How about this: If you disagree with the terms of a contract, or you don't understand it... Don't fucking agree to it?
Or.. No... Let's throw out 200 plus years of contract law because you're too stupid/lazy.
Aw, you couldn't find a proper argument, so you try insult? You have to do better than that, if you want to impress anybody. And don't tell me that you read each and every EULA, contract and online terms-and-conditions that you come across before signing with a greasy thumbprint.
But for those who actually bother to read before they start replying: Every time you shop online or in a brick-and-mortar shop, you effectively agree to a set of terms and conditions. In the traditional shops, these are well know and -understood by most, and heavily regulated, not least because there have been cases in the past where shops have tried to pull a fast one on their customers, but also because it simply isn't practical to ask 1000s of customers in a supermarket to sign a piece of paper with terms and conditions. Not so with online shopping: every time you sign up, you do in fact agree to whatever terms and conditions are in force at that time - at least that is the line online service providers take - and since it is very easy to move from shop to shop, you get to sign up to hundreds of terms and conditions. Is it lazyness if you after some time end up just ignoring them and sign up without reading them? Of course not.
Shops have always used trickery like this - confusing people with misleading wording, overly detailed documents, uncomparable pricing structures and so on; just as another example of this - why do you think supermarkets never, ever give price per liter on similar drinks? It is always product A: x $ per liter, product B: y $ per gallon, product C: z $ per bottle - they don't want you to be able to compare. Tricking you into not bothering to read shelf-meters of nearly identical legalese is part of the plans - and already people are signing away their rights without a second thought. Regulation is regrettably the only way to protect consumers from predators like that.
It's a pretty boilerplate clause. Basically, they need that clause to transmit your user-generated content without it leading to copyright infringement./quote)
Well, isn't that the problem, really? All these services are surrounded by a dense under-forest of legal clauses that no-body cares to try to understand, because it all seems to be written in a deliberately obscure language. In many cases there are no ill intentions, but:
- there may be un-intended implications, that later turn out to put the user at a severe disadvantage. And even if the current owners of a service provider are well-meaning and highly respectful of the privacy and rights of their customers, these things can and do change. So - even if you could trust the people you signed up with, you may not be wise to trust whoever takes over down the line.
- because there are so many obscure clauses that most don't bother to read, it is all too easy to make small, innocent looking changes that changes the relationship in a fundamental way. We know it happens, from the reports from time to time - one wonders how often it happens without being reported.
I think, if these things are "pretty boilerplate", then they should be a compulsory standard to be followed by all service providers. No doubt we would hear cries of "stifling innovation" etc, but that is nonsense; real innovation is not about how to confuse or trap your customers.
It is not without irony that people here seem to feel, that when some member of the public breaks into police or governmenet systems, quite possibly to commit a crime, it is cool, but when the police break into systems of members of the public, usually to catch criminals, this is "gross violation of privacy". If it is wrong for anybody, then it is wrong for everybody, I would have thought.
There are other issues with weight gain and weight loss that have more to do with simplistic "just eat less" advice.
Absolutely - I had hoped that I already expressed this in my opening sentence: "If only we knew. As anyone who has followed the news about health and medical research in the last decade or two will know, we are beginning to realise that this is a very complicated issue. ".
But in practical terms, here and now, what can we do to somehow address this very complex issue through modification of our behaviour? That was what I was talking about, but it is unfortunately true that will-power alone is rarely enough. As for gut flora - this is one of the things we can to some extent influence through what we eat. Too little is known about this, but one thing that seems clear is that a varied diet containing more vegetables and less meat contributes a more diverse gut flora, whereas a diet high in ultra-processed food causes a gut flora poor in species; this is probably significant.
Eh? My wife and I go to the local veg market once a week. We buy things like cabbage (some will keep for months, especially the hard types), roots (carrots, swedes (rutabaga in the US) etc - they keep for at least week), onions (keep for a month or more), etc etc. Plus potatoes and other starchy veg, which keep for ages too.
[Eggs:] They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones.
What nonsense is this? Eggs were evolved as little packets of nutrients that had to stay fresh for long enough that the developing fetus inside could nature without much of an immune system - in an environment where bacteria are abundant; of course they can keep. In the supermarkets in UK they not even kept in cold store - they are out on the shelves in ambient temperatures. We buy them and keep them for as long as it takes to use 15 or 30; the worst I have seen happen is when I forgot one egg for months in the fridge - it had dried out so the shell was only half full.
Onions aren't food
Tell my Chinese wife that - we eat one or two onions as a vegetable dish on most days. Peel, chop and stir-fry for a couple of minutes, so they lose the hotness. Brilliant.
Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
Wheat flour contains protein and vitamins as well as starch - read the label. Cheap crap like donuts is cheap because flour is cheap, especially in bulk; they become crap because the factories cut costs in the production - that doesn't mean that donuts have to be crap. And cheap bread is crap because of what the factories to make it cheap - read about The Chorleywood Bread Process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process) for example. You can take poor quality wheat, add emulsifiers and other stuff to increase your profit margin, and the result is crap, but cheap. Again, anyone with an oven and the will to learn can make a good, healthy bread cheaply.
That leaves bulk rice and beans. For beans you better know what to buy and how to cook them or you're going to get sick. I forget why. I suppose I'll give you rice though.
Beans (dry): soak them overnight, cook until they are nice and soft - often something like 1 hour. 15 minutes is enough to denature the protein that is poisonous, and some beans are not poisonous at all - like chickpeas. Just cook them all, that's all you need to stay safe. It is probably the cheapest and healthies kind of dried food you can find anywhere. Add spices and vegetables (onions, garlic, tomatoes etc) to make them tasty.
Cheap junk food and TV are the only pleasures the 1% let the working poor have.
No - the limiting factor is not money, but education and planning. Buying and preparing a crappy ready-meal from frozen often takes 30 - 50 minutes in the oven, the same time it would take to prepare and cook a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of meat. Or beans, which require a minimum of planning: soak them overnight, cook them when convenient, use them following day. As for the pleasure part: there is far more pleasure in preparing and eating a good meal than there ever will be in eating junk food and watching mind numbingly stupid entertainment.
But you are right about "the 1%" wanting it to be this way - the rich get rich because the poor and the middle class allow them to keep them trapped in this situation. A lot of companies and their rich owners would be in trouble if people at the bottom of society stopped buying all the cheap crap they don't need and stopped wasting time and energy on idiotic television. Read 1985 again - it may have been a story about Communism gone wrong, but you find the same mechanisms at work in today's capitalism.
it's more difficult for obese people to modify their diet and have access to medication.
Why is this?
If only we knew. As anyone who has followed the news about health and medical research in the last decade or two will know, we are beginning to realise that this is a very complicated issue. On the face of it, it seems so simple: you eat more than you burn -> you get fatter. However, that doesn't address the question of why people eat more than they need, and especially why it turns out to be almost impossible for most to stop doing it.
I think a major factor is that we live in an environment where calories are far too easily and cheaply available, especially in the form of ultra-highly processed foods. I think most people have experienced this in some way: if it is inconvenient to get something to eat, you simpy ignore your beginning hunger, sometimes for a surprisingly long time. I noticed this with myself recently: when I work in the office, I generally want a snack about 1 hour after I had my last meal, but when I was digging my garden last weekend, I went on for something like 4 hours, forgetting my lunch and all. I got hungry, of course, but it was just not convenient at the time. So, one lesson to take away from this is: make sure you are not bored, if you want to lose weight.
The other thing, that I think many people don't fully realise is that there is a sometimes large difference between not feeling hungry and feeling full: most people stop feeling acute hunger after a few mouthfuls, but they keep going until the stomach is physically full, which is sometimes a very long way down the line. A good trick for losing weight is to start with a small portion - what feels like far too little, no doubt - and then wait for at least 30 minutes before eating more; in the meantime, do something that will take your mind off eating.
Finally, it matters a lot what we eat for our main meals and how we prepare and serve it. Learn to enjoy cooking, learn to enjoy eating vegetables, choose to spend the time it takes to enjoy cooking and eating; all of this is easily possible for most people, I think. If you have the time to watch TV or play computer games, then it is only a matter of priorities; if you don't have time for leisure, then you have a much more fundamental problem in your life and should probably seek a way out as a matter of some urgency.
Indeed, that would have been brilliant; alas that I am now old and cynical. All the same, I think I speak with some authority in my previous comment: I am Danish, and know the culture from within, at least from the Danish point of view - it is also worth remembering that as a Dane, I have grown up with the memory of the German occupation, so don't have particularly good reasons to love all things German. That being said - Scandinavia and Germany used to be not so much a well defined set of nations, as a large number of rather small, sovereign mini-states that were mostly identified by their common culture, which had a strong oral element to it. Hence the role of the Lawspeaker, and the significane of gathering regularly to hear the law spoken out loudly, to be memorised, interpreted and understood.
Perhaps it is difficult for others to quite accept this, but as a Dane, I feel strongly that the law is something that must feel right and fair - a good law is one that you instinctively approve of and not something you try to find ways to get around.
Germany, like most (no, all) countries in Europe, is a Rechtsstaat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat - note the certain Germanic sound of that word), so follows the rule of law; the North-European countries in general, and the Germans in particular seem to take a particular pride in being law-abiding and care a great deal about not just the letter, but also the spirit of the law. This may be different in America - one sometimes get that impression - but we have a strong tradition for this in Nordic culture; look up as an example the concept of the Lawspeaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawspeaker). Knowing, understanding and following the law is a part of our cultural identity, and implying that our courts are biased or corrupt is hurtful and rather insulting on a level that may surprise outsiders.
The U.S. government has been unable to fight the Islamic State on the one battlefield it currently commands: the Internet.
I don't get the impression that they/we have actually done much to even engage in a propaganda war online. Perhaps because he real battle has to be fought elsewhere, in the communities, where so many young people are vulnerable to the frankly idiotic nonsense from Daesh. I don't think it is only about lack of good opportunities; many of them seem to be genuinely motivated by moral concerns, even if they are perverted in the extreme. It is in many ways driven by the same factors that created the hippies, the punk phenomenon, the 'Moral Majority' and others: the feeling that the establishment are false, self-serving hypocrites, nothing more than "the willing lackeys of capitalism" to use a phrase from yet another anti-establishment movement.
Meanwhile, Daesh will die of natural causes sooner or later. We have already seen for a while that people go out there, full of idealism and enthusiasm and regret it, because they find that Daesh is not the promised Islamic State, built on divine justice, but rather a brutal tyranny ruled by the most depraved and callous criminals. A state can never exist in isolation, and who is going to want to want to trade with them? Only other criminals. Daesh will die out - what we should concentrate on is 1) How to get that to happen sooner, and 2) How to stop it happening again. It isn't a lot of use that we go in and wipe out the plague that springs from our own failings, if we don't go and clean up the conditions that will allow the next plague to erupt.
Most business ideas throughout all of history have been shit, news at 11.
Not quite - most of the business ideas that go like "I'll sell vegetables/groceries/fast food from my small stall in the local market" actually do quite well - the same goes for small businesses in the building trade. They may not become huge, international hi-tech companies, but they do make a living, and they tend to provide jobs more efficiently than do large corporations - because there is much less management overhead.
- it's enough that there seem to always be VC firms about -
I suppose this is what they call trickle-down-economics: Some mediocre people get rich by exploiting their fellow beings unscrupulously, then their combination of lack of actual talent with lack of scruples means they invest stupidly in the hope of making more, undeserved profit, whereby their money trickles down to feed the next layer of parasites. Am I being too cynical?
I think the OP is asking why we don't try to use economies of scale...
I think we are probably already going that way, slowly; we are already exploring things like the Very Large Array (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_G._Jansky_Very_Large_Array) and Very Large Telescope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope) use "small and cheap" (well, you know...) components and achieve better resolutions by spreading out the components over a larger area. We could probably produce a space telescope along the same principle, as a swarm of very many, small mirrors that cooperate - there are challenges to doing this, but if we make it work, it will probably be cheaper, more resilient (losing a few components is no longer critical), and more maintainable (replacing one of many autonomous components is easier).
Oracle believed it needed a hardware division to counter IBM and HP...
I think it is more than the hardware, though. Sun's hardware is certainly on a par with HP and IBM, and in my experience comes at a better price than those (I used to buy servers from all three some years ago, in a previous life); but Sun also come with Java, and Solaris, which has a few amazingly good features, like predictive self-healing and ZFS. I know, people keep predicting the imminent demise of Java, but the big players actually still believe in it in a big, if somewhat discreet way: Oracle's database, of course, comes with integrated support for Java and IBM even offer special CPUs for Java processing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIIP). There is a whole world of Java application servers, and then there is Android. And so on.
As for why they need to have their own hardware: look into Exadata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Exadata), which is basically a rack of hefty, strongly optimized hardware running Oracle RAC.
All the stuff Bernie wants to do requires Congress to make deep, structural changes to our government and economic system. Half the stuff Trump wants to do can be done on day 1 in office.
IOW, Mr Trump is going to act as a dictator, whereas Mr Sanders intends to work within the democratic framework of the nation, which is of course a lot harder and requires much more skill.
It is true that plastics would be okay all by themselves. Many oil companies would prefer to make plastics over petrol. And in plastic form, they aren't really an AGW problem, they're a different problem.
Well, sort of, -ish; plastic is one of those universally useful materials, like concrete, but the problem is that we produce enormous amounts of it to be used solely for things that are immediately discarded: carrier bags, wrappings etc. Plastic waste is a huge and growing problem, because there still aren't many organisms that can break down plastics, so it ends up as sharp, brittle particles that cause damage on a microscopic level - a bit like asbestos fibres, I suppose.
At the root of all these problems lie one things, ultimately: consumerism - the absurd idea that we must keep buying and throwing away far more than we need, even to live a very comfortable life. It is, of course, not sustainable and will come to an end at some point. Hopefully we manage to decide to do it voluntarily, in a controlled fashion. It always strikes me as strangely unambitious and void of vision, when people start talking about "we can't suddenly change away from fossil fuels and keep doing everything else as we do now" - well, of course not! The whole point is that we need to change our ways rather fundamentally - we have to stop doing things that rely on uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, overconsumption, and pollution - I think everybody knows that, even those that try to convince everybody (including themselves) that it isn't so.
We don't even have to live austere lives in bleakness - we just have to stop being stupid and start making a bit of sense. There really is no need for producing huge amounts of cheap tat and transport it halfway arounf the planet; we could start looking into more localised forms of production - things like 3D printers are definitely a step in the right direction. Global consumerism isn't necessary for anything, except for those very few at the top, who are obcessed with constant growth of their own, massive wealth. There are better ways, I think.
I wonder where you have been in Europe, then, 'cause I have never stayed in a hotel or B&B without ensuite bathroom. And $100 - that's £70, which in most places would get you a room af a very reasonable standard. I never expect to pay more than £50 per night, and often less; the cheapest was 29 EUR somewhere in France, and that was basic, but still had ensuite bathroom.
Actually, just today in the news that has been pushed back to 12500 years ago. But this article is about remains from ~4000 years ago.
Well, yes, you are correct. What I was commenting on was the OP itself, not the articles. Once again a/. submitter managed to ignore the facts in the two articles they were referring to, but also tried to put a sensational spin on something that had a whiff of racial supremacy over it: "Pure Celts" - apart from the random choice of epithet, this is little more than a parallel to Germans being "Pure Aryans" and so on. The Irish are good people - and certainly loads better than this sort of attitudes.
The discovery of a burial site in Ireland has thrown into doubt all theories concerning the Celtic origins of the Irish
The Celts, according most thinking on the subject, originated in Central Europe or there abouts some time in the bronze age, something like 1200BC. The earliest evidence of humans in Ireland, according to the BBC article quoted in the OP says:
Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Ireland has been the hunter-gatherer settlement of Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann, County Derry, which dates to 8,000 years ago.
- we now have evidence of humans even earlier than that. So, it was already obvious that the Irish are not likely to be descended purely from the Celtic tribes that immigrated to the island later. Not unless they completely eradicated the previous inhabitants; in any case, this new discovery changes nothing about the ancestry of the Irish.
Only 4% of global CO2 is attributable to humans. 96% of it is naturally occurring, and we couldn't do anything about it if we tried.
This is no different from, say, a budget: if you make $100M each year, and have $96M in expenses, then you accumulate $4M per year. If you eat 2100 kcal per day, but only use 2000 kcal, then each day your body grows that little bit heavier. And so on; in the end, it makes a big difference. If nature is only able to absorb 96% of the CO2 produced, then the 4% that are left over will accumulate in the atmosphere end so on.
There is even an kind of "interest" to keep the money metaphor: when CO2 levels increase, ice melts, which releases CO2 and methane that was previously bound in permafrost, which adds to the overall effect. These things really are happening, and it really is our fault. This isn't about blaming anybody, but we have to face up to reality, otherwise, how can we hope to even begin to think about solving the problem? It strikes me as common sense to stop pissing in the well that we're all drinking from, if you'll excuse the expression.
The mark of a true leftist, is that they always view themselves as the political center. There's always room to move farther left, and every who disagrees is to the right.
So, you're saying that people like Ted Cruze is a Ture Leftist? As well as Donald Trump, the 13th Apostle and patron saint of all who suffer chronic constipation? All politicians will say that their views are moderate and in the center, it sort of goes with the territory.
hmm, perhaps. I can't say it interests me much - for me, smartphones are too awkward. To me the main function of a phone is to make calls, and I find the interface, well, irritating. Not exactly difficult, but there are more steps than should be necessary or something. This is of course because the device now has to perform general tasks that have nothing to do with making calls; I don't use them, though.
Two things I don't like are that most devices don't come with root access - this should be allowed as standard, it should not be necessary to void you warrantee or risking bricking the device to get root access. And it is deeply wrong that there is so much tie-in to app-stores and what have you. Phone manufaturers should learn something from one of the really big players in SW: Oracle. They may not be the darlings of the hacker community (but then, which big company is?) - but they have got one thing right, IMO: they allow developers to download their RDBMS and development tools for free under a very permissive license, which means that a lot of developers learn how to use their tools. Clever, I think, very clever. Get developers on board, and you get a lot of software that requires your platform.
There is another interesting and potentially very important observation: People with ASD appear to have a gut flora that differs significantly from the average population. This is interesting for several reasons - one being that we are beginning to understand that our gut flora has a very big impact on our general health - diabetes 2, obesity and probably a lot of other things, as well as our mental wellbeing. Our intestines also has a nervous system that in many ways is comparable in complexity to our brain (which perhaps ironically lends a new aspect to the expression 'gut instinct'). Just saying.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this: If you disagree with the terms of a contract, or you don't understand it... Don't fucking agree to it?
Or.. No... Let's throw out 200 plus years of contract law because you're too stupid/lazy.
Aw, you couldn't find a proper argument, so you try insult? You have to do better than that, if you want to impress anybody. And don't tell me that you read each and every EULA, contract and online terms-and-conditions that you come across before signing with a greasy thumbprint.
But for those who actually bother to read before they start replying: Every time you shop online or in a brick-and-mortar shop, you effectively agree to a set of terms and conditions. In the traditional shops, these are well know and -understood by most, and heavily regulated, not least because there have been cases in the past where shops have tried to pull a fast one on their customers, but also because it simply isn't practical to ask 1000s of customers in a supermarket to sign a piece of paper with terms and conditions. Not so with online shopping: every time you sign up, you do in fact agree to whatever terms and conditions are in force at that time - at least that is the line online service providers take - and since it is very easy to move from shop to shop, you get to sign up to hundreds of terms and conditions. Is it lazyness if you after some time end up just ignoring them and sign up without reading them? Of course not.
Shops have always used trickery like this - confusing people with misleading wording, overly detailed documents, uncomparable pricing structures and so on; just as another example of this - why do you think supermarkets never, ever give price per liter on similar drinks? It is always product A: x $ per liter, product B: y $ per gallon, product C: z $ per bottle - they don't want you to be able to compare. Tricking you into not bothering to read shelf-meters of nearly identical legalese is part of the plans - and already people are signing away their rights without a second thought. Regulation is regrettably the only way to protect consumers from predators like that.
It's a pretty boilerplate clause. Basically, they need that clause to transmit your user-generated content without it leading to copyright infringement. /quote)
Well, isn't that the problem, really? All these services are surrounded by a dense under-forest of legal clauses that no-body cares to try to understand, because it all seems to be written in a deliberately obscure language. In many cases there are no ill intentions, but:
- there may be un-intended implications, that later turn out to put the user at a severe disadvantage. And even if the current owners of a service provider are well-meaning and highly respectful of the privacy and rights of their customers, these things can and do change. So - even if you could trust the people you signed up with, you may not be wise to trust whoever takes over down the line.
- because there are so many obscure clauses that most don't bother to read, it is all too easy to make small, innocent looking changes that changes the relationship in a fundamental way. We know it happens, from the reports from time to time - one wonders how often it happens without being reported.
I think, if these things are "pretty boilerplate", then they should be a compulsory standard to be followed by all service providers. No doubt we would hear cries of "stifling innovation" etc, but that is nonsense; real innovation is not about how to confuse or trap your customers.
Ah, I see - "The ends justify the means", right?
It is not without irony that people here seem to feel, that when some member of the public breaks into police or governmenet systems, quite possibly to commit a crime, it is cool, but when the police break into systems of members of the public, usually to catch criminals, this is "gross violation of privacy". If it is wrong for anybody, then it is wrong for everybody, I would have thought.
Apropos: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
There are other issues with weight gain and weight loss that have more to do with simplistic "just eat less" advice.
Absolutely - I had hoped that I already expressed this in my opening sentence: "If only we knew. As anyone who has followed the news about health and medical research in the last decade or two will know, we are beginning to realise that this is a very complicated issue. ".
But in practical terms, here and now, what can we do to somehow address this very complex issue through modification of our behaviour? That was what I was talking about, but it is unfortunately true that will-power alone is rarely enough. As for gut flora - this is one of the things we can to some extent influence through what we eat. Too little is known about this, but one thing that seems clear is that a varied diet containing more vegetables and less meat contributes a more diverse gut flora, whereas a diet high in ultra-processed food causes a gut flora poor in species; this is probably significant.
the vegetables on special don't keep.
Eh? My wife and I go to the local veg market once a week. We buy things like cabbage (some will keep for months, especially the hard types), roots (carrots, swedes (rutabaga in the US) etc - they keep for at least week), onions (keep for a month or more), etc etc. Plus potatoes and other starchy veg, which keep for ages too.
[Eggs:] They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones.
What nonsense is this? Eggs were evolved as little packets of nutrients that had to stay fresh for long enough that the developing fetus inside could nature without much of an immune system - in an environment where bacteria are abundant; of course they can keep. In the supermarkets in UK they not even kept in cold store - they are out on the shelves in ambient temperatures. We buy them and keep them for as long as it takes to use 15 or 30; the worst I have seen happen is when I forgot one egg for months in the fridge - it had dried out so the shell was only half full.
Onions aren't food
Tell my Chinese wife that - we eat one or two onions as a vegetable dish on most days. Peel, chop and stir-fry for a couple of minutes, so they lose the hotness. Brilliant.
Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
Wheat flour contains protein and vitamins as well as starch - read the label. Cheap crap like donuts is cheap because flour is cheap, especially in bulk; they become crap because the factories cut costs in the production - that doesn't mean that donuts have to be crap. And cheap bread is crap because of what the factories to make it cheap - read about The Chorleywood Bread Process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process) for example. You can take poor quality wheat, add emulsifiers and other stuff to increase your profit margin, and the result is crap, but cheap. Again, anyone with an oven and the will to learn can make a good, healthy bread cheaply.
That leaves bulk rice and beans. For beans you better know what to buy and how to cook them or you're going to get sick. I forget why. I suppose I'll give you rice though.
Beans (dry): soak them overnight, cook until they are nice and soft - often something like 1 hour. 15 minutes is enough to denature the protein that is poisonous, and some beans are not poisonous at all - like chickpeas. Just cook them all, that's all you need to stay safe. It is probably the cheapest and healthies kind of dried food you can find anywhere. Add spices and vegetables (onions, garlic, tomatoes etc) to make them tasty.
Cheap junk food and TV are the only pleasures the 1% let the working poor have.
No - the limiting factor is not money, but education and planning. Buying and preparing a crappy ready-meal from frozen often takes 30 - 50 minutes in the oven, the same time it would take to prepare and cook a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of meat. Or beans, which require a minimum of planning: soak them overnight, cook them when convenient, use them following day. As for the pleasure part: there is far more pleasure in preparing and eating a good meal than there ever will be in eating junk food and watching mind numbingly stupid entertainment.
But you are right about "the 1%" wanting it to be this way - the rich get rich because the poor and the middle class allow them to keep them trapped in this situation. A lot of companies and their rich owners would be in trouble if people at the bottom of society stopped buying all the cheap crap they don't need and stopped wasting time and energy on idiotic television. Read 1985 again - it may have been a story about Communism gone wrong, but you find the same mechanisms at work in today's capitalism.
it's more difficult for obese people to modify their diet and have access to medication.
Why is this?
If only we knew. As anyone who has followed the news about health and medical research in the last decade or two will know, we are beginning to realise that this is a very complicated issue. On the face of it, it seems so simple: you eat more than you burn -> you get fatter. However, that doesn't address the question of why people eat more than they need, and especially why it turns out to be almost impossible for most to stop doing it.
I think a major factor is that we live in an environment where calories are far too easily and cheaply available, especially in the form of ultra-highly processed foods. I think most people have experienced this in some way: if it is inconvenient to get something to eat, you simpy ignore your beginning hunger, sometimes for a surprisingly long time. I noticed this with myself recently: when I work in the office, I generally want a snack about 1 hour after I had my last meal, but when I was digging my garden last weekend, I went on for something like 4 hours, forgetting my lunch and all. I got hungry, of course, but it was just not convenient at the time. So, one lesson to take away from this is: make sure you are not bored, if you want to lose weight.
The other thing, that I think many people don't fully realise is that there is a sometimes large difference between not feeling hungry and feeling full: most people stop feeling acute hunger after a few mouthfuls, but they keep going until the stomach is physically full, which is sometimes a very long way down the line. A good trick for losing weight is to start with a small portion - what feels like far too little, no doubt - and then wait for at least 30 minutes before eating more; in the meantime, do something that will take your mind off eating.
Finally, it matters a lot what we eat for our main meals and how we prepare and serve it. Learn to enjoy cooking, learn to enjoy eating vegetables, choose to spend the time it takes to enjoy cooking and eating; all of this is easily possible for most people, I think. If you have the time to watch TV or play computer games, then it is only a matter of priorities; if you don't have time for leisure, then you have a much more fundamental problem in your life and should probably seek a way out as a matter of some urgency.
Indeed, that would have been brilliant; alas that I am now old and cynical. All the same, I think I speak with some authority in my previous comment: I am Danish, and know the culture from within, at least from the Danish point of view - it is also worth remembering that as a Dane, I have grown up with the memory of the German occupation, so don't have particularly good reasons to love all things German. That being said - Scandinavia and Germany used to be not so much a well defined set of nations, as a large number of rather small, sovereign mini-states that were mostly identified by their common culture, which had a strong oral element to it. Hence the role of the Lawspeaker, and the significane of gathering regularly to hear the law spoken out loudly, to be memorised, interpreted and understood.
Perhaps it is difficult for others to quite accept this, but as a Dane, I feel strongly that the law is something that must feel right and fair - a good law is one that you instinctively approve of and not something you try to find ways to get around.
Germany, like most (no, all) countries in Europe, is a Rechtsstaat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat - note the certain Germanic sound of that word), so follows the rule of law; the North-European countries in general, and the Germans in particular seem to take a particular pride in being law-abiding and care a great deal about not just the letter, but also the spirit of the law. This may be different in America - one sometimes get that impression - but we have a strong tradition for this in Nordic culture; look up as an example the concept of the Lawspeaker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawspeaker). Knowing, understanding and following the law is a part of our cultural identity, and implying that our courts are biased or corrupt is hurtful and rather insulting on a level that may surprise outsiders.
The U.S. government has been unable to fight the Islamic State on the one battlefield it currently commands: the Internet.
I don't get the impression that they/we have actually done much to even engage in a propaganda war online. Perhaps because he real battle has to be fought elsewhere, in the communities, where so many young people are vulnerable to the frankly idiotic nonsense from Daesh. I don't think it is only about lack of good opportunities; many of them seem to be genuinely motivated by moral concerns, even if they are perverted in the extreme. It is in many ways driven by the same factors that created the hippies, the punk phenomenon, the 'Moral Majority' and others: the feeling that the establishment are false, self-serving hypocrites, nothing more than "the willing lackeys of capitalism" to use a phrase from yet another anti-establishment movement.
Meanwhile, Daesh will die of natural causes sooner or later. We have already seen for a while that people go out there, full of idealism and enthusiasm and regret it, because they find that Daesh is not the promised Islamic State, built on divine justice, but rather a brutal tyranny ruled by the most depraved and callous criminals. A state can never exist in isolation, and who is going to want to want to trade with them? Only other criminals. Daesh will die out - what we should concentrate on is 1) How to get that to happen sooner, and 2) How to stop it happening again. It isn't a lot of use that we go in and wipe out the plague that springs from our own failings, if we don't go and clean up the conditions that will allow the next plague to erupt.
Most business ideas throughout all of history have been shit, news at 11.
Not quite - most of the business ideas that go like "I'll sell vegetables/groceries/fast food from my small stall in the local market" actually do quite well - the same goes for small businesses in the building trade. They may not become huge, international hi-tech companies, but they do make a living, and they tend to provide jobs more efficiently than do large corporations - because there is much less management overhead.
- it's enough that there seem to always be VC firms about -
I suppose this is what they call trickle-down-economics: Some mediocre people get rich by exploiting their fellow beings unscrupulously, then their combination of lack of actual talent with lack of scruples means they invest stupidly in the hope of making more, undeserved profit, whereby their money trickles down to feed the next layer of parasites. Am I being too cynical?
I think the OP is asking why we don't try to use economies of scale ...
I think we are probably already going that way, slowly; we are already exploring things like the Very Large Array (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_G._Jansky_Very_Large_Array) and Very Large Telescope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope) use "small and cheap" (well, you know ...) components and achieve better resolutions by spreading out the components over a larger area. We could probably produce a space telescope along the same principle, as a swarm of very many, small mirrors that cooperate - there are challenges to doing this, but if we make it work, it will probably be cheaper, more resilient (losing a few components is no longer critical), and more maintainable (replacing one of many autonomous components is easier).
Oracle believed it needed a hardware division to counter IBM and HP...
I think it is more than the hardware, though. Sun's hardware is certainly on a par with HP and IBM, and in my experience comes at a better price than those (I used to buy servers from all three some years ago, in a previous life); but Sun also come with Java, and Solaris, which has a few amazingly good features, like predictive self-healing and ZFS. I know, people keep predicting the imminent demise of Java, but the big players actually still believe in it in a big, if somewhat discreet way: Oracle's database, of course, comes with integrated support for Java and IBM even offer special CPUs for Java processing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIIP). There is a whole world of Java application servers, and then there is Android. And so on.
As for why they need to have their own hardware: look into Exadata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Exadata), which is basically a rack of hefty, strongly optimized hardware running Oracle RAC.
All the stuff Bernie wants to do requires Congress to make deep, structural changes to our government and economic system. Half the stuff Trump wants to do can be done on day 1 in office.
IOW, Mr Trump is going to act as a dictator, whereas Mr Sanders intends to work within the democratic framework of the nation, which is of course a lot harder and requires much more skill.
It is true that plastics would be okay all by themselves. Many oil companies would prefer to make plastics over petrol. And in plastic form, they aren't really an AGW problem, they're a different problem.
Well, sort of, -ish; plastic is one of those universally useful materials, like concrete, but the problem is that we produce enormous amounts of it to be used solely for things that are immediately discarded: carrier bags, wrappings etc. Plastic waste is a huge and growing problem, because there still aren't many organisms that can break down plastics, so it ends up as sharp, brittle particles that cause damage on a microscopic level - a bit like asbestos fibres, I suppose.
At the root of all these problems lie one things, ultimately: consumerism - the absurd idea that we must keep buying and throwing away far more than we need, even to live a very comfortable life. It is, of course, not sustainable and will come to an end at some point. Hopefully we manage to decide to do it voluntarily, in a controlled fashion. It always strikes me as strangely unambitious and void of vision, when people start talking about "we can't suddenly change away from fossil fuels and keep doing everything else as we do now" - well, of course not! The whole point is that we need to change our ways rather fundamentally - we have to stop doing things that rely on uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, overconsumption, and pollution - I think everybody knows that, even those that try to convince everybody (including themselves) that it isn't so.
We don't even have to live austere lives in bleakness - we just have to stop being stupid and start making a bit of sense. There really is no need for producing huge amounts of cheap tat and transport it halfway arounf the planet; we could start looking into more localised forms of production - things like 3D printers are definitely a step in the right direction. Global consumerism isn't necessary for anything, except for those very few at the top, who are obcessed with constant growth of their own, massive wealth. There are better ways, I think.
That's a bit _too_ "European" for my tastes :-)
I wonder where you have been in Europe, then, 'cause I have never stayed in a hotel or B&B without ensuite bathroom. And $100 - that's £70, which in most places would get you a room af a very reasonable standard. I never expect to pay more than £50 per night, and often less; the cheapest was 29 EUR somewhere in France, and that was basic, but still had ensuite bathroom.
Actually, just today in the news that has been pushed back to 12500 years ago. But this article is about remains from ~4000 years ago.
Well, yes, you are correct. What I was commenting on was the OP itself, not the articles. Once again a /. submitter managed to ignore the facts in the two articles they were referring to, but also tried to put a sensational spin on something that had a whiff of racial supremacy over it: "Pure Celts" - apart from the random choice of epithet, this is little more than a parallel to Germans being "Pure Aryans" and so on. The Irish are good people - and certainly loads better than this sort of attitudes.
The discovery of a burial site in Ireland has thrown into doubt all theories concerning the Celtic origins of the Irish
The Celts, according most thinking on the subject, originated in Central Europe or there abouts some time in the bronze age, something like 1200BC. The earliest evidence of humans in Ireland, according to the BBC article quoted in the OP says:
Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Ireland has been the hunter-gatherer settlement of Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann, County Derry, which dates to 8,000 years ago.
- we now have evidence of humans even earlier than that. So, it was already obvious that the Irish are not likely to be descended purely from the Celtic tribes that immigrated to the island later. Not unless they completely eradicated the previous inhabitants; in any case, this new discovery changes nothing about the ancestry of the Irish.
Only 4% of global CO2 is attributable to humans. 96% of it is naturally occurring, and we couldn't do anything about it if we tried.
This is no different from, say, a budget: if you make $100M each year, and have $96M in expenses, then you accumulate $4M per year. If you eat 2100 kcal per day, but only use 2000 kcal, then each day your body grows that little bit heavier. And so on; in the end, it makes a big difference. If nature is only able to absorb 96% of the CO2 produced, then the 4% that are left over will accumulate in the atmosphere end so on.
There is even an kind of "interest" to keep the money metaphor: when CO2 levels increase, ice melts, which releases CO2 and methane that was previously bound in permafrost, which adds to the overall effect. These things really are happening, and it really is our fault. This isn't about blaming anybody, but we have to face up to reality, otherwise, how can we hope to even begin to think about solving the problem? It strikes me as common sense to stop pissing in the well that we're all drinking from, if you'll excuse the expression.
The mark of a true leftist, is that they always view themselves as the political center. There's always room to move farther left, and every who disagrees is to the right.
So, you're saying that people like Ted Cruze is a Ture Leftist? As well as Donald Trump, the 13th Apostle and patron saint of all who suffer chronic constipation? All politicians will say that their views are moderate and in the center, it sort of goes with the territory.
Those are much better sizes for portable devices
hmm, perhaps. I can't say it interests me much - for me, smartphones are too awkward. To me the main function of a phone is to make calls, and I find the interface, well, irritating. Not exactly difficult, but there are more steps than should be necessary or something. This is of course because the device now has to perform general tasks that have nothing to do with making calls; I don't use them, though.
Two things I don't like are that most devices don't come with root access - this should be allowed as standard, it should not be necessary to void you warrantee or risking bricking the device to get root access. And it is deeply wrong that there is so much tie-in to app-stores and what have you. Phone manufaturers should learn something from one of the really big players in SW: Oracle. They may not be the darlings of the hacker community (but then, which big company is?) - but they have got one thing right, IMO: they allow developers to download their RDBMS and development tools for free under a very permissive license, which means that a lot of developers learn how to use their tools. Clever, I think, very clever. Get developers on board, and you get a lot of software that requires your platform.
... weight proportional to height ...
Strictly speaking, everybody has a weight that is proportional to their height, it is just a matter of numbers.
There is another interesting and potentially very important observation: People with ASD appear to have a gut flora that differs significantly from the average population. This is interesting for several reasons - one being that we are beginning to understand that our gut flora has a very big impact on our general health - diabetes 2, obesity and probably a lot of other things, as well as our mental wellbeing. Our intestines also has a nervous system that in many ways is comparable in complexity to our brain (which perhaps ironically lends a new aspect to the expression 'gut instinct'). Just saying.