Bonam

Yes, it is. Simple experiment, take a cup of water at 60-70 C and leave it out in the open (while maintaining its temperature). The water will be gone in relatively short order. You don't need to be above the boiling point to evaporate the oceans. Both the vapor pressure of water and the amount of water that can be contained in the air without condensing go up about a factor of 10 if you raise the ambient temperature by 50 C. With the already much higher implied atmospheric pressure that would be required to produce the 50 C increase in the first place, all or most of the ocean's water content would be in the atmosphere.

There's a lot more to quality of life than driving down the costs of products by another couple percent. Not to mention any such cost reduction would likely be more than overwhelmed by the increasing costs of housing that higher population density would produce.

That much is obvious. Western leaders are running around aimlessly like chickens with their heads cut off when it comes to their reactions to the crisis in the middle-east. The best policy would be to simply stay out of that place completely.

Why do we need to? For all the arguments about immigration's effect on Canada (or on other Western nations), people rarely consider the effect on the home countries of the immigrants. Developing and war-torn countries have great need of what few doctors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc, that are there, and yet we drain them all away. When we take all the brightest, most skilled, most progressive people out of these societies and bring them to Western countries, what do we leave behind? How many of the problems faced by developing nations are at least in part a result of immigration policies that siphon off all the best talent that their struggling education systems manage to produce?

Nope, he put his own delusions, hatreds, and ambitions first and led Germany to death and defeat, getting ~7 million Germans killed, the cities in ruins, the economy destroyed, and the country occupied.

A world that is 50C hotter would have the oceans evaporate and would be uninhabitable. Vast amounts of gases locked in limestone deposits and other minerals a the bottoms of the oceans would enter the atmosphere and atmospheric pressure would increase probably a hundredfold. All surface and ocean plants would die, ceasing oxygen production, and existing oxygen would quickly disappear at the high temperatures due to surface oxidation. So the atmosphere would no longer be primarily oxygen/nitrogen, and the air would be unbreathable. While it's possible a tiny sliver of humanity could survive for a while hiding underground growing food in hydroponics, breathing artificial air, and getting energy from nuclear reactors, etc, it would be far from a sure thing. Runaway effects would quickly turn the Earth into something Venus-like. A world ruled by ISIS would suck, especially if you're a woman. But as a male, if they don't kill you while taking things over, you'd be ok. Just profess to believe in Islam, kill an infidel or two, and you can fit right in. Plus, over the long term, even the most extremist societies either fall or become more moderate. Worst case we'd have another thousand years of dark ages (but likely much less than that) before civilization got back on track.

No, if you wanted to satisfy this fairness principle you don't need a tax system that tries to predict anything, but only uses existing past data. For example, let's say your tax rate is 20% on everything up to 50k and 30% on everything over 50k, just to use an example of a progressive income tax. Then in your example: Fisherman A year 1: pays 10k tax Fisherman A year 2: pays 10k tax Total: 20k Fisherman B year 1: pays 8k tax Fisherman B year 2: pays 10k + 3k tax = 13k Total: 21k That's a difference of 1k in taxes. If you want to restore the fairness, the tax system can take past data into account and pretend that income is averaged over years, for example: Fisherman A year 1: pays 10k tax Fisherman A year 2: pays 10k tax Total: 20k Fisherman B year 1: pays 8k tax Fisherman B year 2: since his income has changed, calculate the total income over 2 years (40k + 60k). This adds to 100k. Divide by 2 years to get the average income. This is 50k/year. With a 50k/year average income, the fisherman owes the government an average of 10k/year, which totals to 20k for the two years. The fisherman has already paid 8k, therefore he owes 12k more.' Total: 20k This resolves the issue, and as more years pass you can just keep extending the average over more years and maintain the total lifetime tax burden to be equivalent on any two earners with the same lifetime earnings, regardless of their variability. That said, I don't think fairness in regards to year-to-year income variability is a necessity of the tax system. It'd be nice, but it's not key. More important would be fairness in regards to different types of income... whether they come from employment or investment.

Anything's possible, and if there was sufficient interest/funding I'm sure an adequate way to contain the radiation could be devised. But you're right, the idea could never be implemented in the real world, not in Western countries anyway and probably not anywhere else either due to treaties regarding nuclear weapons. In the 1960s, people investigated peaceful uses of nuclear weapons for terrain modification (Project Plowshare), but that was done without properly understanding the dangers in the way we do today. The project was scrapped after some tests. I bet it could be done much more safely and productively today.

Presumably some engineering would have to go into making sure that it is stable, both in initial site selection as well as potentially reinforcing the cavern after it is created. It also doesn't have to be directly underneath the lake but can be offset by a considerable distance, as needed, at the cost of a very slight loss of efficiency of the system.

Part of it is vaporized and escapes through a vent tunnel. Also, much of the rock is made of oxides of various metallic elements. At high temperatures, these molecules are dissociated and the oxygen can escape, leaving denser minerals behind. Also, much of the material in the ground isn't sitting at the maximum density that it can be at. The shockwave pushes material away from the center and densifies material around the shell of the newly formed cavern. Here's a smaller scale test that was done: http://www.wipp.energy.gov/science/ug_lab/gnome/gnome.htm I'm making the assumption that excavated volume would likely scale linearly with the yield of the device.

Actually the easiest way to implement pumped hydro storage in otherwise flat terrain that does not avail itself to natural hydro might be to find any old decent sized surface lake (or, I suppose, you can use seawater), go like 1-2 km down so you have a nice big height difference to maximize the potential energy, and detonate a high yield hydrogen bomb under ground to create a big cavern. The hydro generator can sit between the lake and the cavern and energy is extracted by letting water flow from the lake down into the cavern, and stored by pumping it back up. A 20 MT device should produce a cavern about one cubic km in size. With an average height difference of 1 km between it and a lake, you can store 10^16 J which is ~ 2800 GWh.

On vacation? I didn't know robots took vacations.

In fact, a large proportion of immigrants would prefer to slam the door behind them. They left their countries behind after all, and usually for a reason. Which makes it all the more odd that political parties think they can score votes by throwing the doors wide open.

I don't think that's even the point here really. Clearly, people are capable of rational thought, I'd say far more than 1% are able to think rationally and act based on their conscious thought rather than basic instincts some of the time, hopefully when it is advantageous for them to do so. In fact, in many aspects of our modern lives, there are no built in instinctual reactions to guide people and it is only higher order conscious thinking that can guide actions. But "rising above" instincts means having your instincts tell you one thing, and doing another. In cases where the instincts are at all applicable, this is rarely useful. For example, if you see something that endangers you, either run or fight, totally reasonable and useful instinct... rising above it means being a pacifist that sits still while your enemies kill you... and that is something some religions/philosophies have indeed advocated as an example of "rising above your instincts". There are many other such examples. So when people talk about "rising above one's instincts", they aren't talking about thinking rationally when it is advantageous to do so (which almost all people at least sometimes do), such as in the course of your scientific work, rather they are talking about ignoring basic human instincts and doing the opposite, often to the direct detriment of oneself.

No it's not "just a big mish mash". It is the history of humankind. The way the world is today is a function of the way the world was before. The history of the interaction between "the West" and the middle east did not start "two generations ago", despite you wanting to start your narrative then. In any case, while history is important to understand, constantly trying to assign blame and fault to "the West" for everything is an obsession of the far left, while more reasonable people would rather focus on understanding and resolving today's problems. And while providing temporary places for people to escape violence is a laudable goal, that is not how the refugee systems of most Western countries function (since they focus instead on permanently resettling small numbers of people rather than temporarily sheltering large numbers), nor will taking in refugees solve the fundamental issues at hand.

For one, you could try reading the rest of my post. Secondly, "the West" has had "direct involvement" in the middle east for a lot more than two generations. Probably the involvement has been significant ever since the Greco-Persian wars starting back in 500 BC.

Everything influences everything else. What a revelation. If you want to go back to the "root causes" in any meaningful way, the main reason "the West" got into the Middle-East in a big way at all in the 20th century is because of the Ottoman Empire's aggression against the Entente powers in WWI, which ended in its defeat and dissolution. After it fell apart, its territories became split up under the administration of the various victorious powers, just as Germany was after WWII.

Naw, I'm sure that wouldn't be good enough. After all, then only the "rich elite" could read the information with their "unnecessary consumerist gadgets", while the "poor", ever the victims of "evil corporations" would remain uninformed and "oppressed", forced to unwittingly continue letting "poisons" into their bodies.

Israel is a convenient scapegoat. When things aren't going well, people tend to get unhappy with their governments. One way for governments to keep their grip on power is to point at a particular group and paint it as the enemy (the scapegoat), and assign fault for the various problems to the scapegoat. In the case of Israel, it's easy to do... not only is there plenty of religious and historical precedent for Muslims to hate Jews, but they have all those juicy pallywood photos/videos to show of the evil "zionists" oppressing their "fellow Muslims". Of course, once you've made a certain group or nation into "the enemy" in the eyes of your people to curb domestic unrest, you then have to take action against that enemy. This is the same reason that Arab states have for decades refused to make any contribution in helping to resolve the issue of a Palestinian state and have kept generations of Palestinians in refugee camps... so long as the problem continues, they can try to keep their own populations distracted from the failure of their governments and focused on hatred of Israel.

In many cases, why would we even want to "rise above" basic instincts? Those instincts are there for a good reason, Fight or flight in the face of danger. Pattern recognition. The desire to survive and to reproduce, etc. In fact, even altruism is a basic instinct built into humans (most people feel pleasure from helping someone else). Most people that talk about "rising above" basic instincts are talking about forcing some kind of "greater good" for "society" that in most cases only ends up poorly (communism, etc)

There's a big difference between collecting information, and requiring it to be printed on every label on the final product.

Now if only the world's population density was low enough that everyone could live in cabins in the mountains...

I can only say the complete opposite. The fact that our society places more value on women seems so inherently obvious that not seeing it begs a question about the person's sanity. Perhaps it is a generational difference. I'm sure your perspective may have had some accuracy in the boomer generation in some way. But as a millennial, it is most definitely not the case.

True. Of course, those not comfortable in these neighborhoods will leave and we'll end up with cities split up into different ethnic enclaves. It's already happened with many other groups. Of course, proponents of mass immigration will see nothing wrong with this.

25,000 is this particular batch of refugees. And I agree, 25k is a small number and wouldn't change anything in the long run. But that's not the whole story. For one, we're getting 250k-300k immigrants per year all the time anyway, and that IS enough to change society in a significant way. Secondly, the moment you give an inch you are asked for a mile. Look at Germany, which is now in the position of accepting 800k refugees and is talking about an additional 500k per year for an indefinite period going forward. That is most certainly enough to change society.