The earth doesn't need saving from asteroids, it's survived asteroid impacts for 4 billion years. Humans are what we need to save from asteroid impacts and the simplest solution to this problem seems to me to be to move off of objects that routinely get struck by asteroids (the earth) and onto something a tad bit more maneuverable (like an asteroid)
"If a company truly hid flaws in their drugs/devices intentionally..."
They're "hidden" so... yea... anyway, here's one that's a little more obvious: http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com/Materials-Formulation/CFC-ban-will-double-albuterol-inhaler-market-in-US Guess who lobbied the FDA to ban CFC's in albuterol inhalers... let me give you a hint... it wasn't environmentalists. The hole in the ozone layer completely closed in December of 2000 (didn't really make the news, funny eh?) It's still coming and going but for the most part the ozone layer is returning. The amount of CFCs being released into the atmosphere are low enough now that they are not having the impact they once did. Asthma inhalers certainly are not a major problem. They were banned purely for the profit of the drug companies.
"Insurers DO NOT LIKE extra testing. " Of course they do. You have no idea what these tests cost. My father was a technician for lab equipment, and the vast majority of tests done cost the healthcare provider under $1. The blood gets put in a device, a disposable test kit is also plugged in, the machine spins, and spits out a result. The test kit has whatever the blood is supposed to react with. The standard tests are done so frequently the labs buy the kits in bulk and get them for around 60 cents a test.
So lets go over our usual illness. You don't feel well, so you schedule an appointment. They set it up for 30min, little do you know they are triple booking you. The doctor sees 3-4 patients at the same time just like your dentist does. They have nurses (ok, not really nurses usually) that rotate from room to room to keep you busy by taking your blood pressure and weight and other completely useless tests. Then the doctor comes in... wait, did we mention yet that the doctor probably isn't even a doctor? Oh yea, you get a "Physicians Assistant" instead. So now there's a doctor on staff, managing half a dozen P.A.'s who are each seeing 3 patients per half hour, and each patient is paying a $20-$30 copay. The insurer knows that most illnesses go away on their own in less than 4 weeks. So they send you down for lab tests. You might have a co-pay on that to. You were likely in the office for less than 15min, didn't even see a real doctor, and the person you did see saw 2-3 other people at the same time. The HMO just got between $60 and $100 in co-pays for 15min of work and a couple of 60cent lab tests that they knew all along would come back negative. If you're still sick when the results come back a week later they collect some more co-pays and send you back for more pointless tests. If you come back again, now you've paid almost $100 in co-pays so they figure, ah... we'll do a real test now, you must really be sick or something. Maybe the P.A. will finally mention you to the real doctor at this point...
Ban HMOs. We'd be half way to solving our healthcare problem.
These are not self replicating and can't adjust their own code. If they can, however, build a machine that builds more smartsand, then we may have a problem.
This question is irrelevant. The real question is: should people be able to spend their money in any way they chose, even if what they spend it on is pointless. If you think that we should be living in a free society then yes, people should be able to spend their money on a $100k cancer treatment that only has a 5% chance of giving them another year to live. It's their money.
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing for a few very simple reasons: 1. a terrible patent system that gives companies exclusive rights to certain drugs, chemicals and procedures when often that company did little to develop what they patented. 2. a terrible legal oversight system in which these same companies can hide flaws in their drug/device until the patent is about to expire, then leak the information, get the drug/device banned and immediately release an alternative under a new patent, there-by allowing them to extend their patents almost forever. 3. The marriage of the insurance and medical industries via the HMO/PPO networks. Now the doctors basically work for the insurer. The insurer demands test after test, sending the patient back and forth between doctors and specialists so they can collect as many co-pays as possible before treating. Closed Pharmacy plans force patients to buy from the HMOs pharmacy which conveniently does not carry many alternative drugs, and the patients are forced into buying drugs with a high co-pay or buying outside the network which, again, comes with a high co-pay. 4. Add all of the above to the simple fact that it's human nature to want to live forever. They have what you need to live, they are the only ones allowed to sell it to you by law. They control the means to get it, the amount you can get, when you can get it and the price. That right there is the ultimate situation to ensure price gouging.
I've not seen a single point I've made above addressed by congress. The simple fact is they are in the pocket of the healthcare industry, any plan that our government has regarding healthcare you can be sure will do nothing but make it even more profitable for the industry.
Well, I'm guessing it depends on how the logging and notification part of the app works and how those features are implemented. We've got a rather large vendor that needs to pull mail from one of our servers. They have a process that does this. If the process fails it logs this. If it fails 100x it a row, it logs that to. They don't send us these logs, they don't call us. We have no idea that the process has failed. It's implemented in the stupidest way possible. I basically had to write my own process that checks to see if we've gotten any data from them in the past couple of hours, and if not it sends out alerts so we can call them and they say "Oh hey, looky there!" But we shouldn't have to do that. But the vendor has absolutely refused to do anything more about the notification process telling us its technically not possible. Which is an outright lie... they really want us to use their email service instead of our own, they charge ridiculous fees for it.. we aren't going to pay for that so they are making the solution we did chose as difficult as possible. Yes, I know we should get a new vendor, but as you likely all know it's a lot more complicated than that.
Over the past year or so I've worked myself into being the technical lead on a bunch of projects, and being an open-source kind of guy in a company that's heavily reliant on many closed source solutions that have not treated us very well in the past I've been pushing for our new contracts, when we're hiring someone to write something for us, to stipulate that the vendor is write code for us, and we get the code... and compile it ourselves. We've had a number of projects where some company wrote us software, and very commonly then jacked up their prices once we were dependent on their software and wanted to modify it. Less commonly, but much worse, sometimes when we'd go back to the vendor for modifications they'd be out of business and we'd basically have to scrap the entire system to make a change. Which we of course wouldn't want to do... so then we'd be stuck using something written all wrong for the processes we're implementing now. Oh how I miss the days when management didn't change business practices every 3 months.
If thieves only targeted a certain model of car because it was very popular and therefor the parts valuable (which is actually the case) you would still be doing yourself a favor by avoiding that model of car, even if you were diligent about where you parked it and buying a security system for it.
But megaupload didn't chose to do that did they? A foreign government did it for them. Just imagine if some non-western country had done something like this to a site as big as megaupload... We've prolly already be bombing someone.
You already are a data point. You've no idea how sophisticated the software that monitors what you do has gotten. I was recently involved in an integration with some of this sort of software on a site that gets a couple of million hits a day. It's amazing what they can do. If you go to a website, they will, regardless of your desires, browser settings, even proxies, know exactly what you do while there, and if you come back. They then share all this with other companies to build a profile of you. The simple fact that you say you don't want to be tracked ironically gives them an excuse to track you. They have to log your desire to not be tracked right? Then the store all your website activity by other methods, like IP Address, browser, OS, and a hundred other data points.... which builds a profile of you, without building a profile of you. They can claim this is just standard logging for security. Then, if you ever enter your email address or phone number on the site, they make the convenient assumption that you've changed your mind about your privacy. And here's the kicker, they don't just assume you've changed your mind going forward, they assume you've change your mind about the past to! So they drag up all your past traffic and attach it to your email address. Everything you do on the web is tracked and logged in excruciating detail by marketing departments all over the world. So far we're lucky that the government hasn't gotten access to this data yet, but it's only a matter of time.
My home security consists of: 2 of these http://www.offroaders.com/directory/animals/images/Labrador_Retriever_chocolate_named_Hershey-s.jpg + 1 of these http://www.leadslingerarmory.com/assets/images/Springfield/xd-tactical-bitone.jpg
Not really, the pirated versions of all these games work just fine without an internet connection. The only people suffering are the paying customers, and who really cares about them?
Yes, because no other news networks cater to their particular audience at the expense of any real journalism.
If you want real news, you need to go out an find it for yourself. If the internets taught us anything it's that what the media has been feeding us for the past couple of hundred years was carefully orchestrated to sell us more news... not provide the news we needed.
I didn't address my conception of freedom of speech in my post. I addressed how meaningless it was to have freedom of speech in an environment in which our political leaders are basically had picked for us and completely ignore everything we say. There is absolutely no difference between our 2 political parties. Irrelevent of who is elected in the next presidential election, our president, whomever they may end up being, will do the exact same thing. We'll invade the same countries, we'll spend the same amount of money on projects that will go no-where.
No there wouldn't. We didn't PAY for the wars. We borrowed the money. Even if we hadn't waged any of the wars we've had since the first gulf war we wouldn't have any more money, because we never paid for any of them, we just stuck them on the national debt. We are currently 15.5 trillion dollars in dept. Your share is $50k. Think about that.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean much when your political leaders don't listen to it. In China, they simply delete information they do not want to address. In the United states they ignore it, or more often then not, drowned it out by creating fake controversies. I know, lets drag some athletes in front of congress to talk about steroids as if anyone cared. Or pretend like they have the power to ban some music. How about we get some hedge fund managers to take the 5th over and over again while congressmen pretend like they aren't taking money under the table from them at the same time? It's ridiculous. And now the president can even order a US citizens death without judicial review. How are we all that different than China? Oh that's right, we're in debt up to our eyeballs, have no potential for future growth and want to fund free healthcare, free internet and trains no-one will ride with money we don't have... that's how we're different.
Actually there's an entire culture of "Christian intellectuals" that often discuss the relationship between science and God. The popes even got a physicist on staff that's also a priest. He does interviews. Anyway, the general idea on this front is this:
Before the whole "war on heaven" business, Satan was a good guy if you remember. He was given dominion over the earth. When God decided to give "grace" to humanity (basically meaning humanity could disobey him and still receive his forgiveness) Satan got pissed and turned. Well, the idea is that the bible is very specific that Satan was given dominion over the earth... so much so that it sounds like other angels had dominion over other areas... other planets maybe?
Species go extinct all the time. And despite what many would lead you to believe the cause isn't usually humanity. Not only is it possible for us to go extinct, there were many other human-like creatures that died out in the past few thousand years. We are the last of our kind, granted there are a lot of us... but the possibility of a disease showing up that wipes us out is a very real possibility. Our only hope is science and medicine. Things we are just beginning to understand.
lol, you're finding someone to hate, and you don't even know who they are. You're talking about oil futures... and you don't have a clue what they are. I'll spell it out for you since you're too lazy to go look it up.
Oil producers produce oil. They don't store it, they don't refine it, they can't sit on it until the price is good. They want to hedge their bets. So, they know that next month they will produce 1000 barrels of oil (made up number for our purposes) the price of oil could be anywhere from $50/barrel to $150/barrel next month. It all depends on a zillion factors. So they sell an Oil "future" You can buy next months oil now. Everyone start bidding. So the market bids for that 1000 barrels. I think oil prices will be about $120/barrel next month... so I'm willing to pay $100/barrel. You think the price will be $70... you're only willing to pay $50... so I win the bid and get the oil future....
Now here's the part where you're and idiot. Next month, when it's time to sell my oil, guess what... I have NO CONTROL over the price. It comes out of the ground and gets shipped... and sells for what refineries are willing to pay. I get whatever I get. If it's over $100/barrel I profit... if it's bellow I lose money. My "speculation" had absolutely no affect on the price of oil.
You don't know what you're talking about. Trees are good as habitat, and for erosion... but CO2? The vast, vast majority of CO2 absorbed is done so by algae in the oceans. Trees are barely a blip. Pines grow fast and burn easily which enriches the soil. Clearly you dont live anywhere where there's a forest but when you do... there are fires. The pines burn quickly. The oaks survive... the pines leave ash which makes the soil less acidic and acts as fertilizer. Most pinecones only open when heated by fire... that's evolution for you. The phoenix trees.
We bought 160 acres of densely forested land a while back. The only part not wooded were a few acres at the front that had been used as farmland. One summer we rented a tree planter, pulled it behind a tractor and in a matter of 3 days planted 70,000 trees. (they're really cheap when you buy them in that volume) We also raised turkeys and released them into the wild (illegally) and brought the wild turkey back to the county in question over a period of 10 years or so. As we put out more and more broods the neighbors started getting involved. Some of our neighbors started gathering roadkill and leaving them in piles in strategically placed areas with pre-made nesting boxes... now we have bald eagles. I'm not sure where the bears and cougars came from but I'm sure there are similar stories involving them that I don't know about. The simple fact is, as a child growing up in the 70's, there were NO big game animals in that area besides deer. There were a few grouse and pheasant but that was about it. Now the countryside is so rife with wildlife we're starting to have problems with Car+bear accidents. It's an amazing change. If there's one thing the USA has got going for it, it's the return of the wilderness.
Well, assuming you mean the christian afterlife, you die... and are very really dead, just as atheists believe. The afterlife awaits the rapture, when God will raise the dead to sit with him in heaven. So technically, you'd take your resurrected body and its memories with you into heaven.
Living in the area affected, I can attest that it's been an unusually warm winter. It's been pretty terrible since I have dogs... instead of nice frozen ground its been mud all winter long. It's not just been warm this month, it's been very warm all winter.
BUT... this is not odd at all. We live next to 3 of the largest freshwater seas in the world. The weather in this area is freakish and unpredictable. It's not unusual for us to get snow in the summer, or a random 75 degree day in December followed by -30 the next. The weathers fucking weird next to the great lakes... nothing new here.
Slashdot Mirror
The earth doesn't need saving from asteroids, it's survived asteroid impacts for 4 billion years. Humans are what we need to save from asteroid impacts and the simplest solution to this problem seems to me to be to move off of objects that routinely get struck by asteroids (the earth) and onto something a tad bit more maneuverable (like an asteroid)
"If a company truly hid flaws in their drugs/devices intentionally..."
They're "hidden" so... yea...
anyway, here's one that's a little more obvious: http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com/Materials-Formulation/CFC-ban-will-double-albuterol-inhaler-market-in-US
Guess who lobbied the FDA to ban CFC's in albuterol inhalers... let me give you a hint... it wasn't environmentalists. The hole in the ozone layer completely closed in December of 2000 (didn't really make the news, funny eh?) It's still coming and going but for the most part the ozone layer is returning. The amount of CFCs being released into the atmosphere are low enough now that they are not having the impact they once did. Asthma inhalers certainly are not a major problem. They were banned purely for the profit of the drug companies.
"Insurers DO NOT LIKE extra testing. "
Of course they do. You have no idea what these tests cost. My father was a technician for lab equipment, and the vast majority of tests done cost the healthcare provider under $1. The blood gets put in a device, a disposable test kit is also plugged in, the machine spins, and spits out a result. The test kit has whatever the blood is supposed to react with. The standard tests are done so frequently the labs buy the kits in bulk and get them for around 60 cents a test.
So lets go over our usual illness. You don't feel well, so you schedule an appointment. They set it up for 30min, little do you know they are triple booking you. The doctor sees 3-4 patients at the same time just like your dentist does. They have nurses (ok, not really nurses usually) that rotate from room to room to keep you busy by taking your blood pressure and weight and other completely useless tests. Then the doctor comes in... wait, did we mention yet that the doctor probably isn't even a doctor? Oh yea, you get a "Physicians Assistant" instead. So now there's a doctor on staff, managing half a dozen P.A.'s who are each seeing 3 patients per half hour, and each patient is paying a $20-$30 copay. The insurer knows that most illnesses go away on their own in less than 4 weeks. So they send you down for lab tests. You might have a co-pay on that to. You were likely in the office for less than 15min, didn't even see a real doctor, and the person you did see saw 2-3 other people at the same time. The HMO just got between $60 and $100 in co-pays for 15min of work and a couple of 60cent lab tests that they knew all along would come back negative. If you're still sick when the results come back a week later they collect some more co-pays and send you back for more pointless tests. If you come back again, now you've paid almost $100 in co-pays so they figure, ah... we'll do a real test now, you must really be sick or something. Maybe the P.A. will finally mention you to the real doctor at this point...
Ban HMOs. We'd be half way to solving our healthcare problem.
These are not self replicating and can't adjust their own code. If they can, however, build a machine that builds more smartsand, then we may have a problem.
This question is irrelevant. The real question is: should people be able to spend their money in any way they chose, even if what they spend it on is pointless. If you think that we should be living in a free society then yes, people should be able to spend their money on a $100k cancer treatment that only has a 5% chance of giving them another year to live. It's their money.
Healthcare costs are skyrocketing for a few very simple reasons:
1. a terrible patent system that gives companies exclusive rights to certain drugs, chemicals and procedures when often that company did little to develop what they patented.
2. a terrible legal oversight system in which these same companies can hide flaws in their drug/device until the patent is about to expire, then leak the information, get the drug/device banned and immediately release an alternative under a new patent, there-by allowing them to extend their patents almost forever.
3. The marriage of the insurance and medical industries via the HMO/PPO networks. Now the doctors basically work for the insurer. The insurer demands test after test, sending the patient back and forth between doctors and specialists so they can collect as many co-pays as possible before treating. Closed Pharmacy plans force patients to buy from the HMOs pharmacy which conveniently does not carry many alternative drugs, and the patients are forced into buying drugs with a high co-pay or buying outside the network which, again, comes with a high co-pay.
4. Add all of the above to the simple fact that it's human nature to want to live forever. They have what you need to live, they are the only ones allowed to sell it to you by law. They control the means to get it, the amount you can get, when you can get it and the price. That right there is the ultimate situation to ensure price gouging.
I've not seen a single point I've made above addressed by congress. The simple fact is they are in the pocket of the healthcare industry, any plan that our government has regarding healthcare you can be sure will do nothing but make it even more profitable for the industry.
Well, I'm guessing it depends on how the logging and notification part of the app works and how those features are implemented. We've got a rather large vendor that needs to pull mail from one of our servers. They have a process that does this. If the process fails it logs this. If it fails 100x it a row, it logs that to. They don't send us these logs, they don't call us. We have no idea that the process has failed. It's implemented in the stupidest way possible. I basically had to write my own process that checks to see if we've gotten any data from them in the past couple of hours, and if not it sends out alerts so we can call them and they say "Oh hey, looky there!" But we shouldn't have to do that. But the vendor has absolutely refused to do anything more about the notification process telling us its technically not possible. Which is an outright lie... they really want us to use their email service instead of our own, they charge ridiculous fees for it.. we aren't going to pay for that so they are making the solution we did chose as difficult as possible. Yes, I know we should get a new vendor, but as you likely all know it's a lot more complicated than that.
Over the past year or so I've worked myself into being the technical lead on a bunch of projects, and being an open-source kind of guy in a company that's heavily reliant on many closed source solutions that have not treated us very well in the past I've been pushing for our new contracts, when we're hiring someone to write something for us, to stipulate that the vendor is write code for us, and we get the code... and compile it ourselves. We've had a number of projects where some company wrote us software, and very commonly then jacked up their prices once we were dependent on their software and wanted to modify it. Less commonly, but much worse, sometimes when we'd go back to the vendor for modifications they'd be out of business and we'd basically have to scrap the entire system to make a change. Which we of course wouldn't want to do... so then we'd be stuck using something written all wrong for the processes we're implementing now. Oh how I miss the days when management didn't change business practices every 3 months.
If thieves only targeted a certain model of car because it was very popular and therefor the parts valuable (which is actually the case) you would still be doing yourself a favor by avoiding that model of car, even if you were diligent about where you parked it and buying a security system for it.
But megaupload didn't chose to do that did they? A foreign government did it for them. Just imagine if some non-western country had done something like this to a site as big as megaupload... We've prolly already be bombing someone.
You already are a data point. You've no idea how sophisticated the software that monitors what you do has gotten. I was recently involved in an integration with some of this sort of software on a site that gets a couple of million hits a day. It's amazing what they can do. If you go to a website, they will, regardless of your desires, browser settings, even proxies, know exactly what you do while there, and if you come back. They then share all this with other companies to build a profile of you. The simple fact that you say you don't want to be tracked ironically gives them an excuse to track you. They have to log your desire to not be tracked right? Then the store all your website activity by other methods, like IP Address, browser, OS, and a hundred other data points.... which builds a profile of you, without building a profile of you. They can claim this is just standard logging for security. Then, if you ever enter your email address or phone number on the site, they make the convenient assumption that you've changed your mind about your privacy. And here's the kicker, they don't just assume you've changed your mind going forward, they assume you've change your mind about the past to! So they drag up all your past traffic and attach it to your email address. Everything you do on the web is tracked and logged in excruciating detail by marketing departments all over the world. So far we're lucky that the government hasn't gotten access to this data yet, but it's only a matter of time.
My home security consists of:
2 of these
http://www.offroaders.com/directory/animals/images/Labrador_Retriever_chocolate_named_Hershey-s.jpg
+
1 of these
http://www.leadslingerarmory.com/assets/images/Springfield/xd-tactical-bitone.jpg
Why is fertilizer an "unsustainable farming method"?
Not really, the pirated versions of all these games work just fine without an internet connection. The only people suffering are the paying customers, and who really cares about them?
Yes, because no other news networks cater to their particular audience at the expense of any real journalism.
If you want real news, you need to go out an find it for yourself. If the internets taught us anything it's that what the media has been feeding us for the past couple of hundred years was carefully orchestrated to sell us more news... not provide the news we needed.
I didn't address my conception of freedom of speech in my post. I addressed how meaningless it was to have freedom of speech in an environment in which our political leaders are basically had picked for us and completely ignore everything we say. There is absolutely no difference between our 2 political parties. Irrelevent of who is elected in the next presidential election, our president, whomever they may end up being, will do the exact same thing. We'll invade the same countries, we'll spend the same amount of money on projects that will go no-where.
No there wouldn't. We didn't PAY for the wars. We borrowed the money. Even if we hadn't waged any of the wars we've had since the first gulf war we wouldn't have any more money, because we never paid for any of them, we just stuck them on the national debt. We are currently 15.5 trillion dollars in dept. Your share is $50k. Think about that.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean much when your political leaders don't listen to it. In China, they simply delete information they do not want to address. In the United states they ignore it, or more often then not, drowned it out by creating fake controversies. I know, lets drag some athletes in front of congress to talk about steroids as if anyone cared. Or pretend like they have the power to ban some music. How about we get some hedge fund managers to take the 5th over and over again while congressmen pretend like they aren't taking money under the table from them at the same time? It's ridiculous. And now the president can even order a US citizens death without judicial review. How are we all that different than China? Oh that's right, we're in debt up to our eyeballs, have no potential for future growth and want to fund free healthcare, free internet and trains no-one will ride with money we don't have... that's how we're different.
Watch, we get down there and the things 100 feet deep in oil....
Because Obama would NEVER invade or attempt to topple a government right?
Actually there's an entire culture of "Christian intellectuals" that often discuss the relationship between science and God. The popes even got a physicist on staff that's also a priest. He does interviews. Anyway, the general idea on this front is this:
Before the whole "war on heaven" business, Satan was a good guy if you remember. He was given dominion over the earth. When God decided to give "grace" to humanity (basically meaning humanity could disobey him and still receive his forgiveness) Satan got pissed and turned. Well, the idea is that the bible is very specific that Satan was given dominion over the earth... so much so that it sounds like other angels had dominion over other areas... other planets maybe?
Species go extinct all the time. And despite what many would lead you to believe the cause isn't usually humanity. Not only is it possible for us to go extinct, there were many other human-like creatures that died out in the past few thousand years. We are the last of our kind, granted there are a lot of us... but the possibility of a disease showing up that wipes us out is a very real possibility. Our only hope is science and medicine. Things we are just beginning to understand.
lol, you're finding someone to hate, and you don't even know who they are. You're talking about oil futures... and you don't have a clue what they are. I'll spell it out for you since you're too lazy to go look it up.
Oil producers produce oil. They don't store it, they don't refine it, they can't sit on it until the price is good. They want to hedge their bets. So, they know that next month they will produce 1000 barrels of oil (made up number for our purposes) the price of oil could be anywhere from $50/barrel to $150/barrel next month. It all depends on a zillion factors. So they sell an Oil "future" You can buy next months oil now. Everyone start bidding. So the market bids for that 1000 barrels. I think oil prices will be about $120/barrel next month... so I'm willing to pay $100/barrel. You think the price will be $70... you're only willing to pay $50... so I win the bid and get the oil future....
Now here's the part where you're and idiot. Next month, when it's time to sell my oil, guess what... I have NO CONTROL over the price. It comes out of the ground and gets shipped... and sells for what refineries are willing to pay. I get whatever I get. If it's over $100/barrel I profit... if it's bellow I lose money. My "speculation" had absolutely no affect on the price of oil.
You don't know what you're talking about. Trees are good as habitat, and for erosion... but CO2? The vast, vast majority of CO2 absorbed is done so by algae in the oceans. Trees are barely a blip. Pines grow fast and burn easily which enriches the soil. Clearly you dont live anywhere where there's a forest but when you do... there are fires. The pines burn quickly. The oaks survive... the pines leave ash which makes the soil less acidic and acts as fertilizer. Most pinecones only open when heated by fire... that's evolution for you. The phoenix trees.
We bought 160 acres of densely forested land a while back. The only part not wooded were a few acres at the front that had been used as farmland. One summer we rented a tree planter, pulled it behind a tractor and in a matter of 3 days planted 70,000 trees. (they're really cheap when you buy them in that volume) We also raised turkeys and released them into the wild (illegally) and brought the wild turkey back to the county in question over a period of 10 years or so. As we put out more and more broods the neighbors started getting involved. Some of our neighbors started gathering roadkill and leaving them in piles in strategically placed areas with pre-made nesting boxes... now we have bald eagles. I'm not sure where the bears and cougars came from but I'm sure there are similar stories involving them that I don't know about. The simple fact is, as a child growing up in the 70's, there were NO big game animals in that area besides deer. There were a few grouse and pheasant but that was about it. Now the countryside is so rife with wildlife we're starting to have problems with Car+bear accidents. It's an amazing change. If there's one thing the USA has got going for it, it's the return of the wilderness.
Well, assuming you mean the christian afterlife, you die... and are very really dead, just as atheists believe. The afterlife awaits the rapture, when God will raise the dead to sit with him in heaven. So technically, you'd take your resurrected body and its memories with you into heaven.
Living in the area affected, I can attest that it's been an unusually warm winter. It's been pretty terrible since I have dogs... instead of nice frozen ground its been mud all winter long. It's not just been warm this month, it's been very warm all winter.
BUT... this is not odd at all. We live next to 3 of the largest freshwater seas in the world. The weather in this area is freakish and unpredictable. It's not unusual for us to get snow in the summer, or a random 75 degree day in December followed by -30 the next. The weathers fucking weird next to the great lakes... nothing new here.