'Cause us intellectuals are never fervent in defense of our pet ideas... Nothing like a good debate on (say) the proper view on human rights to get the blood moving in the morning!
I think it's something that our minds are especially prone to; coming to conclusions and fiercely denouncing error. Consider all that Europe was put through with the whole eugenics thing, which was pushed by the intelligentsia of the day. I don't think ditching religions actually helps all that much. People, with all their flaws, haven't really changed. And it's their flaws, not some dangerous idea, that are responsible for witch-burnings, censorship, and irrational defense of ideas. There has never been a shortage in dangerous, seductively thoughtful ideas. Whether that idea is about torture being the simplest way to make someone conform, or that certain genetics makes someone 'inferior', they will always be there, and there will always be people too smart to leave them alone.
There may not be a single key to solving the problem; indeed, it may not be solvable without changing the nature of man. But we can help by establishing guarantees of journalistic freedom and neutrality of government. Those both stand between us, and the persecution of ideas. And both are continuously under assault, by religious and secular institutions, who believe in a cause. Causes are dangerous. They tend to promote tyranny 'for our own good'. We need to recognize that on this one issue stands or falls tolerant civilization: neutrality of government. Is there something that should be changed about our society? Our culture? Our discourse? Should we choose to recycle, to avoid casual sex, to eat less meat, to not promote unscientific falsehoods? Probably; but we must not allow government to try to adopt any of these causes. Each of them is a reason we need other people to change for a better society, but in forcing them to change we pave the way for people to force us to change. To change what we think, how we act, and what we believe. This is the core flaw in the system that permits the Inquisition, the Gulags, and the Hereditary Health Courts of our institutions. The belief that we should force others to be better. More than religion, however twisted, more than pseudoscience, however dark, this is the ultimate, dangerous idea of mankind. And we just can't leave it alone.
Minor correction: the church rarely burned anyone at the stake. In fact, they rarely had the authority to do any such thing. Most actual religious executions were carried out by secular powers. This includes everything from Christ's crucifixion to the Spanish Inquisition. If you weren't unlucky enough to reside in Italy, the chances of the church directly burning you at the stake was quite minimal. In other words, the politicians of the day were the one's directly responsible.
Furthermore, if you looked for where the science stayed alive, and where mathematics was cherished during the Dark ages, you would find it in monasteries and whatnot. (And in other parts of the world naturally; the Dark ages were only dark for Europe after all.) At that point in European history, the Catholic church was the only one willing to commit the resources to support intellectuals. Sure, most of the intellectuals they supported were intellectuals working in theology. But not most by a long shot.
I'm no fan of the Catholic church, but your hatred wrongs them, and the rest of all religions along with them. Religion has been, historically, one of the most philosophic endeavors civilizations would support. Intellectually driven people have been, as often as not, employed by 'the church.'
Yeah, I was talking about grass colloquially. But you are right that even that includes loads of species, some of which are, indeed, C4. I clearly didn't put much time into my previous reply...
In this thread though, what I meant when I said grass was ordinary, pasture grasses that cows might graze on, and might be harvested for hay. Now, my knowledge of biology is fairly limited. I would be interested to learn more about common C3 and C4 grasses, but that link is dead. Do you have another handy?
sorry if I seem to be obtuse or making this harder than it is but I'm just a bit confused.
Well, I overreacted a bit too, and perhaps it's only obvious inside my particular dialect. I came from farming country in the midwest, and it's quite possible I absorbed some jargon terms... All in all, it's a rather complicated issue, and this isn't the easiest forum for the in-depth discussion this topic deserves.
Errr... Does that mean when people are talking about grass-fed beef, they really could mean corn-fed? Grass has more than one meaning, depending on scope. OBVIOUSLY I was not speaking of all plants which could be called grasses biologically, but was instead using it in the colloquial sense. In which corn is not grass at all.
All semantic nitpicking aside, corn is a C4 plant, grass is a C3. Major difference in efficiency. Of course, sugarcane is even more efficient, but it's a bit hard to grow around here.
Sure! They're also what makes it expensive. Look at Ethanol subsides. Farmers are paid to keep land barren, to keep the price up. This isn't one-sided...
Eating less meat is good for the environment! Eating organic, grassfed is bad for it. Eating local is generally, though not always, also bad for it, but more subtly. Grass-fed and organic are really two separate, correlated issues. Grass-fed beef requires more energy, water, and labor input than corn-fed beef. Each of those has an environmental cost associated with it. If you can do 'it' more efficiently, in general you reduce the environmental impact of 'it'.
I'm not sure you're in earnest, but I think it's worth answering, even at the risk of potentially feeding the troll...
Water is the constraint, not land. There is plenty of land available but no water to make it grow anything. What is needed to feed the world is agriculture that uses as little water as possible so arid conditions can be used for sustainable farming.
Farming corn only makes sense if fresh water was available in infinite supply and land was in short supply. Sadly the reverse is true.
Right. Very true. However, that being said, corn is more water-efficient than grass. I know that sounds like a contradiction of what I said previously, when I acknowledged it as "water-hungry", but it isn't. Corn takes more water per acre, yes. But it takes significantly less per calorie produced. Grass is a singularly inefficient crop. Corn is a highly efficient crop. Most of the water that goes into growing grass, is wasted on evaporation, rhizome growth, etc. By concentrating the area those calories are produced on, we can reduce evaporative waste. By growing plants specifically bred for useful calorie production we can concentrate the water necessary for plant growth into the useable parts of the plant.
There are many different measures of crop efficiency. It is very hard to find one that puts grass (of all things) ahead of corn. For crying out loud, if we insist on wasting good land, labor, water, and effort on pasture land, why not plant alfalfa? Much better nutrient density, quite capable of supporting itself with minimal effort,... and still a lot worse than corn. But grass shouldn't be on the table.
Look up "dessert". Or do you think the dust bowl was an issue because the seasonal land didn't appear? No, it is the lack of water that causes problems. Not the lack of land.
Now why did you make me do that? My sweet tooth is acting up again now... I will freely acknowledge that corn is probably a bad choice for growing in the Sahara. That, or that the Sahara is a bad choice for a place to grow corn... Seriously, I'm using corn as an example. It isn't a crop that CAN be grown solo. Its yield is excellent, much better than, say, soybeans, but it depletes the nitrates in the soil, and, as you so cogently observed, requires a high density of water. You will have to alternate with soybeans (or some other legume), or alfalfa, or some nitrogen fixer. Or find a way to live under a permanent thunderstorm...
Next time you watch starvation in Africa, take a hard look. What is missing? Water or land?
What's missing is food. Not water. Not land. Most places in the world where malnutrition is an issue are not desert. Even the ones that are, are close enough to arable land that it shouldn't be a problem. The issue is really one of availability, transport and free markets. In the US, the one of those we can affect most is availability. The lower the price of corn domestically, the lower it will be in other countries.
On the other hand, I find preventing starvation halfway around the globe to be a fairly weak motivator for me. People die from lots of things, I can't worry about all of them, and I can't do anything effective about most of them. More important to me, and closer to home, is freeing more people from menial labor. High density farming helps. Limiting pollution and erosion. Increasing the standard of living of the poor locally. All of these is strongly aided by cheap food.
No doubt you vote for Romney, you sound like that type.
There are idiots on both sides of the aisle. I don't, as it happens, prefer Romney. I prefer Ron Paul. But seriously? If the sort of lame arguments you made were characteristic of an Obama supporter, I'd rather listen to Romney guys any day. At least they can think.
I.e. fattening them up. Changed the entire industry of cattle from range fed (grasses) to loading them up with Corn, which is a water-hungry crop.
Bah. Corn's photosynthesis cycle is more than 10 times as efficient as grass's. Sure it's a water hungry crop; it's just a much less land hungry crop for the same production, which means less land area under cultivation per cow. Less land per food is a Good Thing when people are starving in some parts of the world. Less land per food means lower food prices and higher availability (given a reasonably free market.) It also means less erosion, less pollution, less CO2 release, and higher population average leisure time.
All the things you mentioned do, indeed, increase profits. But they also lower costs, both to produce and to consume food. You can claim we should eat less meat, as it has relatively high impact on the environment per pound; you're right. But it would have even more impact if we switched to 'organic' or 'grass-fed' meat. There may be good reasons to buy organic; it may be healthier, lower risk of E. coli, more humane treatment of animals, and it just plain tastes good! But recognize, that whenever you indulge these scruples, you do it at the cost of the environment.
This doesn't help develop resistant E. coli; it helps E. coli get into our food. Antibiotic-resistant E. Coli develops the same way any resistance does in a population: strong selective pressure. In this case, the only significant source of selective pressure is antibiotics. Now, I don't know if factory farms abuse antibiotics or not. But heavy use of antibiotics is the only thing known to develop significant populations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
I grew up on a small farm with free-range chickens. Chickens are omnivores. They aren't quite as good at digesting weird things as ruminants, but they come pretty close. Consider that both are quite well adapted for eating grass. It's tough to get much in the way of nutrition out of grass, but they both manage it. In fact, their digestive systems bear some similarities. While a ruminant will puke up there food to reprocess it in their mouth, the chickens have a gizzard for a pre-stomach. The gizzard is full of rocks, and has a strong band of muscles around it which grinds the food apart before it ever gets to their stomach.
Furthermore, we fed our chickens scraps. You have to, as the summary points out, be careful with nutrition. Chickens will gorge themselves on moldy bread, cookies, etc. instead of proper food if you give them a chance. But if you're careful to not feed them too much junk at a time it can be quite economical, and the chickens love it. We used to get rejected hamburger buns and feed it to them. There's nothing quite so amusing as tossing a single bun into the air, and watching all the chickens scattered across a couple acres come barreling up to you, flapping and squawking.
This isn't new, and it isn't really news. I'm sure it happens more now, as the designed food gets more expensive, but it's an old practice.
Sure, there's lots of stuff that CAN be blamed on colonization. The problem is that most of it isn't true of all colonized countries, which tends to indicate it's due either to a difference in original culture or a difference in colonial technique. Either way, it's really hard to nail down what is caused by colonization and what isn't. And blaming colonization is rarely helpful for overcoming current issues in post-colonial societies. Even granting that a given social ill was caused primarily by colonization, how does it matter? If the same social ill were caused by, say, domestic unrest, would it change the steps needed to overcome the problem? Not much.
The best recipe for curing these problems is an internal cultural locus of control. A society needs to own its problems before it can fix them. Americans didn't expand the franchise by blaming it on a bigoted colonizing nation; it happened through the society being internally convicted of error. This is why raising awareness of injustice is critical. It isn't Britain's fault we had slavery in 1800. It was America's. The very second we assumed "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God [entitled us]", we also assumed the responsibility for our own errors. From that day forth, the mistakes we had, whether inherited or not, became ours, even as our successes became ours. The same holds true for any post-colonial nation. Sure, they may well have inherited problems they didn't cause. But by claiming independence, they claimed responsibility for dealing with those problems as well. If they've failed, then the responsibility for that is on their own heads, even as the responsibility for American slavery was on ours.
On a matter of fact though, I must disagree with you as well.
And Africa is far worse case than any other of colonization in name of ripping off the land, the people, etc. and total destruction of original culture and civilization. There used to be some awesome civilizations there that were totally wiped away - wiped away like no other place, including those in Mexico.
Bah. And again I say, Bah. Africa is an entire continent. It was colonized (neglecting the earlier, Ottoman conquest) by seven different European countries, with seven different colonial policies. Parts of it have never been colonized (like Somalia for instance.) It's a bunch of malarkey to claim that all the colonization, of all the areas, including those left uncolonized, is "far worse" than any other. Far worse than the Spanish colonization of Inca? Can you find any traces of Incan civilization left? I think we can all agree the Incans were pretty spectacular too. How can this universally horrible African colonization be worse than the utter destruction and wholesale cultural jihad the Spanish and Catholic church wrought on the Incans? So far as Mexico goes, I have a little less sympathy for the Aztecs. Human sacrifices are one of those cultural trappings which I would embrace obliterating.
Regardless of who, exactly, got the rawest deal out of colonization, my original point stands. You cannot blame all your problems on colonization. Colonization isn't pretty. It's destructive, it's divisive, and it can be evil. But fifty years later, your problems are your problems. No matter who caused them.
I don't think British colonialism improved things for Australians. But if you don't believe me, ask the 2.2% of the population that is indigenous how they feel about the 97.8% that have taken over their country.
Killing off is not improving...
That's a bit of a false comparison isn't it? I mean, when we talk about African issues, we're not just talking about indigenous Africans. We're talking about everyone who lives in those polities, as a whole. There are loads of Africans with French, British and Dutch ancestry. Like I said, I'm not justifying colonialism, or some of the atrocities committed under some colonial governments. I'm refuting the idea that colonialism is (primarily) responsible for the mess African countries are in.
So far as British colonialism in Australia, I'd compare their current lot to countries with similar natural resources, etc. but without (much) colonization. Like Indonesia. Now, to be sure, Indonesia is a lot better than a lot of countries out there. But it doesn't hold a candle to Australia. Why? Lots of different reasons, but one of them is that they missed out on the blursing of colonization.
Human trials find that drugs either work as expected, not at expected or there are serious complications from the drug that might even be worse than what it cures.
I would note that the complications would have to be pretty bad for it to be worse than malaria. In particularly severe malarial infections, the death rate can be as high as 20%, with intensive treatments. In the general population. Very few drugs work harmlessly on animals, but have a one-in-five death rate for humans. It seems there might well be a point to expediting the test process for a disease with such high fatality and incidence rates.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the time were needed for setting up mass-production at any rate. In which case, you might as well know as much about the side effects, etc. as possible before deployment.
Every single major problem in Africa took root from colonialism IMO.
Right. So you blame the prevalence of malarial mosquitoes on colonialism? Or perhaps the large tracts of non-arable land tied up in jungles and desert? Maybe all the barriers to transportation in the interior were due to a largely coastal colonial occupation?
Even moderating the claim from "every single" to "most" problems, still leaves a lot of factors out of the equation. Very few previously colonized countries have as many problem as sub-Saharan Africa. Take India. I doubt anyone would call the British occupation benign, but India has not suffered from it in the long-term. Instead it opened up knowledge and trade routes, drastically improving the lot of the average Indian. Australia was a prison colony for crying out loud. I don't think the Brits had much interest in improving the lot of Australians, but their colonization eventually had that effect. Take a look at the Ottoman occupation of , say Cyprus. Or Morocco. The Spanish colonization of Mexico.
The general rule for colonization with a massive tech imbalance is: inequality, misery, discrimination, and increased prosperity. I'm not justifying colonization, or any particular colonial practices. But it is counter productive to claim that it's the cause of all problems a colonized nation faces. It isn't; no single factor is the cause of all problems ANY country faces. In the end, any external perterbation will stop, the transient, post-colonial upheavals will die out, and the intransient response will be primarily due to how that people, and that culture chose to respond.
Regardless of how ridiculous you may feel a scientific statement to be, citing an unrelated experiment and indulging in ad hominem is not appropriate or helpful. The basic claim was clearly falsifiable: the complexity of a simple living organism is sufficiently great as to make it unlikely to have developed on any other planet in the universe. What, pray tell, does an experiment demonstrating the production of amino acids with a spark demonstrate? That it is possible for a system of some complexity to develop? That has no bearing at all on Crosshair's point, which is not based on possibility, but probability.
Instead, you should try actual running some figures through the Drake equation. Suppose we figure the probability per galaxy, and take the Milky Way as a rough mean galaxy. So, we're looking at around 6.1e10 FGK-stars, which are reasonably similar to our sun. (We have to operate under the assumption that we're calculating the probability of simple life as we know it. Otherwise, the variability gets too large; we DON'T know what it would look like, or where it could develop.) Now, we find habitable zone planets around about 3% of stars we survey. Suppose half are rocky, leaving us with 9.2e8 habitable zone, rocky planets.
Now a lot of those are in globular clusters, etc. where some folks think life is less likely to develop. So lets discount 95% of those planets, leaving us with 4.6e7 planets. Or about 50 million habitable planets per galaxy. With 1e11 galaxies in the universe, that leaves us with 4.6e18 habitable planets. Now comes the tricky part. How do we know the probability of the spontaneous development of life in the history of the universe is greater the 1 in 4.6e18? *Shrugs* I don't think anyone really has a good handle on what the probability is, but most folks would put it significantly higher than that.
Really, all Crosshair advocated was the Rare Earth hypothesis. It isn't completely mainstream, but I'm not aware of anyone who thinks it's discredited.
And remember, if two car travelling at 50 MPH have a head on collision, the force on each driver is 50MPH then adjusted fro mass differences.
Not quite. Force is mass (of the driver) times acceleration. The mass of the driver is a constant between cars, but the acceleration may not be. If one car has a crumple zone of six inches (like a Smart car) and another has a crumple zone of twenty-four inches, the acceleration will be one-fourth as hard in the second car.
But that's beside the point. Acceleration rarely kills people who are wearing a seatbelt. It's mostly the car impinging on the driver compartment that's lethal, which is why telephone poles are so deadly (limited area to crumple before hitting the driver.
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'Cause us intellectuals are never fervent in defense of our pet ideas... Nothing like a good debate on (say) the proper view on human rights to get the blood moving in the morning!
I think it's something that our minds are especially prone to; coming to conclusions and fiercely denouncing error. Consider all that Europe was put through with the whole eugenics thing, which was pushed by the intelligentsia of the day. I don't think ditching religions actually helps all that much. People, with all their flaws, haven't really changed. And it's their flaws, not some dangerous idea, that are responsible for witch-burnings, censorship, and irrational defense of ideas. There has never been a shortage in dangerous, seductively thoughtful ideas. Whether that idea is about torture being the simplest way to make someone conform, or that certain genetics makes someone 'inferior', they will always be there, and there will always be people too smart to leave them alone.
There may not be a single key to solving the problem; indeed, it may not be solvable without changing the nature of man. But we can help by establishing guarantees of journalistic freedom and neutrality of government. Those both stand between us, and the persecution of ideas. And both are continuously under assault, by religious and secular institutions, who believe in a cause. Causes are dangerous. They tend to promote tyranny 'for our own good'. We need to recognize that on this one issue stands or falls tolerant civilization: neutrality of government. Is there something that should be changed about our society? Our culture? Our discourse? Should we choose to recycle, to avoid casual sex, to eat less meat, to not promote unscientific falsehoods? Probably; but we must not allow government to try to adopt any of these causes. Each of them is a reason we need other people to change for a better society, but in forcing them to change we pave the way for people to force us to change. To change what we think, how we act, and what we believe. This is the core flaw in the system that permits the Inquisition, the Gulags, and the Hereditary Health Courts of our institutions. The belief that we should force others to be better. More than religion, however twisted, more than pseudoscience, however dark, this is the ultimate, dangerous idea of mankind. And we just can't leave it alone.
Minor correction: the church rarely burned anyone at the stake. In fact, they rarely had the authority to do any such thing. Most actual religious executions were carried out by secular powers. This includes everything from Christ's crucifixion to the Spanish Inquisition. If you weren't unlucky enough to reside in Italy, the chances of the church directly burning you at the stake was quite minimal. In other words, the politicians of the day were the one's directly responsible.
Furthermore, if you looked for where the science stayed alive, and where mathematics was cherished during the Dark ages, you would find it in monasteries and whatnot. (And in other parts of the world naturally; the Dark ages were only dark for Europe after all.) At that point in European history, the Catholic church was the only one willing to commit the resources to support intellectuals. Sure, most of the intellectuals they supported were intellectuals working in theology. But not most by a long shot.
I'm no fan of the Catholic church, but your hatred wrongs them, and the rest of all religions along with them. Religion has been, historically, one of the most philosophic endeavors civilizations would support. Intellectually driven people have been, as often as not, employed by 'the church.'
True. And I just realized in further reading, that the history I was thinking about was Ethiopian, not Somalian. My mistake.
Err.. I did look it up. I was just being diffident to avoid direct contradiction. See: Other Wikipedia
My recollection of the history also concurred with that article. However, I do agree that the Somalia article seems to support your position.
I'm at a loss to understand how to reconcile the two articles. Perhaps there's some technical distinction...
:D Sounds good to me!
Although, it might not be so good for my waistline...
IIRC, Somalia was one of the few countries in Africa never colonized...
Err. Midwest of the US that is. Not of Australia. :)
Yeah, I was talking about grass colloquially. But you are right that even that includes loads of species, some of which are, indeed, C4. I clearly didn't put much time into my previous reply...
In this thread though, what I meant when I said grass was ordinary, pasture grasses that cows might graze on, and might be harvested for hay. Now, my knowledge of biology is fairly limited. I would be interested to learn more about common C3 and C4 grasses, but that link is dead. Do you have another handy?
sorry if I seem to be obtuse or making this harder than it is but I'm just a bit confused .
Well, I overreacted a bit too, and perhaps it's only obvious inside my particular dialect. I came from farming country in the midwest, and it's quite possible I absorbed some jargon terms... All in all, it's a rather complicated issue, and this isn't the easiest forum for the in-depth discussion this topic deserves.
I didn't mean to imply that getting E. Coli into our food was a good thing...
Errr... Does that mean when people are talking about grass-fed beef, they really could mean corn-fed? Grass has more than one meaning, depending on scope. OBVIOUSLY I was not speaking of all plants which could be called grasses biologically, but was instead using it in the colloquial sense. In which corn is not grass at all.
All semantic nitpicking aside, corn is a C4 plant, grass is a C3. Major difference in efficiency. Of course, sugarcane is even more efficient, but it's a bit hard to grow around here.
Sure! They're also what makes it expensive. Look at Ethanol subsides. Farmers are paid to keep land barren, to keep the price up. This isn't one-sided...
Eating less meat is good for the environment! Eating organic, grassfed is bad for it. Eating local is generally, though not always, also bad for it, but more subtly. Grass-fed and organic are really two separate, correlated issues. Grass-fed beef requires more energy, water, and labor input than corn-fed beef. Each of those has an environmental cost associated with it. If you can do 'it' more efficiently, in general you reduce the environmental impact of 'it'.
I'm not sure you're in earnest, but I think it's worth answering, even at the risk of potentially feeding the troll...
Water is the constraint, not land. There is plenty of land available but no water to make it grow anything. What is needed to feed the world is agriculture that uses as little water as possible so arid conditions can be used for sustainable farming.
Farming corn only makes sense if fresh water was available in infinite supply and land was in short supply. Sadly the reverse is true.
Right. Very true. However, that being said, corn is more water-efficient than grass. I know that sounds like a contradiction of what I said previously, when I acknowledged it as "water-hungry", but it isn't. Corn takes more water per acre, yes. But it takes significantly less per calorie produced. Grass is a singularly inefficient crop. Corn is a highly efficient crop. Most of the water that goes into growing grass, is wasted on evaporation, rhizome growth, etc. By concentrating the area those calories are produced on, we can reduce evaporative waste. By growing plants specifically bred for useful calorie production we can concentrate the water necessary for plant growth into the useable parts of the plant.
There are many different measures of crop efficiency. It is very hard to find one that puts grass (of all things) ahead of corn. For crying out loud, if we insist on wasting good land, labor, water, and effort on pasture land, why not plant alfalfa? Much better nutrient density, quite capable of supporting itself with minimal effort, ... and still a lot worse than corn. But grass shouldn't be on the table.
Look up "dessert". Or do you think the dust bowl was an issue because the seasonal land didn't appear? No, it is the lack of water that causes problems. Not the lack of land.
Now why did you make me do that? My sweet tooth is acting up again now... I will freely acknowledge that corn is probably a bad choice for growing in the Sahara. That, or that the Sahara is a bad choice for a place to grow corn... Seriously, I'm using corn as an example. It isn't a crop that CAN be grown solo. Its yield is excellent, much better than, say, soybeans, but it depletes the nitrates in the soil, and, as you so cogently observed, requires a high density of water. You will have to alternate with soybeans (or some other legume), or alfalfa, or some nitrogen fixer. Or find a way to live under a permanent thunderstorm...
Next time you watch starvation in Africa, take a hard look. What is missing? Water or land?
What's missing is food. Not water. Not land. Most places in the world where malnutrition is an issue are not desert. Even the ones that are, are close enough to arable land that it shouldn't be a problem. The issue is really one of availability, transport and free markets. In the US, the one of those we can affect most is availability. The lower the price of corn domestically, the lower it will be in other countries.
On the other hand, I find preventing starvation halfway around the globe to be a fairly weak motivator for me. People die from lots of things, I can't worry about all of them, and I can't do anything effective about most of them. More important to me, and closer to home, is freeing more people from menial labor. High density farming helps. Limiting pollution and erosion. Increasing the standard of living of the poor locally. All of these is strongly aided by cheap food.
No doubt you vote for Romney, you sound like that type.
There are idiots on both sides of the aisle. I don't, as it happens, prefer Romney. I prefer Ron Paul. But seriously? If the sort of lame arguments you made were characteristic of an Obama supporter, I'd rather listen to Romney guys any day. At least they can think.
I suppose... I just couldn't get past the smell! But then, I grew up on a farm with chickens, and didn't get why everyone else thought they stank...
I.e. fattening them up. Changed the entire industry of cattle from range fed (grasses) to loading them up with Corn, which is a water-hungry crop.
Bah. Corn's photosynthesis cycle is more than 10 times as efficient as grass's. Sure it's a water hungry crop; it's just a much less land hungry crop for the same production, which means less land area under cultivation per cow. Less land per food is a Good Thing when people are starving in some parts of the world. Less land per food means lower food prices and higher availability (given a reasonably free market.) It also means less erosion, less pollution, less CO2 release, and higher population average leisure time.
All the things you mentioned do, indeed, increase profits. But they also lower costs, both to produce and to consume food. You can claim we should eat less meat, as it has relatively high impact on the environment per pound; you're right. But it would have even more impact if we switched to 'organic' or 'grass-fed' meat. There may be good reasons to buy organic; it may be healthier, lower risk of E. coli, more humane treatment of animals, and it just plain tastes good! But recognize, that whenever you indulge these scruples, you do it at the cost of the environment.
This doesn't help develop resistant E. coli; it helps E. coli get into our food. Antibiotic-resistant E. Coli develops the same way any resistance does in a population: strong selective pressure. In this case, the only significant source of selective pressure is antibiotics. Now, I don't know if factory farms abuse antibiotics or not. But heavy use of antibiotics is the only thing known to develop significant populations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Alcohol? Is that what vomit is made of? 'Cause that's what would come out of me if I chewed on silage...
I grew up on a small farm with free-range chickens. Chickens are omnivores. They aren't quite as good at digesting weird things as ruminants, but they come pretty close. Consider that both are quite well adapted for eating grass. It's tough to get much in the way of nutrition out of grass, but they both manage it. In fact, their digestive systems bear some similarities. While a ruminant will puke up there food to reprocess it in their mouth, the chickens have a gizzard for a pre-stomach. The gizzard is full of rocks, and has a strong band of muscles around it which grinds the food apart before it ever gets to their stomach.
Furthermore, we fed our chickens scraps. You have to, as the summary points out, be careful with nutrition. Chickens will gorge themselves on moldy bread, cookies, etc. instead of proper food if you give them a chance. But if you're careful to not feed them too much junk at a time it can be quite economical, and the chickens love it. We used to get rejected hamburger buns and feed it to them. There's nothing quite so amusing as tossing a single bun into the air, and watching all the chickens scattered across a couple acres come barreling up to you, flapping and squawking.
This isn't new, and it isn't really news. I'm sure it happens more now, as the designed food gets more expensive, but it's an old practice.
Sure, there's lots of stuff that CAN be blamed on colonization. The problem is that most of it isn't true of all colonized countries, which tends to indicate it's due either to a difference in original culture or a difference in colonial technique. Either way, it's really hard to nail down what is caused by colonization and what isn't. And blaming colonization is rarely helpful for overcoming current issues in post-colonial societies. Even granting that a given social ill was caused primarily by colonization, how does it matter? If the same social ill were caused by, say, domestic unrest, would it change the steps needed to overcome the problem? Not much.
The best recipe for curing these problems is an internal cultural locus of control. A society needs to own its problems before it can fix them. Americans didn't expand the franchise by blaming it on a bigoted colonizing nation; it happened through the society being internally convicted of error. This is why raising awareness of injustice is critical. It isn't Britain's fault we had slavery in 1800. It was America's. The very second we assumed "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God [entitled us]", we also assumed the responsibility for our own errors. From that day forth, the mistakes we had, whether inherited or not, became ours, even as our successes became ours. The same holds true for any post-colonial nation. Sure, they may well have inherited problems they didn't cause. But by claiming independence, they claimed responsibility for dealing with those problems as well. If they've failed, then the responsibility for that is on their own heads, even as the responsibility for American slavery was on ours.
On a matter of fact though, I must disagree with you as well.
And Africa is far worse case than any other of colonization in name of ripping off the land, the people, etc. and total destruction of original culture and civilization. There used to be some awesome civilizations there that were totally wiped away - wiped away like no other place, including those in Mexico.
Bah. And again I say, Bah. Africa is an entire continent. It was colonized (neglecting the earlier, Ottoman conquest) by seven different European countries, with seven different colonial policies. Parts of it have never been colonized (like Somalia for instance.) It's a bunch of malarkey to claim that all the colonization, of all the areas, including those left uncolonized, is "far worse" than any other. Far worse than the Spanish colonization of Inca? Can you find any traces of Incan civilization left? I think we can all agree the Incans were pretty spectacular too. How can this universally horrible African colonization be worse than the utter destruction and wholesale cultural jihad the Spanish and Catholic church wrought on the Incans? So far as Mexico goes, I have a little less sympathy for the Aztecs. Human sacrifices are one of those cultural trappings which I would embrace obliterating.
Regardless of who, exactly, got the rawest deal out of colonization, my original point stands. You cannot blame all your problems on colonization. Colonization isn't pretty. It's destructive, it's divisive, and it can be evil. But fifty years later, your problems are your problems. No matter who caused them.
I don't think British colonialism improved things for Australians. But if you don't believe me, ask the 2.2% of the population that is indigenous how they feel about the 97.8% that have taken over their country.
Killing off is not improving...
That's a bit of a false comparison isn't it? I mean, when we talk about African issues, we're not just talking about indigenous Africans. We're talking about everyone who lives in those polities, as a whole. There are loads of Africans with French, British and Dutch ancestry. Like I said, I'm not justifying colonialism, or some of the atrocities committed under some colonial governments. I'm refuting the idea that colonialism is (primarily) responsible for the mess African countries are in.
So far as British colonialism in Australia, I'd compare their current lot to countries with similar natural resources, etc. but without (much) colonization. Like Indonesia. Now, to be sure, Indonesia is a lot better than a lot of countries out there. But it doesn't hold a candle to Australia. Why? Lots of different reasons, but one of them is that they missed out on the blursing of colonization.
Human trials find that drugs either work as expected, not at expected or there are serious complications from the drug that might even be worse than what it cures.
I would note that the complications would have to be pretty bad for it to be worse than malaria. In particularly severe malarial infections, the death rate can be as high as 20%, with intensive treatments. In the general population. Very few drugs work harmlessly on animals, but have a one-in-five death rate for humans. It seems there might well be a point to expediting the test process for a disease with such high fatality and incidence rates.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the time were needed for setting up mass-production at any rate. In which case, you might as well know as much about the side effects, etc. as possible before deployment.
Every single major problem in Africa took root from colonialism IMO.
Right. So you blame the prevalence of malarial mosquitoes on colonialism? Or perhaps the large tracts of non-arable land tied up in jungles and desert? Maybe all the barriers to transportation in the interior were due to a largely coastal colonial occupation?
Even moderating the claim from "every single" to "most" problems, still leaves a lot of factors out of the equation. Very few previously colonized countries have as many problem as sub-Saharan Africa. Take India. I doubt anyone would call the British occupation benign, but India has not suffered from it in the long-term. Instead it opened up knowledge and trade routes, drastically improving the lot of the average Indian. Australia was a prison colony for crying out loud. I don't think the Brits had much interest in improving the lot of Australians, but their colonization eventually had that effect. Take a look at the Ottoman occupation of , say Cyprus. Or Morocco. The Spanish colonization of Mexico.
The general rule for colonization with a massive tech imbalance is: inequality, misery, discrimination, and increased prosperity. I'm not justifying colonization, or any particular colonial practices. But it is counter productive to claim that it's the cause of all problems a colonized nation faces. It isn't; no single factor is the cause of all problems ANY country faces. In the end, any external perterbation will stop, the transient, post-colonial upheavals will die out, and the intransient response will be primarily due to how that people, and that culture chose to respond.
Regardless of how ridiculous you may feel a scientific statement to be, citing an unrelated experiment and indulging in ad hominem is not appropriate or helpful. The basic claim was clearly falsifiable: the complexity of a simple living organism is sufficiently great as to make it unlikely to have developed on any other planet in the universe. What, pray tell, does an experiment demonstrating the production of amino acids with a spark demonstrate? That it is possible for a system of some complexity to develop? That has no bearing at all on Crosshair's point, which is not based on possibility, but probability.
Instead, you should try actual running some figures through the Drake equation. Suppose we figure the probability per galaxy, and take the Milky Way as a rough mean galaxy. So, we're looking at around 6.1e10 FGK-stars, which are reasonably similar to our sun. (We have to operate under the assumption that we're calculating the probability of simple life as we know it. Otherwise, the variability gets too large; we DON'T know what it would look like, or where it could develop.) Now, we find habitable zone planets around about 3% of stars we survey. Suppose half are rocky, leaving us with 9.2e8 habitable zone, rocky planets.
Now a lot of those are in globular clusters, etc. where some folks think life is less likely to develop. So lets discount 95% of those planets, leaving us with 4.6e7 planets. Or about 50 million habitable planets per galaxy. With 1e11 galaxies in the universe, that leaves us with 4.6e18 habitable planets. Now comes the tricky part. How do we know the probability of the spontaneous development of life in the history of the universe is greater the 1 in 4.6e18? *Shrugs* I don't think anyone really has a good handle on what the probability is, but most folks would put it significantly higher than that.
Really, all Crosshair advocated was the Rare Earth hypothesis. It isn't completely mainstream, but I'm not aware of anyone who thinks it's discredited.
You're right.
I was thinking on a mass basis.
And remember, if two car travelling at 50 MPH have a head on collision, the force on each driver is 50MPH then adjusted fro mass differences.
Not quite. Force is mass (of the driver) times acceleration. The mass of the driver is a constant between cars, but the acceleration may not be. If one car has a crumple zone of six inches (like a Smart car) and another has a crumple zone of twenty-four inches, the acceleration will be one-fourth as hard in the second car.
But that's beside the point. Acceleration rarely kills people who are wearing a seatbelt. It's mostly the car impinging on the driver compartment that's lethal, which is why telephone poles are so deadly (limited area to crumple before hitting the driver.