There is no job in existence today that we won't have the technology to either eliminate or turn into skill-less labour within the next 20 years. That doesn't mean technology will overcome all jobs, but which ones will stick around will be almost impossible to predict.

Its so cute when Americans from the lower 48 talk about how cold some place gets; sort of like when Canadians talk about heat waves.

Wrong, less than half of our power comes from coal and it falls every year. As of November 2013. 5,690 MW out of 14,003 MW generated in Alberta came from coal.

People love to rag on power deregulation, but it resulted in a lot of new power plants being built, and they have all been greener than what came before.

Its certainly not impossible that AGW will someday be proven wrong, but if it is that proof won't come from the sort of person who is loudly denying it today, it will come from climatologist.

If you aren't a climatologist you aren't qualified to deny AGW any more than the pot heads who for decades claimed that marijuana could cure anything were qualified to make those claims.

That people who are ignorant of science and scientists sometimes end up on the same side of an issue does not lend any credibility to being ignorant.

When I worked in IT I used to laugh at anyone who had spent more time or money schooling than I did but still ended up in the same lousy positions. That was until, after some years in the industry, I came to realize that their education gave them a much better chance at advancement. A lot of the people I used to laugh at are doing well in IT 10 or more years later, while I left for greener pastures back in 2009.

Walmart does what's best for Walmart. When that means screwing employees or customers, they don't hesitate. But there are times when they find themselves on the side of morality simply because that's what's in their best interest, and they can be a good ally to have because they have a lot of might.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-against-copernicus/ has an interesting article on how the scientific evidence available at the time actually disproved Copernicus. It wasn't until much later that the heliocentric solar system was proven true.

I wonder if we start trying to police science too closely if the great theories of tomorrow that we don't yet have enough evidence to support might get tossed.

If you really wanted to kill coal power generation using government intervention, then the more logical thing to do would be to put in place a tax that will only impact coal power stations, and use the money brought in from that tax to subsidize green power stations built to replace the coal ones. If the tax starts low but increases every year, then the transition could be gradual, but coal might still be eliminated on a reasonable time scale.

I am not a workaholic, and would consider myself an average Joe, but since my wife came down with medical problems that have kept her from working I have pretty much been forced into working 60 hour weeks.

Pretty much the problem with your assumption is that you are putting artificial limits in place like 10 hour days and only 6 days of work per week.

I work two jobs; one is a pretty typical Monday to Friday 8 to 5 job and the other is part time in the evenings (usually 4 shifts of 5 hours each per week). On the days the two overlap I will typically be gone from home from 7:30am to 11:00pm, working between 12 and 13 of those hours. I might get one or two days a month where I am off from both jobs.

So do people lie about their hours? Yeah, I'm sure some do. But don't assume that just because you can't imagine working that much that no one could.

Ken Jennings would always ignore the first two questions of every category in double jeopardy until the daily doubles were gone. When things were going well for him his would mean he would do the bottom three questions in one category and then another and so on. However, if he found he wasn't liking a category he wasn't afraid to switch to another, so there were occasions that what Ken was doing looked not dissimilar to what this guy is doing.

Ironically, your example was off by an order of magnitude. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years or 4e15m away.

Smart money knows that no company in the world should be valued at $86 billion when its profits are just $1.8 billion.

If you still had 98.46% of your money at the end of 10 years you would be significantly ahead of where you'd be if you'd been putting the money in a lottery.

Considering the age of most fossil finds in Alberta, that isn't as crazy as you think.

Sure its possible to get your money's worth out of a warranty; its also possible to get your money's worth out of lottery tickets. But both lottery tickets and extended warranties are only sold because the seller makes money on them, and this is only possible because collectively consumers lose money on them. Car and house insurance make sense because most people can't afford to replace those if they are lost. Most people can afford to replace a computer, meaning that the extended warranty isn't so much insurance as it is paying in advance for a service you might never use.