefer to be with all me wits all the time-but I don't care if other folks want to because it is their right to buy it or make it and drink it. The bullshit law eventually got changed back to medium non-bullshit. Because of mass "civil disobedience" which is a polite way of saying "you are full of bullshit and I no longer am going to respect your asinine "law".
It's something you can either see or not, two choices.
Right now copyright and patents are hopelessly broken, because of pigs and their profits, so they are being ignored, because it is basic human nature to not be gouged, lied to, taken advantage of, and so on.. People all over the developing world can't get affordable medicine to save their lives, so now they are just going "ok, enough,we've tried for years to be reasonable, but now that it is patented bullshit with extremely high artificial scarcity prices based on western income levels, which don't exist where we arem we are just going to make the medicines and fuck you and your gouging bullshit pig profits", because it is way past the obvious to anyone rational "bullshit stage" over there.
Now I personally don't download or violate any copyrights with music and movies, because I don't give two craps about hollywood movies and screeching popular music. I have more than what I want, bought it legit years ago, keep getting nailed with format changes, etc, so enough already, noticed the price gouging and bullshit "laws" that keep getting extended, so I quit buying their crap new. And if I can't get it over the air for free by the support of ads, either music or movies or shows, I just don't care, but I *certainly*, on general human principles can relate to people who are human and know they are being lied to, price gouged to the extreme, and forced into technological serfdom by the bullshit pigs of the media industry who want to keep technology to themselves and charge 1000% markups complete with more DRM and other bullshit buggywhip job protection practices and "laws". What do they expect, people will jump up and down and scream HALLELULAH! WE CAN KEEP BEING PRICE GOUGED OR IGNORED!
It used to be illegal for those pesky "commoners" to READ, that was "the law", it was bullshit and got violated and people learned anyway.
The redcoat pigs tried to say the early settlers had to pay taxes to some ignorant drunk royal "king" 3 thousand miles away for no representation, that was obvious bullshit,so the "law" got broken, along with enough redcoat heads to make the point stick.
And so on. Once stuff starts to get into the obvious bullshit stage, you can just expect it to be ignored/worked around/resisted, and depend
When it became apparent that making digital copies was a close to free as things can get, all of society should have embraced and adapted it and adapted TO it. Instead, we got DRM and hyperinflated prices, enforced (legally) Luddism. Content distributors seriously dropped the ball and should have just gone on to find something else to do, it is now up to society to drag our technology back from those who are the real thieves, because in the LONG term, our collective use, and our rights in general, of using advanced technology trumps even their copyrights and laws and profits. There are some simple basic precepts here, number one is-humans are allowed to embrace new useful technology. No one group or industry should be allowed to steal it from the rest of the human race, which is exactly what they are attempting to try and do and failing at, but creating misery along the way.
I will attempt an analogy: If tomorrow "we" came up with the zero point backyard Mr. Fusion universal cheap/free energy source, something that would immediately revolutionize travel, heating and cooling, manufacturing, etc, all the things we use energy for now, should we A)severely limit the use, restrict hell out of it, make it illegal in all sorts of situations to use it because the entrenched energy industries and their profits would suffer, or B) use it and get those folks to go on to do something else?
The entertainment and otherwise "digital products" industries (software would have to be included, as well as books, etc, anything which can now be cheaply reproduced by the billions of copies) are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their products in copied digital form are worth barely a tiny bit more than the cost of replication,and as such, that should be the financial cost for other humans to accumulate "copies".
We are in a transition stage where old world pricing models established back when making copies was actually a lot more tedious and expensive and took some effort, now..it just isn't so. There is obviously still *some* expense, but it is way less than 1% of what it was one generation ago.
There is no perfect solution that will satisfy everyone at this exact time, there are quite legitimate points of view to be addressed all over in this situation, but the gestalt is-we have made such a *profound and significant* technological breakthrough here that has the potential to greatly enrich all of mankind that we should NOT artificially hobble and cripple it, that is the worst possible way to deal with it.
DRM, extraordinarily high prices for cheap copies, laws against making copies, crippled and defective by design hardware, etc are all rather silly from a future historical perspective. It really *is* enforced flat-earth styled Luddism.
If you class the mothership and the exoatmospheric craft as just componenet parts of a coherent system, the old x-15 and the kinetic ASAT missile and now spaceship one used air breathers for the "first stage" of a two stage system.
I think maybe this might work, a 5 stage complete system, airbreathers at two places in the launch stack, where they might work the best.
1) and so on to 5...airbreather (mothership, a normal big modified plane) to normal rocket(dropped and fired, mothership returns for landing), that dropped rocket boosts to high enough speed to go to air breather again with a scramjet, That in turn gets to high enough altitude where another normal rocket takes over for final push to get out to orbit, once in orbit, the ion engine takes over for day to day manuevering/travel
That is exactly what the person in the article is looking for, a small mesh network capable self powered cheap and tough laptop designed for kids.And seeing as how it is for a school, have the school apply and see if they can get them in quantity. It might have to be the elected schoolboard though, the project only deals with governments. And I don't think they could get anything like that at that price anyplace else, in the 100-150 dollar range, not that is a complete machine, wireless, self powered so you don't have to worry about batteries or plugs or chargerts, etc. Even the cheapest miniPC still needs a screen and keyoard and mouse, etc.running up the price The OLPC machine is perfect for this purpose.
According to this guy, the US consumer has already paid for a lot more bandwith than what we are collectively getting, and the implication is, hold the telcos feet to the fire until they provide it-then maybe we can revisit network neutrality. A contract is a contract, a public commitment should be followed through on.
..for folks in your situation, who might want an electric vehicle but no place to plug it in. How about a service-maybe run at cost by the local government??? Anyway, you have your normal parking meters, how about if they had an option to plug-in there as well, so while parked you were getting a charge at the same time? Another option,perhaps where you work, lobby for it as a job perk. At your apartment or townhouse, maybe they could offer it, designated electric car parking places. Yes, I can see your point on all electric without having your own home..not a lot of options right now. So-hybrids are probably your best bet *right now*.
The bottom line is,the most bang for the next transportation buck, is to reuse a lot of what we already have. We have the infrastructure already in place, at huge cost, all over the nation, to deliver liquid fuels. that's what we are set up for, just is is all. Already bought and paid for, installed, nothing new to build there. Now we are also "right there" with the alternative and cleaner/renewable liquid fuels, ethanol and biodiesel, and you can get flex fuel vehicles right now that will run on any mixture ethanol/gasoline, and the new cleaner diesels are hitting the US roads soon, and biodiesel blends are appearing at stations. This is available *now*, no waiting.
To go to a battery swap out economy means all new "fuel" stations all over. Hundreds of thousands of them would need to be built-but we already have fuel stations. You'll be paying for that for a long time before they even break even. I'm just not seeing it happen, but perhaps some niche market there. urban property is expensive, and existing fuel stations (mostly convenience stores now), simply do not have the warehouse room to hold hundreds of large battery packs, their lots are small, enough parking for some to fill up and go into the store typically and not much else. Where would you even store the things? And they have to be laid out for charging, and some serious powerlines run to each store to do bulk charging. Very expensive-as opposed to just using what they already have.
anyway, goodluck! I think if you want a pure electric, but are stuck in an apartment with dismal parking and no place to plug in, get an electric assist bicycle or scooter, something you can haul inside with you at home and charge it up. heh, I've put a 250 cc motorcycle in the living room before, on the second level, so I know getting a little electric scooter inside is doable! The things are cheap, too, I've been looking at them, either kits to convert your existing bike over, or a normal looking small scooter, just all electric. Really not that expensive, just google around, lot of sites out there selling those things now. Even if you can't get it all the way in and have to keep it locked outside, you can still pull the battery and bring it in with you, at work and at home for that matter.
We already have millions...
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
..of humans-serious urbanites- who spend the vast bulk of their entire lives inside of man made rooms, voluntarily, and actually pay money for that privilege. So what's the diff if the "city" is nailed to the ground or floating around yonder space?
I don't think getting people to live onboard a huge ark ship would be all that hard, and it would be well tolerated if it was large enough/designed with some "great" rooms for enjoyment as an alternative "outdoors", and balanced with the population on the ship after some research. I don't know how much squarefootage per person they would need, but it isn't much given the contentment with crowded cities you can see. No additional evolution required really. Have an ark "replica" on the ground, all volunteers, after initial screening, for the final test, must undergo six months inside of that to weed out folks who just can't hack it. You could probably also get some psych studies from the cruise ship industry and from various navies submarine services, and from Antarctica research colonies to see what problems arise and how they are overcome. Prisons wouldn't be good to study because it is the opposite of voluntary.
Drop a jackson in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, snail mail it to the artiste of choice with a "thanks for the tunes, dudes" thankyou note folded around it.. There ya go, clear conscious, no need for two hundred dollar seats and driving 4 hours round trip. Or order some of their schwag off of their site, or pressed disks. Long as I can remember, bands have always sold T shirts, so there ya go, buy some shirts to help them out.
In essence, as long as your money is going to the band and NOT to the middle man skimmers, I think it would be appreciated, well spent, it shows support, and it also shows *no support* for the middleman skimmers and their DRM nonsense.
The biggest problems with the middleman producers, etc, is they have actually placed serious tehnological luddism laws on the books, and luddism practices into the industry. they want to lock in tech advances for themseles, to make more money, but not let everyone else enjoy tech advances. instead of embracing the drastically reduced costs associated with modern copying technology, and passing the savings on to their customers, they fought it tooth and nail, and people just rebelled at the gouging and went off and file shared.
All of this could have been mostly avoided with them not staying locked on their old business models of they had to make "so much a unit" in profits. All they had to do was drop prices as tech advances made it possible, and increase sales that way dramatically.
Not only are they greedy, they are actually retarded, and are helping to hold back tech advances, which is downright *nasty* to everyone. They're jerks! The talent has never liked dealing with them, their customers at the wholesale level don't like them, they don't like each other in the industry, and now they have been successful at annoying a lot of the end user retail customers.
They need a group "intervention" like hardcore alkys get or something to wake them up.
I can't say much about your drivel other than you are rather bonkers. No, "socialism" didn't make General Chemical and Sludge dump toxic waste into the drinking water supply, GREED and being jerks did.
As to being a liberal, I am what is now called a "paleocon", a normal plain vanilla regular old timey Constitutionalist, and as such, I recognize the need for SOME government, because we need it. Not overbearing and bloated. I mean I started my political activism working both normal conservation issues AND on the GOLDWATER campaign. Notice root word, conservative-conserve-be a good steward. I see nothing contradictatory there. Now I did pull one year as a dues paying capital L, but left because of similar bonker theories I kept hearing about total private ownership of everything, laws be damned, etc. Nuts. they won't work in the real world because corruption-which you pointed out-is there. In government we at least have a slim chance to get the bums out, with entrenched corporations whcih invariably fall into cartels and monopolies-you can't get rid of them! Freaking vampires! And their track record? Dismal. We are forced into a lesser of evils stance, some government, some market, case by case basis following our old simple laws works the best.
No, I don't want your corporation owning all the water, no thank you, nor the air,no thank you. They failed it, proof is in the pudding, they had their chance and blew it bigtime, and even today, even with regulations they are still pretty sleazy about it to save a buck for themselves.. And I sincerely doubt most other people would think your switch to corporations owning everything and "leaving it up to the market" is a good idea either. We dumped "snakeoil" as a concept, because that is what happened, mass snakeoil from "the market". And that's not a strawman, that's as direct as it can be put. No, I reject your corporatist company store model total private ownership of every single possible thing theories. Some things, not everything, but some important things, are better left to the commons, and to be protected by the commons. Our founders thought so as well, that is one of the main reasons for having a government in the first place! The major rivers, etc, "owned" by the people in the states they went through, not by ACME Rivers inc., equaly shared out to the middle for the people, for general usages, and we finally realized as a society that because of asshat corporate water polluters, to use my exact point again which fits perfectly as an example, the jerks who just refused to stop, so we needed to slap some regs on them, because..well..they were asshats about it, they screwed up royally when left to "market forces", because in a lot of cases "market forces" just won't work, that is just proven past data back from when we didn't have regulations about such things, they all just dumped crap willy nilly, and it caused *problems* that "the market" wasn't addressing.
For some things they do,markets work just fine and no one cares if you make a buck, that's the deal we all work under, for others they don't, we need a little common government action, and it is as simple as that.
Sorry, don't agree, that's medium nuts swapping out heavy battery packs with a forklift as opposed to attaching a small trailer.I don't think folks want to gas up using a forklift and swapping out for a who knows how beat on used battery pack. I mean, c'mon now, I have both here where I live, forklifts, and trailers from single axle jobs I can lift and move with one hand all the way to serious road trailers. A small trailer with a lift wheel assembly is just not that hard to "attach". I'd take that and being able to just pump some gas at a normal gas station as opposed to pulling up and having a forklift come over, detach the conenctors, lift out a half ton battery pack and so on. that is WAY more hassle than using the gas stations we have now, that are built, work, paid for, anyone can use them (except I think oregon where they think you are a weenie and can't pump your own gas). And trailers, especially normal small ones? MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people tow a trailer every weekend around the US,using small 4 cylinder cars on up. Trailers come in all sizes, and one large enough for a little recharege geeny just wouldn't need to be all that big. egads man where do you live?? You've never seen this?? It's "normal human" do-able thing to do is to have trailers with all sorts of stuff, boat trailers, landscapers trailers, contractors, people moving from this house to that house, you name it. Every size shape config possible. Already out there, nothing weird and new that needs any billion buck government "study" about it. No "hydrogen highway" pie in the sky twenty years and twenty trillion dollars from now scheme needed..
The AC propulsion concept is even simpler as trailers go, as it is a rigidly attached trailer, its axle stays inline with the vehicle axle,it doesn't flex, which means even backing up is little different from backing up without it. And the car itself is a high performance sports car basically. The entire unit car+trailer still fits inside a normal parking place. The same idea could be equally applied to a less expensive less performance oriented normal commuter car and generator trailer, and as I noted, just the idea of having an emergency home back up generator is now highly popular due to the hurricanes/blizzards/ice storms over the past few years. The expression is "selling like hotcakes". Yes, most folks living in high rise condos or apartments wouldn't go buy a generator, that still leaves..*most* of the USA who could use one once in awhile. So it is a potential "same as" purchase, something they either have or are going to get anyway, so why not integrate it into the cheaper electric vehicle idea? Even those high rise folks might weant to own the electric car, and if they knew they could slide down to U B rentin it and get the genny trailer for the long trip to the beach or to see grammaw it might help them out and help get pure electrics adopted, because that is the one thing folks are hesitant on is range mostly, and the geeny/trailer modular approach fixes this. It's a natural!
Really, trailers in general are common, the tech is neither weird nor hard to pull off (pun intended), engineering-wise or legally. And electric brake hookups are common as well, and not even needed or required on light duty trailers. Nothing you mentioned is much of a problem at all, and as stated, it is a rather easy and practical solution for the electric commuter car then having longer range when you need it on demand. As mentioned in earlier articles and discussions, average commute in the US is 33 miles, and electric vehicles with a 50 mile range are very doable right now with non exotic and cheap batteries. Generators are *very* common, any size/config/fuel source you might want. Trailers are trailers, again, very common, cheap to very expensive.
If you are buying a hybrid system, you are still buying a generator, just with the hybrid cars now, it sucks as a home generator. You are paying a lot for something only useful as a car, wherwas a modular hybrid you can get both
...water pollution. Nothing. Zero. It took serious government regulations in a lot of directions at the federal, state and local level and mass civil indignation to do that, because the "market" ALL found it cheaper-better for their "shareholder value and bottom line"- to just dump their toxic waste wherever they felt like it and to transfer health care costs to -anyplace else, downstream usually.
Ya, maybe if we had waited say a few hundred years it might have "corrected", as the remaining few non mutants rose up finally and bumped off the remaining few mass polluters who were left, but for some reason society decided to step in with some stricter laws before it got that bad.
I could name numerous other examples but that is an easily seen one.
Sometimes you just can't wait for the "this quarter's profits" mentality boys to do the right thing. Some things might need to be addressed now, once they are clearly understood to either be a problem now or soon will be, as opposed to waiting around for a long time in an economic and social experiment to see what might happen. And believe it or nuts, there are more important things on this Earth than some corporation's bank balance.
That is not to say that government can't be hugely overbearing and infested with generic mass stoopidity itself,of course it is,I speak out about government abuses all the time, but "the market" is no better really, neither extreme -leave it all to the market (caveat-emptor brand corporatism would be the extreme there) or all to the government(cult of the personality one leader-one party-mass bureaucracy and no one even wants to work any longer except under the whip"- ism government would be the extreme that other way)- is the end all or be all of "solutions". I think what we have more or less constructed- at least semi-regulated markets and at least an attempt at a semi-regulated society via this government thing-is probably the best humans can do at our (barely out of the medieval level intellectually or psychologically) evolutionary stage.
Of the two extremes and the middle, the middle is what we mostly have and falls under the lesser of the three big evils choices. It is imperfect, absolutely no doubt there, but the best we can do right now. What we can do is to keep chipping away at the imperfections on a case by case basis.
same as a lot of guys including me in ye olden hipster days did it with our air cooled volkswagens. They had really crappy heaters stock anyway(unless you had the factory gasoline burners which never worked that good anyway and were kinda rare), and we always liked to tweak more power, so that meant yanking the stock exhaust with heat exchange out and putting in like hollywood style headers or something. No heat even possible then. Solution? $20 propane camping heater, use fire extinguisher wall mounting clamps, mount that thing inside, crack a window, turn it on. *Very* good heat in new england when I did it.
Electric cars could have integral 5 gallon propane tanks and little efficient furnaces with outside exhaust, then all you need is a small electric blower if you want it. I think it might be possible to have a propane powered AC as well, thinking about it, they have propane powered refrigerators that work well, I own two of them myself.
At least that is one way to do it. It's such a small space I don't think you would burn much propane, and you can get propane all over heck in the US.
You have a small generator and fuel tank mounted on a trailer. For day to day commuting, it is detached, you run on batteries, recharge at home. For longer trips, attach the trailer, plug it in, start the generator. Stop and fill up with gas or diesel whenever. Additional empty cargo space as an option with a slightly larger trailer of course, making it normally useful.
See? Range problem solved. Call it the modular hybrid approach, instead of normal hybrids that tote TWO engines (ICE engine AND electric motor) AND a fuel tank AND batteries all in the same vehicle. No wonder there isn't enough room for enough batteries! they got two cars worth of drive-around do dads crammed into one car! Nuts. Make the vehicle pure electric, plenty of room for cheap batteries then, stick the fuel burning engine and fuel tank in a separate trailer. Make the genny trailer an option, maybe people would only need one a few times a year, they can rent it.
AC Propulsion has had that for their electric car, which gives it unlimited range same as any other car, and they came up with a "rigid" trailer that doesn't even flex, making it easy for n00bs to tow and backup with it.
With that said, towing a small trailer is *easy*, go out to the burbs any weekend, a lot of the vehicles are towing something around, so it shouldn't matter there, and having a whole house sized backup emergency generator sitting out in the driveway is an added + bonus good idea anyway.
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The big gamble for online retailing is sudden increases in shipping costs*. Any planetary wildcard, say a sudden huge war centered around the straits of hormuz... could double petroleum prices within days. Then perhaps individual delivery of individual online purchased items might actually cost more than bulk purchases going to the local stores at the mall where the consumers might drive once, but stop at several stores and make several purchases. You just don't know and have zero guarantees there. Delivery of (relatively cheap) items that are still currently profitable for the online retailer and affordable and desirable by the consumer might all of a sudden cost more just for the shipping than the entire purchase price, which would collapse the online guy in favor of back to the brick and mortar guy.
I don't retail, but if I did I think I might like to always have both business presences, "just in case", and to cater to people's preferences.
*that and whenever joe government gets real serious about collecting online taxes, which will probably happen sometime.
They are pretty primeval to be sure, that was the point, they have a few focused tasks. Even with the domestic chickens roosters have been known to be fairly fierce fighters, hence the deal with chicken fights around the world. I was just noting that something like that, totally wild and large, would be quite the predator.
We have a small flock of what I now call the "cluckeraptors", because they certainly *act* like I imagine dinosaurs would act. I mean, they may be small and feathery and soft looking, but watch them run around the yard and interact with each other and you can see how utterly ruthless and focused they are. A few primary drives to them and not much else. For instance if one of them gets injured or the least bit "off" or ill, the others will be merciless with them, it's like they can't stand weakness and translate that to "food". Fascinating to watch really. Lean down close and look a rooster right in the eye, you can see the miniature power there. If they were say ten feet tall or larger, yes indeedy they would be serious nasty predators.
yes, that would be better along with legalizing the growing of industrial hemp, and further research into cellulosic ethanol. The last two would allow ethanol (and many other products) from different land, so called "marginal" land that isn't being used effectively right now.
In addition, pure electric vehicles combined with the "solar carport" idea could go a long way to helping the transportation sector. The studies say the average commute is something like 33 miles round trip, a distance easily reached with existing and cheaper battery tech. We need good pure electric vehicles-not expensive hybrids, cheap pure electrics- sitting on the carlots now, and not those hundred grand sportscars either, just regular plain vanilla commuter cars. We need some *choice* in the marketplace. For longer trips, to give them unlimited range, the small tow behind generator trailer.
...any of the small distros like..damn small? They might still work, or like slax might be even better. I think for the most part though, today, RAM is more important than CPU speed. I know up to last year I was still using a 200 pentium pro and after I crossed the quarter gig of RAM size it ran fedora (1 and 2) OK.
Never been there so had never eaten one, here is the wiki entry for anyone else who wants to see what a doner kebab is
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%B6ner_kebab#Ger
Farmers have NOT practiced CROSS SPECIES selective breeding for centuries. There is simply no comparison between what is being done now with "GM" and what has been done since farming began with just trying to develop more adapted and useful plants. We are getting crops introduced now that are chimeric basically, they would *never* occur in nature no matter what, and no one has any idea at all what the long term effects will be, just the corporations go on the default assumption anything they do with GM is "safe" and it is up to some bureaucrats (in the revolving door industry/government money shuffle) and consumers to do the long term testing.
I think that is pretty stupid.
The only "safety standards" that could apply and would work in the cases of cross species "products" would be generational long studies maintained in highly secure airtight labs, and even then it should be a default until hugely proven otherwise that they could possibly be as harmful as developed bioweapons.
And I am not a luddite, I have just been a gardener and farmer for now more than half a century, and I tell you, some of what they are doing is scarier to me than nuclear weapons proliferation to nutjob nations. because the potential for a mass "whoops" screw up is simply *huge*. Heck's windchimes, just the "normal" invasive species screwups humans have done, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes just accidentally, has been destructive enough. I spend enough of my time as it is now just trying to deal with multiflora rose, japanese privet and kudzu, let alone trying to deal with stuff that has been bred on purpose to be herbicide "resistant". To me, it is good science and common sense to be WAY skeptical of a lot of the GM production that is going on now, and I personally take it as a default that if it is laboratory manufactured it is suspect immediately. I save my own seeds, have done so for decades, and none of what I grow is harmful. Those guys can't make that claim with a straight face, because they don't know, this is all pretty much new science what is going on, and it is coming way too fast and hard and with too much "this quarter's profit" mentality behind it for there to be safety claims from their side of any true merit.
yes -> "As for the military presence that's a completely different thing."....so I said no, it is a direct energy cost. It isn't different at all, it is a cost for making sure that some big US oil companies can continue with their energy cartel action. They get a massive mercenary force to protect their interests paid for by the US tax payer and wrapped up in a flag and false patriotism, encouraged by media propaganda and bribed off "energy insiders" government sock puppets at the very highest levels. And they are this close right now to ripping off the bulk of iraq's oil instead of letting the poor people there use it for their rebuilding.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/13/opinion/ed
If you meant something different, sure, I missed it, and you can enlighten me so I can understand better, but that is how I read it for my response.
It's because once Dell starts offering linux, then the DRIVERS for all the various hardware and games, etc, will follow and *everyone* who runs linux in general will benefit. Dell and HP are the big kahunas with desktops, the entire industry will sit up and take notice that "Linux has arrived" once their linux offerings are common place. The peripheral industry is not impressed enough with the small tier 3 linux -capable computer vendors right now, a lot of them just totally ignore linux or offer some token crappy drivers, etc., but with Dell they will have to take notice and do something about it.
You can't really with a straight face say our huge decades long and expensive military presence and cost in the middle east has nothing to do with oil. Yes, it IS an energy cost that is hidden inside of general taxes and *should* be included in calculating what energy really costs. And it is considerable, both in terms of dollars and in terms of blood.
Iraq-evile tyrannical dictator-also an ocean of oil, man we need a huge war there to save those folks! Cost, over a trillion before they are done most likely
Zimbabwe-evile tyrannical dictator-no oil-ho hum, another harsh press release condemning evile dictator policies and so forth, cost, a few dollars
Just a coincidence they chose iraq? I don't think so....
perhaps, but it wouldn't be near as much fun, and you need a lot of background examples in order to get the impression across of what a clear and dangerous precedent this is for technology/humans in general. If you wait until things get real bad, it sucks to try and change it, that's why I gave examples, real world examples.
If they get away with restricting advanced tech now-even just cheap digital copies, what will they stop at? The tech to make extremely cheap digital copies is sort of like the magic 200 MPG carburetor-but it exists, it's real. That they are trying to get away with it, restricting it, crippling it by law and on purpose, is very dangerous for the future, if you care about things like that. And it is not primarily because "they" have something to lose, it is because all of society has something to lose by allowing that precedent.
Now I am old enough and ornery enough and imbued with a certain sense of basic right and wrong. And as such, some of the things I did when I was younger was I walked in protest marches where the bullshit laws said people of a certain color could not use certain public facilities or go into certain open to the public businesses. Yes, that was "the law" back then and the pigs tried to enforce it, sometimes extremely violently, on orders from their masters, their pig political bosses and pig lawyers and pig "businessmen" who were worried about their pig "profits" should "the law" change, or some other weirdo crap they spewed. The law needed to be violated en masse once it became apparent the system was corrupt and so hopelessly broken that the only actions left to take was either break the law peacefully as possible or break the law violently and have a revolution. I can say it got close probably.
Back before my time, they tried to enforce "no, you can't ever have a drink, for any reason", and that was "the law", and the law was bullshit and it needed to be violated, en masse, and it was, because of basic human nature, that humans can see when things get to the "fuck you, that is total bullshit" stage. Humans can have a drink if they want to. I don't drink, don't like it, did for a long time but just quit, grew tired of it and prefer to be with all me wits all the time-but I don't care if other folks want to because it is their right to buy it or make it and drink it. The bullshit law eventually got changed back to medium non-bullshit. Because of mass "civil disobedience" which is a polite way of saying "you are full of bullshit and I no longer am going to respect your asinine "law".
It's something you can either see or not, two choices.
Right now copyright and patents are hopelessly broken, because of pigs and their profits, so they are being ignored, because it is basic human nature to not be gouged, lied to, taken advantage of, and so on.. People all over the developing world can't get affordable medicine to save their lives, so now they are just going "ok, enough,we've tried for years to be reasonable, but now that it is patented bullshit with extremely high artificial scarcity prices based on western income levels, which don't exist where we arem we are just going to make the medicines and fuck you and your gouging bullshit pig profits", because it is way past the obvious to anyone rational "bullshit stage" over there.
Now I personally don't download or violate any copyrights with music and movies, because I don't give two craps about hollywood movies and screeching popular music. I have more than what I want, bought it legit years ago, keep getting nailed with format changes, etc, so enough already, noticed the price gouging and bullshit "laws" that keep getting extended, so I quit buying their crap new. And if I can't get it over the air for free by the support of ads, either music or movies or shows, I just don't care, but I *certainly*, on general human principles can relate to people who are human and know they are being lied to, price gouged to the extreme, and forced into technological serfdom by the bullshit pigs of the media industry who want to keep technology to themselves and charge 1000% markups complete with more DRM and other bullshit buggywhip job protection practices and "laws". What do they expect, people will jump up and down and scream HALLELULAH! WE CAN KEEP BEING PRICE GOUGED OR IGNORED!
It used to be illegal for those pesky "commoners" to READ, that was "the law", it was bullshit and got violated and people learned anyway.
The redcoat pigs tried to say the early settlers had to pay taxes to some ignorant drunk royal "king" 3 thousand miles away for no representation, that was obvious bullshit,so the "law" got broken, along with enough redcoat heads to make the point stick.
And so on. Once stuff starts to get into the obvious bullshit stage, you can just expect it to be ignored/worked around/resisted, and depend
how do they get and compress just oxygen from the atmosphere in general, at high speed and in-flight,in a short time period?
When it became apparent that making digital copies was a close to free as things can get, all of society should have embraced and adapted it and adapted TO it. Instead, we got DRM and hyperinflated prices, enforced (legally) Luddism. Content distributors seriously dropped the ball and should have just gone on to find something else to do, it is now up to society to drag our technology back from those who are the real thieves, because in the LONG term, our collective use, and our rights in general, of using advanced technology trumps even their copyrights and laws and profits. There are some simple basic precepts here, number one is-humans are allowed to embrace new useful technology. No one group or industry should be allowed to steal it from the rest of the human race, which is exactly what they are attempting to try and do and failing at, but creating misery along the way.
I will attempt an analogy: If tomorrow "we" came up with the zero point backyard Mr. Fusion universal cheap/free energy source, something that would immediately revolutionize travel, heating and cooling, manufacturing, etc, all the things we use energy for now, should we A)severely limit the use, restrict hell out of it, make it illegal in all sorts of situations to use it because the entrenched energy industries and their profits would suffer, or B) use it and get those folks to go on to do something else?
The entertainment and otherwise "digital products" industries (software would have to be included, as well as books, etc, anything which can now be cheaply reproduced by the billions of copies) are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their products in copied digital form are worth barely a tiny bit more than the cost of replication,and as such, that should be the financial cost for other humans to accumulate "copies".
We are in a transition stage where old world pricing models established back when making copies was actually a lot more tedious and expensive and took some effort, now..it just isn't so. There is obviously still *some* expense, but it is way less than 1% of what it was one generation ago.
There is no perfect solution that will satisfy everyone at this exact time, there are quite legitimate points of view to be addressed all over in this situation, but the gestalt is-we have made such a *profound and significant* technological breakthrough here that has the potential to greatly enrich all of mankind that we should NOT artificially hobble and cripple it, that is the worst possible way to deal with it.
DRM, extraordinarily high prices for cheap copies, laws against making copies, crippled and defective by design hardware, etc are all rather silly from a future historical perspective. It really *is* enforced flat-earth styled Luddism.
If you class the mothership and the exoatmospheric craft as just componenet parts of a coherent system, the old x-15 and the kinetic ASAT missile and now spaceship one used air breathers for the "first stage" of a two stage system.
I think maybe this might work, a 5 stage complete system, airbreathers at two places in the launch stack, where they might work the best.
1) and so on to 5...airbreather (mothership, a normal big modified plane) to normal rocket(dropped and fired, mothership returns for landing), that dropped rocket boosts to high enough speed to go to air breather again with a scramjet, That in turn gets to high enough altitude where another normal rocket takes over for final push to get out to orbit, once in orbit, the ion engine takes over for day to day manuevering/travel
That is exactly what the person in the article is looking for, a small mesh network capable self powered cheap and tough laptop designed for kids.And seeing as how it is for a school, have the school apply and see if they can get them in quantity. It might have to be the elected schoolboard though, the project only deals with governments. And I don't think they could get anything like that at that price anyplace else, in the 100-150 dollar range, not that is a complete machine, wireless, self powered so you don't have to worry about batteries or plugs or chargerts, etc. Even the cheapest miniPC still needs a screen and keyoard and mouse, etc.running up the price The OLPC machine is perfect for this purpose.
According to this guy, the US consumer has already paid for a lot more bandwith than what we are collectively getting, and the implication is, hold the telcos feet to the fire until they provide it-then maybe we can revisit network neutrality. A contract is a contract, a public commitment should be followed through on.
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http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.ht
..for folks in your situation, who might want an electric vehicle but no place to plug it in. How about a service-maybe run at cost by the local government??? Anyway, you have your normal parking meters, how about if they had an option to plug-in there as well, so while parked you were getting a charge at the same time? Another option,perhaps where you work, lobby for it as a job perk. At your apartment or townhouse, maybe they could offer it, designated electric car parking places. Yes, I can see your point on all electric without having your own home..not a lot of options right now. So-hybrids are probably your best bet *right now*.
The bottom line is,the most bang for the next transportation buck, is to reuse a lot of what we already have. We have the infrastructure already in place, at huge cost, all over the nation, to deliver liquid fuels. that's what we are set up for, just is is all. Already bought and paid for, installed, nothing new to build there. Now we are also "right there" with the alternative and cleaner/renewable liquid fuels, ethanol and biodiesel, and you can get flex fuel vehicles right now that will run on any mixture ethanol/gasoline, and the new cleaner diesels are hitting the US roads soon, and biodiesel blends are appearing at stations. This is available *now*, no waiting.
To go to a battery swap out economy means all new "fuel" stations all over. Hundreds of thousands of them would need to be built-but we already have fuel stations. You'll be paying for that for a long time before they even break even. I'm just not seeing it happen, but perhaps some niche market there. urban property is expensive, and existing fuel stations (mostly convenience stores now), simply do not have the warehouse room to hold hundreds of large battery packs, their lots are small, enough parking for some to fill up and go into the store typically and not much else. Where would you even store the things? And they have to be laid out for charging, and some serious powerlines run to each store to do bulk charging. Very expensive-as opposed to just using what they already have.
anyway, goodluck! I think if you want a pure electric, but are stuck in an apartment with dismal parking and no place to plug in, get an electric assist bicycle or scooter, something you can haul inside with you at home and charge it up. heh, I've put a 250 cc motorcycle in the living room before, on the second level, so I know getting a little electric scooter inside is doable! The things are cheap, too, I've been looking at them, either kits to convert your existing bike over, or a normal looking small scooter, just all electric. Really not that expensive, just google around, lot of sites out there selling those things now. Even if you can't get it all the way in and have to keep it locked outside, you can still pull the battery and bring it in with you, at work and at home for that matter.
..of humans-serious urbanites- who spend the vast bulk of their entire lives inside of man made rooms, voluntarily, and actually pay money for that privilege. So what's the diff if the "city" is nailed to the ground or floating around yonder space?
I don't think getting people to live onboard a huge ark ship would be all that hard, and it would be well tolerated if it was large enough/designed with some "great" rooms for enjoyment as an alternative "outdoors", and balanced with the population on the ship after some research. I don't know how much squarefootage per person they would need, but it isn't much given the contentment with crowded cities you can see. No additional evolution required really. Have an ark "replica" on the ground, all volunteers, after initial screening, for the final test, must undergo six months inside of that to weed out folks who just can't hack it. You could probably also get some psych studies from the cruise ship industry and from various navies submarine services, and from Antarctica research colonies to see what problems arise and how they are overcome. Prisons wouldn't be good to study because it is the opposite of voluntary.
Drop a jackson in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, snail mail it to the artiste of choice with a "thanks for the tunes, dudes" thankyou note folded around it.. There ya go, clear conscious, no need for two hundred dollar seats and driving 4 hours round trip. Or order some of their schwag off of their site, or pressed disks. Long as I can remember, bands have always sold T shirts, so there ya go, buy some shirts to help them out.
In essence, as long as your money is going to the band and NOT to the middle man skimmers, I think it would be appreciated, well spent, it shows support, and it also shows *no support* for the middleman skimmers and their DRM nonsense.
The biggest problems with the middleman producers, etc, is they have actually placed serious tehnological luddism laws on the books, and luddism practices into the industry. they want to lock in tech advances for themseles, to make more money, but not let everyone else enjoy tech advances. instead of embracing the drastically reduced costs associated with modern copying technology, and passing the savings on to their customers, they fought it tooth and nail, and people just rebelled at the gouging and went off and file shared.
All of this could have been mostly avoided with them not staying locked on their old business models of they had to make "so much a unit" in profits. All they had to do was drop prices as tech advances made it possible, and increase sales that way dramatically.
Not only are they greedy, they are actually retarded, and are helping to hold back tech advances, which is downright *nasty* to everyone. They're jerks! The talent has never liked dealing with them, their customers at the wholesale level don't like them, they don't like each other in the industry, and now they have been successful at annoying a lot of the end user retail customers.
They need a group "intervention" like hardcore alkys get or something to wake them up.
I can't say much about your drivel other than you are rather bonkers. No, "socialism" didn't make General Chemical and Sludge dump toxic waste into the drinking water supply, GREED and being jerks did.
As to being a liberal, I am what is now called a "paleocon", a normal plain vanilla regular old timey Constitutionalist, and as such, I recognize the need for SOME government, because we need it. Not overbearing and bloated. I mean I started my political activism working both normal conservation issues AND on the GOLDWATER campaign. Notice root word, conservative-conserve-be a good steward. I see nothing contradictatory there. Now I did pull one year as a dues paying capital L, but left because of similar bonker theories I kept hearing about total private ownership of everything, laws be damned, etc. Nuts. they won't work in the real world because corruption-which you pointed out-is there. In government we at least have a slim chance to get the bums out, with entrenched corporations whcih invariably fall into cartels and monopolies-you can't get rid of them! Freaking vampires! And their track record? Dismal. We are forced into a lesser of evils stance, some government, some market, case by case basis following our old simple laws works the best.
No, I don't want your corporation owning all the water, no thank you, nor the air,no thank you. They failed it, proof is in the pudding, they had their chance and blew it bigtime, and even today, even with regulations they are still pretty sleazy about it to save a buck for themselves.. And I sincerely doubt most other people would think your switch to corporations owning everything and "leaving it up to the market" is a good idea either. We dumped "snakeoil" as a concept, because that is what happened, mass snakeoil from "the market". And that's not a strawman, that's as direct as it can be put. No, I reject your corporatist company store model total private ownership of every single possible thing theories. Some things, not everything, but some important things, are better left to the commons, and to be protected by the commons. Our founders thought so as well, that is one of the main reasons for having a government in the first place! The major rivers, etc, "owned" by the people in the states they went through, not by ACME Rivers inc., equaly shared out to the middle for the people, for general usages, and we finally realized as a society that because of asshat corporate water polluters, to use my exact point again which fits perfectly as an example, the jerks who just refused to stop, so we needed to slap some regs on them, because..well..they were asshats about it, they screwed up royally when left to "market forces", because in a lot of cases "market forces" just won't work, that is just proven past data back from when we didn't have regulations about such things, they all just dumped crap willy nilly, and it caused *problems* that "the market" wasn't addressing.
For some things they do,markets work just fine and no one cares if you make a buck, that's the deal we all work under, for others they don't, we need a little common government action, and it is as simple as that.
Sorry, don't agree, that's medium nuts swapping out heavy battery packs with a forklift as opposed to attaching a small trailer.I don't think folks want to gas up using a forklift and swapping out for a who knows how beat on used battery pack. I mean, c'mon now, I have both here where I live, forklifts, and trailers from single axle jobs I can lift and move with one hand all the way to serious road trailers. A small trailer with a lift wheel assembly is just not that hard to "attach". I'd take that and being able to just pump some gas at a normal gas station as opposed to pulling up and having a forklift come over, detach the conenctors, lift out a half ton battery pack and so on. that is WAY more hassle than using the gas stations we have now, that are built, work, paid for, anyone can use them (except I think oregon where they think you are a weenie and can't pump your own gas). And trailers, especially normal small ones? MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people tow a trailer every weekend around the US,using small 4 cylinder cars on up. Trailers come in all sizes, and one large enough for a little recharege geeny just wouldn't need to be all that big. egads man where do you live?? You've never seen this?? It's "normal human" do-able thing to do is to have trailers with all sorts of stuff, boat trailers, landscapers trailers, contractors, people moving from this house to that house, you name it. Every size shape config possible. Already out there, nothing weird and new that needs any billion buck government "study" about it. No "hydrogen highway" pie in the sky twenty years and twenty trillion dollars from now scheme needed..
The AC propulsion concept is even simpler as trailers go, as it is a rigidly attached trailer, its axle stays inline with the vehicle axle,it doesn't flex, which means even backing up is little different from backing up without it. And the car itself is a high performance sports car basically. The entire unit car+trailer still fits inside a normal parking place. The same idea could be equally applied to a less expensive less performance oriented normal commuter car and generator trailer, and as I noted, just the idea of having an emergency home back up generator is now highly popular due to the hurricanes/blizzards/ice storms over the past few years. The expression is "selling like hotcakes". Yes, most folks living in high rise condos or apartments wouldn't go buy a generator, that still leaves..*most* of the USA who could use one once in awhile. So it is a potential "same as" purchase, something they either have or are going to get anyway, so why not integrate it into the cheaper electric vehicle idea? Even those high rise folks might weant to own the electric car, and if they knew they could slide down to U B rentin it and get the genny trailer for the long trip to the beach or to see grammaw it might help them out and help get pure electrics adopted, because that is the one thing folks are hesitant on is range mostly, and the geeny/trailer modular approach fixes this. It's a natural!
Really, trailers in general are common, the tech is neither weird nor hard to pull off (pun intended), engineering-wise or legally. And electric brake hookups are common as well, and not even needed or required on light duty trailers. Nothing you mentioned is much of a problem at all, and as stated, it is a rather easy and practical solution for the electric commuter car then having longer range when you need it on demand. As mentioned in earlier articles and discussions, average commute in the US is 33 miles, and electric vehicles with a 50 mile range are very doable right now with non exotic and cheap batteries. Generators are *very* common, any size/config/fuel source you might want. Trailers are trailers, again, very common, cheap to very expensive.
If you are buying a hybrid system, you are still buying a generator, just with the hybrid cars now, it sucks as a home generator. You are paying a lot for something only useful as a car, wherwas a modular hybrid you can get both
...water pollution. Nothing. Zero. It took serious government regulations in a lot of directions at the federal, state and local level and mass civil indignation to do that, because the "market" ALL found it cheaper-better for their "shareholder value and bottom line"- to just dump their toxic waste wherever they felt like it and to transfer health care costs to -anyplace else, downstream usually.
Ya, maybe if we had waited say a few hundred years it might have "corrected", as the remaining few non mutants rose up finally and bumped off the remaining few mass polluters who were left, but for some reason society decided to step in with some stricter laws before it got that bad.
I could name numerous other examples but that is an easily seen one.
Sometimes you just can't wait for the "this quarter's profits" mentality boys to do the right thing. Some things might need to be addressed now, once they are clearly understood to either be a problem now or soon will be, as opposed to waiting around for a long time in an economic and social experiment to see what might happen. And believe it or nuts, there are more important things on this Earth than some corporation's bank balance.
That is not to say that government can't be hugely overbearing and infested with generic mass stoopidity itself,of course it is,I speak out about government abuses all the time, but "the market" is no better really, neither extreme -leave it all to the market (caveat-emptor brand corporatism would be the extreme there) or all to the government(cult of the personality one leader-one party-mass bureaucracy and no one even wants to work any longer except under the whip"- ism government would be the extreme that other way)- is the end all or be all of "solutions". I think what we have more or less constructed- at least semi-regulated markets and at least an attempt at a semi-regulated society via this government thing-is probably the best humans can do at our (barely out of the medieval level intellectually or psychologically) evolutionary stage.
Of the two extremes and the middle, the middle is what we mostly have and falls under the lesser of the three big evils choices. It is imperfect, absolutely no doubt there, but the best we can do right now. What we can do is to keep chipping away at the imperfections on a case by case basis.
same as a lot of guys including me in ye olden hipster days did it with our air cooled volkswagens. They had really crappy heaters stock anyway(unless you had the factory gasoline burners which never worked that good anyway and were kinda rare), and we always liked to tweak more power, so that meant yanking the stock exhaust with heat exchange out and putting in like hollywood style headers or something. No heat even possible then. Solution? $20 propane camping heater, use fire extinguisher wall mounting clamps, mount that thing inside, crack a window, turn it on. *Very* good heat in new england when I did it.
Electric cars could have integral 5 gallon propane tanks and little efficient furnaces with outside exhaust, then all you need is a small electric blower if you want it. I think it might be possible to have a propane powered AC as well, thinking about it, they have propane powered refrigerators that work well, I own two of them myself.
At least that is one way to do it. It's such a small space I don't think you would burn much propane, and you can get propane all over heck in the US.
You have a small generator and fuel tank mounted on a trailer. For day to day commuting, it is detached, you run on batteries, recharge at home. For longer trips, attach the trailer, plug it in, start the generator. Stop and fill up with gas or diesel whenever. Additional empty cargo space as an option with a slightly larger trailer of course, making it normally useful.
See? Range problem solved. Call it the modular hybrid approach, instead of normal hybrids that tote TWO engines (ICE engine AND electric motor) AND a fuel tank AND batteries all in the same vehicle. No wonder there isn't enough room for enough batteries! they got two cars worth of drive-around do dads crammed into one car! Nuts. Make the vehicle pure electric, plenty of room for cheap batteries then, stick the fuel burning engine and fuel tank in a separate trailer. Make the genny trailer an option, maybe people would only need one a few times a year, they can rent it.
AC Propulsion has had that for their electric car, which gives it unlimited range same as any other car, and they came up with a "rigid" trailer that doesn't even flex, making it easy for n00bs to tow and backup with it.
With that said, towing a small trailer is *easy*, go out to the burbs any weekend, a lot of the vehicles are towing something around, so it shouldn't matter there, and having a whole house sized backup emergency generator sitting out in the driveway is an added + bonus good idea anyway.