You aren’t a few hundred dollars off, the total cost of the war is under $2,000 per person not 45, or even 8. The GAO estimate has proven to be accurate. The NYT article was about the same amount, the change in GDP percentage for defense is in line with a half trillion not 3.5 or 12. think about it the total budget of the United States is around 3 trillion. In perspective the cost of the war is a little over what his wife would have spent on gasoline in her Rav4 in a year at $3.50 per gallon, or half the cost of the replacement battery, not the whole system. That is for the whole war. You are right about solar working when people need electricity, business people. But the car is at the office when he has power so he has to charge it from the grid when his wife gets home. His system can’t exist without the grid to support it. If everyone, or something over 10 percent of everyone were using power at night and pumping power into it in the day, the grid will become unstable. If you don’t understand why let me know and I will explain.

Knarly,

We should be vigilant of course but there is no comparison between the Patriot act and China. Our facility there is four or five buildings on maybe 80 to 100 acres, enough for probably 10 more buildings with a village in the middle of it. They had been in their offices less than a week when we were there in July last year. There were 40 people working there with plans for 300 by now. That sets the stage. I’m guessing there were 6 to 10 guards for the 40 people. Here we are used to seeing an old retired police officer behind the front desk. These guys were all young, they had impeccable uniforms and red berets. Two to four of them greeted our bus every morning. As you were walking between buildings if you encountered one of them and made eye contact, they went into a ritual, feet came together, pointed in the direction you were going to be, arms slowly went to the side, slightly bent, heels came together, the right arm was raised slowly until it was 6 inches from the cap and them snapped to the brim in a perfect salute. The salute was held until you broke eye contact. After a couple days we realized if you ignored them they would not salute. But they never ignored us. They were always around.

We asked our hosts if they worked for the company, were they military, should we salute back, were they allowed to talk to us (they didn’t seem to, not even a smile). We never got an answer, nothing, our hosts who were so friendly and helpful in every way ignored our questions. Pretending to not hear or not understand. We knew going in we were in a place unlike any we had ever been, we never felt threatened, in fact I hope to go back later this year or early next. But you realize quickly you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Your last line applies to what some credible people say about The Patriot Act; law enforcement think that run of the mill protest groups are prime picking for, at the very least, monitoring which includes infiltrating as if they were criminals or potential terrorists. There’s been a few good video’s on agent provocateurs lately, but the first I heard about that was in MM’s F911 where a San Fran pro-peace group found out later that one of their former members was an undercover FBI agent scoping them out (he was not suspected at the time even though he never once brought cookies to their meetings like everyone else did.)

Please read the article if you haven’t, I think you could get a lot out of it. After reading your comments, one of the things I recalled from the article was this:

I ask Zheng whether China’s surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng’s deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. “If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways,” he says, staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. “If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn’t be afraid,” he finally adds. “The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid.”

Then it continues…

One of the first people to sound the alarm on China’s upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists…

One last thing, before you enter the country you have to sign a paper that says you will not say or write anything critical of the government, or anything that will reflect on China’s image negatively. The threat is real, what constitutes the infraction is vague.

I thought you might get something out of this article. www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/1

What is most disconcerting about China’s surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn’t just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

“Are you making a copy?” I ask.

“No, no,” he responds helpfully. “We’re just sending a copy to the police.”

Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won’t let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that “we not only know who you are, we also know where you are.” Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives “this kind of data to government authorities” — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for “Fly Clear.” All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.

I am not saying this is the one true solution, and I don’t think the sierra club is either. The point is the price tag $ number just happened to be the same as the costs of our current foreign fubar (or close enough, I was under by $1400, but close enough right?) The point being we had choices to make in 2002 and 2003: Afghanistan was the correct choice, but Iraq was not. At a cost of $45,000 per family we could eliminate consumer consumption of oil/gasoline. Entirely. With 10 year old tech. Believe me that people have been working on better lithium ion batteries (no lefty, not the kind of lithium you take in such massive quantities) or ultracapacitors or fuel cells or… With 3.5 trillion in gunmint money being spent on your wars (note that I am not opposed to the Afghan war, so call it 3 trillion), that choice has costs associated with it other than the hurling of bullets, bombs and blood. There are synergistic costs associated with developing new tech solutions to real world problems: jobs, infrastructure, science output, lower pollution and so on.

The grid becomes unstable? Solar works in the daytime, when folks are using electricity. We can start replacing coal fired plants (or at the worst, clean up the pollution from our current plants and not have to build as many new ones), if we have the national will to do so. Think of it like going to the moon.
Yes.
We.
Can.

And yes, we will.

And as to your CBO numbers, it is quite laughable that you choose to only throw out numbers from before the war started (2002? talk about ridiculous). I’ll stick with 2008 numbers. Real world numbers. Next year it’ll be 2009 numbers etc.

A couple other things. He hasn’t had much in the way of maintenance, but at seven years he is coming up on the life of the batteries. Now if these batteries are anything like a forklift battery, he is looking at a substantial bill, probably 4 or 5 thousand dollars. I didn’t figure that into my numbers above since I don’t know what the number is. But it will obviously make the payback quite a bit longer. Also the batteries at his house. If he is charging the car off batteries at his house the bank to charge the car would have to be larger than that in the car, there would also have to be several times more capacity to operate the house, these would also be in need of replacement.

A more likely scenario is he is putting power into the grid during the day spinning his meter in reverse all day while they are at work. Then he uses power from the grid like everyone else in the evening and to charge his car all night giving him a net zero bill. This is all fine as long as only a small number of people are doing it, when the amount of power being delivered this way gets out of the single digits the grid becomes unstable.

At some point technology may change this dynamic, learning whatever we are learning from this experiment is a good thing, but it is not practical on a large scale at this point, the Sierra club should have mentioned that.

Inky - of course you can get wifi in a men’s room! I thought you were all learned up on this technology stuff now that you’ve moved away from your “genocidal Republican” father’s top secret militia installation. No matter - even if you don’t ever catch on to all this new fangled computer technology, your 23 brothers and sisters will probably learn it fairly quickly, now that the feds have raided ol’ Dad’s “compound d’amour” down there in Texas.

If it wasn’t for wifi, I’m not sure what I’d do while I was in the men’s room. I’m kind of a slower shitter, and I don’t have as much luck as you do meeting interesting friends in the john. That, and I think that I probably mean something a lot more innocent than you do when I say that I’m “fooling around with my laptop.”

70% of Americans believe that Kennedy was assassinated due to a conspiracy, according to Wikipedia, huh? Well, the Sci Fi Channel says 72% of Americans believe in UFO’s. Maybe Sasquatch shot John Kennedy, and now he’s after Obama, too. You better round up the rest of the Blackhawks for an emergency sortie over Roswell. HAWKAAAAAAHHHHH!

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=3822&type=0

The answer to the question of what is the payback: 28 years with financing and 20 years if he pays cash, which he almost did, they fail to mention he either put down $40,000 as a down payment, or he has a big balloon next year. Admitidly this does not take into consideration the savings of running his house totally on solar, I’m skeptical as to whether he really does. With the electricity savings the payback is 17 years (with financing).

thx

ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40043

“The total economic cost of the war in Iraq to a family of four is 16,500 dollars from 2002 to 2008,” the report asserts in its main conclusions. “When the war in Afghanistan is included, the burden to the American family is 20,900 dollars.”

“The potential future impact on the family of four skyrockets to 36,900 for Iraq and 46,400 dollars for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2017,”

or
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

“According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq.[5]

Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has stated the total costs of the Iraq War on the US economy will be three trillion dollars in a moderate scenario, and possibly more in the most recent published study, published in March 2008.[6] Stiglitz has stated: “The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.”

No word on the costs if McBush keeps us there for a hundred years. We are only talking the costs already incurred and the downstream costs of caring for 30,000 wounded US soldiers.

3.5 trillion dollars
heck of a job bushie!

The Iraq War is expected to cost over $45,000 for every man woman and child in America. That number stuck with me and cropped up again when I read this article about solar power.

“Five years ago, I spent about $45,000 and got a brand new car (the RAv4EV) and the solar system,” he says. “We’re still driving the car every day, and the solar system will continue to make fuel for whatever EV we drive in the future. For $45,000 we bought a new car and fuel for the rest or our lives.”

Asked how long it will take for the PV system to pay for itself, Dickey replies: “If we think of everything in terms of what it costs us in the short-term, we’re screwed. It’s the same argument people use against the Prius: When will it pay back in gas savings? But that only accounts for the money paid at the pump. What of the billions of dollars that leave our economy for oil, or the billions of our tax dollars that go toward tax incentives for oil companies? What of the cost of the military and the lives lost to protect our oil?”

$45,000 is no doubt a significant amount of money. But if we invest in this now — like we should have been for the past 20+ years — the price will naturally come down. We need to think of this modest investment in contrast to the billions of dollars that leave our treasury every year for oil.

sierraclub.org/wecandoit/home/electric_cars.asp

Who do you think is more likely to change our policies on energy?
McBush? Hillary? Or curious george?

The math doesn’t look good for Hillary (unless she can seat MI and FL as is).

I had no idea that your men’s room had wifi lefty
now flush and slink back home to your cellar

I know, I know, you keep telling me that your…ahem…work…ahem…for the airlines has won you the the…ahem…friendship…ahem…of some important people in Congress, but I don’t think “Pooky” can pull the strings you think he can when it comes to registries and child welfare and stuff like that. I’m sorry to break it to you, but the only string that guy’s pulling for you is your’s…or is that the other way around? Maybe that wasn’t a banana in the monkey’s hand after all…

This thread was already irrelevant and juvenile before I happened along. If you guys haven’t killed it by now, I doubt I’ll have that chilling an effect.

Here’s an interesting question that should keep the hilarity ensuing at a feverish pitch - since we’ve established that Oswald was a left wing communist, rather than the right winger Chuckles the Factless tried to pawn him off as, the question arises: just how many right-wing nuts have tried to kill either the President or a presidential candidate in recent times? Since I’ve been around, the highest profile, would-be assassins have either been apolitical nuts or delusional left wingers. In fact, most of the assassination attempts I can think of have either been against Republicans (Reagan, Ford) or right-wing Democrats (George Wallace was crippled by an assassin.) Maybe it’s not the right wing nuts Inky needs to be so paranoid about.