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Comment Re:Well considering that.. (Score 2) 390

80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy

Looking at the chart, they say 11%.

The problem with this statement is twofold. First, it still ignores significant parts of the economy, such as future income. For example, if you have an income (not net income) of 17,300 (like the mean of the bottom 40%), then you probably have a few tens of thousands of potential net income over your lifetime. That isn't reflected in the net worth figure.

Second, it ignores that most US residents don't compete for wealth. For example, more than a third don't save at all for retirement (36%). So of the 44% who aren't in the 20% wealthiest and happen to save even a little and thus, compete in even the slightest way for wealth, they have 11% of the wealth of the US. That doesn't sound bad to me at all.

Comment Re:Renewables (Score 1) 433

Desertification is on the menu for much of the world due to AGW. (e.g., all the USA from California to Indiana is expected to desertify.)

I'll just note that we don't have evidence for that claim. We do have plenty of evidence that continued poor agricultural practices (which the US has mostly abandoned) in the US would do much greater harm over corresponding time frames than even the worst predictions of AGW over the next few centuries.

The world population is expected to stabilize at 11 billion. Given sufficient time and stability, technology will allow 11 billion people to have a modern lifestyle, and I hope we have the time. (This solves the poverty issue.)

One of those expectations is that we don't reverse the trend to wealthier societies. Messing with the world's energy infrastructure for poorly thought out purposes is one way we can reverse that and our attempts to stabilize global population.

My biggest fears with AGW is the immense loss of culture and history as the seas swallow and destroy most of the major cities in the world today.

Most culture isn't dependent at all on location. And what is dependent can be moved or rebuilt for small cost over those periods of time. Similarly, history is something that happened. It won't change just because the future is not as you'd like. I find your fears rather trivial, but typical of those who prioritize AGW over much more serious human problems.

Poverty and desertification can destroy cites as well.

Comment Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score 2, Informative) 397

They didn't have the science to know it was asbestos causing health problems 4400 years ago. We have the science now. We figured out that it was a bad thing. Using modern science, we would know if feeding beer waste to cattle is bad. Perhaps in a thousand years to they might have new science that shows eat steaks from beer waste fed cattle increases the likelihood of cancer by .00001%.

Comment Re:So I was all "Social contract, move to Somalia" (Score 4, Insightful) 397

And how many people will consider beer waste handling as an important enough issue to vote out someone? None. They're going to be more interested in big ticket items like gay rights or abortion. This is how the government stealthes in an array of regulations that eventually consume our every moment.

Comment Re:That doesn't really explain it (Score 4, Informative) 234

That's not the enlightened view. Everything that goes wrong is always someone else's fault. It's the #1 Truth of progressive thinking. Poor people are poor because someone else made them poor. If socialist policies don't fix everything, it's because someone else interfered. If all the someone elses could just be burned or imprisoned or gassed or reeducated, society's problems could finally be solved and progressive paradise would be achieved.

Comment Re:Okay, but WHEN (Score 1) 59

No. The linked article doesn't say. I did click on a link to the company's blog from the linked article and found it. Such critical information should have been both in the page that /. linked to and in the /. summary!

tl;dr: This took place AFTER the public disclosure, but not by much: it seems it was April 8th.

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