Octopuses? Every human is born defenseless and remains mostly so until many years later. Sexual maturity takes more than a decade. Moreover, that just gives you a homo sapiens, and I bet you'd gladly deny humanity from a wild raised barbarian. Now, to raise a person you most often will need paternal care, education in language and thought, even the self learned erudites did not figure it out by themselves but from books written by other people. Newton's standing in n the shoulders of Giants.
Your described isolation of humans is delusion. You could say that we ought to strive for it, and we could discuss it. Stating it as a fact though, over what is essentially a social animal is just plain false. Homo sapiens is social, as our ancestors were and our relatives are., civilized people is even something else, not just a socialized animal but an entity whose existence is cultural, and since no one constructed his own culture from scratch, it is social.
Between your imagined dystopian north Korea and your also imaginary hermit natural state there are real societies where humanity and individual humans actually thrive.

The first to verses are 'they came for the socialists' and 'then they came for the trade unionists'. Probably not chance

This. If Emil has a reason why political opinions 'cannot' be discussed at the workplace, he may bring them forward. His personal, arbitrary, preference cannot be enforced as a social norm.

That was an interesting, thought provoking post. Well, waaaay too long but not unnecessarily, maybe.
Thank you

That's how a good part of the world feels of the USA too. China has its problems, I'm not sure they are significantly worse than the American problems though. And yes, I have been to both places, China for a month, US a lot more than that, several times.
There's a Party in the States, and although it pretends to be a multitude of (2?) Voices, the truth is that its will is as total as the will of the CP in China. It's not quite as bad in the rest of the developed world.

Remember the overhead article produced by a "non partisan think tank" that surprisingly recommended NASA outsourced everything? This is the kind of thing they'd included as "overhead" with their ridiculous criteria.
I don't know enough to evaluate the current NASA administration, but I think it does many good things in reaching out to the community and keep NASA relevant to the American public.

Article *never* does a good vs evil judgement. Never advocates anything.
Article simply states: "Inequality was only curbed by catastrophe. Even in the title, it calls all of those events *Catastrophes*!
The point of the Article is to say that constant, mild and progressive policies have seldom had any impact vs catastrophes. The article calls the chinese and soviet revolutions "bloody affairs" and "murderous mechanisms"
Makes you wonder why you're
Why would you hand pick only one school out of inequality when there are many other economists in other countries producing more investigations that we could take into consideration? Many of them have also investigated inequality as a cause and an effect of market failures, that is, failure by the market to maximize the value creation (ie: an inefficient economy).
Switzerland benefited quite a lot from the influx of foreign wealth, not produced by the swiss economy itself. During some of the catastrophes talked about in the article, a lot of the spoils were transferred to Switzerland, and it has a place in the world economy as the most famous tax haven were the beneficiaries of inequality elsewhere stored their wealth. Also, its economy is *far* from unregulated, not quite a libertarian utopia. You will be able to find many more countries with less industrial, environmental, labor and even financial regulations, why didn't you choose one of those instead?

> Apparently, there are only about 38'000 missing persons under 18 per year in the US. Now, if _all_ of them are forced into prostitution (which is most certainly not the case by a very large margin), you are still missing 62'000.
Are they reported again coming next year?
Otherwise, if they are missing for example, since age 10 they have 6 years to continue, you can have 38k * 6 = +200k children
Not that I think that's the actual number, but for all the number crunching in your post, that is a basic mistake

Unions are NOT the solution, an end to global corporations pushing open borders, global "free trade", and treaties like TPP (which gives almost unlimited power to corporations and frees them from oversight/limitation by nations) are what is needed

And in the rest of the world, the most effective resistance against such public measures was by ... the Unions. Unions are not just for salary discussions, but they are political actors in themselves. Of course, there are some very corrupt unions, just as there are some very corrupt political parties. But you would not recommend to win an election with *no* party at all, would you? Same thing with unions.

The guy said that America should change its financial aid policy if Israel continued ignoring America's foreign policy opinion. Mind, even Bush told them to halt construction, and Israel's hawks never changed tany of their policies.
Sorry, even if his positions were much more extreme, and the guy were an anti-zionist (which in the last two decades for sure he wasn't), that is different from anti-semitism. There are many anti-zionist jewish, did you know?

1. So far, all disclosures have been about the 5 eyes. That does not mean others are doing it, but you have no proof, are just mouthing off because it makes you fell better (or because you are a shrill).
2. Most governments don't even have a budget big enough to fund NSA style snooping. For the time being, economics still protect us.
3. US is spying everyone else. As much as I distrust my government, I reckon it has *more* interests in common with me than US government (namely, my country's interests. US has once and again shown that it will screw other countries (population included) to further its interests.
4. World governments, we-hate-USA edition, in public have proofs of their saying. In private. as soon as something leaks, we'll take care don't you worry.
5. World governments, we-are-USA-puppets edition (the ones you don't branded) are part of the problem too. They should be dealt with along the US.

The US government and the 5 eyes are the only ones caught in this abuse of their own (and other countries) population. Like you said, YOU should clean up YOUR fucking house, before claiming of others something you don't even have any proof of.

by other countries is WHERE? I mean, except for the five eyes, that was coordinated by US.

1. Let's suppose they're not actually spying on you. But they collect everyone's data so they:
          - Could actually be spying on every major journalist.
          - Could actually be spying on politic opponents.
            - Could actually be spying on opposing (not necesarilly bad or good, just opposing) governments.
            Once you're in power, they can use parallel construction. Just release some anonymous pointers about corruption about opponents and hide for a latter time the bits about corruption of friends. (2 years ago we were wondering why NSA was spying on Petrobras. Maybe it's only a coincidence, yet the Petrobras scandal gained a lot of force in the last week before Brazil's elections)

2. They totally can do a lot of harm without reading your posts. There is just a thing as automated NLP, sentiment analysis and that shit. I once even saw one commercial offering that listed "Belief propragation analysis in social graphs". Think about identifying who's spreading those dangerous ideas in time. And they even had the dubious taste of using Chelsea Manning as the bad boy to identify. And these are commercial offerings ... the US military compound was traditionally many years ahead in technology than the commercial world, I'm not sure that still holds, but I haven's seen any indication to the contrary either.

Today, 30% of Chile's income is because of the state owned Codelco. Chile's copper was nationalized by Allende.
Chile's current economic state is partially supported by the surge in copper price in 2005 http://www.infomine.com/invest... (at the same time, Venezuela is being hit by a record low oil price, not that that excepts all of Venezuela's mistakes)
If Allende had not nationalized the copper, Chile would need to increase taxes by 50% to maintain current budget. That wouldn't come easily to the economy.

Statistics aside, Chile is no wonder. It's very hard to people with dependents (both older people and kids). In my personal experience, based on how I've worked with chileans in IT, they are below Argentina and Brazil (in my anecdotal evidence, *way* below).

Chile's last right wing president ended his term with the lowest level of public support since the return of democracy, and resulted in a comeback of the very moderate left.
Also, you probably would find it interesting to read about the portuguese Carnation Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C....

typo :S