No, Capitalism - the free market - does NOT LIKE competition. While every *small* company is trying to outdo their competition (which is good and manageable), every *big* company is trying to *kill* their competition (which is very very bad).

You seem to ignore the fact that nothing can work without rules. Capitalism is not - and has never, ever been - about letting companies off their leash and go crashing about like bulls in China shops. When there is less regulation, things like the GFC happens, as well as people dying from smoking, asbestos, pollution, etc.

Without government regulation of the market, you would not currently have cheap water, because there would only be 2 major water companies (after they'd killed all the smaller competition) and you'd have a choice between cheap and nasty, or clean and expensive. Give me one example of a deregulated market which has ended up providing consistent quality at affordable prices.

The only time Capitalism works well, is when government regulates to *ensure* quality and competition. Smell the air in Beijing. That's the smell of lack of regulation. The GFC - lack of regulation. Yes, *too much* regulation is bad, and *not enough* (or inappropriate) regulation is also bad. It's not a zero-sum game, it's about getting the balance right.

> You have no rights of speech with a privately owned business.

What an odd attitude for someone to have these days.

So we don't have a right to expose companies using slave-wage labour in bad conditions in other countries? We don't have a right to protest having our personal data sold, or given away to government agencies? Or about mining companies messing up our environment? Or to form unions to protect workers' rights?

We humans also like attributing "intent" to natural systems - like "balance" and "healing" - but nature doesn't.

Nature doesn't "heal", in the same way that it doesn't "hurt". Organisms just do what they do. Their interaction and interrelation - the patterns our human brains identify are just temporary states. Thing are always changing, but they usually change so slowly (ie. we live so briefly), we think we perceive a "system" and call it "nature" and think it somehow cares what happens.

There is no intent in nature. There is no "healing". Nature is neither benign nor belligerent. In fact, "nature" doesn't exist. There's no such thing, except as a concept in our human minds.

True, but the fact is there is more than one type of "hero". It doesn't have a simplistic definition.

Snoden is a hero, in one definition, because anyone who risks their personal wellbeing to help others is a hero.

Gates is a hero also, as his efforts have saved lives; albeit via money, without personal risk.

Of course, one can be a hero for a period of time, then go and do something stupid and not be a hero anymore. It's just a word, not a permanent tattoo on one's forehead.

Writing from the moshpit of judgementalism, are we?

I've suffered from anxiety and depression all my life. You don't speak for me, and nothing you said makes sense to me. Believe it or not, we're not one single, like-minded, mono-cultural mass.

Is that right? And what research supports this ridiculously simplistic viewpoint?

Actually, you just said exactly that. You imply that the only way it's not going to work for me is if I sabotage it for myself, so I can be "right and miserable". What a holier-than-thou person you are. Oh right, you're religious. Well, I guess you have a right to think you know what's good for me. I have a right to disagree - which, from your mountain-top, you call "the right to be miserable".

You have your medicine, I have mine. Leave it at that, if you are able.

This hasn't proven to be the case in politics, even though the existing problems are already solvable.

Whilst we "intelligent humans" debate invented concepts like "morality", other creatures of nature carry on doing things to each other that we can only begin to have nightmares about. The only reason we worry about hurting other animals is because we are social creatures and therefore wired for empathy - but only for our own survival, not for any other reason. Ethics & morality exist purely for our benefit. Where it happens to benefit other creatures is purely incidental.

I pay taxes for the convenience of a police force so I don't have to hire personal guards, roads so I don't have to make my own, and the country's economic management so I don't have to trade sheep for beer. Convenience over personal responsibility is what allows you to get on the internet and make wild generalisations.

No, that's only half the picture.

First comes a technology that NOBODY thinks is dangerous and NOBODY knows is detrimental. We're sold the cool-aid. Cigarettes for instance. That's a technology too. Advertisers told us smoking was healthy back in the day. So do you blame people for demanding the product and helping create a huge industry?

Same with cars. You forget that we only started talking publicly about pollution in the 80's or thereabouts. I don't remember any talk of pollution in the news before then. Cars go WAY back. Do you think the current supply/demand for cars would have emerged if the media had been all over atmospheric pollution back THEN? If we had been told lead in petrol was bad back THEN?

You can even take mobile phones as another example. It was only AFTER the worldwide success of the iPhone that we started hearing about labour issues. It was only AFTER we started buying all our clothes from China etc. that we started hearing about sweat shops. It was only AFTER we all had electricity that we heard about fossil fuel issues.

You cannot seriously say it's OUR problem because "oh supply and demand", that's just being simple-minded. The demand was created in the first place, before we knew there were any problems. We trusted the process, and only NOW do we realise it has fucked us all for the benefit of a few. But only AFTER we are hooked and it's almost impossible to change. Our livelihoods now depend on these things. Many of us do the best we can to reduce our usage, but that's about all we can be reasonably asked to do for now.

It's funny how, when other people created these markets through misinformation and manipulation, it's somehow now up to *us*, the people who were duped into these false economies in the first place, to somehow change the world. "Think globally act locally" only goes so far. Those in power who created all these problem are where the buck stops, nowhere else. They are guilty. They are responsible.

We did not "demand" this. All we demanded was a better life. It was up to those with money and power to think up a workable version of "better" but what we got in the end was entrapment into a lifestyle that is killing us.

You're kidding, right? The only thing we are affecting here is a few degrees of temperature, and you're equating that to "terraforming"? On top of that, it has taken *decades of activity of millions of people and vast industrialisation* to achieve *a few degrees of change*. No, we are not doing terraforming. We are just fucking with the atmosphere a bit. It's not even enough to wipe us out, or make Earth "unliveable". It's just enough to wipe out our food production and cause millions - perhaps billions - of people to starve or be killed in resource wars, etc. until we adjust to the new climate conditions.

That's not terraforming, that's just another day in human civilisation.

If you knew anything about the topic you're commenting on, you'd know that increased cloud cover *prevents* heat leaving the surface. Increased cloud cover is what helps create a greenhouse effect, increasing temperatures. Hard to believe there are people living in the 21st century who don't know these basic things I was taught in high school. Fucking scary.

"This", as they say. If you need to know the name of the application to run it, it's fail. I've been using Windows since 3.1. Got Win7 and wanted the screen shot tool. Typed in "screen", nope. "Clip", nope. "shot", "grab", "snap", etc. all nope. It's called the "snipping tool" for some godforsaken reason. And somehow typing shit is "more intuitive".

Thing is, I have a mental block about it now, and keep forgetting it's called "snipping tool". The number of times I've had to look it up online again is embarrassing.

Windows XP let me easily *categorise* my menu. My Start menu had a few sub-menus, like "media", "utilities", "internet", and each of those contained shortcuts to relevant programs. It took me THREE KEYPRESSES to run ANY program I wanted. Want to run Chrome? Win+I+C. Filezilla? Win+I+F. The folder my music is kept in? Win+G+M ("G" for "goto"). It was a thing of beauty. I can't do that in Windows 7 - everything takes longer now. And don't get me started on that Frankenstein's abortion they call a Control Panel.

That doesn't mean much to me, as there's no comparison to how far away other things are. Perhaps better to say it will go past at a little over 8 times the distance to the Moon. People are used to seeing pictures of the Earth and Moon.

Aussie here, couldn't agree with you more. I only watch BBC docos, and even then some are dodgy.

I've given National Geographic shows a go, because I like the magazine. But their entertainment division is simply that - entertainment. Special effects and waffle. It's a real shame. Making documentaries on a commercial basis is FAIL from the start. By the time you've made all the compromises necessary, any real value in the enterprise has long since bled out.

Here in Oz we have the ABC, bless its cotton socks. Britain has the BBC. The U.S. has public broadcasters, why was it not made by one of them? It may have actually been something special then.

I wonder why Americans often feel the need to qualify their support for another country by making sure it's known how "patriotic" they are. It sounds very, very weird from the outside (in this case Oz).