Having examined the specs on this new vehicle, an obvious question occurs to me:
Could the steam car work with new coal technologies?
I believe they could. Coal is still by far the cheapest and most plentiful fossil fuel. Thirty years of mostly mediocre research has yielded a few new concepts for clean, effective combustion of coal; application of these technologies to unanticipated fields (e.g. steam-powered external combustion automobiles, home heating, kilns and crucibles, etc.) would shift the economics of developing these technologies.
Currently, advanced coal technologies are mostly in development as an alternative to costly regulations on the construction and expansion of coal-burning power plants. By that measure, most of these technologies would be deemed to expensive. Measured as a power source to replace our internal combustion engines, coal external combustion could be to gasoline internal combustion what the latter was to the former a hundred years ago.
Who gets to arbitrate what context makes things appropriate?
Indeed. The tendency in any established beauracracy is towards "fixing" the "system", regardless of the parent system's necessity or effectiveness. So we think about how the FCC does and should handle things, rather than about doing away with governments altogether, which would make a lot more sense. Wouldn't both sides be happier settling the "moral values" issue with guns? I know I would. I'm inclined to say that only the individual has the capacity to make a judgment call on what is appropriate. I fail to see: the newsworthiness of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, or indeed any soft-news story ("...is Atkins harming the wheat growers?", et al.); any appropriate context in a news broadcast for "soft news", or; why the FCC (whose raison d'etre I also doubt) would find any redeeming service to the public in using the public's airwaves to disseminate the sort of utterly distractionist smeg the networks produce. They should pull every broadcast license and make every one come back and explain why we need them at all. I'd rather see the acts described on Oprah plastered on billboards, television, or what have you than to not see all the atrocities taking place in countries these same media firms deem unsafe and unfit for real coverage. Take the Central African War (or whatever you want to call it), which has killed millions of innocents, where more people have died than in any war since WWII (note: this excludes the Cultural Revolution in China), and yet it is wholly ignored. Meanwhile, we perpetually wring our hands over - and spend our billions on - the ruining of two skyscrapers, four jet airplanes, and a few thousand lives. So an African is worth 0.1-0.2% of an American in the eyes of these stations. They're destroying human civilization all right, just not in the way they're alleged to have. The whole "moral values" community needs to be ignored until it goes away. Teen pregnancy has dropped for over a decade although teen sex was going crazy until quite recently; drug use has remained flat-ish over a decade where serious crimes dropped by over a third. Trace back the advocates of morality and it always ends with people who wholeheartedly belive that a higher power categorized human behaviors and shared with them what was okay and what was not. People are having oral-anal sex or group sex, this is something that people really do, and will continue to do; some people are so scared of the real nature of human sexuality that they run from it. Hear any complaints about depicting the real violence at Omaha Beach? No, they complain about the f-word. Puritanism - and indeed religious fundamentalism in general - has and will remain the real problem destroying our world.
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Having examined the specs on this new vehicle, an obvious question occurs to me:
Could the steam car work with new coal technologies?
I believe they could. Coal is still by far the cheapest and most plentiful fossil fuel. Thirty years of mostly mediocre research has yielded a few new concepts for clean, effective combustion of coal; application of these technologies to unanticipated fields (e.g. steam-powered external combustion automobiles, home heating, kilns and crucibles, etc.) would shift the economics of developing these technologies.
Currently, advanced coal technologies are mostly in development as an alternative to costly regulations on the construction and expansion of coal-burning power plants. By that measure, most of these technologies would be deemed to expensive. Measured as a power source to replace our internal combustion engines, coal external combustion could be to gasoline internal combustion what the latter was to the former a hundred years ago.
Just a thought.
Who gets to arbitrate what context makes things appropriate?
Indeed. The tendency in any established beauracracy is towards "fixing" the "system", regardless of the parent system's necessity or effectiveness. So we think about how the FCC does and should handle things, rather than about doing away with governments altogether, which would make a lot more sense. Wouldn't both sides be happier settling the "moral values" issue with guns? I know I would. I'm inclined to say that only the individual has the capacity to make a judgment call on what is appropriate.
I fail to see: the newsworthiness of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, or indeed any soft-news story ("...is Atkins harming the wheat growers?", et al.); any appropriate context in a news broadcast for "soft news", or; why the FCC (whose raison d'etre I also doubt) would find any redeeming service to the public in using the public's airwaves to disseminate the sort of utterly distractionist smeg the networks produce.
They should pull every broadcast license and make every one come back and explain why we need them at all.
I'd rather see the acts described on Oprah plastered on billboards, television, or what have you than to not see all the atrocities taking place in countries these same media firms deem unsafe and unfit for real coverage. Take the Central African War (or whatever you want to call it), which has killed millions of innocents, where more people have died than in any war since WWII (note: this excludes the Cultural Revolution in China), and yet it is wholly ignored. Meanwhile, we perpetually wring our hands over - and spend our billions on - the ruining of two skyscrapers, four jet airplanes, and a few thousand lives. So an African is worth 0.1-0.2% of an American in the eyes of these stations. They're destroying human civilization all right, just not in the way they're alleged to have.
The whole "moral values" community needs to be ignored until it goes away. Teen pregnancy has dropped for over a decade although teen sex was going crazy until quite recently; drug use has remained flat-ish over a decade where serious crimes dropped by over a third. Trace back the advocates of morality and it always ends with people who wholeheartedly belive that a higher power categorized human behaviors and shared with them what was okay and what was not. People are having oral-anal sex or group sex, this is something that people really do, and will continue to do; some people are so scared of the real nature of human sexuality that they run from it. Hear any complaints about depicting the real violence at Omaha Beach? No, they complain about the f-word. Puritanism - and indeed religious fundamentalism in general - has and will remain the real problem destroying our world.