I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.

First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.

Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.

Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?

These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.

The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.

And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.

And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.

I'm sure Kim Jong-un is just quivering in his boots at this "strongly worded condemnation" by the UN. After all, the UN has such a strong record of following up such condemnations with action...

What's pathetic about this is such UN declarations just serve to reinforce what an absolute joke the whole organization is. The UN has no power whatsoever to do anything to North Korea and Dear Leader knows this.

Here's an idea: instead of spending all this money now to launch probes from Earth, why not spend it instead on building a base with launch infrastructure on the Moon? No atmosphere, no environment to worry about, lesser gravity well...the list of advantages is quite large. The only disadvantage is it would take a while to get going. But the same could be said for the space industry 50 years ago. So we could spend a lot of money on a lunar base now and get huge payoffs later, or keep spending almost as much on Earth-launched probes for the next several decades and advance the human presence in space not one whit.

NASA still hasn't figured this out. The public is not *interested* in these pure science missions, regardless of how beneficial they are to scientists and engineers. The public wants the glory, grandeur, and *adventure* of Apollo. And without public backing, NASA's budget gets whacked again and again and again. NASA needs to come up with things that capture the public's imagination like the glory days of the 1960's. Then they'll get the money and political clout to do big things. I'm sure most American's don't give two damns about a mission to Uranus or Neptune.

What *should* be scary but is being ignored by the larger public is how utilities are increasingly running "peak load" assets as if they were "base load" assets. To wit, combined-cycle turbine plants are not usually designed for continuous operation like this; they're designed to be brought online during peak load *only*. Base load assets like coal and nuclear carry the non-peak loads. The peak load assets are going to have much more intensive maintenance costs if they keep running them like this, leading to higher prices for consumers and the ugly potential for brownout/blackout when these peak load assets break down unexpectedly.

Disclosure: I'm a tech consultant working with TVA right now, and this info comes direct from people who run these assets. We *need* more base load assets like coal and nuclear, but government regulations are making that extremely difficult. Indeed, we're having to *shut down* coal plants due to new government regulations, further stressing an already-fragile national power infrastructure. Thank god we're *finally* building some new nuclear assets (TVA's Watts Bar Unit 2, and Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4) but we need to be doing this on a much larger scale to meet growing demands for power. Conservation will only take you so far; at some point -- a point I think we passed some years ago -- you must expand capacity to keep your system fault-tolerant.

Being a former Marine, I've followed the development of the USMC version of the F-35 with some interest. And I'm disgusted by it. This plane is inferior to its predecessors in every way possible that matters to the main mission of USMC air power: Close Air Support. Sure, it's stealthier. And it's a better dogfighter than the AV-8B (but arguably not the F-18 Super Hornet). But neither of those matter a damn with CAS missions. You need a reliable, rugged bomb truck for CAS. The F-35, with its internal weapons bay, is pathetic for CAS. Stealth doesn't matter much for CAS, either...or at least it doesn't matter in ways that make the F-18 Super Hornet notably inferior. And let's not forget you can buy *three* Hornets for the cost of *one* F-35.

Really, what I've always thought the USMC needs is an A-10 Warthog. Surely the cost of a carrier-spec A-10 would be much cheaper than even Super Hornets...just not as glamorous to fly by fighter jocks. But us grunts on the ground would much appreciate having a GAU-8 Avenger 30mm Gatling cannon on call any day over the whizz-bang-but-underarmed F-35. If jet jockeys want fast fighters, let them join the Air Force or the Navy. We want CAS platforms.

+100 Ivanova points for you!

You can quit when you reach the last digit of Pi. That'll be enough. Call me when you're done.

Why? To satisfy some policy he never violated in the first place? He turned Glass off. That should be enough. That was enough to comply with the "do not record" policy. Prescription eyeglasses aren't cheap. You've no reason to demand he carry around Glass *and* another set of glasses with the same prescription.

You only need to look marginally further into the future to see a point where the functionality of something like Glass could be feasibly *implanted* and thus *non-removable* by the end user *by design*. What then? Do you ban implants? Good luck with trying to stop the march of technology because everyone in history who's tried has failed miserably.

Perhaps you missed the part about where this fellow's Google Glass also happened to be his prescription eyeglasses. You can order Glass that way, you know. And Glass is not detachable from the lenses once this is done. So the best you can do is turn Glass off...which is exactly what this fellow did. Or would you prefer he try to watch the movie all blurry and out of focus?

What part of "Glass with prescription lenses, which he needed to even *see* the movie" did you not understand? He wasn't wearing Glass to be an ass; he was wearing them because those were his prescription glasses.

Except that, if you'd read the fucking article, you'd know he *needed* Glass because he was wearing them with *prescription lenses*. Taking them off would kinda make it hard to see the movie. Idiot.