Tax "breaks" as you refer to them (also known as tax expenditures) are equivalent to a subsidy. If the U.S. government sends you $10,000, or they craft a special tax credit that only benefits you, reducing the taxes you pay by $10,000, the net effect is the same. Either way, they could have charged everyone a little less in taxes by not sending you that money/arbitrarily letting you pay less taxes than everyone else.

On page 7 alone, there are tax breaks so targeted that they clearly exist only to send money to oil and coal companies, e.g.

Credit for Production of Nonconventional Fuels ($14,097) - IRC Section 45K. This provision provides a tax credit for the production of certain fuels. Qualifying fuels include: oil from shale, tar sands; gas from geopressurized brine, Devonian shale, coal seams, tight formations, biomass, and coal-based synthetic fuels. This credit has historically primarily benefited coal producers.

BTW, the dollar figures are in millions, so that one credit, by itself, is a $14 billion giveaway to people who are producing the dirtiest fuels possible; aside from biomass and fracking for natural gas (the latter being arguable), every other entry listed there is far worse for the environment than the energy sources we used even a decade ago. And we gave them $14 billion dollars to encourage this behavior.

For accident induced fires like the ones affecting the Model S, I doubt the age of the car would have anything to do with it. New metal crumples roughly the same way old metal does.

In the U.K., there are 15,000 car fires per year, and ~28.7 million cars on the road. Tesla has had 3 car fires out of 21,500 cars on the road. The fires:car ratio is about 4:1 overall:Model S. That said, most of the Model S's haven't been on the road a full year, but if we assume they've been in service an average of the three months, then the overall rate of combustion is essentially identical.

The article you link reverses the cause and effect you claim; the assumption is that excessive napping is an early indicator of dementia, not the cause of it. And the research itself appears to take no stand on the matter; it established a correlation with no actual evidence for which way (if any) the causation arrow goes.

You're off by roughly a factor of 4. Prior to the printing press, the number of bibles produced yearly would have been trivial. Printing of the Bible from non-movable type woodcuts preceded the Gutenberg press by a century (give or take), but prior to movable type, the numbers were still fairly trivial. During the early years of movable type (1475-1500) only 20 million books were printed total, less than a million a year (source). So in order to hit 6B, you'd be dividing (roughly) over the last 500 years, not 2000. So the yearly print runs would be over 10 million, and probably 2-3x that recently (given that the rate of production would surely be much higher now than it was in 1500-1800).

Exactly my point. Marketing is not known for its insistence on accuracy.

Umm... That list appears to be when they made the feature available on Mercedes; you seem to think it means they invented all of these technologies. Toyota released a vehicle with active lane keep in assist back in 2004 for instance (in fairness, Mercedes did contract out for the first lane departure warning system for their trucks).

How? Seriously. What could possibly be insecure about this feature?

Perhaps I'm being a bit overly picky, but that's essentially tautological for just about any statement of the form "Your system is less secure if usability/functionality feature X is enabled." Sure, turning off JS makes you more secure. It also dramatically reduces functionality. My computer is even more secure if I unplug the network cable, or encase it in concrete and sink it in the Mariana Trench. But my browsing experience will be affected negatively, to say the least.

Wait for the THX noise to go off (or one of a hundred common "we're starting the movie" noises), then disable the phone completely for two and a half hours.

The alcohol flush reaction they refer to isn't just about feeling unpleasant. Yes, people with two copies of the gene for it rarely drink. But those with only one copy (that is, they have some of the enzymes to metabolize acetaldehyde), while less likely to drink, often do so anyway (because they can take it, and they enjoy the feeling or feel socially obligated). And when they do, they raise their risk of esophageal (and I believe a few other cancers) significantly more than someone who drinks the same amount but lacks the flush reaction. Acetaldehyde is highly carcinogenic; most people just get rid of it quickly enough to limit the damage.

In short: If you give this to alcoholics, a large number of them will tolerate the side-effects and you've just dramatically increased their risk of cancer.

I've run into this on my car. I've got radar based crash avoidance (it's just brakes, no steering assist); it sometimes detects an imminent collision for a fraction of a second just before crossing railroad tracks. Luckily, it's so quick that I get the audible alert, but the brakes don't kick in. It's disconcerting though. If it took steering control, that would be terrifying.

Because removing the appendix is invasive surgery requiring anesthesia, with all the attendant risks of infection and anesthesia reactions? A lot more people would die of complications from the surgery than would be saved (and of course, there are some theories that support a role, however limited, for the appendix). The foreskin can be removed with far less cost and risk, and apparently produces more benefits.

What is wrong with this? Logically, if one species splits in two, and one of the resulting species splits again, you're going to have both of those secondary split species related to the other with fairly close similarity. Did you know that I'm equally closely related to all of my first cousins (to within a small margin of error)? That's not all that surprising is it?