The really creepy thing about people interviewed in the SBS programme was the way all the users kept pretending that it was, oh, such a natural thing to have sex with dolls. I'm just a completely normal guy having completely normal sex with dolls. One guy had this weird rope contraption with which he could get his doll, dressed in a school uniform no less, to dangle from the ceiling in a rather bizarre fashion.
At least the sex toy producers seemed to treat it somewhat more 'business-like'.
Doll Producer: 'See how life-like the doll is' = sales talk
Doll User: 'See how life-like the doll is' = actual opinion
Not too long ago, I caught the tail end of a programme on sex dolls on Australian SBS. It seemed largely concerned with sex dolls (Abyss Creations featured heavily), but also showed various sex machines. A man selling robotic body parts (head and hips respectively, both with orifices in suitable places) interviewed at some 'Adult Entertainment' expo, claimed that androids was a question of when, not if, and also that he fully expected to be selling them in the not-too-distant future. And I don't know whether he'd be that wrong considering how the porn industry seems to driving all sorts of developments these days: VHS rather than Betamax; chat rooms; jpeg; secure payment over the net...
I remember watching this programme thinking that Battlestar Galactica got it wrong: that blonde chick came first.
No, it doesn't. And from my point of view that means that it isn't a solution at all.
In at least part of the world, very soon, if we are not there already, there isn't enough land to grow 'multiple, complimentary crops' (as you suggest in your solution (1)) that will feed at least its local population. That is the problem. (Or at least a large part of it.) That is my point. (Or at least a large part of it.)
It is all well and fine to suggest that we feed the world on cake, or for that matter carrots and complimentary crops, but if that is not a real possibility, then you are effectively suggesting that we should simply give up the aspiration of feeding the entire world. Maybe we should. But then we should say so.
still don't see how you can equate GE with selective farming/breeding, though.
In what way does 'selective farming/breeding' not manipulate genes?
I think there's an inherent gamble on our part to feel we can do better with no consequences down the road.
Yes, of course it's a gamble. Yes, of course there is an amount of risk involved. But everything in life involves risk. That's why God invented trade-offs!
You seem to forget that there are 'consquences down the road' even if we don't make use of GM technology to feed the world's hungry. Such a policy too carries risks. Just risks of a different kind. We risk condemning a large part of the population of the developing world to perpetual famish and starvation. I would say that it is at least a tad problematic to condemn a large part of the world's population to a state of 'have-nots', particularly since they seem to have little say-so in the matter, but there are other problems as well. Being starved will necessarily mean that people will be more susceptible to disease and plagues. Plagues spread. With today's increased globalization they spread rapidly. All over the globe. That's a risk. As people starve they are probably (I'm guessing) less content with their lives; thereby probably bringing about more volatile situations within their societies where people might start to fight for whatever arable land and whatever food there is. And people will try to control whatever food there is. Think Rwanda. Think Somalia. That's a risk. People who starve might want to emigrate to countries where starvation is not a problem. There are already signs that those countries are not particularly intested in accepting more immigrants from cultures usually vastly different to their own. This might mean more illegal immigration. More pressures on whatever welfare state there is. This might a more volatile political situation in such 'immigration' countries. Can you say Jean-Marie Le Pen? That's a risk.
I am not so silly that I think GM crops will solve all the problems of the developing world. It won't. For one thing, GM technology won't solve over-population -- the one problem possibly feeding (pun not intended) into the other. However, neither am I silly enough to believe that all the world's problems will just go away if we don't make use of it.
There are two problems, right?! (1) The food production itself and (2) food distribution.
Concerning problem (1): There is only so much arable land available. From what I understand, we have more or less reached the limit as the area of land we can use for agricultural purposes. That means that each unit of land should produce as much food as possible and as nutritious food as possible. The problem with your example of carrots isn't that they don't contain a hell of a lot of vitamin A, nor that they aren't easy to grow just about anywhere; they might well be: the problem is do they contain very much else in terms of nutrition besides Vitamin A?
Cf. these two tables with nutritional facts: rice and carrots. Judging by these, rice provides a better over-all nutritional option; in particular, it contains a not insubstantial amount of protein, which carrots do not contain at all, and which is also a priority in crops if you want to limit people's reliance on animal produce. (And you do want to limit people's reliance on animal produce.)
Given the limitation of arable land, you might have to chose between growing either A or B; in other words, you're not able to grow both. If faced with such a choice -- and I would argue that in particular the developing world is faced with that choice -- you would want to grow as nutritious a crop as possible. I assume that it is easier to modify rice so that it contains Vitamin A than it is to modify carrots so that they contain protein.
Concerning problem (2). Unless food is produced locally you have to distribute it. In order to distribute anything you need, among other things (in no particular order): (a) storage facilities; (b) infrastructure; (c) transport vehicles; (d) cold storage/freighters if you want to transport perishables; and (e) some form of law and order so that the food doesn't 'disappear' before reaching its destination. In too many developing countries all or most of these conditions are lacking. This means that you can have all the carrots you want, but if you can get them to people who starve what use are they?
... However, I believe there must be a better way to go about this than creating a Frankenstien variety of rice.
God, I hate the expression 'Frankenstein food'. Ever since the creation of agriculture, human kind has tampered with the genetics of its food stuffs. Isn't the origin of what we today call tomatoes some poisonous fruit from Latin America? Corn some shitty little purple plant it's impossible to recognize as such? Almonds -- other than bitter almonds -- a complete aberration? Virtually all of our grown food has been developed and/or tampered with in some form or another. The fact that we can now do it in a laboratory instead of in/on the field does not fundamentally alter that fact. Calling the one kind 'Frankenstein' but not the other is merely trying to pervert discourse by calling forth an emotional rather than rational response.
Finally: both problem (1) and (2) contain several 'sub'-problems; obviously, I haven't addressed all of them in this post.
In the longer term perspective, a recent expert study estimated that the world is approaching the limits of global food production capacity based on present technologies. Its most optimistic projection suggests that a doubling of food production by 2050 might be technically feasible, and this could feed 7.8 billion people if grain is largely used as human food and not for animals. A likely higher level of population growth, or a failure of sufficient commitment to increase food supplies around the world, will create severe problems for a major part of the world population (Kendall and Pimentel, 1994). The pessimistic assumptions seem more likely, as present per capita food production is stagnating if not declining, and some crops may be close to biological and environmental limits. Already 700 million people experience endemic hunger, not counting those added by natural disasters (Serageldin, 1995).
Further,
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects the world's population to grow to more than 8 billion by 2030. The FAO projects that global food production must increase by 60 percent to accommodate the estimated population growth, close nutrition gaps, and allow for dietary changes over the next three decades. Food charity alone simply cannot eradicate hunger. Increased supply--with the help of tools like bioengineering --is crucial.
Last year Ethiopia's population grew by 2.7%; according to this article: 'Most years, Ethiopia has to depend on some level of food aid as it rarely grows enough to feed the whole population.' The reliefweb article also states: 'many impoverished rural families say they have no choice but to have large families to help raise their incomes.' This strongly suggests that poverty is a vicious circle: because people are poor and famine-stricken they have more children; which leads to even greater pressure on food production; which, at its non-GM present state, is unable to answer with requisite increases in the amount it yields; which leads to even greater poverty; and so on and on and on. A way to break that vicious circle would be to provide people with the means to farm their own food locally and with better chances of success. In their article Technology That Will Save Billions From Starvation Prakash and Conko write:
The productivity gains from G.M. crops, as well as improved use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, allowed the world's farmers to double global food output during the last 50 years, on roughly the same amount of land, at a time when global population rose more than 80 percent. Without these improvements in plant and animal genetics and other scientific developments, known as the Green Revolution, we would today be farming on every square inch of arable land to produce the same amount of food, destroying hundreds of millions of acres of pristine wilderness in the process.
It is estimated that Vitamin A deficiency leads to some 1,000,000 children dying and some additional 300,000 being struck by blindless every year. According to the WHO between 100 and 140 million children are vitamin A deficient and between 250,000 to 500,000 children per year become blind due to Vitamin A deficiency. If, as Patrick Moore says, 'adding a daffodil gene to rice in order to produce a genetically modified strain of rice can prevent half a million children from going
Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. I have been taken by the hand by some native and very kindly, very gracefully, and very patiently led to... somewhere completely not at all where I wanted to go.
It would make for interesting sight-seeing opportunities, of course, but perhaps not when being later for a conference or some such.
By chasing a chimera of of objectivity they can't meet -- and one the public would happily tell them matters more inside the newsroom than outside of it[.]
Without objectivism science, scientific method and scientic, rational discourse is not possible.
The moment we abandon objectivism as a real, attainable position is the exact same moment we have to abandon universal truth as the objective of our inquiries. And not so incidentally, it is that very moment we have to start calling creationism a credible 'theory' instead of the bloody nonsense it really is.
In a poll (undertaken in Australia, I think) regarding media I read not so long ago, journalists were ranked below politicians in terms of credibility and trustworthiness. I seem to remember that they were ranked somewhere alongside lawyers. And that's a mighty low position. Oh, how the mighty have fallen: the Bernsteins/Woodwards of yore reduced to the Dregs... I mean Drudges of today. From an investigation of a threat to democracy to a semen stained dress. And thereby hangs a tale.
Let me suggest that this disenchantment has less to do with too much objectivity but rather too little. If you have to put up with constant spin and slanting of news anyway, why not go the whole hog and go for someone who doesn't make any faint pretence of objectivity but wears their subjectivity as a badge of honour?! Why watch BBC's Andrew Gilligan when you can have Bill O'Reilly?
Unlike you, however, I don't see this trend as indicating that people trade off objectivity for passion, I just think that given the lack of what I will here call reporting -- i.e., an impartial recounting of events -- which would be the first choice for most people, they are left with the second best, viz. the quasi-editorializing pontificating that is produced by most media outlets today, and then they prefer to listen to someone in their 'corner'. Again, I see that purely as a forced choice between two evils of essentially the same kind (the pro-guy or the con-guy, both (self-) opinionated bastards), rather than a true choice between two different approaches (impartiality on the one hand; partiality on the other).
Regarding accuracy, I think very few people outside the lunatic fringes of politics would really give that up as easily as you suggest. The quest for immediacy is, I believe, largely a media myth, appealing in its simplicity: it's much easier to be first than to be right. HEll, all you need to is to invent things as you go along: obviously you have a really good chance of being first with a story you yourself have just invented. And if somebody else invented it before you, why, all you need to do is invent something else. No sweat. Which is curiously reminiscent of the Ruth Shalit/Stephen Glass/Jason Blair approach to journalism, wouldn't you agree? I refuse to believe that there are very many people who would in the long run prefer their version of 'journalism' to a detached factual recount of events, however colourful their stories.
The blogosphere has its place, just like editorial/op-ed pages and openly opinionated pieces do. And no doubt people read/hear/watch these with great interest. That does not in any way subtract from the fact that the essence of journalism must be reporting, plain, simple, and objective. Passion has its everyday place, but that passion should, as a general rule, rest with the reader/listener/viewer, not with the reporter.
The moment we stop believing that objectivity is not only possible but also desirable is the moment that every argument is reduced to a mud-slinging match, where might is right and truth really is the first casualty.
[T]he growth of the Internet has not substantially altered the political climate in most authoritarian countries. [...] [The State Department's] annual report on human rights in China, [..] released in March, said that last year saw "backsliding on key human rights issues" by Beijing--such significant backsliding that the United States is considering censuring China at the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Indeed, nearly all the Chinese political science professors I have spoken with agree that the mainland Chinese democracy movement is weaker now than it was a decade ago. [...] Why has the Web failed to transform such regimes? In part because, as a medium, the Web is in many ways ill-suited for expressing and organizing dissent. And, even more significantly, because, as a technology, it has proved surprisingly easy for authoritarian regimes to stifle, control, and co-opt.
According to Kurlantzick, the net has three major limitations:
It can only disseminate information, not actually produce it;
Its essence is primarily individualistic: therefore it doesn't naturally foster collective activities/a communal spirit;
It requires literacy.
He continues:
A 2003 study by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, two Harvard researchers, found that China has created the most extensive system of Internet censorship in the world and has almost completely controlled the impact of the Web on dissent. [...] [Zittrain & Edelman] note, "Many of China's up-and-coming Internet entrepreneurs see a substantial... role for the government in the Internet sector.... [They] have visions for Chinese Internet development that are inherently pragmatic and complementary to state strategy." So much for Barlow's idea that technology workers will reject the "tyrannies" of government. [...]
Even beyond its failure to live up to democratizers' dreams, the Web may actually be helping to keep some dictatorships in power. Asian dissidents have told me that the Web has made it easier for authoritarian regimes to monitor citizens. In Singapore, Gomez says, the government previously had to employ many security agents and spend a lot of time to monitor activists who were meeting with each other in person. But, with the advent of the Web, security agents can easily use government-linked servers to track the activities of activists and dissidents. In fact, Gomez says, in recent years opposition groups in Singapore have moved away from communicating online and returned to exchanging information face-to-face, in order to avoid surveillance.
In China, the Web has similarly empowered the authorities. In the past two decades, Beijing's system of monitoring the population by installing informers into businesses, neighborhoods, and other social institutions has broken down--in part because the Chinese population has become more transient and in part because the regime's embrace of capitalism has meant fewer devoted Communists willing to spy for the government. But Beijing has replaced these legions of informers with a smaller group of dedicated security agents who monitor the Internet traffic of millions of Chinese. "The real problem with groups trying to use the Internet is that you are actually more easily monitored if you use online forms of communication than if you just meet in person in secret," one specialist in Chinese Internet usage told me. Indeed, in May 2003 Beijing's security services imprisoned four people for "inciting the overthrow of the Chinese government"; press reports suggested the authorities learned
If libraries store printed media in which libellous statements (i.e., judged so by a court of law) have been printed, are the libraries then in any way guilty? Can they be sued? Can they be sued instead of the original source of the libel? Or only in conjection with or as some sort of accessory after the fact?
Would this be a vioaltion of their anti-trust agreement? Seems like this could really put the hurt on Norton, etc.
Antitrust law does not forbid you to hurt your competitors.[*] All competition does that. In fact, that is what competition is. Given a fixed number of customers, any enterprise that tries to attract as many customers as possible necessarily hurts its competitors, who will either lose customers or not gain as many new ones as they would have otherwise. Thus, the competitors will be financially worse off than they would have been had if they had been able to lay their grubby little hands on those customers. Or at least they should be. Competition is supposed to punish inefficiencies and reward efficiency, thereby allocating scarce resources the best/most efficient way possible.
What antitrust law primarily seeks to protect is competition, not competitors. Now, it might admittedly be just a little bit hard to have the one (former) without the other (latter) and much of tension within antitrust law and the debate surrounding it centres on that particular problem: should antitrust regulate structure or behaviour?
In Alcoa[**] Justice Learned Hand stated that it was not the objective of antitrust law to punish efficient companies: in case a party has had a monopoly 'thrust upon it', its position was not unlawful. However, he went on to say:
'Nothing compelled [Alcoa] to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.'
This so-called Alcoa doctrine placed monopolies under a strict per se-rule: i.e., monopolies were prohibited as such. The issue became one of structure: does an enterprise occupy a position of monopoly (within a relevant market) or not. If yes, unless it can be proved that the company is a mere passive recipient of its monopoly position, it is unlawful.
The Alcoa doctrine was severly critized, notably by Robert Bork in his The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy At War With Itself. Justice Hand seemed to find Alcoa guilty of being nothing more than a better competitor; better at doing business; in fact, Alcoa was being punished for being more efficient. And as the criticism took hold, courts reverted back to an ante-Alcoa, U.S. Steel[#] rule of reason approach centring on the behaviour of monopolizing: simply put, intent + harm. This would appear to be the (established) law today.
Bork and the Chicago schoolers sometimes seem to go futher than that however: one sometimes gets the impression that to them, the existence of a monopoly shows nothing more and nothing less than superiority in the market place. In other words, a position of monopoly is evidence of superior efficiency; efficiency is a valid exculpatory defence as it contibutes to increased consumer welfare[##]. A lot of the defence of Microsoft's monopoly case seems to rest upon this premise. See, for instance, here and here; for a more sober view, see Posner's article Antitrust in the New Economy, in particular, perhaps, pages 8-9.
Neo-classical economic theory and its antitrust exponents (to which Bork and the Chicago-schoolers obviously belong) are not without critics however. See, for instance, this piece by Metzenbaum and Foer in which they write:
'Antitrust remedies, [Greenspan] says, tend not to be efficient. His attitude is, if we wait long enough, dominant companies (po
... my largest problem with Neuromancer was that it took many many readings [...] before I finally really started to understand everything.
Why is that a problem? A book that forces you to think and then go back a re-read it and think again and maybe have an aha-experience at some stage and then think some more and re-read, etc etc, is usually one of the more interesting -- it might irritate the hell out of you, but it would still be interesting, wouldn't it, rather than boring or dull -- reading experiences you can have, in my not-at-all-humble opinion.
Books that you understand immediately can also be interesting of course, but books that are something of a challenge are often the ones that stay with you -- irrespective of whether you finally agree with them or not.
Danish authoress Suzanne Brogger once said, a propos her book Ja, that since it had taken her 10 years to write it, she couldn't understand why it shouldn't take people 10 years to read it. Not that I necessarily think that for me personally that would apply to either Ja or Neuromancer. But it might for you -- after all: you seem to be re-reading after... how many years?
Well, as the Russian guy says in Armageddon while wildly hitting the panel to make the spacecraft start (possibly not an exact quote): 'Russian equipment; American equipment: all made in Taiwan!'
Judging by, among others, these articles in Slate (here and here); these articles regarding an Eisner biography (here and here); this little gossipy titbit; and this critical letter of resignation from Roy E. Disney, the dissatisfaction with Eisner seems to have been brewing for quite some time.
The Nature Of A Hypochondriac
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think most hypochondriacs try to avoid seeing doctors[.]
I think you're wrong. I think most hypochondriacs see a lot of doctors all the time. I wouldn't -- perhaps -- go quite as far as saying that visits to the doctors is their raison d'etre (obviously, that would be spotting descriptions of new, exotic, life-threatening or otherwise interesting diseases and imagine having them), but I would say go as far as saying that such a visit would probably make a hypochondriac's day.
It seems most of them (hypochondriacs, not doctors) are more looking for sympathy than an actual solution to whatever perceived problem they might have.
I'm not sure I agree with that either. I think most hypochondriacs would prefer a certified medical treatment (a pill, some chemotherapy, whatever) that would convince them that they are cured from whatever illness they imagine themselves suffering from rather than sympathy. I mean, surely part of the problem -- from the hypochondriac's point of view -- is that not only are they sick, really, really sick with some -- probably -- life-threatening disease, but their doctor(s) is/are refusing to acknowledge that 'fact' and no treatment will therefore be received?! Sympathy be damned: what a hypochondriac wants is some surgery and a whole lotta pills!
Finally, and parenthetically, I don't think the Internet has managed to add very much to the hypochondriacs' lament. Jerome K. Jerome published his Three Men In A Boat some 100 years ago: in it the narrator J. comes across a medical textbook and manages to persuade himself that he suffers from every ailment in the book (quite literarily) save housemaid's knee. Upon seeing his doctor he receives the following prescription:
1 lb beefsteak, with 1 pt beer
every 6 hours. 1 ten-mile walk every night. 1 bed at 11 sharp every night. And don't stuff your head with things you don't understand.
Which only shows that it was perfectly possible to be struck by hypochondria even without the use of electronics. Now, if only every hypochondriac were to receive such sensible advice.
... the way they seemingly operate on instinct and loosely defined (by our conventions) social structures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by 'loosely defined [...] social structures'. A lot of species live in groups with very clearly defined structures and roles: who's the alpha male/female and who isn't, for example, which decides who gets to eat first, who gets to drink first, who gets to mate etc etc. The individual fulfilling each role may of course vary -- for instance, alpha male gets old and tired and eventually gets ousted from his alpha male position by up-and-coming alpha male-to-be -- nevertheless, the structure of the hierarchy itself (the structure of the group/society) does not change (in my example the position of alpha male remains).
If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less.
Why? Let's face it: so far -- I admit that it might be hard to extrapolate with any larger degree of certainty as humankind is such a new species -- it appears to me that humans are some sort of larger equivalent to rats and cockroaches.
Think about it.
First of all we can eat almost anything: animal or vegetarian, the choice is yours, your body will be able to derive nourishment from either (didn't your mama ever teach you about vegetables?) -- although on a purely vegan diet vitamin B12 might be a bit of a problem.
Secondly, we appear to be able to live under almost any conditions: Eskimos live in extreme cold; Africans in (sometime) extreme heat; desert people endure lack of water; during moonsoons people on the Asian sub-continent get drenched in water. Or look at those people who during the Middle Ages were tortured/imprisoned by being locked up into boxes in which they could neither sit nor stand nor lie down fully but had to half-sit/-stand: there were people who survived inside such boxes for years!
Thirdly, some people seem unusually difficult to kill: when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki most people died but not all people did, some actually survived. They may have developed cancer in later years, their offspring might have developmental problems, but they survived: that's definitely cockroach quality! We also heal quite easily. Have you ever seen Star Gate? When the uber-alien says that it chose to reside in a human body because it was so easy to mend? That's actually true.
Furthermore, because the human species is so 'young' there are signs that our evolution is still very much on-going: a genetic disposition to, I believe, sleeping sickness with particularly the Asian population carries with it a certain measure of immunity to malaria: that particular genetic mutation/change is a direct evolutionary response to the 'environmental' pressure of malaria. In other words, there is still ample room for improvement/change. If the world would all of a sudden become animal-less, odds are we would, after an initial period of adjustment of course, survive and prosper as a species.
I mean geez, Howard, if you're going to send troops to Iraq to support an unpopular war, couldn't you at least get some financial benefit from it?
You're right: what's the point of ridding a country from a vicious dictator who brutalizes his own population, destroys the environment, instigates war and supports terrorism unless you actually get some financial benefit from it?!? Even personal financial benefit would do. That's the proper way to run a country. The Howard way is just pathetic. I am shocked! Shocked! To realize to realize that that sort of thing is going on in this day and age!
... you'd find that lots of people could practice law without going to law school[.]
And would you like to hire such a 'lawyer' to represent you?
'Guilds' such as the ABA are in a way monopolies, it's true. On the other hand: can you think of an easier way than membership of a 'guild' with certain 'quality requirements' to guarantee that a person you wish to hire actually has some qualification for the task at hand?!? Law nowadays is a vastly larger and more complex field than it was 100 years ago. Some 100-200 years ago barbers could function as surgeons. I don't think they needed any formal education for that. Would you have a barber operate on you today?
And before we all get too excited: there is precious little analogy with Microsoft's monopoly in this. ABA admits anyone who passes its requirement for membership. These members then compete against each other. In other words: no monopoly. Microsoft doesn't license its products to anyone (afaik) and it is therefore virtually without competitors, i.e. a monopoly. Spot the difference.
Incidentally, it is not necessarily bad to have a ubiquitous operating system, be it Windows or not. Remember the bad old days when demo disks of games (or for that matter, any other software) were distributed because there was simply no way you could tell whether they could be installed/played on your computer?! The downside of Microsoft's Windows monopoly isn't Windows itself but rather
that there is no one else producing Windows so that Microsoft is free to charge monopoly prices;
that Microsoft uses Windows monopoly as leverage to sell other (inferior) products (Office Suite; Internet Explorer) or crush competitors of such (Netscape; Corel);and
that no one else gets a chance to improve Windows.
David Suzuki's series The Nature Of Things had a really interesting programme on biomimicry in which Janine Benyus was one of the main people interviewed.
Parenthetically: there was a period in my life when I used to end up virtually every weekend watching daytime television while nursing the most horrible and well-deserved hang-overs. For some reason, Swedish TV chose to broadcast most of its David Suzuki shows during those hours. When hung-over, there is something oddly soothing about Suzuki's science-lite; by its sheer optimism and faith it can almost, almost make you believe that there is a light and a life at the end of the hung-over tunnel.
While it is true that corporates and individuals go to great trouble to avoid paying tax, this does not normally result in a company hiding its profits as the tax and accounting treatment of a company's position follow very different rules. A company always wants to tell its owners it is doing well and the tax department to is doing badly. In my new role as a financial analyst I can assure you that for most companies that these two ways of measuring a company's performance usually differ substantially from each other and from our independent valuation of the company.
PS This comment is by bettiwettiwoo's husband, rather than bettiwettiwoo.
It really irks me that this court didn't have the balls to stand up to the RIAA.
The task of the court is to evaluate the evidence presented before it and make a decision according to law, not according to knee-jerk reaction and prejudice.
Why does it all have to go up the court-ladder?
It didn't. The Washington District Court is at the same level as the San Francisco District Court. And yes, both of them are federal courts. According to this article
'[Judge] Illston said that because the two cases involve the same issues, she is concerned about possibility of different rulings from two federal judges.'
In a situation in which the law is somewhat new and uncertain -- as is the case here -- this is actually represents an 'informed, reasoned decision'.
Slashdot Mirror
The really creepy thing about people interviewed in the SBS programme was the way all the users kept pretending that it was, oh, such a natural thing to have sex with dolls. I'm just a completely normal guy having completely normal sex with dolls. One guy had this weird rope contraption with which he could get his doll, dressed in a school uniform no less, to dangle from the ceiling in a rather bizarre fashion.
At least the sex toy producers seemed to treat it somewhat more 'business-like'.
Doll Producer: 'See how life-like the doll is' = sales talk
Doll User: 'See how life-like the doll is' = actual opinion
Not too long ago, I caught the tail end of a programme on sex dolls on Australian SBS. It seemed largely concerned with sex dolls (Abyss Creations featured heavily), but also showed various sex machines. A man selling robotic body parts (head and hips respectively, both with orifices in suitable places) interviewed at some 'Adult Entertainment' expo, claimed that androids was a question of when, not if, and also that he fully expected to be selling them in the not-too-distant future. And I don't know whether he'd be that wrong considering how the porn industry seems to driving all sorts of developments these days: VHS rather than Betamax; chat rooms; jpeg; secure payment over the net ...
I remember watching this programme thinking that Battlestar Galactica got it wrong: that blonde chick came first.
Either way, you're not alone.
In at least part of the world, very soon, if we are not there already, there isn't enough land to grow 'multiple, complimentary crops' (as you suggest in your solution (1)) that will feed at least its local population. That is the problem. (Or at least a large part of it.) That is my point. (Or at least a large part of it.)
It is all well and fine to suggest that we feed the world on cake, or for that matter carrots and complimentary crops, but if that is not a real possibility, then you are effectively suggesting that we should simply give up the aspiration of feeding the entire world. Maybe we should. But then we should say so. In what way does 'selective farming/breeding' not manipulate genes?
Yes, of course it's a gamble. Yes, of course there is an amount of risk involved. But everything in life involves risk. That's why God invented trade-offs!
You seem to forget that there are 'consquences down the road' even if we don't make use of GM technology to feed the world's hungry. Such a policy too carries risks. Just risks of a different kind. We risk condemning a large part of the population of the developing world to perpetual famish and starvation. I would say that it is at least a tad problematic to condemn a large part of the world's population to a state of 'have-nots', particularly since they seem to have little say-so in the matter, but there are other problems as well. Being starved will necessarily mean that people will be more susceptible to disease and plagues. Plagues spread. With today's increased globalization they spread rapidly. All over the globe. That's a risk. As people starve they are probably (I'm guessing) less content with their lives; thereby probably bringing about more volatile situations within their societies where people might start to fight for whatever arable land and whatever food there is. And people will try to control whatever food there is. Think Rwanda. Think Somalia. That's a risk. People who starve might want to emigrate to countries where starvation is not a problem. There are already signs that those countries are not particularly intested in accepting more immigrants from cultures usually vastly different to their own. This might mean more illegal immigration. More pressures on whatever welfare state there is. This might a more volatile political situation in such 'immigration' countries. Can you say Jean-Marie Le Pen? That's a risk.
I am not so silly that I think GM crops will solve all the problems of the developing world. It won't. For one thing, GM technology won't solve over-population -- the one problem possibly feeding (pun not intended) into the other. However, neither am I silly enough to believe that all the world's problems will just go away if we don't make use of it.
Concerning problem (1): There is only so much arable land available. From what I understand, we have more or less reached the limit as the area of land we can use for agricultural purposes. That means that each unit of land should produce as much food as possible and as nutritious food as possible. The problem with your example of carrots isn't that they don't contain a hell of a lot of vitamin A, nor that they aren't easy to grow just about anywhere; they might well be: the problem is do they contain very much else in terms of nutrition besides Vitamin A?
Cf. these two tables with nutritional facts: rice and carrots. Judging by these, rice provides a better over-all nutritional option; in particular, it contains a not insubstantial amount of protein, which carrots do not contain at all, and which is also a priority in crops if you want to limit people's reliance on animal produce. (And you do want to limit people's reliance on animal produce.)
Given the limitation of arable land, you might have to chose between growing either A or B; in other words, you're not able to grow both. If faced with such a choice -- and I would argue that in particular the developing world is faced with that choice -- you would want to grow as nutritious a crop as possible. I assume that it is easier to modify rice so that it contains Vitamin A than it is to modify carrots so that they contain protein.
Concerning problem (2). Unless food is produced locally you have to distribute it. In order to distribute anything you need, among other things (in no particular order): (a) storage facilities; (b) infrastructure; (c) transport vehicles; (d) cold storage/freighters if you want to transport perishables; and (e) some form of law and order so that the food doesn't 'disappear' before reaching its destination. In too many developing countries all or most of these conditions are lacking. This means that you can have all the carrots you want, but if you can get them to people who starve what use are they? God, I hate the expression 'Frankenstein food'. Ever since the creation of agriculture, human kind has tampered with the genetics of its food stuffs. Isn't the origin of what we today call tomatoes some poisonous fruit from Latin America? Corn some shitty little purple plant it's impossible to recognize as such? Almonds -- other than bitter almonds -- a complete aberration? Virtually all of our grown food has been developed and/or tampered with in some form or another. The fact that we can now do it in a laboratory instead of in/on the field does not fundamentally alter that fact. Calling the one kind 'Frankenstein' but not the other is merely trying to pervert discourse by calling forth an emotional rather than rational response.
Finally: both problem (1) and (2) contain several 'sub'-problems; obviously, I haven't addressed all of them in this post.
Further,
Last year Ethiopia's population grew by 2.7%; according to this article: 'Most years, Ethiopia has to depend on some level of food aid as it rarely grows enough to feed the whole population.' The reliefweb article also states: 'many impoverished rural families say they have no choice but to have large families to help raise their incomes.' This strongly suggests that poverty is a vicious circle: because people are poor and famine-stricken they have more children; which leads to even greater pressure on food production; which, at its non-GM present state, is unable to answer with requisite increases in the amount it yields; which leads to even greater poverty; and so on and on and on. A way to break that vicious circle would be to provide people with the means to farm their own food locally and with better chances of success. In their article Technology That Will Save Billions From Starvation Prakash and Conko write:
It is estimated that Vitamin A deficiency leads to some 1,000,000 children dying and some additional 300,000 being struck by blindless every year. According to the WHO between 100 and 140 million children are vitamin A deficient and between 250,000 to 500,000 children per year become blind due to Vitamin A deficiency. If, as Patrick Moore says, 'adding a daffodil gene to rice in order to produce a genetically modified strain of rice can prevent half a million children from going
It would make for interesting sight-seeing opportunities, of course, but perhaps not when being later for a conference or some such.
That first sentence of my original post should of course have been:
The moment we abandon objectivism as a real, attainable position is the exact same moment we have to abandon universal truth as the objective of our inquiries. And not so incidentally, it is that very moment we have to start calling creationism a credible 'theory' instead of the bloody nonsense it really is.
In a poll (undertaken in Australia, I think) regarding media I read not so long ago, journalists were ranked below politicians in terms of credibility and trustworthiness. I seem to remember that they were ranked somewhere alongside lawyers. And that's a mighty low position. Oh, how the mighty have fallen: the Bernsteins/Woodwards of yore reduced to the Dregs
Let me suggest that this disenchantment has less to do with too much objectivity but rather too little. If you have to put up with constant spin and slanting of news anyway, why not go the whole hog and go for someone who doesn't make any faint pretence of objectivity but wears their subjectivity as a badge of honour?! Why watch BBC's Andrew Gilligan when you can have Bill O'Reilly?
Unlike you, however, I don't see this trend as indicating that people trade off objectivity for passion, I just think that given the lack of what I will here call reporting -- i.e., an impartial recounting of events -- which would be the first choice for most people, they are left with the second best, viz. the quasi-editorializing pontificating that is produced by most media outlets today, and then they prefer to listen to someone in their 'corner'. Again, I see that purely as a forced choice between two evils of essentially the same kind (the pro-guy or the con-guy, both (self-) opinionated bastards), rather than a true choice between two different approaches (impartiality on the one hand; partiality on the other).
Regarding accuracy, I think very few people outside the lunatic fringes of politics would really give that up as easily as you suggest. The quest for immediacy is, I believe, largely a media myth, appealing in its simplicity: it's much easier to be first than to be right. HEll, all you need to is to invent things as you go along: obviously you have a really good chance of being first with a story you yourself have just invented. And if somebody else invented it before you, why, all you need to do is invent something else. No sweat. Which is curiously reminiscent of the Ruth Shalit/Stephen Glass/Jason Blair approach to journalism, wouldn't you agree? I refuse to believe that there are very many people who would in the long run prefer their version of 'journalism' to a detached factual recount of events, however colourful their stories.
The blogosphere has its place, just like editorial/op-ed pages and openly opinionated pieces do. And no doubt people read/hear/watch these with great interest. That does not in any way subtract from the fact that the essence of journalism must be reporting, plain, simple, and objective. Passion has its everyday place, but that passion should, as a general rule, rest with the reader/listener/viewer, not with the reporter.
The moment we stop believing that objectivity is not only possible but also desirable is the moment that every argument is reduced to a mud-slinging match, where might is right and truth really is the first casualty.
Joshua Kurlantzick writes:
According to Kurlantzick, the net has three major limitations:
It can only disseminate information, not actually produce it;
Its essence is primarily individualistic: therefore it doesn't naturally foster collective activities/a communal spirit;
It requires literacy.
He continues:
Let There Be Lego
Can one make an analogy with libraries?
If libraries store printed media in which libellous statements (i.e., judged so by a court of law) have been printed, are the libraries then in any way guilty? Can they be sued? Can they be sued instead of the original source of the libel? Or only in conjection with or as some sort of accessory after the fact?
I would have thought not, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Antitrust law does not forbid you to hurt your competitors.[*] All competition does that. In fact, that is what competition is. Given a fixed number of customers, any enterprise that tries to attract as many customers as possible necessarily hurts its competitors, who will either lose customers or not gain as many new ones as they would have otherwise. Thus, the competitors will be financially worse off than they would have been had if they had been able to lay their grubby little hands on those customers. Or at least they should be. Competition is supposed to punish inefficiencies and reward efficiency, thereby allocating scarce resources the best/most efficient way possible.
What antitrust law primarily seeks to protect is competition, not competitors. Now, it might admittedly be just a little bit hard to have the one (former) without the other (latter) and much of tension within antitrust law and the debate surrounding it centres on that particular problem: should antitrust regulate structure or behaviour?
In Alcoa[**] Justice Learned Hand stated that it was not the objective of antitrust law to punish efficient companies: in case a party has had a monopoly 'thrust upon it', its position was not unlawful. However, he went on to say:
This so-called Alcoa doctrine placed monopolies under a strict per se-rule: i.e., monopolies were prohibited as such. The issue became one of structure: does an enterprise occupy a position of monopoly (within a relevant market) or not. If yes, unless it can be proved that the company is a mere passive recipient of its monopoly position, it is unlawful.
The Alcoa doctrine was severly critized, notably by Robert Bork in his The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy At War With Itself. Justice Hand seemed to find Alcoa guilty of being nothing more than a better competitor; better at doing business; in fact, Alcoa was being punished for being more efficient. And as the criticism took hold, courts reverted back to an ante-Alcoa, U.S. Steel[#] rule of reason approach centring on the behaviour of monopolizing: simply put, intent + harm. This would appear to be the (established) law today.
Bork and the Chicago schoolers sometimes seem to go futher than that however: one sometimes gets the impression that to them, the existence of a monopoly shows nothing more and nothing less than superiority in the market place. In other words, a position of monopoly is evidence of superior efficiency; efficiency is a valid exculpatory defence as it contibutes to increased consumer welfare[##]. A lot of the defence of Microsoft's monopoly case seems to rest upon this premise. See, for instance, here and here; for a more sober view, see Posner's article Antitrust in the New Economy , in particular, perhaps, pages 8-9.
Neo-classical economic theory and its antitrust exponents (to which Bork and the Chicago-schoolers obviously belong) are not without critics however. See, for instance, this piece by Metzenbaum and Foer in which they write:
Books that you understand immediately can also be interesting of course, but books that are something of a challenge are often the ones that stay with you -- irrespective of whether you finally agree with them or not.
Danish authoress Suzanne Brogger once said, a propos her book Ja, that since it had taken her 10 years to write it, she couldn't understand why it shouldn't take people 10 years to read it. Not that I necessarily think that for me personally that would apply to either Ja or Neuromancer. But it might for you -- after all: you seem to be re-reading after
Well, as the Russian guy says in Armageddon while wildly hitting the panel to make the spacecraft start (possibly not an exact quote): 'Russian equipment; American equipment: all made in Taiwan!'
Judging by, among others, these articles in Slate (here and here); these articles regarding an Eisner biography (here and here); this little gossipy titbit; and this critical letter of resignation from Roy E. Disney, the dissatisfaction with Eisner seems to have been brewing for quite some time.
I'm not sure I agree with that either. I think most hypochondriacs would prefer a certified medical treatment (a pill, some chemotherapy, whatever) that would convince them that they are cured from whatever illness they imagine themselves suffering from rather than sympathy. I mean, surely part of the problem -- from the hypochondriac's point of view -- is that not only are they sick, really, really sick with some -- probably -- life-threatening disease, but their doctor(s) is/are refusing to acknowledge that 'fact' and no treatment will therefore be received?! Sympathy be damned: what a hypochondriac wants is some surgery and a whole lotta pills!
Finally, and parenthetically, I don't think the Internet has managed to add very much to the hypochondriacs' lament. Jerome K. Jerome published his Three Men In A Boat some 100 years ago: in it the narrator J. comes across a medical textbook and manages to persuade himself that he suffers from every ailment in the book (quite literarily) save housemaid's knee. Upon seeing his doctor he receives the following prescription:
Which only shows that it was perfectly possible to be struck by hypochondria even without the use of electronics. Now, if only every hypochondriac were to receive such sensible advice.
Why? Let's face it: so far -- I admit that it might be hard to extrapolate with any larger degree of certainty as humankind is such a new species -- it appears to me that humans are some sort of larger equivalent to rats and cockroaches.
Think about it.
First of all we can eat almost anything: animal or vegetarian, the choice is yours, your body will be able to derive nourishment from either (didn't your mama ever teach you about vegetables?) -- although on a purely vegan diet vitamin B12 might be a bit of a problem.
Secondly, we appear to be able to live under almost any conditions: Eskimos live in extreme cold; Africans in (sometime) extreme heat; desert people endure lack of water; during moonsoons people on the Asian sub-continent get drenched in water. Or look at those people who during the Middle Ages were tortured/imprisoned by being locked up into boxes in which they could neither sit nor stand nor lie down fully but had to half-sit/-stand: there were people who survived inside such boxes for years!
Thirdly, some people seem unusually difficult to kill: when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki most people died but not all people did, some actually survived. They may have developed cancer in later years, their offspring might have developmental problems, but they survived: that's definitely cockroach quality! We also heal quite easily. Have you ever seen Star Gate? When the uber-alien says that it chose to reside in a human body because it was so easy to mend? That's actually true.
Furthermore, because the human species is so 'young' there are signs that our evolution is still very much on-going: a genetic disposition to, I believe, sleeping sickness with particularly the Asian population carries with it a certain measure of immunity to malaria: that particular genetic mutation/change is a direct evolutionary response to the 'environmental' pressure of malaria. In other words, there is still ample room for improvement/change. If the world would all of a sudden become animal-less, odds are we would, after an initial period of adjustment of course, survive and prosper as a species.
'Guilds' such as the ABA are in a way monopolies, it's true. On the other hand: can you think of an easier way than membership of a 'guild' with certain 'quality requirements' to guarantee that a person you wish to hire actually has some qualification for the task at hand?!? Law nowadays is a vastly larger and more complex field than it was 100 years ago. Some 100-200 years ago barbers could function as surgeons. I don't think they needed any formal education for that. Would you have a barber operate on you today?
And before we all get too excited: there is precious little analogy with Microsoft's monopoly in this. ABA admits anyone who passes its requirement for membership. These members then compete against each other. In other words: no monopoly. Microsoft doesn't license its products to anyone (afaik) and it is therefore virtually without competitors, i.e. a monopoly. Spot the difference.
Incidentally, it is not necessarily bad to have a ubiquitous operating system, be it Windows or not. Remember the bad old days when demo disks of games (or for that matter, any other software) were distributed because there was simply no way you could tell whether they could be installed/played on your computer?! The downside of Microsoft's Windows monopoly isn't Windows itself but rather
that there is no one else producing Windows so that Microsoft is free to charge monopoly prices;
that Microsoft uses Windows monopoly as leverage to sell other (inferior) products (Office Suite; Internet Explorer) or crush competitors of such (Netscape; Corel);and
that no one else gets a chance to improve Windows.
David Suzuki's series The Nature Of Things had a really interesting programme on biomimicry in which Janine Benyus was one of the main people interviewed.
Parenthetically: there was a period in my life when I used to end up virtually every weekend watching daytime television while nursing the most horrible and well-deserved hang-overs. For some reason, Swedish TV chose to broadcast most of its David Suzuki shows during those hours. When hung-over, there is something oddly soothing about Suzuki's science-lite; by its sheer optimism and faith it can almost, almost make you believe that there is a light and a life at the end of the hung-over tunnel.
While it is true that corporates and individuals go to great trouble to avoid paying tax, this does not normally result in a company hiding its profits as the tax and accounting treatment of a company's position follow very different rules. A company always wants to tell its owners it is doing well and the tax department to is doing badly. In my new role as a financial analyst I can assure you that for most companies that these two ways of measuring a company's performance usually differ substantially from each other and from our independent valuation of the company.
PS This comment is by bettiwettiwoo's husband, rather than bettiwettiwoo.
It didn't. The Washington District Court is at the same level as the San Francisco District Court. And yes, both of them are federal courts. According to this article In a situation in which the law is somewhat new and uncertain -- as is the case here -- this is actually represents an 'informed, reasoned decision'.