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Lay off the weed. Realistic theories:

1. We gauge time by memorable events.
As William James hypothesized, we may be measuring past intervals of time by the number of events that can be recalled in that period. Imagine a 40-something mom experiencing the repetitive, stressful daily grind work and family life. The abundant memories of her high school years (homecoming football games, prom, first car, first kiss, graduation) may, compared to now, seem like much longer than the mere four years that they were.

2. The amount of time passed relative to one's age varies.
For a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their entire life. For a 50-year-old, however, one year is only 2% of their life. This "ratio theory," proposed by Janet in 1877, suggests that we are constantly comparing time intervals with the total amount of time we've already lived.

3. Our biological clock slows as we age.
With aging may come the slowing of some sort of internal pacemaker. Relative to the unstoppable clocks and calendars, external time suddenly appears to pass more quickly.

4. As we age, we pay less attention to time.
When you're a kid on December 1, you're faithfully counting down the days until Santa brings your favorite Hot Wheels down the chimney. When you're an adult on December 1, you're a little more focused on work, bills, family life, scheduling, deadlines, travel plans, Christmas shopping, and all of that other boring adult stuff. The more attention one focuses on tasks such as these, the less one will notice the passage of time.

5. Stress, stress, and more stress.
As concluded by Wittmann and Lehnhoff (and replicated by Friedman and Janssen), the feeling that there is not enough time to get things done may be reinterpreted as the feeling that time is passing too quickly. Even older individuals (who are, more often than not, retired from work) may continue to feel similarly due to physical handicaps or diminished cognitive ability.

Energy is going to become more expensive no matter what mix of energy we use. Might as well install as much solar as possible. Arizona is the sunniest state in the Union and installing solar should be a no brainer. We still need a way to store that energy. I hope molten salt batteries, or train car kinetic energy storage or something else will solve that problem. Vote Yes 127

If this is the start of a sixth mass extinction, it might well not be the first mass extinction caused by a species. There isn't a definitive explanation why the Permian-Triassic extinction occurred, but one hypothesis implicates a microbe called Methanosarcina that lived in the oceans. Massive volcanic eruptions in present day Siberia released large quantities of nickel, which helped this microbe to thrive far beyond what it otherwise would have done. This microbe produced large amounts of methane, which caused ocean acidification and also caused global temperatures to warm dramatically.

I don't think this undermines the overall intent of the article, though. If there's precedent that a single species had a large role in the worst mass extinction in the history of the Earth, it demonstrates that this is possible and, therefore, that it could happen again.

If you examine crude oil pumped straight from the ground you'll find the fossilized single-cell plants that produced the oil - algae and related diatoms. The slow, natural processes involving pressure and heat that convert this natural vegetable oil from everything between natural gas to heavy crude just contaminates the feedstock with nasties from the ground (arsenic, cadmium, etc) and makes processing into usable products more expensive and environmentally polluting. So your idea has great merit.

Under the Carter administration, as a result of the politicalization of middle-east oil and the subsequent embargo and US oil crisis, a program was initiated to do just what you propose - the massive, large-scale biological production of oil using algae. This program was called the Aquatic Species Program..

The program started by identifying and isolating strains of algae that were the most efficient oil producers, then setting up a pilot-scale plant. The challenges were that these strains of algae were easily taken over by more dominant, less efficient strains, so open-air ponds were problematic. More elaborate infrastructure to isolate the algae while exposure to sunlight have been proposed and tested on a small scale by others.

The most problematic aspect of this program was that it was political in nature. As soon as the Saudis/OPEC called off the oil embargo all political will to spend money on such a scheme evaporated, along with the Carter administration's energy independence initiatives. Reagan began dismantling and de-funding Carter's programs almost immediately upon entering office.

Solar PV in the 70's was an expensive side-show with future potential, at best. What was immediately available at that time and somewhat economical was solar thermal. In a bizarre and sad twist of fate, the solar thermal panels that once sat atop the United States White House now reside in a museum in China.

Sequestering CO2 probably won't get much serious attention from the US government until the 'politics' of global warming get personal - i.e. when sea levels rise by a few meters, which would put much of Washington DC under water. The Lincoln Memorial is currently 4 meters above sea level. The White House is approximately 15 meters above sea level. The ground level of Trump Tower in NY is at 18 meters above sea level. Currently.

Source: https://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/vie...

fracking ... contaminates aquifers....

Liar.

Stop me when I'm wrong, but be damned sure I'm wrong, first.

Quote the parent comment: Microsoft's "... insane unpredictable chaos..."

The Microsoft chaos existed 10 years ago, but yes, the chaos is worse now. See this Scientific American article: Microsoft Vista voted tech world's top "Fiasco" (Feb. 26, 2009)
It's amazing that a company can be so badly managed that there is an article about it in Scientific American magazine.

A year before that article: Vista's 11 Pillars of Failure. (April 21, 2008)
Some of John C. Dvorak's complaints:
6) Bogus Vista-capable stickers.
7) Missing drivers.
8) Conflicting advice.
11) Performance. You're not supposed to deliver a new operating system that's been in development for more than four years yet performs worse than the previous OS.

A Slashdot comment I wrote 10 1/2 years ago: Microsoft: "The whole world is our beta tester." That comment was way too positive, I realize now. Part of that comment seems correct to me:
"Another problem at Microsoft is apparently that the good people have left, and the people who remain are not knowledgeable enough to do the work."

It's time to stop joking about the many, many problems at Microsoft. (Regarding the parent comment: Cocaine will not fix the problems.)

Microsoft needs a new CEO and a re-organization of management.

See my comment posted yesterday: Microsoft is poorly managed? Plenty of evidence.

That's correct, and water is also a greenhouse gas. Current estimates are that it accounts for about half of the temperature rise that we are seeing.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...

Also, regarding how such a small amount of CO2 can make a big difference, here's a great article about it.

https://www.scientificamerican...

The biggest advantage of electric cars is not the 3x efficiency, it's not the incredible acceleration, and it's only partly the lack of post-purchase carbon emissions. It's that everything is much more fungible. I do not delude myself that my electric car is not polluting, I get my power from the texas power grid, which is 34% natural gas and 30% coal . The 3x efficiency combined with getting 28% from less polluting sources is a big step forward, but ultimately just part of the solution.

The main advantage is that it is easier to pressure ERCOT to change their ways than it is to cause millions of texans to change their ways (and buy new vehicles, which itself is pretty nasty for the environment). If the major source of carbon emissions for electric cars is the manufacturers, we can get after them. These entities are capable of working with their governments to come up with a timeline, and a way of managing the expenses to make change happen. Joe Sixpack in his 1967 pickup is unreachable, possibly couldn't afford to fix it if he wanted to, and might not comply if he didn't.

As long as people are driving around with combustion engines, we can pass laws and scream and yell and nothing will change.

Well, this is the reason so many people focus on extremely unlikely consequences, like human extinction or the complete collapse of civilization. You just can't get most people to focus on the likely consequences, even some pretty serious ones, because twenty or thirty years in the future they seem trivial. Some people can't get their asses in gear unless they're facing catastrophe.

If complete catastrophe were likely, then even the people bankrolling the denialist movement would be concerned. But it's not. There will still be beer, coffee, beef and holiday resorts in a world that's 2C warmer, and if those things cost a lot more, they're counting on making enough money now by externalizing their costs that it wont' matter to them.

It's basically a scheme to transfer wealth, one that exploits most peoples' present bias.

"It should be highly emphasized many of these tests are of questionable utility in the real world. How to interpret the results is often not at all intuitive."

This is an understatement. According to today's Scientific American, "There are two potential issues arising from the question of their results' accuracy. The first is somewhat trivial: Has the sequencing been done well?" This is not a simple matter. Different labs will give different results. One lab failed to recognize that the DNA submitted was from a dog. False positives for disease are common in consumer lab results.

"Assuming the tests are done accurately, some discrepancies can still arise from differences in the companies' DNA databases. " These databases are limited and differ from each other.

The part of the article relevant to 'genetic counselors' is this: "If we assume the data generated is accurate, then the second question that arises is on the interpretation. And this is where it gets murky..." The counselor or analyst must deal almost entirely with probabilities. There is rarely a single gene that codes for an interesting trait; there may be many and not all of them have been located yet. An example given is that you may have two genes that are associated with blue eyes, and yet not have blue eyes.

The author concludes: "Genetics is a probabilistic science, and there are no genes "for" in particular. I have severe reservations about the utility of genetic tests that indicate one individual's propensity for certain conditions outside of a clinical setting; if you don't have a PhD in genetics, these results can be misleading or even troubling."
https://www.scientificamerican...

That is a very good question. A look here shows we are still not as warm as it was 6000- 8000 years ago during a what they call an OPTIMUM. Inother words, we are sub-optimum right now, and we need more heat.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And if you go back further to the Pliocene, "The global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene (3.3 Ma–3 Ma) was 2–3 C higher than today, global sea level 25m higher, and the northern hemisphere ice sheet was ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurred in the late Pliocene around 3 Ma."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

and
https://www.scientificamerican...

So you might want to tell the kids to buy a house at least 25 meters above current sea level, (and if you live on the west coast this is already a good idea due to the Cascadia subduction system) but other than that, life if not going to end if we get back to the Pliocene conditions.

Same argument is made for the bigfoot studies by the U of Idaho anthropologist Jeff Meldrum. In a country as wealthy as the USA, it costs society almost nothing to pay for one anthropologist to devote a career to studying bigfoot. If nothing is ever found, meh, we wasted a few bucks. But if convincing evidence is found, it would be quite exiting science.

Fringe Science

People do not get that fundamental physics is over

Yeah yeah, people were making this bullshit argument centuries ago.

(you would not call seriously "string theory" "scientific" would you?).

As long as it make predictions that can be empirically tested then of course I would.

I know I am repeating what Lord Kelvin said to his embarrassment just before great discoveries in relativistic physics, quantum physics, etc.

And he was just as wrong as you are.

The clear indication that we are close to the limit is absence of ANY fundamental discoveries since a long time ago.

What are you babbling about? You are in a scientific golden age for discoveries. Furthermore we have well known holes in our knowledge of fundamental physics. We have no way to reconcile gravity to quantum mechanics. We can't explain large amounts of seemingly missing matter in the universe. Just because we're not rolling out a new theory of special relativity every other week doesn't mean we've explained everything. It was literally centuries between Newton and Einstein but the only reason Einstein's work was such a breakthrough was because of a LOT of important work done in time between the two men.

Call them for what they are: Nobel Prizes in Technology

You seem to have a huge misapprehension. Physics only advances when we can built devices to test our theories independent of human senses. Theories are fine but they are meaningless without the tools to verify them. Furthermore we cannot refine our theories without the data from these tools which inform us how the world actually behaves. A theory of gravity waves is meaningless unless you have some tool to test for their existence. Physics isn't just blackboards and chalk.

In developing the method, the scientists realized that making the perovskite layer 1 micron thick increased the working life of the solar cell significantly.

Typical good quality crystalline silicon solar cells lose as much as 1% per year in efficiency, and lose as much as 15% efficiency in the first few months of deployment. This is why a 100 watt panel will typically produce as much as 120 watts for the first month or so, then taper off to 100 watts, then degrade slowly thereafter. This is one of the reason that to meet code, wiring for a solar installation must exceed the specs of the panels by around 20%. Now, my apologies if this isn't perfectly accurate, I've been intentionally hand-wavy as I've been out of the PV world for a bit.

Amorphous silicon is much, much worse, as it degrades as much as 10% per year, until they become opaque sheets of glass. This is why cheep Harbor Freight solar panels are cheap. Soon, they'll be just colored glass.

The manufacturing technique described in this article is similar to that of amorphous silicon, and the quoted sentence above glosses over a lot of ifs in the article. Still, I hope these researchers succeed.

Even if they don't, traditional silicon solar and some CdTe technologies are already at grid parity, so the current state of the art can already economically offset burning stuff to keep the lights on, or charge the electric car.

Roundup has been linked to Parkinson's Disease and suspected to be linked to other human neurological diseases as well. Now it looks like it is killing pollinators too. It's probably time to find a better weed killer.

Psychology today refers to it as extroversion.

It's symmetrical that way (introversion - extroversion) to reflect opposite meanings in the subject of human personality.

The Jung thing references a German text. It's not bad Latin any more than extrude or external are.

You know how naming variables is important? That the variable name itself is supposed to convey meaning? Intro- and extro- are more likely to be linked - thus conveying meaning - than 'intro' and 'extra':

int intro;
int extro;

vs.

int intro;
int extra;

The symmetry is logical and conveys meaning. Thus extroversion is the superior spelling.

> While BPA can have effects similar to the hormone estrogen, it is between 10,000 to 100,000 times weaker.

There is a lot of debate whether microdosing of endocrine disruptors can have significant effects. The author of that piece seems to have made a career as a BPA apologist because whenever a study comes out showing harmful effects, he's there downplaying it. Musgrave is clearly in the camp that believes microdoses do not cause significant effects. Others disagree.

Plastic is toxic. Always has been.

The problem with that statement is that what's considered a plastic is chemical diverse. We do know some plastics do not have the kind of negative heath effects that BPA has because they are far more chemically stable. If you read the actual study, you'll see this is only in relation to "structurally similar bisphenols", not plastics in general.

The real problem we have here is that companies have been allowed to use any old molecular structure in their products they wish without proving anything about the health impacts it may or may not impart.

Speaking of diverse, one of the early plastics was made of casein, from cow milk. https://www.scientificamerican... Milk and vinegar will do it.

Window glass at room temperature has a nearly incalculable relaxation time, approaching the age of the universe itself. For all practical observations, this glass is a solid. But its solidity is in the eye of the beholder.

https://www.scientificamerican...

Just after 6 AM local time on Tuesday in Japan, a sound like an explosion was heard near the suppression pool of reactor No. 2 at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This followed an explosion March 11 that ripped the roof off reactor No. 1 and another at reactor No. 3 on March 14 that injured 11 workers. The culprit in all three cases is likely a build-up of explosive hydrogen gas—as occurred at Three Mile Island in the U.S. in 1979 as a result of the meltdown there—caused by nuclear fuel rods experiencing extremely high temperatures stripping the hydrogen out of the plant's steam.

dissociation : Chemistry
the splitting of a molecule into smaller molecules, atoms, or ions, especially by a reversible process.

Seems to mean what I think it means. Why are you mentioning "human liveable conditions" in the core of a nuclear reactor that's melting down ?

ure, charging ones car into a mass of people because some one threatened you several blocks away is completely reasonable. Talk about willful naivete.

Running for your own life

More nonsense. There's nothing in the constitution that says you have the right to bear arms against your own government.

http://www.ushistory.org/decla...

Disingenuous much ? Or do you just expect everyone to be as ignorant ?

DUURRR, more stupid. Tell me, how am I lying when I say that?
. Show me the reputable source that cast doubts on them. All you're doing now is basically saying "Not uh, that's wrong because I say it is".

Your claim is that loose gun control laws in the U.S. are the cause of our murder rate
I showed
1. As our laws liberalized our murder and crime rate went down
2. Between areas within this country gun laws do not correlate with crime
3. Between similar cities with different gun control regimes there is no correlation in the amount of crime over time
4. Between extremes of gun control regimes across countries there is no correlation.

Your response is DURRR People that know more than you say otherwise despite the evidence to the contrary. This while referring to a science well known for being driven by politics.

https://www.scientificamerican...

You're either a liar or an idiot either way my points stand on their own.

I guess soil depletion wasn't the cause after all!

Molten Salt Solar is a potential answer. And perfect for James Bond movies.

https://www.scientificamerican...

In your cost of fossil fuels, please consider the externalized cost of waste product disposal into the lungs of those downwind, and the cost of deleting entire mountains in the Appalachians so we can load them into furnaces, and the costs of doing all that (slurry ponds, destroyed ecosystems, etc.)

The grid operators may see what goes up the stack as zero cost, but there is definitely a cost to society in elevated asthma rates, lung disease, increased chances of low and very-low birth weights, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and death. It's estimated that coal contributes in up to 50,000 deaths every year in the US alone - more than all the deaths from car wrecks in the US in a year.

Let's factor that into the fossil fuel energy costs, completely disregarding sea level rise and how much that's going to cost in lost real estate and property, as well as increased severity and frequency of storms from climate change because some people still argue about if those are real things.

I think we can all agree that breathing coal-fired particulate and sulfur dioxide is bad for you, and anyone 30+ miles downwind from each and every coal plant is doing exactly that.

What does that fossil fuel energy cost now?

"Clean coal", LOL!!! https://www.scientificamerican...

A certain Mr Malthus was not only wrong, but his prognostications have been the justification for some truly heinous policies.

https://www.scientificamerican...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/l...

"Peak oil" has been predicted at least a dozen times - still not true.
World population has gone from the 800 million of Malthus' time to 7 BILLION today, and even now the problem isn't starvation from a lack of food, it's starvation because of political barriers to food distribution. The main medical problem of the developed-world's poor is indeed obesity.

The "well known" market failure in investment in science and technology? How do you explain that the most capitalist of countries on Earth are also the most scientifically advanced?

Your sort of Cassandra is pathetic.

Here is a citation that shows glyphosates are toxic and should go NOWHERE NEAR are food: https://www.scientificamerican...

It has been scientifically proven through Monsantos own documents which is how they lost in court.

The EU has already banned it and here is a citation: https://www.scientificamerican...

I have been going through the Scientific American article here and the cited source here and I don't understand where the data comes from: the cited article never mentions the gender of the doctor.

Not only that, but Brad Greenwood, who is cited as one of the authors of the study that brings the disparity to light, is nowhere to be found in the cited article.

If these claims are not completely made up, there is at least a big case of "Citation needed".

Solar is mostly a "feel-good" solution; capturing a significant fraction of the US energy market with solar is dubious at best.

That's demonstrably false. Germany TODAY gets about 6-7% of their energy from solar and it's clearly possible to do more. Would be much easier to do in many parts of the US which are far sunnier and further south. Hawaii currently gets close to 1/3 of it's electricity from rooftop and grid solar. If you think upwards of 10% (which is very realistic) is not a significant fraction then I don't know what to tell you.

If the US were to try to entirely use solar + batteries for power we would need to cover an area the size of West Virginia with solar panels

It would take roughly a tiny corner of Nevada to power the entire US. Less than 1% of the US landmass. You could capture a good fraction of that simply by using existing roof tops which is already utilized and wasted space anyway and has the bonus of being at point of use. If you're going to argue against solar you might try starting with actual facts instead of made up ones.

Wind is a much better option - centralized power (think MW or 10s of MW) from one turbine

Wind is a great solution in some places and solar is a better option in others. It depends entirely on the local geography. We need and will use both. Centralized power is not necessarily an advantage and in fact distributed power systems can be much more robust if done correctly. The biggest limitation to either of them is the fact that fossil fuels are not required to pay for much of the pollution they generate so economically they appear cheaper than they really are.

A realistic solution is a mix of wind, advancing nuclear, and a dash of solar for the long-term.

A realistic solution is a lot more wind, a lot more solar, keeping what nuke plants we can running for as long as practical (we aren't going to build more). Unfortunately there is no viable solution that doesn't involve substantial fossil fuel use for another half century even if politically we could agree to move on the matter. But as long as we have politicians in the pocket of big oil and coal companies that is going to be hard to do.

So why did oil companies spend so much time and energy spread misinformation about climate change then?

https://www.scientificamerican...

That article doesn't present much of a case.

So why did oil companies spend so much time and energy spread misinformation about climate change then? https://www.scientificamerican...

I've just hunted around. In Jan and Feb of 2018 there was a rash of announcements that Moore's Law was Dead. Here's one.

However, not a single one that I could find showed any kind of chart.

The really nice chart on Wikipedia has not been updated since 2016.

So where are the data?

All we have to do now is combine this with artificial wombs and automate the whole thing in seed ships spreading humanity to neighboring stars...

The only question is who raises the newborns in the seed ship. How many adults do we need to have around? Perhaps a generational with only half a dozen people at any given time but that can spawn thousands once it arrives at the chosen destination.

I can't be the first to think of this concept. Can anyone recommend a sci-fi novel that describes a similar idea?

Wouldn't this qualify the shoes as an illegal performance enhancement ? Just like the artificial lower limbs with a higher than natural spring resistance enhance a runners ability ?

https://www.scientificamerican...

Any shoe violates this overly broad reading. However, you have a point, shoes should be illegal in competition. This would reduce the advantage fast tender-footed runners gain and even out the competition with slightly slower runners with equally impressive natural or developed footpad resilience.

Wouldn't this qualify the shoes as an illegal performance enhancement ? Just like the artificial lower limbs with a higher than natural spring resistance enhance a runners ability ?

https://www.scientificamerican...

What's your pricing on the oil and coal generation's ability to externalize the pollution costs and kill people living downwind? It's been estimated that cleaning up air pollution from fossil fuels would reduce respiratory and heart disease deaths by 10% to 25% per year:

The year 1993 saw the publication of an enormous study that followed over 8,000 adults for 15 years in six U.S. cities. The cities—Topeka; St. Louis; Watertown, Massachusetts; Steubenville, Ohio; Harriman, Tennessee; and Portage, Wisconsin—had differing levels of air pollution.

The researchers measured pollution in detail. After adjusting for factors like smoking, they found that the death rate was 26 percent higher in the most polluted cities than in the cleanest ones. They wrote, “Air pollution was positively associated with death from lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease . Mortality was most strongly associated with air pollution with fine particulates, including sulfates.” Fine particulate pollution is a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets, many times smaller than a human hair.

When people arguing against renewables start representing the total cost of fossil fuels including the effects of displacing entire mountains into the air by way of a coal furnace, then we can talk about subsidies on an equal footing.

Since fracking doesn't contaminate ground water, it's $0 to clean up the water near a fracking site

Yeah, about that...

https://news.stanford.edu/2016...

https://www.scientificamerican...

Space ex prices are only where they are because they cut corners and are losing a massive amount of money per flight to drive out competition. But their rockets have the worst reliability of in the history of rocketry.

Do you have any sources for this bullshit?

Because the Falcon 9 is more reliable than the Airane 5, Pegasus, Long March, Proton and other rockets still in use on this list:

https://blogs.scientificameric...

Quantum entanglement has only been demonstrated in labs or down shielded cables with high frequency EM , ie light. Not with radio waves and not in the outdoor enviroment.

Oh, yeah? Already 11 years ago...

Quantum Spookiness Spans 144 km across the Canary Islands
The reach of the spooky quantum link called entanglement keeps getting longer. A team has transmitted entangled photons some 144 kilometers (89 miles) between La Palma and Tenerife, two of Spain's Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. Physicist Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, the group's leader, presented the results to his colleagues this week at the American Physical Society conference. The distance achieved is 10 times farther than entangled photons have ever flown through the air.

Here you go, from Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican...

The short summary states "Google Earth images reveal that cattle around the world tend to align themselves with Earth's magnetic field. "

You should learn to use Google.

"Although, putting a fission reactor on a plane is also a bunch of nonsense."

Why?

Because the tickets will be $100,000 each to cover the costs.

Seriously, if you have to ask "Why?" you need to get your clue meter adjusted.

There are plenty of other more cost effective carbon neutral solutions. Running jets on peanut oil would cost 1% of airborne nukes.

Scientific American from March 2018 says the US' CO2 emissions are falling, and the EU CO2 emissions are rising. You can talk about "targets" and "goals" all you want - actual results show the US is cutting CO2 output, and Europe and Asia are increasing CO2 output.

And yet we're the ones with an actual drop in emissions as compared to the EU (whose emissions were up 1.5%).

And even if we were, we're doing better than the rest of the 1st world.

Yeah, CO2 is just wonderful. If you believe this to be true, then triple the amount of O2 in the air, and have it replace CO2. Breath that. See how you do.

So many people that do not understand how science works, yet, they still want to make ludicrous claims.

The vast majority of countries are missing their Paris agreement targets.

Interesting article. They left out the US. Check out this article from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican...

Especially this:
"Those increases stood in contrast to the United States, which posted the largest year-over-year decline in carbon emissions of any advanced economy. The decline was all the more notable given President Trump’s outspoken opposition to global attempts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and his plans to withdraw from the Paris deal."

Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago
A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation

Did ExxonMobil commit securities fraud by denying climate change?
New York's state attorney general and a US congressman are looking into whether the energy giant illegally misled shareholders about climate change.

[blockquote]Meanwhile, guns are used hundreds of thousands of times every year in the US to stop people from hurting others. [/blockquote]
Citation definitely needed, because that is the biggest bunch of bullshit I've heard in a while. There is absolutely zero data that backs up this assertion.

A gun in the house results in a 70% increase in being a victim of a homicide, and a 500% increase in the suicide rate.

https://www.scientificamerican...

[blockquote] But people legally defending themselves with guns (including "assault rifles" - a complete misnomer) mitigate or completely prevent violent assault and murder orders of magnitude more often than criminals using guns actually kill anyone. [/blockquote]

I stand corrected, THIS is the biggest bunch of bullshit I've heard in a while.