They're one kind of private asset. There are others. Eliminating all public liabilities would not eliminate all private assets. Also note that the effects are not as evenly distributed as this simplistic balance-sheet view would suggest; "public liability" refers to the majority of future taxpayers who will be made to service the interest on the debt, while the interest-generating "private assets" end up in the hands of those select few with the ready capital (both financial and political) to purchase them. Not the sort of thing to promote if you favor a more equitable distribution of wealth.

No, it's not. That billion dollars a year comes from a paper that claims $900 million "cumulative" spending per year by a large group of conservative groups which turn out to spend a lot of that money on other things. And as that blog post notes, the top three groups (the biggest two of which account for 30% of the alleged spending) rarely comment on climate issues. The blog also notes that the top two groups by spending support carbon taxes, which is kind of an odd target for climate "counter-movement" propaganda spending. The author claims 25% of the "counter-movement" money goes to "think tanks supporting global warming restrictions".

The author find only $68 million explicitly opposing global warming activism while $22 million supports the same. That's not only a bit shy of $900 million a year, it also is suspicious in its substantial incoherence on the subject of climate change.

In comparison, the author notes the presence of five environmental groups with $1.6 billion per year in spending and a far more aggressive and coherent climate change message.

So no, that isn't the number from the blog post that the GGP linked to.

The problem with this argument is that your assertion doesn't happen in practice.

Quite a bit over their lifetime.

If they can't consent or act on their own interests, then they don't have present freedom to infringe upon. Since they can be expected in the future to become human adults, able to act on their interests, then our present actions can infringe on their future freedom.

No, that poster merely showed the potential for immoral action, ie, that the free market system might not, under very contrived circumstances be perfectly morally. Instead, to prove the above assertion, one needs to come up with an approach that works better than the free market in the moral sense of the original poster.

I think we can think of better examples than that. After all, the structure of almost all markets in the first place assumes the presence of immoral behavior in the participants of that market. And externalities are by definition the ways trades in markets can impose on others without their consent. Finally, what isn't traded on a market tends to be invisible to that market (unless there is an obvious proxy). As they say, money can't buy happiness.

Welcome to the thread. My first response was to a post speaking of "eyesore" complaints about wind turbines. Visibility is the number one consideration above size because would-be neighbors are far less likely to complain about an "eyesore", if they can't actually see it.

I'm still waiting for a truly open-source, unlocked, user-controllable phone. Like a successor to Open Moko. (Building a closed platform on a base of open software doesn't cut it.)

Is anything out there or in the works?

(It's particularly acute for me just now: My decade-old feature phone started to flake out last week.)

Where's the evidence for this assertion? I've seen estimates two orders of magnitude less.

Meh. As the other replier noted, there are also crises that governments can cause, which the vast majority of private businesses can't. Wars tend to be an awfully good example of that, unfortunately.

No reason to. My point stands. They aren't doing coal mingin in urban areas and even if they were, it's not going to result in highly visible structures that you can see from a great distance.

One can get similar scaled risks with fires in buildings. It isn't uncommon for things to have low probability but high damage risks associated with them. That doesn't mean you can't do them in urban areas. You just need to address the risks first.

It's kind of interesting how disinterested the US media got on that subject. I haven't heard about this story for a while.

Using the "astroturf" label to describe large public movements is just a silly ad hominem argument. Feel free to rationalize whatever you'd like, but this strikes me as an indication of considerable ignorance on your part. I think a better course of action would be for you to understand the viewpoints you downplay as astroturf.

For example, the US's EPA is part of the same government as the NSA or the US military. It uses different heavy-handed, often extra-legal tactics, but the same bureaucratic indifference for the welfare of the individual (and often, rule of law) is evident. The abuses of government aren't concentrated just in a few divisions we don't like.

The libertarian weighs the risks differently with government actions considered more dangerous and harmful than business actions. I side with that interpretation. No business has sovereign immunity, a captive revenue stream like taxpayers, or the raw power (on numerous levels) than government wields.

I don't see why your BeagleBone black example is systemd's fault. It has a convoluted way of managing network interfaces because it uses connman, a network-management daemon from Intel that is not part of systemd.

I installed ubuntu 14.04 on my BBBs. (Had to upgrade the kernel a little later because the 3.13.0 kernel wasn't ported to arm-on-bone in time to go out with the original 14.04 distribution and the 2.whatever they shipped didn't handle a class of USB device I needed, but it's fine now at 3.13.6-bone8.)

Changing to a specified, fixed, IP address was just a matter of editing /etc/network/interfaces, which was commented well enough (in combination with the man page on my ubuntu laptop) to make it easy.

(Main problem was that DeviceTree overlays weren't supported by 3.13.0-6, so I had to hack the boot-time base device tree to reconfigure for the onboard device functionality I wanted, rather than just overlaying the deltas during or just after the boot procerss.)

Lots of things have happened since the dinosaurs flew away

I love that formulation.

(And just coined a related one: "... since the dinosaurs gave us the bird" B-) )

When it comes to debts, that's pretty much exactly what it means:

If someone who owes you a debt offers to pay the full value in legal tender (regardless of the original form of the debt), you can either take what they're offering or give up on collecting. In general the offer must be exact; if someone who owes you $5 hands you a $100 bill, that legally satisfies the debt but you are under no obligation to provide change.

This doesn't mean that all transaction must involve legal tender, or that you can be compelled to trade goods or services for legal tender. It only applies to debts. If you insist on payment up front, rather than extending credit, then no debt is created and you can make the transaction conditional on whatever payment method you prefer. (Barring laws in the more restrictive jurisdictions outlawing alternate forms of payment, which is a separate issue.)

This. It's a half a billion British Pounds budget. They can afford this modest effort. If you spend an hour per strand of hair, that's only 25 man-years to handle 50,000 hair strands. Even at 100k pounds per man-year cost, that would be 2.5 million pounds in labor costs. I don't see the problem.