Actually I just double checked Pablo's number's. He must of miscopied from his source or something. He says that he's using data from the Greenhouse gas protocol. Their worksheet:

http://www.ghgprotocol.org/downloads/calcs/working9-5.pdf/

tells me that train travel gives you 171.9 grams CO2 per passenger mile instead of the 310 he quoted.(see numbered page 38 or 43 in the PDF's count)

Similarly, Amtrak's page on the same:

http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/Satellite?c=WSArticlePage&cid=1173376444452&pagename=WhistleStop/WSArticlePage/Blank_Template

claims better carbon efficiency than cars & trains.

My 1st car was an 1982 Chevy Impala. (Only a few years younger than me, that Bat Mobile was my college car) I guess that it was a result of the 70's oil shock or something, but that car also had a "fuel efficiency" gauge -- I think in reality it was measuring RPM's or something. Just adding such a gauge really does alter the psychology of driving. Even in the mid/late 90's with ultra cheap gas and less of a global warming concern, I found myself optimizing my driving. Even with that thing having a V8 engine, I could squeeze 30 mpg out of it.

I'd just like to throw this idea out there: The problems that second-wave feminists have in regards to family are mirrored by the problems that men of the same generation have. I'm thinking of careerism to the detriment to family. Most men and women don't get to be world renowned authors. Most don't get to be respected artists. Most don't get to be important scientists or politicians. Instead their careerism is channeled into selling things and business plans. I wonder what they will do when they retire.

The new third wave feminists seem to have realized that this path does not lead to happiness for most. There is a similar realization among men of the same generation. Both realize that when you die, no one will care that you were regional manager.

Sam Adams - Brewer, Patriot. How much more American can you get than that? Beats the pants off of Busch.

I'm still kinda mad at Anheuser-Busch for buying and closing Rolling Rock's Pennsylvania brewery. It's not that I'd ever drink it, but I grew up in the general region of the brewery and there was a certain sense of "home" to the brand. With this in mind, I find it somewhat amusing that Anheuser-Bush are themselves a target of a merger/acquisition that will "destroy a local product".

I didn't mean to imply that anyone who stands over a mash tun at A-B is getting the sweet end of this deal.

I do have to wonder though, why have we allowed companies like A-B to get so large in the first place. Companies like A-B pushed out smaller, less distinguished players out of these markets a long time ago. (In this case prohibition didn't help any either.) I certainly understand that from a corporate profit perspective that bigger is better due to economies of scale, but aren't employment rolls part of the reductions that give these efficiencies? At what point do the gains to the broader economy from greater corporate efficiency get canceled by reductions in well payed consumers to buy their goods?

We share the duties of being boring equally.

If everybody could borrow $100K at 0%, I doubt that there would be any subprime crisis.

Don't call the game until you know that you can substitute Carter for Obama and still win.

but the ones I came across were actually breathlessly flattering

I'm not that surprised that guys have nice things to say about women who will have sex with them.

A decline in population doesn't necessarily correspond to a decline in the educated proportion. I'd argue that it should correspond to an increase in the educated proportion, as each child has a larger pool of adults to support them. Think of the Chinese "little emperors" where the hopes of many parents and grandparents rest on few children. There is both a lot given to and a lot expected from these kids.

The Black Death argument stands here, but with the newly freed resource being parental attention instead of land & cows.

There is this story in the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101825.html

One of the statistics is that around 30% of whites and 34% of blacks are racists. (I don't know what the error bounds on that are; they don't say; so I'd hesitate in saying that blacks are any more racist than whites.) One thing that we we can get out of this, though, is that illiberal attitudes are not confined to the traditionally oppressed group. Presumably there is a similar pattern in sexism.

What I'm getting at is this: Maybe the Hillary holdouts aren't racist, but sexist. This certainly jives with the comments of certain of the continued Hillary supporters here.

The usual measure of grid power parity is on the utility scale and the main result of this kind of parity will be the lack of _new_ fossil fuel fired power plants. With existing investments in the older coal plants, I doubt that coal will go away at mere parity.

The tipping point I'm more interested in is the point where solar is cheap enough that smaller players - like apartment buildings - coat themselves in panels; or, better still, the point where solar energy is cheap enough to redefine existing fossil fuel infrastructure as too expensive to maintain.

I never get the sense in these sorts of stances taken by conservatives. It should be fairly obvious that increasing the costs of birth control will increase the number of abortions and/or unwed mothers; or do they think shotgun weddings are still prevalent? You would think, based on rhetoric, that conservatives think abortion and unwed mothers are the bigger problem. Ah, but I forget that they aren't part of the logic & reality based community.

Unfortunately, "calorie accounting" is also limited by the second law of thermodynamics. (It is a version of "Maxwell's daemon".)