That >2% comes from the funds that they don't spend invading other countries, feeling you up at the airport and paying spooks to pore over your Facebook profile.

I think his point was that it wasn't an injustice, but turned out to be a positive. However, well done on isolating out the perceived negative in his post just so you could point out that you don't care about it.

"Plotting to destroy every human alive at noon GMT June 3rd, 2007"

Dude, plotting do do ANYTHING 4 years in the past is not only not a waste of time, it's frikkin' cool. Plus there are all sorts of puns that can be made when you're talking about wasting time by doing something in the past. So many that I wasn't able to pick one and had to settle for a meta reference to them all.

"mathematically impossible"

What you mean to say is "mathematically improbable". If you're going to split hairs, then make sure your hairs are properly split, lest some bigger, more pedantic anal retentive pedant come and split it for you.

Being from South Africa and having worked in health care, I can confidently tell you that the only people who think dumbass shit like "vaccines are a government plot" are "educated" people from first world countries.

Don't go lumping all religions together. There is nothing in Islam that says contraception isn't allowed, and there's plenty of literature (both recent and ancient) on the subject that says that sex can and should be fun.

Consider:
* The scale of CFC dispersal into the atmosphere from these things is so small that it's literally like complaining that raw sewage pollution is ruining the ocean when a 5 year old toddler pees his pants while buliding a sandcastle on the beach.
* Those who need these things are not in a position to go without. You get them, or you live a miserable life, or potentially die.

The cost/benefit analysis in this case is CLEARLY in favour of making CFC use in medicinal asthma inhalers an exception to the CFC ban. If the alternatives were the same price, I'd be all for it. But those asthmatics who are less well-heeled may find a 3x increase in medicate prices a little difficult. I am all for banning CFCs and crimping corporate profits in favour of the environment, but this is just silly.

Because successful communication requires the rules of language to actually be consistent between the communicator and the communicatee. Sure, I might be able to interpret a sentence like "i hd d wurst day eva fml" at the moment, but at the rate we're going, within a decade the English language will have completely devolved into a mess of mutually unintelligible sets of syntax so different that communication between different groups will present a real problem.

I have no problem, for example, with things like the use of the split infinitive, as it can be argued to enhance certain aspects of writing style, but where is there an argument for eliminating all the homonyms of "there" and just using that spelling for "they're" and "their"? Really, there is no compelling argument, and the only time I've heard this advocated is by lazy people who can't be bothered learning the correct forms.

C'mon man. Laugh a bit. You'll live longer.

Literacy at a level where people can communicate between the lines died decades ago. It's very hard to hide from the onslaught of lolspeak, the conflation of they're/their/there/your/you're and other linguistic degeneracies. Encouraging people to communicate in an intelligent manner? Not going to happen. Not with this generation.

There's this thing called "business strategy". It's a fairly complex subject, but the only part that you seem to need to know is that it is not identical for every company selling competing products.

When it's profitable for them to do so.

Just for the record, the Taliban paid local farmers not to produce poppies in an attempt to move the economy away from drug production. It was only when the US got into Afghanistan that heroin production went through the roof.

No other comment I've read has ever been more deserving of the following response:

"Dude, are you on drugs or what?"

We (western civilization) have progressed in terms of technology and manufacturing output. In all other terms we are in decline. Unquantifiable, but more important measures such as "personal happiness" or "social satisfaction", were only worse at extremely low points in human history such as during war or famine. Unfortuantely, there are no metrics for concepts like that, so we pretend they don't exist and tell ourselves we're happy because we can microwave a meal in 45 seconds and give ourselves temporary lobotomies by watching TV.

I've lived in villages where average income is $2/day and everyone works 6 hours in the fields doing back breaking labour. Yet, at the end of the work day, there's something happier about them that the rich people I normally rub shoulders with back home never seem to have.

I really think that we need to reassess what we're doing with all our advancements, because for all of the benefits to health, comfort and safety that westernized modernity has brought, we seem to be the most miserable people on the planet.