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To reiterate the point, a number of months ago I heard NPR say, "Private jobs have decreased in this month's jobs report, but don't worry the public sector increased jobs to cover most of the gap!"

I heard, "we've lost jobs and we're creating more jobs that we can't afford to pay for given the smaller jobs base." The NPR announcers were actually celebrating this as a good thing! There have been a number of times I have been realized NPR and I seem to be on opposite ends of the aisle...

On this pension issue... Defined Benefit pension plans are ripe for financial manipulation. They're a gun to your head. See my comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2414046&cid=37320404

These other companies you mention are public. While their pension liabilities may not hit their "Net Income" all the time, or to the same effect, you can find their costs in the notes to financial statements. Also check out the "Comprehensive Income Statement". I once had a job where my job was to scan those notes to financial statements and report back which companies were manipulating their pensions the most. Have an unfunded gap? Just increase your estimated annual increase in the stock market and "poof" you suddenly have enough money and don't need to transfer more to your plan to keep it afloat.

As a CPA, I have long felt that Defined Benefit plans (You will get 70% of your pay from retirement until death, etc) should be illegal. The company is mortgaging its future and all of those pensions that people expect to have could be taken away through bad investment luck, fraud, etc. An example is the US auto industry, which has been crippled by their pension obligations. This wouldn't be a problem if employees were on a 401k plan or similar Defined Contribution plan.

To further the problem, imagine an executive faced with a labor strike. Answer: Promise them pension benefits. What does it matter? You won't be running the show in 15 years when the promise comes due, your company goes bankrupt and everyone loses their pension.

You see in this problem in the federal government as well. Social Security collection dollars have been larger than pay-outs since the beginning, but that will change. Where has the money gone? It is has been transferred to the Fed Gov general fund where it has been used to fund wars, roads, and promises elected officials make to stay in office. "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

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I really like this plan!

No really! Buy original CDs that are so scratched up that they are essentially valueless. Now you have the music license legally at pennies per CD.

Hmm... Could this work for both the music that you actually legally purchased, backed up, and lost the medium AS WELL AS a method for "laundering" the music you have acquired less legally? IANAL, but it sounds tempting... Would probably need to hide the $ transaction trail...

+1 funny.

The geekdom of slashdot never fails to provide.

Please support your contention that road damage is solely dependent on number of tires that touch the ground. Here is source directly contradicting you. (Thank you, user mdsolar, for finding this.) This would confirm the GP's post that an escalate @ curb weight of 5900lbs (source) getting 10mpg would do more damage than a prius @ 3000 pounds (source) getting 50mpg.

Core to this project would seem to be relatively precise lat/long data. However, if you take a spin through their 2011 map, you can find a submission located in the middle of the north Atlantic. Having been there myself, I can tell you that as long as the moon isn't out, you should expect all magnitude 8 submissions...

But no, this is a magnitude 3 submission... the same as if you were a few miles from a city. Can't be valid... then when I take a look at the "more information" of this submission, it says that it is associated with South Carolina (USA). Someone entered their longitude wrong!

I also found a magnitude 4 submission in northern Canada that's somehow associated with Texas!

Given that there are no other similarly located observations (middle of the north Atlantic), you couldn't even get an accurate reading based on an "average" of local observations... Maybe you can throw out lat/long pairs that are nowhere near their stated "location"?

I would be very annoyed at my data set.

I read your cited article but not the reports it references, so perhaps there are details in there... however:

I have no problem with cutting government spending through reduction in government employees or positions funded through taxpayer money. Here's the reason:

This past spring I heard an NPR news report where the person said, "private sector jobs are still flat, but the good news is that government jobs are growing." This drives me nuts! Stupid liberal-minded NPR, how do you think government sector jobs are funded? Through private sector jobs! This report should have been presented as: "We're still not growing, but we're increasing government spending anyway."

We were borrowing billions to prop up those government jobs. Now we can shift our scarce resources to better uses.

I couldn't agree more. Note that he hasn't commented at all on this thread. Probably because he'd get attacked. Go to his account page to click on the ball next to his name and you can change your "relationship" status to foe.

Not sure if I'm just feeding the trolls here, but here's some rebuttal:

Ignoring ad hominum attacks and thermal energy tangent, it appears your arguments are (1) work on everything blind to its contribution to the whole and (2) work on vehicle engines because they have a shorter product lifespan when compared to coal plants.

(1) Focus on every single piece and you end up with no focus at all. The question is, where would you have the greatest IMPACT. The solar panel company I work for is now building solar cells that are just a penny or two above the $0.10 per kilo-watt-hour of grid parity. Give us a few years and I think we'll be cheaper than coal. Kill coal and start building solar and wind farms! Coal and petroleum are currently equivalent in their CO2 emissions Source and we can get that power through alternative methods for less than the cost of replacing all of our cars with only slightly better mileage, which would have the greater impact?

(2) Using $250m cars on the road with an estimated average $30k/vehicle retail cost ( Source ), here are approximately $7.5 trillion (that's with a T) worth of cars on the road today. There are approximately 600 ( Source ) coal plants in the US. To improve the mileage of cars, you essentially have to replace them entirely. Cost: $7.5 trillion. Spending that money on coal plants instead would provide $12.5 BILLION on EACH of the 600 coal plants. Considering that a coal plant costs less than $1b ( Source ) to build, I am sure we can find significantly better uses for that extra $11.5b per plant.

Some additional arguments
(1) Where do you suppose the power charging your Chevy Volt is coming from? Chase people from gas and you end up with a coal-powered car.

(2) The largest 15 ocean-going ocean tankers emit as much of some types of air pollution as every single car on earth. (!!!!) Source. I can't seem to find how much CO2 they emit... How many tankers do you think we have circling the globe?

In conclusion, I stand by my position: For CO2 emissions reduction purposes only, our dollars would be better spent on improved power generation... and to beat the CO2 drum is rhetoric designed to whip up the uninformed... or to advance someone's agenda...

Registered vehicles in the US: 250m ( Source 1, Source 2, Source 3 ) Note that this includes all passenger vehicles such as SUVs, not just "cars".

This is an important highlight because it confirms once again that power generation is a larger portion of the CO2 emission "pie" than that emitted by vehicles. So when folks talk about our need to implement CAFE or gas taxes etc in order to reduce CO2 emissions, I will continue to call it mis-direction and/or flat-out mindless drivel. Focus on the coal plants before you come after automobiles on this issue.

I'll still listen you folks about OTHER reasons such as sending flaws inherent in sending cash to despotic regions for oil... or other pollutants... but CO2-crazies: STFU.