I could see Cape Breton being the site of a major launch facility. I always figured that the Maritimes would have a high-tech boom sooner or later, and other provinces already have other areas of science and technology nailed down. With the low employment rate, lots of highly educated people, and a government that isn't tied to legacy industries, the Maritimes are bubbling over with potential.
I wouldn't agree at all that rape erodes society as much as murder. Murder completely removes a person from society, permanently. No maybes, no conditions, that person and every thing they could ever do is gone. Rape victims, although they sometimes commit suicide or are permanently traumatized, are nevertheless quite likely to become productive members of society again after a recovery period. In rare cases the person becomes more productive, creative, or otherwise useful. It's vastly better for their loved ones too.
I agree emphatically though that punishment has nothing to do with "balance" or revenge or anything like that (at least for reasonable, civilised people). It's all about deterrence, providing the opportunity to rehabilitate, and identifying those afflicted with APD so that they can be sequestered from society. Most people who commit a rape are one-time offenders whose effect on society is quite minor. Punishing them as if they were destroying the world doesn't make sense. Even just a one year sentence will deter them, and something like a five year sentence makes rape unthinkable to almost everyone. Conversely though, most rapes are commited by a small number people who offend dozens or even hundreds of times. Punishing them is a waste of time since they're generally beyond reason or morality, and real Humans don't need any deterrence to avoid that kind of behaviour. They're the kind of people that receive dangerous offender status and are indefinitely imprisoned (at least here in Canada where we have that, I'm sure states have comparable sentences where the death penalty has been banned).
Why would you assume I mean your prophet? That's like talking about Christianity and meaning Jesus. It makes no sense. One is a group of blind followers, the other is a person whose life has been heavily fictionalized as part of a campaign to control lots of people. When I say "Islam took", I mean the manipulative brainwashers that went around trying to get people to go out and kill, conquer, rape, and pillage for them. Which is, after all, how religions like Christianity and Islam spread. And Rushdie is regarded as one of the best authors in all of English literature by people who read books, and for a good reason. Since you haven't read The Satanic Verses, you're really not in a position to criticize them (and skimming a book looking for things to get angry about doesn't count -- that's just being an ignorant, close-minded dick, which is sadly a category into which most religious folk fall).
Here's a simple acid test for you: how many rape victims, one year later, would rather have been murdered? If they're equivalent, wouldn't most of those rape victims say that death would have been no worse a fate? Here in reality though, most rape victims are glad to still be alive, because rape just isn't anywhere near as bad as being killed. Yes, it revolts us, and yes, it is terrible. But murder is on a whole different plane of existence, as far as crimes go.
Seriously though -- I suggest you ask a rape victim sometime: would it have been equally unpleasant if you had been killed instead? See how many of them take you seriously. Then note how many rape victims have gone on to relatively normal lives. Hint: it's an awful lot of them. Statistics say that 1 in 4 women experiences sexual assault of some kind during her life. Do you see 1 in 4 women wishing she'd been killed instead? Do you see 1 in 4 women spending the rest of their lives hiding in their basement with a baseball bat because they can't go on with life? Are 1 in 4 women effectively dead?
Murder > Rape. Deal with it. That doesn't mean that rape isn't a serious crime worthy of serious punishment. It's just that it's stupid to suggest that they're just as bad as each other.
Molesting a few children and taking pictures of it is definitely nowhere NEAR as bad as killing hundreds of people (including dozens of children). But crimes against children evoke a far more visceral revulsion in people than just pushing a button that blows some people up. In fact, the difference in how people respond to immoral acts has been studied with interesting results.
Basically it seems to come down to how directly someone is involved in an immoral act. A suicide bomber is somewhat more removed from their crime than someone who's right in there hurting children with their bare hands. Similarly, a politician who initiates military actions that cause tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths (by, say, ordering the firebombing of a city) probably wont be held to even the slightest level of accountability, because he is so incredibly far removed from the acts. He certainly wont be considered as evil as someone who had torched that city in person. And a hypothetical arsonist who burned down a city wouldn't be considered as evil as someone who personally lit even just one or two people on fire -- even though the former caused a vastly greater number of deaths. It's a funny little quirk of how our moral instincts work, and it highlights the importance of applying reasoning to our moral judgements.
No one thinks that. Molecular biologists actually do EXPERIMENTS to see how life may have originated, they do tests to see what is possible. Take a look around, there is lots of interesting research into what kind of organic molecules can form under various conditions and last long enough to form more complex compounds.
By contrast, fundies never question anything. The few tests of the power of prayer and related magical phenomena have yielded negative results. Like those tests about whether praying for people undergoing surgery have higher survival rates? The only factor that mattered was whether the patient believed that they were being prayed for. Praying for someone and not telling them about it had ZERO effect. So much for prayer -- an activity for stupid people with too much free time. Tests of out-of-body experiences had similarly mundane results -- researchers consistently found that people who claimed to have floated around the room while dead hadn't actually seen anything that would have been visible in their altered perspectives. Conversely, under the rght circumstances, hallucinogenic drugs can reroduce out-of-body experiences quite reliably. Phenomenon discredited.
Basically, only stupid people doubt that evolution is a real process at this point. Only stupid people believe in the power of prayer, which has been consistently discredited. THe same goes for basically all other supernatural phenomenon. Feel free to believe in magic men in the sky who don't actually do anything though, since that's all the science leaves room for at this point. And if you doubt science, you'd better give back your computer, microwave, refridgerator, and everything else that science makes possible. What is a computer other than a monument to the might of science and the failure of lesser ways of understanding the world?
Evolution, at least as I was taught it in BIO 1110, doesn't have a single mechanism. Natural Selection is a significant one, but anything that causes a population to change is evolution. The two other mechanisms mentioned were genetic drift (which tends to eliminate rare genes regardless of their utility) and population bottlenecks (which vastly shrink the size of the population and genepool, and allows rare genes to become common, regardless of their utility).
Funny how Islam took an end-run around that idea right from the start, and specifically made the Quran an infallible extension of God. Ever read The Satanic Verses? The parts about "the businessman" are basically a guidebook for how to establish a globe-spanning religion. I always wondered if Rushdie was inspired by the exploits of L Ron Hubbard, and based his caricature of Islam on Scientology.
Funny, but also true. The US army has always been the very model of morale, part of the reason it's so successfull. And things like (good) coffee and stuff like that really do help win wars. Canada had a Tim Hortons donut shop built in Afghanistan, for precisely that reason. Supply drops of Starbucks, pizza pops, and microbrew are the kind of thing that really keep the troops stompin'.
Symbolic calculation would be impractical for highly iterated calculations, as you find in many financial and matrix formulae. The symbolic representations would simply become impractically long, and resolving them into actual numbers for presentation to Humans would have exactly the same issues as before.
There are lots of solutions out there. One good compromise in many situations is to store a range rather than a single value; either a min-max pair, or a median value with a precision. Every floating point operation that a computer can do has a predictable limit on the amount of error that it introduces; tracking this amount explicitly alongside your floats and doubles makes an awful lot of sense, and has a relatively small performance cost compared to solutions like decimal arithmetic and symbolic computation.
Strictly speaking, the effectiveness of any compression technique has to be measured by including the algorithm's length as part of the length of the output. So if you compress a 100kb document with a 30kb build of bzip2, and the output file is 70kb, you've got a compression ratio of 1. This isn't so much a concern in practice (particularly with something like bzip2 that you reuse), but when you're discussing theoretical "bests", it becomes supremely important for exactly the reason you describe. Kolmogorov complexity, and all that.
Oh, it gets so much so worse. Kernels can be of arbitrary length, so determining what they do basically falls under the tragic category of the Acceptance Problem -- developing an algorithm that only accepts candidate kernels that actually do perform the business of being a kernel properly. Unless the OP happens to have solved the Acceptance Problem, his proposal doesn't work.
It actually occurred to me since I posted this that hydrothermal vents DO have meagre numbers of ultra-efficient photosynthetic bacteria that live off of the glow of the heated rock. So marine algal mats could rebound quickly. Wee vent fish, crabs, and worms could probably adapt to live off of those mats. So marine life could possibly rebound in just a few million years. And having both a crustacean and a vertebrate in the new order gives it a running shot at having interesting terrestrial life if and when some kind of ur-plant life pops up.
I think we're entirely capable of exterminating vast portions of nature. Radiation may not do the job, but using a combination of toxic and ultra-stable chemicals, atmospheric contaminants that block light in the energy ranges useful for photosynthesis, and so on, we could definitely leave large sections of the Earth life-free for millenia. With enough damage, we could kill all but the simplest marine life around vents; there probably wouldn't be enough time for multicellular photosynthesizers to re-evolve before either the sun turned into the red giant or the planet's core cooled enough for the oceans to sink into the mantle.
Really though, it's not that surprising that life can withstand radiation, in hindsight. After all, plants and animals are out there every day, all day, without succumbing to the radiation bombarding them from the sun or from space. The capacity to withstand some levetradiation is already It no doubt helps that the animals don't live for seventy years the way we do -- so cancers are much less of a problem. And plants can take phenomenal amounts of abuse as long as the sun keeps shining and the run keeps falling.
Are these really resolvable issues? Ultimately, those two questions are the big ones in security. Mostly the second one, I'd say. But it's nice to be able to focus on them without having to worry that the actual cipher technology will make your efforts worthless. I mean, it's really saying something that we've only now entered an age where we can finally stop worrying about the engineering side of secure communication, and actually focus on the endpoints in confidence. As long as we don't forget that the channel is just the simplest part of security, we've moved forward, and finally have a really solid base upon which to build best practices.
Why bother rebuilding it? In twenty years, Manhattan is going to be under ten feet of water. Of course, not being particularly sentimental myself, I find the idea of the 9/11 memorial being the site of an artificial reef to be pretty funny.
You're talking about a country that is waging a war whose costs are in the TRILLIONS of dollars, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and has made a politically unstable part of the world degenerate into near-anarchy. And they did it based on LIES. And they use the nation's anti-terrorism institutions to harass any reporters that try to publish about those lies. They allow state governments to grossly interfere with federal elections. They abandon an entire major city when disaster strikes it, despite having a warning four days ahead of time. They control an ENTIRE major news network in order to make it easier for them to manipulate the nation's stupid, stupid people.
This is not just another bad government. This is a truly shitty, awful government that has turned America from an inspiring nation with checks and balances and a clearly defined seperation of powers, to one in which the president has TOTAL power to do anything he wants, with the machinery in place to silence vocal critics and propogandize the people into submission. If you valued freedom or democracy even slightly, you'd be haranguing everyone you could find about this government's evils, and getting them to vote for a real party. An actual patriot would be stalking Washington DC with a hunting rifle, trying to find a nice grassy knoll or something.
Gore? Maybe. At least he's intelligent, genuinely cares about the state of the world, and had the balls to work diligently at shrinking the government. Kerry? The man just screamed "stooge". Gore probably would have won if a) The Bush family didn't get to personally oversee the Florida election and remove 10,000 black voters from the lists for having names similar to convicts, and b) Americans didn't despise anyone with an IQ over 90. Kerry probably couldn't have won unless Bush had strangled a baby to death with his bare hands on live television (or worse yet, caused a human nipple to be revealed! The horror!)
Footnote: It's interesting to see just how active Gore was as Vice President. Given Cheney's similarly high level of involvement, does this mark a new era of VPs who do more than act as tie-breakers in the senate?
The best near term solution is just to burn it all and dump it into the atmosphere. It's easy, cheap, fast, and it releases substantially fewer radioactive heavy metals into the atmosphere than the world's coal-fired power plants do. People only get so upset about nuclear waste because they're a bunch of panicky morons with the combined intelligence of a pickled rat.
I had two ideas, but one would have involved armed men summarily executing anyone who used the phrase "two-party system". The other would have involved people thinking before they vote, and hopefully not voting for parties that behave in ways that are diamterically opposed to the philosophies that they claim to follow. The former idea is almost certainly the more realistic one.
EG: why does America still have medicare and medicaid? Bush has had 6 years to scrap it; instead he just lets them stink up the national debt to the tune of 2 trillion dollars a year, despite the fact that they help very few people. A conservative would have scrapped it, cut taxes, and let the improved economy make it easier for people to afford their own health care; ergo, Bush is not a conservative.
Similarly, why doesn't America have universal healthcare? Clinton had 8 years to implement some kind of solution. A liberal would have developed a brilliant blend of public and private care, public and private health insurance, job-benefits and welfare programs, and ended with most people covered and vast numbers of new jobs to run the beauracracy; ergo, Clinton was not a liberal. Both of these presidents have NOTHING stopping them, since they both had/have near-total support in congress. Bunch of jackasses, I tell you.
Yeah, and for your night job you're a ninja security guard for the president right? The Internet, where everyone is simultaneously rocket scientist, a millionaire playboy in their small town, and a former LA gangster king.
Either that, or you're the worst analyst in the world and lack the basic mathematical skills necessary to analyse corn yields.
Why don't we just remove ALL the subsidies, all the tax breaks that exist purely to prop up failing forms of agriculture, and all that other bullshit. Then we can let all of these different forms of fuel compete and evolve. Natural gas, petrol, diesel, ethanol (from diferent sources), butanol from algae, oil from therman depolymerization, etc -- let 'em fight it out. In fact, I'd say it's this ridiculous idea of "technology X will replace gasoline" that is holding us back. Let some people drive electrics, let some people drive ethanol/biogas dual-fuel engine cars, let long-haul truckers gradually use up the last of the petroleum, etc. Multiple solutions, recognizing that what we actually have is a whole bunch of different problems. The free market, despite its weaknesses in some areas, can absolutely stomp the power "crisis" to pieces, if we just ditch the protectionism and corporate welfare.
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I could see Cape Breton being the site of a major launch facility. I always figured that the Maritimes would have a high-tech boom sooner or later, and other provinces already have other areas of science and technology nailed down. With the low employment rate, lots of highly educated people, and a government that isn't tied to legacy industries, the Maritimes are bubbling over with potential.
I agree emphatically though that punishment has nothing to do with "balance" or revenge or anything like that (at least for reasonable, civilised people). It's all about deterrence, providing the opportunity to rehabilitate, and identifying those afflicted with APD so that they can be sequestered from society. Most people who commit a rape are one-time offenders whose effect on society is quite minor. Punishing them as if they were destroying the world doesn't make sense. Even just a one year sentence will deter them, and something like a five year sentence makes rape unthinkable to almost everyone. Conversely though, most rapes are commited by a small number people who offend dozens or even hundreds of times. Punishing them is a waste of time since they're generally beyond reason or morality, and real Humans don't need any deterrence to avoid that kind of behaviour. They're the kind of people that receive dangerous offender status and are indefinitely imprisoned (at least here in Canada where we have that, I'm sure states have comparable sentences where the death penalty has been banned).
Why would you assume I mean your prophet? That's like talking about Christianity and meaning Jesus. It makes no sense. One is a group of blind followers, the other is a person whose life has been heavily fictionalized as part of a campaign to control lots of people. When I say "Islam took", I mean the manipulative brainwashers that went around trying to get people to go out and kill, conquer, rape, and pillage for them. Which is, after all, how religions like Christianity and Islam spread. And Rushdie is regarded as one of the best authors in all of English literature by people who read books, and for a good reason. Since you haven't read The Satanic Verses, you're really not in a position to criticize them (and skimming a book looking for things to get angry about doesn't count -- that's just being an ignorant, close-minded dick, which is sadly a category into which most religious folk fall).
Religion isn't even a theory. It's an unsupported hypothesis. Not unlike astrology, the aether, or trickle-down economics.
Seriously though -- I suggest you ask a rape victim sometime: would it have been equally unpleasant if you had been killed instead? See how many of them take you seriously. Then note how many rape victims have gone on to relatively normal lives. Hint: it's an awful lot of them. Statistics say that 1 in 4 women experiences sexual assault of some kind during her life. Do you see 1 in 4 women wishing she'd been killed instead? Do you see 1 in 4 women spending the rest of their lives hiding in their basement with a baseball bat because they can't go on with life? Are 1 in 4 women effectively dead?
Murder > Rape. Deal with it. That doesn't mean that rape isn't a serious crime worthy of serious punishment. It's just that it's stupid to suggest that they're just as bad as each other.
Molesting a few children and taking pictures of it is definitely nowhere NEAR as bad as killing hundreds of people (including dozens of children). But crimes against children evoke a far more visceral revulsion in people than just pushing a button that blows some people up. In fact, the difference in how people respond to immoral acts has been studied with interesting results.
http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-04/features/who se-life-would-you-save/
Basically it seems to come down to how directly someone is involved in an immoral act. A suicide bomber is somewhat more removed from their crime than someone who's right in there hurting children with their bare hands. Similarly, a politician who initiates military actions that cause tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths (by, say, ordering the firebombing of a city) probably wont be held to even the slightest level of accountability, because he is so incredibly far removed from the acts. He certainly wont be considered as evil as someone who had torched that city in person. And a hypothetical arsonist who burned down a city wouldn't be considered as evil as someone who personally lit even just one or two people on fire -- even though the former caused a vastly greater number of deaths. It's a funny little quirk of how our moral instincts work, and it highlights the importance of applying reasoning to our moral judgements.
By contrast, fundies never question anything. The few tests of the power of prayer and related magical phenomena have yielded negative results. Like those tests about whether praying for people undergoing surgery have higher survival rates? The only factor that mattered was whether the patient believed that they were being prayed for. Praying for someone and not telling them about it had ZERO effect. So much for prayer -- an activity for stupid people with too much free time. Tests of out-of-body experiences had similarly mundane results -- researchers consistently found that people who claimed to have floated around the room while dead hadn't actually seen anything that would have been visible in their altered perspectives. Conversely, under the rght circumstances, hallucinogenic drugs can reroduce out-of-body experiences quite reliably. Phenomenon discredited.
Basically, only stupid people doubt that evolution is a real process at this point. Only stupid people believe in the power of prayer, which has been consistently discredited. THe same goes for basically all other supernatural phenomenon. Feel free to believe in magic men in the sky who don't actually do anything though, since that's all the science leaves room for at this point. And if you doubt science, you'd better give back your computer, microwave, refridgerator, and everything else that science makes possible. What is a computer other than a monument to the might of science and the failure of lesser ways of understanding the world?
Evolution, at least as I was taught it in BIO 1110, doesn't have a single mechanism. Natural Selection is a significant one, but anything that causes a population to change is evolution. The two other mechanisms mentioned were genetic drift (which tends to eliminate rare genes regardless of their utility) and population bottlenecks (which vastly shrink the size of the population and genepool, and allows rare genes to become common, regardless of their utility).
Funny how Islam took an end-run around that idea right from the start, and specifically made the Quran an infallible extension of God. Ever read The Satanic Verses? The parts about "the businessman" are basically a guidebook for how to establish a globe-spanning religion. I always wondered if Rushdie was inspired by the exploits of L Ron Hubbard, and based his caricature of Islam on Scientology.
Funny, but also true. The US army has always been the very model of morale, part of the reason it's so successfull. And things like (good) coffee and stuff like that really do help win wars. Canada had a Tim Hortons donut shop built in Afghanistan, for precisely that reason. Supply drops of Starbucks, pizza pops, and microbrew are the kind of thing that really keep the troops stompin'.
Symbolic calculation would be impractical for highly iterated calculations, as you find in many financial and matrix formulae. The symbolic representations would simply become impractically long, and resolving them into actual numbers for presentation to Humans would have exactly the same issues as before.
There are lots of solutions out there. One good compromise in many situations is to store a range rather than a single value; either a min-max pair, or a median value with a precision. Every floating point operation that a computer can do has a predictable limit on the amount of error that it introduces; tracking this amount explicitly alongside your floats and doubles makes an awful lot of sense, and has a relatively small performance cost compared to solutions like decimal arithmetic and symbolic computation.
Strictly speaking, the effectiveness of any compression technique has to be measured by including the algorithm's length as part of the length of the output. So if you compress a 100kb document with a 30kb build of bzip2, and the output file is 70kb, you've got a compression ratio of 1. This isn't so much a concern in practice (particularly with something like bzip2 that you reuse), but when you're discussing theoretical "bests", it becomes supremely important for exactly the reason you describe. Kolmogorov complexity, and all that.
Oh, it gets so much so worse. Kernels can be of arbitrary length, so determining what they do basically falls under the tragic category of the Acceptance Problem -- developing an algorithm that only accepts candidate kernels that actually do perform the business of being a kernel properly. Unless the OP happens to have solved the Acceptance Problem, his proposal doesn't work.
It actually occurred to me since I posted this that hydrothermal vents DO have meagre numbers of ultra-efficient photosynthetic bacteria that live off of the glow of the heated rock. So marine algal mats could rebound quickly. Wee vent fish, crabs, and worms could probably adapt to live off of those mats. So marine life could possibly rebound in just a few million years. And having both a crustacean and a vertebrate in the new order gives it a running shot at having interesting terrestrial life if and when some kind of ur-plant life pops up.
Really though, it's not that surprising that life can withstand radiation, in hindsight. After all, plants and animals are out there every day, all day, without succumbing to the radiation bombarding them from the sun or from space. The capacity to withstand some levetradiation is already It no doubt helps that the animals don't live for seventy years the way we do -- so cancers are much less of a problem. And plants can take phenomenal amounts of abuse as long as the sun keeps shining and the run keeps falling.
Are these really resolvable issues? Ultimately, those two questions are the big ones in security. Mostly the second one, I'd say. But it's nice to be able to focus on them without having to worry that the actual cipher technology will make your efforts worthless. I mean, it's really saying something that we've only now entered an age where we can finally stop worrying about the engineering side of secure communication, and actually focus on the endpoints in confidence. As long as we don't forget that the channel is just the simplest part of security, we've moved forward, and finally have a really solid base upon which to build best practices.
Why bother rebuilding it? In twenty years, Manhattan is going to be under ten feet of water. Of course, not being particularly sentimental myself, I find the idea of the 9/11 memorial being the site of an artificial reef to be pretty funny.
This is not just another bad government. This is a truly shitty, awful government that has turned America from an inspiring nation with checks and balances and a clearly defined seperation of powers, to one in which the president has TOTAL power to do anything he wants, with the machinery in place to silence vocal critics and propogandize the people into submission. If you valued freedom or democracy even slightly, you'd be haranguing everyone you could find about this government's evils, and getting them to vote for a real party. An actual patriot would be stalking Washington DC with a hunting rifle, trying to find a nice grassy knoll or something.
Gore? Maybe. At least he's intelligent, genuinely cares about the state of the world, and had the balls to work diligently at shrinking the government. Kerry? The man just screamed "stooge". Gore probably would have won if a) The Bush family didn't get to personally oversee the Florida election and remove 10,000 black voters from the lists for having names similar to convicts, and b) Americans didn't despise anyone with an IQ over 90. Kerry probably couldn't have won unless Bush had strangled a baby to death with his bare hands on live television (or worse yet, caused a human nipple to be revealed! The horror!) Footnote: It's interesting to see just how active Gore was as Vice President. Given Cheney's similarly high level of involvement, does this mark a new era of VPs who do more than act as tie-breakers in the senate?
The best near term solution is just to burn it all and dump it into the atmosphere. It's easy, cheap, fast, and it releases substantially fewer radioactive heavy metals into the atmosphere than the world's coal-fired power plants do. People only get so upset about nuclear waste because they're a bunch of panicky morons with the combined intelligence of a pickled rat.
I had two ideas, but one would have involved armed men summarily executing anyone who used the phrase "two-party system". The other would have involved people thinking before they vote, and hopefully not voting for parties that behave in ways that are diamterically opposed to the philosophies that they claim to follow. The former idea is almost certainly the more realistic one.
EG: why does America still have medicare and medicaid? Bush has had 6 years to scrap it; instead he just lets them stink up the national debt to the tune of 2 trillion dollars a year, despite the fact that they help very few people. A conservative would have scrapped it, cut taxes, and let the improved economy make it easier for people to afford their own health care; ergo, Bush is not a conservative.
Similarly, why doesn't America have universal healthcare? Clinton had 8 years to implement some kind of solution. A liberal would have developed a brilliant blend of public and private care, public and private health insurance, job-benefits and welfare programs, and ended with most people covered and vast numbers of new jobs to run the beauracracy; ergo, Clinton was not a liberal. Both of these presidents have NOTHING stopping them, since they both had/have near-total support in congress. Bunch of jackasses, I tell you.
Either that, or you're the worst analyst in the world and lack the basic mathematical skills necessary to analyse corn yields.
Why don't we just remove ALL the subsidies, all the tax breaks that exist purely to prop up failing forms of agriculture, and all that other bullshit. Then we can let all of these different forms of fuel compete and evolve. Natural gas, petrol, diesel, ethanol (from diferent sources), butanol from algae, oil from therman depolymerization, etc -- let 'em fight it out. In fact, I'd say it's this ridiculous idea of "technology X will replace gasoline" that is holding us back. Let some people drive electrics, let some people drive ethanol/biogas dual-fuel engine cars, let long-haul truckers gradually use up the last of the petroleum, etc. Multiple solutions, recognizing that what we actually have is a whole bunch of different problems. The free market, despite its weaknesses in some areas, can absolutely stomp the power "crisis" to pieces, if we just ditch the protectionism and corporate welfare.
It was the slaves. As soon as you lose the slaves, it's all downhill.