Secret Is Out 4241

WTOP radio, Washington, DC. Sorry its not the left-wing, "Bush is the devil", "Mainstream media" who are all designated by 3 letter acronyms as their names.

The fact remains that we haven't built a new refinery in 35 years. If we do get some output out of ANWR eventually, we're gonna have to send it halfway round the world to get it processed unless we do something.

Right.

We've been "running out" ever since we started pumping, but we're not going to run completely out any time soon. We might (and maybe have) run out of cheap oil, but there's vast deposits of shale oil and tar sands. We'll have oil enough to figure out how to do without it, or reduce consumption sufficiently to live with it.

Consumption will take care of itself when the price goes up, just like millions of people that began turning off lights they weren't using in California when the price of electricity went up. People will find a way to afford a diesel Jetta Wagon (49 mpg if you learn how to drive a stick) for most of their driving and something a lot larger for the occasional drive that requires it.

Meanwhile, technological solutions continue to be investigated. The hydraulic hybrid drive has a Ford Expedition getting 33 mpg around town. The technology is expected to be good for about 80 mpg if put in a car, and gets about 82 percent of the braking energy captured for reuse in accelerating the vehicle. Imagine a country with vehicles ranging from 20 - 80 mpg, and still weighing from 1.5 to 3 tons per vehicle. That's a solution.

Not infinite, but a lot more than we have now. Think nuclear.

Produce more energy from something we have: wind, nuclear, solar, geothermal, etc. Well, we don't have a lotta geothermal, but we have the other sort of sources. And of course there could be a breakthrough at any time - cold fusion, not-so-cold fusion, PV at higher efficiencies than we know about right now, etc.

Well, I'm going to oppose any scheme to force me to drive a tiny little rollerskate when I want to be driving my Jeep.

That definitely needs fixed. Balanced budget amendment. Now.

Now, dammit, you'd be the 1st one in line to scream about the negligent administration if Bush had done nothing about all the damn intelligence services, ours and everybody else's, that said Sadaam had WMD and was working on that special kind of WMD, nuclear, and we'd have had a nuke go off in downtown NYC. Y'all can sit back and criticize, criticize, criticize, but the truth is you don't have a clue, didn't have a clue, and would recklessly stand by and allow this country to be put at risk by a UN weapons inspector that blatently had no love for the US, and would overlook tons of possibilities and keep coming up with the same line. If there had been WMD, he'd never have found 'em, and if he did find 'em, would likely not have told anyone. There wasn't even an American allowed on the inspection team? Allowed???? Who the hell says Sadaam gets a choice? He's the supposed criminal. The criminals aren't supposed to get what they want. As the threatened party, the whole damn WMD inspection team should have been American.

As for Iran, you'll know when they do finally get a nuke by the mushroom clouds over NYC and DC, and that's a fact. These bastards hate our guts (and I don't give a damn why, we just have to deal with the threat, not try to figure out some sort of appeasment (which never works)) and the only way to deal with 'em is thru intimidation or outright force. Otherwise they'll keep doing what they're doing, and we'll have a several million degree furnace right where Central Park used to be, or the Capital building was.

Neither one of the political parties are willing to do anything about that. Whazzup with that, anyway?

There's been a war going on against the middle clbutt for the last 40 years, starting with manufacturing. I just read in the IEEE Spectrum that the median income of engineers fell last year, for the 1st time in 30 years. Promote enough outsourcing, allow enough L-1's and H1-B's into the country to take American jobs, and that's going to happen. Both the Democrats and the Republicans agree that this is the thing to do - H1-B's thrived under Clinton, and continue under Bush. There's no end to it until all the people that don't own an industry make the same amount of money, equivalent to what the foreigners will do the work for - I understand that the past $100,000 programmer job here in the US now gets done for about $29,000 in India. Soon it won't matter what you do - your salary will be about $29K. Well, not soon - it'll take another 30 years I think, but its going to happen.

Hell, I criticize the president all over the place, mainly on usenet. That's real public, and I'm still here...

Dave Head