I first visited Huaraz in the Cordillera Blanca in 1987. The entire eastern side of the valley was beautiful glacier-capped mountains. Even in mid-summer a wind from the east would bring a definite chill to the town. People said that previously the western side of the valley was the same way, but that it had lost its glaciers. I didn't pay much attention at the time.

Went back to Huaraz a few years ago, and the change was stunning. At least 3/4 of the mountains have lost their glaciers already, and the remaining ones are obviously smaller. I've compared some of my 1987 photos with the 2007 ones, and the change is appalling.

Lima gets its water from a different watershed, but that one has the same issues. Seven million people living in the middle of the driest desert in the world, and they're drinking fossil water. There has been a gradual movement from the capital back into the countryside on the part of the children and grandchildren who made it into a megalopolis, I hope they're all well settled when Lima runs out of water.

The problem is getting the food to the people who need it.

That's only a temporary problem, there is currently enough food for everyone only because of the enormous energy subsidy supplied by the petrochemical industry in the form of fertilizers and pesticides. Say what you will about the 'Green Revolution', but one thing you can't claim that it's in any way sustainable without cheap oil.

You assume that people who admit that the population needs to be reduced in order to be sustainable only want to eliminate the poor, which is actually the exact opposite of what needs to happen. The poor use very few resources per person, it's the rich countries that are the problem. I have no illusion of being important enough that I need to survive at the expense of others, there are undoubtedly Andean peasants who are more likely to survive a societal collapse than I am.

Of course it's dehumanizing, we're talking about a species in the aggregate. We're living on the energy subsidy of several billion years of accumulated solar energy, when the cheap oil is gone we're going to have to reduce our numbers. Either we do it voluntarily, which is nasty, or Ma Nature does it for us, and she's a bitch. There really isn't a third option.

Actually mass executions of rich people would be more productive. Britney Spears alone consumes enough resources for an entire town in the Amazon to survive on, and the annual spending of Larry Ellison probably exceeds the entire social budget of some countries.

Yes, but each of those individuals use more resources than an entire family of 6 in a Lima slum. If we intend to reduce birth rates by improving living conditions and education we're going to need an order of magnitude more resources to accomplish that.

Black Box Voting has been on this since the late '90s at least, as has Greg Palast. I highly recommend you check them both out. Diebold makes most of the optical scan readers (whatever its new name is, forget now), as well as a minority of the touch screen machines. They got the tech by buying a company founded here in Seattle by a guy who spent several years in prison for computer fraud and a cocaine dealer (they met in prison) (really). For years the fraudster continued in charge of Diebold's election machine business. Did you know that most of the problematic vote tallies in Florida were not the punch card precincts, but the optical scan ones? Sorry, trying to wrap up work now.

That's the best explanation that I've ever read. I'll have to steal that some time.

Spent a year in Des Moines one week, doing security for a client's new data center. I take a walk before going to bed every night, and the only place to walk near my hotel was an office complex. Here in Seattle every office, every cubicle, every janitor's closet, has something to make it at least slightly unique. Family pictures, posters, pyramids of empty Jolt cans, Dilbert cartoons, books, toys, whatever. Not in Des Moines. Not only was every single cubicle that I could see through the windows completely anonymous, so was every freaking office that I could see into. All the offices with doors had the same wooden desk, the same pair of visitor chairs, the same office chair. Utter and complete conformity.

There was a detour on the way back to the airport that took me through some residential districts. Out of the several hundred houses that I passed two of them had gardens.

And I thought growing up in northern Michigan was depressing. Holy freaking crap, what a dismal place that was.

The repeated claims sprinkled throughout this thread that 'incompetent people are always fired in private businesses' are amusing as well. I'd be willing to bet that every one of them could point at someone in their own office who invalidates that claim, if they had just thought for ten seconds about it.

Two points, first that the optical scan machines are at least as easily hacked as the touchscreen ones, and second that almost everywhere the physical ballots can only be inspected with a court order obtainable only with actual evidence of wrongdoing. If 1000 people claim to have voted for Pherd Farkle in a precinct that went 9,999 to 1 for Fleegal Beagle there is no way to check the paper ballots to see what actually happened. BTW, malfunction of the scanner is not normally considered sufficient cause to generate the court order either. Know what a 'recount' in that situation entails? They log into the local server and look at the screen and say, "Yep, Beagle got 9,999 votes and Farkle only got 1."

You can't stem large scale societal deterioration with military force.

No, but you sure can cause it, which seems to have been the entire purpose of the Iraq exercise.

You forgot the bankers. They make over (probably well over) $150 billion a year on "private banking" (aka money laundering) every year. It's so profitable that Clinton's treasury secretary went to work for CitiCorp's private banking branch and engineered the takeover of Banamex, known as "the drug smuggler's bank of choice", with its very valuable customer list.

Easily? I don't think you realize how frightened people are of these dirtbags. There are areas where people won't even admit that their son is in the military, you're certainly not going to find volunteers. In many areas these are the main (or only) employers as well, and in Chiapas (different group) anyone collaborating with the central government is in for serious trouble as well.

Why in the world would you spend $80,000 to put a cop to watching cameras when a $30,000 "security contractor" (recent high school grad video gamer) could do the job better? Seriously, you wouldn't want to waste a cop doing this, it's the wrong skill set. Really though, video cameras are only good for forensics, no one ever gets caught in the act because they were seen doing something on camera.

Hee, hee, you're funny. If there isn't a government agency or insurance company breathing down their neck "something like that broken" is fixed in weeks, if not months/years/ever. Stockholders don't give a shit if 100 bottles of Oxycontin disappear from the pharmacy since it's covered by insurance, but $15,000 to install a camera system to catch the thief, and $10,000 to install security to prevent the next theft comes off the bottom line and affects the share price. In the real world stockholders and the board that represents them care more that the landscaping looks good to customers than whether the loading dock is properly secured.

Can you really imagine ANY private company where a vast number of physical security measures simply do not work at all?

Yep, our company has dealt with several. Normally the situation arises because the original system was installed incorrectly by the maintenance/facilities staff, ignored or actively sabotaged by IT, and covered up by managers and executives that have since moved on. Generally when the customer finds out what it's going to cost to bring things back up to the level of 'functioning adequately', much less 'functioning correctly', they freak out and say "Never mind."

Admittedly, my employer almost never competes on price (there are plenty of shitty installers who are cheaper than we are), but you probably don't realize how much these systems cost to install and maintain correctly, much less monitor, the training involved, and how much work needs to be done to create procedures and protocols to ensure that the correct actions are taken at appropriate times (false alarms can cost thousands of dollars each).

If no one is fired over this it will almost certainly be because there are no guilty parties available to fire. Fuckups like this are easy to see coming, especially since all the technical people involved will have been complaining every step of the way. I'd bet that if you poked around on Linked-In you'd find someone taking credit for the creation of the public/private partnership that got these cameras installed, and that it won't be a techie. It will be some PR/marketing flack who has since moved on to the private sector, and who is probably specializing in creating more of these abominations.