I thought you were joking but then I realized you're probably just not very smart. Have a look at your Social Contract, you agreed to it by being born.
I used to live in Toronto and they had a program where paper and meat could be composted, along with a whole bunch of other surprising things. Worth looking at the list http://www.toronto.ca/greenbin/card.htm
The compost all went into a small bin and the smell was pretty minimal: It fills up really fast, and the mould and bacteria get to work right away. Where I live now there is no municipal composting and my garbage can stinks all the time (it's amazing how bad a chicken bone can smell).
Works really well in a densely populated area, but what about small cities (5-50k people) where the philosophy of competition is not as readily applied?
If company A does a bad job providing a service, that creates an opportunity for company B to provide a superior service and make a profit; in turn, that encourages company A to improve its service standards in order to stay in business. The consumer benefits from the competition. In a rational world, bad companies would go out of business and the remainder would provide a competitively superior quality of service at a price and quantity that is appropriate to the community they serve.
If, on the other hand, company B does not exist there is a problem. It can be argued that an opportunity exists for some entrepreneur to create company B and everyone lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in smaller communities quite often "some entrepreneur" is... you. Until things get really bad, the community will bear with poor/overpriced products.
So, if I live in a small city, my choices of garbage collection service providers might be Bob Down the Street, or Nobody. I would have to commission my own landfill (you're not suggesting landfill sites be regulated, surely?!), mortgage a truck, train and hire staff, and solicit business in a town of 5000. Then begins the long battle against Bob Down the Street Who Everybody Knows and Who Picked Up Mom's Garbage All Her Life. It is simply not profitable for me to go to such extremes unless the barrier to entry is extremely low.
Fair enough - as long as you also admit at the same time that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. In any case, what we know now is what we know. We can't keep doubting it for no reason. When some reason comes long, then we'll see if it needs correcting. Till then, let's have faith in what we know so far.
If you knew the shape of the knowledge, you would already be on your way to obtaining the knowledge.
The best science is done on the premise that nothing is impossible. I wouldn't be so quick to uphold the "laws of the universe" because they're historically very fragile.
I think scientific research has been deified throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, and uncountable atrocities have been committed in the name of science. I wonder if the dispassionate and sometimes unwitting nature of those atrocities makes them morally better or worse than the passionate crimes committed by people filled with religious fervour.
Don't you think rationalization and denial are functions of human nature?
It's easy to lay the evils of humanity at the doorstep of organized religion, but I think people manage cruelty just as well without it. Rationalization and denial are as thoroughly ingrained in secular thinking. In the absence of religion, science becomes god and the same problems persist.
When I lived in the UK, I was shocked to discover that everyone who owned a TV had to pay a £135.50/year "television tax" and that this only gave them something like 4 BBC channels and nothing else. If you had some form of cable or satellite, you still had to pay the fee even if you didn't use the BBC channels. I couldn't imagine how this system could be successful -- surely there was mass outrage and a blatant general disregarded for the rules! On the other hand, it made for excellent quality, commercial free programming. I would pay the same to get those channels here in Canada (not the wannabe BBC Canada version), and the natives seemed generally quite content to pay the fee.
Admittedly, we pay a lot of tax in Canada. As someone so astutely pointed out, we are vey good at it. I imagine that the perspective of many commenting from the US goes something like: "Another tax! What's next, a health care tax!? hahaha, those Canadians will never learn." Except taxes aren't always bad things. We tend to feel more comfortable paying taxes to support things like welfare programs and public healthcare even if we never use them because we realize that other people who live here do. Some people never have kids, does that mean they shouldn't have to pay tax to support education? We have already made that decision over and over, and that's why I live here and not in the Excited States of America.
Imagine that, instead of having to purchase your music from iTunes or steal it from IRC, you could go to a central repository where all the music was stored. Click the artist name, see all their albums. Click the album, see all the songs. Click the song and download. And, true to form, our astonishingly large bureaucracy would aggressively regulate this fee, which is what we pay them to do. Regulate things. I like the idea and I think it could work.
It makes perfect sense if you consider that the costs of rebuilding the energy infrastructure to use solar power as a primary resource are likely higher than the costs of increasing the overall efficiency of hydrocarbon-based energy systems. The best way to ease into a more eco-friendly approach to energy production is with a blend of new, renewable technologies, and modifications to existing technologies to make them more efficient (like this one). After all, it is easier to ask someone to buy a can of gasoline "recovered" from CO2 emissions than to ask them to buy a new experimental solar-powered car.
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I thought you were joking but then I realized you're probably just not very smart. Have a look at your Social Contract, you agreed to it by being born.
I used to live in Toronto and they had a program where paper and meat could be composted, along with a whole bunch of other surprising things. Worth looking at the list http://www.toronto.ca/greenbin/card.htm
The compost all went into a small bin and the smell was pretty minimal: It fills up really fast, and the mould and bacteria get to work right away. Where I live now there is no municipal composting and my garbage can stinks all the time (it's amazing how bad a chicken bone can smell).
Works really well in a densely populated area, but what about small cities (5-50k people) where the philosophy of competition is not as readily applied?
If company A does a bad job providing a service, that creates an opportunity for company B to provide a superior service and make a profit; in turn, that encourages company A to improve its service standards in order to stay in business. The consumer benefits from the competition. In a rational world, bad companies would go out of business and the remainder would provide a competitively superior quality of service at a price and quantity that is appropriate to the community they serve.
If, on the other hand, company B does not exist there is a problem. It can be argued that an opportunity exists for some entrepreneur to create company B and everyone lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in smaller communities quite often "some entrepreneur" is... you. Until things get really bad, the community will bear with poor/overpriced products.
So, if I live in a small city, my choices of garbage collection service providers might be Bob Down the Street, or Nobody. I would have to commission my own landfill (you're not suggesting landfill sites be regulated, surely?!), mortgage a truck, train and hire staff, and solicit business in a town of 5000. Then begins the long battle against Bob Down the Street Who Everybody Knows and Who Picked Up Mom's Garbage All Her Life. It is simply not profitable for me to go to such extremes unless the barrier to entry is extremely low.
Fair enough - as long as you also admit at the same time that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. In any case, what we know now is what we know. We can't keep doubting it for no reason. When some reason comes long, then we'll see if it needs correcting. Till then, let's have faith in what we know so far.
There, fixed that for you.
Looks like you conflated randomness with probability (a tool humans use to predict randomness).
If you knew the shape of the knowledge, you would already be on your way to obtaining the knowledge. The best science is done on the premise that nothing is impossible. I wouldn't be so quick to uphold the "laws of the universe" because they're historically very fragile.
would become a booming business...
I think scientific research has been deified throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, and uncountable atrocities have been committed in the name of science. I wonder if the dispassionate and sometimes unwitting nature of those atrocities makes them morally better or worse than the passionate crimes committed by people filled with religious fervour. Don't you think rationalization and denial are functions of human nature?
It's easy to lay the evils of humanity at the doorstep of organized religion, but I think people manage cruelty just as well without it. Rationalization and denial are as thoroughly ingrained in secular thinking. In the absence of religion, science becomes god and the same problems persist.
Without the pet industry, these animals would never be born.
I'm sure people said the same thing about breeding slaves.
Sure, but you don't count future liabilities against current assets.
Just like Enron...
So I can choose not to pay taxes? Self-determination is an illusion unless you live by yourself on a deserted island.
From the presentation they claim to be able to store 900,000 GB of data in 1g of Bacteria, not 90 GB as stated in the (current) story title.
When I lived in the UK, I was shocked to discover that everyone who owned a TV had to pay a £135.50/year "television tax" and that this only gave them something like 4 BBC channels and nothing else. If you had some form of cable or satellite, you still had to pay the fee even if you didn't use the BBC channels. I couldn't imagine how this system could be successful -- surely there was mass outrage and a blatant general disregarded for the rules! On the other hand, it made for excellent quality, commercial free programming. I would pay the same to get those channels here in Canada (not the wannabe BBC Canada version), and the natives seemed generally quite content to pay the fee.
Admittedly, we pay a lot of tax in Canada. As someone so astutely pointed out, we are vey good at it. I imagine that the perspective of many commenting from the US goes something like: "Another tax! What's next, a health care tax!? hahaha, those Canadians will never learn." Except taxes aren't always bad things. We tend to feel more comfortable paying taxes to support things like welfare programs and public healthcare even if we never use them because we realize that other people who live here do. Some people never have kids, does that mean they shouldn't have to pay tax to support education? We have already made that decision over and over, and that's why I live here and not in the Excited States of America.
Imagine that, instead of having to purchase your music from iTunes or steal it from IRC, you could go to a central repository where all the music was stored. Click the artist name, see all their albums. Click the album, see all the songs. Click the song and download. And, true to form, our astonishingly large bureaucracy would aggressively regulate this fee, which is what we pay them to do. Regulate things. I like the idea and I think it could work.
It makes perfect sense if you consider that the costs of rebuilding the energy infrastructure to use solar power as a primary resource are likely higher than the costs of increasing the overall efficiency of hydrocarbon-based energy systems. The best way to ease into a more eco-friendly approach to energy production is with a blend of new, renewable technologies, and modifications to existing technologies to make them more efficient (like this one). After all, it is easier to ask someone to buy a can of gasoline "recovered" from CO2 emissions than to ask them to buy a new experimental solar-powered car.