Now now, Rei, don't exaggerate. US science education sucks, but most people are taught Civil-War Era physics. None of that relativity or quantum stuff that's over 100 years old now, of course, that's too scary, but we do an OK job of teaching 150-year-old science!

It's always worth spending money on infrastructure - it's the legitimate business of the government. It's the sign of civilization. It's the primary indicator of quality of life.

If expanding freeways doesn't reduce traffic jams you haven't expanded them enough If expanding 3 lanes to 4 doesn't help, you may need 7 lanes (7 lanes each way at chokepoints may still not solve it - sometimes you need overlapping offramps, express highways, and similar fixes).

Exactly - lack of needed infrastructure has reduced freedom in those areas. Build more infrastructure; solve the problem.

NIMBY can't be allowed to win, or we become a 3rd-World shithole with no infrastructure. Building infrastructure needs to trump NIMBY - in fact, it's the one legitimate use of Eminent domain.

True enough, but Jag wasn't that terrible when Tata got them. If Tata is serious about improving quality, they don't have far to go. If instead it seeks the quality of the Nano, then starts making forward progress, well, 15 years is optimistic.

Not so much. Most air-quality problems are caused by cars idling in traffic - the amount of driving people do isn't very elastic, while the amount of fuel burned to get to a given destination can rise dramatically if you spend 80% of the journey not moving.

Fuck you hippie. Shave that neckbeard, get a job, buy a car, and then you'll see. Then die in a fire, you fucking hippie.

P.S. Fuck you, you fucking hippie.

Before Tata took over Jag, it had fallen far behind competing brands in terms of cool tech like this for luxury cars. Tata has made great leaps in closing that gap. It's great to see some new stuff as well.

Personally, I'm still a bit skeptical of "Tata quality", given some of their other products, but everyone was equally derisive of the quality of Japanese cars when I was a kid, and Korean cars when I was first driving. Who knows - Tata could pass the Japanese brands for quality in a few years.

I see now why "1 + 1 = 2" was a protest sign under Communism - you can't tell a left anything that conflicts with his community-based-reality.

The goal isn't "reduce traffic", as the freedom to travel by cad is a great thing! The goal is to make life better. Removing traffic jams, getting traffic off surface streets and on to freeways, reducing bumper-to-bumper to improve air quality - all of these can be achieved by adding enough lanes to your freeways. Enough many be quite high number, butt hat's fine: building robust infrastructure to make life better is what my taxes are for.

In most states, it's just silly to use surface streets when there's a freeway - even in rush hour, the freeway will be faster. But California is broken, and they just don't want to build big enough freeways (though LA at least tried, once). Making traffic flow better anywhere is rejected with "but it will bring more traffic" (sure, in the same way building a hospital will bring more deaths). NIMBY for more lanes on the freeway. NIMBY for wider surface streets. NIMBY for everything. The basic understanding that, yes, you can build enough lanes on a freeway was lacking. As a result, it sometimes felt like the entire state was a bumper-to-bumper gridlock, every neighborhood street, everything. Meh, they have the roadways they wanted, let em live with it.

Socialism is always about lying a lot. It's a hook to gain centralized power that people just keep biting at.

It's a sign of the cross-over in American politics of the control freaks from the right to the left. (Did you know John Kerry wrote much of the Patriot Act?) When I was young, the moral busybodies and authoritarians were indeed on the right, balanced by the desire on the right for a poorly-funded government that would limit the effect of that. But that seems to have been a brief anomaly, and the moral busybodies and preachy humorless prudes are firmly on the left these days, save for a few elderly Bible-bashers who haven't died off yet.

Hitler thought he was a socialist. His contemporaries thought he was a socialist. The National Socialist Workers Party saw themselves as socialist. He started in power with a straight-up socialist agenda (including the eugenics, lest we forget where he got that from). Denying history won't change it, it just means you can't learn from it. What else do you think Orwell was writing about, passionate socialist that he was? He had seen first hand where socialism can lead if the people aren't careful with it.

You want more government power to give you a living wage. You want more government power to give you health care. You want more government power to give you a safe retirement. You want more government power to protect you from this that and the other thing. Do you ever stop to think what the government will do with all that power once it has it? We only have to look back 75 years to learn the answer - the government is your friend while it accumulates power, but eventually it accumulates enough power that it no longer needs to be your friend.

Political activists love climate change as a way to take control of industry, and have been trumpeting the end of the world for some time now. I doubt there's ever been science to back that up. As the upper atmosphere warms, you necessarily have less atmospheric convection, a.k.a. weather. The only real science I've seen predicting anything drastic has been speculative - that ocean currents have a dramatic effect on local climate, and should climate change cause a shift in those, you could see rapid local warming or cooling - but no specific predictions, just noting it's a chaotic system and we can't predict how it might play out.

*Deckard - why the Hell do I keep typing Decker?

When I first saw the movie, the intent was clear to me: "how would any of us know if we were actually replicants". That's the interesting part of the film! I assumed Deckard was human while watching the beginning, but the "happy ending" broke that assumption for me, with the line something like "but do any of us really know?"

Once "fridge logic" kicked in, I saw many hints:
* The police officers who tell Decker he's un-retired treat him like shit for no apparent reason.
* The police just assumed he could take down multiple combat replicants, which seems bizaare once you see what he's up against, if he's human.
* The scene in which he's testing Rachel and asks "does she know" - what an amazingly powerful scene that is if Tyrell is really testing Decker: does he know.

In the world of engineering, we call that "your PowerPoint looks better than my shipping product". Glorious claims of splendor and awesomeness, and "but you can't buy it yet" go together quite often you see.

I'm a fan of SpaceX. I think it's likely they'll deliver. But until they have a track record with a given vehicle, they have wonderful PowerPoint.