Why do scientists such as yourself disparage supernatural proposals as though they were false, when you are yourself not in honest pursuit of truth, but of credible naturalistic explanations?
That is pretty much a semantic argument. There really is no difference between the natural and the supernatural. When we describe something as "natural", it is because we can explain it already. When we describe something as "supernatural", it is because we cannot explain it yet. Lightning was once supernatural. As soon as we have a working theory for something, it becomes "naturalistic".
Science does not ignore "supernatural" occurances. They are routinely dismissed because they are usually found to be simple misconceptions, but the options are always on the table. Any decent scientist will tell you that we know that we dont know everything yet.
If God was shown to exist, he would be a very natural being. He would just have natural laws that are completely unknown to us, just as electromagnetism was unknown to us 1000 years ago. The reason why God's existance is dismissed is not simply because he is deemed to be supernatural, but because there is no reason to believe that he does exist.
Not a single scientific experiment that I am aware of has ever pointed to the existance of any god that has ever been worshiped by man. Quite the opposite in fact. An almost infinite amount of natural phenomena that have at one time been attributed to a godlike being have been explained with "natural" laws.
We basically have two choices: 1) Almost every god that has ever been worshiped in the history of mankind is false, but the One God worhiped by a few similar religions today is real. OR 2) ALL relgions that provide no tangible and reasonable proof are false.
I am sure that the Romans thought the same thing that we do today. I am sure that they laughed at the idea of the old babylonian gods actually existing. Just like our descendants a thousand years from now will probably be laughing at our current religious beliefs.
Science is not being close minded by not listening to religious arguments. Science has listened, but has found nothing worth continued listening. The only reason that it is even a topic of discussion is because of how many people still believe in organized religion. Illiteracy is something that has only recently been almost eliminated in the civilized world. Our civilization's next step of enlightenment is to rid ourselves of religion, but it will take a while. Until then we will still have discussions that confuse the natural and supernatural, and confuse scientific conviction with religious conviction.
Virtually all innovations are incremental improvements. Creating a new way for the internal combustion engine to work would be very innovative, but is just an incremental improvement on our current engines. A new drivetrain with less loss of horsepower from the cranshaft to the wheel would be a great innovation, but would still just be an incremental improvement on our current cars.
I was pointing out how people generally will act based on what authority figures have told them to do, not on any innate sense of morality. We do not steal because our parents have educated us on why we shouldnt do it, not because we were born with any sense that stealing is bad.
All of our moral laws tell us not do things. Do not steal. Do not kill. That is because our natural tendencies are to kill, steal, lie; whatever it takes to survive. Now that we live in a society where surviving is not that difficult, we rely on our society's "rules" to help us supress these "evil" desires. We no longer need to steal to eat because food is everywhere.
These morals are put into place so that we do not fall back on our natural tendencies. Our modern society can only exist with these morals in place, which is why it is so important that we keep passing them on to our children. Otherwise they would turn out like all feral children do: almost completely void of any kind of moral compass.
Most people only play nice because of the law structures that we put in place. Not because of any natural desire to be a good person.
You need to read up on psychological experiments such as The Milgram Experiment. Obedience to authority beats out natural "decency" almost every time. They found that 2/3 of people would apply a lethal dose of electricity to an ordinary person just because an authority figure told them to. Almost 100% of people would apply doses that almost exceeded a lethal amount. The study was used to show why it was so easy for Nazi soldiers to commit such atrocities during the Holocaust. Now these types of experiments are considered unethical because it shows people how "evil" they really are deep inside.
Your kids may very well be fine, I never said that they were definetly "screwed up". I said that I feared that they may be.
I would be considered by basically any psychologist to be very well adjusted. And I have talked to a couple of them through the couples counseling I wanted to do before I got married. I react well to criticism, am very responsible and caring, well above average intelligence (while not a genius, except maybe by the technical definition), and I am generally happy as a default mood.
But I found through counseling that I have one major flaw that is most probably a result of my upbringing. I have almost never yelled at my fiance, and would never even think of hitting her in anger. But I do the same thing my parents did; I make her feel like she has "disappointed" me whenever she does something I do not approve of. I never go out and say that I am disappointed, but it is usually fairly obvious. And this feeling that I unknowingly give my fiance is far more damaging than any physical strike could be.
Not everyone's psychological idiosyncrasies manifest as mental health disorders such as depression. Left unchecked, I could have very well caused my fiance to become depressed later in our marriage. That is why I wanted to do couples therapy before our wedding this summer, so that we could work out any issues that maybe we didnt even know we had. The ego defences that I had developed in childhood did not damage my mental health, but they did make be a "worse" boyfriend/fiance/husband. If my fiance had lived our whole marriage with the constant desire to not disappoint me, she would be quite miserable indeed.
Your children may very well have no major problems. I assure you that they do have some protective ego defences that have been caused by your parenting, but that is true of every child. But the way you describe them they sound more like brainwashed children whose first-most desires in life are to live up to their parent's expectations. I have never met them, but that is how it sounds from your posts.
Parenting is very difficult, and it takes alot of work to be a good parent. But realize that your average person has, well, a 100 IQ. And I do not know about you, but I do not think that 100 IQ is really all that smart. Most people are not capable of walking the fine line between being a good parent or a controlling parent. And to call anyone a failure because they have had to spank their children is being pretty harsh.
I am not saying that the correct answer is to beat your children. But the correct answer is not necessarily to never spank your children. Any credible child psychologist would tell you that no parenting technique will work for every child. You may have been lucky that it has worked for two children, but I guarantee you that it would not work for any child. Even though my parents brought me up in a way similar to your described parenting methods, I doubt I would have turned out as well as I have without a few swift smacks to the butt when I was really out of line.
Children need to learn that there are SERIOUS consequences to some actions. Most adult laws are simply fines or probations, but the really serious ones warrent jail time. Spanking is the child version of jail time. And I would much rather have a police officer punch me in the face a few times than send me to jail for 6 months, so I think our children should be pretty grateful of their arrangement. --
Believe it or not, humans are not 'naturally' evil
That is very true. Human are "naturally" animalistic. The problem is that most of those animalistic tendencies are considered evil by our current moral codes. That is why it is easy for someone to believe that humans are inherently evil. Luckily our society has evolved to a point where many people grow up to be honorable and decent people in spite of our "natural" state.
When I was a child nothing was worse than my parents being disappointed in me. Well, except for getting spanked that is. I probably only got spanked about 4-5 times my entire childhood, but the knowledge that it could happen often stopped me from doing something I knew would require it.
If your kids are so scared of disappointing their parents, then they have a whole slew of problems far more severe than a tanned ass. If they are hurt more by your disappointment than by physical pain I fear for their mental health.
My fiance and I will not start trying for children for about a year, so I cannot speak from experience other than from talks with other parents and psychologists. But I sure hope that my children shed more tears from being spanked than tears from fears of disappointing me. I hope I am never that consistently controlling or demanding of my children.
should be something like paying 150% of the retail price of the infringing software.
I think locking people up for life for pirating is a little over the top, but only paying an extra 50% for software when you are caught? It is VERY hard to catch someone for piracy, so if the penalty was that low then it wouldnt stop anyone.
The penalty should simply be whatever it takes to get people to think twice about pirating. The point of these laws is to stop the behavior, so the penalties have to take that into account as well.
No individual "pirate" is dangerous, just as no one vote will ever make a difference in a presidential election. But that does not make voting useless, just as it doesnt make pirating not dangerous. (to our economy, not necessarily any individual person)
I write software for a living, and I sure as hell do not want people obtaining my hard work for free. While not every one of them would have bought my software, at least some of them would have. I think the penalty should be whatever it takes to make piracy unthinkable.
Sun spots are *cool* parts of the sun. If the sun is at a 1,000 year peak of sunspot activity, that means that it is at a 1,000 year *low* for temperature, as far as sunspots are concerned. So if there is global warming, then this argues *against* the sun as an explanation.
That is a common misconception. Direct satellite measurements of irradiance have shown that solar irradiance increases as the number of sunspots increase.
According to current theory, sunspots occur in pairs as magnetic disturbances in the convective plasma come close to the surface of the Sun. Magnetic field lines emerge from one sunspot and re enter at the other spot. Also, there are more sunspots during periods of increased magnetic activity. At that time more highly charged particles are emitted from the solar surface, and the Sun emits more UV and visible radiation.
It is most likely that the sunspots do not cause more radiation, but they instead are caused by the same events that cause the Sun to emit more radiation.
Regardless of what happens, it is clear that increased sun spot activity increases the radiation and therefore the heat that is transferred to the Earth from the Sun.
why is a mentally disabled person protected, while an equally-intelligent chimp is not?
It could simply be because of misfirings in the genetic and social development of our species. Our compassion for other humans is useful, while compassion for useless humans is not. But because evolution is not perfect, our brains are unable to make the difference. That is a good reason for why our morals do not allow us to kill humans that are of no use to us or to society.
It seams that this misfiring does not go so far as to give us the same level of compassion for other animals. It does give us some compassion, because we sure have members of our species who do want to give rights to animals. But it is obviously not to the same magnitude as our morality regarding other humans; mentally disabled or not.
Maybe they can find a way to limit fuel efficiency without making our roads more dangerous and more congested. Speed is not dangerous, variation is speed is dangerous. Everyone driving at 80 mph is not much more dangerous than 60 mph. What is dangerous is some people driving 60 mph and others driving 80 mph on the same road.
If the government enacted tougher speeding limits, more people would be ignoring them. And the roads would be less safe because there would be a 15-25 mph difference between a large amount of drivers, instead of the 5-15mph difference we have today. Many studies have shown that people tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable driving, speed limits be damned.
They have done research in areas where they have raised or lowered the speed limit by 5 mph, and the average speed of motorists changed by about 1 mph in either case. The reason is that when they lower the speed limits no one cares, and when they raise the speed limits everyone was already going faster to begin with. All they would do by lowering speed limits is have the few people who actually pay attention to the limits be in danger because the people around them are going significantly faster than they are.
And also, if you lower the speed limits then you put more people on the road. Say you have 6,000 workers that leave work at 4:30 - 5:30 and have an average of 30 miles to drive home. If they left work at an even distribution and drove an average of 65mph, you would have no more than 2600 motorists on the road at the same time and there would be 104052 vehicle-miles driven. But if they drove at an average of 75mph, you would have no more than 2300 motorists on the road at one time and there would be 92046 vehicle-miles driven.
By raising the (average) speed limit by 10mph, you have 12% less traffic congestion and 12% less driving. Not only is it safer to drive with less traffic congestion, you are less likely to get into an accident if you spend less time in your car. There are studies that show (Solomon, 1964) that traffic accidents rates drop until you reach a speed of about 65-70 mph. But the rise in traffic accidents per mile driven is lower than 12% between 65mph and 75 mph (it is about 10%). And that does not take into account the lack of congestion, which is the greater cause of accidents than speed.
Top speed has to do with aerodynamics, not horsepower. When you reach high speeds it is your car's drag coefficient that is primarily responsible for how fast you are going to get. An '04 Hyundai Elantra has 138 hp, which more more than enough to reach over 100 mph. For Hyundai to make your little econobox top out at around 80-90 mph they would have to make it a little square box with fins to pick up drag. That would make it alot less efficient even at slower speeds.
Almost any car that is suitable for the general public is going to be able to hit 100 mph and beyond. For the car manufacturers to do anything about it would be rediculous, because it would make the car far less desireable in asthetics and efficiency.
Buying a cellphone sucks. You choose your plan and contract length and pick your options and transfer data from your old phone etc... Ipods are simple.
But you already have a cell phone contract. The contract will not be any messier by adding a phone that also plays MP3s. Sure there are 5% of the people out there who really hate those contracts, but most people dont care. It is true that an IPOD is easier to give as a gift, but no one will need it as a gift once they can get an IPOD built into their phone for the same $50 up front + a 2yr contract.
IPODs will still exist, just like walkmans still exist. They just wont be nearly as popular as they are today. Apple will eventually just have to find something else to make money on. Like an IPhone.
You can program without understanding how the hardware actually executes your code. But a "good" programmer? No. A hack (and not in the complimentary sense) at best.
That is a very elitist statement. I used to think like that when I was younger. People writing code in Visual Basic were not real programmers, only people like me using C/C++ and assembler code when necessary were real programmers.
But then I got into the real world, where results are whats important and not the way you obtain those results. I used to access the mouse using dos interrupts and wrote directly to video card's buffer for graphics. Sure it was great for improving the refresh rates of some little game I was programming, but the effort necessary was tremendous.
When I started actually being paid to write code, no one cared how I wrote their machine design simulation program. They just cared that it was done in a month. I had learned Visual Basic along side Visual C++ back in the 5.0 days (im not that old), so I knew that was the best way to solve the problem. They still use that program today to help design machines that are sold for upwards to a million dollars each. Man I should have been paid more.
Now I use MouseDown and Paint events to write my code. I use C++ every now and then to write *.Dlls and other libraries, but C# has become my language of choice. I write my own software and sell it retail now. I dont write video games, so ultimate performance is not a very high priority. I write software that helps companies run their business.
A good programmer is someone who can produce results on a schedule. A "hack" is someone who spends time worrying about memory reference densities and branch prediction miss penalties when all their customer needs is a User Interface to input invoices. In the real world people want a product, not a programmer telling them it should hopefully be done in another month.
Queue the relgious arguments. Everyone knows that God tells us what morality is. Why does science keep working on the question of morality when we already have an answer? Not really a very good answer, but it was good enough for people 2000 years ago it should be good enough for me.
I just reread this thread, and I didnt see anything about causation and correlation. Even the National Association of Professional Organizers never confused the two. They said that 1000 "knowledge workers" lose $48k/wk due to an inability to locate information. They then say that disorganization causes that loss in productivity. They even made a point that you shouldnt confuse mess with disorganization.
What the article was saying (and the post you replied to) is that the $48k/wk argument is wrong. They arent arguing about causation, they are arguing about whether that productivity is lost at all.
That is why I assumed you were trying to say there is only a correlation (between what I dont know), because I saw no one making that argument before you. Sorry for the misunderstanding, but I still dont see what you were referring to in your post.
In other words, and say it slowly with me, "Correlation does NOT equal causation."
While I am glad that more people seam to understand this concept, most people take it to an extreme. While a correlation does not equal causation, correlations are not useless. Almost everything we as humans know about anything started with a correlation. Finding correlations is what leads us to causational relationships.
Finding a correlation in research is the first important step. They should not be ignored, or denounced simply because they are "only" correlations. These correlations should be used to warrant further research to find out what the cause of the correlations are.
Considering the US population is ~10 times greater than Canada, it seems reasonable that the number of bovines turned into burgers every day/week/year in each country should follow the same ratio. What is 100,000 cattle per day divided by 65,000 per week? Are you smarter than a fifth grader, or what?
I made the point that certain regulations do not scale up well. It is true that the United States only slaughters about 40% more per capita than Canada (the actual number is closer to 120k per day, I rounded down). But just because we have more people doesnt necessarily mean we can handle the same standards.
If you are tutoring 4 students, and creating a standardized test for each of them to take at the end of every week, there would be very little work in doing so. You know each student very well and can probably make a fair test for all 4 students that will result in a fair grade for each. But if 10 teachers were each tutoring 4 students, and you had to create a standardized test that all 40 students have to take. Now it takes more collaberation, and therefore more overhead. Even if the number of teachers rises linearly with the number of students, it doesnt mean that the amount of work increases linearly.
Sometimes work becomes harder when you scale it up. Sometimes the work becomes easier. But the basic point I was making is that we (the common citizens) have NO IDEA what it would take to do something like that. So to complain that it isnt being done is rediculous.
And even if we could do it, there would have to be a reason to do all of that work. Canada had a very good reason: There was panic because of the mad cow disease scare. The U.S. does not have a similarly good reason. Paranoia about hormones in our beef is just paranoia until studies start to show that they are harmful and by what degree.
DES was found to be harmful by the FDA, so it is no longer used. But the FDA has found no such problems with the five types of hormones that are being used today. It is true that they could be harmful and we do not know it, but they are just as likely to be beneficial to us as well. Until there is a reason to think there is a problem (other than your standard hippie/environmentalist paranoia) there is no reason for the FDA to force such labeling on our meat.
If you really care that much, buy organic beef. Where I live, it is only about 2.4 times as expensive as high quality choice beef (Certified Angus). If your paranoia is strong enough to pay over twice as much for the same steak, go ahead. (I have had a good amount of both Certified Angus and Organic Beef over the years, and prefer Certified Angus in taste also, although only slightly) --
That is very different from us being unable to grow enough food to feed those people.
No, it really isnt any different. You cannot just ignore local politics, they are there. Politics will always ensure unequal distribution of just about everything. If you only have 100% of the necessary food to feed a particular country, there will be starvation. You need 120%/130%/... of the necessary food in order to make it abundant enough that no warlord would be able to use food as a power source.
There is nothing I see that prevents us from, theoretically, feeding 6 billion people easily, much of it is just bad distribution and local politics. The western world consumes much more than it needs to for example.
Yes, the western world does consume more than it needs. But it wont stop. People very rarely take the time to consider their impact on the world. They just go along eating 3000+ calories/day, throwing away another 2000+ calories/day in waste, and driving their full sized SUV to pick up their one child from school. And once the third world starts to get more food, their middle class will become more wasteful as well. It will still take twice as much food as "needed" to be able to feed their entire population.
Waste cannot be ignored, because it is unavoidable. Sure we can limit it, but it will always be there. Anyone who tries to make a home budget but doesnt add in a Miscellaneous column is doomed for failure.
We grow many crops that aren't strictly required and raise a lot of meat that isn't efficient use of land as well.
Again, you are correct that if we all decide to just eat potatoes there would be alot more food to go around. But when given the chance, people prefer to eat meat. A population of people will usually eat as much meat in their diet as they can afford. Only once food becomes very plentiful do things such as health concerns become a problem because of too much meat intake.
Once the third world starts to become more prosperous, the most wealthy of them will start eating more meat just like we do in the US. And again, you have the same problem.
We have enough nuclear energy to last a few centuries
Currently there is about 4.7 million tonnes of known useable Uranium on Earth. Current nuclear production uses 68 thousand tonnes/yr, and produces about 7.6% of the world's energy. While we will find new sources of Uranium along the way, it is rediculous to think that nuclear energy will be such a major contributor to our lasting energy needs. We will run out of uranium in about 70 years even if our consumption never increases, not centuries as you claim.
It's also amazing what people can do when they actually have incentive (like say fear of starvation)
The only people with the power to solve the problems are the ones who have no fear of starvation. I havent met any bio-engineers who have trouble putting food on the table, have you?
Our planet already produces about 2800 calories/person of food. That could keep everyone from starving. But that is with no waste at all, and with no political pressures or unequal distribution of food. Those factors are unavoidable, so even with enough food to feed everyone we still have a great deal of malnutrition in the world today. And it will only get worse as populations rise. We can either turn everyone into greedless robots, or we can increase our food production even further.
I guess that is possible, but I have generally only noticed the degredation of our education standards. Grade inflation and "teaching to the tests" is rising rapidly. All I see is more people getting degrees just because the quality of those degrees is diminishing.
Im sorry, I did say during the 90s. I agree that over the last century there were many other factors. I was just saying that during the 90s the only thing that really changed was our increase in IT technology. The USSR had already collapsed by that point, and women had been in the workplace for decades.
Not really imho, a lot of malnutrition is caused by local political situations (ie: warlords and idiotic leaders) not the inability for the world to supply enough food.
The scarcity of food is what allows the warlords to use food as a source of control. If food was plentiful, they would have to use other methods such as controlling energy/electricity.
Also current estimates predict the world's population will level out at ~12 billion (birth rates are falling as more of the world become developed) which is likely well within the limits of a sustainable population.
You would disagree with alot of "experts" in thinking that we can adequatly feed 12 billion people. We have trouble feeding 6 billion. The experts could be wrong, but what leads you to think that they are? We currently use alot of fossil fuels to drive our agriculture (from gas for machinery to natural gas based fertilizers), and with our energy resources already being streched its possible that our food output might start to decrease soon. We currently produce about 4x the food that photosynthesis would allow because of our use of fertilizers, and most of our fertilizers come from non-renewable sources.
Of course new technologies could continue to make food production easier even with these problems, but its hard to be too optimistic about that. --
How about the isolated mad cow cows from a few years back, where they traced it back to individual cows?
The reason they can trace mad cow to individual cows is because the inspections done to test for mad cow disease are done very early in the process. The only thing they do know about the cow at that point is which farm it came from. They still dont know anything about what the cow was fed, what injections it has recieved, etc.
And the cases where they have singled it down to single cows were in Canada (as far as I know), where the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has developed a Canadian Cattle Identification Program for cattle and bison. This was necessary because of the BSE scare, because no responsible government would spend that kind of money if it wasnt to help out an industry that was being damaged by bad PR.
This Identification Program is not that hard for a country that slaughters 65,000 cattle per week. In the US we slaughter about 100,000 cattle per day. That is a huge difference. The same rules and procedures do not always scale up easily by that level.
I just need to know that they have to have a method to keep from double dosing animals
The problem is not only tracking this data, but verifying it. You are correct that individual farmers mostly keep track of what is happening to their herds. But if they are going to be passing on that information then you need government/industry oversight to check their claims. Without this oversight the farmers could just lie. This is where the costs come in, not just the price of the hard drives and data entry people necessary to keep track of the numbers.
And with meat costs already going up because of the rising price of corn (because of ethanol), this is the worse time to add extra costs to our meat inspection/packaging process.
As for public panic, I frankly don't care. If they worry that people will stop eating their produce because of what they put in it, maybe they should think twice about what they put in it.
Not caring about public panic is a very irresponsible attitude. Public panic did enormous damage to the Canadian and UK cattle markets, even though the actual damage from BSE was very minimal. It cost their governments alot of money in subsidies to keep the industries going. Even if it was the fault of the leaders of the cattle industry, why should individual farmers who had no idea what was going on suffer also?
Public panic can often make problems much worse. For instance if there was a disease outbreak in a major city, a public panic would cause people to flee the city and spread the disease further. --
But "pesticide" and "no-pesticide" labelling is commonplace now, at least in the EU. This is no different.
In the U.S. there are plenty of similar standards, such as the Organic Beef labels. But Organic beef is about twice the price as standard beef, with very little difference in quality (from what I can tell after eating alot of both). I can get Prime Steaks for about the same price as Organic steaks, and the quality is MUCH higher.
These foods are not for the mainstream, but only for people with extra money and nothing important in their lives to worry about. This kind of labeling is mostly just an excuse to raise prices without adding any extra value.
When it comes to steak, if I had a choice I'd vote with my tastebuds and go with European (non-hormone-fed) every time. Unfortunately, since hormone-feeding of cattle is illegal in the EU and widespread in the USA it's difficult to do a side-by-side taste test. Steak in the USA tastes like it's spent too much time with Arnold Schwarzeneggar.
The problem is that those higher standards in the EU cause beef prices to go up dramatically. Beef is far more expensive in Europe than it is in the US. That is due both to their lack of feeding efficiency and economies of scale. I can get Certified Angus or Prime steaks in the U.S. for the same price or cheaper than the average steaks in Europe. And I would take Prime steaks in the U.S. any day (although I only have limited knowledge of the taste of steaks in Europe, so I can only speak of the steaks in Germany).
Oh come on, like they don't do meat inspections, and like they don't track what they give to each cow in terms of drugs.
Meat inspections done by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) do not check for all drugs and hormones used on cattle. They only check for things that are known to be harmful (i.e. Mad Cow) and that can be determined by simply inspecting a carcass.
While a single farmer may know what they give to their cattle, a single slaugterhouse will have cattle from multiple farmers. My father is a cattle farmer and our butcher is a close friend. While my father may know what feed was given to his cattle, our butcher doesnt. He had no idea what hormones are used. And if my father was to get cattle feed from a supplier rather than from his own corn crop, he might not even know what hormones are used.
I think I recall a batch of e coli-contaminated spinach that they traced down to one field.
No, it was traced to three counties in California. It isnt really clear which county(s) caused to problem, so they recalled all of it. And it took some time (a week or so) to track this down, and that was with the full might of the FDA searching for one source of spinach. I dont want my local Walmart to spend a week searching for the source of their poultry just to check what types of hormones were given to them while feeding.
So don't spout the industry line at me, that any requirement for them to share data which they damn well collect
Again, you assume they collect it. Where is your cited study? What makes you believe they collect it? From my time working with companies and writing software to help with distribution/invoicing/etc, I am constantly suprised with how little record keeping is actually done in some industries. Expecially when they do not think the data is important.
I buy sides of cattle from a local butcher instead of from the supermarket most of the time. One time I only got 180lb of beef from a 410 lb side of beef (44% yield, 60% is more standard). The butcher said he has been being sent Certified Angus beef recently for no price increase for a few months, so I asked if he has noticed less of a yield from that type of cattle. He had no idea, because it never donned on him to even keep track.
You may be happy to have people feed you whatever they want to, but I'd at least like to know.
Letting people know things that only cause hysteria is not always a good idea either. MRIs used to be referred to as NMRIs (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging), but they had to remove the nuclear part because people associated it with ionizing radiation exposure (which is not used in MRIs).
Food irradiation has a similar problem. Much of our food is not irradiated (such as milk) because it must be labelled as such and people are generally scared of such terminology. Food used as ingredients in restaurants and food processing does not have the labeling requirement, so that is the main area where such foods can be used. If the labeling wasnt necessary then we wouldnt have as much problems with food spoilage as we currently do. And it is primarily caused by unnecessary food labeling.
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Why do scientists such as yourself disparage supernatural proposals as though they were false, when you are yourself not in honest pursuit of truth, but of credible naturalistic explanations?
That is pretty much a semantic argument. There really is no difference between the natural and the supernatural. When we describe something as "natural", it is because we can explain it already. When we describe something as "supernatural", it is because we cannot explain it yet. Lightning was once supernatural. As soon as we have a working theory for something, it becomes "naturalistic".
Science does not ignore "supernatural" occurances. They are routinely dismissed because they are usually found to be simple misconceptions, but the options are always on the table. Any decent scientist will tell you that we know that we dont know everything yet.
If God was shown to exist, he would be a very natural being. He would just have natural laws that are completely unknown to us, just as electromagnetism was unknown to us 1000 years ago. The reason why God's existance is dismissed is not simply because he is deemed to be supernatural, but because there is no reason to believe that he does exist.
Not a single scientific experiment that I am aware of has ever pointed to the existance of any god that has ever been worshiped by man. Quite the opposite in fact. An almost infinite amount of natural phenomena that have at one time been attributed to a godlike being have been explained with "natural" laws.
We basically have two choices:
1) Almost every god that has ever been worshiped in the history of mankind is false, but the One God worhiped by a few similar religions today is real.
OR
2) ALL relgions that provide no tangible and reasonable proof are false.
I am sure that the Romans thought the same thing that we do today. I am sure that they laughed at the idea of the old babylonian gods actually existing. Just like our descendants a thousand years from now will probably be laughing at our current religious beliefs.
Science is not being close minded by not listening to religious arguments. Science has listened, but has found nothing worth continued listening. The only reason that it is even a topic of discussion is because of how many people still believe in organized religion. Illiteracy is something that has only recently been almost eliminated in the civilized world. Our civilization's next step of enlightenment is to rid ourselves of religion, but it will take a while. Until then we will still have discussions that confuse the natural and supernatural, and confuse scientific conviction with religious conviction.
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So what do you consider to be an innovation?
Virtually all innovations are incremental improvements. Creating a new way for the internal combustion engine to work would be very innovative, but is just an incremental improvement on our current engines. A new drivetrain with less loss of horsepower from the cranshaft to the wheel would be a great innovation, but would still just be an incremental improvement on our current cars.
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I was pointing out how people generally will act based on what authority figures have told them to do, not on any innate sense of morality. We do not steal because our parents have educated us on why we shouldnt do it, not because we were born with any sense that stealing is bad.
All of our moral laws tell us not do things. Do not steal. Do not kill. That is because our natural tendencies are to kill, steal, lie; whatever it takes to survive. Now that we live in a society where surviving is not that difficult, we rely on our society's "rules" to help us supress these "evil" desires. We no longer need to steal to eat because food is everywhere.
These morals are put into place so that we do not fall back on our natural tendencies. Our modern society can only exist with these morals in place, which is why it is so important that we keep passing them on to our children. Otherwise they would turn out like all feral children do: almost completely void of any kind of moral compass.
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Most people only play nice because of the law structures that we put in place. Not because of any natural desire to be a good person.
You need to read up on psychological experiments such as The Milgram Experiment. Obedience to authority beats out natural "decency" almost every time. They found that 2/3 of people would apply a lethal dose of electricity to an ordinary person just because an authority figure told them to. Almost 100% of people would apply doses that almost exceeded a lethal amount. The study was used to show why it was so easy for Nazi soldiers to commit such atrocities during the Holocaust. Now these types of experiments are considered unethical because it shows people how "evil" they really are deep inside.
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Your kids may very well be fine, I never said that they were definetly "screwed up". I said that I feared that they may be.
I would be considered by basically any psychologist to be very well adjusted. And I have talked to a couple of them through the couples counseling I wanted to do before I got married. I react well to criticism, am very responsible and caring, well above average intelligence (while not a genius, except maybe by the technical definition), and I am generally happy as a default mood.
But I found through counseling that I have one major flaw that is most probably a result of my upbringing. I have almost never yelled at my fiance, and would never even think of hitting her in anger. But I do the same thing my parents did; I make her feel like she has "disappointed" me whenever she does something I do not approve of. I never go out and say that I am disappointed, but it is usually fairly obvious. And this feeling that I unknowingly give my fiance is far more damaging than any physical strike could be.
Not everyone's psychological idiosyncrasies manifest as mental health disorders such as depression. Left unchecked, I could have very well caused my fiance to become depressed later in our marriage. That is why I wanted to do couples therapy before our wedding this summer, so that we could work out any issues that maybe we didnt even know we had. The ego defences that I had developed in childhood did not damage my mental health, but they did make be a "worse" boyfriend/fiance/husband. If my fiance had lived our whole marriage with the constant desire to not disappoint me, she would be quite miserable indeed.
Your children may very well have no major problems. I assure you that they do have some protective ego defences that have been caused by your parenting, but that is true of every child. But the way you describe them they sound more like brainwashed children whose first-most desires in life are to live up to their parent's expectations. I have never met them, but that is how it sounds from your posts.
Parenting is very difficult, and it takes alot of work to be a good parent. But realize that your average person has, well, a 100 IQ. And I do not know about you, but I do not think that 100 IQ is really all that smart. Most people are not capable of walking the fine line between being a good parent or a controlling parent. And to call anyone a failure because they have had to spank their children is being pretty harsh.
I am not saying that the correct answer is to beat your children. But the correct answer is not necessarily to never spank your children. Any credible child psychologist would tell you that no parenting technique will work for every child. You may have been lucky that it has worked for two children, but I guarantee you that it would not work for any child. Even though my parents brought me up in a way similar to your described parenting methods, I doubt I would have turned out as well as I have without a few swift smacks to the butt when I was really out of line.
Children need to learn that there are SERIOUS consequences to some actions. Most adult laws are simply fines or probations, but the really serious ones warrent jail time. Spanking is the child version of jail time. And I would much rather have a police officer punch me in the face a few times than send me to jail for 6 months, so I think our children should be pretty grateful of their arrangement.
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Believe it or not, humans are not 'naturally' evil
That is very true. Human are "naturally" animalistic. The problem is that most of those animalistic tendencies are considered evil by our current moral codes. That is why it is easy for someone to believe that humans are inherently evil. Luckily our society has evolved to a point where many people grow up to be honorable and decent people in spite of our "natural" state.
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When I was a child nothing was worse than my parents being disappointed in me. Well, except for getting spanked that is. I probably only got spanked about 4-5 times my entire childhood, but the knowledge that it could happen often stopped me from doing something I knew would require it.
If your kids are so scared of disappointing their parents, then they have a whole slew of problems far more severe than a tanned ass. If they are hurt more by your disappointment than by physical pain I fear for their mental health.
My fiance and I will not start trying for children for about a year, so I cannot speak from experience other than from talks with other parents and psychologists. But I sure hope that my children shed more tears from being spanked than tears from fears of disappointing me. I hope I am never that consistently controlling or demanding of my children.
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should be something like paying 150% of the retail price of the infringing software.
I think locking people up for life for pirating is a little over the top, but only paying an extra 50% for software when you are caught? It is VERY hard to catch someone for piracy, so if the penalty was that low then it wouldnt stop anyone.
The penalty should simply be whatever it takes to get people to think twice about pirating. The point of these laws is to stop the behavior, so the penalties have to take that into account as well.
No individual "pirate" is dangerous, just as no one vote will ever make a difference in a presidential election. But that does not make voting useless, just as it doesnt make pirating not dangerous. (to our economy, not necessarily any individual person)
I write software for a living, and I sure as hell do not want people obtaining my hard work for free. While not every one of them would have bought my software, at least some of them would have. I think the penalty should be whatever it takes to make piracy unthinkable.
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Sun spots are *cool* parts of the sun. If the sun is at a 1,000 year peak of sunspot activity, that means that it is at a 1,000 year *low* for temperature, as far as sunspots are concerned.
So if there is global warming, then this argues *against* the sun as an explanation.
That is a common misconception. Direct satellite measurements of irradiance have shown that solar irradiance increases as the number of sunspots increase.
According to current theory, sunspots occur in pairs as magnetic disturbances in the convective plasma come close to the surface of the Sun. Magnetic field lines emerge from one sunspot and re enter at the other spot. Also, there are more sunspots during periods of increased magnetic activity. At that time more highly charged particles are emitted from the solar surface, and the Sun emits more UV and visible radiation.
It is most likely that the sunspots do not cause more radiation, but they instead are caused by the same events that cause the Sun to emit more radiation.
Regardless of what happens, it is clear that increased sun spot activity increases the radiation and therefore the heat that is transferred to the Earth from the Sun.
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why is a mentally disabled person protected, while an equally-intelligent chimp is not?
It could simply be because of misfirings in the genetic and social development of our species. Our compassion for other humans is useful, while compassion for useless humans is not. But because evolution is not perfect, our brains are unable to make the difference. That is a good reason for why our morals do not allow us to kill humans that are of no use to us or to society.
It seams that this misfiring does not go so far as to give us the same level of compassion for other animals. It does give us some compassion, because we sure have members of our species who do want to give rights to animals. But it is obviously not to the same magnitude as our morality regarding other humans; mentally disabled or not.
Maybe they can find a way to limit fuel efficiency without making our roads more dangerous and more congested. Speed is not dangerous, variation is speed is dangerous. Everyone driving at 80 mph is not much more dangerous than 60 mph. What is dangerous is some people driving 60 mph and others driving 80 mph on the same road.
If the government enacted tougher speeding limits, more people would be ignoring them. And the roads would be less safe because there would be a 15-25 mph difference between a large amount of drivers, instead of the 5-15mph difference we have today. Many studies have shown that people tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable driving, speed limits be damned.
They have done research in areas where they have raised or lowered the speed limit by 5 mph, and the average speed of motorists changed by about 1 mph in either case. The reason is that when they lower the speed limits no one cares, and when they raise the speed limits everyone was already going faster to begin with. All they would do by lowering speed limits is have the few people who actually pay attention to the limits be in danger because the people around them are going significantly faster than they are.
And also, if you lower the speed limits then you put more people on the road. Say you have 6,000 workers that leave work at 4:30 - 5:30 and have an average of 30 miles to drive home. If they left work at an even distribution and drove an average of 65mph, you would have no more than 2600 motorists on the road at the same time and there would be 104052 vehicle-miles driven. But if they drove at an average of 75mph, you would have no more than 2300 motorists on the road at one time and there would be 92046 vehicle-miles driven.
By raising the (average) speed limit by 10mph, you have 12% less traffic congestion and 12% less driving. Not only is it safer to drive with less traffic congestion, you are less likely to get into an accident if you spend less time in your car. There are studies that show (Solomon, 1964) that traffic accidents rates drop until you reach a speed of about 65-70 mph. But the rise in traffic accidents per mile driven is lower than 12% between 65mph and 75 mph (it is about 10%). And that does not take into account the lack of congestion, which is the greater cause of accidents than speed.
Speed limits are there for economic reasons.
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Top speed has to do with aerodynamics, not horsepower. When you reach high speeds it is your car's drag coefficient that is primarily responsible for how fast you are going to get. An '04 Hyundai Elantra has 138 hp, which more more than enough to reach over 100 mph. For Hyundai to make your little econobox top out at around 80-90 mph they would have to make it a little square box with fins to pick up drag. That would make it alot less efficient even at slower speeds.
Almost any car that is suitable for the general public is going to be able to hit 100 mph and beyond. For the car manufacturers to do anything about it would be rediculous, because it would make the car far less desireable in asthetics and efficiency.
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Buying a cellphone sucks. You choose your plan and contract length and pick your options and transfer data from your old phone etc... Ipods are simple.
But you already have a cell phone contract. The contract will not be any messier by adding a phone that also plays MP3s. Sure there are 5% of the people out there who really hate those contracts, but most people dont care. It is true that an IPOD is easier to give as a gift, but no one will need it as a gift once they can get an IPOD built into their phone for the same $50 up front + a 2yr contract.
IPODs will still exist, just like walkmans still exist. They just wont be nearly as popular as they are today. Apple will eventually just have to find something else to make money on. Like an IPhone.
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You can program without understanding how the hardware actually executes your code. But a "good" programmer? No. A hack (and not in the complimentary sense) at best.
That is a very elitist statement. I used to think like that when I was younger. People writing code in Visual Basic were not real programmers, only people like me using C/C++ and assembler code when necessary were real programmers.
But then I got into the real world, where results are whats important and not the way you obtain those results. I used to access the mouse using dos interrupts and wrote directly to video card's buffer for graphics. Sure it was great for improving the refresh rates of some little game I was programming, but the effort necessary was tremendous.
When I started actually being paid to write code, no one cared how I wrote their machine design simulation program. They just cared that it was done in a month. I had learned Visual Basic along side Visual C++ back in the 5.0 days (im not that old), so I knew that was the best way to solve the problem. They still use that program today to help design machines that are sold for upwards to a million dollars each. Man I should have been paid more.
Now I use MouseDown and Paint events to write my code. I use C++ every now and then to write *.Dlls and other libraries, but C# has become my language of choice. I write my own software and sell it retail now. I dont write video games, so ultimate performance is not a very high priority. I write software that helps companies run their business.
A good programmer is someone who can produce results on a schedule. A "hack" is someone who spends time worrying about memory reference densities and branch prediction miss penalties when all their customer needs is a User Interface to input invoices. In the real world people want a product, not a programmer telling them it should hopefully be done in another month.
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Queue the relgious arguments. Everyone knows that God tells us what morality is. Why does science keep working on the question of morality when we already have an answer? Not really a very good answer, but it was good enough for people 2000 years ago it should be good enough for me.
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I just reread this thread, and I didnt see anything about causation and correlation. Even the National Association of Professional Organizers never confused the two. They said that 1000 "knowledge workers" lose $48k/wk due to an inability to locate information. They then say that disorganization causes that loss in productivity. They even made a point that you shouldnt confuse mess with disorganization.
What the article was saying (and the post you replied to) is that the $48k/wk argument is wrong. They arent arguing about causation, they are arguing about whether that productivity is lost at all.
That is why I assumed you were trying to say there is only a correlation (between what I dont know), because I saw no one making that argument before you. Sorry for the misunderstanding, but I still dont see what you were referring to in your post.
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In other words, and say it slowly with me, "Correlation does NOT equal causation."
While I am glad that more people seam to understand this concept, most people take it to an extreme. While a correlation does not equal causation, correlations are not useless. Almost everything we as humans know about anything started with a correlation. Finding correlations is what leads us to causational relationships.
Finding a correlation in research is the first important step. They should not be ignored, or denounced simply because they are "only" correlations. These correlations should be used to warrant further research to find out what the cause of the correlations are.
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Considering the US population is ~10 times greater than Canada, it seems reasonable that the number of bovines turned into burgers every day/week/year in each country should follow the same ratio. What is 100,000 cattle per day divided by 65,000 per week? Are you smarter than a fifth grader, or what?
I made the point that certain regulations do not scale up well. It is true that the United States only slaughters about 40% more per capita than Canada (the actual number is closer to 120k per day, I rounded down). But just because we have more people doesnt necessarily mean we can handle the same standards.
If you are tutoring 4 students, and creating a standardized test for each of them to take at the end of every week, there would be very little work in doing so. You know each student very well and can probably make a fair test for all 4 students that will result in a fair grade for each. But if 10 teachers were each tutoring 4 students, and you had to create a standardized test that all 40 students have to take. Now it takes more collaberation, and therefore more overhead. Even if the number of teachers rises linearly with the number of students, it doesnt mean that the amount of work increases linearly.
Sometimes work becomes harder when you scale it up. Sometimes the work becomes easier. But the basic point I was making is that we (the common citizens) have NO IDEA what it would take to do something like that. So to complain that it isnt being done is rediculous.
And even if we could do it, there would have to be a reason to do all of that work. Canada had a very good reason: There was panic because of the mad cow disease scare. The U.S. does not have a similarly good reason. Paranoia about hormones in our beef is just paranoia until studies start to show that they are harmful and by what degree.
DES was found to be harmful by the FDA, so it is no longer used. But the FDA has found no such problems with the five types of hormones that are being used today. It is true that they could be harmful and we do not know it, but they are just as likely to be beneficial to us as well. Until there is a reason to think there is a problem (other than your standard hippie/environmentalist paranoia) there is no reason for the FDA to force such labeling on our meat.
If you really care that much, buy organic beef. Where I live, it is only about 2.4 times as expensive as high quality choice beef (Certified Angus). If your paranoia is strong enough to pay over twice as much for the same steak, go ahead. (I have had a good amount of both Certified Angus and Organic Beef over the years, and prefer Certified Angus in taste also, although only slightly)
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That is very different from us being unable to grow enough food to feed those people.
No, it really isnt any different. You cannot just ignore local politics, they are there. Politics will always ensure unequal distribution of just about everything. If you only have 100% of the necessary food to feed a particular country, there will be starvation. You need 120%/130%/... of the necessary food in order to make it abundant enough that no warlord would be able to use food as a power source.
There is nothing I see that prevents us from, theoretically, feeding 6 billion people easily, much of it is just bad distribution and local politics. The western world consumes much more than it needs to for example.
Yes, the western world does consume more than it needs. But it wont stop. People very rarely take the time to consider their impact on the world. They just go along eating 3000+ calories/day, throwing away another 2000+ calories/day in waste, and driving their full sized SUV to pick up their one child from school. And once the third world starts to get more food, their middle class will become more wasteful as well. It will still take twice as much food as "needed" to be able to feed their entire population.
Waste cannot be ignored, because it is unavoidable. Sure we can limit it, but it will always be there. Anyone who tries to make a home budget but doesnt add in a Miscellaneous column is doomed for failure.
We grow many crops that aren't strictly required and raise a lot of meat that isn't efficient use of land as well.
Again, you are correct that if we all decide to just eat potatoes there would be alot more food to go around. But when given the chance, people prefer to eat meat. A population of people will usually eat as much meat in their diet as they can afford. Only once food becomes very plentiful do things such as health concerns become a problem because of too much meat intake.
Once the third world starts to become more prosperous, the most wealthy of them will start eating more meat just like we do in the US. And again, you have the same problem.
We have enough nuclear energy to last a few centuries
Currently there is about 4.7 million tonnes of known useable Uranium on Earth. Current nuclear production uses 68 thousand tonnes/yr, and produces about 7.6% of the world's energy. While we will find new sources of Uranium along the way, it is rediculous to think that nuclear energy will be such a major contributor to our lasting energy needs. We will run out of uranium in about 70 years even if our consumption never increases, not centuries as you claim.
It's also amazing what people can do when they actually have incentive (like say fear of starvation)
The only people with the power to solve the problems are the ones who have no fear of starvation. I havent met any bio-engineers who have trouble putting food on the table, have you?
Our planet already produces about 2800 calories/person of food. That could keep everyone from starving. But that is with no waste at all, and with no political pressures or unequal distribution of food. Those factors are unavoidable, so even with enough food to feed everyone we still have a great deal of malnutrition in the world today. And it will only get worse as populations rise. We can either turn everyone into greedless robots, or we can increase our food production even further.
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What about education?
I guess that is possible, but I have generally only noticed the degredation of our education standards. Grade inflation and "teaching to the tests" is rising rapidly. All I see is more people getting degrees just because the quality of those degrees is diminishing.
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Im sorry, I did say during the 90s. I agree that over the last century there were many other factors. I was just saying that during the 90s the only thing that really changed was our increase in IT technology. The USSR had already collapsed by that point, and women had been in the workplace for decades.
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Not really imho, a lot of malnutrition is caused by local political situations (ie: warlords and idiotic leaders) not the inability for the world to supply enough food.
The scarcity of food is what allows the warlords to use food as a source of control. If food was plentiful, they would have to use other methods such as controlling energy/electricity.
Also current estimates predict the world's population will level out at ~12 billion (birth rates are falling as more of the world become developed) which is likely well within the limits of a sustainable population.
You would disagree with alot of "experts" in thinking that we can adequatly feed 12 billion people. We have trouble feeding 6 billion. The experts could be wrong, but what leads you to think that they are? We currently use alot of fossil fuels to drive our agriculture (from gas for machinery to natural gas based fertilizers), and with our energy resources already being streched its possible that our food output might start to decrease soon. We currently produce about 4x the food that photosynthesis would allow because of our use of fertilizers, and most of our fertilizers come from non-renewable sources.
Of course new technologies could continue to make food production easier even with these problems, but its hard to be too optimistic about that.
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How about the isolated mad cow cows from a few years back, where they traced it back to individual cows?
The reason they can trace mad cow to individual cows is because the inspections done to test for mad cow disease are done very early in the process. The only thing they do know about the cow at that point is which farm it came from. They still dont know anything about what the cow was fed, what injections it has recieved, etc.
And the cases where they have singled it down to single cows were in Canada (as far as I know), where the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has developed a Canadian Cattle Identification Program for cattle and bison. This was necessary because of the BSE scare, because no responsible government would spend that kind of money if it wasnt to help out an industry that was being damaged by bad PR.
This Identification Program is not that hard for a country that slaughters 65,000 cattle per week. In the US we slaughter about 100,000 cattle per day. That is a huge difference. The same rules and procedures do not always scale up easily by that level.
I just need to know that they have to have a method to keep from double dosing animals
The problem is not only tracking this data, but verifying it. You are correct that individual farmers mostly keep track of what is happening to their herds. But if they are going to be passing on that information then you need government/industry oversight to check their claims. Without this oversight the farmers could just lie. This is where the costs come in, not just the price of the hard drives and data entry people necessary to keep track of the numbers.
And with meat costs already going up because of the rising price of corn (because of ethanol), this is the worse time to add extra costs to our meat inspection/packaging process.
As for public panic, I frankly don't care. If they worry that people will stop eating their produce because of what they put in it, maybe they should think twice about what they put in it.
Not caring about public panic is a very irresponsible attitude. Public panic did enormous damage to the Canadian and UK cattle markets, even though the actual damage from BSE was very minimal. It cost their governments alot of money in subsidies to keep the industries going. Even if it was the fault of the leaders of the cattle industry, why should individual farmers who had no idea what was going on suffer also?
Public panic can often make problems much worse. For instance if there was a disease outbreak in a major city, a public panic would cause people to flee the city and spread the disease further.
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But "pesticide" and "no-pesticide" labelling is commonplace now, at least in the EU. This is no different.
In the U.S. there are plenty of similar standards, such as the Organic Beef labels. But Organic beef is about twice the price as standard beef, with very little difference in quality (from what I can tell after eating alot of both). I can get Prime Steaks for about the same price as Organic steaks, and the quality is MUCH higher.
These foods are not for the mainstream, but only for people with extra money and nothing important in their lives to worry about. This kind of labeling is mostly just an excuse to raise prices without adding any extra value.
When it comes to steak, if I had a choice I'd vote with my tastebuds and go with European (non-hormone-fed) every time. Unfortunately, since hormone-feeding of cattle is illegal in the EU and widespread in the USA it's difficult to do a side-by-side taste test. Steak in the USA tastes like it's spent too much time with Arnold Schwarzeneggar.
The problem is that those higher standards in the EU cause beef prices to go up dramatically. Beef is far more expensive in Europe than it is in the US. That is due both to their lack of feeding efficiency and economies of scale. I can get Certified Angus or Prime steaks in the U.S. for the same price or cheaper than the average steaks in Europe. And I would take Prime steaks in the U.S. any day (although I only have limited knowledge of the taste of steaks in Europe, so I can only speak of the steaks in Germany).
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Oh come on, like they don't do meat inspections, and like they don't track what they give to each cow in terms of drugs.
Meat inspections done by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) do not check for all drugs and hormones used on cattle. They only check for things that are known to be harmful (i.e. Mad Cow) and that can be determined by simply inspecting a carcass.
While a single farmer may know what they give to their cattle, a single slaugterhouse will have cattle from multiple farmers. My father is a cattle farmer and our butcher is a close friend. While my father may know what feed was given to his cattle, our butcher doesnt. He had no idea what hormones are used. And if my father was to get cattle feed from a supplier rather than from his own corn crop, he might not even know what hormones are used.
I think I recall a batch of e coli-contaminated spinach that they traced down to one field.
No, it was traced to three counties in California. It isnt really clear which county(s) caused to problem, so they recalled all of it. And it took some time (a week or so) to track this down, and that was with the full might of the FDA searching for one source of spinach. I dont want my local Walmart to spend a week searching for the source of their poultry just to check what types of hormones were given to them while feeding.
So don't spout the industry line at me, that any requirement for them to share data which they damn well collect
Again, you assume they collect it. Where is your cited study? What makes you believe they collect it? From my time working with companies and writing software to help with distribution/invoicing/etc, I am constantly suprised with how little record keeping is actually done in some industries. Expecially when they do not think the data is important.
I buy sides of cattle from a local butcher instead of from the supermarket most of the time. One time I only got 180lb of beef from a 410 lb side of beef (44% yield, 60% is more standard). The butcher said he has been being sent Certified Angus beef recently for no price increase for a few months, so I asked if he has noticed less of a yield from that type of cattle. He had no idea, because it never donned on him to even keep track.
You may be happy to have people feed you whatever they want to, but I'd at least like to know.
Letting people know things that only cause hysteria is not always a good idea either. MRIs used to be referred to as NMRIs (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging), but they had to remove the nuclear part because people associated it with ionizing radiation exposure (which is not used in MRIs).
Food irradiation has a similar problem. Much of our food is not irradiated (such as milk) because it must be labelled as such and people are generally scared of such terminology. Food used as ingredients in restaurants and food processing does not have the labeling requirement, so that is the main area where such foods can be used. If the labeling wasnt necessary then we wouldnt have as much problems with food spoilage as we currently do. And it is primarily caused by unnecessary food labeling.
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