Here in California our snow packs are dwindling year after year, which means our valleys are likely to revert to their natural desert climate. That's where a full third of our nation's food comes from. We might want to consider some windtraps, not growing rice in a desert, or maybe borrow some Australian expertise to do something cool.
Whenever you want to evaluate Havana, ask yourself what you would do if a gallon of gas cost one third of your monthly income, if your nation had wide-ranging sanctions against it, and you still needed to get by. Now keep in mind that we are going to face peaking resources and are going to have to learn to live efficiently. I'm not endorsing Castro, I'm saying that folks in Cuba have learned some things since the USSR fell that we'll all need to learn from.
All interesting points, but there's always the example of Havana, Cuba, where 70% of the food eaten in that city was actually grown in that city. That's got to be an attainable goal here as well. As for heating and air conditioning, we've got a lot to learn from the buildings built before the industrial craze, and plenty of new ideas as well. Check it out. I have the privilege of spending my days in a LEED Platinum building, and let me tell you, this green building thing is going to take off when people realize how comfortable they can be.
The very fact that airliners leave their exhaust directly at or near the stratosphere should tell you something. After that, their contrails seed clouds which have an impact on the weather which I can't generalize on here. This reminds me of a study on embodied energy in cities; people were questioning the impact of making all those buildings, but it comes out that the high level of re-use by a densely packed population makes cities a much greener choice for the bulk of the human race.
One of every four homeless people in the USA is a veteran. However, given what the world knows about what the US military does in places like Abu Ghraib, I'd salute anyone who didn't go back.
You tell it! My family came all too close to where you're at, and anyone who thinks that you go homeless simply from drugs or no will to work is clueless. A bad job market or bad home situation can do all kinds of things. Kudos to you for surviving all that, and I hope it never happens to you again.
Considering the likelihood of a gas giant to have many moons of significant size, why do we insist on a planet in the goldilocks zone? Here we are considering Europa and Callisto for possible subsurface oceans, and even life, and how would it be to have moons in that orbital slot?
When you think of the money and time we're pouring into ways to kill folks off, and compare that to what it'd cost to relieve poverty and chaos, it's just tragic.
Well, that's just the spirit. Grandparent post: anecdote about real-world outcomes. Parent post: pure ideology.
Consumer choice is no replacement for citizenship, especially when you're choosing between a handful of diversified corporations, all alike, nor does it do justice to society. Example: I'm sure that the homeowners in Southern California whose homes burned last year due to badly funded public fire departments, while rich people bought their own fire private protection - and I wonder how many of them favored the budgets that gutted the public services that were supposed to protect everyone. Libertarian ideology really falls down here.
But the biggest things we can do to stop desertification, so far as I know, would be to adopt better agricultural practices and stop forcing a stationary lifestyle on ecosystems dependent on migration.
Government is also in the business of being accountable. You already have a vote and a voice, while a sufficiently large and diversified corporation will shrug off your loss as a consumer. Things like the FOIA act in the US wouldn't come readily from the private sector, which is concerned with the bottom line. My point is, when you're talking about government and the objective isn't just profitability in the next few quarters, you actually do have a chance at a balanced and ethical society. Not a guarantee, but a chance. This isn't pie in the sky either; look at the Scandinavian countries or the Indian state of Kerala, where government programs assure better baseline health and quality of life. Equal access to the necessities, if not the luxuries, is worth the social work.
The more any industry is regulated, the more it will concentrate into fewer and larger organizations. Big companies can cope with the regulation, but the compliance costs drive smaller competitors out, or push them to be acquired by larger organizations.
That's an interesting observation, but I think it's actually the other way around. The more wealth concentrates, the more the elite will lean on the government to issue laws that secure their wealth, and tilt the odds in favor of their acquiring more. There is no non-disruptive way to hold this in check once this happens. You cannot legislate against money's corruption. People can be bought - period. This makes systems of political checks and balances incompletely, because wealth is power, power corrupts, and economic power is most other forms of power spring from.
This is why I am absolutely in favor of redistribution of wealth. I approve of Norway's lack of a sharp division between rich and poor.
Ideology meets money, you mean. There is absolutely no such thing as clean coal. The mining process itself does enormous environmental damage that we presently shove down the throats of the Appalachian poor. If we redirected funding from expensive military toys along the lines of the F-22 into remodeling our energy production and usage, we could easily leave coal behind. Hell, even nuclear is a cleaner and safer alternative to coal, and that's actually saying something.
But, let them mouth off about "clean coal" if it keeps Big Coal pacified; green energy is gaining momentum and nobody's going to want coal in the coming paradigm.
I am completely hopeful for the sake of knowledge and experience that we get to into space like in Star Trek. However, I do note a bit of escapism in some of the hopes for a warp drive. I think people are a bit afraid of the idea that this Earth might be the only world humanity will ever live on. The cynic in me suggests that people want this world to be disposable.
We co-evolved with the planet all the way back to when we were microbes. This world is a part of us. Yes, let's try to break past the speed of light, for the sake of science and achievement. Are we existentially okay with our fate as a species being completely contained in this world? I think we can be.
When you're out in a social setting, like a coffee shop with wifi, you totally want to be staring at your netbook, or maybe furtively peering over the lid.
If that fails, start downloading as much as you can. You will get attention, I promise!
I'm telling you, dude, keep it as it is. Carry your ten inch netbook with pride! Women can spot a penis extension right away, but this will tell them that no laptop can contain your confidence.
Also, whatever you're driving now, trade it in for a Mini Cooper or a Smart.
Any suggestions on how it could be done simpler? And will your suggestion allow the same degree of control? The only idea I have is to drop the 'Cancel' for being redundant with the 'Close' button in the corner.
Yes. Gnome, XFCE, and OSX do it. You click an option, it takes effect. Don't like it? Just put it back. Optionally, the dialogue can have a revert or defaults button.
Gnome's gone a bit far in the direction of stripping down features, but overall, I like the uncluttered presentation. I'd love to have KDE's power behind that kind of thinking.
I wish KDE would adopt at least some of Gnome's Human Interface Guidelines. It'd help everyone if the Linux desktops came together in that respect, at least to ditch those silly Windows-centric "Cancel/Apply/OK" preference dialogues which don't offer any reason not to be done more simply.
You know what's ironic? I bet you that the next 500 years of the Galactica timeline on earth would have been a tragic story of the white man's burden. Good intentions can't blunt greed but so much. Yeah, they'd really be colonials then!
I think that these days it's easy to get wrapped up in our civilization and lose perspective on where humanity came from.
You should read books about the Kung-San people of the Kalahari, as they were until their culture was obliterated in the past couple decades. They had a rather good life as hunter-gatherers, in a desert. Now, the majority of humanity's existence has been spent in this state, and for a good reason.
A lot of human ingenuity goes unsung in the modern day where it seems taken for granted that not much happened prior to the bronze age - a definite mistake IMHO.
I don't know about you, but Nana Visitor's character captured quite a lot of the attitude I thought the population on the fleet would have, crammed into cargo vessels, eating algae. I can see why they'd be pretty fed up with technology. Hunter-gatherer living on earth of 150,000 years ago would actually be a nice break by comparison.
I'm not kidding. Anthropologists have it documented, a hunter-gatherer works about four hours a day to meet their needs. Hunter-gatherers also had better diets than early horticulturalists; it's a point of debate why anybody stopped being hunter-gatherers at all. There wasn't much payoff initially.
The show ended too soon. I was waiting for the episode where Kara Thrace gets taken off duty and sent to a ship where a retired captain lives with his twelve children, only he still acts like a captain and hard-heartedly marches his children about like they're officers, but then, Kara teaches them all to sing.
The USA currently subsidizes the oil trade directly, and indirectly through foreign policies centered around oil. This includes military spending, a lot of it. If the free market were sane, and the costs were built in to the products that incur them, what do you suppose would happen? What if all spending for military intervention in the Middle East had to be paid for through gas taxes? The effects would be seismic.
We in the US only just now got $80 billion in subsidies for alternative energies in the last stimulus bill from Obama. That's a good start, but had we spent all the money we've spent on the bloody misadventure in Iraq on putting up solar panels, solar chimneys, and wind turbines or more innovative forms of wind power, the world would be a different place, and Shell would be singing a different tune.
Corporations go after the easiest money, quite reflexively. They have no other ethic. They're just not built for it. If you want a world where companies do what's right, change the rules, whether from the capitol or the grassroots.
> Barn bred cats are the ninja's of the cat world.
Absolutely. My grandfather had barnyard cats, and I watched one of them make a habit of stalking squirrels like a pro. She knew that the squirrel would dash for the nearest tree, and would line herself up behind the tree so that the squirrel actually ran *towards* her when startled, allowing for a quick swipe of the paw. Then, she knew how to grab the neck to avoid getting bitten. As spastic and clever as squirrels are, rats are in serious trouble from a feline hunter like that.
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Here in California our snow packs are dwindling year after year, which means our valleys are likely to revert to their natural desert climate. That's where a full third of our nation's food comes from. We might want to consider some windtraps, not growing rice in a desert, or maybe borrow some Australian expertise to do something cool.
Whenever you want to evaluate Havana, ask yourself what you would do if a gallon of gas cost one third of your monthly income, if your nation had wide-ranging sanctions against it, and you still needed to get by. Now keep in mind that we are going to face peaking resources and are going to have to learn to live efficiently. I'm not endorsing Castro, I'm saying that folks in Cuba have learned some things since the USSR fell that we'll all need to learn from.
All interesting points, but there's always the example of Havana, Cuba, where 70% of the food eaten in that city was actually grown in that city. That's got to be an attainable goal here as well. As for heating and air conditioning, we've got a lot to learn from the buildings built before the industrial craze, and plenty of new ideas as well. Check it out. I have the privilege of spending my days in a LEED Platinum building, and let me tell you, this green building thing is going to take off when people realize how comfortable they can be.
The very fact that airliners leave their exhaust directly at or near the stratosphere should tell you something. After that, their contrails seed clouds which have an impact on the weather which I can't generalize on here. This reminds me of a study on embodied energy in cities; people were questioning the impact of making all those buildings, but it comes out that the high level of re-use by a densely packed population makes cities a much greener choice for the bulk of the human race.
One of every four homeless people in the USA is a veteran. However, given what the world knows about what the US military does in places like Abu Ghraib, I'd salute anyone who didn't go back.
You tell it! My family came all too close to where you're at, and anyone who thinks that you go homeless simply from drugs or no will to work is clueless. A bad job market or bad home situation can do all kinds of things. Kudos to you for surviving all that, and I hope it never happens to you again.
Considering the likelihood of a gas giant to have many moons of significant size, why do we insist on a planet in the goldilocks zone? Here we are considering Europa and Callisto for possible subsurface oceans, and even life, and how would it be to have moons in that orbital slot?
When you think of the money and time we're pouring into ways to kill folks off, and compare that to what it'd cost to relieve poverty and chaos, it's just tragic.
Well, that's just the spirit. Grandparent post: anecdote about real-world outcomes. Parent post: pure ideology.
Consumer choice is no replacement for citizenship, especially when you're choosing between a handful of diversified corporations, all alike, nor does it do justice to society. Example: I'm sure that the homeowners in Southern California whose homes burned last year due to badly funded public fire departments, while rich people bought their own fire private protection - and I wonder how many of them favored the budgets that gutted the public services that were supposed to protect everyone. Libertarian ideology really falls down here.
But the biggest things we can do to stop desertification, so far as I know, would be to adopt better agricultural practices and stop forcing a stationary lifestyle on ecosystems dependent on migration.
Government is also in the business of being accountable. You already have a vote and a voice, while a sufficiently large and diversified corporation will shrug off your loss as a consumer. Things like the FOIA act in the US wouldn't come readily from the private sector, which is concerned with the bottom line. My point is, when you're talking about government and the objective isn't just profitability in the next few quarters, you actually do have a chance at a balanced and ethical society. Not a guarantee, but a chance. This isn't pie in the sky either; look at the Scandinavian countries or the Indian state of Kerala, where government programs assure better baseline health and quality of life. Equal access to the necessities, if not the luxuries, is worth the social work.
The more any industry is regulated, the more it will concentrate into fewer and larger organizations. Big companies can cope with the regulation, but the compliance costs drive smaller competitors out, or push them to be acquired by larger organizations.
That's an interesting observation, but I think it's actually the other way around. The more wealth concentrates, the more the elite will lean on the government to issue laws that secure their wealth, and tilt the odds in favor of their acquiring more. There is no non-disruptive way to hold this in check once this happens. You cannot legislate against money's corruption. People can be bought - period. This makes systems of political checks and balances incompletely, because wealth is power, power corrupts, and economic power is most other forms of power spring from.
This is why I am absolutely in favor of redistribution of wealth. I approve of Norway's lack of a sharp division between rich and poor.
Ideology meets money, you mean. There is absolutely no such thing as clean coal. The mining process itself does enormous environmental damage that we presently shove down the throats of the Appalachian poor. If we redirected funding from expensive military toys along the lines of the F-22 into remodeling our energy production and usage, we could easily leave coal behind. Hell, even nuclear is a cleaner and safer alternative to coal, and that's actually saying something.
But, let them mouth off about "clean coal" if it keeps Big Coal pacified; green energy is gaining momentum and nobody's going to want coal in the coming paradigm.
I am completely hopeful for the sake of knowledge and experience that we get to into space like in Star Trek. However, I do note a bit of escapism in some of the hopes for a warp drive. I think people are a bit afraid of the idea that this Earth might be the only world humanity will ever live on. The cynic in me suggests that people want this world to be disposable.
We co-evolved with the planet all the way back to when we were microbes. This world is a part of us. Yes, let's try to break past the speed of light, for the sake of science and achievement. Are we existentially okay with our fate as a species being completely contained in this world? I think we can be.
When you're out in a social setting, like a coffee shop with wifi, you totally want to be staring at your netbook, or maybe furtively peering over the lid.
If that fails, start downloading as much as you can. You will get attention, I promise!
I'm telling you, dude, keep it as it is. Carry your ten inch netbook with pride! Women can spot a penis extension right away, but this will tell them that no laptop can contain your confidence.
Also, whatever you're driving now, trade it in for a Mini Cooper or a Smart.
Any suggestions on how it could be done simpler? And will your suggestion allow the same degree of control?
The only idea I have is to drop the 'Cancel' for being redundant with the 'Close' button in the corner.
Yes. Gnome, XFCE, and OSX do it. You click an option, it takes effect. Don't like it? Just put it back. Optionally, the dialogue can have a revert or defaults button.
Gnome's gone a bit far in the direction of stripping down features, but overall, I like the uncluttered presentation. I'd love to have KDE's power behind that kind of thinking.
I wish KDE would adopt at least some of Gnome's Human Interface Guidelines. It'd help everyone if the Linux desktops came together in that respect, at least to ditch those silly Windows-centric "Cancel/Apply/OK" preference dialogues which don't offer any reason not to be done more simply.
You know what's ironic? I bet you that the next 500 years of the Galactica timeline on earth would have been a tragic story of the white man's burden. Good intentions can't blunt greed but so much. Yeah, they'd really be colonials then!
I think that these days it's easy to get wrapped up in our civilization and lose perspective on where humanity came from.
You should read books about the Kung-San people of the Kalahari, as they were until their culture was obliterated in the past couple decades. They had a rather good life as hunter-gatherers, in a desert. Now, the majority of humanity's existence has been spent in this state, and for a good reason.
A lot of human ingenuity goes unsung in the modern day where it seems taken for granted that not much happened prior to the bronze age - a definite mistake IMHO.
I don't know about you, but Nana Visitor's character captured quite a lot of the attitude I thought the population on the fleet would have, crammed into cargo vessels, eating algae. I can see why they'd be pretty fed up with technology. Hunter-gatherer living on earth of 150,000 years ago would actually be a nice break by comparison.
I'm not kidding. Anthropologists have it documented, a hunter-gatherer works about four hours a day to meet their needs. Hunter-gatherers also had better diets than early horticulturalists; it's a point of debate why anybody stopped being hunter-gatherers at all. There wasn't much payoff initially.
That part of the show made sense to me, anyway.
The show ended too soon. I was waiting for the episode where Kara Thrace gets taken off duty and sent to a ship where a retired captain lives with his twelve children, only he still acts like a captain and hard-heartedly marches his children about like they're officers, but then, Kara teaches them all to sing.
The USA currently subsidizes the oil trade directly, and indirectly through foreign policies centered around oil. This includes military spending, a lot of it. If the free market were sane, and the costs were built in to the products that incur them, what do you suppose would happen? What if all spending for military intervention in the Middle East had to be paid for through gas taxes? The effects would be seismic.
We in the US only just now got $80 billion in subsidies for alternative energies in the last stimulus bill from Obama. That's a good start, but had we spent all the money we've spent on the bloody misadventure in Iraq on putting up solar panels, solar chimneys, and wind turbines or more innovative forms of wind power, the world would be a different place, and Shell would be singing a different tune.
Corporations go after the easiest money, quite reflexively. They have no other ethic. They're just not built for it. If you want a world where companies do what's right, change the rules, whether from the capitol or the grassroots.
> Barn bred cats are the ninja's of the cat world.
Absolutely. My grandfather had barnyard cats, and I watched one of them make a habit of stalking squirrels like a pro. She knew that the squirrel would dash for the nearest tree, and would line herself up behind the tree so that the squirrel actually ran *towards* her when startled, allowing for a quick swipe of the paw. Then, she knew how to grab the neck to avoid getting bitten. As spastic and clever as squirrels are, rats are in serious trouble from a feline hunter like that.
Thank you for exploiting such a rare and wonderful opportunity.