Umm, tax collectors THEORETICALLY collect taxes for the common good...Robin Hood is just a thief.
Robin Hood THEORETICALLY (being a fictional character) returned wealth stolen and exploited from aristocrats and corrupt politicians. back to the people.
We could use a few hundred of him today -- send them to Wall Street and Washington.
The right to private property is a negative right insofar as it obligates people to inaction in the form of 'you cannot take my stuff.'
The right to private property is a positive right: the right to use government force to remove someone from a piece of land when you have a government-issued piece of paper that says its yours. And as all material objects trace their origin to land, so any physical claim of property rests on such government action.
As a society mandates that more productive people be slaves (that's what involuntary labor for others is)
Slaves to non-productive investors and bankers, perhaps. But making people pay for services they use via taxes is not slavery; nor is making them pay their fair ante for playing the property game.
If you want to carve the planet's land and resources up into "private property", to draw imaginary lines on the planet and point government guns to enforce them, you owe it to the people who are no longer permitted to walk where they please, to gather and hunt where they please, to build a shelter where they please, to compensate them for the share of their common inheritance that you're fencing off. See Tom Paine's "Agraian Justice" for an early but sound and eloquent exploration of this principal.
Wow, a manufacturer of high-end paper is concerned about a decrease in use of high-end paper? Color me shocked.
Again: I have mass market paperbacks -- cheap paper -- from the 1960s that are still readable. Fragile, yes, and some have been Scotch-taped a bit. But they're much more useful than any digital media from that era.
Right here on my desk, for example: Envoy to New Worlds, Keith Laumer, a 1963 Ace paperback. Yellowed, but so what? I can still enjoy the adventures of Retief, the interstellar two-fisted diplomat. I expect that in 47 years, a paperback printed today will be just as useful as this one is today. (If we haven't burned all the books by then either from crazed religious fundamentalism, or to keep warm once the oil runs out.)
And the toilet has a dozen buttons and two knows to adjust seat and water temperature.
YMMV depending on where you go, but I only saw toilets with washlets in hotels and in the restrooms of few restaurants. Most that I saw were as simple as the standard U.S. model, expect for having "small" and "large" flush options -- a brilliant, simple idea that we should all adopt. And you will still find the simple squat type in many places. (Learn how to use 'em, and learn the kanji for "man" and "woman", and you'll be much better equipped for a trip to smaller towns or the countryside, where you won't find Western toilets or the standard international graphics at the restrooms.)
Any shopping area in Japan that I have been to is loud, bright and flashing.
Downtown in the big cities, yes, especially near the big train stations; but away from the urban center your neighborhood shotengai isn't much more loud, bright and flashing than a suburban strip mall here in the U.S. I spent three months living in the Bentencho neighborhood of Osaka, and the local shops were not much different than what you'd find in any big city in the U.S.
Well, except for the pachinko parlor. Damn, but they are loud -- every time the door opened it was a sonic assault.
I think you could say that Japan has a high dynamic range: from downtown Toyko or Osaka to quiet countryside where all you hear is the water trickling through rice paddies. And because of the smallness of the nation and the ubiquity of high-speed rail, you can go from one extreme to the other much more rapidly than in the U.S.
Even in terms of the classical visual aesthetic you can go from sparse and simple Zen gardens to ornate temples and thirty-foot-high Buddha statues. It's the nation that gave us both seppuku and Hello Kitty. What nation could compare to that weirdness? Probably only the one that gave the world both the atom bomb and Mickey Mouse.
I wouldn't assume that any books you buy today will still be holding together in 20 years time. If this is something you are worried about, I hope you are buying library editions of books (and those can be $100 per copy).
I have plenty of paperbacks that are 30 to 40 years old, and quite a few hardbacks that are 50+. I recently purchased a hardback that's over 110 years old. None are "library editions".
Please don't try to spread FUD about the lifespan of books. It's just silly.
If you look at statistics of gun violence between countries where gun ownership is a right (US) and countries that heavily regulate gun use (Canada, Britain, Australia, any other country) you'll see that there's far more gun violence, and violence in general, in the US.
If you take away all of the gun violence, we still have a higher murder rate than most other industrialized nations. It's not the guns.
between Germany and the Japanese the US would have been fucked
Japan had no interest in invading the U.S. The Pacific war was a war between expansionist imperial powers over colonies/territories. It was the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor that made it into total war and an existential conflict for Japan.
Had the Allies lost WWII, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would have increased their territory, and their brutal policies would have killed millions more than they did. It would have been bad. But they would not have ruled the world, any more than the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. or the British Empire did. The idea that we'd be speaking German or Japanese here in the U.S. had the war gone different is part of WWII mythology, often involved to justify the U.S.'s use of nuclear weapons against Japan.
You do realize that Atkins has been roundly criticized in the literature by every nutritional authority, right? The National Academy of Sciences, the AMA, the ADA, the ACS, the AHA, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, the American Kidney Fund, the American College of Sports Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health has all criticized the Atkins plan. See the AtkinsExposed website I linked above.
You can find a handful of people with "Dr." before their name who will tell you than smoking cigarettes is fine and dandy, or with "PhD" afterward who will tell you that climate change is a hoax -- or that 9/11 was a controlled demolition, or that we never went to the moon, or whatever. This does not change the science.
How do you explain the coexistence of malnutrition and obesity within a community?
Malnutrition includes deficiency of micronutrients -- kwashiorkor, for example. Empty calories are cheap calories.
Japanese people also work far harder than most us Westeners, in addition to eating a lot of fish, shellfish, eggs and meat. Their overall sugar consumption is also faaar lower than most so-called "Americanized" societies.
None of which addresses the point that their consumption of carbs is high, putting the lie to the "high carb diets make you fat!" theory. And no, they don't eat a lot of meat -- though the consumption of meat is trending upward, along with the incidence of obesity, heart disease, and all the other fun stuff a high-protein, high-fat diet brings with it.
Yes, their sugar consumption is far lower. Large amounts of sugar are a bad idea, I think we can all agree on that shocking conclusion.
Also, what we have done in recorded history has nothing to do with our biology or evolution. The fact is, we've been growing crops for the past ~10.000 years which in evolutionary terms is just barely a blip on the radar. Hunter/gatherers collected fruits and berries when they could and fattened up for winter, but otherwise ate what the hunters brought home. After all, wild carbohydrates aren't exactly "in stock" all year around while meat and fish is.
Ah, bad anthropology rears its head again. First, our existence as hunter-gatherers was a blip in evolutionary terms; our digestive metabolism remains mostly the same as our primarily herbivorous primate ancestors and our primarily herbivorous chimp and gorilla cousins. (Yes, chimps eat some flesh -- mostly insects; that does not change the fact that they are primarily herbivorous.) Second, carbohydrates are indeed in stock all year round in the areas where we evolved -- what do you think those animals our ancestors were hunting were eating? Not just fruits, but roots, tubers, seeds, nuts, leaves...we've been eating grains for 20,000, perhaps even 100,000, years, well before the Neolithic revolution.
The idea that our paleolithic ancestors were mostly hunters is not based on good evidence, but on "me mighty hunter!" mythology. Contemporary hunter-gathers get the bulk of their nutrition from plant foods.
A huge part of the problem these days is the massive consumption of carbohydrates.
No, in fact the bulk of your caloric intake should be complex carbohydrates. Now, highly refined carbs do make it easier to overeat -- as do fatty foods. But the bulk of our problem is very simple: we eat something on the order of 25% more calories now than we did three or four decades ago. When you're overeating by 500 calories a day, shuffling around the proportions of macronutrients is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Carbohydrates raise blood sugar, which raises insulin levels, which promotes fat storage, inhibits release of energy from fat tissue and promotes inflammation, associated with next to all our "western diseases" like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, fibromyalgia and so on
Yeah, that's why you see so many fat Japanese people, all that rice. And why we've had all these "western diseases" for centuries, as we ate a grain-centered diet since, like, the beginning of human civilization.
Oh, wait a minute...obesity rates in Japan, where the typical diet gets about 55 to 60% of calories from carbs, are about 1/10 those of the U.S. -- but are rising as carb levels decrease and fat and protein levels increase.
And the fact that for most of human history[*] the majority of the human race has eaten a grain-centered high carbohydrate diet -- these "diseases of affluence" were awfully rare until the 20th century.
([*]To be taken literally: history starts with writing, which comes after the Neolithic revolution.)
The whole 'gym' mentality is broken. The problem is that people eating less doesn't make anybody rich.
Well, neither does running the trails in a several-year-old pair of Chuck Taylor knock-offs.
You don't need to join a gym to exercise. Second-hand bikes are cheap; if you want to go running, if you shun expensive, injury-producing running shoes it's pretty cheap (and contrary to common practice, you don't actually need an iPod or other music player to go running); walking remains free, as do calisthenics; and you can usually find some sucker in your neighborhood teaching yoga or karate or something along those lines at little above cost.
It's certainly true that our massive caloric intake -- which increased 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000, and I'm sure has only gone up since then -- tends to swamp weight-loss effects from exercise for many people. You won't burn off an extra 500 calories a day with moderate exercise. But exercise has benefits apart from weight loss; and once caloric intake is down to something more sane, it will help burn off minor excesses.
We recently programmed Bucket, the IRC chat bot in #xkcd, to allow people set their gender so he can use pronouns for them. This ended up taking hundreds of lines of code, three pages of documentation, and six different sets of pronouns and variables, just to cover all the basic ways people in the channel with different gender identifications wanted to be referred to (even without invented pronouns like "xe", which we vetoed). And that's just to cover the pronouns. The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I've ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I've spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.
It works about 95% of the time for gender and they're getting better
If I called one in twenty guys I see "ma'am", I'm pretty sure I would be punched in the face by the end of the day; an advertiser who deployed a system that mis-identified viewer's gender that often would face a horrible backlash. I think a 5% failure rate is about two orders of magnitude higher than would be socially acceptable, and contradicts the idea that "gender is really easy".
It's funny the cues that people think make it simple to determine gender. I do not have a feminine build -- broad shoulders, no hips. I've got a short beard, and masculine -- almost Neanderthal -- facial features. But I have very long hair, and so every once in a while someone will come up behind me and say "Excuse me ma'am..."
(The funniest one was where I was standing at a urinal and another guy walked in to the men's room and did a double take. "For a second I thought that was a woman standing there," he said.)
The trouble with having guns is that (1) sooner or later you're going to be tempted to use it on someone
Uh, no, not any more than I'm tempted to stab, bludgeon, strangle, immolate, or otherwise kill or assault people.
(2) someone else will use it on you, which will result in you being dead.
Again, no. IWhen they are not at hand, my guns are locked away; when they are at hand, I have a highly effective means of preventing an attacker from getting close enough to me to take them away.
BTW, gun suicides are more effective, and do raise the death count of suicide attempts.
Rubbish. Suicide attempts are of two types: people who are serious about dying, and people who on some level want to be stopped. Shooting yourself in the head puts you in the first category. If those people didn't have access to guns, they would choose some other highly effective method.
And really, suicide is already illegal; you think that gun control laws are going to deter someone who's planning on killing themself from buying a black market gun? (Which will never be any more difficult than buying black market heroin -- i.e., not significantly.) "Oh, I was going to shoot myself, but I don't want to get a criminal record! Better not buy a gun."
It lets you do a reverse DNS lookup on an IP address, which sometimes will give you more useful info than whois will. Often, whois will just tell you that the IP address is part of some huge block belonging to XYZ corp, while DNS will tell you that it maps to a name like qw34.dsl.baltimore.foo.xyz.net, a strong hint as to its location.
But refusing to recognize the gods was not a matter of him being persecuted for his beliefs (as noted, the ancient Greeks didn't care what somebody believed, only what they did), but for him forcing those beliefs on others in the Agora by accosting them and playing devil's advocate.
My understanding -- and maybe you can clarify -- was that you could believe what you wanted, but if you insulted the official gods, it was thought that you would bring bad juju on the city, so that was forbidden.
I've also heard a theory that Socrates was getting old and sick and was about ready to check out,so why not tweak the nose of authority and go out with dignity and style? Again, I'm not at all an expert, and welcome more informed correction.
"Just a model" is not what physicists seek. The aim is to seek laws of physics that are absolute, inviolable, and a complete description of space, time, and mass-energy.
A description is a model. "Just a model" implies a value judgment that's not really relevant.
To know that your model was "absolute, inviolable, and complete", you would have to be able to compare it with every measurement ever made, now or in the future. Lotsa luck, kid.
I forget who it was who said that going into science with the desire to arrive at absolutely firm knowledge was like entering the seminary as a plan to meet women...
You're digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole, Tastecicles. I'm sorry, but you're simply misinformed, and it's time to become silent, listen, and become more knowledgeable.
The US Constitution, which itself is based upon the British Constitution of 1689, stipulates the right to engage in commerce without interference.
No, it isn't, and no, it doesn't.
There is no "British Constitution of 1689". The "British Constitution" is not a written document but a set of traditions. You may be thinking of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which certainly did inspire similar enumerations by states and eventually by the federal government, but it's a far stretch to say that our Bill of Rights is based on that document.
And the U.S. Constitution does not have any passage about a "right to engage in commerce without interference". (Nor, from my admitted quick scan, does the 1689 Bill of Rights) The Constitution does, though, explicitly stipulate the power of the federal government to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" (Article I, Section 8). As AOL is an American company, and the buyer is Russian, the feds have legitimate Constitutional authority to regulate the transaction as they wish.
I tell ya, conservatives and propertarians remind me more and more often of that old Star Trek (TOS) episode where there's a barbarian tribe that worships the Constitution but has no idea what it actually says. ("E pleb neesta...")
In general, as you scale up, costs go down due to economies of scale.
The costs of actually moving bits around have gone way down since the 80s -- I now have a ~4,700,000 bps (according to speedtest.net) WiMax link for less (counting for inflation) than I paid in the late 1980s for a phone line I could only use to move data at 2,400 bps. (9,600 and 56k modems didn't come into common usage for ordinary folks until the 1990s.) Improvement: a factor of over 1,900.
The costs of storage are tremendously lower. Back in 1988 or so my first hard disk cost on the order of $200. It held 30 MB -- 30,000,000 bytes. One can get terrabyte disks -- 1,000,000,000,000 bytes -- now, for less money. Improvement: over 33,000 times.
And the costs of twiddling bits are far, far lower than they were in the late 80s. My first PC operated at 8 MHz -- "Turbo" mode. My current box, old and pokey as it is, runs at 2210 Mhz. Let's say the overall cost was roughly the same, though I remember my dad paying something on the order of $5,000 for our first PC. (A Victor 9000 that could run both CP/M and MS-DOS, wow!) Improvement, over 270 times -- and that's not counting the improvement in what gets done per tick. My current box rates 4420.08 BogoMIPS; using the conversions at that article, my * MHz "Turbo" PC would have rated about.032 BogoMIPS. Improvement: over 138,000 times.
US soldiers pick up a dozen people on the battlefield. What are they supposed to do with them?
Please re-read the GP post, which mentions "abducting people far away from any battlefields". The U.S. has developed a habit of bashing in doors and kidnapping people who are nowhere near battlefields, often on the basis of tips made by informants who collect a bounty or otherwise stand to benefit from the kidnappee's removal from the scene.
People actually captured on a battlefield are either legitimate combatants, entitled to POW status; or else they stand accused of being illegal combatants, and are entitled to a fair and honest trial. The fact that they might be found not guilty in such a trial is not an excuse to not grant them the due process of law; in fact, the possibility that they might not be guilty is exactly why a trial is necessary.
Right, sure, because you can deploy a massive service like gmail to millions and millions of people out of the "kindness of people's hearts".
The point is that "back in the good old days" you didn't need a massive service like Gmail. Things were distributed. You found some fellow geek who, out of the "kindness of his heart", let you log into his computer over a state-of-the-art 2400 baud modem to access FidoNet, and the world was yours.
If you have to have advertising, why not have advertising that is relevant?
Because there are two types of advertising:
1) I would like to inform you that product/service X exists. Thank you and good night.
2) X! You're unpatriotic and impotent if you're not using X every day! All your friends are laughing at you because you don't have X! If only you had X in your life then everything would be good forever!
I exaggerate -- though only a little bit -- but most of modern advertising is of type 2, not meant to inform but to inflame consumerism, to strengthen the society of consumption.
And as we live on a finite planet, the society of consumption is not sustainable in the long run; and in the present, it reduces human happiness by suggesting that contentment lies in owning the right combination of things. It is a form of mass insanity, and that which tends to strengthen that insanity is problematic.
Advertising of the second variety tends to strengthen that insanity. Making it more effective is detrimental to the human species.
Slashdot Mirror
Robin Hood THEORETICALLY (being a fictional character) returned wealth stolen and exploited from aristocrats and corrupt politicians. back to the people.
We could use a few hundred of him today -- send them to Wall Street and Washington.
The right to private property is a positive right: the right to use government force to remove someone from a piece of land when you have a government-issued piece of paper that says its yours. And as all material objects trace their origin to land, so any physical claim of property rests on such government action.
Slaves to non-productive investors and bankers, perhaps. But making people pay for services they use via taxes is not slavery; nor is making them pay their fair ante for playing the property game.
If you want to carve the planet's land and resources up into "private property", to draw imaginary lines on the planet and point government guns to enforce them, you owe it to the people who are no longer permitted to walk where they please, to gather and hunt where they please, to build a shelter where they please, to compensate them for the share of their common inheritance that you're fencing off. See Tom Paine's "Agraian Justice" for an early but sound and eloquent exploration of this principal.
Wow, a manufacturer of high-end paper is concerned about a decrease in use of high-end paper? Color me shocked.
Again: I have mass market paperbacks -- cheap paper -- from the 1960s that are still readable. Fragile, yes, and some have been Scotch-taped a bit. But they're much more useful than any digital media from that era.
Right here on my desk, for example: Envoy to New Worlds, Keith Laumer, a 1963 Ace paperback. Yellowed, but so what? I can still enjoy the adventures of Retief, the interstellar two-fisted diplomat. I expect that in 47 years, a paperback printed today will be just as useful as this one is today. (If we haven't burned all the books by then either from crazed religious fundamentalism, or to keep warm once the oil runs out.)
YMMV depending on where you go, but I only saw toilets with washlets in hotels and in the restrooms of few restaurants. Most that I saw were as simple as the standard U.S. model, expect for having "small" and "large" flush options -- a brilliant, simple idea that we should all adopt. And you will still find the simple squat type in many places. (Learn how to use 'em, and learn the kanji for "man" and "woman", and you'll be much better equipped for a trip to smaller towns or the countryside, where you won't find Western toilets or the standard international graphics at the restrooms.)
Downtown in the big cities, yes, especially near the big train stations; but away from the urban center your neighborhood shotengai isn't much more loud, bright and flashing than a suburban strip mall here in the U.S. I spent three months living in the Bentencho neighborhood of Osaka, and the local shops were not much different than what you'd find in any big city in the U.S.
Well, except for the pachinko parlor. Damn, but they are loud -- every time the door opened it was a sonic assault.
I think you could say that Japan has a high dynamic range: from downtown Toyko or Osaka to quiet countryside where all you hear is the water trickling through rice paddies. And because of the smallness of the nation and the ubiquity of high-speed rail, you can go from one extreme to the other much more rapidly than in the U.S.
Even in terms of the classical visual aesthetic you can go from sparse and simple Zen gardens to ornate temples and thirty-foot-high Buddha statues. It's the nation that gave us both seppuku and Hello Kitty. What nation could compare to that weirdness? Probably only the one that gave the world both the atom bomb and Mickey Mouse.
I have plenty of paperbacks that are 30 to 40 years old, and quite a few hardbacks that are 50+. I recently purchased a hardback that's over 110 years old. None are "library editions".
Please don't try to spread FUD about the lifespan of books. It's just silly.
If you take away all of the gun violence, we still have a higher murder rate than most other industrialized nations. It's not the guns.
Switzerland has millions of assault rifles in private hands, but a low crime rate. It's not the guns.
...which was never going to happen, with or without the U.S. First, the Nazis didn't have the naval power for an invasion of Britain; second, the Germans lost 4.3 million men in their futile attempt to take the U.S.S.R.; the USSR lost 7 million. Indeed, some people argue that the U.S.S.R. should get the most credit for defeating Hitler. Wanna-be rulers of the world, take note: never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Japan had no interest in invading the U.S. The Pacific war was a war between expansionist imperial powers over colonies/territories. It was the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor that made it into total war and an existential conflict for Japan.
Had the Allies lost WWII, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would have increased their territory, and their brutal policies would have killed millions more than they did. It would have been bad. But they would not have ruled the world, any more than the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. or the British Empire did. The idea that we'd be speaking German or Japanese here in the U.S. had the war gone different is part of WWII mythology, often involved to justify the U.S.'s use of nuclear weapons against Japan.
You do realize that Atkins has been roundly criticized in the literature by every nutritional authority, right? The National Academy of Sciences, the AMA, the ADA, the ACS, the AHA, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, the American Kidney Fund, the American College of Sports Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health has all criticized the Atkins plan. See the AtkinsExposed website I linked above.
You can find a handful of people with "Dr." before their name who will tell you than smoking cigarettes is fine and dandy, or with "PhD" afterward who will tell you that climate change is a hoax -- or that 9/11 was a controlled demolition, or that we never went to the moon, or whatever. This does not change the science.
Malnutrition includes deficiency of micronutrients -- kwashiorkor, for example. Empty calories are cheap calories.
None of which addresses the point that their consumption of carbs is high, putting the lie to the "high carb diets make you fat!" theory. And no, they don't eat a lot of meat -- though the consumption of meat is trending upward, along with the incidence of obesity, heart disease, and all the other fun stuff a high-protein, high-fat diet brings with it.
Yes, their sugar consumption is far lower. Large amounts of sugar are a bad idea, I think we can all agree on that shocking conclusion.
No, in fact insulin has an anti-inflammatory effect (see also here.)
Ah, bad anthropology rears its head again. First, our existence as hunter-gatherers was a blip in evolutionary terms; our digestive metabolism remains mostly the same as our primarily herbivorous primate ancestors and our primarily herbivorous chimp and gorilla cousins. (Yes, chimps eat some flesh -- mostly insects; that does not change the fact that they are primarily herbivorous.) Second, carbohydrates are indeed in stock all year round in the areas where we evolved -- what do you think those animals our ancestors were hunting were eating? Not just fruits, but roots, tubers, seeds, nuts, leaves...we've been eating grains for 20,000, perhaps even 100,000, years, well before the Neolithic revolution.
The idea that our paleolithic ancestors were mostly hunters is not based on good evidence, but on "me mighty hunter!" mythology. Contemporary hunter-gathers get the bulk of their nutrition from plant foods.
But finally, the evolutionary tale tells us jack shit about what makes for a healthy diet . Evolutio
Suicide rates per 100,000, averaging male and female rates: UK 7.55, U.S. 10.55, India 10.65, China 13.9, Switzerland 18.25, Japan 25.3.
Guns per 100 residents: China 3.5, India 4.0, UK 5.6, Switzerland 46.0, U.S. 90.0. Japan's rate of firearms ownership is nearly nil.
(The numbers given are numbers of guns, not gun ownership rates; the U.S. number is distorted by ownership of multiple guns being common. 38% of households and 26% of individuals own at least one firearm.)
So, no, we do not have a higher suicide rate than countries with few guns. Try again.
You do not understand the nature of suicide. One does not take one's own life on a passing whim.
In Japan, despite the absence of guns, people manage to kill themselves highly effectively by jumping off high places or in front of trains.
Taubes is a scientific and journalistic fraud, who pushes nutritional pseudoscience and misrepresents the positions of people he interviews. See http://www.fumento.com/fat/reason.html and http://www.atkinsexposed.org/atkins/105/Center_for_Science_in_the_Public_Interest.htm.
No, in fact the bulk of your caloric intake should be complex carbohydrates. Now, highly refined carbs do make it easier to overeat -- as do fatty foods. But the bulk of our problem is very simple: we eat something on the order of 25% more calories now than we did three or four decades ago. When you're overeating by 500 calories a day, shuffling around the proportions of macronutrients is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Yeah, that's why you see so many fat Japanese people, all that rice. And why we've had all these "western diseases" for centuries, as we ate a grain-centered diet since, like, the beginning of human civilization.
Oh, wait a minute...obesity rates in Japan, where the typical diet gets about 55 to 60% of calories from carbs, are about 1/10 those of the U.S. -- but are rising as carb levels decrease and fat and protein levels increase.
And the fact that for most of human history[*] the majority of the human race has eaten a grain-centered high carbohydrate diet -- these "diseases of affluence" were awfully rare until the 20th century.
([*]To be taken literally: history starts with writing, which comes after the Neolithic revolution.)
And a high protein meal will also raise insulin levels -- good, since insulin is necessary for uptake of amino acids protein synthesis.. And people who are exercising lose weight and improve insulin response on high carb diets better than on high fat ones. And a high-complex carbohydrate diet will have you lose much more weight that a low-carb, high fat diet.
So, in summary: Taubes, full of shit; low carb diets, not backed by science.
Well, neither does running the trails in a several-year-old pair of Chuck Taylor knock-offs.
You don't need to join a gym to exercise. Second-hand bikes are cheap; if you want to go running, if you shun expensive, injury-producing running shoes it's pretty cheap (and contrary to common practice, you don't actually need an iPod or other music player to go running); walking remains free, as do calisthenics; and you can usually find some sucker in your neighborhood teaching yoga or karate or something along those lines at little above cost.
It's certainly true that our massive caloric intake -- which increased 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000, and I'm sure has only gone up since then -- tends to swamp weight-loss effects from exercise for many people. You won't burn off an extra 500 calories a day with moderate exercise. But exercise has benefits apart from weight loss; and once caloric intake is down to something more sane, it will help burn off minor excesses.
Far from it! Besides the fact that there are plenty of people out there of quite determinate biological sex whose appearance is ambiguous ("It's Pat!"), and besides the existence of a handful of people who are biologically intersexed, gender identification is one of the most complex things out there, as Randall Munroe of xkcd fame noted:
We recently programmed Bucket, the IRC chat bot in #xkcd, to allow people set their gender so he can use pronouns for them. This ended up taking hundreds of lines of code, three pages of documentation, and six different sets of pronouns and variables, just to cover all the basic ways people in the channel with different gender identifications wanted to be referred to (even without invented pronouns like "xe", which we vetoed). And that's just to cover the pronouns. The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I've ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I've spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.
If I called one in twenty guys I see "ma'am", I'm pretty sure I would be punched in the face by the end of the day; an advertiser who deployed a system that mis-identified viewer's gender that often would face a horrible backlash. I think a 5% failure rate is about two orders of magnitude higher than would be socially acceptable, and contradicts the idea that "gender is really easy".
It's funny the cues that people think make it simple to determine gender. I do not have a feminine build -- broad shoulders, no hips. I've got a short beard, and masculine -- almost Neanderthal -- facial features. But I have very long hair, and so every once in a while someone will come up behind me and say "Excuse me ma'am..."
(The funniest one was where I was standing at a urinal and another guy walked in to the men's room and did a double take. "For a second I thought that was a woman standing there," he said.)
Uh, no, not any more than I'm tempted to stab, bludgeon, strangle, immolate, or otherwise kill or assault people.
Again, no. IWhen they are not at hand, my guns are locked away; when they are at hand, I have a highly effective means of preventing an attacker from getting close enough to me to take them away.
Rubbish. Suicide attempts are of two types: people who are serious about dying, and people who on some level want to be stopped. Shooting yourself in the head puts you in the first category. If those people didn't have access to guns, they would choose some other highly effective method. And really, suicide is already illegal; you think that gun control laws are going to deter someone who's planning on killing themself from buying a black market gun? (Which will never be any more difficult than buying black market heroin -- i.e., not significantly.) "Oh, I was going to shoot myself, but I don't want to get a criminal record! Better not buy a gun."
It lets you do a reverse DNS lookup on an IP address, which sometimes will give you more useful info than whois will. Often, whois will just tell you that the IP address is part of some huge block belonging to XYZ corp, while DNS will tell you that it maps to a name like qw34.dsl.baltimore.foo.xyz.net, a strong hint as to its location.
My understanding -- and maybe you can clarify -- was that you could believe what you wanted, but if you insulted the official gods, it was thought that you would bring bad juju on the city, so that was forbidden.
I've also heard a theory that Socrates was getting old and sick and was about ready to check out,so why not tweak the nose of authority and go out with dignity and style? Again, I'm not at all an expert, and welcome more informed correction.
A description is a model. "Just a model" implies a value judgment that's not really relevant.
To know that your model was "absolute, inviolable, and complete", you would have to be able to compare it with every measurement ever made, now or in the future. Lotsa luck, kid.
I forget who it was who said that going into science with the desire to arrive at absolutely firm knowledge was like entering the seminary as a plan to meet women...
All you've done is copy the very same document I linked to way up-thread.
Which is the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Not a "Constitution".
You're digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole, Tastecicles. I'm sorry, but you're simply misinformed, and it's time to become silent, listen, and become more knowledgeable.
No, it isn't, and no, it doesn't.
There is no "British Constitution of 1689". The "British Constitution" is not a written document but a set of traditions. You may be thinking of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which certainly did inspire similar enumerations by states and eventually by the federal government, but it's a far stretch to say that our Bill of Rights is based on that document.
And the U.S. Constitution does not have any passage about a "right to engage in commerce without interference". (Nor, from my admitted quick scan, does the 1689 Bill of Rights) The Constitution does, though, explicitly stipulate the power of the federal government to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes" (Article I, Section 8). As AOL is an American company, and the buyer is Russian, the feds have legitimate Constitutional authority to regulate the transaction as they wish.
May I suggest you read the document in question before you make statements about what it stipulates?
I tell ya, conservatives and propertarians remind me more and more often of that old Star Trek (TOS) episode where there's a barbarian tribe that worships the Constitution but has no idea what it actually says. ("E pleb neesta...")
Well, no, actually. If you'd RTFA -- or even the summary -- you'd see that this bill reduces a power that the POTUS has had since the early 1940s.
So it was a long time ago this, then recently health care.
So calm down and take your meds; they may improve your ability to put together something resembling coherent written English.
In general, as you scale up, costs go down due to economies of scale.
The costs of actually moving bits around have gone way down since the 80s -- I now have a ~4,700,000 bps (according to speedtest.net) WiMax link for less (counting for inflation) than I paid in the late 1980s for a phone line I could only use to move data at 2,400 bps. (9,600 and 56k modems didn't come into common usage for ordinary folks until the 1990s.) Improvement: a factor of over 1,900.
The costs of storage are tremendously lower. Back in 1988 or so my first hard disk cost on the order of $200. It held 30 MB -- 30,000,000 bytes. One can get terrabyte disks -- 1,000,000,000,000 bytes -- now, for less money. Improvement: over 33,000 times.
And the costs of twiddling bits are far, far lower than they were in the late 80s. My first PC operated at 8 MHz -- "Turbo" mode. My current box, old and pokey as it is, runs at 2210 Mhz. Let's say the overall cost was roughly the same, though I remember my dad paying something on the order of $5,000 for our first PC. (A Victor 9000 that could run both CP/M and MS-DOS, wow!) Improvement, over 270 times -- and that's not counting the improvement in what gets done per tick. My current box rates 4420.08 BogoMIPS; using the conversions at that article, my * MHz "Turbo" PC would have rated about .032 BogoMIPS. Improvement: over 138,000 times.
Please re-read the GP post, which mentions "abducting people far away from any battlefields". The U.S. has developed a habit of bashing in doors and kidnapping people who are nowhere near battlefields, often on the basis of tips made by informants who collect a bounty or otherwise stand to benefit from the kidnappee's removal from the scene.
People actually captured on a battlefield are either legitimate combatants, entitled to POW status; or else they stand accused of being illegal combatants, and are entitled to a fair and honest trial. The fact that they might be found not guilty in such a trial is not an excuse to not grant them the due process of law; in fact, the possibility that they might not be guilty is exactly why a trial is necessary.
The point is that "back in the good old days" you didn't need a massive service like Gmail. Things were distributed. You found some fellow geek who, out of the "kindness of his heart", let you log into his computer over a state-of-the-art 2400 baud modem to access FidoNet, and the world was yours.
Because there are two types of advertising:
1) I would like to inform you that product/service X exists. Thank you and good night.
2) X! You're unpatriotic and impotent if you're not using X every day! All your friends are laughing at you because you don't have X! If only you had X in your life then everything would be good forever!
I exaggerate -- though only a little bit -- but most of modern advertising is of type 2, not meant to inform but to inflame consumerism, to strengthen the society of consumption.
And as we live on a finite planet, the society of consumption is not sustainable in the long run; and in the present, it reduces human happiness by suggesting that contentment lies in owning the right combination of things. It is a form of mass insanity, and that which tends to strengthen that insanity is problematic.
Advertising of the second variety tends to strengthen that insanity. Making it more effective is detrimental to the human species.