yeah, about an hour per CPU.

Hydrogen is #10 at .12% of crust mass.
Carbon is #15 at .03%, but passes all other elements in industrial production at 8.6 gigatons/year, not counting agriculture. Iron is next for production at 1.2 gigatons.
Nitrogen is #31 at .005%, right below lanthanum and yttrium! And Lithium is #33.

You can find the full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust. I love Wikipedia. That is all.

I don't see why local interest groups shouldn't be allowed to do their own thing. Do you just dislike them because they're not like you? The solution is allowing more groups or individuals exemption from regulation, thus taking away the idea that these few groups are "special".

The cost of replacing an incandescent bulb is insignificant compared to the cost of energy used in illumination.

Cited by Thomas Sowell in Economic Facts and Fallacies, average real income per household has only risen 6% per household, but has risen 51% per individual, between '69 and '96. Wages have increased significantly, the problem is smaller households. Furthermore, households with higher incomes usually have two or more wage-earners, lower-income households have one or none, making household income a terrible substitute for individual wages in this discussion. Unions have been an important check on the power of big business, but all-out attack or no, they aren't in a regulatory disadvantaged position today. Rather, they're in decline because what they offer either isn't valued by many workers (for lower-wage walmart-type jobs often taken by people who either don't fight for their rights or don't care much about the job anyway/short-term workers) or isn't especially needed (for higher-wage jobs that you have to not suck at to keep).

Of course, easy credit only returns to bite borrowers in the ass, to the benefit of the banking system.

I probably shouldn't have included oil in that list considering recent prices. In the midwest where I live practically no one heats with electricity because of the expense compared to propane or natural gas furnaces.

Yes, but (1) if electricity were an ideal heat source, we wouldn't be heating with gas, propane, and oil. And in my house in Virginia, we used the lights and A/C simultaneously quite a bit thanks to warm nights and semi-nocturnalism. A/C is much more expensive per BTU than heat. I'll grant you that as an easy-to-make, easy-to-power low-tech light source, incandescents can't be beat. But with today's electricity prices, I'm switching to CFLs.

Thanks a ton for the link. My brain just exploded.