BTW, I’m soooo a cat person and not a dog person.

It’s not a big surprise. Dogs have been domesticated by humans for a very, very, very long time. Unlike other domesticated animals, dogs are one of the few (if not only, remember, cats are only partially domesticated by comparison, and other animals, like mice, birds, snakes, even guinea pigs and rabbits exist primarily as wild critters) that are domesticated for companionship as well as for specific tasks. It’s no wonder over time that the ability to understand humans has been somewhat bred into them. 

After looking over who won the award in the past, I can only say that whether or not he won it, it’s not of much matter.I also, however, don’t see much change, nor do I see him being able to do much to fullfill the very reason I voted for him. I see Obama as a man with a great desire to fix what is wrong with this country, and do his best by the people of the US, however, on both political sides of the spectrum, he meets opposition, and everything he puts himself towards becomes gridlocked. In fact,to hazard a bit of criticism, I also feel that Bush had done what, in his mind, was best for the country, no matter how misguided some of those efforts were, and since the Bush/Gore election, for the most part, the public has been somewhat polarizing, as evidence from the voting in the past two elections. I only believe Obama won by the margin he did because there wasn’t an incumbent, and McCain kinda made a general ass out of himself and the GOP. It’s not that Obama hasn’t been trying, but that half the nation is hell bent on fighting him over ever little issue, and the other half seems to think of him as ineffectual, despite his efforts to listen to both sides and cautiously seek middle ground (health care for example). Perhaps it’s time for our indivisible nation to divide. 

mmm.. that’s why I hated the metric system. It’s based on archaic scientific “constants” which have incredibly abstruse situational needs.The length of a swinging pendulum, timed to a distance based on calculations (converting the existing “feet” into the new “meter”, or do you think they took a giant string, ran it around the globe [careful not to hit any of the spots on the earth that might be higher or lower than the average] and divided it into 10,000,000 pieces). Then that measurement is used to create a brass rod of some rather archaic length to be the new meter, but of course that stretches and contracts and corrodes and generally falls apart with age, so platinum is used, and that’s based on the length of the brass rod, which may have contracted or expanded over its lifetime. (see how far removed we are from the original “length of a pendulum definition already,), but now there’s the issue of expansion and contraction due to heat! GASP! so another rod is made based on the old platinum rod (we definitely like rods in the metric system don’t we??) except thisa time we use an alloy that probably doesn’t shrink as much, and it needs to be at a specific tempurature (also metric, though the metric tempurature system, in its original form, makes a hell of a lot of sense).But still not specific enough! atmospheric pressure may affect a meter! so we need to set this bar now on two discs measuring a certain number of milliimeters (now wait, are these milliimeters, instrumental to measuring the “official” meter, based on some other official meter, or is the official milliimeter held elsewhere??) apart, and at a standardized metric atmospheric pressure (probably measured in the equally abstruse “kilogram”). Of course this system isn’t perfect enough! So we’ll use something purely mathematical and even more obscure! We’ll use the radiation wavelength of a decaying atom between two particular states – oh screw it, we’ll take however many meters light was suppose to travel in a second and say that defines a meter.A foot though, kind of just came about as “this much” and was based on a fairly useful (practical to the common man, I mean) amount at the time. Eventually that was standardized somewhat, and even to this day, in most applications (most) rough measurements work just fine.

I’m against it. More debt for the individual, and quite frankly, we should reduce our consumption rather than encourage more of it. Use less air conditioning rather than buying a new air conditioner, which requires new materials to create, and may only see an increase of 5% energy efficiency. Instead, one should try to not use air conditioning as much, thus saving money and helping the earth even more.

One thing I’ve wondered about in the past is distilling mead. Since it’s an animal product, the problem of methyl alcohol would be reduced, no? And of course would you steam distill or use freezing techniques?And how would the resultant product be?Just curious…

well, I don’t drive at all, making me far more environmentally friendly than anyone who has posted yet.:Pnow that we’re done with our environmental pissing match, I still say that CARS has serious problems as the trade in value isn’t even half the price of a new car which its supposed to go towards. (how many new cars do you see out there at $9,000, much less $4500?)This means in addition to the already existing debt crisis, due to the mortgage situation, the shrinking credit limits to small businesses and consumers, and in genera, poor money management, we now have a governmentally sponsored way of creating more personal debt.FANTASTIC.Secondly, I can’t quote a source off the top of my head, but I remember an article floating around on the internet that one of the hidden problems for the auto industry is that, well, quite frankly, the US markets are already tapped out most families have a car or two or three.  There just aren’t that many people here that need to go out and buy a new car… which is why countries where saturation isn’t nearly what it is here are doing fantastic in the auto trade. India and China are (or at least were) selling cars faster than they could build roads to drive them on due to an increase in personal wealth and, quite frankly, people who didn’t already have one!Autos aren’t like Coca Cola and other consumables where you are constantly replacing them with newer models. (though, as a side note the tech industry is MARVELOUS at convincing people they need a new computer every year, and a new cell phone every six months). They’re more like houses. You buy one, you use it for a while, if it breaks down, you get it repaired.. Once you’re ready to move on, you sell it to someone else, and then find a another one, possibly also used. Eventually somewhere along the way, it might get damaged or old enough that it gets torn apart for scrap, and another is made. You just can’t expect to sell 30 million cars in 2008, and then 45 million in 2009, and 60 million in 2010. It’s laughable.So all in all, the CARS program is just a quick fix for the auto industry (which will be failing again by 2012) and a quick way to piling on more debt for the American consumer.

yeah…. not seeing it. I’d say a fair number of people I know with college degrees make less than me and lack on the job experience. Plus college isn’t what it used to be. I dropped out because my classes were repetitive of my HS coursework. I visited friends at two other schools and found the experience to be the same.Additionally the college degree is becoming more and more demanded for jobs not traditionally requiring one, such as bank teller, receptionist, clerical work, etc. These are jobs more HS graduates can handle, but the prerequisites are simply set higher.The best thing you can do is start work early, gain experience and work your way up,  and take college course later, when you are more able to decide what you actually want to learn whilst in school.

I don’t drive but I’m very adamantly against this program. $4500 credit towards a 14500 car (which is moderately priced) means that you’re racking up $10,000in debt by participating.I originally thought that ecologically it might offset itself, but honestly, it’s more environmentally damaging to manufacture the newer cars (i remember reading articles somewhere about how keeping your old car was more envionmentally friendly than the process of creating a new prius) and the process necessary to destroy and decommission the old vehicles (hopefully recycling what can be recycled along the way).I’m all for environmentalism and helping out the common man, but a much better idea would have been to pump that money into greening our energy resources through creating wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric means and getting off of coal and petroleum.  Not only would it create jobs, which would have a more lasting effect, but could better our living conditions and ease some of the stress on US resources.

Nope. Apple’s a pretentious product. Almost across the board their products are vastly overpriced compared to their competition. (And though it may start a war,  a mac is still a pc [personal computer] )My $20 sansa works just fine.Another thing about this is a matter of quality. As the article states, the US’s manufacturing base has been absolutely gutted, which unfortunately, has resulted in our trade deficits due to a lack of goods to trade, but also has resulted in an inferior quality product. I’d probably be getting a better made iPod made in China than the US.  Plus, if I read correctly, his calculations are based off of final assembly. Where are the components manufactured, and what are the equivalent US labor costs there?

BTW, I’m soooo a cat person and not a dog person.

It’s not a big surprise. Dogs have been domesticated by humans for a very, very, very long time. Unlike other domesticated animals, dogs are one of the few (if not only, remember, cats are only partially domesticated by comparison, and other animals, like mice, birds, snakes, even guinea pigs and rabbits exist primarily as wild critters) that are domesticated for companionship as well as for specific tasks. It’s no wonder over time that the ability to understand humans has been somewhat bred into them. 

After looking over who won the award in the past, I can only say that whether or not he won it, it’s not of much matter.I also, however, don’t see much change, nor do I see him being able to do much to fullfill the very reason I voted for him. I see Obama as a man with a great desire to fix what is wrong with this country, and do his best by the people of the US, however, on both political sides of the spectrum, he meets opposition, and everything he puts himself towards becomes gridlocked. In fact,to hazard a bit of criticism, I also feel that Bush had done what, in his mind, was best for the country, no matter how misguided some of those efforts were, and since the Bush/Gore election, for the most part, the public has been somewhat polarizing, as evidence from the voting in the past two elections. I only believe Obama won by the margin he did because there wasn’t an incumbent, and McCain kinda made a general ass out of himself and the GOP. It’s not that Obama hasn’t been trying, but that half the nation is hell bent on fighting him over ever little issue, and the other half seems to think of him as ineffectual, despite his efforts to listen to both sides and cautiously seek middle ground (health care for example). Perhaps it’s time for our indivisible nation to divide. 

mmm.. that’s why I hated the metric system. It’s based on archaic scientific “constants” which have incredibly abstruse situational needs.The length of a swinging pendulum, timed to a distance based on calculations (converting the existing “feet” into the new “meter”, or do you think they took a giant string, ran it around the globe [careful not to hit any of the spots on the earth that might be higher or lower than the average] and divided it into 10,000,000 pieces). Then that measurement is used to create a brass rod of some rather archaic length to be the new meter, but of course that stretches and contracts and corrodes and generally falls apart with age, so platinum is used, and that’s based on the length of the brass rod, which may have contracted or expanded over its lifetime. (see how far removed we are from the original “length of a pendulum definition already,), but now there’s the issue of expansion and contraction due to heat! GASP! so another rod is made based on the old platinum rod (we definitely like rods in the metric system don’t we??) except thisa time we use an alloy that probably doesn’t shrink as much, and it needs to be at a specific tempurature (also metric, though the metric tempurature system, in its original form, makes a hell of a lot of sense).But still not specific enough! atmospheric pressure may affect a meter! so we need to set this bar now on two discs measuring a certain number of milliimeters (now wait, are these milliimeters, instrumental to measuring the “official” meter, based on some other official meter, or is the official milliimeter held elsewhere??) apart, and at a standardized metric atmospheric pressure (probably measured in the equally abstruse “kilogram”). Of course this system isn’t perfect enough! So we’ll use something purely mathematical and even more obscure! We’ll use the radiation wavelength of a decaying atom between two particular states – oh screw it, we’ll take however many meters light was suppose to travel in a second and say that defines a meter.A foot though, kind of just came about as “this much” and was based on a fairly useful (practical to the common man, I mean) amount at the time. Eventually that was standardized somewhat, and even to this day, in most applications (most) rough measurements work just fine.

I’m against it. More debt for the individual, and quite frankly, we should reduce our consumption rather than encourage more of it. Use less air conditioning rather than buying a new air conditioner, which requires new materials to create, and may only see an increase of 5% energy efficiency. Instead, one should try to not use air conditioning as much, thus saving money and helping the earth even more.

One thing I’ve wondered about in the past is distilling mead. Since it’s an animal product, the problem of methyl alcohol would be reduced, no? And of course would you steam distill or use freezing techniques?And how would the resultant product be?Just curious…

well, I don’t drive at all, making me far more environmentally friendly than anyone who has posted yet.:Pnow that we’re done with our environmental pissing match, I still say that CARS has serious problems as the trade in value isn’t even half the price of a new car which its supposed to go towards. (how many new cars do you see out there at $9,000, much less $4500?)This means in addition to the already existing debt crisis, due to the mortgage situation, the shrinking credit limits to small businesses and consumers, and in genera, poor money management, we now have a governmentally sponsored way of creating more personal debt.FANTASTIC.Secondly, I can’t quote a source off the top of my head, but I remember an article floating around on the internet that one of the hidden problems for the auto industry is that, well, quite frankly, the US markets are already tapped out most families have a car or two or three.  There just aren’t that many people here that need to go out and buy a new car… which is why countries where saturation isn’t nearly what it is here are doing fantastic in the auto trade. India and China are (or at least were) selling cars faster than they could build roads to drive them on due to an increase in personal wealth and, quite frankly, people who didn’t already have one!Autos aren’t like Coca Cola and other consumables where you are constantly replacing them with newer models. (though, as a side note the tech industry is MARVELOUS at convincing people they need a new computer every year, and a new cell phone every six months). They’re more like houses. You buy one, you use it for a while, if it breaks down, you get it repaired.. Once you’re ready to move on, you sell it to someone else, and then find a another one, possibly also used. Eventually somewhere along the way, it might get damaged or old enough that it gets torn apart for scrap, and another is made. You just can’t expect to sell 30 million cars in 2008, and then 45 million in 2009, and 60 million in 2010. It’s laughable.So all in all, the CARS program is just a quick fix for the auto industry (which will be failing again by 2012) and a quick way to piling on more debt for the American consumer.

yeah…. not seeing it. I’d say a fair number of people I know with college degrees make less than me and lack on the job experience. Plus college isn’t what it used to be. I dropped out because my classes were repetitive of my HS coursework. I visited friends at two other schools and found the experience to be the same.Additionally the college degree is becoming more and more demanded for jobs not traditionally requiring one, such as bank teller, receptionist, clerical work, etc. These are jobs more HS graduates can handle, but the prerequisites are simply set higher.The best thing you can do is start work early, gain experience and work your way up,  and take college course later, when you are more able to decide what you actually want to learn whilst in school.

I don’t drive but I’m very adamantly against this program. $4500 credit towards a 14500 car (which is moderately priced) means that you’re racking up $10,000in debt by participating.I originally thought that ecologically it might offset itself, but honestly, it’s more environmentally damaging to manufacture the newer cars (i remember reading articles somewhere about how keeping your old car was more envionmentally friendly than the process of creating a new prius) and the process necessary to destroy and decommission the old vehicles (hopefully recycling what can be recycled along the way).I’m all for environmentalism and helping out the common man, but a much better idea would have been to pump that money into greening our energy resources through creating wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric means and getting off of coal and petroleum.  Not only would it create jobs, which would have a more lasting effect, but could better our living conditions and ease some of the stress on US resources.

Nope. Apple’s a pretentious product. Almost across the board their products are vastly overpriced compared to their competition. (And though it may start a war,  a mac is still a pc [personal computer] )My $20 sansa works just fine.Another thing about this is a matter of quality. As the article states, the US’s manufacturing base has been absolutely gutted, which unfortunately, has resulted in our trade deficits due to a lack of goods to trade, but also has resulted in an inferior quality product. I’d probably be getting a better made iPod made in China than the US.  Plus, if I read correctly, his calculations are based off of final assembly. Where are the components manufactured, and what are the equivalent US labor costs there?