Ah. So Godot has to wait for you.

So, you're saying that this is what you've been waiting for?

You may not be able to imagine that, but this merely represents a failure in your imagination.

When Congress passes a bill stating that NASA "shall" spend money on project X,this is not optional. They must spend that money.

That was the language in the bill:
“Wicker Three” was an amendment sponsored by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). His amendment said NASA “shall complete construction and activation of the A-3 test stand with a completion goal of September 30, 2013.” That language was included in the bill that passed the committee, then the Senate, then the House. In October 2010, Obama signed it into law.

That was covered in the summary:
"Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."

And relevant to the discussion, here's a nice article on 538 today, talking about the current California drought, and saying (with detailed discussion) that even though climate warming may exacerbate drought, it's nearly impossible to attribute this particular drought to climate warming:
The complex, dynamic nature of our atmosphere and oceans makes it extremely difficult to link any particular weather event to climate change. That’s because of the intermingling of natural variations with human-caused ones.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

And a link to a (2 year old) Nature editorial saying the same thing about extreme weather: http://www.nature.com/news/ext...

And as far as I can tell, you seem to agree with them: you think our freedom of religion is a weakness, and should be eliminated.

You're not the solution: you're the problem.

You phrased this as a statement, but it should be phrased as a question: if the work done by the actress is used in a way substantially different than what she was informed by the film-maker, is there an "implied right" which gives the actress copyright over the film (or, more specifically, over her performance in the film)?

Again: you phrased that as a statement, but it should be a question: is there precedent? What is the precedent?

Yes, really. Or, more precisely: the White House statements were based on the information reported by US intelligence at the time.

Here's the report http://www.intelligence.senate...
The relevant part, from the summary, is here:
In intelligence reports after September 11, 2012, intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the U.S. mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, but without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements to corroborate that assertion. The Intelligence Community took too long to correct these erroneous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements of policymakers.

I agree. It would be nice to be accurate about what we know, and how well we know it.

To a very large extent, the problem is exacerbated by the news media: the more extreme a statement is, the more newsworthy; and the more immediate it is, also the more newsworthy. "Some models indicate that hurricanes could be 10% more powerful by the year 2100, but we need to do some more modelling work to verify how well this number holds up under different scenarios" just doesn't play well in the media. They'll interview that scientist, but the headline is from the scientist who says "killer hurricanes ahead!"

Usually the more detailed kind of statement is toward the middle or end of news articles: the sensational stuff first, and the more cautiously-worded part later ("most scientists don't think we will see a noticeable increase in storm intensity until the next century") toward the end.

Take-home lessons: 1. don't get your science information from the popular press. 2. When you do read the popular press science articles, the important part is outside the headlines.

I wouldn't attribute present day weather patterns to global warming. Undoubtably there will be changes, but it's a bit too early to attribute specific events-- like "more frequent and severe heat waves"-- to anthropogenic warming. There isn't a strong consensus yet. And anthropogenic warming doesn't substitute for natural variations-- natural variations (like heat waves) still occur.
With that said, in terms of modelling effects, what's known and how well it's known keeps getting better. if you do want more details of the current thinking, I'd direct you to the literature. That would be the province of Working Group 2, so I'd probably start with the most recent working group 2 report http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/index....

I don't recall anybody ever predicting "the coasts scoured down to bedrock by hurricanes, the interior a hell of violent weather".

It's worth summarizing what we actually know (minus the idiotic alarmism), what we have some models for but still need details, and what is simply speculation.

Here is what we do know: greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere increases the average temperature of the planet, and this includes the greenhouse gasses added by human activity. The physics of this seems to be sound, large numbers of measurements bear out the fundamentals, and so far all the alternative theories that say greenhouse gasses don't increase average temperature have been failed; they've been ruled out by evidence.

There is still quite a large set of error bars on how much warming to expect from anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. A hundred different groups have studied this problem (this is not one or two climate scientists) with models using different assumptions. The best estimate is 3 degrees kelvin per doubling, with error bars of about plus or minus 1.5. The amount by which the planet has so far warmed due to anthropogenic effects is slightly over a half degree-- call it about one degree Fahrenheit. Let me point out how small that is-- you probably wouldn't feel the difference between, say, a fall day with a high of 54 F or one that's 55. However, on a global scale, this has an effect, and it's worth noting that the warming is cumulative-- the average will go up from there, not down.

However, it's also important to not that this is an average. It's not what you see in one particular location, or one particular day, or even any particular year. This is summarized by the motto "climate is not weather." Any location--any region-- might be warmer of cooler than the average in any given year.

The effect of this warming on weather--extreme storms-- is less well known. This is a much harder problem to model. The best models suggest that warming will increase extremes of weather, but this is not a robustly confirmed result, and exactly which extremes of weather-- hurricanes? typhoons? Arctic storms? Tornados? Droughts? Floods?-- needs a lot of work to model well.

In general, these predictions of increases of extreme weather are long term predictions. So far, the warming is still relatively small. If we keep increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the effect (assuming that better models confirm that there is an effect) will be larger. This is a long term effect, not a short term one-- we're talking effect of warming of several degrees, not the current half degree. Not next year, but in decades in the future. And even then, predicting an average increase in large storms doesn't necessarily say large storms hitting the continental US will increase-- we are discussing the world, not the few percent of the world that is called the U.S.

But in general, detailed effects are much harder to model than global averages.

And of course, any given storm cannot be ascribed to global warming. All the people who said "Hurricane Sandy is an example of global warming!" were simply off base. Climate is not weather.

I repeat: you have failed to convince me that you know anything about road maintenance. However, you have convinced met that you know little or nothing about economics.

You also don't seem to pay attention to what you write.

Here are your actual words:

So: people purchase goods, and part of the money from that purchase goes to pay for road maintenance.

That's a sales tax.

I will rephrase my question in the form of a statement. You are making trivial objections to the simple solution, but propose only muddled and confused solutions yourself-- so muddled that you don't even remember what you proposed-- which don't address the problems that you yourself bring up.

You have failed to convince me that you know anything about road maintenance. You also haven't convinced me you have much understanding of economics. What you say implies that we should build roads that trucks aren't allowed on, because (according to you) that means that they will cost nothing because they are maintenance-free. Yeah, right. Write to your state governor: roads that don't have to be paid for at all! Every politician will love you.
Around here the worst damage to the roads is done by salt and snowplows. This is needed even if no trucks use the road. This should be paid for by the people who use roads (and the cost of salting and snowplowing as well). There are also indirect costs ("externalities", in economics jargon) that should be paid by the people incurring them.
We could categorize the various expenses in road maintenance for many boring hours, but the trivial solution is still that people who use roads should pay for them with a gasoline tax. Yes, some people don't use cars, but still buy goods shipped on roads. Guess what? These people still pay, because the cost includes transportation cost, which includes the fuel cost.
Unless a sales tax is based not on the cost of the goods but on the mass, the distance it is shipped, and the kind of vehicle used to ship it, it doesn't address the problems you mention in any way. This is what I would call "vastly more complicated".
(In any case, you can hardly say that a sales tax is less regressive. It is almost the poster child for regressive taxation.)
Let me repeat: you are saying that the simple solution won't work because of trivial and inconsequential problems, and then you propose different solutions that not only doesn't address any of the problems you mention, they make all of the problems you bring up worse.
So, my question is: what is the point in your proposing solutions that are more complicated but in no way better?

EVs are such a trivial fraction of the vehicles on the road that your objection here is pointless. Possibly some time in the future it won't be. But it is now.

As for other vehicles-- the amount of gasoline used, and the amount of road damage done, are both going to be proportional to how far you drive. Road wear will also be proportional to weight (which decreases gas mileage). Therefore, yes, the amount of gas used for transporting stuff tends to be proportional to the amount of damage done to the road. People driving 1000 miles are going to do roughly a hundred times less damage than people driving 100000 miles

Yes, there are other factors. However, your idea to pay for roads with sales taxes addresses none of these other factors. It doesn't have even a vague connection between the amount of road wear used to transport the goods and the amount of tax paid, unless you start with an assumption that all goods have the same ratio of price to mass and all goods are transported the same distance. These assumptions are laughably wrong.

So, basically, you have taken a very simple idea, pointed out an unimportant problem, and then propose solutions that are more complicated... but don't solve any of the problems you point out.

What's the point here? You don't solve any of the problems you mention-- you don't even try to solve any of the problems you mention.