Gone forever until they rebuild the hotels. I wager inside of twenty years, the pilgrims on Hajj would be just as numerous as they are now. Functionally, there's no real difference between having a few meteorites or a glass lake at the spot.

And they were right. Once again, the victims get blamed because the city drove them away. All these companies, all those workers, and all that productivity and investment would have stayed if the environment were far less toxic.

I also find it odd how irrelevant the "myths" of your story are to the original poster's assertion. For example, "Detroit will be saved by bankruptcy" is just so totally on topic.

OTOH, it's far easier to cultivate bacteria than viruses. For example, Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague can be grown in a modified agar gel with no need for host cells of any kind. And it's pretty easy to breed in resistance to anti-biotics by exposing the bacteria over many generations to all the anti-biotics in use at doses where a small part of the colony survives.

Whether that can be done over a short enough time that interests an organization like ISIS, is unknown to me. But it wouldn't take much effort IMHO to make a bubonic plague variant that is at least highly resistant to anti-biotics. Making it also highly infectious and lethal is another problem. That might require substantially more testing and breeding of the bacteria in host animals like rats or mice or something closer to us, like monkeys or people themselves.

Amazing how putting this on the front of your list just discredited your entire post instantly. Public labor unions are a particularly nasty parasite. The union in question, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union got overly greedy and demonstrated an epic level of hubris.

The results were not so good. Not only did they get burned permanently (the strikers weren't only fired, but banned permanently from employment with the Federal government), but they also set back all labor unions by swinging public opinion massively against labor unions in general.

Well, there's not much evidence that they got out dead either. It's not like anyone's counted the bodies to make sure we got everyone.

If it's not bending metal, it's not pretty thorough. And a big problem with the study that you mention is that it is written by people with a huge conflict of interest to present solar and wind power as being sufficiently reliable that they can drive most of an electric grid without a lot of expensive infrastructure like energy storage and transmission.

I thought we would need storage permanently in a situation where we're relying heavily (80%) on variable sources of power.

The "smart grid" just throws the cost of energy storage and brown outs (when supply can't meet demand) onto the end user.

So we make it more efficient to buy a lawnmower at 3am by making it a moral wrong? I'm not seeing the connection here.

Executive orders are merely relatively formal written orders from the person in charge of the executive branch, the US President. If you do away with executive orders then no one is in charge and the only meager control you have is via Congress's power of the purse.

Where's the evidence? If the Greys land in front of the White House in a flying saucer and ask to be taken to our leader, then I would allow that there's something to this UFO stuff. Who knows? You might too.

It doesn't seem that way to me. I think a lot of people here on Slashdot have figured out the life-work balance that's good for them in their current situation. Maybe we could do an "Ask Slashdot" thing here.

You know I'm not speaking of UFOs in the literal definition, but of the social phenomenon. And who knows, there may actually be aliens, humans from the future, beings from alternate dimensions, or whatever. That doesn't mean much since we don't have actual evidence of these guys, but rather a huge load of hysterical tales and remarkably poor and often doctored photographic evidence.

So what about that "gets" you? Supernatural by definition needs not be observable. What gets me are the natural conclusions supposedly justified by this supernatural being, like that God considers homosexual behavior to be a sin (not to mention the concept of sin in the first place) or that humanity can continue to multiply exponentially because God will end the game before too many people become a serious problem.

I doubt it. For example, there's UFOs and New Age crystal healing.

Any reason why shopping for a lawnmower at 3am somehow is a moral quandary? What is so magical about that time that we should keep people from shopping for lawnmowers?

Real life is way ahead of you. The reason most workers don't have "work-life balance" is because they don't want it as much as they want other things.