Reminds me of the following passage in the Commodore-64 Wikipedia page:

In January 1983, Commodore offered a $100 rebate in the United States on the purchase of a C64 to anyone trading in another video game console or computer.[27] To take advantage of this rebate, some mail-order dealers and retailers offered a Timex Sinclair 1000 for as little as $10 with purchase of a C64, so the consumer could send the TS1000 to Commodore, collect the rebate, and pocket the difference; Timex Corporation departed the computer market within a year.

Normally, if you are a person who is inclined to blow $10k on a piece of jewellery, you would expect that you "investment" *won't* be obsolete in one year.

How did they secure the rights to make these episodes? You'd think that would be the most expensive and most restrictive part.

You're saying that corporations can't profit from building mega projects, infrastructure, dams, reservoirs, pipelines, desalinization plants, etc. on the pubilc dime? You'd think that the corporations that purportedly control all government decisions would be order them to open the floodgates of public money into these projects.

All you need to do is limit the admission of boys to be equal to the number of girls in STEM programs. Then, perfect gender equality is guaranteed and no girls are forced into programs they don't want. Perfection achieved! The excess of boys can just go into basket weaving. I mean, it's not like we have a need for so many STEM students.

There's an important factor that you Doomer types seem to forget about. The pre-revolutionary French and the Arab Springers didn't have access to a particular pressure-relief valve that we do: DEMOCRACY. Instead of breaking out the torches and pitchforks, all that the disgruntled masses need to do is vote for the Pitchfork Party that will be newly created to (attempt to) deliver whatever it is that the masses want. If the masses want punitive taxes on the rich, then that's what we'll get.

There'll be unintended consequences, of course, like chasing rich people, their entrepreneurship, their businesses, and their capital and all foreign capital out of the country, but if this is what the masses want, we can have Venezuela right here. Everyone will be *equally* poor — mission accomplished! The 'revolution' will happen in the voting booth.

Strange that what we actually see in the first world isn't voters opting for far-left or far, far left-er types, but actually a tendency toward business-friendly conservative types. The Pending Doom(TM) is strictly a minority opinion, most particularly among the supposedly outraged masses.

Or "Why should I care about the peasants when I have absolute power?"

I still can't get rid of the last 5-10 lbs of flab. It doesn't matter how little I eat.

I think some WWII POWs might disagree. Unless you are claiming that you body violates the universal Law of Conservation of Mass.

Is Microsoft preparing a Plan B for when they finally give up on Windows Mobile?

SMBC

Used to be that in a democracy we will weight the facts and then vote on a decision.

Huh? That's never been the case.

They're not even debating the right question: Are humans causing a climate change that will cause us considerable harm?

You could get it down to one box labelled "Charge all smartphones in room". See? Super-easy!

Christianity has the same problem. If you haven't murdered every single homosexual you've ever encounterd, then you are disobeying the Bible. The crucial difference is that "Christians" have rejected the more barbarian aspects of their sacred and unchanging scripture (making them exactly what, I don't know) and all "Christian" states have rejected the integration of church and state. Islam is still stuck in its own Dark Ages.

The reason that languages fragmented in the past was that populations were fragmented and rarely communicated. That is not the case today. Increasingly concentrated mass media in English will cause accents and dialects of English to converge. Mind you, the root English will also evolve over hundreds and thousands of years, but eventually, everyone will speak this root English.