I'm familiar with the benefits - I built one into our home's electrical system - that's why I'm familiar with the maintainance issues of the little ones you get at home depot, etc.
I'd like to see the math on your typical 2500 watt generator with an EV, two passengers, plus luggage, pulling a trailer. Will 15...20 amps @ 120 vac (or the equivalent at 12 vdc) keep the rig going? Are you including charging time when parked? If you are, I wonder what the reaction of the hotels and motels along the way will be to that generator chugging away in the parking lot...
You're missing the point, which is perhaps my fault for invoking the spirit of the Proud American Redneck. Basically, it's like this.
You can't just steal stuff. So the infrastructure is not available to you. Which makes it irrelevant that it is there. In order to be useful, real estate will have to be purchased, charging stations will have to be set up, fees charged, taxes paid, etc. It's not a slam dunk. Further, you expect to charge several cars, you're going to need some fairly serious connections and hardware and you have to be prepared to do it at any hour, which is not the same situation one finds at home, or even close to it.
BTW, the cost of using a standard outlet for charging is less than 50 cents per hour
20 amps at 120 VAC; that's a typical garage outlet; all of mine are wired that way, each with their own breaker. That's 2400w of supply; I'm paying about.1059/Kwh, if we assume full draw for an hour: 2.4 kwh is about $0.25; six hours is a buck fifty. Those are current (hah!) numbers.
If they plug into a 240 VAC / 50 amp outlet (which I also have in my garage, btw), that's 12 kw/h, or $1.27 for an hour, or $7.62 for six hours. And while the average service probably wouldn't flinch at the 20 amp / 120 vac draw, the 50 at 240 is likely to limit what you can do in your house while it is present.
Keep in mind too, that these electrical costs do not yet have road taxes figured into them, as do petroleum based fuels.
Just saying, I don't think you're going to find that the available infrastructure is anywhere near as broad as you might initially imagine. Actually, I think if you plugged into someone's outdoor outlet without handing over a twenty or so (even right now), you'd be greeted with a shotgun if they can do math.:)
The problem here is the one fault it's not tolerant of is that it isn't even close to being a practical quantum computer, and so lands squarely in that magic world with all the high efficiency solar cells, nanotube based ultracaps, and the myriad of medical discoveries, of which only a very, very few actually make it to market -- the rest are dead ends, for whatever reason. I am actually beginning to find these announcements a little depressing. Either there's something really wrong with our "get it to market" system, or there's an awful lot of bullcrap out there. Neither answer is good.
You think the terrorists wouldn't be happy just to blow the plane up?
That's a risk we've always been exposed to, and it is far from the catastrophe we faced in September of 2001 -- we lose planes from time to time for various reasons, we always have. We can tolerate this, just as we tolerate the loss of tens of thousands of lives lost on the highway.
We can also respond in kind: Drop a plane, we blow up a city in your home country - the cost would be minimal, and that whole idea of the terrorists having gotten away with anything would completely evaporate. I'm also not at all sure that the terrorist's relatives and families would be all that willing to meet Allah with them. Likely there would be some muttering over the crater that was Mecca, or whatever little village, assuming we can get the cowards who run this country to respond in kind, and to the right target, which also seems to be a problem - when terrorists primarily from Saudi Arabia, with a sprinkling of other countries, notably excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, attacked us, what did we do? Bloody idiots.
But the bottom line is, are we going to continue down this road of burning our liberties to the ground in order to maybe, perhaps, someday, stop a terrorist? Maybe so, but as long as that's the attitude, I'm not flying.
The vast majority of terrorist incidents have been stopped by passengers, not security theater. As John Tyner says, it's time we stopped treating passengers like terrorists and started treating them like assets.
Fuck the TSA, and the legislators that created them, and those who would give up our liberties for a fake feeling of safety. Really. Fuck them with a pineapple.
There is no need for the government to get involved.
No, actually, there is. We need to eliminate our dependence on countries that support violent extremist theists ASAP. Petroleum is the basis for that dependence; moving to EVs immediately increases the efficiency of our petroleum usage, and it opens the door to conversion to other energy sources without *again* modifying the fleet of vehicles out there. Government assistance here is very much a good idea, ideally on the scale of the Manhattan project, and directed at our own economy, instead of the Japanese, both as a sensible economic act and as a way to assist our much-eroded manufacturing base in recovering. If we wait, what will happen (again) is other countries will beat us to the punch, we'll lose the market, and we will continue to be screwed by the "wait-and-see" attitude.
...are you going to let just any old person plug in and run up your electric bill? If not, the availability of chargers "everywhere" is questionable. Also, coming soon to your electric bill, substantial taxes to support the roads. As gasoline and diesel tax revenues drop, you can rest assured that legislators will turn right to the electric company for the revenues to support the road infrastructure.
But really.. where the hell do you think that there will be no gas station for 300+ plus road miles in any direction ?? I doubt you will find a location like that in the usa at least..
Any direction? Do you really want to go sideways to your intended path in order to get enough energy to get back to it? No, the issue is, how far is it along your path before there is a gas station? And here, in Montana, right where I live, it's 70 miles to the first one, which thankfully is open all night, and then, on the way to Billings, it's another 160 miles, and then another 50. In practical terms, that means we fill up before we leave, and make the trip - 280 miles - in one go, without stopping.
If, however, I decide to drive to Miles City, it's about 200 miles, no all-night gas stations. There's one here, and there are several in Miles city. So one does need to fill up before leaving.
Anyway, I wouldn't buy an EV for those trips. I'd buy it for the 99.99% of my driving, which is in-town and way, way less than twenty miles a day. Maybe five on a *really* busy day.
I've done the math before, using my personal driving habits, and worked out going with electric would cost me about 10%-15% the cost of gasoline per mile, at $3/gallon and $0.22/kWh.
Right now, gasoline and diesel fuels have huge built-in taxes to support the road infrastructure. Electricity does not. However, when electricity is used to power the vehicles, they will definitely move those taxes to the electric grid in some fashion, and your savings will be considerably less. Sad, but true. The good news is that the EV would reduce the pollution generated by a very large factor, as the energy obtained by your EV from a coal, gas or oil turbine, even after transmission and conversion losses, is obtained at much higher efficiency; plus the grid can migrate to less polluting sources as they become available, and your EV won't even notice.
For many users it will get the *majority* of its energy from the grid.
If I were to buy one, living in a small town that is quite far from anything else, it would always get its power from the grid, because the furthest it would go might be about 20 miles - ten miles to our lake, and back. Otherwise, I'd have to go to one edge of town, and drive to the opposite edge, in order to make a two-mile run.
And yes, the temptation to buy one is huge. As is the temptation to turn my 30x50+10x20 E-W facing roof into a PV source.:) My concerns are primarily longevity, reliability, performance in the cold. And for that info, I think I'm going to have to watch how they perform for a while. The good part of that is that not only will they identify and fix the weak points, they'll also attain some cost efficiencies and create some model variations. I'd prefer a van or pickup body to a sedan, and my range issues mean that this would be very practical.
The US market tends not to be particularly friendly to diesel engines.
That's because diesel engines smell awful. Get stuck behind one in traffic one time, that's all it takes to fervently vow you'll never buy one. I don't know why euro-types are so willing to put up with it, though jokes about their ability to smell are simply too easy.:)
I really want to know why they do not use diesel or pure ethanol in a compression engine.
Diesel exhaust smells really bad; this causes many consumers to avoid vehicles that use it. Ethanol is a boondoggle, and the science has been pretty clear on that for a while - it's increasing food prices, in the process consuming a great deal of resources from fertilizer to refining to transport, and in the end, not really helping. The ethanol boom is over.
EV's have huge advantages; they trump any possible ICEV.
I was wondering for a long time why fleet vehicles that stop and start every couple blocks were not electric since it seems like electricity would work best in well managed systems more than for consumers.
No question about it. One of the (many) benefits of electric motors is that high torque is available from essentially zero RPM. This eliminates the need to gear the drive in many cases, and it certainly makes roll-start, which is common for these vehicles, much, much easier on them as well as more efficient - an internal combustion engine has to be revving relatively high to put it in the torque range, and then geared down to provide the slow roll needed to not jerk the passengers off their seats.
There is at least one bus system in place that charges at the pick-up points, and so has to run only between them. There's some into here.
If it's night-time load that's not a bad thing per se - it means we're making better use of our capital.
And any sensible charging station will slowly charge itself during the night, and then be able to dump that slowly acquired charge into the vehicle at a high rate in the morning. This solves both the grid loading issue and the "need it now" nature of preparing the vehicle to travel.
Even so, this is only a critical issue when travels at or near the vehicle's range are attempted. If you're going to the corner store and picking the kid up from school, you will not need much of a charge, and consequently, the charge station won't load the grid much, even at night.
Most of these analysis go a bit too far, presuming both that every car needs a full charge, and that said charge must come right off the generator at the time the charge is transferred to the vehicle. Neither is a reasonable assumption.
Hopefully people will wake up to the benefits of Nuclear Energy. It is in fact our only hope for future energy demands.
In the USA, fear-mongering will ensure that new nukes aren't built for quite a while, if ever. It's gotten into the political system, and it is now almost impossible to get a new reactor built -- the red tape is unbelievable. This, despite the much less risky nature of modern designs. Even if one was built, the huge up-front costs of all that regulation makes them not particularly cost-effective - they end up making expensive electricity.
So you'd better hope for improvements in photo-voltaics and battery (and/or ultracapacitor) technologies, because that's the only path that isn't straight-jacketed by the loons in the various legislatures. They even make it difficult to put up a darned windmill.
The good news is that photo-voltaics, combined with storage (like pumped storage) can supply our current needs, as well as our needs for a considerable time into the future. In the meantime, we have a little breathing room, and perhaps, just perhaps, we can solve the fusion problem. That, my frosty friend, might just be the holy grail of power generation.
Armor the cockpits and completely isolate from the cabins, except...
Add a cabin button "Medical Emergency, please land ASAP"
Add tiny random variations to all flight paths, just sufficient to make specific overflight unpredictable
Then DUMP the security theater. It's bullshit and always has been.
Why? Because the hole in our security that the terrorists identified and used was that heavy aircraft make excellent kinetic strike warheads. In order to exploit this, they must obtain control of the aircraft. If we isolate the flight crew, this is no longer possible. The button further ensures that no relationship with the pilot can be used to leverage control, even to the point of flying over a certain area at a certain time.
The end result would be a security state not unlike that prior to 9/11; very low risk of hijacking, because the rewards are also very low.
What pisses me off the most is the government's presumption not that the best solution would be found in crushing the liberties of US citizens, but that their idea is that any solution was to be found there.
Ah, but CTS, about religion, you're preaching to the converted (presuming your response to my post was directed at me.)
I disagree about the "war on drugs", though. That's just a social screw-up, one of many inherently wrong actions taken by the government in the face of obvious personal and consensual liberties. It's also vastly economically unsound, and that'll probably solve the problem even though the country's leaders are too stupid to manage a correct solution intentionally.
1) There's no more "wrong" with communism than there is with democracy -- that is, implemented well and with adequate safeguards applied by an honest control system, it can work. The anti-communist attitude in the US was no more than hysteria and, I should point out, we have "communist" structures embedded in our government. The one you're probably most familiar with is the graduated income tax, which is designed to take much, much more from the rich and, via innumerable other programs, give the proceeds to the poor; precisely along the lines of Marx's "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs.")
It is also worth noting that democracy, as presently implemented in the US, is a system where any two uninformed people can outvote an informed person, in an environment where informed people are rare, a truly frightening prospect for any thinking person that is true for both federal and state legislatures, and the average citizenry. In terms of rights, it has also been accurately characterized as "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner", again, something we just saw made real (again) by Iowa voters dumping the judges that stood up for the rights of gays. The lesson is that even when the current system does work well, which is rare enough, the voters are always there to screw it up.
This basic problem with letting anyone vote without qualification has led to enormous numbers of very bad decisions, social and legislative impasse, uncalled for wars, state-sponsored prejudice, state-sponsored torture, arrogation of powers not constitutionally authorized, and the trampling of numerous rights that are constitutionally guaranteed. So let's not get all crazy about any supposed innate superiority of democracy. Or, at least until someone makes it work decently.
Finally, if you really want to credit Reagan, the most you can say is that he was fighting the Soviet Union, not "communism"; he (inadvertently, most likely) outspent them, and their economy collapsed. I think it's a little disingenuous to give Reagan the credit for that (I credit it to the idiots running the USSR at the time) but if you want to paint the picture, I can go with "fighting the USSR", but communism? You notice China falling to its knees?
2) You mistake me. I didn't say that good things didn't happen in religious environments. I'm saying they happen better outside them; also that specific types of bad things happen in those environments as the various religions swing from fanatic to reflective and back.
The movement has taken Islam from being an unquestioned powerhouse of intellectual and cultural innovation to being perceived as a force of stagnation
Your whole post founders on this misrepresentation. Islam was never a powerhouse of anything. Arabic people, under less repressive versions of Islam, managed to make some significant progress. but Islam itself, like almost all religions at almost all times, is a repressive force that imposes false beliefs in non-existent entities on children, who then grow up with crippled critical thinking facilities, not to mention more gullibility than they ought to carry and a good dose of fear inculcated by the religion's dogma - punishment on the one hand, rewards on the other. Islam, like Christianity and most other theistic religions, alternates between fairly benevolent social oversight, and madness like Sharia law (or worse)
Islam is the albatross around the neck of these countries, much as Christianity has been the albatross for America and England for most of their days.
Religion cannot be eradicated except by force on the one hand, as long as tolerance for bullshit exists as an idolized social component; or until the combination of crippled critical thinking facilities, gullibility, and fear can be eradicated.
It's not just that people are stupid - though many are - if that were all it was, we would already be free of the mental quagmire that is religion. Religion is a mechanism for control that has been tuned for century after century until it grips the unprepared mind with the ease of a healthy tiger taking down a diseased sheep. If credit must be given to Islam and/or Christianity for holding things together in some tough times, this is far outweighed by the incredible amount of damage they have caused, lives spent chasing mythology when further exposure of reality would have been of much greater use to the world, lives expended in various punishments for not following the dogma... crusades, fatwas, jihads, blood libel, brainwashing, theft, subjugation of women, rape, pillage, repression, "witch" burnings, financial parasitism, torture, scientific repression, murder of "heretics", censorship and blue laws, theft, sanction of excessive breeding, pogroms, inquisitions, vilification of sexuality and the outlawing of many consensual family arrangements... religion is poison at best, and at worst, it is viral, deadly, and ultimately destructive.
Islam is not the problem
No, Islam is the problem for this particular region. Islam can never be given the credit for the technical achievements of any people; instead, we can credit lighter versions of it for simply not getting in the way quite as much. Dogma that insists on mythological creatures who demand worship has never been much of a positive force for anything, albeit ameliorating problems it had been complicit in causing in the first place, and creating art dedicated to the deit(y|ies).
We were talking about a flat *sales* tax rate on new items and new value, with a built-in COL payment. Such a tax is inescapable, because everyone has to pay it for everything they buy. No more tax shelters. At all. For anyone. One of the concepts many merits. You should have read the thread.
The bit of yours about how power aggregates - absolutely right. Can't be fixed as long as the government is based upon centralized power, which I suspect is the same as "can't be fixed."
No kidding. There's nothing to distinguish this headline from one a character might see in any scifi novel. The concept of a private company building a factory solely to build spaceships (albeit 60km ones) is staggering.
Last I heard, these are spaceships only in the very most technical sense. About the same way a Roomba is "a robot." You get what, a few minutes of free fall, and that's it. I don't know about you folks, but that's most emphatically not what I've been thinking of when I thought "space ship" over quite a few decades. It's more the kind of thing I was hoping a long-hop high speed transport would do. And the price... good grief.
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I'm familiar with the benefits - I built one into our home's electrical system - that's why I'm familiar with the maintainance issues of the little ones you get at home depot, etc.
I'd like to see the math on your typical 2500 watt generator with an EV, two passengers, plus luggage, pulling a trailer. Will 15...20 amps @ 120 vac (or the equivalent at 12 vdc) keep the rig going? Are you including charging time when parked? If you are, I wonder what the reaction of the hotels and motels along the way will be to that generator chugging away in the parking lot...
You're missing the point, which is perhaps my fault for invoking the spirit of the Proud American Redneck. Basically, it's like this.
You can't just steal stuff. So the infrastructure is not available to you. Which makes it irrelevant that it is there. In order to be useful, real estate will have to be purchased, charging stations will have to be set up, fees charged, taxes paid, etc. It's not a slam dunk. Further, you expect to charge several cars, you're going to need some fairly serious connections and hardware and you have to be prepared to do it at any hour, which is not the same situation one finds at home, or even close to it.
20 amps at 120 VAC; that's a typical garage outlet; all of mine are wired that way, each with their own breaker. That's 2400w of supply; I'm paying about .1059/Kwh, if we assume full draw for an hour: 2.4 kwh is about $0.25; six hours is a buck fifty. Those are current (hah!) numbers.
If they plug into a 240 VAC / 50 amp outlet (which I also have in my garage, btw), that's 12 kw/h, or $1.27 for an hour, or $7.62 for six hours. And while the average service probably wouldn't flinch at the 20 amp / 120 vac draw, the 50 at 240 is likely to limit what you can do in your house while it is present.
Keep in mind too, that these electrical costs do not yet have road taxes figured into them, as do petroleum based fuels.
Just saying, I don't think you're going to find that the available infrastructure is anywhere near as broad as you might initially imagine. Actually, I think if you plugged into someone's outdoor outlet without handing over a twenty or so (even right now), you'd be greeted with a shotgun if they can do math. :)
The problem here is the one fault it's not tolerant of is that it isn't even close to being a practical quantum computer, and so lands squarely in that magic world with all the high efficiency solar cells, nanotube based ultracaps, and the myriad of medical discoveries, of which only a very, very few actually make it to market -- the rest are dead ends, for whatever reason. I am actually beginning to find these announcements a little depressing. Either there's something really wrong with our "get it to market" system, or there's an awful lot of bullcrap out there. Neither answer is good.
No, I'm talking about current generation vehicles. There are plenty of them where I live; they smell terrible.
That's a risk we've always been exposed to, and it is far from the catastrophe we faced in September of 2001 -- we lose planes from time to time for various reasons, we always have. We can tolerate this, just as we tolerate the loss of tens of thousands of lives lost on the highway.
We can also respond in kind: Drop a plane, we blow up a city in your home country - the cost would be minimal, and that whole idea of the terrorists having gotten away with anything would completely evaporate. I'm also not at all sure that the terrorist's relatives and families would be all that willing to meet Allah with them. Likely there would be some muttering over the crater that was Mecca, or whatever little village, assuming we can get the cowards who run this country to respond in kind, and to the right target, which also seems to be a problem - when terrorists primarily from Saudi Arabia, with a sprinkling of other countries, notably excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, attacked us, what did we do? Bloody idiots.
But the bottom line is, are we going to continue down this road of burning our liberties to the ground in order to maybe, perhaps, someday, stop a terrorist? Maybe so, but as long as that's the attitude, I'm not flying.
The vast majority of terrorist incidents have been stopped by passengers, not security theater. As John Tyner says, it's time we stopped treating passengers like terrorists and started treating them like assets.
Fuck the TSA, and the legislators that created them, and those who would give up our liberties for a fake feeling of safety. Really. Fuck them with a pineapple.
No, actually, there is. We need to eliminate our dependence on countries that support violent extremist theists ASAP. Petroleum is the basis for that dependence; moving to EVs immediately increases the efficiency of our petroleum usage, and it opens the door to conversion to other energy sources without *again* modifying the fleet of vehicles out there. Government assistance here is very much a good idea, ideally on the scale of the Manhattan project, and directed at our own economy, instead of the Japanese, both as a sensible economic act and as a way to assist our much-eroded manufacturing base in recovering. If we wait, what will happen (again) is other countries will beat us to the punch, we'll lose the market, and we will continue to be screwed by the "wait-and-see" attitude.
One thing... most generators, especially consumer ones, don't run a whole lot of hours before they need service.
Any direction? Do you really want to go sideways to your intended path in order to get enough energy to get back to it? No, the issue is, how far is it along your path before there is a gas station? And here, in Montana, right where I live, it's 70 miles to the first one, which thankfully is open all night, and then, on the way to Billings, it's another 160 miles, and then another 50. In practical terms, that means we fill up before we leave, and make the trip - 280 miles - in one go, without stopping.
If, however, I decide to drive to Miles City, it's about 200 miles, no all-night gas stations. There's one here, and there are several in Miles city. So one does need to fill up before leaving.
Anyway, I wouldn't buy an EV for those trips. I'd buy it for the 99.99% of my driving, which is in-town and way, way less than twenty miles a day. Maybe five on a *really* busy day.
Right now, gasoline and diesel fuels have huge built-in taxes to support the road infrastructure. Electricity does not. However, when electricity is used to power the vehicles, they will definitely move those taxes to the electric grid in some fashion, and your savings will be considerably less. Sad, but true. The good news is that the EV would reduce the pollution generated by a very large factor, as the energy obtained by your EV from a coal, gas or oil turbine, even after transmission and conversion losses, is obtained at much higher efficiency; plus the grid can migrate to less polluting sources as they become available, and your EV won't even notice.
If I were to buy one, living in a small town that is quite far from anything else, it would always get its power from the grid, because the furthest it would go might be about 20 miles - ten miles to our lake, and back. Otherwise, I'd have to go to one edge of town, and drive to the opposite edge, in order to make a two-mile run.
And yes, the temptation to buy one is huge. As is the temptation to turn my 30x50+10x20 E-W facing roof into a PV source. :) My concerns are primarily longevity, reliability, performance in the cold. And for that info, I think I'm going to have to watch how they perform for a while. The good part of that is that not only will they identify and fix the weak points, they'll also attain some cost efficiencies and create some model variations. I'd prefer a van or pickup body to a sedan, and my range issues mean that this would be very practical.
That's because diesel engines smell awful. Get stuck behind one in traffic one time, that's all it takes to fervently vow you'll never buy one. I don't know why euro-types are so willing to put up with it, though jokes about their ability to smell are simply too easy. :)
Diesel exhaust smells really bad; this causes many consumers to avoid vehicles that use it. Ethanol is a boondoggle, and the science has been pretty clear on that for a while - it's increasing food prices, in the process consuming a great deal of resources from fertilizer to refining to transport, and in the end, not really helping. The ethanol boom is over.
EV's have huge advantages; they trump any possible ICEV.
No question about it. One of the (many) benefits of electric motors is that high torque is available from essentially zero RPM. This eliminates the need to gear the drive in many cases, and it certainly makes roll-start, which is common for these vehicles, much, much easier on them as well as more efficient - an internal combustion engine has to be revving relatively high to put it in the torque range, and then geared down to provide the slow roll needed to not jerk the passengers off their seats.
There is at least one bus system in place that charges at the pick-up points, and so has to run only between them. There's some into here.
And any sensible charging station will slowly charge itself during the night, and then be able to dump that slowly acquired charge into the vehicle at a high rate in the morning. This solves both the grid loading issue and the "need it now" nature of preparing the vehicle to travel.
Even so, this is only a critical issue when travels at or near the vehicle's range are attempted. If you're going to the corner store and picking the kid up from school, you will not need much of a charge, and consequently, the charge station won't load the grid much, even at night.
Most of these analysis go a bit too far, presuming both that every car needs a full charge, and that said charge must come right off the generator at the time the charge is transferred to the vehicle. Neither is a reasonable assumption.
In the USA, fear-mongering will ensure that new nukes aren't built for quite a while, if ever. It's gotten into the political system, and it is now almost impossible to get a new reactor built -- the red tape is unbelievable. This, despite the much less risky nature of modern designs. Even if one was built, the huge up-front costs of all that regulation makes them not particularly cost-effective - they end up making expensive electricity.
So you'd better hope for improvements in photo-voltaics and battery (and/or ultracapacitor) technologies, because that's the only path that isn't straight-jacketed by the loons in the various legislatures. They even make it difficult to put up a darned windmill.
The good news is that photo-voltaics, combined with storage (like pumped storage) can supply our current needs, as well as our needs for a considerable time into the future. In the meantime, we have a little breathing room, and perhaps, just perhaps, we can solve the fusion problem. That, my frosty friend, might just be the holy grail of power generation.
Why? Because the hole in our security that the terrorists identified and used was that heavy aircraft make excellent kinetic strike warheads. In order to exploit this, they must obtain control of the aircraft. If we isolate the flight crew, this is no longer possible. The button further ensures that no relationship with the pilot can be used to leverage control, even to the point of flying over a certain area at a certain time.
The end result would be a security state not unlike that prior to 9/11; very low risk of hijacking, because the rewards are also very low.
What pisses me off the most is the government's presumption not that the best solution would be found in crushing the liberties of US citizens, but that their idea is that any solution was to be found there.
Ah, but CTS, about religion, you're preaching to the converted (presuming your response to my post was directed at me.)
I disagree about the "war on drugs", though. That's just a social screw-up, one of many inherently wrong actions taken by the government in the face of obvious personal and consensual liberties. It's also vastly economically unsound, and that'll probably solve the problem even though the country's leaders are too stupid to manage a correct solution intentionally.
1) There's no more "wrong" with communism than there is with democracy -- that is, implemented well and with adequate safeguards applied by an honest control system, it can work. The anti-communist attitude in the US was no more than hysteria and, I should point out, we have "communist" structures embedded in our government. The one you're probably most familiar with is the graduated income tax, which is designed to take much, much more from the rich and, via innumerable other programs, give the proceeds to the poor; precisely along the lines of Marx's "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs.")
It is also worth noting that democracy, as presently implemented in the US, is a system where any two uninformed people can outvote an informed person, in an environment where informed people are rare, a truly frightening prospect for any thinking person that is true for both federal and state legislatures, and the average citizenry. In terms of rights, it has also been accurately characterized as "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner", again, something we just saw made real (again) by Iowa voters dumping the judges that stood up for the rights of gays. The lesson is that even when the current system does work well, which is rare enough, the voters are always there to screw it up.
This basic problem with letting anyone vote without qualification has led to enormous numbers of very bad decisions, social and legislative impasse, uncalled for wars, state-sponsored prejudice, state-sponsored torture, arrogation of powers not constitutionally authorized, and the trampling of numerous rights that are constitutionally guaranteed. So let's not get all crazy about any supposed innate superiority of democracy. Or, at least until someone makes it work decently.
Finally, if you really want to credit Reagan, the most you can say is that he was fighting the Soviet Union, not "communism"; he (inadvertently, most likely) outspent them, and their economy collapsed. I think it's a little disingenuous to give Reagan the credit for that (I credit it to the idiots running the USSR at the time) but if you want to paint the picture, I can go with "fighting the USSR", but communism? You notice China falling to its knees?
2) You mistake me. I didn't say that good things didn't happen in religious environments. I'm saying they happen better outside them; also that specific types of bad things happen in those environments as the various religions swing from fanatic to reflective and back.
Ugh. I think you've nailed it, frankly.
Your whole post founders on this misrepresentation. Islam was never a powerhouse of anything. Arabic people, under less repressive versions of Islam, managed to make some significant progress. but Islam itself, like almost all religions at almost all times, is a repressive force that imposes false beliefs in non-existent entities on children, who then grow up with crippled critical thinking facilities, not to mention more gullibility than they ought to carry and a good dose of fear inculcated by the religion's dogma - punishment on the one hand, rewards on the other. Islam, like Christianity and most other theistic religions, alternates between fairly benevolent social oversight, and madness like Sharia law (or worse)
Islam is the albatross around the neck of these countries, much as Christianity has been the albatross for America and England for most of their days.
Religion cannot be eradicated except by force on the one hand, as long as tolerance for bullshit exists as an idolized social component; or until the combination of crippled critical thinking facilities, gullibility, and fear can be eradicated.
It's not just that people are stupid - though many are - if that were all it was, we would already be free of the mental quagmire that is religion. Religion is a mechanism for control that has been tuned for century after century until it grips the unprepared mind with the ease of a healthy tiger taking down a diseased sheep. If credit must be given to Islam and/or Christianity for holding things together in some tough times, this is far outweighed by the incredible amount of damage they have caused, lives spent chasing mythology when further exposure of reality would have been of much greater use to the world, lives expended in various punishments for not following the dogma... crusades, fatwas, jihads, blood libel, brainwashing, theft, subjugation of women, rape, pillage, repression, "witch" burnings, financial parasitism, torture, scientific repression, murder of "heretics", censorship and blue laws, theft, sanction of excessive breeding, pogroms, inquisitions, vilification of sexuality and the outlawing of many consensual family arrangements... religion is poison at best, and at worst, it is viral, deadly, and ultimately destructive.
No, Islam is the problem for this particular region. Islam can never be given the credit for the technical achievements of any people; instead, we can credit lighter versions of it for simply not getting in the way quite as much. Dogma that insists on mythological creatures who demand worship has never been much of a positive force for anything, albeit ameliorating problems it had been complicit in causing in the first place, and creating art dedicated to the deit(y|ies).
We were talking about a flat *sales* tax rate on new items and new value, with a built-in COL payment. Such a tax is inescapable, because everyone has to pay it for everything they buy. No more tax shelters. At all. For anyone. One of the concepts many merits. You should have read the thread.
The bit of yours about how power aggregates - absolutely right. Can't be fixed as long as the government is based upon centralized power, which I suspect is the same as "can't be fixed."
Last I heard, these are spaceships only in the very most technical sense. About the same way a Roomba is "a robot." You get what, a few minutes of free fall, and that's it. I don't know about you folks, but that's most emphatically not what I've been thinking of when I thought "space ship" over quite a few decades. It's more the kind of thing I was hoping a long-hop high speed transport would do. And the price... good grief.
Methinks more waiting is called for.