Dean Kamen just built a Mini Cooper that runs on a sterling engine, and uses junked food oil and garbage for fuel, and theoretically sells for $5K. I don’t know anything about science, but that sounds cool to me. I personally think that getting the brains where they need to be is more important than building a slightly-better-pre-nanotech car.

After all, there will be near perfect travel (forget cars! Paul Maccready is right, in the environment of the future! …And how long after advanced development will we even be traveling at slower than electron-simulation speeds?) after enough brains meet in the right conditions. So let’s just get the nanotech people meeting with each other, and who cares if they drive there in gas-guzzlers, so long as they can afford to?

…I also don’t care how much gas is burned. If we actually had a free market, we could correct for any problems caused, if evolution didn’t simply keep pace anyway. Heaping power on the already power-drunk and inept government is not a good idea. The EPA does nothing valuable that couldn’t be accomplished voluntarily (unless you think stealing farmers’ land is “valuable”).

Moreover, the problems attendant to too little liberty are unbelievably stifling, and tend to be underestimated by everyone who doesn’t naturally find themselves in a fight to the death with the government.

The fundamental principles serve as a good guide. Government requires the initiation of force for every function it currently serves. If it was voluntary, how much of it would go away? 99%

And we’d all be happier and not so bullied. Eric would be richer and more productive, as naturally good thinkers are rewarded in a rational environment.

I’ve always been surprised at the lack of free market thought on genius-level science boards. Is it true that Kurzweil and Drexler have thought out anarcho-capitalists Lysander Spooner, Carl Watner, and Marc Stevens’ statements and disagreed with them?

I don’t think so. I think rather that they always stop short of thinking them through fully, because of the emotional pain it brings their world view to do so: There is no immediate payoff, and the threat of long boring hard work (battling bureaucracies) and social ostracization. Moreover, there is the feeling of wrongness in not having acted sooner on a subject that it of primary moral importance.

(Who feels good about tolerating slavery? When literal chattel slavery existed in the South, mainstream Northerners and Southerners found bogus arguments to defend it. Of course, none of those arguments held up when honestly examined, but survived because there was no benefit seen to “fighting city hall”.)

Also: although Eric makes his living thinking about things vastly more complex than I am even capable of thinking about, it’s possible he simply has less experience with tyranny than I have. Moreover, it’s also possible to hold a concept in one’s mind abstractly, but not value its widespread implications, or to imagine that the negative implications are not as far-reaching as the abstract thought indicates they COULD be. Such as: Although the rule of law has broken down, and there are no more proper jury trials, per se, most people probably get a fair jury trial, anyway, because most people are decent people.

(Without examining the court system and prison system, and economic stagnation, –in relation to what it COULD be– that might appear to be true.)

Gallons per mile. Interesting. I’ll have to think about that.

BTW: Is Bjorn Llomborg (“The Skeptical Environmentalist”) wrong? Has Eric addressed Llomborg’s ideas elsewhere? I was under the impression Llomborg had some good arguments. But I admittedly have a defective wetware “math brain”.

I don’t expect to see mpg go away, of course, but there’s no great barrier to also quoting gallons per hundred miles, especially in policy-oriented discussions. Using gphm is just another way to use familiar English units, and makes it easier to think about the cost of what we do. Thinking in terms of mpg, people pay too little attention to numerically small differences in the low-mpg range. It’s hard to estimate how many more millions of barrels of oil are consumed as a result.

I wish the US used metric units (and have given up on it), but the advantage here is more fundamental. Neither pounds nor kilograms is actually confusing.

Other than that — sensible suggestion. I expect it’ll happen any day now, the same week you actually start metric units, which also makes sense, for quite similar reasons.