Who uses the nonrenewable resource? The company that digs it from the ground? The person who burns it? The company that converts it into a manufactured product? The person who buys the product? The person who throws it away?

You don't "consume" expensive toys like yachts. You invest in them. Or at least, that's what you will tell the IRS. If that won't fly, you form a company that buys yachts and you invest in the company.

Taxing consumption is stupid. It encourages people to save and hoard till the day they die, which defeats the purpose of money. The rich are the most capable of doing this, which big trust funds and investments. Also, the idea of a progressive consumption tax is mind-boggling. How can a sales tax be progressive? Right now, sales taxes are collected on point of sale, which is a flat (actually regressive) tax. Do you have to fill out everything you buy on some IRS form?

A better idea is to tax wealth. That will encourage people to spend, and drive the economy forward.

And we had a proof of concept for tokamaks in the 50s.

There are several aspects of this announcement which cause me to disregard it. First of all, there doesn't seem to be any journal article describing the work. I'm of the impression that science journalists are mostly full of shit and one must go to the primary sources to get any semblance of reality. Where are the technical documents?

The idea of a magnetic mirror is not new. For a state-of-the-art mirror system, take a look at the Gas Dynamic Trap. You see that it's mostly science and not hype. There's plenty of actual journal articles and technical documents. (With Lockheed, we are supposed to just take their word for it, based on their layman explanations to journalists?) Note that scientists working on GDT are much more modest about what is realistically attainable using this technology. A fusion reactor based on GDT technology would be 1km long [AA Ivanov and VV Prikhodko. PPCF 55 (2013) 063001], and so people look at it more as a neutron source for fusion material research than a viable reactor concept.

Lockheed spokespeople were making the claim that they could develop more quickly than tokamaks due to the small size of the system. Well, you know, first generation tokamaks were also pretty small. We have a good understanding of how reactor parameters will scale with size, and that's why ITER is so large. (The original plan for ITER was even larger, in order to guarantee ignition (fusion gain=infinity), but we have scaled back our ambitions to achieve a fusion gain of 10.)

Power != energy.

All else is not equal. If you didn't have solar panels up there, you could put some light-colored paint on the roof, which reflects much of the sunlight. Solar panels tend to be quite dark, and get quite hot since they aren't anywhere near 100% efficient.

What percentage of male calves become studs? Only some very lucky ones.

I think "vacuum" in the article means the Bose-Einstein condensate with no phonons, which is the analog to the true vacuum and not actually a vacuum.

Science isn't so clear cut. The question isn't settled yet, and probably won't be settled until we have a clear theory of quantum gravity.

Farm animals are not much better off than if they were in the wild. Sure, they get food, but they are slaughtered as soon as they reach full size. Dairy cows might have it a little better, depending on your point of view, but most of their babies certainly don't have it better.

What is animal abuse? Going by what gets media and court attention, it seems like the definition of animal abuse in America is treating dogs and cats as farm animals.

It's not about the prize money. It's about the recognition and implied chance for a future contract with Amazon, which could be worth several orders of magnitude more.

Eh, drilling is pretty damaging in of itself.

Certainly not true. This means we would spend more resources on a cure.

You manage to siphon 4 liters of gasoline from the tank of a broken down truck before fleeing from a pack of motorcycle vandals. How far can you go?

Sounds like a recipe for memory tampering.