I know environmentalists can sometimes see issues in only black and white, but a lot of the fossil fuel "subsidies" are programs to develop clean smockestack technology, carbon capture and storage, etc. Carbon capture and storage is, in my opinion as an industry insider, a larger technical challenge than the Manhattan project. Industry sure as heck isn't going to take on a massive engineering projects by itself. If these things were easy or cheap, they would have been done already. I want to leave a good planet to my kids too, but it can't happen overnight. Little steps. We'll get there.

And we celebrate our victory over a historical foreign power by lighting incendiary devices manufactured in a future foreign power.

We have very cheap energy in the US right now. Investing in even cheaper energy is not worthwhile. Why should we pay? Let those countries who have high energy bills now, pay the bill now. Otherwise the US is just subsidizing other countries.

I think you are grossly underestimating the ability of people to be complete morons. This link is a little dated, but in 1999, a poll showed that 18 percent of Americans think the Sun revolves around the Earth. In 2011, seven percent of people said they believe more than half of the federal government's budget goes to public broadcasting. Another four percent thought it was 31 to 50 percent of the budget. Is is easy to get 10-15% of the population to believe in absolute rubbish despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The MMR vaccine has an effectiveness of only around 95%- meaning 5% of people do the right thing, get vaccinated, but could still get the disease. MMR is given at 12-15 months of age, so roughly 1.5% of the population who will get the vaccine hasn't gotten it yet. Some people (no idea what %) are very poor and never go to doctors, even if the vaccine is free. That 5-20% "margin" of herd immunity starts to look awfully shaky if you consider all the people who already can't or don't get a vaccine.

Finally, the anti-vaxxers tend to live in pockets of people who believe as they do. This means the disease can get a foothold in those neighborhoods, and survive. There is a very real risk that some diseases could thrive long enough to mutate enough so that the vaccine doesn't work anymore.

Even if this doesn't become a "big" problem, the consequences can be very damaging on an individual basis. My daughter is only 6 months old. She hasn't gotten many vaccinations yet because she is just too young. If some clown passes on the measles to her, her death is a very real possibility. Can you justify a death like that as not being "a serious threat"? The stakes too high to ignore these idiots.

It poses a threat because these terrible ideas of the anti-vaxers get picked up by legitimate sources sometimes. And there are people who can't tell the difference between legitimate science and junk science. Ideas can spread more virulently and rapidly than real diseases. The antivax ideas are a threat, even if the effects of their actions aren't causing significant problems at this moment.

On the other hand, it seems wise to make a statement. Everybody can track those bitcoins anyway. One of the concerns I might have as a buyer of them would be that no exchange would deal with me and I couldn't cash them out. By making a statement which shows he is a "good guy" he might be able to escape the communities anger about the situation and deflect it back on the person who lost them and the government who took them, which is where the blame rightly belongs anyhow.

Bad power factor isn't a generation expense. It is a distribution one, and one with relatively fixed infrastructure costs. The solution is to put some capacitor banks in each neighborhood. They are pretty small devices and utility-grade capacitors last a long time. It makes a lot more sense, costwise and environmentally-wise, to install 30-50 year design life capacitors in a neighborhood than to install power factor correcting capacitors in every consumer electronic device.

The cost of installing neighborhood capacitors scales with overall grid capacity, and does not vary based on the amount of power going through a residential meter on a per-kW-hr basis. That is why the utility doesn't charge for bad residental power factor. Unless there is a really pennypinching evil utility out there, you will never see a separate charge for it in the future either.

Most people think of evolution as "survival of the fittest", but this is a gross simplification. In a population bottleneck, genetic diversity can shrink rapidly if a large portion of the population dies out. Imagine what would happen if everyone in the world died except a small and distinct group- lets say the Vietnamese people just for example. If the population recovered and repopulated the world, humans would have lost a tremendous amount of genetic diversity which may or may not be beneficial to survival.

Evolution in the traditional sense also only affects characteristics which affect the ability to reproduce. For example, it is impossible for humans to evolve the problem of cataracts or alzheimer's out of our genetic code. By the time these problems show up, the children of those affected have already become self-sufficient. Evolution is about "reproduction of the fittest" not the more general "survival of the fittest".

You seem to deride the practice, but handing out halloween candy has a purpose- its a gift to make people want to keep doing what they just did (ie. show up). Small incentives and gifts can be very valuable tools for building relationships. I used to be a field engineer working at power stations. The big thing there was stickers. Millwrights and pipefitters have a tradition (going back probably until the invention of stickers) of collecting stickers and placing them on their hard hats. Stickers are "earned" by attending mandatory safety presentations ("Power Plant XYZ Safety Training 2014"), by belonging to various industry clubs, or just handed out by people (engineers/sales reps) looking to get a favor in the future. A hard hat full of stickers shows that you're an experienced guy who has been around a while. It is a mark of respect and experience. If you work in those professions and don't have a hard hat full of stickers, you're a greenhorn or otherwise somebody who doesn't know what they're doing.

I've shown up to a power station many times with a roll of stickers, and these guys instantly became my best friend and helped me out greatly in achieving the thing I was there to do. Don't underestimate the value of token gifts.

They would make just as much money, if not more, by selling smaller volumes at a not-quite proportionally smaller cost.

If the US taxed corn syrup, instead of subsidizing it, that would be a start. Soft drnks are very modestly sized in every foreign country I have been in. Coincidentally, all those foreign countries use real sugar instead of corn syrup in their fizzy drinks.

The ammonia in your cleaning bottle is hydrous ammonia, which is a fancy way of saying it is mostly water. Hydrous ammonia is pretty tame stuff. Anhydrous (no water) ammonia, like the kind required for chemical reactions, is nasty nasty stuff. If you breathe the vapors it can cause permanent damage to your lungs. If you get it on your skin, you can easilly get a nasty chemical burn. The vapor is flamable and forms explosive mixtures with air. It reacts violently with a variety of compounds.

Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.

You've got the overall picture, but this isn't pushed down by the companies. It's the unions. There are numerous unions, including for things which are not unionized in other countries, like Engineers. Everybody could work 8 hours a day if they wanted, but there is pressure to stretch out the work. If you aren't booking a similar level of overtime as the other workers, you might get a visit from the union guy. Companies are hesitant to increase wages to eliminate the need for overtime, because there is no guarantee that employees wouldn't just soak up as much overtime as before.

One other odd thing about Japan is that in many professions, the salary curve is an upside down "U" shape. Straight out of college they pay low salaries, mid-career the employee has received salary increases and promotions and so are making a lot more. But as the employees career peaks, so too does their salary. The salary eventually decreases every year until the employee retires. Some companies even have a special "Retiree Consulting Company" where employees work when they reach a certain age (55, 60, etc). The employee takes a big pay cut, is taken off the company payroll, and is then a contractor/consultant, but doing the same job. Usually their hours are ramped down to 3 days/week, 2 days/week, 1 day/week etc until they actually retire from working.

It has benefits in that a person retiring has had a LONG time to prepare, pass on their knowledge, and train the next worker. But it definitely adds perverse incentives to milking the salary when you can because after a certain point, the employee is just making less and less every year.

Day 1 DLC is still idiotic. It raises the cost of entry for the gamer and doesn't do anything to foster goodwill. Have the devs make DLC during the lull time if you must, but delay that DLC until 3-5 months after release.

Its not a lie, just a bad manager. The problem for management is that what works awesome at some companies fail completely at others. Company/Department A may be doing great with an open-office scheme, all the employees are happy and productivity goes up 50%. The problem is that a a manager at Company/Department B will try it out without considering in what, if any, ways which A is different from B. if B is the same as A in all the ways which matter, then the manager is a hero. But if B is different than A in some small way, then the manager has committed a big mistake. Sometimes the difference is foreseeable (bad manager) and sometimes it isn't.