I have to wonder what the diet and farming methods in the USA would have been like though. Here ostriches still get plenty of space to run, and live on a largely natural diet. That could well make a huge difference. This is, at least in part, because ostrich meat is still a relatively small niche-market farming industry particularly focusing on health-conscious purchasers (the same people who prefer organic foods and free-range meats) so there would be no point in intensive farming with them as it wouldn't sell at all.
I will say this. I had crocodile meat once, and decided I never wanted to again. That stuff tastes absolutely foul.
This is true on many levels. In South Africa one of our abundant and popular hunting antelope is the waterbuck which holds in riverbeds mostly (big and easy to find therefore). They are also not hard to hunt because they have basically no predators. Lions and leopard ignore them. The reason is a bit of evolutionary genius - they are the only animal crocodiles won't attack. Waterbuck being evolved to live in the same territory as crocodiles have evolved a unique defense. There is a gland in their lower calf muscles which on stress or injury starts to secrete an incredibly foul-tasting toxin (though not a very poisonous one). It's location is a clear defense against crocodiles - but if the animal dies under stress the toxin rapidly spreads throughout the body (it does not apparently use the circulatory system to do so and this process continues after death) - this is why other predators also usually ignore them. Humans can and do hunt them however - but we have to be good. A single-shot kill is essential (headshots are preferred - though since they don't bother to hide much it's not that hard) - and immediately after shooting you have to cut the legs off, they are inedible anyway - but if you cut them off the toxin cannot taint the rest of the meat (obviously) and it's actually edible.
This makes a lot of sense. Of course carotene (especially beta-carotene) is very healthy (in fact essential) nutrient so having more of it in my eggs sound like a benefit - and I think if there's a general increase in the carotene levels, then it is a fair guess that several other nutrients will also be present in greater amounts for the same reason. All this suggests that a free range egg is, over all, significantly healthier for you than one that was battery-farmed.
I started eating free range because of moral reasons - I don't think the way battery-farming is done is morally acceptable. I have no problem with animal products but I do think humans ought to obtain it with the minimum possible level of cruelty and battery-farming is so far on the other end of the scale as to be completely unacceptable for me. The improved taste and apparent health benefits have made it an easy decision to stick to. For starters, I like to bake - a loaf of home-baked bread made with free range eggs looks and tastes more flavorful (notably a bit yellower) than one baked with battery-farmed eggs. I think your suggestion that this is as a result of higher carotene levels is the best explanation I've yet found - and I'd consider that a very good thing.
Well living in a country where game meat is still common and readily available - I do occasionally buy some (not as much as the Namibians where wild game meat is actually cheaper than beef but still) - and I usually leave those purchases for the kind of occasions where time is not a factor. For example to invite a few friends over and make "potjiekos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potjiekos).
>As an Australian it still amazes me why the US has a health care system set up like those in 3rd world countries.
Don't insult us. Both South Africa and Brazil are third-world countries (though the politically correct term nowadays is "developing nations") and we both have significantly better healthcare than the USA does ! Hell Britons fly to South Africa to get cosmetic surgery (among the few things the NHS doesn't provide) because they can get world-class surgery and thanks to the exchange rate pay about 10% of what it would cost in the UK. There's quite a thriving industry in boobjob-tourists down here.
As for Brazil - I have been in their clinics and hospitals and got excellent treatment, with a massive amount of preventative care thrown in (I went with a flu and got a huge dose of vitamins along with my meds and a 3 hour oxygen-tank treatment to boost my immune system and reduce the risk of secondary infections): result I got healthier quicker than any other flu in my life (which if I was working when I was there would have meant a LOT less sick days lost) - and the bill ? There wasn't one.
Ostrich meat is quite common in South Africa (since the bird is native here) where Ostrich farms are commonplace. Most restaurants have some ostrich recipes (burgers on the low end and other dishes in the fancy ones) and we can buy ostrich meats of various cuts at most supermarkets. I occasionally buy ostrich burgers or sausages.
It's one of the more delicious red meats and for what is still technically game - one of the most tender.
This is true of all wild animals. Game cheffs will tell you that game meat is simply not ideal for grilling or barbequing. Flambe is a good option if you have the skills, else keep your game meats for stews and roasts where it can be slow-cooked with plenty of moisture to make up for the lack of fat and the toughness of the muscle.
There's a much bigger factor: diet. Free range farming means a much more natural diet for the animals and you can definitely taste the difference.
More-over it can even be seen with your eyes sometimes. I started buying exclusively free-range eggs some time ago (because frankly while I love meat I am opposed to senseless cruelty in the process and I can think of no crueler farming method than battery chickens) - and there is a clear difference. They don't just taste different (more flavorful) but actually look different. Free range egg have a decidedly stronger yellow yolk than battery-farmed eggs break any one of each and compare the free range egg yolk is a darker, richer yellow sometimes even hinting toward light browns, orange and reds. You can always tell the difference - the pale one is the battery-farmed egg.
Isaac Newton did not study the occult. He studied alchemy. He was doing so at a time when it's discrediting was already in progress but importantly was far from complete. Quite frankly I cannot help but think that if alchemy had anywhere to go - Newton would have been the one to find the way. But your statement doesn't hold water in general. Einstein despised astrology - as do almost every other scientist. Any doctor worth his salt despises homeopathy. Pseudoscience relies on these concepts.
Now sometimes something that came from a pseudoscientific history will voluntarily submit itself to testing via the scientific method. When this happens a number of things usually occur. Firstly the unscientific explanations for it's theories are almost immediately abandoned - instead the things that "work" (in other words the observed phenomena) gets re-explained using real science. From that basis the techniques are then invariable improved. This does mean that the occult, cultural and pseudoscientific traditions around has to be abandoned leaving us with something that is just plain science. Examples include willow bark becoming aspirine and more recently both acupuncture and chiropractics. If you get either chiropractics or acupuncture therapy from an accredited physiotherapist you should be well aware that what you're getting is so different from what you'd have gotten from the traditional healers who it came from as to be virtually unrecognizable - on the other hand the benefits are far more effective and real because all the mystic crap got thrown away and the technique the physiotherapist uses focuses only on those which are based in scientific fact.
Those cases are where scientists should legitemately be open-minded. When proponents of a cultural or other knowledge artifact says "test us via the scientific method, check our statements, correct them and improve them and we'll accept the parts that are lost in exchange for the improvements to the parts that are right" - then it would be callous of a scientist to refuse to be involved with such studies (if he's in the field) or accept them once done because of where the idea originally came from.
Now as for ghosts, there is nothing remotely close to a scientific observation that can be studied. We have no definition or idea of what the phenomena is we're supposed to study, no clear parameters of how to identify it if we did find it, no repeatable scenario, nothing we can replicate in a laboratory - nothing at all. All we have is anecdotal reports (that vary immensely) many of which can be explained by known natural phenomena (an this is where Occam's razor DOES kick in and say we MUST assume those explanations rather than one that relies on something we cannot define and the very existence of which relies on something which if it exists at all is not only observable but doesn't obey the laws of nature). I suggested a study of the people however because I believed that we can get interesting psychological and sociological data from comparing facts about those who would choose the scientifically implausible scenario (including usually those aspects which are so supernatural they cannot be explained and would require us to accept exceptions to the very laws of nature - in the absence of any known singularity) compared to those who would be sceptical and declare most of it to be human error and the rest to be caused by unidentified but completely natural phenomena (radiation sources, leaky vents whatever). The bit about IQ tests was a joke. The bit about testing general level of science knowledge was not - I'm convinced that the more knowledgeable somebody is about science (and in particular about the scientific method) the less likely they are to accept that ghosts or haunting is involved. This should align with other data we can reasonably use for comparison - such as the fact that theism shows a marked decline with higher levels of scientific education and becomes extremely rare among professional scientists - where it does exist there the scientists i
Personally I would suggest an IQ test of all the people who believe vs. all the people who don't believe, I'll bet there will be a clear division. Perhaps even throw in a test scientific knowledge - that one will show an even clearer and more detailed line as with increases of scores the likelihood of believing in the haunting will rapidly decline.
Why act as a corporation at all ? Corporations have many very clear deficiencies and are simply not ideal for all things (not even all forms of profitable business). Remember when Virgin went public - and Branson found those same deficiencies so extreme he bought back every single share and made it private again ?
If it is to operate as a business structure at all then it should be a private company -NOT a public company, and that means all sales of shares have to be approved by the auditors and can only be made shareholder to shareholder. Any sale to a third-party requires authorization from the board of directors - so you can be selective about who gets shares at all.
But even a private company is a stupid way to do it. Companies are for profit seeking purposes, a protective coalition designed to provide a defensive patent-stock for free and open-source software projects should not be profitable at all. Even a trust is probably too much. It should simply be registered as a standard run-of-the-mill not-for-profit charity. I believe in the US they are called section-21 enterprises ? Thus: no tax burden, no need to worry about profits. Funding from donation and reasonable membership fees - any cardholding member (which can be a company, individual etc. so membership for individuals have to be cheap enough so hobbyists can afford to join) automatically gains access to the patent pool, and as a condition of membership has to contribute their own patent pool as free-of-charge licensed to other members (possibly limiting this license to only allow FOSS projects to use it - so if a member wants to create a proprietary program using one of your patents they'll have to negotiate a separate license to do that). Structurally it's not very hard to set up and makes perfect sense for the task at hand - and we have lots of successful projects operating this way that we can learn from: the FSF, OSI, EFF and LinuxFoundation all operate in this manner.
Is there any reason why a non-profit cannot own patents and use them for defensive counter-suing to protect members from patent abuse ? I may even go further though and say that you should register the non-profit OUTSIDE the USA in a country where software patents are not legally recognized (South Africa would be a great place to start). Nothing stops a non-US citizen or organisation from owning patents in the USA - which is what the organisation will do - but since it's not a US organisation it is itself not subject to US laws. Right now - I could get a patent in the US on an algorythm and sue IBM quite secure in the knowledge that they cannot sue me back because none o their patents are recognized under the law in my country - but mine is recognized in theirs. RMS has stated that this commercial advantage currently given to developers in countries where software patents are illegal is one that those countries should strive to protect (and not be fooled by the propaganda that changing their laws will be good for their software industries). So why not scale it up ? It's advantages to me as an individual are quite big, but to an organisation owning hundreds or even thousands of patents - all registered in the USA and other countries where they are legal - but itself registered and situated in a country where one cannot be sued for violation of software patents would be a very powerful force for good in the marketplace. It's unlikely the coalition itself will ever be sued- since it won't develop software itself, merely act as a friendly ally to others who do, but that immunity will nonetheless give it some serious teeth.
Either way - I stand by my original statement - this idea requires a non-profit, not a company of any kind, shape or form.
>Both police and army are used to enforce the laws of the land. They are simply employed against different level of threats. Also, it doesn't really matter if you call your fighters soldiers or police, if you use them to "deal with" another country you're waging a war.
No their not. At least in theory - the military is never deployed against your own citizens, there are massive differences in what they are - and what they aim to achieve. Soldiers want to WIN a war. Policemen have only one goal -to restore the state of peace.
>No, it can't. Aggression and ambition are parts of human nature, and for very good reasons. As long as they remain so, you have competition and the possibility of it turning violent.
Ants have those qualities and wage wars - do you truly believe that humans are INCAPABLE of evolving beyond their hive-mind mentality ? I'm the first to admit most of us haven't - we just dress it up in words like "patriotism" - but I do believe we are capable of it.
>And as I said above, the only real difference between police and military is the level of violence they can counter. That is wrong on every possible level. Policemen shout stop BEFORE they shoot. Surrender is the option they WANT you to take. They only use violence as a LAST resort and you have rights even before they meet you. A policeman never goes up on a hill and starts shooting everybody wearing gang colors from afar. Policemen don't bomb neighbourhoods with high crime rates... the entire approach is almost directly opposite. That is why an army is at worst a warforce, at best a defense force while the police is at best a PEACE force.
>So what will you do when these few remaining nations with a military send a horde of those poor schmucks to take over your country? Will you pull a stunt from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and arrest them?
Better - I would pull a Monty Python and arrest their entire high command and every soldier for behaviour likely to cause a disturbance of the peace. Soldiers get life in prison, all officers and higher get an automatic death penalty. Nobody will even TRY to start a war then - unless they truly believe their armies can hold off every cop on the planet and are well aware that they are getting a guaranteed death penalty with no option of lenience if caught... because THAT is what they ought to face - not to mention - try to recruit soldiers and especially officers THEN ? Not even the worst madman will be able to get enough people willing to take that risk to get an army you can't subdue by the simple method of arresting the whole damn lot of them.
>Flags are nothing but symbols, just like the Scales of Justice is. And a system that prevents anyone from amassing power - in other words, keeps everyone in their place - is either a totalitarianism or at the very least a dictatorship and in both cases anything but just. And dictatorships are quite infamous for their militancy; after all, stomping down everyone who tries to rise requires a huge army.
You only look at history - you never consider how ELSE things may be done - only how they have been done before when the very IDEA of world peace requires us to consider something radically different. Now imagine a version of the UN that actually governs all people, and everyone on the PLANET gets a vote. Not one strong nation playing global policeman while all the rest of us hope to god they pick a smart president this time - which is what we have now (and it's failing miserably). But government by consent of the governed for all people - and the automatic restriction of power that comes from having to please damn near everybody. Oh - and conveniently, since everybody is your constituency - nobody left to actually fight with. Flags are not just a symbol - they are a target. Flags were invented for the same reason soldier's uniforms were - so that they soldiers on your side could tell the soldiers on the other side apart, and know who to kill. They serve no purpose in a world without wars.
>How are we going to deal with them? They have a military and we don't.
With a POLICE force. The crucial difference is this: soldiers make wars. Policemen are supposed to KEEP THE PEACE.
>Look, pacifism in its moderate form of preferring peaceful solutions to violent ones is a good thing, but taking it to the extreme where violence is never an option is suicidal, It seemed to work for Ghandi. But even so I wasn't suggesting that TODAY. I know we aren't living in that world - but the reality is that the only world peace worth HAVING is the one you don't NEED to defend, and it is attainable. Not overnight, not in a few years - but it can be done.
>and letting a genocide continue even when you could stop it is monstrous. At the point in time where I'm suggesting this scenario - genocides would not ever happen anymore. I never suggested it was right to let ones like Rwanda continue as long as we did. I did suggest that we should strive for a world where they NEVER START. How is that not BETTER than stopping them AFTER the fact ?
>Furthermore, you seem to be suggesting that mass murderers can be shamed into stopping, which is completely delusional.
Shamed ? No. Imprisoned and punished by a criminal NOT a military justice system - absolutely. I never said no justice. I never even said no violence. I said - peace forces as opposed to WAR forces. Policemen as opposed to soldiers. Nobody going onto a battlefield with effectively no real rights, there to be pointed at and pull a trigger at some other schmuck who is except for the colour of his uniform EXACTLY LIKE ME. No flags. No targets. But justice systems so effective that individuals are incapable of ever amassing the kind of power you need to start a war - and if no government has a military then THEY are not a threat either. Your two kinds of warlords in this world are the official government, or the guy who wants to BE the official government but can't get there via the official channels. Both of those need to be effectively neutralized and you've made war impossible.
>"What comes next will, as the Chinese say, be interesting times."
Sorry the nitpicker in me has to point out that no such phrase exists in Chinese. Either as an expression or a "curse" as it's often quoted. It is quite telling that throughout the West, people use this phrase, invariable attributing it to a Chinese curse - when in fact the phrase is of English origin and has never existed in any other language - it certainly doesn't reflect anything that actually gets said in China.
"How much real democracy is there when you can only get elected president if you can somehow manage to spend in the 100s of millions of USD?"
America != the West. Western democracy also exists in many other places -and works better in a lot of them. For starters the the combined campaign expenses of every German Chancelor since World War 2 is less than the lowest campaign expense by any single elected US president in the same period. Money doesn't win elections there ! This may explain why they are the only country to come up with the brilliant idea of offering companies a tax benefit if - during recessions they reduce worker hours rather than cutting jobs (people are generally better off with a temporary reduction in income than with losing it entirely). Why their socialist wellfare state is the only nation in Europe or the Americas to have not had major job losses in the last two years - and in fact has seen employment rates start to increase already. You can't become Chancelor of Germany by being a good personality with lots of money - you have to convince people you can actually do a good JOB ! Of course Merkel and those before her aren't perfect leaders, but I'll tell you this I would MUCH rather live in Germany than in the USA. Not to be playing favorites or anything - the point is merely that democratic republics can work, can work a lot better than it does in the USA, and that apparently a bit of socialism isn't all that bad either. Germany's economy has consistently done remarkably well despite their welfare state. In fact - on her last visit there in 2008 Gondoleeza Rice asked Merkel how Germany manages to do so consistently well in the economy despite their rigid job protection, highly-complete welfare ( though Rice didn't mention this but we should keep in mind it is nicely counteracted by systems that make it nicer to have a job than welfare, and help make sure you probably won't lose that job because some bankers on another continent were greedy and corrupt). Merkel replied: "It's really simple. Unlike you - we still MAKE STUFF".
>"It is little more than X-factor for rich people, and not even as entertaining." This made me laugh - best description of politics (as it happens in most countries I admit) that I've ever read.
I would turn your argument on it's head. All those atrocities happened because somebody was TOO eager to go to war. That people still go to war over racist, xenophobic or other incredibly stupid reasons like in for example Rwanda is incredibly sad, but it's something that has to change.
The atrocities didn't happen because other nations were recalcitrant about stopping them - they happened because the barbarians involved were NOT recalcitrant enough ! Now sure a global policeman is one way to reduce or prevent wars - the price is that nobody in the world has any freedom, which must inevitably lead to a world war the magnitude of which we cannot imagine.
The world is now filled with nations who despise America's power- exactly because of that. Because even free nations like mine realize we would be a LOT more free if it wasn't for America- especially as regards our economic freedom. And we're not a country you even care much about.
The only way to really end war is the same way we ended slavery - by education and political pressure until practically nobody on earth supports the idea anymore. Until any politician who even suggests HAVING a military is by definition unelectable. By the time we've crushed it into a few small illegal things in a few rare countries (which would be even rarer because fundamental to this one would be greatly reducing the number of poor countries around, which ipso facto reduces the places where criminals have free reign) - we can deal with those few.
I don't consider even one of the things you mentioned to be examples of a system that works, none of them had anything to with why the statism was ended either. Alexander's absolute rule conquered half the world too - conquest is practically built into statism and one of the reasons why it DOESN'T work - sooner or later every empire built that way collapses under it's own weight because they are by definition ill equipped for what actually matters -keeping their own citizens well fed and happy. Rome more than anything fell to starvation - even as their wars of conquest persisted. When the enemy comes to your gates, starving citizens tend not to be very loyal defenders. Britain during it's period as the largest empire on Earth committed some of the worst human rights atrocities in history. The Nazis could have taken lessons from them. The culmination was the flagrant murder of 27 thousand boer women and children in the 3-years war. Couldn't beat the men in the field, so they killed off the women and children in the first ever example of concentration-camp slaughter (that lesson the Nazis actually DID learn from them).
At the same time, the socio-economic state within England itself (it's own citizens) was rapidly declining. It peaked in terms of education levels near the late Victorian age - when worker-run universities provided some of the best science education in the world, it was from this breeding ground that people like Darwin came.
At the same time they had the highest child mortality rate in human history. No nation before or since has matched. 99% of all children dying before age 10. That disaster was the basis of Dickins' famous books - and the reason why most modern countries ended up making child-labor illegal.
I don't think how much of the world you conquer is any indication of how well your system works - on the contrary, it tends to be an indication of how misplaced your priorities are. A state can only be said to function in a sustainable way when it places the welfare of it's citizens as it's SOLE priority. All other goals are either pursued to promote said welfare, or not pursued at all.
>They haven't really entered into (open) conflicts that willingly, since their general populace tends to disapprove of them.
They did do all you say- but this line is just plain wrong, they've done it all too often and more-over been involved in just about every war any other western nation has fought as well !
As for this: "Seriously? You think it's bad that there have only been 22 days of world peace since WW2? How many days of world peace do you think there have been since the dawn of history? I'd be surprised if it was more than 40..."
That is an example of the naturalist fallacy. Defined as stating that "the way something is, is the way it ought to be/ the only way it could be". Just because mankind has never managed to be peaceful does not mean that it's not a worthwhile goal. Many other things that were once considered too normal to change HAVE changed. Slavery is now illegal in virtually every country on earth -once there was no country that didn't practice. Hardly any religions practice human sacrifice anymore - once the Aztecs sacrificed 26 thousand people in three months. In short... the next great achievement our species needs is peaceful coexistence, and any suggestion that this is impossible is not only historically ignorant but reliant on a recognized fallacy. Fallacies are not valid arguments. Now it's not going ot happen in a week, I'm pretty sure it won't happen in 5 years (sorry for the 5YP guys) - most of those other changes took 50 or 100 years to do... but they all happened. This one can happen too. Right now - the most important thing we can do about it is to complain everytime somebody orders people to war.
> but read an anthropological study of the English and then tell me that the class system isn't a powerful part of today's English culture.
Oh no doubt about that ! I even acknowledged as much - but the class system's political power prior to the 1970's class-war was orders of magnitude greater than it is today. Culturally that power is still incredibly prevalent, but politically it's quite watered down -especially in this age where half the Lords in the house weren't even born aristocrats.
All you say is true - but meaningless because you misunderstood my point. I didn't say that they don't work as in "they collapse" - I meant they don't work as in "they inevitably lead to abuse and eventually the response to that abuse is revolution".
>meaningless "peace" prize founded by an arms manufacturer
That last bit is not really accurate. Nobel invented dynamite. Dynamite literally means "safe explosive" - it's invention was NOT intended as a weapon - but as a safer explosive for mining. Compared to Nitro-glycerine dynamite was a major advance. The truth is that strictly speaking Nobel's invention has saved millions upon millions of lives - not soldier lives, the lives of ordinary people who work in a mine, people with families just doing their job - by making mining hugely safer than it had been prior.
Now of course in retrospect it was pretty much inevitable that dynamite would become a weapon as well - the ability of controlled detonation for warfare was far to irresistible to the kind of people who think warfare is a good thing, but it's quite a slur on Nobel to pretend that this was his intention. Nobel invented a device to SAVE lives, and indeed every day it still does exactly that. It can also be used to take lives, but that wasn't HIS fault.
Aaah yes - because when a scientist changes his mind about something we praise him for being open-minded and reconsidering things when new data comes to light, but when a politician does the same thing (like realize a war you were in favor of had become wrong, or perhaps just realizing that during an extremely emotional time you made an understandable mistake) we call him a flip-flopper who is weak an unprincipled...
Well... I don't do that. I hate that politics work like that. I PREFER politicians who are willing to change their minds. Now if he changes his mind about whether to keep a campaign promise or not - that's another matter, but when a politician changes his view on a policy issue that's a sign of a potentially great leader. Trust voters to call it weakness...
The irony with Obama is that what American's now seem to hate him most for: his healthcare bill WAS a campaign promise. Holy shit, whoever heard of voters hating a politician for KEEPING a promise ?!?!?! That one is brand new. You know in the UK the house of lords don't actually GET to vote on any bill that was a campaign promise ? By mere virtue of being a campaign promise neither parliament nor the HoL nor the queen can block a bill *and* their other oversight tasks are limited to literally "making sure nothing else is being slipped in". Now THAT Is how it should be. A campaign promise is something the people ASKED for, it should be IMPOSSIBLE to even TRY to stop a president from passing a bill if he had it as a campaign promise. You may be able to sway some local votes, do some politicking and derail it (getting some really nice lobyist money in the process) but the reality is - he promised it, people voted for it- the choice is MADE and nobody should get a chance to second guess it again until the NEXT election.
When a system allows politicians to prevent an elected leader from keeping the promises that got him elected, democracy has already failed.
>The funny thing about the Taiwanese is that they are, as a people, mostly willing to return to China. The government is very much not and alot of businesses aren't either. And for us in IT since Taiwanese motherboard makers make up nearly all the retail board makers in the world... Is probably best it not scoot back to China right now...
What on earth ? I have many Taiwanese friends. I talk to them regularly - whenever China comes up I hear them talk about how fortunate they feel to live in a democratic country that respects human rights. How they love that they have the freedom to be critical of their government - freedom of thought and of speech. Now granted, my friends are mostly academics - and academics do not always represent the view of much of the rest of the population (just see conservapedia's page on "professor values" to see how different they can be...) but to say that most Taiwanese would be happy to give up their votes, give up their freedoms and join China... well that statement needs some serious backing up !
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I have to wonder what the diet and farming methods in the USA would have been like though. Here ostriches still get plenty of space to run, and live on a largely natural diet. That could well make a huge difference.
This is, at least in part, because ostrich meat is still a relatively small niche-market farming industry particularly focusing on health-conscious purchasers (the same people who prefer organic foods and free-range meats) so there would be no point in intensive farming with them as it wouldn't sell at all.
I will say this. I had crocodile meat once, and decided I never wanted to again. That stuff tastes absolutely foul.
This is true on many levels. In South Africa one of our abundant and popular hunting antelope is the waterbuck which holds in riverbeds mostly (big and easy to find therefore). They are also not hard to hunt because they have basically no predators. Lions and leopard ignore them. The reason is a bit of evolutionary genius - they are the only animal crocodiles won't attack.
Waterbuck being evolved to live in the same territory as crocodiles have evolved a unique defense. There is a gland in their lower calf muscles which on stress or injury starts to secrete an incredibly foul-tasting toxin (though not a very poisonous one). It's location is a clear defense against crocodiles - but if the animal dies under stress the toxin rapidly spreads throughout the body (it does not apparently use the circulatory system to do so and this process continues after death) - this is why other predators also usually ignore them.
Humans can and do hunt them however - but we have to be good. A single-shot kill is essential (headshots are preferred - though since they don't bother to hide much it's not that hard) - and immediately after shooting you have to cut the legs off, they are inedible anyway - but if you cut them off the toxin cannot taint the rest of the meat (obviously) and it's actually edible.
This makes a lot of sense. Of course carotene (especially beta-carotene) is very healthy (in fact essential) nutrient so having more of it in my eggs sound like a benefit - and I think if there's a general increase in the carotene levels, then it is a fair guess that several other nutrients will also be present in greater amounts for the same reason.
All this suggests that a free range egg is, over all, significantly healthier for you than one that was battery-farmed.
I started eating free range because of moral reasons - I don't think the way battery-farming is done is morally acceptable. I have no problem with animal products but I do think humans ought to obtain it with the minimum possible level of cruelty and battery-farming is so far on the other end of the scale as to be completely unacceptable for me. The improved taste and apparent health benefits have made it an easy decision to stick to.
For starters, I like to bake - a loaf of home-baked bread made with free range eggs looks and tastes more flavorful (notably a bit yellower) than one baked with battery-farmed eggs.
I think your suggestion that this is as a result of higher carotene levels is the best explanation I've yet found - and I'd consider that a very good thing.
Well living in a country where game meat is still common and readily available - I do occasionally buy some (not as much as the Namibians where wild game meat is actually cheaper than beef but still) - and I usually leave those purchases for the kind of occasions where time is not a factor. For example to invite a few friends over and make "potjiekos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potjiekos).
>As an Australian it still amazes me why the US has a health care system set up like those in 3rd world countries.
Don't insult us. Both South Africa and Brazil are third-world countries (though the politically correct term nowadays is "developing nations") and we both have significantly better healthcare than the USA does !
Hell Britons fly to South Africa to get cosmetic surgery (among the few things the NHS doesn't provide) because they can get world-class surgery and thanks to the exchange rate pay about 10% of what it would cost in the UK. There's quite a thriving industry in boobjob-tourists down here.
As for Brazil - I have been in their clinics and hospitals and got excellent treatment, with a massive amount of preventative care thrown in (I went with a flu and got a huge dose of vitamins along with my meds and a 3 hour oxygen-tank treatment to boost my immune system and reduce the risk of secondary infections): result I got healthier quicker than any other flu in my life (which if I was working when I was there would have meant a LOT less sick days lost) - and the bill ? There wasn't one.
Escargot is hardly a French-only thing. It's common in every culture that had any major influence from them.
Heck here in South Africa it's particularly popular and is one of the standard starters on any steak serving restaurant's menu.
A more recently popular one is to server escargot in the sauces on steak - bloody delicious I tell you !
Ostrich meat is quite common in South Africa (since the bird is native here) where Ostrich farms are commonplace.
Most restaurants have some ostrich recipes (burgers on the low end and other dishes in the fancy ones) and we can buy ostrich meats of various cuts at most supermarkets.
I occasionally buy ostrich burgers or sausages.
It's one of the more delicious red meats and for what is still technically game - one of the most tender.
This is true of all wild animals. Game cheffs will tell you that game meat is simply not ideal for grilling or barbequing.
Flambe is a good option if you have the skills, else keep your game meats for stews and roasts where it can be slow-cooked with plenty of moisture to make up for the lack of fat and the toughness of the muscle.
There's a much bigger factor: diet.
Free range farming means a much more natural diet for the animals and you can definitely taste the difference.
More-over it can even be seen with your eyes sometimes. I started buying exclusively free-range eggs some time ago (because frankly while I love meat I am opposed to senseless cruelty in the process and I can think of no crueler farming method than battery chickens) - and there is a clear difference.
They don't just taste different (more flavorful) but actually look different. Free range egg have a decidedly stronger yellow yolk than battery-farmed eggs break any one of each and compare the free range egg yolk is a darker, richer yellow sometimes even hinting toward light browns, orange and reds.
You can always tell the difference - the pale one is the battery-farmed egg.
Isaac Newton did not study the occult. He studied alchemy. He was doing so at a time when it's discrediting was already in progress but importantly was far from complete. Quite frankly I cannot help but think that if alchemy had anywhere to go - Newton would have been the one to find the way. But your statement doesn't hold water in general. Einstein despised astrology - as do almost every other scientist. Any doctor worth his salt despises homeopathy. Pseudoscience relies on these concepts.
Now sometimes something that came from a pseudoscientific history will voluntarily submit itself to testing via the scientific method. When this happens a number of things usually occur. Firstly the unscientific explanations for it's theories are almost immediately abandoned - instead the things that "work" (in other words the observed phenomena) gets re-explained using real science. From that basis the techniques are then invariable improved. This does mean that the occult, cultural and pseudoscientific traditions around has to be abandoned leaving us with something that is just plain science. Examples include willow bark becoming aspirine and more recently both acupuncture and chiropractics. If you get either chiropractics or acupuncture therapy from an accredited physiotherapist you should be well aware that what you're getting is so different from what you'd have gotten from the traditional healers who it came from as to be virtually unrecognizable - on the other hand the benefits are far more effective and real because all the mystic crap got thrown away and the technique the physiotherapist uses focuses only on those which are based in scientific fact.
Those cases are where scientists should legitemately be open-minded. When proponents of a cultural or other knowledge artifact says "test us via the scientific method, check our statements, correct them and improve them and we'll accept the parts that are lost in exchange for the improvements to the parts that are right" - then it would be callous of a scientist to refuse to be involved with such studies (if he's in the field) or accept them once done because of where the idea originally came from.
Now as for ghosts, there is nothing remotely close to a scientific observation that can be studied. We have no definition or idea of what the phenomena is we're supposed to study, no clear parameters of how to identify it if we did find it, no repeatable scenario, nothing we can replicate in a laboratory - nothing at all. All we have is anecdotal reports (that vary immensely) many of which can be explained by known natural phenomena (an this is where Occam's razor DOES kick in and say we MUST assume those explanations rather than one that relies on something we cannot define and the very existence of which relies on something which if it exists at all is not only observable but doesn't obey the laws of nature).
I suggested a study of the people however because I believed that we can get interesting psychological and sociological data from comparing facts about those who would choose the scientifically implausible scenario (including usually those aspects which are so supernatural they cannot be explained and would require us to accept exceptions to the very laws of nature - in the absence of any known singularity) compared to those who would be sceptical and declare most of it to be human error and the rest to be caused by unidentified but completely natural phenomena (radiation sources, leaky vents whatever).
The bit about IQ tests was a joke. The bit about testing general level of science knowledge was not - I'm convinced that the more knowledgeable somebody is about science (and in particular about the scientific method) the less likely they are to accept that ghosts or haunting is involved. This should align with other data we can reasonably use for comparison - such as the fact that theism shows a marked decline with higher levels of scientific education and becomes extremely rare among professional scientists - where it does exist there the scientists i
Personally I would suggest an IQ test of all the people who believe vs. all the people who don't believe, I'll bet there will be a clear division. Perhaps even throw in a test scientific knowledge - that one will show an even clearer and more detailed line as with increases of scores the likelihood of believing in the haunting will rapidly decline.
Why act as a corporation at all ? Corporations have many very clear deficiencies and are simply not ideal for all things (not even all forms of profitable business). Remember when Virgin went public - and Branson found those same deficiencies so extreme he bought back every single share and made it private again ?
If it is to operate as a business structure at all then it should be a private company -NOT a public company, and that means all sales of shares have to be approved by the auditors and can only be made shareholder to shareholder. Any sale to a third-party requires authorization from the board of directors - so you can be selective about who gets shares at all.
But even a private company is a stupid way to do it. Companies are for profit seeking purposes, a protective coalition designed to provide a defensive patent-stock for free and open-source software projects should not be profitable at all. Even a trust is probably too much. It should simply be registered as a standard run-of-the-mill not-for-profit charity. I believe in the US they are called section-21 enterprises ?
Thus: no tax burden, no need to worry about profits. Funding from donation and reasonable membership fees - any cardholding member (which can be a company, individual etc. so membership for individuals have to be cheap enough so hobbyists can afford to join) automatically gains access to the patent pool, and as a condition of membership has to contribute their own patent pool as free-of-charge licensed to other members (possibly limiting this license to only allow FOSS projects to use it - so if a member wants to create a proprietary program using one of your patents they'll have to negotiate a separate license to do that).
Structurally it's not very hard to set up and makes perfect sense for the task at hand - and we have lots of successful projects operating this way that we can learn from: the FSF, OSI, EFF and LinuxFoundation all operate in this manner.
Is there any reason why a non-profit cannot own patents and use them for defensive counter-suing to protect members from patent abuse ? I may even go further though and say that you should register the non-profit OUTSIDE the USA in a country where software patents are not legally recognized (South Africa would be a great place to start). Nothing stops a non-US citizen or organisation from owning patents in the USA - which is what the organisation will do - but since it's not a US organisation it is itself not subject to US laws.
Right now - I could get a patent in the US on an algorythm and sue IBM quite secure in the knowledge that they cannot sue me back because none o their patents are recognized under the law in my country - but mine is recognized in theirs. RMS has stated that this commercial advantage currently given to developers in countries where software patents are illegal is one that those countries should strive to protect (and not be fooled by the propaganda that changing their laws will be good for their software industries). So why not scale it up ? It's advantages to me as an individual are quite big, but to an organisation owning hundreds or even thousands of patents - all registered in the USA and other countries where they are legal - but itself registered and situated in a country where one cannot be sued for violation of software patents would be a very powerful force for good in the marketplace.
It's unlikely the coalition itself will ever be sued- since it won't develop software itself, merely act as a friendly ally to others who do, but that immunity will nonetheless give it some serious teeth.
Either way - I stand by my original statement - this idea requires a non-profit, not a company of any kind, shape or form.
>Both police and army are used to enforce the laws of the land. They are simply employed against different level of threats. Also, it doesn't really matter if you call your fighters soldiers or police, if you use them to "deal with" another country you're waging a war.
No their not. At least in theory - the military is never deployed against your own citizens, there are massive differences in what they are - and what they aim to achieve. Soldiers want to WIN a war. Policemen have only one goal -to restore the state of peace.
>No, it can't. Aggression and ambition are parts of human nature, and for very good reasons. As long as they remain so, you have competition and the possibility of it turning violent.
Ants have those qualities and wage wars - do you truly believe that humans are INCAPABLE of evolving beyond their hive-mind mentality ? I'm the first to admit most of us haven't - we just dress it up in words like "patriotism" - but I do believe we are capable of it.
>And as I said above, the only real difference between police and military is the level of violence they can counter.
That is wrong on every possible level. Policemen shout stop BEFORE they shoot. Surrender is the option they WANT you to take. They only use violence as a LAST resort and you have rights even before they meet you. A policeman never goes up on a hill and starts shooting everybody wearing gang colors from afar. Policemen don't bomb neighbourhoods with high crime rates... the entire approach is almost directly opposite.
That is why an army is at worst a warforce, at best a defense force while the police is at best a PEACE force.
>So what will you do when these few remaining nations with a military send a horde of those poor schmucks to take over your country? Will you pull a stunt from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and arrest them?
Better - I would pull a Monty Python and arrest their entire high command and every soldier for behaviour likely to cause a disturbance of the peace. Soldiers get life in prison, all officers and higher get an automatic death penalty. Nobody will even TRY to start a war then - unless they truly believe their armies can hold off every cop on the planet and are well aware that they are getting a guaranteed death penalty with no option of lenience if caught... because THAT is what they ought to face - not to mention - try to recruit soldiers and especially officers THEN ? Not even the worst madman will be able to get enough people willing to take that risk to get an army you can't subdue by the simple method of arresting the whole damn lot of them.
>Flags are nothing but symbols, just like the Scales of Justice is. And a system that prevents anyone from amassing power - in other words, keeps everyone in their place - is either a totalitarianism or at the very least a dictatorship and in both cases anything but just. And dictatorships are quite infamous for their militancy; after all, stomping down everyone who tries to rise requires a huge army.
You only look at history - you never consider how ELSE things may be done - only how they have been done before when the very IDEA of world peace requires us to consider something radically different. Now imagine a version of the UN that actually governs all people, and everyone on the PLANET gets a vote. Not one strong nation playing global policeman while all the rest of us hope to god they pick a smart president this time - which is what we have now (and it's failing miserably). But government by consent of the governed for all people - and the automatic restriction of power that comes from having to please damn near everybody. Oh - and conveniently, since everybody is your constituency - nobody left to actually fight with.
Flags are not just a symbol - they are a target. Flags were invented for the same reason soldier's uniforms were - so that they soldiers on your side could tell the soldiers on the other side apart, and know who to kill.
They serve no purpose in a world without wars.
>How are we going to deal with them? They have a military and we don't.
With a POLICE force. The crucial difference is this: soldiers make wars. Policemen are supposed to KEEP THE PEACE.
>Look, pacifism in its moderate form of preferring peaceful solutions to violent ones is a good thing, but taking it to the extreme where violence is never an option is suicidal,
It seemed to work for Ghandi. But even so I wasn't suggesting that TODAY. I know we aren't living in that world - but the reality is that the only world peace worth HAVING is the one you don't NEED to defend, and it is attainable. Not overnight, not in a few years - but it can be done.
>and letting a genocide continue even when you could stop it is monstrous.
At the point in time where I'm suggesting this scenario - genocides would not ever happen anymore. I never suggested it was right to let ones like Rwanda continue as long as we did. I did suggest that we should strive for a world where they NEVER START. How is that not BETTER than stopping them AFTER the fact ?
>Furthermore, you seem to be suggesting that mass murderers can be shamed into stopping, which is completely delusional.
Shamed ? No. Imprisoned and punished by a criminal NOT a military justice system - absolutely. I never said no justice. I never even said no violence. I said - peace forces as opposed to WAR forces. Policemen as opposed to soldiers. Nobody going onto a battlefield with effectively no real rights, there to be pointed at and pull a trigger at some other schmuck who is except for the colour of his uniform EXACTLY LIKE ME.
No flags. No targets. But justice systems so effective that individuals are incapable of ever amassing the kind of power you need to start a war - and if no government has a military then THEY are not a threat either. Your two kinds of warlords in this world are the official government, or the guy who wants to BE the official government but can't get there via the official channels.
Both of those need to be effectively neutralized and you've made war impossible.
You know if I hadn't already started this thread - and had modpoints - I would spend every single one upmodding you for this post !
>"What comes next will, as the Chinese say, be interesting times."
Sorry the nitpicker in me has to point out that no such phrase exists in Chinese. Either as an expression or a "curse" as it's often quoted. It is quite telling that throughout the West, people use this phrase, invariable attributing it to a Chinese curse - when in fact the phrase is of English origin and has never existed in any other language - it certainly doesn't reflect anything that actually gets said in China.
"How much real democracy is there when you can only get elected president if you can somehow manage to spend in the 100s of millions of USD?"
America != the West.
Western democracy also exists in many other places -and works better in a lot of them. For starters the the combined campaign expenses of every German Chancelor since World War 2 is less than the lowest campaign expense by any single elected US president in the same period. Money doesn't win elections there !
This may explain why they are the only country to come up with the brilliant idea of offering companies a tax benefit if - during recessions they reduce worker hours rather than cutting jobs (people are generally better off with a temporary reduction in income than with losing it entirely). Why their socialist wellfare state is the only nation in Europe or the Americas to have not had major job losses in the last two years - and in fact has seen employment rates start to increase already.
You can't become Chancelor of Germany by being a good personality with lots of money - you have to convince people you can actually do a good JOB !
Of course Merkel and those before her aren't perfect leaders, but I'll tell you this I would MUCH rather live in Germany than in the USA.
Not to be playing favorites or anything - the point is merely that democratic republics can work, can work a lot better than it does in the USA, and that apparently a bit of socialism isn't all that bad either. Germany's economy has consistently done remarkably well despite their welfare state.
In fact - on her last visit there in 2008 Gondoleeza Rice asked Merkel how Germany manages to do so consistently well in the economy despite their rigid job protection, highly-complete welfare ( though Rice didn't mention this but we should keep in mind it is nicely counteracted by systems that make it nicer to have a job than welfare, and help make sure you probably won't lose that job because some bankers on another continent were greedy and corrupt).
Merkel replied: "It's really simple. Unlike you - we still MAKE STUFF".
>"It is little more than X-factor for rich people, and not even as entertaining."
This made me laugh - best description of politics (as it happens in most countries I admit) that I've ever read.
I would turn your argument on it's head. All those atrocities happened because somebody was TOO eager to go to war. That people still go to war over racist, xenophobic or other incredibly stupid reasons like in for example Rwanda is incredibly sad, but it's something that has to change.
The atrocities didn't happen because other nations were recalcitrant about stopping them - they happened because the barbarians involved were NOT recalcitrant enough ! Now sure a global policeman is one way to reduce or prevent wars - the price is that nobody in the world has any freedom, which must inevitably lead to a world war the magnitude of which we cannot imagine.
The world is now filled with nations who despise America's power- exactly because of that. Because even free nations like mine realize we would be a LOT more free if it wasn't for America- especially as regards our economic freedom. And we're not a country you even care much about.
The only way to really end war is the same way we ended slavery - by education and political pressure until practically nobody on earth supports the idea anymore. Until any politician who even suggests HAVING a military is by definition unelectable. By the time we've crushed it into a few small illegal things in a few rare countries (which would be even rarer because fundamental to this one would be greatly reducing the number of poor countries around, which ipso facto reduces the places where criminals have free reign) - we can deal with those few.
I don't consider even one of the things you mentioned to be examples of a system that works, none of them had anything to with why the statism was ended either.
Alexander's absolute rule conquered half the world too - conquest is practically built into statism and one of the reasons why it DOESN'T work - sooner or later every empire built that way collapses under it's own weight because they are by definition ill equipped for what actually matters -keeping their own citizens well fed and happy.
Rome more than anything fell to starvation - even as their wars of conquest persisted. When the enemy comes to your gates, starving citizens tend not to be very loyal defenders.
Britain during it's period as the largest empire on Earth committed some of the worst human rights atrocities in history. The Nazis could have taken lessons from them. The culmination was the flagrant murder of 27 thousand boer women and children in the 3-years war. Couldn't beat the men in the field, so they killed off the women and children in the first ever example of concentration-camp slaughter (that lesson the Nazis actually DID learn from them).
At the same time, the socio-economic state within England itself (it's own citizens) was rapidly declining. It peaked in terms of education levels near the late Victorian age - when worker-run universities provided some of the best science education in the world, it was from this breeding ground that people like Darwin came.
At the same time they had the highest child mortality rate in human history. No nation before or since has matched. 99% of all children dying before age 10. That disaster was the basis of Dickins' famous books - and the reason why most modern countries ended up making child-labor illegal.
I don't think how much of the world you conquer is any indication of how well your system works - on the contrary, it tends to be an indication of how misplaced your priorities are. A state can only be said to function in a sustainable way when it places the welfare of it's citizens as it's SOLE priority. All other goals are either pursued to promote said welfare, or not pursued at all.
>They haven't really entered into (open) conflicts that willingly, since their general populace tends to disapprove of them.
They did do all you say- but this line is just plain wrong, they've done it all too often and more-over been involved in just about every war any other western nation has fought as well !
As for this:
"Seriously? You think it's bad that there have only been 22 days of world peace since WW2? How many days of world peace do you think there have been since the dawn of history? I'd be surprised if it was more than 40..."
That is an example of the naturalist fallacy. Defined as stating that "the way something is, is the way it ought to be/ the only way it could be". Just because mankind has never managed to be peaceful does not mean that it's not a worthwhile goal.
Many other things that were once considered too normal to change HAVE changed. Slavery is now illegal in virtually every country on earth -once there was no country that didn't practice. Hardly any religions practice human sacrifice anymore - once the Aztecs sacrificed 26 thousand people in three months.
In short... the next great achievement our species needs is peaceful coexistence, and any suggestion that this is impossible is not only historically ignorant but reliant on a recognized fallacy. Fallacies are not valid arguments.
Now it's not going ot happen in a week, I'm pretty sure it won't happen in 5 years (sorry for the 5YP guys) - most of those other changes took 50 or 100 years to do... but they all happened. This one can happen too. Right now - the most important thing we can do about it is to complain everytime somebody orders people to war.
> but read an anthropological study of the English and then tell me that the class system isn't a powerful part of today's English culture.
Oh no doubt about that ! I even acknowledged as much - but the class system's political power prior to the 1970's class-war was orders of magnitude greater than it is today. Culturally that power is still incredibly prevalent, but politically it's quite watered down -especially in this age where half the Lords in the house weren't even born aristocrats.
All you say is true - but meaningless because you misunderstood my point. I didn't say that they don't work as in "they collapse" - I meant they don't work as in "they inevitably lead to abuse and eventually the response to that abuse is revolution".
>meaningless "peace" prize founded by an arms manufacturer
That last bit is not really accurate. Nobel invented dynamite. Dynamite literally means "safe explosive" - it's invention was NOT intended as a weapon - but as a safer explosive for mining. Compared to Nitro-glycerine dynamite was a major advance.
The truth is that strictly speaking Nobel's invention has saved millions upon millions of lives - not soldier lives, the lives of ordinary people who work in a mine, people with families just doing their job - by making mining hugely safer than it had been prior.
Now of course in retrospect it was pretty much inevitable that dynamite would become a weapon as well - the ability of controlled detonation for warfare was far to irresistible to the kind of people who think warfare is a good thing, but it's quite a slur on Nobel to pretend that this was his intention. Nobel invented a device to SAVE lives, and indeed every day it still does exactly that. It can also be used to take lives, but that wasn't HIS fault.
>Before he was against them, of course...
Aaah yes - because when a scientist changes his mind about something we praise him for being open-minded and reconsidering things when new data comes to light, but when a politician does the same thing (like realize a war you were in favor of had become wrong, or perhaps just realizing that during an extremely emotional time you made an understandable mistake) we call him a flip-flopper who is weak an unprincipled...
Well... I don't do that. I hate that politics work like that. I PREFER politicians who are willing to change their minds. Now if he changes his mind about whether to keep a campaign promise or not - that's another matter, but when a politician changes his view on a policy issue that's a sign of a potentially great leader. Trust voters to call it weakness...
The irony with Obama is that what American's now seem to hate him most for: his healthcare bill WAS a campaign promise.
Holy shit, whoever heard of voters hating a politician for KEEPING a promise ?!?!?! That one is brand new.
You know in the UK the house of lords don't actually GET to vote on any bill that was a campaign promise ? By mere virtue of being a campaign promise neither parliament nor the HoL nor the queen can block a bill *and* their other oversight tasks are limited to literally "making sure nothing else is being slipped in".
Now THAT Is how it should be. A campaign promise is something the people ASKED for, it should be IMPOSSIBLE to even TRY to stop a president from passing a bill if he had it as a campaign promise. You may be able to sway some local votes, do some politicking and derail it (getting some really nice lobyist money in the process) but the reality is - he promised it, people voted for it- the choice is MADE and nobody should get a chance to second guess it again until the NEXT election.
When a system allows politicians to prevent an elected leader from keeping the promises that got him elected, democracy has already failed.
>The funny thing about the Taiwanese is that they are, as a people, mostly willing to return to China. The government is very much not and alot of businesses aren't either. And for us in IT since Taiwanese motherboard makers make up nearly all the retail board makers in the world... Is probably best it not scoot back to China right now...
What on earth ? I have many Taiwanese friends. I talk to them regularly - whenever China comes up I hear them talk about how fortunate they feel to live in a democratic country that respects human rights. How they love that they have the freedom to be critical of their government - freedom of thought and of speech.
Now granted, my friends are mostly academics - and academics do not always represent the view of much of the rest of the population (just see conservapedia's page on "professor values" to see how different they can be...) but to say that most Taiwanese would be happy to give up their votes, give up their freedoms and join China... well that statement needs some serious backing up !