If hybrid car is good, why is hybrid seed bad?



  • Hybrid seed is increasing production and helping starving people feed.

    Filed Under: Monsanto Rules the Universe.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Some people just need to hate things they don't understand.


  • BINNED

    I seriously heard someone complain that hybrids/electrics are too quiet. Not in safety sense mind you. No. He complained that he can't rev his engine for "sick sound".

    Another guy complained on the same account but limited to electrics only. Why? Because he won't know when to shift unless he can hear the engine. Now, granted, I shift "by ear" myself, but I couldn't get it into his thick skull that, when properly executed, an electric car doesn't need or have gears.

    So yeah, ignorance mixed with stupidity,



  • @Onyx said:

    I seriously heard someone complain that hybrids/electrics are too quiet. Not in safety sense mind you. No. He complained that he can't rev his engine for "sick sound".

    When I was a bit younger, I used to have one of those beauties:

    And let me tell you, an old motorbike's engine is a music for the ears. And that's 50ccm, a Jawa or MZ bike could pretty much write symphonies.

    And I was shifting by ear too, mostly because those things didn't have such a thing as a tachometer.

    Another thing to consider is that when I first got into a car, I drove for about 2 minutes without realizing I'm doing 90 kph on a dirt road - just because there was no real audible feedback. I was like "oh hey, that's cool and calm... holy shit!".

    @Onyx said:

    when properly executed, an electric car doesn't need or have gears.

    I thought it was the other way around - you can do without gears, but it impacts your performance.



  • Could be true for electrics too.

    If you try to limit your output from your batteries because you don't have gears and want a low speed, maybe you'll find out that limiting to a certain low output is inefficient or even damaging.

    Just a thought.


  • BINNED

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    And that's 50ccm, a Jawa or MZ bike could pretty much write symphonies.

    Ahhh, MZs... Never had one, but I had a Tomos 14 which is... well, very similar to that actually. The leg guards were removed though. Also, on first glance, bigger wheels. I never seen one like that, I mostly see the bigger (125cc and 250cc) ones around here.

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Another thing to consider is that when I first got into a car, I drove for about 2 minutes without realizing I'm doing 90 kph on a dirt road - just because there was no real audible feedback. I was like "oh hey, that's cool and calm... holy shit!".

    It's all a matter of habit, really. I drove quiet cars, I drove loud cars, had to adjust to each one. First time I drove a car with a larger diesel engine I thought I just broke every speed limit in the book before realizing I'm still in second gear.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    @Onyx said:
    when properly executed, an electric car doesn't need or have gears.

    I thought it was the other way around - you can do without gears, but it impacts your performance.

    Electric motors don't need the same sort of gearing as internal combustion engines; they've got an entirely different angular-velocity/torque graph. The main thing limiting their use in cars for a long time was the mass of an efficient motor and battery system (by contrast, diesel train engines have used electric transmissions for quite a while precisely because it works better and they don't have the same weight constraints). Hybrids tend to use the ICE to feed power into the electric circuit, which helps a lot, since you can then tune the engine for running at a single speed instead of needing power over a wide range.



  • @dkf said:

    Electric motors don't need the same sort of gearing as internal combustion engines; they've got an entirely different angular-velocity/torque graph.

    And electric motors themselves have vastly different speed/torque graphs depending on the design of the motor.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Some people just need to hate things they don't understand.

    GMOs are fine. Monsanto is a comic book villain.



  • GMO is too broad a label. It covers stuff like breeding (relatively benign, if encouraging monoculture in food production) to physically inserting genes from bacteria into plants. For example, plants are being engineered to make pharmaceuticals. Genetic engineering has the power to create plants that contain unsafe chemicals.



  • @Captain said:

    Genetic engineering has the power to create plants that contain unsafe chemicals.

    Sure, but so does rain and pesticides. Pretty much everything can kill you if used improperly.



  • But we don't and can't know when we're using genetic engineering improperly...


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @ben_lubar said:

    Monsanto is a comic book villain.

    People who say this with a straight face shouldn't be taken seriously.

    @Captain said:

    But we don't and can't know when we're using genetic engineering improperly...

    If that's really true, then I guess the downside is pretty minimal. Sweet.



  • Yeah, the downsides are just the possibility of a cancer epidemic. Or accidentally engineering prions. It would be like smoking all over again.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Oh, so we would know.



  • ...

    Probably not in your lifetime. Especially if it gets cut short.

    Also, consider that it took about a hundred years of statistics before people believed smoking caused cancer. And that had a single factor to consider.

    How much data will we need to figure out which plants are safe (or rather, which one is causing an epidemic), if they're all engineered?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I'm more worried about killer asteroids and mega volcanoes.

    SMOD 2012: On The Issues – 01:01
    — Drew McCoy


    Filed Under: And by worried about, I mean I want to vote for them



  • @boomzilla said:

    @ben_lubar said:
    Monsanto is a comic book villain.

    People who say this with a straight face shouldn't be taken seriously.

    Monsanto files lawsuits against farmers who have a few of their neighbors' seeds carried by the wind into their fields for infringing on Monsanto's patented Soybean™ technology and blacklists them from ever buying a Monsanto product. So even if they wanted to pay for the seeds that were dropped on their farm by someone else, they can't.

    Or so I've heard.



  • @Onyx said:

    I seriously heard someone complain that hybrids/electrics are too quiet. Not in safety sense mind you. No. He complained that he can't rev his engine for "sick sound".

    Once we move to electric cars, I'm going to miss the grunt of a nice, large displacement V8.


    Filed under: [Although I suppose one could tune it to run on ethanol and have a lean, green, laughable fuel economy machine.][1]


  • @ben_lubar said:

    Monsanto files lawsuits against farmers who have a few of their neighbors' seeds carried by the wind into their fields for infringing on Monsanto's patented Soybean™ technology and blacklists them from ever buying a Monsanto product. So even if they wanted to pay for the seeds that were dropped on their farm by someone else, they can't.

    Or so I've heard.

    That wasn't true. The guys from Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast did a little research into that story. Seems the guy wasn't sued because wind carried the seeds, but because he liked what he saw when that happened (better quality products etc) so he started spreading the seeds himself.


  • BINNED

    @Groaner said:

    Once we move to electric cars, I'm going to miss the grunt of a nice, large displacement V8.

    Oh, I agree. But the argument that electrics are not viable vehicles because there's no "grunt" is absurd.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Groaner said:

    Once we move to electric cars, I'm going to miss the grunt of a nice, large displacement V8.

    Maybe, but there's also not much to beat the grunt of a Harley-Davidson.

    Filed under: you don't need a big engine to be the coolest car about



  • You could use the energy savings to play audio clips of cars with louder engines.



  • This is true, and is already seeing use. VW has their "soundaktor" system. I remember watching Beyond Tomorrow (or Beyond 2000) in the late 80s, where they showed a neat system that would let you switch between like 10 different engine sounds.


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