The abstract concludes that talking about changes in precipitation are more likely to convince people of climate change.

Sure it will. Until their favored politicians tell them one way or the other, at which point I'll bet dollars to yuan that the same statistical anomaly appears for perceptions in precipitation change.

Now I'll never get rid of that Canadian Tire money. It'll sit in my sock drawer for all eternity.

Could someone explain this part to me:
"It would be even worse if we weren't also locking up lots of water from rivers behind dams like the Hoover Dam."

I get that destroying dams would cause greater fluctuations in water flow rates downstream. Over the long term, however, how would destroying dams cause a net increase in annual water flow rates? Are we actually letting out less aggregate water than comes in, causing dam lakes to actually grow larger each year and dooming them to inevitably flood over the dams creating them? I thought dams merely regulated water flow after building up a large reservoir to spin the turbines for electricity generation.

Actually, it /was/ more-or-less self-sustaining, then the baby boomers didn't have kids at the same rate as their parents, and the Ponzi scheme it's based on started to fall apart.

Social Security had been planned on the assumption that the U.S. population would always have more income-earning tax payers than retired geriatrics, costing individual Americans a small amount of money each year to take care of the relatively few Social Security payouts. This is why I call it a Ponzi scheme: the program is premised on paying retirees using the money currently being gathered from taxpayers, and has been since its inception. There was no phase of the program where taxpayers began paying in but Social Security wasn't paying out.

The problem is that two things changed. First, the baby boom happened, which initially meant Social Security was in its heyday, but the relatively better-educated baby boomer kids didn't themselves continue to have children at the same rate as their parents. Second, the baby boom generation has seen the benefit of vastly improved health care, prolonging their life and, consequently, increasing the number of retired Americans drawing on social security.

True, Congress took money from Social Security instead of raising taxes, but the result is simply that they've accelerated what was inevitable anyways. I don't think there was any way the baby boomers could have paid enough into Social Security to avoid this outcome.

Also true, Social Security is not the only long-term problem facing the U.S. budget, nor is it the biggest. Medicare is probably the single biggest contributor to the U.S.'s long-term budget. Also, if we keep raising the debt limit for the country, then paying back those debts may eclipse even Medicare.

Sounds like my cellphone, but without the vibration features.

Then the answer to global warming is obvious: Re-start the mass use of CFCs!

Port iOS to Plan 9!

At first I was going to make a joke about my government in response to your thought about organizations without profit motive, but then I read about the FCC commissioner joining Comcast/NBC now that her vote has helped make the merger between those two possible.