CSpec

Except your assertions of rule of law are intermixed with statements about immigrants stealing the jobs of Americans, who are more entitled to them because they had the good luck of being born on this side of the fence.

You're ignoring the fact that there is basically no legal avenue for legal immigration anyway, so it's a useless distinction. It's a red herring in order to oppose immigration generally. Saying you only support legal immigration, but then support a system that allows for very little legal immigration, doesn't strike me as supportive of immigration.

The EPA’s Electric Vehicle Mileage Fraud Forbes The Nissan Leaf was rated at 99 MPGe. To reach this number, the EPA created a conversion factor between a quantity of electric energy, measured in kilowatt-hours (KwH) and a volume of gasoline, measured in gallons. They did this be dividing the potential energy or heating value of a gallon of gasoline (115,000 BTUs) by the energy in a KwH of electricity (3412 BTUs) to get a conversion factor of 33.7 gallons per KwH. Using this factor, they can convert miles per KwH of electricity in an electric vehicle to an MPGe that is supposedly comparable to more traditional vehicles. The problem is that, using this methodology, the EPA is comparing apples to oranges. The single biggest energy loss in fossil fuel combustion is the step when we try to capture useful mechanical work (ie spinning a driveshaft in a car or a generator in a power plant) from the heat of the fuel’s combustion. Even the most efficient processes tend to capture only half of the potential energy of the fuel. There can be other losses in the conversion and distribution chain, but this is by far the largest. The EPA is therefore giving the electric vehicle a huge break. When we measure mpg on a traditional car, the efficiency takes a big hit due to the conversion efficiencies and heat losses in combustion. The same thing happens when we generate electricity, but the electric car in this measurement is not being saddled with these losses, even though we know they still occur in the system. Lets consider an analogy. We want to measure how efficiently two different workers can install a refrigerator in a customer’s apartment. In both cases the customer lives in a fourth floor walkup. The first installer finds the refrigerator has been left on the street. He has to spend much of his time struggling to haul the appliance up four flights of stairs. After that, relatively speaking, the installation is a breeze. The second installer finds his refrigerator has thoughtfully been delivered right to the customer’s door on the fourth floor. He quickly brings the unit inside and completes the installation. So who is a better installer? If one only looks at the installer’s time, the second person looks orders of magnitude better. But we know that he is only faster because he offloaded much of the work on the delivery guys. If we were to look at the total time of the delivery person plus the installer, we’d probably find they were much closer in their productivity. The same is true of the mileage standards — by the EPA’s metric, the electric vehicle looks much better than the traditional vehicle, but that is only because someone else at the power plant had to do the really hard bit of work that the traditional auto must do itself. Having electricity rather than gasoline in the tank is the equivalent of starting with the refrigerator at the top rather than the bottom of the stairs. An apples to apples comparison, then, would compare the traditional car’s MPG with the Leaf’s miles per gallon of gasoline (or gasoline equivalent) that would have to be burned to generate the electricity it uses. Incredibly, the DOE actually established and published such a standard in a rules-making process way back in Clinton Administration. The standard, called “well to wheels,” adds a couple new factors to the MPGe calculation we discussed above. First, the DOE looked at the electrical generation efficiency, and determined that only 32.8% of the potential energy in the fossil fuel becomes electric energy in the average US power plant, which it further reduced to 30.3% to account for transmission losses. However, they realized it was unfair to charge electric vehicles for these losses without also charging gasoline-powered vehicles for the energy cost of refining and gasoline distribution. They calculated these as adding 20% to the energy it takes to run a gas-powered car, but rather than reducing exiting MPG standards by this amount, they instead gave a credit back to electric vehicles. The 30.3% electric production and distribution factor was increased to a final adjustment factor of 36.5%. This means that the conversion factor discussed above of 33.7 gallons/KwH must be multiplied by 36.5% to get a true apples to apples MPGe figure. The end result is startling. Using the DOE’s apples to apples methodology, the MPGe of the Nissan Leaf is not 99 but 36! Now, 36 is a good mileage number, but it is pretty pedestrian compared to the overblown expectations for electric vehicles, and is actually lower than the EPA calculated mileage of a number of hybrids and even a few traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. Supporters of the inflated EPA standards have argued that they are appropriate because they measure cars on their efficiency of using energy in whatever form is put in their tank (or batteries). But this is disingenuous. The whole point of US fuel economy standards is not power train efficiency per se, but to support an energy policy aimed at reducing fossil fuel use. To this end, the more sophisticated DOE standard is a much better reflection of how well the Nissan Leaf affects US fossil fuel use. The only reason not to use this standard is because the EPA, and the Administration in general, has too many chips on the table behind electric vehicles, and simply can’t afford an honest accounting. In the private sector, this is called accounting fraud and a number of high profile executives are in jail for doing something similar.

Yeah, Bush tried to get NYC airports to have an auction system for landing slots, but corporatist airlines freaked out. Still far less subsidized than the big model toy train set called Amtrak though. Competition is a wonderful thing.

How is this not xenophobic again?

I like when you don't read my post: "As most airport costs are paid for out of airport landing fees, subsidies to air travel were even smaller: about 0.1 cent per passenger mile."

CATO In 2006, Americans paid $93.6 billion in tolls, gas taxes, and other highway user fees. Of this amount, $19.3 billion was diverted to mass transit and other non highway activities. At the same time, various governments—mainly local—spent $44.5 billion in property, sales, or other taxes on highways, roads, and streets. The net subsidy to highways was $25.1 billion, or about half a penny per passenger mile. As most airport costs are paid for out of airport landing fees, subsidies to air travel were even smaller: about 0.1 cent per passenger mile. Transit carries only 1.5 percent of urban travel and Amtrak carries only 0.2 percent of intercity travel, yet transit and intercity rail require huge subsidies. In 2006, subsidies to Amtrak totaled just over $1 billion, or about 22 cents per passenger mile. This is more than 40 times the subsidies to driving. Subsidies to public transit totaled about 61 cents per passenger mile, or 120 times the subsidies to autos and highways.

And? Are you going to say we should ban all immigrants and imports?

Oh boy, replace nationalized, subsidized air travel with nationalized, subsidized rail service. That sounds great.

What's your point?

People should be very afraid that TSA will continue to get worse and air travel will be nationalized in response to mass airline bankruptcies in the face of a declining customer base. God help us if that happens.

Are you one of those people who completely dodges the question of what to do about the millions of undocumented residents that are already here? Have you heard of status quo bias? Just because a law is what it is doesn't mean it should be that way. The legal immigration process is insane, much like the drug war. Notice how the fact that pot is illegal doesn't really stop people from smoking it? Your thinking is backwards. Immigration numbers are very highly correlated with employment opportunities--immigration is down significantly in the past few years, and in fact many immigrants have gone back the other way (both skilled and unskilled alike). Immigrants don't just show up and suckle at the teat of the taxpayer; there is only a stream of immigrants if there are jobs for them to fill. Market forces take care of it. Get back to me when the laid off IT guy wants to work at a meat-packing plant.

What? A positive derivative is growth. It takes time to rebuild after a speculative bubble--resources that were mistakenly poured into non-real assets need to be reallocated to productive sectors. Shopping, profits, and employment are all improving.

Alright, ignoring the stupid populist Bolshevism, here's some more data: Mall traffic for November 2010 has shown a steep rise recently, according to a report released today by Thomson Reuters. Using satellite images the firm is able to measure parking lot traffic, which correlates well with same-store sales. “Based on this relationship, we may be seeing an early sign that stronger November 2010 mall traffic is pointing to stronger same-store sales,” wrote Thomson Reuters analyst Jharonne Martis-Olivo in the report. At 3.5%, the Thomson Reuters Same-Store Sales Index for November is significantly stronger than the 0.5% in November 2009 and the -7.8% for November 2008.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-gdp-revised-higher-to-25-in-third-quarter-2010-11-23?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Then immigrant workers tend to go home (either to Guatemala or to India with their American PhD). There were lots of stories last year about immigrants sneaking back the other way. But the economy is growing at the moment.

You're making a classic mistake, assuming that the economy is a fixed pie and that immigrants must directly replace a native-born on the assembly line. That is not true. Illegal immigrants come here to work, which means there is a large market that would like to hire them in order to sell their products and increase wealth. Note that illegal immigration has slowed substantially in the downturn because of fewer work opportunities. Did your ancestors not escape the Old World in order to work their way up in the the US?

If they aren't illegal for any particular reason, it doesn't make sense to freak out that they're entering the country illegally to work. Just change the law. And I don't think you're a migrant worker picking berries in Florida--you go to the store and pay low prices for those berries.

You know those drug cartels only exist because they supply the American drug market, right? It's American policy that creates them.

This is just completely incorrect. Besides, we're mainly talking about immigrants who are already here and working away, making your life better.

You refer to specific xenophobic acts of Congress in the 20s. You need to look before that--the proportion of foreign born residents in the US was much higher in the 1890s than it is today.

That's how it worked for many years in this country. If it hadn't been for that, we would be Australia. Nice country, no people.

The Economist One of the things that's so attractive to you about America is it's sound institutions, including its sturdy rule of law. You would very much like to migrate to the United States legally. So what are your options? Zip. Zilch. Zero. You have no options! There is no way to "get in line" and "wait your turn" because there is no line for you to stand in that leads to the legal right to live and work in the United States. So you pack up one day, take a hair-raising hike through the desert with your young daughter, meet up with your friends in Tucson, and get to work on the American dream. What were you supposed to do? Consign yourself and your daughter to a life on the edge of poverty out of respect for the American rule of law? Please.

The Economist Suppose your parents moved to America from Mexico without legal permission when you were five years old. You grow up in America. You graduate from high school in America. You're an American in every sense except the legal one. You want to go to college, but because your parents came into the country illicitly, you don't qualify for government financial aid, and you can't get legal work. If caught by immigration authorities, you face the possibility of detention or deportation, even though this is, in every sense, your home. That doesn't seem fair. Every year, over 60,000 kids like you graduate high school in the United States. And unless something like the DREAM Act becomes law, you and they will become part of a growing class of marginalised and unprotected Americans without papers.