Programs like this need to incorporate things like comfort, convenience, price, durability etc., you know, things we all look for when buying stuff, that are comparable with or superior to the current norms, and not just energy efficiency. It is easy to make things more energy efficient; we can all live in huts, give up our cars for bicycles, throw out our washing machines, driers and air-conditioners, drink filtered rain water and grow vegetables in our backyards. But we don't want to give up things which make our life easier, safer, more pleasant and convenient, that's what civilization is all about.

A single room mud hut is good for the environment too. How about a net-zero house that normal families would actually want to live in?

Except that GCHQ cost £337 million. Is the Apple building really expected to cost $5B? It is not mentioned anywhere in TFA. Seems excessive even for Bay Area , where fixing up half a bridge costs $6.3 billion.

You don't understand Ran'd philosophy (even if you had read her books, which I doubt) and you cannot explain why reading them would make you a emotionally stunted. Yet you claim that you can. That's dishonesty and, by the way, your dumb 'jokes' are not succeeding in covering up your ignorance.

So your understanding of Rand's philosophy is that it is immoral to do something unless you get paid for it?

You are not being selfish, you are being dishonest.

I have but I don't understand why reading her book will have such effects. Can you explain it to me?

The quote is idiotic and yet it gets repeated every time Ayn Rand is mentioned and seems to always get modded up. Obviously, neither book will read to an "emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood". No single book can ever do that.

Bold statements. Common sense indicates that if that were the case everybody would be installing solar panels and that's clearly not happening even here in the SW USA desert.

If that was fraud, it was also committed by the government as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were mandated by law to issue subprime mortgages (i.e. mortgages to bums who didn't qualify and couldn't be expected to pay them). 30% of all mortgages backed by those two government-controlled organizations were subprimes and 40% of all subprimes were backed by them.

Would you also say that a preference for white males is no big deal as long as it doesn't cost too much? Discrimination based on race and gender is a moral issue, not a cost issue. Government is paid for by all of us and it should serve all of us equally. There should be a law about government NEVER being allowed to mention race, gender, sexuality etc on any application form, whether for welfare, a job or a contract.

If we didn't have such an impossibly complex tax code we probably wouldn't need many of those 87K and we wouldn't have the need for so many extensions and refunds.

Don't fall for political blame games. The world will not end because a small part of our overbloated federal government takes a break. 83% of the government is still functioning, only 17% are temporarily furloughed (even less if you count private contractors). It's worth it to shake things up a little bit every once in a while. Last two shutdowns actually had positive results and led to spending cuts in the government bureaucracy. We can only hope this one works out the same way.

87,000 IRS employees are still staying home without pay. That makes it all worth it.

Mostly bullshit. With the amount of information you can get easily these days it's your own fault if you get caught by some unexpected charge. One of the first things I look for when booking a hotel is the free parking/free internet/"resort fee" situation and it is usually easy enough with reviews on travelocity, expedia and other travel sites, plus yelp, google etc. With an extremely complex transaction like real estate, I think there is a place for regulation to standardize the format of the information presented to the parties but "failure of capitalism" because of some extra charges when booking a hotel, give me a break. What about a failure of government in that in the USA a cell phone bill is on average 17% larger than advertised because of taxes and that after all these years of filling income taxes I still can not understand a damn thing about the illogical, confusing mess that is the US tax code and need help of a very expensive professional each time.