It's a marginal cost. Reducing the number of people can reach a regime where there is a positive value to people once again.

It is we who choose to make human life valuable or not. And there are easy to conceive global collapse scenarios such as a global famine where human life has negative value - each additional mouth to feed takes food from everyone else and causes more suffering.

My view on this is that the economic mechanisms of trade and private ownership of capital have done far more to make human life valuable than any system of ethics. One can say the same of technology progress, particularly in agriculture, transportation, and labor saving devices.

You went way off the rails here. NSA has already done a lot to undermine corrupt and non-corrupt US corporations and nothing has been done about it. They still get their usual captive revenue stream (which let us note, will flow no matter how unhappy the business world gets about it). Just because large corporations are more useful to the US intelligence community than you are doesn't mean that they're in charge. It just means that the large corporation has some opportunity for profit as long as they continue to play ball. The tail, corporations aren't wagging this dog.

Do you really believe that curbing the power of businesses is going to result in the NSA spying less or hinder the other power grabs that the US federal government routinely engages in?

One of the huge things routinely missed in this topic is that business versus government is the huge informal division of power in democracies throughout the world. Making businesses absolutely subservient to government is another step towards tyranny. Sure, I don't think it's a good idea to let businesses rule our societies. But neither do I think it's a good idea to cripple them so much that they can't help us resist tyranny from the government side.

I can't help but think that you are an unwitting shill for a statist ideology which seeks to knock out the obstacles to rule.

They provide deterrence to certain behavior by providing negative consequences.

It can't. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Very well. There's still violation of a couple of department rules concerning preservation of emails and the scheme may also illegally obstruct FOIA requests.

No, it was a military action not a law enforcement action. And kidnapping by a military force waives a lot of human rights both in the document you mention and in the Geneva Conventions.

Pakistan doesn't have the capability to enforce that law. What's plan B?

Larry Niven used Uranus and nuclear fusion of its atmosphere to move the Earth, via a series of flybys in the story, "A World Out of Time". I personally was thinking more loops of asteroids doing flybys of Earth and Jupiter, slowly transferring velocity from Jupiter to Earth and various other planets and bodies of interest. And yes, while the occasional impact by a misplaced asteroid would suck, getting baked by the Sun probably would suck a lot more.

Move to a star that isn't burning out at that time. In five billion years, you can move the Earth as well not just yourself. Solved that problem.

I'll meet your erroneous generalization with a real world counterexample.

Even in a world of strictly monetary values, very few own copyrights that held their value so long after creation. It's not everyone's monetary value that's being preserved, but rather that of a few. Limited duration IP has value even in the world of pure monetary value.

That's the power of a good ethics system. That it holds even with widely divergent moral viewpoints.

What a dumb thing to say.

Not true. We need to remember that there are more than 100 known caldera eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot as it migrated from eastern Oregon to its present location over the past 16 million years. None of these eruptions, including the big eruption of 2 million years ago, are tied to known global extinction events over this time period.

Sure, if you were a plant or animal with a limited range too close to one of these supervolcano eruptions, you were out of luck, but we don't see global impact over the known lifespan of the hotspot. If it were remotely as bad as you claim, we would have seen some obvious signs of it in the fossil record, which we don't.

Further, why would the Earth's atmosphere become unbreathable? Sure, there's a lot of ash and gases released in a supervolcano eruption. But the Earth's atmosphere is much bigger than that and most of those gases, aside from carbon dioxide and other relatively insoluble gases, would wash out in rain. The remnant that remains in the stratosphere wouldn't have much effect precisely because of how little there is in the stratosphere.

Enough lead time and you can prep for anything nature throws at you other than universe-scale problems like the heat death of the universe. Maybe even that can be managed successfully though I'm not feeling up to it.

or, kill three birds with one stone.

use this geothermal energy to distill seawater to end coastal drought