philosophy
Posts: 5284
Joined: 2/15/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Fellow Are you claiming the car engine consumes more gasoline when not running (mostly on idle producing nothing of value)? .....hi, i'm philosophy. We haven't met, but the above quote was just too much of a learning opportunity for me to ignore. Wrong technological object in the metaphor, you see.... Think of a bessemer furnace, something used in the production of tons of molten metal. They take a shitload of energy to run. So, by your logic, shutting it down overnight would save money, right? Wrong. That would cost an even bigger shitload of money. The problem is, that starting the damn thing is when a disproportionate amount of energy is used. So, shutting it down, far from being a cost saving measure, is in fact a good way of pissing money down a rope. Now, i'm not sure of the exact calculation......but you are correct in a sense. If the shut down is of a sufficient length it can offset the start up cost. However, then you have to factor in all the benefits of having the thing running. After all, you may save money by not running the furnace......but you're not making any either. Governments, despite the ideology, do a lot of useful things. One of which is to pay the military. To shut down government long enough to actually offset the cost of restarting it, how long are you prepared to not pay your military? A day? A week? A month? Six months? The devil is in the details. It's an excellent phrase. The devil is that which ones given ideology says is wrong. Details often mean we have to compromise our ideals. The current spirit of anti-compromise in US domestic politics is the problem, not the solution.
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