As I pointed out in my reply to your other comment, you're wrong. CEOs are not in charge of their own pay. You are also still confusing the question of why CEOs receive the compensation that they do, which is fundamentally economic in nature, with "fairness", which is what you think their pay "should" be.

Who approves the pay increases and golden parachutes?

Okay.

Oh yes the CEOs.

No, they don't. From the link:

If bosses set the salaries of their workers, who decides what the bosses earn? In a modern corporation, the task of setting the CEO's pay falls to the board of directors, typically a subgroup of board members on its compensation committee.

You seem to be confusing two very different issues. My original claim was (worded a little differently) that employees tend to be compensated according to what the market will bear. If it takes a compensation package that includes raises despite poor stock performance and so-called "golden parachutes" to get and retain an executive, then that's the market rate. Companies apparently think it's a worthwhile arrangement. You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about what is "fair" in some subjective sense.

That by itself is not an argument against what I claimed. For your convenience, I wrote:

What they can get away is what you're worth. If your services were worth more, someone else would steal you away with better compensation.

If executive pay is rising across the board (that is, every company is paying more), all that means is that the level of compensation required to keep an executive at a particular company is rising. You might argue that executive pay is greater than executive productivity, but that raises an obvious question: Why are they being paid that much? Are companies all stupid? It seems like these companies would realize at some point that they could offer lower pay and achieve the same results.

Maybe I'm just being dense, but you're going to have to spell that out for me. Why do you think it doesn't apply to the executive level?

What they can get away is what you're worth. If your services were worth more, someone else would steal you away with better compensation.

The key phrase there is "as much." It turns out that conservatives edge out liberals in their support of censorship by a fairly narrow margin. In my experience, there's also a big difference between the types of ideological control that the two groups would enact, with liberals being more commonly in favor of, for example, odious "hate speech" laws and compulsory "diversity" training.

I'm friends with a fair number of US-trained young scientists, and the only ones I know who are planning to leave the country can't stay because they aren't US citizens. A small minority (~15% or so) plan to seek or currently have temporary postdoctoral positions overseas, but I doubt that many intend to make that arrangement permanent. I might add that I personally have experience doing research in another country, and I have no inclination whatsoever to leave the US. I admit that my personal, anecdotal evidence isn't proof against a larger trend, but it does make me suspicious. What makes you believe that "most" young scientists are departing the US?

I don't think so. (IANAL, but I have been following news about the HHS mandate and the RFRA.) The judge seems to have ruled that the owners of Hobby Lobby aren't eligible to receive protection under the RFRA. They intend to appeal, of course. I hasten to add that other judges have granted businesses preliminary injunctions against the mandate, and some informed commentators I've read are saying that this issue probably will go eventually to the US Supreme Court.

Synechoche.

Actually, in some cases you do, and it's not just about kowtowing to stupid religious people. It's an important tenet of limited government. Specifically, it's one reason that religious freedom (which protects the right of atheists to be atheists, too, btw) is enshrined in the first amendment of the US Constitution. It's also reflects the fact that our government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address. We are citizens of the US, not subjects or slaves of its government. We live in a pluralistic society where everyone has different ideas about the ultimate authority that they are answerable to, and the concept of religious freedom stems at least in part from the recognition that government has no business picking from among them. As far as it's practical (and perhaps a little farther, because we ought to err on the side of individual liberty), we should refrain from coercing people to do things that violate their firmly held convictions.

There's actually a pretty recent law about this that's been getting a little press because of the HHS contraception mandate. It's called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it basically prohibits the passage of laws that create a substantial burden to religious freedom unless the government has a really good reason for doing it, and also the law in question is the least intrusive way of going about it.

You might find this story interesting.

I have never felt insulted by disagreement, even strong disagreement. However, what people like Richard Dawkins do often goes beyond disagreement into the realm of being intentionally insulting. And regardless of what he says in this video, which strikes me as duplicitous, he has at other times specifically advocated ridiculing religious people.

The truth will out "eventually", but that's not always fast enough. You should check out the book Plastic Fantastic, which is about the Schön scandal. The careers of many innocent people who wasted years of their PhD training trying to replicate fraudulent results were ruined in that little episode. Schön was asked repeatedly to provide access to his samples, to more clearly describe his methodology, and the like, but kept finding excuses to avoid doing so. He was only found out when suspicious researchers in his area noticed that the noise in the results of multiple experiments was identical, likely having been faked using the same random numbers. It's a classic example of the inadequacy of our current way of doing and reporting science to quickly identify fraud.

The summary contains a hint. The US government keeps the price of helium artificially low. The article that the link goes to is an interview, in which it is stated,

The rich wells are in the USA, they contain up to 2 % helium within the natural gas. But the United States decided to sell their strategic helium reserve five years ago, driving prices down.

It's entirely possible that the price of purified He is currently so low that re-purifying it isn't cost effective.