CPL.Luke

alright Inow bare with me because this is only basic logic, but solar power doesn't benefit from being smaller. if you have a silicon wafer that gets sliced up into 200 processors, and you perform a die shrink so that each processor is half the size that it would be otherwise you get 400 processors out of the same wafer. Now what would the expected cost be if the machine that builds the smaller processors cost the same as the machine that built the larger ones? Answer about half the cost, now wasn't that fun. I'm sorry for being condescending but how could the process of fitting more processors onto a silicon wafer ever benefit pv manufacture? the point of a pv is to gather sunlight, and in order to do that it requires area. also this statement earked me a little anyway I'm sick of arguing over solar, you can read about the real economics (not the silly subsidized stuff) here http://www.txses.org/PVeconomics.php bottom line assuming grid power is constant over the 25 year lifetime of the solar panel at a real level of 8 cents per year, the installation of solar panels will result in you paying 3.7 times as much for your electricity over the grid power cost. here is a chart of real versus nominal pv costs http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/Real_and_Inflation_Adjusted_Price_per_Watt.PNG&imgrefurl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mrshaba/Experiments&h=408&w=219&sz=7&hl=en&start=40&um=1&usg=__vGomEWW8zY5_dijE71agBeulteA=&tbnid=XM6HT5htqWzrgM:&tbnh=125&tbnw=67&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgrid%2Bpower%2Binflation%2Badjusted%26start%3D36%26ndsp%3D18%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN the trend is quite clear here is a chart of grid power costs in inflation adjusted terms over the past several decades http://www.grinzo.com/energy_old/graphics_misc/us_real_electricity_prices_1960_2005.jpg these tend to validate the assumptions made earlier in the article I linked to about using present costs to analyze the cost per kwh of solar versus grid power. Phi for all I think we should have a disussion about the benefits and drawbacks of subsidies in a different thread, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to respond to your points without launching into the much larger topic of subsidies in general. We should start a seperate thread on subsidies as I don't have a definitive opinion on them as while I believe that support for a new industry is better shown in other manors and that they have a negative effect on the industry in the long run, however I'm very open to arguments for how they can benefit the economy as a whole. I've also never really heard the argument for why subsidies are the best method of propping up a new and beneficial industries. The reason I am so anti-solar and anti-hydrogen though is that I don't believe in sending good money after bad. Solar has seen massive incentives and investment over the past 30 years, and it still hasn't been able to undercut the staples of grid energy (coal, hydro, oil, natural gas, nuclear) I prefer to work on things that show near term <10 years out promise, after all "in the long run, we're all dead". For instance clean coal technology, even if it costs twice as much as regular coal it will be able to undercut natural gas and nuclear. Nuclear's problems have largely been solved excepting excessive beurocracy involved in getting the permits to build one. Hydro is one of the best deals out there, but its use is limited to certain areas. Wind leaves something to be desired in terms of reliability and so its use is also restricted to certain areas. There are also a coupleof promising new fusion techniques out there, however they should not be a major focus for the same reasoning that solar should not be a major focus. Fusion has always been 30 years away, despite the investment thats been made over the past 30 years. We need a real solution to the energy crises and we need one now. The energy crises will not be solved by pretending that it could easily be done, the first step is realizing just how hard it will be. That it is not something that will go away after a few key steps are taken, and that the change to cleaner sources of energy will be incremental. If you want clean energy than you are going to have to compromise, solar is to expensive and adoption by the power industry en-mass will cost huge amounts of money, and it simply will not happen in the next ten years. If you want cleaner energy you are going to have to look at things that are cost effective now as power plants are renewed, there won't be an oppurtunity to change things like we can now for a long time to come. If we try to pretend that these sources are available today we will wind up with dirtier air as oil, nuclear and natural gas plants are replaced by coal plants.

microprocessors are small...solar farms are big... see the difference. processors were originally very expensive die shrinks are what made them cheaper and faster, I would highly doubt a plate of silicon can get better at absorbing the sunlight when it gets smaller. not to mention at $200 per cm^2 thats pretty expensive

if you notice I posted a link that showed that lithium ion batteries are currently much better than nimh. how big were those rebates? I wouldn't be surprised if the government took over $10000 off the cars price tag in order to be able to trot out a couple ev's in california to demonstrate their commitment to the environment, also keep in mind that I was talking about 50 kwh batteries capable of taking an electric car 200 miles down the road based on an energy efficiency of 4 miles/kwh (taken from one of the links I posted). You also have yet to post any numbers which show that the nimh battery is as good as you say it is. hmm as I've owned a car that was at 260000 and would've lasted at least another 20k if it wasn't for my own stupidity, I have to ask what you do with your cars when you get rid of them? do you sell them for scrap, because if you don't and instead you only trade it in, than the dealer looks at the car and figures out how much he can get for it. On a car that is going to require a new $10000 battery soon I can tell you that you will barely get a dime for your trade in. ALso from a production standpoint its quite silly to insist that there is a general demand (a demand for mass-production) for an EV on the basis that 400 were made and they found buyers for them, thats kind of like insisting that there is demand for mass-produced ferrari's because they make a few hundred a year and you have to wait on a waiting list in order to get one. As for the solar panel bit I would like to remind you of the energy costs of producing them, as silicon requires high heat to melt, and even higher heat to be forced into chemical bonds with other materials, the energy cost in producing these solar panels should not be underestimated, and why subsidies that support their use tend to have a distorting effect on the market, similar to subsidies for tar sands and biofuels. tax breaks for their use also switches money away from research and into development, which hurts the solar industry even more in the long run as compared to an enviroment with no subsidies.

swansont remember that according to Milton Friedman inflation is always a monetary phenomenon, and while the government running a deficit will not always result in large inflation, one of the things the government talks about. A large deficit will eventually cause deficit. for instance without the Feds 2001 easy money policy people wouldn't have been able to buy homes the way they did which drove of the price, and people who already owned their homes wouldn't have been able to refinance to get cash out like they did in order to spend it. If the fed had used the 1970's measure of inflation we would have seen inflation rates of 10% or more for the past several years (although by the same token today we would be most likely seeing deflation) the main difference I'm talking about is that in the 1970's the fed used home ownership to measure the cost of housing, today we use "rental equivalent" which is somewhat of a vaccuous measure as it can be taken to mean different things. Similarly the Fed focuses on core inflation meaning inflation sans food and energy. there is good reason for this however it causes them to miss certain warnings, like the fact that commodity prices across the board were sky-rocketing with or without speculation markets (at the time oil was at its height iron ore had also gone up 40% since the beginning of the year and iron ore doesn't have a speculation market), which is a clear sign of inflation, because if the total supply of money in an economy is constant, and the GDP is constant, and unemployment is constant, prices cannot rise across the board, as say the price of energy increases peoples disposable income dissapears causing them to spend less on descretionary items, either reducing demand for that item and lowering its price such that the net increase in cpi is 0 or causing unemployment to rise, as people are layed off from companies whose customers are being reduced (although normally these people would be incorporated into the energy industry which is in need of more employees). Since currently our government claims that unemployment is relatively constant, and that our GDP is virtually stagnant something is causing inflation. ^note its possible through a series of arguments milton friedman used to show that inflation can only be caused by changes in the supply and demand for money. inflation expectations are important as the government can effectively cheat and pursuing a highly inflationary monetary policy and fix certain aspects of their economy while doing that, as long as people don't expect inflation to be that high any bits of inflation that show up will be short lived. Although once people expect that inflation will be high they start demanding that their employers pay them more maintaining an inflationary enviroment.

as I said solar costs 3-4 times more than coal and wind. we do have to drill (or scoop) for solar, where do you think they get the silicon from, as for wind I don't know much about the supply chain of carbon fiber, but I's imagine drilling occurs at some point. the volt was created under rick wagoner, Bob Lutz took over the helm late last year. also coal is an example of "undercooked" petroleum, and there is alot more of it. Its been estimated that the US has enough coal to satisfy present energy consumption for over 200 years. again to reitreate my position I believe that the battery technology and grid technology will be in place 10-20 years in the future, so that my childrens first cars will most likely be all electric, but its unlikely that my next 1 or 2 cars will be all electric. Just consider that with the technology that you have been saying existed since the 1990's (lithium ion) it would take several days to charge a car up to the point that would be considered normal for an average car powered by gasoline, and it would also cost about $10,000 per battery capable of 200 miles, these batteries wear out after 2-3 years and so you would be looking to replace $10000 of your car every 2-3 years regardless of the miles traveled. And thats assuming the battery had the maximum energy density per dollar that is available with lithium ion. for those nimh batteries you keep talking about it that same 200 mile battery would cost 200 miles/(4 mile/kwh)=50kwh 50000wh/(1.37wh/$)= $36496 and now you have succesfully made it so that the batteries is indeinate provided you drive 0 miles a year. as those batteries last for 1000 cycles, so if each cycle is worth 200 miles the battery will need to be replaced after about 200000 miles, however one thing I've ignored in this calculation is that with each cycle the battery loses some of its capacity, after a certain point its expected that it will be useless in its application hence the cycle liftime. however so you should consider the 200000 number an upper bound. Further each cycle will be worth progressively fewer miles, so the actual point of replacement would be considerably earlier than that. Also the number of wh/$ in the wikipedia page I linked to sources the nimh energy per cost numbers from a AA rechargeable nimh battery, so it could be expected that the batteries would cost considerably less, possibly on the order of 5 wh/$ which would make it equivalent to the cost of the lithium ion battery. I would doubt however that the batteries will get much cheaper with increased scale, as they start requiring extra parts, such as an internal liquid cooling system. But, thats just a guess as I don't know much about the cost of these things.

I'ver been around for 3 years now, I'll probably still be here in the future. I'm not saying we won't do it, in fact I gave a rough outline of how a company could get hydrogen powered vehicles out and how that transition could occur given thats the only option. My point was merely that you guys are talking like the big evil corporations are trying to stop the switch and if they only saw the big picture I'd be driving an all-electric car by the end of next year We will switch... eventually also paranoia whats wrong with peak oil man? his evidence has been quite clear that peak oil will occur at some point soon, and that has been somewhat backed up by recent oil prices.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121936581501662161.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries personally I would've ignored this article except for the fact it showed up in the wall street journal. its kind of interesting, except it ignores that immediatly following WW2 the US had 120% of its GDP in debt and got out of it mainly through the post-war boom, although the 1970's certainly helped.

interesting I had always heard europeans had less of a problem with binge drinking than we did. I wonder what the rate of acohol poisoning is at universities in the UK and Germany

you realise that GM has been working on that car since sometime in 05-06 with the full resources of their company, and it won't be out till late 2010 early 2011 with the price having nearly doubled from what they originally wanted. THey are half expecting to lose money on these things at this point as the car is just to expensive for what they spent developing it. CAptainPanic, but its not like we build it from scratch every 10-40 years, their are the factories that have been built to build and maintain the power plants. There is a transportation network for bringing the finished product to the site, etc. and all of these new bits of infrastructure have pre-defined times to become profitable. Any new type of infrastructure that doesn't provide an immediate cost reduction or tangible benefit to the users faces a large risk of not being adopted. Also if you read any articles on it you'll see that the main problem has been that they and their suppliers are litterally inventing the battery technologies required for this

thats interesting I had never heard of a school succesfully stopping or reducing drinking. While I still doubt that its been as success full as they have made it appear, I stick by my belief that the drinking just went further underground (although possibly in reduced quantities). The question is what was the net cost and the net benefit of this procedure. They may have fewer academic notables joining the factory because after all alcohol has been one of the great social lubricants of all time. A reduced number of social gatherings may hurt students oppurtunities to "vent" and relax etc. this can lead to students becoming more stressed and suffering academic problems. Also the cost of running that kind of police force and the lobbying campaigns to cahnge the laws must have cost the school a good deal. The potential beneits would be something along the lines of students binge drinking less, which will lead to better academic performance, also fewer alcohol related deaths. Now the question is whether or not this could be accomplished more efficiently with comparable results if the drinking age was lowered. Leep in mind a school could still pursue a policy like URI's with a lower drinking age, by merely declaring the campus dry. Or they could combat the problems I mentioned about a lack of social activities by placing a pub/poolhall/thing on campus, enforcing strict no alcohol policies on the rest o campus however treating the bar as a normal bar where the bartenders cut people off and do all that.

Phi for All your failing to understand the critical difference between this move and others, we've spent the better part of a century building our oil infrastructure, drilling wells etc. We can't replace it that fast. you also seem to be ignoring large parts of my posts where I say that I think we will movie to electricity, but I was merely saying its not a thing GM can wave a wand and have done by the end of the year. Or the end of 5 years for that matter. Switching to horses and computers had direct economic benefit (but you didn't see IBM making a $500 computer in 1970 did ya?) switching to solar now or at any time in the recent fututure switching to solar would be bad. Solar costs 11-23 cents per kilowatt-hour whereas coal costs 4 cents, it costs that much because the panels are expensive, and last time I checked the law of supply and demand, when people wanted more of something the price increased. economies of scale won't lower the price below coal. Now lets consider why we buy cheaper things, we buy cheaper things because it allows us to have more money, more money means more resources, resources we can invest. if we all switched to solar tomorrow it would make electrical cars about on par with gasoline because the cost of electricity would quadruple. Thus Solar would have eliminated other green initiatives.

sorry I got a tad bit caught up in quantum computing, my point was that existing infrastructure and the like is hard to replace. if for instance we find viable alternatives like new biofuels that don't mess up our food supply it can be fast, if the future comes in the unlikely form of a hydrogen economy, it will take a very long time to switch as neither hydrogen gas nor liquified hydrogen can move through existing pipelines to my knowledge, and so a new and very costly system of mass distribution would have to be built. Any business trying to attempt mass marketing and distribution of hydrogen power vehicles and a deployment of infrastructure to support the vehicles hits a catch-22 with their customers saying "how could I fill up" and the guys building the infrastructure saying "who am I building this for" businesses trying to market capital goods tend to have a similar problem when they move into a new country or area where people won't buy their equipment unless there are service centers in the vicinity, similarly the business can't deploy service centers unless they have customers. There are a few solutions, but they are difficult to implement particularly in the transportation sector where the point of transportation is to go somewhere other than where you bought the car, so people demand infrastructure be in existence already (I'm not saying that its impossible just extremely difficult) -it should also be noted that all of the necessary technology for mass scale hydrogen powered vehicles and infrastructure exist. Which brings us back to electric, where we have an existing electrical grid, that allows us to power our vehicles using whatever source we want. Which by itself solves the issue of whether you can "fuel" your car no matter where you are, allowing decent sized niche markets to exist around the country, so you can immediatly target the eco-friendly or the gadget lovers across the country, rather than in a small segment. however this doesn't change things like the charging issue. For instance if a battery existed today that could charge at whatever rate you could feed it and soak up as much energy as you wanted, and everyone switched to vehicles like this, then the electrical grid would have to expand by 11000 miles/year ('95 data)~30 miles/day ~7.5 kwh required per day to meet average requirements. average household electrical use in 2001 was ~11000 kwh/year~30 kwh per day. http://msl1.mit.edu/Mar2Lecture/Use_Safety3.htm http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs2001/enduse2001/enduse2001.html so shifting the burden of powering our cars toour electrical grid would require at least a 20% increase in baseload power required to power US homes, assuming a 100% efficiency between outlet and batteries for the duration of charging. however a considerable investment in distribution technologies would have to be made to guarantee power for when people decided to charge their cars. (most of our current residential load is dedicated to things like refrigerators and the like, so the changes in power consumption are relatively minor in comparison to climate control, refrigeration, and lighting which are all predictable changes in power demand. (not saying that their aren't solutions to this, just that methods of controlling baseload power and distributing techniques are required) as for the idea that chevron is sitting on the best battery technology in the world I suggest you look at the wikipedia page on rechargeable batteries, it appears lithium Ion are superior in every way except possibly energy density (hence their used in laptops and cell phones) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery corporations don't often bury things that they own if they expect to make money, its contrary to the nature of business. However they do occasionally pursue crappy business models. Also I don't buy things that I have to rent after I made my purchase

considering this is a forum on quantum physics wouldn't it be appropriate to respond to this post with quantum physics? the results of quantum mechanics experiments are not random, they are probabilistic events with the probability distribution determined by well known and validated laws of physics. The double slit experiment is a very good example of this. The laws of quantum physics dictate that a particle is more of a wavical, the wavicle expands and evolves under the schrodinger equation until someone measures it, at which point it collapses into a smaller wavicle, in the standard double slit experiment this means that as you send particles through the slits 1 at a time they form little pin pricks of light on a screen until after you've sent thousands or millions through you get the familiar wave interfernce pattern. moral of the story is that the particle doesn't collapse randomly, it collapses in a similar way as a weighted die, with different outcomes given different weights.

being the largest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor and the largest attack on U.S. civilian populations in the nations history makes it a little bit more than just a little substance granted the way it was manipulated by our political process later was rather discusting.

bah I just wrote out a pretty long post in response to phi for all and accidently left the page to see if inow was from America. anyway I'll just respond primarily to inow for now and cover some of phi for all's points later. first of all a zinger line like that is useful only once, excessive repitition is partronizing and annoying. I have not met a single person who does not take a long trip (over 200 miles) at least once a year, even the people who live in New York City I know make trips of that nature at least once a year, its one of the benefits of having a gas powered car, people take advantage of it. you may want to try reading a thread before replying to it, as you may have noticed I spoke a little bit about it in my first post. it appears though that I had my units wrong for the power of a gas pump, and that explains the 3 orders of magnitude error when I tried to calculate the time. http://www.hybridcars.com/electric-cars/power-of-pump.html ^source a gas pump produces a power output (into your car) at 3960 kilowatts and a standard household electrical supply of 1.5 kilowatts (I believe the author assumes an inefficiency in the batteries ability to charge). It would take 9 days to deliver the equivalent of a 10 gallon tanks worth of energy. as for economic damage I cannot say as the technology for wide scale implementation does not exist yet. however I'd imagine it takes more people to produce the oil than it does to produce the batteries and the like etc. gathering information for a precise economic impact calculation is something that I don't have the time, expertise or resources for. but it is rather logical that economic growth is hampered whenever the ability to transport people or goods is limited. And I don't believe there has been a single incidence in modern history where this situation was not so. Phi for all fair enough I saw the 3x increase however I thought that everything was still on par with what other people recieved, but perhaps I should do more reading. sorry I didn't mean to miscontrue what you were saying to mean you wanted a policy mandate, I was trying (and clearly failing) to say that if a policy mandate were in place it would have massive negative consequences. fair enough on the charging point for a commercial trucker, however the lack of any move in this direction when trucking companies are losing business back to rails would indicate that somebody did a cost analysis and found that it would be far to expensive to implement. as for new technology coming in, the demand for new battery technologies has never been stronger than it is today, as cell phone makers and computer companies demand cheap high capacity batteries to power their equipment, the technology will probably be developed to solve the electric car problem... eventually. My point is that its not at the point that would enable a company to role electric cars out in large quantities and expect to make any money. switching away from fossil fuels will probably be similar to the expected switch to quantum computers. which is also a subject under considerable debate today. For instance if quantum computers can be made using the same types of technology as microprocessors the switch could occur in a matter of a decade and be extremely profitable for the innovators who get it out in time. whereas assuming quantum computers follow moore's law but the manufacturing technology requires the equivalent of a reset to the early days of the microprocessor, than by the time quantum computers can best classical computers even in the things that quantum computers are better at, may be 50-100 years after a working one was developed. preventing anyone from ever making money off of them Like the switch away from oil the switch to quantum computers is seen as inevitable as classical computers will be unable to increase their density much farther beyond the 2020's, and there aren't any known solutions to prevent this.

have you any evidence whatsoever that the problem isn't taken seriously? I have given ample personal accounts of how it is being taken seriously. What would you feel would be taking it seriously, and please try to answer the question of how to stop someone from legally purchasing alcohol and then redistributing it to persons between the the ages of 18 and 21. The Frats and dorms are private property for the duration of of the school year. a student effectively "leases" the property from the school, subject to certain conditions such as maintaining a inimum of noise and the like. The school cannot mandate that the dorms be available to search, over and beyond that that would normally be considered appropriate for law enforcement. AS I said in my previous post my school demolished the dorms and saw no decline in parties. In fact if you want to know the damaging effects of alcohol laws on campus consider the statistic that Umass is currently circulating to curb drinking. 9 out of 10 Umass students know how to have fun without alcohol" this of course implies 1 out of 10 students at Umass are borderline alcoholics, considering the school has ~25000 students, this implies ~2500 students are borderline alcoholics.

the last information I saw on it stated that it would prevent the development of "clean coal" and as I said I believe there was an explicit ban on carbon sequestration.

Pangloss you are continually saying that NYU is an example of rules being enforced, I have said nothing of the kind anywhere. ITs an example of the rules "not" being enforced at all. as I said in New York City enforcement is so lax that at the age of 17 I was getting served in bars and at liquor stores, and NYU has less binge drinking because of this. since when can the police raid private property at random? as I recall your American so you should know that that would be illegal. That is why the college administrators are asking for the drinking age to be lowered, because there are alcohol related deaths on campuses that are a direct result of binge drinking and despite their best attempts they have not been able to curb binge drinking and the problem has gotten succesively worse rather than better. I'm sure their are a couple of people on here who went to college before the drinking age was set to 21, how often did you see people half drink themselves to death, or better yet how many drinks would you estimate the average person drank at a party back then? my rough estimate for today would be that on average a person drinks between 8 and 16 units of alcohol at a party at my school. and mine is a school that has demolished frats has one of the largest police forces of any university (staties) combined with its own police helicopter and riot guard. The police do continually conduct raids and similar such things that are boderline or blatantly illegal. The school has also tried seperating the freshman from everyone else in order to limit access. All of these efforts have been completely innefective. there are 25000 people who attend the school and when they try seperating the freshman from everyone else the freshman go off campus and find parties, then they meet people who will buy them alcohol. Our police force which has attempted every legal means of catching violators has failed. Its time to attempt a different policy rather than more of the same. you also haven't adressed any aspect of my analogy nor proposed any real solution to change the sociology of drinking rather you just say that it should be changed and then lower the drinking age (even though lax enforcement standards seem to accomplish that goal anyway)

yeah but a car is largely considered to be under your control a reactor failure isn't viewed in the same manner (very similar to how people view flying as more dangerous than driving), It doesn't help that most people think a nuclear meltdown is equivalent to a nuclear explosion which in the publics mind are capable of single handedly destroying the east coast. and if you can convince a person of these aspects are false than they turn to the waste issue even though a standard coal plant emits more nuclear bydproducts into the atmosphere than a nuclear plant puts out as waste. and then most enviromental types will say that we need 100% wind and solar never mind how much it costs.

^they are already kicking people out of housing and fining them $100 for alcohol related incidents at my school, it has had no effect. I'd personally atribute the change in alcohol related deaths to successful anti-drunk driving policies over the drinking limit. (consider that germany has no drinking age and they have a lower accident rate than we do) phi for all current laws prevent them from pursuing such a policy.

This is, I'm afraid, another contradiction. You just said that they can't perform a search without a warrant, and then gave an exception that happens to be the one time one would envision enforcement would take place. So clearly there's something they can do about it without violating anybody's rights -- you just said when that can happen. however in this cased it qualifies as probable cause, and the whole process is slightly more complicated than I may have led you to believe, however the main point is that some form of probable cause is there when a party is going on (there are a large number of appeals at the school related to whether cause was present). no the point was that alcohol is readily available at NYU as anybody can purchase alcohol in a bar or a liquor store, and yet there is less drinking than at a school where no one under the age of 21 is capable of directly purchasing alcohol from and licensed store due to strict enforcement. the law is broken when the 21 year old gives me the alcohol. However it is impossible to stop this type of distribution, as the alcohol has left the store and any ability to monitor it, once it enters a bag and passes into a private citizens hands there is no way to determine where the bottle came from or is going to (without spending considerable amounts of money), it is equivalent to the government passing a law that said that red lingerie was obscene and that no one under the age of 21 is to be allowed to where it. AS the police aren't allowed to search someone to see if their wearing it the law is virtually unenforceable except for requiring id's at victoria's secret, and fining people who sell it to people under 21, but we can quickly imagine how a number of people will disagree with the justice of the law and continue to provide, thus making the whole venture pointless. As for adults drinking responsibly its interesting to note that most adults today have drank while being underage, most people over 21 seem to drink responsibly however it appears that they are irresponsible between 18 and 21, there seems to be a demarkation line here which suggests that people who are legally adults are more responsible when treated as adults. EDIT: a number of states already have laws that allow parents to provide alcohol to their children, last I heard there were 3 of them and I think one of them was New jersey

pangloss talking about changing a sociology is essentially saying lets do nothing, schools have been spending tremendous amounts of money on getting people to not drink it is utterly ineffective. the laws governing the sale of alcohol to minors are very well enforced around most college campuses. For instance around my school it is impossible for anyone under 21 to enter a liquor store. And the police regularly stake out the liquor stores in order to catch people buying large quantities of booze so that they can follow where the alcohol is going. However this is not the problem, the problem is that I can and do easily get alcohol when any of my friends who are over 21 go out to get some, I ask them to grab me some and they do. there is no way of stopping this as a person over 21 entering a liquor store and purchasing two handles of vodka is not probable cause for anything. And a handle of hard liquor is easily concealable in any bag, thus preventing the police from ever catching me aquiring this alcohol without violating my civil rights. Similarly a College cannot perform a search inside the dorm rooms without a warrant as I am leasing the dorm from the school and everything inside of it is considered my private space. The only exception to this would be when someone calls in and says that there is a party going on, schools spend considerable amounts of money preventing such parties from occuring, but it happens and there is nothing the school can do to stop it without violating peoples rights. Personally I drank at home in moderation since I was 13 and never pursued binge drinking until college as it was silly and pointless. As a side note I've been to several parties at NYU where drinking laws are almost unenforced, and the most booze I ever saw at such a party was 4 six packs for 6 people, and rarely did I encounter hard alcohol at such events. contrast that to my school Umass where for a party with a dozen people there is likely to be between 6 and 12 litres of hard alcohol, combined with whatever beer or such things show up. granted this is not a sizeable sample of parties, however from what I've heard from students at NYU there is extremely little binge drinking, in large part because the night normally consists of trying to get served (and succeeding) at various bars and clubs. This accomplishes the change in sociology that you were reffering to before, and it is accomplished without spending any money at all. its good that people are finally interested in fixing this as its been an issue that people care about when they are under 21 but afterwards people stop caring meanwhile this law has been having negative consequences on our higher education system, and I would question the justice in any law that declares the vast majority of people as violators of the law (I'd estimate that the percentage of people who have not violated the law at somewhere around the percentage of people who never consume alcohol).

under normal circumstances it would, however the state is under constant pressure to lower energy prices and increase enviromental standards, as the price of energy is artificially raised the state comes under increased pressure to reduce costs, if energy is expensive it makes sense to fill any gaps with cheaper sources of energy, and natural gas is more expensive than coal, and will be increasing in price. clean coal is off the table due to a provision in the law, now this may alow for legal loopholes that would allow them to implement clean coal as long as they don't call it that, or no one would ever notice when the new coal plant contains IGCC technology or something similar. however I believe the law included a provision against carbon sequestration. a couple words from the enviromental lobby and wind and solar lobby's probably got that put in. remember the slogan "dilution is not the solution"

what you guys seem to be talking about is the semi-classical limit. Quantum mechanics simplifies to classical mechanics as the various parameters go to infinity, however classical mechanics only perfectly coincides with quantum in the limit that things go to infinity, at the macro-level classical mechanics becomes an excellent "approximation" for quantum mechanics, however quantum mechanics still holds the real answer at these levels. unfortunatly the quantum processes that are in effect at this level are poorly understood and considerable work is being done on the behavior of quantum mechanics in larger systems. The main motivation for this work is that large scale quantum systems exist like, like superconductors and understanding how quantum mechanics works at this scale may eventually lead to an understanding of how high temperature superconductors work.

alcohol is available on campus period. alcohol is readily available to people between 18 and 21 period. The ony way to stop the flow of alcohol to campuses is by turning the campus into a police state where everyones bags and dorm rooms are searched regularly for alcohol which in my opinion is just silly and can be summed up in the following statement "drinking is healthier than fascism" the problem is that when the drinking age is 21 people can't go to bars (the most preferable place to drink), where getting smashed is considered bad form and on top of that hideously expensive. If my only access to alcohol is sporadic I buy litres of wiskey instead of 6 packs of beer, you can easily see how this train of logic leads to binge drinking.