The impresion I have is that Obama "was convinced" to go along with these programs after elected. He might have truly believed the system was not abusive, or if he didn't he would be risking creating enemies inside his government, or both.

The problem is, no matter how much non-abusive such a system might be today/yesterday, it will/would derail into abuse in the future (1 year, 5 years, 10 years time, who knows). There's no way people with this kind of power would always "be responsible".

Here's an example:

http://blog.workhere.io/mozilla-needs-to-move-persona-out-of.../

And as much as I love Google, I don't know how much comfortable I am in using their cloud services for everything... Unless they allow me to choose which of their datacenters my email is being stored.

I don't see this as an economic problem but as a moral problem. If they had applied a stimulus program in Greece instead of austerity, maybe the economic contraction wouldn't be too big, but there would still be some.

In corrupted countries neither austerity or stimulus are the solution. The solution is not an economic one, but a moral one. Iceland solution, which is so much used as an example in these discussions, wasn't an economic one of defaulting on their debt, but of jailing corrupt bankers, putting the blame in the right places, taking out the defective cogs out of the great system and adding mechanisms to prevent new defective cogs from appearing. The defaulting is a consequence of that, not the reason.

A stimulus program in Greece wouldn't do much neither, because most of the money would be concentrated in a few corrupted pockets instead of trickling down to a large amount of the population.

Phages probably suffer from the same disease antibiotics do these days, "capitalism-unfriendliness":

"It's quite simple - if they make something to treat high blood pressure or diabetes and it works, we will use it on our patients everyday. "Whereas antibiotics will only be used for a week or two when they're needed, and then they have a limited life span because of resistance developing anyway."

I'd say 2500 deaths per year from antibiotic resistant bacteria in the UK alone is already a bigger risk than terrorism.

Yeah, I'd like to know that as well...

The impact of the video would be much greater if there was a small/big stick figure in one of the corners that changes size depending on the shoot to give a sense of proportion.

This is quite good as well:

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of The World by Niall Ferguson Epsd. 1-5 (Full Documentary)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx_5PuLIzc

But I'm not sure I agree that steps to mitigate climate change are being taken. Or if they are enough. There are still too many and strong economic interests not to do so, even though is just a really bad idea to burn up all the oil right now.

What's interesting here is that this project was funded by the very people that do not want to take steps to mitigate climate change, but the scientist responsible for it, being a scientist, had his mind reversed by the facts. Kudos to him.

It doesn't need to diverge so much from capitalism as communism did. Capitalism is great, it just needs some more polishing. (And the polisher is not called free market).