TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly).
What I meant here is that TFA is about creating open-access resources in the form of a kind of collaborative scholarly encyclopedia summarizing the main consensus of ideas in a discipline. It's NOT about open-access publishing in the sense of publishing your random research out of context, as in a journal or something.
A lot of the discussion here doesn't seem to have much to do with TFA. (Surprise, surprise...)
People seem to be missing the importance of "scholarly canons" in the summary. TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly). This is NOT about Wikipedia (except perhaps as a model of how to do certain aspects of a scholarly encyclopedia better than Wikipedia).
TFA holds up Scholarpedia as its main exemplar of a better kind of scholar online encyclopedia of canonic knowledge in a particular field.
That's not the only one out there, and Scholarpedia does have its issues. Personally, I think if our goal is to produce a standard scholarly encyclopedia for a particular discipline (or for many disciplines), we could also take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a great example of a model project of collaboration by scholars to produce a summary of research and ideas in a discipline...
... and it's been around for nearly 20 years already. Long before most of these other things have existed.
Bitcoin is backed by the agreement of people that use bitcoin that it has a certain value. This value tends to change as more people use bitcoin, as there are only so many of them.
The U.S. Dollar is similarly backed by the agreement of the people that it has a certain value. However, that value may change because an outside authority has the power to print more of such money
SCARCITY != VALUE
Say it with me: SCARCITY != VALUE
Yes, scarcity can be a component of value, but it is not a guarantee. I can go out into my back yard and start picking up random worthless rocks, build a little stand and try to sell them: "Genuine rocks from AthanasiusKircher's back yard! Only a few like them in the world!" Nobody will care.
I could even argue that "This rock is the ONLY ROCK WITH THIS EXACT SHAPE IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!!" That's probably true. If it looks pretty, maybe somebody would pay a $1 for it at some flea market. Otherwise, nobody cares about that fact that this rock is "one of a kind."
Spend some time watching those random shows that go looking for antiques, and you'll understand this. There are a lot of rare things in the world, and you'll often get somebody who's willing to pay something for an item that is sufficiently rare. But whether that person will pay $1, or $100, or $10,000 is really up to whether (1) that person really wants the thing that badly for a person collection, or (and much more likely) (2) that person is aware that there is a group of other people out there who would pay at least that much.
You remind me of a friend who said that I should go in with him and invest in case of some kind of scotch (liquor) that was a couple hundred dollars per bottle. It was very rare and rather old, so it's pretty unlikely that anyone would come out with a new giant stockpile somewhere. My friend was convinced that these bottles would only go up in value, and in a decade or two, we could sell them for many times what we bought them for.
Now, what my friend said could happen. There are rare old bottles of scotch that have sold for thousands of dollars. On the other hand, there are also rare old bottles of scotch that aren't worth much more than they were when they were first sold. It all depends on the whims of a very small group of collectors and rich drinkers.
What you say could happen too: Bitcoin's "value tends to change as more people use bitcoin, as there are only so many of them."
But right now the price of Bitcoins is being driven by speculators -- people who are all betting the same thing. It is therefore very volatile. Whether "more people" will gradually adopt it in more circumstances is based on a lot of factors. But even if people start to like the idea of Bitcoin, perhaps someone else will come up with some sort of "virtual currency" that has attributes and advantages which Bitcoin doesn't, and maybe everyone will flock to that instead.
There are items that more-or-less have inherent utility value (like food), and there are others that only have value built on convention (like most currencies). Bitcoin's scarcity will only help it have value IF enough people actually want it.
The government does not "back" the dollar at all. If you give them a dollar, they will give you nothing in return, but another dollar.
Well, the dollar does have one thing going for it that Bitcoin doesn't (and likely never will): the U.S. government requires payment of taxes in dollars. It therefore forces people to use that currency. If people need to pay taxes in dollars, they are likely to receive wages in dollars, and if people receive wages in dollars, they are likely to want to spend them elsewhere.
As long as the government can throw you in jail for failing to pay your taxes using their chosen currency, you'll be forced to use that currency. And if people are forced to use tha
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com?
Well, um... you, uh, get the see the book???
Seriously. I buy almost all non-fiction books, and 2-3 minutes leafing through the book, looking up a few things in the index, and reading a couple specific passages on topics I'm looking for will immediately tell me: (1) does the book contain the information I need and care about? (2) does the author have a freakin' clue what he/she is talking about? (3) are these things valuable enough to justify the cost?
I can spend time skimming dozens of reviews on Amazon and still have no clue about the answers to those questions. Sure, for some books on Amazon I can get a limited preview or limited search capability, but that's generally not enough to really let me check what I need to.
I own a couple thousand physical books. I can only think of ONE physical book that I purchased in an actual store that I regret buying, and I was in a hurry and just picked up some Barnes & Noble special for $1.99 or something. On the other hand, I must have at least 20 or more books I purchased online that turned out to be much less useful than I imagined. I just can't tell adequately from online descriptions. And returning them is often too much of a pain to bother.
On a related note, there's also the seredipitous encounter with interesting books on a physical shelf. While Amazon may be good at telling me what other people tend to buy who buy the books I'm already searching for, it's very unlikely to tell me about the really cool books out there that people like me may not always know about. Library shelves, on the other hand, are great for containing those hidden treasures, sitting there right next to a book I know on a similar topic. Actual physical bookstores can be good about that as well, though only if they have the kind of specialized non-fiction I like to browse for (and very few do anymore).
I'm very likely to walk out of a physical bookstore with some book I found and thought to be really interesting, and I almost never regret those purchases. Online, I only tend to buy books I already have heard about and which already are supposed to be "good," because I often can't adequately evaluate them otherwise.
Used bookstores are even more critical, because they carry all sorts of out-of-print stuff that's even more difficult to sort through on Amazon (if it's there at all).
You still get the same 'about the author' and plot taglines on the back...
I don't give a crap about the author bio or what some random other people say about how this is the "coolest book ever." I suppose if that's the way you evaluate the books you want to buy, I guess there's no benefit to a physical bookstore. I, personally, prefer to actually examine the merchandise... like the people you mention who might actually like to look at the TV or listen to the stereo before purchasing.
Digital download/streaming videos still doesn't match the video/audio quality of a blu-ray, and wont for a long, long time
You know, I think this is a matter of personal taste. I couldn't care less about video quality, within reason. I have absolutely no desire to try to have a movie theatre in my home. Then again, I don't watch a lot of movies or TV. For audio, I'm a little more picky.
A book is a static image. If you don't have a fetish over paper and binding the experience can be reproduced much more easily.
While you're correct that it would now be pretty easy to replicate the experience of a high-quality printed book, nobody is really doing it. If only I could buy a "static image" of a decently designed book, I'd be happy. But most "ebooks" are just text that's thrown into some stupid engine that formats text like the worst version of MS Word, only with a smaller selection of fonts and less control over other things that affect readability.
I actually own a Kindle, but I've purchased exactly two ebooks. I've tried downloading other free ones too, and they just look horrible, if you care at all about typography. I'd much prefer a static image (e.g., PDF), if it were sized so that I could read it on my screen properly. Almost all the books I actually have loaded on my Kindle are PDFs derived from paper books (even very old ones), because the typesetting is just so much better.
It has nothing to do with a "paper fetish" or binding. Good typography just "looks better," just like high-quality video or whatever. Page layout, text-block size, spacing between lines, between words, between sentences, etc. does make a difference. Line-breaking automatically and hyphenating automatically is more-or-less possible, but it requires a better engine that most ebook readers. And different typefaces require different solutions.
If someone wanted to really implement high-quality ebooks, they could make use of, say, a LaTeX engine which could regenerate and retypeset a book to fit whatever screen size desired, with the font size chosen. A durable PS or PDF version could be generated that would always look the same, once the user decides the specs for that book.
This would better replicate the experience of paper books, not just from an aesthetic standpoint, but also the sense of "memory" one gets about "where something was on the page." When I actually sit down and read to learn something, I usually remember where something is discussed by the placement on the page, and the approximate location thumbing through the book. That sort of physical interaction with "browsing" through pages and remembering locations is much more difficult with ebooks, especially when text can reflow on a whim.
I'm not saying everyone has to care about typography in this way, but some people do. To them, "the experience can be reproduced much more easily," but so far hasn't. Unfortunately, the people who want to have a movie theatre in their home seem to be much more numerous than the people who care about beautiful typesetting. Alas, Donald Knuth's vision for beautiful automatic typography seems to have been forgotten....
Please point to one actual human study that shows that HFCS causes obesity or other related issues in humans if consumed in the same quantity as sucrose. I bet you can't.
What I meant to say is "Please point to one actual human study that shows that HFCS causes obesity or other related issues in humans AT A GREATER RATE than if the same quantity as sucrose is consumed."
Of course, that point should also be clear from context. I am NOT disputing that excess HFCS consumption (or excess sucrose consumption or excess honey consumption or whatever sugar) can cause obesity. I just think that the differences between these are overrated.
I'm going to preface my comment here by saying that I generally cook my own foods, and eat a lot of things fresh. I consume very little added sugars of any sort. But this ridiculous debate about sugar vs. HFCS is just idiotic. Both of them are bad for you.
there is no chemical difference between HFCS and Sucrose.
Wrong again. HFCS is high-fructose corn syrup. The ratio of fructose to glucose is higher in HFCS than in sucrose. That's why it is called "high fructose".
It would instill more confidence in your post if you actually showed that you knew anything about the substance you're discussing. The ratio of fructose to glucose in HFCS has nothing to do with comparisons to sucrose. The adjective "high-fructose" added to "corn syrup" is self-explanatory. Corn syrup (the kind of stuff you use when making candies that need a certain texture) is naturally almost all glucose. "Corn syrup" thus contains almost no fructose. Therefore, any "corn syrup" which contains more than a tiny percentage of fructose is automatically a kind of "high-fructose" corn syrup. Normally, HFCS is produced by taking normal (little to no-fructose) corn syrup and processing it in some manner to raise fructose, generally to around 50%
Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. The kind of HFCS normally used in most foods is either HFCS 55 (about 55% fructose, 42% glucose, 3% other) or HFCS 42 (about 42% fructose, 53% glucose, 5% other). The former is generally used in sodas; the latter in most other processed foods with HFCS (like baked goods, etc.). Please note that HFCS 42 actually contains LESS fructose than sucrose.
While we're on the topic of chemical breakdowns, I also think it's important to bring up honey, which is roughly the same as HFCS 55 in terms of having almost all fructose and glucose, with a bit more fructose. (Honey has a slightly higher proportion of other sugars than HFCS, particularly maltose, but still less than 10%.) Natural foods wackos generally hold up honey as an ideal "natural" alternative sweetener, but it's mostly the same as HFCS, particularly regarding the simple sugars the parent is so worried about.
Whenever HFCS comes up, why aren't people proposing a honey ban as well?
Anyhow...
The problem with HFCS is that it first bypasses the metabolic pathway that sucrose must go through, thereby creating a rush as the simple sugars are directly absorbed by the blood.
As pointed out by other responders to your post, this metabolic pathway doesn't appear to be that significant... it may not be on the order of milliseconds in the stomach, but downing a Coke with sucrose vs. downing a Coke with HFCS will both be causing a surge of simple sugars into your bloodstream in short order.
Most of the studies that purport to "prove" that HFCS is terrible are actually studies that compare pure fructose to other things. (Most people apparently, like the parent poster, are ignorant of the fact that "high-fructose" doesn't even necessarily mean that most of HFCS is fructose.) Yes, apparently eating a lot of pure fructose is bad for you. But the metabolic response is largely dependent on context, and HFCS in that respect is much closer to table sugar than to pure fructose.
Only in the past few years have there been some studies that actually compare HFCS to sucrose directly. Out of the handful that I've seen, all but one have shown no significant statistical difference between HFCS and sucrose consumption, and that includes human studies (for example, this recent one).
You must be one of the people who's going 1mph below limit to teach everyone else a lesson...
Umm, no. You see, you're describing an irrational practice that actually decreases safety. The issues I brought up were things that actually increase safety, including one thing I mentioned: "observe reasonable speed limits."
Any decent drivers education teacher would tell you that you should not drive in a way that impedes the flow of traffic. If everyone on a highway is going 10-15 mph above the speed limit, you'll actually decrease everyone's safety by driving under the limit. Best to go with the traffic flow.
You seem to fail to understand the distinction between safe driving and people who are out there to "teach people lessons." Those are like the idiots who will cut in front of a person and slam on the brakes, rather than just let the tailgater pass.
Being a careful driver may save your life. On the other hand, observing traffic "rules" in situations where those rules decrease safety is stupid -- especially if you have sort of "road rage" issues that cause you to want to "teach lessons" to people.
The person who wants to "teach everyone a lesson" is just as stupid as the idiot who tailgates and tries to drive 90mph everywhere.
- You say they'll reduce my premiums by 80%? Well, maybe I was wrong, and I'll actually trust the computer to drive. After all, insurance companies aren't going to reduce my premiums by 80% unless the risk from claims is reduced by at least that much.
I agree with this logic, up to a point. But just because the claims are reduced by 80% doesn't mean that you -- personally -- would actually be safer.
First off, you may actually be a very good driver. You may do things like leave extra space, not tailgate, not run red/yellow lights, not accelerate or decelerate suddenly, continuously check your mirrors, always signal, observe reasonable speed limits, etc. that many other drivers don't do as fastidiously. If so, you might already be doing many things that the computer would do naturally that most people don't, because most people drive like idiots in some sort of imaginary racetrack, even if it doesn't actually get them to where they're going significantly faster.
But, more importantly, you'd need to know what sort of errors still make up those 20% of claims left. If the computer uses marginally better judgment most of the time than average humans, but has bugs that will very likely kill you in certain scenarios (where human drivers might be able to avoid that), it still may be rational to avoid the computer.
The strain on our Federal budget and perpetual deficit due to things like duck penii studies?
As someone else pointed out above, even if you are in a high tax bracket, you probably paid something like 0.002 cents out of your taxes toward this study. The vast majority of U.S. taxpayers probably paid something on the order of a ten-thousandth or hundred-thousandth of a cent.
Even if this study is bogus, are you really sure this is where you should be directing your focus? I'm all in favor of trimming the federal budget, but you may want to spend a little time figuring out the huge categories of expenses in the federal budget before complaining about something that constitutes something like 0.00001% of it for one year (literally). Many people here have mentioned defense (which takes up roughly 19% of the annual budget, which is about 1,600,000 TIMES the size of this duck study every year, but we could just as easily talk about other expense categories that cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
I read about the shape of their penii from the Daily Beast and I care about how much was spent on researching them because I get the impression from this anecdote and many others how bad we are at controlling waste, pork, and fraud.
We're absolutely TERRIBLE at controlling waste, pork, and fraud. Do have any clue how much money is handed out to random defense contractors every year through inappropriate channels? With just a little Googling, you could come up with dozens of categories of spending that EACH cost tens of thousands of times your duck study every year. Recalling one soldier from Afganistan for one year would save roughly 2.5 times as much as your duck study.
I think you're absolutely right that there's a huge amount of waste and corruption. However, directing your anger at legitimate scientific inquiry, which is already severely at risk within the federal budget, is a bit odd -- if your goal really is to save taxpayers a significant sum of money.
Also, by the way, your Daily Beast article actually argues that the duck research is legitimately interesting. From the little I know, I agree. I'm not a biologist, but I heard about the strange properties of duck phalluses years ago -- long before this study -- and it wouldn't surprise me if studying them would produce some unique insights into reproduction, perhaps far beyond just ducks or birds. Just because you're too ignorant to imagine that such research might be useful, it doesn't mean that it isn't. There are all sorts of reproductive issues in the world these days, from endangered species who aren't reproducing property to falling human birth rates in developed countries, and I'll trust the experts to know whether this research could be helpful.
Lastly, if you want to go on some ignorant screed about something, take a few minutes and at least learn to spell the topic you're discussing. The plural of "penis" is "penises," as you can see in your Daily Beast article. If you insist on using the Latin plural, it is "penes" (since it's a 3rd declension noun), but you won't find that except in very old medical textbooks. "Penii" is just something ignorant people say when they're trying to look smarter than they are.
If niche (read: more intellectually rigorous) books are more affordable, this primarily benefits higher-educated, wealthier consumers. In practice, the French model asks the masses to subsidize the consumption habits of the educated rich.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to couple "educated" and "rich" here, except to make your argument appear stronger than it is. It's true that people with more education tend to earn more money. But the most educated people (and "most intellectually rigorous") often aren't "the rich." Most academics, for example, earn more than a blue-collar salary, but they don't earn anything like what a lawyer or medical doctor would earn, let alone a corporate executive or something.
And there are plenty of intelligent people who want to read intelligent books who aren't rich at all, or even upper middle class.
Years ago, many publishers actually DELIBERATELY did what you make sound like some sort of social injustice: they used profits from the stuff they sell the masses to fund the "quality" intellectual books they wanted to produce. Some publishers still do this -- many academic books are produced with slim profit margins or even losses, with print runs sometimes only in the hundreds even at major presses.
Personally, I think this is not only a noble thing to do (rather than just taking the money from the best-sellers and paying it to publishing executives), but it's also a net social benefit. Besides the importance of publishing quality research and things like that, making quality books affordable is important so that we can actually allow social mobility. If only the rich people can afford to be educated because quality books are expensive, then class divisions become even worse.
Far from an injustice, your argument highlights a practice that would actually have a social benefit if more widely practiced. Taking a few dollars from the profits of the latest celebrity biography or crappy genre fiction novel and using them to promote intellectually rigorous books and make them affordable is making an investment in the education for society as a whole.
"Force" is a pretty strong word. I've never heard of an Amazon purchasing agent carrying a shot gun into a publishers office.
The closer a distributor gets to being a monopoly, the more producers are willing to give up just to do business with them. I agree that "force" is a strong word, but publishers who refuse to put their books for sale on Amazon these days are often going to take a big potential sales hit.
Amazon negotiates for a lower price on a large quantity of books. The publisher snaps at the chance to sell half a million copies at once.
Yeah, if the book is already marketed as a potential bestseller, your little story might actually be true.
The reality in the world is that most books only sell a few THOUSAND copies, not millions. Specialized books -- even by major university presses and such -- may only have first print runs in the HUNDREDS. Yet Amazon will still insist on taking a huge cut out of the retail price for the book -- much larger than almost any other distributor or retailer.
Just do a few Google searches, and you'll easily find stories about small publishers who are forced to LOSE MONEY on every Amazon sale if they want to market their books there. Yet some still do it in the hopes that some book might get some attention and become a big seller, and they might eventually sell enough copies of that one book to fund all the rest of their inventory.
Now, you might say -- why don't they raise the prices of their books? But that makes their books look overpriced -- and just so Amazon can take 60% of their profit. The only way to make the book reasonably priced at other sellers while still making money on Amazon would be to produce a special "Amazon exclusive edition" that's overpriced, just so Amazon could mark it down and lay claim to the majority of the purchase price... and, I'd bet Amazon wouldn't really go for that sort of thing.
Amazon, and any bulk buyers reduce the inefficiency in the distribution system. That's all they do.
That doesn't affect quality in any way.
This works for small bulk buyers and wholesalers. Once a company starts showing monopolistic tendencies and deliberately driving competition from the marketplace, they can begin to make demands on producers like reduced prices. There are well-known examples of Amazon making exactly these sorts of demands on publishers.
And once producers feel like they can't refuse (because otherwise they can't market their product), they have no choice but to lower their own costs. In the process of lowering costs, quality in fact may have to decrease.
I'm all for decreasing inefficiencies in the marketplace. But the vast majority of "quality" books (e.g., specialized research, academic publications, technical books, new literature, etc.) are already produced with very slim profit margins or even at a loss at some presses (subsidized by sales of more popular things). I have nothing against popular books, celebrity bios, romance novels, genre fiction, whatever -- but I'd also like publishers to keep producing other things that may not sell a million copies. Amazon's model may in fact make it harder for those sorts of books to be produced, and it does in fact make it harder to small specialized presses to exist.
Well there's that, the fact that items get delivered fast (often the stuff they promise to me in two days comes overnight, and I don't even live near a distribution center) and the fact that returning items is dead simple and they even pay for the return shipping. Also a book I bought from them had a mangled cover, I called to complain about it and they just refunded me $35 (the book cost $80,) and they didn't even want the book back.
Amazon pays for the return shipping as long as you don't do it too often. I've never hit the threshold, but I know a few people who have. As for complaints, if you have a simple issue that's easily solved by a refund, chances are you'll get it resolved simply -- as long as it's not too much money and you don't do it too often. If you have a situation that's more complicated, don't hold your breath. (My most recent example: I downloaded an mp3 album, but three of the tracks were wrong... I mean, actually from some other CD. I complained, and after three email exchanges, I got some $5 credit or something. Except I had paid something like $30 for the "multi-CD" album, and the wrong tracks were still up on the web. I requested that they either (1) send me an actual physical copy of the album, so I could have the correct tracks, (2) refund my money completely so I could buy the physical album, or, ideally, (3) put the correct tracks up so I could download them. It's been almost a year since they told me twice that they'd look into it... nothing happened. Before that, I could cite a number of instances of weird things happening with service. And heaven help you if you buy from a 3rd-party seller through Amazon and things don't go right. Amazon customer service was great back in the late 1990s... very hit-or-miss these days.)
You've got that way off. Organic itself is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating,
Umm, duh. I don't see how agreeing with me is "way off." Notice that I put "organic" and "wholesome" in quotation marks. Note also later when I explicitly stated in my post: "I care about flavor and wholesomeness, but only when it's a significant change and not just stamped 'natural' or 'organic' or whatever."
I don't think we actually disagree very much here.
That's not what people actually want. You yourself might claim as such, but chances are you won't actually follow that line of thinking when it comes to your palate. Most people like a specific flavor and tend to want to stick to its distinct taste, only changing when in their head they specifically seek change, or are otherwise forced to.
Given that I actively seek out new taste experiences -- I'm the kind of person who will order the food I've never heard of before on the menu -- I think I actually WILL "follow that line of thinking when it comes to [my] palate." I discover new foods and new culinary ideas on a regular basis.
As to what "people actually want," I also tend to cook a lot for other people and introduce them to new foods or flavor combinations. Maybe they're just humoring me, or maybe it's the kind of people I hang out with, but I have seen many, many people respond to quality ingredients that might have their flavors tweaked in some ways.
On the other hand, I do also know some people who prefer the taste of crappy canned and jarred foods over those prepared fresh -- just because they're used to them. So I agree with you. I also think that the typical person who goes out of their way to shop at alternative supermarkets -- or, to get back on topic to TFA, those who actively seek independent bookstores -- are generally those looking to broaden their palates.
Regardless of your Pepsi test, though, while I was living in Europe, I encountered lots of Americans who were not as adventuresome in eating as I was. Yet they too often remarked about the quality of the fresh ingredients. Just because people prefer the soda that they are addicted to to
By forcing people to pay more for books? Since there are many other ways to enjoy your spare time, consumer demand for books is very elastic, so they will certainly consume fewer books.
And since literature depends on people reading books and sharing their experiences, France is actually sabotaging literature.
Actually, while I agree with you in part, I also think you're missing a fundamental part about the traditional "literary" community that France may be trying to preserve.
The actual volume of books sold does not necessarily produce a larger "literary community." If I sell a bunch of crappy Romance novels and paperback Westerns, I'm not going to produce a group of customers that are educated in traditional "literature."
Nor, for that matter, does it much matter even if I sold cheap paperbacks of Moby Dick or of the collected works of Shakespeare.
What matters in preserving "literature" in culture (at least in the traditional, canonic sense) is that certain educated people form communities that value certain types of literature.
Those are the kind of people who like to hang out in indenpedent bookshops. They like to have "deep" discussions about philosophical issues in coffee shops or recommend their favorite books, etc.
I know this is an elitist perspective, and I don't quite agree with it. But if France wants to preserve its "literary culture" (as it has been created over the past few centuries), it's not about ensuring that a poor worker can buy hundreds of crappy paperback novels or even hundreds of paperback classics that will never be read. It's about keeping smaller communities of educated "literary afficionados" around.
And to do that, keeping the independent bookshop culture is probably pretty essential... even if it means that everybody has to pay an extra couple Euros per book.
Actually they do. They provide a service as well. Providing a better service for less has similar results to providing a better product for less.
In what way is Amazon's "service" better? Mostly, they have a huge inventory and cheap prices. That's about it. Whenever I've had to actually deal with Amazon for actual customer service, my generally experience has been fair to poor.
Traditional book stores often provide much richer and interesting "service," not to mention the experience of shopping, browsing, interacting with the community of local people who shop at a store, etc. That may not be valuable to you, but it is added "service." What drives most people to Amazon is not the "service," but the prices and ability to choose from a huge selection at one place. Unlike service industries that require longer extended customer interactions for any success (like dine-in restaurants), people don't really care as much about "atmosphere" or "individual attention" in buying a book. But on the few occasions when it would be helpful, it's no longer there in the same way on Amazon.
I'm not against Amazon, and I acknowledge that they do provide a sort of giant database and warehouse. But providing "service" in the traditional retailer sense? Not anything great.
Anyways, I keep hearing that luddite argument that cheap food is now low quality, but that's a big load of crap. Having to follow a renal diet myself, I have to cook my own food from fresh ingredients, and I can't taste the difference between wal-mart tomatoes and whole foods tomatoes.
That's not a good analogy. Whole Foods is a giant corporate structure whose goals are only marginally better than Walmart. Whole Foods isn't terrible, but its version of "organic" and "wholesome" foods is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, rather than necessarily providing a consistently better product.
I'm going to preface what I'm about to say by noting that I absolutely detest the whole "hippy" "earthy-crunchy" "love-the-earth" "buy-organic-even-though-it's-often-meaningless" garbage. I care about sustainability, but only if it's real and not some corporate crap made up to sell more expensive products. I care about flavor and wholesomeness, but only when it's a significant change and not just stamped "natural" or "organic" or whatever.
Anyhow, a more apt analogy for the present discussion would be buying tomatoes from either one of these bohemoths vs. buying tomatoes from a local farmer at a stand at a market or even growing your own. Tomatoes are an interesting choice to bring up, since their flavor does get altered so much when they are refrigerated and picked early for shipping. As someone who has bought fresh-picked tomatoes from farmers I know as well as grown my own, I can certainly tell the difference in flavor compared to most varieties in most supermarkets, including probably most in Whole Foods.
The reality of a traditional food distribution structure -- far from being "luddite" -- is that it actually allows food to be produced for superior flavor. I don't want to claim it's actually "more nutritious," since everybody has their own standards for nutrition. But small-scale food production does allow for maximizing flavor.
Why? Because large-scale food production requires a choice of foods that ship well and stand up to longer storage. It also requires choices made in shipment and storage conditions that may affect flavor -- like refrigeration and tomatoes, or picking them a little early before they are fully ripe.
On a broader scale, those choices actually lead to fewer choices in basic ingredients. Perhaps not fewer in your actual local supermarket, but fewer available across the country -- a decreased diversity of crops. Farmers choose breeds of tomatoes based on how fast they grow, whether they will be able to be pick
Sure, we can make edible food with just flour and water even blindfold,
If it's edible, we survive the disaster. Isn't that the point here?
but automated manufacturing systems (3D printers are just one, and will evolve)
It's a disaster. Exactly how many "automated manufacturing systems" are you planning to magically have available (with the power to run them)?
With flour, water, some fire source, and a flat surface that can survive heating, I can make flatbread in a matter of minutes. Your solution depends on complex technology being available and power to run it.
can in principle create vastly more complex products using large numbers of ingredients or components and with microscopic precision.
Umm, again, it's a freakin' disaster. Does anyone really give a crap about doing anything with "microscopic precision"? We're looking to survive, not do a lab experiment.
This would be totally beyond the capability of humans to reproduce in any reasonable span of time.
Anything that's "beyond the capability of humans to reproduce in any reasonable span of time" is probably not needed in a disaster scenario.
Regarding your first example, it is a machine that makes bread (I guess in various shapes) out of dough, but if you have the dough, a regular bread machine would be more efficient, and a regular oven would be even more efficient as long as you have a human available to kneed the dough. And many kinds of ovens work without electricity.
Just to clarify, I would imagine the first example would be targeted more to specialized pasta shapes. So if you have to have your "bowtie" or "corkscrew" pasta in the middle of a disaster, you could make it, I guess.
On the other hand, most people in the world don't mind eating dried pasta (which is probably about the quality this thing will put out anyway), and dried pasta stores about as well as the flour you'd need to make the pasta dough anyway. So why not just store your bowtie pasta for the emergency?
As for fresh bread, you don't even need a human to knead the dough. Most cultures have some form of flatbread where it's possible to just mix the dough together, maybe rest it for a while, and then bake/cook (pizza, naan, tortillas, etc.). And even if you wanted risen loaves of bread, there are plenty of ways to produce passable (and even superior) bread without kneading. It really would only require someone to be able to mix the dough, wait until it rises, and throw it into an oven to bake it.
In a true disaster scenario, people aren't looking to dine on al dente tagliatelle and a crusty hearth-fired artisan bread. Making bread and pasta is just not that hard. And besides, I have sincere doubts that any 3-D printer can replicate the texture and taste of artisan bread anytime soon, since it depends so much on the changes produced in the dough as a whole during long fermentation. Wonderbread in funny shapes, maybe. Good bread? I doubt it.
I swear that after the shoe bomber got them to make us take off our shoes, the underwear bomber was sent in to see if they'd strip search us. (And they responded with backscatter scanners. Discuss.)
Yeah, there were even people who predicted that this would happen.
The more I follow idleness as an art, as a way of being, the happier I've become. It hasn't gotten rid of too many negatives, per se, but I find myself happier in general
This is the most insightful thing I've read here, since it gets at the heart of the many things wrong with TFA.
As I understand TFA, it's trying to blame the high rate of depression, anxiety "disorders," etc. in our modern culture on an evolutionary preference to emphasize bad experiences and memories.
I think that's a load of BS. It's a typical attempt by psychology to connect to evolution, where we don't actually think through the implications and logic of the argument.
If TFA were actually true, think about what would follow. The societies with the most stress caused by things relevant to survival should have the highest depression, highest anxiety disorders, highest numbers of suicides, etc. In other words, if we go find hunter-gatherer societies, where ensuring food sources, etc. can be a daily struggle, we should find loads of them committing suicide randomly or something.
That's, of course, nonsense. And it doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary perspective. It wouldn't make any sense for evolution to cause depression or chronic anxiety that results in continuous unhappiness.
In fact, I can't recall any studies showing that less technologically sophisticated societies have higher rates of these mental disorders. They should if this were really driven by evolution, since chances of food scarcity, disease, etc. are much higher. On the other hand, I can recall a few studies showing how the introduction of a modern commercial culture to global societies would cause depression, anxiety disorders, etc. where they didn't exist before. Also, these disorders begin to appear in parts of the population that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Why should teenagers, for example, have one of the highest rates of depression and suicidal thoughts in developed societies? Evolution shouldn't kill off people before they have a chance to reproduce. It makes no sense. By the logic in TFA, the people who should be most depressed should be people in pain or who live in conditions where fundamental necessities of life are undependable -- instead, we see a lot of depression among healthy young folks in societies where they have all basic needs fulfilled.
Moreover, although TFA points out an evolutionary advantage to learning from negative experiences (like "fire is hot -- don't touch it again or it will cause pain"), there are also significant rewards for positive experiences with evolutionary pressure.
For example, sex and food. Most people have very strong memories about these, particularly when they are first encountered (first kiss, first sexual experience, etc.). How many people get a psychological boost when they encounter something that "tastes like Mom's cooking" again?
Also, particularly for women, there are all sorts of reinforcing and filtering mechanisms that make reproduction seem like a "positive" experience, even though it involves great pain, great sacrifices in time and energy, many sleepless nights, etc. I can't tell you how many fathers I've talked with who have made a comment like: "If women actually remembered how crazy the birth and raising of an infant was, the human race would have died out long ago." Instead, we get loads of hormones that make new mothers remember these as mostly positive experiences (despite the yelling and screaming and stressful days and nights that the dads remember). When the child is a little older, rather than saying, "gosh that was crazy, I can't imagine going through that again!" many people just look at a baby they see somewhere and say, "Isn't that cute? Let's have another!"
In general, in fact, I'd say that TFA is completely wrong when it comes to long-term memories. Yes, we learn from painful and negative experiences. But humans also seem to have a natural
I am not a member of the Tea Party. But your understanding of Constitutional law is fundamentally flawed. Officially, the federal government is granted a very specific list of powers, known as "enumerated powers," which are listed explicitly in the Constitution. The Founders were suspicious of a powerful central government and thus severely limited powers to those explicitly authorized.
Of course, it hasn't really been that way since about 1937, when FDR threatened to enlarge the Supreme Court and pack it with his cronies if the Supremes didn't agree to allow the federal government to do anything it wanted (including Social Security) rather than sticking to the enumerated powers that were the only things allowed for the first 150 years or so of the US.
Need proof that there was a fundamental shift? Ask yourself: why did we require a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol during Prohibition (and another to allow it again)? There's nothing in the Constitution about alcohol or why such a ban would be illegal -- but a ban would have been illegal since it is not an enumerated power of Congress.
Fast forward a couple decades and suddenly Congress can easily ban marijuana and other drugs. Why? Shouldn't we need a new Prohibition amendment for those bans? Not any more. Though the words of Constitution stayed the same, the post-1937 SCOTUS has only rarely held Congress to the original limitations that used to be enforced.
I personally think we should have as programs that are like Social Security, etc. But I also firmly believe that the vast majority of the federal government's actions today are clearly illegal according to the standards of the first 150 years of Constitutional law. To enact these reforms properly does require a Constitutional amendment.
Before you judge my response below, be aware that I'm actually the kind of parent who strongly believes in teaching kids to do things by themselves, eventually leading to unsupervised activities after guided exploration. By the time a kid is 4 or 5, he/she can be prepared to do all sorts of "dangerous" "adult" tasks, with proper education and training. In years past -- and still in many other countries -- 5-year-old kids can probably cook on a hot stove or in an oven (if not manage an open fire), use sharp knives for cooking and other repetitive tasks, etc.
But kids who learn to do these things are able to because they've been taught how to know what is safe and unsafe.
It is the Internet, not real life, they cannot actually get hurt, decapitated, or disabled while using it.
The internet may be a "virtual place," but that doesn't mean that interactions on the internet can't lead to real-life interactions (and even potentially dangerous ones).
The internet may be a "virtual place," but that doesn't mean that encounters there couldn't cause real-life emotional or psychological damage to young people who don't have the frame of reference that adults have.
That is why the Internet is such a great place for children to explore unfettered. Little Jonny can wonder off alone and learn about the word and himself, and you do not actually have to worry about them being eaten by a wolf or breaking their leg like our parents/grandparents used to, when learning about the worded entailed large amounts of real danger and life threatening situations.
The "wolves" and "broken legs" can still appear in different forms, from creepy guys who "groom" kids and young teens in inappropriate interactions (perhaps coaxing them into real-world "encounters") to cyberbullying scenarios that can drive a kid to depression or even suicide. In case you haven't noticed, people tend to be meaner on the internet -- not having to say or do nasty things to someone's face often makes it easier. How many people who lay on the horn in their car? How many of those same people would start randomly screaming at somebody who was walking too slowly in front of them?
The "virtual" space of the internet allows more abstract interactions -- often more extreme and unusual than in real life -- some of which children and young people may need guidance to navigate.
As far as I am concerned, knowingly filtering a child's knowledge, and retarding their ability to learn, is nothing sort of child abuse.
Filtering knowledge and retarding abilities to learn are different from providing guidance or creating reasonable restrictions when a child cannot be continuously monitored. I agree with you that the GP's approach can sound rather extreme. I personally think an ideal solution involves parents providing direct guidance and supervised exploration, rather than background monitoring and surveillance.
On the other hand, I don't see a huge amount of difference in the GP's behavior from a parent who puts up a fence around the yard so the 2-year-old doesn't go wandering into the street. Having a fence to keep the kid from wandering away in the few seconds a parent may be distracted by something else is a reasonable restriction. And it doesn't mean that the parent can't also have the gate open at times, teach the child to look both ways, teach the child never to run after balls into the street until he/she is older, etc.
The place I disagree with the GP is the sense of constant surveillance. Kids need to have "safe places" to explore on their own. There are places on the internet that is possible, just like there are places in the backyard that are safe for a 2-year-old. A better solution would allow a kid to wander about in those safe places without being worried about parental surveillance.
However, the entire internet is NOT always a safe place. It's incredibly naive to act like it is.
The Federal Reserve Act says that they have to buy them on the open market. Are you saying they have a "more open" market? That would contravene the purposes of the Act, but not surprise me.
I'd suggest you re-read the links you posted. The Fed buys treasuries through "primary dealers," who are basically the banks that show up for every treasury auction and deal directly with the Fed. Also, note that it is actually an "auction," in the sense that different people make different "bids." If you look at stats from various auctions at the Treasury, you'll see "high bid" and "low bid" and "median bid" listed at each auction. These usually get summarized by one number in media reports, but that doesn't mean there aren't different bids. If the primary dealers (who sell to the Fed) put in lower bids, they get the T-bills first... at least, that's how I understand it. I imagine that primary dealers are usually instructed by the Fed to bid as low as necessary to acquire the amount of debt that the Fed wants... which is how they can decide to buy up 90% of the market -- they just bid lower.
But that doesn't mean other people aren't interested or aren't bidding almost as low.
They say that there's a line to buy them, but if the market actions are open, then the Fed would not be able to grab 90% of there really was such a line.
It's not so much that the market is "cooked" or "not open," as much as these Treasury "auctions" are NOT like the old floor of the NY Stock Exchange. It's not a bunch of bankers screaming prices at some Treasury official. Instead, these meetings are quiet affairs with only small groups of people in the room, mostly representing huge banks and financial firms. These people have clear ideas of what they are supposed to (and allowed to) bid before they come into the room, and if the Fed's primary dealers bid lower, the rest of the people may not get all the T bills they want.
But the price of the auction is still determined by the bidders, so it's not that the Fed is cooking the market exactly. If the rest of the bidders don't bid rates down very far, the primary dealers won't either. So even in cases where the Fed acquires 90% of the Treasuries auctioned, the price the Fed buys this stuff at is still set by what the other 10% of the market is willing to bid to (along with the other 150-300% of people who don't even buy any T bills at all).
The dirty secret is that in recent auctions, the Federal Reserve bought 90+% of those - nobody else wants them.
What the heck are you talking about? Even in the most recent auction, in the middle of the government shutdown, there were still bids for 2.75 times the amount of debt the Treasury was actually offering in 1-month T-bills, which are the most volatile. For longer-term T-bills, the numbers are much better. In recent years, you often tend to see bids for at least 4 times the value of securities at auction.
Claiming that "nobody else wants them" is pure BS. There is no "dirty secret" here. The Fed often gets "first dibs" at auctions because of their role in managing the money supply, so they do buy up a lot of T-bills, but that doesn't mean there weren't lots of people waiting in line to buy that debt.
Admittedly, the numbers are down in terms of the numbers of bids in recent auctions (and we'd expect short-term bids to be down given the craziness in Washington), but your implication that the Fed is buying them up because no one else would is completely and utterly bogus.
Believe it or not, I still wear a digital watch as well as have a smartphone. It's just quicker to glance at the time on it (which I do quite regularly) than take a few seconds taking out my smartphone from a pocket that also has keys in it.
I believe it, and I agree. I went for about 6 months a decade or so ago without a watch, and used my cellphone for telling time... but then for a time I was doing international traveling, and I needed a watch again. I've kept using them again ever since. They're useful.
On the other hand, I teach college students. Wristwatches started to disappear from their wrists about a decade ago, and by 5 years ago I could walk around a large lecture hall and only see one or two. For people younger than about 30-35, the wristwatch seems pretty much dead, except as a status symbol or jewelry.
Once again, from a legal standpoint, an employee was not property -- thus, again, technically we're not talking about slavery per se. But if you were in debt, often you technically could not leave legally. From a practical standpoint, it might be hard to track you down, but from a practical standpoint it could be hard to find a runaway slave as well. A choice of forced work for a company or forced labor in debtors prison (or more likely poorhouses or poor farms in the late 1800s) isn't much of a choice. And, for the record, there were even cases where a child was forced to work for years to pay off a father's debt to a company store... while such people may have been technically free to leave, legally they could only be free by paying off the debt, and the company often had the means to basically make that impossible without outside help or money.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to self-reply, but to clarify
TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly).
What I meant here is that TFA is about creating open-access resources in the form of a kind of collaborative scholarly encyclopedia summarizing the main consensus of ideas in a discipline. It's NOT about open-access publishing in the sense of publishing your random research out of context, as in a journal or something.
Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia.
A lot of the discussion here doesn't seem to have much to do with TFA. (Surprise, surprise...)
People seem to be missing the importance of "scholarly canons" in the summary. TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly). This is NOT about Wikipedia (except perhaps as a model of how to do certain aspects of a scholarly encyclopedia better than Wikipedia).
TFA holds up Scholarpedia as its main exemplar of a better kind of scholar online encyclopedia of canonic knowledge in a particular field.
That's not the only one out there, and Scholarpedia does have its issues. Personally, I think if our goal is to produce a standard scholarly encyclopedia for a particular discipline (or for many disciplines), we could also take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a great example of a model project of collaboration by scholars to produce a summary of research and ideas in a discipline...
Bitcoin is backed by the agreement of people that use bitcoin that it has a certain value. This value tends to change as more people use bitcoin, as there are only so many of them.
The U.S. Dollar is similarly backed by the agreement of the people that it has a certain value. However, that value may change because an outside authority has the power to print more of such money
SCARCITY != VALUE
Say it with me: SCARCITY != VALUE
Yes, scarcity can be a component of value, but it is not a guarantee. I can go out into my back yard and start picking up random worthless rocks, build a little stand and try to sell them: "Genuine rocks from AthanasiusKircher's back yard! Only a few like them in the world!" Nobody will care.
I could even argue that "This rock is the ONLY ROCK WITH THIS EXACT SHAPE IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!!" That's probably true. If it looks pretty, maybe somebody would pay a $1 for it at some flea market. Otherwise, nobody cares about that fact that this rock is "one of a kind."
Spend some time watching those random shows that go looking for antiques, and you'll understand this. There are a lot of rare things in the world, and you'll often get somebody who's willing to pay something for an item that is sufficiently rare. But whether that person will pay $1, or $100, or $10,000 is really up to whether (1) that person really wants the thing that badly for a person collection, or (and much more likely) (2) that person is aware that there is a group of other people out there who would pay at least that much.
You remind me of a friend who said that I should go in with him and invest in case of some kind of scotch (liquor) that was a couple hundred dollars per bottle. It was very rare and rather old, so it's pretty unlikely that anyone would come out with a new giant stockpile somewhere. My friend was convinced that these bottles would only go up in value, and in a decade or two, we could sell them for many times what we bought them for.
Now, what my friend said could happen. There are rare old bottles of scotch that have sold for thousands of dollars. On the other hand, there are also rare old bottles of scotch that aren't worth much more than they were when they were first sold. It all depends on the whims of a very small group of collectors and rich drinkers.
What you say could happen too: Bitcoin's "value tends to change as more people use bitcoin, as there are only so many of them."
But right now the price of Bitcoins is being driven by speculators -- people who are all betting the same thing. It is therefore very volatile. Whether "more people" will gradually adopt it in more circumstances is based on a lot of factors. But even if people start to like the idea of Bitcoin, perhaps someone else will come up with some sort of "virtual currency" that has attributes and advantages which Bitcoin doesn't, and maybe everyone will flock to that instead.
There are items that more-or-less have inherent utility value (like food), and there are others that only have value built on convention (like most currencies). Bitcoin's scarcity will only help it have value IF enough people actually want it.
The government does not "back" the dollar at all. If you give them a dollar, they will give you nothing in return, but another dollar.
Well, the dollar does have one thing going for it that Bitcoin doesn't (and likely never will): the U.S. government requires payment of taxes in dollars. It therefore forces people to use that currency. If people need to pay taxes in dollars, they are likely to receive wages in dollars, and if people receive wages in dollars, they are likely to want to spend them elsewhere.
As long as the government can throw you in jail for failing to pay your taxes using their chosen currency, you'll be forced to use that currency. And if people are forced to use tha
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com?
Well, um... you, uh, get the see the book???
Seriously. I buy almost all non-fiction books, and 2-3 minutes leafing through the book, looking up a few things in the index, and reading a couple specific passages on topics I'm looking for will immediately tell me: (1) does the book contain the information I need and care about? (2) does the author have a freakin' clue what he/she is talking about? (3) are these things valuable enough to justify the cost?
I can spend time skimming dozens of reviews on Amazon and still have no clue about the answers to those questions. Sure, for some books on Amazon I can get a limited preview or limited search capability, but that's generally not enough to really let me check what I need to.
I own a couple thousand physical books. I can only think of ONE physical book that I purchased in an actual store that I regret buying, and I was in a hurry and just picked up some Barnes & Noble special for $1.99 or something. On the other hand, I must have at least 20 or more books I purchased online that turned out to be much less useful than I imagined. I just can't tell adequately from online descriptions. And returning them is often too much of a pain to bother.
On a related note, there's also the seredipitous encounter with interesting books on a physical shelf. While Amazon may be good at telling me what other people tend to buy who buy the books I'm already searching for, it's very unlikely to tell me about the really cool books out there that people like me may not always know about. Library shelves, on the other hand, are great for containing those hidden treasures, sitting there right next to a book I know on a similar topic. Actual physical bookstores can be good about that as well, though only if they have the kind of specialized non-fiction I like to browse for (and very few do anymore).
I'm very likely to walk out of a physical bookstore with some book I found and thought to be really interesting, and I almost never regret those purchases. Online, I only tend to buy books I already have heard about and which already are supposed to be "good," because I often can't adequately evaluate them otherwise.
Used bookstores are even more critical, because they carry all sorts of out-of-print stuff that's even more difficult to sort through on Amazon (if it's there at all).
You still get the same 'about the author' and plot taglines on the back...
I don't give a crap about the author bio or what some random other people say about how this is the "coolest book ever." I suppose if that's the way you evaluate the books you want to buy, I guess there's no benefit to a physical bookstore. I, personally, prefer to actually examine the merchandise... like the people you mention who might actually like to look at the TV or listen to the stereo before purchasing.
Digital download/streaming videos still doesn't match the video/audio quality of a blu-ray, and wont for a long, long time
You know, I think this is a matter of personal taste. I couldn't care less about video quality, within reason. I have absolutely no desire to try to have a movie theatre in my home. Then again, I don't watch a lot of movies or TV. For audio, I'm a little more picky.
A book is a static image. If you don't have a fetish over paper and binding the experience can be reproduced much more easily.
While you're correct that it would now be pretty easy to replicate the experience of a high-quality printed book, nobody is really doing it. If only I could buy a "static image" of a decently designed book, I'd be happy. But most "ebooks" are just text that's thrown into some stupid engine that formats text like the worst version of MS Word, only with a smaller selection of fonts and less control over other things that affect readability.
I actually own a Kindle, but I've purchased exactly two ebooks. I've tried downloading other free ones too, and they just look horrible, if you care at all about typography. I'd much prefer a static image (e.g., PDF), if it were sized so that I could read it on my screen properly. Almost all the books I actually have loaded on my Kindle are PDFs derived from paper books (even very old ones), because the typesetting is just so much better.
It has nothing to do with a "paper fetish" or binding. Good typography just "looks better," just like high-quality video or whatever. Page layout, text-block size, spacing between lines, between words, between sentences, etc. does make a difference. Line-breaking automatically and hyphenating automatically is more-or-less possible, but it requires a better engine that most ebook readers. And different typefaces require different solutions.
If someone wanted to really implement high-quality ebooks, they could make use of, say, a LaTeX engine which could regenerate and retypeset a book to fit whatever screen size desired, with the font size chosen. A durable PS or PDF version could be generated that would always look the same, once the user decides the specs for that book.
This would better replicate the experience of paper books, not just from an aesthetic standpoint, but also the sense of "memory" one gets about "where something was on the page." When I actually sit down and read to learn something, I usually remember where something is discussed by the placement on the page, and the approximate location thumbing through the book. That sort of physical interaction with "browsing" through pages and remembering locations is much more difficult with ebooks, especially when text can reflow on a whim.
I'm not saying everyone has to care about typography in this way, but some people do. To them, "the experience can be reproduced much more easily," but so far hasn't. Unfortunately, the people who want to have a movie theatre in their home seem to be much more numerous than the people who care about beautiful typesetting. Alas, Donald Knuth's vision for beautiful automatic typography seems to have been forgotten....
Mea culpa -- I wrote one thing unclearly.
Please point to one actual human study that shows that HFCS causes obesity or other related issues in humans if consumed in the same quantity as sucrose. I bet you can't.
What I meant to say is "Please point to one actual human study that shows that HFCS causes obesity or other related issues in humans AT A GREATER RATE than if the same quantity as sucrose is consumed."
Of course, that point should also be clear from context. I am NOT disputing that excess HFCS consumption (or excess sucrose consumption or excess honey consumption or whatever sugar) can cause obesity. I just think that the differences between these are overrated.
I'm going to preface my comment here by saying that I generally cook my own foods, and eat a lot of things fresh. I consume very little added sugars of any sort. But this ridiculous debate about sugar vs. HFCS is just idiotic. Both of them are bad for you.
there is no chemical difference between HFCS and Sucrose.
Wrong again. HFCS is high-fructose corn syrup. The ratio of fructose to glucose is higher in HFCS than in sucrose. That's why it is called "high fructose".
It would instill more confidence in your post if you actually showed that you knew anything about the substance you're discussing. The ratio of fructose to glucose in HFCS has nothing to do with comparisons to sucrose. The adjective "high-fructose" added to "corn syrup" is self-explanatory. Corn syrup (the kind of stuff you use when making candies that need a certain texture) is naturally almost all glucose. "Corn syrup" thus contains almost no fructose. Therefore, any "corn syrup" which contains more than a tiny percentage of fructose is automatically a kind of "high-fructose" corn syrup. Normally, HFCS is produced by taking normal (little to no-fructose) corn syrup and processing it in some manner to raise fructose, generally to around 50%
Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. The kind of HFCS normally used in most foods is either HFCS 55 (about 55% fructose, 42% glucose, 3% other) or HFCS 42 (about 42% fructose, 53% glucose, 5% other). The former is generally used in sodas; the latter in most other processed foods with HFCS (like baked goods, etc.). Please note that HFCS 42 actually contains LESS fructose than sucrose.
While we're on the topic of chemical breakdowns, I also think it's important to bring up honey, which is roughly the same as HFCS 55 in terms of having almost all fructose and glucose, with a bit more fructose. (Honey has a slightly higher proportion of other sugars than HFCS, particularly maltose, but still less than 10%.) Natural foods wackos generally hold up honey as an ideal "natural" alternative sweetener, but it's mostly the same as HFCS, particularly regarding the simple sugars the parent is so worried about.
Whenever HFCS comes up, why aren't people proposing a honey ban as well?
Anyhow...
The problem with HFCS is that it first bypasses the metabolic pathway that sucrose must go through, thereby creating a rush as the simple sugars are directly absorbed by the blood.
As pointed out by other responders to your post, this metabolic pathway doesn't appear to be that significant... it may not be on the order of milliseconds in the stomach, but downing a Coke with sucrose vs. downing a Coke with HFCS will both be causing a surge of simple sugars into your bloodstream in short order.
Most of the studies that purport to "prove" that HFCS is terrible are actually studies that compare pure fructose to other things. (Most people apparently, like the parent poster, are ignorant of the fact that "high-fructose" doesn't even necessarily mean that most of HFCS is fructose.) Yes, apparently eating a lot of pure fructose is bad for you. But the metabolic response is largely dependent on context, and HFCS in that respect is much closer to table sugar than to pure fructose.
Only in the past few years have there been some studies that actually compare HFCS to sucrose directly. Out of the handful that I've seen, all but one have shown no significant statistical difference between HFCS and sucrose consumption, and that includes human studies (for example, this recent one).
There is one intriguing rat study t
You must be one of the people who's going 1mph below limit to teach everyone else a lesson...
Umm, no. You see, you're describing an irrational practice that actually decreases safety. The issues I brought up were things that actually increase safety, including one thing I mentioned: "observe reasonable speed limits."
Any decent drivers education teacher would tell you that you should not drive in a way that impedes the flow of traffic. If everyone on a highway is going 10-15 mph above the speed limit, you'll actually decrease everyone's safety by driving under the limit. Best to go with the traffic flow.
You seem to fail to understand the distinction between safe driving and people who are out there to "teach people lessons." Those are like the idiots who will cut in front of a person and slam on the brakes, rather than just let the tailgater pass.
Being a careful driver may save your life. On the other hand, observing traffic "rules" in situations where those rules decrease safety is stupid -- especially if you have sort of "road rage" issues that cause you to want to "teach lessons" to people.
The person who wants to "teach everyone a lesson" is just as stupid as the idiot who tailgates and tries to drive 90mph everywhere.
- You say they'll reduce my premiums by 80%? Well, maybe I was wrong, and I'll actually trust the computer to drive. After all, insurance companies aren't going to reduce my premiums by 80% unless the risk from claims is reduced by at least that much.
I agree with this logic, up to a point. But just because the claims are reduced by 80% doesn't mean that you -- personally -- would actually be safer.
First off, you may actually be a very good driver. You may do things like leave extra space, not tailgate, not run red/yellow lights, not accelerate or decelerate suddenly, continuously check your mirrors, always signal, observe reasonable speed limits, etc. that many other drivers don't do as fastidiously. If so, you might already be doing many things that the computer would do naturally that most people don't, because most people drive like idiots in some sort of imaginary racetrack, even if it doesn't actually get them to where they're going significantly faster.
But, more importantly, you'd need to know what sort of errors still make up those 20% of claims left. If the computer uses marginally better judgment most of the time than average humans, but has bugs that will very likely kill you in certain scenarios (where human drivers might be able to avoid that), it still may be rational to avoid the computer.
The strain on our Federal budget and perpetual deficit due to things like duck penii studies?
As someone else pointed out above, even if you are in a high tax bracket, you probably paid something like 0.002 cents out of your taxes toward this study. The vast majority of U.S. taxpayers probably paid something on the order of a ten-thousandth or hundred-thousandth of a cent.
Even if this study is bogus, are you really sure this is where you should be directing your focus? I'm all in favor of trimming the federal budget, but you may want to spend a little time figuring out the huge categories of expenses in the federal budget before complaining about something that constitutes something like 0.00001% of it for one year (literally). Many people here have mentioned defense (which takes up roughly 19% of the annual budget, which is about 1,600,000 TIMES the size of this duck study every year, but we could just as easily talk about other expense categories that cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
I read about the shape of their penii from the Daily Beast and I care about how much was spent on researching them because I get the impression from this anecdote and many others how bad we are at controlling waste, pork, and fraud.
We're absolutely TERRIBLE at controlling waste, pork, and fraud. Do have any clue how much money is handed out to random defense contractors every year through inappropriate channels? With just a little Googling, you could come up with dozens of categories of spending that EACH cost tens of thousands of times your duck study every year. Recalling one soldier from Afganistan for one year would save roughly 2.5 times as much as your duck study.
I think you're absolutely right that there's a huge amount of waste and corruption. However, directing your anger at legitimate scientific inquiry, which is already severely at risk within the federal budget, is a bit odd -- if your goal really is to save taxpayers a significant sum of money.
Also, by the way, your Daily Beast article actually argues that the duck research is legitimately interesting. From the little I know, I agree. I'm not a biologist, but I heard about the strange properties of duck phalluses years ago -- long before this study -- and it wouldn't surprise me if studying them would produce some unique insights into reproduction, perhaps far beyond just ducks or birds. Just because you're too ignorant to imagine that such research might be useful, it doesn't mean that it isn't. There are all sorts of reproductive issues in the world these days, from endangered species who aren't reproducing property to falling human birth rates in developed countries, and I'll trust the experts to know whether this research could be helpful.
Lastly, if you want to go on some ignorant screed about something, take a few minutes and at least learn to spell the topic you're discussing. The plural of "penis" is "penises," as you can see in your Daily Beast article. If you insist on using the Latin plural, it is "penes" (since it's a 3rd declension noun), but you won't find that except in very old medical textbooks. "Penii" is just something ignorant people say when they're trying to look smarter than they are.
If niche (read: more intellectually rigorous) books are more affordable, this primarily benefits higher-educated, wealthier consumers. In practice, the French model asks the masses to subsidize the consumption habits of the educated rich.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to couple "educated" and "rich" here, except to make your argument appear stronger than it is. It's true that people with more education tend to earn more money. But the most educated people (and "most intellectually rigorous") often aren't "the rich." Most academics, for example, earn more than a blue-collar salary, but they don't earn anything like what a lawyer or medical doctor would earn, let alone a corporate executive or something.
And there are plenty of intelligent people who want to read intelligent books who aren't rich at all, or even upper middle class.
Years ago, many publishers actually DELIBERATELY did what you make sound like some sort of social injustice: they used profits from the stuff they sell the masses to fund the "quality" intellectual books they wanted to produce. Some publishers still do this -- many academic books are produced with slim profit margins or even losses, with print runs sometimes only in the hundreds even at major presses.
Personally, I think this is not only a noble thing to do (rather than just taking the money from the best-sellers and paying it to publishing executives), but it's also a net social benefit. Besides the importance of publishing quality research and things like that, making quality books affordable is important so that we can actually allow social mobility. If only the rich people can afford to be educated because quality books are expensive, then class divisions become even worse.
Far from an injustice, your argument highlights a practice that would actually have a social benefit if more widely practiced. Taking a few dollars from the profits of the latest celebrity biography or crappy genre fiction novel and using them to promote intellectually rigorous books and make them affordable is making an investment in the education for society as a whole.
"Force" is a pretty strong word. I've never heard of an Amazon purchasing agent carrying a shot gun into a publishers office.
The closer a distributor gets to being a monopoly, the more producers are willing to give up just to do business with them. I agree that "force" is a strong word, but publishers who refuse to put their books for sale on Amazon these days are often going to take a big potential sales hit.
Amazon negotiates for a lower price on a large quantity of books. The publisher snaps at the chance to sell half a million copies at once.
Yeah, if the book is already marketed as a potential bestseller, your little story might actually be true.
The reality in the world is that most books only sell a few THOUSAND copies, not millions. Specialized books -- even by major university presses and such -- may only have first print runs in the HUNDREDS. Yet Amazon will still insist on taking a huge cut out of the retail price for the book -- much larger than almost any other distributor or retailer.
Just do a few Google searches, and you'll easily find stories about small publishers who are forced to LOSE MONEY on every Amazon sale if they want to market their books there. Yet some still do it in the hopes that some book might get some attention and become a big seller, and they might eventually sell enough copies of that one book to fund all the rest of their inventory.
Now, you might say -- why don't they raise the prices of their books? But that makes their books look overpriced -- and just so Amazon can take 60% of their profit. The only way to make the book reasonably priced at other sellers while still making money on Amazon would be to produce a special "Amazon exclusive edition" that's overpriced, just so Amazon could mark it down and lay claim to the majority of the purchase price... and, I'd bet Amazon wouldn't really go for that sort of thing.
Amazon, and any bulk buyers reduce the inefficiency in the distribution system. That's all they do. That doesn't affect quality in any way.
This works for small bulk buyers and wholesalers. Once a company starts showing monopolistic tendencies and deliberately driving competition from the marketplace, they can begin to make demands on producers like reduced prices. There are well-known examples of Amazon making exactly these sorts of demands on publishers.
And once producers feel like they can't refuse (because otherwise they can't market their product), they have no choice but to lower their own costs. In the process of lowering costs, quality in fact may have to decrease.
I'm all for decreasing inefficiencies in the marketplace. But the vast majority of "quality" books (e.g., specialized research, academic publications, technical books, new literature, etc.) are already produced with very slim profit margins or even at a loss at some presses (subsidized by sales of more popular things). I have nothing against popular books, celebrity bios, romance novels, genre fiction, whatever -- but I'd also like publishers to keep producing other things that may not sell a million copies. Amazon's model may in fact make it harder for those sorts of books to be produced, and it does in fact make it harder to small specialized presses to exist.
Well there's that, the fact that items get delivered fast (often the stuff they promise to me in two days comes overnight, and I don't even live near a distribution center) and the fact that returning items is dead simple and they even pay for the return shipping. Also a book I bought from them had a mangled cover, I called to complain about it and they just refunded me $35 (the book cost $80,) and they didn't even want the book back.
Amazon pays for the return shipping as long as you don't do it too often. I've never hit the threshold, but I know a few people who have. As for complaints, if you have a simple issue that's easily solved by a refund, chances are you'll get it resolved simply -- as long as it's not too much money and you don't do it too often. If you have a situation that's more complicated, don't hold your breath. (My most recent example: I downloaded an mp3 album, but three of the tracks were wrong... I mean, actually from some other CD. I complained, and after three email exchanges, I got some $5 credit or something. Except I had paid something like $30 for the "multi-CD" album, and the wrong tracks were still up on the web. I requested that they either (1) send me an actual physical copy of the album, so I could have the correct tracks, (2) refund my money completely so I could buy the physical album, or, ideally, (3) put the correct tracks up so I could download them. It's been almost a year since they told me twice that they'd look into it... nothing happened. Before that, I could cite a number of instances of weird things happening with service. And heaven help you if you buy from a 3rd-party seller through Amazon and things don't go right. Amazon customer service was great back in the late 1990s... very hit-or-miss these days.)
You've got that way off. Organic itself is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating,
Umm, duh. I don't see how agreeing with me is "way off." Notice that I put "organic" and "wholesome" in quotation marks. Note also later when I explicitly stated in my post: "I care about flavor and wholesomeness, but only when it's a significant change and not just stamped 'natural' or 'organic' or whatever."
I don't think we actually disagree very much here.
That's not what people actually want. You yourself might claim as such, but chances are you won't actually follow that line of thinking when it comes to your palate. Most people like a specific flavor and tend to want to stick to its distinct taste, only changing when in their head they specifically seek change, or are otherwise forced to.
Given that I actively seek out new taste experiences -- I'm the kind of person who will order the food I've never heard of before on the menu -- I think I actually WILL "follow that line of thinking when it comes to [my] palate." I discover new foods and new culinary ideas on a regular basis.
As to what "people actually want," I also tend to cook a lot for other people and introduce them to new foods or flavor combinations. Maybe they're just humoring me, or maybe it's the kind of people I hang out with, but I have seen many, many people respond to quality ingredients that might have their flavors tweaked in some ways.
On the other hand, I do also know some people who prefer the taste of crappy canned and jarred foods over those prepared fresh -- just because they're used to them. So I agree with you. I also think that the typical person who goes out of their way to shop at alternative supermarkets -- or, to get back on topic to TFA, those who actively seek independent bookstores -- are generally those looking to broaden their palates. Regardless of your Pepsi test, though, while I was living in Europe, I encountered lots of Americans who were not as adventuresome in eating as I was. Yet they too often remarked about the quality of the fresh ingredients. Just because people prefer the soda that they are addicted to to
By forcing people to pay more for books? Since there are many other ways to enjoy your spare time, consumer demand for books is very elastic, so they will certainly consume fewer books.
And since literature depends on people reading books and sharing their experiences, France is actually sabotaging literature.
Actually, while I agree with you in part, I also think you're missing a fundamental part about the traditional "literary" community that France may be trying to preserve.
The actual volume of books sold does not necessarily produce a larger "literary community." If I sell a bunch of crappy Romance novels and paperback Westerns, I'm not going to produce a group of customers that are educated in traditional "literature."
Nor, for that matter, does it much matter even if I sold cheap paperbacks of Moby Dick or of the collected works of Shakespeare.
What matters in preserving "literature" in culture (at least in the traditional, canonic sense) is that certain educated people form communities that value certain types of literature.
Those are the kind of people who like to hang out in indenpedent bookshops. They like to have "deep" discussions about philosophical issues in coffee shops or recommend their favorite books, etc.
I know this is an elitist perspective, and I don't quite agree with it. But if France wants to preserve its "literary culture" (as it has been created over the past few centuries), it's not about ensuring that a poor worker can buy hundreds of crappy paperback novels or even hundreds of paperback classics that will never be read. It's about keeping smaller communities of educated "literary afficionados" around.
And to do that, keeping the independent bookshop culture is probably pretty essential... even if it means that everybody has to pay an extra couple Euros per book.
Amazon doesn't make anything
Actually they do. They provide a service as well. Providing a better service for less has similar results to providing a better product for less.
In what way is Amazon's "service" better? Mostly, they have a huge inventory and cheap prices. That's about it. Whenever I've had to actually deal with Amazon for actual customer service, my generally experience has been fair to poor.
Traditional book stores often provide much richer and interesting "service," not to mention the experience of shopping, browsing, interacting with the community of local people who shop at a store, etc. That may not be valuable to you, but it is added "service." What drives most people to Amazon is not the "service," but the prices and ability to choose from a huge selection at one place. Unlike service industries that require longer extended customer interactions for any success (like dine-in restaurants), people don't really care as much about "atmosphere" or "individual attention" in buying a book. But on the few occasions when it would be helpful, it's no longer there in the same way on Amazon.
I'm not against Amazon, and I acknowledge that they do provide a sort of giant database and warehouse. But providing "service" in the traditional retailer sense? Not anything great.
Anyways, I keep hearing that luddite argument that cheap food is now low quality, but that's a big load of crap. Having to follow a renal diet myself, I have to cook my own food from fresh ingredients, and I can't taste the difference between wal-mart tomatoes and whole foods tomatoes.
That's not a good analogy. Whole Foods is a giant corporate structure whose goals are only marginally better than Walmart. Whole Foods isn't terrible, but its version of "organic" and "wholesome" foods is more about making customers feel better about what they're eating, rather than necessarily providing a consistently better product.
I'm going to preface what I'm about to say by noting that I absolutely detest the whole "hippy" "earthy-crunchy" "love-the-earth" "buy-organic-even-though-it's-often-meaningless" garbage. I care about sustainability, but only if it's real and not some corporate crap made up to sell more expensive products. I care about flavor and wholesomeness, but only when it's a significant change and not just stamped "natural" or "organic" or whatever.
Anyhow, a more apt analogy for the present discussion would be buying tomatoes from either one of these bohemoths vs. buying tomatoes from a local farmer at a stand at a market or even growing your own. Tomatoes are an interesting choice to bring up, since their flavor does get altered so much when they are refrigerated and picked early for shipping. As someone who has bought fresh-picked tomatoes from farmers I know as well as grown my own, I can certainly tell the difference in flavor compared to most varieties in most supermarkets, including probably most in Whole Foods.
The reality of a traditional food distribution structure -- far from being "luddite" -- is that it actually allows food to be produced for superior flavor. I don't want to claim it's actually "more nutritious," since everybody has their own standards for nutrition. But small-scale food production does allow for maximizing flavor.
Why? Because large-scale food production requires a choice of foods that ship well and stand up to longer storage. It also requires choices made in shipment and storage conditions that may affect flavor -- like refrigeration and tomatoes, or picking them a little early before they are fully ripe.
On a broader scale, those choices actually lead to fewer choices in basic ingredients. Perhaps not fewer in your actual local supermarket, but fewer available across the country -- a decreased diversity of crops. Farmers choose breeds of tomatoes based on how fast they grow, whether they will be able to be pick
Sure, we can make edible food with just flour and water even blindfold,
If it's edible, we survive the disaster. Isn't that the point here?
but automated manufacturing systems (3D printers are just one, and will evolve)
It's a disaster. Exactly how many "automated manufacturing systems" are you planning to magically have available (with the power to run them)?
With flour, water, some fire source, and a flat surface that can survive heating, I can make flatbread in a matter of minutes. Your solution depends on complex technology being available and power to run it.
can in principle create vastly more complex products using large numbers of ingredients or components and with microscopic precision.
Umm, again, it's a freakin' disaster. Does anyone really give a crap about doing anything with "microscopic precision"? We're looking to survive, not do a lab experiment.
This would be totally beyond the capability of humans to reproduce in any reasonable span of time.
Anything that's "beyond the capability of humans to reproduce in any reasonable span of time" is probably not needed in a disaster scenario.
Regarding your first example, it is a machine that makes bread (I guess in various shapes) out of dough, but if you have the dough, a regular bread machine would be more efficient, and a regular oven would be even more efficient as long as you have a human available to kneed the dough. And many kinds of ovens work without electricity.
Just to clarify, I would imagine the first example would be targeted more to specialized pasta shapes. So if you have to have your "bowtie" or "corkscrew" pasta in the middle of a disaster, you could make it, I guess.
On the other hand, most people in the world don't mind eating dried pasta (which is probably about the quality this thing will put out anyway), and dried pasta stores about as well as the flour you'd need to make the pasta dough anyway. So why not just store your bowtie pasta for the emergency?
As for fresh bread, you don't even need a human to knead the dough. Most cultures have some form of flatbread where it's possible to just mix the dough together, maybe rest it for a while, and then bake/cook (pizza, naan, tortillas, etc.). And even if you wanted risen loaves of bread, there are plenty of ways to produce passable (and even superior) bread without kneading. It really would only require someone to be able to mix the dough, wait until it rises, and throw it into an oven to bake it.
In a true disaster scenario, people aren't looking to dine on al dente tagliatelle and a crusty hearth-fired artisan bread. Making bread and pasta is just not that hard. And besides, I have sincere doubts that any 3-D printer can replicate the texture and taste of artisan bread anytime soon, since it depends so much on the changes produced in the dough as a whole during long fermentation. Wonderbread in funny shapes, maybe. Good bread? I doubt it.
I swear that after the shoe bomber got them to make us take off our shoes, the underwear bomber was sent in to see if they'd strip search us. (And they responded with backscatter scanners. Discuss.)
Yeah, there were even people who predicted that this would happen.
The more I follow idleness as an art, as a way of being, the happier I've become. It hasn't gotten rid of too many negatives, per se, but I find myself happier in general
This is the most insightful thing I've read here, since it gets at the heart of the many things wrong with TFA.
As I understand TFA, it's trying to blame the high rate of depression, anxiety "disorders," etc. in our modern culture on an evolutionary preference to emphasize bad experiences and memories.
I think that's a load of BS. It's a typical attempt by psychology to connect to evolution, where we don't actually think through the implications and logic of the argument.
If TFA were actually true, think about what would follow. The societies with the most stress caused by things relevant to survival should have the highest depression, highest anxiety disorders, highest numbers of suicides, etc. In other words, if we go find hunter-gatherer societies, where ensuring food sources, etc. can be a daily struggle, we should find loads of them committing suicide randomly or something.
That's, of course, nonsense. And it doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary perspective. It wouldn't make any sense for evolution to cause depression or chronic anxiety that results in continuous unhappiness.
In fact, I can't recall any studies showing that less technologically sophisticated societies have higher rates of these mental disorders. They should if this were really driven by evolution, since chances of food scarcity, disease, etc. are much higher. On the other hand, I can recall a few studies showing how the introduction of a modern commercial culture to global societies would cause depression, anxiety disorders, etc. where they didn't exist before. Also, these disorders begin to appear in parts of the population that don't make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Why should teenagers, for example, have one of the highest rates of depression and suicidal thoughts in developed societies? Evolution shouldn't kill off people before they have a chance to reproduce. It makes no sense. By the logic in TFA, the people who should be most depressed should be people in pain or who live in conditions where fundamental necessities of life are undependable -- instead, we see a lot of depression among healthy young folks in societies where they have all basic needs fulfilled.
Moreover, although TFA points out an evolutionary advantage to learning from negative experiences (like "fire is hot -- don't touch it again or it will cause pain"), there are also significant rewards for positive experiences with evolutionary pressure.
For example, sex and food. Most people have very strong memories about these, particularly when they are first encountered (first kiss, first sexual experience, etc.). How many people get a psychological boost when they encounter something that "tastes like Mom's cooking" again?
Also, particularly for women, there are all sorts of reinforcing and filtering mechanisms that make reproduction seem like a "positive" experience, even though it involves great pain, great sacrifices in time and energy, many sleepless nights, etc. I can't tell you how many fathers I've talked with who have made a comment like: "If women actually remembered how crazy the birth and raising of an infant was, the human race would have died out long ago." Instead, we get loads of hormones that make new mothers remember these as mostly positive experiences (despite the yelling and screaming and stressful days and nights that the dads remember). When the child is a little older, rather than saying, "gosh that was crazy, I can't imagine going through that again!" many people just look at a baby they see somewhere and say, "Isn't that cute? Let's have another!"
In general, in fact, I'd say that TFA is completely wrong when it comes to long-term memories. Yes, we learn from painful and negative experiences. But humans also seem to have a natural
I am not a member of the Tea Party. But your understanding of Constitutional law is fundamentally flawed. Officially, the federal government is granted a very specific list of powers, known as "enumerated powers," which are listed explicitly in the Constitution. The Founders were suspicious of a powerful central government and thus severely limited powers to those explicitly authorized.
Of course, it hasn't really been that way since about 1937, when FDR threatened to enlarge the Supreme Court and pack it with his cronies if the Supremes didn't agree to allow the federal government to do anything it wanted (including Social Security) rather than sticking to the enumerated powers that were the only things allowed for the first 150 years or so of the US.
Need proof that there was a fundamental shift? Ask yourself: why did we require a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol during Prohibition (and another to allow it again)? There's nothing in the Constitution about alcohol or why such a ban would be illegal -- but a ban would have been illegal since it is not an enumerated power of Congress.
Fast forward a couple decades and suddenly Congress can easily ban marijuana and other drugs. Why? Shouldn't we need a new Prohibition amendment for those bans? Not any more. Though the words of Constitution stayed the same, the post-1937 SCOTUS has only rarely held Congress to the original limitations that used to be enforced.
I personally think we should have as programs that are like Social Security, etc. But I also firmly believe that the vast majority of the federal government's actions today are clearly illegal according to the standards of the first 150 years of Constitutional law. To enact these reforms properly does require a Constitutional amendment.
Before you judge my response below, be aware that I'm actually the kind of parent who strongly believes in teaching kids to do things by themselves, eventually leading to unsupervised activities after guided exploration. By the time a kid is 4 or 5, he/she can be prepared to do all sorts of "dangerous" "adult" tasks, with proper education and training. In years past -- and still in many other countries -- 5-year-old kids can probably cook on a hot stove or in an oven (if not manage an open fire), use sharp knives for cooking and other repetitive tasks, etc.
But kids who learn to do these things are able to because they've been taught how to know what is safe and unsafe.
It is the Internet, not real life, they cannot actually get hurt, decapitated, or disabled while using it.
The internet may be a "virtual place," but that doesn't mean that interactions on the internet can't lead to real-life interactions (and even potentially dangerous ones).
The internet may be a "virtual place," but that doesn't mean that encounters there couldn't cause real-life emotional or psychological damage to young people who don't have the frame of reference that adults have.
That is why the Internet is such a great place for children to explore unfettered. Little Jonny can wonder off alone and learn about the word and himself, and you do not actually have to worry about them being eaten by a wolf or breaking their leg like our parents/grandparents used to, when learning about the worded entailed large amounts of real danger and life threatening situations.
The "wolves" and "broken legs" can still appear in different forms, from creepy guys who "groom" kids and young teens in inappropriate interactions (perhaps coaxing them into real-world "encounters") to cyberbullying scenarios that can drive a kid to depression or even suicide. In case you haven't noticed, people tend to be meaner on the internet -- not having to say or do nasty things to someone's face often makes it easier. How many people who lay on the horn in their car? How many of those same people would start randomly screaming at somebody who was walking too slowly in front of them?
The "virtual" space of the internet allows more abstract interactions -- often more extreme and unusual than in real life -- some of which children and young people may need guidance to navigate.
As far as I am concerned, knowingly filtering a child's knowledge, and retarding their ability to learn, is nothing sort of child abuse.
Filtering knowledge and retarding abilities to learn are different from providing guidance or creating reasonable restrictions when a child cannot be continuously monitored. I agree with you that the GP's approach can sound rather extreme. I personally think an ideal solution involves parents providing direct guidance and supervised exploration, rather than background monitoring and surveillance.
On the other hand, I don't see a huge amount of difference in the GP's behavior from a parent who puts up a fence around the yard so the 2-year-old doesn't go wandering into the street. Having a fence to keep the kid from wandering away in the few seconds a parent may be distracted by something else is a reasonable restriction. And it doesn't mean that the parent can't also have the gate open at times, teach the child to look both ways, teach the child never to run after balls into the street until he/she is older, etc.
The place I disagree with the GP is the sense of constant surveillance. Kids need to have "safe places" to explore on their own. There are places on the internet that is possible, just like there are places in the backyard that are safe for a 2-year-old. A better solution would allow a kid to wander about in those safe places without being worried about parental surveillance.
However, the entire internet is NOT always a safe place. It's incredibly naive to act like it is.
The Federal Reserve Act says that they have to buy them on the open market. Are you saying they have a "more open" market? That would contravene the purposes of the Act, but not surprise me.
I'd suggest you re-read the links you posted. The Fed buys treasuries through "primary dealers," who are basically the banks that show up for every treasury auction and deal directly with the Fed. Also, note that it is actually an "auction," in the sense that different people make different "bids." If you look at stats from various auctions at the Treasury, you'll see "high bid" and "low bid" and "median bid" listed at each auction. These usually get summarized by one number in media reports, but that doesn't mean there aren't different bids. If the primary dealers (who sell to the Fed) put in lower bids, they get the T-bills first... at least, that's how I understand it. I imagine that primary dealers are usually instructed by the Fed to bid as low as necessary to acquire the amount of debt that the Fed wants... which is how they can decide to buy up 90% of the market -- they just bid lower.
But that doesn't mean other people aren't interested or aren't bidding almost as low.
They say that there's a line to buy them, but if the market actions are open, then the Fed would not be able to grab 90% of there really was such a line.
It's not so much that the market is "cooked" or "not open," as much as these Treasury "auctions" are NOT like the old floor of the NY Stock Exchange. It's not a bunch of bankers screaming prices at some Treasury official. Instead, these meetings are quiet affairs with only small groups of people in the room, mostly representing huge banks and financial firms. These people have clear ideas of what they are supposed to (and allowed to) bid before they come into the room, and if the Fed's primary dealers bid lower, the rest of the people may not get all the T bills they want.
But the price of the auction is still determined by the bidders, so it's not that the Fed is cooking the market exactly. If the rest of the bidders don't bid rates down very far, the primary dealers won't either. So even in cases where the Fed acquires 90% of the Treasuries auctioned, the price the Fed buys this stuff at is still set by what the other 10% of the market is willing to bid to (along with the other 150-300% of people who don't even buy any T bills at all).
The dirty secret is that in recent auctions, the Federal Reserve bought 90+% of those - nobody else wants them.
What the heck are you talking about? Even in the most recent auction, in the middle of the government shutdown, there were still bids for 2.75 times the amount of debt the Treasury was actually offering in 1-month T-bills, which are the most volatile. For longer-term T-bills, the numbers are much better. In recent years, you often tend to see bids for at least 4 times the value of securities at auction.
Claiming that "nobody else wants them" is pure BS. There is no "dirty secret" here. The Fed often gets "first dibs" at auctions because of their role in managing the money supply, so they do buy up a lot of T-bills, but that doesn't mean there weren't lots of people waiting in line to buy that debt.
Admittedly, the numbers are down in terms of the numbers of bids in recent auctions (and we'd expect short-term bids to be down given the craziness in Washington), but your implication that the Fed is buying them up because no one else would is completely and utterly bogus.
Believe it or not, I still wear a digital watch as well as have a smartphone. It's just quicker to glance at the time on it (which I do quite regularly) than take a few seconds taking out my smartphone from a pocket that also has keys in it.
I believe it, and I agree. I went for about 6 months a decade or so ago without a watch, and used my cellphone for telling time... but then for a time I was doing international traveling, and I needed a watch again. I've kept using them again ever since. They're useful.
On the other hand, I teach college students. Wristwatches started to disappear from their wrists about a decade ago, and by 5 years ago I could walk around a large lecture hall and only see one or two. For people younger than about 30-35, the wristwatch seems pretty much dead, except as a status symbol or jewelry.
Once again, from a legal standpoint, an employee was not property -- thus, again, technically we're not talking about slavery per se. But if you were in debt, often you technically could not leave legally. From a practical standpoint, it might be hard to track you down, but from a practical standpoint it could be hard to find a runaway slave as well. A choice of forced work for a company or forced labor in debtors prison (or more likely poorhouses or poor farms in the late 1800s) isn't much of a choice. And, for the record, there were even cases where a child was forced to work for years to pay off a father's debt to a company store... while such people may have been technically free to leave, legally they could only be free by paying off the debt, and the company often had the means to basically make that impossible without outside help or money.