In more populated locales of the USA, the density of people and of money is substantially higher than many places in Sweden or Japan, which nevertheless have much superior internet service to the USA.

Is internet really awesome and inexpensive in Manhattan or San Francisco or Philadelphia? No.

Internet is really awesome in the tiny number of places which have Google Fiber.

powertalk, not fact talk

It's the no good deed goes unpunished file. Sun does a bunch more for open source than any other major public for profit company at the time. Geeks shit all over them for not doing everything up to a Communist-sympathizing FSF thinks is necessary.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Oracle act like asses and thrive on aggressively proprietary and expensive software.

Richard Lindzen is somewhat respectable when he publishes in peer-reviewed journals---and there he hardly denies the influence of greenhouse forcing on climate, but he hypothesizes a string of various mechanisms to make the climate sensitivity somewhat lower than the consensus. These are usually refuted by observations.

He isn't respectable when he publishes completely misleading BS in right-wing newspaper editorial pages.

And the point is that he is the only name people seem to know, and there are thousands of climatologists who do real work too and their names are anonymous because they aren't prominent denialists.

| The general scientific consensus has been wrong on countless things throughout history.

And it's been much much less wrong on its subject matter expertise than any other group of humans throughout history.

| Of note, the other product of combustion is water vapor. Irrigation forces more water vapor into the air. Paving forces more water vapor into the air. Even the cooling towers of nuclear power plants force more water vapor into the air. These things happen on a continuous basis, so the world is on average more humid by perhaps 1% than it was 100 years ago. Which would be more than enough to account for ALL observed warming.

Silly person, water is in statistical equilibrium with the oceans, direct human injection of water is irrelevant, in contrast to greenhouse gases.

The amount of water in the atmosphere depends on the climate.

www.head-fi.org

Not as good as open in general, but not bad at all.

| The corruption and violence of the Iranian regime is what spurred the 1979 revolution that installed the current Islamist government

Indeed, but the continued radical hostility and virulent anti-Israeli ideology and corruption and terrorism and violence and lack of freedom of the current Islamist government is the fault of Ayatollah Khomeini and his fellow ideologues.

After all, Vietnam is hardly anywhere near as hostile as Iran, and the USA bombed half the country and killed a million, instead of merely being highly friendly to an authoritarian ally. Likewise all sorts of Central and South American ex-dictatorships, none exhibits the hostility of Iran despite worse actions by the USA.

This problem, reproducible data analysis, has been solved before.

Decent alternatives to spreadsheets (which are entirely opaque) are (a) Matlab, (b) Mathematica notebook, (c) iPython notebook+numpy+pandas, (d) SAS/SPSS/R

Iranian leadership is managed by Persian non-Arabic Moslems. They have many disputes with Arabs, but anti-Jewish bigotry and ideology is a common bond.

| Enough time has past and lots of CO2 has been emitted, to know with certainty that CO2 is not doing what it is claimed to do - cause a greenhouse effect.

This is false. The increase in greenhouse effect has been directly measured by balloons, satellites aircraft and ground instruments.

Which is no surprise since it is based on indusputable atomic physics.

The NIF is a nuclear weapons project, not an energy project. It is financed by DOE NNSA, National Nuclear Security Agency.

The primary goal is to generate calibration data for nuclear weapons simulations. There some minor lip service to energy research, but the engineering approach is 70 years behind where the tokamak is for energy production.

Because the person is getting a significant extra benefit---a substantial sum of money---as a primary, and clearly negotiated result of a contract about that very issue. I get X for Y.

It's completely different, for instance, if you take a taxi to the airport, and then find a submarine clause that your "taxi-use license" required you to pay the driver's fuel cost for the next year, and forbade you from telling anybody that the taxi company did this.

The usual is "get ride for money" or "get meal for money", not "get meal and gag order for money".

| I very sincerely doubt Russia wants any part of a sincere challenge, so dicking with astronaut counts and the cost of a space toilet seems reasonable

The Russians are imposing sanctions on themselves, to pre-empt the embarrassment of US doing it to them first.

"Oh, so you are thinking of ordering Lockheed to stop buying our RD-180 engine for hard currency? Nyet! We'll ban it first!"

The shifting is all the sleazy tricks to make shell companies so that the 'territory' which makes the profit happens to be a small office in a low tax country which somehow is supplying this global market, and the large operations in the large markets operate at a loss.

The US charging taxes on worldwide income is an attempt to circumvent those shenanigans.

The 'territorial' system would make the farcical tax evasion entirely legal instead of tax-deferred. Now it's just legal until the money comes back to the U.S. (i.e. tax-deferral benefit provided for free).

Now the companies and their WSJ propagandists claim all this money is "trapped" when it is no such thing---they just don't want to pay the taxes they owe---and use it as extortion for tax "reform" which reforms only one half of the bargain. Is your money in your 401k "trapped"?

And in aggregate, corporate income tax i.e. actual money paid is at generational lows, not highs as you would have believed from the noise. But they're working to make it even lower.