Well, yes and no. It's true that there were only 31 direct deaths from the explosion itself (2) and radiation poisoning (29, or possibly closer to 50; records aren't clear). But the UN estimates 4,000 additional deaths due to things like cancer as a result of exposure, and some estimates from other organisations are considerably higher than that. With long-tail risk it's often hard to come up with a definitive number. Even so, you're right that there is no doubt that Banqiao was worse - just, not 10,000 times worse; more like 50 to 60 times.

Doesn't he? It comes up for me. Literally a third of the page, with a big red border. Maybe it only comes up in certain regions?

Well, if you were designing a private property system from scratch - say, settling an entirely new planet with no prior ownership claims - you might well define ownership along those lines; the planet as a whole is the shared property of all humans, with the right to exclusive access to individual plots being "sold" to individuals via some sort of auction system (where a "higher price" is a promise to pay a higher level of future taxation - that way access to the best land goes to the ones with the best prospects of creating new value using that land, rather than merely those with the most prior assets).

Unfortunately on a planet with thousands of years of recorded human history full of wars and conquests, it's quite a lot harder to come up with an equitable solution; any attempt to redress past wrongs by the forcible redistribution of land is problematic to say the least (just look at Zimbabwe!), and so far the least-worst approach (in terms of damage to future economic prospects) has been the strong enforcement of property rights for existing owners, with such redistribution as may be necessary handled via the use of a willing-buyer-willing-seller principle funded by a progressive tax system. This is what South Africa currently uses, so the AC above is right to be concerned that they appear to be moving away from it.

Ah, but now here's the rub - is there a legal or moral right to return that land to the descendants of the people who had it before that, when they in turn were also the descendants of violent thugs who stole the land and enslaved the people?

Take, for example, the area around Johannesburg and Pretoria (the former Transvaal), seized by Afrikaaner (Dutch) settlers in the 1830s at the expense of the Northern Ndebele (a.k.a. Matebele) people, who were forced across the Limpopo river into what is now Zimbabwe. Sounds like it should be fair enough for them to make a land claim and take back what was theirs from the invaders, right?

Except: The Matebele tribe was founded by Mzilikazi, a former Lieutenant of Shaka Zulu. He and his people lived in Zulu territory well to the southeast, until he quarrelled with Shaka, rebelled, and fled - initially north into Mozambique, then west into the lands that the Afrikaaners would later take. Arriving there, he slaughtered the local tribes and engaged in a scorched earth tactic to ensure that even the lands not actually used by his own tribe in the area could not support other tribes. When did this happen? The 1820s.

The fact that only a decade or so passed between successive conquests obviously makes this an unusual case, but the fact remains: go far enough back, and there's not a single piece of land anywhere that wasn't at some point taken forcibly from someone by someone else. And while I have great sympathy for the notion that if you buy or inherit stolen property you can't complain when its former owner comes to claim it, things are considerably less cut and dried when that former owner in turn got the property by theft, or inherited it from someone who did.

At a certain point you just have to draw a line under history, admit that nobody really has a "legitimate" claim to ownership of the land, and try to establish the rule of law so that in future land is no longer taken from people against their will.

My takeaway from this is: great news for the big boys in the game, primarily Google.

Link Tax: Most news sites need Google more than Google needs them. They will waive the charges for Google or see traffic plummet. Google's less-well-known competitors, though... perhaps not. You wanna launch an aggregator as a competitor to Google News, expect to have to pay a lot more for content than Google does.

Meme Ban: Google has the economies of scale that will allow it to afford the investment that complying with the regulations requires without simply blanket-banning anything containing any copyrighted content. Google's competitors... not so much.

Not really. Tons of the stuff literally falls out of the sky in drinkable condition. That's actually sort of the problem. The UK gets so much rain that it's never really been worthwhile to invest in the infrastructure to capture and store more than a tiny fraction of it. All this article is really saying is that as the population grows, that tiny fraction will need to increase. Which is hardly a startling revelation.

Factually untrue. There was a referendum, and more people voted to leave than remain.

Also factually untrue. Turnout was 72.2% - which is higher than turnout at any US Presidential election since 1900. Are those all invalid too?

...is a convenient excuse for people who want to ignore the result. How little do you think of the people of Britain that you think that the activities of a few trolls on the internet are enough to decisively swing the result?

What do you define as a REAL vote? Do you seriously think that a second referendum would magically be "cleaner" than the first one? I don't think you do. I think you just want to keep asking the question until you get the answer you want, and democracy be damned.

For what it's worth, I voted Remain. I think leaving the EU is a terrible decision. But the precedent that would be set by ignoring the expressed will of the public because you don't like the result is more frightening to me than the worst chaos Brexit might bring.

And the problem with this would be...? Higher employment rates leading to higher wages in the third world, lifting people out of poverty there while delivering cheaper food here? And a world less likely to go to war since the potential disruption to the food supply makes the prospect more dangerous to governments? How terrible.

Anyway, the subsidies you're talking about refer to NATIONAL food supply planning, not city-level.

You're saying a government-run ISP is not the government taking control of internet provision? Or are you just taking my "everything" too literally? Fine, I'll rephrase: "the more things are handled by the government, the less fine-grained control people have over the decisions that are made on their behalf." Happy now?

"No other choices" is literally the exact situation you're in when it comes to your government, too. So, in your worst case-scenario (no other competitors, which incidentally I don't believe is actually true anywhere when you consider other options like mobile internet), you are in effectively the same position with regard to ISPs as you are with governments. Except then, to change ISP you may have to move to a different town; to change governments you'd have to move to a different country altogether.

On the other hand, if it's Trump who starts throttling your Netflix, can you actually elect a new President? Do you honestly think that THAT issue, among all the millions, is the one on which the country will be making its electoral decision? What if at the next election your choice is between someone you agree with on economics, foreign policy, health and defence, but they want to throttle your internet, or someone who offers you the best internet imaginable but will also trash the economy and start a load of unnecessary wars?

The underappreciated value of NOT having the government take control of everything is that it gives more fine-grained control - different people make the decisions about different things.

And no, you can't elect a new CEO of Comcast, but you can switch to a different service provider a lot more easily than you can switch to a different government.

How do you figure? Surely logic dictates that as fossil fuels become more scarce, their price will rise; and as alternatives continue to be developed, their price will fall; therefore the BEST time to switch is the time when the cost of the alternatives is less than the cost of the fossil fuels?

Yes, it would. It would also be nice to own a Rolls Royce. The question isn't "is it nice?", it's "is it nice enough that it's worth the cost?"

Get this straight: there is nobody who is against improving the environment. There are simply those who believe it's worth the cost, and those who don't. Which group you're in seems to be largely a matter of...
a) How high you think the cost will be to actually fix the problem
b) Whether or not you consider yourself to be part of the group that will end up actually footing the bill

Genuine question: do you believe that this principle applies to contracts other than labour too?

The other day, I bought a laptop. It's really great, and I would happily have paid at least £2000 for it. As it happens, the manufacturer was happy to sell it to me for £1000. Have I behaved unethically by paying less for the laptop than the value that laptop generates for me?

If not, what is it about the labour market specifically that changes the ethical calculus?