and so it begins...

this is great.... geez

you cannot comment in your own thread as if you just read the link!!1 you read it before any of us did!!!1one

i noticed the very same thing. awesome.

but it is better than the original plan to scrap the hybrid tax break all together. 

i think the better solution would be to rely more on large-scale centralized powerplants rather than small localized powerplants for all of our non-human-powerable needs. ride a bike walk, cognate when you have to, but for many, such as those in a supply field it's extremely difficult to use such a "friendly" powersource. the solution of using only localized goods and services seems rather naive to me.  We live in a global world, and use global goods. but the truth about car powerplants is that regardless of whether it's a big mac diesel or a tiny little prius, it's not doing much better than 30% on efficiency scale. whereas a large powerplant (implying you would have an electric motor in your car) is going to be far more efficient in terms of what it puts out energywise versus what you put in resourcewise, as well as producing far less pollution per watt.  The problem with a lot of "eco-friendly" solutions to things is that those in charge tend to get a myopic focus on one aspect of what they consider to be bad, and then go to great, often more devastating overall, lengths to get rid of a small bad.  for instance, i am a big fan (not nearly as big as i am of nuclear, said nuke-you-lar) of bio-diesel. not because it is a "renewable" resource that we grow thereby removing our dependence on foreign oils. but because the people who seem to use and advocate it get all of their fuel from the spent wastes at buger places. they are using something that's otherwise trash (conversely i think those nutbags that want to run things on chickenshit are total whackjobs). but if they were to grow their own biodiesel, i would line up to oppose them. simply because they would be consuming vast amounts of otherwise beautiful wilderness to power their cars, cars that still pollute by the way.  whereas crude oil takes its cache from deep in the earth, leaving a rather small footprint on the face of the earth. and this is why i am such a fan of nuclear power (most return for the smallest investment as it were).  i ride a bike because it's fun, not because i'm worried about the earth, and i think we will run out of oil soon. if that were the case i would burn as much oil as i could afford just to further along our depletion of it and thereby speed along the inevitable need for everyone to ride bikes or take rikshas everywhere. but i know that will not be the case. mankind will not run out of energy, our means to make energy from what we have will adapt as we need them to. running out of oil wont make us live like mad max (although i have really been looking forward to driving around in a v8 with extra fuel tanks and a turbo, battling for go-juice with nuclear-winter-fallout-mutants). all of the Limits models for the past 500 years have all been proven wrong. they predict we will run out of this, or that, or that we will consume so much that we will bury ourselves in our own wastes, or that we will force the earth to burn us alive, or freeze us to death. personally, anyone who says that mankind can impact global climate on an appreciable scale should be considered suspect. now, i'm not saying burn it all and we'll be ok, but i am saying that no one takes into account the ingenuity of humans when they belt out these alarmist claims about such and such. sorry to get all scatterbrained here, but there's a lot i want to say about this sort of thing and not enough keystrokes or time to say it all.  i will restate my starting point though, that while bikes are fun, and can be used as a means of cheating the system and effectively increasing your income bracket while at the same time not contributing to anything other than small scale carbon dioxide (exhaling) and methane (increased food wastes from an active lifestyle) emissions, they should not be viewed as a replacement to large-scale motorized transport. nor should we ever consider any energy solution that consumes large amounts of wilderness a viable alternative to one that leaves the forests and the fields intact. and as far as pollution goes, use the one system that seems to work regardless of what we do (market) and introduce across-the-board pollution credits. nothing drives efficiency like free market. and nothing kills it more than government stagnate-mandates.  sorry again for wasting everyone's time with that. and i am sorry mindy, and to anyone else the other night if any of my actions were inappropriate, i have little if any memory of what happened and no chronology whatsoever, but apparently i was having as good a time as a zombie could be expected to have.