For perspective, the tax breaks given to oil companies amounts to about $2.4 billion/year (in the form tax breaks which are similar to the same tax breaks that every other industry gets for investing in expansion). Loan guarantees like the one A123 got totalled $90 billion in the "stimulus" bill passed in 2009.

Government sticking its thumb on the scales of the economy is always a bad idea--whether it be bailing out banks or perpetual ethanol subsidies + ethanol mandates + import tariffs.

I'm afraid the data doesn't match up with your perceptions. The rich already pay a higher effective tax rate than those in lower income brackets on average (about 24%), while the bottom 50% pay an average of less than 2%. Yes, by all means, let's let the wealthy pay their proportionate share of taxes, by reducing their tax rates!

The current projections are for the Social Security Trust Fund to be depleted around 2037, last I checked. At that point, assuming the government only pays out what it brings in, benefits will be reduced by about 25%. I would assume with current demographics, the payroll taxes will pay for an ever-shrinking percentage of the original benefits, until the baby boomers die off in significant numbers.

I don't know anybody under the age of 55 who is planning on receiving benefits from SS when they retire.

You can find Bic Clic Stic pens on amazon and ebay. They're my wife's favorite as well.

Good point. It also sounds like at least some of the folks at Fox were trying to prevent the footage from going live, and they apologized immediately afterward. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, deliberately posted the footage with full knowledge of its contents.

I think Fox has the moral (relative) high ground here.

Malthus, perhaps. Hari Seldon, probably not.

If the title of this post isn't reason enough to reform the English language, I don't know what is. At first I though it had something to do with homeowners refinancing.

Cash-Poor (adj) Sharp (adj/noun) Mortgages (verb/noun) Display (verb/adj/noun) Factories (noun)

There are plenty of other places to list ads, though none are as big. My preference is Bookoo, which *does* do some sort of radius searching (I forget how exactly it works), but still has individual local sites.

Yes, PV=nRT (or some more accurate version of it). However, for this application, the volume is so huge that the air doesn't actually heat up all that much as it's compressed. Similar methods have been used for storing natural gas in salt domes for decades.

This smacks me as being a bit odd and inefficient. Given the volume being produced, wouldn't a pipeline make more sense? It'd be safer and cheaper in the long run. Of course, given the troubles the Keystone XL pipeline is having, maybe it's more economic to truck it than to try and get through all the red tape for a pipeline.

I used to travel abroad at my previous job, and I had similar, though often worse, experiences in other countries. For example, when leaving Luanda, Angola, here was the process:

1. Arrive at airport, get in line
2. Go through metal detector, have your itinerary checked against your passport
3. Get in line for the check-in desk. Start filling out a passenger information sheet
4. Get interviewed for a few minutes by a security person who again checks your itinerary against your passport
5. Airline checks your itinerary against the passport and the passenger information sheet
6. Move to the next line to actually check in
7. Stand in another security line, bags get xrayed, you go through the metal detector
8. Go into a small room to be interviewed to make sure you're not carrying any Angolan currency out
9. Go wait in waiting area (not by the gate) until it's about time to board
10. Go through another check of boarding pass vs. passport
11. Bag search to *really* make sure you're not carrying currency
12. Pat-down to *really* *really* make sure you're not carrying currency
13. Another check of boarding pass against passport (by airport security)
14. Another check of boarding pass against passport (by the airline)
15. Go out the door to board a bus which takes you to the airplane

Uh, perhaps there's some measure in the law which places tariffs on higher-polluting sources, but I can't recall any time when mandatory, arbitrary efficiency/emissions standards have lowered costs. If higher efficiency truly creates savings, then the mandates aren't necessary. Witness the boom in demand for fuel-efficient cars as gas prices go up.

I don't recall hearing much in the way of incidents involving lithium-containing batteries combusting during shipping. This leads me to wonder which of the following is going on. Is it:
1) A response to actual incidents?
2) An over-reaction to the potential of an accident, much like the no-electronic-gadgets rule on airplanes?
3) Something more sinister involving patents and/or protectionism?

Given the USPS's boneheaded management style (e.g. you still can't buy first-class postage on their site, only the much more expensive Priority and Express), I'm thinking option #2, but that's just speculation

The money has to come from *somewhere*. TANSTAAFL. A few things to note: The Senate bill would raise taxes permanently, and it will take ten years of that tax increase to cover one year of the student loan interest freeze. Secondly, the money cut in the House bill comes from a portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which is pretty much just a slush fund. The proposal is to cut spending which hasn't happened yet. Third, it's good to have educated workers. But that education ain't worth much if potential employers can't hire the graduates, and taking money away from potential employers makes it that much harder for them to hire those graduates.

The author throws this premise and assumption in without giving it too much examination:

a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection. Once such connections become ubiquitous...

That's a big leap. Countries with high populations densities, such as those in Europe and the Far East, will have a much easier/cheaper time of building out the infrastructure for reliable high-speed internet to a vast majority of their population. Here in the US, however, it's a lot more expensive. Simply hand-waving the "once such connections become ubiquitous" ignores the cost of installing that infrastructure, and the time required to extend it to enough households.

Besides, a 1080p movie is going to suck a lot of bandwidth, and I'm guessing most people won't want to pay for a connection fast enough when they can save a few bucks with a slower connection. Not to mention the whole throttling/bandwidth cap issue.