You mean the standards set by the politicians who are paid by the private prison lobby? That's the situation we have today.

You'd think that privately run prisons are so pervasive in this country as to dominate the criminal justice (punishment) system.

Alas, fewer than 10% of the convicts in the USA are held in "private prisons"....

People especially Americans, do not like the government telling them what they can and can't do to their own property. Also the small local governments have limited funds, such actions will mean that the local government will need to make a serious sacrifice.

Local governments can change local building codes to require all new construction to fit the guidelines for albedo modification. Done.

Yeah, it won't affect existing infrastructure, but in the long term (and with AGW we're talking long term, or should be), it'll have the desired effect.

Assuming, of course, that the albedo-modification theories are correct in the first place.

Yes, I know that modifying the albedo will do what we want. What I wonder about is whether we can effectively modify the albedo in a controlled fashion.

You forgot Iraq and Afghanistan for Obama.

Or did you think we'd stopped bombing them back in 2009?

And we all know how well Smoot-Hawley worked, right?

It should also be pointed out that Weimar Germany went that route once too. And that worked almost as well as Smoot-Hawley....

That transcontinental railroad was built entirely by private industry.

No government money involved, in case you were unaware. Well, except for the money paid TO governnment for the railroad right of ways, of course.

SpaceX is going to be capable of sending seven astronauts for under $100 million. That's about $15 million per seat or 20% of what the Russians are charging.

Last numbers I saw, the Commercial Crew program was expecting to cost the government ~$58M per astronaut (plus assorted cargo), with a payload of five astronauts plus cargo per launch.

The WWI-1918 "Spanish Flu" was perhaps the last major pandemic, infecting 1 out of 3 people in the world and killing 10% of the world's population in about 18 months.

3% to 5% of the world's population. It killed fewer than 100 million people, possibly as low as 50 million....

Chicago's, motto translated from Latin, means "We make Louisiana's government look honest", or something like that.

Well, then, they suck at that too. NOONE makes Louisiana's government look honest.

And I say that in the nicest possible way, being a longtime resident of N'Awlins....

Meanwhile, my wife often has barely enough gas in her car in the morning to be able to get to the gas station.

I take it that either

a) the nearest gas station is ~100 miles away, or

b) your wife is an idiot?

Face it, it's not that hard to stop at a gas station on the way home from work rather than drive till there's teacup of gas left in the tank.

For that matter (anecdotal evidence from where I live) there are half a dozen gas station within five miles of where I live - it takes even the worst performing of our cars less than a quart of gas to go five miles.

Either way, having "barely enough gas in her car in the morning to get to the gas station" is a situation that shouldn't happen "often"....

Yeah, well we don't have a War Department anymore either.

Note, for those who don't know, that the War Department was the original name for what is now the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force (when there was a War Department, there was no USAF).

Both are, of course, subordinate to the Department of Defense....

heid yins

Is that like a muckety muck?

Slightly more seriously, how is "heid" pronounced (besides with a Scottish accent)? Like "hide"? "Heed"? I'm assuming "yin" is pronounced the same as it would be in "yin-yang"?

In any case, my thanks for the new bit of slang....

but I would like to point out that when the USA was a new country, having its merchant ships being attacked by the Pirates of Tripoli, it responded and thus formed the Marine Corps.

Well, no.

The Marines (and the Navy) were formed in 1775. Then they were disbanded at the end of the Revolution.

Then they were recreated in 1798 for the Quasi-War with France.

Shortly after that (1801), Marines were sent with Decatur's Squadron to deal with the Barbary Pirates.

And no, the Barbary Pirates had little, if anything, to do with "radical Islam". No more than Edward Teach was a part of "radical Christianity" a century earlier....

Would recompiling the entire system from source defeat "intercepted in transit and been tampered with for spying purposes"?

Only if you have read and understood ALL the source code for same.

Good luck with that....

2) Unified pushback, in the form of informed voting, on the part of the majority of voters (extremely rare, as the issue has to be very direct and poignant for this to happen).

Meaningless in the USA, at least. An "informed voter" has the same candidate choice as the uninformed voter, and the candidates have been vetted by the Parties.

Or are the rules different in Russia, that you don't have to be a monopoly in order to come under antitrust regulations?

Somehow, I see this as a reaction to the sanctions imposed over the Ukraine mess. I think that someone in Russia is thinking that hitting Google will hurt the US Government in some way....