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I never said anything about a president being a god king. I’m just stating the fact that the president cannot be indicted. He can be removed by congress though. There is a difference.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
A form of energy can die, but it should happen in the free market. We do not want the government controlling everything.
The reality is that the economics of renewables is not good enough yet. Not even Tesla has their operations powered 100% by renewables. It’s possible to do it, but it is too costly otherwise it would be done. Is Tesla a climate change denier or have no understanding of physics? No, that would be ridiculous. Why are you not pushing Tesla to produce all electricity from renewables RIGHT NOW? According to your reasoning they should.
Is 100% of your electricity coming from renewables? If not, why?
Let me be clear. I am a big believer in renewable energy. But realistically, the technology and economics are still evolving.
(in 1956 PV was approximately $600/watt, in 1975 approximately $101/watt, now about 30 cents!!!.)
SO, __how__ far does it have to evolve? __free__?
use nanotech and bio-engineering to grow PV panels in the back yard?
Yes, to answer your question, actually appx 150-175%+ of my electricity or more.
How about _you_?
In the last 30 days, i have made, from _free_ sunshine, 1,568.7 kWh, exported ~2/3 of it to the grid. (2/28 - 3/29),
and not even in the sunnier portion of the year.
If I can convince 99 neighbors to do the same, we will have a >1,000,000 (1 megawatt) VPP, easily scalable, why i like Tesla Energy
EVNow
Well-Known Member
Why "should" it happen in "free" market ?
Is free market more important than billions of lives (yes Billions) ?
If free market says lets keep using fossil fuels (because the costs are externalized) - is it ok to kill off humans on earth ?
There is nothing sacrosanct about either "free market" or "government control".
EVNow
Well-Known Member
As long as she supports the ruling Hindu Supremacist bigots in India, not going to watch anything Tulsi.
And, as has been pointed out, you are wrong. It is current justice department policy not to indict a sitting president. That doesn't mean that they couldn't just as easily reverse the policy on a whim. And there is certainly no actual law to that effect, and the constitution pretty much says the opposite.
There's not such thing as the "free market fairy" that solves all problems.
I give you a couple of articles.
Full article at:
How do you make car companies innovate? Regulate them: Don Pittis | CBC News
What's the other side of the story? What happens when there's no regulations?
Full article at:
Car manufacturers accused of lower safety standards in Latin America
Essays at:
Essay:A Day In The Life of Joe Conservative - RationalWiki
There are no laws saying the president can't be indicted in office. The Constitution is silent. There are 0 court cases decided by any federal court about the question (though the NY Supreme Court recently ruled in a Trump tax case that the state could indict the sitting president). There aren't even any written regulations about it.
The only thing that exists is a single memo written during the Watergate era for very political purposes when there was a debate about whether the VP could be indicted in office. Since that memo was written, there has been a SCOTUS case that ruled the president can be sued while in office and that case can move forward. If someone is not immune from lawsuits, it makes logical sense that the more serious situation of someone being indicted for a crime shouldn't be prevented either.
Mueller is very small "c" conservative. He doesn't charge unless he's far more confident of a conviction than the average prosecutor and he is a stickler for following every rule and regulation to the letter, even if they are just memos. So Mueller would have had to break with his lifelong pattern to indict the president. Other prosecutors handling other Trump cases are probably bolder and someone may try the courts on that issue and it will end up in front of the Supremes.
Just because it's never been done doesn't mean it won't. We've had that happen at least 100 times in the last year.
Technology is always evolving. For stationary and ground based transportation, the tech is there to replace fossil fuels with renewables, but there is a staggeringly massive infrastructure to replace. And renewables are all less dense in KWH/sqft (or whatever measure of area you want to use) than fossil fuels and nuclear. It takes a lot of windmills or solar panels to replace a single, high output coal or natural gas fired power plant.
On the other end, consumption, other than some stationary uses using more energy than they need to, there are no big issues between using renewables vs fossil fuels for most stationary electricity users.
Tesla has shown that electric cars can be better then ICE in jut about every way except speed of fueling while traveling and initial cost. However in cost of ownership Tesla has made big advancements in total cost of ownership. The problem with ground transportation is the sheer numbers of vehicles that need to be replaced.
Many predict that when full self driving vehicles becomes a thing car ownership will plummet, which may or may not happen. People are weird creatures and don't always make rational decisions. Ride sharing with autonomous taxis may become a thing, or it may just be a thing with a segment of the population, or possibly just a regional thing (like urban areas).
Tesla has been promising FSD "soon" for years and they may be on the edge of that breakthrough now, but even if they introduce the FSD tech tomorrow, it will still be years until we have fully autonomous taxis running around. Regulators are going to be very cautious about approving any of this tech. Between the tech that still needs to develop, regulator approval, and the time it takes to roll out any new tech, we're looking at a decade minimum before you have any hope of catching a ride in an autonomous taxi even in a high tech urban city (outside of some sort of demo program).
Total car and light truck production in the world is around 100 million a year and there are around 1.3 to 1.5 billion cars in the world. In developed countries the private car fleets are not growing much, but in China, India, Brazil and a few other countries car ownership is growing. In China at a phenomenal rate.
Just replacing all the ICE cars currently on the road with EVs would take first converting all vehicle production to EVs, and then it would take around 15 years to replace all the existing cars. And battery production is just barely capable of matching current EV production, which is currently just around 1% of world vehicle production. To make enough batteries to do a complete EV switch over would require about 100 more GigaFactory equivalents.
All of this is doable, but even with 0 political resistance it's going to take time.
For some forms of transportation, we have no good alternative to fossil fuels. We will probably have some short range electric planes within the next decade, but long haul air travel is going to remain impossible without fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. There is no practical alternative fuel with the energy density of fossil fuels for this purpose. There is research in biofuels going on, but so far all biofuels have lower energy density than fossil fuel equivalents.
For transporting cargo by ship, the same problems crop up. For short haul ferry systems, some kind of alternative fuel is probably possible, and there are a few experimental ferries using alternatives, but for long haul ocean going transport, we have two technologies: sail and fossil fuels. There has been some talk of making hybrid cargo ships with sails managed by computerized system to augment the fossil fuel driven system, but cargo haulers are not all that interested in the more complex systems and the cargo space that will be lost to support the giant masts needed. Sail is also significantly slower than fossil fuel driven cargo ships.
So the tech for some alternatives is not advanced enough yet. The tech is there to do quite a bit, but the manufacturing isn't there to do it quickly. We can do a lot to eliminate the political resistance. That would help expand the manufacturing and installation issues. More money into research might help a bit on that front, but there are no guarantees with fundamental research. Breakthroughs can take years to come through. Sometimes they never happen. We've been trying to get fusion reactors to happen since the 50s.
We can definitely do better than we've been doing, but it's going to take a fair bit of time to just convert what we can convert now.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
There is no free market. Established industries have had a century or more of government help and subsidies.
That's where government support can speed things up, just as it has with many technologies in the past. You seem to think older established technologies "competed" their way to prominence in a "free market". Didn't happen. You also consistently ignore the true, indirect costs of fossil fuels.
The history of the Texas oil-soaked politicians getting the "intangible drilling costs deduction" and "percentage depletion" and the "domestic production activities deduction" and locking in 1920s lease rates on federal land for 100 years and.... anyway, no free market involved there.
Truly free markets are a myth. Some are highly rigged while others have a lot less government thumbs on the scale. Advancements in Geology has drastically reduced the risks involved in oil exploration. In the early days those who got rich and those who went broke was largely a matter of luck. One of the early Texas drillers hit a big find only to find out he had sold more than 100% of his company in an attempt to pay for drilling.
John D Rockerfeller became the richest person in the world mostly by monopolizing the oil that had already been found. A much less risky business.
Once some people began to make money in the oil business they got Congress to give them tax breaks to leverage their risk. The tax breaks were so good that some wealthy people invested in oil drilling projects that were almost guaranteed to fail so they could get the tax write offs.
A physician named Armand Hammer who had been working in Russia during the Russian Revolution and smuggled out a large number of looted Russian treasures during his time there was looking for a tax break to offset his income selling stolen Russian art when someone put him onto the oil drilling tax scam and he invested in some California oil projects that unexpectedly hit quite a bit of oil and turned into Occidental Petroleum with Armand Hammer as the biggest stock holder.
By the 1930s is was becoming quite clear that oil was a strategic asset. The navies of the world converted to oil from coal, which not only improved range of their ships, but also produced less dark smoke that would give away a ship's position. Armies were beginning to mechanize. By 1940 the British army was almost completely mechanized and the US Army was pretty much there by the time the US entered the war.
World War II was the first major war fought over access to oil. A major goal of the invasion of Russia was to seize Russian oil fields. Stalingrad became such an epic battle because the Germans needed that city for access to Russia's oil fields. The war in North Africa was a side project to try and wrestle the Middle East oil away from the British. And the Japanese went to war to take the oil in modern day Borneo and Indonesia. They attacked Pearl Harbor in an attempt to cripple the US Pacific Fleet long enough to secure what the Japanese called the Southern Resource Area.
Some historians have been baffled about why Germany declared war on the US right after Pearl Harbor, but that was about oil too. The British Isles were dependent on American oil to keep the war effort going there and to protect from u-boats while the US was neutral tankers loaded up in New Orleans and Houston would stay close to the US coast all the way to Newfoundland where they were put into convoys and sent across the Atlantic. By declaring war on the US, the Germans could send u-boats into US coastal waters in an attempt to sink enough tankers to cripple the UK before the US could get organized enough to protect the tankers.
It was actually wildly successful. U-boats sank a huge number of tankers in US waters before Doenitz got cold feet and pulled them back. Doenitz was concerned about losing most of his long range u-boat fleet in one fell swoop. The u-boats were operating in very shallow water which made them vulnerable to even modestly competent anti-submarine efforts and a damage u-boat that far from home had a low chance of making it home.
Oil was so critical to the US that the US Navy set aside an entire oil field in California until the late 80s. When crude has been cheap the US has bought large amounts and pumped it into empty oil reservoirs in Texas.
In 1972 the world changed because the US dropped from being the #1 oil producer and had to start importing. The easy to get oil was running out and secondary recovery hadn't started yet. OPEC was able to cause economic chaos playing with oil production, though competition with each other sometimes undercut their efforts.
Since the 1970s oil crisis US government policy as well as many other countries have worked hard to keep the oil market stable. Whenever you have a high priority issue and a lot of money allocated for that issue, you will have people wanting a little sugar for themselves. So there is a tremendous amount of handouts to the oil business in exchange for what they supposedly do for world security.
I heard an interview back around 2006 or 2008 with a former New York Times reporter who had done digging into the manipulation of the oil market. He had interviewed some people from different countries who told him how oil prices had been manipulated since at least Reagan to achieve various political goals. There were a number of European countries, plus Saudi Arabia and Israel that participated, but the US was the biggest player. He found evidence of some people who were supposedly independent futures traders who had lost billions in the oil market, but never seemed to be hurt by it and nobody really knew who they were. He suspected they were government shills. For the US losing $1 billion in the oil market to help some national objective is chump change.
He made some predictions that did come true. He said that in the Reagan and Bush I years, the price of oil was kept artificially low to hurt the USSR, but when the USSR collapsed, the price of oil went unusually high through the 90s and until the late naughts. He said the first round was to destroy the USSR's ability to bring in international currency and the latter round was to hurt China who needed to import oil. he also gave some examples where the US had stepped in to blow up sweet oil deals the Chinese had made.
He predicted that oil prices would go down when Putin went too far. As the oil started flowing from the Bakken, there were a lot of people scratching their heads wondering why the price of oil hadn't dropped significantly. But within a few weeks of Putin's seizure of the Crimea, the price of oil plummeted.
Since then Russia has been hurting badly. Their GDP has shrunk below Italy's.
The oil market is not really free, on any level. There are all sorts of sweet deals to oil companies to do what they do, and the price of oil is probably highly manipulated. The value of the US dollar is tightly tied to the price of oil. The entire world's economy and security is deeply tied to oil.
We need to dismantle the oil industry because the cheap stuff has all been found. What's left is either very expensive to refine or very expensive to develop and produce, or both. Climate issues aside, the world is facing an economic crisis if we don't move away from oil.
But it isn't as simple as it was to switch from landlines to cell phones, or film to digital photography. Those were relatively easy compared to oil.
John D Rockerfeller became the richest person in the world mostly by monopolizing the oil that had already been found. A much less risky business.
Once some people began to make money in the oil business they got Congress to give them tax breaks to leverage their risk. The tax breaks were so good that some wealthy people invested in oil drilling projects that were almost guaranteed to fail so they could get the tax write offs.
A physician named Armand Hammer who had been working in Russia during the Russian Revolution and smuggled out a large number of looted Russian treasures during his time there was looking for a tax break to offset his income selling stolen Russian art when someone put him onto the oil drilling tax scam and he invested in some California oil projects that unexpectedly hit quite a bit of oil and turned into Occidental Petroleum with Armand Hammer as the biggest stock holder.
By the 1930s is was becoming quite clear that oil was a strategic asset. The navies of the world converted to oil from coal, which not only improved range of their ships, but also produced less dark smoke that would give away a ship's position. Armies were beginning to mechanize. By 1940 the British army was almost completely mechanized and the US Army was pretty much there by the time the US entered the war.
World War II was the first major war fought over access to oil. A major goal of the invasion of Russia was to seize Russian oil fields. Stalingrad became such an epic battle because the Germans needed that city for access to Russia's oil fields. The war in North Africa was a side project to try and wrestle the Middle East oil away from the British. And the Japanese went to war to take the oil in modern day Borneo and Indonesia. They attacked Pearl Harbor in an attempt to cripple the US Pacific Fleet long enough to secure what the Japanese called the Southern Resource Area.
Some historians have been baffled about why Germany declared war on the US right after Pearl Harbor, but that was about oil too. The British Isles were dependent on American oil to keep the war effort going there and to protect from u-boats while the US was neutral tankers loaded up in New Orleans and Houston would stay close to the US coast all the way to Newfoundland where they were put into convoys and sent across the Atlantic. By declaring war on the US, the Germans could send u-boats into US coastal waters in an attempt to sink enough tankers to cripple the UK before the US could get organized enough to protect the tankers.
It was actually wildly successful. U-boats sank a huge number of tankers in US waters before Doenitz got cold feet and pulled them back. Doenitz was concerned about losing most of his long range u-boat fleet in one fell swoop. The u-boats were operating in very shallow water which made them vulnerable to even modestly competent anti-submarine efforts and a damage u-boat that far from home had a low chance of making it home.
Oil was so critical to the US that the US Navy set aside an entire oil field in California until the late 80s. When crude has been cheap the US has bought large amounts and pumped it into empty oil reservoirs in Texas.
In 1972 the world changed because the US dropped from being the #1 oil producer and had to start importing. The easy to get oil was running out and secondary recovery hadn't started yet. OPEC was able to cause economic chaos playing with oil production, though competition with each other sometimes undercut their efforts.
Since the 1970s oil crisis US government policy as well as many other countries have worked hard to keep the oil market stable. Whenever you have a high priority issue and a lot of money allocated for that issue, you will have people wanting a little sugar for themselves. So there is a tremendous amount of handouts to the oil business in exchange for what they supposedly do for world security.
I heard an interview back around 2006 or 2008 with a former New York Times reporter who had done digging into the manipulation of the oil market. He had interviewed some people from different countries who told him how oil prices had been manipulated since at least Reagan to achieve various political goals. There were a number of European countries, plus Saudi Arabia and Israel that participated, but the US was the biggest player. He found evidence of some people who were supposedly independent futures traders who had lost billions in the oil market, but never seemed to be hurt by it and nobody really knew who they were. He suspected they were government shills. For the US losing $1 billion in the oil market to help some national objective is chump change.
He made some predictions that did come true. He said that in the Reagan and Bush I years, the price of oil was kept artificially low to hurt the USSR, but when the USSR collapsed, the price of oil went unusually high through the 90s and until the late naughts. He said the first round was to destroy the USSR's ability to bring in international currency and the latter round was to hurt China who needed to import oil. he also gave some examples where the US had stepped in to blow up sweet oil deals the Chinese had made.
He predicted that oil prices would go down when Putin went too far. As the oil started flowing from the Bakken, there were a lot of people scratching their heads wondering why the price of oil hadn't dropped significantly. But within a few weeks of Putin's seizure of the Crimea, the price of oil plummeted.
Since then Russia has been hurting badly. Their GDP has shrunk below Italy's.
The oil market is not really free, on any level. There are all sorts of sweet deals to oil companies to do what they do, and the price of oil is probably highly manipulated. The value of the US dollar is tightly tied to the price of oil. The entire world's economy and security is deeply tied to oil.
We need to dismantle the oil industry because the cheap stuff has all been found. What's left is either very expensive to refine or very expensive to develop and produce, or both. Climate issues aside, the world is facing an economic crisis if we don't move away from oil.
But it isn't as simple as it was to switch from landlines to cell phones, or film to digital photography. Those were relatively easy compared to oil.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
I think one of the places I stand apart here is on the subject of competence. You may not like Cheney but there is something to be said for a ruthlessly competent Dick.
The above said, there is no question that fossil fuels dump sequestered carbon in the air. That is unwise. There is no question that fossil fuels are a finite asset and thus should not be squandered. There is no question that, if we are here X number of years down the road, we will not be getting our energy from fossil fuels.
Given the above fact set any competent manager (or citizen for that matter) would plan accordingly to do the least damage to their environment while transitioning their livelihood over to the next required technology/capability so as to be relevant in the future.
The question is how?
The idea that government is this pool of well meaning competence that is capable of making such changes is shear nonsense.
The idea that the "free market" will be driven to make these changes is nonsense.
The solution resides in cold hard competence with the motivation of public service addressing an issue of national (and global) LONG TERM self interest.
I love ACO for her youthful enthusiasm and perhaps the younger generation can shame us fools into addressing this problem but there is no way ACO possesses the competence, experience and capability to begin to know how to address this problem.
The Republicans were once the party of competence. That is no more. There is competence on the Democrat side but that seems to have a counter balance of governmental redistribution of wealth. Both parties pander to their constituents by buying their votes. Until that changes - until we loose interest in having our vote bought by actions/legislation that address our particular desires at the expense of the collective us - you will not have the coming together of competence and public service.
The above said, there is no question that fossil fuels dump sequestered carbon in the air. That is unwise. There is no question that fossil fuels are a finite asset and thus should not be squandered. There is no question that, if we are here X number of years down the road, we will not be getting our energy from fossil fuels.
Given the above fact set any competent manager (or citizen for that matter) would plan accordingly to do the least damage to their environment while transitioning their livelihood over to the next required technology/capability so as to be relevant in the future.
The question is how?
The idea that government is this pool of well meaning competence that is capable of making such changes is shear nonsense.
The idea that the "free market" will be driven to make these changes is nonsense.
The solution resides in cold hard competence with the motivation of public service addressing an issue of national (and global) LONG TERM self interest.
I love ACO for her youthful enthusiasm and perhaps the younger generation can shame us fools into addressing this problem but there is no way ACO possesses the competence, experience and capability to begin to know how to address this problem.
The Republicans were once the party of competence. That is no more. There is competence on the Democrat side but that seems to have a counter balance of governmental redistribution of wealth. Both parties pander to their constituents by buying their votes. Until that changes - until we loose interest in having our vote bought by actions/legislation that address our particular desires at the expense of the collective us - you will not have the coming together of competence and public service.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
What I appreciate about her is an ability to change her mind. She's said she had a conservative upbringing which gave her some ill informed ideas on a number of subjects. Her stance on homosexuality for example has changed completely and she's apologized for her past statements. An open mind is a powerful asset.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
The "idea" is that government can assist in these changes, just as it has in the past. Government actions helped accelerate technological advances and helped grow our economy. The Progressives seem to be pushing for the changes you've been talking about, seems as if you'd be more supportive.
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
JRP3,
And this is where I stand apart. You can have the right (and obvious) ideas but if you have no competence you can not execute. There will be horrific unintended consequences to any significant action. Course correction will be needed and necessary. All of this must be done with the equally primary goal of preserving the ability of people to make a living.
I support the idea which should be obvious. I have yet to see the competence required to execute nor the ability to work in unison to succeed. So, I concentrate my efforts on those issues.
It all starts with defanging money (as Elizabeth Warren has come to realize). Nothing meaningfully positive happens before that unless by shear happenstance.
And this is where I stand apart. You can have the right (and obvious) ideas but if you have no competence you can not execute. There will be horrific unintended consequences to any significant action. Course correction will be needed and necessary. All of this must be done with the equally primary goal of preserving the ability of people to make a living.
I support the idea which should be obvious. I have yet to see the competence required to execute nor the ability to work in unison to succeed. So, I concentrate my efforts on those issues.
It all starts with defanging money (as Elizabeth Warren has come to realize). Nothing meaningfully positive happens before that unless by shear happenstance.
EVNow
Well-Known Member
Indeed - just not sure whether it is just politically expedient or genuine. Afterall, in Hawaii conservatives don't go far.
She has been given ample opportunity in the past to condemn Modi and she has not done so.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
True.
In general her stance seems to be that the US should mostly stay out of foreign conflicts since we haven't been much of a positive influence since WW2. She certainly should condemn Modi but I don't see that having any real influence on the situation one way or another. Modi, like Trump, are symptoms of an unfortunate rise in extreme intolerant nationalism across the globe.
I rated your post love for overall content but flagged this on basis of a book report for Mrs. Bowers my eighth grade home room teacher. What I wrote about was a biography of John D. Rockefeller senior on whom I heaped copious praise for his business success. Mrs. Bowers loudly blasted me in class, "You would like him!" I remembered the book said he got power principally through influence over railroads and refusing to ship from refiners he didn't own until they were run out of business and he then bought them. I'm too lazy to nail this down, but a wiki quickie says his power over the railroads with little other elaboration as to his reasons for success.
John D. Rockefeller - Wikipedia
The oil embargo got my attention in 1973. About the middle of the year, maybe earlier, Big Oil approached the Nixon administration about rescinding the decision taken during the Eisenhower Administration to keep out cheap oil from Saudi Arabia through quotas. As you rightly point out domestic demand was rising but there was a contest between domestic producers and Bigger Oil, the majors. The majors prevailed after they assured Nixon there would not be an embargo. CIA concurred. Later that year the embargo was imposed and it was confirmed by the Jackson Committee hearings the next year that both the producing countries and big oil had the same economic interest. A former colleague who wrote his Ph.D. thesis about the oil industry's boom and bust cycles earlier in this century later worked for the Department of Energy and became a prominent advisor to oil companies. His take: "Saudi Arabia asked Big Oil for the worldwide print out of supply of oil and then told them at which points they were to cut off deliveries." The Chief of Naval Operations complained at the Jackson hearings his ships were refused fuel at Naples, for example.
One of the great innovations of Churchill when he was First Lord of the Admiralty during WWI was realizing the importance of oil to replace coal. Fewer sailors needed, more fungible, and higher available energy per volume. Hence he really pushed the UK into Iran through Anglo-Iranian Oil.
A small point of elaboration. FDR cut off oil shipment to Japan. They had only 3 months worth of gasoline for aircraft, if memory serves. They were then forced to attack Dutch interests in today's Indonesia.
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