oxymoron said: "Also, hasn't it been 1979 since 2004?"

Roshi said: "My new style is whorish, but whorish like in the 2100s"

mlbot said: "

in 2100, all whores will look like Odd Job."

frnortnr said: "i cant' believe i hadn't tied the green and diy movements with the recession until now. durrrrr."

ignatius said: "

you mean canada is in a recession? isn't that kind of edgy for canada?"

deltasleep said: "The green and diy movements are really about peeling back some of those layers of convenience we were paying for and figuring out how to save a few bucks by exchanging your time for it. Essentially, these movements mean that our time as a whole has become worth a lot less than it was in the 1990's."

EPA said: "It's not just the American dollar that's losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn't worth what it used to be.

The "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.

The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted."