Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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Oh, what the hell
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sniper, that was the funniest post I have ever seen on here.
Gary, you obviously adhere to the fight fire with fire school of propagandizing and psychological warfare, eschewing subtlety for the clumsy and heavy-handed approach promoted by our Fearless Retard. I say, there is room for both.
As someone else has already mentioned, religion is at the heart of our conflicts in the Middle East. So this strip is directly targeted at the underlying cause of most of our problems, including how the Grand Poobah managed to get himself re-elected in 2004.
A lot of people don't seem to be able to handle bombastic attacks of the type your posts exemplify. They tune out, shut down, when confronted by someone screaming at them. BB is coming in through the back door, highlighting the stupidity demonstrated by all sides of the conflict in a way that gets people to actually think about what he is saying. Your approach makes it all about you, which is bad because it seems the majority of people on here don't like you and don't want to listen to what you have to say because of that.
If you are going to go ballistic because BB is not only not talking about what you want him to talk about, but also not talking about it in the way that you want him to talk about it, you should just stop reading Opus. Even if you are a paid subscriber, you do not have creative and editorial control over this site and you never will.
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Ahem
[Read the article: Oil prices: You ain't seen nuthin' yet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First, someone mentioned Duesenberg selling a $30,000 car at the height of the Depression as a warning the the rich will be unaffected by a crash. They sold 8 of them. They went bankrupt. Bad example.
If we could go back 100 years and do it all over, of course we would see the error of basing everything on the availability of cheap gas. The Europeans had the advantage of having 85% of their development occur before the advent of motorized transport, so please don't act like they were smarter or more forward thinking than we were. 10 years ago their biggest problem was congestion. Nice of the Chinese and the oil producing nations to turn this into an asset for them.
We are not going to change the landscape of America fast enough to make urbanization a viable solution to our problems. Just not possible. What we need are viable, sustainable alternatives to oil, because that is the only option that will work within our existing, too expensive to replace, infrastructure.
Ethanol is not the answer - you can burn it in an internal combustion engine, but it has none of the advantages that made gas the fuel of choice for 100 years.
Electric is good and getting better, but most of our electricity creates more pollution and causes more problems than oil does. And it doesn't address the problem of energy needed for manufacturing.
Solar is the obvious answer, but we are a long way from approaching the energy in a gallon of gas using that technology. And earth based solar power will never be able to run a heavy manufacturing facility. If only we had followed Robert Heinlein's advice and put orbiting solar generators in space 40 years ago we wouldn't have these problems.
For cars, hydrogen is looking good. BMW will be selling cars with fuel cells starting late next year. Performance is comparable to a gas powered car. But where will you fill it up?
For manufacturing the only answer is nuclear, fission or fusion. Fission is messy, expensive, requires enormous infrastructure, and is not appropriate for remote and undeveloped areas (like Africa). Fusion is a dream. Clean, cheap, safe, renewable. Been a while since I checked (about 10 years) but the word back then was that everyone working on it (US, France, UK, Germany, China) set the date for the first production reactor to go online in 2040. Budgets were raised and lowered based on that target date, because no one wanted it sooner. Why? Because the biggest impact of fusion power will be that the nations that produce most of our raw materials will have access to enough power to manufacture things out of them, turning the world economy on its head.
What we need is a real leader, which we haven't had in quite a while, and a commitment equal to what we applied to the space race in the 60's. Every President since Carter has paid lip service to this, but none of them have actually done anything. The issue is too highly politicized for any real progress to be made within the current system. We will never solve this problem until we address the underlying issues of political corruption and corporate interference in our government.