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Comment Re:Wouldn't it be rejected? (Score 1) 77

I suppose, now that I think about it, they might even be able to eventually grow you a new heart while your body ran on an artificial heart for a bit.

Would you need an artificial heart? Could it be possible to grow another heart somewhere else in the body?

As the new organ matures, then it could be transplanted to replace the existing one.

Comment Re:So there is a problem... (Score 1) 174

In Minnesota? Insulated garage doors is $10 of styrofoam. And I've seen lots of detached garages, in warmer climes. But in the cold areas, people don't like to have to run outside to get something from the garage. Everyone would insulate the garage walls as if it were a house wall, and the door would be insulated with PS foam at a minimum.

Currently in Minnesota. My house has a detached garage, and the garage door is not insulated.

Walking around my neighborhood, detached garages are the norm. Most appear to be uninsulated.

Comment Re:Changing nature of 911 (Score 1) 80

911 calls are by nature a conversation, a two-way exchange of details from the caller and suggestions from the operator as the situation unfolds. That will (likely) be lost in a text exchange - what parent will keep texting 'she's not breathing, she's turning blue' to 911 when they are standing by their choking child?

On the other hand, a bystander may be more likely to text than call 911, especially if it's a situation where they don't want their actions known.

Comment Re:Lies and statistics... (Score 1) 570

I had a lien against my state tax return briefly. It concerned a few grand.

Luckily, I wasn't living in the state at the time, and I could show that I paid the bill off years before. It got worked out rather quickly.

But if they couldn't find me, I'd have had that "debt" for the next several years (until the seven year rule kicked in) completely unaware of it.

Comment Re:It's a shame (Score 1) 288

"important things" like walking three miles to and from work and the grocery store instead of spending time on the lake fishing and developing a deeper friendship with my fishing partners?

Or, of course, you could just use this amazing, cheap invention called a bicycle and do the route in an easy 15 minutes.

If you did it twice a day, to and from work, that would be 30 minutes of exercise. Depending on the traffic, it could take very little additional time for your commute.

And since driving a car tends to be a lot more expensive per mile than most people realize, you'd save a decent chunk of change.

Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 619

So because it's "more expensive in pretty much every other country." One should follow that example to screw "everyone else over." As a point it's $1.42/L($5.32/Gal) Canadian where I am right now, and businesses are already jacking up the prices on everything else.

Where I'm at, it's about US$3.50/Gallon. About $0.50 of that is tax. Also, in my area, that tax (and other taxes and user fees specific to automobile drivers) pay for about a quarter of the cost of roads. The rest is subsidized from non-transportation taxes & fees.

As you can see, if the gasoline tax was increased to cover the full share of the cost of roads, it would make the final cost of gas about $5.00/gallon. That is without figuring out any externalities - such as the 34,000 deaths directly caused each year by automobiles in my country. Or the additional estimated 53,000 early deaths caused by transportation pollution. And that pesky cost of military involvement to reduce oil supply disruptions - while most of our oil comes from Canada, oil is a fungible good, which means any major disruption worldwide will cause gas price shocks.

So while you may think $5.32/gallon is screwing automobile drivers over, I suspect it's too cheap to cover even most of the cost of oil.

Comment Re:So a bicyclist is safer..... (Score 1) 490

I'm in Minnesota here, and the bicycle paths, which are used year-round, seem to be holding up a lot better than roads that we repaved at the same time.

In the last year, we've had a low in my area of below -20F (-30C), and a high of around 100F (40C).

The damage to the roads may be accelerated by the freeze/thaw cycle, but don't discount what automobiles do to roads.

Comment Re:So a bicyclist is safer..... (Score 1) 490

OK. Rule 1 - you don't pay road taxes, you don't get to use the road.

In my state, gasoline taxes and related automobile driving fees only pays for a part of road construction, repair, and maintenance.

The rest comes from the general fund for state expenditures, and property taxes seem to fund the majority of local expenditures.

Since damage done to roads is dependent on the weight of the vehicle, it ends up that cyclists actually save the government money, while drivers are effectively subsidized to use their automobiles.

So, since you don't want others to be a leech on society, I expect you'll do the right thing and start cycling, right? Unless you're just a dumb internet troll who can dish it out but can't take it.

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