I don't remember where I saw it, and I didn't think it was so much vaporizing as dissolving. I can try finding it, again. IIRC they simply talked of lost mass after using.

> I think it's going to be very unpleasant sometime in the next 30-50 years for most humans.

But some of those who don't want to believe that global warming is real won't suffer a bit. They can afford to make sure they live in someplace nice, move to someplace else nice if needed, and will always have good food available. They're also the ones sowing the "science discord" because they know that their wealth comes from the status quo. Again, the "important people" will find life perfectly pleasant.

I would tend to prefer paper over styrofoam cups because when you pour hot beverages in them, the latter lose more mass. That mass is going into your gut. I presume it's reasonably safe, else it would be forbidden or regulated like so many other things. But I'd still just as soon minimize it. That said, I don't run around the block to avoid a styrofoam cup, but when there's a choice, I'll choose the paper.

I wonder how David Brin's (fictional) Kanten would feel about this...

Reminds me of Waterhouse's Army unit in "Cryptonomicon" - Show another way that we know what we know, so they don't know how we really found out.

Standardization solves your problem and mine, but that's not the carmakers' problem. His problem is to keep selling cars, and for the very reason you and I would like standardization it hurts their business. Our priorities are not aligned.

There has been enough time for it to have a known reliability - time enough to measure it.

It may well be that new tech is more reliable - but there hasn't been time to measure that. By the time there is, today's new tech will be tomorrow's old tech.

Accelerated life testing is all well and good, but sometimes there are new mechanisms that aren't kicked out by the old testing. Nothing beats time in grade like time in grade. Twas ever thus when life and liability is on the line.

Unfortunately asking the wrong questions can do a lot to make a surveillance state an annoying place to live. But I agree - failing to ask the right questions does little to prolong the life of that surveillance state - I'll grant that it may increase their luck from time to time.

Let's allow that they have the storage capacity and the capability to record everything. Let's even allow that they can query this database and find what they want to know. It's still missing the critical element.

You have to ask the right questions. Without the right questions, you almost never get the right answer - I'll allow that every now and then the right answer does smack you in the face, unbidden.

So now they're flashable, most likely remote-flashable.

New attack vector - flash all of the meters into bricks.

That assumes you're not busy clearing Amazon rain forest, turning US farmland into housing projects and parking lots, etc.

The same mentality that doesn't believe global warming is real and anthropogenic is likely to believe that anthropogenic influences on global O2/CO2/H2O are also negligible.

I thought of that too, and was hoping the boy would feed his girlfriend to the atom at the end. Would it have gobbled her up like a black hole?

I agree. I thought about bringing that up, but felt it would dilute my main point.

How much oxygen do we have, and how does that compare to the supposed quantity of fossil fuels?

The Earth originally had a reducing atmosphere, and the fact that we now have an oxidizing atmosphere is because it has been "bioformed". Biological activity yanked the CO2 and other stuff out of the atmosphere, locked it away in some other form, and released O2, leaving us with the combination of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and other traces that we consider - pleasant and essential.

By burning fossil fuels we're essentially reversing that process. It's worth noting that those biological processes are still ongoing and to some extent auto-compensating. But one could make the case that by going after every last scrap of fossil fuel we would at the same time be going after every last scrap of O2 as well.

It's a rather simplistic argument, I'll agree. But we make far too many policies based on unrecognized externalities and the assumption of an abundant and inexhaustible biosphere. Most likely "using up all of the O2 with fossil fuels" is absurd, but perhaps "doing something to measurably reduce worldwide O2" isn't, and I would suspect that high-altitude nations would be as upset by this as sea-level nations are by current global warming issues.