...has been a political shill for the left eco-agenda since about the early 90s. That's when I cancelled my 25 year subscription anyway. Used to love that magazine, until they became a political organ.
Disagree with what I'm saying? No objective observer - even someone who disagrees with his data - could condone how they handled Bjorn Lomborg.
Or 2007's Conservatives are stupid religious zealots, Liberals are wise, reasonable people: "Left Brains vs. Right Brains Political ideology is tied to how the brain manages conflict"
Or their "scientific" article that came out - coincidentally - 6 weeks before the 2008 election: "Media Bias: Going beyond Fair and Balanced Despite popular accounts, researchers found that Barack Obama got more negative press coverage than John McCain did in the early summer" What's your point there again, SciAm? Science? Really?
When our society seemingly turns to government to protect us from the consequences of our stupid decisions*, eventually we end up with a government that is going to want to control our every decision. It makes sense in a world where the government subsidizes your health care, that the government gets a voice in your unhealthy choices.
*to wit: - I had unprotected sex, the govt should pay for my abortion - I had kids I can't support, the gov't should pay to help me care for them - I'm an addict, the gov't should pay for my treatment - I made shitty life choices and now I'm poor, the gov't should pay for me to have a decent life - I have a $25,000/year job but signed for a mortgage on a $500,000 home that I now understand I can't afford, the gov't should pay to help me renegotiate - I'm a bank and I've made a catastrophic series of worthless investments, the gov't should pay to keep me running because I'm "too big to fail"
It has been going on at all levels of American life since at least the Great Society programs, and we as voters have cheerfully voted consistently for the government to 'cushion' more and more of life's hard knocks from our sensitive existences.
Welcome to your self-designed Nanny State.
As they would say in Firefly: "Nee mun doh shr sagwa".
Yeah, medicine, nutrition, agriculture, which have all ended up in at least doubling life expectancy, lowering childhood mortality, etc. it's horrible what the modern world has done for Aborigines. Practically torture. I'm sure they'd all be rather living as subsistence hunter-gatherers like the tribes in the jungles of Paupua, New Guinea.
What the heck have the Romans ever done for us?
We seem to repeatedly fail to distinguish the difference between individual, personal tragedy (which has no doubt been suffered by the Native peoples of Australia, North America, South America, Africa and, well, pretty much everywhere an advanced people met a less-technologically adept one, ever in history) and overall outcome. I'm not saying the ends justify the means - particularly when the bulk of the tragedies were inflicted by people whose intentions were in no way positive - but over the span of centuries where individual tears don't really count, it's hard not to see it that way.
People are generally poor because they make shitty life-choices, generally around the failure to delay gratification or understanding long-term cause-effect.
Is it really shocking that these people continue to make those sorts of decisions when presented with technology that allows them to do that even easier?
Of course, when asked for a "reason" to have music on, people will assert they're more productive to the PHB who demands productivity uber alles, but it could simply be that at work (which is rarely fun, and quite often miserable)
If it makes us happer, maybe that's WORTH 0.05% loss in productivity. I know, crazy talk.
FWIW I personally think it does help me get through the day (instrumental, non-vocal music), but I tend to turn it off when I'm working on something complicated, or if I'm driving and the weather/conditions get dangerous.
Meh, I think the systems they have today are pretty impressively sophisticated.
Uploaded a school video I'd cut together for some local teens, using their video and 3 different (commercial) music clips.
As soon as I'd uploaded, google told me some content would be restricted in some geographical areas due to licensing for songs X and Y in the video, as well as saying that for the other content, I could use it but viewers would see ads.
I'm perfectly cool with that, and thought that was impressive, given that the song excerpts were no more than 1:30-2:00.
"...54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors..."
Please, please tell me that the answer was 42.
Now how long will it take for us to compute the question?
"Maybe just natural tendencies - I don't know. Wish I did."
Sadly, it was a paraphrase of this simple, honest question that got Lawrence Summers pilloried and fired. We had two boys within 2 years so all we had were piles and piles of "boy" toys aside from the lone Raggedy Andy* given by my sister in a (desperate?) attempt to offer another theme. *who, it turns out, was invariably the 'accident victim' or 'dinosaur prey'...
When our first daughter arrived, as a crawling infant (pretty nearly yet immune to much 'socialization' pressure) she would CLAW through the piles of cars, dinosaurs, balls, to get to that doll and cuddle it.
A few years later, we noticed that when we were coloring, while the boys would color for a while and then vanish off to something more engaging, the girls would color longer...until we listened in and realized that Mr Purple had married the Pretty Miss Orange and they had babies named Red, Blue, Black, and Yellow. The crayons were being used as families.
To us, it's utterly self-evident that boys and girls are simply wired to see the world differently, and that's perfectly fine.
"...Unfortunately WotC seems content to just re-release the game every five years and clean up on the sourcebooks. It's vile...."
Well, investing money in actually improving it would make this an ACTUAL improvement, and less of a slutty cash grab (credits for that phrase above).
D&D: the invention AD&D: an improvement on the invention AD&D extra crap starting with UA: slutty cash grab AD&D2nd Ed: pure slutty cash grab 3rd Ed: I think this was a conscientious effort to really pull the system into a consistent set of mechanics and a rules set that was (by now) more exceptions than rules. 3.5 slutty cash grab 4.0 something between 3rd E and a slutty cash grab, but at least it was a serious effort to rewrite the rules to be more appealing to video gamers familiar with cooldowns, etc. IMO it's actually not a bad system; it's not D&D but it's not a bad system intrinsically. 4.5 slutty cash grab D&D Next: looking like slutty cash grab.
I'd love to see a link to that "strong evidence". The only thing I've seen suggesting this are CSIRO "reports" whose basis is essentially "laws were put in place in the west to reduce aerosol pollution in the 1990s, and the drought in the Sahel ended at the same time".
By that level of intellectual rigor, a decrease in world ninja populations directly caused WW2.
The idea that pollution in one area of the globe effects others isn't novel or even particularly new; the 'tragedy of the commons' has been a long-term issue for anyone concerned about the environment. However to look at the coincidental end of a drought event (roughly 1970-1985) and the passage of legislation at the same time is specious at best, or politically-motivated mendacity at worst.
Two very simple questions that the study chose not to answer: - Passage of the laws was neither geographically nor chronologically homogeneous as the studies' authors would like to imply; to suppose that a 15-year drought 'suddenly' stopped because of their passage would require postulating a 'tipping point'. Tipping points are generally a sign of poorly-understood systems. Sure, TPs exist in nature, but more frequently they're just a sign of sophomoric science and failed interpretation; they are the scientific equivalent of hand-waving. - If Western industrial pollution was the cause of the Sahel droughts, why did they START in 1970 when by every measure western industrialization was DECREASING? Remember, you've already posited a nearly-instant connection between turning off the pollution and the end of the drought.
It's absolutely logical to expect that an input (pollution) into a complex system has an impact somewhere else, but to believe this specific assertion would require some basis of faith in the first place - faith that the West is evil, white-guilt, whatever you want to call it.
At best useless, at worst a deliberately tendentious metric. Might as well measure it by hair length.
Sure, the PER PERSON pollutant output of countries like India and China is low; they have BILLION(s) of people living essentially like pre-industrial primitives.
Let's use CO2, since you like that metric, but instead of using raw population numbers, let's take at OUTPUT: PPP.
US CO2 5.7 bill (tons/yr), China CO2 3.4 US PPP: $11 trillion. China PPP $7 trillion On that basis they're basically the same.
If we compare per-capita income - since you want to consider that whole population figure more proportionally: US citizens have a PPP income of $43K. China's is $7K. At that same proportion, China's pollution output should be barely 1 bill ton/yr - or in other words, they are putting out more than 3.5 TIMES more pollution per $1 that goes into their citizen's pockets, than the US.
What were you saying again about the US being the "worst in the world"?
"...how did we survive these things in the past?" We seem to be in a different place, psychologically speaking.
In our world of 2012, every single human life is deemed to be precious. (I don't think it necessarily IS, even to the people stating that, but that's the public line.)
It seems that as we have made our world ever-safer, and insulated most people from the random vagaries that could harm/kill us, we have become ever more sensitive to the loss of a single person.
For much of human history, the bulk of a person's siblings (and there were often many) would have died before age 2. Today, a simple (natural) miscarriage is enough to send a woman into years of counseling for her loss.
For centuries, the penalty for piracy was death, pure and simple. If you weren't killed in being taken, you were promptly hung or thrown overboard. Now the world's navies operate on catch-and-release basis, giving pirates in Somalia medical treatment, food, air-conditioned comfort before returning them gently to shore.
Today we'll spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a single life - even if that life is 75+ yrs old and doesn't have much left to go anyway.
I'm reminded also of a public television documentary on the building of the Hoover Dam. This was a difficult, low paid job during harsh economic times. 112 men died in work conditions that were dirty and dangerous out of a workforce of approx 5000. This wasn't seen to be a scandal at the time, it just "was". (And in fact a casualty rate of 2% over that 5 year project would be comparable to the US fatality rate in Iraq over the past 5 years.)
The test pilots of the original space program were, as far as I recall, all combat veterans. All of them had a keen understanding both of risk, and the necessity of running it to make progress. I suspect there are many, many similar personalities today, but the political will to employ them - or even recognize the risks publicly - has simply vanished.
Does this mean we're more pussified, or does this mean that we're more thoughtful, sensitive, and compassionate? The problem is that we've got no absolute yardstick that says "past this point you're going too far", and there's always political value in appearing more caring, more concerned for the welfare of any/everyone.
Again, I don't know if this is really how people feel, or how people believe they should publicly appear to feel. In my experience, when engaged individually, people are lot more measured in their concern for their fellow man (which is, I suspect, more like our ancestors). Locally there was a recent news story about a baby dying, and the public clamor was the absolute tragedy of the thing - when in fact the undercurrent from people with firsthand knowledge recognized that the mom was an habitual meth user who was probably so wasted at the time she couldn't help her child at all.
I suspect 50+ years ago, there wouldn't have been such a need to provide this veneer of compassion.
Complete disregard for long term geo-(luno?)politics, -1.
Lunar astronomers can jump in here regarding how significant libration is, but there seem to be only two points on the moon that have both full-time solar exposure (ie power) and full-time line-of-sight to the earth: the north pole and the south pole.
Two total, on the only significant satellite earth has.
Look at WW2 and imagine how much harder that would have been to fight without Hawaii - an 'unsinkable aircraft carrier' sitting in the middle of the pacific.
It doesn't take a strategic genius to see that it would be militarily and scientifically helpful to be the state that gets a base planted on at least one of these, if not both.
...don't you have to land a person there first, to have a "base".
Perhaps the title should have been "Russia PLANS to have moon base"?
In other news, the US "plans" to - go metric - be energy self-sufficient - 'win' the war(s) on terrorism, drugs, poverty, child abuse, crime, and whatever else we're in a "war" with....after which I suppose we can all ride our unicorns across the rainbow bridge and have tea with the Easter Bunny, Santa, and ethical politicians.
If depressed people did more file-sharing programs, torrents, online sharing sites, chatting more, email, online video viewing, and game playing...what did the non depressed people do? What's LEFT?
But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel MÃrner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr MÃrner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.... When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
But hey, we all know that "there is 100% consensus among the serious scientists on AGW", right?
It's pretty bloody refreshing that you have a group that has a set of social values, that are getting together to logically discuss a way that they and their families can access the useful but wild'n'wooly Internet in a way that fits with their precepts, doctrines, and social values.......and doesn't make even a whisper about controlling OTHER PEOPLES' access.
That's absolutely wonderful. I sincerely wish more people in this country would follow their lead and build their lives comfortably along their own beliefs but leave the REST of us ALONE.
You don't want porn? Fine. Don't watch porn. Build your ironclad access controls high and mighty to keep that out - just don't step up and say that the REST OF US can't watch porn either. Then you've crossed a line.
Really, this holds true outside of religious issues too. Want to help the homeless? Fine, pay more taxes, volunteer your time, whatever - just quit insisting on taking more of my paycheck to pay for your moral compunction.
Of course, given the lackluster IPO results and the nature of relationships, secretly she probably read about his $19 billion and thought: disappointing....
It has everything to do with it, because need is infinite, and resources are not.
Hyperbole doesn't help anything, and causes us to chase our tails "fixing" things of marginal significance when matters of real importance fall by the wayside.
Claiming a burning match is "pretty much the same as a house burning down" would cause a strange allocation of firefighting resources.
Claiming a slight increase in particulates in an area is "pretty much the same as an island" and then equating it to a "pile of dirt in a pond" GROSSLY, disingenuously, and in fact DECEPTIVELY misstates the situation. You've seen smaller things called islands? Particles smaller than the naked eye can see? What "islands" are you talking about?
Tell you what: I'll drive my boat through this "island" you drive yours through Oahu. Let's see who sinks.
You're waving your hand and saying "bad stuff is going on anyway". Well sure it is, if an excess of dust in an area is considered a crisis in your view. Then EVERYTHING is going wrong and you might as well just give up.
Me, I'd rather we spend our time: - removing dioxins and PCBs from the environment/waste stream - find renewable, non-polluting energy sources - find a successful way to distribute basic medical and food aid to the bulk of the world's population whose lives would be SIGNIFICANTLY improved with an absolutely minimal expenditure of resources....far, far, far before I give a rat's ass about some plastic particles floating in the mid Pacific.
This is news? When I was a kid, and McDonald's were few and far between (early 70s) a McDonald's "meal" was a hamburger, fries, and drink.
That's a single hamburger, what is now a small fries, and a small beverage. That was a satisfying full meal for an adult. Is that even a kids meal any more?
Another example, I believe it was mentioned by a poster on slashdot. He was remodeling a 100yr-old farmhouse and he hadn't planned to, but found he had to rip out the cabinets as they were too small - the only plates that fit in the cupboard were the 9" (small) dinner plates, not our today-common 12" dinner plates.
Finally, I was talking with a friend that runs a restaurant. I asked him why their portion sizes were so massive. His response was that it was to camouflage the prices with extra food, since food prices were cheap - it's the labor that drives costs. If he offered a moderately-sized meal, it might cost $8. If he was to DOUBLE the amount of food on that plate, it would cost perhaps +$1. Conversely, cutting the amount of food in half would only save $1. Consumers are far more willing to pay $9 for a GIANT pile of food (they feel they're getting a bargain), than $7 for 1/4 the food. On the latter, they feel they're being ripped off.
Slashdot Mirror
What's really important, though, is how do you say "pedantry" in Chinese?
I wish you hadn't responded AC, that's a great idea and I'd love to have something like that to send as well.
...has been a political shill for the left eco-agenda since about the early 90s. That's when I cancelled my 25 year subscription anyway. Used to love that magazine, until they became a political organ.
Disagree with what I'm saying? No objective observer - even someone who disagrees with his data - could condone how they handled Bjorn Lomborg.
Or 2007's Conservatives are stupid religious zealots, Liberals are wise, reasonable people: "Left Brains vs. Right Brains Political ideology is tied to how the brain manages conflict"
Or their "scientific" article that came out - coincidentally - 6 weeks before the 2008 election: "Media Bias: Going beyond Fair and Balanced
Despite popular accounts, researchers found that Barack Obama got more negative press coverage than John McCain did in the early summer"
What's your point there again, SciAm? Science? Really?
When our society seemingly turns to government to protect us from the consequences of our stupid decisions*, eventually we end up with a government that is going to want to control our every decision. It makes sense in a world where the government subsidizes your health care, that the government gets a voice in your unhealthy choices.
*to wit:
- I had unprotected sex, the govt should pay for my abortion
- I had kids I can't support, the gov't should pay to help me care for them
- I'm an addict, the gov't should pay for my treatment
- I made shitty life choices and now I'm poor, the gov't should pay for me to have a decent life
- I have a $25,000/year job but signed for a mortgage on a $500,000 home that I now understand I can't afford, the gov't should pay to help me renegotiate
- I'm a bank and I've made a catastrophic series of worthless investments, the gov't should pay to keep me running because I'm "too big to fail"
It has been going on at all levels of American life since at least the Great Society programs, and we as voters have cheerfully voted consistently for the government to 'cushion' more and more of life's hard knocks from our sensitive existences.
Welcome to your self-designed Nanny State.
As they would say in Firefly: "Nee mun doh shr sagwa".
Yeah, medicine, nutrition, agriculture, which have all ended up in at least doubling life expectancy, lowering childhood mortality, etc. it's horrible what the modern world has done for Aborigines. Practically torture.
I'm sure they'd all be rather living as subsistence hunter-gatherers like the tribes in the jungles of Paupua, New Guinea.
What the heck have the Romans ever done for us?
We seem to repeatedly fail to distinguish the difference between individual, personal tragedy (which has no doubt been suffered by the Native peoples of Australia, North America, South America, Africa and, well, pretty much everywhere an advanced people met a less-technologically adept one, ever in history) and overall outcome. I'm not saying the ends justify the means - particularly when the bulk of the tragedies were inflicted by people whose intentions were in no way positive - but over the span of centuries where individual tears don't really count, it's hard not to see it that way.
People are generally poor because they make shitty life-choices, generally around the failure to delay gratification or understanding long-term cause-effect.
Is it really shocking that these people continue to make those sorts of decisions when presented with technology that allows them to do that even easier?
Could it simply be that music makes us happier?
Of course, when asked for a "reason" to have music on, people will assert they're more productive to the PHB who demands productivity uber alles, but it could simply be that at work (which is rarely fun, and quite often miserable)
If it makes us happer, maybe that's WORTH 0.05% loss in productivity. I know, crazy talk.
FWIW I personally think it does help me get through the day (instrumental, non-vocal music), but I tend to turn it off when I'm working on something complicated, or if I'm driving and the weather/conditions get dangerous.
Meh, I think the systems they have today are pretty impressively sophisticated.
Uploaded a school video I'd cut together for some local teens, using their video and 3 different (commercial) music clips.
As soon as I'd uploaded, google told me some content would be restricted in some geographical areas due to licensing for songs X and Y in the video, as well as saying that for the other content, I could use it but viewers would see ads.
I'm perfectly cool with that, and thought that was impressive, given that the song excerpts were no more than 1:30-2:00.
"...54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors..."
Please, please tell me that the answer was 42.
Now how long will it take for us to compute the question?
"Maybe just natural tendencies - I don't know. Wish I did."
Sadly, it was a paraphrase of this simple, honest question that got Lawrence Summers pilloried and fired. We had two boys within 2 years so all we had were piles and piles of "boy" toys aside from the lone Raggedy Andy* given by my sister in a (desperate?) attempt to offer another theme.
*who, it turns out, was invariably the 'accident victim' or 'dinosaur prey'...
When our first daughter arrived, as a crawling infant (pretty nearly yet immune to much 'socialization' pressure) she would CLAW through the piles of cars, dinosaurs, balls, to get to that doll and cuddle it.
A few years later, we noticed that when we were coloring, while the boys would color for a while and then vanish off to something more engaging, the girls would color longer...until we listened in and realized that Mr Purple had married the Pretty Miss Orange and they had babies named Red, Blue, Black, and Yellow. The crayons were being used as families.
To us, it's utterly self-evident that boys and girls are simply wired to see the world differently, and that's perfectly fine.
Is it irony or coincidence that this was posted "anonymous coward"?
"...Unfortunately WotC seems content to just re-release the game every five years and clean up on the sourcebooks. It's vile...."
Well, investing money in actually improving it would make this an ACTUAL improvement, and less of a slutty cash grab (credits for that phrase above).
D&D: the invention
AD&D: an improvement on the invention
AD&D extra crap starting with UA: slutty cash grab
AD&D2nd Ed: pure slutty cash grab
3rd Ed: I think this was a conscientious effort to really pull the system into a consistent set of mechanics and a rules set that was (by now) more exceptions than rules.
3.5 slutty cash grab
4.0 something between 3rd E and a slutty cash grab, but at least it was a serious effort to rewrite the rules to be more appealing to video gamers familiar with cooldowns, etc. IMO it's actually not a bad system; it's not D&D but it's not a bad system intrinsically.
4.5 slutty cash grab
D&D Next: looking like slutty cash grab.
I'd love to see a link to that "strong evidence".
The only thing I've seen suggesting this are CSIRO "reports" whose basis is essentially "laws were put in place in the west to reduce aerosol pollution in the 1990s, and the drought in the Sahel ended at the same time".
By that level of intellectual rigor, a decrease in world ninja populations directly caused WW2.
The idea that pollution in one area of the globe effects others isn't novel or even particularly new; the 'tragedy of the commons' has been a long-term issue for anyone concerned about the environment. However to look at the coincidental end of a drought event (roughly 1970-1985) and the passage of legislation at the same time is specious at best, or politically-motivated mendacity at worst.
Two very simple questions that the study chose not to answer:
- Passage of the laws was neither geographically nor chronologically homogeneous as the studies' authors would like to imply; to suppose that a 15-year drought 'suddenly' stopped because of their passage would require postulating a 'tipping point'. Tipping points are generally a sign of poorly-understood systems. Sure, TPs exist in nature, but more frequently they're just a sign of sophomoric science and failed interpretation; they are the scientific equivalent of hand-waving.
- If Western industrial pollution was the cause of the Sahel droughts, why did they START in 1970 when by every measure western industrialization was DECREASING? Remember, you've already posited a nearly-instant connection between turning off the pollution and the end of the drought.
It's absolutely logical to expect that an input (pollution) into a complex system has an impact somewhere else, but to believe this specific assertion would require some basis of faith in the first place - faith that the West is evil, white-guilt, whatever you want to call it.
At best useless, at worst a deliberately tendentious metric. Might as well measure it by hair length.
Sure, the PER PERSON pollutant output of countries like India and China is low; they have BILLION(s) of people living essentially like pre-industrial primitives.
Let's use CO2, since you like that metric, but instead of using raw population numbers, let's take at OUTPUT: PPP.
US CO2 5.7 bill (tons/yr), China CO2 3.4
US PPP: $11 trillion. China PPP $7 trillion
On that basis they're basically the same.
If we compare per-capita income - since you want to consider that whole population figure more proportionally: US citizens have a PPP income of $43K. China's is $7K. At that same proportion, China's pollution output should be barely 1 bill ton/yr - or in other words, they are putting out more than 3.5 TIMES more pollution per $1 that goes into their citizen's pockets, than the US.
What were you saying again about the US being the "worst in the world"?
"...how did we survive these things in the past?"
We seem to be in a different place, psychologically speaking.
In our world of 2012, every single human life is deemed to be precious. (I don't think it necessarily IS, even to the people stating that, but that's the public line.)
It seems that as we have made our world ever-safer, and insulated most people from the random vagaries that could harm/kill us, we have become ever more sensitive to the loss of a single person.
For much of human history, the bulk of a person's siblings (and there were often many) would have died before age 2. Today, a simple (natural) miscarriage is enough to send a woman into years of counseling for her loss.
For centuries, the penalty for piracy was death, pure and simple. If you weren't killed in being taken, you were promptly hung or thrown overboard. Now the world's navies operate on catch-and-release basis, giving pirates in Somalia medical treatment, food, air-conditioned comfort before returning them gently to shore.
Today we'll spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a single life - even if that life is 75+ yrs old and doesn't have much left to go anyway.
I'm reminded also of a public television documentary on the building of the Hoover Dam. This was a difficult, low paid job during harsh economic times. 112 men died in work conditions that were dirty and dangerous out of a workforce of approx 5000. This wasn't seen to be a scandal at the time, it just "was". (And in fact a casualty rate of 2% over that 5 year project would be comparable to the US fatality rate in Iraq over the past 5 years.)
The test pilots of the original space program were, as far as I recall, all combat veterans. All of them had a keen understanding both of risk, and the necessity of running it to make progress. I suspect there are many, many similar personalities today, but the political will to employ them - or even recognize the risks publicly - has simply vanished.
Does this mean we're more pussified, or does this mean that we're more thoughtful, sensitive, and compassionate? The problem is that we've got no absolute yardstick that says "past this point you're going too far", and there's always political value in appearing more caring, more concerned for the welfare of any/everyone.
Again, I don't know if this is really how people feel, or how people believe they should publicly appear to feel. In my experience, when engaged individually, people are lot more measured in their concern for their fellow man (which is, I suspect, more like our ancestors). Locally there was a recent news story about a baby dying, and the public clamor was the absolute tragedy of the thing - when in fact the undercurrent from people with firsthand knowledge recognized that the mom was an habitual meth user who was probably so wasted at the time she couldn't help her child at all.
I suspect 50+ years ago, there wouldn't have been such a need to provide this veneer of compassion.
Complete disregard for long term geo-(luno?)politics, -1.
Lunar astronomers can jump in here regarding how significant libration is, but there seem to be only two points on the moon that have both full-time solar exposure (ie power) and full-time line-of-sight to the earth: the north pole and the south pole.
Two total, on the only significant satellite earth has.
Look at WW2 and imagine how much harder that would have been to fight without Hawaii - an 'unsinkable aircraft carrier' sitting in the middle of the pacific.
It doesn't take a strategic genius to see that it would be militarily and scientifically helpful to be the state that gets a base planted on at least one of these, if not both.
...don't you have to land a person there first, to have a "base".
Perhaps the title should have been "Russia PLANS to have moon base"?
In other news, the US "plans" to ...after which I suppose we can all ride our unicorns across the rainbow bridge and have tea with the Easter Bunny, Santa, and ethical politicians.
- go metric
- be energy self-sufficient
- 'win' the war(s) on terrorism, drugs, poverty, child abuse, crime, and whatever else we're in a "war" with.
If depressed people did more file-sharing programs, torrents, online sharing sites, chatting more, email, online video viewing, and game playing...what did the non depressed people do? What's LEFT?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
But hey, we all know that "there is 100% consensus among the serious scientists on AGW", right?
It's pretty bloody refreshing that you have a group that has a set of social values, that are getting together to logically discuss a way that they and their families can access the useful but wild'n'wooly Internet in a way that fits with their precepts, doctrines, and social values.... ...and doesn't make even a whisper about controlling OTHER PEOPLES' access.
That's absolutely wonderful.
I sincerely wish more people in this country would follow their lead and build their lives comfortably along their own beliefs but leave the REST of us ALONE.
You don't want porn? Fine. Don't watch porn. Build your ironclad access controls high and mighty to keep that out - just don't step up and say that the REST OF US can't watch porn either. Then you've crossed a line.
Really, this holds true outside of religious issues too. Want to help the homeless? Fine, pay more taxes, volunteer your time, whatever - just quit insisting on taking more of my paycheck to pay for your moral compunction.
Of course, given the lackluster IPO results and the nature of relationships, secretly she probably read about his $19 billion and thought: disappointing....
Be funny if she dumped him because of it. Heh.
It has everything to do with it, because need is infinite, and resources are not.
Hyperbole doesn't help anything, and causes us to chase our tails "fixing" things of marginal significance when matters of real importance fall by the wayside.
Claiming a burning match is "pretty much the same as a house burning down" would cause a strange allocation of firefighting resources.
Claiming a slight increase in particulates in an area is "pretty much the same as an island" and then equating it to a "pile of dirt in a pond" GROSSLY, disingenuously, and in fact DECEPTIVELY misstates the situation. You've seen smaller things called islands? Particles smaller than the naked eye can see? What "islands" are you talking about?
Tell you what: I'll drive my boat through this "island" you drive yours through Oahu. Let's see who sinks.
You're waving your hand and saying "bad stuff is going on anyway". Well sure it is, if an excess of dust in an area is considered a crisis in your view. Then EVERYTHING is going wrong and you might as well just give up.
Me, I'd rather we spend our time: ....far, far, far before I give a rat's ass about some plastic particles floating in the mid Pacific.
- removing dioxins and PCBs from the environment/waste stream
- find renewable, non-polluting energy sources
- find a successful way to distribute basic medical and food aid to the bulk of the world's population whose lives would be SIGNIFICANTLY improved with an absolutely minimal expenditure of resources
Pretending a supposition is a "fact" is even more widely used.
This is news?
When I was a kid, and McDonald's were few and far between (early 70s) a McDonald's "meal" was a hamburger, fries, and drink.
That's a single hamburger, what is now a small fries, and a small beverage. That was a satisfying full meal for an adult. Is that even a kids meal any more?
Another example, I believe it was mentioned by a poster on slashdot. He was remodeling a 100yr-old farmhouse and he hadn't planned to, but found he had to rip out the cabinets as they were too small - the only plates that fit in the cupboard were the 9" (small) dinner plates, not our today-common 12" dinner plates.
Finally, I was talking with a friend that runs a restaurant. I asked him why their portion sizes were so massive. His response was that it was to camouflage the prices with extra food, since food prices were cheap - it's the labor that drives costs. If he offered a moderately-sized meal, it might cost $8. If he was to DOUBLE the amount of food on that plate, it would cost perhaps +$1. Conversely, cutting the amount of food in half would only save $1. Consumers are far more willing to pay $9 for a GIANT pile of food (they feel they're getting a bargain), than $7 for 1/4 the food. On the latter, they feel they're being ripped off.
Refuting histrionics with histrionics does your case no good.
"...Or the ecological disasters like the garbage islands in each major ocean ..."
Garbage islands? Really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
We're talking about a density of 5kg per square kilometer, of pieces that are mostly too small to be seen.
If that's an "island", Hawaii would be what, a Neutron Star?
The plastic particulates are a concern, and should be reduced. Claiming it's an ISLAND just makes you look like a Chicken Little.