Weak central government has been tried hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of civilization. It doesn't work. I'm old enough to have seen the Cuyahoga River burning, from back in the days of weak central government control of environmental issues. Unfortunately Libertarians tend to be the most historically illiterate people around (which is probably why they believe in their central doctrines). Even Adam Smith was in favor of a strong central government to control abuse of the markets.

The person most frequently pointed at as the likely creator of bitcoin is a CIA contractor, it would not surprise me at all to eventually learn that this was a CIA/DARPA project in experimental economics. What would surprise me is if none of the missing bitcoins showed up in the wallets of the investigators that took down Mt. Gox.

That's called "money laundering" in the real world, and CityCorp, BoA, Credit Suisse/First Boston, etc. make $50-$100 billion dollars a year doing it. It's so profitable that US Treasury Secretaries retire from "public service" to head these companies' "private banking" operations. If you want a way to deal with stolen bitcoins you're going to need to get the big money laundries involved to get the process legalized.

the building up of human and livestock waste

The Maya and other peoples in this region did not have domesticated livestock, at least as we think of them. They raised domesticated ducks (and apparently chickens brought from China) but other than that their only animals were dogs and pets such as monkeys and parrots. This area is a thousand or more kilometers from the Amazon, which your link refers to.

In the last '90s I worked as System Operator for a company which sent several thousand automated account renewals to credit card companies each month. We had been sending 9-track tapes via Fed Ex, and I was tasked with converting all these to digital transfers. We ended up with a mish-mash of different methods, dialup modem, encrypted email attachments, etc. but American Express had a rather unique approach.

They had us FTP an unencrypted, unzipped text file to a folder with our account number on their ftp site. Logged in as anonymous. With full access to all the other folders showing all their other customers' data transfers. They didn't clean up the folders either, so some of the other customers had a year's-worth of data transfers piled up. We couldn't believe it.

Wow, hard to believe that this still happens. First encountered this when I opened my first (and only) online banking account at SeaFirst bank in the late '90s. When I realized that in order to get into someone else's account all I had to do was change the account number in the URL I took some screen shots and sent it off to their webmaster. It was told that it was fixed within a couple of weeks, but I was so appalled that it was even possible that I had them delete my online profile and lock my account from changes made from an online account. Have never signed up for online banking since because every few years there's another of these stories appearing, I think the most recent was Chase just two years ago.

This is the inevitable result of outsourcing all your IT work to the lowest bidder.

no solid proof on the existence of any kind of god.

There seems to be some liquid proof though, at least according to Benjamin Franklin who said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Atheist != anti-theist. An atheist is simply someone who doesn't believe in religion, not necessarily someone who believes there isn't a god.

Oh, damn, and I've already commented so I can't mod this up.

"You can't fix stupid." - Ron White

And more importantly, a command and control structure, generally hierarchical. What use is a religion if you can't control anyone/anything with it?

One of the more amusing aspects of astrology is that the tables that they use were not accurate to start with, and didn't allow for precession, stellar movement, etc. Now 800 years later when "Jupiter is in Orion" according to their charts it probably isn't actually anywhere near it.

It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.

We in the US have a head start, we elected Reagan in 1980. His wife Nancy's astrologer seems to have had a say in a number of policy decisions, especially later in his second term when the Alzheimers was setting in.

It seems as though the quality of ACs has been deteriorating the last few years, while the number of them rises. It's too bad.

Horsepucky. Most allergic reactions are non-fatal, some are almost unnoticeable. Ever get a mosquito bite? That itching is your body's allergic reaction to the bug's saliva.