Why bell curve?

I had a similar faceplant experience when our university's ECE department was demo'ing a Segway, and the professor told me that you can't tip it over on flat surface

I've watched half of the second video, and they propose to abolish private lending at interest, just letting the government print money to finance its spending. There is a couple of problems with this:

1. If the government is elected like in US, it would be motivated to print more money to coincide with elections, to increase it's electability. This was seen with Carter administration putting pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates (thereby increasing money supply), that were raised to battle stagflation. Fed didn't bulge, Carter got voted out, and Fed managed to conquer the stagflation crisis. US government being forced to borrow from the Fed puts a check on irresponsible spending, likely to prevent hyperinflation episodes like in Russia or Yugoslavia

2. If there's no private lending with interest, how would promising ventures get funded? Surely we couldn't have some government bureaucrat review funding for every start-up

I've watched half of the second video, and they propose to abolish private lending at interest, just letting the government print money to finance its spending. There is a couple of problems with this:

1. If the government is elected like in US, it would be motivated to print large amounts of money to coincide with elections, to increase it's electability. This was seen with Carter administration putting pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates (thereby increasing money supply), that were raised to battle stagflation. Fed didn't bulge, Carter got voted out, and Fed managed to conquer the stagflation crisis. US government being forced to borrow from the Fed puts a check on irresponsible spending, likely to prevent hyperinflation episodes like in Russia or Yugoslavia

2. If there's no private lending with interest, how would promising ventures get funded? Surely we couldn't have some government bureaucrat review funding for every start-up

So...are there any plans to add the full-screen button?

I wonder what became of her (the singer)

Is this the movie where the protagonist gets his private parts cut-off with a pair of garden shears?

I'm from Russia and I've never seen the alleged Russian counting method

A similar "rejected" proposal was staged in 2005 to spice up a basketball game http://www.local6.com/sports/4199099/detail.html

I'd expect a real girl to lie to save the guy from public humiliation

I didn't raid anyone's discard pile, found this on delicious

GDP is a measure of economic activity not "economic health". It's not up to economists to define what a "healthy economy" is, since that's a value judgement. IE, someone may say that the healthiest economy is what we had before agriculture -- http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm

also known as the "glass harmonica"

Notice that he has no difficulty pulling the string taut with his fingers, so the tension must be quite low

This kind of myopic thinking is fundamental to human nature which might take some genetic engineering to change. Think about all the people that go on diet, then break it. Or people who relapse into drugs. They know their long-term goals are in conflict with their short-term goals, and their nature pulls them away from the long-term goals. It made sense for people who evolved in hunter-gatherer societies and had 60% chance of being murderered. People are hard-wired to discount future rewards because, well, they may not be alive to reap them.

You can see this on Wall Street, where a company promising great returns in 5 years would always outraise one promising one in 50. And you can see it in government -- who would vote for a politician who promises to make things miserable now so that everyone is better off in 50 years?

Green's did win almost 10% of the seats in Germany's Bundestag, but that is a victory in a country where harms of pollution were felt already, through acid rain and Chernobyl fallout.

The bottom line is that it's not realistic to expect wide adoption of any technology that requires sacrifices made now for the future. The best we can hope for is a technology that benefits us now, and doesn't hurt future generations too badly

An interesting statistic in the fossil vs. nuclear debate is that coal power plants release 3 times more radioactivity into environment than nuclear power plants, per MW. http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html