Venezuela oil is good for paving roads for more cars to warm the planet with and finally end the quaternary ice age, so the whole planet can be nice and tropical again for a few hundred million years.

I grew up with Christmas in summer. To me, that is how it should be, with sun, sea and sex on the beach.

See this for a graph of the last 2.5 billion years: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Ff... We are right now in the quaternary ice age - possibly in the middle of it. An ice age lasts for a few million years, while the normal hothouse periods when both poles are ice free and which are about 15 degrees warmer, last hundreds of millions of years.

The Soviets used metric.

Do you mean the Johnny-come-lately Americans? I guess they were operating on Imperial time. They did bring a bunch of very useful 105 and 155 mm Howitzers though.

Not a special legal category that is less than, usually a lot less than, the "minimum" legally allowed.

The US: if we have to pay people enough that they can afford to live and have health care then the industry will die!

The rest of the world: ???

Man, you just made me snort my corn flakes - it hurts!

Technically, we are still in an ice age. The earth is most of the time a little bit warmer. If you are wondering what is normal - the 185 million years of the Mesozoic period is probably it.

So it's a plan with no drawbacks?

I do recognize that this is an issue for the disabled, but it's unsustainable for them as well, and I reject temporary solutions that aren't backed up by permanent ones. If the plan is only to kick the can and wish for a miracle, it's a bad plan.

That's not even wrong, it's just not how anything works. You're comparing a motor to an energy storage mechanism and also ignoring efficiency at the same time.

Monthly payments matter. Also when people are poor and can't afford big payments and the vehicles are very expensive then they wind up spending a lot in interest. TCO matters but so does monthly cost.

They have existed for decades. What did you actually mean to say?

No military of consequence is going to shift to purely electric vehicles any time soon because of refueling times alone, but in number of roles an EV has an advantage because it's quiet and reliable. If you can deliver a tanker truck, then you can deliver a generator.

Most of my coworkers have to go out of county for even fairly basic medical care because there isn't anything available here and wait times can be into the months. I had referrals for over a year that I never even got a call back on. It's not clear why you think that the USA has functional medical care, but in many cases and places it very much does not.

It depends on how you define it. If you think of it from a purely mineral basis then sure, the arctic is not looking at many changes. If you're thinking about the animal life that is there, it's in trouble. We are not the only animals on this mudball.