Re:Unlikely to run out of oil -- ever!!
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
"There are current theories (that the oil companies don't want you to consider) that suggest that oil does not originate in dinosaur-era plant life, but in reactions to high pressure and temperature in carbon-bearing rock in the earth's crust. See here for an article."
You mean to tell me my gasoline isn't the byproducts of decaying sleestacks?
Hmmm...where does the Hollow Earth theory fit in with this?:)
Re:www.dieoff.org - depressing news for you
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
"Has all you need to know, and it's not crackpottery - just thousands and thousands of pages of studies and data from the Horses's mouth - Congress and the US Petrochemical industry. The people in power know what the deal is and it's not pretty. We will fight wars over oil in the future."
Pardon me, but with gasoline at $2.50 a gallon in the States, it now becomes viable for domestic production of crude to go back online. This is what Texas has been praying about for for over a decade.
And as for oil running out, there are plenty of places that have large reserves that haven't been tapped. I'm thinking the Falkland Islands for one. Its projected there is more oil there than in Kuwait. No wonder the British fought over that place; it certainly wasn't over preserving wool subsidies.
I'd also venture to guess there's a ton of oil under the Antartic ice. Then again, Atlantis is under there too so maybe we'd rediscover some other wacky energy efficient technologies to boot!:)
- I refrained from throwing in a WMD reference in that last paragraph...:)
Re:gov't should encourage telecommuting
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Out of Gas
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"Provide businesses with tax/other insentives for having a certain portion of their work force telecommute for 3-4 days out of the week would greatly reduce the amount of fuel use caused by suburbia."
Amen to that. I can do everything that I do here back at my place thanks to having a modern computer and a cable modem. The real crime is that government (in my case, State government) pays lip service to telecommuting, but then fails to mandate that all of their agencies actually adopt it.
Re:The only real answer is to reorganize society.
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Out of Gas
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"started looking at hybrids when my gas pump cut me off at $50.00 without filling my tank ('92 ford bronco, 11 mpg, 32 gallon tank). About a year later, I bought a VW New Beetle with the TDI (diesel) engine. Now it's *possible* to run my car with *no* foreign oil (biodiesel), and to date, about 1/3 of the fuel I've used has been from renewable sources, grown by my local farmers."
Do you live in Portland? I was up there last week and noticed one of the gas stations selling bio diesel, which cost more than gasoline and diesel. I found that rather interesting considering from the stuff I've read that biodiesel is just spent (used) vegetable oil.
"Ever heard of free trade? I guess we could spare some sugar cane alcohol for reasonable prices... it would keep money from wahabist terrorists, ease up pressure on your Middle East ally, and help distribute wealth better."
Awesome. Isn't that what we are trying to do with the FTAA (Free Trade Association of the Americas)? Isn't Brazil one of the holdouts while trying to strengthen their tactical advantage through Mercosur (sic)?
I myself favor more trade with Argentina with their surgically enhanced women thanks to their free health care system...:)
"You guys complain? Bah! In Europe we're worse off. I live in one of the countries with the lowest gas prices in the EU, but we nearly reached the 1/litre mark last week. That's 4$ per gallon for you American folks. My commute being 16 miles single way (which seems to be the norm according to this slashdot poll ) doesn't really help. Yes, I know, I could take the bus, but that would take me 60 minutes instead of 30 minutes with the car."
So does that mean you'll support our next adventure in the Middle East? Of course, the second country on our hit list is Syria and they don't really have that much oil. Then again, they do have the WMD that was transferred...hmmm...
Re:Start by banning plastics for consumables
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
"On the contrary: Petroleum use should be limited to producing plastics and other petrochemical products that are harder to replace than gasoline. Alternative energy sources are easier to come by than alternatives to plastics. (Environmental issues aside.)"
You can make plastic out of soy beans or corn. Plastic pellets made of corn is becoming a rage with Japanese manufacturers.
"The only OPEC country that isn't pumping at full capacity is Saudi Arabia. This shortage isn't a result of OPEC manipulation."
You forgot Iraq.:)
And we all know that the Baathists are blowing up the refineries to sabotage the Governing Council's planned takeover.
Re:It's worse than that
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Out of Gas
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"The hybrids sold by Honda and Toyota are jokes. When I went to UC Davis, the engineering department showed off a hybrid they had designed with funding from the U.S. Air Force"
I would also like to point out that that was back in 1997.
"In a trend that we all seem to already be hyper-aware of... 'The video game industry was once an afterthought in Hollywood, at most an ancillary source of revenue like action figures. The people passionately developing the computer-based form of entertainment were seen as dorks compared with the celebrities. Not anymore. Now that games have matured into a $11 billion business, topping movie box-office sales and siphoning television viewers, the lucrative and increasingly influential genre has attracted more star power than ever.'"
Does anyone not know the history of the videogame industry on Slashdot? Try 1976. That was the year Warner Communications (think Warner Bros. Pictures) purchased Atari, Inc. By the early 1982, Atari accounted for 3/4's of Warner's profits. So in your analysis, you are 22 years off on the video game industry's importance to Hollywood.
"I never said that France helped America for it's own altruistic reasons. It absolutely did help us because it wanted to piss of the British. However the fact is that after the war our relationship with France was an extremely strong and stable one, not like it is today."
No it wasn't. The United States conducted an undeclared naval war against France in 1800. France was implicated with bribing President Thomas Jefferson in the XYZ Affair. And after the conclusion of the American Revolution, the Federalists favored a strategic alliance with the British because they did not trust the French. It was the Jeffersonian Republican-Democrats who worshipped France - and took bribes.
I should also mention that the Federalists were against the War of 1812 as well. They felt the United States should've fought alongside Britain against Napoleon. The Federalists were so angry over that that they almost succeeded at getting the New England States to withdraw from the United States (Maine having been the closest to achieving that goal) and rejoin the British Empire.
So no, the United States never had a strong and stable relationship with France.
France was the motivator at bankrupting the German Weimar Republic after WWI, despite British and American protests. Their foolishness allowed the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.
Instead of actively resisting the Nazis, the French Parliament voted for the establishment of Marshall Patain's regime. That regime aided the Nazi war effort and also collaborated with the Holocaust.
After WWII, France tried to reconquer some of its former colonies. They asked for US help, especially in Indochina, known to you and I as "Vietnam." The US aided France, hoping France would support the creation of NATO. France lost miserably against the Vietnamese. When the US later took up the cause (to prevent the spread of communism, not to reconquer a French colony), the French backstabbed the US by pulling out of NATO, ordering US forces out of France, and then opposed the US action in Vietnam. France did all of that to preserve its interests. France also started championing the European Economic Community in an effort to create the "third wave," making all of Western Europe a vassal state of France and independent of American AND British influence.
France is not a *friend* of the United States. Of course, I'd also say the same about Israel as well. And if France really wants to be free of American influence, perhaps they should pay off their war debt to us from WWII. The same goes for the rest of Europe.
Re:It's worse than that
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Out of Gas
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· Score: 2, Informative
"If 30% of all new vehicles sold in California since 1990 had been hybrids, we'd be way beyond Toyota and Honda technologically and the reduced fuel demand would have eliminated the refinery capacity squeeze too."
The hybrids sold by Honda and Toyota are jokes. When I went to UC Davis, the engineering department showed off a hybrid they had designed with funding from the U.S. Air Force (the Air Force was kicking in funds to convert the closing nearby McClellan Air Force Base into a manufacturing base for hybrid cars and the like). They took a V6 Ford Taurus and made it a hybrid. It averaged 66 MPG. Now compare that to the clam traps by Toyota and Honda with 3 cylinder engines and yet they barely get above 40 MPG. Let's repeat this... A car the size of a Ford Taurus with a V6 getting 66 MPG versus a shoe of a car with a 3 cylinder engine that only gets 40 + MPG. Its a disgrace. What I also do not understand is that how these hybrids cannot beat the fuel economy of a 1989 3 cylinder Geo Metro. The Geo Metro could get 59 MPG. And it certainly was not a hybrid.
Re:Inflation.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Just because our total price is lower doesn't mean we have no right to complain. In fact, one might wonder why Europeans tolerate such outrageous taxes on gasoline."
Its also not just the taxes that make gasoline more expensive in Europe than America. You also have to figure out the currency equation too. Oil is priced in dollars, not euros or sterling. Heck, I think the North Sea Oil is even priced in dollars.
One of the dire predictions in the alarmist book entitled "Euroquake" was that the Arab oil producing counties would grow even more angry with U.S. support of Israel and would counter the perceived inequality by changing the pricing of oil to euros. Saddam tried to do that with the oil-for-food program but even the UN shot down that idea. Now if oil was priced in euros in the markets, us in the U.S. would be out more money for gasoline, especially if the euro continues to appreciate in value against the dollar.
"Please come to the UK, where it is around $5.50+ a US gallon most of the time. Of course, because we are a smaller country and have had this fuel price thing going for many a year, we usually live closer to where we work than many people in the US [do to their place of work]. We aren't as reliant on personal transport."
You in the UK, just like the rest of Western Europe, also have a decent public transportation system, whereas here in America, we do not. We relegate the homeless and the poor to public transport and thus it is undesireable (and sometimes unsafe) to ride. Now that is a generalization, because some cities in the US do have good subway or mass transit systems, like Bart in the Bay Area, the subways of New York City, or the Metro in D.C.
Of course, the taxes that your country place on gasoline (err, that's "petrol" to you) also pays for such a great public transport system. It also leaves you succeptable (sic) to lazy terrorist attacks (see Spain and Israel) which would be much more difficult to carry out in the US (shopping malls excluded from this scenario).
"WWI: the US army joined battle in full force only in July 1918. That's right, in a four year war they fought for *FOUR MONTHS*!!! No wonder the other allies wanted to tell Wilson to get stuffed.
WWII: after the fall of France, the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's dad) was telling all and sundry that Britain didn't have a chance of hanging on. Meanwhile US arms manufacturers were making a fortune as the British Empire went massively into debt (this was before Lend-Lease).
Me? I'm an Australian. We were in both wars from the word go..."
Yes, and you Aussies were also in Vietnam with the United States, the Persian Gulf War, and now the latest adventure in Iraq. And I'm sure those that are educated enough to know that here in the States appreciates that.
But why do Australians want to dump the Monarchy? Is it the influx of non-Commonwealth immigrants? Is it the desire not to see a King Charles III (but wait, there's a King William on the horizon)? Or is there a deep desire for an Australian President named Paul Hogan?:)
"Europeans do not have anything against legal, UN sanctioned military action, especially for humanitarian reasons. Europeans, however, do have something against unlawful, unilateral military action regardles if the party in question happens to be dictatorial Iraq under Saddams rule (First Gulf War) or a democratic state (slowly turning into a theocracy/police state) of US of A under Bush administration."
How does having the UN approval sanction anything? The United Nations is a collection of crackpot third world dictatorships. The Sudan on the Human Rights Commission? I think not.
I'd rather not have the UN approval if it means sucking up to the likes of Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe. Or the People's Republic of China, the fine respectors of human rights that they are.
Why do Europeans glamourize the UN so much? Have you all forgotten who you are? After all, it can be argued that us Americans are having to do "clean up" jobs in the various parts of the world that your countries ruled and then abandoned when imperialism fell out of fashion. That makes the European position hypocritical. While I do not expect anything less from the French, I do expect more from the British. Blair is trying to do the right thing and exert leadership while the general public seems to be fighting over semantics.
"As someone who lives in the UK, I think our stance on this is ridiculous, and a legacy of WW2. We're an important and influential member of the EU, and the last couple of years should have made it obvious that a close relationship with the US damages our relationship with the rest of Europe (and the wider world) and only benefits the Americans. In the post Empire world, Britain's role is as a democratic and decent European nation. We should not support pre-emptive war or the Israeli's mistreatment of the native Palestinians."
Excuse me? Pre-emptive war is necessary when you are dealing with leaders who do not respect the normal channels of negotiations. What you propose is exactly what Chamberlain did with Hitler. Appeasement. Or in terms of the French, self-serving appeasement (ie. make a ton of money arming dictators like Hussein).
Appeasement does not work with megalomaniacs who think they are superior to all others. Look at North Korea. That madman will stop at nothing to attain nuclear weapons because he has no other endgame. You can try to buy him off just as the Clinton Administration tried to do, but they just go ahead and funnel more funds into the weapons program covertly.
How many times did Saddam have the chance to clean up his act? Since 1991. He chose not to. And if he didn't have WMD, why play the bluff game with the world when it only served to give the US and the UK reason to invade and topple him?
If you go the EU route and sit on your hands, then the whole non-Western world will have nukes. While I myself do not agree with probably more than half of what my government does (ie. Palestine) in the world, I don't want countries like North Korea, Iran, Sudan, or Senior Bin Laden getting ahold of nukes. Its bad enough that Israel, China, India and Pakistan all have nukes.
This whole passiveness only works in a world filled with passive democracies. Outside of the western world, there aren't too many true democracies. I laugh when I try to imagine the people of the Roman Empire asking their Emperor(s) not to smite their enemies when they had the upper hand. The Romans didn't believe in appeasement and nor should we in the western world.
To you, I say "be British, damn it!" If anything, your nation owes the people you once ruled the right not to live under the homegrown dictatorships that replaced the Empire. Heck, if it was up to me, I'd ask the UK to co-invade Zimbabwe and put Mr. Mugabe into a permanent sort of retirement.
"As an example look at Franco-American relationships. While I think we are a long way away from a shooting war our friendship with them is no where near as strong as it use to be back when they did favors for us, little things like helping us found our country (their role is largely downplayed in American History classes but it is arguable that America would have lost the Revolutionary War without the economic assistance of France and the help of it's navy)."
Are you kidding? Do you really think the French King had any interest in helping form American democracy? No. The French Empire helped the American colonies as a form of revenge against the British (and its Colonies) for winning the Seven Years War. You know, the war called "The French and Indian War" where the British fought the French and Spanish across the globe, mainly at the start to protect the North American colonies, and then France lost all of Canada to the British.
If the French King would have had any interest in democratic reforms, he wouldn't have balked at the reform movement in his own country a few short years later where French thinkers tried to create a constitutional monarchy and parliament similar to the one in Britain. The French King betrayed his countrymen and asked the Austrian King to invade with his forces to put down the reform movement. The French King then lost his head and the French Revolution truly began. Had the King read what happened to Charles I in the English Civil War, he might have opted for a different strategy.
What we can thank the French for was interfering in a "cousins war" that has kept a counterproductive rift between the US and the UK since then.
"The majority of espionage conducted against the US is by our friends, largely from Europe. UK, France, and Germany being the major active players from Europe as I seem to remember. While it doesn't get wide press, the US catches (and then deports) several hundred European spies every year. How spies are treated depends on what country they are from."
How does the UK spy on the US without its consent? MI6 and the CIA work together; they have offices within each other. Both countries use Echelon to spy on its own citizens to get around their own national laws against the government doing that.
Compare that to French intelligence that spies on the US and UK economic interests. The French were the very reason why the Clinton Administration asked the CIA to start spying on other nations for economic advantage. That had not been a concern of the CIA before, because the CIA and MI6 were really busy winning the Cold War and now routing terrorists while the French fiddle around and try to steal business contracts from us. So much for the term "friends."
The French government is not the friend of the United States, and the sooner we acknowledge that the better. We'll stop vetting about our "relationship" and treat them as strategic competitors like they truly are. A friendly nation does not trade with an enemy you currently are fighting, and that "friend" certainly does not issue visas and fake passports so members of the toppled regime cannot flee - unlike say what France did for members of Saddam's former regime.
"The EU has its problems, lack of democracy being one of them, but Britain ain't so Great anymore, and we have to face economic realities. Personally I'd rather we try to take a hand in directing Europe than follow the US wherever it goes, and I don't say that to be anti-US."
There is nothing wrong with wishing to be a European, but none of your "partners" are actually too interested in such an endeavour. Look at the French. They view the EU as a tool of making all of Europe French. That's been France's goal since even before Napoleon and Louis XIV. Even now, the French government is concerned about creating "European Champions" (ie. French national champions) of corporations instead of promoting free and fair trade within the Common Market. The French cannot even abide by their treaty obligations to the Euro. If all the countries participating in the Euro did the same, the currency would tank.
Do you really trust the French? Why does Echelon piss them off so much? Because they get caught by it. French Intelligence is mainly concerned now with protecting French economic interests. And did the French oppose toppling Saddam Hussein based upon principles or the will to hide the amount of trading they had been doing with Iraq despite the UN sanctions?
If the EU were more like the British-founded EFTA, then it would be in Britain's interests to support it. However, the EU is a means by the French to impose their own cultural imperatives upon the whole continent and limit the role of Anglo-Americanism that takes hold.
"If the US and UK were to merge I think we'd wind up with two capitals rather than moving the Whitehouse from DC. I can't see it happening though, maybe a closer set of alliances between the US and UK, but not becoming a single nation."
Why not? We have more in common than in difference. Churchill was a strong proponent of such a deal, but instead, the U.S. opted to create NATO.
Just think about the U.S., English Canada, and the U.K. rolled up into a superstate. We'd have to work out our differences in terms of health care and other government assistance, and the U.S. Constitution would have to be amended to allow the U.K. to retain their Monarch, but I think the general U.S. populace would agree to that. Hell, I think *King William* would be an easy sell in a few years...
Outstanding problems with such a merger would be:
*What to do with Northern Ireland. The American public would probably demand a united Ireland, included in this newfangled Anglo-American Empire. Granted, a united Ireland as a State would be very similar to the proposed "Home Rule Ireland" retained in the United Kingdom that Gladstone failed to deliver.
*Scottish nationalism. Somehow since WWII, many Scots (similar to Austria's claim about being the first victim of the Nazis) claim they were victimized by the British Empire and not the actual co-conspirators and joyous participants. The SNP would have to be discredited in Scotland, although their views and goals seem downright foolish to the casual American. Lemme get this straight, Scots complain yet they get free health care and a free education at a Scottish university? You want to gain independence from the U.K. but don't mind being a fiefdom of the European Union? You want to "nationalize" the North Sea Oil? You want to pull out of NATO and abolish nuclear weapons? Ring ring, the People's Republic of Berkeley is on the line and they want their issues back...
*How the history of the American Revolution is taught in the US K-12 educational system. The current method of teaching the events is self-serving and is outright propaganda; you don't receive a critical analysis of the events until you get to the university system.
*English Canada. The best way to get this to happen is to encourage Quebec to actually pull off its quest for independence once and for all.
"No offense personally, but Unscrewed is the reason I stopped watching TechTV for a good while. It was vulgar, and downright offensive. Mebbe he can head on over to Comedy Central"
My gawd...it sounds like you need to spend some time in the *touching shed* (obligatory "Unscrewed" reference) instead of deciding to stop watching an entire cable network over one channel. Geez. Sargant is funnier than Leno or The Late Late Show. If I said he was funnier than Letterman, I'd be accused by some moderators here as pandering...although I think it...
Re:And the timeliness of /. prevails!
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"I was *just* wishing for TechTV to start showing up on my Comcast Digital Cable."
Eh? TechTV WAS on Comcast Digital. It just wasn't on their standard digital package. You had to pay $5 extra to get TechTV and Trio...and BET Jazz. Isn't that a combo? And apparently, that is Comcast's most popular add-on, that package, not the BET Jazz component. G4 came in the standard Comcast package. So the question is, will G4TechTV be in the standard digital Comcast package or if it will remain in the $5 add-on.
"* Atari video games were funded and developed by the department of defense in order to improve our reflexes to prepare us for 21st century automated combat... the company name "Atari" was just an acronym for special black ops project."
I guess this conspiracy theory was powered by the fact that the US Army was interested in using Atari's BattleZone as a tank simulator.
Seriously, how one could conclude Atari was a black ops project doesn't know about Nolan Bushnell and Crew's penchant for hot tubs, herb, and all sorts of other fragments of the 70s California lifestyle. Then again, that would fly in DARPA. Perhaps the Video Music Machine was a form of CIA hypnotic brainwashing.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are current theories (that the oil companies don't want you to consider) that suggest that oil does not originate in dinosaur-era plant life, but in reactions to high pressure and temperature in carbon-bearing rock in the earth's crust. See here for an article."
:)
You mean to tell me my gasoline isn't the byproducts of decaying sleestacks?
Hmmm...where does the Hollow Earth theory fit in with this?
"Has all you need to know, and it's not crackpottery - just thousands and thousands of pages of studies and data from the Horses's mouth - Congress and the US Petrochemical industry. The people in power know what the deal is and it's not pretty. We will fight wars over oil in the future."
:)
:)
Pardon me, but with gasoline at $2.50 a gallon in the States, it now becomes viable for domestic production of crude to go back online. This is what Texas has been praying about for for over a decade.
And as for oil running out, there are plenty of places that have large reserves that haven't been tapped. I'm thinking the Falkland Islands for one. Its projected there is more oil there than in Kuwait. No wonder the British fought over that place; it certainly wasn't over preserving wool subsidies.
I'd also venture to guess there's a ton of oil under the Antartic ice. Then again, Atlantis is under there too so maybe we'd rediscover some other wacky energy efficient technologies to boot!
- I refrained from throwing in a WMD reference in that last paragraph...
"Provide businesses with tax/other insentives for having a certain portion of their work force telecommute for 3-4 days out of the week would greatly reduce the amount of fuel use caused by suburbia."
Amen to that. I can do everything that I do here back at my place thanks to having a modern computer and a cable modem. The real crime is that government (in my case, State government) pays lip service to telecommuting, but then fails to mandate that all of their agencies actually adopt it.
"started looking at hybrids when my gas pump cut me off at $50.00 without filling my tank ('92 ford bronco, 11 mpg, 32 gallon tank). About a year later, I bought a VW New Beetle with the TDI (diesel) engine. Now it's *possible* to run my car with *no* foreign oil (biodiesel), and to date, about 1/3 of the fuel I've used has been from renewable sources, grown by my local farmers."
Do you live in Portland? I was up there last week and noticed one of the gas stations selling bio diesel, which cost more than gasoline and diesel. I found that rather interesting considering from the stuff I've read that biodiesel is just spent (used) vegetable oil.
"Ever heard of free trade? I guess we could spare some sugar cane alcohol for reasonable prices... it would keep money from wahabist terrorists, ease up pressure on your Middle East ally, and help distribute wealth better."
:)
Awesome. Isn't that what we are trying to do with the FTAA (Free Trade Association of the Americas)? Isn't Brazil one of the holdouts while trying to strengthen their tactical advantage through Mercosur (sic)?
I myself favor more trade with Argentina with their surgically enhanced women thanks to their free health care system...
"You guys complain? Bah! In Europe we're worse off. I live in one of the countries with the lowest gas prices in the EU, but we nearly reached the 1/litre mark last week. That's 4$ per gallon for you American folks. My commute being 16 miles single way (which seems to be the norm according to this slashdot poll ) doesn't really help. Yes, I know, I could take the bus, but that would take me 60 minutes instead of 30 minutes with the car."
So does that mean you'll support our next adventure in the Middle East? Of course, the second country on our hit list is Syria and they don't really have that much oil. Then again, they do have the WMD that was transferred...hmmm...
"On the contrary: Petroleum use should be limited to producing plastics and other petrochemical products that are harder to replace than gasoline. Alternative energy sources are easier to come by than alternatives to plastics. (Environmental issues aside.)"
You can make plastic out of soy beans or corn. Plastic pellets made of corn is becoming a rage with Japanese manufacturers.
"The only OPEC country that isn't pumping at full capacity is Saudi Arabia. This shortage isn't a result of OPEC manipulation."
:)
You forgot Iraq.
And we all know that the Baathists are blowing up the refineries to sabotage the Governing Council's planned takeover.
"The hybrids sold by Honda and Toyota are jokes. When I went to UC Davis, the engineering department showed off a hybrid they had designed with funding from the U.S. Air Force"
I would also like to point out that that was back in 1997.
"In a trend that we all seem to already be hyper-aware of... 'The video game industry was once an afterthought in Hollywood, at most an ancillary source of revenue like action figures. The people passionately developing the computer-based form of entertainment were seen as dorks compared with the celebrities. Not anymore. Now that games have matured into a $11 billion business, topping movie box-office sales and siphoning television viewers, the lucrative and increasingly influential genre has attracted more star power than ever.'"
Does anyone not know the history of the videogame industry on Slashdot? Try 1976. That was the year Warner Communications (think Warner Bros. Pictures) purchased Atari, Inc. By the early 1982, Atari accounted for 3/4's of Warner's profits. So in your analysis, you are 22 years off on the video game industry's importance to Hollywood.
"I never said that France helped America for it's own altruistic reasons. It absolutely did help us because it wanted to piss of the British. However the fact is that after the war our relationship with France was an extremely strong and stable one, not like it is today."
No it wasn't. The United States conducted an undeclared naval war against France in 1800. France was implicated with bribing President Thomas Jefferson in the XYZ Affair. And after the conclusion of the American Revolution, the Federalists favored a strategic alliance with the British because they did not trust the French. It was the Jeffersonian Republican-Democrats who worshipped France - and took bribes.
I should also mention that the Federalists were against the War of 1812 as well. They felt the United States should've fought alongside Britain against Napoleon. The Federalists were so angry over that that they almost succeeded at getting the New England States to withdraw from the United States (Maine having been the closest to achieving that goal) and rejoin the British Empire.
So no, the United States never had a strong and stable relationship with France.
France was the motivator at bankrupting the German Weimar Republic after WWI, despite British and American protests. Their foolishness allowed the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.
Instead of actively resisting the Nazis, the French Parliament voted for the establishment of Marshall Patain's regime. That regime aided the Nazi war effort and also collaborated with the Holocaust.
After WWII, France tried to reconquer some of its former colonies. They asked for US help, especially in Indochina, known to you and I as "Vietnam." The US aided France, hoping France would support the creation of NATO. France lost miserably against the Vietnamese. When the US later took up the cause (to prevent the spread of communism, not to reconquer a French colony), the French backstabbed the US by pulling out of NATO, ordering US forces out of France, and then opposed the US action in Vietnam. France did all of that to preserve its interests. France also started championing the European Economic Community in an effort to create the "third wave," making all of Western Europe a vassal state of France and independent of American AND British influence.
France is not a *friend* of the United States. Of course, I'd also say the same about Israel as well. And if France really wants to be free of American influence, perhaps they should pay off their war debt to us from WWII. The same goes for the rest of Europe.
"If 30% of all new vehicles sold in California since 1990 had been hybrids, we'd be way beyond Toyota and Honda technologically and the reduced fuel demand would have eliminated the refinery capacity squeeze too."
The hybrids sold by Honda and Toyota are jokes. When I went to UC Davis, the engineering department showed off a hybrid they had designed with funding from the U.S. Air Force (the Air Force was kicking in funds to convert the closing nearby McClellan Air Force Base into a manufacturing base for hybrid cars and the like). They took a V6 Ford Taurus and made it a hybrid. It averaged 66 MPG. Now compare that to the clam traps by Toyota and Honda with 3 cylinder engines and yet they barely get above 40 MPG. Let's repeat this... A car the size of a Ford Taurus with a V6 getting 66 MPG versus a shoe of a car with a 3 cylinder engine that only gets 40 + MPG. Its a disgrace. What I also do not understand is that how these hybrids cannot beat the fuel economy of a 1989 3 cylinder Geo Metro. The Geo Metro could get 59 MPG. And it certainly was not a hybrid.
"Just because our total price is lower doesn't mean we have no right to complain. In fact, one might wonder why Europeans tolerate such outrageous taxes on gasoline."
Its also not just the taxes that make gasoline more expensive in Europe than America. You also have to figure out the currency equation too. Oil is priced in dollars, not euros or sterling. Heck, I think the North Sea Oil is even priced in dollars.
One of the dire predictions in the alarmist book entitled "Euroquake" was that the Arab oil producing counties would grow even more angry with U.S. support of Israel and would counter the perceived inequality by changing the pricing of oil to euros. Saddam tried to do that with the oil-for-food program but even the UN shot down that idea. Now if oil was priced in euros in the markets, us in the U.S. would be out more money for gasoline, especially if the euro continues to appreciate in value against the dollar.
"Please come to the UK, where it is around $5.50+ a US gallon most of the time. Of course, because we are a smaller country and have had this fuel price thing going for many a year, we usually live closer to where we work than many people in the US [do to their place of work]. We aren't as reliant on personal transport."
You in the UK, just like the rest of Western Europe, also have a decent public transportation system, whereas here in America, we do not. We relegate the homeless and the poor to public transport and thus it is undesireable (and sometimes unsafe) to ride. Now that is a generalization, because some cities in the US do have good subway or mass transit systems, like Bart in the Bay Area, the subways of New York City, or the Metro in D.C.
Of course, the taxes that your country place on gasoline (err, that's "petrol" to you) also pays for such a great public transport system. It also leaves you succeptable (sic) to lazy terrorist attacks (see Spain and Israel) which would be much more difficult to carry out in the US (shopping malls excluded from this scenario).
"WWI: the US army joined battle in full force only in July 1918. That's right, in a four year war they fought for *FOUR MONTHS*!!! No wonder the other allies wanted to tell Wilson to get stuffed.
:)
WWII: after the fall of France, the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy (JFK's dad) was telling all and sundry that Britain didn't have a chance of hanging on. Meanwhile US arms manufacturers were making a fortune as the British Empire went massively into debt (this was before Lend-Lease).
Me? I'm an Australian. We were in both wars from the word go..."
Yes, and you Aussies were also in Vietnam with the United States, the Persian Gulf War, and now the latest adventure in Iraq. And I'm sure those that are educated enough to know that here in the States appreciates that.
But why do Australians want to dump the Monarchy? Is it the influx of non-Commonwealth immigrants? Is it the desire not to see a King Charles III (but wait, there's a King William on the horizon)? Or is there a deep desire for an Australian President named Paul Hogan?
"Europeans do not have anything against legal, UN sanctioned military action, especially for humanitarian reasons. Europeans, however, do have something against unlawful, unilateral military action regardles if the party in question happens to be dictatorial Iraq under Saddams rule (First Gulf War) or a democratic state (slowly turning into a theocracy/police state) of US of A under Bush administration."
How does having the UN approval sanction anything? The United Nations is a collection of crackpot third world dictatorships. The Sudan on the Human Rights Commission? I think not.
I'd rather not have the UN approval if it means sucking up to the likes of Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe. Or the People's Republic of China, the fine respectors of human rights that they are.
Why do Europeans glamourize the UN so much? Have you all forgotten who you are? After all, it can be argued that us Americans are having to do "clean up" jobs in the various parts of the world that your countries ruled and then abandoned when imperialism fell out of fashion. That makes the European position hypocritical. While I do not expect anything less from the French, I do expect more from the British. Blair is trying to do the right thing and exert leadership while the general public seems to be fighting over semantics.
"As someone who lives in the UK, I think our stance on this is ridiculous, and a legacy of WW2. We're an important and influential member of the EU, and the last couple of years should have made it obvious that a close relationship with the US damages our relationship with the rest of Europe (and the wider world) and only benefits the Americans. In the post Empire world, Britain's role is as a democratic and decent European nation. We should not support pre-emptive war or the Israeli's mistreatment of the native Palestinians."
Excuse me? Pre-emptive war is necessary when you are dealing with leaders who do not respect the normal channels of negotiations. What you propose is exactly what Chamberlain did with Hitler. Appeasement. Or in terms of the French, self-serving appeasement (ie. make a ton of money arming dictators like Hussein).
Appeasement does not work with megalomaniacs who think they are superior to all others. Look at North Korea. That madman will stop at nothing to attain nuclear weapons because he has no other endgame. You can try to buy him off just as the Clinton Administration tried to do, but they just go ahead and funnel more funds into the weapons program covertly.
How many times did Saddam have the chance to clean up his act? Since 1991. He chose not to. And if he didn't have WMD, why play the bluff game with the world when it only served to give the US and the UK reason to invade and topple him?
If you go the EU route and sit on your hands, then the whole non-Western world will have nukes. While I myself do not agree with probably more than half of what my government does (ie. Palestine) in the world, I don't want countries like North Korea, Iran, Sudan, or Senior Bin Laden getting ahold of nukes. Its bad enough that Israel, China, India and Pakistan all have nukes.
This whole passiveness only works in a world filled with passive democracies. Outside of the western world, there aren't too many true democracies. I laugh when I try to imagine the people of the Roman Empire asking their Emperor(s) not to smite their enemies when they had the upper hand. The Romans didn't believe in appeasement and nor should we in the western world.
To you, I say "be British, damn it!" If anything, your nation owes the people you once ruled the right not to live under the homegrown dictatorships that replaced the Empire. Heck, if it was up to me, I'd ask the UK to co-invade Zimbabwe and put Mr. Mugabe into a permanent sort of retirement.
"As an example look at Franco-American relationships. While I think we are a long way away from a shooting war our friendship with them is no where near as strong as it use to be back when they did favors for us, little things like helping us found our country (their role is largely downplayed in American History classes but it is arguable that America would have lost the Revolutionary War without the economic assistance of France and the help of it's navy)."
Are you kidding? Do you really think the French King had any interest in helping form American democracy? No. The French Empire helped the American colonies as a form of revenge against the British (and its Colonies) for winning the Seven Years War. You know, the war called "The French and Indian War" where the British fought the French and Spanish across the globe, mainly at the start to protect the North American colonies, and then France lost all of Canada to the British.
If the French King would have had any interest in democratic reforms, he wouldn't have balked at the reform movement in his own country a few short years later where French thinkers tried to create a constitutional monarchy and parliament similar to the one in Britain. The French King betrayed his countrymen and asked the Austrian King to invade with his forces to put down the reform movement. The French King then lost his head and the French Revolution truly began. Had the King read what happened to Charles I in the English Civil War, he might have opted for a different strategy.
What we can thank the French for was interfering in a "cousins war" that has kept a counterproductive rift between the US and the UK since then.
"The majority of espionage conducted against the US is by our friends, largely from Europe. UK, France, and Germany being the major active players from Europe as I seem to remember. While it doesn't get wide press, the US catches (and then deports) several hundred European spies every year. How spies are treated depends on what country they are from."
How does the UK spy on the US without its consent? MI6 and the CIA work together; they have offices within each other. Both countries use Echelon to spy on its own citizens to get around their own national laws against the government doing that.
Compare that to French intelligence that spies on the US and UK economic interests. The French were the very reason why the Clinton Administration asked the CIA to start spying on other nations for economic advantage. That had not been a concern of the CIA before, because the CIA and MI6 were really busy winning the Cold War and now routing terrorists while the French fiddle around and try to steal business contracts from us. So much for the term "friends."
The French government is not the friend of the United States, and the sooner we acknowledge that the better. We'll stop vetting about our "relationship" and treat them as strategic competitors like they truly are. A friendly nation does not trade with an enemy you currently are fighting, and that "friend" certainly does not issue visas and fake passports so members of the toppled regime cannot flee - unlike say what France did for members of Saddam's former regime.
"The EU has its problems, lack of democracy being one of them, but Britain ain't so Great anymore, and we have to face economic realities. Personally I'd rather we try to take a hand in directing Europe than follow the US wherever it goes, and I don't say that to be anti-US."
There is nothing wrong with wishing to be a European, but none of your "partners" are actually too interested in such an endeavour. Look at the French. They view the EU as a tool of making all of Europe French. That's been France's goal since even before Napoleon and Louis XIV. Even now, the French government is concerned about creating "European Champions" (ie. French national champions) of corporations instead of promoting free and fair trade within the Common Market. The French cannot even abide by their treaty obligations to the Euro. If all the countries participating in the Euro did the same, the currency would tank.
Do you really trust the French? Why does Echelon piss them off so much? Because they get caught by it. French Intelligence is mainly concerned now with protecting French economic interests. And did the French oppose toppling Saddam Hussein based upon principles or the will to hide the amount of trading they had been doing with Iraq despite the UN sanctions?
If the EU were more like the British-founded EFTA, then it would be in Britain's interests to support it. However, the EU is a means by the French to impose their own cultural imperatives upon the whole continent and limit the role of Anglo-Americanism that takes hold.
"If the US and UK were to merge I think we'd wind up with two capitals rather than moving the Whitehouse from DC. I can't see it happening though, maybe a closer set of alliances between the US and UK, but not becoming a single nation."
Why not? We have more in common than in difference. Churchill was a strong proponent of such a deal, but instead, the U.S. opted to create NATO.
Just think about the U.S., English Canada, and the U.K. rolled up into a superstate. We'd have to work out our differences in terms of health care and other government assistance, and the U.S. Constitution would have to be amended to allow the U.K. to retain their Monarch, but I think the general U.S. populace would agree to that. Hell, I think *King William* would be an easy sell in a few years...
Outstanding problems with such a merger would be:
*What to do with Northern Ireland. The American public would probably demand a united Ireland, included in this newfangled Anglo-American Empire. Granted, a united Ireland as a State would be very similar to the proposed "Home Rule Ireland" retained in the United Kingdom that Gladstone failed to deliver.
*Scottish nationalism. Somehow since WWII, many Scots (similar to Austria's claim about being the first victim of the Nazis) claim they were victimized by the British Empire and not the actual co-conspirators and joyous participants. The SNP would have to be discredited in Scotland, although their views and goals seem downright foolish to the casual American. Lemme get this straight, Scots complain yet they get free health care and a free education at a Scottish university? You want to gain independence from the U.K. but don't mind being a fiefdom of the European Union? You want to "nationalize" the North Sea Oil? You want to pull out of NATO and abolish nuclear weapons? Ring ring, the People's Republic of Berkeley is on the line and they want their issues back...
*How the history of the American Revolution is taught in the US K-12 educational system. The current method of teaching the events is self-serving and is outright propaganda; you don't receive a critical analysis of the events until you get to the university system.
*English Canada. The best way to get this to happen is to encourage Quebec to actually pull off its quest for independence once and for all.
And now I'm spent.
"Will that sweet sweet maiden Sarah Lane still be on Screen Savers, and will she dump Kevin Rose for me?"
And where is Ms. Cat Schwartz? Photoshop will never be the same without her...
"No offense personally, but Unscrewed is the reason I stopped watching TechTV for a good while. It was vulgar, and downright offensive. Mebbe he can head on over to Comedy Central"
My gawd...it sounds like you need to spend some time in the *touching shed* (obligatory "Unscrewed" reference) instead of deciding to stop watching an entire cable network over one channel. Geez. Sargant is funnier than Leno or The Late Late Show. If I said he was funnier than Letterman, I'd be accused by some moderators here as pandering...although I think it...
"I was *just* wishing for TechTV to start showing up on my Comcast Digital Cable."
Eh? TechTV WAS on Comcast Digital. It just wasn't on their standard digital package. You had to pay $5 extra to get TechTV and Trio...and BET Jazz. Isn't that a combo? And apparently, that is Comcast's most popular add-on, that package, not the BET Jazz component. G4 came in the standard Comcast package. So the question is, will G4TechTV be in the standard digital Comcast package or if it will remain in the $5 add-on.
"* Atari video games were funded and developed by the department of defense in order to improve our reflexes to prepare us for 21st century automated combat... the company name "Atari" was just an acronym for special black ops project."
I guess this conspiracy theory was powered by the fact that the US Army was interested in using Atari's BattleZone as a tank simulator.
Seriously, how one could conclude Atari was a black ops project doesn't know about Nolan Bushnell and Crew's penchant for hot tubs, herb, and all sorts of other fragments of the 70s California lifestyle. Then again, that would fly in DARPA. Perhaps the Video Music Machine was a form of CIA hypnotic brainwashing.