Ew. There are enough drawbacks to solar power already without making the device ugly to boot. :P What's next? Solar panel wind chimes? Solar panel big earrings? Solar panel blinds on your window? You know - just because you CAN stick solar panels on crap doesn't mean you should...

This. Too many young, ignernt (and old ignernt) people hit the roof over stories like this based on purely thier own lack of knowledge. This guy earned his money and PAID his income taxes on it. AFTER being taxed, he left the country and moved his money. Why should he pay capital gains taxes when he isnt' a…

The U.S. government is 3 hairs and some air away from Greece the way it is spending right now. It's unsustainable and everyone knows it. Give us 2 years. Maybe 3 to 5, and we'll be Greece. No question about it. Massive cuts are the only solution. There's time, but not much.

Well - quite frankly - I don't blame anybody who uses any sort of loophole they can find in order to keep the Federal Government from obtaining one red cent more than absolutely necessary. The US Federal Government is the most wasteful, irresponsibly run, bloated, incompetent organizations the world has ever seen. …

Hmm - good. I know that a little piece of every environmentalist's soul dies whenever they see a tree go down, but come on. Trees are THE #2 most 'renewable' resource on the planet, second only to grass. In 10 years every tree that was knocked down will be well on its way to having a perfectly healthy, new tree…

Take the doll and tell me where 'facts' and 'reality' touched you. :) I have no axe to grind. I simply dislike it when people only tell half a story. Anyone who says, "Hey - all you have to do man is like go in with 100 neighbors man and it's totally affordable man" is fooling themselves. If you think Spain's…

Massive subsidies paid for the panels, not the 'townsfolk'. Spain's government went all-in on solar and broke thier economy doing it. Now they have tons of solar panels and no money, so they are welching on thier promised subsidies and stiffing the people who were supposedly going to get 'free' power. In the…

Ah - if it was really that easy then it would have been done already. The fact is that there have been entire nations (Spain) who have tried to make the solar 'thing' work, and it has been a spectacular economic failure.

"It's no secret that conservative minded people are intolerant of other people's views, beliefs, or differences (just ask one, they'll tell you)."

The economics of Solar power do not scale up. The cost for powering 50 to 100 homes is proportionally the same as powering 5 to 10. What Spain did was massively subsidize people for building the kinds of plants you're talking about, but by no means was it some sort of Communist 'sharing' system. Wealthy private…

Hypocrisy much? So it's bad that someone discriminated against a hajib wearing 'brown person', but you're OK with discriminating against conservatives and the elderly? If you're going to enter a fit of nerd-rage over discrimination, you might want to excise yourself of bigotry first.

That's a lot more palatable than the big huge H.G. Wellsian turbines with thier giant Bird Kill blades.

That $2,500 is not an annual thing you get every year just for owning a Prius. It is a one-time rebate for purchasing a new EV. Furthermore, you only get that rebate if you are a resident of the state of California. Believe it or not - not everyone is living in California. :) In fact, if the demographics are…

How does that work? You'd end up taxing every citizen "X" dollars to buy a windmill, but that windmill only generates 5 KwH, so it would only be helping one or two citizens. You'd need to buy a windmill for every household - at which point you're taxing them as much as if they just bought it themselves. Economics…

Indeed - it's a pretty piece of work - but how much does it cost? That's really the issue that matters the most. There are beautiful pieces of art out there, but I don't have $30,000 lying around to buy them no matter how much they might cut my power bill. :)

I don't think Republicans complain about 'windmills' as much as they complain about the rather illogical practice of forcibly replacing a cheaper, better energy source with a more expensive one.

This. The average single-family seperate dwelling's power bill is $110 a month. It not a convincing argument to tell people that they should take out a $20,000 loan so they can 'save' $110 a month. Not to mention that you'd need to buy converters, inverters, and batteries. I think we all like the IDEA of wind…

I support an "all of the above" approach. Solar? Sure. Wind? Sure. Thorium/nuclear? Why not? Coal & fossil? Absolutely. Hydro, Thermal, whatever. I say open the floodgates and let's go after them all. I see no reason to artificially limit the market to one thing or another. Use them all.

Weeeeell... It is a bit more complicated than that. The price of oil does indeed effect overall economies because it drives the costs of manufacturing, wholesale, and retail. Manufacturing uses tons of petroleum products, which drives up wholesale costs, which drive up retail costs. Oil is not the "only" driver of…

The problem is that "poor people loans" was political justification used to sell the whole mess, so that's what most people hear about and/or remember the most prominently. The people wanting to repeal G/S were saying stuff like, "How could you possibly 'redline' these poor people away from a chance at the American…