I'm talking about states like Arizona, which has enacted a $50/month fee if you want to feed solar electricity back into the grid. If you install a solar panel and a battery system that has absolutely no interaction with the grid, you can they justify charging a fee for your system. They might as well charge you for installing high efficiency appliances, bulbs, or for simply using less energy.

Actually, I think one of the biggest results of this will be to allow homes with solar energy to store ALL the energy they capture with their panels, instead of feeding that energy back into the grid. This will effectively neuter the arguments of power companies who say that grid feed-in is making the grid unstable, thus reducing the impetus for putting punitive fees on houses with solar panels.

Go in, take your ballot, and simply decline to vote for any sock-puppets from the big two. If that means you turn in a blank or mostly-blank ballot, so be it. THEN you're sending the message that you DO care enough to vote, just not for either of the available candidates.

As a side benefit, there may well be state amendments, etc. on the ballot as well - and voting for/against on those can actually matter directly.

And who knows - if you're going to be voting anyway, maybe there's one or two offices where there's a decent candidate available - sometimes they manage to sneak into even the big two. Hell, an Elizabeth Warren / Bernie Sanders ticket would be promising enough to get me to not only vote for them, but go canvasing.

I suspect the movie's real "sin" was to make bank a banker like "old man Potter" the greedy villain. Today, the greedy banker/financier is the hero, acting valiantly in the "public interest".

However, (almost) all is the default assumption.

Oranges prevent scurvy - eat enough oranges, you won't develop scurvy.
Condoms help prevent pregnancy - use them regularly and properly, and you greatly reduce (from 80% to around 15%/year), the chances of pregnancy.
Meanwhile The Pill straddles the edge - while not 100% effective, the fraction of a percent of risk remaining is low enough that it's commonly referred to as preventing pregnancy.

So don't vote for one of the big "two" - there's usually other candidates on the ballot as well. At worst you send the message that "I'm so sick of the big two that I'll throw my vote away on this wacko". Hopefully there's even a 3rd-party candidate you can agree with - if enough people vote for them then we can even influence the big two a little as they try to capture the "defectors".

Anything's better than sending the message "I'm too lazy to vote, do whatever the hell you want."

Frank Capra's classic "It's a Wonderful Life" was largely forgotten in its time. In 1974, possibly due to an error, its copyright lapsed. TV networks, eager for low cost holiday fare, basically had this film running on a loop during certain times of the year. Then, Paramount managed to pull the movie back into copyright. And low and behold, the showings of this great movie slowed to a trickle once again. Public interest indeed. These media industry slime-balls are evil. Literally evil.

In the US most of those people got reelected with the support of not much more than 25% of the voters. And most of those were probably actually voting against the other guy. Funny definition of popularity you've got there.

If doing X will prevent Y, then if I do X, Y will not occur.

Eating healthily may prevent many individual tumors from forming, but it does not prevent ALL of them, so it can't be said to prevent cancer. It may HELP prevent cancer, much like condoms help prevent pregnancy, but that's a much weaker claim.

Hey, they're right. Where do you think all the "Humans aren't causing Global Warming" "science" comes from. Sure it's atrocious science, but as long as someone with a Ph.D. and a lab coat is telling people what they want to here, plenty won't look too to see if they're actually scientists or just sciency PR flaks.

I do not contest that he has a good reason, but that's a far different thing than a Good reason. Such things seem to generally be far less likely to work out well.

The person I was responding to did not mention off-road activity, and the root of the discussion was about space, not off-roading. If you are off-roading, you need an off-road vehicle, whether it's an SUV or something else.

This is because, speaking as a Vermonter, I see so many SUVs coming up with New York City plates and no mud, and then heading south again on Sunday with the same New York City plates and the same no mud. Of course there are people for whom full-time SUV ownership is a requirement, but a lot of people just do it because why not?

In my experience the main difference between a minivan and an SUV is that the minivan has more room for stuff, on the positive side, and a less rugged chassis (which is sometimes a negative). If I had to choose between the two, I'd pick the minivan because you can haul plywood in it, which you can't do in a typical SUV.