Private ownership of natural monopolies is a threat to my security.

There is more competition for backbone services, not to mention the threat of Google's massive amounts of dark fiber.

From your first link :

"There are aberrations, of course. Americans are relatively productive and work relatively long hours. And within the American labour force hours worked among the rich have risen while those of the poor have fallen. But a paper released yesterday by the New Zealand Productivity Commission showed that even if you work more hours, you do not necessarily work better. The paper made envious comparisons between Kiwis and Australians—the latter group has more efficient workers."

You need bioreactors for that (ocean water is not very nutritious). PV + power to gas seems to me the best approach.

Plenty of ocean though ...

For a while it was a middle class game, for a middle class with lots of leisure time. The current remaining middle class works far more than the old middle class.

Golf is returning to being an upper class game ... but that means much less players and thus less courses.

Be sure to hold your breath waiting for that too happen.

Please do tell the Australians how to easily desalinate their farmland, they're struggling with it a bit.

If those factories were still in the US they'd use far more automation and employ only a fraction of the labour they use overseas and used in the past in the US.

Maybe, but it would only be a stopgap solution even if it worked. In the end there are REAL resource (ie, not money, not even gold) limits to consumption, there are no limits to labor productivity.

Not looney tunes, she's just letting herself be taken in by the comfortable reality distortion bubble her backers create for her ... it's much easier to tell yourself all those people supporting you can't be wrong than to admit the mistake to yourself and others.

Not very nice, but also not crazy.

The ear is nonlinear, so it can downmix ... not that it's a relevant effect for perceiving music, but just saying.

Didn't Slashdot have another story recently about how pop-science was in love with trying to find power laws in everything? (And producing nothing of value along the way.)

It's a parable, also it's literal truth.

Is there no stegonagraphy chat app using instagram yet? Obsessive selfie taking seems like a good cover.