In this universe we obey the laws of thermodynamics, including the 2nd Law. There is no, and can be no 100% efficiency.

Small black holes are basically 100% efficient at turning mass into energy via Hawking Radiation, which is nearly two orders of magnitude more efficient than Stars powered by fusion.

There are some serious suggestions as to how to go about making them (ultra powerful converging gamma ray lasers, as photons aren't subject to Pauli Exclusion Principle). While it probably requires a moon-sized machine to do it, it is probably feasible for a civilisation capable of building a Dyson sphere, and once you have that technology you don't need stars or the gravitational hassles that they create anymore.

Really the only downside to splashdown is potential corrosion of parts of the capsule, but given amount of refurb work that will go on anyway this is probably a pretty minor consideration.

Capsule trajectory prediction is good enough that you don't need to land on water when you have a Nevada dry lake bed available. The recent SpaceX Dragon Capsule flight had a touchdown within (I believe) about 1 mile of target.

Transporting a big heavy capsule overland to the launch site again is a bit tricky, anything more than 3-4m diameter starts to be a problem on roads (Orion is 5m diameter). But you could also use heavy lift helicopters - at 8 tonnes it could be carried by a Chinook to an airport without too much trouble.

For a parachute landing you can hit water pretty fast without damaging the capsule - whereas for a hitting dirt you need landing gear to prevent point loading and a clever terminal speed arresting system to kill your parachute sink rate of a few m/s just as you touch the ground.

The sea is far more accessible for Cape Canaveral. Ultimately a relatively small boat and crane with a small crew could recover the capsule and return it to Canaveral for reprocessing. (Though that would not be the SpaceX rather than the Nasa way of doing things).

Helium is also available from the atmosphere for several $1000/kg. So we won't run out.

Most Cryogenic applications like MRI magnets can use Hydrogen 14K or Neon 24K instead.

But I agree save the helium for more important uses.

Instead use Neon - its a renewable resource from the atmosphere, and would only cost about $300/kg of lift or a couple of $ per balloon - not much worse than helium, and well within typical retail margins, also won't leak away as quickly.

For bigger lift applications use methane. Dirt cheap, commonly available, not poisonous, less leaky than hydrogen or helium and would work fine for most lift applications. Downside is flammability, though far less dangerous than hydrogen, and rises quickly in air to disperse in an accident. A party balloon with 4 litres would only release 100kJ when burnt - though that is more than the 20kJ from an equivalent hydrogen balloon. It is much harder to ignite methane - only ignites in a relatively narrow range of air-methane mixes, spanning about 4-15%, vs hydrogen 4-75%

The real waste in the Budget is in things like Medicare. US spends 15% of GDP on health, while most OECD countries spend about 7-8% on evil "socialised medicine" yet have everyone is covered and in many cases they have higher life expectancies. 7% of us GDP is about $1 Trillion per year, I realise that isn't the federal budget but it is money that people could use for other things if they weren't wasting it.

Higher education 3% of GDP vs OECD average 1.5%. College attendees are getting screwed to the tune of $200 billion per year.

Around $1000 per person spent on tax filing per year due to ridiculously complex tax system - another 2-300 $billion per year.

And I am not even going to bother talking about the Pentagon.

Point is that there are ways of saving all that needs to be saved without impacting negatively on peoples standard of living, but the US needs to be willing to adopt the best practices of the rest of the west, regardless of philosophical objections about free-markets etc.

To be honest I wasn't even looking at the trend I was just trying to illustrate the 60 year cycle driven by the PDO/AMO ocean cycles as it impacts the Arctic. We see PDO in all climate data, from sea level rise, to Global Temperatures to Droughts etc. And because it is so dominant you cannot say much that is sensible about climate trends at shorter timescales. That is where IPCC climatology of recent decades has gone so wrong - extrapolating rises from a decade or two of upward slope in teh 80's and 90's taken from a 60 year sinusoidal variation (even though 1910-1940 temp rise was just as fast as 1970-2000 rise it was before significant rises in CO2, and IPCC models just can't explain that or other historic variation without some colossal fudging of input data on 'forcings').

Taking the change over 60 years gives you something like the real trend underlying PDO driven variation - and works out at something like 0.7 deg C per century for global temperatures. The temperature trend is higher in Europe and mostly lower or even in some cases negative in the rest of the world.

As far as I am aware WW2 had no noticeable effect on climate, it was a minuscule blip in terms of its effects on the world, and actually led to a post war industrialisation and population explosion that drove the first sharp rise in CO2, which by IPCC assertions should not have caused a 30 year cooling trend such as what was seen globally 1940-1970 - again pointing to the dominant effects of PDO.

So we have had 30 years of slowly dropping average Arctic Ice coverage during the warming phase of the PDO, however in the southern hemisphere Ice has generally been increasing. The Key point is that 30 years is too short a data timescale in the context of the PDO/AMO cycle and that in last 5 years it has been looking like the falling Arctic Ice trend might have actually bottomed out as the PDO tips over into its cooling phase just as it did 60 years ago.

http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo
There was almost a million km more ice over last winter than there was in the previous low year of 2007.

There was also an exceptionally strong summer storm this year in early August (the time when ice is thinnest) that led to a lot of ice breaking up - hence the relative ice low.
http://earthsky.org/earth/powerful-summer-storm-in-arctic-reduces-sea-ice-even-more

Result is an at least 30 year low, but it is pretty consistent with the 60 year AMO/PDO ocean cycle:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif

So it doesn't actually look like this is a "death spiral" at least in the short term, more like a bit of seasonal variability in an otherwise 5 year upwards trend.

Definitely a lot of organised crime in relatively strong Australian unions.

In the days of strong militant unions in New Zealand OC in unions was a big factor (surprising considering that New Zealand is nearly the least corrupt place on the planet), but unions were thankfully mostly broken in 80's, (with partial exception of waterfront), at the point where they had come close to destroying the economy with uncompetitive labour practices and the Labour govt of the time was left with no choice but massive reform.

Solidworks, an engineering CAD and analysis package, was nearly twice as much in Australia as in US a few years ago (not peanuts, close to AUD $20k vs around US $10k for full analysis package) . Very hard to understand reason. US engineering salaries were about he same as Oz, so this imposes significantly higher cost of business for any Australian corporation trying to compete internationally. I would have expected similar prices in countries with similar wage costs.

Actually worth hopping on a plane, buying it and installing from a reseller in the US and then getting a US proxy for updates and servicing.

Governments of the abused customers should specifically legislate to make the laws that support such predatory pricing illegal regardless of copyright lobby, because our businesses have to compete with the countries that get the advantage of cheaper prices.

I'll see your stratospheric warming and raise you a missing tropospheric hot spot.

One of the only testable predictions of CAGW is relative warming of the tropical troposphere, yet apparently the earth has not been reading the literature and is failing to conform to the 'consensus' theory. Likewise absence of significant warming in last 15 years, and lack of acceleration in sea level rise, with IPCC predictions being consistently too high in both cases.

In other branches of science failure of a predictive test of a theory is called falsification, and leads to said theory being chucked out or at minimum extensively modified. But climatology is apparently different.

So how many more years of little to no cooling will it take before the IPCC backs down on the thermogeddonist claims it is making and revises their CO2 water feedback down to more realistic (ie lower) figures? Perhaps it will be at the same time that they admit they have no idea what causes the 1100 year period warm periods (Minoan, Roman, Medieval and ... now), or why the earth has varied by 3C during the last 10000 years (mostly warmer than now), or even what the mechanism is that brings on or ends ice ages.

Frankly while they are on the receiving end of Billions in grants so long as they continue to predict catastrophe, I won't be holding my breath for any balanced or realistic assessment of model weaknesses and predictive uncertainties from the IPCC. Though thankfully it does appear that the general population is getting wise to the hyperbole, and it is dropping off the radar as a significant political issue.

The instrument record of the last 150 years most definitely does not back CAGW driven heat waves. Hansen is (as usual) full of it. Check out the below graph of record US temperatures by decade:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01761679905d970c-pi
intersting how the 1930's dominates temperature records, and yet on average is a bit cooler than today.