They say that if you are young and vote Republican you are heartless but if you are older and vote Democrat you are stupid. Not sure which gene controls that...
The only reason we dropped behind China recently is because they ramped up their manufacturing so much.
It also doesn't hurt that they have roughly three times the US population. If everyone there bought 1% more manufactured goods the change in GDP would be greater than the total annual production of some entire countries.
My son (currently 6) is obsessed with a creature called the Terror Bird. Standing ten feet tall they were apex predators in South America. I would be plenty scared of a meat eating bird that big.
While I can see a need for putting together and rehearsing a plan for "after" I would like to see the cost-benefit analysis on hardening the infrastructure. There are a lot of things we *could* do in life, like making planes more protected from missile damage we don't do because the likelihood of the event being protected against is so low relative to the aggregate cost to implement said solution. Are we prepared to build EMP shielding into every electronic device, thereby increasing the cost of life in general to protect against a very unlikely event? (Note I am not advocating one way or the other, simply asking the question.)
There really is no excuse for 30 years of innovation... for gas mileage to have gone down.
The only way this works is if cars remain exactly the same while improving only the engine technology. In 1981, the Honda Accord was 175" long, 64: wide and weighed 2,083 lbs. The 1.8L engine made 75hp. A current Accord is 191" long, 72" wide and weighs 3,287 lbs. Its 2.0L engine makes 154hp. The power-displacement ratio of the engine went up by 84% but the weight went up by more than 50%. As long as people want faster/bigger/more we will eat up any efficiency gains to have more comfort. Only when forced will the average person use efficiency to decrease consumption.
...for many applications. For a significant portion of people's driving needs battery powered vehicles are great. For the rest they absolutely fail. No amount of money will get me to trade the 4x4 diesel used at my family's ranch for existing electric car technology. The qualities that make liquid fuel attractive cannot be touched in this application. I can carry a whole Prius battery pack of energy in a couple external cans of diesel on my trailer.
Regarding emissions, I am going to have to argue that the jury is still out on that. While the battery powered car itself has zero emissions, the power had to be generated someplace. While some are quick to jump in to offer solar or wind power, iirc charging a Tesla S is the equivalent of adding half an average house's load on the power grid in off peak hours. Solar and wind work best when the sun is out, so other power sources will be required when it is dark out. That means coal, nat. gas or my favorite, nuclear. As of today, electric cars displace emissions, not eliminate them. Electric cars are part of our transportation future. A perfect alternative they are not.
He doesn't have to work for an oil company to hold this opinion, though "always" is an awfully long time. Personal transportation presents one main problem to overcome, that the energy to power a vehicle must either be carried on the vehicle or delivered to it. Unless we want to all drive slot car racers, vehicles must carry their fuel, the optimal fuel being determined primarily by two factors. The first is the energy stored per unit of volume, the other is the amount of energy stored by weight. As of today, liquid petroleum is the optimal maximization point of the combination of these two factors. Lithium-ion batteries are very poor energy storage in comparison being beaten by a factor of 40 by weight and ten by volume. I certainly think that we will see improvements in both of these, but I hold the opinion that a different technology will be required to compete with liquid energy.
Did you actually read the wiki article to which you linked? As stated in TFA, "...many of the "subsidies" available to the oil and gas industries are general business opportunity credits, available to all US businesses." The value of subsidies specifically targeting fossil fuels is only a small fraction of the total subsidies received. If you take away the subsidies available to all businesses we can just lower emissions by crushing the economy at large. I'm sure Silicon Valley would love to see the R&D expense credit go away in the name of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies.
but it is just a matter of time before there is a breakthrough in battery or power supply technology
Why do you think this is true? Further, even if there is a breakthrough in storage technology, some other factor may make it unusable, e.g. toxicity, chemical instability, throughput, scalability, cost, etc. We have reached a point that we are pushing the limits of the elements themselves. The entire model for electric cars depends on the power to weight ratios available only with rare earth magnets. I am all for thinking about what could be possible, but if you bank on technological breakthrough you will find yourself broke.
Limited liability is in respect to the owners of a corporation, not the employees and management. If a company goes belly up, no avenue exists to contact shareholders and say "You owe $50.82 per share to satisfy the obligations of the company." Until true A.I. exists, people still make all decisions and individuals should still be held responsible for their decisions, even if said decision was directing a corporate action.
The only way to fix this is for the people behind decisions to face penalties. Whether or not a corporation is considered an entity, a real person makes every decision, and only holding the people behind a decision to break the law responsible will fix this kind of behavior.
IIRC, when a woman is born she has all the egg cells she is ever going to have. When she ovulates one of them finishes developing and is released. Consequently, it only makes sense that the longer they stick around, the more likely an egg is to degrade. Men, on the other hand, make new sperm by the millions constantly, so the sperm he contributes are only recently created.
I thought the SAG card came with a certificate making the holder an automatic expert on any topic on which he or she chooses to speak. For goodness sake, these are the Beautiful People. Aren't they supposed to be superior at all times?
When the activists boarded the whaling ship I was praying the people on the whaling ship would simply throw them overboard. I know the Sea Shepherd had Zodiacs deployed to pluck people from the water if needed, but I promise you anybody that went in that water will think very long and hard about risking having that happen a second time. It was obvious that many of the people on the Shepherd thought this was all fun and games but a quick dose of reality in the form of freezing water would probably change their attitude. I also thought the whaling ships needed someone on board with a 12 gauge shotgun to take out the bags of rancid butter being flung at the ship. Unlike most flying targets, those were large and slow moving and should have been easy to blow open.
Just make sure they are tethered so they don't fall on a populated area.
The only reason these are necessary is that the residents live in sparsly populated areas. If more people lived there the infrastructure cost of traditional electric delivery would be justifiable. From TFA, a turbine could power "dozens" of homes. In the biggest state in the US, a dozen homes is a rounding error in population density.
$75,000 total cost for how many millions (billions?) in licensing revenue from PC manufacturers? This may go down as one of the best acquisitions in business history.
If a person works in an industry that changes over time in response to market needs then said individual needs to put in the time/effort to stay current or suffer the consequences. Some industries have this built in; CPA's, financial advisors and insurance agents, even doctors are required to do continuing education to ensure that they are abreast of changes in their field. Anybody in a tech field that fails to incorporate new technology into their toolbox is asking to be replaced.
Rush said it best: "Changes aren't permanent, but change is."
but I thought most people on slashdot wouldn't know what they were
/. is a place wherein denizens brag about using their acoustic couplers, or bbs'ing at 300 baud or computing in the snow, uphill both ways while editing inodes by hand with a magnet. You take a pretty big leap when you guess that "most" people don't know about an outdated technology.
The poor are ALWAYS hardest hit. The definition of "poor" in general context is "those lacking resources." No matter what harmful event happens on Earth, the "have-not's" are going to be most adversely impacted; the "have's" would have left, bought supplies, lived in brick & mortar instead of a modular home. lived on higher ground, etc.
Most businesses lose money their first few years. Under the current system they pay no taxes until they make a profit (and burn off their carried losses.) Under a "tax every incoming dollar" plan, even at only a minimal amount businesses on an already shaky footing would be even less likely to make it.
Why is perhaps why businesses should get taxed on income (aka revenue) like the rest of the tax payers.
Nothing would destroy the world economy faster than this staggeringly short sighted idea. A typical grocery store averages about 2% profit on sales. If, for example, a store pays $2.00 for a gallon of milk that it sells at $2.05 any tax that takes more than $0.05 make said grocer unable to restock his dairy case. How long exactly do you expect any store to remain in business under those terms?
We've got SpaceX and other commercial entities capable of launching supplies into orbit and rendezvouing with with ISS or a shuttle.
I am not an aerospace engineer or astrophysicist, but I have to ask how "capable" SpaceX is of this mission you propose. SpaceX won the X Prize by getting to 112 km twice. The shuttle orbited at 304 km and the ISS at 370km. The marginal cost of taking each additional kg to space is significant. To get any amount of any moderate mass more than twice as high above the Earth has got to have a massive energy budget. I realize SpaceX gets to the edge of space, but Shuttle type altitudes are higher above where SpaceX got than SpaceX itself was above the Earth.
Since I have small children that don't all understand that repeatedly entering a bad pin will erase my phone, I back up my iPhone & iPad to iTunes every night (and do not use iCloud.) All I have to do is plug it in and do a complete restore. If people don't back up their phones, whatever happens to them is their own fault. If someone wants to remote erase my device, I say "Bring it on."
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They say that if you are young and vote Republican you are heartless but if you are older and vote Democrat you are stupid. Not sure which gene controls that...
The only reason we dropped behind China recently is because they ramped up their manufacturing so much.
It also doesn't hurt that they have roughly three times the US population. If everyone there bought 1% more manufactured goods the change in GDP would be greater than the total annual production of some entire countries.
My son (currently 6) is obsessed with a creature called the Terror Bird. Standing ten feet tall they were apex predators in South America. I would be plenty scared of a meat eating bird that big.
While I can see a need for putting together and rehearsing a plan for "after" I would like to see the cost-benefit analysis on hardening the infrastructure. There are a lot of things we *could* do in life, like making planes more protected from missile damage we don't do because the likelihood of the event being protected against is so low relative to the aggregate cost to implement said solution. Are we prepared to build EMP shielding into every electronic device, thereby increasing the cost of life in general to protect against a very unlikely event? (Note I am not advocating one way or the other, simply asking the question.)
So the mnemonic device to remember the names of the planets will be about 60% as long as War & Peace.
There really is no excuse for 30 years of innovation... for gas mileage to have gone down.
The only way this works is if cars remain exactly the same while improving only the engine technology. In 1981, the Honda Accord was 175" long, 64: wide and weighed 2,083 lbs. The 1.8L engine made 75hp. A current Accord is 191" long, 72" wide and weighs 3,287 lbs. Its 2.0L engine makes 154hp. The power-displacement ratio of the engine went up by 84% but the weight went up by more than 50%. As long as people want faster/bigger/more we will eat up any efficiency gains to have more comfort. Only when forced will the average person use efficiency to decrease consumption.
Batteries are already good enough.
...for many applications. For a significant portion of people's driving needs battery powered vehicles are great. For the rest they absolutely fail. No amount of money will get me to trade the 4x4 diesel used at my family's ranch for existing electric car technology. The qualities that make liquid fuel attractive cannot be touched in this application. I can carry a whole Prius battery pack of energy in a couple external cans of diesel on my trailer.
Regarding emissions, I am going to have to argue that the jury is still out on that. While the battery powered car itself has zero emissions, the power had to be generated someplace. While some are quick to jump in to offer solar or wind power, iirc charging a Tesla S is the equivalent of adding half an average house's load on the power grid in off peak hours. Solar and wind work best when the sun is out, so other power sources will be required when it is dark out. That means coal, nat. gas or my favorite, nuclear. As of today, electric cars displace emissions, not eliminate them. Electric cars are part of our transportation future. A perfect alternative they are not.
He doesn't have to work for an oil company to hold this opinion, though "always" is an awfully long time. Personal transportation presents one main problem to overcome, that the energy to power a vehicle must either be carried on the vehicle or delivered to it. Unless we want to all drive slot car racers, vehicles must carry their fuel, the optimal fuel being determined primarily by two factors. The first is the energy stored per unit of volume, the other is the amount of energy stored by weight. As of today, liquid petroleum is the optimal maximization point of the combination of these two factors. Lithium-ion batteries are very poor energy storage in comparison being beaten by a factor of 40 by weight and ten by volume. I certainly think that we will see improvements in both of these, but I hold the opinion that a different technology will be required to compete with liquid energy.
Did you actually read the wiki article to which you linked? As stated in TFA, "...many of the "subsidies" available to the oil and gas industries are general business opportunity credits, available to all US businesses." The value of subsidies specifically targeting fossil fuels is only a small fraction of the total subsidies received. If you take away the subsidies available to all businesses we can just lower emissions by crushing the economy at large. I'm sure Silicon Valley would love to see the R&D expense credit go away in the name of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies.
but it is just a matter of time before there is a breakthrough in battery or power supply technology
Why do you think this is true? Further, even if there is a breakthrough in storage technology, some other factor may make it unusable, e.g. toxicity, chemical instability, throughput, scalability, cost, etc. We have reached a point that we are pushing the limits of the elements themselves. The entire model for electric cars depends on the power to weight ratios available only with rare earth magnets. I am all for thinking about what could be possible, but if you bank on technological breakthrough you will find yourself broke.
Limited liability is in respect to the owners of a corporation, not the employees and management. If a company goes belly up, no avenue exists to contact shareholders and say "You owe $50.82 per share to satisfy the obligations of the company." Until true A.I. exists, people still make all decisions and individuals should still be held responsible for their decisions, even if said decision was directing a corporate action.
The only way to fix this is for the people behind decisions to face penalties. Whether or not a corporation is considered an entity, a real person makes every decision, and only holding the people behind a decision to break the law responsible will fix this kind of behavior.
IIRC, when a woman is born she has all the egg cells she is ever going to have. When she ovulates one of them finishes developing and is released. Consequently, it only makes sense that the longer they stick around, the more likely an egg is to degrade. Men, on the other hand, make new sperm by the millions constantly, so the sperm he contributes are only recently created.
I thought the SAG card came with a certificate making the holder an automatic expert on any topic on which he or she chooses to speak. For goodness sake, these are the Beautiful People. Aren't they supposed to be superior at all times?
When the activists boarded the whaling ship I was praying the people on the whaling ship would simply throw them overboard. I know the Sea Shepherd had Zodiacs deployed to pluck people from the water if needed, but I promise you anybody that went in that water will think very long and hard about risking having that happen a second time. It was obvious that many of the people on the Shepherd thought this was all fun and games but a quick dose of reality in the form of freezing water would probably change their attitude. I also thought the whaling ships needed someone on board with a 12 gauge shotgun to take out the bags of rancid butter being flung at the ship. Unlike most flying targets, those were large and slow moving and should have been easy to blow open.
Just make sure they are tethered so they don't fall on a populated area.
The only reason these are necessary is that the residents live in sparsly populated areas. If more people lived there the infrastructure cost of traditional electric delivery would be justifiable. From TFA, a turbine could power "dozens" of homes. In the biggest state in the US, a dozen homes is a rounding error in population density.
$75,000 total cost for how many millions (billions?) in licensing revenue from PC manufacturers? This may go down as one of the best acquisitions in business history.
If a person works in an industry that changes over time in response to market needs then said individual needs to put in the time/effort to stay current or suffer the consequences. Some industries have this built in; CPA's, financial advisors and insurance agents, even doctors are required to do continuing education to ensure that they are abreast of changes in their field. Anybody in a tech field that fails to incorporate new technology into their toolbox is asking to be replaced.
Rush said it best: "Changes aren't permanent, but change is."
but I thought most people on slashdot wouldn't know what they were
/. is a place wherein denizens brag about using their acoustic couplers, or bbs'ing at 300 baud or computing in the snow, uphill both ways while editing inodes by hand with a magnet. You take a pretty big leap when you guess that "most" people don't know about an outdated technology.
The poor are the hardest hit.
The poor are ALWAYS hardest hit. The definition of "poor" in general context is "those lacking resources." No matter what harmful event happens on Earth, the "have-not's" are going to be most adversely impacted; the "have's" would have left, bought supplies, lived in brick & mortar instead of a modular home. lived on higher ground, etc.
Most businesses lose money their first few years. Under the current system they pay no taxes until they make a profit (and burn off their carried losses.) Under a "tax every incoming dollar" plan, even at only a minimal amount businesses on an already shaky footing would be even less likely to make it.
Why is perhaps why businesses should get taxed on income (aka revenue) like the rest of the tax payers.
Nothing would destroy the world economy faster than this staggeringly short sighted idea. A typical grocery store averages about 2% profit on sales. If, for example, a store pays $2.00 for a gallon of milk that it sells at $2.05 any tax that takes more than $0.05 make said grocer unable to restock his dairy case. How long exactly do you expect any store to remain in business under those terms?
Apparently. Sometimes I come to /. to find out how incomplete my knowledge is.
We've got SpaceX and other commercial entities capable of launching supplies into orbit and rendezvouing with with ISS or a shuttle.
I am not an aerospace engineer or astrophysicist, but I have to ask how "capable" SpaceX is of this mission you propose. SpaceX won the X Prize by getting to 112 km twice. The shuttle orbited at 304 km and the ISS at 370km. The marginal cost of taking each additional kg to space is significant. To get any amount of any moderate mass more than twice as high above the Earth has got to have a massive energy budget. I realize SpaceX gets to the edge of space, but Shuttle type altitudes are higher above where SpaceX got than SpaceX itself was above the Earth.
Since I have small children that don't all understand that repeatedly entering a bad pin will erase my phone, I back up my iPhone & iPad to iTunes every night (and do not use iCloud.) All I have to do is plug it in and do a complete restore. If people don't back up their phones, whatever happens to them is their own fault. If someone wants to remote erase my device, I say "Bring it on."