The public trusts the banks to the extent government backstops the banks. The FDIC insurance will cover up to $200K if the bank goes bye-bye. And even if the public didn't trust the banks, they surely wouldn't trust Ma and Pa Kettle's Valu Metal Ingots with the genuine look of real gold.

I think your conclusion is essentially correct. The problem is that spotting good science in realtime is hard work. The scientists reviewing the paper can only put it in the perspective of their experience. If it too far outside and they are too far inside, then the paper gets rejected. It frequently requires a fair amount of time to pass before the results of a paper can be properly analyzed, and that's if the paper hasn't been so buried that no one recalls it ever being written.

To make matters worse, there are a fair number of whack jobs out there who act as though they were serious scientists when they are not, or are regurgitating something that may not even be their work and of which they have a dim understanding. And then there are charlatans who think science is some sort of dodge (e.g., those indulging their fantasies in scientific creationism).

Another complication is that interdisciplinary science gets rejected by the disciplines it spans because the reviewers inhabit a single discipline and see the interdisciplinary work as some other discipline infringing on their Universal Right to define their discipline.

More like they did it to themselves so they can use the world press to claim the big bad U.S. is picking on little ol' N. Korea and its sawed off runt of a leader.

I doubt the Japanese government would let a Japanese company do anything to N. Korea. As far as I can tell, the Japanese government is still hiding behind the skirts of the U.S. The PM would like to have more muscular military, but even if they had one, they will be wary of doing anything the Chinese could take objection to unless it is defending their islets in the S. China Sea.

Well, it is funny in a funny sense. The real problem is it showed the fragility of American media companies (movie chains) to blackmail and exposes a problem with freedom of speech. When an outside power can effect freedom of speech to this extent, it becomes a serious issue.

Writ large, someone mentioned it was probably the insurance companies that put a stop to the showing of the film. That lesson will no go unnoticed by other bad actors in the world.

Ah, you forget Putin's dickski, it is waaaaay long enough to reach North Poleski with foots left over!!

You are not cutting in China for a slice. There was a news article a year or so ago where the Chinese government made the case for why they should get a slice of the Arctic. Given their absurd claims to the S. China Sea, they probably believe they are entitled to a slice of the Arctic as well.

Ice for cocktails. In a few years, they'll have cornered the cocktail market, at least the part that relies on ice. Those Danes are sneaky devils.

The U.S. Senator in question is Sen. Wicker, one of the biggest dolts in the Senate. You can hear him wax on and on and on about wasteful government spending unless.....errr...it happens to occur in his state whereupon it is magically transformed into a vital piece of American infrastructure.

That's not entirely true, Japan has a program now to attempt to harvest methane. If they find a way to do it cheaply enough, poorer nations will be use using it. However, burning it still results in extra carbon in the atmosphere, although admittedly a less dangerous form. Some of the big oil companies also have small projects to see if it viable.

It has had negligible effect on Conservative Republican thought processes, hence it doesn't exist.

You don't have to believe in climate change to realize dumping large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is a problem. Just look at the acidifying oceans. Yes, it isn't methane (hence the difference in name and molecular structure). The implication of your statement is that since we have no good way of separating out the influence of man made climate change and natural climate change, we can forget about the controversy until the science resolves it. The science around the acidifying ocean is not in doubt except possibly by Sen. Sessions who never met a scientific fact he couldn't contradict.

You do recall the ocean, yes? Base the food chain? Screwing it up means you eventually go hungry.

It isn't clear that Red Hat's model can scale to the size of MS.

So, you think you are smart enough to figure out what your optimizing C compiler did to your code?

Honor my ass. Their notion of honor is to not look bad, not being bad has nothing to do with it.