There are still large swathes of the population, however, who don't get it, and there are huge corporations with lots of money to be lost if we actually start doing the right things about the problems. Logic is against them, but they are pumping cash into our decisionmaking process to make logic go away.
Feeding them the correct food, giving them room to roam away from each other and from their waste or cleaning their living areas continually, identifying and isolating the sick ones quicker, all do cost more.
At current prices most producers would quit. Supply drops, prices go up, demand drops, equilibrium is reached, and we move on with less meat in our diets or pay more for it. It's a sort of tax vs. current status quo.
The alternative is to give medicine to the animals to avoid all that and still get the meat to the market. Supply is maintained, prices remain (relatively) low.
But then we get superbugs, get sick, have to spend money on medicine for us, lose income to illness, and/or die. It's a sort of tax vs. the current status quo.
Anyone who wants a bill against use of drugs that create superbugs in the food chain needs to be making this sort of argument: we're going to pay for it one way or the other; we can can choose between a more expensive sandwich, or death.
And they need to make sure that the voters in their district know that the person opposing them is choosing to kill people to make an agricorporation another.
* - Some people would think that's a good thing; I happen not to be one of them, but that's not the point here. Pass the veal.
If the families of fallen and standing soldiers are having undue stress, they shouldn't be wasting their time trying to get a fucking game changed, they should be spending it trying to get the fucking war changed.
But because of a couple of decades of hard propaganda by the right, the word "liberal" is totally misdefined in the minds of most people, as is "socialism", and virtually nobody ever understood what "fascism" meant, but it makes a good scare word, so now, after dodging it since WW2, the right has started using it to describe a Democrat President of the U.S., pretty much putting a huge, red, spinning light atop their propagandamobile so you can clearly see it if you pry your eyes away from the dial of the radio on which Rush Limbaugh is teaching you to think anything left of Joe McCarthy is Stalinism.
If you don't want the government telling the self-made fiefdoms how not to assist other self-made fiefdoms to defraud the serfs, then you just don't want a government at all.
But if you want an example of that, I refer you to Somalia, and ask you again if you really want that.
We were born to eat, sleep, shit, get laid, and then die. Preferably downwind.
The rest of this stuff is just something to do, because in the process of not-dying before we could get laid, we somehow developed more intellectual capacity than we'd ever need just to survive what this planet was throwing at us.
Oh. Well, yes. I agree that robots are much better at exploration than humans.
Because, honestly, 99.9% of the stuff we want to explore in space isn't accessible to humans at all. I mean, you can't touch an asteroid in its native environment. Might as well send a robot to grab a chunk (or a few nanogranules) and bring it back so we can touch it in ours, and do a whole university's worth of tests on it, instead of what we could stuff into a science-storage bin next to the toilet paper closet of the waste processing node in the habitation wing of the giant robot we have to use to takes us there anyway.
in this, he's reflecting on the fact that from what he knows about GUTE, he doesn't know if there's a way to get there from here, and he thinks he knows there's no way to get there from here
learn how to live away from and independent of the Earth
We evolved here. Here is where we function optimally. To function even close to optimally anywhere else, we need somewhere that is nearly like here. Where we can interact with the environment as we do here. Take our food, water, air, and shelter from it and give our waste and growth to it. The similarity we need is very, very, rare, to the point we haven't found anything even close, yet, and still consider living on planets that are no better than empty space.
But to live in empty space we need to create an Earth-similar environment in a tin can. And make it work through all succeeding generations of us. Hard to do. The march of entropy says that closed systems are dead ends (which is of course the ultimate source of the notion that we have to find a way off this particular closed system).
Unless you consider that we all are born, live, and then die. We as individuals are not eternal. Why do we believe that our exponential population growth, or the line of our race, must be eternal? Is it better to fight our eventual extinction and run into it full-speed with great suffering, or to recognize the limitations on our propagation on the planet and manage our population to make ourselves comfortable as the critical resources run out, for our last citizens to live comfortably and die happy, along with the race that prepared their world for them?
So I'm not sure I'm missing the point. It's just not the only point I'm thining about.
tin can is mostly space. easy to launch. can even pack them inside each other. very efficient.
human being is bag of water. effing heavy and inefficient to launch. and need other effing heavy but otherwise pointless systems to get them there safe. plus several replacement weights in food to keep them there. bloody expensive.
send up a few humans to take pictures, show them in IMAX to the rest of us down here, and i'm good.
beyond that, it's a game of how much would you pay to make the other country look stupid, plus how much science can we get out of it with the few people we can afford to send on the public science nickel, plus how much would you pay to be kinda special and have something to brag about, plus how rich and gullible are you.
yeah, but today i read another piece on this where some goon at a U in Californuthouse says he's 100% certain there's life on that rock...same article says the temperature varies from -24F to +10F (it's really close to its star, something like 0.15 AU, but its star is a red dwarf, hence not very radiant)
I have a problem with the idea that life could spring from free carbon compounds in 10F. I have a huge problem with the claim that there's 100% chance of life on a planet where all we know is its orbital characteristics and mass, and those suggest some things hostile to life.
It's a non-rotating planet, if there's an atmosphere the only weather would be brownian motion. There will be no magnetic field to stop even the meager high-energy particles from the in-your-face star.
It's effing cold. Water would be frozen. Methane might not, but is liquid methane going to do the amazing things water does for biochemistry? The polarity of the water molecule makes a big difference in solubility and the ionization/acid-base/proton-donation thing is an active component of making organic molecules.
I'd be surprised if there's any active chemistry on the planet, much less biochemistry.
Not so fast. This isn't a legal finding, it's just some data collected by a government agency. Which no doubt is the company's argument.
I suppose since the FCC already has access to it (probably a regulation somewhere requiring the company to provide it) the issue is whether the FCC can release it. "Is information in the hands of the government public information," kind of thing.
And if hypothetically the FCC was on the board of the company, would that give it another sort of leave to release it? (The answer is no, board members generally aren't allowed to make proprietary information public except through the normal channels, i.e. the company's PR department).
IMO all public-company information should be public information, since the "insider trading" rules are routinely and obviously ignored, so any non-public information is a disadvantage for the investor in the public markets.
Trade secrets are antithetical to the constitutional provision that valuable inventions and creations may be protected, so any company that has patents or copyrights or other protected information and still claims any secrets is a hypocrite trying to screw someone. Corporations as usual want things both ways, because they want everything their way and damn anyone else who wants a chance to compete or get a fair deal from them.
This is the sort of thing that gives capitalism a bad name.
Venus and Mars are also rocky "Earthlike" planets orbiting roughly in the habzone ("goldilocks" zone).
If that's true, we really need to tighten up the width of the habzone.
Because Venus is unfeasibly hot and Mars, despite all the woo, is unfeasibly cold. We can only "hab" on them in the same way we'd "hab" in deep space: in a temperature-controlled canister of our own construction.
Slashdot Mirror
No chance of the virus crossing over to affect humans
Anyone who thinks that is a few nucleotides short of knowing how evolution works.
Well, awareness and familiarity are two different things.
For 30 years we had the concept of superbugs and some intellectually distant reports fo actual instances.
Now we have an infestation of MRSA in hospitals, and C. Diff is breaking out all over.
There are still large swathes of the population, however, who don't get it, and there are huge corporations with lots of money to be lost if we actually start doing the right things about the problems. Logic is against them, but they are pumping cash into our decisionmaking process to make logic go away.
As a vegetarian, you're threatening the food chain on an even deeper level:
http://www.safe-food.org/-issue/dangers.html
Feeding them the correct food, giving them room to roam away from each other and from their waste or cleaning their living areas continually, identifying and isolating the sick ones quicker, all do cost more.
At current prices most producers would quit. Supply drops, prices go up, demand drops, equilibrium is reached, and we move on with less meat in our diets or pay more for it. It's a sort of tax vs. current status quo.
The alternative is to give medicine to the animals to avoid all that and still get the meat to the market. Supply is maintained, prices remain (relatively) low.
But then we get superbugs, get sick, have to spend money on medicine for us, lose income to illness, and/or die. It's a sort of tax vs. the current status quo.
Anyone who wants a bill against use of drugs that create superbugs in the food chain needs to be making this sort of argument: we're going to pay for it one way or the other; we can can choose between a more expensive sandwich, or death.
And they need to make sure that the voters in their district know that the person opposing them is choosing to kill people to make an agricorporation another.
* - Some people would think that's a good thing; I happen not to be one of them, but that's not the point here. Pass the veal.
If the families of fallen and standing soldiers are having undue stress, they shouldn't be wasting their time trying to get a fucking game changed, they should be spending it trying to get the fucking war changed.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that making NYNY's unique aesthetics look like everywhere else's just diminishes the uniqueness of NYNY?
It already let the rest of the world get ahead of it on the skyline thing.
Next they'll be letting cabs be any color and shape they want, and putting coffee in styrofoam...
NYC isn't just another hive. It's a theater, and it needs competent art-direction if it wants to continue to win awards.
Well, no, Liberals dislike both.
But because of a couple of decades of hard propaganda by the right, the word "liberal" is totally misdefined in the minds of most people, as is "socialism", and virtually nobody ever understood what "fascism" meant, but it makes a good scare word, so now, after dodging it since WW2, the right has started using it to describe a Democrat President of the U.S., pretty much putting a huge, red, spinning light atop their propagandamobile so you can clearly see it if you pry your eyes away from the dial of the radio on which Rush Limbaugh is teaching you to think anything left of Joe McCarthy is Stalinism.
Well, no, it's just government.
If you don't want the government telling the self-made fiefdoms how not to assist other self-made fiefdoms to defraud the serfs, then you just don't want a government at all.
But if you want an example of that, I refer you to Somalia, and ask you again if you really want that.
But we were born to do impossible things.
Says the fuck who?
We were born to eat, sleep, shit, get laid, and then die. Preferably downwind.
The rest of this stuff is just something to do, because in the process of not-dying before we could get laid, we somehow developed more intellectual capacity than we'd ever need just to survive what this planet was throwing at us.
Oh. Well, yes. I agree that robots are much better at exploration than humans.
Because, honestly, 99.9% of the stuff we want to explore in space isn't accessible to humans at all. I mean, you can't touch an asteroid in its native environment. Might as well send a robot to grab a chunk (or a few nanogranules) and bring it back so we can touch it in ours, and do a whole university's worth of tests on it, instead of what we could stuff into a science-storage bin next to the toilet paper closet of the waste processing node in the habitation wing of the giant robot we have to use to takes us there anyway.
That sort of thing implies eugenics to force evolutionary adaptations.
That's not what we do any more.
Because now if we do it it's intentional, and considered barbaric. (That's irony, Alanis).
If we take the "we have to leave" option, then we all have to leave, no matter how unfit and inadaptable we now are.
Because if we don't, we have a population of left-behinds marooned on a dying planet, going extinct in the painful way and not the intelligent way.
but it excludes all theories of everything, and is therefore nonexistent itself
but are you unified? or just loosely connected?
check an x-ray before you answer...
he was making a joke about SETI
in this, he's reflecting on the fact that from what he knows about GUTE, he doesn't know if there's a way to get there from here, and he thinks he knows there's no way to get there from here
Nor has going anonymous.
You know, it's no longer necessary to actually link to xkcd from /.
Just mention the number.
We'll laugh just as hard.
I'm just being realistic.
learn how to live away from and independent of the Earth
We evolved here. Here is where we function optimally. To function even close to optimally anywhere else, we need somewhere that is nearly like here. Where we can interact with the environment as we do here. Take our food, water, air, and shelter from it and give our waste and growth to it. The similarity we need is very, very, rare, to the point we haven't found anything even close, yet, and still consider living on planets that are no better than empty space.
But to live in empty space we need to create an Earth-similar environment in a tin can. And make it work through all succeeding generations of us. Hard to do. The march of entropy says that closed systems are dead ends (which is of course the ultimate source of the notion that we have to find a way off this particular closed system).
Unless you consider that we all are born, live, and then die. We as individuals are not eternal. Why do we believe that our exponential population growth, or the line of our race, must be eternal? Is it better to fight our eventual extinction and run into it full-speed with great suffering, or to recognize the limitations on our propagation on the planet and manage our population to make ourselves comfortable as the critical resources run out, for our last citizens to live comfortably and die happy, along with the race that prepared their world for them?
So I'm not sure I'm missing the point. It's just not the only point I'm thining about.
tin can is mostly space. easy to launch. can even pack them inside each other. very efficient.
human being is bag of water. effing heavy and inefficient to launch. and need other effing heavy but otherwise pointless systems to get them there safe. plus several replacement weights in food to keep them there. bloody expensive.
send up a few humans to take pictures, show them in IMAX to the rest of us down here, and i'm good.
beyond that, it's a game of how much would you pay to make the other country look stupid, plus how much science can we get out of it with the few people we can afford to send on the public science nickel, plus how much would you pay to be kinda special and have something to brag about, plus how rich and gullible are you.
Spamnik.
yeah, but today i read another piece on this where some goon at a U in Californuthouse says he's 100% certain there's life on that rock...same article says the temperature varies from -24F to +10F (it's really close to its star, something like 0.15 AU, but its star is a red dwarf, hence not very radiant)
I have a problem with the idea that life could spring from free carbon compounds in 10F. I have a huge problem with the claim that there's 100% chance of life on a planet where all we know is its orbital characteristics and mass, and those suggest some things hostile to life.
It's a non-rotating planet, if there's an atmosphere the only weather would be brownian motion. There will be no magnetic field to stop even the meager high-energy particles from the in-your-face star.
It's effing cold. Water would be frozen. Methane might not, but is liquid methane going to do the amazing things water does for biochemistry? The polarity of the water molecule makes a big difference in solubility and the ionization/acid-base/proton-donation thing is an active component of making organic molecules.
I'd be surprised if there's any active chemistry on the planet, much less biochemistry.
human bodies regulate breathing based on CO2 levels
you wouldn't want to live in a high-CO2 atmosphere, even if it was also a high-O2 atmosphere
tides
hence stromatolites, q.v.
Not so fast. This isn't a legal finding, it's just some data collected by a government agency. Which no doubt is the company's argument.
I suppose since the FCC already has access to it (probably a regulation somewhere requiring the company to provide it) the issue is whether the FCC can release it. "Is information in the hands of the government public information," kind of thing.
And if hypothetically the FCC was on the board of the company, would that give it another sort of leave to release it? (The answer is no, board members generally aren't allowed to make proprietary information public except through the normal channels, i.e. the company's PR department).
IMO all public-company information should be public information, since the "insider trading" rules are routinely and obviously ignored, so any non-public information is a disadvantage for the investor in the public markets.
Trade secrets are antithetical to the constitutional provision that valuable inventions and creations may be protected, so any company that has patents or copyrights or other protected information and still claims any secrets is a hypocrite trying to screw someone. Corporations as usual want things both ways, because they want everything their way and damn anyone else who wants a chance to compete or get a fair deal from them.
This is the sort of thing that gives capitalism a bad name.
Venus and Mars are also rocky "Earthlike" planets orbiting roughly in the habzone ("goldilocks" zone).
If that's true, we really need to tighten up the width of the habzone.
Because Venus is unfeasibly hot and Mars, despite all the woo, is unfeasibly cold. We can only "hab" on them in the same way we'd "hab" in deep space: in a temperature-controlled canister of our own construction.
0%. I logged in there ready to make the same joke Dutchmaan did and couldn't find it.