So, you can prove you're a citizen by carrying no papers?:-)
That's what's always impressed me about these laws -- in theory, citizens need not carry papers, but if you don't, how does that "discussion" with the cop usually go? Of course *I* don't have to worry about this, I'm a fat old white guy. It's obviously discriminatory, it's intended to be discriminatory, and it's understood to be discriminatory. If *I* (and my kids) had to carry papers around all the time or risk arrest, I'd be furious. But I'm supposed to be okay with the law, because I'm white, so "we all know" that won't happen to me, it's only a problem for "other people". Bleah. This law has to go.
Never mind the "there will always be risk", the risk is very low compared to other stuff that we take for granted and do nothing about. Poor allocation of health care resources apparently kills thousands of infants each year (if we had Canada's infant mortality rate, 8000 fewer deaths per year, and Canada's only middle of the pack among developed nations). Lack of exercise shortens expected lifespans by 2-5 years, depending on how you define "exercise". Careless driving is good for tens of thousands of deaths each year, including over 3000 pedestrians (i.e., people not in cars). It is likely, though not proven, that inadequate food regulation (the fact that trans-fats from partially hydrogenated oils are still considered "food" instead of "poison") and poorly chosen agricultural subsidies (does HFCS need to be so cheap? No, it does not.) cause tens of thousands of early deaths each year.
PS Alumin[i]um is often recycled, and that saves a lot of energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling . Something as large as a car is definitely going to be recycled. I would expect that costly lithium batteries would also be recycled, and we already do that for lead batteries so it would not require much new.
Main plan is to "drive" much smaller "cars". Ideally, bicycles and electric scooters, though those don't work for all people and all commutes. Depending on speed the scooters can be most efficient, can manage a higher average speed, and don't get you all sweaty. Cycling has substantial exercise benefits, which can make it "infinitely fast" if you regard time on the bicycle as time "spent at the gym", and then surprise, you are at your destination.
And clearly, this crustacean armor can be used to develop better helmets; definitely necessary for the scooters, and possibly necessary for bicycles (it's not a major factor in bicycle safety -- where cycling is safest they are hardly used at all).
It was a Google search (actually DuckDuckGo -- I got pissed off at Google because it fills the browser history with Google redirection URLs instead of where I actually went), but I knew about the study, so I knew some likely words. The winning search was "Prius lifecycle costs".
I think the fuel efficiency depends on your commute. My brother's may win -- 50 miles one-way, crap driving (a lot of varying speeds). They ought to be a good choice for taxi cabs; again, high mileage, lots of stops and starts. I am somewhat hacked off at the subsidy that they received over the years (where's my bicycle subsidy, hmmm?) but I don't think it's as large as the effective subsidy that corn ethanol receives because of its mandated use in fuel (would need to check that, of course).
I was being informative. Was curious to see if anyone noticed. The Prius-haters are looney-toons. I'm not sure they make sense economically (would not for my commute) but they clearly have a lower life-cycle energy cost than most other new cars, and used cars don't last forever -- somebody has to buy new cars.
Note that the comparison of new-car to used-car will always start out behind on the lifecycle costs, since it is assumed that the "production cost" for the now-used-car was assigned to the first owner.
You realize that you're also questioning pretty much the whole foundation of economics, by asserting that price has nothing to do with demand. Sure, there are other factors, but the default assumption is that raising the price will reduce demand, and it's usually right.
But the old data includes rates of sea level rise that handily exceed 1 meter per century, so the law manages to not accomplish much at all. That's somewhat amusing, which I think is what you regard as "not proper logic".
I went and tried to read some of the discussions, and those people are insane. One bit, called (after convening a task force to deliberate on the important issue of name of bit, and much harrumphing) "NSFW". Done. Any organization that can't do that, is busted.
That's part of the problem. There's people who tell him all the reasons it won't work, but he doesn't want to hear that. There's other people who don't bother telling him unpleasant truths, and instead just sell him a magic button, and when that doesn't work, sell him more magic buttons.
You have to admit, the magic button vendors have it figured out. They get to make money, AND cheat the RIAA out of their hard-"earned" money.
Correct, yes. Most feasible, probably not, because there are plenty of people making money on the status quo, and a fair amount of "economic value" depends on burning fossil fuels that are still in the ground (a scary amount -- http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175499/ -- search for "value" to skip chit-chat about the climate). Assume that something similar holds in China. Given this, there's going to be a powerful economic incentive to stick with business as usual, and plenty of money whose jobs, wealth, or pensions depend upon the continued consumption of fossil fuels. Politically, it may not be feasible to cut back until we start to see unambiguously negative outcomes (not predicted outcomes, not reports endorsed by a mere 95% of climate scientists, but actual bad stuff), and maybe not even then, if they only happen to poor people in countries we don't care that much about.
So given that, it's sadly prudent to consider a plan B, and perhaps a plan C and D.
I'm not sure what an "actual bad outcome" would be. How bad would a drought or a heat wave have to get before people quit claiming it was just "natural variation"? Sea levels right now are rising at 3.3mm/year; if the rate suddenly doubled to 6.6mm/year, climate scientists' hair would spontaneously catch fire, but most people would not notice for years.
I'm not following you here. I see (at least) three different responses -- "bail out", "socialist take over", and "let the banks fail". In the first two choices, we avoid a bank crisis. In the last two choices, shareholders get wiped out. What we did was plan A, avoiding crisis, but not allowing the "negative incentives" to bank shareholders to be (ahem) fully expressed. Your proposal (as I read it) is the third choice -- shareholders get wiped out AND we risk an economic crisis. I.e., you criticize plan B for screwing the commoners, and then you promote plan C, which also screws the commoners.
Plan A would be a lot more tolerable if we reinstituted Glass-Steagal or passed some other similarly toothy regulations, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
You do know that there are somewhat credible pessimistic scenarios where the sea level rises at 5 meters per century under conditions pretty much like the ones we are creating right now? The estimates are based on "paleoclimate" studies; best estimates are that there was a time when the sea rose that quickly.
This paper (you may want to click through to linked/referenced papers from it) http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/ discusses attempts to discern any lag in sea level rise given the relatively slow (compared to present conditions) climate forcings, and finds none. Essentially, it says that if you fail to see rapid sea level rise in the geological record, that should not comfort you -- it only indicates that the temperature did not rise quickly, but as fast as it did rise, so did the sea level.
All of this is subject to caveats about what is melting (Greenland? Antarctica? Ice sheets?) and the resolution and accuracy of geological proxies. But people aren't just pulling these scary estimates out of their posteriors.
I do not think it would be possible to protect coastal Florida with dikes; the geology there (karst) would literally undermine your efforts. There are water-filled passages connecting the Gulf of Mexico with inland lakes and sinkholes.
There's another alternative, that I believe was recently used in Sweden, but it is a bit too "socialist" for our taste. If I am recounting this right, it is the same in terms of bailout of the banks (meaning, they get money to carry on), but in return for that money the shareholders of the bank pretty much get wiped out, because the government gets most of the bank in return for the bailout. Over time, the government sells off its stake in the bank, but temporarily very socialist. On the plus side, there's big-time negative incentives applied to the bank owners.
We could mostly solve the Greece problem (and our too-many-underwater-mortgages problem) with worldwide currency devaluation (i.e., inflation). The nominal value of money owed goes does not change, but the actual value goes down.
"Health Care which even the moderate Republicans won't touch"
So what does that make Romney, who actually mostly pushed for the universal health care that we have here in Massachusetts? Obamacare used to be the Republican counterproposal to Democratic single-payer (i.e., Medicare for all, or what they have in Canada) proposals.
It's instructive to see what a big hurricane can do. Friend of mine grew in Louisiana, his boy scout troop visited the coast post-Camille. He still recalls seeing a concrete slab, with the structural i-beams for the building cast into it, slightly bent away from the shoreline. Friends of ours spent their honeymoon 10 floors up above the beach during hurricane Gilbert, which was tossing conch shells through the windows of rooms in floors 1 through 4. Strictly speaking, the building they were in was "resistant" to a monster storm, since it stood, though floors 1-4 were toast (once the windows go, in comes the salt spray, not-so-good for the building's electrical system, sheetrock, or anything else).
Your experience does not match my parents. Also in Florida, 80 feet up and a couple of miles inland, and they said that their insurance rates shot up (in the last 10 years) -- so much that they went and installed roller-blind metal storm shutters, and cut back on their insurance.
In that part of the country (PA, NY), if there is no fracking, then there is no point in drilling (now). All the easy oil and gas there is gone. Therefore, nothing to dispose of.
The "getting rid of" (rather, "cutting way back on") fossil fuels is not some random agenda. There are reasons, generally supported by science. There's some reason to believe that some corollaries of cutting back (if we do it by driving cars less) will have other beneficial effects, everything from fewer crash fatalities, to less time wasted in traffic jams and parking, to improved health (more exercise from walking and biking), to intensified economic activity in cities (cars waste space).
High fuel costs do not kill other economies (look at Canada, look at Japan, look at non-Greece Europe). Is our economy that fragile?
There are plenty of alternatives. I know several car-free families; some do bikes, mass transit, and the rare zip-car, another does bikes and motorcycles. To the inevitable "but my conditions are special" -- maybe you're mistaken and haven't really tried, maybe you need to change those conditions. Cars are really fucking expensive; their fuel is expensive, their maintenance is expensive, their insurance is expensive.
Sure, but one way to get rid of the crappy disposal wells, is to ban fracking -- no fracking, nothing to dispose. If the fracking industry now wants to whine that the wrong thing is being regulated, who the hell's fault is that? They could have gotten ahead of this and asked the state legislatures to enshrine their best practices into law, but they did not. They could even do that now. Instead, they only complain that the wrong thing is being regulated. This is not signalling that they intend to do the right thing -- instead, it signals that they intend to cut whatever corners they can, as long as they can. The logical reaction to an industry that behaves like that is to ban it.
GDP, not GDP per capita? They're #30, per capita. Don't forget, small states, mostly rural, means there's not many people there in the first place, and they like it that way.
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So, you can prove you're a citizen by carrying no papers? :-)
That's what's always impressed me about these laws -- in theory, citizens need not carry papers, but if you don't, how does that "discussion" with the cop usually go? Of course *I* don't have to worry about this, I'm a fat old white guy. It's obviously discriminatory, it's intended to be discriminatory, and it's understood to be discriminatory. If *I* (and my kids) had to carry papers around all the time or risk arrest, I'd be furious. But I'm supposed to be okay with the law, because I'm white, so "we all know" that won't happen to me, it's only a problem for "other people". Bleah. This law has to go.
Arrest != crime. Arrest can also indicate mere harassment by police.
Never mind the "there will always be risk", the risk is very low compared to other stuff that we take for granted and do nothing about. Poor allocation of health care resources apparently kills thousands of infants each year (if we had Canada's infant mortality rate, 8000 fewer deaths per year, and Canada's only middle of the pack among developed nations). Lack of exercise shortens expected lifespans by 2-5 years, depending on how you define "exercise". Careless driving is good for tens of thousands of deaths each year, including over 3000 pedestrians (i.e., people not in cars). It is likely, though not proven, that inadequate food regulation (the fact that trans-fats from partially hydrogenated oils are still considered "food" instead of "poison") and poorly chosen agricultural subsidies (does HFCS need to be so cheap? No, it does not.) cause tens of thousands of early deaths each year.
PS Alumin[i]um is often recycled, and that saves a lot of energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling .
Something as large as a car is definitely going to be recycled. I would expect that costly lithium batteries would also be recycled, and we already do that for lead batteries so it would not require much new.
Main plan is to "drive" much smaller "cars". Ideally, bicycles and electric scooters, though those don't work for all people and all commutes. Depending on speed the scooters can be most efficient, can manage a higher average speed, and don't get you all sweaty. Cycling has substantial exercise benefits, which can make it "infinitely fast" if you regard time on the bicycle as time "spent at the gym", and then surprise, you are at your destination.
And clearly, this crustacean armor can be used to develop better helmets; definitely necessary for the scooters, and possibly necessary for bicycles (it's not a major factor in bicycle safety -- where cycling is safest they are hardly used at all).
It was a Google search (actually DuckDuckGo -- I got pissed off at Google because it fills the browser history with Google redirection URLs instead of where I actually went), but I knew about the study, so I knew some likely words. The winning search was "Prius lifecycle costs".
I think the fuel efficiency depends on your commute. My brother's may win -- 50 miles one-way, crap driving (a lot of varying speeds). They ought to be a good choice for taxi cabs; again, high mileage, lots of stops and starts. I am somewhat hacked off at the subsidy that they received over the years (where's my bicycle subsidy, hmmm?) but I don't think it's as large as the effective subsidy that corn ethanol receives because of its mandated use in fuel (would need to check that, of course).
I was being informative. Was curious to see if anyone noticed. The Prius-haters are looney-toons. I'm not sure they make sense economically (would not for my commute) but they clearly have a lower life-cycle energy cost than most other new cars, and used cars don't last forever -- somebody has to buy new cars.
Note that the comparison of new-car to used-car will always start out behind on the lifecycle costs, since it is assumed that the "production cost" for the now-used-car was assigned to the first owner.
Here, these should do the job:
http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_science/case_studies/hummer_vs_prius.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20070714131759/http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Transportation/T07-01_DustToDust.pdf
You realize that you're also questioning pretty much the whole foundation of economics, by asserting that price has nothing to do with demand. Sure, there are other factors, but the default assumption is that raising the price will reduce demand, and it's usually right.
But the old data includes rates of sea level rise that handily exceed 1 meter per century, so the law manages to not accomplish much at all. That's somewhat amusing, which I think is what you regard as "not proper logic".
I went and tried to read some of the discussions, and those people are insane. One bit, called (after convening a task force to deliberate on the important issue of name of bit, and much harrumphing) "NSFW". Done. Any organization that can't do that, is busted.
Right, but she's already burnt out on working with flaming assholes.
That's part of the problem. There's people who tell him all the reasons it won't work, but he doesn't want to hear that. There's other people who don't bother telling him unpleasant truths, and instead just sell him a magic button, and when that doesn't work, sell him more magic buttons.
You have to admit, the magic button vendors have it figured out. They get to make money, AND cheat the RIAA out of their hard-"earned" money.
"that the law prevents from looking forward by declaring that calculations cannot use new and complementing data, only old data"
except, of course, that there's very old data ...
Correct, yes. Most feasible, probably not, because there are plenty of people making money on the status quo, and a fair amount of "economic value" depends on burning fossil fuels that are still in the ground (a scary amount -- http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175499/ -- search for "value" to skip chit-chat about the climate). Assume that something similar holds in China. Given this, there's going to be a powerful economic incentive to stick with business as usual, and plenty of money whose jobs, wealth, or pensions depend upon the continued consumption of fossil fuels. Politically, it may not be feasible to cut back until we start to see unambiguously negative outcomes (not predicted outcomes, not reports endorsed by a mere 95% of climate scientists, but actual bad stuff), and maybe not even then, if they only happen to poor people in countries we don't care that much about.
So given that, it's sadly prudent to consider a plan B, and perhaps a plan C and D.
I'm not sure what an "actual bad outcome" would be. How bad would a drought or a heat wave have to get before people quit claiming it was just "natural variation"? Sea levels right now are rising at 3.3mm/year; if the rate suddenly doubled to 6.6mm/year, climate scientists' hair would spontaneously catch fire, but most people would not notice for years.
I'm not following you here. I see (at least) three different responses -- "bail out", "socialist take over", and "let the banks fail". In the first two choices, we avoid a bank crisis. In the last two choices, shareholders get wiped out. What we did was plan A, avoiding crisis, but not allowing the "negative incentives" to bank shareholders to be (ahem) fully expressed. Your proposal (as I read it) is the third choice -- shareholders get wiped out AND we risk an economic crisis. I.e., you criticize plan B for screwing the commoners, and then you promote plan C, which also screws the commoners.
Plan A would be a lot more tolerable if we reinstituted Glass-Steagal or passed some other similarly toothy regulations, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
Except, of course, that there's (very) old data suggesting a possibly rate of 2.4m/century, century after century.
http://people.uncw.edu/grindlayn/GLY550/Fairbanks-Sealevel-1989.pdf
You do know that there are somewhat credible pessimistic scenarios where the sea level rises at 5 meters per century under conditions pretty much like the ones we are creating right now? The estimates are based on "paleoclimate" studies; best estimates are that there was a time when the sea rose that quickly.
This paper (you may want to click through to linked/referenced papers from it)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/
discusses attempts to discern any lag in sea level rise given the relatively slow (compared to present conditions) climate forcings, and finds none. Essentially, it says that if you fail to see rapid sea level rise in the geological record, that should not comfort you -- it only indicates that the temperature did not rise quickly, but as fast as it did rise, so did the sea level.
This paper
http://people.uncw.edu/grindlayn/GLY550/Fairbanks-Sealevel-1989.pdf
finds that there was a time when the sea level rose 24m in 1000 years at one time, and a second "melt water pulse" appears to have had even higher rates of rise.
All of this is subject to caveats about what is melting (Greenland? Antarctica? Ice sheets?) and the resolution and accuracy of geological proxies. But people aren't just pulling these scary estimates out of their posteriors.
I do not think it would be possible to protect coastal Florida with dikes; the geology there (karst) would literally undermine your efforts. There are water-filled passages connecting the Gulf of Mexico with inland lakes and sinkholes.
There's another alternative, that I believe was recently used in Sweden, but it is a bit too "socialist" for our taste. If I am recounting this right, it is the same in terms of bailout of the banks (meaning, they get money to carry on), but in return for that money the shareholders of the bank pretty much get wiped out, because the government gets most of the bank in return for the bailout. Over time, the government sells off its stake in the bank, but temporarily very socialist. On the plus side, there's big-time negative incentives applied to the bank owners.
We could mostly solve the Greece problem (and our too-many-underwater-mortgages problem) with worldwide currency devaluation (i.e., inflation). The nominal value of money owed goes does not change, but the actual value goes down.
"Health Care which even the moderate Republicans won't touch"
So what does that make Romney, who actually mostly pushed for the universal health care that we have here in Massachusetts? Obamacare used to be the Republican counterproposal to Democratic single-payer (i.e., Medicare for all, or what they have in Canada) proposals.
It's instructive to see what a big hurricane can do. Friend of mine grew in Louisiana, his boy scout troop visited the coast post-Camille. He still recalls seeing a concrete slab, with the structural i-beams for the building cast into it, slightly bent away from the shoreline. Friends of ours spent their honeymoon 10 floors up above the beach during hurricane Gilbert, which was tossing conch shells through the windows of rooms in floors 1 through 4. Strictly speaking, the building they were in was "resistant" to a monster storm, since it stood, though floors 1-4 were toast (once the windows go, in comes the salt spray, not-so-good for the building's electrical system, sheetrock, or anything else).
Your experience does not match my parents. Also in Florida, 80 feet up and a couple of miles inland, and they said that their insurance rates shot up (in the last 10 years) -- so much that they went and installed roller-blind metal storm shutters, and cut back on their insurance.
In that part of the country (PA, NY), if there is no fracking, then there is no point in drilling (now). All the easy oil and gas there is gone. Therefore, nothing to dispose of.
The "getting rid of" (rather, "cutting way back on") fossil fuels is not some random agenda. There are reasons, generally supported by science. There's some reason to believe that some corollaries of cutting back (if we do it by driving cars less) will have other beneficial effects, everything from fewer crash fatalities, to less time wasted in traffic jams and parking, to improved health (more exercise from walking and biking), to intensified economic activity in cities (cars waste space).
High fuel costs do not kill other economies (look at Canada, look at Japan, look at non-Greece Europe). Is our economy that fragile?
There are plenty of alternatives. I know several car-free families; some do bikes, mass transit, and the rare zip-car, another does bikes and motorcycles. To the inevitable "but my conditions are special" -- maybe you're mistaken and haven't really tried, maybe you need to change those conditions. Cars are really fucking expensive; their fuel is expensive, their maintenance is expensive, their insurance is expensive.
Sure, but one way to get rid of the crappy disposal wells, is to ban fracking -- no fracking, nothing to dispose. If the fracking industry now wants to whine that the wrong thing is being regulated, who the hell's fault is that? They could have gotten ahead of this and asked the state legislatures to enshrine their best practices into law, but they did not. They could even do that now. Instead, they only complain that the wrong thing is being regulated. This is not signalling that they intend to do the right thing -- instead, it signals that they intend to cut whatever corners they can, as long as they can. The logical reaction to an industry that behaves like that is to ban it.
GDP, not GDP per capita? They're #30, per capita. Don't forget, small states, mostly rural, means there's not many people there in the first place, and they like it that way.