Autoblog

+1000

Much of the debate here has turned toward global warming, CO2, alergies, trees, and

But lets step back a second. How much "polution" is generated from this form of entertainment vs.:

- millions of gas-guzzling RVs traveling about the country for what? For entertainment, that's what.

- millions of vacationing families driving SUVs and minivans packed full of kids and gear, heading of to Disney Land. And for what? For entertainment, that's what.

- millions of people going out to clubs, bars, movies, parties visiting friends or whatever else you enjoy. And all for what? Well for that pesky entertainment again.

So, let me get this straight - its ok to waste gas in order to get to a entertainment destination, but its not ok to merely be entertained by the act of driving? Wow. I say, it is this level of terminally harmful short thinking, falacial reasoning, and hypocrisy that is wrong with America! Just because someone points a finger, doesn't mean they actually thought anything through beforehand. Its really ok, and even encouraged, to think about what they are actually saying before jumping on the bandwagon. I mean damn, these people should just be slapped silly for making such dumb arguments.

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Maybe it's just me, but 650,000 lbs for 200 supercars isn't so bad. That's just 3250lbs per person, which is well below the average footprint of an individual.

If they ride a bike a lot, or stay green, it's fine to do this rally.

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Mr. Porter, imagine a Veyron, exactly as it is. Now, add technology to make it weigh about 1500 pounds, being fully recyclable and creating no hazardous emissions. I appreciate a Veyron's engineering and design as much as I appreciate the technological leaps that lead from the Wright brothers to supercharging aircraft in WWII and to supercruise technology on the F22 Raptor, so why is it impossible to work for a Veyron (or any such vehicle) that can do 253mph and still make the greenies/tree-huggers feel good? It's not impossible if will is there.

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Mr. Porter, imagine a Veyron, exactly as it is. Now, add technology to make it weigh about 1500 pounds, being fully recyclable and creating no hazardous emissions. I appreciate a Veyron's engineering and design as much as I appreciate the technological leaps that lead from the Wright brothers to supercharging aircraft in WWII and to supercruise technology on the F22 Raptor, so why is it impossible to work for a Veyron (or any such vehicle) that can do 253mph and still make the greenies/tree-huggers feel good? It's not impossible if will is there.

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You compare what's happening here to the evolution of an airplane from a mode of transport into one of the most advanced devices BUILT TO KILL PEOPLE known to man.

I think your comparison is unlikely to convince people that doing things to the Veyron is innocuous.

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I Don't understand what the big deal is regarding co2, don't trees love it? aren't trees good? I don't believe in man made global warming anyway. mars is also heating up (from sun), so I would recommend these drivers to just have fun

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7a9_1199627199

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That's not the sun. It's our CO2 wafting through space, everyone knows it! And if you believe that, I got a bridge for sale. Maybe they can use it in the Antarctic to save the polar bears that apparently forgot how to swim, too.

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Well, as someone with a bit of knowledge about the medical side of things, I will point out that it's true that trees do in fact love CO2. See, they love the higher levels of CO2 so much that they try to reproduce much more.
Unfortunately, this has mostly just resulted in insanely high concentrations of pollen being spewed out by trees, causing a rapid increase in all sorts of allergies. It's not a coincidence that kids have way more allergies these days and people are consuming vast amounts of allergy medications.

And anyways, the trees don't really reproduce much better for all their extra pollen since we probably cut down any random trees that sprout up where they shouldn't, so they're still limited by space.

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I guess my point with the previous post is that CO2 emissions aren't neccessarily even about global warming. People have to stop assuming that whatever they do can only cause one thing or another. Everything you do causes all sorts of chain reactions, for better or for worse.

In this case it's actually caused medical problems, and mostly for human beings (whose immune systems aren't under quite the level of assault from actual bacteria, etc, as animals' immune systems are). So all the smart-asses talking about how it helps trees grow, well that's not always a good thing.

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tekdemon: there are roughly 9-bajillion species of plants that all use photosynthesis. How many of these are you allergic to?

The point is that the environment has negative feedback abilities that make the whole CO2 --> hotter temperatures too oversimplified to accept without some serious skepticism.

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I agree the environment has negative feedback capabilities. This is something, btw, that many greenies think is not so. They refer to us being at a "tipping point", which seems unlikely to me.

However, it is possible to change the CO2 makeup of the atmosphere more quickly than the negative feedback systems can respond to reverse the buildup. It would seem we've already overwhelmed any short-term negative feedback systems, since CO2 overall in the atmosphere is rising. It's is not clear at this point if medium-term and longer-term systems will come into play to halt or reverse the CO2 buildup. I, for one, don't really want to find out and thus would rather moderate our carbon emissions.

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I think it's safer to say, that allergies don't react so much to the quantity of natural pollen as they do to the different kinds of GMO and weird things inside them. Or there would be more bees...

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@cheezwiz, me personally? I have no clue, but my allergies don't usually get any worse than some itchy eyes.
BTW, you do realize that pollen from all those bazillion species of trees travels all over the planet, right? Wind can carry pollen many thousands of miles away...that's the whole point of pollen.
I'm a med student and all the medical data shows that the number of kids with allergies has skyrocketed. And don't think just because it's pollen it can't help to produce allergies to OTHER things. The onslaught of pollen basically causes your immune system to go haywire and start attacking when you come into contact with all sorts of stuff, since your immune system isn't perfect at telling things apart. So once the pollen triggers an allergic reaction, any other substance that looks similar to your immune system will start causing reactions as well.
Allergic reactions often come together with each other since it's essentially the immune system malfunctioning. So while you may think it's harmless or just annoying that seasonal allergies have multiplied, you should keep in mind that those serious food allergies might very well be related to the fact that kids' immune systems have been bombarded with tons of plant pollen beforehand.
If you really don't believe pollen and food can cross-react please read these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome
http://pediatrics.about.com/od/foodallergies/a/0806_oral_alrgy.htm

There's a ton of kids with crazy food allergies to all kinds of fruits and vegetables all because the insane amounts of pollen in the air has caused their immune system to start attacking any similar plant materials. Kids' immune systems aren't smart enough to always tell apart the pollen from a plant from the stuff in a peanut.

And if you don't think the fact that peanut allergies have DOUBLED (peanuts cross react with all the pollens on the wikipedia page) in the last 10 years is a problem...well, I have two 2nd cousins who are 4 and 6 years old. From two different cousins (who had different parents), who married people of 2 totally different ethnicities. And both of these kids go into anaphylactic shock if they eat a peanut.

But whatever, don't listen to me, I mean what the heck do I know about the immune system and allergies right? I mean, I'm just some moron who's actually studied immunology. Just don't be too surprised when your kids have peanut allergies, or some other insane fruit/vegetable allergy that makes you constantly paranoid that they're going to go into shock at school. Keep pumping out CO2 without giving a rats ass. I mean who cares if your kids and your grandkids all have insane immune system problems right?

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BTW, I love how both fritz and cheezwiz came up with their own "common sense" versions of how allergies work, based on either the "bazillion different species" argument (which makes no sense, just more trees to be allergic to), and the "organic food" merchant's wet dream of blaming GMO or whatever. But if either of you actually just read up about how your immune system actually works, and how pollen can obviously cross-react to all kinds of food like in the rather informative wikipedia link I linked to you'd probably realized that it's much more likely that the huge spike in seasonal allergies and pollen counts have lead to the huge spike in deadly food allergies.
Am I saying that genetically modified foods can't be more allergenic? No, I'm not. Some of them might accidentally be. But then again genetically modified foods can also be modified to be less allergenic, so it does not make any sense to be against GMO as far as allergies go.
Seriously, these "common sense" theories only seem plausible if you don't actually know anything about allergies. And companies like Whole Foods would like nothing more than for everyone to buy super expensive organic food from them in paranoia of allergies. But seriously, instead of randomly blaming GMOs or vaccines or whatever other thing that happened to have been invented in the last 30 years, how about blaming the friggin' pollen that has very obviously and solidly been shown to cause allergies and cause your immune system to cross-react with foods? The same pollen that's been increasing in concentration perhaps?
Seriously though, please don't try to use common sense to try to think up explanations for stuff that's insanely complex. It's like trying to figure out the specific design layout of the hundreds of millions of transistors inside your computer's processor by guessing. Sure if you know a ton of stuff about computer processor design you might be able to draw out some of the likely basic computational pathways and layouts. But if you're not an electrical engineer you pretty much have zero chance of figuring out even one circuit out of millions using common sense or logic, no matter how smart you are.
For some bizarre reason people seem to think that their own bodies are easy to understand or simple, when in fact it's even more insanely and ridiculously complicated than the most complex microprocessor.

And don't get me wrong, I used to think up all sorts of what seemed like plausible explanations for allergies and stuff. All of them seemed like perfectly logical explanations, except that was only because I didn't actually know anything about the immune system. So if you want your crackpot theories to be more logical at least go read a book on immunology.

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