Newsflash, the vast majority of investments and purchases made by individuals are driven by emotion and circumstance, logic is way down the list when it comes to real life decisions, what most claim to be logic is actually rationalisation of emotions. If what TFA claims is true then these people are merely rationalising a high risk investment with a secondary social motive, so even if they lose their money they can be satisfied that some nebulous "social good" came out of it. They are trying to set things up so they cannot fail to get some sort of "reward". Thing is we don't consciously think those things, we "feel" them when making a decision to hand over the money, or not.

No, they have a hypothesis that may one day be tested on the entire population in question, they formed their hypothesis on the basis of laboratory tests, Extrapolation is a perfectly valid method of making a prediction (and quite possibly the only useful method), corporations and political organisations all over the planet spend gazillions on the results of such "focus group" tests.

Of course nature is what it is and "the future" always reserves the right to to ignore our most confident predictions. In other words science is in the business of disproving its best answers by replacing them with better ones, it can never prove anything no matter how high you stack the data. If nobody has bothered with the question before then obviously the answer these people have is currently the best answer anyone has.

I was a teenager in the 70's, the social and behavioural sciences have come along way since Feynman pointed out their fundamental problem, the findings from the "Stanford prison experiments" during the same decade is an important, uncomfortable, and sadly underrated example of an early "law of human behaviour".

Whatever it is, it's not sexist if a woman does it.

It's an open maths question, nobody has ever number crunched the perfect game.

The plants are "talking to each other" in the same way a human and a flu virus "talk to each other".

We already have storage on the grid in the form of hydro, the notion we need to create a lot more storage for renewables is little more than propaganda from the FF industry. So called 'base load" provides a flat supply curve, consumers create a "roller coaster" demand curve with distinct peaks and troughs. When the demand is at it's peak they need to run gas turbines to make up for the slack, when demand is low they use the excess to pump water uphill. In some specific scenarios renewables are better suited to meeting the demand curve of a modern city than coal, for example solar on a hot day is at peak output precisely when the air conditioners are at peak demand.

Indeed, one of the first acts in the Irish/UK peace process in N Ireland was a military order for all UK soldiers to remove their helmets while on street patrol as a gesture of trust. The simple act of removing a helmet requires a hell of a lot more courage than shooting into a crowd with rubber bullets from atop of armored vehicles. Sure, the macho swat stuff must remain an option for serious incidents, but calling in a swat team with riot gear and snipers for a routine suburban drug bust is the hallmark of a coward.

As an Aussie I have to say 30C is not too bad, as long as it's not too humid. However mormons knocking on my door with suit and tie in 40C+ heat without a bead of sweat on them, is downright spooky.

"arithmatic" - Smelly maths?

Rural people have much more need for a car than city people. Back in the early 80's I lived here, the town has been a ghost town since the mill closed down in the mid-80's, it's not even marked on google maps anymore. Sure I could walk out the front door and be at work, but as the AC/DC song goes, "it's a long way to the shop, if you wanna sausage roll"

Don't kid yourself, it is their equipment, everything on it belongs to them. My employer monitors everything that happens on my desktop, email, IM, RDC, the lot. They have been doing so for the last 13yrs I have worked for them. I really couldn't care less, I have never known them to use it against any of their 180,000 employees although I'm sure browsing stats would be used if they had to cut back on staff for some reason. Stuff we want to keep for future reference is CC'd to the project's mailing list by the sender. Without email and vpn's I doubt I would be working from home 3 days a week, but I also doubt our PHB's are stupid enough to dump all that juicy email onto their competitors network.

IM has been around for a couple of decades now, if it was a superior replacement for corporate email then it would already be dead and buried. It seems to me that people who think email can be replaced by facebook simply don't have the work experience to know what the hell they are talking about.

No, a fat woman is sitting on his neck.

This is just Chomsky style conspiratorial nonsense. What model? Who came up with the plan to employ these specialist, and to what end?

Western family structures have not been as diverse as they are now for a very long time. You are as much an enabler of modern society as you are a victim of it. Human nature is what it is, you cannot escape it at best you can be aware of it. A major theme in human nature with an unbroken trail leading back to a time before we were anatomically human is that every generation believes they are special and have all the answers, they don't really change their tune until their own kids start disagreeing with that stance. This is the way "nature intended", if nothing else it ensures a stable society and explains why the vast majority of our leaders have always been "elders" with adult children.

Having said all that, I do think the GP fraternity has a lot of explaining to do and ignorance to heal among themselves wrt the over prescribing of such drugs.

What's your excuse for that post, "delusions of grandeur"?

A friend of mine once took his kid to the doctor with "measles" only to be told they were mosquito bites, way back in 1980 my wife and I took our first born to casualty because he was "throwing up blood", felt relived but a tad foolish when the doctor asked; did you give him blackcurrant juice? Now for the sake of argument, let's say a significant portion of cases are "socially founded in the parent", who the fuck is supplying the parent with ritalin on the basis of the parent's ammature diagnosis?

Concerned parents, the one's who take a keen interest in their child's well being, go to GP's for help when something seems wrong, but when it comes to behavioural problems in either adults or children (Australian) GP's are far too often more interested in signing a script than signing a referral for a proper diagnosis.