If I could, I would mod you up. That was very insightful. Thanks!

Obama tax? I didn't vote for him, but fact check.

http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx?city1=USA Average&city2=&city3=&crude=n&tme=96&units=us

There's graph of gasoline prices in the last 8-years; roughly half under Bush, half under Obama. I can't say that the average price is particularly different.

Actually in three different cars with manual transmissions I've driven. I commuted about 55 miles each way in primarily flat, highway driving, and could repeatably beat the EPA figures in Fall and Spring. The best was a Saturn SL2 with a manual, which could easily beat the manufacturer by 4-5 mph. Of course snow/ice/AC and all bets are off.

You know the same things affect endurance in standard cars as well, right? Windows-up vs. down, wind, air-conditioning/heating all have sizable effects on range, and you just get a feel for how it drives in your area. It's really estimating by neural network, but it works.

Of course, range is a bigger issue due to fewer fueling stations for a Tesla, but the estimation of range is actually easier (electricity doesn't vary in octane, for instance.)

It really depends on how high the standard is for a lie. Unambiguously incorrect statements are easy to come by:

"The entire north polar ice cap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade." [1]

Clearly not true; the percent gone was actually closer to 24%, and the worst-case projections only show the ice cap nearly disappearing in summer. OTOH, I'm not about to call them lies either; 40% would have been right two years earlier, and I can see forgetting to mention the detail about being ice-free only in summer. Furthermore, that was in a live interview; easy to make mistakes.

Perhaps more damning would be:
"The melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland would result in a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet in the near future." (From An Inconvenient Truth)

Just no. Projections of sealevel rises of 20 feet tend to be looking at millenia-scale warming; for no conceivable definition of "near future" is that true. Worse, it's actually in a movie; presumably the script was edited with a finetooth comb.

You could argue it's still only twisting the data, as it is based on actual research; but it's based on claiming that research says something it really doesn't, which is roughly equivalent to Monckton's shenanigans.

Correction: Nuclear energy does not come from the sun.

Not really. Hundreds of people have pointed out the Al Gore is twisting and outright lying about research. Whether the original researchers were among them is irrelevant; it's simply ideologically motivated deceit either way.

Actually, revolvers and derringers are trivial with equipment in most garages. The only special part they need is a spring, which a fairly innocuous part. It won't be as nice/accurate as on made in a shop (skip rifling the barrel: a tube works, etc.) but it'll fire multiple shots between reloads.

Depends on if I believed he was guilty. If I believed him innocent, I'd let someone nuke the city; their actions aren't my responsibility, mine are.

FTFY

A tough choice; and an irrelevant one. I'd trust either of them more than, say, Andrew Jackson. This is an important precedant, and it doesn't matter who I'd rather have making the call; these calls will indubitably be made in the future by a president I trust substantially less than Bush or Obama. Who makes them now doesn't matter.

"It's bad civic hygiene to build the apparatus of a police state" -- Bruce Schneier

Whoosh!

There's a big distinction between coercive and noncoercive social/governmental pressure. Is there pressure to conform? Yes. To take the society's goals as our own? Yes. It's based on our nature as herd critters. But there's a huge difference between recognizing the existence of social pressure (an inevitable in any society) and attempting to force people to abide by the social norm. I'll admit there are many examples of that in Western countries. Every where from Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant in Canada, to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, folks have been prosecuted for stepping too far outside the 'social norm'. (The US has been remarkably resistant to that, due to a fairly strict interpretation of the first amendment.)

But there is a massive quantitative difference between enforcement like NK, and enforcement like Canada. I think both are qualitatively abominable, and I agree they stem from the same human urge to enforce conformity seen in classroom bullies the world around. But I don't think the Western bubble is really comparable, because the coercion is the exception, rather than the norm. Indeed, we even pride ourselves on how far we go to accommodate radically different ideas.

I guess I'm just saying it's a completely different system when the primary pressure to conform is internal (social) rather than external (coercion).

And no, Aaron Swartz isn't a counter example. Copyright law is idea-agnostic, and so is nonbiasing on ideological bubbles.

You want to suggest Voyage from Yesteryear as a suggestion for moving beyond what we have? What we have is a massive set of economic and psychological data which predict humans will never respond en masse like they do in that book. Is it possible we're just measuring some sort of inherited culture we could break from if only we could get a generation away from us to think on their own? Not really. Cultures have been abandoned repeatedly, for centuries, and never developed anything similar.

Furthermore, it posits unlimited resources. While possible, it's quite unlikely any time soon. Even granted that though, it completely neglects information cost! Even if raw materials and labor are practically limitless, the knowledge about what is worth having and what isn't is worth something. That knowledge must be transmitted somehow. Currently, it's in prices. In an unlimited resource society, it will still be prices. There is no evidence that anything else is remotely as efficient, and quite a bit that lots of specific other things aren't.

If by the US's 'ideological bubble' you mean a grounding in the observable and measurable, I aim to never escape it! I want to spread that bubble to encompass the world, that they may taste of fruit of knowledge! This is the foundation of science; no amount of wishful thinking is preferable.

Try reading the Declaration a bit more closely.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal,
That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,
That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

Secure. Similar to protect. Not meaning provide, grant or give.

You cannot secure something which does not already exist. The rights governments (according to the authors) are instituted to protect are clearly preexisting, unlike rights to food, water, or other provision which does not and cannot exist without government of some form.

Similarly, "Promote the general welfare" does not imply "Provide for the needs of the public." It means exactly what it says, to promote our general welfare through protection of rights, enforcement of laws, and redress of grievances. The general welfare is promoted by any well-ordered government, regardless of whether it institutes a policy of provision for the unfortunate.