So what? Expecting idiots to agree with me would be like expecting it to rain only on Tuesdays. I see, for example, that the author completely ignores the most important factor in why these countries are able to keep their social programs intact. Namely, their governments don't have extremely high levels of public debt.

The difference between Finland and Greece, for example, is that Finland owes a factor of four less as a fraction of its GDP. The other Scandinavian countries do even better.

Bottom line is that if you want pretty social programs or anything else on the public dollar, you need to control spending and borrowing. That's austerity in a nutshell. I find it bizarre that the countries which best exemplify this maxim are the ones being presented as a demonstration of why austerity supposedly doesn't work.

Especially when having three to four F-16s in the air may be more of a military advantage than having one F-35.

I would love for that to be true. But I'm reminded of a maxim of Napoleon, "To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war." Substantial military advantage will accrue to countries which fight on a regular basis. And if that advantage becomes great enough, then we may well see the real "organized" war of which you speak.

The distribution of asteroids that we can detect follow a power law: for a given cross-sectional area, the number is crudely inversely proportional. This not only holds for the biggest ones which we can observe in telescopes, but also meteorite impacts with the Earth and Moon. So we have estimates of asteroid populations by size from the largest to well below the minimum size which can cause harm to us on Earth.

And it's worth noting by this weak standard, both accidents you mention were regulated. I find it interesting how canned this response is. It reminds me of the blowhards stating within a few days of Fukushima that the accident was due to the incompetence of the operators rather than the obvious magnitude 9 earthquake and its consequences without knowing anything about the situation.

Regulation doesn't magically provide perfect protection against nuclear accidents especially when as in today's world you don't have a lot of experience with nuclear accidents because they don't happen that often. A fundamental lesson of these accidents is that you often have to learn by failure what works and what doesn't work.

I just did. So do you have something to contribute or are you going to keep saying it is "not reasonable"?

I merely made a correct observation. Though I do have to agree that if it can't be written down on paper, it's probably not regulation.

In that the risk is unplanned. Hydroelectric has similar risk, but it's planned.

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In other words, agility. You can be too responsive though that is less of a problem than you claim.

With other goods of value. Keep in mind the original poster was speaking of using gold and silver as money. How many people buy euros with their euros?

That's incidentally what Japan did in 1991. And now their government owes twice as much as their GDP. So maybe that's not such a good investment.

That's like claiming emergency rooms are responsible for vehicular deaths just because so many people die there. No one goes through a crash bout of austerity because they're doing well just as no one goes to an emergency room unless they have substantial problems.

In other words, Greece fucked around for a couple of decades rather than deal with the above problem. Now they're paying the consequences.

The time to implement austerity and similar measures would have been two decades ago. It's not like the "unequal trade relationship" showed up yesterday.

And austerity does work. The Scandinavian countries successfully practice austerity right now. When you control spending over generations rather than only when your creditors force you to, you can have a much better society.

It's worth noting here that Greece lied about its financial health for a time (and may still be lying, not like I care). So some of that debt was picked up under false pretenses.

There's always liability. And given the current huge burden of regulation, I don't buy that it's making nuclear plants safer, especially when we have nuclear plants operating well past their design lifespan.

Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note. Fukushima was overwhelmed by a natural disaster for which regulation was inadequate at the time, but would have in around five to ten years (IMHO). Chernobyl was run by the people who regulated it. They deliberately ignored their regulations and took it into a regime where it would fail.

Primarily by curbing the power and reach of government. We don't need a government that spies on us (most of the world). We don't need a government that runs the largest military in the world (the US), runs its own oil companies (Russia, China, and most of OPEC), pampers us by doing things for us that we could, if we really wanted to, do ourselves (social safety nets of most of the world), and runs the largest networks of corruption in human history (everyone either directly or by incentivizing the creation of black markets and smuggling).

And most of this crap doesn't help us create a counterweight to business, religious cults, or other possible rival power centers.

No. There are very substantial differences between the two. The most important is simply that markets can cater to small groups and interests and wants that change day to day. They have a responsive to wants that are simply not present in a government.

Further, this lack of immediate responsiveness in government is by design. There is no democratic government in the world that allows real time modification by its constituents/customers.

I think it's completely foolish to equate the infrequent and very coarse-grained opportunities for control changes of an election to the fluid and fine-grained changes of a modern market.