Or Bloody Mary. 'Tis the season, you know. 
Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
I seem to recall specifically saying that externalities should be counted. Why yes, in fact I did. By definition, externalities are those costs which are not counted in the price of something.
However, externalities should generally be accounted to the industry that produces them. That will create the maximum possible driving force to reform those industries. Charge the energy producers the costs for the pollution they emit. They’ll have to either charge their consumers more or switch to less costly technology.
Trying to count these deaths against indifferent consumers is silly, and likely to be counterproductive. The solar panel manufacturer is perfectly happy to use power from, say, solar panels. But because they buy power on the open market like everyone else, they are partly running on coal and other dirty energy. Charge those costs to the dirty energy producers and they will have to switch to something cleaner. Everything downstream will automatically benefit.
Please take this hijack elsewhere.
It’s a Pit thread, and one that’s gotten otherwise boring due to @Sam_Stone’s cowardice. And it’s not like we’re going to get an answer to “what happened to you, man?” anyway other than what we already know, which is that he’s been poisoned by right-wing propaganda to the point where he can no longer detect even obvious lies by Trump. I’ve seen the same thing in my own parents and I don’t think there’s any going back. It’s sad and hard to understand but I suspect we’ve all seen the same pattern in our personal lives.
I’ve got a different theory in case of Sam_Stone. I doubt very much he is fooled in the slightest by Trump&Co. But the conservative side has been gutted for years by unscrupulous right wing lunacy, culminating (I hope) with Trump. The left meanwhile, has become more progressive to the point where most traditional conservatives can’t find it tolerable. Biden is an exception as a centrist but he does not represent the progressive Democrats and conservatives know it. Extreme right wing politics of the past 20 years have ruined any chance for bi-partisanship. Compromise to GOP politicians now just looks like capitulation and gets them the RINO label by their supporters and a primary challenge from the lunatic fringe right. So they have no safe high ground to which to run. No DMZ. Doubling down on the anti-left agenda is the only identity they can safely put forward, no matter how self-destructive it is in the long run. That is why Sam_Stone appears to support absurd arguments that don’t even resemble reality. He can’t bring himself to abandon the right, regardless of how little it resembles legitimate conservative values. In other words, he’s taken the position of ‘better wrong than blue, fuck you very much’. This is the hill he and others like him have decided to die on.
Except Sam is Canadian and blue is the colour of the Conservative Party of Canada. 
Which probably further contributes to his identity crisis when he wades into American politics.
Have you ever had the feeling that you wanted to blue but then you had the feeling that you wanted to red…?
Or I’ve over-complicated it and he’s just a standard issue right wing asshole.
Jesus Christ, dude. You are coming across as unhinged. What fucking difference does it make to you if Sam returns to this thread or not? I wouldn’t if I were him. Why do you care? How will his returning to this thread improve your life? He can’t even vote in the upcoming election.
You specifically haven’t used that word before in this thread.
I’m not talking about prices. I’m talking about deaths. You wanting to talk about prices doesn’t change this. And even if we were talking about prices, you previously wrote that “When you order a load of concrete, whatever (fractional) deaths that went into making it already show up in the costs”, which is flat-out false.
Nobody is “charging” anybody anything. All else being equal, a generating process that requires more electricity, steel, cement, etc. than another will result in more deaths per unit power generated. Similarly, replacing a steel part in a car with one made from titanium will result in overall higher energy used per mile driven, despite the lightweighting resulting in the real-time gas mileage reading higher, primarily due to the energy required to shove electrons into titanium that really don’t want to be there.
Thank you for that lesson in how not to overreact.
So, @sam_stone is a 1970s-Style Death Trap?
Indeed he is:
I’m not saying it’s correct. I’m saying it’s a rational concern that can be addressed, like in the way you just chose to do so. You addressed it by appealing to a common reality and statistics and such. Thus we can come to some solution.
I’m contrasting that with the more conspiracy-theory and alternative facts stuff that makes it so hard to have a rational discussion with modern conservatives.
Also, I’m not sure, but I think usernames may be case sensitive. Could someone specifically use @bigt without the capital letters in a post (that isn’t a reply to me) so I can see if I get pinged?
Sure, buddy.
Thanks. It still pinged me. So I guess capitalization doesn’t matter.
Also: @Larry_Borgia: You don’t get multiple notifications for multiple uses of the name per thread.
@Czarcasm was just making a (rather common) joke.
Getting back to the original issue that started all this (other than the nuclear stuff), some media outlets, like Sam, have taken the President’s tweets as being a real directive, and have applied to Federal Court to have all the documents released. Apparently they had previously lodged an FOI request, which was turned down by the government on national security grounds.
So they’ve asked the judge to order the disclosure, since the docs have been declassified by the Prez, so there are no longer any national security grounds that justify non-disclosure.
The federal DOJ lawyer is opposing the request, saying that they’d checked with the White House counsel, who said that the President’s tweets weren’t meant to change the situation.
The judge ain’t buying it:
In response, the DOJ lawyer again emphasised that White House counsel said he’d checked with the Prez, and no change was meant.
Petard, hoist, etc.
When you’ve lied for four years straight, and done everything you can to undercut the credibility of the federal government, this is what happens. A federal judge can’t trust anything coming from the White House to be true unless it’s proven in court.
Does the same argument apply to his tweets? We have no proof that the tweet that started this thread was written by Trump and not some rogue element in the White House communications office.
An interview with Limbaugh is probably really him, but what were his exact words in that interview? Trump’s manner of speaking usually avoids anything clear and definite enough to be an actual order.
Essentially, the judge is calling Trump’s bluff and making his enablers squirm.