It would be trivial for developed countries to write laws that prevent the import or manufacture of products made from raw materials that came from "dirty" factories.

Trivial?

It would work for about 3 seconds - if that long - because the instant there were even a hint of that, then there would spring up a slew of intermediate companies whose on-paper existence is as intermediates in the import-export business from one country to another (if you've ever had to import or export equipment or raw materials, then you'll know this is a very plausible excuse), but in reality who provide multiple layers of plausible deniability between ultimate consumers and ultimate suppliers.

Because, for all the hand-wringing and public pronouncements, a sufficient number of people in the consuming societies are only concerned with the lowest immediate price. They will get pandered to, and the entire supply chain will become contaminated as a result.

If you really think it's "trivial", list the steps. Start with regulations for your country, then for the next bigger economy, and the next, until you've got to the biggest economy (China, isn't it? Or is it India yet?).

... I call an ore deposit in formation.

Give it a couple of million years and people will be clamouring for this stuff. (For values of "people" including small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri and other galactic residents.)

I'm surprise no Keynesian has pointed with admiration to WW 1 trench warfare, which used up lots of military materiel. With better management by the belligerent nations, it could have lasted decades.

Considering that significant chunks of the current problems in the world are consequences of the mismanagement of the Middle East by the "victorious powers" in the aftermath of World War 1, you could make a fair argument that WW1 is continuing to this day.

I note that the Ottoman Empire didn't have any significant problems in the region in the preceding centuries. But hey, they're darkies, and non-Xtians with it, so they can't have been doing anything right.

To my knowledge the U.S. hasn't done anything like that to a British company, with maybe the exception of BP after they blackened the Gulf of Mexico.

BP were operating in concert with an American company (Anadarko, 25% owner). While being a minor partner means that Anadarko wouldn't have had full control of the operations of drilling (and completing) the well, they would certainly have had substantial input in the planning phases, and at non-urgent operational decisions during the drilling of the well. While they won't have shared full culpability for the blowout, they at the very least did not object ot the bad choices made which lead to the blowout.

Yes, they brought out of the disaster afterwards, but their hands were by no means clean. Nor would Halliburton's, not Transocean's, even if BP take the majority of the blame.

I must have put too much sugar in my coffee, I missed the subtle taste of irony

No, you missed the taste of irony because someone put too much (several percent of chromium and vanadium in the steel of your coffee spoon, rendering it something like stainless steel instead of plain old mild steel (it was very unlikely to ever have been pure iron - very little even vaguely pure iron is made these decades).

by MightyMartian

The link is between nutrition and brain development, [...] I can't imagine why anyone would see this as controversial.

by ahodgson

Probably because there just aren't all that many people in the 1st world who are truly going hungry.

The link cited was between "poor nutrition" and "brain development", not between "going hungry" and "brain development". I can feed you a kilo and a half of rice a day and watch you die of malnutrition. It may take a while, but you'll never be particularly hungry while you're dying of malnutrition.

Construction has always been dangerous. That doesn't mean that the number of deaths is acceptable.

We actually had to give up an hour of our off-shift time last Sunday, after the safety meeting, to go through some corporate "culture building exercise" (something I normally associate with home brewing) about how in the past the death rate was reckoned at about one corpse per million dollars spent, but by the investment of 0.13 million dollars (a leg or so), the guy who constructed the Golden Gate Bridge saved 26 lives on his 35 million dollar project, and got something like a 800% ROI from his spending on safety.

Working in construction (of oil wells, but it's construction nonetheless), it is just possible that I take a slightly different view of "that makes it different how?" Those people you dismiss with a "how?" are friends and colleagues of mine. We're on a half-billion dollar work site trying to construct things that your (and my) civilisation is going to be needing and using in the coming decade. I'm probably a damned sight closer than you are to the man who'll be earning his dollar "spraying plastic onto the roof" of your Moonbase. It won't be constructed by geeks steering robots by telepresence. At the very least, speed-of-light means that it'll be constructed by telepresence from within Moonbase-0.5. Bollock-frying radiation, leaky vacuum toilet and monotonous dehydrated diet and all.

And on that subject - our internet connection dies for the 4th time in a half hour. What was I saying about telepresence?

Gilbert may have proposed that lunar craters were impact structures a long time ago (I'm tired of fighting with 20-minute page loads so I'm not going to search for it. I wish the crane operator hadn't smacked the aft satellite dish.), but that doesn't mean that his explanation was accepted at the time. As I said, the strong consensus at the time that Heinlein was writing (that book) was the lunar craters were volcanic phenomena. About 1962-63, an aspirant astronaut and field geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, started publishing and presenting papers arguing parallels between the structure of the small number of known terrestrial impact craters and the structures visible on the moon, and proposing that the large majority of the craters on the Moon were of an impact origin, not an eruptive origin. Through the 1960s Shoemaker argued the position, was ruled out of the astronaut corps for health reasons, and successfully changed the expectation until the Russian landers of the mid-60s shifted the balance of evidence appreciably in the favour of the impact origin hypothesis for craters.

Actually that's how science is meant to work. It wasn't as dramatic a paradigm change as the contemporaneous development and acceptance of plate tectonics and so was probably overshadowed in the popular press, but that is what went on.

Meanwhile, absolutely no-one has ever argued that all craters on the Moon are of impact origin and none of volcanic origin, in the same way that no-one has (TTBOMK, and I am actually a geologist) seriously argued that all terrestrial craters are of volcanic origin and none of impact origin. We know of craters and other structures on both bodies, of both origins.

Lunar rilles were proposed as possible lava tube collapses so long ago that I'd have to seriously look it up to find an alternative proposal (and that bloody crane operator!).

more recent papers on fairly RECENT volcanic flows (as early as 100 million years ago).

In the 1950s a variety of people (including the selenographer Patrick Moore, famous as a BBC astronomy broadcaster from the same period) were continuing to report "Transient Lunar Phenomena" from a number of places, and proposing that they might be the product of volcanic fumarole activity, or something similar. i.e. contemporaneous volcanic activity. Certainly not impossible, though it's not clear that Moore had really made his case. But he did present a good argument.

All that said, the overwhelming majority of the Moon's volcanic activity took place in the "maria-forming" period of about 4 gigayears ago (maybe as recently as 3.7 gigayears ago), and the structures formed then have only been lightly modified since. That is when the structures we recognise as "the Man in the Moon" were formed.

Check out volcanic glass recovered by Apollo 17

You seem to be under the misapprehension that volcanic glasses are of necessity "recent" (if not "Recent", or Holocene). This is incorrect. It is true that, under terrestrial conditions, volcanic glasses do devitrify fairly rapidly (I've sketched the thin sections ; I've actually used devitrification of (non-volcanic) glasses to estimate pressure-temperature conditions of a geological event as part of my mapping-derived Honours thesis. But I'll stress again that this is under terrestrial conditions. If you have a glass-forming melt which is very low in water, (and other volatiles, but principally water) then the devitrification rate goes through the floor as the mobility of ions in the glass drops considerably. By the time you're down to the millimolar (IIRC - marginal internet here, as I said above) water concentrations in your magma, it's perfectly possible to have glasses persist for billions of years. Your Apollo volcanic glasses could easily be Archean or Hadean in age (Before 2.5 gigayears ago, or 4.0 Gyr respectively : I've got Gradstein & Ogg's 2013 chart taped to the wall of the office.), and still be vitreous.

Heinlein's writing in the 1960s was based on the (incorrectly) accepted science of the 1950s. Which is actually quite up-to-date for a SF writer, and doesn't distract from the pleasure I get from reading the stories in the slightest. But people here do have a depressing tendency to get SF (and other F) confused with fact.

Neither does drilling a hole in the ground involve any new technology principles. Tell that to the widows of the Macondo 11. Or the Piper Alpha 167. Or the North Cormorant 13. Or the Shetland 45. Or the more recent Shetland 4. Or, for that matter, yesterday's Russian 54.

Moonbase-1 will be built on blood (boiled to a powder) and bones.

The reason dark matter was hypothesized in the first place was because of the behavior of colliding galaxies,

Not by a large part of a century. (Expressing it as a fraction of a century to get the magnitude of the difference across. I feel a bit wobbly and I'm not yet a half century old.)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, while some palaver called world war two was happening in some parts of the world, astronomers were mapping the rotational velocity profile of rotating galaxies. to their surprise they found that the velocity profile did not match the distribution of luminous matter (stars), but had to incorporate a significant quantity of non-luminous ("dark") matter in addition to the luminous matter. And thus was born the mystery of the dark matter. Constraints on the properties of the dark matter have tightened, slowly, over the decades, and estimates of it's quantity have increased (at first) then stabilised at around 4 times the gravitating mass of the luminous matter (note : I'm not tying it's gravitating and inertial mass to each other - we don't know anything where the two aren't exactly equal to depressing precision, but I'm not aware of any good reasons why that is the case).

It's not a new problem. It's a much older problem than our ability to clearly image colliding galaxies.

From orbit.

With nukes.

Rumour is that a Hubble-type error had happened on at least one nadir-directed telescope, and that opticians who were aware of those problems had watched the public design of the Hubble with increasing unease then downright horror as they saw the error become increasingly likely.

But because they were on classified work, they couldn't say a thing.

Our system protects people by instilling fear of consequences. That works very well for most crimes and criminals, but not if the criminal believes he has the skills to avoid being caught (the beltway sniper) or is intent on committing blue suicide (Adam Lanza).

Agreed on the fear of consequences. But I think you're looking at the wrong set of consequences. The most likely way this data would be used would be for the doxxed target to be observed, and when he (or she - there may be female soldiers on the list, I don't have a reliable enough connection to bother looking) goes off to the daily grind in civvy street ... a while later Mr Wil'I'am Jihaddy turns up with a Pizza Hut uniform and box and shoots the soldier's family and children dead. An then probably gets away because no-one noticed.

The fear is of having your family killed as a consequence of signing up for the military. And yes, it is intended to inflict terror on the target population (anyone in the military, or who is family to anyone in the military).

Hate them or fear them, but you've got to admit that Al Quaeda and ISIS have got some pretty effective (note : that word does not imply "nice", or anything like it) tactical planners.

He didn't say the it should be illegal for him to offend you ; he said that you have no right to not be offended.

And you don't.

Considering these are a real and verified occurrence and considering the considerable amount of energy they release as has been recorded,

Have you actually looked at the magnitudes of moonquakes? Apart from the sporadic ones caused by impacts, they're not powerful quakes, and they're deep below the surface, which add up to low levels of ground shaking. Which is what you are really concerned with.

The typical shaking caused by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake (on the moment-magnitude scale, since the Richter scale has been deprecated since the equipment went out of service in the 1940s and 50s) would be in the region of V - VI on the Modified Mercalli Scale :

V. Moderate Felt by nearly everyone; many awakened. Some dishes, windows broken. Unstable objects overturned. Pendulum clocks may stop.
VI. Strong Felt by all, many frightened. Some heavy furniture moved; a few instances of fallen plaster. Damage slight.

You're worrying about a pretty small hazard.