I'd be much more sympathetic to the "quarantine 'em all" approach if I had some evidence that quarantine-on-symptoms didn't work.

3D printing will remain one of the most expensive ways to fabricate things for a long time. For anything mass-produced (like most toys) it will be much less expensive to have them injection-molded and sold in stores.

The real interesting thing is the ability to produce parts fast and cheap enough in quantities of one. Instant repair parts are a possibility, for machines and people.

We won't in general be printing toys or building houses that way (although people have done some work on printing houses). We won't be able to control food texture with current technology. We may well find that 3D-printing food is a considerably worse idea than buying food in the grocery store.

Frankly, I never was able to afford any hard drive less than 20MB. They were cheap enough that I could get one.

You have a much different view of the scientific community than I developed. Most scientists appear to be rather apolitical. You appear to be talking about a relatively small number of scientists, and I suspect the scare quotes you used with respect to GMO alarmism are entirely appropriate.

So, if you're a hard-working scientist, just trying to get a grant, do some research, make the world a slightly more knowledgeable place, that sort of thing, what are you supposed to do? Turn into a political activist of some sort because a few other scientists have?

We can do some fairly simple things to slow down the CO2 increase, and we aren't really at crisis levels yet. Nuclear, solar, and wind power, and electric cars, could give us extra time to come up with other ideas and develop better technology.

I have no particular objection to the mindless fanatics screwing themselves over. I do have an objection to them hurting the planet I happen to live on.

The scientific method of solving the political problems would be mass mind control. Are you cool with that?

At this point, we should be able to transition to non-fossil-fuel sources over the next several decades. We can build more nuclear reactors, solar panels are getting cheaper and more efficient, etc.

This time, humans are around. We're a pretty good extinction event all by ourselves, even without climate change.

There are doubtless honest global warming skeptics. That's fine.

There's also people who are convinced it isn't happening, for some stupid reason or another, and are so sure that they are willing to make mass accusations of gross fraud because that's what their fanatically held position requires. Those are the ones that some of us compare (quite accurately) to spiteful children.

There's scientists, and then there's activists. Scientists aren't a subset of activists. You may not like the activists, but that doesn't reflect on most of the scientists. Since the appropriate scientists are almost all convinced that global warming is continuing and it's going to be bad, that can't be due to political activism.

Can you point me to any evidence that people have fudged data on a large scale? Or are you reasoning that global warming isn't happening, so any data showing otherwise must be fudged, so the scientists must have fudged it?

Not quite true. The economy can get into a state where spending on unproductive stuff can stimulate enough activity to make it stay picked up.

The obvious example is WWII, when the US spent gobs and gobs of money on training and supporting people to go kill other people and break their stuff, and giving them warships and warplanes and tanks that are pretty much useless for anything except killing people and breaking stuff. This got the US out of the Depression. There were quite a few people afraid that the Depression would return when the war was over, but that didn't happen.

Some of these things are just cheap entertainment. You can't buy that much food for what a good TV costs nowadays, and you sure can't for what you could get for one if you sold it. It doesn't make a big difference in the ability to support a family. It does in making poverty survivable.

Are you complaining about microwaves? Do you realize how vital a basic means to cook is? You can't get ready-to-go food with food stamps, by and large.

You have to ask who wants the residents to feel beholden to the government. Institute a program where people get foreclosed-on houses free and the right wing will lambaste it. A lot of this is the fault of the US electorate, who seem to prefer extremely expensive solutions like swelling prison populations to anything that might be thought of as being soft on crime.