The point I was trying to make is that this sort of misappropriation of funding is the root cause.

My point is that you might have been able to say that in 1993 (we don't know for sure), but now we have two variables to contend with. In real terms, funding has been cut approximately in half. So even if the system was 30% waste in 1993 and they spent the past 21 years diligently eliminating 100% of that waste, funding has been cut enough for the operation to be considered underfunded. It would have to be more than 50% waste right now assuming it was "correctly" funded in 1993 and a lot more than 50% waste now assuming it was overfunded in 1993 (which seems to be your contention). Sure, we can cut bike paths out, but I'm very skeptical of the notion that bike paths and ferries are major percentage of the federal outlay given that we have almost 48,000 miles of interstate highways or that half of the budget is wasted.

It looks like about half of the budget goes to the "state of good repair" right off the bat, so even assuming that everything else they do is waste, it's a pretty close call to say that the current budget is right, and that's only if the 1993 budget was waste-free.

Let's assume it was "correctly" funded and managed in 1993. Even assuming no new waste in the system, the revenue is down substantially in the face of inflation. Adding to that is the fact that you can drive a lot more miles per gallon of gas now than you could 21 years ago, so revenue per mile driven should be way down. I'm sure there's plenty of waste in the system, but the past 21 years have been a pretty substantial revenue cut by any reasonable measure.

Wear and tear on the roads per unit gas consumed has also changed. A modern car of simialr weight to a 1993 car should be expected to consume substantially less gas than the 93 car, so keeping the tax constant with respect to gallons of gas consumed and the CPI will still underfund maintenance assuming it was set correctly in 1993.

A tax credit for a specific person, company or sector is pretty much a subsidy by definition. It's favored treatment of one entity with the loss in revenue being made up by everybody else. I'd be all for simplyfing the corporate income tax or eliminating it completely, but as long as it's there, any loopholes or giveaways in it are subsidies.

If anything, it looks like commodities investors alone drive the price independent of supply/demand.

How does this work? Given that at the end of every futures contract is a barrel of oil, there must be somebody on one end buying the oil to use (or store) and somebody on the other end pumping the oil out of the ground to sell it. There's clearly a price differential between those two endpoints, but how does the path that price travels on its way between those endpoints make a serious long run difference?

Doesn't matter which country we buy it from specifically. Oil is a global market and disruptions in part of the supply jack up prices everywhere. I'm open to the idea that our poking a stick in the Middle East may not be generating much net stability, but on the assumption that it does, the primary reason we care about what goes on there enough to spend mony on it is that they're a big chunk of the world's oil supply.

Good to see that we're still beating the shit out of the people at the end of the engineer production pipeline for picking engineers from the output stream instead of looking at the earlier stages of the pipeline to figure out why it looks that way. Seriously, Google and Yahoo are not going to be able to force more 13 year old girls to dream of becoming engineers, and even if they do, it'll be 10+ years before we see the results. You can't hire 50% women out of a pool of 20% women without making serious compromises, and you can't turn most recent graduates in other fields into good engineers without massive retraining.

To get an engineering job at a super selective place like Google, you almost certainly need a CS or engineering degree. To be noticed in their truckload of excellent resumes, it helps to have a top school on your resume, or go to a top school that lets you network with other people who might work at highly selective companies. In order to do that, you need to decide well before your 18th birthday that you're serious about this stuff. You need to take the hard math and science classes in high school and you need to do well in them. You need to prep for tests and plan for your future. Google doesn't make that happen when you're 23 years old. You make it happen starting when you're 13-14 years old, 16 at the latest. If you miss that boat, some serious magic is going to have to happen to even get Google to notice your resume. Maybe you're one of a handful of whiz kids who can make a name in a big open source project, but barring that, you're probably out of luck.

If we want women in engineering, try to get girls interested in it in middle school. Slapping Google around for working with what they have isn't going to do the trick.

"Hey, Facebook, can you give us some information about your company that couldn't possibly help you so we can almost certainly use it against you?"

"Uh, no thanks."

Those people can get plenty of technical jobs without a degree, but they'd probably never have a crack at a Google interview unless there was something particularly special about them. Google has so many resumes poured into its office every day that they could probably require a graduate degree for every position and still have way too many candidates. They have to filter on something, and that something has to be apparent from the resume. Technical education is a really good filter for technical jobs.

The numbers look like they're from the overall workforce, not necessarily the engineering sections. Do Google and Yahoo! have roughly the same sturucture, or is one of them much more engineering heavy?

That does sound really fishy. I guess if you're going to do that, you need to set the ransom low enough that the company will pay it for a "maybe he'll hold up his end of the bargain" level of assurance rather than a "problem is solved forever" level of assurance. If I said, "Give me a dollar or I'll expose your keys," it's probably worth a dollar to reduce the 100% probability of key exposure to anything marginally less than 100%. If I said, "Give me a hundred million dollars for an unkown but nonzero reduction in the probability that I'll expose your keys," that sounds like less of a good deal.

The best part of this is that the blackmailer could also sell your keys to somebody who might use them without you ever knowing. Not only did they not know beforehand whether the keys were going to be kept secret, there's no way to be 100% sure even now that the keys were left unused.

South San Francisco Bay area, PG&E. We're a mess when it comes to energy for a whole variety of reasons. My last bill was average $0.20 per kwh. Tiers here range from $0.13 to start to $0.36. You move up the tiers rapidly.

What's your threshold for "negligible" and how many negligible things add up to be non-negligible? Most households have more than one stupid electronics box that burns negligible but nonzero power 24 hours a day and would benefit from smarter sleep states.

Think of it this way: 35 watts in a household of 2 people is 3.5%. Let's say we go to 3 people per household and it drops to 2.3%. If that's a "normal" household, we could rephrase, "2.3% of your electricity bill," as, "2.3 % of all residential household energy consumption," which is a hell of a lot in absolute terms. I'd be willing to be that most utilities would notice a 1% drop in baseline consumption if it happened over a statistically significant interval.

Another thing to remember is that most households pay a progressive rate. The "20 cents per kwh" average is cute, but at my consumption level, I'm looking at 33 cents for the last marginal killowatt hours, and those are the kwh that get cut when you reduce your consumption. So it's about $100 per year. "Negligible" when compared to total household expenditures, but if you found it in your pocket at the end of the year, you'd notice. And if these devices were engineered properly, it's money that you'd get for free without having to do anything "green" like turning off the AC when it's hot or putting a brick in your toilet tank.

What are you paying for cable? If you're only watching it 45 minutes a day and it costs you, say $30 a month, we're talking about more than a dollar per hour. It seems like going with an on-demand streaming service would make a lot more sense.

The AC is a serious issue in your area. Not many good options to get around that. But you're off on the refrigerator. A modern one should average well below 100 watts over time. The vampire/suspend/idle draw of all of the electronic crap in my house exceeds the average draw of my refrigerator by a pretty notcieable margin.

I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where the air is reasonably dry and the temperature drops off pretty quickly at sunset, so even if it's 100+ degrees during the day, I can kick on the house fan at night and crash my house temperature with very little energy. If you have to run your AC 20 hours a day, your nights are probably still too hot to make that a viable option. That's rough.