Producing Gasoline With Metabolically-Engineered Microorganisms 233
An anonymous reader writes "For many decades, we have been relying on fossil resources to produce liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and many industrial and consumer chemicals for daily use. However, increasing strains on natural resources as well as environmental issues including global warming have triggered a strong interest in developing sustainable ways to obtain fuels and chemicals. A Korean research team led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) reported, for the first time, the development of a novel strategy for microbial gasoline production through metabolic engineering of E. coli."
Sounds plausible (Score:5, Funny)
My poop already comes out black and tarry. Turning it into crude oil is the next logical step.
Re:Sounds plausible (Score:5, Funny)
e. soylent coli, it's made from people!
Re:Sounds plausible (Score:4, Funny)
My poop already comes out black and tarry. Turning it into crude oil is the next logical step.
Ah! A fellow Guinness drinker!
And let's not forget the wonderful gas!
I think we should have "energy farms" where we have a bunch of blokes with tubes up their arses, watching football, and drinking Guinness all day - and night.
The output is then piped to these wonderful little creatures and the energy problems of the World will be solved!
Re:Sounds plausible (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't you find a good stout where you live?
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http://mcauslan.com/en/beers/oatmeal-stout/ [mcauslan.com] + poutine will power quebec for decades to come.
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Obsidian Oatmeal Stout is my stout of choice.
Re:Sounds plausible (Score:4, Funny)
You might enjoy watching Aachi & Ssipak [wikipedia.org].
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Those with MOD points - how could you NOT raise this to a +5 Funny? I am dying - laughing!
Re:Sounds plausible (Score:5, Funny)
We at the Slashdot Moderation Group do not have a sense of humor that we are aware of, ma'am.
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I think we should have "energy farms" where we have a bunch of blokes with tubes up their arses, watching football, and drinking Guinness all day - and night.
Something like Matrix for jocks, as opposed to the 1999 Matrix for geeks?
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that is usually symptom of internal hemorrhaging. if you have this problem seek medical help at once as it can be fatal.
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who gives a shit?
Re:Sounds plausible (Score:5, Insightful)
My poop already comes out black and tarry. Turning it into crude oil is the next logical step.
While your comment was humorous, it isn't what made me laugh. That honor went to the realization that there were Slashdot moderators who thought, "Wow, that's useful information; I'm going to mark that as informative!" What's even funnier than that is that there was more than one moderator who had the same thought.
The only thing I can say to those moderators is, "Here's your sign."
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Do you think you're the only one who thinks it's funny when such a post is moderated Informative?
Here's your sign.
obviously not the fashion police... (Score:2)
Deadly Farts (Score:2, Funny)
Can you imagine if an invasive form of e.coli that produces large amounts of alkanes displaced e.coli normally occupying the lower bowels? Farts would become much more entertaining!
Bucket seats could take on a new meaning as well...
So what? (Score:5, Informative)
We can already make Butanol, a 1:1 replacement for gasoline, via the ABE process. The feedstock is any organic material. But we can't actually buy any, because Gevo and Butamax (a holding company owned by BP and Dupont) are fighting over the patents — which should have failed the test for obviousness.
Why would this process wind up any different?
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It might not, but we only have to wait 20 years for this to sort itself out. Just be glad patents are not authors life + damn near infinity compared to human lifespan.
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Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
Putting the gene into an organism that can survive in a range of environments which make the process commercially viable was researched at a public university and is patented by Butamax. Apparently Gevo also has some relevant patent so they have something to fight about.
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Classic case of The Tragedy of the Anticommons [wikipedia.org].
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Thanks for the link. I've read Hardin's work but wasn't aware of the counterpoint article with the clever name. I'm not sure that the formal Tragedy of the Anticommons argument presented is sufficient to explain all possible failures of capitalism, so that it is not clear that "successful capitalism" is its inverse as suggested in the wikipedia article -- monopoly is a more or less independent failure mode brought about by e.g. absurdly long copyrights even when the copyright is held by a single individua
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Maybe the patents won't get bought out by an oil company this time...unlike automotive nimh batteries and butanol. We gotta keep trying until something gets through.
Volume (Score:2)
And the volume expected from this process when it goes into widespread production, is what percentage of the world's consumption? I mean, is this viable in sufficient quantities, or is it another "coffee grounds into fuel" type deal? (See a slashdot article a couple years back.)
Although, mind you, this may appeal to survivalists. You may not be able to create enough gasoline for the entire countryside, but you might be able to eck out enough for a family.
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Coffee grounds are better fed to red worms and used as highly enriched soil to grow plants in.
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Coffee grounds are better fed to red worms and used as highly enriched soil to grow plants in.
Agreed. We use coffee grounds for fertilizer. It's a better use than burning in a car.
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Assuming this can scale to even 5%, that's a huge amount to put towards things that do actually need the energy density and quick refuel times.
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Or this becomes just one of many fuels we can use - tailored the specific job requirements. We don't *need* gasoline for daily trips around town. It is needed for things like military and other things where you don't have a corner station to fill up with.
Assuming this can scale to even 5%, that's a huge amount to put towards things that do actually need the energy density and quick refuel times.
I guess I could agree with that, but I suspect it won't ramp up anywhere near that high. We'll see.
Mixed Blessing (Score:2)
Although growing gasoline in a factory like facility certainly beats ripping up the world to have the fuel available it really does have a hidden curse. The idea is to get off of fuels like gasoline entirely and this could perpetuate the use of gasoline. I would prefer the research money be spent on batteries than on producing gasoline.
Re:Mixed Blessing (Score:5, Insightful)
If gasoline can be used in a carbon neutral way why get off it at all? It would be essentially rendered harmless.
What you want to use ecologically horrific batteries everywhere?
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What you want to use ecologically horrific batteries everywhere?
Because batteries are recyclable? Look at lead-acid batteries and lead content in the environment. We solved that problem by recycling them and now the bulk of the material used in new lead-acid batteries comes from the old ones.
Every job has different requirements and we'll need to use multiple fuels for the different jobs. Gasoline has many good qualities and we should use it (if we can make it like this) for those. But I highly doubt we can make enough to completely replace the current demand.
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Gasoline that added CO2/CO/other gasses to the environment by the tons per day is bad.
This isn't that.
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Or mine rare earth minerals required in modern batteries?
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Yes, but this is at least carbon-neutral gasoline (carbon in the air is re-used, rather than releasing carbon trapped in the ground), so it's still a huge step in right direction for clean energy.
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Why? Seriously, why? I get it that hippies hate cars, and by extension hate gasoline, but lets ignore them.
Here's the perfect ideal: a desert gourd that slowly fills with gasoline over the season. Every year the farmer harvests the crop. It's the perfect solar battery for transportation. What downside would you imagine for this plan?
Also, here's a free clue: Central Committees with Five Year Plans are always the worst approach to anything. Let researchers work on each idea that seems promising (there'
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Benzene is toxic. Gut bacteria producing it will probably be bad. Aside from that, yes, gasoline is a really great way to store energy, and internal combustion engines are getting quite efficient, so this might well be a less toxic alternative to batteries. However, until it's reduced to practice there's no point in arguing about it.
Re:Mixed Blessing (Score:4, Informative)
Hey now, /. exists entirely to argue about things there's no point in arguing about.
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If you can make that fuel today to meet demand, then there is no change in the CO2 levels as everything you release was recently taken out. Zero-sum game and it's good.
Scaleability (Score:3)
The article mentions that people have created hydrocarbons like this before. The problem is always scaling up from lab scale to industrial scale. If the price of oil doubles, this kind of technology might be cost competitive. If oil stays anywhere close to where it is now, I seriously doubt we'll see this make any impact.
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Or if global conflict made some sources inaccessible that might spur investment. Of course then it would drive up prices and, um, nevermind.
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Are you referring to Syria? Syria exports less oil than Belgium or Thailand. The war there has no impact on global prices.
And its purpose? (Score:2)
Granted, if it's as an economical alternative for creating energy other than coal or nuclear for general use, then sure, full steam ahead!
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Turning a fossil fuel into a carbon-neutral renewable fuel that most vehicles on the roads could switch to overnight even if their owners don't have 5 digits to blow isn't "exciting" to you? I know ICEs are horrifically inefficient but that's still big news.
It's about time (Score:2)
There's so much carbon-rich waste that could theoretically be "fuel" for this process, it's about time that people are looking into this possibility.
In a sane competitive entrepreneurial world this would come out of the labs of the big oil companies, or from some "methane alley" start-up investment group. But seeing as how nearly every large tech-based corporation has repeated dropped the ball on follow-on technology and competition, I guess it's just more of the same.
Cute idea and it *still* won't scale worth a damn (Score:3)
Look, organically produced hydrocarbons, whether from poop, algae or [insert plant of your choice], are still either directly or indirectly dependent on the sun as an energy collector. As such, they are simply inefficient solar energy collection devices that produce a chemical as their output.
All still require infrastructure, water, sunlight and land, which would otherwise be used for human cropland or to support a natural ecology.
So, this might be great for something about the scale of a farm where the outputs weren't being put to any use, but don't expect to significantly add to civilization's energy budget.
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Towns have been drowned in pig shit when dams failed. There are plenty of sources of carbon at the moment, thank you. Of course, methane digesters are a proven technology that will also work on pig shit, so it'd be better to just get to work generating power with them, rather than waiting for this pipe dream to become a reality. When people figure out how to make gasoline digesters, we can probably upgrade the methane digesters.
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Do you know what scales nicely? A thousand different solutions where each won't scale.
If you convert your waste into fuel, you solve two problems: you get a bit of fuel, and you get ride of your waste. It does not need to scale beyond the waste supply for completely solving the second problem, and it will increase the efficiency of the inefficient solar energy collectors we use today.
Now, if you want to help at increasing the efficiency of the crop growing and harvest, go ahead. it'll add (or, more specific
He is about 10 years late to the game (Score:3)
My guess is that since Joules Energy made the announcement 2 years ago about what they had worked towards for the previous 8 years, that South Korea is simply playing catch up.
Its a miracle! (Score:2)
And then we'll have OCEANS of gasoline!
doesn't "solve" our transportation problems (Score:3, Interesting)
A few days ago I saw an interesting comment about alternative fuels that re-cast the issue for me.
Namely: they're a distraction. By focusing on the "greenness" of the fuel for cars, be it gas, ethanol, hydrogen, CNG, electricity...we ignore the problem of operation space and storage space (not to mention, the inefficiency, energy-wise, of moving 2 tons of metal just to move one person.) As population grows, we don't have space for everyone to bop around by themselves in their car, nor do we have the space to put them when they're not in use. Bloomberg figured this out a couple of years ago, for example, and hence his strong push of cycle infrastructure in NYC, to great result.
Sure, more cars = not a problem in the middle of Nebraska. But in any metropolitan area, traffic is an enormous burden, and we cannot just throw more pavement at the problem. It's well known that adding lanes doesn't add capacity. We also don't have room for all these cars to park, at least not without paving every square inch in sight.
We need to get people out of their cars. That means higher gas taxes (which haven't been adjusted in decades), car-sharing systems, legal protection for pedestrians and cyclists, and infrastructure spending on pedestrian walkways, cycleways, usable long distance/regional/local public transit (and ending the insistence that public transit pay for itself, something "private" road/infrastructure users aren't expected to do). For example: it is *idiotic* that you cannot take luggage or a bicycle with you on the entire Amtrak northeast corridor.
Funding alternative fuels is fine, but don't do it if you won't fund alternative transportation infrastructure as well. Imagine what $2BN (what Obama wants to spend on "alternative fuels") can buy in terms of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
The carbon released by burning this gasoline would have been pulled out of the atmosphere by the bacteria- making the process carbon neutral. The problem with fossil fuels is that you're taking carbon that sitting quietly underground and putting it into the atmosphere.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
you're taking carbon that [was] sitting quietly underground
A fact that has always given me mild amusement. Our current trend of releasing the CO2 from fossil fuels is just repairing the damage caused by prehistoric vegetation, which absorbed the natural CO2 from the atmosphere and replaced it with harmful oxygen [wikipedia.org].
Surely, our ethical duty is to return the Earth to its former glory!
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Does that include the eradication of H. Sapiens?
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Well, obviously. H. Sapiens is a parasitic species that was not present in that pristine natural environment.
Also, s/vegetation/microbes/ in my first post... Silly absent-minded lunch-break posting...
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obviously. H. Sapiens is a parasitic species
Well few parasitic species recognize their nature and actively try to change it....sort of like this article describes?
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obviously. H. Sapiens is a parasitic species
Well few parasitic species recognize their nature and actively try to change it....sort of like this article describes?
That's not entirely true. While few species actively recognize themselves as parasitic, there are many examples of parasitic species that adapt to their new environment in ways that are beneficial to the host species/environment. Not only are you currently crawling with species that were originally purely parasitic, you could not survive without them.
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You don't dare to call it intelligent design, do you?
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Our current trend of releasing the CO2 from fossil fuels is just repairing the damage caused by prehistoric vegetation,
Please tell me you just didn't personify nature? Plants causing damage? Who says? Let me guess, a God? No? Well, that's what you've done. You've just applied good and evil distinctions to a natural process. How about this then: We should eliminate all life in order to repair the harm that order is having on the prehistoric entropy?
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What is not natural is supernatural.
What is supernatural is magic.
Per Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Therefore, any of our technology that is insufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from being natural. To a sufficiently-advanced alien civilization, our adorable little skyscrapers are simply the natural result of our natural building instinct.
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The idea of "nature" was given that name to describe the portion of the world which is outside of the works of man. Using the term Nature presupposes a separation between what man controls and influences and what we do not. The idea that man is an outsider to nature is very old and entwined with many other ideas and ideals. At it's core is the idea that our sentience allows us a measure of control over the universe to shape as we will.
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If its like most algae biofuels, it takes CO2 from coal power plants or similar polluting source. It decreases overall CO2 impact per unit of production, but is not renewable per se.
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I don't have access to the full figures on the paper, but this preview figure seems to show glucose going into the cell [nature.com]
You would be making glucose through photosynthesis in plants or algae or cyanobacteria (I guess?) and THAT would pull carbon from the atmosphere. So yeah, I'm guessing this would s
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Creating a closed system where the CO2 released is also then consumed by some process to turn it back into fuel. This is what is missing now.
Our problem is not that we burn fuel and create CO2, it's that we have ignored the responsibility to take released CO2 and turn it back into fuel with a process that might actually work.
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Obviously it helps the greenhouse problem by killing off the dirty masses of the poors. Without them exhaling CO2, the air will be clean and pure for his fellow plutocrats.
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Poop is a very natural, sustainable resource.
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At the moment, the economy, running on fossil carbon fuels, acts like any other carbon based life form.
No it doesn't. Every carbon based life form consumes/releases carbon from their current environment, not one from 30 million years ago.
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It does solve the big problem and several others. This is for a carbon neutral solution: plants take carbon from the air, this organism turns that into hydrocarbon fuel, which is then burned to return carbon to atmosphere.
Also, straight hydrocarbons rather than the carcinegenic cyclical ones can be produced, with no sulfur or other contamination. this would produce very "clean" fuel
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We are currently facing a soil quality and agricultural water source crisis, using farmed plants to supplement our fuel source is not a sustainable process.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Soil quality is extremely easy to solve. Everyone wants to use pesticides and herbicides out the ass, mostly petrol-based shit and chemical shit and dangerous plant derived shit etc. There are other ways.
Every time I open this argument, somebody comes along with the "Green Revolution" that started all of this heavily-scienced lab bullshit that apparently saved the world from starvation. That's all well and good, but that doesn't mean that's the only direction we can take science; it doesn't all have to happen in a beaker, and we've made great strides in natural science research since then. We know more about the biosphere, and thus can leverage various attributes in new ways.
Bad soil. Let's attack bad soil first.
Farmers have access to a lot of manure. Cow manure, sheep manure, goat shit, chicken shit, the like. They also have access to non-useful plant matter, although some of that goes to ethanol. Farmers will tend to plow manure into the land; good. Do that. Skip the petrol, do this more. We have a lot of regulations here about plowing "natural fertilizer" into the land: it all needs to be used at once in the beginning of the season; this is unsustainable because farmers will add more manure to the top of the land throughout the season, and don't know how much to use in the beginning. This is a real thing. We've had legislative arguments on it. The legislature wants to prevent run-off of cow-shit-based nitrogen sources into the bay here, because algae growth from fertilizer run-off is a real problem; unfortunately, they're encouraging farmers to use chemical nitrogen sources, which doesn't help.
So, drop the chemical fertilizers. Use more cow shit.
Step two: Worms. European Night Crawlers will dig deep into the soil. We bin them as an invasive species, but I don't believe the damage is as bad as people think. There's talk about how worms accelerate the nitrogen cycle in forests and will cause biosphere changes; but I believe that the research is too young to produce anything intelligent and that everything here is conjecture and knee-jerk reaction. I'll add mine to the pile: the forests aren't collapsing overnight and they won't. New seedlings that can handle the new nitrogen cycle better will out-compete new seedlings that can't; over time, the forests will shift toward plants that can better handle living with earthworms, and no major crisis will occur.
European Night Crawlers move through deeper soil, consuming soil and killing bacteria on the soil. They consume the bacteria as food and leave behind processed, crushed soil containing remaining bits of destroyed bacteria and crushed matter. The soil is better aerated, has a high nutrient availability, holds water better, drains better, and is easier for plant roots to take hold in. The soil is effectively cultivated (turned, tilled, etc.) and fertilized continuously. This means ENC greatly improve soil quality.
Red Wigglers are another type of worm. These feed on bacteria present in rotting matter--plant matter that's rotted and softened, or manure. Essentially, Red Wigglers process rotting (i.e. composting) matter into high-quality soil; ENC process soil into high-quality soil, and will further enrich the soil that Red Wigglers produce. Thus manure and hummus tilled into the top layer of soil provides a high-quality basis for a long-running enrichment process that produces and maintains extremely high-quality soil during the growing season.
Our industry is such that we can do this at home and get better quality farm land than farmers have. We have tiny little plots of land in our back yard gardens. There is not a massive, ginormous scale worm farming industry in our country; we can't supply the worms for this (although, given a big stacked worm bed and enough input feed, we could breed enough worms in under a year to support the whole farming industry; they breed fucking fast). Our farming industry also relies largely on petrol and chemical fertilizers; however w
Re: This solves nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not so much that as soil viability. We already manage soil by round-up treating the field, tilling everything over, planting seeds, repeated round-up treatment from time to time if the crop is round-up ready, etc. We also till organic fertilizer (cow shit) into the soil at the first run, and later add chemical fertilizer as needed. We also apply pesticides by air spraying.
We do this for crop density, but it's not a great practice to keep the soil viable. Too much chemical herbicide treatment and soil depletion. The soil is kept viable by the addition of chemical fertilizers and a lesser addition of organic matter. My suggestion is merely that we could greatly improve soil viability by using more organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.) between crops and applying worms for continuous enrichment; this has the advantage of improving soil quality continuously in many ways beyond simple nutrient content, but the caveat that use of chemical herbicides and pesticides could harm the worms to a point that compromises their viability for this use. That means we would also need to grow food with worm-safe weed and pest control practice--either alternate practices or restriction to chemicals which do not harm worm viability.
It appears Round-Up may be toxic to red worms [usc.edu]. From this paper the author conjectures that it may only kill smaller red worms; I conjecture that it could be killing a random subset (variation in tolerance), sterilizing (breeding problems), killing eggs, or killing young worms. A random subset would be the best possible outcome here, as a 20% higher mortality rate at random would still retain viability. Propagation problems (breeding, egg destruction, or death of juveniles) would be the worst, as this would cause a steady population decline.
Pesticides will likely kill worms. Pyrethrin will, for example.
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Some examples of better feedstock might be switch grass [wikipedia.org] or algae [wikipedia.org], though I'm sure there are major concerns with those as well, or we'd be seeing mo
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It does solve the problem. Atoms are not create or destroyed thru normal chemical means, biology as we know it is pretty much all chemical. All the carbon in the gasoline has to come from somehwere; if you make the somewhere the same atmosphere you dump it into when the gasoline is burned than you don't net out any new carbon in the atmosphere. This is what people mean when they say "carbon neutral" not that carbon isn't part of the process, just that the overall process takes out as much as it puts in.
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The bacteria, or the material they consume will ultimately have extracted carbon from the air... If production and consumption are roughly equal then you end up with a closed loop. The only problem with fossil fuels is that production is much slower than consumption.
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we don't create more fossils. that's the main problem with fossil fuels.
hint: "fossil".
so either you're trolling the same as poster above you or you didn't think things through.
now the real problem is this: is this cheap enough or not? it has to be cheap enough to be self sustaining for it to be practical.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah, another ignorant green reaction.
First, Fossil Fuel is what comes from the ground after millions of years of biological decay. Nothing today will create "fossil" fuel.
Second, taking CO2 that we have released into the atmosphere and turning it back into hydrocarbon fuel will close the loop so that things will at least not get worse. It might not do a lot to remove 100+ years of excessive burning of fossil fuels, but at least will help to reach a balance where we might be able to remove as much CO2 as we put into the air from burning fuels moving forward. If we reach a balance like that, then nature can do the rest to remove the excessive CO2.
Abandoning hydrocarbons is not a solution. Hydrocarbons are a highly concentrated and relatively easy to transport and store form of energy and ALL other forms of energy production are a lot less efficient in the long run to create the energy we need. That isn't going to change, ever. I would even suggest that being able to hook in solar or wind energy and having them produce hydrocarbons using some process is better than simply abandoning burning "fuel" and relying solely on something that only makes energy when the sun shines or the wind blows.
A system to create a closed cycle where CO2 is released but then pulled back to create fuel is what our civilization needs, not an ignorant reactionary myopic solution like "fossil fuel is bad" so ride a bike bullshit.
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Diesel is bad too - when produced from oil from fossils.
If we can make gasoline via green methods? Absofucking great. And while I highly doubt this is scalable to current demands, but if it can produce even a small fraction we're better off. Uses that do require the energy density and quick refuel time of h
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Much to the mods discredit, you're more ignorant than the GP.
Hydrocarbons are a highly concentrated and relatively easy to transport and store form of energy and ALL other forms of energy production are a lot less efficient in the long run to create the energy we need.
You seem to have driving range confused with efficiency. I should also note that what comes out of the tailpipe is polluting in ways other than CO2 emissions.
And "TheSkepticalOptimist" doth protest too much about CO2. Here is a sample of your concern over global warming:
OMG, Ice is 6th lowest since we decided to give a rat's ass about it. But hey, it was lower 5 more times than now but the green alarmists won't consider that an upward trend.
Recorded history is only 0.00000000625% total of actual history, give or take a few zillionths of a percentage.
GP's confusion at least seems honest compared with the way you keep taking cheap shots at "greens"... even if they're peer-reviewed scientists.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:4, Informative)
That's some pretty good delusion there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials [wikipedia.org]
Let us know when batteries get a 60x improvement in energy density.
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If bleeding-edge tech counts, how about negative 17 months?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/20/1344223/ibm-creates-breathing-high-density-lithium-air-battery [slashdot.org]
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Uhhh... (Score:2)
Where does the carbon come from when you are "Using bugs to create more fossil fuels"? Are you expecting microbial alchemy?
So if someone does get a scheme that does a good job of making hydrocarbons using microbes what do you think the effect of pumping surplus back into the ground?
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We could use only plants that are relatively unchanged over millions of years and whose only close relatives are fossils. We could call it living fossil fuel!
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I took microbiology as my science elective in college. We did a variety of things with E. coli. Our final project was a little gene splicing to make it change color.
Of course, as I was the only one in the class taking it as an elective, I had a bit more fun with it than most people. Notably, petri culture smiley faces with blue eyes, green nose and yellow lips.
Re:E.coli (Score:4, Funny)
I wouldn't go so far as to say competent, but a petri dish loaded with e. coli would be an improvement over many of our current politicians. At least the petri dish can only harm you if you ingest some of it.
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Isn't that just going to delay the production of more oil? We need bodies in the ground to get the process started.
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You need to pay this other insurance if you choose to continue to exist...
Stop being a dipwad pretending that PelosiCare is just like car insurance. It makes you look pathetic.
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Fine, then make it so you can only enter a hospital if you have RomneyCare insurance.
The basic idea is the same. It forces a little personal responsibility. Instead of the current situation where the uninsured go the the ER and skip on the bill.
We can both make stupid names for the ACA, don't do that it makes you look pathetic.
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No it doesn't. It absolves people of personal responsibility because no matter what, someone else will be there to pick up the cost.
Smoker? No problem, keep sucking on those cancer sticks because someone else will pay for your medical care. Obese? Those Ho Hos sure do fill you up, don't they? Drug user? Here ya go, keep smoking, injecting and snorting to your heart's content.
This government mandate does absolutely nothing for personal responsibi
Re:idiot (Score:4, Interesting)
Everybody dies once. It's always expensive.
The cost to society is that those that die early don't keep paying taxes for their lost days.
So what we want it to encourage smoking, drug taking and obesity among the net takers (bottom 75% and already retired) and discourage it among the net payers (top 25%, still working).
Perverse economic incentives are everywhere. Careful what you wish for.
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Reagan's ERs must take everyone already did that.
Smokers are actually cheap, so are the obese. Those healthy bastards live forever and cost a fortune in care when they get old.
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Fine, then make it so you can only enter a hospital if you have RomneyCare insurance.
I have Major Medical [thefreedictionary.com] you ignorant twat. Unfortunately PelosiCare is about to make my responsible plan where I completely cover my own ass illegal.
Meanwhile the insurance that you have apparently been carrying covers those "surprise" annual visits to the doctor. What a surprise that you get your yearly physical.. lets package that unexpected event into an insurance premiuym and give some fuckwad middle-man a cut...
You people are complete morons. Seriously. Insurance is not for fucking 100% predictable
Re: (Score:2)
Ever wonder why that is?
Because catching diseases early is cheaper. If annual visits were not covered folks would skip them and more diseases would go untreated until they were much more expensive to deal with.
How about you spend a little less time thinking up insults and a little more contemplating why things might be the way they are.
Re:Defund Obamacare. (Score:4, Informative)
You do know that Social Security is completely paid for, has always been, through the soc sec trust fund (simplifying here)? The government borrows from social security! Not is it not " financially unfeasible" as you seem to think, but is't been (very) solvent for over 60 years, and with some relatively small adjustments, will be that way for ever.
But I read the rest of your nonsense, and it wouldn't surprise me if you didn't know this.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, this will end up as a carbon sink:
1) Plants are grown for their sugars to feed into this process (carbon sequestered from atmosphere into the roots left in the soil after harvesting, and into animals that the resulting cellulose will be fed to after sugar extraction).
2) Sugar (carbon) from step (1) is fed to the modified E. Coli to make gasoline. "Dead" E. Coli sludge could be used in animal feed, or processed into fertilizer for (1).
3) Gasoline from step (2) is then used for cars/trucks.
The probl
Re: (Score:2)
By using the virtually unlimited amounts already present in the atmosphere.
Why do people keep not getting this idea?