He isn't saying "Comic Books" are for kids. He is saying "super heroes" are for children.
His point is that these type of hero-worship stories aren't really what adults should be reading, but rather stories with more nuanced characters.I am sure he wouldn't mind adults reading "Saga" or "Sunstone".

Pre-filled tax forms have been proposed many times in the USA. They are ALWAYS shot down by Intuit and other tax company lobbyists

You will notice, every time that politicians talk about "easier taxes", they are just hand-waving.
-Trump talked about reducing the number of tax brackets to make the FORMULA simpler, despite it being something anyone can do with a basic calculator
-Paul Ryan bragged about reducing the basic tax form (1040EZ) from 12 lines to 10 lines

None of these things actually make taxes easier. They are just lip-service.
The IRS has ALL of the data needed to perform pre-filled tax forms, but they won't do it.

WTF is a "protection circuit"?
They are called protective relays.

Fun fact: once we start talking about power systems outside of your house, the device that causes the circuit to trip(protective relay) is isolated from the actual breaker. They are also much more complicated than the simple over-current devices found in your house. They also typically require careful design and regular calibration(at least if they are older units. Newer microprocessor units are a little bit more reliable, but still rely on analog relays/contactors that fail.

Also, it probably wasn't that they were overly-sensitive. That is a gross oversimplification as it would imply negligent design(which is uncommon).
They either failed to operate appropriately which led to a cascading failuer or some equipment had been upgraded without changing the settings.

Why do we need a "flat tax" or a "fair tax".
For 90% of Americans, who take the "standard deduction", tax calculations aren't even "calculations". I could write an Excel spreadsheet to do them in an hour. The govt has ALL of the relevant information and could just do them for the people. You don't need to do some kind of "flat tax" or "Fair tax". It already is EASY

The problem is that most Americans don't understand it because of laws like this one.

You can still "target" your latin-dancing party. You can target "only white people" if you want to advertise your "Better Homes and Gardens" cookbook. You can target people for all kinds of ads, legally.

The law is only about housing.

This is pretty simple. We have some advertising laws in the USA.
You can't target housing ads towards certain ethnic groups
You can't target tobacco at children
You can't advertise medication without listing all side-effects
etc

Facebook fucked up by using a generic form for all advertising. They didn't perform their due diligence and verify that they were complying with the advertising laws. This is a REALLY STUPID mistake on Facebook's part.

Then you don't understand the law.

There is an EXPLICIT law that says that advertisers(facebook and google are advertisers) cannot target certain types of ads.
If they even ALLOWED the targeting, it would be illegal.
Similarly, many countries have laws that you cannot target children with smoking ads. If Facebook allowed tobacco companies to buy ads targeting children, they would be in deep shit

The problem is that Facebook naively didn't check the law about housing advertisement. This is a GIANT FUCK-UP on Facebook's part.

I understand that you want to default to the classic "safehaven" position, but that doesn't apply. Facebook isn't an internet forum when they post ads. They are an advertising company and advertising companies have been regulated for over a century.

It isn't needed.
This is obviously already part of Federal IT policy.

If they find hidden Nazi gold to finance the crypto-currency, then this is officially the sub-plot of a Neal Stephenson book.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I don't think there is anything inherently crazy about saying that capitalism might cease to be a functional system to operate a global economy.
Capitalism is pretty much the laziest economic system you could possibly create. It is successful simply because it is so heuristically simple. It is the "natural selection" of economic systems. If it breaks, it will self-correct. However, just like natural selection, you can't just use it for everything.

We don't use evolution to develop new strains of rice. We don't use natural selection to farm. We don't use natural selection to develop cures for disease. At a certain point, despite the beauty, strength, and simplicity of natural selection, we had to use a more complicated system.

The UN paper isn't groundbreaking, but it isn't unscientific. Energy generation will create direct and indirect costs. As energy markets shift towards new generation technologies, those technologies will have more indirect costs. Current capitalistic models don't really have a good way to deal with these issues. In fact, we have had this issue before. The raw capitalism of the gilded age gave us the rampant pollution of shit-clogged streets and undrinkable water. This is why the USA wound up with a more refined vision of capitalism that saw more government regulation and oversight of pollution, because it was understood that these external costs were too high.

I dont think anyone disagrees. Free-market capitalism is great. It is a bit like natural selection. You get very robust and successful specimens out of the process.
The problem is that just like natural selection, shit can get a bit out of control. The old animals don't simply move over and let the new animals in. The world has to burn a bit. You get malthusian collapses and periods of starvation. Everything eventually settles down and equilibrium is reached(after a few hundred generations), but it isn't a smooth transition.

Also, just like natural selection, stuff gets completely out of control if you pump unlimited resources into an environment. Imagine you had an aquarium, and you started pumping it full of fish food. The fish aren't simply going to eat until they are full and then allow the other animals to thrive. The larger fish will gourge themselves. Some of them will gourge themselves to death if you aren't careful. They will grow huge. They will still attack all of the smaller fish that they can now fit in their mouth. It won't be because of any need for food, rather it will be a basic predatory instinct. They will use their new size to dominate the fish tank. Even with the unlimited food supply, they will still be attacking all of the other organisms in the aquarium. They will pick the aquarium clean, until you have nothing in the tank but a few massive fish. The massive fish wont even be able to swim.

No one is saying that natural selection/free-market is bad. In fact, it is very good. Evolutionary algorithms are some of the best in the world to solve difficult computer problems. The issue is that they are messy. They are incredibly messy. They will require many generations of destruction to reach equilibrium. That is fine if we are talking about bits of data. It can be a bit more dubious if we are talking about human lives. They also frequently come up with solutions which are very counter-intuitive and downright cruel. Once again, not so bad in some realms. Awful when discussing human beings. The solution to the problem is to keep some hand on the system and make sure that the experiment of the free-market doesn't get too crazy. We don't want 5-year-olds working in mines or people being sold as slaves, both of which are free-market solutions.
You can debate how much 'regulation' you want on that experiment, but don't pretend for a second you want a completely unregulated free market. I can promise you that a world without regulation would be very messy and very ugly. After a few thousand years, it might settle down, but in the meantime many millions of people would suffer. So the real debate is only how tightly you want to rein in the experiment.

Now, as far as a post-scarcity world:
You want to get there more quickly? Why?
We have no idea how to handle that transition and the transition will be ugly as fuck. Lets be honest, we are pretty much already to a post-scarcity world.
Right now, the total energy cost to build a solar power plant is less than the output of the solar power plant. What does that mean?
Hypothetically I could build a 1 MW solar plant, and then exclusively energy from that solar plant over the next 30 years to build a 1.2 MW plant. That would include the mining, refining, fabrication, feeding the workers, harvesting their food, etc.
Unfortunately, the gains are pretty minimal and without an energy market it doesn't quite work out right now. However, we are on the precipice of a world where energy is basically just limited to how much time we want to spend building solar/wind generation facilities. For all practical purposes, that is a "post-scarcity" world for basic needs.
So, how are we going to handle that?
We going to start giving away electricity? We going to let electricity costs slowly crater? Are we going to have a race to the bottom to see who can build the cheapest solar plants without govt subsidy? Do we have any coherent plan?

I will make sure I alert all of the people in the Royal Society! They should remove the term "scientist" from all members prior to Isaac Newton.

^^
Damn lazy scientists who can't get real jobs!!!

If I ever build a time machine, I will go back and kick Isaac Newton and Leibniz in the balls so hard!!
what did they ever do to help mankind? Two homosexuals who just wrote books and played around in a library. Just a bunch of "scientists". They should have got REAL JOBS. /s

Science may seem esoteric and pointless, but amazingly, since we started doing this science shit we went from being a bunch of idiots to a rapid technologically progressive world. So maybe you should back off on attacking science? Unless you have a better idea of how to get people into outer space?

It is, but it would be an interesting campaign position if the Democrats pushed through a "tax reform" bill which gave massive tax deductions to the wealthy.
Obama even wanted to lower the corporate tax rate, and he couldn't pull it off despite almost all economists agreeing that it would be beneficial.

Even if the Ultra-Rich literally OWNED Hillary, I seriously doubt that the Democrats were suddenly going to start passing laissez-faire legislation and tax bills for that systemically favored wealthy Wall Street donors.
You can argue that Hillary was a "wall street friendly" Democrat and that she wouldn't be as hard on the rich as Bernie Sanders. That is a fair point. However, you can't pretend that a "wall street friendly" Democrat = "wall street friendly" Republican.

I don't really care about all of this Trump vs Hillary bullshit, but this is mathematically not true. I really wish people would look at a map.
Those dense urban population exist in states with really high electoral counts. Think about it for even a second. Where are your "dense urban populations"? California, New York, Florida, Texas. Where do you get all of your electoral votes? California, New York, Florida, Texas!!!!

The electoral vote vs the popular vote is really only different in close elections. If you changed the rules, it wouldn't even change the outcome of elections(except Washington D.C. would suddenly matter).
It has nothing to do with urban vs rural. It hasn't mattered since the Civil War.

THE REAL REASON FOR THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Electoral votes are awarded based on population, not on eligible voters. Even illegal immigrants count towards the total.

Originally, very few people were eligible to vote(land owning white males in most states). Voter turnout was around 5% of total population. The Southern Plantation States figured out that they would be at a big disadvantage if 'electoral' votes were based on eligible voters. They devised a system based on total population. This meant that slaves, women, native Americans, children, etc ALL counted towards your 'electoral' votes.

It was so lopsided, that they actually had to come to a compromise where slaves were only partially counted.(The 3/5ths Compromise). Why? Because Plantation states were sweeping the table on Presidential elections.

While California says you can't be fired for HAVING a political opinion, you can be fired for expressing it.
In the rest of the US, your boss can walk in and fire you just for posting a Pro-Trump picture on your personal facebook page. Alternatively, he could just ask every Republican to raise their hand and then tell everyone who didn't raise their hand, "You're fired".
California banned this practice.
However, your boss can still fire you for wearing a Trump hat to work or sending an internal email that advocates for Hillary Clinton.

Whistleblower Protection
You are a pretty weird whistleblower if you complain internally about a public practice. I cannot imagine anyone EVER considering this a case of whistleblowing.
That would be like an Apple engineer sending around an internal memo about the small battery in their new phones, and then people calling that "whistleblowing". You can't blow the whistle on something that everyone knows about!

Right to Discuss Working Conditions
May be viable. Unfortunately, the memo didn't really discuss working conditions. It discussed business practices. Working conditions addresses how the business practices have an impact on the employee. He was discussing how he felt they were wrong-headed and misguided. Those might be fair assessments, but they are not addressing HIS working conditions.
Did he work more hours because of the hiring practices?
Did he get less time off?
Did it impact him in any demonstrable way?