So, once this has happened, the homeowner has the legal right to steal the intruder's stuff and rape the intruder's wife? Or that of somebody who looks like the intruder?

I was being ironic too.

You do realize that poor people are going to suffer more than the affluent from climate change effects, don't you? Barring some sort of intervention, they're screwed either way.

As our tech gets better and better, we'll be able to find new ways to reduce CO2 emissions, and if it's increasing slowly enough we can use other means (such as trees) to reduce CO2 in the air. Therefore, the rate at which things get worse matters.

As a cynical liberal, you obviously don't know what you're talking about.

Businesses have only a very limited ability to pass costs to their customers. The reason is that the cost, in fields where there is competition, is pretty well set by a fairly standard supply-demand curve. If it becomes more expensive to produce something, the supply curve changes, but there's no bloody way a business can pass along costs and add their profit margin to it (unless you're talking about a contract specifically written that way).

If a business could just pass its costs onto its customers, then it could just raise its prices now and make more money. Do you think businesses in general keep their prices low and their profits low, for some reason? My observation is that they like profits, and set prices to their best guess on what to charge to make maximum profit.

Besides, if there's different ways to produce something, that produce varying amounts of carbon dioxide, the tax shifts production towards the methods not using as much carbon dioxide, reducing the amount of tax paid anyway.

We can estimate a 9/11 plane crash as killing about fifteen hundred people. There is one nuclear power disaster that has caused deaths on that order, which is Chernobyl. Chernobyl is, very simply, not happening again. (Who ever claimed that Chernobyl was absolutely safe? Do you have some sort of cite?)

Your other examples don't support your claims. Fukushima may or may not have killed someone, and few people not immediately involved in the cleanup have any significant harm. The exclusion zone is much less than a state, and it's real hard to poison something for a thousand years when you're working with a dangerous isotope with a half-life of about forty years. Three Mile Island was even more innocuous.

You can go with a gas or propane powered refrigerator. My family has one at a cottage which is too remote for electricity. Works pretty well though I can't vouch for it being particularly efficient. Uses ammonia as the coolant. I understand they are often used in RVs too.

There are two reasonable definitions of the value of somebody's work. One is the amount you need to pay to get somebody to do it, and one is the amount it contributes to the employer's bottom line. There is a class of jobs that pretty much anybody can do, and unless we're at full employment those jobs are going to pay minimum. These jobs are often worth considerably more to the employer than the employer is paying. The immediate effect of raising minimum wage is that a few jobs will go away and the rest will pay better. The longer-range effects are much less predictable. For example, if an employer is paying more for an employee the employer might find it worth investing in making that employee more productive. This could spur the economy.

Do you have any evidence that the cost of living rises quickly? Most prices are tied to labor costs, to some extent, but in most fields the bulk of the labor costs are from employees making more than minimum wage anyway.

I think it was more like 20 million...

That may be. The official numbers estimate 10 million military and 14 million civilians. Either way, without Russia soaking up everything Hitler could muster against them, there might well not have been enough time to plan for a Normandy invasion before England was gone. The costs were horrific, and Americans who forget that it wasn't just G.I. Joe that defeated the Nazis dishonor themselves.

So what? There are print shops for that unless you are printing a LOT of photos. And very few people print a lot of photos these days. Unless you have a very specific need for an inkjet there is really no reason not to buy a color laser these days. I use laser's exclusively. On the rare occasion I want to actually print a photo I can get it done at my local print shop, drug store or even Walmart.

The high end copiers are laser based and they'll do pretty much as nice a job as most inkjets.

I mean nobody would dare say Black people shouldn't be pissed about Colonialism. Ooops this comment is likely to get censored due to "racism" but then again nobody will care, "OMG CENSORSHIP ON SLASHDOT. Racism ohh okay no problem then."

Geez, man. What are you so upset about? You better take care you don't have a stroke worrying about all that.

A few points.

While deficits have generally been less under Bush than Obama, the highest Bush deficit is higher than any of Obama's, and Obama has been cutting the deficit he inherited pretty well.

For all of the people who complain about Obama's diplomacy in the Middle East, I have yet to hear a semi-coherent explanation of what he should have done. Instead of getting Iran to accept a treaty that prevents them from developing nuclear weapons without being discovered, what should he have done? Exactly what was he supposed to do in Iraq, given the withdrawal treaty negotiated by the Bush administration? Bear in mind that we cannot, in the long run, impose a regime on Iraq. Trying to do so would be about as successful as Iran, which wound up being governed by religious loonies because they were the ones that managed to overthrow the US-supported Shah.

The moral of the story is; if you are ever on safari and need to claim some pack mules, either bring them back with you or describe them as "breakfast" on the expense claim..

See, that would just get me in trouble. My office won't pay for meals, only for per diem, so then I'd be out the cost of the mules, unless they cost less than an out-of-state breakfast allowance (somewhere around $12.00, I think)--and then I'd be out of pocket for the cost of my actual breakfast that day, unless I did in fact eat the mules!

I think I'd be better off describing the mules as 'rental transportation' and then filing a 'lost receipt memo' so the bean counters couldn't see that I'd actually bought them.

it's pretty simple, if you are coughing up blood, you dont go to work and then infect your coworkers with ebola. why should we allow computers that are doing the same thing to come to the internet? people mostly dont know they are infected, so injecting a little HTML into served pages that will help them disinfect their computer would be a good start. if it's been a week and they are still infected, it's time to serve them pages only on how to disinfect their machine and close any unrelated ports.

there is no need for this bullshit to continue.