less cars : roll on $2 per litre

scotty72 wrote:

Fed gov tops up - incresingly putting funds in as a way of trying to
wrestle control...

Nope, they are increasingly shoving conditions on their funds to try and
force the states to follow their political philosophies. If the state
depts had any balls, they'd tell them to shove it.

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:42:50 +0800, "Theo Bekkers"
wrote in aus.bicycle:

Terryc wrote:
ghostgum wrote:


The cost to run an electric vehicle is not the cost of the
electricity to charge the batteries, it is the cost of replacing the
batteries every 1-5 years.

Is that a comment based on actual experience?
He certainly would be lucky to get that if he treated his batteries
the way most people treat their current car batteries. Depending on
driving conditions, say regular daily commute to desk job, with
proper (monthly) care, I would expect that his batteries could last
thn years. (thinking lead acid, nothing else).

Ten years? We're not talking car batteries here, you need deep discharge
batteries. Will last maybe 5 years in lead-acid, and cost twice as much as a
regular car battery.

Theo


My department at work has a Prius (sp?) and the batteries are supposed
to last 10 years. This is a hybrid car rather than an electric car.


Regards
Prickles

Timendi causa est nescire
This message only uses recycled electrons

"Zebee Johnstone" wrote in message
...
In aus.bicycle on Sun, 20 Aug 2006 00:30:29 +1000
Terryc wrote:
wrote:

I think you would be hard pressed to find a 20 storey apartment block
from the 1850s.

When did they start using concrete in tall building construction?
I believe the practical/economic height was limited by the compression
strength of bricks.

Didn't start building tall things till the early 1900s, perhaps even
1920s? The big buildings in the US date from around then.

That's when they discovered things like the air movement - a tall
building has a fair old convection effect, hence rotating doors.

I suspect the invention of the elevator had something to do with it
too, but that's older than very tall buildings.

I believe it was the advent of steel framing that made taller buildings
feasible. I can't remember where I read that though.

Terryc wrote:

Your might like to find that out yourself. Then you will appreciate the
information. Easy to find. Just broaden your reading.

Come on Terryc, that's a bloody poor effort and you know it. Its the
easiest thing in the world to make a grand sweeping claim, its much
harder to prove it.

For example:

"Scientists have known for decades that quantum mechanics is wrong. It
doesn't work at all, but it is a dogma, a religion, and despite the top
scientists privately knowing the truth, they won't admit it publicly or
stop teaching it in physics courses. Want proof? Just do the math
yourself. I can't be bothered posting it for you right now though, if
you are smart enough you'll be able to prove it yourself."

"Aliens have been visiting Earth for many years, and there has been
high level contact between the US government and these aliens. They
are keeping the truth from us though, but if you do your own research
you will find this out for yourself because they have been clumsy at
covering their tracks, and the truth is out there, well documented."

Most advertising also disproves your "basic principles of economics"

How?

As I said, economics is just a philosophy. It has no practical exampes
of ever working.

So there are no examples of the most efficient producer of items that
the market most desires making the biggest profits? And in fact there
are many examples of highly inefficient producers of items nobody wants
to buy making huge money?

Name a few such companies.


Everytime someone trots a suppssed example of
successfull appicaltion of the principles of economic theory, someone
else points out political or other conditions/forces that were equally
as responsible.

Lets start with the international chip making industry then.
Politicians around the world decided it would be a good thing for their
countries to be involved in making chips. It wasn't the free market,
it was a political idea that the best way to modernise an economy is to
manufacture microchips.

So, they provided either free or cheap finance and other incentives to
companies to build chip factories.

And the result of that is massive overcapacity around the world, with
chip manufacturing reduced to a low or negative profit margin basic
contract business.

Silicon has a little more glamour still than tin, because of the clean
rooms and white coats and everything, but the overcapacity brought
about by political forces has turned the economics of the industry into
a high tech version of the sort usually associated with making tin
cans.

Travis

On 2006-08-20, Travis (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
So there are no examples of the most efficient producer of items that
the market most desires making the biggest profits? And in fact there
are many examples of highly inefficient producers of items nobody wants
to buy making huge money?

Name a few such companies.

Eolas.


They buy invalid computational related patents (you know how patents
are for processes that are both novel and unobvious to those who
practice in the trade?), and enforce them on companies that either
don't want the risk of going to court (combined with a broken and
outdated US patent system), or those who don't know any better.

$500m so far, was it? They're basically a parasite, although they do
function entirely off poorly thought out government mandated
regulations.

Likewise for the Motion Picture Association of America and the Record
Industry Association of America. And SCO.

The IT industry is full of such people, but perhaps it's just because
law hasn't caught up with computers yet.

Lets start with the international chip making industry then.
Politicians around the world decided it would be a good thing for their
countries to be involved in making chips. It wasn't the free market,
it was a political idea that the best way to modernise an economy is to
manufacture microchips.

So, they provided either free or cheap finance and other incentives to
companies to build chip factories.

And the result of that is massive overcapacity around the world, with
chip manufacturing reduced to a low or negative profit margin basic
contract business.

Silicon has a little more glamour still than tin, because of the clean
rooms and white coats and everything, but the overcapacity brought
about by political forces has turned the economics of the industry into
a high tech version of the sort usually associated with making tin
cans.

Of course, most of modern economic growth has been brought about from
increased productivity resulting from the electronic revolution. It's
been relying on Moore's law for the past 30 years. Now that Moore's
law is set to break down (indeed, has been slowing for the past 5
years) because of the physical limitations of the size of
interconnects approaching quantum levels, economies are in for a
shock. Even without the energy crisis. Whoopsies.

--
TimC
GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY (#7): April 2, 1751
Isaac Newton becomes discouraged when he falls up a flight of stairs.

On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 20:19:21 -0700, Travis wrote:

So there are no examples of the most efficient producer of items that
the market most desires making the biggest profits? And in fact there
are many examples of highly inefficient producers of items nobody wants
to buy making huge money?

Name a few such companies.

Microsoft. Arguably they inefficiently produce a product that is inferior
in many ways to some that cost much less, but they are the leader through
marketing (going back to the days of DOS 3.3 and Win95).

If you really want to bring in fruit loop conspiracy theories, how about
Capitalism?

--
Dave Hughes |
"Quantum materiae materietur marmota
monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?"

TimC wrote:

Name a few such companies.

Eolas.


They buy invalid computational related patents (you know how patents
are for processes that are both novel and unobvious to those who
practice in the trade?), and enforce them on companies that either
don't want the risk of going to court (combined with a broken and
outdated US patent system), or those who don't know any better.

$500m so far, was it? They're basically a parasite, although they do
function entirely off poorly thought out government mandated
regulations.

Likewise for the Motion Picture Association of America and the Record
Industry Association of America. And SCO.

How interesting that all of the examples you have cited of supposed
free market failure are examples of the use and abuse of government
regulations.

These strategies would work in a completely free market where there
were no laws regulating how businesses operate. The examples you have
provided are in fact examples of the failure of government regulation.

(Or perhaps the inevitable downside to a generally positive thing, the
protection of intellectual property rights. Patent and copyright
protection is an important way to encourage people to do research and
development or make movies, records etc. Innovators are not obliged to
seek this protection though, for instance Coke has never patented their
recipe and instead keep it a closely guarded trade secret, because they
believe the best way to protect their IP is through secrecy. Patents
expire eventually, and the Coke patent would have expired years ago. I
already stated that in the case of environmental concerns, among other
things, some regulations may be beneficial and indeed necessary, IP is
another, even though it also enables companies like Eolas to make a
parasitic buck.)

The IT industry is full of such people, but perhaps it's just because
law hasn't caught up with computers yet.

Arguably it is because the law HAS caught up with computers, and that's
the problem.

No law = no copyright lawsuits = no parasites.

On the other hand, no law = no copyright lawsuits = as soon as you
create something someone steals it and puts it in their own box and
makes a parasitic buck selling your stuff for the cost of blank CD
media plus a small markup, not allowing you to recoup any of your
development costs.

We have to ask what is worse, and so far the general consensus is that
the occasional IP parasite like Eolas is a lesser evil compared to
rampant piracy and the complete non-protection of IP.


Of course, most of modern economic growth has been brought about from
increased productivity resulting from the electronic revolution. It's
been relying on Moore's law for the past 30 years. Now that Moore's
law is set to break down (indeed, has been slowing for the past 5
years) because of the physical limitations of the size of
interconnects approaching quantum levels, economies are in for a
shock. Even without the energy crisis. Whoopsies.

They're always saying that Moore's law is set to break down, then they
come up with new technology and off we go again.

Yes, every second week in MIT's Technology Review there is another
article about how we're finally running into the limits set by physics
on conventional silicon semiconductors. Then we get an article about
the latest experiments in quantum computing and interesting new
non-silicon based semiconductors, and how now they're putting multiple
cores onto processors and developing newer and faster ways to bus
information between these cores. And then off it goes again, we've
postponed the ever inevitable end of Moore's law by another ten or
twenty years... until the next big thing that nobody has yet thought of
comes along.

Travis

Travis wrote:

These strategies would work in a completely free market where

I mean, the strategies would *NOT* work without government regulations
to facilitate them.

You could use your examples to argue that the law is an ass, but its a
long shot to call this a failure of a free market capitalist system,
which would imply that the antidote would be markets which are more
regulated and less free.

Travis

Dave Hughes wrote:
On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 20:19:21 -0700, Travis wrote:

So there are no examples of the most efficient producer of items that
the market most desires making the biggest profits? And in fact there
are many examples of highly inefficient producers of items nobody wants
to buy making huge money?

Name a few such companies.

Microsoft. Arguably they inefficiently produce a product that is inferior
in many ways to some that cost much less, but they are the leader through
marketing (going back to the days of DOS 3.3 and Win95).

They efficiently produce products which the market wants.

You can say "the market are idiots for wanting that product" until
you're blue in the face, but it starts to look like sour grapes after a
while.

If you really want to bring in fruit loop conspiracy theories, how about
Capitalism?

I know, its the worst system ever devised, apart from socialism.

At the end of the Korean War the North Korean side of the border had
almost all of the undamaged infrastructure, all the factories, all the
mineral wealth etc. They had everything going for them. The South
Korean side of the border on the other hand was smashed, barely a
factory still stood, a far greater portion of houses were demolished.
The whole south was a smoking ruin, and everyone expected that the
North would always be more powerful than the South.

The language of the Korean peoples is the same. They had the same
culture, the same values. The difference was that the government in
the North thought they could run the economy more efficiently than a
free market could. The government in the South decided just to let
market forces shape the economy.

50 years later, the North doesn't have enough electricity to light
their cities at night. The south is an economic powerhouse, admired
all over the world.

A pretty positive experimental result showing the advantages of
capitalism over socialism don't you think Dave?

Travis

On Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:26:06 -0700, Travis wrote:

They efficiently produce products which the market wants.

They've made the market want their products, and therein lies the fault of
capitalism. It's a subtle difference, but the reason we don't have a pure
capitalist society. Or have you never needed consumer protection laws?

--
Dave Hughes |
Brooker's Law: "The wackier the project, the easier it is to fund."