Time and health are finite commodities and you never know when they'll be taken off you.

Sure, but if the fisherman could afford health care, he would be far less likely to die if he accidentally hooked himself and got an infected wound. If he had cash reserves, he wouldn't need to worry too much if he broke his arm and couldn't cast for a month or two, or if his boat were destroyed in a hurricane. If he were well off, he wouldn't have to worry too much if the fisheries collapsed due to his or his neighbors' unsustainable practices or the pollution from nearby farms and factories. If he died of skin cancer from sitting in the sun all day, his wife wouldn't have to go and work the dockyards to keep herself and the children from starving to death.

For most of history, personal wealth was not just a way to attain power for its own sake, but a way to manage risk in an uncertain, dangerous world. Recently, some of the more affluent nations have implemented safety nets that make this less necessary, but it is quite naive to think that an idyllic life of poverty generally works out well.

It has been estimated that the amount of resources it would take to reduce CO2 emissions significantly over 100 years, is enough to completely solve the world hunger problem, in the same amount of time, even taking into account predicted population growth.

I'd be interested in seeing your proposed strategy for completely solving the world hunger problem, together with a rigorous demonstration of cost-optimality within reasonable error bounds. It has been estimated that the likelihood that you (or your favorite mouthpiece like Lomborg) made up a bunch of numbers to fit a pre-specified agenda is very close to 100%.

The referenced article mentions the project name and claimed that it was a technical success. They didn't bother to mention several technical failures, including unexpected releases of radioactive dust (some of which drifted into Canada, in contravention of a treaty), and a general inability to predict the outcome of their explosions. One of their experiments attempted to create a hill, but ended up with a crater. Another experiment did the opposite. They tried to connect two natural gas cavities, and not only failed to do so, but made the gas too radioactive for safe use. This is only a success in some weak sense, where we can move the goalposts to some relatively trivial problem, like that of making explosions underground. See also: this article.

Teller's vision of reshaping the crust to our will has a strong appeal, especially since conventional earth-moving is still expensive 50 years later. Geological structures still strongly affect the development of cities and the economy of nations, and the idea that many of the problems that arise from this can be made to disappear makes this project very compelling to those who don't consider the unexpected costs. Before we can do this well, I think our technology needs to progress to the point where we can not only produce large amounts of energy such as that produced by a fusion bomb, but also direct it in a controlled way, and we still seem to be relatively far from that goal.

The strikes against Oppenheimer were relatively minor (seriously, age??), and Gladwell, as usual, neglected to mention contravening evidence, presumably in an attempt to reinforce the chosen narrative. Oppenheimer's contributions to quantum mechanics and nuclear physics even at that time were absolutely huge - he wasn't some average theoretical physicist. He was well-known to have unusually keen perspective on problem-solving, and was quick to grasp the import aspects of new ideas. It seems kind of incongruous to point to some lack of administrative experience but downplay his people skills as just a tool he uses to glad-hand the power structure into giving him a job. The people skills he had were exactly what they wanted.

Only a fool would argue with the basic logic of the Laffer Curve. The only puny argument would be that we are on the good side of it, but history rebuts that so completely even The One didn't attempt it.

I guess I'm that fool - how sad. The main problem with the Laffer curve is a type mismatch. The space of possible tax policies is a high-dimensional system, and expected tax revenues over time depends not only on these policies, but also on additional inputs like trade policy, currency management, and vagaries of the business cycle. When Laffer attempts to distill a complex system to a single curve like this, he communicates essentially zero useful information. However, one can take something resembling a partial derivative, and ask whether cutting income tax by, e.g., 10 percent, while holding most other variables steady is expected to yield revenue growth. Fortunately, the Congressional Budget Office studied exactly that (pdf warning) in 2003, and found that you're wrong. Also, the US treasury studied historical effects (another pdf, sorry) of tax cuts and raises, and found that contrary to your assertions, the Reagan and Bush tax cuts were highly revenue-negative. The revenue act of 1964 was signed by Johnson, not Kennedy, and was also revenue-negative.

Where are your sources? Do you have any data to back up your claims?

I am 100% certain that the NSA has run this program past their lawyers and 99.9% certain that it has received congressional approval.

This sounds like a load of hot air. What unimpeachable information source gives you this sort of confidence? It is unrealistic unless you have personally seen the documentation signed. We already have plenty of evidence of the Bush administration's malfeasance in other departments. Why do you think the NSA is distinguished in this regard? If anything, their lack of public accountability makes them more corruptible, not less so.

As a side note, when I was a freshman, many of my classmates did not find the TEAL lectures to be terribly effective in teaching the material.

This seems to be the big paradox of TEAL. From what I've heard among the faculty, it seems to be quite unpopular among students, but by every metric of student progress available, they actually learn substantially more than in traditional lecture classes. My own experience as an undergrad at Caltech suggests that many of the lecture classes were delivered in a way that most benefited the top 5-10 percent of the class, and a large fraction of the students were just trying to survive through the term. I think the interactivity of TEAL is good for letting the teacher know what parts are worth repeating for most people, although one might reasonably argue that the top 5-10 percent of the class is then not getting as much information as they could potentially receive. Other commenters have remarked that under a lecture regime a student could in theory do the in-class exercises at home, but this requires nontrivial initiative, and the interactive classroom more or less removes this variable.

Let me give you my take on mass. Mass is: - a point from which gravitational forces are exerted

This does not agree with the definitions of modern physics. Mass is an inertial property, i.e., resistance to acceleration under action of a force.

Light doesn't exert gravitational force on anything. It has no coordinates from which one would calculate the exertion of gravitational forces on other objects. Ergo, light has no mass.

This isn't true. Light does exert gravitational force on nearby things, because it contributes to the stress-energy tensor in general relativity. However, that force is very small, so you don't feel it in everyday situations. In the standard model of particle physics, light has no mass because the photon doesn't interact with the Higgs field.