Kyle Mcallister writes: "And some of the stuff in cars is just ridiculous....people are getting stupider because of it. Press a button, it tells you how much oil is in your engine. We have people coming to the shop that don't know how to check the oil in their engine, they just trust the level light. In the 3rd bay of our shop there lies a Porsche. Its owner trusted the oil level indicator. The indicator malfunctioned . . ."
Hence the name "idiot light." I'll bet that customer could sue Porsche. "What we need is a bare-bones alternative-energy vehicle, with manual everything and no convenience features that can be made and sold dirt cheap." The Chinese are putting serious efforts into developing something like that. It will get 40 to 50 mpg. They plan to sell it in Europe and the U.S. for around $6,000. They are also preparing to ban the sale of most U.S. automobiles in China, supposedly because they consume too much gas. "> I used to have one like that -- an Isuzu diesel. Great car! I do not understand what caused the downfall of the diesel. Really when you get down to it, they are not that hard to work on. . . ." I think the automotive diesel was hurt by the fall in gas prices. It is doing well in Europe these days. "$300 billion in Iraq....wow." Much more than that, I am afraid. A recent estimate put the total long-term cost of the war at over $1 trillion. This includes things like the lifetime care of the severely wounded, and 5 more years of occupation. (Although Rumsfield thinks it will take 12 years, and I think he is right.) This was reported in the New York Times, and I think the estimate was made by a federal economist. "Anyone have any realistic idea how much of our power grid could have been converted to something nicer with that kind of cash?" For $1 trillion we could end the use of oil completely. We could replace it with something like wind-power generated hydrogen, or space-based power with space elevators. (The elevators would cost $6 billion.) As I said in my book in the chapter on desalination, people will never spend that kind of money on anything other than war. The U.S. would not spend $1 trillion to prevent global warming even if most of the population and political leaders were convinced it is real. They just could not bring themselves to do it. We will only spend such unthinkably vast sums of money on homicide -- which, as I have said, is our most sublime & favorite activity, judging by great works of art such as Hamlet. - Jed
