...Exactly. People talking too loud on their phones may be annoying, but at least none of them have tried to poke my eye out (at least, not since they got rid of the phones with the little antennas...).
Random thoughts... ...Why the USA has lots of roads is because of fiat currency. The interstates came later--but the USA began building lots of roads in the WPA projects during the 1930's, after the 1929 stock market crash,,,, which was used to justify the change to fiat currency. When gold=money the govt couldn't just pull a bunch of it out of a hat to get people to do whatever they wanted. After they could just print money on paper, they could--and one thing they decided to do was build roads, because the roads would in turn encourage all sorts of other consumption. Like the proliferation of cars. "The oil companies" didn't really have much to do with this in particular; it was the wealthiest people in the nation that made these decisions, and they also happened to run a lot of the oil companies....And this doesn't mean that gold money is superior or not, it has pros and cons,,,, but for various reasons debating that now is rather pointless.
...So now that the US can print money and is always causing inflation by doing so, the govt has to keep pushing ever-greater amounts of money into circulation. So now, they DO NOT look for the cheapest ways to do anything (interstate highways costing $2-$7 mil per mile?). There is no point. The money needs to be spent into circulation for it to do any good. The solutions usually proposed very often are not greatly concerned about overall efficiency. The more money they require further down the line, all the better.
...The govt also isn't trying to turn profits on everything they do, since doing so would be counter-productive. It would mean that overall they took more money OUT of the economy than they had put in, and since they are the creators of money, that's exactly what they aren't supposed to do. Anyone arguing that public transit "fails" because it doesn't turn a profit, does not understand this particular circumstance. Public transit fails for other reasons, but losing money isn't one of them.
...Mass-transit is not advanced transit, sorry. The practical problems that exist with it can't really be solved. There is the peak-issue problem (busy during rush hours but much-less-used at other times) and the accessibility problem (more stops=more accessible transit, but slower transit times,,, resulting in lower utilization). The most-ideal transportation would be that which starts wherever you are and ends at whatever destination you choose, and can be used at any time you want but doesn't waste energy when you aren't using it. Cars could stand a lot of improvement--but they are much closer to that than any trains or buses are. An IHPVA/Battle Mountain style vehicle with a ~1 HP engine can cost only a couple thousand dollars, can hold one person and cruise at 50+ MPH while getting ~200 MPG--except that current laws do not allow such vehicles. There is no exotic technologies required, at all. One particularly outstanding example: http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2010/01/21/do-it-yourself-214-mpg-motorcycle-project/
... You should consider the $14000 + the cost of the original honda civic as the total cost of the finished vehicle....
I agree.... So much so, that I looked up the MSRP of a 1996 Honda Civic.
This site-- http://www.cars.com/honda/civic/1996/
shows a low-end of $10,350 and a high of $16,480....
So converting this car increased its cost roughly 2 to 2.5 times, and cut its range from 330~440 miles, down to 30 miles.
This is the reason car companies wouldn't build these things until the govt paid them to....
I am fully supportive of improving transportation efficiency, but electric cars just aren't it--and aren't going to be it as long as there's still oil left in the ground. The ONLY form of electric transportation that is in significant use around the world is trains, and the reason is because they are fed from overhead lines and so are free from the technical limitations of storage batteries.
Hundreds of millions of tires go from fresh, deep tread with the tiny mold fingers to terrifyingly bald and that volume difference goes... where?...
I have no cite--but have read that much of it ends up as tire dust, which (now in most US cities) is the main ingredient of smog.
The article claimed that this was the problem with trying to increase air quality by enforcing lower standards of tailpipe emissions--the two main factors left are tire dust, and diesel-engined vehicles. Tire dust isn't being addressed at all, and diesel-engined vehicles aren't held to the same emissions standards as gasoline-powered vehicles.
...So all that raising EPA emissions on gasoline vehicles is doing is making people buy new cars for no real benefit--other than stimulating a dying economy a bit longer. (along with airbags [$2500+ per car], and ethanol-cut fuel [10% of the fuel you buy now is nothing])
In a past article asking why kids are still carrying around heavy bookbags when all their books would fit onto a 2gb USB drive, I mentioned that the textbook companies actively refuse to publish e-book versions. They are fighting this every step of the way, and they have methods that the entertainment industry can only dream of.
",,,,,,because the asking wages still aren't low enough!"
For as much as an enthusiast as I am about computers and programming in general, I still don't do it for a living nor do I see it as a skill that "everyone" has a need to learn--nor is it (along with "COMPUTERS in the CLASSROOM!!!") a grand solution to anything.
We might compare the whole idea to that of making shoes: most people (who own a computer) wear shoes, yet very very few of those people know how to make a pair of decent (wearable, durable) shoes. And honestly, there is little financial or technical reason for them to. Shoe-making is a high-income occupation for a talented few and a some others do it as a hobby, but mostly it is a sweatshop job done under third-world conditions and paying poverty wages. It is not a job they'd choose--and for most, it's not even a job to realistically train for.
There is no useful reason to require that every kid in school learn to make shoes. Or code.
While the hordes argue over what the term "assault weapons" means or doesn't mean, there is a much more significant question: how did a firearm get sent to a private individual's house in the US, who is not a licensed firearms dealer? This is the error that (I suspect) is going to get someone (who shipped that package) into trouble....
I had thought that doing so was illegal in all 50 states. Is it so?
You can mail a gun TO a dealer or a repair center, but they can only return it to a FFL/firearms dealer. They cannot legally send it directly to your home address. Most companies are very skittish on following this law; I've sent in air rifles for repair and they wouldn't mail them back to my house....
Why not wait until after the Tax deadline, before paying any refunds? If there is potential fraud, there will be at least 2 unique returns, for the same SSN?
Well, because. Quick refunds are the incentive that the IRS is using to get people to pay online.
The way one common scam works is this:
1--someone steals your SSN, obtains a throwaway prepaid debit card and uses your SSN and name to file a fake return online for a few thousand dollars refund.
2--the IRS cheerfully pays out the refund in 5-7 days after verifying that the math on the return is correct, even thoughthey cannot verify the W-2 or other information that fast. (IIRC it takes them about 6 weeks to verify W-2 info)
3--in a few days the refund hits the thief's debit card and they "spend it off" by buying money orders (so that the IRS cannot take back the money off the debit card if they discover the fraud), and then the person throws the bank card away. It is only when a second return is filed that the IRS stops everything and realizes that there is a problem.
I tend to suspect that there is not much actual incentive to fix this issue from a lot of corners, since it is just pumping even more money into the dying US economy. The IRS knows very well how big the problem is but under the current system can't do anything to stop it, and simply refuses to publish any actual numbers.
... Chalk it up to a scam angle used to push out crap tablets....
Speaking of pushing crap, I have noticed something odd over the years:
Christianity and White Supremacists both have the same problem of attracting youth, and both Christian and White Supremacist music generally sucks.
On the Christian side you could say Sam Phillips and Jars of Clay weren't bad, but Sam Phillips 'left' Christian music before her biggest albums. ,,, And on the White Supremacist side, there's,,,, ? Anyone? I don't know any, except maybe that David Allen Coe 2-album weirdness.
(If there is any other genuinely talented acts of either genre, feel free to mention them)
...to look around at is logisysus.com. They specialize in mobile PC setups, and have been around at least 6-7 years now...
Though most are not hardly 'gaming' rigs, they will surf, play movies and music just fine. They are micro-form-factor and they can run straight off of 12V systems as well.
...Looking recently, I find the monitors to be shockingly expensive (considering you can get portable DVD players for $100) but then most of them are touch-screens I suppose. A keyboard's not real handy rolling down the road, even for passengers...
...I wonder how much longer the world at large will put up with such shenanigans?...
As if they had any choice.
Its very simple, really.
There's a few very rich and powerful people running the world.
Sometimes they make money selling petroleum futures, and other times they make money selling carbon credits.
You didn't really believe Al Gore won that Nobel prize fairly, did you?
I have often thought that the laptop as we know it is already outdated. Instead of a big power-hungry screen, all you really need is a keyboard and a wearable HUD. Tiny screen, tiny power.
Retina Display is ice and all, but from a product-evolution standpoint, it's a dead-end (much like how many people refuse to pay extra for Blu-Ray movies now.
You could maybe have a VERY small, low-res black & white/LCD screen on there, for basic boot/recovery messages.
"What if somebody else wants to look?"....Well put 3 or 4 HUD jacks on there then. They need to bring their own damn HUD.
You gotta be older to know that tho'. Like,,,, 40+ years old? Tube amps were used in TVs long after they fell out of favor in home hi-fi setups. Old TVs had a 'sound' that you can't get out of any transistor amp. Playing with the EQ doesn't do it.
And a lot of commercially-released music nowadays is mastered to play on transistors, and it is mastered retarded and tragically, and sounds like shit because they flatten it to raise the levels to make it sound louder.
So there is no dynamic range to overload a transistor,,,, so if newer music on transistor amps is all you've ever heard, then you don't ever know that anything isn't there.
Back in the 1980's, transistors (cheap shit) audio and tube audio fought a war, and cheap crap won.
(sigh)
Someday you will hear an old recording played on a tube amp, and you will listen in awe and wonder "why don't any of the stereos I've ever had sound like this?"
Excuse me for asking but ( as somebody who got some schooling in programming and then never got a job doing it) what makes any language "better for bioinformatics"? That seems like saying "C++ is better for programs about cats, but Java is better for programs about dogs".
I have seen this asserted with Linux distros too: that some are "better" for one thing or another--such as bioinformatics. What would be the basis of such an argument?
As for my own hobby use,,,,,, the first requirement is a drag-and-drop GUI editor, since 99% of what I need is a Win32-GUI-capable program. I remember having to learn to type out code to make a button; it was boring and repetitive and generally counter to productivity (even from a hobbyist perspective). It allowed some variations not possible in the drag-and-drop editor, but those usually weren't needed. Nobody does it unless they need to, and they usually don't.
It's as silly as people who ask "How to design websites" and somebody always says "Notepad". -Which will work, but it is a terrible way to approach the matter at all. You can spend an hour typing out and troubleshooting a few pages of basic code, when a GUI editor can let you do the same thing, correctly, in under two minutes. For anyone wanting to lean programming for hobby uses, there is no benefit in making it more difficult than it has to be.
The problem here is that the article claimed that they are eliminating the penny for cash transactions and still using it for non-cash transactions. This means that paying cash in a transaction can legally save up to 2.49 cents over the same non-cash transaction.
Doesn't sound like much, but when you're in a business that handles hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, that kind of difference can add up fast. 500K transactions = ~$12,500 a day, ~$4.5m a year. Some companies will gain that much, and other companies are going to lose it...
If they want to eliminate the penny, they should do it for all transactions, at the same time.
Airbags aren't necessary at all anymore, if you wear your seat-belt anyway. In that circumstance all they do is increase injury to the passengers and increase damage to the vehicle. They accomplish nothing good, at all. Car insurance companies figured this out quite some time ago.
The government never said that airbags would replace the greater safety of wearing seat-belts. The catch back then was that some states didn't have mandatory seat-belt laws and didn't know if they could pass them (without getting voted out next election) and the government didn't know if they could legally impose a federal law that mandated wearing them in all 50 states, so the fed government changed the NHTSA rules (that all cars in the USA had to follow) so that cars had to have either automatic seat-belts (an engineering comedy in themselves) or airbags.
After states adopted mandatory seat-belt laws, airbags were no longer required, by any safety measure. At all. The only reason they're still required in cars now is because now there are a couple big & rich companies that make loads of money selling airbags to car companies, and they make sure that airbags are still required.
You can legally disable them yourself (or get them disabled if you can find a shop that will do it) but there is no guarantee that the airbag warning light will not go on. So you might have to disable that too.
Hybrids are pushed now because there is government money to push them--because while they use somewhat lower fuel, they cost a lot more money over the long run. This was the technical truth 100 years ago, and it was the reason that hybrid cars were unheard of all that time since,,,,, until now.
It's about fiat currency, its about the need to drive the economy, the constant need to push ever-greater amounts of money into circulation to offset the spiraling inflation caused. The need to make everything more expensive, to soak up all the money being printed.
The individuals talk a different story when cornered with the news cameras, but behind closed doors the US government isn't interested in saving money. As the [effective] creator of US dollars, they have no interest in ever picking the cheapest, most-efficient method for anything.
And now they think that hybrids are great, where there is not a cent for resurrecting the much-cheaper-and-just-as-efficient Geo Metro.
The proposed law does not ban driving while using cellphones; it only recommends that cellphones be "permanently attached to a single fixed location by a non-removable cable between six and eight feet long".
I have the Von Neumann/Morganstern book. It is very heavy reading, Rain-Man level stuff. Unless you're rich or its really cheap, it's a good idea to thumb through a copy before buying.
On the other [fuffy] end of the spectrum is Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone. A 1-2 hour read suitable for teens, with no difficult math and a lot of real-world examples.
Slashdot Mirror
...Exactly. People talking too loud on their phones may be annoying, but at least none of them have tried to poke my eye out (at least, not since they got rid of the phones with the little antennas...).
Random thoughts...
...Why the USA has lots of roads is because of fiat currency. The interstates came later--but the USA began building lots of roads in the WPA projects during the 1930's, after the 1929 stock market crash,,,, which was used to justify the change to fiat currency. When gold=money the govt couldn't just pull a bunch of it out of a hat to get people to do whatever they wanted. After they could just print money on paper, they could--and one thing they decided to do was build roads, because the roads would in turn encourage all sorts of other consumption. Like the proliferation of cars. "The oil companies" didn't really have much to do with this in particular; it was the wealthiest people in the nation that made these decisions, and they also happened to run a lot of the oil companies. ...And this doesn't mean that gold money is superior or not, it has pros and cons,,,, but for various reasons debating that now is rather pointless.
...So now that the US can print money and is always causing inflation by doing so, the govt has to keep pushing ever-greater amounts of money into circulation. So now, they DO NOT look for the cheapest ways to do anything (interstate highways costing $2-$7 mil per mile?). There is no point. The money needs to be spent into circulation for it to do any good. The solutions usually proposed very often are not greatly concerned about overall efficiency. The more money they require further down the line, all the better.
...The govt also isn't trying to turn profits on everything they do, since doing so would be counter-productive. It would mean that overall they took more money OUT of the economy than they had put in, and since they are the creators of money, that's exactly what they aren't supposed to do. Anyone arguing that public transit "fails" because it doesn't turn a profit, does not understand this particular circumstance. Public transit fails for other reasons, but losing money isn't one of them.
...Mass-transit is not advanced transit, sorry. The practical problems that exist with it can't really be solved. There is the peak-issue problem (busy during rush hours but much-less-used at other times) and the accessibility problem (more stops=more accessible transit, but slower transit times,,, resulting in lower utilization). The most-ideal transportation would be that which starts wherever you are and ends at whatever destination you choose, and can be used at any time you want but doesn't waste energy when you aren't using it. Cars could stand a lot of improvement--but they are much closer to that than any trains or buses are. An IHPVA/Battle Mountain style vehicle with a ~1 HP engine can cost only a couple thousand dollars, can hold one person and cruise at 50+ MPH while getting ~200 MPG--except that current laws do not allow such vehicles. There is no exotic technologies required, at all. One particularly outstanding example: http://thekneeslider.com/archives/2010/01/21/do-it-yourself-214-mpg-motorcycle-project/
I agree.... So much so, that I looked up the MSRP of a 1996 Honda Civic.
This site-- http://www.cars.com/honda/civic/1996/
shows a low-end of $10,350 and a high of $16,480....
So converting this car increased its cost roughly 2 to 2.5 times, and cut its range from 330~440 miles, down to 30 miles.
This is the reason car companies wouldn't build these things until the govt paid them to....
I am fully supportive of improving transportation efficiency, but electric cars just aren't it--and aren't going to be it as long as there's still oil left in the ground.
The ONLY form of electric transportation that is in significant use around the world is trains, and the reason is because they are fed from overhead lines and so are free from the technical limitations of storage batteries.
I have no cite--but have read that much of it ends up as tire dust, which (now in most US cities) is the main ingredient of smog.
The article claimed that this was the problem with trying to increase air quality by enforcing lower standards of tailpipe emissions--the two main factors left are tire dust, and diesel-engined vehicles. Tire dust isn't being addressed at all, and diesel-engined vehicles aren't held to the same emissions standards as gasoline-powered vehicles.
...So all that raising EPA emissions on gasoline vehicles is doing is making people buy new cars for no real benefit--other than stimulating a dying economy a bit longer. (along with airbags [$2500+ per car], and ethanol-cut fuel [10% of the fuel you buy now is nothing])
In a past article asking why kids are still carrying around heavy bookbags when all their books would fit onto a 2gb USB drive, I mentioned that the textbook companies actively refuse to publish e-book versions. They are fighting this every step of the way, and they have methods that the entertainment industry can only dream of.
",,,,,,because the asking wages still aren't low enough!"
For as much as an enthusiast as I am about computers and programming in general, I still don't do it for a living nor do I see it as a skill that "everyone" has a need to learn--nor is it (along with "COMPUTERS in the CLASSROOM!!!") a grand solution to anything.
We might compare the whole idea to that of making shoes: most people (who own a computer) wear shoes, yet very very few of those people know how to make a pair of decent (wearable, durable) shoes.
And honestly, there is little financial or technical reason for them to.
Shoe-making is a high-income occupation for a talented few and a some others do it as a hobby, but mostly it is a sweatshop job done under third-world conditions and paying poverty wages. It is not a job they'd choose--and for most, it's not even a job to realistically train for.
There is no useful reason to require that every kid in school learn to make shoes. Or code.
While the hordes argue over what the term "assault weapons" means or doesn't mean, there is a much more significant question: how did a firearm get sent to a private individual's house in the US, who is not a licensed firearms dealer? This is the error that (I suspect) is going to get someone (who shipped that package) into trouble....
I had thought that doing so was illegal in all 50 states. Is it so?
You can mail a gun TO a dealer or a repair center, but they can only return it to a FFL/firearms dealer. They cannot legally send it directly to your home address.
Most companies are very skittish on following this law; I've sent in air rifles for repair and they wouldn't mail them back to my house....
Well, because. Quick refunds are the incentive that the IRS is using to get people to pay online.
The way one common scam works is this:
1--someone steals your SSN, obtains a throwaway prepaid debit card and uses your SSN and name to file a fake return online for a few thousand dollars refund.
2--the IRS cheerfully pays out the refund in 5-7 days after verifying that the math on the return is correct, even though they cannot verify the W-2 or other information that fast. (IIRC it takes them about 6 weeks to verify W-2 info)
3--in a few days the refund hits the thief's debit card and they "spend it off" by buying money orders (so that the IRS cannot take back the money off the debit card if they discover the fraud), and then the person throws the bank card away. It is only when a second return is filed that the IRS stops everything and realizes that there is a problem.
I tend to suspect that there is not much actual incentive to fix this issue from a lot of corners, since it is just pumping even more money into the dying US economy.
The IRS knows very well how big the problem is but under the current system can't do anything to stop it, and simply refuses to publish any actual numbers.
Does anybody else remember the movie 'Looker'?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/
How about, Oh, I dunno. A pictorial map? With a human skull marking each site?
They may dig up one, but after that they should be able to figure out what the other sites are.
Speaking of pushing crap, I have noticed something odd over the years:
Christianity and White Supremacists both have the same problem of attracting youth, and both Christian and White Supremacist music generally sucks.
On the Christian side you could say Sam Phillips and Jars of Clay weren't bad, but Sam Phillips 'left' Christian music before her biggest albums.
,,,
And on the White Supremacist side, there's,,,, ? Anyone? I don't know any, except maybe that David Allen Coe 2-album weirdness.
(If there is any other genuinely talented acts of either genre, feel free to mention them)
...to look around at is logisysus.com. They specialize in mobile PC setups, and have been around at least 6-7 years now...
...Looking recently, I find the monitors to be shockingly expensive (considering you can get portable DVD players for $100) but then most of them are touch-screens I suppose. A keyboard's not real handy rolling down the road, even for passengers...
Though most are not hardly 'gaming' rigs, they will surf, play movies and music just fine. They are micro-form-factor and they can run straight off of 12V systems as well.
As if they had any choice.
Its very simple, really.
There's a few very rich and powerful people running the world.
Sometimes they make money selling petroleum futures, and other times they make money selling carbon credits.
You didn't really believe Al Gore won that Nobel prize fairly, did you?
I have often thought that the laptop as we know it is already outdated. Instead of a big power-hungry screen, all you really need is a keyboard and a wearable HUD. Tiny screen, tiny power.
....Well put 3 or 4 HUD jacks on there then. They need to bring their own damn HUD.
Retina Display is ice and all, but from a product-evolution standpoint, it's a dead-end (much like how many people refuse to pay extra for Blu-Ray movies now.
You could maybe have a VERY small, low-res black & white/LCD screen on there, for basic boot/recovery messages.
"What if somebody else wants to look?"
The good news is, my dream-bachelor-pad is s-l-o-w-l-y becoming reality: there are paper (disposable) dishes, robot vacuum cleaners, and now this.
The bad news is, we'll have to look at the "Elderly couple dies of starvation, trapped in perfectly made bed" stories now and then.
A bunch of suckers in Vietnam tried it once..... I forget what happened though.
Yea but,,, transistor amps don't sound right.
You gotta be older to know that tho'. Like,,,, 40+ years old? Tube amps were used in TVs long after they fell out of favor in home hi-fi setups. Old TVs had a 'sound' that you can't get out of any transistor amp. Playing with the EQ doesn't do it.
And a lot of commercially-released music nowadays is mastered to play on transistors, and it is mastered retarded and tragically, and sounds like shit because they flatten it to raise the levels to make it sound louder.
So there is no dynamic range to overload a transistor,,,, so if newer music on transistor amps is all you've ever heard, then you don't ever know that anything isn't there.
Back in the 1980's, transistors (cheap shit) audio and tube audio fought a war, and cheap crap won.
(sigh)
Someday you will hear an old recording played on a tube amp, and you will listen in awe and wonder "why don't any of the stereos I've ever had sound like this?"
Excuse me for asking but ( as somebody who got some schooling in programming and then never got a job doing it) what makes any language "better for bioinformatics"? That seems like saying "C++ is better for programs about cats, but Java is better for programs about dogs".
I have seen this asserted with Linux distros too: that some are "better" for one thing or another--such as bioinformatics. What would be the basis of such an argument?
As for my own hobby use,,,,,, the first requirement is a drag-and-drop GUI editor, since 99% of what I need is a Win32-GUI-capable program. I remember having to learn to type out code to make a button; it was boring and repetitive and generally counter to productivity (even from a hobbyist perspective). It allowed some variations not possible in the drag-and-drop editor, but those usually weren't needed. Nobody does it unless they need to, and they usually don't.
It's as silly as people who ask "How to design websites" and somebody always says "Notepad". -Which will work, but it is a terrible way to approach the matter at all. You can spend an hour typing out and troubleshooting a few pages of basic code, when a GUI editor can let you do the same thing, correctly, in under two minutes. For anyone wanting to lean programming for hobby uses, there is no benefit in making it more difficult than it has to be.
The problem here is that the article claimed that they are eliminating the penny for cash transactions and still using it for non-cash transactions. This means that paying cash in a transaction can legally save up to 2.49 cents over the same non-cash transaction.
Doesn't sound like much, but when you're in a business that handles hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, that kind of difference can add up fast. 500K transactions = ~$12,500 a day, ~$4.5m a year. Some companies will gain that much, and other companies are going to lose it...
If they want to eliminate the penny, they should do it for all transactions, at the same time.
Airbags aren't necessary at all anymore, if you wear your seat-belt anyway. In that circumstance all they do is increase injury to the passengers and increase damage to the vehicle. They accomplish nothing good, at all. Car insurance companies figured this out quite some time ago.
The government never said that airbags would replace the greater safety of wearing seat-belts. The catch back then was that some states didn't have mandatory seat-belt laws and didn't know if they could pass them (without getting voted out next election) and the government didn't know if they could legally impose a federal law that mandated wearing them in all 50 states, so the fed government changed the NHTSA rules (that all cars in the USA had to follow) so that cars had to have either automatic seat-belts (an engineering comedy in themselves) or airbags.
After states adopted mandatory seat-belt laws, airbags were no longer required, by any safety measure. At all. The only reason they're still required in cars now is because now there are a couple big & rich companies that make loads of money selling airbags to car companies, and they make sure that airbags are still required.
You can legally disable them yourself (or get them disabled if you can find a shop that will do it) but there is no guarantee that the airbag warning light will not go on. So you might have to disable that too.
......is there any magazine similar to OMNI out there?*
*( I mean old/middle ages OMNI, not the fluffy alien/psychic stuff they put out in the last couple years it was printing )
Hybrids are pushed now because there is government money to push them--because while they use somewhat lower fuel, they cost a lot more money over the long run. This was the technical truth 100 years ago, and it was the reason that hybrid cars were unheard of all that time since,,,,, until now.
It's about fiat currency, its about the need to drive the economy, the constant need to push ever-greater amounts of money into circulation to offset the spiraling inflation caused. The need to make everything more expensive, to soak up all the money being printed.
The individuals talk a different story when cornered with the news cameras, but behind closed doors the US government isn't interested in saving money. As the [effective] creator of US dollars, they have no interest in ever picking the cheapest, most-efficient method for anything.
And now they think that hybrids are great, where there is not a cent for resurrecting the much-cheaper-and-just-as-efficient Geo Metro.
Why do you think that is?
The proposed law does not ban driving while using cellphones; it only recommends that cellphones be "permanently attached to a single fixed location by a non-removable cable between six and eight feet long".
great..... we dump all this money in some eggheads' laps, and all they can think of is to make fancy adult toys
I have the Von Neumann/Morganstern book. It is very heavy reading, Rain-Man level stuff. Unless you're rich or its really cheap, it's a good idea to thumb through a copy before buying.
On the other [fuffy] end of the spectrum is Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone. A 1-2 hour read suitable for teens, with no difficult math and a lot of real-world examples.