There has never been great outcry in the mainstream media over any of this, regardless of who was president at the time.

I like having my Facebook and Gmail as separate entities. I email close friends and business contacts; I facebook casual acquaintences and people I'm on teams/groups with.

I don't know what anything in this thread means.

...but I like games.

I can't attest to the veracity either way, but I was told the same thing...but by a guy wearing a shirt that read, "Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but he invented global warming", so I was a bit skeptical.

[mini rant] I love how the "Everything's just fine! We can't hurt the environment!" crowd jump all over Al Gore, as if he's anything other than a spokesman and advocate. He's not a scientist, so discrediting him does nothing to discredit climate science. [/mini rant]

In case there was any confusion, I was agreeing with you about the illusory quality of paper/digital "valuables". (and pointing out that this category includes "money")

So is your bank account.

Just sayin.

It can, most certainly. And it will quickly devolve into a monopolistic or feudal system. People are too smart to sit idly by and not make money any way they can, so inevitably an unregulated market will be taken over by those willilng to use the most shady business practices and cut the most corners. This is similar to now, except we have in place minimum standards that determine how low a company can go and still be allowed to conduct business. Those rules help ensure a healthy and competitive market, and in this case, they create and define that market.

The issue that determines whether cap and trade is a successful market solution that succeeds in atmospheric carbon reduction is not too much government regulation and intervention, it is too little. If not properly regulated, cap and trade will do nothing to reduce carbon emissions, and it will become an arbitrary wealth generator with no incentive to actually reduce global emissions since that would, by definition, eradicate the market.

And when it comes to issues of health and safety, it is almost never consumer demand that forces those changes, it is government regulation (on behalf of constituent demand...but remember, you have a lot more say with your local politician than you do with any corporation, even if it's "little" in both cases).

The study merely states an interesting coincidence that may be worth studying further. All of a sudden people here are questioning the motives behind the study, whether or not they controlled for signs of depression before heavy internet usage, and getting angry because of this or that... If someone were to do a study to show that heavy internet usage causes depression, then yes, they would have to control for pre-existing signs. This study only shows that these two statistical phenomena match in a statistically significant way. However, then some have countered that there's "nothing to see here" or that this article is useless. Maybe I'm just more interested in how actual research gets done (observation --> testing --> conclusion) instead of what people seem to demand (conclusion --> proof). I got no sense from this that it is an attempt to incite panic or fear of teh interwebs; it is merely an interesting observation that may warrant further study into the causal relationship (if any) between heavy internet usage and depression, or other factors that might lead these two phenomena to correlate.