No wrong. Listen: We know that banks like money to begin with. They don't generally say "Oh, we're making enough money" and rest on their laurels avoiding some profitable change in policy until they're shocked by an external event. If it were possible for them to profitably raise fees or credit-card interests, they'd have done it already.

This is a direct hit to the bank's shareholders, or to their insurance.

This is where I point out the amusing factoid that hydroelectric power accidents have killed 2/3 about as many people as nuclear power.... iff you include the atomic bomb in the latter number.

(One botched dam in China...)

Seriously, though, radiation's totally overrated.

They say that the whole premise of democracy is that the people know what they want, and moreover they deserve to get it good and hard.

Yes, there's a movie with NIMH in the title, and it came out in the 1980s, and it's sometimes regarded as the pinnacle of American hand-drawn animation. And the film diverges substantially from the book it was based on in order to express an allegory on the promise and the perils of atomic energy, and it provides a useful contrast to the attitudes expressed in other 1980s films dealing with similar issues (like Blade Runner - especially the director's cut, Aliens, and Rock-a-doodle).

Or something? You're making an argument when you don't even know? Check out green energy tariffs. They are a bit more expensive than ordinary ones. But not 4 times, that would be ridiculous.

The US Department of Energy estimates that a new photovoltaic power plant entering service in 2017 will runs about $157/MWh in total levelized system costs (in 2010 dollar terms). It figures natural gas at $65. Dirty coal plants in China are cheaper though.

How about this, instead? We invest in alternative energy technologies R&D now?

If you're going to use the word "invest", let's talk investment and ask the tough questions, see if we can come up with some good answers. What is the return on this investment? Is it financial, or non-financial? Are the returns earned by the owner of the investment or by third parties? Who is qualified to estimate the size of these returns in an unbiased manner? (If non-financial returns are being earned by the third parties, it may be better understood as an exercise in philanthropy than in investment.) What is the opportunity cost of this investment: are there other investments which could make a non-philanthropic investor more money, or, if we're operating in the realm of philanthropy, are there other worthier philanthropic endeavors with larger and more immediate returns that we ought to be investing in, instead of this? (There are a lot of candidate investments in the class of "get clean water to $african_village".)

By "let's invest" do you primarily mean "let's have the government levy taxes and attempt to make this happen"? What sort of incentives are in place to make sure that the "investment" actually is done wisely, rather than becoming an exercise in corporate leeches clamoring for government funds but producing nothing of value? Or even just bankruptcy a la Solyndra? (There's room enough for criticism about where the money gets to when the government "always seem[s] to be able to find money to fund wars", and wars are relatively easy to measure results on.) What is the real price of this investment to taxpayers, in terms of taxes or debt and debt-service (and the effects of debt like the government calls "crowding out"?) And if "we always seem to be able to find the money to fund wars", what about the ~50% increase in US government spending combined with ~0% increase in government revenues since 2007, and the commensurate increase in the annual deficit to ~50% of revenues? That's easily more spending than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined; should we roll some of the new programs back in order to pay for this proposed investment? How do you sell the policy changes to people as politically active entities, especially if they will suffer material setbacks (taxes or higher energy costs)? Even if they're willing to suffer setbacks in theory, do the people trust these investments to actually deliver meaningful value of some sort?

Not that all these questions are unanswerable. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's easy.

And if we have to switch to renewables anyway, why not do it as soon as possible.

This question is easier to ask when you're making well-above-average computer-programmer-level salaries and quadrupling the price of electricity and fuel (or something) and the various manufactured things which depend on that price isn't going to really ding your lifestyle. But given the number of people in this world who make a trivial fraction of that, it gets more complicated.

That's not an article about tax avoidance, though, that's an article about tax evasion, which is different. Remember, tax avoidance is the legal one which has even been endorsed by the court system: "Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase oneâ(TM)s taxes." - Helvering v. Gregory.

(Not that tax avoidance and tax evasion are both bipartisan things, but, the distinction is worthwhile, because one is criminal.)

For example.

If the signal from the real transmitter reaches the location of your jammer, the signal from your jammer reaches outside.

Hello. It sounds like you've neglected the essence of the near-far problem. You can have a very low power jammer block your signal, it just needs to be really close to the phone in question while the tower is far away.

If you use it as a medium of exchange, it's a currency. So far Bitcoin's a little weak on that front, preferring to be a store of value. (And even when it is being used as a medium of exchange, just about nobody is using it as a unit of account, because no one wants the price of their services to fall 50% in dollar-terms in a single day if there's another freakout, or for their monthly bill to double between when they use the service and when they pay for the use.)

The best source for aurora visibility information is a forecast page run by the NOAA, but it's crushed under the load already, so I won't link it here. The second-best source is probably AccuWeather Astronomy's Facebook page or something like that. Anyway. Visibility hasn't even reached Maine yet.

"And I have to pay taxes to support free meals for those Google employees.'

I'm pretty sure that Google's advertisers pay Google to pay for the free meals for those Google employees. Without prejudicing any other case for equitable treatment, just because someone isn't paying taxes doesn't mean they're robbing you. It's the fruits of their own labor. In the absence of laws to the contrary, is Google not entitled to dispose of their money as they see fit?

The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

-- C. S. Lewis

(who, on a side-note, also wrote a snazzy novel which more or less served as the blueprint for 1984

"apparently the new flavor of crazy this administration is pulling is all hunky dory."

Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor, theorizes:

Mr. Obama "believed the cartoon version of the Bush critique so that Bush wasn't just trying to make tough calls how to protect America in conditions of uncertainty, Bush actually was trying to grab power for nefarious purposes. "So even though what I, Obama, am doing resembles what Bush did, I'm doing it for other purposes," Mr. Feaver added.

-- The New York Times
(disclosure: Feaver is a partisan with ties to the Bush administration.)

Jennifer Granholm supports this notion:

"We trust the president," the former Michigan governor told the Times, "And if this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms because we wouldn't trust that he would strike in a very targeted way and try to minimize damage rather than contain collateral damage."

-- The Guardian
(The British columnist here goes on to assert: "That many Democratic partisans and fervent Obama admirers are vapid, unprincipled hacks willing to justify anything and everything when embraced by Obama - including exactly that which they pretended to oppose under George W Bush - has also been clear for many years.")