yeah, because you see you have an above average income and lifestyle and figure I know better that the average so I should be able to make all the spending decisions about my money. But the instant you hit the wall, you get long term disease, become permanently disabled in auto accident, or my fear get accidently shot by one of the gun nuts, you will be singing a different tune.

Actually, I should have used the subject to High Risk + Low Success = Wasted Money

Its interesting. I just noticed when I posted the third line stating with the sorry sounds like a run on sentence from the previous. Its kind of chilling when read like that.

This sounds tough, but how much of the high risk- low success operations being done contribute to the high cost of health care in the US? maybe in some of the high risk situations somebody needs to say no. sorry, but costs are out of control and we need some realistic assessments. On a similar note, its been some years since I've heard people say ' I don't care how much it costs, if it just saved one life it was worth it.'

Personally I shrug my shoulders over it. Population of Africa is growing so fast. Plus it the perfect location to feed Asia. Long term there will be no habitat for free ranging animals. OTOH, I don't mind that people are trying to stop poaching, it would be interesting to see how it plays out and its important to change peoples ethical outlook. But long term I wouldn't put money on big animals coming out a winner.

No more H1B visas from now on. Zero, is that careful enough?

ok, so starving people today is not a compelling example that food sharing doesn't happen, how about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06...
Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Food hoarding by governments keen to keep prices low is pushing prices higher

http://www.scmp.com/business/c...
Memories of 2008 food crisis push Asian countries to hoard grain

trust me, if there is a world wide crisis that affects agriculture, things will change very quickly. A drought in California is regional, so people wouldn't get to excited about that. Also, food sharing doesn't work all that well right now. there are lots of people starving in different places the world. I tried to look up info on max exporters, US is number 1 and has in the past 60+ years been the only one that really affects international prices. France is listed as 2, but that's because of the high value wine, cheese they sell. Brazil and Argentina are emerging big exporters of basic food crops, and they are increasing fast, the limiting factor seems to be infrastructure to get crops from fields to ships. I grew up on a farm and read quite a bit about world food supply, its not nearly as elastic as you are saying.

My impression is this would be a world wide event. Kansas and other areas would be similarly bad off, its just they didn't have good information about what was going on there in 1815. Also, I wouldn't want to depend too much on 'sharing'. I suspect a lot of countries will go into hoarding mode.
Good News:, I did some further investigating. The Tambora volcano was a 10,000 year event on the VEI, Volcanic Eruptions Index.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Eruptive Volume: 100 km3 (20 cu mi)
Type: Ultra Plinian
Frequency: 10,000 years
Example; Tambora (1815)

Every so often I like to look over this list just so see what kinds of things can go wrong with the planet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This one has always gotten my attention, I have heard about from multiple sources.
10 deadliest volcanic eruptions --1815 eruption of Mount Tambora-- 92,000 dead -- Year Without a Summer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It just boggles my mind that there is a real potential for global disaster like this. I believe there is only a 40-90 day world wide food surplus available. I remember in the 1970s there were some discussions on the talking head shows about it. I think it was after Vietnam and the talking heads were scraping the barrel for things to get people excited about. A few economists said it was too big of a capital expenditure on something with a speculative return. But the possibility of an event is not 0... gives me something to ponder when I don't have anything else to worry about.

>>average diet of a libertarian is The eat carcinogens and poop out flowers and butterflies.

I can tell you how to kill your sweet tooth quick. at least it works for me. first thing in the morning eat about 1/2 or less of a pickle. You can even run it under the water a bit to get rid of some of the taste if its too strong. eat it slowly and suck the vinegar out. It seems like first thing in the morning your taste buds need to be calibrated and this makes your palate more sour than sweet. I've noticed quite a bit Asian and eastern European diets are rather sour and seems to keep them slim. I've also noticed when I used to drink beer, I had little interest in sweets. now I don't drink beer anymore, not much alcohol either. I can make and excellent milk shake out of some whole milk, frozen banana, and some vanilla flavoring. a regular milkshake would be so sweet it wouldn't be enjoyable. I'm avoiding all processed foods that have added sugar. I make my own bbq sauce - ketchup from tomato paste and pineapple. I make my own salad dressing, starting with blended chickpeas (hummus), then adding horseradish, or mustard, or buffalo wing sauce (the one I like has no sugar in it, thank goodness). I've been watching a lot of BBC history shows and I can tell from portraits that people started to gain weight around the tudor times, basically HenryVIII. Apparently that's when sugar got popular. Some people blackened their teeth on purpose to make it look like they could afford to eat sugar regularly. it was a status symbol.

I do use Drop Box and Google Drive for some stuff, but I use DSL and my upload speeds are horrible so its only really small stuff in this system.

I have two synology 211's I got off of Ebay for 100$ ea. I have 5x 3TB WD Red drives. There are two in each configured as Raid 1. One station has misc stuff on it, (classic public drive), the other had critical stuff on it. The fifth is the transit drive. when one fails, the fifth one replaces the failed one and failed one is in transit (as we speak) to be replaced under warranty. I've bought the drives new from Best Buy, on sale for 99-105$, with 3 yr warranty, The nice thing about synology is there are lights on the front that show disk status and it beeps when one fails so I immediately know. Also, I have quite a few old drives that I can put in Sata swap racks in one of my pc to make periodic backups. Some of those drive are off site. The past spring I put the system together, had 1 drive fail recently and had no loss of data, just a short period of downtime. Just saying what I finally did. Its a big relief knowing my precious data is safe from the most typical failures.

don't you need unobtanium to create gravatrons? probably the last bit of unobtanium will be under the last rino-elephant reserve in Africa. I wonder what will happen then. that might make a good movie plot.