Most humans are either too ignorant (not stupid) or too arrogant, and think that the only way an organism can 'live' anywhere must be by our own standards as seen on Earth.
Standards? You must not have gone to college, where we learned that organisms can live without standards and thrive in just about any environment. Though I'm not sure whether I am referring to the students or the microorganisms.
And, honestly, refusing to help out by working on an overloaded phone queue (out of some principle you don't quite enunciate) doesn't make you look like the most cooperative, in-the-loop kinda guy. In my day, when one queue was overloaded, we all helped out, even if it meant password resets. Were you guys too good for that?
Yes, AOL made a hell of a lot of mistakes in those days, but lying to the public about our infrastructure was not one of them. If you're gonna accuse my buds of fabrication, you're gonna have to give some facts, and you're gonna want to sign a name.
Although you are probably right about his lowly vantage point, yours was clearly too high. When I had to spend 45 minutes on your cancellation line only to argue with your customer service person for another 15 minutes to convince her why I really, really, honest cross my heart wanted to cancel and then that person called me back on the next Saturday morning to ask if I missed the service and wanted to come back... I knew that AOL was evil. When you choose to force people to stay on the line for so long just to cancel, then no wonder the queue would be full.
AOL made it super easy to sign up and made it nearly impossible to cancel, it didn't just happen, it was designed that way. Previously they allowed you to just click a button to cancel the service, so it wasn't like they hadn't already figured out how to allow people to self manage the accounts and were simply inundated. I am certain that there was a decision made that they needed to increase retention, so they put up barriers to cancelation.
Issn't that called astro-turfing? In other words artificial grass-roots type thing?
How is this "artificial" if you can convince unpaid people that your product or cause is worth telling other people about? I heard the buzz over the last few years, all the people saying how great the series was and it was a sin that it was canceled. I bought the DVDs and I agree and I want as many people as possible to know that we were deprived of good art by stupid executives at Fox that were apparently unwilling to continue with the series, probably because of the riske nature of the series' atmosphere in light of political pressures at the time.
Marketers can't artificially create a self sustaining buzz, they can only serve to help get it started. If I had bought the DVDs and they sucked then I would have told people that it was a bunch of horse shit. But they didn't suck, it was a great series. You know the type of thing that you can't stop watching all weekend long even though you have lots of shit to do? And I'm not talking about the bad monster movies on the sci fi channel that you watch when nothing else motivates you to leave the couch on a Sunday afternoon. I'm talking about really interesting stories with some hillarious dialog. They got it, they got it good.
There is nothing artificial about successful viral marketing, especially as regards to Serenity. And if it is unsuccessful then who cares.
Even more precisely, it's a marketing attempt to generate buzz about a product by getting company whores to act like real people and claim their product is great. As such, I wouldn't go within 100 yards of this movie no matter how much I liked the series (assuming I'd ever watched it). Not because the company whores are necessarily wrong about the awesomeness of their product, but because marketing hacks are soulless leeches and they all deserve to be kicked in the nuts.
here here. I'd much rather they stick to parading around scantilly clad women to promote products. That is money well spent.
Part of the cost is caused by the need to take out insurance in case of a malpractice lawsuit, and to carry out usability and safety tests.
What part? What part of the cost? I always hear the same excuses over and over whenever people complain about the unreasonable costs of medical care. And the poor pharmaceuticals need to recoup their investments in life saving drugs too. And the costs of lawsuits and liability. And the cost of education. And the Cost of all those middlemen that work for the medical insurance companies. Give me a break, this is precisely the problem with medical care these days, everybody and their cousin is getting a cut or kickback. Universities overcharge for education, Government over controls, People are allowed to over sue, Too many people are allowed to get in the middle and overburden the system. Too expensive is too expensive and we don't need to be making excuses for what amounts to corruption on a catastrophic scale. Expensive healthcare is killing people.
Sure liability is a problem and it should be solved simply by letting people sign away any future claims in return for medical services. But the actual percentage that liability raises costs for medical devices and medical care is much lower than those that want to keep their cash cow would like you to believe.
We as seekers of health care need to cut out the middlemen and accept more responsibility and risk for ourselves in order to lower the cost of health care. If we continue to insist on a false sense of perfection, then too many people will continue to go without basic health care and sound medical advice.
Clearly you should have capitalized the word 'ALL' not 'AT' for emphasis. Perhaps also capitalizing the word 'NO' would have been the way to go there, but you chose a very strange emphasis. Really you would have been better off not capitalizing any words at ALL for emphasis.
You authoritarians are just people that weren't loved by their own mommies and don't believe that God loves them, so you'll do anything the politicians say as long as they say they will love and care for you.
Its a bad relationship, get out now. Seek help. Relationships don't have to be based on controlling others.
Taxes are manditory. Fail to pay them, and you can go to jail. Attempt to break out of jail, and you could end up getting shot. Therefore, for every government spending proposal, ask yourself "I'm not a fan of hyperbolic expressions. Taxes are not "slavery", but they are manditory, and therefore a constitutional government has a responsibility to only spend money on things which promote the general welfare of the people."
Slavery is an "institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services." How is this not equivalent to modern taxation? The state asserts ownership over its citizens and compels them to work for its benefit.
"would I shoot my favorite grandmother over this?" If the answer is "no", then we can do without the state funding it.
Exactly, it should never be overlooked by those of an authoritarian philosophy that the fundamental mechanism of government coercion is violence. Libertarians are of the belief that violence is only justifiable in self defense and that that is the basis for our civilization. Therefore for a government to threaten violence against people in the form of taxation cannot be justified except in matters directly related to the common defense.
Fundamental to that would be defense from outside threat, which is countered with military force. And the threat from within which is countered with police and a system for resolving disputes between individuals in the form of a court system.
Communication systems are necessary for the common defense, so I would agree that wifi or any other system is perfectly acceptable on priciple alone as a use of taxpayer money.
Ultimately, though taxation should not be mandatory because it is merely a form of servitude and I don't think you can or should sugar coat it any other way. Far better to simply to deal with those that don't pay by social exclusion. That way, taxation that did not have popular support would be untenable.
That's why it's hard to argue against automatic updates (or at least semi-automatic, as in timing it so that an admin is on hand to fix any problems that pop up)
There is a risk to automatic updates. If everyone had them enabled, then a poorly tested (emergency type) patch could take out everyone in the world who was running Windows simultaneously. It would be like the Y2k scenerio that never was. Everyone could conceivably have to reinstall from CD, and take themselves offline until MS fixed the problem. And assuming that Microsoft themselves were running automatic patching, then it would probably take out microsoft at the same time limiting their ability to fix the problem. Commerce/economy would grind to a halt for a day or two or more.
That is the argument against uniformly enabling automatic patching. Sure you say that proper testing would eliminate that risk, but you can't test for everything. No, something that immediately shut down everyones computer likely wouldn't get through QA, but how about something that took some time to appear as a problem. Like a patch that has a time bug that goes off the third tuesday of the month?
Uniformity like that in any system risks catastrophic failure.
And here is where you drive my point home. Sure, things SHOULD be this way. But real economics say differently. Environmental costs are not reflective of actual cost of items. This was my point and no matter how many ways you want to twist it that is how the world works. Only in markets which are flooded do environmental costs show through on actual costs.
I think we may be talking about two different things, you seem to be talking about environmental damage and I am talking about resource use.
And your two examples are of luxury, brand-name non-essential items which I think is telling. Look at food, look at building supplies, look at many other things where there is competition and necessesity. There is a direct relationship between cost and the amount of resources used and number of people that it took to get it to you.
And here is I think the point that you miss, labor is an environmental cost. People eat, drink, excrete and generally make a mess of things. If something has a higher margin or cost more simply because of the higher quality, then fewer people will be able to afford it, so fewer units of whatever good is being sold will be produced. So, compared to others that person is less productive than others. Assuming that quality has nothing to do with durability or other usefulness.
Take the example of a pair of trousers, one pair might cost twice as much as another. By my rule of thumb you would take the more expensive pair to have more of an environmental damage. And I submit that this would be true, but if the more expensive pair will last twice as long then they have an equivalent environmental effect on resources used. If however, the more expensive pair is merely more expensive because of marketing , and not because of durability or usefulness, then there are likely more people making a living or fewer people who are using more resources based on the increase profit margins of that product.
Sure in order to assess the environmental impact of an activity you have to trace back every activity that supports that, but those things are not always available to a person. And sure some very destructive and wasteful activities can be less expensive in the short run such as overfishing, but there I think you should see that in an increasingly utilized world the costs associated with such wasteful practices go up even over the medium term.
and after reading a bit on Przewalski's horse, they would be really cool to introduce into North America. Less than a hundred in the wild in Mongolia and 1500 in zoos and captive breeding programs. Sounds like someone has to have a few thousand acres lying around somewhere that would be a lot less boring with these things running around.
Technically this would be "Pleistocene Park", but that is what I thought they were proposing when I read the slashdot headline. Much cooler than just dropping African elefants in into North American would be to try and genetically engineer or clone some of the animals that were around back then. I know there isn't much dna remaining, but once we have a better understanding of genetics and molecular biology I bet someone could "reverse" bioengineer mastadon DNA or giant sloth DNA.
But we already have wild horses and mountain lions, coyotes and wolfs, so really the giant sloth and the mastadon/mammoth would be the only ones of interest to me.
As for the african elephant, it seems that the North american elephants were more closely genetically related to the Indian elephants, so if you are trying to be more true to our heritage then it would be better to bring in Indian elephants and just start selectively breeding them bigger.
This is incorrect. The cost of an item is more about its supply or demand. In other words, prices are driven by want and need.
How is what i said incorrect? In everything that matters on a societal level, demand is flexible. Food, housing, transportation, clothing and healthcare all have flexibile demand in the market.
Sure, cost of natural resources, effort (labor), and inginuity factor into its manufacturing cost.
Natural resources cost nothing, they are just there. It is individual labor, inginuity, the owners of the land that cost money. From there it is those that refine goods and manufacture them into usable items that cost money. It is the people, fuel and equipment that transport those goods to market or to other factories and wharehouses that cost money. And it is the middlemen that connect the ultimate buyers with sellers that often cost the greatest portion of the eventual cost.
But when is the last time you saw an item's price based primarilly off manufacturing cost? you probably won't without looking into highly competative markets with excess supply (hint, this almost never happens).
It would be foolish to gauge an items environmental cost merely by the cost of manufacturing. Everything that it took to bring that item to you should be considered. Every mouth that was fed, every middleman, every tank of fuel in some delivery truck, every tree that was felled to make some push cart. Every Car that was driven by some salesperson, every lunch that they ate at a restaurant. The only way you can possibly hope to gauge all that waste and efficiency is with economics.
Yes, sometimes real costs are obscurred, but they eventually catch up with people. The rule of thumb should be that of two things of equal value to you the more expensive something is then the more environmental cost there was to get it to you.
Um- How much money do you save recycling aluminum? How much do you get paid to drive to the city facility to get rid of old paint and batteries instead of throwing them out? How much do you save by (Name any act that is helpful to the enviornment)? Doing the right thing isn't always about saving money....
How do you know whether something is actually less destructive of the environment? If some activity is more economical, it is very likely that it is less wasteful overall. Cost is often a measure of effort and if some method takes more effort to accomplish the same thing then it likely it is more wasteful. Sure sometimes when you compare two different things it is not always a fair comparison because the real costs are obscured or shifted by dishonest people, be they politicians or other middlemen. But eventually it is all about economics, because what we are really talking about is the efficiency of achieving certain goals.
Imagine a world where you are under constant surveillance by law enforcement...not because you have a history of violent crime, but because you have a genetic predisposition to violence. You find it difficult to get a job because of your genetic predisposition to adult ADD, and you can't get health insurance because you are geneticlly predisposed to heart problems.
I imagine that would make that person a might testy. Thus proving to many people (At least those that were genetically predisposed to stupidity) that they had a violent predisposition and thus it was somehow okay to persecute them. It is an age old argument, look at how those people violently reacted to persecution and oppression they aren't as civilized as us. That kind of argument just makes evil sleep better at night.
Using genetics is no different than using race to discriminate against someone.
The flip side of that must be that no person or company should be held liable for another person's ill health as long as that person or company has done no wrong that contributed to that ill health.
In fact, under that condition it would benefit the employer not to know about any possible genetic or developmental anomolies or other health problems since knowing about some risk would impart additional liability.
The risk here is that there will be jobs that are so valuable and require so much investment by an employer that they will require Gattaca style genetic screaning. The key will be to make such screening as illegal as racial discrimination. It won't eliminate it, but it may keep it at bay.
I just bought and watched (almost all the way through) the dvd series. That is the best television I've ever seen. I'm hooked and want more.
Makes other television look like crap, which is most likely why they killed it. I mean come on, you air a series out of sequence and expect an instant hit? The promos alone killed it by making it look stupid.
I remember watching 10 minutes of Mrs. Reynolds and thinking it was silly. But then I watch the whole thing and was blown away. The whole series was witty, smart, hilariously funny at times.
I'd pay to watch new episodes. Hell, who cares if scifi can't buy the tv rights, put new episodes directly to dvd and I'd buy them.
Of course, there is a lot of our information on the Internet that we didn't put there, which is why we need better laws regarding dissemination of personal information.
I completely disagree.
When I hear so called privacy activists get all huffy about needing new laws to prevent government and corporate disclosure of all the information that they keep about us, I think you don't know what you are asking for.
If you are upset about so called personal information being available to other people then you should hit it at its source and limit the legally mandated collection of personal information. Once it is public information, ie stored in a publicly owned database, it should be freely accessible to everyone. Otherwise you are just setting us up for a disparity of power between those with access to information and those who do not, because information is power.
I should have access to mine and everyone else's public records... if the police are keeping a file on me or anyone else then I should be able to access it unless it is part of an ongoing (reasonably defined)investigation.
If a company has information about people the use of that information should be dictated not by some law, but if I have given that information to them then it should be dictated by their agreement with me.
Sure nobody wants Spam or solicitations or to be stalked, but those are all things that are already regulated. Much worse is a society where you can't find out what "They" know about you, that is when you really have to start worrying about what "They" know.
What makes you think the Democrats don't want to be able to track Republicans. The Democrats aren't exactly saints either.
They do, that is why we will have to make the tracking of individuals bipartisan... that way the two sides can keep tabs on eachother. You know like balance of power and stuff. Of course if you don't belong to the party...err... i mean one of "the two" parties, then you are shit out of luck.
You know that strip club you visited when you were 22 for a bachleor party, well that means that your opinions on tax reform when you are 40 don't matter. You know that coffee you like to drink, well it so happens that a "known" associate of terrorists also likes to get their mocha frapachino at the same time everyday. Well, now you are a "known" associate of terrorists and just try getting a government job or contract.
Screw the beaurocrats! Launch it yourself. it takes about 7 minutes to reach the ionosphere. Even if the US air force could scrample jets in that time to take you out, you're out of the range of their missiles. Or if you don't believe that, then the GIANT PLUME OF FIRE thats behind your rocket will confuse any heat-seeker and you'll most likely not get hit.
What about the friggin lasers?
But seriously, governments will not look kindly upon your return. Best to launch in international waters flagged under a small island nation's flag. And if you don't want to coordinate with US/Chinese/Russians, then launch in the South Pacific (east of US military bases) or South Atlantic, Maybe eastern Caribbean. At the expense of a ship of adequate size at least you could avoid some of the politics of launching in some "national" airspace.
That is what Sea Launch does. And though they don't say so on their web site, I bet they can cut through a lot of red tape for the launches themselves, being in international waters.
Please, take a basic physics class before you start telling people how it's not very difficult to get to orbit or the moon.
I believe economics is the more appropriate expertise to cite when determining cost.
The physics is well understood, the engineering is a bit more complicated (but has already been done if you are to believe NASA and the Kremlin), so the big costs at this point are materials, assembly and fuel... oh and don't forget all the beaurocrats you have to feed in order to get launch approval.
"Ohh how quickly we forget about Power Computing, Power Max, Windows, and why this a bad idea."
Bad idea for Apple, in the short term at least. Since it would cut deaply and immediately into Hardware sales as it did with the Mac clones (I bought a clone, but would I have bought an Apple?).
Keep in mind that being an OS company has worked pretty well for Microsoft as a business model, but they weren't trying to sell their own hardware except as accessories for the software (ie the MS mouse) I think in the long term that Apple could get out of the hardware business altogether and sell the OS only. Or alternately split the hardware and software businesses as was envisioned with the clones.
Though, I agree why mess with a good thing, but the clone strategy was in response to slipping market share, not the cause of it. Ultimately, I think the clones helped maintain mindshare and helped Apple reinvent itself.
Another counter example, Sun now has a x86 version of Solaris that works on non Sun hardware. But that makes sense simply because it means that unix admins and college students can hone their Solaris skills on commodity hardware which helps support their core server business.
Overall, I'd just be a little less quick to judge the lessons learned from the Apple clone experience. After all, it was a short lived business model and the Mac OS wasn't nearly as good a product as it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying to make a joke about the depravities of college life using the social meaning of the word "standards", it wasn't meant at your expense.
And it really didn't work.
Most humans are either too ignorant (not stupid) or too arrogant, and think that the only way an organism can 'live' anywhere must be by our own standards as seen on Earth.
Standards? You must not have gone to college, where we learned that organisms can live without standards and thrive in just about any environment. Though I'm not sure whether I am referring to the students or the microorganisms.
And, honestly, refusing to help out by working on an overloaded phone queue (out of some principle you don't quite enunciate) doesn't make you look like the most cooperative, in-the-loop kinda guy. In my day, when one queue was overloaded, we all helped out, even if it meant password resets. Were you guys too good for that?
Yes, AOL made a hell of a lot of mistakes in those days, but lying to the public about our infrastructure was not one of them. If you're gonna accuse my buds of fabrication, you're gonna have to give some facts, and you're gonna want to sign a name.
Although you are probably right about his lowly vantage point, yours was clearly too high. When I had to spend 45 minutes on your cancellation line only to argue with your customer service person for another 15 minutes to convince her why I really, really, honest cross my heart wanted to cancel and then that person called me back on the next Saturday morning to ask if I missed the service and wanted to come back... I knew that AOL was evil. When you choose to force people to stay on the line for so long just to cancel, then no wonder the queue would be full.
AOL made it super easy to sign up and made it nearly impossible to cancel, it didn't just happen, it was designed that way. Previously they allowed you to just click a button to cancel the service, so it wasn't like they hadn't already figured out how to allow people to self manage the accounts and were simply inundated. I am certain that there was a decision made that they needed to increase retention, so they put up barriers to cancelation.
You sir, worked for a bastard of a company.
Issn't that called astro-turfing? In other words artificial grass-roots type thing?
How is this "artificial" if you can convince unpaid people that your product or cause is worth telling other people about? I heard the buzz over the last few years, all the people saying how great the series was and it was a sin that it was canceled. I bought the DVDs and I agree and I want as many people as possible to know that we were deprived of good art by stupid executives at Fox that were apparently unwilling to continue with the series, probably because of the riske nature of the series' atmosphere in light of political pressures at the time.
Marketers can't artificially create a self sustaining buzz, they can only serve to help get it started. If I had bought the DVDs and they sucked then I would have told people that it was a bunch of horse shit. But they didn't suck, it was a great series. You know the type of thing that you can't stop watching all weekend long even though you have lots of shit to do? And I'm not talking about the bad monster movies on the sci fi channel that you watch when nothing else motivates you to leave the couch on a Sunday afternoon. I'm talking about really interesting stories with some hillarious dialog. They got it, they got it good.
There is nothing artificial about successful viral marketing, especially as regards to Serenity. And if it is unsuccessful then who cares.
Even more precisely, it's a marketing attempt to generate buzz about a product by getting company whores to act like real people and claim their product is great. As such, I wouldn't go within 100 yards of this movie no matter how much I liked the series (assuming I'd ever watched it). Not because the company whores are necessarily wrong about the awesomeness of their product, but because marketing hacks are soulless leeches and they all deserve to be kicked in the nuts.
here here. I'd much rather they stick to parading around scantilly clad women to promote products. That is money well spent.
Part of the cost is caused by the need to take out insurance in case of a malpractice lawsuit, and to carry out usability and safety tests.
What part? What part of the cost? I always hear the same excuses over and over whenever people complain about the unreasonable costs of medical care. And the poor pharmaceuticals need to recoup their investments in life saving drugs too. And the costs of lawsuits and liability. And the cost of education. And the Cost of all those middlemen that work for the medical insurance companies. Give me a break, this is precisely the problem with medical care these days, everybody and their cousin is getting a cut or kickback. Universities overcharge for education, Government over controls, People are allowed to over sue, Too many people are allowed to get in the middle and overburden the system. Too expensive is too expensive and we don't need to be making excuses for what amounts to corruption on a catastrophic scale. Expensive healthcare is killing people.
Sure liability is a problem and it should be solved simply by letting people sign away any future claims in return for medical services. But the actual percentage that liability raises costs for medical devices and medical care is much lower than those that want to keep their cash cow would like you to believe.
We as seekers of health care need to cut out the middlemen and accept more responsibility and risk for ourselves in order to lower the cost of health care. If we continue to insist on a false sense of perfection, then too many people will continue to go without basic health care and sound medical advice.
Personally, I couldn't care less if it's only BETA. I've been using quite a large amount of beta probrams from Google and I've yet to be disappointed.
...well maybe they will fix the spelling mistake.
Me too, really what is the functional difference between beta and released when using a free product?
No side of the stem-cell debate is AT all honest.
I take great issues with that sentence!
Clearly you should have capitalized the word 'ALL' not 'AT' for emphasis. Perhaps also capitalizing the word 'NO' would have been the way to go there, but you chose a very strange emphasis. Really you would have been better off not capitalizing any words at ALL for emphasis.
"mommies"? That's great.
You authoritarians are just people that weren't loved by their own mommies and don't believe that God loves them, so you'll do anything the politicians say as long as they say they will love and care for you.
Its a bad relationship, get out now. Seek help. Relationships don't have to be based on controlling others.
Taxes are manditory. Fail to pay them, and you can go to jail. Attempt to break out of jail, and you could end up getting shot. Therefore, for every government spending proposal, ask yourself "I'm not a fan of hyperbolic expressions. Taxes are not "slavery", but they are manditory, and therefore a constitutional government has a responsibility to only spend money on things which promote the general welfare of the people."
Slavery is an "institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services." How is this not equivalent to modern taxation? The state asserts ownership over its citizens and compels them to work for its benefit.
"would I shoot my favorite grandmother over this?" If the answer is "no", then we can do without the state funding it.
Exactly, it should never be overlooked by those of an authoritarian philosophy that the fundamental mechanism of government coercion is violence. Libertarians are of the belief that violence is only justifiable in self defense and that that is the basis for our civilization. Therefore for a government to threaten violence against people in the form of taxation cannot be justified except in matters directly related to the common defense.
Fundamental to that would be defense from outside threat, which is countered with military force. And the threat from within which is countered with police and a system for resolving disputes between individuals in the form of a court system.
Communication systems are necessary for the common defense, so I would agree that wifi or any other system is perfectly acceptable on priciple alone as a use of taxpayer money.
Ultimately, though taxation should not be mandatory because it is merely a form of servitude and I don't think you can or should sugar coat it any other way. Far better to simply to deal with those that don't pay by social exclusion. That way, taxation that did not have popular support would be untenable.
And yes, you have to pay for government, or go to jail. its called citizenship.
No, its called slavery.
That's why it's hard to argue against automatic updates (or at least semi-automatic, as in timing it so that an admin is on hand to fix any problems that pop up)
There is a risk to automatic updates. If everyone had them enabled, then a poorly tested (emergency type) patch could take out everyone in the world who was running Windows simultaneously. It would be like the Y2k scenerio that never was. Everyone could conceivably have to reinstall from CD, and take themselves offline until MS fixed the problem. And assuming that Microsoft themselves were running automatic patching, then it would probably take out microsoft at the same time limiting their ability to fix the problem. Commerce/economy would grind to a halt for a day or two or more.
That is the argument against uniformly enabling automatic patching. Sure you say that proper testing would eliminate that risk, but you can't test for everything. No, something that immediately shut down everyones computer likely wouldn't get through QA, but how about something that took some time to appear as a problem. Like a patch that has a time bug that goes off the third tuesday of the month?
Uniformity like that in any system risks catastrophic failure.
And here is where you drive my point home. Sure, things SHOULD be this way. But real economics say differently. Environmental costs are not reflective of actual cost of items. This was my point and no matter how many ways you want to twist it that is how the world works. Only in markets which are flooded do environmental costs show through on actual costs.
I think we may be talking about two different things, you seem to be talking about environmental damage and I am talking about resource use.
And your two examples are of luxury, brand-name non-essential items which I think is telling. Look at food, look at building supplies, look at many other things where there is competition and necessesity. There is a direct relationship between cost and the amount of resources used and number of people that it took to get it to you.
And here is I think the point that you miss, labor is an environmental cost. People eat, drink, excrete and generally make a mess of things. If something has a higher margin or cost more simply because of the higher quality, then fewer people will be able to afford it, so fewer units of whatever good is being sold will be produced. So, compared to others that person is less productive than others. Assuming that quality has nothing to do with durability or other usefulness.
Take the example of a pair of trousers, one pair might cost twice as much as another. By my rule of thumb you would take the more expensive pair to have more of an environmental damage. And I submit that this would be true, but if the more expensive pair will last twice as long then they have an equivalent environmental effect on resources used. If however, the more expensive pair is merely more expensive because of marketing , and not because of durability or usefulness, then there are likely more people making a living or fewer people who are using more resources based on the increase profit margins of that product.
Sure in order to assess the environmental impact of an activity you have to trace back every activity that supports that, but those things are not always available to a person. And sure some very destructive and wasteful activities can be less expensive in the short run such as overfishing, but there I think you should see that in an increasingly utilized world the costs associated with such wasteful practices go up even over the medium term.
and after reading a bit on Przewalski's horse, they would be really cool to introduce into North America. Less than a hundred in the wild in Mongolia and 1500 in zoos and captive breeding programs. Sounds like someone has to have a few thousand acres lying around somewhere that would be a lot less boring with these things running around.
Has nobody seen Jurassic Park?!
Technically this would be "Pleistocene Park", but that is what I thought they were proposing when I read the slashdot headline. Much cooler than just dropping African elefants in into North American would be to try and genetically engineer or clone some of the animals that were around back then. I know there isn't much dna remaining, but once we have a better understanding of genetics and molecular biology I bet someone could "reverse" bioengineer mastadon DNA or giant sloth DNA.
But we already have wild horses and mountain lions, coyotes and wolfs, so really the giant sloth and the mastadon/mammoth would be the only ones of interest to me.
As for the african elephant, it seems that the North american elephants were more closely genetically related to the Indian elephants, so if you are trying to be more true to our heritage then it would be better to bring in Indian elephants and just start selectively breeding them bigger.
And I bet you any money that, when we reach this stage, we still won't have any damned flying cars!
But we damn will have flying horse and buggies!
This is incorrect. The cost of an item is more about its supply or demand. In other words, prices are driven by want and need.
How is what i said incorrect? In everything that matters on a societal level, demand is flexible. Food, housing, transportation, clothing and healthcare all have flexibile demand in the market.
Sure, cost of natural resources, effort (labor), and inginuity factor into its manufacturing cost.
Natural resources cost nothing, they are just there. It is individual labor, inginuity, the owners of the land that cost money. From there it is those that refine goods and manufacture them into usable items that cost money. It is the people, fuel and equipment that transport those goods to market or to other factories and wharehouses that cost money. And it is the middlemen that connect the ultimate buyers with sellers that often cost the greatest portion of the eventual cost.
But when is the last time you saw an item's price based primarilly off manufacturing cost? you probably won't without looking into highly competative markets with excess supply (hint, this almost never happens).
It would be foolish to gauge an items environmental cost merely by the cost of manufacturing. Everything that it took to bring that item to you should be considered. Every mouth that was fed, every middleman, every tank of fuel in some delivery truck, every tree that was felled to make some push cart. Every Car that was driven by some salesperson, every lunch that they ate at a restaurant. The only way you can possibly hope to gauge all that waste and efficiency is with economics.
Yes, sometimes real costs are obscurred, but they eventually catch up with people. The rule of thumb should be that of two things of equal value to you the more expensive something is then the more environmental cost there was to get it to you.
Um- How much money do you save recycling aluminum? How much do you get paid to drive to the city facility to get rid of old paint and batteries instead of throwing them out? How much do you save by (Name any act that is helpful to the enviornment)?
Doing the right thing isn't always about saving money....
How do you know whether something is actually less destructive of the environment? If some activity is more economical, it is very likely that it is less wasteful overall. Cost is often a measure of effort and if some method takes more effort to accomplish the same thing then it likely it is more wasteful. Sure sometimes when you compare two different things it is not always a fair comparison because the real costs are obscured or shifted by dishonest people, be they politicians or other middlemen. But eventually it is all about economics, because what we are really talking about is the efficiency of achieving certain goals.
Imagine a world where you are under constant surveillance by law enforcement...not because you have a history of violent crime, but because you have a genetic predisposition to violence. You find it difficult to get a job because of your genetic predisposition to adult ADD, and you can't get health insurance because you are geneticlly predisposed to heart problems.
I imagine that would make that person a might testy. Thus proving to many people (At least those that were genetically predisposed to stupidity) that they had a violent predisposition and thus it was somehow okay to persecute them. It is an age old argument, look at how those people violently reacted to persecution and oppression they aren't as civilized as us. That kind of argument just makes evil sleep better at night.
Using genetics is no different than using race to discriminate against someone.
The flip side of that must be that no person or company should be held liable for another person's ill health as long as that person or company has done no wrong that contributed to that ill health.
In fact, under that condition it would benefit the employer not to know about any possible genetic or developmental anomolies or other health problems since knowing about some risk would impart additional liability.
The risk here is that there will be jobs that are so valuable and require so much investment by an employer that they will require Gattaca style genetic screaning. The key will be to make such screening as illegal as racial discrimination. It won't eliminate it, but it may keep it at bay.
I just bought and watched (almost all the way through) the dvd series. That is the best television I've ever seen. I'm hooked and want more.
Makes other television look like crap, which is most likely why they killed it. I mean come on, you air a series out of sequence and expect an instant hit? The promos alone killed it by making it look stupid.
I remember watching 10 minutes of Mrs. Reynolds and thinking it was silly. But then I watch the whole thing and was blown away. The whole series was witty, smart, hilariously funny at times.
I'd pay to watch new episodes. Hell, who cares if scifi can't buy the tv rights, put new episodes directly to dvd and I'd buy them.
Of course, there is a lot of our information on the Internet that we didn't put there, which is why we need better laws regarding dissemination of personal information.
I completely disagree.
When I hear so called privacy activists get all huffy about needing new laws to prevent government and corporate disclosure of all the information that they keep about us, I think you don't know what you are asking for.
If you are upset about so called personal information being available to other people then you should hit it at its source and limit the legally mandated collection of personal information. Once it is public information, ie stored in a publicly owned database, it should be freely accessible to everyone. Otherwise you are just setting us up for a disparity of power between those with access to information and those who do not, because information is power.
I should have access to mine and everyone else's public records... if the police are keeping a file on me or anyone else then I should be able to access it unless it is part of an ongoing (reasonably defined)investigation.
If a company has information about people the use of that information should be dictated not by some law, but if I have given that information to them then it should be dictated by their agreement with me.
Sure nobody wants Spam or solicitations or to be stalked, but those are all things that are already regulated. Much worse is a society where you can't find out what "They" know about you, that is when you really have to start worrying about what "They" know.
What makes you think the Democrats don't want to be able to track Republicans. The Democrats aren't exactly saints either.
They do, that is why we will have to make the tracking of individuals bipartisan... that way the two sides can keep tabs on eachother. You know like balance of power and stuff. Of course if you don't belong to the party...err... i mean one of "the two" parties, then you are shit out of luck.
You know that strip club you visited when you were 22 for a bachleor party, well that means that your opinions on tax reform when you are 40 don't matter. You know that coffee you like to drink, well it so happens that a "known" associate of terrorists also likes to get their mocha frapachino at the same time everyday. Well, now you are a "known" associate of terrorists and just try getting a government job or contract.
Screw the beaurocrats! Launch it yourself. it takes about 7 minutes to reach the ionosphere. Even if the US air force could scrample jets in that time to take you out, you're out of the range of their missiles. Or if you don't believe that, then the GIANT PLUME OF FIRE thats behind your rocket will confuse any heat-seeker and you'll most likely not get hit.
What about the friggin lasers?
But seriously, governments will not look kindly upon your return. Best to launch in international waters flagged under a small island nation's flag. And if you don't want to coordinate with US/Chinese/Russians, then launch in the South Pacific (east of US military bases) or South Atlantic, Maybe eastern Caribbean. At the expense of a ship of adequate size at least you could avoid some of the politics of launching in some "national" airspace.
That is what Sea Launch does. And though they don't say so on their web site, I bet they can cut through a lot of red tape for the launches themselves, being in international waters.
Please, take a basic physics class before you start telling people how it's not very difficult to get to orbit or the moon.
I believe economics is the more appropriate expertise to cite when determining cost.
The physics is well understood, the engineering is a bit more complicated (but has already been done if you are to believe NASA and the Kremlin), so the big costs at this point are materials, assembly and fuel... oh and don't forget all the beaurocrats you have to feed in order to get launch approval.
"Ohh how quickly we forget about Power Computing, Power Max, Windows, and why this a bad idea."
Bad idea for Apple, in the short term at least. Since it would cut deaply and immediately into Hardware sales as it did with the Mac clones (I bought a clone, but would I have bought an Apple?).
Keep in mind that being an OS company has worked pretty well for Microsoft as a business model, but they weren't trying to sell their own hardware except as accessories for the software (ie the MS mouse) I think in the long term that Apple could get out of the hardware business altogether and sell the OS only. Or alternately split the hardware and software businesses as was envisioned with the clones.
Though, I agree why mess with a good thing, but the clone strategy was in response to slipping market share, not the cause of it. Ultimately, I think the clones helped maintain mindshare and helped Apple reinvent itself.
Another counter example, Sun now has a x86 version of Solaris that works on non Sun hardware. But that makes sense simply because it means that unix admins and college students can hone their Solaris skills on commodity hardware which helps support their core server business.
Overall, I'd just be a little less quick to judge the lessons learned from the Apple clone experience. After all, it was a short lived business model and the Mac OS wasn't nearly as good a product as it is now.