Huh? Roads made out of Plastic?

America's roads suck. They're in terrible condition and most of the time they're being torn up by road crews just when we need to get somewhere else. The government says it'll cost 100 billion dollars every year just to maintain our current road system, much less upgrade it.

Meanwhile, there's something else you might have noticed in the environmental news lately, that we humans have been dumping plastic trash into our oceans for about half a century now and it's actually been piling up. Big time.

Researchers say that around 15% to 40% of our plastic litter goes directly into the oceans each year. That works out to from 4 million to 12 million metric tons of the stuff every single year, enough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet.  And what's worse, scientists don't even know where about 99% of the ocean plastic debris is actually winding up, meaning that it's probably having a godawful effect on marine life and eventually our own food supplies. Plus, they say the annual amount of this junk is probably going to double over the next 10 years.

Yup, we are doomed.

Unless, of course, somebody comes up with a solution. And that's what a Dutch construction company called VolkerWessels wants to do. They've gotten together with the city of Rotterdam to take that same plastic waste and pull it out of the ocean to make, are you ready? Plastic roads!

If the idea works, these roads would be durable, quick to construct, and work a lot better than good old Arabian oil-based asphalt, because they are supposed to last three times longer than conventional roads.

Of course they'll be more expensive, but if they last three times longer, make utility access easier, can be built off-site and then can be installed quicker, these plastic roads might actually turn out to be cheaper in the long run.

The next step is to build a few and test them in the laboratory to make sure they work in wet and slippery conditions, etc. The city of Rotterdam has embraced the idea wholeheartedly and is ready to help put together a pilot project.

The company is planning to install one of the roads in Rotterdam’s street laboratory, and as soon as it's shown to be workable, we may be seeing the solution to one of our problems coming from fixing another one of our problems. How neat is that? Sometimes the human race may actually not be as stupid as everybody else thinks we are!

The Biggest White Elephant in Human History?

The Trillion Dollar F-35 Stealth Fighter is once again in the news. You remember the F-35, right? A plane that's supposed to be so technologically advanced that it would give the U.S. absolute air superiority in any future conflict. The world’s most advanced stealth fighter jet that's ever been created! And, of course you also remember that costs and delays on the thing have spiraled so far out of control that one commentator has warned that "our skies and seas are vulnerable."

Well there's news out today that this massive boondoggle of a fighter plane can't even fight. One of the F-35's test pilot has written a scathing five-page brief saying the plane can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane if it's in a dogfight or even dodge the enemy's own gunfire.

The "official use only" document says that the pilot flew an F-35A in a mock exercise with an F-16 over the Pacific Ocean near Edwards Air Force Base in California on January 14, 2015 and the stealth fighter was too sluggish "for every engagement."

According to the report, the two jets played the roles of opposing fighters in a pretend air battle, designed by the Air Force to test the F-35’s effectiveness as a close-range dogfighter. The F-35 pilot would fly his jet hard, trying to maneuver his plane in order to “shoot down” the F-16, while the F-16 pilot would do his best to evade and shoot down the F-35.

The pilot stated that his plane, the F-35, was flying “clean,” and had no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage, while the F-16 was heavily loaded with two bulky underwing drop tanks, which should have put the F-16 at a distinct aerodynamic disadvantage.

But the F-35 pilot says his fighter was so sluggish it couldn't reliably defeat the F-16, even when the older jet was carrying extra fuel tanks.

The pilot of the F-35 tried to target the F-16 with the plane's 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. Meanwhile, when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35 and had the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the F-35 pilot couldn't maneuver out of the way.

The F-35 pilot writes that there's no point in trying to fly the plane in a sustained, close turning battle with another fighter. "God help you if the enemy surprises you and you have no choice but to turn."

He also had some pretty nasty comments about the cockpit of the F-35. He said he discovered that he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That, he says, allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

The F-35 is the only new fighter jet the U.S. and its allies are currently developing . The F-16, meanwhile, has been around since the late 1970s.

The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

Criticism of the F-35 program in the U.S. has been mounting for years. Last month the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated, "The F-35’s engine’s reliability is very poor,” and reported that the total cost of the program is up from $233 billion in 2001 to $391 billion last year, making it the US Department of Defense’s “most costly and ambitious acquisition program.” 

Current estimates are that the F-35 fleet will cost a grand total of $1 trillion to operate and support in its lifetime. Yup, it's another example of your tax dollars at work.