"people who only qualify for unskilled labor"
I have a few problems with this statement. First is the assumption that someone working at Walmart has no skills. Plenty of people there who just can't find work anywhere else at the moment. Second, while I don't think people deserve some huge reward simply for working, it must be remembered that an employee is literally selling a bit of their life. In that light they should be given enough money to live off (and I don't mean just enough to survive). Those unskilled workers are often doing work that you won't, and hell, I wouldn't either.

Why should having a some mass produced college degree entitle anyone to such grossly higher pay? They already have the benefit of having a job that won't destroy their body to the point being unable to do their job. Does a CEO really bring 1000 times the benefit to the company than a laborer would?

Morality and legality, while often related, should never be equated. One example is marijuana. Illegal, but you'd be hard pressed to make a negative morality statement regarding its consumption. How about speeding? Pick any victimless crime. It's not moral for Apple to avoid paying into the government, whose benefits they've enjoyed for a long time, forcing everyone else to make up the difference. It's essentially stealing from everyone else, legal or not. Besides, if not for the government, Microsoft or IBM would have crushed them two decades ago.

My theory, based on no actual empirical evidence, is that whatever object struck Earth to make the moon was a large comet. While I'm not sure how this could be proven, it would explain the arrival of the oceans after Earth was formed and after the moon came along. It also explains the subsurface water being found on the moon. It would also mean that "Earth-like" planets take a somewhat rarer series of events to happen.

There isn't much, as in 15 times as much atmospheric CO2 as here on Earth. I explained it below to the AC two replies down.

CO2 isn't the only heat trapper, very true. My argument is entirely over CO2 and I am arguing that it is only a minor one at that. Mars has 15 times the CO2 of Earth and still receives 43% the sunlight. Earth also reflects over twice as much visible light than Mars. Also of note is that Svante Arrhenius, the guy who figured out CO2 was a greenhouse gas, said as the concentration increased exponentially the temperature would increase linearly. It's a natural log graph where the Y axis is the temperature and the X is the CO2 concentration. Basically the exact opposite of the hockey stick, it flattens out as it gets more concentrated.

Water vapor is the only current significant greenhouse gas. Methane makes up .00018% of the atmosphere, barely measurable, and would only ever be a problem if the planet released all of it's methane hydrates in a short interval. If it get's hot enough for that we have huge problems already.

Actually, the partial pressure of CO2 on Mars is far greater (all numbers are taken from Wikipedia and assumes an ideal gas):
Earth - 101.325 kPa x .00038 (CO2 is .038% of Earth's atmosphere) = .0385 kPa CO2
Mars - .636 kPa x .9532 (95.32% of Martian atmosphere) = .6062 kPa CO2 .6062 / .0385 = 15.75
So actually the partial pressure of CO2 on Mars is 15 times greater than here on Earth.

CO2 is the money making scapegoat. We aren't going to see dramatic changes going from .03% to .04% concentration. But, it is a gas produced in a seemingly large, quantifiable amount. The Earth is slowly heating at the moment, no doubt, but CO2 isn't bogeyman it's made out to be. Where is the hockeystick graph for Mars, which has CO2 concentrations far beyond anything achievable on Earth?

Yes and no. Why do you think we are hated then? "For our freedoms"?

Just who do you think would try to invade the US? It's citizenry alone are the most well armed in the world. We have 89 guns per 100 citizens, beating #2 Serbia (big threat there!) at 58, China has 5. It's suicide. Our biggest threat is ourselves. How does a smaller military weaken us ideologically, or more absurdly, economically? Has it occurred to you that we are so despised in so many places because of our large military and its pervasive grip? This citizen doesn't want an empire or all the economic and moral baggage that goes with it.

The only thing I can think of is the voltage difference. Regular AAs (an all single cell alkaline) are 1.5V whereas rechargeable alkaline are 1.2V. I haven't encountered any device that it makes a difference with.