But a lot of the important issues that affect the public aren't well understood. We don't understand everything about the atmosphere or the environment or the human body. If we did have a complete and irrefutable understanding there wouldn't be any controversy. The problem is that the public expects everything to be black and white, but we're just not at level yet, so we have to make the best decisions that we can with the information currently at our disposal.
I don't think its too cynical to say that about 40% of the people of in the United State do want a religious, Ten Commandments law based dictatorship. They might not use those exact terms, but when you talk with them, that's what they describe.
Actually, $1,500 is a reasonable settlement to me. That's about a month's worth of wages at a burger flipping job. It's comparable to the punishment for similar misdemeanour crimes. It's enough to be a financial disincentive, but not so much that it would ruin someone's life.
Water is pretty special stuff. It's polar solvent. It has a fairly broad range of temperatures where it exists in a liquid state. It's solid state is less dense than it's liquid state. It can be both an acid and a base under reasonable conditions. It's hard to come up with another substance that would facilitate the complex chemical reactions necessary for any life.
TV is a terrible indicator for contemporary culture. It's the most biased, commercial, censored medium. Did "Leave it to Beaver" address the issues of shell-shocked WWII veterans reintegrating with civilian life? What did The Andy Griffith show tell you about the sexual revolution that was occurring during the '60s? How did The Dick Van Dyke Show reflect the Cold War mentality and the Cuban Missile Crisis? How did Friends represent the ethnic diversity of New York City?
That claim isn't very convincing without some numbers. The Holocene extinction has seen the a lot of species die off, but the "big events" kill off large percentages of entire genera and families.
The reason BP can say "no" is because they (and the rest of the oil cartel) control a resource that we depend on. If the government starts to play hardball, they can turn off the oil faucet and the whole country will come to a screeching halt. How many people and congressmen are going to stick to their principles when gas is $10/gallon?
Which is hilarious in the context of all the people who are quick to label any social program as "communism". We, the USA, learned the wrong lessons from the cold war. We should have learned that a modern military-police state is unsustainable. Instead we're taught that the Soviet Union failed because of their socialist programs, all while he happily march towards a military-police state of our own making.
Re:Planetary visits are an obsolete idea
on
Gardening On Mars
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· Score: 1
You're missing the point. There are better ways to ensure humanities survival that plopping an colony at the bottom of another gravity well. If the sun starts shooting out solar flares or a black hole appears in our neighborhood or a gamma ray burst is aimed at us or there's a vacuum phase transition, then having a colony on Mars doesn't help at all. People who advocate colonization as a survival strategy are thinking too small.
Re:Planetary visits are an obsolete idea
on
Gardening On Mars
·
· Score: 1
I think your timeline for nanotech and Matrioshka Brains is about 2 orders of magnitude too optimistic, but the your basic point seems irrefutable. By the time we do have technology to colonize other worlds, why would we want to? Resource gathering will certainly be an automated task, colonizing doesn't solve any overpopulation problems and most extinction level events aren't avoided if your colony is still in the same solar system (or even the same galactic neighborhood).
The problem is that the sci-fi genre started off as a metaphor for contemporary societies and then moved on to wish fulfilment scenarios. Now that we're on the cusp of realizing some these technologies, no one wants to admit that their fantasies are just plain impractical.
If you allowed patients unrestricted access to experimental procedures, you're removing any incentive for companies to spend the time and money to thoroughly test anything. People will still pay, because their desperate for any sliver of hope and the pharma industry would be automatically protected from lawsuits.
Another posted pointed out your omission of European socialist countries. But more directly: China, Venezuela and Vietnam really have made substantial progress in the last 30 years. In terms of year-to-year growth, they're doing better than the US.
mod parent up
Catharsis is a belief that goes back to the Greeks, but doesn't have any standing in modern scientific views. Conditioning, on the other hand, is very well documented phenomenon.
We militarily overthrow the government of a country, replace it with one friendly to our interests and leave enough military bases there to make it clear that we're willing to do the same thing again if the new government gets out of line. How is that different than what any empire has ever done?
A large part of the reason those bases continue to operate is to project power into places like South-east Asia and the Middle East. They wouldn't need to be replaced because Europe and Japan are mostly uninterested in the continuing misadventures of imperialism.
Slashdot Mirror
But a lot of the important issues that affect the public aren't well understood. We don't understand everything about the atmosphere or the environment or the human body. If we did have a complete and irrefutable understanding there wouldn't be any controversy. The problem is that the public expects everything to be black and white, but we're just not at level yet, so we have to make the best decisions that we can with the information currently at our disposal.
I don't think its too cynical to say that about 40% of the people of in the United State do want a religious, Ten Commandments law based dictatorship. They might not use those exact terms, but when you talk with them, that's what they describe.
Actually, $1,500 is a reasonable settlement to me. That's about a month's worth of wages at a burger flipping job. It's comparable to the punishment for similar misdemeanour crimes. It's enough to be a financial disincentive, but not so much that it would ruin someone's life.
Water is pretty special stuff. It's polar solvent. It has a fairly broad range of temperatures where it exists in a liquid state. It's solid state is less dense than it's liquid state. It can be both an acid and a base under reasonable conditions. It's hard to come up with another substance that would facilitate the complex chemical reactions necessary for any life.
TV is a terrible indicator for contemporary culture. It's the most biased, commercial, censored medium. Did "Leave it to Beaver" address the issues of shell-shocked WWII veterans reintegrating with civilian life? What did The Andy Griffith show tell you about the sexual revolution that was occurring during the '60s? How did The Dick Van Dyke Show reflect the Cold War mentality and the Cuban Missile Crisis? How did Friends represent the ethnic diversity of New York City?
That claim isn't very convincing without some numbers. The Holocene extinction has seen the a lot of species die off, but the "big events" kill off large percentages of entire genera and families.
The reason BP can say "no" is because they (and the rest of the oil cartel) control a resource that we depend on. If the government starts to play hardball, they can turn off the oil faucet and the whole country will come to a screeching halt. How many people and congressmen are going to stick to their principles when gas is $10/gallon?
He also was the prime recipient of millions of dollars from BP. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html The pattern is more than a bit disturbing.
3 out of those 4 aren't even jokes
Which is hilarious in the context of all the people who are quick to label any social program as "communism". We, the USA, learned the wrong lessons from the cold war. We should have learned that a modern military-police state is unsustainable. Instead we're taught that the Soviet Union failed because of their socialist programs, all while he happily march towards a military-police state of our own making.
You're missing the point. There are better ways to ensure humanities survival that plopping an colony at the bottom of another gravity well. If the sun starts shooting out solar flares or a black hole appears in our neighborhood or a gamma ray burst is aimed at us or there's a vacuum phase transition, then having a colony on Mars doesn't help at all. People who advocate colonization as a survival strategy are thinking too small.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqstats.php
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/graphs.php
I think your timeline for nanotech and Matrioshka Brains is about 2 orders of magnitude too optimistic, but the your basic point seems irrefutable. By the time we do have technology to colonize other worlds, why would we want to? Resource gathering will certainly be an automated task, colonizing doesn't solve any overpopulation problems and most extinction level events aren't avoided if your colony is still in the same solar system (or even the same galactic neighborhood). The problem is that the sci-fi genre started off as a metaphor for contemporary societies and then moved on to wish fulfilment scenarios. Now that we're on the cusp of realizing some these technologies, no one wants to admit that their fantasies are just plain impractical.
n/t
If you allowed patients unrestricted access to experimental procedures, you're removing any incentive for companies to spend the time and money to thoroughly test anything. People will still pay, because their desperate for any sliver of hope and the pharma industry would be automatically protected from lawsuits.
Another posted pointed out your omission of European socialist countries. But more directly: China, Venezuela and Vietnam really have made substantial progress in the last 30 years. In terms of year-to-year growth, they're doing better than the US.
There is also difference that you were doing PHYSICAL exercise instead of playing video games.
Maybe crime rates have more than one contributing factor and that if it weren't for video games, the crime rate would be even lower.
mod parent up Catharsis is a belief that goes back to the Greeks, but doesn't have any standing in modern scientific views. Conditioning, on the other hand, is very well documented phenomenon.
My kingdom for a mod-point! xkcd fails at the most basic level: being funny. I have gotten far more laughs from xkcd sucks than from the actual comic.
The problem isn't the detectors, its sending the signal in a way the brain can interpret.
In other words: the Scotty Principle.
At this rate, without question the Chinese will be first to the moon.
Are the Chinese building a time machine?
We militarily overthrow the government of a country, replace it with one friendly to our interests and leave enough military bases there to make it clear that we're willing to do the same thing again if the new government gets out of line. How is that different than what any empire has ever done?
A large part of the reason those bases continue to operate is to project power into places like South-east Asia and the Middle East. They wouldn't need to be replaced because Europe and Japan are mostly uninterested in the continuing misadventures of imperialism.