There are good arguments for environmental policy that do not depend on the risk of global climate change, and the environmental movement is doing itself no good by linking policy and science together they way they have, so that people think "if there is no risk of global climate change then driving my SUV must be ok."

This tends to reflect my feelings on the matter too.

I want more fuel efficient vehicles. There are several reasons for this, and, frankly, global climate change doesn't make the top 10. Reducing my out-of-pocket driving expenses (gas) does. Reducing my country's (USA) exporting of wealth to nations that fund religious extremists does.

I want cleaner production methods, and better enforcement of environmental regulations. I like breathing air that doesn't make my lungs and eyes burn. I like camping and hiking, and not finding industrial sludge on the banks of rivers. I like scuba diving, and not seeing coral reefs covered in red algae from sewage waste disposal pipes (West Palm Beach, I'm looking at you.).

Simple, solid, personal-self-interest reasons to support better efficiency and good environmental stewardship. I don't need doom prophecies to support that. Clear rational open science.

Speaking as an American...

Never forget this country was founded by rich white land owners that didn't want to pay taxes. without representation in Parliment because they refused such representation when offered, knowing they would then be taxed with representation

History is rarely as simple or concise as one-line rallying cries would have you believe.

Really, if some ominous "they" want to track you then "they" already know your banking info and attendant RFID signatures, vehicle profile and numbers, list of known or possible associates, etc..

This is true, but there are other issues to consider with this.

For example, one of the things that is legal in the United States is for the police to follow you around throughout your day, seeing where you go, who you talk to, when you scratch your butt walking down the street. There's plkenty of case law supporting the idea that as long as you are in public areas, the police can follow you as much as they want, given their resource limitations.

That last limitation is VERY important, especially in a mostly free society like the United States or other free democracies/republics/whatever.

The police should have the power (with reasonable oversight) to do what they need to do to enforce good laws. I'll define "good laws" in the US context as "constitutional". One of the ways they do this is following "people of interest" around.

This is a VERY different thing from the police putting a GPS transponder on every car in America, and looking through their logs for nearby vehicles when a convenience store gets robbed. It is also different form the police logging your location information from cell tower triangulation (or cellphone GPS) and, again, looking through their logs to find all the people near a crime scene when it occurred.

The first starts with suspicion. They must already have a reason to be interested in you, because assigning a police officer, or more likely several of them, is a very resource-intensive operation. They don't do it a lot because there are only so many cops. This is, societally, on purpose. We limit police power by making it hard and expensive for the police to poke their nose into your business.

GPS logging into a database, and then a simple database query for "every person near YYY at time ZZZ" is cheap. It is too easy for the police to poke their nose into the business of the generally law-abiding public.

It isn't that the technology is easy or hard. It isn't really that is it cheap or expensive in dollars to acquire the capability initially. It is that it is cheap to operate all the time, and makes it too easy and cheap for the police to poke their noses into private citizens' business with little reason, justification, or oversight. That's a good way to get bad police.

Don't design systems that make it easy to get bad police. It is too dangerous to our society.

Okay, you are

real manly

But perhaps not terribly consistent.

Why would you

video tape the event

if there is

nothing to see here

.

Aside from a cool volcanic eruption, what am I missing?

But we need to be very careful not to miss, Russia is right next door [to Iran].

Google maps is a wonderful resource. Look at it. There's about 400 miles between Tehran and the nearest Russian city, on the Caspian Sea. It's not that near.

One of the reasons we were scared about nuclear weapons based in Cuba is that if we nuked them to stop a launch we would also be nuking ourselves.

Not so much. We were concerned that the flight time for a ballistic missile from Cuba, aimed at Miami, was about 6 minutes. You cannot respond with anything other than a completely automated system in that time frame. Which is unacceptable when you are talking about a nuclear response. As to the "be nuking ourselves" we do have low-yield nuclear weapons also.

In fact, any attempt to launch nuclear weapons at Iran would probably set off the Russian early warning systems and they would just retaliate before our missiles hit their targets.

Probably not. If the United States were to launch nuclear weapons at Iran, it would probably be from SSBN(s). The flight time for a SLBM (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile) is less than 8 minutes. Most early warning systems can detect that fast... but they have a human in the loop, and alerting that human (Obama, Putin, whoever), getting a decision, and sending that decision back to the military can easily take more than 8 minutes.

The really worrying thing is that this would also probably true if Israel launched a nuclear strike on Iran.

Israel would probably use a nuclear weapon dropped by an F-15. From a distance, it's rather hard to tell the difference between an F-15 carrying a conventional payload and one carrying a nuclear payload, before it hits the target.

Assuming, of course, that you believe they have nuclear weapons, which they refuse to acknowledge. *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*

The odds of an accident are approximately 1 per 10,000 for every car trip. [snip] The chance that you have been in an accident is, if my math is correct, about 62% by the time you're 35.

The thing with that logic is that the distribution of accidents is not flat. I looked around a bit, and couldn't find any stats to support what I'm about to say, which is from memory of some stuff I read a few years ago. Feel free to find a few references I couldn't and tell me I don't know how to use Google. :)

The distribution of accidents among the driving population is not even. Most drivers (more than 50%) will drive their entire career and never be in an accident. Most accidents involve at least one driver who has been in one or more accidents already. This is one of those 80/20 rule things. 80% of accidents occur with 20% of drivers. Or something like that, I made up the 80/20, I expect the distribution is something else.

This is why it is so easy to mislead with statistics. Sometimes when distilling numbers down, you lose significant related facts.

Oh, and can anyone tell me why I kept typing "accidnets" instead of "accidents"? It's an annoying typo, and I was very consistent with it.