Unlike the continental US, Hawai'i doesn't benefit from a geographically diverse grid. When it's cloudy, it's cloudy over all of Hawai'i. When it's not windy, it's not windy anywhere. An oversimplification to be sure, but fundamentally the continental US has much more diverse weather at any given time [plus many more total hours of sunlight], which means that it's not subject to the wild swings of non-dispatchable weather-impacted renewables that Hawai'i is.
Hawai'i can and should get lots of it's energy needs from renewables. However, they need to be able to dispatch, so either storage or fossil or a boat load of biomass or concentrated solar thermal, as the fixed costs of geothermal generally make it inappropriate for anything but base load.
The EU nations import 8.5 million barrels a day. USA: 13.5. Japan: 5.5. China: 4.5. South Korea: 2.5. Get *all* of those nations to ban Iran crude and you'll substantially affect Iranian prices for the worse (and prices within the embargoing nations for the worse, too). Just EU? Meh. EU plus USA? Still meh since in fact most of the current USA's imports come from the Americas. But EU, USA, Japan, SKorea? Now we're talking. As Iran goes further and further down the list of importing nations they start having to deal with shipping into smaller ports, into ports which can't take as much oil as quickly, etc. Less efficient transactions and less efficient shipping, and potentially for a lower base price because the countries agreeing to buy Iranian oil will have negotiating leverage.
In the mean time, it wouldn't be the worst thing for each of the potentially embargoing nations to figure out how to reduce the oil required for each unit of GDP, health, or any other metric of "goodness" that the nation uses. After all, an oil embargo hurts both trade partners, but reducing demand hurts the seller and improves conditions for the (former) buyer.
It's the cheapest route, but it really isn't as necessary as Iran would have you believe. There's enough surplus pipeline capacity through Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, even Israel to offset about half of the closure [although admittedly not all of that capacity is ready to go immediately, as some of it has been mothballed]. That means world oil supply is reduced by 10% in the near term. A supply shock? Sure. However, the combination of fuel switching for electricity generation and oil already being stored elsewhere, plus the potential increase in production elsewhere (OPEC and otherwise) to grab extra profits suggests this isn't going to be terribly disruptive, and certainly not something worth going to war over.
In the mean time, it's worth noting that a sudden increase in petrol-energy-efficiency could shave off that last 10% in just a few years. Help avoid war: ride a bicycle | ride a bus | ride a subway | walk | telecommute | carpool.
If I owned a car, I'd likely drive it to work every day. I'd also drive it home from work every day. Quality statistics aside, that's 50 car tips every 25 days, not every 50.
According to the law*, a yellow light is to be treated as a red light *if* the vehicle can safely stop. Only if you can't safely stop at a yellow are you to proceed.
Naturally, if folks are driving the posted speed limit, it's far easier to stop at a yellow, because stopping distance increases quite a bit when your speed goes from 30 mph to 35 to 40 to 45. We can bicker about speed limits on the interstate all day long, but local road speed limits are much more important to get right, because you've got pedestrians, cyclists, autos pulling in and out of driveways, right on red at intersections, etc. Stopping distance is really important. Do a better job enforcing local speed limits, and you'll find that folks are less likely to drive through a yellow (or "orange") light, improving safety for everyone.
The other part is this. Plenty of folks treat a yellow as green. Always. Lengthen the yellow, and folks get a feel for the longer length... and will continue to just plough through it as if it were green. Once folks re-calibrate, you've got a worse situation, because people will see a yellow and be even more inclined to accelerate.
There's no need to lengthen the yellow. We need to enforce local speed limit laws.
* all vary state to state, but this is generally speaking the case
"And as for healthcare, no one goes without treatment, even if they don't pay for it themselves, like myself and most of us do."
Dead wrong. Nobody goes without urgent care if they show up to an ER. Anything short of that... unless you're (a) very poor, (b) over 65, (c) a veteran, (d) under 18 and poor but not very poor, or (e) have a job which provides health insurance, or (f) married to or the (25 year old) child of someone in category e.
That sounds like everybody, but its far from it. This is just for "body" care -- dentistry and health care coverage gaps in America are massive, often even for the so-called insured. Even if you are in one of those categories, you're not guaranteed care... it all depends on what ails you, who declares it a pre-existing condition, whether or not the best treatment is the lowest cost treatment, whether or not you want a second opinion or a specialist, if you can afford the co-pays for therapeutic treatment or medication which pile up week after week, etc. etc.
but the claim that it's merely a revenue collection aid is bogus.
ALPR does a remarkable job of finding autos for which the owner has an outstanding warrant. It's usually pretty minor stuff, but not always. ALPR flags an auto with a warrant, the police officer takes notice. Obviously not every ALPR is located on a police vehicle and not every car flagged is being driven by the person for which there is an outstanding warrant.
Still, some of the time, it is used to find persons with outstanding warrants, and that is a very real, positive public safety and justice tool. We can argue if the benefits are worth the general loss of privacy (including tracking of location), but to claim that it does "nothing to promote safety" is flat wrong.
For urban-to-urban commuting, the 25 mph top speed is sufficient. Urban roadways have a speed limit of 30 mph and, during rush hour, rarely hit that speed due to the congestion. For suburban-to-urban commuting, 25 mph ain't going to cut it.
In my case, I try to. My family doesn't own a car -- but my used bike, the bus, and an occasional carpool has done a wonderful job getting me to and from daycare, work, and local activities. Yes, I live near good transit, but I don't "happen to", I choose to, and pay extra for the privilege. I live in a small condo in a large building, resulting in much lower need for heating or cooling. My electric bill is about 130 kWh a month except summer, when it's more like 170 kWh. I try to eat local food [though I don't try too hard], and I limit my meat consumption to perhaps 1-2 pounds per week.
I'm not perfect -- I fly 1-3 times a year, and my family is flying from Eastern USA to India (and back) early next year. Between work and home, my family probably acquires one new computer each year.
Still, mix a little environmental awareness, a little health concern, a bit of stinginess, and the ability to plan long term, and it's actually quite easy to reduce one's negative impact on the Earth substantially while improving both health and enjoyment. May I humbly suggest you make a single lifestyle change which will be better for your Earth, your wallet, and your body. Once you've got that one incorporated, consider repeating.
According to wikipedia, Belgium has 6000 MW of nuclear power, generating a hair over 50% of their electricity. It seems unlikely that they could replace 6000 MW with fossil fuels within a decade and still be sensitive to local issues, emissions and pollution, fuel transportation, and transmission needs. For renewables, 6000 MW is certainly theoretically possible within a decade, but again unlikely. Beligium has some number of dispatchable MW which aren't nuclear. It's *conceptually possible* [I don't have easy access to the numbers] that the existing (dispatchable) fossil fuel plants aren't all running at night, and that they could make up some of the night time slack caused by reducing nuclear. The daytime could be made up with photovoltaics. It might require some more natural gas to handle cloudy days with higher demand [hotter? colder? darker due to being near daylight savings? dunno], although Belgium does have a fairly large natural gas capacity.
My point: Belgium may well end up reducing but not eliminating their nuclear power generation. They could easily make a big push on photovoltaics, taking public policy lessons from Germany [and borrowing their business practices, now that Germany is ramping down]. Belgium could also build a few SC or CC natural gas plants to help bridge the gap. Keep in mind that about 860 MW of Belgium's nuclear power is nearly 40 years old, and that although nuclear fuel is very cheap, the plants will need capital additions and face higher O&M costs, and fuel disposal is not cheap. If you start adding those costs in, it may be the case that the additional renewables and natural gas production [at existing facilities or building a new one] may not come at a substantially higher price than the full cost of keeping Belgium's first generation nuclear power stations operational and safe.
Personally, I wish Belgium was focused on replacing the roughly 9% of electricity generated from coal with renewables first, but it's their choice, not mine.
Pretty straightforward. Let's buy all the Chinese PV manufactured in 2012 *and* all tUSA PV manufactured in 2012. Do that, and, we'll:
* support tUSA businesses by buying their PV
* get a whole bunch of additional PV at firesale prices, helping consumers lock in to lower long term energy prices, helping utilities comply with upcoming EPA policies, helping clean our air and water by reducing the amount of coal and natural gas we burn for electricity, and BTW creating bunches of jobs selling, shipping, installing, and maintaining the PV.
As an added bonus, if China really is dumping due to government subsidies, we get a wealth transfer from China to tUSA in the process, and $deity knows we could use some of that.
P.S. This is slashdot, so nuclear has to work its way into the conversation. Based on both 20th and 21st century experience, PV generated electricity is actually cheaper on a long term total cost than nuclear generated electricity. That's not to say that we shouldn't have nuclear, but rather that since we are operating coal and gas plants during sunny portions of the day, there's plenty of room to install PV without taking away room to install more nuclear.
I too don't download music, don't torrent music, don't P2P music. I too am a model citizen.
More about me:
* I purchase 50-100 CDs per year.
* Every single one of them is purchased used, from used record stores, from Goodwill et al, from Amazon resalers, from friends, from garage sales. I rarely pay more than $3. I then rip them to mp3 and store the CDs in wine 12-pack boxes in my closet.
Wouldn't the music industry love having an entire market of folks just like me!
P.S. I'm willing to wait to find the CDs I want the most, both because (a) I'd prefer to have a smaller environmental footprint and the used market allows that, and (b) because I despise the way the RIAA has handled itself, and I don't want them to get my cash.
Perhaps the issue is that the inflation rate for college tuition is well above the general inflation rate, that states are contributing a far lower percentage toward operating state unis and community colleges than they have in the past, and that more and more employers are requiring a 4 year degree for positions which don't really need one in the first place.
Perhaps they're not protesting their own debt. Perhaps they're protesting the current situation -- created by banks, governments, universities, and employers -- which has helped foster the enormous tuition rates being charged for students *today*, thereby necessitating massive student loans or a society in which upward social mobility is unnecessarily reduced.
Perhaps there's more to a strong and diverse society and culture than engineering. Perhaps your $USELESS_DEGREE has tremendous social value, and the real problem is that our current economic structure doesn't reward the people working in job($USELESS_DEGREE) well enough. Perhaps they think the problem is that we're simply not funding enough social workers and teachers and the arts -- not that there are too many young people with those degrees.
Look -- I earned a whole bunch of college degrees on full scholarship in tUSA, in fields which pay reasonably well. This isn't about me. Yet, I do agree with the OWS protesters. College debt is too high. Sure, it was all taken voluntarily, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't change the circumstance for future high school graduates. I believe that the Federal Gov't should open more universities at free/low tuition, and not require military service to be admitted -- and focus on areas where we have a national interest. Health care, energy, infrastructure, etc. I believe that state governments should pour far more money into their state universities. I believe that both Fed and state gov'ts should hire more teachers and fund more arts. I support raising taxes on folks with more money [both income and wealth] to pay for it. I think that if we moved in that direction, we'd have a safer, healthier, *better* society.
So the AC points out how people who don't know what they're talking about "form a highly vocal opinion about it anyway!" and then proceeds to do the exact same thing about poverty in Texas, riddled with so many false assumptions it doesn't warrant a point by point response.
"First, companies don't pay taxes. Their customers do."
No, that's not right. An increase in cost is made up by both customers and owners, unless one of the curves (supply or demand) is perfectly flat or perfectly vertical. Even if 100% of the tax is imposed on price [unlikely, due to the prior sentence], unless the demand curve is vertical the quantity sold will decrease, resulting in lower revenue [and profits] for the corporation, despite the higher price.
All of this assumes that the government isn't able to invest the tax revenue in a way which increases value to both the owners of the corporation and consumers. If, for example, the added revenue is used to suppress long term transportation costs [invest in bridges, etc], production costs [invest in education, etc], security costs [invest in police], insurance costs [invest in inspectors, fire service, etc] by enough, it might be that the total gain for both consumers and owners is greater due to the government tax. I'm not arguing that this is always the case, but I am arguing that some amount of government tax and spend is a good thing, lest one wants his nation to look like Rwanda.
P.S. A national sales tax completely screws over the retired -- who paid their income tax back when they were earning more income than they were spending, and who would then have to pay more spending tax than they do now right when their income is close to zero. For that reason alone, it's a no-go.
The refrigerators being shredded are far less energy efficient than modern refrigerators. The idea is that the 'wasted' effort and energy in shredding a repairable fridge is less than the electricity wasted by letting that refrigerator continue to operate instead of being replaced by a modern, more energy efficient model. In fact, the total amount of electricity used by all refrigerators in tUSA has fallen by something like 75% since the 1970s, due to manufacturers complying with ever increasing government energy efficiency requirements.
Unlike private corporations, the USPS is required by law to give preferential treatment to military veterans. The exam scores of vets get a bonus when the USPS is deciding who to hire. I'm not arguing that vets aren't capable of being good postal employees -- my father is a vet and a retired postal employee. My point is simply that it's one more additional constraint.
Here's another: the USPS, by law, has to deliver everywhere. Not everywhere every day -- some remote locations don't get daily service. For the same price in the case of letters. UPS and FedEx, on the other hand, have no such restriction and therefore they don't offer the same product, because getting a letter to the northern tundra of Alaska or to an adobe hours away from any other building in New Mexico will never be profitable.
The OP is right, but there is a third possible option: allow the USPS to raise the price of postage. It doesn't necessarily need subsidies [though it's a reasonable proposal]. Let them charge what it costs.
Believe it or not, a Senator [and his staff] can do more than one thing at a time. Besides, since young males account for the largest share of the American drunk driving population, and since young males have a large potential to contribute more to the federal tax base over then they receive in government benefits, keeping them alive and healthy does cut the deficit. Same goes for wars -- we need soldiers, and young men make fantastic soldiers.
P.S. The deficit isn't the problem. The deficit is the symptom of an economy which hasn't recovered for the middle and lower class. A lack of decent jobs is the problem.
If it's the case that the costs associated with offering the product are far less than the fees, then there is market failure because in a well operating market, charging too much invites competition who will undercut your prices.
Are Visa and Mastercard charging so much that there's room to be undercut? I don't know. Ask Discover.
I go BOS to NYC on Acela, and it's faster than flying. Not for everyone of course, but for me who lives on the T (Boston subway) and wants to get to Manhattan, door-to-door is faster on Acela than it is in the air.
Could it be even made even faster? Sure. Keep in mind though that the Northeastern corridor is the densest part of America. The rights of way are narrow and windy, and straightening and widening them is massively expensive because of the value of the property adjacent to them. A few minutes could be shaved here and there with some straightening, banking, passing lanes, etc, but you simply can't go fast around a sharp corner. Furthermore, the corridor is crowded, and fitting more trains on the same set of tracks is a challenge., in part because of all the commuter rail which uses the same track.
As for other parts of the country, HSR between cities under 300 miles apart could beat airplane times, wouldn't suffer from the difficult constraints facing the Northeast, and setting it up frees both highway and runway from needing to be expanded, as well as provides another transportation option, thereby increasing the robustness of the system.
If we are talking "small business" 'HR' is likely the owner or one of his immediate subordinates checking his email in what is otherwise(from an IT setup) disturbingly like a home environment.
A common mistake is to assume that in tUSA, "small business" means "mom and pop." In fact, the Small Business Association (SBA) defines a business as small based on number of employees, and though it depends on industry, it typically is 500 (source).
It's true that, by sheer quantity, most businesses are small. There's only 500 Fortune 500 companies, but a zillion hot dog stands. In terms of number of employees or revenue or profits or any other number of factors, many small businesses aren't so small after all.
then so is the use or reliance on roads, public schools or universities, police, firemen, zoning codes, enforcement of contracts, national defense, and so forth. Which is to say, taxation is not theft, and a civilized society is not free of financial cost.
You've assigned zero economic value to the avoided accidents in which somebody didn't die. These include both the medical cost and lost productivity of non-fatal pedestrian injuries, as well as the cost of the bumper-to-bumper physical damage. I'd bet that once that's included, you'd actually come out way ahead with this. Heck, bumper repair alone might be enough to make this work, depending on what the new backing-up accident rate becomes.
That written, my bet is that the biggest problems facing pedestrians who are being backed up upon are poor visibility common in SUVs and drivers who've forgotten that operating a many thousand pound vehicle requires full attention and two hands.
According to TFA, the US Army is going to shell out over $400,000,000 on these guns. Each shell (?) has a computer chip; they aren't pennies apiece.
Meanwhile, we keep hearing about an overwhelming debt and how we'll need to cut social security benefits, cut energy R&D, cut mass transit investments, cut unemployment benefits. But we've got enough money to provide a tax cut for those making $250,000+, and we've got enough money for yet another BFG.
I love my country despite it's terrible collective decision making skills.
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Unlike the continental US, Hawai'i doesn't benefit from a geographically diverse grid. When it's cloudy, it's cloudy over all of Hawai'i. When it's not windy, it's not windy anywhere. An oversimplification to be sure, but fundamentally the continental US has much more diverse weather at any given time [plus many more total hours of sunlight], which means that it's not subject to the wild swings of non-dispatchable weather-impacted renewables that Hawai'i is.
Hawai'i can and should get lots of it's energy needs from renewables. However, they need to be able to dispatch, so either storage or fossil or a boat load of biomass or concentrated solar thermal, as the fixed costs of geothermal generally make it inappropriate for anything but base load.
The EU nations import 8.5 million barrels a day. USA: 13.5. Japan: 5.5. China: 4.5. South Korea: 2.5. Get *all* of those nations to ban Iran crude and you'll substantially affect Iranian prices for the worse (and prices within the embargoing nations for the worse, too). Just EU? Meh. EU plus USA? Still meh since in fact most of the current USA's imports come from the Americas. But EU, USA, Japan, SKorea? Now we're talking. As Iran goes further and further down the list of importing nations they start having to deal with shipping into smaller ports, into ports which can't take as much oil as quickly, etc. Less efficient transactions and less efficient shipping, and potentially for a lower base price because the countries agreeing to buy Iranian oil will have negotiating leverage.
In the mean time, it wouldn't be the worst thing for each of the potentially embargoing nations to figure out how to reduce the oil required for each unit of GDP, health, or any other metric of "goodness" that the nation uses. After all, an oil embargo hurts both trade partners, but reducing demand hurts the seller and improves conditions for the (former) buyer.
It's the cheapest route, but it really isn't as necessary as Iran would have you believe. There's enough surplus pipeline capacity through Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, even Israel to offset about half of the closure [although admittedly not all of that capacity is ready to go immediately, as some of it has been mothballed]. That means world oil supply is reduced by 10% in the near term. A supply shock? Sure. However, the combination of fuel switching for electricity generation and oil already being stored elsewhere, plus the potential increase in production elsewhere (OPEC and otherwise) to grab extra profits suggests this isn't going to be terribly disruptive, and certainly not something worth going to war over.
In the mean time, it's worth noting that a sudden increase in petrol-energy-efficiency could shave off that last 10% in just a few years. Help avoid war: ride a bicycle | ride a bus | ride a subway | walk | telecommute | carpool.
If I owned a car, I'd likely drive it to work every day. I'd also drive it home from work every day. Quality statistics aside, that's 50 car tips every 25 days, not every 50.
According to the law*, a yellow light is to be treated as a red light *if* the vehicle can safely stop. Only if you can't safely stop at a yellow are you to proceed.
Naturally, if folks are driving the posted speed limit, it's far easier to stop at a yellow, because stopping distance increases quite a bit when your speed goes from 30 mph to 35 to 40 to 45. We can bicker about speed limits on the interstate all day long, but local road speed limits are much more important to get right, because you've got pedestrians, cyclists, autos pulling in and out of driveways, right on red at intersections, etc. Stopping distance is really important. Do a better job enforcing local speed limits, and you'll find that folks are less likely to drive through a yellow (or "orange") light, improving safety for everyone.
The other part is this. Plenty of folks treat a yellow as green. Always. Lengthen the yellow, and folks get a feel for the longer length... and will continue to just plough through it as if it were green. Once folks re-calibrate, you've got a worse situation, because people will see a yellow and be even more inclined to accelerate.
There's no need to lengthen the yellow. We need to enforce local speed limit laws.
* all vary state to state, but this is generally speaking the case
"And as for healthcare, no one goes without treatment, even if they don't pay for it themselves, like myself and most of us do."
Dead wrong. Nobody goes without urgent care if they show up to an ER. Anything short of that... unless you're (a) very poor, (b) over 65, (c) a veteran, (d) under 18 and poor but not very poor, or (e) have a job which provides health insurance, or (f) married to or the (25 year old) child of someone in category e.
That sounds like everybody, but its far from it. This is just for "body" care -- dentistry and health care coverage gaps in America are massive, often even for the so-called insured. Even if you are in one of those categories, you're not guaranteed care... it all depends on what ails you, who declares it a pre-existing condition, whether or not the best treatment is the lowest cost treatment, whether or not you want a second opinion or a specialist, if you can afford the co-pays for therapeutic treatment or medication which pile up week after week, etc. etc.
but the claim that it's merely a revenue collection aid is bogus.
ALPR does a remarkable job of finding autos for which the owner has an outstanding warrant. It's usually pretty minor stuff, but not always. ALPR flags an auto with a warrant, the police officer takes notice. Obviously not every ALPR is located on a police vehicle and not every car flagged is being driven by the person for which there is an outstanding warrant.
Still, some of the time, it is used to find persons with outstanding warrants, and that is a very real, positive public safety and justice tool. We can argue if the benefits are worth the general loss of privacy (including tracking of location), but to claim that it does "nothing to promote safety" is flat wrong.
For urban-to-urban commuting, the 25 mph top speed is sufficient. Urban roadways have a speed limit of 30 mph and, during rush hour, rarely hit that speed due to the congestion. For suburban-to-urban commuting, 25 mph ain't going to cut it.
In my case, I try to. My family doesn't own a car -- but my used bike, the bus, and an occasional carpool has done a wonderful job getting me to and from daycare, work, and local activities. Yes, I live near good transit, but I don't "happen to", I choose to, and pay extra for the privilege. I live in a small condo in a large building, resulting in much lower need for heating or cooling. My electric bill is about 130 kWh a month except summer, when it's more like 170 kWh. I try to eat local food [though I don't try too hard], and I limit my meat consumption to perhaps 1-2 pounds per week.
I'm not perfect -- I fly 1-3 times a year, and my family is flying from Eastern USA to India (and back) early next year. Between work and home, my family probably acquires one new computer each year.
Still, mix a little environmental awareness, a little health concern, a bit of stinginess, and the ability to plan long term, and it's actually quite easy to reduce one's negative impact on the Earth substantially while improving both health and enjoyment. May I humbly suggest you make a single lifestyle change which will be better for your Earth, your wallet, and your body. Once you've got that one incorporated, consider repeating.
According to wikipedia, Belgium has 6000 MW of nuclear power, generating a hair over 50% of their electricity. It seems unlikely that they could replace 6000 MW with fossil fuels within a decade and still be sensitive to local issues, emissions and pollution, fuel transportation, and transmission needs. For renewables, 6000 MW is certainly theoretically possible within a decade, but again unlikely. Beligium has some number of dispatchable MW which aren't nuclear. It's *conceptually possible* [I don't have easy access to the numbers] that the existing (dispatchable) fossil fuel plants aren't all running at night, and that they could make up some of the night time slack caused by reducing nuclear. The daytime could be made up with photovoltaics. It might require some more natural gas to handle cloudy days with higher demand [hotter? colder? darker due to being near daylight savings? dunno], although Belgium does have a fairly large natural gas capacity.
My point: Belgium may well end up reducing but not eliminating their nuclear power generation. They could easily make a big push on photovoltaics, taking public policy lessons from Germany [and borrowing their business practices, now that Germany is ramping down]. Belgium could also build a few SC or CC natural gas plants to help bridge the gap. Keep in mind that about 860 MW of Belgium's nuclear power is nearly 40 years old, and that although nuclear fuel is very cheap, the plants will need capital additions and face higher O&M costs, and fuel disposal is not cheap. If you start adding those costs in, it may be the case that the additional renewables and natural gas production [at existing facilities or building a new one] may not come at a substantially higher price than the full cost of keeping Belgium's first generation nuclear power stations operational and safe.
Personally, I wish Belgium was focused on replacing the roughly 9% of electricity generated from coal with renewables first, but it's their choice, not mine.
Pretty straightforward. Let's buy all the Chinese PV manufactured in 2012 *and* all tUSA PV manufactured in 2012. Do that, and, we'll:
* support tUSA businesses by buying their PV
* get a whole bunch of additional PV at firesale prices, helping consumers lock in to lower long term energy prices, helping utilities comply with upcoming EPA policies, helping clean our air and water by reducing the amount of coal and natural gas we burn for electricity, and BTW creating bunches of jobs selling, shipping, installing, and maintaining the PV.
As an added bonus, if China really is dumping due to government subsidies, we get a wealth transfer from China to tUSA in the process, and $deity knows we could use some of that.
P.S. This is slashdot, so nuclear has to work its way into the conversation. Based on both 20th and 21st century experience, PV generated electricity is actually cheaper on a long term total cost than nuclear generated electricity. That's not to say that we shouldn't have nuclear, but rather that since we are operating coal and gas plants during sunny portions of the day, there's plenty of room to install PV without taking away room to install more nuclear.
I too don't download music, don't torrent music, don't P2P music. I too am a model citizen.
More about me:
* I purchase 50-100 CDs per year.
* Every single one of them is purchased used, from used record stores, from Goodwill et al, from Amazon resalers, from friends, from garage sales. I rarely pay more than $3. I then rip them to mp3 and store the CDs in wine 12-pack boxes in my closet.
Wouldn't the music industry love having an entire market of folks just like me!
P.S. I'm willing to wait to find the CDs I want the most, both because (a) I'd prefer to have a smaller environmental footprint and the used market allows that, and (b) because I despise the way the RIAA has handled itself, and I don't want them to get my cash.
Perhaps the issue is that the inflation rate for college tuition is well above the general inflation rate, that states are contributing a far lower percentage toward operating state unis and community colleges than they have in the past, and that more and more employers are requiring a 4 year degree for positions which don't really need one in the first place.
Perhaps they're not protesting their own debt. Perhaps they're protesting the current situation -- created by banks, governments, universities, and employers -- which has helped foster the enormous tuition rates being charged for students *today*, thereby necessitating massive student loans or a society in which upward social mobility is unnecessarily reduced.
Perhaps there's more to a strong and diverse society and culture than engineering. Perhaps your $USELESS_DEGREE has tremendous social value, and the real problem is that our current economic structure doesn't reward the people working in job($USELESS_DEGREE) well enough. Perhaps they think the problem is that we're simply not funding enough social workers and teachers and the arts -- not that there are too many young people with those degrees.
Look -- I earned a whole bunch of college degrees on full scholarship in tUSA, in fields which pay reasonably well. This isn't about me. Yet, I do agree with the OWS protesters. College debt is too high. Sure, it was all taken voluntarily, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't change the circumstance for future high school graduates. I believe that the Federal Gov't should open more universities at free/low tuition, and not require military service to be admitted -- and focus on areas where we have a national interest. Health care, energy, infrastructure, etc. I believe that state governments should pour far more money into their state universities. I believe that both Fed and state gov'ts should hire more teachers and fund more arts. I support raising taxes on folks with more money [both income and wealth] to pay for it. I think that if we moved in that direction, we'd have a safer, healthier, *better* society.
So the AC points out how people who don't know what they're talking about "form a highly vocal opinion about it anyway!" and then proceeds to do the exact same thing about poverty in Texas, riddled with so many false assumptions it doesn't warrant a point by point response.
"First, companies don't pay taxes. Their customers do."
No, that's not right. An increase in cost is made up by both customers and owners, unless one of the curves (supply or demand) is perfectly flat or perfectly vertical. Even if 100% of the tax is imposed on price [unlikely, due to the prior sentence], unless the demand curve is vertical the quantity sold will decrease, resulting in lower revenue [and profits] for the corporation, despite the higher price.
All of this assumes that the government isn't able to invest the tax revenue in a way which increases value to both the owners of the corporation and consumers. If, for example, the added revenue is used to suppress long term transportation costs [invest in bridges, etc], production costs [invest in education, etc], security costs [invest in police], insurance costs [invest in inspectors, fire service, etc] by enough, it might be that the total gain for both consumers and owners is greater due to the government tax. I'm not arguing that this is always the case, but I am arguing that some amount of government tax and spend is a good thing, lest one wants his nation to look like Rwanda.
P.S. A national sales tax completely screws over the retired -- who paid their income tax back when they were earning more income than they were spending, and who would then have to pay more spending tax than they do now right when their income is close to zero. For that reason alone, it's a no-go.
The refrigerators being shredded are far less energy efficient than modern refrigerators. The idea is that the 'wasted' effort and energy in shredding a repairable fridge is less than the electricity wasted by letting that refrigerator continue to operate instead of being replaced by a modern, more energy efficient model. In fact, the total amount of electricity used by all refrigerators in tUSA has fallen by something like 75% since the 1970s, due to manufacturers complying with ever increasing government energy efficiency requirements.
Unlike private corporations, the USPS is required by law to give preferential treatment to military veterans. The exam scores of vets get a bonus when the USPS is deciding who to hire. I'm not arguing that vets aren't capable of being good postal employees -- my father is a vet and a retired postal employee. My point is simply that it's one more additional constraint.
Here's another: the USPS, by law, has to deliver everywhere. Not everywhere every day -- some remote locations don't get daily service. For the same price in the case of letters. UPS and FedEx, on the other hand, have no such restriction and therefore they don't offer the same product, because getting a letter to the northern tundra of Alaska or to an adobe hours away from any other building in New Mexico will never be profitable.
The OP is right, but there is a third possible option: allow the USPS to raise the price of postage. It doesn't necessarily need subsidies [though it's a reasonable proposal]. Let them charge what it costs.
if you're not in jail or wrapped around a tree...
Believe it or not, a Senator [and his staff] can do more than one thing at a time. Besides, since young males account for the largest share of the American drunk driving population, and since young males have a large potential to contribute more to the federal tax base over then they receive in government benefits, keeping them alive and healthy does cut the deficit. Same goes for wars -- we need soldiers, and young men make fantastic soldiers.
P.S. The deficit isn't the problem. The deficit is the symptom of an economy which hasn't recovered for the middle and lower class. A lack of decent jobs is the problem.
If it's the case that the costs associated with offering the product are far less than the fees, then there is market failure because in a well operating market, charging too much invites competition who will undercut your prices.
Are Visa and Mastercard charging so much that there's room to be undercut? I don't know. Ask Discover.
I go BOS to NYC on Acela, and it's faster than flying. Not for everyone of course, but for me who lives on the T (Boston subway) and wants to get to Manhattan, door-to-door is faster on Acela than it is in the air.
Could it be even made even faster? Sure. Keep in mind though that the Northeastern corridor is the densest part of America. The rights of way are narrow and windy, and straightening and widening them is massively expensive because of the value of the property adjacent to them. A few minutes could be shaved here and there with some straightening, banking, passing lanes, etc, but you simply can't go fast around a sharp corner. Furthermore, the corridor is crowded, and fitting more trains on the same set of tracks is a challenge., in part because of all the commuter rail which uses the same track.
As for other parts of the country, HSR between cities under 300 miles apart could beat airplane times, wouldn't suffer from the difficult constraints facing the Northeast, and setting it up frees both highway and runway from needing to be expanded, as well as provides another transportation option, thereby increasing the robustness of the system.
A common mistake is to assume that in tUSA, "small business" means "mom and pop." In fact, the Small Business Association (SBA) defines a business as small based on number of employees, and though it depends on industry, it typically is 500 (source).
It's true that, by sheer quantity, most businesses are small. There's only 500 Fortune 500 companies, but a zillion hot dog stands. In terms of number of employees or revenue or profits or any other number of factors, many small businesses aren't so small after all.
then so is the use or reliance on roads, public schools or universities, police, firemen, zoning codes, enforcement of contracts, national defense, and so forth. Which is to say, taxation is not theft, and a civilized society is not free of financial cost.
You've assigned zero economic value to the avoided accidents in which somebody didn't die. These include both the medical cost and lost productivity of non-fatal pedestrian injuries, as well as the cost of the bumper-to-bumper physical damage. I'd bet that once that's included, you'd actually come out way ahead with this. Heck, bumper repair alone might be enough to make this work, depending on what the new backing-up accident rate becomes.
That written, my bet is that the biggest problems facing pedestrians who are being backed up upon are poor visibility common in SUVs and drivers who've forgotten that operating a many thousand pound vehicle requires full attention and two hands.
According to TFA, the US Army is going to shell out over $400,000,000 on these guns. Each shell (?) has a computer chip; they aren't pennies apiece.
Meanwhile, we keep hearing about an overwhelming debt and how we'll need to cut social security benefits, cut energy R&D, cut mass transit investments, cut unemployment benefits. But we've got enough money to provide a tax cut for those making $250,000+, and we've got enough money for yet another BFG.
I love my country despite it's terrible collective decision making skills.