Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

"We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes." - Frederich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom We used Executive Orders to subvert the legislative process, and now we're worried we'll use Executive Orders to subvert the legislative process. We said it was "OK" to have all this surveillance, because we trusted those in charge of the information. Now we're worried about all this surveillance because those in charge of the information. We quashed the fillibuster with the "nuclear option" to grunt through legislation, and now we're worried we'll quash the fillibuster with the "nuclear option" to grunt through appointees. We pushed through legislation without any bipartisan support, and now we're worried that we'll push through legislation without any bipartisan support. We tried "Faithless Electors" to over-...

By now you are well aware of the Volkswagen “TDI Scandal”: In September 2015 VW got caught by a West Virginia University lab [1] cheating on its emissions testing procedures for 2009 – 2015 VW 2.0L TDI-equipped cars. Simply put, the EPA accused VW of putting code in its ECU to recognize that the car was being officially tested by the EPA and adjust the engine appropriately to pass the tests [2] . However, when the car was being driven normally by the consumer, the ECU code would revert to different emissions levels to improve drivability and fuel economy. [3] The result was increased emissions of NOx, claimed by the EPA to be “of 10 to 40 times above EPA compliant levels”. VW could have addressed this by the addition of “selective catalytic reduction”, or SCR, which involves injecting urea into the exhaust; this is what they did on 2016 and later models. However, doing so affects the packaging of the components (tank, heater, mixer) in the smaller vehicle and around the susp...