Seriously, I recently find way more entertainment in 30 year old shows than in the rubbish produced today.
There was better TV 30 years ago? A few TV shows from the top of my head, Knight Rider, ALF, Riptide, Manimal, and A-Team. Not great TV as I recall, just a mix of good to awful. I remember A-Team as something I looked forward to watching. ALF was campy fun. Manimal was memorable mostly because of how awful it was.
If you want to talk about formulaic and predictable then look at A-Team, Knight Rider, or just about any other man vs. evil in the world show. Come to think of it the man vs. evil trope is pretty common well before and after the 1980s. We'll see the hero (or hero and sidekick, or small team of heroes) do some humorous banter over an everyday task, like buying a newspaper or going to a movie, when something happens that sucks them in. They get introduced to the monster of the week by a damsel in distress, a hungry child, or some other character that can gather easy sympathy. This monster shows how evil he/she/it can be either as part of the opening or shortly after by some terrible act. The hero or heroes create a strategy to fight using amazing skills, gadgetry, or just plain magic. They face off, and the monster is captured, killed, or is chased off to return in a later episode.
The only real surprise is if the ending is a happy one with everyone dancing and singing, a downer ending with a serious lesson to ponder, or a bittersweet ending with something like a dead loved one mourned but the others live on free from the monster of the week.
Maybe you like the old TV shows better because the terrible ones don't get re-runs on TV, only the good ones with three or more good seasons (and the bad season shown out of order to hide the string of bad episodes) getting any air play now.
So you are confirming what so many global warming "deniers" have said? That's what it looks like to me. Curious, plants consume CO2 more efficiently when it is more concentrated in the air. Almost as if there has been a natural control on global warming and cooling that has existed for millions of years. Something has been keeping the climate so stable for so long, now we've confirmed one mechanism for that.
Well, looks like we have nothing to worry about now.
Oh, the lowered nutrition value of plant life is a problem now? I wonder if there is a mechanism we might find where animals adapt to changing food sources. Like, I don't know, some means by where those animals that can survive on this plant life reproduce with offspring that also have this adaptation? Well, it's just a theory I have.
Ah, I see. You'd rather people die than use nuclear power. All you said was a repeat of what you said before, that nuclear power costs too much so we should all die instead.
If you are opposed to nuclear power then you must not be opposed to billions of people starving to death.
I don't understand this opposition to nuclear power. Whenever it's brought up people complain about the cost, but we have people willing to pay extra to utilities to build out wind power. Where is my option to toss a few extra bucks to buy nuclear power?
To the deniers: If we agree on nothing else can we at least agree on continuing to fund well planned scientific studies on the climate?
But... Al Gore and Arnold Shrwartzenwhatever told me the debate was over.
It's not just the "deniers" that want to stop the research.
If the politicians were serious about an "all the above" solution to solving the problems of CO2 producing fuels then they'd be funding research into nuclear power, fission and fusion. Since they are not I must conclude that global warming is not a problem.
If the problem of nuclear power was the waste it produces then we'd see the federal government follow through on the nuclear waste deposit that they've held up for 30 years. Since they haven't then nuclear waste must not be a problem.
Which is it? Is global warming an end of life event that can only be averted by eliminating CO2 production? Or, is nuclear power such a greater threat that we'd rather see all life end from global warming first? If we can wait for solar power and "giga-batteries" to replace coal then global warming doesn't seem like an immediate problem.
You want me to agree that global warming is a problem? Then agree with me that nuclear power needs to be part of the solution. If you fear nuclear power more than global warming then you are telling me that global warming is not a problem.
Two things are crippling America: poor basic education in some parts of America due to widely uneven funding based on local communities resources (kinda defeats the idea of giving the next generation a fair chance).
The declining state of education in America seems to coincide with the creation of a federal government department dedicated with "helping" it. Maybe less government is in order.
The other is legalized corruption by allowing unlimited corporate donations to politicians; for example this has resulted in American health care costs being more than twice that of the next country in the entire world! (With worse outcomes)
People talk about how "untrammeled capitalism" is ruining everything but get real quiet when asked just how "trammeled" it needs to be. Health care is a mess because of government intervention. If you want prices to go down then open up competition, let people buy insurance across state lines. Don't make people buy it. If it's against the law to go without insurance then the insurance companies can charge whatever they like because you have to pay the price no matter how high it is. If there is a fine to go without insurance then guess what will inevitably happen, the prices will rise to the cost of the fine. Is that too hard to understand?
Did I say that's all was needed? Of course other materials would need to be used. The point is that farmers currently use source of lime that produced a lot of CO2 and we have a means to produce this lime that is CO2 negative. To get this working we need nuclear power, nothing else we currently have will do. That might change in the future but it's nuclear power or this won't work.
Also, nuclear power generation is horrendously expensive - a new plan with decades old but improved design costs 30 billion.
More expensive than finding a new planet? Any argument against nuclear power looks really petty when compared to saving life on Earth. I just proposed a plan to save all life on Earth and all you can come up with is, "it will cost too much". Compared to what? You have a better plan?
We can't use wind power. Those silly windmills made of wood and sheet metal can't power anything more than a small water pump. Oh, you say windmill technology has improved in the last 100 years? IMPOSSIBLE! Because... because I said so. The argument that nuclear power has stood still for the last 50 years is just as logical that wind power has stood still. Why is it that whenever windmills and solar panels are brought up we get, "Yeah, it still sucks now but just wait ten years!" At the same time when nuclear power is brought up we get mentions of the problems of nuclear power from 50 years ago, as if nobody has bothered to improve the technology.
There are hundreds of nuclear power plants operating on Earth right now. We know how to build them to produce power safely, reliably, and cheaply. Any complaints on them should be left in the 1970s when the USA stopped building them until very recently. When people complain about the spent fuel the claim is that the mass is as much as the heaviest element, with the radioactivity of the deadliest element, with a half life of the longest lived element. To make it sound dangerous they have to lie.
It's not "waste", it's fission products that contain some very valuable materials if we'd just get some politicians to take their head out of the 1970s. I guess it makes sense, so many of them got into office in the 1970s. Nuclear power costs go down with economies of scale, kind of like how solar panels get cheaper the more they are made.
Once you have some nuclear power plants to stop the CO2 released from coal then use some of that nuclear power to mine and pulverize basalt rock as fertilizer for crops.
Once spread on the fields the calcium oxide, or lime, in basalt will react with the CO2 in the soil to reduce the acidity. Farmers already lime their fields, only now it's produced from mining limestone and then cooking off the CO2 to produce lime. Any CO2 this takes from the soil will only counteract what was released in the lime kilns. It does nothing for the CO2 released from the fuel burned in the kilns. Any CO2 taken from the soil will mean reducing CO2 in the air since natural processes, such as the rain, will carry the CO2 out of the air into the soil where the lime can trap it chemically as limestone, or CaCO3.
There are other uses for the lime and sand from the mined basalt, like making cement and glass. Using nuclear power is an important aspect of this plan since this is an energy intensive process that would have to operate in the mines. They'll have to mine where the rock is easy to reach, not where the sun shines and wind blows. They may be far from infrastructure, making running power lines impractical.
Farmers need to replace this lime in the fields continuously as the nutrients are taken up in the crops and as rains wash it away, so it's not like they spread it out once and the acidity problem is fixed. There is an incredible amount of basalt on Earth, we just will not run out.
I don't understand how people can argue that big companies are bad for us and big government is good. Both are bad. The difference with a company is that no one is forced to buy their product or service, with a government there is no choice. If I had to choose between the two then I'll take the big companies, they don't have people with guns to take my money if I don't like their services.
I hear this with oil companies, that there is no choice. Sure there is. It's that the choice to do without their products is not nearly as pleasant as using their products. The oil companies aren't "stealing" your money when you fill up your car any more than you are "stealing" their fuel. Nobody trades down, you gain with having the fuel instead of the money, and they gain by having your money instead of the fuel.
This goes for people with a lot of money too. If you can prove that they stole the money they have then they deserve to be put in prison. Just because they have more money than you doesn't mean they are obligated to share it with you. Using the force of the government to take their money by force through taxation is just theft by proxy.
Stopping this bad advertising with government is playing with fire. It's not always easy to prove fraud. People get things wrong all the time, that's different than lying. If someone claims a product does something out of ignorance then that's not fraud. That's buying from an idiot. It also brings up the question on who is the bigger idiot, the buyer or seller. If someone knows the product they are selling cannot perform as advertised then that is fraud. Creating a government large enough to handle every single way that fraud could happen is creating a government that can get out of control.
I'm reminded of the warning labels that California likes to put on everything. These are usually worded something like, "This product contains a material known by the State of California to cause cancer." This reached absurdity when they tried to make a bottled water plant put arsenic warnings on the bottles. Sure, the water contained detectable amounts of arsenic but then so does the tap water provided by government owned water treatment plants. Putting these warnings on everything makes them meaningless and gives the government a reason to poke their nose in your business.
You want to stop the practice of sending young men off to die in some far off desert? Put these dictators out of business. Make domestic energy so cheap that we don't have to go over there to get more. Implement a true "all the above" energy strategy. I hear Democrats (and it's almost always Democrats) talk about an all the above strategy to reduce CO2 output but when something threatens to actually solve the problem it gets killed in congressional bullshit.
Keystone XL is a good example. Killing this project doesn't stop people from burning oil, it just diverts the movement of oil to whatever path of least resistance might be. In this case it's oil from a friendly neighbor, Canada, not ending up in refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Instead it would likely end up on a ship bound for China or Japan. This is because it's easier for Canada to sell the oil there, and the USA to buy oil from South America, than try to ship the oil by truck or rail.
You want to reduce oil spills? Then build more pipelines, they don't spill near as often as ships, trucks, or trains. These pipes move natural gas too. Not great as far as CO2 goes but still 1/2 the CO2 output of coal for electricity production.
Let's talk electricity production too. You want to stop the burning of coal? Then build nuclear power plants. We've started building them again but not nearly fast enough. We need to build one gigawatt nuclear power plant per month to replace the current coal and nuclear power plants at the rate they are getting shut down. That's not adding any new capacity, that's just keeping up with retiring old power plants.
We replace coal with nuclear then we can use this abundant natural gas for our cars and trucks. If you think that for some reason we can't build a new nuclear power plant every month then think again. We've done it before, we can do it again.
Let's do all the above. Wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas, and even coal. Put those oil funded dictators out of business.
I've always wondered how many people would be driving electric cars if it wasn't for the state/Fed subsidies (rebates) or other benefits like Leaf's free charging.
I've always wondered how many people would be driving ICE cars if they had to pay to remove the CO2 that they are pumping into the atmosphere.
People are effectively paying for the CO2 emitted, they pay in that they passed on the EV tax break. What would it cost to remove the CO2 rather than just stop producing more? That depends on how it's done, wouldn't it?
I read a paper some time ago from, as I recall, a retired chemistry professor. His plan to take CO2 from the atmosphere was to mine basalt and spread it out on cropland. Basalt is mostly just sand, which does nothing for the crops. About a quarter of it is calcium and magnesium oxides that react with CO2 and create limestone. There's a lot of basalt to mine, we aren't going to run out.
Why would farmers agree to have ground basalt spread on their fields? Because they do something like this already, spreading lime on fields is a common practice to control acidity in the soil and restore nutrients taken up by the crops. This professor (I can't remember his name) claims farmers should be able to be convinced to do this with a subsidy. I assume this subsidy would cover the cost difference of getting the lime from traditional sources plus a bit for the trouble.
That brings the question on how farmers get this lime now for their fields. Turns out that they mine limestone and cook the CO2 out in large furnaces. This is a very old practice, going back hundreds or thousands of years. There are century old lime kilns all over the world. So, all the CO2 that this lime captures is the same as what was released in the firing of the limestone. Then there is the CO2 produced from fueling the furnaces.
Why not replace this lime with basalt now? Why would we have to pay farmers to do this? Because basalt is a very hard rock and is difficult to mine. Limestone is relatively soft and easy to mine. Then there is the matter that basalt is only about half as effective by weight to control acidity as the lime from a lime kiln. This costs money. Don't blame the farmers for this, they just want to grow food as cheaply as they can so that you can buy it.
Oh, another reason why this professor might not be taken seriously. He advocates using nuclear power to drive this basalt mining. The reasoning is simple, driving heavy mining equipment from wind and solar power is simply not practical. Using fossil fuels to drive the process is counter productive.
So, what would this cost? One cost is having to use nuclear power. It seems that "environmentalists" that lack basic arithmetic skills cannot seem to figure out that carbon sequestration like this cannot be practically driven by wind and solar. If you want to get CO2 out of the air then first stop digging. That means nuclear power. Next step is mine basalt and grind it up so the natural process of reacting with CO2 in the air is sped up enormously. The first step, using nuclear power costs nothing really, people are willing to build nuclear power if only given permission to do so. The second step, where CO2 is actually removed, costs money. According to this professor it's very expensive now because there is no market, create a market and the price should come down.
The reason they are built as "tricycles" is it greatly simplifies the suspension and drive train. Having only three wheels is now banned in many of the races like this is because of a very bad accident when a solar car lost one of it's wheels while on an overpass. The car skidded out of control into the sidewall of the bridge, tossing the windscreen to the road below and injuring the driver. I'm not aware of any solar car race, or similar competition, that will allow a three wheeled vehicle since.
That does not mean the cars won't still be a tricycle style design, there are still advantages to having three points of contact on the road instead of four. What they will do is put the rear two wheels side by side. This avoids the complexity and weight of a differential axle, or the (potentially unsafe) compromise of a single driven wheel. Having independently driven wheels is expensive, heavy, and also potentially unsafe. Why would two motors be unsafe? Imagine a controller failure or wiring mistake where each wheel is driven in opposite directions.
I recall an electric race car that was required to have four wheels but wanted a narrow front for aerodynamic reasons. This was solved by putting the two front steering wheels in the center line of the vehicle, one behind the other.
I agree that these vehicles don't always meet the definition of a car. If they do, such as having four wheels to comply with laws or race regulations, then they still push the limits of that definition.
What good is a cell phone when you need power now and can't even charge a cell phone. And you need power for other necessities more than a Cell phone where they tell you help is not available now.
I think of the reports of the "Cajun Navy" in Texas that went out to rescue people stranded by flood waters, or in need of supplies to shelter in place. The people in the "Cajun Navy" were volunteers that were not part of any larger rescue organization, they had no real plan in place and no real hierarchy. These people were able to coordinate over cell phones and internet because cell service survived or was restored quickly. The people in need of help may have cell phones in need of a charge, or no cell phone at all, but the people coming in to help could use the cell service to be more effective.
The people that planned ahead for a smaller storm, with hand crank cell phone chargers among their survival kit, would certainly appreciate cell phone service to contact family and let them know all is well (which would prevent a diversion of resources for a search and rescue of such people) or if they are in need of supplies then they can contact others to assist in their coordination.
At a minimum we have people in need of communication for their mental well being. Humans are complex social creatures and even knowing that help is not available now is better than knowing nothing at all. People need to know that there are other people out there that have not given up and are trying. Maybe some of these people will use the cell phone service to watch cat videos, but then at least this distracts from how cold and hungry they are.
Let's assume what you say is true, that wind is cheaper than coal. What happens when, not if, another hurricane hits the island? I can put a coal plant in a concrete bunker and not interfere with it's operation. After a major storm there will likely still need to be repairs, like replacing smokestacks and transmission lines, but the bulk of the plant will still remain. What will these windmills look like afterwards? I have an idea, they'll look like dandelion stalks after the seeds have blown away in the wind.
Same for solar thermal or PV, what will they look like after 160 kph winds? These things are made of glass, they have to be. Maybe they can be covered with the same kind of glass we use on smartphones and tablet computers now but it's one thing to make pieces of glass a few centimeters across and another to make them a square meter in size.
It's not like an island like Puerto Rico can just spread out the windmills and solar collectors to reduce losses in a hurricane, the island is only so big. The island is less than 200 km across at it's widest point, and hurricanes can be many times larger than that.
Wanting to reduce CO2 output is great, but we must also be practical. Wind and solar are bad ideas in hurricane prone areas. Repairs after storms need to be taken into account on the total cost of ownership. A nuclear power plant can be put in a concrete bunker, in fact that's common practice for reasons other than storm readiness but it also holds up to storms quite well. Nuclear power is just as "green" as wind and solar, but it won't get taken out in a hurricane.
First you state that batteries do not require maintenance and then describe the maintenance that must be performed. Periodic replacement is maintenance.
The US failed as Vogtle and Summer. Why should you get another chance to mess up?
For the same reason we don't give up on computers because Commodore went out of business. There are hundreds of operational nuclear power plants on Earth, and holding up 2 that failed proves nothing.
I don't know how much I spent on it but I got this box for my truck that when installed behind the radio allows me to hear audio from my iOS devices and have some control over the music. Not perfect since it's a hack of the Sirius interface on the radio to get my iPod working with it. That was a bit expensive, compared to using a simple headphone input port it was very expensive.
I've started to look for a new car stereo, not for that truck though. I've found that many offer some means to get audio from a pocket computer, often multiple means. (Let's be honest, these things aren't music players or phones any more, they are computers that fit in a pocket.)
It's almost hard to find a car stereo that does not offer a USB port for plugging in a phone or storage device to play music. Often this is in addition to Bluetooth audio. You'll probably find a pair of old school RCA jacks on the back too for connecting to whatever you like. Oh horrors of you have to buy a $6 RCA to 1/8 inch headphone jack that's long enough to run from the back of the stereo to where you can reach it from the driver's seat.
I remember WAY back when cassettes were being replaced by CD players in car stereos. Being the poor college student that I was I bought one of those cassette adapters so I could hear my portable music device through the speakers of my old car. Not great but cheaper and easier than replacing the stereo. Today I find it difficult to believe people will have difficulty finding a means to get audio from a car made in the last 5 or 10 years from a pocket computer made in the last couple years.
It seems rare to even find a headphone jack input on car stereos. If you don't have a headphone jack input then I'd think you can use USB or Bluetooth. If you have something so old that it has no headphone jack, USB, or Bluetooth, then I have a cassette adapter around here somewhere I can give you.
We SHOULD be aggressively pursuing practical energy storage solutions, not denigrating progress and clinging to the status quo.
I agree. One storage solution I'd like to see given more money and publicity is the US Navy project to produce aviation fuel from seawater. The Navy sends out these large oilers carrying just gobs of JP-5, what is effectively just kerosene. For logistics and safety reasons they've standardized their ships, aircraft, generators, even the field cooking stoves, to run on JP-5. If we can scale up this process from just a lab experiment to something that can produce fuel at meaningful rates we can have nuclear power plants that produce this fuel for the community to power trucks, aircraft, generators, and cooking stoves. If the nuclear plant needs to be shutdown for any reason then we can have tanks of the fuel it produced to make up for the loss of it's power.
Put a nuclear power plant on Puerto Rico and the island should never have to worry about having a shortage of fuel again. To those that think a nuclear power plant would just melt down and render the island uninhabitable for eternity I say ask the Navy how to build a nuclear power plant, I'm quite sure they've never had a meltdown. In fact, put the power plant on a ship. If the weather is looking bad then pull up anchor and sail for calmer waters until the storm passes.
Now, if you want to talk about nuclear fusion,...
Fusion energy does not exist today, fission energy does. You can talk about fusion all you like, the rest of us would like to actually solve the problem with fission now.
The marginal cost of wind and solar = $0. The marginal cost of oil, coal, and natural gas???
In other words the same marginal cost of nuclear power. Looks like solar power has it's own non-zero marginal costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Solar panels today already last 25-30 years and their capital costs is MUCH less than any new power plant.
I'd like to see some data on that. We've seen hundreds of nuclear power plants last 40 years without issue, and we expect many of them to last 80 years.
Saying we can't build a nuclear power plant in North Dakota because of a tsunami that hit Fukushima is idiocy. Nuclear power is cheap, safe, clean, reliable, and plentiful. We're running the nearly non-existent risk of another Fukushima or Chernobyl (because we don't build nuclear power like that any more) against the near certainty of catastrophic global warming. Solar is expensive and unreliable. If we compare solar to nuclear then it's not as safe (comparing deaths to energy produced) or as green (CO2 released to energy produced).
Talking about fusion and solar power gets us no where. Fission gets us energy we can use today.
O&M is likely worse for wind as moving parts require more maintenance than solid state solar panels.
What's the total cost of ownership? I have a guess based on electricity rates. Wind is double that of nuclear, coal, and combined cycle natural gas, or on par with peaking power natural gas turbines. Solar is three times that of coal and nuclear, perhaps as high as ten times.
On a tropical island that has its electricity largely produced by oil shipped in that changes the math. Wind might be cheaper than oil but then comes in issues of land use. (Issues such as putting the windmills where they might interfere with aircraft traffic, be too close to occupied buildings for safety, and put migrating birds at risk.) Solar might even be competitive too but then this is an island that just got hammered by a tropical storm. How long will these solar collectors last in that weather? How much would it cost to put in protective measures? Measures like having protective plates cover them in a storm.
Puerto Rico is an island and getting energy to any island is expensive. Oil is in fact the best means to get energy there since it has a high energy density per volume and weight. Oil is also easily pumped onto and off a ship. Finding a ship capable of shipping oil is trivial.
Transporting natural gas by ship is very expensive since it has to be compressed or liquified and stored in large pressure vessels. The natural gas must be carefully pumped out of the tanks with specialized equipment or risk a fire or other damage.
Coal is just heavy, dirty, soaks up water, and therefore difficult to move. I don't know the process of getting the water from coal but separating oil from water is trivial by comparison.
What else is there? Do the math on how much area that wind or solar would take to supply the island with energy and you will find that impractical.
But then there is the "N-word" that shall not be spoken. Do we dare put a nuclear power plant on the island?
Over simplify? What other correlations are there besides increasing, decreasing, or no change? You can complicate this with giving rates of increase or decrease but how does that help?
You just invalidated your own purported study. It took you only two more sentences.
I guess if we look at the data one has a choice, robberies or rapes. Total crime is effectively unchanged but when one goes the other takes it's place.
Nope. You shouldn't guess, especially when it's easy to recognize the flaw in your premise.
You're just acting like "rapist" and "robbers" are interchangeable, but that really isn't very believable.
Whether you find it believable or not that's what I found in my study. I used the FBI UCR for my data set on crimes committed and the Brady Campaign score on the gun laws of every state.
And you didn't name them. Here's a something [vox.com] though.
They committed the same crime I warned about, incomplete data. They compare nations on "gun violence" but leave out any crimes committed without a firearm and also left out a vast number of nations from their study. Just look at Wikipedia for the rates of deaths by firearms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I noticed something odd about the two lists. The "gun death" rate in the USA was double the homicide rate. I looked closer at the first list.
The following list includes suicides, accidental fatalities, and justifiable homicides.
Oh, so we include suicides in "gun deaths"? That's not what I think of as "gun deaths", and not even what I think of if someone brings up a case of "gun violence". So what is the suicide rate in the USA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
USA is right up there with Sweden. Sweden must be a terrible place to have a suicide rate like the USA. Other places with a higher suicide rate are Finland, Japan, and Belgium. It's no surprise that North Korea has such a high suicide rate but do you think their gun ownership rate is a problem? I think it's a problem, it's far too low.
You know, you might want to look up the statistical studies on rape. Or robbery.
The two groups are not as correlated as you seem to think.
Didn't I just say I did that study? I believe I did. There is an odd correlation between the two that someone might want to study more. If we lump together violent crimes and correlate that to restrictions on gun ownership then we find no correlation. If we separate out murders, rapes, and robberies then we see for every robbery "prevented" by gun laws we see a rape in it's place.
This study I did was for a graduate level statistics course but it was a very basic study. A study that I've said has been done before. Here's one example. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The correlation between the homicide rate and Brady score in all 51 jurisdictions is +.032 (on a scale of -1 to +1), which means that states with more gun restrictions on average have very slightly higher homicide rates, though the tendency is so small as to be essentially zero. (If you omit the fatal gun accident rates, then the correlation would be +.065, which would make the more gun-restricting states look slightly worse; but again, the correlation would
I gave no such threat. I spelled out a very basic cause and effect. If you cause harm to one of the many veterans in the USA then you can expect them to react to prevent further harm.
This is how I expect any other person to act, if you break into their home in the middle of the night then expect to get shot. The difference is that there are 20 million veterans that have been trained in the use of firearms by the best trained military in the world and therefore have the ability to respond more effectively than most.
I threatened you just as much as a sign reading "High Voltage: Do Not Enter". That's pretty simple, isn't it? If you enter then expect to die. The response should not be fear. The goal should not be to ban high voltages. People should react by respecting people's personal property.
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Protip: Bush hasn't been president in a long time now.
Yeah? Who made that happen? That's right, that's Bush's fault too. Just another thing we can blame on Bush.
Seriously, I recently find way more entertainment in 30 year old shows than in the rubbish produced today.
There was better TV 30 years ago? A few TV shows from the top of my head, Knight Rider, ALF, Riptide, Manimal, and A-Team. Not great TV as I recall, just a mix of good to awful. I remember A-Team as something I looked forward to watching. ALF was campy fun. Manimal was memorable mostly because of how awful it was.
If you want to talk about formulaic and predictable then look at A-Team, Knight Rider, or just about any other man vs. evil in the world show. Come to think of it the man vs. evil trope is pretty common well before and after the 1980s. We'll see the hero (or hero and sidekick, or small team of heroes) do some humorous banter over an everyday task, like buying a newspaper or going to a movie, when something happens that sucks them in. They get introduced to the monster of the week by a damsel in distress, a hungry child, or some other character that can gather easy sympathy. This monster shows how evil he/she/it can be either as part of the opening or shortly after by some terrible act. The hero or heroes create a strategy to fight using amazing skills, gadgetry, or just plain magic. They face off, and the monster is captured, killed, or is chased off to return in a later episode.
The only real surprise is if the ending is a happy one with everyone dancing and singing, a downer ending with a serious lesson to ponder, or a bittersweet ending with something like a dead loved one mourned but the others live on free from the monster of the week.
Maybe you like the old TV shows better because the terrible ones don't get re-runs on TV, only the good ones with three or more good seasons (and the bad season shown out of order to hide the string of bad episodes) getting any air play now.
So you are confirming what so many global warming "deniers" have said? That's what it looks like to me. Curious, plants consume CO2 more efficiently when it is more concentrated in the air. Almost as if there has been a natural control on global warming and cooling that has existed for millions of years. Something has been keeping the climate so stable for so long, now we've confirmed one mechanism for that.
Well, looks like we have nothing to worry about now.
Oh, the lowered nutrition value of plant life is a problem now? I wonder if there is a mechanism we might find where animals adapt to changing food sources. Like, I don't know, some means by where those animals that can survive on this plant life reproduce with offspring that also have this adaptation? Well, it's just a theory I have.
Perhaps, but getting them to reply a second time is a successful trolling. Have a nice day!
Ah, I see. You'd rather people die than use nuclear power. All you said was a repeat of what you said before, that nuclear power costs too much so we should all die instead.
I got it. We're done here.
If I'm the troll and you replied then I have successfully trolled you. What does that make you?
Use clean energy? You mean like nuclear power?
If you are opposed to nuclear power then you must not be opposed to billions of people starving to death.
I don't understand this opposition to nuclear power. Whenever it's brought up people complain about the cost, but we have people willing to pay extra to utilities to build out wind power. Where is my option to toss a few extra bucks to buy nuclear power?
To the deniers: If we agree on nothing else can we at least agree on continuing to fund well planned scientific studies on the climate?
But... Al Gore and Arnold Shrwartzenwhatever told me the debate was over.
It's not just the "deniers" that want to stop the research.
If the politicians were serious about an "all the above" solution to solving the problems of CO2 producing fuels then they'd be funding research into nuclear power, fission and fusion. Since they are not I must conclude that global warming is not a problem.
If the problem of nuclear power was the waste it produces then we'd see the federal government follow through on the nuclear waste deposit that they've held up for 30 years. Since they haven't then nuclear waste must not be a problem.
Which is it? Is global warming an end of life event that can only be averted by eliminating CO2 production? Or, is nuclear power such a greater threat that we'd rather see all life end from global warming first? If we can wait for solar power and "giga-batteries" to replace coal then global warming doesn't seem like an immediate problem.
You want me to agree that global warming is a problem? Then agree with me that nuclear power needs to be part of the solution. If you fear nuclear power more than global warming then you are telling me that global warming is not a problem.
Two things are crippling America: poor basic education in some parts of America due to widely uneven funding based on local communities resources (kinda defeats the idea of giving the next generation a fair chance).
The declining state of education in America seems to coincide with the creation of a federal government department dedicated with "helping" it. Maybe less government is in order.
The other is legalized corruption by allowing unlimited corporate donations to politicians; for example this has resulted in American health care costs being more than twice that of the next country in the entire world! (With worse outcomes)
People talk about how "untrammeled capitalism" is ruining everything but get real quiet when asked just how "trammeled" it needs to be. Health care is a mess because of government intervention. If you want prices to go down then open up competition, let people buy insurance across state lines. Don't make people buy it. If it's against the law to go without insurance then the insurance companies can charge whatever they like because you have to pay the price no matter how high it is. If there is a fine to go without insurance then guess what will inevitably happen, the prices will rise to the cost of the fine. Is that too hard to understand?
You need a lot more than basalt to grow crops.
Did I say that's all was needed? Of course other materials would need to be used. The point is that farmers currently use source of lime that produced a lot of CO2 and we have a means to produce this lime that is CO2 negative. To get this working we need nuclear power, nothing else we currently have will do. That might change in the future but it's nuclear power or this won't work.
Also, nuclear power generation is horrendously expensive - a new plan with decades old but improved design costs 30 billion.
More expensive than finding a new planet? Any argument against nuclear power looks really petty when compared to saving life on Earth. I just proposed a plan to save all life on Earth and all you can come up with is, "it will cost too much". Compared to what? You have a better plan?
We can't use wind power. Those silly windmills made of wood and sheet metal can't power anything more than a small water pump. Oh, you say windmill technology has improved in the last 100 years? IMPOSSIBLE! Because... because I said so. The argument that nuclear power has stood still for the last 50 years is just as logical that wind power has stood still. Why is it that whenever windmills and solar panels are brought up we get, "Yeah, it still sucks now but just wait ten years!" At the same time when nuclear power is brought up we get mentions of the problems of nuclear power from 50 years ago, as if nobody has bothered to improve the technology.
There are hundreds of nuclear power plants operating on Earth right now. We know how to build them to produce power safely, reliably, and cheaply. Any complaints on them should be left in the 1970s when the USA stopped building them until very recently. When people complain about the spent fuel the claim is that the mass is as much as the heaviest element, with the radioactivity of the deadliest element, with a half life of the longest lived element. To make it sound dangerous they have to lie.
It's not "waste", it's fission products that contain some very valuable materials if we'd just get some politicians to take their head out of the 1970s. I guess it makes sense, so many of them got into office in the 1970s. Nuclear power costs go down with economies of scale, kind of like how solar panels get cheaper the more they are made.
Once you have some nuclear power plants to stop the CO2 released from coal then use some of that nuclear power to mine and pulverize basalt rock as fertilizer for crops.
http://www.energyfromthorium.c...
Once spread on the fields the calcium oxide, or lime, in basalt will react with the CO2 in the soil to reduce the acidity. Farmers already lime their fields, only now it's produced from mining limestone and then cooking off the CO2 to produce lime. Any CO2 this takes from the soil will only counteract what was released in the lime kilns. It does nothing for the CO2 released from the fuel burned in the kilns. Any CO2 taken from the soil will mean reducing CO2 in the air since natural processes, such as the rain, will carry the CO2 out of the air into the soil where the lime can trap it chemically as limestone, or CaCO3.
There are other uses for the lime and sand from the mined basalt, like making cement and glass. Using nuclear power is an important aspect of this plan since this is an energy intensive process that would have to operate in the mines. They'll have to mine where the rock is easy to reach, not where the sun shines and wind blows. They may be far from infrastructure, making running power lines impractical.
Farmers need to replace this lime in the fields continuously as the nutrients are taken up in the crops and as rains wash it away, so it's not like they spread it out once and the acidity problem is fixed. There is an incredible amount of basalt on Earth, we just will not run out.
Are you serious or sarcastic? It's hard to tell.
I don't understand how people can argue that big companies are bad for us and big government is good. Both are bad. The difference with a company is that no one is forced to buy their product or service, with a government there is no choice. If I had to choose between the two then I'll take the big companies, they don't have people with guns to take my money if I don't like their services.
I hear this with oil companies, that there is no choice. Sure there is. It's that the choice to do without their products is not nearly as pleasant as using their products. The oil companies aren't "stealing" your money when you fill up your car any more than you are "stealing" their fuel. Nobody trades down, you gain with having the fuel instead of the money, and they gain by having your money instead of the fuel.
This goes for people with a lot of money too. If you can prove that they stole the money they have then they deserve to be put in prison. Just because they have more money than you doesn't mean they are obligated to share it with you. Using the force of the government to take their money by force through taxation is just theft by proxy.
Stopping this bad advertising with government is playing with fire. It's not always easy to prove fraud. People get things wrong all the time, that's different than lying. If someone claims a product does something out of ignorance then that's not fraud. That's buying from an idiot. It also brings up the question on who is the bigger idiot, the buyer or seller. If someone knows the product they are selling cannot perform as advertised then that is fraud. Creating a government large enough to handle every single way that fraud could happen is creating a government that can get out of control.
I'm reminded of the warning labels that California likes to put on everything. These are usually worded something like, "This product contains a material known by the State of California to cause cancer." This reached absurdity when they tried to make a bottled water plant put arsenic warnings on the bottles. Sure, the water contained detectable amounts of arsenic but then so does the tap water provided by government owned water treatment plants. Putting these warnings on everything makes them meaningless and gives the government a reason to poke their nose in your business.
You want to stop the practice of sending young men off to die in some far off desert? Put these dictators out of business. Make domestic energy so cheap that we don't have to go over there to get more. Implement a true "all the above" energy strategy. I hear Democrats (and it's almost always Democrats) talk about an all the above strategy to reduce CO2 output but when something threatens to actually solve the problem it gets killed in congressional bullshit.
Keystone XL is a good example. Killing this project doesn't stop people from burning oil, it just diverts the movement of oil to whatever path of least resistance might be. In this case it's oil from a friendly neighbor, Canada, not ending up in refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Instead it would likely end up on a ship bound for China or Japan. This is because it's easier for Canada to sell the oil there, and the USA to buy oil from South America, than try to ship the oil by truck or rail.
You want to reduce oil spills? Then build more pipelines, they don't spill near as often as ships, trucks, or trains. These pipes move natural gas too. Not great as far as CO2 goes but still 1/2 the CO2 output of coal for electricity production.
Let's talk electricity production too. You want to stop the burning of coal? Then build nuclear power plants. We've started building them again but not nearly fast enough. We need to build one gigawatt nuclear power plant per month to replace the current coal and nuclear power plants at the rate they are getting shut down. That's not adding any new capacity, that's just keeping up with retiring old power plants.
We replace coal with nuclear then we can use this abundant natural gas for our cars and trucks. If you think that for some reason we can't build a new nuclear power plant every month then think again. We've done it before, we can do it again.
Let's do all the above. Wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas, and even coal. Put those oil funded dictators out of business.
I've always wondered how many people would be driving electric cars if it wasn't for the state/Fed subsidies (rebates) or other benefits like Leaf's free charging.
I've always wondered how many people would be driving ICE cars if they had to pay to remove the CO2 that they are pumping into the atmosphere.
People are effectively paying for the CO2 emitted, they pay in that they passed on the EV tax break. What would it cost to remove the CO2 rather than just stop producing more? That depends on how it's done, wouldn't it?
I read a paper some time ago from, as I recall, a retired chemistry professor. His plan to take CO2 from the atmosphere was to mine basalt and spread it out on cropland. Basalt is mostly just sand, which does nothing for the crops. About a quarter of it is calcium and magnesium oxides that react with CO2 and create limestone. There's a lot of basalt to mine, we aren't going to run out.
Why would farmers agree to have ground basalt spread on their fields? Because they do something like this already, spreading lime on fields is a common practice to control acidity in the soil and restore nutrients taken up by the crops. This professor (I can't remember his name) claims farmers should be able to be convinced to do this with a subsidy. I assume this subsidy would cover the cost difference of getting the lime from traditional sources plus a bit for the trouble.
That brings the question on how farmers get this lime now for their fields. Turns out that they mine limestone and cook the CO2 out in large furnaces. This is a very old practice, going back hundreds or thousands of years. There are century old lime kilns all over the world. So, all the CO2 that this lime captures is the same as what was released in the firing of the limestone. Then there is the CO2 produced from fueling the furnaces.
Why not replace this lime with basalt now? Why would we have to pay farmers to do this? Because basalt is a very hard rock and is difficult to mine. Limestone is relatively soft and easy to mine. Then there is the matter that basalt is only about half as effective by weight to control acidity as the lime from a lime kiln. This costs money. Don't blame the farmers for this, they just want to grow food as cheaply as they can so that you can buy it.
Oh, another reason why this professor might not be taken seriously. He advocates using nuclear power to drive this basalt mining. The reasoning is simple, driving heavy mining equipment from wind and solar power is simply not practical. Using fossil fuels to drive the process is counter productive.
So, what would this cost? One cost is having to use nuclear power. It seems that "environmentalists" that lack basic arithmetic skills cannot seem to figure out that carbon sequestration like this cannot be practically driven by wind and solar. If you want to get CO2 out of the air then first stop digging. That means nuclear power. Next step is mine basalt and grind it up so the natural process of reacting with CO2 in the air is sped up enormously. The first step, using nuclear power costs nothing really, people are willing to build nuclear power if only given permission to do so. The second step, where CO2 is actually removed, costs money. According to this professor it's very expensive now because there is no market, create a market and the price should come down.
The reason they are built as "tricycles" is it greatly simplifies the suspension and drive train. Having only three wheels is now banned in many of the races like this is because of a very bad accident when a solar car lost one of it's wheels while on an overpass. The car skidded out of control into the sidewall of the bridge, tossing the windscreen to the road below and injuring the driver. I'm not aware of any solar car race, or similar competition, that will allow a three wheeled vehicle since.
That does not mean the cars won't still be a tricycle style design, there are still advantages to having three points of contact on the road instead of four. What they will do is put the rear two wheels side by side. This avoids the complexity and weight of a differential axle, or the (potentially unsafe) compromise of a single driven wheel. Having independently driven wheels is expensive, heavy, and also potentially unsafe. Why would two motors be unsafe? Imagine a controller failure or wiring mistake where each wheel is driven in opposite directions.
I recall an electric race car that was required to have four wheels but wanted a narrow front for aerodynamic reasons. This was solved by putting the two front steering wheels in the center line of the vehicle, one behind the other.
I agree that these vehicles don't always meet the definition of a car. If they do, such as having four wheels to comply with laws or race regulations, then they still push the limits of that definition.
My prints would jamb and it would burst into flames all without human supervision
Is it possible you are holding it wrong?
I had the problem of my 3D printer falling over, bursting into flames, and then sinking into the swamp until I figured this out.
What good is a cell phone when you need power now and can't even charge a cell phone. And you need power for other necessities more than a Cell phone where they tell you help is not available now.
I think of the reports of the "Cajun Navy" in Texas that went out to rescue people stranded by flood waters, or in need of supplies to shelter in place. The people in the "Cajun Navy" were volunteers that were not part of any larger rescue organization, they had no real plan in place and no real hierarchy. These people were able to coordinate over cell phones and internet because cell service survived or was restored quickly. The people in need of help may have cell phones in need of a charge, or no cell phone at all, but the people coming in to help could use the cell service to be more effective.
The people that planned ahead for a smaller storm, with hand crank cell phone chargers among their survival kit, would certainly appreciate cell phone service to contact family and let them know all is well (which would prevent a diversion of resources for a search and rescue of such people) or if they are in need of supplies then they can contact others to assist in their coordination.
At a minimum we have people in need of communication for their mental well being. Humans are complex social creatures and even knowing that help is not available now is better than knowing nothing at all. People need to know that there are other people out there that have not given up and are trying. Maybe some of these people will use the cell phone service to watch cat videos, but then at least this distracts from how cold and hungry they are.
Let's assume what you say is true, that wind is cheaper than coal. What happens when, not if, another hurricane hits the island? I can put a coal plant in a concrete bunker and not interfere with it's operation. After a major storm there will likely still need to be repairs, like replacing smokestacks and transmission lines, but the bulk of the plant will still remain. What will these windmills look like afterwards? I have an idea, they'll look like dandelion stalks after the seeds have blown away in the wind.
Same for solar thermal or PV, what will they look like after 160 kph winds? These things are made of glass, they have to be. Maybe they can be covered with the same kind of glass we use on smartphones and tablet computers now but it's one thing to make pieces of glass a few centimeters across and another to make them a square meter in size.
It's not like an island like Puerto Rico can just spread out the windmills and solar collectors to reduce losses in a hurricane, the island is only so big. The island is less than 200 km across at it's widest point, and hurricanes can be many times larger than that.
Wanting to reduce CO2 output is great, but we must also be practical. Wind and solar are bad ideas in hurricane prone areas. Repairs after storms need to be taken into account on the total cost of ownership. A nuclear power plant can be put in a concrete bunker, in fact that's common practice for reasons other than storm readiness but it also holds up to storms quite well. Nuclear power is just as "green" as wind and solar, but it won't get taken out in a hurricane.
First you state that batteries do not require maintenance and then describe the maintenance that must be performed. Periodic replacement is maintenance.
The US failed as Vogtle and Summer. Why should you get another chance to mess up?
For the same reason we don't give up on computers because Commodore went out of business. There are hundreds of operational nuclear power plants on Earth, and holding up 2 that failed proves nothing.
I used to think the same thing.
I don't know how much I spent on it but I got this box for my truck that when installed behind the radio allows me to hear audio from my iOS devices and have some control over the music. Not perfect since it's a hack of the Sirius interface on the radio to get my iPod working with it. That was a bit expensive, compared to using a simple headphone input port it was very expensive.
I've started to look for a new car stereo, not for that truck though. I've found that many offer some means to get audio from a pocket computer, often multiple means. (Let's be honest, these things aren't music players or phones any more, they are computers that fit in a pocket.)
It's almost hard to find a car stereo that does not offer a USB port for plugging in a phone or storage device to play music. Often this is in addition to Bluetooth audio. You'll probably find a pair of old school RCA jacks on the back too for connecting to whatever you like. Oh horrors of you have to buy a $6 RCA to 1/8 inch headphone jack that's long enough to run from the back of the stereo to where you can reach it from the driver's seat.
I remember WAY back when cassettes were being replaced by CD players in car stereos. Being the poor college student that I was I bought one of those cassette adapters so I could hear my portable music device through the speakers of my old car. Not great but cheaper and easier than replacing the stereo. Today I find it difficult to believe people will have difficulty finding a means to get audio from a car made in the last 5 or 10 years from a pocket computer made in the last couple years.
It seems rare to even find a headphone jack input on car stereos. If you don't have a headphone jack input then I'd think you can use USB or Bluetooth. If you have something so old that it has no headphone jack, USB, or Bluetooth, then I have a cassette adapter around here somewhere I can give you.
We SHOULD be aggressively pursuing practical energy storage solutions, not denigrating progress and clinging to the status quo.
I agree. One storage solution I'd like to see given more money and publicity is the US Navy project to produce aviation fuel from seawater. The Navy sends out these large oilers carrying just gobs of JP-5, what is effectively just kerosene. For logistics and safety reasons they've standardized their ships, aircraft, generators, even the field cooking stoves, to run on JP-5. If we can scale up this process from just a lab experiment to something that can produce fuel at meaningful rates we can have nuclear power plants that produce this fuel for the community to power trucks, aircraft, generators, and cooking stoves. If the nuclear plant needs to be shutdown for any reason then we can have tanks of the fuel it produced to make up for the loss of it's power.
Put a nuclear power plant on Puerto Rico and the island should never have to worry about having a shortage of fuel again. To those that think a nuclear power plant would just melt down and render the island uninhabitable for eternity I say ask the Navy how to build a nuclear power plant, I'm quite sure they've never had a meltdown. In fact, put the power plant on a ship. If the weather is looking bad then pull up anchor and sail for calmer waters until the storm passes.
Now, if you want to talk about nuclear fusion, ...
Fusion energy does not exist today, fission energy does. You can talk about fusion all you like, the rest of us would like to actually solve the problem with fission now.
The marginal cost of wind and solar = $0. The marginal cost of oil, coal, and natural gas???
In other words the same marginal cost of nuclear power. Looks like solar power has it's own non-zero marginal costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Solar panels today already last 25-30 years and their capital costs is MUCH less than any new power plant.
I'd like to see some data on that. We've seen hundreds of nuclear power plants last 40 years without issue, and we expect many of them to last 80 years.
Saying we can't build a nuclear power plant in North Dakota because of a tsunami that hit Fukushima is idiocy. Nuclear power is cheap, safe, clean, reliable, and plentiful. We're running the nearly non-existent risk of another Fukushima or Chernobyl (because we don't build nuclear power like that any more) against the near certainty of catastrophic global warming. Solar is expensive and unreliable. If we compare solar to nuclear then it's not as safe (comparing deaths to energy produced) or as green (CO2 released to energy produced).
Talking about fusion and solar power gets us no where. Fission gets us energy we can use today.
O&M is likely worse for wind as moving parts require more maintenance than solid state solar panels.
What's the total cost of ownership? I have a guess based on electricity rates. Wind is double that of nuclear, coal, and combined cycle natural gas, or on par with peaking power natural gas turbines. Solar is three times that of coal and nuclear, perhaps as high as ten times.
On a tropical island that has its electricity largely produced by oil shipped in that changes the math. Wind might be cheaper than oil but then comes in issues of land use. (Issues such as putting the windmills where they might interfere with aircraft traffic, be too close to occupied buildings for safety, and put migrating birds at risk.) Solar might even be competitive too but then this is an island that just got hammered by a tropical storm. How long will these solar collectors last in that weather? How much would it cost to put in protective measures? Measures like having protective plates cover them in a storm.
Puerto Rico is an island and getting energy to any island is expensive. Oil is in fact the best means to get energy there since it has a high energy density per volume and weight. Oil is also easily pumped onto and off a ship. Finding a ship capable of shipping oil is trivial.
Transporting natural gas by ship is very expensive since it has to be compressed or liquified and stored in large pressure vessels. The natural gas must be carefully pumped out of the tanks with specialized equipment or risk a fire or other damage.
Coal is just heavy, dirty, soaks up water, and therefore difficult to move. I don't know the process of getting the water from coal but separating oil from water is trivial by comparison.
What else is there? Do the math on how much area that wind or solar would take to supply the island with energy and you will find that impractical.
But then there is the "N-word" that shall not be spoken. Do we dare put a nuclear power plant on the island?
There's three possible correlations:
Somebody likes oversimplifications, don't they?
Over simplify? What other correlations are there besides increasing, decreasing, or no change? You can complicate this with giving rates of increase or decrease but how does that help?
You just invalidated your own purported study. It took you only two more sentences.
I guess if we look at the data one has a choice, robberies or rapes. Total crime is effectively unchanged but when one goes the other takes it's place.
Nope. You shouldn't guess, especially when it's easy to recognize the flaw in your premise.
You're just acting like "rapist" and "robbers" are interchangeable, but that really isn't very believable.
Whether you find it believable or not that's what I found in my study. I used the FBI UCR for my data set on crimes committed and the Brady Campaign score on the gun laws of every state.
And you didn't name them. Here's a something [vox.com] though.
They committed the same crime I warned about, incomplete data. They compare nations on "gun violence" but leave out any crimes committed without a firearm and also left out a vast number of nations from their study. Just look at Wikipedia for the rates of deaths by firearms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Then the rates of intentional murders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I noticed something odd about the two lists. The "gun death" rate in the USA was double the homicide rate. I looked closer at the first list.
The following list includes suicides, accidental fatalities, and justifiable homicides.
Oh, so we include suicides in "gun deaths"? That's not what I think of as "gun deaths", and not even what I think of if someone brings up a case of "gun violence". So what is the suicide rate in the USA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
USA is right up there with Sweden. Sweden must be a terrible place to have a suicide rate like the USA. Other places with a higher suicide rate are Finland, Japan, and Belgium. It's no surprise that North Korea has such a high suicide rate but do you think their gun ownership rate is a problem? I think it's a problem, it's far too low.
You know, you might want to look up the statistical studies on rape. Or robbery.
The two groups are not as correlated as you seem to think.
Didn't I just say I did that study? I believe I did. There is an odd correlation between the two that someone might want to study more. If we lump together violent crimes and correlate that to restrictions on gun ownership then we find no correlation. If we separate out murders, rapes, and robberies then we see for every robbery "prevented" by gun laws we see a rape in it's place.
This study I did was for a graduate level statistics course but it was a very basic study. A study that I've said has been done before. Here's one example.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The correlation between the homicide rate and Brady score in all 51 jurisdictions is +.032 (on a scale of -1 to +1), which means that states with more gun restrictions on average have very slightly higher homicide rates, though the tendency is so small as to be essentially zero. (If you omit the fatal gun accident rates, then the correlation would be +.065, which would make the more gun-restricting states look slightly worse; but again, the correlation would
I gave no such threat. I spelled out a very basic cause and effect. If you cause harm to one of the many veterans in the USA then you can expect them to react to prevent further harm.
This is how I expect any other person to act, if you break into their home in the middle of the night then expect to get shot. The difference is that there are 20 million veterans that have been trained in the use of firearms by the best trained military in the world and therefore have the ability to respond more effectively than most.
I threatened you just as much as a sign reading "High Voltage: Do Not Enter". That's pretty simple, isn't it? If you enter then expect to die. The response should not be fear. The goal should not be to ban high voltages. People should react by respecting people's personal property.