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in order to better yourself you need to take risks

In order to become famous, notably wealthy, a successful entrepreneur, or an unsuccessful entrepreneur, you need to take risks. In order to become a reasonably comfortable anonymous middle-class person, you need to play it safe. (To stay in school is to play it safe.)

Every new technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Technologies that were minorly disruptive were minor net creators of jobs. Technologies that were hugely disruptive were huge net creators of jobs. Predict a pessimistic deviation from that paradigm at your own peril.

We don't "let them starve" now, and a failure to implement Sam Altman's idea does not constitute "letting them starve" in the future.

One of the key transformations UBI is addressing is that increases in productivity mean that an ever smaller fraction of the population needs to work to grow food or manufacture goods. In 2000, only 1.9% of the US labor force was in agriculture, and in 2002 93% of US households in agriculture had non-farm income, meaning that a fair amount of the labor force is doing agriculture part time (source). The fraction of the non-farm labor force in manufacturing has also been decreasing steadily, and was down to 10% in 2007 (source). The US in a net importer of manufactured goods, so there are some foreign workers who would have to be counted, but that doesn't change that the trend has been relentlessly downward (figure 5 in the manufacturing report). US labor force participation is about 51% of the total population (table 1 in the manufacturing report), so even padding the manufacturing fraction to 18% and counting all the ~2% in agriculture, 10% of the US population is sufficient to make all the food and manufactured goods required.

Yes it does. Stop being lazy. https://www.ams.usda.gov/about...

The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.

We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.

This gets the story of the switch from agriculture to manufacturing and white collar work completely backwards.

It was not a process of automation on the farm putting farmers out of work who then migrated to other jobs.

It was a process of new high labor-demand industries (the original factory system), and clerical work of new complex economy, that paid higher wages pulling people away from farms that caused this switch. It was a labor-demand driven process.

As people left farming for better jobs, farms got sold and assembled into ever larger farms which could then support the high capital requirement for automation to replace the now non-existent plow boys and girls.

See for example which depicts the ag side of this transformation.

A process that eliminates jobs, and reduce labor demand, which we are now facing, is completely different

Well... For one, they probably lack your cable and internet costs. And probably spend less on their mobile costs too.
They most likely don't own their home or a car, so there are no costs related to the use and maintenance of those either. They use public transport instead.
Then, there are food stamps, which come out to about 125$ per person, per month, if the monthly income of that family doesn't exceed 2552$ (30624$ per year).
Which is about 6000$ in food stamps. Up to 7788$ max.
Then there are other social programs that the families with children are eligible for.

And then there's that bit where they are struggling, wheres you "are good" - which you are actually not, as you yourself say that your debt is creeping upward, while you're quite probably eligible for SNAP as well.

I assume only long-term economic behaviors which have operated as such since hunter-gatherer man.

the reduction in unemployment you refer to are people settling for (two or three) jobs as unskilled labor

The reduction in unemployment is per-capita, and you don't get -3 unemployment for 1 person getting 3 jobs. Employment is a function of job availability, not a function of how job-ready the populous is; and job availability is a function of what the populous can buy.

My logic successfully and correctly predicts all gross economic behaviors throughout human history. Your arguments are idealistic platitudes. Particularly of note:

you assume all profits are fed back into the local economy

That's not what happens. Various economic factors drive prices down. Let's explore some.

Competition is the biggest one: either direct (food producers are *common*, so you can't overcharge on food without losing customers) or indirect (smartphones are more popular than Crocs, so you can't have that huge mark-up on Crocs and expect people to buy your product when they won't have money left over after buying a smartphone). Goods with bigger markets--more demand--are more ripe for competition; low-demand and low-flexibility goods and services (rental housing is a notable one; diamonds are another) aren't, and tend to hold bigger margins and drive off price competition more readily.

A special case of competition is supply-chain competition. When GM wants to build cars, they find a contract for, say, 100 million tonnes of steel per year for 5 years. There are a dozen steel mills with that kind of output. Say they each charge $500/tonne for steel. A steel mill makes that steel at a cost of $430/tonne. When approached, the steel mill goes back to the steel ore mine and the coal mine (you need coal to make steel) and negotiates for a contract for massive amounts of ore and coal to ensure it won't breach contract. The same process occurs: the costs of these things drop from $200 of coal per steel-tonne and $150 of ore per steel-tonne to something closer to the *labor cost* of those products. In the end, the steel producer gets his costs down to $230/tonne, and sells steel to GM for $232/tonne, netting a $200 million per-year profit (thanks to the coal miners and steel ore miners also cutting their margins razor-thin to capture a $200 million per-year contract for 5 years--a billion dollar sale they'd otherwise miss out on).

That kind of supply-chain contracting drives prices for things like cars and buildings down toward labor costs.

Market saturation is another factor. 1TB SSDs cost about $200 to make last year, but had a price of $700; now they carry a price of $330. All the early adopters have thrown in their money, buying up drives with huge margins; it's no longer **profitable** to charge those big margins, so Samsung et al have backed down pricing to capture the next rung of the market. The prices will eventually settle closer to labor cost.

Consumer resistance to inflation is another factor. Each year, the amount of income per production increases, causing a rise in prices; consumers dislike rising prices, and so will slow their purchasing. This causes downward price pressure. Manufacturers have attempted downsizing on goods they can't adequately cut prices on.

Let's take some real data.

The Consumer Price Index shows a general increase in prices per unit good of 0.8% across 2014 and 0.7% across 2015; the CPI for food shows food has inflated much faster than general inflation, at 2.4% and 1.9%, with home-cooked meals experiencing a 2.4% and 1.2% price increase (eating out became a lot more expensive in 2014--2.9% over the year).

The GDP per capita in 2013 was $52,607.9

"majority of products"

I'd love to see you try to prove that. But you can't, so you won't, because that is patently false.

more than %90 of the staples crops corn and soy are GMO. High fructose corn syrup alone is in the majority of products on a supermarket shelf. Trends in GE Adoption

So butteflys didn't actually die fro BT crops?

Caterpillars that eat BT crops sure do. But the story that's usually told is that BT crops are wiping out the Monarch butterfly, which does not seem to be true. Roundup is a problem for monarchs because they eat milkweed and milkweed is... a weed. Modern farming techniques are making weeds less and less common, so they are reducing monarch habitats. But that's not a problem of chemical toxicity. Just that we need milkweed patches to keep monarch populations up.

Bees are not sick?

Bee populations have been hit with various problems, but none appear to be traceable to GMOs as far as I'm aware. Did you have some data for that?

The roundup resistant crops are not causing other crops to die in Argentina?

I don't know what this claim maps back to, but the answer is almost certainly that no, they are not.

I've applied this new technology to my 1975 Toyota pickup. Here's a photo of me standing next to it:

http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Inter...

I know I'm generalizing, but let's be real - an anti-education, anti-tech, extremely reactionary way of looking at things dominates rural America, specially in the south. They would never do the same things their Japanese counterparts do cuz the interweebz would bring the gay or something.

And that generalization would be wrong. Farmers have a higher high school graduation rate than the rest of the population and for larger operators, are on parity with the rest of the population for college degrees. Why? Because modern farming uses lots of tech and has done so for quite a while. In the 1980s, farmers were the some of the first ones to get personal computers and later dial up Internet access. Why? To manage their businesses and to check on futures markets. The Ag teacher/FFA advisor in those schools usually had a PC before the math department did. Parents in those areas are not anti-education as their kids will need a good education if they want to take over the family business or do something other than be a clerk at the local gas station or grocery store (well, if the parents are not on public assistance...they don't seem to care if their kids get a good education or not since they can just live off the govt teat like they and their grandparents have done since the 60s. In this case, it is more of a class problem, not a rural vs urban problem and is why MS is so bad on many rankings). If you would have said "conservative way of looking at things", you would have been correct. http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-p...

The fact that people have a higher HS graduation rate means squat if done from the POV that crush critical thinking. Think how many people graduate from HS thinking evolution is the work of the devil. For Christ' fucking sake, just look at Ben Carson, a renown neuro-surgeon claiming that the pyramids were built for storing grain!

Sorry, graduation rates =/= positive stance on education or advancement. Go travel the world, talk to people, see how they talk, see how they think. It will open your goddamned eyes on how backwards we have it in some areas of the US.

I know I'm generalizing, but let's be real - an anti-education, anti-tech, extremely reactionary way of looking at things dominates rural America, specially in the south. They would never do the same things their Japanese counterparts do cuz the interweebz would bring the gay or something.

And that generalization would be wrong. Farmers have a higher high school graduation rate than the rest of the population and for larger operators, are on parity with the rest of the population for college degrees. Why? Because modern farming uses lots of tech and has done so for quite a while. In the 1980s, farmers were the some of the first ones to get personal computers and later dial up Internet access. Why? To manage their businesses and to check on futures markets. The Ag teacher/FFA advisor in those schools usually had a PC before the math department did. Parents in those areas are not anti-education as their kids will need a good education if they want to take over the family business or do something other than be a clerk at the local gas station or grocery store (well, if the parents are not on public assistance...they don't seem to care if their kids get a good education or not since they can just live off the govt teat like they and their grandparents have done since the 60s. In this case, it is more of a class problem, not a rural vs urban problem and is why MS is so bad on many rankings). If you would have said "conservative way of looking at things", you would have been correct. http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-p...

Non-operators (landowners who do not themselves farm) owned 29 percent of land in farms in 2007, though that proportion has declined since 1992.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/...

It's an interesting read. Industrial farming does take place but it's not as much as people seem to think nor is it on the rise. I don't usually watch TV but I do go down south a lot. Sometimes, when there, I turn on the TV in the hotel room and find the RFD channel and watch the Farm Report. I watch 'em sell cows and stuff too. No, I have no idea why I find it interesting. I can sit there and watch that shit for hours - oddly, I can't stand normal television for that long.

This idea that anybody who has reservations on going to town with GMO technology is a stupid luddite, because GMO is a technology that cannot possibly cause any unforeseen harm, is pretty idiotic in it self. I'm all for science but deregulating GMO and allowing greedy corporations to do anything they want without any oversight because GMO is a supposedly such a safe technology is not something I'm prepared to do.

No-one is claiming that having concerns about GMO is stupid, but in order to have strong reservations about the technology today you do have to be largely ignorant (as in unaware, not stupid) of the vast body of knowledge that currently exists as to the safety of the GMO products currently on the market. The fact that most of this information can be found with a simple search of pubmed or the USDA's website.

I can't speak for all nations, but no one is attempting to deregulate GMO in the US. Not mandating a GMO label is not the same thing as not regulating GMO. Each and every GMO variety has undergone Individual Review before being allowed to be sold commercially. The USDA/APHIS, FDA, and EPA all weigh in on the safety within their bailiwick before the product can be approved, and then post them on their website (linked to above). No one is even trying to prevent companies from labeling for GMO status voluntarily. What is happening is that regulators are trying to strike a balance between the costs and benefits of a label, by making sure that those paying the cost of the label are those who want it. I should not have to subsidize the irrational fears of my neighbors if they are fully capable of footing the entire bill themselves.

Finally, greedy corporations, are a completely separate issue from GMO. If you don't like the way the US seed industry operates (professional seed breeders have required contracts that preclude seed saving for many years before GMO seeds came along) then pass laws that change that aspect of their business, not some other, completely unrelated aspect. Monsanto et al. sell both GM and non-GM seeds, and there are non-profit companies developing GMO crops that can literally save lives and plan to GIVE AWAY the seeds they develop.

And yet they're falling at a precipitous rate.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/d...

1820 hours are per year but not per person. A hunter would catch a prey which would feed many tribe members (depending on the animal's weight).

First off, they hunted in groups. One person didn't go out with a spear to fetch the tribe dinner.

Second, the 4.8 hours per person per day statistic is the current scientific conjecture. That's not "some people, when they worked, worked 4.8 hours per day"; that's "we believe each person put forth an effort of 4.8 hours of working time per day."

749K farmers don't work solo, they have other people working with/for them.

Try agricultural workers. 749,400 agricultural workers in the United States in 2012.

You raise a point, and I've done more digging. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers...

Let's take your numbers. Produces 9-22 hours per person per YEAR.

I'm not sure about your other numbers (citation needed)

Population of the US: 318.9 million (2014).

Exports seem to vary (31% of soy versus 62% of soy, depending on who you ask?).

There's production numbers. Looks like cotton and vegetables don't outweigh corn; the USDA estimates the US exports over 20% of its corn production, but Wikipedia estimates about 15%. USDA suggests 30% of wheat exported, while FAO suggests average grain export (wheat export) fluctuates between 52% and 63% per year. I just took the chart Google gave me on the first search.

Taking the low numbers, we can raise my estimates by a further 50%. Somewhere between 15 and 33 hours per person per year of working time invested in the production of food per year.

So we're not talking about each individual human working 1,815 fewer hours each year to feed itself; we're talking about each individual human working 1,800 fewer hours per each year to feed itself. I was off a little, I guess. Across 320 million humans in the US, that's only 576 billion hours per year saved; across the 1.2 billion in developed countries, it's 2.16 trillion working hours not spent on producing food.

The sheer power of my shrug at a rounding error can move the sun.

We can tell you're full of shit when you mention China.

They have no need of your rice. One can only assume the rest of your post was just as idiotic.

We can tell you are full of shit when you post as an AC, and fail to cite statistics or source. Here, asshole: USDA information on China's rice imports.

http://ers.usda.gov/data-produ...

"Rice imports by China are expected to set a new record in 2015, surpassing 2014 levels by 200,000 metric tons and marking the fourth consecutive year of record imports. Rice imports surged in 2012 to more than 7 times the average of the previous 5 years, and continued to grow each year thereafter. China remains the world’s largest rice producer and consumer, and has been largely self-sufficient in rice for more than 30 years and until recently, was typically a net rice exporter. In 2012, China surpassed Nigeria to become the world’s largest rice importer. "

China has been a net importer of rice since 1981, and is currently the words largest rice importer, as of 2012.

But you know, don't let facts stop you.

Well then, nobody should complain if I want sell cyanide and heroin on the street corner.

Is cyanide a product with a bunch of beneficial uses that lots of customers want that has no known negative side effects? If so, that sounds great. But I'm pretty sure that's not how cyanide works.

But it's being handled badly, kinda like nuclear power, perfectly safe, but grossly mismanaged.

How so? What specifically is being mismanaged?

Right now we must demand simple transparency and put labeling on the package. People must be allowed the choice of what to ingest.

Sure. If there's huge demand for transparency, it sounds like a voluntary label like this one would do the trick. If you want to advertise to your customers that you're GMO free, knock yourself out. If you want to buy only foods that label themselves as GMO free, that's awesome too. But that's not what the organic lobbyists want. They want a mandatory label so they can spread FUD. It goes like this:

Monsanto: "This stuff is safe. The science is on our side."
Anti GMO activist: "If it's safe, why don't you want it labeled?"
...
Anti GMO activist: "If it's so safe, why does the government require it to be labeled? Buy our product instead!"

his electronics are gone along with his head.

That doesn't sound like vandalism to me, it sounds like plain theft. I know the article wanted to pain this person as "terrible" to fit with the snappy title, but it's more likely that this person was just desperate and found some electronics to steal. According to the USDA there's close to 7 million households in the US that go hungry once in a while because they don't have a reliable income.

All GMO have to petition for "nonregulated status" from the USDA-APHIS. They do not sell the seeds until they get this, and it is the USDA that decides when/if safety has been adequately demonstrated.

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/biot...

There is a big difference between "trust me" and several hundred to a couple thousand pages of "here is why we believe this to be safe"

I very much mind not being allowed to know WHAT my food IS.

You are allowed to know. It is freely available on the internet, in fact, I'll tell you right now that the only GE crops currently available in the US are corn, canola, soy, cotton, alfalfa, sugar beet, papaya, and summer squash. The genes used include Cry and Vip genes, C4 EPSPS, prsv-cp, pat, and others. This is all freely available on APHIS's site. Now, for fun, if you care so much about knowing what is in your food, tell me if the last tomato you ate contained the Ph-3 gene from a wild Solanium pimpinellifolium. Tell me if the last apple you ate was a bud sport, and which one. Tell me if the last sweet corn you consumed was the product of doubled haploid hybridization. Tell me what the last pear you ate was grafted on. Tell me if the last citrus you ate was produced via radiation induced mutagenesis. Tell me if the last banana you ate was from a tissue cultured plant. Did the last watermelon contain product you consumed from from watermelons which have had induced polyploidy? Can you tell me? If not, why are you so selectively concerned? Why are you concerned about the thing which you can easily find yourself, but not everything else, and most importantly, tell me why that deserves a law.

For capitalism to work properly the consumer need to be able to make a INFORMED decision.

Wrong. If there is sufficient demand for consumer labeling, it will happen, in fact, it already has. If you have not seen dozens of non-GMO labels at your local mega mart you're not paying attention. It is the job of government to enforce rational regulations, yes, but it is not the purpose of government to cater to superstitions.

The USDA seems to disagree with you.

Are you sure that a disaster on the coastal infrastructure will have negligible effect on the non-coastal regions of the country? Last I checked our ports are on the coast and our ports are where most of our clothing [1], and non-negligible amount of food [2] come from.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business...
[2] http://www.ers.usda.gov/datafi...

The interesting question is how long can this last before we reach a level that is not affordable to the majority of the demographic that is being serviced.

Care to guess what happens at that point? New construction doesn't sell, developers go bankrupt, new construction is sold at auction for lower prices. Then the new units available at lower prices push down prices of other housing, which makes purchase more affordable, which results in renters buying, which curbs rent prices.

Unless of course, large financial companies and well-connected donors are threatened by that circumstance.

Then, the central bank will step in, through its many channels, to put a floor under rental prices ("So I think if we spent enough money, got enough of a hit right now, it would look like a floor on house prices, and we might have something every bit as good as a floor on house prices."). The multiple government housing agencies (Fannie, Freddie, FHA, VA, USDA, etc) can also step in to influence the rental market, as they did the housing market.

Blackstone is a company securitizing rental flows and selling them. They are the largest private equity company in the world ("By both profit measures, the first quarter set quarterly records for Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm").

The former head of the US central bank, Bernanke, is now employed by Citadel, a massive hedge fund.

My point is simply this: house prices did not revert to historical norms because of the big players - donors - that would have been deleteriously impacted by it. With big players moving into the rental market, if something went wrong with their business plan, don't expect them not to use their clout to get the government and central bank to do something about it.

Any place I ever worked that had part-time positions (I only ever held one part-time position, it was a second job as a favor for a friend who had more fiberglass work than he could handle on-schedule; beyond that, a second part-time job is a near impossibility as they all only seem to hire if you have open availability, which you can't have if you already have a job), they were 16-24hr/wk and the scheduling was usually closer to 16hr. I held a number of menial service-level and retail jobs before striking my first decent contract, so I have a sizable sample. Not a single past employer of mine routinely gave part-timers more than 16 hours per week. Not one. That, combined with the fact that most positions available outside of the professional world are part time, is my basis for using a 16 hour work week to calculate a livable wage. Sure, you can live on 7.25/hr if you're getting full-time work, that's $15080/yr; I supported my ex making barely $1000/yr over that for nearly a decade, but even if we halve that, nobody is surviving for a year on $7540, I don't care how skilled they are at budgeting. Hell, that's below the poverty level for a single person but, then, even a full-time minimum wage worker qualifies for food stamps. It's not a livable wage if we have to subsidize it.

In most of the country, $12/hr should be livable for a single person at anything over 16 hours, comfortable for those who excel at their part-time work and are granted more hours, and even more comfortable for anyone working full-time. Bay area and NYC excepted, of course.

Slashdot must be getting kickbacks from the NYT because all the story links go to their paywall now. But a nerd would go right to the source because the NYT is a fat fucking waste of time any more. They're the next CNN or Faux News, they just sensationalize other people's news. Too bad this ain't News for Nerds any more.

Actually there's a pretty good trail being laid down:

http://missoulian.com/news/loc...

Not only that, but per this article (with stats), bee populations are stable to increasing despite CCD:

http://www.perc.org/articles/e...

The amount of honey being produced is a good indicator, given you can't make honey without bees.

This won't load for me but I imagine it goes into more detail:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/...

And actually, you can demonstrate 'insanity' in any wild colony with an aging queen -- the bees become aggressive at greater and greater distances from the hive. I watched this with a wild colony that had taken up residence in the wall of a barn. For the first three years, they were 'gentle' (not concerned about intruders) -- to the point that you could actually poke around in their entryway without incurring any retaliation. The 4th year, they got twitchy about people walking nearby. The 5th year, they regularly chased people who passed within about 20 feet of their hive entrance. The colony died off entirely that winter. Far as I saw, it never swarmed, indicating they didn't produce any new queens.

We probably don't see this in domesticated colonies because modern beekeepers are diligent about replacing queens in a timely manner. But I asked an old-timer about it (who'd been in the bee business since the 1930s) and he said that was all perfectly normal for a colony with an old queen.

You know what would really help consumers a lot? If there were LABELS to tell which were GE crops and which weren't. Why are you so anti-consumer on this issue?

There are; they're called ingredient labels. Corn, soy, cotton, canola, sugar beet, alfalfa, summer squash, papaya. Know that, and a few details behind them, and you can tel if something is GE or not. Why do you need a label to replace educating yourself?

Great idea! LABEL ALL THE THINGS!

Yeah, that's practical. You offering to pay for all the tracking necessary to do that?

No let's talk "all the safety data that shows no problems" instead. Citation please?

Pick

one. There's plenty of information if you are willing to search through the scientific literature and not just random blogs and activist rants. Can't say the same for the supposed dangers though.
Now how about you point me to a single person who has gotten so much as a headache from GE crops? I notice you surprisingly ignored my request to elucidate the biochemistry behind how or why GE is intrinsically dangerous. Given how much genetic engineering is used in basic research, if you're right then there's a lot more than food that needs re-evaluation; step forward and claim your worldwide recognition, please.

But of course we would never find out about the linkage given the industry's fear of "Killer GE Crop" headlines...

Oh look, it's the old 'industry controls everything' conspiracy card. Didn't take that one long to come out.

My first thought was poor nutrition as well. It's the same sort of claim that dentists make, like how unhealthy teeth can lead to other health problems. I've always figured it's more likely that people who don't take care of their teeth also don't take care of their bodies in general.

About your proposed food stamp rules... you're missing the "grains" food group (bread, flour, rice, etc) entirely, not to mention a few other fundamental things like eggs, butter, salt, and sugar. I'm going to take a wild guess that you don't do the bulk of the shopping and cooking for your household.

You can read the rationale as to why the US government currently does not restrict any "food" item, no matter it's health value. Personally, I think it's more worthwhile to focus on working to get people off food stamps altogether than trying to add a bunch of regulatory burdens to the program. If you want to focus on abuse, let's look at more rampant fraudulent welfare claims to start with. Buying a candy bar instead of an apple is a terrible health choice, but I'd hardly count it as "abuse".

Let's say since greens are in season now, I cook a HUGE 6-7QT pot of greens, Basically the only fat in the thing is 1lb of Andouille sausage. This pot will easily be 6-10 portions/meals. Granted this is a simple dish with few ingredients, but what about the same size pot of mushroom chili?

If you're serious, the nerd answer is that you go download the sr27 nutrient content of foods database, stuff it into a database, and then come up with some way to query it. I downloaded the ascii, used phpmyadmin to stuff it into mysql, then I used the Views Database Connector and Views Field View modules (along with Views, of course) to query those database tables. That way it works when the 'net is down. You can always just go to the website but it seemed so retarded to have to look up everything across the internets every time. The database will tell you that x volume is approximately y mass and has approximately z amount of total carbs, fiber, fat, etc — down to all the known micronutrients.

The thing is...I rarely cook anything simple with an easy to find and read ingredients list, It would take forever to figure what the calories and all were from what I cook since so much of it is fresh vegetable and meat based, etc.

You have to mix your food on or across a scale. It's an added step, but it's not impossible. I made Atkins baking mix from their publicly available recipe, with some tweaks to include coconut flour. I put a bowl on a scale and measured the amounts in grams, and then I was able to figure out that a low-carb waffle has about 20g of net carbs (less fiber) if I make it with a non-nutritive sweetener, e.g. a mix of monk fruit and stevia extracts, based on 1-1/4c of mix and one egg.

Yeah, it's extra work. But let's not pretend that it can't be done.

Reading the article I saw this:

It helps greatly if you are willing to eat similar foods day to day that are easy to track

THIS is my problem. I tend to rarely eat pre-packaged processed food, or simple things. I cook from scratch, large batches of things, to eat as leftovers for most of the week.

No, your problem is not realizing that eating the same large batch of food as leftovers for most of the week IS eating similar foods day to day that are easy to track.

The fact that you can't figure out the nutritional content of raw ingredients without a label is your problem. Try starting here: http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/

Utter bullshit. The easiest way to control weight is to exactly follow the scientific advice. I lost a lot of weight (about 25 kg over 6 months) by a simple system:

(Change in Weight (kg))/7700 = Calories I ate - Calories I used

The calculation is really simple and entirely based on nutrition science. For "Calories I ate", I used the free USDA nutrition database from, I think, Dept. of Agriculture (yep, here. http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/). For "Calories I used", I used the standard age-adjusted formulas you can find at the back of any nutrition text. For detection activity I used the android phone, Tasker and a small timesheet app.

Just for the kicks I kept a graph of the loss weight, and the fit to the "theoretical" weight loss has an R-squared upwards of 0.87 over more than a year. The body response is so precise, that even the occasional heavy meal registered the next day. No magic, no voodoo, just sticking to the 'scientific rules'.

7700 is the kCal in a kg body weight, if you're curious.

As for the nutrition, I stick to the good ole food pyramid. My (slightly high) cholesterol went to norm in the first year, and no problems whatsoever in 5 consecutive yearly checkups since I started the routine.

Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, it works, bitches.

Butbutbut paleofat is good for you! It will make your hipster beard far fluffier than if you stick to eating processed foods like a jackass.

Utter bullshit. The easiest way to control weight is to exactly follow the scientific advice. I lost a lot of weight (about 25 kg over 6 months) by a simple system:
(Change in Weight (kg))/7700 = Calories I ate - Calories I used

The calculation is really simple and entirely based on nutrition science. For "Calories I ate", I used the free USDA nutrition database from, I think, Dept. of Agriculture (yep, here. http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/). For "Calories I used", I used the standard age-adjusted formulas you can find at the back of any nutrition text. For detection activity I used the android phone, Tasker and a small timesheet app.

Just for the kicks I kept a graph of the loss weight, and the fit to the "theoretical" weight loss has an R-squared upwards of 0.87 over more than a year. The body response is so precise, that even the occasional heavy meal registered the next day. No magic, no voodoo, just sticking to the 'scientific rules'.

7700 is the kCal in a kg body weight, if you're curious.

As for the nutrition, I stick to the good ole food pyramid. My (slightly high) cholesterol went to norm in the first year, and no problems whatsoever in 5 consecutive yearly checkups since I started the routine.

Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, it works, bitches.

Not to cure them of anything, but to make them fatter for market, and make more money for Agrobusiness

You are completely incorrect. Antibiotics are used to control many infectious agents in livestock. Animals don't complain about intestinal discomfort or headaches so I'm not sure how you propose only administering drugs to those that are infected.

Current inflation rates are around 1.6%. And that's with the steep decline in the price of oil. Of course food is really up quite a bit...

The causative factor is obviously the infrared absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide and how that changes with concentration.

You say CO2 is a trace gas but if I put you in a room with a concentration of 250 ppm of hydrogen cyanide you'd be dead in a matter of minutes. Trace concentrations can matter, it's all a matter of context.

All told greenhouse gases make up less than 5000 ppm of the atmosphere and yet they're responsible for about 59 degrees F of temperature on the surface.

I don't say that CO2 is disproportionally relevant, just as relevant as it is. The most common gases in the atmosphere are in order are nitrogen, oxygen argon, water vapor and carbon dioxide. The first three are not greenhouse gases and have little effect on temperature. Water vapor concentrations are strictly limited by temperatures and therefore it can not drive temperature changes but is a feedback to temperature changes. There is nothing we can do to directly affect the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere (except locally irrigation may raise the concentration over small areas). That makes CO2 the most important greenhouse gas that we have any control over.

The fact that the same basic atmospheric model works for both Venus and Earth but also Mars and Titan is an indication that it's getting things mostly right.

My assumption that warming will continue is based on the absorption characteristics of CO2 and the fact that CO2 concentrations continue to rise. Nothing more than that.

Grapes have been grown in England basically as long has humans have practiced agriculture there. I never heard of oranges growing there but I suppose it's possible.

Warmth and CO2 levels are only two of many factors in agricultural productivity. More important is water and nutrition (fertilizer). Temperatures that get too high can reduce productivity significantly. Here is a study of corn and soy bean yields as related to temperature and precipitation. It found for corn that 1 degree warmer temperature in July caused a 2.28 bushel per acre drop in yields while 1 degree cooler caused an increase of 2.28 bushel per acre (see the section on "Corn Yield Response to July Temperatures".)

I live in Oregon and am quite familiar with the Great Basin desert. The only southwest state I haven't visited so far is New Mexico. As far as transporting water to the southwest, where is it going to come from? Most of the Colorado river water is currently used for agriculture in Arizona and California already and the Colorado basin has been in drought for most years since around 2000. Look at the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. You can take water from the Snake/Columbia system over my dead body.

I expect between 2 and 6 feet of SLR by 2100 and it will probably be between 200 and 300 years before it's risen by 20 feet. The 70-80 foot rise probably takes 600-1000 years at least.

I explained to you way back in this thread why high CO2 concentrations and ice ages were not incompatible 600+ million years ago. That has practically noting to do with what's going on now.

Let us not forget about beet sugar which is produced in fairly large quantities around the red river valley (Warning xls spread sheet from the USDA). These 2 states produce about 1/2 the entire US crop of sugar beets (~15 million tons out of ~32 million tons) and both are also corn states too.

... Culture "Minds", drones, and humans/cyborgs all have privacy of what is in their own thoughts and memories. However, anything in a non-sentient "databank" is public to all (so, externally stored communications or designs in that sense are publicly shareable). I'm just re-reading "Excession" (out loud to my kid) where Banks made that point. In the "Culture", Banks makes it clear that sentient beings of any sort (including typical drones) have a variety of rights related to independence. When I first read that, coming from an idea of free software and free culture, it seemed somehow strange or wrong that the AI "Minds" or drones would have that sort of privacy, but now it seems to make more and more sense to me, given the sort of issues raised in the article, including that there can be many times when the line is blurred between human and machine. But the probably deeper issue is what it means to have an advanced post-scarcity "Culture" where many of the citizens are entirely non-biological (like the AI "Minds" that run much of everything).

BTW, the original "RUR" story from 1920 (where the term "robot" came from) has almost exactly the same plot as you outline for BG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R....

A lot of long-term robotics (like Asimo) is implicitly the quest for the ideal "slave". The question is, at what points does something have rights? In the USA and elsewhere animals have some legal rights (or at least laws to protect them) since starting about a 150 years ago, and that campaign I've heard eventually led to children having independent rights (on the logic of, why should a horse or dog have rights when a child does not?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/p...
"The first national law to regulate animal experimentation was passed in Britain in 1876--the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. This bill created a central governing body that reviewed and approved all animal use in research. After that, there were numerous countries in Europe that adopted some regulations regarding research with animals. "

Also:
http://www.humanium.org/en/chi...
"At the beginning of the 20th century, children's protection starts to be put in place, including protection in the medical, social and judicial fields. This kind of protection starts first in France and spreads across Europe afterwards. Since 1919, the international community, following the creation of The League of Nations (later to become the UN), starts to give some kind of importance to that concept and elaborates a Committee for child protection."

However, going back to hunter/gatherer times thousands of years ago, there was in many such cultures (from what remains of them) at least an ethic of giving thanks to the larger "animal" kind (e.g. "Rabbit") that you killed for it letting you kill it so you might survive. But it's hard to know for sure what such cultures really believed day-to-day in all circumstances. And some such cultures had various sorts of slavery.

I don't know what the line is where a mechanism (mechanical or electronic or photonic or fluidic or other) becomes self-aware, or even if that should be the line. Or at what point can a mechanism feel "pain" or "pleasure"? Is that ultimately a political and/or religious question?
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/tec...

And also:
http://www.aspcr.com/
"We are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, founded in 1999 in Seattle, Washin

That is why even organic meat contains sugar and all kinds of syrup nowadays.

Uh, what? Only processed foods, and then frankly, almost none of them. The lack of unnecessary ingredients is part of the draw to most Organic brands. Only the fake-ass organics like "O" (Safeway's brand) are full of bullshit like that.

There isn't any regulation around "unneccesary ingredients" in regards to organic foods. It mostly just means they aren't GMO and have used approved fertilizers and pesticides, which are about as toxic as the synthetic ones. Organic lunchmeat is still organic as long as the sugar and syrup it's loaded with is also organic.

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal...

Doesn't say anything about "no additives", only that any additives need to follow the same certification.

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades [emphasis mine -mi], a major new study shows.

A person can choose to eat this or that and it is his own responsibility. But, when the government decides, what's good for you (based on some "settled" science), it not only affects citizenry's opinion and makes us less responsible for ourselves, it also leaves millions directly controlled by the government — such as pupils in government schools — without choices at all.

Now, I don't doubt, that some of the stuff removed from schools by our omni-scient and caring Congressmen will never be considered good for anyone again. But they still force fat-free chocolate milk on kids, for example, in seeming contradiction to this new study. Maybe, both ought to be available — and parents, rather than the Federal government, be allowed to control the children's nutrition?

Sadly, the movement seems to be in the wrong direction. Some parents are already being punished for children eating incorrectly. And though in this case (200+ pound 8 year old), it is fairly obvious, that the parents are, indeed, screwy, it is likely to be a "poster-boy" for future interventions in cases less and less obvious.

There are audits, and acceptable variances. For instance, there's this.

Auditors regularly check the weight of the patties before cooking. While it won't help much with a specific instance, it will prevent systemic abuse like alleged in the article.

Or just dig into the regolith. I like the hexagonal modules design, except that bringing something as heavy as depleted uranium to Mars in usable amounts will be impossible at first because of the weight. I picked up a chunk of DU once, the size and shape of a common brick; at first, I thought it was welded to the bench it was sitting on. No, it was just unbelievably heavy. I needed both hands to lift it.

So locate the hex design in a natural cave or make it earth-sheltered. If there are lava tubes on Mars like this one, they would be ideal:

http://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/por...

Sounds simple doesn't it? Except where do you put all that salt?
                  see:Impacts via Scientific American
And where do you get all that energy for desalination and at what cost?
                  see: Cost of Desalination
Also the quantity water for agriculture and industrial use is HUGE. The flushing of soil by natural water flow is one of the basic ways we flush salt from overused fields
                  See: Salt and Agriculture

Your statements seem calculated to dismiss to the reality of food insecurity in the United States without including any relevant factual information. Here you - or any earnest reader - can find the USDA's 2012 report on domestic food security, which is (in contrast) an excellent source of such information.

An estimated 14.5 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2012, meaning they lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The change from 14.9 percent in 2011 is not considered statistically significant. The prevalence of very low food security was unchanged at 5.7 percent.

Courtesy of the US Forest Service:

http://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/por...

Government contributes disruptive innovation (computers, USDA contributions to agriculture, GPS, the internet, etc.) that has created a lot of surplus productivity. Your story lacks historical support.

Starvation rates are so low in the US you wont actually find an independently tracked stat for it.

It's bundled up in the stats for "very low food security"
You might find more info if you dive deep into the PDF reports.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us.aspx

Kids have no choice in who their parents are, and typically only get SS if they have something like autism.

SNAP SNAP offers nutrition assistance to millions of eligible, low-income individuals and families and provides economic benefits to communities. SNAP is the largest program in the domestic hunger safety net.

A better example than the Bangalore torpedo would be the mine clearing line charge which is capable of clearing a full width fire break (20 feet) under many conditions.

While chain saws, and wrapping trees with C4 is effective, where feasible, there are many situations where it is not (inaccessible, imminent fire danger precludes it, it is already on fire).

And there is other interesting prior art showing effectiveness on suppressing wild fires.

And the idea that blast charges can't knock down trees in an area (if that is what you are implying) is simply incorrect. The famous BLU-82 "Daisy Cutter" certainly could. Now they wouldn't be dropped daisy cutters, but a system tailored for this application might be effective. Also note that standing dead trees and trees that have undergone a certain amount of pyrolysis are not going to be as resilient and healthy tree and be easier shatter.

All told, I think the dismissive skepticism I see on this thread to be unfounded.

Did you even read it?

Census tracts qualify as food deserts if they meet low-income and low-access thresholds:

        1. They qualify as "low-income communities", based on having: a) a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, OR b) a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area median family income; AND

        2. They qualify as "low-access communities", based on the determination that at least 500 persons and/or at least 33% of the census tract's population live more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (10 miles, in the case of non-metropolitan census tracts).

As expected, "Food desert" is a political term designed to allocate public money to specific demographics. Absolutely no determination was made of the availability and affordability of "fresh, healthy, and affordable food" or precisely what that description even means. But it does let the grant money flow.

Start reading, stop assuming.