Calling open season in the upper tiers of athletics would certainly have the effect of more young folks (and hell even that guy who cares too much about company soft ball) doing more drugs, and that isn't healthy and it isn't good.
I don't believe in the criminalization of drugs myself, but for something so explicitly about the body, athletics should really not be helping sell young people on the idea of dangerous chemical recreation.
I hate the drug war, but it is important to note that our world would be a lot better without certain drugs.
If I really thought about it, I'd take the opposite view point. Every medical and recreational drug should be available for over the counter sales anywhere that sells drugs. Would I ever take heroin, crack, smoke or drink? Nope, but I won't stop you from trying it. Now if I would like to go and find the 10 most commonly needed emergency drugs and would like to keep them on hand "just encase." How many of those are licensed to where only certain medical people can even handle them? True. I don't have the knowledge to properly use said drugs, but if I had said drugs, I'd really, really make an effort to follow the directions if I ever really felt that I needed them.
Now think of "recreational & enhancement" drugs. I don't smoke & drink, but maybe you do. I do like caffeine in my drinks though. Those are all recreational drugs. If I wanted to take speed to stay up, why shouldn't I be allowed knowing its effects? There are military enhancement drugs as well that your average athlete might really love, but wouldn't want to use for long because it could have negative effects.
If you really wanted a catch all law. You'd outlaw knowingly giving others drugs and doing/being too stupid while under the influence of your drug. That's all you really need. (Heck, even let your average cop define what "too stupid" is.) The knowingly giving others drugs would apply to emergency medical people giving you drugs that you don't want, those that hook others on drugs that they didn't want, and those that give others "date rape" drugs.
How would emergency medical practices change if they weren't allowed to give you any drugs without your pre-approval of any of the drugs to be used? We could do it. We could either use medical dog tags with what drugs that we allow or have a national data base with our biometric ID and drug preferences and if we are ever in an accident then they'd have to query the db before being allowed to give you anything. This would be in your interest. The doctors wouldn't be allowed to make decisions; you'd have to approve every action taken. It would either work really well or very badly.
Plus, since our society is unfortunately much more centered on professional sports, than on education and science, doing so will immediately create a high budget research field for human enhancement, both at the molecular and the tissue levels. No one is holding a gun to these athletes' heads, (not in this country anyway) telling them to do these things to themselves. If a grown man of consentual age wants to put himself in harm's way, I see no need to intervene.
What I what to know, is how well traditional athletes would do against unlimited modified humans. Everyone just seems to assume that the original human won't fare as well as the cyber/bio-engineered person. I think of Dune. You wouldn't really find out until you had unlimited modified humans and "normal" humans competing against each other. The high end edge for normal athletes will change over time. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some one started a selective breeding program for better athletes. You wouldn't know if those breed athletes were actually any better until they started to compete. Until then, they'd be simply unranked athletes.
Permitting doping in any sport is the road to that sport's ruin. And justifying the proposal on the basis that the current restrictions fail to 'think of the children' is pretty perverse-
Imagine you are the parent of a child who shows some kind of sporting talent early on- Do you encourage him, knowing that weird drug induced side-effects might overshadow his life?.... (...No, you don't)
Um, actually it could be the best thing ever for this country! Think about it getting rid of the cultural bias in sports in less than two generations. It'd be awesome. Really like.00001% of athletes ever make it to that level anyway. What doping would do is just weed out an entire segment of athletes and coaches that really screw up their bodies for no gain. If doping did produce noticeable effects, where I could magically compete at that level it would be one thing. As I read it though, most doping, is for "fine tuning" that.00001% of athletes that made it into that level. It would just be stupid for your kids to dope up for their little league game. (Now if you and the kid thought it was a great idea and that the cost to the kid's body was worth the slight edge it could give him then go ahead and enhance your kids body.)
Actually I don't think unlimited doping would have any noticeable effects. Athletes are at the extreme at knowing/tuning their body for their sport. The more money that they have to loose, the less that they'll want to mess up their edge with doping or artificial edges. Now if you or I could replace a leg, or take a drug and magically be at their level for an event though with nasty long term costs, would you? (I'd say there would be some crazy enough to do it, but so what let them. We let people smoke and drink.)
Actually according to the International Labour Organization and the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, Americans work on average almost 100 hours more per year than Japanese. Mostly due to the fact that Japanese get 7 more vacation days per year on average.
And then there are folks like me. I get 2 weeks a year and rarely use it. We can only roll over 240 hours at the end of the year and some time in October my supervisor comes by to get me to use some of that 350+ hours of vacation time. They don't really want me to take most of November and December off. (Not that I'd like to.) I generally do take the week off around Christmas, but I'm gaining more time around holidays since I get all the major holidays anyway. I usually end up taking random Fridays off to spend with the wife while the kids are at school. Its actually more "work" if I'm off any during summer since then I gotta help watch the kids.;)
There is only so much playing Disgaea, Disgaea 2, Rogue Galaxy, XenoSaga 1, 2, & 3 or heck playing Civ 4 that I can handle before I feel like I better clean up and go back to work. Heck, I get home about 5:30 pm and have then until midnight to eat, play games, browse the net, or watch movies. I'm living in a golden age as it is and get tones of time off and plenty of entertainment to keep me occupied when I'm not at work. What the hell would I do with another 1-2 weeks of vacation time? I wouldn't have any additional money to spend, so I'd pretty much be limited to playing with my existing toys.
Back to reality, though: The Chinese have seen reality in the eye, just like we have - they know that this kind of things are necessary if we are to avoid choking in our own filth, and they know it has to happen on an absolutely epic scale. The difference is that they are taking action instead of waffling over who should pay and which foot to stand on.
China has been around in one form or another for a long time. With actions like this, it'll be around in some form in the future as well. This little North American country that isn't even 500 years old yet has nothing on its longevity or foresight yet. In 20-50 years, China may regain their title of sole global superpower except this time without turning isolationist.
So they'll just export the pollution to a different city which will manufacture goods for them. The roads will still be made of concrete (made with huge energy inputs) and they'll still use diesel earthmoving machines to build the place. The people will still eat meat (probably only second to transport as a way people generate carbon footprint). Basically its just a greenwashing exercise.
I just love how the Greens like to use greenwashing as an PR slander when anyone that they don't like starts do to things that the Greens say that they support. Walmart started looking into mainly as a way to reduce costs and save consumers money. China needs test case village/town/city to see what works and what doesn't. You instantly call it greenwashing and that for them to even use your Green tech that they are exporting their pollution!
Don't you realize that the US is exporting its pollution to China? This is atleast a step in the right direction to reducing China's nongovernmental impact. China is far more likely to drastically change the tech in all of its cities to whatever it decides is its green standard than the US is. The US will likely be able to afford to buy cheap green tech once China starts making it at that volume. Don't you dare tell me that its all just a greenwash that it doesn't matter because some one in the chain pollutes some where. That's not the freaking point. The freaking point is this is a test case to see if it is even possible to do it.
If you commute 45 minutes each way to work, and let's say you work 5 days a week for 48 weeks out of the year (taking out 4 weeks for vacation and holidays). That means you spend 360 hours per year in your car driving to and from work. How many hours of vacation-time does your employer give you? 80? 120? If you cut your commute in half, you get an extra 180 hours per year!
I live in a small town. It takes about 10-15 minutes to get anywhere here except at the peak traffic times and then you'd likely see 20-25 minutes to get anywhere. It's always amazed me at how wasteful those rich folks in cities are that can afford to daily commute more than 1 hour each way. That's like 2 hours of extra work right there. I often wonder at what time these people get up in the morning and in what condition they get home in. That's most likely half their problem right there. They are so tired by the time they get home that all they can do is chill in front of the TV/computer, eat dinner and prepare to do it again tomorrow. Thinking about the larger issues isn't even in there. They like to say mass transit is the solution of all the world problems because for them, it would be. They could at least use that commute time to browse the net, watch tv, or read whatever if anyone else was doing the driving. So to them, mass transit is a god send social solution for all the worlds problems.
They've not really noticed that the true answer it to cut down their daily commute so it takes about 10-15 minutes to get to work no matter what means you use.
Every additional step in the food chain represents about a 90% loss of efficiency, so the benefits of vegetarianism are far from negligible.
Basically, vegetarians are against animal life in general and esp. domesticated animal life. Farmers and those that eat meat know how much it takes feed the chickens, cows, fish, or other animal life that we eat. It's something we have to take into account. Sure if you want to be lazy you could all just eat grass and live like poor peasants if you really want to. Most of the rest of humanity like variety and to eat as much various meat products as we can reasonably afford.
You'd rather us cut down on all that variety to support less animals and a larger number of absolute humans. Why the heck would we want to do that though? (That's the key complaint against vegetarianism right there. It's not really needed. We make choices on which kinds and variety of foods to eat now. Why should we limit it to a select list because a vocal minority don't like our food sources?)
Billions more eat very little meat. A diet low in meat is normal for most of the world & something easy you can do if you want to be green.
Yeah all you have to do is be dirt poor and all you'd be to afford would be veggies with meat maybe once a month or so on a special occasion. The greens think that's a great thing though so they should all try it themselves.
Give me a break. It's not that hard to look at temperature observations and compare them to predictions. You have to wait about 30 years before the signal comes unequivocably out of the noise, not 50-100.
The last time that I checked the predictions weren't matching the observed temps. We weren't having anywhere near the "predicted" level of so called global warming. It's already in place today to speak out or voice any information against the entire global climate change thing will get you socially black listed and being called a long list of names to basically through out everything you've researched in order to keep their status quo. Now since that's happening now. How can you honestly believe in 30, 50, 100 years it won't be much worse. For any example, just look at the entire Creationism/Evolutionist thing. It's the same logic at work. This we are doing something/anything to cause climate change meme won't die for generations. It'll last as long as the entire Creationism/Evolutionist thing. It doesn't matter what the evidence says. The meme will still be with us and cause a voting block to always follow its logic.
And, because of the DBZ reference, he'd deserve it...
And thanks to those Dragon balls anyone can be brought back. Actually that's the solution to this whole mess. We need a search for the Dragon Balls and wish away this whole global climate change/air pollution thing.;)
I'm not saying global warming is wrong, but this kind of logic (revisionist rationalizing) destroys accountability. Quite frankly, if global warming turns out to be incorrect, I hope that it's advocates will have the decency to stand up and say "we were wrong, and we understand that our mistake has impacted countless lives" rather than "but... but... but... the air is cleaner people!".
Are you kidding? If global climate change were false, we wouldn't find out about for 50-100 years after due to the entire industries and politics that are structured around it. Any thing that was brought up that states hey, nothing really happened or it was all a mountain out of a mole hill will be shoot down. It won't even matter if we've gotten to 100% renewable and 10000% stricter pollution controls, questioning of the need for the regulations will be questioning the faith as it were, and the followers of the environmentalism religion will go after anyone that dares suggest that things aren't so.
1. Eroding faith in government. 2. Shitty infrastructure. Um, pot calling kettle black. I'll point to both Clinton and Bush as to eroding faith in government. The 2 is the same. I remember something about a lack of damns/levies in New Orleans and something about lots of national bridges needing work.
3. The pollution is freaking out of control. What kind of collapses and failures environmentally can they look forward to? The Gobi is expanding rapidly. What happens if they have famine? They know that and are actually working at fixing it as best as they can. They are working on it, but they are more worried about getting a larger percentage of their population to a higher standard of living first. Um, the US could say screw Africa. We are sending China all of our surplus food because the US needs Chinese cheap labor intact. Kinda goes with your Number 4.
6. Population time bomb. One Child per Family means there's a lot of boys and not many girls to go around. What are they going to do for wives when they grow up? That's where those mail order Russian, Indian, African or even US brides come into play.
Most 8 year olds I know are good at making up a pretext for getting what they want. A: I really wanna shoot down a satellite! B: You can't do that, it'll make you look like a violent war provocateur. A: But! But! But! What if it was a dangerous satellite. Like it was going to kill everyone or something. And we had to shoot it down to save everyone! And it had racing stripes and a turret on top and played the A-Team theme song! B: Well.... Okay, but only if it's a dangerous satellite. A: Yay! Mom! Dad says we can shoot down a satellite!
Um, this is mirroring exactly what I was thinking. Some one in the military wanted to shoot down a satellite. If they need a reason, give 'em 5-10 seconds, and they'll come up with something. Hey it might not be the best excuse in the world, but if it got them the o.k. to do what they want, then it was a pretty good excuse.;)
If only we could invade Middle East/Africa and bring them up to our societal level with the same logic.
If you truly feel drastic measures should be taken to reduce the human population, I invite you to start with yourself. Pick a building 6 storeys or more high and jump off the top. Or are you saying it's the OTHER humans that need thinning down, not you? Isn't it funny how we overlook some obvious solutions when it's our very selves that are the problem?
Um, you don't actually understand his point. You want him to kill himself off since you don't agree with him. His point is that those that can afford the resources to feed themselves will do so. Those that can't depend on charity from those wealthy enough to just give them free resources, and then they breed like crazy which makes the future problem worse. His point was those that can't afford basic resources to live shouldn't live or just be given free resources to make you feel better.
After the entire Nazi thing, I don't think any other government will go that route in the short term or while we have international news media anyway. I do think with modern medicine that it would be possible to sterilize vast percentages of these people in addition to feeding them. It should even be reversible sterilization just so if they ever make enough that they can have it undone and breed. That sounds far to close like Nazism for us to ever do it. I wouldn't be surprised if India or China did it within 20-50 years though to their own populations.
Since we can't really kill the children, and we don't really want to let them die, we feed them. Then those children reach breeding age and soon afterwards create more children, which also need food. And the circle continues.
So what do we do? Well, a number of approaches have been proposed, including teaching the children how to not make more children the instant they become fertile. But it's really painfully obvious that we need to look further ahead than "stop them from starving", because we're just making the hole deeper. If you're sympathetic to their plight because you also reproduced, try to look for ways to stop the plight in the future, not just mitigate it in the present.
If only we could lace the free food with something that sterilizes them, the problem should self correct in 3-4 generations. It would be even better if they could buy a drug that unsterilized an individual for what we'd think of as a middle class income of say $500-1000. If you can't afford that, then you don't have enough basic wealth to breed. Work more or don't ever eat our free food and you could have as many children as you want. It would work as well domestically for our welfare system.
When we dump free food on a third world country, we ruin their farmers because they can't compete with free food. When we dump free clothing on them, we ruin the few textile mills they have. Essentially, what we do with development aid is to push them more and more into dependency because we ruin whatever industry for the local market might start to grow. Instead we force them to build industries for export, so they can somehow pay back the "development help" we "grant" them.
I thought that was the plan though. I thought we didn't want Africa to be a developed continent so we do all this economic warfare crap that makes sure that they aren't a threat.
It's been my conclusion that any view of privacy on the part of the Japanese is strictly limited to the island of Japan. Which I've never had a problem with from a privacy standpoint--just a personal intrusion.
I think that its more that they are on vacation more than anything. US tourists are most likely just as rude to the locals. We actually tend to do most of our tourists crap domestically though so we don't export it. I think that people on vacation just tend to let there normal morals slide especially when there isn't any one they'd recognize as from home to call them on it. It's sort of like going to Las Vegas with your mom/preacher/priest vs with a bunch of coworkers in one case you'd likely mind your manners in the other you'd get pushed into doing what ever your coworkers thought was fun and might regret it or just try to forget it when you got back home.
The moral is that people act stupidly when on vacation away from their normal moral police.
Obviously where the US and Japan differ, is that the Japanese still strongly fight for their expectations of privacy or "cultural values" while in the US there is a sense of apathy and hopelessness.
Hmm, there is a part of me that would love to see if that's true. The only test would be to have google go and do street view there. I bet if it was done by a Japanese company; they'd be annoyed by it, but still allow it. That a foreign company would try it, would irk them more than not, and would be easier to get the population to move to make that kinda of activity illegal there.
I bet that mindset is in the US as well. Google is just viewed as US company. We'd consider most EU or Japanese companies as US companies as well as long as whoever they have doing the local work speaks English we'd be fine with it as long as they have proper rights of way and such.
What this really reminds us of is that meatspace is fundamentally different from cyberspace. On the net, we've evolved the ROBOTS.TXT for just this problem, and everybody agrees that websites aren't private by default, unless the owners explicitly say so. Google is a net company, and views the world as if it was an extension of the internet.
I'd have to say that I disagree with that. I think that they are the same. People don't magically transform into others whenever they get on the internet. They also expect all the companies on the internet to obey the existing laws/common culture. That common culture is what keeps changing on the net and is what all law and custom is based around in the real world. Those net companies just tend to absentmindedly forget that they are operating in the real world in both meat space and cyberspace and just because some because common culture appears one way on the net doesn't mean others will support your view of how the common culture actually is there and real world laws don't magically change just because you define yourself as a net person.
Remember it's perfectly o.k. for Google, MS, IBM, Axiom, any government or religious group to play tracking god and record, sell, or trade every scrap of data about you that they can. And try to control you through any means at their disposal. What laws are all about is everyone fighting back on various social levels throughout history. If no one fights for a "Right to Privacy," then you'll loose it by default to those that would like to data mine you.
A suicide bomber who is targeting a military asset is, imho a 'freedom fighter'. A suicide bomber who targets a bus full of civilians is a terrorist. A man who kills an enemy soldier is a freedom fighter, a man who beheads a journalist because he is Jewish is a terrorist... Are you seeing the difference?
It depends. Killing your own civilians is stupid. Killing enemy civilians is o.k. We don't really like that now a days, but in real war its perfectly acceptable. Its a given the civilians in the war zone will be hit and hurt. Now what we don't like is that our civilians aren't in the war zone. We like to think that they are safe back home so its o.k. for our soldiers overseas. Now the first nuke that kills a US city will really change that. To be perfectly honest you and I are valid military targets. If it was profitable for them to kill us before we, our local police, or our military react and kill them, then they'd be doing that. The problem with that as a long term tactic is that they can't kill very many people before the local citizens (gangs) or police take note and shoot back. Compare that with where those local citizens don't have anything to shoot back with and its known on almost all sides those civilians are unarmed. You'd have everyone from the UN, US, and "suicide bombers"/terrorists accidentally killing civilians without fear of being shoot back. Heck even if you are the UN/US, you can define anyone shooting back as terrorists that you need to kill as all civilians would be unarmed cowards.
I fully respect that from time to time, horrible things must be done.
That said, I hope the USAF has only limited success with brainwashing all the guilt away. Guilt is important. Guilt is what reminds us what is morally right. When the operator pushes the button that fires the missile people die. Again, I understand that sometimes it must be done. But the decision to kill should be tough and difficult and fraught with guilt.
I hate to say it, but they just need a UAV pilot sim where the average person can use Google Earth to "pilot" virtual UAV missions and blow up random famous or not so famous places. It has always been the military's most difficult task to get it's soldiers to kill other humans. Everything else is easy compared to that. They need to get Blizzard to make a front end for this to where any one can play over and over blowing stuff up. The ideal thing to do is an Enders Game and use "trained" kids and never let the kids know that they've been shooting real live entities. When it's all sim, the pressure isn't nearly as great. I hate to say it, but there problem is having these solders know that they've killed some one. They could just as easily schedule a couple of teams to man the same plane and one team "siming" a run and using the sim run as the live excise. It's only a matter of time before that's practical.
I was looking at http://www.lbweyewear.com/ and using a debit card that you could use anywhere on the mastercard system. The site mentioned something about a Secure MasterCard program. So I did what anyone intelligent would to. I went to the mastercard website to look up the damn thing. What is it? Basically another PIN that you have to enter for you to use your card.
I was hoping/wanting to go to the mastercard site and have them generate me a unique one time card ID for either each individual online transaction or for each individual online merchant. That's what I'd have considered secure and worth signing up for. They basically wanted me to register my card for an additional online PIN that would allow the card to be used for online purchases. What individual came up with that scheme? It didn't sound secure at all to me other than the naming of it.
I'd sign up for what I consider decent security in a heart beat. Heck, I don't mind having a mastercard login that I'd sign in to each time to preapprove all purchases and would give me tools that would help with keeping my account secure. I don't want something just labeled "secure" so their marketing/PR departments can say its now "safe" to use their card through the internet.
I think that this is wasted money on Microsoft's part in that they probably really don't need to bother with it. Walk out on the local corner and ask people if they know who made their operating system and I suspect 90% of them will say Microsoft. 5% will say Windows. I imagine the remainder will be people who have no idea what you speak of or use something other than Windows.
Are you kidding? It's made by Dell, HP, or the I bought it from walmart so I thought it was made in china.
In the example I have given the buyer only has to check that the amount is correct because all other modifications give them free groceries. The store only needs to ensure they match the format specified by VISA, and that the buyer's signature is valid. VISA takes most of the work, checking that the format is correct, the signatures are valid, the transaction id is unique for the seller, the buyer has enough credit, etc.
I'm sure there are holes, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
I'm surprised that we even still use signatures now. It seems like no cashier actually looks at them, or could tell if there is even a difference. There is a strong part of me that would like the credit/debit card industry to add various biometrics that would at least be scanned by a machine so we'd actually have some ID verification other than the damn PIN number.
I think that the credit card companies are stuck at the moment. They'd like to actually throw out a few more security measures, but it would cost retailers money to add the biometric scanners. We could end alot of ID theft if a finger print was required to be sent with each purchase. If some one stole your card, they'd also have to have a means to forge your finger prints to use it most places. It won't stop these professionals as they'd figure out ways around any system in a few months, but for all the less casual ID thefts that go on, it would make detecting ID fraud and criminals far, far easier.
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Calling open season in the upper tiers of athletics would certainly have the effect of more young folks (and hell even that guy who cares too much about company soft ball) doing more drugs, and that isn't healthy and it isn't good.
I don't believe in the criminalization of drugs myself, but for something so explicitly about the body, athletics should really not be helping sell young people on the idea of dangerous chemical recreation.
I hate the drug war, but it is important to note that our world would be a lot better without certain drugs.
If I really thought about it, I'd take the opposite view point. Every medical and recreational drug should be available for over the counter sales anywhere that sells drugs. Would I ever take heroin, crack, smoke or drink? Nope, but I won't stop you from trying it. Now if I would like to go and find the 10 most commonly needed emergency drugs and would like to keep them on hand "just encase." How many of those are licensed to where only certain medical people can even handle them? True. I don't have the knowledge to properly use said drugs, but if I had said drugs, I'd really, really make an effort to follow the directions if I ever really felt that I needed them.
Now think of "recreational & enhancement" drugs. I don't smoke & drink, but maybe you do. I do like caffeine in my drinks though. Those are all recreational drugs. If I wanted to take speed to stay up, why shouldn't I be allowed knowing its effects? There are military enhancement drugs as well that your average athlete might really love, but wouldn't want to use for long because it could have negative effects.
If you really wanted a catch all law. You'd outlaw knowingly giving others drugs and doing/being too stupid while under the influence of your drug. That's all you really need. (Heck, even let your average cop define what "too stupid" is.) The knowingly giving others drugs would apply to emergency medical people giving you drugs that you don't want, those that hook others on drugs that they didn't want, and those that give others "date rape" drugs.
How would emergency medical practices change if they weren't allowed to give you any drugs without your pre-approval of any of the drugs to be used? We could do it. We could either use medical dog tags with what drugs that we allow or have a national data base with our biometric ID and drug preferences and if we are ever in an accident then they'd have to query the db before being allowed to give you anything. This would be in your interest. The doctors wouldn't be allowed to make decisions; you'd have to approve every action taken. It would either work really well or very badly.
Plus, since our society is unfortunately much more centered on professional sports, than on education and science, doing so will immediately create a high budget research field for human enhancement, both at the molecular and the tissue levels. No one is holding a gun to these athletes' heads, (not in this country anyway) telling them to do these things to themselves. If a grown man of consentual age wants to put himself in harm's way, I see no need to intervene.
What I what to know, is how well traditional athletes would do against unlimited modified humans. Everyone just seems to assume that the original human won't fare as well as the cyber/bio-engineered person. I think of Dune. You wouldn't really find out until you had unlimited modified humans and "normal" humans competing against each other. The high end edge for normal athletes will change over time. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some one started a selective breeding program for better athletes. You wouldn't know if those breed athletes were actually any better until they started to compete. Until then, they'd be simply unranked athletes.
Permitting doping in any sport is the road to that sport's ruin. And justifying the proposal on the basis that the current restrictions fail to 'think of the children' is pretty perverse-
Imagine you are the parent of a child who shows some kind of sporting talent early on- Do you encourage him, knowing that weird drug induced side-effects might overshadow his life?.... (...No, you don't)
Um, actually it could be the best thing ever for this country! Think about it getting rid of the cultural bias in sports in less than two generations. It'd be awesome. Really like .00001% of athletes ever make it to that level anyway. What doping would do is just weed out an entire segment of athletes and coaches that really screw up their bodies for no gain. If doping did produce noticeable effects, where I could magically compete at that level it would be one thing. As I read it though, most doping, is for "fine tuning" that .00001% of athletes that made it into that level. It would just be stupid for your kids to dope up for their little league game. (Now if you and the kid thought it was a great idea and that the cost to the kid's body was worth the slight edge it could give him then go ahead and enhance your kids body.)
Actually I don't think unlimited doping would have any noticeable effects. Athletes are at the extreme at knowing/tuning their body for their sport. The more money that they have to loose, the less that they'll want to mess up their edge with doping or artificial edges. Now if you or I could replace a leg, or take a drug and magically be at their level for an event though with nasty long term costs, would you? (I'd say there would be some crazy enough to do it, but so what let them. We let people smoke and drink.)
Actually according to the International Labour Organization and the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, Americans work on average almost 100 hours more per year than Japanese. Mostly due to the fact that Japanese get 7 more vacation days per year on average.
And then there are folks like me. I get 2 weeks a year and rarely use it. We can only roll over 240 hours at the end of the year and some time in October my supervisor comes by to get me to use some of that 350+ hours of vacation time. They don't really want me to take most of November and December off. (Not that I'd like to.) I generally do take the week off around Christmas, but I'm gaining more time around holidays since I get all the major holidays anyway. I usually end up taking random Fridays off to spend with the wife while the kids are at school. Its actually more "work" if I'm off any during summer since then I gotta help watch the kids. ;)
There is only so much playing Disgaea, Disgaea 2, Rogue Galaxy, XenoSaga 1, 2, & 3 or heck playing Civ 4 that I can handle before I feel like I better clean up and go back to work. Heck, I get home about 5:30 pm and have then until midnight to eat, play games, browse the net, or watch movies. I'm living in a golden age as it is and get tones of time off and plenty of entertainment to keep me occupied when I'm not at work. What the hell would I do with another 1-2 weeks of vacation time? I wouldn't have any additional money to spend, so I'd pretty much be limited to playing with my existing toys.
Back to reality, though: The Chinese have seen reality in the eye, just like we have - they know that this kind of things are necessary if we are to avoid choking in our own filth, and they know it has to happen on an absolutely epic scale. The difference is that they are taking action instead of waffling over who should pay and which foot to stand on.
China has been around in one form or another for a long time. With actions like this, it'll be around in some form in the future as well. This little North American country that isn't even 500 years old yet has nothing on its longevity or foresight yet. In 20-50 years, China may regain their title of sole global superpower except this time without turning isolationist.
So they'll just export the pollution to a different city which will manufacture goods for them. The roads will still be made of concrete (made with huge energy inputs) and they'll still use diesel earthmoving machines to build the place. The people will still eat meat (probably only second to transport as a way people generate carbon footprint). Basically its just a greenwashing exercise.
I just love how the Greens like to use greenwashing as an PR slander when anyone that they don't like starts do to things that the Greens say that they support. Walmart started looking into mainly as a way to reduce costs and save consumers money. China needs test case village/town/city to see what works and what doesn't. You instantly call it greenwashing and that for them to even use your Green tech that they are exporting their pollution!
Don't you realize that the US is exporting its pollution to China? This is atleast a step in the right direction to reducing China's nongovernmental impact. China is far more likely to drastically change the tech in all of its cities to whatever it decides is its green standard than the US is. The US will likely be able to afford to buy cheap green tech once China starts making it at that volume. Don't you dare tell me that its all just a greenwash that it doesn't matter because some one in the chain pollutes some where. That's not the freaking point. The freaking point is this is a test case to see if it is even possible to do it.
If you commute 45 minutes each way to work, and let's say you work 5 days a week for 48 weeks out of the year (taking out 4 weeks for vacation and holidays). That means you spend 360 hours per year in your car driving to and from work. How many hours of vacation-time does your employer give you? 80? 120? If you cut your commute in half, you get an extra 180 hours per year!
I live in a small town. It takes about 10-15 minutes to get anywhere here except at the peak traffic times and then you'd likely see 20-25 minutes to get anywhere. It's always amazed me at how wasteful those rich folks in cities are that can afford to daily commute more than 1 hour each way. That's like 2 hours of extra work right there. I often wonder at what time these people get up in the morning and in what condition they get home in. That's most likely half their problem right there. They are so tired by the time they get home that all they can do is chill in front of the TV/computer, eat dinner and prepare to do it again tomorrow. Thinking about the larger issues isn't even in there. They like to say mass transit is the solution of all the world problems because for them, it would be. They could at least use that commute time to browse the net, watch tv, or read whatever if anyone else was doing the driving. So to them, mass transit is a god send social solution for all the worlds problems.
They've not really noticed that the true answer it to cut down their daily commute so it takes about 10-15 minutes to get to work no matter what means you use.
Every additional step in the food chain represents about a 90% loss of efficiency, so the benefits of vegetarianism are far from negligible.
Basically, vegetarians are against animal life in general and esp. domesticated animal life. Farmers and those that eat meat know how much it takes feed the chickens, cows, fish, or other animal life that we eat. It's something we have to take into account. Sure if you want to be lazy you could all just eat grass and live like poor peasants if you really want to. Most of the rest of humanity like variety and to eat as much various meat products as we can reasonably afford.
You'd rather us cut down on all that variety to support less animals and a larger number of absolute humans. Why the heck would we want to do that though? (That's the key complaint against vegetarianism right there. It's not really needed. We make choices on which kinds and variety of foods to eat now. Why should we limit it to a select list because a vocal minority don't like our food sources?)
Billions more eat very little meat. A diet low in meat is normal for most of the world & something easy you can do if you want to be green.
Yeah all you have to do is be dirt poor and all you'd be to afford would be veggies with meat maybe once a month or so on a special occasion. The greens think that's a great thing though so they should all try it themselves.
Give me a break. It's not that hard to look at temperature observations and compare them to predictions. You have to wait about 30 years before the signal comes unequivocably out of the noise, not 50-100.
The last time that I checked the predictions weren't matching the observed temps. We weren't having anywhere near the "predicted" level of so called global warming. It's already in place today to speak out or voice any information against the entire global climate change thing will get you socially black listed and being called a long list of names to basically through out everything you've researched in order to keep their status quo. Now since that's happening now. How can you honestly believe in 30, 50, 100 years it won't be much worse. For any example, just look at the entire Creationism/Evolutionist thing. It's the same logic at work. This we are doing something/anything to cause climate change meme won't die for generations. It'll last as long as the entire Creationism/Evolutionist thing. It doesn't matter what the evidence says. The meme will still be with us and cause a voting block to always follow its logic.
And, because of the DBZ reference, he'd deserve it...
And thanks to those Dragon balls anyone can be brought back. Actually that's the solution to this whole mess. We need a search for the Dragon Balls and wish away this whole global climate change/air pollution thing. ;)
I'm not saying global warming is wrong, but this kind of logic (revisionist rationalizing) destroys accountability. Quite frankly, if global warming turns out to be incorrect, I hope that it's advocates will have the decency to stand up and say "we were wrong, and we understand that our mistake has impacted countless lives" rather than "but... but... but... the air is cleaner people!".
Are you kidding? If global climate change were false, we wouldn't find out about for 50-100 years after due to the entire industries and politics that are structured around it. Any thing that was brought up that states hey, nothing really happened or it was all a mountain out of a mole hill will be shoot down. It won't even matter if we've gotten to 100% renewable and 10000% stricter pollution controls, questioning of the need for the regulations will be questioning the faith as it were, and the followers of the environmentalism religion will go after anyone that dares suggest that things aren't so.
1. Eroding faith in government. 2. Shitty infrastructure.
Um, pot calling kettle black. I'll point to both Clinton and Bush as to eroding faith in government. The 2 is the same. I remember something about a lack of damns/levies in New Orleans and something about lots of national bridges needing work.
3. The pollution is freaking out of control. What kind of collapses and failures environmentally can they look forward to? The Gobi is expanding rapidly. What happens if they have famine?
They know that and are actually working at fixing it as best as they can. They are working on it, but they are more worried about getting a larger percentage of their population to a higher standard of living first.
Um, the US could say screw Africa. We are sending China all of our surplus food because the US needs Chinese cheap labor intact. Kinda goes with your Number 4.
6. Population time bomb. One Child per Family means there's a lot of boys and not many girls to go around. What are they going to do for wives when they grow up?
That's where those mail order Russian, Indian, African or even US brides come into play.
Most 8 year olds I know are good at making up a pretext for getting what they want.
A: I really wanna shoot down a satellite!
B: You can't do that, it'll make you look like a violent war provocateur.
A: But! But! But! What if it was a dangerous satellite. Like it was going to kill everyone or something. And we had to shoot it down to save everyone! And it had racing stripes and a turret on top and played the A-Team theme song!
B: Well.... Okay, but only if it's a dangerous satellite.
A: Yay! Mom! Dad says we can shoot down a satellite!
Um, this is mirroring exactly what I was thinking. Some one in the military wanted to shoot down a satellite. If they need a reason, give 'em 5-10 seconds, and they'll come up with something. Hey it might not be the best excuse in the world, but if it got them the o.k. to do what they want, then it was a pretty good excuse. ;)
If only we could invade Middle East/Africa and bring them up to our societal level with the same logic.
If you truly feel drastic measures should be taken to reduce the human population, I invite you to start with yourself. Pick a building 6 storeys or more high and jump off the top. Or are you saying it's the OTHER humans that need thinning down, not you? Isn't it funny how we overlook some obvious solutions when it's our very selves that are the problem?
Um, you don't actually understand his point. You want him to kill himself off since you don't agree with him. His point is that those that can afford the resources to feed themselves will do so. Those that can't depend on charity from those wealthy enough to just give them free resources, and then they breed like crazy which makes the future problem worse. His point was those that can't afford basic resources to live shouldn't live or just be given free resources to make you feel better.
After the entire Nazi thing, I don't think any other government will go that route in the short term or while we have international news media anyway. I do think with modern medicine that it would be possible to sterilize vast percentages of these people in addition to feeding them. It should even be reversible sterilization just so if they ever make enough that they can have it undone and breed. That sounds far to close like Nazism for us to ever do it. I wouldn't be surprised if India or China did it within 20-50 years though to their own populations.
Since we can't really kill the children, and we don't really want to let them die, we feed them. Then those children reach breeding age and soon afterwards create more children, which also need food. And the circle continues.
So what do we do? Well, a number of approaches have been proposed, including teaching the children how to not make more children the instant they become fertile. But it's really painfully obvious that we need to look further ahead than "stop them from starving", because we're just making the hole deeper. If you're sympathetic to their plight because you also reproduced, try to look for ways to stop the plight in the future, not just mitigate it in the present.
If only we could lace the free food with something that sterilizes them, the problem should self correct in 3-4 generations. It would be even better if they could buy a drug that unsterilized an individual for what we'd think of as a middle class income of say $500-1000. If you can't afford that, then you don't have enough basic wealth to breed. Work more or don't ever eat our free food and you could have as many children as you want. It would work as well domestically for our welfare system.
Governments the world over would love the stuff.
When we dump free food on a third world country, we ruin their farmers because they can't compete with free food. When we dump free clothing on them, we ruin the few textile mills they have. Essentially, what we do with development aid is to push them more and more into dependency because we ruin whatever industry for the local market might start to grow. Instead we force them to build industries for export, so they can somehow pay back the "development help" we "grant" them.
I thought that was the plan though. I thought we didn't want Africa to be a developed continent so we do all this economic warfare crap that makes sure that they aren't a threat.
It's been my conclusion that any view of privacy on the part of the Japanese is strictly limited to the island of Japan. Which I've never had a problem with from a privacy standpoint--just a personal intrusion.
I think that its more that they are on vacation more than anything. US tourists are most likely just as rude to the locals. We actually tend to do most of our tourists crap domestically though so we don't export it. I think that people on vacation just tend to let there normal morals slide especially when there isn't any one they'd recognize as from home to call them on it. It's sort of like going to Las Vegas with your mom/preacher/priest vs with a bunch of coworkers in one case you'd likely mind your manners in the other you'd get pushed into doing what ever your coworkers thought was fun and might regret it or just try to forget it when you got back home.
The moral is that people act stupidly when on vacation away from their normal moral police.
Obviously where the US and Japan differ, is that the Japanese still strongly fight for their expectations of privacy or "cultural values" while in the US there is a sense of apathy and hopelessness.
Hmm, there is a part of me that would love to see if that's true. The only test would be to have google go and do street view there. I bet if it was done by a Japanese company; they'd be annoyed by it, but still allow it. That a foreign company would try it, would irk them more than not, and would be easier to get the population to move to make that kinda of activity illegal there.
I bet that mindset is in the US as well. Google is just viewed as US company. We'd consider most EU or Japanese companies as US companies as well as long as whoever they have doing the local work speaks English we'd be fine with it as long as they have proper rights of way and such.
What this really reminds us of is that meatspace is fundamentally different from cyberspace. On the net, we've evolved the ROBOTS.TXT for just this problem, and everybody agrees that websites aren't private by default, unless the owners explicitly say so. Google is a net company, and views the world as if it was an extension of the internet.
I'd have to say that I disagree with that. I think that they are the same. People don't magically transform into others whenever they get on the internet. They also expect all the companies on the internet to obey the existing laws/common culture. That common culture is what keeps changing on the net and is what all law and custom is based around in the real world. Those net companies just tend to absentmindedly forget that they are operating in the real world in both meat space and cyberspace and just because some because common culture appears one way on the net doesn't mean others will support your view of how the common culture actually is there and real world laws don't magically change just because you define yourself as a net person.
Remember it's perfectly o.k. for Google, MS, IBM, Axiom, any government or religious group to play tracking god and record, sell, or trade every scrap of data about you that they can. And try to control you through any means at their disposal. What laws are all about is everyone fighting back on various social levels throughout history. If no one fights for a "Right to Privacy," then you'll loose it by default to those that would like to data mine you.
A suicide bomber who is targeting a military asset is, imho a 'freedom fighter'. A suicide bomber who targets a bus full of civilians is a terrorist. A man who kills an enemy soldier is a freedom fighter, a man who beheads a journalist because he is Jewish is a terrorist... Are you seeing the difference?
It depends. Killing your own civilians is stupid. Killing enemy civilians is o.k. We don't really like that now a days, but in real war its perfectly acceptable. Its a given the civilians in the war zone will be hit and hurt. Now what we don't like is that our civilians aren't in the war zone. We like to think that they are safe back home so its o.k. for our soldiers overseas. Now the first nuke that kills a US city will really change that. To be perfectly honest you and I are valid military targets. If it was profitable for them to kill us before we, our local police, or our military react and kill them, then they'd be doing that. The problem with that as a long term tactic is that they can't kill very many people before the local citizens (gangs) or police take note and shoot back. Compare that with where those local citizens don't have anything to shoot back with and its known on almost all sides those civilians are unarmed. You'd have everyone from the UN, US, and "suicide bombers"/terrorists accidentally killing civilians without fear of being shoot back. Heck even if you are the UN/US, you can define anyone shooting back as terrorists that you need to kill as all civilians would be unarmed cowards.
I fully respect that from time to time, horrible things must be done.
That said, I hope the USAF has only limited success with brainwashing all the guilt away. Guilt is important. Guilt is what reminds us what is morally right. When the operator pushes the button that fires the missile people die. Again, I understand that sometimes it must be done. But the decision to kill should be tough and difficult and fraught with guilt.
I hate to say it, but they just need a UAV pilot sim where the average person can use Google Earth to "pilot" virtual UAV missions and blow up random famous or not so famous places. It has always been the military's most difficult task to get it's soldiers to kill other humans. Everything else is easy compared to that. They need to get Blizzard to make a front end for this to where any one can play over and over blowing stuff up. The ideal thing to do is an Enders Game and use "trained" kids and never let the kids know that they've been shooting real live entities. When it's all sim, the pressure isn't nearly as great. I hate to say it, but there problem is having these solders know that they've killed some one. They could just as easily schedule a couple of teams to man the same plane and one team "siming" a run and using the sim run as the live excise. It's only a matter of time before that's practical.
I was looking at http://www.lbweyewear.com/ and using a debit card that you could use anywhere on the mastercard system. The site mentioned something about a Secure MasterCard program. So I did what anyone intelligent would to. I went to the mastercard website to look up the damn thing. What is it? Basically another PIN that you have to enter for you to use your card.
I was hoping/wanting to go to the mastercard site and have them generate me a unique one time card ID for either each individual online transaction or for each individual online merchant. That's what I'd have considered secure and worth signing up for. They basically wanted me to register my card for an additional online PIN that would allow the card to be used for online purchases. What individual came up with that scheme? It didn't sound secure at all to me other than the naming of it.
I'd sign up for what I consider decent security in a heart beat. Heck, I don't mind having a mastercard login that I'd sign in to each time to preapprove all purchases and would give me tools that would help with keeping my account secure. I don't want something just labeled "secure" so their marketing/PR departments can say its now "safe" to use their card through the internet.
I think that this is wasted money on Microsoft's part in that they probably really don't need to bother with it. Walk out on the local corner and ask people if they know who made their operating system and I suspect 90% of them will say Microsoft. 5% will say Windows. I imagine the remainder will be people who have no idea what you speak of or use something other than Windows.
Are you kidding? It's made by Dell, HP, or the I bought it from walmart so I thought it was made in china.
In the example I have given the buyer only has to check that the amount is correct because all other modifications give them free groceries. The store only needs to ensure they match the format specified by VISA, and that the buyer's signature is valid. VISA takes most of the work, checking that the format is correct, the signatures are valid, the transaction id is unique for the seller, the buyer has enough credit, etc.
I'm sure there are holes, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
I'm surprised that we even still use signatures now. It seems like no cashier actually looks at them, or could tell if there is even a difference. There is a strong part of me that would like the credit/debit card industry to add various biometrics that would at least be scanned by a machine so we'd actually have some ID verification other than the damn PIN number.
I think that the credit card companies are stuck at the moment. They'd like to actually throw out a few more security measures, but it would cost retailers money to add the biometric scanners. We could end alot of ID theft if a finger print was required to be sent with each purchase. If some one stole your card, they'd also have to have a means to forge your finger prints to use it most places. It won't stop these professionals as they'd figure out ways around any system in a few months, but for all the less casual ID thefts that go on, it would make detecting ID fraud and criminals far, far easier.