Money is in fact extremely important to our elections, which is unfortunate. The fact that some very rich men (Perot and Forbes) lost to other very rich men (or, rich/entrenched political parties if you prefer) does not defeat this notion. These clowns spend a fortune on some of these political races...
Media favor is probably the most important factor in elections... money is important because it can influence media favor to some degree.
Wow, thanks for the jolt down memory lane... I hear you about Kings Quest -- when you were someplace where you shouldn't have been, it was quite tense... you were just waiting for them to pop in unexpectedly.
I agree with a lot of other comments... System Shock 2 was scary, as was Resident Evil 4 (the Gamecube Resident Evils in general were quite well made).
I also remember Undying being pretty scary in parts... I thought that game was underrated.
The synopsis is pretty idiotic... there is a lot of cherry picking of the best content available (Sopranos for TV, Kaufman films for movies, etc) which probably are not all that representative of pop culture as a whole. The mainstream of movies nowadays is Spiderman - not Adaptation. Sopranos? More like Everybody Loves Raymond and American Idol...
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy.
But Lord of the Rings is a book written long before Star Wars... he should have picked an action film created fully in the modern era. Something like Spiderman or Doom... but, of course, that would defeat his thesis (i.e. they have far less characters than Star Wars).
A socialist is a guy who is determined to control the manner and amount of use the CD gets AFTER it is sold.
Then why is it that Ralph Nader/liberals seem to be the only political voice opposing these institutions? And why is it that Republicans are so closely tied to these businesses (not that Democrats aren't, too)?
Yes, and Henry Ford shouldn't have bothered with the Model T because BMW was simply going to upstage him at a later date. A lot of time and energy could have been saved if we had just waited for BMW.
Oh wait, that's right... it's the people who push the technology of their day who make later developments possible.
My maternal grandparents never had health insurance. My paternal grandmother never had health insurance. My parents started off their working careers making less than minimum wages and no insurance, but they worked anyway.
Yes, times have changed... we live longer now, and medical care has skyrocketed in both complexity and cost. I suppose you could argue that we are all not entitled to receive these new treatments, but I find it hard to defend the notion that people should die when we have reasonable means to save them - especially when we spend a higher percent of our GDP on medical care than does Canada, which has a socialized healthcare system (which is much more efficient).
Were these grandparents alive during the depression? You know, when the elderly poverty rate was something like 40% and there was no safety net? Oh yes, let us travel back to that wonderful age, gentle Conservatives...
We have no shortage of people on public assistance, but we have to import Mexicans to do the work.
Bullshit. You hire Mexicans because they work hard, and you can pay them terrible wages and not have to worry about benefits. This is what is occurring all across the country... You might be an exception, but that is the rule. Americans are lazy and are in need of a reality check, for sure, but don't pretend that the influx of Mexican workers is a result of a lack of local American workers... the workers are here and perfectly willing to do the job; they just expect a wage that matches our standard of living. You found a way to live in a country with a high standard of living, but to pay out wages below that line. Works out for you, I suppose.
One farmer I know had a bumper crop of sweet corn two years ago. He offered free corn to welfare families. All they had to do was come and get it. These people had transportation and not one single individual came. The problem was they had to pick it. Sorry, they were too good to pick their own corn.
You are not painting a pretty picture of the people of Ohio... and here I just thought they screwed the rest of us in national elections. Being serious though, I do hear you... There is a sense of entitlement in our population that is disgusting. I see the same thing with gas prices and SUVs... A reality check is needed, and will eventually come when we lose our place as sole economic superpower and our economy takes a hit.
Look around my area. Of the dozen or school so districts, the worst performing district has the highest funding per pupil (with the exception of one very affluent district). This particular district had nearly $2,000 per year per student more than one of the best performing districts. School is tantamount to improving one's station in life, but despite the highest funding and some of the best curricula and magnet programs they performed the worst.
Your situation, I do not think, maps closely with urban poor areas. There are schools in Chicago in which, at least up until a few years ago (not sure if it is any better now) were not heated. Children had to wear winter coats inside the classroom. There was no hot water or soap in the bathrooms. They had to share books. The quality of the teachers was lacking because all the good teachers went to better schools. This is not a good learning environment, and yet the children liked being in school because it was the only place they felt safe (they did not feel safe at home or in the local neighborhood because of all of the violence).
The correct response is a real help program, not institutionalized dependency. Make work programs like the WPA of the thirties shold be created.
Your parent's story does indeed reflect what many people think of as the American Dream. I wonder if they could have pulled off the same feat if they worked at WalMart for minimum wage (which, like it or not, is a reality for many people)... They have little or no health benefits, and then a child gets sick. Oops...
I had to take out student loans too. And yet I was spared growing up in a dilapidating neigborhood with underfunded schools and high crime... areas where the only sense of stability is offered by a gang. I've never had to face racism... Somehow I don't think my student loan story is all that impressive.
I will not defend those JTPA students who slept in class (that would make me furious). Nor will I defend those who beg for money to buy drugs... but there are a lot of people who are, as you say, trapped in those situations that would have made something of themselves had they been born in different circumstances. Poverty is a gift that keeps on giving... Adults who are clearly milking the system are, I agree, deplorable... but is the correct response to scrap the system entirely just because some take advantage?
Like legs to walk to the nearest emergency shelter...
... where they were greeted with water shortages and no signs of help for days. Some were seperated from their families and hesitated to leave without them. Others probably stayed to attempt to defend what little posessions they had against gangs of looters as civil law broke down around them.
But fuck it... all they needed was a couple of bucks for the bus. Idiots...
And for those that are phyiscaly unable to leave there are more then enough services to call upon to get help to leave.
And of course, poor people have just as many education choices as anyone else... you might want to give this one a bit more thought. I did chuckle at some of your simplistic generalizations, though. Don't give up - it's a start!
If you were a poor person fighting out a living in the ghettos of New Orleans, you might not be so quick to jump to that conclusion. Not all people are lucky enough to have been born with the options available to, say, the average slashdotter.
In my limited experience, I have found that people who share your worldview have seldom faced poverty or any real need... more often, that worldview seems to be an excuse for conservatives to convince themselves that there is no class, and that poor people choose to be poor.
Carl Sagan wrote a great book about this phenomenon, called The Demon Haunted World. It systematically debunks many of the popular "scientific" myths widely believed by the public and perpetuated by the media (ghosts, UFO abductions, psychics, etc). It talks in depth about how real science gets filtered out by the media, in favor of junk science. I can't recommend this book enough!
I agree -- this is not a case of slash and burn, and not a case of impacting the rainforest. But there are other areas of concern that the paper industry is indeed responsible for, especially when there are much better methods available (e.g. hemp). Claiming only that trees can be replaced is a simplistic argument, and ignores many other facets of the impact of this industry on the environment. Here is some more info...
Unfortunately, the paper making process is not a clean one. According to the U.S. Toxic Release Inventory report published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), pulp and paper mills are among the worst polluters to air, water and land of any industry in the country. The Worldwatch Institute offers similar statistics for the rest of the world. Each year millions of pounds of highly toxic chemicals such as toluene, methanol, chlorine dioxide, hydrochloric acid, and formaldehyde are released into the air and water from paper making plants around the world.
Paper making also uses up vast quantities of trees. But trees are a renewable resource, which means that once one is cut down another can be planted in its place. In fact, much of the wood used by paper companies in the U.S. comes from privately owned tree farms where forests are planted, groomed and thinned for harvest in 20 to 35 year cycles, depending on the tree species. Around the world, tree farms supply 16% of all wood used in the paper industry while the bulk comes from second growth forests. Only 9% of the wood used to make paper is harvested from old growth forests, which are impossible to replace because of their maturity.
Yet, while tree farms or plantations help feed the demand for wood, they can't provide the plant and animal diversity found in natural forests. Plus, according to a 1996 report from the U.S. Forest Service, the rate of harvest for softwood trees in the southern United States outpaced growth for the first time since 1953.
Despite the fact that some (not all) of trees used for paper-making comes from tree farms, there are still problems with the paper industry as a whole. Here are a few paragraphs from an, IMO, interesting article:
Paper Made from Timber
Think bundling your newspapers is "messy"? Not when compared with the process of making paper from virgin timber. While modern paper recycling mills can be designed to operate without producing any hazardous air or water pollution and virtually no hazardous wastes,[16] the virgin pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest generators of toxic air pollutants, surface water pollution, sludge, and solid wastes. A recent assessment of the virgin timber-based papermaking industry concluded that reducing hazardous discharges at paper mills worldwide to safe levels would cost $27 billion.[17] Indeed, the timber industry has in all likelihood wiped out more habitat and more species per unit of production than has any other industry. Most Americans associate virgin paper mills with both the destruction of resident-species habitat and the contamination of streams and rivers with chlorinated dioxins and other pollutants. But the fact is these mills are also major sources of a wide variety of hazardous air and water pollutants, odors, solid waste, contaminated sludge, and water discoloring agents. Besides their well known, often unbearable emissions of sulfur compounds (causing an odor resembling rotten eggs), pulp and paper mills are classified under U.S. federal law as generators of "significant quantities of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) chlorinated and non-chlorinated. Some of these pollutants are considered to be carcinogenic, and all can cause toxic health effects following exposure. Most of the organic HAPs emitted from this industry also are classified as volatile organic compounds which participate in photochemical reactions in the atmosphere to produce ozone, a contributor to photochemical smog."[18]
Moreover, the virgin "pulp and paper industry is the largest industrial process water user in the United States. Approximately 1,551 billion gallons of wastewater are generated annually by pulp, paper, and paperboard manufacturers."[19] Water pollutants contained in these billions of gallons discharged into streams, rivers, and lakes by virgin paper manufacturers include a wide range of hazardous and conventional pollutants as well as volatile organic compounds, including chlorinated dioxins and furans, chloroform, absorbable organic halides [AOX], methylene chloride, trichlorophenols, and pentachlorophenols.[20]
Processing rigid stands of timber into flexible, printable, smooth, glossy (or absorbent) paper requires an intensive chemical and mechanical effort after a tree is harvested. Once roads have been cut into the forest to get to the timber, it is transported to the mill, stockpiled, debarked, chipped, "cooked" in vats of chemicals, and turned into pulp and bleached mechanically and chemically. Then the pulp must be turned into paper or dried and shipped off to another mill. While paper can be recycled even at very large mills using fewer than a dozen nonhazardous chemicals and bleaching solutions that contain, for example, 99.5 percent water and 0.5 percent hydrogen peroxide (a concentration more diluted than the peroxide in your medicine cabinet),[21] most virgin pulp and paper is made using literally hundreds of highly corrosive and hazardous chemicals, including chlorine. As the EPA has documented, this presents enormous problems in reducing pollution from virgin paper mills because "elimination of dioxin, furan, chlorinated phenolics, and other chlorinated organics [can]...not be achieved unless all forms of chlorine-based bleaching are eliminated."[22] This is not expected to happen in the United States for quite some time. In addition, not all of the toxic pollutants discharged in the wastewater produced by virgin pulp and paper mills are currently regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, including certain congeners of dioxin and furans and a range of chlorinated phenols.
You must be driving to environmental rallies or something, too. Either that, or you're just lying. People just don't care what car you drive, and they don't notice unless you're doing something to stand out.
Incorrect - and yes, I own one too.
I know of two people that own hybrid cars, and no people planning on getting one. I never see these vehicles on the road (and trust me, I would notice an Insight, same as I notice Elements and Azteks).
Just curious, where do you live? I see hybrids all the time - especially the new Toyota Prius.
Rather than playing the uninformed enviro-whacko type, why don't you do some research. That "enviro-friendly" car that you're touting the benefits of isn't very friendly at all. It a large amount of very toxic chemicals to make the batteries, it still needs fossil fuels to work, and it isn't the best thing on the market.
The advantage of hybrids is that they work with today's fuel source - gasoline. You need not plug them in, nor do you need to special order some form of bio-deisel. They work just like every other car, just much more efficiently. It is true that hybrids are not the "end" of the movement towards the ideal car, but they are certainly an important step. Im a hybrid owner and believe me, I will also be one of the first in line to buy the "next best thing" when its turn comes. The two are not mutually exclusive, and in fact spending money on hybrids now gives incentive to car manufacturers to build more efficient vehicles. You really are wrong on many accounts...
You're just spouting the typical "I'm helping the environment by doing something that doesn't matter or inconvenience me" type environmental fool attitude. Why don't you push for electric generation by nuclear in your area? Or wind farms? I bet if one was planning to go up in your area, you'd be fighting it with some ridiculous completely bullshit excuse that amounted to "Not In My BackYard".
Not much to say here... sort of a stupid set of comments, based on your own opinions on what other people think. Not terribly interesting...
Most people don't share your opinion. This is because, though you try to play it as fact, you're wrong about them. "People" do not want underpowered small and annoying hybrid cars. They want a car that works, and they want to be able to fuel it in a few minutes and not have to worry about anything. They want to be able to accelerate and go a good speed, and they want to be able to put a lot of stuff in them. Many of these people that you so insist want hybrid cars actually *want* a big-assed, inefficient SUV.
It doesn't matter that "most people" do not own hybrids... I recommend that you start thinking for yourself. If you believe in a cause and you want to put your money where your mouth is, I say good for you... I personally do not like giving my money to energy companies, and I think our nation's reliance on foreign oil is one of our single largest problems. Should the fact that "most people" either disagree with that assessment (or are just plain ignorant of it) matter?
And for the record, my hybrid works just fine, thank you very much. And I too can "fuel it in a few minutes and not have to worry about anything." Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
And the facts are that in IMAX theatres people sit for 1-2 hours watching 3D films with polarized glasses and noone "leaves the theatre with a serious headache".
I recently saw an IMAX film... looked absolutely stunning, but by the end of it my eyes were really bothering me. So much so that I actually wanted the film to end...
The solution? Simple: concentrate on one, specific state. And that's why, two months ago, I moved to New Hampshire.
You certainly have your work cut out for you in New Hampshire, what with all the Mass people flooding north. Heck, New Hampshire went blue this past election as a result of it...
While I am not a libertarian, I must say I *loved* the idea of the Lost Liberty Hotel. It was a clever way to demonstrate just how horrible that new eminent ruling was.
I never thought I would argue about such things in terms of "bananas", but it goes;)
Ok, so we have "thrown away the banana", and that is the reason we have depression/cancer/stress/suicides (I could not disagree more strongly with this conclusion, but for the sake of argument let's suppose this is true). Tell me, was there ever a time that humans did, in fact, have the complete "banana" (and not just the skin)? At what point in history did humans, armed with the full/True banana, act differently than they do now? How long did this period last? Which societies were involved?
Defenders of religion often claim that problems with religion stem from the fact that they aren't *really* religious - that they have lost their way, and if they were Truly religious, we wouldn't have any of these problems. Yet, how comforting is this notion if society can never acheive this True form of religion?
You are being a tad simplistic. The challenge and "reward" of AIMFight was not achieved simply because they figured out how to "traverse a tree"... it's because they took all that data and aggregated it some interesting way. I'm not saying it's rocket science, and I have no idea how complicated/good their algorithm and results actually are, but give it a bit of credit.
Well, the pickings are pretty slim, but I would point to rural electrification as one of the very few worthwhile achievements of FDR's great power grab.
The fact that social security largely solved an elderly poverty rate greater than 50% doesn't impress you all that much, eh? I would post a counter "LOL!" myself, but that seems kind of childish... Cheers
Slashdot Mirror
Money is in fact extremely important to our elections, which is unfortunate. The fact that some very rich men (Perot and Forbes) lost to other very rich men (or, rich/entrenched political parties if you prefer) does not defeat this notion. These clowns spend a fortune on some of these political races...
Media favor is probably the most important factor in elections... money is important because it can influence media favor to some degree.
Wow, thanks for the jolt down memory lane... I hear you about Kings Quest -- when you were someplace where you shouldn't have been, it was quite tense... you were just waiting for them to pop in unexpectedly.
:)
And yes, I remember the car, too.
I agree with a lot of other comments... System Shock 2 was scary, as was Resident Evil 4 (the Gamecube Resident Evils in general were quite well made).
I also remember Undying being pretty scary in parts... I thought that game was underrated.
The synopsis is pretty idiotic... there is a lot of cherry picking of the best content available (Sopranos for TV, Kaufman films for movies, etc) which probably are not all that representative of pop culture as a whole. The mainstream of movies nowadays is Spiderman - not Adaptation. Sopranos? More like Everybody Loves Raymond and American Idol...
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy.
But Lord of the Rings is a book written long before Star Wars... he should have picked an action film created fully in the modern era. Something like Spiderman or Doom... but, of course, that would defeat his thesis (i.e. they have far less characters than Star Wars).
A socialist is a guy who is determined to control the manner and amount of use the CD gets AFTER it is sold.
Then why is it that Ralph Nader/liberals seem to be the only political voice opposing these institutions? And why is it that Republicans are so closely tied to these businesses (not that Democrats aren't, too)?
Yes, and Henry Ford shouldn't have bothered with the Model T because BMW was simply going to upstage him at a later date. A lot of time and energy could have been saved if we had just waited for BMW.
Oh wait, that's right... it's the people who push the technology of their day who make later developments possible.
My maternal grandparents never had health insurance. My paternal grandmother never had health insurance. My parents started off their working careers making less than minimum wages and no insurance, but they worked anyway.
Yes, times have changed... we live longer now, and medical care has skyrocketed in both complexity and cost. I suppose you could argue that we are all not entitled to receive these new treatments, but I find it hard to defend the notion that people should die when we have reasonable means to save them - especially when we spend a higher percent of our GDP on medical care than does Canada, which has a socialized healthcare system (which is much more efficient).
Were these grandparents alive during the depression? You know, when the elderly poverty rate was something like 40% and there was no safety net? Oh yes, let us travel back to that wonderful age, gentle Conservatives...
We have no shortage of people on public assistance, but we have to import Mexicans to do the work.
Bullshit. You hire Mexicans because they work hard, and you can pay them terrible wages and not have to worry about benefits. This is what is occurring all across the country... You might be an exception, but that is the rule. Americans are lazy and are in need of a reality check, for sure, but don't pretend that the influx of Mexican workers is a result of a lack of local American workers... the workers are here and perfectly willing to do the job; they just expect a wage that matches our standard of living. You found a way to live in a country with a high standard of living, but to pay out wages below that line. Works out for you, I suppose.
One farmer I know had a bumper crop of sweet corn two years ago. He offered free corn to welfare families. All they had to do was come and get it. These people had transportation and not one single individual came. The problem was they had to pick it. Sorry, they were too good to pick their own corn.
You are not painting a pretty picture of the people of Ohio... and here I just thought they screwed the rest of us in national elections. Being serious though, I do hear you... There is a sense of entitlement in our population that is disgusting. I see the same thing with gas prices and SUVs... A reality check is needed, and will eventually come when we lose our place as sole economic superpower and our economy takes a hit.
Look around my area. Of the dozen or school so districts, the worst performing district has the highest funding per pupil (with the exception of one very affluent district). This particular district had nearly $2,000 per year per student more than one of the best performing districts. School is tantamount to improving one's station in life, but despite the highest funding and some of the best curricula and magnet programs they performed the worst.
Your situation, I do not think, maps closely with urban poor areas. There are schools in Chicago in which, at least up until a few years ago (not sure if it is any better now) were not heated. Children had to wear winter coats inside the classroom. There was no hot water or soap in the bathrooms. They had to share books. The quality of the teachers was lacking because all the good teachers went to better schools. This is not a good learning environment, and yet the children liked being in school because it was the only place they felt safe (they did not feel safe at home or in the local neighborhood because of all of the violence).
The correct response is a real help program, not institutionalized dependency. Make work programs like the WPA of the thirties shold be created.
Perhaps... are any politicians championing this?
Your parent's story does indeed reflect what many people think of as the American Dream. I wonder if they could have pulled off the same feat if they worked at WalMart for minimum wage (which, like it or not, is a reality for many people)... They have little or no health benefits, and then a child gets sick. Oops...
I had to take out student loans too. And yet I was spared growing up in a dilapidating neigborhood with underfunded schools and high crime... areas where the only sense of stability is offered by a gang. I've never had to face racism... Somehow I don't think my student loan story is all that impressive.
I will not defend those JTPA students who slept in class (that would make me furious). Nor will I defend those who beg for money to buy drugs... but there are a lot of people who are, as you say, trapped in those situations that would have made something of themselves had they been born in different circumstances. Poverty is a gift that keeps on giving... Adults who are clearly milking the system are, I agree, deplorable... but is the correct response to scrap the system entirely just because some take advantage?
Like legs to walk to the nearest emergency shelter...
... where they were greeted with water shortages and no signs of help for days. Some were seperated from their families and hesitated to leave without them. Others probably stayed to attempt to defend what little posessions they had against gangs of looters as civil law broke down around them.
But fuck it... all they needed was a couple of bucks for the bus. Idiots...
And for those that are phyiscaly unable to leave there are more then enough services to call upon to get help to leave.
No. No, there weren't.
Ahh, the Dildo Theory of Poverty. Fascinating...
Education is truly the key to this life...
And of course, poor people have just as many education choices as anyone else... you might want to give this one a bit more thought. I did chuckle at some of your simplistic generalizations, though. Don't give up - it's a start!
If you were a poor person fighting out a living in the ghettos of New Orleans, you might not be so quick to jump to that conclusion. Not all people are lucky enough to have been born with the options available to, say, the average slashdotter.
In my limited experience, I have found that people who share your worldview have seldom faced poverty or any real need... more often, that worldview seems to be an excuse for conservatives to convince themselves that there is no class, and that poor people choose to be poor.
Carl Sagan wrote a great book about this phenomenon, called The Demon Haunted World. It systematically debunks many of the popular "scientific" myths widely believed by the public and perpetuated by the media (ghosts, UFO abductions, psychics, etc). It talks in depth about how real science gets filtered out by the media, in favor of junk science. I can't recommend this book enough!
I agree -- this is not a case of slash and burn, and not a case of impacting the rainforest. But there are other areas of concern that the paper industry is indeed responsible for, especially when there are much better methods available (e.g. hemp). Claiming only that trees can be replaced is a simplistic argument, and ignores many other facets of the impact of this industry on the environment. Here is some more info...
Unfortunately, the paper making process is not a clean one. According to the U.S. Toxic Release Inventory report published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), pulp and paper mills are among the worst polluters to air, water and land of any industry in the country. The Worldwatch Institute offers similar statistics for the rest of the world. Each year millions of pounds of highly toxic chemicals such as toluene, methanol, chlorine dioxide, hydrochloric acid, and formaldehyde are released into the air and water from paper making plants around the world.
Paper making also uses up vast quantities of trees. But trees are a renewable resource, which means that once one is cut down another can be planted in its place. In fact, much of the wood used by paper companies in the U.S. comes from privately owned tree farms where forests are planted, groomed and thinned for harvest in 20 to 35 year cycles, depending on the tree species. Around the world, tree farms supply 16% of all wood used in the paper industry while the bulk comes from second growth forests. Only 9% of the wood used to make paper is harvested from old growth forests, which are impossible to replace because of their maturity.
Yet, while tree farms or plantations help feed the demand for wood, they can't provide the plant and animal diversity found in natural forests. Plus, according to a 1996 report from the U.S. Forest Service, the rate of harvest for softwood trees in the southern United States outpaced growth for the first time since 1953.
Despite the fact that some (not all) of trees used for paper-making comes from tree farms, there are still problems with the paper industry as a whole. Here are a few paragraphs from an, IMO, interesting article:
Paper Made from Timber
Think bundling your newspapers is "messy"? Not when compared with the process of making paper from virgin timber. While modern paper recycling mills can be designed to operate without producing any hazardous air or water pollution and virtually no hazardous wastes,[16] the virgin pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest generators of toxic air pollutants, surface water pollution, sludge, and solid wastes. A recent assessment of the virgin timber-based papermaking industry concluded that reducing hazardous discharges at paper mills worldwide to safe levels would cost $27 billion.[17] Indeed, the timber industry has in all likelihood wiped out more habitat and more species per unit of production than has any other industry. Most Americans associate virgin paper mills with both the destruction of resident-species habitat and the contamination of streams and rivers with chlorinated dioxins and other pollutants. But the fact is these mills are also major sources of a wide variety of hazardous air and water pollutants, odors, solid waste, contaminated sludge, and water discoloring agents. Besides their well known, often unbearable emissions of sulfur compounds (causing an odor resembling rotten eggs), pulp and paper mills are classified under U.S. federal law as generators of "significant quantities of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) chlorinated and non-chlorinated. Some of these pollutants are considered to be carcinogenic, and all can cause toxic health effects following exposure. Most of the organic HAPs emitted from this industry also are classified as volatile organic compounds which participate in photochemical reactions in the atmosphere to produce ozone, a contributor to photochemical smog."[18]
Moreover, the virgin "pulp and paper industry is the largest industrial process water user in the United States. Approximately 1,551 billion gallons of wastewater are generated annually by pulp, paper, and paperboard manufacturers."[19] Water pollutants contained in these billions of gallons discharged into streams, rivers, and lakes by virgin paper manufacturers include a wide range of hazardous and conventional pollutants as well as volatile organic compounds, including chlorinated dioxins and furans, chloroform, absorbable organic halides [AOX], methylene chloride, trichlorophenols, and pentachlorophenols.[20]
Processing rigid stands of timber into flexible, printable, smooth, glossy (or absorbent) paper requires an intensive chemical and mechanical effort after a tree is harvested. Once roads have been cut into the forest to get to the timber, it is transported to the mill, stockpiled, debarked, chipped, "cooked" in vats of chemicals, and turned into pulp and bleached mechanically and chemically. Then the pulp must be turned into paper or dried and shipped off to another mill. While paper can be recycled even at very large mills using fewer than a dozen nonhazardous chemicals and bleaching solutions that contain, for example, 99.5 percent water and 0.5 percent hydrogen peroxide (a concentration more diluted than the peroxide in your medicine cabinet),[21] most virgin pulp and paper is made using literally hundreds of highly corrosive and hazardous chemicals, including chlorine. As the EPA has documented, this presents enormous problems in reducing pollution from virgin paper mills because "elimination of dioxin, furan, chlorinated phenolics, and other chlorinated organics [can]...not be achieved unless all forms of chlorine-based bleaching are eliminated."[22] This is not expected to happen in the United States for quite some time. In addition, not all of the toxic pollutants discharged in the wastewater produced by virgin pulp and paper mills are currently regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, including certain congeners of dioxin and furans and a range of chlorinated phenols.
Here is the source article.
What if the extinction of some species causes that "cure" species to evolve to fill the niche?
;)
I think we might need the cure a bit sooner than that
You must be driving to environmental rallies or something, too. Either that, or you're just lying. People just don't care what car you drive, and they don't notice unless you're doing something to stand out.
Incorrect - and yes, I own one too.
I know of two people that own hybrid cars, and no people planning on getting one. I never see these vehicles on the road (and trust me, I would notice an Insight, same as I notice Elements and Azteks).
Just curious, where do you live? I see hybrids all the time - especially the new Toyota Prius.
Rather than playing the uninformed enviro-whacko type, why don't you do some research. That "enviro-friendly" car that you're touting the benefits of isn't very friendly at all. It a large amount of very toxic chemicals to make the batteries, it still needs fossil fuels to work, and it isn't the best thing on the market.
The advantage of hybrids is that they work with today's fuel source - gasoline. You need not plug them in, nor do you need to special order some form of bio-deisel. They work just like every other car, just much more efficiently. It is true that hybrids are not the "end" of the movement towards the ideal car, but they are certainly an important step. Im a hybrid owner and believe me, I will also be one of the first in line to buy the "next best thing" when its turn comes. The two are not mutually exclusive, and in fact spending money on hybrids now gives incentive to car manufacturers to build more efficient vehicles. You really are wrong on many accounts...
You're just spouting the typical "I'm helping the environment by doing something that doesn't matter or inconvenience me" type environmental fool attitude. Why don't you push for electric generation by nuclear in your area? Or wind farms? I bet if one was planning to go up in your area, you'd be fighting it with some ridiculous completely bullshit excuse that amounted to "Not In My BackYard".
Not much to say here... sort of a stupid set of comments, based on your own opinions on what other people think. Not terribly interesting...
Most people don't share your opinion. This is because, though you try to play it as fact, you're wrong about them. "People" do not want underpowered small and annoying hybrid cars. They want a car that works, and they want to be able to fuel it in a few minutes and not have to worry about anything. They want to be able to accelerate and go a good speed, and they want to be able to put a lot of stuff in them. Many of these people that you so insist want hybrid cars actually *want* a big-assed, inefficient SUV.
It doesn't matter that "most people" do not own hybrids... I recommend that you start thinking for yourself. If you believe in a cause and you want to put your money where your mouth is, I say good for you... I personally do not like giving my money to energy companies, and I think our nation's reliance on foreign oil is one of our single largest problems. Should the fact that "most people" either disagree with that assessment (or are just plain ignorant of it) matter?
And for the record, my hybrid works just fine, thank you very much. And I too can "fuel it in a few minutes and not have to worry about anything." Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
And the facts are that in IMAX theatres people sit for 1-2 hours watching 3D films with polarized glasses and noone "leaves the theatre with a serious headache".
I recently saw an IMAX film... looked absolutely stunning, but by the end of it my eyes were really bothering me. So much so that I actually wanted the film to end...
You're a Republican, aren't you?
The moderation system is broken on Slashdot... the trolls are coming out in full force -- and are winning. I'm afraid the tides have turned...
The solution? Simple: concentrate on one, specific state. And that's why, two months ago, I moved to New Hampshire.
You certainly have your work cut out for you in New Hampshire, what with all the Mass people flooding north. Heck, New Hampshire went blue this past election as a result of it...
While I am not a libertarian, I must say I *loved* the idea of the Lost Liberty Hotel. It was a clever way to demonstrate just how horrible that new eminent ruling was.
I never thought I would argue about such things in terms of "bananas", but it goes ;)
Ok, so we have "thrown away the banana", and that is the reason we have depression/cancer/stress/suicides (I could not disagree more strongly with this conclusion, but for the sake of argument let's suppose this is true). Tell me, was there ever a time that humans did, in fact, have the complete "banana" (and not just the skin)? At what point in history did humans, armed with the full/True banana, act differently than they do now? How long did this period last? Which societies were involved?
Defenders of religion often claim that problems with religion stem from the fact that they aren't *really* religious - that they have lost their way, and if they were Truly religious, we wouldn't have any of these problems. Yet, how comforting is this notion if society can never acheive this True form of religion?
You are being a tad simplistic. The challenge and "reward" of AIMFight was not achieved simply because they figured out how to "traverse a tree"... it's because they took all that data and aggregated it some interesting way. I'm not saying it's rocket science, and I have no idea how complicated/good their algorithm and results actually are, but give it a bit of credit.
Well, the pickings are pretty slim, but I would point to rural electrification as one of the very few worthwhile achievements of FDR's great power grab.
The fact that social security largely solved an elderly poverty rate greater than 50% doesn't impress you all that much, eh? I would post a counter "LOL!" myself, but that seems kind of childish... Cheers
Will do! And if you would like to learn more about it, here is some info about the New Deal. Cheers
Ever heard of Social Security?
Of course - Social Security was perhaps the most important and successful part of the New Deal.