Ooh, sounds fun. When is that?

I'll be happy to host. I'm agriculturally zoned and can light bonfires without attracting 5-0.

I'll agree with the comment above on Atlas Shrugged not being an overt paean to psychopathy, but I have to agree with the GP that Rand's "philosophy" is bankrupt and psychopathic at its core. (I use quotes because, from the two main books, I didn't really get much of a philosophy at all, just kind of a pep rally. Maybe it made sense at the time, as a counterpoint to some radical communist sympathies or something, but it didn't seem realistic or philosophically useful to me. It's a caricature of a philosophy that we use to discuss actual philosophies.)

I thought The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a much better outline of what an anarcho-libertarian utopia might look like, and fun to read to boot. (I'm not an anarcho-libertarian, and I don't think it's quite realistic, but at least Heinlein tries to be plausible.) I like to point people away from Rand and towards Heinlein, while pointing out that it's still an unrealistic extreme when you look carefully. Then you can take Milton Friedman and bang on his ideas to get even closer to practical reality.

I'm pretty much as cynical and misanthropic as the next guy. Yeah, the mass of sheeple are willfully ignorant and unambitious. But the vast majority do their jobs and earn their keep, and we need them, even from a perspective of enlightened self-interest. Yes, there will always be freeloaders, and politicians, etc. They all end up being reflections and parts of ourselves if we look at the big picture (like reflecting for a moment on all people that were essential to making such a miracle as a modern automobile what it is today, for example).

If I understand correctly, he's talking about the voters' thinking, or society in general, not specific interests. Yes, you can assume that a fascism (corporatocracy) will come up with the cost-benefit analyses you describe. That's correct for them. But the voters don't do their own cost-benefit analyses, so they don't actually know what's in their best interests, and are therefor easier to manipulate.

The key being "contradictory". You get to manipulate voters by pulling whichever side's "principle" you want. Both sides of a feasible yes/no decision have principles, after all. This is the usual "think of the children", "terr'rists!", "drugs are bad, m'kay", "socialists!", "communists!", etc.

Not that every decision comes down to cost-benefit analysis, but many of them do. Environmental and safety issues usually should.

It's not just corporate interests lobbying against nuclear plants, for example. Not that every single opponent is an idiot, but most that I've talked to genuinely don't have a sense of the quantities involved and how that makes the problem of nuclear waste storage much smaller than it's made to appear.

(By the way, has anyone tried moving up close to a nuclear plant? I was kind of thinking of doing that, on the principle that it should be kind of a reduced stupidity zone.)

Unfortunately, the average voter's thought process is much less sophisticated than that.

Interesting.

Re. Palin hating on JFK, I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised. I'm not sure Republicans ever got any closer to not hating JFK than chafing under his martyrdom. (I'm not trying to criticize the partisanship in this case - there are plenty of reasonable problems to have with JFK. I'm not a huge fan, although I'm quite non-Republican. A reasonable Republican has good reasons not to like JFK.)

I don't think it's politically stupid. It's a pretty smart move. Palin's not trying to change any Democrat's or Libertarian's mind. This is just to out-hate the competition within the Republican party, to collect as many Republican voters as possible. She's fortifying her position as the people's choice within the party.

It's the perfect time, because anything you can call remotely "socialist" can be hated openly. This would also be the time to eliminate Social Security or Medicare or something. (OK, those would be beyond tricky. But some young Republican genius might be able to pull off an association game, and voters are a bit desperate.)

(Note that I don't think you have to be an idiot to be a Republican or anything, or that most Democrats aren't idiots. I just happen to have seen the Rally to Restore Sanity videos recently and think Jon Stewart's optimism is misplaced. The media echo-chamber and political antics are, after all, just reflections of (1) some real, fundamental disagreements about governance and (2) actual human nature to form tribes and hate.

I agree with those on this thread who say that there's a huge Republican constituency that's not being understood. Palin is not unelectable. Before 2000, I would've said the same thing myself. There are a lot of voters who actually like neocon-flavored nonsense.

Again, I'm not trying to say every Republican is dumb. Just that you don't get elected by overestimating the intelligence of the American electorate or trying to reason with anyone.)

I second the question, and I am being snarky (but still don't know the answer).

I agree with this, and also point out the pure engineering/logistics/production issue: money spent on 3D is not spent on something else that might have less buzzword value to the movie-going public but actually make the movie better.

That said, it's a tool, and I'm kind of excited to see what artists will use it for. Good cinematographers and directors will get a tasteful grip on it pretty soon. Eventually, someone will do something really worthwhile with it. Maybe Jackson? Probably too soon to hope for that, but I'm curious.

A bunch of crappy movies, easily avoided if I don't want to see them, is a small price to pay to, ultimately, advance the art and science. It's not like that crap isn't being made anyway, with ample budgets. Really, would Transformers have been *worse* in 3D? Having Hollywood do the advance development of 3D camera technology is really not costing us anything of value, and it puts cheap 3D cameras in more directors' hands sooner, which turned out pretty well for HD / all-digital production.

It's the property taxes that really get you, although real estate is otherwise cheap. Check out the next county over, Orleans...

And grow sugarcane and other crops from which to make ethanol and food products (some of which are indeed fed to cattle). And, apparently (news to me), most significantly for the poorest among us, in the poorest places, to feed our families (subsistence farming) [Wikipedia, UN report]. And for harvesting wood to go in all the engineered wood products we buy.

In discussions of heating efficiency, don't forget heat pumps for your baseline. The fact that electric heaters (including incandescent bulbs) are 100% efficient in converting electricity to heat is actually not that good, because ("geothermal") heat pumps are more like 400% efficient in that sense.

Heat pumps are too expensive for a cabin or whatever, at least the ground source ("geothermal") heat pumps you need up north, but for big buildings they make sense. They even compare favorably to efficient combustion heaters, which are otherwise much better than the total efficiency of direct electric heat. (Burning oil directly is like 90% efficient to heat. Burning it in a power plant around 40%, so that's really the efficiency of direct electric heat, where the heater itself is 100% efficient. But then you can multiply that by a COP around 4 for a good heat pump.)

The fundamental principle at work here is that not all heat is equivalent. Electricity has a very high effective temperature, so you can trade some of that high temperature heat to pump a larger volume of lower temperature heat.

The thing most public schools have in common is (1) disdain for rational thought / academic achievement / intellectualism, (2) Lord of the Flies style social structure that anti-prepares you for real life, and (3) entitlement. Actually, it's not just public schools, it's current American culture generally, so I imagine most private schools are similar, although I haven't been there.

The "liberal" / "conservative" indoctrination is regional. Where I went to public school, we learned more about how towel-heads are funny, environmentalists are retarded, atheists eat babies, football is the most important subject (and funded by the school board accordingly), and so on, in addition to the shared nationalistic and War on X stuff (every vote counts, drugs 'r' bad, etc.).

(1) is the biggest threat, I think, and the reason I didn't send my kids to public school at a young age. If you can avoid (1), you can think your way past all the rest and make the best of the (substantial) resources available in public schools. But if you can't think your way out of a paper bag, you get sucked in by all the rest.

The tree-hugging indoctrination is by no means universal and I don't think it's the underlying problem. In fact, America is polarized by AGW because like 40% are successfully indoctrinated that way and 40% the other. (It's also kind of hard to see how respect for other cultures is a destructive value, unless you mean completely uncritical acceptance of the bad with the good.) There's a fraction that respond to reason and evidence, but they're not a politically significant bloc.

So, the indoctrination works great, but it's not there to create a homogeneous arborophilic utopia. It's there to support football-game style political circuses, which end up being good for Republican and Democrat politicians within their constituencies and also serve to give them something to argue about to appear busy while they do the usual politician thing in the background. Enough people benefit from the education-industrial complex that it can keep itself going well beyond what otherwise makes rational sense, like the other industrial complexes.

Hence, (1): kids get taught that thinking is naughty.

You do need lots of energy to collect the CO2, apparently around 6-15kJe/mol CO2
[http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/84.Stolaroff.AirCaptureGHGT-8.p.pdf], by my layman's interpretation of the paper. Then you also need a lot of energy to break the CO2 up via, e.g., reverse water-gas shift, maybe 38kJ/mol. (You get all this back, and more, if you then put the resulting CO through Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, but you need to supply extra H2 to drive the reaction. The extra O2 from the CO2 ends up in an H2O byproduct, which represents a lot of energy sucked out, having been supplied as a lot of extra H2 in this case.)

So, hopefully one of the researchers that's commented will address this point, but it appears to this layman that the limestone cycle isn't too bad. (Capital-intensive, since efficient calcination requires a recuperator with particulate mass flows, but at least that's an industrially solved problem.) It's more that the thing you're pulling out of the air, CO2, is extremely stable.

You're lucky to live where you live, if wind is viable. I live near Buffalo, NY, in a moderately windy lake plain location. It sounds like a good place to favor wind, but I got a load factor of like 8 for wind, even if I cut out very early and throw away most of the wind energy. More like 20 if I did the math with a higher cut-out speed, where my plant cost was totally dominated by generator capacity, which is expensive. So the lower cut-out was more economical, but still much worse than solar, which is maybe 3-4 load factor, and it's relatively cheap to store heat, even high temperature heat. (This is all on paper, in early planning, so not very convincing. Still, I did several hours of analysis to estimate capital costs and ROI, and you'd have to live in a place with extremely steady wind to favor wind over solar. On the other hand, a wind plant is much simpler and scales down much better than a solar thermal plant, and if you don't have to store the electricity, because you use it immediately in some process, then that's not an issue. I know I can build a wind turbine, but my solar design-under-evaluation is risky and more of a hobby idea than a sure-fire solution.)

Synthesizing longer chair hydrocarbons rather than methane is not much harder, thermodynamically, if I recall. There are the various synthesis processes, which use different catalysts and conditions, but I don't recall methane synthesis being all that much easier or more efficient. Again, I guess we want to hear from an expert, not a layman such as myself that has merely surveyed some random sample of the literature from a position of ignorance...