"as we know it" is an important caveat, since nuclear war, even if we blew every weapon up, wouldn't destroy human civilization. We could decimate a few major cities, but there'd be plenty of people and technology left.

We exploded over 500 devices in the atmosphere in the 50s and 60s, some of them far more powerful than those currently in the stockpile (which are typically 100-300kt these days). Nuclear winter was a hoax perpetuated by Sagan, a man I respect, but a man who seemed to have an irrational fear of nuclear things, which corrupted his integrity on those matters.

I don't think the TSA turned the trend around, it was the actions of the 9/11 hijackers themselves, who turned the standard advice of "comply with hijackers and wait it out" into "fuck that, swarm the fuckers and stand on their throat until they die".

None of them were actual grenades. The blog post says some were smoke grenades or flash bangs, which don't even look at all like the explody kind. Still wouldn't be fun to have a smoke grenade go off on a plane, but it's not a very credible hijacking threat.

And besides, I doubt even the threat of a grenade would get a hijacker far these days. 9/11 made planes pretty difficult to hijack on a mere threat.

I don't believe that's the case, at least not at many airports. I've read an article that says that air taxi service is getting popular because it does avoid TSA.

Branzburg v. Hayes which lead to one of the big supreme court rulings on this matter (striking down protections for press) was under Burger's court and was hardly a conservative bunch (the same court that gave us Roe v Wade).

The world isn't black and white, and those who would oppress you aren't limited to one side of the aisle.

One big point you miss is that to do otherwise basically assumes that silence=guilt. If you refuse to talk to the police, right now that's a protected right. If people didn't have 5th amendment protections, it would be a crime to refuse to be interviewed by the police about some crime you were suspected in, guilty or not. In the real world, people incriminate themselves all the time. It's the police's job to try to trick them into doing so. Confessions are the goal of police interviews with suspects. Giving police the power to threaten jail for merely not talking would pretty much allow them to jail anyone they wanted.

Historically, the 5th amendment is about something much larger and more sinister, the practice of using torture to extract forced confessions. This isn't necessarily some outlandish thing, it happens in more subtle ways every day. When the cops keep a junkie too stupid to lawyer up in an interview room for 12 hours, eventually they will say anything to get out of there, once the withdrawal really hits.

Regarding your other scenario, extending 5th amendment protections to third parties, there have been some limited cases of that, married couples for example. The idea behind there being a different standard for third parties is that a third party testimony is a lot more suspect than a confession from the suspect. The motivation to torture a confession out of a third party about some crime they weren't involved in is pretty low.

Ignoring your attempt to drag religion into an otherwise insightful comment, it's an interesting question.

I guess the truth is that there's a pretty large amount of uncertainty about the effects of global warming. Such uncertainty would make the deliberate warming of the globe ill advised. But that same uncertainty tends to gut arguments that we should take drastic action, such as the misanthropic neo-luddite position that we need a strong central world government that is largely socialist in order to control the actions of multinational corporations, and/or individual government actions to reduce us back to a "low energy" society world-wide (i.e. back to third world standards of living).

If you object to my characterization of socialist, realize that it would necessarily involve the governmental power to dictate the utilization (or disuse) of capital resources, the very definition of socialism.

Ultimately, taking a "wait and see" position is taking a position of optimism in humanity, and having faith that the people of today and tomorrow will have the intelligence and problem solving ability to develop technology in response to actual problems that arise.

The irony is that to take the pessimistic position that humanity will blindly run things into the ground and not do anything about it requires faith in technology as well, faith in the computer simulations of a chaotic system (actually two, climate and economic), designed primarily by people with a leftist political bias, and fed only 40 years of reliable detailed data in combination with historical data extrapolated from ice cores with a significant margin for error.

Which position is the smallest leap of faith? That humanity will be able to find solutions to any pressing problems that arise, or faith that a computer simulation of a very chaotic system based on limited data and designed by those with a political bias is correct? And to go further, that we should spend trillions of dollars of resources to address these problems that haven't happened yet?

To me the latter position is untenable. It's not a question of politics when examined in these terms, it's a question of healthy scientific skepticism and an application of taking the position that requires the smallest leap of faith.

Good to see I'm not the only one who realizes this. The peak oil types seem to imagine a world that is incapable of developing new technology or adapting to alternatives as the prices of something slowly increase over a period of 100 or more years, which is a ridiculous assumption.

It's nice of you to actually admit that the ulterior motive is a powerful global socialist government. Most climate change people stop short of actually admitting that.

That's a funny definition of hybrid. Since when does regen braking define hybrid?

You are wrong anyway, a lot of trains do use regenerative braking, either for prime energy, or to supplement head end power (aux loads).

If a small series hybrid is so great and easy, why aren't they out there? The only full series hybrids I've heard of are prototypes and large busses.

So, if it's so easy, go build it and get very rich.

Very pure water is very aggressive. For example spray nozzles that spray RO or distilled water get eaten up very quickly.

Industrially, you have to often add controlled salts back into distilled water to keep it from destroying your machines by dissolving them.

So it's entirely plausible that distilled water had a negative effect on her teeth.

It's not as if distilled water falls from the sky for free or anything.

Series hybrids are really inefficient in small sizes. I've built one. It mostly sucked.

They have to do all the convoluted series-parallel shit because it's the only thing that even gets you a slight edge over straight gasoline in those sizes.

I think someone once said the first rule of engineering is that nothing scales. That's true for scaling down as well. The things that work well in a 4400HP train engine that rarely varies its output aren't going to necessarily work in a 150HP car that has to go zero to 60 in less than 8 seconds with constant stopping and starting.

Why would you think that? Al + O to Aluminum Oxide isn't easily reversible... at least not back into anything that's a useful anode, water or no water.

You could move out to the country. But then you wouldn't be around all the other hipsters.