keeping farmers in business and improving local economy is more important in the long run. Without robust economy these will be a bunch of dependent beggars forever. Feel free to donate/invest in their infrastructure, know-how, tech level and what not but never give them finished products for free - it fortifies the position of already established players from developed countries and prevents the birth of successful local competition.

Let's say there are 1000 starving people. you give them free food from foreign aid. They now multiply like rabbits (that is their current strategy of survival, the difference is they don't die now) and soon go back to starving. Foreign aid has to be bigger to compensate. You raise the ceiling to 10k, 100k, 1M - the bar goes every time the population reaches the capacity of its environment.
You had 1000 starving people, now you have million and you might think the world can support this situation indefinitely. That's a very risky assumption. Let's say huge huge economic downturn happens and people in the West don't feel rich enough to blow money and food on Africa, because they have their own poor and unemployed to take care of. Suddenly all that artificial support for millions of people vanishes and you have mass starvation so harsh the initial state seems like a child play in comparison.

People need to face the basic fact that starvation is a nature's way to signal overpopulation relative to what the ecological niche can bear. Granted, you can cheat it with external support but only so long (most organisms follow exponential growth until they hit the hard wall of environmental limitations and africans are no different here). You need to ask yourself, how long you want to subsidize people so they can have their unrestricted e^x growth. You *will* run out of resources and even the idea of not increasing aid at some point will be disastrous, not to mention withdrawing it completely.

This is a perfect example why bleeding heart do-gooders need to be smacked upside the head every time they want to fix the world - the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. They should first prove they have a grasp of possible consequences before being allowed to act. Policy based on feelings invoked by sad pictures of little black people with flies all over them does no favors to anybody, well maybe except local elites who sell the aid food on the black market and UN bureaucrats who can justify their existence.

if they are starving they have a very strong incentive to BUY food from local farmers. That gives farmers the incentive and means to improve their tech level and yield. If people are fed the farmers are shit-outta-luck because nobody needs them, everybody gets food for free. That's a problem in the making, because by making sure people survive and multiply, mismatch between the needs and what the environment and local economy can provide is even bigger, which means even greater dependence on external help. It does nothing to solve the problems, everything to perpetuate them.

Tell me how is it possible that population Ethiopia, country in a pretty much perpetual state of famine, *doubled* in last 30 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ethiopia

I've read article than in Senegal and neighboring countries there are dirt cheap snacks made from chicken legs on every street and everybody buys them. Problem? These chicken legs are dumped on these markets by european companies who get rid of stuff nobody in Europe wants for pennies. Unfortunately local farmers can't compete with dirt cheap throwaway parts of animals that were raised on subsidized grain in rich Europe, so they go out of business.

no, not really.
You can't blame nordic countries for sexism or discrimination, yet in Norway they still have only 10% female engineers. Paradoxically, the more people are free, the more likely they are to pursue stereotypical gender roles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ @5:30, 29:30

nobody bats an eye when it's the men who who experience 90% of deaths at work or when homelessness is a predominantly male problem. The shittiest/the most dangerous jobs? All male dominated. Is this kind of discrimination ok? Because i have never seen anybody mention it as something very bad that needs to be fixed asap.

Draw 2 bell curves, one tall and narrow (women) and one low and wide (men) - that's how most traits are generally distributed, with greater deviation for men. Now tell me why it's always the difference on the right that is talked about, and nobody ever mentions the one on the left.

gnome-open or xdg-open ftw

Earth Hour is nothing more than a crap invented solely for simpletons so they can click Like on their facebook profile and feel like they accomplished something.
Ask them if they *really* want to really sacrifice their oversized houses, 3 cars, airconditioning 24/7 and boatloads of gizmos they don't really need in order to significantly reduce their footprint - now that would be interesting.

existing inertia, design by commitee meaning decisions take too long? I am not saying their decision is right, but i can somewhat understand it.
If Canonical are in a hurry to gain any foothold in an exploding mobile/tablet market they can't wait X years because the players already present in the market will use that time to fortify and distribute the spoils among them, not leaving anything for newcomers. If you are going to be way too late, you can as well not try at all.

what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party. Insurance is about the management of highly unlikely events. Covering someone who is 100% certain to generate costs has nothing to do with risk management, it's a money losing position. Risk management would be: 5% chance of costing X => premium is roughly 5% of X. The price discrimination against cost centers is what makes insurance work. With coverage of 100% certain cases you have only offloading cost on someone else, who would see his premium greatly reduced if that was not the case. Also maintenance stuff like regular checkups have no place in a true insurance model (it's a 100% certain cost that will inflate your premium).

With rising unemployment and detoriating perspectives among the young i don't really think that making them subsidize older generations who are more likely to be wealthy than they are is such a brilliant idea.

too vs to i can forgive (though it should not survive proofreading), but misusing there/they're/their or you're/your is outright inexcusable.

afaik bitcoin is divisible up to 8 decimal places, so you don't really overpay for anything.

too bad sc2 pissed all over the motivations/reasons from sc1.

yes, they sold it as some kind of groundbreaking storytelling and whatnot, in reality it was 1/3 meat tops, the rest was filler where you do completely unrelated things only to jump into the main storyline 3 missions before ending. And the story sucked ass too.
Sc1 offered you a complete balanced package with equal attention to all races, in case of sc2 zerg was clearly undercooked, heart of the swarm is still not out, and when will legacy of the void be released, in 2015? I admit that stretching the game to five years is an epic achievement.

are you serious? Govt that keeps corporations in check? So why everybody and their dog whine about the citizens united and the money as speech thing? Ever heard of regulatory capture (plain as day in case of FDA, EPA, SEC)?

while i agree the op went too far in his rant, the wording does imply govt regulations. Show me any public utility that doesn't have a long list of govt strings attached. Roads and airports are public utility and you begin to have TSA and other 3letter wonders everywhere. In the age of terrorist and pedophile bogeymen the fate of the internet is sealed.

i assume you don't buy anything from india or china? Do you get excited like that all the time or only when the CEO explicitly spells the mainstream doctrine out?
That's how the huge majority of stuff is made, deal with it.