A better idea would be to give everyone breaks on the sillier stuff. I.e., repeal the sillier stuff.

We all know that Musk cares a lot about the environment. That's why he's Chairman of Solar City. So Musk's battery factory is not going to be a big polluter, and any regulatory regime that drives said factory out of the state is unreasonable.

California should make its regulations reasonable for all enterprises -- large and small, famous and obscure. Not only would that preclude accusations of "selling out"; it's just the right thing to do.

Your link contains an interesting graph, showing that CA unemployment has consistently been higher than the national average, since about 1990.

Imagine how much larger the surplus would be -- or how much lower tax rates could be, without impacting services provided by state government -- if CA unemployment had been consistently lower than the national average!

Reasonable regulations on fab plants are welcome. But if the parent post is correct (waste water from semiconductor plants must be cleaner than tap water), that's simply not reasonable. That would not be a case where the rest of the world ought to emulate California's unreasonable standards; it's a case where California ought to become reasonable.

I've been inside NORAD, and it was not as high-tech as portrayed in War Games (1983).

Word

the warzone is so small and densely packed with civilians that there is nowhere that Hamas can attack from that isn't near, more or less, civilian installations

Which is another very good reason why Hamas shouldn't attack Israel. (In addition to, you know, basic human decency.) Your fixation on the idea that Hamas should attack Israel, in spite of the certain misery this will bring upon its own citizens, reveals unsavory things about you.

Israel attacks anything, anytime, anywhere and doesn't care about the civilian casualties caused

You make that assertion with a straigt face even though you know Israel has dropped leaflets begging civilians to get away from military targets. Congratulations, you have just utterly ruined your credibility. (The men whom Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation" tried to maximize civilian casualties, and this leaflet campaign tries to minimize civilian casualties. A little application of logic would lead Brokaw to say the IDF is "greater than the Greatest Generation," but I won't hold my breath for that.)

You have the right to make the analogy less realistic, but I don't see how that's helpful. The reality is not a mere suspicion of rockets in a school, it's actual rockets in at least three actual schools:

(Reuters) - UNRWA said it found a rocket cache in one of its central Gaza schools on Tuesday, the third such incident.

That's a very bad analogy. It has led you to the wrong conclusion, as bad analogies often do.

A far better analogy: I live in Bellingham, Washington, and my government, the United States Government, stockpiles rockets in my child's school and starts firing them over the border into residential areas of Vancouver, British Columbia, for no good reason. To try to stop the rocket attacks, Canada launches some airstrikes on Bellingham.

In this situation, I would be completely ashamed of my government, the United States Government, and I would be rooting for the Canadians, because I'm a civilized person.

And then if the airstrikes failed to stop the rocket attacks, and Canadian troops arrived in Bellingham, you bet I'd help them find the jerks launching the rockets.

And if the Canadians dropped leaflets begging civilians to evacuate the school before they bomb the rocket-launching site, I would have even more admiration for the Canadians, because that type of concern for civilians is nearly unprecedented in warfare.

And if American leaders called those evacuation warning leaflets "psychological warfare, and urged people to stay put," my disgust for my own government would multiply.

And if my child was killed because a school administrator obeyed the duplicitous order to stay put, would I suddenly lose my grip on logic and rationality, and lash out at the Canadians? Nope. My anger would be entirely directed at the Americans who instigated this conflict.

If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. in 1952 spent 2.5x as much as Israel does today: http://i.cfr.org/content/publi...

And in 1952, the threat of the U.S. homeland being invaded was much less than the current threat of the Israeli homeland being invaded.

Oh, I didn't realize that Israel was systematically exterminating other ethnic groups, by the millions, in gas chambers. Thanks for enlightening me.

Yes, pork-barrel spending is a huge problem; see http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

But you can't say that money spent on SpaceX contracts won't go to SpaceX. By definition, it does.

they have so-far demonstrated no ability to either reliably launch on-schedule, or leaunch at any sustained rate

The amazing thing about SpaceX is that even while their costs are at least an order of magnitude lower than ULA's, their development cycle is far more rapid and the capabilities they are adding are far more advanced. Fixing the things you are complaining about, if indeed they are a genuine problem, seems trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.