It seems to me to border on the religious to believe that if such a great filter exists then each species has one and only one of them. Much more likely, to my thinking, there is a number of great filters and while we may have put some of them behind us there are others yet to come.

We may have dodged the asteroid extinctions, the numerous disease vectors, and nuclear annihilation; but how will we deal with overpopulation, environmental collapse, and the corruption inherent in our increasingly large political constructs? To think that we're out of the woods just because we had one or two close shaves in the past is to be blind to the perils that still lie ahead of us.

The original architect necessarily has to be very conservative in his estimates because he has, in your example, 20-40 years of future uncertainty messing up his predictions. He cannot actually know how high the humidity will be, how much the ambient temperature will fluctuate, how much the soil will shift, what sorts of loads the facility will come under, etc., except as some form of probability distribution. And this distribution becomes more uncertain the further into the future he tries to plan it.

After the 20, 30 or 40 years have actually passed however we know all these things, or can find them out, pretty exactly. And if life has fared gentler with the facility than the architect's worst fears accounted for then there may still be decades of useful life left in it. In this case it is perfectly sensible to make a new maintenance plan and life estimate for it, and then take it from there.

This always seemed to me like a very silly sort of "paradox".

In short, yes of course he could. After he did it he would no longer be omnipotent, but then, it has to be such that an omnipotent being has the power to make himself no longer omnipotent; or he would not have been truly omnipotent in the first place.

Also, as a trivial observation, once he had made the unliftable stone he could still use his remaining near omnipotence to turn it back into a liftable one, thus restoring his own full omnipotence. It is of course possible to rephrase the "paradox" in such a way that he cannot do this but that doesn't change the reasoning in the previous paragraph.

There are some more interesting paradoxes involving the question of whether an omnipotent god could make things happen that are simply flat out illogical (I forget the specifics, but draw a two dimensional circular square perhaps). These fast get difficult to relate to however and may be artifacts of our language more than they are good philosophical observations.

The lawsuit ended in Tesla's disfavour because Top Gear isn't a car review show, it's a sitcom with cars in it. And in a sitcom you can say almost anything no matter how outrageous and easily get away with it.

You can't really know this though. Those times when it does succeed (if ever) you won't have heard about, that is the whole point, and so you won't know that it happened. It will therefore seem like it never works even if quite often it does, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a world in which suppression never works and a world in which it often does.

Homeland Security isn't about doing things "cheap". In fact that would pretty much completely defeat the purpose.

The pork barrel used to be about building expensive green kit to kill the commies with, now it's about harassing citizens just enough so that they think you're protecting them from dangerous men with beards. There's lots of money in the pork barrel and the more expensively you can manage to do your job the more money will get poured into it.

Did this manual process by any chance involve a "Yes To All" button?

Because if you don't heavily tax (effectively) inheritance then that's your new aristocracy right there.

My junk defaults to package private.

Slashdot, now a wholly owned subsidiary of greenpeace.org.

The very least they could of done is photoshop in some friggin lasers. Is that really too much to ask?

I am "implying" no such thing. I am explicitly saying that if it's very popular then that is a strong argument in its favour. How odious or not you personally may feel it is, is neither here nor there.

This maze is otherwise known as "politics" and yes it does have lots of twisty little debates in it.

In evaluating the market size I expect number of participants is more important than transaction sizes. Essentially, if a significant percentage of citizens want to engage in the trade then this is a good indicator the trade should be legal. How many percent of citizens have expressed an interest in child porn?

Do note that child pornography laws have drifted a long way away from being about protecting children. Nowadays if you draw a stick figure and write the caption "naked 6yo" under it then that's child pornography and they'll put you in jail if the fancy strikes them. Personally I don't consider drawing stick figures to be particularly evil regardless of the caption, but others may disagree.

Well, the free market is an argument for legalization, but only with qualifications. Essentially, if the free market for a given good or service is or would be big enough then this alone is a very strong argument for legalizing it. The reasoning behind this is that first of all, if a lot of citizens want to trade in it then it is a democratic problem if they are prevented from doing so; secondly, that with such a big market even if you outlaw it the trade is still going to happen at large scale so what are you really achieving; and thirdly, that a lot of money that would otherwise move around the economy in a proper manner is now going to get funneled into a black economy where it will see less circulation (thus having a stagnating effect on the economy overall), will not be properly taxable, and will tend to leak into other more serious criminal enterprises. Also as we have seen with drugs, criminalizing what many see as a necessary good has led to the blatant militarization of police forces and erosion of civil rights for everyone. This is a very high price to pay for feelgood politics.

Of course this would only be one of the arguments in any given debate but it would be a weighty one.

It would need to be reported one way or the other. The easiest way to try to get around it is possibly not to register it but then you won't have a number plate (unless you fake one) and so couldn't use it on public roads. Maybe you could drive it on foreign plates and hope no one notices/cares that you've been doing so for far too long. You'd still be required to list it as wealth but if you choose not to there may not be any obvious ways for the tax man to find out on his own.

What will happen from time to time though is that someone you pissed off at some point reports you and then you may be in trouble again.

If you want to drive the car on public roads it's probably very difficult to avoid registering it. Cheating one's way around this is probably possible but if you ever have an accident or otherwise end up in the spotlight it's game over.

While legally carried handguns may present problems, this isn't one of them. When someone decides to go shoot up a school I have yet to see evidence that this is a spur of the moment decision. Rather, it is a pre-planned event for which the shooter brings weapons from home explicitly for this purpose. He is going to bring them whether carrying guns is legal or not, because he has already decided to break much more serious laws.

If anything, legally carried handguns may help prevent school shootings or at least keep down the body count because they increase the likelihood of an armed citizen being nearby to shoot the shooter.