and don't forget that most wealth is generated by engaging in activities with energy requirements.

That Tesla 80D Insane Edition that I want takes $115K worth of economic profit to acquire, which in most industries requires 5-20x as much revenue. So over a million dollars worth of economic activity on average to just get that Tesla before you can drive it. Is that greener than a Fiesta?

he is showing his value by creating crap for his handlers to screw up your future.

Yeah, I totally hate the Internet too. If only the FCC had been regulating it since it's inception, it would be so much better now!

Classic example of a market failure.

Just so you know, Microsoft did a lot of shitty deals back then and screwed over a lot of people.

Why wasn't the contact enforced when Vista or 7 came out? One party is a nuclear-armed sovereign - don't tell me Microsoft refused... the courts would surely order cooperation if that were the case.

lemme guess, American public school student?

It's rich since the government in the region of Iran hasn't attacked another country since the 1820's but jingoistic Americans insist that they need to be attacked before they strike again. The irony is laid on thicker than the blood of the millions of victims of American imperialism. Or the women in Iran who have been repressed and murdered since the US overthrew the Shah there and installed theocratic thugs 40 years ago.

Even the CIA admits that all the imperialists are doing is creating more terrorists. We need to take down these morons - for our own safety.

"peace and commerce with all nations, entangling alliances with none."

the state steps in and forces support for the benefit of the child

Humans respond to incentives. What the State actually accomplishes is encouraging mothers to get rid of the father because she'll get his money anyway (in the vast majority of the cases) without having to deal with him. While this outcome is predictable, empirical evidence has borne it out too. Broken households don't benefit the child, in the vast majority of cases (the empirical evidence bears this out too).

Besides, parents are the holders-in-trust of the child's rights, not the State. The State is a legal fiction and as such cannot hold any natural rights, so it's a non-sequitor. Yeah, they can send the boys in blue to enforce any arbitrary rule, but that's not sound moral reasoning.

On the other hand, even if global warming were not caused by humans, shouldn't we be trying to mitigate its effects anyway? Should we be planning for the effects of rising sea waters, instead of (as the skeptics want) just do nothing and let the waters rise?

Is that their claim? The seas have risen by something like 200m in the past 13000 years.

I thought their claim was that human-produced CO2 is a minor contributor and that the vapor feedback cycle is limiting, so humans should focus on adaptation to change rather than trying to prevent it since they can't.

Is this a misrepresentation of the claims?

In scandinavia, kids are also given fluorine pills

With their school lunches? Baloney.

Xylitol has very little - if any - effect on dental health. It's just a sweetener that is not sugar (does not cause karies).

Nope - plaque uptake the xylitol and try to process it as a sugar and fail, exhausting their metabolites and ultimately starving off. Here's the most cited link on PubMed but you're welcome to search all the others, including more recent ones.

The schools aren't investing in the program because somebody's brother owns a chicklet factory - they've demonstrated success with it.

Source: I read peer reviewed real scientific reports.

Except the ones on the topic that are easily to find?

I tried to point out the difference between sodium fluoride and silicofluorides but you just heard 'fluoride'. Of course studies will use sodium fluorides - because that's the safer one. Silicofluorides interact across calcium channels and dissociated fluoride ions don't. Meanwhile about 80% of municipal water supplies use silicofluorides.

Europe banned Fluoride in drinking water since at least the 1980's.

And all their teeth fell out! ;) Just kidding, they got refrigeration too.

The biggest risk is that fluoride is not fluoride. Sodium fluoride dissociates well, but most water supplies use silicofluorides that don't, and they cause heavy metals to cross the blood-brain barrier because the silicofluoride compounds interact biologically.

The dominant fluoridation chemical is actually toxic waste from fertilizer plant smokestack scrubbers that would have a real disposal problem if there weren't municipal water supplies to dump it in.

And those problems don't even touch on osteoporosis, the economic problems with watering one's lawn with fluoridated water, or the moral issue of involuntary medication.

I've got cavity-free kids on well water. Toothpaste with xylitol (birch/watermelon sugar alcohol) is the simple answer. In Scandinavia they give the kids a couple pieces of xylitol gum with their school lunch - far more economical than the US system and with fewer risks. But in the US, government programs are a secular religion that may only ever be tweaked, not found to be foolhardy.

yeah, and it's probably carcinogenic.

I've got a nasty Diet Cola habit, but switched from Pepsi to Sam's after Pepsi started adding ace-K. It's not hard to calculate a dose of aspartame that your liver enyzmes can handle but there's no safe-ish dose of ace-K.

Oh, and the whole "aspartame makes you fat" meme is bullshit - I've dropped 45 lbs in the past year by getting rid of nearly all the carbs in my diet, all while drinking the stuff. An over-abundance of carbs is what horks your insulin system.

A sweetener that is proven to be incredibly dangerous, though: sugar, especially HFCS. It causes the largest health crisis the country has ever seen and innumerable downstream morbidities. Most articles about artificial sweeteners tend to "gloss over" that part.

A huge number of Americans self-medicate on caffeine (the drug they should be on is probably illegal or guarded behind the nearly impenetrable veil of the AMA's psychiatric guild). But encouraging them to drink their caffeine with sugar is the worst possible idea. Ace-K is probably carcinogenic, but once you've got some cancer cells, to really make them happy, fill them with fructose - Pepsi's got what cancer craves!

At what point did Pandora explicitly ask the artists if they wanted their work advertising? At which point did the artists explicitly agree to Pandora advertising their works?

Pandora is just radio "on the Internet", with the logical efficiencies that unicast delivery can provide. Demanding a different licensing scheme is as much bullshit as every one of the patents that demanded rent for some existing thing and then added "on the Internet" on the end.

It's only lawyers who benefit from re-litigating established societal norms. Of course, they promise some middlemen riches to get them to file actions, but there's only one party that's guaranteed any riches.

This. I don't give a damn about animations or not animations, but what I do give a damn about is when I load G+ and I can't even start typing what I want to type for 15 seconds while the UI gets its shit together and loads all its assets from all kinds of Google domains and re-arranges its layout on-the-fly.

Same reason I don't 'like' YouTube comments anymore - it's at least a 10 second pain while it opens new browser windows, redirects to G+, bounces back, and occasionally works round-trip.

I really don't think that Google is this stupid - engineering principles can fix all of these problems. These must be features that somebody wanted to rot on the vine and incentivized their developers and users accordingly.

I use a few non-search Google products, but the way they seem to trip over 98% of them makes me never want to rely on any of them.

If Google can't even make Lollipop work on its own hardware, how much of an endorsement is that for other manufacturers to put their efforts into Android? Clearly it's not because Google is underfunded.

I'm not jumping to conclusions, but the people who have been making the case for historical alien visitors claim that the written record specifies liquid mercury rotating at high speeds as part of their antigrav drives. The Mayan writings are the most-often cited.