single UK town or city that has a "downtown"
translation required
it's called the 'town centre', and every town has one these days
2416 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2010
Re: Tax the poor
Re: tax the assholes who get shitfaced on a couple of gallons of cheap booze every weekend and make everyone else's life a misery, and cost each and every one of us sensible types a small fortune on the provision of police and health services required to deal with their inability to behave like human beings.
there fixed it for you.
"That's like saying all drivers should be taxed to pay for the harm caused by the occasional deranged speed merchant who crashes his car and kills other people"
you mean exactly as they do at the moment, that's what actuarial tables are for.
a young lad with a scooby gets screwed by the insurance, not because _HE_ is going to crash it (although there is a fair chance he will), but because loads of other youngsters in scoobys have already crashed.
We all pay for other peoples bad driving - all depending on how well the insurance wonks can tease out each groups likelihood of costing the insurance company money (this assumes that you are a perfect driver, as am i of course!)
which sounds like exactly the argument being put forward - a progressive tax, if you drink sensibly you pay a bit, if you drink like someone is going to take it away - you pay a lot.
I think they are thinking about other people.
I hate to come across as a po-faced misery guts, but it's a bit hard to argue with the points made:
Millions of fuckwits getting tanked up on cheap booze is a problem in the UK
(please god dont let me have a heart attack just after chucking out time on a saturday night - i'll never survive a visit to A&E)
There are enormous costs to our society resulting from widespread abuse of alcohol. It's hard to argue that those costs shouldn't be met by the sales of the stuff in the first place.
I drive a car, and have to pay taxes to ameliorate the impact of my car on the rest of society.
I smoke cigarettes and have to pay for the increased use of the health service that that will inevitably entail.
If our emergency services are at full stretch every Saturday night because so many people are getting wasted and getting themselves into various sorts of trouble, then that needs paying for.
apart from anything else - I have a good job, and anything that reduces the queues at the bar is a good idea in my book :-D (oops i kinda fucked that up didnt I)
Wind provides a key component in fighting global warming!!
after we realise they are a waste of space as generation (which they clearly are - even if the wind blew all the time, they are still shite) Then we can wire them up backwards and use them as bloody big fans to cool us all down!
lol
so it wasnt better
but eveyone wanted it
if thats the case how come apple havent copyrighted it yet?
batteries are, let's be honest, at least an order of magnitude away from where they need to be to actually be viable as a fuel source for personal transportation. and that is now, at the start of the 21st century.
so what did they know about battery technology in the 1880's that we have somehow forgotten?
i'd posit _nothing_, electric cars were a stupid idea then and they stil are today. Maybe one day they will work, but not today (or tomorrow)
apparently it was all down the those fashion concious dustbowl farmers 'forcing' us to join the ratrace???
As for town planning - i live in colchester, establshed as the capital of roman britain, head st, hight st, culver st, sheregate, st johns gate, were all established some 3000 years before the birth of daimler & ford et al., so the town layout was probably not driven by the car much
oh dear - heinlein - it's so very easy to create a utopian future when you dont have to do the sums. nuff said.
2.1 tonne to 1.8 tonne, thats 300 kilos difference, thats getting on for 3 passengers (okay 1 in the states - cheap shot, cant resist, easy target {well it weights 300kg so of course its an easy target} - I'm here all week, and dont forget to tip your waitress! take my wife.....)
i really would expect to see a significant change in the performance of my car with that sort of additional load in it.
bollocks more like
he made a totally un substantiated claim, and then walked back from it with each succesive challenge.
100 million,
well no, not in yer actuall lost orders.
that would be 'around' 100 (how the fuck do you work that out? - i was thinking of looking into buying one, but it turns out they are shite so i am now thinking about buying something else.
(so thats another figure musk just pulled out of his arse)
suddenly the 100 million is at worst 5-10 million...
but theres also the damage to the rep of the company - 'cause im sure that can all be attibuted to the NYT and clarkson, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the products or behaviour of the company.
maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt, it's not like he has form for this sort of hyperbole...
oh hang on a minute...
that modern gas CHP you speak of..
a> is not what most of americas juice (42%) is made from - that would be nasty, smelly, old coal
b> that the welsh power station you quote... is in fecking WALES! - there is, as yet, to the best of my knowlege no transatlantic power interconnector, and im pretty sure there are no plans to build one any time soon. (HVDC or otherwise :-))
when you get your nice new tesla be prepared to be very upset and more than a little worried about the metric fuckton of heat you ill encounter on charging/discharging, address all complaints to Mssrs Ohm and Kirchoff.
You can expect all you want from HVDC but building a 10 million pound inverter (this is HVDC lite, the cheaper option yes??) each end of a line connecting your hydro/nuclear/wind/rabbit-farts power station to your roadster charging socket is not going to happen any time soon, in fact any time at all. (it just occured to me, you think you'll be charging the car at DC tranmission voltages!!!! pml. cough, splutter fart!, no you wont! really you wont - -well you wouldnt be able to fit the plug in your garage to start with!)
apart fro that, good point well made!
You drove 25mph round a flat (oval? lol) track for 14 hours??? so that'll be exactly what the 'roadster' is designed to do then!
So caning the arse off it round a flat (wiggling all over the place) track like top gear did (while getting about 55 miles out of a charge) is _NOT_ what it's designed to do??
so i suppose calling it a 'roadster' is all marketing hype, what they meant to call it was 'invalid carriage'???
pull the other one.
one more thing... how did your driver manage to survive saying 'Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee' for all that time?
MOORES LAW _IS_ BOLLOCKS!
you cretin!
and in your little exposition on the virtues of static generation you ommitted the transmission losses, and the heating effect of charging and discharging the battery (loads of amps all over the place, very high I-squared R losses) nevermind the emissions of the fuel burned at the power station
you are however c orrect that there were indeed electric cars in the olden days, but they died out, on account of them all being crap, and the petrol engine being a far better engineering solution to the problem.
Call it industrial evolution if you will.
Does that 1/2 tank of fuel stop YOU from topping off before a large trip?
Yes it does you idiot!
my car does 700 miles to a tank of diesel (on a run) so 1/2 a tank is about 350 miles.
as I drive along passing petrol stations every 10 miles or so, it _never_ occurs to me to fill up when i still have over 300 miles in the tank!
apart from anything else, think of all that extra weight i'd be lugging around, particularly in the reductio absurdiam case where i stopped at every filling station to top up (like some moron in a tesla for eg) id be carriying around 40 kg of fuel, all the time, for no good purpose. you see in a real car the fuel system gets lighter as it empties, just one of the many, many, many advantages of a proper car over a 'leccy noddy car.
As for disability, yes i put my hands up, pure speculation on my part.
but that article did mention he was disabled, from this i made the massive jump that that meant he was _officially_ disabled, this is of course a slippery slope!
I then assumed:
He wasn't blind
He wasn't a quadriplegic
He wasn't subject to eplilepsy
He didn't suffer from acute cerebral palsy
He wasn't in the later stages of parkinsons, ALS or MS
He didn't suffer from narcolepsy
He didn't have Alzheimer's or CJD, or any degenerative CNS condition
as all of the above preclude driving at all
this kinda leaves paraplegic or any other form of infirmity of the lower limbs.
or possibly missing all or part of an upper limb.
my bad! he could have been deaf (although having conversations with the plod, as mentioned in the article, would have been precluded if he was profoundly deaf)
plus all the mods i have ever seen done to any car to assist the disabled have been based around their legs not working too well/at all, or them missing an arm.
hence the issue of vastly increased control input.
but you are correct, i didnt really think about it :-D
i guess he could have been hard of thinking, clearly someone is around here.