^^^ 2015 nominee for most terrifying sentence on Slashdot :)

Interesting; I found just the opposite. When I was a programming n00b working on my C assignments in college, and it was the night before it was due and I couldn't figure out why it was crashing, I tried praying, hoping, wishing, random changes to the code, furrowing my brow at the screen, loud cursing, exhaustive special-case-logic, and a dozen other increasingly desperate non-methods to "make the code work" without actually understanding it.

Just before the 4 AM deadline for submissions, the code would still be crashing, so I'd give up, email in the non-working code, and get a poor grade.

Eventually I realized that the only way to get the code to work was to understand what I was doing, and that if I didn't understand something I needed to learn about it (through experimentation, or reading the man pages, or asking a fellow programmer for help, or simplifying the program to make it more manageable, or etc) until I did understand it. Once I understood what was really going on under the hood, the nature of the problem (and therefore its solution) usually became obvious and trivial.

I think it was this more than anything else that cemented my atheism -- the repeated experience of prayer not making a bit of difference, followed by the realization that only the application of logic and observation would lead me to the correct solution.

Some people, when trying to analyze a buggy program, think "I know, I'll use a debugger". Now they have two buggy programs to analyze.

-- a grumpy old programmer

You misunderstand how a carbon tax would work.

It would be revenue-neutral, which is to say the money collected by the tax on carbon would be used to reduce the tax load of the population as a whole. All the money collected would be given back to the taxpayers.

As such, costs would actually go down for everyone except people/businesses who emit a lot of CO2.

Heavy CO2-emitters would pay more, of course, which would give them a clear economic incentive to find less CO2-intensive ways of doing business, which is the point of the exercise.

It's a great example of the sort of "market-based reform" that Republicans used to champion as an alternative to command-and-control strategies, back before they went batshit.

CO2 emissions in transportation are being reduced as well, via higher fuel economy standards, development of electric cars, etc.

This isn't a scenario where any one improvement will "solve" the problem. The problem has to be attacked on many fronts simultaneously, and all of the partial reductions will start to add up over time.

Hardly. The proposal merely sets targets and leaves it up to the individual states how to reach them. The states don't even have to submit a proposal until 2016, and don't have to start making any actual changes until 2020. The administration is bending over backwards to make this as easy as possible, and still conservatives are crying like they're being waterboarded.

There's your problem -- you think global warming is imaginary, and therefore the amount of resources that can justifiably be allocated to fighting it is zero. There's no point in discussing mitigation strategies with when you haven't even accepted that there actually is a problem that needs to be solved. Most likely at some point in the next 5, 10, 15 years the evidence will become obvious enough to overcome your ideological blinders; but in the meantime the rest of us need to start working on a fix now, rather than waiting for you to be convinced.

Interesting fact: In 2014 the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA not only the authority to regulate CO2 emissions, but the responsibility to do so.

So you're right, Obama doesn't need the legislature to do this, because the legislature already gave him (or more precisely, gave the EPA) the power to do this back in 1970.

If the legislature doesn't like what the EPA is doing, they can of course pass new legislation limiting what the EPA can do. Assuming the legislature is still capable of passing anything, of course.

The same way that going to the gym once or twice helps a person lose weight -- not by a whole lot, but you have to start the ball rolling somehow.

Also, it's a lot easier to convince other nations to reduce their emissions when you've started reducing your emissions first. Otherwise they just accuse you of "do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy.

I think capitalism could solve it, it's just that by the time AGW began kicking the living shit out of the economy and causing widespread ecological damage, much of it would be irreversible.

But guys like the Koch's want it that way. They'll walk away with vast amounts of money and insulate themselves from the woes being suffered by everyone else. We are literally allowing our economic and political systems be completely co-opted to serve a tiny fraction of the population. And worse, many of us actually think that the Heartland Institute and the Wall Street Journal are some sort of purveyors of truth.

Perhaps when people come to grips with the fact the physical laws of nature don't give a flying fuck about anyone's favorite economic system or political ideology, we can move on to solving problems. But I suppose it's always easier to believe that whatever deity you worship, be it Yahweh or the Invisible Hand, will save you, and just go on as if nothing is happening.

You've changed your claim. You're now discussing not the majority of people but the majority of people who name their cars which as far as I can tell is a very, very small percentage of automobile owners. I find it believable that people who name their cars wouldn't like to rent one. Note that that's not the same as saying I believe it.

Your claim about ages rings hollow to me, though. I don't know anyone over the age of 25 who has named their car. Of course, I only know two people who have named their cars, period (one is 21 and one is 19).

However, my experience doesn't really matter. You're the one making the claim that no one will be willing to buy a car that doesn't perfectly fit all of their needs, so it's on you to support it, not on me to refute it.

Which is better for the planet, an auto industry that is moving towards renewably-powered electric cars, or one where electric cars remain an insignificant niche market indefinitely?

Because Tesla is the company that is driving the move towards the former by making electric cars that people actually want to buy, and scaling production up so that people can afford them.

Just because you don't like the means they are using to achieve that goal doesn't mean they aren't heading towards that goal.

Speak for yourself. I refuse to use Facebook, but quite like Google+. I also have a Twitter account, which I never use. But I dumped Facebook the second or third time they changed my privacy settings without asking me, and have no intention of every going back.

Assuming anyone even cares about minutes any more, Google Voice does the same. When GV answers your phone and takes voicemail it doesn't use your cell minutes. And users of GV rarely dial in to listen to their voicemails either; the transcription is so good they just glance at the e-mail/SMS/Hangout message and get what they need to from it.

Apple may indeed be able to find some way to innovate in this space, but simply transcribing voicemails isn't going to do it.

Well, my experience with my kids is that we stop every two hours. Not necessarily to eat. Granted that it's often for 15-20 minutes rather than 30, but it wouldn't be difficult to wait a few minutes more before heading out.

Cite? From what I see that ceases being true by about age 30 for the vast majority of people.