New Mars Forums

Going back up again. 2.59-2.61 range today.

Most of the gas stations here only have pre-pay at night and/or at the pumps closest to the road and therefore easiest to zip away from.

As the article touched on, they're reluctant to go pre-pay because fewer people go inside and buy other stuff. Everytime I'm at a pre-pay gas station I don't know exactly how much it'll take so I can't give exact change yet still want to fill it, so I charge it. You can do that from the pump, no need to go inside, no Coke and chips, no donuts, no profit for the owner. Plus they have to pay the service charge.

That, and when you prepay that last buck fifty takes forever.  :evil:

So long story short you can still steal gas in Detroit, though outright robbing the stations still seems to be more popular.

For a tank, I really don't object. I'm kind of in the market for a tank myself. 

An ICBM can't be used defensively, strictly speaking. It's not an arm that an individual can bear. It's not a battlefiled weapon. An ICBM is purely a weapon of attack. You can retaliate with it, but you can't defend.

It's a matter of precision and whether the individual can make proper use of the weapon. A gun is precise, a bomb is not.

The question is what is the underlying goal of change. If it's to use less petroleum-based fuel you've got a point. However if it's to reduce dependence on foreign oil or alleviate high fuel prices you're off base.

Increasing gas prices don't really solve anything themselves. We just pay more for foreign oil, use almost as much regardless and have that much less to spend for alternatives. When people are paying five bucks a gallon no politician that ever lived can convince them to pay even more to build a mass transit system on the grounds that it will save them money in the long run.

Until alternatives become viable, we're left with increasing production of hybrid vehicles and increasing domestic drilling. Either that, or rationing and the tanking economy that would result.

Hybrid cars, go nuclear for municipal power, we'd be saving a buttload of oil right there. Domestically produce the remainder and we're set. We can cut off the Saudi's in short order if we so choose.

In theory. In practice it doesn't really work out that way. Most people have to expend a certain amount of gas to get to and from work everyday, carpooling and other such things are often impractical. So for most people the major fuel usage can't be curtailed. Some recreational use is unavoidable, people aren't going to sit at home just to save gas and the economy would suffer greatly if they did.

Hybrid cars will be more attractive when they are in the same price range as a comparable non-hybrid vehicle, and then only for those who can afford to buy a new car. Most other alternative fuel sources are either not ready for market (Hydrogen fuel cells) or are largely hype (ethanol). Mass transit requires either increased taxation, which is impractical if people are already paying out the ass for gasoline, or cutting other government expenses which leads to all sorts of political chaos.

So really the only short-term solution is cut gas taxes, standardized environmental requirements for fuel across the country instead of the current patchwork, and reactivate some of the drilling rigs and refineries currently shut down for economic or enviromental reasons. When oil is $60 a barrel all sorts of things become practical that weren't at $30 a barrel.

I wouldn't say that all people should be armed, whether on a plane, a street or wherever. There are some nutjobs out there that shouldn't have so much as a disposable razor. But they are a tiny minority. Better to screen them out than blanket-prohibit weapons of self-defense unless an individual can prove they deserve and need it.

It's easy to slip into oft-repeated platitudes on this but the simple fact is that "bad guys" always manage to arm themsleves and the police can't protect everyone all the time. If the individual is denied the means to defend themself from attackers the odds that they will be victimized increase dramatically.

In other words, the need for guns is like the need for armies. We may not like it but the simple fact is that sometimes you need them and when that time comes you better have 'em.

I suppose it is time for this again.

There's no need to require everyone to be armed, but there most certainly is a need for allowing people to be armed. There is simply no better deterrent to criminal activity than the knowledge that every potential victim could well be fully equipped to defend themselves.

Interestingly, a simple statistical correlations shows that, in Western countries at least, the places with the strictest gun control laws have the highest crime rates and further that crime rates increase as restrictions are tightened.

What was it that Einstein said about insanity? 

Sure, we have professional police to handle crime, or so we are taught, but the fact is that police respond after the fact to investigate and apprehend. In most cases they can't protect you. In fact there have been court cases where it was ruled that they aren't even obligated to! Police are not bodyguards, we can't rely solely on them to protect the citizenry from crime.

Shaun also raises a good point about the drug trade being an integral factor in the present level of crime. An obvious parallel of course is America's experience with Prohibition. Infer from that what you will. The simple fact is that we are enacting policies that tend to increase the appeal of criminal activity to certain elements and then when that criminal activity increases, we deny the non-criminals the means to defend themselves from it. It's so absurd that it's hard to believe it's still an issue for debate. It would be comical if there weren't so many people being robbed, raped and murdered as a direct result of it.

Or as the bumper sticker says, guns cause crime like flies cause garbage

Ask and ye shall receive. 

To be blunt, I don't. You don't. None of us have a "right" to any resources whatsoever. When standing in the middle of a desert under the blazing noonday sun your rights to the resources needed for survival are revealed to be merely our own little philosophical constructs. Neither the sand nor the sun gives the posterior of a rodent about "rights." The universe doesn't care.

On another level the question itself is flawed, for not only does this "right to resources" not exist but who are we supposed to be justifying our supposed right to? Mr. Meaney? The benevolent Space Commonwealth that sends dissenters to rot in lunar gulags? The eternal spirits of the universe? No, the mere act of formulating the question reveals a set of unsubstantiated assumptions. Asking one to justify their claim to a supposed right is silly. If it requires justification it implies it's conditional, in which case it ceases to be a right and descends to the realm of privelege.

Do we deserve to have a market share of resources? This can be debated but it's so subjective as to be meaningless. Riddled with assumptions, flexible to the point of irrelevance.

Though Grypd's answer comes close. 

So in the end, Trebuchet is closest to the right answer. On what grounds do we individually lay claim to our share of resources? We take possession of them and with some level of overt or implied force maintain it. We all accept a certain level of tradeable currency because of the implied threat of force if we try to exceed that level. We maintain a hold on the things we purchase through the threat of force we call "property rights." Even then, sometimes the baseline threat is insufficient. People get robbed all the time.

Our claim to resources is based in essence on our capacity to hold them. We distort that with social constructs, but at the core that's what we've got.

Ah yes, those annoying local lingusitic peculiarities.

Several years ago I was in Florida, meeting up with some people that arrived the day before. I went to the front desk of the hotel to get a parking pass. They ask what my "tab" is. I don't know. They say I need to have a tab, I tell them I'm here to get one, they tell me I can't get one there. This goes on for awhile, each of us trying to figure out what the hell the other was talking about. Finally the clerk says "the license tab on your car, what are the numbers?"

"Plate" I answer. "License plate." After that everything was cool, though I've never heard anyone else refer to it as a "tab."

But then the next day I had to get a friend out of "jail" that was really just a tent full of drunks, so . . .  :?

We can take control of our own evolution to become whatever we choose to be, whether philosophically or in a more mundane biologic sense. Rather than being merely a reflection of God we can through our own toil and genius become Gods.

What's more empowering than that? 

The question then revolves around our definition of "quickly" in this context. We're talking about geologic time afterall, it's entirely possible that if we created a sufficiently large enclosure of early-Earth conditions that in the very quick span of a couple million years primitive life would emerge from those base elements arranging by chance into ever more complex forms. Unfortunately we don't have that kind of time to check it out.

spontaneous generation redux. 

The universe is full of these weird little order-from-chaos things, whether we're talking about life, the formation of planets in stable orbits around their stars, the arrangement of those stars into defined galaxies. . . We don't get it yet, but I suspect that we can get it.

And when we do, that evolution chart may well start with a clump of moist dirt. Humbling ain't it. 

Evolved? 

Interesting to consider what really separates us from the animals, especially from our close ape relatives. Apes have social structures, though simpler than our own. Chimps have been known to use crude tools, sticks to get termites and things of that sort. They organize into closed social groups and have been knwon to fight other such groups in an vaguely organized fashion. Chimps and gorillas have even been taught to communicate via sign language, demonstrating the capacity for symbolic reasoning.

We seem to be little more than really advanced apes. Kinship goes beyond mere genetics.

I've not heard a non-evolutionary position on that. I'm sure there is a Creationist line on it, I'm just not familiar with it. It does beg the question though, why would a supernatural being create a reasoning, social animal only to have it fight and eat in the jungle, then turn around and create another similar creature with more advanced capability? From an evolutionary standpoint it makes perfect sense, a steady progression, though perhaps steadier than we might like. From a "creation" standpoint it seems to imply that God needs practice or change his mind, either of which has profound theological implications.

It would be interesting if some small pocket of Neanderthals or Homo Erectus survived to this day, further blurring the line between what we think of as man and ape.

There is wisdom in this. Success has consequences. We have responsibilities. The mantle of Empire has been passed from Britain to us, it's time we acknowledged the reality even if we deny the label.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that stronger cooperation in military, economic and scientific endeavors  between the descendents of the British Empire could yield great good. America, Britain, Australia and Canada together to Mars anyone?