Well, there are solutions to this. One is to store that power for nighttime consumption, perhaps as potential energy, by adding water to a reservoir, or thermally, by heating something up a lot.

You need suitable geology for a pumped hydro system. Even if you can find a suitable site the "greenies" will oppose it.

Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.

Nor are they much good as "topping plants" since not only do these vary in output their variation is in no way related to demand. Thus you need more plants which can rapidly vary their output in a controlled way in order to avoid the entire grid falling over.

1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.

No shortage of subsidies when it comes to wind and solar. Which are rather poor methods of generating electricity.

2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.

Even with an inefficient fuel cycle and no reprocessing there isn't really that much waste in the first place. IIRC the US actually stopped researching how to make nuclear fission "renewable" some time ago.

I realize you're cherry picking the NASA buy, but I'm pretty sure Google is acting on self interests alone. Even if you choose to believe that NASA picked up the phone one day, and a bunch of politicians on the other line said, "Hey NASA, buy this thing from Canada, cause that would be awesome!" I bet that kind of simplistic worldview makes their scientists and mathematicians feel awesome.

I guess D-Wave's Google Ads campaign (Buy a 10 million dollar computer! Click here!) wasn't getting good sell through rates, huh?

The kids I see can't type. Some of them can't use a mouse. Most of them use CAPSLOCK when they mean Shift.

I've seen plenty of adults use Caps Lock to enter a single capital. These include teachers.
Some of them easily old enough to have been around when you'd press the Shift key on a typewriter to release Caps Lock...

India is launching a new census in which every person aged over 15 will be photographed and fingerprinted to create a biometric national database.
And from the comments..
I think it is good that we are creating the national database of all our citizens. This will help maintain law and order, minimise crimes and help in locating people responsible for crimes. This will also ensure government benefits reach everybody and we will know who is left out. It will help individuals in getting house or land registrations, opening bank accounts and getting employment easier. These things usually take a lot of time because of background checks and the numerous documents required. I think this is a great job that the government is doing.

Except that gathering such data can create all sorts of opportunities for criminals. Since no country in history, AFAIK, has managed to keep criminals out of actual law enforcement what chance is there of ensuring that everyone involved in such a census is honest?

....they sell to a bunch of countries, supposedly over 160, including China, Iran, Bahrain, Syria, the USA and India, and then each country simply tweaks it a mite and calls it by a different name

Given that there are only around 200 countries there can't be many not on the list.

"Snooping" is when your harmless 80-year-old neighbor peers out between the blinds to see who you've invited over to visit. The term "snooping" implies harmlessness, whereas government (and its fundamental tool of physical force) is anything but harmless.
What government does is called spying, because government is a coercive authority, not an equal.

Except in the smallest of countries "government" spies tend not to be one monolithic entity. Even within the same "agency". India is certainly big enough to have all sorts of complex politics within it's spying groups. They also tend not to care too much about the security of data they gather, unless it concerns them or their "friends". As well as freely sharing information with "friends", ("friends of friends", "friends of friends of friends" and so on).

The government is spying on our codebase! It's so cute.

More importantly, why should you be on the defensive? Isn't it good to know both things? Is it somehow a binary choice between wanting to know about the two issues? Snowden is the messenger, not the message, and you probably have a higher likelihood of impacting domestic policy than raising awareness to the 'scandal' that is foreign governments trying to disrupt or influence local politics. Especially since it doesn't take any tinfoil whatsoever to discuss USA's storied history of doing the same. This strawman of somebody who thinks that China would never stoop to what the USA stoops to all the time is pretty hilarious. This is what governments do, the world over. The idea that the USA isn't doing this, or wouldn't do it in the future is downright silly given the history of unilateral foreign interference by all world super powers.

I hear over and over in this discussion the salve "only the metadata has been recorded".

I'm guessing that's simply a function of limited technology, i.e., "today" that's just too much data to store. But in keeping with technologies amazing storage capacity growth, it's only a matter of time before the content is also recorded and archived. It's just too tempting not to.

The point the original post was making is that just because they called themselves "socialists" doesn't necessarily make it true.

It's fairly common in politics for entities to try to re-define terms, even to the point of twisting them to have the opposite meaning from normal. Another variation on this is very tiny political groups claiming to represent some "silent majority".

It extrapolates backwards using all of the known data (ice cores, etc) and shows that over the past 100, CO2 levels began to rise almost linearly at an unprecedented rate and are now higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Just look at that linear upward trend. If that's not man-made, what the fuck is it?
Possibly an artefact (thus in a sense "man-made") of trying to stick the information from different measuring techniques, with different resolutions, together. Air trapped in ice cores is not "hermetically sealed".
Low resolution "proxies" simply won't show rapid changes. Ever heard of Harry Nyquist?

This is ridiculous. No one would take a one-time one foot rise in global sea level seriously if it wasn't being construed as a canary in a coal mine with respect to a larger threat. They would just accept the city being built with insufficient surge margin as one of a thousand things done differently one hundred years ago.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
Building too close to unpredictable water is an ageless human tradition.

Land can also move up or down. If it was simply an issue of sea levels changing you wouldn't see relative changes between land and sea being a LOCAL phenomenon. (Including cases where there has been no apparent change for periods of time longer than a century.)