humanoid robots would be for most things be just an intermediate solution, so saying "1 million robots" means actually pretty much nothing, and they don't know yet what they're going to manufacture anyways.
I guess I'm an old fogy... I remember when this was happening in the US. In the mid-nineties there was a panicked rush to automation. My company makes automation equipment, but the machines need to be loaded by hand. We found ourselves behind the competitors because they had all developed auto-loading schemes. In a desperate move, we teamed up with a competitor who had a such a system but lacked in other areas. Fortunately for us (ha-ha), all of the production moved to Mexico and then Asia. So here we are, 15 years later, and finally the talk of automation is coming back:)
My company still does not have an auto-load system, but I think the 15-year-old software development will finally pay off...
If we go from 100 people doing manual labor to ten fixing the robots, what do the other 90 people do?
It's actually pretty exciting, because this is how whole new industries are born. When agriculture became more efficient and pushed people into the cities, millions of new jobs and thousands of new industries were created. People worried that the end of the family farm would mean the end of America, but America just changed and got very, very wealthy.
I don't mean to downplay the suffering of those individuals who find themselves without a job - but in the long-term we will all be wealthier if robots take care of our basic needs, or even just shit factory work.
Seriously though it is time for we humans to face a cold hard fact of reality, and that is the days of trading labor for capital are over
Nonsense. This has been going on for hundreds - if not thousands of years. The fewer people it takes to create the staples of life, the more people are freed up for more frivolous things. Whole new industries pop up. People have been making your claim ever since agriculture got more mechanized and efficient. Probably before that.
Hell, just health care is now consuming about a sixth to a fifth of our GDP. I don't see that going down... and you don't need a high IQ to be a nurse or orderly.
The medical costs are where they are exactly because government money is in it. FDA is the main reason for the prices of medications being so high [slashdot.org], and Medicare and Medicaid are the reasons for health insurance prices skyrocketing.
A agree that the FDA adds cost, but the payoff is some degree of scientific rigor in the drug market. There was a time in modern history when there was no FDA, and it was a complete disaster. People were selling radium pills, for god's sake. And jackass with a few chemicals and a pitch could sell a "drug" - never mind that it had no efficacy or safety.
Medicare/Medicaid are certainly not helping keep costs down, but they are "the" reasons - the problem is way more multi-dimensional than that. The government subsidizes the cost of insurance through tax breaks to employers, for instance. The government requires emergency rooms to treat patients without any payment whatsoever, passing the costs on to the payers. But besides the government, look at all of the new technology used in medicine: nuclear medicine, MRIs, CAT scans, and a huge array of laboratory tests. Then there are new treatments and surgeries: cancer is in many cases curable and in many other cases just another chronic condition, heart surgery is routine, and organs routinely replaced. Formerly fatal injuries are no longer fatal. All of that costs money. Finally, you have an out-of-control tort system. Doctors are so afraid of lawsuits that they order up the "whole enchilada"... diagnostic tests that are probably unnecessary, but cover the doctor's ass in case there is something else wrong. And the tests are generally harmless, costing "only" money.
So is the government partly responsible for the high costs of health care? Sure. Are they the only driver? No - that ignores the fact that we GET more than we did even 30 years ago. And unlike microprocessors, some of the new technology is still very expensive because it is always brand-new, not something that has been refined over 40 years like semiconductors. Take x-rays... an x-ray doesn't really cost any more today than it ever did, and it doses you with less radiation, has higher resolution, and is available instantly because it is digital. That's exactly like semiconductors. But you can't force a brand new cancer treatment into the microprocessor analogy - microprocessors were also quite expensive when they were first introduced... pretty much limited to government/military and large corporations.
Nobody gets a TV subsidy, yet everybody has a TV or 2 or more, and costs are going down while features and quality are increasing.
How many people had a TV when they first came out? TV is now over 60 years old as a consumer technology. You think the equivalent of an MRI will still cost a small fortune in 60 years? I happen to think it will become as routine as an x-ray. It will never be as cheap as a TV, because you don't want life-critical machinery assembled by illiterate third-world factory workers. If your TV has quality problems, it's not really a big deal. Also, you cannot offshore the doctor - you still have to pay your doctor at first-world rates. What do you think that TV would cost if you had to pay someone $10/hour instead of $1.50/hour to assemble it?
Basically you can thank your government for terrible health and health insurance costs and low volume of innovation in those areas.
Costs are one thing, but where the heck do you get off saying there's a low volume of innovation in health care? Compared to what? LOL! What period in human history has seen such a surge in medical capability?
Ford and other manufacturers would have bought out the failed GM and Chrysler factories for pennies on the dollar and would have restored the capacity in their own vision.
Ford was afraid of running out of cash, and they would not have spent any significant money on GM assets. Hell, Ford was shutting down factories
Ridiculous assertion that Ford would have wanted his competitors to be bailed out by the government, no less, with all sorts of consequences arising from that.
If you don't feel like reading a grown man beg, here's the relevant statement:
Now, we believe we must join our competitors in asking for your support to gain access to an industry bridge loan that will help us navigate through this difficult economic crisis. We suggest the loans be structured in a revolving format, so exposure to the taxpayer would be limited – and, if used, would be repaid with interest.
We at Ford are hopeful that we have enough liquidity. But we also must prepare ourselves for the prospect of further deteriorating economic conditions in 2009.
The domestic auto industry is highly interdependent. A collapse of one of our competitors would not only affect Ford and our transformation plan, but would have a devastating ripple effect across the economy.
so those employees could afford their own medical care
Pretty sure health care is affordable if you stick to early 1900s standards of care. Good luck healing from an infection or surviving any kind of surgery.
Agreed. Mostly it comes up when I have to defend government policy where the rules for pickup trucks "only" increase by 4MPG while cars have to go up by 10MPG. Then I have to do math to prove that the cars are actually getting off easier.:)
You are right - so long as people have dollars on their mind when they are doing the calculations - but inverting the numbers doesn't make it any harder to work in percentages.
But saving "half" doesn't really help you when calculating cost - at some point you still have to convert it to dollars.
Where it really confuses things is when talking about trading in ONE of your cars on a more efficient model. If you have an old commuter car and an old family SUV, most of the time getting a newer SUV will save gas and money over trading in the commuter for a high-mileage hybrid, even though the hybrid has very impressive MPG numbers: for instance, should you sell the old 15MPG Explorer and get the new 25MPG Explorer? Or should you ditch the old 28MPG Camry for a 50MPG Prius?
The layman would probably say, hey, I get a 10MPG improvement from trading in the Explorer and a 22MPG improvement from trading in the Camry... that's a no brainer to replace the commuter. But of course that might be wrong. If the Explorer were expressed as 6.7GPHM, the Camry as 3.6GPHM, and the new cars as 4.0GPHM and 2.0GPHM.... well, now the difference is 2.7GPHM for the new Explorer and 1.6GPHM for replacing the Camry. Depending on mileage driven, of course, the new Explorer becomes the "obvious" choice to the layman.
I prefer manuals, so I won't argue there - but my scenario of putting the hammer down in the on-ramp isn't significantly changed by the transmission type. The auto would add some weight and be a tad less efficient, but the little engine would still be struggling with a full load.:)
- that's a misunderstanding. There are 2 ways to get liability
1. Private insurance. 2. Court system.
The court system IS government interference - as is the concept of a corporation (which is necessary for insurance on a large scale... though some kind of partnership could probably work), which does not exist in anything but a government charter. And I think we have plenty of evidence that a large number of people will not have private insurance unless the government forces it.
And anyway, how good for the economy is it to have a bunch of lawyers producing nothing? Are you sure that lawsuits are more efficient than EPA mandates?
you will start seeing reduction in usage immediately. People would start moving in closer to city centers, leaving their suburban sprawls, moving closer to places were they work if they actually have to pay for they use of that impossible infrastructure.
I disagree. Those people are already paying for those roads in the form of gas taxes. You'd have to drop the gas tax if you stopped funding the roads. This could easily make up for the tolls. Anyway, you'd also have to force the states to stop funding roads - not just the feds.
But most of all, your solution is completely non-practical from a political point-of-view. You have to work within the current system.
Again, look at the European cars (which I had the opportunity to drive about 2 weeks ago) - they do just fine with what they have.
They do fine, but they drive slower cars:)
I'm actually not opposed to the European model of taxing the hell out of gas - but they are just as addicted to oil and gas from unstable sources as we are so I'm not sure that is the right approach. It's also very regressive - the poor are most affected by the tax on gas.
The National Security argument is moot, since it was US government that created the problem of oil dependence in the first place, by subsidizing auto-makers via the highway building project.
How is it moot? The highways exist, like it or not. Even if we shut off subsidy to highways, they would still exist for a long, long time. Most would probably live on as toll roads. Turning off the highway subsidy will not reduce oil consumption in the short term.
The only thing that these regulations will do to me if I want a tank, they will make it more expensive to own one
Which will preclude certain people from owning tanks.
but the economy will suffer again, because there was no reason to make this more expensive to buy a bigger car, which always creates inefficiency in the market, by mis-allocating resources to something that shouldn't cost as much as it costs with government intervention.
How can you pronounce that without including the cost to the economy that all of the death and injury from automobile accidents causes? That's a limitation of the free market - it will never tie the cost of a car to the costs of the effects of driving a car. There is no feedback mechanism unless the government interferes. Dead and maimed people cost the economy billions in health care, lost productivity, and wasted education and experience.
Pollution is another example of this. A car that emits fewer smog gasses is more expensive than a car that pollutes. There is no economic reason for anyone to spend the extra money on the cleaner car. So without government intrusion, smog is an intractable problem.
Either there is market for large vehicles or there isn't.
It's heavily correlated to gas prices - so sometimes there's a market and sometimes there isn't.
While I tend to agree that government regulation is not great for business, sometimes other things trump an efficient market. For instance, I can argue for lighter cars for reasons of public safety and for reasons of national security. In the case of safety, it is almost always safer to drive the heaviest car available. If the heaviest car available is lighter, than someone who is safety conscious doesn't need to get in an arms race to drive a big-ass car. In the case of national security, we spend billions securing our oil supply from a highly unstable region. We need to make stopping the import of oil from the middle east a national goal, even at the expense of an ideal market economy.
Do a test on a few coworkers. Don't ask an engineer who is going to write stuff on paper:)
Tell them to pretend that they have a pickup truck that gets 10MPG and a sedan that gets 20MPG. Ask them whether they are better off getting a high-efficiency 20MPG pickup or a 40MPG hybrid sedan to replace one or the other. Most people will pick the 40MPG sedan even though they'd save a lot more money by getting the new pickup.
If you phrase it as a 10GPHM pickup and a 5GPHM sedan upgrading to a 5GPHM pickup or a 2.5GPHM sedan people will more often make the right choice.
It's simple psychology... people see the 20MPG difference and think they are doing better than the 10MPG difference.
Since so many people live in two car households (commuter car and family car), I bet this choice gets made all the time. In fact, I just talked a woman out of replacing her Versa with a Leaf because when you do the math, replacing her fuel-sipping Nissan with an electric would never pay off, but replacing her old Explorer with just about anything would eventually pay off.
99HP is always going to be anemic in a 5-passenger car because 5 EUROPEAN adults weigh somewhere north of 800lbs, and Americans weigh even more than that. Add gasoline and you are talking almost a half-ton before there is any car or cargo involved. Sure, your average commuter car is carrying one adult, but people wouldn't necessarily be happy if they couldn't merge onto a highway when their car was more full.
You've completely changed the topic. Your opinions about government interference in the economy are completely valid, even if I don't completely agree.
I was specifically commenting on your assertion that the market was demanding big cars, when in fact that market evaporated even before the economic crises.
Or did you think the safety requirements are there because anyone cares whether you eat your steering wheel when you hit a truck?
Motivations are important.... why?
Seriously, why do I care what the motivations are? I only know that cars kill far more people than terrorism and war and all of the other things we blow money on. So yeah, I support stricter safety standards. I only know that most of the petroleum we spend hundreds of billions protecting gets burned in the tanks of cars. So yeah, I support stricter mileage standards. If that aligns me with some protectionist trade union with a totally different motivation but the same goals, what the hell do I care?
Maybe you could, you know, let people buy the vehicles they want to buy and then if gas is expensive most won't buy gas guzzlers?
National security is not best served by buying a bunch of oil from third world dictatorships where the people hate us.
In this case I'm guessing the auto makers are salivating at the prospect of being 'forced' to load up cars with hybrid crap that will allow them to push up prices and make more profit.
The profit margin on a big SUV is far higher than the profit margin (or loss) on a hybrid. Economy cars have tiny little margins measured in the hundreds of dollars.
But this regulation would actually punish the automakers for making and selling cars that their MARKET wants from them.
Yeah, the market wanted all of those big American cars so badly that Japan had to bailout both Toyota and Honda. Oh, wait...
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I don't get your point. The American car companies produced cars for the high-end large vehicle market and then the market completely vanished. The government had to bail out two of them.
The thing to realize is that going from 10 MPG to 20 MPG saves twice as much as going from 20 to 40.
That's a good point - it's better in general to use the inverse measure. It is blatantly obvious that going from 10 gallon/100miles to 5 gallon/100miles saves twice as much as going from 5 gallon/100miles to 2.5 gallon/100miles. In the first case the difference is 5 gallons and in the second it is 2.5 gallons - any fool can see it. This is the way they compare in Europe, and unlike pointless discussions about the metric system I think it is a much better standard for general use.
Was there ever anyone who actually thought that 25mpg was really the best a small sedan could muster?
Maybe, but that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking fleet average, which includes powerful sports cars and minivans - and depending on the day that you look at the legislation - SUVs.
I mean, I used to own a Saturn that got 39 with it's massive 99 HP engine. It sucked, but it certainly proved that 25 was no problem for a small sedan.
you are 100% sure your data is in someone else's hands.
While this is true, it is also a necessity. You need to have off-site storage for backups. Whether it's an external drive sitting in your girlfriend's closet or a big binary blob on Dropbox's systems doesn't really matter - you should still be encrypting anything sensitive.
Slashdot Mirror
humanoid robots would be for most things be just an intermediate solution, so saying "1 million robots" means actually pretty much nothing, and they don't know yet what they're going to manufacture anyways.
I guess I'm an old fogy... I remember when this was happening in the US. In the mid-nineties there was a panicked rush to automation. My company makes automation equipment, but the machines need to be loaded by hand. We found ourselves behind the competitors because they had all developed auto-loading schemes. In a desperate move, we teamed up with a competitor who had a such a system but lacked in other areas. Fortunately for us (ha-ha), all of the production moved to Mexico and then Asia. So here we are, 15 years later, and finally the talk of automation is coming back :)
My company still does not have an auto-load system, but I think the 15-year-old software development will finally pay off...
Also, we should station sharpshooters on every overpass. This will also cut down on oil imports.
If we go from 100 people doing manual labor to ten fixing the robots, what do the other 90 people do?
It's actually pretty exciting, because this is how whole new industries are born. When agriculture became more efficient and pushed people into the cities, millions of new jobs and thousands of new industries were created. People worried that the end of the family farm would mean the end of America, but America just changed and got very, very wealthy.
I don't mean to downplay the suffering of those individuals who find themselves without a job - but in the long-term we will all be wealthier if robots take care of our basic needs, or even just shit factory work.
Seriously though it is time for we humans to face a cold hard fact of reality, and that is the days of trading labor for capital are over
Nonsense. This has been going on for hundreds - if not thousands of years. The fewer people it takes to create the staples of life, the more people are freed up for more frivolous things. Whole new industries pop up. People have been making your claim ever since agriculture got more mechanized and efficient. Probably before that.
Hell, just health care is now consuming about a sixth to a fifth of our GDP. I don't see that going down... and you don't need a high IQ to be a nurse or orderly.
The medical costs are where they are exactly because government money is in it. FDA is the main reason for the prices of medications being so high [slashdot.org], and Medicare and Medicaid are the reasons for health insurance prices skyrocketing.
A agree that the FDA adds cost, but the payoff is some degree of scientific rigor in the drug market. There was a time in modern history when there was no FDA, and it was a complete disaster. People were selling radium pills, for god's sake. And jackass with a few chemicals and a pitch could sell a "drug" - never mind that it had no efficacy or safety.
Medicare/Medicaid are certainly not helping keep costs down, but they are "the" reasons - the problem is way more multi-dimensional than that. The government subsidizes the cost of insurance through tax breaks to employers, for instance. The government requires emergency rooms to treat patients without any payment whatsoever, passing the costs on to the payers. But besides the government, look at all of the new technology used in medicine: nuclear medicine, MRIs, CAT scans, and a huge array of laboratory tests. Then there are new treatments and surgeries: cancer is in many cases curable and in many other cases just another chronic condition, heart surgery is routine, and organs routinely replaced. Formerly fatal injuries are no longer fatal. All of that costs money. Finally, you have an out-of-control tort system. Doctors are so afraid of lawsuits that they order up the "whole enchilada"... diagnostic tests that are probably unnecessary, but cover the doctor's ass in case there is something else wrong. And the tests are generally harmless, costing "only" money.
So is the government partly responsible for the high costs of health care? Sure. Are they the only driver? No - that ignores the fact that we GET more than we did even 30 years ago. And unlike microprocessors, some of the new technology is still very expensive because it is always brand-new, not something that has been refined over 40 years like semiconductors. Take x-rays... an x-ray doesn't really cost any more today than it ever did, and it doses you with less radiation, has higher resolution, and is available instantly because it is digital. That's exactly like semiconductors. But you can't force a brand new cancer treatment into the microprocessor analogy - microprocessors were also quite expensive when they were first introduced... pretty much limited to government/military and large corporations.
Nobody gets a TV subsidy, yet everybody has a TV or 2 or more, and costs are going down while features and quality are increasing.
How many people had a TV when they first came out? TV is now over 60 years old as a consumer technology. You think the equivalent of an MRI will still cost a small fortune in 60 years? I happen to think it will become as routine as an x-ray. It will never be as cheap as a TV, because you don't want life-critical machinery assembled by illiterate third-world factory workers. If your TV has quality problems, it's not really a big deal. Also, you cannot offshore the doctor - you still have to pay your doctor at first-world rates. What do you think that TV would cost if you had to pay someone $10/hour instead of $1.50/hour to assemble it?
Basically you can thank your government for terrible health and health insurance costs and low volume of innovation in those areas.
Costs are one thing, but where the heck do you get off saying there's a low volume of innovation in health care? Compared to what? LOL! What period in human history has seen such a surge in medical capability?
Ford and other manufacturers would have bought out the failed GM and Chrysler factories for pennies on the dollar and would have restored the capacity in their own vision.
Ford was afraid of running out of cash, and they would not have spent any significant money on GM assets. Hell, Ford was shutting down factories
Ridiculous assertion that Ford would have wanted his competitors to be bailed out by the government, no less, with all sorts of consequences arising from that.
Alan Mually's (Ford's CEO) testimony from November 18, 2008
If you don't feel like reading a grown man beg, here's the relevant statement:
so those employees could afford their own medical care
Pretty sure health care is affordable if you stick to early 1900s standards of care. Good luck healing from an infection or surviving any kind of surgery.
I just don't think it comes up very often.
Agreed. Mostly it comes up when I have to defend government policy where the rules for pickup trucks "only" increase by 4MPG while cars have to go up by 10MPG. Then I have to do math to prove that the cars are actually getting off easier. :)
You are right - so long as people have dollars on their mind when they are doing the calculations - but inverting the numbers doesn't make it any harder to work in percentages.
Nonsense, Ford was in support of the government assistance - the CEO even flew out to Capitol Hill to testify on GM and Chrysler's behalf.
Ford would have gone bankrupt without the GM and Chrysler bailout.
But saving "half" doesn't really help you when calculating cost - at some point you still have to convert it to dollars.
Where it really confuses things is when talking about trading in ONE of your cars on a more efficient model. If you have an old commuter car and an old family SUV, most of the time getting a newer SUV will save gas and money over trading in the commuter for a high-mileage hybrid, even though the hybrid has very impressive MPG numbers: for instance, should you sell the old 15MPG Explorer and get the new 25MPG Explorer? Or should you ditch the old 28MPG Camry for a 50MPG Prius?
The layman would probably say, hey, I get a 10MPG improvement from trading in the Explorer and a 22MPG improvement from trading in the Camry... that's a no brainer to replace the commuter. But of course that might be wrong. If the Explorer were expressed as 6.7GPHM, the Camry as 3.6GPHM, and the new cars as 4.0GPHM and 2.0GPHM.... well, now the difference is 2.7GPHM for the new Explorer and 1.6GPHM for replacing the Camry. Depending on mileage driven, of course, the new Explorer becomes the "obvious" choice to the layman.
I prefer manuals, so I won't argue there - but my scenario of putting the hammer down in the on-ramp isn't significantly changed by the transmission type. The auto would add some weight and be a tad less efficient, but the little engine would still be struggling with a full load. :)
- that's a misunderstanding. There are 2 ways to get liability
1. Private insurance.
2. Court system.
The court system IS government interference - as is the concept of a corporation (which is necessary for insurance on a large scale... though some kind of partnership could probably work), which does not exist in anything but a government charter. And I think we have plenty of evidence that a large number of people will not have private insurance unless the government forces it.
And anyway, how good for the economy is it to have a bunch of lawyers producing nothing? Are you sure that lawsuits are more efficient than EPA mandates?
you will start seeing reduction in usage immediately. People would start moving in closer to city centers, leaving their suburban sprawls, moving closer to places were they work if they actually have to pay for they use of that impossible infrastructure.
I disagree. Those people are already paying for those roads in the form of gas taxes. You'd have to drop the gas tax if you stopped funding the roads. This could easily make up for the tolls. Anyway, you'd also have to force the states to stop funding roads - not just the feds.
But most of all, your solution is completely non-practical from a political point-of-view. You have to work within the current system.
Again, look at the European cars (which I had the opportunity to drive about 2 weeks ago) - they do just fine with what they have.
They do fine, but they drive slower cars :)
I'm actually not opposed to the European model of taxing the hell out of gas - but they are just as addicted to oil and gas from unstable sources as we are so I'm not sure that is the right approach. It's also very regressive - the poor are most affected by the tax on gas.
The National Security argument is moot, since it was US government that created the problem of oil dependence in the first place, by subsidizing auto-makers via the highway building project.
How is it moot? The highways exist, like it or not. Even if we shut off subsidy to highways, they would still exist for a long, long time. Most would probably live on as toll roads. Turning off the highway subsidy will not reduce oil consumption in the short term.
The only thing that these regulations will do to me if I want a tank, they will make it more expensive to own one
Which will preclude certain people from owning tanks.
but the economy will suffer again, because there was no reason to make this more expensive to buy a bigger car, which always creates inefficiency in the market, by mis-allocating resources to something that shouldn't cost as much as it costs with government intervention.
How can you pronounce that without including the cost to the economy that all of the death and injury from automobile accidents causes? That's a limitation of the free market - it will never tie the cost of a car to the costs of the effects of driving a car. There is no feedback mechanism unless the government interferes. Dead and maimed people cost the economy billions in health care, lost productivity, and wasted education and experience.
Pollution is another example of this. A car that emits fewer smog gasses is more expensive than a car that pollutes. There is no economic reason for anyone to spend the extra money on the cleaner car. So without government intrusion, smog is an intractable problem.
Either there is market for large vehicles or there isn't.
It's heavily correlated to gas prices - so sometimes there's a market and sometimes there isn't.
While I tend to agree that government regulation is not great for business, sometimes other things trump an efficient market. For instance, I can argue for lighter cars for reasons of public safety and for reasons of national security. In the case of safety, it is almost always safer to drive the heaviest car available. If the heaviest car available is lighter, than someone who is safety conscious doesn't need to get in an arms race to drive a big-ass car. In the case of national security, we spend billions securing our oil supply from a highly unstable region. We need to make stopping the import of oil from the middle east a national goal, even at the expense of an ideal market economy.
Do a test on a few coworkers. Don't ask an engineer who is going to write stuff on paper :)
Tell them to pretend that they have a pickup truck that gets 10MPG and a sedan that gets 20MPG. Ask them whether they are better off getting a high-efficiency 20MPG pickup or a 40MPG hybrid sedan to replace one or the other. Most people will pick the 40MPG sedan even though they'd save a lot more money by getting the new pickup.
If you phrase it as a 10GPHM pickup and a 5GPHM sedan upgrading to a 5GPHM pickup or a 2.5GPHM sedan people will more often make the right choice.
It's simple psychology... people see the 20MPG difference and think they are doing better than the 10MPG difference.
Since so many people live in two car households (commuter car and family car), I bet this choice gets made all the time. In fact, I just talked a woman out of replacing her Versa with a Leaf because when you do the math, replacing her fuel-sipping Nissan with an electric would never pay off, but replacing her old Explorer with just about anything would eventually pay off.
It's hard to come up with a car that my old Saturn could blow the doors off of, but you sir seem to have one. Bravo :)
99HP is always going to be anemic in a 5-passenger car because 5 EUROPEAN adults weigh somewhere north of 800lbs, and Americans weigh even more than that. Add gasoline and you are talking almost a half-ton before there is any car or cargo involved. Sure, your average commuter car is carrying one adult, but people wouldn't necessarily be happy if they couldn't merge onto a highway when their car was more full.
You've completely changed the topic. Your opinions about government interference in the economy are completely valid, even if I don't completely agree.
I was specifically commenting on your assertion that the market was demanding big cars, when in fact that market evaporated even before the economic crises.
Or did you think the safety requirements are there because anyone cares whether you eat your steering wheel when you hit a truck?
Motivations are important.... why?
Seriously, why do I care what the motivations are? I only know that cars kill far more people than terrorism and war and all of the other things we blow money on. So yeah, I support stricter safety standards. I only know that most of the petroleum we spend hundreds of billions protecting gets burned in the tanks of cars. So yeah, I support stricter mileage standards. If that aligns me with some protectionist trade union with a totally different motivation but the same goals, what the hell do I care?
Maybe you could, you know, let people buy the vehicles they want to buy and then if gas is expensive most won't buy gas guzzlers?
National security is not best served by buying a bunch of oil from third world dictatorships where the people hate us.
In this case I'm guessing the auto makers are salivating at the prospect of being 'forced' to load up cars with hybrid crap that will allow them to push up prices and make more profit.
The profit margin on a big SUV is far higher than the profit margin (or loss) on a hybrid. Economy cars have tiny little margins measured in the hundreds of dollars.
But this regulation would actually punish the automakers for making and selling cars that their MARKET wants from them.
Yeah, the market wanted all of those big American cars so badly that Japan had to bailout both Toyota and Honda. Oh, wait...
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I don't get your point. The American car companies produced cars for the high-end large vehicle market and then the market completely vanished. The government had to bail out two of them.
The thing to realize is that going from 10 MPG to 20 MPG saves twice as much as going from 20 to 40.
That's a good point - it's better in general to use the inverse measure. It is blatantly obvious that going from 10 gallon/100miles to 5 gallon/100miles saves twice as much as going from 5 gallon/100miles to 2.5 gallon/100miles. In the first case the difference is 5 gallons and in the second it is 2.5 gallons - any fool can see it. This is the way they compare in Europe, and unlike pointless discussions about the metric system I think it is a much better standard for general use.
Was there ever anyone who actually thought that 25mpg was really the best a small sedan could muster?
Maybe, but that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking fleet average, which includes powerful sports cars and minivans - and depending on the day that you look at the legislation - SUVs.
I mean, I used to own a Saturn that got 39 with it's massive 99 HP engine. It sucked, but it certainly proved that 25 was no problem for a small sedan.
you are 100% sure your data is in someone else's hands.
While this is true, it is also a necessity. You need to have off-site storage for backups. Whether it's an external drive sitting in your girlfriend's closet or a big binary blob on Dropbox's systems doesn't really matter - you should still be encrypting anything sensitive.