Let's extend it past white people. Almost* everyone in the world has got where they by an accident of birth.

I have a good job and I earn a decent living. I worked hard to get where I am and I continue to work hard to provide value to my boss so he pays me well. But I didn't get here entirely on my own.

First, I was lucky enough to be born in a first world country. Second, I have a reasonable aptitude for math and science and logic/programming comes easily to me.
Third, my parents both had good jobs (partially a product of their own births) and they cared about my education and gave me the opportunities to study.

And yeah, I'm white, English speaking, heterosexual and even more fortunately, male .

All of which gave me a frankly insurmountable head start over someone born in a 3rd world country whose family are scrapping by. Even if I had the same skills and work ethic, it's highly likely that I wouldn't have been able to have the quality of life I have now.

So yeah, I didn't own any slaves and neither did my ancestors. Hell, my country was oppressed for centuries. But that doesn't mean I still didn't come into this world with a massive privilege and it would be the height of hubris not to acknowledge that.

* obviously there are people who have pulled themselves out of extreme adverstiy despite everything against them. I'm not talking about those people.

The Labour Party Manifesto is quite the mixed bag, if the Guardian's bullet points are reasonably accurate.

Some good ideas in it, but looming over all, again, is the one-two of deficit reduction and "competetive" (aka miniscule) corporate tax rates. Any guess on how many of their decent ideas would be scrapped due to budgetary constraints? My money would be on 70%+.

It would be cool to know where the Olympics scraps ended up. Like if I die, who will inherit my organs?

love your haiku, girl
made me shed a single tear
over some scrap metal

@newtboy
I think the people of Kiribati would disagree that it's not time to panic!
If you'd read my post I didn't claim the people of Kiribati weren't in a position to panic. I actually went further in agreeing with you, to the point that they should have been panicked a hundred years ago in 1914 already. The distinction being that what ever the climate does wasn't going to save them. 200 hundred years of cooling and sea level decline from 1914 would still have them on an island a few feet on average above sea level and still a disaster waiting to happen.

California alone, which produces over 1/4 of America's food,
Here we do have a difference of fact. I don't know what measure you've imagined up, but the cattle in texas alone are more than double the food produced in California. The corn and other crops in any number of prairie states to the same. You can't just invent numbers. Yields across crops have been increasing steadily year on year in North America for decades.

The violence is often CAUSED by the lack of food, making the 'men with guns' have a reason to steal and control food sources. If food were plentiful, it would be impossible for them to do so.
I'm sorry, read more history, you are just wrong on this. 10 guys with guns against 10 farmers with food and the farmers lose every time. The guys with guns eat for the year. The farmers maybe even are able to beg or slave for scraps that year. The next year maybe only 5 farmers bother to grow anything, and next harvest there are 15 guys with guns. Look at the Russian revolution and that's exactly the road that led to Stalin's mass starvations and lack of food. It's actually why I am a Canadian as my grandfather's family left their farm in Russia with the clothes on his back after the his neighbours farm was razed to the ground enough times.

The thugs SELL that food, so it doesn't just disappear
Food doesn't create itself as noted above. The cycle is less and less food as the thugs destroy all incentive to bother trying to grow something.

adopting new tech, even quick adoption, absolutely CAN be an economic boon
I agree. I hadn't realized that adoption of new tech was that simple. I was under the impression one also had to take the time to, you know, invent it. The existing technology for replacing oil and coal cost effectively doesn't exist yet. Electric cars and nuclear power are the closest thing. The market will adopt electric cars without us doing a thing. Switching from coal to nuclear though, even if universally agreed and adopted yesterday, would still take decades for a conversion. Those decades are enough that even if we got to zero emissions by then(~2050), the sea level and temperature at 2100 aren't going to look much if any different(by IPCC best estimates).
So I repeat, if you want meaningful emission reductions, you have no other option but restricting consumption across the globe. That hasn't been accomplished in the past without setting of wars, so I keep my vote as cure is worse than disease.

The 78% glacial mass loss was worst case if CO2 emissions are still accelerating in 2100. The mountains with the glaciers will still be bulking each winter and running off each summer, just to a 78% smaller size in the depth of summer. As in, absolutely not 78% less run off. And they are not 'my' numbers as you wish to refer, but the IPCC's numbers. Your effort to somehow leave question to their veracity is the very campaign of 'doubt' in the science the video is talking about.

They're just begging some meth-heads to come and steal that floor for scrap.

There is audio at 1:02. It's when he gives the order to "lock the doors".

This is the code to start saving everything as they are now trying to preserve every scrap of knowledge for the impending investigation.

I highly recommend the accompanying article... it's fascinating.

They probably dumped in too much scrap that was wet from being stored outside.

Now if they were going to issue their own currency... Then I think you'd see a rash of unexpected apparent suicides and convenient fatal accidents to key persons until the idea was scrapped.

Those tidal turbines are all well and good, right up to the point they start making sushi out of whales, then they'll be scrapped.

Always thought the Bay of Fundy would be a good place for ship building. Save a lot of energy flooding and evacuating the drydocks.

when it comes to emotion,
makes me start choking
so I, sit by the ocean
spent my last buck on a bottle of whiskey
drunk and broke
sittin' here in history
I made my mind up
I'm going
I got no where to go
don't know where I'm going
I do know one thing
one thing that is true
wherever I go, I'm gonna need you
we just cant let each other go now
were too close, to ever slow down
the only one who keeps my chin up
when you touch my lips we're like two dogs stuck
cold, cold beer
don't you ever worry I am right here
never live without you
don't care what I amount to, no.
talkin' bout cold cold beer
don't you ever worry, I am right here
can't ever live without you
I pick you up
I take you home
sit on my couch, turn off my phone,
cuz I love your taste, love your smell
who would ever thought that we could do so well
hell, I guess we're meant for each other
sorta like the microphone and my buddy Bruce Buffer
I can't really express my joy
sorta like a scrap between Osgood and Patty Roy
I cant take my eyes of you
went to rehab, thought that I lost you
but now we're are back together, with a vengeance
must be my little, Irish decendance.
it feels pretty good, to get this off my chest
even though people sayin, Jesse's obsessed
well maybe I am, maybe their right
one thing that I know, it was love at first sight.
Yeah, cold cold beer
don't you ever worry i am right here
can never live without you
i wouldn't even want to
cold, cold beer
don't you ever worry
i am right here
never live without you
you don't care what I amount to
Well I'm sitting on my stoop feelin' kinda lonely
me and Brenda fightin' so I call up the homies
but guys busy hangin' out in front of Sobey's
there's only one little fella who really knows me
he comes in a little brown, bottle or can
sits in my hand til I can barely stand
he's part of the family, he's part of the team
Took me under his wing when I was just a teen
every time he comes around he always,
takes me back to when I had a fake ID, and a little dirt stash
he rope soak cold pop 2 4 white pop pop top swish top tall boy, cold shot
BEER, cold, cold beer
don't you ever worry, I am right here
never live without you
you don't care what I amount to,
Oh cold beer,
don't you ever worry,
I am right here can't ever live without you
I wouldn't even want to

Lets not forget that currently the nation spends a great deal of money on simple yearly road repair, and that is only short term as most roads need to be entirely re-milled and replaced once or twice a decade.

I think this technology may well begin to seep into more liberal states, as others have said with parking lots (especially electric vehicle recharging stations) or perhaps with big and wealthy businesses like fast food chains. If the tiles can stay relatively undamaged over decades, eventually it would become very cost effective.

Yes melting snow would be improbable until perhaps there were enough roads connected to say the national grid. But everything else is not only probably but plausible.

I really hope this technology is implemented, slowly but surely. But I fear things like this won't become a viable alternative until the world is so tapped for oil and natural gas that there IS no alternative but to go with solar and wind technologies as a primary resource. Sadly America is woefully behind much of Europe. Some nations in Eur-Asia plan to be oil free within 100 years. The US will be mired in wars over the last scraps of the limited resources by then if something doesn't change.

"Always a welcome sight to US and allied forces on the ground"
Well, not always....

Warthog is a cool plane, but apparently it's being retired because Lockheed Martin need more money or something...

Yeah, they were working on it in the 70's but I believe it was scrapped as the budget was too ridiculous. This is the upcoming documentary about it.

This is heartbreaking. Kenyan ingenuity is amazing (as it is everywhere in the world where people can't just throw away things and buy new). The vehicles they use would have been condemned decades ago here in the UK, but without a big spares network, dealer servicing or even a garage to work in they keep them running.

He's following his dream and good for him. It's just so painfully obvious that he's never going to get there. Anyone who looks at what he built and even think 'maybe...' is obviously completely oblivious to aeronautics!

There are some great examples of awesome, life changing technologies which have been created out of scraps in the African bush, like the kid who built windmills in Malawi: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8257153.stm

But it seems for every person who does great things, others fall by the wayside.

I'm glad I don't have to live like they do in Kenya, but I wouldn't mind a bit of their spirit. Dude's built more than I have...