|Congress controls the spending. Btw, "Bush's wars" propaganda is getting boring. Democrats overwhelmingly supported them (unanimously in case of Afghanistan) and it was Clinton admin that set the stage for Iraq war with regime change policy (Iraq Liberation Act 1998). You can argue whether it was right or wrong but you can't blame just one side for it - they all had the same intelligence. Same applies with the current administration. Would they really cut the spending if Republicans weren't fighting for it all along.

Looks great to me but that's subjective. However, 300 mile radius v 208-265 comparison is irrelevant. One can be refueled everywhere in 5 minutes for another 300 miles, the other takes 8 hours unless you find one of the supercharging stations which are still very rare. That is a HUGE difference for anybody who needs to drive that distance occasionally (say LA-Bay Area or LA-Vegas).

has no taste for putting their own lives on the line
 
Really? I though that a large majority of coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are the US military.

the other side doesn't have anything close
 
China doesn't have anything close? Maybe not yet, but surely it will pretty soon, not to mention that they have more military age males than the entire population of the USA. We might need some robots.

Everybody is working on military robots, not just the US.

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.