I wonder about the long-term viability of such jobs.

Inasmuch as wind power is utterly dependent on subsidies that means the jobs are dependent on the political fortunes of the "green" lobby and the various parasitic, private sector entities that feed off their political power, the industry would disappear if the influence of the "green" lobby declines.

It doesn't happen every day but there are more then a few cases of industries, no longer viable or no longer viable in America, using political power to maintain themselves only to see their subsidies zero out when their political power wanes.

The psychtric diagnoses and barrage of invective may now commence.

Of course the problem's that there's no profit motive. Saints may be admirable but you just can't count on them showing up when and where they're needed. The profit motive, all frantic claims to the contrary notwithstanding, is everywhere.

Ah, there's no demand for education and you worked hard to get an education. Got it.

I'm pretty sure the only explanation for that contradiction is that you're better then most people. Lucky you and lucky us for having your around to act as an unrequested role model.

If you were a free enterprise education provider you'd last about fifteen minutes.

If you don't give a fuck how good your education solutions are they'd better be better then those offered by people who do give a fuck because if they aren't, you're gone. You see, the guy who does give a fuck is going to do a better job then you at something - advertising, distribution, educational efficacy - and you become a case history of how not to run a business. Seeing as how you don't give a fuck it should be pretty easy to run you out of the market.

Oh, and countries with the socialist education model generally have a pretty shitty education system because there's no incentive to be any better.

When you come across the exceptions, after your hyperventilation and excitment subsides, be sure to take plenty of pictures and swipe some stationary. It's a temporary aberration. Reversion to the mean occurs just as soon as the individual, or the tiny cohort, responsible for the unlikely phenomenon of a good, socialist education system is elbowed out of the way by the political forces that are part and parcel of every socialist solution for everything. Including education.

By the way, very impressive moral compass. I'm guessing that's what causes you to believe you're smarter and better then the people with whom you're forced to share a planet.

The reason to keep reinventing the wheel is because reinventing the wheel costs lots of money.

The monopolistic nature of the public education system means that customer demands - the parents - can be ignored. So, we've got a textbook industry that can ignore cost and can ignore efficacy, since their customer is the school district, but can't ignore political fads.

If you want textbooks to get relentlessly better and relentlessly cheaper then the people who are urgently concerned about the safety and effective education of the kids - parents - have to assume direct control over education.

That's in the process of happening with the spread of charter schools, vouchers, parental trigger and tax credits but we're only just now getting to the point that those changes are starting to impact education. But another two to three years should see the monopolistic complacency of the public education system shattered as the nature of public education, and the costs of that nature, are more widely understood as they stand in contrast to the alternatives.

If Europeans want to pay $9/gallon for gasoline that imposes no responsibility on America to follow suit and it certainly doesn't make $9/gallon gasoline a good idea.

Fortunately, that day will never come.

It's impossible to "fully fund" public education because however much funding public education gets the result will be that it's not enough. The proof is in this question: how much money constitutes "all the money they need"?

The answer, never given explicitly, is always "more".

Unless of course some bright, young thing figures out a way to use the recoil of a projectile weapon to tactical advantage. Much of the history of warfare consists finding new lemonade recipes for the new lemons that keep showing up.

Oh, and not all projectile weapons have recoil or at least recoil that has to be absorbed. There was a fairly brief, by military standards, love affair between militaries and recoilless rifles.

Really? I thought Big Fat Oxycontin Whore Show was where the comment went flat. But you know, hatred of the proper people and ideas is really evidence of compassion, tolerance and intelligence.

When you aren't concerned with the quality of the evidence "temporarily" means "until I can't stop it".

Dismissing the burden such a ban places on the drillers isn't a measure of the unimportance of what they do but of how little exposure you have to the losses they'd suffer.

In medicine the dictum is "first, do no harm". But that requires a sense of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. You, like all admirers of the cautionary principle, have no sense of responsibility for the harm you might cause.

If I were a public official I'd take a look at the quality of the evidence, which is either execrable or nonexistent, balance that against losses that would be incurred and form a conclusion on that basis. If I were irresponsible I'd give into the temptation to appear terribly concerned with public safety when I have no reasonable basis for the concern but have something to gain by pandering to and inflaming public fears.

Not so much a hoax as an example of pandering to hysteria.

The wells haven't been opened yet so unless the earth can be frightened into producing an earthquake at the prospect of a fluid injection well the wells could hardly have had anything to do with the earthquake.

So yeah, it is a fragile and precarious victory since it's based fear-mongering. But then if you don't have the science on your side what are the alternatives to whipping up fear?

That's exactly what's happening.

The solar power industry's entirely dependent on subsidies. Solar power doesn't make any sense on an economic basis and the people who think solar power's the next step in power generation can't change that so they've thrown in with commercial interests, which are perfectly happy to take government money while it flows, in the hopes that those subsidies will "prime the pump".

But even government subsidies have an upper limit and that limit's clearly been reached. Now the "invisible hand", having been thwarted by those subsidies, is going about the business of setting things right by putting an end to companies that offer products not for their economic value but for their narcissistic value.

There's a rising tide of African voices that agree with you since most of that aid never leaves the capitals of the nations being "helped".

Other times the aid ends up trashing the local economy since aid agencies are quite often less concerned with the results of their efforts then with shaking down rich donors.

the hypothesis is that some number of climate scientists, noting which side their bread is buttered on, are quite capable of artfully, in some cases not so artfully, slanting the science. Can we at least agree that scientists are human and thus vulnerable to the same pressures that motive other human beings?

With all due respect to your smart-aleckiness, I don't think so.

At the very least the density of water, while resulting in a superficially similar motion to wing-flapping in air, is just such so much more dense a medium I'd guess the adaptations necessary for the penguin wouldn't easily translate to the adaptations necessary for flight. Then there's the problem of intermediate forms. What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?

The "intermediate steps" problem is why I have doubts about birds evolving from purely gliding to powered flight.

Wings adapted to the production of thrust, to improve running performance, will also generate lift when held still in an air stream. The skeletal, musculature and nervous system adaptations can occur incrementally because incremental improvements result in incremental benefits. For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.

I don't know about Zerglings but it's always struck me that the use of wings to improve land speed would be a good evolutionary intermediate step to flapping-winged flight.

The bone and muscle structure and all the supporting bodily systems wouldn't be much different between a bird that's improved its running speed by wing-flapping and a bird that can take flight for short but worthwhile distances.