The Government IS the people. People, by and large, don't want to have to get off of their fat asses to inconvenience themselves in any possible way. Most people don't want to have fewer kids. Most people don't want to drive smaller, or electric vehicles. Most people don't want to curb their use of plastics. Most people don't want to use less energy. Most people don't want to pay for the true cost of the resources they use. Governments around the world are just responding to what the people want, unfortunately.

The rich don't care, they just buy up the high ground or build bunkers in the side of a mountain. They won't lift a finger until rioters start storming their mansions and dragging them out through the streets to be lynched. Unlike the French revolution though, the powers that be have much more effective brainwashing tools at their disposal to deflect public ire away from themselves which is delaying the process, for now anyway.

...the Hamptons is not a defensible position.
    -- Mark Blyth

I'm reminded of a Larry Niven story set in a world where they had solved the rejection problem and the transplant was a routine operation. They had been so successful that they were extending life through transplantation, not just restoring normal lifespans. Of course, there was a shortage of organs to transplant. Naturally, this lead to mandatory organ donor status, then to organs harvested from the death penalty. Then more and crimes became punishable by death......

And that last bit is the problem with harvesting organs from condemned prisoners.

Just what I was thinking - when do they notify me that my information was stolen.

Also, remember, if you're health insurance includes Medicare, your id has been your Social Security number and may still be. I'm assuming the billing company needs this information to bill Medicare. It's taking awhile for the new Medicare IDs to be issued.

"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

- Steve Jobs, 1996

Western companies are the same. Maybe better at hiding it, but of course they get hold of competitor's equipment and take it apart, stealing all the best ideas. I've done it myself for various companies. Worked around patents to implement similar features.

Reminds me of that BS line that there are more people alive today than have ever died... another total piece of garbage legend.

Curious... why do you think this is a "garbage legend?"

We need to keep an eye on this technology. The scope for abuse is frightening.

Imagine a "memory detector" that works by showing the subject images and monitoring the memory centres of the brain to see if they recognize them. Kinda like a lie detector, with similar levels of reliability and scientific rigour applied to the results.

The alarmists are the ones who do the "it doesn't matter if two opposite things happen, both are evidence that catastrophic climate change is going to destroy the world!" thing.

Preliminary data reported from the reference glaciers of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) in 2018 from Argentina, Austria, China, France, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and United States indicate that 2018 will be the 30th consecutive year of significant negative annual balance (> -200mm); with a mean balance of -1247 mm for the 25 reporting reference glaciers, with only one glacier reporting a positive mass balance (WGMS, 2018).

Israel has to launch to the west instead of the east which makes everything a lot harder. They'd probably need a Saturn V size rocket to just _land_ something on the moon.

A large portion of the population hasn't.

NeXTstep (and by extension OS X) uses a double float seconds since 1970 in its NSDate class. This not only avoids the Y2038 (and Y10000) problem, but gives you microsecond accuracy for dates that are inside the current era. There is also no floating-point round-off error for any whole number of seconds because they are the base unit.

Hawaii did it first. These sunscreens were banned there last year.

Not true. Sufficient motivation in the form of money might very well lead to the invention of atmospheric processors that when large enough ones are built and powered with nuclear power could reduce total CO2. Of course that would require massive amounts of capitalism and nuclear energy, both things that most enviroweenies find taboo.

I actually think the most likely doomsday scenario is a bioweapon. Genetic manipulation makes it more more likely that some fools will do it inadvertently in the belief they have targeted the weapon accurately enough to only kill their genetically marked enemies.