It was revealed that the FTC's biggest concern is Radio Shack's subterranean cache of over 35,000 tons of yellow slips of carbon paper dating as far back as the 1960s, which correlate names, addresses and phone numbers to detailed lists of discreet electronic components. Who knows what kind of embarrassments would ensue if all of those dots got connected with modern data mining techniques.
And what do you think ALL THE PLANTS ON EARTH photosynthesise with?
They use the carbon given off by decaying plants and animals. They do not consume all the carbon dug up from geological deposits, and even if they did, they would give it back up as they decay. Redepositing that carbon into geological strata is an exceedingly slow process that has been totally overwhelmed by the rate of our mining it.
None of those taxes begins to account for the lack of disposal fees for fossil fuels.
If all fossil fuel users were required to collect and safely sequester the CO2 that they're allowed to spew into the air free of charge, fossil fuels would not be even close to competitive with solar energy. As it stands, the rampant use of fossil fuels is saddling future generations with hundreds of $Trillions of remediation costs. It only looks cheaper because you're kicking the can down the road.
Ok, I'll grant that I could understand your first sentence. However, if it were really a problem, installing a heating loop under the array would fix the problem at the touch of a button. For the DIYer, some plastic tubing, antifreeze, and aquarium pump, and a 5 gallon tank of propane would do the job. I'll also point out that although it snows frequently, that's not typically a disaster. It's also only been 200 years since a mammoth earthquake that would, if it happened today, paralyze this nation for months. That's only three lifespans, so the odds of witnessing that again may not be as low as you assume.
Your entire second paragraph is an incomprehensible bowl of word soup. You seem to be advocating that 50 million people without gas hop in their cars and find a hotel in a different region of the continent.
Your last paragraph disregards the whole point of the damned thread: that you can recharge the batteries indefinitely without fuel. Even when keeping a dangerous amount of volatile gasoline on your premises, you get a couple days max of electricity generation, and as I pointed out, natural gas generators are no panacea either.
WTF? Every sentence in that argument makes zero sense.
How about a large earthquake on the New Madrid fault in Missouri takes out most of the gas pipelines in the central US. There could very well be precious little electricity or gasoline available for an extended period of time.
I don't know why everyone who replied is so focused on snow. If the blizzard is that bad, you'll be sitting around with nothing better to do than figure out how to clear snow off a few dozen square feet of slippery surface. If you do a half-assed job with a roof rake, the sun hitting a south sloping roof would generally finish the task quickly.
Most of the country doesn't even get hurricanes. However, if a hurricane has ripped the roof off of your house, then you've got bigger fish to fry than a lack of electricity.
OTOH, in a real crisis, that might be the last 20 gallons of gas you get your hands on for a good while. The solar powered system refuels itself.
Your use of microbes in your argument is ironic since farmers are also a huge part of the problem of driving bacterial evolution for resistance through misuse of antibiotics.
Antivirals, antibiotics and pesticides should be used in the minimal amounts exactly where most needed. They should not be routinely used everywhere indiscriminately. That's the mode that these GMO crops are encouraging.
The GMO plants I was referring to were designed specifically accommodate increased usage of chemicals. Look up "Roundup ready".
Herbicide use in this country has skyrocketed due to the widespread adoption of GMO crops.
Making a plant manufacture its own insecticide is one thing. Modifying it so that it can withstand being soaked with ever-increasing quantities and varieties of synthetic pesticides is another.
Weeds are gradually evolving to resist this chemical onslaught. Most people would rather not have themselves subjected to such evolutionary pressure within their lifetimes.
The weeds are destined to eventually win this arms race anyway, so this huge experiment in chemical exposure to the US population is eventually going to be for naught.
His message is that he wants the government to limit your ability to engage in free speech.
There's a constant and deliberate conflation of money and speech going on in this country. They are not equivalent to each other.
It's a lot easier to be heard when you have money. You know it, I know it. What Mayday pac and their friends want is to shut down voices that aren't sufficiently obedient to the left.
Incidentally, you stop hearing about the evils of money in politics for a while whenever Tom Steyer or Tim Cook opens his mouth, but as soon as another two-minute hate of the Koch brothers is invented, it's all over the headlines again.
...how many systems let you try new passwords ad-infinitum, rapidly? I know back when I was in college I could brute force Windows shared folders (script kiddie style), but nowadays I'd expect any semi-serious authentication system to limit the number and frequency of login attempts.
I am not an IT professional engaging in rhetoric; I'm actually curious.
All the plastic helps with the incremental increments in fuel economy: approximately 2X better over the past 57 years. I also neglected to mention safety, which has improved a good deal more than fuel economy. That's all OK, but it's nothing like the dramatic changes that happened previous to the 707. After nearly six decades, today's planes still look very similar to a 707, are about the same size, and go the same speed.
I think we've been hearing about the end of Moore's law for the last 15 years... inevitably, some process improvement comes along and it all keeps on going.
I don't think that it's necessarily "inevitable". Take aviation, for example. There was arguably exponential increases in the capability of aircraft for 55 years from 1903 to 1958, when the Boeing 707 was introduced. Ever since, further progress on economically viable aircraft has been pretty much limited to incremental increases in fuel economy and marketing strategies to keep costs down by keeping planes full.
Like the operators of Enron decided it was too much trouble to keep their electric plants running in California, so they'd shut them down for spurious reasons, and then make a killing on selling outside power to the state?
Yeah, don't believe the nuclear industry BS where they whine about government oppression, the power companies would shut all the country's nuclear reactors down and extract money in other ways if they could. But see, they got caught up in their advertising about nuclear power being cheap, so their profit ratios couldn't be too high, and so they need somewhere to sink costs. Thankfully for them, blaming the government is ALWAYS popular.
Unless you're not rich and powerful, of course.
You know nothing about San Onofre.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
