>So you're saying that if someone who likes to wear suits and ties goes to a metal concert, he wouldn't get funny looks or be judged negatively for it?
Actually, no he wouldn't. Not here where I live in Cape Town anyway - the alternative crowd here (which is per capita among the largest of any city in the world) is all about respecting somebody's right to express themselves without judgement or exclusion. A few of them wear suits, a few of those do it ironically - either way - nobody treats them any differently. The only difference is, when the night advances a bit, which girls are grabbing them for drunken make-out sessions (that would be the ones who think suits look good).
I am part of a massive community built on the premise that you have no right to have an opinion about somebody until you know them well enough to base that opinion on their BEHAVIOUR - and it works wonderfully (and it's sufficiently large that the businesses in Cape Town have, for the most part, adopted that value - they had too, there is just too many good employees who embrace that culture, it's impossible to staff a high-skill company without accepting this fact)
That said - there is another factor that makes it irrelevant anyway even where there is no such cultural group changing the values of the society: there is no power relationships in my personal life. If I am late to a metal concert - nobody is going to fire me from being a metalhead and tell me I can't go them anymore. Nobody has authority over me, nobody can pressure me to obey or threaten to remove my livelihood if I don't. Employers DO have a power relationship and that, by itself, is justification to restrict and limit that power to the bare minimum that is needed.
Anarchist values say that whenever somebody suggests one person should have power over another the burden of proof is on the wielder of power to show that the power they want is 1) a true necessity - i.e. the system in question could not function without somebody having it and no alternative method of functioning is available. 2) The bare minimum amount of power to satisfy section 1. I believe it's been shown that the power to dictate dress and style is not in any way required for the functioning of a business. There may be exceptions - in those cases, the burden of proof is on those businessmen to show that their business would be harmed by the lack of clothing rules and that this harm would exceed the harm that having clothing rules do their employees.
There's a reason I don't agree with you - I am paid for 8 hours work a day (though like most people in I.T. it's frequently more) - but I have 16 hours a day (twice as much) that belong to me. How I look should make me happy in that other 16. I object to the idea that somebody thinks just because he pays me for my skills he gets a say in my personal life. Judging somebody's abilities based on style is no less discrimination than doing it based on race or sexual orientation. Telling me I have the choice to change my style is no less evil than declaring that a gay person can always just marry the opposite sex for appearances. A significant portion of our personalities is born in - and I believe that if we lose the capacity to express ourselves then the legal right to self-expression has become entirely meaningless.
The point is - my personal style is dictated by things that are no less important than my career - by the peer group I identify with on a friday night at the local metal club, by the things that, not to beat around the bush - makes my wife wet and by the things I love and that appeal to me artistically.
I should not have to suppress these things in my job - as that would make it impossible to have them in my personal life.
That's an unreasonable expectation - now yes, I've been highly successful in my career despite making stylistic (and educational) choices that I was constantly told would doom me to poverty (hint: never trust career experts I outearn them all and nothing they ever told me has been true, I don't look like they thought and I didn't specialize - I studied all the things I loved - literature and drama and compsi and philosophy and I worked as a sysadmin and worked as a programmer and ended up being very well paid in the devops field exactly because long before that term was coined I couldn't choose and refused to specialise and cross-trained). That's not enough though - I am also proof that my lack of a 'corporate' look has zero impact on my ability to excel at my job - so I am sympathetic to all those who say that their personal style (and the one described here happens to be one dictated by at least one religion - so THAT freedom now also comes into play) is held against them - in field where there is ZERO business motivation for doing so (the GP is also working in tech and not customer facing). At least for customer facing I can see there may be a reduction in your value if your look puts of some (more conservative) customers - but for the vast majority of us who are not in such positions - why do these ridiculous judgements persist. They have no positive value, but they can cost you a fortune (and if you're a company that could have hired me and chose not to because of my looks - they have).
>Do I think it would be better if everyone was judged with no regard for their appearance?
Absolutely. And it can, actually, be MORE efficient if you do it right. In fact, we're moving toward that already - in this day and age where your first (sometimes your first two or three) interviews are usually telephonic - you have every opportunity to assess the employee's skills long before you ever see his face - if you're going to judge him on appearance during the final interview, then you're an idiot.
> I believe that once we get some nice inflation going Sorry but it's not going to happen. As economist Paul Krugman points out - the econ101 story of the government who printed money and caused hyperinflation has zero actual truth to it- in the real world that has NEVER happened. Hyperinflation can happen in large money-printing times but ONLY when accompanied by severe political chaos that destroys production - this is what happened in Zimbabwe (long before there was hyperinflation there was farm ceisures), the Wiemar republic (there was a civil war FIRST) and the Roman empire (severe outbreak of plague and 3 consecutive civil wars before the money printing ever began). In the real world - a recession is a liquidity-trap, and that liquidity-trap undoes any inflationary effect that printing more money could have had.
So your answer is that he should sacrifice the most important and basic of human freedoms: the right of self expression, to fit a norm he doesn't agree with, or accept being discriminated against because of something that has exactly ZERO bearing on his abilities or the value he ads ?
Now here's the clencher: I'm a very well paid engineer - top of the payscales in my country (and in the top 2% of earners in this country in all fields), I drive a lovely German car and own the house I live in. I also have a beard and my hair is dyed in bright, punk colours (currently: race-car red with blue and purple streaks) and hangs down to my waist.
No. We're not. We're engineers - in the old and proper meaning of the word: we apply science to the solving of practical problems. Science is about understanding things not making them. Engineering is about making things not understanding them. The two are symbiotic but they are definitely not the same and the kind of approaches they require and attract are (correctly) very different.
You know - I recently had a question in an interview to write a function to calculate the fibonaci sequence.
I said: "I haven't been at university in almost a decade and I've forgotten the formula for the fibonacci sequence, please remind me". The interviewer wrote it down, I looked a it and wrote him a python function to calculate it, then in follow ups I optimized that to cache results and allow rapid lookups.
I daresay the problem is that you just declared ignorance which most interviewers will percieve as "gives up too easily" - while I admitted what I didn't know and then asked for the needed information to get started, and proceeded to solve the REAL problem and do the work. The difference between us is: I received a very nice job offer from that company yesterday.
No, I don't think you need to know everything, but unlike 20 years ago - what you need to show in interviews is initiative and problem-solving skills, and when you run into the limits of your insta-memory-recall it's exactly how you DEAL with that which they look at: do you give up, or do you ask for information and proceed to solve the problem before you. Will you get stumped on the job ? Or will you acquire knowledge when needed and get the job done even if you didn't know how to do it when you started ? And as somebody who regularly interviews candidates for positions -that is exactly what I look at, how many questions you answer right counts for very little, what you DO after answering wrong- now THAT counts.
I'm not even remotely convinced that it's a sufficient motivation. You would have to show that the long-term income from these medications (whose use is only potential) would exceed that of the long-term use of the cancer treatment (whose purchase is now all but guaranteed).
Imagine a gameshow host saying this: "You have ten thousand dollars guaranteed, if you open door number 2 you will lose this, but there is an undisclosed sum there - up to about ten thousand and one dollars, though it could be nothing".
Would you open the door ? Because no smart businessman would... For it to make sense the potential amount behind that door would have to exceed the guaranteed money by a massive margin, indeed so MUCH of a margin that the patients for whom door number 2 ends up containing 0 dollars could be paid off and you STILL make more than you would have made selling treatments to all the patients for life.
Neither of your examples apply: * Companies who already HAVE the long term gains constantly flowing in aren't going to give those up for a quick splurge of one-time cash. They aren't "giving up short term gains" - they are refusing to give up very LARGE long term gains that are ALREADY REALIZED.
* That's just not true - companies love to cooperate, they would always much rather cooperate than to ever compete. Collusion and cartel formation is a continuos plague of capitalist economic systems which, despite the libertarian's claims, do not benefit consumers and do not get eradicated by new competition (because becoming new competition to an established cartel is very difficult - and libertarians have this silly assumption that companies never, ever break the law [and I don't mean market regulations - I mean fraud, theft, blackmail, violence and other serious crimes] to get rid of smaller competitors). In the real world -the only thing that even slightly keeps this trend in CHECK is antitrust laws and even then only if they are actively and efficiently enforced. Companies love to work together, they work together brilliantly and indeed historically they are never MORE eager or efficient at working together than when it allows them to screw consumers better.
So... the only cure you'd accept is one that doesn't exist... for any disease.. at all ?
Hell even the most natural and powerful disease treatment on earth - with 4.3 billion years of trail and error scientific development and basically the entirety of all human economic systems in history indirectly funding it's continued improvement: our natural (un-retrained) immune systems can't do what you demand - there are still occasional "side-effects" where those immune systems go haywire and we end up with auto-immune diseases, immuno-infertility and allergies. Sure it's inherited but the system that allows us to survive the vast majority of infections we encounter in our lives (indeed - generally all but ONE) still doesn't live up to your demands !
Of course, radiation and chemotherapy are virtually risk free and has no harmful or potentially fatal side effects.... oh wait.
The simple truth is that gene therapy (including - but not limited to this version) is changing the face of cancer treatment. Cases that were a death sentence just 5 years ago suddenly have a chance at recovery - even full recovery. The war isn't over by a long shot - but we're winning a lot of significant battles lately.
>Maybe not from a single report... or a few isolated incidents. But given a steady drip feed of "the other side is the DEVIL" a propaganda machine disguised as a news network can absolutely cause people to take drastic action. Even worse, it can cause a severe disconnect between reality and your own delusions.
That's exactly what happened in Rwanda, the initial genocide was primarily committed by the military but a steady-drip-feed of anti-Tutsi propaganda by both state and private media turned into an outright call for mass-murder on those networks which greatly increased the civilian participation in the genocide and according to some researchers probably more than doubled the actual death toll.
Well... a is a bit of a red herring, if it's such a small project, then it's also got fewer users, making it by definition less of a risk since attacking small niche groups have a very low return on investment.
Finding a bug/backdoor and using it takes time and effort - therefore it's logical to target things with large numbers of uses to maximize yield. For mass surveilance, putting a back door in a program for butterfly-collectors isn't worth it - because there just aren't enough butterfly-collectors to get any useful results.
I think it's patently ridiculous that a toy which has never harmed anybody and could only potentially do so if somebody was seriously stupid with it can be banned for being dangerous while a device with absolutely no possible use OTHER than to harm people cannot even be regulated properly.
>How does focusing on a species that lives in national parks in an unindustrialized part of the world negate the notion that environmental impacts other than process food which are endemic to modern, industrial life have an influence on weight gain?
I never said it does.
>Your proposed "control" fails to differentiate between diet and non-diet influences by removing both from the equation. It's essentially irrelevant to the thesis at hand.
That's not the thesis it was meant to be a control FOR.
Actually - this discussion WAS precise about which specific processing the GP thought was bad. He may even be right, I have consistently refrained from expressing an opinion on whether he was right or not because I don't have the data to form one - but your critique is invalid, he gave a specific example.
I actually do have one on Orange Juice for you though - there is a very good reason to avoid purchased orange juice - it is much more concentrated, many dienticians believe it's TOO concentrated and advise against ever having more juice than you can squeeze from ONE fruit per day.
>There's an implication that a big factory manufacturing is utterly unable to make something healthy and nutritious, even if they got rid of the nutrition sucking machine and stopped putting in additives.
Incapable ? Nope. Completely without incentive ? Definitely. There will always be more profit in taking shortcuts and cutting corners.
>I'm pretty sure feral rats are wild animals, though they do feed off of human food. Of course, if you want to eliminate any species that eats human food, you're also going to reduce or eliminate almost all the other potential influences listed in the article -- regulated indoor temperature, excessive light exposure, exposure to industrial chemicals, exposure to the Ad-36 virus or to M. smithii, etc.
Or... you could, you know, look at these animals in their natural habits rather than the ones who live in Human habitats. The African wildcat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wildcat shows no sign of obesity in national parks.
[citation needed] Citation: I live in Africa, I see these animals (in the wild) every day of my life. The wild ones are not fat.
>Not for nothing but do you really think lab feed isn't pretty well standardized. I mean, do you really think professional biologists just don't care what the aminals on whom their results depend are eating? Do they also take them home and let them run around on the carpet and feed them cheetos and let them watch TV?
No I don't, that's sort of the point. But on the other hand - labs actually hardly ever raise their own animals. They buy them in bulk from companies that specialise in breeding animals for lab work. Do you really believe these profit seeking corporations have never cut corners on the feed considering it would be virtually impossible to prove ? I also never said food was the ONLY thing they had in common with humans, I merely said that contrary to the GP - these animals DO have that in common with us.
Who knows - they could be buying the exact same product under the exact same brand and that product could have had a radical change in it's composition without anybody ever really having noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
>So you're saying that if someone who likes to wear suits and ties goes to a metal concert, he wouldn't get funny looks or be judged negatively for it?
Actually, no he wouldn't. Not here where I live in Cape Town anyway - the alternative crowd here (which is per capita among the largest of any city in the world) is all about respecting somebody's right to express themselves without judgement or exclusion. A few of them wear suits, a few of those do it ironically - either way - nobody treats them any differently.
The only difference is, when the night advances a bit, which girls are grabbing them for drunken make-out sessions (that would be the ones who think suits look good).
I am part of a massive community built on the premise that you have no right to have an opinion about somebody until you know them well enough to base that opinion on their BEHAVIOUR - and it works wonderfully (and it's sufficiently large that the businesses in Cape Town have, for the most part, adopted that value - they had too, there is just too many good employees who embrace that culture, it's impossible to staff a high-skill company without accepting this fact)
That said - there is another factor that makes it irrelevant anyway even where there is no such cultural group changing the values of the society: there is no power relationships in my personal life. If I am late to a metal concert - nobody is going to fire me from being a metalhead and tell me I can't go them anymore. Nobody has authority over me, nobody can pressure me to obey or threaten to remove my livelihood if I don't.
Employers DO have a power relationship and that, by itself, is justification to restrict and limit that power to the bare minimum that is needed.
Anarchist values say that whenever somebody suggests one person should have power over another the burden of proof is on the wielder of power to show that the power they want is
1) a true necessity - i.e. the system in question could not function without somebody having it and no alternative method of functioning is available.
2) The bare minimum amount of power to satisfy section 1.
I believe it's been shown that the power to dictate dress and style is not in any way required for the functioning of a business. There may be exceptions - in those cases, the burden of proof is on those businessmen to show that their business would be harmed by the lack of clothing rules and that this harm would exceed the harm that having clothing rules do their employees.
There's a reason I don't agree with you - I am paid for 8 hours work a day (though like most people in I.T. it's frequently more) - but I have 16 hours a day (twice as much) that belong to me.
How I look should make me happy in that other 16. I object to the idea that somebody thinks just because he pays me for my skills he gets a say in my personal life.
Judging somebody's abilities based on style is no less discrimination than doing it based on race or sexual orientation.
Telling me I have the choice to change my style is no less evil than declaring that a gay person can always just marry the opposite sex for appearances. A significant portion of our personalities is born in - and I believe that if we lose the capacity to express ourselves then the legal right to self-expression has become entirely meaningless.
The point is - my personal style is dictated by things that are no less important than my career - by the peer group I identify with on a friday night at the local metal club, by the things that, not to beat around the bush - makes my wife wet and by the things I love and that appeal to me artistically.
I should not have to suppress these things in my job - as that would make it impossible to have them in my personal life.
That's an unreasonable expectation - now yes, I've been highly successful in my career despite making stylistic (and educational) choices that I was constantly told would doom me to poverty (hint: never trust career experts I outearn them all and nothing they ever told me has been true, I don't look like they thought and I didn't specialize - I studied all the things I loved - literature and drama and compsi and philosophy and I worked as a sysadmin and worked as a programmer and ended up being very well paid in the devops field exactly because long before that term was coined I couldn't choose and refused to specialise and cross-trained).
That's not enough though - I am also proof that my lack of a 'corporate' look has zero impact on my ability to excel at my job - so I am sympathetic to all those who say that their personal style (and the one described here happens to be one dictated by at least one religion - so THAT freedom now also comes into play) is held against them - in field where there is ZERO business motivation for doing so (the GP is also working in tech and not customer facing). At least for customer facing I can see there may be a reduction in your value if your look puts of some (more conservative) customers - but for the vast majority of us who are not in such positions - why do these ridiculous judgements persist. They have no positive value, but they can cost you a fortune (and if you're a company that could have hired me and chose not to because of my looks - they have).
>Do I think it would be better if everyone was judged with no regard for their appearance?
Absolutely. And it can, actually, be MORE efficient if you do it right.
In fact, we're moving toward that already - in this day and age where your first (sometimes your first two or three) interviews are usually telephonic - you have every opportunity to assess the employee's skills long before you ever see his face - if you're going to judge him on appearance during the final interview, then you're an idiot.
> I believe that once we get some nice inflation going
Sorry but it's not going to happen. As economist Paul Krugman points out - the econ101 story of the government who printed money and caused hyperinflation has zero actual truth to it- in the real world that has NEVER happened. Hyperinflation can happen in large money-printing times but ONLY when accompanied by severe political chaos that destroys production - this is what happened in Zimbabwe (long before there was hyperinflation there was farm ceisures), the Wiemar republic (there was a civil war FIRST) and the Roman empire (severe outbreak of plague and 3 consecutive civil wars before the money printing ever began).
In the real world - a recession is a liquidity-trap, and that liquidity-trap undoes any inflationary effect that printing more money could have had.
assinated ?
I don't know what that is but it sounds even worse than being assassinated.
So your answer is that he should sacrifice the most important and basic of human freedoms: the right of self expression, to fit a norm he doesn't agree with, or accept being discriminated against because of something that has exactly ZERO bearing on his abilities or the value he ads ?
Now here's the clencher: I'm a very well paid engineer - top of the payscales in my country (and in the top 2% of earners in this country in all fields), I drive a lovely German car and own the house I live in.
I also have a beard and my hair is dyed in bright, punk colours (currently: race-car red with blue and purple streaks) and hangs down to my waist.
I just happen to be white...
>It doesn't mean that you have been victimized.
Actually the very fact that some looks are "unusual" in jobs is itself victimization.
>We are scientists
No. We're not. We're engineers - in the old and proper meaning of the word: we apply science to the solving of practical problems. Science is about understanding things not making them. Engineering is about making things not understanding them.
The two are symbiotic but they are definitely not the same and the kind of approaches they require and attract are (correctly) very different.
You know - I recently had a question in an interview to write a function to calculate the fibonaci sequence.
I said: "I haven't been at university in almost a decade and I've forgotten the formula for the fibonacci sequence, please remind me".
The interviewer wrote it down, I looked a it and wrote him a python function to calculate it, then in follow ups I optimized that to cache results and allow rapid lookups.
I daresay the problem is that you just declared ignorance which most interviewers will percieve as "gives up too easily" - while I admitted what I didn't know and then asked for the needed information to get started, and proceeded to solve the REAL problem and do the work.
The difference between us is: I received a very nice job offer from that company yesterday.
No, I don't think you need to know everything, but unlike 20 years ago - what you need to show in interviews is initiative and problem-solving skills, and when you run into the limits of your insta-memory-recall it's exactly how you DEAL with that which they look at: do you give up, or do you ask for information and proceed to solve the problem before you.
Will you get stumped on the job ? Or will you acquire knowledge when needed and get the job done even if you didn't know how to do it when you started ?
And as somebody who regularly interviews candidates for positions -that is exactly what I look at, how many questions you answer right counts for very little, what you DO after answering wrong- now THAT counts.
I'm not even remotely convinced that it's a sufficient motivation. You would have to show that the long-term income from these medications (whose use is only potential) would exceed that of the long-term use of the cancer treatment (whose purchase is now all but guaranteed).
Imagine a gameshow host saying this:
"You have ten thousand dollars guaranteed, if you open door number 2 you will lose this, but there is an undisclosed sum there - up to about ten thousand and one dollars, though it could be nothing".
Would you open the door ? Because no smart businessman would...
For it to make sense the potential amount behind that door would have to exceed the guaranteed money by a massive margin, indeed so MUCH of a margin that the patients for whom door number 2 ends up containing 0 dollars could be paid off and you STILL make more than you would have made selling treatments to all the patients for life.
So you're saying the only company that would ever sell a cancer cure is Bayer in the hope of increasing sales of Viagra ?
Do you actually think about your ideas before you write them down ?
Neither of your examples apply:
* Companies who already HAVE the long term gains constantly flowing in aren't going to give those up for a quick splurge of one-time cash. They aren't "giving up short term gains" - they are refusing to give up very LARGE long term gains that are ALREADY REALIZED.
* That's just not true - companies love to cooperate, they would always much rather cooperate than to ever compete. Collusion and cartel formation is a continuos plague of capitalist economic systems which, despite the libertarian's claims, do not benefit consumers and do not get eradicated by new competition (because becoming new competition to an established cartel is very difficult - and libertarians have this silly assumption that companies never, ever break the law [and I don't mean market regulations - I mean fraud, theft, blackmail, violence and other serious crimes] to get rid of smaller competitors). In the real world -the only thing that even slightly keeps this trend in CHECK is antitrust laws and even then only if they are actively and efficiently enforced.
Companies love to work together, they work together brilliantly and indeed historically they are never MORE eager or efficient at working together than when it allows them to screw consumers better.
So... the only cure you'd accept is one that doesn't exist... for any disease.. at all ?
Hell even the most natural and powerful disease treatment on earth - with 4.3 billion years of trail and error scientific development and basically the entirety of all human economic systems in history indirectly funding it's continued improvement: our natural (un-retrained) immune systems can't do what you demand - there are still occasional "side-effects" where those immune systems go haywire and we end up with auto-immune diseases, immuno-infertility and allergies.
Sure it's inherited but the system that allows us to survive the vast majority of infections we encounter in our lives (indeed - generally all but ONE) still doesn't live up to your demands !
Of course, radiation and chemotherapy are virtually risk free and has no harmful or potentially fatal side effects.... oh wait.
The simple truth is that gene therapy (including - but not limited to this version) is changing the face of cancer treatment. Cases that were a death sentence just 5 years ago suddenly have a chance at recovery - even full recovery. The war isn't over by a long shot - but we're winning a lot of significant battles lately.
>Maybe not from a single report... or a few isolated incidents. But given a steady drip feed of "the other side is the DEVIL" a propaganda machine disguised as a news network can absolutely cause people to take drastic action. Even worse, it can cause a severe disconnect between reality and your own delusions.
That's exactly what happened in Rwanda, the initial genocide was primarily committed by the military but a steady-drip-feed of anti-Tutsi propaganda by both state and private media turned into an outright call for mass-murder on those networks which greatly increased the civilian participation in the genocide and according to some researchers probably more than doubled the actual death toll.
Well... a is a bit of a red herring, if it's such a small project, then it's also got fewer users, making it by definition less of a risk since attacking small niche groups have a very low return on investment.
Finding a bug/backdoor and using it takes time and effort - therefore it's logical to target things with large numbers of uses to maximize yield.
For mass surveilance, putting a back door in a program for butterfly-collectors isn't worth it - because there just aren't enough butterfly-collectors to get any useful results.
Has it EVER occurred to you that maybe the founding fathers were not all-knowing and maybe, just maybe, they just once... made a mistake ?
I think it's patently ridiculous that a toy which has never harmed anybody and could only potentially do so if somebody was seriously stupid with it can be banned for being dangerous while a device with absolutely no possible use OTHER than to harm people cannot even be regulated properly.
They beat stress-balls over and over when you need a coding break.
All I can say is: only in America can they ban a magnet but argue against even the most basic control over a gun...
>How does focusing on a species that lives in national parks in an unindustrialized part of the world negate the notion that environmental impacts other than process food which are endemic to modern, industrial life have an influence on weight gain?
I never said it does.
>Your proposed "control" fails to differentiate between diet and non-diet influences by removing both from the equation. It's essentially irrelevant to the thesis at hand.
That's not the thesis it was meant to be a control FOR.
Actually - this discussion WAS precise about which specific processing the GP thought was bad. He may even be right, I have consistently refrained from expressing an opinion on whether he was right or not because I don't have the data to form one - but your critique is invalid, he gave a specific example.
I actually do have one on Orange Juice for you though - there is a very good reason to avoid purchased orange juice - it is much more concentrated, many dienticians believe it's TOO concentrated and advise against ever having more juice than you can squeeze from ONE fruit per day.
>There's an implication that a big factory manufacturing is utterly unable to make something healthy and nutritious, even if they got rid of the nutrition sucking machine and stopped putting in additives.
Incapable ? Nope. Completely without incentive ? Definitely. There will always be more profit in taking shortcuts and cutting corners.
>My local McD's is full of them, I swear!
True, but we were talking about them as consumers not ingredients :P
>I'm pretty sure feral rats are wild animals, though they do feed off of human food. Of course, if you want to eliminate any species that eats human food, you're also going to reduce or eliminate almost all the other potential influences listed in the article -- regulated indoor temperature, excessive light exposure, exposure to industrial chemicals, exposure to the Ad-36 virus or to M. smithii, etc.
Or... you could, you know, look at these animals in their natural habits rather than the ones who live in Human habitats. The African wildcat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wildcat shows no sign of obesity in national parks.
[citation needed]
Citation: I live in Africa, I see these animals (in the wild) every day of my life. The wild ones are not fat.
>Not for nothing but do you really think lab feed isn't pretty well standardized. I mean, do you really think professional biologists just don't care what the aminals on whom their results depend are eating? Do they also take them home and let them run around on the carpet and feed them cheetos and let them watch TV?
No I don't, that's sort of the point. But on the other hand - labs actually hardly ever raise their own animals. They buy them in bulk from companies that specialise in breeding animals for lab work. Do you really believe these profit seeking corporations have never cut corners on the feed considering it would be virtually impossible to prove ?
I also never said food was the ONLY thing they had in common with humans, I merely said that contrary to the GP - these animals DO have that in common with us.
Who knows - they could be buying the exact same product under the exact same brand and that product could have had a radical change in it's composition without anybody ever really having noticed.