And of course, now I see I've posted this twice. Haha. My bad!

Oh well, my karma is excellent, I don't need to be modded up, I guess. :D1

I just wrote a long post explaining it, and somehow I wasn't logged in, it got posted as AC, and now it's not here anymore. I am very frustrated because I spent about 20 minutes doing calculations.

Here's the gist of what I had put:

The 10-to-1 figure is for energy, not volume.

A barrel of crude is 42 gallons and has 1.7 MWh of energy. Current market price is $105 per barrel. That's 40.5 kWh/gal. Corn oil has 94 kWh/gal. (Calculated from 120 kcal/tbsp.)

That would mean you could make 1.8 gal of corn oil from a barrel of crude, and corn oil should cost $56.66/gal, but you're saying you can get it for $4, I assume in bulk. So what's the problem? Consider how corn oil is produced: You extract the oil from the germ of the kernel. The remainder of the corn is not useful for oil. That's the part your missing. Here's the calculations on that:

According to wikipedia, a bushel of corn yiels 1.55 lbs of corn oil. Corn oil has a density of 77lbs/gal. So in other words you need 50 bushels of corn to make one gallon of corn oil! A bushel is 8 dry gallons. Raw corn has 132 kcal/cup. That means that 50 bushels of corn has 844,800 kcal of energy, or 982.5 kWh.

So there's your answer: it takes 982.5 kWh of corn to make 94 kWh of corn OIL. A factor of 10.5. Pretty close to the 10-to-1 figure. Divide our $56.66 cost by 10.5, and you get a much more reasonable $5.40/gal. Figure in some government agriculture subsidies and oil subsidies, some market economics between the two goods, sales of corn byproduct (they don't just discard the portions not used for oil) and you have something very close to your supermarket price on vegetable oil. The 10-to-1 number is just an estimate, but it's a pretty darn good one.

Adjust your tin foil hat. :)

Not all knowledge we have comes from the scientific method. Some of it is just our best guess. A lot of history is like that. When we dig up bones or old writings, and try to reconstruct what a society was like back-when, then we are using science, but we are not creating a strictly falsifiable hypothesis. In the event we DO uncover something new that throws a wrench in our conclusions, we'll rework the theory to satisfy the new data. It's occam's razor.

There is a lot of stuff we suspect, but can't actually test. Even atomic structure is just inference. We haven't actually seen it. Then there are things like the uncertainty principle, where you actually CANNOT know both position and momentum! A lot of stuff is just inferences like that. But it's science. It works. It's real. I don't know why god needs a more rigorous proof than that.

For me, a lot of comes down to the fact that technology works. It's not omnipotent, but it does what it is designed to do. (Of course, sometimes a faulty design fails, but that's not common.) If I were to believe there were a god, I'd have to believe that he... doesn't do anything at all. Except maybe keep the natural order of things going as they are. That's not really a "god" as most religions would have it. It's deism at best.

Atheists don't believe there is no god. They know there is no proof for a god, therefore, it is only reasonable to assume he does not exist. It is not a belief. It is a rational conclusion based on observation. This is different from belief.

Atheism is not faith. It's not "faith" in the same way to saying you don't think there's a magic pink unicorn or flying spaghetti monster is not faith. You don't need faith when you have evidence, or are relying on evidence to make a decisions about something.

This DOES happen in America, though. Look at religious zealots vs. abortion clinics.

Atheism is not a religion, not even when you use "quotes". Atheism is relying empirical evidence rather than superstition. Atheism asks "why?" and doesn't accept "because god says" as an answer. It's hard to accept "we don't fully know yet", but it's a much better answer than "god". Once you write down "god" as an answer for something, you stop looking at the problem, or worse, it becomes taboo to look at the problem. That's a very bad place to be, because, god or not, I don't see anyone solving any human problems except for other humans.

Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Democracy is a mechanism to do whatever a majority of people more or less think is right, within the framework of the constitution. Specifically, congress was given power to regular commerce, which is directly related to rights of ownership of property.

I wouldn't expect the neighbor to be able to graze his cows in my fields and then sell the solely for his own profits. I would expect the a government to protect my fields in some fashion. This isn't a situation too different.

Making it an even worse deal.

The current state of the US economy, maybe?