Personalised domain suffixes up for grabs

New domain name suffixes are being auctioned off this week in an attempt to widen the spectrum of website domains available to be hosted across the web

. . . These new domain names will be restricted to a high-income market, as it will cost roughly $US185,000 ($NZ232,000) to apply and at least $25,000 a year to keep the domain maintained.

In addition to these high costs, a ten-year commitment is required, raising the total maintenance bill to around $US250,000 for a decade of hosting one of these domains.

So you could have addresses like http://www.DarkLegionsArchive.anus, http://www.StudiesCenter.hessian, etc. I hope a precious metals mining company doesn't buy .metal before I do.

You should get a discussion forum going, it's pretty tedious and impractical to wade through all those comments.

One thing I'd like to add, I think for all the good Christianity legitimately does, it's usually forgotten or misunderstood how much bad it does in regards to the threat of eternal damnation. I live in a relatively atheistic city (thank god), but I believe I understand fear and the impact it can have on a person. And surely no notion in the whole world can be more frightening than eternal damnation--if you think about it, it's absolutely sick. The majority of society's underbelly, all those kids and adults who got to thinking they were on the wrong side of god, or in anger or despair chose to reject god, I think they believe in god, and psychologically they heavily repress and deny the immorality of their lifestyle, or they repress and deny the idea of god's existence, and until they get past this psychological baggage they can't come to any true sort of reckoning about how they've lived and how they could change the way they live. The notion of eternal damnation is just so far off-base from any human point of reference, it's very difficult for the mind to come to terms with it. It's such a sick, disgusting notion, makes me want to vomit that it's appropriated in the name of good and used to suppress the less fortunate. To the extent America's built on Christianity it's also built on fear, and the consequences are plain to see.

Or leave it to Aristotle, who pretty much irrefutably proved monotheism in his Metaphysics.

'Irrefutable' proof can't be 'pretty' conclusive.

Medical resources are a finite resource, but I didn't say they were in short supply. I'm not saying people are dying in epidemic proportions due to lack of resources, but quality of care is diminishing and costs are rising. A few ways poor health wastes resources is that:

- patients often only seek help once their condition is severe and expensive to treat
- investing in lots of medical resources to treat diseases that aren't natural and that only arise due to poor eating and lifestyle means less investment in preventative  and educational medical resources
- being unhealthy diminishes your productivity as an individual in society
- mass poverty of health increases the cost of health insurance under plans which cover everyone indiscriminately or which employ weak screening criteria

Is there anything that doesn't qualify as escapism?

It's all escapism to some degree, until you realize you have nothing to escape from.

A more practical tip: you have to go a little insane before you can discover sanity.

At some point, civilization is in our self-interest. It saves us a lot of time through specialization of labor and economies of scale.

After that point, not having parasites is in our self-interest. It prevents us from losing those gains by supporting people out of social obligation.

At some point, eugenics is in our self-interest. Civilization either keeps moving to greater heights, or it regresses. This is why people turn to fascism, monarchism, feudalism and other consequentialist belief systems.

I have no problem with self-interest, so long as it's consequence-aware.

I disagree.

Working to improve civilization, remove the 'parasites' and promote eugenics, this requires lots of work. From the standpoint of pure self-interest, the reward would be desirable but the work would be undesirable--to the extent the work isn't particularly enjoyable--so the work / reward ratio must be taken fully into consideration.

Furthermore, I believe improving civilization, removing the 'parasites' and promoting eugenics is largely long-term multi-generational work, that is to say, not much of the work's fruit will manifest during our lifetimes. Dramatic changes don't leap from inception to realization overnight. Therefore we would be doing the work mostly not for ourselves but rather for any of our offspring, culture, nation, global collective, etc.

Do you disagree with my assessment?

Addressed on the front page

What front page? I'm curious where did you quote that text from?

Not a new story, but still an evolving one. Please let me know if you're aware of additional developments.

Media reports on recent academic study are biased against metal