FSAE and EPA Regulation

[Claude Rouelle]

Ryan,

The short answer is Love.

*****

That being said I criticize US and give praise to European countries when I teach seminars in the US....and vice versa when I am in Europe. I am controversial; otherwise I would not be a design judge!

And Denver is a very nice place to live. http://www.thegoodlifedenver.com/201...e-love-denver/

For the food, Denver is good but there is no place like Italy!

Claude

[MegaDeath]

For the record and so that everybody knows my true colors, I do contribute to Bernie Sanders election.

Not here to provide any benefit to this discussion, just want to drop this off.

[rmk36]

Ryan,

The short answer is Love.


Claude

Claude,

If I can convince Bernie to propose a total ban on yaw moment diagrams, will you stop contributing?

[Mbirt]

The short answer is Love.

Hillary loves NASCAR.

[Danschwind]

Pro-tip from a guy living a socialist country: Don't be a socialist.

[Kevin Hayward]

Pro-tip from a guy living a socialist country: Don't be a socialist.

Danschwind,

A US socialist is usually pretty far removed from a real socialist.

I found living there that the right wing in Australia more closely resembles the US left wing. We would see someone like Obama as being pretty centrist, and the Clintons more likely to be in our right party (Liberal). Probably a holdover from huge over-reaching socialist scare campaigns in the US. I would also argue that the Australian left wing is probably far from the socialist agenda of your own country. Trump probably scares people in our country about as much as Castro would.

On top of that there is no real clear example of real people being all left or all right. I would probably hold to a view of financial conservatism and personal liberty. Keep the red terror away from from long term investment, but don't let the capitalist scum dismantle public safety nets. The reality is that elements of both socialism and capitalism have merit.

My Claude equals the FSAE Trump comment was playful in intent. While we have differences in how we approach the comp, I know that we have much closer political opinions.

Encourage and allow people to soar, but be there to catch them if they fall.

Kev

[Danschwind]

Keep this line of thought and in a 20 years span, you will be living in a socialism like Brazil is now.

The gradualism is strong in your speech, and that is the way most leftists build their power. I know because I've felt its effects.

There is absolutely no merit in socialism. Only a free-market system, with civil liberty, is capable of generating wealth.

Bernie is more to the left than Dilma Rousseff or Lula is, and trust me: they simply destroyed our country, both in economical ways (and their solution for that is, guess what, MORE state, MORE control, MORE taxes) and with a classes-war that is unbelievable for anyone not living it.

And I'm not telling people to vote Trump, Cruz, Clinton...I'm telling them to vote Paul in the next oportunity

[Kevin Hayward]

The gradualism is strong in your speech, and that is the way most leftists build their power. I know because I've felt its effects.

Whoa,

Steady on there big fella.

I take voting to be a great responsibility and privilege, and am glad to be living in a democratic country. Since I have been of voting age I have voted for both our left and right parties, based on the policies and character of the people running for office at a given time. Blind following of an ideology without consideration of current circumstances is a recipe for disorder.

Kev

[Danschwind]

That is exactly what brazilians thought in 2002. "If it is bad the way it is, lets change!"

Result: 16 years in power. Legislative, Judiciary and Public-Owned Companies (!!!!) dominated by ideologists of the ruling party. Attempt to change things? STRIKES!!!!!!!!!

[Swiftus]

4. Whatever way the energy is shared out, I still reckon the best way to "package" it is in the form of chemical-energy trapped in the Carbon-cycle products of HydroCarbons + Oxygen....
Z

I am really interested in this line of thinking in general. President Obama mentioned artificial photosynthesis in his State of the Union address when he was talking up renewable energies. UC Berkeley has a research program which recently published a paper entitled "Nanowire–Bacteria Hybrids for Unassisted Solar Carbon Dioxide Fixation to Value-Added Chemicals". Essentially, they have figured out a way to get sunshine to turn water and air into hydrocarbon chains with electricity and bacteria. Pretty neat research.

The primary idea is that you could cease the extraction of hydrocarbons from the earth and simply recycle the carbons already in the atmosphere and they re-run them through the same kinds of combustion engines we have right now. Straightforward and very easy to implement with the current infrastructure around the world. We just have to solve the issues with NOs that end up being emitted.

3. Jay's question.


This is a common objection to "biofuels". It is really rather baseless. Ultimately, we have to decide whether to feed ourselves, or feed our "horses", or feed our profligate and energy-expensive lifestyles, or whether we can do a bit of each... Can we share the "food" around?

The same argument against biofuels (ie. that they take away our food), also works against the idea that "E-cars are the future, because we can collect all the energy they need from the sun, via solar panels". Okayyy... so where do you put all those solar panels? If you put them on farmland near the cities, then ... they steal all the food-crops' sunshine. Put them out in remote deserts ... and there are long transmission line losses...

Err, so maybe put the solar panels in a remote desert, and use the electricity they generate to turn water into Hydrogen (+O2), then pipe or truck the H2 back to the cities? But, if you are taking water out to the desert, then ... why not just grow sunflowers out there!? I have seen half-a-dozen crops of sunflowers pop-up out of the ground (from farmer's seeds) in one year, after one single flood in outback Oz.

All the above thinking can be extrapolated a long way. Ultimately (???), we might build a huge sphere of solar panels that completely surrounds the Sun. Exery single drop of sunshine is collected. But what to do with it? How to share it out? Is it all for us, or do the horses get some?
~o0o~

Heh - extrapolating all the way to absorbing all of the Sun's energy is a little too far sighted for my thinking. Maybe our future terminator robot overlords will be faced with that issue.

As for the competition - I think there are many places on earth where an energy production like solar will not compete with 'food' production of any kind simply because there are places which are very inhospitable to life. But your larger point of how to store the energy generated is one that is very interesting. The folks over at Berkeley have the similar idea of storing it in a fuel which is 10 times as energy dense as our current batteries.