Poverty almost certainly IS due to lack of food or resources in the world.

Poverty may be reduced if some "optimal" resource allocation model would be obtained, with "optimal" allocation meaning totally different things for different people and even the same people during the course of their lifetimes.

In any case, the absolute number of mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, rest and shelter puts absolute requirements on finite physical resources. So no mode of allocation is possible to give every human on this planet more than 20 grams of gold. Even if these requirements may not be cleanly extrapolated from current resource use per capita by a Club of Rome and probably also aren't fix over time, they are certainly larger than zero. Even with perfect recycling and optimum use, there is a maximum of people to serve from any given amount of any resource. While it is tolerable to not have golden necklaces for everyone, there are other resources that cannot be left out so easily.

Unless poverty is defined only as "relative" poverty, i.e. "not poorer than 40% of the average", resources and mouths depend on each other, but not for infinity.

The optimal and sustainable population density is extremely dependent on the social structure of said population. With social norms loosely or not at all enforced, living close together with millions of anti-socials is Hell in almost a literal sense. With social norms strongly enforced, the tenable population density goes up quickly, but the social control then will bring with it other problems.

In other words, the suburb layout e.g. in California may be the primary reason that mass transit is non-existent there, but the suburb layout is the result of a social structure and (lack of) social norm enforcement that would make living in tight spaces untenable for the myriads of the completely different cultures there. Wasting fuel and space on roads is the downside of that.

Counter-example would of course be Tokyo, where the social structure is totally uniform (1% non-Japanese). The Japanese culture probably has the strictest and strongly enforced social norms worldwide, with exception of N. Korea, so - for Japanese - it's perfectly possible to live in extreme population densities. Mass transit is totally feasible and in fact indispensable, private vehicles insanely wasteful. But there's downsides to that as well, with social norms (from a Western perspective) being untenable and overly strict, people shut themselves in or commit suicide much more often than elsewhere.

Clash of cultures in the US, overbearing control in JP. The existing transit systems are only a secondary consequence of that.

IT is all about control and protection. Always has been. That's not a side-effect, it's the main feature.

What are the primary goals the IT dept. is set up by management?
- make sure all data stays intact and accessible to authorized users, and only them
- make sure no data can be created, manipulated or exported by authorized users without an audit-able log trace
- make sure all authorized users can do the work they are supposed to do and evolve infrastructure with evolving work requirements

Secondary goal:
- keep costs of all that down to a sane minimum, without compromising the first 3 goals

Tertiary goal:
- keep internal and external (clients, contractors, partners) IT morale as high as possible, without compromising all the other goals

To make any of this possible, control over hard- and software is the pivotal element. With unlimited funds, IT could support any device with any software. On a budget, all expenses are better spent on improving on the first 3 goals, business-wise, rather than the last.

Depending on the company's line of business, the first goals can be weighted very differently and result in vastly different trade-offs between security and usability.
- Defense contractors would rather have the entire network and all users shut down than to lose one kilobyte of secret data. Employees turn over rarely, but trust is never full and can be revoked in seconds. Staff has no freedom. Absolute secrecy is key.
- Media and graphics company would prefer to let all doors open than to miss an important shipping date or flashy presentation meeting with an important client. Some staff have extreme turn-over rates, new staff is not trusted, but still has many freedoms. Flexible creativity is key.
- Power-and-utilities want a third and fourth line of backup connectivity to never ever have a service interruption. Turn-over is low, employee and employers trust each other fanatically, long into weekends, night shifts and retirement if needed. Continuous uninterrupted operation is key.

IT has to adjust for these different goals, but only the "media" scenario can work without heavy-handed control without going miles and miles over budget.

Except when different scenarios are key to different sub-companies, but somehow the entire consortium requires everyone to adhere to the exact same policies, probably extending over several thousands of employees and dozens of companies across half the planet's time zones. That can never work as intended and will probably never cease to annoy the hell out of everyone involved except the highest CIO of the holding company, making their job safe for all eternity. (Any resemblance to the hallmarks of Marxist economies are NOT at all coincidental in an enterprise that includes many time zones and multiple or all business domains in them)

And the the only 2 women in the game are also the most dangerous pieces, killing brave men left and right.

Yes and yes.

When all your company is doing is relatively rational and above all, legal, there's no harm in keeping it in the logs forever. When someone outside messes up, sues the company or somehow tries to frame you, reconstructing a stream of crystal-clear business practices and always-legal operation procedures is worth all the hard drives in pure gold.

Unlike video surveillance, this is a nothing-to-hide approach that does not damage anyone's privacy, but the opponent's lawsuit.

Deleting emails as soon as legally possible can only serve two purposes: save on storage space or hide some shady deeds. And I doubt saving a few bucks on emails is going to offset the legal advantage when having to prove the business is kept clean.

Can anyone think of a situation, where everything was done legally and clearly, but still the paper trail that is email could theoretically bring a disadvantage in a lawsuit?

Then Indonesia is the silver lining on the Muslim horizon.

Deliberately ignoring the attacks on Bali tourists a few years back because it targeted Westerners is a smoke screen, but it probably is the safest, most economically advanced and politically free Muslim-dominated country on this planet. Comparing with other Muslim countries, Turkey still wins by a small margin, followed by Saudi-Arabia with about half the GPD as one of them.

G20 has Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi-Arabia on place 16, 17 and 18. Turkey's GDP per capita is four times as high as Indonesia. But as they started to get more Islamist and significantly reduced their economic and religious freedom in the last few years, that, too, will soon start to drop fast.

When economies like Indonesia, Turkey and Saudi-Arabia are far on top of the other 45 officially Muslim-dominated countries, it tells us a lot about them.

"But Johnny did it, too" didn't even work in grade school. I'm sure your mom told you. Time to grow up.

Dismissal is not just a lot of skepticism, it's the refusal to even look at something.

Dismissing something is totally different from merely doubting it.

If you have your casual conversation over unencrypted, megawatt-boosted ham radios.

A sale is a contract, an agreement between two parties, where party A agrees to give something to B and vice versa. The very moment A and B come to that mutual agreement, A is owing B the agreed-upon item and B is owing a the agreed-upon remuneration. A hands the item over to B, who is then in debt to pay money.

Every sales contract begins with mutual debt and usually the item being handed over first and then the money. Thus, all money used for any sale is used to pay back debt, even if that debt only existed for a fraction of a second between taking the item and paying for it.

So:
1) Whenever money is changing hands, it is always either a gift or used for clearing debt.

Louisiana now seems to think it's possible to circumvent this basic act of mutual agreement by forcing A and B to always include a third party C who has to clear the monetary transaction for them. This is blatantly unconstitutional, since C - probably a credit card company - will always take a fee for it, increasing the price between A and B by a tax imposed by a private corporation. Regulating the sale of perfectly-legal items between perfectly-legal consenting adults is not only horribly un-American, it is also completely useless. Buyers and sellers will just switch to a different currency or different contracts, e.g. tiny specks of Gold or mutual gifting. Also regulating mutual gifting would not only also be un-American, but utterly inane.

When direct monetary exchange is prohibited, but A and B don't want a paper trail, they will
a) agree to a third party C* of *their* choice, preferring a C* that is leaving no paper trail.
b) give mutually agreed-upon "gifts" to each other that are timed appropriately. A gifts B an item, B gifts A some money.
c) agree to exchange the item for a different second item, with item no.2 being a nameless coupon or a valuable, countable, divisible, stable commodity, eg. Gold

If a) or b) or c) are allowed, this law will fizzle.
If a) and b) and c) are all prohibited, you could just as well draw a Red Hammer And Sickle on Dollar notes and the White House and be done with it.

Everyone would use Facebook the exact same way they do now if Facebook did NOT store all those photos and status messages that you deleted.

Don't store things that no one sees. Delete things that users want deleted.

Problem solved.

I want some of my info to be available to friends, but if I delete a file, I mean it.

How many times do artists deserve to get paid for the same 1 item of their artistic work? And for how many years will they and their heirs and the heirs of their heirs deserve to get paid for the lead character in "Steamboat Willie"?

Which other job on Earth rewards 1 piece of work perpetually, for all eternity?

100 uploads for a song that costs 99cents when bought via iTunes. Even IF (and that's a very very big IF) we assume that all 100 downloader would have definitely, positively bought and paid for the song on iTunes instead, we would be looking at 100x0.99USD in actual lost profit. That is only gross profit and certainly not the net profit for the MAFIAA-related companies.

99USD in maximum thinkable lost profits. Let's add punitive damages. Extremely generous punitive damages. Let's say 1000% of maximum thinkable lost profit as compensation. Plus lawyering costs. Also very generous at 300% of the maximum thinkable lost profits. Then we have at max 990USD in punitive damages plus at max 297USD in lawyering plus at max 99USD of thinkable lost profits. So, by the magic of "mathematics" and "common sense", I arrive at about 1386 USD in settlements to pay.

Punitive damages for 1 shared song that is 15.000.000% more than the retail price of it is totally insane. Criminally, pathologically insane. If that ratio for punitive to actual damages would be worth any good, it would mean that stealing a Ferrari sports car - 250.000 USD in actual damage - would incur punitive damages of 37.5 billion dollars or a significant portion of the yearly federal budget. Either a compensation-to-damage-ratio of 150.000x is insane or we didn't punish car theft hard enough. Remember, with car theft, the original car is gone, unlike a fileshared song. Your choice.