At least some of the larger countries lack the social organising principle that might be needed to do the job.

...a politician declare an unfit-for-purpose, bloated behemoth fully operational before?

Having RTFA, I'm still in the It Is Never Fucking Aliens camp. There appears to be only weak evidence for it, while the strong evidence against it still stands.

I dunno... maybe we're just generally not determined enough to go shooting the shit out of each other.

I was about to say that we wouldn't live in space without a construction to sustain us, but then again, we could presumably "just as easily" build a construction to sustain us in an environment of poison flaming gas and ash.

Why kill your self or debase your self on technology and procedures that are so randomly enforced, that it doesn't do any good anyways.

Because it's a fucking long drive from Sydney to Singapore or LA where my friends live?

And some of them are on fire at the moment.

This is probably a battle we'll end up losing.

We certainly will if we don't fight it. I'm with ath0mic on this: keep calling them on it, especially if they don't care.

A peculiar typo, "athiest".

... which is provably the same as 42.

And people who have to hold you skull together who otherwise wouldn't have had to had you worn a helmet? They're adults, too, and don't need you to make that decision for them.

Ignore. Them.

Troll them back for larfs, maybe?

Or perhaps just understand that there's a difference between something published by a well-credentialed masthead with a long reputation for quality journalism and a throw-away 140-character blurb from @axethetax.

Come on, people. A bit of skill in discrimination when it comes to dots on a screen, please.

What, abc.net.au didn't carry enough heads-up about this for you?

You don't understand: 1) there's not enough of us, AND 2) we have a federal voting system that mandates a vote for one or the other of the major parties in order for one's vote to count. Number 2 is the main problem, to be honest.

I can be as honest, passionate, brief, garrulous, deadpan, irreverent or whatever as you like, and I've found that it makes little difference. And by the time I get to the ballot box, guess what? Both of the two major parties -- which is all you will ever get in a mandatory preferential voting system -- offer the same shit. All that's left for the rest of us is to gripe about it in places like this, in newspaper letters to editors, in philippics written on ballot papers, or wherever. But then that gets back to 1: there's just not enough of us.

Why buy a CD when I can hear the music free on youtube?

Notwithstanding that I'm just a slashdot number posting randomly on the intertubes, but I have recently bought 5 CDs precidely because of what I saw free on YouTube.