>> ^Porksandwich:

From third party experience and personal observations of the system, the checks and balances need to be returned into the system. Like I stated earlier, the police department refused to comply with written orders from a judge. And this same judge when shown the paperwork the police department wanted signed said that he'd never seen that paperwork before and that he himself wouldn't have signed it under any circumstance.
There's just too much complication to the system, each part of the 3 wanting to take the powers of the other two upon itself while being completely kept out of the loop as to the other branches goings on. No handful of people have the time to check out the other goings on when they are so busy trying to get more power for themselves.
They need to implement a system in which laws that are reviewed and thrown out when a new law takes over it's function, or if the law is outdated with the times and requires an update to create an update that doesn't require broad interpretation of every word in it. Lots of interpretation slowly becomes the new "spirit" of the law that was never intended to be used in such ways.

I guess I see a problem with both of these suggestions. First, how do you restore checks and balances? If the police refuse to comply with written instructions from a judge, what's supposed to happen? If the police refuse because the judge didn't use a particular form the police expect for a particular type of legal request, who settles the dispute? For that matter, who's supposed to take action to resolve the dispute?

I'd also point out that isn't really a question of checks and balances so much as trouble with inefficient communications.

Second, the problem with all law is that it's still written in English, which is not a formal language, free of all ambiguity. I mentioned in another thread that so-called "legalese" is usually about trying to make law more precise, so that it reduces the ambiguity of its meaning. But even then, there's often still room for interpretation, because legalese is still just technical English, and is therefore bound to include ambiguous elements.

For example, if you're going to ban "drunk driving" you have to come up with rigorous, objective standards for what constitutes being "drunk", and also what constitutes "driving". Is a separate law needed for boats and aircraft, for example? What about farm machinery? Is drunkenness determined by a test for impaired function, or by some sort of biochemical standard? In either case, you need to set a standard for what constitutes a valid test, how you verify the authenticity of the test, and how you document the test.

If the law defines "driving" as operating a gasoline-powered vehicle with 2 or 4 wheels, and someone is driving around with an ethanol-fueled car or a trike, should he be exempt from the law?

As for legal precedent, a lot of times that comes into play because the law was intentionally written to leave room for judges to make their own interpretation on the meaning of things that could never be exhaustively defined (e.g. "reasonable suspicion"). Over time you do start building up a more regular definition of "reasonable suspicion" by the way cases have been decided in the past, and so you'll find that the topic of precedent will naturally come up whenever a prosecutor or defense wants to challenge (or defend) the way one of those ambiguous standards was applied.

As for the way the courts tend to screw you if you try to file claims, I think part of that is because the court system is perpetually starved for resources, and they want to try to stave off frivolous lawsuits by making the process a pain in the ass.

Moving freight, airplanes and battleships requires different solutions (in my opinion) then the problem of getting your kids to the hockey game.

The engines that run minivans are identical to the ones used by freight ships, freight trains, Farm implements, highway tractors, backup generators, battleships and prop planes. The same solution applies to them all. In fact, large enough ships like carriers and subs already run off electricity instead of oil because it is cheaper.


Even if energy storage technology was to rapidly become what we would need it to be, where would the energy come from if the source for more then half of our current use was to vanish?


We have enough sources of uranium and thorium to meet global energy needs for 100's of years. With any luck, we can develop renewable sources like wind,tidal and solar with that kind of time to get them ready. If we're really lucky, maybe we'll even get fusion power before that and then we are good for the lifetime of the solar system. As a bonus, nuclear is cheaper when developed on a large scale, France is making good money running over 80% nuclear power and exporting it's cheaper electricity to the rest of Europe.


A battery won't move an 18 wheeler. The only thing that will move an 18 wheeler is foreign oil, diesel and gasoline, and our domestic natural gas.

That is utter nonesense. Lookup Tesla motors, they've actually managed to use current battery technology to make a Lotus Elise that is FASTER than it's oil driven counter-part. The argument is as silly as when people felt automobiles where worthless because they couldn't go as far as a horse without a fill-up. Batteries don't need to improve too much more to be a viable replacement and then a landslide shift will take place to cheaper more powerfull electric vehicles.


In the mean time, let me know when you've found a battery that can power an ocean liner.


And this is your fundamental and underlying misunderstanding. The navy is currently using compact nuclear generators as giant batteries to power their largest ships more cheaply and without any dependence on oil. The problem for ocean liner's isn't building a battery that is big enough, it's building them SMALL enough. If a battery can be made small enough to replace the gas tank in a car, then you can power ANYTHING bigger than that car as well by using 2,10 or 1000 such batteries. Already with current laptop battery technology we are almost there. We don't need a breakthrough, a few small improvements to weight and cost and the solution is there. Anything to small to be powered by a compact nuclear generator can instead be run off of batteries without a loss in performance or ability.


The social attachment to oil is much deeper the powering the transportation to get to the grocery store or the beach. It is in every piece of food you get at the grocery store or bring to the beach. It is in the road you drive on, the oil that lubricates the engine as well as just the gas tank.


But moving goods is all still part of the transportation network. And ALL of those applications use internal combustion engines that can be replaced with only a moderately improved battery over those available today.


The agricultural attachment to oil is not just that it is used in the production and delivery of the fertilizer that grows the food to feed the citizen or just the fuel in the gas tank of the grain harvester and other farm machinery.


I grew up on a farm. The agricultural attachment to oil is again dominated by the use of internal combustion engines for machinery, which is easily replaced with a better battery.


The political attachment to oil is not just ensuring that a population have access to the cheap energy for their car, but the cheap fuel for the cheap power plant the provides the cheap electricity for to run the fridge for the cheap food brought from all corners of the earth.

Wrong, the cheap power plant runs off of coal, not oil. Coal reserves utterly dwarf oil reserves, that's why not even crazy people talk about 'peak' coal. In fact, many talk about converting coal to oil if necessary.


I'm sorry, but the entirety of the arguments you make NEVER go beyond the assumption that nothing can replace internal combustion engines and so when oil runs out everything using them is doomed. Fortunately that is not the reality we live in. Even with current technology, battery powered electric motors are begining to appear in automobiles. The military has been running their largest ships on electricty and independent of oil for decades. We are not looking at a dire need for a major breakthrough. We only need small, incremental improvements to battey technology to being able to replace internal combustion engines with batteries, and oil with electricity. Then we are free to simply expand the electric grid, which we have been doing for nearly a century already and are getting rather good at.

<>> ^bcglorf:
...

The social attachment to oil is much deeper the powering the transportation to get to the grocery store or the beach. It is in every piece of food you get at the grocery store or bring to the beach. It is in the road you drive on, the oil that lubricates the engine as well as just the gas tank.

The agricultural attachment to oil is not just that it is used in the production and delivery of the fertilizer that grows the food to feed the citizen or just the fuel in the gas tank of the grain harvester and other farm machinery.

The political attachment to oil is not just ensuring that a population have access to the cheap energy for their car, but the cheap fuel for the cheap power plant the provides the cheap electricity for to run the fridge for the cheap food brought from all corners of the earth.

The monetary attachment to oil is not just to the Oil Barons and Corporations who make billions mining and selling it to citizens and governments.

The military attachment is not just to fuel the transportation of tanks, battleships and aircraft carriers, as well as fighter-jets and bombers. It is not just the means of production of weapons which are then transported to the front lines where they are employed in freeing up more oil for the Country, for the Government, for the Citizen, for the Oil Baron, and for the Military which turns round and does it again.

The attachment to oil is all of those things. Interwoven and inseparable.

There is no quick fix or replacement for oil. There must be a reduction of our energy consumption. There will be massive social and political changes required for us to get through the coming crisis of the long emergency. If we are smart we will get those changes moving sooner rather then later. Some of them are already beginning. And that gives me some hope.

In the mean time, let me know when you've found a battery that can power an ocean liner.