I've never tried standardizing on a language after the fact, so I don't know how that would work. But I am a firm believer that a common language for the development team is a good thing. Much like a common spoken language for the team is a good thing. It encourages code reuse, sharing, and general system understanding. On the occasions that something in our system is written in another language (we had a few C modules from contractors and third parties), it usually ends up being a mystery system and we accept it with it's behavioral limitations or we end up rewriting it in our own language (which happens to be Perl) so we can tweak it as needed.
Of course we actually do use several languages: perl, SQL, DHTML. But each one covers a very specific, non-overlapping domain. I've tried to stay away from having a second language cover the same need in a different way. It's hard enough to keep everything understood and shared as is.
But you must admit -- dark matter theory has that ring to it of something stuck in there to explain what we don't quite understand yet. Maybe it'll turn out to be true... but right now it sure seems like the remainder to an imperfect equation.
Don't you think there's an interesting little symmetry there though? We're trying to understand the complexity of the natural world, usually with formulae, but even divorced from the natural world our formulae are known to have limitations. Doesn't this imply that the very concept of description and understanding through formulae is limited? It cuts right through the idea that if we could only pin everything down to a number than it would all make sense (which seemed to be the prevailing theory before Godel, and still has a few proponents today).
Anyways, I'll be looking into the information theory stuff more, but I think Godel's proof applies in a loose way to the concept of the unknowable, even in one of the most purified forms of logic: mathematics.
For some definitions of "people", they did think it was flat. I agree that the finer minds knew the earth was round long before Columbus, but I knew a pastor at a local church who once gave an impassioned sermon on how scientists were foolish because they thought the world was round, and he pulled several scriptural references to back up his claims. The majority of the congregation nodded and gave a "Hallelujah". And this was in the 20th century.
People have all sorts of wacky ideas. I'm sure large segements of people throughout history have believed the world was flat. I'm sure small segements of people today think the same thing.
Strangely, I'll have to disagree. I'm a mild Apple fanboy, so don't let's get bent out of shape, but it seems they only care about the appearance until it's sold. The Powerbook G4 has a notorious problem with screen scratches because the tolerance between the screen and the keys is so little. And I've had four Powerbook G4's now -- from the original Titanium to the most recent 17", and they all have the same problem. I am careful and take good care of my stuff, but still get these screen scratches. You'd think they might have addressed this by now?
Then there's the fact that the anodized aluminum wristguard is corroded by skin oils under normal usage. Haven't fixed this either, even though it's been several revisions. Again, this is under normal usage.
Apple makes pretty great products. But in some cases they go form over function and the result is something that's not super durable. Whenever this comes up somebody always says "you should be more careful with it then". Yeah. Thanks for the advice. Apple might want to make their expensive (and nearly perfect) products a little more durable too.
My first thought is that IQ tests are fairly imprecise to start with, and when you're tracking different tests at different times with different peoples... well, I'm not sure I'd believe that there's that much of a difference.
But let's say you're right, improvements to the average IQ have been going up. That doesn't mean that smart people are any smarter. And that's what I'm talking about here.
I admit, the average person stops learning and adapting at some point in their life. The earlier in their life they do this, the worse it would be to plop them into the distant future (or any time, for that matter). But for those who are constant learners, I think they could adapt to the new situation.
Fair enough... I certainly didn't mean to imply that it should be more like Firefly. I like serious stuff too... but Gallactica just doesn't do it for me. Regarding the jingoistic stuff, sure, it's accurate, but I don't get the sense that they offer much insight or color to it. Just the basic "we got attacked, now we're gonna kick their ass". I don't know exactly what I'd prefer to see after such an event, but that response just seems too shallow.
But again, as I always say about art, if you didn't like it, it's not intended for you. I guess the show isn't intended for me. Glad you enjoy it though!
Well, there's no accounting for taste, so don't take anything I say too seriously... but I really don't get Battlestar Gallactica's appeal. I heard many good things so I bought the first season on iTunes. I'm about 3/4 of the way through, and I just don't care to finish it. To be immature about it, it seems like geek TV written by jocks. A little bit starship-troopers-like. It's all jingoistic and the themes are black and white. And it's very hard for me to feel the character's motivations are natural -- they seem like "characters" and not people. It has virtually no sense of humor, and none at all about itself. There's definitely some interesting high-level stuff it explores, like managing a tiny struggling society under those conditions, but none of the personal stuff connects for me, so it just seems hollow.
I don't know... I was really hoping for something I could dig to come along after Firefly got canned.
But if you enjoy it, good for you. I just had to vent my disappointment.
The only point I take exception with is the idea that you'd be a "relative idiot". I think there's a funny tendancy for us to think that over time people become more intelligent. They don't. At least not on the time scale of a few thousand years. I am sure that there were people in ancient Egypt who were brighter and more intellectually ambitions than I. I may have more acquired knowledge in certain modern fields of research, but I can hardly claim much credit for that.
I think if such a person were plopped into our modern day they would, after a degree of struggle, they'd be able to make sense of it.
But the rest of your point is taken. I'd still prefer a chance, I think:)
Heh. Looks like you've already picked it up, but yes: I was being sarcastic:) In your defense, my post wasn't written as well as it should have been. I actually almost used a similar example to yours where I figured gays should be beaten for five minutes because I thought 0 minutes and my homophobe friend thought 10. But I decided to use a less dramatic example. Though I suppose if the cake was really good it could be dramatic.
But yeah: I'm not sure the enlightened effort these days to include all viewpoints is really a good idea.
I'll defer to your superior math skills, and also mention that I could have worded things more clearly... I started from the assumption that they both wanted as much cake as they could get (i.e. all of it). But that Jill was willing to go halfsies and Jack wasn't. And our enlightened efforts to find the halfway solution can fail us when dealing with unfair viewpoints.
No no! The correct answer is always halfway between the opposing viewpoints! Don't you know that if Jill wants half the cake and Jack wants the whole cake, then the right thing to do is give Jack 3/4? Claiming that one group of people might be right and the others wrong is just unfair!
I think a more accurate view would be that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to end up as programmers and engineers because of the lack of educational opportunities in those areas.
Actually, I think and even more accurate view would be that people tend to want to fit in with those they identify with. Call it cultural inertia, but dumping educational opportunities into poor communities doesn't make as big an impact as one would like to believe. In general, the culture in those areas ridicule intellect and honest ambition. I'll leave it to someone else to hypothesize why it got that way, but the end result is that children from those communities reject becoming like outsiders, as it might feel they are "selling out".
Even if the kids are moved to a better area, if they are recognizably different (e.g. black) they are likely to latch on to others that they see as similar. If that subculture is not education oriented, they won't be either. However, if the child has nobody obvious to identify with on race, they may choose to identify with some other group -- say "nerds" or "jocks" or whatever, and will likely pick up habits and culture from those groups.
It works both ways, as the more intellectual Asian and Jewish cultures tend to maintain their identity even when mixed in with any variety of other cultures with varying degrees of intellectual respect.
WMP for mac is pretty weak, but it is the only way to play certain files.
Quicktime is a great player -- but there's still several file formats it can't play by default. Mostly MS formats (like their various non-standard MPG4 versions). The plugins require all sorts of gymnastics to get them working on Quicktime. If MS gets someone to make a good, easy to install plugin for Quicktime, that covers all their WMP formats, that would be a good thing.
I've been using the bayes option on spamassassin for the past several years, and I get just about no spam in my inbox. And I get over 500 per day in my spam folder. I get maybe one or two false positives a year, usually business email that I actually wanted. I train on ham and spam regularly with a script. I tweaked the scores of the bayes tests to be more extreme than the default. I don't even think about spam any more.
I think the key is training on personal email, as opposed to doing something systemwide. And with spamassassin, you've got to boost the bayes scores. Here's the important part of my user_prefs:
required_hits 5
# I don't want spamassassin to mistrain my filter! bayes_auto_learn 0
But you 've got to train it a lot first... after that the maintenance is easy. So as far as I'm concerned, spam is solved. Maybe not for everyone, bur for me.
Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed.
And usually incorrectly to boot! I agree with your statement in theory, but in practice I think it rarely works well. The subtle human interactions that result in the need for morality are easy to miss. Seems that in most cases someone tragically oversimplifies things and then does their cost/benefit analysis. I mean, how do you measure "the human cost"? Or "abstract political gain"? It's not quantitative, that's for sure.
Sometimes things turn out fine anyways, but I think it's a stretch to call such stuff "science".
But they're _not_ black or brown. In the case of chimps, they're caucasian colored, with straight brown hair all over their bodies, just like caucasions. Africans have less body hair, and what hair they have is curly. I mean, it's a bit ridiculous to argue about who looks more like an ape, but I'm just saying it's not clear to me that any race is more like an ape than any other.
Which even from the perspective of a racist seemingly makes no sense, since manyapes have white skin, and they all seem to have straight hair, oftentimes brown. Ridiculous as it is in either case, it makes just as much sense for black folks to call white folks monkeys or apes, so I'm not sure how this particular idiocy got started. I guess it just demostrates a little more ignorance and stupidity on the part of those making such comparisons.
Was anyone else shocked by the prediciton at the bottom that Apple might be dropping Firewire? I mean, Firewire isn't that popular for general use, but the areas where it is used it is the only game in town, really. My Firewire 800 HD is wonderfully fast, the audio breakout boxes for recording multitrack, and 1394 support is built in to nearly every video camera. USB can do some of this stuff in a less consistent way, but Firewire is pretty much the professional connection, no? I would be quite sad if Apple gave it up.
I hear you. I'm not saying that ideas aren't powerful, or that they can't have terrible consequences. I think that in the cases of USSR and Germany, things started with large scale desperation and an easy bullshit idea presented by a charismatic leader. The ideas may have been wrong or bad... but I think that it wasn't until they grew so powerful and fearful that they started squashing other ideas that things truly got out of control. So I guess I'm saying that the moment one ideology tries to silence another is the point where it's gone too far. This is usually the same point where the ideology starts thinking about violence.
As to fighting World War II, we weren't fighting an idea. We were fighting violent aggressors. In fact, the ideas of World War II are still alive and well and protected by US law. As long as they don't try to shut anyone up, they can think and say what they want.
I oppose many ideas. And I believe in defense. But opposing an idea with aggression is the seed of nearly all evil.
I would argue that it wasn't their ideas that were dangerous, rather it was their own fear of dissenting ideas that was. Both Stalin and Hitler spent an enormous amount of energy sliencing people who didn't agree. I think Dan's point was that silencing ideas is always more dangerous than letting them fly. I tend to agree.
No reason to think that a larger animal has a larger brain... elephants and whales still have smaller brains than ours. King Kong needn't be an exception.
I don't know where you draw the line between "greenie environmentalists" and people like myself -- who understand that in a closed system you can only fuck with your resources so much before you fuck yourself. I agree there's a lot of chicken-little-sky-is-falling going on. There are extremes in every group. But I take greater exception to those who think we can plow ahead with resource consumption and contamination and never pay a price.
I mean, it's not impossible to contruct a formula that would tell us how much of a given resource we can consume without upsetting the ecosystem. (I'm guessing the word ecosystem makes you cringe). Here's an example: at the extremes, cutting down only a million trees per year is probably fine, cutting down a trillion per year is probably not. Do you know why? Because by my rough calculations there's less than 2 trillion trees in the world. I don't have any idea the rate at which we're cutting down trees, so maybe there's no problem. But I bet most people form their opinions on the topic of deforestation without any data. Did you have any guess as to the number of trees in the world before I threw out my estimate? Do you have any idea of the rate of deforestation (I don't)? Isn't that strange? We do need these things for oxygen among other things.
I don't know anything about tree reproduction rates or biodiversity needs. So who's going to do the research and tell me what's sustainable? So far all I hear is people shouting "not one more tree" or "cut at will" without anything but ideology to back up their stance. Seems a bit foolish to me. I wonder whether those who go around using phrases like "greenie environmentalists" care. But we're not talking about unknowable mysteries here, and it does matter eventually, assuming you care about the human race.
So stop and think, from time to time, about how many people are pissing in the pool before being so cavalier about it. You're swimming in the pool whether you like it or not.
As to your comment about evolution vs. genetic modification & cross-pollination causing the resistant weeds, I totally agree. This was bound to happen anyways. Finding new antibiotics, pesticides, etc, will be a endless task.
Of course not -- I don't believe anyone ever does anything out of the kindness of their heart. I have yet to meet a person (even the diehard communists I know) who don't do everything out of self sufficiency and personal profit.
Oh please. I'm fairly tired of this worn out meme. I'm sure you feel pretty elightened saying such things, as though you've pulled back the veil on everyone's bullshit. But it's a meaningless statement. Are you really claiming that every time I've donated to a cause, volunteered or helped out, it was for personal profit? You'd have a damn hard time tracing any of the benefits back to me. Oh sure, I felt good about helping... so I guess that makes it a selfish act? What a shallow and pointless philosophy.
I mean, I get it: everything we do can be traced back to a desire to feel good. But given that, if you can't tell the difference between kindness and selfishness, well, pull your head out of the sand.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never tried standardizing on a language after the fact, so I don't know how that would work. But I am a firm believer that a common language for the development team is a good thing. Much like a common spoken language for the team is a good thing. It encourages code reuse, sharing, and general system understanding. On the occasions that something in our system is written in another language (we had a few C modules from contractors and third parties), it usually ends up being a mystery system and we accept it with it's behavioral limitations or we end up rewriting it in our own language (which happens to be Perl) so we can tweak it as needed.
Of course we actually do use several languages: perl, SQL, DHTML. But each one covers a very specific, non-overlapping domain. I've tried to stay away from having a second language cover the same need in a different way. It's hard enough to keep everything understood and shared as is.
Cheers.
It is fun, which is why I keep coming back :)
But you must admit -- dark matter theory has that ring to it of something stuck in there to explain what we don't quite understand yet. Maybe it'll turn out to be true... but right now it sure seems like the remainder to an imperfect equation.
Cheers.
Don't you think there's an interesting little symmetry there though? We're trying to understand the complexity of the natural world, usually with formulae, but even divorced from the natural world our formulae are known to have limitations. Doesn't this imply that the very concept of description and understanding through formulae is limited? It cuts right through the idea that if we could only pin everything down to a number than it would all make sense (which seemed to be the prevailing theory before Godel, and still has a few proponents today).
Anyways, I'll be looking into the information theory stuff more, but I think Godel's proof applies in a loose way to the concept of the unknowable, even in one of the most purified forms of logic: mathematics.
Cheers.
Ah. Whoops. Guess my sarcasm detector has a few too many scratches on it.
For some definitions of "people", they did think it was flat. I agree that the finer minds knew the earth was round long before Columbus, but I knew a pastor at a local church who once gave an impassioned sermon on how scientists were foolish because they thought the world was round, and he pulled several scriptural references to back up his claims. The majority of the congregation nodded and gave a "Hallelujah". And this was in the 20th century.
People have all sorts of wacky ideas. I'm sure large segements of people throughout history have believed the world was flat. I'm sure small segements of people today think the same thing.
Cheers.
Strangely, I'll have to disagree. I'm a mild Apple fanboy, so don't let's get bent out of shape, but it seems they only care about the appearance until it's sold. The Powerbook G4 has a notorious problem with screen scratches because the tolerance between the screen and the keys is so little. And I've had four Powerbook G4's now -- from the original Titanium to the most recent 17", and they all have the same problem. I am careful and take good care of my stuff, but still get these screen scratches. You'd think they might have addressed this by now?
Then there's the fact that the anodized aluminum wristguard is corroded by skin oils under normal usage. Haven't fixed this either, even though it's been several revisions. Again, this is under normal usage.
Apple makes pretty great products. But in some cases they go form over function and the result is something that's not super durable. Whenever this comes up somebody always says "you should be more careful with it then". Yeah. Thanks for the advice. Apple might want to make their expensive (and nearly perfect) products a little more durable too.
Cheers.
What a coincidence! Did you see the new slashdot article on the flynn effect?
My first thought is that IQ tests are fairly imprecise to start with, and when you're tracking different tests at different times with different peoples... well, I'm not sure I'd believe that there's that much of a difference.
But let's say you're right, improvements to the average IQ have been going up. That doesn't mean that smart people are any smarter. And that's what I'm talking about here.
I admit, the average person stops learning and adapting at some point in their life. The earlier in their life they do this, the worse it would be to plop them into the distant future (or any time, for that matter). But for those who are constant learners, I think they could adapt to the new situation.
Cheers.
Fair enough... I certainly didn't mean to imply that it should be more like Firefly. I like serious stuff too... but Gallactica just doesn't do it for me. Regarding the jingoistic stuff, sure, it's accurate, but I don't get the sense that they offer much insight or color to it. Just the basic "we got attacked, now we're gonna kick their ass". I don't know exactly what I'd prefer to see after such an event, but that response just seems too shallow.
But again, as I always say about art, if you didn't like it, it's not intended for you. I guess the show isn't intended for me. Glad you enjoy it though!
Cheers.
Well, there's no accounting for taste, so don't take anything I say too seriously... but I really don't get Battlestar Gallactica's appeal. I heard many good things so I bought the first season on iTunes. I'm about 3/4 of the way through, and I just don't care to finish it. To be immature about it, it seems like geek TV written by jocks. A little bit starship-troopers-like. It's all jingoistic and the themes are black and white. And it's very hard for me to feel the character's motivations are natural -- they seem like "characters" and not people. It has virtually no sense of humor, and none at all about itself. There's definitely some interesting high-level stuff it explores, like managing a tiny struggling society under those conditions, but none of the personal stuff connects for me, so it just seems hollow.
I don't know... I was really hoping for something I could dig to come along after Firefly got canned.
But if you enjoy it, good for you. I just had to vent my disappointment.
Cheers.
The only point I take exception with is the idea that you'd be a "relative idiot". I think there's a funny tendancy for us to think that over time people become more intelligent. They don't. At least not on the time scale of a few thousand years. I am sure that there were people in ancient Egypt who were brighter and more intellectually ambitions than I. I may have more acquired knowledge in certain modern fields of research, but I can hardly claim much credit for that.
:)
I think if such a person were plopped into our modern day they would, after a degree of struggle, they'd be able to make sense of it.
But the rest of your point is taken. I'd still prefer a chance, I think
Cheers.
Heh. Looks like you've already picked it up, but yes: I was being sarcastic :) In your defense, my post wasn't written as well as it should have been. I actually almost used a similar example to yours where I figured gays should be beaten for five minutes because I thought 0 minutes and my homophobe friend thought 10. But I decided to use a less dramatic example. Though I suppose if the cake was really good it could be dramatic.
But yeah: I'm not sure the enlightened effort these days to include all viewpoints is really a good idea.
Cheers.
I'll defer to your superior math skills, and also mention that I could have worded things more clearly... I started from the assumption that they both wanted as much cake as they could get (i.e. all of it). But that Jill was willing to go halfsies and Jack wasn't. And our enlightened efforts to find the halfway solution can fail us when dealing with unfair viewpoints.
Cheers.
No no! The correct answer is always halfway between the opposing viewpoints! Don't you know that if Jill wants half the cake and Jack wants the whole cake, then the right thing to do is give Jack 3/4? Claiming that one group of people might be right and the others wrong is just unfair!
Cheers.
I think a more accurate view would be that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to end up as programmers and engineers because of the lack of educational opportunities in those areas.
Actually, I think and even more accurate view would be that people tend to want to fit in with those they identify with. Call it cultural inertia, but dumping educational opportunities into poor communities doesn't make as big an impact as one would like to believe. In general, the culture in those areas ridicule intellect and honest ambition. I'll leave it to someone else to hypothesize why it got that way, but the end result is that children from those communities reject becoming like outsiders, as it might feel they are "selling out".
Even if the kids are moved to a better area, if they are recognizably different (e.g. black) they are likely to latch on to others that they see as similar. If that subculture is not education oriented, they won't be either. However, if the child has nobody obvious to identify with on race, they may choose to identify with some other group -- say "nerds" or "jocks" or whatever, and will likely pick up habits and culture from those groups.
It works both ways, as the more intellectual Asian and Jewish cultures tend to maintain their identity even when mixed in with any variety of other cultures with varying degrees of intellectual respect.
I recommend The Nurture Assumption for some insightful thoughts on this topic.
Cheers.
WMP for mac is pretty weak, but it is the only way to play certain files.
Quicktime is a great player -- but there's still several file formats it can't play by default. Mostly MS formats (like their various non-standard MPG4 versions). The plugins require all sorts of gymnastics to get them working on Quicktime. If MS gets someone to make a good, easy to install plugin for Quicktime, that covers all their WMP formats, that would be a good thing.
Cheers.
I've been using the bayes option on spamassassin for the past several years, and I get just about no spam in my inbox. And I get over 500 per day in my spam folder. I get maybe one or two false positives a year, usually business email that I actually wanted. I train on ham and spam regularly with a script. I tweaked the scores of the bayes tests to be more extreme than the default. I don't even think about spam any more.
I think the key is training on personal email, as opposed to doing something systemwide. And with spamassassin, you've got to boost the bayes scores. Here's the important part of my user_prefs:
required_hits 5
# I don't want spamassassin to mistrain my filter!
bayes_auto_learn 0
# I'm going all out with this Bayesian stuff:
score BAYES_00 -2.0
score BAYES_01 -2.0
score BAYES_10 -1.0
score BAYES_20 -1.0
score BAYES_30 -1.0
score BAYES_40 -1.0
score BAYES_44 -1.0
score BAYES_50 5.0
score BAYES_56 5.0
score BAYES_60 5.0
score BAYES_70 5.0
score BAYES_80 6.0
score BAYES_90 6.0
score BAYES_95 7.0
score BAYES_99 7.0
But you 've got to train it a lot first... after that the maintenance is easy. So as far as I'm concerned, spam is solved. Maybe not for everyone, bur for me.
Cheers.
Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed.
And usually incorrectly to boot! I agree with your statement in theory, but in practice I think it rarely works well. The subtle human interactions that result in the need for morality are easy to miss. Seems that in most cases someone tragically oversimplifies things and then does their cost/benefit analysis. I mean, how do you measure "the human cost"? Or "abstract political gain"? It's not quantitative, that's for sure.
Sometimes things turn out fine anyways, but I think it's a stretch to call such stuff "science".
Cheers.
But they're _not_ black or brown. In the case of chimps, they're caucasian colored, with straight brown hair all over their bodies, just like caucasions. Africans have less body hair, and what hair they have is curly. I mean, it's a bit ridiculous to argue about who looks more like an ape, but I'm just saying it's not clear to me that any race is more like an ape than any other.
Cheers.
blacks were often likened to monkeys and apes
Which even from the perspective of a racist seemingly makes no sense, since many apes have white skin, and they all seem to have straight hair, oftentimes brown. Ridiculous as it is in either case, it makes just as much sense for black folks to call white folks monkeys or apes, so I'm not sure how this particular idiocy got started. I guess it just demostrates a little more ignorance and stupidity on the part of those making such comparisons.
Cheers
Was anyone else shocked by the prediciton at the bottom that Apple might be dropping Firewire? I mean, Firewire isn't that popular for general use, but the areas where it is used it is the only game in town, really. My Firewire 800 HD is wonderfully fast, the audio breakout boxes for recording multitrack, and 1394 support is built in to nearly every video camera. USB can do some of this stuff in a less consistent way, but Firewire is pretty much the professional connection, no? I would be quite sad if Apple gave it up.
Cheers.
I hear you. I'm not saying that ideas aren't powerful, or that they can't have terrible consequences. I think that in the cases of USSR and Germany, things started with large scale desperation and an easy bullshit idea presented by a charismatic leader. The ideas may have been wrong or bad... but I think that it wasn't until they grew so powerful and fearful that they started squashing other ideas that things truly got out of control. So I guess I'm saying that the moment one ideology tries to silence another is the point where it's gone too far. This is usually the same point where the ideology starts thinking about violence.
As to fighting World War II, we weren't fighting an idea. We were fighting violent aggressors. In fact, the ideas of World War II are still alive and well and protected by US law. As long as they don't try to shut anyone up, they can think and say what they want.
I oppose many ideas. And I believe in defense. But opposing an idea with aggression is the seed of nearly all evil.
Cheers.
I would argue that it wasn't their ideas that were dangerous, rather it was their own fear of dissenting ideas that was. Both Stalin and Hitler spent an enormous amount of energy sliencing people who didn't agree. I think Dan's point was that silencing ideas is always more dangerous than letting them fly. I tend to agree.
Cheers.
No reason to think that a larger animal has a larger brain... elephants and whales still have smaller brains than ours. King Kong needn't be an exception.
I don't know where you draw the line between "greenie environmentalists" and people like myself -- who understand that in a closed system you can only fuck with your resources so much before you fuck yourself. I agree there's a lot of chicken-little-sky-is-falling going on. There are extremes in every group. But I take greater exception to those who think we can plow ahead with resource consumption and contamination and never pay a price.
I mean, it's not impossible to contruct a formula that would tell us how much of a given resource we can consume without upsetting the ecosystem. (I'm guessing the word ecosystem makes you cringe). Here's an example: at the extremes, cutting down only a million trees per year is probably fine, cutting down a trillion per year is probably not. Do you know why? Because by my rough calculations there's less than 2 trillion trees in the world. I don't have any idea the rate at which we're cutting down trees, so maybe there's no problem. But I bet most people form their opinions on the topic of deforestation without any data. Did you have any guess as to the number of trees in the world before I threw out my estimate? Do you have any idea of the rate of deforestation (I don't)? Isn't that strange? We do need these things for oxygen among other things.
I don't know anything about tree reproduction rates or biodiversity needs. So who's going to do the research and tell me what's sustainable? So far all I hear is people shouting "not one more tree" or "cut at will" without anything but ideology to back up their stance. Seems a bit foolish to me. I wonder whether those who go around using phrases like "greenie environmentalists" care. But we're not talking about unknowable mysteries here, and it does matter eventually, assuming you care about the human race.
So stop and think, from time to time, about how many people are pissing in the pool before being so cavalier about it. You're swimming in the pool whether you like it or not.
As to your comment about evolution vs. genetic modification & cross-pollination causing the resistant weeds, I totally agree. This was bound to happen anyways. Finding new antibiotics, pesticides, etc, will be a endless task.
Cheers.
Of course not -- I don't believe anyone ever does anything out of the kindness of their heart. I have yet to meet a person (even the diehard communists I know) who don't do everything out of self sufficiency and personal profit.
Oh please. I'm fairly tired of this worn out meme. I'm sure you feel pretty elightened saying such things, as though you've pulled back the veil on everyone's bullshit. But it's a meaningless statement. Are you really claiming that every time I've donated to a cause, volunteered or helped out, it was for personal profit? You'd have a damn hard time tracing any of the benefits back to me. Oh sure, I felt good about helping... so I guess that makes it a selfish act? What a shallow and pointless philosophy.
I mean, I get it: everything we do can be traced back to a desire to feel good. But given that, if you can't tell the difference between kindness and selfishness, well, pull your head out of the sand.
Cheers.