IMO the best way to deal with problems like this in SF novels is to gloss over them to the extent that you can. Simply say that you recovered DNA through some fancy and expensive process. No need to go into details. "I push this button and our MagicTech FastDrive moves us instantly to Alpha Centauri" is not too hard to believe in context. "I push this button and our warp core will bend space using finely ground particles of human blood, which will then use heavy tachyons to accelerate us to 1.2 times the speed of light, moving us instantly to Alpha Centauri" is just an invitation for people to find all the problems with your "science".
It was blindingly obvious as early as two years ago that the problem of subprime mortgages was undermining our financial system and that the day of reckoning was only a matter of time. I cannot comprehend why nobody in government and nobody in finance thought to do anything about it until this autumn, after it had already imploded.
You have principles like "it is wrong to kill people except in self defense" so that, when the heat of the moment arrives, you make the correct decision even though your brain is all screwed up.
In the case of Congress, the principles they should have (and clearly lack) are that this country is based around freedom and is fundamentally ruled by the Constitution, and protecting freedom and following the Constitution should always be done no matter what. That way, even when presented with a situation where people! will! die! they can still make the correct decision.
Sure, the President could simply shut down the entire government until he either gets what he wants or 2/3rds of Congress agree to go against him. But such a President will discover that it has become impossible to secure the cooperation of Congress in any other matters, that he has made his party deeply unpopular, and if it's his first term he will discover that it has become impossible to secure a second one.
Only the most shallowest and partisan hack can look at the problems we are in and claim that the republicans are the reason.
This is simply false. Take me, for example. Shallow and hack I would dispute but this is obviously something I am not impartial about. However I am very much non-partisan, and yet I still hold the opinion you mention.
This kind of bullshit pisses me off to no end. To paint everyone who holds a popular opinion with such a broad brush is pure ignorance. All it does is serve to alienate all those people from possibly listening to you. Here's a newsflash for you: it is possible to have all the facts, be politically neutral, and still come to a different conclusion.
If the law is still needed then it can be renewed by simply passing a new one with the same wording.
The nice thing is that this effectively limits the maximum size of the body of law, since at some point the lawmakers spend 100% of their time renewing existing laws instead of making new ones. I think that we have way too many laws already and so see this as a very good thing.
The saddest thing about contemporary politics is that we have arrived at a point where everybody is polarized into two virtually identical camps, each one thinking that the other camp's opinions are so insane that only an idiot or a villain could hold them. As such, absolutely no useful discussion can take place anymore.
It's certainly not communist, but it sure doesn't look socialist to me. Western Europe is socialist. The US is somewhat socialist. China, a mix of dictatorship and capitalism.
There's the basic premise of scientists bringing dinosaurs back from the dead and build an amusement park around it. Perhaps a bit silly but nothing really bad. And then there's the explanation for it, involving mosquitos trapped in amber, frog DNA spliced in, and all the rest, which is simply ridiculous. If he had simply said that they had been cloned from recovered DNA and not gone into all the mechanisms behind it then it would have been much better off.
Was it? I read the book many years ago so it all sort of runs together for me, but I distinctly remember each chapter beginning with a picture of successive iterations of a fractal, and I'm pretty sure that this tied in somehow with chaos theory. Wikipedia says:
Both are pessimistic, but Malcolm, having been consulted before the park's creation, is emphatic in his prediction that the park will collapse, as it is an unsustainably simple structure bluntly forced upon a complex system.
The basic premise of Jurassic Park wasn't dumb. The science background was, and the "chaos theory means that they must run amok and kill us all!" part was just utterly nuts.
Another reason is that (as far as I understand) the phone company charges far more overhead for transaction processing than a credit card merchant account would, and there are virtually no consequences for failing to pay your 1-900 calling bills so there's a greater rate of delinquency. This can trump the impulse-dial benefit of the 900 number depending on your audience and your thoughts on the matter.
If race has its roots in genetics, why do different societies disagree on the definitions so much, and why was race a concept in people's heads long before anybody knew about genetics?
Who said anything about "after Pearl Harbor"? In case you somehow were unaware, FDR became President in 1933 and Pearl Harbor was in 1941.
I also said nothing about cause. Merely that FDR was President as these things happened, and that as far as I can see the changes he presided over (even if he did not influence them in any way, which seems a bit of a stretch) were just about universally negative.
The difference between race and your other examples is that everybody pretty much agrees on the definitions to use for your other examples, whereas different societies have widely different ideas of what defines any given race or even what races exist.
I honestly do not see the difference between "race is a fiction" and "almost no-one is of `pure' descent, and it's hard to even say what that means".
It's a social construct. It happens to be based partially on exterior features, which are in turn linked partially to ancestry and genetic markers. This means that the social construct of race can be correlated with certain real conditions (although sickle-cell anemia is a poor example as a map I posted elsewhere demonstrates) but that doesn't mean that race itself has any scientific basis.
Well no. You accused a specific poster, mopower70, of being racist because he thinks that a black President changes everything. My point is that you don't need to be a racist to think that, you merely need to believe that society is racist. If you think that society is racist, then "a black President changes everything" is a simple statement of fact.
I still don't understand what you're saying. I wrote what I meant. Race does not mean where you or your ancestors came from. It means whatever the society you're in says it means. In Apartheid South Africa, people in the same family (with the same ancestry!) would often be assigned different races. Here in the US, "black" is generally used to describe people with some ancestry as African slaves, even though most of their ancestry may be from somewhere completely different.
Despite having a distinct genetic makeup, Ashkenazi Jews are not generally considered to be a different race (although this depends on who you talk to...) which should further show to go how the societal concept of "race" is not very related to genetics.
That's not a belief about Obama's inherent nature, that's a belief about society.
If a black man does something against the implicit rules of a racist society and thereby disrupts that society, discussing this fact does not make the person discussing it racist.
I think it's pretty obvious that race means something aside from where you or your ancestors come from.
For example, South Africa during Apartheid tried to define race to fall along neat boundaries. It was not uncommon for different people in the same family to get defined as different races!
Race is a social concept. That it may be somewhat related to certain scientific concepts is interesting, but the fact that those scientific concepts exist does not automatically lend any credibility to the social construct.
It's pretty funny, really. Leftists think that the media has a conservative bias. Rightists think that the media has a liberal bias. Must mean they're doing a pretty good job of telling the truth! Everybody hates the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, after all. I'm no fan of the media but the fact that they're hated by fanatics on both sides is a very good thing.
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IMO the best way to deal with problems like this in SF novels is to gloss over them to the extent that you can. Simply say that you recovered DNA through some fancy and expensive process. No need to go into details. "I push this button and our MagicTech FastDrive moves us instantly to Alpha Centauri" is not too hard to believe in context. "I push this button and our warp core will bend space using finely ground particles of human blood, which will then use heavy tachyons to accelerate us to 1.2 times the speed of light, moving us instantly to Alpha Centauri" is just an invitation for people to find all the problems with your "science".
Of course, they could have fixed it.
It was blindingly obvious as early as two years ago that the problem of subprime mortgages was undermining our financial system and that the day of reckoning was only a matter of time. I cannot comprehend why nobody in government and nobody in finance thought to do anything about it until this autumn, after it had already imploded.
This is the whole reason why principles exist!
You have principles like "it is wrong to kill people except in self defense" so that, when the heat of the moment arrives, you make the correct decision even though your brain is all screwed up.
In the case of Congress, the principles they should have (and clearly lack) are that this country is based around freedom and is fundamentally ruled by the Constitution, and protecting freedom and following the Constitution should always be done no matter what. That way, even when presented with a situation where people! will! die! they can still make the correct decision.
Sure, the President could simply shut down the entire government until he either gets what he wants or 2/3rds of Congress agree to go against him. But such a President will discover that it has become impossible to secure the cooperation of Congress in any other matters, that he has made his party deeply unpopular, and if it's his first term he will discover that it has become impossible to secure a second one.
Only the most shallowest and partisan hack can look at the problems we are in and claim that the republicans are the reason.
This is simply false. Take me, for example. Shallow and hack I would dispute but this is obviously something I am not impartial about. However I am very much non-partisan, and yet I still hold the opinion you mention.
This kind of bullshit pisses me off to no end. To paint everyone who holds a popular opinion with such a broad brush is pure ignorance. All it does is serve to alienate all those people from possibly listening to you. Here's a newsflash for you: it is possible to have all the facts, be politically neutral, and still come to a different conclusion.
If the law is still needed then it can be renewed by simply passing a new one with the same wording.
The nice thing is that this effectively limits the maximum size of the body of law, since at some point the lawmakers spend 100% of their time renewing existing laws instead of making new ones. I think that we have way too many laws already and so see this as a very good thing.
He probably does.
The saddest thing about contemporary politics is that we have arrived at a point where everybody is polarized into two virtually identical camps, each one thinking that the other camp's opinions are so insane that only an idiot or a villain could hold them. As such, absolutely no useful discussion can take place anymore.
It's certainly not communist, but it sure doesn't look socialist to me. Western Europe is socialist. The US is somewhat socialist. China, a mix of dictatorship and capitalism.
There's the basic premise of scientists bringing dinosaurs back from the dead and build an amusement park around it. Perhaps a bit silly but nothing really bad. And then there's the explanation for it, involving mosquitos trapped in amber, frog DNA spliced in, and all the rest, which is simply ridiculous. If he had simply said that they had been cloned from recovered DNA and not gone into all the mechanisms behind it then it would have been much better off.
Was it? I read the book many years ago so it all sort of runs together for me, but I distinctly remember each chapter beginning with a picture of successive iterations of a fractal, and I'm pretty sure that this tied in somehow with chaos theory. Wikipedia says:
Both are pessimistic, but Malcolm, having been consulted before the park's creation, is emphatic in his prediction that the park will collapse, as it is an unsustainably simple structure bluntly forced upon a complex system.
Is it not so?
The basic premise of Jurassic Park wasn't dumb. The science background was, and the "chaos theory means that they must run amok and kill us all!" part was just utterly nuts.
Another reason is that (as far as I understand) the phone company charges far more overhead for transaction processing than a credit card merchant account would, and there are virtually no consequences for failing to pay your 1-900 calling bills so there's a greater rate of delinquency. This can trump the impulse-dial benefit of the 900 number depending on your audience and your thoughts on the matter.
If race has its roots in genetics, why do different societies disagree on the definitions so much, and why was race a concept in people's heads long before anybody knew about genetics?
Who said anything about "after Pearl Harbor"? In case you somehow were unaware, FDR became President in 1933 and Pearl Harbor was in 1941.
I also said nothing about cause. Merely that FDR was President as these things happened, and that as far as I can see the changes he presided over (even if he did not influence them in any way, which seems a bit of a stretch) were just about universally negative.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The fact that all humans are "interracial" is a big reason why the whole concept of "race" is illogical.
The difference between race and your other examples is that everybody pretty much agrees on the definitions to use for your other examples, whereas different societies have widely different ideas of what defines any given race or even what races exist.
I honestly do not see the difference between "race is a fiction" and "almost no-one is of `pure' descent, and it's hard to even say what that means".
It's a social construct. It happens to be based partially on exterior features, which are in turn linked partially to ancestry and genetic markers. This means that the social construct of race can be correlated with certain real conditions (although sickle-cell anemia is a poor example as a map I posted elsewhere demonstrates) but that doesn't mean that race itself has any scientific basis.
Well no. You accused a specific poster, mopower70, of being racist because he thinks that a black President changes everything. My point is that you don't need to be a racist to think that, you merely need to believe that society is racist. If you think that society is racist, then "a black President changes everything" is a simple statement of fact.
I still don't understand what you're saying. I wrote what I meant. Race does not mean where you or your ancestors came from. It means whatever the society you're in says it means. In Apartheid South Africa, people in the same family (with the same ancestry!) would often be assigned different races. Here in the US, "black" is generally used to describe people with some ancestry as African slaves, even though most of their ancestry may be from somewhere completely different.
Regarding sickle-cell anemia, take a look at the distribution of that particular trait and ponder the race of the people living in those areas.
Despite having a distinct genetic makeup, Ashkenazi Jews are not generally considered to be a different race (although this depends on who you talk to...) which should further show to go how the societal concept of "race" is not very related to genetics.
That everybody is making such a big deal over the First Black President ought to be proof enough.
Excuse me, where did I say anything of the sort?
That's not a belief about Obama's inherent nature, that's a belief about society.
If a black man does something against the implicit rules of a racist society and thereby disrupts that society, discussing this fact does not make the person discussing it racist.
And that would do the trick if race were only about skin color, but it is not.
I think it's pretty obvious that race means something aside from where you or your ancestors come from.
For example, South Africa during Apartheid tried to define race to fall along neat boundaries. It was not uncommon for different people in the same family to get defined as different races!
Race is a social concept. That it may be somewhat related to certain scientific concepts is interesting, but the fact that those scientific concepts exist does not automatically lend any credibility to the social construct.
It's pretty funny, really. Leftists think that the media has a conservative bias. Rightists think that the media has a liberal bias. Must mean they're doing a pretty good job of telling the truth! Everybody hates the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, after all. I'm no fan of the media but the fact that they're hated by fanatics on both sides is a very good thing.