Dear neatorma,
I like political discussions just as much as the next guy, but don't let the home of neat things turn into a politics forum. that being said....

Hell, no don't bail them out! We don't know what is going to happen to that money, we don't know if the US will ever really get any kinds of returns on the investment, and even if it does, is it worth it?

however, something needs to be done. Not just long term regulation to solve this, but something short term and immediate needs to be done to allow people to borrow money again. without that we're all rather - ahem - boned.

so don't throw money at them... but we gotta do something. Honestly I'm glad I'm not in any position of power, I don't want to decide this stuff!

I don't have a huge problem with JM - at least I didn't 3 years ago. a few years back JM had some good ideas and was a reasonable guy. but add in all the changes he's made recently and Palin (uuuuugh scarier by the day) and I'm 100% against him.

Obama was my first choice in the primaries. I don't know that he'll be as incredible as we're all hoping, but I think the movement and the excitement he's building up around him had some real possibility for positive change.

so I'm rooting for Obama, I think he'll win but either way I am moving out of the US in a year or so.

It seems lockpicking would be a very useful skill to have in this case.

there's also some great ways to do this in OSX. The most convenient is with this dashboard widget that has a lot more than this site: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/symbolcaddy.html

gosh you make it all sound so idealistic. I just stopped watching most TV in college. I'll still catch the occasional show on hulu, and have my favorites I like to see (Battlestar Galactica). But it's got nothing to do with power, politics or family values (hah).

It's just that most TV is bad. I might as well search for random youtube videos with the kind of quality you'll find in most TV shows.

Andri, you're welcome.

Anne, I'm not sure if you're responding to me or not. My argument about food has nothing to do with it being Africa. It's all about how a population reacts to a huge and sudden drop in infant mortality, and a sudden rise in life expectancy. As I said, the huge population boom didn't happen as much in the Europe because the culture of having large families to work the farms had time to change as Europe slowly became industrialized and urbanized.

You'll find a statistical tendency to larger families in most rural or agricultural areas, and smaller families in wealthier educated urban areas. Even within the US and Europe.

Hey this is a lot of fun, I'm enjoying this discussion, thanks for keeping it civil, everyone.

Andri, I'm gonna have to pick on what you said for a little bit. I've read Ishmael, and its a fun read. But he presents the world in a totally inaccurate way. Native, or indigenous, cultures are generally not at peace with the environment. It may appear that way, and popular culture sure reinforces that stereotype, but it's not accurate.

I'm not going to go into any large specifics here, but Easter Island is an excellent example of an indigenous culture not able to sustain itself. I'd recommend reading Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book) for more info. It's a fantastic book.

Changing topics a little back to population: one more very interesting image to the people who think we're going to overpopulate the earth and we "westerners" should be personally responsible: http://www.prb.org/images07/62.3_01GlblPopGrth.gif

Almost all of this growth happened because we broke the previous barriers of food production during the "Green Revolution". It was actually so successful that the US and Europe dumped cheap food on the rest of the world (in part because of aid, partly to keep out farmers in business now that grain is so cheap).

Demographically, people in agriculturally dominated food-poor nations had been attempting to have large families to run their subsistence farms (kids = free labor :) ). This has just been the cultural norm in many of these regions.

So back to the Green Revolution and Malthusian Principle: we flood their economies with cheap or free food. Infant morality goes WAY down REALLY fast, but cultural norms don't change that fast. So people keep having kids until the culture changes and population skyrockets.

The "west" went through this same thing a long time ago, but it was a gradual process where the norms changed at the same pace of the slow innovation.

Um... now that I've written an encyclopedia... if it's any consolation several demographers expect total global population to drop over the next century as developing nations urbanize and industrialize.

And of course it is more complicated than this. there are corrupt governments, and a nasty colonial history. But this population issue is why I think the majority of our aid money should be going to slowing down the population growth that the green revolution and outdated cultural norms have created.

oops, I somehow added a space in the URL. here's the correct link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_principle#The_Principle_of_Population

I.... Would tend to agree with the author of the article, but not with such generally inflammatory rhetoric.

It is true that much of the land in Africa is at or well above its ecological carrying capacity, especially with the mismanagement of the land and so many corrupt governments over there. Much of the aid given to Africa exacerbates the poor situation.

An example to pull upon would be the Malthusian principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_principle#The_Principle_of_Population). It's an outdated view of population in the modernized world, but still somewhat true in the poorer, agricultural areas of the world (in Arica or anywhere else). He says that population will generally keep growing at a quick rate until it reaches the maximum food supply, at which point disease, malnutrition and other crises will bring it down to just below that level. This process will continue, where food will limit the population of the area and a strange painful equilibrium will form.

Anyway, as I said, Africa as it currently isn't producing or distributing its food well enough to keep its whole population fed. Large increases in food in the form of aid artificially -- and temporarily -- increase the food supply, which may lead to temporary population growth, followed by more death. So we are leading to a huge amount of pain and hardship in those areas by giving them all the food and medicine aid.

What we need to be doing more of is promoting family planning, contraceptive usage and education of women. This will help get the population down to a level where hopefully everyone will have enough to eat.

pomokey : they're not firing anyone. These people still have the right to be fat and lazy as you say. The insurance for these people is probably costing the state more money, so the state is just passing along the extra cost. It's just like if you're fat you generally have to pay more for food and gas for your heavier car.

I was an RA in the dorms I went to. There were a few people of legal age on my floor, and they spent most of their time sneaking the younger people drinks.

I agree with these administrators. Lowering the age might not reduce drinking as much, but it would make it easier to talk about this with people. Because of the RA rules I officially had to do everything possible to discourage drinking and couldn't talk honestly about it, when that really just forced people away into the frats.

Besides the small amount of gold in my electronics the most gold I own is probably in the form a wedding band.

But it's repurposed, reccyled gold from http://www.brilliantearth.com/ One of the rings I bought also contains conflict free diamonds from Australia.

full disclosure: I do NOT work for brilliant earth and have no connection to them, I just love the 2 wedding rings I have bought from them.

Zach, I'm behind you 100%. as a professional website creator (a relatively new one, but a professional none the less) Tables are fine, but they will hurt your page rank, they will make your site inaccessible and they really do require twice as much work for half the result.

And while it's true that 90% of the web may never know that your site is tables vs. CSS, or if it validates, it's those 10% (and the search engines!) that really show a what a top-notch web developer or designer can do.

Those aren't LEGO, they look more like DUPLO

HaricotVert and hark :

Bingo. It's weird that a right wing blog would link to this, it makes them look like a bunch of dumb hicks.