"The implication was that indiginous Australians tried to follow the natural progression from hunter gathering to large scale settlement, but it somehow failed."
If that was the implication of the article, it was probably put there by the author, and not the archaeologist. There's controversy as to how 'natural', meaning here 'inevitable', that farming setttlements are. (Note that in Australia, there were no suitable staple crop plants nor domesticated animals, so everyone was a hunter-gatherer until the Europeans arrived.)
The theory that makes the most sense to me is that farming spreads because of its *instability* -- when you have a crop failure and famine, farmers flee to more fertile areas and do the only thing they know how -- farm. Since farmers have more children, they out-compete hunter-gatherers in terms of re-production. Pretty soon, everyone's farming.
Hunter-gatherers work about 2-4 hours a day to meet thier needs. Why would someone give that up to work 8-12 hours a day for some payoff in another season?
"Even so, I don't think you could relate any european country with south american ones, since people's mentality is so different in so many ways. I'd also like to know -- if South America was colonized by the Spanish and Portugese, couldn't South America be compared to Spain and Portugal? Is it the indigenous influence?
I'm just curious -- what social services did the government provide, or claim to provide? Can you also speak to the situation in other South American countries?
I bring up South America because almost every other country is a counter-example to your thesis. Glancing over Argentina's history at wikipedia, it looks like repeated coups and political instability is a better explanation as to why they aren't doing as well as Sweden.
So you are saying that social programs caused Argetina to fall behind Sweden after WWII, when Argentina was richer after the war? Well, weren't Sweden's social programs were wider-reaching and more comprehensive than Argetina's? So shouldn't Sweden be further behind Argetina then? Shouldn't all the indusrialized, western nations be behind South America and Africa, since they have larger social programs?
The reason they're not is because social programs create the middle class. Corporations would have slaves or indentured servants if they could. They have no incentive in paying for someone's retirement, or making them wealthier, if the wealth could stay with the corporation instead. There is nothing wrong with corporations making money -- that's their role. However, it is the role of democratic government to provide for the general welfare through taxes. Without that, we would live in facism -- a system in which, as Mussolini said, is the merging of state and corporate power.
Where are the shanty towns in Sweden? Where are the poor families (mom, dad, and kids) lierally living on the street in rest of Scandinavia? In Europe? Australia? Japan? Canada? They don't exist. You only find this kind of poverty in countries without social programs.
When you talk about wealth, you should look at the distribution of wealth. Who cares if a country has a high GDP when a few families control most of the wealth, and the average guy is living in the street or in a shanty town.
I apologize for calling you an untraveled American. I made an assumption and I was wrong.
I spent ten weeks with a poor, indigenous family in Ecuador in a university field study program. They lived on the banks of a river in thatch-roof, plywood floor huts. They farmed food to eat and coffee and cocoa to sell. Some of the men had jobs in the city -- menial jobs. They had no education, and since they were "Indians", nobody is going to give them a decent job. (Because, you know, they are always late, they steal, etc.)
However , if they get sick, they are screwed. They have no money for doctors. All you do is lie in a hut and have a shaman literally blow smoke over you, maybe wave some leaves. People frequently die from illness.
What your talking about is emergency relief. Yes, without food, people die. That's what's needed in famine, earthquake, war, etc. However, poor != desperate. Poor people have some kind of hook-up for food, whether it be the garden, a job, or a relative. However, if you start giving them food, they re-adjust thier strategy -- they might quit the job to be with the children, they might stop working in the garden. Then, when the free-food dries up, they have to re-jigger their life again.
If you give them food, they are dependent on you. They have no control over that part of their life. However, if you give them something like a cell-phone or a fishng pole, they can setup a new 'income' stream in thier life that they are in control of. That is empowerment and improvement.
Another Armchair American who's never been outside of the country yet knows everything about politics.
Countries with social programs, such as Australia, Japan, Canada and those in western Europe have highly productive economies and high standards of living for their citizens. Poor countries, like those in South America, have few social program, and a significant portion of the population live in dirt-floor poverty. A few wealthy faimilies re-direct all of the countries wealth to themselves.
The United States, a western, industrialized nation, yet one that does have many of the social protections that others have, has the highest rate of poverty, hunger, malnutrition amongst our peers.
I'm sick of right wing facists spewing lies and fighting the ruskies while the Walmarts are making themselves rich on the backs of the working poor. We're America, and we strive to be the greatest country in the world. If you don't like it, move to South America.
They inherited the house. I don't know which argument that supports. For one, a person may have inherited a house they can't afford the property taxes, heating, or maintenance for, which puts a strain on the budget for other things. But, nonetheless, they still are living in a nice house, so their standard of living is somewhat nicer.
I guess the best thing to do is sell the house when you inherit it.
As far as what you get in return from your congress person, you do get a form letter. As far as the effect of you contacting you congress person, a letter means very much. Remember, congresspeople have to get elected at the next go-around, so they won't stick to positions that are seen as unpopular.
Congressional offices do an estimation for each contact they receive. Each type of correspondence carries a number of constitutents it is thought to represent. For instance, a letter might be 100, a fax, 50, a phone call, 25, an email, 10. When you write a letter, the office assumes you represent, say, 100 other people. So individually, your voice won't count much, but if you get four other people to write a letter, the congressperson will start to wonder if sticking to this position will cost them the next election.
As far as your single letter changing your congress persons' position, I'm glad you're not that powerful, esp. if I disagree with you. Nobody voted for you. A congressperson ran and was elected on a platform, amd presumably that's what the voting constituents want to see happen.
"Child labor laws weren't fully implemented enofrced until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act in the US."
Unions did not pass labor laws -- only the the legislature can do that -- but they did succeed in getting child laborers out of the work place, thanks to their unionizing efforts. And when legislatures did pass laws , it was due to the grounswell of awareness and support that unions created. Where do you think this 'social consciouness' came from?
If you are a small inventor, and have nothing but your product, you still need to line up funding, manufacturing and distribution, and marketng and promotion. Meanwhile, the big boys have all of those in place already, and can use their marketing to spread FUD about your product, and tell people to wait for thier vaporware.
I think it's a problem when people are wary about hanging out with strangers. It makes for a more fragmented, xenophobic society. If everybody tries to avoid interacting with strangers, the only people out and about will be crazy, homeless, or vagrant -- in other words, it will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"It is a bit difficult to show a medicine bottle through the Internet"
The WWW does have a protocol for displaying images, you know. You can scan a label, or take a picture of it with your camera phone, and upload it somewhere.
"Heck, there are even *medicines* with instructions saying "this medicine is known to not work effectively on people from race X" - for fortunately medicine doctors apparently did not surrender science to political correctness like many biologists did..."
Please show me the medicine bottle that has the word race on it. I think what you are actually talking about is ancestry, which is different than old, consistently discredited theories of race.
OK - here's the crux -- why do we need a theory of race in order to diagnose disease? Couldn't you do it more effectively by determinimng their ancestry? For instace, I have met African-Americans who look like Southern Europeans, Asians, or Hispanics.
The study you cited about sickle cell anemia has *already* decided that certian people are African-American before the results were in. What I am asking for is the objective criteria by which we can run an experiment with to determine which race a person belongs to.
What exactly is race? It seems like when you talk about race, you are using as another term for ancestry.
And, more to the point, you have yet to address the official races, and the criteria. If race is such a useful bit of knowledge for medicine, certainly doctors would have a lot of data on race (and race alone, not ancestry and disease), and have ways of determining race when, say, the person is injured so badly you can't tell the race.
"...with any one gene there will necessarily be a largish amount of error."
Why would that be, and what are the ramifications of this fact for your theory of race? Again, where can I find the official genetic races, and each particular genetic profile of the races?
What scientific questions does this theory of race answer? How do I know that this theory is actually a scientific one, rather than an attempt to justify old, consistently discredited racial theories?
"The concept that race is solely a cultural construct is mere wishful thinking: "
I am interested to see your criteria for race that is based solely on genetics. What are the racial groups, and what genes denote membership to which group?
The diseases you mention occur everywhere in the world. If I show you a guy whose ancestors have lived in Mongolia for the last 5,000 years, are you going to tell me that he is African-American if he has sickle cell anemia?
Yeah, in the past couple of months I was involved in some flamewars. It's the old Voltaire (?) quote -- "Be careful, when wrestling with monsters, that you don't become one yourself." I saw myself using more and more snarky and trollish arguing techniques, even making stuff up and exaggerating. I decided to swallow my pride, take the high road, and become a gentleman again.
It seems to me that the level of discussion on slashdot has degraded in the past year or so, and I don't want to be part of the problem.
A third option is that they might volunteer to work with you, or even pay you to teach them.
Right now there is no incentive for you to take *any* employees, but if it got to the point where you had more work than you had time in the day, then it would be in your benefit to hire an employee. Otherwise, *someone* is going to take the work and become your competitor, and they might actually be competent at it. It would be in your interest to have the person taking on the extra work under your control, rather than being on their own.
"No form of protectionism has ever been good, labor or otherwise."
Oh really? How is it, then, that Finland, which has had cradle-to-grave socialism for around 100 years has the most competitive economy? The United States is second, but Canada ranks 3rd, Australia 5th, and Norway 6th -- each of which have extensive social program.
Of those four industrialized, western nations with extensive social services and labor protections, three rank above the US in the Economist's Quality of Life ranking -- and the Economist is a pro-free-trade, pro-gloablisation magazine. The US ranks 13th, and Canada ranks right below at 14th.
Slashdot Mirror
"The implication was that indiginous Australians tried to follow the natural progression from hunter gathering to large scale settlement, but it somehow failed."
If that was the implication of the article, it was probably put there by the author, and not the archaeologist. There's controversy as to how 'natural', meaning here 'inevitable', that farming setttlements are. (Note that in Australia, there were no suitable staple crop plants nor domesticated animals, so everyone was a hunter-gatherer until the Europeans arrived.)
The theory that makes the most sense to me is that farming spreads because of its *instability* -- when you have a crop failure and famine, farmers flee to more fertile areas and do the only thing they know how -- farm. Since farmers have more children, they out-compete hunter-gatherers in terms of re-production. Pretty soon, everyone's farming.
Hunter-gatherers work about 2-4 hours a day to meet thier needs. Why would someone give that up to work 8-12 hours a day for some payoff in another season?
</rant>
"All you can do is postulate a theory and provide evidance to back it up."
Well, it also helps if you have experiment(s) that were designed specifically to disprove the theory, and they didn't.
They are measuring the light generated from the event itself. Isn't that the same as seeing it? ;)
"Even so, I don't think you could relate any european country with south american ones, since people's mentality is so different in so many ways.
I'd also like to know -- if South America was colonized by the Spanish and Portugese, couldn't South America be compared to Spain and Portugal? Is it the indigenous influence?
I'm just curious -- what social services did the government provide, or claim to provide? Can you also speak to the situation in other South American countries?
I bring up South America because almost every other country is a counter-example to your thesis. Glancing over Argentina's history at wikipedia, it looks like repeated coups and political instability is a better explanation as to why they aren't doing as well as Sweden. So you are saying that social programs caused Argetina to fall behind Sweden after WWII, when Argentina was richer after the war? Well, weren't Sweden's social programs were wider-reaching and more comprehensive than Argetina's? So shouldn't Sweden be further behind Argetina then? Shouldn't all the indusrialized, western nations be behind South America and Africa, since they have larger social programs?
The reason they're not is because social programs create the middle class. Corporations would have slaves or indentured servants if they could. They have no incentive in paying for someone's retirement, or making them wealthier, if the wealth could stay with the corporation instead. There is nothing wrong with corporations making money -- that's their role. However, it is the role of democratic government to provide for the general welfare through taxes. Without that, we would live in facism -- a system in which, as Mussolini said, is the merging of state and corporate power.
Where are the shanty towns in Sweden? Where are the poor families (mom, dad, and kids) lierally living on the street in rest of Scandinavia? In Europe? Australia? Japan? Canada? They don't exist. You only find this kind of poverty in countries without social programs.
When you talk about wealth, you should look at the distribution of wealth. Who cares if a country has a high GDP when a few families control most of the wealth, and the average guy is living in the street or in a shanty town.
I apologize for calling you an untraveled American. I made an assumption and I was wrong.
I spent ten weeks with a poor, indigenous family in Ecuador in a university field study program. They lived on the banks of a river in thatch-roof, plywood floor huts. They farmed food to eat and coffee and cocoa to sell. Some of the men had jobs in the city -- menial jobs. They had no education, and since they were "Indians", nobody is going to give them a decent job. (Because, you know, they are always late, they steal, etc.)
However , if they get sick, they are screwed. They have no money for doctors. All you do is lie in a hut and have a shaman literally blow smoke over you, maybe wave some leaves. People frequently die from illness.
What your talking about is emergency relief. Yes, without food, people die. That's what's needed in famine, earthquake, war, etc. However, poor != desperate. Poor people have some kind of hook-up for food, whether it be the garden, a job, or a relative. However, if you start giving them food, they re-adjust thier strategy -- they might quit the job to be with the children, they might stop working in the garden. Then, when the free-food dries up, they have to re-jigger their life again.
If you give them food, they are dependent on you. They have no control over that part of their life. However, if you give them something like a cell-phone or a fishng pole, they can setup a new 'income' stream in thier life that they are in control of. That is empowerment and improvement.
Another Armchair American who's never been outside of the country yet knows everything about politics.
Countries with social programs, such as Australia, Japan, Canada and those in western Europe have highly productive economies and high standards of living for their citizens. Poor countries, like those in South America, have few social program, and a significant portion of the population live in dirt-floor poverty. A few wealthy faimilies re-direct all of the countries wealth to themselves.
The United States, a western, industrialized nation, yet one that does have many of the social protections that others have, has the highest rate of poverty, hunger, malnutrition amongst our peers.
I'm sick of right wing facists spewing lies and fighting the ruskies while the Walmarts are making themselves rich on the backs of the working poor. We're America, and we strive to be the greatest country in the world. If you don't like it, move to South America.
They inherited the house. I don't know which argument that supports. For one, a person may have inherited a house they can't afford the property taxes, heating, or maintenance for, which puts a strain on the budget for other things. But, nonetheless, they still are living in a nice house, so their standard of living is somewhat nicer.
I guess the best thing to do is sell the house when you inherit it.
As far as what you get in return from your congress person, you do get a form letter. As far as the effect of you contacting you congress person, a letter means very much. Remember, congresspeople have to get elected at the next go-around, so they won't stick to positions that are seen as unpopular.
Congressional offices do an estimation for each contact they receive. Each type of correspondence carries a number of constitutents it is thought to represent. For instance, a letter might be 100, a fax, 50, a phone call, 25, an email, 10. When you write a letter, the office assumes you represent, say, 100 other people. So individually, your voice won't count much, but if you get four other people to write a letter, the congressperson will start to wonder if sticking to this position will cost them the next election.
As far as your single letter changing your congress persons' position, I'm glad you're not that powerful, esp. if I disagree with you. Nobody voted for you. A congressperson ran and was elected on a platform, amd presumably that's what the voting constituents want to see happen.
"Child labor laws weren't fully implemented enofrced until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act in the US."
Unions did not pass labor laws -- only the the legislature can do that -- but they did succeed in getting child laborers out of the work place, thanks to their unionizing efforts. And when legislatures did pass laws , it was due to the grounswell of awareness and support that unions created. Where do you think this 'social consciouness' came from?
argh! I meant simply "south of the American border".
"There aren't a whole lot of Indians left in Manhattan (or anywhere else, for that matter.)"
Try visiting south of the American bordere arcitic. You'll find plenty of Indians.
If you are a small inventor, and have nothing but your product, you still need to line up funding, manufacturing and distribution, and marketng and promotion. Meanwhile, the big boys have all of those in place already, and can use their marketing to spread FUD about your product, and tell people to wait for thier vaporware.
So you think that everyone should be homeschooled?
I think it's a problem when people are wary about hanging out with strangers. It makes for a more fragmented, xenophobic society. If everybody tries to avoid interacting with strangers, the only people out and about will be crazy, homeless, or vagrant -- in other words, it will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"It is a bit difficult to show a medicine bottle through the Internet"
The WWW does have a protocol for displaying images, you know. You can scan a label, or take a picture of it with your camera phone, and upload it somewhere.
"Heck, there are even *medicines* with instructions saying "this medicine is known to not work effectively on people from race X" - for fortunately medicine doctors apparently did not surrender science to political correctness like many biologists did..."
Please show me the medicine bottle that has the word race on it. I think what you are actually talking about is ancestry, which is different than old, consistently discredited theories of race.
OK - here's the crux -- why do we need a theory of race in order to diagnose disease? Couldn't you do it more effectively by determinimng their ancestry? For instace, I have met African-Americans who look like Southern Europeans, Asians, or Hispanics.
The study you cited about sickle cell anemia has *already* decided that certian people are African-American before the results were in. What I am asking for is the objective criteria by which we can run an experiment with to determine which race a person belongs to.
What exactly is race? It seems like when you talk about race, you are using as another term for ancestry.
And, more to the point, you have yet to address the official races, and the criteria. If race is such a useful bit of knowledge for medicine, certainly doctors would have a lot of data on race (and race alone, not ancestry and disease), and have ways of determining race when, say, the person is injured so badly you can't tell the race.
"...with any one gene there will necessarily be a largish amount of error."
Why would that be, and what are the ramifications of this fact for your theory of race? Again, where can I find the official genetic races, and each particular genetic profile of the races?
What scientific questions does this theory of race answer? How do I know that this theory is actually a scientific one, rather than an attempt to justify old, consistently discredited racial theories?
"The concept that race is solely a cultural construct is mere wishful thinking: "
I am interested to see your criteria for race that is based solely on genetics. What are the racial groups, and what genes denote membership to which group?
The diseases you mention occur everywhere in the world. If I show you a guy whose ancestors have lived in Mongolia for the last 5,000 years, are you going to tell me that he is African-American if he has sickle cell anemia?
Yeah, in the past couple of months I was involved in some flamewars. It's the old Voltaire (?) quote -- "Be careful, when wrestling with monsters, that you don't become one yourself." I saw myself using more and more snarky and trollish arguing techniques, even making stuff up and exaggerating. I decided to swallow my pride, take the high road, and become a gentleman again.
It seems to me that the level of discussion on slashdot has degraded in the past year or so, and I don't want to be part of the problem.
I admit it. I was confused. Thank you.
A third option is that they might volunteer to work with you, or even pay you to teach them.
Right now there is no incentive for you to take *any* employees, but if it got to the point where you had more work than you had time in the day, then it would be in your benefit to hire an employee. Otherwise, *someone* is going to take the work and become your competitor, and they might actually be competent at it. It would be in your interest to have the person taking on the extra work under your control, rather than being on their own.
Or am I misunderstanding your point?
"No form of protectionism has ever been good, labor or otherwise."
Oh really? How is it, then, that Finland, which has had cradle-to-grave socialism for around 100 years has the most competitive economy? The United States is second, but Canada ranks 3rd, Australia 5th, and Norway 6th -- each of which have extensive social program.
Of those four industrialized, western nations with extensive social services and labor protections, three rank above the US in the Economist's Quality of Life ranking -- and the Economist is a pro-free-trade, pro-gloablisation magazine. The US ranks 13th, and Canada ranks right below at 14th.