I'm in the market for a car that gets better gas mileage than my 1987 Chevy Van (:-), which is still a great car for telecommuting except that it's an old beater. It's annoying that most cars on the market don't get better mileage than the car I had 25 years ago.
The best conditions for diesel engines are when they're hot and running for a long time. Back in the 80s I took an airport limo that got 35+mpg on diesel, when most American gasoline-based cars of that size were under 20mpg, partly because the guy spent all day driving up and down the turnpike, occasionally going on neighborhood streets to pick up a passenger and get back on the turnpike, so the car never cooled down.
The trick with the recent small cars from India is that most of them are made to run in India city conditions, where the streets are way too crowded to go faster than about 35mph, so even if they can go faster than that, they aren't made for high-speed crashes, and won't necessarily even win in a collision with a motorcycle, much less a truck.
On the other hand, if your compressed-air car is running low and you're desperate, almost any US gas station that does car repairs has a compressed-air pump and you might be able to pay them for some air. There are also pumps for inflating tires, but those are usually reduced pressure so they don't explode your tires.
I once encountered one of those "where do you get your news" surveys, and one of the options was "conservative talk radio". I checked that one, and identified the stations as "NPR" and "BBC" - because they really are conservative. They're high-quality news, but they're biased.
They're not right-wingers like Limbaugh, they're Official Establishment News, and while they're not highly biased toward whichever Administration is currently in power, they're still clearly working for The Government. When the government puts out press releases, NPR covers them as if they're authoritative news and not just politics (though they might have commentators who are for or against the Administration's position, but still within the Administration's framing), and when the government wants them to say "enhanced interrogation" instead of "torture", that's what they say.
They do cover the arts a lot, but the Establishment really does like art and music, even though some right-wingers like Jesse Helms would like the National Endowment for the Arts limited to black velvet paintings of Elvis.
Mayan prophecies refer to dates several thousand years farther in the future than the date at the end of the popular Mayan calendar. Basically, all that you need when the calendar rolls over is just adding another character or getting a bigger stone, and the Mayans didn't have to worry that they'd have to upgrade all their abacuses to Stone 2K compliance.
I've got no idea how fast an "Alien vs. Predator" video game needs the graphics system to be, since I stopped caring once any modern hardware could play Nethack or Solitaire.
Can the hardware play 1080p video without needing a noisy fan? How low power is "low-power"?
Fox tells you what's happening? Hardly. If I want to listen to news radio talking about the bad things the Obama Administration is doing, I'll listen to Pacifica Radio (KPFA in Berkeley, WBAI New York, etc.) which has some insight and some information density. Sure, it's leftist, but you can adjust for that, because you'll get stories than aren't on CNN or Fox or even NPR.
NPR still doesn't call torture committed by the US government "torture". On the other hand, they aren't like Fox, which says [set voice="Beavis&Butthead"] "Enhanced Interrogation is cool, heh heh heh heh" [/voice].
The Pentagon just bought up the entire 9500-book print run of a retired military officer's book, so they can destroy it to protect alleged secrets. The publisher will be allowed to do more printings with some parts censored.
Democrats want to censor you for saying words that are mean to people, but Republicans want to censor you for saying words that are impolite, because that's politically incorrect. They don't think it's impolite when Dick Cheney says them to Senators, because the rules don't apply to them, and they don't think the N-word is impolite, but Janet Jackson's covered nipple was way impolite.
Democrats think women should have the right to control their own bodies, unless what they want to do with their bodies involves smoking weed or other politically incorrect drugs. Republicans don't think women should have the right to control their own bodies, but believe that interfering with it should be a state job, not a federal one, unlike controlling drugs which requires a massive Federal military infrastructure.
But yes, the Surveillance State folks have been active under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. They were highly visible under Bill Clinton, when Louis Freeh was heading the FBI and trying to run the Crypto Wars, using Commie spies as an excuse but the Drug War as the major actual user. And big big kudos to the couple of guys at Netscape who put SSL into the browser, and to everybody who told the Clinton Administration that online commerce needed it, and to the Clinton folks who understood that the Internet technology boom was what was making their economic management look good so they shouldn't let the FBI mess with it. And a big Boo Hiss to the apparatchiks who put all the surveillance stuff back into the Patriot Act as soon as the Bush Administration had an excuse to do it.
Eh? *I* still think of Eisenhower as modern, though the first president I actually remember watching on TV was Kennedy, and that was mostly when he got shot. And while LBJ, Nixon, and Ford all had some hair on top, they had the receding hairline thing in a big way.
The luxury car was leased back during the boom, and it's long since been returned. It got replaced with an SUV, which they've still got, and that became a lot less fun with $3-4 gasoline.
The liberals are made at Obama, because he hasn't been particularly liberal in office, once he got past the campaign speech stage and actually got into power, and everybody's unhappy because he didn't instantly fix Bush's eight years of economic damage so the economy's still in the pits. And people who actually believe in fiscal responsibility (as opposed to those who suddenly discovered it only after Bush spent eight years spending money like drunken sailors with stolen credit cards) think that Keynesian deficit spending isn't going to fix the damage, but aren't surprised that he's trying it, because that's what Democrats not named Bill Clinton think is supposed to work, and aren't surprised that he's trying it in a massive way, because he's dealing with a massive problem. Also, nobody's been impressed with his competence, and he hasn't been able to provide the leadership that the wimpy scared Congressional Democrats needed to get their bills passed over the filibuster-threatening Republican minority in the Senate.
However, he's far better than the malicious evil that was the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration, and nobody with half a clue thinks that the Republican Party's current leadership would take the country in directions that would actually fix anything, as opposed to trying to replicate the damage they did before. Bush and Cheney may be out of the picture, but the Rove/Norquist machine is still there, and the Limbaugh/Beck/FoxNews propaganda circus are cheering on everybody's worst impulses.
While the Bush Administration certainly pushed for major increases in intrusiveness, it wasn't new with them either - Louis Freeh from the FBI were pushing this kind of thing under the Clinton Administration as well, and presumably the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations. The civilian surveillance enthusiasts aren't just up in the political structure of the Executive Branch - they're down at the operational levels in the FBI and NSA, and of course the kinds of people that get picked to run the FBI are part of that. The NSA wanted to prevent Communists from having eavesdropping-resistant conversations, but they've long since figured out that there aren't really any significant Commies around any more. On other other hand, the FBI is heavily into eavesdropping, primarily for the Drug War, secondarily for Gambling(!), and also for other crimes which make up a high fraction of their rhetoric but only a few percent of their actual reported wiretap approvals.
Gun control. Yeah, right - the Republicans haven't fixed that, in spite of telling the NRA that they're the only game in town and the NRA believing them.
Thanks for the pointer on Obama's positions on wiretapping.
Obama's first week or two in office were great, but the followthrough has been rather the opposite. If you look at what's been happening in the courts, Obama's Justice Department has been defending itself against people who are suing because they were renditioned and tortured, and using the ostensible state secrets privilege to do so, blocking inquiry into policymakers like John Yoo, and doing a bunch of things like that. Recently there's been the approval for the assassination of that American-born imam who's now living in Yemen, and they also used state secrets privilege to block a lawsuit against that. Maybe they're not torturing any new people in Gitmo, though they're not letting anybody into Baghram to check, but they're not only not prosecuting the people who did the tortures, they also haven't given prisoners in Gitmo fair public trials even though they've had almost two years.
Except for the assassination approval, Obama hasn't been the kind of virulent enemy of civil liberties and proponent of absolute power that Bush was, but he hasn't been cleaning up the mess either.
Blackmail isn't always about things you personally feel ashamed of - I've had friends who got fired from their jobs for being gay (hey, she didn't know her boss was a homophobe when she started working there), and there are people whose families would freak out if they knew.
One of the TLAs, probably NSA, once wanted to hire a guy who was gay, some time after it had stopped being illegal in most of the US. The deal they made was that he had to come out to his family, so it couldn't be used for blackmail. If it had been the Army, either under DADT or the previous Hunt Down The Queer Witches policy, blackmail would have still been a possibility even if his family was fine with it.
I care much more about issues like illegal prisons, torture (whether or not by that name), secret kidnappings, state secrets, assassinations without trials, warrantless wiretapping, and policies like that than I do about downloading free music, but Obama's Just-Us Department is defending the Bush Administration's policies on all of those things. Instead of Hopey Changey Stuff, we've been getting Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss. And the kind of people who want the uncontrolled spying on people's music download habits get along really well with the politically-motivated spooks who want the same powers and same infrastructure.
As far as the economy goes, Keynes himself was smarter than most people who use his name to describe themselves - it's not surprising that the Obama Administration tried to fix Bush's massive economic damage by borrowing and spending lots of money, but if that were all it took, the way Bush racked up deficits by spending money like a drunken sailor with a bunch of stolen credit cards should have helped things instead of hurting them. It's certainly better to spend them on domestic pork-barrel projects than on wars, but Obama hasn't slowed down the wars by much either. There's a better excuse for it (naive optimism instead of cynical irresponsibility), but I don't see it getting us out of the tar pits, since we're still going to have to pay that money back, and with the demographic hit of all the boomers going on Social Security in the next decade, the general budget will need to start running surpluses, not deficits, which will be tough with fewer actual workers.
(And religious bigotry's not pretty even if you are attacking politically correct targets. Blamin' Texans is ok, though...) (Also, I once pulled a bird out of the La Brea Tar Pits; it was still alive, but the folks at the museum said it was unlikely to recover from getting stuck in that stuff.)
Unconstitutional establishment of religion? What's the problem? (As some people point out, they do that with liquor stores, which is wrong, too.)
Church steeples are popular locations for cellular antennas, and cell phone companies market to churches that can rent them tower space, even providing fiberglass steeples for churches that don't already have them.
Churches aren't usually right in the middle of residential areas, so it gives them a way to ban cellular antennas in town as well as near homes.
Most churchgoers only spend an hour or two a week there, so the risk of Evil Cellphone Rays would be only 1% as high as having Evil Cellphone Rays near homes. On the other hand, the risk is a lot higher, because if the antenna is in the church steeple, people are much much closer than average.
Some churches are from the time period that tin ceilings were popular, and that lets you economize by not buying tinfoil hats for everybody, which is really how the town should have handled it.
There was an article on the internet a few years back, so I'm sure you could find it if you wanted, but it said that while the Amish don't like having phones in their houses, they're fine with cell phones, which they can use to call their men in from out in the fields if there's something going on. A metal triangle hanging by the back door will do fine if they're just out in the barn, but if they're plowing 100 acres by mules, they could be far away.
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I'm in the market for a car that gets better gas mileage than my 1987 Chevy Van (:-), which is still a great car for telecommuting except that it's an old beater. It's annoying that most cars on the market don't get better mileage than the car I had 25 years ago.
The best conditions for diesel engines are when they're hot and running for a long time. Back in the 80s I took an airport limo that got 35+mpg on diesel, when most American gasoline-based cars of that size were under 20mpg, partly because the guy spent all day driving up and down the turnpike, occasionally going on neighborhood streets to pick up a passenger and get back on the turnpike, so the car never cooled down.
The trick with the recent small cars from India is that most of them are made to run in India city conditions, where the streets are way too crowded to go faster than about 35mph, so even if they can go faster than that, they aren't made for high-speed crashes, and won't necessarily even win in a collision with a motorcycle, much less a truck.
On the other hand, if your compressed-air car is running low and you're desperate, almost any US gas station that does car repairs has a compressed-air pump and you might be able to pay them for some air. There are also pumps for inflating tires, but those are usually reduced pressure so they don't explode your tires.
Al Gore wanted the National Information Superhighway to have 65 bits. That can handle a lot of trucks.
Foamhenge is a styrofoam Stonehenge that's been mentioned in some of the articles about this bureaucratic nonsense.
It's pretty obvious how she knows the questions the reporters are going to ask - she's a Witch!
She even turned one of the reporters into a newt!
I once encountered one of those "where do you get your news" surveys, and one of the options was "conservative talk radio". I checked that one, and identified the stations as "NPR" and "BBC" - because they really are conservative. They're high-quality news, but they're biased.
They're not right-wingers like Limbaugh, they're Official Establishment News, and while they're not highly biased toward whichever Administration is currently in power, they're still clearly working for The Government. When the government puts out press releases, NPR covers them as if they're authoritative news and not just politics (though they might have commentators who are for or against the Administration's position, but still within the Administration's framing), and when the government wants them to say "enhanced interrogation" instead of "torture", that's what they say.
They do cover the arts a lot, but the Establishment really does like art and music, even though some right-wingers like Jesse Helms would like the National Endowment for the Arts limited to black velvet paintings of Elvis.
Mayan prophecies refer to dates several thousand years farther in the future than the date at the end of the popular Mayan calendar. Basically, all that you need when the calendar rolls over is just adding another character or getting a bigger stone, and the Mayans didn't have to worry that they'd have to upgrade all their abacuses to Stone 2K compliance.
I've got no idea how fast an "Alien vs. Predator" video game needs the graphics system to be, since I stopped caring once any modern hardware could play Nethack or Solitaire.
Can the hardware play 1080p video without needing a noisy fan? How low power is "low-power"?
AMD buys ATI. ATI animates Lizard. Lizard bites Spock. Spock buys nVidia. nVidia dominates ATI.
Fox tells you what's happening? Hardly. If I want to listen to news radio talking about the bad things the Obama Administration is doing, I'll listen to Pacifica Radio (KPFA in Berkeley, WBAI New York, etc.) which has some insight and some information density. Sure, it's leftist, but you can adjust for that, because you'll get stories than aren't on CNN or Fox or even NPR.
NPR still doesn't call torture committed by the US government "torture". On the other hand, they aren't like Fox, which says [set voice="Beavis&Butthead"] "Enhanced Interrogation is cool, heh heh heh heh" [/voice].
The Pentagon just bought up the entire 9500-book print run of a retired military officer's book, so they can destroy it to protect alleged secrets. The publisher will be allowed to do more printings with some parts censored.
But yes, the Surveillance State folks have been active under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. They were highly visible under Bill Clinton, when Louis Freeh was heading the FBI and trying to run the Crypto Wars, using Commie spies as an excuse but the Drug War as the major actual user. And big big kudos to the couple of guys at Netscape who put SSL into the browser, and to everybody who told the Clinton Administration that online commerce needed it, and to the Clinton folks who understood that the Internet technology boom was what was making their economic management look good so they shouldn't let the FBI mess with it. And a big Boo Hiss to the apparatchiks who put all the surveillance stuff back into the Patriot Act as soon as the Bush Administration had an excuse to do it.
That's way too believable for them not to do something like that.
Eh? *I* still think of Eisenhower as modern, though the first president I actually remember watching on TV was Kennedy, and that was mostly when he got shot. And while LBJ, Nixon, and Ford all had some hair on top, they had the receding hairline thing in a big way.
The luxury car was leased back during the boom, and it's long since been returned. It got replaced with an SUV, which they've still got, and that became a lot less fun with $3-4 gasoline.
The liberals are made at Obama, because he hasn't been particularly liberal in office, once he got past the campaign speech stage and actually got into power, and everybody's unhappy because he didn't instantly fix Bush's eight years of economic damage so the economy's still in the pits. And people who actually believe in fiscal responsibility (as opposed to those who suddenly discovered it only after Bush spent eight years spending money like drunken sailors with stolen credit cards) think that Keynesian deficit spending isn't going to fix the damage, but aren't surprised that he's trying it, because that's what Democrats not named Bill Clinton think is supposed to work, and aren't surprised that he's trying it in a massive way, because he's dealing with a massive problem. Also, nobody's been impressed with his competence, and he hasn't been able to provide the leadership that the wimpy scared Congressional Democrats needed to get their bills passed over the filibuster-threatening Republican minority in the Senate.
However, he's far better than the malicious evil that was the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration, and nobody with half a clue thinks that the Republican Party's current leadership would take the country in directions that would actually fix anything, as opposed to trying to replicate the damage they did before. Bush and Cheney may be out of the picture, but the Rove/Norquist machine is still there, and the Limbaugh/Beck/FoxNews propaganda circus are cheering on everybody's worst impulses.
While the Bush Administration certainly pushed for major increases in intrusiveness, it wasn't new with them either - Louis Freeh from the FBI were pushing this kind of thing under the Clinton Administration as well, and presumably the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations. The civilian surveillance enthusiasts aren't just up in the political structure of the Executive Branch - they're down at the operational levels in the FBI and NSA, and of course the kinds of people that get picked to run the FBI are part of that. The NSA wanted to prevent Communists from having eavesdropping-resistant conversations, but they've long since figured out that there aren't really any significant Commies around any more. On other other hand, the FBI is heavily into eavesdropping, primarily for the Drug War, secondarily for Gambling(!), and also for other crimes which make up a high fraction of their rhetoric but only a few percent of their actual reported wiretap approvals.
Gun control. Yeah, right - the Republicans haven't fixed that, in spite of telling the NRA that they're the only game in town and the NRA believing them.
Thanks for the pointer on Obama's positions on wiretapping.
Obama's first week or two in office were great, but the followthrough has been rather the opposite. If you look at what's been happening in the courts, Obama's Justice Department has been defending itself against people who are suing because they were renditioned and tortured, and using the ostensible state secrets privilege to do so, blocking inquiry into policymakers like John Yoo, and doing a bunch of things like that. Recently there's been the approval for the assassination of that American-born imam who's now living in Yemen, and they also used state secrets privilege to block a lawsuit against that. Maybe they're not torturing any new people in Gitmo, though they're not letting anybody into Baghram to check, but they're not only not prosecuting the people who did the tortures, they also haven't given prisoners in Gitmo fair public trials even though they've had almost two years.
Except for the assassination approval, Obama hasn't been the kind of virulent enemy of civil liberties and proponent of absolute power that Bush was, but he hasn't been cleaning up the mess either.
Blackmail isn't always about things you personally feel ashamed of - I've had friends who got fired from their jobs for being gay (hey, she didn't know her boss was a homophobe when she started working there), and there are people whose families would freak out if they knew.
One of the TLAs, probably NSA, once wanted to hire a guy who was gay, some time after it had stopped being illegal in most of the US. The deal they made was that he had to come out to his family, so it couldn't be used for blackmail. If it had been the Army, either under DADT or the previous Hunt Down The Queer Witches policy, blackmail would have still been a possibility even if his family was fine with it.
I care much more about issues like illegal prisons, torture (whether or not by that name), secret kidnappings, state secrets, assassinations without trials, warrantless wiretapping, and policies like that than I do about downloading free music, but Obama's Just-Us Department is defending the Bush Administration's policies on all of those things. Instead of Hopey Changey Stuff, we've been getting Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss. And the kind of people who want the uncontrolled spying on people's music download habits get along really well with the politically-motivated spooks who want the same powers and same infrastructure.
As far as the economy goes, Keynes himself was smarter than most people who use his name to describe themselves - it's not surprising that the Obama Administration tried to fix Bush's massive economic damage by borrowing and spending lots of money, but if that were all it took, the way Bush racked up deficits by spending money like a drunken sailor with a bunch of stolen credit cards should have helped things instead of hurting them. It's certainly better to spend them on domestic pork-barrel projects than on wars, but Obama hasn't slowed down the wars by much either. There's a better excuse for it (naive optimism instead of cynical irresponsibility), but I don't see it getting us out of the tar pits, since we're still going to have to pay that money back, and with the demographic hit of all the boomers going on Social Security in the next decade, the general budget will need to start running surpluses, not deficits, which will be tough with fewer actual workers.
(And religious bigotry's not pretty even if you are attacking politically correct targets. Blamin' Texans is ok, though...)
(Also, I once pulled a bird out of the La Brea Tar Pits; it was still alive, but the folks at the museum said it was unlikely to recover from getting stuck in that stuff.)
There was an article on the internet a few years back, so I'm sure you could find it if you wanted, but it said that while the Amish don't like having phones in their houses, they're fine with cell phones, which they can use to call their men in from out in the fields if there's something going on. A metal triangle hanging by the back door will do fine if they're just out in the barn, but if they're plowing 100 acres by mules, they could be far away.
It was connected to the "I feel sorry for the bird", as well as to the machine looking at various pieces of a literary genre...