Dems ran a candidate with (ahem) substandard people skills. Not real big on shaking hands, hanging out in bad weather at campaign events, that sort of thing. The Repubs were seriously energized on the whole health-care thing, and the economy's been crappy.
They also tend to elect Republican governors, (Weld, Celluci, Romney) for reasons that make little sense to me.
I do worry about our better ability to observe and how that might skew data (e.g., recorded hurricane intensities). But, it would require exceptional stupidity on the part of people who were selected for the intelligence, and then spent years in graduate school, to be unaware of this issue, and to not take the trouble to correct for it. Do you really expect them to be THAT stupid, that nobody would point it out, and that they would not take steps to account for it, once it was? (Problems with improved detection are not new -- breast cancer screening had this problem decades ago, we're having that argument about PSA testing now.)
There's plenty of evidence that we're warming, and there's no dispute that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, and almost no dispute that we are the cause of it. Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the warming is in the same ballpark as predicted by models, it would be really stupid to bet that the two are unconnected.
Semi-seriously, among all the jokes, beyond a point you reach pretty quickly, thicker wire only helps survive abuse. At high frequencies, all the conduction is in the conductor's skin ("skin effect", wikipedia), so thickness is no electrical benefit. Conductor pairs tend to be twisted so that any large scale magnetic interference (e.g., a speaker, or a motor) is cancelled across twists, and the twists in turn occur at different rates for different conductor pairs to avoid crosstalk ("cat 5 cable", wikipedia).
But note that this is all taken care of, in dirt-cheap ethernet cable. This is a solved problem.
I think the poster has been drinking too much wonders-of-the-market koolaid. With the very low incidence of terrorism, what we'll get, is all sorts of silly-ass marketing of safety -- security theater, but this time with dancing girls. No doubt there would be weird interactions with insurance company policies, and you have to worry about market size (who refuses to fly, for what reasons), and you have to worry about civil rights suits, too.
I just had this scary vision, of privatized security, hiring an actual designated A-rab, to repeatedly stand in line, and be obviously searched and questioned, just so that all the Upstanding American Fraidy Cats can see this happening and be reassured that they were secure. And I ask you, why wouldn't a privatized outfit deploy exactly such (literal!) security theater? I dunno -- maybe a market solution would be ok after all, at least until this "security fraud" was breathlessly reported on whatever your favorite "news" source was.
It's all so depressing and boneheaded -- we mostly die from our own dumb choices. Al Qaeda's about as dangerous as falling out of bed.
PS perhaps you are too young to remember the oil embargo in the 1970s. It's possible to run low on gas, and not be able to refill in ten minutes and be on your way. Here, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis .
I think the issue is, electric cars, DO have a limited range, that even falls within the daily unassisted range of fat old men on bicycles. If you add an electric assist to a bicycle, for a very low price (dollars, energy, carbon footprint) you get a lot of the benefits of a car, and you don't have to worry about being stranded when the batteries run down, because you yourself can keep on pedaling. "A lot of the benefits of a car" means that for common-case use of a car, the bicycle is just as good -- given the speeds you actually travel in dense areas, and the loads that you actually carry, the assisted bicycle can carry the load, and move roughly as fast (what is lost in the fast stretch, is gained filtering through stopped traffic). The bicycle's also faster if you account for the exercise that you need -- with the bike, you get it "for free" (alternatively, you exercise for a while, then show up instantly at your destination). If you're over 40 and you're not accounting for this, you're a fool.
Economies of scale, economies of scale, economies of scale. Gas scooters in Europe and US are an established market, electric is not. "Many many people in Paris" is a tiny number of people, compared to "many many people in China". Electric assists for bicycles are also expensive in the US, despite (1) the availability of lead batteries here and (2) no need for a motorcycle license or registration. It's almost all down to the market size -- good LED bicycle lights in the US typically cost hundreds of dollars, despite the fact that a 1-3watt power LED and lens costs $10, retail, and the switching current supplies cost less than $20, retail. It has nothing to do with what your or I think the prices "should" be, and everything to do with what the market will bear, and when our opinions shown wrong, you can't just blame "regulations".
In addition, China's paying a price for their casual attitude towards lead -- much more poisoning and contamination that in the US and Europe.
The carbon tax helps fix the problem by making alternatives economically competitive. The amount of tax I've seen talked about, initially, is in the ballpark of 40 cents per gallon of gasoline -- not trivial, but well within the range of price changes we've seen in the past and might see in the future.
Furthermore, it is possible to reduce some other tax, or increase a subsidy, to put money back into the pockets of the poor. It need not be regressive.
Let me ease your doubts. The energy required to propel a bicycle nicely is about 200 watts, 300 if you wish to go extra fast or are climbing hills. Electric motors are pretty efficient, lithium batteries are also pretty efficient in charge/discharge. 5 hours of use (more than you get from one charge, but bear with me) gives you about a kilowatt-hour of energy. Double that, just to be really generous, and call it 2 kilowatts. That's 25 to 30 cents worth of electricity, to travel 60-80 miles. You can also roughly estimate the amount of fuel burned, from the cost of the energy. 30 cents is not much fuel, meaning not much pollution (and it is burned in power plants, which benefit from economies of scale in their pollution control). Another way to look at this is that if you could eat "gasoline", you'd get about 600 mpg on a bicycle, and electric use is comparable to that in scale.
"Range" depends a lot on the design of the bike and how you use it. Electric-only, when the battery is dead, you're stopped. "Assist", you can keep on going under your own power if you need to, which gives you a range (in my experience, on a cargo bike) of about 65 additional miles. The battery weight is not that big a deal, on a bike that is designed for it. Put it this way -- you're not stranded, like you are in a car.
No. The cost has nothing to do with regulations, and very much to do with "stuff in China is cheap". In addition, in China, between the laws banning motorcycles, and an installed base of a gazillion cyclists who'd like to either move a little faster, or with less sweat, and a bit more money than they used to have, there's an enormous market. Here, and in France, the installed base is people driving cars, and a relatively small number of cyclists, hence a tiny market. Now, the regulations may make it the case that we (French or USAian) cannot piggyback on the Chinese market, and you can blame that, but the regulations do not make the bike itself grossly more expensive.
Or 5 watts of solar panels, arranged to feed a 5V regulator. Or build your own USB charger, using a bicycle "dynamo" and a regulator off of that (you don't need a whole bike, you could just mount it and run it like a mini-spinning wheel, you would get many watts of power at a high-ish voltage)
Kinda depends upon what you mean by "software" and what it is responsible for. I built a standlight for my bicycle. There's software in it that watches the wheel go round (AC from the hub), turns on a battery, watches the wheel not go around for a while, and turns off the battery. Latest "innovation" was adding blink-when-stopped (wait a second, turn off the battery and let the voltage sag to 8v, turn on the battery, repeat). But the controller is NOT doing the heavy lifting of implementing switching-supply logic -- I just buy one of those.
The PCBs are all CC-BY-SA, haven't gotten around to publishing the resistors and software yet, but there's not much to it. How happy would it make you if I took the trouble to open source it? From my point of view, building the housing etc is the hard part, though I am also aiming for a hostile environment (all-Boston-weather, with bicycle vibration).
As opposed to, say, driving around with ten or more gallons of gasoline in the car? Or even, real live CNG, since vehicles are out there, and fracked gas is Our Future. We'll be fine (or rather, no worse off), as long as an arcs-in-crashmobile doesn't run into a leaks-gas-in-crashmobile.:-)
And semi-seriously, how many deaths to you predict that this would cause, and how does that number compare with pedestrians killed per year (US, 3000), people-in-cars killed per year (US, 30,000), or people dying early for lack of exercise per year (US, perhaps 300,000 -- it's a good fraction of all CV deaths, as well as some cancers, strokes, complications of diabetes, etc).
Under the statute, consent is not required for the taping of a non-electronic communication uttered by a person who does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that communication. See definition of “oral communication,” Fla. Stat. ch. 934.02. See also Stevenson v. State, 667 So.2d 410 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1996); Paredes v. State, 760 So.2d 167 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2000).
I've seen similar data to the reference the other replier posted. It's not very addictive, it is short-term non-toxic. Many other drugs, including many sold over the counter, if you overdose, you can easily die. I don't think there is even one death attributed to marijuana overdose (I did a little Googling to see if I could refute this, and turned up a bunch of zeroes and a parody). Long-term, if you smoke it, it's not optimal for your lungs, no, but the last person I saw smoking dope, smoked a pinhead's worth (modern dope is very strong) which is not very much smoke to inhale.
And you also have to be careful to distinguish between "use" and "abuse". Alcohol is not a "safe" drug, judged as an abusable drug (it is slightly addictive, it can kill you in overdose, it can trash your liver with long-term overconsumption), but moderate consumption is judged to be good for most people.
I'm also pretty skeptical of nanny-state arguments -- if you think it's okay to make me not smoke dope "for my own good", I think it's okay to force you to exercise four hours each work "for your own good". My (hypothetical) nanny-ism will result in many more lives saved than your (hypothetical) nanny-ism (need a reference? Here, bicycle commuting cuts mortality by 28%.)
The alleged superinjunction. I haven't seen it personally. Have you? Do you believe everything you read on the internet? This could all be an elaborate hoax, for all we really know.
Maybe we can get a super-duper-injunction on referring to USAians as "Septics"? And if you violate our super-duper-injunction, it's double-secret-probation for you.
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Dems ran a candidate with (ahem) substandard people skills. Not real big on shaking hands, hanging out in bad weather at campaign events, that sort of thing. The Repubs were seriously energized on the whole health-care thing, and the economy's been crappy.
They also tend to elect Republican governors, (Weld, Celluci, Romney) for reasons that make little sense to me.
You seem to have confused "terrible" and "awesome".
I think we're in violent agreement, then. Especially about the damnable jump-scroll. Safari?
This has been measured, and it's not quite as high as 40% -- the one large study, gave 27%. Unless perhaps, some fraction of the population is so stupid that they vote randomly, thus skewing the measurements. See http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-crazification.html
It's not as if gas were a safe and trouble-free technology, yet since it was status quo, its risks were ignored and/or accepted.
I do worry about our better ability to observe and how that might skew data (e.g., recorded hurricane intensities). But, it would require exceptional stupidity on the part of people who were selected for the intelligence, and then spent years in graduate school, to be unaware of this issue, and to not take the trouble to correct for it. Do you really expect them to be THAT stupid, that nobody would point it out, and that they would not take steps to account for it, once it was? (Problems with improved detection are not new -- breast cancer screening had this problem decades ago, we're having that argument about PSA testing now.)
There's plenty of evidence that we're warming, and there's no dispute that there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, and almost no dispute that we are the cause of it. Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the warming is in the same ballpark as predicted by models, it would be really stupid to bet that the two are unconnected.
Sweden? Norway?
Or if we've decided that what they've got is not socialism, then is it okay to have it here? That would be nice.
Semi-seriously, among all the jokes, beyond a point you reach pretty quickly, thicker wire only helps survive abuse. At high frequencies, all the conduction is in the conductor's skin ("skin effect", wikipedia), so thickness is no electrical benefit. Conductor pairs tend to be twisted so that any large scale magnetic interference (e.g., a speaker, or a motor) is cancelled across twists, and the twists in turn occur at different rates for different conductor pairs to avoid crosstalk ("cat 5 cable", wikipedia).
But note that this is all taken care of, in dirt-cheap ethernet cable. This is a solved problem.
Imagination is not evidence.
I think the poster has been drinking too much wonders-of-the-market koolaid. With the very low incidence of terrorism, what we'll get, is all sorts of silly-ass marketing of safety -- security theater, but this time with dancing girls. No doubt there would be weird interactions with insurance company policies, and you have to worry about market size (who refuses to fly, for what reasons), and you have to worry about civil rights suits, too.
I just had this scary vision, of privatized security, hiring an actual designated A-rab, to repeatedly stand in line, and be obviously searched and questioned, just so that all the Upstanding American Fraidy Cats can see this happening and be reassured that they were secure. And I ask you, why wouldn't a privatized outfit deploy exactly such (literal!) security theater? I dunno -- maybe a market solution would be ok after all, at least until this "security fraud" was breathlessly reported on whatever your favorite "news" source was.
It's all so depressing and boneheaded -- we mostly die from our own dumb choices. Al Qaeda's about as dangerous as falling out of bed.
PS perhaps you are too young to remember the oil embargo in the 1970s. It's possible to run low on gas, and not be able to refill in ten minutes and be on your way. Here, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis .
I think the issue is, electric cars, DO have a limited range, that even falls within the daily unassisted range of fat old men on bicycles. If you add an electric assist to a bicycle, for a very low price (dollars, energy, carbon footprint) you get a lot of the benefits of a car, and you don't have to worry about being stranded when the batteries run down, because you yourself can keep on pedaling. "A lot of the benefits of a car" means that for common-case use of a car, the bicycle is just as good -- given the speeds you actually travel in dense areas, and the loads that you actually carry, the assisted bicycle can carry the load, and move roughly as fast (what is lost in the fast stretch, is gained filtering through stopped traffic). The bicycle's also faster if you account for the exercise that you need -- with the bike, you get it "for free" (alternatively, you exercise for a while, then show up instantly at your destination). If you're over 40 and you're not accounting for this, you're a fool.
Economies of scale, economies of scale, economies of scale. Gas scooters in Europe and US are an established market, electric is not. "Many many people in Paris" is a tiny number of people, compared to "many many people in China". Electric assists for bicycles are also expensive in the US, despite (1) the availability of lead batteries here and (2) no need for a motorcycle license or registration. It's almost all down to the market size -- good LED bicycle lights in the US typically cost hundreds of dollars, despite the fact that a 1-3watt power LED and lens costs $10, retail, and the switching current supplies cost less than $20, retail. It has nothing to do with what your or I think the prices "should" be, and everything to do with what the market will bear, and when our opinions shown wrong, you can't just blame "regulations".
In addition, China's paying a price for their casual attitude towards lead -- much more poisoning and contamination that in the US and Europe.
The carbon tax helps fix the problem by making alternatives economically competitive. The amount of tax I've seen talked about, initially, is in the ballpark of 40 cents per gallon of gasoline -- not trivial, but well within the range of price changes we've seen in the past and might see in the future.
Furthermore, it is possible to reduce some other tax, or increase a subsidy, to put money back into the pockets of the poor. It need not be regressive.
Let me ease your doubts. The energy required to propel a bicycle nicely is about 200 watts, 300 if you wish to go extra fast or are climbing hills. Electric motors are pretty efficient, lithium batteries are also pretty efficient in charge/discharge. 5 hours of use (more than you get from one charge, but bear with me) gives you about a kilowatt-hour of energy. Double that, just to be really generous, and call it 2 kilowatts. That's 25 to 30 cents worth of electricity, to travel 60-80 miles. You can also roughly estimate the amount of fuel burned, from the cost of the energy. 30 cents is not much fuel, meaning not much pollution (and it is burned in power plants, which benefit from economies of scale in their pollution control). Another way to look at this is that if you could eat "gasoline", you'd get about 600 mpg on a bicycle, and electric use is comparable to that in scale.
"Range" depends a lot on the design of the bike and how you use it. Electric-only, when the battery is dead, you're stopped. "Assist", you can keep on going under your own power if you need to, which gives you a range (in my experience, on a cargo bike) of about 65 additional miles. The battery weight is not that big a deal, on a bike that is designed for it. Put it this way -- you're not stranded, like you are in a car.
No. The cost has nothing to do with regulations, and very much to do with "stuff in China is cheap". In addition, in China, between the laws banning motorcycles, and an installed base of a gazillion cyclists who'd like to either move a little faster, or with less sweat, and a bit more money than they used to have, there's an enormous market. Here, and in France, the installed base is people driving cars, and a relatively small number of cyclists, hence a tiny market. Now, the regulations may make it the case that we (French or USAian) cannot piggyback on the Chinese market, and you can blame that, but the regulations do not make the bike itself grossly more expensive.
Still don't put it in a drawer, unless you are searching with a Geiger counter.
Of course, first you have to find the Geiger counter.
Or 5 watts of solar panels, arranged to feed a 5V regulator. Or build your own USB charger, using a bicycle "dynamo" and a regulator off of that (you don't need a whole bike, you could just mount it and run it like a mini-spinning wheel, you would get many watts of power at a high-ish voltage)
Kinda depends upon what you mean by "software" and what it is responsible for. I built a standlight for my bicycle. There's software in it that watches the wheel go round (AC from the hub), turns on a battery, watches the wheel not go around for a while, and turns off the battery. Latest "innovation" was adding blink-when-stopped (wait a second, turn off the battery and let the voltage sag to 8v, turn on the battery, repeat). But the controller is NOT doing the heavy lifting of implementing switching-supply logic -- I just buy one of those.
The PCBs are all CC-BY-SA, haven't gotten around to publishing the resistors and software yet, but there's not much to it. How happy would it make you if I took the trouble to open source it? From my point of view, building the housing etc is the hard part, though I am also aiming for a hostile environment (all-Boston-weather, with bicycle vibration).
As opposed to, say, driving around with ten or more gallons of gasoline in the car? :-)
Or even, real live CNG, since vehicles are out there, and fracked gas is Our Future.
We'll be fine (or rather, no worse off), as long as an arcs-in-crashmobile doesn't run into a leaks-gas-in-crashmobile.
And semi-seriously, how many deaths to you predict that this would cause, and how does that number compare with pedestrians killed per year (US, 3000), people-in-cars killed per year (US, 30,000), or people dying early for lack of exercise per year (US, perhaps 300,000 -- it's a good fraction of all CV deaths, as well as some cancers, strokes, complications of diabetes, etc).
Fascist. Often enough, someone is just filming, and then the cop starts "doing his job". Like this guy.
Here, some "dick" mounted a camera on a building.
Don't think he was.
"Non-electronic", and on a public way.
From http://www.rcfp.org/taping/states/florida.html.
I've seen similar data to the reference the other replier posted. It's not very addictive, it is short-term non-toxic. Many other drugs, including many sold over the counter, if you overdose, you can easily die. I don't think there is even one death attributed to marijuana overdose (I did a little Googling to see if I could refute this, and turned up a bunch of zeroes and a parody). Long-term, if you smoke it, it's not optimal for your lungs, no, but the last person I saw smoking dope, smoked a pinhead's worth (modern dope is very strong) which is not very much smoke to inhale.
And you also have to be careful to distinguish between "use" and "abuse". Alcohol is not a "safe" drug, judged as an abusable drug (it is slightly addictive, it can kill you in overdose, it can trash your liver with long-term overconsumption), but moderate consumption is judged to be good for most people.
I'm also pretty skeptical of nanny-state arguments -- if you think it's okay to make me not smoke dope "for my own good", I think it's okay to force you to exercise four hours each work "for your own good". My (hypothetical) nanny-ism will result in many more lives saved than your (hypothetical) nanny-ism (need a reference? Here, bicycle commuting cuts mortality by 28%.)
The alleged superinjunction. I haven't seen it personally. Have you? Do you believe everything you read on the internet? This could all be an elaborate hoax, for all we really know.
Maybe we can get a super-duper-injunction on referring to USAians as "Septics"?
And if you violate our super-duper-injunction, it's double-secret-probation for you.