Only tax based on use (i.e. Sales Tax)

A national sales tax is arguably unconstitutional.

Historically, that sort of thing has been found perfectly fine at times, and absolutely wrong at other times. Just depends on how the Supremes of the day read the law.

Which means it would probably require another Amendment to make it legal.

Your assumption that the unelected bureaucrats in an African kleptocracy are more responsive to the needs of millions of people (who aren't related to them) is...amusing.

And I don't care how justified you think you are....

Dont know about the fallout though, that'd probably be pretty nasty.

If you're wrecking cities, you go for airbursts, which result in (relatively) low fallout.

If you're doing a counterforce strike (attacking their nuclear missiles), then you go for groundbursts, which result in quite a lot of fallout.

Slashdot hasn't ever solved any problems in a real sense.

I'm curious - whyever do you think slashdot is supposed to solve problems? In a real sense or otherwise.

Personally, I come here to get a feel for how people think about various topics that may be of interest to me. I've never expected to solve anything by being here, anymore than I expect voting to solve anything...

But if we're supposed to be here to "solve problems in a real sense", then I'm wasting my time. And so is everyone else....

Based on current trends and short of a major breakthru there is no way someone born today will live to be 120-130.

Intriguing theory you have there. How does it account for Gertrude Weaver (born 1898, died - well, she'll die one of these years, but hasn't yet)?

Note that she's not unique in living in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. If someone can manage to reach 116+ when more than half her life went by with medical care no better than what was available when I was a kid....

To get a sense of the energies involved: if you're a light-year way from a supernova, the neutrinos will kill you, even though they barely interact with matter at all. One light year is pretty close, but the gamma ray flux is comparable to the neutrino flux and forty orders of magnitude more deadly,

The numbers you assign here do not match reality, since if neutrinos from a supernova can kill you at 1ly, and gammas from same are 40 orders of magnitude more deadly, then a single supernova would sterilize the universe.

Given that we can SEE supernovae, they obviously haven't sterilized US, much less the entire Universe.

Just so.

I'm hoping to be him in 30 years....

My parents are both 75+.

And still doing fine.

Yeah, they've slowed down a bit, and have some aches and pains they didn't have 20 years ago. But they still walk the dog a mile or so each day. And Dad still mows five acres (give or take, the treeline could have moved some over the last decade) of his yard weekly.

I think this bioethicist bozo is forgetting that "75" is life expectancy at birth. If you make it to 75 today, odds are good you've got another decade or two in you*. And if you're born today, by the time you're 75, you should have four or five decades left*.

* barring unpredictable things like terminal cancer, of course.

Note that my wife's parents were both born in the early 1920's, and both lasted into this decade. Arguably, they'd have both been better off to have died a year earlier than they did (in both cases, their last year was pretty bad), but that still meant 85+ good years starting from before the Great Depression....

the green-white striped rope that connects the beam to the hull - you say mainsheet*.,
* if my English sailing jargon is correct - not a native speaker

I'm impressed. Only thing you got wrong was "beam" (you meant "boom"). So, what's your native language? Or native as far as sailing goes, anyways?

so some parts have now droughts for years,

I'm assuming you're referring to Oklahoma in the 1930's, right?

What, there have been "droughts for years" before now? How can that be???

That's why you carry spare parts with you. And why you "design for maintenance". And why you do extensive development and testing beforehand to figure out what parts are most likely to break. And design parts to be reliable. And reinforce the parts where you can. And...

And after you do all of those things, sometimes something breaks that you don't have a spare for. And when the nearest replacement part is nine months away, you're screwed.

Being able to make spare parts is a GOOD thing. And the fewer things you have to carry along to make spare parts with, the better.

Its the equivalent of adding another $200 billion to your $17.6 trillion credit card balance every year

The Deficit has not been as low as $200B since 1985. It hasn't been as low as $500B since 2008.

And isn't expected to be as low as $500B again....

3D printing is one of those things that will be pretty much essential for successful manned missions farther away than the moon.

Being unable to fix broken things will be fatal if the nearest spare parts are nine months away, and a 3D printer or two can, conceivably, replace a great many individual spare parts....