Because "warmist religion" is indeed a convenient shorthand way to refer to the thought process of legions of people who opine on this topic.

Well here in our state, we've now got a rain tax. So all they have to do is tweak the law that makes guesses about how much grass you have (and this how much you should be charged each year when it rains X amount), and instead make guesses about how much wind-interfering surface area your house has, and how that might be disturbing, through turbulence, the mating habits of a special sub-species of gnats.

Not that you'd like to make a useful point by actually speaking of substance or anything. No, it's just "you're wrong, and I know secret things that you don't." Which is always a sure sign that you don't, actually. My perspective is shaped by daily reality: higher premiums, wildly higher deductibles, millions of people still not covered, millions of people now covered by charging other people for their consumption, more national debt, and a coming tsunami of yet more rate increases for millions of people. Yay, it's "Affordable!"

Other than the fact that they can use it to pay off more muscle, to make up for not always being able to attract enough true believer goons. Also works for buying supplies, getting people on airplanes, and other things that you can't get with ammo left in the dirt by the fleeing Iraqi army.

...said the AC.

Uh, wut?

It was almost $100 on this day, a year ago, and now it's about $440.

As long as those "few rich hands" are BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin - because PayPal still isn't actually accepting "bitcoin."

PayPal takes "BitPay," "Coinbase" and "GoCoin."

BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin take BTC.

Oh, you're still flogging that dead impeachment horse?

OK, fine, Roger Daltrey.

I'm not sure how.

In your long definition, you basically said it was about dealing with the consequences of living in a changed world - one only made possible by the science in science fiction (not merely the backdrop of stars and planets). I don't see a *real* difference between Wizards and Telepaths, and there's been plenty of space-fantasy that blurred the lines. I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with Jedis.

Couldn't you just as well say "Fantasy is about considering and exploring the human ramifications when certain aspects of reality are changed"? If you don't care about the science, you're just using sci-fi as window dressing to take you somewhere else, like Avatar is essentially Dances with Wolves with a ton of fancy gadgetry. You can do a historic war movie like 300 or contemporary one like Enemy at the Gates or a futuristic one like Independence Day and it's often the same story of a desperate stand against overwhelming forces with everything in the balance. For that matter, so could many of the great battle scenes in LotR that don't deal with the ring. It's only occasionally the science is an essential plot item and rarer still that it has any real scientific substance. In Star Trek, they just say "beam me up, Scotty" and you're back on the Enterprise, it might just as well have been Gandalf throwing a teleportation spell. That essentially just makes it futuristic fantasy, with sufficiently advanced technology to make it indistinguishable from magic.

I swear that appeared after the story was posted.

In places without the rule of law, everybody (with the muscle) IS doing it. That's why it's a major industry in certain parts of Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. Which of course you know, but would rather ignore.

This sentence is impossible to parse.

But I'll take a guess. You think that 30,000 guys armed with millions of dollars, fanatical recruits, and huge numbers of weapons abandoned by fleeing Iraqi forces, are unable to walk into village and towns and kill people? How complicated do you think this actually is? Your need for a fantasy narrative is making you invent something far to complicated, and you're now confusing yourself and writing incoherently.

"Flat" is just a label,and setting a floor on taxation or providing exemptions for necessity items fixes the largest knock on "Flat Tax" which is that hits those near the poverty line with a pretty blunt hammer.

The problem with the current graduated system isn't that people in the middle or people in, say, the 60-80 percentile don't pay enough -- I'm fairly sure they do -- it's that it ceases to scale at the top. As long as Buffet pays a smaller percentage than his secretary, something seems broken with the graduated system -- since it's obviously not graduated, as the wealthiest pay 15% tax, and (I suspect) guys like you and me pay in the 30+ range.

http://www.politifact.com/trut...

We fact-checked Warren Buffett's statements about taxes in the New York Times. Buffett said that his taxes amounted to "only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent." Individual tax filings are private, so there was no way we could compare Buffett's actual tax return with that of his secretary and other co-workers. (We contacted his office when we did the fact-check and didn't hear back.) So instead, we checked Buffett's statement that the "mega-rich" pay about 15 percent in taxes, while the middle class "fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot." We rated the statement True.

It's easy to argue that, hey, after I pay a million, perhaps I've paid enough, 'eh? And it's hard to argue against a cap on both ends. There's no perfect system.