Poignant Comic Strip on a Bee Orchid

[epiphyte78]

Anybody a fan of xkcd? Saw this poignant comic strip on a bee orchid and thought I'd share it with you all.

Is it possible that the bee went extinct because the males preferred mating with the flowers?

Last night I watched a futuristic doomsday Korean movie where fertility rates were plummeting because people were preferring to partner up with robots.

Even better than the real thing?

You can choose x...or you can choose y. You can have your cake...or you can eat your cake...but not both. So there's always going to be an opportunity cost.

You have $20 in your pocket...you can choose Laelia speciosa or Mystacidium capense. Which one do you prefer?

Basically you have an idea of...heaven...but on earth. So you choose whichever option will result in the shortest distance between you and your utopia.

Like a kid in a candy store. The options before him reflect the utopia decisions of billions of kids before him. And his utopia decisions will influence the options of billions of kids after him. We can say that the options get better over time because kids give producers an incentive to come up with better options.

Centralizing these decisions increases the distance between most people and their utopia. Consumer sovereignty is the compass...without it we're lost.

Imagine if taxpayers could choose where their taxes go. We'd have a market in the public sector and people could shop for themselves.

You could choose x or y. Every dollar you give to the DoD is a dollar that you can't give to the EPA. So which one would result in the shortest distance between you and your heaven on earth? Attacking Syria or conserving orchid habitat?

Each taxpayer could be contributing to a community which would become more reflective of the kind of world in which he or she would like to live. Gaudeat Emptor! - Daniel J. Brown, The Case For Tax-Target Plans

Personally, my utopia would definitely have two things...

1. tax choice
2. an orchid on every tree.

Would your utopia have an orchid on every tree? Maybe every other tree?

I really wasn't planning on it...but I've given you plenty of discussion options to choose from! What are the chances that you're all going to want to discuss Ophrys apifera?