for some reason I'm always able to trace that privately-held power back to be a direct consequence of the government force, and government policies.
Of course you can; this is almost trivially true. As you point out, corporations are creations of the law. The very reason for corporations violates certain natural-law assumptions like the inviolacy of debts and obligations. But laws allow them to do this because it is immensely useful for encouraging the formation of capital; it stems from that same deontological/utilitarian split I mention. And corporations becoming too powerful because of their immunities violates utilitarian principles too; under a purely utilitarian approach you'd allow corporate owners to escape some responsibility for debt if that's useful, but then regulate them. Treating them as if they have the rights of natural persons is nonsensical except by special pleading. Their very existence presupposes the violations of individuals' rights for utilitarian reasons.
Wernher von Braun... John von Neumann... Edward Teller...
Those are just the kind of names known to the general populace; it doesn't even begin to list the kind of people who are pre-eminent in their field but not known to the general public.
We're a big country, but still only 4% of the world's population lives here. US preeminence in science and technology, along with the military and economic benefits that brings, is unnatural and temporary. It was jump-started by the Nazis -- when I was at MIT in the 1970s many of the most prominent professors were scholar-refugees from WW2 -- but for the rest of the 20th century the influx of brilliant minds became a self-perpetuating process, to the immense benefit of native-born scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.
Few of us are old enough to remember a time when American wasn't the unchallenged world leader in science, technology, and business; Many of us regard this as a kind of American birthright. But it's not. Yes, there may be cultural reasons for American innovation punching above our very considerable population weight, but we can't overcome sheer numbers.
Current economic projections see the US overtaking China as the world's largest manufacturing nation in several years, based on US technological leadership. But that's something we can't take for granted, not without a steady influx of the best young minds in the world.
Every country has spooks. None of them should be trusted, even if they have your best interests in mind, which if you're American the Russian SVR probably doesn't.
I don't buy this argument, but I find it interesting, because it addresses a limitation in a lot of libertarian thinking (which I am generally sympathetic to), which is that it does not consider the power of privately held power to restrict liberty, other than to dismiss it out of hand.
I believe if you think hard and critically about this situation you end up turning up compelling arguments on both sides of the question. On one hand I don't think that something like a social media monopoly is all that stable. Other companies have the technology to reproduce Facebook, and if enough people got disgusted they'd jump over to some competitor. So in a sense Facebook does depends on a kind of consent by the users to live under rules they don't entirely like.
But on the other hand, Facebook's move to de-legitimize white supremacists actually is a response to the sensibilities of most users, at least the ones that care one way or other. White supremacy is a socially deviant position when considered across the entire contemporary population, even though it would have been the norm a hundred years ago.
So as is always the case with any entity responsive to majority opinion, Facebook treats unpopular viewpoints prejudicially. And that makes a difference when you talk about a medium which for better or worse (actually for worse) is the single largest source of news in the country. Even if you think that some instance of prejudicial treatment is beneficial, you'd still want there to be limits on Facebook's treatment of unpopular opinions. Had Facebook existed a hundred years ago, it'd be coming down hard on views promoting racial equality.
In a way this mirrors the split between deontological (rights and duties) and utilitarian ethics. From a deontological perspective it's Facebook's network, they built it and own it, so "my house, my rules" applies. I tend toward this position myself. But from a utilitarian perspective it's not optimal for either a single entity (Facebook management) or the majority to have complete control over access to unpopular opinions.
No, my assumption is that IQ tests are relatively meaningless. About the best you can say for them is that they're reasonably self-consistent.
Here's I think why: intelligence isn't something directly observable, like height or length. It's something we infer. So to measure it we develop indirect tests, but how do we know that those tests measure what we think they should? We compare the results to what we expected to get, for example to they rank subjects approximately the way our intuition ranks them?
The problem is that this empirical confirmation gets harder to obtain the further you get from the mean, because you have too few subjects with which the calibrate your results. For that reason you can be pretty sure that someone who has a 110 IQ is (by intuitive measures) smarter than someone who has a 100 IQ, which was by the original test design average. But you really know nothing about whether someone who has a 170 IQ is smarter than someone with a 160 IQ.
Unfortunately, one of the things I've learned over the years is how little IQ correlates to anything useful; at least once you get much past 1.5 or 2 standard deviations over the mean.
I'm aware of the dwarf wheat change; I'm just saying that from a sensory standpoint once you've removed most of the flavor components it probably doesn't make any culinary difference.
Well the irony is that Americans now eat worse than our supposedly horrible diet of the 1960s and 70s. The reason is that sheer amount of refined carbohydrates that have replaced fat calories.
Personally I believe you can eat healthy, and eat whatever you want, the key is moderation. Prioritize real food first, and once you've made that your base if you want to occasionally have a casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and potato chips as ingredients, enjoy.
I shouldn't think there would be much difference in white flour. Aside from the loss of protein and fiber, the other macronutrient difference between white and whole wheat flour is whole wheat has five times the fat. Fat carries a lot of the flavor subtleties of food.
The lower fat content contributes to white flour's very long shelf life. Whole wheat flour should only be purchased as needed, because the fats in it flour go rancid.
They both moved away from their common roots, but as is common (e.g. with Spanish) provincial speech retained a lot of archaisms as the language changed more rapidly in its ancestral land.
The biggest diverging change in pronunciation for British English was that in the 1800s it became "non-rhotic". An aristocratic schoolboy affectation for dropping the "r" sound except before vowels spread through the population, much to the consternation of contemporary writers who compared the pronunciation of English youth unfavorably to the "pure" English spoken by event the "lowest classes" in America. In parts of the US with greater cultural ties to England non-rhoticity also spread (e.g. New England).
But American English also changed, for example many Americans pronounced "cot" and "caught" as homophones.
You can do a lot more than most people would imagine with beans and root vegetables, although the addition of new world peppers and tomatoes was a huge post-Columbian boost to cuisine worldwide. What potatoes added was a very calorie and nutrition dense (if you eat the skin) crop that could in intensively farmed. Potatoes have twice the protein by weight as turnips and rutabagas which it largely displaced in late 1700s Europe.
Most European cuisines have a basic go-to flavor combo used to liven up boring but nutritious calories like beans or the stewed cheap bits of an animal. In France this is mirepoix: diced onion, carrot, and celery. Take your boiled beef, and instead simmer it in stock made from bones with mirepoix. While the water is heating you have plenty time to go out and pick the weeds you need to make a bouqet garni: thyme, bay leaves and sage. Add that to your stew and result isn't boring, tasteless meat mush. It's something you'd pay money to eat if someone else took all the trouble, and all it takes is stuff that grows wild on the edges of your fields.
In Germany and the low countries you might add dried peas, leeks,celeriac and turnip to your stew -- flavors which might not be so attractive alone but which in concert accomplish something close to flavor alchemy. In Italy you have soffritto: onions and garlic browned and cooked down with herbs, and that's not boring either. In the Eastern Meditteranean you might combine garlic, spices like turmeric and cardamom, herbs like mint, and lemon juice.
As long as you stick to vegetables, legumes, roots, and spices the flavors of pre-modern times are fairly easy to reproduce in the modern kitchen. What's harder to reproduce are the flavors of the actual meat people would have eaten. Beef would have been grass-fed and relatively lean -- that has a very different flavor although you can still obtain lean grass-fed beef from local farmers in many cities I've also had wild hog, which is very likely what the domestic pig tasted like before it was selectively bread into the massive, lean, relatively tasteless pork we're used to now; all I can say is that it tastes intensely swine-y. Old style chicken is as far as I know impossible to obtain as meat. Chicken as we now know it, with grotequely huge breasts and very little dark meat didn't exist until WW2.
Most younger Americans transported to 1950 would starve unless they were sent back with a large supply of cash, in which case they would be at a high risk of food poisoning. One of the reasons for the rise of restaurant chains in the 50s was to make it possible for travelers to know where to eat without getting "ptomaine poisoning" (most people didn't even understand the microbial nature of foodborne illness).
Until the 1970s most Americans cooked nearly all their own food from scratch, other than bread. I'm old enough remember in the 1960s the tail end of the process of re-educating Americans to "cook" with prepared food. It was the Age of the Casserole, because the food industry was spending huge bucks in training people to dump cans of cream of mushroom soup into "chicken a la king". In seconds a can of cream of mushroom soup replaced spending hours making stock and thickening it by whisking it into a roux.
But it wasn't just convenience; looking back on these product-oriented recipes, it's astonishing how dreadful many of them sound to us. How does combining canned fruit cocktail, mayonnaise, and mini-marshmallows sound to you? I can tell you how it sounded back then, it sounded exciting.
I think the marketers tapped into a pair of contradictory but deep-rooted impulses in human diet: familiarity and novelty. If you look at hunter gatherer societies you see both eating patterns: pursuing go-to calorie sources along with lots and lots of opportunistic foraging.
You know, this attitude is just as emotional as the strawman position it attacks.
While I am generally supportive of the idea of developing new nuclear technologies and making them part of a global climate change response, the attitude displayed here shows one of the legitimate reasons that anti-nuclear activists have to be concerned. Nuclear power is potentially very useful tool in addressing anthropogenic climate change, but it's not a quick and easy fix. It has serious issues that ought to be treated seriously. More seriously than a grade school name calling contest at any rate.
I have no doubt that problems like waste disposal and proliferation can be solved. But I have considerably less confidence that we can trust government and industry to address those problems responsibily. Right or wrong a big part of the reason Germany closed its nuclear plants was a loss of faith in the nuclear industry in the wake of the revelations of TEPCO's abysmal performance and lack of corporate responsibility.
You can see this particular impulse as dovetailing with the rise of cryptocurrencies. Now that the technologies enable groups of private individuals to do so, they are attempting to develop a sphere of action that is outside the control of traditional national sovereign entities.
But even more so with this than cryptocurrencies, people aren't really opting out of the existing systems; they're trying to establish a kind of parallel identity free of traditional constraints. I doubt many "citizens" of Asgardia are willing to be bound by its laws, or forgo the legal protections of terrestrial citizenship to rely solely on the Asgardian "citizenship".
Nor if they truly renounced their traditional citizenship do I suspect they'd find Asgardian "citizenship" that satisfying. Civilization is about compromises people make in order to gain the benefits of living with other people. People alway chafe under those limintations, but historically barbarian invaders rapidly assimilate and become civilized too because it's a net win. But perhaps in the future people will find a way to split the difference, to be entirely civilized in one part of their lives and entirely free in another.
We need people to say, "Dude, you really don't know what your talking about, and you are unnecessarily scaring yourself and other people"
We might not know much about the specifics of the underlying mechanisms in supervolcano eruptions, but that doesn't mean we can't study such eruptions in a statistical fashion, and assign a statistical likelihood for one happening in any given period of time.
What the present results tell us is that we might have only a few decades of warning about such an event, which is not a lot of time given how hard it is to get people to agree about what to do about such things, and in particular who will pay for it. It's not something to be scared about, but in a world where we worry about Internet-connected sex toys leaking private information we can spare some concern for what is an inevitable disaster, even if it's not likely to occur in our lifetime.
In fact, forget decades. We won't have any warning at all if we don't study the geology of such things, and even that is controversial in the current political climate. That's because the frequency of such events is such that it is unlikely that one will occur in our lifetimes. But if one did, it's pretty certain that without those decades of warning civilization as we know it would collapse.
The world does not as a whole stockpile food; global food reserves are sufficient to feed the population for about two months -- basically just enough to buffer variations in harvest yields. Of course some people would have access to years of food supplies, and others are already starving as it is, but a year without a harvest would result in most of the world's population dying, and the survivors would not be immune from the disruption that will cause.
That's kind of the point behind the very well thought out design of the space ship Discovery One in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You had a spherical pressure hull up front and a nuclear rocket in back with a long boom connecting/separating them, along with propellant tanks and other stores.
Well, a lot of what you're talking about is neither here nor there with respect to this situation. It's a truism by this point that customers don't really know what you want until you show it to them -- although this doesn't mean that you as a product developer know any better.
But one of the things that people forget that Jobs did when he came back is that he drastically simplified Apple's product line. Since a single product can't satisfy everyone, companies tend toward having many products through a kind of incrementalism, trying to capture as much of the market as possible. But there are downsides to having too many products and versions of products. Selling is harder, because you have to walk prospective customers through all the choices you offer, and they're often never quite satisfied that they made the right choice. Production, delivery and support become harder too; you can't hit one out of the park when you're trying to swing at as many balls as you physically can.
Jobs also made a virtue of the drawbacks of a more limited product offering by turning the new product offerings into an event -- something much harder to do when sexy new features are spread across a large number of products. Putting all your eggs in fewer baskets turns a complicated basket selection decision into a simple go/no go for consumers.
There are currently eight iPhone models in production, four introduced over an eighteen month period. I wonder whether this is a move back to the product-for-everyone incrementalism that Jobs product discipline replaced. Mobile phones are possibly the single most challenging consumer product to engineer and produce; it's quite possible we're looking at an Apple with too many balls in the air.
A watch doesn't take much power at all. Digital watches can run for years on tiny, tiny batteries. The classic Casio F-91w, also known at the "al Qaeda watch" runs for seven years on a CR2016 cell which delivers 100 maH at 3V: in other words roughly 1000 joules. That translates to a power draw of 5 microwatts.
Now a smart watch is going to draw a lot more power than that, because it has a processor and probably a part time on luminous display to power. But "a lot more than 5 microwatts" leaves a lot of headroom.
Now there are mechanical watches that are powered by photovoltaics, but combining this with a display could be tricky. But another possibility might be a small dynamo powered by wrist action. Of course non-electronic "automatic" watches have been doing this for decades, but every since Seiko introduced it's "kinetic" watch movements in the mid 80s there have been quartz watches powered by mechanical generators with capacitive storage. Currently Seiko and Swiss manufacturer ETA produce "mechanical quartz" movements.
The question is whether you get more power out of a mechanical generator or a thermoelectric generator. I believe Bulova introduced a thermoelectric quartz watch in the 80s, but it never caught on, where as kinetically powered and photovoltaic powered quartz watches remain quite popular. Undoubtedly the technology has improved since then.
What you are talking about is called geoengineering, and yes, people have examined the possibility of stratospheric aerosol injection.
There are some drawbacks to the procedure. CO2 has a half-life of 100 years, and CO2 levels are continuing to rise; you'd have to put a lot of aerosols into the stratosphere and continue doing so indefinitely on an increasing basis as CO2 rises. So one question is whether this is cheaper in the long run than simply curbing carbon emissions. Aerosol injection will also cause drastic local climate changes in many places, and effect crop yields globally.
The editors seem to think a computer scientist would be expected to think digital only voting is a good idea.
Do you know anyone with expertise in computer science or engineering who thinks paperless voting is a good idea? I mean excluding people who work for companies that make the machines? Can you name even a single respected independent computer security expert who favors the damn things?
The overwhelming consensus among people who know anything is that paperless voting is a terrible idea.
Yes. Because science doesn't dabble in truth, it deals with evidence, and likelihoods. Truth may be unchanging, but the most probable scenario has to change as you obtain more evidence.
From the 1940s to around 1980, the globe actually cooled because of industrial aerosol emissions, which reflect solar energy back out into space. From around 1910 to around 1960, CO2 mediated warming was believed to be impossible because (a) atmospheric CO2 was mistakenly believed to be in a stable equilibrium with ocean dissolved CO2 and (b) CO2's emission spectrum was mistakenly believed to overlap that of water vapor, which is much, much more common.
In the 1950s both those beliefs were disproven, by Roger Revelle's study of ocean CO2 chemistry and by more precise spectrographic instrumentation. This meant CO2-mediated warming was physically possible, however in the 1960s cooling was still the consensus because at that time scientists thought aerosol cooling would outpace CO2 warming. That was easy to believe, because the Earth was cooling before our very eyes.
In the 1970s measurements of increasing CO2 along with newly available computer modeling techniques tipped the balance of scientific consensus toward warming in the upcoming decades even though we were still in a aerosol-mediated cooling phase.
This is about as robust as a scientific result gets: an accurate prediction of a reversal of current trends. Were the predictions being made perfectly precisely correct? Of course not. But on the whole the prediction of a reversal of current temperature trends was correct. There was still significant dissent about the direction of future climate in the 80s, but by 1990 it was clear to virtually everyone in the climate research field that CO2 warming was overwhelming aerosol cooling.
Again, that's how science works. It's about reasonable extrapolations from evidence, not eternal and unassailable truths.
The term in the sex trade I believe is "girlfriend experience". In addition to having sex with you the sex worker will also spend time pretending to love you. Since it's a higher level of service it naturally costs more.
I find the notion that something like that exists poignant. Although prostitution where it exists outside the protection of law is alarmingly exploitative, I have no fundamental objection to trading a few minutes of physical pleasure or relief for money. But creating a counterfeit experience smacks of an infantile retreat from the difficulties of genuine relationships.
In a world full of lonely people, the solution would seem to be obvious. But genuine intimacy requires risk and compromise. Compromise is increasingly a dirty word in our culture, but we fetishize risk, which is just another side of the same coin. A fetish isn't real; the kind of risk intimacy exposes you to *is* real. Nobody can disappoint, hurt or betray you like someone you love. But take away the danger, and what do you have left?
I don't have as much of a problem with playing a role where society conventionally expects someone to come with a date say, but I do have a huge problem with counterfeiting an important relationship, especially on a nonconsenting party: e.g., pretending to be a child's parent. And it comes down to the pain which only people you love can inflict on you.
At least a third of millennials are financially illiterate.
"Bitcoin" is a specific asset. "Stocks" are a class of asset. You want your assets diversified so that if something terribly wrong is found with one of them (e.g., a cryptographic flaw in Bitcoin) you are not wiped out.
If you were invested in a diverse portfolio on Black Tuesday-- the day the stock market crashed setting off the Great Depression -- you'd have been find even if your portfolio consisted entirely of stocks. It was people who put all their eggs in one basket that lost everything.
Slashdot Mirror
for some reason I'm always able to trace that privately-held power back to be a direct consequence of the government force, and government policies.
Of course you can; this is almost trivially true. As you point out, corporations are creations of the law. The very reason for corporations violates certain natural-law assumptions like the inviolacy of debts and obligations. But laws allow them to do this because it is immensely useful for encouraging the formation of capital; it stems from that same deontological/utilitarian split I mention. And corporations becoming too powerful because of their immunities violates utilitarian principles too; under a purely utilitarian approach you'd allow corporate owners to escape some responsibility for debt if that's useful, but then regulate them. Treating them as if they have the rights of natural persons is nonsensical except by special pleading. Their very existence presupposes the violations of individuals' rights for utilitarian reasons.
I do appreciate your thoughtful response.
Wernher von Braun... John von Neumann... Edward Teller...
Those are just the kind of names known to the general populace; it doesn't even begin to list the kind of people who are pre-eminent in their field but not known to the general public.
We're a big country, but still only 4% of the world's population lives here. US preeminence in science and technology, along with the military and economic benefits that brings, is unnatural and temporary. It was jump-started by the Nazis -- when I was at MIT in the 1970s many of the most prominent professors were scholar-refugees from WW2 -- but for the rest of the 20th century the influx of brilliant minds became a self-perpetuating process, to the immense benefit of native-born scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.
Few of us are old enough to remember a time when American wasn't the unchallenged world leader in science, technology, and business; Many of us regard this as a kind of American birthright. But it's not. Yes, there may be cultural reasons for American innovation punching above our very considerable population weight, but we can't overcome sheer numbers.
Current economic projections see the US overtaking China as the world's largest manufacturing nation in several years, based on US technological leadership. But that's something we can't take for granted, not without a steady influx of the best young minds in the world.
Every country has spooks. None of them should be trusted, even if they have your best interests in mind, which if you're American the Russian SVR probably doesn't.
I don't buy this argument, but I find it interesting, because it addresses a limitation in a lot of libertarian thinking (which I am generally sympathetic to), which is that it does not consider the power of privately held power to restrict liberty, other than to dismiss it out of hand.
I believe if you think hard and critically about this situation you end up turning up compelling arguments on both sides of the question. On one hand I don't think that something like a social media monopoly is all that stable. Other companies have the technology to reproduce Facebook, and if enough people got disgusted they'd jump over to some competitor. So in a sense Facebook does depends on a kind of consent by the users to live under rules they don't entirely like.
But on the other hand, Facebook's move to de-legitimize white supremacists actually is a response to the sensibilities of most users, at least the ones that care one way or other. White supremacy is a socially deviant position when considered across the entire contemporary population, even though it would have been the norm a hundred years ago.
So as is always the case with any entity responsive to majority opinion, Facebook treats unpopular viewpoints prejudicially. And that makes a difference when you talk about a medium which for better or worse (actually for worse) is the single largest source of news in the country. Even if you think that some instance of prejudicial treatment is beneficial, you'd still want there to be limits on Facebook's treatment of unpopular opinions. Had Facebook existed a hundred years ago, it'd be coming down hard on views promoting racial equality.
In a way this mirrors the split between deontological (rights and duties) and utilitarian ethics. From a deontological perspective it's Facebook's network, they built it and own it, so "my house, my rules" applies. I tend toward this position myself. But from a utilitarian perspective it's not optimal for either a single entity (Facebook management) or the majority to have complete control over access to unpopular opinions.
No, my assumption is that IQ tests are relatively meaningless. About the best you can say for them is that they're reasonably self-consistent.
Here's I think why: intelligence isn't something directly observable, like height or length. It's something we infer. So to measure it we develop indirect tests, but how do we know that those tests measure what we think they should? We compare the results to what we expected to get, for example to they rank subjects approximately the way our intuition ranks them?
The problem is that this empirical confirmation gets harder to obtain the further you get from the mean, because you have too few subjects with which the calibrate your results. For that reason you can be pretty sure that someone who has a 110 IQ is (by intuitive measures) smarter than someone who has a 100 IQ, which was by the original test design average. But you really know nothing about whether someone who has a 170 IQ is smarter than someone with a 160 IQ.
Unfortunately, one of the things I've learned over the years is how little IQ correlates to anything useful; at least once you get much past 1.5 or 2 standard deviations over the mean.
I'm aware of the dwarf wheat change; I'm just saying that from a sensory standpoint once you've removed most of the flavor components it probably doesn't make any culinary difference.
Well the irony is that Americans now eat worse than our supposedly horrible diet of the 1960s and 70s. The reason is that sheer amount of refined carbohydrates that have replaced fat calories.
Personally I believe you can eat healthy, and eat whatever you want, the key is moderation. Prioritize real food first, and once you've made that your base if you want to occasionally have a casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and potato chips as ingredients, enjoy.
I shouldn't think there would be much difference in white flour. Aside from the loss of protein and fiber, the other macronutrient difference between white and whole wheat flour is whole wheat has five times the fat. Fat carries a lot of the flavor subtleties of food.
The lower fat content contributes to white flour's very long shelf life. Whole wheat flour should only be purchased as needed, because the fats in it flour go rancid.
They both moved away from their common roots, but as is common (e.g. with Spanish) provincial speech retained a lot of archaisms as the language changed more rapidly in its ancestral land.
The biggest diverging change in pronunciation for British English was that in the 1800s it became "non-rhotic". An aristocratic schoolboy affectation for dropping the "r" sound except before vowels spread through the population, much to the consternation of contemporary writers who compared the pronunciation of English youth unfavorably to the "pure" English spoken by event the "lowest classes" in America. In parts of the US with greater cultural ties to England non-rhoticity also spread (e.g. New England).
But American English also changed, for example many Americans pronounced "cot" and "caught" as homophones.
You can do a lot more than most people would imagine with beans and root vegetables, although the addition of new world peppers and tomatoes was a huge post-Columbian boost to cuisine worldwide. What potatoes added was a very calorie and nutrition dense (if you eat the skin) crop that could in intensively farmed. Potatoes have twice the protein by weight as turnips and rutabagas which it largely displaced in late 1700s Europe.
Most European cuisines have a basic go-to flavor combo used to liven up boring but nutritious calories like beans or the stewed cheap bits of an animal. In France this is mirepoix: diced onion, carrot, and celery. Take your boiled beef, and instead simmer it in stock made from bones with mirepoix. While the water is heating you have plenty time to go out and pick the weeds you need to make a bouqet garni: thyme, bay leaves and sage. Add that to your stew and result isn't boring, tasteless meat mush. It's something you'd pay money to eat if someone else took all the trouble, and all it takes is stuff that grows wild on the edges of your fields.
In Germany and the low countries you might add dried peas, leeks,celeriac and turnip to your stew -- flavors which might not be so attractive alone but which in concert accomplish something close to flavor alchemy. In Italy you have soffritto: onions and garlic browned and cooked down with herbs, and that's not boring either. In the Eastern Meditteranean you might combine garlic, spices like turmeric and cardamom, herbs like mint, and lemon juice.
As long as you stick to vegetables, legumes, roots, and spices the flavors of pre-modern times are fairly easy to reproduce in the modern kitchen. What's harder to reproduce are the flavors of the actual meat people would have eaten. Beef would have been grass-fed and relatively lean -- that has a very different flavor although you can still obtain lean grass-fed beef from local farmers in many cities I've also had wild hog, which is very likely what the domestic pig tasted like before it was selectively bread into the massive, lean, relatively tasteless pork we're used to now; all I can say is that it tastes intensely swine-y. Old style chicken is as far as I know impossible to obtain as meat. Chicken as we now know it, with grotequely huge breasts and very little dark meat didn't exist until WW2.
Most younger Americans transported to 1950 would starve unless they were sent back with a large supply of cash, in which case they would be at a high risk of food poisoning. One of the reasons for the rise of restaurant chains in the 50s was to make it possible for travelers to know where to eat without getting "ptomaine poisoning" (most people didn't even understand the microbial nature of foodborne illness).
Until the 1970s most Americans cooked nearly all their own food from scratch, other than bread. I'm old enough remember in the 1960s the tail end of the process of re-educating Americans to "cook" with prepared food. It was the Age of the Casserole, because the food industry was spending huge bucks in training people to dump cans of cream of mushroom soup into "chicken a la king". In seconds a can of cream of mushroom soup replaced spending hours making stock and thickening it by whisking it into a roux.
But it wasn't just convenience; looking back on these product-oriented recipes, it's astonishing how dreadful many of them sound to us. How does combining canned fruit cocktail, mayonnaise, and mini-marshmallows sound to you? I can tell you how it sounded back then, it sounded exciting.
I think the marketers tapped into a pair of contradictory but deep-rooted impulses in human diet: familiarity and novelty. If you look at hunter gatherer societies you see both eating patterns: pursuing go-to calorie sources along with lots and lots of opportunistic foraging.
You know, this attitude is just as emotional as the strawman position it attacks.
While I am generally supportive of the idea of developing new nuclear technologies and making them part of a global climate change response, the attitude displayed here shows one of the legitimate reasons that anti-nuclear activists have to be concerned. Nuclear power is potentially very useful tool in addressing anthropogenic climate change, but it's not a quick and easy fix. It has serious issues that ought to be treated seriously. More seriously than a grade school name calling contest at any rate.
I have no doubt that problems like waste disposal and proliferation can be solved. But I have considerably less confidence that we can trust government and industry to address those problems responsibily. Right or wrong a big part of the reason Germany closed its nuclear plants was a loss of faith in the nuclear industry in the wake of the revelations of TEPCO's abysmal performance and lack of corporate responsibility.
You can see this particular impulse as dovetailing with the rise of cryptocurrencies. Now that the technologies enable groups of private individuals to do so, they are attempting to develop a sphere of action that is outside the control of traditional national sovereign entities.
But even more so with this than cryptocurrencies, people aren't really opting out of the existing systems; they're trying to establish a kind of parallel identity free of traditional constraints. I doubt many "citizens" of Asgardia are willing to be bound by its laws, or forgo the legal protections of terrestrial citizenship to rely solely on the Asgardian "citizenship".
Nor if they truly renounced their traditional citizenship do I suspect they'd find Asgardian "citizenship" that satisfying. Civilization is about compromises people make in order to gain the benefits of living with other people. People alway chafe under those limintations, but historically barbarian invaders rapidly assimilate and become civilized too because it's a net win. But perhaps in the future people will find a way to split the difference, to be entirely civilized in one part of their lives and entirely free in another.
We need people to say, "Dude, you really don't know what your talking about, and you are unnecessarily scaring yourself and other people"
We might not know much about the specifics of the underlying mechanisms in supervolcano eruptions, but that doesn't mean we can't study such eruptions in a statistical fashion, and assign a statistical likelihood for one happening in any given period of time.
What the present results tell us is that we might have only a few decades of warning about such an event, which is not a lot of time given how hard it is to get people to agree about what to do about such things, and in particular who will pay for it. It's not something to be scared about, but in a world where we worry about Internet-connected sex toys leaking private information we can spare some concern for what is an inevitable disaster, even if it's not likely to occur in our lifetime.
In fact, forget decades. We won't have any warning at all if we don't study the geology of such things, and even that is controversial in the current political climate. That's because the frequency of such events is such that it is unlikely that one will occur in our lifetimes. But if one did, it's pretty certain that without those decades of warning civilization as we know it would collapse.
The world does not as a whole stockpile food; global food reserves are sufficient to feed the population for about two months -- basically just enough to buffer variations in harvest yields. Of course some people would have access to years of food supplies, and others are already starving as it is, but a year without a harvest would result in most of the world's population dying, and the survivors would not be immune from the disruption that will cause.
Actually the original concept art for Discovery had large heat radiators; Kubrick nixed them because people would think they were aerodynamic wings.
That's kind of the point behind the very well thought out design of the space ship Discovery One in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You had a spherical pressure hull up front and a nuclear rocket in back with a long boom connecting/separating them, along with propellant tanks and other stores.
Well, a lot of what you're talking about is neither here nor there with respect to this situation. It's a truism by this point that customers don't really know what you want until you show it to them -- although this doesn't mean that you as a product developer know any better.
But one of the things that people forget that Jobs did when he came back is that he drastically simplified Apple's product line. Since a single product can't satisfy everyone, companies tend toward having many products through a kind of incrementalism, trying to capture as much of the market as possible. But there are downsides to having too many products and versions of products. Selling is harder, because you have to walk prospective customers through all the choices you offer, and they're often never quite satisfied that they made the right choice. Production, delivery and support become harder too; you can't hit one out of the park when you're trying to swing at as many balls as you physically can.
Jobs also made a virtue of the drawbacks of a more limited product offering by turning the new product offerings into an event -- something much harder to do when sexy new features are spread across a large number of products. Putting all your eggs in fewer baskets turns a complicated basket selection decision into a simple go/no go for consumers.
There are currently eight iPhone models in production, four introduced over an eighteen month period. I wonder whether this is a move back to the product-for-everyone incrementalism that Jobs product discipline replaced. Mobile phones are possibly the single most challenging consumer product to engineer and produce; it's quite possible we're looking at an Apple with too many balls in the air.
Watch geek here.
A watch doesn't take much power at all. Digital watches can run for years on tiny, tiny batteries. The classic Casio F-91w, also known at the "al Qaeda watch" runs for seven years on a CR2016 cell which delivers 100 maH at 3V: in other words roughly 1000 joules. That translates to a power draw of 5 microwatts.
Now a smart watch is going to draw a lot more power than that, because it has a processor and probably a part time on luminous display to power. But "a lot more than 5 microwatts" leaves a lot of headroom.
Now there are mechanical watches that are powered by photovoltaics, but combining this with a display could be tricky. But another possibility might be a small dynamo powered by wrist action. Of course non-electronic "automatic" watches have been doing this for decades, but every since Seiko introduced it's "kinetic" watch movements in the mid 80s there have been quartz watches powered by mechanical generators with capacitive storage. Currently Seiko and Swiss manufacturer ETA produce "mechanical quartz" movements.
The question is whether you get more power out of a mechanical generator or a thermoelectric generator. I believe Bulova introduced a thermoelectric quartz watch in the 80s, but it never caught on, where as kinetically powered and photovoltaic powered quartz watches remain quite popular. Undoubtedly the technology has improved since then.
What you are talking about is called geoengineering, and yes, people have examined the possibility of stratospheric aerosol injection.
There are some drawbacks to the procedure. CO2 has a half-life of 100 years, and CO2 levels are continuing to rise; you'd have to put a lot of aerosols into the stratosphere and continue doing so indefinitely on an increasing basis as CO2 rises. So one question is whether this is cheaper in the long run than simply curbing carbon emissions. Aerosol injection will also cause drastic local climate changes in many places, and effect crop yields globally.
The editors seem to think a computer scientist would be expected to think digital only voting is a good idea.
Do you know anyone with expertise in computer science or engineering who thinks paperless voting is a good idea? I mean excluding people who work for companies that make the machines? Can you name even a single respected independent computer security expert who favors the damn things?
The overwhelming consensus among people who know anything is that paperless voting is a terrible idea.
Yes. Because science doesn't dabble in truth, it deals with evidence, and likelihoods. Truth may be unchanging, but the most probable scenario has to change as you obtain more evidence.
From the 1940s to around 1980, the globe actually cooled because of industrial aerosol emissions, which reflect solar energy back out into space. From around 1910 to around 1960, CO2 mediated warming was believed to be impossible because (a) atmospheric CO2 was mistakenly believed to be in a stable equilibrium with ocean dissolved CO2 and (b) CO2's emission spectrum was mistakenly believed to overlap that of water vapor, which is much, much more common.
In the 1950s both those beliefs were disproven, by Roger Revelle's study of ocean CO2 chemistry and by more precise spectrographic instrumentation. This meant CO2-mediated warming was physically possible, however in the 1960s cooling was still the consensus because at that time scientists thought aerosol cooling would outpace CO2 warming. That was easy to believe, because the Earth was cooling before our very eyes.
In the 1970s measurements of increasing CO2 along with newly available computer modeling techniques tipped the balance of scientific consensus toward warming in the upcoming decades even though we were still in a aerosol-mediated cooling phase.
This is about as robust as a scientific result gets: an accurate prediction of a reversal of current trends. Were the predictions being made perfectly precisely correct? Of course not. But on the whole the prediction of a reversal of current temperature trends was correct. There was still significant dissent about the direction of future climate in the 80s, but by 1990 it was clear to virtually everyone in the climate research field that CO2 warming was overwhelming aerosol cooling.
Again, that's how science works. It's about reasonable extrapolations from evidence, not eternal and unassailable truths.
The term in the sex trade I believe is "girlfriend experience". In addition to having sex with you the sex worker will also spend time pretending to love you. Since it's a higher level of service it naturally costs more.
I find the notion that something like that exists poignant. Although prostitution where it exists outside the protection of law is alarmingly exploitative, I have no fundamental objection to trading a few minutes of physical pleasure or relief for money. But creating a counterfeit experience smacks of an infantile retreat from the difficulties of genuine relationships.
In a world full of lonely people, the solution would seem to be obvious. But genuine intimacy requires risk and compromise. Compromise is increasingly a dirty word in our culture, but we fetishize risk, which is just another side of the same coin. A fetish isn't real; the kind of risk intimacy exposes you to *is* real. Nobody can disappoint, hurt or betray you like someone you love. But take away the danger, and what do you have left?
I don't have as much of a problem with playing a role where society conventionally expects someone to come with a date say, but I do have a huge problem with counterfeiting an important relationship, especially on a nonconsenting party: e.g., pretending to be a child's parent. And it comes down to the pain which only people you love can inflict on you.
Right, but even if you'd been invested in JUST those stocks, you wouldn't be wiped out, and a few years later you'd have been right as rain.
At least a third of millennials are financially illiterate.
"Bitcoin" is a specific asset. "Stocks" are a class of asset. You want your assets diversified so that if something terribly wrong is found with one of them (e.g., a cryptographic flaw in Bitcoin) you are not wiped out.
If you were invested in a diverse portfolio on Black Tuesday-- the day the stock market crashed setting off the Great Depression -- you'd have been find even if your portfolio consisted entirely of stocks. It was people who put all their eggs in one basket that lost everything.