A couple of remarks here. First, there are 3000 dead now from Ebola, which is more than it has infected in all previously known infections (though obviously, it may have killed more in the past before we were aware of it). What it has done in the past is not necessarily what it will do in the future, and we're already in uncharted waters with Ebola having reached large urban areas.

WHO is projecting hundreds of thousands of infections over the next year and a half. If it's lethality doesn't go down, then that's a lot of deaths too.

Second, Europe didn't lose a quarter of its population to the 1918 influenza pandemic. A better guess is 2%.

No, it doesn't. Just because there is a disadvantage to a choice, doesn't mean that it is "almost" zero sum. You still have to consider the advantages.

What species would not be a selfish species in your sense? And this overpopulation problem isn't being caused by the rich. It's being caused by the teeming masses of non-rich.

Even in good times, astronomy as a career choice will suffer due to the considerable overproduction of PhDs in the field.

Again, I see no evidence for the "create jobs" aspect or why it's even worth discussing.

No, when the government funds the companies that serve government, then a lot of resources, not just the companies themselves, become unavailable for the private sector, "free" markets, etc.

I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?

Again, that's not what he's doing. Public funding is potentially a huge profitable gravy train. This has little to do with creating jobs except incidentally. The only people who would be fleeced are taxpayers, which is already rather easy to do.

Further, while I haven't brought it up before in this discussion, what is supposed to be the benefit to just "creating jobs"? Hiring people for make-work means that they aren't available for more productive work.

Well, you have a plan? Because right now, taking over the bad countries and making them good countries that don't starve their citizens doesn't seem to work. I suppose we could create a dependent, exponentially growing dependent class of people who need our continued munificence to survive. But last I checked our resources weren't similarly exponentially growing over the rest of eternity.

Or I suppose we could just kill the starving people. But that's not in the spirit of the thing.

Ultimately, it's going to be those starving people who have to help themselves. And they are, depending on location. The developing world is in a far better state than it was in 1950, which seems to be a low point for what was at the time, the Third World.

Ugh, that's a terrible characterization especially he actually has a valid business model, invest in start ups whose business model is doing highly profitable services for government. It's not about "making" jobs, but hoovering up public funding for profit.

I think the spin about returning tech to government is an attempt to evade the opposition to government expenditures. It may also be an attempt to portray the VC fund he represents as being one of a few players in that sector, even though it probably isn't IMHO.

That's not what he's doing. It's a standard VC fund with the expectation of profit. They just happen to specialize in start ups providing government services.

If you were accurate, he'd be fleeced in short order (your last sentence in other words) and life would move on, but with one significantly poorer and wiser entrepreneur.

And it sure won't solve the government completely changing the contract at the last moment.

I see you can learn something from this example.

The original post indicates he didn't go in uninformed. A classic negotiation tactic is to let the other side go first. Asking a salesman to show you something is a good opening move for an expensive purchase even if you know exactly why you are there and what you want to buy. When the salesperson went immediately to the product of the day, that gave away that they were acting in bad faith.

Please, be ignorant somewhere else. It's not that hard to do gravity experiments with controls. For example, a good example is the Cavendish experiment. Here, there are two heavy movable weights which pull via gravity on two smaller weights. You can move the heavy weights around so that they pull on the small weights in the opposite direction or remove them altogether, giving you a control.

Further, we can observe dynamics of regions of low density space and see how those are far less dominated by local gravity that the surface of Earth is. This is another study of gravity that gives you a control.

OTOH, the ozone hole is in tiger-repelling rock territory. We don't know how often or under what circumstances ozone holes have formed over the past few million years. Is it a regular thing or is it very unusual? Your assurances aren't worth the effort of making them. We need actual evidence instead.

And we're speaking of an organization that gets a free pass to lie to Congress.

In other words, because the innumerate can't quite grasp what "global warming" and its implications mean, we're going to use a far less accurate term for propaganda purposes. "Global warming" as a label does not given the impression you claim it gives. I think a huge part of the problem is this ridiculous doublethink and cognitive dissonance.

Especially the cognitive dissonance that goes into claiming as you do that we have very accurate models of how the Earth's climate is changing - via global warming - yet still claim that we're ignorant enough of the situation that we have to use an all-encompassing label "climate change" that means by definition any sort of climate change possible.

Namely, that we've still haven't been able to improve a bit on the original estimates of Arrhenius about the temperature forcing effect of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Despite a century of work on the most important parameter of so-called "climate change" now has the same error estimate as Arrhenius's original estimate.

Keep thinking about it. The original poster already had this angle covered.

Controlled airspace != civilian airspace.