This just improves their memory. The solution is to feed them something that destroys their memory. Propylene Glycol might work. (It seems to work for cats, but that might be species specific.)
A better solution is a trap that's 100% lethal. Here's one: Take a barrel, partly fill it with water. remove much of the top. In the center at the top, place the bait suspeded on a platform accessible through two metal walkways. So arrange things that when the bait is touched (or slightly before) a circuit is closed that starts the bait-platform and walkways revolving while simultaneously sending a (moderately) high voltage shock into the animal closing the circuit. The rat is thrown off into the water. If it lives through the shock, it's swimming at the bottom of a barrel with no exit it can reach. The trap resets itself.
There's lots of variations on this theme. They're all fancier than the current rat traps, but they are close variations of traps that have a long history of success. (My grandfather just used a platform that was unbalanced by the weight of a rat, and a walkway that didn't provide much in the way of footholds. I wanted to fancy it up, but his answer might be better...though mine would make any that survived leery of metal, and that would be worthwhile.)
If they get too subtle for the trap mentioned (and it's obvious variations) it'll be easy to keep them out of places. One could also make nice traps involving things like liquid Nitrogen.
Could be "Day of the PagBeasts", alternate title "The Fittest". I think the author was Edgar Pagborn, but it could be J.T. McIntosh. Written in the 1940's or 50's.
I read it once from a library and could never find it again. It wasn't all *that* good, but there was something compelling me to read it again for something I missed the first time. Never did find it. My guess is it never got printed in paperback, and was originally printed in Britain. Given that it had two titles I suspect that it must have had at least two separate printings. (I suppose one could have been in some magazine, but not one that I ever encountered.)
The judge doesn't need to be convinceable. He just needs to be pliable. The intelligence service has a few judges that never have refused any request for a warrant...and have been asked frequently.
Do I think this leads to justice? No. But it does limit the intrusions. Justice would require that each request for a warrant be decided on it's merits, and that would mean that some would be refused (unless you are able to believe that our intelligence services are so reliable and certain that they would never make an invalid request).
I also don't think this would meet the constitutional grounds for a warrant, but of that I'm much less certain. Were my decision significant I'd research this more carefully, as it is, I'll just assert that "I don't feel that those warrants were valid, and I doubt that they showed proper cause."
That was clear when he voted for FISA. If you trusted him after that, it's because you mislead yourself. He's probably better than the other guy would have been, and you can't say that much else in his favor. The wars are still going on.
On the other hand, he's stopped the libeling of foreign leaders. He's much more personable. He's relatively easy to like. And he MAY ensure that all US citizens (and residents?) can get adequate health care. (Good health care will probably wait quite awhile. But maybe if the gov't ensures adequate health care, the private insurance companies will start providing good. At a price. If you can afford it.)
(Note that I say this as a person who currently has good health care from an HMO. It's quite expensive, but it's literally been a lifesaver. OTOH, some HMOs, Kaiser, e.g., provide barely adequate on-going health care, but when an emergency comes along, they provide quite good health care. I've had several friends who came through major surgeries and reported excellent care.. And it's a lot cheaper than Kaiser. But Kaiser's mediocre daily care once almost cost me an index finger. Not quite, but nearly. After a few decades I'm almost back to equivalent mobility. I'd probably have been better off without any treatment at all, though.
As another point of comparison, during the 1950's I was a military dependent. At that point I received daily care superior to what Kaiser currently provides, though inferior to what my current health plan provides...but not by much. I understand that this health care for dependents has be trimmed, shackled, and minimized since the 1950's, but that period of time convinced me that decent health care doesn't depend on having a price affixed to each treatment. Example is the best existence proof.)
I think the real problem is that being "top dog" causes you to have rabidly crazy leaders. I don't know why, but it seems true throughout history, and we certainly haven't seemed immune. Up until WWII, we had good leaders and bad leaders, but they didn't get so puffed up with their own importance that they went crazy. (Some were crazy for other reasons, but that happens everywhere.) Since then, however, only Eisenhower seemed to escape the plague, and I'm not certain about him. (Well, and possibly Ford, but he was clearly a caretaker, even to himself.)
He's wrong, but *SOME* black's are lactose intolerant. It depends on which area your ancestors are from. And commercial mayonnaise may contain milk products. (It doesn't all, but it all looks like it does.)
He may well have ancestors from an area of Africa that is largely lactose intolerant. (I think that's most of it, but not all. I'm not sure, because I never investigated in detail.) But lactose tolerance evolved independently in three groups of people, and one of those was in Africa. But the people of Africa are more genetically diverse than all the rest of humanity put together.
It's not brown people. It's anyone they don't like. Some of them don't like brown people, others don't like jews or hippies, or even conservative christians. Doesn't matter who you don't like. Get them on the list and you can persecute them.
Currently brown people are a large target, because they're less likely to be able to fight back. This doesn't mean they're the main target, just that they're the "low hanging fruit".
It's not that the corporations are an arm of the government, and it's not that the government is an arm of the corporations. It's more like Mussolini style fascism, where the government and the corporations agree to work together against the citizenry. (Mussolini didn't believe that it would be "against the citizenry", but that's the way its turned out when the idea has been tried. True, there haven't been a statistically significant number of cases, but there's currently a 100% correlation.)
I believe that California spends less per child than Louisiana. This wasn't the case in the past, but for the last 20 years the California educational system has been getting worse and worse. Up until around 1980 California had possibly the best educational system in the country. Then a bunch of people passed a constitutional ammendment hobbling the property tax (making it require a 60% share of the vote). About all elementary and secondary education depends on that, and this also effectively removed corporately owned lands from reassessment as property values changed. (*NOT* personally owned land. Only corporately owned land.)
So... well, as expenses rose, the funds available didn't. As federal funds were removed, it became impossible to replace them.
These days those who can generally prefer to send their children to private schools, as was probably the intent of the measure. And slowing the property taxes didn't slow the taxes imposed at the state level.
Another factor was a court decision that said the social services could not be limited by a city to residents of that city (established by a period of residency). This meant that a city couldn't support it's own disadvantaged without attempting to support everyone in the country, a clearly impossible task. As a result social services have necessarily been cut to the lowest common denominator. This caused an immense swell in the number of homeless. Perviously cities had been willing to take care of the local unfortunate, but clearly attempting to care for all mobile unfortunates in the country was impossible.
I could go on to give other ways in which state and national governments have sabotaged the citizenry of the state, but I think I've made my case.
There is a reasonable reason for limiting it to the last 30-40 years. Both the Republican and Democrat parties before that time period had much different agendas than the ones they do now.
OTOH, your argument that this biases the figures against the Republicans is also valid.
To me the variation between individual presidents seems larger than the variation between the parties in how they spend money. E.g., Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Johnson (and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy) spent money on developing the social infrastructure. Many spent significantly on wars with unclear purposes and no clear beneficial result (and many undesireable results). Note that I carefully phrased that to exclude Roosevelt, and that this *was* intentional. I have not been satisfied with the justifications used for ANY major military conflict since WWII. (I wasn't very aware of the Korean conflict, but that's one that I'm not aware of the justification for how we participated.)
I am definitely not what people call a pacifist, but I also dislike being treacherously lead into violent actions. E.g., the whole Viet Nam war's justification appears invalid. It occurred because we refused to accept the decisions of an international conference, and it turned people who could have been our allies against us. And for no reason that was ever made clear. And note that this was a big part of Johnson's expenses. There are others to which the same analysis applies. We incurred expenses for wars initiated by our dishonorable behavior. (Sometimes it was only our own expenses that were do to our dishonorable behavior, and the wars would have happened anyway, sometimes without our dishonorable actions the wars wouldn't have happened.)
N.B.: I'm *not* claiming that we have acted more dishonorably than most countries do. Instead I'm claiming that our dishonorable behavior has been very expensive, has cost us allies, and hasn't produced much in the way of publicly observable gains. Some have claimed that these wars are for the benefit of private interests, but I'm not certain. Clearly there are private interests that benefit, but it's not clear that they are effectively initiating the dishonorable actions, rather than just taking "low hanging fruit".
If you make your decisions on the basis of Democrat vs. Republican, you are making your decisions on a false basis. The only consistent difference that I've noticed between them is that the Democrats are more interested in having people like them, and the Republicans are less interested in that. They both seem to have the same goals, and largely the same methods.
I *can't* dispell the "Neanderthals were dumb" myth because we don't know. They could have been. They could have averaged smarter than Cro-magnon. No reasonable evidence either way.
Our images of Neanderthals are based on an early reconstruction that was based on a skeleton that turned out to be severely arthritic. But they were stockier than Cro-magnon, at least on the average.
Personally I suspect a large overlap, to the extent that one couldn't easily tell the two apart, but I'm *NOT* a professional. My ideas could easily be hogwash. I just do a bit of outside reading. OTOH, many professionals will spew off papers without much in the way of backing evidence. Attracting attention is important in attracting funding, and most people won't read or understand the paper. (So I spend a lot of time being uncertain just what to believe.)
The net is fine if I want opinions and assertions, and the newspapers aren't reliable sources of factual news. That doesn't leave them much of a niche.
These days I still have lots of print subscriptions, but not to any newspapers or news magazines. I don't like paying someone to lie to me. (I'll pick up an occasional copy of something, but it's as likely to be the "Weekly World News" as a standard newspaper. They don't try to fool me about lying to me.)
N.B.: Being staid and boring isn't the same thing as being trustworthy. It just means that even your lies are boring.
What you're missing is that archaeologists can become famous for finding a new species of human. So there's lots of pressure to exaggerate any differences.
Neanderthals probably had poorer speech capabilities than Cro-magnon (a guess based on nasal sinuses and palate configuration). They also were probably worse at throwing things overhand. (Their favored hunting style was for a bunch of them to take spears and get in close to thrust for the kill.) Also, there's some evidence that their women had narrower hips relative to the size of the baby's head at birth. This probably translated into higher mortality in both the mother and the baby.
We do know that groups of Cro-magnons and Neanderthals lived in the same place at approximately the same time. Proving that it's exactly the same time is quite difficult, and I'm not certain that it's possible, but they certainly *could* have co-habited. They seem to have exchanged styles of tool-making, so occasional close relationships seems clear.
Neanderthals tended to be stockier and more muscular. As a result they needed to eat more, but they were also less sensitive to cold. (They evolved during a glaciation.) It's not at all clear to me that they deserve to be called a separate species. They've several distinct physical features, but that's not enough. So, e.g., do red-heads. (E.g., they tend to be more sensitive to pain.)
Also, don't pay too much attention to the visual appearance of museum reconstructions. They are made with an eye towards making the public aware of the differences, and as a result they tend to exaggerate any theorized differences portrayed by current (or recent past) science.
You're making rather large assumptions. Basically you're assuming that people stayed in one place for hundreds of thousands of years. This conflicts with much known history. True, by the time that known history starts, the Caucasoid peoples were in Europe, but earlier they appear to have been in northern asia (possibly getting there from Japan). At that point they split into (at least) two groups, on of which migrated across the Bering straits (somehow...possibly by sea), the other of which headed across northern eurasia. This second group arrived in Europe in multiple waves.
Who was there before they arrived? I don't know, but the language they spoke was probably the ancestor of both Magyar and Basque.
Until the invention of brewing, Europe after the glaciers was an unpleasant place to be, because there wasn't much safe water. (That's why brewing was so important. Weak beer was a potable liquid.) In other places the god of brewing was a god of revelry or spiritual intoxication. In Europe he was the god of civilization. (Yeah, I'm vastly oversimplifying. And lots of things depend on exactly how old the thing you're looking at is. Which is kind of my point.)
Human populations are mobile over historic time periods. This was especially true before agriculture, but even afterward it still happened, just a bit more slowly. Until the world filled up. (Go back a few hundred thousand years and people become relatively rare. And the population is basically a pack hunter. Such groups are mobile, even by modern standards. They'll pick up on a couple of days notice and move a few hundred miles, to where the game seems better.)
Race is only very loosely correlated with most genetic types. Even sickle-cell anemia isn't *that* closely correlated. But it's been easy to test for, so it's been used as a surrogate for tests that are a LOT better. (They're also still a lot more expensive. But the cost is falling.)
When I see a study that even *talks* about race rather than geography or genetic variations, I take it with a VERY large grain of salt.
Sorry. I don't think that solves any of the problems. It's already *officially* true that our legislature represents us. It just doesn't work out that way. And it's been LESS that way since the networks stopped being required to provide equal time to competing candidates. Which was a governmental decision. (The bureaucracy, but one that was taking orders from above, not acting independently.)
I've occasionally thought that there should be a limit on how long a law could be, and another on how many laws could be on the books. I've also thought that any law, before it was made into law, but be understood the same way by more than half of three high school senior classes. (If people don't understand the law, it's unjust to expect them to obey it.) Both of those would help. So would an automatic sunset clause attached to all laws. (If it's important enough, they can vote it in again.) Or a third house of the legislature whose only power was to revoke laws.
Basically, laws always go into effect in an early alpha state, and they aren't then subject to debugging unless the flaws are extremely severe. (That's not the only problem, but it's a major one.)
Of course these are all "Not going to happen" type proposals. Any real enactment of them would have thousands of little corner cases that would need to be debugged.
The problem is that governments haven't been making good long-term decisions either. You're right, they "should", but they don't. Realism requires that we realize that they don't.
Now I will agree that this doesn't provide a solution, and an anarchic operation in this sphere doesn't work either. The problem appears to be that we have a secondary "Tragedy of the commons", where the different countries are each trying to maximize their profit. So the role of the villagers is taken by the individual countries. And many are unwilling to be regulated by an international body.
Thinking a bit more about it, even on local issues (i.e., within one country) governments don't have a stellar record. They're too subject to corruption. They might not think of it as such, but when, say, the Bureau of Land Management takes orders from a Senator or Representative who is bought by a mining company ("I should support my constituents!") rather than considering independent (unbiased by profits resulting from which way the decision goes) advice, to me that's a form of corruption. Under some theories of how government should work, corruption isn't the right term, but I don't use those theories. Under my theories the purpose of government is to steer a safe course into the future, or at least the safest that can be managed. This means considering the long term implications of policy decisions.
Sigh. The world is far from ideal. I don't know of a way to get a decent government, or even what it could look like.
HOWEVER, governments do slightly better than individual companies at regulating environmental damage. It's faint praise, but that's all I've got in stock.
That's if the copyright is maintained. If it's just let lapse, or even affirmatively donated (forget the correct term) then the copyright can last for a lot shorter time period.
I've run across several works that I know were printed in the 60's or 70's at Gutenberg. (Also, anything first published outside the US is out of copyright in the US up until the US signed the Berne convention. E.g., Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.)
Note that I'm not talking about justice or fairness. Those concepts are just about orthogonal to copyright law.
The mistake is believing that Libertarians and those who proclaim themselves to be libertarians are, indeed, in favor of liberty. By their actions you shall know them.
This isn't unusual. The Communists weren't communists. NONE! NONE! None of them! They weren't all totalitarians (one of the opposites of communist), but most of them were. Others were anarchists, a couple were socialists, a few were a weird kind of royalist. Etc. Most royalists, however, actually ARE royalists. I think the problem is that people have a built in desire for a king...and a social group of 20-100 people. (At that size a king provides a cheap, effective, government, provided that you have an effective means of recall. Which such groups did. Murder wasn't uncommon, and the king didn't have THAT much power. If people disagreed with him too often, he stopped being king.)
Libertarians don't expose kingship, but what they DO espouse doesn't work any more than communism does in a large diverse society. If you examine FOSS groups you'll find them filled with Dictators and Gods and other titles of ultimate authority. Guido is BDFL: Benevolent Dictator for Life. He's not the only one. But his only power is that he rules those who wish to be ruled by his absolute dictates. So he's got to be very careful about how he exerts his authority. Linus famously called it "herding cats".
FOSS is a workable form of libertarianism. It doesn't come with the traditional dogmas, though. Just a few software licenses, and a lot of rules of thumb for what works in an organization where the only authority is that which is freely given. Traditional libertarians often find this quite unpalatable. They prefer their Libertarianism to be a religion, with a hierarchical structure and rules passed down by a centralized authority. Them. But they don't want to earn the position. Some would be quite willing to buy it, but that's not the same thing. (Note that FOSS isn't directly dependent on government issued money. The individual developers are, but that's a different matter. In the FOSS communities status and wealth are nearly independent variables.)
It's also worth noting that the FOSS form of organization doesn't work in projects that have large up front costs. (Small costs distributed over a wide area and long period of time does work, however.) So the FOSS form of organization isn't a form of government, and can't, at our current level of technology, be successfully made into one.
OTOH, quite a large proportion of FOSS proponents are young males. Such folk are traditionally given to causes. Many FOSS proponents are also libertarians in politics. That this doesn't necessarily work in areas with large capital costs tends to get lost on them until they're a bit older. Unfortunately, the US government has proven itself an enemy of liberty recently, so there's a good argument that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are worthy of trust. The US government seems clearly headed towards some form of totalitarianism, and that's extremely bad. But this doesn't mean that Libertarianism as currently defined would be a workable answer.
But "workable" isn't what Libertarianism is about. So of course they object to libertarianism whose main goal is "workable liberty".
I haven't acquired a media company DVD or CD since 2000, and this won't cause me to accept their "word of honor" as a substitute.
If they made a legally binding promise that all the contents would be released to me in non-copyprotected format of whatever media was at the time the most popular in 20 years, or on termination of business, then I might consider it enough to have a lawyer examine their promise.
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This just improves their memory. The solution is to feed them something that destroys their memory. Propylene Glycol might work. (It seems to work for cats, but that might be species specific.)
A better solution is a trap that's 100% lethal. Here's one:
Take a barrel, partly fill it with water. remove much of the top. In the center at the top, place the bait suspeded on a platform accessible through two metal walkways. So arrange things that when the bait is touched (or slightly before) a circuit is closed that starts the bait-platform and walkways revolving while simultaneously sending a (moderately) high voltage shock into the animal closing the circuit. The rat is thrown off into the water. If it lives through the shock, it's swimming at the bottom of a barrel with no exit it can reach. The trap resets itself.
There's lots of variations on this theme. They're all fancier than the current rat traps, but they are close variations of traps that have a long history of success. (My grandfather just used a platform that was unbalanced by the weight of a rat, and a walkway that didn't provide much in the way of footholds. I wanted to fancy it up, but his answer might be better...though mine would make any that survived leery of metal, and that would be worthwhile.)
If they get too subtle for the trap mentioned (and it's obvious variations) it'll be easy to keep them out of places. One could also make nice traps involving things like liquid Nitrogen.
Could be "Day of the PagBeasts", alternate title "The Fittest". I think the author was Edgar Pagborn, but it could be J.T. McIntosh. Written in the 1940's or 50's.
I read it once from a library and could never find it again. It wasn't all *that* good, but there was something compelling me to read it again for something I missed the first time. Never did find it. My guess is it never got printed in paperback, and was originally printed in Britain. Given that it had two titles I suspect that it must have had at least two separate printings. (I suppose one could have been in some magazine, but not one that I ever encountered.)
The judge doesn't need to be convinceable. He just needs to be pliable. The intelligence service has a few judges that never have refused any request for a warrant...and have been asked frequently.
Do I think this leads to justice? No. But it does limit the intrusions. Justice would require that each request for a warrant be decided on it's merits, and that would mean that some would be refused (unless you are able to believe that our intelligence services are so reliable and certain that they would never make an invalid request).
I also don't think this would meet the constitutional grounds for a warrant, but of that I'm much less certain. Were my decision significant I'd research this more carefully, as it is, I'll just assert that "I don't feel that those warrants were valid, and I doubt that they showed proper cause."
That was clear when he voted for FISA. If you trusted him after that, it's because you mislead yourself. He's probably better than the other guy would have been, and you can't say that much else in his favor. The wars are still going on.
On the other hand, he's stopped the libeling of foreign leaders. He's much more personable. He's relatively easy to like. And he MAY ensure that all US citizens (and residents?) can get adequate health care. (Good health care will probably wait quite awhile. But maybe if the gov't ensures adequate health care, the private insurance companies will start providing good. At a price. If you can afford it.)
(Note that I say this as a person who currently has good health care from an HMO. It's quite expensive, but it's literally been a lifesaver. OTOH, some HMOs, Kaiser, e.g., provide barely adequate on-going health care, but when an emergency comes along, they provide quite good health care. I've had several friends who came through major surgeries and reported excellent care.. And it's a lot cheaper than Kaiser. But Kaiser's mediocre daily care once almost cost me an index finger. Not quite, but nearly. After a few decades I'm almost back to equivalent mobility. I'd probably have been better off without any treatment at all, though.
As another point of comparison, during the 1950's I was a military dependent. At that point I received daily care superior to what Kaiser currently provides, though inferior to what my current health plan provides...but not by much. I understand that this health care for dependents has be trimmed, shackled, and minimized since the 1950's, but that period of time convinced me that decent health care doesn't depend on having a price affixed to each treatment. Example is the best existence proof.)
I think the real problem is that being "top dog" causes you to have rabidly crazy leaders. I don't know why, but it seems true throughout history, and we certainly haven't seemed immune. Up until WWII, we had good leaders and bad leaders, but they didn't get so puffed up with their own importance that they went crazy. (Some were crazy for other reasons, but that happens everywhere.) Since then, however, only Eisenhower seemed to escape the plague, and I'm not certain about him. (Well, and possibly Ford, but he was clearly a caretaker, even to himself.)
No, you see the trick is that just as the kudzu is on the edge of being wiped out, you start eating the goats.
Now getting rid of the people, that's the tricky bit. (At least unless you don't mind getting caught in the process.)
I think that depends on *which* nitrogen oxide. I think 70% NO is breathable, provided the rest isn't oxygen. (That would make it too rich.)
P.S.: It might be breathable, but you wouldn't be exactly conscious. NO is the safest of the anesthetics, and is sometimes called "laughing gas".
He's wrong, but *SOME* black's are lactose intolerant. It depends on which area your ancestors are from. And commercial mayonnaise may contain milk products. (It doesn't all, but it all looks like it does.)
He may well have ancestors from an area of Africa that is largely lactose intolerant. (I think that's most of it, but not all. I'm not sure, because I never investigated in detail.) But lactose tolerance evolved independently in three groups of people, and one of those was in Africa. But the people of Africa are more genetically diverse than all the rest of humanity put together.
It's not brown people. It's anyone they don't like. Some of them don't like brown people, others don't like jews or hippies, or even conservative christians. Doesn't matter who you don't like. Get them on the list and you can persecute them.
Currently brown people are a large target, because they're less likely to be able to fight back. This doesn't mean they're the main target, just that they're the "low hanging fruit".
It's not that the corporations are an arm of the government, and it's not that the government is an arm of the corporations. It's more like Mussolini style fascism, where the government and the corporations agree to work together against the citizenry. (Mussolini didn't believe that it would be "against the citizenry", but that's the way its turned out when the idea has been tried. True, there haven't been a statistically significant number of cases, but there's currently a 100% correlation.)
I believe that California spends less per child than Louisiana. This wasn't the case in the past, but for the last 20 years the California educational system has been getting worse and worse. Up until around 1980 California had possibly the best educational system in the country. Then a bunch of people passed a constitutional ammendment hobbling the property tax (making it require a 60% share of the vote). About all elementary and secondary education depends on that, and this also effectively removed corporately owned lands from reassessment as property values changed. (*NOT* personally owned land. Only corporately owned land.)
So... well, as expenses rose, the funds available didn't. As federal funds were removed, it became impossible to replace them.
These days those who can generally prefer to send their children to private schools, as was probably the intent of the measure. And slowing the property taxes didn't slow the taxes imposed at the state level.
Another factor was a court decision that said the social services could not be limited by a city to residents of that city (established by a period of residency). This meant that a city couldn't support it's own disadvantaged without attempting to support everyone in the country, a clearly impossible task. As a result social services have necessarily been cut to the lowest common denominator. This caused an immense swell in the number of homeless. Perviously cities had been willing to take care of the local unfortunate, but clearly attempting to care for all mobile unfortunates in the country was impossible.
I could go on to give other ways in which state and national governments have sabotaged the citizenry of the state, but I think I've made my case.
There is a reasonable reason for limiting it to the last 30-40 years. Both the Republican and Democrat parties before that time period had much different agendas than the ones they do now.
OTOH, your argument that this biases the figures against the Republicans is also valid.
To me the variation between individual presidents seems larger than the variation between the parties in how they spend money. E.g., Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Johnson (and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy) spent money on developing the social infrastructure. Many spent significantly on wars with unclear purposes and no clear beneficial result (and many undesireable results). Note that I carefully phrased that to exclude Roosevelt, and that this *was* intentional. I have not been satisfied with the justifications used for ANY major military conflict since WWII. (I wasn't very aware of the Korean conflict, but that's one that I'm not aware of the justification for how we participated.)
I am definitely not what people call a pacifist, but I also dislike being treacherously lead into violent actions. E.g., the whole Viet Nam war's justification appears invalid. It occurred because we refused to accept the decisions of an international conference, and it turned people who could have been our allies against us. And for no reason that was ever made clear. And note that this was a big part of Johnson's expenses. There are others to which the same analysis applies. We incurred expenses for wars initiated by our dishonorable behavior. (Sometimes it was only our own expenses that were do to our dishonorable behavior, and the wars would have happened anyway, sometimes without our dishonorable actions the wars wouldn't have happened.)
N.B.: I'm *not* claiming that we have acted more dishonorably than most countries do. Instead I'm claiming that our dishonorable behavior has been very expensive, has cost us allies, and hasn't produced much in the way of publicly observable gains. Some have claimed that these wars are for the benefit of private interests, but I'm not certain. Clearly there are private interests that benefit, but it's not clear that they are effectively initiating the dishonorable actions, rather than just taking "low hanging fruit".
If you make your decisions on the basis of Democrat vs. Republican, you are making your decisions on a false basis. The only consistent difference that I've noticed between them is that the Democrats are more interested in having people like them, and the Republicans are less interested in that. They both seem to have the same goals, and largely the same methods.
I *can't* dispell the "Neanderthals were dumb" myth because we don't know. They could have been. They could have averaged smarter than Cro-magnon. No reasonable evidence either way.
Our images of Neanderthals are based on an early reconstruction that was based on a skeleton that turned out to be severely arthritic. But they were stockier than Cro-magnon, at least on the average.
Personally I suspect a large overlap, to the extent that one couldn't easily tell the two apart, but I'm *NOT* a professional. My ideas could easily be hogwash. I just do a bit of outside reading. OTOH, many professionals will spew off papers without much in the way of backing evidence. Attracting attention is important in attracting funding, and most people won't read or understand the paper. (So I spend a lot of time being uncertain just what to believe.)
The net is fine if I want opinions and assertions, and the newspapers aren't reliable sources of factual news. That doesn't leave them much of a niche.
These days I still have lots of print subscriptions, but not to any newspapers or news magazines. I don't like paying someone to lie to me. (I'll pick up an occasional copy of something, but it's as likely to be the "Weekly World News" as a standard newspaper. They don't try to fool me about lying to me.)
N.B.: Being staid and boring isn't the same thing as being trustworthy. It just means that even your lies are boring.
What you're missing is that archaeologists can become famous for finding a new species of human. So there's lots of pressure to exaggerate any differences.
Neanderthals probably had poorer speech capabilities than Cro-magnon (a guess based on nasal sinuses and palate configuration). They also were probably worse at throwing things overhand. (Their favored hunting style was for a bunch of them to take spears and get in close to thrust for the kill.) Also, there's some evidence that their women had narrower hips relative to the size of the baby's head at birth. This probably translated into higher mortality in both the mother and the baby.
We do know that groups of Cro-magnons and Neanderthals lived in the same place at approximately the same time. Proving that it's exactly the same time is quite difficult, and I'm not certain that it's possible, but they certainly *could* have co-habited. They seem to have exchanged styles of tool-making, so occasional close relationships seems clear.
Neanderthals tended to be stockier and more muscular. As a result they needed to eat more, but they were also less sensitive to cold. (They evolved during a glaciation.) It's not at all clear to me that they deserve to be called a separate species. They've several distinct physical features, but that's not enough. So, e.g., do red-heads. (E.g., they tend to be more sensitive to pain.)
Also, don't pay too much attention to the visual appearance of museum reconstructions. They are made with an eye towards making the public aware of the differences, and as a result they tend to exaggerate any theorized differences portrayed by current (or recent past) science.
You're making rather large assumptions. Basically you're assuming that people stayed in one place for hundreds of thousands of years. This conflicts with much known history. True, by the time that known history starts, the Caucasoid peoples were in Europe, but earlier they appear to have been in northern asia (possibly getting there from Japan). At that point they split into (at least) two groups, on of which migrated across the Bering straits (somehow...possibly by sea), the other of which headed across northern eurasia. This second group arrived in Europe in multiple waves.
Who was there before they arrived? I don't know, but the language they spoke was probably the ancestor of both Magyar and Basque.
Until the invention of brewing, Europe after the glaciers was an unpleasant place to be, because there wasn't much safe water. (That's why brewing was so important. Weak beer was a potable liquid.) In other places the god of brewing was a god of revelry or spiritual intoxication. In Europe he was the god of civilization. (Yeah, I'm vastly oversimplifying. And lots of things depend on exactly how old the thing you're looking at is. Which is kind of my point.)
Human populations are mobile over historic time periods. This was especially true before agriculture, but even afterward it still happened, just a bit more slowly. Until the world filled up. (Go back a few hundred thousand years and people become relatively rare. And the population is basically a pack hunter. Such groups are mobile, even by modern standards. They'll pick up on a couple of days notice and move a few hundred miles, to where the game seems better.)
Race is only very loosely correlated with most genetic types. Even sickle-cell anemia isn't *that* closely correlated. But it's been easy to test for, so it's been used as a surrogate for tests that are a LOT better. (They're also still a lot more expensive. But the cost is falling.)
When I see a study that even *talks* about race rather than geography or genetic variations, I take it with a VERY large grain of salt.
It seems to me that a few years ago I read about a guy needing surgery after sticking his tool up an automobile exhaust pipe. It got caught.
I don't think that what *I* can think of is the limit.
Who pays for the campaign?
Sorry. I don't think that solves any of the problems. It's already *officially* true that our legislature represents us. It just doesn't work out that way. And it's been LESS that way since the networks stopped being required to provide equal time to competing candidates. Which was a governmental decision. (The bureaucracy, but one that was taking orders from above, not acting independently.)
I've occasionally thought that there should be a limit on how long a law could be, and another on how many laws could be on the books. I've also thought that any law, before it was made into law, but be understood the same way by more than half of three high school senior classes. (If people don't understand the law, it's unjust to expect them to obey it.) Both of those would help. So would an automatic sunset clause attached to all laws. (If it's important enough, they can vote it in again.) Or a third house of the legislature whose only power was to revoke laws.
Basically, laws always go into effect in an early alpha state, and they aren't then subject to debugging unless the flaws are extremely severe. (That's not the only problem, but it's a major one.)
Of course these are all "Not going to happen" type proposals. Any real enactment of them would have thousands of little corner cases that would need to be debugged.
It probably is, if you don't consider ANYTHING about efficiency. That's always the killer in massive parallel processing.
The problem is that governments haven't been making good long-term decisions either. You're right, they "should", but they don't. Realism requires that we realize that they don't.
Now I will agree that this doesn't provide a solution, and an anarchic operation in this sphere doesn't work either. The problem appears to be that we have a secondary "Tragedy of the commons", where the different countries are each trying to maximize their profit. So the role of the villagers is taken by the individual countries. And many are unwilling to be regulated by an international body.
Thinking a bit more about it, even on local issues (i.e., within one country) governments don't have a stellar record. They're too subject to corruption. They might not think of it as such, but when, say, the Bureau of Land Management takes orders from a Senator or Representative who is bought by a mining company ("I should support my constituents!") rather than considering independent (unbiased by profits resulting from which way the decision goes) advice, to me that's a form of corruption. Under some theories of how government should work, corruption isn't the right term, but I don't use those theories. Under my theories the purpose of government is to steer a safe course into the future, or at least the safest that can be managed. This means considering the long term implications of policy decisions.
Sigh. The world is far from ideal. I don't know of a way to get a decent government, or even what it could look like.
HOWEVER, governments do slightly better than individual companies at regulating environmental damage. It's faint praise, but that's all I've got in stock.
That's if the copyright is maintained. If it's just let lapse, or even affirmatively donated (forget the correct term) then the copyright can last for a lot shorter time period.
I've run across several works that I know were printed in the 60's or 70's at Gutenberg. (Also, anything first published outside the US is out of copyright in the US up until the US signed the Berne convention. E.g., Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.)
Note that I'm not talking about justice or fairness. Those concepts are just about orthogonal to copyright law.
The mistake is believing that Libertarians and those who proclaim themselves to be libertarians are, indeed, in favor of liberty. By their actions you shall know them.
This isn't unusual. The Communists weren't communists. NONE! NONE! None of them! They weren't all totalitarians (one of the opposites of communist), but most of them were. Others were anarchists, a couple were socialists, a few were a weird kind of royalist. Etc. Most royalists, however, actually ARE royalists. I think the problem is that people have a built in desire for a king...and a social group of 20-100 people. (At that size a king provides a cheap, effective, government, provided that you have an effective means of recall. Which such groups did. Murder wasn't uncommon, and the king didn't have THAT much power. If people disagreed with him too often, he stopped being king.)
Libertarians don't expose kingship, but what they DO espouse doesn't work any more than communism does in a large diverse society. If you examine FOSS groups you'll find them filled with Dictators and Gods and other titles of ultimate authority. Guido is BDFL: Benevolent Dictator for Life. He's not the only one. But his only power is that he rules those who wish to be ruled by his absolute dictates. So he's got to be very careful about how he exerts his authority. Linus famously called it "herding cats".
FOSS is a workable form of libertarianism. It doesn't come with the traditional dogmas, though. Just a few software licenses, and a lot of rules of thumb for what works in an organization where the only authority is that which is freely given. Traditional libertarians often find this quite unpalatable. They prefer their Libertarianism to be a religion, with a hierarchical structure and rules passed down by a centralized authority. Them. But they don't want to earn the position. Some would be quite willing to buy it, but that's not the same thing. (Note that FOSS isn't directly dependent on government issued money. The individual developers are, but that's a different matter. In the FOSS communities status and wealth are nearly independent variables.)
It's also worth noting that the FOSS form of organization doesn't work in projects that have large up front costs. (Small costs distributed over a wide area and long period of time does work, however.) So the FOSS form of organization isn't a form of government, and can't, at our current level of technology, be successfully made into one.
OTOH, quite a large proportion of FOSS proponents are young males. Such folk are traditionally given to causes. Many FOSS proponents are also libertarians in politics. That this doesn't necessarily work in areas with large capital costs tends to get lost on them until they're a bit older. Unfortunately, the US government has proven itself an enemy of liberty recently, so there's a good argument that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are worthy of trust. The US government seems clearly headed towards some form of totalitarianism, and that's extremely bad. But this doesn't mean that Libertarianism as currently defined would be a workable answer.
But "workable" isn't what Libertarianism is about. So of course they object to libertarianism whose main goal is "workable liberty".
Not if it had DRM.
I haven't acquired a media company DVD or CD since 2000, and this won't cause me to accept their "word of honor" as a substitute.
If they made a legally binding promise that all the contents would be released to me in non-copyprotected format of whatever media was at the time the most popular in 20 years, or on termination of business, then I might consider it enough to have a lawyer examine their promise.