I thought Obamacare is the examplar of taxing people for things that they are not doing. This was made entirely clear by chief justice Roberts. Taxing your for something you don't do has already started.

Your preferences were identical to mine, but I kept reading about how Python was actually a pretty useful and powerful tool. So, I decided to started working through the Euclid Project using Python (I am up to #45) -- Only invested a few days so far, but since this process is very fresh in my memory, thought I would share.

My brain is starting to get to used the both of my objections -- There is quite a bit a built in goodness especially when you factor in all the libraries out there.

My long term goals are to benefit from the cross-platform scripting -- Python beats the pants on Perl IMHO -- having used Perl primarily for this purpose, I always tend to find myself wondering how a Perl script works a few months after I wrote it.

Cross platform GUI is tempting, but have not investigated yet.

US message volume was 2.19 trillion times in 2012 (a 5% decline from 2011) this is equivalent to 6 billion each day. article

Deu 18:20-22

But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.'
And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?'--
when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.

Being dead has not prevent exhuming the body and "punishing it" in the past. And to be honest, I don't recall anywhere the Bible calls for burning false prophets in the general case (though there are examples of putting them to death)

Of course Asimov never claimed to be a prophet, just a prognosticator. Jean Dixon on the other hand ...

Yes, but what about the problem of Global Tilt -- Caused by the mass of all the icebreakers stuck in the Antarctica

I'm sure similar odes have been written by others, but I wrote my version, I think in 1977 when I took my first FORTRAN class. Trust me, it was not so good.

ARPANET was fairly new back then.

So, you have no problem with teaching showing snuff films, and child pornography to 2nd graders. I think that using discretion in books and other media used in schools is a far lesser problem than failing to do so. Censorship requires authoritative (governments, Catholic church and many others can be cited) agencies banishing or restricting objectionable content -- with associated civil or criminal penalties (official or not) associated with violations -- without penalties, there is no real restriction. Lessor restrictions are really not censorship, that though may well be undesirable or even odious and evil.

Say I personally kill you for reading the Bible because I think it is evil -- this is not censorship.
Say Muslims are known to kill people for reading the Bible because I think it is evil -- this is not necessarily censorship, depends on whether said Muslims are extremist that are officially or unofficial sanctioned or tolerated, if so -- yeah its censorship, otherwise it is same same as me doing it.

Being a member of the school book and saying a teacher crossed the line by showing Debbie Does Dallas to 2nd graders crossed the line and make sure she gets fired is not censorship, it is reasonable because community standards dictate that such would be totally inappropriate content. Showing Debbie Does Dallas to seniors is almost certainly the same answer -- it is not the in the purview of the school exercising its in loco parentis rights and responsibility to educate students in such a manner. Minors do not have the same legal rights as adults. See Contributing to the delinquency of a minor if you still doubt the responsibility to exercise judgment.

Highest estimate I was able to find at all related to the Bible related deaths was 17 million in a quick search.

How about Das Capital and everything related to it? 100 million give or take.

The 100 million deaths related to Communism being attributed to Das Kapital is certainly at least as valid as counting the Crusades and the Inquisition as being a result of the Bible -- Nothing in the Bible can accurately be attributed as a direct cause of these 2 events. Just as in the case of Das Kapital was not the direct cause of the many atrocities of communism.

The Bible is at best 2nd place is the history of killing people because of a book.

It may be in third place if you count Mein Kampf related deaths at about 15 million (6 million Jews + 9 million war deaths), as the 17 million for the Bible may be a bit high on the as accurate numbers for Bible related deaths are hard not available.

Cult is one of those words that "mean whatever the user meant". Very fuzzy definition in practice.

I wrote this many many years ago ...

In the beginning were the zeroes and the ones.
And the programmer said, "Let their be FORTRAN"
And the programmer saw that it was not so good

(There was more, but this is remember off the top of my head)

I read somewhere that the total load was about 40 grams of cobalt-60 -- Assuming I did the math correctly, this would result in a 5 Sv dose at a distance of 1 meter from the sample in about 30 seconds. So, about 30 seconds of exposure would be likely to kill you. Of course, since radioactivity is proportional to the inverse square of the distance poking your eyeballs up close to get a get look gives a fatal dose much more quickly.

I would agree, if those things could be labeled "tax deductions" as they are clearly not. You can call them tax policy I suppose. Tax deductions are only useful to offset profits -- you never make a profit, all the tax deductions in the the world do you no good.

The subsidy situation varies widely from country to country. Some countries do subsidize the oil price of oil to consumers, rather heavily in some cases.

You missed the biggest downside of hydro power. Most of the viable hydro power is already being used. There is a good reason for that -- hydro power is the low-hanging fruit of power generation, so naturally we used it when it was available. Yes, there is some hydro not being used - small basins. The total is quite small compared the the amount we use. Lots of hydro power is not used in base load conditions, it is more valuable for peak production due to it fast ramp-up and the fact that the total water available for power generation is less than needed to run the hydro plant at full load 24x7

You don't want to dam the Mississippi for good reasons, so this "hydro power source" will never been used effectively -- damming is by far the most efficient way to extra power from rivers. So, you can't count these solutions as viable.

Well, considering you need large profits to make large tax deductions possible, this is not likely to be a large number for quite a while yet.