A man goes to doctor, doctor says he has a blocked artery, he needs a bypass surgery. The doctor also says the man needs to give up cheeseburgers and cigarettes. The man says "Bullshit, it's the block in my veins that is killing me, not my diet or smoking!"

You're right that developing countries may be contributing more to pollution in the future, but you're wrong in taking that to mean that developed countries shouldn't bother taking annoying steps to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, both the patient in my story and developed nations will totally ignore that and will continue being irresponsible.

I'm not even sure at this point WHY they're moving towards opacity. (Is opacity the opposite of transparency when it comes to government?) He's not going for another term, so it's not like hiding details from the voters is going to get him another term. And he's obviously not going to get in real legal trouble, he'd be pardoned by whoever the next guy was, worst case scenario. He's keeping Bush administration secrets about torture secret. He was elected in part because people thought he was an anti-bush. You'd think self interest alone would cause him to expose it during his first term. He's not winning any support from anyone for continuing the war on terror, his supporters dislike it, most voters are apathetic, and the opposition is doing anything they can to stop him no matter what.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that the administration is actually convinced it's important for national security. I'm not open-minded enough to believe torturing people in secret keeps anyone safe, so it's frightening that the administration is that deluded.

You're choosing what you focus on to justify your cynicism. Or maybe elitism. The NFL for example, is not all brute force and no thinking. There's a reason the sports talk shows are TALK and not just movies of players lifting heavy weights. Sports fans who yell at the TV seem to be yelling more about strategy than about "TACKLE THAT GUY HARDER!!!!"

Likewise I'm sure you can point to specific examples of where jocks were rewarded more than nerds, but I could point at just as many examples of the opposite. The dumb kid who can run and catch good is perhaps more well known outside of the school because football is a spectator sport, while high-school debate is tough to follow even if you're one of the competitors.

It has always been THIS way: there are teachers who have too many kids to take care of and are stretched too thin. You have teachers who have to help the jock figure out which button is divide on his calculator while the nerd is either falling asleep or is programming an RPG into his calculator. Any chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. This is not a uniquely american phenomenon.

"The earth is overpopulated" is one of those statements that gets said so often on the internet that people forget it's less a fact and more of an opinion. It would be a fact if we were running short on food, but we're not. There are people starving, but that's not because we have too little food on earth, it's because we're not distributing it well, or there are military powers more interested in people starving than food being delivered.

Any other way of saying "there are too many people" comes down to opinion. I think there could be fewer people on earth and that would solve some problems, but just realize it's not a fact.

We've made absolutely no progress on "not wanting to kill each other" from what I can tell but we HAVE made significant headway in fighting against death by natural causes.

Put another way: a future in which we've defeated death is science fiction. A future in which we've stopped wars and murder is SILLY fiction.

I'm guessing approximately everyone who will be using a steam machine will have a touchscreen phone and/or tablet within arms reach most of the time when playing. I'd assume that anything you could use with a touchscreen on a controller, you could do with a synced phone or tablet.

Not sure why that wasn't a feature last generation for consoles. I suppose they thought it would decrease the sales for controllers, but I can't imagine that holding true for steam boxes.

I'm skeptical of the idea that what seperates antivaxers and everyone else is genetic. I think pretty much everyone is illogical to some extent, and antivaccination people are simply ignorant. That's not necessarily passed on to their offspring, who are doing the dying. So no, we can't even right this in our heads with any half-cooked darwinian notions. This is just children dying pointlessly.

To play devil's advocate, your dog doesn't have medical autonomy, nor does it have any religious rights either. The two situations aren't really at all similar.

You realize that's a value statement without any justification. It's not really a fact that you're stating there. I happen to agree with your opinion, that religion is not a good justification for being a health hazard, but there are plenty of people who would argue it IS an excuse not to be vaccinated.

I'd argue it's not a valid excuse because it has the potential to get others sick, you're not just making a decision for yourself. Of course, one could say that line of reasoning, using indirect, unintended consequences, is isn't good because it could be extended to deny you of any other right. Like "Your gun might be stolen and used to murder someone: therefore you should not be able to own a firearm."

My point is that it's not as black and white as you're making it, even though I think we all here agree with you.

A bit like burning a house down to fireproof it. Allowing them to get sick IS the health hazard we want to avoid. Having people who should be immune carry the diseases just to teach them a lesson is still going to affect immunocompromised people or kids who are too young to be vaccinated.

I'd say ONLY blame the media for promoting it. It will happen again if the media continues to equate "how famous is this person" with "does this person know what they are talking about?" So there's real importance to blaming the media. There is none for blaming a former playboy model for unscientific views.

Well, I suppose you get to feel smarter than one individual person. Maybe validate some opinions about attractive blonde famous celebrities if that's your thing. I guess one could consider those worthy goals. If so, please, keep it to yourself. Yes yes, you're much smarter than somone who used to have an MTV show, congrats. Now shut up and focus on what's important.

I also remember hearing that the iphone was suffering poor adoption because they had a reputation for needing to be connected to a PC regularly. Many japanese customers didn't like that, a surprising number didn't have any home PC. Low-end japanese phones (sold for a penny) in the early 2000s were capable of most of what people use smartphones for today: they got e-mail, they could surf the web, they could take pictures.

I went there for a few months, and was really annoyed at having to take a step down in terms of phone function when I came back. There were comparable phones, but not in the same price range. As we all know, apple is mainly a marketing wonder, the iphone was successful because it was leaps and bounds ahead of what most people THOUGHT a phone was capable of here, but it wasn't much ahead of what was available in japan.

Ladies and gentlemen: it's official. Hipsterism has moved onto webcomics. Detonate the nukes. Perhaps the cockroach culture can do better than we did.

Yeah, those fools should have definitely given their money to the pros.

You know what, that's too much sarcasm for me to fart out at once. This sounds essentially like the subprime mortgage crisis. And a lot of other banking crises. It doesn't seem totally insane to me to trust your friend Joe in a trailer over the banking industry: when he runs off with my money, at least he might go to jail rather than getting millions in rewards.

Indeed, it's states rights when it comes to lack of gun control, teaching creationism in schools, denying gay marriage, and polluting. When states try to enact gun control, raise taxes, abolish creationism, raise environmental standards, or allow gay marriage, suddenly states rights aren't important.