Islam generally frowns on "usury", so I guess a determined Iranian Religious Judge could easily fudge a conviction with a trumped up charge about that. Islamic Banking jumps through all kind of hoops to keep the Imams happy when making loans and paying interest.
But I'm curious if student loans are a general problem with Islam . . . ? Do pious students avoid them . . . ?
This would be a catastrophe for the US, if it would wake up tomorrow an Islamic Republic . . . all those students saddled with debt that will never be able to pay back would face prison, as well!
My wacky thought for the morning . ..
Foreign citizens are not eligible for student loans in the US. Kokabee probably got some other form of financial assistance like a fellowship or an assistantship. The summary is wrong.
What is the point of getting a second PhD? Other than financial, I don't see other reason to pursue a second PhD. Besides, all the class credits would transfer and you'd basically end up doing research what a post-doc would do but be a PhD student.
Good point about distractions. Good managers or team leads will make sure their coders are not distracted. Someone mentioned phone calls and silly questions taking up half of their work day, but interruptions are worse than that: interrupting a coder who is in "flow" even for one minute can easily cost half an hour or more of that coder's productivity. Even worse: nudging a coder out of flow several times a day for an extended period of time will lead to severe fatigue and, when under pressure to deliver, a high risk of burnout.
Working coders need to be left alone. Not because they are prima donnas, just because of the nature of their work and the mindset required for it.
Hamming, a famous programmer at Bell Labs talks about open-doors and closed-doors. The general consensus is that people with open-doors tend to be more successful than people with closed-doors.
It is very important to keep your ears to the ground and know what is going on in the workplace. Those "distractions" can sometimes be very important information that can save you hundreds of hours of works or advance your career. A "minute" talking to a person can reveal what a thousand words cannot.
Evolution is nothing more than "scientific knowledge". How has it been utilized for practical uses for society? Eugenics?
Evolution has been used to reason some horrible acts. Slavery was acceptable since white slave owners were more evolutionarily advanced (the leaves of the evolutionary tree). Nazis gassing Jews was all right in their view because Aryans were the superior uber-race and they had to clear out the inferior unter-races for the master race to expand.
For a lot of people, evolution stands for superiority of some group of people over others.
Of course, the theory of evolution doesn't say that but we have lots of people using evolution to imply superiority of races, groups or country over another.
And of course there is this big thing that creationism and evolution are not alternate theories. Creationism is about how life started and evolution is about how we got the diversity we have now. The primordial soup theory of evolution is still a weak un-demonstrated theory. We could easily have that god created life and then evolution created the diversity of species, or that evolution was part of God's creation so he didn't have to do all the work.
So, people don't want evolution to be taught in schools because they think evolution is just veiled racism theory which says some races are closer to the apes and mentally inferior than others.
LOL. Didn't they make people who were caught file-sharing write similar "anti-piracy" confessions for reduced charges?
Anyways, we criticize countries for not having freedom of press. But, on the other hand, when countries do have freedom of press, we exploit that by planing stories to produce a favorable climate (e.g. the Iran CIA coup started with planted stories in the press).
We have the largest prison population in the world and we have made incarceration and jails into a intricate behemoth of a system to deal out punishment to torture on any level we like. Yet, we criticize the laws of other countries which incarcerates a smaller portion of their population.
As many have pointed out, wasn't Manning subjected to the same treatment that you describe what might happened? Didn't the kidnapper Castro "commit suicide"?
On Wikipedia, it's written that head and neck cancer
is strongly associated with certain environmental and lifestyle risk factors
The article says,
Other limitations included lack of data on potential confounders such as patients' diet and socioeconomic status
Isn't the work conditions one of the biggest things you look at in a cancer study? In the case of dental study, also diet.
Among 399 patients with head and neck cancer, current or previous dental caries were significantly less common than in 221 individuals without a cancer diagnosis,
Something like smoking or chewing tobacco would increase cancer risks but lower cavities.
Pros who aren't super-famous *restored* the "music industry" for me, assuming that what you mean is "got me to pay for music". On more occasions than I can count, I have visited coffee shops or the San Gregorio General Store and flipped some money into the tip jar.
Prior to that, I just didn't pay for stuff because radio was good enough, or I had Yahoo music subscription and they ruined it. So yeah, RIAA got ruined by pros who aren't famous, but these guys get money directly from me without going through you and I help to support interesting local music. In other words, so long RIAA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Once upon a time, music labels would send music scouts and sign bands and support them for years even at a loss hoping they would pay off in the future. This would of course be supported by the money generated by the superstar bands.
There are so many bands that only produced works of great artistic value in their 4th or later albums.
Of course, music labels later on stopped doing that and started creating their own music stars. I don't know if this coincided with internet music or was because of it.
There used to be a feeling that if you were good in the local music scene, the record companies would sooner or later come knocking. In the past ten to fifteen years, that evaporated. There were local superstars who ran massive credit card debts and spent all their energy on music only to burn out and get real jobs (bald spots and long hair look silly together).
Perhaps things have changed now. I haven't been in the local music scene since I'm not in my twenties any more. Perhaps bands now don't give up but market their music through the internet and achieve some level of success there.
You think it's GM food that's making everyone fat?? What's making everyone fat is part chemistry (plastics) and other environmental changes (I'm 61, I never saw a single man with moobs when I was a kid no matter how fat he was) but mostly increased caloric intake. When I was a kid a small soda was 8 oz, medium 12, and large 16. Now a small is 20 oz. There were no half pound hamburgers. Restaurants didn't give you double portions of everything like they do now.
Since genetic engineering is biology and not chemistry, it shouldn't have any bad effects, right?
You don't have to look hard to see what vitamin A deficiency is doing to people in the third world.
You literally have to look away from what obesity is doing to people in this country.
Idiots who shop at Whole Foods would rather a child go blind due to vitamin deficiency rather than allow an evil GMO food to be used. Their suggestion of "they should eat more vegetables" ignores the simple fact that they need the special rice because they don't have access to the fucking vegetables.
Tons of food have been destroyed in Africa because of this ignorance. It's better that people starve rather than risk ingesting a GMO food. What. The. Fuck?
Would rather die from cardio-vascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer then?
Spoken like someone that has never gone hungry.
Would I rather die of obesity and heart disease than hunger? Yes, a million times, yes. At least I would have a chance to live. Fuck you to hell for suggesting it is better to let people go blind and starve than be forced to admit the GMO boogeyman isn't as horrible as you want him to sound.
Also, GMO produce is not causing American obesity, or any of the other conditions you are referring to.
So morbid obesity is more "pleasant" than malnutrition then, huh?
I've heard this "well intentioned" bullshit before. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we were supposed to be using smart bombs to liberate millions of people. Now, we're spending billions to be sitting around flying drones killing villagers and kids.
So, let's bomb the rice genome with smart viruses and this will help millions of people right? Nothing bad could possibly happen.
Which has sweet fuck all to do with GMO and everything to do with the American government bringing in subsidies to discount the production of corn. America as a country is actively encouraging people to eat unhealthy food. It might be stupid, and it might be something worth discussing, but it has nothing at all to do with people dying or going blind in Africa and Asia.
We're not going around looking for problems you dumb cunt, millions of people are dying and millions are going blind, we've already found a monstrously big problem and ignorance is stopping a viable solution from being used.
When the food subsidies were being introduced, if someone had said it was a bad idea because it would cause the nation to get fat, he/she would probably have been called a dumb cunt as well.
If we mess with rice, the basic of the most basic stapes of billions of people, we could turn a million people problem into a billion people problem.
Have you actually set foot in a rice paddy here in Asia? I'm guessing not. Rice is extremely unique in its ability to grow under monsoonal conditions. I'm not aware that carrots are fond of 5cm of standing water throughout the growing season.
Are you serious? The problem can be solved easily by elevating and draining small portions of the field for other crops than rice. Even if you believe the entire Asia farmlands turns into few inch deep pond, what about rice with fish farming?
Beyond that, as the grandparent noted, these people use all the land to grow rice. It's not that there aren't good solutions (from a Western developed country standpoint), it's that this one FITS the problem at hand.
To me it seems like there are many many solutions. It's just that the other solutions can't be the product of a mega-corporation.
Agree. It's better to put our trust in arbitrary fears and let a couple of million children go blind.
All I'm saying is that genetically modifying rice to produce vitamin A sounds like a professor with a lab looking for things to do rather than someone really trying to solve the real vitamin A deficiency problem.
The simplest solution seems to be to grow some carrots or other vitamin A rich food alongside rice. But, maybe you're right and they need every inch of their land to grow rice and can't spare any for other vegetables.
Maybe we all become orange oompa-loompas eating nothing but fortified rice.
Yes, god forbid that we try to solve problems with technology. Where would THAT leave us? Especially with technology that can have unspecified "large possibly unknown consequences". I prefer my solutions without any potential problems. I haven't found any such solutions yet, but I am confident that I will strike gold any day now.
There is a difference between solving problems with technology and going looking for problems to solve with the technology we have.
I guess you prefer your solutions which produce larger problems than the initial problem it solved.
Idiots who shop at Whole Foods would rather a child go blind due to vitamin deficiency rather than allow an evil GMO food to be used. Their suggestion of "they should eat more vegetables" ignores the simple fact that they need the special rice because they don't have access to the fucking vegetables.
Tons of food have been destroyed in Africa because of this ignorance. It's better that people starve rather than risk ingesting a GMO food. What. The. Fuck?
Would rather die from cardio-vascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer then?
We tinkered around with our food system and 2/3 of the population is over-weight and 1/3 is obese. We suffer from heart disease, diabetes and related problems in epidemic proportions.
Maybe the solution isn't genetically modifying rice but something simpler as finding the right vegetables to grow alongside the rice that supplies the missing vitamin.
Plus, vitamin A in excess is toxic and causes liver damage. Maybe we fix childhood blindness but instead give teenage cirrhosis.
Just because we can genetically modify plants doesn't mean we should go around looking for problems to solve with it, especially that can have large possibly unknown consequences.
In a number of different memoirs from actors in the original Planet of the Apes, it was noted that people playing different types of apes always sat with each other at lunch. It was a bizarre granfalloon - baboons with baboons and orangs with orangs for no other reason than that they looked the same. And these were people that knew each other before the film.
People have a natural inclination to like people that look more like them whether it makes sense in modern society or not.
That doesn't make sense. A while ago, I had to with storing my clothes and getting dressed where there were no mirrors. I had no idea how badly I was mismatching clothes and colors.
The point is I had no idea what I looked like. How would I seek out similar people?
The different apes could have sat together for thousands of reasons. Something as small as a prelunch routine that gave the different apes even something small differently could result in them sitting together.
My last owner's manual was about 400 pages; but contained only about 10 pages of useful information.
10 pages of useful information to you maybe. Other people will find some other 10 pages useful.
My mathematics textbook is 600 pages but there is only 1 page with the information that I need to solve a problem. Doesn't mean the book has only 1 page of useful information.
Everytime I visit the grocery store nearby, it's like a game of pacman. They have about six security guards per isle and they follow me around like dim-witted ghosts. I have to hurriedly snatch up my bread, coffee, and milk to make it safely to checkout.
I have no idea what kind of grocery store you go to but the one I go to has hundreds of cameras mounted above the isles. If they follow me, they do so in the comfort of their central room where they can view the camera feeds.
Since there is only one exit to the grocery store, they can always nab me there if needed.
Plus, most stores employ plain clothes loss prevention agents who disguise themselves as shoppers. They get rewarded for every shoplifter they catch because if you are caught shoplifting, they will offer to make a deal with you for $400 to not press charges in the local courts.
When computers and automated machines get more intelligent, you will need to be a genius to do most of the work in the world. The reason this time it's different from the luddites is that this time computers *are* capable of being smarter than the average dumbass. I thought on Slashdot this crucial point would be obvious.
Computers can't even read captchas. The stuff you are talking about is far far away, many many breakthroughs in many many fields away. Sadly it will be well after our lifetimes.
Tell that to the economies that are experiencing 10+% unemployment. Tell that to Spain and Greece where their youth unemployment rate is greater than 50%. Tell me that when you get unemployed.
Those are creations of economic fluctuations and are just temporary. Things will go back up soon. If you take the average over windows of years or decades, it is about the same over time.
Do you really think you can take a relatively unskilled job worker and magically train them for a higher skilled job and not have that affect the balance? Presuming most can barely move up one or two rungs on the intellectual ladder, they just push the next group up. Now, there's a reason they're in a poorly paid, low-skilled position; we're not replete with geniuses assembling cars and driving big rigs because they enjoy the lifestyle.
Haha, Ho Lee Christ. I don't even know where to start.
It takes 1-4 years to retrain someone.
You don't have to be a genius to do 99.99% of the work in the world. Anyway, most geniuses are geniuses because they produced a work of genius. High IQ or whatever measure doesn't make a genius and a geniuses don't all score high on the same IQ or such measure. Even the icon of genius Einstein would a picture of a failure the day before he published his works of genius. It could very well be that the average human is capable of being a genius with the right circumstance.
There is an infinite number of things for people to do. Unless there is millions of users or billions of dollars, the progress in most fields advance at almost a snail's pace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with_diseases [wikipedia.org]
it doesnt really matter if i "believe" theyre bad for me. Scientific research seems to conclude saturated fats are linked to varying extents with both heart disease and cancer.
Scientific research does NOT seem to conclude saturated fats linked to heart disease. It is still being highly debated. Just one side of the argument got support from a senator decades ago and popular culture embraced it.
Sure, there are papers that show correlations but as I said they are flawed. There are plenty of refutes and other papers that show saturated fats help in heart disease.
'tastes like grass' is an incredibly subjective assertion. the conclusion that fat 'brings out their flavour' is also baseless considering fermentation and roasting are readily available alternatives which have been used for centuries. Beets, Carrots, Corn and cucumber all have a distinctive flavour despite the lack of fat.
Fermentation and roasting rely on the starches and glucides. Vegetables high in starches and sugar tastes good raw. But, of course, in the modern food world with sugar, they can't compete on sugar. Vegetables that are low in both starches/sugar and fat can be eaten but cooked right with fat, they bring out the flavors of the vegetables. Yes, it's a highly subjective opinion but as someone who has cooked heaps of vegetables like broccoli and spinach that even kids have loved to eat, I stand by it.
hydrogenated oils go through chemical processing in order to introduce hydrogen. as for cream, or butter, not a single drop reaches a supermarket before being pasteurized at 'temperatures'.
I could make butter at home but I can't make corn/soyabean/canola oil at home. So, they are still industrial foods in my book.
I can get a crappy cheese burger for a buck. Oh sorry I didn't realize you meant the cheapest healthy food available. Do carry on with your imaginary argument, though.
Ground beef is $1.99/lb here. A dozen eggs is 99c and onions are 3lbs for $1. Mix them together and you have meat for more than 4 quarter-pounders or maybe 8-12 dollar burgers. Buns are $1 for eight and cheese slices are $2 for a dozen. So, you can make cheeseburgers cheaper than for a dollar.
McDonald's have successfully hacked the human brain and created foods that people just can't say no to.
The problem with these kinds of argument is "what is the hack?" What is the magic "Turkish Delight" that we simply can't say no to. People simply believe that there is something like this but don't know what it is or don't care to find out but still hold onto the belief that there is this magic hack.
Why don't people get their local fast food recipe and cook them at home and get the same brain hack itch satisfied? Do you see anyone making McDonald hamburger clones to home?
Because there is no hack, no magic ingredient. It's just advertising, convenience, habits and low price. There is no magic in the food. If there is magic ingredient, it is ingredients that we are too afraid to cook at home because they are "bad" for you. Maybe we are afraid to cook ground beef in oil or put cheese/mayo in our food and that is magic ingredient. But, certainly no, magic chemical.
Browned butter and whole cream are still entirely acceptable additions to most semi-casual and upscale dining experiences despite the well proven fact theyre killing us.
They are not proven or if you think they are proven, the proof is under a lot of dispute. The major papers and studies that constitute "proof" have been found to have major statistical and analytical problems. One such problem was that all correlations to saturated fats to heart disease did not control for sugars and carbs. People who were eating high saturated fats were also eating higher sugars and carbs but it was not controlled because the researcher believed sugars/carbs to be harmless.
Because of attitude like yours, butter and cream are replaced with canola/corn/soyabean oil because it is unsaturated fat/plant oil. These oils are industrial products going through high temperatures, chemicals and storage processes and even though they are unsaturated and "good", they are unstable and full of impurities.
Many adults simply avoid healthy vegetables like onions, tomatoes or broccoli alltogether, picking from their meal and instead focusing on pasta or meat.
And, you know why? Because, vegetables need fat to make them tasty and bring out their flavor. If you start throwing out the fat, vegetables start tasting like grass. If they are cooked properly with fat and seasonings, they are great. Even seafood like shrimps and crabs legs were once considered food that didn't taste good. Only by cooking them with butter, it has reached its status as it has now.
So, stop believing saturated fats are bad for you. It's just a product of the 80s advertising campaign that hammered the point that fats are bad for you by showing saturated fats in semi-solid form in lower temperatures clogging drains and making the connection that your arteries are the drain and saturated fats clogs both.
Slashdot Mirror
Islam generally frowns on "usury", so I guess a determined Iranian Religious Judge could easily fudge a conviction with a trumped up charge about that. Islamic Banking jumps through all kind of hoops to keep the Imams happy when making loans and paying interest.
But I'm curious if student loans are a general problem with Islam . . . ? Do pious students avoid them . . . ?
This would be a catastrophe for the US, if it would wake up tomorrow an Islamic Republic . . . all those students saddled with debt that will never be able to pay back would face prison, as well!
My wacky thought for the morning . . .
Foreign citizens are not eligible for student loans in the US. Kokabee probably got some other form of financial assistance like a fellowship or an assistantship. The summary is wrong.
The wikipedia article says he was working on his second PhD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omid_Kokabee
What is the point of getting a second PhD? Other than financial, I don't see other reason to pursue a second PhD. Besides, all the class credits would transfer and you'd basically end up doing research what a post-doc would do but be a PhD student.
Good point about distractions. Good managers or team leads will make sure their coders are not distracted. Someone mentioned phone calls and silly questions taking up half of their work day, but interruptions are worse than that: interrupting a coder who is in "flow" even for one minute can easily cost half an hour or more of that coder's productivity. Even worse: nudging a coder out of flow several times a day for an extended period of time will lead to severe fatigue and, when under pressure to deliver, a high risk of burnout. Working coders need to be left alone. Not because they are prima donnas, just because of the nature of their work and the mindset required for it.
Hamming, a famous programmer at Bell Labs talks about open-doors and closed-doors. The general consensus is that people with open-doors tend to be more successful than people with closed-doors.
It is very important to keep your ears to the ground and know what is going on in the workplace. Those "distractions" can sometimes be very important information that can save you hundreds of hours of works or advance your career. A "minute" talking to a person can reveal what a thousand words cannot.
As scientific knowledge advances, god shrinks.
Evolution is nothing more than "scientific knowledge". How has it been utilized for practical uses for society? Eugenics?
Evolution has been used to reason some horrible acts. Slavery was acceptable since white slave owners were more evolutionarily advanced (the leaves of the evolutionary tree). Nazis gassing Jews was all right in their view because Aryans were the superior uber-race and they had to clear out the inferior unter-races for the master race to expand.
For a lot of people, evolution stands for superiority of some group of people over others.
Of course, the theory of evolution doesn't say that but we have lots of people using evolution to imply superiority of races, groups or country over another.
And of course there is this big thing that creationism and evolution are not alternate theories. Creationism is about how life started and evolution is about how we got the diversity we have now. The primordial soup theory of evolution is still a weak un-demonstrated theory. We could easily have that god created life and then evolution created the diversity of species, or that evolution was part of God's creation so he didn't have to do all the work.
So, people don't want evolution to be taught in schools because they think evolution is just veiled racism theory which says some races are closer to the apes and mentally inferior than others.
LOL. Didn't they make people who were caught file-sharing write similar "anti-piracy" confessions for reduced charges?
Anyways, we criticize countries for not having freedom of press. But, on the other hand, when countries do have freedom of press, we exploit that by planing stories to produce a favorable climate (e.g. the Iran CIA coup started with planted stories in the press).
We have the largest prison population in the world and we have made incarceration and jails into a intricate behemoth of a system to deal out punishment to torture on any level we like. Yet, we criticize the laws of other countries which incarcerates a smaller portion of their population.
As many have pointed out, wasn't Manning subjected to the same treatment that you describe what might happened? Didn't the kidnapper Castro "commit suicide"?
On Wikipedia, it's written that head and neck cancer
is strongly associated with certain environmental and lifestyle risk factors
The article says,
Other limitations included lack of data on potential confounders such as patients' diet and socioeconomic status
Isn't the work conditions one of the biggest things you look at in a cancer study? In the case of dental study, also diet.
Among 399 patients with head and neck cancer, current or previous dental caries were significantly less common than in 221 individuals without a cancer diagnosis,
Something like smoking or chewing tobacco would increase cancer risks but lower cavities.
Pros who aren't super-famous *restored* the "music industry" for me, assuming that what you mean is "got me to pay for music". On more occasions than I can count, I have visited coffee shops or the San Gregorio General Store and flipped some money into the tip jar.
Prior to that, I just didn't pay for stuff because radio was good enough, or I had Yahoo music subscription and they ruined it. So yeah, RIAA got ruined by pros who aren't famous, but these guys get money directly from me without going through you and I help to support interesting local music. In other words, so long RIAA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Once upon a time, music labels would send music scouts and sign bands and support them for years even at a loss hoping they would pay off in the future. This would of course be supported by the money generated by the superstar bands.
There are so many bands that only produced works of great artistic value in their 4th or later albums.
Of course, music labels later on stopped doing that and started creating their own music stars. I don't know if this coincided with internet music or was because of it.
There used to be a feeling that if you were good in the local music scene, the record companies would sooner or later come knocking. In the past ten to fifteen years, that evaporated. There were local superstars who ran massive credit card debts and spent all their energy on music only to burn out and get real jobs (bald spots and long hair look silly together).
Perhaps things have changed now. I haven't been in the local music scene since I'm not in my twenties any more. Perhaps bands now don't give up but market their music through the internet and achieve some level of success there.
You think it's GM food that's making everyone fat?? What's making everyone fat is part chemistry (plastics) and other environmental changes (I'm 61, I never saw a single man with moobs when I was a kid no matter how fat he was) but mostly increased caloric intake. When I was a kid a small soda was 8 oz, medium 12, and large 16. Now a small is 20 oz. There were no half pound hamburgers. Restaurants didn't give you double portions of everything like they do now.
Since genetic engineering is biology and not chemistry, it shouldn't have any bad effects, right?
You don't have to look hard to see what vitamin A deficiency is doing to people in the third world.
You literally have to look away from what obesity is doing to people in this country.
Idiots who shop at Whole Foods would rather a child go blind due to vitamin deficiency rather than allow an evil GMO food to be used. Their suggestion of "they should eat more vegetables" ignores the simple fact that they need the special rice because they don't have access to the fucking vegetables.
Tons of food have been destroyed in Africa because of this ignorance. It's better that people starve rather than risk ingesting a GMO food. What. The. Fuck?
Would rather die from cardio-vascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer then?
Spoken like someone that has never gone hungry.
Would I rather die of obesity and heart disease than hunger? Yes, a million times, yes. At least I would have a chance to live. Fuck you to hell for suggesting it is better to let people go blind and starve than be forced to admit the GMO boogeyman isn't as horrible as you want him to sound.
Also, GMO produce is not causing American obesity, or any of the other conditions you are referring to.
So morbid obesity is more "pleasant" than malnutrition then, huh?
I've heard this "well intentioned" bullshit before. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we were supposed to be using smart bombs to liberate millions of people. Now, we're spending billions to be sitting around flying drones killing villagers and kids.
So, let's bomb the rice genome with smart viruses and this will help millions of people right? Nothing bad could possibly happen.
Which has sweet fuck all to do with GMO and everything to do with the American government bringing in subsidies to discount the production of corn. America as a country is actively encouraging people to eat unhealthy food. It might be stupid, and it might be something worth discussing, but it has nothing at all to do with people dying or going blind in Africa and Asia. We're not going around looking for problems you dumb cunt, millions of people are dying and millions are going blind, we've already found a monstrously big problem and ignorance is stopping a viable solution from being used.
When the food subsidies were being introduced, if someone had said it was a bad idea because it would cause the nation to get fat, he/she would probably have been called a dumb cunt as well.
If we mess with rice, the basic of the most basic stapes of billions of people, we could turn a million people problem into a billion people problem.
That pretty well sums up what happened when hard drives became expensive a couple of years ago - surely you noticed it?
Fish Culture in Rice Fields
Have you actually set foot in a rice paddy here in Asia? I'm guessing not. Rice is extremely unique in its ability to grow under monsoonal conditions. I'm not aware that carrots are fond of 5cm of standing water throughout the growing season.
Are you serious? The problem can be solved easily by elevating and draining small portions of the field for other crops than rice. Even if you believe the entire Asia farmlands turns into few inch deep pond, what about rice with fish farming?
Beyond that, as the grandparent noted, these people use all the land to grow rice. It's not that there aren't good solutions (from a Western developed country standpoint), it's that this one FITS the problem at hand.
To me it seems like there are many many solutions. It's just that the other solutions can't be the product of a mega-corporation.
Agree. It's better to put our trust in arbitrary fears and let a couple of million children go blind.
All I'm saying is that genetically modifying rice to produce vitamin A sounds like a professor with a lab looking for things to do rather than someone really trying to solve the real vitamin A deficiency problem.
The simplest solution seems to be to grow some carrots or other vitamin A rich food alongside rice. But, maybe you're right and they need every inch of their land to grow rice and can't spare any for other vegetables.
Maybe we all become orange oompa-loompas eating nothing but fortified rice.
Yes, god forbid that we try to solve problems with technology. Where would THAT leave us? Especially with technology that can have unspecified "large possibly unknown consequences". I prefer my solutions without any potential problems. I haven't found any such solutions yet, but I am confident that I will strike gold any day now.
There is a difference between solving problems with technology and going looking for problems to solve with the technology we have.
I guess you prefer your solutions which produce larger problems than the initial problem it solved.
Idiots who shop at Whole Foods would rather a child go blind due to vitamin deficiency rather than allow an evil GMO food to be used. Their suggestion of "they should eat more vegetables" ignores the simple fact that they need the special rice because they don't have access to the fucking vegetables.
Tons of food have been destroyed in Africa because of this ignorance. It's better that people starve rather than risk ingesting a GMO food. What. The. Fuck?
Would rather die from cardio-vascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer then?
We tinkered around with our food system and 2/3 of the population is over-weight and 1/3 is obese. We suffer from heart disease, diabetes and related problems in epidemic proportions.
Maybe the solution isn't genetically modifying rice but something simpler as finding the right vegetables to grow alongside the rice that supplies the missing vitamin.
Plus, vitamin A in excess is toxic and causes liver damage. Maybe we fix childhood blindness but instead give teenage cirrhosis.
Just because we can genetically modify plants doesn't mean we should go around looking for problems to solve with it, especially that can have large possibly unknown consequences.
The day after Snowden reveals NSA snoops secure internet traffic ...
Do we even trust the media anymore? They are just a tool for beating the war drums now.
Wasn't the whole CIA-Iran coup thing started with planting false stories in the media. How do we know that we aren't being fed planted stories?
In a number of different memoirs from actors in the original Planet of the Apes, it was noted that people playing different types of apes always sat with each other at lunch. It was a bizarre granfalloon - baboons with baboons and orangs with orangs for no other reason than that they looked the same. And these were people that knew each other before the film.
People have a natural inclination to like people that look more like them whether it makes sense in modern society or not.
That doesn't make sense. A while ago, I had to with storing my clothes and getting dressed where there were no mirrors. I had no idea how badly I was mismatching clothes and colors.
The point is I had no idea what I looked like. How would I seek out similar people?
The different apes could have sat together for thousands of reasons. Something as small as a prelunch routine that gave the different apes even something small differently could result in them sitting together.
My last owner's manual was about 400 pages; but contained only about 10 pages of useful information.
10 pages of useful information to you maybe. Other people will find some other 10 pages useful.
My mathematics textbook is 600 pages but there is only 1 page with the information that I need to solve a problem. Doesn't mean the book has only 1 page of useful information.
I have no idea what kind of grocery store you go to but the one I go to has hundreds of cameras mounted above the isles. If they follow me, they do so in the comfort of their central room where they can view the camera feeds.
Since there is only one exit to the grocery store, they can always nab me there if needed.
Plus, most stores employ plain clothes loss prevention agents who disguise themselves as shoppers. They get rewarded for every shoplifter they catch because if you are caught shoplifting, they will offer to make a deal with you for $400 to not press charges in the local courts.
Computers can't even read captchas. The stuff you are talking about is far far away, many many breakthroughs in many many fields away. Sadly it will be well after our lifetimes.
Those are creations of economic fluctuations and are just temporary. Things will go back up soon. If you take the average over windows of years or decades, it is about the same over time.
Didn't they have Microsoft Messenger?
The thing kept popping up in startup.
Haha, Ho Lee Christ. I don't even know where to start.
It takes 1-4 years to retrain someone.
You don't have to be a genius to do 99.99% of the work in the world. Anyway, most geniuses are geniuses because they produced a work of genius. High IQ or whatever measure doesn't make a genius and a geniuses don't all score high on the same IQ or such measure. Even the icon of genius Einstein would a picture of a failure the day before he published his works of genius. It could very well be that the average human is capable of being a genius with the right circumstance.
There is an infinite number of things for people to do. Unless there is millions of users or billions of dollars, the progress in most fields advance at almost a snail's pace.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/saturated-fat-healthy/#axzz2cZ2Fmnln
Scientific research does NOT seem to conclude saturated fats linked to heart disease. It is still being highly debated. Just one side of the argument got support from a senator decades ago and popular culture embraced it.
Sure, there are papers that show correlations but as I said they are flawed. There are plenty of refutes and other papers that show saturated fats help in heart disease.
Fermentation and roasting rely on the starches and glucides. Vegetables high in starches and sugar tastes good raw. But, of course, in the modern food world with sugar, they can't compete on sugar. Vegetables that are low in both starches/sugar and fat can be eaten but cooked right with fat, they bring out the flavors of the vegetables. Yes, it's a highly subjective opinion but as someone who has cooked heaps of vegetables like broccoli and spinach that even kids have loved to eat, I stand by it.
I could make butter at home but I can't make corn/soyabean/canola oil at home. So, they are still industrial foods in my book.
Ground beef is $1.99/lb here. A dozen eggs is 99c and onions are 3lbs for $1. Mix them together and you have meat for more than 4 quarter-pounders or maybe 8-12 dollar burgers. Buns are $1 for eight and cheese slices are $2 for a dozen. So, you can make cheeseburgers cheaper than for a dollar.
The problem with these kinds of argument is "what is the hack?" What is the magic "Turkish Delight" that we simply can't say no to. People simply believe that there is something like this but don't know what it is or don't care to find out but still hold onto the belief that there is this magic hack.
Why don't people get their local fast food recipe and cook them at home and get the same brain hack itch satisfied? Do you see anyone making McDonald hamburger clones to home?
Because there is no hack, no magic ingredient. It's just advertising, convenience, habits and low price. There is no magic in the food. If there is magic ingredient, it is ingredients that we are too afraid to cook at home because they are "bad" for you. Maybe we are afraid to cook ground beef in oil or put cheese/mayo in our food and that is magic ingredient. But, certainly no, magic chemical.
They are not proven or if you think they are proven, the proof is under a lot of dispute. The major papers and studies that constitute "proof" have been found to have major statistical and analytical problems. One such problem was that all correlations to saturated fats to heart disease did not control for sugars and carbs. People who were eating high saturated fats were also eating higher sugars and carbs but it was not controlled because the researcher believed sugars/carbs to be harmless.
Because of attitude like yours, butter and cream are replaced with canola/corn/soyabean oil because it is unsaturated fat/plant oil. These oils are industrial products going through high temperatures, chemicals and storage processes and even though they are unsaturated and "good", they are unstable and full of impurities.
And, you know why? Because, vegetables need fat to make them tasty and bring out their flavor. If you start throwing out the fat, vegetables start tasting like grass. If they are cooked properly with fat and seasonings, they are great. Even seafood like shrimps and crabs legs were once considered food that didn't taste good. Only by cooking them with butter, it has reached its status as it has now.
So, stop believing saturated fats are bad for you. It's just a product of the 80s advertising campaign that hammered the point that fats are bad for you by showing saturated fats in semi-solid form in lower temperatures clogging drains and making the connection that your arteries are the drain and saturated fats clogs both.