...and almost never discussed: return to herd-based agriculture, to mimic the pre-human massive herds of herbivores that crossed the plains that are desertifying.
Rather than looking at the boutique massive firms highlighted in INC. or Forbes, maybe point your socialist eyes at the small business owner - you know, the engine that really drives the economy? The folks with personally that: - took a cut in pay, or a cut in benefits, or both to keep their businesses afloat in the last 6-8 years. - have raised employee salaries instead of their own - took NO salary for several years while paying employees to keep the business running.
In the real world, most small business owners are often the FIRST to suffer when business goes bad because they're already paying as few people as they can to get by. They don't have the luxury of laying off staff to temporarily improve budgets. They're the ones working 70-80-90+ hour weeks while most of everyone else goes home at 5.
It's certainly not all, but yeah, if you believe "capitalism" is just the starched-shirt business-set or the studiously-casual megacorps, well, then you really don't understand the first thing about capitalism.
So you were in such a hurry to show how much more intelligent you are in understanding the US Constitution that you didn't read the NEXT WORDS I WROTE?
"if not the establishment of an official religion, of course"
I'm a Christian, and I would prefer that there is no such thing as a 'religious' exemption from taxation. To me, that's contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state and is an example of the state's recognition of religion (if not the establishment of an official religion, of course).
No, simply churches should have to file as non-profits, and hew to the rules (including auditing, etc) therefor. If they do, great. If they don't, too bad.
You know, humans have operated in isolation on long, dangerous trips in very small groups regularly throughout history: for example, the voyages of exploration throughout the 16th-18th centuries.
I suspect that those only are remarkable in the level of documentation, and that primitive peoples did it a lot - a small group of hunters (or simply explorers) would depart and come back weeks or even months later. The fact is that the earth was a large, hostile, and relatively empty place for much of human history.
This really isn't a terribly new problem; likely the answer in how we deal with it successfully lies somewhere in those examples.
Stupid article, written by stupid elite intellectual postmoderns sitting in an airconditioned office whose familiarity with living in such conditions stretches perhaps so far as reading about it in the doctor's waiting lounge or "camping" modern 21st century American style, ala hundred-dollar footwear, thousands of dollars of advanced fabrics, aluminum everything, carefully crafted nutritional freeze-dried meals, all used to camp at prepared campsites where the major concern of the campers is "how do I keep my 'sport' beverages cold?" or "how do I make sure I my organic shampoo doesn't run into the pristine nearby lake?"
It's hard to even know where to start tearing this thing apart.
His initial sentence is ludicrous: "It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." What? We have thousands of years of coal at current consumption rates, setting aside the fact that such an apocalyptic scenario he's talking about would mean that likely 75-90% of humanity is dead and our consumption rate would obviously drop. While coal today may be hard to retrieve IN BRITAIN, it's not hard to find in other places.
Secondly, even the use of oil (that he keeps referring to) presupposes an extant level of technology that is unlikely to survive such a situation. If we've fallen so low that we can't retrieve coal from the ground, do you really think we would be able to build engines that could even use oil? People seem to forget that there's a crapton of accumulated skills and techniques - mostly forgotten to the bulk of civilization - involved in building things like steam engines. Hell, he goes off on building a society based on alternative generation of electricity, failing to note that even making WIRE involves a rather high level of technological development.
Thirdly,"How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?" Well, there are ample examples of civilizations that were quite 'civilized' that didn't use coal or oil - Rome, etc used WOOD, and they were able to reach rather comfortable levels of advancement without fossil fuels. Last time I checked, the Romans were pretty damn good at engineering and cement - in some ways better with cement than we are today.
He then maunders off mulling the ability of such a rebuilding society focusing on using solar power or wood gasification, setting aside the final reality: if one is in an apocalyptic situation, desperate for food, shelter, clean water, and simply working hard trying to live, "giving a shit" about the environment, CO2 loading, and pollution outside your immediate circumstances falls far below one's level of concern because it's ultimately a LUXURY to worry about impacts on future generations when you're trying to survive tonight or to the end of the week.
Seriously ridiculous article, starting from ridiculous premises and reaching ridiculous conclusions.
The Economist speaks of her candidacy very much in terms of inevitability.
I don't believe they understand how deeply this woman is disliked in the U.S. I'm not taking about policy or history, I'm talking about on a personal level. Her first act as a political climber was working on the Watergate case, from which she was dismissed without a recommendation letter...the fellow later said she wasn't so bad, coincidentally with her husband's presidency of course...
Maybe the entire country could stop massive subsidies for farmers to grow crops in what amounts to coastal steppe/desert? Oh, and the massive subsidies allowing millions and millions of people to live in deserts (and yes, I'm not just looking at California).
It was a stupid policy in the early 20th century, but at least then there was the incentive to populate the (south) west coast for geopolitical/security reasons. Now, simply start charging people (farmers, corporations, individuals) the ACTUAL costs of the water they use and let the market cull the system./solved.
I love paying taxes when they go for public services and infrastructure (i.e. civilization), and not for bread and circuses giveaways that are simply an exercise in vote-buying slightly more subtle than packs of cigarettes.
The causal relationship implied by the title is also somewhat sketchy, but why would we let things like facts or science get in the way of some juicy FUD?
...but I recall some economist observing that against market demand, arbitrarily constraining supply will create black markets.
I'm not saying that's how it should be, just how it IS.
I understand that ESA want to control any and all access to products of their developers (on principle, if the developers no longer exist, etc), but I expect that ultimately this will be futile, and lead to their irrelevance sooner rather than later.
"The ops question stems from a deep misunderstanding of what human language is." Perhaps.
Personally, what I read in the OP was a very slashdottian, 'utilitarian' approach to the use of language, thinking that it was simply a tool somehow chosen for use based on need/function, like a computer language. He/she didn't seem to recognize it as an organic, dynamic thing by which our brains (involuntarily and uncontrollably, in most cases) understand the world and communicate this understanding to others.
I find it curious that this entire "privacy" thing - which should rightly transcend politics - seems to be largely a concern of the left in the American context: these are the same people that cheerfully support the expansion of government control into everything from health care to commerce.
I guess we'd need to see the statistics for the failure-rate of drone flights, not just for 'mission terminating'-level incidents, but for every crack-up on landing etc that would cause passengers problems. Compare this to the failure-rates of flights that are human-piloted, including to some degree the number of 'cockpit events' where a pilot's human reflexes and situational awareness avoided an incident entirely.
Most likely, it's not even close. Planes are still staggeringly safer in the hands of human pilots - even recognizing their very-human fallibilities - than computer piloted.
In the same sense that people have greater fear of flying than driving (despite ample evidence as to which is more dangerous), while people will cheerfully get into driverless cars, I suspect pilotless airplanes will never...ahem... 'take off'.
So, lining the pockets of defense contractors with their ridiculously inflated costs for projects of dubious utility is ridiculous bullshit, while lining the pockets of con-men and medical professionals for social welfare and medical projects of dubious actual utility is money well spent?
Well, if you recall there was a HUGE issue about JFK being catholic, after which the whole idea of "OMG a CATHOLIC PRESIDENT" simply went away.
The fact that Barack Obama won election, and then REelection (not even really being close) should likewise dispense with racist folly about people's melanin levels and qualification for the presidency.
" And "brown people" (as you so elegantly put it) are stopped, searched and incarcerated statistically higher on average and for longer durations for the many of the same crimes that white people commit. "
Are you therefore just as outraged by the sexism which is even MORE egregious in the criminal justice system?
If you believe that black incarceration rates (being so much higher than their population) as "proof" of an injustice, then the fact that incarcerated felons are 92% male must be taken as equal "proof" of gross sexism, right? I mean, shouldn't prison populations be more like 50/50 men/women?
Unless you're ok with asserting that men are "just naturally more likely to be criminals than women"?*
*and doesn't that then just put you in the same place as sexists and racists, claiming that gender or skin color predisposes people to/away from criminality?
Genuine question: If you are truly about "equality" of treatment, then what's your endpoint?
When have we "won" the civil rights movement? I truly want to know, because as far as I can tell, the 'movement' is a self-perpetuating game of shift-the-goalposts. If there's never a victory condition, then people can just keep complaining forever.
Do we feel women have gotten "enough" help educationally, because the majority of college students are now female? Can we stop with women-preferential programs?
Or what about that black president? Anyone notice that?
Slashdot Mirror
"Legal jurisdiction of the NSA"
Ha ha, even funnier.
-Angela Merkel
"....away from the NSA."
Ha ha ha ha ha, yeah, that was +1, hilarious.
-The NSA
...and almost never discussed: return to herd-based agriculture, to mimic the pre-human massive herds of herbivores that crossed the plains that are desertifying.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan...
Watch it, and tell me you're not convinced.
Um, in the summary text they refer to "...as well as Google-bankrolled Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, and NCWIT..."
Black Girls Code: http://www.blackgirlscode.com/
So yeah, they've already pre-empted your irony with reality.
No, you really don't.
Rather than looking at the boutique massive firms highlighted in INC. or Forbes, maybe point your socialist eyes at the small business owner - you know, the engine that really drives the economy? The folks with personally that:
- took a cut in pay, or a cut in benefits, or both to keep their businesses afloat in the last 6-8 years.
- have raised employee salaries instead of their own
- took NO salary for several years while paying employees to keep the business running.
In the real world, most small business owners are often the FIRST to suffer when business goes bad because they're already paying as few people as they can to get by. They don't have the luxury of laying off staff to temporarily improve budgets. They're the ones working 70-80-90+ hour weeks while most of everyone else goes home at 5.
It's certainly not all, but yeah, if you believe "capitalism" is just the starched-shirt business-set or the studiously-casual megacorps, well, then you really don't understand the first thing about capitalism.
So you were in such a hurry to show how much more intelligent you are in understanding the US Constitution that you didn't read the NEXT WORDS I WROTE?
"if not the establishment of an official religion, of course"
I'm a Christian, and I would prefer that there is no such thing as a 'religious' exemption from taxation. To me, that's contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state and is an example of the state's recognition of religion (if not the establishment of an official religion, of course).
No, simply churches should have to file as non-profits, and hew to the rules (including auditing, etc) therefor. If they do, great. If they don't, too bad.
You know, humans have operated in isolation on long, dangerous trips in very small groups regularly throughout history: for example, the voyages of exploration throughout the 16th-18th centuries.
I suspect that those only are remarkable in the level of documentation, and that primitive peoples did it a lot - a small group of hunters (or simply explorers) would depart and come back weeks or even months later. The fact is that the earth was a large, hostile, and relatively empty place for much of human history.
This really isn't a terribly new problem; likely the answer in how we deal with it successfully lies somewhere in those examples.
Stupid article, written by stupid elite intellectual postmoderns sitting in an airconditioned office whose familiarity with living in such conditions stretches perhaps so far as reading about it in the doctor's waiting lounge or "camping" modern 21st century American style, ala hundred-dollar footwear, thousands of dollars of advanced fabrics, aluminum everything, carefully crafted nutritional freeze-dried meals, all used to camp at prepared campsites where the major concern of the campers is "how do I keep my 'sport' beverages cold?" or "how do I make sure I my organic shampoo doesn't run into the pristine nearby lake?"
It's hard to even know where to start tearing this thing apart.
His initial sentence is ludicrous: "It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." What? We have thousands of years of coal at current consumption rates, setting aside the fact that such an apocalyptic scenario he's talking about would mean that likely 75-90% of humanity is dead and our consumption rate would obviously drop. While coal today may be hard to retrieve IN BRITAIN, it's not hard to find in other places.
Secondly, even the use of oil (that he keeps referring to) presupposes an extant level of technology that is unlikely to survive such a situation. If we've fallen so low that we can't retrieve coal from the ground, do you really think we would be able to build engines that could even use oil? People seem to forget that there's a crapton of accumulated skills and techniques - mostly forgotten to the bulk of civilization - involved in building things like steam engines. Hell, he goes off on building a society based on alternative generation of electricity, failing to note that even making WIRE involves a rather high level of technological development.
Thirdly,"How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?" Well, there are ample examples of civilizations that were quite 'civilized' that didn't use coal or oil - Rome, etc used WOOD, and they were able to reach rather comfortable levels of advancement without fossil fuels. Last time I checked, the Romans were pretty damn good at engineering and cement - in some ways better with cement than we are today.
He then maunders off mulling the ability of such a rebuilding society focusing on using solar power or wood gasification, setting aside the final reality: if one is in an apocalyptic situation, desperate for food, shelter, clean water, and simply working hard trying to live, "giving a shit" about the environment, CO2 loading, and pollution outside your immediate circumstances falls far below one's level of concern because it's ultimately a LUXURY to worry about impacts on future generations when you're trying to survive tonight or to the end of the week.
Seriously ridiculous article, starting from ridiculous premises and reaching ridiculous conclusions.
The Economist speaks of her candidacy very much in terms of inevitability.
I don't believe they understand how deeply this woman is disliked in the U.S. I'm not taking about policy or history, I'm talking about on a personal level. Her first act as a political climber was working on the Watergate case, from which she was dismissed without a recommendation letter...the fellow later said she wasn't so bad, coincidentally with her husband's presidency of course...
Maybe the entire country could stop massive subsidies for farmers to grow crops in what amounts to coastal steppe/desert? Oh, and the massive subsidies allowing millions and millions of people to live in deserts (and yes, I'm not just looking at California).
It was a stupid policy in the early 20th century, but at least then there was the incentive to populate the (south) west coast for geopolitical/security reasons. Now, simply start charging people (farmers, corporations, individuals) the ACTUAL costs of the water they use and let the market cull the system. /solved.
I love paying taxes when they go for public services and infrastructure (i.e. civilization), and not for bread and circuses giveaways that are simply an exercise in vote-buying slightly more subtle than packs of cigarettes.
I guess we know where the phrase "anchored in reality" comes from.
The causal relationship implied by the title is also somewhat sketchy, but why would we let things like facts or science get in the way of some juicy FUD?
If only the courts would take that final logical step to ban people having bad opinions.
Think how much nicer the world would be?
...but I recall some economist observing that against market demand, arbitrarily constraining supply will create black markets.
I'm not saying that's how it should be, just how it IS.
I understand that ESA want to control any and all access to products of their developers (on principle, if the developers no longer exist, etc), but I expect that ultimately this will be futile, and lead to their irrelevance sooner rather than later.
"Americans' worsening health"
can be added to http://whatreallyhappened.com/...
(Go to the link to find links supporting every item here)
A (Not Quite) Complete List Of Things Supposedly Caused By Global Warming
Acne , agricultural land increase , Afghan poppies destroyed , Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost , aggressive weeds , air pressure changes , airport malaria , Agulhas current , Alaska reshaped, moves , allergy season longer , alligators in the Thames , Alps melting , Amazon a desert , American dream end , amphibians breeding earlier (or not) , anaphylactic reactions to bee stings , ancient forests dramatically changed , animals head for the hills, animals shrink , Antarctic grass flourishes , Antarctic ice grows , Antarctic ice shrinks , Antarctic sea life at risk, anxiety treatment , algal blooms , archaeological sites threatened , Arab Spring , Arctic bogs melt , Arctic in bloom , Arctic ice free , Arctic ice melt faster , Arctic lakes disappear , Arctic tundra to burn , Arctic warming (not), Atlantic less salty , Atlantic more salty, atmospheric circulation modified , attack of the killer jellyfish , avalanches reduced , avalanches increased , Baghdad snow , Bahrain under water , bananas grow , barbarisation , beer shortage , beetle infestation , bet for $10,000, better beer, big melt faster, billion dollar research projects , billion homeless , billions face risk , billions of deaths , bird distributions change , bird loss accelerating , birds shrinking , bird strikes , bird visitors drop , birds confused , birds decline (Wales) , birds driven north , birds return early , bittern boom ends , blackbirds stop singing , blackbirds threatened , Black Hawk down , blood contaminated , blue mussels return , bluetongue , brain eating amoebae , brains shrink , bridge collapse (Minneapolis), Britain one big city , Britain Siberian , brothels struggle , brown Ireland , bubonic plague , budget increases , Buddhist temple threatened , building collapse , building season extension , bushfires , business opportunities , business risks, butterflies move north, camel deaths , cancer deaths in England,cannibalism, cannibalism again , caterpillar biomass shift, cave paintings threatened , childhood insomnia, Cholera , circumcision in decline , cirrus disappearance , civil unrest , cloud increase , coast beauty spots lost , cockroach migration, coffee threatened , cold climate creatures survive , cold spells (Australia) , cold wave (India) , computer models , conferences , conflict , conflict with Russia , consumers foot the bill , coral bleaching, coral fish suffer , coral reefs dying , coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink , coral reefs twilight, Cabbage Shortage , cost of trillions , cougar attacks, crabgrass menace, cradle of civilisation threatened , creatures move uphill, crime increase , crocodile sex, crops devastated , crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems , curriculum change , cyclones (Australia), danger to kid's health , Darfur , Dartford Warbler plague , death rate increase (US) , deaths to reach 6 million, Dengue hemorrhagic fever , depression , desert advance , desert retreat , destruction of the environment , disappearance of coastal cities, disasters , diseases move from animals to humans , diseases move north , dog disease , Dolomites collapse , dozen deadly diseases , drought, ducks and geese decline , dust bowl in the corn belt , early marriages , early spring , earlier pollen season , Earth biodiversity crisis , Earth dying , Earth even hotter , Earth light dimming , Earth lopsided, Earth melting , Earth morbid fever , Earth on fast track , Earth past point of no return , Earth slowing down , Earth spins faster, Earth to explode,Earth's poles shift, earth upside down , earthquakes , earthquakes redux , earthquakes redux 2 , Egypt revolt , El Niño intensification , end of the world as we know it , erosion , emerging infections, enceph
"The ops question stems from a deep misunderstanding of what human language is."
Perhaps.
Personally, what I read in the OP was a very slashdottian, 'utilitarian' approach to the use of language, thinking that it was simply a tool somehow chosen for use based on need/function, like a computer language. He/she didn't seem to recognize it as an organic, dynamic thing by which our brains (involuntarily and uncontrollably, in most cases) understand the world and communicate this understanding to others.
I find it curious that this entire "privacy" thing - which should rightly transcend politics - seems to be largely a concern of the left in the American context: these are the same people that cheerfully support the expansion of government control into everything from health care to commerce.
Isn't that a little contradictory?
I guess we'd need to see the statistics for the failure-rate of drone flights, not just for 'mission terminating'-level incidents, but for every crack-up on landing etc that would cause passengers problems. Compare this to the failure-rates of flights that are human-piloted, including to some degree the number of 'cockpit events' where a pilot's human reflexes and situational awareness avoided an incident entirely.
Most likely, it's not even close. Planes are still staggeringly safer in the hands of human pilots - even recognizing their very-human fallibilities - than computer piloted.
In the same sense that people have greater fear of flying than driving (despite ample evidence as to which is more dangerous), while people will cheerfully get into driverless cars, I suspect pilotless airplanes will never...ahem... 'take off'.
So, lining the pockets of defense contractors with their ridiculously inflated costs for projects of dubious utility is ridiculous bullshit, while lining the pockets of con-men and medical professionals for social welfare and medical projects of dubious actual utility is money well spent?
Fuck yeah, I say as well!
Well, if you recall there was a HUGE issue about JFK being catholic, after which the whole idea of "OMG a CATHOLIC PRESIDENT" simply went away.
The fact that Barack Obama won election, and then REelection (not even really being close) should likewise dispense with racist folly about people's melanin levels and qualification for the presidency.
" And "brown people" (as you so elegantly put it) are stopped, searched and incarcerated statistically higher on average and for longer durations for the many of the same crimes that white people commit. "
Are you therefore just as outraged by the sexism which is even MORE egregious in the criminal justice system?
If you believe that black incarceration rates (being so much higher than their population) as "proof" of an injustice, then the fact that incarcerated felons are 92% male must be taken as equal "proof" of gross sexism, right? I mean, shouldn't prison populations be more like 50/50 men/women?
Unless you're ok with asserting that men are "just naturally more likely to be criminals than women"?*
*and doesn't that then just put you in the same place as sexists and racists, claiming that gender or skin color predisposes people to/away from criminality?
Genuine question:
If you are truly about "equality" of treatment, then what's your endpoint?
When have we "won" the civil rights movement? I truly want to know, because as far as I can tell, the 'movement' is a self-perpetuating game of shift-the-goalposts. If there's never a victory condition, then people can just keep complaining forever.
Do we feel women have gotten "enough" help educationally, because the majority of college students are now female? Can we stop with women-preferential programs?
Or what about that black president? Anyone notice that?
*retributive racism OR retributive sexism. /. will develop an 'edit post' feature....
Someday