That's a far cry from a hydraulic empire since first, there would be no central control over water and it's trivial in the cases you mention to circumvent any such authority.

No, it isn't. Water falls out of the sky in most of the world. And farmers, the largest consumers of water can in most parts of the world considerably reduce their water consumption with some simple approaches should that ever become important enough to do so.

Fraud when used to overconsume a public good is a manifestation (and a very common one at that) of tragedy of the commons.

Sure, we'll just make more rules and increase our surveillance of everyone. And sometimes we won't actually do anything to diminish the fraud, because the point of creating the public good was to enable the fraud. One ends up with a lot of theater and a diminishment of human freedom as a result.

For example, I believe that's what US defense procurement is about these days. They make a great show of accounting for screws and a remarkably poor one of accounting for the effectiveness of the resulting military systems. Using substandard screws is abhorrent while building a few hundred planes for a good part of a trillion dollars that are terrible for the roles they are used in is just fine.

No, we don't even have evidence that anyone even tried. I think it's silly to conflate willfully negligent economic and fiscal decisions for at least a couple of decades (and really ever since the 1950s off and on) with actual enemy action.

While sure, it's true that some flavors of socialism don't, it's worth noting that public surveillance is a natural consequence of the creation of public goods. For example, are you going to take my word for it that I'm actually five hundred people, all drawing a public pension and all using up expensive health care at my personal health care facility which strangely enough has an abandoned parking lot as address and only employs a few dozen members of me.

To prevent such fraudulent overconsumption of public welfare-related public goods (a standard tragedy of the commons situation BTW), by necessity, they need to know that the application is a real human and relevant data to that applicant. The more services and goods provided, be it welfare or some other things, the more surveillance of its citizens needs to be done merely to protect the viability of what is provided.

Not only does this directly encourage more surveillance of a populace inching towards total surveillance, it also creates ammunition for a future tyranny. Health care records which can be used to prevent abuse of public health care can also be used in combination with other data to create a more complete understanding of would-be rebels and their associates in a society.

Actually, the laws did work and by the end of the series had worked too well, to the point that robots had not only removed themselves from human society in order to protect humans, but it is implied that they also had removed any other potential intelligences (in the whole galaxy!) that they had deemed non-human as well.

News to me.

Greece is an own goal. Don't make the mistake of assuming it took any sort of effort to take them down.

It's easy to criticize in hindsight. I found their response to the disaster more than adequate. Similarly, now that we know there's a problem, it would be inexcusable to do that. But not prior.

I've been right more often than people like you have. For example, you make above the classic conflation of hindsight with foresight. That demonstrates profound ignorance of how we learn stuff that we haven't done very often like operating nuclear reactors in times of disaster.

Why don't you do that yourself and show me how it's done? Who knows, maybe you'll learn something.

Income is a hard problem to control. Spending is an easy problem to control. If spending were the most important part of income, then Greece would have never gotten into trouble in the first place.

And "austerity" is not being used in the meaning above. It's painfully obvious that Greece isn't embracing any sort of self-denial, but is rather being subject to fiscal discipline by external pressure.

The Three Gorges dam uses up a bit more than 1000 sq km of land due to its reservoir. That's about the area exclusion zone from Fukushima (which I gather is a bit smaller, maybe 600-800 sq km), but considerably smaller than the current exclusion zone around Chernobyl which is around 2600 sq km. In other words, one of the larger dams (by reservoir size) uses up more than a quarter of the land set aside after the only two significant nuclear power accidents (in terms of radiation released to the outside world).

And dam failures kill more people than radiation poisoning from nuclear accidents does.

Just no. Maybe 2040-2050. But not that close in the future.

Now, let's look at public debt as percentage of GDP:

USA: 72.5%
UK: 90.0%
France: 89.9%
Greece: 161.3%
Netherlands: 68.7%
Canada: 84.1%
Switzerland: 52.4%
Germany: 79.9%

One of these is not like the others. One can warble on about "neoconservative economic pseudo-science", but Greece fucked up badly and now it's paying for it. Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries did not, and they don't have to undergo such things.

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.