With Seinfeld having being so much about understanding social interaction well enough to lampoon it on a level that everyone can relate to, that seems very unlikely. From a layman's point of view it seems he's simply better at resisting the temptation to simply accept societal conventions and instead question them.

Thanks. If you're interested the album has leaked and is available through 'sources'. Probably his best since O.

You should tell NASA about this, they and nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations will be flabbergasted they got it so wrong. Good thing we have a conservative news and opinion site set up by Tucker Carlson to set them straight.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Yay, The Economist.

*promote

Just because this is associated with Koch doesn't mean it's wrong. It is a simplification though. Changes to the legal code which saw enforcement of property rights were critical. Without the scientific advances of the industrial revolution, these gains in efficiency and wealth couldn't have been achieved and a disproportionate proportion of the population would have had to remain in agriculture. Among other things I'm forgetting.

@ChaosEngine

I hope I don't have to be the one to point out the multitude of studies which have shown where crowds, group think or subjugation of one's opinion's to someone's authority results in terrible consensual decisions being made:

Stanford Prison Experiment
Milgram Experiment
Asch Conformity Experiment
Bystander Effect

In a situation like this, it's likely no one in the crowd has ever dealt with a serious fire. They may not recognise the risks of unexpected suffocation. They may not recognise how fast fire can travel or the risks of being trapped.

Earthquakes are somewhat different (and living in Oz I have no experience with them), but I would imagine that they can go from mild to serious very unexpectedly. California sits on multiple major fault lines. A serious earthquake is very plausible, it is in fact 'expected and long overdue' to happen:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/16/us-japan-quake-california-idUSTRE72F5KG20110316

That was morbidly hilarious. This would fit right in on a reality prank show with a laugh soundtrack.

I suppose the added factor here is the misunderstanding of fire as a hazard. I would suspect most people associate it with the risk of burning (which didn't appear imminent) compared to the perhaps more dangerous risk of smoke based loss of consciousness and suffocation.

*beg

Thanks for your reliable music upvotes

Thanks mate

Thanks so much

@bcglorf @Fairbs

I used to hold the same view on military intervention. If only it were applied impartially by a nation or alliance, then any would be genocidal leader would be deterred by threat of imprisonment or death.

However we all know that in reality this is stymied by the lack of altruistic intentions, the political dimensions of risking soldiers' lives in foreign wars and the unintended consequences of even fully altruistic intervention.

I can't really argue against there being a case for intervention in Rwanda or after Saddam gassed the Kurds.

A sufficiently large force by the US/NATO would have probably deterred the Hutu militias in Rwanda from waging their genocide. Had the international community demanded Kurdish sovereignty from Iraq following the gas attacks, Saddam would have probably accepted it coming off the Iran-Iraq war for fear of being attacked by Iran while he waged a civil war.

In either case I can also play devil's advocate. Would the inevitable Tutsi government set up by intervening forces in Rwanda have been seen as legitimate by its people? Would reconciliation really have been effective if it was effectively imposed by outside powers? Would civil war have reignited? Even with how things turned out in the absence, we know that Kagame's government is increasingly authoritarian and has supported militias like M23 in Congo against the remnants of Hutu militias which has itself been a source of much death and violence. In the case of the Kurds, what if calls for cession resonated in the Kurdish population in Syria and Iran and the opposition turned violent in those countries?

In most cases, while hypothetical intervention may appear the clear moral ground I just can't be certain the outcome would have been better. In the case of Rwanda, probably, a large portion of the 500,000 lives lost would have been spared. In the case of the Iraqi Kurds, no intervention would have pre-empted the initial gas attack, however inciting the situation could have resulted in more people dying in violent struggle and resistance.

Was with him until futured/futureless. It's one thing where the word for something doesn't exist and it alters behavior, but where it's merely a difference of grammatical structure I'm skeptical. Even if phrasing is different, a distinction is still clearly being made.

I don't know how rigorous the relationship is but I would think a great deal of cultural factors are in play beyond religion and simple socio-economics like income. The origins of the language and the cultural factors associated with that might be a good explanation for the grouping.

Thanks mate