From: John Beckett 

"Phil Payne"  wrote in
message news::
> Looks like the friendly point-scoring rivalry between Gates and Buffet is
> over.
>
> http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/25/magazines/fortune/charity1.fortune/index.htm?
cnn=yes

 I see this came from my next port-of-call - Slashdot.

Well here is a really EXCELLENT post from Slashdot on another topic:

Immaturity Level Rising in Adults
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/25/0456237&threshold=-1

[One thread debates whether it was better being a six-year old playing with
simple things like mud pies, or whether maturity wins.]

Re:I agree wholeheartedly
by Thangodin (177516) 

The subtleties of maturity beat the thrills of immaturity anytime. The
world is a complex place, and I love the complexity of it. The best taste
in life is bittersweet, with only enough sweetness to prevent the bitter
from being bland. It's no surprise that diabetes is on the rise. People
have lost the palate for strong tastes. Even fibre comes in a pill, as if
eating raw oats and bran is some sort of trial too harsh for people to
bear. The world is divided into simple primary colors and basic binaries:
red and blue, left and right, liberal vs conservative. Only the caricatures
that pass as media personalities fit into these categories. The world is
just not that simple.

It is revealing to contrast the tone of public discourse 50 years ago to
what it is today. Ronald Reagan abandoned formal rhetoric for folksy chat,
and now we're stuck with it. G W Bush got elected by appearing to be just a
regular guy--at some point, people forgot that you don't want just a
regular guy as your leader, you want the best and brightest. Distrust of
intellectuals is at an all time high, because it takes work to understand
what they're saying. But democracy takes work, every single day.

I've always suspected that the main point of "family values" and
all of these exhortations to "think of the children" are just
scare tactics to turn the world into the largest nursery in history, where
you cannot even have an adult conversation, and where kids aren't even
allowed to play unsupervised. Can you imagine a childhood where you have to
make "play dates," where it is no longer possible to just walk
anywhere? Thanks to media scaremongering, parents see the world as a
frightening place with a child molestor or Satanic cult member lurking in
every playground. The fact is, your kids are about a hundred times as
likely to get killed by a car as they are to be kidnapped. But that doesn't
sell soap.

Even God has been turned into the cosmic wetnurse, who will rapture us up,
clean our nappies, and dry our tears. ID promises us the fantasy of every
child; that we are the center of the universe, that it's really all for us.
Since you're saved by faith alone, you don't have to do jack, just show up
at the mega-church for the show and listen to a postmodernist drivel which
is equal parts fairy tale and new-age glurge. You gotta hand it to them,
they know their market. Why stop at frying your pancreas with candy, when
you can get diabetes of the soul too?

-+-
John

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5