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To support AC's point:
http://www.dollarsandsense.org...
https://www.energyandcapital.c...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

From the first one, discussing the US defense-related costs as just one aspect: "Put all these numbers in perspective: The price of a barrel of oil consumed in the United States would have to increase by $23.40 to offset military resources expended to secure oil. That translates to an additional 56 cents for a gallon of gas, or three times the federal gas tax that funds road construction. If $166 billion were spent on other priorities, the Boston public transportation system, the âoeT,â could have its operating expenses covered, with commuters riding for free. And there would still be money left over for another 100 public transport systems across the United States. Or, we could build and install nearly 50,000 wind turbines. Take your pick."

But there are many other external costs to fossil fuels like health care costs (the legacy of leaded gas is still taking a tremendous toll on our society, but air pollution in general is a killer). For example:
https://thinkprogress.org/here...
"The average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. right now is $2.47. If that cost took into account the environmental and human health costs of burning the gasoline, however, it would more than double, according to a new study. The study, published this week in the journal Climatic Change, created models for the âoesocial cost of atmospheric release,â a method of determining the costs of emissions beyond their market value. According to the study, accounting for the social costs of burning gasoline would add an average of $3.80 per gallon to the pump price, raising the price to $6.27. Diesel has an even higher social cost of $4.80 per gallon. The study also measured the social costs of other fossil fuels not used at the pump. Coal, for example, would jump from 10 cents per kilowatt hour to 42 cents per kilowatt hour, the study found. And natural gas, which has emerged in recent years as a cheap source of fuel, would see its price rise from 7 cents per kWh to 17 cents per kWh."

And on the legacy of leaded gas (and how it has contributed to the USA's huge prison populations): http://www.motherjones.com/env...

A related essay I wrote in 2009 on "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user":
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."

But the real answer (if maybe not politically acceptable) is not to subsidize electric cars. It is to tax *all* the externalizes of fossil fuel use at the point of purchase, bringing the cost of gas to, perhaps, US$10 a gallon or more. The tax could be redistributed as a basic income to everyone.

Perhaps the deepest irony about all this (mentioned in the above essay) is mentioned here by B

Your objection is important.

Here's a fine example why it's so important:

The jobs situation now is certainly drastically different from 2008-2010, when unemployment was increasing dramatically—there’s no argument about that. At the bleakest point of the recession, in each of two consecutive months (January-February 2009), over half a million more people went from being employed to unemployed than from unemployed to employed. In March 2013, in contrast, over 250,000 more people went from being unemployed to employed than the reverse. But the end of the employment freefall is hardly the same thing as a robust recovery.
Employment-Population Ratio, 2005-2013

The trend in the employment-to-population ratio—a much less familiar indicator than the headline unemployment rate—tells a different tale.

Click the source link to read the rest. Statistics and graphs with political overtones.... there is a reason people are skeptical.

Unemployment Is Down, So What’s the Problem?

So yes, many topics are, to exceptionally well-informed citizens, over the heads of the scientists who use them in these tests as 'uncontested truth'. I dare say that.

On the other hand, I don't think most people tested have reached a sufficiently advanced level of reasoning and news analysis that they qualify as an exception to the general rule that people believe things because they want to believe them. And ....that they refuse to accept facts not because they're better informed than the researcher doing the experiment, but simply because they're stubborn and believe they're being lied to, and will reject 'facts' regardless of their knowledge of the topic at hand.

Which is why some politicians, unions, researchers and even some companies are promoting the 6 hours a day workday.
http://www.6hourday.org/ http://www.informationweek.com/news/6502155 http://www.petitiononline.com/6hourday/petition.html http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2001/0901mutari.html

Be well rested, happy and then work more effectively for shorter time produces better end result than less effective work over longer time. Apparently. Maybe more applicable for office / knowledge workers, not so much for tollbooth attendants, truck drivers, shop keepers. But you could say a happy rested waiter gets more tips than a tired snappy one...

Although the 6h day has also been discredited by other researchers. http://www.thelocal.se/2238/20051007/

Personally I think 6 hours is not the solution. It takes a while before I find my flow, my coding happy zone, http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2008/10/code-forrest-code.html and 6 hours would mean most of day is wasted on meetings, lunch, and other interruptions. 40 hours seems a good balance.

Having just had 21 fully paid weeks off last year due to 14 weeks paternity leave and the rest as holiday I shouldn't complain about Norwegian vacation laws. :)

If running a BC client constitutes being part of a pyramid scheme, then Social Security is also a pyramid scheme.

Social Security is a pyramid scheme. However Bitcoin is a bubble scheme. Both are bad - either for your wallet or for your freedom :-) Though bubbles don't have to be based upon a crime. The recent housing bubble in the USA was based largely in greed.

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0510dancs.html

The US military subsidizes the security of oil, some estimate to the tune of $100/bbl if the Iraq war is included (and while Iraq may not be a 'war for oil', we wouldn't have had anything to do with that whole godforsaken region of the world if it weren't for oil in the first place).

What's worse, we pay that money and the rest of the world is a free rider on the back of our military. I would like all "freedom of the seas" military spending stopped, and the US military return to a defensive posture plus R&D and maintenance of industrial readiness (enough work to keep a core of contractors going in case of another war). Let Europe and Asia pay the cost of world peace, especially if the US loses seignorage of world currency if/when the dollar loses its 'reserve status'.

There's an article up on Computerworld lamenting this trend, but there's an even better commentary on it, which puts it into historical perspective, here: A modern window into the historical dislike of bosses against expertise.
  In a nutshell, capitalists have always tried to reduce the skill required to perform a job, so that their employees will not be able to demand any kind of respect, better wages, or workplace equality. They prefer increasing control over employees, even if it harms their profitability in the long run. It's happened over and over again, and IT is just the latest case.

On a related note, one of the downsides of setting up shop in India is that they apparently don't take shit lying down. Man, I wonder if this guy was as much of a dick as the guy I worked for ten years ago. I often contemplated doing him grievous bodily injury. HR manager beaten to death by angry workers

It's funny though, five people committed the crime, but they've arrested nine people, and the police "are expected to arrest more."

  I guess the idea is that "they were all in on it!" I don't know, if these HR workers really did sit down and plan on killing their boss, they sure as hell didn't plan very hard!
  "Okay, guys, when he puts down his mug and says 'yeeeeeah, we're gonna need you to move your offices into the alley out back. You'll probably want a cot, too, since that's where you'll be living now.' we all beat him to death, right there in his office! It's the perfect crime!"

  That totally sounds realistic to me.

  Admittedly being short on details, it still reminds me of the McKinley assassination, when authorites tried to argue that Czolgosz was instructed to kill the president, (because Anarchist leaders are known for handing down marching orders to their subservient lackeys, heh!) despite it being obviously a lone, emotionally troubled man's act -- it was merely a convenient excuse to round up "troublemakers" and deport them.

The US car companies don't make big, inefficient cars because that's what Americans want. Rather, Americans want big, inefficient cars because that's what they are sold

Thank you! Sometimes it's like talking to a brick wall, those people who insist that the Big Three were just selling what people wanted. As though they don't spend over 7 billion dollars a year on marketing. That's about 40% of NASA's annual budget, all on pushing the vehicles they want you to buy the most -- and this decade, those ads have been overwhelmingly for big, heavy, inefficient vehicles. They've been pushing them because they have the highest profit margin; it doesn't cost them that much more to make a vehicle bigger, but Americans have been historically willing to pay more, proportional to the size of the vehicle.

Sigh. I'm not sure it is worth trying to point you toward some references where you might actually learn something since you clearly already consider yourself an expert, but I'll try. Here is a reasonably well written explanation of what is being discussed. The Wiki article is very incomplete, but you can try it too. Any standard freshman undergrad textbook (e.g. Samuelson) will cover this material as well.

"you do know that 79% of the tax burden is carried by the top 20% of income earners, right?"

You mean those folks that hold the vast majority of the assets? Sure just cherry pick a single statistic from a single source and proclaim 'look what I know, you dip shits didn't know this did you, huh, huh?'. Look the issue here is just how out of balance things can get EITHER way before it breaks the system. The balance right now grossly favors those at the top of the economic food chain. If it continues to the point of breakdown just what do you think the fate of the top x% will be? In the end it is in everyones interest to not break the frickin system.

"Maybe for once we should stop being partisan"

Yea, thats rich, considering the drivel to from the "conservative" party I have listened with great restraint, and admittedly often with amusement, for most my life. Can you make a clear argument just using common sense instead of falling back on a single cherry picked statistic form BillO's list of "facts" to throw at a liberal---remember you have to use this word in with a dirty slur pretext or voice. Don't take this to mean I am a just another sheep in the Democratic flock, which in contrast to the Republican flock, is actually more like a herd of cats anyway. I will say I like many others are sick of the "good cop - bad cop" routine the two parties have used so successfully for so many years. So exactly whose drivel is it you like best? Oh thats right you like to quote the "fiducially conservative ones", hehehe, yea.

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

read...

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2 007/20070206/default.htm

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f5e905ce-69d8-11db-952e-00 00779e2340.html

http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/povert y_and_inequality/index.html

http://www.chicagofed.org/economic_research_and_da ta/wp_abstract.cfm?pubsID=732

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03 interviewswolff.html

http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?st ory_id=7055911

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ecj/econjl/v112y2002i478p c68-c73.htm

http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704tilly .html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18995

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11418244330 8492484.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/71954e1a-ad43-11da-9643-00 00779e2340,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http% 3A%2F%2Fnews.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F71954e1a-ad43-11da -9643-0000779e2340.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fne weconomist.blogs.com%2Fnew_economist%2Fpoverty_and _inequality%2Findex.html

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/

You made the claim that the wealthy were politically apathetic. Now, we see that isn't true. Even if we restrict our attention to legitimate politics in the US, IMHO we still see that the wealthy are inordinately involved. At the simplest level, they're more likely to vote. This is all based on the simple fact that the wealthy simply have more at stake than the poor do.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is actually a good example of the drawbacks of a business based heavily on politics for profit. He exploited the Yeltsin auctions of public companies to build a huge conglomerate. But when political power shifted to someone else, he fell out of favor and had those assets seized. Unless Putin (or someone else) can become "president for life" (and currently the Russian Federation Constitution still prevents that from happening), then there will further transfers of power which will continue to dillute the power of the greedier political players.

It's not pretty and there's no real reason to expect it to lead to genuine democracy in the near future, But even heavily authortarian societies (as long as they have turnover among whoever decides policy) have some limits to the extent of corruption and cronyism that they will endure.

By putting their advertisers' interests above their readers', news sites risk alienating their core customers. Without us, there wouldn't be any advertisers to appease.

This is one more reason why anyone who cares about the content of the news they read should ensure that they read some non-corporate news sources.

As a reader, you should demand that your media keeps your interests in mind, not just the interests of people who want to sell you things.

First of all, I wasn't referring to deficits - only the revenue side of the equation. Analysis from here and here would indicate that the US is not taxed so highly that we're on the far side of the Laffer Curve, i.e. that reducing taxes would lead to increased revenues. It makes for a nice story, but it just simply isn't true.