Very insightful sounding, but astounding BS. When government doesn't restrict people's choices in life, other people do, much more so. It's generally called the "state of nature", and the guy that first described it as such also noted how people's lives in it were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

It's never one IT person, especially for such a massive outbreak or such an important site. Any actual boots-on-the-ground guy could have done what you said, but getting a whole org to do things is just a hair short of infinitely harder.

I see you've run out of arguments. Don't worry, it's easier to attack than to think.

I want you to refuse any treatment that was not done using 'real' science.

Sure. Actually, no -- I insist on it. Double-blind study anything you want to give me.

You're not a foreigner to this, your country has a financial sector too. (I'm not American, nor does my country have a big financial sector, but I am from a Western country.)

I don't want anybody to suffer. I think a fast route to suffering would be for the West to destroy its financial sector, because some of that money (not nearly enough, by the way), to use Reagan's words, trickles down, and some if it is taxed, so they are an important prop to Western economies.

Nor does a financial sector that profits from selling to foreigners mean suffering for the same foreigners, so please don't be melodramatic. Most of the time you enjoy buying its services. I grant you that when it crashes, it's bad, but the fix to that is better regulation, not destruction.

By the way, in the case of any big Western country -- say the G7 -- if the financial sector were destroyed, it wouldn't be just that country that would be crippled; the knock-on effects would cause a major depression in the world economy.

Much as I hate them, they also drain Johnny Foreigner's wallets, and just as badly as ours. Destroying the financial sector would not be a good thing for the West.

I'm not American, but wow, your kind of comment makes me ashamed of being European. American engineering in its heyday was really good. All right, a good chunk of it was boostrapped from the British, and a lot of it from imported German scientists, but the British used their own non-metric measurement systems too. Units do not make good or bad engineering. The best engineers in the world are the British, the Russians, the Germans and the Americans. Of those, two used to use non-metric systems, and two use metric. Your argument is ridiculous, arrogant and patronising.

Disagree, imperial measurements (and the "traditional" measurements of most countries) have the undisputable advantage of actually being useful in day-to-day conversions. It's very easy to divide a yard into three, a foot or a dozen into three or four or two or six, etc. On the other hand, with a system based on how many fingers most of us have on two hands, you get ugly repeating decimals.

Just throw a dice for your next move. 1-2 for rock, 3-4 for paper, 5-6 for scissors. You can't be second-guessed.

Amen to that. I always tell them I use Linux these days (not that they understand) instead of Windows so I have no idea how to fix their system. That grain of truth is there, because if they've seen me with a computer it sure wasn't running Windows.

Family and pretty girls still get their machines cleaned, of course.

And make quite sure you're incomprehensible. Even one pass would make sure you sounded like a complete dick. But think about it, this wouldn't change your sentence length distribution, for instance.

It looks like we're not doing that badly for trolls, eh? ;)

it's not even a talking head, just little more than an animated wax dummy, able to blink and sigh but incapable of a decent conversation

So at least it could be a high-school teacher then.

Or as Dawkins said, "Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."

Except of course rent and real estate prices have been going up pretty steadily as a proportion of income. A hundred years ago most of a single man or woman's income went on food. Rent was provided by the employer, subsidised, or cheap. Today we spend much less on food. If we're thrifty we can live for practically free and still eat a balanced diet. Progress, eh? Instead, most of our money goes on rent. In fact, most of our money still goes down the drain. If you take into account things like more people paying student loans and doctor's fees, we end up being able to buy even less with our disposable income today than a hundred years ago. (I'm not originally from this country, so my look back a hundred years isn't to the same situation as yours would be, but the basics remain true).