After checking all the comments, I didn't see anyone pointing out what seemed very obvious to me when I read the summary: all the countries, USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, are offshoots of the old British empire, and all speak English only (well, Canada does have some francophones). It's like a club of like-minded countries, with the same base culture and language.

There's an interesting article on the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06... which contends that moral judgements depend on what language we're speaking. Within this 5-country native English language club, the emotional strength of their own shared language totally overrides any moral qualms they might have for spying on those foreigners speaking strange languages in primitive countries.

When men don't get into 2 as many accidents as women. Sorry, but a corporate accountant has analyzed your criteria, and found that your penis is correlated with a higher rate of accidents. Enjoy your rate.

Your mistake is to assume that we can survive without an ecosystem replete with a shit-load of species whose impact on us is largely unknown. We're about to find out if we can survive with a drastically changed one.

Yep, I'm aware of union shops and right to work states. Just wanted to be sure what you were talking about, because your initial description told a much, much wilder story.

Because free markets do not exist, and capitalism is not a silver bullet to the world's problems (it may, however, be a silver bullet for the problems of the 1% to get more money, which is why quite a few people like it).

That said, I can't figure out if this is sarcasm, or if someone is serious. The political discussion in this country is seriously fucked.

By instituting rules that apply to how speech is created, and completely disassociated from the content of that speech.

Some examples:
1) You can't run ads that mention political candidates or parties 2 weeks before an election.
2) You can't contribute more than x money to the campaign of a single person/party for a specific election.

Does it leave concern-troll ads open? Sure does. It's not meant to be remove all influence of money on political speech. It just attempts to curtail the impact that a single large donor can have on the entire political process (witness Christie's pilgrimage to Adlai Stevenson's "political forum").

Yes, it means that political speech is impacted. Congratulations, you found out that sometimes, there's a trade-off in a decision that you make, and a perfect solution doesn't exist. It also means that you're capable of weighing the pros and cons of a decision.

Because money is not speech.

Seriously, stop trying to undermine the entire concept of a democracy. Or, in your lingo, a republic (even if that means you think the US and China have the same form of electing leaders... oh, wait, that would explain a lot of things).

Do you have a citation for that? The only thing I know is that some states allow union-membership to be automatic once you're hired into a particular position at a particular company. That is very, very different from being required to have a union membership to get a particular anywhere in the state.

Furthermore, the big difference is the scale. It's a lot harder to get a large group of people to agree on a political course of action than it is to get one person to agree with themselves. The entire point of democracy is to remove money and power as a tool for selecting a leader, and to instead trust the wisdom of the masses to make an orderly transition at the top. The current campaign finances remove that approach.

That said, union-membership requirements can go die in a fire. I understand the concept of free-loading, but I also understand the concept of not wanting to support a useless organization.

That's technically not a Net Neutrality argument, which is why the argument existed in the first place. To some extent, Comcast was right: it wasn't funneling as much data to Level 3 as Level 3 was funneling to it. What Comcast left out was that this problem was 100% of its own making, and impossible for Level 3 address: Comcast only sells highly asymmetric pipes to highly asymmetric users. It is actually illegal for its users to try to create a situation where it will funnel as much data to Level 3 as Level 3 funnels to it. Which is why techies were incensed by the argument.

That's the issue. All techies know the huge holes that have to exist in NN for the Internet to work. No one disagrees with any of those. The problem is that the principle of NN is all we have to concisely explain to people why Comcast is being an utter monopoly-rent-seeking shithead in this discussion, and how Comcast's attitude will break the Internet. Anything more requires delving into the depth of QoS, CDNs, dark fiber, roll-out subsidies, last-mile topologies, and barriers-to-entry in the website market to make a coherent argument. No one in the public sphere is going to listen to that.

That's why NN keeps being brought up. It's the only sound bite that's remotely applicable, and unfortunately, sound bites is what wins political wars.

If you'd read, you'd notice the pine borer beetle. There's the melting of the arctic permafrost, the increased acidification of the ocean and it's impact on marine ecosystems and fisheries... and that's just the ones that are happening right now, and are costing billions right now. Feel free to wait for more change.

Absolutely. However, I'd like to continue living without having to fight for all my daily resources. I'd also like to have kids, so that we may reach the stars one day.

Yep, it's selfish. All acts are selfish in one way or another. It's how we progress. So, yes, environmental change that a lot of species can't adapt to is bad for them and bad for me.

That'd be nice if that was the case. Production, especially heavy industries, was controlled by a very profitable set of private enterprises, some of which still exist today. Krupp is just one example, BMW another. As for control over Mass Media, that's an authoritarian concept. Otherwise, what do you call Fox News?

And, according to today's Republicans, Reagan, Nixon, Bush Sr, Goldwater and more are also leftists. It just means that today's republicans are so ignorant that they don't notice how close they are to Neo-nazis and how batshit insane their positions are.

Actually, it used to be speculated that changes in nesting populations of Emperor Penguins might have been due to Climate Change. Instead, this particular research indicates that those changes might be fairly normal migrations between nesting sites.

What we have here is science using new data to falsify an old assumption. Science to the rescue! As is article-reading.

Without a doubt. The question is: is the environment changing faster than the species can adapt to it? We, the most adaptable species the earth has ever produced (if measured by how fast we can move into previously inhospitable environments) are still feeling significant effects from global climate change. The pine borer beetle, with its expanded range of warmer temperatures, is impacting whole chunks of communities that will have to adapt to brand new realities. What do you think is going to happen to species without opposable thumbs, a huge brain, and the ability to modify the environment on massive scales?