Wait, how is the progressive income tax the "most regressive tax possible?" You're suggesting they indirectly do what sales taxes directly do. Wouldn't they be at least tied with sales taxes?

To be fair, that number is probably a lot lower than it would be in sane political climates. Mention taxes and the voters go insane. Mention much of anything besides jobs and yay USA and they'll go insane. "They're trying to take away your refund!" will get a lot more traction than "death panels" did.

The lesson here is that neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism ever exist long in the real world and we should probably stop talking about economics in theoretical terms.

What are you saying? Surely you're not suggesting that any scary scientific predictions made in the 70's cannot as a rule come true.

I'd suggest some of those dire predictions were self-defeating predictions anyway. CFCs and the ozone hole for example lead to a reduction in CFC emissions. Politicians occasionally listen to scientists.

Okay, I think you need to take your own advice, I didn't think you were suggesting abolishing government funding. I'm suggesting that we keep the same amount of state funded research, but put it into higher risk grants and let the private sector take over more sure projects, which will get the benefits you're hoping for.

I guess not enough people are voting in firehose. Whining about the outcome is fun and all, but you could do something about it. This is also true of the republican and democratic parties, through the primaries, but I digress.

Yesterday netflix was looking great, yet when I tried to check my e-mail, nothing. Speedtest didn't even load. I assumed someone else in the building was torrenting. The whole building shares a comcast line of some type, included in rent, and at best it's exactly as bad as you'd expect. Now the internet is going to be unusable for anything OTHER than netflix.

I really have to hand it to comcast to finding ways to consistently make things worse than expected.

I disagree. One of the points of the article was that grants were too safe. Government grants are necessary to pay for research that is high-risk but high reward. If I want to do a multi-million dollar study that maybe has a 98% chance of leading nowhere but has a 2% chance of curing cancer, that's a probably a terrible risk for private sector, but should be funded by the government. Instead, with so much competition, grant comittees are playing it safe and boring. That type of research can be funded by the private sector maybe.

The article really drives that point home: the taxpayers invest in PhD scientists and postdocs, for the students to then leave the field means the taxpayer investment has been wasted.

What? No it didn't. The article pointed out that the problem was noticed, and commented on, including some of the authors, for the past few decades.

That's only part of the problem. The article pointed out that a lot of the problem was actually after PhD, the postdoc phase. Postdocs are paid peanuts becuase it's only supposed to be a temporary situation. The result is that permanent staff scientist jobs that one can live on long term don't really exist.

"They" being about ten scientists (far less than the thousands suggesting climate change today), and "calling for" being "suggested it but said it was too soon to do anything about it."

Your comparison is rather meaningless.

Climate engineering encompass a lot of options. There are definitely options that could have bad effects, but there are some that should be safe. I've heard it refer to carbon sequestration and iron fertilization. We know how much carbon we're pumping out, we know that the climate we have gotten used to is not the climate we're moving to. We can reasonably assume that soaking up the carbon we've added will not change things.

Unfortunately, that's probably the most expensive option, I expect that when rising temperatures become an issue for China and/or the US, we'll go with a cheap fix like put sun blocking aerosols up that will reduce the heat and also sunlight to developing countries, that will cause the effects you're talking about.

I hate both of those groups for the troubles they're causing, but lets not in any way shape or form imply that willful ignorance is exclusive to those groups. It's a human trait. This is not just to be PC either: punctuated equilibrium suggests that real change only happens with speciation events and extinctions. There's variation within species, but it's generally just noise that never amounts to much. It's not some individuals within a species are stronger, faster, or smarter than others, it's that some species as a whole give rise to something better, and then they die out.

Taken as a philosophy, we're more like those people we look down on. Lets not imagine for a moment that we're more highly evolved than them.

You mean trolls. Real anti-vaxers aren't engaging in debate on or offline anymore than real 9/11 truthers, birthers, racists or homophobes are. Antivaxers write off the internet as in on the conspiracy after they get slapped down once. It feeds into their narrative and manages to convince them more that they're right and being persecuted. They continue to spread their gospel to people who haven't already made up their mind on the subject. To their credit, we're not exactly open-minded about it, talking about it here would be a waste of time for them. Against their credit, there's reason for that.

Because the other ones have been dealt with in the appropriate manner, yet the problem remains.