It's hard to charge the local steel mills (which closed 30+ years ago) for the current respiratory problems of people who played outside as kids back when the mills were running. Most externalities have long time lags.

But we *are* trying to charge industries for externalities. We use cap-and-trade, carbon credits, etc. But that only works when the companies don't control the re-election funds of those who create and enforce those programs. Sure, charging the coal plants more would be the right choice, but that's not an option, so we can either subsidize solar (and wind, waves, nuclear, etc) or we can do nothing. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Nope. We became a world superpower around WW1 and WW2, well after the unions came around. It's harder to be a superpower when your citizens are wage slaves. (Not impossible, but harder.)

And we gained access to manufactured goods and became affluent when unions raised the factory wages from poverty to middle class. Seriously, look this stuff up; look at when unions gained power and when the median lifestyle in the US improved and when the US began projecting power around the world. Your comments show that you really don't know US history at all.

Why does personal responsibility only apply to the poor, not the bankers?

Blaming the people who took out loans they could not repay is a good idea. (Though it seems that many of those people were lied to by their mortgage brokers about variable rates and balloon loans, but still, people should know better.)

But I'm surprised that you don't blame the mortgage brokers who falsified the mortgage applications. Or the bank approval officers who approved the applications which contained ludicrous data. Or the people who chopped up the mortgages into tranches, or who rated the crap mortgages AAA, or who bought them for their pensions funds, etc.

You are blaming the people with absolutely no financial training and who only saw a tiny piece of the landscape, but are giving a free pass to all of the financial experts who saw the whole rotten thing. Why?

Oh, right, because we bailed out the banks so bankers' only repercussions were 6-8 figure annual bonuses. Once again, why do you want personal responsibility to only apply to the poor, not the bankers?

No, that is why we have regulation by an ideally democratic government - to impose those rules upon the entire marketplace that cannot realistically be instated any other way. Because just like most other Tragedy of the Commons situations, if everyone behaves with rational self-interest, then everybody loses. It's only by having rules imposed by a collectively empowered authority that we can align rational self-interest and our own best interests.

Well, robbery would be a bit tougher than general mayhem. In the foreseeable future you'd probably need a human in the loop, for example to confirm that the victim actually complied with the order to "put ALL the money in the bag." Still that would remove the perpetrator from the scene of the crime. If there were an open or hackable wi-fi access point nearby it'd be tricky to hunt him down.

This kind of remote controlled drone mediated crime is very feasible now. It wouldn't take much technical savvy to figure out how to mount a shotgun shell on a quadcopter and fly it to a particular victim (if you have one). That's a lot less sophisticated than stuff terrorists do already; anyone with moderate technical aptitude could do it with off-the-shelf components. I'm sure we'll see our first non-state-actor controlled drone assassination in the next couple of years. Or maybe a hacktivist will detonate a party popper on the President or something like that.

Within our lifetime it'll surely be feasible for ordinary hackers to build autonomous systems that could fly into a general area and hunt down a particular victim using facial recognition. People have experimented with facial recognition with SBCs like the Raspberry Pi already.

You can forbid states from doing this all you want, but as technology advances the technology to do this won't be exotic. It'll be commonplace stuff used for work and even recreation.

On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.

But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.

Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.

True, but they are more practical due to smaller size.

>because it's actually more than two-factor authentication
Kind of, maybe, but you really have to stretch the definition. Two factor authentication is typically a combination two of:
- something you know
- something you have (physical object)
- something that's an inherent characteristic (biometric data)
specifically so that it's extremely unlikely that an unauthorized user can get access to more than one of them.

Meanwhile yours (from what I can guess from your under-specified description) involves:
-Picture (keyfile?) that's stored online where anyone can get it (and how do you access it? a password?)
-passphrase
-password

And yes, that's considerably more challenging to hack than a simple password alone, but it still sounds like it only involves "something you know", and thus offers none of the more concrete protections offered by more traditional two-factor authentication. All it takes is someone filming your keyboard and screen while you log in and your security is completely bypassed. Not appreciably more difficult to hack than a completely random 30-character password that can be conveniently stored in an encrypted password manager on a USB flash drive accessible via passphrase, which provides quasi-twofactor authentication on the front end. You can watch me enter my passphrase, but without also having the file on my USB drive it won't help you log into any of my accounts

Granted, that's not as convenient on phones/tablets/etc, but given how common spyware of various types is on such devices I'd be *extremely* hesitant to access anything actually important from those unless you completely refused to install any software that has the potential to monitor your activities - a call that's becoming increasingly difficult to make even for the competent.

She probably means the more common 250W panel size, and is including installation costs, and other equipment costs like the inverter.

The solar industry would survive without subsidies, but it would also take a lot longer to get the number of panels that the country needs to reduce pollution and CO2 emissions.

It won't be, for the most part. Storage is moving towards lithium for small scale and sodium sulphur for large scale. In both cases, most of the battery is recycled. Used lithium cells are already getting quite cheap thanks to electric vehicles.

They are getting tax breaks for a variety of historical reasons, the main one being that they gave massive amounts of money to certain politicians in exchange for them. Sometimes they use threats as well, as in give us more free money or we will raise prices and cripple parts of the economy, and make your voters really pissed off with you.

Renewables, depending on the type, have been profitable for a long time. There are two problems though. Firstly we need lots of continued investment and a drive to push costs down even further. Secondly unlike other forms of generation where a company can build one large site supplying vast amounts of energy, solar is usually installed on roof tops so requires individuals and businesses to invest a few thousand in them up-front. That's a barrier for many people, a barrier to something that the country as a whole needs.

Not necessarily a tyrant. Any psychopath with money.

Because turning off JavaScript completely breaks so many sites these days.

Sure, because if you're not 100% guaranteed success, you should never even try?