Next time maybe we can try something that involves actual communism rather than just a communist banner carried by authoritarian thugs. Hint: if members of the government are living substantially better than the poorest members of society, it's not actually communism.

Not at all - law has very little to do with science. Whether something is biologically human is largely irrelevant to whether it is a legal person with guaranteed rights.

Contrast with corporations, which are unquestionably NOT human, but are regarded as legal persons in most jurisdictions.

All of science is based on the idea that something for which there is no evidence probably doesn't exist. Maybe gravity is actually based on the actions of invisible fairies, but unless and until you have *evidence* of the existence of such fairies the broader scientific community is going to say you're nuts. Similarly claiming the mind has it's roots in magic/soul/etc. Unless and until you have evidence that there is something outside normal physics involved, the default assumption is that there is not. Occam's Razor is not without it's flaws, but it is extremely efficient in trimming out the vast bulk of magical thinking from the scientific community.

Actually diddling kids has been standard practice in many cultures until fairly recently - it's only in the last few centuries that it's begun getting a bad name in the West. Hell - take the word "erotic", derived from the Greek "eros" - an emotion that was accepted to only be possible within the confines of a relationship between an adult man and a young boy - something that was openly embraced at the time.

Moral of the story: don't assume that your modern moral compass is of any use in determining historical reality.

>Also, the only place to reasonably deliver advertising is on the landing page, once you pass this, there is really no way to deliver advertising in an efficient manner.

Come now - there's always the page of ads randomly inserted as a response to every tenth HTTP request. Wildly popular among users and generates much good will for the companies advertising.

Which strongly suggests the existence of the TSA is pointless. As you say, and the professionals all agree - anyone competent who wants to blow up a plane will be able to do so unless stopped long before they get to the airport (and the NSA claims hey really truly have done so, but you'll have to trust us on that because we can't reveal the evidence). Meanwhile the TSA can't even catch the loonies who try to blow up their shoes and underwear - those have all been stopped by their own incompetence and/or other passengers. So the TSA is accomplishing what exactly?

And yet when those businesses fail it's the government that perpetuates those failed businesses. Strange that. You are truly a fool if you believe we live in a capitalist democracy. In the US we live in the imploding hell that Ayn Rand predicted. Capitalism has given way to who can buy the most politicians to pass laws perpetuating obsolete and/or failing business models and businesses. Democracy has given way to who will pay the most to get their business perpetuated.

Yeah, fixed the number error in a rely to Solandri - I was thinking insolation in the Southwest, which is indeed ~5kWh, but that's only directly relevant to solar-thermal uses.

I think you badly overestimate the summer-versus-winter variation, though I'll grant you that areas prone to long winter storms might indeed be that bad. But regardless - yes: the biggest problem with solar and wind is variability - the answer is some combination of storage and/or a high-efficiency long range distribution grid. Both of which are technologies under active development. After all, Arizona's insolation doesn't vary all that much over the year, and you'd only need to cover 60% of it with solar panels to provide the entire nation's energy needs. Double our PV and energy usage efficiencies and you'd only need to cover 14% of it, then you just need a superconducting grid backbone and a few days worth of batteries to power the nation.

Whoops, my bad - I was thinking insolation where I live in the Southwest: clear skies and lowish latitude translate to roughly 5 hours of peak solar equivalency per day, and the solar thermal systems which interest me as a tinkerer can easily approach 100% efficiency (1kW/m^2 at peak). At 16% efficiency that's still about 0.8kWh/day, but not nearly as impressive as 5kWh. On the other hand as you get into more overcast areas further from the equator the appeal of solar thermal increases, and high capacity thermal batteries (aka insulated water tanks) are cheap. Even in northern Montana a DIY thermal installation can pay for itself in a few years, and unless it's replacing wood or geothermal heating that's a big win.

But even PV isn't as bleak as you make out: let's use your number: 0.435kWh/m2/day w/current solar panels. Double that for the high efficiency panels to 0.87kWh. Then halve per-capita energy consumption to get in line with European efficiency:123.5kWh/day. That's still only 142 square meters per person. Three times my flawed estimate, but still not terrible. That's ~44,600km^2, or an area about 30% larger than Maryland, to supply the entire US with all its energy needs. Even with current energy consumption and cheap silicon PV we'd only need an area the size of Missouri to do the job.

And remember: the vast majority of that energy is consumed by businesses rather than individuals, and they are already beginning to roll out solar in a big way, because the $/Watt has already fallen to the point that it's notably cheaper than today's grid electricity over a 20-year amortization period, and businesses are accustomed to dealing with everything in terms of amortized costs. Let the price of fossil fuels keep climbing and the price of PV continue to fall, and it won't be long before PV is cheaper than burning coal on-site in many areas.

>He is fighting the system from within the system, something I didn't think was possible
Quite. I have my doubts as to how successful it will actually be in the long term*, but the only other alternative seems to be violent uprising, about which I have even greater doubts as to the wisdom and efficacy of. So I've got my fingers crossed and am cheering him on mightily.

* I'm betting there's 160 or so people who will gladly donate a few tens of millions each out of their pocket change to lobby against such reform if this movement becomes a credible threat. But we are still at least superficially a democracy, and staging a public lobbyist battle against the populace could backfire badly at the polls.

Actually there are - it fluctuates of course, but there is a normal range of fluctuation - ice cores going back over the last million years show fluctuations between about 175 and 275ppm, with the highest peaks occasionally, and very briefly, just breaking 300ppm. At ~400ppm we're currently almost as far beyond the highest historical peaks as the peaks are above the troughs.

But that's neither here nor there - reread that sentence, I was discussing the density of *grazing animals*, not CO2. Since the ecosystem changes occurred at a nearly geological pace as our ancestors gradually spread across the globe it didn't cause significant changes in atmospheric CO2 levels - but intelligently reversing desertification could potentially increase biomass dramatically in a matter of decades, stripping an enormous amount of CO2 from the atmosphere in the process, in addition to producing enormous numbers of well-exercised meat animals and converting vast near-desert regions into thriving grasslands. And as long as we stay away from the serious methane producers like cows that should be a dramatic win for slowing global warming, possibly even reversing it for a while. Of course we'd still need to cut way back on fossil fuel use, but we could potentially buy ourselves several decades, possibly as much as a century, of extra time to do so, which should be enough for new energy technologies and market forces to start implementing a long-term solution in a far less painful fashion.

Yeah, but we've made ourselves a really convenient target for them to enrage the masses at. Nazis, "commies", etc. were mostly people just like us, under the leadership of a different group of sociopaths, but look how worked up our leaders managed to get us at them. We were full into witchhunt mode and even had internment camps where we imprisoned over 100,000 American citizens for the crime of being of Japanese descent. Similar thing today with the terrorists - the folks on the ground are mostly just poor angry schmucks who've been getting the the short end of the stick for decades, but the fact that they can legitimately lay some of their grievances at our feet (The installation of Saddam in the first place, 10s (100s?) of thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of our military more recently, to name a couple of the most grievous) makes it really easy for their leaders to whip them into enough of a fury to throw their lives away in suicide attacks against both us and local collaborators. Cynical manipulation by sociopaths for their own ends? Of course. But we did more than our fair share in producing fertile ground for them to work with.

Quite so. Tangentially related, have you seen this talk on reversing desertification? The fellow seems to be on to something, and even if you're mostly growing grasses and meat, if you can drastically increase the biomass in areas where vegetation is currently extremely sparse that's an enormous amount of carbon sequestration potential, in addition to the numerous other environmental and climatological benefits of nurturing a thriving biosphere.

  http://www.ted.com/talks/allan...

If you're producing plastics, or anything else that doesn't involve burning the fuel and producing CO2, then you're not really contributing to global warming so it's not a particularly urgent problem. Sure there's still some geopolitics involved, but I'd bet good money that we'd care a lot less about the Middle East if we only needed their oil to produce cheap plastic crap rather than to fuel all aspects of our civilization.

Sure we can - our current usage is rife with waste. We could easily cut US energy consumption by 50+% simply by wasting less energy, we'd only need to drop per-capita energy usage to levels comparable to such backwards wastelands as the UK and France - and even they've really only taken advantage of the low-hanging fruit so far.

Meanwhile even at current energy consumption levels US per-capita energy consumption is 308 million BTU per year, or 247 kWh per day. At 5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day (a conservative number achievable almost anywhere with low-to-mid-range solar panels) that's only 49.5 meters of panels per person, or 532 square feet. A little high, but not unachievable.

Meanwhile we've recently made some great breakthroughs in solar panel technology, for example discovering that panels made with relatively common and non-toxic magnesium salts can perform on par with our current best-of-breed panels based on gallium arsenide and other extremely rare and toxic elements. Let that hit mainstream and we can cut those panels to 266 sq.ft. Add in European-class efficiency and we'd only need 133 sq.ft. of solar panels per person. Eminently achievable - all we need is decent batteries for daily power buffering and we're set. And advances in virtually "immortal" ultra-high-power liquid metal batteries look quite promising, not to mention businesses like Aquion that are already scaling up production for grid-focused saltwater batteries. And if you happen to live in mountainous areas pumped water gravitational batteries are a moderately mature and inexpensive technology already, if not quite so efficient.