Women don't contribute for the same reason most men don't. Its a big waste of time. The real question is why anybody contributes. Obviously their freaks. Conclusion - most freaks tend to be male.

I knew this would happen. I knew global warming was a bogus and completely false theory. I knew that no one would ever ever admit this. I kept on thinking how could the establishment lie about global warming if people could see that things were not getting worse. 50 years from now when there is no 5 degrees of warming, what lies would they tell.

Then I realized the media is the key. The media could keep making things look worse and worse. Keep reporting on the worst climate problems, keep talking about global warming. Eventually people would stop believing their eyes and start believing the media.

People are fucking stupid. No matter how much education they have. This society increases their stupidity. I think the media could convince people of anything. If they wanted they could convince people that we are undergoing an apocolypse. The herd mentality is part of being human and its dangerous. Everything in our society, our media, our democracy or market system has only increased the power of it. Nobody think individually anymore. They can't. We have become an extremely stupid mob that only get dumber every year.

I don't really think money management is horrendously difficult (that is not to say there shouldn't be some high school training in it or even university .... i think their should be). But the elementary idea of saving money and spending less is pretty much common sense. If you find yourself constantly in debt in seems like it would be a good idea to take some remedial action and buy a book like the Wealthy Barber. I don't think its a matter of lack of knowledge. The problem is the culture of status seeking and entitlement.

Now learning how to protect your savings from inflation (using defensive investments in equities and bonds) is a little more complicated but it seems like this is not the main problem we are having right now.

"Sirota's point is that the megafarms that will inevitably continue producing swine flus, like the massive deregulated finacial institutions, need to be reregulated and brought back down to a size where they cannot get out of hand again. Is it a reading comprehension issue? What he is saying is painfully obvious."

Yes and what is your evidence. I am ideologically motivated I admit it. And yes my ideology is libertarian. But I willing to except evidence. For instance after reading Devil Take the Hindmost I accept the fact that the capitalist system has periodic and very severe financial crisis. And I accept that after FDR we have had very few financial crisis which would seem to indicate that something produced a very long and sustained period of excellent economic performance. It could be a specific regulation, it could be culture, it could be luck. I don't know.

But, your statement does not make any sense to me. Canada has very large financial institutions relative to the size of the country. In fact they just have basically 5 big banks: CIBC, BMO, RBC, Scotia and TD. And in many ways they are less regulated than the US: they have prepayment penalties for mortgages and they have recourse in case of mortgage defaults. US regulations disallows both of these.

The also have no separation between commercial (no Glass-Stegall) and investment banking and historically nothing to prevent the creation of large national banks (which they in fact do have). On the other hand the US has a shit load of banks, tonnes of financial competition and many regulations - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_regulation_in_the_United_States.

And yet Canada has been less prone to financial crisis than the US. Indeed Canada has the strongest banks in North America and the World. You said we need to bring financial institutions down in size but Canada did the opposite.

So is bigger better? I look at Europe and I know it isn't. Maybe Canadians are just smarter :). European banks are very large and many are in very very bad shape. So maybe bigness and less/more regulation is not the real issue. I don't really know what can be done to prevent financial crises, what regulations are good regulations or why we had some many horrible financial panics in the 19th century and why we had none till now.

If you have the answers I am all ears. Indeed if you have got some good answer I think the whole world is all ears. But here are a few criteria:

1) Your answer should agree with diverse international banking experience including Canada and Europe's

2) you should be specific - it is not enough to say more regulation is the answer. Regulations by themselves are like terrorism they are means - not ends. I could for instance have tonnes of regulations which promote risk-taking (indeed the community reinvestment act did precisely that). These regulations won't increase financial stability they will reduce it.

3) differential analysis is best - if you can point to a number of countries and point out a regulation which countries with more stable financial systems have and countries with unstable financial systems don't have, then this is a solid piece of evidence.