Air is 5 ppm helium and 15 ppm neon. Neon lifts balloons too, but we don't use it because it's too expensive to recover from the air, and recovering helium is even more inefficient.

NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.

Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donald Trump commutes to work in a blimp refilled with freshly scented helium-3 every morning. MY airship has a pedal-powered generator to pump current through a electrolysis chamber. Hydrogen works so much better than helium anyway... it really gets you high.

Would Verizon really get in trouble for a DMCA violation? I think the the users with compromised emails have more to fear from the DMCA.

I don't think Obama needs to worry about the veto hurting the Democrats in 2016. His veto count so far is 2, a lower count than any president since James Garfield in 1881. (In comparison GWB vetoed 12 bills, Clinton 39, GHWB 29, Reagan 39.) This is mostly a consequence of the filibuster used to cut off the flow of legislation that reaches him- which effectively raised the required vote count from 50 to 60 during his term. But now, more stuff is now going to percolate through Congress and reach his desk, including some unpopular, corrupt shit that will scare the public. Before, he simply hadn't been given many bills to veto; now he's going to be tested. Even if he only vetoes one bill in the next Congress, that's going to be enough to elicit nuclear head explosions on Fox, so he might as well add a few dozen without having to worry about any additional meaningful repercussions. Hopefully he won't cave as usual.

Just four fucking million public comments sent by American citizens to the FCC- but they're not corrupt politicians, so screw 'em.

Why is it flamebait? (It got modded as flamebait but went back up to a 5). This video is two years old, but that's the new guy who's now going to head the Environment and Public Works Committee in 2015. He's already bragging that his staff is been poring over NSF studies to compile a list of "wasteful studies" to be targeted in 2015, and says that one of his "top three priorities" for that committee is going to be âoeshining a lightâ on wasteful funding of climate scientists.

I used to work for a guy who founded a software company in Sunnyvale. After Bush got reelected, he decided to sell the company to Agilent for a couple million bucks, went back to Australia, and formed a new company there. He comes back to visit sometimes, and says that he now gets a lot of questions from people in Australia- "What happened over there? Americans used to be smart!" His standard answer: "No, it's not that they're stupid, but the news they get in the U.S. is really bad."

Ooops, this is where I stopped reading.

1. The "difference" is math. You don't pay estate taxes on $5 or $5 million. It doesn't apply to the first $5.3 million dollars of inheritance.
2. If someone wants to leave an inheritance as a legacy to his children to enjoy, it IS his choice. A tax on a huge inheritance won't prevent anybody from doing that.
3. If someone leaves $5 million to their kids, it's usually not because they worked 100 times as hard as a school bus driver leaving $50K. In fact, the driver paid a percentage of income in tax that is roughly double what the millionaire paid.
4. School bus drivers who make $30K per year are not going to leave behind a $5.3 million dollar fortune of hard-earned money. But all the cable news shows this guy is willing to trust have got him and his redneck friends at church panicked about the "death tax".
5. People don't seem to understand this anymore, but it's the government's job to collect taxes on income. It doesn't matter if you have $5 or $5 million or $5 billion. If you want electricity going to traffic lights, you have to pay your fair share. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you get special rights to stuff your mattress. My friend worked hard and brought kids to school. If you want to see the hard work billionaires do, just run your kitchen faucet and light a match.

Yeah, I voted with the majority (of the popular vote)- guilty as charged.

It's "not the US government's anymore, only because some people now are so rich they can afford to legalize their activities. (The Mafia, OTOH, was never really good at infiltrating politics.)

Yes, two brothers were free at last to "pool together" donating 0.05% of their wealth through shady corporations to politicians who thump people with Bibles and propose policies from bad science fiction novels. And it's a good thing, too- this was the most expensive American election in history and now we need the help of billionaires if we want to win!

Why are we spending so much money on satellites? We could have bought a couple Cold War fighter jets that will never be used and that explode on liftoff!

Your friend is is a different guy, if he's the inheritor. The guy I was talking about is afraid that his kids are going to have to pay taxes on his life savings from driving a school bus.

You need to listen to someone other than Ted Cruz.

The Supreme Court ripped the First Amendment a new asshole in 2012 with their new concept that every dollar suddenly has free speech. "Going after the First Amendment" is a bullshit talking point made by people who directly benefit from corporate donations.

You should look into wolf-PAC. They're gathering petitions to state legislatures to allow votes on a Constitutional Amendment to reinstate laws on political donations that the Supreme Court entirely threw out the window with that Citizens United 5-4 decision.

But voters are easily convinced that if their freedom to form a corporate monopoly is central to their own economic future. I know a guy who drives a school bus and is worried sick about the estate tax.