Utilities are publicly owned for a good reason. Your bill would otherwise shoot up sky high the very moment your provider became a monopoly, and utilities are natural monopolies.

Many of our collective bills would go down if we pushed for more public ownership of natural monopolies and let go of the failed conservative dogma that beneficial competition is what happens when there are no rules. Comcast is what happens when there are no rules and natural monopolies are allowed to be privatized.

hammer is trigger

the citrussy:

USA did it in 1991, day one of Desert Storm

It could be a little carbon negative, in the way planting trees is a little carbon negative.

Sourcing carbon from atmosphere and hydrogen from water to make liquid fuel would pull carbon out of the air and put it into your gas tank.

Methane is easier to work with than hydrogen, but it still needs to be kept colder than what’s practical. If it turns out that propane is much cheaper to make from (renewable energy + atmosphere + water), relative to the cost of making liquids like diesel, kerosene, or gasoline, then propane might be a winning choice for renewable transportation fuel.

TST exists as a means to build a counterpoint to the reach of other religions

False.

TST is just as real and valid as any other religion.

If there’s enough excess capacity of clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, that it can be converted into portable fuel . . . why hydrogen?

Its hard to contain, embrittles everything it touches, in gaseous form its density is low so its tanks need to be huge but in liquid form it needs to be kept unreasonably cold and is still low density and requires oversize fuel tanks, and its explosive when it mixes with air - not just flammable, but explosive.

Why not use that clean energy to pull CO2 out of the air and use it to build new hydrocarbon liquid fuels that are compatible with existing infrastructure?

look at Mr Moneybags over here, able to afford a van down by the river

That extra weight will also mean that more force is required to accelerate and change directions.

The nimbleness of a vehicle can be expressed as the ratio:

(Tire Contact Area * Tire Stickiness) / Vehicle Mass

Increasing the vehicle’s mass while making the tires harder will lead to longer breaking distances and will cause a vehicle to understeer at lower speeds.

So this big breakthrough in tire technology is . . . making them harder and reducing their grip?

There’s no reason EVs have to be heavier forever

That’s a bit of a stretch, unfortunately. The energy density of batteries is nowhere close to that of gasoline - joule for joule, gasoline weighs about 100 times less than batteries. Also, a fuel tank big enough to give its vehicle a 400 mile range will get lighter over the course of the trip, as the liquid fuel gets converted into polluting gas and exhausted into the atmosphere - batteries don’t get appreciably lighter as you discharge them.

Agree that 400 miles range with charging stations as ubiquitous as today’s gas stations would help EV adoption. I do worry about the rollout of charging stations being slowed down by competition with expensive and fragile hydrogen tech (keep the hydrogen on boats and trains pls).

096 has breached containment

Who gets to choose what the truth is?

Not really. Its trees from a time before micro organisms evolved the ability to eat dead trees. These days, the solar energy collected by trees will get used to power the metabolisms of fungi before those trees can get buried and eventually become new coal & petroleum.

I suppose an impact from a sufficiently large asteroid could turn the entire crust of the planet into magma, sterilizing it and therefore opening the possibility that new oil might be created some day.

That’s just a fucking blatant lie. Obamacare is free if your income is low enough.

This is also factually inaccurate. If your income is low enough, then I know from experience that the sign up process for the ACA will redirect you to Medicaid.

I believe that you believe that you’re telling the truth, but it seems like you’ve been misinformed. In reality, you’ve asked me to disregard my own lived experience and to ignore the evidence provided by my own lying eyes.

I’m in it. Right now. Trying to get healthcare as a poor person in USA.

Your replies make it seem like you are not - like you’re out of touch and apparently believe its easier to be poor in USA than it actually is. A poor person in USA can get free healthcare, but you have to stay poor to keep it. If your income grows to about 1 standard deviation below the median, which is still less than a living wage, then you’ll lose access to Medicaid and have to shop for an ACA plan in the marketplace. Those marketplace plans became garbage after the Republicans repealed the important parts of ‘obamacare’.

That’s factually inaccurate.

The cheapest plans cost hundreds of dollars per month and have deductibles that make you pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before the insurance company will pay out a cent. Its worse than just not having any insurance - not only are you still paying full price for healthcare, but you’re also out hundreds of dollars a month paying the premiums for an insurance policy that doesn’t actually cover anything unless you happen to have thousands of dollars in the bank to pay the deductibles.

If you make enough money that you can afford to pay the premiums and deductibles for even the cheapest of ACA plans, or if you’re so out of touch and far removed from shopping for ACA plans as a poor person that you’re not aware of just how expensive they are and how little they cover, perhaps it is you who needs to re-evaluate how privileged you are.

The ACA was good the first year it existed, but deductibles and premiums have both since increased beyond the point of usefulness.

The value of stocks has no direct impact on the volume of currency that exists, and printing literal paper money is only a tiny fraction of the new currency generated by the banking system. The person you replied to is correct. Most new money is created by banks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

As banks hold in reserve less than the amount of their deposit liabilities, and because the deposit liabilities are considered money in their own right (see commercial bank money), fractional-reserve banking permits the money supply to grow beyond the amount of the underlying base money originally created by the central bank.

For example, if banking regulators set the ‘reserve ratio’ at 1:10, and you deposit $1,000 at your bank, then your bank would be able to give out loans worth $10,000. The effect on the volume of currency that exists is the same as if the US Mint printed an additional $9,000.

One of the problems with that system is that all that money is owed back to the bank + interest. However, there’s not actually enough currency in existence to pay back all the loans + interest, so the banks inevitably get to confiscate people’s property when they default on loans. Remember that the banks invented that money from thin air via fractional reserve lending - now they’ve turned that thin air into physical, tangible wealth at no cost to them.

Another problem with that system is that big loans - i.e. new currency entering the system - take time for their full inflationary effects to be felt. The “people” who get the big loans can spend the new currency at its full value, but by doing so they put enough new currency into circulation to devalue it via inflation.

One of the consequences of the fractional reserve lending system is that increasing the ‘reserve ratio’ will decrease the rate of inflation. Less new loans are issued, so less new currency enters the system. The banking lobby does not want this to become common knowledge, for obvious reasons. Federal taxes can be eliminated entirely, and the regulatory effect those taxes would have had on inflation can be substituted by taking it out of the banker’s profits by reducing the amount of new currency the banks are adding to the economy via fractional reserve lending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory

a thin layer of positive mass tucked inside an outer layer of negative mass

If the universe provides negative mass, maybe we could use it to build an FTL warp drive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Maybe they’re looking at SLS numbers and ignoring reusable rockets like Starship? Perhaps it would not be feasible to move a sufficient mass of shielding into orbit using the $2 billion per flight, one time use SLS.