"how are you going to discriminate the placebo effect from the real effect?"
This is a problem with your logic. You start from the assumption that placebo is illegitimate or lesser than something that works via other mechanisms. At the end of the day all psychological effects correspond to electrical and chemical changes in the brain which in turn can result in changes in most body systems. Why are those objective physical results less valid than those cause by other mechanisms? If I take a pill that directly reacts and chemically converts to serotonin and another person is told they are taking a drug that causes euphoria and takes placebo resulting in their body producing serotonin why is one considered legitimate and the other less so when both have the same result? The problem with the pill that causes a direct chemical action is that the body tends to detect this sort of manipulation and develops tolerance to it.
Of course pain is psychological, the entire nervous system is actually composed of neurons, aka braincells. The nerves next to an injury are just brain tendrils. Placebo works by convincing your consciousness to filter out those signals where codeine produces a chemical reaction that impairs your ability to process those signals. EITHER reduces pain. At the end of the day psychological effects translate to electrical and chemical effects in the body, any competent psychiatrist will tell you as much.
Placebo is software where codeine is hardware. Unfortunately, the problem comes from trying to treat hardware solutions to health problems as real and dismiss software ones as not real or lesser. The entire system of western medicine works from the assumption that you have to force the body to do what you want and anything that coaxes your body to heal itself is nothing more than a scam. The problem with that is something like forces your body instead of coaxing it, for example codeine, your body will see as interference and work around.
Don't believe me? Take that codeine awhile and you'll find you have to take more of it as your body resists its interference. At the same time it releases pleasure endorphins so other parts of your brain will want it. Soon your body will start generating very real pain sensations to get you to take that codeine because your brain is a pattern recognition engine and the nerves are part of your brain. Those neurons fired pain signals before and that resulted in other neurons receiving reward signals (because you took opiates). Most of the pain habitual opiate users are curing with the opiates is actually being generated by your body for the sole purpose of getting you to take more opiates. You tell yourself the pain is proof you need the meds but its actually proof you want the meds not that you need them.
The most honest look at this type of thing isn't in human medicine or even veterinary medicine but rather animal training. Stop trying to manipulate your body with drugs and manipulate it (including your thought process) via a reward pathway the same way you would a pet. My recommendation would be chocolate. Sugar is the most habit forming substance known to man. You are already addicted to it and it is tied so strongly to your chemical makeup it is highly doubtful you'd ever form anything like a tolerance to it. Not a lot of chocolate, a single chocolate chip is good. For instance if you hate studying eat a chocolate chip every time you study. You don't need to give it any thought, effort or affirmation. Just eat a chip every time you sit to study. Your negativity toward studying won't go away immediately but it will be reduced over time and may even turn into an actual enjoyment of learning.
Placebos impact objective symptoms as well such as blood pressure.
At the end of the day if you take a pill and you stop hurting or have lower blood pressure as a consequence does it matter what it did? You are paying for the result, not the chemical interaction that is supposed to bring it about.
Placebo can impact anything the brain can impact, that means anything affected by heart rate, blood pressure, the immune system, literally every interaction related to the nervous system (which is all actually part of the brain), and anything related to or affected by hormone and/or protein production. That covers pretty much everything that goes wrong with your health other than trauma or infection and includes the rate of recovery from those.
It's a scale for measuring light and the one that the most effective lights for horticultural use are measured in, namely HID lights. It doesn't matter what scale you use, LED's output a small amount of low intensity light. For vegetative growth they use an ideal spectrum and watt for watt outperform HID lights but for fruiting/flowering in plants that need full sun they manage equal yields at best vs HID lighting. Using an HPS light with digital ballast and enhanced blue spectrum bulb will give equal to greater yields to a watt per watt equivalent LED.
This is something anyone who actually grows under these lights knows.
True but one would think that there are probably some full sun flowering plants, like fruit trees and tomato plants, that would be desirable.
Not to mention the cannabis. Seriously, these people are going to have a lot of time to kill in the evenings and no tv, radio, books, or movies to kill it with. Cannabis and alcohol production are a minimum.
'"That isn't to say that you can't grow with led just that 1000w HPS will grow stronger and healthier plants than 1000w LED,"
That's an outright lie.'
You just proved it. You linked an image that shows plant output that can be achieved and exceeded (genetics permitting) under a 400w HPS with corrected blue spectrum being achieved with 4 UFO lights. They could be 90w to 140w each or somewhere in that ballpark so we are talking anywhere from the same to greater wattage. The cost is going to be $100-200 per so $400-$800. A 400w HPS with the bulb will come in under $200 and for what you are paying you could get a couple 1000w light setups and quadruple that output.
That said. Nice grow with healthy plants. There are other factors besides the light and most people can't get maximum yield for the strain and light they have but I have yet to see someone who can produce equal or higher yields with significantly less watts in LED land. Certainly not enough to justify the increased price.
I admit there are other considerations that vary with climate like heating and cooling costs. In Florida LED's would have been all gain. In NM the heat output from HPS is a godsend part of the year and a nightmare the other half, cooler lights would mean using more watts to heat during winter. That is here on Earth. On Mars, it is basically winter all the time. There is also the LED's last forever myth but that is after all a myth.
"Methinks you haven't kept up with LED technology."
Methinks you are mistaken and are buying into marketing from LED companies. They are better especially in terms of directionality and at the end of the day LED's simply put out less intense light than HID lighting. Someone else pointed out that lumens are a bad scale for horticulture and they are right. Unfortunately, the HID lighting that works best for plants that require "full sun" is measured in lumens, LED's aren't and are measured on a scale that is hard to convert to lumens. Preference for one scale over the other doesn't change that LED's lack intensity.
LED's cost more than HID lighting and to get the intensity you need with full sun plants, you need to use the same wattage as you do with HID. You are right, they do run cooler but the heat might be helpful in a Mars habitat. It is certainly helpful during winter here on Earth.
"Which plants can't be cultivated indoors? Plant can't actually tell if they're indoors Penny. They respond to correct amounts of nutrients and light at the correct temperature."
No, that is our model for plant growth and theoretically anything can be made to grow indoors according to that model. Nature is more complex than that. There are quite a few plants that haven't been successfully cultivated indoors or more often that don't grow well indoors. Some plants are tied to certain light cycles (like cannabis), temperature, certain atmospheric pressure, humidity, seasonal changes, are co-dependant on enzymes and/or fungus. There are even plants that make use of contact with the roots of sibling plants. That is if we are talking exclusively plants, fungi and molds have their own challenges.
I can clone, root, or sprout most plants indoors. I can grow most plants indoors. There are some plants that I can grow indoors but they won't produce the same nutritional content, alkaloid content, or they will grow in a stunted manner that wouldn't live up to your expectations for that plants role in your carefully balanced habitat.
Anyone who has grown cannabis under LED can tell you this. LEDs lack the raw lumens needed to penetrate thick foliage and reach lower branches. LEDs seem to work well enough for the vegetative growth phase but for flowering just can't put out as much raw light as HPS.
LED advocates will tell you the reduced lumens don't matter because the light is in targeted spectrums. That is great but it doesn't help penetrate the plant canopy. That isn't to say that you can't grow with led just that 1000w HPS will grow stronger and healthier plants than 1000w LED, albeit with more waste heat.
Some plants can't be cultivated indoors at all.
On the other hand, what you should probably be farming on a mars colony isn't tomatoes, it is algae.
Whether you have suits or a giant bubble you are talking about tanked gas a bubble with CO2 scrubbing is more efficient. I'd expect any sort of colonization effort to have plans for a base camp from the start. It may be temporary but I'd expect at least a large inflatable habitat.
Point taken about field work. Although I wouldn't be expecting an early Mars colony to be doing much more than establishing a mars colony for quite some time. We wouldn't want them to stop engaging in farming and construction just to conduct experiments like they do on the space station. Their colonization efforts are experiment enough. Robots are better at taking measurements than people. People are better at designing, building, controlling, repairing and maintaining robots than robots. The people can probably normally sit in their bubble, occasionally taking remote control of robots that are outside.
"Is this some weird pretentious Yank affectation, like the jarring way they don't pronounce the "h" in "herbs" for some reason?"
No that is an idiot. Blue Cheese is blue cheese here in yank land. As for pronouncing the silent "h" in herbs, silent letters aren't supposed to be pronounced.
"The same approach in the medieval times meant (as the medical scientists speculate) fewer allergies, but at the cost of more child burials. Hardly a good trade-off"
Seems like a good tradeoff to me, allergies suck and we've got over-population problems.
A person is nothing but a brain + nervous system which are just brain tendrils. The brain is a bunch of independent logic units responding to each others electrochemical signals and reorganizing based on them. A second brain is more of the same, there is a high speed link between them composed of light and smell. The consequence is that two brains are effectively one large brain. They are separated by that link much like the lobes of your personal pool of neurons so the neurons are going to have more of their pathways based on local input and even more so because interaction with the same pool of neurons might exist more or less frequently.
Effectively, you, and everyone you interact with are just individual neurons in a much much collective pool of neurons. If a single neuron in your brain dies the impact it had on other neurons does not, it will influence their reactions to stimuli to some extent forever after. The same is true of that larger brain. In a way, there has been a larger brain that has persisted since the beginning of mankind. It used to be separated and localized quite extensively but the pools that were towns have formed faster and faster connections and even the individual members form faster and more efficient connections to more and more people.
Saying someone lives on in those they've left behind isn't just a figure of speech. It is a literal fact.
There is a class of investor that does this. It's just another higher risk form of investment. There are no shortage of these high paying scams just look at forex. There are even sites that review the scammers and let you know the ones who have a history of floating the scam for awhile.
There are lots of these especially in the currency markets. Generally they pay out in the beginning so if you catch them early and get out early you will actually get the promised yields while the people on the tail end get burned. Some people invest early in these schemes understanding exactly what it is.
People have claimed Bitcoin itself is a Ponzi scheme and this is unrelated to that as this is just a normal Ponzi scheme that happened to use bitcoin as the currency.
Last I checked 5 million bucks isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to Ponzi schemes involving completely traceable bank transactions in government backed currencies.
Completely traceable but there are no people in the transaction chain, only addresses and the addresses are completely anonymous. Using small uneven varied transactions, multiple addresses, and taking advantage of large multiple user pools of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is effectively untraceable.
Your body produces hydrogen peroxide directly in the bloodstream on a fairly regular basis. Nature produces it on a far more regular basis. Rainwater contains hydrogen peroxide. Our body evolved in the presence of this substance. Although it reacts with cells we are talking about seemingly random cells in very tiny quantities and byproduct is oxygen which bonds pretty much immediately with hemoglobin. The body certainly has no trouble replacing cells that belong but won't replace any toxins or byproducts that the peroxide has reacted with.
I'm sure we all know at least one person who takes the stuff regularly for 40+ years. I wouldn't recommend it. Peroxide does kill cells, necessitating replacing cells, increasing the need to replace those cells, and therefore increasing the likelihood of copying errors which lead to aging and possibly even cancer.
That said the idea that short term use of some dilute form of hydrogen peroxide is toxic is ridiculous. Because a few quacks pitched it as a the miracle cure for everything the medical establishment has built the stuff up as the devil. It's a shame because peroxide has many potential internal medical uses. For instance a round of inhaled hydrogen peroxide can help remove tar build-up in a smokers lung. Or a current smoker can use it periodically to help remove the tar their body has difficulty with naturally and possibly stop a great deal of the damage they are doing. Peroxide is definitely a safer route with fewer side-effects than chemo for killing cancer and can even be injected directly into a tumor making it a far more targeted treatment. In small quantities peroxide in the bloodstream acts as sort of molecular polish that reacts with arterial build-up. Like smokers, fast food junkies might be better off having periodic treatments with peroxide than not.
"Likewise, it's perfectly acceptable (probably even a good idea) to have a course in high school talking about religion, as long as it's in the context of learning about religious views, not endorsing a particular viewpoint. "
I wouldn't be opposed to that as long as its a history or social studies class. We had a section in World History in high school covering Greek and Roman mythology so why not cover Hebrew mythology with the same tone and sincerity. Buddhism is probably better taught in a philosophy class than as a mythology.
Religion obviously has no place in a science class because it can't be analyzed with the scientific method. That doesn't preclude there being a class that covers religion and its affect on culture. It should of course be an elective.
"You seem to assume that getting your food spit in is an inevitable consequence of being an ass. There are others, like getting your ass 86'ed from the premesis by the manager."
They aren't mutually exclusive. Getting your food spit in isn't inevitable on a per incident of being an ass, but it is an inevitable consequence of being an ass to service staff in general. 9 times out of 10 they might get away with it but they won't get away with it forever.
I wasn't placating the GP by entertaining his fantasy situation in which bosses have some clue about what their staff is doing. The boss thing is a straw man. Every (sane) boss everywhere punishes staff for something like spitting in food. It is equally given that if you are dick to restaurant staff you are going to eat spit sooner or later, probably sooner and later.
"And if karma sees fit to have my cook spit in my customer's food AND not let me catch them in the act, so be it."
This. It's what happens in every restaurant everywhere.
"Strangely enough, I predict that karma will reward ME for sticking to my principles."
Nobody is talking about a restaurant manager's karma. We are talking about an asshole customer's karma.
Slashdot Mirror
"how are you going to discriminate the placebo effect from the real effect?"
This is a problem with your logic. You start from the assumption that placebo is illegitimate or lesser than something that works via other mechanisms. At the end of the day all psychological effects correspond to electrical and chemical changes in the brain which in turn can result in changes in most body systems. Why are those objective physical results less valid than those cause by other mechanisms? If I take a pill that directly reacts and chemically converts to serotonin and another person is told they are taking a drug that causes euphoria and takes placebo resulting in their body producing serotonin why is one considered legitimate and the other less so when both have the same result? The problem with the pill that causes a direct chemical action is that the body tends to detect this sort of manipulation and develops tolerance to it.
Of course pain is psychological, the entire nervous system is actually composed of neurons, aka braincells. The nerves next to an injury are just brain tendrils. Placebo works by convincing your consciousness to filter out those signals where codeine produces a chemical reaction that impairs your ability to process those signals. EITHER reduces pain. At the end of the day psychological effects translate to electrical and chemical effects in the body, any competent psychiatrist will tell you as much.
Placebo is software where codeine is hardware. Unfortunately, the problem comes from trying to treat hardware solutions to health problems as real and dismiss software ones as not real or lesser. The entire system of western medicine works from the assumption that you have to force the body to do what you want and anything that coaxes your body to heal itself is nothing more than a scam. The problem with that is something like forces your body instead of coaxing it, for example codeine, your body will see as interference and work around.
Don't believe me? Take that codeine awhile and you'll find you have to take more of it as your body resists its interference. At the same time it releases pleasure endorphins so other parts of your brain will want it. Soon your body will start generating very real pain sensations to get you to take that codeine because your brain is a pattern recognition engine and the nerves are part of your brain. Those neurons fired pain signals before and that resulted in other neurons receiving reward signals (because you took opiates). Most of the pain habitual opiate users are curing with the opiates is actually being generated by your body for the sole purpose of getting you to take more opiates. You tell yourself the pain is proof you need the meds but its actually proof you want the meds not that you need them.
The most honest look at this type of thing isn't in human medicine or even veterinary medicine but rather animal training. Stop trying to manipulate your body with drugs and manipulate it (including your thought process) via a reward pathway the same way you would a pet. My recommendation would be chocolate. Sugar is the most habit forming substance known to man. You are already addicted to it and it is tied so strongly to your chemical makeup it is highly doubtful you'd ever form anything like a tolerance to it. Not a lot of chocolate, a single chocolate chip is good. For instance if you hate studying eat a chocolate chip every time you study. You don't need to give it any thought, effort or affirmation. Just eat a chip every time you sit to study. Your negativity toward studying won't go away immediately but it will be reduced over time and may even turn into an actual enjoyment of learning.
Placebos impact objective symptoms as well such as blood pressure.
At the end of the day if you take a pill and you stop hurting or have lower blood pressure as a consequence does it matter what it did? You are paying for the result, not the chemical interaction that is supposed to bring it about.
Placebo can impact anything the brain can impact, that means anything affected by heart rate, blood pressure, the immune system, literally every interaction related to the nervous system (which is all actually part of the brain), and anything related to or affected by hormone and/or protein production. That covers pretty much everything that goes wrong with your health other than trauma or infection and includes the rate of recovery from those.
Ever try poppies?
It's a scale for measuring light and the one that the most effective lights for horticultural use are measured in, namely HID lights. It doesn't matter what scale you use, LED's output a small amount of low intensity light. For vegetative growth they use an ideal spectrum and watt for watt outperform HID lights but for fruiting/flowering in plants that need full sun they manage equal yields at best vs HID lighting. Using an HPS light with digital ballast and enhanced blue spectrum bulb will give equal to greater yields to a watt per watt equivalent LED.
This is something anyone who actually grows under these lights knows.
True but one would think that there are probably some full sun flowering plants, like fruit trees and tomato plants, that would be desirable.
Not to mention the cannabis. Seriously, these people are going to have a lot of time to kill in the evenings and no tv, radio, books, or movies to kill it with. Cannabis and alcohol production are a minimum.
'"That isn't to say that you can't grow with led just that 1000w HPS will grow stronger and healthier plants than 1000w LED,"
That's an outright lie.'
You just proved it. You linked an image that shows plant output that can be achieved and exceeded (genetics permitting) under a 400w HPS with corrected blue spectrum being achieved with 4 UFO lights. They could be 90w to 140w each or somewhere in that ballpark so we are talking anywhere from the same to greater wattage. The cost is going to be $100-200 per so $400-$800. A 400w HPS with the bulb will come in under $200 and for what you are paying you could get a couple 1000w light setups and quadruple that output.
That said. Nice grow with healthy plants. There are other factors besides the light and most people can't get maximum yield for the strain and light they have but I have yet to see someone who can produce equal or higher yields with significantly less watts in LED land. Certainly not enough to justify the increased price.
I admit there are other considerations that vary with climate like heating and cooling costs. In Florida LED's would have been all gain. In NM the heat output from HPS is a godsend part of the year and a nightmare the other half, cooler lights would mean using more watts to heat during winter. That is here on Earth. On Mars, it is basically winter all the time. There is also the LED's last forever myth but that is after all a myth.
"Methinks you haven't kept up with LED technology."
Methinks you are mistaken and are buying into marketing from LED companies. They are better especially in terms of directionality and at the end of the day LED's simply put out less intense light than HID lighting. Someone else pointed out that lumens are a bad scale for horticulture and they are right. Unfortunately, the HID lighting that works best for plants that require "full sun" is measured in lumens, LED's aren't and are measured on a scale that is hard to convert to lumens. Preference for one scale over the other doesn't change that LED's lack intensity.
LED's cost more than HID lighting and to get the intensity you need with full sun plants, you need to use the same wattage as you do with HID. You are right, they do run cooler but the heat might be helpful in a Mars habitat. It is certainly helpful during winter here on Earth.
"Which plants can't be cultivated indoors? Plant can't actually tell if they're indoors Penny. They respond to correct amounts of nutrients and light at the correct temperature."
No, that is our model for plant growth and theoretically anything can be made to grow indoors according to that model. Nature is more complex than that. There are quite a few plants that haven't been successfully cultivated indoors or more often that don't grow well indoors. Some plants are tied to certain light cycles (like cannabis), temperature, certain atmospheric pressure, humidity, seasonal changes, are co-dependant on enzymes and/or fungus. There are even plants that make use of contact with the roots of sibling plants. That is if we are talking exclusively plants, fungi and molds have their own challenges.
I can clone, root, or sprout most plants indoors. I can grow most plants indoors. There are some plants that I can grow indoors but they won't produce the same nutritional content, alkaloid content, or they will grow in a stunted manner that wouldn't live up to your expectations for that plants role in your carefully balanced habitat.
Anyone who has grown cannabis under LED can tell you this. LEDs lack the raw lumens needed to penetrate thick foliage and reach lower branches. LEDs seem to work well enough for the vegetative growth phase but for flowering just can't put out as much raw light as HPS.
LED advocates will tell you the reduced lumens don't matter because the light is in targeted spectrums. That is great but it doesn't help penetrate the plant canopy. That isn't to say that you can't grow with led just that 1000w HPS will grow stronger and healthier plants than 1000w LED, albeit with more waste heat.
Some plants can't be cultivated indoors at all.
On the other hand, what you should probably be farming on a mars colony isn't tomatoes, it is algae.
Whether you have suits or a giant bubble you are talking about tanked gas a bubble with CO2 scrubbing is more efficient. I'd expect any sort of colonization effort to have plans for a base camp from the start. It may be temporary but I'd expect at least a large inflatable habitat.
Point taken about field work. Although I wouldn't be expecting an early Mars colony to be doing much more than establishing a mars colony for quite some time. We wouldn't want them to stop engaging in farming and construction just to conduct experiments like they do on the space station. Their colonization efforts are experiment enough. Robots are better at taking measurements than people. People are better at designing, building, controlling, repairing and maintaining robots than robots. The people can probably normally sit in their bubble, occasionally taking remote control of robots that are outside.
This is Slashdot not an academic paper, the burden is on the reader to find references not the writer to provide them.
colonists need to live in a giant bubble that alleviates the need for them to actually wear any kind of special suit all day...
My guess is he's talking about finding life.
"Is this some weird pretentious Yank affectation, like the jarring way they don't pronounce the "h" in "herbs" for some reason?"
No that is an idiot. Blue Cheese is blue cheese here in yank land. As for pronouncing the silent "h" in herbs, silent letters aren't supposed to be pronounced.
"The same approach in the medieval times meant (as the medical scientists speculate) fewer allergies, but at the cost of more child burials. Hardly a good trade-off"
Seems like a good tradeoff to me, allergies suck and we've got over-population problems.
A person is nothing but a brain + nervous system which are just brain tendrils. The brain is a bunch of independent logic units responding to each others electrochemical signals and reorganizing based on them. A second brain is more of the same, there is a high speed link between them composed of light and smell. The consequence is that two brains are effectively one large brain. They are separated by that link much like the lobes of your personal pool of neurons so the neurons are going to have more of their pathways based on local input and even more so because interaction with the same pool of neurons might exist more or less frequently.
Effectively, you, and everyone you interact with are just individual neurons in a much much collective pool of neurons. If a single neuron in your brain dies the impact it had on other neurons does not, it will influence their reactions to stimuli to some extent forever after. The same is true of that larger brain. In a way, there has been a larger brain that has persisted since the beginning of mankind. It used to be separated and localized quite extensively but the pools that were towns have formed faster and faster connections and even the individual members form faster and more efficient connections to more and more people.
Saying someone lives on in those they've left behind isn't just a figure of speech. It is a literal fact.
There is a class of investor that does this. It's just another higher risk form of investment. There are no shortage of these high paying scams just look at forex. There are even sites that review the scammers and let you know the ones who have a history of floating the scam for awhile.
There are lots of these especially in the currency markets. Generally they pay out in the beginning so if you catch them early and get out early you will actually get the promised yields while the people on the tail end get burned. Some people invest early in these schemes understanding exactly what it is.
People have claimed Bitcoin itself is a Ponzi scheme and this is unrelated to that as this is just a normal Ponzi scheme that happened to use bitcoin as the currency.
Last I checked 5 million bucks isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to Ponzi schemes involving completely traceable bank transactions in government backed currencies.
Completely traceable but there are no people in the transaction chain, only addresses and the addresses are completely anonymous. Using small uneven varied transactions, multiple addresses, and taking advantage of large multiple user pools of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is effectively untraceable.
Your body produces hydrogen peroxide directly in the bloodstream on a fairly regular basis. Nature produces it on a far more regular basis. Rainwater contains hydrogen peroxide. Our body evolved in the presence of this substance. Although it reacts with cells we are talking about seemingly random cells in very tiny quantities and byproduct is oxygen which bonds pretty much immediately with hemoglobin. The body certainly has no trouble replacing cells that belong but won't replace any toxins or byproducts that the peroxide has reacted with.
I'm sure we all know at least one person who takes the stuff regularly for 40+ years. I wouldn't recommend it. Peroxide does kill cells, necessitating replacing cells, increasing the need to replace those cells, and therefore increasing the likelihood of copying errors which lead to aging and possibly even cancer.
That said the idea that short term use of some dilute form of hydrogen peroxide is toxic is ridiculous. Because a few quacks pitched it as a the miracle cure for everything the medical establishment has built the stuff up as the devil. It's a shame because peroxide has many potential internal medical uses. For instance a round of inhaled hydrogen peroxide can help remove tar build-up in a smokers lung. Or a current smoker can use it periodically to help remove the tar their body has difficulty with naturally and possibly stop a great deal of the damage they are doing. Peroxide is definitely a safer route with fewer side-effects than chemo for killing cancer and can even be injected directly into a tumor making it a far more targeted treatment. In small quantities peroxide in the bloodstream acts as sort of molecular polish that reacts with arterial build-up. Like smokers, fast food junkies might be better off having periodic treatments with peroxide than not.
History works too. We learned about greek and roman mythology in school. Just toss hebrew mythologies in the list.
"Likewise, it's perfectly acceptable (probably even a good idea) to have a course in high school talking about religion, as long as it's in the context of learning about religious views, not endorsing a particular viewpoint. "
I wouldn't be opposed to that as long as its a history or social studies class. We had a section in World History in high school covering Greek and Roman mythology so why not cover Hebrew mythology with the same tone and sincerity. Buddhism is probably better taught in a philosophy class than as a mythology.
Religion obviously has no place in a science class because it can't be analyzed with the scientific method. That doesn't preclude there being a class that covers religion and its affect on culture. It should of course be an elective.
"You seem to assume that getting your food spit in is an inevitable consequence of being an ass. There are others, like getting your ass 86'ed from the premesis by the manager."
They aren't mutually exclusive. Getting your food spit in isn't inevitable on a per incident of being an ass, but it is an inevitable consequence of being an ass to service staff in general. 9 times out of 10 they might get away with it but they won't get away with it forever.
I wasn't placating the GP by entertaining his fantasy situation in which bosses have some clue about what their staff is doing. The boss thing is a straw man. Every (sane) boss everywhere punishes staff for something like spitting in food. It is equally given that if you are dick to restaurant staff you are going to eat spit sooner or later, probably sooner and later.
"And if karma sees fit to have my cook spit in my customer's food AND not let me catch them in the act, so be it."
This. It's what happens in every restaurant everywhere.
"Strangely enough, I predict that karma will reward ME for sticking to my principles."
Nobody is talking about a restaurant manager's karma. We are talking about an asshole customer's karma.