But that 76 trillion doesn't create inflation, just like bailing out the 'creators' when those OTC derivatives fail doesn't. Only demand side fiat money creation causes inflation, not supply side fiat money creation. Deficits to expand the military don't cause inflation, just deficits to fund health care. /endsnark

Anyone who uses the phrase "Tragedy of the Commons" should have to first pass a test showing they know the history of the enclosure acts before they throw that phrase around.

There weren't seven billion of them. The real challenge isn't working hard enough to survive as one of 200,000 hunter/gatherers in a stable population, it's in making it through the stabilizing process.

A nation literally cannot attack a multi-national company in the way these attacks have happened. That's because these attacks now include physical threats against the citizens of other nation states. Those threats make no sense coming from a nation state, and just about have to be from some third party if North Korea is involved in even the 'cyber' part of the attacks. That's because the nation doesn't want to find itself in a war with other nation states and not just the corporation, or to get boxed in by making a threat they don't intend to follow through on and lose face. Bluffs are for when you are already desperately losing, not beginning.
          Do you really think North Korea could follow up on those death threats by actually attacking those people, perhaps claiming they were legitimate targets as Sony employees and not being killed as citizens of the US, Japan, or other states, and that those states should also ignore any other deaths that resulted as merely collateral damage? Assasinate a few thousand citizens and any witnesses, family members, and first responders and such that get involved, and act like their citizenship doesn't matter? The bodies that deal with such things are not elected, they are called by such names as carrier strike forces and joint combat arms taskforces.
      If the Korean government did pay for hacking teams, and sticks to just cyber-attacks, there's still some risk if they hit promiscuous targets or affect the various stock markets enough, but any involvement by governments would depend on whether Sony or Wall Street or whatever even asks them to become involved. For such non-lethal attacks, sanctions would probably begin with a UN resolution and individual states agreeing to participate in further economic restraints as they saw fit once that resolution passes. Sony would have to lobby various governments to support the UN sanctions if they can get more declared, and this gets to such things as taking out ads in many of those countries reminding their citzens that Sony is not just a Japanese company, and such preliminaries, before anything much else is done.
          If UN lobbying efforts fail (unlikely if there's any real evidence NK is involved), Sony would probably still lobby individual nations to act, but Sony can also go ahead with asking some individual governments to help with proving for certain just where the attacks are coming from, and not have to rally the UN there, so that's the one step they are doubtless already taking.
        Sony is actually allowed less independence in even trying to gather evidence that it was really North Korea than North Korea is in initiating such non-physical attacks, and in theory, Sony is the side that would have to be very careful not to have any malicious code spread to other parties and such, while a nation has more rights. In practice, theory goes out the window if the right US senators are taking a hit because of the Sony stock in their retirement portfolios.

Add to that, companies that assume they will be able to get 60 hours a week in the future are assuming that the economy will still have all the problems it has right now, or more, in that future. That assumpion hardly sounds like a good business plan - "Our employment model is to assume the recession will never end.".

If all your itches can be satisfied at work, then you are asexual, since satisfying that one at work will get you fired. By identifying as a person who would gladly spend all their time at work, but not mentioning how statistically unusual you are, you're thus posing a Kantian Universal - That is, you're claiming that what is good for you should be good for everyone. If everyone stops having sex, the human race dies out in a generation. Why do you hate the whole human race?

You just legitimately committed the logical fallacy of begging the question - congratulations!

The judge can order production, or hold the police in contempt.

In many cases where it isn't a matter of the police testimony vrs the accuesed, and in just about all cases in civil court, judges will instruct the jury that they should put the worst reasonable interpretation on one side 'losing' evidence. Losing cases from that is generally going to correct police departments faster than individual contempt citations, and can be used in more situations (Just who gets the contempt citation when a judge suspects the guy running the evidence room was involved, but he's not been called as a witness ? Yes in theory, making the prosecution prove chain of evidence is part of the rights of the accused, but what if the accused's lawyer hasn't even thought of putting that person on the list of witnesses to call? Does the judge have to first order that cop to come to the court and testify on a matter relating to the trial, get him sworn in and get him to say something for the record, so he can be included in the contempt citation?)
        Telling the jury to regard missing evidence in the light most favorable to the opposition lets a good judge cut through a lot of BS. I saw a judge use it once when a prosecutor was trying to convince the jury they needed to unravel one of those situations where a subordinate was saying they were just following orders and their surpervisor was claiming that their orders had been misinterpreted before they could go any further. The judge told the jury they didn't have to worry about where the problem had originated, they just had to treat ALL the related claims as unreliable, and listed what those were. Pushing judges to use this tool as they would in so many other cases looks like a pretty safe way of fixing a social problem to me, but I wouild be interested in hearing how treating cops the standard way (when it comes to losing evidence) can be abused, if people have some counter-examples.

It's not really significant that Von Daniken used it in his work, it's that at least much of it seems to have originated there, and for the bits that may not, there aren't any references from earlier sources that are actually considered any more reliable. What a hoaxter promotes is less significant than what he originates. I bring this point up because there are some people, such as Carlos Casteneda, that tend to occasionally mention some real bits in the middle of runs of pseudo-science, and readers end up dismissing those bits when they run across some obvious hokum. Velikovsky is another good example. A good con-artist bothers to build on some real research, making it harder to winnow the chaff because they have left clues to a little wheat.

The trust usually comes because the small company assumes the big one wants to make money by completing an actual product line and selling it - normally the way just about everybody thinks Capitalism works. The small company says to itself, well, they've got to have X (like Sapphire coatings for screens) to make money - they can't actively want us to fail and take steps to make us fail or they take a hit too. So what we have to do is deliver the component at the price where they still make money, and as long as we do that, we're on the same side. So the small company focuses on distrusting the contract clauses it thinks are rational to distrust, in ways that it thinks might allow abuses a rational but dishonest actor might try..
      It's like buying a car and thinking you can't trust the salesman to tell you the truth - only you should have somehow known the salseman wasn't the real salesman but a psycho-killer who had just slain the real salesman and the big thing he wanted wasn't to make too much money selling that car, it was your home address so he could pop by at 2 AM with his skinning knife collection. Most people don't go through life checking with NASA in case the persons they are dealing with are secretly space ailens.
            From the summary, Apple seems to have had control over the decision to install back up power supplies, and to have chosen to save money on them instead. That sounds like an Apple executive brought in a good quarterly bottom line and then got out before the product couldn't be made as specced, and to heck with whether Apple still looks good five years down the road. The big company takes a small hit, the little one goes bankrupt. Apple is by this definition exceptionally untrustworthy, just because they won't take as much damage as their smaller subcontractors, or individuals, but if that's true, then Capitalism is a system where the bigger a company gets, the less it should be trusted, just for sheer size, and smaller businesses and customers should rationally start distrusting sheer bigness. How about that, free-market types and Randroids, do we need stronger Anti-Trust laws? The other solution seems to be extreme paranoia. If great market share or rapid growth mean everyone should regard that company as exceptionally untrustworthy, they why doesn't it make sense for consumers to always pick a smaller competitor for everything?

It's not a few that are really developing and a lot that aren't, but the contrary. For example, if you look at how well Nigeria has dealt with the current Ebola crisis, you pretty much have to acknowledge that they have improved a lot since the 1960's. In the same way, Uganda today is not sliding downhill from some Idi Amin glory days, quite the contrary. We could fairly describe a few states as failed - that's not a racist term per say, it's a rational assessment if used correctly, but when people talk about developing nations like 9 of 10 are never going to develop instead of the contrary, that's an abuse of terms like 'developing' and 'failed state'. There's also this meme that foreign aid is just pumping money into corrupt regimes that will never actually improve the lot of their populaces, and again, that's more the exception than the rule.
      There's also a difference in comparing a failed state with a successfully developing one in 21st century terms and comparing it to its colonial past or some general colonial era. You can take the real numbers for famine deaths caused by the British raj in India and Irish potato famine deaths of about the same time, and with fair statistics, nobody should ever complain about anything Stalin did to the USSR again,unless they are prepared to compare Queen Victoria with Hitler and Stalin, to her disfavor. That's your colonial era, without even knowing the figures for Africa and how much they would make the totals worse. Somalia today probably has it about as bad as they did in the colonial era, but not worse. That's bad, a drastically failed state - there's no need to claim that somehow it's even worse than what Belgum did to its colonies or other cases which were unimaginable hells - by the time things get any worse than that, everyone is dead.

Cheaper than coal isn't enough, until it's so much cheaper people shut down existing coal plants early. As cheap or slightly cheaper just means people will stop planning new coal plants and start building new wind farms to cover new demand - that is, it only impacts the increase in desired power generation, not all the power already being generated that already contributes to CO2 rise.

Why do people keep mentioning the (presumably left wing) enviro-weenies, when the US stopped running breeder programs and reprocessing spent fuel based on the arguement that we couldn't stop the isotopes from falling into the hands of terrorists - various parts of the shutdown were started back in both the Carter and Reagan administrations, by people who were Homeland Security type policy wonks, who went to work for Oil companies after leaving the public sector. In other words, - generally right wing, even under a Democrat president. Movements to develop Thorium power have been opposed, in large part, because Thorium designs can't produce Plutonium for nuclear weapons use, again, something the right wing cares about much more than the left, which mostly wants to stop making more bombs at all. Yes, there are plenty of people in the environmental (green party) left who don't like nuclear power or nuclear deterance, but by singleing just them out for all the blame and ignoring the ones on the other side of the political spectrum, you have accomplished two things - you've helped kill the thing you desire, and you've taught the ones on the right that they can count on what Stalin called useful idiots. Making nuclear power all about right v. left is being played for a fool.

Now you're out of SF and just spewing outright fantasy! ;-)

Even though he's probably right, it's unimportant - let's assume you're right, there really is some way to move at at least a high fraction of c, and even that it can open the stars themselves to humans. - WE certainly won't be looking for life in other galaxies before we have even looked around our own. We won't be looking for life closer to our own galactic core before we have looked at the immediate neighborhood in our own spiral arm. We won't even be looking as close as Tau Ceti until after we have checked our own solar system in such places as Titan and Europa, if we even get that far. Most probably, we won't be looking at Europa at all until we have proven the technology to tell absolutely and for sure if Mars has life. This whole discussion is like a young person speculating about what they would do after they have more money than Warren Buffett, before they have actually made their first million. The time to start speculating is after you've made a few hundred million or even a full billion or so.