One mistake many people are making in criticizing this is assuming that the premium-regular spread will remain what it currently is. For a LONG time, premium was about 20 cents per gallon more than regular, consistently, on a day-in, day-out basis. Now it’s 50 cents or so. It isn’t because it suddenly became more…

Evidence right here of how screwed up this country is when it comes to mass transit. Dallas has its own system. Fort Worth has its own system. Arlington refuses to work with either one and instead chooses to operate a marginal system that barely will meet federal minimums and is largely ineffective. For a city that…

It isn’t a question of it saving money or not, its the utter insanity of your claim that doing so would cut costs 98% or more.

Are you attempting to suggest they could do the same project for a lot less if they just closed the freeway for a year?

Speaking of not doing any research, you clearly haven’t done yours, because roads are NOT mainly funded via gasoline tax. In no state does this even come close to being true. Hell, in Alaska, 88% of all road construction is funded through general revenues, NOT gas taxes. In Virginia, it’s 63% from general revenues.…

Why are we incapable of having self-sustaining individual transit in this country? Roads are MASSIVELY subsidized through general revenue taxes, and we complain about a little bit of funding for mass transit which reduces the need for more subsidies for roads?

Hell, we’re spending over $4 billion, but projected to jump closer to $6-7 billion, just to add ONE freaking lane of interstate along a ~25 mile route here.

Many of us do see something wrong with it.

But we also need fair trade - and that isn’t always possible in other markets, where restrictions are put on our products. There’s a reason why the 25% tax is called the chicken tax, fwiw...

“I’m not sure there’s anything scarier on this Earth than a pegged Geiger counter, screaming and screeching away.”

Depends on your reading, though - their meters were screaming and screeching away at 60 microsieverts per hour at some points in the video, and in others at 1 millisievert per hour. A single chest x-ray…

“So, i’m guessing you think trade deficits are good. Can you explain that?”

They aren’t necessarily good, but neither are they necessarily bad.

You have to view them in a light where you determine what the economy would be without them. It isn’t exactly all wine and roses without them. For example, you could have two…

“we’ve struggled to maintain 3% gdp growth since the mid 90s when globalization began to take root. We’vehad avg gdp of 2.4% since 95. I’d say that it has absolutely stymied potential gdp growth.”

GDP growth is fueled primarily by two things:

1) Productivity improvement - how much you can produce with 1 unit (man hour,…

“The EU applies a 10 percent duty on cars made in the U.S. The U.S. applies a 2.5 percent duty on cars made in Europe.

Too many variables to say for certain - it would depend on the speed of reentry and how things heated / broke apart if they did. Mars, for example, has a very, very thin atmosphere, so depending upon velocity coming in, it may or may not get hot enough.

Still nowhere near cold enough to kill off many bacteria and even some small animals.

Conductivity still works in space, and it isn’t like this thing is rock steady and has no tumbling.

A black body with the same reflectivity as the earth in orbit at the aphelion of the Roadster’s orbit would be around 191 K. At perihelion, it would be about 250K.

“Calculating earnings after expenses are taken into consideration is weird, too.”

How on earth is this weird? You think that they should only consider the money coming in from fares and not consider depreciation, maintenance, repair, fuel, insurance?

Every business on earth calculates their earnings based on removing…

Not necessarily...

Though sometimes making old tech cost more artificially is what it takes to get new tech in.

Take light bulbs. The government regulation that effectively killed incandescents was simple - it mandated an efficiency improvement over standard cheap incandescents. You could hit those levels, but it made incandescent bulbs…

Well, that plus we needed local politicians who weren’t so rabidly anti- anything Obama proposed that they wouldn’t just stick their heads up their asses and scream that they wouldn’t consider “encouraging” Obama by asking for ARRA money.

Seriously - our local sewer district is under an EPA order to clean up its act -…

I’d argue you’re being too kind to Jack Welch - the CYA mentality is toxic, but much of what he built GE on has turned to be an abject failure. His big push into finance and insurance products has burned and is continuing to burn them. Remember their huge loss on insurance products this last quarter? That was a Jack…