Washington has no state payroll tax, sorry.

Of course the government creates wealth when it spends money on projects. Any spending creates wealth, it doesn't matter if it's a private company spending the money or the government. Either way, someone gets money and someone else gets a product. So where before you only had money, now you have money and some product (say, a rocket). Thus "creating wealth". Where did you get this idea that the government doesn't create wealth just like any other investor?

Ahh yes, such as roads, water, power, gas, fire departments, police, primary education, &c...

It wouldn't be very smart to put your name and copyright on a file which is being disseminated with pirated material. Just sayin.

Where in the US can you cast ballots from your home computer?

Freedom of speech doesn't extend to fraud, you idiot. What, you think that perjury isn't a crime either, because of "freedom of speech"?

Careful son, that's voter fraud, and could earn you a nice vacation in your local Federal penitentiary.

Oh, and let's not forget to mention the lunacy of white streets in places where it snows.

Concrete streets are not white. "White" in this case means a "highly reflective surface", which concrete is definitely not. The whole point of this silly idea was that the streets would have to reflect as much light as possible.

I think it's interesting to add Australia, Germany and France into that mix.

France is actually set to go below China in that mix, and Germany has been rapidly declining.

The Aussies, on the other hand, are being complete assholes.

Al Gore is set up to become a "carbon billionaire" because he's investing heavily in green technology, which is benefiting from growth due to subsidies by countless governments. It has nothing to do with cap and trade.

If you want to argue against the government subsidizing green-tech companies, that's fine with me. I'll just say this though, I'd rather have the government investing in green-tech than military tech.

What do you mean it's a myth? Overpopulation is an observable phenomenon in almost every form of life, from yeast dying in their own alcohol to deer starving when they lack natural predators.

The only difference is that humanity has found ways using technology to push back the population ceiling (which is mainly determined by food production). Eventually, and this is a certainty, we will not be able to produce any more food on Earth.... or some massive storm and/or drought will cause widespread crop failure. This will result in starvation, and will be a natural check on the human population.

Saying the earth can only support so many of us is an absolute fact. Now, that number might be far, far larger than we currently believe, but that there is an absolute ceiling is without doubt. One absolute ceiling for the population of the earth would be the amount of energy arriving from the sun divided by the amount of energy consumed by a person. Of course, that would mean no energy was being used by anything else on the planet, so it is impossibly high, but it's just to prove a point.

Painting streets white is a terrible idea, can you imagine how difficult that would make it to drive on a sunny day? Ugh.

No no, you need to make sure he fossilizes. Just burying him will probably cause him to decompose.

I'd like to thank the parent too, I hadn't heard of this WRF idea. From what I gather, it certainly seems likely that the evolution of WRF prevents any significant production of new coal.

Contrary to what symbolset says though, I think that the impact of white-rot fungus was quite the opposite of "releasing untold billions of CO2 into the air". It seems much more likely that what happened is that, by preventing coal production through tree fossilization, it halted the massive sequestration of CO2 that was going on during the Carboniferous era. This led to an equilibrium, since the coal that had been produced wasn't going anywhere, and WRF was preventing new coal from being produced - most of the CO2 sequestered in new trees was being sent right back into the atmosphere via WRF.

In the past few hundred years though, with the advent of man burning coal, we could easily be upsetting the equilibrium. Humans are, after all, just another species that evolved. If the evolution of trees can lead to a massive decline in CO2 levels due to fossilization, and the evolution of WRF can lead to an equilibrium by preventing further fossilization, there's absolutely no reason to believe that the evolution of humans couldn't lead to a breaking of the equilibrium and a massive rise in CO2 levels.