There is a lot of opinion here, and very little data. Here is a simple bit of research everyone can do: find a map of the USA, showing rates of poverty, and another showing rates of obesity. Bingo! They match one-for-one!

Obesity: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/October-2011/The-Low-Poverty-Diet/

Poverty: http://visualecon.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/percent_in_poverty.gif

The correlation is especially marked in Appalachia, the lower Mississippi and the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. What's going on here? Do poor people exercise less? I doubt it. Most poor people have physical jobs, while rich people sit in offices. I think the problem is that most poor people can't afford much beyond spaghetti, potatoes, and bread (cheap starches), whereas rich people can afford protein, butter, and vegetables.

We have to be careful about making statements about obese people's lifestyles. Usually our statements about fat people are little more than racial and class prejudice: "those people eat too much" really means "they're uncontrolled gluttons", and "those people don't get enough exercise" really means "they're lazy slobs". As long as social classes have existed, the rich and comfortable have justified their privilege by claiming that the poor are weak and immoral.

Actually, the Black-Scholes formula is innocent. Sure, it assumes that stock movements follow a standard distribution, but that's not as big a sin as is being made out in the article. The formula computes the fair price for an option contract. Such a contract gives its owner the right (or "option") to buy or sell some asset up to a future date (the expiry date), at some given price (the "strike" price). The formula uses the following values:

1. The time remaining until the contract expires
2. The current price of the undelying asset
3. The strike price (the contract gives its buyer the right or "option" to buy the asset at the strike price)
4. The risk-free rate of return on cash (return that could be earned by putting your money into, say, treasuries rather than stock)
5. The volatility of the underlying asset.

At the time the contract is written, the first four of these values are known (assuming of course that the risk-free rate stays constant, which is pretty close to a sure bet). The LAST value is the problem. It says how much the stock will fluctuate, between the present time and the time of expiry. This is unknown, because, after all, it requires knowledge of the future. Usually, PAST volatility is used in its place, going with the assumption that the stock will behave in the future the same way it behaved in the recent past.

If the stock suddenly becomes very quiet, and stops fluctuating, the buyer payed too much for the contract, on average. If the stock gets very wild, the buyer got a bargain, on average. In either case, the contract buyer and seller guessed wrong. They should have used a different volatility to price the option.

Of course, stock fluctuations do NOT follow a normal curve, after all. And option traders do NOT follow Black-Scholes exactly either (see "volatility smile"). But the much bigger flaw, I think, is lack of clairvoyance. The formula requires knowledge of the future.

I kinda see where you're coming from. I attended two different high schools: one in the suburbs of Toronto, which served children of working-class parents (many worked at the local auto assembly plant). It was hell. Few students valued academic subjects, and if you excelled in math or English you got persecuted. Shop class was highly valued, though. Then we moved to downtown Toronto, where students were well off (Toronto reverses the American pattern of rich suburbs and poor downtown). It was lovely: students valued learning. What I experienced was class solidarity: if you try to step outside your class (eg, if you value book learning when your peers value mechanical skills), you will be ostracized. The instinct to fit in and conform is very powerful, especially during adolescence.

But just because the ITU says they don't have the mandate, or the budget, and insist that the alleged plan is just a mis-information campaign, why should be believe them? Of course they would deny it. They're just trying to get our guard down, as any sinister anti-American organization would. Just watch: the minute the WSJ stops running editorials like this, the UN will take over! ;-)

If you look at an actuarial table from the USA: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html and plot the probability of death versus age, on a semi-log graph, you get a straight line after age 30. This means that the probability of death rises exponentially with time. It reaches 100% probability at age 121. Hence that's the hard limit. Interestingly, there's a slight change in slope around age 97: maybe some other aging mechanism takes over. Nevertheless, the change is slight, and the probability continues its lethal rise to 100%.

Please people, read the article in Wired. It points out something very simple and very important: since websites lock you after a handful of failed login attempts (or slow you down with captchas), brute-force cracking of passwords is no longer an issue! Strong passwords are a thing of the past.

Feel free to use as simple a password as your system allows. No one will guess it.

Another way to look at this is that antibiotics are a short-term imbalance on a nature's long-term balance. In the short time (since the 1930s) that antibiotics have existed, we have managed to push back against bacteria. In the long term, organisms develop defenses against pathogens, and the pathogens develop ways around the defenses. We can expect that nature, with its huge numerical advantage (many microbes vs very few antibiotics), will eventually find evolutionary pathways around our defenses.

> The nth doughnut disappears just about as quickly as the first.

Not if you are the only person in the room, and are eating all twelve donuts. Back when I was young and strong, I could eat a dozen donuts in one sitting, but I did slow down near the end of the box.

As slashdot.org/~Sir_Sri points out, the study quoted here is provocative, but it's way off the mark. Go to the newscientist article, and you'll see, for example, that Vanguard is #8 in the list of evil companies. Vanguard is a mutual fund company. It doesn't have its own money. It just takes your money, keeps a small fee (theirs are among the lowest in the business), and uses your money to buy shares in other companies.

.

It is more accurate to say that a large fraction of the middle class in Western countries owns, through mutual funds, a substantial portion of the stock of the largest publicly-traded companies in the world. What's the big deal?

Or maybe it's some vast middle-class conspiracy. If so, you're probably part of it.