There are also verses about partying down with plenty of booze --- after all, a certain Nazarene carpenter's son's first biblical miracle was making sure a wedding party wouldn't run out of wine *after the guests were already pretty soused*. The overall message one might take away from the scriptures is "there are times to be sober, and times to not."
Done. Well, two crops --- corn and soy, to cover sugar, fat, and protein. And we don't even have to wait for government mandates --- private industry has taken the lead in pushing the entire food supply towards a processed corn/soy goop monoculture.
Depends on how much of the raw material for your carbonized hemp nanomaterials you can produce and distribute. Folks who manage to efficiently ramp production of such materials up to industrial scales with proper distribution networks do indeed get quite rich --- but just having a lab prototype rarely makes researchers much money.
I think we're a lot closer than "very far away." For medium-sized cars, like the Nissan Leaf, an improvement of ~5x in battery capacity (with matching improvements in charging rate, charging infrastructure, cost, etc.) would put you pretty much at full gas car equivalent. There are already lots of "5x improvement" technologies on the development horizon right now --- lab prototypes today, that could make it to market in 10 years (at which point, they'll be no big deal --- just another incremental improvement from the 4.5x better-than-now batteries available the year before). Internal combustion engines are a rather "mature" technology at this point; with room for only slow and tiny improvements. Batteries are still on the "rapid improvement" portion of the technology curve. The upper limit for battery technology is rough parity with chemical energy sources, ~20x away from present technology; leaving plenty of room for major improvement before hitting the diminishing marginal returns development slowdown stages.
I absolutely agree we should move more freight (and passengers!) to rail. Note, in the context of the discussion above, "truck" was referring to a pickup truck or light truck, not a semi --- and, while I'm a strong supporter of rail infrastructure, I wouldn't go quite so far as to suggest "farmers with Ford Super Duty's" should switch over to pulling their horse trailers around town by train:). Time will tell, but I suspect that the continued development of battery technology will eventually make EV light trucks a better choice than turbo diesel --- similar or improved handling capability, range, and TCO, with lower total environmental impact.
The same result would hold for random numbers whose distribution gets more sparse with increasing N
This is false --- depending on how fast the random numbers "spread apart", you can have an infinite number of random numbers but a finite number of "close pairs". Simple example: for each positive integer N, choose N to be in your set of random numbers with probability 1/N. This gives you an infinite expected number of such random choices: sum 1/N over positive integers diverges. But what's the chance of adjacent pairs? The probability of N and N+1 being in your random set is 1/N * 1/(N+1). The expectation value for this set is *finite*: sum 1/(N*(N+1)) converges to a finite value.
Well, I tend not to think people who can't get a job --- despite looking for one --- because there is massive unemployment are necessarily lazy. And people on foodstamps while working 60+ hours a week of multiple grueling minimum wage jobs (under employers like Wal*Mart who prefer not to pay their own employees an above-foodstamps-level living wage, despite loads of profits to do so) are also not lazy. And children needing free school lunches because they had the bad luck to be born poor are also not lazy. And retirees, who've worked 50+ years for reduced wages on the promise that they'd be compensated by a pension (now stolen by corporate raiders) are also not lazy. You seem to have confused "being fucked over by the corporate profiteering state" for "being lazy" --- a common misconception, especially by those who receive all their information from the propaganda arms of the corporate profiteering state.
We could do things like some Nordic countries do, and scale fines with income/wealth --- give the state a proportionally larger incentive to fight for a $100,000 fine against the legal team of a rich CEO jackass (earning 400x more than his typical employee) than a $250 fine against Joe Schmoe.
Anyone who drinks regularly is like not that impaired at those levels.
Well, they probably are similarly impaired --- they're just more used to the condition. And if they're correspondingly more cocky about how well they handle their liquor, they'll just be that much less reluctant to head out on the road and murder a bunch of folks. Just because you can hold down a bunch more vodka shots without puking, and have developed mental coping strategies to not seem like a total klutz when you walk or speak, doesn't mean you aren't still quite impaired (without knowing it).
What about the old bat that is more impaired than either of us to do age?
Well, one could work towards increasing availability of public transportation and services for the elderly/disabled. One might even be more accepting of involuntary impairments (getting old), versus voluntary impairments (chugging a few beers soon before driving) --- realizing that banning an elderly person without preexisting access to suitable transportation alternatives from driving at all is likely a far greater hardship to them than insisting that the young and healthy pick a designated driver or arrange their drinking needs not to immediately precede their driving needs.
* Under normal circumstances, 8 hours is no big deal. But what happens when you get the evacuation order 2 hours after you plug in?
I suppose the same thing as when you get the evacuation order when your car's gas gauge is at 1/4, and the filling stations are already jammed with mile-long lines of panicking evacuees wiping out all available local fuel reserves. Hope you can hitch a ride out of town with someone else. At least the hybrid/electric cars won't end up burning through all their fuel idling in the 6-hour traffic jam of everyone leaving town.
This is assuming no major socio-political upheavals, pandemics, natural disasters, or any number of other unknown unknowns that may have a negative effect on our ability to make those improvements. While planning for the future is a good idea, making predictions based on the expectation of a particular future is a ridiculous notion, IMO.
A general guess that batteries will continue to improve doesn't seem like an overly "particular" future; true, we might all be back to stone tools and animal skins after the zombie apocalypse. But, for figuring out how to direct research, development, and energy policy from *today,* assuming a reasonable continual increase in battery capability seems reasonably plausible. That doesn't require kicking society into panic mode: nobody is suggesting that we bulldoze all the gas stations and put in EV chargers by next weekend to support EVs available 20 years from now. But a continued slow-and-steady emphasis on rolling out new EV-compatible infrastructure in tandem with the slow-and-steady progress in EV research and availability seems like a decent plan (better than "do nothing whatsoever! fossil fuels forever!") --- it's even useful at every stage along the way (as your articles indicate, EVs aren't perfect for every application today, but they do pretty well in the places they're generally appearing first --- and can continue to spread *where they are useful*), and if it ends up not panning out in the long term to replace all cars, it's still a useful tech for urban commuter scenarios in regions with access to clean electricity.
Oh, and build one that can tow a horse trailer. That might get the farmers out of their Ford Super Duty's.
Indeed, some automobile applications might take a lot longer to transition to all-electric than others. But there's no particular reason that pulling a trailer is especially hard for an EV. Once battery price/capacity have fallen enough, heaving a big heavy battery pack onto a big heavy truck frame doesn't seem like an insurmountable technological marvel. And the advantages that electric motors have for low-speed, high-torque applications might make a truck with great handling performance for yanking a trailer into motion.
Applying different standards for voluntary conditions (having a drink) and largely involuntary conditions (being over 60 --- unless you really think everyone should be taking the voluntary opt-out to this condition) isn't necessarily a terrible thing. Just because one driver might already be pretty bad (for hard-to-fix reasons), doesn't mean we shouldn't have strong encouragements for potentially-much-better drivers to not make themselves equally dangerous (by considerably-easier-to-fix methods). As a society, we accept some level of shared hardship to accommodate weaker members, like the elderly and disabled --- but perhaps less to accommodate sheer laziness in otherwise capable people.
The world certainly would be entirely safe from driving accidents if nobody was ever allowed to drive. 0% is physically impossible: alcohols are a broad class of naturally occurring organic chemicals, that will be present at some (tiny) level in any human body, even if you have never taken a drink in your life. If you want to permit anyone to drive, then you'll need to set a non-zero limit somewhere; preferably above natural fluctuations in baseline level and measurement error. So, where to set the level? Do you need to check whether the driver has consumed a drink in the last year? Week? Hour? Minute? Rather than setting a useless/impossible "0 is lowest, so it must be best" limit, one should look at *actually available data* to determine how alcohol levels correlate with actual increases in accidents.
P.S.: do you ever stay up an extra 10 minutes at night, to finish reading that book chapter / checking your favorite news site? If you do, do you avoid driving the next day, because you've *knowingly decreased your driving ability* by sleep deprivation? And, if you didn't know before, you do now --- so don't even think about stepping in a car if you've stayed up the least bit past your bedtime.
I was thinking of current "affordable" electric models, like the Nissan Leaf --- improve battery technology by ~5x (capacity, charge rate, cost) over the next decade or two (extremely slow progress rate compared to past history; plausible technologies already on the "too expensive now, but not for long" horizon), and you've hit the "does everything a gas car does" level.
"A decade or two" is a long friggin' time. Who knows what we'll come up with between now and then? (P.S. this is why I think futurists, AKA self-proclaimed oracles, are idiots).
I don't think it's unreasonable to make mid-term projections of basic technological progress; you just have to decide how far out to draw the line between "batteries will improve 8% per year for another decade or two" versus "everyone will have mind-control jetpacks and be part of a supercomputer hive mind." I consider it fairly safe to expect technologies we *already have today* (slightly limited and expensive, but in an area of research progress) can gradually get better and cheaper. Some loonies in the '60s may have said we'd all be in space: but those were just the idiots speculating that rockets which cost *billions of dollars* would be affordable to middle-class families in a couple decades. But assuming that today's ~$100k (and falling) technology will reach the ~$20k range in a decade or two doesn't require a comparable stretch of credibility.
hybrids and EVs pollute as much if not more than their gasoline or diesel counterparts.
For hybrids, let's take a quote from your last article:
The Argonne National Laboratory ran a side-by-side comparison of hybrid and conventional vehicles over their entire life cycle, which includes vehicle production, vehicle operation and the energy required to produce fuel for both cars. If you assume that both vehicles travel 160,000 miles (257,495 kilometers) over their lifetime, the conventional vehicle requires 6,500 Btu of energy per mile compared to 4,200 Btu per mile for a hybrid. That higher energy input results in far greater lifetime greenhouse gas emissions for conventional vehicles compared to hybrids, more than 1.1 pounds (500 grams) per mile compared to 0.75 pounds (340 grams) per mile [source: Burnham et al].
So hybrids are *already* significantly past their "gasoline or diesel counterparts," according to your own source. EVs are more mixed depending on how terribly dirty the available electric sources are: the very worst case "pure coal" scenario is
it could be responsible for emitting up to 10 percent more greenhouse gasses than a conventional vehicle
So, you are correct, it can be a little worse than hydrocarbon-fueled cars in the worst case --- however, note that this problem is *not* so much from the "battery production being insanely polluting" as the electric charging source being "insanely polluting." With better sources, the EVs start to to better. From your second article,
The findings show that only the 45 percent of the U.S. population living along the coasts have sources of electricity capable of using a Nissan Leaf EV at lower greenhouse gas levels than gasoline engine vehicles capable of 50 mpg in combined driving.
so, for roughly half the US population with access to cleaner energy sources, EVs meet or exceed the lifetime efficiency of a 50mpg car (like a hybrid; lots better than similar-sized all-gas cars on the market). Coupled with the ongoing decommissioning of coal plants for cleaner energy sources, a larger and larger portion of the population will live in areas where EVs allow them to make good use of cleaner energy sources to claim significantly better energy efficiency than sticking with fossil-fuels-only technologies.
I'm not expecting a "major technological breakthrough" either; whether adoption is "anytime soon" is a matter of definition of "soon." Battery quality/capacity/charging-rate/cost is something that non-"breakthrough" advances have steadily increasing year to year; extrapolation of the slow-but-steady trend in battery technology makes it seem a near certainty that today's "daily commute only, no long road trips" range cars will, in a decade or two, be up to the full range of gas vehicles. Over the same time period, suitable infrastructure will get gradually rolled out into place. By the way, do you have any reference about battery production --- for the types going into current and near future electric cars --- being "insanely polluting," comparable to the insane level of pollution released over the lifetime of a gasoline car? I've seen various FUD articles trying to "prove" points like that, but nothing that actually stands up to much scrutiny.
They probably can't stop people from going out-of-state to do so --- but that's quite a lot of time/work. If you're really already fully committed to getting a Tesla regardless of hassles, then you'll find a way to get one. But Tesla presumably wants to sell even more cars, to the folks browsing around the high-dollar BMW, Audi, etc. showrooms in the trendy part of town. More stores on the ground, offering instant gratification to cruise off the lot with your new toy, means more sales that would otherwise go to other luxury car dealers who can locate nearer where the disposable income is.
You mean, time for the 'OMG chek aut mah fancie not-so-green 'lectric supahcah!' fad to end?
That's definitely a fad doomed to end --- but it ends with ubiquitous <$25k electric cars, at which point just having an electric vehicle won't score many conspicuous-"green"-consumption bragging points, but EV manufacturers will still be doing just fine.
No, it doesn't, to be extortion (note the absence of any such qualification in the law you've quoted). Truth is a defense for slander/libel: if I want to publish in the newspaper that my neighbor watches goat porn, then I can avoid libel charges by proving it true. But if I ask my neighbor for money first to not publish their porn habits, then I'm extorting them --- independent of whether publishing would be slander/libel.
So, it's not blackmail if I say "give me $5000, or I'll ask your wife to help my investigation into who the person (who looks like you) with the hooker is in these photos."? I can't think of any blackmail scheme that couldn't be "explained" with the "investigating" excuse. The dead giveaway to what this really is is the fee to "drop the investigation" --- they aren't "collecting evidence" to actually file claims in a court of law; they're going for intimidation/extortion.
No, the $7B gain was *including* "donating" $36B to his "charity" --- Bill G's investments (in companies that benefit from his "philanthropic" advocacy for global corporatism) returned him $36+7 billion dollars (read the linked article). When you publicly say you're working towards "giving away all your money to charity," but your net worth is *growing* faster than you can give away, and your "charity" organization is linked to all sorts of shady moneygrubbing interests --- there's room for quite a bit of suspicion. Gates has, his whole life, been a ruthless empire-building, wealth-accumulating, screw-over-anyone-to-make-billions, sociopath. "Accidentally" using your "charity" as a massive corporate tax dodge and lobbying organization to turn a big profit on "philanthropy" seems in line with the available evidence.
To be fair, I think the show is well written to work on "dual levels": both the little girls watching it, and the parents who might be dragged in to endure spending some time with their children. From actually *watching* episodes, I can attest that the writing has enough to offer to keep an adult entertained, too (so long as you're still capable of appreciating storytelling without constant gory violence, profanity, and explicit sex). It is indeed a matter of taste --- but for folks who enjoy absurdist humor, genre spoofs (which would often be over the head of "target audience" girls), character acting, sight gags / slapstick comedy, running jokes, etc., it's an enjoyable show. Yes, there are plenty of other great hobbies besides watching a TV series --- but that is true of *every* TV series.
No; but I do try to learn enough about other "strange seeming" people that I don't reflexively assume everyone with different interests from my own must be a child-molesting goat-fucker pervert by default.
Welcome to the internet; I see you're new here. There's a useful reference section right around the corner called "Wikipedia" where you can often get introductory answers to questions like yours: what is a furry?. From this, you should be able to learn that being a "furry" does not equate to being "pervy" (assuming by that you mean "interested in sexual activity besides missionary-position procreative copulation within marriage"), and has nothing whatsoever to do with screwing animals.
I hope you succeed in convincing the judge to void your visitation rights, because being obsessed with avoiding cooties from girly stuff is a pretty good sign of elementary-school-level emotional development.
Yet Gates' personal wealth grew tremendously, after "giving away" so much to the foundation --- not only recovering the donated amount, but returning it with 20% interest. Yes, a foundation will want investments for holding money until better uses can be found --- but the type of investment (and whether there are multibillion dollar conflicts of interest with the for-profit holdings of charity board members) is up for scrutiny.
And yes, there are plenty of easy ways for Gates and his corporate buddies to get money back from the foundation: whenever the foundation spends money by giving it to a "corporate partner" to buy "charitable" items. For example, the Gates Foundation might buy medications --- with very low marginal production costs, but at high "market value" that third-world countries would never pay --- from a pharmaceutical giant, laundering tax-deducted "charity" money back into corporate profits.
Is there any search keyword for which sufficient indiscriminate googling would not result in traumatic horrors? By a simple corollary of "rule 34", any subject googled in ignorance will appear disturbingly perverted.
Slashdot Mirror
There are also verses about partying down with plenty of booze --- after all, a certain Nazarene carpenter's son's first biblical miracle was making sure a wedding party wouldn't run out of wine *after the guests were already pretty soused*. The overall message one might take away from the scriptures is "there are times to be sober, and times to not."
Done. Well, two crops --- corn and soy, to cover sugar, fat, and protein. And we don't even have to wait for government mandates --- private industry has taken the lead in pushing the entire food supply towards a processed corn/soy goop monoculture.
Depends on how much of the raw material for your carbonized hemp nanomaterials you can produce and distribute. Folks who manage to efficiently ramp production of such materials up to industrial scales with proper distribution networks do indeed get quite rich --- but just having a lab prototype rarely makes researchers much money.
I think we're a lot closer than "very far away." For medium-sized cars, like the Nissan Leaf, an improvement of ~5x in battery capacity (with matching improvements in charging rate, charging infrastructure, cost, etc.) would put you pretty much at full gas car equivalent. There are already lots of "5x improvement" technologies on the development horizon right now --- lab prototypes today, that could make it to market in 10 years (at which point, they'll be no big deal --- just another incremental improvement from the 4.5x better-than-now batteries available the year before). Internal combustion engines are a rather "mature" technology at this point; with room for only slow and tiny improvements. Batteries are still on the "rapid improvement" portion of the technology curve. The upper limit for battery technology is rough parity with chemical energy sources, ~20x away from present technology; leaving plenty of room for major improvement before hitting the diminishing marginal returns development slowdown stages.
I absolutely agree we should move more freight (and passengers!) to rail. Note, in the context of the discussion above, "truck" was referring to a pickup truck or light truck, not a semi --- and, while I'm a strong supporter of rail infrastructure, I wouldn't go quite so far as to suggest "farmers with Ford Super Duty's" should switch over to pulling their horse trailers around town by train :). Time will tell, but I suspect that the continued development of battery technology will eventually make EV light trucks a better choice than turbo diesel --- similar or improved handling capability, range, and TCO, with lower total environmental impact.
The same result would hold for random numbers whose distribution gets more sparse with increasing N
This is false --- depending on how fast the random numbers "spread apart", you can have an infinite number of random numbers but a finite number of "close pairs". Simple example: for each positive integer N, choose N to be in your set of random numbers with probability 1/N. This gives you an infinite expected number of such random choices: sum 1/N over positive integers diverges. But what's the chance of adjacent pairs? The probability of N and N+1 being in your random set is 1/N * 1/(N+1). The expectation value for this set is *finite*: sum 1/(N*(N+1)) converges to a finite value.
Well, I tend not to think people who can't get a job --- despite looking for one --- because there is massive unemployment are necessarily lazy. And people on foodstamps while working 60+ hours a week of multiple grueling minimum wage jobs (under employers like Wal*Mart who prefer not to pay their own employees an above-foodstamps-level living wage, despite loads of profits to do so) are also not lazy. And children needing free school lunches because they had the bad luck to be born poor are also not lazy. And retirees, who've worked 50+ years for reduced wages on the promise that they'd be compensated by a pension (now stolen by corporate raiders) are also not lazy. You seem to have confused "being fucked over by the corporate profiteering state" for "being lazy" --- a common misconception, especially by those who receive all their information from the propaganda arms of the corporate profiteering state.
We could do things like some Nordic countries do, and scale fines with income/wealth --- give the state a proportionally larger incentive to fight for a $100,000 fine against the legal team of a rich CEO jackass (earning 400x more than his typical employee) than a $250 fine against Joe Schmoe.
Anyone who drinks regularly is like not that impaired at those levels.
Well, they probably are similarly impaired --- they're just more used to the condition. And if they're correspondingly more cocky about how well they handle their liquor, they'll just be that much less reluctant to head out on the road and murder a bunch of folks. Just because you can hold down a bunch more vodka shots without puking, and have developed mental coping strategies to not seem like a total klutz when you walk or speak, doesn't mean you aren't still quite impaired (without knowing it).
What about the old bat that is more impaired than either of us to do age?
Well, one could work towards increasing availability of public transportation and services for the elderly/disabled. One might even be more accepting of involuntary impairments (getting old), versus voluntary impairments (chugging a few beers soon before driving) --- realizing that banning an elderly person without preexisting access to suitable transportation alternatives from driving at all is likely a far greater hardship to them than insisting that the young and healthy pick a designated driver or arrange their drinking needs not to immediately precede their driving needs.
* Under normal circumstances, 8 hours is no big deal. But what happens when you get the evacuation order 2 hours after you plug in?
I suppose the same thing as when you get the evacuation order when your car's gas gauge is at 1/4, and the filling stations are already jammed with mile-long lines of panicking evacuees wiping out all available local fuel reserves. Hope you can hitch a ride out of town with someone else. At least the hybrid/electric cars won't end up burning through all their fuel idling in the 6-hour traffic jam of everyone leaving town.
This is assuming no major socio-political upheavals, pandemics, natural disasters, or any number of other unknown unknowns that may have a negative effect on our ability to make those improvements. While planning for the future is a good idea, making predictions based on the expectation of a particular future is a ridiculous notion, IMO.
A general guess that batteries will continue to improve doesn't seem like an overly "particular" future; true, we might all be back to stone tools and animal skins after the zombie apocalypse. But, for figuring out how to direct research, development, and energy policy from *today,* assuming a reasonable continual increase in battery capability seems reasonably plausible. That doesn't require kicking society into panic mode: nobody is suggesting that we bulldoze all the gas stations and put in EV chargers by next weekend to support EVs available 20 years from now. But a continued slow-and-steady emphasis on rolling out new EV-compatible infrastructure in tandem with the slow-and-steady progress in EV research and availability seems like a decent plan (better than "do nothing whatsoever! fossil fuels forever!") --- it's even useful at every stage along the way (as your articles indicate, EVs aren't perfect for every application today, but they do pretty well in the places they're generally appearing first --- and can continue to spread *where they are useful*), and if it ends up not panning out in the long term to replace all cars, it's still a useful tech for urban commuter scenarios in regions with access to clean electricity.
Oh, and build one that can tow a horse trailer. That might get the farmers out of their Ford Super Duty's.
Indeed, some automobile applications might take a lot longer to transition to all-electric than others. But there's no particular reason that pulling a trailer is especially hard for an EV. Once battery price/capacity have fallen enough, heaving a big heavy battery pack onto a big heavy truck frame doesn't seem like an insurmountable technological marvel. And the advantages that electric motors have for low-speed, high-torque applications might make a truck with great handling performance for yanking a trailer into motion.
Applying different standards for voluntary conditions (having a drink) and largely involuntary conditions (being over 60 --- unless you really think everyone should be taking the voluntary opt-out to this condition) isn't necessarily a terrible thing. Just because one driver might already be pretty bad (for hard-to-fix reasons), doesn't mean we shouldn't have strong encouragements for potentially-much-better drivers to not make themselves equally dangerous (by considerably-easier-to-fix methods). As a society, we accept some level of shared hardship to accommodate weaker members, like the elderly and disabled --- but perhaps less to accommodate sheer laziness in otherwise capable people.
The world certainly would be entirely safe from driving accidents if nobody was ever allowed to drive. 0% is physically impossible: alcohols are a broad class of naturally occurring organic chemicals, that will be present at some (tiny) level in any human body, even if you have never taken a drink in your life. If you want to permit anyone to drive, then you'll need to set a non-zero limit somewhere; preferably above natural fluctuations in baseline level and measurement error. So, where to set the level? Do you need to check whether the driver has consumed a drink in the last year? Week? Hour? Minute? Rather than setting a useless/impossible "0 is lowest, so it must be best" limit, one should look at *actually available data* to determine how alcohol levels correlate with actual increases in accidents.
P.S.: do you ever stay up an extra 10 minutes at night, to finish reading that book chapter / checking your favorite news site? If you do, do you avoid driving the next day, because you've *knowingly decreased your driving ability* by sleep deprivation? And, if you didn't know before, you do now --- so don't even think about stepping in a car if you've stayed up the least bit past your bedtime.
Which cars are those?
I was thinking of current "affordable" electric models, like the Nissan Leaf --- improve battery technology by ~5x (capacity, charge rate, cost) over the next decade or two (extremely slow progress rate compared to past history; plausible technologies already on the "too expensive now, but not for long" horizon), and you've hit the "does everything a gas car does" level.
"A decade or two" is a long friggin' time. Who knows what we'll come up with between now and then? (P.S. this is why I think futurists, AKA self-proclaimed oracles, are idiots).
I don't think it's unreasonable to make mid-term projections of basic technological progress; you just have to decide how far out to draw the line between "batteries will improve 8% per year for another decade or two" versus "everyone will have mind-control jetpacks and be part of a supercomputer hive mind." I consider it fairly safe to expect technologies we *already have today* (slightly limited and expensive, but in an area of research progress) can gradually get better and cheaper. Some loonies in the '60s may have said we'd all be in space: but those were just the idiots speculating that rockets which cost *billions of dollars* would be affordable to middle-class families in a couple decades. But assuming that today's ~$100k (and falling) technology will reach the ~$20k range in a decade or two doesn't require a comparable stretch of credibility.
hybrids and EVs pollute as much if not more than their gasoline or diesel counterparts.
For hybrids, let's take a quote from your last article:
The Argonne National Laboratory ran a side-by-side comparison of hybrid and conventional vehicles over their entire life cycle, which includes vehicle production, vehicle operation and the energy required to produce fuel for both cars. If you assume that both vehicles travel 160,000 miles (257,495 kilometers) over their lifetime, the conventional vehicle requires 6,500 Btu of energy per mile compared to 4,200 Btu per mile for a hybrid. That higher energy input results in far greater lifetime greenhouse gas emissions for conventional vehicles compared to hybrids, more than 1.1 pounds (500 grams) per mile compared to 0.75 pounds (340 grams) per mile [source: Burnham et al].
So hybrids are *already* significantly past their "gasoline or diesel counterparts," according to your own source. EVs are more mixed depending on how terribly dirty the available electric sources are: the very worst case "pure coal" scenario is
it could be responsible for emitting up to 10 percent more greenhouse gasses than a conventional vehicle
So, you are correct, it can be a little worse than hydrocarbon-fueled cars in the worst case --- however, note that this problem is *not* so much from the "battery production being insanely polluting" as the electric charging source being "insanely polluting." With better sources, the EVs start to to better. From your second article,
The findings show that only the 45 percent of the U.S. population living along the coasts have sources of electricity capable of using a Nissan Leaf EV at lower greenhouse gas levels than gasoline engine vehicles capable of 50 mpg in combined driving.
so, for roughly half the US population with access to cleaner energy sources, EVs meet or exceed the lifetime efficiency of a 50mpg car (like a hybrid; lots better than similar-sized all-gas cars on the market). Coupled with the ongoing decommissioning of coal plants for cleaner energy sources, a larger and larger portion of the population will live in areas where EVs allow them to make good use of cleaner energy sources to claim significantly better energy efficiency than sticking with fossil-fuels-only technologies.
I'm not expecting a "major technological breakthrough" either; whether adoption is "anytime soon" is a matter of definition of "soon." Battery quality/capacity/charging-rate/cost is something that non-"breakthrough" advances have steadily increasing year to year; extrapolation of the slow-but-steady trend in battery technology makes it seem a near certainty that today's "daily commute only, no long road trips" range cars will, in a decade or two, be up to the full range of gas vehicles. Over the same time period, suitable infrastructure will get gradually rolled out into place. By the way, do you have any reference about battery production --- for the types going into current and near future electric cars --- being "insanely polluting," comparable to the insane level of pollution released over the lifetime of a gasoline car? I've seen various FUD articles trying to "prove" points like that, but nothing that actually stands up to much scrutiny.
They probably can't stop people from going out-of-state to do so --- but that's quite a lot of time/work. If you're really already fully committed to getting a Tesla regardless of hassles, then you'll find a way to get one. But Tesla presumably wants to sell even more cars, to the folks browsing around the high-dollar BMW, Audi, etc. showrooms in the trendy part of town. More stores on the ground, offering instant gratification to cruise off the lot with your new toy, means more sales that would otherwise go to other luxury car dealers who can locate nearer where the disposable income is.
You mean, time for the 'OMG chek aut mah fancie not-so-green 'lectric supahcah!' fad to end?
That's definitely a fad doomed to end --- but it ends with ubiquitous <$25k electric cars, at which point just having an electric vehicle won't score many conspicuous-"green"-consumption bragging points, but EV manufacturers will still be doing just fine.
However, remember that defamation must be false.
No, it doesn't, to be extortion (note the absence of any such qualification in the law you've quoted). Truth is a defense for slander/libel: if I want to publish in the newspaper that my neighbor watches goat porn, then I can avoid libel charges by proving it true. But if I ask my neighbor for money first to not publish their porn habits, then I'm extorting them --- independent of whether publishing would be slander/libel.
So, it's not blackmail if I say "give me $5000, or I'll ask your wife to help my investigation into who the person (who looks like you) with the hooker is in these photos."? I can't think of any blackmail scheme that couldn't be "explained" with the "investigating" excuse. The dead giveaway to what this really is is the fee to "drop the investigation" --- they aren't "collecting evidence" to actually file claims in a court of law; they're going for intimidation/extortion.
No, the $7B gain was *including* "donating" $36B to his "charity" --- Bill G's investments (in companies that benefit from his "philanthropic" advocacy for global corporatism) returned him $36+7 billion dollars (read the linked article). When you publicly say you're working towards "giving away all your money to charity," but your net worth is *growing* faster than you can give away, and your "charity" organization is linked to all sorts of shady moneygrubbing interests --- there's room for quite a bit of suspicion. Gates has, his whole life, been a ruthless empire-building, wealth-accumulating, screw-over-anyone-to-make-billions, sociopath. "Accidentally" using your "charity" as a massive corporate tax dodge and lobbying organization to turn a big profit on "philanthropy" seems in line with the available evidence.
To be fair, I think the show is well written to work on "dual levels": both the little girls watching it, and the parents who might be dragged in to endure spending some time with their children. From actually *watching* episodes, I can attest that the writing has enough to offer to keep an adult entertained, too (so long as you're still capable of appreciating storytelling without constant gory violence, profanity, and explicit sex). It is indeed a matter of taste --- but for folks who enjoy absurdist humor, genre spoofs (which would often be over the head of "target audience" girls), character acting, sight gags / slapstick comedy, running jokes, etc., it's an enjoyable show. Yes, there are plenty of other great hobbies besides watching a TV series --- but that is true of *every* TV series.
No; but I do try to learn enough about other "strange seeming" people that I don't reflexively assume everyone with different interests from my own must be a child-molesting goat-fucker pervert by default.
Welcome to the internet; I see you're new here. There's a useful reference section right around the corner called "Wikipedia" where you can often get introductory answers to questions like yours: what is a furry?. From this, you should be able to learn that being a "furry" does not equate to being "pervy" (assuming by that you mean "interested in sexual activity besides missionary-position procreative copulation within marriage"), and has nothing whatsoever to do with screwing animals.
I hope you succeed in convincing the judge to void your visitation rights, because being obsessed with avoiding cooties from girly stuff is a pretty good sign of elementary-school-level emotional development.
Yet Gates' personal wealth grew tremendously, after "giving away" so much to the foundation --- not only recovering the donated amount, but returning it with 20% interest. Yes, a foundation will want investments for holding money until better uses can be found --- but the type of investment (and whether there are multibillion dollar conflicts of interest with the for-profit holdings of charity board members) is up for scrutiny.
And yes, there are plenty of easy ways for Gates and his corporate buddies to get money back from the foundation: whenever the foundation spends money by giving it to a "corporate partner" to buy "charitable" items. For example, the Gates Foundation might buy medications --- with very low marginal production costs, but at high "market value" that third-world countries would never pay --- from a pharmaceutical giant, laundering tax-deducted "charity" money back into corporate profits.
Is there any search keyword for which sufficient indiscriminate googling would not result in traumatic horrors? By a simple corollary of "rule 34", any subject googled in ignorance will appear disturbingly perverted.