You raise a very good point that can be applied to a lot of situations - such as reasearch or inventment in infrasturcture or even whether or not to go to war (ex. Iraq) - but most people are terrible in assessing risk, we are comfortable with huge familiar risks like getting in a car accident, getting cancer or getting shot by a gun and so underinvest in efforts to mitigate them, while unfamiliar risks are highly overweighted (radiation, plane crash, terrorism) - needless to say the people in power understand this, they hype the obscure risks that can lead to profit (defense, homeland security) and fight like hell against anyone who trys to point out an "everyday" or long term risk that can be mitigated (lung cancer, seatbelts, global warming, motorcycle helmets, vaccines) but might cost them. It is funny that even the terrorism risk is really just being afraid of a label, every few days we have the eqivalent of hundreds of small scale terrorist attacks, i.e. shootings in malls, public places, street corners etc... yet we ignore them - whereas if a guy with a foregn name did the same thing the media would go apeshit about it...

Why has nobody modded this post up? he is right, this is econ 101 and it is stupid not to borrow money at ultra low rates if you can create an asset with a return greater than the rate

you sir, are an idiot, have you ever had food poisoning? you _can't_ hold water you barf it up every time you try and drink it - you need a fucking IV you moron

They are not bad at the internet - my Caddilac ATS is pretty well connected to the web, it sends me an email status report every month, I can talk to the car (open the doors etc.) over an iphone app, my wife's 2013 audi can't do that - also, as a car it is a good americanized version of a BMW 3 series - I did order the car from the dealer, I will not take whatever they have sitting on the lot, the dealers are bad news, anything to aviod dealers sounds good to me - but GM did for many years suck, they made horrible cars, unfortunately it took a goverment takeover to clear out the incompetent management of that company - so much for the private sector doing everything better, big private sector companies often get infested with parasitic management who loots the company and run it into bankruptcy.

You mean like RomneyCare in MA?

+1 you nailed it

I think in the context of the Fermi Paradox finding lots of habitable planets is _bad_ news because it invites the question "so where the hell is all the intelligent life on all these habitable planets" the aswers to that question indicate a term in the drake equation is close to zero, hopefully it isn't the term that indicates the length of time a technological civilization exists....

People misunderstand what large amounts of wealth really is - a billionaires wealth comes from the people who work for him and the infrastructure he owns if he wants to leave the country the people and infrastructure stays behind - the wealth of the society is unchanged, all he has done is exchanged his assets for some foreign currency slightly modifying the exchange rate - in short let them leave the country and sell their assets - the overall tax base will be unchanged - and good riddance

Well if we don't run out of oil I predict people will be stupid enough to keep burning it until our atmosphere approches that of Venus - but I doubt the mantle of the earth is a gooey delicicous layer of oil - even with the new estimate of oil reserves it amounts to only one year of extra oil consumption

I tend to agree, but you would think game developers, by not having to build a game to take advantage of the next generation hardware, would have more time to focus on making a decent game, so far they have not succeeded in doing that any better, where are the great, creative games?

You are right what is the point of finding a cure for any disease? We should just shoot the disabled and feeble who don't have the money to be cared for - the would save a lot of money - and of course you argue we don't have the money, of course we have the money to currently care for these people, we just don't have any money to really fix the problem, and money is like some sort of magic scarce resource to you instead of just a way of keeping score - saying the government is out of money is like saying you can run out of points at a basketball game - you can't - all that matters is if there are idle resources available to do what you want or not and with 7% unemployment there are plenty of idle resources - in short, sir, you are a nitwit

This is very sad news - I can't say anything more that others on this thread but just to add my voice in saying thank you

Russsia by far bore the brunt of casualties during WWII, but the US was critical to winning, in 1940 the US GDP was greater than the rest of thw world _combined_, the US truely was the "arsenal of Democracy" in the sense that it could produce an endless number of tanks, fighters, bombers and ships - so long as England did not fall the US could just stack up equipment in England to use as a staging ground for the invasion of Europe - Russia was quite pissed off that the US waited so long to invade while they bore the brunt of the casualties. The US had a similar role in WWI, in that american equipment helped break the stalemate between the axis and the allies.

NIce - esp. the mom comment - stay classy, So uh how do you store value, sheep and glod? I am pretty sure that fits your investor profile, since the sheep keep you company at night - oh one more thing, fuck you asshole.

Ding Ding Ding - Currencies are most definely not stores of value, and not _designed_ to be stores of value - if you want to store value buy stock, bonds, land or something else, currencies are meant to fascilitate exchange, not store wealth, if they were designed to store wealth they would be useless for exchange since - the currency supply would be limited, there would be no inflation which people might think is great but it would encourage horading, hence making it less and less useful for exchange and cause a major depression - all currencies have to have a little inflation just to keep it circulating - currency is not an investment - it shocks me that so many people are confused but this, if you hate inflation, buy an asset, it will float with inflation - duh