Do the calculation yourself (or just read below) - it is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude!

Wait - the expected global warming is on the order of 1 degree per century, not per year - so they are really off by 3 orders of magnitude. They aren't talking about warming the atmosphere. They are calculating the warming of the entire planet, including the core. Very silly - way before a 1 degree change has propagated even a tenth of the way in we will be back in the more usual ice age climate.

Honestly, though, the state that global warming is adding 160 tons of mass to Earth is just BS. You could say that if we were talking about geological time periods, but global warming (if it exists) definitely doesn't exist for geological time periods. Ice ages last long enough to get noticed by the planet's interior, warming periods do not.

It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet. And even the worst case runaway global warming projections do not predict one degree per year. Long before the entire planet is heated by rising surface temperatures, the next ice age will hit us.

Actually, this is an interesting question - the answer is a resounding "yes".

What you do is have a small "elevator" on the actual elevator. So, you deflect the small "elevator" up. That hitting the airflow causes the real elevator to move down. That causes the airplane to pitch.

It like getting hydraulic controls for free, using the airflow. Doesn't work too well at the edges of the performance envelope, but used in many older aircraft.

Imputed income is entirely different - in fact, it is as close to the opposite as is possible. So you are no longer arguing that I am paying higher taxes than you even though I'm not getting more money? So now you're just saying I should be happy to pay the extra taxes, since I get benefits from the government. It might even make sense if we didn't have a progressive tax code - I supposedly get the money back later, but that doesn't actually happen because I get phantom income that moves me to the highest bracket, then when I finally get "phantom losses" I am retired and back in a lower bracket - so they don't actually help me.

I don't own the building. I lease it - this is about cash flow, not profit. Again, you don't know what you are talking about but you feel free to belittle me and say I should support you financially. Why should I pay some of your portion of the tax burden? Don't you receive the benefits of the government too?

I am not rich - and I pay at the highest tax bracket.

Bill Gates is rich, and he pays effectively lower than middle class taxes - much lower proportionally than me. And then everyone says that he and Buffet are heroes for saying that my taxes should be increased! Note that their plan doesn't even really change their own tax rate!

Why do you want to raise taxes on me instead of him?

I should also mention that I could have hired 3 more people (and wanted to), but I can't afford to do that because I have to save money for the phantom income taxes.

Please google the words "phantom income", and get back to me.

You pay taxes on phantom income, but you do not receive it. It is rare across the population, but unfortunately not rare in small business owners.

Maybe you shouldn't vote to raise taxes on things you don't understand?

Look, moron, what I am complaining about is something else entirely. I'll explain my finances for this year to you, shall I?

One of my companies (that I founded) is doing really well this year. That's great, of course. But it means that we had to staff up, and go into a new building. That cost a lot of cash flow (which is not the same thing as profit). So I now have a company that I was able to grow, but did not get significant cash out of (as I, I personally didn't get a huge paycheck).

But the government says that I own the business, so I made all the profit. Even though I essentially reinvested the entire thing. Even though the company generated very little actual cash. My tax bill is larger than what I get paid! Essentially, the company's growth rate is cut to about half of what it could have been if I had been allowed to keep the money and reinvest it. The tax money has to come from somewhere!

You might think that this is OK, higher taxes this year probably will be balanced by lower taxes eventually. And in a non-progressive tax regime, you'd be right - but I'll leave that calculation to the interested student.

This is not theoretical - this is what really happened to me this tax year!

Note, however, that no one EVER says they are going to raise taxes on the rich. They raise taxes on the high income workers - because those people are a threat to the rich (they might catch up!), and they can count on sour grapes votes from the poor as well.

If we wanted to tax the rich, we would tax accumulated wealth, not income. Most high income people are struggling to build businesses, and taxes definitely adversely effect them. (I know, I'm in that boat)

In addition to this, the real reason we do not have a budget is that the last budget past was an emergency budget. That gave our fearless leaders an opportunity to cram the bill full of special cashouts for their friends. Unfortunately, under current conditions they would never get those passed. So instead, they pass continuing resolutions - so that the same friends continue to get rich, but no one can single out a bad line item...

You can't. So stop trying!

What you do is ask each person if they are a terrorist, while they person is being observed by essentially a high tech lie detector. Those that pass, go through easily. The 1% that don't get individual attention, and still pass through more easily than before.

This isn't rocket science - Israel is already doing this!

This is a bad test, by the way - no one is saying that CO2 cannot be used as a greenhouse gas at high concentrations. People are arguing about the relative effect of a change from 300 ppm to 350 ppm. This can be modeled, but there are so many interdependancies in the atmosphere that the models end up unable to actually be predictive.

Anyway, the other author of this report went on record recently saying that Richard Muller went too far in his statements. She says that the interesting thing is not that they did show consistent warming up to 1990, but rather that the interesting part is that the warming stopped suddenly in 1998 or so. So during a period where CO2 was steadily rising, temperatures remained stable.

She went on further to say that the big news item is not that they have proven or disproven anything - the news item is that there is now a non-AGW biased data source to use, that agrees in essence with the existing sources. (Which also show that the temperature has stopped going up.)

The part holding the cameras was made from plastic, because he didn't have enough time to machine it. It melted when the rocket hit mach 3+, because of the compression shock wave that formed in front of it. (Commonly misreported in the media as "air friction")

Essentially, the plastic thing poked out of the rocket. The mach 3+ air had to be brought to a dead stop right in front of it. The way it does that is by forming a high pressure shock right in front of it. Basic physics, when you compress air is gets hot - in this case, melting the plastic rocket bits...

He was going Mach 3+ - the plastic melted from the heat from the mach shock wave. (Typically reported incorrectly in the media as "air friction")

Don't tell my son that, OK?

In 1,000,000 years, your descendants will effectively be gods, right?

Do you believe this is the first time through that evolution? On what basis?

Well, that might be a reason to reject certain religious strands...

"So if your kid doesn't learn do you torture him for eternity..."

No, you damn him. Put literally, you stop him. If he does not become a responsible adult, you do not give him the root password to the universe. As a child, he may consider that torture for all eternity, but hopefully he will grow up some day.

  "Do you give them (or at least expose them to) hundreds of slightly different sets of rules and just hope they'll find the right one..."

If he is going to give you the root password to the universe, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to not require specific instruction on what the "right rules" are. Perhaps you should be able to look at a new situation, and figure out the morality questions in it.

Your arguments are against a particular form of religion that you don't like. In my experience, most religions have a part of the truth - only you can decide what parts are good and what parts are bad.

In my chosen religion, we are here because we chose to be. We judged for ourselves that the value gained by enduring evil exceeded the unpleasantness of the endurance period. There were many who rejected that choice and are not here. Of course, that opens a whole new can of metaphysical worms...