They break because there was no selective pressure that made them work. Cartilage doesn't regenerate because it lasted as long as we were mobile, veins don't clear plaque because that wasn't an issue with the ancestoral timeframe and lifestyle, neurons don't regrow much because they lasted long enough to keep up, our cancer defences are limited because the cell division errors generally don't go crazy until later life, etc.

There's not one root cause, each system fails because it's just not designed to keep going past that point. You can fix one system, and that might buy you a couple years if that was the thing that would kill you, but there's still dozens of others all ready to fail in their own unique ways.

Yeah, I think people underestimate the difficulty of extending life.

It isn't just one thing that needs to be fixed, some immortality gene that needs to be turned on. It's everything.

Our bodies are designed to work really well for about 45 years, and decently well for another 15-20 after, but after that we're operating outside of spec.

None of our systems evolved to work after seventy, they don't all breakdown at the same rate, but they all break down.

I think we'll hit the singularity or cyborgs before we hit average humans passing 120.

That's a long time to live with a tenuous connection to reality.

How would you prefer people to get rich?

I don't agree with the philosophy that people aren't supposed to get rich helping people, if anything those are exactly the sort of people we want to get rich.

People spend a lot of time communicating with co-workers and generally become friends of some kind, it's pretty natural that they'd make jokes. And if your primary form of communication is over email it's natural you'll joke over email as well, it's not stupid as much as human nature.

And I don't see what makes the jokes offensive. Sure in the wrong context they're racist, but there's no reason to think they were using a bad context. This just feels like one of those incidents where a politician says something dumb and everyone wastes a newscycle trying to be offended by it.

They're not altruistic enough to leave the current oil in the ground I don't see why this oil would be different.

Sure they may delay a few years, but people tend to be a lot more altruistic when it isn't costing much. The moment I point out you're sitting on a ton of oil is the moment you start to rationalize reasons that pumping oil isn't so bad.

Don't worry. I'm sure congress will do the right thing and point to this wasteful spending as a reason to cut funding to NASA.

It's legal but it's still a bit douchey. This is why cities make horrible convoluted suburbs now, to thwart this exact kind of action.

Actually they might have the right idea. The info the media will be most interested in is the gossipy Sony exec emails, and those things only really have legs for one news cycle.

So a lawsuit does two things, first it causes a bunch of papers to run things by the lawyers first, this could slow down some of the reporting until the news cycle has finished.

Second it gives them another related bit of news to report about, so the email contents are now part of the previous news cycle and the Sony lawsuit threat is the new news cycle.

So was the US not practising Christianity in the 1850s? Because there were a lot of slaves with a lot of Christian endorsements of their condition.

So is the problem Islam, or the contemporary expression of Islam in specific regions and among specific populations?

The problem with just blaming Islam as a whole is you blame a whole lot of people with beliefs completely unrelated. It would be like pointing at the Westburo Baptist Church and saying Christians are homophobic.

I don't deny Islam is the language they use to express their extremism, and to the extent that the Koran and Hadiths lay out some fairly brutal rules Islam does bear some blame.

But you can find justifications for slavery and sex slaves in the Old Testament as well.

I didn't claim that. I claimed that some Americans were joining the military for the same reasons that some Muslims become terrorists, to defend their religion and culture against its perceived enemies.

And yes, this occurs:
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

...

This is hardly the first time something like this has happened. We’ve had soldiers painting Bible verses on turrets of tanks and on bombs on airplanes. We’ve had soldiers handing out Bibles to the locals. The Pentagon and the American government seems to understand that this is very, very bad for American credibility in the Muslim world because it sends the message that this is a religious war of Christianity vs Islam.

And don't forget Ann Coulter

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

That sounds a hell of a lot like terrorist ideology to me except she's able to carry out her religious war via army instead of suicide bomber. Don't you think there were a few people who thought like Ann Coulter and joined the military? Enough to rival the number of Muslim terrorists?

I'm not saying Iraq war=terrorism or Drone attacks=terrorism, but I will say that a lot of people who turn to terrorism in the Middle East would be able to fulfil those urges as soldiers in the West.

I said nothing about "preaching". I said, Muslim faithful are compelled — by their religion — to fight for spreading Islam world-wide and to establish a Califate.

There is nothing of the kind in the Bible.

He's fighting and promoting, same way the IRA did.

IRA's fight was purely secular — nothing in Catholicism insists nor mandates the sort of things they've done. Muslims, once again, must fight other religions — in order to remain good Muslims. Because Koran — which they believe to be the word of God verbatim — says so.

Crusades? Residential schools? Inquisitions? The mechanisms are different but Christianity has it's own long history of aggressive attempts to spread the faith.

To be fair we are bombing ISIS territories and various Arab nations (via drones) and killing a crapload of non-military forces.

I'm guessing they're able to rationalize attacking our civilians without too much trouble.

I'm not trying to defend them, they're as ridiculous a caricature of villainy as you can get, but they're a product of the east west dynamic much more than a product of Islam.

The Iraq war?

I'm not saying they launch terrorist attack from the military. I'm saying that they're motivated by the same clash of civilizations desire to defend their culture and religion. Some might be perfectly good soldiers not doing anything wrong, and some might be responsible for some of the really ugly atrocities that Western militaries sometimes perpetrate.

The US army is steeped in Christianity, if the tables were turned do you think all of those soldiers would be content to stay on the sidelines while a Muslim superpower exerted its will over the West?

You think the guy in the Cafe is preaching? He's fighting and promoting, same way the IRA did. And asking why Christian terrorists aren't attacking the West is like asking why Wall Street bankers aren't mugging people at gunpoint. They aren't using those methods because they've got far less costly ways to get what they want.

Because they don't have to.

If you're a religious fanatic in the Middle East and want to kill Christians you become a terrorist.

If you're a religious fanatic in the West (or Australia) and want to kill Muslims you join the army.

I'm not trying to equate soldiers with terrorists, just pointing out why the comparison isn't valid.

You're always going to have a subset of people who will dedicate their lives to fighting and killing whom they perceive to be enemies. If they identify as Christian they simply join a western military and get to fight Muslims without sticking out, if they identify as Muslim they become terrorists because that's the only way to join the war.