I know you are joking, but airplanes don't really run on explosions the ways cars do. Jets simply use an continues burn. Pistons work the way you think they do but they are no longer common in large aircraft

I doubt you get large performance benefits. Downloading is by and large network bound.

Stock in "safe" companies (Verizon, AT&T, con ed, and companies that that nature) are paying 3-5% in dividends right now.

Err.... Companies are NOT allowed to band together to increase their power (anti-trust laws apply)

The placebo is a very documented and very powerful effect. As homeopathy is simply water, it is also a very safe placebo with no side effect.

As far as bad cures go, there are probably much worse.

iPhone? It is two instead of quad core, but it will run most apps just fine.

Local militiamen often do deter the invaders enough to make them decide that it is not worth the effort to keep the occupation going. (I will however note that the United States is a sufficiently rich target that the task becomes a lot harder than normal.) That said, look over the history books again and look at all the sheer amount of human suffering and devastation those wars impacted on the country in question. Loss of life is usually measured in double digit percents of the population, the economies of the nations in question generally stops existing and don't recover for decades, if at all.

Even with all of this, resistance efforts often fail. By comparison, stopping them with a conventional army seems pretty good.

2 years of lost wages for every person would cost too much. For one thing, that is two years of productivity that they lose. As the average person is in the labour force for around 30 years, losing 2 years for everyone is losing 6% of our labor force.

By comparison, the DOD cost around 4% of GDP. Seems cheaper just to keep the DOD around.

It would be trivial to shut down bitcoin if you have as much resources as the US government. For one thing, double spending attack on bitcoins becomes trivial as long as the attacker have more processing power than the defenders.

Even bitcoin's own FAQ notes that double spending is possible as long as an entity controls a majority of the hashing power of the network. It is very unlikely for a person to get that kind of power, but a government (or worse yet, a coalition of governments) can easily amass enough GPUs to take down the network via double spending.

Spending 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production isn't something that will fundamentally change life as we know it. A process that produces 100 joules with no energy invested is no different from a process that produces 200 joules that requires you to use 100 joules to extract it. The bottlenecks are still the same for all renewable energy sources - manpower, land, and the geographical locations suitable for the production of this kind of thing.

For things like biodiesel, saying that you need to spend 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production is the same as saying that you need to double the land over a native calculation that does not use energy consumption at all. Those estimates are typically well below the amount of land we farm today, let alone the land mass of the planet.

Biodiesel production in the US today - 5000 gallons per acre per year. Oil consumption of the planet today - 93 million barrels per day. Combine the two numbers, and you would need 750 million acres, which is around 0.6 million sq km. Double that to account for the 50% of energy figure that you quote, and we are looking at 1.2 million sq km. That amounts to around 10% of global farmland, which is a lot, but not enough to change the way the way the world works.

I believe that politicians will do whatever it takes to make it easier to them to get re-elected. Generally, that means that wildly popular ideas tend to get written into laws quickly and easily. Even mildly popular ideas tend to have a sizable number of politicians working toward making them reality.

Hmm, you can ding the US on a lot of things, but I think there is quite a few indicators that we do quite well on. American homes are the largest in the world, the American transportation system allows for people to move large distances both quickly and cheaply. A passenger-mile by private automobile cost around 40 cents in the US, which is far cheaper than any first world public transportation system that comes to mind, especially when you factor in income.

I would argue that America is quite a nice place to live if you like large houses and driving everywhere. In other words, America is extremely well suited to the average American.

I would argue that GDP per capita is more important than unemployment in terms of economic indicators. To see why this is the case, consider the following policy - raise taxes by around 2% GDP and use the money to hire all the unemployed people to dig holes and fill them back in at minimum wage. This will drive unemployment to zero and have a small (and probably negative) impact on GDP. If people truly consider unemployment to be more important than GDP, you would expect for this to be a very popular policy. But it obviously isn't (or else you would hear about serious politicans suggesting it) so people obviously care more about GDP.

By the same token, I also might get a more favorable rate. Informations asymmetries allow people with higher default risks to blend in with people with lower default risks, and forces rates for everyone to go up. More efficient markets are good for all of us.

How does that work legally? Doesn't the constitution have that line about 20 dollar charges?