You both have a point, but sharing and using knowledge takes energy. Without the cheap energy of oil (or an alternative which has yet to take over) all that knowledge won't go very far or even last very long.
You sound unimpressed with "stuff", so don't buy "stuff". Buy experiences. Take them to the zoo, or a children's show, or a good hands-on science museum. It'll cost the same, they'll get more out of it, and there'll be that much less plastic sitting around your sibling's house.
Maybe because they can be the geekier type that have less social lives, maybe feel alienated from those around them, and thus easier to isolate and brainwash.
In other words, engineers don't get laid enough. Promise them an afterlife full of virgins, and the next thing you know....
That's only true for monoculture fed by petroleum-based fertilizers. As soon as you talk in terms of sustainable farming, with crop rotations and even mixed fields, traditional farming has productivity levels that monoculture can't touch.
It's a moot point, though. Petroleum-based monoculture cannot be sustained indefinitely. Traditional agriculture has been and--unless we continue to destroy our soils--will be.
Wait, they want to turn the International Space Station into a national lab? What about all the other countries with a stake in this real estate?
The only spanner in the works here is that the PS3 owners don't need to upgrade their PS3s. All their games that they've bought so far currently work, so long as they don't "upgrade" to the latest firmware, plus they keep their other OS functionality.
Alas, Sony has no out there either. Users can no longer play their current games online, which is definitely an advertised feature. The user loses functionality no matter what they do.
We need to make manufacturers calculate mileage averages from the total vehicles they sell, not the total vehicles in their lineup. This is just going to result in more abominations like the PT Cruiser, which was designed to lower the average mileage of Dodge's truck line rather than to be a useful (or even safe) passenger vehicle.
I see two ways out of that:
1. Cost of living varies regionally. Of course, as soon as you inject money the cost of living changes, so you have to do it gradually.
2. Economics is not a zero-sum game.
To some extent, we do need to grow our way out of poverty... but that only works if we commit ourselves to sharing the wealth to a reasonable degree. I'm not advocating Communism. I just don't think the highest incomes should be thousands of times the size of the lowest.
And the real trick is that the next terrorist attack won't be on a plane. It will probably be a real nuke stashed in a port somewhere, since we don't even bother to check the trillions of pounds of cargo we import each year.
Could we, even? At what point would it be cheaper to just relieve the world of poverty than establishing an impassible fence three miles from every American border?
The system is broken: even the experts realize that. Should we be playing with the algorithm, or throwing the whole system out?
If racial profiling doesn't work, what do we do next? Do we keep going with the security theatre, building a divide between "us" and "them", or do we start attacking the causes of terrorism rather than pretending we can do anything about the effects?
I have two concerns with that, without getting into legitimate questions of the pros and cons of running your government by utilitarian principles.
1. Who's compiling the statistics? And have we seen them, or are we just fearing the people Fox News tells us to fear?
2. If the statistics show us that 9/11 was an anomaly, we have a real problem with your system.
Guess who belongs to terrorist organizations? Young middle eastern men with travel records back and forth from Pakistan.
Tell that to Christian militia groups in Michigan.
people who don't understand the difference between binary and decimal have no place in IT
And they shouldn't be allowed to buy hard drives, either?
At the risk of being moderated "Troll"...
What a jerk.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
