The typical family uses an acre-inch of water a month, or an acre-foot per year, whatever that is in gallons.

But residential use is trivial over all - most water use is in power generation, and most of the rest is agricultural. California is one of the few states that actually uses saltwater for power generation, but still: mostly farms.

You might be a liberal if your solution to an engineering problem is "everyone else just needs to change how they behave and the problem goes away!"

In California (which started this discussion), "peak usage" is the majority of the day. Rush hour is from 6am to 9pm. That's what happens when you won't build enough roads.

And all to significantly improve everyone's quality of life, by giving them back often significant chunks of time every day they used to spend commuting. It's a worthy goal!

*Appalachians

Apparently I still have the trailer-park spell checker.

Sure, I had it great growing up in a trailer in the Appellations, single mother, etc. Leave me out of your privilege claims and stop fucking stereotyping me based on the color of my skin, you damn racist bigot.

I certainly understand that the mostly upper-middle-class-good-college Social Justice Warriors who have never done anything use with their life feel like they have unearned privilege. Yup, you do. That has little to do with race. Stop assuming that other people who look like you have a similar background. Stop assuming that there aren't people who look nothing like you but have the same background. That's exactly the sort of offensive stereotyping we're trying to stamp out!

Heck, none of these are very new, other than perhaps the scale of Bug Data. Agile was new around 2000. "Cloud" was all the hype around 2007. These are proven ideas now, though as you say you have to understand them, you can't just move your systems and hope fore the best.

A lot of people don't get this yet, though moving all your back-end systems to be cloud-hosted is as good as you can often get with legacy systems. Though the DB servers are often the sticking point (even if you can get cloud-hosted servers that work with your software, which is wonderful when you can, you still need to get the data there, and otherwise you have to be very careful what cloud servers you try to run your own DB servers on - sometimes there's no way).

Obviously, that's a lot of work, to think through security, availability, supportability, and so on, because the solutions to each are different in the cloud. They may be easier once you're done, but it can be quite difficult indeed for admins to abandon their tried-and-true bag of tricks for an environment where they need a new bag!

This. Oh, so very much this.

People don't encounter evolution in their daily lives either, excepting the Flu, but I find it rather important to teach (more stuff in that 100-150 window).

Relativity and QM are easy enough to teach qualitatively (and the math for SR for many examples is simple algebra). There's a host of people who don't believe either, who think modern physics is a hoax, because it contradicts the physics they were taught in school. We should really be teaching "an electron is not like a particle, nor like a wave, but behaves in it's own inimical way" in high school, along with the basics of relativity, so that people get the sense that physics is real, that all this crazy stuff came from explaining experiments, that's it's not storytelling looking for proof!

Now now, Rei, don't exaggerate. US science education sucks, but most people are taught Civil-War Era physics. None of that relativity or quantum stuff that's over 100 years old now, of course, that's too scary, but we do an OK job of teaching 150-year-old science!

It's always worth spending money on infrastructure - it's the legitimate business of the government. It's the sign of civilization. It's the primary indicator of quality of life.

If expanding freeways doesn't reduce traffic jams you haven't expanded them enough If expanding 3 lanes to 4 doesn't help, you may need 7 lanes (7 lanes each way at chokepoints may still not solve it - sometimes you need overlapping offramps, express highways, and similar fixes).

Exactly - lack of needed infrastructure has reduced freedom in those areas. Build more infrastructure; solve the problem.

NIMBY can't be allowed to win, or we become a 3rd-World shithole with no infrastructure. Building infrastructure needs to trump NIMBY - in fact, it's the one legitimate use of Eminent domain.

True enough, but Jag wasn't that terrible when Tata got them. If Tata is serious about improving quality, they don't have far to go. If instead it seeks the quality of the Nano, then starts making forward progress, well, 15 years is optimistic.

Not so much. Most air-quality problems are caused by cars idling in traffic - the amount of driving people do isn't very elastic, while the amount of fuel burned to get to a given destination can rise dramatically if you spend 80% of the journey not moving.

Fuck you hippie. Shave that neckbeard, get a job, buy a car, and then you'll see. Then die in a fire, you fucking hippie.

P.S. Fuck you, you fucking hippie.

Before Tata took over Jag, it had fallen far behind competing brands in terms of cool tech like this for luxury cars. Tata has made great leaps in closing that gap. It's great to see some new stuff as well.

Personally, I'm still a bit skeptical of "Tata quality", given some of their other products, but everyone was equally derisive of the quality of Japanese cars when I was a kid, and Korean cars when I was first driving. Who knows - Tata could pass the Japanese brands for quality in a few years.