Where can I find one of these 90% efficient gas turbines? Especially, one that is suitable for use in an automobile (hint: thermodynamics -- large immobile engines, we can at least do something useful with their waste heat).
Or both. And look at all the "dumb Amuricans hates the nucular so much!!!" comments above. Which I guess totally justifies this scam as a way to make money.
The nudge, if we follow the Dutch model, is the following: - a tax on auto purchases - a high tax on gasoline - in crashes, a default assignment of blame to the heavier party (evidence can counter this) - rigorous tests for driver licensing * good infrastructure for cycling; additional paths, wide side lanes, modified signals * low speed limits in any shared spaces * priority (right of way, most direct routes, etc) is not given to cars.
The *'d items are claimed to be the ones that really make a difference.
And despite Dutch advocates' claims, it doesn't get that hot there in the summer. Atlanta and Houston are problematic. I HAVE bicycle commuted in Houston in an extremely hot summer, and though it can be done without too much sweat, that's for a short commute, leaving very early, riding quite slowly, and adding clothes once you get there (i.e., ride in shorts and the thinnest of T shirts). If someone says, "I live on the Gulf Coast, I have a ten mile commute, are you kidding?", that makes total sense to me, at least in the summer. But Boston? New York? Anywhere on the West Coast (in particular, Portland)? Winter is MUCH less of a problem, since you can buy snow tires, and because it's easy to add clothing. Cars in winter are the main deterrent, because they're not safe for people around them. Plowed paths ARE necessary -- a bike won't get stuck like a car, but you can't make it go through heavy snow with pedal power.
The infrastructure expenses are not especially high compared to auto infrastructure costs, and there are offsetting savings, though not always in the infrastructure column. Think, signs, signals, curbs, barriers, parking, and road maintenance. Bikes don't tear up roads, and bikes (see better, hear better, more maneuverable) do just fine with rotaries. In particular, bikes don't tear up poorly-maintained roads; trucks wear roads out, but once the cracks are there, what really does roads in, is a wet day with fast traffic jetting water into the cracks, both cars and trucks.
One pervasive theme in the bike-skeptic arguments, is that cars are normal-normal-normal, and everyone already owns one, and that bikes are always spartan racing bikes. Neither of these are necessarily the case. So for your example, you would propose that instead of using a bike trailer, which might cost $800 (I picked the first utility trailer site I could find, and the largest trailer they offered; and it's large), someone should spend 10 or 20 times that for a car, and that is a winning argument for the car. As a practical matter, a bike I own right now (the one I ride the most, that gets about 1/3-1/2 of all my car+bike mileage) can carry a door (I've carried cut-up plywood, I've carried a folding ladder, a shrubbery, a pair of pallets, and two other bicycles -- though not all at the same time).
The answers to most "but what if" questions fall into the the following categories: - cargo bikes -- cost between $700 (Sun Cargo) to $6000 (Metrofiets) - electric assist -- cost between $400 and $2000 (Bionx, Stokemonkey) - tricycles - delivery services - taxis - Zipcar.
For most "how can I carry", and in particular, most loads that most people normally carry, the answer is "cargo bike". For issues of hill-climbing, habitual heavy loads, heat, or generic lack of strength, "e-assist". For balance, a tricycle. For unusually large loads, same as when it won't fit on a car, you ask for delivery. In a pinch, a taxi gets the job done.
And the standard car response to this is, "but a car will do it all" -- but a cheap car (Toyota Yaris) costs $13000, has limited capacity (3 cars seats is probably the limit, a cargo bike + trailer will haul 4 kids), is unable to carry things that a cargo bike can carry (pallets), and for anyone too infirm to ride a bike, probably cannot be loaded with anything that cumbersome or heavy, so you would take delivery anyway.
And note that I don't assume zero cars, and zero trucks
Never much bought into the whole grey-goo thing. Isn't that the plan of every bacteria and mold out there? It seems that if it were within our abilities, it probably would have already occurred through bacterial evolution.
And what stops "grey goo" from acquiring its own bacterial/fungal parasite?
This guy managed to ride a bike. He is also the first to say that the bike and diet were both secondary to the decision to do something. And if you need a bike that can carry 400 lbs, well, I own one, though the intent is that half of that be cargo. Each of the two tires is rated for 330lbs. We could put most Americans on a bike; whether they would stay there ("my butt hurts!!!! I'm all sweaty!!!") is another matter.
Luckily, my body was ignorant of this book, and thus lost 20 pounds when I started biking in earnest. Ignorance is bliss, I guess. I did NOT change my diet then, and subsequent changes to my diet have had no particular effect on my weight (but then, the beer-and-salad diet is probably not on the recommended list:-).
Except, as I understand from experience in Northern Europe, that adding more bicycles to the mix tends to raise the level of economic activity. If business is parking-constrained, it's plausible to see how this could be so. If it's not parking constrained, then this probably wouldn't happen. This at least suggests a rule to use when picking places to make more bike-friendly.
I think you are taking the wrong point of view here, because we are not food-consuming robots; we're some interacting bag of hormones and nerves and who knows what else, and our exercise and our food intake may or may not be tightly linked.
Speaking only from personal experience, anecdote != data, but five years ago I started riding 50 miles per week (seriously, setting a minimum quota, like a medical prescription, which was part of the reason) and in the space of a few months, lost about 20 pounds. I did not modify my diet. Years later, my weight is basically unchanged. It rises a little in the winter (don't always hit quota, what with crap roads and ice and snow -- and understand, the bike can do it just fine, it's the cars I am worried about. I have studded snow tires, I can happily ride on wet ice.) I think that large doses of exercise move your set point -- your appetite does not rise in exact proportion to the additional exercise.
Some summer weeks, I hit 100 miles per week, and after two weeks of that, I get Really Hungry (licking grease off frying pans hungry). My weight drifts down over time if I keep that up, but I don't for long, so it drifts back up again.
A friend, who is a biochemist/microbiologist and studies this stuff in rats, says that regular exercise, especially regular exercise of the monster leg muscles, tends to make your body better at burning sugar -- insulin causes sugar storage, but it also tweaks your muscles to burn it, and regular exercise makes them better at that. If I eat a huge meal, I get hot. So this probably also figures into the whole set-point thing.
A bike is certainly not always the answer, but most of your examples are bogus. There's a notable, local example, a famous biking guy named Sheldon Brown (since deceased) who came down with some horrible nerve condition -- he quit riding bikes, and started riding trikes. I bought a used wheel from a guy with a trike, who has spinal stenosis (another horrible nerve condition).
I don't see that the non-bike-non-trike-riding population is necessarily second class, either; some of the Kamen wheelchairs are pretty impressive, and I wouldn't be surprised if they could roll you along at 15mph, which makes you pretty much equal. Arguably, a Segway is another instance of a Kamen Wheelchair. And I did not mean to offend, but did intend to make you think. How is a car, not a wheelchair, especially if you think that they are necessary for those people unable to get around on bicycles (or tricycles)? You listen to enough I-can't-I-can't-I-can't in various forms, eventually the fat old guy with arthritis who rides his bike starts to think, "okay, I guess you're disabled, and that car is your wheelchair".
I don't hate cars, I merely think they are (grossly) overused and carelessly driven. Where did you ever get the idea that *I* hate cars? I can understand how people who hate unnecessary death might hate cars, but I think the convenience is worth it, don't you?
I'm a bicycle advocate who also owns and drives a car. The car doesn't get that much use nowadays; it's a good umbrella, and it's good for longer trips, and it's good for when I am feeling too lazy to haul my kid uphill on the bike. It's good for picking people up at the airport. I tend not to ride my bike home after giving blood (though I did ride it to work the next day).
I'm not sure what being a "car-hater" has to do with task allocation. Objectively, cars kill -- they kill about 3000 pedestrians per year, versus about 1 for bicycles. A big Danish study found a 39% higher mortality rate for people who did NOT ride their bikes to work (correlation, not causation, but seriously, "get plenty of exercise" is about the only medical advice that has not been revised or retracted in all these years). So, just by counting dead bodies, worse than terrorists.
I think you need better examples. Women who bike, and then get pregnant, often continue to bike right up to their due date, or within a week.
I don't see too many young children driving cars, either, but I do see them riding in seats on bikes, in trailers, or on the backs or fronts of cargo bikes, or on tag-alongs, or on big bikes for carrying kids.
Friend of mine has congenital badness of the circulatory system, she thinks she'd be an invalid if not for regular bicycle commutes.
Another friend of mine has nerve pinches that don't let him ride a normal bike, so instead he uses an ElliptiGO. Lack of exercise was contributing to type 2 diabetes; his car was killing him, more or less. Now with some commutes by "bike", it's not.
In your case, perhaps a recumbent tricycle would work, but if not, there is such a thing as a wheelchair, and a car is just a sort of glorified wheelchair.
I can tell you that if you are overweight, and decide to bike some anyway, and lose 10% of your weight, and keep it off for 5 years (while eating whatever the heck you feel like) that you are not likely to stop biking. But if you never start, you won't know this. There are other advantages, typically unknown to non-cyclists, everything from being non-delayed by traffic, to being in much, much better shape. If my bike breaks, for common values of "break", I don't need to call AAA and wait for an hour for a tow so I can wait for a day for a fix; I can usually fix it in a few minutes myself, and be on my way.
Obviously, people vary in their attitudes, and this has been studied. A good fraction of the population thinks it is a "good idea", but for whatever reason, don't get around to it. Another good fraction of the population falls into the no-way-no-how camp, and that's okay, too, as long as they don't expect too much of a government subsidy for their lifestyle choice (automobile infrastructure is expensive -- spend a little time looking at all the lights, and signs, and curbs, and railings, etc -- bikes need much less of that to obtain the same level of safety, primarily because they are much lower-energy and lower-momentum vehicles, and also because they can see and hear better than drivers).
The issue is how do you get people started, when they are not sure, or when the roads are only so-so. I had the advantage of having raced as a kid, and "knew" that my 10-mile commute to work was small potatoes, and also knew how to ride in traffic comfortably, and also how to handle a bike well enough to deal with many hazards (I practice riding no-hands through potholes, just for example). Someone who doesn't know these things is going to be deterred if they are also out of shape, or if they don't have a non-stressful place to ride. And the first 10-mile commute, did not feel so good, but now, it's nothing.
What you can do, is run the models again, and again, and again, tweaking various inputs (infrastructure changes) to see what result you get. I am pretty sure I saw a presentation on just these models a few years ago, and they were interesting, and they both told us things that we already knew (how cars interact at intersections -- and interestingly, older, simpler models got this wrong) and they told us things that we were not really sure of, such as "who to immunize first against the flu" (school kids, apparently).
Obviously, you validate the model against what we already know about the world, and we also treat "new" knowledge from models carefully, but we can certainly learn from models, even the model builders.
As to the particular conclusions of this model, I find them unsurprising, but then I've been riding a bike (commuting, groceries) 50 miles per week for the last 5 years. What I find pretty darn amusing, is the certainty that some people, who apparently have not even tried to get useful transit out of a bike, have in their assertions that biking cannot do this or that. I will say that my outlook has changed, from 5 days in, to 5 weeks in, to 5 months in, to 5 years in. I don't know if they modeled that.
As I read it, those are not real diamonds, they are "diamond simulants". The fact that they contain C, S, Fe, Ca, Co, Ni, Y, Zr, Gd, and Hf, suggests that they are not diamonds. That they coat them with corundum to "increase the hardness" is another clue that these are not real diamonds.
There are synthetic diamonds out there, but I'm not sure how low the prices are. The two companies I know of are Gemesis and Apollo Diamond (their web site is quite dated).
"We", kimosabe? Lots of problems have monetary solutions, if you are willing to spend enough money. Surely, you have heard of the free market. Do you really expect to attract hardworking, talented people, if you don't compensate them properly? Conversely, if you pay peanuts, why are you so surprised when you get monkeys?
Car crash deaths are not that big a deal. Lack of exercise is estimated to kill an order of magnitude more people. One study compared the health risk from not exercising (i.e., from driving cars to excess), to the crash risk for bicycles (not cars, bicycles), and found that riding bicycles saves about 10 years of expected lifespan for every year lost to bicycle crashes. Another study in Denmark found that the mortality rate was 39% higher for non-bicycle commuters, after correcting for risk factors.
So, seriously, it's old news, but if you think that the right way to think about safety is which car to drive, as opposed to whether to you should be driving, you're not looking at the big picture. If government officials were smart, they would ignore this pinheaded economist, and focus on ways to get people out of their cars and getting a bit more exercise.
I've seen proposals in the $40/ton-CO2 range, which corresponds to about $.40 per gallon of gasoline. We get fluctuations like that just from supply/demand/speculation, so it's not that enormous. Other costs (e.g., auto insurance) are comparable or larger. The cost of the Iraq war came to something like $.70 per gallon.
It's not nothing, and it has to be high enough to change behavior, but it doesn't have to be high enough to destroy the economy. That much "new" tax money flowing into the government could be offset by reduction in some other tax, preferably a regressive one (for example, exempting the first N dollars earned from Medicare or Social Security).
As far as "world-wide" goes, many of the other big players are already doing stuff. Gas taxes in Europe are very high already. China had one-child-per-family (ponder that, next time someone says "but what is China doing?"), and they also have regulations banning fossil-fueled motorcycles from city centers, in favor of e-bikes of various sorts (2010 sales, 28 million, scroll down through the comments here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/4973351342/ ). Even run on coal-powered electricity, a small 2-wheeled e-bike is so efficient that it's a huge win over any car commercially available.
I've never used git, so no opinion there. When I inflicted Mercurial on the rest of my team, they were not so happy at first. Principal gripe was: "you mean I have to type TWO commands to send my stuff to the server?" They seem to be getting over that.
The factors that drove our choice of version control system were not the ones I have seen discussed here. When we started out, I don't think Mercurial was quite ready for prime time, and none of us had heard of it, either. Some years back, we were looking for something to use for hosting our project, tracking bugs, etc, and Trac ended up as our choice (low-hassle, low-overhead) and that was how I first learned of Mercurial. BUT -- for an external website, I could not figure out how to (easily) secure external Mercurial access (on a box that was by-default only http-accessible, so no option to ssh in for Mercurial), so we did not use it. This was a case of theory meets practice meets impatient developer meets crap Apache documentation, but it ended killing the Mercurial option.
I DID, however, use Mercurial privately to mediate between two subversion repositories (because it was easy) and that got me hooked. Again, note that I pursued the path of least resistance -- if there's a clean way to do this subversion, then they have a TERRIBLE case of opaque documentation.
Later on, change in corporate ownership, change in internal IT practices, we were encouraged to move our stuff to Java.net. I looked, and lo, Mercurial or Subversion, and they handled the security for me, so we went with Mercurial. The two main advantages are (1) merging sucks less and (2) I can do local commits as I work. And we put all sorts of crap in our repository, because I am impatient, and pursue the path of least effort. A tool that works for impatient people, is a good tool. Reading things that translate as "the easy way is the wrong way (with this tool)" suggest to me that I would not be happy with that tool.
You SHOULD be a flaming liberal saying this, because social conservatives ("Griswold v. Connecticut was wrongly decided") don't believe in a constitutional right to privacy.
I'm in the camp of "this is probably a bad idea, but I do so hate the way so many people drive, why not stick it to them". This is similar to "that anti-smoking law sure seems draconian, as soon as you nicotine addicts speak up for the right of other people to consume other drugs, maybe I'll give a shit".
Though really, I'd be happier with black boxes for accident and insurance purposes. If we sold auto insurance by the mile (and by the behavior), people would drive less (converts fixed costs into incremental costs, allows you to save more money by not driving) and they would drive better ("tailgating surcharge activated"). In terms of harm to society, since cars kill roughly twice as many people as are murdered in a given year, we'd get a higher social benefit from this, than from giving the police more tools that *might* allow them to solve crimes that had already been committed (and that's assuming that both choices are equally effective, but I think that the black box would be more effective).
Slashdot Mirror
Must be this guy: http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/speed.html
Where can I find one of these 90% efficient gas turbines? Especially, one that is suitable for use in an automobile (hint: thermodynamics -- large immobile engines, we can at least do something useful with their waste heat).
Or both. And look at all the "dumb Amuricans hates the nucular so much!!!" comments above. Which I guess totally justifies this scam as a way to make money.
Sorry if this is TLDR, sigh.
The nudge, if we follow the Dutch model, is the following:
- a tax on auto purchases
- a high tax on gasoline
- in crashes, a default assignment of blame to the heavier party (evidence can counter this)
- rigorous tests for driver licensing
* good infrastructure for cycling; additional paths, wide side lanes, modified signals
* low speed limits in any shared spaces
* priority (right of way, most direct routes, etc) is not given to cars.
The *'d items are claimed to be the ones that really make a difference.
And despite Dutch advocates' claims, it doesn't get that hot there in the summer. Atlanta and Houston are problematic. I HAVE bicycle commuted in Houston in an extremely hot summer, and though it can be done without too much sweat, that's for a short commute, leaving very early, riding quite slowly, and adding clothes once you get there (i.e., ride in shorts and the thinnest of T shirts). If someone says, "I live on the Gulf Coast, I have a ten mile commute, are you kidding?", that makes total sense to me, at least in the summer. But Boston? New York? Anywhere on the West Coast (in particular, Portland)? Winter is MUCH less of a problem, since you can buy snow tires, and because it's easy to add clothing. Cars in winter are the main deterrent, because they're not safe for people around them. Plowed paths ARE necessary -- a bike won't get stuck like a car, but you can't make it go through heavy snow with pedal power.
The infrastructure expenses are not especially high compared to auto infrastructure costs, and there are offsetting savings, though not always in the infrastructure column. Think, signs, signals, curbs, barriers, parking, and road maintenance. Bikes don't tear up roads, and bikes (see better, hear better, more maneuverable) do just fine with rotaries. In particular, bikes don't tear up poorly-maintained roads; trucks wear roads out, but once the cracks are there, what really does roads in, is a wet day with fast traffic jetting water into the cracks, both cars and trucks.
One pervasive theme in the bike-skeptic arguments, is that cars are normal-normal-normal, and everyone already owns one, and that bikes are always spartan racing bikes. Neither of these are necessarily the case. So for your example, you would propose that instead of using a bike trailer, which might cost $800 (I picked the first utility trailer site I could find, and the largest trailer they offered; and it's large), someone should spend 10 or 20 times that for a car, and that is a winning argument for the car. As a practical matter, a bike I own right now (the one I ride the most, that gets about 1/3-1/2 of all my car+bike mileage) can carry a door (I've carried cut-up plywood, I've carried a folding ladder, a shrubbery, a pair of pallets, and two other bicycles -- though not all at the same time).
The answers to most "but what if" questions fall into the the following categories:
- cargo bikes -- cost between $700 (Sun Cargo) to $6000 (Metrofiets)
- electric assist -- cost between $400 and $2000 (Bionx, Stokemonkey)
- tricycles
- delivery services
- taxis
- Zipcar.
For most "how can I carry", and in particular, most loads that most people normally carry, the answer is "cargo bike". For issues of hill-climbing, habitual heavy loads, heat, or generic lack of strength, "e-assist". For balance, a tricycle. For unusually large loads, same as when it won't fit on a car, you ask for delivery. In a pinch, a taxi gets the job done.
And the standard car response to this is, "but a car will do it all" -- but a cheap car (Toyota Yaris) costs $13000, has limited capacity (3 cars seats is probably the limit, a cargo bike + trailer will haul 4 kids), is unable to carry things that a cargo bike can carry (pallets), and for anyone too infirm to ride a bike, probably cannot be loaded with anything that cumbersome or heavy, so you would take delivery anyway.
And note that I don't assume zero cars, and zero trucks
Never much bought into the whole grey-goo thing. Isn't that the plan of every bacteria and mold out there? It seems that if it were within our abilities, it probably would have already occurred through bacterial evolution.
And what stops "grey goo" from acquiring its own bacterial/fungal parasite?
That's not rain, that's a downward fog.
This guy managed to ride a bike. He is also the first to say that the bike and diet were both secondary to the decision to do something. And if you need a bike that can carry 400 lbs, well, I own one, though the intent is that half of that be cargo. Each of the two tires is rated for 330lbs. We could put most Americans on a bike; whether they would stay there ("my butt hurts!!!! I'm all sweaty!!!") is another matter.
Luckily, my body was ignorant of this book, and thus lost 20 pounds when I started biking in earnest. Ignorance is bliss, I guess. I did NOT change my diet then, and subsequent changes to my diet have had no particular effect on my weight (but then, the beer-and-salad diet is probably not on the recommended list :-).
Except, as I understand from experience in Northern Europe, that adding more bicycles to the mix tends to raise the level of economic activity. If business is parking-constrained, it's plausible to see how this could be so. If it's not parking constrained, then this probably wouldn't happen. This at least suggests a rule to use when picking places to make more bike-friendly.
I think you are taking the wrong point of view here, because we are not food-consuming robots; we're some interacting bag of hormones and nerves and who knows what else, and our exercise and our food intake may or may not be tightly linked.
Speaking only from personal experience, anecdote != data, but five years ago I started riding 50 miles per week (seriously, setting a minimum quota, like a medical prescription, which was part of the reason) and in the space of a few months, lost about 20 pounds. I did not modify my diet. Years later, my weight is basically unchanged. It rises a little in the winter (don't always hit quota, what with crap roads and ice and snow -- and understand, the bike can do it just fine, it's the cars I am worried about. I have studded snow tires, I can happily ride on wet ice.) I think that large doses of exercise move your set point -- your appetite does not rise in exact proportion to the additional exercise.
Some summer weeks, I hit 100 miles per week, and after two weeks of that, I get Really Hungry (licking grease off frying pans hungry). My weight drifts down over time if I keep that up, but I don't for long, so it drifts back up again.
A friend, who is a biochemist/microbiologist and studies this stuff in rats, says that regular exercise, especially regular exercise of the monster leg muscles, tends to make your body better at burning sugar -- insulin causes sugar storage, but it also tweaks your muscles to burn it, and regular exercise makes them better at that. If I eat a huge meal, I get hot. So this probably also figures into the whole set-point thing.
PS, there's some pretty hot recumbent trikes out there. I'm not saying it's for you, but the world is full of interesting variations on "bicycle".
A bike is certainly not always the answer, but most of your examples are bogus. There's a notable, local example, a famous biking guy named Sheldon Brown (since deceased) who came down with some horrible nerve condition -- he quit riding bikes, and started riding trikes. I bought a used wheel from a guy with a trike, who has spinal stenosis (another horrible nerve condition).
I don't see that the non-bike-non-trike-riding population is necessarily second class, either; some of the Kamen wheelchairs are pretty impressive, and I wouldn't be surprised if they could roll you along at 15mph, which makes you pretty much equal. Arguably, a Segway is another instance of a Kamen Wheelchair. And I did not mean to offend, but did intend to make you think. How is a car, not a wheelchair, especially if you think that they are necessary for those people unable to get around on bicycles (or tricycles)? You listen to enough I-can't-I-can't-I-can't in various forms, eventually the fat old guy with arthritis who rides his bike starts to think, "okay, I guess you're disabled, and that car is your wheelchair".
I don't hate cars, I merely think they are (grossly) overused and carelessly driven. Where did you ever get the idea that *I* hate cars? I can understand how people who hate unnecessary death might hate cars, but I think the convenience is worth it, don't you?
I'm a bicycle advocate who also owns and drives a car. The car doesn't get that much use nowadays; it's a good umbrella, and it's good for longer trips, and it's good for when I am feeling too lazy to haul my kid uphill on the bike. It's good for picking people up at the airport. I tend not to ride my bike home after giving blood (though I did ride it to work the next day).
I'm not sure what being a "car-hater" has to do with task allocation. Objectively, cars kill -- they kill about 3000 pedestrians per year, versus about 1 for bicycles. A big Danish study found a 39% higher mortality rate for people who did NOT ride their bikes to work (correlation, not causation, but seriously, "get plenty of exercise" is about the only medical advice that has not been revised or retracted in all these years). So, just by counting dead bodies, worse than terrorists.
I think you need better examples. Women who bike, and then get pregnant, often continue to bike right up to their due date, or within a week.
I don't see too many young children driving cars, either, but I do see them riding in seats on bikes, in trailers, or on the backs or fronts of cargo bikes, or on tag-alongs, or on big bikes for carrying kids.
Friend of mine has congenital badness of the circulatory system, she thinks she'd be an invalid if not for regular bicycle commutes.
Another friend of mine has nerve pinches that don't let him ride a normal bike, so instead he uses an ElliptiGO. Lack of exercise was contributing to type 2 diabetes; his car was killing him, more or less. Now with some commutes by "bike", it's not.
In your case, perhaps a recumbent tricycle would work, but if not, there is such a thing as a wheelchair, and a car is just a sort of glorified wheelchair.
I can tell you that if you are overweight, and decide to bike some anyway, and lose 10% of your weight, and keep it off for 5 years (while eating whatever the heck you feel like) that you are not likely to stop biking. But if you never start, you won't know this. There are other advantages, typically unknown to non-cyclists, everything from being non-delayed by traffic, to being in much, much better shape. If my bike breaks, for common values of "break", I don't need to call AAA and wait for an hour for a tow so I can wait for a day for a fix; I can usually fix it in a few minutes myself, and be on my way.
Obviously, people vary in their attitudes, and this has been studied. A good fraction of the population thinks it is a "good idea", but for whatever reason, don't get around to it. Another good fraction of the population falls into the no-way-no-how camp, and that's okay, too, as long as they don't expect too much of a government subsidy for their lifestyle choice (automobile infrastructure is expensive -- spend a little time looking at all the lights, and signs, and curbs, and railings, etc -- bikes need much less of that to obtain the same level of safety, primarily because they are much lower-energy and lower-momentum vehicles, and also because they can see and hear better than drivers).
The issue is how do you get people started, when they are not sure, or when the roads are only so-so. I had the advantage of having raced as a kid, and "knew" that my 10-mile commute to work was small potatoes, and also knew how to ride in traffic comfortably, and also how to handle a bike well enough to deal with many hazards (I practice riding no-hands through potholes, just for example). Someone who doesn't know these things is going to be deterred if they are also out of shape, or if they don't have a non-stressful place to ride. And the first 10-mile commute, did not feel so good, but now, it's nothing.
What you can do, is run the models again, and again, and again, tweaking various inputs (infrastructure changes) to see what result you get. I am pretty sure I saw a presentation on just these models a few years ago, and they were interesting, and they both told us things that we already knew (how cars interact at intersections -- and interestingly, older, simpler models got this wrong) and they told us things that we were not really sure of, such as "who to immunize first against the flu" (school kids, apparently).
Obviously, you validate the model against what we already know about the world, and we also treat "new" knowledge from models carefully, but we can certainly learn from models, even the model builders.
As to the particular conclusions of this model, I find them unsurprising, but then I've been riding a bike (commuting, groceries) 50 miles per week for the last 5 years. What I find pretty darn amusing, is the certainty that some people, who apparently have not even tried to get useful transit out of a bike, have in their assertions that biking cannot do this or that. I will say that my outlook has changed, from 5 days in, to 5 weeks in, to 5 months in, to 5 years in. I don't know if they modeled that.
As I read it, those are not real diamonds, they are "diamond simulants". The fact that they contain C, S, Fe, Ca, Co, Ni, Y, Zr, Gd, and Hf, suggests that they are not diamonds. That they coat them with corundum to "increase the hardness" is another clue that these are not real diamonds.
There are synthetic diamonds out there, but I'm not sure how low the prices are. The two companies I know of are Gemesis and Apollo Diamond (their web site is quite dated).
"We", kimosabe? Lots of problems have monetary solutions, if you are willing to spend enough money. Surely, you have heard of the free market. Do you really expect to attract hardworking, talented people, if you don't compensate them properly? Conversely, if you pay peanuts, why are you so surprised when you get monkeys?
Car crash deaths are not that big a deal. Lack of exercise is estimated to kill an order of magnitude more people. One study compared the health risk from not exercising (i.e., from driving cars to excess), to the crash risk for bicycles (not cars, bicycles), and found that riding bicycles saves about 10 years of expected lifespan for every year lost to bicycle crashes. Another study in Denmark found that the mortality rate was 39% higher for non-bicycle commuters, after correcting for risk factors.
So, seriously, it's old news, but if you think that the right way to think about safety is which car to drive, as opposed to whether to you should be driving, you're not looking at the big picture. If government officials were smart, they would ignore this pinheaded economist, and focus on ways to get people out of their cars and getting a bit more exercise.
You propose this as a reason for not adopting this technology, but it looks like it could just as easily apply to cars in general.
I've seen proposals in the $40/ton-CO2 range, which corresponds to about $.40 per gallon of gasoline. We get fluctuations like that just from supply/demand/speculation, so it's not that enormous. Other costs (e.g., auto insurance) are comparable or larger. The cost of the Iraq war came to something like $.70 per gallon.
It's not nothing, and it has to be high enough to change behavior, but it doesn't have to be high enough to destroy the economy. That much "new" tax money flowing into the government could be offset by reduction in some other tax, preferably a regressive one (for example, exempting the first N dollars earned from Medicare or Social Security).
As far as "world-wide" goes, many of the other big players are already doing stuff. Gas taxes in Europe are very high already. China had one-child-per-family (ponder that, next time someone says "but what is China doing?"), and they also have regulations banning fossil-fueled motorcycles from city centers, in favor of e-bikes of various sorts (2010 sales, 28 million, scroll down through the comments here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/4973351342/ ). Even run on coal-powered electricity, a small 2-wheeled e-bike is so efficient that it's a huge win over any car commercially available.
I've never used git, so no opinion there. When I inflicted Mercurial on the rest of my team, they were not so happy at first. Principal gripe was: "you mean I have to type TWO commands to send my stuff to the server?" They seem to be getting over that.
The factors that drove our choice of version control system were not the ones I have seen discussed here. When we started out, I don't think Mercurial was quite ready for prime time, and none of us had heard of it, either. Some years back, we were looking for something to use for hosting our project, tracking bugs, etc, and Trac ended up as our choice (low-hassle, low-overhead) and that was how I first learned of Mercurial. BUT -- for an external website, I could not figure out how to (easily) secure external Mercurial access (on a box that was by-default only http-accessible, so no option to ssh in for Mercurial), so we did not use it. This was a case of theory meets practice meets impatient developer meets crap Apache documentation, but it ended killing the Mercurial option.
I DID, however, use Mercurial privately to mediate between two subversion repositories (because it was easy) and that got me hooked. Again, note that I pursued the path of least resistance -- if there's a clean way to do this subversion, then they have a TERRIBLE case of opaque documentation.
Later on, change in corporate ownership, change in internal IT practices, we were encouraged to move our stuff to Java.net. I looked, and lo, Mercurial or Subversion, and they handled the security for me, so we went with Mercurial. The two main advantages are (1) merging sucks less and (2) I can do local commits as I work. And we put all sorts of crap in our repository, because I am impatient, and pursue the path of least effort. A tool that works for impatient people, is a good tool. Reading things that translate as "the easy way is the wrong way (with this tool)" suggest to me that I would not be happy with that tool.
If the men stripped down to thongs, perhaps that would make a case for lower temperatures in the office.
You SHOULD be a flaming liberal saying this, because social conservatives ("Griswold v. Connecticut was wrongly decided") don't believe in a constitutional right to privacy.
I'm in the camp of "this is probably a bad idea, but I do so hate the way so many people drive, why not stick it to them". This is similar to "that anti-smoking law sure seems draconian, as soon as you nicotine addicts speak up for the right of other people to consume other drugs, maybe I'll give a shit".
Though really, I'd be happier with black boxes for accident and insurance purposes. If we sold auto insurance by the mile (and by the behavior), people would drive less (converts fixed costs into incremental costs, allows you to save more money by not driving) and they would drive better ("tailgating surcharge activated"). In terms of harm to society, since cars kill roughly twice as many people as are murdered in a given year, we'd get a higher social benefit from this, than from giving the police more tools that *might* allow them to solve crimes that had already been committed (and that's assuming that both choices are equally effective, but I think that the black box would be more effective).