for the purposes of discussion only

It has been a central disagreement on this blog that you want it to be like two beer drinking buddies in a bar, and I want it to be the debate club. And I know I am way to argumentative, people tell me that often, and in fact even with my beer drinking buddies I am pretty argumentative. Probably I am not so relentless at the bar though because there are all these breaks to order another beer, or somebody new enters the bar, or something, whereas sitting here in the rising sun fueling myself with coffee, there is nothing to stop me.

There’s this whole thing about the KBW which I know is just a fantasy, this is just two old guys flapping their gums at each other, and everytime I try to entice some innocent bystander by dragging them into this blog, they take a quick look, utter a quick, “Verynice,” and quickly change the subject.

But you know I am curious. I’ve always been curious about why people think the way they do, and KBW crap aside, that’s why I ask these questions, and if their answers don’t make sense to me I want to ask more questions, and if they say something that I don’t think is true well I have to argue about that. And mostly I am talking about facts here, not opinions. I think you have to have your facts straight because I also believe it is an objective universe and facts can be determined to be true or false. I would be much happier if you said when sitting in my duck blind suchandsuch occurred to me, rather than I read suchandsuch somewhere.

I’m somewhat reluctant to even accept you for the purposes of discussion only premise, because I like to follow something to a conclusion, but we have pretty much banged this up to the point of boredom, and in truth we are just two old guys flapping our gums at each other, so okay.

As for your solution I would like to say first that everytime my dems want to spend money to develop alternative fuels your reps shoot them down, secondly all the money spent on these studies is probably less than the Koch brothers rake in in a week, much of which money goes to elect pro coal and oil pols, third hydrogen fuel cells don’t capture any energy they just transfer it from one source to another, fourthly cold fusion is pie in the sky at the present time, fifthly what you are saying is a little like saying let’s take all the money spent to promote Obamacare and spend it all on curing every disease known to man.

We can spend a gazillion bucks and successfully send a spaceship to the moon, but we can spend a gazillion dollars to invent something but there is no certainty that the invention will take place.

I am curious about your phrase of allowing somebody to take it to market. This sounds like all those rumors that went around when we were kids, but I don’t hear them that much lately, that some kind of energy source has been discovered, but THEY are holding it down because THEY fear it will hurt THEIR profits somehow. Actually you always see an enemy somewhere, usually the govt, but it could be anybody because THEY is everybody but you.

How about this for tossing something into the conversation because like that bar vs debate club, I think it is a fundamental difference between the two of us. When something goes wrong you think there must be an enemy doing it, whereas I think it is a bunch of assholes who don’t know what they are doing.

So what’s my solution then? Well I am a little weak here, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, solar, wind, unlike most of my ilk I could go with nuclear, cleaner smokestacks, more efficiency, almost all enforced by those hated gov regulations because nobody is going to do it on their own. I think this last plan that the eco people have proposed included a blueprint which they figured would not hurt the economy too much, but I confessed I haven’t even skimmed it because it will never happen.

Smoking anyone?