It wasn't necessary of course. It happened for many reasons - overpopulation, inefficient farming, and abusive reparations after the First World War were big ones. Though you could combine the first two I suppose. It really depends how you look at it though: some might point the finger at a system of adversarial government, which was unable to satisfactorily solve the problems of overpopulation and inefficient farming, and which allowed the abusive reparations to be levied. Other people might point at specific politicians... Once again, I don't understand where you're going with this.

The first part of your comment: is that a complicated way of saying that women should not be allowed to have jobs before their childbearing years are finished?

It's immoral to allow other people to implore a woman to do something? That's pretty messed up, but I'm going to assume that was unintended statement on your part.

If I had a daughter, what I'd want for her is a life without children of her own. I'm lost on the point that you're arguing for here - is it fucked up that people would want children so badly that they would go to such extreme lengths to ensure that they could have one? Yes it is, certainly. We would all be better off if people did not want children so badly.

But maybe you're arguing for children and against having a career? You're suggesting that women should stick with the traditional domestic role, so that they won't have to give up their child bearing years? Or maybe you're arguing against the idea that the child bearing years and career-having years should overlap at all? Perhaps this is a subtle argument against age discrimination, your point just isn't clear.

The first part is true - marijuana has more carcinogens than tobacco does. The fact that a marijuana smoker smokes far less in quantity than a tobacco smoker makes a much bigger difference though. There's was also a suggestion, at one point, that THC might slow the growth of tumors.

So that's certainly something, but absolutely not 100% bullshit. "Mostly bullshit," perhaps.

It's unlikely that Peru really cares about them. These sorts of situations are usually more about political posturing than about the actual people or event.

It's funny... there's one picture showing a huge amount of damage caused by their footprints, even deeper and more visible than the landmark lines in places, and in the rest of the pictures you can't see any damage at all.

I don't know anything about The New Republic, but I do know that the opposite of conservative is progressive, not liberal. A liberal conservative isn't an oxymoron, nor is such a person necessarily a moderate - some of the most strongly partisan conservatives are also liberals.

What you've described is sex (for which you gain health) followed by violence. I'm familiar with both of those things, they've been in previous GTA games, but the point is that they're unrelated. For the sake of the video the player has chosen to do one right after the other, but they could have just walked away after the sex or committed the violence without the sex.

Your suggestion that sex should render the NPC invulnerable is... odd. Before the sex she's an NPC just like any other, after the sex she's an NPC just like any other.

All right, lets look at this another way: in Halo players have the ability to crouch, this serves a functional purpose. There's a rather juvenile tradition in Halo of killing another player in a multiplayer match and then standing over their corpse and crouching. The existence of the corpse and the ability to crouch are entirely separate from one another, each there for a good reason, but when the player decides to combine them in this way they do so with the intent to suggest a humiliating sexual act. There are ways that Bungie could prevent this one particular act if they chose to do so - they could eliminate corpses, they could make the areas around corpses impossible to crouch in, they could remove the ability to crouch entirely - but the act exists because the players wanted it and created it themselves. So in other words: 1) The fact that people use the game as a medium for their expression, and that expression in undesirable, does not mean that there's anything wrong with the game. 2) Any attempt to censor this sort of thing is likely to get worked around. 3) Free expression isn't always nice, it doesn't always make you feel good about humanity, but it is always valuable.

So how does that relate to a single player game like GTA? Ultimately what I'm saying here is that the player makes the game what they want it to be.

I haven't played GTA 5, but I've played all the others and this: "incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points." is bullshit unless things have changed dramatically. Violence, yes. Plenty of violence, but the player never commits sexual violence. That would be thematically way out of line with the series. And you don't get 'health' points by abusing or killing women either. You can certainly rob them of their money... Is that supposed to be the same thing?

The only way you'd have a choice of 10 ISPs is with government regulation.

If you've only ever lived in cities known for their pizza, Pizza Hut seems like cheap junk. If you've ever lived in one of the many many places where people don't even know what good pizza tastes like, you'll learn to appreciate Pizza Hut for being, at least, edible.

This is inevitably what goes through my head whenever I see a device with some clever hardware tchotchke - "That nice." I say, "But it'll only work as long as the device is using their software, which ties me to their OS and possibly configuration, limits my privacy options, etc." So a laptop with a second screen, like the Razer Blade Pro, or a phone like the Yota, is ultimately pretty useless.

Thanks. I guess you got downmodded for the ex-Windows comment, but it was still a helpful reply. Appreciated.

There isn't anything this thin and light, there aren't any AMD CPUs that can run at a decent speed at such low power, but on larger notebooks they're competitive at the low end if you factor in the GPU. An A10 is both faster and cheaper than Iris Pro.

Trouble is, most people who care about that want something discrete. But for a cheap notebook which is actually gaming-capable an A10 is a good choice.

I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?

I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.

Because that wouldn't actually reduce the number of babies, it would just make them poorer and less educated. We certainly do need to reduce the population, but there's no evidence to suggest that welfare programs, daycare, foodstamps, etc., are contributing to the birth rate. Even when the payouts of those programs are tied to the number of children that the recipients have. In fact there's some evidence for the opposite, that using welfare to alleviate some of the very worst effects of poverty can lower the birthrate.

Not enough though, clearly, welfare isn't the magic bullet that's going to bring the population down. Unfortunately, a lot of people use the fact that greater prosperity goes hand-in-hand with lower birth rates as an excuse to ignore the problem... I suspect that this is something that isn't going to be even widely acknowledged, let alone solved, until an awful lot of people have died violently.

There's some kind of cognitive disconnect here.

Question: "Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries?"
Answer: "China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody" "Tens of millions of people perished"

Question: "they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?"
Answer: "Tens of millions of people perished"

Look, the survival of the country doesn't mean shit. Countries are just organizational tools. The aid has the objective of improving the lives of the people, not the country, and it does work - it has been rigorously demonstrated to work when it's done a certain way under certain conditions. All that the article is trying to do is point out that those conditions are very idiosyncratic and that aid organizations need to take that under consideration.