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Russia's economy has been booming for years. There is massive foreign investment in Russian industry. Their energy sector is straight up roaring. Russia had fully recovered from the 2008 'crisis' by mid-2010 and kept growing from there. Russia is a creditor nation now, buying the public debt of declining nations, such as the US.

Russian unemployment is about 6%. And that's a legitimate number as well; not like US unemployment figures that are mostly the result of shrinking the size of the workforce to polish the turd that is the US economy.

As far as employment goes it's a good time to be young in Russia. Looking in from the outside our anti-anything-bigger-than-a-hobby-farm types are hate'n on Russia, wishing they could shut it down, but they'll just have to wait few decades till the employed and prosperous get comfortable enough for the hate mongering to take hold and pull up the ladder on their youth, as we have.

Yeah, I cringed a bit when my google search for "London Fog" came up with an io9 article (is that a gawker site... ech). Anyway, here's a better one on previous occurences in the 1800s:

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/environmentalism-in-1880/888

Or just read up on "London Fog" leading to the "Clean Air Act of 1956" on wikipedia, whatever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog

As a Canadian, I'm looking for a Canadian cloud provider that guarantees data is located in Canadian data centres, is Canadian-owned (U.S. law treats subsidiaries of U.S. companies as U.S. companies), and is only subject to Canadian laws.

Good luck with that. Canada is one of the senior partners of the ECHELON program (a program that mandates the exchange of information).

And even then, the ECHELON program isn't abiding by any law, whether they be Canadian laws, British laws, or even US laws.

Surface seasteading, on the other hand, seems to be very promising in spite of the fact that nobody has really been successful at doing that with 21st Century technology.

They've been successfully doing it since ancient times. The current very successful model is seasteading by ship with occasional stops in specialized structures called docks and harbors.

While a few people do seem to live their lives almost permanently aboard ship, they really are transportation devices to get you from one place to another and not a place where civilizations form and act independently.

There really is a difference between a ship and an island or city. There is also the difference between a spaceship and a settlement in space as well, even though you can build a city in the middle of the ocean just as much as you can build a city in some random spot in space.

I think it could be argued that if you are going to try and build the L-5 colony, why not at least at first try to build a "colony" in the Sargasso Sea? Unlike claims about people trying to "settle" Antarctica before trying Mars (or in the above discussion Ceres), there really aren't any significant international treaties that are stopping a group of folks building a whole bunch of barges and other relatively stable vessels and building a city in what could arguably be a pretty nice place to live (as temperate as the Bahamas, plenty of access to food and even fresh water (if you collect rain), and far enough away from other locations on the Earth that you can in theory flip the bird to other governments and start your own if you care. Unlike a micronation like Sealand, there is also room to expand and grow so in theory you could have a large enough population for a viable community as well.

There are limited locations where such a sea community could legitimately be established, but many of the same issues that will eventually need to be addressed for space colonization certainly could be applied from efforts at such "seasteading" efforts.

The only real ancient example of seasteading is with the people who lived on Lake Titicaca, where a society exists with children being born "at sea" is normal instead of a very rare exception, and for those children along with hundreds of other children to spend their lives on floating platforms as a way of life where they reasonably expect to have their own children also live that way. It does require some technology in order to make that happen even in the case of the , but it doesn't need to be very sophisticated.

If you can show a similar kind of group existing today to the Uru people but using cruise ships or something like that, I love to know about it. There is a group at seasteading.org which has a bunch of dreamers hoping some day to do a thing like this. It is worth looking at, but there certainly are challenges to the idea.

...yes, those were fun times.

They used to strap radioactive stuff to their nuts, too (The Scrotal Radiendocrinator)
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/10-radioactive-products-that-people-actually-used/1388?image=4

But just because they used to do it doesn't mean we should.

"...news that asteroid 2012 BX34, 11 meters wide..."

Size is one thing, what's it made of? If it were iron/nickel it could be "interesting times" should it come to earth. Rocky wouldn't be as bad. Frozen gasses would be pretty exciting, but as it's not trailing a coma, it's likely one of the former. If you're looking for a place it's likely to land, probability seems to favour Canada - consider these craters and how many are in the GWN

Reminds me of this:

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/stalins-deranged-vision-human-ape-super-race/1257

Saw it on History Channel a few years back. Didn't know there was active research going on in mixing human DNA with brains.

Isn't this story a coincidence when the move Rise of the Planet of the Apes is about to come out?? Pretty scary

But they never used it for military purposes.

LOLWUT?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#Development_in_China

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/earliest-gunpowder-weapons-history/19198

Some time ago radiation wasn't well understood, and a number of tools were built to take advantage of it for personal use. The radioactive shoe sizer came to mind right off the bat, but a searching for it I found a number of tools that were certainly ill advised. http://www.thingamababy.com/baby/2006/05/fun_with_radiat.html http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/10-radioactive-products-that-people-actually-used/1388

I just love when someone talks about this issue, as it highlights the wonky liberal "say something but mean something else." Yes, you can bring a gun to the park, but it is illegal to discharge it! LOL, so what does Obama want gun owners to do, throw the gun at the grizzly?

even evolution won't do anything in a time period as small as 6000 years.

O RLY?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/ecology/elephants-evolve-smaller-tusks-due-to-poaching/711

Crushed under the weight of regulations,

The problem is that companies do unscrupulous things in the absence of regulation. Monsanto and PCPs for instance. Do we really want companies pumping toxic crap into our ground water? What about pumping black soot into the sky? How about using melamine in milk to maximize profits? What about all the snake oil stuff that got sold to the public in the 1920s? with the lack of regulation. back then people had all kinds of radioactive products back then. No regulation. Look at china today. Look at Bejing. Where they had to take drastic measures to cut smog for the Olympics. The don't use catalytic converters over there. Look at all the companies that know they are selling unsafe products due to internal research yet still chose to sell the product because profits come first. I think its the sleazy players in the marketplace that forces regulators to step in. If the market players had any ethics there would be no need to regulate.

And before you complain: compare the maps - don't blindly believewhat your high priest Watts preaches you.

These things are a great way to make a beautiful landscape hideous.

As opposed to what, a coal plant?

Personally I think the electrical towers are really ugly. These artistic pylons are an interesting start to the "beautify the tower" problem, but what I'd really like to see are transmission towers that are sculptures. Some ideas off the top of my head: Paul Bunyan, Woody Hayes, Iron Man, Superman, knights, samurai, ninjas (probably should only be used for wireless power transmission, otherwise the cables will give them away), Micky Mouse, Greek Gods (Like from Rockefeller Center), national heroes, sports mascots.

Never mind that they actually are better for the environment than anything else.

Clean renewable energy is worse for the environment than radioactive waste? I understand that nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal and oil, and that it produces constant power and all that, but how is it better for the environment than wind?

In this case, yes. Wind power is nice, but wind isn't constant. Do you want your family or loved ones undergoing surgery when the wind stops and the power fails? I sure don't.

Radioactive waste can be mitigated by several methods:

1. Use of Breeder Reactors which actually create more fissionable fuel as they operate. So a lot of the radioactive waste is actually recycled into fuel sources.

2. Modern reactor designs are more efficient than the prior designs. Just like cars from 2000 are more reliable, have better fuel economy, and are safer than cars from the 1960's, the reactors that are being designed and implemented now outside the U.S. typically have 1/3 fewer mechanical parts and are made from materials that will last a lot longer. See Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor and Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor for two examples of these designs. Wikipedia has more information about these "Generation III" reactors.
3. Power generation efficiency could be increased beyond current levels by adding Stirling Engine-style generators to the cooling towers, but note that many of the Generation 3 and newer reactor designs don't use cooling towers (Three Mile Island).
4. Depleted uranium is great for tank/aircraft shells, tank armor, and has several other uses in the civilian market.
5. The Federal Government promised the nuclear power industry a radioactive waste storage facility, Yucca Mountain, in 1987. It's a law. The nuclear industry has been paying for that, doubling the end-user cost of electricity, but hasn't received anything in exchange for the money. And then Secretary Chu decides that Yucca Mountain isn't good enough and kills it. So basically the nuclear power industry has paid millions of dollars for the past two decades and got nothing back for it, except coolant ponds that are filling up with more and more spent fuel, scattered across the country rather than being held in a single, secured location.

You may point to Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear reactors should be avoided. Good point, but the cause of that problem wasn't the reactor itself, it was the people running the reactor. Some stupid test* was conceived by an idiot, and when the most experienced shift refused to do it because it was dangerous, the idiot tried again and again until he got a group of less-experienced people who didn't know any better to do the test. Then things went wrong and we're left with Satan's spotlight shini

Yeah, talk about 'speaking of duh'...
Read about how the scientists attributed as having agreed upon the existence of global warming were named without their consent, nor had they voiced any such affirmation on the matter.

Please *do* read about it, with your comprehension cap on your head brim forward this time.
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/business/45-scientists-dump-global-warming-deniers-in-24-hours/1117

You have it exactly backwards. From TFA:
"DeSmogBlog took it upon themselves to see what the scientists who are on the famed list of "500 scientists who don't believe in global warming" actually think and as it turns out, many of them didn't know they were on it."

If there's a different story you're talking about, by all means please post some linkage.