I think if they'd negotiated it for themselves, even the staunchest "Randroid" would have difficult objecting. The fact is, Detroit car companies had guns to their heads in the form of the NLRB. I would never blame the poor fortunes of American automakers solely on the fleecing they've suffered at the hands of the government-backed unions, but it's nonetheless obvious why Toyota chose to build their US factories in right-to-work states.

Tyson is a smart guy, but probably out of his depth in this case. I doubt he's ever taken more than a couple of economics or business courses, let alone run a successful business on the scale of Paypal, SpaceX, or Tesla. Sadly, he's suffering from the same delusion that lots of people like him eventually contract. Being expected to comment as a kind of "public intellectual" on all things space and science related has given him the misapprehension that he can comment intelligently on anything, including things he doesn't know much about.

Look into getting a PhD or at least an MS in the science you're interested in. In my (pretty limited, admittedly) experience, the developers who do the heavy lifting on scientific codes are PhDs. At the same time, very few (almost 0) freshly minted science or engineering PhDs have any experience developing software in a production environment, so as long as you aren't terrible at interviewing, I think you'd be a shoe-in at a national lab or a company that does this kind of work after you finish.

FYI, because you probably don't know this, getting a PhD in a hard science or engineering is usually free (to you). In fact, they even pay you to do it. The stipend will be a half or a third or a quarter of what you're making now, but it's enough to live on. The challenge of course is that with little or no educational background in geology or whatever, it's going to be harder, though not impossible, to get into a good PhD program. At the very least, they will expect you to take a few undergraduate courses in the beginning to give you the baseline knowledge that most of your classmates will arrive with. And I would urge you to shoot for a top 10 or 20 department. On the BS level, where you got your degree doesn't matter much (again, in my experience). Where you get your PhD matters a lot more. Of all places, academia should be a meritocracy, but in reality, people with PhDs can be really petty about these things, and your lineage matters. At the very least, many places that would hire someone like you only directly recruit at a limited number of schools, and those schools tend to be the best ones.

Another thing you might consider to help you get around this lack of science background is applying to an applied math program that has a scientific emphasis. I had a friend at The University of Texas who was in the computational science and applied math program there, and his research was about computational fluid dynamics. Maybe dig around on their website, or the websites of similar programs, to see if any of the faculty have research collaborations with geologists.

I'm glad you asked. The answer, according to a preliminary report which was written at the request of the President and very recently released, guns are probably used for defensive purposes at least as often as they are used for criminal purposes. Here's a summary of a few interesting points made in the report. Point #7 addresses your exact question.

Engineering coop positions and internships pay very generously in the US. On the other hand, the amount of useful knowledge and skills gained in such positions is pretty negligible, so I don't think the person you responded to was correct. They serve mostly as ways for companies to get tedious, low skill work done and to inexpensively vet potential future employees.

Good luck examining the structure of a single molecule using crystallographic techniques.

As I pointed out in my reply to your other comment, you're wrong. CEOs are not in charge of their own pay. You are also still confusing the question of why CEOs receive the compensation that they do, which is fundamentally economic in nature, with "fairness", which is what you think their pay "should" be.

Who approves the pay increases and golden parachutes?

Okay.

Oh yes the CEOs.

No, they don't. From the link:

If bosses set the salaries of their workers, who decides what the bosses earn? In a modern corporation, the task of setting the CEO's pay falls to the board of directors, typically a subgroup of board members on its compensation committee.

You seem to be confusing two very different issues. My original claim was (worded a little differently) that employees tend to be compensated according to what the market will bear. If it takes a compensation package that includes raises despite poor stock performance and so-called "golden parachutes" to get and retain an executive, then that's the market rate. Companies apparently think it's a worthwhile arrangement. You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about what is "fair" in some subjective sense.

That by itself is not an argument against what I claimed. For your convenience, I wrote:

What they can get away is what you're worth. If your services were worth more, someone else would steal you away with better compensation.

If executive pay is rising across the board (that is, every company is paying more), all that means is that the level of compensation required to keep an executive at a particular company is rising. You might argue that executive pay is greater than executive productivity, but that raises an obvious question: Why are they being paid that much? Are companies all stupid? It seems like these companies would realize at some point that they could offer lower pay and achieve the same results.

Maybe I'm just being dense, but you're going to have to spell that out for me. Why do you think it doesn't apply to the executive level?

What they can get away is what you're worth. If your services were worth more, someone else would steal you away with better compensation.

The key phrase there is "as much." It turns out that conservatives edge out liberals in their support of censorship by a fairly narrow margin. In my experience, there's also a big difference between the types of ideological control that the two groups would enact, with liberals being more commonly in favor of, for example, odious "hate speech" laws and compulsory "diversity" training.

I'm friends with a fair number of US-trained young scientists, and the only ones I know who are planning to leave the country can't stay because they aren't US citizens. A small minority (~15% or so) plan to seek or currently have temporary postdoctoral positions overseas, but I doubt that many intend to make that arrangement permanent. I might add that I personally have experience doing research in another country, and I have no inclination whatsoever to leave the US. I admit that my personal, anecdotal evidence isn't proof against a larger trend, but it does make me suspicious. What makes you believe that "most" young scientists are departing the US?

I don't think so. (IANAL, but I have been following news about the HHS mandate and the RFRA.) The judge seems to have ruled that the owners of Hobby Lobby aren't eligible to receive protection under the RFRA. They intend to appeal, of course. I hasten to add that other judges have granted businesses preliminary injunctions against the mandate, and some informed commentators I've read are saying that this issue probably will go eventually to the US Supreme Court.