There is no scientific correlation between gun ownership and being safe.
You are correct. There's three possible correlations: - More guns = more crime - More guns = less crime - More guns = simply more guns
I did a study on this for a graduate level statistics class. While I did not compare gun ownership rates I did compare the gun laws of various states. I suspect greater restrictions on ownership correlates to ownership. The best I found was some very weak correlations to gun laws and crime. Increased restrictions correlated to increased rates of rape and decreased robberies.
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. I generally dislike the government telling me how and where I may defend myself. I also dislike the idea of leaving women vulnerable to rape. This will come at a cost of robberies, which is still considered a violent crime. There's likely to be some bruised faces and battered pride but if all that is lost is some money and a cell phone then life goes on.
I'm not the only one that did this analysis, there are others that took similar data and came to similar conclusions. Here's the important part, look for the effect on total crime. There's lots of studies on "gun violence" which give a lot of nonsense. It doesn't include the deterrent factor that gun ownership has on people getting injured and killed with knives and fists. It also counts legal shootings by police and innocent citizens stopping criminals as "gun violence". Also included in "gun violence" is suicides.
Again, I looked at ALL CRIME, not gun crime, or this fiction that is "gun violence". Filter out the noise and you are correct, gun ownership does not keep you safe. It does mean that women should go armed because they are less likely to get raped when armed. They might have to hand over some cash to make a thug go away but that will save them from a more severe outcome.
And while you try and become a civilized country, try the metric system, even in the USA I think most of you can count to 10
I can count to ten, I'm way ahead on the conversion to metric. I have my 9mm Luger, 10mm Auto, and 7.62 NATO. I'm keeping my.45 ACP though, there's some family history behind that.
Anyone that thinks gun bans will work to reduce gun ownership or violent crime is insane. There's enough people with scrap metal, CNC mills, and time to make working firearms on their own. Oh, and ammunition too. What is the government going to do about it? Things changed since this "assault weapon" nonsense started 30 or so years ago.
In that time there's been a lot of young men and women that volunteered for military service. When in basic military training they'd be given a M-16. Depending on their role after training they'd get further training on a 9mm pistol, a 12 gauge shotgun, M-4 rifle, maybe even some bolt action sniper rifles and machine guns. These weapons become their daily companion while on tour. Some served a single 6 month tour. Some served one or two year long tours. Assuming an enlisted person served a 5, 6, or 8 year enlistment to the end, they'll leave with a mindset that these weapons are what keeps them alive.
They'll go home, with some coin in their pocket, and buy civilian versions of what they carried for so long. It won't have burst fire. Maybe they won't spend the money on a scope like they had. The barrel might be a few inches longer. But for the most part this weapon is much like they had and is now they see this as their means to survive and no one will take it from them.
It might sit in a forgotten corner of a closet. Maybe it is again a constant companion as they work on ranches, as security guards, law enforcement, or just in the back of their truck along with PVC pipes, scrap lumber, and cordless drills. They'll hunt with them. They'll shoot target with friends with them. Or, still sit in a corner nearly forgotten.
There's 20 million veterans in the USA. All trained in the use of firearms. Many of them own weapons much like those that they carried to war. These are peaceful people. Quiet and yet vigilant. Like a dog lying half asleep on a porch watching the world go by.
Don't kick that dog. So long as the dog is there we have civilization. You provoke those dogs and teeth will come out to protect their home.
People fear "gun violence". I don't. If someone brings violence on any of these 20 million veterans then expect violence in return. It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. Removing the gun changes nothing. Violence will still happen, only more good guys will have to die to restore the peace.
The second cause on your list, cancer, is not a single disease. Cancer is a group of diseases, and the treatments for them vary based on the type. We've got so good at this that we're doing genetic testing on the cancers to see which drugs would be most effective on it. Now that we've sliced it that thin it doesn't look like a single disease any more. Cancer is now an ever increasing number of diseases, each one increasingly rare.
How does choosing to take an experimental drug take away the choice to take a more effective one? So long as people can choose their medicine no one is taking away anything. That's just it though, isn't it? People are losing their ability to choose the medical care they wish to receive.
Shows great wellbeing to the financial survival of big pharma.
Well "big pharma" makes medicine to make money, if they don't make money then they can't make things like antibiotics that save lives, or common cold medicine that make us feel better and more productive.
If there is a problem with the medicines we get in the USA its from the FDA. The FDA refuses to allow many many drugs to enter the market because they haven't proven effectiveness. Well, it's impossible to prove effectiveness unless allowed to test the drugs on real and actual people. Sure, we're going to have a lot of drugs that don't work, and the drug companies will make a profit on them. That's because the people that develop the drugs cannot simply work for free. These people need to get paid, and show a profit, or they go do something else. Something else as not develop the next life saving drug.
Another part of the problem is we've already solved the big problems, what's left are the increasingly rare diseases. The R&D costs are then spread on fewer and fewer patients. That means pills that cost $100 each, before the FDA, insurance companies, and so on all get a cut.
The people in "big pharma" aren't evil for making a profit, any more than you are evil for getting paid for whatever you do to pay your bills.
I'll go on road trips and stay at campsites instead of hotels to save money. The sites I've seen offer AC service. Generators are typically frowned upon on a campsite.
So is hydrogen and biofuels pretty much a dead end at this point?
Hydrogen is not an energy source so any vehicle that burns hydrogen is really running off the energy that created it, which in the USA is a mix of coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Same for electric cars, they really run on coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Some places with an abundance of flowing water will have some of the energy from hydro.
Biofuels is also mostly a means to convert a low quality energy source (coal and natural gas mainly) into a high quality energy for storage and transportation (liquid fuels and electricity). Given that people are debating whether or not biofuels give a net energy gain is evidence to me that the benefits to using biofuels are small if they exist at all. If the gain wasn't so small then we'd be debating how much of an energy gain it gives, rather than if it gives one at all.
Electric cars, without nuclear power, might give some reduction in CO2 introduced into the environment but we'd do much better with nuclear power. Wind and solar have shown no real reduction in CO2 output since it needs backup power from peaking power sources like natural gas turbines. Natural gas turbines produce nearly as much CO2 per energy produced as coal, add in the carbon footprint of the wind and solar, and it becomes debatable if there is a net reduction in CO2 output. Germany is given as an example of a failure of switching from reliable nuclear power to unreliable wind and solar. The only CO2 output reduction they've seen recently has been due to a reduction in demand. The demand reduction may or may not be caused by the higher prices they've paid.
Electric vehicles will be a failure in the goal to reduce CO2 output unless it is paired with nuclear power.
I haven't flown on such flights myself but I've heard stories of people getting on planes and being greeted by a person they assume to be the flight attendant. This person will show them to their seats, give them their safety briefing, perhaps even hand out drinks and snacks, and then go to the flight deck and help fly the plane.
I don't know exactly what size of a plane would have only a crew of two, 40 or fewer perhaps. In those cases the flight attendant is the co-pilot. If there's something like 20 or fewer passengers then there can be a crew of one, the pilot. In that case the pilot serves the role of flight attendant too.
If there is going to be crew of any size then it would make sense that one or two of them know something about how to fly the plane in case of a failure in the remote or automated piloting system. Being a pilot used to be a high paid job but so many people want to fly, and it's not terribly difficult to learn how to do it, that the pay has shrunk. The cost of having a trained pilot on the plane versus just someone that knows how to do a safety briefing and hand out snacks has to be so small that it has to be hard to make a case to not require knowledge on how to actually fly the plane.
Put another way, if you are an airline and you are looking for people to be the one and only crew member on the plane then what would you look for in hiring that person? People want these jobs so they'll do what the job requires. If there's a bunch of people applying to be a flight attendant, and one of them has a pilot's certificate, then which one would you hire first?
People that want to become managers. Most companies want to see managers that can demonstrate an ability to manage before getting promoted to management. This can be done with years in the business as a "non-management manager", such as a team leader, or with the MBA degree, usually both.
The Master of Business Administration degree is a graduate program, so people will have a degree in something before they apply. There's the pure business types that give MBAs a bad name that know nothing but what they learned in business school, they know "business" but nothing of how the business they are in works. It seems to me that a large number of MBA graduates have degrees in engineering, sciences, medicine, law, and such that go to get an MBA to learn how to run a business on top of what they know of the industry that they are in. This trend, or perhaps need, for people that have technical knowledge and business knowledge is high enough that many schools offer programs that allow for people to get their MBA and other degree concurrently.
The people studying for their MBA tend to be people that want to run their own business or wish to be managers in whatever company that hires them. There are many companies that simply will not hire someone into management unless they have that MBA on their CV. Even if not required for the position it can show management knowledge to get to a management position.
And, closer to home for most of us, I don't call my computer "CPU" or "hard drive".
Apparently you've never done computer support work. I have people calling their computer a "hard drive" all the time. Why this is baffles me a bit but I'd rather just get the person's issues resolved than debate the distinction between the computer as a whole and the hard drive as a part of that whole.
I don't call my car "engine" or "mirror".
I'll hear people refer to their car as "wheels", and I've done the same. Language is a complex thing.
Still, the remaining black-white disparity âoeis not acceptable,â said Lee Schwartzberg, a medical oncologist at West Cancer Center in Germantown, Tenn. He said the gap reflects complicated social, economic and biological factors that are not yet fully understood, including insurance and employment status. In addition, black women are twice as likely as white women to develop so-called triple negative breast cancer, which can be harder to treat, the report noted.
They do a study and find that people with African ancestry tend to have a kind of cancer that we don't yet know how to treat. What if this disparity was found between people from Angola vs. Kenya? Would this be "unacceptable? What if it was between Greeks and French? Would that be "unacceptable"? They can call this "complicated" all they like but the reason that this one group tends to have higher rates of deaths from cancer is clear from the paragraph I quoted, it's genetic. There's nothing we can do about one's genes.
It seems obvious they know the reason why the disparity exists, it's genetic. However, when we equate this disparity to race instead of genetics then it becomes "unacceptable" to people. It's unfortunate that we cannot treat this "triple negative" cancer better. Research into treating this cancer should continue, as should treatments for all kinds of cancer. Seeing this as a matter of race instead of genetics turns a problem of medicine and science into a political issue.
Can we leave politics out of science? Please? Politics ruined football. If sanity is not regained then politics will ruin everything.
Okay then, let's assume a $500 to $1000 is somehow unacceptable. There's a lot of $5000 to $10,000 cars out there and they are not junk. Can anyone buy an EV in that price range? One that doesn't need a new battery or some other high dollar repairs?
As long as my previous post was I failed to complete my thought. If we do not burn natural gas efficiently, in combined cycle plants, then it produces as much CO2 output as coal. Mix unreliable energy like wind and solar with natural gas turbine backup and you end up with as much energy per CO2 as if you burned coal.
Wind and solar do not reduce CO2 output per energy produced because we have no other technology to back that up than natural gas and coal. What else is there? Nuclear. Any other technology, such as some sort of storage, is not mature enough for utility scale use.
Even if we can replace current coal with a mix of natural gas and "unreliables" the net CO2 output is no different than if we burned coal. You can say it's not coal powered, and that might be true technically, but the outcome in CO2 output is no different.
If you want people to use them then they need to be (as I said before) cheap, safe, reliable, and low CO2.
Wind, cheap (or at least within double the price of coal) but not reliable.
Solar, far from cheap, not reliable.
Tidal, perhaps it is quite reliable, maybe it is safe, also likely low CO2. It is not cheap. Seawater is very abrasive, carrying sand with the water. This sand destroys turbines. There may come a day when we figure out how to make this cheap but that is not today.
Geothermal, unless you happen to live on top of volcanic activity it is not cheap. Making it more plentiful means digging deeper, and that adds to the cost.
Biowaste, there is no such thing. Biowaste does not exist. I grew up on a farm and we wasted nothing. Cornstalks were used as cattle bedding and then spread out on the fields for fertilizer and erosion control. Spoiled corn was sold for non-food (industrial ethanol mostly) uses. Generally anything "bio" that is not food is returned to the soil for fertilizer. Taking that "waste" for fuel and something needs to replace that or we will ruin the soil and we grow nothing.
An electric engine becomes instantly cleaner the moment a coal plant is turned off, and anything else is turned on.
What would that "anything else" be? There's not a whole lot of choices out there. We'd need something reliable, cheap (at a cost comparable to coal), safe, and if we agree that CO2 output is a problem then it needs to have a low CO2 output. There are only two energy sources we have today that meet those requirements, hydro and nuclear. We've already dammed up nearly every river worth a dam. That leaves nuclear. This might change in the future with some future technological development but that's what we have right now.
There is nothing terribly wrong with nuclear, but it works best in tandem with electric cars, and electric cars work well with any improvement on electrical generation, not just nuclear.
Electric cars can solve only a portion of the transportation CO2 problem. Electric vehicles cannot fly any meaningful distance, or sail across oceans, or even do long haul trucking. Synthesized fuel solves the CO2 problem and it does not require new vehicles. To synthesize fuels requires nuclear power, nothing else we have today will do.
With synthetic fuels every car on the road today becomes instantly cleaner. We don't need electric vehicles to do this. That's not saying electric vehicles don't have a place, only that electric vehicles are not required to get a carbon neutral economy.
Here's something I found real quick on the technology, do some more searching on your own to find more. https://www.nrl.navy.mil/media...
Whilst it is possible to synthesise liquid fuels using nuclear power, the process of generating it in this way, in terms of input energy to final drive power is likely to be under 10% efficient and so is unlikely to be commercially viable.
You are speculating. Also, the efficiency is largely irrelevant, it's the costs that matter for commercial viability. Certainly efficiency of the process is part of the cost computation but that's not the only thing. There are articles and video presentations out on the internet of people from the US Navy talking about their fuel synthesis process. They claim that it can produce fuel at a cost "competitive" with current fuel sources if scaled up to mass production. Does "competitive" mean $6/gallon? Or, $2/gallon? We cannot be sure until we try. If this does work then we could turn every plane, train, and automobile that runs on fossil fuels into zero emission vehicles overnight.
Passenger transport accounts for over 20% of our CO2 output.
Let's do some math, shall we?
Transportation is about 30% of our CO2 output, but only about 1/3rd of that is passenger cars. The rest of that is aircraft, ships at sea, and so forth that cannot run on batteries. Replacing an ICE passenger car with an electric car cuts the CO2 output to 1/4 of what it was, because the electricity we use now comes largely from coal and natural gas. So, by replacing every passenger car with an EV we take maybe 10% of the total CO2 output and turn that into 2%. I am not impressed.
I say that electric vehicles solve only half the problem because replacing passenger vehicles would mean very little improvement. It's not nothing but it's small. Nuclear power, on the other hand, takes the larger slice of the pie (about 30%) that is electrical production and take that to zero. Does it all have to be nuclear? No. Have some wind and hydro in there, quite likely some natural gas too. I don't believe we'll get rid of natural gas any time soon because it's just so cheap, very convenient, very clean (compared to coal at least), easy to store and transport, and perhaps more.
Use nuclear power for industrial processes and we reduce CO2 output further. Nuclear power would be great for fertilizer production, desalination of water, perhaps even providing heat for things like making cement.
Can't we use wind and solar for this? Not totally. Wind and solar are very unreliable, we'd need a back-up for those.
The NBER report quoted one grid manager in Germany as saying that 8 MW of back-up capacity are required for any 10 MW of wind capacity added to the system.
If we use natural gas for this then we run the risk of not reducing our CO2. Running a turbine means getting 30% efficiency in turning that natural gas into electricity. Burning that in a combined cycle plant, a plant that cannot be used to backup wind, gets 60% efficiency. If we see the wind blow half the time and have to run the turbines half the time then we saved nothing in fuel costs and CO2 output. We'd be better off just burning the natural gas in the combined cycle plant.
Fourth generation nuclear power plants may offer the ability to load follow. Using nuclear to backup wind gains nothing because nuclear is as zero carbon as wind. The fuel costs in running nuclear is next to nothing, other operating costs dominate. If for every 10 MW of wind it takes 8 MW of nuclear for backup then wind would have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear to compete. Similar math applies for solar. This does not apply to natural gas so it can compete with nuclear with near parity prices.
Electric vehicles are not "charged from coal". Coal is baseload and is running regardless of what is happening in the country. If the USA switches to electric cars it will put more strain on generation requiring the construction of new power plants. These are not powered by coal.
Coal still dominates, being roughly 1/3rd of our electricity production. Calling electric vehicles coal powered is not inaccurate. New generation is dominated by natural gas. With wind and solar, as history tells us, would need large investments in inefficient natural gas to remain viable. Future developments in battery or nuclear fission technology may change this but for now we have three choices to make: - Nuclear power - Fossil fuels - The lights going out
I'd like to see people choose nuclear power.
GM is not in the business of solving all of our energy problems, so I cannot lay this all at their feet. With that said I would like to see some recognition by GM and others in the EV business to recognize the need to have nuclear power to take us the rest of the way on reducing CO2 output.
I think one conclusion is clear: biofuels canâ(TM)t add up â" at least, not in countries like Britain, and not as a replacement for all transport fuels. Even leaving aside biofuelsâ(TM) main defects â" that their production competes with food, and that the additional inputs required for farming and processing often cancel out most of the delivered energy (figure 6.14) â" biofuels made from plants, in a European country like Britain, can deliver so little power, I think they are scarcely worth talking about.
The problems of nuclear waste is not only solvable but largely already solved. Encasing the waste in glass and burying it in the ground is a completely viable solution. http://www.withouthotair.com/c...
It's safer than a $500 motorcycle. Safer than a $500 bicycle. Safer than trying to walk to work in freezing rain, or waiting for a bus in a crime ridden neighborhood.
Electric vehicles that are charged from coal are not "green". They might be "greener" than most any ICE vehicle but it's still nibbling about the edges rather than taking a big bite of the problem. Driving an electric car might mean producing 1/4 the carbon footprint than an ICE but commuter cars are really a small part of our total carbon output.
To make an electric car a true "zero emission vehicle" (or as close to zero as we can get) means nuclear power. Nuclear power is as "green" as wind or solar, is safer (based on studies of deaths per TWh produced), cheaper, and more reliable.
If we go to nuclear power as a primary source of energy then synthesized fuels start to become practical. The US Navy has demonstrated the ability to make aviation fuel using nuclear power and seawater as a feed stock. Scaling this process up to commercial scales should be trivial if given some development funding. The carbon in the fuel is from the environment, not out of the ground, so it closes the loop on carbon. It adds no new carbon to the air.
With nuclear power and synthetic fuels these electric cars don't look so "green" any more. They might have other advantages over ICE cars, such as running quieter or better acceleration, so it might not be complete nonsense in the end. With nuclear power and synthetic fuels even a Boeing 747 is "green".
If we all agree that digging carbon out of the ground and oxidizing it into the air is a problem then we need to find meaningful solutions. I'm not a fan of electric vehicles since they don't really solve anything. Nuclear power does.
If GM cared about selling the Bolt, they'd put any sort of real effort into advertising it.
Perhaps GM doesn't care if the Bolt sold.
I read somewhere that the big automakers are really only selling their electric cars to comply with certain state and federal regulations. They are often sold at a considerable loss on each vehicle. Electric cars are still a very small portion of the market, and are likely to remain so for a long time yet. A quick Google search tells me that 17 million cars are sold in the USA each year. A quick Google search didn't tell me how may electric cars have been sold each year, only that 500,000 electric cars in total are on US roads right now.
If people wanted electric cars then they can buy them. GM will make what people will buy, excepting the regulations imposed on them as I mentioned above. When people start buying electric cars, like the Bolt, then GM will start advertising them. I realize that this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but GM is still interested in making a profit. If they don't make a profit today then they won't be around to make electric cars next decade.
Is this announcement showing a shift in what people want to buy? Or, is this just more money spent on electric cars to satisfy regulators and tree huggers? (Or rather tree hugging regulators?) There's still the matter of following through on this announcement. They might quietly reverse this next year, next month, or even next week.
You can lease an electric car for $200/month, with very small fuel charges. They're not a rich man's toy unless you buy an expensive one...same as with ICE cars.
In college my roommate bought an ICE car for $500. I sold my old car for $500 on trading up, and it likely to sold in the $1000 range once they fixed the gas leak, changed the oil, and scrubbed the cola I spilled from the carpet. $200/month may not be in the realm of a "rich man's toy" but it is still a lot more than a rust box on four wheels that gets people from point A to point B and back in relative safety and comfort. A cheap car in the $1000 range can be saved up for in 5 or 6 months instead of 5 or 6 years of payments of the same amount to lease. A used $10,000 ICE vehicle is still pretty nice, and cheap to run. After 5 or 6 years of $200/month payments the vehicle is owned, not leased, and is free and clear to run for years after with no further payments. Even taking fuel costs into account the ICE is still considerably cheaper.
There may come a day when used BEVs sell for prices in the same range as ICE cars. Until then any arguments on BEVs being even close to "cheap" is lost on me.
Electric cars don't work when the power goes out, ICE powered cars do.
That is until you go to gas up, and there's no power to the pumps.
I recall this was a laughably common problem in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Those that learned from this have installed backup hand crank pumps and generators that run off the same fuel that's in the underground tanks. Those that didn't learn from this will be like the idiots that packed pallets of canned food but forgot a can opener. The people that did learn their lessons will be able to get fuel from the tanks so long as there is fuel in those tanks.
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There is no scientific correlation between gun ownership and being safe.
You are correct. There's three possible correlations:
- More guns = more crime
- More guns = less crime
- More guns = simply more guns
I did a study on this for a graduate level statistics class. While I did not compare gun ownership rates I did compare the gun laws of various states. I suspect greater restrictions on ownership correlates to ownership. The best I found was some very weak correlations to gun laws and crime. Increased restrictions correlated to increased rates of rape and decreased robberies.
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. I generally dislike the government telling me how and where I may defend myself. I also dislike the idea of leaving women vulnerable to rape. This will come at a cost of robberies, which is still considered a violent crime. There's likely to be some bruised faces and battered pride but if all that is lost is some money and a cell phone then life goes on.
I'm not the only one that did this analysis, there are others that took similar data and came to similar conclusions. Here's the important part, look for the effect on total crime. There's lots of studies on "gun violence" which give a lot of nonsense. It doesn't include the deterrent factor that gun ownership has on people getting injured and killed with knives and fists. It also counts legal shootings by police and innocent citizens stopping criminals as "gun violence". Also included in "gun violence" is suicides.
Again, I looked at ALL CRIME, not gun crime, or this fiction that is "gun violence". Filter out the noise and you are correct, gun ownership does not keep you safe. It does mean that women should go armed because they are less likely to get raped when armed. They might have to hand over some cash to make a thug go away but that will save them from a more severe outcome.
And while you try and become a civilized country, try the metric system, even in the USA I think most of you can count to 10
I can count to ten, I'm way ahead on the conversion to metric. I have my 9mm Luger, 10mm Auto, and 7.62 NATO. I'm keeping my .45 ACP though, there's some family history behind that.
Anyone that thinks gun bans will work to reduce gun ownership or violent crime is insane. There's enough people with scrap metal, CNC mills, and time to make working firearms on their own. Oh, and ammunition too. What is the government going to do about it? Things changed since this "assault weapon" nonsense started 30 or so years ago.
In that time there's been a lot of young men and women that volunteered for military service. When in basic military training they'd be given a M-16. Depending on their role after training they'd get further training on a 9mm pistol, a 12 gauge shotgun, M-4 rifle, maybe even some bolt action sniper rifles and machine guns. These weapons become their daily companion while on tour. Some served a single 6 month tour. Some served one or two year long tours. Assuming an enlisted person served a 5, 6, or 8 year enlistment to the end, they'll leave with a mindset that these weapons are what keeps them alive.
They'll go home, with some coin in their pocket, and buy civilian versions of what they carried for so long. It won't have burst fire. Maybe they won't spend the money on a scope like they had. The barrel might be a few inches longer. But for the most part this weapon is much like they had and is now they see this as their means to survive and no one will take it from them.
It might sit in a forgotten corner of a closet. Maybe it is again a constant companion as they work on ranches, as security guards, law enforcement, or just in the back of their truck along with PVC pipes, scrap lumber, and cordless drills. They'll hunt with them. They'll shoot target with friends with them. Or, still sit in a corner nearly forgotten.
There's 20 million veterans in the USA. All trained in the use of firearms. Many of them own weapons much like those that they carried to war. These are peaceful people. Quiet and yet vigilant. Like a dog lying half asleep on a porch watching the world go by.
Don't kick that dog. So long as the dog is there we have civilization. You provoke those dogs and teeth will come out to protect their home.
People fear "gun violence". I don't. If someone brings violence on any of these 20 million veterans then expect violence in return. It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. Removing the gun changes nothing. Violence will still happen, only more good guys will have to die to restore the peace.
The second cause on your list, cancer, is not a single disease. Cancer is a group of diseases, and the treatments for them vary based on the type. We've got so good at this that we're doing genetic testing on the cancers to see which drugs would be most effective on it. Now that we've sliced it that thin it doesn't look like a single disease any more. Cancer is now an ever increasing number of diseases, each one increasingly rare.
How does choosing to take an experimental drug take away the choice to take a more effective one? So long as people can choose their medicine no one is taking away anything. That's just it though, isn't it? People are losing their ability to choose the medical care they wish to receive.
If you like your doctor you can keep him. Right?
Shows great wellbeing to the financial survival of big pharma.
Well "big pharma" makes medicine to make money, if they don't make money then they can't make things like antibiotics that save lives, or common cold medicine that make us feel better and more productive.
If there is a problem with the medicines we get in the USA its from the FDA. The FDA refuses to allow many many drugs to enter the market because they haven't proven effectiveness. Well, it's impossible to prove effectiveness unless allowed to test the drugs on real and actual people. Sure, we're going to have a lot of drugs that don't work, and the drug companies will make a profit on them. That's because the people that develop the drugs cannot simply work for free. These people need to get paid, and show a profit, or they go do something else. Something else as not develop the next life saving drug.
Another part of the problem is we've already solved the big problems, what's left are the increasingly rare diseases. The R&D costs are then spread on fewer and fewer patients. That means pills that cost $100 each, before the FDA, insurance companies, and so on all get a cut.
The people in "big pharma" aren't evil for making a profit, any more than you are evil for getting paid for whatever you do to pay your bills.
I'll go on road trips and stay at campsites instead of hotels to save money. The sites I've seen offer AC service. Generators are typically frowned upon on a campsite.
So is hydrogen and biofuels pretty much a dead end at this point?
Hydrogen is not an energy source so any vehicle that burns hydrogen is really running off the energy that created it, which in the USA is a mix of coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Same for electric cars, they really run on coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Some places with an abundance of flowing water will have some of the energy from hydro.
Biofuels is also mostly a means to convert a low quality energy source (coal and natural gas mainly) into a high quality energy for storage and transportation (liquid fuels and electricity). Given that people are debating whether or not biofuels give a net energy gain is evidence to me that the benefits to using biofuels are small if they exist at all. If the gain wasn't so small then we'd be debating how much of an energy gain it gives, rather than if it gives one at all.
Electric cars, without nuclear power, might give some reduction in CO2 introduced into the environment but we'd do much better with nuclear power. Wind and solar have shown no real reduction in CO2 output since it needs backup power from peaking power sources like natural gas turbines. Natural gas turbines produce nearly as much CO2 per energy produced as coal, add in the carbon footprint of the wind and solar, and it becomes debatable if there is a net reduction in CO2 output. Germany is given as an example of a failure of switching from reliable nuclear power to unreliable wind and solar. The only CO2 output reduction they've seen recently has been due to a reduction in demand. The demand reduction may or may not be caused by the higher prices they've paid.
Electric vehicles will be a failure in the goal to reduce CO2 output unless it is paired with nuclear power.
I haven't flown on such flights myself but I've heard stories of people getting on planes and being greeted by a person they assume to be the flight attendant. This person will show them to their seats, give them their safety briefing, perhaps even hand out drinks and snacks, and then go to the flight deck and help fly the plane.
I don't know exactly what size of a plane would have only a crew of two, 40 or fewer perhaps. In those cases the flight attendant is the co-pilot. If there's something like 20 or fewer passengers then there can be a crew of one, the pilot. In that case the pilot serves the role of flight attendant too.
If there is going to be crew of any size then it would make sense that one or two of them know something about how to fly the plane in case of a failure in the remote or automated piloting system. Being a pilot used to be a high paid job but so many people want to fly, and it's not terribly difficult to learn how to do it, that the pay has shrunk. The cost of having a trained pilot on the plane versus just someone that knows how to do a safety briefing and hand out snacks has to be so small that it has to be hard to make a case to not require knowledge on how to actually fly the plane.
Put another way, if you are an airline and you are looking for people to be the one and only crew member on the plane then what would you look for in hiring that person? People want these jobs so they'll do what the job requires. If there's a bunch of people applying to be a flight attendant, and one of them has a pilot's certificate, then which one would you hire first?
what kind of a person becomes MBA?
People that want to become managers. Most companies want to see managers that can demonstrate an ability to manage before getting promoted to management. This can be done with years in the business as a "non-management manager", such as a team leader, or with the MBA degree, usually both.
The Master of Business Administration degree is a graduate program, so people will have a degree in something before they apply. There's the pure business types that give MBAs a bad name that know nothing but what they learned in business school, they know "business" but nothing of how the business they are in works. It seems to me that a large number of MBA graduates have degrees in engineering, sciences, medicine, law, and such that go to get an MBA to learn how to run a business on top of what they know of the industry that they are in. This trend, or perhaps need, for people that have technical knowledge and business knowledge is high enough that many schools offer programs that allow for people to get their MBA and other degree concurrently.
The people studying for their MBA tend to be people that want to run their own business or wish to be managers in whatever company that hires them. There are many companies that simply will not hire someone into management unless they have that MBA on their CV. Even if not required for the position it can show management knowledge to get to a management position.
And, closer to home for most of us, I don't call my computer "CPU" or "hard drive".
Apparently you've never done computer support work. I have people calling their computer a "hard drive" all the time. Why this is baffles me a bit but I'd rather just get the person's issues resolved than debate the distinction between the computer as a whole and the hard drive as a part of that whole.
I don't call my car "engine" or "mirror".
I'll hear people refer to their car as "wheels", and I've done the same. Language is a complex thing.
Still, the remaining black-white disparity âoeis not acceptable,â said Lee Schwartzberg, a medical oncologist at West Cancer Center in Germantown, Tenn. He said the gap reflects complicated social, economic and biological factors that are not yet fully understood, including insurance and employment status. In addition, black women are twice as likely as white women to develop so-called triple negative breast cancer, which can be harder to treat, the report noted.
They do a study and find that people with African ancestry tend to have a kind of cancer that we don't yet know how to treat. What if this disparity was found between people from Angola vs. Kenya? Would this be "unacceptable? What if it was between Greeks and French? Would that be "unacceptable"? They can call this "complicated" all they like but the reason that this one group tends to have higher rates of deaths from cancer is clear from the paragraph I quoted, it's genetic. There's nothing we can do about one's genes.
It seems obvious they know the reason why the disparity exists, it's genetic. However, when we equate this disparity to race instead of genetics then it becomes "unacceptable" to people. It's unfortunate that we cannot treat this "triple negative" cancer better. Research into treating this cancer should continue, as should treatments for all kinds of cancer. Seeing this as a matter of race instead of genetics turns a problem of medicine and science into a political issue.
Can we leave politics out of science? Please? Politics ruined football. If sanity is not regained then politics will ruin everything.
You're holding it wrong.
Okay then, let's assume a $500 to $1000 is somehow unacceptable. There's a lot of $5000 to $10,000 cars out there and they are not junk. Can anyone buy an EV in that price range? One that doesn't need a new battery or some other high dollar repairs?
Have you ever hugged a tree? It's quite pleasant.
Yes, I have. It's not that great. It also smells like cinnamon.
apparently he's talking about the UK and it might work better in the US.
No, it won't.
As long as my previous post was I failed to complete my thought. If we do not burn natural gas efficiently, in combined cycle plants, then it produces as much CO2 output as coal. Mix unreliable energy like wind and solar with natural gas turbine backup and you end up with as much energy per CO2 as if you burned coal.
Wind and solar do not reduce CO2 output per energy produced because we have no other technology to back that up than natural gas and coal. What else is there? Nuclear. Any other technology, such as some sort of storage, is not mature enough for utility scale use.
Even if we can replace current coal with a mix of natural gas and "unreliables" the net CO2 output is no different than if we burned coal. You can say it's not coal powered, and that might be true technically, but the outcome in CO2 output is no different.
Germany tried to reduce CO2 output without nuclear power and failed.
http://www.environmentalprogre...
If you want people to use them then they need to be (as I said before) cheap, safe, reliable, and low CO2.
Wind, cheap (or at least within double the price of coal) but not reliable.
Solar, far from cheap, not reliable.
Tidal, perhaps it is quite reliable, maybe it is safe, also likely low CO2. It is not cheap. Seawater is very abrasive, carrying sand with the water. This sand destroys turbines. There may come a day when we figure out how to make this cheap but that is not today.
Geothermal, unless you happen to live on top of volcanic activity it is not cheap. Making it more plentiful means digging deeper, and that adds to the cost.
Biowaste, there is no such thing. Biowaste does not exist. I grew up on a farm and we wasted nothing. Cornstalks were used as cattle bedding and then spread out on the fields for fertilizer and erosion control. Spoiled corn was sold for non-food (industrial ethanol mostly) uses. Generally anything "bio" that is not food is returned to the soil for fertilizer. Taking that "waste" for fuel and something needs to replace that or we will ruin the soil and we grow nothing.
An electric engine becomes instantly cleaner the moment a coal plant is turned off, and anything else is turned on.
What would that "anything else" be? There's not a whole lot of choices out there. We'd need something reliable, cheap (at a cost comparable to coal), safe, and if we agree that CO2 output is a problem then it needs to have a low CO2 output. There are only two energy sources we have today that meet those requirements, hydro and nuclear. We've already dammed up nearly every river worth a dam. That leaves nuclear. This might change in the future with some future technological development but that's what we have right now.
There is nothing terribly wrong with nuclear, but it works best in tandem with electric cars, and electric cars work well with any improvement on electrical generation, not just nuclear.
Electric cars can solve only a portion of the transportation CO2 problem. Electric vehicles cannot fly any meaningful distance, or sail across oceans, or even do long haul trucking. Synthesized fuel solves the CO2 problem and it does not require new vehicles. To synthesize fuels requires nuclear power, nothing else we have today will do.
With synthetic fuels every car on the road today becomes instantly cleaner. We don't need electric vehicles to do this. That's not saying electric vehicles don't have a place, only that electric vehicles are not required to get a carbon neutral economy.
Here's something I found real quick on the technology, do some more searching on your own to find more.
https://www.nrl.navy.mil/media...
Whilst it is possible to synthesise liquid fuels using nuclear power, the process of generating it in this way, in terms of input energy to final drive power is likely to be under 10% efficient and so is unlikely to be commercially viable.
You are speculating. Also, the efficiency is largely irrelevant, it's the costs that matter for commercial viability. Certainly efficiency of the process is part of the cost computation but that's not the only thing. There are articles and video presentations out on the internet of people from the US Navy talking about their fuel synthesis process. They claim that it can produce fuel at a cost "competitive" with current fuel sources if scaled up to mass production. Does "competitive" mean $6/gallon? Or, $2/gallon? We cannot be sure until we try. If this does work then we could turn every plane, train, and automobile that runs on fossil fuels into zero emission vehicles overnight.
Passenger transport accounts for over 20% of our CO2 output.
Let's do some math, shall we?
Transportation is about 30% of our CO2 output, but only about 1/3rd of that is passenger cars. The rest of that is aircraft, ships at sea, and so forth that cannot run on batteries. Replacing an ICE passenger car with an electric car cuts the CO2 output to 1/4 of what it was, because the electricity we use now comes largely from coal and natural gas. So, by replacing every passenger car with an EV we take maybe 10% of the total CO2 output and turn that into 2%. I am not impressed.
I say that electric vehicles solve only half the problem because replacing passenger vehicles would mean very little improvement. It's not nothing but it's small. Nuclear power, on the other hand, takes the larger slice of the pie (about 30%) that is electrical production and take that to zero. Does it all have to be nuclear? No. Have some wind and hydro in there, quite likely some natural gas too. I don't believe we'll get rid of natural gas any time soon because it's just so cheap, very convenient, very clean (compared to coal at least), easy to store and transport, and perhaps more.
Use nuclear power for industrial processes and we reduce CO2 output further. Nuclear power would be great for fertilizer production, desalination of water, perhaps even providing heat for things like making cement.
Can't we use wind and solar for this? Not totally. Wind and solar are very unreliable, we'd need a back-up for those.
http://www.power-eng.com/artic...
The NBER report quoted one grid manager in Germany as saying that 8 MW of back-up capacity are required for any 10 MW of wind capacity added to the system.
If we use natural gas for this then we run the risk of not reducing our CO2. Running a turbine means getting 30% efficiency in turning that natural gas into electricity. Burning that in a combined cycle plant, a plant that cannot be used to backup wind, gets 60% efficiency. If we see the wind blow half the time and have to run the turbines half the time then we saved nothing in fuel costs and CO2 output. We'd be better off just burning the natural gas in the combined cycle plant.
Fourth generation nuclear power plants may offer the ability to load follow. Using nuclear to backup wind gains nothing because nuclear is as zero carbon as wind. The fuel costs in running nuclear is next to nothing, other operating costs dominate. If for every 10 MW of wind it takes 8 MW of nuclear for backup then wind would have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear to compete. Similar math applies for solar. This does not apply to natural gas so it can compete with nuclear with near parity prices.
Electric vehicles are not "charged from coal". Coal is baseload and is running regardless of what is happening in the country. If the USA switches to electric cars it will put more strain on generation requiring the construction of new power plants. These are not powered by coal.
Coal still dominates, being roughly 1/3rd of our electricity production. Calling electric vehicles coal powered is not inaccurate. New generation is dominated by natural gas. With wind and solar, as history tells us, would need large investments in inefficient natural gas to remain viable. Future developments in battery or nuclear fission technology may change this but for now we have three choices to make:
- Nuclear power
- Fossil fuels
- The lights going out
I'd like to see people choose nuclear power.
GM is not in the business of solving all of our energy problems, so I cannot lay this all at their feet. With that said I would like to see some recognition by GM and others in the EV business to recognize the need to have nuclear power to take us the rest of the way on reducing CO2 output.
Why not biofuels? No nasty radioactive waste to deal with.
Because bio-fuels don't add up.
http://www.withouthotair.com/c...
I think one conclusion is clear: biofuels canâ(TM)t add up â" at least, not in
countries like Britain, and not as a replacement for all transport fuels. Even
leaving aside biofuelsâ(TM) main defects â" that their production competes with
food, and that the additional inputs required for farming and processing
often cancel out most of the delivered energy (figure 6.14) â" biofuels made
from plants, in a European country like Britain, can deliver so little power,
I think they are scarcely worth talking about.
The problems of nuclear waste is not only solvable but largely already solved. Encasing the waste in glass and burying it in the ground is a completely viable solution.
http://www.withouthotair.com/c...
It's safer than a $500 motorcycle. Safer than a $500 bicycle. Safer than trying to walk to work in freezing rain, or waiting for a bus in a crime ridden neighborhood.
Electric vehicles that are charged from coal are not "green". They might be "greener" than most any ICE vehicle but it's still nibbling about the edges rather than taking a big bite of the problem. Driving an electric car might mean producing 1/4 the carbon footprint than an ICE but commuter cars are really a small part of our total carbon output.
To make an electric car a true "zero emission vehicle" (or as close to zero as we can get) means nuclear power. Nuclear power is as "green" as wind or solar, is safer (based on studies of deaths per TWh produced), cheaper, and more reliable.
If we go to nuclear power as a primary source of energy then synthesized fuels start to become practical. The US Navy has demonstrated the ability to make aviation fuel using nuclear power and seawater as a feed stock. Scaling this process up to commercial scales should be trivial if given some development funding. The carbon in the fuel is from the environment, not out of the ground, so it closes the loop on carbon. It adds no new carbon to the air.
With nuclear power and synthetic fuels these electric cars don't look so "green" any more. They might have other advantages over ICE cars, such as running quieter or better acceleration, so it might not be complete nonsense in the end. With nuclear power and synthetic fuels even a Boeing 747 is "green".
If we all agree that digging carbon out of the ground and oxidizing it into the air is a problem then we need to find meaningful solutions. I'm not a fan of electric vehicles since they don't really solve anything. Nuclear power does.
If GM cared about selling the Bolt, they'd put any sort of real effort into advertising it.
Perhaps GM doesn't care if the Bolt sold.
I read somewhere that the big automakers are really only selling their electric cars to comply with certain state and federal regulations. They are often sold at a considerable loss on each vehicle. Electric cars are still a very small portion of the market, and are likely to remain so for a long time yet. A quick Google search tells me that 17 million cars are sold in the USA each year. A quick Google search didn't tell me how may electric cars have been sold each year, only that 500,000 electric cars in total are on US roads right now.
If people wanted electric cars then they can buy them. GM will make what people will buy, excepting the regulations imposed on them as I mentioned above. When people start buying electric cars, like the Bolt, then GM will start advertising them. I realize that this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem but GM is still interested in making a profit. If they don't make a profit today then they won't be around to make electric cars next decade.
Is this announcement showing a shift in what people want to buy? Or, is this just more money spent on electric cars to satisfy regulators and tree huggers? (Or rather tree hugging regulators?) There's still the matter of following through on this announcement. They might quietly reverse this next year, next month, or even next week.
You can lease an electric car for $200/month, with very small fuel charges. They're not a rich man's toy unless you buy an expensive one...same as with ICE cars.
In college my roommate bought an ICE car for $500. I sold my old car for $500 on trading up, and it likely to sold in the $1000 range once they fixed the gas leak, changed the oil, and scrubbed the cola I spilled from the carpet. $200/month may not be in the realm of a "rich man's toy" but it is still a lot more than a rust box on four wheels that gets people from point A to point B and back in relative safety and comfort. A cheap car in the $1000 range can be saved up for in 5 or 6 months instead of 5 or 6 years of payments of the same amount to lease. A used $10,000 ICE vehicle is still pretty nice, and cheap to run. After 5 or 6 years of $200/month payments the vehicle is owned, not leased, and is free and clear to run for years after with no further payments. Even taking fuel costs into account the ICE is still considerably cheaper.
There may come a day when used BEVs sell for prices in the same range as ICE cars. Until then any arguments on BEVs being even close to "cheap" is lost on me.
Electric cars don't work when the power goes out, ICE powered cars do.
That is until you go to gas up, and there's no power to the pumps.
I recall this was a laughably common problem in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Those that learned from this have installed backup hand crank pumps and generators that run off the same fuel that's in the underground tanks. Those that didn't learn from this will be like the idiots that packed pallets of canned food but forgot a can opener. The people that did learn their lessons will be able to get fuel from the tanks so long as there is fuel in those tanks.