The crime rate has plummeted in recent decades, you know.

Not the only factor, I know, but...

There's a really interesting 10-15 year lag from the removal of leaded gas from American society, and the drop in the crime rate. It's almost like exposure to lead in early childhood causes developmental problems in the brain related to anger management and impulse control in adults. Maybe there's even some medical studies on the effects of lead in people...

Didn't the Romans have societal problems when they introduced lead-lined aqueducts?

Causation, correlation, and coincidence. Whatever, it's a fun little statistic (not to be confused with useful data).

Yeah, this is basically how I interpretted it. Where the hydrogen comes from is outside scope of the sales pitch. I don't care about a portable battery replacement though.

I have a house with "common asphalt shingles" like most home owners in the US. When that house needs to be re-roofed, I'd like to get a set of solar panels, if I can convince myself at the time that it is cost-effective. That will probably be in 10-15 years, as the house was built in the mid-1990s. A large part of the cost of consumer rooftop solar panels is the installation, not the panels. Double the number of panels, installation cost doesn't change that much, use the extra energy to split water into hydrogen, store the hydrogen and use it at night to power the house when the sun doesn't shine. Keep the electric utility connection (and, reasonably, pay some kind of "connection fee" even if I don't use any electricity, probably even if I net provide power instead of consume it) and I have self-sufficient home electrical power for a one-time payment. I can probably tax deduct the interest if I pay for it with a home improvement loan, too.

Now, is it really economically feasible to do that? The rooftop solar panels and DC-AC converters, yeah, they tend to have an okay ROI now, less than 15 years for a system that should last 25-30 years.

Add in a water electrolysis system, hydrogen storage, and a hydrogen fuel cell? Okay, that's harder to make the numbers work out right. I'm still hopeful for 10 years from now, though.

It's hard to convince myself this won't become standard in the southern US in 20 years, if the engineering can get worked out.

Come on now. If you see a traffic cop, he's not there to "protect and serve." They are the Badged Highwaymen, state-sanctioned assholes whose job it is to flip the lights on behind random people in the universal cop-sign for "stick em up and hand over your wallet, brownie."

Seriously? As an honest reply to this (okay, I admit, I just got trolled) traffic cops are there for several reasons.
A) Revenue collection. I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit that up front.

B) Keeping traffic close to speed limits. Yeah, the definition of "close" varies from cop to cop, and that makes it hard for a driver to drive with a lot of confidence of just how fast you can drive without getting a ticket. I hate that. I'd like an up front admission of "The speed limit is 70, but we won't ticket anyone doing under 82 unless they are otherwise driving unsafely". We'll never see that. Besides, "driving unsafely" is hard to define, but it's easy to give the guy changing lanes unsafely a speeding ticket, and it punishes unsafe behavior about as well (which means, not very) as a reckless driving ticket does, but it takes less to defend in court.

C) Being nearby when there is an accident. A nearby traffic cop is a first-responder for a traffic accident, and that job saves lives. They also do care-and-comfort during and after accidents. You look in any highway patrolman's trunk, and you'll find a teddy bear to be given to the little kid that survived a traffic accident (whose parent maybe didn't).

Most good traffic cops (and almost all Highway Patrol) regard speeding tickets as a way to get traffic to slow down so when there is an accident, there will be fewer deaths. In their job, it's always "when" and not "if" there is an accident. Energy is mass times velocity squared, remember.

Doing A lets the state pay for more cops to be around for C. Can't really tell you if I like that trade-off or not.

And yeah, none of this stops me from being pissed when I get a speeding ticket. Don't they have something better to do than bug me when I'm not hurting anyone?!?! ;)

This is one of those "Lying with facts" things that needs more context to correctly understand.

The House of Representatives is currently controlled by a Republican majority, 232 (R) vs 200 (D). A simple majority is all that is required to pass any Bill in the House of Representatives, therefore, so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line, they can pass anything, no matter how much Democrats hate it, with no thought at all about compromise.

The Senate, on the other hand, has a Democrat majority of 53 Democrats, plus 2 independents that caucus with the Democrats. That's 55 Democrati-caucussed Senators. That's a "Democratic-controlled Senate", true. However.... Functionally, the Senate can't pass much of anything, especially a budget bill, without a 60-vote majority. Therefore, they require at least 5 Republican Senators to agree to a mutually-acceptable Bill. Quoting myself above... "so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line"...

For the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass a budget bill, the Republicans and Democrats have to find an acceptable compromise.
For the Republican-controlled House to pass a budget bill, the Republicans don't have to care about an acceptable compromise at all.

The House passes a Budget Bill. The Senate doesn't. Pretending those are equivalent situations is lying with facts.

The larger issue is that neither side seems willing to compromise much at all, so finding an acceptable compromise is much harder that you'd normally think it would be.

There are several other people on this thread that are giving similar (unsupported, oops) comments about T. Boone Pickens and his interest in water rights.

Honestly, I mostly admire his business sense. He saw/sees a bunch of related problems, and found a great way to make buckets of money off of providing a solution to the problems.

The problems that he is providing a solution to, in no particular order:
A) Several large Texas cities are going to have to limit growth very soon if they don't get another reliable source of water.
B) Automobiles produce a lot of CO2 as "pollution" in burning gasoline.
C) Coal-fired electricity plants make a "lot" of CO2 pollution also. Society needs more electricity, but people claim to want "green" power. It is possible to build a clean coal plant, but, to my knowledge, it has not been done, and is estimated as being about the same cost to construct as a nuclear plant, but has continuing fuel costs that nuclear pants don't have.

Pickens has found a great solution to these problems, from his point of view.

1) He has a LOT of natural gas that he owns rights to in the US, and he wants to switch cars over to natural gas from the US, instead of oil imported from countries that, frankly, the US should not be sending large amounts of money to. With high oil prices ($140/barrel I think?), natural gas is competitive price-wise.
2) He can, with good financing, build wind turbine power systems that produce reasonable power, though it has the difficulty of all wind systems that it is "surgy". It is not a consistent supply, even averaged across 300,000 acres. He needs high voltage transmission lines to move this power around. My understanding is that Texas already recognizes the need for more high voltage power transmission lines anyway. Pickens wants the right of way for those lines for his companies, rather than someone else's.
3) If he gets right of way for utility services, he can build water pipes alongside those transmission lines to ship water from distant aquifers to those soon-to-be water-starved Texas cities. Strikes me as efficient use of the right of way land.

And he'll make a lot of money providing this solution. Is it a bad solution? Frankly, there are a lot worse ideas. But I have to wonder if Pickens views it as an all-or-nothing affair, or if he is willing to do just pieces of it. My impression so far is that he wants to do the whole thing, and thinks that it is a matter of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". He may even be right.

But from what I've seen, he only advertised the "clean wind energy" part of things heavily. He somewhat advertised the "cars burning natural gas" but I never could decide if he was advertising that as cleaner, or simply as not foreign dependent energy. I never really saw him advertising the water rights piece, but my impression was that it was very important to him and his plan.

How's that for a better explanation of an unsupported conspiracy theory? :)

To Pickens' credit, he tried hard for years to get financing for this project

The T. Boone Pickens Plan had one little-advertised caveat that most people never heard of, and which is what was really responsible for killing the deal.

Pickens wanted the government to impose a Right-Of-Way for his company to provide "utility services" to the major cities in Texas. Selling wind power was a oh-by-the-way to putting some great big huge wells and pumps on the Texas Aquifer, great big water pipes next to the electricity transmission lines, and selling water to the major cities. He would have made boatloads of money from that.

The utility right of way was not agreed to, so Pickens lost his chance to sell water, the thing he was really interested in, and the deal was dropped.

Now, the big cities still have water source problems, so Pickens will probably get what he wants, he'll just have to make a few more campaign contributions first.

As technology improves and ads become more targeted, they will be increasingly effective and less annoying.

Nope. There's a major problem with this viewpoint.

Privacy is the opposite of targeted advertising. For targeted advertising to work, you cannot have any privacy.

Targeted advertising is more than just "You read articles about computers, so we'll show you computer advertisements".

It is "Your car needs an oil change, we'll show you ads about your local QuickLube". It is "Your kid got in a fight at school, we'll show you ads for self defense classes and team sports". It is "Your marriage is going to crap, we'll show you ads for divorce attorneys".

Are you really comfortable with that idea? Because that is what targeted advertising is really about.

First, sales tax is owed by the seller, not the buyer.

Bzzt!

When giving a state-specific answer, please also say the state your answer applies to.

For example, in Florida where I live, if you buy something by mailorder (including internet purchases of real physical items) and the vendor does not charge you sales tax, you are required by state law to file and pay proper sales tax at the end of the calendar year.

If you wish to change your answer to "But no one pays attention to the law that says the buyer must pay sales tax" then that is a completely different argument. That tends to decay into a discussion about laws that are selectively enforced, and only used to punish... whoever the prosecutor wants to punish.

You know, I agree that regulated capitalistic markets are the "best" way to run an economy, but I'm going to comment on what seems an internal contradiction here anyway.

New industries might start out competitive but once they get to a certain size, they start bending the rules in their own favor. Using unfair practices to freeze out competition, getting sweetheart legislation pushed through Congress, buying influence.

You free market preachers are just naive. The only free markets are also fair markets.

You seem to assume here that business grow until they can unbalance the system by exerting undue influence on the government, at which point you get a non-free market with government-enforced barriers to entry and monopolies or oligopolies.

The solution to this is to have the government properly regulated markets to promote fairness, remove artificial barriers to entry, and increase transparency to give small consumers and small businesses more power against large suppliers.

I agree with that.

Now, the problem I have with that, the way you say it, and the way I think about it, is this:
In the quote from you above, a major problem is that governments are easily bribed and influenced.
For our "fair market" preference, a basic requirement is that government NOT be easily bribed and influenced.

But it's the same government.

We appear to have some implementation difficulties that were not adequately covered in the design. :)

There are good arguments for environmental policy that do not depend on the risk of global climate change, and the environmental movement is doing itself no good by linking policy and science together they way they have, so that people think "if there is no risk of global climate change then driving my SUV must be ok."

This tends to reflect my feelings on the matter too.

I want more fuel efficient vehicles. There are several reasons for this, and, frankly, global climate change doesn't make the top 10. Reducing my out-of-pocket driving expenses (gas) does. Reducing my country's (USA) exporting of wealth to nations that fund religious extremists does.

I want cleaner production methods, and better enforcement of environmental regulations. I like breathing air that doesn't make my lungs and eyes burn. I like camping and hiking, and not finding industrial sludge on the banks of rivers. I like scuba diving, and not seeing coral reefs covered in red algae from sewage waste disposal pipes (West Palm Beach, I'm looking at you.).

Simple, solid, personal-self-interest reasons to support better efficiency and good environmental stewardship. I don't need doom prophecies to support that. Clear rational open science.

Speaking as an American...

Never forget this country was founded by rich white land owners that didn't want to pay taxes. without representation in Parliment because they refused such representation when offered, knowing they would then be taxed with representation

History is rarely as simple or concise as one-line rallying cries would have you believe.

Really, if some ominous "they" want to track you then "they" already know your banking info and attendant RFID signatures, vehicle profile and numbers, list of known or possible associates, etc..

This is true, but there are other issues to consider with this.

For example, one of the things that is legal in the United States is for the police to follow you around throughout your day, seeing where you go, who you talk to, when you scratch your butt walking down the street. There's plkenty of case law supporting the idea that as long as you are in public areas, the police can follow you as much as they want, given their resource limitations.

That last limitation is VERY important, especially in a mostly free society like the United States or other free democracies/republics/whatever.

The police should have the power (with reasonable oversight) to do what they need to do to enforce good laws. I'll define "good laws" in the US context as "constitutional". One of the ways they do this is following "people of interest" around.

This is a VERY different thing from the police putting a GPS transponder on every car in America, and looking through their logs for nearby vehicles when a convenience store gets robbed. It is also different form the police logging your location information from cell tower triangulation (or cellphone GPS) and, again, looking through their logs to find all the people near a crime scene when it occurred.

The first starts with suspicion. They must already have a reason to be interested in you, because assigning a police officer, or more likely several of them, is a very resource-intensive operation. They don't do it a lot because there are only so many cops. This is, societally, on purpose. We limit police power by making it hard and expensive for the police to poke their nose into your business.

GPS logging into a database, and then a simple database query for "every person near YYY at time ZZZ" is cheap. It is too easy for the police to poke their nose into the business of the generally law-abiding public.

It isn't that the technology is easy or hard. It isn't really that is it cheap or expensive in dollars to acquire the capability initially. It is that it is cheap to operate all the time, and makes it too easy and cheap for the police to poke their noses into private citizens' business with little reason, justification, or oversight. That's a good way to get bad police.

Don't design systems that make it easy to get bad police. It is too dangerous to our society.

Okay, you are

real manly

But perhaps not terribly consistent.

Why would you

video tape the event

if there is

nothing to see here

.

Aside from a cool volcanic eruption, what am I missing?

But we need to be very careful not to miss, Russia is right next door [to Iran].

Google maps is a wonderful resource. Look at it. There's about 400 miles between Tehran and the nearest Russian city, on the Caspian Sea. It's not that near.

One of the reasons we were scared about nuclear weapons based in Cuba is that if we nuked them to stop a launch we would also be nuking ourselves.

Not so much. We were concerned that the flight time for a ballistic missile from Cuba, aimed at Miami, was about 6 minutes. You cannot respond with anything other than a completely automated system in that time frame. Which is unacceptable when you are talking about a nuclear response. As to the "be nuking ourselves" we do have low-yield nuclear weapons also.

In fact, any attempt to launch nuclear weapons at Iran would probably set off the Russian early warning systems and they would just retaliate before our missiles hit their targets.

Probably not. If the United States were to launch nuclear weapons at Iran, it would probably be from SSBN(s). The flight time for a SLBM (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile) is less than 8 minutes. Most early warning systems can detect that fast... but they have a human in the loop, and alerting that human (Obama, Putin, whoever), getting a decision, and sending that decision back to the military can easily take more than 8 minutes.

The really worrying thing is that this would also probably true if Israel launched a nuclear strike on Iran.

Israel would probably use a nuclear weapon dropped by an F-15. From a distance, it's rather hard to tell the difference between an F-15 carrying a conventional payload and one carrying a nuclear payload, before it hits the target.

Assuming, of course, that you believe they have nuclear weapons, which they refuse to acknowledge. *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*

The odds of an accident are approximately 1 per 10,000 for every car trip. [snip] The chance that you have been in an accident is, if my math is correct, about 62% by the time you're 35.

The thing with that logic is that the distribution of accidents is not flat. I looked around a bit, and couldn't find any stats to support what I'm about to say, which is from memory of some stuff I read a few years ago. Feel free to find a few references I couldn't and tell me I don't know how to use Google. :)

The distribution of accidents among the driving population is not even. Most drivers (more than 50%) will drive their entire career and never be in an accident. Most accidents involve at least one driver who has been in one or more accidents already. This is one of those 80/20 rule things. 80% of accidents occur with 20% of drivers. Or something like that, I made up the 80/20, I expect the distribution is something else.

This is why it is so easy to mislead with statistics. Sometimes when distilling numbers down, you lose significant related facts.

Oh, and can anyone tell me why I kept typing "accidnets" instead of "accidents"? It's an annoying typo, and I was very consistent with it.