Are you saying we shouldn't build any pipelines, because we can't completely eliminate rail shipment of crude oil? It would seem to me that if you build just a few pipelines from the sources of crude oil to the refineries, you would greatly reduce the crude oil being shipped on rails.

That's the idea behind the Keystone XL pipeline.

Warren Buffet, Obama's buddy, owns BNSF railway, incidentally. Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline from being built directly enriches a major Obama campaign donor.

During the Eisenhower administration the tax rate on the uppermost bracket of incomes was 91%. Ninety one friggin' precent. Yet, there were still obscenely wealthy people. It's time to define new upper income brackets. I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%.

While there technically was a 91% Tax bracket, that single fact in no way communicates the reality of the situation. There were loopholes big enough to drive a Maybach through, and everyone did so. The fact is that wealthier Americans pay a higher share of the tax burden today than in 1958, and lower income Americans pay much less in taxes. More here

The vast majority of businesses have no significant branding to speak of, publish no significant media, and do no significant R&D. To put some perspective on it, there are more companies in the US than there are individual engineers and very few companies produce anything where copyright is central to the business.

Most businesses are built almost entirely on individual customer relationships. Restaurants, contractors, specialty manufacturers, agriculture, etc. In all of these areas there are a few outliers that develop a substantial brand that they trademark but more often than not the "brand" is the individuals that work there or run the business so trademarks simply are not that important to their success.

I think this is surprising to people only because most of the largest and most visible American companies do have substantial investment in IP, so it is an availability bias. It overlooks the myriad smaller companies that have little investment in IP. It would probably be fair to say that IP is important to a significant percentage of the American economy but only because it tends to be concentrated in many of the largest and most successful companies. It is not evenly distributed across all companies.

Er, I thought everyone knew by now that story was a bs fabrication of the right-wing media?

No, but I can understand why folks would want to spread that line. Here's an excerpt of the latest news on the subject:

The Oversight Committee .... is expressing gross dissatisfaction with Wilkins’s testimony and, in a letter sent to him on Wednesday, offering him the opportunity to amend it. “In your testimony, you stated ‘I don’t recall’ a staggering 80 times in full or partial response to the Committee’s questions,” committee chairman Darrell Issa and Ohio representative Jim Jordan wrote. “Your failure to recollect important aspects of the Committee’s investigation suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.” The most pertinent subject on which Wilkins’s memory failed him was the nature of his communications with Treasury Department officials: in particular, whether he discussed the applications of tea-party groups with anybody at the Treasury Department, whether he discussed with Treasury Department officials regulatory guidance for 501(c)(4) entities engaged in political activities, and whether he discussed with them the inspector general’s report that blew the lid off of the targeting scandal in mid May.

"I don't recall" is how you prevent later perjury charges when you're on the wrong side of an investigation and you're doing your best to cover your ass while not advancing the investigation. But you probably knew that.

When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted. Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.

It'll get worse for the IRS, now that it is enmeshed in partisan politics. President* Obama should be noted with an asterisk from here on out.

*Obama was re-elected in 2012 while the IRS was actively suppressing opposing groups, while rubber stamping liberal political action committees.

Most alternative reactor designs have some major flaw. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Pebble-bed reactors have pebble jams. (An experimental one in Germany is such a mess there's no way to fully decommission it.) Helium gas-cooled reactors leak helium. (Fort St. Vrain was converted from nuclear to natural gas because of that.) One of the painful lessons of long-life nuclear power plants is that what goes on inside the reactor vessel has to be really, really simple. Anything complex in there will break. It's being shot full of holes at the atomic level, after all. (See "hydrogen embrittlement"). Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors at least have only water to deal with. The fuel rods are solid rods. The thing is basically simple,

Came here to say this. Everything at a nuclear power plant is periodically taken apart to fix and clean on routine basis. Maintaining any of these exotic reactors always sounds like a nightmare.

That's no defense against your callousness and shifting position. However, if cursing me helps you avoid any introspection that might upset you, please continue.

So, DerekLyons there bought individual health insurance on the open market, exactly as you advocated in the previous post, and you don't give a sh*t and may not even understand. The "Affordable" Care Act made his independantly bought insurance unaffordable. You casually moved the goalposts in this reply, and you blatantantly dismissed the fact that his personal situation got markedly worse.

This marks you as the jerk who will wreck good deals you're not party to because you have some f*cking pie in the sky grand design. In any case, damn near everyone who has been losing their coverage because of the ACA has been an independant purchaser. The policy you advocate is going backwards.

Yet you say 'So What?'

Waffle Iron is the sort of person I warned about- perfectly happen to f*ck up deals he's not party to, because he has a grand vision of how things should be that can't possibly be wrong.