Which is why I suspect that for the medium term, we will end up using other methods to harness and/or generate the energy (solar, wind, geothermal) and use them to produce hydrocarbons - perhaps in some sort of a carbon neutral fashion - as a means of storing and transporting that energy.
The hidden assumption here is that no substantial amount of oil is being placed *into* the ground. This is certainly the dominant opinion, but definitely not the only one, and while we know a great deal about the geology of the first few miles of the earth's crust, there is a great and increasing amount that we don't know as we go deeper and deeper therein. There may be processes as yet unexplained that account for some, perhaps even much, of the oil in the ground. I don't think it would be wise to count on that; I think it is safest to assume that oil is a finite and non-renewable resource. But there is a small but nonzero chance that it is not, and, if it should turn out that it isn't, we may need to explore other reasons and benefits (of which there are many) for encouraging the development of other sustainable energy production and storage technologies.
Unfortunately in NE Ohio (Cleveland and its sprawling, yet half-empty suburbs and exurbs), it is hard to find decent food in a supermarket that does not take the better part of 2 hours to get into and out of, because of, among other reasons:
Narrow aisles filled with very generously sized people, many too big to walk or stand without assistance, and thus driving motorized carts.
Very few of them polite enough to merely occupy most of each thin aisle rather than all of it.
The selections are very unhealthy, almost all being saturated with salt, high fructose corn syrup, saturated fats, and unpronounceable additives.
The produce is flavorless, costs 5-10x what it would cost at a farmers' market, and is doctored to look healthier and fresher than it actually is.
The lines are often an hour long or more, and it's not unusual for people to leave them once they get close to the front in order to purchase frozen items that otherwise would have thawed while they are in line.
People either don't know how to use the self-service lanes, or try to cheat them, resulting in their frequent closure, but the checkout lanes that actually are manned are usually worse. Even here, in one of the poorest cities in the industrialized world, $15 an hour isn't enough to attract people who actually give a crap about customer service.
Corner stores are rare even in the very urban part of town I'm in (Lakewood) and typically sell primarily booze, cigarettes, snacks, and lottery tickets, not anything that a person hoping to live another decade would actually want to consume.
Big-box, warehouse type stores like Costco offer better and fresher produce options, but require very long drives out into the suburbs and are typically at least as congested (both the stores themselves and the shopping centers they're in) as grocery stores in the inner suburbs.
Poor inner-city neighborhoods have even fewer options than the ostensibly middle-class areas like mine - sometimes, unless one can borrow a car or take 2 buses that run at best hourly, none whatsoever.
In short, trying to find decent food is a nearly unbearable ordeal here compared to most other places I've been, even within the U.S., and that probably goes a long way toward explaining why we're among the fattest and least healthy cities in a country not particularly known for leanness nor for good health to begin with.
Destroy enough of lower Manhattan, and: (a) more Americans would die within a month from starvation, thirst, or disease than not; and (b) even more people would die outside the U.S. as a result than in it. Most Slashdotters have absolutely no clue how dependent all industrialized countries are on the smooth functioning of the global economy, from which they derive every essential of life except for air (but most definitely including clean water, the lack of which kills almost as many people around the world TODAY as everything else combined). This is gradually changing; the world is becoming more decentralized financially and otherwise. But we are still a long, long way off from a time in which most people can have food and clean water without first having money and jobs, and, hence, at least some, at least indirect, access to the world financial system.
I have sometimes been critical of Mr. de Icaza. I do not believe I have ever attacked him personally. If I have, my bad, and thank you for pointing that out. I believe that anyone who contributes to Free Software is entitled to some respect and gratitude and as a result if I must disagree I will try to do so respectfully.
I've found that using a source-based distro (in my case, Gentoo) allows for great long-term library stability, at the possible expense of occasional short-term breakage. Basically, anytime anything is updated, everything depending on it directly or indirectly gets rebuilt, then the whole thing gets checked to make sure nothing was missed (as can happen with a bad ebuild or for various other reasons). Once in a while, a bug in an upstream package or an ebuild (the spec for building the software, akin to a BSD port) causes a package to break, and this can be a big problem if it is an important package such as X or glibc upon which many others depend. But these are usually corrected fairly quickly. What does *not* happen with any regularity is the "shared library/DLL hell" that can happen with any system premised on the idea of binary, rather than source, compatibility. Anything that manages to compile will generally "Just Work," at least to the same degree it would on a binary distro, but with much less chance of future breakage as a result of updates to its dependencies.
My understanding is that Mr. de Icaza is, always has been, and generally has conceded himself to be, a pragmatist. He values software freedom for the practical benefits that it brings. I can respect that to a point. However, like Mr. Stallman, I am an idealist. I believe that freedom is valuable primarily for its own sake, that suppressing it is a bad thing even if it is alleged to bring "practical" benefits, and that encouraging it is a good thing even if it comes at the price of some (usually temporary) inconvenience. Pragmatism, unfortunately, often leads to compromise, and to the abandonment of ideals that prove difficult or inconvenient. Idealism on the other hand motivates people like RMS to continue to try to address the problems with, e.g., free software on the desktop, not by abandoning freedom, but by trying to fix them.
Iraq can get hotter than that outdoors (record temp of almost 53C was set in Basra 3 years ago). But an enclosed space in any inhabited part of the world can get much hotter if exposed to sunlight. Here in Cleveland, on the Canadian border, we rarely see 40C outdoors, and get very little sunlight most days; yet the inside of a car may well be 15-20C hotter than the outside, any time of year, if it is directly in the sun. In most months this means hot enough to melt plastic, or to cause water to evaporate almost on contact. 85C, I don't know, but I wouldn't consider it implausible even here, much less someplace where it is both much hotter to begin with, and much sunnier.
OK, I will grant you that (and I do not consider Ada to be mainstream). But what would be the upside of choosing C++ rather than a higher level language (e.g., C#, Python, or maybe in your case Fortran) plus C for the places where maximal performance and/or hardware access are required?
MANY 3 year olds CAN read. Some can't, and that is not an indication of lesser intelligence or ability; some kids just develop differently than others, and some kids are exposed to letters and words and books earlier than others. But there are many, many 3 year olds, and even some younger children, who can.
My wife, myself, and my 2 older sons were reading at 3. My third son, who is just short of his 2nd birthday, knows his ABCs, and can read some words by sight (I'm not sure he understands what they mean yet, but he recognizes and says the word). He is ONE, he is not potty trained, and he does not speak in sentences longer than one or two words, but, for whatever reason, he learned. Our oldest, who has mild Asperger's, was able to read and understand long sentences and relatively complicated ideas, before he was able to grasp those same thoughts and ideas audibly; for some reason his brain was wired to understand things he saw in print better than things he would hear audibly. He also did not speak at all until around the same time he was beginning to read, although his verbal abilities are exceptional now.
BTW . . . a lot of their early literacy was enhanced with computers and educational videos. Pediatricians almost unanimously recommend against computers and TV at that age, and there are plausible reasons for that, but we did carefully choose what we would buy or rent and what sites we would open up for them, and, so far, I think it has worked well for us.
Heavy inflation and/or a falling dollar will make oil, food, electronics, and other things crucial to the U.S. economy largely unaffordable to the average person. It won't be a particularly great thing for holders of U.S. bonds either, of course, but, since they are the ones calling the shots, NOT the people, you can be very sure they will be protected from the worst of what's coming, somehow, while the rest of us are about to get screwed good and hard.
I had a lot of trouble learning to do TDD well because for a long time I confused it with unit testing. They are related, and complementary, but separate disciplines, and it is best not to confuse them. The way I approach TDD right now is to try to gather testable (though not necessarily complete) requirements, write tests to verify them, design smaller components that will implement these requirements, write the tests and then implementation, and continue to divide the problem into smaller pieces until the implementation is complete. The unit tests validate the functioning of the individual components, but they do not drive the overall design; functionality tests do. The functionality tests tell you if you've broken something in a refactor or redesign or in whatever other way. The unit tests, ideally, help you to find the broken piece(s) quickly. Both kinds of tests help to ensure that your architecture and design is testable, and thus verifiable, and thus far less likely to break. Mocking can be used to simulate the behavior of other systems outside of one's control (e.g., databases, legacy systems, etc.), including error conditions these systems may encounter or errors connecting to them, so that the software within one's control can respond in an intelligent manner if things beyond it go wrong. I've been accused of being a TDD skeptic, and, indeed, I don't think it's appropriate everywhere, but it is broadly useful in many areas of software development and it helps to teach and enforce other good architecture, design and coding practices. Unit testing is great but it's only one component of TDD, and, often, much less important than comprehensive behavior and integration testing. It should still be done where possible, because seemingly small changes and refactorings can cause subtle breakage that the unit tests can catch quickly, especially if they are automated as they should be, possibly before an integration build is even attempted.
Respectfully disagree. Some adults do in fact have trouble figuring out what constitutes socially acceptable behavior. That would include people like me with Asperger's and related conditions, who happen to be grossly overrepresented in IT and related fields.
I manage most of the time by always erring on the side of being cautious and keeping my mouth shut, which can make me seem unfriendly and antisocial, but not (usually) offensive.
I'm sorry to say it, but we guys can be real jerks sometimes in an environment where there are no women around to help to "civilize" us. In bigger companies, there tend to be enough women, and sufficient emphasis on avoidance of anything that could be reasonably interpreted as sexual harassment, that the problems are minimal. However, I now work in an all-male office. They're great guys, but I promise you, the average woman would NOT be comfortable with some of the language and attitudes and generally low-brow culture here. If we had a female suddenly show up, we would have to adapt, and so would she. It would happen, I'm sure, but not without some effort, on both sides.
The Chinese are not likely to waterboard me, or murder everyone in my neighborhood by an "accidental" drone attack, because of something I said on the Internet. The U.S. government very well might. I fear the U.S. government far more than the Chinese, and I would even if I were a Chinese citizen living in China. Not that the Chinese human rights record is great; it is somewhere between appalling and worse; but it still does not begin to compare with the U.S. government and its 200+ year long history of torturing, enslaving, and murdering innocent people both here and abroad. If by stealing its secrets the Chinese manage to prevent a war against the U.S. government - or to prevail, should they be unable to avoid it - the world, and even the U.S., will be much better off.
An unfortunate reality is that women are biologically programmed to prefer "alpha male" types while they are in their prime childbearing years (puberty to maybe 25 or so).
The good news is that that tends to change when they reach their late 20s and 30s, when most women figure out that "alpha" types tend to be assholes who hurt them repeatedly, and that not all men are like that. On the contrary, "nice guy" types are able and willing, even eager, to provide the decency, kindness, nurturing, and protection and provision for children, that alpha males typically cannot or will not. So "nice guy" types tend to get preferred by women in their 30s and beyond.
As women mature, BTW, they may lose a little in terms of appearance, but what they gain in maturity, wisdom, compassion, intelligence, and willingness to accept their mates more or less as they are, without trying to change them into something they aren't, MORE than makes up for it.
Yes, I am aware of that, more so than most, because my workplace and church are in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, which is among the poorest cities in the U.S., which has among the highest rates of concentrated poverty in the developed world.
Even so, very few people are actually starving, and those people are not making 90k per year. Most of those who suffer from malnutrition and actual hunger are the children of substance abusers and/or the working poor who do not qualify for most forms of government assistance.
Most of the people I know here, other than my fellow IT workers, live on about half of that, and that is enough money for a family of 4 or 5 to live acceptably in Cleveland, though certainly not lavishly.
In a world where around 30% of people live on less than $2 a day, being able to earn something like 100x that amount of money says to me something very different than "we're f*cked."
First of all, we are all "sick sheep." We all live in a world tainted by sin (failure to live up to God's perfect standards). We also are all guilty of sin ourselves. The point is not to pretend that we are not sick, or that we are less sick than others, but to try to get better.
You try to care for other "sick sheep" if (and ONLY if) they want your care. Otherwise, as long as they are not harming others without their consent, you pray for them and otherwise leave them alone.
Christian ethics go far beyond merely respecting the rights of others. Christians are supposed to actively engage and love those both inside AND outside the community of fellow Christians. The "shunning" of nonbelievers by believers is explicitly forbidden in Scripture. The only people who are in some sense "shunned" are those who profess the Christian faith but willfully choose not to live it, even after attempts at correction/reconciliation, and even that is debatable: they are to be treated as unbelievers, *but* unbelievers, and even enemies, are also to be treated with kindness and love. The "shunned" are excluded from church services and from the sacraments. That is it. This is to remind them that the rest of the community of believers does not consider the person in question to be in full fellowship with God or with His people, BUT that they (and God) desire for that person to return, which he or she can do by simply stopping the behavior that caused them to be disfellowshipped.
I do not believe in victimless "crimes," which means there are many things I consider sin but do not consider crimes because no one is being harmed without their consent. For instance, drug abuse, consensual premarital sex, or giving God the middle finger. I don't think those things are right, but I *also* don't think it's right to throw people in jail for doing them. The only things that should be crimes are things that harm others without their consent. And, of these, the only ones that should result in imprisonment are those that demonstrate the inability of the offender to live among civilized people. Defacing public property is a crime, for instance, as it should be; but the punishment should be proportional to the crime, and therefore probably should not consist of things such as prison rape or barring the perp from future employment - but *should* result in making the victim right, plus deterring the perpetrator from doing similar things in the future. Perhaps when we catch someone spraying graffiti, we try and sentence him to cleaning it up, plus maybe 2 or 3 other buildings as well.
My beliefs do, and those of every Christian should, include "do not harm others." It's an integral part of the Great Commandment. That similar teachings also are found at or near the very core of many other belief systems as well should not negate their centrality with respect to Christian faith and practice. On the contrary, they should be a starting point for dialogue, understanding, and cooperation with those of other belief systems.
You got it, and that, in a nutshell, is what regulatory capture is all about. It's why when well-intentioned progressives impose more and more regulations on business, things get worse and worse, even from their own viewpoint: the big megacorps manage to find ways around the supposed intent of the regs, while smaller and more ethical competitors get screwed over by those regs and eventually go under. It doesn't occur to most of them that on a deeper and more fundamental level, most of the problems they seek to redress result from not applying natural law (no stealing, no fraud, no harming others without their permission, no polluting what is not yours to pollute, etc., etc.). More regulations don't solve this problem, but better enforcement of laws against theft, fraud, assault, etc., even when they are committed by corporations, would at least begin to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The ruling is also quite hilarious, peppered with ridicule, Star Trek references, and such. Not what one would expect from the typical judge.
Which is why I suspect that for the medium term, we will end up using other methods to harness and/or generate the energy (solar, wind, geothermal) and use them to produce hydrocarbons - perhaps in some sort of a carbon neutral fashion - as a means of storing and transporting that energy.
The hidden assumption here is that no substantial amount of oil is being placed *into* the ground. This is certainly the dominant opinion, but definitely not the only one, and while we know a great deal about the geology of the first few miles of the earth's crust, there is a great and increasing amount that we don't know as we go deeper and deeper therein. There may be processes as yet unexplained that account for some, perhaps even much, of the oil in the ground. I don't think it would be wise to count on that; I think it is safest to assume that oil is a finite and non-renewable resource. But there is a small but nonzero chance that it is not, and, if it should turn out that it isn't, we may need to explore other reasons and benefits (of which there are many) for encouraging the development of other sustainable energy production and storage technologies.
Corner stores are rare even in the very urban part of town I'm in (Lakewood) and typically sell primarily booze, cigarettes, snacks, and lottery tickets, not anything that a person hoping to live another decade would actually want to consume.
Big-box, warehouse type stores like Costco offer better and fresher produce options, but require very long drives out into the suburbs and are typically at least as congested (both the stores themselves and the shopping centers they're in) as grocery stores in the inner suburbs.
Poor inner-city neighborhoods have even fewer options than the ostensibly middle-class areas like mine - sometimes, unless one can borrow a car or take 2 buses that run at best hourly, none whatsoever.
In short, trying to find decent food is a nearly unbearable ordeal here compared to most other places I've been, even within the U.S., and that probably goes a long way toward explaining why we're among the fattest and least healthy cities in a country not particularly known for leanness nor for good health to begin with.
I'm very sorry for the loss of your friend. :(
Destroy enough of lower Manhattan, and: (a) more Americans would die within a month from starvation, thirst, or disease than not; and (b) even more people would die outside the U.S. as a result than in it. Most Slashdotters have absolutely no clue how dependent all industrialized countries are on the smooth functioning of the global economy, from which they derive every essential of life except for air (but most definitely including clean water, the lack of which kills almost as many people around the world TODAY as everything else combined). This is gradually changing; the world is becoming more decentralized financially and otherwise. But we are still a long, long way off from a time in which most people can have food and clean water without first having money and jobs, and, hence, at least some, at least indirect, access to the world financial system.
I have sometimes been critical of Mr. de Icaza. I do not believe I have ever attacked him personally. If I have, my bad, and thank you for pointing that out. I believe that anyone who contributes to Free Software is entitled to some respect and gratitude and as a result if I must disagree I will try to do so respectfully.
I've found that using a source-based distro (in my case, Gentoo) allows for great long-term library stability, at the possible expense of occasional short-term breakage. Basically, anytime anything is updated, everything depending on it directly or indirectly gets rebuilt, then the whole thing gets checked to make sure nothing was missed (as can happen with a bad ebuild or for various other reasons). Once in a while, a bug in an upstream package or an ebuild (the spec for building the software, akin to a BSD port) causes a package to break, and this can be a big problem if it is an important package such as X or glibc upon which many others depend. But these are usually corrected fairly quickly. What does *not* happen with any regularity is the "shared library/DLL hell" that can happen with any system premised on the idea of binary, rather than source, compatibility. Anything that manages to compile will generally "Just Work," at least to the same degree it would on a binary distro, but with much less chance of future breakage as a result of updates to its dependencies.
My understanding is that Mr. de Icaza is, always has been, and generally has conceded himself to be, a pragmatist. He values software freedom for the practical benefits that it brings. I can respect that to a point. However, like Mr. Stallman, I am an idealist. I believe that freedom is valuable primarily for its own sake, that suppressing it is a bad thing even if it is alleged to bring "practical" benefits, and that encouraging it is a good thing even if it comes at the price of some (usually temporary) inconvenience. Pragmatism, unfortunately, often leads to compromise, and to the abandonment of ideals that prove difficult or inconvenient. Idealism on the other hand motivates people like RMS to continue to try to address the problems with, e.g., free software on the desktop, not by abandoning freedom, but by trying to fix them.
Iraq can get hotter than that outdoors (record temp of almost 53C was set in Basra 3 years ago). But an enclosed space in any inhabited part of the world can get much hotter if exposed to sunlight. Here in Cleveland, on the Canadian border, we rarely see 40C outdoors, and get very little sunlight most days; yet the inside of a car may well be 15-20C hotter than the outside, any time of year, if it is directly in the sun. In most months this means hot enough to melt plastic, or to cause water to evaporate almost on contact. 85C, I don't know, but I wouldn't consider it implausible even here, much less someplace where it is both much hotter to begin with, and much sunnier.
OK, I will grant you that (and I do not consider Ada to be mainstream). But what would be the upside of choosing C++ rather than a higher level language (e.g., C#, Python, or maybe in your case Fortran) plus C for the places where maximal performance and/or hardware access are required?
MANY 3 year olds CAN read. Some can't, and that is not an indication of lesser intelligence or ability; some kids just develop differently than others, and some kids are exposed to letters and words and books earlier than others. But there are many, many 3 year olds, and even some younger children, who can.
My wife, myself, and my 2 older sons were reading at 3. My third son, who is just short of his 2nd birthday, knows his ABCs, and can read some words by sight (I'm not sure he understands what they mean yet, but he recognizes and says the word). He is ONE, he is not potty trained, and he does not speak in sentences longer than one or two words, but, for whatever reason, he learned. Our oldest, who has mild Asperger's, was able to read and understand long sentences and relatively complicated ideas, before he was able to grasp those same thoughts and ideas audibly; for some reason his brain was wired to understand things he saw in print better than things he would hear audibly. He also did not speak at all until around the same time he was beginning to read, although his verbal abilities are exceptional now.
BTW . . . a lot of their early literacy was enhanced with computers and educational videos. Pediatricians almost unanimously recommend against computers and TV at that age, and there are plausible reasons for that, but we did carefully choose what we would buy or rent and what sites we would open up for them, and, so far, I think it has worked well for us.
Heavy inflation and/or a falling dollar will make oil, food, electronics, and other things crucial to the U.S. economy largely unaffordable to the average person. It won't be a particularly great thing for holders of U.S. bonds either, of course, but, since they are the ones calling the shots, NOT the people, you can be very sure they will be protected from the worst of what's coming, somehow, while the rest of us are about to get screwed good and hard.
I had a lot of trouble learning to do TDD well because for a long time I confused it with unit testing. They are related, and complementary, but separate disciplines, and it is best not to confuse them. The way I approach TDD right now is to try to gather testable (though not necessarily complete) requirements, write tests to verify them, design smaller components that will implement these requirements, write the tests and then implementation, and continue to divide the problem into smaller pieces until the implementation is complete. The unit tests validate the functioning of the individual components, but they do not drive the overall design; functionality tests do. The functionality tests tell you if you've broken something in a refactor or redesign or in whatever other way. The unit tests, ideally, help you to find the broken piece(s) quickly. Both kinds of tests help to ensure that your architecture and design is testable, and thus verifiable, and thus far less likely to break. Mocking can be used to simulate the behavior of other systems outside of one's control (e.g., databases, legacy systems, etc.), including error conditions these systems may encounter or errors connecting to them, so that the software within one's control can respond in an intelligent manner if things beyond it go wrong. I've been accused of being a TDD skeptic, and, indeed, I don't think it's appropriate everywhere, but it is broadly useful in many areas of software development and it helps to teach and enforce other good architecture, design and coding practices. Unit testing is great but it's only one component of TDD, and, often, much less important than comprehensive behavior and integration testing. It should still be done where possible, because seemingly small changes and refactorings can cause subtle breakage that the unit tests can catch quickly, especially if they are automated as they should be, possibly before an integration build is even attempted.
Respectfully disagree. Some adults do in fact have trouble figuring out what constitutes socially acceptable behavior. That would include people like me with Asperger's and related conditions, who happen to be grossly overrepresented in IT and related fields.
I manage most of the time by always erring on the side of being cautious and keeping my mouth shut, which can make me seem unfriendly and antisocial, but not (usually) offensive.
I'm sorry to say it, but we guys can be real jerks sometimes in an environment where there are no women around to help to "civilize" us. In bigger companies, there tend to be enough women, and sufficient emphasis on avoidance of anything that could be reasonably interpreted as sexual harassment, that the problems are minimal. However, I now work in an all-male office. They're great guys, but I promise you, the average woman would NOT be comfortable with some of the language and attitudes and generally low-brow culture here. If we had a female suddenly show up, we would have to adapt, and so would she. It would happen, I'm sure, but not without some effort, on both sides.
The Chinese are not likely to waterboard me, or murder everyone in my neighborhood by an "accidental" drone attack, because of something I said on the Internet. The U.S. government very well might. I fear the U.S. government far more than the Chinese, and I would even if I were a Chinese citizen living in China. Not that the Chinese human rights record is great; it is somewhere between appalling and worse; but it still does not begin to compare with the U.S. government and its 200+ year long history of torturing, enslaving, and murdering innocent people both here and abroad. If by stealing its secrets the Chinese manage to prevent a war against the U.S. government - or to prevail, should they be unable to avoid it - the world, and even the U.S., will be much better off.
It's not an ideal situation. But it also isn't as hopeless for "nice guys" as it may first appear.
An unfortunate reality is that women are biologically programmed to prefer "alpha male" types while they are in their prime childbearing years (puberty to maybe 25 or so).
The good news is that that tends to change when they reach their late 20s and 30s, when most women figure out that "alpha" types tend to be assholes who hurt them repeatedly, and that not all men are like that. On the contrary, "nice guy" types are able and willing, even eager, to provide the decency, kindness, nurturing, and protection and provision for children, that alpha males typically cannot or will not. So "nice guy" types tend to get preferred by women in their 30s and beyond.
As women mature, BTW, they may lose a little in terms of appearance, but what they gain in maturity, wisdom, compassion, intelligence, and willingness to accept their mates more or less as they are, without trying to change them into something they aren't, MORE than makes up for it.
Yes, I am aware of that, more so than most, because my workplace and church are in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, which is among the poorest cities in the U.S., which has among the highest rates of concentrated poverty in the developed world.
Even so, very few people are actually starving, and those people are not making 90k per year. Most of those who suffer from malnutrition and actual hunger are the children of substance abusers and/or the working poor who do not qualify for most forms of government assistance.
Most of the people I know here, other than my fellow IT workers, live on about half of that, and that is enough money for a family of 4 or 5 to live acceptably in Cleveland, though certainly not lavishly.
In a world where around 30% of people live on less than $2 a day, being able to earn something like 100x that amount of money says to me something very different than "we're f*cked."
First of all, we are all "sick sheep." We all live in a world tainted by sin (failure to live up to God's perfect standards). We also are all guilty of sin ourselves. The point is not to pretend that we are not sick, or that we are less sick than others, but to try to get better.
You try to care for other "sick sheep" if (and ONLY if) they want your care. Otherwise, as long as they are not harming others without their consent, you pray for them and otherwise leave them alone.
Christian ethics go far beyond merely respecting the rights of others. Christians are supposed to actively engage and love those both inside AND outside the community of fellow Christians. The "shunning" of nonbelievers by believers is explicitly forbidden in Scripture. The only people who are in some sense "shunned" are those who profess the Christian faith but willfully choose not to live it, even after attempts at correction/reconciliation, and even that is debatable: they are to be treated as unbelievers, *but* unbelievers, and even enemies, are also to be treated with kindness and love. The "shunned" are excluded from church services and from the sacraments. That is it. This is to remind them that the rest of the community of believers does not consider the person in question to be in full fellowship with God or with His people, BUT that they (and God) desire for that person to return, which he or she can do by simply stopping the behavior that caused them to be disfellowshipped.
I do not believe in victimless "crimes," which means there are many things I consider sin but do not consider crimes because no one is being harmed without their consent. For instance, drug abuse, consensual premarital sex, or giving God the middle finger. I don't think those things are right, but I *also* don't think it's right to throw people in jail for doing them. The only things that should be crimes are things that harm others without their consent. And, of these, the only ones that should result in imprisonment are those that demonstrate the inability of the offender to live among civilized people. Defacing public property is a crime, for instance, as it should be; but the punishment should be proportional to the crime, and therefore probably should not consist of things such as prison rape or barring the perp from future employment - but *should* result in making the victim right, plus deterring the perpetrator from doing similar things in the future. Perhaps when we catch someone spraying graffiti, we try and sentence him to cleaning it up, plus maybe 2 or 3 other buildings as well.
If it would help my family, I would do it in a heartbeat. My own quality of life doesn't matter much to me. Theirs does.
My beliefs do, and those of every Christian should, include "do not harm others." It's an integral part of the Great Commandment. That similar teachings also are found at or near the very core of many other belief systems as well should not negate their centrality with respect to Christian faith and practice. On the contrary, they should be a starting point for dialogue, understanding, and cooperation with those of other belief systems.
You got it, and that, in a nutshell, is what regulatory capture is all about. It's why when well-intentioned progressives impose more and more regulations on business, things get worse and worse, even from their own viewpoint: the big megacorps manage to find ways around the supposed intent of the regs, while smaller and more ethical competitors get screwed over by those regs and eventually go under. It doesn't occur to most of them that on a deeper and more fundamental level, most of the problems they seek to redress result from not applying natural law (no stealing, no fraud, no harming others without their permission, no polluting what is not yours to pollute, etc., etc.). More regulations don't solve this problem, but better enforcement of laws against theft, fraud, assault, etc., even when they are committed by corporations, would at least begin to do so.