I'm not saying there's inherently anything wrong with doing something new. The OP referred to "ladder climbing" though, which sounds more like a viewpoint on the job world than it is doing what's needed for the project.
I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer.
It sounds like you haven't really enjoyed much of anything you're doing. Why else would you change positions so often? Seven years is a pretty short time to have 4 different jobs in vastly different areas. Why do you want to be a manager, and why do you think you'd be any good at it? If your answer is "to make more money/be more accomplished", you've chosen the wrong path.
I'd say the first step in getting a management job is to show that you can do a job for more than 2 years without more "ladder" climbing.
It sounds like you're using email when you should be using another, or several different technologies.
Look into putting up an IM server, a wiki, blogs, online discussion groups, etc. Email is poorly suited to the kind of long-running threads you're talking about. One size does NOT fit all.
So Microsoft has basically admitted that Vista is a flop, market wise. So what do they do? Announce a successor Real Soon Now.
They know they can't possibly get anything worth a damn out that quickly.. but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stave anyone figuring they might as well think about switching to Linux or OSX, cuz "Microsoft is going to fix Windows Real Soon Now".
In reality the product will actually be released in the middle of 2010. It may be good, it may be another bomb. How long can Microsoft keep up the "But the next one is going to be just GRRREEAAAT!"? Stay tuned...
Sometimes, they'll quip, "Well, how do they know who the terrorists are if they don't read all of the emails..." To which I reply, "If a terrorist is so dumb so as to discuss their plans over the phone or email, how much damage could they do?" I'll remind them of Richard Reid, who was so dumb he didn't know plastic explosives couldn't be detonated with matches.
This is just a poor argument. Criminals do this all the time. They might not be dumb, they just don't think anyone is listening. Why do you think wiretaps exist in the first place? They wouldn't exist if they didn't work. People are people, be they criminals or terrorists.
That's not to say I approve of the "wide net" approach the Bush Administration has advocated. Far from it. My enormous problem with the approach is that it's warrantless. We need oversite of the goverment by other parts of the government. No oversite leads to abuse of power. Our founding fathers understood this very well, and that's why they setup our system as adversarial. I think your first question falls under this argument well, but your latter question falls apart.
I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.
I'd say that's because the CLI tools on windows aren't very good.
If I want to copy a file from one computer to another, it's a million times easier to use scp than it is to open up a GUI tool, drag the files around, etc. Same thing for changing file ownership of an entire directory.
Creating a user on the other hand is a lot easier using a GUI. I don't want to have to remember obscure, seldom used commands to assign the right groups, etc.
The mistake people seem to make is that it's an either/or choice. Shell or GUI? No, shell AND GUI.
What do you think, that because some machine created a carbon copy of you you'll be somehow magically linked to it?
I guess you're getting to that whole, unobservable, "soul" thing. You're obviously a believer in that. In quantum mechanics, and science in general there's no soul, or some kind of magical "you" linked to your body.
The only reason people don't sound so callous when they discuss war or economic policy is because they're tuned to the same wavelength as the others around them. They know what kinds of real things seem real and what kinds of real things seem unreal to the people they're talking to, hardly the kind of nuance you'd expect a mind like Bobby Fischer's to grasp.
Huh. That's probably the most insightful thing I've read in months.
That and a few other choice comments attributed to him make me want to say, good riddance.
He was certainly a huge dick, and a bigot to boot. But AFAIK all he ever did was rant and talk. Not exactly someone you wish dead. In a word, "Mostly Harmless".
I have to say, the world is a slightly less interesting place with Bobby Fischer not in it.
There's some technologies that everyone wants, and there's a solution that'll fit 90% of the populace.
Examples would be hosted email, contact management, and calendaring. A central provider can just simply do a better job at providing all these things that an IT department does, and the requirements are all extremely generic. Users seem to want infinite amounts of email storage, and the ability to find an email at a moments notice. That's difficult to manage unless you want to dedicate someone to JUST knowing the email systems.
The thing I disagree with is that the IT department is going away. Simply not true. The difference with other utilities is that the IT department doesn't provide a single, simple resource like electricity. IT provides automation and tools that increase productivity, many of which are going to be way to specialized to centralize.
IT departments may evolve, like they've been evolving for the last 50 years. I've heard many years ago (before my time at least) there were people dedicated just to swap tapes around. We don't have that anymore of course.
People look to the well-known figures in a group, and extrapolate to the entire group. It might be wrong, you might not like it, but it's true.
I guess I don't understand your point. People are ignorant? That's really nothing new, and doesn't add much to the discussion. it seems to me that militant atheism (and for that matter, young earth creationism and related hogwash) is a fairly modern phenomenon.
There's one guy who's gotten a lot of press lately. The press likes to cover anything that can attract eyeballs, so do publishers. Your implication is this is some kind of national movement. I guess I haven't seen this myself. One guy on TV isn't a movement. If this is the first time you've heard someone call atheism a religion, you must have had your head in the sand for the past decade or so.
Not really. I just don't sit around and waste my time listening to conservative christians though. They tend to poison the mind with dumb ideas that atheism is a religion, or Richard Dawkins represents some kind of movement. and attempt to convert others to that view (evangelize), and label as an idiot anyone who disagrees (condemn). In that case, the analogy to religion isn't totally off the wall.
That just sounds like plain old politics to me. Who hasn't tried to convince someone else of a political belief? Is advocating a political belief now a religion because you're trying to "convert" others to your belief? It sounds like you're trying to tell me atheists are fine, just as long as they stay nice and quiet and don't challenge anyones beliefs.
Two different things sharing a few of the same properties doesn't make them the same, or even related. An orange and a school bus are both orange.. but they aren't the same thing.
Has anybody else noticed that Catholicism is quickly becoming the more "accepting/open-minded" branch of Christianity, especially compared to "mainstream Christianity" in the US?
Nope, I haven't noticed that. Maybe you're getting your views of Christianity from the news media a bit too much? There's more to Christianity than Catholicism, and Fundamentalism.
The reason you might have that belief is because the fundamentalists are.. loud. Very loud. They like to scream about this and that, and they get in the news for doing douche bag things like protesting funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, or their ministers getting caught doing meth with gay prostitutes.
The public perception in many places is that Richard Dawkins is a spokesperson for scientists (with a position like Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, perhaps the perception is warranted).
Huh? Saying some is a "spokesperson for scientists" is like saying Linus Torvalds is a "spokesperson for software developers". It's just incredibly inaccurate. Frankly I don't really care if peoples perception is "warranted". I'm sure lots of evil crap that goes down in the world is "warranted". What I care about is if right or wrong, and clearly it's wrong. When such a well-known public figure rags on religion as much as he does, it's no wonder that religious people feel threatened by science.
Religious people feel threatened by science because many of them have built a religion on the gaps of knowledge. As those gaps are filled in, it threatens their belief structure. Rather than modify their belief structure, they choose to challenge science itself. Dawkins has really little to do with it. It's not like this whole science/religion schism just developed in the last several years. In a very real sense, Dawkins does evangelize for atheism. This is one reason why people have started calling it a "religion."
Who are all these people? You? This is honestly the first time I've ever heard someone try to call atheism.. the lack of belief in a deity.. a religion. It's just amazing to me that anyone takes this kind of thing seriously.
Many scientists are pushing atheism as the new religion and they seem to want to force everyone to accept it.
Can you give me a list of these "many scientists"? The only one I've heard of in the last 30 years is Richard Dawkins, and while he has gotten a lot of press coverage in the last couple years, I still don't think that makes him plural.
For those of you that don't know, The National Review is a conservative magazine that publishes political opinion pieces. It's not exactly a scholarly journal of well researched historical fact.
... Its not like a rational scientist or tolerant liberal would shout down someone they disagree with
Where did you hear about someone being shouted down? I didn't read that anywhere.
The article is pretty sucky in terms of what actually happened. But it's pretty clear there was no shouting down going on. It makes a nice strawman argument though.
It's funny you mention C64 software. That was from the last time copy prevention was tried and failed miserably.
Yah, that's exactly why I brought it up. We've already been down this path in the software industry 20 years ago. Mostly because the data sizes are so much smaller, and copying is of course an inherent process to computers. It's not to hard to take the experiences of 20 years ago and put them on the current DRM strategy of the music and DVD industries. Of course modems and BBSes only multiplied this process and created an international distribution system.
The only real difference is that the distribution mechanisms of music and movies used to be limited by physical person-person exchange. You could of course copy a CD, copy a tape, etc. The quality was still pretty damn good (the music industry likes to put out FUD that it's bad.. but that's just propaganda). It was a lot harder to distribute the music though. You had to have a friend who had a copy, and nationwide distribution was much smaller (I'd bet limited to special niches like The Greatfull Dead).
I guess I'd say that I can choose to avoid trans-fats etc, but I may well be unable to avoid cloned derived products, or certainly not with any ease or certainty. This makes my ability to avoid potential damage a lot harder.
Choice choice choice. Why is it always about individual choice, as if that's the ultimate value? I'm concerned about public health.
The scientific data says there's no difference between cloned animals and non-cloned animals. The whole debate is starting to border on religious beliefs. There's some people that think non-organic food is "bad". Does that mean we should require labels for all food that's not organic? Some people don't want to eat pork for religious reasons (some may even claim "scientific" reasons). Does that mean we should require labels on anything that contains any pork, or may have come into contact with pork? (yes we already have ingredient labels, that's not what I'm talking about).
Required labeling should be based on scientific data, not individual beliefs about what you consider scary or not scary. A few years ago we found out quite definitely that trans-fat was dangerous to a lot of peoples health (it raises LDL "bad" cholesterol and lowers HDL, "good" cholesterol. There's now a requirement to disclose how much trans-fat is in food.
While we may think odd damage to DNA won't cause any problems, I don't believe we know with any certainty it won't.
The thing is, we don't really know anything "for certain". Picking out cloning out of the things we don't know for certain is simply dishonest, and misleading.
I say go ahead, do GM foods, cloning etc. Just make the producers put up a 10 trillion dollar bond. If the risks are SO well quantified, and that no risk exists, the cost of than 10 trillion bond should be very very small.
Court cases aren't decided upon scientific evidence, by scientists in a given field. They're decided by jurors in courtrooms. That's probably a good thing, but it makes your argument moot. The risk (and thus the cost) would be based on the chance of loosing a court case, and thus lawyers ability to convince 12 random people.
A plant clipping will naturally re-grow, you don't really need to do much with it,
I'm not really sure what "natural" means. It seems to have something to do with not being influenced or created by people. If that's the case, NONE of the food you eat on a daily basis is "natural", even the super-earth-friendly organic stuff, even something grown in your own garden. Basically all our food has been engineered by us for thousands of years, since agriculture began. However, my limited understanding is that we introduce degradation and errors when we replilcate DNA of mammals
All re-production introduces errors. What of it? We simply haven't cloned enough animals, over enough generations to have any factual data that the original genes aren't getting slightly borked by the technology
They might be. The thing is we're talking about EATING the animal, not worrying about if it'll get cancer earlier. Simply cooking your food introduces WAY more different chemicals into it than cloning ever could. I don't hear anyone sane suggesting we should stop cooking food (there are a few insane people that claim this of course) IMO, the FDA has said something is safe which they can't possibly know.
So we don't have the technology to look at the meat of one animal and see if there's anything wrong with it? We do. We can't look at the DNA of the animal and compare it? We can. What exactly is the big unknown lurking in the background? Is it fear of the unknown? Possibly.
More like fear of fear. People are so paranoid about food today. There's some legitimate concerns about cloning. They're really about all the deformed or aborted animals produced to produce one healthy clone. It has nothing to do with the safety of the meat. By the time you fuck with your food supply and find out that it wasn't safe, you're screwed.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. We already KNOW there's a TON of shit already in the food supply that's NOT SAFE. It's not pesticides, preservatives, or any of that crap, it's simply too much saturated fat, and trans-fat, and for some people, salt. We've know these things cause deaths for more than 30 years.. and yet people get all concerned about freaking cloned animals or "GMO" foods. Shit, I'd bet the saturated fat in a mad-cow infested cow causes more deaths than the infectious agent in it. (There was a LOT of mad-cow infected cows in Britain consumed in the 80s, and only a handful of people ever got sick).
I've recently been recovering data from some 20+ year old Commodore 64/128 disks (mostly interested in old papers). They were written using the word processors of the time, and can't really be recovered without them. I still have the old disks, and for the most part the data is still fully readable. I legally purchased the word processor many years ago, and still have the disks. My methodology was to recover the data to a modern PC running linux to an image file, and then run the word processor off an image file using an emulator.
Of course, I was thwarted by the copy protection on the disks. I couldn't get a proper image of them because of it. I wound up having to find a cracked copy of the word processor on some website (which took me all of 20 minutes to find using Google), and can recover my old papers perfectly.
It's very amusing to me that the CRACKED version of the software is actually more valuable to me than the non-cracked version. Re-buying the software (even if it was available) is useless to me, as I can't run it on an emulator, and thus transfer the data to somewhere useful.
This may seem like a special case.. but I don't think so. Even 20+ years later I can STILL get the cracked, pirated version of the software. The software was cracked many years ago, so it didn't really prevent much of anyone from getting it if they wanted to. I suspect if I had used a proper C64 copy utility I'd have been able to copy the disk anyway. The only thing it prevented was ME, the guy who bought the software from using the product as intended.
I hear Soviet Russia was pretty safe too. Looking at my (and everyone elses) email makes me about a zillionth of a percent safer. It alsomakes me several times less free.
This is NOT zero sum. The magnitude of damage caused by this kind of stuff far outweighs any even theoretical increase in security.
The US Government was buying some quantity of helium at some unknown price and selling for some unknown amount of money.
Was it a significant percentage of the market? Unknown. Was it at a significant price increase? Unknown. Was the price it sold it at lower? higher? Unknown.
I'm more of a fan of basing arguments on facts, not not so hidden assumptions. I'm not an economist, but I have heard they like hard numbers to base market effects on, not made up numbers.
The only reason for that is the US used to pay $5/liter for it and sells it for $1/liter and no longer buys it. . (I made up those numbers - they're just illustrative but reflect the problem.)
Thanks for making up numbers that much of your argument hinges on. To make a real argument about the affect of the US government on Helium prices you'd have to get REAL numbers, not ones you just made up.
The biggest problem is that once helium has escaped into the atmosphere it is literally lost for *EVER*
I guess you missed the part where I mentioned the vast majority of helium is already being released into the atmosphere when natural gas is separated from CO2. Party balloons are not the big problem here.
Try to get it into your head that we're NOT running out of helium. We're currently low on the ability to extract helium from natural gas. There's multiple ways to solve that problem.. but this isn't a standard environmental response of "we need to stop using so much of resource X, because we're running out of resource X". No, helium isn't renewable.. but that doesn't make it fit into the standard environmental line of thinking.
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I'm not saying there's inherently anything wrong with doing something new. The OP referred to "ladder climbing" though, which sounds more like a viewpoint on the job world than it is doing what's needed for the project.
I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer.
It sounds like you haven't really enjoyed much of anything you're doing. Why else would you change positions so often? Seven years is a pretty short time to have 4 different jobs in vastly different areas. Why do you want to be a manager, and why do you think you'd be any good at it? If your answer is "to make more money/be more accomplished", you've chosen the wrong path.
I'd say the first step in getting a management job is to show that you can do a job for more than 2 years without more "ladder" climbing.
It sounds like you're using email when you should be using another, or several different technologies.
Look into putting up an IM server, a wiki, blogs, online discussion groups, etc. Email is poorly suited to the kind of long-running threads you're talking about. One size does NOT fit all.
So Microsoft has basically admitted that Vista is a flop, market wise. So what do they do? Announce a successor Real Soon Now.
They know they can't possibly get anything worth a damn out that quickly.. but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stave anyone figuring they might as well think about switching to Linux or OSX, cuz "Microsoft is going to fix Windows Real Soon Now".
In reality the product will actually be released in the middle of 2010. It may be good, it may be another bomb. How long can Microsoft keep up the "But the next one is going to be just GRRREEAAAT!"? Stay tuned...
Sometimes, they'll quip, "Well, how do they know who the terrorists are if they don't read all of the emails..." To which I reply, "If a terrorist is so dumb so as to discuss their plans over the phone or email, how much damage could they do?" I'll remind them of Richard Reid, who was so dumb he didn't know plastic explosives couldn't be detonated with matches.
This is just a poor argument. Criminals do this all the time. They might not be dumb, they just don't think anyone is listening. Why do you think wiretaps exist in the first place? They wouldn't exist if they didn't work. People are people, be they criminals or terrorists.
That's not to say I approve of the "wide net" approach the Bush Administration has advocated. Far from it. My enormous problem with the approach is that it's warrantless. We need oversite of the goverment by other parts of the government. No oversite leads to abuse of power. Our founding fathers understood this very well, and that's why they setup our system as adversarial. I think your first question falls under this argument well, but your latter question falls apart.
I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.
I'd say that's because the CLI tools on windows aren't very good.
If I want to copy a file from one computer to another, it's a million times easier to use scp than it is to open up a GUI tool, drag the files around, etc. Same thing for changing file ownership of an entire directory.
Creating a user on the other hand is a lot easier using a GUI. I don't want to have to remember obscure, seldom used commands to assign the right groups, etc.
The mistake people seem to make is that it's an either/or choice. Shell or GUI? No, shell AND GUI.
What do you think, that because some machine created a carbon copy of you you'll be somehow magically linked to it?
I guess you're getting to that whole, unobservable, "soul" thing. You're obviously a believer in that. In quantum mechanics, and science in general there's no soul, or some kind of magical "you" linked to your body.
The only reason people don't sound so callous when they discuss war or economic policy is because they're tuned to the same wavelength as the others around them. They know what kinds of real things seem real and what kinds of real things seem unreal to the people they're talking to, hardly the kind of nuance you'd expect a mind like Bobby Fischer's to grasp.
Huh. That's probably the most insightful thing I've read in months.
That and a few other choice comments attributed to him make me want to say, good riddance.
He was certainly a huge dick, and a bigot to boot. But AFAIK all he ever did was rant and talk. Not exactly someone you wish dead. In a word, "Mostly Harmless".
I have to say, the world is a slightly less interesting place with Bobby Fischer not in it.
There's some technologies that everyone wants, and there's a solution that'll fit 90% of the populace.
Examples would be hosted email, contact management, and calendaring. A central provider can just simply do a better job at providing all these things that an IT department does, and the requirements are all extremely generic. Users seem to want infinite amounts of email storage, and the ability to find an email at a moments notice. That's difficult to manage unless you want to dedicate someone to JUST knowing the email systems.
The thing I disagree with is that the IT department is going away. Simply not true. The difference with other utilities is that the IT department doesn't provide a single, simple resource like electricity. IT provides automation and tools that increase productivity, many of which are going to be way to specialized to centralize.
IT departments may evolve, like they've been evolving for the last 50 years. I've heard many years ago (before my time at least) there were people dedicated just to swap tapes around. We don't have that anymore of course.
People look to the well-known figures in a group, and extrapolate to the entire group. It might be wrong, you might not like it, but it's true.
I guess I don't understand your point. People are ignorant? That's really nothing new, and doesn't add much to the discussion.
it seems to me that militant atheism (and for that matter, young earth creationism and related hogwash) is a fairly modern phenomenon.
There's one guy who's gotten a lot of press lately. The press likes to cover anything that can attract eyeballs, so do publishers. Your implication is this is some kind of national movement. I guess I haven't seen this myself. One guy on TV isn't a movement.
If this is the first time you've heard someone call atheism a religion, you must have had your head in the sand for the past decade or so.
Not really. I just don't sit around and waste my time listening to conservative christians though. They tend to poison the mind with dumb ideas that atheism is a religion, or Richard Dawkins represents some kind of movement.
and attempt to convert others to that view (evangelize), and label as an idiot anyone who disagrees (condemn). In that case, the analogy to religion isn't totally off the wall.
That just sounds like plain old politics to me. Who hasn't tried to convince someone else of a political belief? Is advocating a political belief now a religion because you're trying to "convert" others to your belief? It sounds like you're trying to tell me atheists are fine, just as long as they stay nice and quiet and don't challenge anyones beliefs.
Two different things sharing a few of the same properties doesn't make them the same, or even related. An orange and a school bus are both orange.. but they aren't the same thing.
Has anybody else noticed that Catholicism is quickly becoming the more "accepting/open-minded" branch of Christianity, especially compared to "mainstream Christianity" in the US?
Nope, I haven't noticed that. Maybe you're getting your views of Christianity from the news media a bit too much? There's more to Christianity than Catholicism, and Fundamentalism.
The reason you might have that belief is because the fundamentalists are.. loud. Very loud. They like to scream about this and that, and they get in the news for doing douche bag things like protesting funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, or their ministers getting caught doing meth with gay prostitutes.
The public perception in many places is that Richard Dawkins is a spokesperson for scientists (with a position like Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, perhaps the perception is warranted).
Huh? Saying some is a "spokesperson for scientists" is like saying Linus Torvalds is a "spokesperson for software developers". It's just incredibly inaccurate. Frankly I don't really care if peoples perception is "warranted". I'm sure lots of evil crap that goes down in the world is "warranted". What I care about is if right or wrong, and clearly it's wrong.
When such a well-known public figure rags on religion as much as he does, it's no wonder that religious people feel threatened by science.
Religious people feel threatened by science because many of them have built a religion on the gaps of knowledge. As those gaps are filled in, it threatens their belief structure. Rather than modify their belief structure, they choose to challenge science itself. Dawkins has really little to do with it. It's not like this whole science/religion schism just developed in the last several years.
In a very real sense, Dawkins does evangelize for atheism. This is one reason why people have started calling it a "religion."
Who are all these people? You? This is honestly the first time I've ever heard someone try to call atheism.. the lack of belief in a deity.. a religion. It's just amazing to me that anyone takes this kind of thing seriously.
Many scientists are pushing atheism as the new religion and they seem to want to force everyone to accept it.
Can you give me a list of these "many scientists"? The only one I've heard of in the last 30 years is Richard Dawkins, and while he has gotten a lot of press coverage in the last couple years, I still don't think that makes him plural.
For those of you that don't know, The National Review is a conservative magazine that publishes political opinion pieces. It's not exactly a scholarly journal of well researched historical fact.
Where did you hear about someone being shouted down? I didn't read that anywhere.
The article is pretty sucky in terms of what actually happened. But it's pretty clear there was no shouting down going on. It makes a nice strawman argument though.
It's funny you mention C64 software. That was from the last time copy prevention was tried and failed miserably.
Yah, that's exactly why I brought it up. We've already been down this path in the software industry 20 years ago. Mostly because the data sizes are so much smaller, and copying is of course an inherent process to computers. It's not to hard to take the experiences of 20 years ago and put them on the current DRM strategy of the music and DVD industries. Of course modems and BBSes only multiplied this process and created an international distribution system.
The only real difference is that the distribution mechanisms of music and movies used to be limited by physical person-person exchange. You could of course copy a CD, copy a tape, etc. The quality was still pretty damn good (the music industry likes to put out FUD that it's bad.. but that's just propaganda). It was a lot harder to distribute the music though. You had to have a friend who had a copy, and nationwide distribution was much smaller (I'd bet limited to special niches like The Greatfull Dead).
I guess I'd say that I can choose to avoid trans-fats etc, but I may well be unable to avoid cloned derived products, or certainly not with any ease or certainty. This makes my ability to avoid potential damage a lot harder.
Choice choice choice. Why is it always about individual choice, as if that's the ultimate value? I'm concerned about public health.
The scientific data says there's no difference between cloned animals and non-cloned animals. The whole debate is starting to border on religious beliefs. There's some people that think non-organic food is "bad". Does that mean we should require labels for all food that's not organic? Some people don't want to eat pork for religious reasons (some may even claim "scientific" reasons). Does that mean we should require labels on anything that contains any pork, or may have come into contact with pork? (yes we already have ingredient labels, that's not what I'm talking about).
Required labeling should be based on scientific data, not individual beliefs about what you consider scary or not scary. A few years ago we found out quite definitely that trans-fat was dangerous to a lot of peoples health (it raises LDL "bad" cholesterol and lowers HDL, "good" cholesterol. There's now a requirement to disclose how much trans-fat is in food.
While we may think odd damage to DNA won't cause any problems, I don't believe we know with any certainty it won't.
The thing is, we don't really know anything "for certain". Picking out cloning out of the things we don't know for certain is simply dishonest, and misleading.
I say go ahead, do GM foods, cloning etc. Just make the producers put up a 10 trillion dollar bond. If the risks are SO well quantified, and that no risk exists, the cost of than 10 trillion bond should be very very small.
Court cases aren't decided upon scientific evidence, by scientists in a given field. They're decided by jurors in courtrooms. That's probably a good thing, but it makes your argument moot. The risk (and thus the cost) would be based on the chance of loosing a court case, and thus lawyers ability to convince 12 random people.
A plant clipping will naturally re-grow, you don't really need to do much with it,
I'm not really sure what "natural" means. It seems to have something to do with not being influenced or created by people. If that's the case, NONE of the food you eat on a daily basis is "natural", even the super-earth-friendly organic stuff, even something grown in your own garden. Basically all our food has been engineered by us for thousands of years, since agriculture began.
However, my limited understanding is that we introduce degradation and errors when we replilcate DNA of mammals
All re-production introduces errors. What of it?
We simply haven't cloned enough animals, over enough generations to have any factual data that the original genes aren't getting slightly borked by the technology
They might be. The thing is we're talking about EATING the animal, not worrying about if it'll get cancer earlier. Simply cooking your food introduces WAY more different chemicals into it than cloning ever could. I don't hear anyone sane suggesting we should stop cooking food (there are a few insane people that claim this of course)
IMO, the FDA has said something is safe which they can't possibly know.
So we don't have the technology to look at the meat of one animal and see if there's anything wrong with it? We do. We can't look at the DNA of the animal and compare it? We can. What exactly is the big unknown lurking in the background?
Is it fear of the unknown? Possibly.
More like fear of fear. People are so paranoid about food today. There's some legitimate concerns about cloning. They're really about all the deformed or aborted animals produced to produce one healthy clone. It has nothing to do with the safety of the meat.
By the time you fuck with your food supply and find out that it wasn't safe, you're screwed.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. We already KNOW there's a TON of shit already in the food supply that's NOT SAFE. It's not pesticides, preservatives, or any of that crap, it's simply too much saturated fat, and trans-fat, and for some people, salt. We've know these things cause deaths for more than 30 years.. and yet people get all concerned about freaking cloned animals or "GMO" foods. Shit, I'd bet the saturated fat in a mad-cow infested cow causes more deaths than the infectious agent in it. (There was a LOT of mad-cow infected cows in Britain consumed in the 80s, and only a handful of people ever got sick).
So? Fake problem, fake solution, everybody's happy.
Except people that aren't so happy about how fake problems are such big concerns, and fake solutions are becoming the norm more and more.
All these fake problems and fake solutions are a drain to the REAL problems of the world.
I've recently been recovering data from some 20+ year old Commodore 64/128 disks (mostly interested in old papers). They were written using the word processors of the time, and can't really be recovered without them. I still have the old disks, and for the most part the data is still fully readable. I legally purchased the word processor many years ago, and still have the disks. My methodology was to recover the data to a modern PC running linux to an image file, and then run the word processor off an image file using an emulator.
Of course, I was thwarted by the copy protection on the disks. I couldn't get a proper image of them because of it. I wound up having to find a cracked copy of the word processor on some website (which took me all of 20 minutes to find using Google), and can recover my old papers perfectly.
It's very amusing to me that the CRACKED version of the software is actually more valuable to me than the non-cracked version. Re-buying the software (even if it was available) is useless to me, as I can't run it on an emulator, and thus transfer the data to somewhere useful.
This may seem like a special case.. but I don't think so. Even 20+ years later I can STILL get the cracked, pirated version of the software. The software was cracked many years ago, so it didn't really prevent much of anyone from getting it if they wanted to. I suspect if I had used a proper C64 copy utility I'd have been able to copy the disk anyway. The only thing it prevented was ME, the guy who bought the software from using the product as intended.
I hear Soviet Russia was pretty safe too. Looking at my (and everyone elses) email makes me about a zillionth of a percent safer. It alsomakes me several times less free.
This is NOT zero sum. The magnitude of damage caused by this kind of stuff far outweighs any even theoretical increase in security.
So basically the argument boils down to this:
The US Government was buying some quantity of helium at some unknown price and selling for some unknown amount of money.
Was it a significant percentage of the market? Unknown.
Was it at a significant price increase? Unknown.
Was the price it sold it at lower? higher? Unknown.
I'm more of a fan of basing arguments on facts, not not so hidden assumptions. I'm not an economist, but I have heard they like hard numbers to base market effects on, not made up numbers.
The only reason for that is the US used to pay $5/liter for it and sells it for $1/liter and no longer buys it. . (I made up those numbers - they're just illustrative but reflect the problem.)
Thanks for making up numbers that much of your argument hinges on. To make a real argument about the affect of the US government on Helium prices you'd have to get REAL numbers, not ones you just made up.
The biggest problem is that once helium has escaped into the atmosphere it is literally lost for *EVER*
I guess you missed the part where I mentioned the vast majority of helium is already being released into the atmosphere when natural gas is separated from CO2. Party balloons are not the big problem here.
Try to get it into your head that we're NOT running out of helium. We're currently low on the ability to extract helium from natural gas. There's multiple ways to solve that problem.. but this isn't a standard environmental response of "we need to stop using so much of resource X, because we're running out of resource X". No, helium isn't renewable.. but that doesn't make it fit into the standard environmental line of thinking.