These two are not connected. Bankruptcy in this case has a lot more to do with the banks than anything else.

They do pay American taxes, the Irish operation only works with European, Middle Eastern and African income.

On the contrary, hundreds of thousands of people depend for their living directly and indirectly on FDI.

Ireland is in trouble because the government stupidly guaranteed the gambling loans of investors in Anglo Irish, not because of foreign direct investment.

If you look at the video, it never seems to actually submerge though - is it in fact a sub?

You dickhead.

Indeed. Someone needs to go to prison for this.

Yeah it did.

Great, lets hope the female politicians in Saudi Arabia use it to further their careers.

Meh, just keep everything under a little pressure.

Because space has a lot more stuff than earth. True, you'd need to do it just for space based markets first, but before too long economies of scale would kick in and you could just drop your manufactured products straight down to earth.

The more engineers I meet, the less I respect the breed tbh. Science, motherfucker, it does stuff it couldn't do yesterday. Economics, you do not understand it.

Oh piss off you spellchecker abusing malignancy.

Better than you putting words into the mouths of others.

Mmm, sarcasm is no replacement for a critical mind. Although some clearly feel that it is.

On the contrary, it merely involves educating you on the limits of our knowledge, which doesn't take long.

In flat defiance of the clear predominance of possibility pointed out by the poster you misrepresented, and which you have thus far failed to refute.

You're not interested in evidence. You should, however, look up calls to authority as they were used in the medieval period. Most of us have moved on, you know.

Sigh... what you're saying is that the possibility does not exist because of the lack of a fossil record, which is the exact opposite of what the poster in question is saying. Let me spell this out for you - we probably have less than a single percent of the biodiversity of any given period stored in the fossil record. Not only is there room for the lineages you are looking for, there is room for hundreds of thousands of them.

Also, on the issue of fantasies, I'm not saying that any such civilisation has existed. I am, however, saying that you most certainly can't rule out the possibility.

I respect Dawkins and all that guff, but he's really spawned a lot of self righteous authoritarians on the internet, a plague previously seen in the middle ages before it gave way to true scientific curiosity and open mindedness.

The argument in question is one of whether or not such a civilisation or civilisations could have existed, and we would know nothing about it. The answer is unarguably yes. Sznupi seems to feel that a lack of fossil record leading to homonid intelligence denies the possibility of such a happening, despite that the fossil record is in all likelihood less than one percent of all the biodiversity in any particular period in time.

I find when presented with a response which goes against the basic reality of a situation, the element of rationality has vacated the premises. Whether simply unable to comprehend what is being said, invested in the idea that our species' civilisation is the first, dogmatism, or simply into getting the last word, interest wanes.