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."

Hey, this is off-topic, but I've been interested in the topic of color blindness recently, after figuring out that my son is color blind. He has not been officially diagnosed as colorblind (and he is only 4), but he has a lot of trouble with certain shades or blends, and the Ishihara plate graphics that we tried online seemed pretty definitive as well.

I'm just curious about your experience. My son seems to have NO trouble with red and green most of the time (which I didn't expect), but rather colors like purples, oranges, even yellow.

Another person I've spoken with said something like "I can figure out green...and I can figure out red...but don't ask me to find a red bird in a green tree!"

I'm just curious if these impressions match your experiences at all?

Thanks for your insights!

I'm not arguing that VB is good, but that's a pretty trivial example of what makes it bad. Here's a discussion of where DIM came from: http://stackoverflow.com/quest... You used to be able to just say "variablename = value" without a dim statement. That's improved in the current syntax for VB.Net. If you want an example or two of what makes VB bad look at some of the legacy VB6 and classic ASP code hanging around out there. PHP has some (most) of the same problems.

You get a compiler error from doing what? I wasn't giving a code example, I was noting that scalar variables occupy space in memory and have to be able to be referenced, hence they have a dimension.

What's your unmentioned better way of looking at it?

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.

Actually, all variables have a dimension. Think of your "myObject" as having dimensions of [1].

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.

Ah, I see I got the infamous "-1 disagree" moderation. I thought my post cited enough outside sources (Slate, for goodness sake!) that I'd be immune. Ah well.