The rate of growth has been slowing for decades. It's not only sub-exponential, it's been sub-linear for 20 years - the world's population was growing at 83M/yr in the 80s, and will end this decade with an average growth of less than 80M/yr, despite a larger population.
the most likely scenario is that we will simply continue growing our consumption until we run out of the resources
Why do you believe that's the most likely outcome? Entire nations have behaved in exactly the opposite manner as you suggest they would; for example, Germany's energy consumption hasn't changed in 20 years, despite a strong economy and substantial population growth. Now that the population of the country is shrinking, its overall energy consumption will most likely also fall.
It is an enormous and fallacious oversimplification to suggest that humans are the same as yeast, for both theoretical reasons (we're able to reason about our situation) and evidential ones (e.g., Germany).
You're right. Your one paragraph assessment is far more detailed and comprehensive than a national auto company's research and publications.
His one paragraph is certainly far more detailed and comprehensive than the zero paragraphs we've seen to back up the original claim.
All of the numbers in the grandparent post are sourced from fairly authoritative sites, and the math he does on them is simple, so anyone can check his results rather than simply believing his conclusions. If you think he's wrong, then how about you say where he's wrong, and provide evidence for that claim, rather than simply waving your hands about some alleged analysis that may or may not even say what it was claimed to?
Evidence beats assertion. If someone doesn't back up their claims, why should we believe them?
The internet is just a way for people to talk to each other. If you censor "the internet", it is the same as censoring what you can speak to another person.
You're confusing the communication technology (internet, ink-on-paper) with the communication technique (email vs. webpage, letter vs. newspaper).
Censoring private communication is arguably quite different from censoring publication, a fact which is already reflected in law. Whispering "fire" in a friend's ear while at the theatre will have very different effects - and almost certainly has very different legal ramifications - than shouting "Fire!!" at the top of your lungs. Private and public communication serves different purposes, so it is not unreasonable to consider whether it should have different rules.
If a parent doesnt want their child on the internet, they shouldn't allow them on it. Case by case. It is the same reason why you don't bring your kid with you to a sex shop. The material should be allowed to be there, and the parents should choose whether it is appropriate for their child or not.
You do realize that zoning laws are the sex shop equivalent of censorship, don't you?
In most places, there are restrictions on where certain types of businesses (sex shops, liquor stores, brothels, etc.) can be located, in part so people can choose to avoid being exposed to those stores. It would substantially interfere with the right of people to choose what was appropriate for themselves and their children if every toy store in the city had a sex toy store - with a big window display - open up right beside it.
As it is, zoning laws create neighbourhoods where certain types of businesses (such as sex shops) cannot be found, so children for whom those businesses are not appropriate can move around without a constant (and unreasonable) level of supervision. At the same time, those businesses are still permitted to exist, so people for whom those businesses are desirable can still access them. The tradeoff between the two groups (sometimes longer travel to a sex shop but some appropriate neighbourhoods for children) is (hopefully carefully) carefully judged and set according to local needs.
The idea is to apply that reasonable tradeoff to the web, and that's not innately a bad idea.
The problem, as usual, is implementation details. With no real equivalent to physical neighbourhoods on the web, how can it be made difficult for children to access inappropriate content without making it unreasonably hard for adults to access that content? Making the entire web a "child-safe zone" is unreasonable, but is it reasonable to make the entire web a "red-light district"? Is it a good idea to make the web a resource which children cannot use without constant, over-the-shoulder supervision?
Neither one of those seem like reasonable extremes, meaning that people will keep looking for some kind of middle ground.
If no such middle ground exists, then you're probably right that "no restrictions for anyone" is better than "harsh restrictions for everyone". Don't fault people for trying to find that reasonable middle ground, though, and keep in mind that while it's selfish for parents to want a no-sex-shop area around their elementary school, it's even more selfish to complain that that would mean you'd have to drive 20 minutes to find a sex shop instead of only 15. Living in communities means making fair and reasonable compromises.
Oh please! Did you not hear his slogan "Change you can believe in"? The entire foundation of that slogan was an attempt to convince people he wasn't a Washington insider.
That you interpreted it as such doesn't mean that's what it meant.
Indeed, I don't see how you could reasonably have believed it meant that. How can a federal senator and a many-term federal senator possibly base their campaign on the idea that they're "outsiders" to the federal government?
"Change" doesn't mean "outsider", no matter how often McCain tried to say otherwise.
He'd look pretty ridiculous saying "Vote for change by voting for a Washington insider", now wouldn't he?
He'd look pretty ridiculous if he believed that change could only come from the outside.
There's no difference between modern western politics and autocratic regimes such as monarchy or even dictatorships.
From which I can only conclude that you know very little of dictatorships, or of democracy.
Major parties will tend to cluster around the centre in their country's political spectrum. This isn't due to some exciting "conspiracy" by "The Man", it's simply due to the fact that most people in most modern western nations don't want their countries to change too much too quickly. (For obvious reasons - times of rapid change tend to be stressful and difficult, and most people have more than enough stress and difficulty in their personal lives without the government adding more.)
Roughly speaking, if most people want no more than C amount of change in a governmental term, then any party which positions itself outside the interval [-C,+C] (centre=0) is inherently saying that it does not intend to reflect the will of the majority, and consequently will not be considered a major party.
It's not a conspiracy; it's just social dynamics.
without the vastly dumbed down population being any the wiser
I have yet to see any reference to "the dumbed down population" or "the sheeple" be anything other than a straw man used to bolster a crackpot argument.
Perhaps you'd like to offer some data to support the notion that today's population is "dumbed down"? In particular, you may wish to focus on demonstrating that today's population is more compliant than the population of McCarthy's era, or the population which would forcibly and repeatedly shock a screaming man at the request of an authority figure.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no evidence today's population is any more dumbed down than the populations of every other generation. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary; note, however, that "why, when I was a boy..." does not constitute evidence.
all this reporting on online attacks by the Chinese is an example of the media reporting bias.
Or attentional biases on your part - this is the first media report which mentions it that I've seen in quite some time, and it's not actually a report on Chinese hacking, but rather a report on the current activities of the US government.
Not, of course, that seeing vastly more reporting on China-vs-US hacks than US-vs-China hacks should be at all surprising, since
- (a) information is much more available in the US, so news media is simply more likely to hear about an event,
- (b) information in the US is predominantly in English, so those of us reading in English are much more likely to hear of it,
- (c) the US is either the country of or a treaty ally of most readers of English-language news media, and attacks on entities we are legally obligated to defend are naturally of rather more interest than attacks on other entities,
- (d) the US is militarily more technologically advanced than China, meaning that China has vastly more to gain from this kind of espionage.
And so on. The simple fact of the matter is that we're more likely to hear of a Chinese hack on the US for a great many reasons which have nothing to do with any purported "media bias". Such a bias may or may not exist, but it's a sign of intellectual laziness and/or dishonesty to simply invoke "teh MSM iz bias!1!" rather than actually thinking about the underlying factors.
Not that intellectual laziness and dishonesty is surprising to find in an argument equating democracy with dictatorship.
There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. Even if it were true that alternative energy sources were more expensive and had a lower EROEI, that does not mean they cannot effectively replace oil. At $60/bbl, world spending on oil is about $1.8T/yr, or about 3% of world GDP, meaning that there's a great deal of scope for an alternative to get "more expensive" before it actually gets too expensive.
More importantly, though, your premises aren't correct.
Wind power has an EROEI of about 25:1, comparable to oil, and costs about $2500/kWp (including pumped storage), or about $1/kWh/yr. By contrast, a barrel of oil contains 1,700kWh; at $60/bbl, that's about $0.035/kWh, or a net present value of about $0.50/kWh/yr. However, oil provides heat energy, which is of lower quality than electrical energy, in the sense that it can provide less useful work (lower exergy). The discount factor varies; a common one is about 3:1 (e.g., heat pump for heating your home), but perhaps the most relevant one here is the 8:1 factor between cars with electric drivetrains and cars with internal combustion ones.
And that's not even considering externalities. Taking everything into account, oil simply isn't a cheap wonder-fuel. Since it isn't, it'll be replaceable.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of work to do to replace it. Almost all of that work is in retooling infrastructure, though (electrified rail, hybrid/electric cars, heat pumps, etc.); the challenge of replacing the actual useful work delivered by oil is relatively minor (30Gb/yr x 1700kWh/bbl = 50T kWh/yr / 8:1 exergy ratio = 6T kWh/yr / 2500 productive hrs/yr = 2.5B kW/hr wind = 2.5TWp * $2.5T/TWp = $6.5T = 10% of world GDP, or about 4 months of world manufacturing capacity).
What can anyone do about it? Nothing. What COULD everyone do? Ignore the game. Don't pirate it. Don't purchase it. Don't talk about it on forums. But that won't happen. Most will happily take whatever the game publisher does to them just so they can have that shiny new version of their favorite game.
Some people do exactly what you suggest. I personally have gone from talking excitedly about a game to literally saying "I guess I'm not getting that, then" in a matter of seconds after finding out that it would install invasive copyright software on my machine. Never played it - plenty of other things to do. A guaranteed sale that was permanently lost for the sole reason of overly-burdensome security measures.
How many people do that? How many times has that happened? I don't know. It does happen, though, which means that it's a very real question whether onerous security measures will help or hurt sales.
No, it actually has quite a bit of stability.. in its skyrocketing trend.
It skyrocketed during the gulf war in 1990, and pretty much stayed at that price afterward
Cite? The price data I can find disagrees with your claim.
Take oil as an example. The price of WTI was about $15-20/bbl in the late 80s, spiked up to $36/bbl in Oct 1990, and then fell back to $20 by the end of 1991, which is where it stayed until the end of the decade.
The useful work is not only through heat. If you inject essentially a liquid and ignite it, even without any heat, it will nearly instantly vaporize, which increases the pressure
Yes, of course. My main concern is that they're saying "it's just like crude!" (to the extent that they're basically saying it can be refined much the same way) while demonstrating properties wildly different from those of crude.
Others have had a good point that some fuels burn cooler - I'm familiar with alcohol, but didn't know it could cause ice buildup due to expansionary cooling - but if it burns like methanol then it's not similar to gasoline, which is what they were claiming.
Fundamentally, there aren't all that many hydrocarbon fuel molecules one can make, meaning their fuel will be some other, already-used fuel. The fact that they're selling it as "gasoline that's so efficient it burns without heat!1!" instead of, say, "we have an efficient means to distill methanol from agri waste" makes them sound like snake-oil salesmen.
Maybe the writer was just a moron, but it sounded like they had a whole dog-and-pony show prepped to demonstrate how "amazing" their "new" fuel was. There's just not that many hydrocarbon fuel molecules - even heavier fuels like kerosene are 12-15 carbon molecules - meaning their fuel just plain can't be all that different. That they appear to be claiming it is just doesn't help their credibility.
I live deep in the midwest....It would be nice if we could do this, but somehow I get the feeling that the political will and financial investment won't be coming
Depending on where you are, it's already there. Iowa, for example, seems pretty keen on wind power, and by now has likely passed Minnesota for third spot in the US in terms of installed capacity.
Wind doesn't need subsidies but until fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies dry up, there isn't enough market incentive to get it going on a scale that's more than a science project.
Then the EU must be running a hell of a big science project, as last year they added more wind than any other generating source, and it provided 4% of their total electricity (source).
The USA must be keen on pumping money into science projects, too, as wind trailed only gas in terms of capacity added last year (and wind's 31% capacity factor is higher than natural gas's 25% - compare EIA capacity and generation figures).
It's too late to say wind power can't scale; it's already done so.
Germany gets 6% from wind. And the us uses 10x as much electricity.
And the US is 30x as large.
Space is not a problem for wind.
Thats 800,000mills. At current prices this will take 28trillion dollars to install
Let's check that, but not with numbers you've just made up.
The USA uses 7x the electricity of Germany, meaning it would need 20%/6%*7 = 23x as many wind turbines. Germany had 22,000MW installed at the end of last year, so the USA would need 516,000MW.
Pickens is planning on spending about $10B for 4,000MW, or about $2.5M/MW. $2.5M/MW * 516,000MW = $1,300,000M = $1.3T = 2% of what you claimed.
So it's pretty clear you don't know what the hell you're talking about, but I bet you Pickens does.
The real problem is that a 200MW farm takes 20 square kilometers. So to fill that 20% need it would cover around a quarter of texas.
At 20km^2 per 200MW, we'd need 516,000MW/200MW*20km^2 = 51,600km^2 of the USA's 9,800,000km^2 of land, or 0.5%.
20% wind is about right. More than that, and there are problems during periods of no wind.
Not if you're sensible enough to use pumped storage to smooth out that wind power.
Based on the modelling I've done (hourly real-world wind production data for all of 2007), a capacity factor of 31% (US avg), 75% round-trip storage efficiency (average), and just 2 days of storage (the Hoover Dam has that for all of the US), 6MW of wind can provide 1MW of electricity more reliably than coal can (> 95% uptime, hours of warning before shutoff).
Using more than 20% wind really is not a technical problem. It's just more expensive (factor of ~3), so it's not yet appealing.
Europeans are paying $9 US or more per gallon of gas and although they don't like it, they manage. What happens to the US economy when gas doubles again? You're having trouble at $4/gallon.
This is such a popular thing to throw around, especially when US gas prices rise, but it's a completely bogus argument.
How would you know? You don't even have the faintest idea what his argument is.
He's not saying "Europeans are so great because they pay so much for gas", and it's news to nobody that that high price is due to tax. What he's saying is that because Europeans tax their gas so much, they've had years to get used to the high prices, and adapt their lifestyles and city layouts accordingly. Going from $4/gal to $8/gal in 10 years is a lot less painful than doing so in 2 years.
His point isn't about Europeans at all; it's about how vulnerable Americans are.
What I think many of the "Just use less" people really want is a complete change of lifestyles.
Not unless you think the lifestyles of Europeans are completely different from those of Americans. Having lived in both regions, I can tell you they're not that different, despite rich-country Europeans using half the energy per capita that Americans do.
Plus walking - or waddling - around town would do many of us a lot of good.
It's easy to say "Just use less", but to get to the point where you can use less sometimes requires some economically UNviable steps, like those I mentioned above.
Which part of "insulate your house and buy an efficient heat source" is not economically viable? In most cases, it'd pay for itself due to energy savings in 4-8 years.
Food? Don't kid yourself - although the US has many farms, a huge proportion of our food comes from overseas.
Don't kid yourself - the US is the world's largest food producer, and exports $30B more in agriculture than it imports, making it the world's largest food exporter.
Margins on such products are super-low; in the end, a huge proportion of the money you spend on your iPod, car, or even tooth brush is basically money that is leaving the country permanently.
Far more than "margins" stays in the country of sale; have you not heard of "overhead"? All those well-paid design, marketing, and managerial types are likely to be in the US.
Not to mention that for some of those products, like cars, the US is one of the world's manufacturing heavyweights.
Why invest in a US company that gets 5% return when you can invest in a Chinese company that is more likely get a 25% return?
Because the Chinese company is also more likely to get a minus 25% return. Or, in reality, -50% so far this year. Volatility in developing markets is hardly new.
You have some strange ideas about the state of the world that don't agree with the available data. You might want to reconsider some of them.
And where did the other $226 go?...the rest to cover cost of labor and materials, neither of which goes to the US.
It went to the guy who ran the cash register where you bought it, and to the guy who stocked it on the shelf, and to the guy who drove it there. Not to mention the guy who supplies electricity to that store, and takes its taxes, and spends its taxes, and earns its profit, much less the guys who come up with the marketing campaigns, and print them in magazines, and...
And all of those guys are in the US (assuming your store is, of course).
Your numbers are completely made up. The situation for an iPod is probably roughly similar to the situation for a CD, which has the overwhelming majority of the purchase price accounted for by local expenses (retail overhead, label=Apple overhead, retail profit, label=Apple profit, marketing, distribution).
The large majority of money from an iPod bought in the US stays in the US.
Some to cover product design done in the US (assuming that isn't part of the $70 profit, which it actually probably is)
You may want to review the definition of the word "profit"; it comes after expenses have been deducted.
Rivera claims that products made from Vetroleum burn at near 100 percent efficiency, leaving behind neither heat nor pollution as proof of the chemical reactions taking place.
Burns without heat? WTF?
Correct me if (when) I'm wrong, but doesn't no heat output mean no enthalpy in the reaction means no ability to do useful work with that reaction? How is a reaction with no heat output supposed to do work in a heat engine like your car?
Your car converts gasoline into mechanical energy by mixing it with air and using the resulting explosion to push a piston (see, for example, here). Without heat output, how is the reaction supposed to cause the rapid pressure change needed to drive the piston?
If "no heat output" is one of their big selling points, I don't see how this can be legit.
If you fill up the tank in five minutes, you're transferring power at 7.368 megawatts. Can you imagine what kind of electrical infrastructure you would need to transfer the same power over mere wires?
Yeah - a bigger one than you'd need.
Those 491.2kWh from 14 gallons of gasoline can take you about 14x25=350 miles. At 0.15kWh/mile, an equivalent electric car would travel those 350 miles using 0.15x350=52.5kWh, or 10.7% as much energy.
52.5kWh / 250kW from the commercially-available charger mentioned here = 12.6 minutes to charge from empty. How many of you run your gas tanks dry and then fill them to the brim on anything other than a rare, long-distance haul? Nobody I know.
Most people I know will get about 3gal each time they go to a gas station, or a little under 20% of their tank's capacity. 20% of 52.5kWh = ~10kWh / 250kWh = 2.5 minutes, which is well under your desired time.
even in urban centers, you're not going to noticeably reduce car use. Its just too convenient. I live in downtown Seattle
Judging the convenience of public transit based on Seattle is like judging the convenience of cars based on an ox-cart.
If you want to look at the effects of a reasonably-available public transit system, most of North America won't give you any guide. Even Manhattan's system was slow, inconvenient, and clunky compared to some of the continental European cities I've been in. If you want to look at functional public transit, I would recommend Prague and the Ruhr Area of Germany as places that've done a pretty good job. With rail/subway every 5 minutes for longer trips and a dense tram network every 2 minutes for shorter trips, I never once had the slightest desire to drive during my week in Prague. For travel inside the city, a car would have been pointless.
Fast, clean, pleasant, and efficient public transit systems not only can exist, they already exist. That's no guarantee they'll be preferable to cars, of course, but they're enormously better than Seattle's system.
the only thing that seems to get people keyed up is cell phone use. Can anyone explain to me why?
Higher cognitive load.
Carrying on a conversation is more mentally taxing than turning a radio dial, and isn't as interruptable, since you're only in control of half of it. See, for example, this research:
"the Carnegie Mellon study, for the first time, used brain imaging to document that listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving. This can cause drivers to weave out of their lane, based on the performance of subjects using a driving simulator."
in the 1990s we would have had a 1500% increase over 4 years
It might interest you to learn that it's no longer the 1990s.
Internet usage has increased 290% in the last 8 years, or an average of less than 20% per year. If growth slowed from 100%/yr in the 1990s to 20%/yr in the 2000s, it should be no surprise that the next few years will see growth that's slower yet.
(This is, incidentally, a nice example of the folly of blindly extrapolating exponential growth rates; if the 2000s had seen the 100% growth rate you talk about, we'd have about 100 billion internet users on earth right now. The other response mentions logistic curves, which you really should look into; they're a standard technique for modelling adoption of technology, and show quite clearly how exponential early growth will progressively slow as the population becomes saturated.)
Slashdot Mirror
No it isn't.
The rate of growth has been slowing for decades. It's not only sub-exponential, it's been sub-linear for 20 years - the world's population was growing at 83M/yr in the 80s, and will end this decade with an average growth of less than 80M/yr, despite a larger population.
Why do you believe that's the most likely outcome? Entire nations have behaved in exactly the opposite manner as you suggest they would; for example, Germany's energy consumption hasn't changed in 20 years, despite a strong economy and substantial population growth. Now that the population of the country is shrinking, its overall energy consumption will most likely also fall.
It is an enormous and fallacious oversimplification to suggest that humans are the same as yeast, for both theoretical reasons (we're able to reason about our situation) and evidential ones (e.g., Germany).
His one paragraph is certainly far more detailed and comprehensive than the zero paragraphs we've seen to back up the original claim.
All of the numbers in the grandparent post are sourced from fairly authoritative sites, and the math he does on them is simple, so anyone can check his results rather than simply believing his conclusions. If you think he's wrong, then how about you say where he's wrong, and provide evidence for that claim, rather than simply waving your hands about some alleged analysis that may or may not even say what it was claimed to?
Evidence beats assertion. If someone doesn't back up their claims, why should we believe them?
You're confusing the communication technology (internet, ink-on-paper) with the communication technique (email vs. webpage, letter vs. newspaper).
Censoring private communication is arguably quite different from censoring publication, a fact which is already reflected in law. Whispering "fire" in a friend's ear while at the theatre will have very different effects - and almost certainly has very different legal ramifications - than shouting "Fire!!" at the top of your lungs. Private and public communication serves different purposes, so it is not unreasonable to consider whether it should have different rules.
You do realize that zoning laws are the sex shop equivalent of censorship, don't you?
In most places, there are restrictions on where certain types of businesses (sex shops, liquor stores, brothels, etc.) can be located, in part so people can choose to avoid being exposed to those stores. It would substantially interfere with the right of people to choose what was appropriate for themselves and their children if every toy store in the city had a sex toy store - with a big window display - open up right beside it.
As it is, zoning laws create neighbourhoods where certain types of businesses (such as sex shops) cannot be found, so children for whom those businesses are not appropriate can move around without a constant (and unreasonable) level of supervision. At the same time, those businesses are still permitted to exist, so people for whom those businesses are desirable can still access them. The tradeoff between the two groups (sometimes longer travel to a sex shop but some appropriate neighbourhoods for children) is (hopefully carefully) carefully judged and set according to local needs.
The idea is to apply that reasonable tradeoff to the web, and that's not innately a bad idea.
The problem, as usual, is implementation details. With no real equivalent to physical neighbourhoods on the web, how can it be made difficult for children to access inappropriate content without making it unreasonably hard for adults to access that content? Making the entire web a "child-safe zone" is unreasonable, but is it reasonable to make the entire web a "red-light district"? Is it a good idea to make the web a resource which children cannot use without constant, over-the-shoulder supervision?
Neither one of those seem like reasonable extremes, meaning that people will keep looking for some kind of middle ground.
If no such middle ground exists, then you're probably right that "no restrictions for anyone" is better than "harsh restrictions for everyone". Don't fault people for trying to find that reasonable middle ground, though, and keep in mind that while it's selfish for parents to want a no-sex-shop area around their elementary school, it's even more selfish to complain that that would mean you'd have to drive 20 minutes to find a sex shop instead of only 15. Living in communities means making fair and reasonable compromises.
That you interpreted it as such doesn't mean that's what it meant.
Indeed, I don't see how you could reasonably have believed it meant that. How can a federal senator and a many-term federal senator possibly base their campaign on the idea that they're "outsiders" to the federal government?
"Change" doesn't mean "outsider", no matter how often McCain tried to say otherwise.
He'd look pretty ridiculous if he believed that change could only come from the outside.
From which I can only conclude that you know very little of dictatorships, or of democracy.
Major parties will tend to cluster around the centre in their country's political spectrum. This isn't due to some exciting "conspiracy" by "The Man", it's simply due to the fact that most people in most modern western nations don't want their countries to change too much too quickly. (For obvious reasons - times of rapid change tend to be stressful and difficult, and most people have more than enough stress and difficulty in their personal lives without the government adding more.)
Roughly speaking, if most people want no more than C amount of change in a governmental term, then any party which positions itself outside the interval [-C,+C] (centre=0) is inherently saying that it does not intend to reflect the will of the majority, and consequently will not be considered a major party.
It's not a conspiracy; it's just social dynamics.
I have yet to see any reference to "the dumbed down population" or "the sheeple" be anything other than a straw man used to bolster a crackpot argument.
Perhaps you'd like to offer some data to support the notion that today's population is "dumbed down"? In particular, you may wish to focus on demonstrating that today's population is more compliant than the population of McCarthy's era, or the population which would forcibly and repeatedly shock a screaming man at the request of an authority figure.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no evidence today's population is any more dumbed down than the populations of every other generation. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary; note, however, that "why, when I was a boy..." does not constitute evidence.
Or attentional biases on your part - this is the first media report which mentions it that I've seen in quite some time, and it's not actually a report on Chinese hacking, but rather a report on the current activities of the US government.
Not, of course, that seeing vastly more reporting on China-vs-US hacks than US-vs-China hacks should be at all surprising, since
- (a) information is much more available in the US, so news media is simply more likely to hear about an event,
- (b) information in the US is predominantly in English, so those of us reading in English are much more likely to hear of it,
- (c) the US is either the country of or a treaty ally of most readers of English-language news media, and attacks on entities we are legally obligated to defend are naturally of rather more interest than attacks on other entities,
- (d) the US is militarily more technologically advanced than China, meaning that China has vastly more to gain from this kind of espionage.
And so on. The simple fact of the matter is that we're more likely to hear of a Chinese hack on the US for a great many reasons which have nothing to do with any purported "media bias". Such a bias may or may not exist, but it's a sign of intellectual laziness and/or dishonesty to simply invoke "teh MSM iz bias!1!" rather than actually thinking about the underlying factors.
Not that intellectual laziness and dishonesty is surprising to find in an argument equating democracy with dictatorship.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. Even if it were true that alternative energy sources were more expensive and had a lower EROEI, that does not mean they cannot effectively replace oil. At $60/bbl, world spending on oil is about $1.8T/yr, or about 3% of world GDP, meaning that there's a great deal of scope for an alternative to get "more expensive" before it actually gets too expensive.
More importantly, though, your premises aren't correct.
Wind power has an EROEI of about 25:1, comparable to oil, and costs about $2500/kWp (including pumped storage), or about $1/kWh/yr. By contrast, a barrel of oil contains 1,700kWh; at $60/bbl, that's about $0.035/kWh, or a net present value of about $0.50/kWh/yr. However, oil provides heat energy, which is of lower quality than electrical energy, in the sense that it can provide less useful work (lower exergy). The discount factor varies; a common one is about 3:1 (e.g., heat pump for heating your home), but perhaps the most relevant one here is the 8:1 factor between cars with electric drivetrains and cars with internal combustion ones.
And that's not even considering externalities. Taking everything into account, oil simply isn't a cheap wonder-fuel. Since it isn't, it'll be replaceable.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of work to do to replace it. Almost all of that work is in retooling infrastructure, though (electrified rail, hybrid/electric cars, heat pumps, etc.); the challenge of replacing the actual useful work delivered by oil is relatively minor (30Gb/yr x 1700kWh/bbl = 50T kWh/yr / 8:1 exergy ratio = 6T kWh/yr / 2500 productive hrs/yr = 2.5B kW/hr wind = 2.5TWp * $2.5T/TWp = $6.5T = 10% of world GDP, or about 4 months of world manufacturing capacity).
Some people do exactly what you suggest. I personally have gone from talking excitedly about a game to literally saying "I guess I'm not getting that, then" in a matter of seconds after finding out that it would install invasive copyright software on my machine. Never played it - plenty of other things to do. A guaranteed sale that was permanently lost for the sole reason of overly-burdensome security measures.
How many people do that? How many times has that happened? I don't know. It does happen, though, which means that it's a very real question whether onerous security measures will help or hurt sales.
Cite? The price data I can find disagrees with your claim.
Take oil as an example. The price of WTI was about $15-20/bbl in the late 80s, spiked up to $36/bbl in Oct 1990, and then fell back to $20 by the end of 1991, which is where it stayed until the end of the decade.
THANK GOD!
Yes, of course. My main concern is that they're saying "it's just like crude!" (to the extent that they're basically saying it can be refined much the same way) while demonstrating properties wildly different from those of crude.
Others have had a good point that some fuels burn cooler - I'm familiar with alcohol, but didn't know it could cause ice buildup due to expansionary cooling - but if it burns like methanol then it's not similar to gasoline, which is what they were claiming.
Fundamentally, there aren't all that many hydrocarbon fuel molecules one can make, meaning their fuel will be some other, already-used fuel. The fact that they're selling it as "gasoline that's so efficient it burns without heat!1!" instead of, say, "we have an efficient means to distill methanol from agri waste" makes them sound like snake-oil salesmen.
Maybe the writer was just a moron, but it sounded like they had a whole dog-and-pony show prepped to demonstrate how "amazing" their "new" fuel was. There's just not that many hydrocarbon fuel molecules - even heavier fuels like kerosene are 12-15 carbon molecules - meaning their fuel just plain can't be all that different. That they appear to be claiming it is just doesn't help their credibility.
Depending on where you are, it's already there. Iowa, for example, seems pretty keen on wind power, and by now has likely passed Minnesota for third spot in the US in terms of installed capacity.
That you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Pumped storage is 75-80% efficient (round-trip) for storing electricity, and is a mature technology that's already in wide use all over the world.
Then the EU must be running a hell of a big science project, as last year they added more wind than any other generating source, and it provided 4% of their total electricity (source).
The USA must be keen on pumping money into science projects, too, as wind trailed only gas in terms of capacity added last year (and wind's 31% capacity factor is higher than natural gas's 25% - compare EIA capacity and generation figures).
It's too late to say wind power can't scale; it's already done so.
And the US is 30x as large.
Space is not a problem for wind.
Let's check that, but not with numbers you've just made up.
The USA uses 7x the electricity of Germany, meaning it would need 20%/6%*7 = 23x as many wind turbines. Germany had 22,000MW installed at the end of last year, so the USA would need 516,000MW.
Pickens is planning on spending about $10B for 4,000MW, or about $2.5M/MW. $2.5M/MW * 516,000MW = $1,300,000M = $1.3T = 2% of what you claimed.
So it's pretty clear you don't know what the hell you're talking about, but I bet you Pickens does.
At 20km^2 per 200MW, we'd need 516,000MW/200MW*20km^2 = 51,600km^2 of the USA's 9,800,000km^2 of land, or 0.5%.
Space is not a problem for wind.
Not if you're sensible enough to use pumped storage to smooth out that wind power.
Based on the modelling I've done (hourly real-world wind production data for all of 2007), a capacity factor of 31% (US avg), 75% round-trip storage efficiency (average), and just 2 days of storage (the Hoover Dam has that for all of the US), 6MW of wind can provide 1MW of electricity more reliably than coal can (> 95% uptime, hours of warning before shutoff).
Using more than 20% wind really is not a technical problem. It's just more expensive (factor of ~3), so it's not yet appealing.
How would you know? You don't even have the faintest idea what his argument is.
He's not saying "Europeans are so great because they pay so much for gas", and it's news to nobody that that high price is due to tax. What he's saying is that because Europeans tax their gas so much, they've had years to get used to the high prices, and adapt their lifestyles and city layouts accordingly. Going from $4/gal to $8/gal in 10 years is a lot less painful than doing so in 2 years.
His point isn't about Europeans at all; it's about how vulnerable Americans are.
Not unless you think the lifestyles of Europeans are completely different from those of Americans. Having lived in both regions, I can tell you they're not that different, despite rich-country Europeans using half the energy per capita that Americans do.
Plus walking - or waddling - around town would do many of us a lot of good.
Which part of "insulate your house and buy an efficient heat source" is not economically viable? In most cases, it'd pay for itself due to energy savings in 4-8 years.
Don't kid yourself - the US is the world's largest food producer, and exports $30B more in agriculture than it imports, making it the world's largest food exporter.
Far more than "margins" stays in the country of sale; have you not heard of "overhead"? All those well-paid design, marketing, and managerial types are likely to be in the US.
Not to mention that for some of those products, like cars, the US is one of the world's manufacturing heavyweights.
Because the Chinese company is also more likely to get a minus 25% return. Or, in reality, -50% so far this year. Volatility in developing markets is hardly new.
You have some strange ideas about the state of the world that don't agree with the available data. You might want to reconsider some of them.
It went to the guy who ran the cash register where you bought it, and to the guy who stocked it on the shelf, and to the guy who drove it there. Not to mention the guy who supplies electricity to that store, and takes its taxes, and spends its taxes, and earns its profit, much less the guys who come up with the marketing campaigns, and print them in magazines, and...
And all of those guys are in the US (assuming your store is, of course).
Your numbers are completely made up. The situation for an iPod is probably roughly similar to the situation for a CD, which has the overwhelming majority of the purchase price accounted for by local expenses (retail overhead, label=Apple overhead, retail profit, label=Apple profit, marketing, distribution).
The large majority of money from an iPod bought in the US stays in the US.
You may want to review the definition of the word "profit"; it comes after expenses have been deducted.
Burns without heat? WTF?
Correct me if (when) I'm wrong, but doesn't no heat output mean no enthalpy in the reaction means no ability to do useful work with that reaction? How is a reaction with no heat output supposed to do work in a heat engine like your car?
Your car converts gasoline into mechanical energy by mixing it with air and using the resulting explosion to push a piston (see, for example, here). Without heat output, how is the reaction supposed to cause the rapid pressure change needed to drive the piston?
If "no heat output" is one of their big selling points, I don't see how this can be legit.
Yeah - a bigger one than you'd need.
Those 491.2kWh from 14 gallons of gasoline can take you about 14x25=350 miles. At 0.15kWh/mile, an equivalent electric car would travel those 350 miles using 0.15x350=52.5kWh, or 10.7% as much energy.
52.5kWh / 250kW from the commercially-available charger mentioned here = 12.6 minutes to charge from empty. How many of you run your gas tanks dry and then fill them to the brim on anything other than a rare, long-distance haul? Nobody I know.
Most people I know will get about 3gal each time they go to a gas station, or a little under 20% of their tank's capacity. 20% of 52.5kWh = ~10kWh / 250kWh = 2.5 minutes, which is well under your desired time.
Judging the convenience of public transit based on Seattle is like judging the convenience of cars based on an ox-cart.
If you want to look at the effects of a reasonably-available public transit system, most of North America won't give you any guide. Even Manhattan's system was slow, inconvenient, and clunky compared to some of the continental European cities I've been in. If you want to look at functional public transit, I would recommend Prague and the Ruhr Area of Germany as places that've done a pretty good job. With rail/subway every 5 minutes for longer trips and a dense tram network every 2 minutes for shorter trips, I never once had the slightest desire to drive during my week in Prague. For travel inside the city, a car would have been pointless.
Fast, clean, pleasant, and efficient public transit systems not only can exist, they already exist. That's no guarantee they'll be preferable to cars, of course, but they're enormously better than Seattle's system.
"a 2006 study concluded that talking on a cell phone while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk, even if the phone is a hands-free model."
The problem isn't the phone occupying your hands; the problem is the phone occupying your brain.
Apparently.
Higher cognitive load.
Carrying on a conversation is more mentally taxing than turning a radio dial, and isn't as interruptable, since you're only in control of half of it. See, for example, this research:
"the Carnegie Mellon study, for the first time, used brain imaging to document that listening alone reduces by 37 percent the amount of brain activity associated with driving. This can cause drivers to weave out of their lane, based on the performance of subjects using a driving simulator."
Internet usage has increased 290% in the last 8 years, or an average of less than 20% per year. If growth slowed from 100%/yr in the 1990s to 20%/yr in the 2000s, it should be no surprise that the next few years will see growth that's slower yet.
(This is, incidentally, a nice example of the folly of blindly extrapolating exponential growth rates; if the 2000s had seen the 100% growth rate you talk about, we'd have about 100 billion internet users on earth right now. The other response mentions logistic curves, which you really should look into; they're a standard technique for modelling adoption of technology, and show quite clearly how exponential early growth will progressively slow as the population becomes saturated.)