I'm pretty sure America's completely out of control health insurance costs are a bigger problem than the unions. Most of the perks people miss were probably aced to pay the health insurance premiums.

Unions are a no win situation to argue either way. Not having them lets employers massively exploit workers. Having them allows lazy and incompetent people to massively exploit their employers and customers.

The U.S. has pretty much reached a magic zone where most of its corporations completely suck. so does most of its unions and work force, and so does nearly every politician. Chances are this is a mix that wont end well.

Because he zoomed out.

Wow. You need to work on your reading comprehension.

50ml is actually a pretty common limit for unlicensed combustion-powered bikes. Electrics appear to be around 300-500W, but higher and lower limits exist.

"Xenon headlights are a hazard, especially to older drivers."

⦠because drivers can see seniors on sidewalks sooner and have a better chance of hitting them for points?

The odd thing is uranium based fission for power generation never did become particularly stable and certainly isn't cheap.

The only reason we did it was because we wanted to make bombs and dual use of Uranium and Plutonium mitigated some of the costs and provided some civilian cover for what was basically a weapons program to produce Plutonium and enriched Uranium. Probably exactly the same thing Iran is doing today.

Japan, Germany and Canada are among the few countries that pursued fission purely as a power source using them to make bombs. Last time I checked Japan and Germany are both abandoning the concept because they've realized its not safe(stable) nor it is it very economical.

If we were actually pursuing fission as a power source Thorium would have been a vastly better approach, but it has no value for making Plutonium or justifying Uranium enrichment infrastructure, so it got no R&D or funding until very recently.

You apparently missed the parady in my post dude. It was partially to draw out the self righteous people like yourself who are willing to declare with absolute certainty that they KNOW what is going to happen.

You have absolutely no more knowledge of what's going to happen to the world's climate in the next hundred years than I do or do the global warming deniers.

When you chicken littles start claiming that mantle of certainty, and prognosticating the planets imminent demise you just make yourselves look comical. Its why so many people are getting weary of the global warming chicken littles, they are so consistently self righteous and smug.

Yes there might be a run away green house and calamity at every turn but I kind of doubt it. The world could turn in to a tropical paradise with abundance for all, I kind of doubt that too.

Chances are it will probably be somewhere in the middle.

Thanks to fracking the U.S. is dramatically reducing its green house gas emissions, and is apparently running ahead of the Kyoto accords it rejected. its also doing it without punitive taxes or other economic damage. It now appears the U.S. may never build another coal fired power plant, and will probably start shuttering some. Coal fired power plants can't compete economically with gas any more, and gas produces less CO2 than coal, though there is a risk the U.S. will just export all its coal to China to burn.

At the current rate solar will pass coal in economics in the next 10 years and gas in 20 years. It is very possible that we will solve much of our dependence on fossil fuels in the next few decades and without crippling economic engineering by the chicken littles.

As global temperatures rise, ocean temperatures rise and they are almost certainly going to push more water in to the atmosphere in the form of clouds and rain on land. Earth does have natural mechanisms to adapt to climate changes. More rain could mean floods, could mean places that aren't getting enough precipitation like the Sahara will get more and be more habitable. The Sahara hasn't always been a desert. The people who live there might LIKE climate change.

Some researchers are contending that half the sea level rise we've seen to date is due to cities and farms pumping water out of ancient aquifers on an industrial scale. If you had more rain civilization wouldn't be so dependent on depleting aquifers. When aquifers are gone it will take a really long time before they come back.

Yes there is a danger of a runaway greenhouse effect but its also true that the Earth doesn't have "one true" climate and we shouldn't pretend that we are going to lock it in to one. Its always changed over time, sometimes dramatically and unless man is going to start teraforming we aren't going to lock it down now.

Me personally I'm OK with global warming, of course I'm heavily invested in harbor and beach front property on the northern coast of Canada, or at least it will be beach front when sea level rises 9-10 meters.

I always like to "look on the bright side of life".

The whole problem with the Space Shuttle is it proved to be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than every other launch option. In part because of the huge amount of dead weight being lifted to orbit, and mostly because of the huge work force and logisticial train required to refurbish and refit it between each launch.

Unless you have unlimited amounts of money at your disposal, successful access to space is almost entirely about how many dollars it costs to lift a kilogram/pound in to low earth orbit. The more it costs the less you launch which translates in to less you do there. The less it costs the more you launch and the more you accomplish.

The Shuttle failed miserably by this metric which is why its a museum peice now. Everyone shedding tears over this fact need to get over it and realize its entirely for the best. The only way this country could afford the Shuttle would be to gut defense spending or Medicare/Medicaid and transfer all the money to NASA. Gutting defense spending, especially the trillion+ we are blowing on the F-35, would be smart but this country isn't smart and it would never fly in Congress, since Lockheed owns too many congressmen.

If you think you are going to get in to space on the shuttle then you must be a billionaire because it is prohibitively expensive to fly anyone in to space that way without huge taxpayer subsidies.

If you actually want to get in to space, common sense dictates you should be advocating SpaceX Falcon and not space shuttle. Then you only need $10-20 million instead of the several $100 million a shuttle ride would cost you without taxpayer subsidies.