Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
Why two, rather than N?
I'm sorry, this whole "marriage belongs to the church and the rest of you can fuck off" idea is just complete bullshit. I say keep marriage as a civil institution, open to all -- gay, straight, theist, atheist, black, white, whatever -- and let churches perform their own "spiritual unions" instead.
Do you realize that you and the parent post actually want the exact same thing, but choose to use opposite terminology?
Personally, I think that for exactly the reason you described -- that "marriage" is an emotionally-charged word with lots of religious and historical connotations (whether you like it or not) -- the civil institution should be called a "civil union," specifically to avoid those controversial connotations. Anyone who's Hell-bent on getting something called a "marriage" is still free to take their "civil union license" to a priest instead of a judge.
If it's less hassle for me to burn my fryer oil for electricity than to turn the back dock into a fuel depot, then so be it.
It's not, though. Setting the used oil out back to be picked up by someone, whether it's a guy with a diesel car or a disposal company, is what restaurants currently do anyway. Plus, it's a restaurant -- they get deliveries of food, new oil, etc. all the time. One more truck at the back door is no big deal. And that way they don't have to buy and maintain an extra machine.
So... cleaner than the current standard. But certainly not cleaner than, say, hydro-electricity.
Good luck running a vehicle with hydroelectricity! Last I checked, dams don't move...
Folks... if you're burning a hydrocarbon, no matter where you get it from it ain't clean unless you manage to sequester ALL THE EMISSIONS. (Let me know when you pull that off.)
To be blunt, that's a stupid way of looking at it, for several reasons.
First, there are two general categories of emissions: short-term and long-term. Short-term emissions are things like NOx, VOCs, and particulates. They cause acute, local problems like smog, but they dissipate after a while (for example, particulates eventually precipitate out). Long-term emissions are things like carbon dioxide, methane, and CFCs. They stay in the atmosphere forever and cause global warming. "Sequestering" is only relevant to long-term pollutants, not short-term ones.
Second, it's entirely possible to have short-term emissions so low that they're actually cleaner than the surrounding air. In fact, if you drive a car this clean around a polluted city, it'll remove existing pollutants! The Prius is the car most famous for being able to do this, but other cars can too.
The bottom line is that a new diesel could be "clean" when using biodiesel, even though it's burning hydrocarbons, because it has zero net carbon emissions (since the carbon was recently CO2 before the plant photosynthesized it anyway) and because the catalytic converter etc. is good enough to make it emit less short-term pollutants than exist in the surrounding atmosphere.
Yes, you could make lipstick from WVO. Of course I'd rather have biodiesel, personally.
By the way, the by-product of biodiesel production is glycerin, so you could probably make the biodiesel and the lipstick at the same time if you wanted.
You're missing the big picture: if the restaurant sells the oil for use in diesel vehicles, that displaces the dino-diesel the vehicles would otherwise use. If you assumed that the electricity the restaurant would use otherwise was created more efficiently than mining, refining, and burning the diesel in the vehicle, then selling the waste veggie oil wins.
Restaurants can easily be powered with electricity generated from clean and renewable resources. Vehicles still need fuel, because [synthetic] gasoline and [bio]diesel work much better than batteries (or hydrogen, or any other alternative so far).
If the cost of electricity is X, why would I ever pay more than X for vegetable oil?
You would pay more because you can't burn electricity in your diesel engine. Restaurants could power themselves using waste veggie oil or electricity from the grid; vehicles (at least, real vehicles as opposed to non-existent electrics and plug-in hybrids) must use diesel, and thus have more inelastic demand.
IMNAL- But, I was looking and frightened by this. Due to imlications for future trials, like in a rape case. I can easily seeing this being used as proof to validate the facebook profile being used against the victim. Look- she said she was feeling sexy and horny- *that* made it consensual. And on her myspace page she talks about promiscuity.
Dangerous, Dangerous territory.
What if it actually was consensual? What if the "victim" was actually the man, falsely accused because the woman got pissed off at him later? If it's otherwise her word against his (which is skewed way in her favor nowadays), then that facebook profile might be the only thing that keeps an innocent guy from getting his life ruined.
You mean like the criminals here in Atlanta who murdered* an old lady after lying to get a warrant to do a no-knock raid on her house?
(*Of course, they got the charges reduced to "voluntary manslaughter" and "violating civil rights" because they happened to be cops in addition to being criminals.)
If the officers don't even know what they think the person did, how the fuck is the DA going to find out?! The officers are the ones who are supposed to be telling him what happened!
Drug use can be victimless, but in the case of meth or similar, the side effects of meth labs and the destruction the drug causes...
If meth were legal, then meth labs could be regulated to use proper safety procedures and wouldn't be blowing up all the time. And they'd be in areas zoned for that sort of thing, so if they did blow up they wouldn't take an apartment block full of people with them.
Except the fact that for some unknown reason over the last 5 years the media has become much more likely to report each and every incident of violence with a knife that they get to hear about.
Well, if there's only 5 incidents a week then it's easy to report each of them separately. When there's 500 incidents a week, you only really have time to report the totals.
BrandsmartUSA sucks. It's kind of like the old Incredible Universe (remember that?) or like Wal-Mart except only electronics and appliances -- it seems like everything they have is cheap crap.
Maybe a greeter at the front door that says something like "welcome to Circuit City, let us know if you need help because we'll leave you in peace otherwise." And then salespeople strategically located so that a customer that does want help doesn't have to look too hard to find them.
There's this mass misconception that products are "marked up". Really? From what baseline?
It's marked up from the baseline of the price it was the week before. For example, before the liquidation you might find some widget selling for $200. Not a sale price, the normal white-tag price that the store sold it at ever since it came out. Then they go into liquidation, mark it back up to the $250 MSRP (i.e., the "manufacturer's suggestion" that was never actually followed by the retailer), and then put "on sale" for 20% off from that, ending up back at -- guess what -- $200 again!
If you call something "20% off," people expect it to be 20% off of the price it was before (in this example, 20% of $200 = $160). It's essentially a fake sale, and customers get rightfully pissed off when you try to trick them like that!
One hundred and nine dollars. For technology that's fifteen years old, and has been mostly obsolete for the last five.
That's normal: technology gets cheaper until it hits a minimum at the "slightly obsolete" stage, then the price goes back up because it stops being manufactured and gets harder and harder to find. Go check pricewatch or something, you'll see.
'Course, you're still stupid if you pay it, since you could just go grab a less-obsolete whole computer from a thrift store for the same price (or a used stick of RAM from some independent shop's random-old-parts bin for $5).
Comparing economy of a diesel car to that of a gas car is like comparing a special olympian to Mike Phelps.
No, it's a fair comparison: they both use readily-available liquid fuels that cost about the same amount of money. That makes them comparable.
It's easy to get 40 MPG when you have a 17:1 compression ratio.
So? All that really means is that diesel engines are an inherently superior technology. Of course, that doesn't mean I have anything against gasoline engines: I hear some of the new direct-injection gas engines will be almost as good.
Unfortunately those engines cost twice as much to build, and not many Americans are willing to pay the price premium...
People pay that price premium for a hybrid; a diesel is just as worth it.
...even if they are willing to accept a diesel.
What do you mean, "accept" a diesel? Diesels are good! My 10-year-old Beetle TDI is reliable, quiet (until I got a single-mass flywheel, which doesn't dampen the engine vibrations as much as the stock dual-mass one), and very, very efficient. Stock, it was quick enough to at least equal most other economy cars, and after a measly $375 worth of ECU programming and larger injector nozzles it's about the equal of a 1.8T gasser Beetle. Plus I can use carbon-neutral biodiesel with absolutely no modifications.
And all that was for an old diesel. I test-drove a new 2009 TDI Jetta, and you cannot tell the difference between it and a gasser except for the extra torque and extra fuel economy. It's amazing.
I don't just "accept" a diesel I prefer it, thankyouverymuch!
Well if it's a sports car then it's not a "gas sipper," now is it? The fact that you don't care about it -- which is perfectly fine -- doesn't change the definition of the term!
Your sports car, even if it gets relatively good mileage, is still not a fuel-sipper in exactly the same way that my TDI, even if it gets relatively good performance, is not a sports car!
Don't know where you are living, but down here in the south diesel is about $1 higher and always has been to my knowledge.
I'm in Atlanta, GA -- that qualifies as "South" too, I'd think. Around here both diesel and regular unleaded are about $2/gallon. They fluctuate a bit week to week and station to station, but they've been within about 10 cents of each other for a few weeks now.
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Why two, rather than N?
Do you realize that you and the parent post actually want the exact same thing, but choose to use opposite terminology?
Personally, I think that for exactly the reason you described -- that "marriage" is an emotionally-charged word with lots of religious and historical connotations (whether you like it or not) -- the civil institution should be called a "civil union," specifically to avoid those controversial connotations. Anyone who's Hell-bent on getting something called a "marriage" is still free to take their "civil union license" to a priest instead of a judge.
"Tyranny of the majority" is exactly what democracy is. That's why the USA is a republic instead.
That's only because the North won.
It's not, though. Setting the used oil out back to be picked up by someone, whether it's a guy with a diesel car or a disposal company, is what restaurants currently do anyway. Plus, it's a restaurant -- they get deliveries of food, new oil, etc. all the time. One more truck at the back door is no big deal. And that way they don't have to buy and maintain an extra machine.
Good luck running a vehicle with hydroelectricity! Last I checked, dams don't move...
To be blunt, that's a stupid way of looking at it, for several reasons.
First, there are two general categories of emissions: short-term and long-term. Short-term emissions are things like NOx, VOCs, and particulates. They cause acute, local problems like smog, but they dissipate after a while (for example, particulates eventually precipitate out). Long-term emissions are things like carbon dioxide, methane, and CFCs. They stay in the atmosphere forever and cause global warming. "Sequestering" is only relevant to long-term pollutants, not short-term ones.
Second, it's entirely possible to have short-term emissions so low that they're actually cleaner than the surrounding air. In fact, if you drive a car this clean around a polluted city, it'll remove existing pollutants! The Prius is the car most famous for being able to do this, but other cars can too.
The bottom line is that a new diesel could be "clean" when using biodiesel, even though it's burning hydrocarbons, because it has zero net carbon emissions (since the carbon was recently CO2 before the plant photosynthesized it anyway) and because the catalytic converter etc. is good enough to make it emit less short-term pollutants than exist in the surrounding atmosphere.
Yes, you could make lipstick from WVO. Of course I'd rather have biodiesel, personally.
By the way, the by-product of biodiesel production is glycerin, so you could probably make the biodiesel and the lipstick at the same time if you wanted.
Biodiesel has reduced emissions (warning: PDF) compared to dino-diesel for every category of pollutant except NOx (oxides of nitrogen).
And there's no reason that stuff couldn't also have been run on biofuels anyway!
You're missing the big picture: if the restaurant sells the oil for use in diesel vehicles, that displaces the dino-diesel the vehicles would otherwise use. If you assumed that the electricity the restaurant would use otherwise was created more efficiently than mining, refining, and burning the diesel in the vehicle, then selling the waste veggie oil wins.
Restaurants can easily be powered with electricity generated from clean and renewable resources. Vehicles still need fuel, because [synthetic] gasoline and [bio]diesel work much better than batteries (or hydrogen, or any other alternative so far).
You would pay more because you can't burn electricity in your diesel engine. Restaurants could power themselves using waste veggie oil or electricity from the grid; vehicles (at least, real vehicles as opposed to non-existent electrics and plug-in hybrids) must use diesel, and thus have more inelastic demand.
What if it actually was consensual? What if the "victim" was actually the man, falsely accused because the woman got pissed off at him later? If it's otherwise her word against his (which is skewed way in her favor nowadays), then that facebook profile might be the only thing that keeps an innocent guy from getting his life ruined.
You mean like the criminals here in Atlanta who murdered* an old lady after lying to get a warrant to do a no-knock raid on her house?
(*Of course, they got the charges reduced to "voluntary manslaughter" and "violating civil rights" because they happened to be cops in addition to being criminals.)
If the officers don't even know what they think the person did, how the fuck is the DA going to find out?! The officers are the ones who are supposed to be telling him what happened!
If meth were legal, then meth labs could be regulated to use proper safety procedures and wouldn't be blowing up all the time. And they'd be in areas zoned for that sort of thing, so if they did blow up they wouldn't take an apartment block full of people with them.
Well, if there's only 5 incidents a week then it's easy to report each of them separately. When there's 500 incidents a week, you only really have time to report the totals.
That's fine. I was just giving a generic example because girlintraining didn't seem to understand the concept.
BrandsmartUSA sucks. It's kind of like the old Incredible Universe (remember that?) or like Wal-Mart except only electronics and appliances -- it seems like everything they have is cheap crap.
Atlanta has at least one Fry's (and a few Microcenters, and a bunch of Best Buys, but alas, no longer any CompUSAs...)
LOL! At least Circuit City's customer service is consistent, all the way to the top!
Maybe a greeter at the front door that says something like "welcome to Circuit City, let us know if you need help because we'll leave you in peace otherwise." And then salespeople strategically located so that a customer that does want help doesn't have to look too hard to find them.
It's marked up from the baseline of the price it was the week before. For example, before the liquidation you might find some widget selling for $200. Not a sale price, the normal white-tag price that the store sold it at ever since it came out. Then they go into liquidation, mark it back up to the $250 MSRP (i.e., the "manufacturer's suggestion" that was never actually followed by the retailer), and then put "on sale" for 20% off from that, ending up back at -- guess what -- $200 again!
If you call something "20% off," people expect it to be 20% off of the price it was before (in this example, 20% of $200 = $160). It's essentially a fake sale, and customers get rightfully pissed off when you try to trick them like that!
Do you get it now?
That's normal: technology gets cheaper until it hits a minimum at the "slightly obsolete" stage, then the price goes back up because it stops being manufactured and gets harder and harder to find. Go check pricewatch or something, you'll see.
'Course, you're still stupid if you pay it, since you could just go grab a less-obsolete whole computer from a thrift store for the same price (or a used stick of RAM from some independent shop's random-old-parts bin for $5).
No, it's a fair comparison: they both use readily-available liquid fuels that cost about the same amount of money. That makes them comparable.
So? All that really means is that diesel engines are an inherently superior technology. Of course, that doesn't mean I have anything against gasoline engines: I hear some of the new direct-injection gas engines will be almost as good.
People pay that price premium for a hybrid; a diesel is just as worth it.
What do you mean, "accept" a diesel? Diesels are good! My 10-year-old Beetle TDI is reliable, quiet (until I got a single-mass flywheel, which doesn't dampen the engine vibrations as much as the stock dual-mass one), and very, very efficient. Stock, it was quick enough to at least equal most other economy cars, and after a measly $375 worth of ECU programming and larger injector nozzles it's about the equal of a 1.8T gasser Beetle. Plus I can use carbon-neutral biodiesel with absolutely no modifications.
And all that was for an old diesel. I test-drove a new 2009 TDI Jetta, and you cannot tell the difference between it and a gasser except for the extra torque and extra fuel economy. It's amazing.
I don't just "accept" a diesel I prefer it, thankyouverymuch!
Well if it's a sports car then it's not a "gas sipper," now is it? The fact that you don't care about it -- which is perfectly fine -- doesn't change the definition of the term!
Your sports car, even if it gets relatively good mileage, is still not a fuel-sipper in exactly the same way that my TDI, even if it gets relatively good performance, is not a sports car!
I'm in Atlanta, GA -- that qualifies as "South" too, I'd think. Around here both diesel and regular unleaded are about $2/gallon. They fluctuate a bit week to week and station to station, but they've been within about 10 cents of each other for a few weeks now.