>> ^PancakeMaster:

So the land development, building and fueling/mining of a nuclear power plant is free of emissions? What about waste disposal and decommissioning? Bremnet speaks the truth, albeit in a markedly sarcastic way. Car emissions come from energy production. Electric cars simply have their energy production out-sourced. Things become interesting at a local level with electric transport because you can potentially choose how your energy is produced. But you'd better believe that coal and oil is still powering all things electric in the majority of households, including recharging batteries.
I am a huge proponent of nuclear power, though I really wish LFTR's would come into production especially considering it's organic safety features and relative fuel abundance.
Since we're on the subject of electric cars, don't forget that the production of batteries and electric motors is very expensive. I'm not necessarily talking about monetary costs, but rather cost in resources and energy. Again, I support the development and usage of electric vehicles but dare not ignore their true cost.
>It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits.
You have so much more power to control your resource usage than the government. Don't rely on them for a solution. You can choose what you eat (agriculture is a huge resource spender), how you travel (walk or take public transport), what and why you buy (industry is another big spender), and your home resource usage. Don't pass the buck and blindly empower the government when it's our responsibility.
Now if only the planet was run on pancake power. Then, surely, I would be the true master of Earth.
edit
BTW, great video and awesome car. Would love to give it a go (as with all Audi Rx cars
>> ^bcglorf:
Well, nuclear is there to make electricity and vehicles emission free. If the greens hadn't worked so hard to ensure that nuclear power was stopped the 41% for electricity and whatever chunk of transportation is vehicles would all be gone.
But fine, is you wanna be sarcastic how about you chime in with a better solution. You hear plenty of chicken little's running around crying it's time to panic. You hear plenty of talk about reducing our emissions. You don't hear nearly so much about how to do that. It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits. Without nuclear power for electricity production and switching large parts of transportation over to electricity, what is left? Are we just to stop using transportation and electricity all together I suppose?
>> ^bremnet:
Yes, so true. Just look at all of the countries signing up for new nuclear power plants. Oh, and of course, those who generate their electricity today with that peskily cheaper natural gas from shale gas will likely just shut that down. Forgot to ask, how do we generate the electricity to charge our batteries? If you say anything that involves rubbing balloons in ones hair, well that's just too clever! Let's see - in 2009, 41% of global CO2 emissions were from the generation of electricity and heat, and only 23% for transport per the IEA report (that's all transport - cars, trucks, buses, seagoing vessels, trains, planes) so let's call your 30% a rounding error. By 2015, it is estimated that the total CO2 emissions from seagoing vessels will surpass that for all land based automobiles, so can we get a video of an electric cargo ship instead of this car? Pretty sure they have those, right? If we have electric vehicles, and have to generate more electricity ummm... (head explodes). Top marks for enthusiasm, but I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you back for another year to re-teach math and energy balance.




But just how much can you realistically reduce your emissions by through changed behaviour? I doubt even 50% is realistic. Now, how about getting our entire society to do the same, are people gonna voluntarily give up everything they need to drop 50%? Not a chance.

If electric cars can be improved enough to be desirable over gas, then a switch over to nuclear for electricity production can drop emissions nearly 50%. More importantly, it happens by consumers buying something new because they simply want to, and government/corporations making money off selling nuclear energy to run everyone's new cars.

Short of putting guns to peoples heads and telling them what they can and can not eat, how far they are allowed to travel in a year, and enforcing that across the globe, emissions ARE NOT going to be lowered. Electric cars and nuclear power are the only viable options out there and they are either ready now(nuclear) or will be very, very soon(electric cars).

So the land development, building and fueling/mining of a nuclear power plant is free of emissions? What about waste disposal and decommissioning? Bremnet speaks the truth, albeit in a markedly sarcastic way. Car emissions come from energy production. Electric cars simply have their energy production out-sourced. Things become interesting at a local level with electric transport because you can potentially choose how your energy is produced. But you'd better believe that coal and oil is still powering all things electric in the majority of households, including recharging batteries.

I am a huge proponent of nuclear power, though I really wish LFTR's would come into production especially considering it's organic safety features and relative fuel abundance.

Since we're on the subject of electric cars, don't forget that the production of batteries and electric motors is very expensive. I'm not necessarily talking about monetary costs, but rather cost in resources and energy. Again, I support the development and usage of electric vehicles but dare not ignore their true cost.

>It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits.

You have so much more power to control your resource usage than the government. Don't rely on them for a solution. You can choose what you eat (agriculture is a huge resource spender), how you travel (walk or take public transport), what and why you buy (industry is another big spender), and your home resource usage. Don't pass the buck and blindly empower the government when it's our responsibility.

Now if only the planet was run on pancake power. Then, surely, I would be the true master of Earth.

*edit*

BTW, great video and awesome car. Would love to give it a go (as with all Audi Rx cars

>> ^bcglorf:

Well, nuclear is there to make electricity and vehicles emission free. If the greens hadn't worked so hard to ensure that nuclear power was stopped the 41% for electricity and whatever chunk of transportation is vehicles would all be gone.
But fine, is you wanna be sarcastic how about you chime in with a better solution. You hear plenty of chicken little's running around crying it's time to panic. You hear plenty of talk about reducing our emissions. You don't hear nearly so much about how to do that. It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits. Without nuclear power for electricity production and switching large parts of transportation over to electricity, what is left? Are we just to stop using transportation and electricity all together I suppose?

>> ^bremnet:
Yes, so true. Just look at all of the countries signing up for new nuclear power plants. Oh, and of course, those who generate their electricity today with that peskily cheaper natural gas from shale gas will likely just shut that down. Forgot to ask, how do we generate the electricity to charge our batteries? If you say anything that involves rubbing balloons in ones hair, well that's just too clever! Let's see - in 2009, 41% of global CO2 emissions were from the generation of electricity and heat, and only 23% for transport per the IEA report (that's all transport - cars, trucks, buses, seagoing vessels, trains, planes) so let's call your 30% a rounding error. By 2015, it is estimated that the total CO2 emissions from seagoing vessels will surpass that for all land based automobiles, so can we get a video of an electric cargo ship instead of this car? Pretty sure they have those, right? If we have electric vehicles, and have to generate more electricity ummm... (head explodes). Top marks for enthusiasm, but I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you back for another year to re-teach math and energy balance.

@rbar Spain is at most a mixed economy, with a monetary system controlled by the European Central Bank, that is very far from what a free market ought to be. It's another galaxy.

To me, coercion is the difference between bad and no choice. I never said it was arbitrary, so stop agreeing with what I didn't say, please? I have a feeling you are silently ignoring or reading something entirely different whenever I say the word "coercion". I won't dispute for now your impossible standards of what a choice is supposed to be, I think we have more pressing issues.

If by "powerful" you mean the rich, they can only set rules as much as government lets them, because unless they're criminals, they have no power to coerce in any way. Again, that goes back to the definition of coercion.

"all people always want to improve themselves"... have you ever heard of laziness?

Whether a person doing charity is asking for anything in return is irrelevant to the fact that the receiver of charity can be as dependent on the charity as an employee is to his wage. You are pointing out differences that are inconsequential to the analogy I made between charity and employment.

It's as absurd to accuse an employer of "coercing" an employee based on the fact that he needs the money to survive as much as it is to make you responsible for someone dependent on charity to survive.

In both cases, they are not being denied anything that they are entitled to, so there is no coercion.

No one is entitled to a job, or to charity, or even money to survive. Your right to your life doesn't impose any requirements on others around you to provide for your survival. Maybe if it's an emergency.

I don't understand your question about how to implement the free market on 4 products and 10 companies. A free market is not supposed to be tailored to a certain market, just as free speech is not meant to adjust itself based on how many broadcasting companies and TV shows we currently have.

>> ^renatojj:

Bankers were given powers they shouldn't have and they abused them. They were given money they shouldn't have access to and they squandered it and rewarded themselves. Central banks were established with monopolistic power over the monetary system, and they're destroying the money supply and enabling massive debts with impossibly low interest rates.
When are we going to blame the bastards who gave them these powers in the first place?
Corporations = capitalism/evil
Government = the tool liberals need to accomplish socialism
It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to find the real culprit, but liberals will go as far as blaming corporations and not look an inch further, because that would mean blaming government... no, that's not allowed.


that's a weird new username you got there, qm.

Bankers were given powers they shouldn't have and they abused them. They were given money they shouldn't have access to and they squandered it and rewarded themselves. Central banks were established with monopolistic power over the monetary system, and they're destroying the money supply and enabling massive debts with impossibly low interest rates.

When are we going to blame the bastards who gave them these powers in the first place?

Corporations = capitalism/evil
Government = the tool liberals need to accomplish socialism

It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to find the real culprit, but liberals will go as far as blaming corporations and not look an inch further, because that would mean blaming government... no, that's not allowed.

You crazy yankies and your anti-central bank views. I suppose the bouts of 10-20% inflation that just magically stopped after any country introduced an independent central bank is lost on your guys? Or that the Fed through QE1, QE2 and Operation Twist is pretty much single handedly responsible for preventing millions of people from remaining unemployment these last few years and joining the ranks of the permanently unemployed?

@renatojj

The European Union was created purportedly to create intra-regional peace. The Euro Zone was the fundamentally flawed idea of creating a monetary union without a fiscal union.

You don't blame the banks for corrupting politicians, but you do blame the politicians for being given so much power? And you think that less regulation is the answer? Banking regulations are irrelevant in this conversation. The only question is whether it should be legal for banks to bribe politicians. As long as politicians are open to bribery, the rich will have enormous sway over them, and most regulations the politicians produce will favour the rich. If campaign contributions were illegal or limited to an amount that most interested parties could afford -- an amount that might help them in a small way, but not in a disproportionate way -- then the rich wouldn't be able to write themselves blank cheques.

So politicians who accept bribes AND banks who bribe them are out of order. The power doesn't like with society, nor with the clients, nor the market, and certainly not with doing good business. The power could lie with those groups if the system were less corrupted by unchecked campaign financing.>> ^renatojj:

@Porksandwich The question is, who is out of order? The banks for bribing politicians, or politicians for having so much power to forcibly regulate banking/monetary/financial practices and institutions?
Politicians have their hands all over their businesses, the financial, monetary and banking sectors are already heavily regulated. I'm not saying they're WELL regulated, not at all, but there are tons of regulations in place on everything and that screams to big bankers and businesses, "the power lies with us, politicians. Not with society, not with your clients, not with the market, not with doing good business and taking calculated risks. We dictate everything that is and isn't allowed. If you're not on our good side, we will screw you over".
What you don't seem to realize is that, big banks and big businesses usually lobby for more regulations that benefit them, because the more regulations you have, the bigger the burden is for smaller competitors.

@Porksandwich The question is, who is out of order? The banks for bribing politicians, or politicians for having so much power to forcibly regulate banking/monetary/financial practices and institutions?

Politicians have their hands all over their businesses, the financial, monetary and banking sectors are already heavily regulated. I'm not saying they're WELL regulated, not at all, but there are tons of regulations in place on everything and that screams to big bankers and businesses, "the power lies with us, politicians. Not with society, not with your clients, not with the market, not with doing good business and taking calculated risks. We dictate everything that is and isn't allowed. If you're not on our good side, we will screw you over".

What you don't seem to realize is that, big banks and big businesses usually lobby for more regulations that benefit them, because the more regulations you have, the bigger the burden is for smaller competitors.

Yup - the penny used to have inherent value as a monetary unit. Inflation has rendered that value just shy of inherently meaningless. Between writing checks and paying with debit cards, there is very little need for the physical penny any longer. Just round it to the nickel for cash transactions, and have non-cash transactions keep going to the penny. It's a good plan, and hopefully the US follows suit. At the same time let's make it illegal for gas stations to charge 9/10 of a cent...

The question with global warming to me is, are we even capable of reducing emissions and would we still be able to afford to feed ourselves if we did to the level it would require to reverse it.

Can't stand to read much on it because it's usually non-quantified changes they tell everyone to make, and you have to wade through all the nuts discussing it on both sides. There's almost no "practicality-tempered view" in everything that comes out.

IE
If we all are expected to take public transport, are they going to build public transport, is it going to be so restrictive as to be worthless? Or so costly as to be useless?

If we all are expected to get electric cars, how will we pay for them? How long do current one's last? If it's less than 10 years, how is it cost effective in both the monetary and environmental sense to replace a car that often?

Why do we have manufacturing laws that allow companies to pump out stuff that breaks and is too costly to repair creating a system of replacing whatever every 1-3 years? I've had these microwaves, the POSes don't even last 5 years, where my grandmother had one from the 80s that still works today. Granted it takes forever to nuke something, but good lord, not even getting a 5 year average out of microwaves is piss. And then we have cell phones, those things get replaced more than underwear by some people. Computers have mostly slowed down, where you don't need a new computer every 3-5 years to do simple things.....but you know we got a load of tube monitors and old computers just sitting wherever or shipped wherever because there is nothing to be done with them in the US...charities won't even take OLD machines most the time.

And is the environment impact greater importing things from China or manufacturing them here so they travel less distance and hopefully have better environment protections and more efficiency in place? It's certainly more economically sound, in the short term at least, to ship everything from China. But if we're going to do global warming fixes and this is one.......it would be a huge boon to the US population to actually have an abundance of jobs return. PLUS they can hopefully be told they have to make no planned obsolete cheap-shit products to fill the junkyards and landfills and require a new one to be made like is currently going on.

Got a fridge a few years back, it is craptacular compared to the fridge it replaced that was like 10-15 years old. Sure it keeps food cold, but it's ice maker sucks, it's been "repaired" at least twice and it still sucks. And again, the grandmother's fridge...no ice maker, but it still works to this day and it's an 80s model.

None of this can be productive. Like cash for clunkers......was it really productive destroying that many cars when you'd just have to make new ones to fill that gap? And the people who have old cars and couldn't afford to get new ones?....they still have old cars, perhaps worse than if they had bought one of those clunkers. They were purposefully destroying the motors in those cash for clunker cars by running the motors without oil until they froze, that is not good for the environment and has no productive worth.

When they start to explain things in terms you can look at your own house and property and say, you know...that does need replaced and it'll be so much better because it's guaranteed to perform better and not need replacing for 5-10 years with regular maintenance due the new standards.

Upvote granted. That is probably the best way to reply to that sort of argument too.

The real underlying problem with the "gas prices are going up because the Fed is printing money" theory is that gasoline is just one price, and "inflation" is a rise in the price of everything, overall. Economists say that to really spot inflation, you have to look at prices that are generally pretty stable; volatile commodities like food & gas which see frequent large shifts in both supply & demand are very poor measures of inflation, because there's just too much non-inflationary noise. Here's a much more in-depth explanation from Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/core-logic/

Keep in mind that the methods economists use to measure inflation show that we've been in a period of record-low inflation. That should, for any rational person, be the end of talk of inflation. This constant cry of "INFLATION!" at every price increase is quite literally the economic equivalent of hearing hoof-beats and assuming it's zebras and not horses.

Most changes in prices happen in response to real shifts in supply or demand, not because the Fed is expanding the monetary base.

In reply to this comment by lampishthing:
I researched a comment on the sift for the first time in about 2 years. I would like an upvote oh sage one.

You might even find it interesting!!!!

A good discussion of the movie here.

The film Money as Debt 2 has a better explanation of the present monetary system.

This film underestimates the difficulty of eliminating all forms of usury, from person to person lending up to national bank lending. Discount rates (the basis of interest) are fundamental to our psychology of the time value of goods.

That would be another smart thing to do then. But I'd start with campaign financing. Surely that has to stop first before there will be the political will to dismantle the Fed.>> ^renatojj:

>> ^messenger:
Does the Fed contribute to political campaigns?
I don't work there, you'd have to audit the Fed to find out.
The Fed's monopoly over the monetary system is what mostly facilitates crony capitalism. They use inflation to dilute everybody's wealth and benefit those who are politically connected and are getting the easy money first: the big banks.

>> ^messenger:
Does the Fed contribute to political campaigns?
I don't work there, you'd have to audit the Fed to find out.

The Fed's monopoly over the monetary system is what mostly facilitates crony capitalism. They use inflation to dilute everybody's wealth and benefit those who are politically connected and are getting the easy money first: the big banks.

If you're on a gold standard, you have to guarantee your money is convertible to gold. That means your central bank sets its interest rates according to how much gold is on hand. If you happen to be losing gold, you have to raise interest rates, reduce the amount of money in circulation, so you can stay on the gold standard.

If — just suppose — you're in an economic downturn, and people are pulling a bunch of gold out of the banks, then you raise interest rates and reduce the amount of money in circulation, which keeps you on the gold standard... but also is exactly the opposite of the monetary policy you want when people are losing their jobs. It stops economic activity dead.

In other words, this modern crying-out for a gold standard in the midst of an economic crisis is of a piece with all the other claims that we ought to adopt policies not because they will help, but because they're painful, and we deserve pain, don't we? We've been very, very naughty, or we must have been, to get into this kind of trouble, and we need to punish ourselves. Or at least, Ron Paul needs to punish you. And trust me, this will hurt you more than it hurts him.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/ron-paul-gold-standard-bad-6654238#ixzz1o4oUit5j