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Right: and now we'll a) stop driving pickup trucks and start driving Priuses and b) coalesce into denser population centers that require less driving, provided we're smart enough to have land use controls that do so. Granted, big coastal cities aren't that smart, but maybe inner America will do better.

Given our record with rail, which exacerbates the size problem you noted, this seems unlikely. But if gas prices rise enough, what seemed unlikely becomes much more palatable, despite people who want to support their lifestyle instead of recognizing the trade-offs inherent in social and political decisions.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/02/mccain-against.html

He is still for small government, against nation building (he recognizes that once you start you must finish), and pro-human rights. McCain voted against Bush's tax cuts b/c they did not include spending cuts. He backs keeping the cuts in place now b/c of the economy, and, as President, he would have more influence on spending issues.

There will be two legitimate choices in November: McCain and Obama. If you supported McCain before because of the principles you have stated, it would be irrational to abstain or vote for Obama in November.

• Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? - the classic Atlantic article about the De Beers Diamond cartel.
• Ten reasons why you should never accept a diamond ring

In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points, so that each packet of information could be routed quickly around any temporary obstruction. In China, the Internet came with choke points built in. Even now, virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of three points: the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north, where cables come in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, where they also come from Japan; and Guangzhou in the south, where they come from Hong Kong. (A few places in China have Internet service via satellite, but that is both expensive and slow. Other lines run across Central Asia to Russia but carry little traffic.) In late 2006, Internet users in China were reminded just how important these choke points are when a seabed earthquake near Taiwan cut some major cables serving the country. It took months before international transmissions to and from most of China regained even their pre-quake speed, such as it was.

Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of these few 'international gateways' a device called a 'tapper' or 'network sniffer,' which can mirror every packet of data going in or out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal sense. 'Mirroring' is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of 'Golden Shield' computers.Here the term's creepiness is appropriate. As the other routers and servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where it's supposed to go, China's own surveillance computers are looking over the same information to see whether it should be stopped.

Think again of the real importance of the Great Firewall. Does the Chinese government really care if a citizen can look up the Tiananmen Square entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. Anyone who wants that information will get it-by using a proxy server or VPN, by e-mailing to a friend overseas, even by looking at the surprisingly broad array of foreign magazines that arrive, uncensored, in Chinese public libraries.

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous mirrors that help build the Great Firewallâ"these and other modern achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and pre-technological reason. By making the search for external information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an environment in which familiar tools of social control come into play.

Excellent post! Informed, pragmatic rationalism based on facts - uncommon in /. discussions about international affairs.

See also a very informative article from the Atlantic Monthly: How We Would Fight China by Robert Kaplan, an experienced journalist covering U.S. foreign affairs and the military. Detailed description of China's current military, with short- and long-term views of their military growth.

A tiny exceprt: (please keep in mind that Kaplan isn't advocating for confrontation, but doing a thorough analysis of what might happen if foolish politicians get us into such a mess).

" At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy's warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world's warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy's warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world's thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn't mount a rescue effort after the tsunami)."

"China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II...Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically...But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat."

"There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection--that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range--all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers."

--- --- --- ---

Also from the Atlantic Monthly:

Superiority Complex - Why America's growing nuclear supremacy may make war with China more likely Again, detailed anaylsis of possible flashpoints and the resulting warfare. Section title: "Strategic Implications of the Nuclear Imbalance"

Excellent post! Informed, pragmatic rationalism based on facts - uncommon in /. discussions about international affairs.

See also a very informative article from the Atlantic Monthly: How We Would Fight China by Robert Kaplan, an experienced journalist covering U.S. foreign affairs and the military. Detailed description of China's current military, with short- and long-term views of their military growth.

A tiny exceprt: (please keep in mind that Kaplan isn't advocating for confrontation, but doing a thorough analysis of what might happen if foolish politicians get us into such a mess).

" At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy's warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world's warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy's warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world's thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn't mount a rescue effort after the tsunami)."

"China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II...Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically...But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat."

"There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection--that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range--all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers."

--- --- --- ---

Also from the Atlantic Monthly:

Superiority Complex - Why America's growing nuclear supremacy may make war with China more likely Again, detailed anaylsis of possible flashpoints and the resulting warfare. Section title: "Strategic Implications of the Nuclear Imbalance"

Read and learn.

In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China's electronic control but its new refinement--and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses--certain Internet cafes, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. (I am not giving names or identifying details of any Chinese citizens with whom I have discussed this topic, because they risk financial or criminal punishment for criticizing the system or even disclosing how it works. Also, I have not gone to Chinese government agencies for their side of the story, because the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague statements about the importance of keeping online information "wholesome.")

I for one am excited and happy that so many Chinese bloggers have been able to finally puncture the information controls set up by their government. Now we can finally hear the true voices of China, free from propagandistic manipulation, free from oversight by the Great Firewall of China, and free to say whatever they want about the Tibetan Troublemakers!

The Chinese government has been far too soft on the Tibetan Troublemakers. Now that the government has finally allowed the true voices of China to be heard, the government will no longer be allowed to coddle and protect those violent, dangerous Tibetan thugs!

With the voices of the people forcing the Chinese government to respond to the evil that the Tibetan thugs represent, we'll finally see just how powerful true Chinese democracy can be!

It is shameful to suggest that any of the spontaneous outpouring of disbelief and anger by ordinary Chinese citizens has anything to do with the government's control of news outlets, or with the government's Internet filtering apparatus. Shameful!

I have little to no sympathy with Seidel. Thiomerisol, a mercury(!) compound, deals enormous damage to a child's (and an adult's) brain. Basically it boils down to a needle full of lobotomy. If she is defending Thiomerisol then either she hasn't done her homework or knowing the facts she is on their payroll.

What the fuck hyperbole train did you just ride in on?

The amount of ethyl mercury in a dose of vaccine is tiny, and ethylmercury is eliminated so quickly (half-life 18 days or less) that it does not bioaccumulate. You're putting your kid in more danger by feeding them a tuna sandwich once a week than you are by giving them the standard childhood vaccinations, even if you go back in time to 1998 before the US started phasing out thiomersal. Unlike ethylmercury, methylmercury does build up in the body (half-life 44 days), and methylmercury is found in tuna and other large, long-lived ocean fish. (It's also found in large, long-lived land mammals like humans, and babies receive noteworthy amounts of mercury through breast milk.)

The reality is that toxicity depends on dose. Oxygen is a deadly poison at a high enough concentrations: divers at 600m generally use breathing gas that's 98% He and 2% O2, because 21% O2 would kill them more-or-less instantly. Iron, an essential nutrient, is acutely toxic at a dose that's not much larger than a healthy amount: iron overdose is a leading cause of poisoning deaths in young children, and it used to be even worse thanks to the iron in Flintstone's chewables. (I myself had my stomach pumped when I was 4.) Methyl salicylate, better known as Ben-Gay and closely related to aspirin, killed a cross-country runner last year because she didn't know that it's poisonous in large doses.

On top of that, thiomersal has been phased out of the routine childhood vaccines for years now. There was no resulting drop in autism rates; there was no resulting drop in mercury poisonings; there was no resulting increase in cognitive function, or test scores, or any measurable thing whatsoever. All the available evidence shows that removing thiomersal did absolutely nothing.

On top of that, thanks in large part to the autism-vaccine controversy, mumps is making a comeback, and pertussis is now endemic in the area around Boulder, CO, thanks explicitly to unvaccinated children and a failure to reach herd immunity (which for pertussis is 92-94% vaccination).

I mean, hell, at least autism won't kill you.

While you joke about red on yellow, I personally use a three color font system that is brown stokes infilled with a pale orange sitting on a white background. It's very legible as you can see in this example here

It sounds like something from The Atlantic. Seriously, it's the "capitalist" parallel of the Chinese "communist" governments "Great Firewall" (to use the obsolete language of the old Cold War false dichotomy),

Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man,
the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time
handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now
restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:
bread and circuses

If you are in the sort of place that needs Freenet you can be certain your ISP will report you to the government for using freenet.

I would have thought so too, but technology moves faster than the law, and governments have conflicting demands on their resources. China has the most advanced internet censorship in the world. How do people get around it? They google for proxy servers. The government could stop them if it tried, but like any government it has a lot of other demands on its time and money, so it applies the 80/20 rule and finds a cheap solution that keeps most people away from banned information most of the time.

In the sort of places that need Freenet, possession of Freenet will get you shot.

You need Freenet in the "free world" right now if you don't want the NSA to mine your web searches, phone calls, social contacts and email subject lines (none of which requires a warrant or even probable cause). Yet using Freenet in the "free world" won't get you shot (or at least I haven't been shot yet).

The Atlantic Monthly had an article last month about this, and what I got out of it was that the Chinese government doesn't have to block everything, just make it inconvenient enough so that most citizens don't bother and instead stick with the in-country sites. It was a pretty decent article for a non-techie publication.

That article looks awfully familiar to the one that floated to on Digg few days ago, see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall @ http://digg.com/tech_news/Why_Internet_Censorship_in_China_is_So_Incredibly_Effective

*Some* people like to talk, *some* people like to be heard, and *some* people like to listen.
These people should recognize that not everyone fits into all of these categories. Nor do they
apply all of the time. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch/

There are plenty of public spaces where there is a reasonable expectation of little noise
(libraries, movie theaters, plays, public meetings, most kinds of stores) and this expectation
has always been implicit for airplanes (the alternative was not an option). It's not unreasonable
to expect that the status quo to persist, particularly when one is thrown in with a random mix
of strangers for an extended period of time. Talk all you fucking want on a 40 minute commuter
shuttle (though I feel sorry for your inability to be with yourself that long), but by gum you
better respect the varying activities of others (and the incumbent conditions) on a 6 hour flight.

We already know that for the games, the Great Firewall will be disabled at all of the access points that foreigners are likely to use (luxury hotels, the Olympic, village, etc.) James Fallows wrote an excellent article on the subject in last month's Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall.

As Fallow's notes, the Great Firewall isn't exactly difficult to bypass anyway, for those people who are so inclined. What's truly pernicious about it is its panopticon effect: the Great Firewall it engenders a tolerance for censorship and surveillance among the complacent majority of the Chinese populace so that it becomes simply an accepted part of life. The censorship itself is almost beside the point - the actual objective is social control, so that the population will censor themselves and know what sort of ideas are inappropriate to express/learn about online. It doesn't matter how easy the Great Firewall is to bypass if the citizens know that certain subjects are off-limits and that you can be thrown in jail for violating that barrier.

The conventional wisdom is that in the lead up to, and during, the olympics that Great Firewall is going to be deactivated for those with IP addresses originating in parts of Beijing where foreigners are expected to be. The idea is that foreigners will come to China, not see anything a miss and then go back to their home countries and spread the false impression.

It's a page right out Chairman Mao's playbook. When Nixon went China, the handlers routinely gave people on the street transistor radios to listen to. That way Nixon and Kissenger would say, "Wow. What a nice scene. China truly is wonderful place." Then as soon as these people were out of sight of dignitaries, goons (I'm sorry, "the advance team") would collect the radios for redistribution to other Potemkin Villages.

As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was."

I'm going to be in Beijing next month in a hotel down by the Bird's Nest. I'm going to have to check out the Great Firewall.

The entire text of the sermon can be read here. The worst bits, the ones that get all the play, are essentially Wright quoting someone else, inside a parenthetical aside from his main disquisition, using an essentially "devil's advocate" voice. Jerry Falwell's comments, even in context, on the same topic were far worse.

Another aspect of the Chinese duty in Tibet is the sense that rapid modernization is needed, and should take precedence over cultural considerations. For Westerners, this is a difficult perspective to understand. Tibet is appealing to us precisely because it's not modern, and we have idealized its culture and anti-materialism to the point where it has become, as Orville Schell says, "a figurative place of spiritual enlightenment in the Western imagination -- where people don't make Buicks, they make good karma."

But to the Chinese, for whom modernization is coming late, Buicks look awfully good. I noticed this during my first year as a teacher in China, when my writing class spent time considering the American West. We discussed western expansion, and I presented the students with a problem of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded much the way this student did: "The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life.... We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society. Only in this way can we strengthen the country."

Or read this great example of investigative reporting from 1982:
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond.
It's all still true today (although you might have to swap some
country names here and there).

Even if you don't care about diamonds per se, the "gem" diamond business
is interesting for its unique economy and as an example of the power of
PR firms.

I will never by a "natural gem" in my life. Nothing says I love you like
pure zirkonium. Not that any woman would know the difference, anyway.

Here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200711/multitasking/ so you can focus on the article, and not advertisements or 'page turning'.

Who's making a determination of intent if not you? And why the angry tone?

Googling "Bobby Fischer paranoid schizophrenia" quickly gives some reading material. Take a look here, and here. From the second one: "Bobby Fischer has been swindled out of a "vast fortune" in royalties by book publishers, movie studios, and clock manufacturers (yes, clock manufacturers), who have brazenly pilfered his brand name, patents, and copyrights... Gary Kasparov, the world's top-rated player, is a "crook" and a former KGB spy who hasn't played a match in his life in which the outcome wasn't prearranged... Millions of dollars' worth of personal memorabilia, painstakingly collected and stockpiled by Bobby Fischer in a ten-by-ten-foot Bekins storage room in Pasadena, California, has been stolen from him in a secret plot involving the Rothschilds (Jews), Bill Clinton (a secret Jew), and unnamed Bekins executives (CIA rats who work for the Jews)". Sane?

FIY, I got a BA degree in psychology before I turned to CS. That in no way makes me capable of diagnosing someone I only know through the media. What makes you the authority to declare him having been a hate-spewing sane person?

this propaganda is getting really old. Newsletters were published in Paul's name when he was in private practice-- he didn't edit or approve of them, and he has acknlowedged his mistake and has repudiated them publicly many times. his policies include reforming racist drug laws. Libertarianism is about the individual, not about abject groups. If he is such a homophobe, how come he is in favor of private contracts (marriage) between consenting people (same or opposite sex) and is endorsed by gay rights advocate and blogger andrew sullivan. this stuff (you posted) is all just FUD.

i don't agree with everything he says and wants to do, but he's honest and straight forward.. a rarity in today's political climate, and I don't think that's a bad thing. and despite the FUD and those opposed to him, he's gone from 0% to 10-15% of the polls in less than a year; because honesty and liberty are powerful catalysts... and efforts to disparage or vilify Paul will only galvanize his supporters further.

Sure, the sensationalism is short-sighted, much like the cuts in media attention to books described in Gail Poole's Faint Praise, but each short-term decision has a logic behind it. Unhappy with it? Me too. But we can only vote with our eyeballs and wallets, and hope that media companies eventually take note. Judging from how long ago Fallows published Breaking the News and how little seems to have changed since, I'm not overly optimistic.

Obama's entire qualifications are 1) he's not GWB, and 2) he's not Hillary.

Even if you parse some particular meanings of (1) and (2) -- that he's likely to be considerably more thoughtful and effective than the current president, and he doesn't have a 16 years of culture war political baggage which Clinton has -- this doesn't seem like an apt summary to me.

Once you get past those admittedly great points in his favor, all you have left is an utterly conventional politician.

If nothing else, one reason people are already attracted to him is that his politicking is already notably different:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

But there are some indications his positions, say, on a number of technical issues are hardly Washington DC business as usual:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/26/qa-with-senator-barack-obama-on-key-technology-issues/

That's the feeback program. You can get free Vista but to do so you need to sign up to the feedback program, and that uses some spyware, er, software that needs Vista or XP.

In makefile terms

freevista: pc_with_xp_or_vista

Let's hope that the terrorists are short of money and care about using legitimate software ;-)

Actually, that reminds me. A reporter in Afghanistan just after the fall of the Taliban bought a looted al Qaeda laptop -
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200409/cullison

From the sound of, they seem unlikely to grasp the fact that the export version of Windows uses 56 bit keys (which the NSA can presumably crack quickly) rather than 128 bit ones.

http://www.news.com/2100-1023-204556.html

That would include mandatory, supervised reporting of _any_ possible negative effects. Where do you expect to find that when there's enormous financial pressures on everyone from the developers to the prescribers?

Do yourself a favor. Read this April, 2006, Atlantic Magazine article titled "The Drug Pushers", then see if you have any confidence left in the process of getting drugs into people. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/drug-reps It's substantially better researched than the stuff on YouTube.

And yet....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplier
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/force+multiplier
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/10/green.htm
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/4012.pdf
http://https//www.maxwell.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v3c15-1.htm

The first five hits in Google for Force Multiplier are directly referring to combat operations, with the exception of the article talking about Wesley Clark - who just happens to be a General.

It seems to me that I'm perfectly aware of its proper usage. It also seems to me that some people delight in using $5 words when a nickel word would have been perfectly sufficient, or to claim credibility by using professional jargon in every-day discussions.

While his suggested implementation was off (and he didn't predict Facebook), Vannevar Bush arguably predicted the web, in an article in The Atlantic Monthly ... in 1945.

That was also mentioned in the "As We May Think" article in the July 1945 Atlantic Monthly. Just in case you don't happen to have a copy of the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly here is a link:

As We May Think (from July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly

Of course there was also the "The Final Cut" with Robin Williams from 2004.

The Final Cut

Then there are also various Science Fiction books and articles such as "The Heaven Virus."

The Heaven Virus

I see that Microsoft is looking into this now. I hope that there will eventually be an open-source, GPL licensed alternative for backing up the contents of our brains. If so, I would also like to be able to encrypt the backup with GnuPG which is a free implementation of the OpenPGP.

The Bush administration and Dick Cheney would probably require some kind of built in back door for easy warrantless access by the NSA. They might demand government access, in the name of looking for terrorists, child molesters or perhaps even critics of Bush administration. Another problem might be, that during the discovery phase of a trial, courts might demand a copy of the backed-up contents of various defendants brains. Lets hope that there wasn't anything somewhere in our lives that court system or the government wouldn't approve of. Would courts demand the encryption keys to the backup copy of the memory of my life?

Oh, I almost forgot about the RFID chips that may supposedly eventually implant in our foreheads or the back of our hands. They might even try to tie the two technologies together in some privacy invading way that the average citizen would not like.

Read this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/fallows

It's an interesting essay written by an economist who is highly respected. It's potentially FUD, but this guy has a history or predicting things accurately. It's fictional (takes place 8 years form now) but he makes a good case for why we're fucked.

Essentially it's about the run on the dollar.

It is just not spoken of; a communal taboo of sorts. In fact, many Saudi gays find the American lifestyle of obvious expression of homosexuality degrading, preferring the "closeted" version.

\ -OJ

Karl Rove is brilliant. And, he did win elections. But I would argue that he has come close to destroying the long-time conservative coalition of Business Interests, the Religious Right, and pro-Military types. In politics, things can change overnight, but at this point it looks like the Dems could find themselves in a majority for a long time. Check out this post by Andrew Sullivan.

If that's not enough, you can read the TechWorld article he links to.

If that's not enough, you can read the TechWorld article he links to.

Perhaps you're thinking about diamond's company researcher from the 1970's:

Women are in unanimous agreement that they want to be surprised with gifts.... They want, of course, to be surprised for the thrill of it. However, a deeper, more important reason lies behind this desire.... "freedom from guilt." Some of the women pointed out that if their husbands enlisted their help in purchasing a gift (like diamond jewelry), their practical nature would come to the fore and they would be compelled to object to the purchase. -Daniel Yankelovich, Inc. (working for) N.W. Ayer (working for) De Beers

And the observation that people give gifts that are fancier than what people would choose to get themselves is hardly limited to De Beers or engagement rings. What do you think the Christmas shopping season is all about?

Anyway there's no reason to make such angry arguments, when your arguments are based on pulling made-up statistics out of your ass. If you're actually interested in the history of diamond marketing (I suspect you're just interested in being a jerk) there's an interesting (if dated) take in The Atlantic Monthly.

Consider this: maybe if young Muslim males had more access to mates, there wouldn't even be a cause. It'd be too hard to find a steady supply of young, impressionable males to kill themselves and abandon their families.

This article seems to back up your case with a real-world example.

One of Arafat's commanders used a similar strategy (marrying off the terrorists) to shut down the Black September organisation after they had served their purpose:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200112/hoffman

Studies have generated a range of rates of "non-paternity events". There's an article with more details in this month's The Atlantic (subscription required):

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/paternity

From the article:

"When geneticists do large-scale studies of populations, they sometimes can't help but learn about the paternity of the research subjects. They rarely publish their findings, but the numbers are common knowledge within the genetics community. In graduate school, genetics students typically are taught that 5 to 15 percent of the men on birth certificates are not the biological fathers of their children. In other words, as many as one of every seven men who proudly carry their newborn children out of a hospital could be a cuckold."

"Non-paternity rates appear to be substantially lower in some populations. The Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, which is based in Salt Lake City, now has a genetic and genealogical database covering almost 100,000 volunteers, with an overrepresentation of people interested in genealogy. The non-paternity rate for a representative sample of its father-son pairs is less than 2 percent. But other reputed non-paternity rates are higher than the canonical numbers. One unpublished study of blood groups in a town in southeastern England indicated that 30 percent of the town's husbands could not have been the biological fathers of their children."

The more I think we seriously need to consider "weeding out the population" of all the dumb shits too stupid to accept fact...

Would that it were that simple. It's not. Humans don't naturally think in a scientific way. Doing it is hard. Even scientists who train for years have a hard time at at, and usually can only do it within the specific field they've trained in.

Of course, we can dream. And once it was thought that universal literacy was an impossible pipe dream... I can hope for universal scientific literacy.

It's worth pointing anybody that will read something, long as it is, to this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

See As We May Think: the Memex.

April 2007 (subscription probably required for back issues.)

Similar article in that the premise is accepted: global warming is real, and it's too late to stop or turn it back. So, on to the next question: who will benefit from it? How will market forces respond to higher sea levels, longer growing seasons, etc? And one big theme, and irony, is that the developed countries will likely reap large benefits, while the developing countries will be faced with the worst detrimental effects.

about 419eater. How To Trick an Online Scammer Into Carving a Computer Out of Wood

Diamond market is actually a perfect example of asymmetric market where uninformed buyers are paying something like 10 times more than the good is really worth. The market for diamonds is artificially inflated by cartel.

If you don't believe try selling your precious diamond (not exchanging it for another). You will be happy to get 50% of what you paid for it, what by the way is still a great deal considering what it cost to produce the diamonds.

This is a very good story about the diamond industry. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond/ Please note that this is a link to a newspaper and not any academic source. Still it is a very good read.

If you prefer academic resources Google for Central Selling Organization. You will find plenty of articles and HBS cases.