Purchasing things in bulk is actually the answer to your quandry - it's just that you need more consumers splitting the quantity. Many grocery stores have bulk spices where you can purchase exactly what you need in a small baggy. But you have to go there and decide how much you want and spoon it in yourself.

In Europe people buy what they intend to eat for the day and as a result they always have fresh foods. Daily or almost visits to the bakery, the butcher, the produce stand, the fromagerie, etc.

It's a beautiful way to live, really. And completely sustainable within parameters (you have to live within some measure of civilization, you have to decide how far you're willing to travel for a quantity and price that satisfy you). They've been doing it for centuries. A bakery that is well patronized on a daily basis does not need to charge $2.99 for a baguette to stay afloat. They charge reasonable prices, people patronize them regularly and the cycle supports itself.

I'm not sure what your post has to do with delivery though. What you want gets less and less feasible as you add more transaction costs like even more packaging and even more transportation.

It's all about funding. When you say "we", the underlying implication is that someone will pay for this research and development. The medical condition charities and drug company conglomerates have deep pockets and vast future potential earning. Also when people tighten their belts and make personal budget cuts, healthcare is often not an optional expense.

NASA was one R&D driver that wasn't related to medical conditions. Whether or not it was worth the price, a lot of technology came out of all that work.

That made me laugh, codepigeon.

Please remember this story next time your boss thinks it's okay to hire or use just anyone to do QA. PMs and Customer Service agents are not testers! Nor can you do effective testing with only kids straight out of school.

Imagine if buildings got built with no architects, no engineers, just construction workers. Or no construction workers, just engineers. Would you feel safe on the top floor?

Don't know about L.A. but in Seattle there are plenty of key intersections that people are constantly blocking. Pulling out into the intersection when there's no room for them to make it out, then sitting in the intersection during the other direction's whole green light blocking the way. It accomplishes nothing, gets them no further, and only makes traffic worse for everyone. I haven't seen any way to get people to stop mindlessly gridlocking these bottlenecks except by holding them accountable for it, and cameras do just that. I hate cameras and violation of privacy, but when people consistently don't follow the rules (and they're not so hard to follow, not so hard to understand, and not such a sacrifice here), it's one way to solve the problem.

It's an interesting contrast to the message we attempted to send the world about our spewing millions of barrels of oil into the ocean for months on end.

Not to worry, it's hardly anything, a few barrels here and there, we'll have it fixed in a jiffy, move along nothing to see here ... ah look we poured more chemicals in for a couple of days and now it's good as new .. Good. As. New. Yep!

Our parents taught us to be wary of bad neighborhoods, parks at night, strangers with candy, men in vans offering rides, to look both ways before crossing the street, to use a condom (well, we learned that somewhere anyhow), to wear our seatbelts, etc, etc...

They didn't teach us to be afraid of classifieds. Well some people seem to indicate that, but honestly that sounds like a bad movie to me. I may be naive and everyone who grew up around me may also be naive, but that's not really a sin or a personality flaw. It's just a little dangerous under the wrong circumstances. When you mix it with a crime-ridden forum that seems innocuous you turn innocent people into suckers really fast. Which is just sad and unfair.

I think the real issue is that we run in circles where we're comfortable and understand how to keep ourselves safe. Craigslist helps us step out of those circles very fast without realizing it until it's too late.

People have just never understood satire very well. It's too sophisticated and you get more attention if you get pissed and shout louder than the next guy.

This poor teacher could have posted that they should serve Irish babies for lunch in the cafeteria and the parents would've been just as UP IN ARMS and clamoring for her head.

Actually I take that back, some people have kids by accident or without knowing it which isn't necessarily a selfish motivation.

Also to clarify, making one selfish decision doesn't automatically imply that one is a selfish person.

I would like to point out that your reason for having children has no bearing on how well you parent them, and that is far more important.

Thank you for eloquently making this point that people are so loathe to acknowledge.

Do you also speak for all parents in third world nations? How about parents in the middle east whose lives are defined by war and/or oppression? Are your kids representative of children the world over?

Or are you just thinking about yourself?

In fact, I think you've made the original poster's point pretty successfully.

The only unselfish parents are those who adopt.

Plus we learn more from our failures than from our successes.

When we don't try at all we learn nothing.

Just when you think something so ridiculous wouldn't work

1. Find a news story which is putting the government on the brink of declaring martial law
2. Issue an anonymous press release claiming responsibility with a ludicrously simple "mistake" which attributes authorship to the target

Then the only way to solve the problem is with a mass "I am Spartacus" defense.

Word processors did a better job than typewriters. Typewriters did a better job than pens. The new technologies improved use over the old ones.

A smart phone is not better at making clear continuous phonecalls than a landline. An ipad is not better at web browsing than a desktop. Neither gadget is a better camera, graphing calculator, alarm clock, dictionary, pen, translator, text input device, audio player, video player, or battery than any of its traditional counterparts.

The only thing going for the gadgets is that they are highly mobile, however there are big trade-offs. It's harder to do just about anything and therefore it encourages the user to be passive in every interaction. It also allows us to be disrupted and disrupt others at any time or place. It also makes it very easy to fragment our attention. A whole generation is growing up taking all this negative conditioning for granted; it's just a way of life.