So? The Netherlands are a tax haven for postal-box firms from all over the world. These firms have no business in the Netherlands, except for avoiding to pay tax. They don't care what their name says in Dutch.

Storing CO2 does not help anyone, and only does harm. The problem is not that there is too much CO2 in the world, the problem is that we convert way too much carbon and oxygen into CO2. Period. If we store all the CO2, we deprive ourselves from oxygen, because we keep on converting it! The Biosphere II experiment has clearly demonstrated that (by using concrete, which, by itself, stores CO2). Storing CO2 is just one more environmental crime to cover up another.

Please do not mix economy with finance. They are hardly related anymore.

So:

1. 1 - The market will solve it!
2. 2 - The money goes to a newly formed group of big companies in bed with a bank (because this allows the bank to create money out of thin air). Off course, the bank demands "securities" (for what?) and society is heavily taxed.
3. 3 - Problem solved. At least, on the low-traffic pacific island where the "investors" now live.

To bear the blame if things go wrong. Oh, you want quality? Sorry, in the modern everything-must-be-done-yesterday-at-no-cost IT sector, quality is usually not an option. There's no market for quality.

They left a message: "So long, and thanks for all the plastic"

Well, they did not send an X-Do-Not-Spy HTTP header, so they obviously agreed.

That's the problem of politics today: when so much money is at stake, it is plainly impossible to put that money where your mouth is. It literally doesn't fit...

"You have just been erased."

They don't. They operate at different levels, so they may be listening to an extra "backup" data flow. I rather think they use each other. It is too convenient for "intelligence" agencies not to tap into the already existing camera and audio feed from another spy.

There, fixed that for you. By the way, that is a good thing for an actual economy, as it is stopped from drowning, draught, etc. Some of these fairy tales are already fairly convincing.

Indeed. It was probably the mortgage bubble that was responsible for this.

Well, you may laugh about that, but in the past that is exactly what happened, and we try to cover it up now in scientific circles.

It took a religious liberation to stop people to adhere to ancient texts that could only be interpreted by priests. People started looking for the Creator by investigating the creation. This religiously motivated search has added tremendously to science. For example, the Frederik Ruysch collection in the KunstKammer in St Petersburg is from that period.

Alas, we like to think that science is "neutral", just observing and deducing. Any other motives are left out of the educational system. So we learn that Newton saw an apple falling and wrote his laws. And then deduce Kepler's laws from them. It actually was the other way around: Kepler thought that the creation had to be "harmonic" and therefore brilliantly simple. So planet movements could not be governed by more than second order formulas. That (and being brilliant in measurement of position of celestial bodies) led him to discover his laws, from which Newton derived his.

Now I am not in favour or against religion, but I am very much against rewriting history. Especially in science. Some problems are much easier solved with one school of thought than with another. For example, Pythogoras' theorem is easily solved with greek math, and very hard with arabic math. Even schools of thought that you might considered "flawed" can accidentally yield insightful results. Suppressing any school of thought in science is a crime to science itself, and making even making science into a form of religion (with believers in "neutrality").

At least, thanks to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, we know that Earth is a Vega. Or has that theory been busted as well?