On 08/01/2013 09:24 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> The article is a year old, not that ancient.It's far from the only
> one on the topic. Google "prius status symbol".

That's why I wondered how old the cars were. You don't buy cars like
groceries. If the same stat was true in 5-10 years I'd be surprised.

> Even South Park famously did an episode on it.

Yes, in 2006! The market has changed a lot since then, from many more hybrid models to choose from, to all-electric vehicles. If you want to flaunt wealth and eco-smugness, get a Tesla.

> So the prius is more cost effective because you drive it less?

It's about an apples-to-apples comparison. There's a lot of upfront cost
to creating a car. If you drove it for a year and trashed it your
environmental numbers would look horrible. Alternatively, you
could put a lot more miles on the Prius if you wanted to. The Prius has
taxis with over 200,000 miles on them.

And that was just one point of contention. You don't seem very
interested in looking critically at this report, instead going for Glenn
Beck level analysis.

> The Hummer is the poster boy for polluting Americans, and the Prius
> the poster boy for enlightened environmental consciousness. The
> truth is a lot harder to get at than that.
>
> What does work is, of course, orienting your life so you drive less.
> Like living closer to work, combining errands into one trip,
> carpooling, biking, using Amazon instead of going to the mall, etc.

So here you are advocating to drive less, unlike the 379,000 mile
Hummer. Make up your mind.

On Friday, 2 August 2013 at 01:24:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> What does work is, of course, orienting your life so you drive less. Like living closer to work, combining errands into one trip, carpooling, biking, using Amazon instead of going to the mall, etc.

Good luck with that in a country where cars are religious material.

On 8/1/2013 9:46 PM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> So here you are advocating to drive less, unlike the 379,000 mile
> Hummer. Make up your mind.

We could go on for weeks back and forth with clever ripostes. I don't really care to, this is the wrong forum for that.

On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 21:40:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/1/2013 2:30 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> The disadvantage of gasoline is that in a sense we're "cheating",
>> because the energy stored in it was built up over millions of years by
>> ancient organisms that have long decayed, and we're only now discharging
>> all that build-up. We didn't pay anything to put that energy there,
>> that's why it's so economical.
>
> Yet the electric power to charge the batteries comes from burning coal and natural gas :-)
>
> Yeah, I know, solar, wind, etc. But that's still way off in providing base power.
>
> Like I said, it ain't easy being green. It's hard to do a "dust to dust" analysis, and most of the time people simply choose to ignore costs that are hard to calculate.

That's in the US. Most of Europe is on nuclear power.

If we set aside controversies on the dangers of plant meltdown (BTW, Fukushima was hit by a mag 9 *and* a tidal wave, just saying), it *is* about over 9000 times greener.

IMO, nuclear power is like airplanes: Spectacular when an accidents happen, but at the end of the day (IMO) safer: Coal miners die by the 100's when a cave in happens, and thousands of people die in china due to coal pollution.

On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 22:10:07 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> My hopes are with fusion. Specifically ITER. My research is on diagnostics/data analysis for tokamaks, working with the guys at Culham, UK (MAST and JET). They are cautiously optimistic.

When you read about fusion energy, you *can't* not be optimistic about it. At times though, it feels like its *such* a technological and *financial* hurdle, that the question is more like "Will we have mastered this technology before gas prices get so high a global recession will prevent us from ever financing the research?"

On 8/1/2013 11:46 PM, monarch_dodra wrote:
> That's in the US. Most of Europe is on nuclear power.
>
> If we set aside controversies on the dangers of plant meltdown (BTW, Fukushima
> was hit by a mag 9 *and* a tidal wave, just saying), it *is* about over 9000
> times greener.
>
> IMO, nuclear power is like airplanes: Spectacular when an accidents happen, but
> at the end of the day (IMO) safer: Coal miners die by the 100's when a cave in
> happens, and thousands of people die in china due to coal pollution.

I know. The problems with nukes are political, not technological.

All the plant safety problems can be solved.

I also don't really understand the issue with radiation that lasts 10,000 years. It, by definition, will be extremely weak radiation.

On 08/02/2013 01:30 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> We could go on for weeks back and forth with clever ripostes. I don't
> really care to, this is the wrong forum for that.

I wasn't interested in "clever ripostes". I was interested in intellectual honesty.

And while this is certainly the wrong forum, it hasn't stopped you before when discussing other off-topic stuff. Of course, you need not reply, or you could invoke your ownership privs and either delete my posts or demand I make no further ones.

On 8/2/13 12:23 AM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 08/02/2013 01:30 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> We could go on for weeks back and forth with clever ripostes. I don't
>> really care to, this is the wrong forum for that.
>
> I wasn't interested in "clever ripostes". I was interested in
> intellectual honesty.
>
> And while this is certainly the wrong forum, it hasn't stopped you
> before when discussing other off-topic stuff. Of course, you need not
> reply, or you could invoke your ownership privs and either delete my
> posts or demand I make no further ones.

Whoa, what's the matter here?

Andrei

On Friday, 2 August 2013 at 06:50:46 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 22:10:07 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>> My hopes are with fusion. Specifically ITER. My research is on diagnostics/data analysis for tokamaks, working with the guys at Culham, UK (MAST and JET). They are cautiously optimistic.
>
> When you read about fusion energy, you *can't* not be optimistic about it. At times though, it feels like its *such* a technological and *financial* hurdle, that the question is more like "Will we have mastered this technology before gas prices get so high a global recession will prevent us from ever financing the research?"

When I say they are cautiosly optimistic, I mean that they are optimistic that ITER will be the last big pre-prototype Tokamak. Next step prototype powerplant.