That jives with my understanding. Whatever form the great solar death brings for life on this rock, if we havent figured out a solution by then, we're either dead or awaiting our well-deserved fate

I'm USAian, so there's that. I can certainly buy that countries with actual functioning anti-trust and consumer protection laws force their businesses to actually compete.

Well, today's Furry porn crowd may have found satisfaction in Kilrathi babes...

I can attest to cyan nipples. Shitty quantization is indeed to fault for it. Compressing high color depth down to 8-bit color depth requires making decisions on color accuracy. Unfortunately, automated processes aren't always great at deciding if nipples or shadows are more important.

+1 Internets for you, sir

Watch out for their Foot

I'm sorry, but no it's not.
You could very well be correct that they take this very seriously, I'm not in a position to speculate.

However, they do function as cartels, and the free market does not serve to regulate ad-hoc price fixing schemes amongst them. Simply google "insurance cartels". Buy some books on the topic. Read some papers.

Again, I'm not denying that actuarially, climate change is a real coefficient. But the assertion that the free market would bring to light any kind of price-fixing scheme? Horse-shit.

We couldn't get knocked into a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect. If we could, it would have happened, as earth has oscillated from nearly 100% carbon sequestration to nearly 0%. The earth apparently has better equilibrium seeking mechanisms than Venus had.

Bingo.

It's been pretty much every extreme you can imagine, with the vast majority of its time spent in states that would not support today's human population. To me, the collapse of civilization and the migratory patterns that would emerge with even a small shift in arable land patterns is pretty goddamn scary.

You and I agree that it is real. We really, really, really don't agree on corporate business practices it would appear though.

If the CF/EO determines that it is more profitable to raise prices with the rest of the cartel, then that's what they will do, actuarial tables be damned.

It pains me to have to agree with you, but you're dead on. The insurance industry is not a free market. It's a pseudo-cartel.

I'm no AGW Denier... but I think you've struck an entirely different problem than you were aiming for. The illusion of free market. In reality, insurance companies largely operate as pseudo-cartels, with ad-hoc price fixing. No one is going to buck the crowd, they're going to play along with the rest of the cartel.

I feel like there's a joke there that I'm not getting...

A good point. Would be cool if we could get things like OMAP/Sitara chips with an open GPU.