He didn't say WHICH tax bill. However, they way the roads are funded, unless you can get a lot of people to agree with you and vote for change, you pay quite a bit for them whether you use them or not, which will tend to encourage overuse.
From Pimentel and Pimentel, Food, Energy and Society, 3rd edition, p. 18:
"Americans burn about 40% more fossil energy than the total solar energy captured by all the plant biomass in the United States each year."
So yes, we could convert coal plants to biomass, but we cannot cover our current consumption with biomass, even if we use every last plant that grows in the US.
Nope, sorry. Facebook (and careless use of Facebook) empowers these abusive jerks. Actually doing the legwork to figure out why you were fired and getting damages out of the ultimately responsible party is hard work and far from likely to succeed. In a world of infinite free time and free legal services, sure, Facebook's not to blame, but we don't live in that world.
There seems to be some disagreement about the accounting for the costs of services provided. The advance is easy to account, but all the promotional hoo-ha also needs to be paid back, and some artists think that the record companies overcharge for that. Sort of like buying your groceries at the company store on credit.
See http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for technical details. As near as I can tell, best case is 250mg/g of the scrubbing compound -- so a scrubber that will grab the CO2 from burning 10 gallons of gasoline would weigh 800 lbs (at least -- I think that the weight of the fumed silica support material is not counted in that figure).
Not sure I buy that popsci article. To get a feel for how much you'd need to scrub, if you were to scrub the CO2 from burning 10 gallons of gas in your car, the scrubber would need to gain about 200 lbs in the process (that is, the weight of the CO2, is about 3x the weight of the gasoline burned to produce it). Every time you fuel up, you'd need to also get rid of all the CO2, somehow.
It may be a major advance in terms of materials, but can we actually scale it up in the same way that we have scaled up our CO2 production infrastructure? It's much like the guys proposing to run our cars with biofuels -- if we convert the entire US corn crop to ethanol, that's about 1/5 of what we need to replace gasoline. Where is the other 80% coming from, and what about the missing corn? (yes, the ethanol leftovers still have value as cattle feed)
TFA quotes experts saying that CO2 levels have to fall below 240-270ppm to allow an ice age to occur. We're at 390 right now, we passed 320 back in 1965. We're overdoing it rather much. Would be nice to hang on to some of that carbon for later, just in case. Plan B when (not if) we use up all the carbon and need to warm the planet later, is to use something like CF4 -- powerful greenhouse gas, 50,000 year residence time, not an ozone-destroyer. For comparison, CO2's residence time is estimated in the 30-95 year range, and water vapor has a residence time of only 9 days (figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)
Believe me, I know ALL about skidding versus traction. I ride a bicycle 2500 miles per year, and I've done the manual ABS thing both on the bike (when the rear wheel starts to rise, back off the front brake, then brake more, repeat till stopped) and in a station wagon-on-unsalted-snow-down-a-hill. I've also used the real thing once in a hard stop, and that was impressive as heck. Nonetheless, these people are out there, and lacking a proof that they are totally blowing smoke, I'm going to assume that once in a million years, skidding the brakes will save someone's butt. Of course, they could be as physics-challenged as the crowd that claims that rear-wheel bicycle braking (.25G max) is as good as front-wheel bicycle braking (.5G max).
And, to slightly make the case for my own ignorance (and hence, unwillingness to reject claims out of hand), I drive FWD cars only, and since moving to the Boston area, every once in a while I'll spot someone on nasty snow/ice who knows what they are doing in a RWD car, and they pull some really interesting (and intended, and successful) maneuvers with a distinct lack of traction. These people are rare, of course -- most people merely manage to be interesting (from a safe distance) under those conditions.
Right. So I check out digital delivery, and on iTunes, Princess Bride HD is $14.99, Wild Hogs HD is $17.99. SD prices are the same, but back when I first noticed this, Princess Bride SD was cheaper.
"Never" is mighty strong language. I don't offhand know an example, but I'd swear that I had seen/heard someone else express a similarly emphatic opinion about the occasional necessity of skid.
For that, there's brakes. It has the disadvantage that it allows the lane-merger to "win", but at anything above parking-lot speeds it clears the hazard without creating any new ones (assuming that the guy behind you maintains a safe following distance -- but then the hazard was not newly created, it was already there), and it is always an option, whereas changing to the other lane might not be an available choice. For a robotically controlled car, that would certainly be the algorithm, because it ensures that the robot will not be at fault if a crash occurs following the avoiding maneuver. Impatient+savvy human drivers might learn to aggressively cut off robot-cars, but this would also be true even if the reaction was a swerve, even an optional swerve.
Braking has the secondary advantage of reducing speed in any crash that might subsequently result, which generally reduces the severity and scope of the crash.
It would, but people manage to simultaneously hold in their heads both "I am a better than average driver" and "the anti-idiot squad might come after MY driver's license". There's a huge diversity of opinion about exactly what "good driving" is, too -- I try to be very conservative with following distance (not slow, just plenty of space, and not in the fast lane, either) , and sooner or later someone who ends up behind me will get upset that I am doing this, because look at all that empty space we could be driving in. As far as they are concerned, I'm one of those idiots, even though I am taking deliberate steps to avoid known-dangerous driving. Obviously, I think THEY are the idiots. At least one of us is wrong.
Citation? It's hard to imagine risk compensation for airbags; it's not like it's constantly reminding you of its presence (like a seatbelt, or traction control, or helmet), and it's not exactly sweetness and light when it deploys. An airbag broke my sister-in-law's arm, badly.
Forest for the trees. We tolerate far worse already, and think that it's wonderful.
Do you have any idea how bad it is for us, that so many of us use cars when we could instead be walking or riding bicycles? There was a large, multi-year study in Denmark, and (as they phrased it) non-bicycle commuters had a 38% higher mortality rate (from the US POV, 29% lower mortality rate if you get serious amounts of regular exercise (*)). Follow-on to that study found that bicycle-commuting increased lifespan by 2-5 years.
(*) 29% lower = 38% higher; study found this associated with bicycle commuting, not "exercise", presumably because commuting is daily and non-trivial, unlike some forms of "exercise".
I've never owned an American car, and I've happily driven my various dinky little cars the full length of I-10 and most of I-5. I really don't get this love of the giant cars. A car is just transportation, for those trips in the range where bicycles and airplanes don't work so well.
Such technology exists in various forms already. There's bicycles, mass transit, scooters, and small motorcycles. If we had these hypothetical collision-avoiding self-driving cars, they wouldn't need to weigh so damn much "for [my] safety".
How much extra weight are we talking about? Consider how the driver could probably extend his/her life by losing an amount of weight that is probably comparable, it's unlikely to matter. Add to that, all the people who buy grossly overweight cars because they think they are safer.
One other problem with the "driving off the road" death metric is that some fraction of those are cars traveling at speeds (or on wet/snowy/icy surfaces) where nobody, human or computer, will be able to keep the car on the road.
"Some emergency situations" occur how often? No doubt, for every safety feature on a car there is some fringe case that it makes worse, but the net is (usually) better. What if you *needed* to lock up your brakes and slam the car into a skid, and the ABS prevented it? But overall, ABS is a good thing. We (humans) seem easily distracted by "fault", "intent", and "blame", when it would make a lot more sense to just try to minimize the body count.
Recall the workstation industry in the late 80s and early 90s? Many companies, many failures, a few survivors. Couple that with the suck economy, and anyone who guessed wrong on the timing of the recovery, is in a tricky place.
PS - I'm going to bet that they are also taking a bonus risk because of the hill. I've been riding bikes for over 40 years, some racing, commuting, some touring. So on the one hand, I can sort of visualize the recipe for intersection X and how it might play out -- but on the other hand, I've finally gotten to the point where I notice that I've been tricked into doing stupid shit. Hills are one of those places -- you get going so fast, the momentum is so lovely, why would you want to slow down and waste it? Cars do this too (not stopping all the way), but it's a big deal on a bike, since that momentum came from your own personal muscles.
Stupid shit #2 is variations on "the awareness test". There are some intersections where you get distracted by (say) the left-turning traffic, and next thing you know, you're running a red light. There is one light that I have zero intention of ever running, where at least twice, I have found myself smack in the middle of it with the light red, without ever noticing the yellow. My attention is clearly drawn to something else, but what? I suspect that this may be a basic car-vs-bike difference, because drivers are usually focussed on the signal (I once watched a driver, focussed on the signal, start her car forward right into a jay-walking pedestrian), where on the bike, you're assuming that anything might happen, because if it does, it hurts, so you are looking at all the other stuff around you. And sometimes, there's enough "other stuff" going on, that you don't notice the light turning yellow.
This might have some relevance to the original topic of this article, way up at the top:-).
(Sorry for the late reply -- I started this in the morning, it's been a busy day.)
A-ha. Their safety "depends". If they are coming downhill in the same direction that you are turning left, and if there are two travel lanes, OR if there is a good place for them to bail (a sidewalk, a shoulder, parking spots), then they're safe. If it's two lanes, they're counting somewhat on your actually executing a clean left turn, though the more experienced (i.e., scarred) cyclists aren't going to depend on that.
By-the-way, at night your headlights give you away, and unless you are driving a hybrid, probably also your engine noise, especially once you start to move. Some cyclists are tricky that way. Others wear earbuds.
The question is, are there often any major swervy altercations, where they have to "correct" very gracelessly? You braking hard is not necessarily an indication that a collision is imminent (they may have a plan that you don't know about, so your braking is redundant safety, not that this is a bad thing), but them engaging in all sorts of nonsense is an indication that they don't have a plan.
If they're coming downhill and cutting across your left turn (i.e., traveling opposite your intended direction), that's just bone stupid, especially since they're rolling down a hill, but that doesn't sound like the case here.
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He didn't say WHICH tax bill. However, they way the roads are funded, unless you can get a lot of people to agree with you and vote for change, you pay quite a bit for them whether you use them or not, which will tend to encourage overuse.
From Pimentel and Pimentel, Food, Energy and Society, 3rd edition, p. 18:
"Americans burn about 40% more fossil energy than the total solar energy captured by all the plant biomass in the United States each year."
So yes, we could convert coal plants to biomass, but we cannot cover our current consumption with biomass, even if we use every last plant that grows in the US.
But on the other hand, WTF was Anthony Weiner thinking?
Nope, sorry. Facebook (and careless use of Facebook) empowers these abusive jerks. Actually doing the legwork to figure out why you were fired and getting damages out of the ultimately responsible party is hard work and far from likely to succeed. In a world of infinite free time and free legal services, sure, Facebook's not to blame, but we don't live in that world.
There seems to be some disagreement about the accounting for the costs of services provided. The advance is easy to account, but all the promotional hoo-ha also needs to be paid back, and some artists think that the record companies overcharge for that. Sort of like buying your groceries at the company store on credit.
See http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for technical details. As near as I can tell, best case is 250mg/g of the scrubbing compound -- so a scrubber that will grab the CO2 from burning 10 gallons of gasoline would weigh 800 lbs (at least -- I think that the weight of the fumed silica support material is not counted in that figure).
Not sure I buy that popsci article. To get a feel for how much you'd need to scrub, if you were to scrub the CO2 from burning 10 gallons of gas in your car, the scrubber would need to gain about 200 lbs in the process (that is, the weight of the CO2, is about 3x the weight of the gasoline burned to produce it). Every time you fuel up, you'd need to also get rid of all the CO2, somehow.
It may be a major advance in terms of materials, but can we actually scale it up in the same way that we have scaled up our CO2 production infrastructure? It's much like the guys proposing to run our cars with biofuels -- if we convert the entire US corn crop to ethanol, that's about 1/5 of what we need to replace gasoline. Where is the other 80% coming from, and what about the missing corn? (yes, the ethanol leftovers still have value as cattle feed)
TFA quotes experts saying that CO2 levels have to fall below 240-270ppm to allow an ice age to occur. We're at 390 right now, we passed 320 back in 1965. We're overdoing it rather much. Would be nice to hang on to some of that carbon for later, just in case. Plan B when (not if) we use up all the carbon and need to warm the planet later, is to use something like CF4 -- powerful greenhouse gas, 50,000 year residence time, not an ozone-destroyer. For comparison, CO2's residence time is estimated in the 30-95 year range, and water vapor has a residence time of only 9 days (figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)
Believe me, I know ALL about skidding versus traction. I ride a bicycle 2500 miles per year, and I've done the manual ABS thing both on the bike (when the rear wheel starts to rise, back off the front brake, then brake more, repeat till stopped) and in a station wagon-on-unsalted-snow-down-a-hill. I've also used the real thing once in a hard stop, and that was impressive as heck. Nonetheless, these people are out there, and lacking a proof that they are totally blowing smoke, I'm going to assume that once in a million years, skidding the brakes will save someone's butt. Of course, they could be as physics-challenged as the crowd that claims that rear-wheel bicycle braking (.25G max) is as good as front-wheel bicycle braking (.5G max).
And, to slightly make the case for my own ignorance (and hence, unwillingness to reject claims out of hand), I drive FWD cars only, and since moving to the Boston area, every once in a while I'll spot someone on nasty snow/ice who knows what they are doing in a RWD car, and they pull some really interesting (and intended, and successful) maneuvers with a distinct lack of traction. These people are rare, of course -- most people merely manage to be interesting (from a safe distance) under those conditions.
Right. So I check out digital delivery, and on iTunes, Princess Bride HD is $14.99, Wild Hogs HD is $17.99. SD prices are the same, but back when I first noticed this, Princess Bride SD was cheaper.
Inconceivable!
I think we all know which is the better movie.
"Never" is mighty strong language. I don't offhand know an example, but I'd swear that I had seen/heard someone else express a similarly emphatic opinion about the occasional necessity of skid.
For that, there's brakes. It has the disadvantage that it allows the lane-merger to "win", but at anything above parking-lot speeds it clears the hazard without creating any new ones (assuming that the guy behind you maintains a safe following distance -- but then the hazard was not newly created, it was already there), and it is always an option, whereas changing to the other lane might not be an available choice. For a robotically controlled car, that would certainly be the algorithm, because it ensures that the robot will not be at fault if a crash occurs following the avoiding maneuver. Impatient+savvy human drivers might learn to aggressively cut off robot-cars, but this would also be true even if the reaction was a swerve, even an optional swerve.
Braking has the secondary advantage of reducing speed in any crash that might subsequently result, which generally reduces the severity and scope of the crash.
Yeah, I realized afterwards that I failed at logic there. Both be idiots is what I meant.
It would, but people manage to simultaneously hold in their heads both "I am a better than average driver" and "the anti-idiot squad might come after MY driver's license". There's a huge diversity of opinion about exactly what "good driving" is, too -- I try to be very conservative with following distance (not slow, just plenty of space, and not in the fast lane, either) , and sooner or later someone who ends up behind me will get upset that I am doing this, because look at all that empty space we could be driving in. As far as they are concerned, I'm one of those idiots, even though I am taking deliberate steps to avoid known-dangerous driving. Obviously, I think THEY are the idiots. At least one of us is wrong.
Citation? It's hard to imagine risk compensation for airbags; it's not like it's constantly reminding you of its presence (like a seatbelt, or traction control, or helmet), and it's not exactly sweetness and light when it deploys. An airbag broke my sister-in-law's arm, badly.
Forest for the trees. We tolerate far worse already, and think that it's wonderful.
Do you have any idea how bad it is for us, that so many of us use cars when we could instead be walking or riding bicycles? There was a large, multi-year study in Denmark, and (as they phrased it) non-bicycle commuters had a 38% higher mortality rate (from the US POV, 29% lower mortality rate if you get serious amounts of regular exercise (*)). Follow-on to that study found that bicycle-commuting increased lifespan by 2-5 years.
(*) 29% lower = 38% higher; study found this associated with bicycle commuting, not "exercise", presumably because commuting is daily and non-trivial, unlike some forms of "exercise".
I've never owned an American car, and I've happily driven my various dinky little cars the full length of I-10 and most of I-5. I really don't get this love of the giant cars. A car is just transportation, for those trips in the range where bicycles and airplanes don't work so well.
Such technology exists in various forms already. There's bicycles, mass transit, scooters, and small motorcycles. If we had these hypothetical collision-avoiding self-driving cars, they wouldn't need to weigh so damn much "for [my] safety".
Given that someone driving a car can kill people and entirely escape any criminal penalty, I think we've got a long way to go.
How much extra weight are we talking about? Consider how the driver could probably extend his/her life by losing an amount of weight that is probably comparable, it's unlikely to matter. Add to that, all the people who buy grossly overweight cars because they think they are safer.
One other problem with the "driving off the road" death metric is that some fraction of those are cars traveling at speeds (or on wet/snowy/icy surfaces) where nobody, human or computer, will be able to keep the car on the road.
"Some emergency situations" occur how often? No doubt, for every safety feature on a car there is some fringe case that it makes worse, but the net is (usually) better. What if you *needed* to lock up your brakes and slam the car into a skid, and the ABS prevented it? But overall, ABS is a good thing. We (humans) seem easily distracted by "fault", "intent", and "blame", when it would make a lot more sense to just try to minimize the body count.
Piecewise linear driving works for that, too.
Problem is, if I want to encourage people to ride their bicycles instead, making them think the road is full of drunks is not going to help.
Recall the workstation industry in the late 80s and early 90s?
Many companies, many failures, a few survivors.
Couple that with the suck economy, and anyone who guessed wrong on the timing of the recovery, is in a tricky place.
PS - I'm going to bet that they are also taking a bonus risk because of the hill. I've been riding bikes for over 40 years, some racing, commuting, some touring. So on the one hand, I can sort of visualize the recipe for intersection X and how it might play out -- but on the other hand, I've finally gotten to the point where I notice that I've been tricked into doing stupid shit. Hills are one of those places -- you get going so fast, the momentum is so lovely, why would you want to slow down and waste it? Cars do this too (not stopping all the way), but it's a big deal on a bike, since that momentum came from your own personal muscles.
Stupid shit #2 is variations on "the awareness test". There are some intersections where you get distracted by (say) the left-turning traffic, and next thing you know, you're running a red light. There is one light that I have zero intention of ever running, where at least twice, I have found myself smack in the middle of it with the light red, without ever noticing the yellow. My attention is clearly drawn to something else, but what? I suspect that this may be a basic car-vs-bike difference, because drivers are usually focussed on the signal (I once watched a driver, focussed on the signal, start her car forward right into a jay-walking pedestrian), where on the bike, you're assuming that anything might happen, because if it does, it hurts, so you are looking at all the other stuff around you. And sometimes, there's enough "other stuff" going on, that you don't notice the light turning yellow.
This might have some relevance to the original topic of this article, way up at the top :-).
(Sorry for the late reply -- I started this in the morning, it's been a busy day.)
A-ha. Their safety "depends". If they are coming downhill in the same direction that you are turning left, and if there are two travel lanes, OR if there is a good place for them to bail (a sidewalk, a shoulder, parking spots), then they're safe. If it's two lanes, they're counting somewhat on your actually executing a clean left turn, though the more experienced (i.e., scarred) cyclists aren't going to depend on that.
By-the-way, at night your headlights give you away, and unless you are driving a hybrid, probably also your engine noise, especially once you start to move. Some cyclists are tricky that way. Others wear earbuds.
The question is, are there often any major swervy altercations, where they have to "correct" very gracelessly? You braking hard is not necessarily an indication that a collision is imminent (they may have a plan that you don't know about, so your braking is redundant safety, not that this is a bad thing), but them engaging in all sorts of nonsense is an indication that they don't have a plan.
If they're coming downhill and cutting across your left turn (i.e., traveling opposite your intended direction), that's just bone stupid, especially since they're rolling down a hill, but that doesn't sound like the case here.
Would you rather those incredibly rude people were driving? It's not like driving a car, OR riding a bicycle, turns people into saints.