OK, so who will be the first to post the phrase "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"?

Oh, it was me.

That 51,1% certainly does not include a lot of the things you have listed - like the 25% VAT (sales tax), the egregious taxes on anything related to cars and don't even get me started about liquor taxes in Sweden. If you factor all that in, it comes a lot closer to 75%.

Exactly :)

Scratch is localizable, it's actually running in Hungarian on my Debian desktop. Looking at /usr/share/scratch/locale, it's already translated to over 40 languages.

I continue to see Opera fall. It started with the insistance on the MS WIndows ecosystem instead of bringing the incredible functionality of other OS.

Sorry?... I have been using Opera on Linux since the late 90's. FreeBSD and OSX are also supported as was Solaris for a long time. They are also present on cell phones since forever and the browser in the Nintendo Wii is also Opera.
I just do not see that great insistence on the MS Windows ecosystem.

What you should have taken from the FAQ answer is that network transparency is not a function of Wayland, it's not a function of the programs running on Wayland, but the renderer. So as long as you have a renderer that supports network transparency, all the Wayland apps are network-transparent. And I am quite willing to bet a larger sum that the default Wayland renderer will be network transparent.

But I'm not about to shut up about it until the "full stack" exists, has all the features X11 had, and performs better.

Helping with the project instead of complaining seems to be a better idea. Just my $0.02.

get the Wayland developers to guarantee that Wayland apps will be network transparent

Well, I should quote the Wayland FAQ here:

"Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No, that is outside the scope of Wayland."

Really, everybody should read that and understand it, and also its consequences. Frankly, to me, the idea, that by switching to Wayland will somehow mean that you lose network transparency it just as absurd that by switching to X you lose OpenGL support (which is absolutely not a part of the X protocol - X11 came out in 1987, OpenGL in 1992). So while Wayland itself will not support network transparency, the full stack surely will.

Actually, "Extra Large Eyes Caused Neanderthal's Demise" is terribly tabloid in itself. It's not about the size of the eyes (eyeballs) but the percentage of the brain used for visual processing.

No, it just does not work like that. To keep the American viewpoint: compare, for example, WWII and the Vietnam War: the losses in WWII were far-far more numerous than in Vietnam, yet people supported it but the USA had to leave Vietnam by popular demand.
Why?
Because the Americans thought that fighting the Japanese and the Nazis was justified while they found the war in Vietnam unjust. And this was not because soldiers died there - it was because they photos of naked children running from American napalm bombings and unarmed captives shot in the head*. So no, it's not the dying soldiers that turn the tide of public opinion but the images of brutal inhumanities and you can get those images without soldiers being there: the aforementioned photos were taken by reporters and the collateral murder video is the kind of video that drones record. You need those images to stop the war - or to start it.

*: and they did not had the context for it

People in the military need to be injured or killed in war, to remind everyone that it is fucking terrible and that no one should *want* to do it.

It's stupid and counterproductive.
Remember the collateral murder video? That shit was done by soldiers that were there and were very much aware that they could be injured or killed. They lost their better self and killed innocent civilians. Do you really want it? Do you really want drunk soldiers raping and pillaging? Really?

No, I do not think so.

Also, history tells us that being personally in the war is not much of a deterrence, people fought wars practically continuously.

The only interesting thing in the whole machine is the display.
It has sane proportions (3:2) and it has a very decent resolution (2560x1700). Basically these were the worst problems of the notebooks of the last few years: the 16:9 display that made no sense whatsoever* and the laughably low resolution. Now it seems that these may go away.

*: please note that I'm talking about the really portable size range where basically the keyboard determines the width of the notebook - in this category the displays did not get wide; they got short, with huge unused spaces above and below them.

Actually the connection between republic and democracy is even looser than you seem to suggest: it's not just that a republic is not necessarily a democracy (or not) but a democracy is not necessarily a republic. Case in point, half of the EU is some kind of monarchy (Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, etc) yet they are representative democracies.

People believe in conspiracy theories because it is way much easier than to actually learn the truth. The great thing about conspiracy theories that you don't have to know the actual facts (in the case of many theories it is actually a hindrance), you don't have to be very rigorous with your logic and if there's any hole in the theory you are welcome to make up any explanation. Compare that to the hard work required to be competent in a real area of knowledge.

Also, your reasoning does not make much sense: you cannot trust the authorities so you believe everything the first nut job tells you? Really?

This paper is about the thought processes, not about the actual truth. Actually there are no guarantees that you can not arrive to a right conclusion using flawed reasoning (however, I don't recall conspiracy theory nutjobs speculating about the LIBOR fixing).

I herd you like conspiration theories