All this guy has to do is wait for the next missing person to show up dead from exposure/injury, and then go to the local paper saying "I could have saved this person, but the FAA wouldn't let me"

To use your starbucks example to explain the point of the parent post: the government spent MORE than $100,000 in order to eliminate that $5 cup of coffee

When I was little we used to play NES over at my friends house. The TV in the basement where we played was kinda built into the wall, and the drywall around the TV had a bunch of little triangular dents from all the times my friend and his brother would throw the controller.

I got my start doing mr-fix-it work by fixing smashed NES controllers for all my friends

If Jesus is the son of God, then you shouldn't be worshiping him like you do (that would be putting someone else before god, Exodus 20:3)
And if Jesus IS God, then he never really died, just merely faked his own death.

Can't have it both ways

The modern bible makes it sound like Jesus and God are somehow the same thing. Probably to get around the dilemma of believing in the Old Testament which says "have no other god before me" while simultaneously worshiping Jesus instead of God.

As far as the tree of knowlege goes, if God didn't put it there, who did? and why would he intentionally tell them not to eat it? Wouldn't it have been better to just snap his fingers and make the tree go away?
Adam and Eve didn't have "knowledge" at the time, so they presumably had the mental capacity of the average toddler (having no concept of nakedness), so God basically performed the equivalent of placing a cookie jar in front of a 2-year-old and then telling the 2-year-old not to eat any of the cookies. I would expect the creator of the universe to be a bit smarter than that.

Now, you could claim that it was Lucifer that created the Tree of Knowledge in order to trick us, but that would contradict other parts of the bible that say Lucifer has no power to create anything.

Basically, either the Bible is wrong, or God is a complete moron who should have known better.

This might be the most important part. The internet shows you that it's OK to disagree with the people directly around you, because you aren't alone in your opinion.

Unfortunately this also works both ways, and emboldens crazy fringe beliefs as well.

There was a recent survey showing that the majority of people believed astrology was a legitimate science. Unfortunately it was discovered shortly afterwards that most of the people taking the survey had confused the word "astrology" with the word "astronomy".

Science isn't perfect, and unlike most religions, never claims to be perfect.

If you are the type to accept external morality more easily than internal personal morality, then there is nothing wrong with shopping around and picking the best parts from each option.

All people have a deep desire to believe they are doing the right thing. Some people seek confirmation from others as a group, and some people self-confirm. Unfortunately, within these two categories there are also people who delude themselves, both as individuals (self-centered egomaniacs) and as groups (cults and religious zealots) who end up causing harm while convincing themselves they are doing good.

There is nothing wrong with having external morality, as long as you don't end up with external self-delusion. Picking and choosing from different religions helps to minimize the self-delusion, because it prevents you from being swallowed-up by any particular viewpoint.

I want this expression as a bumper sticker

In most areas the cost of electricity is heavily regulated, and in Minnesota and Wisconsin (xcel energy), the actual production costs are broken down in detail on every single monthly bill. We pay X cents per KwH for the power plant, and Y cents for the lines, and Z cents for administration, etc. and when the power company wants to change their rates they have to get approval from the state. I don't know about other parts of the country, but here atleast, they aren't selling below cost

The vast majority of people who die in a building fire died because of toxic fumes, not because of actual fire. A smokeless fire isn't really dangerous to you unless you are near it (you would feel the heat) or it is large enough to compromise the building structure.

Also, a smokeless housefire is pretty much impossible, there aren't that many materials in common use that burn that cleanly

They make basic smoke alarms with "bad cook" buttons that disable the alarm for a 10-20 minutes when pressed. The button is big enough that you can poke it with a broom handle if it's too far from the floor

If you did raise the cost of electricity, where would that extra money go? Giving more money to the power company isn't going to reduce climate damage, it would just make the executives and shareholders richer.

Just look at oil. There are already ridiculous markups on oil (and obscenely rich Arabs) but it doesn't stop people from driving gasoline cars.

The only way you could raise the price of electricity to match it's "true cost", while actually paying back the environment, would be to put the extra money into environmental restoration or renewable energy projects. That would require a new tax however, and the people currently in charge of the government are a bunch of tax-hating climate change deniers.

SATA sucked when it first came out. They rarely put any sort of reinforcement around the connector on early sata hard drives, and the connector tended to break right off the circuit board. One computer I worked on had 2 10k RPM hard drives ruined by a heat sink falling on the sata cables and breaking the connectors. The customer had important data on the drives, so we ended up cutting apart some sata cables and soldering the wires directly to the circuit board as a semi-permanant fix