The sign placement you describe is done by the highway departments (at least up here in Mass.), not the police departments. I am pretty sure we're dealing with plain old incompetence (i.e., most of the signs up here are stupidly located), and not some vast conspiracy to separate upstanding motorists from their money.
And if it really bugs you, drive to rule. When I can't tell what I'm supposed to do at an intersection (because some clown hid the sign, or simply didn't put one up), I make conservative assumptions. I'll stop till I'm sure it's safe, or slow down till I can be sure that I see all the signs. Sometimes people honk their horns, but the conservative assumption is that the horn is signalling a safety problem that I was unaware of, and if you don't know anything about the danger, best plan is to slow down, or stop, till you can tell what is wrong (that's not always the safest thing to do, but it is usually the safest thing to do, and in the absence of information, assume usual case). Everything I've just told you is totally obnoxious in practical terms, and totally by the book.
Just the opposite -- if you make driving onerous enough, people will get around some other way, which usually involves more physical activity. More exercise means reduced deaths from CP disease can (somewhat) reduced deaths from cancer. It might not be the intended effect of the laws, and it might take really draconian and obnoxious laws (that would likely be repealed by an angry mob of voting drivers), but the estimates of death-from-car-induced-lack-of-exercise are higher than the estimates of deaths from car crashes. (Links, I know, you want them. Sigh. Later. I have to DRIVE home to transport a kid to soccer practice, maybe she'll let me use the bike to get her there, no irony in my life, no, not at all.)
I'm not drawing any correlation, but rather pointing out that history suggests fat models are unlikely to exert a strong influence in the fat direction, else we would have been fat before. I.e., correlation is not causation, but lack of correlation strongly suggests lack of causation.
Free speech for people, absolutely. Corporations, not-so-much; not only are they not people and thus should not enjoy the same rights, they don't enjoy the same rights already.
We also have a pretty good idea what to do for obesity in most cases. People just don't want to do it, or don't have time to do it. (Diet and exercise, lather-rinse-repeat. There are other possible causes that we should not ignore.) Arguably, their employers (corporations, again) should be regulated to ensure that they have time, possibly our jack-booted infrastructure fascists should not make it quite so easy to drive-drive-drive to every last place, possibly advertising of sweet stuff to children should be sharply curtailed. Other countries do various combinations of these things, their populations are not all mopey and sad, they did not zoom down that slippery slope to NewSpeak, it might be worth a try.
I think if the researchers came up with a way to reduce obesity through what was published, they would propose it. I read TFA, their point is that they believe (based on their studies) that anorexia and bulimia could be reduced by changing pictures in a magazine, and that would save lives, suffering, and medical expenses (and the rest of us are not that worse off for not seeing pictures of women skinnier than we are ever likely to encounter in the flesh; and it is, after all, commercial speech). The argument I keep reading in the comments here is that even though we have an idea that is likely to work, we should instead not attempt to save those lives, and instead, we should focus our efforts on a larger problem for which similarly easy solutions as yet elude us. Makes no sense -- why wait to do this, when we could do it now, and continue working on obesity?
And if you look at historical trends for magazine models skinniness and population obesity, they seem to move in opposite directions -- we were thinner, when models were fatter.
Quit worrying so much about the small fraction that abuses (or mis-uses, or gratuitously uses) the system, and be glad that you're not paying as much as we are in the US, dying earlier like we are in the US, and at risk of medical-bill-induced-bankruptcy like we are here in the US. Humans aren't perfect. They're not perfect "customers", not perfect patients, not perfect doctors, nor are they perfect administrators. You guys in England have a system that works decently well, and before you tinker with it too much to cut down on the frivolous users, remember, "first, do no harm".
And who's to say that those people bothering the doctor with every little case of the sniffles does not need to see the doctor, not necessarily for the cold, but perhaps instead to relieve their nervous worry (their sincere, nervous, debilitating worry) that this time, it's Ebola.
CUPS does not work fine for me. I wasted a good chunk of the last few days attempting to share printers from my Linux box to the rest of the world (with a goal of eventually printing from iPad), and it never, ever worked. I would go to the administrative interface, click "share this printer" (options were presented, not grayed out), clicked "save", watched them reset. Tried manually ripping out all the permission snot from cupsd.conf, succeeded only effing things up even worse than before, eventually wiped all my changes and gave up. Tried searching for help, it was the usual mish-mash of poorly phrased misinformation missing all the tricky details (hint: one unambiguous way to give directions, is with a shell script. If one shell script doesn't do the job across all the different flavors of Linux, THAT is a different, gigantic bug.)
Apple can do whatever the heck they want to CUPS, it sure can't make it work worse (for me) than it already does.
I think we've got little-to-no useful information, either way. That strategy memo could also have been a paper copy in someone's hands, scanned at the last minute. And it might have been paper, not emailed around, because everyone knows you're not supposed to plot world domination, monopoly, or the destruction of Los Angeles over email (or text message, or on Facebook, or Twitter). I'm not claiming that any of this is the case, merely that there's decently reasonable explanations for a lot of these discrepancies (at least, based on what I've heard).
The way we find out, is IF Heartland sues. Lawsuit provokes discovery, meaning we get more information -- unless, of course, there's a mysterious hard drive crash at Heartland the day before they file their suit.
Most likely it uses its own allocation pools for all objects, and may include some localization for non-escaping objects. It is possible that it could spot objects whose interfaces are side-effect free and that are never tested for object equality; those are effectively "values" and subject to loop-hoisting and common-subexpression optimizations.
Problem with object pools (if you are multi-threaded) is that they you need to synchronize access to them, and THAT adds overheads and potential bottlenecks. You can make your pools thread-local, but then you've got to worry about them getting too large (how many threads do you have, also?). Unless you're doing some really expensive object preparation, if you've got a generational collector, that's usually a good bet -- simpler, fast enough, not a source of confusion six months down the road.
I don't recall seeing or hearing about this. Perhaps you could refresh my memory with a citation, a link, something like that? You seem familiar with this, I'm surprised you didn't provide one the first time I suggested it.
I googled "google obama special treatment", and mostly got a bunch of pages saying he didn't (but it's part of the special treatment that Google would return those results, if we're going to be properly conspiracy-theoretic, right?).
Care to provide some sort of a citation for your claim?
And even if this bullying did exist, how would you know that it was due to Savage's efforts, and not Santorum's? Having the same name as a nationally famous jerk doesn't necessarily make you popular, either.
Perhaps you may have heard liberals bitching about the content of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, and their willingness to act as an echo chamber and amplifier for very-conservative opinions, some of them verging on crackpot (Obama a Socialist? really? Death panels? really?). There's no need to hypothesize. Difference is, there it's a few very wealthy guys with a strong bias (Murdoch, Ailes) promoting their views. At least in the case of Google and its algorithms, they are reflecting the strong opinions of a much larger number of people, and the corporation itself is (apparently) relatively unbiased.
SpreadingSantorum predates It Gets Better, so this doesn't look like a causal link.
I don't think Google should do anything at all. Why should Santorum get special treatment? The already provide SafeSearch, and TFA proposes setting it to "strict" if you don't want to get results like this.
If the enforcement cameras are on the busses, sounds like de facto the cars get to use the lane, except when a bus needs it, so the use of the lane is somewhat flexible. Another thing to note is the "official" capacity rule which is 1500 cars per hour per lane (learned this from a friend who was a traffic engineer years ago). Busses in SF, at least the last time I used one, tend to run full, so that's about 50 people, more on those articulated long busses. A full bus every 2 minutes moves the same number of people as if the lane was jam-packed with cars. I suspect, but I'm not sure, that urban streets carry fewer cars per hour (because of all the start-stop, lights, crosswalks, and random obstructions).
For the guy who's tailing, you are there are many remedies that don't necessarily induce rage. One is to pretend to drive like you're falling asleep; drift over to the rumble strip or the edge, hear the noise, jerk back. Another, if the opportunity presents itself, is to drive through puddles and piles of debris, that may be kicked up into the other guy's face. Be sure your windshield is really, really clean, too -- better wash it, a lot, which results in spray on his windshield. On a multilane highway, if you can drive up alongside a truck, position yourself so that the tailgater behind you is next to the noisy+obnoxious part of the truck, and then stay there.
Plan B, slightly less aggressive than a middle finger, is to not maintain a steady speed. Drift down, speed up, drift down, speed up. Following you will get annoying.
In all cases, it helps if this is done subtly enough that the guy behind you can't tell for sure if you are doing it on purpose.
There's some sort of an economic theory failure here. If the city is less nice, why is it more expensive? Are you sure that people aren't just sorting themselves out to where they want to live, and you like the suburbs, but plenty of people like the city, also?
We'll have the evidence-base soon enough -- if some people elect to do this, and some do not, and it judges risks inappropriately, that insurance company will lose money (pricing risk too low) or customers (pricing risk too high). It's a free country, they're free to offer this deal, and drivers are free to decline it.
IF, however, it turns out that this monitoring does accurately identify truly risky driving (or reduce it because people know they are being "watched"), the company will attract and retain safe drivers with its low rates for safe drivers. Unsafe drivers will migrate to the other insurance companies, driving their rates up, further increasing the incentive for safe drivers (and even kinda-safe drivers) to be monitored.
I have a hard time seeing the problem with this -- if the experiment fails, the experimenter loses a bunch of money, if it succeeds, safe drivers save money on insurance and unsafe drivers have a greater incentive to either stay off the road or learn to be safe drivers.
Some people think they can read minds, and he's figured out that there's a secret conspiracy of international elites out to micromanage his life. Never mind that the whole point of something like a CO2 tax is to give you a price signal, and let you figure out the best way for you to deal with it. I like hot showers. I don't like big cars. I know where I would spend my money.
But it's not, certainly not in the US. US personal auto emissions are 1.1Pg of CO2. Total US fossil fuel CO2 emissions is 2.2Pg. Unless an "order of magnitude" is the third-root of 2 (1.26), that's not several.
Citation? When I look at the EPA's GHG inventory for the US, on page 5 I see that Electricity Generation leads with 2.2Pg (Pg = petagram = 10e15 grams). Next is Transportation at 1.7Pg. After that Industrial at.7Pg. All of CH4 (as CO2 equivalent) is.7Pg, all of N2O is.3Pg. Volcanos worldwide are.2Pg.
And, page 9: "Transportation End-Use Sector. Transportation activities (excluding international bunker fuels) accounted for 33 percent of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2009. Virtually all of the energy consumed in this end-use sector came from petroleum products. Nearly 65 percent of the emissions resulted from gasoline consumption for personal vehicle use.".65 times 1.7Pg = 1.1Pg, or 20% of our total CO2 (not CO2-equivalent) emissions. In the US, cars are number two, after electricity generation. What are these "lots of other things" that would be better for us to cut, and how much are their yearly emissions?
World emissions are at about 30 Pg, so US automobiles alone account for about 3.7%, ignoring cars in all other countries. World-wide, "road transport" produces 5Pg of CO2 (p. 10), or 1/6 of the total, with no breakdown into personal and not. It is possible that US personal car use alone is not in the top ten of world-wide sources of CO2, but I'd like to see a reference for that or an explanation. World wide, 41% is "electricity and heat". The next big category is "transport" at 23%, then "industry" at 20%, "other" at 10%, and "residential" at 6%. Obviously, there's some category shuffling going on here (transport includes ships and airplanes, too), but if you carved out the world-wide top two (ignoring our contribution to "transport"), our 3.7% for personal autos looms decently large against the remaining 40%. It's bigger than ships, world-wide, it's bigger than airplanes, world-wide.
This might have something to do with why people who worry about global warming don't much like big, wasteful automobiles. They have the secondary problem of making the road a scarier place for people who might like to drive smaller cars or take a motorcycle, scooter, or bicycle. And in theory, yes, we could switch to a GHG-free fuel for our cars and then people could choose them just as huge as SUVs today. But here on Planet Earth, for the next ten years or so, that is not much of an option. An E-vehicle can be more efficient, but right now a whole lot of "E" comes from coal-fired power plants, so it's best to keep them small, and use them where they win biggest (start/stop driving so they can use regenerative braking).
Have a look at Early Warning. You'll have to root around a bit for the climate entries (some are oil, some are economic), but a recent few point out the medium-term possibility of killer droughts, and the long term possibility of not-necessarily so bad. The main issue that is very hard to appreciate (hard for me, too) is that it takes a long time (many decades, maybe centuries) to reach equilibrium. The heat capacity of the oceans is ginormous., meaning that they can absorb an extraordinary amount of energy without their temperature changing much.
What that means in the short term is that we may (articles mentioned in EW, above) hit a point where the land is warm, but the oceans are relatively not. This leads to less precipitation over land. Long-term, land and oceans are in thermal equilibrium, not so much drought, but that is not predicted to happen for centuries. A century or so of drought would suck. Centuries-from-now-equilibrium might be better, assuming that you trust the models.
Another issue caused by oceans-are-enormous is that yearly variation really does swamp slow steady change, depending on which part of the ocean is warming or cooling the air that happens to be blowing our way. We're having an insane "warm" winter here in the Northeast, but it is allegedly caused almost entirely by a change in the Arctic Oscillation -- not Nina/Nino, not global warming. It's a wind pattern, apparently it can change in a matter of weeks. AO trends might be affected by global warming, but people are still arguing about that.
It's also virtually guaranteed that centuries from now the oceans will be many meters higher. Other papers, also referenced from EW, mention this. Hansen has several; one of his principal worries is that he sees geological evidence of the oceans rising 20 meters over 400 years -- that is, a meter every 20 years. Could that happen to "us"? When would it start? What we don't know is how this actually happens, because it's a rate of glacier flow into the ocean that would be outside of anything we've ever observed, and "explosive". Reasons to be nervous about this include: the IPCC explicitly ignores sea level contributions from ice caps melting; the IPCC predictions of arctic sea ice melting have turned out to be grossly over-conservative; recent satellite observations of Greenland's ice cap show an accelerating rate of loss (but accelerating how? Too early to tell).
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The sign placement you describe is done by the highway departments (at least up here in Mass.), not the police departments. I am pretty sure we're dealing with plain old incompetence (i.e., most of the signs up here are stupidly located), and not some vast conspiracy to separate upstanding motorists from their money.
And if it really bugs you, drive to rule. When I can't tell what I'm supposed to do at an intersection (because some clown hid the sign, or simply didn't put one up), I make conservative assumptions. I'll stop till I'm sure it's safe, or slow down till I can be sure that I see all the signs. Sometimes people honk their horns, but the conservative assumption is that the horn is signalling a safety problem that I was unaware of, and if you don't know anything about the danger, best plan is to slow down, or stop, till you can tell what is wrong (that's not always the safest thing to do, but it is usually the safest thing to do, and in the absence of information, assume usual case). Everything I've just told you is totally obnoxious in practical terms, and totally by the book.
Just the opposite -- if you make driving onerous enough, people will get around some other way, which usually involves more physical activity. More exercise means reduced deaths from CP disease can (somewhat) reduced deaths from cancer. It might not be the intended effect of the laws, and it might take really draconian and obnoxious laws (that would likely be repealed by an angry mob of voting drivers), but the estimates of death-from-car-induced-lack-of-exercise are higher than the estimates of deaths from car crashes. (Links, I know, you want them. Sigh. Later. I have to DRIVE home to transport a kid to soccer practice, maybe she'll let me use the bike to get her there, no irony in my life, no, not at all.)
I'm not drawing any correlation, but rather pointing out that history suggests fat models are unlikely to exert a strong influence in the fat direction, else we would have been fat before. I.e., correlation is not causation, but lack of correlation strongly suggests lack of causation.
Free speech for people, absolutely. Corporations, not-so-much; not only are they not people and thus should not enjoy the same rights, they don't enjoy the same rights already.
We also have a pretty good idea what to do for obesity in most cases. People just don't want to do it, or don't have time to do it. (Diet and exercise, lather-rinse-repeat. There are other possible causes that we should not ignore.) Arguably, their employers (corporations, again) should be regulated to ensure that they have time, possibly our jack-booted infrastructure fascists should not make it quite so easy to drive-drive-drive to every last place, possibly advertising of sweet stuff to children should be sharply curtailed. Other countries do various combinations of these things, their populations are not all mopey and sad, they did not zoom down that slippery slope to NewSpeak, it might be worth a try.
I think if the researchers came up with a way to reduce obesity through what was published, they would propose it. I read TFA, their point is that they believe (based on their studies) that anorexia and bulimia could be reduced by changing pictures in a magazine, and that would save lives, suffering, and medical expenses (and the rest of us are not that worse off for not seeing pictures of women skinnier than we are ever likely to encounter in the flesh; and it is, after all, commercial speech). The argument I keep reading in the comments here is that even though we have an idea that is likely to work, we should instead not attempt to save those lives, and instead, we should focus our efforts on a larger problem for which similarly easy solutions as yet elude us. Makes no sense -- why wait to do this, when we could do it now, and continue working on obesity?
And if you look at historical trends for magazine models skinniness and population obesity, they seem to move in opposite directions -- we were thinner, when models were fatter.
Quit worrying so much about the small fraction that abuses (or mis-uses, or gratuitously uses) the system, and be glad that you're not paying as much as we are in the US, dying earlier like we are in the US, and at risk of medical-bill-induced-bankruptcy like we are here in the US. Humans aren't perfect. They're not perfect "customers", not perfect patients, not perfect doctors, nor are they perfect administrators. You guys in England have a system that works decently well, and before you tinker with it too much to cut down on the frivolous users, remember, "first, do no harm".
And who's to say that those people bothering the doctor with every little case of the sniffles does not need to see the doctor, not necessarily for the cold, but perhaps instead to relieve their nervous worry (their sincere, nervous, debilitating worry) that this time, it's Ebola.
One explanation: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-are-gas-prices-high.html
Basically, we're supply-constrained, and economic growth around the world is supporting demand.
CUPS does not work fine for me. I wasted a good chunk of the last few days attempting to share printers from my Linux box to the rest of the world (with a goal of eventually printing from iPad), and it never, ever worked. I would go to the administrative interface, click "share this printer" (options were presented, not grayed out), clicked "save", watched them reset. Tried manually ripping out all the permission snot from cupsd.conf, succeeded only effing things up even worse than before, eventually wiped all my changes and gave up. Tried searching for help, it was the usual mish-mash of poorly phrased misinformation missing all the tricky details (hint: one unambiguous way to give directions, is with a shell script. If one shell script doesn't do the job across all the different flavors of Linux, THAT is a different, gigantic bug.)
Apple can do whatever the heck they want to CUPS, it sure can't make it work worse (for me) than it already does.
A few journalists were scared of global cooling. Scientists, not so much, though it was discussed in a small number of papers (which got the attention of journalists, "SQUIRREL!"): http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-global-cooling.html
I think we've got little-to-no useful information, either way. That strategy memo could also have been a paper copy in someone's hands, scanned at the last minute. And it might have been paper, not emailed around, because everyone knows you're not supposed to plot world domination, monopoly, or the destruction of Los Angeles over email (or text message, or on Facebook, or Twitter). I'm not claiming that any of this is the case, merely that there's decently reasonable explanations for a lot of these discrepancies (at least, based on what I've heard).
The way we find out, is IF Heartland sues. Lawsuit provokes discovery, meaning we get more information -- unless, of course, there's a mysterious hard drive crash at Heartland the day before they file their suit.
Most likely it uses its own allocation pools for all objects, and may include some localization for non-escaping objects. It is possible that it could spot objects whose interfaces are side-effect free and that are never tested for object equality; those are effectively "values" and subject to loop-hoisting and common-subexpression optimizations.
Problem with object pools (if you are multi-threaded) is that they you need to synchronize access to them, and THAT adds overheads and potential bottlenecks. You can make your pools thread-local, but then you've got to worry about them getting too large (how many threads do you have, also?). Unless you're doing some really expensive object preparation, if you've got a generational collector, that's usually a good bet -- simpler, fast enough, not a source of confusion six months down the road.
I don't recall seeing or hearing about this.
Perhaps you could refresh my memory with a citation, a link, something like that?
You seem familiar with this, I'm surprised you didn't provide one the first time I suggested it.
I googled "google obama special treatment", and mostly got a bunch of pages saying he didn't (but it's part of the special treatment that Google would return those results, if we're going to be properly conspiracy-theoretic, right?).
Care to provide some sort of a citation for your claim?
If you're going to cite the Streisand Effect, don't forget to cite the Streisand Effect. There, FTFY.
Citation? Any evidence of this bullying, like, say, an increased suicide rate?
And even if this bullying did exist, how would you know that it was due to Savage's efforts, and not Santorum's? Having the same name as a nationally famous jerk doesn't necessarily make you popular, either.
Perhaps you may have heard liberals bitching about the content of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, and their willingness to act as an echo chamber and amplifier for very-conservative opinions, some of them verging on crackpot (Obama a Socialist? really? Death panels? really?). There's no need to hypothesize. Difference is, there it's a few very wealthy guys with a strong bias (Murdoch, Ailes) promoting their views. At least in the case of Google and its algorithms, they are reflecting the strong opinions of a much larger number of people, and the corporation itself is (apparently) relatively unbiased.
SpreadingSantorum predates It Gets Better, so this doesn't look like a causal link.
I don't think Google should do anything at all. Why should Santorum get special treatment? The already provide SafeSearch, and TFA proposes setting it to "strict" if you don't want to get results like this.
See also: Dan Savage on this.
If the enforcement cameras are on the busses, sounds like de facto the cars get to use the lane, except when a bus needs it, so the use of the lane is somewhat flexible. Another thing to note is the "official" capacity rule which is 1500 cars per hour per lane (learned this from a friend who was a traffic engineer years ago). Busses in SF, at least the last time I used one, tend to run full, so that's about 50 people, more on those articulated long busses. A full bus every 2 minutes moves the same number of people as if the lane was jam-packed with cars. I suspect, but I'm not sure, that urban streets carry fewer cars per hour (because of all the start-stop, lights, crosswalks, and random obstructions).
For the guy who's tailing, you are there are many remedies that don't necessarily induce rage. One is to pretend to drive like you're falling asleep; drift over to the rumble strip or the edge, hear the noise, jerk back. Another, if the opportunity presents itself, is to drive through puddles and piles of debris, that may be kicked up into the other guy's face. Be sure your windshield is really, really clean, too -- better wash it, a lot, which results in spray on his windshield. On a multilane highway, if you can drive up alongside a truck, position yourself so that the tailgater behind you is next to the noisy+obnoxious part of the truck, and then stay there.
Plan B, slightly less aggressive than a middle finger, is to not maintain a steady speed. Drift down, speed up, drift down, speed up. Following you will get annoying.
In all cases, it helps if this is done subtly enough that the guy behind you can't tell for sure if you are doing it on purpose.
There's some sort of an economic theory failure here. If the city is less nice, why is it more expensive? Are you sure that people aren't just sorting themselves out to where they want to live, and you like the suburbs, but plenty of people like the city, also?
We'll have the evidence-base soon enough -- if some people elect to do this, and some do not, and it judges risks inappropriately, that insurance company will lose money (pricing risk too low) or customers (pricing risk too high). It's a free country, they're free to offer this deal, and drivers are free to decline it.
IF, however, it turns out that this monitoring does accurately identify truly risky driving (or reduce it because people know they are being "watched"), the company will attract and retain safe drivers with its low rates for safe drivers. Unsafe drivers will migrate to the other insurance companies, driving their rates up, further increasing the incentive for safe drivers (and even kinda-safe drivers) to be monitored.
I have a hard time seeing the problem with this -- if the experiment fails, the experimenter loses a bunch of money, if it succeeds, safe drivers save money on insurance and unsafe drivers have a greater incentive to either stay off the road or learn to be safe drivers.
Some people think they can read minds, and he's figured out that there's a secret conspiracy of international elites out to micromanage his life. Never mind that the whole point of something like a CO2 tax is to give you a price signal, and let you figure out the best way for you to deal with it. I like hot showers. I don't like big cars. I know where I would spend my money.
But it's not, certainly not in the US. US personal auto emissions are 1.1Pg of CO2. Total US fossil fuel CO2 emissions is 2.2Pg. Unless an "order of magnitude" is the third-root of 2 (1.26), that's not several.
Citation? When I look at the EPA's GHG inventory for the US, on page 5 I see that Electricity Generation leads with 2.2Pg (Pg = petagram = 10e15 grams). Next is Transportation at 1.7Pg. After that Industrial at .7Pg. All of CH4 (as CO2 equivalent) is .7Pg, all of N2O is .3Pg. Volcanos worldwide are .2Pg.
And, page 9: "Transportation End-Use Sector. Transportation activities (excluding international bunker fuels) accounted for 33 percent of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2009. Virtually all of the energy consumed in this end-use sector came from petroleum products. Nearly 65 percent of the emissions resulted from gasoline consumption for personal vehicle use." .65 times 1.7Pg = 1.1Pg, or 20% of our total CO2 (not CO2-equivalent) emissions. In the US, cars are number two, after electricity generation. What are these "lots of other things" that would be better for us to cut, and how much are their yearly emissions?
World emissions are at about 30 Pg, so US automobiles alone account for about 3.7%, ignoring cars in all other countries. World-wide, "road transport" produces 5Pg of CO2 (p. 10), or 1/6 of the total, with no breakdown into personal and not. It is possible that US personal car use alone is not in the top ten of world-wide sources of CO2, but I'd like to see a reference for that or an explanation. World wide, 41% is "electricity and heat". The next big category is "transport" at 23%, then "industry" at 20%, "other" at 10%, and "residential" at 6%. Obviously, there's some category shuffling going on here (transport includes ships and airplanes, too), but if you carved out the world-wide top two (ignoring our contribution to "transport"), our 3.7% for personal autos looms decently large against the remaining 40%. It's bigger than ships, world-wide, it's bigger than airplanes, world-wide.
This might have something to do with why people who worry about global warming don't much like big, wasteful automobiles. They have the secondary problem of making the road a scarier place for people who might like to drive smaller cars or take a motorcycle, scooter, or bicycle. And in theory, yes, we could switch to a GHG-free fuel for our cars and then people could choose them just as huge as SUVs today. But here on Planet Earth, for the next ten years or so, that is not much of an option. An E-vehicle can be more efficient, but right now a whole lot of "E" comes from coal-fired power plants, so it's best to keep them small, and use them where they win biggest (start/stop driving so they can use regenerative braking).
Have a look at Early Warning. You'll have to root around a bit for the climate entries (some are oil, some are economic), but a recent few point out the medium-term possibility of killer droughts, and the long term possibility of not-necessarily so bad. The main issue that is very hard to appreciate (hard for me, too) is that it takes a long time (many decades, maybe centuries) to reach equilibrium. The heat capacity of the oceans is ginormous., meaning that they can absorb an extraordinary amount of energy without their temperature changing much.
What that means in the short term is that we may (articles mentioned in EW, above) hit a point where the land is warm, but the oceans are relatively not. This leads to less precipitation over land. Long-term, land and oceans are in thermal equilibrium, not so much drought, but that is not predicted to happen for centuries. A century or so of drought would suck. Centuries-from-now-equilibrium might be better, assuming that you trust the models.
Another issue caused by oceans-are-enormous is that yearly variation really does swamp slow steady change, depending on which part of the ocean is warming or cooling the air that happens to be blowing our way. We're having an insane "warm" winter here in the Northeast, but it is allegedly caused almost entirely by a change in the Arctic Oscillation -- not Nina/Nino, not global warming. It's a wind pattern, apparently it can change in a matter of weeks. AO trends might be affected by global warming, but people are still arguing about that.
It's also virtually guaranteed that centuries from now the oceans will be many meters higher. Other papers, also referenced from EW, mention this. Hansen has several; one of his principal worries is that he sees geological evidence of the oceans rising 20 meters over 400 years -- that is, a meter every 20 years. Could that happen to "us"? When would it start? What we don't know is how this actually happens, because it's a rate of glacier flow into the ocean that would be outside of anything we've ever observed, and "explosive". Reasons to be nervous about this include: the IPCC explicitly ignores sea level contributions from ice caps melting; the IPCC predictions of arctic sea ice melting have turned out to be grossly over-conservative; recent satellite observations of Greenland's ice cap show an accelerating rate of loss (but accelerating how? Too early to tell).