1) There is already sales tax in most places, so very little would change for businesses.

2) It would completely eliminate scrutiny (and tax preparation!) for private citizens.

You need to read about the "prebate" aspect of the Fair Tax. It eliminates the regression that concerns you.

In fact, most of what you wrote is so far off base, you should just go read about the Fair Tax at the source, so you can discuss it intelligently.

The current tax code consists of 73,000 pages of regulations, requiring a giant, intrusive bureaucracy, an armada of tax preparers, and a fleet of tax lawyers. It is unfair, and it is broken. Just imagine if all that effort, and all those people were put to productive use instead of accounting.

That's very simply a bunch of crap.

With a consumption tax, it's up to you how much you are taxed. It rewards saving and investing much more than our current tax system. It would also get rid of the inequity between income tax and capital gains tax, which benefits the wealthy a great deal.

It would boost the economy immensely, and eliminate several forms of double taxation we "enjoy" now. It would also eliminate the IRS, and government snooping into every aspect of our economic life - that is a huge win as well. (Not to mention the billions saved on tax preparation and related activities...)

Sorry, but El Nino isn't cooperating.

Actually, given the likely solar activity we're going to see for the next twenty years, I fully expect a cooling trend of some type.

The right policy prescription is pretty simple - ton of research should go into cheap, clean energy sources like LFTR. Displacing coal power with clean energy is a win regardless of climate issues.

Actually I think you're more representative of someone who's making a lot of money working with an unpopular language.

C++ has fallen way down the charts, and I'd be willing to bet fewer than 10% of those writing software today are writing C++, especially using recent/advanced features. You're making good money because you're using one of the more difficult and painful languages out there. :-)

Sooner or later a superior language that fills the C++ niche will come along, then it will go to a truly legacy status...finally.

Right now Sony is eating Microsoft's lunch with PS4 actually.

I think SteamOS has a good chance of doing well, especially given how close Linux is to MacOS. Mac marketshare is picking up, so hitting both with (more or less) a single port is attractive. Various game engines are also making cross-platform a lot easier.

Windows has had its heyday, it's definitely on the decline going forward.

That is one hypothesis, and an unproven one.

No, almost all of it comes from freezing seawater.

Right, it never snows in Antarctica...the miles-thick sheets of ice appeared by magic. Got it.

That of course remains to be seen. Also be clear on sea ice versus landlocked ice. Some parts of the antarctic icecap are growing.

No, it's an objective look at polar sea ice based on the only directly measurable metric. Your interpretation of that is exactly that - one interpretation. Furthermore, you should reflect (oops, bad pun) on the fact that the additional antarctic sea ice increases albedo and thus has a net cooling effect - the same argument used to say that arctic sea ice loss is increasing arctic ocean heating.

No, the science is not clear. What is clear is the desperation of those shouting "the science is settled" while stubborn reality continues to contradict the beautiful theories and models. :-)

Nothing in particular. Here's the last 10 years (you know, the 10 years with the highest CO2 levels in history) of UAH data, showing a dead flat temperature trend. The point being, warming has definitely paused on around a decadal time scale. Will it last longer? That's a very interesting question. Solar activity, despite being near a maximum in the 11 year cycle, is low. The interesting thing is that the next cycle (forecast to begin roughly around 2020) is predicted to be extremely low - so low that a sunspot will be a rare event for 12-15 years (weak solar cycles are also longer). Such low cycles have historically been associated with quite significant temperature drops. So, we may in fact see flat or declining temperatures through 2035 or longer. That will be quite a shock for the alarmists if it works out that way. :-)

BTW, it may not be only lower solar irradiance that's responsible for lower temperatures, there may be other effects having to do with the solar wind and/or the solar magnetic field.

Citation? My understanding is that RSS and UAH are two independent analyses of the same data. The relevant Wikipedia article contains no mention of such a thing...

At any rate, this chart shows the close agreement between the two datasets.

It can't be "trending near" if the trend is up from the low. Right now it's 15% higher than it was in 2012, or 810,000 km^2 in absolute terms. It's perilously ;) close to 1995 levels.

As I pointed out to someone else, almost all of that is well north of the region where hurricanes form - and hurricane formation is what the summary addressed. There is also something called "natural variability" which can cause quite large anomalies at times, and which has nothing to do with humans. Finally, as I said before, the baseline for the SST anomalies is completely arbitrary - there is nothing to say it's "normal".

Reality. What's yours?

FWIW, I do support a large scale conversion of coal electric generation to nuclear - I think that's a reasonable point of compromise for the alarmists. :-)

Well, putting it in bold clearly means you're right...not.

Try looking at actual data. That's the RSS data, which is inherently better than spotty surface station coverage in that it directly integrates the entire lower troposphere. That's a slightly negative trend that's going hard on twenty years...all with CO2 levels worth panicking over according to some.

2012 was the lowest (due mainly to a weather phenomenon, not climate in particular. 2013 was the rebound year, and this year looks to be continuing the trend. Will the long-term decline resume? Personally, I doubt it based on solar activity, but we'll see...

I'll leave it to the readers to decide who's ignorant (or brainwashed:).

As for your Slate link, it's addressing one specific article. It makes the tired "the heat is hiding in the ocean" claim, which has not been verified whatsoever. How has the ocean been heating (imperceptibly) for almost 20 years while the atmosphere stays the same temperature, pray tell?

You might also want to reflect on the fact that while the Arctic ice has been generally on the decline, Antarctic sea ice has been at record extent this year, and global ice as a whole is around average...

The preceding 100 years have not been a "steady upward trend", furthermore by all accounts CO2 was not a significant contributor in the early part of that period when temperatures rose fastest.

From basic physics it's clear CO2 will produce some warming. The important question is how much, and the jury is still very much out on that. It's highly dependent on water vapor feedback and cloud formation. The current trend seems to indicate lower sensitivity to CO2 levels than previously thought.

There's no realistic scenario where we won't see 500 PPM CO2 at least. It's encouraging that things aren't looking worse.

It's very close to average, with the main development region flat or below normal. The highest anomalies are well north of hurricane formation territory.

Regardless, the temperatures on that map are well within natural variability, not "abnormally warm". Also bear in mind that the "anomalies" are versus an arbitrarily chosen baseline in the first place.

Nope. 2012 was a record low minimum, but 2013 was a significant rebound. This year is slightly above 2013 levels so far, contrary to the summary's alarmism.

Actually the summary is fairly untainted by facts. For instance:

Arctic sea ice is trending near record lows for this time of year, abnormally warm ocean water helped spawn the earliest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in North Carolina, and a rash of heat waves have plagued cities from India to California to the Middle East.

Yikes, that all sounds alarming right?

Except...

1) Arctic sea ice is actually currently above last year's level, which was already a rebound of over 25 million square km more than the previous year at the minimum extents.

2) The ocean waters in the North Atlantic hurricane region are right around average for this time of year, by no means "abnormally warm".

3) "Rashes of heat waves plague" various places every summer, and always have. NOAA recently reinstated 1934 as the hottest year in the US on record.

The article attacking the Heartland data does have a minor point, but it is absolutely true that temperatures have been essentially flat for around 17 years, while CO2 has been at the highest levels in history. There have been quite a few peer reviewed papers trying to explain this pause, so it's clearly a real phenomena. We'll see if it continues, the El Nino this year is now expected to be a fairly minor event.

At this time, the forecasters anticipate El Niño will peak at weak-to-moderate strength during the late fall and early winter (3-month values of the Niño-3.4 index between 0.5oC and 1.4oC).