Corporate taxes are really just a way to tax individual shareholders, employees and customers, but without any of them noticing that the money is coming out of their pockets. Taxes are necessary, but hidden taxes are evil. Taxes should be visible, so the taxpayers know what they're paying and can weigh it against the value they receive, to decide if they're getting good value for their money, and vote accordingly.

This particular proposal is a great example. Obama wants to go after this particular pool of money because to American taxpayers it appears to be "free" money. It doesn't cost them anything... or at least that's how it looks. I suppose to the extent that this is taxing foreign income generated by foreign workers producing goods and services for sale to foreign customers, it is "free". The only Americans who will be hurt are the Americans who are shareholders in the targeted companies, and there are also plenty of foreign shareholders. So to the extent the money is all foreign, it's taken from foreign taxpayers, which is, if anything, even more insidious.

We do need to maintain our infrastructure, and we should pay for it. But up front and in the open.

It takes an expert in "gas physics" to explain the ideal gas law to them? Didn't these lawyers have to take a basic physics or chemistry course in their undergrad coursework?

Just like they tell you that you any time you think you might be being pulled over by someone who's not a real cop (say, an unmarked car), you can drive to the parking lot of a police station before pulling over.

Disclaimer: That only works if you are white.

there is a Flash exploit that STILL isn't patched, that only requires a user to visit a site with a bit of compromised embedded flash content like a banner ad, and BOOM, owned. You don't even have to click a link, just visit a domain hosting the content on a page.

I notice your account was created yesterday. Please let me be the first to welcome to you Slashdot.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself, by way of introduction. Like maybe your badge number.

Heh. Obviously I was talking about OEM devices, not user customizations. If you include custom configs you'll find just about everything.

Er, vast majority. If only there were some way to see my post before I submit it...

What? Who are these few people who are going to get rich off a carbon tax?

There has been a lot of attention given to space weather, like solar dynamics. So far there has been no evidence that space weather is having warming effects. That doesn't mean that nobody has been looking. People have, especially in the energy industry, and so far what little evidence there is actually points in the opposite direction.

I've heard this point made a lot- we can't reduce CO2 because that means a one-world government would take my guns away and force me to be an atheist, or something.

Have any reference to that other than geoengineeringwatch? Scientists do talk about that as a possible idea but so far it remains speculative, and nobody is actually trying it. Those jet trails you see over your house are from carrying passengers. Sulfuric acid just doesn't have the money to afford the ticket prices.

(If anyone got confused by that, the "compounds" he's talking about are sulfur aerosols, not CO2.) To my knowledge the idea strikes everyone as fanciful and distasteful; it only gets discussed as a possible last ditch, desperate option. Cities would have to be pretty flooded before anyone would actually seriously consider doing that. The main argument in its favor is that one ton of sulfuric acid would be potent enough to offset the warming of about 100000 tons of CO2. That's about all that can be said for it. (FWIW, CO2 is also an acidic gas, and obviously it also "shoots the atmosphere with radiation".)

The Senate just voted 98 to 1 that the climate is changing, but refused to vote on whether humans were in any way responsible. I think that if anything qualifies as "paying honor to the creation but not the creator".

I think that's because we can see them under the streetlamp- if we're the type who even bothers to look at all.

IIRC it's 97%, not 100%. But that's still a really good consensus for a scientific theory, especially given the financial incentives for scientists to dissent.

That's definitely true- a typical CO2 molecule remains airborne for about 10,000 years before being reabsorbed. in several million years the planet will have forgotten about us, except for any mass extinction event that we might have triggered- similar to what happened during the Carboniferous period, when today's fossil fuels were actually fossilized.

Rush Limbaugh said this the day after the storm. Weathermen and climatologists aren't actually the same people. In fact most of the "skeptical scientists" that appear on TV to deny climate change are actually weathermen. But even if a weatherman can't tell you whether it's going to be warmer next week than today, he can predict with good confidence that exactly six months from now it's going to be warmer than today was. You're demanding a perfect weather forecast over every possible timescale before you'll even pull your fingers out of your ears.

Actually, climatologists are pretty irritated that they can't talk about their science in public without the discussions instantly getting mobbed by Rush Limbaugh fans. I see these articles and I figure, there might be actual scientists posting intelligent things in there somewhere, but I'm never going to find them through all this crud.

I've heard a lot about scientists who are supposedly scamming the government with a giant hoax so they can get piddling NSF grants, but this is the first I've heard about wannabe trillionaires.

But some people can. Then Tesla can get more business, they can come out with better and cheaper cars, other companies will be incentivized to sell similar cars, and someday your car will work that way too.

Say what you want about pencil pushers, they can usually do math. Most households pay about $3000 on gas per year. If you're worrying about paying $30K a year on gas taxes, that's some pretty serious driving.

No.

They obviously got the date wrong, but that doesn't mean the day will never come.

We're talking about a problem that isn't causing us difficulties in the short term but threatens to be a long term disaster. Cancer, traffic deaths, child abuse, teen smoking, alcoholism, disease, etc. are all problems in the short term as well as the long term, which is why we address them. That doesn't mean that specifically long term problems aren't worth addressing at all, especially if they need to be dealt with in the short term by their very nature. It's like saying "my kid is hungry today, I can't afford to vaccinate him- so I'll just wait until he actually gets the measles".

Maybe you thought I was actually talking about AGW, but the point I was making there was about people's views being shaped by politics.