Oh, I was going to say medicine. Sorry, my mistake.
My wife is a market researcher at a large (Fortune 100) company. She works from 7am to 4pm, mostly from home. Sometimes she has to travel abroad for a few days and hold meetings. Maybe once a week she has to go to the office for the afternoon. And she gets to sleep at night. And she earns a 6 figure number greater than I did after liability insurance, professional fees, and other expenses. Plus she got to sleep at night - never has one of her people woken her up at 3am because the company had lost market share...
Makes you wonder. Well anyway, I quit the medical profession - too much stress, not enough quality of life. I figure I've saved enough people. After a couple heart attacks of my own, maybe I want to live to see 50.
I can't imagine - no, I wouldn't want to deal with a classroom full of hormone-fueled pimply teenagers. It's funny where society places its values. Some idiot pretending to be a gangster, wearing a lot of fake jewelry and mumbling out an incoherent tune that would have Bach jumping of a cathedral roof is apparently very highly valued by society - to the amount of tens of millions of dollars, and probably even more. But teachers? You mean we have to PAY them?
Hah. Your post got modded -1 Flamebait on a "nerd" site. Buddy, I think you were just talking way over their heads. At the end of the day I think all that's left here on slashdot are Microsoft shills, Apple fanboys, and creationist trolls. Well at least there's one other thinker here...
And required Congress and the White House staff to attend class. Maybe then they'd understand the enormity of what they're doing with our money.
Dunno if that would help. Apparently they didn't take History or Economics either.
Everyone is sold on Keynes' idea to use the printing presses to create enough money until employment returns. Only in Keynes' day, the government wasn't starting with a debt the size of its annual GDP, despite taxes being through the roof. Add to that fact that the money you print you give to your banker buddies to cover their debts - well exactly what have you "created"? You've just wallpapered over a huge hole, but the hole is still there.
I can't wait for my $10 million glass of Coke and my $40 million steak.
Following that line of thought, I wonder what aliens would think if the first images they received of our species was goatse...
"Ohh, what a strange mouth. And look, it has pedipalps. Funny how they put the eyes on the back of the critter though, and how it breathes just next to its butt-hole..."
Why broadcast our location with those odds? It's not logical.
It is logical if you take the position that WE are the agressive ones. Like you pointed out, broadcasting a signal is a sign of confidence - first it shows that we have the technology to do it (note the lack of signals being received from us - perhaps we're the most advanced!) and second that we have the interest to do it, and the confidence to deal with the consequences.
Now there is a possible scenario where the xenos (if they exist) have moved beyond radio, or are just lying in wait passively listening for radio signals in order to pounce - but that's a rather paranoid view isn't it?
Either way, I would enjoy a little green alien pet, or on the other hand, being some alien's little pink pet...
You're equating keeping fish in an aquarium or a koi pond to slavery?
If you've ever had a salt water aquarium, you will know that unless you want to see floating fish, it's a full time job. However if the use of the word "slavery" offended you - fuck off. I don't DO "politically correct". The right to offend is more important than the right to not be offended.
That is, fish farming uses more fish than it creates
That's true of any form of agriculture. Biological systems are not 100% efficient. Crops will leach nitrogen out of the soil, requiring fallow, legumes or fertilizer. It gets even worse when you consider that at harvest time, you remove the crop and carry off all that nitrogen. Cows, pigs and chickens are even less efficient. They eat inefficient grass and digest it in an inefficient manner, so that you need a lot of grass to keep one cow alive.
On the whole though, as a source of protein, fish aren't too bad. They're cold blooded, so their feed conversion ratio is quite good - they don't need to produce heat to maintain a constant body temperature. 1.5 - 2 grams of food will give you 1 gram of fish, although it varies by species. Compare that to a warm blooded animal - where the ratio of food/flesh is 6:1 or worse.
No, the REAL problem is the large and exponentially growing HUMAN population. THAT is what is making ALL of these methods of protein production unsustainable in the medium term. More efficient food production methods are being found - aquaponics, for example. But if we don't stop breeding, well, it's the crash part of the J curve in an earth-sized petri dish for us.
It would be nice to see DECENT aquaculture come to fruition.
Yikes, aquaculture is hard enough to do with fresh water fish. You want to do it with salt water fish? Good luck...
It's one thing to have a salt water aquarium, at a zoo or for a hobby (read: slavery). But aquaculture involves raising fish at incredibly high densities in order to be profitable. These high densities mean that the slightest little change - in dissolved O2, pH, temperature, nitrites, ammonia, etc will kill your fish. Now you want to add salinity which not only has to be kept within limits but corrodes your pumps, pipes and valves, increasing the chances of breakdowns?
No thanks! Have fun!
PS: Fish die really really quietly, and they love to do it in large quantities. I know whereof I speak, I promise...
What we need is sushi regulation, not this useless information.
Oh yes, why not. Appoint a sushi Tzar. And a whole department of the FDA devoted to sushi. And eventually when the cost of doing business in the sushi trade threatens to break the larger sushi bar trades, why not a tax-payer funded government bail out?
It's a new form of taxation. How dare you argue against taxation! Surely you are no patriot, you must hate the Earth (and coming soon) you will be arrested and processed for daring to speak against what is obviously yet another way to reach into our pockets and waste our money on frivolous projects that employ people in useless jobs.
As the owner of a managed forest, I have seriously looked into being paid (yes PAID) over a million euros per year to NOT cut down my trees. There is a HUGE market for carbon offsetting, and it's growing yearly. The sad thing is, it's all a scam. Since I'm not a scammer I haven't moved ahead with this.
However what I've discovered through my own research and what my engineers have told me, is that METHANE from decomposing leaves poses a far greater "greenhouse" risk than any CO2 my trees are likely to absorb. Oh dear. But the EU pays (and taxes) based on CO2, not methane. Could it be that the government(s) are simply interested in taxing the most COMMON pollutant, and not the most HARMFUL? After all, everyone produces CO2 - industry, farmers, transportation, cows, humans. Not everyone produces methane (cow farts/burps aside).
Climate change is REAL. Yet the recently disturbed atmosphere of Jupiter (you've heard about the NEW Red Spot, right?) and the melting martian polar ice caps (oh yeah, it's because Mars is "wobbling" but HEAVEN FORBID that Earth can be wobbling, no - it's SUV's that are to blame here on Earth!) should alert any rational person to the fact that special interests have led politicians down a path they want to go - a path that leads to more revenue for the government, in the name of man-made "global warming".
It's amazing for me to think that even when they tax anywhere from 3 to 15% of EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION MADE (sales/VAT taxes) AND tax your income, tax your fuel, tax your capital gains, and yes, in some places, your death and your estate - GOVERNMENTS ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE PISSING OUT MONEY. WTF? When does it stop? What am I getting for my money? Roads with potholes in them? Bridges that collapse? Brown outs and water shortages? Monopolies in everything from utilities to software? Justice that fails to prevent crime, feeds criminals for life in jail (that is, when they don't get released), and makes me wonder if I will get TASERed the next time I get pulled over for speeding? Oh and governments that are willing to pay people like me (only with less morals) to not cut down my forest? Hell I don't want to cut it down, imagine what 2000 acres of 80 year old teak will be worth to my great-grandchildren...
Heh, what a world. But by all means, believe what governments tell you. After all, they're right about so many things./cynicism
Yet another reason why private healthcare must be stopped. Curing people doesn't come into it - it's about keeping them sick enough to stay profitable.
As a doctor I am disgusted by your remark. There's something called the Hippocratic Oath, you know. Insurance companies also have a vested interest in insuring only healthy people. Now I can't vouch for our cousins in the pharmaceutical industry who have ALWAYS been about the money, and make no allusions otherwise (hence their use of the Caduceus - the staff of Mercury god of Business, rather than the Asclepius or "healing" staff we doctors use). After all, the ideal situation for them is for all patients to become chronic, pill taking customers.
But those of us who actually provide the healthcare ONLY have the patient's full recovery in mind, when that's possible. The only thing we have to balance here is our own personal lives and time (doctors are people too - we have families, we have hobbies, and we get stressed - especially since most patients are ungrateful and we rarely hear the words "thank you" when we do our job well: we're just "expected" to do it). Being realistic, however, it's not always possible to "cure" everyone.
This is one good thing that comes with economic hardship. Idiotic, wasteful, inefficient ideas like this get swept away in the tide while people start focusing on more important issues, like keeping a roof over their heads or feeding and clothing themselves and their children.
We need many more years of economic hardship to get rid of all the free-loaders who make a living from telling other people how guilty they should be feeling, or making nonsensical claims with no evidence to back them up.
Yes, but it did spark an interesting debate on whether it was Russia beat the Germans or not.
Wow. Only 13 posts and Godwin's law is already invoked. Perhaps you didn't use the word "Nazi", but you are referring to the time period. Someone was bound to mention it sooner or later. OK, say it was 14 posts (counting mine). Well done.
Isn't it great? Leak a fake story on the internet and reap the free publicity, then leak a statement denying the original fake story, and get another bout of publicity. TWO slashvertisments for no cost at all! Marketing at its finest.
Oh, the "silicon" part of the technology may be ready. However any foreign body inside a human body is susceptible to 1) chronic inflammation (which isn't so bad if it's around the metal holding your shattered bones together, after all, you can always take the metal out or at worst amputate the limb) and b) infection.
Now, hands up who is willing to have a device implanted in their brain that might cause permanent brain damage, bacterial meningitis (and all of its sequellae) or death?
Lab rats, as usual, will have the advantage (?) of having their intellect enhanced with implants long, long before we humans will.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what really pays like crap? Teaching.
Oh, I was going to say medicine. Sorry, my mistake.
My wife is a market researcher at a large (Fortune 100) company. She works from 7am to 4pm, mostly from home. Sometimes she has to travel abroad for a few days and hold meetings. Maybe once a week she has to go to the office for the afternoon. And she gets to sleep at night. And she earns a 6 figure number greater than I did after liability insurance, professional fees, and other expenses. Plus she got to sleep at night - never has one of her people woken her up at 3am because the company had lost market share...
Makes you wonder. Well anyway, I quit the medical profession - too much stress, not enough quality of life. I figure I've saved enough people. After a couple heart attacks of my own, maybe I want to live to see 50.
I can't imagine - no, I wouldn't want to deal with a classroom full of hormone-fueled pimply teenagers. It's funny where society places its values. Some idiot pretending to be a gangster, wearing a lot of fake jewelry and mumbling out an incoherent tune that would have Bach jumping of a cathedral roof is apparently very highly valued by society - to the amount of tens of millions of dollars, and probably even more. But teachers? You mean we have to PAY them?
You (mostly) don't play the game
Oh THAT part is clearly evident, based on the quality of the titles on release over the past, say, 15 years or so.
Amazing when donwloading a 400MB patch for a 700MB game is the NORM...
Hah. Your post got modded -1 Flamebait on a "nerd" site. Buddy, I think you were just talking way over their heads. At the end of the day I think all that's left here on slashdot are Microsoft shills, Apple fanboys, and creationist trolls. Well at least there's one other thinker here...
And required Congress and the White House staff to attend class. Maybe then they'd understand the enormity of what they're doing with our money.
Dunno if that would help. Apparently they didn't take History or Economics either.
Everyone is sold on Keynes' idea to use the printing presses to create enough money until employment returns. Only in Keynes' day, the government wasn't starting with a debt the size of its annual GDP, despite taxes being through the roof. Add to that fact that the money you print you give to your banker buddies to cover their debts - well exactly what have you "created"? You've just wallpapered over a huge hole, but the hole is still there.
I can't wait for my $10 million glass of Coke and my $40 million steak.
Following that line of thought, I wonder what aliens would think if the first images they received of our species was goatse...
"Ohh, what a strange mouth. And look, it has pedipalps. Funny how they put the eyes on the back of the critter though, and how it breathes just next to its butt-hole..."
Why broadcast our location with those odds? It's not logical.
It is logical if you take the position that WE are the agressive ones. Like you pointed out, broadcasting a signal is a sign of confidence - first it shows that we have the technology to do it (note the lack of signals being received from us - perhaps we're the most advanced!) and second that we have the interest to do it, and the confidence to deal with the consequences.
Now there is a possible scenario where the xenos (if they exist) have moved beyond radio, or are just lying in wait passively listening for radio signals in order to pounce - but that's a rather paranoid view isn't it?
Either way, I would enjoy a little green alien pet, or on the other hand, being some alien's little pink pet...
You're equating keeping fish in an aquarium or a koi pond to slavery?
If you've ever had a salt water aquarium, you will know that unless you want to see floating fish, it's a full time job. However if the use of the word "slavery" offended you - fuck off. I don't DO "politically correct". The right to offend is more important than the right to not be offended.
That is, fish farming uses more fish than it creates
That's true of any form of agriculture. Biological systems are not 100% efficient. Crops will leach nitrogen out of the soil, requiring fallow, legumes or fertilizer. It gets even worse when you consider that at harvest time, you remove the crop and carry off all that nitrogen. Cows, pigs and chickens are even less efficient. They eat inefficient grass and digest it in an inefficient manner, so that you need a lot of grass to keep one cow alive.
On the whole though, as a source of protein, fish aren't too bad. They're cold blooded, so their feed conversion ratio is quite good - they don't need to produce heat to maintain a constant body temperature. 1.5 - 2 grams of food will give you 1 gram of fish, although it varies by species. Compare that to a warm blooded animal - where the ratio of food/flesh is 6:1 or worse.
No, the REAL problem is the large and exponentially growing HUMAN population. THAT is what is making ALL of these methods of protein production unsustainable in the medium term. More efficient food production methods are being found - aquaponics, for example. But if we don't stop breeding, well, it's the crash part of the J curve in an earth-sized petri dish for us.
goatse, tubgirl and GNAA I can take. But now SPAM, on my slashdot? Someone please ban this fucker.
In a few years?
Or quite possibly, a few years ago...
(TARDIS sounds in the background)
Actually, the idea is to breed the fish and then release millions upon millions of fingerlings into the various oceans.
What could possibly go wrong. I mean, after you've fed all those fingerlings to the other fish in the ocean I mean...
It would be nice to see DECENT aquaculture come to fruition.
Yikes, aquaculture is hard enough to do with fresh water fish. You want to do it with salt water fish? Good luck...
It's one thing to have a salt water aquarium, at a zoo or for a hobby (read: slavery). But aquaculture involves raising fish at incredibly high densities in order to be profitable. These high densities mean that the slightest little change - in dissolved O2, pH, temperature, nitrites, ammonia, etc will kill your fish. Now you want to add salinity which not only has to be kept within limits but corrodes your pumps, pipes and valves, increasing the chances of breakdowns?
No thanks! Have fun!
PS: Fish die really really quietly, and they love to do it in large quantities. I know whereof I speak, I promise...
What we need is sushi regulation, not this useless information.
Oh yes, why not. Appoint a sushi Tzar. And a whole department of the FDA devoted to sushi. And eventually when the cost of doing business in the sushi trade threatens to break the larger sushi bar trades, why not a tax-payer funded government bail out?
I, for one, welcome my new parasitic overlords.
Although in your case, "innerlords" may be more accurate. Or in a few hours, "underlords".
Does this make google evil now?
Well at least I think.
It's a new form of taxation. How dare you argue against taxation! Surely you are no patriot, you must hate the Earth (and coming soon) you will be arrested and processed for daring to speak against what is obviously yet another way to reach into our pockets and waste our money on frivolous projects that employ people in useless jobs.
As the owner of a managed forest, I have seriously looked into being paid (yes PAID) over a million euros per year to NOT cut down my trees. There is a HUGE market for carbon offsetting, and it's growing yearly. The sad thing is, it's all a scam. Since I'm not a scammer I haven't moved ahead with this.
However what I've discovered through my own research and what my engineers have told me, is that METHANE from decomposing leaves poses a far greater "greenhouse" risk than any CO2 my trees are likely to absorb. Oh dear. But the EU pays (and taxes) based on CO2, not methane. Could it be that the government(s) are simply interested in taxing the most COMMON pollutant, and not the most HARMFUL? After all, everyone produces CO2 - industry, farmers, transportation, cows, humans. Not everyone produces methane (cow farts/burps aside).
Climate change is REAL. Yet the recently disturbed atmosphere of Jupiter (you've heard about the NEW Red Spot, right?) and the melting martian polar ice caps (oh yeah, it's because Mars is "wobbling" but HEAVEN FORBID that Earth can be wobbling, no - it's SUV's that are to blame here on Earth!) should alert any rational person to the fact that special interests have led politicians down a path they want to go - a path that leads to more revenue for the government, in the name of man-made "global warming".
It's amazing for me to think that even when they tax anywhere from 3 to 15% of EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION MADE (sales/VAT taxes) AND tax your income, tax your fuel, tax your capital gains, and yes, in some places, your death and your estate - GOVERNMENTS ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE PISSING OUT MONEY. WTF? When does it stop? What am I getting for my money? Roads with potholes in them? Bridges that collapse? Brown outs and water shortages? Monopolies in everything from utilities to software? Justice that fails to prevent crime, feeds criminals for life in jail (that is, when they don't get released), and makes me wonder if I will get TASERed the next time I get pulled over for speeding? Oh and governments that are willing to pay people like me (only with less morals) to not cut down my forest? Hell I don't want to cut it down, imagine what 2000 acres of 80 year old teak will be worth to my great-grandchildren...
Heh, what a world. But by all means, believe what governments tell you. After all, they're right about so many things. /cynicism
That's a reason to destroy the greatest healthcare system in the free world?
How does Cuba come into this?
You think I'm joking, but for the dollars invested per capita, Cuba has the greatest health care system in the world. Look it up.
Yet another reason why private healthcare must be stopped. Curing people doesn't come into it - it's about keeping them sick enough to stay profitable.
As a doctor I am disgusted by your remark. There's something called the Hippocratic Oath, you know. Insurance companies also have a vested interest in insuring only healthy people. Now I can't vouch for our cousins in the pharmaceutical industry who have ALWAYS been about the money, and make no allusions otherwise (hence their use of the Caduceus - the staff of Mercury god of Business, rather than the Asclepius or "healing" staff we doctors use). After all, the ideal situation for them is for all patients to become chronic, pill taking customers.
But those of us who actually provide the healthcare ONLY have the patient's full recovery in mind, when that's possible. The only thing we have to balance here is our own personal lives and time (doctors are people too - we have families, we have hobbies, and we get stressed - especially since most patients are ungrateful and we rarely hear the words "thank you" when we do our job well: we're just "expected" to do it). Being realistic, however, it's not always possible to "cure" everyone.
A lot of parents do care, and do like some sort of age rating.
You obviously don't care enough to fund it, hence the insolvency.
This is one good thing that comes with economic hardship. Idiotic, wasteful, inefficient ideas like this get swept away in the tide while people start focusing on more important issues, like keeping a roof over their heads or feeding and clothing themselves and their children.
We need many more years of economic hardship to get rid of all the free-loaders who make a living from telling other people how guilty they should be feeling, or making nonsensical claims with no evidence to back them up.
Yes, but it did spark an interesting debate on whether it was Russia beat the Germans or not.
Wow. Only 13 posts and Godwin's law is already invoked. Perhaps you didn't use the word "Nazi", but you are referring to the time period. Someone was bound to mention it sooner or later. OK, say it was 14 posts (counting mine). Well done.
Isn't it great? Leak a fake story on the internet and reap the free publicity, then leak a statement denying the original fake story, and get another bout of publicity. TWO slashvertisments for no cost at all! Marketing at its finest.
Bullshit.
Oh, the "silicon" part of the technology may be ready. However any foreign body inside a human body is susceptible to 1) chronic inflammation (which isn't so bad if it's around the metal holding your shattered bones together, after all, you can always take the metal out or at worst amputate the limb) and b) infection.
Now, hands up who is willing to have a device implanted in their brain that might cause permanent brain damage, bacterial meningitis (and all of its sequellae) or death?
Lab rats, as usual, will have the advantage (?) of having their intellect enhanced with implants long, long before we humans will.
Funny, I play windows games in a virtual machine running XP under linux...