Social Security? No, but that doesn't take away from my children anyways except that the money is being stolen now so that my children will end up paying my benefits... but I have no chance to affect the theft.
Huh? No politician out there would dream of touching social security or medicare with a ten foot pole. Heck, we don't even have the most basic means testing. The senior voting bloc is too powerful. And yet.. everyone knows that these entitlements will not.. CAN not exist in their current form for the next generation. So, in short, the seniors are voting themselves some pork taken off the plates of the working generation.
If you need another example look at unions. They bribe / strong-arm / do whatever it takes to get preposterous sweetheart deals made with politicians that are based on pie-in-the-sky investment strategies. Just look at CALPERS and others.
When someone tries to point out that these agreements will bankrupt the municipality they fight tooth and nail to keep their loot even when it means cutting back on schools and everything else that benefits the upcoming generation.
Instead, what we ended up with was someone who was very well wise to how to work out all the loopholes.
What? Obama worked out all the loopholes to enable spying? Please! That's suggesting he actually gave enough of a rat's ass about the Constitution to worry about side-stepping it. No need, just have a quasi-legal court apparatus working in secret that approves everything that gets near it.
Then, when the annoying asses^H^H^H^H^H public makes a fuss about this egregious violation of our nation's founding document you do what a duplicitous, double-speaking, consummate politician does.. say something like "Look - I know there are concerns about finding the right balance between our civil liberties and our security and frankly I share them. I am appointing a special secret committee of NSA folks to review all this and report their findings to me. Now fuck off^H^H^H^H I want to assure you that your concerns are heard loud and clear. God bless America."
Loss of vitamin C manufacture could well have to do with the development of some other pathway that was more important at the time, and may well continue to be more important today.
What if there was a co-occurring mutation that was, at that time, more advantageous than the loss of vitamin C production? What if the loss of vitamin C production happened to a population living in an area with abundant ascorbic acid in their food? Maybe they killed off their less-lucky neighbours? The notion that something is because it's got to be optimal is false. There's a lot of flexibility to life even within a species.
It may be true that we've some advantage by not producing this vital anti-oxidant. I just rather doubt it.
"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"