Additionally, hydrocarbons wont be replaced for use in more than a small minority of air travel, ocean travel or rail travel in my lifetime. Cars, yeah, you probably wont be able to buy a new ICE car 40 years from now. The rest of our modes of transport will still be hydrocarbon then.

Also, we've seen how well utility scale solar is working out at Ivanpah. Utility scale solar is a dead-end. Utility scale wind power is limited in deployable area. The environmentalists wont allow tidal or nuclear. So, we're left with fossil fuels.

Personally, I'm long XOM, CVX, RDS, COP, and a whole host of smaller upstream, midstream and downstream companies.

I don't know, but I can give you a useful data point. My wife and I went to the annual NRA convention in Houston in 2013. Eighty-six thousand NRA members attended that year. Since concealed carry is legal in Texas, and since concealed carry could not legally be prohibited in the convention space (because it was owned by the city), and since it was in Texas (where gun ownership is high relative to most of the rest of the country), and since it was the NRA convention (so gun ownership among attendees was probably close to 99.99%), it probably represents the single largest non-military event in human history both in terms of number of guns carried by attendees and percentage of attendees carrying guns.

And what happened?

A whole lot of nothing. Three days of exhibits, conferences, speakers, events, etc. And a lack of people being shot.

The RNC convention in 2012 was expected to have 50,000 attendees. Assume 2016 will be the same. Even then, the number of people and the % of people who want to carry guns at an RNC convention is going to me MUCH less than at the NRA convention.

If they allowed it, even if they requested that people do it, it would be shocking if anything bad happened. In Texas, concealed carry license holders are more law-abiding than police officers according to the statistics that the Department of Public Safety is required to collect and publish as part of our carry laws.

The liberal hand-wringing over "what if" and "might" and "blood in the streets" when it comes to carrying guns in public is so so tiring.

Imagine that: another California Democrat looking to restrict your freedom in order to make themselves feel better, with no useful law enforcement outcomes realized, or even possible.

The background check analogy is spot on: a useless check, easily bypassed, that does more to harm the law abiding than it does criminals. There's predictive power in that analogy too: bad people caught attempting to buy burner phones wont be prosecuted, just as known felons attempting to buy guns from federally licensed gun dealers aren't prosecuted now. In 2010, out of 48,321 felons and fugitives who attempted to illegally purchase firearms, the Department of Justice prosecuted only 44 of them. https://youtu.be/06wJ50p6rMs

The proof is in the pudding. Democrat President Obama's Justice Department gladly allows 99.91% of the prohibited felons who attempt to buy a gun from a federally licensed dealer simply walk free. Firearms background checks, and similarly background checks for burner phones, aren't about crime prevention or law enforcement; they're about restricting your rights to property and privacy, and in the burner phone case specifically it's about a kind of sick cryptophobia where a law-abiding person is hated by their government for their desire to not be constantly spied on by that same government.

Pretty much.

I read the article. It's all about feelers feeling feels. There's not a bit of objective wrongdoing even hinted at on Amazon's part. They provide a facility that can employ 8% of the unemployed people in the town, and HuffPo acts like they're awful for it. It's strenuous physical labor, and some people can't handle it, especially when you're obese (6'3", 300lbs = 37.5 BMI; for his height, 200lbs is his healthy weight).

HuffPo is just trying to ride a wave of anti-Amazon sentiment to get ad-views.

All the feelers at HuffPo can rest easy though: when the robots replace all of these people, there will be no need to bitch about the working conditions any more!

Taxi's can't offer guaranteed service at certain locations and times precisely because they do not use the author's dreaded "surge/congestion pricing schemes."

When your professional society conference lets out at the same time that the local sportsball team's game gets over, and everyone is headed downtown to eat, the taxi company runs out of cabs because they're all cheap and everyone takes one. Uber surges the price to match the market demand, more drivers come out, and everyone who wants a ride can get one.

Under the pure cartel taxi system, if you need to get to the hospital because your wife called and she's gone into labor early, too bad! All the cabs are taken because they're so cheap and the demand is so high. Under Uber's system, the price rises to match the demand and you can pay for a ride.

It's no different than when people decry "price gauging" after a natural disaster. Go ahead and keep gas at pre-disaster prices, and 100% of it will sell out. Then, if you MUST have it, say to run your generator to power grandma's oxygen machine, too bad! It was all sold for $2/gal to a bunch of people who panicked and drank it all up even though they really didn't need it. If the gas stations had surged pricing to match demand, they'd be more likely to have some left, and while it would be very expensive, at least it would be available for people who really needed it, instead of being consumed by people who merely panic-purchased because it was still cheap.

Uber's surge pricing system is a virtue of their business model, not a vice.

Pay no attention to the 130 years of Democrat rule of the city leading up to Katrina. All the fault for the city's unpreparedness lies with a single Republican who had no authority to intervene.

If I rolled my eyes sufficiently for the amount of derp packed into your comment, I'd probably get dizzy and fall over.

As many as you want. Buy the components, get your papers in order, and then build them.

Here's a guy who did it: https://www.ar15.com/forums/t_...

Just because you're stupid and ignorant of reality doesn't mean that reality doesn't exist.

Are you saying those things are not protected by the 2nd, or that they're illegal, or both? The only things on your list that you can't actually make/buy/own/use as a private citizen in the US are nerve gas, chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. The rest are legal with varying degrees of paperwork.

(Mines may have some restrictions on usage in some states since it's generally illegal to set a trap meant for a human.)

Can you site a source for that, because I've never seen it? Private citizens owned fleets of warships each armed with dozens of cannons during and after the revolution, and were given free reign to hunt British shipping.

Even if you agree with the more restrictive interpretation of the second amendment, that it only covers "bearable" arms (ie, weapons one person can transport alone), an interpretation that I've never seen any founder's writings suggesting, you must still grant grenades and some other forms of explosive weapons. They are man-portable, and they were available and used in the framers' time.

Grenades are still legal to make, possess, and use today: https://www.ar15.com/forums/t_...