On 04 Nov 2021, Mike Powell said the following...
Marxism/socialism/communism didn't exist by that name at the time that t Constitution was written. The founders didn't make as much of a distinct as is made today. They felt that providing a government-run communicatio infrastructure was the responsibility of the federal government, for exa
If you read anything they wrote, most if not all of the founders were not marxist/socialists/communists, or whatver they would have been called at the time. I suspect you have a favorite or two that you feel otherwise about, so go ahead and trot them out.
Of course they weren't; there wasn't any such thing. However, the explicit inclusion of a government-owned, government-run Postal Service in the Constitution itself seems enough to counter your assertion.
Also, there was a common phrase at the time that the Declaration of Independence was written. It was, "the right to life, liberty, and property." Jefferson would surely have been familiar with this phrase, and yet he
changed it. Why do you suppose that was?
Great strides have been made in renewable energy sources in the l fe
decades, despite the fact that conservatives have fought against
[...]
To put this another way, this "conservative" has never fallen asleep
while listening to speeches about climate change, and I have listened
and read plenty about it.
Not only have I not done so, I have not done so after previously, and hypocritically, claiming they were important (enough to pay attention and stay awake during).
Then surely you know how dire our situation is, and that while we cannot convert to green energy all at once, everything in that direction helps.
3 of our 4 cars are currently dead from not having been driven. Without work commute, I hardly drive anywhere anymore. I have a bicycle that get me to the town center and back.
Why are they dead? Mine dies because it gets cold and the battery loses power in the cold if you don't run the fossil-fueled engine on a regular basis. If the only place I ever aspired to travel was the town center
and back, I could walk in most weather. Most people have higher expectations than that.
Mine have dead batteries because the gasoline engines have not been run in a very long time.
For the most part, I am content with the range of my bicycle. For other
things, we have a working automobile. Like I said earlier, everything that moves us in the direction of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels helps.
Even the current President has aspirations of traveling abroad, via a fossil-fuel burning jet, so that he can take a nap during the very important climate-control conference in Europe.
It's his job to attend those conferences. And again, we can't convert to
green energy all at once, but anything in that direction helps.
We can't be very global if we only travel around town, and we certainly cannot have any important or meaningful exposure to other cultures if
all we do is stay at home.
And yet, we can still cut down our use of fossil fuels dramatically. For example, we can use mass transit where available, and work to make it
available where it's not. That may seem like a lot to ask, but since you brought up global travel, think about how airplanes and ships currently work. Most people have gotten very used to having their own car, but how many have their own plane or seaworthy ocean vessel? Not very many. And so when most people need to travel using those technologies, they go and get into a
vehicle with a bunch of other people going to the same place.
Electricity does not require fossil fuels to produce.
It does if you want enough of it to run a automobile on (to get anywhere beyond your local town), or to have home electric without interruption during high-demand times (like heat-waves or intense cold).
Not true. The World Solar Challenge in Australia challenges teams to complete
a 1,878-mile course through the Australian Outback using only solar energy.
The first was held in 1987 and as of 2007 there have been multiple classes of vehicles competing, with the introduction in 2013 of the "Cruiser Class" for multi-seater solar vehicles.
The General Motors team's Sunraycer prototype won in 1987 with an average
speed of 41.6 mph, but since then vehicles from various teams have been
capable of exceeding the legal speed limit on Australian highways, leading
race organizers to make the race more demanding and challenging. Many of the competing vehicles are certified as road-legal.
It's understandable that we can't all have prototype cars like these in our driveways, but in the same way that races and competitions fostered
innovation in increasing the power and efficiency of internal combustion engines, massive progress in the vehicles can be seen from the first competitors in 1987 to the most recent in 2021.
Jeff.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: Cold War Computing BBS (1:387/26)