Every red-blooded American turns green at the gills at the mention of taxes, yet any public transit system is NOT self-supporting. It can't be, unless ticket prices were so unreasonably high that no one would ride it. We don't have the notion that roads and bridges should pay for themselves (a few have tolls, but most don't). Why do we expect that public transit should? Yet that opinion seems to prevail, at least in my own city.

The Europeans pay far higher taxes than we do. They have awesome public transit. They see public transit as a priority. I'd guess that in most cities across the US, most taxpayers see public transit as a necessary evil, or a way to get poor people around.

When more and more people up the economic ladder are forced into public transit, will those people actually be willing to pay for improvements to it?

I agree with a previous poster, that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the personal automobile, and of suburban sprawl. But it will take a while to get from here to there. In the interim, which cities/counties/states will actually pony up and pay for public transit?

Yes, in fact, she may be sexually active.

Many, many seniors in nursing homes are widowed, and find partners there in the same situation. More power to 'em! My husband's grandfather (quite a catch at the assisted living home, still with most of his marbles and no wife, in his 90s) has had three partners (that we know of) in the last eight years since his wife of 60 years died. He may have had more. Not my business. The point is that a lot of sex is going on in assisted living, among people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Seniors are sexually active, and many of them are showing up with various STDs. Most seniors usually have multiple medical conditions anyway, no one wants to add genital warts or cervical cancer to the mix.

As food prices rise, and the commodities that make up our foods, the price of processed food (packaged tortellini, cheese flavored goldfish crackers, Cheetos, Rice-A-Roni, Mac and Cheese, canned soup, cornflakes, microwave popcorn, you name it) will also rise. All that modified food starch (which I'm just as guilty of consuming as the next suburbanite) just won't make economic sense.

What a concept that we'll go to the store and buy things like flour, cornmeal, beans, vegetables, meats, and spices.

Just as the rising price of oil makes us do what we should do anyway (ride our bikes and take public transit), the rising prices of food commodities will make us do what we ought to be doing anyway--eating less processed food, eating out less, and cooking at home from real ingredients.

We'll have less stuff, and less space. Less need for our more expensive electricity from solar cells. It won't be a one to one transfer, oil to solar, and we all zip around in electric cars and live in spacious, lighted, air-conditioned houses.

The planet cannot support us all living in houses like mine, I'll be the first to admit it. What a weird world we live in where the biggest problem (to me) in my household is clutter. To damn much stuff. Kids toys, clothes, junk mail, papers, McDonald's Happy Meal toys (and don't go all sanctimonious on me, I'd bet every house in America with a child under 10 has at least one), and stacks and stacks of papers.

Does all this stuff make me happy? Not in the least. Getting rid of it takes a ton of time and effort. It takes even more time and effort not to accumulate it in the first place. It's a constant, daily barrage of stuff, and a super-organized human (which I am not) to keep track of it all. But the sole reason it accumulates is because stuff is cheap, and time is expensive.

And there is a connection here to the HTTW article. I'll know when photovoltaic cells make economic sense, when I stop getting little plastic toys, made of an oil by-product, and shipped halfway round the world to put in with a bad hamburger at a fast food joint. When giving away all those little plastic doodads no longer makes economic sense, I'll know that oil is expensive enough to make solar cells viable.