Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

You're barking up the wrong tree, paper money is becoming more and more a thing of the past, the government printing press is more and more a metaphor for the "real" money supply, most of which doesn't really, physically, exist. You want to invest in companies that:

1) manufacture the plastic for the credit and debit cards to spend the money
2) make the hard drives or host the servers upon which the symbolic representations of the money supply (electrical signals and memory bits stored in computers representing theoretical 'dollars' in various accounts across the country)

The last 8 years have lowered the bar considerably on my expectations. I'm not expecting anyone to be able to pull us out of the pit we've been dug into, that's gonna take at least 4 or 5 administrations, assuming that all of the problems created by this administration are even fixable at all.

At this point I will be absolutely thrilled if we can just elect someone who will simply stop actively making everything worse. If there is some measurable improvement to things then that's great, that's just gravy. But for now I will be satisfied with an end to the 'worsening' of things.

I rode mass transit for years -- this sort of thing isn't the norm, that's why when it happens it makes the news and becomes a youtube sensation.

The reason I stopped riding is the budgets were cut and the service that was useful for my commute was eliminated.

Now that he's got the nomination sewed up, it's "safe" for him to step out and state a few positions that put him more in the mainstream.

But I have to admit it always throws me when I hear of a republican candidate who cares about the environment and future generations.

Of course, I can't be sure if he really means it or if he's just making all the right noises to appeal to moderates, but it does offer some solace in that if he did win the election it probably wouldn't be quite as bad as the current administration.

Actions and results speak louder than words. The hard uncomfortable fact is that Iran has been the single biggest strategic beneficiary of Bush Administration policy the last 8 years.

There is no single silver technological bullet until we have portable fusion reactors or something so we need to stop shutting our eyes and thinking that technology will just bail us out of our fix. Doesn't happen. Today's engines are light-years ahead of yesteryear in terms of power-efficiency and so on, but still the gas mileage gets worse because auto-makers have continuously compensated by making the vehicles bigger every year.

People have to learn to think creatively and get away from the notion that you need 8000 pounds of steel to move 150 pounds of flesh. Instead of owning 2 SUV's and 1 car the more typical garage of the future will be more like 1 gas/diesel/whatever car, 1 electric car and 1 scooter. The obvious, bicycling walking etc. -- utilitarian exercise will to some degree replace gas-driven trips to health clubs. People will have to start factoring in commute distances into their choice of working/living locations.

Oh, I agree totally with the 'at some level' bit -- it was the dem leaders at the state level that totally hosed this up. The rules were set well before the primaries, the dem leaders at the state level chose to nullify their own states' votes in exchange for the perceived value of 'steering' the course of the election early in the process simply by being 'first'.

In short, they gambled and lost. They are paying an appropriate price so that there isn't a complete and total disregard for any and all rules in the next cycle.

The national party chose the diplomatic course of compromise, the state parties take their lumps from their constituents, chalk it up under lessons learned, and everyone moves on. The party suffers some credibility at all levels of course and that should be an additional deterrent from such monkey business in future cycles. In the general election they'll still have their full votes (at least those that aren't on the 'caging' and false-felon lists anyway).

So don't get me wrong I'm not defending the dem party generally on this -- it was utter lunacy on the part of the leaders at the state level -- this kind of nonsense is one of the things that makes me hate the dem party almost as much as the repub party.

But the ending compromise is as adequate a fix as could possibly have been forged from an unfixable screw-up at the state level (and it is that spirit of compromise that gains the dem party some renewed credibility in the wake of an insufferably arrogant administration the last 8 years). If their 'primaries' had been fully recognized it would have been a complete slap in the face to those states and voters who follow the rules.

From what I understand Obama was 8 years old in the pentagon bomber's heyday so it's kind of hard to hold him responsible for that.

Members of GWB administration have been visibly friendly with much worse types (Saddam Hussein in the 1980's comes to mind, as well as McCain's Myanmar connections) so any republicans wishing to throw stones in this regard had better see to their glass houses...

Lee Spain said:
And even when a big company owns an alternative car, how come they can't kick the products up a notch and bring some of them into the mainstream?

http://www.gemcar.com/

The gemcar, like Ford's Th!nk program, was designed to fail. Taking electrics and putting them into big ugly golf carts that no one would ever let themselves be seen in. Basically they came up with electric cars and went out of their way to make them super ugly. Then use the results to argue that there's no demand for electric cars.

And why don't state and local governments put incentives in place and infrastructure in place to make it possible to safely use some of these lightweight vehicles in a seperate environment from heavier more powerful gas powered vehicles?

They made a misguided effort to get around this the cheap way by giving them (NEV's) a different speed limit (25mph) than regular cars. The predictable result was this effectively made the vehicles totally non-viable in the market because you can't drive them anywhere. If they boosted it to 35-40mph it would make a huge difference, but 25mph doesn't cut it even in a central urban environment.

Broke the military, ransacked the treasury, shredded the constitution, alienated allies, elevated enemies, censored science, duped the public, sunk the dollar and ran the economy into the ground. A fine legacy indeed.

No U.S. president has managed to do so much damage in so short a time. No one. Ever.