And the entire line of debate about 'too big' or 'too sparse' is irrelevant. It isn't relevant because it cannot explain why US cities are not on par with the rest of the world.
There isn't any excuse for the cities. We can talk about the sparse country once the cities are matching the rest the world.
How was competition for 'the commons' controlled/regulated? (Like, there is a physical limit to the amount of lines you can put in a pipe. And startup costs: no company could start up and compete if it had to re-wire the last mile to each house). Were some portions of the infrastructure government controlled or government granted monopolies?
Bringing up Al Gore does prove something. That there exists powerful people who have exaggerated the impact of climate change in order to accumulate further power and wealth. Of course, this doesn't change any scientific facts, but its an important consideration when evaluating any proposed policy changes.
If only we could get past the conspiracy theory 'feeling' that is evoked by talking about Al Gore and "big government" so a meaningful debate could be had about possible policy changes to address the current scientific facts and scientific predictions.
Right wing talk show/far right conservatives won't allow the public to move past the "its a power grab" or "it isn't happening at all, it is a conspiracy" talk to even begin to form policy in Congress, let alone evaluate it.
If you are too incompetent to control the use of your own gun
Do you include being overpowered or ambushed and having your gun taken from you incompetence? Some people, like police, might want this option if the failure rate is low enough to be inconsequential.
Yes, we have more violence than other wealthy nations. We also have more of a problem with an unaddressed legacy of slavery and segregation, ongoing racism, ongoing economic injustice, and lack of access to useful mental health care than those nations do. Those factors have far more to do with our violence problem than access to firearms does.
Completely agree. I know a lot of conservative people and a lot of liberal people. I always the odd one out on the gun issue. I think guns are largely irrelevant to levels of either gun violence or crime prevention. I see countries with more guns than us, less guns than us, and more or less violence, in all combinations. The presence of the guns seems to have zero to do with any of it.
But what I do see in violent countries, is exactly what you described: large amounts of inequality (economic, racial, etc..), poverty cycles and joblessness, very low social mobility, lack of adequate health care (especially mental health), fewer social safety nets, inner cities crumbling into ruins, etc....
That is the exact opposite of what you see in countries with high gun ownership yet low gun violence. They are typically "evil socialist" countries, that have large social safety nets, less income inequality, higher social mobility, etc..
Well, most people do not need a an extremely well thought out philosophical framework in order to arrive at moral conclusions. And even if philosophical frameworks were more commonly taught and understood in society, rare is the person who remains ideologically or philosophically consistent. And in most cases, science and/or plain facts can give you an answer to a moral question.
Should we teach children about sex? Is that good for society? There is good data on the effects of sex education and pregnancy/STD rates. A rational person could conclude, scientifically, what is best for society and individuals when dealing that this specific topic.
Biology/anthropology can even answer questions about 'meaning of life' stuff. "What is my purpose?". Unfortunately, the answers can sometimes be pretty boring and uninspiring.
If scientific and philosophical frameworks provided more feel good answers about life , it might influence a larger portion of society:) I like how the new show Cosmos attempts to do that when possible. Things like "we are all made of star dust!".
But in the end, it is going to be a long time before a sizable percent of the population is willing to give up beliefs in things like an afterlife. Maybe it will never happen. There are just too many mental bonuses. For the "low" cost of sacrificing reason on a handful of positions, you get 1) an afterlife where you can rejoin your loved ones 2) during life someone (super powerful) constantly watching out for you and loving you 3) clear decisions on many moral issues that other people might have to wrestle with, etc..
Can I just point out that American Atheists are, uh, weird?
Is your evidence for that from southern baptist towns, or other conservative areas of the country where atheists feel a need to stick together or something? In the NW, atheism is a non-issue. It isn't a source of bonding, nor a source of division. No one cares. Just like no one cares what your favorite color might be.
Actually the "god" question ("no god" is not a question, it is the default) is a question very much subject to science, and science has provided a few pretty good insights into it.
Oh? Why can't "god" be the default? That's awfully convenient that you get to choose that particular reference point, isn't it?
Substitute "god" with anything that doesn't exist and see how illogical your statement is...
For example, "Why can't 'unicorns are real' be the default"?
The main issue is that cab-like services are usually regulated in such a way to act like an extension of a city's other transportation services like buses, trains, etc..all of which is basically considered infrastructure. Just like power lines, roads, and anything else that is best maintained by enforcing artificial monopolies at some level, with that level usually dictated by natural limitations. Like... only room for one road here, it makes sense to only allow one entity to control road creation.
Same goes with Taxi-like companies. There is basically a limited amount of $ to be made, with the most profitable areas being downtown, runs to the airport, etc.. certain areas only. Most cities say to taxi companies, "in exchange for having a license to operate in our city, you must promise to not discriminate based on race/religion, etc.., and you must service the less profitable areas equally as well as the more profitable areas".
If some service comes in and competes with Taxi's, but only has to compete in the profitable areas, the taxi service will go bankrupt. Now the city has no transportation service to offer anyone in the less profitable 'outlier' regions around the city. Unless they want to extend rail lines and buses, which may not be economically feasible if the traffic density is low.
How much of that comes from their invesment in renewable energy, though? Other neighboring European countries that have not invested in renewables have comparable prices, as shown on this map. Denmark is 13% more expensive and Italy is 15% less expensive and the UK is 36% less expensive. Germany is towards the top there, but it is not an outlier. There are a few countries with prices comparable to the USA in the EU, such as Estonia which is 2.4 times chepear than Germany. But it seems strange to claim that the main difference between Germany and Estonia is the amount of renewables. And as this image shows, the price of electricity in Germany has been following the average in the European Union for some time now, which again doesn't match with the hypothesis that power in Germany is more expensive than in the USA because of all the solar power.
Not to mention, I'd be curious how much the US electrical prices might rise if our tax dollars stopped subsidizing certain areas of the energy sector. I know we subsidize oil, so I assume we also give tax breaks and other forms of encouragement to things like natural gas and coal.
Please there is no effective difference in US politics, it's the same group.
People keep saying that, but it is too broad a brush. If you take corporatism, levels of corruption, national defense, privacy rights (patriot act, wiretapping, etc...), police power, etc., as the sole indicators, then yeah, Republicans and Democrats are identical.
But you can't pretend there aren't huge differences in other areas. You may consider those areas inconsequential, but lots of other people consider things like social issues (education, medicine, reproductive rights/lack of rights, gay marriage, legalize/don't legalize pot, etc...), taxes (trickle down vs trickle up, etc..), federal vs state power, as huge issues.
Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs.
I've started asking for citations on that statement also. I have never gotten a response. Every time I search for information related to that statement, I get the opposite result.
However, I think it would be accurate for those 'anti renewable' people to say "with our current energy storage capabilities, and current state of our electrical grid, renewables alone will not scale to meet our energy needs completely".
A lot of people are under the assumption that energy storage, and shifting energy around the country, is an impossible problem given our current tech. I don't doubt it will cost a significant amount of money to overcome, but it certainly isn't impossible.
I am not the sys admin. I am an application developer / analyst who works closely with sys admin.
"expandability sucks"
Whoa... no way. It is by far the most flexible expansion I've ever seen. I have yet to make a request of any of the sys admins that wasn't instantly fulfilled on a zfs system. Other systems I'll often get a "well.. we can't do it that way, but I can move this mount point over here, and rename this, then add a disk, then name it back, etc....".
ZFS has pools. You can add anything that can present as a block device (file, hard disk, virtual disk from a storage device, usb keychain, etc..) to a pool. Then you can carve that pool in many different ways and attach it to zones (zfs virtual machines). And, of course, all this can be done live, in production. No reboots required. Space is added or removed from my live servers all the time.
I think one of the home NAS manufacturers uses ZFS. You can mix match drives, hot swap them, and the raid will rebuild itself on the fly.
ZFS Snapshot of 500GB, instant. Rollback when I mess something up, instant or like a minute.
VMWare Snapshot of 500GB, 10 minutes. Rollback when I mess something up, 30 minutes.
ZFS snapshot "myvolume" | zfs send "myvolume-snapshot" other zfs system. On other system, zfs boot "myvolume", log in, change the IP and system name, done. A second new server is up and running. Or a new backup system created from production, etc..
Writes to the ZFS array went from 65+ MB/s (bunch of mixed random files) down to about 8 MB/s with dedup turned on, and memory use climbed to where I ordered more RAM to bump the system up to 16 GB. In the end I decided the approx 2% disk space I was saving with dedup wasn't worth it and disabled it.
I was always curious how well it scaled down (like for home use). At work we have have multiple 100+ disk storage systems using ZFS, and notice zero performance hits using de-dupe features (mainly through mirroring).
I really have no clue why people are so obsessed with proving (or disproving) racial differences in intelligence
You answered your own question quite well here:
And, if you look back at that history of people who claimed racial superiority for one race or another -- even promoting "scientific" opinions -- you'll find that they disproportionately have a racist agenda.
Scientific reasons aside, I think the general public is so interested in these sorts of studies, because of the ramifications if significantly true or false.//entering the mind of a racist Why is Africa so poor? Well to a racist, it is because they are black. A study proving that blacks are less intelligent justifies their racism. We should continue to micro-manage them, international companies should continue to take advantage of corrupt leadership and suck the countries dry of natural resources, the international community can't every make that place better through law or actions. Why are inner cities in the US in such bad shape? Well, because they are mostly minorities, mainly black. And blacks are less intelligent. There isn't anything we can do about it. Spending tax dollars trying to make things better for 'those people' is a waste of money. *//existing the mind of a racist(I hope).
*(I honestly think a sizable segment of our conservative politicians believe this.. though they would never say it)
Since any amount of genetic 'proof' that races have different success/intelligence rates, when controlling for other factors, is always almost instantly jumped on by bigoted/racist people, scientists are right to be cautious and clearly spell out the limits of their research.
Whenever any of this comes up, I always like to point out that modern humans (with fully modern anatomy, brain size, etc..) have been around 100,000+ years. Why did it take us 90,000 years before we decided to start farming? Or 95,000 years before we decided to use modern writing? Why was Egypt and the Middle East the cultural and knowledge centers of the world for thousands of years, and are now messed up and regressive? (Hint... their DNS didn't drastically change).
Yes, but how? Which genes? What factors? What percent is our cultural communal upbringing vs genes? How 'smart' would a child raised by wolves be? Or a child raised by apes?
Humans have had essentially the same DNA for probably 100,000 or so years. Why did it take us so long to build up cities and go to the moon? Some anthropology books have even pushed the 'modern man' figure back beyond 100,000 years. If our DNA were the major factor in our intelligence, why did it take us 80,000 years to start growing food instead of only hunting/gathering? Why did it take us 90,000 years to record the first clay tablet?
Why are stone tools extremely primitive and then gradually get more refined and skillfully crafted in the archaeological record? Shouldn't any caveman with a modern brain be able to produce top of the line stone tools? Why do we see a very clear evolution of stone tools? It is almost as if a changing environment, and shared cultural knowledge, were more important than DNA....
Sure, our DNA is part of it. But so is a long history of cultural, technological, and philosophical development, as well as a certain population density being reached that increased trade, knowledge transfers, and cooperative social strategies. Heck, one could make a strong argument that our nimble fingers alone are responsible for a huge chunk of our success. The ability to write and record our knowledge alone is huge advantage (why did writing take so long to develop.... another mystery).
some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups.
I was curious so I read the wikipedia page. It doesn't sound nearly that simple. Alan Gross was distributing the equipment while working for a contractor that "won a US$6 million U.S. government contract for the program in which Gross was involved, a controversial "democracy-promotion program" that ballooned under the Bush administration, to provide communications equipment to break the Cuban government's 'information blockade'."
In addition from the wiki page:
USAID's US$20 million Cuba program, authorized by a law calling for regime change in Cuba, has been criticized repeatedly in congressional reports as being wasteful and ineffective, and putting people in danger.
So you travel to a communist country, funded by US tax dollars (through a contractor), which are part of a law 'calling for regime change' and 'democracy promotion' and don't expect the communist country to act?
I agree Cuba would be a lot better off if they opened up, moved to democracy, allowed free speech, etc.. but sending US civilians into Cuba to do work that will obviously be opposed by the current government, is bordering on stupidity. Unless your goal is to provoke Cuba into arresting US citizens in order to continue the embargo, in which case the plan worked perfectly.
What makes you think the current environment is anything new?
The last 20-30 years has seen a large chunk of our political leaders (nearly all Republican) distance themselves from many mainstream scientific theories for political (or in many cases, actual disbelief) reasons. The main reason for this is the conservative religious right in the country taking over a lot of the Republican party. Lots of articles like this one: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/
I hope it is just a cycle and both parties can get back to more sane debates, instead of half our political system claiming (truly or just for politics) to not believe in something as mainstream as evolution.
So this current slump in scientific support does feel new to most people. There may have been an older cycle of religious right taking over the conservative party, but I'm not familiar with it.
I think that is a likely outcome when self-driving cars become reality. Car computers could even feed a grid computer destinations, and the grid computer could efficiently plot each cars best route, grouping cars with similar destinations together even. Like forming trains of cars.
A scientific fact is a different thing than an authoritative claim, and you need consensus and political debate in order to create the latter. Science produces testable facts but the question of wether or not we, as a people, must do something in response to these facts, or if these facts are relevant or important, are not questions science can answer.
Unfortunately, in the US, we are still debating whether the facts are real....
I'd love it if all the Republican congress folks trusted the scientific facts about AGW and were debating what to do about it. Weighing the risk vs reward of spending money to counter the possible range of effects, weighing that against the cost of doing nothing, etc...
But nope, half of congress flat out says the Earth isn't even warming. And don't believe in Evolution either...
Slashdot Mirror
I would assume you would actually interview them. That is how I got hired as a system analyst right out of college with an anthropology degree.
And the entire line of debate about 'too big' or 'too sparse' is irrelevant. It isn't relevant because it cannot explain why US cities are not on par with the rest of the world.
There isn't any excuse for the cities. We can talk about the sparse country once the cities are matching the rest the world.
Companies invested in infrastructure
How was competition for 'the commons' controlled/regulated? (Like, there is a physical limit to the amount of lines you can put in a pipe. And startup costs: no company could start up and compete if it had to re-wire the last mile to each house). Were some portions of the infrastructure government controlled or government granted monopolies?
Bringing up Al Gore does prove something. That there exists powerful people who have exaggerated the impact of climate change in order to accumulate further power and wealth. Of course, this doesn't change any scientific facts, but its an important consideration when evaluating any proposed policy changes.
If only we could get past the conspiracy theory 'feeling' that is evoked by talking about Al Gore and "big government" so a meaningful debate could be had about possible policy changes to address the current scientific facts and scientific predictions.
Right wing talk show/far right conservatives won't allow the public to move past the "its a power grab" or "it isn't happening at all, it is a conspiracy" talk to even begin to form policy in Congress, let alone evaluate it.
It's slashdot, he still got a +5 informative:) hehe.
Isn't Minecraft last week's news?
Not to the millions of people playing every day.
14 million PC sales, and the fairly recent port to xbox sold 10 million more copies.
Not to mention all the physical merchandise: google product search
If you are too incompetent to control the use of your own gun
Do you include being overpowered or ambushed and having your gun taken from you incompetence? Some people, like police, might want this option if the failure rate is low enough to be inconsequential.
Yes, we have more violence than other wealthy nations. We also have more of a problem with an unaddressed legacy of slavery and segregation, ongoing racism, ongoing economic injustice, and lack of access to useful mental health care than those nations do. Those factors have far more to do with our violence problem than access to firearms does.
Completely agree. I know a lot of conservative people and a lot of liberal people. I always the odd one out on the gun issue. I think guns are largely irrelevant to levels of either gun violence or crime prevention. I see countries with more guns than us, less guns than us, and more or less violence, in all combinations. The presence of the guns seems to have zero to do with any of it.
But what I do see in violent countries, is exactly what you described: large amounts of inequality (economic, racial, etc..), poverty cycles and joblessness, very low social mobility, lack of adequate health care (especially mental health), fewer social safety nets, inner cities crumbling into ruins, etc....
That is the exact opposite of what you see in countries with high gun ownership yet low gun violence. They are typically "evil socialist" countries, that have large social safety nets, less income inequality, higher social mobility, etc..
Well, most people do not need a an extremely well thought out philosophical framework in order to arrive at moral conclusions. And even if philosophical frameworks were more commonly taught and understood in society, rare is the person who remains ideologically or philosophically consistent. And in most cases, science and/or plain facts can give you an answer to a moral question.
Should we teach children about sex? Is that good for society? There is good data on the effects of sex education and pregnancy/STD rates. A rational person could conclude, scientifically, what is best for society and individuals when dealing that this specific topic.
Biology/anthropology can even answer questions about 'meaning of life' stuff. "What is my purpose?". Unfortunately, the answers can sometimes be pretty boring and uninspiring.
If scientific and philosophical frameworks provided more feel good answers about life , it might influence a larger portion of society:) I like how the new show Cosmos attempts to do that when possible. Things like "we are all made of star dust!".
But in the end, it is going to be a long time before a sizable percent of the population is willing to give up beliefs in things like an afterlife. Maybe it will never happen. There are just too many mental bonuses. For the "low" cost of sacrificing reason on a handful of positions, you get 1) an afterlife where you can rejoin your loved ones 2) during life someone (super powerful) constantly watching out for you and loving you 3) clear decisions on many moral issues that other people might have to wrestle with, etc..
Can I just point out that American Atheists are, uh, weird?
Is your evidence for that from southern baptist towns, or other conservative areas of the country where atheists feel a need to stick together or something? In the NW, atheism is a non-issue. It isn't a source of bonding, nor a source of division. No one cares. Just like no one cares what your favorite color might be.
Actually the "god" question ("no god" is not a question, it is the default) is a question very much subject to science, and science has provided a few pretty good insights into it.
Oh? Why can't "god" be the default? That's awfully convenient that you get to choose that particular reference point, isn't it?
Substitute "god" with anything that doesn't exist and see how illogical your statement is...
For example, "Why can't 'unicorns are real' be the default"?
Contract enforcement is only part of the issue.
The main issue is that cab-like services are usually regulated in such a way to act like an extension of a city's other transportation services like buses, trains, etc..all of which is basically considered infrastructure. Just like power lines, roads, and anything else that is best maintained by enforcing artificial monopolies at some level, with that level usually dictated by natural limitations. Like... only room for one road here, it makes sense to only allow one entity to control road creation.
Same goes with Taxi-like companies. There is basically a limited amount of $ to be made, with the most profitable areas being downtown, runs to the airport, etc.. certain areas only. Most cities say to taxi companies, "in exchange for having a license to operate in our city, you must promise to not discriminate based on race/religion, etc.., and you must service the less profitable areas equally as well as the more profitable areas".
If some service comes in and competes with Taxi's, but only has to compete in the profitable areas, the taxi service will go bankrupt. Now the city has no transportation service to offer anyone in the less profitable 'outlier' regions around the city. Unless they want to extend rail lines and buses, which may not be economically feasible if the traffic density is low.
Tesla is selling a luxury product to anyone that can afford to spend 100k on a super fast sports car that won the coveted car of the year award
http://www.motortrend.com/oftheyear/car/1301_2013_motor_trend_car_of_the_year_tesla_model_s/
How much of that comes from their invesment in renewable energy, though? Other neighboring European countries that have not invested in renewables have comparable prices, as shown on this map. Denmark is 13% more expensive and Italy is 15% less expensive and the UK is 36% less expensive. Germany is towards the top there, but it is not an outlier. There are a few countries with prices comparable to the USA in the EU, such as Estonia which is 2.4 times chepear than Germany. But it seems strange to claim that the main difference between Germany and Estonia is the amount of renewables. And as this image shows, the price of electricity in Germany has been following the average in the European Union for some time now, which again doesn't match with the hypothesis that power in Germany is more expensive than in the USA because of all the solar power.
Not to mention, I'd be curious how much the US electrical prices might rise if our tax dollars stopped subsidizing certain areas of the energy sector. I know we subsidize oil, so I assume we also give tax breaks and other forms of encouragement to things like natural gas and coal.
Please there is no effective difference in US politics, it's the same group.
People keep saying that, but it is too broad a brush. If you take corporatism, levels of corruption, national defense, privacy rights (patriot act, wiretapping, etc...), police power, etc., as the sole indicators, then yeah, Republicans and Democrats are identical.
But you can't pretend there aren't huge differences in other areas. You may consider those areas inconsequential, but lots of other people consider things like social issues (education, medicine, reproductive rights/lack of rights, gay marriage, legalize/don't legalize pot, etc...), taxes (trickle down vs trickle up, etc..), federal vs state power, as huge issues.
Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs.
I've started asking for citations on that statement also. I have never gotten a response. Every time I search for information related to that statement, I get the opposite result.
However, I think it would be accurate for those 'anti renewable' people to say "with our current energy storage capabilities, and current state of our electrical grid, renewables alone will not scale to meet our energy needs completely".
A lot of people are under the assumption that energy storage, and shifting energy around the country, is an impossible problem given our current tech. I don't doubt it will cost a significant amount of money to overcome, but it certainly isn't impossible.
I am not the sys admin. I am an application developer / analyst who works closely with sys admin.
"expandability sucks"
Whoa... no way. It is by far the most flexible expansion I've ever seen. I have yet to make a request of any of the sys admins that wasn't instantly fulfilled on a zfs system. Other systems I'll often get a "well.. we can't do it that way, but I can move this mount point over here, and rename this, then add a disk, then name it back, etc....".
ZFS has pools. You can add anything that can present as a block device (file, hard disk, virtual disk from a storage device, usb keychain, etc..) to a pool. Then you can carve that pool in many different ways and attach it to zones (zfs virtual machines). And, of course, all this can be done live, in production. No reboots required. Space is added or removed from my live servers all the time.
I think one of the home NAS manufacturers uses ZFS. You can mix match drives, hot swap them, and the raid will rebuild itself on the fly.
ZFS
Snapshot of 500GB, instant.
Rollback when I mess something up, instant or like a minute.
VMWare
Snapshot of 500GB, 10 minutes.
Rollback when I mess something up, 30 minutes.
ZFS snapshot "myvolume" | zfs send "myvolume-snapshot" other zfs system. On other system, zfs boot "myvolume", log in, change the IP and system name, done. A second new server is up and running. Or a new backup system created from production, etc..
Writes to the ZFS array went from 65+ MB/s (bunch of mixed random files) down to about 8 MB/s with dedup turned on, and memory use climbed to where I ordered more RAM to bump the system up to 16 GB. In the end I decided the approx 2% disk space I was saving with dedup wasn't worth it and disabled it.
I was always curious how well it scaled down (like for home use). At work we have have multiple 100+ disk storage systems using ZFS, and notice zero performance hits using de-dupe features (mainly through mirroring).
I really have no clue why people are so obsessed with proving (or disproving) racial differences in intelligence
You answered your own question quite well here:
And, if you look back at that history of people who claimed racial superiority for one race or another -- even promoting "scientific" opinions -- you'll find that they disproportionately have a racist agenda.
Scientific reasons aside, I think the general public is so interested in these sorts of studies, because of the ramifications if significantly true or false. //entering the mind of a racist //existing the mind of a racist(I hope).
Why is Africa so poor? Well to a racist, it is because they are black. A study proving that blacks are less intelligent justifies their racism. We should continue to micro-manage them, international companies should continue to take advantage of corrupt leadership and suck the countries dry of natural resources, the international community can't every make that place better through law or actions.
Why are inner cities in the US in such bad shape? Well, because they are mostly minorities, mainly black. And blacks are less intelligent. There isn't anything we can do about it. Spending tax dollars trying to make things better for 'those people' is a waste of money. *
*(I honestly think a sizable segment of our conservative politicians believe this.. though they would never say it)
Since any amount of genetic 'proof' that races have different success/intelligence rates, when controlling for other factors, is always almost instantly jumped on by bigoted/racist people, scientists are right to be cautious and clearly spell out the limits of their research.
Whenever any of this comes up, I always like to point out that modern humans (with fully modern anatomy, brain size, etc..) have been around 100,000+ years. Why did it take us 90,000 years before we decided to start farming? Or 95,000 years before we decided to use modern writing? Why was Egypt and the Middle East the cultural and knowledge centers of the world for thousands of years, and are now messed up and regressive? (Hint... their DNS didn't drastically change).
Yes, but how? Which genes? What factors? What percent is our cultural communal upbringing vs genes? How 'smart' would a child raised by wolves be? Or a child raised by apes?
Humans have had essentially the same DNA for probably 100,000 or so years. Why did it take us so long to build up cities and go to the moon? Some anthropology books have even pushed the 'modern man' figure back beyond 100,000 years. If our DNA were the major factor in our intelligence, why did it take us 80,000 years to start growing food instead of only hunting/gathering? Why did it take us 90,000 years to record the first clay tablet?
Why are stone tools extremely primitive and then gradually get more refined and skillfully crafted in the archaeological record? Shouldn't any caveman with a modern brain be able to produce top of the line stone tools? Why do we see a very clear evolution of stone tools? It is almost as if a changing environment, and shared cultural knowledge, were more important than DNA....
Sure, our DNA is part of it. But so is a long history of cultural, technological, and philosophical development, as well as a certain population density being reached that increased trade, knowledge transfers, and cooperative social strategies. Heck, one could make a strong argument that our nimble fingers alone are responsible for a huge chunk of our success. The ability to write and record our knowledge alone is huge advantage (why did writing take so long to develop.... another mystery).
some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups.
I was curious so I read the wikipedia page. It doesn't sound nearly that simple. Alan Gross was distributing the equipment while working for a contractor that "won a US$6 million U.S. government contract for the program in which Gross was involved, a controversial "democracy-promotion program" that ballooned under the Bush administration, to provide communications equipment to break the Cuban government's 'information blockade'."
In addition from the wiki page:
USAID's US$20 million Cuba program, authorized by a law calling for regime change in Cuba, has been criticized repeatedly in congressional reports as being wasteful and ineffective, and putting people in danger.
So you travel to a communist country, funded by US tax dollars (through a contractor), which are part of a law 'calling for regime change' and 'democracy promotion' and don't expect the communist country to act?
I agree Cuba would be a lot better off if they opened up, moved to democracy, allowed free speech, etc.. but sending US civilians into Cuba to do work that will obviously be opposed by the current government, is bordering on stupidity. Unless your goal is to provoke Cuba into arresting US citizens in order to continue the embargo, in which case the plan worked perfectly.
What makes you think the current environment is anything new?
The last 20-30 years has seen a large chunk of our political leaders (nearly all Republican) distance themselves from many mainstream scientific theories for political (or in many cases, actual disbelief) reasons. The main reason for this is the conservative religious right in the country taking over a lot of the Republican party. Lots of articles like this one: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/
I hope it is just a cycle and both parties can get back to more sane debates, instead of half our political system claiming (truly or just for politics) to not believe in something as mainstream as evolution.
So this current slump in scientific support does feel new to most people. There may have been an older cycle of religious right taking over the conservative party, but I'm not familiar with it.
I think that is a likely outcome when self-driving cars become reality. Car computers could even feed a grid computer destinations, and the grid computer could efficiently plot each cars best route, grouping cars with similar destinations together even. Like forming trains of cars.
Or we could just work on energy storage more aggressively....
http://phys.org/news/2011-11-battery-electrodes-grid-storage.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512206/years-in-the-making-promising-rechargeable-metal-air-batteries-head-to-market/
A scientific fact is a different thing than an authoritative claim, and you need consensus and political debate in order to create the latter. Science produces testable facts but the question of wether or not we, as a people, must do something in response to these facts, or if these facts are relevant or important, are not questions science can answer.
Unfortunately, in the US, we are still debating whether the facts are real....
I'd love it if all the Republican congress folks trusted the scientific facts about AGW and were debating what to do about it. Weighing the risk vs reward of spending money to counter the possible range of effects, weighing that against the cost of doing nothing, etc...
But nope, half of congress flat out says the Earth isn't even warming. And don't believe in Evolution either...