That brings up one random question:

At age 27, would that make the new guy the youngest ruler to ever control a nuclear arsenal?

And yeah, the region's kind of bracing for impact.  South Korea's military is on high alert right now... not sure what Japan's up to...

Okay... now here's the prediction I want to make... I've done some research into this, and there's actually something really interesting that may come up.

The next question here... is going to be the transition issue.  Until about a year ago, North Korea really hadn't developed a succession plan.  So if this happened then, there would seriously have been a real power vacuum in North Korea.  Now, however, we have an interesting scenario.  Kim Jong Il spent about a year and a half establishing the legitimacy of one of his sons, Kim Jong Un.  Presumably, this would be the person supposed to take power in North Korea, so it should be a relatively simple transition.

However... there's a couple caveats to this story.  First, this isn't a clear transition.  You all know how it normally works in monarchies... the first son takes power after their father dies... this guy is Kim Jong Il's third son.  Not that this is necessarily an important issue, but it establishes some legitimate counter-claim from a different son who wished to take power.

More importantly, though... this new guy is not a North Korea insider.  Until about two years ago, he was actually living in China... most North Koreans didn't even know this guy was Kim Jong Il's son until a couple years ago when he started being groomed for leadership.  Being a Chinese resident, he's been very engaged in the international economy... something from which North Korea is completely divorced.  So... from the perspective of the North Korean military, this guy is the completely new kid on the block who has only been groomed for leadership for a couple years, and is apparently the guy whom the military is supposed to take orders from.  That's never a good sign.

As a result, North Korea is a nation ripe for an internal coup.  The next year will be critical.  If Kim Jong Un can secure his power in North Korea, through political courting to the military, and perhaps some reforms, he will probably be able to secure leadership.  However, if he's seen during this first year as a weak leader, it's very possible the military could either push him out of power (remember, this new guy is not a military man... he's a business man), either placing a general in power or finding another son to place in power as a puppet.

> ~Wornstrum~ wrote:

> So we have 57375000 acre's of farmland producing ethanol, so if we stopped ethanol production and produced food, we would get 57375000*4.2=240975000 tons of corn.

So in 2010 there was 1300000000 tons of food wastage, so lets take our extra food we obtained from stopping ethanol production and take it away from our wastage (1300000000-240975000=1059025000). This is still over 1 billion tons for food wasted in the world each year.

Ethanol production is only but a very small component of the food production in the world, yet it leads to starvation of the masses?

Oh, I almost forgot to address this issue.

The problem here is that, as a whole, grains such as corn, rice, or wheat are considered inelastic goods.  That means, unlike other items we may normally buy, people have little choice in whether to buy or refuse to buy the item in question.  As a result, even with relatively small changes in supply, the price will increase by a greater percentage than the percentage by which the supply itself changed.

Also, remember that the starvation occurring is in some of the poorest parts of the world.  Why do I note this?  In the US, food accounts for about 3% of a person's expenditures.  This could definitely be higher, but probably not more than 10% (so... a person making $30,000 per year would probably only spend $3,000 on food for the year).  In contrast, in nations like Egypt, that percentage can increase to as much as 30% of total income.  That's where the impact comes: If I make $1,000 per year, $365 of which goes to food ($1 per day on food), and the price of food jumps 10%, I have to spend $401 to obtain the same amount of food... many people in these countries have very tight budgets, and are simply unable to meet that added price increase as a result of demand.  In this case, a 10% increase in the price of food requires a person to obtain a 3.6% increase in income (and this is assuming inflation and all other expenses remain flat, which is very unlikely).

Care to elaborate?

I'll write the letters to the families of the 2472 dead wizards...

(psst.. if the above comment was true, it wouldn't mean the people value their nation... it would mean the government values its power)

I'm with SD on this one...

Personally, I like the subservient agencies like this.  Why?  Because they can experiment.  So... if the EPA sets up a regulation... and realize after a while that it's stupid... they can wave a magic wand and remove the regulation.  But if they don't... the President can wave a magic wand and remove the regulation by executive order, generally.  But if he doesn't... Congress can pass a bill to tell all of them to stuff it.  If there was a precedent that a legislature had to make regulations like this... essentially, your plan C became plan A.

It's like with the legal system.  Court cases generally come forward where the judge really has no idea of what the law means with regard to the specific case.  The judge can't just say "I dunno, let's figure this out later," and it's terrible legal precedent to create laws to apply to situation that occurred before the law came into play... so the alternative is to take what laws you have and construct an interpretation which makes sense and has some semblance of root in legal precedent.  Then, if Congress says "wait... that's a terrible precedent..." they can specify legislative intent on a bill.

Also.. remember... this issue just isn't by any definition the most important issue on the planet.  Having regulatory agencies make rules like this helps the legislature avoid   and, in some cases, defer to people with expertise in that particular area.  The best example... I'd definitely rather have the Federal Reserve managing the US money supply than Congress, largely because the amount of legislators with backgrounds in macroeconomics is miserable (not to mention that governments with monopoly control over the money supply have a good precedent of ruining it).  The same can be said of regulations created in a number of other agencies...

Remember, Cain's out, so you can throw him out of the equation.

Would a general ban on grenades include flash-bangs?  They're a non-lethal weapon, making them a suitable home defense system!

But grenades are an important part of recreational fishing, a completely legal sport.

That's why mods have the capability to reset the galaxy.  We would just have to make sure the AIs don't have the capability to learn how to deactivate the mod's ability to end a galaxy... THAT'S when I'd worry!

Not quite... it's not rooted in high oil prices.  Actually, in some cases, it's quite the opposite.  Remember, when oil prices are high, oil nations generally manage to keep the population quiet by subsidizing every product on the market.  So if food prices rise along with oil prices, oil revenues will be redirected to subsidize food, keeping food prices low so the people don't feel the effects.

I'm looking at a data sheet on oil prices during the past 5 years... the Arab Spring actually began during a period of relatively mild prices... and by "mild," I mean "not as high as the insane high prices we were seeing before the financial crisis..." around $70-$80 per barrel.  For perspective, July 2008 prices were $144 per barrel.

http://www.nyse.tv/crude-oil-price-history.htm

So the perfect storm scenario is one in which oil prices are low and food prices are high.  That actually happened during the beginning of the financial crisis in Iran, where the government began to see unrest due to economic issues associated with falling oil revenue and increasing needs for food subsidies.

I really wasn't suggesting this as some sort of long term scenario, though.  I was just highlighting a historical fact: If ethanol was not subsidized in the US, Egypt, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East would never have seen the democratic reforms they are seeing now.  +1 points for ethanol and unintended consequences