Try reverse engineering the spec. Do you think a DMCA takedown is any more pleasant when it's done by Chrysler or Honda than when it's done by the RIAA?

Nobody's arguing against your right to contract with a dealer and get whatever repairs done you'd like. Other people would like the liberty to choose a different path. Why do you want to deny them that?

Big corporations generally screw you six ways from Sunday by buying up the law in one way or another. The more you regulate the economy, the more likely that guys who have connections will have the ability to ruin you.

Actually, the monopolies exist because of unserious politicians. Intellectual property exists in the US Constitution because it was viewed as an acceptable betrayal of principle in order to promote innovation for the public good. It's one of the less odious of those sorts of things (the worst being, of course slavery) but it is a compromise on the principles of liberty this country was founded on.

If US politicians were serious, we'd be having periodic reviews aimed at deciding if it was time to ditch the compromise entirely and live our principles or adjust the terms to maximize public good. Right now we're clearly tilted way off the original idea.

In the US, factions coalesce into parties before the election. We elect a government. In parliamentary systems, each faction goes on its own and negotiates a majority after the election under the common use case they can't do one on their own.

It's not self-evident that coalitions before voting are worse or better than coalitions after voting.

Actually, all we need do is stop the 45% of the world that subsidizes the price of gasoline so it is below market price and you'll get a great deal more benefit. When you can by gasoline for 80% below market rate on the government's dime, who cares about fuel efficiency?

How many resignations from the IPCC for violations of scientific principles would it take for you to stop treating their pronouncements so seriously?

In case you haven't noticed warming's stopped the last dozen or so years and we've actually started to get colder the last two. How many IPCC models predicted that? Zero?

A little humility might be in order on the part of the AGW crew. We've got a big puzzler that both we've got major ocean cycles going negative for the first time in quite a while and the sun basically shutting down between cycle 23 and 24 while at the same time this pause in warming. Maybe all three are coincidental. Maybe not. But it's not science but scientism to ignore new evidence. Trying to freeze consensus to the state of knowledge of a few years ago and ignoring the end of warming for the time being is politics masquerading as science and is doing real damage to science in general.

That sucks.

Since I have a need to transport 6, I guess I'm just screwed.

You're getting ahead of the story. The openly self-loathing phase where the nuts start to agitate for us to off ourselves in order to save the planet is next decade.

Price discipline creates better solutions over time but we don't care about that too much these days. We just want action now and a great press release. Screw results, we're not interested in the age of Brown and Obama.

You left out a bit of the story. After the data came in, the 55 mph limit was found to be a marginal saver of both fuel and lives (the other reason why advocates push the law) while it was a big waste of time for all those people stuck driving those extra hours across the country.

The drastic measures included sponsoring fuel initiatives for $90/bbl equiv synthetic fuels in a major boom/bust initiative that was completely unnecessary (deregulation of oil prices fixed our supply problems). Now that the technology has more naturally progressed, we can do synthetic fuels for maybe $30/bbl equiv extraction costs except the greens won't let us (too much CO2 release).

Fuel savings v. exploration for new sources v. switchover to entirely new technologies involve tradeoffs that government has proven over decades that it sucks at. And that's the direction that we've chosen.

Rah rah, yeah!

It's not the purchase but rather the injection of politics into the economy after the purchase that's the main problem. Let's say some blogger works for Chrysler engineering and pisses off the White House. It just got much more likely that he's going to get fired if his real identity is discovered. That sort of thing is how free speech sickens and eventually dies.

I've been told to do something illegal or clinically stupid by my managers in the past. That's about the time to get a bit slow and just 'not notice' things. Didn't happen here and that's a shame. Let me be perfectly clear, what happened here is a bit of a pattern of jumped up US authority figures lying about the law and creating discomfort and fear for the general public. The wailing and threats are the public's means of pushing back and trying to restore normalcy after a nasty security shock in 2001.

I believe the store's lost a great deal of custom and if I were a retail establishment with one of these ATMs in my premises, I wouldn't renew permissions and clear these bozos out before they scare some of my own customers away. In short, by yelling loudly, this guy's probably improved things for the next amateur photographer.

In most industries, I can buy land or rent a building and create a competing business across the street. Hospitals are regulated creatures at least in my neck of the woods. You have to petition the state for permission to open a hospital and all the competing hospitals get a say on whether you are allowed to open.