so now you're just arguing about which dictionary is correct. Merriam-Webster includes "to slaughter wantonly" which just implies you are willing to participate in the killing.
but as I posted elsewhere, once you get to this point it becomes obvious that my statement that it's "not open to interpetation" is silly, because even the meanings of words themselves are in fact nothing BUT interpretation. mea culpa...
But, merriam-webster disagrees that murder is so limited in scope.
But now we hit the point where it becomes plain that ALL conversation is interpetation. Even the meanings of words are open to interpretation. I think all killing is murder... just sometimes, murder is justifiable. So my original implication that this is not open to interpretation is, in fact, wildly off base. As simple as I wanted to think it was...
Murder, Killing, Slaying... there isn't any real difference in any of those words in any case. Only whether the Murder, Killing, or Slaying of someone is justified or not. If you kill someone, it's murder. Maybe not legally, maybe you could call it justified in some cases, but we're not talking about a court of law, we're talking about a higher moral power here. Hell, courts of law weren't very lawful when this stuff was written in the first place. You don't take a lawyer to "heaven" with you to argue with St. Peter that stabbing someone was "killing", not "Murder". In fact, Merriam-Webster online defines Kill AND slay as synonyms of murder.
The commandment does not say "Do not Murder Unless You Really Have To". It says: don't (Kill/Murder/Slay).
But fine... we're interpreting, at this point, as clear it would seem to be to me that you would not want to risk getting it wrong with God and instead you would assume when he says don't murder, you don't murder anyone, ever, being a non-believer I suppose my grounds for arguing it are not the same as others. Roll your dice, Judeo-christian believers.
understood and while I don't share your faith I can respect your stance (and appreciate the conversation, thanks).
ignoring the translation issues in another part of the discussion;
I think it's not even interpretive to assume that "people" is implied in "thou shalt not kill". vegetarianism as far as I know isn't even mentioned in the bible.. that doesn't open the door to language craziness. The commandments are very clearly about how to treat people and act in your society. so sure, interpetation is big business and there is a lot of stuff that needs it, but the commandments (assuming proper translation) are pretty frickin' clear, really. yes, strictly speaking I made an "interpretation" there. But any communication requires some small amount of interpretation. That's just basic comprehension skills, which somehow are not applicable all of a sudden when we start looking at holy books? Frankly, I think it's ridiculous.
a quick jaunt over to wikipedia shows that the kill language is roman catholic in origin, and murder is the original... now that, you could argue I suppose, depending on what you consider murder. Strictly speaking, I would call it killing. Sometimes Justifiable murder, maybe, but always murder. but now....
*waves hands* *issues of interpretation remain, forever, despite frantic hand waving*
Exactly the reason why, if that were correct, the translation should have been updated by now, no?
If it really were that important, would such a basic translation error be allowed to stand even for 400 years (assuming the error arrived with the king james version)?
If it has not been fixed, and it is indeed wrong, doesn't that say something else... perhaps something much more interesting... about how important the "word" of god really is even to people who say it is important... at least, how important it is, compared to something truly heinous... like admitting a mistake?
In which case.. for a different reason, admittedly... my original point of people not being very good at practicing their religion still stands. If they can't even be bothered to correct a translation on a pretty basic tenant of their religion...
I'll have to concede though, and throw my hands up and admit I don't understand these people at all and it's really just as likely that every word of the whole book is totally mangled in common print translations as it is to be even remotely correct, you're right, and it's yet one more reason I have such a hard time with it all lol...
That would be one basic translation error, to be unable to get more precise than "kill" from an original word of something less general than Kill. While I am sure... as in positive... there are major translation issues in both testaments and in other holy books, I am much less creduluous that a basic statement like that would be translated so ambiguously. Perhaps I'm wrong, but even if I were, "thou shalt not kill" is how it has been taught for more than 1700 years now at least. The original phrase is, for all practical purpose, irrelevant. If "kill" is not sufficient, the translation should have been changed long before now.
I'm an agnostic myself (with no doubt that the "personified" God is a figment of imagination), but as such I still find the questions of how and why people sign on to these belief systems very, very interesting.
Interpretations aside, "Thou shalt not kill" is unambiguous. It is only made ambiguous by people who need to justify killing. As a commandment, in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, it is present in all 3 religions.
How side-stepping that is justified in all 3 religions is of no interest to me. More, how hypocrisy, contradiction, and cognitive dissonance of all varieties and intensities are rationalized also doesn't interest me... well, honestly, they both interest me a great deal as a matter of curiosity, but it doesn't change the basic issue; According to all 3 religions, God laid down the law. In no uncertain terms (though it was obviously a "Do as I say, not as I do" thing in the old testament what with the plagues, floods, and smiting going on, hey, it's God.. if he says to not do something, and chooses to do it Himself, well, how the heck can anyone second guess that, right?)
I mean really! You can't really "interpret" thou shalt not kill... that's unambiguous, entirely unambiguous. That they did, wrote it down, and leaders teach "around" it... well, that just codifies the shortcomings of religion in general, if you ask me.
Actually, if you read the article, you'd see they corrected the earlier data in the chart to be a more accurate comparison to the post-1993 methodology.
"thou shalt not kill", a fairly straightforward piece of divine advice, hasn't stopped the Jews, Christians, OR the muslims either. I suppose no one is very good at following their own religion, eh?
Unless you pick up new customers with a high profile draw item like, say, an iPod.
You could consider the loss an "advertising expense" in that case. The goal of which, in both cases, is just to get people in the door to your shop to buy stuff that does make you money. In this case, you do it by offering something you know they want. They could order off the web, of course, but if they want to buy in person, they are likely to want to keep buying stuff in person, or even better maybe they are impulse shoppers.
Target market, hello! come on in.
Now, how does a true free market deal explain this? It's not supply and demand... it's the supply OF demand, but it distorts the price of popular items. Enough demand can make it cheap again...
I get all my power from relatively green sources. Anyone in my state can, if they choose to pay just a bit more.
Plug in hybrids would be quite awesome for us. Even better than focusing on the "damage you can actually see" is the damage being done in your name through the choices you make, whether you can "see" it or not.
Understood, and I myself have a very close friend who was stationed there. That said, at what point do you excuse a soldier for just 'doing what he was told'? That defense didn't work for nazis, and I'm not at all saying we are anywhere NEAR as bad as that, but where exactly is that line?
Just asking the question, I haven't figured it out yet either.
Re:Completely absurd experimentation method
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Can Time Slow Down?
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Not True. Jumping out of a plane has real risk. You could really die.
Simply jumping off of something in a controlled environment that is so obviously not dangerous you are being asked to count something hardly applies.
Personally, I'm not surprised that our physical ability to receive data is not changed, but I would think that our ability to *process*, relevant, focused data could still improve. it's not what you see, it's what you do with it.
For what it's worth, I think lots of practice can approximate this phenomena too... if you do any sports, you've "been in the zone". I think it's the same place, perhaps at a lower level, but you can see what's going to happen before it does, read opponents down to very fine detail, react smoothly and quickly with very little conscious direction. I would start studying there because rare as it may be, it's at least achievable in lab conditions.
I understand what you're saying, and I am saying yes, some thing may not be proven to be detrimental but a reasonable person could very easily assume so, and should reserve the right to in spite of the lack of scientific study or results on the matter, without backlash or disdain. Scientific evidence can still be fallible, and if not, then the interpretation of that evidence is most certainly fallible, even when the interpretation can be logically rigorous. Either by omission of relevant data, observer bias, or any number of other mechanisms.
You cannot extinguish this tendency in people, and more than that, you shouldn't want to. Scientific inquiry is by the very nature of its rigor, limited. You can't study everything... for our ongoing example, you can't hope to isolate every variable, and every possible effect, and say with any rigor what effect formula or forceps has on a baby. It might be nothing at all... and it might not. You can rule things out one at a time. You can search for correlations. But there is always going to be a margin where it is not only impossible to nail things down with certainty, but even where what we know with certainty may not be an adequate representation of the whole story.
Again, referencing the way doctors behaved before they found out about bacteria; they were behaving "correctly" on the basis of their current knowledge. People preferring to give birth without a doctor would have been derided as backwards or scientifically ignorant. Yet, they would also have been absolutely correct from a risk standpoint, whether by luck or by intuition or by their direct experience (which is limited, of course). Likewise, it is a certainty that the same "blindness" to reality exists today in all scientific disciplines.. and no one knows where, except by intuition, and experience.
When they argue exact facts (I think blah causes cancer), that can be proven or disproven in most cases. Continuing to ignore facts in this manner is weak minded... completely agreed.
However, believing a particular thing... say, that bruising a babie's face is undesirable... is not constrained by scientific knowledge, unless somehow you could in fact prove that hurting the baby has no impact of any kind. That is quite obviously way beyond the reach of current science at least. Meanwhile, we know stress and danger result in reactions in the body that are conducive to short term survival, but are straining to the bodies' systems... reducing that could be seen as good... but regardless of the rigor involved, intuitive we grasp that it's not ok to hurt people unnecessarily, all else being equal, for reasons that perhaps very few of us could articulate.
I'm not sure if I framed that as clearly as I want to, but the upshot is that to truly engage with the world, you have to be able to make judgements beyond the ability of science to fully inform you, and you also must be able to critically judge scientific thoughts for how they may be applied or misapplied in daily life. This "slop" is not only unavoidable, it shouldn't be denigrated wholesale. Consider biodiversity and why it is useful: then no one shortcoming in a population leads to its entire demise. Likewise for intellectual diversity; creating a monoculture based only on what is scientifically studied and commonly accepted is both prohibitively limiting and potentially quite dangerous.
And I hope it is rational to point this out, without being termed "anti-science", because if I among all people are "anti-science", then you guys don't have a prayer with the rest of the population and you never will.
You're blowing the response a bit out of proportion (certainly my response, anyway), but again... the waste of the energy isn't the issue. The other points you raise are more interesting... just drop the waste one. that's irrelevant, if the other issues you bring up are not issues.
I'm certainly not advocating for this to happen tomorrow based on a slashdot post, but your response seems to indicate someone has crunched some numbers on this. Got any links? That would be more interesting that "hand waving" about "hand waving";)
I understand the arguement, but if the numbers are good, then we only need what,.014% Surface coverage to meet current need. Let's meet double that, and then do it at 10% efficiency;.28% coverage required.
obviously the number of numbers influencing this are dizzying, but the order of magnitude we are discussing is established (if those numbers are correct).
Cost is much more nebulous. Sure, solar is already more expensive; but if you put in an order to cover even 1% of the earth's surface, I would have to think an economy of scale would kick in.
I'm not saying it's workable, I'm just saying it was an interesting viewpoint for the GP and I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
If his irradiation numbers are correct, efficiency in this process is basically irrelevant.
150kTW compared to 22 leaves an awful lot of room for "wiggle", conversion and transmission losses. You could even use an aribtrary amount of energy just to distill seawater for temporary usage in the electrolysis process.
Agreed, and as I noted I have nothing against the idea of vaccination nor the use of established vaccines. I do have a problem with new, relatively untested in the wild procedures and practices being forced on anyone. If we were in a polio epidemic, sure, take that new polio vaccine out and let's save some lives; the risk vs reward is there. Keeping kids from having chicken pox? Hey, maybe keeping them from shingles would be a good thing, but almost all of us have had it already and we're fine. Let's just let the willing test it for awhile... is that such a big deal, really?
I would find it rather difficult to exaggerate the negative consequences of denying a baby breast milk, however. Sure, it may not kill them, but it is pretty undeniable at this point that breast milk is by a very wide margin superior for babies. You may not think that drugging a mother during the birth, and pulling a child out of her with bruises on its face is without consequence. I, however, would disagree. This is exactly the issue; you don't have a study saying "it's bad to do that". I don't need a study to know that bruising a baby's face is not ideal, nor is drugging it through the mother, nor is removing the mother's ability to feel how her muscles are working during childbirth. I might need one to know exactly what the affects are, ok, fine... but how about instead, I just do the more ideal thing as much as possible and skip the specifics?
Are forceps and formula as bad as polio? Probably not. That doesn't make them "good practice" though, and yet they were held up as normal, as expected, as proper. In my grandmother's generation, learned, educated doctors were recommending formula as superior to breast milk, and you would have been the "skeptic" to say otherwise then. What damage did that cause? Well, no one could ever say, because you could never study the overall effects. I myself was raised on formula. I'm healthy now, by any objective standard I'm reasonably intelligent as well. But who knows what I would be if I were breast fed? There is no way to say, except to say that as a baby, I'd definitely had been better off with breast milk... just as I was better off with formula rather than starving to death. So thank you, formula, for being there, as I truly needed it. And keep it away from my baby.
I don't follow your last paragraph though. You aren't saying that rarer diseases rise because more common ones are snuffed out more successfully, are you? that is, you aren't saying that autism would rise because (for instance) we vaccinated against chicken pox... I assume you're not anyway... so can you rephrase?
I"m with you to a large degree: certainly with a lack of regulation and registration and certification and study comes a lesser definition of what is "real", and "complimentary" medicine is certainly rife with hucksters of all types, and entirely too credulous a population of adherants. But then... you could say that about some others in this very discussion advocating for "established" medicine as well, who equally gloss over the faults in the medical establishment. alternative medicine circles do not have a monopoly on weak mindedness.
many seem to say that only what has been studied, defined, and categorized is real. Anything outside of that, since it has not been studied, cannot be real. Anyone willing to explore further in their daily lives who is not a trained scientist, well... we all know about *those* people, eh?
given the unsurety all around, there is room for reasonable people to have different stances on the matter, IMHO, and different levels of comfort with the undefined, and different levels of skepticism with the current beliefs of modern science which, if anything, have proven fallible in the past. It's not even really science that is in question, it's medical technology.. the proper application of the science that is out there. Heck.. we don't even know how a lot of pills WORK yet... that is not understanding of any kind, scientific or otherwise, that is gambling, again IMHO.
Very nice and thoughtful post though.. thanks. It's a pleasure to discuss with reasonable people.
It's only true that you have to be "predatory" if you do not have a service or product of true value to capitalize on, or if you do not know how to capitalize on said product or service. If you actually have value on your side, you just have inform people, you don't have to bamboozle them.
Note that "nice" does not mean "naive", or "trusting". It just means honestly wanting to do what's best for everyone, not just yourself. And it is not only possible to do that in business, I would argue it is ultimately the best strategy... especially if "score" is kept by any metric in addition to the flow of money.
It may be true that most businessmen are a little evil (as I get further into it, not as many as I once thought, but some for sure). It may be true you don't get to the top without "stepping on some heads". But then, you don't have to be at the top to be successful in business or life, and a more realistic measure may find a person quite willing to forgo evil and still succesful because of it (not in spite of it).
In short; greed makes evil necessary, not business. Anything else can be served simply with a fair viewpoint, instead of a selfish one.
that's my two cents anyway. My biz is doing quite well so far and things look good for the future too, as long as our service continues to have value to the marketplace, and I'm paying attention to see if that changes... we'll see what my tune is if it does;)
That depends, before, during, or after western doctors were delivering babies without washing their hands and killing infants and mothers by the boatload?
See, before they figured out bacteria, the doctors themselves killed an awful lot through infection.
Prior to that, I'm not sure. Don't see a lot of other animals dying of childbirth though, so I'm not sure why we have to. Maybe it has something to do with the way we're taught to do it, hmm?
Slashdot Mirror
so now you're just arguing about which dictionary is correct. Merriam-Webster includes "to slaughter wantonly" which just implies you are willing to participate in the killing.
but as I posted elsewhere, once you get to this point it becomes obvious that my statement that it's "not open to interpetation" is silly, because even the meanings of words themselves are in fact nothing BUT interpretation. mea culpa...
But, merriam-webster disagrees that murder is so limited in scope.
But now we hit the point where it becomes plain that ALL conversation is interpetation. Even the meanings of words are open to interpretation. I think all killing is murder... just sometimes, murder is justifiable. So my original implication that this is not open to interpretation is, in fact, wildly off base. As simple as I wanted to think it was...
I see. That makes some sense (as far as a rationalization goes). Thanks for the post.
Are you saying a book of the bible is equivalent to one of the ten commandments?
Murder, Killing, Slaying... there isn't any real difference in any of those words in any case. Only whether the Murder, Killing, or Slaying of someone is justified or not. If you kill someone, it's murder. Maybe not legally, maybe you could call it justified in some cases, but we're not talking about a court of law, we're talking about a higher moral power here. Hell, courts of law weren't very lawful when this stuff was written in the first place. You don't take a lawyer to "heaven" with you to argue with St. Peter that stabbing someone was "killing", not "Murder". In fact, Merriam-Webster online defines Kill AND slay as synonyms of murder.
The commandment does not say "Do not Murder Unless You Really Have To". It says: don't (Kill/Murder/Slay).
But fine... we're interpreting, at this point, as clear it would seem to be to me that you would not want to risk getting it wrong with God and instead you would assume when he says don't murder, you don't murder anyone, ever, being a non-believer I suppose my grounds for arguing it are not the same as others. Roll your dice, Judeo-christian believers.
understood and while I don't share your faith I can respect your stance (and appreciate the conversation, thanks).
ignoring the translation issues in another part of the discussion;
I think it's not even interpretive to assume that "people" is implied in "thou shalt not kill". vegetarianism as far as I know isn't even mentioned in the bible.. that doesn't open the door to language craziness. The commandments are very clearly about how to treat people and act in your society. so sure, interpetation is big business and there is a lot of stuff that needs it, but the commandments (assuming proper translation) are pretty frickin' clear, really. yes, strictly speaking I made an "interpretation" there. But any communication requires some small amount of interpretation. That's just basic comprehension skills, which somehow are not applicable all of a sudden when we start looking at holy books? Frankly, I think it's ridiculous.
a quick jaunt over to wikipedia shows that the kill language is roman catholic in origin, and murder is the original... now that, you could argue I suppose, depending on what you consider murder. Strictly speaking, I would call it killing. Sometimes Justifiable murder, maybe, but always murder. but now....
*waves hands* *issues of interpretation remain, forever, despite frantic hand waving*
sigh....
Exactly the reason why, if that were correct, the translation should have been updated by now, no?
If it really were that important, would such a basic translation error be allowed to stand even for 400 years (assuming the error arrived with the king james version)?
If it has not been fixed, and it is indeed wrong, doesn't that say something else... perhaps something much more interesting... about how important the "word" of god really is even to people who say it is important... at least, how important it is, compared to something truly heinous... like admitting a mistake?
In which case.. for a different reason, admittedly... my original point of people not being very good at practicing their religion still stands. If they can't even be bothered to correct a translation on a pretty basic tenant of their religion...
I'll have to concede though, and throw my hands up and admit I don't understand these people at all and it's really just as likely that every word of the whole book is totally mangled in common print translations as it is to be even remotely correct, you're right, and it's yet one more reason I have such a hard time with it all lol...
That would be one basic translation error, to be unable to get more precise than "kill" from an original word of something less general than Kill. While I am sure... as in positive... there are major translation issues in both testaments and in other holy books, I am much less creduluous that a basic statement like that would be translated so ambiguously. Perhaps I'm wrong, but even if I were, "thou shalt not kill" is how it has been taught for more than 1700 years now at least. The original phrase is, for all practical purpose, irrelevant. If "kill" is not sufficient, the translation should have been changed long before now.
I'm an agnostic myself (with no doubt that the "personified" God is a figment of imagination), but as such I still find the questions of how and why people sign on to these belief systems very, very interesting.
Interpretations aside, "Thou shalt not kill" is unambiguous. It is only made ambiguous by people who need to justify killing. As a commandment, in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, it is present in all 3 religions.
How side-stepping that is justified in all 3 religions is of no interest to me. More, how hypocrisy, contradiction, and cognitive dissonance of all varieties and intensities are rationalized also doesn't interest me... well, honestly, they both interest me a great deal as a matter of curiosity, but it doesn't change the basic issue; According to all 3 religions, God laid down the law. In no uncertain terms (though it was obviously a "Do as I say, not as I do" thing in the old testament what with the plagues, floods, and smiting going on, hey, it's God.. if he says to not do something, and chooses to do it Himself, well, how the heck can anyone second guess that, right?)
I mean really! You can't really "interpret" thou shalt not kill... that's unambiguous, entirely unambiguous. That they did, wrote it down, and leaders teach "around" it... well, that just codifies the shortcomings of religion in general, if you ask me.
Actually, if you read the article, you'd see they corrected the earlier data in the chart to be a more accurate comparison to the post-1993 methodology.
"thou shalt not kill", a fairly straightforward piece of divine advice, hasn't stopped the Jews, Christians, OR the muslims either. I suppose no one is very good at following their own religion, eh?
Unless you pick up new customers with a high profile draw item like, say, an iPod.
You could consider the loss an "advertising expense" in that case. The goal of which, in both cases, is just to get people in the door to your shop to buy stuff that does make you money. In this case, you do it by offering something you know they want. They could order off the web, of course, but if they want to buy in person, they are likely to want to keep buying stuff in person, or even better maybe they are impulse shoppers.
Target market, hello! come on in.
Now, how does a true free market deal explain this? It's not supply and demand... it's the supply OF demand, but it distorts the price of popular items. Enough demand can make it cheap again...
You think $3/gallon will hold up for the next ten years?
I get all my power from relatively green sources. Anyone in my state can, if they choose to pay just a bit more.
Plug in hybrids would be quite awesome for us. Even better than focusing on the "damage you can actually see" is the damage being done in your name through the choices you make, whether you can "see" it or not.
and before our government, you could say the same thing about Monarchy, as long as you weren't the person the king was pissed at that day.
Does that mean all progress should stop with what we have now?
We should just accept its shortcomings as the best achievable result of mankind?
I understand what you're saying and you're not entirely wrong, but that's a pretty weak arguement.
Understood, and I myself have a very close friend who was stationed there. That said, at what point do you excuse a soldier for just 'doing what he was told'? That defense didn't work for nazis, and I'm not at all saying we are anywhere NEAR as bad as that, but where exactly is that line?
Just asking the question, I haven't figured it out yet either.
Not True. Jumping out of a plane has real risk. You could really die.
Simply jumping off of something in a controlled environment that is so obviously not dangerous you are being asked to count something hardly applies.
Personally, I'm not surprised that our physical ability to receive data is not changed, but I would think that our ability to *process*, relevant, focused data could still improve. it's not what you see, it's what you do with it.
For what it's worth, I think lots of practice can approximate this phenomena too... if you do any sports, you've "been in the zone". I think it's the same place, perhaps at a lower level, but you can see what's going to happen before it does, read opponents down to very fine detail, react smoothly and quickly with very little conscious direction. I would start studying there because rare as it may be, it's at least achievable in lab conditions.
I understand what you're saying, and I am saying yes, some thing may not be proven to be detrimental but a reasonable person could very easily assume so, and should reserve the right to in spite of the lack of scientific study or results on the matter, without backlash or disdain. Scientific evidence can still be fallible, and if not, then the interpretation of that evidence is most certainly fallible, even when the interpretation can be logically rigorous. Either by omission of relevant data, observer bias, or any number of other mechanisms.
You cannot extinguish this tendency in people, and more than that, you shouldn't want to. Scientific inquiry is by the very nature of its rigor, limited. You can't study everything... for our ongoing example, you can't hope to isolate every variable, and every possible effect, and say with any rigor what effect formula or forceps has on a baby. It might be nothing at all... and it might not. You can rule things out one at a time. You can search for correlations. But there is always going to be a margin where it is not only impossible to nail things down with certainty, but even where what we know with certainty may not be an adequate representation of the whole story.
Again, referencing the way doctors behaved before they found out about bacteria; they were behaving "correctly" on the basis of their current knowledge. People preferring to give birth without a doctor would have been derided as backwards or scientifically ignorant. Yet, they would also have been absolutely correct from a risk standpoint, whether by luck or by intuition or by their direct experience (which is limited, of course). Likewise, it is a certainty that the same "blindness" to reality exists today in all scientific disciplines.. and no one knows where, except by intuition, and experience.
When they argue exact facts (I think blah causes cancer), that can be proven or disproven in most cases. Continuing to ignore facts in this manner is weak minded... completely agreed.
However, believing a particular thing... say, that bruising a babie's face is undesirable... is not constrained by scientific knowledge, unless somehow you could in fact prove that hurting the baby has no impact of any kind. That is quite obviously way beyond the reach of current science at least. Meanwhile, we know stress and danger result in reactions in the body that are conducive to short term survival, but are straining to the bodies' systems... reducing that could be seen as good... but regardless of the rigor involved, intuitive we grasp that it's not ok to hurt people unnecessarily, all else being equal, for reasons that perhaps very few of us could articulate.
I'm not sure if I framed that as clearly as I want to, but the upshot is that to truly engage with the world, you have to be able to make judgements beyond the ability of science to fully inform you, and you also must be able to critically judge scientific thoughts for how they may be applied or misapplied in daily life. This "slop" is not only unavoidable, it shouldn't be denigrated wholesale. Consider biodiversity and why it is useful: then no one shortcoming in a population leads to its entire demise. Likewise for intellectual diversity; creating a monoculture based only on what is scientifically studied and commonly accepted is both prohibitively limiting and potentially quite dangerous.
And I hope it is rational to point this out, without being termed "anti-science", because if I among all people are "anti-science", then you guys don't have a prayer with the rest of the population and you never will.
You're blowing the response a bit out of proportion (certainly my response, anyway), but again... the waste of the energy isn't the issue. The other points you raise are more interesting... just drop the waste one. that's irrelevant, if the other issues you bring up are not issues.
;)
I'm certainly not advocating for this to happen tomorrow based on a slashdot post, but your response seems to indicate someone has crunched some numbers on this. Got any links? That would be more interesting that "hand waving" about "hand waving"
I understand the arguement, but if the numbers are good, then we only need what, .014% Surface coverage to meet current need. Let's meet double that, and then do it at 10% efficiency; .28% coverage required.
obviously the number of numbers influencing this are dizzying, but the order of magnitude we are discussing is established (if those numbers are correct).
Cost is much more nebulous. Sure, solar is already more expensive; but if you put in an order to cover even 1% of the earth's surface, I would have to think an economy of scale would kick in.
I'm not saying it's workable, I'm just saying it was an interesting viewpoint for the GP and I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
If his irradiation numbers are correct, efficiency in this process is basically irrelevant.
150kTW compared to 22 leaves an awful lot of room for "wiggle", conversion and transmission losses. You could even use an aribtrary amount of energy just to distill seawater for temporary usage in the electrolysis process.
Agreed, and as I noted I have nothing against the idea of vaccination nor the use of established vaccines. I do have a problem with new, relatively untested in the wild procedures and practices being forced on anyone. If we were in a polio epidemic, sure, take that new polio vaccine out and let's save some lives; the risk vs reward is there. Keeping kids from having chicken pox? Hey, maybe keeping them from shingles would be a good thing, but almost all of us have had it already and we're fine. Let's just let the willing test it for awhile... is that such a big deal, really?
I would find it rather difficult to exaggerate the negative consequences of denying a baby breast milk, however. Sure, it may not kill them, but it is pretty undeniable at this point that breast milk is by a very wide margin superior for babies. You may not think that drugging a mother during the birth, and pulling a child out of her with bruises on its face is without consequence. I, however, would disagree. This is exactly the issue; you don't have a study saying "it's bad to do that". I don't need a study to know that bruising a baby's face is not ideal, nor is drugging it through the mother, nor is removing the mother's ability to feel how her muscles are working during childbirth. I might need one to know exactly what the affects are, ok, fine... but how about instead, I just do the more ideal thing as much as possible and skip the specifics?
Are forceps and formula as bad as polio? Probably not. That doesn't make them "good practice" though, and yet they were held up as normal, as expected, as proper. In my grandmother's generation, learned, educated doctors were recommending formula as superior to breast milk, and you would have been the "skeptic" to say otherwise then. What damage did that cause? Well, no one could ever say, because you could never study the overall effects. I myself was raised on formula. I'm healthy now, by any objective standard I'm reasonably intelligent as well. But who knows what I would be if I were breast fed? There is no way to say, except to say that as a baby, I'd definitely had been better off with breast milk... just as I was better off with formula rather than starving to death. So thank you, formula, for being there, as I truly needed it. And keep it away from my baby.
I don't follow your last paragraph though. You aren't saying that rarer diseases rise because more common ones are snuffed out more successfully, are you? that is, you aren't saying that autism would rise because (for instance) we vaccinated against chicken pox... I assume you're not anyway... so can you rephrase?
I"m with you to a large degree: certainly with a lack of regulation and registration and certification and study comes a lesser definition of what is "real", and "complimentary" medicine is certainly rife with hucksters of all types, and entirely too credulous a population of adherants. But then... you could say that about some others in this very discussion advocating for "established" medicine as well, who equally gloss over the faults in the medical establishment. alternative medicine circles do not have a monopoly on weak mindedness.
many seem to say that only what has been studied, defined, and categorized is real. Anything outside of that, since it has not been studied, cannot be real. Anyone willing to explore further in their daily lives who is not a trained scientist, well... we all know about *those* people, eh?
given the unsurety all around, there is room for reasonable people to have different stances on the matter, IMHO, and different levels of comfort with the undefined, and different levels of skepticism with the current beliefs of modern science which, if anything, have proven fallible in the past. It's not even really science that is in question, it's medical technology.. the proper application of the science that is out there. Heck.. we don't even know how a lot of pills WORK yet... that is not understanding of any kind, scientific or otherwise, that is gambling, again IMHO.
Very nice and thoughtful post though.. thanks. It's a pleasure to discuss with reasonable people.
It's only true that you have to be "predatory" if you do not have a service or product of true value to capitalize on, or if you do not know how to capitalize on said product or service. If you actually have value on your side, you just have inform people, you don't have to bamboozle them.
;)
Note that "nice" does not mean "naive", or "trusting". It just means honestly wanting to do what's best for everyone, not just yourself. And it is not only possible to do that in business, I would argue it is ultimately the best strategy... especially if "score" is kept by any metric in addition to the flow of money.
It may be true that most businessmen are a little evil (as I get further into it, not as many as I once thought, but some for sure). It may be true you don't get to the top without "stepping on some heads". But then, you don't have to be at the top to be successful in business or life, and a more realistic measure may find a person quite willing to forgo evil and still succesful because of it (not in spite of it).
In short; greed makes evil necessary, not business. Anything else can be served simply with a fair viewpoint, instead of a selfish one.
that's my two cents anyway. My biz is doing quite well so far and things look good for the future too, as long as our service continues to have value to the marketplace, and I'm paying attention to see if that changes... we'll see what my tune is if it does
That depends, before, during, or after western doctors were delivering babies without washing their hands and killing infants and mothers by the boatload?
See, before they figured out bacteria, the doctors themselves killed an awful lot through infection.
Prior to that, I'm not sure. Don't see a lot of other animals dying of childbirth though, so I'm not sure why we have to. Maybe it has something to do with the way we're taught to do it, hmm?