Working for a cable company, that is the general perception of most people outside the industry. What you and they also fail to consider is the packages (Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Spike, +11 others) are all from the same company, in this case Viacom. The content providers, like Viacom, are the ones most threatened by al a carte programming. We as a cable company would love this model as we could grab many more subscribers while reducing costs paid to the content providers.

Here is an example of how these content deals work. Viacom has several niche channels that wouldn't sell without being tied to huge money makers like Comedy Central. Viacom doesn't want its channels to fail, so it'll agree to sell us CC only if we also buy their crappy channels. The majority of the cost of cable comes from these kind of deals through the numerous content providers that make up the whole cable television market. This is why we have 200+ channels of which 15 or so are any good.

Do you really believe the sludge you are spewing out? Partisan politics is a waist of time. Grow up and have an original thought.

I completely agree. I'd also love to see some large federal programs in the US dissolved and passed to the states. Then we would have 50 test grounds to see what works and what doesn't. Unsuccessful states could then adopt programs from the successful states.

I may take some criticism for this, but the first area should be education. The federal government has completely failed the people in this regard. I honestly think the current situation is so bad, its worth creating test programs across the 50 states, guaranteeing some will fail, to find out what really works. Also as an after thought, because someone will ask, success could be measured based on a combination of graduation rates, college enrollment and job placement of recent public education graduates from each state.

Another great area would be healthcare.

Of course now that I've written this down, I realize it would never happen. The federal government would need to willingly relinquish control over something. Then they would need to use empirical evidence to determine the best course of action for the country. Neither of these things I expect to happen without violent protest from one side or another.

What are you smoking? Not believing in something is in itself a belief. You believe the idea that there is no God. Stop trying to alter the English language to suit your fancy.

I think the AC is agnostic, not religious, and you seemed to completely miss his point. The point I got from the AC was that atheism is just as open ended as theism. Both require the belief in something that currently has no evidence to support it. There is no evidence to support a god and lack of evidence doesn't prove non-existence.

No idea where you got this from.

I do like "No god is more likely than some god, given no evidence" as it clearly shows how atheism makes as much sense as theism.

Did you read the article you linked to:

Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. There is a finite amounts of it. Every human takes away from that finite amount, the energy need to make that human survive comes from that amount, and any additional amount used to make their life better comes from that amount. The more people, the less extra that can be used purely for increased standard of living. At some point you just have a bunch of people and the resources to keep them alive. There is nothing left to make them happy.

Immanuel Kant would disagree. People are an end in themselves and not a means to an end. If you do not understand that, I'm not going to take the time to explain it to you.

Source?

I didn't provide evidence because your statement was contrary to mine. I said decreasing populations lead to loss in technology. Which is supported by this article and the many referenced within it:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

You asked "What knowledge and technology has been lost as a result of regression effects from population growth?" of which I have no supporting evidence. That's why I assumed you misread my initial comment and also provided no citation.

You did, however, catch me in a logical fallacy. I should have stated above the minimum threshold of a sustainable population in where there is no loss of important technical knowledge from generation to generation, the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole for each person added. More to your liking?

Can you read?

I was stating there is a minimum size a population must be to be sustainable and not regress. At that number of people (one), you face entirely different issues as stated in the previous post. So, your argument of killing everyone but one man is irrelevant to the discussion of sustainable population sizes.

Its hard to trust the reports of an organization that said 2013 was the fourth warmest year on record:

http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

While at the same time we had record breaking cold temps and huge growth in the polar ice caps:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Already answered this argument here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

My hypothesis is purely about population size, not advances in technology. Without the rapid increase in technological advancements of the 20th century, we wouldn't be able to feed the current worlds population. The real question is, is there a point where our growth will outpace the supporting technologies? I think yes.

Jumping to the extreme of one person left doesn't really help your argument. There is substantial evidence supporting a minimum sustainable population. That is, once we reach a certain minimum size, we as a population regress and actually lose knowledge and technology. There is a healthy population bound on each side, minimum and maximum. To think otherwise is obtuse.

My hypothesis is purely about population size, not density. Density is more about the location of the worlds population not the overall size. Its hard to argue that if everywhere was as dense as New York City we would be better off. We need somewhere to grow food.

What a warped view of reality. For every increase in human population on the Earth the standard of living goes down for humanity as a whole, because the finite resources of the Earth are then divvied up among more people. No matter how efficiently resources are used, there is a point were the standard of living afforded to everyone isn't enough to live on.

You may try to argue that the point I'm referring to is way off, but what you'd be failing to take into consideration is that between now and that point would be a continuous decline in the standard of living for everyone everywhere. Before we ever reached such a point there would be mass extinction due to war and fighting over what little was left.

As for space travel, if we reach a population on Earth that requires supplies to be shipped in from other planets, what happens if there is a break in that supply? War, famine and lots of death.