You have a reference for that? Last time I looked into it a few years ago when I was living in HK (lots of people wear cheap crappy facemasks when they've got a respiratory disease) there was no good evidence that it worked either way. You can say that "intuitively" blocks infectious droplets. I can say that well, maybe, it could also efficiently nebulise the droplets that do get through, making it even worse.

Gah, chewed off my "/chemist_troll" html tag

Silly, chemical engineers don't know chemistry :P

How exactly would the market correct this? I don't quite have the black-is-white-yes-is-no imagination for this one.

Whoosh!

Externalities?

So don't drive on to the wedge of snow?

FUD. Heavier axles weights cause more wear. A Prius and an Explorer have the same number of wheels so a comparison is pretty straightforward.

Increased road wear, air pollution, pollution from manufacturing, use of space on the road....I'm sure someone else could do a more thorough job.

That's an intriguing idea...except you'd have a very hard time separating legitimate fundraising activities from outright lobbying.

This is a joke right? I accept the inevitable whooshes if it is. Please say it is.

Except, this is \., supposedly inhabited by people educated enough to tell the difference between the common vernacular and the legal. You'd think that in a thread about the legality of copyright infringement people would at least be more likely to you use the precise word to communicate their point across to others. If you communicated ambiguously, you just wasted mine and everyone else's time.

That the growth rate is slowing down tells you it isn't exponential. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_rate_1950%E2%80%932050.svg

This is \. Please restate your analogy in car form.

No it's so that a farmer can pay big bucks to a chemical company to wholesale spray his crops hard with a nasty chemical and not have it kill the crops...so he can make more money overall than if he didn't spray in the first place. FTFY.