If we survive the coming world wars of find ways to avoid them altogether, we probably will send people to Neptune and farther. And we will one day regard it as trivial and snicker about times when old farts like us rambled and dreamt about it.
I'm curious how some of the/. crowd still cannot grasp the speed of technology after the last, well, ten years, maybe 12. To get a sense of it: Roll back to the year 1909: do you think anyone could've ever imagined even a fraction of the technology we now regard as trivial?
Heck, people living in 1959 couldn't have imagined what living was in 2009, people in 1979 could not.
Can you remember or imagine what life in an office environment without email, photocopier or telephones actually looks like? No one does. I asked a dozen friends and family members who actually worked in an office with no email and one telephone for the entire floor - yet no one could clearly describe what they filled the day with back then. Everyone has their feelings about the past, rose colored glasses and all that - but the specifics are gone quicker than you can flip the calendar.
What I'm trying to tell is that we've only got a faint idea what the past was like, even if we have movies, books, pictures and living memories. How on earth should we have a clue on what the future brings?
The only thing we do know is that it probably brings things we couldn't ever imagine lest smoke crack.
It was meant more like "$FACT doesn't change the warming theory" (except for a cooling theory, which is also admissible and probably equally valid)
Truth is, we're not getting any carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has never been there before. IF carbon dioxide is heating up the planet, it's not going to be warmer than what we once had. This might be bad news for penguins and polar bears, but humans who thrive from equator to polar circle probably have not much to worry about as a whole.
Building dams in the lowlands and combating moskitoes and deserts should be the first line of defense, because that's where it will be needed, if ever.
Are people really claiming that *the* single most effective AND efficient method to prevent a flood is burning less oil? It's only a few steps above Voodoo, but I personally can think of several hundred things that can prevent future floods much better than stopping today's cars.
In terms of actual flood protection per dollar spent, carbon dioxide reduction is totally ridiculous.
Is that your own opinion or that of "we run out of oil and arable land in 1970"-Club of Rome?
We don't know much about the weather ten days from now and you think you know about the general climate a hundred years in the future? Are you serious?
Your "bullet fired" analogy has serious flaws, because it leaves us with a small batch of options, all of which point AGAINST combating "climate change" today:
- bullet is fired, ducking away is possible we now have a hundred years of time to duck, which is an eternity given current speed of technological progress. Another 50 or even 100 years can might have the Technology Singularity or Grey Goo scenario - everything else is utterly trivial compared to that. Either way, we're terraforming Mars within several decades, if we can avoid some impending World Wars. Cooling or heating a runaway climate will then be an engineering task, not a catastrophe.
- "bullet is fired, ducking away is impossible" Improbable, given the climate change speed which is whole orders of magnitude slower than "The Day After Tomorrow", but other than that, we could just sit down and pray. No need to impoverish everyone when they everyone dies in the end without escape.
- "bullet is not fired, ducking away or preventing firing is possible" same as the first one: preventing the firing now is a million times more expensive than ducking away later, given technological advances and even simple compound interest over that time period.
- "bullet is not fired, but ducking away is impossible, preventing firing is not possible" improbable, as the second one, and riddled with assumptions, hypotheses and hard factual errors. We're not betting the farm on this.
If you're too small to buy a simple, used USB harddrive for 30 bucks, only God may help you. Or not, because you're obviously not serious about what you do.
Do or not do, don't "try". Save on coffee or cigarettes, office paper, phone calls, whatever, but not on the smallest possible backup, you'd regret it so much when your company or project is all but gone the first instant any server/workstation hiccups ever so slightly.
Show me that small business that really cannot afford - a one-time 100 USD investment in a brand-name 500GB external HDD (USB, eSATA, whatever) - an absolute maximum of three person-hours per month to actually pick up the drive, initiate the backups and take it back offsite aftwards (encrypted at a trusted home, partner or wherever it is reasonably safe)
The cost in case of data loss is so much higher than the operation cost of a poor-man's offsite backup like this - I doubt anyone can reasonably argue against it. The more a company is strapped for cash the more it usually needs a good backup - or it'll go down one second after anything happens to any data.
I know this method has several imperfections and inherent risks, but it's a whole lot better than no backup and feasible for the smallest of small companies.
If they started several projects all leading nowhere, they'd better stop starting projects before finding out why they failed and improving their shortcomings.
When the same people trash a project that had the same premise several times over, you and I know there's a deeper problem. 3d Realms did not and I dare not to ask how many venture capitalists were ripped off in the process.
Well, if they were self financed, how did they pay for rent, electricity, water and the daily pizza delivery?
Did they have a second job flipping burgers or investing their saved pocket money?
Anyone paid for them sitting around and coding bunk, so whoever that was is probably incompetent. If they were self-financed, they should've invested in beer instead, because that brings at least 4.5 percent.
Much of the time is spent for story, graphics, sound and map design, which is the reason for 3-year cycles between episodes. The engine itself can be bought wholesale and gameplay mechanics don't take decades to finish.
What Valve actually finishes in 3 years is still much more than what 3D Realms did in 15. If the result is an Episode or a Game doesn't matter, because most Duke Nukem players would be satisfied with either, as long as the damn company Gets Something Done Real Quick(tm).
They didn't, because 3D Realms were underfunded, incompetent or overzealous, which Valve (or iD Software) were not. Some of the solo projects of iD artists were, which is why i.e. Daikatana and the others were not commercially successful. But at least they finished some day.
Competent managers are not required to have a product out the door in, what?, 15 years? Other companies without real managers do that in three. Example: iD Software managed several of these feats, making quality games, having some kind of time and money estimate beforehand and then actually finishing something.
When a product like this takes *umpteen* years without any kind of progress or even a measly status report, you have incompetent managers, incompetent programmers, insufficient funding, incompetent financers, inadequate workplace or ideas distant from reality. 3D Realms probably had all of it and more.
Unfortunately, badly managed companies go bankrupt. Fortunately, they're not wasting anyone's resources, money and time anymore.
But it's much much worse when badly managed companies cannot go bankrupt under any circumstances, being deemed "too big to fail" or having some other kind of socialist protection.
It costs a lot of money to build cinemas, public swimming pools, underground railway lines, international airports and maglev trains and it takes a long time to recoup the costs.
You would have limited competition or even no cinemas, public swimming pools, no underground railway lines, no international airports and no maglev trains at all in sparsely populated areas, therefore I advocate government intervention to bring all that and more to my suburb, Smalltown USA and everywhere else, including rural Africa.
Well, I exaggerated, but I hope you understand: everything costs money (no free lunch, nowhere) and many investments are not profitable everywhere but densely populated cities. If you decide to build expensive infrastructure where it is not profitable, you place the burden for YOUR idea on OTHER taxpayers. I know, YOUR idea is so much better than MY idea or that of someone else, and sooo worth all that taxpayer money, but unfortunately "long term profitability" is the only real *impartial* measure to decide whether something was a good idea or a waste of money. All other measures are either skewed or can be manipulated, which is the reason socialism always ends up in bankruptcy, as emotionally and politically appealing ideas are usually easier to have than truly good ideas.
The Western world probably doesn't accept travel times of several days anymore and alternatives are cheap enough to be worth it. Maybe air travel itself has become cheaper because of mass production, computerisation or railways have become more expensive because of wage increases, steel prices, real estate property costs?
Another point that they're not telling you is the financial results of the oh-so-great European railway systems. They are all state-subsidized, incur losses ranging from mediocre to catastrophic, some have a very low surplus but that's not the norm. Especially the German rail is trying to reach an IPO-ready balance sheet and they're pruning first and foremost all the small connections from their network, concentrating on the major city interconnects. They've increased railway car capacity, speed and transfer reliability and are as fast as air travel on some routes in our smallish country, time expended for check-in and security included. They've reached much lower deficits and a staggering passenger-mile total by this - but rail ticket prices are still closing in on air travel every year, with the rail company still not making a profit.
Compared to the situation here, I can hardly imagine how it should be profitable or useful to network the US this way.
East Germany (the GDR) actually was much better than the German Reich before, but still an awfully totalitarian society.
The GDR had The One Party, dangerous secret police above all laws, state-owned everything, state-controlled arts and education, disappearing dissidents, political justice, a large army, bellicose rhetoric and of course the hallmark of socialism worldwide: scarcity of everything else.
But other than that, they had enough edibles, bearable housing, no Holocaust and no wars. Unfortunately that's why people around here indulge in "Eastalgia" time and again, because when seen against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, most other dictatorships look terribly weak. Maybe when compared to the Black Death, cancer doesn't seem so bad.
Anyway, without an unyielding and definetly unfriendly Reagan, the expensive arms race, and maybe the aftermath of Chernobyl, a sensible Gorbatchev may have never come to power.
Maybe it's time to remember again what effects Chamberlain had on the Nazis and compare them to the impression Churchill made.
The Soviets wasted 500'000 of their soldiers as cannon fodder just to rush a capture of Berlin before the US.
As an inhabitant of the former Eastern Germany, I'm not thankful to the Soviets for "liberating" my half of the country, because they just replaced brown shirts with red flags.
Maybe the Soviets would have captured the whole continent, maybe the Germans would have captured the whole Soviet Union, nobody knows.
Russia is much larger than the US, area-wise, right. Economy is still concentrated on a few select centers in the western part of it and even then they're flying everywhere when they have the money.
Some more things: - parts of Russia can only be reached by air, because road and rail would be utterly destroyed after a few winters - the trans-siberian railroad cost *hundreds* of "World Trade Center-equivalents" in money and human lives to build. They built it with slave workers and dissidents, untold numbers in the hundred thousands of whom died miserably and were buried all along the track. The Egyptian pyramids were cheaper in human lives and resources, really. - the trans-siberian railroad is not high speed in any sense of the word. You can literally pick some flowers on the ride and the track breaks down all the time somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
If the trans-siberian railroad is your prototype, you're hosed if you have less than 1'000'000 expendable forced laborers at your disposal.
That's just you. Many people don't like waiting for hours in a loud metal tube if they don't have to, no matter if said tube is barreling along at 10000 meters or 1 meter above ground.
But in any case, if I'd be paying US taxes, I'd refuse paying through the nose for people who simply like a comfy railway more. Life is not a bowl of cherries.
Interstate highway is not cheap, maybe it's even more expensive than high speed rail, maybe not.
But the point is you need to have individual transport, because you cannot (currently) serve all transportation needs by vehicles limited to fixed, pre-laid rails. You always need to have vehicles with flexible schedules, flexible routing that can go everywhere, turn, load or unload in a small courtyard and successfully navigate everywhere from a large interstate to a barely-maintained country road.
You cannot maintain an n:n network between all destinations just by rail alone, without building roads. You could do by air, if helicopters and VTOLs were cheap and efficient instead of converting 90% of their fuel to noise, but you cannot do that by rail.
Maybe we can sometime, with an automated n:n distribution network, but currently you have fixed destinations, central scheduling and exclusive access for rails.
Cheap asphalt as they said. Other than that, even the people few and far between need to somehow need to get some groceries, right?
The interstate highway is also used for cargo by trucks, which firstly needs to reach everywhere and secondly is very very cheap compared to air and high speed rail.
Oh and there's already low speed rail going through the States, which is more than enough for most bulk cargo.
The real lesson is that pussies get raped. First ship gets hijacked out of the blue. Owner pays several millions to get it back. Pirates buy huge amounts of guns and bling-bling. Pirates are heavily armed and broke, hijacking the next vessel. Then the pirates' neighbors see all that bling and now try to do the same.
Rinse, repeat and then you have an economy of blackmail, robbery, extortion. Earning millions by simply hijacking a passing ship is sure as more profitable than planting wheat in soil as hard as concrete, so they're doing it. Now that they've tasted it AND have more weapons than they'd ever need, you cannot stop them without killing at least half of 'em.
Well said. Life is not fair, we don't have equal headstart and we will always be very differently-abled. And just as well are some ways of life more compatible with failure than others. Somalia has made their choice and so have we. As long as we claim all ways of life are equally worthy, we will not change a thing, because some ways of life create poverty while others create wealth.
We don't need to lay it down to the survival of the fittest but we sure as hell neither have the resources nor the will it takes to bring peace and wealth to every downtrodden, crime-ridden part of this earth.
We don't need to help everyone equally, people who demand that are clinically insane and need help. I say we help much, but we'd better start at home, we've got enough of a challenge there without needing to ship Marines, money and aid halfway across the globe.
Slashdot Mirror
If we survive the coming world wars of find ways to avoid them altogether, we probably will send people to Neptune and farther. And we will one day regard it as trivial and snicker about times when old farts like us rambled and dreamt about it.
I'm curious how some of the /. crowd still cannot grasp the speed of technology after the last, well, ten years, maybe 12. To get a sense of it: Roll back to the year 1909: do you think anyone could've ever imagined even a fraction of the technology we now regard as trivial?
Heck, people living in 1959 couldn't have imagined what living was in 2009, people in 1979 could not.
Can you remember or imagine what life in an office environment without email, photocopier or telephones actually looks like? No one does. I asked a dozen friends and family members who actually worked in an office with no email and one telephone for the entire floor - yet no one could clearly describe what they filled the day with back then. Everyone has their feelings about the past, rose colored glasses and all that - but the specifics are gone quicker than you can flip the calendar.
What I'm trying to tell is that we've only got a faint idea what the past was like, even if we have movies, books, pictures and living memories. How on earth should we have a clue on what the future brings?
The only thing we do know is that it probably brings things we couldn't ever imagine lest smoke crack.
It was meant more like "$FACT doesn't change the warming theory" (except for a cooling theory, which is also admissible and probably equally valid)
Truth is, we're not getting any carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that has never been there before. IF carbon dioxide is heating up the planet, it's not going to be warmer than what we once had. This might be bad news for penguins and polar bears, but humans who thrive from equator to polar circle probably have not much to worry about as a whole.
Building dams in the lowlands and combating moskitoes and deserts should be the first line of defense, because that's where it will be needed, if ever.
Are people really claiming that *the* single most effective AND efficient method to prevent a flood is burning less oil? It's only a few steps above Voodoo, but I personally can think of several hundred things that can prevent future floods much better than stopping today's cars.
In terms of actual flood protection per dollar spent, carbon dioxide reduction is totally ridiculous.
Is that your own opinion or that of "we run out of oil and arable land in 1970"-Club of Rome?
We don't know much about the weather ten days from now and you think you know about the general climate a hundred years in the future? Are you serious?
Your "bullet fired" analogy has serious flaws, because it leaves us with a small batch of options, all of which point AGAINST combating "climate change" today:
- bullet is fired, ducking away is possible
we now have a hundred years of time to duck, which is an eternity given current speed of technological progress. Another 50 or even 100 years can might have the Technology Singularity or Grey Goo scenario - everything else is utterly trivial compared to that. Either way, we're terraforming Mars within several decades, if we can avoid some impending World Wars. Cooling or heating a runaway climate will then be an engineering task, not a catastrophe.
- "bullet is fired, ducking away is impossible"
Improbable, given the climate change speed which is whole orders of magnitude slower than "The Day After Tomorrow", but other than that, we could just sit down and pray. No need to impoverish everyone when they everyone dies in the end without escape.
- "bullet is not fired, ducking away or preventing firing is possible"
same as the first one: preventing the firing now is a million times more expensive than ducking away later, given technological advances and even simple compound interest over that time period.
- "bullet is not fired, but ducking away is impossible, preventing firing is not possible"
improbable, as the second one, and riddled with assumptions, hypotheses and hard factual errors. We're not betting the farm on this.
If you're too small to buy a simple, used USB harddrive for 30 bucks, only God may help you. Or not, because you're obviously not serious about what you do.
Do or not do, don't "try". Save on coffee or cigarettes, office paper, phone calls, whatever, but not on the smallest possible backup, you'd regret it so much when your company or project is all but gone the first instant any server/workstation hiccups ever so slightly.
Show me that small business that really cannot afford
- a one-time 100 USD investment in a brand-name 500GB external HDD (USB, eSATA, whatever)
- an absolute maximum of three person-hours per month to actually pick up the drive, initiate the backups and take it back offsite aftwards (encrypted at a trusted home, partner or wherever it is reasonably safe)
The cost in case of data loss is so much higher than the operation cost of a poor-man's offsite backup like this - I doubt anyone can reasonably argue against it. The more a company is strapped for cash the more it usually needs a good backup - or it'll go down one second after anything happens to any data.
I know this method has several imperfections and inherent risks, but it's a whole lot better than no backup and feasible for the smallest of small companies.
If they started several projects all leading nowhere, they'd better stop starting projects before finding out why they failed and improving their shortcomings.
When the same people trash a project that had the same premise several times over, you and I know there's a deeper problem. 3d Realms did not and I dare not to ask how many venture capitalists were ripped off in the process.
Well, if they were self financed, how did they pay for rent, electricity, water and the daily pizza delivery?
Did they have a second job flipping burgers or investing their saved pocket money?
Anyone paid for them sitting around and coding bunk, so whoever that was is probably incompetent. If they were self-financed, they should've invested in beer instead, because that brings at least 4.5 percent.
If you thought all iD did was engines, you probably missed the first Doom back in its days and what it meant for the gaming world, did you? :)
Am I old or what?
Much of the time is spent for story, graphics, sound and map design, which is the reason for 3-year cycles between episodes. The engine itself can be bought wholesale and gameplay mechanics don't take decades to finish.
What Valve actually finishes in 3 years is still much more than what 3D Realms did in 15. If the result is an Episode or a Game doesn't matter, because most Duke Nukem players would be satisfied with either, as long as the damn company Gets Something Done Real Quick(tm).
They didn't, because 3D Realms were underfunded, incompetent or overzealous, which Valve (or iD Software) were not. Some of the solo projects of iD artists were, which is why i.e. Daikatana and the others were not commercially successful. But at least they finished some day.
Competent managers are not required to have a product out the door in, what?, 15 years? Other companies without real managers do that in three. Example: iD Software managed several of these feats, making quality games, having some kind of time and money estimate beforehand and then actually finishing something.
When a product like this takes *umpteen* years without any kind of progress or even a measly status report, you have incompetent managers, incompetent programmers, insufficient funding, incompetent financers, inadequate workplace or ideas distant from reality. 3D Realms probably had all of it and more.
Unfortunately, badly managed companies go bankrupt. Fortunately, they're not wasting anyone's resources, money and time anymore.
But it's much much worse when badly managed companies cannot go bankrupt under any circumstances, being deemed "too big to fail" or having some other kind of socialist protection.
Any program that does this is not not only destined for a Fields Medal, but the Skynet Award For Outstanding Achievements In The Field Of AI.
It costs a lot of money to build cinemas, public swimming pools, underground railway lines, international airports and maglev trains and it takes a long time to recoup the costs.
You would have limited competition or even no cinemas, public swimming pools, no underground railway lines, no international airports and no maglev trains at all in sparsely populated areas, therefore I advocate government intervention to bring all that and more to my suburb, Smalltown USA and everywhere else, including rural Africa.
Well, I exaggerated, but I hope you understand: everything costs money (no free lunch, nowhere) and many investments are not profitable everywhere but densely populated cities. If you decide to build expensive infrastructure where it is not profitable, you place the burden for YOUR idea on OTHER taxpayers. I know, YOUR idea is so much better than MY idea or that of someone else, and sooo worth all that taxpayer money, but unfortunately "long term profitability" is the only real *impartial* measure to decide whether something was a good idea or a waste of money. All other measures are either skewed or can be manipulated, which is the reason socialism always ends up in bankruptcy, as emotionally and politically appealing ideas are usually easier to have than truly good ideas.
How much MHz do you think THIS thing has:
http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=i&i=1684&s=big&tb=1&n=
The Western world probably doesn't accept travel times of several days anymore and alternatives are cheap enough to be worth it. Maybe air travel itself has become cheaper because of mass production, computerisation or railways have become more expensive because of wage increases, steel prices, real estate property costs?
Another point that they're not telling you is the financial results of the oh-so-great European railway systems. They are all state-subsidized, incur losses ranging from mediocre to catastrophic, some have a very low surplus but that's not the norm. Especially the German rail is trying to reach an IPO-ready balance sheet and they're pruning first and foremost all the small connections from their network, concentrating on the major city interconnects. They've increased railway car capacity, speed and transfer reliability and are as fast as air travel on some routes in our smallish country, time expended for check-in and security included. They've reached much lower deficits and a staggering passenger-mile total by this - but rail ticket prices are still closing in on air travel every year, with the rail company still not making a profit.
Compared to the situation here, I can hardly imagine how it should be profitable or useful to network the US this way.
East Germany (the GDR) actually was much better than the German Reich before, but still an awfully totalitarian society.
The GDR had The One Party, dangerous secret police above all laws, state-owned everything, state-controlled arts and education, disappearing dissidents, political justice, a large army, bellicose rhetoric and of course the hallmark of socialism worldwide: scarcity of everything else.
But other than that, they had enough edibles, bearable housing, no Holocaust and no wars. Unfortunately that's why people around here indulge in "Eastalgia" time and again, because when seen against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, most other dictatorships look terribly weak. Maybe when compared to the Black Death, cancer doesn't seem so bad.
Anyway, without an unyielding and definetly unfriendly Reagan, the expensive arms race, and maybe the aftermath of Chernobyl, a sensible Gorbatchev may have never come to power.
Maybe it's time to remember again what effects Chamberlain had on the Nazis and compare them to the impression Churchill made.
The Soviets wasted 500'000 of their soldiers as cannon fodder just to rush a capture of Berlin before the US.
As an inhabitant of the former Eastern Germany, I'm not thankful to the Soviets for "liberating" my half of the country, because they just replaced brown shirts with red flags.
Maybe the Soviets would have captured the whole continent, maybe the Germans would have captured the whole Soviet Union, nobody knows.
Russia is much larger than the US, area-wise, right. Economy is still concentrated on a few select centers in the western part of it and even then they're flying everywhere when they have the money.
Some more things:
- parts of Russia can only be reached by air, because road and rail would be utterly destroyed after a few winters
- the trans-siberian railroad cost *hundreds* of "World Trade Center-equivalents" in money and human lives to build. They built it with slave workers and dissidents, untold numbers in the hundred thousands of whom died miserably and were buried all along the track. The Egyptian pyramids were cheaper in human lives and resources, really.
- the trans-siberian railroad is not high speed in any sense of the word. You can literally pick some flowers on the ride and the track breaks down all the time somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
If the trans-siberian railroad is your prototype, you're hosed if you have less than 1'000'000 expendable forced laborers at your disposal.
That's just you. Many people don't like waiting for hours in a loud metal tube if they don't have to, no matter if said tube is barreling along at 10000 meters or 1 meter above ground.
But in any case, if I'd be paying US taxes, I'd refuse paying through the nose for people who simply like a comfy railway more. Life is not a bowl of cherries.
Well, ask something only a German native would know.
Interstate highway is not cheap, maybe it's even more expensive than high speed rail, maybe not.
But the point is you need to have individual transport, because you cannot (currently) serve all transportation needs by vehicles limited to fixed, pre-laid rails. You always need to have vehicles with flexible schedules, flexible routing that can go everywhere, turn, load or unload in a small courtyard and successfully navigate everywhere from a large interstate to a barely-maintained country road.
You cannot maintain an n:n network between all destinations just by rail alone, without building roads. You could do by air, if helicopters and VTOLs were cheap and efficient instead of converting 90% of their fuel to noise, but you cannot do that by rail.
Maybe we can sometime, with an automated n:n distribution network, but currently you have fixed destinations, central scheduling and exclusive access for rails.
Cheap asphalt as they said. Other than that, even the people few and far between need to somehow need to get some groceries, right?
The interstate highway is also used for cargo by trucks, which firstly needs to reach everywhere and secondly is very very cheap compared to air and high speed rail.
Oh and there's already low speed rail going through the States, which is more than enough for most bulk cargo.
Well well, there's several "overrated" mods hoping to downvote an apparently inconvenient truth while escaping meta-moderation.
Abusing the under/overrated mod options for opinion guerilla warfare, eh?
"You get what you pay for"
You pay millions TO pirates and get millions OF pirates.
The real lesson is that pussies get raped. First ship gets hijacked out of the blue. Owner pays several millions to get it back. Pirates buy huge amounts of guns and bling-bling. Pirates are heavily armed and broke, hijacking the next vessel. Then the pirates' neighbors see all that bling and now try to do the same.
Rinse, repeat and then you have an economy of blackmail, robbery, extortion. Earning millions by simply hijacking a passing ship is sure as more profitable than planting wheat in soil as hard as concrete, so they're doing it. Now that they've tasted it AND have more weapons than they'd ever need, you cannot stop them without killing at least half of 'em.
Well said. Life is not fair, we don't have equal headstart and we will always be very differently-abled. And just as well are some ways of life more compatible with failure than others. Somalia has made their choice and so have we. As long as we claim all ways of life are equally worthy, we will not change a thing, because some ways of life create poverty while others create wealth.
We don't need to lay it down to the survival of the fittest but we sure as hell neither have the resources nor the will it takes to bring peace and wealth to every downtrodden, crime-ridden part of this earth.
We don't need to help everyone equally, people who demand that are clinically insane and need help. I say we help much, but we'd better start at home, we've got enough of a challenge there without needing to ship Marines, money and aid halfway across the globe.