"...you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom... I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

From Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift (1726).

Not a bad point about adapting; humans are almost as widespread as some species of bacteria and fungi, so we're probably going to survive anything short of an oceanic anoxic event, large meteorite impact, massive volcano, or alien/zombie invasion. Canadians will, anyway, as long as we have the Mexican Asparagus, California Tomatoes, and Florida Oranges stocking our shelves in the grocery stores. If we run out of food in the winter, those 5.5 million people in the greater Toronto Area can just fish the great lakes and the 1.5 million in Montreal can just go out and hunt Moose. Oh, wait...

How the hell did this get a score of 4? Who the fuck moderates this forum? There are nearly 20 "American" countries.

1. Open Google Earth
2. Look at the continent of North America
3. What colour is it?
4. Where is the snow and ice that is going to melt and flood Canada?

If I understand the ruling correctly, it looks like we dodged the bullet this month.

I thought you were joking but then I realized you're probably just not very smart. Have a look at your Social Contract, you agreed to it by being born.

I used to live in Toronto and they had a program where paper and meat could be composted, along with a whole bunch of other surprising things. Worth looking at the list http://www.toronto.ca/greenbin/card.htm

The compost all went into a small bin and the smell was pretty minimal: It fills up really fast, and the mould and bacteria get to work right away. Where I live now there is no municipal composting and my garbage can stinks all the time (it's amazing how bad a chicken bone can smell).

Works really well in a densely populated area, but what about small cities (5-50k people) where the philosophy of competition is not as readily applied?

If company A does a bad job providing a service, that creates an opportunity for company B to provide a superior service and make a profit; in turn, that encourages company A to improve its service standards in order to stay in business. The consumer benefits from the competition. In a rational world, bad companies would go out of business and the remainder would provide a competitively superior quality of service at a price and quantity that is appropriate to the community they serve.

If, on the other hand, company B does not exist there is a problem. It can be argued that an opportunity exists for some entrepreneur to create company B and everyone lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in smaller communities quite often "some entrepreneur" is... you. Until things get really bad, the community will bear with poor/overpriced products.

So, if I live in a small city, my choices of garbage collection service providers might be Bob Down the Street, or Nobody. I would have to commission my own landfill (you're not suggesting landfill sites be regulated, surely?!), mortgage a truck, train and hire staff, and solicit business in a town of 5000. Then begins the long battle against Bob Down the Street Who Everybody Knows and Who Picked Up Mom's Garbage All Her Life. It is simply not profitable for me to go to such extremes unless the barrier to entry is extremely low.

There, fixed that for you.

Looks like you conflated randomness with probability (a tool humans use to predict randomness).

If you knew the shape of the knowledge, you would already be on your way to obtaining the knowledge. The best science is done on the premise that nothing is impossible. I wouldn't be so quick to uphold the "laws of the universe" because they're historically very fragile.

would become a booming business...

I think scientific research has been deified throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, and uncountable atrocities have been committed in the name of science. I wonder if the dispassionate and sometimes unwitting nature of those atrocities makes them morally better or worse than the passionate crimes committed by people filled with religious fervour. Don't you think rationalization and denial are functions of human nature?

It's easy to lay the evils of humanity at the doorstep of organized religion, but I think people manage cruelty just as well without it. Rationalization and denial are as thoroughly ingrained in secular thinking. In the absence of religion, science becomes god and the same problems persist.

I'm sure people said the same thing about breeding slaves.