The logical thing to do would be for the government to create special low paying jobs for the unemployed. If you're going to spend money anyway, on welfare, food stamps, and medicaid, you might as well get something for it. Make the unemployed work for their benefits.
There isn't? Ever heard of the Shannon limit? As a matter of fact, there ARE inherent bandwidth limits to the electromagnetic spectrum using a particular signalling technology. (and advancing the technology requires R&D funding and upgrading all of the equipment)
Internet is a completely different case. For the most part, a coaxial cable or a fiber optic cable is a private fully contained space within a certain frequency range. Every subscriber or small group of subscribers is basically getting a private reserved channel just for them.
Actually studies of primitive tribes and/or of primates reveal that rape isn't the majority of the matings. The reason is that primates, like humans, live in tribes. It is thought that a typical human tribe's natural size is on the order of 100 individuals. In such a tribe, there are consequences for rape. In those times, there was no privacy, so it would be obvious if a rape happened and the male family members of the woman might potentially take action.
These ideas come from a field of science known as evolutionary psychology, and are based on field research and mathematical modeling. (evolutionary psychology is a hard science based on facts and testable hypotheses not a soft science like normal psychology)
More practically : if the FBI prosecutes you, you get charged with wire fraud. It basically doesn't matter what the crime was, the statute is so broad it can apply to nearly anything. Also, the FBI wins trials over 90% of the time...doesn't matter if you are innocent or not...if the FBI comes for you you are going to the Gulag.
Because the man doesn't usually control when a sexual encounter happens, the woman does. Make up sex is when the woman is either trying to induce you to stay in the relationship or is turned on because of how you responded to the argument.
Problems : Using rail does not remove the problems you would have with the obvious alternate way : trailers. You basically have all of the disadvantages of using mobile trailers stacked with ADDITIONAL problems from width limits on a rail line. I'm not even going to go into the problems associated with mobile homes/trailers, other than to say that every single one I have ever been in sucked.
And another additional problem : you can tow mobile homes and trailers over gravel and dirt roads that are dirt cheap to build and maintain (pun intended)
Rail is VERY expensive : about $1 million/mile. Totally economically unfeasible to build the additional rail segments this plan would need to work, as well as to bring the old abandoned track up to code that this architect has in mind to use.
The consistently highest paying jobs are for doctors and lawyers from a top 14 law school. You cannot get either unless you do extremely well on exams.
Microsoft does ONE thing well : it hires thousands of competent programmers and it makes usable software. There are many critics but the stuff isn't all bad and they do try to improve it. It SELLS the software to users, and because it has so many customers, the revenue vastly exceeds the cost of paying thousands of programmers. They have a swanky corporate headquarters with all the free soda you can chug, and many many 6-figure jobs.
It's failed miserably at EVERYTHING ELSE IT HAS TRIED. As far as I know, it has not made ONE DOLLAR OF NET PROFIT ON ANYTHING ELSE.
It's wasted billions of dollars trying to compete as an online portal and as a search engine. A company crammed to the brim with top CS grads and extremely good custom software SPECIALIZES in search and basically nothing else. Expecting to ever beat them and make more money is a fool's errand.
It's wasted more billions, with little or NO net profits on gaming consoles. (MAYBE it's finally breaking even on that, but I doubt it)
And 50 other assorted ventures that never made a dime that we don't hear about.
Software is STILL a good idea. How about the executives pay dividends and focus on doing their core business WELL.
Uhh, it kind of looks like it is heading rapidly in that direction NOW.
You do realize that regardless of equal "opportunity", people with the genetics to be more intelligent DO have a significant advantage TODAY. Sad truth is that studying doesn't influence standardized test scores as much as you might think : there is a huge IQ component. The reason why Asian males make the highest incomes on average is because they are smarter. (no, I am not an asian male and I don't resent their success per say)
We DO live in a police state, especially in some areas.
No, you don't eat noodles off the street if you are poor...but life isn't going to be easy.
Do you think Nike tries to benefit the host country when it opens up a Malaysian sweatshop? Or Dell? Or any other U.S. company that outsources operations overseas to save on costs?
The answer is no. Every decision made by these firms is to benefit the upper management and the stockholders. (priorities generally in that order). If the host country benefits overall, that is a coincidence from the perspective of the corporation.
China is doing exactly what they should in regards to this. If our corporations give away our technology it's not the fault of China.
To be honest, Hans and Nina got a pretty good deal until some spousal argument ended in murder. (which happens all the time with couples in the U.S. in any case. Probably was not statistically more likely to happen because it was an overseas marriage)
They were married for 10 years. Nina was a doctor, and eventually got a U.S. license. She gave him 2 kids and probably lots and lots and lots of sex. She was beautiful until the day she died (rather than blowing up like a balloon like many spouses do) He got to stay a software nerd rather than forcing himself to be someone else. Had it not ended like it did, it would have been overall a good relationship that ended like most do.
Even the criminal trial was fair : the judge told Hans that he believed that this kind of thing could happen in an outburst of anger, and offered him about 4 years in jail if he admitted to the crime. Had Hans come clean about it he would be released soon and would get a second chance.
That doesn't really counter my argument. In the U.S. today there's 1000 of those "suckers only" mail order get-rich schemes. Odds are, at least some of them actually will get you rich if you get in early (if it's a pyramid scheme/multi-level marketing) and get very lucky. They're not all scams (just 990/1000 of them)
Point is, if you cheat at the game of getting rich AND get very lucky you just might be one of the handful of success stories.
But that's the same argument with the book you reference (which I do have a copy of). If you're an 'average' man of average height and build and you try to act like an alpha male...you might get lucky. Then again, you might get lucky sitting in your apartment and smoking pot (I knew a guy with a beautiful girlfriend who did that).
Doesn't change the hard reality that the game is heavily, heavily weighted against you.
Go somewhere else where the odds aren't stacked against you quite so heavily, and you might do better with less effort. In "the game" they admit you'll often have to try hundreds of times before you get a hit. Stories I've read say that people who go date in Eastern Europe go straight to meeting the girls and frequently get laid if nothing else.
Absolutely. Capitalism has one huge advantage : it distributes the decision making between all the actors. Theoretically, the collective actions of millions of people composing the "market" control what is rewarded or punished and thus control the economy.
Disadvantages are also huge. Millions of people can be systematically lied to, tricked, and fooled. People in general are short sighted by nature, so you have an inherent advantage in selling them things that give immediate returns at the cost of future losses. (such as companies selling stock...the ones who shout about this quarter's incredible profits (at the expense of paying the maintenance on the firm's equipment...like BP does)
The governmental machinery can be manipulated by the richest corporations into creating an environment that favors them at the expense of everyone else. If someone cheats the system or gets lucky they can accumulate colossal fortunes that appear to dwarf the amount of money they could ever conceivably earn through their own labor.
The best system would be one that uses government to make wise decisions, such as taxing pollution, massive spending on infrastructure and R&D, and taxing the extremely wealthy. Also the government would break up obvious monopolies such as trade guilds of "physician training schools" who artificially limit supply. And it would not allow monopolies such as "banks" to have inordinate power over the economy.
But the followers of Ayn Rand and half the population don't believe this. They literally believe that pure unregulated capitalism, where the strong can stack the deck against the week, is the right way to go.
The sad thing, the majority of Republicans aren't rich. They NEVER WILL BE. They vote to defend the possibility of attaining a status that 99.9% of them will never reach.
One observation : this is all very well and good, but China is growing insanely rapidly...at catch-up. It's hurtling through the phases of industrial developement...but it's also decades behind the west overall. Once China's industry and economy is overall to par with the west...will they be able to keep making such rapid progress? Copying technology is one thing...doing the original engineering to advance the tech to the next phase is something else.
I don't actually know the answer to this. I know that China does do some original engineering, and theoretically with the world's largest population, they could do a lot more if they had enough trained and educated people.
From the perspective of an average man in the United States : there are a number of factors working against the average man in the U.S. today in terms of dating.
1. The obesity epidemic. This removes millions of women who have the genetics to be desirable, but are instead obese.
2. High incomes of most American workers, and relative egalitarianism. Unlike say, 1950, many women don't need men for money. They are no longer remotely impressed by men making incomes in the bottom 99%.
3. Aging of the populance. All men, from age 13 to age 90, want women in the same age range. Women are fertile and make good mothers between ages 15 and 35. That's 17 years of (legal) breeding ability. Yet, out of the millions of men in the United States, every last one of them prefers women in this age range.
And other factors. Sexual harassment laws mean that men who ask anyone at work for a date risk their careers. The laws in general have gone from being biased towards men (prehistory-1980) towards heavily biased in favor of women.
This is why a lot of men in the U.S. would be best served dating oversees. If you're in the top 10-20% of income in the U.S., but not the top 1%, and you have average looks...you're a dud by the standards of the handful of attractive available non-obese women in the United States. You're royalty with that kind of money and prospects by equally attractive women in say, Ukraine.
The health care system in the USA gets a larger share of the richest economy in the world than any other health system anywhere. If the problem is lack of money, I must ask...where is the money going, then?
Got $2000? Then you can buy yourself a terrabyte of non-volatile, flash drives and the high speed controller chips to make them work. Not pocket change, but I bet you can afford it if you sacrificed elsewhere.
The car thing is physically doable, but thanks to another parasite on society (lawyers/the U.S. legal system) it's unfeasible. (because even if fully automated cars were 10 times safer, plaintiff lawyers would sue the pants off the company that made the cars every time someone DID die)
The phone thing...very doable, using several methods. Just turn the cell phone off when you get to the house (or use an app running on the phone to do this automatically) and forward your calls to a VoIP box in the house.
Remote desktop lets you control a computer remotely for years. It's not anything new.
And the final comment : that is impractical due to software architecture constraints. And it makes for a more reliable phone if the phone can keep functioning the moment it loses link to the computer, because the computer crashed or whatnot. But, come to think of it, it IS possible.
ALL of those problems that you speak of are almost exclusive to the United States.
China won't have energy problems : they have the guts (and the money to pay for) thousands of small nuclear generators, engineered to be fundamentally safe. China has our money, and their banking system isn't leveraged by credit default swaps.
Europe has similar protection against these problems : they don't depend so utterly on cheap light crude oil to run their cars.
Nuclear energy is cheap, if you use fundamentally good reactor designs and you don't bury the plant operators in red tape.
And we are a matter of a few years away from having solar energy so cheap to be better than coal. Photovoltaic cells have consistently declined in price, decade after decade, and are only a couple times more expensive than coal today. About 10 separate companies are producing cells using new processes that are substantially cheaper than conventional silicon. Yes, there's a way to store the power : compressed air in caverns is cheaper than any battery technology ever invented.
Oh, and the United States has colossal reservoirs of coal.-centuries worth. Coal energy is cheaper than oil. It's horrible for the environment, but if we were desperate, we could burn it and power everything. It's easy to make natural gas from coal, and with more complex chemistry you can make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and the rest.
Yeah, that would explain quite a bit, actually. The X chromosome is huge. If it has genes on it influencing intelligence, then with no averaging you would end up with people that are either very smart or very stupid.
Between 70 and 200 genes (depending on the study) on the Y chromosome. Versus about 23,000 genes in the full codebase (plus some spacers and other bits of junk that influence gene expression)
The OP speculated that the reason some men have very high IQ is solely due to influence of that Y chromosome. I'm saying this is unlikely to be the reason : the Y chromosome's codebase is too small, and most of the genes there are critical, and don't have many versions out there.
You are correct, though : just one gene could make a huge difference. However, for various reasons related to the very trait we are talking about (intelligence), I don't think the reason men sometimes have higher intelligence is due to this chromosome alone.
There aren't very many genes on the Y chromosome, so that part of your theory is not correct.
View it from another perspective : evolutionary psychology. Generation after generation, in the natural environment, 80% of women succeed in reproducing but only 40% of men. Thus, men have to take risks for a greater chance at being among the 40%. (the giant difference is due to men dying before reproducing doing risky activities, and from competition from other men. Genetic evidence is that polygamy (a few dominant men taking all the women in a tribe) is the natural state of affairs)
The actual way this risk taking is implemented in the genetic code is more complex : hormones and protein factors from the Y chromosome are obviously activating genetic code stored on the other chromosomes resulting in both risk taking by the nervous system and riskier choices by the body.
Correct. And such companies have a competitive advantage, because they can make it LOOK like their rates are lower, were it not for the hidden fees. More people sign up, and get shafted. And the early termination fee means you can't switch. And the company bribes the regulators into looking the other way...
Just like grifters at the county fair offering 'fair' odds for a gambling game are part of the "free" market.
Slashdot Mirror
The logical thing to do would be for the government to create special low paying jobs for the unemployed. If you're going to spend money anyway, on welfare, food stamps, and medicaid, you might as well get something for it. Make the unemployed work for their benefits.
There isn't? Ever heard of the Shannon limit? As a matter of fact, there ARE inherent bandwidth limits to the electromagnetic spectrum using a particular signalling technology. (and advancing the technology requires R&D funding and upgrading all of the equipment)
Internet is a completely different case. For the most part, a coaxial cable or a fiber optic cable is a private fully contained space within a certain frequency range. Every subscriber or small group of subscribers is basically getting a private reserved channel just for them.
Actually studies of primitive tribes and/or of primates reveal that rape isn't the majority of the matings. The reason is that primates, like humans, live in tribes. It is thought that a typical human tribe's natural size is on the order of 100 individuals. In such a tribe, there are consequences for rape. In those times, there was no privacy, so it would be obvious if a rape happened and the male family members of the woman might potentially take action.
These ideas come from a field of science known as evolutionary psychology, and are based on field research and mathematical modeling. (evolutionary psychology is a hard science based on facts and testable hypotheses not a soft science like normal psychology)
More practically : if the FBI prosecutes you, you get charged with wire fraud. It basically doesn't matter what the crime was, the statute is so broad it can apply to nearly anything. Also, the FBI wins trials over 90% of the time...doesn't matter if you are innocent or not...if the FBI comes for you you are going to the Gulag.
In the animal kingdom, in primates, and in primitive tribes this is still true. Note I said "usually".
Because the man doesn't usually control when a sexual encounter happens, the woman does. Make up sex is when the woman is either trying to induce you to stay in the relationship or is turned on because of how you responded to the argument.
Problems :
Using rail does not remove the problems you would have with the obvious alternate way : trailers. You basically have all of the disadvantages of using mobile trailers stacked with ADDITIONAL problems from width limits on a rail line. I'm not even going to go into the problems associated with mobile homes/trailers, other than to say that every single one I have ever been in sucked.
And another additional problem : you can tow mobile homes and trailers over gravel and dirt roads that are dirt cheap to build and maintain (pun intended)
Rail is VERY expensive : about $1 million/mile. Totally economically unfeasible to build the additional rail segments this plan would need to work, as well as to bring the old abandoned track up to code that this architect has in mind to use.
Man oh man, mixing almost any 2 of those items would go badly.
DIY Railguns + Naval base = uh oh ... ... ... ... ...(pornography is usually banned if you're a sailor) ... ...
gas heater + homemade C-4 =
C-4 + drugs =
anthrax + opiates =
Railguns + C4 =
porn + Naval base =
anthrax + porn magazine =
radiant gas heater + porn =
porn + opiates = GOOD TIMES!!!!
Only a few combos are a good thing...
The consistently highest paying jobs are for doctors and lawyers from a top 14 law school. You cannot get either unless you do extremely well on exams.
From a Microsoft stock holder : NO. NO, NO, NO.
Microsoft does ONE thing well : it hires thousands of competent programmers and it makes usable software. There are many critics but the stuff isn't all bad and they do try to improve it. It SELLS the software to users, and because it has so many customers, the revenue vastly exceeds the cost of paying thousands of programmers. They have a swanky corporate headquarters with all the free soda you can chug, and many many 6-figure jobs.
It's failed miserably at EVERYTHING ELSE IT HAS TRIED. As far as I know, it has not made ONE DOLLAR OF NET PROFIT ON ANYTHING ELSE.
It's wasted billions of dollars trying to compete as an online portal and as a search engine. A company crammed to the brim with top CS grads and extremely good custom software SPECIALIZES in search and basically nothing else. Expecting to ever beat them and make more money is a fool's errand.
It's wasted more billions, with little or NO net profits on gaming consoles. (MAYBE it's finally breaking even on that, but I doubt it)
And 50 other assorted ventures that never made a dime that we don't hear about.
Software is STILL a good idea. How about the executives pay dividends and focus on doing their core business WELL.
Uhh, it kind of looks like it is heading rapidly in that direction NOW.
You do realize that regardless of equal "opportunity", people with the genetics to be more intelligent DO have a significant advantage TODAY. Sad truth is that studying doesn't influence standardized test scores as much as you might think : there is a huge IQ component. The reason why Asian males make the highest incomes on average is because they are smarter. (no, I am not an asian male and I don't resent their success per say)
We DO live in a police state, especially in some areas.
No, you don't eat noodles off the street if you are poor...but life isn't going to be easy.
Do you think Nike tries to benefit the host country when it opens up a Malaysian sweatshop? Or Dell? Or any other U.S. company that outsources operations overseas to save on costs?
The answer is no. Every decision made by these firms is to benefit the upper management and the stockholders. (priorities generally in that order). If the host country benefits overall, that is a coincidence from the perspective of the corporation.
China is doing exactly what they should in regards to this. If our corporations give away our technology it's not the fault of China.
To be honest, Hans and Nina got a pretty good deal until some spousal argument ended in murder. (which happens all the time with couples in the U.S. in any case. Probably was not statistically more likely to happen because it was an overseas marriage)
They were married for 10 years. Nina was a doctor, and eventually got a U.S. license. She gave him 2 kids and probably lots and lots and lots of sex. She was beautiful until the day she died (rather than blowing up like a balloon like many spouses do) He got to stay a software nerd rather than forcing himself to be someone else. Had it not ended like it did, it would have been overall a good relationship that ended like most do.
Even the criminal trial was fair : the judge told Hans that he believed that this kind of thing could happen in an outburst of anger, and offered him about 4 years in jail if he admitted to the crime. Had Hans come clean about it he would be released soon and would get a second chance.
That doesn't really counter my argument. In the U.S. today there's 1000 of those "suckers only" mail order get-rich schemes. Odds are, at least some of them actually will get you rich if you get in early (if it's a pyramid scheme/multi-level marketing) and get very lucky. They're not all scams (just 990/1000 of them)
Point is, if you cheat at the game of getting rich AND get very lucky you just might be one of the handful of success stories.
But that's the same argument with the book you reference (which I do have a copy of). If you're an 'average' man of average height and build and you try to act like an alpha male...you might get lucky. Then again, you might get lucky sitting in your apartment and smoking pot (I knew a guy with a beautiful girlfriend who did that).
Doesn't change the hard reality that the game is heavily, heavily weighted against you.
Go somewhere else where the odds aren't stacked against you quite so heavily, and you might do better with less effort. In "the game" they admit you'll often have to try hundreds of times before you get a hit. Stories I've read say that people who go date in Eastern Europe go straight to meeting the girls and frequently get laid if nothing else.
Absolutely. Capitalism has one huge advantage : it distributes the decision making between all the actors. Theoretically, the collective actions of millions of people composing the "market" control what is rewarded or punished and thus control the economy.
Disadvantages are also huge. Millions of people can be systematically lied to, tricked, and fooled. People in general are short sighted by nature, so you have an inherent advantage in selling them things that give immediate returns at the cost of future losses. (such as companies selling stock...the ones who shout about this quarter's incredible profits (at the expense of paying the maintenance on the firm's equipment...like BP does)
The governmental machinery can be manipulated by the richest corporations into creating an environment that favors them at the expense of everyone else. If someone cheats the system or gets lucky they can accumulate colossal fortunes that appear to dwarf the amount of money they could ever conceivably earn through their own labor.
The best system would be one that uses government to make wise decisions, such as taxing pollution, massive spending on infrastructure and R&D, and taxing the extremely wealthy. Also the government would break up obvious monopolies such as trade guilds of "physician training schools" who artificially limit supply. And it would not allow monopolies such as "banks" to have inordinate power over the economy.
But the followers of Ayn Rand and half the population don't believe this. They literally believe that pure unregulated capitalism, where the strong can stack the deck against the week, is the right way to go.
The sad thing, the majority of Republicans aren't rich. They NEVER WILL BE. They vote to defend the possibility of attaining a status that 99.9% of them will never reach.
One observation : this is all very well and good, but China is growing insanely rapidly...at catch-up. It's hurtling through the phases of industrial developement...but it's also decades behind the west overall. Once China's industry and economy is overall to par with the west...will they be able to keep making such rapid progress? Copying technology is one thing...doing the original engineering to advance the tech to the next phase is something else.
I don't actually know the answer to this. I know that China does do some original engineering, and theoretically with the world's largest population, they could do a lot more if they had enough trained and educated people.
From the perspective of an average man in the United States : there are a number of factors working against the average man in the U.S. today in terms of dating.
1. The obesity epidemic. This removes millions of women who have the genetics to be desirable, but are instead obese.
2. High incomes of most American workers, and relative egalitarianism. Unlike say, 1950, many women don't need men for money. They are no longer remotely impressed by men making incomes in the bottom 99%.
3. Aging of the populance. All men, from age 13 to age 90, want women in the same age range. Women are fertile and make good mothers between ages 15 and 35. That's 17 years of (legal) breeding ability. Yet, out of the millions of men in the United States, every last one of them prefers women in this age range.
And other factors. Sexual harassment laws mean that men who ask anyone at work for a date risk their careers. The laws in general have gone from being biased towards men (prehistory-1980) towards heavily biased in favor of women.
This is why a lot of men in the U.S. would be best served dating oversees. If you're in the top 10-20% of income in the U.S., but not the top 1%, and you have average looks...you're a dud by the standards of the handful of attractive available non-obese women in the United States. You're royalty with that kind of money and prospects by equally attractive women in say, Ukraine.
The health care system in the USA gets a larger share of the richest economy in the world than any other health system anywhere. If the problem is lack of money, I must ask...where is the money going, then?
Got $2000? Then you can buy yourself a terrabyte of non-volatile, flash drives and the high speed controller chips to make them work.
Not pocket change, but I bet you can afford it if you sacrificed elsewhere.
The car thing is physically doable, but thanks to another parasite on society (lawyers/the U.S. legal system) it's unfeasible. (because even if fully automated cars were 10 times safer, plaintiff lawyers would sue the pants off the company that made the cars every time someone DID die)
The phone thing...very doable, using several methods. Just turn the cell phone off when you get to the house (or use an app running on the phone to do this automatically) and forward your calls to a VoIP box in the house.
Remote desktop lets you control a computer remotely for years. It's not anything new.
And the final comment : that is impractical due to software architecture constraints. And it makes for a more reliable phone if the phone can keep functioning the moment it loses link to the computer, because the computer crashed or whatnot. But, come to think of it, it IS possible.
ALL of those problems that you speak of are almost exclusive to the United States.
China won't have energy problems : they have the guts (and the money to pay for) thousands of small nuclear generators, engineered to be fundamentally safe. China has our money, and their banking system isn't leveraged by credit default swaps.
Europe has similar protection against these problems : they don't depend so utterly on cheap light crude oil to run their cars.
Nuclear energy is cheap, if you use fundamentally good reactor designs and you don't bury the plant operators in red tape.
And we are a matter of a few years away from having solar energy so cheap to be better than coal. Photovoltaic cells have consistently declined in price, decade after decade, and are only a couple times more expensive than coal today. About 10 separate companies are producing cells using new processes that are substantially cheaper than conventional silicon. Yes, there's a way to store the power : compressed air in caverns is cheaper than any battery technology ever invented.
Oh, and the United States has colossal reservoirs of coal.-centuries worth. Coal energy is cheaper than oil. It's horrible for the environment, but if we were desperate, we could burn it and power everything. It's easy to make natural gas from coal, and with more complex chemistry you can make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and the rest.
Yeah, that would explain quite a bit, actually. The X chromosome is huge. If it has genes on it influencing intelligence, then with no averaging you would end up with people that are either very smart or very stupid.
Between 70 and 200 genes (depending on the study) on the Y chromosome. Versus about 23,000 genes in the full codebase (plus some spacers and other bits of junk that influence gene expression)
The OP speculated that the reason some men have very high IQ is solely due to influence of that Y chromosome. I'm saying this is unlikely to be the reason : the Y chromosome's codebase is too small, and most of the genes there are critical, and don't have many versions out there.
You are correct, though : just one gene could make a huge difference. However, for various reasons related to the very trait we are talking about (intelligence), I don't think the reason men sometimes have higher intelligence is due to this chromosome alone.
There aren't very many genes on the Y chromosome, so that part of your theory is not correct.
View it from another perspective : evolutionary psychology. Generation after generation, in the natural environment, 80% of women succeed in reproducing but only 40% of men. Thus, men have to take risks for a greater chance at being among the 40%. (the giant difference is due to men dying before reproducing doing risky activities, and from competition from other men. Genetic evidence is that polygamy (a few dominant men taking all the women in a tribe) is the natural state of affairs)
The actual way this risk taking is implemented in the genetic code is more complex : hormones and protein factors from the Y chromosome are obviously activating genetic code stored on the other chromosomes resulting in both risk taking by the nervous system and riskier choices by the body.
Hydro is inherently cheap. Anyone could run a hydro plant, make electricity cheaply, and sell it for low rates at a profit.
Hydro is also inherently limited : we've tapped all of the rivers that the environmentalists will ever let us tap.
Correct. And such companies have a competitive advantage, because they can make it LOOK like their rates are lower, were it not for the hidden fees. More people sign up, and get shafted. And the early termination fee means you can't switch. And the company bribes the regulators into looking the other way...
Just like grifters at the county fair offering 'fair' odds for a gambling game are part of the "free" market.